"I am Mujar."
The creatures’ wings rustled under the hard wing cases on their backs and their clawed feet scraped the floor as they shifted. The manant said, "The last creature who tried to command us lies dead over there, and now you think you can do the same?"
Law struggled with a growing sense of impending doom, unused to defiance from creatures that should have respected him. The line of golden writing kept flashing in his eyes like a warning beacon he dare not ignore, yet the words still made no sense. He knew that these creatures were wrong, as the queen had been, but they were worse. He remembered Vosh's warning.
"I could have ordered your deaths," he told them, "when you were still grubs, and the queen would have obeyed me. But I did not."
"Are you saying that we owe you our lives?" the manant clicked. "Because we owed them to the one we just killed, too. If you were mistaken in sparing us, that's your mistake, Mujar."
"What you're doing is wrong, yet you are wrong within yourselves. I cannot help you, even if I would."
The manants hissed, a sibilant, threatening sound alien to the semi-ants' language. The speaker clicked, "We won't tolerate creatures like you in our hive. We will rid it of all who don't belong, and eventually these useless brothers who are so helpless without their mother to guide them. We have no need of her, or them, or you."
Law knew that the situation was lost. He had failed Letta. "Then we'll leave."
"No. You'll die. We need fresh meat for our stores. Why should we let it run away when it's right under our noses?"
"You cannot kill me."
"Then we'll just eat you alive."
Law stepped back, filled with an urge to flee but unsure of how to do it. Hampered by his blindness, his progress through the warren of tunnels had always been slow, and he had no hope of outrunning these creatures. The manants moved towards him, their manner threatening, and he retreated towards the tunnel through which he had entered the cavern.
"This is forbidden," he told them.
"Not to us," the speaker clicked. Its comrades pressed close around it in a solid wall. The leader slashed at Law with a pincer, and he avoided it with an instinctive backward leap that jumbled his senses' image. Alarmed, he struggled with a confusing urge to call on the Powers and flee. He did not want to harm those who threatened him, but he had never used his powers deliberately.
The manant made another swipe at him, its claw tip brushing Law's arm, and his fear increased. They toyed with him, he knew, enjoying his fear and their supremacy. Their forms remained difficult for him to perceive, but they contained more Crayash than the semi-ants had. The appeared to be six-limbed, and their forelegs ended in powerful, toothed pincers.
The semi-ant warriors in the cavern raised their armoured heads, opened scissor jaws of sharp chitin and rushed to Law's defence. Imposing themselves between him and the manants, they again waged the uneven battle they had just lost. Some attacked those that threatened the Mujar from behind, adding to the confusion as manants fell under their cutting jaws. All those the queen had summoned flung themselves into the new battle to protect Law, guided by an instinct as strong as the one that made them defend their queen. The manants recoiled in confusion at this unexpected attack, then rallied and fought back. Law found himself in the middle, and the cause of, another bloody battle even fiercer than the one he had just witnessed. The semi-ants flung themselves at their foes with no regard for their lives, and the manants' pincers severed their chitin jaws and punctured their armoured carapaces.
Backing away from the bloodshed, Law bumped into the wall and sidled along it. The golden light swirled, confusing him as it whispered words he did not understand. Within it, his inborn knowledge vied for attention, seeking to guide him out of this situation. The urge to call on the Powers grew stronger than ever, fuelled by his fear. Gasping, he groped along the wall, seeking the tunnel entrance so he might escape through it. When his hands discovered it, they encountered a wall of semi-ant warriors coming through it to defend him. Further alarmed, he tried to push through them, and the semi-ants attempted to move aside, but so many packed the tunnel that they could not. Grabbing a warrior to steady himself, Law fought the impulse to use the Powers to escape the melee. He could not leave Letta at the mercy of the manants, which would kill her.
