by Marc Secchia
A salty slap announced the ship’s boat had slipped free of its moorings. Calling upon Mata’s name I surged forward, heedless of any other man, and threw myself bodily upon the gunwale. I scrambled in, shivering, my clothing sodden and torn. Two men were already aboard. One of the mariners thrashed through the waves toward the boat.
“Give him an oar!”
I cast about stupidly until I felt wood thrust into my hand. “Here!” I held it out over the water.
The skin of the sailor’s bearded cheeks was grey with terror. Once he had a grip of the oar, the man well-nigh yanked me overboard in his eagerness to escape. I hauled him closer. Helped him get his arm over the gunwale. I was just leaning over to grab the back of his jacket when one of my fellows in the boat cried out in alarm, “The Karak! Watch out!” and knocked me aside with his shoulder. A tentacle smashed down between us. It stuck to the skin of my thigh where my trousers had ripped–the mere tip of a tentacle, but the thing was unbelievably strong.
Then I heard one of the masts snap. I glanced up to see it falling upon the Karak’s marauding tentacle. The suckers ripped loose from my flesh, leaving a nasty wound. Blood welled up immediately. But the clinging man was not so fortunate, for the Karak snagged him even as the mast’s weight forced its tentacle underwater. He vanished from sight.
“Row! Put yer lazy backs into it!” A bellow in my ear made me jump. I snatched up an oar and rowed as though Ulim himself were aboard that ship.
“Row, you laggards!” It was the Captain of the mariners, and he had somehow gathered seven of the crew into the boat, including me. “Faster! It watches us!”
I, hindmost in our vessel as I plied my oar to the captain’s hoarse-throated beat, shuddered as the Karak’s twin orbs bobbed above the waves. They were fixated upon us. Though the gap was widening, we were yet close enough that I could discern an expression of baleful condemnation at our attempt to escape.
“It cares not for us, but for the plunder,” I suggested over my shoulder.
A vile curse constituted the Captain’s reply.
Suddenly I recalled a snippet of our conversation in the small makh of my parting night. Eliyan, noting, ‘It is thought the Karak are attracted to magic, Arlak. I believe that is why the Karak swarm around the Dark Isle–for the Banishment is a monumental magic indeed. Some hold that the place was always a breeding-ground of the creatures. Your sighting through the Portal appears to confirm that view.’
‘So what’s the Banishment like, Eliyan, to the initiated?’ I enquired.
‘A fortress,’ said he. ‘Imagine a fortress whose walls of seamless stone–not a crack nor a join–extend from the roots of the world to the skies above. As you examine the length and breadth, and the height and depth of that fortress, you see there is no gate. No way in and no way out.’
‘So how in Nethe’s name then does the Portal operate? Surely it must cross those fortress walls …?’
Eliyan smiled indulgently across the table. ‘Well-reasoned, Arlak. Let me be forthright. I have no answer. No convincing answer, that is. I could bore you with a thousand makh of argument and counter-argument … to summarise–some form of teleportation, methinks.’
‘Straight out of Eldrik legend,’ Amal noted.
‘Truly told, Umarite legends too. Space-shifting is our term.’
I glanced at P’dáronï as I spoke, but she remained silent. Had she not teleported out of her holia that eventide when Pedyk became drunk?
Eliyan jabbed his forefinger at Amal. ‘That is what you and I need puzzle out. Our oldest writings suggest the truth of it, and we know that strange truths may oft be cloaked in legend. For it seems the Portal is a circle within a circle within a circle, ever diminishing, in which each layer masks the next. To a Sorcerer, it appears as a black hole. True nothingness.’
I redoubled my efforts at the oar.
Nought did I say, but the mariners behind me could see as well as I. The creature was slowly, steadfastly, disentangling itself from the ship. A growing realisation within all of us was voiced by the man behind me, “Captain, is the Karak pursuing us?”
Indeed–and I knew why. Exactly why.
“ROW!” roared the Captain. “Row, row, ROW!”
Every man’s back bent to as our boat surged towards the distant shore.
I awoke when a spear-butt slammed into my gut.
Now I was to suffer the same fate as the wild porker just ahead. Lashed hand and foot to a branch, slung between two half-naked savages, I was bound for the pot. Just another bad day in a recent rash of bad days.
