An unspoken message passed between them as Gebrem took another sip of kef. They both knew the flawed First Calling no longer mattered; the coming of the Fidi was of much greater significance – perhaps greater than anything that had happened to the Matile since the Storm Wars ended.
“The Emperor is taking a long time to decide,” Tiyana said.
Gebrem grimaced and shook his head.
“Alemeyu decided before he went into Agaw’s Chamber,” he said.
“Then why – ”
Tiyana broke off as she realized the answer to the question she no longer needed to ask. By forcing her and Gebrem to wait, Alemeyu was asserting his authority. But she still didn’t understand why he needed to do so. Was he not the Emperor? She decided not to ask Gebrem to explain Alemeyu’s motives. Her father had a tendency to become rancorous whenever he talked about his exalted cousin.
“What do you think he decided?” she asked instead.
Gebrem shrugged.
“Alemeyu has always been difficult to predict,” he said. “But I don’t see any reason to keep the Fidis captive. Do you?”
Tiyana thought for a moment, thinking of the sliver of doubt that still remained in her mind; the single word Nama-kwah had spoken to her.
“No,” she finally said.
Danger ...
“For now,” she added.
Gebrem was about to respond to her equivocation when a stirring among the guards signalled the Emperor’s return to the Audience Chamber. When he came into sight, Dardar Alemeyu was shrouded in shadows, and his face betrayed no emotion.
As Gebrem and Tiyana rose to their feet, Alemeyu strode wordlessly toward the Lion Throne and settled into its seat. Without his crown and other regal trappings, he seemed diminished by the grandeur of the huge throne. But there was no lessening of the authority in his voice when he spoke.
“I have made my decision,” he said.
He paused, staring hard at Gebrem and Tiyana in turn. He allowed the silence to stretch uncomfortably before he continued.
“The Fidi have come from afar to be among us. We will grant them that wish. They will abide here as our honored guests.”
That was what Gebrem wanted to hear, although he allowed none of his gratification to show. However, the Emperor’s next words soured that moment of satisfaction.
“You, Leba, saved the life of the Fidis’ sorcerer, this Kyroun. What Kyroun does – or does not do – is your responsibility.”
Again, Gebrem concealed his true reaction. He did not yet know the true extent of the Seer’s sorcerous power. And he did not know what he would – or could – do once he did learn.
“As you wish, Mesfin,” was all Gebrem could say.
CHAPTER TEN
Sehaye’s Message
1
Like pieces of a broken necklace, the Uloan Islands lay strewn across the sea west of Abengoni. In the time before the Storm Wars, the Uloans’ homeland had been a magnificent archipelago, a gem of the ocean that matched the splendors of Khambawe, the Jewel City of the mainland. There were islands large and small, bordered with beaches of white and gold sand, clothed in verdant mantles of semi-animate vegetation called mwiti, and crowned with cratered hills – remnants of volcanoes that had long been dormant, but never dead. Flowers grew in rampant profusion throughout the archipelago and the animal life, which was different from that of the mainland, was as docile as though it had been domesticated long before the first humans had set foot on the islands. Birds of brilliant plumage flew like jewels through forest and sky, singing songs of welcome.
The descendants of the original settlers from the mainland had built beautiful towns and cities of coral, tamed the islands’ animals and moving plants, and cultivated soil that was so fertile that farmers’ crops could grow almost unattended. One crop, sweetcane, grew only in the Uloas, and traders from the islands carried it to the mainland and eventually to other parts of the world, including Fiadol, even as the mainlanders traded crafts and kef.
For centuries, peace and prosperity had reigned in the Uloas, so much so that they became known far and wide as the “Happy Isles.” But the Uloans were not satisfied with their contentment for long, even though others who visited their islands always went away envious of the way of life the Uloans had developed.
