The Reward of The Oolyay

by Alden Smith, Liam

  “What happened?” he asked her, hearing Teftek and Aljefta rush to his side. The other soldiers lowered their weapons and beheld her female form like frightened, curious children.

  “Shades,” she sputtered, as violet blood trailed from her lips and the gashes along her sides and stomach. Teftek and Aljefta attempted to guide her away from Inlojem, but his grasp was tight, and her hands pushed the two soldiers away. His wide, brazen eyes kept on hers, as he jostled her to keep her awake.

  Teftek tried to rip the hide-sewn cloak and she reflexively yanked herself away from Inlojem and punched Teftek backward. She hissed at him, showing her bloody teeth, and fell back into Inlojem’s lap.

  As Teftek nursed his lip, Inlojem told him

  “She is a Necrologist- this hide is made out of her kills.”

  “Well, we’ll have to get it off of her if she wants to be patched up,” Teftek advised.

  “Do you require…sacrifice?” Inlojem asked her calmly, as her head tilted this way and that, and her body writhed in pain. She snapped out of her trance and grabbed the back of Inlojem’s neck, pressing her thumb deep into his throat.

  “NO!” She commanded. “Strip me, but do not dare sacrifice me here…I must live…through…The Prophecy,” she gurgled through a mouthful of blood and collapsed in his arms completely, losing consciousness from the sheer agony of her wounds.

  “Come on - get her into the tent, and we’ll treat her. You can take the robes off, but we need to get her medical attention right now if she’s got any hope of anatomic regeneration,” Teftek insisted, as he caught Inlojem’s eyes. Inlojem knew they did not have the tools to cure her of a shade’s plague - even the minimal vaccines they carried would not work against such serious gashes.

  But a cure was not what she desired. He arose with the female Vesh in his arms and brought her to Teftek’s tent. The soldiers stared at the tent as Teftek and Aljefta worked on her while Inlojem sat in silence next to her. All the soldiers could see were their silhouettes, but they were still immersed with curiosity, caught up by the lure of a female form out here among the wastes. Iogi stood behind them, and stared into the meadow, the only one watching for the Shades.

  Inlojem watched Teftek and Aljefta carefully remove the young Necrologist's cloak and place it in Inlojem’s hands. He felt her blood seep through it, down across his own coat. Across her was splattered the invisible blood of the Shade that she had undoubtedly slain, given the amount of its blood on her. It made parts of her blend into the tent behind her, until it was wiped away and her pale skin was revealed.

  She bore old scars and wounds that far outnumbered her new ones. These scars were all over her body - a testament to the battle-strength of her being. Her breasts were uneven, one having been severed and replaced with one that had regenerated through a patch of sewn together skin. Although she had all her fingers, her left hand, the one with which she blocked, boasted two crooked fingers that had regenerated when they were severed. The skin around the base of those knuckles was a different white than the skin of those new, flimsy digits.

  These lacerations and scars maneuvered between the tribal tattoos that showed her battles and sacrifices. Those spanned from her buttocks to her nape and around and across her chest. There were more scars on her than even Inlojem could boast of, and he knew in that moment that she was more hardened than any in this party, himself included. She was a testament to the section of the Oolyay that honors torment, most likely a trusted ranger of these lands; but from what settlement?

  Her eyes opened occasionally as the two soldiers stitched her wounds together. She allowed no hint of anguish in her waking moments, gritting her teeth and silently boring holes through Inlojem with her widened, hurting eyes. Finally, once the blood was wiped from her body and she lay covered in medical patches, she lost consciousness and lay quiet. Teftek and Aljefta wrapped a blanket around her and left their own tent respectfully. Inlojem sat with her cloak on his lap for the rest of the night. The soldiers scattered off to their tents as Teftek barked at them from outside, and only two soldiers remained, keeping guard over the small tent village amongst the rubble of a forgotten town.

  Iogi crawled inside and sat across from Inlojem, cradling the hand of the young female. After a while, her body began to spasm slightly, and whispers evacuated her lips, tainting the quiet air with visions of her past. The plague had come into her and now it was only a matter of time. Inlojem knew to let this first bout last for as long as possible before giving her Ytiri herb. After the first dosage, hallucinations would onset for an hour, and then consciousness would remain for a day. The following bouts of consciousness would become less and less, until after a month, there was no salvation from the disease - the convulsions would overwhelm her and she would be released back into The Void.

