The Legend of El Shashi

by Marc Secchia

  “That was inventive,” said my father. “Shrinking your hand.”

  I wondered how it was possible to have grown to love the gaze of a pair of eyes quite so suddenly. I had, of course, always prized romantic love, and the love of my children and especially my grandchildren was a thing still fresh enough to thrill to my quoph. But the love of a son for his father … ay. Cut off early in my manhood by the Faloxx, and now renewed a few anna shy of seventy later; this was a thing strange and wondrous indeed.

  “I can’t reach you with this thing on my neck.”

  “Not only did you think of an unselfish path, but you thought also of my needs and refused to leave me.”

  “Father … father. Do not say it.”

  Orik’s voice had grown weaker. I knew my father was fading away in my very presence. I could keep healing him, but there was still a physical, mental, and emotional toll being exacted that without a great deal of time and effort, I could not hope to begin to redress.

  “Very well,” he agreed, “I will not. But think upon this, Arlak. Is it selfish to deny me my time to die? And is that in accordance with or against Mata’s will?”

  I hedged: “It is not selfish because the Wurm has not risen.”

  “But is it cruel? Is love cruel?”

  In the other room, a door banged. A puff of air entered with the ruffians, air that to my nostrils hinted at the tang of a storm. The Wurm? Was the Wurm soon to rise?

  Against this, I weighed my father’s words. I twisted upon them with the greatest discomfort. How was I to choose between these two great evils? Whichever I chose, I would have to live with the knowledge and guilt for the rest of my anna.

  Not that my prospects of living until eventide appeared bright.

  The men gathered in the room, filling it with the reek of their body odour mouldered for seasons beneath leathern body armour, of lethola spirit and of salikweed, which can turn a good man into a monster. They measured the compass of my chain once more. Lenbis brought in his chair and settled into it, looking greatly the worse for wear, a man who had spent the night wrestling with the ghost of his own quoph. His men laughed and joked coarsely. They lashed spears to the underside of the table, arranging them so that I would have to impale myself in order to reach my father to heal him.

  Orik smiled at me. “Shame you can’t shrink your head.”

  Now a joke? Was he prodding at my ego? Or was he afraid? After all he had said about being ready, was my father afraid of the afterlife? I would be.

  I considered trying to melt my flesh around the metal collar locked at my throat, causing it somehow to pass through my neck. But that would involve severing my own spinal cord. Could even I heal such damage? And cause metal to move through bone? I could hardly imagine such a feat, even given time and perfect resources–neither of which I enjoyed now.

  “Do you have much oil left in that barrel of yours?” he asked.

  “Plenty for us both.”

  Orik sighed and closed his eyes. I had lied; he knew it. If only I could have sucked back some of that lillia from the Wurm. Then I would have power beyond imagining. But I did not know how. Even Eliyan had been stumped by that question.

  “Hurry up! I grow impatient.”

  Lenbis, I thought. Should I beg him one last time?

  Another man brought in a steaming pot. At least, I thought it was steam, at first. With a pair of tongs, he pulled out a red-hot coal and, without warning, pushed it beneath my father’s back. Orik arched away as best he could. Another coal followed, and another, placed wherever his limbs touched the table. I smelled wood burning, mingled with the sweet stench of flesh. The last of my father’s clothes caught fire.

  And I was staring unmoving at this spectacle!

  I jerked forward against the chain. I could not reach him. Gritting my teeth, I pushed forward until two spear-points pierced my belly. They were the Lymarian kind with a leaf-shaped point, and none too sharp. Indeed, they might have been deliberately blunted by Lenbis’ men. I touched my father and dulled his pain before he suddenly writhed away from my touch. The man with the metal tongs was applying a coal to the soft skin of his armpit.

  “Father! Reach out to me!”

  The chains would allow me no further. I was strangling myself, truly told. With a start I realised that the spear-points had been poisoned; dipped in the juice of the deadly redbane berry. I recoiled, fighting the spread of contagion within myself.

  Orik screamed. He lay now on a bed of coals, unable to escape the scorching points beneath his body. Both of his hands balled into fists. I could not have reached him had I wanted to.

  “Father!” I shouted. “Father! I won’t let you die!”

