The Legend of El Shashi

by Marc Secchia

  Moreover, I devoured everything the Mystic Library owned on the subject of magic–the majority, I soon realised to my disgust, being fanciful, contradictory, or downright false. Truly told, Janos grounded me thoroughly in the scholarly arts. Reason. Logic. Critical comparison of texts. Debate. Perusal of sources. In these I had been drilled eventide by eventide by a man I recognised in hindsight as a master of the art. Janos of the perfect recall. What a mind that man had, what a teacher, what a privilege I had squandered!

  I discussed my findings with the monks, who offered me little help, cold and clannish to a man.

  But one thing I did learn–and this was passing strange–several of the texts referred to a seventh sense. We Umarik know there are six senses. Sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and the sense of grephe, sometimes called foreknowledge. But here were texts referring to a seventh sense. And I could not understand it. The texts never described or named this seventh sense, assuming all people were born with it and knew exactly what it was. I knew of no such thing. I concluded it must be something to do with the Eldrik.

  How vast my ignorance!

  One morn, I was picking my way downhill, mindful of ice glazing the cobbles underfoot, which turned each rounded stone into an opportunity to break one’s ankle. The frost-rimed cavern mouth was illuminated by a golden sunrise peeking beneath a blanket of cast-iron clouds. A thousand anna-old bragazzar tree, gnarled by the seasons’ turning and grown hunched over due to the easterly trade winds, guarded the yawning darkness of the Library’s interior. As I descended, a flock of crimson gannets took to flight from the limbs of that tree. Suthauk’s early glory set their feathers aflame against the backdrop of the dark cavern and the rich lime-green of the bragazzar’s foliage–evergreen even in the depths of Glooming season.

  Behind the tree I saw a line of small, dark men enter the cavern, cloaked and hooded against the chill as I was. The sea breeze cut through my robe. I cursed as I wrenched my foot despite my care. Larathi! Now I would have to hobble the rest of the way.

  Suddenly, an old woman stood at my elbow.

  “High morn to you, stranger,” she said.

  An archaic greeting, whistled between toothless gums. I confess I was slow to respond, startled, already deeply engrossed in my thoughts about lillia–an Eldrik word meaning ‘the essence’, which is used to describe a concentration or source of magic power. I had concluded that the Wurm was full of lillia; it was the vessel containing Jyla’s sorcerous power.

  I perceived her face, wrinkled as an old apple, sharp but kindly, and eyes which had seen more of the world than I could ever know.

  “And a very good orison to you, woman,” I said.

  “Here. You need it more than I.”

  I grasped the ulinbarb cane she swung at me, more out of self-preservation than need. “Thank you. What can I give you …?”

  “None of that,” she said, touching my wrist to stop me fumbling at my purse. “Have you a grephe for me this makh?”

  “I … pardon?”

  “Your grephe. I wish to know it.”

  “Well,” I fumbled, then blurted out the first thing that came to mind, “I bless you for your gift, good woman. May the warmth of light and companionship be yours this Darkenseason. And may your road beyond be blessed indeed.”

  “Ah!” she said.

  I could not tell what she heard of this, but my words seemed to strike her with a strange force. Had I not spoken of her death and passing beyond?

  I stared a moment longer. Then I made to go my way. As I turned downhill, I heard her call, “Fear not the dark man! Mata will sustain you.”

  A jolt of grephe, marrow-deep, froze my steps. Fearful now, I whirled, but the old woman was already trotting up the street at a speed that belied her age. I stroked my chin. Omen or nonsense? Crazy or sane? I was sick of grephe. Sick of the Gods. When had they brought me ought but sorrow? Anger and discontent began to boil in my gut. So much for feeling settled in the Herliki Free Fiefdom! I had wondered at putting down roots here.

  Ye great galumphing Gods. Would they not leave me alone? Sadistic meddlers!

  Why not a dark woman … Jyla? Had her dark purpose not been fulfilled all these anna? Destroyer of lives. ‘I need you to be selfish, Arlak.’ Wrecker of families. ‘And I need your Wurm, Arlak Sorlakson! I need it now!’ My fingers itched to sink into her neck like the talons of a hunting falcon. I consider myself a peaceful man, mark my words, but my thirst for revenge was malign and brutal.

