by Marc Secchia
But the clouds marched to her cadence, weather and water hearkening to her call as if a vast instrument thrummed at its master’s fingertips. The wind picked up spray up off the pool, soaking me from every angle, and as I wiped my face I became aware of a new sound; rather, I felt it in my bones, a basso rumble that quickly intensified until I thought my teeth would shake loose from my jaw and patter around my feet as hailstones. Then the wind changed.
My lungs laboured to draw breath. My feet became light. Jyla’s robes shot skywards. Suddenly I could no longer keep my stance, for a fierce up-draught rushed beneath my body, lifting me with astounding facility, flipping me upside-down. Only the manacles entrapping my wrists kept me from being plucked away instantly.
Forked lightning struck the platform.
I screamed.
Jyla, arms outstretched and head flung back, screamed too in a kind of ecstasy, at precisely the same moment. Our cries mingled until they became indistinguishable.
With that, Nethe’s breath struck the world.
Up surged the water from the pool. Down came the clouds. A dark, snaking funnel descended towards my feet. Mark my words, at that time I knew nothing of tornados, for the Umarik Fiefdoms do not suffer such freak weather. But I believe it was a tornado Jyla created that day. And I was its target.
The storm attacked as if intent on driving its weapons into my flesh, pummelling my body this way and that until I feared the manacles would tear my hands clean off my wrists. It tossed me about as a leaf blasted by a gale. All I could do was to squeeze my eyes shut and endure, to hold my face when the wind dropped for a moment, and then be hoisted aloft by a fresh gust. How could she still be standing? The wind shrieked as if the thousand cacodemons of Ulim’s Hunt loosing tongue together, as the crack of Ulim’s whip lashed them on through the ever-darkness of Alldark Week.
But even more terrifying was Jyla’s next command: “IMMACO WURI AATAK WURM!”
This, at last, I understood. Through the tempest, I glimpsed the Sorceress striding to the brazier, insensible to the slashing rain and a windstorm that could hoist a grown man aloft. She cast an object within. Her once-comely features were drawn into a death mask, as though her life were somehow sup to those demons I had envisaged and they had claimed payment due for the magic she had wreaked upon an innocent world.
A thick, greasy tendril of smoke began to leach from the brazier. It did not dissipate as I would have expected, nor did the raging storm shred it. Instead it swayed, coiled beneath the blast, and oozed toward me.
I wanted to cry out, ‘What more? What more can I stand?’ But now the sweet stench of burning flesh suffused my nostrils. It triggered the memory of how, in my ninth anna, I had chanced upon a charred body in the bragazzar woods near Yarabi village; how I fled to my farm, never stopping for breath; how upset I had been when I burst into the farmhouse only to discover my parents were away trading. Janos found me quivering beneath my bed that eventide. He told the Layik of the village, the head woman. The scandal broke that same night. My find unearthed a cell of Ulitrists–those Ulim-worshippers who, it is said, dissect corpses in search of arcane knowledge and burn the remnants for Ulim’s pleasure.
Were Janos’ organs sizzling on the coals? Was Jyla an Ulitrist? Her independence decried such an association. She would see allegiance as an impediment, I supposed, making her motivation no less opaque to me than before. But I did note a sick stirring of grephe at the thought–and agonised again over Janos’ fate.
Wurms, I understand now, are augmented forms of the crawling or squirming classes of insects, of which the Fiefdoms are bedevilled in abundance. The Sorcerer applies his or her powers by means of a sorcerous construct–the Web of Sulangi being one amongst several–to enlarge a creature’s size and power far beyond what nature intended. Eldrik Warlocks are particularly fond of these monstrous pets. Even the brutal Faloxx hunt elsewhere, though it took the annihilation of not one but two invading armies to drive that message home. No one bothers the Eldrik. No person, to my best knowledge, had ever crossed their borders.
The smoke slithered into my hands.
Lasciviously, it curled in bracelets about my wrists. It clung to my skin with a touch at once feather-light and inexorable. The brutish wind gave it no pause. Stinging rain could not sweep it away. The smoke behaved as an animate liquid–never sticky, never hurried, spreading up my arms as smoothly as oil.
