The Legend of El Shashi

by Marc Secchia

  “Fool,” he scoffed. “You did nought but her will.”

  Then he raised a rock in his right paw, and clubbed me senseless.

  Chapter 4: Jyla

  How incandescent the romance

  Twixt moth and flame

  How quixotic

  Fatal

  P’dáronï of Armittal, Time Was, Time Is

  “Out! Out!”

  The guard thrust his baton into my rat-hole, and jabbed me in the ribs. When I did not stir quickly enough for his liking, he laid about my back and shoulders with the air of a connoisseur of affliction. Sadist! He enjoyed his job far too much. But my sour thoughts belied an alacrity to obey. Anything to avoid being beaten again.

  The dungeon door clanged open. I staggered forward, blinking against the torchlight as if I were a mole freshly roused from its burrow.

  “Filth!”

  “Gods, he stinks like a rotting corpse!”

  “Come!” Coarse laughter rang in my ears as I nearly brained myself on the low stone ceiling. “Hurry! The mistress must not wait!”

  Raising a hand to my forehead, I drew it back sticky with blood.

  Jyla had left me to moulder in her dungeon. Twenty-three days of solitude, marked by a bowl of slop served twice daily by a mute drudge, who ignored my every attempt to communicate. He did not empty the leather waste-bucket. The stench of my own faeces, the lack of space, and the impenetrable blackness had combined to drive me to despair. I exhausted myself in self-recrimination, reliving Janos’ fate a thousand times.

  And now she wanted me.

  “Move!”

  The brightness stabbed my eyes. I marched as best my chains allowed, hustled along by a guard on each arm. Squinting through my eyelashes, sun-blind as a dune mole, I perceived that we crossed an open courtyard, which completely surrounded a tall, slender tower fabricated of quarried rose-quartz blocks. My half-boots scuffed up puffs of dust as we crossed that sandy space and rounded the tower’s base. We halted before a solid, ironbound door. One of the guards fumbled at his belt for keys, the other man mined his left nostril for delicacies.

  I had long wished to know where I was held captive. The accents of my jailors sounded eastern to my untutored ear; the few sounds that drifted to my ear, unfamiliar and unwelcoming. But now, glancing at my captors, I saw foreign garb as well. Were we in Hakooi, fabled for its minstrels? Or as far as desert Lorimere, fifty leagues and more from Yarabi Vale? It was certainly further afield than Arlak Sorlakson had ever travelled.

  A rough blow against my shoulder plunged me through the doorway onto my already aching knees. “Up!” A boot propelled me forward as if I were some mangy cur the guard wished to kick out of his way. The chains tangled up and I crashed headlong into a flight of stone steps.

  The gloomy hallway stank of dead animals. I spat blood. Hopefully I had not lost any teeth. What use, rattling my chains at this treatment? I said nought as they hauled me bodily up the dank stairs, for I was too weak to climb.

  We plodded up and up that spiral staircase until I imagined we should arrive in the heavens themselves. My legs felt as ribbons blowing in a breeze. The starvation diet I had endured during my incarceration allowed them to handle my weight with the ease of grown men lifting a child. At length the guards halted before a second, smaller door. The one to my left gestured abruptly for his fellow to knock. The other balked. Even I sensed the strangeness emanating from those plain hardwood panels.

  “Enter!”

  Jyla’s voice. I fought an urge to scratch my skin as though I had been covered in a thousand exploring ants. The door swung open upon well-oiled hinges. A hard palm thrust me inside. The guards dared not cross the threshold; instead, they scrambled back down the stairs, shoving and scuffling to be fastest to depart. This speared the fear of Ulim’s Hounds into my quoph.

  A magnificent chamber greeted my awed gaze. Surely, far larger than the tower could support? The floor was a mirror-still pool of clear liquid–presumably water–so depthless that the effect was of standing on the edge of a cliff and peering over a vertiginous drop. My eyes rolled upward. Above my head, a domed, cobalt-hued ceiling arched to an impossible height, supported by ornate columns of priceless lapis lazuli. An evocative smell teased my nostrils–rich, exotic spices for which I had no name, which I traced to a brass brazier set upon a pedestal of highly polished onyx in the centre of the pool. The pedestal was perhaps three paces across, and raised but a handspan above the pool’s surface.

