The Legend of El Shashi
Page 52
Warmth rose from beneath my feet. The rain steamed steadily off the Wurm, but more than that, with the steam rose a constant stream of lillia, as though the Wurm were an imperfect vessel to contain all that lay within–or rather, that no substance in all creation could contain such a storehouse of magic any longer.
With the eyes P’dáronï taught me to use, I saw a core of lillia beneath our feet, as white and hot as Belion’s glare. I could not let Jyla have that. With it she could reshape the world to her whim.
“What now?” panted Amal. Her slim hands twisted in the air, reforming our shield. “In Mata’s name, Arlak, why do I trust you in this?”
“Because it’s our only chance,” I returned, but tempered my tone with a quick smile. “Use the lillia to strengthen yourself. Cast a Web of Sulangi in this way.”
And in Janos’ words, I made good on my suggestion. Amal blinked. “You have become a master Sorcerer, El Shashi.”
“It’s not me–it’s Janos.”
We tottered as the Wurm pitched beneath our feet; we shouted in panic as it reared into the air, venting a staggering roar. My ears rang. But Amal had somehow damped the sound with a shield. She smiled grimly at me.
“Eliyan escapes. Do what you must, brother-mine.”
I prepared my mind. Well I remembered the vast hungers of the Wurm from before, the alien mind full of pain and fury, and an appetite unquenchable. I needed Janos’ guardtower will to gird my thoughts and El Shashi’s knowledge of the ways of minds and bodies, so that I could achieve what I hoped for: control of the Wurm. I dived in.
I swam a violet ocean of lillia. Dimly, I felt Amal beside me, gripping my arm, holding the shield firm as Jyla’s assault rent the air around us. She gathered her strength from the Wurm’s excess magic and resisted every blow, despite sparks shrieking off the shield and an acrid, stinking smoke that surrounded us as the Wurm’s carapace smouldered. But I was within the beast, standing amidst a different storm, searching for whatever might be left of its intellect–for I knew it reasoned. It was cunning. It learned. But the fires driving the creature, I owned, must have gantuls ago driven any thinking creature to insanity.
The struggle was long and draining. I found the beginning of the Portal, not very far beneath our feet. And then I recognised, somewhere in that storm, a thread of mental activity. I pounced on it at once, apprehended it, and wrenched it over to my use. The Wurm surged forward.
“What are you doing?” Amal cried.
“Hunting a Karak,” said I. “I’ve turned its hunger against her.”
Again the Wurm voiced its hunting cry. Lillia blasted out of its mouth, shimmering the air before us despite the downpour. I flexed my knees, keeping Amal upright with a strong but not crushing grip on her arm, and we rode the beast as it oriented on the great Karak slipping across the rocks ahead of us.
I shook my head as though I had a torfly in my ear. “You … what? Now? Amal–truly told, you pick your moments!”
“You haven’t noticed?”
“No, I was too preoccupied with my own loss!” I snarled back. “Oh, Amal-nish …” I swore beneath my breath.
“Are you opposed?”
I tore my eyes from the spectacle of Jyla suddenly realising what we were up to and slithering away downhill, away from the angle of the Wurm’s approach. “Amal-nish–no, I’m not. Now, can I concentrate on defeating the wicked destroyer of the Eldrik race?”
She offered a bow, slightly mocking. “After you, Arlak-nih.”
The huge Karak side-slipped our first foray. Jyla came alongside and tried to get a tentacle’s purchase on the Wurm.
“Roll it,” Amal barked.
I wrestled with the Wurm, trying to force it to comply. Would the creature take commands? Suddenly, a hint of something familiar touched my mind. ‘Janos?’ I thought. ‘Benethar?’ What was it that made me think so? I could not fathom it. Could the creature contain some residue of Janos, even after all these anna, and all that had happened? Was the creature not me, but Janos? Sustained by his mind contained within mine? My head spun at these thoughts.
Suddenly, the Wurm began to barrel-roll.
“Run!” Amal smacked me on the back. “Run, Arlak!”