The smoke felt as I imagined Jyla must feel. O hateful touch! No sorcery of hers would overmaster me unopposed. I hurled my fullest strength against the manacles, fighting claw and fang against the way the storm pummelled my body and blinded my eyes, and against the weird smoke, but it mattered nought.
Water streamed into my eyes. I wiped them clear on against my upper arm only to see Jyla’s face close enough to spit at, her expression marked with a kind of maternal delight that perversely mimicked what I had once seen on a woman who that makh delivered her babe at the roadside safe and sound, and, cradling it in her arms, gazed adoring into her newborn daughter’s eyes. So Jyla perceived her creation.
I, glimpsing movement behind her, beheld: A bird … a blue condor? Here?
The tornado made a fluttering rag of my body. The great bird should have been smashed against the tower. Instead, it drifted through the uproar, wings outspread as though buoyed upon an afternoon zephyr. Effortless. Not a pinion was ruffled. Not a feather seemed out of place.
Its eyes fixed upon mine. Suddenly, I could not look away. Surely I dreamed? Peace streamed from the bird’s gentle gaze into my fevered mind. I imagined it speaking: ‘Come. Here is an oasis of tranquillity, if only you will take your rest.’
A sending of Mata’s? But … I was no believer!
The smoke slid up into my nostrils. Slipped down my throat. I tasted grit, ash, and the tang of blood. I could not breathe. My lungs burned, but the thing would not relent. Deeper and deeper it spread. I heaved, tried to cough, and strove with every fibre of my being to vomit it up. Nethe’s chills wracked my body. Had I the use of my hands I would have reached down my own throat to claw the ghastly thing loose. Yet my eyes, as if drawn by strings, swivelled to follow the condor as it dipped behind Jyla.
“What?” she grunted. “What are you–?”
The Sorceress whirled. The bird was an arm’s-length from my right hand, circling behind me so that I could no longer see it, but I could follow Jyla’s reaction perfectly. Surprise. Shock. Then a white-lipped fury that had it been unleashed, would have immolated us all.
The wind broke off as though a door had slammed shut upon its wrathful storehouse. A deafening stillness enveloped the world.
I crumpled upon the platform. Barely had my head smacked against cold stone, and my mind registered that the tower had again been struck by multiple branches of lightning, when I became aware of a new sound, a shriek that climbed rapidly through the registers until it attained a pitch that stabbed knives into my eardrums. I distinctly felt something burst. I clutched my head. Curled into a foetal ball, I prayed most fervently to die.
Then the wind returned. Where before it had been a whirling dervish, now it was a wall, and many times amplified. As I shot sideways the manacles saved me once more. Jyla grabbed for the brazier, but the wind knocked it over and dumped the contents into the pool. The hissing steam was whipped away, snuffed out as though it had never been. Another blast picked up the Sorceress and flung her across the platform, dashing her against my flapping body. She clutched my waist. Jyla somehow found purchase amongst my soiled rags. Her eyes, stripped at last of all arrogance, pleaded with mine.
No human-made edifice could have withstood this renewed assault; the inexorable stress, the ferocity of Nature stressed beyond forbearance. The tower groaned. Long and low, its stones voiced the one clear thought remaining in my head–death knell.
The tower began to tilt.
The wind was an unforgiving tyrant. Slowly, digit by digit, it prised Jyla loose. What her fingers would not release, unravelled thread b
y thread beneath the windstorm’s awesome force. I could do nought, nor would I have done, to offer her aid. She even used her teeth to hold on, but her efforts were doomed. The cloth frayed. Ripped. She seized my belt, lost that, and snatched at my trousers. For a moment I thought she might be secure, but her grip slipped again under the tremendous pressure and she scored bloody trails with her fingernails down to my knees, then ripped my calves open, and now the last bastion, my ankles, came into her clawed grasp.
At the very last, Jyla gazed up my body’s length into my eyes. She smiled–hideously.
Then she was torn loose.
A single flutter.
Gone.
Chapter 5: Reawakening
O to find a new beginning
My reinvention
Of nascent wholeness
My becoming
What I have never been
Oldik Laymarson, Verses Beyond the Rumik, Scrolleaf the Third
“Drink up,” said the old woman, thrusting a bowl of broth into my hand. She stumped back to the fireplace, humming tunelessly.