Truly told, the Karak we escaped, but narrowly. Our ship was long since lost. The mariners grumbled about dark magic, and were only too eager to abandon me once ashore. “Here Faloxxir. That way lie Umarik lands,” muttered one, then turned and hurried after his companions. I suppose they thought me bad luck. Perhaps afeared of the Karak, they abandoned the rowboat in favour of the long hike back to the Eldrik territories–although how they planned to cross the narrows between Eldoria and the northerly tip of Faloxxir, I could barely imagine. I briefly considered taking the ship’s boat myself, but I have heard one too many ulules recite tales of woe concerning the Nxthu Straits. Ay, and if the Karak found magic’s taste so irresistible, then doubly unlucky the man bound to Jyla’s cursed Web of Sulangi!
Ah, Janos, how I failed! What burden is greater than grief and loss?
I cared not a brass terl to pass over death’s threshold, for any man with hands as blood-stained as mine, had surely earned pride of place at Ulim’s table anna before.
For several makh, having pushed deeper into the interior of Faloxxir through a damp forest of giant ferns, my captors toted me without apparent fatigue. Toward early eventide we arrived at the village of these painted barbarians. I was mobbed, prodded and spat at by a hooting crowd as we picked our way between three concentric circles of low, rude stick-and-mud huts, to a central clearing. There they dumped me in the loamy dirt before their chieftain, whose towering sotik-feather headdress and rude throne proclaimed his station.
I found myself regarding these Faloxx tribespeople as curiously as they did me, without fear. Their shoeless, ragged, malnourished poverty stirred my pity, ay. And I claim it no discredit to have gaped at their tattoo-festooned bodies, at such an abundance of imagery graven upon the flesh of human beings. This practice is forbidden among both the Eldrik and Umarik peoples, along with other laws against modifying the flesh of Mata’s finest creation.
The villagers stank to the very heavens of rancid butter, which, I had read, the Faloxx employ to beautify their hair. And while I expected to be greeted by grotesque heaps of human bones, none did I see. Nay, as my gaze moved over the throng–probably the whole village gathered to gape at their forthcoming dinner–what truly moved me was their ulcers.
One of the hunters who bore me had a maimed arm I assumed had been burned, for the tissue around his elbow had healed so as to fuse his forearm to his upper arm. Many of the Umarite poor suffer unspeakable burns, for by and large they dwell in nought but a rude hut, where one room must suffice for living, sleeping, raising a family, and cooking all. Not that many count the Faloxx amongst the Umarite peoples! But burns, if the victim survives, will often cause the skin to contract and thus disable the affected joint.
But their ulcers were appalling.
I saw, near me, a child of perhaps eight or ten anna. A great swathe of flesh was missing on the left side of his torso–across his ribs, around the back of his shoulder blade, up his neck and down his arm to the elbow. It looked exactly as if the skin had been eaten away by an animal which had no interest in the underlying tissue and bone. The edges of the wound were distinct, as neatly cut as with a blade. He seemed in no obvious pain. But a hunter skinning his catch could have done no finer work.
Another child had a hole the size of my hand in her lower thigh. Through it I could see the striated thigh muscle. Another had a grotesquely swollen hand, its digits split open like overripe fruit
to reveal the tendons embedded in raw flesh beneath the skin.
A jatha-horn trumpet blast stilled the crowd.
“I speak!” cried the chieftain, thumping his spear upon the ground not a handspan from my nose. “Let the hunters stand forth. Let the tale be told.”
He was speaking a barbarous dialect of the Umarik tongue, but I found I understood the better part of his speech. The maimed hunter, advancing, began to declaim the mighty and amazing deeds of his band in a formal poetic metre. They had seen the Karak attack the Eldrik vessel, tracked me for a day, captured me the following morn, and bought me and my possessions back to the village. They thought I was a Sorcerer or Warlock. And, judging from the snarls emanating from the crowd, that was not a good thing.
When the telling was ended, the chief summarily declared my readiness for the pot. The people erupted.
“Wait!” I howled. “I’m a healer! An athocary! I am–”
“Eat him!” screamed the children.
“Cook him and his lies!” cried the hunters.
“I’m no Warlock! I’m a healer! Listen to me, you fools!”
