by Marc Secchia
And how did one build a new tongue, exactly? I licked my lips. Ready for this challenge, El Shashi? Could I grow her tongue anew?
But my slender daughter was dancing with the hulking ex-wrestler and now ex-monk–and what did I know? I could not deny what Mata had made right and good and true, a flower of love blossoming from the Nethe-wrought pits of burning hell she had been forced to walk though. Now Lailla twirled out of Sherik’s arms and into mine. Her mouth was flung wide in soundless laughter. Perhaps, I reflected, this was Mata’s way of healing what I could not.
“Spin me!” Lyllia demanded.
Sherik threw her toward the rafters until she was breathless with giggling.
“So you’re leaving this work to Jerom?”
My father inclined his head stiffly. “I believe all is ready, Arlak. He has an excellent grasp of business. And he wants to do this. He wants to do something worthwhile rather than sell pots and kitchenware the rest of his life.”
Alldark had long ago given way to Youngsun. The day outside was mild; Orik’s shutters stood open to welcome the breezes. “Nought I taught him,” I muttered bitterly. “What kind of father was I?”
“And what kind of father was I?”
I sank into the chair opposite my father’s desk, which had sprouted over the last couple of seasons, as if by some miracle, piles of scrolls fit to sink any Eldrik tollish ship. For a man approaching his hundred and eleventh anna, Orik was amazingly productive and still as sharp as a Herliki scimitar. I sat up straighter.
“Father, are you feeling quite well?”
“The chill of Nethe rests upon my quoph this day, son,” he said. “I feel every one of my anna. I fear my time is soon.”
“Say it not–”
“I long ago resolved to speak nought but the truth. You should do the same.”
We both glanced up at a sound without the room. The house was quiet, as Jerom and his family, together with Rubiny and Tarrak, had travelled north to the Solburn Monastery on what they were now beginning to term ‘family business’.
We had no time to move from our seats as first two, then a further five or six ruffians crowded into the room. I smelled salikweed upon the breath of their leader–a big, scarred brute clutching a cudgel which appeared to have seen much service. His fellows brandished a salcat’s basket of barbed weaponry at us.
“What can we do for you, in Mata’s name?” my father asked mildly.
“You’ll come with us,” rasped one of the thugs.
“In whose name?”
“That’s no concern of yours!”
I pushed back my seat, leaping to my feet. What thought I–that my short time in military service would stand me in some kind of stead against these ruffians? The leader lashed out with his cudgel. I snapped up my right arm reflexively, and had my elbow smashed into pieces for my trouble. I stared at my arm in surprise and pain. Chuckling, the man flicked the club a second time. Blackness exploded across my vision.
When my eyes cracked open, it was to ignite a headache. My head felt as though it had been battered by a dozen cudgels, rather than the single blow I remembered. I squeezed down on the pain emanating from a lyom’s-egg upon my left temple. Biting my lip, I directed my power into my elbow. What a mess!
Even as I saw to my needs, my mind calmly evaluated my situation. I sensed I was in another place. My left arm was upraised as though it clutched a dagger ready for a downward blow, chained at the wrist to the wall against which my back rested. I tested the chain, finding it short and immovable.
“Well rested, El Shashi?”
I knew that voice! Mata, I had never wished to hear it again. The voice doused my quoph in the bitter acid of despair. And my eyes fixed at once on the person I knew owned that nasal whine.
Lenbis leaned forward in his comfortable couch. “El Shashi. How good to see you again. With your aged father. You at least are looking well. I can’t say the same for the old fossil.”
“Release us, Lenbis!”
Lenbis threw back his head and laughed unpleasantly. “Release you? Not before I’ve had my fun, El Shashi. You stole my toys and ruined my business. The business I don’t mind, because I’ll get rich again. But I liked the girl. She had spirit.”
I found him as revolting as ever. A chill slithered from my quoph into my body.
Looking about, I saw that I was chained in a room I did not recognise–a room with no windows, and but one door. It held the chair that Lenbis was sitting on, me, and a table upon which another person lay, chained hand and foot. Although I could see nought but the person’s shoes, I knew this was my father. What was going on here? What was Lenbis planning?
