Western Shore ac-3

by Juliet E. McKenna

'Let's just see what we can before dark.' Velindre guided the Zaise deftly down a different channel, the barest suggestion of a summoned breeze stirring her hair.

  Naldeth watched the muted ripples of the ship's wake spreading behind them. 'Your studies with Azazir certainly paid off.'

  'I wouldn't call it studying with him.' Velindre gave the young wizard a mordant look. 'And he's an object lesson to us all as to what can happen when you become entranced by your own affinity.'

  Kheda saw Naldeth acknowledge that caution with a meek nod.

  Velindre isn 't going to discuss this Azazir with you, boy, accept it. Dev said he had been banished by the other wizards as a danger to any who came near him. Yet she went to find him because he was the only one who knew the secret of weaving a false dragon out of summoned magic. How many wizards die in their quests for learning?

  'This place isn't quite as dead as it looks.' Risala came to stand beside Kheda and pointed to the edge of the cliff looming above them.

  As Kheda looked up to see a tracery of twisted stems tufted with leaves outlined against the sky, a cloud of pink and grey birds erupted from niches in the rocks. Their whistling cries filled the air as an eagle, or something akin, soared overhead, claws splayed. Circling, it stooped and dived to snatch something from the water in a flurry of spray. It climbed into the sky with powerful strokes of black-and-white-banded wings, pointed tail feathers sharp as shears. A long fish, brown as the decaying leaves, writhed in its grip, trailing silver drops of water.

  'That would be an omen,' Risala said with a shiver. 'If we were looking for such things,' she added quietly with a hint of foreboding.

  'We're looking for any sign of savages who were left

  behind.' Kheda peered keenly around as the Zaise emerged into a wider channel. 'Or some clue as to what became of them.'

  'Velindre, over there.' Naldeth suddenly pointed to a larger lump of land some way off rising steeply out of the water to a peak high enough to snare a skein of mist. 'There's something . . .' His words trailed away into uncertainty.

  'Was this land or sea?' Kheda studied the black waters on either side of the boat.

  'Does it matter?' Velindre was peering at the peak ahead, eyes narrowed. 'Naldeth, what do you sense in that cloud?'

  'Ash and steam,' the youthful wizard said slowly as they drifted closer. 'That's a fire mountain.'

  'We're safe enough as long as it's breathing white smoke.' Kheda searched the plume for any hint of the grey that presaged catastrophe. He caught Naldeth's slight surprise. 'There are plenty of records of the omens seen around fire mountains erupting in the Archipelago.'

  'I shall have to look them up when we get back.' The wizard grinned.

  'Is it safe to go any closer?' Risala was looking at the strange seas ahead. Ridges of greenish water were surging up from the depths, breaking in ragged trails of white foam.

  'For the present.' Velindre was unconcerned as the Zaise rocked erratically in the confused seas. 'This is just the currents fighting their way through new paths in the deep.'

  'There's fire in the deep as well,' Naldeth said suddenly, 'in the rocks underneath the sea.'

  They crossed the uneasy channel and the waters abruptly stilled. Now they were close enough to see the full strangeness of the island ahead. The peak was riven from top to bottom, with a wide central cleft belching

  out the pale cloud that streamed away over the mastheads. Below the sheer drop of the uppermost rocks, molten stone had congealed in ungainly twists and lumps, sparkling with incongruous beauty here and there as the sinking sun struck some glassy facet. A paler flow overlaid a lifeless black slurry disappearing into the water. The grey column of cooled stone was contorted like a tree crippled by a strangling vine, dividing to thrust rootlike tendrils into the sea, sharp and spiky where they had been brutally snapped off.

  'This is close enough.' Velindre waved a hand and a cloud of green magelight gathered around the ship's hull, drawing them away from the waters sucking ominously around the ugly margin of the shattered rocks. They drifted slowly past the cliff, the cloven rock sharp as a knife edge.

  'How long ago did this happen?' Kheda asked. 'How many storm seasons does it take to blunt something like that?'