Law mind-locked with the warrior he held and commanded it to find the plump Trueman female, guide her from the hive and keep her safe. When he released it, the semi-ant tried to go back the way it had come, but the packed warriors trapped it, too. Fearing that it might not survive, Law grabbed another and filled its mind with his command, then another. He had instructed five when the manants overcame warriors behind him. Hissing and clicking in triumph, the manants surged after their prey. Semi-ant warriors pushed past Law to battle them, but their numbers were insufficient to hold back the tide of larger manants.
Law yelped as a sharp pincer locked around his arm, crushing it. Galvanised by the pain, he turned too quickly, smeared the images in his mind and added to his confusion. He wrenched his arm free, tearing his skin. Another claw fastened onto his leg, and he kicked out, but that only increased the pain. Everything moved too fast for the information from his senses to settle, making him truly blind. He was lost in a world of smeared colour, jostled by hard bodies and injured by scratching claws and pincers. The semi-ants that strived to protect him released an acid stench like a scream of frustration and rage at his injury. The flesh of his calf tore, sending a lance of pain through him, and the Powers left his control.
Crayash manifested in a screaming inferno that made all the combatants drop to their bellies in terror. The Power writhed within Law, a fire akin to the one in his head, and it offered freedom. The claw that held his leg had released him, but, with the cessation of the manifestation, the manants surged forward once more. Letting his instincts guide him, Law raised his head, and a sheet of fire exploded upwards from him, burning through the hive above him to the sky. His fire destroyed the honeycomb of tunnels and opened a gaping rent in the citadel's earthen fabric.
The manants recovered swiftly from this second shock and the burning soil that cascaded down on them, flinging themselves at the Mujar again. A serrated fang ripped into Law's flank with a gush of blood, wringing a cry of pain from him. Freedom beckoned above, and again he let his instincts save him. The rush of Ashmar filled the cavern with wind and the sound of beating wings. Images of winged, alien shapes flashed through his mind, and he chose one at random.
The blind Mujar transformed as he leapt into the air, and a grey dove rose on beating wings, flying up through the tunnel of Dolana to the freedom of the skies above. Law spiralled upwards, filled with wonder at this new, unfettered form he had found. Bursting from the hive into the vast expanse of nothingness that was air, he became utterly lost.
Chapter Fourteen
From the rushing of wind past him, Law knew that he was moving forwards, and his wings beat the air to keep him aloft. The Powers he could sense were all beyond his range. Invisible Ashmar surrounded and buoyed him, but locked him in a new prison of nothingness. His injured wing ached, and blood soaked the feathers of his flank as his wing strokes pumped it from the wound. Weakness invaded him, and his wing's ravaged muscles unbalanced his flight, allowing him to spiral downwards. His senses were too slow to warn him of the ground rushing towards him, and he hit it with a thud, lying still amid a cloud of settling feathers.
Within the hive, Shyass eddied around the chamber as the manants hissed and clicked, turning to each other in confusion. The wind sympathised with their bewilderment, giving a soft chuckle. First the Mujar had proven himself dangerous with his fire, then he had turned into a bird and flown away. The warlike Lowman crossbreeds could not understand such strange behaviour. Their agitated discussion of this phenomenon preoccupied the manants, and only Shyass noticed that, when the semi-ant warriors became motionless at the Mujar's exit, four pushed past their recumbent comrades and vanished down the tunnel. The win
d followed, curious.
Dolana's numbing cold crept into Law, bringing intense discomfort with it. The unfamiliar bird form proved unwieldy on the ground, and his wings hampered his efforts to rise. With a flick of his mind, he released it and became a man again in a rush of wind. He lay still, confused and a little stunned by the violent events that had brought him here and the hard landing. Pain throbbed in his arm, leg and flank, and his head pounded. He raised a hand to touch the stickiness that coated the side of it, tracing the ooze to a deep gash in his scalp.
Sitting up to free himself from Dolana's unpleasant invasion, Law held his head and groaned. The visible Powers drew the world inside his mind, a flat expanse of Dolana furred with spikes of silver-blue Shissar. He knew that this was grass, and in the distance the two Powers were mixed in a looming wall of trees. His memories of the outside world were hazy, but instinct told him that he must find pure Shissar. He rose to his feet and limped towards the forest.
