A Respite From Storms

by Robert J. Crane

  He gripped the handle of his knife, tucked semi-tight into a scabbard not made for it, scavenged from a storeroom on the Lady Vizola as they had passed en route back from their visit to Stanislaus.

  This one was leather.

  The blade’s next sheath would be Baraghosa’s throat.

  “The Aiger Cliffs,” said Kuura when their climb had resumed, “is nothing like the cities where I am from.”

  Alixa said, “Shipmaster Burund said it’s a place called Coral …”

  “Coricuanthi,” Kuura corrected. “Yes. But that is the continent, like your Luukessia. The place I am from is called Nunahk. But this is not a city,” he said, shaking his head. “Nunahk is only a village. Yet, isn’t that how all cities begin?” He smiled broadly at Alixa and Jasen in turn. Spreading his hands wide to encompass the Aiger Cliffs, he said, “This city was once just as small as a baby is to a full-grown man. And look at it now: it bustles with life, people visiting it from the world over.” Dropping his arms, he said, “And so, maybe one day Nunahk will be a city too, with houses spread over the hills for miles and miles to see.”

  “Would you like that?” Alixa asked.

  “No,” said Kuura, very earnestly. “Coricuanthi has enough cities. If its people wish to build another, then they may build another—but I wish that it will not be Nunahk.”

  Jasen’s eyebrows pressed close together, low. Even without his wild swings from seriousness to laughing like a lunatic, Kuura was a struggle to follow.

  Apparently Alixa felt the same, after his singing about the growth of a village, for she asked, “Why don’t you want Nunahk to grow?”

  “It can grow!” Kuura said, and Jasen felt his confusion increase another increment. “But in a little way, yes? Slow, and gradual, so it retains what it is today, and what it has been in the past. When places become cities, though, they become watered-down. All their character becomes muddled.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Stop,” Kuura said, halting.

  Jasen obeyed, more than happy for the pause. Halfway up now, and still so far to go—a rocky spire coiled above the next plateau, the path winding around it three times before reaching its apex. A sweat had broken upon his forehead and the small of his back already, his tunic clinging to him uncomfortably. He’d be drenched by the time he reached the top …

  Assuming, that was, his legs didn’t give out on him first.

  Kuura gestured back over the Aiger Cliffs, all its hustle and bustle filling the streets. “You have seen the city first-hand now,” he said. “Maybe not for long, but you have seen it. You have seen the faces of people from many far-off lands—lands like your Luukessia, or my Coricuanthi, or a dozen others. They are all here in this place, doing their business, mixing their cultures.”

  Alixa was frowning. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing is wrong with it. In fact, it is a beautiful thing.”

  Her frown only deepened. “So …”

  Kuura laughed. Resuming their journey upward, he said, “Nunahk has a special place in my heart. It has a culture all of its own, a history. And so, selfishly, I do not wish for Nunahk to grow beyond that. Its culture would endure, I know, and it would be shared with the people who came to make it home … but it would also be forever changed. It would not be the Nunahk I know anymore. Does this make sense?”

  Alixa mulled it over. “I think so.”

  “It is a beautiful place, Nunahk. Not the same as this—the buildings are smaller, the paths are dirt … but it straddles the Locau River as it bends—it is a glistening blue river, the Locau, alive with fish of every color you can imagine—and my people have crafted tributaries of their own so that our fields are wet, and our crops plentiful. They have planted fruit trees, with the most wondrous bark that shines like the wings of a moth in the moonlight—and there are thick grasses, perfuming the air, which we would run through as children.”

  His eyes twinkled. “And then, when we have our own children, we chase them through it too, laughing and playing—so they know it is okay, yes? So they know not to be afraid of the world outside of our village. It is this philosophy that led me here, now. You see?”

  Alixa nodded.

  “I am very fond of Nunahk,” said Kuura, somewhat wistfully.

  “Stanislaus mentioned you have a wife?” Alixa asked.

  “I do,” said Kuura—and he grinned again, showing almost all of his teeth. “Asha. And two daughters: Imami and Ada. They are all so beautiful.”