I tried to stuff my hatred of Lenbis back down my throat. “I wronged you in Darbis,” I said. “Why don’t you let me heal you, and we can put this business behind us?”
“Don’t make me laugh!” he snarled. “Do you think I’m letting you near me, El Shashi?” Pulling a scrap of cloth from his pocket, Lenbis mopped his glistening forehead. “Let’s be clear. I intend to get rich. After you wrecked my warehouse and burned all my stores in Darbis, El Shashi, I wanted nothing more than to track you down and wring your scrawny lyom’s-neck. But then I discovered I was not the only one seeking a measure of your flesh. I fell in with agents of a certain Mistress Jyla.”
“Jyla has no further interest in me,” I shot back, full of uncertain bravado.
“Agreed,” said Lenbis, with a cruel twist of his fleshy lips. “But she is interested in your power. Oceans of your power.”
My power? I ran my tongue over my dry lips. She still wanted my power? Whatever for? What could she use the Wurm’s power for which did not involve breaking the Banishment? She must have some new plan … and it was active. She and her ambitions were alive and well, and she had somehow recruited this worm of a man to carry out her desires.
“Let us go, boy, and the House Telmak will make you rich beyond your dreams,” whispered my father.
“Riches I want,” Lenbis grinned, rising awkwardly to his feet so that he could overshadow my father and I. “But, unlike your fool of a son, I have the good sense not to cross a Sorceress. My colleagues in the criminal underworld agree on few things, but they are unanimous in their fear and loathing of the Honoria Jyla. I’ve always harboured a weakness for a truly ruthless and diabolical woman. They whisper she is Matabound with Ulim Godslayer himself.”
No surprises there, truly told! Shuddering, I asked, “So what do you want, Lenbis? Name your price.”
“Look about you, El Shashi. Stand for me. See if you can reach out and touch your father.”
I did not understand. But I obeyed him, rising to my feet, finding the limit of the chain, and reaching out to touch the fingertip of my father’s right hand.
“Perfect,” said Lenbis, looking so cheerful that I yearned for nothing more than a length of rope in my hands to use for a garrotte. “Read the shalik runes upon this for me, El Shashi. Do I strike you as a man interested in terls and ukals? Why would I chain your aged father to this table if I was? What think you?”
“You want me to heal him,” I said, slowly. I hoped against hope that would be all.
“But he has nought to heal, save old age,” Lenbis said. “And what pleasure would I derive from a simple healing?” He reached down toward his feet. When his hand reappeared, there dangled from it a heavy whip–the kind used by some cruel masters to drive their jatha in place of the master-prod, which is a kinder tool by leagues. As he continued to speak he moved backward to give himself space to wield the weapon. “I’ve a better idea. Why don’t you and I shoot not just two birds with one arrow, but three? I will have my revenge by seeing you and your father scream and weep and curse the day you were whelped. You will keep your father alive by healing him. And you will supply the Sorceress with the power she craves. There, shall we not all be satisfied?”
“Please,” my voice cracked. “Please, Lenbis, I beg you. Let me heal you.”
“I’ll not waste my
breath further.”
Crack! My father’s shirt leaped and settled again. He cried out. As if by magic, a red stain enlarged from the spot the whip had struck.
“Oh dear, El Shashi,” said Lenbis, pretending horror. “An old man’s skin is so thin! It took at least two or three strokes in the same place to break your daughter’s skin–except where she was already scarred and scabbed.”
“Please! Have pity, Lenbis!”
Crack! Spoke the whip. It first vented a horrible hiss as it curled through the air, and then an angry retort as the leather bit into the skin. I was reminded of the strike of a forest cobra; the warning hiss, and then the fatal strike.
“Come, El Shashi. Have mercy upon your poor father. Will you not heal him?”
“Mata’s name!” I shouted, stretching to the limit of my chain in order to reach my father’s uncurled fingers. “Stop this madness!”
