Totelun shook his head. He snatched the stick and wrote, [Am I going to have to force you to tell me what books are?]
She held up her hands in surrender, a cock-eyed smile under her mischievous eyes. [Books are the most wonderful things. Imagine the greatest experts in each subject wrote all the things they had learnt down on hundreds of leaves like this. And then they kept them, and used them to teach the next generation, and the next, each recording more and more knowledge. Some wrote about their time, and now we have history. The ancient Medologers knew numbers and now we have mathematics, and ways to calculate your Islands’ movements. Some were storytellers and wrote down wonderful tales of brave princesses and young warriors going on adventures and falling in love.]
The words about storytellers only served to make him think of Naus and he still wasn’t ready to deal with that yet.
Cassandra’s note finished, [Books were my first love. When I was reading, I could be hundreds of miles from the palace, riding into battle with Eleutheria, or solving famous riddles. I would dance in the moonlight with the fairy folk or go on a doomed quest.]
Totelun considered writing, how does this quest compare, but he didn’t want to force her to talk about what she had seen that lay ahead. Their owned doomed quest? He simply nodded as he read, leading them on through the undergrowth. He supposed books for Cassandra were the same as these notes had become for him, a window into the mind of another person that he couldn’t know any other way. Without them she was shut to him, and he from her.
Their note writing had come on in great leaps. Cassandra had told him of her life in the palace, the games that she used to play with the sister who was now the Empress of a fallen city. She told him of her secret telepathic connection with Aurelia, how they used to both be mute as tiny children, completely able to speak, but not needing to until they realised they were scaring their mother.
[I suppose I have come full circle,] she wrote. [I am mute once again.]
[You can still speak to me.]
[That is true, and I am so glad we didn’t have to travel all the way without working out how to communicate. I can speak to Aurelia as well at any time, even all these miles away, she can hear me if I send to her.]
[That must be nice,] wrote Totelun, thinking of Naus. [You are never really alone. You always have someone.]
He told her about his tribe and his family, about his boisterous young brothers, his caring gentle mother Sedara and the stoic father he missed so much.
[He sounds terrifying,] Cassandra remarked after Totelun’s description. [Why do you love him so?]
[He is a force of nature. Respected in tribes across many Islands. The greatest hunter in a generation. Though he may have been strict, and he was, he was also an amazing teacher, and treated my mother with great kindness, far more than many of the other men I watched as a child. I learned to respect him and hang off his every considered word, because when he spoke I knew I deserved those words. I wanted more than anything to attain his approval. I still do. I just always wanted him to be proud of me. If a man like him could be proud of me, then I had succeeded in life.]
Totelun found he wrote more than he generally would speak out loud, and through the notes, shared more with Cassandra than he had with Naus. Somehow despite their handicap, they were able to understand each other both quickly and deeply. Probably more so than if they had some stilted conversation.
He tried to teach Cassandra the ways of a hunter as they travelled, and she was receptive to his lessons on which plants were edible and which would cause excessive vomiting. Totelun knew all about excessive vomiting. She was decidedly unreceptive to his assertion that hunting animals was all right, and no amount of explaining predators and prey and the natural order made any difference. But when he shot and killed a wolf and skinned it, explaining it was the only way he was going to be able to keep her warm on the mountain, she didn’t argue. He continued to find them water and supplies, but their meals became something Cassandra could help him with; during the day she would gather the roots and vegetables he pointed out, and after a day or two was able to do this without instruction. She would still present her bundle of mushrooms, tubers and fruits to him before he cooked, but he rarely had to remove anything dangerous anymore.
A few nights ago, Cassandra had tapped him on the shoulder and held out a dishevelled leaf. Totelun had made a mental note to gather more before they left the forest behind. He had a collection of branches to cut into arrows before he slept, but he’d read her note immediately. It had become rude to wait.