  “Do they live back in Nunahk?”

  “Oh, yes. I would not endanger their lives at sea! That would make me a bad husband and father indeed, a very bad man. Maybe if I did not love them.” He barked laughter. “But they are fortunate that I do love them, very much—so they stay in Nunahk, and they wait for me when I come back to visit.”

  “How often do you go?”

  “A few times a year, if we can manage it. Never for very long—a week, maybe two.”

  “It must be hard,” said Alixa.

  “Aye,” Kuura confirmed. “For me more than them, I think. They make my life so much richer. But me—I am just the crazed old loon who comes around every few months with far-fetched stories of the places he has been to.” And again he laughed, like it was the funniest thing in the world to him.

  Jasen’s mouth twitched down at the corners.

  “If I could stay longer, I would,” Kuura went on. “They are my family, and I love them dearly. But our trade does not pay great riches, so I must return to work that I may support them the best I can.”

  When he was not breaking into laughter, he spoke very seriously but also very plainly. Almost businesslike, it was as if he was not speaking of the melancholy. If his heart ached—and surely it did—he made no show of it.

  Alixa said, “You’re a good man, Kuura.”

  He did not acknowledge this. Instead, he said, “I have told you of my village. Perhaps you can regale me with a story of yours as we climb?”

  Alixa glanced to Jasen. He didn’t say anything—was too busy sucking in breaths as his legs fought the increasing slope. Three quarters of the way up this lowest cliff now—maybe a third of the total distance. He saw why people took horses and carts up here—although it was hard to ignore the fact that men and women and children on foot made up probably eighty percent of the traffic moving in either direction. None of them were even a fraction as out of breath as Jasen was.

  It had been a long day, he reasoned.

  Scratch that. It had been a long week. When was the last time he’d eaten properly? Biltong and hardtack did not a meal make. He’d probably lost fifty ounces of body fat already—and it was not fat he could spare.

  Sooner or later he had to stop pushing himself, or he would push himself too far.

  Baraghosa went up here, he thought. I’ll stop when I’ve killed him.

  So he carried on and listened as, after a long pause, Alixa spoke.

  “We lived in Terreas.” Her voice was soft. Idly, she ran a hand across Scourgey’s haunch—comfort, for herself, not the scourge. Her eyes, downcast, did not appear to take in the cobbled pattern of the road, but stared an infinite distance away—to a past, perhaps, where the world had not been turned on its head, and Terreas still stood.

  “It was a village at the base of mountains—seven of them, arranged in a curve. In the mornings, you could—you could see the mist come in as the air condensed through the gaps between them, around their bases. I’d watch, sometimes. Monsters roamed in them … but that wasn’t what I was watching for. Not always.”

  Jasen remembered that first morning when they had sat on the rock together, back at the start of this—not when Baraghosa arrived, but in the days before, when he had traded dares with Alixa and vaulted the boundary, saving Tery Malori and then clambering over again to retrieve his mother’s necklace.

  He touched it now, feeling the stone pressed against his chest.

  Strange; for the past days, he hadn’t thought
of her, or the amulet, this last thing he had left, much at all.

  A great wave of guilt washed over him.

  Alixa gave Scourgey an idle pat, lost in her memories.

  “We were small,” she said. “And comfortable, even in the corner of our land where we eked out a life. But it was a life,” she said fiercely—and Jasen looked up to see that tears glistened in her eyes. She’d squeezed her hands into tight fists, pressing hard crescents into her palms, knuckles yellow-white as she tightened. “We might have been boxed in, and there might have seemed to be nothing left for us in the world beyond the little boundary the scourge were afraid to cross … we might’ve been slowly running out of space as the mountains ate up our crop fields, and mothers and fathers fought back against the world by having more babies than we could ever hope to feed …”

  Without Baraghosa, she didn’t say—but Jasen tacked it on all the same, in his mind.

  “But we had a life,” she said. “We loved, and we lived, and we fought for every day we had together.”