I stared at the herbs dancing slow curlicues upon the hot liquid, and at the rising steam, trying to remember. How long had I been here? When last had I sat abed? What day was it?
“You’re hungry, lad. Drink.”
And this manner of greeting? I sipped, yelped, blew the half-unfurled herbs across the small bowl. Veined leaves gelid with sap. That smell … konis? Baltagia tea? The words came to me as from a great distance. Untried. Unwieldy, like lumbering farmers attempting a delicate dance.
Gazing over the blue-glazed rim of the bowl, I took in the bundles of herbs tied to the hut’s roof, which consisted of a latticework frame of wattle branches overlaid with layers of woven reed mats, the rude fireplace, the cooking pot hanging above it. There was a simple pallet for a sleeping-place. I took in the woman’s knotted calf muscles half-hidden beneath a clean peasant smock, wooden clogs upon her feet, and her iron-grey hair tied back in a careless bundle. I could have been anywhere in the Fiefdoms.
The old woman dipped a ladle into the pot and drew out a portion for herself. Without turning, she called, “Stop gawping and eat. I’ll not have a stickman in my house–better I plant you in the garden to scare off the crows.”
This made me smile. The odd, unremembered sensation around my mouth made me reach up to touch an explosion of beard that beggared belief. I drew out a leafy twig and gaped at it.
“Well you’ve been living rough for some anna, mark my words,” she remarked, setting her bowl aside. Reaching to a shelf, she drew forth a pakari flatbread and broke it in half. “Bread you can have when I’ve seen that broth safely down. No telling what you’ve been eating. Found you running with some speckled deer, my daughter did. Telia lured you here. In all my anna, never have I seen a sight more peculiar. A man deer.”
Broth! My tongue howled its delight. Had it not been so hot I would have gulped it down and the bowl too.
“Starving?” She had not turned around, but still seemed to know my every thought. “There’s more.”
I tried my voice. “I … grateful.”
“Rusty as an old tine!” cackled my hostess. “I’ll wager ten brass terls to a tinker’s boot you haven’t spoken in anna. Now you can thank me by finishing your sup.”
“What anna is it?”
She squinted at the ceiling. “It must be … don’t think I rightly know. All’s a-muddle in my head. It must be Summer’s Richness. Harvest season’s a ways off and the Glooming farther still.”
“It’s the twenty-fourth anna of Gracious Albora’s reign, and today is Sayth, the day of rest,” piped a new voice. “Is he awake, mother?”
I automatically tugged the covers over my nakedness. Mata’s name, I had not a stitch of clothing upon my body! Fancy … and as the rush doorway fell to again, I beheld the merry eyes of the old woman’s daughter, and grew flustered at her frankly appraising stare.
“He is nought but washboard bones and a shaggy mane!” She pecked the old woman on top of her head, set her basket beside the table, and smiled at me. “Doubtless she hasn’t introduced herself?”
“She? Who’s she–the cat’s mother? Huh! Who’s been swanning off to the village all morning whilst I sweat buckets tending this poor puppy?”
“I am Telia, and this is Agria, my mother. You have to understand she’s–”
“Go on, say it, you ungrateful wretch!”
“Forgetful.”
“The anna I wasted teaching you your manners. Huh!”
Telia was taller than most women, with a face that was characterful rather than comely, but I sensed a wholesomeness about her manner that I warmed to. She was not yet a matron, but maturing towards that station, being perhaps fifteen anna older than I.
“What’s the standard anna?” I inquired.
“One thousand, three hundreds, fifty and six,” Telia replied. By this mode of counting I knew her at once for an Elbarath–courtesy of Janos’ teaching–from a Fiefdom which lies a hundred or more leagues south of Roymere. Mata’s name, I was far from home!
By her reply and the season, I calculated I must have spent some three and a half anna in the wilderness, in madness. And that was when I began to remember what had been.