[Can you make me a staff?] Totelun had looked up at her, standing expectantly in her wolf skin wraparound. In the nights since, he’d made sleeves that attached underneath and protected her bare arms. He’d taken the longest, straightest branch and handed it to her, but she shook her head. [No. A staff. For fighting.] When he’d looked up Cassandra mimed a very convincing movement with her hands that spoke of natural skill, and practiced muscle memory.
Now three nights later he had finished his work. When Cassandra returned to camp with an armful of walnuts, he presented her with the staff; it was almost as tall as her and carefully whittled into a smooth surface with sharpened stakes at either end. He’d made sure to give it a careful balance; it hadn’t been that far removed from crafting a bow, just a sturdier wood instead of one he could bend and shape. She beamed, taking it and weighing it in hand. Totelun sat back on his log to watch.
With speed and reflex that he would never have suspected, Cassandra whipped the staff around, over her head and then out into a perfect straight line, without a hint of sway. A duelling stance. Then she began to rotate it in fast circles, first on her left side, and then without slowing, round to her right. She had perfect balance and threw the staff through the moves of a practised kata.
Totelun was more than impressed. He marvelled that she could whip the staff around her without tangling it behind her head and round the Medusi tube. She had incredible spatial awareness, the staff whizzing around her in a blur.
[That’s amazing,] he wrote. [Did your tutor teach you that?]
[For once, no,] she wrote back. [My father wanted us to know how to fight and gave us each weapons at an early age. Aurelia chose the bow. She can split acorns at fifty paces. She could even give you a challenge. I chose the staff. I worked with a surly old fighter who thought teaching a child was beneath him, despite the money that the Emperor paid. He came around once I was able to knock the boys in the yard black and blue.]
They ate a spare meal of nuts and fruits Cassandra had gathered, and Totelun added some dried wolf meat he had kept from the earlier kill, eating it despite Cassandra’s dirty look. Wolf was not tasty.
The topic of her visions was never far away from their minds.
[Instead of me asking questions, why don’t you tell me what you have seen?] Totelun wrote.
Cassandra knew what he meant. [I don’t want to burden you with them.]
[It is not a burden. You should not have to bear the weight alone. You are fiercely independent, Cassandra, just like your sister, but sometimes you have to let others share the load.]
It was a while before she handed him another note, and Totelun was finishing the fletching on another arrow – one that his father would actually be proud of – with feathers he’d kept from the skinny chicken.
[I see Aurelia betrayed by someone close to her, but I cannot see their face. I have never met them. Trying to see her future is like watching through water, as another liquid, poison I think, billows out like blood. I see a young boy, wearing my brother’s clothes, kneeling at the feet of Noctiluca, but when I try to look directly at his face, it is invisible. There is no face, just a flesh-coloured blank, his features scoured away. I see Naus,] here she had erased her words a few times, but what was gone was illegible, [trapped in a chamber from which there is no exit, while Medusi pour in all around him. He is alone in hostile lands.
[And you, Totelun. When I can see anything beyond the mountain crowding out my eve
ry thought, I see a waterfall over a great abyss, where the water just falls forever. I have seen you fall, but I never see you return.]
He looked at her, trying to gauge what she was thinking. There was fear in her words, confusion and frustration at not being able to use her gift for any purpose. [They aren’t just visions. Some are riddles.]
[I know,] Cassandra wrote, [riddles I cannot solve.]
He wrote a note, then took her hand. [Not alone. But together, maybe.]
[If I could see the face of the one threatening Aurelia, I could warn her, as it is I can only say be vigilant and suspicious of everyone.]
Totelun nodded. [Maybe the more she can tell you about her new acquaintances, the more that vision will solidify into something. If she told you of a special tattoo, and then you saw it, you could tell her.]
Cassandra shrugged. [I will try. What does Anthrom’s blank face mean?]
[The less said about your traitorous brother the better, but it’s a riddle. He’s clearly sold his soul to the Medousa and lost his own identity.] Totelun had never and would never forgive that boy for trying to kill Cassandra.
[And yours?] she asked.