My shouting, pleading, and cursing only encouraged Lenbis. His fleshy, sweating jowls were formed into a half-smile as he plied the whip. His smile was a deviant caricature. I began to feel that my cries were stroking his pleasure, giving him what he could never again have by his own flesh, after the damage I had wrought in Darbis. I would have healed him at least to set my conscience aright, but Lenbis was having none of it. Perhaps he feared me. Perhaps rightly so. I had vowed never again to exact such a revenge, but now my anguish threatened at every stroke to rise up and strangle my resolve.
Lenbis could land the tip of his whip upon a brass terl. He must have had a great deal of practice. I could not imagine how my father suffered, but after his first few groans, Orik appeared to bear the punishment with a grim surfeit of pride–in the face of which, I felt the lesser man.
We fell into a strange rhythm. After each stroke of the whip I would strain forward, waiting for my father’s hand to uncurl, for his fingers to straighten so that I could make the healing touch. My world narrowed to the gap between us. Lenbis had cleverly positioned the table so that only at a stretch could I touch my father’s longest digit–the digit used by yammariks the Fiefdoms over to point to Mata. He must have measured while I was unconscious, I realised. Each period of time I spent waiting for Orik’s fingers to move inflicted upon my quoph a horror all of its own, quite apart from the physical, for that was the time given in which to appreciate the impact of each blow upon my father; to see pain’s stamp upon his body and to trace the course of it in the taut tendons of his neck and the unavoidable quivering of his muscles, and the whiteness of the muscles around his mouth pressing his lips together in an attempt to stifle his moans.
After what must have been a makh, Lenbis tired of his sport and left the room. I slumped against the wall. My father’s clothes resembled a beggar’s rags. The whip had stripped most of the fabric off of his body. What tatters remained, were stained crimson, rising and falling in tune with his breathing. Orik lived.
I wondered how much the Wurm must have been augmented by Lenbis’ torture.
Mark my words, I have seldom had to heal and heal and heal without pause–save, I recall, during the plagues I attended. I felt as a washrag freshly squeezed out. The other end of my link with the Wurm must be an insatiable stomach, I decided, able to take and take without ceasing. How many-fold now did Jyla’s enchantment magnify my efforts? Surely mere flesh, even flesh strengthened by the power of magic, must at some point become unable to withstand the white-hot lillia that suffused it? Could the Wurm be infinitely filled?
Orik’s arms stirred against their chains. “How are you, son?”
“Shattered. Upset. So sorry that you have to endure this–”
“I told you. I hear Mata calling.”
“But not this way, father.”
I looked up as one of Lenbis’ men appeared in the doorway, picking his fingernails with the point of his dagger. “Rest time is over,” growled the man.
This one amused himself by pricking and cutting the soles of Orik’s feet with his dagger. The next carved open his stomach to make some ‘examination’ of the contents. Perhaps he was a secret Ulitrist, one who partook of the demonic delights of Ulim’s very table. After that came a fool who took a couple of token blows at the old man’s torso before settling in a corner to drink himself into a stupor. Lenbis came in later to wake the man with the lash of his whip.
I begged Lenbis for my father’s life. He took the lash to me instead of my father, which I greatly preferred. I fell to taunting him. But he grew wise to this and turned again upon my father, this time with a vicious twist: he found himself a second whip and plied the two in tandem, driving me to the sweating, fainting brink of endurance. Then, as night was long fallen, the men brought us water and bade us slumber well.
I meant to speak to my father. I meant to think my way out of this predicament. Many times had I thought of summoning the Wurm–but that would be the end of Orik, in all likelihood, and the end of me too. Lest I could loosen my chains. But my brain seemed stuffed full of old leaves. I fell asleep, and woke when the whip caressed my cheek.
This day, Lenbis did not even speak. He moved about his task with the air of a man driving his cart into the white of death–he found no pleasure in it as before, nor did his eyes light with any perverse fire, nor indeed did he spare any words to torment me. Sweat from the day’s warmth rolled freely from his hairline and stained the armpits and chest of his rumik. I could smell his rank stench across the room. When his arm dropped to his side, I said:
“I see your heart is troubling you, Lenbis.”