Yet the Uloans, in turn, coveted the continent-spanning influence of the Matile Mala Empire. Embers of ambition for greater dominance eventually flared into flames of jealousy and hatred against the mainland, which continued to consider the islands part of the Empire and demanded tribute along with the trade between them. And those flames eventually grew into a conflagration that would consume not only the islands, but also the mainland, which had long since ceased to be the Motherland in the minds of the islanders.
The land from which their ancestors had come was now seen as an impediment to the Uloans’ overweening aspirations, an obstacle that needed to be removed. The Uloans’ dreams of a destiny of dominance over the mainland had been planted and patiently nurtured by the renegade god Legaba, who was using the Uloans as tools in his schemes against his fellow Jagasti, who had made him an outcast after an altercation that had shaken their Realms. The Uloans were willing accomplices of the Spider God, and the disastrous results of their subsequent course of action were as much their responsibility as Legaba’s.
The Storm Wars were the culmination of combined human and divine arrogance, and in the end arcane forces were unleashed that went beyond even the Jagastis’ control. And when the cataclysmic conflict called the Storm Wars finally ended, the Uloas were no longer idyllic dreamlands. Smaller islands, and parts of the larger ones, had been swallowed by the sea. The sleeping volcanoes had awakened, burying cities in mounds of lava and ash. The sands of the white and gold beaches turned red as the blood that had been spilled during the Storm Wars. And the island’s unique, semi-animate plant life, the mwiti, had become ... restless.
Few Uloans had survived the appalling carnage the Storm Wars had wrought. Those who still lived continued to maintain their loyalty to Legaba, even though the Spider God’s promises of empire had failed disastrously. For Legaba was all they had left, because they had long since abandoned the worship of the other Jagasti who had been revered by the Matile and Uloans alike. And as the decades after the Storm Wars became centuries, the Uloans had grown farther apart from their Mainland kin. Their customs changed, as did their speech and even their appearance, until the blood and cultural ties that once bound them disappeared almost completely.
And as the Uloans gradually rebuilt what they could of their broken realm, a singular purpose drove them onward as the centuries crawled forward. That goal was Retribution Time. One day, a day the Uloans believed would soon come even as the years dragged by, the mainlanders would pay for the destruction they wrought upon the islanders. Retribution Time ...
And now, Sehaye’s gede was on its way to the Shattered Isles.
2
On a dark, overcast morning, the gede washed up on the crimson beach of Jayaya, the largest remaining island of the Uloas. After the wave that carried it onto the shore retreated, the gede continued to slide across the incarnadine sand, hitching its gelatinous body forward like an inchworm and leaving a glistening, foul-smelling track of ooze behind it.
When it had travelled far enough away from the water to prevent another wave from taking it back to sea, the sorcerous construct stopped moving. And it waited to be picked up: its task completed, its semblance of life gone.
The green of the foliage that grew beyond the red sand was so bright the plants appeared to glow even on a sunless day. Pink and yellow mwiti flowers grew amidst the grass, and multicolored mwiti fruits festooned the branches of the trees that abounded in the background. But the plant life was far from ordinary, for the petals of the flowers opened and closed like fingers, and the fruits pulsated like beating hearts. The grass moved like ocean waves, yet there was no breeze blowing to stir its blades.
Then the grass moved in
a different way, impelled by a volition other than its own. And a serpentine form emerged and wriggled onto the sand. It was dark green and about four feet in length. Despite the surface resemblance to the ophidian-kind, however, it was not a snake. It was an ubia-vine, a mwiti-plant that was capable of independent motion. Ubias could not move quickly enough to be dangerous to people or animals mobile enough to evade them. However, a stationary object like the gede was another matter.
Small leaves sprouted at random intervals on the narrow tube that constituted the ubia’s body. There was no discernable head at its anterior; only a mouth-like stoma encircled with thorn-like barbs. Its tail end was pointed like a spike.
The ubia-vine moved closer to the gede, which remained inert. When the vine reached its quarry, its mouth fastened onto the gede’s side, and the barbs began their work, cutting into the viscous flesh and channeling the pieces into the ubia’s gullet. The lapping waves drowned out the sound of the ubia’s cutting and chewing.