Totelun closed his eyes, portraying a confidence he felt was slipping away from him. [All we need to do is avoid all endless waterfalls. That will solve that.] With her cryptic responses regarding the top of the mountain, coupled with this new vision, he was dreading starting the climb up the silent sentinel. What was he going to find up there? He already suspected there could be an ambush waiting. The waterfall could be a good sign, that they reach one of the Floating Islands; some of them had lakes and rivers that eclipsed the edges of their land mass and water flowed off them into the Cloudsea. But did that mean he was he going to gain the Islands, only to fall again?
[What about you?] he wrote.
Cassandra just wrote a question mark.
[I mean you have seen me die in torture, and now falling from a waterfall. Have you seen your own death?]
He hadn’t gauged her reaction to that correctly at all. Cassandra threw his note down, scowling at him, and then stormed away into the trees. Totelun let her go but watched her carefully. She was easy to find with her blue glow, but he didn’t want her to get attacked.
When she came back to the fire almost an hour later, she didn’t respond to the leaves he gave her, and curled up near the fire with her back to him.
*
On the afternoon of the tenth day, the trees of the forest finally began to thin. Cassandra walked just ahead with her staff strapped to her back, her little Medusi a feeble light now that the canopy allowed the sun to penetrate through to the ground. They’d been a short time without water, but Cassandra had learned well and spotted a low shrub with large leaves that collected the morning dew; some still lasted into the early afternoon. When they up-ended them, the water was fresh and delicious to parched throats. Through the trees Totelun could see the mountain looming huge ahead of them, dominating the horizon from one side to the other.
His gaze tracked up and into the sky; the clouds were sparse and the Floating Islands clear and present. He imagined himself already home sitting on a favourite outcrop with his legs dangling into the abyss, looking at the strange surface world below. The one the Shamans said wasn’t real, he thought. The one they told us didn’t exist. What else had he been told would turn out to be a lie?
The last of the trees subsided and Cassandra had stopped ahead. She turned and beckoned him forward. When he came up level with her and looked out across the remaining miles before the mountain, he could hardly believe his eyes.
[Wait here,] he wrote, handing the leaf to Cassandra.
He left her writing a very long note and backed up a few metres to the tallest tree that was still on the edge of the forest. He flicked his daggers into his hands; their straps never left his wrists, although he had made small restraints for them to clip into so they didn’t flop about. Bark chipped off each time he slammed a piton blade into the wood, but the tree was hale and sturdy. When he reached about thirty foot, he stopped and looked out over the terrain laid out before the mountain.
It was covered in Medusi. Not just a bloom, not a natural explosion of individuals caused by easy access to food, favourable winds and no discernible predators. This was far more. This was more like five or six blooms, all congregating together. It was many times larger than the huge armies of Medusi that had been making their way to Theris months earlier, more even than had assaulted the city and thralled its citizens.
The bloom was three or four miles wide and stretched across the horizon from left to right; it was also a mile or so deep at its densest point, and went most to the way to the base of the mountain.
Why are they here? Some kind of defence Noctiluca had devised? Had she determined his destination and got them here to bar his way? Or were these just her reserves ready for some other purpose?
Totelun looked from east to west, counting dense thickets of wild Medusi everywhere. It was only a matter of time before Abrax was up and about, tracking him down again. He didn’t have time to drag Cassandra around this ocean of writhing tentacles.
[Then we have to go through,] she wrote after he had descended and told her what he’d seen. He’d made it clear how hopeless it was.
[We can’t,] he said. [Didn’t you see what happened to your city? We’d be thralled in minutes. I can’t fight that many.]
She shook her head. [You misunderstand. And you give up so easily. Aren’t you are the one who is supposed to stop the Medusi?]
[There are no standing stones for safety,] Totelun wrote. When she just looked at him blankly he added, [The old man once taught me that Medusi won't venture past standing stone circles. And it’s true, I saw it.]