  I stumped down to the Mystic Library. My ankle throbbed. But to touch it might summon the Wurm … I had lived so long with that fear it shadowed my ways constantly, dulling the brightest day, spoiling any happiness, drawing me back into the blackness where my inner Wurm lurked. Always, when I thought upon it, that place stirred as though alive, alien to my quoph; restless, oily and unpleasant.

  I bade the monks no greeting, but picked up a lantern from a line of small recesses built into the entrance hall and made my way through the massive inner doors, as thick as a man is tall, into the first of the great halls. Here was light, a gigantic candelabrum that had been converted to hang argan-oil lanterns instead, but was still thickly encrusted with the wax drippings of the ages.

  I took the first corridor to the right, then the second at my left hand, each lined with crowded but tidy bookshelves. I boorishly ignored the spectacular display stalagmites and spires in the following chamber, and took the only exit further down into the Library. A damp breeze cooled my cheeks. How was it, I wondered idly, that the Helkon monks managed to preserve ancient scrolleaves against the damp of these caves? Surely a cave was no place for delicate, valuable records? Yet preserve them they did.

  A span’s walk between the narrowly-spaced scroll racks along that tunnel brought me to a large culvert, off of which branched eleven chambers. My chamber was the fourth on the right, reached through a winding entryway some twenty-two paces in length. Even this space was crowded with volumes. Dull shipping records, no more.

  I banged the outer door shut, wishing no disturbance.

  My shoulders brushed the shelves to either side as I entered my study-chamber. I hung the lantern next to the door, as I always did, and rustled in my pouch for my sparkstone to light the others further within so that I would have enough light to read the scrolleaves.

  But I was not alone.

  The basal part of a human is animal. We can tell when we are being watched, or when there is another presence in a room. I fell into a half-crouch. Scanned the room. Three desks, two armchairs … my eyes jerked back to a black-robed man sitting cross-legged on the second desk, the one I usually kept clear for writing. Nay, truly told, he was hovering above the wooden surface; even in the dim light, I marked this well.

  I felt movement behind me. All around me. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw now what I had taken for shadows around the room, were indeed two–no five–even six more small men, all robed as the first, in cloaks so very black that they seemed nought but heads and hands curiously adrift of their bodies. Of the first, all I could see was his head–shaven and tattooed in complex patterns–for his hands were hidden in the sleeves of his robe. His eyes were pebble-hard.

  “Who by the Hounds are you?”

  No-one said a word. But I sensed magic in the room, closing around me, hemming me in, causing me to recoil toward the dark lair of the Wurm. My fists clenched, and a dull throb developed behind my temples.

  I tried again, “What do you want?”

  The dark man–Mata preserve me! The dark man!–said, “El Shashi, I presume?”

  Sing his tune? Seven to one or none, I was having none of it. Flatly, I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who are you?”

  His voice flowed like a brook, and echoed more than a few of Jyla’s exotic vowels. “My name is Eliyan the Sorcerer,” he said, “First Councillor of the Eldrik Sorcerers. I would have words with the man who calls himself El Shashi.”

  He sounded like Janos! A low gasp
hissed between my teeth at this realisation. Janos, Jyla, and this Eliyan–were they all Eldrik?

  I forced my body to straighten, and advanced boldly into the middle of the room. His six disciples tensed visibly, but Eliyan did not. He remained floating mid-air, this in itself a demonstration of breathtaking power, and his gaze measured me all the while.

  “If I were El Shashi,” said I, deliberately reckless, “and I’m not saying I am, but if I were, I would wonder at the need for seven men to accost one unarmed man in the depths of the Mystic Library. I would wonder at their motives. Should I be inclined to trust their approach?”

  “Perhaps there are those who value discretion.”

  “As a hammer values the nut?”

  Eliyan remained inscrutable. “Perhaps you are Arlak Sorlakson.”

  “Who?”

  “Maybe you are the Scourge of the Westland.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve heard ulules utter such a legend.”

  “Ah, such as the Bringer of the Wurm. Yes. Legends.”