  That will be long enough, he thought, long enough to last until the end of the world.

  IV

  The morning came without great apprehension or bloodshed, but rose up and turned the abyss into gray fog cradling a cloud of stale white light. The fog crept around the tents and made them seem like ships adrift in a vast ocean. Inlojem kept watch over the young Vesh as she murmured in her sleep and showed the first convulsions. He pressed himself to wait longer, until she began to shudder uncontrollably. Her eyes opened and she gasped, glaring at him with fear and torment, and Inlojem decided that it was finally time to feed her the Ytiri herb; The Prophecy. He took a mortar and pestle from his small carry pouch, and ground up the herb in it, until the juice ran from it and gathered in the attached vial. He removed the finger-sized depository with an extraction tube and tilted her jaw up, holding her writhing body still as he poured the liquid down her throat.

  Slowly the movement went out of her and her body gradually eased into a sense of calm, but her eyes remained open, and for a moment she gained enough consciousness to look upon Inlojem.

  “Stay with me- st-stay with me, Necrologist. I will ha-have your re-reward,” she sputtered. Inlojem brushed his weathered hand across her forehead and through her short orange wiry hair.

  “What is your name, young one?” Inlojem asked her.

  “I…Iquay. I am called The Stalker, Iquay,” she replied.

  “Release your fear, Iquay. Allow The Prophecy to enter you,” Inlojem whispered. “I am your caretaker, now until the very end.” Her eyes widened even larger, until they bulged from her head and she gripped Inlojem intensely. Then, her eyes glazed over and she stared upward, seeming to feel some force consume her. She let go of his arm as her body deflated into a sudden calm. After a moment, Inlojem moved his hand in front of her nose, the warm air assuring him that she still lived in his care.

  * * *

  Teftek muddled with an old battery-powered listener, adjusting the antenna this way and that to play with the channels, sifting through static. Aljefta glanced up at him occasionally, peeling the skin from a vegetable with his oversized combat knife.

  “Quanca Angkelm,” Teftek cussed as the white noise chattered against his open ears. “The only stuigen gut-sucker that could boost this thing - why did Pojlim have to go off and get himself killed!” Teftek looked at the listener with his brows furrowed, and exhaled in exasperation. “Make this work,” Teftek ordered, shoving the listener toward Aljefta.

  “Ah, come on, Captain,” Aljefta complained, his shoulders shrugging and his hands reflexively putting down the knife and vegetable.

  “Just try, okay?!” Teftek pushed it into Aljefta’s now empty hands and walked away from the gathering of soldiers huddled around their morning fire. Dawn hadn’t entirely broken the ridge yet, and Teftek was giving Inlojem the courtesy of time in order to rouse the female Necrologist. Now there’s two of them, he thought indignantly as he placed his butt down on a cracked, rotting log and stared into the gray nothingness of the rolling fog. He tore some y’Yoz root and stuffed it into his mouth, the tingly feeling assaulting his gums quite suddenly before his body hesitantly relaxed. It hadn’t been five days, but Teft
ek was under too much duress to care.

  “I know a secret,” a child’s voice announced from behind him. Teftek’s head slowly turned, anxiety creeping right back up his neck. He realized it wasn’t an alien with a child’s body dangling from a tentacle - it was just Iogi.

  “What...what do you want?” Teftek answered, turning his body.

  “I know a secret,” Iogi repeated.

  “Let me guess - I’m the Death Priest,” Teftek crowed halfheartedly .

  “Nooo…” Iogi teased, his body swaying in the fashion of a little child. Teftek also swayed back and forth a little, gnawing on the y’Yoz root, sucking the juice out of its porous structure as it rolled between his teeth. He spat across the wet dirt and turned his narrow gray eyes toward the child.

  “Yeah, alright - tell me your secret,” Teftek surrendered.

  “Um- um,” the child chortled, in a fit, “you’re a believer!”

  “Hah!” Teftek scoffed, getting up and spitting his y’Yoz root on the ground. “Yeah right, kid,” he said as he rubbed his hand roughly over the child’s barbed red hair, walking away.