I picked her up and sprinted along the Wurm’s head, trying somehow to keep pace with the Wurm as it rotated. It was a slow, grinding earthquake in motion. Boulders, hills, and knots of Transformed disappeared beneath the majestic bulk, crushed. Amal shifted the shield around us, knocking away a hail of flying Transformed and a flurry of dark bats I assumed must be Jyla’s offering. As we sailed on, I saw to my chagrin that we had missed Jyla by a few paces, perhaps mashing one of the mighty tentacles, but nought more. She did not shift back to her old form. Still, her body pulsed as she drank up lillia from the outlet of the Portal.
“I’ll bring the Wurm around.”
I could never have imagined riding such a beast, two trins wide and at least fifty trins long, or I was no judge. It was like trying to steer a moving island, or harness the wind itself. Ponderously, the Wurm came around in a wide circle, crossing the beach and the empty bay of Birial en route, on the opposite side of the island from which we had landed. I aimed the Wurm back over the hill toward where we had left Jyla. Truly told, we could have cut right through the hill. With my P’dáronï-trained eyes I observed the play of magic around the Wurm’s mouth and mandibles, capturing and processing rock and earth, bushes and water, at an impossible rate. As matter disappeared into the Wurm’s maw, so it truly … disappeared. I pressed closer, trying to understand this phenomenon. How was this possible? Where did all the energy of lillia vanish to? My tutors in Eldoran had been ferociously convicted of the idea that matter could neither appear out of nothing, nor could it be reduced to nothing. Here was yet another mystery.
“Beware Sanctuary!” Amal called suddenly.
“Why?”
But it was too late. Sanctuary’s light-cannons scorched multiple trenches in the Wurm’s side as we passed by, scoring great, long gashes in its segments. A waterfall of lillia sprayed out. Instinctively, I put my hands to the Wurm’s back and pressed in with my healing touch. There such an overflow of power in that great, cavernous body–greater power than El Shashi ever had the luxury to command–that even these terrible wounds proved easy to manage. The carapace merged smoothly together as I urged the Wurm on.
Amal cried out and pointed. Glancing up, I saw the Karak-Jyla grown mountainous, taking a stand in our path. She meant to destroy us. Jyla meant to grapple with the Wurm? I could not believe my eyes, but she was expanding by the moment. Huge tentacles, with suckers bigger than houses, waved at us. Her eyes fixed on the two tiny figures standing on the Wurm’s head. All she needed to do was grip and hold on. She would squash Amal and I like bugs.
As we approached, she and Amal traded sorcerous strikes. I felt her spell descend and knew we could no longer levitate away from the Wurm. She had us locked in place. Amal responded with multiple attacks, too fast to follow with the naked eye, but they had little apparent effect on Jyla. I readied myself.
“Hold on, Amal!”
The Wurm reared up to the skies, and then plunged down toward our nemesis as if a mountain fell from the sky. The Karak rippled. It screamed a fearsome cry. Tentacles wrapped about the huge mandibles before us as the Wurm took a gigantic scoop out of Birial’s rock. The Karak clung on, partly inside the Wurm’s mouth. The dangling, hindmost tentacles shimmered and disintegrated beneath the windstorm of magic inside that maw, clearly visible to my mind’s eye. Jyla began to pull herself up and over the ridge of the Wurm’s mouth.
I dove deep into the Wurm.
Now! I commanded with all my might.
The Wurm vomited the Portal straight into the underside of Jyla’s Karak. M
agic blossomed from the impact in a blinding flower of light. The Karak’s eyes bulged. Her beak opened in an unearthly scream which split even the raging storm, like a clarion trump-call to Ulim himself, summoning the great hunt–so I imagined.
Part of Jyla was translated from herself, into herself, for she contained both the start point and the endpoint of the Portal which had so long translated the Banished to Birial Island. And with one accord, Amal understood what I had done. Her lips moved briefly, shifting the location of the Portal’s endpoint.
The resulting explosion juddered the entire length of the Wurm. It irradiated the clouds, and blazed around the entire ambit of the encircling storm. Mandibles and bits of tentacles as large as boulders blasted around us, so powerfully that despite the shield, Amal and I were blown a hundred segments down the Wurm’s body. Sanctuary’s lights flickered out, and then started to come back on, very slowly and dimly. Transformed fell out of the sky as though a scythe had been taken to their ranks.