  My throat was suddenly dry. I had an inkling of why they were here, and as surely as Doublesun scorches the Fiefdoms, I knew it spelled grave danger for me. This Eliyan was an Eldrik Sorcerer. Foremost of the Sorcerers. As my first proper contact with the Eldrik race, of which I had hardly dared dream, this conversation was not quite what I had imagined. He was–as I–very suspicious, very cautious. I should tread with care. But I was a rat cornered in the serpent’s lair.

  Eliyan continued, “The process of creating or summoning a Wurm assumes two things–great knowledge, and greater power. Healing by touch alone is miraculous, and indeed, in the scale of powers, vanishingly rare even amongst the Eldrik. No Umarite, man or woman, has ever boasted such a command of lillia. So I must conclude that you are not who or what you seem.”

  “If I were El Shashi.”

  “Obduracy is a pitiful substitute for wisdom,” he reproved me, as mildly as a monk. Yet he remained as taut as the strings of a lummericoot. His mien was dark waters rushing smoothly over some hidden obstacle. “Unknown to us, you are dangerous. But as an unknown with advanced skills in the magical arts, doubly so. Long have we sought you. You appear to have a knack for vanishing.”

  That had more to do with Jyla’s knack for finding me, I wanted to spit back, than any skill on my part. But I kept my jaw clamped shut.

  The Sorcerer suddenly unfolded his limbs and took to the ground like any ordinary mortal. “You-who-are-not El Shashi, are working through some interesting material,” he said, flicking through my scroll stand. “Arcana by Nomik the uneducated amateur. A tome better used for lighting fires. Vox Aureum, worth less than the scrolleaf it is inked on. Here, a saving grace, is the voluminous Magical Arts of Yore, which attempts to address the basics with a modicum of accuracy. Lurmi, Tork, Faradan–don’t even bother to unfurl these supposed ‘masters’. So much for the famed Mystic Library! Could it offer no better?”

  Irritated, I decided to provoke him. “So how is it,” I inquired, “that a Sorcerer so inflated with his own powers as to levitate for a guest, cannot be certain who that guest is? So much for that Sorcerer. Could he do no better?”

  Two of the men snarled and started for me, but Eliyan raised his hand. “So, pup, you would show your teeth? Then let me show mine!”

  At once, the lantern’s glow grew enfeebled. A titanic pressure took hold of my temples, as though my head were being ground between two slowly-rolling boulders.

  I screamed. I crumbled; fading, falling into the lightless pit where the Wurm had infested my quoph. I tasted bloody grit between my teeth. Jyla’s voice roared in my ears and I saw Janos nailed to the door with crimson froth bubbling from his lips and the sanguine-streaked wreck of his face and there was blood, so much blood, and a howling madness within me spiralling out of control and a river of power surging over my inner barriers, overeager and overwhelming, spiteful and capricious, and in my torment I let it flood where it willed … and now Eliyan screamed too and blood spurted from his nostrils and stained his bared teeth, while his eyeballs fluttered back in their sockets in a ghastly simulacrum of death.

  Last I remember, wings of uttermost darkness spirited me away to a land of shadowed snows.

  Chapter 19: Of the Eldrik Way

  Warlock’s Roost, 5th Levantday of the Glooming, Anna Nol 1704

  I am a doddering old meddler.

  Take pride, El Shashi, in stooping low. Here, in the makh of life’s waning, the Glooming chills dance a deadly court to my ailing flesh. The seven hundred and seventy-three steps leading up to the Warlock’s Roost are my daily trial–today I had to stop to rest twenty-six times before I reached the top. Some young pup had the gall to offer his arm. I, inwardly gnashing my teeth, accepted with a gracious nod.

  I was reviewing the notes left to me by First Councillor Eliyan, my dear friend who passed on nigh one hundred and thirty anna ago. Many would count this a lifetime. I, but one of several. Memories fade. As I approach the three hundred and seventy-sixth anniversary of my birthing, may I be forgiven the odd lapse?