  “Yeah right kid! It is right, kid!” said Iogi with excitement. “I know because one time...um...one time when you were a little boy...um…there was this guy who told you that one day the world would end, and you didn’t believe him!” It stopped the young captain in his tracks, his thick rubber soles scrapping to a halt in the grimy gravel. His head turned eighty degrees and forced his body along with it as he listened to the child with sudden zeal. “And you said ‘you’re a stupid old Necrologist’ and then... and then you threw a rock at him and it hurt him, and then he grabbed you, but then someone shot him and you looked at him and you felt really bad, and you thought you’d never believe, but he mentioned the red people and I know...“

  “Shut up,” Teftek stated curtly. “Now. Go back into the tent.” Iogi stared at Teftek for a moment. “GO! GET OUT OF HERE!” Teftek barked at him. The child sprinted and fumbled clumsily through the tent flap like a Quwarki skiff-runner through a narrow canyon, and cuddled up against Inlojem’s knee. Teftek stared at the tent and then turned his gaze toward his own hand, which shook almost uncontrollably with fear. He gripped it and turned away from his staring soldiers.

  He looked at Aljefta, who had witnessed the exchange. In his hands was the listener receiving some scratchy communications. Teftek stood in the same place, riddled with shock as everyone gathered around toward Aljefta when he turned up the listener. They could make out a Qol news program. There was a reporter on the ground.

  “It’s entering low atmosphere right now, over the Juldji District. DGS is telling us to stay calm- they’re still trying to evacuate the districts before they launch fission weaponry…” there was a loud crack, and then static. Teftek knew what that meant; Qol was gone, obliterated by whatever these things were. If they eradicate the city in one swift blow, then they would be preparing a ground invasion, which meant thousands of those things spread across the city, ripping people into pieces as they asked “Will you be my friend?” Either that, or DGS would turn the city into a nuclear fire to stop the spread of the invasion…which was not outside the realm of possibility. Teftek’s toughness came back and overwhelmed his fear.

  “Pack up! Let’s get ready to move out!” He commanded as he walked the opposite direction. For such a small thing, Teftek’s presence was always commanding. He heard the camp rustle into a panic behind him; a form of obedience he found quite comforting.

  He walked just out of sight and sat down against a rock face while his soldiers packed. Teftek stared at the tree line, from which a thick bank of fog taunted him. He felt his hand shaking again as the memory emerged into his mind and gripped him like a terrible hallucination.

  The old Vesh with his wide red eyes, the brims of them twitching, pointed to Teftek’s child-like frame and made his inane prophecy known. The rock in Teftek’s young hand was smooth enough that he would take it down to the river later and skip it along, with a pile of rocks he had saved for weeks, if the guards of his labor camp permitted him to leave that day. The old Necrologist clutched his knee in agony, with gritted teeth, staring at the child like he was an aberration on the world while Teftek had pointed and laughed and Pojlim and Aljefta were cringing at the sight of it.

  The feel of the Necrologist’s cane striking across Teftek’s back was the most intense pain he had ever felt as a child. The deepest agony, that far outweighed the pain, though, was watching the two Uyor military officers drag the old Vesh up against a fence...and riddle him with bullet holes. They said it was for beating those children, but it was really because he'd annoyed them. Thick purple ooze poured from every appendage of the broken old Necrologist as Teftek confirmed his death with his eyes, and then with his hands, as viscous liquid sputtered from the dead Necrologist’s mouth. He felt his own tears streaming down his face as Pojlim and Aljefta tore him away from the sight.

  “You’re shaking,” Inlojem observed from behind Teftek. The captain clenched his hands together and gritted his teeth, releasing a long, cool sigh. The priest persisted with “What troubles you, my child?”

  “I’m not a child, and I’m not yours,” Teftek seethed, walking past Inlojem. Inlojem’s hand caught Teftek’s shoulder, and their eyes locked.

  “Iogi has rattled you, hasn’t he?” Inlojem asked slowly.

  “You know nothing about me and nor does he,” Teftek spat.

  “And yet he sees inside of you. There is death on your conscience.” Inlojem responded coolly.