  Fluid movement behind the brazier brought the woman Jyla to my notice. Barefoot, robed in purest white samite, she trod a stately circuit around the pedestal’s circumference. She wore a towering headdress draped in an ornate netting of tiny, blood-coloured crystals, and her slender neck bent with a heron’s suppleness to support its weight. The water conveyed her soft, sibilant chanting perfectly to my hearing. The language was archaic and melodic, falling upon my ear with a subtly hypnotic power. Even from a distance, the sight of her spread the chill of an Alldark ice storm through my veins.

  A familiar paw crushed my left bicep.

  “Greetings,” said Tortha, with a purple-rimmed smirk of his lips. “Step this way.”

  He led me–or forced me, truly told–to advance out over the water. Vertigo tugged at my senses, but the walkway extended automatically beneath our feet, keeping exact pace with our progress. The jingling of my chains mingled with Jyla’s chanting, which never faltered during the age it took us to cross the pool, and to the tune of this discordant plainsong I arrived at the pedestal.

  She did not acknowledge my presence.

  Tortha cast me rough-handed at the brazier’s base, and there secured the chains upon my wrists to an iron ring embedded deep within the oily black stone. My reflection sullied its surface–ragged beard, soiled clothing, pallid skin, and fear acid-etched upon my brow.

  After watching Tortha withdraw, I turned my attention to Jyla, the author and mistress of my misery. Her sheer silken robes whispered as she moved, but where before I might have found the sight and sound erotic, this day I felt uncurious and detached from the business of living. Perhaps I had exhausted all possible emotion during my incarceration. Perhaps I had given up. Whatever the reason, fate no longer held claim upon my life.

  I knew she wove magic, but to what purpose?

  I wondered again at Jyla’s obsession. No-one beneath the suns is born evil. They choose their path–so my father taught me. Though a child may do wrong, and be taught wrong, true depravity is the acquired habit of adults. But Jyla! Could ought but Ulim’s own spawn be so steeped in evil? Jyla, mark my words, would maim, ruin, and torture without hesitation or regret. Small wonder Janos had chosen to live in hiding! To my knowledge he had never left Yarabi Vale, yet I knew he must have travelled the lands to acquire his great knowledge. What was his secret? I burned to know. It must be a cause dark and sinister, vast and terrible, that this murderess should pursue it unto death …

  As for Tortha, he had brute strength. He despised the weak. Jyla’s service offered opportunity aplenty to bloody his hands, I assumed, a duty he patently took cruel pleasure in perfecting. He had come to my cell one night, reeking of lethola spirit, to spit and rail at me through the bars. And the weal-marks of his whipping were not yet healed.

  What would my parents have made of this? Dragged to the tower of a Sorceress, bound to her whim and pleasure? And Janos? I had taken flight rather than fight; made no attempt to save him. Coward! Fool! Fool through and through … had I but done differently on that fateful night, had I but driven past! Ay, and had I not thought it through, considered the angles, replayed those events until I loathed myself with a loathing that burned as glowing coals in my heart? Why ignore the trader’s grephe? Why tell Jyla where Janos lived? Why tarry in Elaki Fountain, acting the whore?

  I had betrayed the man I loved as a father.

  Would he ever forgive me? Was he already dead?

  As my bitter reminiscence proceeded, I became aware that the chanting h
ad stopped. A silence as deep as black waters surrounded us. Jyla’s stony orbs studied me as though I were a loathsome species of crawling insect she had discovered on her bedroom floor and was contemplating crushing with her heel.

  She said, “You’re bleeding.”

  I replied in low tones, “What is it to you?”

  “I need you alive and well–for the moment.” Jyla offered this without inflection, not threatening.

  Had ought changed? Patience, Arlak, I counselled myself. Wait her out. Do not give in to your enervation …

  At length she continued, “You intrigue me, Arlak Sorlakson. You hail from a Roymerian village which even by Umarite standards is a stinking hovel. Yet your bearing is worthy of a Hassutl. Here are sensitive hands. Hands made not for dirt and calluses, but for the quim, for poetry, and musicianship. Perhaps … perhaps even for magic.”

