The Legend of El Shashi

by Marc Secchia

  Amal, with a grim smile, raised Eliyan with her own show of power and thrust him once more toward the gaping portal. One of the Inquisitors vanished through it on his way to Birial. Eliyan dodged and twisted. He grasped Amal’s robe and tried to pull her in with him. She in turn wrenched herself free and dealt him a staggering blow with her fist. It must have been augmented by magic, for it blasted him into the portal’s mouth. He was swallowed up in a flash. Casually, she dusted off her hands and turned to Jyla.

  Now my most desperate move flashed to my mind. With Eliyan gone and P’dáronï about to be overwhelmed by two powerful Sorceresses working in tandem, I had little choice. Our best plan lay in ruins. I had to kill myself … or be killed. And Jyla would never be more vulnerable than now. She could not teleport through the shield.

  P’dáronï stumbled beneath a flurry of blows.

  I knew what I had to do. Something vain and utterly inappropriate should suffice.

  The Armittalese Warlock slumped upon the platform. My heart broke in twain as she collapsed. Dimly I viewed Jyla’s triumphant, unheard shout. Amal’s mouth open in pleased laughter. Now the Sorceress should have free reign to abuse my power as she wished. If I was the Wurm … P’dáronï’s limp body dangled in Jyla’s arms–defeated, or dead. The Sorceress moved toward the portal.

  “Youth be my aid,” said I, and set to work on my body.

  Deep in the secret cavern of my quoph, the Wurm stirred.

  Did the jerlak know? To all sides I saw the great beasts trundling away, vanishing as though their appearing had been a fleeting vision of strange animal spirits. They had been unable to break the shield, but perhaps they had done enough. The square was curiously silent and empty. Crumpled robes and hassocks lay everywhere. Blood congealed in pools upon the flagstones of the square.

  Jyla stood at the portal.

  She was no slave of Armittal to me, I thought. She was far, far more than that.

  Amal staggered slightly. They must realise the Wurm was rising. Jyla half-turned–and P’dáronï writhed in her arms. Her body twisted upon itself. Before I could blink, a whirlwind of colour surrounded Jyla. It lurched, toppled toward the portal, and vanished from sight.

  “P’dáronï!”

  Great Mata, had she Banished the banisher? My head whirled. This we had never discussed seriously, thinking it nigh impossible.

  I fell forward on my hands and knees. The block was gone. The shield was gone. The Warlocks and Sorcerers, released, behaved as men and women in a dream, staggering about and blinking and rubbing their eyes. Mata forgive me, I cared nought for them. All I cared for was where P’dáronï and Jyla had gone. My work was not finished; Jyla must die. She must not be allowed to escape the Banishment a second time.

  And the Wurm was coming, rising from the bowels of the earth like a vengeful volcano about to erupt in the middle of Eldoran.

  I knew I had but one of choice.

  Scrambling to my feet, I sprinted across to the platform, scaling its steps in a single huge bound. I staggered as the planks lurched beneath my feet. I was already inside the Wurm’s gullet. An endless rumbling surrounded me–rocks splitting and grinding together and wooden planks snapping and houses being crushed into dust. Up there the gigantic mandibles rocketed into the sky–or was I falling? Lillia crashed around me, great lightning-bolts of magic and power. Ring after gargantuan ring rose upward, blotting out the sun and turning day to violet-tinged night.

  The portal wobbled and wavered between its white pillars. I focussed desperately. “P’dáronï!” I screamed. “Hold on!”

  A shadow rose before me. At the speed I was moving I could not have avoided the collision. I caught a glimpse of my half-sister’s furious, upturned face as I sprawled headlong over her body. Amal! My head passed a white pillar.

  I grasped her amulet instinctively. “Come to m–”

  And then the world went dark.

  Chapter 40: The Lair of the Karak

  Birial Island, 4th Glimday of Youngsun, Anna Roak 1407

  A low humming pervaded my ears. It ran through the mastoid bones into the base of my skull and buzzed there as though an Eldrik surgeon were trying to saw my head off of my shoulders.

  Someone slapped my cheek.

  “Stop that!”

  “Arlak-torfea.”

  I blinked and tried to focus. A well-remembered face hove into view above me. “Eliyan-tor.”

