by Tim Lebbon
“… come back to me.”
He sees everything, filtered down to useful and useless, and when the Stranger kneels beside him, Kel’s arm flashes out. He breathes slowly, not concentrating too harshly because he knows doing so will fracture his senses. His fingers close around the hilt of the knife tucked into the Stranger’s metal boot, its color making it almost indistinguishable from the armor.
The Stranger freezes in surprise. Only for a beat, but it is long enough.
Kel rolls to the left, pulling the knife free, then rolls back again, thrusting up with the blade, hearing and feeling the scrape of metal on metal as it pierces the Stranger’s armor at its throat and penetrates flesh and bone.
“Yes!” O’Peeria says, her image dispersing to the dank air but always, always there. “You’re back.”
The Stranger gargles something, his companion comes forward, and Kel, not trusting his legs for an instant, starts rolling away, pulling the knife with him.
The second Stranger runs past the first, dives for Kel and lands across him. Kel gasps, winded. But he continues rolling, knowing what will happen when the first Stranger dies and needing to be as far away as possible.
The metal-clad man falls from him, then kneels, grabs his head and presses its face up close.
Kel slashes up with the knife. The Stranger blocks it with its metal arm, pulls its head back, then slams it forward again into Kel’s bruised nose.
He almost passes out from the pain.
The first Stranger is lying on his side, and his armor is beginning to melt, blue sparks flying, the two writhing limbs struggling to break free of their constraints in readiness for death.
The soldier pulls its head back ready to strike again. Kel remains motionless, inviting the impact. And when its curved, hard nose connects squarely with his forehead, Kel thrusts the knife into the Stranger’s throat.
The world explodes. He sees the redness of fresh blood, then darkness seeks him out and pulls him down. As he goes, he is calling out for O’Peeria, but if she is still watching, she does so silently.
THEY MOVED QUICKLY down into the village. Namior had thought she would be of help to them, knowing the geography of the place so well. She could take them through its hidden routes, she knew which garden went where, which paths led toward the river and curved up the valley sides. But it looked almost as if the three Core had been there before; they flowed through the streets and alleys, pouring down toward the harbor like so much floodwater. There was a comforting confidence in their movement.
Why did they bring me? she thought. They’d have been even faster without me, I’m slowing them down, so why not leave me waiting with the others? But she soon found out.
It was an old woman, walking slowly through the streets and calling a name. Her voice was hoarse from shouting, and her face was puffy with tears. Namior recognized the name she called, and when the woman saw them she froze, eyes going wide as she stared at their weapons.
“No problem here,” Namior said softly, stepping forward with her hands stretched out, palms up. “It’s—”
The woman’s face lit up. “Are you here to save us?” she asked, childlike wonder pulling her creased skin into a smile.
“You can’t tell anyone about this,” Namior said.
“Are you going to rescue my son?”
Pelly moved past the woman and squatted by a wall, motionless and alert. U’Nam had already retreated to cover their rear, and Mallor squatted at the edge of the path, listening.
“Where is he?” Namior asked, fearing the reply.
The woman’s smile faded quickly, replaced by confusion. “I saw him down at the harbor,” she said, “but he isn’t really there.”
“What do you mean?” Mallor asked, and the old woman gazed at him, eyes resting on his drawn sword and the crossbow on his arm.
“He’s not himself anymore. He was for a while, after I found him. But then he just…went away. Right before my eyes. And he hasn’t spoken to me since.”
“Did anyone else see?” Namior asked, but the woman ignored her.
“So I’m looking for him everywhere else,” she said, delusion welcoming back the smile. “He must be somewhere. Maybe he’s lost. Since the wave, everything has changed.”
“It has,” Namior said. Some of it looked the same, but it felt different, as though they breathed air from somewhere other than Noreela. “Please, don’t tell anyone you’ve seen us.”
“Changed so much, and now there are things in the streets.”
“Things?” Mallor asked.
The woman grabbed Namior’s arms. “But you’ll find my son, won’t you? If I can’t?”
“We will,” Namior said.
“Swear on the Black?”
Namior caught her breath, because she could do no such thing, and the last thing she wanted was to upset the old woman.
“I swear on the Black,” Mallor said.
The woman looked at him again for a beat, then seemed to decide something for herself. She nodded and went on her way.
“Move on,” Mallor whispered, and they continued stalking down toward the harbor.
He’s cold, Namior thought. But if that would help them do what they could for Pavmouth Breaks, so be it.
Pelly led them down toward the river, and soon they came to the first signs of destruction. The Core paused for a moment, evidently shocked, standing beside a house, beyond which lay a landscape of ruin right down to the water’s edge. There were signs of digging here and there, desperate excavations to search for impossible survivors. The river sighed by.