  I had to fling myself against the spear-points once more. This time I caught the tip of his finger with mine, and the tune of Orik’s agony changed momentarily.

  “Ah, the sweet music of torture,” crowed Lenbis, saluting me with a mocking flip of his hand. “Now, let us see if you dance as well as you sing!”

  I cursed him with every word I knew as his men approached me from either side, cudgels in hand. They struck at my feet to crush my toes. I shrieked, tried to kick out at one of them, groaned and almost collapsed as a spear-point scraped along my spine. I pulled back, but then I could not abide my father’s screams. So I flung myself once more upon the spears. I dulled my pain with a thought, careless of the damage, as I battled to reach my father. The men teased me by cracking my outstretched fingers with their cudgels.

  Once more I touched Orik’s fingers. His head turned my way and his eyes opened. Tears streaked his cheeks. He mouthed, ‘Love you.’

  I stared back.

  His fist curled shut.

  I wept and raged against the chain, almost choking myself, but the links would not yield a dyndigit to my strength. I willingly impaled myself upon the spears, but a stubborn half-a-hand separated Orik and I. And he would not relent. Rather, he gazed at me. And I thought I saw a strangeness enter his eyes. Resignation? Hopelessness? A willing parting of his soul from the flesh that framed it?

  He fell silent.

  The collar strangled my cries. One of the men crushed my kneecap with his cudgel, sending me crashing down upon the spears, hanging by my ribs. But I felt little.

  There is a moment, I own, when the flesh dies but the quoph yet lives. That is my experience: I, who have seen the white of death so many times over. And that is what I beheld in Orik Sorlakson. One moment he breathed, the next he did not. His body slumped upon the table as though all the strength had fled his muscles at once, as though the pain no longer mattered and he no longer suffered. His eyes shone their love to me. And then, by degrees it seemed to me but in reality, quickly indeed, they glazed over. His immortal quoph had fled its vessel.

  “Father!”

  My raw scream echoed around the room.

  Orik’s clenched fist fell open. I could touch him at last.

  “Father! No! I want you back! Come back, please, oh please, come back …”

  My sobs stopped in my throat. Appalled, I stared at my fingers. What had I done? What had I just wished? Not merely by the power of words …

  Thunder rolled in the distance. Lightning struck in the next room. A man’s scream was cut off by a loud thud. Lenbis swore, half-turning in his seat.

  In a whirl of black robes, the Sorceress Amal strode in through the doorway–the very last person in Mata’s creation I would have expected at that moment. In her wake I saw a woman fully veiled save her eyes, but those might as well have been veiled too, for she was blind. My quoph leaped as though awakened as the world to its very first dawn.

  P’dáronï!

  Chapter 33: Chasing the Wind

  Every eye on Mata’s earth hardened against me,

  And every hand was raised in the buskal of rejection,

  Even the doors of heaven slammed against my petitions,

  All I chased was the wind.

  Faliyan of Eldoran: Legends, 6th Tale: El Shashi

/>   Her face set in a scowl as black as her robes, Amal shook her wrists free of her sleeves. Violet haloes of lillia gathered about her hands like the ghostly auras that flicker in the northern nights. I had but a blink of time to reflect that now I could see lillia. Fire flashed forth from each of her fingertips. It left streaks upon my retinae, as though I had beheld the strikes of multiple fork lightning assaulting a mountain fastness. When I was able to look again, I saw that Lenbis and his men were neat piles of ash on the floor.

  “Arlak!” she cried. “Brother-mine!”

  “Amal-nish.” I struggled to rise. “I … I …”

  “P’dáronï! Help me!”

  Thrusting a shoulder beneath each of my arms, the two women helped lift me clear of the spears. My breathing whistled as if a chill Alldark wind had lodged in my chest. I realised I had run one of the spear points through the base of my lung. Somehow, I forced myself to find a residue of my power; strength to begin to close my wounds. I shaped it and sent it forth.

  Amal held my head. P’dáronï touched me. Half of me believed she was some apparition, that I dreamed in my extremity and grief … how could this be? Yet there she was, moving, breathing; I watched her eyelids flutter down over those white, never-healed orbs. I sensed something flow from her into me, a kind of magic alien to my experience, and immediately felt stronger.

