by Marc Secchia
“That means the long way around.” I rubbed my arms, looking about me with a wildly rolling eye. “That storm is following me, can you see it? It’s the Wurm.”
“There’s no storm, Brother,” Sherik said gently. “It blew off north-east two makh ago.”
I marked compassion in his eyes. He probably thought me mad.
“I must go.”
To hide my emotions, I bent forward and kissed Tyrak, the little boy, then Lailla, and fussed over her for as long as I dared. Earth-tremors, approaching. Thunder from the clear heavens. I had no time to deal with her deeper wounds, especially not her tongue, but I strengthened her for the journey as best I was able. Then I fell to my knees before Lyllia. She gazed at me with huge eyes. Disturbingly akin to mine in their dark depths.
The magic could not have passed down to her gantul, could it? Surely not … I caught myself shaking my head. I really was going mad!
“Whatever you have learned of men,” I told her, “this man is different. His name is Sherik, and he will take care of you until I come back. I will come back.”
“You need to go,” Sherik urged. He felt, as did I, the ground beginning to quiver beneath our feet.
“Are you really my grandfather?” Lyllia asked in a piping little voice. Her first real words to me, apart from her name in a frightened whisper. “Can you heal mommy?”
“Truly told, I am your grandfather. And I will come back for you and your mother. I promise.”
“El Shashi? Is your name El Shashi?”
“Arlak. Or grandfather …”
I stood up, meaning to back away, but Sherik clasped me in a crushing one-armed hug. “Go with Mata, Brother.”
The freezing wind whipped away my tears as I dashed into the night, as naked as the makh I was born.
Fourteen days.
The price of my transgression. I knew it, had counted it, dreaded it, prayed again and again to Mata I would never have to go through with such an extended run–and nigh a gantul had kept my integrity untroubled. The southern deserts evoked memories of mental and physical extremes, of a failure arrested only by chance. Six nights and seven days nigh killed me. Should I survive fourteen? Tears pricked my eyes.
At your every failure, the cost will be multiplied. Double my power. Double your forfeit. Your deeds shall feed my Wurm!
Well and truly had Jyla named my fate.
Double her power. I owned there must be oceans of lillia at Jyla’s disposal now–what more could she possibly need to break the Banishment? After that day, perchance, could I conceive my life should return to normal and everyone would be happy … ay, and I was smoking a treble dose of yesteranna’s pipe-dreams!
I smiled. Grimly.
“What you so blasted cheerful ‘bout?” grunted my jailor, setting a bowl of steaming stew down in front of me. He settled on the bench opposite and stared at his boots. “A man who’s to be displayed ‘morrow at dioni orison has no right to happiness.”
“Look, I’ve clothes, a bed–albeit flea-ridden–and warm food. That’s more than I had sunrise last.”
“You can’t as blame our Watch for taking a man running nikked through the streets of Hollybrook, stranger!”
With hounds, nets, and clubs? I settled for a mild response. “I was about to buy clothes, friend, truly told.” Ay, I had protested capture violently, but there was no escape. I had many bruises to show for my futile efforts. Where was the Wurm? It had been makh since I saw or felt sign of the creature. Had I truly run that far and that fast, these two days?
“Ha. Pretty boy you are, but nikkid no good.”
“You fancy boys, Tarkis?”
“Don’cha be cheeky to a man Matabound right and proper, you crazy jerlak!”
“Is your house nearby?”
“Other sida town.” He looked at me for the first time. “What’s it to you?”
“Just checking, Tarkis. I wouldn’t want your family to be eaten when the Wurm comes.”
He shook his head and guffawed. “You an’ that crazy El Shashi talk. Well I’ll like as be eaten by the Hounds than by your Wurm, crazy man! Wurm, ha! A dozen fools a season we brings in here swearing blind to Mata ‘n all they’s El Shashi.”
I chewed my food for a space. For jail fare, it was very acceptable. “Friend, did you ever have your leg seen to? Is that an old wound?”
“Don’cha start again. You touching nothing of mine!”