While Cassandra composed her reply, still shaking her head, Totelun began to question why he brought her. At least if she wasn’t here he wouldn’t have to also worry about her safety. He could just get on with things. For a moment he considered his ability to fight his way through, and then realised it was futile. With Cassandra or without, he was going to have to go around somehow. And by doing so he would lose valuable time. The Islands were getting closer, Abrax was probably getting closer. He didn’t know what to do.
Suddenly a stick hit him round the back of the knees and knocked him on his ass. Cassandra dropped a note on his chest.
[Let me guess, you’re thinking I’m a liability.]
He looked up at her scowling face, twirling that staff like she’d love to take his head off with it. He hadn’t said anything, had he?
Another note. [I’ve written you a story. It’s about Naus.]
[I don’t want to read it,] Totelun wrote back.
[I know you don't want to, but I don’t care. Read it.]
Totelun took the offered leaves, maybe ten in all, and browsed them for a moment. This was what she had begun to write when he’d climbed the tree to scout. They were full of ancient names that he had no hope of working out how to pronounce, but he could recognise them each time they appeared. Cassandra stormed over to an upended trunk and sat waiting while he read.
*
The first Empress Eleutheria fought the Overlords in a war that lasted many decades, and cost thousands upon thousands of lives. One determined woman defending humanity against the power of the Overlords with all their magic and all their thralled power. They were evil and corrupt beyond the ken of mortals.
Eleutheria is an idol of mine and Aurelia’s. We always used to bicker silently over who got to be her in our games.
She had many loyal friends and allies, not least among them her unstoppable assassin, The Thorn. Early in the War of the Overlords, she sent him out to assassinate an enemy of hers, a subordinate general of the Overlords, named Septimus, who had kidnapped Eleutheria’s beautiful thralled Healer, Frayja. She had healing talents like your friend Chrysaora, and Eleutheria wanted her back.
Septimus basked in the reflected glory of the Overlords, especially that of the greatest of
them all, Cepheus. It was said that Cepheus could command and control the Medusi, work them to his will. Septimus enjoyed the benefits of this power and resided in a fort that sat at the centre of a bloom of Medusi a mile wide. It was so huge that no one had ever traversed it and lived. The surrounding countryside was littered with the blackened carcasses of those who had tried and failed.
But The Thorn wasn’t just any man. He was the greatest assassin that had ever lived.
He braved the sea of Medusi, striking out for the fort at the centre and his prize. Septimus and Frayja watched from the battlements because The Thorn had announced his intention with a great horn blast. He was attacked immediately and his sword tasted the flesh of a hundred Medusi as he carved his way through. But just like the men who had gone before him, The Thorn eventually tired, and was overcome by the sheer numbers of Medusi. He was brought down, struck by a Medusi in the back of the neck. He fell and didn’t regain his feet.
Septimus, high on his fort, laughed himself to sleep that night, but Frayja stayed, keeping vigil on that cold night.
Later, The Thorn woke to find himself alive, but thralled. The ranks of Medusi had closed in and he was trapped. But even as he lurched to his feet, even as his hands found the Medusi tube at his neck, he was not attacked. He counted his luck that he was not thirsty, for that was the sign that Medusi had laid their polyps in his stomach. The other Medusi were uninterested in him. The Thorn realised that no thrall had ever attempted to cross Septimus’ defences, for if they had they may have learned this terrible weakness.
In the dead of night, The Thorn surged through the throng, wading through thousands of Medusi, all of which let him be. Eventually he reached the fort and climbed the high tower where Frayja was imprisoned. He gained the roof and embraced the Healer who had waited all night for him. Suddenly Septimus appeared, alerted by the sight of a blue light climbing the tower, and stabbed him. The Thorn was quick, quick enough to bring his own sword to bear, to run Septimus through even as Septimus plunged the dagger into him again and again. Both men died up there on the battlements mired in each other’s blood.
Embrace of the Medusi (The Overlords Trilogy Book 2) Page 23