  She whispered, “Arlak–”

  “P’dáronï … nish,” I wheezed. “The Wurm comes!”

  “What did you do?” Amal growled, still a-storm with fire and fury. “Did you kill this man?”

  “That’s Orik. Your … father.”

  By the horrified flight of her hand to her mouth, I knew that Amal grasped at once what had transpired in the room. She transferred my head to P’dáronï’s lap. Rising, she stood over him. She gazed unblinkingly at Orik for a breathlessly long time. I felt a warm droplet strike my foot. Amal’s tears.

  Great Mata! That Amal should have missed meeting her father by a fraction of a makh! What bitter, bitter irony was this? I did not know whether to curse Mata or thank Her.

  A faint trembling was conducted through the floor into my limbs. It was distant, but I knew the Wurm had stirred. I sensed a ponderous movement, as though much had been required to set the beast into motion–but once it moved not even the mountains could stand in its way. At least Orik’s quoph would now know its rest; a rest that was denied to El Shashi.

  Amal’s finger traced his cheek. “He’s at peace now.”

  I said, “He wanted you to know, Amal–”

  “How sweet! A family reunion! Shall I shed a tear, too?”

  Our eyes leaped to the doorway.

  “Jyla!” I gasped.

  “Arlak Sorlakson. We meet again.”

  Amal moved between the Sorceress and my father’s body, forming mystic symbols with her hands.

  Jyla sniggered, “Don’t bother with that, child. Don’t you know who I am?”

  “By the fires of Nethe, who are you?” asked my sister.

  Jyla threw back the hood of her dark robe. Still a lover of the dramatic gesture, I thought, loathing her with every iota of my being. Her dead black eyes fixed upon Amal. “Have you no greeting for your long-lost mother, daughter-mine?”

  Amal gave a small scream. “Aulynni!”

  “One and the same, Amal-nish. Mother to you.”

  “You’re no mother of mine!”

  There was clear similarity in their features, I decided, looking from one to the other. Amal was nearly a head taller than her mother, but there was no question in my mind who was deadlier.

  Jyla seemed bemused by Amal’s response. “As I was against my father, so you seem set against your mother,” she said. “A cruel wind of destiny. But I, unlike my father, do not intend for your little rebellion to progress. I have destroyed many powerful Sorcerers already, Amal-nish. Defy me, and I won’t hesitate to do the same to you.”

  “I am not your ‘nish’ anything,” Amal countered, pale of face. She glanced about her as the shaking escalated. “Why don’t you just say what you came to say, mother?”

  “Hold me fast,” P’dáronï breathed in my ear.

  At the Wurm’s approach, the whole building began a lively dance–far more lively than was good for bricks, mortar, or wood frame. I imagined that at any moment, the creature would descend upon us like an avalanche rolling down a mountain. Through dust scattered into the air, I saw Jyla lash out with a burning, crimson whip attached to her wrist–a fiery scourge, the Warlocks called this magical weapon. I had read about it during my studies in the Mystic Library. Amal instantly threw up a wall of blue fire. There came a sharp crackling of energies. And then I saw the blue fire fall.

  “No!”

  “Ah, yes!” crowed Jyla, as her rope of fire settled around Amal’s waist. Somehow the fire, without burning her flesh, had contrived to bind Amal to the Sorceress’ will. At the jerk of her mother’s hand, Amal stumbled forward. “And here I thought you’d put up more of a fight. Time for you and I to have a little mother-daughter talk, you reprobate girl.”

  “Ready?” P’dáronï whispered. I nodded–feeling faintly ridiculous at not knowing what I was nodding for–but I had to trust her. I could not walk in my current state.

  “And I’ll see you in Nethe, El Shashi.”

  Jyla’s right hand snapped forward, hurling a roiling wave of heat and fire at us. But I saw the room waver before my eyes, as though I perceived the world across the rising heat and smoke of a cooking fire. There came an eerie tugging at my neck. I distinctly felt the collar slip right through my flesh, but my being had become so insubstantial that the metal passed through me without any apparent disturbance or difficulty. A hummingbird’s wing beat later, I found myself sprawled in the middle of a hewehat field in the bright sunshine.