  She touched me then, just the faintest brush of her fingertips, akin to a lover’s butterfly touch. My skin prickled. I did not realise I was shaking my head when she said: “You disagree? Yes, so do I. It puzzles me why Janos should choose for his protégé, a man so riddled with weaknesses?”

  “I am no Sorcerer, truly told.”

  “No–and neither was Janos, despite my suspicions. A most skilful opponent, mark my words. I broke him only yesterday, even with the aid of your uncaring betrayal. A difficult man. Janos of the guardtower will. He is all the man that you’ll never be.”

  “Nought will you gain from me!”

  A spider’s smile crept around her lips. I knew at once that my denial was baseless. A trick, a cruel manipulation, and my cowardice had doomed Janos. Jyla had been leagues ahead of me all the while. I felt unclean, used, abused.

  “Don’t cower!” she snapped suddenly. “It’s unbecoming in a man.”

  “It’s modest …”

  “It’s pathetic! What passes for culture in the Umarik Fiefdoms is a filthy perversion of the natural order! Where is the balance, the harmony, the respect for the way things ought to be? I’ll never understand the Umarite mind, even embodied in such a pretty specimen. Were you not such a spineless species of toad–well! I might have considered umak talis with you.”

  I cast my eyes to her feet. A dalliance with Jyla? I admit, for a moment something akin to desire warmed through my better judgement, for she was beautiful–as an icicle is beautiful, or a prism lit by refractive light–and powerful, and different to any woman I had ever known. But she was also as deadly as a mountain adder. A woman who would use and cast aside as she pleased, never sparing a thought to the good. Her contempt swamped my momentary wish. Heat flooded my cheeks.

  “So I broke Janos!” I flinched as her sudden shout echoed across the chamber. “I tortured him. I snapped him in twain and learned everything he knows; everything he had to tell. Ay, I sucked him out to a dry husk. In the end he begged to answer my questions.”

  Janos? It hardly seemed …

  “And now I know I need you, and your especial connection with him. Janos implored me to save you–and I will. He would even have appreciated it. He loved you–more the fool he.” In her mouth, the word ‘love’ twisted into a curse. It paralysed me, this unforeseen notion. “You’re a malleable material, Arlak, mine to shape and to hone. A tool for my needs. For you I have prepared this chamber, and a magic simple in structure yet profound in effect. It will be a … special creation. One day, you might even come to appreciate the irony.”

  Jyla moved closer, until her black eyes filled my world, like a night sky devoid of stars. The darkness was formidable, intoxicating, ravenous. “I need you to be selfish, Arlak,” she whispered, cupping my cheek tenderly. O accursed hands! “There, that isn’t too difficult, is it? Great power will be yours to command, but housed in such a flawed vessel, it can only lead to misuse. Your selfishness and wrongdoing will magnify the enchantment a thousandfold.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m raising a Wurm. You’ve heard of those, haven’t you?”

  “Ulules’ tales–”

  Jyla shook her head, breaking the connection, and stepped backward with a graceful flexion of her thighs. “Idiot!” she sneered. “Enough inane chatter.”

  At once she was all business, regal and haughty, drawing her robes about her person with a purposeful snap, transfigured into the role of Sorceress. Her hands began to weave a complex series of symbols in the air, moving as with a mind of their own in sequences of hypnotic power. I caught myself gaping like a dullard and hated myself all the more.

  Suddenly she cried: “Orlio immio oorrallia aatak!”

  No human larynx could have produced such a thunderous command.

  The result was spectacular. Like flower petals peeling away from the stalk, what I had taken for a solid dome above my head split along its seams and began to fall away slowly, majestically, into the space around the tower. Gods alone knew what the people on the ground must have thought. There was no other sound, just the sight of the dome pieces dropping past the edge of the pool, and though my ears expected it any moment, there came no thundering report of pulverised stone upon the ground below. Instead, a cool breeze soothed my fevered brow, bringing the aroma of sweet pine needles and rich, loamy soils.

  Every way I turned, my wondering gaze took in snow-capped peaks sparkling in the golden evening sunshine. They were ancient, riddled with caves and bearded with long-needled coniferous forests, resembling ranks of hoary-eyed kings wearing gilded crowns, with long beards flowing down over their slumbering chests. Where was I? What was this place? We were level with the heavens, eagles in our eyrie.

