Chaos Shifter

by Marc Secchia

  The following morning, his sixty-fifth on the Island according to his log, which was a literal log Asturbar chisel-marked to keep track of the days, he woke to a faceful of water, spluttering and roaring, “What the …”

  A wet, annoyed and voluble ex-soldier burst out of his hut. His jaw dropped. Wish granted. He now had a waterfall falling some four hundred feet from above directly onto his roof. It had already washed away enough of the grassy sods with which he had covered his dwelling to penetrate the roof and clearly, introduced a catastrophic leak to his previously neat handiwork.

  “Thank you!” He yelled, did a silly dance, and shook his fist at the Island up there. “Thank you very much!”

  As if the Island had heard him, wish granted.

  Hilarious.

  He moved out, and spent five days figuring out what to do with that not very large, but steady flow. A huge, roughly indented piece of timber did the trick, installed above a layer of ragion-cement stone which he painstakingly scraped from beneath the denizens of the surrounding Islands. One must not think too hard about what one might be scraping beneath those animals. Freshly collected, the exudate was a virulent mauve colour, but it soon hardened to a dull lilac, even when damp. Then he mopped out his dwelling, re-sanded the floor and moved back in.

  Asturbar rewarded himself with a celebratory swim in the big pool.

  Then came the second strange event in a week. He was swimming underwater when he both heard and felt a dull thump against his ears. A few seconds later he heard it again. Distinctly. Having exited the water with some considerable alacrity, he shamefacedly reconnoitred his surroundings and found no immediate danger. Alright. Asturbar put his ear to the ground. A couple more times he heard what had to be a very large body thrashing about somewhere inside the Island, smashing absent rocks, perhaps, and he was quite convinced he heard a distant, muffled roar that was not the usual background rushing of the waterfalls, but he could not be certain he was not imagining something.

  The mind manufactured sounds to fill available silences. After all, that was what made solitary punishments so cruel.

  When he returned to his hut, Asturbar touched his battle-axe. “Hey, old thing. Might need to warm you up.” It would not surprise him if he was sharing this Island with something large and toothy. Just his luck. Tomorrow, he must go exploring.

  * * * *

  The following morning, Asturbar discovered that his waterworks above the hut, leading the flow down the left side into a catchment basin, from which it meandered away fifty feet or so and disappeared down a small crack between two rocks, was the Three Scamps’ new favourite Island feature – evidently, they took this for their personal playground, thank you Asturbar, and had taken the liberty of inviting two new friends. This raised the volume of the dawn carolling – in his considered opinion – to the level of a full-blown battle waged right above his delicate cranium.

  “GOOD MORNING!” he bellowed at them in his best Drillmaster-voice.

  The dragonets exchanged glances of mild surprise, and promptly continued singing.

  Asturbar scratched his left ear. “I find your lack of respect deeply insulting. Carry on, soldiers.” They did. In five-part harmony.

  Hefting his axe, he set off scouting.

  This Island was not large, but it certainly packaged a great deal of entertainment into its compact size. He passed over hills and through pretty dales and meadows, skirted more boulders than he cared to count, and beat his way steadily through bushes, tree vines and sections of dense tropical forest. The terrain was crisscrossed by jagged, deeply shadowed ravines which played host to many further species of protodragons. His observation suggested they belonged to altogether nastier, toothier and more aggressive warrens than anything he had encountered so far. Proceed with caution. However, these were not the source of the sound he had heard.

  If he was to make this journey regularly, he would have to bridge these ravines properly.

  Asturbar hiked up to a hilltop on the eastern periphery. Breathtaking view. Islands drifting serenely amidst a fresh morning mist, lit by the fierce rays of the rising twin suns. Seen through the drifting veils of moisture, each disc was the size and deep bronze colour of a tamarisk fruit, but they would soon turn dazzling white with the day’s warmth. Then he walked or scrambled steadily down the eastern leg of the V to its southernmost tip, cataloguing four more binder footings from which he might reach likely nearby Islands. There were no spoor or marks of fearsome monsters to be found anywhere.