  Sprawled, ay–in the comfort of P’dáronï’s lap.

  My eyes, the only part of me that had strength and will to move, swivelled about. There were the Lyrn Mountains, a league or so closer than the village of Imbi where I had lately lived with my family. Lenbis must have brought us to the farmhouse I saw yonder. That was where I sensed the Wurm’s presence.

  Even as I watched, the house sank away in bizarre silence. I saw a tremendous oval depression developing in the earth, akin to the huge sinkholes of MaraUdal in faraway Damantia, a province I had visited but once in all my travels around the Fiefdoms. Now I heard it, a low rumbling akin to gravel sliding down a mine-chute. The ground simply melted downwards. A few heartbeats was all it took. The Wurm ate that house whole–and the barn, the fence, the vegetable garden …

  I held my breath, as unmoving as the world about me.

  What happened to all that rock and dirt the Wurm swallowed? An earthworm passed all matter through its body. Nothing came out of the Wurm, that I knew. Was all matter made of magic, as Eliyan theorised, and the Wurm converted all it swallowed into lillia? How else could it swim the basal rock of Mata’s creation?

  “Do you see the Sorceress, Arlak-nih?”

  “I do.” I swallowed, rallying my strength. I must remember to describe what P’dáronï could not see. “She flies a creature shaped like a giant bat, truly told.” I squinted against Suthauk’s glare. “Amal is her prisoner, held before her. They fly west to the mountains.”

  “Toward Eldoran. Toward her final victory.”

  “P’dáronï.” I stopped, coughing. There was nothing left, nothing with which to heal the gaping rent that stretched from my pelvis to my lower ribs. Only my arm was keeping my intestines within my abdominal cavity. I forced out a few more words, “Why … did you come?”

  She looked away, toward the Wurm’s sinkhole. I wondered what she sensed there; how she perceived the world.

  P’dáronï sighed, “Arlak, am I no longer dear to you?”

  All I could summon was a wordless squeal as my wound flared, overwhelming the trickle of lillia with which I had damped down the pain.

  “Have you forgotten our anna together?”
>
  My body curled up of its own accord, trying to draw together using the ragged strip of muscle remaining on the right side of my stomach. I groaned, “Wurm!”

  The world shimmered again. The Lyrn Mountains leaped closer. Somewhere out there, the Wurm twisted in the bowels of the earth, hunting us anew. I sensed it. I heard the azure sky thunder; I knew that the earth trembled at the beast’s passage, and that the sense of lillia was overpowering in its immediacy, as close as … P’dáronï?

  I was going mad. Suddenly, I was drowning in the fragrant nearness of her, as though a window had been opened upon a new world and a breeze had swept in a surfeit of wondrous redolence. Long anna had I pined for this woman. How many the eventide makh had I imagined holding her in my arms? Her scent flooded my sensitised nostrils as if I had never smelled the proximity of a woman before, as though she alone was the sweet siren-song my quoph had secretly longed for before it could ever know its final rest. I wanted to drink her in. I wanted to scribe her poems of undying devotion. I reeled from this sense to another: that the Wurm was there and she was here, that the Wurm was burrowing closer and she was bending over me, a glistening tear welling from the duct within each eye.

  Two drops, catching the power of Suthauk. Magnifying my insight.

  “P–” I tried. My throat worked. “P’d–”

  “I’ve been such a fool,” she sobbed.

  The world shifted again. I felt the cool of the mountain air as a balm upon my forehead. The power that rippled out of P’dáronï each time she shifted us from place to place was lillia reshaped in ways I could not grasp. Who was this woman? How could she be a slave of the Eldrik? With one part of my mind I marvelled, while with another I grasped I was dying–and she thought I had forgotten our love. Rich irony! Or was it? I had but one pressing thought, that there was no way Jyla was going to steal this from me too.

  I screamed helplessly in the fastness of my mind: Larathi, woman! I love you!

  P’dáronï caught her breath.

  She had heard! I knew my intuition was right. It must have happened when I spoke Janos’ true name–Benethar–in the mountains. I was open to the gyael-irfa. His code word had unlocked my Eldrik potential, hidden for so long. That must be how Jyla had discovered me.