  The Sorcerers! I looked frantically about, but he patted my shoulder, saying: “You did well. I’ve dealt with the Inquisitors. Amal lies yonder and I see you succeeded in Banishing the Sorceress Jyla, too. Most resourceful, Arlak.”

  Again I whirled myself about on the sand. “Birial. This is Birial?” He nodded. What a Mata-forsaken place! I scrambled to my feet. “Larathi, is this Ulim’s throne-room?”

  A crescent of black sand greeted my gaze. Above the beach I saw low mounded hills covered in a dense olive-green brush I did not recognise, and patches of trees that grew bent over like old peasant women carrying a huge load of firewood to town to sell. Dark breakers hissed sullenly upon the sandy shore, and beyond the jagged fangs of rock rising from the surf, I saw two further islands–active volcanoes, judging by the fiery streaks of lava running down the flanks of the first, and the smoke billowing steadily from the second. And beyond all that, toward the horizon? Heavy grey clouds scudded about sideways in an eternal circuit about the islands, whipping foam off the tops of the waves, constantly lit by flashes of lightning within the seething walls of cloud.

  “A storm tipped on its side,” I muttered to myself, taking an intense dislike to it at once. The whole scene was bathed in twilight. Could the suns ever burn through that storm, I wondered? There was a throng of Eldrik perhaps four hundred strong gathered nearby, staring at us newcomers as if desiring to size us up for a snack. They were pale specimens, perhaps malnourished by the poor fare available on the island. My eyes roamed over the few people helping us. Perhaps they had been colleagues or friends of Eliyan’s in the past?

  Truly told, depression was already coiling its tentacles about my quoph as I looked about me. I had followed my wife here? Must be love. Speaking of P’dáronï …

  “Eliyan-tor, where’s Jyla? And P’dáronï?”

  Eliyan rubbed his chin with his fingers. “P’dáronï? I last saw her on the platform. She didn’t come through. You need to tell me what happened out there, Arlak. How did you enter the Portal? Last I saw you–”

  The Sorcerer talked on, but my mind was stuck several sentences back. “You must be mistaken, Eliyan. P’dáronï put Jyla through the portal. They went through together. She’s here.”

  “Jyla was alone.”

  He shook his head slowly, I could see what he was about to say reflected in his eyes and I screamed at him: “She’s here, Eliyan! She … she has to be!”

  “Arlak, listen to me–”

  “No! She trapped Jyla, don’t you see? She was doing some Armittalese trickery with teleporting when … when …” Did it work like the shield? Disrupting her translation? Could the magical portal have simply torn her apart? Left less of her than a vapour drifting on a breeze?

  Eliyan tried to comfort me, but I threw off his hands with a violent shudder. “Leave me alone!”

  “I was here,” he said. “I’ve been watching. If she came through after me, I would’ve seen her. Maybe we can search the island together? Maybe she yet lives …”

  “You don’t understand, you stupid lump of rockwood!” I shouted over his words, desperately wanting to hit someone, something, anything. “I summoned the Wurm! I had to, because Jyla and Amal had beaten her–I thought P’dáronï was dead! Curse you, Mata! Curse you and your fate! I loved her, oh Eliyan, how I loved her … if she’s not here, she’s dead or inside that beast, Ulim take it to his Nethe and burn it upon his bonfires! P’dáronï!”

  Crashing to my knees upon that beach, my despairing wail soared over the uncaring waves. I tore my face and pounde
d my fists upon the sand. “P’dáronï! Oh, P’dáronï!”

  After a long time I knelt, keening, rocking back and forth, and I groaned within myself: ‘She had just learned to see. You were betrothed but a few days; you had found your true happiness, you told me. And now? Mata crushed Her finest flower and cast her away like chaff upon an ill wind–why not me?’ Why not he who in his lifetime had stirred up a crimson tide to fill Ulim’s goblet to overflowing? Why not the weak, imperfect vessel, the one doomed to feed the Wurm his power, the one who lacked the courage even to take his own life?

  This was my reward for trying to break the Banishment and save the Eldrik?

  Knowing full well that Mata would spurn even my grief; knowing that She hated me, I lay on that black sand and wept as I had never wept before.