  'This wasn't just one cataclysm.' Naldeth gazed at the mottled rocks. 'I would say the trouble began a couple of years ago. There would have been earth tremors and lesser eruptions to begin with.'

  'Then the land began sinking and the seas encroached further with each passing season.' Velindre looked back to the drowned valleys. 'So men and beasts alike moved into the heights.'

  'Then the final eruption shattered these islands,' muttered Naldeth, keen eyes searching intently among the fissures and bulges.

  'So the wild men came to Chazen.' Risala nodded her understanding. 'Looking for somewhere safer to live.'

  'But the dragon stayed here for nearly a full year more.' Kheda studied the shore now coming into view. 'Did it do this?'

  The long, smooth slope of this side of the island was a striking contrast to the destruction of its other face. It looked no more inviting, though. A thick forest of mighty trees had been laid low, like sailer stems slashed with a scythe. Barely a handful were still standing, down by the shallow curve of the beach, white and skeletal amid a choking layer of ash and boulders. The only hint of colour ran along the high-water mark where the brown decay of storm-tossed branches was valiantly nourishing a fringe of feeble grasses, a few tufts of sturdy cane and even an unknown infant tree.

  'I can't think why a dragon would destroy its home,' Naldeth said dubiously. 'And it would have liked it here. The elemental fires of the mountain would have buoyed up its magic'

  'Until they broke loose.' Velindre turned the Zaise broadside to the beach.

  'The people fled first and finally things got too hot even for a fire dragon.' Kheda looked back across the trackless ocean towards the Archipelago. 'So it followed them.'

  'But what happened to the women and children?' Risala wondered. 'They didn't come with the wild wizards and their warriors.'

  No one could answer her as they sailed slowly past the pallid landscape. Velindre guided the Zaise towards a bulging crag thrusting out to sea. The ripples running outwards from the ship's blunt prow washed against the pale rock, staining it black. The stone was pocked with broken edged holes, some overlapping, some deep enough to swallow a man whole. Further up, long furrows had been gouged into the once-molten ridges.

  'This wasn't caused by the fire that came up out of the earth to destroy the mountain.' Naldeth sounded pleased. 'Magic's been at work here - though long since, I'm afraid.

  But this wasn't caused by a fire dragon, either. An earth dragon must have been drawn to the eruption.'

  'You're sure?' Kheda regretted the words as soon as he'd said them.

  'Believe me,' said Naldeth sardonically. 'My fire affinity has given me a sympathy with earth magic. Once I got back to Hadrumal after my . .. mishap, I spent a year and a half studying with one of the finest stone masters that element has ever imbued. He said -' and Kheda got the distinct impression the young mage was quoting this unknown wizard precisely '- "You may as well do something more constructive with your time than stare at that empty metal foot of yours and imagine you can feel your toes."'

  'The fire dragon would have fought to defend its territory,' mused Velindre. 'I wonder if their feral magic stirred up the fire mountain.'

  'I'd say it was more likely the other way round,' Naldeth demurred.

  'You're sure it's gone, this earth dragon?' Kheda glanced up to reassure himself that the cloud rising from the narrow peak was still blandly white.

  'Yes,' the young mage said slowly. 'Though this is still a very strange place as far as the elements are concerned.'

  'Where did it go?' Risala shared Kheda's concern. 'We'd have heard if any other dragon had come to the Archipelago.'

  'The news would have run the length and breadth of the domains,' Kheda agreed.


  'There are plenty of places in the northern mainland where dragons could find a focus of elemental power.' Velindre shrugged. 'And hide themselves from anyone wishing them ill.'

  As if anyone other than a mage could threaten a dragon with the slightest harm.

  Kheda held his tongue as the ship rounded the bulbous headland to find a narrow cove clogged with the floating stone that erupting fire mountains threw up into the air and Aldabreshin seers prized for its contrary nature. But these were not the fist-sized pieces that traders offered in the Archipelago. Slabs of the frothy rock as thick as a man's arm was long bobbed in the slack water.