I lived with Telia and Agria until full Harvest, turning my hands daily to the tasks that governed life in the deep backwoods. I split wood to store against the coming cold seasons of Rains, Alldark Week, and Thawing. The walls I chinked with winterbrush and brown sponghum moss. As the days grew short I gathered the last berries and edible tubers from the forest surrounding their home, went hunting several times, and traded in the village for supplies. Ay, my fresh-shorn locks set tongues a-wagging there!
My hands were kept busy, but not busy enough to prevent my mind from dwelling upon the past at great length. The realisation that a considerable portion of my life had been wasted–or stolen from me–was painful and disorienting. The anna! Where had they flown? A great gap, then Jyla. The tower. Janos. The storm … her grand design apparently ruined by Mata’s envoy.
What did it mean?
What had Jyla done to me?
The memory of Jyla’s sorcery seemed a nightmare wreaked upon some stranger’s person. Not I, not this withered husk of a man. But my wrists bore scars from the manacles. When had I lost those? Even as a quim to the scrolleaf, so had Tortha’s rod and whip scored its tale upon my flesh. As the days rolled into seasons, I found I could recall the past in ever-greater detail. I knew too much. I dreamed repeatedly of Jyla, tasting again the smoke of her sacrifice, walking panting and choking upon my own vomitus.
I found it in my eyes. The day I borrowed Telia’s glass, the better to extract a thorn from my cheek, I saw it lurking there. The accursed Wurm. Or did I imagine it?
The glass slipped from my nerveless grasp. Shards burst star-like from the point of impact. Shattered, silvery slivers winking back my fractured life.
It is commonly held that a man’s eyes mirror his quoph. Zealots of the highly religious and influential Grathayn sect, which is strongest in the southern Fiefdoms, practise matali-ur-uli or ‘light overcomes darkness’ to exorcise the evil they believe is rooted in the quath and corrupts the quatl and quoph if left unattended. Matali-ur-uli involves using mirrors to direct sunlight into the bound subject’s eyes. I hear it can make one go blind–may I never suffer such ignorance! Even before Doublesun matali-ur-uli will blind the subject, but Belion’s brilliance makes a smoking ruin of the flesh. This to save the quoph? Idiocy!
Thus, the broken looking-glass became a portent to my febrile mind. A curiously beautiful, enigmatic motif. To know this madness was to behold the visage of my inmost terrors. My sanity resembled aged scrolleaf–thin, brittle, and curled at the edges. Truly told, when the terrors descended upon me I thought I should stop breathing, and shadows would stalk the edges of my vision, and I cowered in a corner for makh barking at all comers.
White was the colour of my mourning. Sunk in a bot
tomless well of depression, I made myself a terrible burden to Telia and Agria. I treated them harshly, but never a harsh word did they return. Their kindness restored my life. Slowly, nourished at their hearth, I gathered strength. The fears abated. I grieved for my friend Janos, who I had betrayed.
My soles itched to tread new roads.
And so, as Glooming season turned to the Rains and the harvest was safely stored in granaries the Fiefdoms over, Agria shared with me her deepest longing and the best way I could express my appreciation to her daughter.
That selfsame night, I fled with nary a backward glance.
Ay, the Arlak of old might have obliged with scarce a second thought, but I was far from that man now. Grant her a child? A kindly thought, except that my terrors far overshadowed any sense of obligation. Perhaps the ulules had invented one too many tales birthed in the contaminated seed of demon-possessed men. To what Nethespawn monster might Jyla’s foul labours give rise, lay there but a grain of truth therein?
Chapter 6: Magic
Warlock’s Roost, 3rd Joinday of Highsun, Anna Nol 1603
I dipped my quim in the lithpot, trapped the excess ink against its rim, and said, “You will understand, Benethar, that two hundred and fifty anna ago I knew as little of the ways of magic as I knew of the world beyond Roymere.” I scratched a careful note on the scrolleaf. “I was ignorant and cocksure. The more I have learned, the more I realise there is to know. There can be no end to the accumulation of knowledge in one man’s lifetime. There are mysteries that can never be fathomed, just as my own life is a mystery. I enjoy mysteries. They humble the wise.”
His reply, a low groan, rattled the shutters in their casements for a span.
“Ah, forgive me. I assumed you required no grounding in the fundaments. Jyla stole more from you than ever I imagined.”