I was watching the fleas and bedbugs springing out of my mattress and bedding. In quick procession, a dozen or so cockroaches and the scampering claws of a lone rat followed them. Tarkis’ eyes jumped. The same was happening in the cell opposite, only that one, being empty, had five rats plus the usual complement of insect life.
I fell to shovelling the food into my mouth as fast as I could. The cell walls trembled as with the ague. Old lime-mortar crumbled like sand from between the blocks above my head, making the stew gritty and unpalatable. I bolted it anyway. Where would I gain my next meal? I needed every drop of strength I could husband and more.
“I don’t suppose you would consider opening the door and letting us both run away before we get eaten, Tarkis? Got any children who’d miss you?”
I sounded as though I was matching a hoof-split jerlak for mood.
Tarkis blanched. Then he sprang to his feet, grabbing the key-ring dangling from his leather belt, fumbling ham-fingered at the keys. “One, two … is it this one? This?”
Pathetic fool. He would kill us both.
A block smashed at my feet. Another. My upraised forearm was beaten against my head and my head battered down to my knees by the ensuing avalanche of debris, from which I surfaced as if I were a mole excavating a cave-in. I wiped my eyes. Gusty sneezes … screaming at Tarkis “Run!” but here, dear sweet Mata, bright sunlight above me marked a way out and I scrambled toward the daylight with a sense of sobbing gratitude. I threw myself upwards and wriggled out of the hole even as the bottom dropped out of the cell.
I felt the Wurm passing right beneath me.
To my right, guards spilled out of the jailhouse door. I was relieved to spy Tarkis amongst their number, but directly he cried, “Catch that prisoner!” and set them upon me like hounds to the hare–ungrateful wretch!
I shook the dust off my feet and pelted down the road. A half-dozen men came shouting after. When a man tried to stand me down, I threw an elbow at his throat and felled him with a satisfying thud. I had learned one or two things during my army service! And my luck–or Mata’s hand, as Janos would have put it–was strong upon my shoulder this day, for every dance or sidestep of my feet launched me smoothly through the crowd, around corners with the speed of a hawk, at one stage even hurdling me over five fruit-laden marketplace trestles in a row without mishap.
Perhaps I was a hawk, flying through the cobbled streets.
Immediately this thought crossed my mind, my vision jumped. For a short span I came out of myself. I did not understand. Suddenly I soared above my own body, or my quoph was somehow divorced from its physical vessel, for I had a clear vision of myself careening headlong between the narrow houses, darting here and there beneath the overhanging eaves, able to see several streets ahead and guide my path accordingly. The sensation was disquieting. I began to sense … differently. The scuttling of a rat upon a slate roof drew my attention with an almost irresistible force, so much so that below, my body ricocheted off the wall of a house as it instinctively tried to pursue the rat.
The pain brought me back to myself. Brutally.
Breath upon breath, my heart beating in a Qur’lik message drum’s rhythms, feet pounding the stones. I shot through the town gates in straight flight, at my enhanced top speed, right into the midst of a group of traders gathered on the lip of a ravine.
Too late!
I was moving too fast. After an instant’s hesitation, I gathered my body and tried to leap the ravine. I heard shouts. I was soaring on the wind! Airborne!
And I fell short.
Nex
t I remember lying on my back, staring at a bank of menacing clouds marching across the sky. Rain was imminent, or I was not born in the mountains. The channel I lay in was gently rounded at the base, but its edges were far too steep to climb, and it was at least four or five men deep. I rolled over. A row of faces peered down at me. My knees and back were full of jagged pain. I felt rock as smooth as river-stones beneath my hands. My eyes swivelled in their sockets as my mind made a leap. Larathi! It was Wurm-shaped! I gagged. Truly told … while I tarried in jail, the Wurm had quarried a trap outside of town?
The beast wanted to get close enough to devour me. Then nought would stand in the way of Jyla and her ambitions. Could she thus be thwarted? Should I lay down and die?
But my feet were already dancing an answer to that question.
Somewhere in this trap must be the place the Wurm had started. The trick would be to find the exit–or some other means of escape–before the Wurm found me, otherwise I would give Jyla exactly what she wanted. Oh Amal, Eliyan … oh P’dáronï! Would I fail them all?