  Tree roots and stumps were caught up with the jostling stones, dark and waterlogged yet kept afloat by the strange rock. Paler shards lay atop some of the uncanny rafts, yellow as old bone. Kheda looked more closely. It was bone. He saw sallow lengths knobbed at each end and the shattered fan of a ribcage. The stained bones were dry and free from flesh and there was no smell of putrefaction.

  Countless animals must have been killed when the mountain exploded. No wonder there are still plenty of birds here. The scavengers must have feasted till they couldn't fly.

  Then he saw the smooth dome of a skull, empty eye sockets vacant, lower jaw gone. Now he knew what he was looking at, his eyes were irresistibly drawn to a ghastly grin just beyond, a smashed brow above the stained teeth.

  He found his voice. 'This is what happened to the women and elders.'

  'And the children.' Risala pressed her hands to her face, eyes rimmed with white as she stared at a fragile broken skull amid a mess of tiny bones.

  'With all the animals dead, and all the people too, there was nothing for the dragon to eat.' Velindre strove to keep her words dispassionate but her voice shook nevertheless.

  Kheda looked at the uncanny, macabre scene.

  Can this really be the end to it all, after this long voyage and all its apprehension?

  'Their mountains were burning and their land was drowning. They had some way of living with one dragon but a second came to fight it.' There was an odd strained

  note in Risala's voice as she turned her back on the charnel cove. 'The men and their mages sailed off on their logs and rafts, heading east into unknown waters full of sea serpents and whales and all manner of sharks. Did they know how far they would have to go to find somewhere safe? Did they even know the Archipelago lay out there? And the women and children and the old men and women waited and waited, but no one came back because they all died in the fight for Chazen. So everyone here died as well when the mountain exploded.'

  We didn 't know. We didn 't know who they were or why they had come. They attacked us with fire and spears and magic and showed us no mercy. We didn't start the fight. All we did was defend ourselves and our own.

  Kheda turned around, but any attempt at words to comfort her died on his lips. There was no more land on this side of the fire island. The eerie waters lapping this drowned domain yielded to more natural seas that stretched out dark and mysterious in the deepening twilight. The indigo sea melted into a lavender sky streaked with all the reds and oranges of sunset. Black and featureless as the sun sank behind it, a vast island lay long and low on the horizon, larger than any Kheda had ever seen or heard tell of, capped with a bank of gilded white cloud.

  Risala gazed at it. 'What's over there that's so horribly frightening to people with wizards and even a dragon to call on somehow, that they'd risk the open ocean rather than make less than a day's sail to a certain shore?'

  Kheda could only shake his head for an answer.

  'Let's find out,' Naldeth said incautiously.

  Kheda found his voice. 'Why?'

  'Because that earth dragon went somewhere,' Velindre reminded him. 'And we don't know what other dangers

  might lurk there. Forewarned is forearmed. That's why we came here.'

  'Can't you scry from this distance?' Kheda objected. 'Why put ourselves at risk, if the wild men and their mages chose to avoid the place?'

  'Hadrumal's magic is considerably more sophisticated than these savages' spells.' Naldeth sounded faintly offended. 'You must have learned that from Dev.'

  'Scrying's not the most robust of enchantments.' Velindre silenced the young mage with a wave of her hand. 'There's fire beneath the water hereabouts and both are woven into the depths of the earth where the mountain's eruption has split the sea bed. The steam and the ash are weaving all the other three elements into the air. The best course is to sail over there and see what there is to see with our own eyes.'

  'The confluence of elements stretches all the way over there.' Naldeth was looking increasingly eager as he stared at the distant shore. 'We've come all this way. There has to be more to learn here.'

  'I suppose so,' Kheda said with deep reluctance.

  / had better return with some solid news to set in the balance against the contented indolence and self-indulgence of this voyage so far.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The old woman liked being by the boundless water. Not just because she could forage among the rocks when the waters receded in their daily dance and fill her belly with the sweet salty shellfish she prised from the damp crevices. Not just because she felt so safe sitting high in the cranny she had discovered half-way up the shallow rocky cliff, which was only accessible from below. She would see anyone walking along the shore long before they saw her and she had painstakingly stockpiled stones on her ledge to break the heads and hopefully the resolve of anyone who wanted to capture her. Not that she had seen anyone else on this exposed shore in all the days she had been here.

