The Legend of El Shashi

by Marc Secchia

  Suddenly, there was a touching of minds. I stiffened, rejecting the overture–partly, because the shock of contact transferred across to the Wurm as well. But nothing came back. Nothing ever came back, save the ravenous hunger of a beast arrowing toward our location with the knack of a hound hot on the scent.

  “You’re hurting me,” P’dáronï said tightly.

  “I … uh, sorry, P’dáronï-nish. Wurm …”

  This time, after we shifted, she said at once, “You’re hurt, Arlak-nih. Where?”

  “Stomach.”

  Angels of Mata were not acceptable theology in the Fiefdoms, I told myself inanely. But as the gold-haloed head of P’dáronï of Armittal bent over my wound, might I not be forgiven a moment’s heresy mingled with imagination? A spur of blood-loss and father-loss and the unimaginable torment which had spanned only two days, but seemed to have lasted a lifetime? Unless Lenbis could resurrect himself from ashes digesting in the Wurm’s belly, his at least was an evil wiped from the face of the earth. Yuthe Herself, the Goddess of all women–forgive me yet more heresy–must own this superb woman for a sister, she who had rescued me. But what of Amal?

  Trust Arlak Sorlakson to be consumed with nought but regard for a woman’s charms when he was bound to run twenty-eight days from the Wurm!

  P’dáronï’s lips bent toward her fingertips, delicately touching my wound. “I learned some few things from you, El Shashi,” she whispered. “It took me anna. But see what I can do now.”

  Her breath funnelled over her fingertips as the early-morn mist rising over the Nugar River in the Gloaming season, the mist through which the fishermen would glide like wraiths, neither speaking nor dipping a paddle to steer or propel their vessels, seeking the tell-tale bubbles from beneath the surface that would betray the great river pike hiding just beneath the loam-brown surface; the great pike from which even the salmon fled. And where her breath wafted my skin did follow. My skin grew and stretched in amazing, unexpected, and downright unnerving ways. Strangest of all, I could not tell how her power accomplished this miracle–my impression, had I not known better, was that P’dáronï had somehow issued orders at an elemental level more suited to Mata’s work of creation than the human … and I should know these things. I, of all people!

  For some reason this irritated the very Hounds of Nethe out of me.

  But I did have a new covering upon my stomach.

  “You’ll have to regrow everything beneath,” said P’dáronï.

  “Rushed for time?”

  “Would you prefer to be dragging spans of intestines around the Lyrn Mountains?”

  “P’dáronï-nishka …”

  “We crossed a continent for you, Arlak, and your ingratitude shines forth? Amal surrendered herself into Jyla’s power to aid your escape. Do you remember your interrogation in Eldoran? Jyla will make that seem as a fresh breeze off the ocean!”

  “P–” My words wavered and we moved again.

  I swallowed, reminded that the last time I had seen P’dáronï angry, a man had ended up being Banished. Was this the same woman I had loved? Did I love her still?

  “Well may you ask why we came for you!”

  “Ulim’s breath upon it, I just saw my father killed!” I blazed back. “Do you have any idea how that felt?”

  Her face crumpled like a wet scrolleaf. A quiver passed through her body and into mine.

  “Oh, larathi!” The swear word exploded out of me. “P’dáronï … truly told, you must think you’re talking to the biggest fool in the Fiefdoms. And Eldoria. And anywhere else you care to mention.” I wished I could have read her eyes. I felt cast adrift when speaking to her. Another woman could have read what I meant in my gaze, but I needed to pour it all into my voice. “I’m sorry,” I added simply. “I know nothing about where you come from. I’m worse than a dumb jatha at the yoke. Truly told, did you even know your father? Did he sell you into slavery?”

  “I knew him,” P’dáronï said in a murmur barely audible above the storming approach of the Wurm. I imagined the creature was becoming irritated with P’dáronï’s ability to teleport us overland. The skies darkened unnaturally overhead, and I saw lightning strike upward into the clouds. “He sold me in my ninth anna. He said it was my duty to keep my family alive.”

  The gathering storm formed a perfect backdrop to her hurt.

  “Have you see him since?”

  “Never again.”