  Thence he walked the inside of that leg to the notch of the V, trying very hard and failing not to consider any comparisons to a woman’s splayed legs – clearly, it had been far too long – and from there he traversed the western leg, struggling with three deeply cleft ravines and generally broken terrain until he again stood upon the southern tip but this time to the western aspect, and gazed about with a mixture of satisfaction and irritation. Much learned. Zero monsters slain. His battle-axe dangled in its makeshift sling on his back, unblooded, and his boiling masculine warrior blood would have to remain unsatiated.

  Erm … right. He should go cool his ego in that pool before it exploded and sank this entire archipelago into the Cloudlands with its titanic encumbrance.

  Asturbar turned, and saw a curl of smoke.

  Smoke! Or was that mist? Either way, his heart was turning butterfly-dragonet somersaults in his chest, and something stirred in his stomach. Oh. The Jewels? He had forgotten about those. Somewhat to his bemusement, Asturbar realised that they had not passed through his digestive system. He would have … known.

  And now he blushed? Stupid girl.

  An opinion formed in the brain of a sexist slug. Asturbar chuckled at himself. How many years of soldiering and he blushed over the thought of bodily functions? So he was having girlish thoughts. Ha, probably beneficial for his personal growth. Yet it stuck in his mind that he was surveying the Island’s crotch, like one of those nasty crotch-sniffing basker-dragonets he had discovered during that campaign around Marshal Fazurku’s former archipelago of Gomx’i – a word with a click in it. Solitude definitely had its drawbacks. Yet did he not imagine that this Island was not the daddy so much as the mother of all of its smaller spawn, connected to them in some mysterious way that he did not understand. This was why his eyes rebelled at surveying, well, her underparts …

  He decided he was going feral-Dragon crazy.

  Still, an inexpressible inkling of hope lodged in his breast and caused him to retrace his steps for an hour and a half, until he stood above the notch of the V. Asturbar scrutinised what he could and tested the air carefully, almost certain he caught a tang of wood smoke, before retracing his steps several hundred feet along the overhang. The crevice was deep, perhaps the entrance to a cave. It could conceivably hide something large, although once more he saw no sign – no massive paw prints, say, nor broken foliage, droppings nor talon strokes scored deeply in stone, as he might have expected of a beast sizeable enough to create such a commotion. The overhang also carved deeply back beneath his boots here, hiding a great deal from scrutiny from above. Again, spied a wisp more of what could have been smoke or mist, but he detected no other signs of habitation save a small animal trail down below.

  Oh well, he should complete his circuit before finding a way down to the ledge and perhaps attempting that circuit too. He should also comb the interior of the Island for any cave systems, which were entirely likely given the broken nature of the terrain.

  The mystery deepened.

  * * * *

  Over the course of the following week, Asturbar alternated carving chair parts with exploring the Island’s interior. He planned his assault in the sand outside his hut, cursed the dragonets when they trooped through his drawings in the throes of a friendly wrestling match, and quartered the terrain like a good infantry soldier. Not an exiled thief. He found nothing bar a substantial pile of deadfall apparently torn from its roots by a force that seemed to have no place in the changeless,
wind-still weather of the doldrums. He eyed the splintered trunks and torn-up roots pensively. No clear direction of attack. No talon-marks or any identifier of what that force might have been, save that it had been devastating, and confined to this patch of Island.

  Perturbing.

  Stoically, Asturbar identified a good trunk, slung it up with his rope, and failed to move it an inch.

  Great. Much chopping ahead. Still, he had stock enough for ten huts now. He could make dwellings for the dragonets too, if he wanted to. Definitely a bed for his aching back.

  Decrepit at twenty-eight. What a man.

  After completing his reconnoitring activities to his satisfaction save the depths of the dangerous-looking ravines, Asturbar prepared diligently for expedition number two. He cut lengths of vine and braided himself a rope measuring seventy of his paces. He tested it by tying it off to a tree stump and throwing his full strength against it, until he was convinced it would not break under the weight of a metal-boned, steel-sinewed Azingloriax warrior. He of mighty bodily heft and miniscule ego.

