Jasen recalled what she’d said way back at the beginning of all this, when he’d saved Tery Malori out in the rye spread beyond Terreas’s boundary: “The only good scourge is a dead scourge.”
Yet though he expected nothing to come from her mouth—or, more likely, a harsh, snipped response—she averted her eyes, watching Milo and the path he led the cart upon, and mumbled, “Appreciate it.”
And then she was quiet.
They all were. The noise between them became only the rumbling of the cart’s wheels turning, turning, and Luukessia falling behind as they approached the mountain, and with it, Terreas.
At some point, the gentle slope became the dirt and stone of a mountainside trail. It wended higher and higher, and began to turn back in on itself.
Jasen closed his eyes, and it passed.
Then a judder, and he was awake. The sky was different, brighter with the approaching dawn. Only a lone star remained that he could see, winking against a lightening purplish-blue.
“—nearly there,” Shilara was muttering.
Jasen roused. He swiped a balled fist across one eye, then the other.
“… much farther?” Alixa asked.
“Just around this bend.”
Jasen tuned into their conversation. Only he couldn’t quite get his brain to focus entirely upon it. There were other things vying for attention, not least of which was his fatigue. Nights of poor sleep had piled up, and though he had never been the swiftest person in Terreas to get up to speed in the mornings, on this particular one he was already struggling like never before.
The impact last night, maybe? Had that rattled his head?
What impact? he thought, confused.
Scourgey’s smell washed over him, heavy, a dense fog.
Fog. That made Jasen blink, take in his surroundings properly.
Usually fog condensed around the mountains before dawn, staying put much of the morning, till the sun made its way high enough that its blinding glare and brilliant heat could dissipate the mists. That they weren’t surrounded by it suggested they’d come from another direction though—and as Jasen peered up, he found empty sky where he’d anticipated seeing the mountains themselves.
Just where—?
On the opposite side.
He frowned. The confusion ratcheted up higher inside of him. “Why did the mountains move?”
Shilara and Alixa both turned his way, the former only briefly. She had a grim look on her face, and that set off another confused fragment of Jasen’s mind, spinning wheels madly to catch up and place him in the world again.
“You’re awake,” Alixa said.
“We came in from the other direction,” said Shilara.
“Why?”
“Scourge on the road,” she answered flatly. “Managed to see them far enough off that we could change course. Could’ve been back an hour ago if we hadn’t, but Milo’s making good time. Damn near run himself to death, but …”
“Poor Milo,” Alixa whispered. “You’ll rest soon, boy.”
Jasen squinted at the mountains. He’d never seen them from the wrong direction, and never from this vantage point, beyond Terreas, which still lay out of sight—though the remnants of this trail forked left maybe two, three hundred feet ahead. Hadn’t Shilara said the village lay just beyond the bend? If that were the case, he was just minutes away from seeing the home he’d left behind—how many days ago now? Three? It was hard to keep track; the excursion had blurred into one long, endless trip, filled with sleepless nights and fuelled by pure adrenaline—
Something was burning.
Cookfires.
Jasen’s stomach rumbled.
But even as it did, another flash of confusion crossed him. It was usual for Terreas to start up their fires early, before the sun crested the horizon beyond the mountains … but should the smell be so heavy when they were still so far away?.
“Are the cookfires usually this strong?” he asked of no one in particular.
“No,” said Shilara, short and terse.
Jasen looked skyward. Clouds had settled in above the village, blotting out the sky—and they were dark, close to the mountains. Stormclouds? Perhaps; storms were not uncommon in the summer. And the temperature had been hot these past days—although maybe that was from all their desperate fleeing, and Jasen had only felt hot as fear made him ooze with an apparently ceaseless oily sweat. Not changing his clothes for days had only made that worse.
Scourgey whined.
Jasen eyed her. She loped close to the cart—yet there was a reluctance to the way she stepped. Her head was turned down as low as it would go, eyes focused on the earth passing underfoot.
“What’s wrong with her?” he asked.
Shilara shrugged. “Been whining like that for the past couple of hours.”
Alixa looked worriedly at the scourge. “Do you think she knows she won’t be able to come into Terreas with us? That she’ll have to stay beyond the boundary?”
Any day before this one, Shilara would surely have called that idea a load of old tosh, and mocked Alixa for having it. Scourge were not capable of intelligent thought, after all; they were just mindless creatures, alive to kill, to rip, to tear, and nothing more.
But she said nothing, so Jasen had to answer Alixa’s question for her. “Maybe.”
Scourgey moaned again.
Peculiar.
The cart rounded the last bend. Milo was heaving now, pace slowed. How fast he’d been going during the hours when Jasen slept, he didn’t know, but the last he remembered, Shilara had pushed Milo as fast as he could manage. They’d been going up a gentle slope then. It would’ve grown only steeper as they ascended the mountains to where Terreas lay. Tugging the barrels and maintaining such a pace was a serious undertaking, especially for a horse accustomed to barely any slope, and pulling barely any weight, in the small haven that was Terreas and its tiny slice of surrounding, unmolested land.