With much happy banter, ignoring my shouts and pleas, the painted hunters cut me loose of the carry-pole, laid hands upon my person, and dragged me again through the village, with at least fifty children running after. The maimed one reached down and began to cut my shirt off my body–the better not to spoil the meal, I supposed. Perhaps cloth stuck in the throat.
‘Just a stinking span,’ I told myself. ‘Let him touch me again. I’ll show him.’
When he did, I released the power.
“Yee!” shrieked the hunter, leaping back as though stung. “He bit me!”
A dozen spear-blades made an instant necklace at my throat. I smiled at them in my best attempt at good cheer and cried, “Look at his arm!”
The hunter stared as though his arm had become a snake. It wasn’t whole, for that would have taken several makh of concentrated effort. But he could straighten the joint. The crowd hushed as though Ulim himself had appeared behind me with a hundred of his slavering, red-eyed Hajik Hounds. He waved his arm this way and that. Someone hushed the children at the back. Every pair of eyes fixed upon the warrior as he flexed his arm for the first time in, I imagined, a number of anna. The man made a high, wailing ululation, eerily akin to the death-rites of my native Roymere.
Abruptly he turned, swooped, plucked a child from the throng, and held him high. He approached me with a trembling step.
We eyed each other–I, smiling, and the Faloxx warrior, caught halfway between a scowl and wonderment.
“Heal my son,” he demanded.
The child had an ulcer, a small one, on the ball of his left thumb. He wailed, but was unable to squirm free as the hunter touched him to my bound hands. I think I was praying just then, but I had reserves in abundance. Before our eyes, the flesh grew back whole.
That eventide, I ate roast porker with the villagers as the newest member of the Sy Faloxx tribe. I have a Faloxx tattoo upon my shoulder to prove it.
Ay, I am a sinner of graven flesh. And proud of it.
Let me mark it plain. The Faloxx are not the barbarians and cannibals painted in the words of ignorant ulules. Truly told, they consume the flesh of men, but that is not their staple diet. Their lives are rude and poor. They must by any and all means eke out a living upon the infertile central plains of their realm. The great fern brakes of the coastal regions quickly give way to a rocky plateaux where the Faloxx husband their goats and cattle. All live in fear of those they call the nomads, who are the truly wild ones of their kind. It was the nomads who must have slain my parents.
This flesh-eating disease was a dreadful bane. It afflicted mainly the children, and after consuming much flesh, left disfiguring scars and damaged limbs. My Eldrik medical encyclopaedia made no mention of it. I could only surmise it was something in the air or water of this region, heal the suffering, and long for the wealth of Eldrik medical equipment and expertise P’dáronï had introduced me to in Eldoran.
Maybe I should start a medical school?
Maybe Arlak Sorlakson had enough delusions of grandeur already! I was supposed to be keeping a low profile.
But Eliyan’s words haunted me. Staring at the glowing embers of a fire, late one night, I tried to face up to my fear that I myself might be the Wurm. Should I kill myself? Rid the world of me and my problems … and rid Jyla of her unwilling foil?
I could not imagine Jyla wanted merely to break the Banishment and restore the Eldrik to wholeness–laudable as that aim might be. She was mad. Power-mad. Had I not seen as much echoing in the void of her eyes? She would demand much, much more. Was that not why she had crushed Janos? Suddenly it popped back into my mind what she had said of him, ‘But your kind were there–ah yes, you were there, with Lucan, when he committed that vile offence’. Janos was there? Just as he had spied on Talan, he had attended Lucan himself while the great Sorcerer built the Banishment? But what did she mean, ‘your kind?’ I had neglected that little detail when telling Eliyan, P’dáronï, and Amal the rest of my sorry tale.
How many other details had I misremembered?
Mayhap I could have spent a lifetime with the Faloxx, but it was not to be. One season passed, then two more, before there came to my ears via the Qur’lik message drums word of strangers seeking my whereabouts. That was signal clear enough.
I packed my bag once more.
Scrolleaf the Third
Loneliness is a giant sat upon my chest.
Every so often he shifts sideways, lifting one buttock so that I may gasp for breath, but his weight is no less crushing.
He laughs.
He shows no care.
No strength of mine could push this giant off his perch.
One day I realise I have stopped fighting him.