  The downward-notched mouth of one of those ravines on the western inner leg seemed a good enough spot to start. Asturbar tied his anchor vine with a military issue bowline knot, checked his weapons – battle-axe and daggers – and abseiled confidently down toward the ledge below. Easily done. There was a good surplus of vine rope below, the ledge was wide enough to receive him without any real danger, and … the vines trembled in his hand. He glanced up. An expletive sprang to his lips. Under attack – curse it! A flight of tiny, obsidian-skinned dragonets gnawed at his vine as though their lives depended upon it. He hesitated. Too high. Down. Quickly.

  Abandoning control in favour of preserving life and limb, Asturbar shimmied down his vine rope with the agility of a much smaller man. Fifty feet from the bottom, he felt the strands jerk. Twenty feet, and they parted. With a wild yell, he instinctively flung out a hand. It jammed between the gnarled stem of a bush and the very last foot of overhang. Crack!

  He landed hard. Absorbing the impact with flexed knees, he soldier-rolled as years of training had taught him, and probably saved himself a few broken bones. He ended up a foot from the edge of the void, thanking anything he cared to name that he was still alive. Fervently alive! He hissed up at the dragonets, who were still munching the dangling vine rope with clear relish. Pox-raddled skurramudgets! One paused half a second to hiss back a snarky peep of sound, before returning to its meal.

  Great. As a result, his left forefinger was bent back at an eighty-degree angle. He had a few things to say to the air about that, none of them pretty or fit for respectable company.

  Asturbar startled as a berry bush not three feet from his right hip rustled sharply. Spinning, dagger palmed and held at the ready, his eyes tracked movement through the dense undergrowth. Here, a shaking branch. There, an enticing quiver of leaves. Berries plopped to the ground. A dragonet. He would not have pursued it anyway, because these fat purple beauties were protected by crimson, three-inch thorns with three hooked ruffs of further spikes each. Horrible to pick out of clothing; worse embedded in his flesh, because they inflamed the skin as he knew from recent, painful experience.

  His eyes fell upon a proper path. Lifted convulsively. That was when his heart pounded thud-da-da-DOOM! in his chest, and the huge man crashed down to his knees, panting in sharp spurts. A hut. Details swam before his dizzied senses. It was built of clean-cut, sanded board that clearly had not originated on this Island. Flowering vines festooned one side, proclaiming a respectable age, but they had been trimmed recently around a rectangular window frame of unfamiliar design to him, with triangular crysglass panels embedded in seemingly random yet artistic collage patterns. Three neat windows also fronted the place, flanked by flower trellises and perfect window boxes that again, looked frequently tended. The flowers were pink climbing anemones.

  Their floral girly-cutesiness introduced a now familiar burning sensation to his eyes. Asturbar simply could not process what he was seeing. A person! A fellow exile! Chuntering foolishly at the joy suffusing his heart, he pushed to his feet and sprinted up the path before it struck him that all this might be false. Skidding to a halt ten feet shy of the hut, Asturbar whipped out his battle-axe. Right. Try using the brains. If a woman had been marooned here, she was most probably a hundred years old. More to the point, why was she here? What had she done or whom had she offended? As he well knew, it took an extraordinary act of foolishness or malice to earn the punishment of exile to paradise in the middle of absolutely nowhere. She might be a criminal. A magic user. More dangerous than he?

  Gruff laughter burbled in his chest. He felt threated by some female … what was that?

  Asturbar flashed to his right, but whatever had been lurking behind a screen of cream mahiti blossoms tumbling down the cliff face that swayed gently – mockingly – at him now, it was faster than him by far. Long gone. He peered suspiciously into the undergrowth but spied nothing untoward.

  “Ruddy dragonets.”

  Whoever the person was, they had fled when they heard his approach, he concluded. Very well. A little nosing about never hurt. Sheathing the axe but palming his dagger in its place, Asturbar announced himself with, “Whoever’s there, I come peacefully.” Wow. Imaginative. “I … uh, just wanted to find out who’s on this Island with me.”

  No reply.

  “I’m coming in.”