  I had no words. Numbly, I wondered if I owned P’dáronï, as my father had intimated. If she doubted me already, what ruin might this secret wreak upon our fragile relationship? Any why was this thought anathema to my quoph? Though the Umarite Fiefdoms lacked the formal slavery system of the Eldrik, many families were kept indebted to their Hassutla or Hassutl over the gantuls–a system in most respects similar to slavery, although there was always the option of buying out a contract. For a poor family this was akin to envisioning a voyage around Belion. Janos had always grown animated when teaching me about injustice. Now I understood what had confused me in my youth. Ay, truly told, I understood with a sense of trembling outrage at the unfairness of the world, or perhaps what we humans had made of Mata’s world.

  The world leaped again; twice, in rapid succession. From my new vantage point I could gaze the height and breadth of a solid bank of clouds gathering over to the east, as though Ulim’s army of doom marched across the lands at the world’s final death-knell.

  “I see the Wurm shouldering aside the mountains,” said P’dáronï. “The world is ablaze in lillia. So much so, I can see shapes–I believe they must be hills and forests, and above them, more mountains.”

  “Clouds,” I corrected her, shivering with wonder. “A storm front.”

  “I’ve never seen the world like this before.”

  “In energies?”

  Her smile was a study in childlike delight; an abruption of her preceding distress. “By the essence of magic. The Wurm’s magic. I’ve always had interaction with close things; mostly with what I could touch. But this is … amazing. Truly told, I never knew!”

  “I’m sorry you must flee the Wurm with me.”

  P’dáronï tilted her face again to the horizon. “I committed myself to this, Arlak-nih.”

  “This … P’dáronï-nish,” I stressed the endearment slightly, “you think this is a mistake, don’t you?”

  I could not read the miniscule tightening of the muscles around her mouth. “Can you heal yourself?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Then we must find space that you may rest. I will carry you as far as I am able. And I will Dissemble for us both until you have the strength to learn the skill.”

  And so we travelled: the man of power, as helpless as any babe, and the blind slave, who held me as much captive as friend. When I began to ask questions she bade me, with ire, to rest and gather my strength. But I could try to draw my own conclusions. Why should Jyla seek me out after all these anna? Why should she abscond only with Amal? What had changed meantime in Eldoran? Did she seek to draw me back to the Eldrik?

  I needed answers from P’dáronï. But she seemed disinclined–unless, by opening my mind to her, I could lay my quoph’s secrets bare. Ay, and how many of those secrets would I want another to know? Especially one so dear? Total, naked honesty … how could I ever consent?

  I wanted to ruminate more upon these things, but my body would not tolerate any further abuse. Shortly, I slept, insensible to the world and its dangers.

  El Shashi had never been in such a state.

  Never had I lacked the power to heal myself. But with the poison of the redbane berry spreading though my system, whatever tiny amount of lillia I managed to gather, was turned immediately to keeping the toxins at bay. Besides the poison there was massive damage to my stomach. An infection took root there. I was more than sickly. I was dying.

  I confess I knew little of this. It was P’dáronï who bore me without complaint, dazed and delirious, across the Lyrn Mountains and d
own into the foothills of eastern Hakooi.

  “You have to open yourself,” she kept saying. “Show me how to heal you, Arlak.”

  I tried! Ay, Mata, I tried. I fought and cursed my inability to comply; I wept and gnashed my teeth and moaned my love for her through cracked and bleeding lips. But my traitorous mind would not relent. Locked for gantuls in the guardtower will of Janos’ manufacture, which had been imbedded in the very foundations of my being under the full force of his supreme hypnosis, my mental bastion no longer knew how to let itself be breached. Not only was the key missing, but the door itself was long forgotten. In attempting to help me, P’dáronï hurt and drove herself to collapse.

  I dreamed of Ulim’s Hunt. I dreamed of lying beneath the Pentacle in Eldoran beneath the Inquisitors terrible assault, as they threw the amplified power of a hundred minds at me, yet something within would not yield. I dreamed of drawing P’dáronï of Armittal tenderly into in my arms, only to realise her blind eyes hid a contagion spreading from her body into mine. She clasped her arms around my neck and smiled a ghastly, succubus smile filled with fangs that mirrored the rocky spires of Birial. ‘Die with me, Arlak.’ I shrieked and flailed at her … and dreamed again … of being carried upon the back of Thurbarak, the albino king of the jerlak, at the head of a jerlak tide. And always behind, stalking me with bestial purpose to the very ends of the world, was the invisible but clearly felt presence of the Wurm.