  I could see for leagues around from the onyx platform. Verdant pastures lapped gently at the base of the mountains, and a flock of egrets made brilliant white specks against the darkling forests.

  Serenity.

  “Oalisi aatak!”

  Jyla stabbed her hands into the pool. She held that pose so immobile, and for so long, that I began to wonder if some kind of seizure had not overtaken her. At length I noticed the surface begin to stir, yet a turgid sleeper, but steadily wakening to an unseen force. The pool became agitated. Her shoulders quivered, pressing downward, transferring some arcane energy, I imagined, into the waters.

  “Inio alik alakin!” She sprang back, startling me, and then began to stalk the pool’s edge. Watching. Waiting.

  Something was happening. A pressure on my eardrums, a salcat’s paw stroking my spine. I realised I had risen from my knees into a hunched-over standing position, the better to inspect my fate, but could see nothing alarming until I followed Jyla’s glance to the skies.

  My jaw sagged open.

  “Can you feel it, Arlak?” Jyla’s fingers sank into my hair as a tygress sinks its talons into rabbit-flesh. Dear Gods! What demoniacal strength possessed her hand–she would surely lift my scalp clear of the bone beneath! “Mark how the Wurm rises! Soon you will be invested with power the like of which mortals may only dream. As it unfolds within you, as the magic overwhelms and consumes you, you will be unable to hold back. Mighty Arlak! Mighty, helpless Arlak. My web will tear you from your wretched existence and make you great!”

  The sight held me transfixed. Above the tower, despite horizons as clear and blue as a pearlock’s eggshell, a glutinous grey-black mass of clouds surged together, seething and boiling as though dragged protesting to this rendezvous by Jyla’s invisible conjuration, and held prisoner against its will. Unnatural energies crackled between angry, jostling thunderheads. Growls of fractious displeasure sounded from their midst, giving me the impression of a pack of gigantic, snarling hounds confronting each other over a choice hunk of meat.

  The magnitude of her power!

  One hears stories of magic. A good ulule would know hundreds. The mad wizard and the evil Eldrik Sorcerer are as much ingredients of folklore as moxi flour is basic to bread-baking. Their abilities are fabulous, embellished by the poetic and bardic arts, encased in a storyteller’s rune and leaf. Reality was a harsh teacher. Instantly I gr
asped three truths: the limitations of my education, how I had laughed at those tales with a disbelieving heart, and how frail was the vessel that cupped my life.

  Jyla uncoiled her fingers. Thrust my head aside. “You’ll serve, Arlak. You’ll serve me well.” I was speechless. “Now give me your narrowest attention,” she declared. “Mark my words and be forewarned! At your every failure, the cost will be multiplied. Double my power. Double your forfeit. Your deeds shall feed my Wurm!”

  I had to assert myself. “I will never serve–”

  “Your will is neither barrier to man nor to child,” Jyla cut in. “What choice you had, Arlak, you squandered in betraying Janos. Look! Water and wind! Nature’s strength against yours. Which, think you, will triumph?”

  “What did you do with Janos? Where is he?”

  “In the water. In the sky. All around you.”

  She was serious.

  “You’re crazy!”

  “Mere drivel. Power is all that matters, nought else.”

  I shook my chains, helpless as any newborn babe.

  The rising wind plucked my rags and tousled my hair. The platform trembled beneath my feet. I expected the water to slop over the edge any moment, for a circular mill-race surrounded us.

  The Sorceress began to chant forcefully in a guttural tongue, a long rattle of syllables that built on itself with each repetition. To my ear it resembled the smattering of Low Eldrik Janos had once drummed into me. Should I not understand …? At length, however, Jyla’s labours provoked an eerie, throbbing wail from above, as though the mythical blackbeast had taken form to hunt its prey in the makh of twilight and howled answer to her summons. The clouds swirled faster and faster, I saw, goaded by her unending, increasingly impassioned efforts. She was sweating despite the cool atmosphere. The tendons of her neck were hawsers so taut I could have plucked them for music, had I been able.

  Mark my words, I was sore glad of my captivity. Jyla, unafraid, remained in the open with her robes clinging to her slight figure as the wind buffeted her this way and that. A sudden gust could knock her right over the edge, I imagined. The storm might yet turn to my advantage. The white cloth would flutter as she plummeted through the air …