Alixa was right when she called Milo a “poor thing.” He’d worked harder than any of them.
That thought quickly dissipated, though—because there was Terreas. It was still a couple of miles away, the boundary at least another few minutes’ journey from where the cart rounded into view. Up the last of the hill to where the village lay nestled under the mountains and presently shadowed by the brewing stormclouds above it, blotting out the brightening dawn, Jasen saw a faint dusting of lights. Tiny amber dots, they illuminated windows smaller than a pinprick from so far.
Somewhere among them was his father, his aunt, uncle, cousins.
A swell of hope filled his chest.
It had been a trying excursion, one that Jasen had feared he would not make it back from. But here he was, returning to a Terreas that had tried to shun him in its fear—and he would save them, he and Alixa and Shilara, with this bounty of grain they had managed to return. One barrel lost was not so many, for they still had plenty enough to last—and never, ever would they need to deal with Baraghosa again.
That was the sweetest thought of all.
At least, perhaps the sweetest after getting to see his father again, to look into his face and see the pride there when he knew that Jasen was safe, that he had survived and kept his head about him—and that Jasen had done the unthinkable, leaving the village after a lifetime of warnings never to do so. And then, to top it all off, to have not only lived to tell the tale, but returned with provisions that would sustain Terreas’s people for decades, never needing to trade with Baraghosa again.
Tears bit Jasen’s eyes, unbidden. He blinked them back.
“We did it,” he murmured to himself. “We saved Terreas.”
A smile lifted the corners of his lips, wider than he’d grinned in a long time—
The world rumbled.
There was just enough time for the smile to slip from his face as his eyebrows tightened in confusion—
And then the cratered mountain exploded right in front of him.
28
Th
e noise was world-ending. There was no describing its volume; the explosion was a roar unlike anything he had ever known, like a thousand—a million—scourge, all loosing a bass note as one grotesque, enormous cacophony—
And it did not end. It went on, as the earth quaked and the mountainside split. Jasen slammed his hands over his ears before his eardrums burst, and his entire head went with it—
In the space of a fraction of a second, the time it took to blink, the cratered mountain split asunder, the one that had smoked so regularly that Jasen and Alixa had joked between them—whose joke was it, now?—that someone built a cottage there—
That cleft in the mountain that had sometimes spilled over with molten rock had ruptured. Rock there, countless tons of it, so much and so heavy that it would take thousands of years of work to carry it down the mountainside, blew off the mountain like dust. The shattered stone was flung through the air—but Jasen saw it only for a moment, for the mountain belched a noxious cloud of deepest grey smog. It was as if the earth had taken a great lungful, holding it the way Jasen had seen the elderly sucking on pipes and keeping the smoke in their chest for as long as they possibly could. Now it plumed out, a relentless billow—
And rolled across Terreas in an instant.
Jasen had a second to cry something—Alixa and Shilara had too, for he was certain he heard their voices amidst the rumble, even though he surely couldn’t have; the cacophonous noise had drowned them out—and then the smoke swept over them.
It was hot, so damned hot. Jasen’s skin warmed some twenty degrees as it flowed over him. He clamped his mouth shut, and held his eyes tight—but too late. An acidic sting had already set in, and he screamed as it burned him, blinding, surely wrenching his sight away from him forever—
And still the explosion roared in his ears!
Someone was clutching him. Little hands.
Alixa? Must be.
He groped for her in his blindness, catching her wrists, tightening his hold.
I’m here, he tried to convey, broken into a deep sweat. I’m still here.
What about Shilara? Milo? Scourgey?
Still out there, surely. Unless a wayward rock had careened this far—and Jasen could not be sure of that, because how would he ever feel the impact of a nearby rock, given that the world shuddering underfoot with such unbridled, relentless force.
They’d survived the blast.
But Terreas …
His eyes jolted open, and he sucked in a panicked breath.
It made him cough. Disgusting, acrid, it was sour and hot and tasted of bitter ash—
The world was cloaked in grey. It was as if the mists about the base of the mountains had spread across all of Luukessia, only a hundred times thicker, and so damned hot on his skin.
Yet despite its denseness, it could never blot out the horror Jasen’s eyes found.
From the split in the mountain poured a river of magma. A roiling stream of vibrant orange, Jasen watched it with wide, terrified eyes as it oozed like water down the mountain. It blackened as it went, the molten rock cooling and hardening at its edge—but new cables, the color of bright embers, flowed over the top, or the tubes split open, new magma renewing the flow. Its vibrant whiteness was sapped with so much smog clouding the space in between, but even so it made Jasen squint harder than the fumes did.
He opened his mouth to scream—
“FATHER!”
But it had already come too late. The explosion had rained destruction down in an instant. The exhumed side of the mountain had been thrown forcefully over Terreas like hail. The cloud would have been suffocating, so hot skin would blister instantly as it rolled over the village, the surrounding air granted insufficient time to cool it.
And the flow of lava was spilling toward Terreas.
