by Tim Lebbon
They seemed to be growing, most of them upright, though some were tilted slightly, like flowers following the sun. They were the same as the thing that the man had carried across the square, most around the length of a human’s forearm and slightly thicker. They were beautiful, but somehow revolting as well. The light refracted from them felt unclean and the colors corrupt. Namior could think of no other way to describe them. She could almost taste the colors, and smell them, and they made her sick.
“Amazing,” Kel said. He stepped past Namior and approached the edge of the crystal gully. She wanted to reach out and grab his arm, but through the disgust, she was amazed as well. There was something mysterious about them, perhaps magical in a way she had never encountered or imagined ever before. A large part of her training as a witch was the acquisition of knowledge, and not all of it was comfortable to have.
“What do you think they are?” Namior asked.
Kel did not answer. He froze for a beat, then started stalking closer, attention focused on one crystal close to the edge of the gully. She went with him, glancing back along the beach at where the village reached the sea. They had heard nothing since leaving—no more cheering, nor any sounds of pursuit. That troubled her.
“By all the gods,” Kel muttered. “This is the same as …”
“It’s what was carried into the square,” Namior said. “What they used when Trakis …” She trailed off. The crystal was not still. For a beat, she thought the shapes dancing inside were caused by something disrupting the sunlight, and she looked up, expecting to see the Strangers in their metal suits bearing down upon them. But the only thing moving was the sea. It shushed and whispered to their left, speaking secrets they could never know.
“There’s something in there,” Kel said. “Something moving. Something alive.”
Namior went cold. The hairs on her neck and arms bristled, and a chill broke across her body. Sometimes while making love, Kel bit her neck and caused the same effect, but this was the exact opposite of lust and pleasure. It was disgust and pain.
It was not something solid, of flesh and blood. It was smoke and light, mist and color.
“A shade,” she said. “But… different.”
“A shade’s the ghost of something not yet born,” Kel said. “How can we see that?”
“Then maybe the wraith of something born and died.” Namior bent and looked closer. Within the crystal’s light-spreading mass, something dark seemed to roll and twist. Parts of it moved fast, thrashing massively in a space too small to contain it. Other parts rolled and billowed as slow as storm clouds. Every movement seemed pained, and she was sure she heard wretched screaming somewhere too far away to be true. “Or perhaps it’s both. A trapped soul.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We’re living things, Kel. We’re not meant to understand the dead.”
“But when they brought that thing into the square …” He grew distant, looking out across the sea at their home, thinking. And then he slumped to his knees.
“What? Kel?” She reached out, and when she touched his flesh it was cold and hard, muscles tensed against a threat she did not yet know.
“All these years,” he said. “They’ve come, and we’ve tracked them and killed them, and all this time they were trying us on for size.”
Namior looked across the array of crystals, and all of them held the same sickly movements of something trapped for so long, awaiting a new, fresh body to call its own. A body like Trakis’s. A body like her own.
“We have to go,” she said.
Kel switched from despair to anger in the blink of an eye. He spat, kicked out at the crystal nearest to them and its base shattered, breaking from where it grew from the ground and hitting the dirt hard. The thing inside flipped and rolled some more, agitated by the movement. Namior closed her eyes, and something spiked at her ears like a cry too high to hear.
Kel took off his jacket and wrapped the broken vessel.
“You’re taking it?”
“Yes.”
“But—”
“But nothing. The Core has to see. Our witches might be able to use it.”
Namior could see the sense in his actions, but the thought of traveling back with that thing in the boat with them … She shivered again, and the nausea was still with her. “It just seems so wrong,” she said.
“All the more reason to take it back.” His gaze softened, but he still spoke urgently. “Please, Namior. We need to go.”
They walked through the breaking waves where no more crystals grew. Namior felt rough edges beneath her boots, and wondered whether they were walking across the broken roots of old crystals. What happened when the sea struck them? Why did they grow so close to the sea, rather than inland where… ?
The possibility hit her that they had seen only a small portion of crystals. Perhaps inland there were many more. Valleys filled with them, hillsides spiked with their dreadful beauty. Maybe Komadia was home to a hundred thousand trapped souls.
She felt a brief moment of pity. But the memory of Trakis’s final agonies drove it down, and the danger that her village, family and friends were in ensured that pity had no place in her heart.
Kel splashed through the breaking waves ahead of her, hugging the thing to his chest.
And then a high whistling sound rose up behind them, and a thousand voices called out in anger.
“THEY’VE SEEN US!” Kel said. He climbed a tangled bank of tree roots and rocks, holding the cloth parcel to his chest with one hand and finding handholds with the other. Namior followed, and soon they were in the forest again, following the coastline as they ran for their boat.
If it’s still there, Namior thought. Or if they haven’t already found it and hidden their metal-clad soldiers behind it, ready for our arrival. But she could not trouble herself with that at the moment. She had to run, watch her footing, jump over fallen logs and step around twists of tree roots seemingly reaching up to trip her. They had to manage their escape and survival step by step.
The whistling sound came again, and from somewhere inland she heard undergrowth crashing as something stormed through.