  On Birial, the day consisted of shades of twilight. The suns never rose. Evening was marked by a deepening of ubiquitous greys, of shadows which swelled to consume what little was light. They did not move as with a sunset. The shadows coalesced and grew impenetrable. The boulders grew mouths and grossly distended bellies. And the sea as far as the storm soughed as though it were a vast pool of black oil. The whistling and howling of the storm never ceased, never paused, never abated even for a breath.

  Sitting beside me on the beach, Amal said, “I’m so ashamed, Arlak-nih. I thought I was stronger.”

  “Sister-mine, what you did–”

  “But Jyla came against me with a kind of magic I’ve never encountered before,” said Amal. “Through the gyael-irfa. It was … animalistic. She slithered in at a level below conscious thought, below my defences–it reminds me of nought else than how you described the Wurm within you, Arlak. Before I knew it, I was in her thrall. It was as though I was lost in a fog, unable to think my own thoughts. I was her minion. I helped her kill P’dáronï.”

  “No, we don’t know that for certain,” said Eliyan. He stood no more than a pace behind us. I bit my tongue, unwilling to scream at him again. Why could he not accept the truth? “Arlak, you shared what happened in Eldoran. Now mark you this: Jyla, when she arrived here through the portal, dropped just in the first line of breakers. Almost the moment she arrived, she screamed, and shuddered, and began to change … it was appalling.”

  “She became a Karak,” I realised. “She shape-shifted, didn’t she? That’s how she escaped the Banishment before, isn’t it, Eliyan?”

  “By any laws of magic we understand, an impossible feat,” said the Sorcerer, gesturing at the storm. “How does a Karak swim through that?” He walked around in front of us, rubbing his head tiredly. “But that I saw her with my own eyes …”

  “Eliyan and I discussed this,” said Amal. Her voice was gentle, and much in her tone told me that she, too, had just lost a good friend. “There’s much we don’t understand. Here on Birial, during her Banishment, my mother, Aulynni, must have learned to change–”

  Eliyan put in, “Or was changed.”

  “–or was changed, truly told, by some magic here on this island. There’s something strange and powerful here, Arlak. Something … bizarre.”

  I accepted Amal’s holding my hand.

  “The Portal changes location,” said Eliyan. “I arrived on this beach. You and Amal fell just in the first wash of surf. Jyla, a trin or so out there. And I think the Portal has now retreated into the storm. I thought the endpoint was fixed.”

  “The other end is still inside the Wurm’s stomach.”

  “If it still exists.”

  “What happens if the two ends of the Portal come together?”

  Eliyan smacked his hands together illustratively. “Annihilation–I think.”

  Or perhaps it had already turned the Wurm inside-out and splattered the creature over half the Fiefdoms, I wished, even though I knew better. The Wurm, from far away, still stalked my mind. I growled, “You’re uncertain about everything today, Eliyan-tor. P’dáronï is dead. The Wurm is about to chase me for over fifty days. And I’m stuck on Birial with a bunch of Eldrik who look more like ghouls than men.”

  Eliyan the Sorcerer offered me a small bow. “Pray explain to me, then, what you think will happen when the Wurm runs into the Banishment storm?”

  My laughter sounded as hollow as my quoph, which Mata had ripped out of me. “It will break the Banishment, kill Jyla, and we will all return to Eldoran dancing and singing hymns.”

  Before, the Eliyan I remembered might have been offended or goaded by my tone. “Ay, would that were so,” he replied mildly. “And do you wish that Belion sang paeans to turquoise oceans, El Shashi? Look, a representative of these Eldrik Banished approaches us. We must learn whatever we can and formulate a strategy before the Wurm’s advent. By Mata’s will we are all here. This is where the Banishment will be broken. This is where Jyla will be laid low.”

  I had to try to function despite my grief. But I would not forget. I must not forget P’dáronï of Armittal. Maybe Eliyan the Sorcerer would be able to work out her fate … “Eliyan, is it my imagination, or is the storm strengthening?”

  “I hear it too,” said Amal.

  The Sorcerer stroked his neat, grey-streaked beard. “If the Portal is open, it is probably spewing rocks or water or whatever the Wurm is moving through, out into the storm. And lillia. I wonder what that will mean. The magic of the Banishment has not been augmented in all these anna since–”

  “As far as we know.”