I sensed the Wurm approaching, as if a great grey cloud were impinging upon my senses–a cloud, similarly to the weather, laced with fork lightning at its edges. This way? Or that? I stopped to glance back over my shoulder. Which direction should I choose? Either way, my aches and hurts screamed and protested every jolting step, so I dipped into the lillia’s balmy depths to soothe my body. So tempting. I never could control the power properly; it was a drug. One taste and I craved nought else.
Striking my fist upon my thigh, I pushed myself into a run.
I dashed along for the better part of a makh, slowly curving my way around to the south side of Hollybrook, before I felt the first shafts of rain thud against my head and shoulders. Oh no. Here was another problem. Sometimes in Hakooi it rains, and sometimes a river pours out of the heavens to drown the unwary. It was soon raining so hard that the fat droplets splashed back up off the ground with the force of each strike, and the roar of it grew until I could no longer hear or sense the Wurm. Water streamed into my eyes. A river formed around my ankles–and suddenly I recalled that I had run uphill out of Hollybrook. The north side was higher. That meant I was about to start swimming, if it was true to my growing suspicion that the Wurm had ringed the entire town with this channel.
But where had it entered?
As I cast about in alarm, I saw to my dismay through the torrential rain the Wurm’s feelers sliding smoothly around the bend behind me. It was coming fast … and had grown again by my mark. The head was longer and more streamlined, and its progress was definitely more efficient–even stretching my running-stride to the maximum, I could barely keep ahead of the creature now.
Water dragged at my knees. I passed a place where a stream poured over the edge of the Wurm’s ravine. I glanced back, but saw no way past the beast, for its bulk filled the channel from wall to wall. I was now running as high up the side as I was able while keeping my balance, and the water at my right hand was rapidly deepening. If only I could buy enough time, I thought, I would be able to swim out of this trap–or perhaps the surge being pushed up by the Wurm would literally wash me out of the gully?
Either way, I was never to know.
From the billowing clouds above came a blinding flash of lightning and a concussion that blew me clear off my feet. Fighting to raise my head above the waters, I heard a voice boom:
“INIO ALIK ALAKIN WURM!”
Jyla? Was she here? I struggled to keep afloat. A jagged flare was emblazoned across my cornea, making it even more difficult to see, but I perceived in shadowy relief the Wurm rearing upward toward the sky, as if to answer that mighty command. Abruptly, I was overwhelmed with a sense of my vitality draining away into the storm, into the sky and water and ground, as if all my lillia had been stolen away and I had never known how much I depended on it; that it was my lifeblood and I could not survive without its sweet music filling my veins. My bones became as dust. The Wurm bellowed, falling in a great avalanche of flesh. And all I wanted was to close my eyes and drift away into an eternity of lassitude.
I felt a wave lift me up, and envisaged being washed up onto the shore like some piece of driftwood washed up on the banks of a river. The Wurm’s fall would do that.
Then, with a shocked gurgle, I was sucked under the surface.
I spiralled away into darkness.
I learned what it is to be blind.
Later, I would work out I must have spent the better part of six days underground before finally I happened upon a shaft of light, and clambered out into the ferny hills somewhere east of Hollybrook. Until then, I lived in frenzy of perpetual, unsleeping dread–fear of the Wurm, fear of what I could hear but not see, fear of dying somewhere unmarked and unknown beneath the pillars of the earth, where slimy blind creatures make their homes in those realms of perpetual night. Nay, even so, the night has its stars. I did find several caverns where strange worms secreted luminous, sticky threads from their ovipositors, illuminating a secret world of huge crystal formations, depthless drop-offs, and scuttling, sightless creatures man has never named. But for the most part I could not even see my forefinger if I touched my own nose.
I ate mosses and worms and other creeping things, and the darkness even helped me swallow down some of the more unsavoury creatures. I drank water tangy with minerals. I could not help but recognise that P’dáronï would have done much better in this place than I.