Shakily, I rose to my feet. My ears rang. I offered Amal my hand.
She stared at me in horror. “What have we done?”
“Jyla is no more,” I replied.
“And the storm rages unchanged.”
We gazed at each other in despair. A new realisation gripped our quoph. Without the Portal we had no way home–unless the storm changed, or could be shifted or nullified. Perhaps Eliyan would know a way, I hoped. We had all of Janos’ memories to work with as well.
“You … should heal the Wurm. And we should return to Sanctuary. Will it chase us now?”
I shook my head. “It was Benethar, Amal–Janos. All these anna, Janos was chasing me.”
And with those words, a trembling began in my feet and rapidly overwhelmed my being. I put my face in my hands, and wept for the man who had been a true father to me, who I betrayed all those anna ago.
Amal and Eliyan found me atop the battlement of Sanctuary, staring out over the blasted fields of Birial. It was day–a grey, twilight day, as only Birial Island could have it. There lay the Wurm, able to rest at last. Benethar, I should learn to call it. I wondered if there was a way to transfer what Janos bequeathed me, into that great creature, and make him anew. Such dreams belonged to Mata rather than mortal men, but it did not stop me dreaming them.
Feeling my dear friends waiting for me, I said softly to the wind and the storm:
“As El Shashi’s last stumble crosses the waters,
Royal voice of thunder, and lightning that rends the sea’s belly,
Yes, he will rise from the depths,
And from amidst the dark creatures will he appear.”
Eliyan’s sigh was replete with frustration. “Tell me again how you thought destroying the Portal would eliminate the Banishment storm, Arlak-torfea?”
I dredged up Janos’ memories and recounted the constructs for him once more. “‘Destabilise’ was the word I used, Eliyan-tor.”
“Perhaps our Benethar’s memory was fallible after all,” he commented after a time. “But the spell was changed. Talan, son of Lucan made it so. We are rid of Jyla, rid of the Karak, too, and are prisoners in a perfect prison of our own making. All that magic within the Wurm, and the storm just laps it up like some salcat with a bottomless stomach. Torbin’s Sorcerers are still working on a spell, they say, but I don’t hold out any great hope. That Banishment spell was utterly flawless, thanks to our dear brother Benethar. What think you, Amal-nishka?”
I gritted my teeth as they shared a fond glance. I had never missed P’dáronï of Armittal so greatly–but I should not begrudge them their happiness.
Amal’s eyes, the very mirror of mine, regarded me gently. She knew my thoughts. “I say Arlak is thinking upon the Transformed he has not yet healed.”
“Ay, that I am.”
Eliyan growled, “We could not possibly feed them all.”
Torbin and Eliyan had entreated me to stop healing the Transformed–or we would all starve. Some of the Warlocks and scholars worked on ways to produce food from magic. Their ideas were not very advanced. Three days had passed since Jyla’s defeat, and we all felt defeated too. Even the prospect of being free from Jyla’s pursuit, after all the anna of my life, was unable to lift my mood. That burden had vanished only to be replaced with another. My quoph felt sore beset.
I sighed. “All those Eldrik–call them Eldrik, Eliyan-tor, for they are people clothed in the skins of beasts–hiding deep in their caves, far from any light … their caves … yes, caves!”
Amal and Eliyan gaped at me.
I stroked my chin, my thoughts racing.
“Too much jerlak in him by far,” said Amal.
“Three puffs of a dream-pipe,” added Eliyan, “and your dear brother hallucinates in broad daylight.”
“His head’s floating on clouds above the Warlock’s Roost.”
I just grinned at my friends. “Truly told, I’ve a little idea.” They nodded as one. “What say you we ride the Wurm to Eldoran?”
“What?”
“Don’t shout at me. Listen. The Wurm could ride us either through the ocean or beneath the ocean floor, all those leagues back to Eldoran. We stand either inside the Wurm itself, or we tie ourselves to its tail.”
“Tied to its tail?” Eliyan spluttered. “I wasn’t joking about the dream-pipe!”