  I sprang awake as the ground trembled.

  I found myself lying prone upon a sandbank beside the young and narrow reach of the Nugar River, easily recognisable to me, in the shadow of a small sailboat. P’dáronï was nestled against my left shoulder, her body pliant against mine, the brush of her breath upon my cheek a faint and uncertain perfume. Hearth and hand, how I craved … a tendril of danger tickled my senses. My regard leaped to alarm.

  “P’dáronï-nish! Wake up!”

  The Wurm was close. Dozens of river pike leaped agitatedly from the brown waters, racing downstream from a doom slithering down the river channel toward us.

  I leaped to my feet. How this was possible, I knew not–had I healed myself whilst asleep? Bending, I slapped P’dáronï’s cheek harder than I had intended. “Wake up!”

  Jerlak hoof prints? All around where we had lain … prints twice the size of my palm. My quoph lurched. My dream! But I was acting on instinct now. Before I knew what I was doing, I scooped the surprisingly slight form of P’dáronï into my arms. Water surged around my knees. As the boat shifted towards me, I dumped us together over the gunwale and into the belly of the vessel. Ungainly, but effective, I congratulated myself, as the floodwaters swept us away.

  That was when we ran into a tree. And I ran my head into a wooden box tucked into the bow.

  “Larathi!”

  The boat rotated slowly, snagged upon a branch. I staggered upright, finding a curl of power within to dull the pain. But even that action froze mid-thought; because well above the treeline I saw the roof of the Wurm’s mouth, a vast, gaping cavern smoking at its edges with violet lillia, shovelling a brown tide of sludge and water before it as the creature sailed majestically down the Nugar’s riverbed. Trees and bushes either side on the river banks were inundated by the rising swell.

  I still did not understand why, but the terror that quivered my quoph was more than fear of dying; more than a furious conviction that P’dáronï and I deserved a chance after so many anna; greater even than what the name El Shashi had come to represent. I could not have described this knowledge given the tongue of ulule crossed with mystical insight of a Hakooi poetess.

  What I knew was that I had an oar in my hands. I plied it like a madman stabbing soft turf with murderous glee, for we had risen now upon that pile of mud and were being inexorably drawn into the Wurm’s mouth. It was more akin to poling through a Frenjj swamp than paddling. My frantic backward glances assured me that the Wurm ate water and mud with ease, and whole trees tipped into its gargantuan mouth in a steady stream. The mandibles, as thick as houses, waved back in forth with a steady sweeping motion, shovelling all before it into the Wurm’s insatiable maw. I could not estimate how large it had grown. Comparisons faded into insignificance. As the river bent I thought the creature must be a goodly part of a league in length. Its tail was lost in the distance. The mouth had to be a trin wide, over a hundred paces. It carved out the Nugar anew.

  For a span, the beast’s roaring shook us and that slipping pile of mud as though we rowed across a bowl of gelatine. Mud splattered over us until I came to resemble a shadworm slithering about in a pit of clay.

  Suddenly, the boat lurched and we tipped forward. As the muck thinned, so we accelerated, until we rode the Wurm’s bow-wave along with a snarl of branches and bushes and several dead jatha. Taking up the second oar, I set them to the oarlocks and began to bend my back in earnest–at which my innards agonisingly announced they were not yet whole. I distinctly felt the contents of my intestines squeezing into places they had no right to be. Each stroke brought fresh tears to my eyes.

  And then my gaze dropped from the Wurm to P’dáronï.

  I shipped the oars with a curse and dragged her face free of the mud pooled in the bottom of the boat. Her body hung limp in my arms. “Jyla, how could you do this to me?” I shouted. I jammed my fingers into her mouth and scooped out half a handful of mud and filth. “Breathe! Sink you to Nethe’s hells, you stupid, stupid Wurm!”