  He knocked politely. All that happened was the back of his neck prickled as though unseen eyes feasted upon his suns-burned nape. After checking about him several more times, Asturbar sidled inside, having to rotate his shoulders before scraping through the doorway.

  Wow. Nice. The place was neat, homely and light. It had little touches that bespoke long occupation –tasteful rose-coloured shadecloth drawn aside by satin ribbon ties adorned the windows, a vase of pretty flowers sat upon a cream lacework doily of exquisite detailing in the middle of a table which had not a speck of dust upon it, a glazed mug sat beside the washbasin, again decorated with flowers … if this place was occupied by a man, Asturbar would eat his battle-axe. Sideways.

  Still, he should make certain. Creeping circumspectly into the rear chamber, her bedroom, Asturbar checked the drawers of a neat armoire. She owned far finer furniture than he. A real craftsman had made these pieces. There were floorboards, well-worn. A lute-like instrument hung from two wood carved hooks on the wall. And she had real cutlery on the table in her kitchen area!

  Now he had a severe case of hut envy.

  Ridiculous. Furthermore, the simple azure dress he extracted from the drawer and held up to the light was rather shorter in the skirt than his solitude-sharpened constitution could withstand at this point. As he imagined a young woman wearing the garment, he blushed … well, like a maiden, from the tips of his ears right down his neck. The high waistline was pinched with a treble tie of a design unfamiliar to him, but the bosom was cut generously, bringing to mind the kindly but ancient matrons who worked in the Marshal’s kitchens. They had always shown a soft spot for a hungry teenage trainee soldier; they had been his mothers, his confidantes, the ladies who would cuff him fondly about the earhole when he erred and pinch his cheek when he was good.

  Asturbar tucked the intriguing garment away exactly as he had found it. “My apologies for the snooping.”

  Ah, a slight scraping at the window. This time, he did not startle. With studied casualness Asturbar tried to peek from the corner of his eye, but what he thought he saw was a purple plant with eyes on stalks, which vanished so rapidly it was as if the touch of his thoughts had scared it away.

  Enough. Treading lightly, for he truly felt like a giant in the confines of her petite hut and could not have sat in her chair had he dared, Asturbar exited the expertly carved front door – yes, he was desperately envious of her perfect little home – and then without warning, dashed around the hut toward the bedroom window. Flutter! Whoosh! He saw nothing but a purple blur that dived into a patch of bright yellow, eight-
petalled mazigidaises and vanished without a trace.

  If that had been a woman, he would regurgitate the axe for good measure.

  He paused to scratch his hot-and-bothered neck. Skanky scallogazids, she was not the easiest prey, was she? Well, prey was probably exactly how she felt seeing a man like him turning up unannounced and probably deeply unwelcome, on her doorstep. He was not the least intimidating fellow, stomping about the Isles in his outsized boots waving a battle-axe that probably weighed a goodly fraction of her entire body mass. Stow the dagger. On second thoughts, he ceremoniously laid his weapons – most of them, excepting the stabbing blade concealed in his right boot – beside the path, and settled upon a smidge more scouting. His finger hurt abominably, so he held the skewed digit up to shoulder height to reduce the throbbing.

  Her hut was tucked beneath the overhang with a connoisseur’s eye for camouflage. Neither the structure nor her well-ordered garden beside it could be seen from above, nor from most of the Island’s upper rim, he judged. The paths about it had been left overgrown – deliberately, to further keep up her disguise. He approved. The available tracks were a mishmash of many beasts, mostly dragonets’ paws, but a little further into the cleft he found the clear imprint of a woman’s foot in a muddy patch below where a trickle of water seeped out of a crack. He dwarfed her petite footprint with the proximity of his outsized boot, and grimaced. She was no Azingloriax. She was also missing a toe on that right foot, the smallest.

  Definitely Human, however.

  So, was she a crone, demented by years or decades living alone? The orderliness of her dwelling seemed to argue against this conclusion. The pristine vegetable patch. Her clean, folded clothes were in a good state of repair, despite showing signs of wear. But she must be shy. Or, terrified to the core. Did that argue a younger age? No question which scenario he preferred!