“When we get there,” Kel said, “jump in and get ready to start rowing.”
“But you—”
“I’m stronger than you. I’ll throw this thing in and push the boat down to the sea.” He was panting, but he spoke calmly, and she could not doubt his logic. They needed to be rowing away when the Strangers arrived at the shore.
Something cracked up the hillside, and she heard a cry of pain. Maybe one of the lizard-things had taken down a Komadian. Right then, she could not even smile in hope.
Namior leapt a fallen tree and found herself ahead of Kel, pumping her arms as she ran. She jumped over anything that looked as though it could trip her, snaked around tree trunks, ducked beneath branches and clasped the knife in her hand like a lucky charm. No charm could work if it had not been properly made, she knew, but the blade glinted, its keenness comforting.
“They’re coming,” Kel said. Namior glanced uphill and saw the glimmer of metal, way up between the trees. They, Kel had said. He’d almost died fighting just one of them.
And then she saw the boat. She resisted the temptation to throw down the knife and start pushing, instead doing exactly what Kel had said. She climbed in, dropped the knife and grabbed the oars, holding them along the gunwales in readiness to dip into the water the instant it was close.
We’ll have to get over the breakers. Past the waves, across the white-crests, then back to Noreela, and they’ll be chasing us all the way.
Kel hit the boat hard. The wrapped crystal fell from his hands and thumped down inside, and the craft was already sliding across tree roots and oily seaweeds, slicking down toward the beach with Kel grunting and straining behind it. He’d jammed his sword into the boat’s hull, just inside and still within reach.
Namior looked over his head and through the trees. She could see plenty of movement,
but she wasn’t sure how much of it was simply leaves flickering in the breeze. She saw a flash as something shiny moved from left to right, then all was still once again.
When she glanced back down at Kel, he was grimacing.
“They won’t stop,” he said. “I’ve never met a Stranger that knows fear.”
“Lucky bastards.”
Water splashed across Namior’s back. She gasped at the coldness, then when she dipped the oars they were wet as well. She started pulling, watching Kel splashing through the breaking waves, looking behind him at the rough beach, his footprints, the twisted trees, pulling, pulling. The boat jarred up and splashed down, again and again.
Kel heaved himself in, landing with his face close to the wrapped crystal. He paused, just for a beat, then looked up at Namior.
“We might just—” he said, but the rest of his words were drowned by a flurry of explosions. Flashes burst from within the forest, Kel winced, something struck Namior in the chest, and she fell back. She tried to close her hands on the oars but they were gone. She felt around, waving her hands, confused at why she was not still rowing, why she saw sky and clouds instead of beach and water. Confused, too, at why the water in the bottom of the boat felt so warm.
Lying on her back, the late-afternoon sky suddenly seemed very blue and peaceful.
KEL BOON FELT something whip by his right ear and thought, They’re shooting at us. Beyond Namior, past the bow of the boat, the top of a wave parted and spat spray at the sky. Another shot hit the boat’s stern a hand’s width from his head. Wood splintered, and he felt shards peppering his cheek and exposed neck. He grimaced in pain, looked at Namior, and something hit her in the chest.
Her eyes and mouth went wide. Blood sprayed the air before her, splashing into the water sloshing inside the boat. And she fell back, striking the wood and gasping, hands clawing at the air as though to catch a cloud. Looking at her chest Kel could see the meat of her, and the white flash of bone.
“No!” he yelled, and another volley of shots smashed into the boat and sea.
Every instinct was pulling him toward Namior, pressing his hand to her wound and his mouth to hers, looking into her eyes to make sure they still saw him. But if he did that, he would be dead.
If he turned around and tried to fight—crossbow bolts against projectile weapons—he would be just as dead.
So he reached into the boat and picked up the heavy crystal, shaking his jacket away so that the sun kissed colors from its angular surfaces, and held it up high.
The shooting ceased. There were four Strangers standing along the edge of the forest, two of them down on the beach and up to their knees in water. They all held golden tubes, steam venting from them, and their dull metal armor reflected the color of the waves.
The crystal was heavy.
Namior moaned behind him, hissing something wet at the air. Not her, not here, not now, Kel thought.
“I’ll do it!” he yelled, though as yet he was not quite certain what “it” was. He heaved himself up into the boat, holding on tight because the waves were striking the bow, lifting and dropping it again and again. He dropped the crystal, rolled, and snatched it up, and when he looked back at the beach the Strangers had all advanced several steps.
“Stop!” Sitting on the cross seat, he placed the crystal in his lap; it was warmer than he’d expected, as though the thing writhing inside exuded heat. Then he drew a weighted throwing knife and held it up, heavy handle pointing down. He had no idea how much damage he could do with that, but the Strangers exchanged glances and lowered their weapons.
“I’ll smash it!” And he almost did. Namior was bleeding and dying behind him, and he came so close to indulging the only small, petty revenge he could muster. He wanted to feel the Strangers beneath his sword, part their necks as he had the one on the beach, watch their enraged wraiths spit and sputter as their existence faded away to nothing, not even the Black. But the greater revenge of denying them what they had come for… that was more noble.
And for that, he had to survive.