He simply is.
The Middle Anna, by El Shashi
Chapter 23: Dreaming of Jerlak
1st Glimday of Springtide, Anna Nox 1387
I was picking my way down the forest trail down from Stith Village to Sillbrook Town when I was ambushed.
Eliyan had bidden me bury my presence in the Fiefdoms. I knew not where. By day I followed my boots through Hakooi’s myriad small villages, plying my trade with grim certitude, healing the sick, comforting the mourning, and bedding down with the animals beneath hedges and bushes, or the occasional barn granted by a landowner. I grew lean. Hungry. Unshaven. By night I wrestled with Ulim’s horde–terrors, depression, suicidal thoughts, and above all, the quoph-ravaging isolation of my position and powers.
Now it was the Rains–in Hakooi, a gentle season of soft showers and lowering shutters, so unlike the cruel, bitter rule of Alldark in the mountains of my birthplace. Hakooi snows fell like puffs of powder from a woman completing her makeup. In Roymere the snow lashed in sideways as though intending to strip the burnoose from one’s body.
Stumping along beneath the weight of my precious books, I sensed a large blister developing from my ill-fitting boots. I tried to wrap my threadbare burnoose closer about my lean frame, for the wind had claws of ice. My breath steamed before my nose. The dense thickets of intertwined ulinbarb and lyrithbark made walking tricky. Many tree-roots reached up with gnarled fingers to snag an unwary step, unearthed by dozens of icy streamlets trickling the moist topsoil away. The Chupik squirrels–stout fellows the height of my knee, mark my words, and unafraid of any man–appeared especially industrious, chattering incessantly as they scoured the fallen leaves and branches for berries and nuts. Odd behaviour for this season, I observed.
Then I heard a strange snuffle; a large animal drawing breath. And though, by and large, I am friends with animals, I know to respect them.
With a crash, a huge bull jerlak burst out of the bushes and charged down the trail. Despite having been alerted, I quaked in my boots for a vital instant before leaping for the nearest branch and swinging my legs up–not fast enough to avoid being gored in the right buttock, but fast enoug
h to save my life. The jerlak turned on a brass terl and charged back for another pass.
“Hajik Hounds!” I yelped, arching upward. The blasted creature leaped, gracefully for a near-ton of enraged bull jerlak, and its horn glanced off my pelvic bone as it scored my lower back.
Trembling in shock, I scrambled desperately to lever myself up above the ulinbarb branch. The jerlak returned, circling below, sniffing from time to time at the splatters of blood, one gleaming eye tilted askance to regard me with naked hatred. Filthy son of a maggot! I could smell its scent, rank and musky, like a civet in heat.
I climbed higher.
Having thought my wounds shut, but stopping short of full healing for fear of invoking the Wurm, I shucked my pack and tried to find a comfortable perch. I scrutinised my tormentor–a magnificent creature, all compact muscle beneath a sleek black pelt, and two sweeping horns to either side of its head, sharp enough to gash a man open with the ease of a paring knife slicing fruit. It tested its strength against the ulinbarb, making me cling to the branches with the tenacity of the tree-bark itself. Then the jerlak ambled off to amuse itself by further whetting its horns on a nearby boulder.
A makh drifted by, and the creature showed no sign of growing bored. But my legs were numb, my back was throbbing, and my bones felt encased in ice. So I climbed higher among the branches, until through a break in the ulinbarb thicket my gaze lit upon the northern horizon. I vented a low whistle of wonder.
From my perch I gazed over a moss-green ulinbarb sea, mottled with the autumnal russet and ginger heads of lyrithbark trees. Sillbrook was as yet hidden from sight, sheltered in the lee of the next range of hunchbacked hills–a far cry from the jagged mountain ranges of Roymere, which had not greeted my fond gaze for many an anna. But above those hills, a towering wall of black, deep-bellied clouds stretched from one horizon to the other–in Brephat they called this type of cloud ‘Ulim’s Chariot’, so named for the accompanying hailstorms. I released a breath I had not realised I was holding. I had travelled afar and seen more weather than a man has a right to. Ay, but these clouds struck me as a sight unnatural. Their crowns were white, but nearer ground level changed from grey to an evil, emerald-black hue, blacker than any cloud had a right to be.