“What say you?” he growled. “I’m as set on having my revenge–”
“You’re not a well man,” I said. “Your colour tells me you have heart trouble.”
Lenbis’ eyes rolled toward me, eyes framed in sagging bags of skin. His cast was not good. I knew it; perhaps he did too.
“Ulim’s calling you, Lenbis,” I called softly across the room. “Ulim’s icy talons are clutched around your heart, squeezing … I can heal you if you want. Just say the word.”
“Never!” he shouted, cracking the whip across my father’s neck one more time. I reached out and closed the wound.
With a foul curse, Lenbis left us in silence.
Orik’s head turned in my direction. “Truly told?” he whispered.
“Heart trouble,” I said. “Too many anna of drinking, or the drugs–”
“Or supping with Ulim.”
“Ay.” I was silent for a time, before adding, “Father, I’ve little strength left. Pray you we can find a way out of this.”
“Summon the Wurm,” Orik chuckled dryly. “Kill us all and be done with it.”
“Kill you? And grant Jyla victory in one fell swoop?” I shook the chain one more time, the chain I had tested with my fullest strength over and over again. “I think not, father.”
Orik was looking along the length of his arm at me. He deliberately formed his hand into a fist. “We could end this.”
“No!” I was at the end of my chain, reaching for him, caring not how the manacle bit into my wrist. “I will not let you die, father! Not now; not ever!”
“Listen to yourself, boy!” Orik sighed a long, drawn-out soliloquy. “My life has run its course. A hundred and eleven anna come the second Joinday of Sowing. I’ve already lived longer than I ought. Is that because you healed me before? That eventide at Solk Inn–did you do more than you ought?”
Despite my intentions, my head nodded the affirmative. “I have long wondered, father. Perhaps I strengthened you beyond the ordinary. I knew so little of the ways of healing back then.”
“I’m an Umarite, not a long-lived Eldrik like you, son. Had Alannah survived, she would have outlived me twice over. And yet she still loved me.” The gentle regard in Orik’s gaze held me more powerfully than any hot words could have. “I love you more than I can frame into words. But you need to let me pass on.”
“No!”
“Arlak.”
Our conversation was cut short by three of Lenbis’ drunken stoo
ges staggering into the room. They laid about Orik, chopping and hacking at him with a horrible disregard for his humanity. I lunged at once to my chain’s end to touch my father, to pour into him what I had, wincing as I felt his body jerking and twitching beneath the blows. Blood seeped out of his mouth where he had bitten through his tongue.
A young man would have struggled to take this abuse, much less a man of his advanced age. I pitied him. I loved him. I hated the pain he was in … but to let him die? I could not bear it. It cut across the grain of all I ever was, and all the man I ever wanted to be. Granted, I had sent many to Nethe’s clutches through my unthinking foolishness, but this was different. Here I could think and feel and know what was the right course … but could I know what was Mata’s will? Who was Arlak, or El Shashi, to be the judge of a man’s anna? To ascertain when one should pass on? To hold a man from the brink even when he wanted to cross over? Mata, what an evil pass!
Suddenly, I knew what I must do. Something unselfish.
I shrivelled my left hand.
As I slipped loose of the chain, I crashed to my knees. Then I barrelled into the men attacking my father, careless of their blades swinging my way. I could not leave my father in this way, so I took a dagger in my stomach and a sword-cut upon my back as I tried to wrestle one of them to the ground and steal his weapon.
The men bawled for help. A great weight crashed upon my back. Wriggling my way free, sword in hand and forgetting any lesson Janos had ever drilled into my stubborn skull, I laid about me with the grace of the farm boy I had once been. I caused some damage, ay, but not near enough afore the men buried me beneath a press of bodies and pummelled me into submission.
A handful of makh later, for my trouble I had earned myself a collar worthy of any hound, and was chained once more to the wall. One man had been dragged out by his heels. Clearly the ruffians had little enough regard even for their dead.
However, they celebrated his death in quite a different way to what I expected.