Namior looked up at the sky, depressed by the mud and water, but what she saw there did little to alleviate her mood. The clouds were gathering thick and heavy, and they seemed to be so low that she could have reached up and touched the lowest of them. They were streaming in from the sea, thickening all the time, cutting out the morning sun and giving dusk back to the village. The breeze was increasing in strength, sweeping exotic smells in from across the water. Namior closed her eyes and experienced a brief but intense flashback to her time on the island. She shivered.
Mallor clasped her arm. “What is it?”
Namior shook her head, but she saw Mallor glance up at the clouds. Lightning thrashed again, reverberating around the valley.
“Sea storm?” he asked.
“They do come this quickly, sometimes.” She saw the shades of clouds in his eyes.
“I’ve told Pelly to work us along to the harbor. I need to see what the situation is down there, then we’ll get back out, wait for the others to—”
“My mother.”
“That’s not why we came in, Namior, not this time. Soon.”
“I’ll be going to her, even if you’re not. I’ve guided you in.”
Mallor looked ready to object, but he sighed and turned away.
Pelly led them parallel to the river, slipping over garden walls, through stone arches, and along narrow alleys where rats and mud-blights scampered and slunk through the shadows. Namior knew every place they saw, and many should have been nostalgic to her: the garden where she’d had her first kiss; the small courtyard where her father had died, bent over a table with a glass of rotwine in his hand and still laughing from some joke; the house where once lived a boy she’d thought she’d loved, long before Kel. But she passed the places and felt nothing, and that upset her more.
This is my village, she thought, but the clouds collecting above her were doing their best to deny her that certainty.
U’Nam and Pelly paused at a bend in the path, frozen into invisible shadows. Mallor touched Namior’s arm. The two of them dropped, and Namior listened for the step of metallic feet.
Pelly dashed back to them. “Bodies ahead.”
They went on, and Namior prepared herself, but she could never have been ready for what she saw.
Chief Eildan was pinned to the front of a house with his own harpoon. It had been driven through his chest and buried deep in the wooden lintel
above the building’s front door. His feet were a step above the ground, and blood and shit pooled around the door, the puddle extending through the gap beneath. His face was slack and bloody from a beating, and his eyes were missing.
As Namior gasped and dropped to her knees, she heard the chitinous scampering of many-legged sea things running away.
Eildan had grasped her attention, but when she looked down and saw what U’Nam was doing, she could not help uttering a cry of shock. There were several more bodies piled along both sides of the path, broken, holed and bloodied, and slimy, finger-sized things crawled over them, eating. But it was the weapons that U’Nam was inspecting, not the corpses of people Namior had known.
She made herself stand and go to the dead, hoping she saw no one she loved. Kel was not there, neither was her mother or Mell.
“They were putting up a fight,” Pelly said, nudging a fishing pike with her boot. “But none of their weapons are bloodied.”
There were gutting knives, a few old swords and several spikes and blades more commonly at home on a fishing boat, some of them scattered on the ground, others not even drawn from the corpses’ belts.
“Looks like they didn’t do much damage,” U’Nam said.
“At least they tried!” Namior hissed.
Mallor stepped between her and the bodies, took her hand and guided her onward. “We can do nothing here,” he said. He signaled the other two Core and they passed on, and soon the scene of slaughter was behind them. To Namior, it felt even more hopeless knowing they had died fighting than if they had put up no resistance at all.
As they moved on, she saw the imposing outline of the Moon Temple slightly uphill to her right, and the harbor came into view ahead of them. The reconstructed bridge spanning the river was still piled with debris, water streaming against it and churning brown with the mud it carried.
The Moon Temple seemed silent, and sad, and …
And then Namior looked back to the harbor. It had not registered the first time, but she saw it now, and was amazed.
“Looks the same as the ones on the hills,” Mallor said.
The rectangular surface of a tower was growing from the harbor waters. On its top, two machines worked to extrude the black stuff from their bellies, traveling back and forth across the flat surface and raising it even as Namior watched. She guessed it was twenty steps out of the water already, slightly higher than the mole.
Other shapes worked around and on the dark tower. They swam around its base in the dirty water and crawled like huge spiders up its sides. They were too far away to see properly, but Namior knew what they were.
There’s something in the harbor, the woman had said. I’ve only seen the ripples.
At least they knew why the Strangers had gills.
The Core went to ground, melding with their surroundings and once again making Namior feel as though she stood out. She knelt beside Mallor.
“Was that there—?” he began.
“First time I’ve seen it,” she said. “It must be growing very quickly.”
The rain that had been promised for some time began, the sky opening and the downpour becoming torrential within beats.
“It’ll give us cover,” Mallor said.
Namior looked skyward, held out her hands and felt the water on her face. “It’s warm.”
“And?”
“The rain here is never warm.”
There was one ship still at anchor against the mole, and beyond that Namior could see the hints of masts tipping slowly left and right as boats sailed away from Noreela. They were going back to the island.
“Last time I was here, there were a dozen of their ships and boats in and around the harbor.”