Alixa was screaming—
The mountainside gave way under the intense pressure that had been building for—how many years? Had this been fated before Jasen was born? Before the scourge defiled Luukessia? The smell was overwhelming. There were no comparisons Jasen’s mind could find. He knew the smell of bonfires, from the rare times that Terreas held one. And just days ago he had witnessed his home go up in flames, engaging in a futile effort to save it as it was turned to ash and cast up into the sky.
But nothing could have prepared him for the intensity of this fire. The heat and smoke flowed not just into his lungs but beyond, filling his blood. Every magic little piece of biology that carried oxygen throughout him now was filled with black soot, hard, burned rock, superheated halfway to glass. He was leaden with it, and he coughed—
Flesh burned too. He could smell it, taste it—like burning pig, well past charring as it twisted on a spit—
People. Those were Terreas’s people, burning under the lava.
His father was among them.
He screamed and made to leap from the cart—
“GET BACK!” Shilara yelled. She grabbed him from behind—he had forgotten she was here at all—and he saw, through the corner of his eye, that she held Alixa too, pinning her into place so she could not leap over the edge, could not hurtle for Terreas as it was buried deeper, deeper below molten rock, rivers of it, burning white hot—
“We have to go back!” Alixa was screaming. “We have to—”
“There’s nothing we can do!” Shilara cried.
Their voices echoed from far away.
There’s nothing we can do …
There had to be. Had to be something. If Jasen could just get a breath, a real breath, and clear the painful shrieking in his head—if he could climb over the side, if Shilara would just let him—
“They’re gone!” Shilara shouted—and there was pain in her voice, pain like Jasen had never heard from her, had never thought he would hear from Gressom.
“They can’t be!” Alixa screamed.
“They are! Alixa, they—Alixa—stop fighting!” Shilara shook the girl, and Jasen sagged, all the fight going out of him, realizing that he knew the truth of Shilara’s words before she’d said them. Before Alixa heard the awful reality, before her heart was ripped in two as she acknowledged the truth of it.
“No one could survive that,” Shilara said. Her cheeks were wet with tears beneath the ash, Jasen saw, seeming to condense out of the air into smears like snow stained with streaked charcoal. “Everyone back there is dead, Alixa. I’m sorry.”
Alixa’s mouth worked up and down, finding words.
She found one:
“No!” And she flung herself forward, fighting against Shilara’s arm to be freed, to leap from the cart, to bound toward the village—
Yet there was no village left to run to. It had been buried, the cloud of dust and smoke rising, billowing where once it had stood.
His father was gone.
“No,” Jasen whispered.
“Can you hold her?” Shilara asked him.
He blinked, dazed.
“Please,” Shilara said—and she was not talking down to him, the way she sometimes did, but on his level, one person appealing to another.
Jasen nodded shakily. “What will you do?”
“I need to turn us around.”
He blinked, not really understanding. “And go where?”
Shilara’s brow was furrowed, the ash covering it smoothing out the lines in her face. “Anywhere but here.”
Shilara eased away from Alixa. Alixa looked like she might bolt and Jasen half expected her to as he slipped across to her. He kept his arm about her midriff but it mattered not: she did not fight him.
“Haw, Milo!” Shilara said.
The cart began to shift, turning. Terreas swiveled—
That’s not Terreas anymore, Jasen thought. That’s just rock.
Your father is dead.
Why do I feel …
Nothing?
Shock. His body was protecting himself from collapsing into a mess when it mattered most. Later, surely he would turn into Alixa.
For now, he held her.
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“What’s happening?” Alixa asked. Her voice pitched up, high. “Why are we leaving?” No answer, yet Terreas kept swinging around, so it was almost behind the cart’s stack of barrels—utterly, totally pointless barrels. “Why are we leaving?”
“Because if we stay here, we’ll die with them,” Shilara said. Then: “Yah!”
And they were in motion again.
Alixa screamed, a wail to compete with the eruption in sound. It shook Jasen’s eardrums, and he tightened his hold as she fought against himself, desperate to go—
Terreas, or what had once been Terreas, slipped behind.
She screamed for a long, long time.
Jasen’s lips were clamped closed. Inside, though, he screamed with her—for Terreas was gone, his father was gone, his aunt and uncle and cousins and every person he had ever known in his entire life. The lone stronghold remaining against the scourge, the only place in this land that had endured and survived all these years …
… All of it had vanished in an instant, buried under rubble, and there was nothing they could have done to stop it.
They three were the last people left.
… save one.
The name tasted bitter as Jasen’s lips formed it soundlessly.
Baraghosa.
Jasen recalled the way the reedy, slithery snake of a man had stood before the Assembly. Stickly as he was, his voice just a touch too high for a man, he should not have cowed any of them … yet Terreas fell at his knees, this loathsome, vile, wandering man, stalking the forsaken earth of this isle.
Jasen hated him.
And every echo of those last words intensified that hate until it was a burning fire in his chest:
“You will regret this.”
He had done this. He commanded his strange magic, slipped past the scourge where normal men could not.
He had promised that Terreas would regret their decision not to agree to his deal this year.
And this was what he had done.
“Murderer,” Jasen muttered.
A Haven in Ash (A Sanctuary Series) (Ashes of Luukessia Book 1) Page 24