My weakness did not lift. Long makh did I ponder what these events portended–for, I concluded, Jyla must have called upon the pent-up magical energies of the Wurm, but to what end? To wreck the Banishment? Was that even her intent? Was the Wurm itself broken, spent, never to rise again? But neither theory weighed comfortably in my opinion. Ay, I knew the Wurm was still alive, and my connection with it enfeebled, as though I was sensing its presence but at a far greater distance than I could ever recall.
I ached in ways I did not understand. I found myself–proof of my madness–wishing rather for the chase than for this lingering, malingering sense of wrongness, and fearing perhaps that my own powers were forever departed.
Would the lack of El Shashi’s fame diminish me?
Could I exist without the Wurm?
Again, that day I departed the caverns, I was unexpectedly struck down with a severe and debilitating frailty that left me barely able to set one foot before the other. Then I collapsed. I did not feel my cheek strike the ground. Never had the warm earth felt so comfortable, nor Suthauk’s golden eye so peaceful–even nearing Darkenseason, the noontide was warm enough to thaw the snow. I realised I was rising into a tunnel of light, moving away from my body to a different place, and I said to myself, ‘So this is death.’
Eternal whiteness.
It was enticing. No more struggles, no more fleshly failings and limitations, no more demands on my time and energies. No more El Shashi striding the Fiefdoms to succour the lost. The worries over my family’s wellbeing could be safely left behind, for if I departed, what need would Jyla have to stalk them?
I sensed I was moving faster now, soaring over a mass of humanity outspread like tiny twinkling lights on a black blanket, each quoph illuminated in holy Matafire. At the speed of thought I crossed the ocean and dropped into …
Janos?
“Janos!”
My hands fell to my sides as I realised he was but a wraith. Did I dream? Very slowly, without speaking a word, Janos raised his arm and pointed. I turned to follow the sweep of his finger.
Where a spit of mottled granite defied the churning sea, where the waves dashed their heads in endless fury and threw up great columns of spray, stood a figure whose billowing black robes could not disguise the slight, dread form of Jyla. Her hands were claws raking the heavens, and her back hunched in a strangely animalistic pose. Despite the gouts of spray drenching her body, the Sorceress’ beautiful features appeared as unmoving as aged stone. And in the troughs amidst the heaving swells I beheld a vast multitude of Karak reg
arding her with their great lidless yellow eyes, their tentacles in a position of rest, mesmerised, as if drinking in the power of her spell-weaving.
As my eyes shifted over the scene I noticed the Wurm lying behind her vantage-point, immobile and apparently lifeless, but from its entire length a slight blue luminescence seeped forth, merging into a steady stream that flowed over to the Sorceress to infuse her with the lillia of magic.
She will steal your life. All of it.
I glanced at Janos. Had he spoken?
By Mata’s good Name, I was growing weary of these visions and dreams, of doubting the very fabric of my own mind! Had I thought to die? How foolish! Mata would not leave me die; nay, was She not bent on driving me beyond the realms of human reason, resolve, and endeavour? How much more would she pour in the vessel who was once, gantuls ago, named Arlak Sorlakson? Even my name was a subterfuge. My every new name, another mask to camouflage the original lie, another shackle upon my over-weary quoph.
Her purpose has failed, but she will not relent.
Ay, this was the Jyla I knew. I wished her dead. I wished her cut off from the Wurm, which fed her with the power of its life and mine. In response I felt myself shifting again, moving from my position near Janos toward the Wurm–fast, too fast. Rather than slamming into the immovable wall of its carapace I merged through it and into another mind of raging, bestial hungers wholly alien to my experience.
What followed was too quick for me to grasp. Oh, the makh I would puzzle over it ever after, for in that instant there woke in the murky, basal part of my quoph that thing I feared was the Wurm within, and it shrieked a most awful, wrenching cry. I tasted once more the blood upon Jyla’s brazier and its oily exudate. The great cavernous presence I had entered reared up as if it were a jatha bitten in its softest parts by a torfly, and bellowed its agony across the many Fiefdoms of men until the very foundations of the world seemed to quake and shrink in alarm. I felt myself spat out. Rejected. Smashed aside so hard and fast that I became a comet streaking across the heavens. Before I knew it, I was back in my own body, gagging on the blood of my half bitten-through tongue.