  “DEATH?!” Teftek yelled, shaking Inlojem’s hand off of him. “What do you really know about death, death-priest? You Necrologists claim to be the be-all-end-all authority on death, but how many people have you really killed, thirty? Forty?”

  “Fifty seven,” Inlojem stated.

  “Fifty seven,” Teftek repeated. “I lost count at a hundred.” The Necrologist heard Teftek’s words but found himself speechless, failing to comprehend the trauma of this young man. It was true that Inlojem believed himself to be the most experienced purveyor of death among these people whom he regarded as children, and yet this one had simply shattered his reality. “I know more about death than you do, Inlojem. You may have a nice little ritual, where, OH, the weak old chieftains beg you to put them in the ground - how pleasant for them. Death must be a nice walk. But I’ve put young children in the ground when they begged me not to. I’ve killed more of your people, and more of the Hagayalicks, than you can imagine. And if I wanted to I could kill you too, in a heartbeat.”

  Inlojem stared at his opponent with a heightened sense about him. The soldiers around them had stopped to gawk. Iquay looked on as well, with most of her strength regained, holding Iogi’s shoulder for support. Inlojem slowly pulled his knife from his belt and handed it to Teftek.

  “If I am such a burden, present me with my death, that I may welcome it before the end of the world,” Inlojem eloquently declared. He presented Teftek with the blade, but Teftek did not even extend his arms. He slipped his sickle-blade back into its holster and clipped it. “You may be a well-trained killer, Teftek, but I am a Necrologist. I do not study death for the sake of understanding death. I study death to understand life. You have much to learn about life.”

  He walked away from the soldier and lowered his shoulder so that Iquay could lean on him, instead of Iogi. Teftek stared at the ground until Aljefta came up and harassed him about the day’s journey.

  Inlojem placed Iquay down on a cracked rock, and presented her belts, lined with potions and small throwing knives, back to her. She took her sickle-blade from him and latched it to her leg, and then she checked the caps of all of her potions, noticing that her bottle of Ytiri herbs was full.

  “Did you give me these, Inlojem?” she asked.

  “You’ll need them for the road ahead,” he replied.

  “But what if they strike you?” she suggested.

  “Then I am an old Vesh. I will die,” he explained.

/>   “But the proph-“ she started

  “the prophecy is for the young,” he finished. “I am an old Vesh…and it is refreshing to find another…true Necrologist here.” Teftek walked up briskly, batting Aljefta’s complaints off of him, and placed his back to Inlojem to speak to her:

  “We’re still three days away from our goal. Is there a Temple nearby where we can rest?”

  “Yes,” she stated, “but my people aren’t particularly fond of your military.”

  “Well, these two are your people, so they’ll have to make do,” Teftek declared, and walked away with just as much brashness. He picked up his carry pack and stopped, staring at Iquay; he was waiting for her to lead. The other soldiers, all young men, looked back toward her and Inlojem. The three Oolyayns could not have looked more foreign to them- all dressed in rags, with little bands of valuables strapped to their limbs or hanging below their tattered robes like ornaments, and not a hair on their faces. The soldiers, in contrast, were all carrying two-handed guns, and loaded down with body-sized carry packs, their skin covered in rusty bronze hair that glinted in the pale light.

  “They aren’t a patient group are they?” she asked Inlojem rhetorically. She stood up on her own, limping forward. He tried to help her, but she assured him that she could walk perfectly fine. They watched her walk between them and take up the lead, taking up pace behind her as her pace grew faster.

  * * *

  A short time passed before they reached a massive slab of pyrix that seemed to carve itself through the glacial mountains, directly across their gravel path. Yet straight down the middle of the slab was a narrow slit that could have been cut with lightning, showing a slim opening for the gravel path to keep going. As Iquay reached it, her eyes widened and she turned to the group, seemingly nervous.

  The fog had recessed only slightly for them, not burning off in the morning sun, as expected. It lingered, tracking them as they trekked farther and farther up into the cold, barren, mountainous landscape . The opening in the slab was only large enough for one of them to nudge through at a time, and Iquay peaked her head through it to behold the gripping white cloud of fear that faced them. A whole basin lay ahead, completely filled with thick white fog, which rose above the path and seemed to merge with the clouds overhead. Iquay was visibly nervous as she turned back to the soldiers.