The lifeless gede had no defense against the ubia’s determined assault. Its poisonous flesh and sorcerous aura had protected it well from the predators of the sea as it swam from the mainland. But those defenses had no effect on the predatory plant life of the islands, which had been altered by the uncontrolled magic unleashed during the Storm Wars. And with its charge completed, the gede was now only an inert lump of tissue, and it could do nothing to save itself as the ubia burrowed its way ever-deeper into the construct’s motionless form.
Soon the barbs reached the wooden tube ... and sank into it.
Then footsteps rustled in the bright-green, waving grass. And an Uloan stepped onto the beach. The grass-blades pressed down by his feet sprang upright – and continued to move long after they were standing straight again.
The Uloan, whose name was Bujiji, uttered an exclamation of dismay and rushed to the gede. He reached down and ripped the ubia from its prey, easily avoiding the teeth-laden mouth that whipped toward him. He cut the vine in half with the long, broad-bladed knife he carried, then hurled the pieces into the sea. The severed sections of the ubia continued to thrash as they sank beneath the surface.
Muttering bitter curses, Bujiji reached deep into the gede’s mouth. Despite grimacing in disgust at the touch of the construct’s gelatinous substance, he closed his fingers around the message tube. Then he yanked the tube out, pulling pieces of the gede with it. At the sight of the marks the ubia’s mouth-barbs had made on the wood, he cursed again. He knew those marks would soon make trouble for him – trouble he could not avoid.
As the Uloan turned and strode away from the beach, the torn gede lay in the sand, dead eyes staring up at the gray sky. Within moments of Bujiji’s departure, another ubia came out of the grass and wriggled toward the construct to finish the meal the other had begun.
3
As he strode through the seaside forest, Bujiji glared again at the marks on the message tube. Those marks were clear evidence of his late arrival at the beach, and the near-disaster his tardiness had caused. Bujiji had only himself to blame for whatever happened next. Jass Imbiah had told him the gede would be waiting for him to pick up, but he had stayed too long with Awiwi, his current love, before going to the beach to retrieve the message the construct brought.
It was worth it to I, Bujiji thought, remembering the sensation of Awiwi’s sweat-slicked skin sliding against his as they made love. Well worth it.
The ubia-vine had not broken the tube; the message inside remained intact. That was the most important thing. Bujiji knew Jass Imbiah would berate him, and that would be an ordeal, never mind the far worse punishments the woman who was the ruler of Jayaya, and first among the Jassi of the other islands, was capable of inflicting. Those other punishments were not likely to happen ... he hoped.
“It was still worth it to I,” he said aloud, not caring that there was no one close enough to hear him.
Bujiji was a sturdy, sienna-skinned man of medium height. His only garments were a multicolored cloth knotted around his lean waist with ends that hung halfway to his knees, and a pair of leather boots that warded off the grasping strands of grass that adhered persistently, and painfully, to whatever flesh they touched. His knife, which he had sheathed again, bumped against his hip as he walked into the mwiti-forest.
In contrast to spies like Sehaye, Bujiji could never pass unnoticed on the mainland. His head was shaved, and he allowed no hair to grow on his face. His scalp was covered with lines of raised scars that stretched from the beginning of his forehead to the nape of his neck, giving the effect of a spiderweb. A series of straight, vertical lines were incised into the rest of his face.
His upper body was decorated with a stylized spider-cicatrice. The outline of the spider’s bulbous thorax had been carved into the middle of his chest, and its eight legs reached across his entire torso, meeting in the middle of his back, as though the arachnid had trapped him in a lethal embrace.
The scarification patterns were symbolic of Legaba, the only god the Uloans acknowledged, considering all the other Jagasti to be Mainlanders’ devils. All but a few Islanders wore his holy image on their skin, and gladly bore the pain of its incision during their coming-of-age ceremonies.