  She looked down. No tears had slipped out. Those saltwater droplets clung to her eyelashes though, held there.

  Alixa thumbed them away.

  Softly, she finished, “They’re with our ancestors now, may their souls find peace.”

  Quiet, for a time. Even talkative Kuura, inappropriate as his mood tended to be at times, did not break it.

  Jasen thought again of Terreas—the corner of a blighted world which they had fought for, as Alixa put it, in which they dared to live when monstrous beasts had overrun the rest of their land, wishing only death upon them.

  He’d longed to leave it, never appreciating till now how much he loved it.

  All of it was gone. Not diluted, the way Kuura feared Nunahk would grow over time; simply extinguished in fire and rock and ash …

  Were he not breathing hard through his mouth, Jasen would’ve ground his teeth.

  Again, that name reverberated in his skull. Again, his rage built at every echoed syllable.

  Baraghosa.

  He heaved hard.

  Baraghosa.

  The top of the cliff cupping the city loomed, the path splitting in two directions: rightward, a smaller route that took a circuit of the higher rocks; and ahead, where horses and carts receded to a village outpost a few miles distant, toward roads that led out into a world Jasen had once dreamed of exploring.

  He saw none of it, heard none of the slow conversation that resumed between Kuura and Alixa.

  All he saw was that man, his thin, gaunt face; the long, spindly fingers; the lights dancing above him like a beacon, signalling him for miles to see …

  Baraghosa …!

  And he heard his voice, like grass whickering in the wind, just a little too high-pitched for a man. So very unnatural, yet so sinister and frightful.

  Jasen would kill him. Had to kill him. He had to—

  Nearing the fork in the path, his legs gave out. One moment the world was upright; the next it had tilted, as if the ground were pulled out from under him. He pushed his hands out to catch himself—but it was too late; he’d already slammed into the cobbles, fallen into a sweating heap.

  “Jasen!” Alixa cried.

  “I tripped,” he lied.

  Her hands were on him, pulling. A moment later, Kuura’s joined. He eased Jasen up so he was sitting.

  The world had taken on a slight spin, just at the edges.

  Jasen sucked in steadying breaths, trying to ease it.

  “You’re sweating,” said Alixa.

  “I’m tired,” he said.

  “And not very fit,” Kuura chuckled.

  “It’s been a long …” Jasen started to say. He’d run out of breath though, and cut himself off drawing for more air.

  “Your cousin struggle like this very often?” Kuura asked Alixa over the top of Jasen’s head.

  “We’ve not really stopped for almost a week now,” she answered, looking at him with concern. Scourgey, at her heels, apparently felt it too, for she edged up to Jasen and pressed her nose against his temple, sniffing.

  She whined.

  “Just … give me a minute,” Jasen said.

  His breath caught, he allowed Kuura to pull him back onto his feet. Slightly wobbly, maybe … but he could stand. And after the first step, it was like he hadn’t just scaled a whole cliff at all. (A quarter of it, maybe—no use pretending he wasn’t still kind of exhausted—but the pause was appreciated.)

  “Next time just ask to have a breather,” said Kuura as he led them along the rightward path, to the highest plateaus, and the field of conduction rods. “Not all of us c’n walk as hard or far as I can.” He laughed.

  Jasen laughed politely too.

  Around they went, and around. This winding path, etched right along the twisting rock face, was thinner, more perilous. Jasen stood on the inside edge, and Alixa followed behind. They’d still got four, five feet of space between themselves and the edge. Yet there was no fence. And though Jasen would not let on, he did not trust his legs to remain stable.

  His knees began to wobble as they corkscrewed by the city spread beneath them for the second time. By the third and final pass he was panting hard again. Sweat stuck his tunic to his entire back. What he wouldn’t give to take up Kuura’s offer of a breather …

  But Baraghosa had come up here. That was what Stanislaus had said.

  The sorcerer would be here—and Jasen would kill him.

  This thought was what kept him putting one foot in front of the other. Left foot—right. Left foot—right.

  His breathing was haggard, hard.