Amal put her hand on his arm. “No, Eliyan, Arlak has a point. Let’s say he can control the Wurm and bid it carve a tunnel all the way back to Eldoria–there are territories perhaps a hundred and seventy leagues from here … these people couldn’t walk that. So we tow them on a sled, like the northerners use during Alldark season.”
“This madness runs in the family, says I. How will you build a sled, pray ask, on an island where the biggest piece of wood is some Mata-forsaken stubbly bush? Grow it for an anna?”
“Eliyan-nihka, do not spurn what Mata put on your shoulders,” Amal said scathingly. “How much lillia do we have at our disposal? We could levitate the whole of Sanctuary and shield it across ten thousand leagues.”
First Councillor of the Eldrik Sorcerers or none, the surprise writ on his face was comical. And somehow beautiful to behold. His shoulders straightened. His chest swelled. Eliyan gathered his dark, tattered robes about his lean frame with something of his former snap. A purposeful glint entered his dark gaze.
“If we cannot take all, this time,” I added, taking great care to stress my words, “then I will return with the Wurm until all of the Transformed are healed and taken home. And in Eldoran, you will use the Wurm’s power to restore the city, tear down the Pentacle, destroy the work of the Interrogators, and make what was lost, new.”
Eliyan said, “You are not for nothing the man called El Shashi.”
“Ay,” I said. “A poetess I knew said it best:
Not to kill but to heal, not to break but to summon,
No longer to plough the desert as before,
Only to await the master’s beck and call,
El Shashi’s duality, the reason that he be.”
I fixed my gaze on Eliyan. “The Wurm awaits our call.”
Chapter 44: Restoration
Birial Island, 1st to 4th days of Sowing, Anna Roak 1407
Eliyan the Sorcerer raised his hand. “Cast off.”
His voice was low, but his command easily carried the few paces to where Amal and I stood in our stone barrel, hooked to the end of the Wurm’s tail. Above us and to our sides, two dozen massive metal hooks were implanted deep in the Wurm’s carapace. Huge plaited hawsers, forged by magic from the pitiful iron ores found on the island, were attached to the hooks and extended all the way around Sanctuary.
Torbin signalled his Sorcerers and Warlocks hid inside Sanctuary. “Cast off!”
The entire fortress rose a pace or so off the ground. The cannon stood still. The lights were off. All of th
e power was needed by the magicians, who numbered over two hundred. I could not see from my position, but I knew the entire courtyard of Sanctuary was packed shoulder to shoulder with humanity. We would leave thousands more of the Transformed behind. But I planned to return.
El Shashi’s work was not complete.
“Take the strain,” said Eliyan. “El Shashi?”
I placed my hands on the Wurm. “Easy, Benethar. Just as we discussed. Don’t you be rushing off to the horizon without us, alright? This is your chance to achieve what you always dreamed of, old friend. Let’s do this together. You and me, and the Banished. Let’s take them home.”
“Stop gabbling, you incorrigible old fraud, and get us moving,” Amal whispered in my ear.
With my power, I teased the Wurm into motion.
The hawsers jerked at that first pull from the Wurm, but we had anticipated this. Behind me, an array of Sorcerers had already–as Eliyan put it–put the skids underneath Sanctuary. The Warlocks threw up a huge shield over the entirety of the fortress, shaping it as Janos’ memories had taught them, making the air shimmer behind and around us.
The Wurm’s segments rippled as it went to ground, burrowing down at the shallowest angle we had calculated should take us beneath the ocean bed itself. An entire stone fortress holding thousands of people bobbled along behind. Eliyan, standing in Sanctuary’s stone entryway, offered a hesitant smile as I glanced over my shoulder. Then Sanctuary tipped over the lip of the Wurm’s pit and accelerated down the slope.
Suddenly, thousands of tons of stone were overtaking us from behind.
“Beware!” shouted Amal.
She and Eliyan slammed up shields; I felt them in my mind. I desperately tried to spur the Wurm on. In slow motion, the fortress pressed up against the stone barrel and cracked it. I felt a gentle bump from behind, but the expected effect–of us being torflies smashed against a hard surface–did not materialise.