Law found the outside world daunting, and fled from every rustle and movement. Wandering through the trees, he sensed the land's sickness. So keen was his perception of the Powers that the faintest taint in the silvery lines caught his attention. He stopped every time he found corruption and healed the wounds, unable to pass them by. In his wake brown areas of dying land turned green again and wilting trees lifted their leaves to the sun. His wounds slowed him, for although they had ceased to bleed, the pain made it difficult to walk, and he stopped often to rest.
By the time the warmth in the sky faded, the gurgle of a rivulet led him to it. Shissar's pure, glittering blue flowed over its stony silver bed, and Law knelt to scoop it up, enjoying in its cool wetness. Its cleansing touch brought an unexpected lash of pain, which confused and alarmed him. When it eased, however, his wounds were gone, and he stayed awhile to play with its fascinating essence.
In distant lands, Trueman wars raged as kings invaded their neighbours and sacked towns, chasing people into the wilderness to die. Their armies, glutted with manbulls and manhorses, waged long bloody battles on grassy meadows, turning them into stinking killing fields. Some of the hapless pawns fled their grisly fate and escaped into the forests, where they bred with wild creatures.
Kings and queens with black armies flourished, annexing new lands as their armies swelled. The new souls they collected allowed them to animate more of the lifeless statues that had been Hashon Jahar. In cities that had black armies, ritual sacrifices and bloodletting kept the Torrak Jahar fed with souls and blood. A dark worship of death sprang up, spawning a cult of knife-wielding priests whose one wish was to feed the Torrak Jahar.
The forest people wept as the trees fell, and fled with the animals deep into unknown lands. A few good strongholds sprang up, but Torrak Jahar attacked these and forced their denizens to flee into the shrinking forests as well. Semi-ants captured some, who spawned new hives of manants, each citadel subtly different from the others. Those with strong spider ancestry possessed long legs and killed their prey with venom. Others that had beetle in their genes flew on filmy wings and killed with serrated jaws. Their Trueman blood endowed them with intelligence and a lust for conquest that made them wipe out Trueman cities, then bury them beneath giant hives of dried mud.
Some rulers banded together for protection, but the rapidly multiplying manants continued to spread and lay waste to Trueman lands. The spreading corruption swallowed vast areas, and in places the ground tore open and birthed rivers of earth blood that killed all in their path. Huge dustbowls blossomed like brown flowers, and the gritty winds that played in them choked the life around them. Often, the earth trembled, and storms tore out trees and flattened whole cities in their fury. Disaster and famine stalked the world, and people died of strange diseases that spread through the towns like wildfire. Crops failed and animals died for no apparent reason. Floods washed villages away and fires ravaged forests and plains alike. Chaos consumed the dying world as the laws vanished, and the elements that formed Shamarese unravelled.
*****
The tale continues in Book IV, The Staff of Law.
About the author
T. C. Southwell was born in Sri Lanka and moved to the Seychelles when she was a baby. She spent her formative years exploring the islands – mostly alone. Naturally, her imagination flourished and she developed a keen love of other worlds. The family travelled through Europe and Africa and, after the death of her father, settled in South Africa.
T. C. Southwell has written over forty novels and five screenplays. Her hobbies include motorcycling, horse riding and art, and she earns a living in the IT industry.
All illustrations and cover designs by the author.
Contact the author at [email protected]
Acknowledgements
Mike Baum and Janet Longman, former employers, for their support, encouragement, and help. My mother, without whose financial support I could not have dedicated myself to writing for ten years. Isabel Cooke, former agent, whose encouragement and enthusiasm led to many more books being written, including this one. Suzanne Stephan, former agent, who has helped me so much over the past six years, and Vanessa Finaughty, good friend and business partner, for her support, encouragement and editing skills.
Broken World Book Three - A Land Without Law Page 26