  Abandoning my own pain, I dove into P’dáronï and found myself in an unfamiliar place–in a body whose elemental composition was as alien to my experience as though the world were built upon different foundations–she was human in all parts but somehow, in her tiniest components, formed in a different way. I grappled momentarily with my shock. Ay, she had limbs and organs, blood and heart and brain, so why …? I was a sculptor who, having expected fromite, finds himself working instead with the finest crystal. Here I found an elegant, enigmatic magic woven into the warp and weft of her being, magic intrinsic and not learned, magic of untold potency–here was design and artistry, complexity and balance and beauty, I had never before encountered but knew I was uniquely positioned to appreciate.

  And I had imagined healing this woman’s vision? The odious arrogance of El Shashi!

  But time was short. I reached for her reserves. There are hidden depths every person has, hid away by Mata against an evil day. These I stoked to wakefulness. I husbanded and focussed her strength. I attempted to rouse her magic. She coughed and retched, and then fell into a more normal sleep. A pleasing hint of colour stole into her cheeks.

  Now I must row, though it burned me as the fires of Nethe itself.

  Three makh later, having kept ahead of the Wurm all the while, it came to my mind that I might raise the sail and save myself the labour.

  Chapter 34: Upon the Nugar

  2nd Levantday of Youngsun, Anna Nol 1407

  P’dáronï’s hair may have been be caked in dry mud, and her flowing Armittalese robes and trousers were now as soiled and tattered as though she had played for makh in a porker’s favourite mud-pit, but to me she was still the most beautiful woman in the world. My happiness reached an absurd pitch. This woman had crossed the Fiefdoms for me. How many nights had I not dreamed of speaking with her again? Must I convince her of my love? A task most agreeable!

  “Where did you get the bread?” P’dáronï asked.

  “Having stolen from your pouch, I bought bread and ale at Darrow,” I smiled. “With this breeze we must be at least a makh ahead of the Wurm.”

  “I felt you enter me.”

  “I did not!” I began hotly, and then blushed even more heatedly than before. “Oh–you meant, by magic? Ay, truly told. You’re an enigma, a wonder, a–”

  “And what did you learn?”

  “I choose not to read minds, P’dáronï. Not without your consent.”

  She inclined her head graciously. “Manners that once would once have endeared you in Eldoran, Arlak-nih. Now the gyael-irfa
is spoiled and split. And Jyla daily adds to the number of those in her thrall.”

  “By force?” I asked, half-hoping I was wrong.

  “All Eldoran, and indeed, all of the Eldrik peoples, pass their days in mortal fear. Having lived all of their lives open to the racial mind, they are helpless to resist–and should they resist, Jyla has learned how to bring the full force of her sorcerous cabal against them through the gyael-irfa. Even those Warlocks and Sorcerers who fall into her hands, like Amal, have been undone. Worse, she turns them to her side, as though all are coins of the same stamp. They speak alike, act alike, even think alike. We are lost as to how she achieves this.”

  “Perfect harmony,” I muttered, tearing off a crust with my teeth and champing at it with all the strength in my jaw. “The ultimate ambition of Lucanism. Then riddle me this: why come for me? Why did you and Amal brave the many leagues?”

  “Because we felt you. Every Eldrik felt you, Arlak-nih, from the lowest to the highest–like the thundering of Mata’s voice, ‘I am alive!’” She reached for my hand and took it between hers; gently stroking the path of my veins with her fingertips, as though through this gesture she sought to comprehend the very course of my life. So many nuances I had forgotten since leaving Eldoran! “You are a beacon, a Doublesun dawning,” she whispered. “To the Interrogators, you embody their worst fears. A rogue Eldrik Sorcerer of unimaginable potential. To Jyla, you are the fount of her power. To those opposed, led by Eliyan and Amal, you represent hope.”

  “And to P’dáronï of Armittal?”

  “Don’t ask me that.”

  “I am asking.” I clasped her fingers. “P’dáronï-nishka, I have to know.”

  “Is that I crossed the Fiefdoms for you, not enough? That I held Eliyan’s knee and begged until he let me go?” To me this picture was rather unlikely. I shifted upon my bench and pretended to adjust the sail. P’dáronï added, a trifle tartly for my taste, “And you can unbend that smirk from your lips, Arlak Sorlakson! Eliyan bade us–if we could not reach you–to see you killed.”