  Eliyan was, in his way, a man as meticulous as Janos. He reminded me of a garden robin as it hops along with a black beady eye angled toward the ground, pecking sharply at a hidden worm and holding it wriggling in his beak before gobbling it down. He too moved sharply, always active, but the sharpest thing about Eliyan was his mind. In the manner of a robin carefully pecking at a patch of grass, it missed no detail, no matter how small. How many times did I not see him instantly pluck the right scroll from amidst hundreds on his racks, and roll straight to the desired paragraph? Ay, a great scholar. A prolific author. The Umarik and Eldrik histories were his darlings.

  I cast my eyes to the unfurled scrolleaf, scanning the dense columns. Ah, here was what he wrote about the dark days of the Eldrik:

  Yea, they brought the Umarite to me, this Arlak son of Sorlak, a damaged shell, and bade me wreak my will upon him. ‘He will not yield,’ they said.

  These my enemies offered no mercy. Actions I had sanctioned, to my shame. Greater than my compassion for this man, were my fears that my position in the Council should weaken. We L’yæm clung to the slenderest margin amongst the Sorcerers, and of the Warlocks, we were a minority. He was meat to the wolf pack. A pittance; an atonement for our wrongdoing and incapacity. And now he was bleeding upon my priceless shillier wool rug.

  ‘A shielded mind?’ said I.

  ‘An impregnable fortress,’ they replied, unwittingly echoing Lucan’s very words when he announced the Banishment’s completion. One makh later, he perished in circumstances most mysterious. ‘We’ve tortured him every way we know how.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  They hissed like the snakes they were, ‘But we are convinced–convinced, First Councillor–that he hides valuable knowledge–’

  ‘–Sorcery akin to Birial’s binding mists!’

  ‘Such power! An immensity of power!’

  ‘Ay, Birial,’ said I. ‘The accursed isle. Our crowning glory.’

  I peeled my eyes from the scrolleaf. What possessed Lucan to choose that Mata-forsaken spit of rock I fathom not, but the very mention of Birial Island still blights my quoph. Inhospitable, I swear by Mata’s name, is by leagues too gentle a picture. A bleak spit of granite to which life clings with grim forbearance; a province of low scrubby bushes and trees so battered by the prevailing winds they grow sideways rather than upward. Surrounded by seething seas, magic, eternal storms, and a breeding ground of the dreadful Karak, lordling monsters of the great deeps, Birial was a prison-island where nought but the most pitiful existence might be eked out by its inmates.

  The perfect location to dump the unwashed masses of Eldrik society. Truly told, as Janos had taught me: ‘isolation breeds bitterness, bitterness hatred, and the ripe fruit of hatred is tyranny, war, and pain everlasting’. Truly, no bars were needed on Birial as in the prisons of the northern Fiefdoms, where the rule of justice may consign felons to die in stinking rat-holes, for Lucan’s
act of high magic accomplished all that and more.

  Ay. For a gantul and more, Birial had been Jyla’s home.

  This I shall recount in Mata’s good time.

  ‘Do you dare question the wisdom of the Inquisitors–you, First Councillor of the Sorcerers?’

  ‘Our great, wise leader!’

  ‘You know my mind. It has always been open to examination.’

  From beneath the crimson cowl, a voice dryer than the great salt desert south of the Nugar River emerged, ‘Doubt is unbecoming, First Councillor. It betrays weakness. A weakness of the soul. Have you the will? Or have you lost your thirst for righteousness?’

  ‘Soymal, foremost of the Inquisitors.’ I bowed my head, briefly. ‘You honour us with your presence. May your feet always tread the Way.’

  ‘And yours, Councillor. May they never depart the Way.’

  With that warning, the Inquisitors departed. Why not brand me traitor? They had no proofs, or I would have been dragged away anna ago. Twittering ghouls! Gorging themselves upon the lifeblood of our suffering people!

  My soul groans. Ah, my soul, it breaks.

  To the zealot any deviation from Lucanism, however small, was anathema–an unforgivable betrayal of Eldrik history, culture, ideals, and even the Eldrik psyche itself. Need I speak of the gyael-irfa, the world-mind of Mata Herself, the greatest treasure of our people? Here is identity. Here is oneness. Here is our greatest gifting. Here is our spiritual home–the spiritual home of every Eldrik man, woman, and child. We believe:

  NOTHING can be hidden in the gyael-irfa.

  ALL are part of it, are subsumed in it. We are its lifeblood.