  Eliyan frowned at Amal’s interjection. “We can debate later.”

  The man who approached us along the beach introduced himself as Torbin, Leader of the Banished. He was tall and abnormally gaunt. What skin of his that we could see–what was not concealed by his thick brown cassock–was covered in patches of red, angry eczema. Eliyan introduced us in turn. Torbin raised a scarred eyebrow, as if to suggest we were notable company. He declared that he had come to conduct us to Sanctuary for the night. After a moment I realised he was referring to a place called ‘Sanctuary’. Aptly named, I thought grimly. A rest for my body, while my quoph died within. ‘P’dáronï …’

  As we walked along, he explained, “We spend each night behind locked and barred doors. It is that, or be taken by the Transformed.”

  “Transformed?” Eliyan echoed him.

  “As the former First Councillor of Eldoran, Eliyan the Sorcerer,” Torbin noted in his deep, gravelly voice, “you will already have sensed an unusual quality in the magic here. That magic attacks us. Slowly, over the anna, we the Banished succumb to its influence. Even my skin has not been spared. And it is thus with us all. No amount of study, nor any course of medication or remediation available to us, has thus far been able to prevent the magic from taking over. And when it does, a person becomes one of the Transformed–a beast howling in the night, living in the caverns beneath Birial. A creature fit for Ulim’s service. And now that you are one with us, you too will suffer this fate. This is the way of Birial.”

  Truly told, I shuddered at Torbin’s bleak words. He looked to the storm. “Come, we must hurry to Sanctuary.”

  “Torbin, can you tell us–”

  “Peace, Eliyan,” he said, breaking into a trot as we ascended the low hill above the beach. “I will answer all your questions when we reach safety.”

  “But magic does work here?”

  “Not against such as these.”

  From my position as last in our company, I saw Eliyan and Amal exchange concerned glances. I looked back to the beach.

  Only the wind gave me answer–a low, bitter moan.

  As we rushed through the deepening gloom toward Birial’s Sanctuary, I began to pick out a new sound above the constant noise of the storm. At first I thought I heard the faraway call of a sea-bird. But Torbin’s head snapped up at once. “They’re coming,” he muttered. He broke into a fast trot that belied his apparent age. Soon, I began to hear eerie cries floating on the wind–indeed, as I might have imagined the voices of Ulim’s horde to sound. Plai
ntive, chilling, and inhuman, the cries filled me with an instinctive dread. A howling sounded from the rocks to our left; a guttural barking and coughing from behind and to our right hand.

  “Ready a spell of light, as bright as you can sustain,” Torbin instructed.

  “Or levitation? What about shielding?”

  “Light burns them,” Torbin threw over his shoulder. “Levitation? You would be brought down by the fliers. They enjoy shields. They will feed on the magic until you are exhausted.”

  “How do you defend yourselves?” puffed Eliyan. The oldest of our number, he was not enjoying having to run.

  I saw Eliyan levitating slightly over the rougher parts of our trail. We had now crested the hill, which had only hid a taller hill behind it. There, upon the brow of the hill, blazed a fortress that had to be our goal. It was tall and devoid of ornament, a forbidding massif clearly constructed for nought but stolid defence. I could not tell the source of its light, but it glowed with commendable and welcoming urgency upon that hillside; my quoph leaped at the sight.

  “Conserve your energies, Sorcerer Eliyan. The more you employ your magic, the faster Birial will corrupt your flesh.”

  “So the castle … has self-sustaining Webs?”

  “Indeed,” said Torbin, who on the downhill was now stretching his long legs, easily matching the best efforts of my companions. “As is the Banishment–self-regenerating, and self-sustaining, even though so many creatures feed upon it.”

  “These … Transformed … are the feeders?”

  “Ay, and the Karak.”

  At this dour assessment, Eliyan uttered a low curse. His words were well-chosen. All around us now, as the darkness deepened, we heard strange cries tracking our progress. Skin like leather rustled over stone. Wings flapped ominously. A wild chattering swelled, as though the wild and fey things of Birial were discussing what kind of a meal they were about to enjoy. I found myself pressing closer to my sister as her hands lit up, suddenly encased in globes of icy blue light. The darkness backed up. But only a little.