  She simply loved to look at the water. It fascinated her. She had never imagined it could be so vast. The painted men had often said that the whole land was ringed with endless waves, so fleeing their supremacy was pointless. She had heard such tales since her childhood in that village she could scarcely remember. She had imagined these boundless waters were like the floods that swept through the green forests when the great storms came and the empty rivers overfilled and overflowed.

  Some years the floods came quicker than others. The rivers roared down from the high ground in ravening spate, surging through the trees, felling the forest giants whose day was done and crushing lesser trees with the tumbling trunks. Once such fury was done, the flooded

  forests were quiet and still. The swamped shrubs were briefly home to swimming lizards and snakes, and to the birds that preyed upon them. Gradually the waters seeped away into the soil to hide once more from the all-seeing sun and the rivers shrunk back into their narrowest courses.

  The spectacle before her was so far beyond such floods that there was no comparison. This water was alive, defying the sun with a brilliance quite unlike the muddy clumsiness of the rivers. She couldn't imagine it ever drying up. It scoured the shore with crashing waves, white as a great beast's teeth. It came and went back and forth over the rocks as it saw fit. She had watched its powerful billows shaping the long expanse of dunes where the cliffs fell away. This flood wasn't about to sink into the sand and vanish.

  There were mysteries in the depths of this water that she could never have envisioned. Beyond the lowest point where the waters yielded temporarily to the land each day, the shallows shone with all the colours of a butterfly's wing. Out past the strange-coloured rocks that broke the surface with a froth of white, the water turned darker, patterned with lines where swirling greens fought shadowy blues. Every so often, a breaking crest of foam surged across the dappled surface before vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.

  She gazed out into the misty blue. She had never lived anywhere where there weren't trees or mountains to be seen on the horizon. If there was a horizon here, it lay too far distant for her clouded eyes to see it. Perhaps the waters simply curved upwards to become the dazzling sky somewhere beyond her understanding. This water was blue as the sky—and water fell from the sky as rain, after all.

  Other things came from the sky. A shadow undulated

  across the yellow
and brown rocks. She looked up warily and huddled in the niche that protected her from more than the sun's unblinking eye. A few pink-and-black-striped birds swooped and chattered above the vacillating ripples on the beach. She was happy to see them. They would disappear the instant any larger shadow darkened the shallows, proclaiming their alarm. She moved out of the shade, relishing the warmth of the sun-soaked rocks that she found so soothing to her stiff back.

  She looked down to her favourite scatter of rocks jutting up from the shallows. It wouldn't be too much longer before she could climb carefully down and walk over the rapidly drying sands to reach them. There would be the tiny black spiral shells she could empty with a twist of a stone splinter and the larger brown ones that clasped such sweet yellow flesh tight in their twin halves. She decided she would gather some of the frilled green weeds today and bring them back up here to dry, held secure with a rock. She had small stones to spare for shying at the pink and black birds who would steal her food given half a chance.

  The painted men had never mentioned the strange burning taste of this vast blue water. Why was that? She picked up her gourd and shook it. It was less than half-full. She would have to make her way to the grudging seep of sweet water that darkened the rocks where an outcrop banded with brown and black like a lizard's back rose above the shore. She had burrowed into the flaking stone a little way with her digging stick and that useful shoulder-blade bone she had carried with her but it still took an interminable time for the precious trickle to fill the gourd. Though she didn't have anything else to do, for the first time that she could recall in all her long life. Better fetch water first, she decided, so she didn't have to leave whatever food she might gather exposed to the scavenging birds.

  She reminded herself to watch for any birds gathering around one of the pools left in the hollows of the rocks. That meant trapped fish, left behind by the retreating waters. She looked thoughtfully at her bundle of mottled scurrier skin faded to an indeterminate colour somewhere between grey and brown. She needed a sharp edge to slice into a fish and she had precious little of her black stone left. Was there none to be found anywhere on this exposed shore? She had looked, time and again. She certainly didn't want to retrace her steps back inland in search of cutting stones.