  Left foot … right.

  Around and around …

  The conduction rods swelled. From down at the dock, this portion of the cliffs had seemed minute. Here, climbing to its peak, though, Jasen saw the truth: it was enormous, easily the size of Terreas from boundary to mountain foot. And there were more, where the spires and arches rose elsewhere too, all lined with great steel rods with bulbous tips and metal crossbeams tilted up to the heavens, channelling lightning strikes.

  Cabling ran down the cliffside. A vertical trench had been gouged out, the thick cables inset and tethered. Here there were mesh fences, so tight only a finger could be stuck through, and then nowhere near close enough to touch. What the effect of that might be, Jasen could only imagine. Each time they passed a coil, the air felt like it filled with static. Gooseflesh rose of its own accord. A hum filled the air with it, low, barely discernible yet unsettling. Jasen less heard it than simply felt when he’d passed through the electric field. His heart, beating hard, let up a little.

  Step after step:

  Baraghosa. Baraghosa.

  The peak loomed. The last thirty feet now. Jasen pulled on every last drop of energy he had. One hand reached for the hilt of his blade and rested there. Palm slick with sweat, he tightened his hold, ready to unsheathe it, to brandish it skyward, to run at Baraghosa, to thrust—

  They climbed—and Jasen pushed ahead as the top dropped before him, coming to eye level, down—

  He took four steps, eyes wide, surveying—

  The field of conduction rods stretched out before him, grand behemoths that were as thick as his waist and taller than the Lady Vizola’s main mast.

  … and that was all.

  No one was up here—no one except him, Kuura, and Alixa.

  14

  “No. No, no, no …”

  “Jasen …”

  Alixa’s hands were on him.

  He shrugged them off. Carried on legs that hardly could hold him any longer, he lurched forward into the field of conduction rods. All of them hummed, infusing the air with electricity—perhaps like the sort Baraghosa had brought upon Aiger Cliffs since his arrival. A spark could jump at any moment, from rod to rod—or maybe rod to Jasen, using him to reach the earth and neutralize itself, one last cacophonous explosion of energy that would do away with him in a blinding flash of light.

  He searched desperately, eyes
jerking back and forth like he was looking through a forest, trying to catch a glimpse of his quarry through trees and undergrowth.

  Yet, in all directions: no one.

  Baraghosa was not here.

  “Nooo …”

  Alixa caught him again, by the shoulders. “Jasen, please—”

  He thrust away from her. Whirled.

  Kuura stood at the end of the path. Somehow, Jasen had traveled past a half-dozen of these huge rods, with their wide bases, like a miniature set of steps. Thinner cables than the one snaking down the rock spire spilled off them, held to the ground by metal staples. Each rod they passed, another filament was added, until they gathered into one vast coil that wended down toward the city.

  Kuura watched with a half-opened mouth—

  Pity. He pitied him.

  Jasen staggered toward him.

  “Where is Longwell?” he said.

  Kuura said, “Jasen, perhaps you ought to …”

  “Where is he?”

  Jasen was on him now, and he clutched at the elaborate, oversized flaps of Kuura’s tunic. His grip was weak, but desperation turned his hands into claws that tangled and held fast.

  “I need to know where Longwell went,” Jasen panted. “He said he was after Baraghosa too. He said he’d be here. Stan said he’d be here.”

  Alixa tried a third time: “Jasen—”

  “Where is he?”

  This, a shout. It was stark, in the near-quiet of the clifftops.

  It seemed to take long seconds for the background hum to return.

  Kuura answered, “I do not know.”

  Jasen whirled. Again, he scoured desperately, as though perhaps Baraghosa had concealed himself behind a conduction rod. His form would fit, it would, unnaturally thin and long as it was …

  He stumbled through, looking—

  Finding no one, he craned skyward.

  No lights.

  There had been no lights.

  Never had been. Just blinding sun.

  Climbing here—it was a fool’s errand, said the voice of Hanrey, the crabby old village elder of Terreas, loud in his mind—and always right, always. And you are a fool for doing it.