He put the knife down on top of the crystal in his lap, picked up the flailing oars and started rowing.
The Strangers watched. One of them walked into the sea, waves breaking around its stomach, then its chest. Kel dropped one oar and picked up the knife, and the metal-clad soldier halted.
He heard that rising and falling whistling from somewhere else on the island. An alarm? A scream of pain?
“Namior?” he said, not wanting to look back. He was still too close. If he turned away, they might try to get him with a lucky shot. So he rowed hard, feeling the muscles of his back and shoulders pulling but relishing the sensation. “Namior?” he said again, listening for any sign of acknowledgment.
She only hissed, and it sounded far too much like air venting from her ruined chest.
Up one wave, down another, topping the white-crests as they roared in to expend their energy on Komadian soil, and the Strangers watched them go. Kel glanced down at the crystal, at the shifting thing inside that could have been as big as his hand close-up, or the size of a mountain thirty miles away. What do I have in here?
He drew farther from shore, and when he was far enough away he let the waves take him for a while. They drove the small boat along the southern shore of Komadia, and he could see the first buildings of the settlement they had visited. Behind it, up the hillside and closer to the forest, the curving black monolith pointed at the sky, obvious now that he knew it was there. Viewed from that distance and angle, it could have been a ravine split down into the ground, as well as a structure built up.
He turned and looked at Namior, and he feared that she was already dead. But he could not stop. The wound in her chest was wide, deep and pulsing blood, and there was nothing he could do for her without help. If he stopped, to hug and whisper as her life ebbed away, he would be losing whatever small chance she had to survive.
“Keep breathing, keep fighting,” he said. He repeated those words over and over, and they became the beat by which he rowed.
The pains in his shoulders and back became so great that he thought he was on fire. He rowed harder.
The sun was setting behind the Komadian hills. It threw the shadow of that alien land across the sea after him, and he knew that in that shadow, they would come.
HE ROWED THROUGH the dusk, through his tears, and despite the certainty that his arms were no longer a part of his body. Once away from the island, he paused several times to go to Namior, but all he could do was to make sure she was still breathing. He tried pressing his jacket to her bleeding wound, but her breathing became harsh, and she thrashed in unconsciousness. She was withdrawn, fighting for survival inside her own mind. He hoped that would last.
Watching Komadia, expecting to see sails coming after him at every moment, the jagged silhouette of that strange place took on sinister proportions.
As the second love of his life lay dying behind him—a slower death than his first, yet weighing even heavier on his shoulders—he did his best to plan. The rhythm of the waves and the tempo of his rowing made it easier to concentrate, the physical side of things taking care of themselves.
The absolute priority was to contact the Core. The time they had always feared was upon them, and though it might not be exactly the invasion they had anticipated, still the Strangers had declared war on Noreela. Perhaps they would stay until every person in Pavmouth Breaks had been taken away and made a home for one of those things trapped in the crystals. And maybe there were many more such crystal fields all across the island, thousands of them, and their intention was to launch forays deeper and deeper into Noreela. Their weapons were deceit and stealth, and Kel knew that Noreela’s realization about what was happening would be far slower than the Komadians’ progress. They could sweep across the land, taking people, changing them and advancing again, and by the time any survivors realized what had happened, the wave would have moved on.
How to contact the Core? That
was something else entirely. Land. Get Namior to a healer. Escape Pavmouth Breaks, plant the communicator, let it do its work …
Except there was something wrong with that scenario: the part about finding a healer for Namior. His Core training was urging him to leave her on the beach and escape. The fate of Pavmouth Breaks, and perhaps Noreela, was far more important than the life of one woman.
“I have to land and leave her,” he said to the air. A wave hit the stern and splashed across him in response.
Kel stopped rowing for a beat and let the waves take him, urging the craft closer to shore. He bailed water for a while, looking back at the island. But there were no signs of pursuit on the dusky water. He turned and looked at the shore, surprised at how far he had come. He should be planning where to land, not just aiming haphazardly and hoping it would be somewhere safe. South of where they had left, farther along the beach, that would be best… except that would mean dragging Namior back up through the Throats, and he would never have the strength to take her all the way. She’d die in there, adding her wraith to the darkness. And he would be left mourning another dead love.
The Komadians and the Strangers must surely have communication devices, similar to the one Namior had foisted upon him. Those on Noreela could already know of their covert visit to the island, the theft of the crystal, and they would be ready for him.
There was nowhere safe to land. It was impossible. This was all too much for one man, especially a man who had shunned such responsibility long ago.
Namior moaned in pain, the sea urged him closer to home, and the sunset painted Komadia blood red.
Chapter Nine
leaving
KEL FELT THE crystal watching him. He covered it with his jacket. His arms were almost useless by then, and the tide and waves seemed to be carrying him toward the harbor. There was little he could do to correct their course. And in truth, he thought it as good a place as any to land. If he could drift past the larger Komadian ships in the darkness, beach the boat on the ruined northern shores of the village… It felt foolish and crazy, yet at the same time it just might work. They would be watching for him along the coast, not in the harbor. They would never believe that he would be mad enough to return there.