“Maybe they’ve already got everyone they want over to the island,” Mallor said, “and now they’ll come back with their army.” The idea hit Namior with a jolt. She imagined the front door of her home being kicked open by a metal-clad Stranger, her mother struggling and fighting, then being subdued and dragged out. Down the path, across the cobbles, over the bridge, past the bodies of those who had fought to the end, and then thrown onto a boat with others from the village.
Can this really be the end?
“No!” she said. “Pavmouth Breaks won’t go without a fight.”
Mallor smiled for the first time, and the expression hardly suited him. Namior experienced a newfound respect for the man who had sacrificed his life to a secret, silent protection of the land.
“There’s something else going on at the harbor,” Pelly said. She held a narrow telescope to her eye, and for a long time she said no more. “There are …” Unable to speak, she passed it back for someone else to see.
Mallor took it, looked and shook his head.
“What is it?” Namior asked.
“Something you wouldn’t want to see.”
Namior held out her hand, Mallor hesitated, and she snatched the telescope from him.
It was an old instrument, its lenses knocked out of alignment by some impact, and it took her a while to angle it just right. She’d looked through one before—Mygrette, the old village witch, had a collection of such objects from fishing towns and villages up and down the coast—but she had never liked the sensation. It felt unnatural to her, bringing the distance close in such a way. Magic was the only true way to do so.
There are things in the streets, the old woman had told them, and there were things down on the harbor. Some walked, some crawled, a couple seemed to fly, and Namior closed her eyes and remembered what she and Kel had seen over on Komadia.
“The pretense is over,” she whispered.
“What are those things?” Pelly asked.
“They only sent those who looked like us,” Namior said. “But now that they have Pavmouth Breaks, they can …” She trailed off, because she had seen something else.
The things seemed to be in a panic. They moved back and forth across the harborfront, but their general direction was toward the mole, and the remaining ship anchored there. She had never seen the Komadians moving in such a way—they had always appeared calm, and in control.
“Something’s happened,” she said.
Lightning arced overhead again, and the rain swept sideways for a time, as if something huge had passed quickly above the valley.
“We need to leave,” Mallor said.
“My mother,” Namior said. “You do what you want, but my house is up there.” She pointed past the Moon Temple where she had watched Mourner Kanthia chanting so many down, what seemed like so long ago. “I’ll not abandon her as well.” And Kel? she thought. But hopeless as it felt, there was little she could do for him.
“U’Nam, Pelly …” Mallor said. He looked at Namior, silently pleading with her. She hated him for it.
At last, he turned to the Moon Temple. “Just up there?”
“Two hundred steps.” Her heart fluttered with hope.
He sighed. “We’ll come with you. If it means we’ll leave a different way from how we came in, it helps us know the place more.”
“Thank you!” Namior said, and even the stern glances she sensed from Pelly and U’Nam did nothing to dampen her relief.
Namior climbed the wall into the Moon Temple’s garden first, looking at the flattened grass where so many dead had rested. There were still three bodies there, and she wondered why no one had come to claim them. The heavy rain tapped against the blankets covering their faces.
She thought she heard the door to the Temple click shut as she entered the gardens, but she did not mention it to the Core. They followed her, feet slipping on the slick ground, and the rains came down even harder, offering them cover more akin to dusk than daylight. The rain was still warm, and it tasted of something Namior could not place—stale, insipid, and painfully familiar.
U’Nam joined her, walking by her side along the paths and pausing every few steps to listen. Namior realized that the downpour would offer equally effective cover to any Strangers coming their way.
She felt Mallor’s hand on her shoulder, and saw Pelly ready to pounce if she cried out again; but she bit her lip and remained silent.
U’Nam searched the house quickly, and when she came back downstairs she shook her head.
Mother isn’t here, Namior thought. And those three words repeated again and again as they left, their repetition surrounding her with silence and shutting out the terrible, overbearing sense that everything was about to end.
The rain fell harder than ever. It tasted of Komadia.
Fifty steps after leaving Namior’s home open to the elements, she and the Core met the first Strangers hiding in the shadows.
O’PEERIA WAS NO longer there. That was Kel Boon’s first thought as he came around. His second was that his back must be broken.
He was lying on his stomach, head turned to one side so that he looked down the hillside toward the valley, and he could not move. He could see nothing other than rain striking the ground before him, and the mist it formed as it splashed back up. It was warm and intimate, trickling down his neck and sides, across his legs, and the smell was something he could not quite place—the sea and somewhere else.
Sheet lightning thrashed overhead, lighting the scene in brilliant starkness for beats at a time. Every raindrop was pinned to the air, each flash-frozen into a stilled moment in time. In those moments, through puffy eyes, Kel saw the scorched remains of one of the Strangers.
He blinked, trying to remember what had happened. He recalled Kashoomie, apparently startled and running away. Then the fight, stabbing, punching, the Stranger’s head coming toward his own, and the explosive sound of a wraith tearing its way from one of their bodies. After that, nothing.