Bujiji thought about the spy who had sent the message from the Mainland. He did not know the identity of the man or woman; those who were to be sent to the Mainland were singled out at a young age and isolated from the rest of the islands’ populace until the time came for them to go across the sea. Of necessity, informants were left blank-skinned, like the Matile.
And for that, Bujiji pitied the spies, regardless of their value to the ultimate cause of Retribution Time. He was glad that he had not fit the specifications that would have placed him in their ranks.
Without conscious thought, the Uloan ducked away from an ubia vine that had extended itself from an overhanging tree limb. The sweet scent of the clenching flowers tickled his nostrils. He ignored the smell. If the petals of those flowers ever touched his skin, they would fasten onto it like the waving grass, and they were even more difficult to tear away. Yet if they were not removed, they would cling until all the blood had been leeched from his body.
As he trotted through the weaving grass and towering trees, Bujiji passed charred, twisted ruins caught in the embrace of encroaching mwiti trees – remnants of the destruction the Storm Wars had wrought. Bujiji paid the relics no heed. The Dying Time was part of the far-distant past. And Retribution Time – the time when vengeance would be wrought against the Mainlanders – belonged to an unknowable future that would soon come, however long “soon” proved to be.
Then a chittering sound from a nearby tree caught his attention. Bujiji looked up, and saw a vaguely manlike shape capering in the branches. The creature pointed at him and its screeches sounded like imprecations.
“Hush, munkimun,” Bujiji said. “You got no quarrel with I.”
Unlike on the Mainland, there were no true monkeys in the islands. But the swarms of long-armed, long-tailed arboreal creatures the first settlers had encountered when they arrived bore a strong resemblance to the simians they had left behind. However, the islands’ tree-dwellers had huge, round eyes, and the ears that jutted from their heads resembled those of a cat more than they did a monkey or ape. The creatures were lemurs, distant relations of monkeykind that had mostly died out on the Mainland ages ago.
Even on the islands, there were few munkimun left now. And whenever one of them saw a human, it would scream out its grievances over the ravages of the Storm Wars, and their displacement from the home that was theirs before the humans cleared parts of the forest to build their own dwellings.
Bujiji listened to the munkimun’s imprecations a few moments longer. Then he found a fruit – one that did not pulsate – and tossed it to the arboreal creature, which caught it deftly and began to chew on it. And he continued his journey away from the beach without having to hear anything more from the lemur.
Soon there were no more ruins to be seen.
The grass no longer moved, nor did the fruits on the trees pulsate. Bujiji was now back among the flat-roofed coral houses of Ompong, the capital city of Jayaya and the last outpost of the Uloans’ former splendor in the time when they were truly the Happy Isles.
Bujiji greeted the other spider-scarred people he passed. As they returned his calls and waves, the other Uloans cast a wary glance toward the damp tube in his hand. Their eyes were sharp enough to see the marks the ubia’s teeth had made, and they knew what would waiting for Bujiji when he delivered the spy’s message to Jass Imbiah. After he passed, they sucked their teeth and shook their heads in sympathy even as they thanked Legaba that they were not in Bujiji’s boots.
Jass Imbiah will not be too vexed with I, he tried to reassure himself as the notched tube pressed hard against his palm. At least I catched the message before that ubia did ...
3
Jass Imbiah held the message tube in her slender hands. She sat on an ivory throne in her palace of pink coral. The ivory from which the throne was carved had been brought over from the Mainland in ancient days; no Uloan had seen an elephant since the days before the Storm Wars, when travel and trade between the Mainland and the islands had been frequent.
Although Jass Imbiah had lived for a long time, her true age was impossible to guess from her appearance. Her body was swathed in a voluminous chamma of red and green stripes, and a cap of silver decorated with a carved spiderweb covered her head; only her face and hands could be seen. Her fingernails jutted like talons. And every visible inch of her umber skin was covered with small scars cut in the shape of spiders, making the usual indications of age difficult to discern.
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