Broken World Book Three - A Land Without Law (14 page)

The young
queens spawned from this colony, blind and somewhat clumsy
creatures of deformed appearance, had mated with drones from yet
another crossbreed of insect origins. The new breed was far larger,
armoured in chitin, armed with poison and cursed with a cunning
intelligence. A young queen of this new breed returned to her
mother's colony and slew her, assuming her position. With the speed
of insect breeding, successive queens bred larger and larger
offspring. Each generation was more ferocious than the last, and
returned to usurp the old queen.

Now the colony
was a well-established citadel of hardened mud that choked the
valley. Workers had cleaned out the trees and used the wood pulp to
build bastions of defence against intruders. Secure within it, the
mighty queen laid an egg every few minutes to swell the ranks of
her massive army. She was the size of a large dog, but her
offspring had already reached the measure of a full grown man, and
the new queens soon to hatch would be larger still.

The wild world
had spawned its first creatures of chaos. In the mountains, hunting
cats had mated with wolves, their young already fierce and deadly.
Dire bears had bred with bog boars, and raised massive cubs with
tusks and claws. As yet, these young were no real threat. The worst
crossbreeds were still to be born, and they would be those with
Trueman blood.

The semi-ant
colony was ready to unleash its first wave of death in a swarm of
winged warriors sent out to find food and clear the way for new ant
cities ruled by the young queens still in their eggs. The swarm
found creatures with which to do battle that rivalled themselves in
fierceness and armament. They brought some back to the nest as
slaves, wrapped in cocoons of silk gleaned from spider ancestry.
Searching further afield, some warriors crossed the sea and fell
upon a Trueman village, taking prisoners. These were brought back
to the nest and found to be clever, so the queen bred with
them.

Talsy raced
down the beach, grinning with unadulterated joy as a sleek grey
shape powered through the breakers with lashing strokes of his
flukes to beach himself on his smooth pale belly. Chanter
transformed in a haze of Shissar and stood up, banishing the water
on his skin with a flick of his hands. Talsy flung herself at him,
forcing him to step back or be bowled over. He held her, patting
her back. After several minutes she released him, keeping hold of
his hand without noticing that it was his right one.

"You didn't
find it." Her happiness became tinged with disappointment.

"No." Chanter
glanced up the beach at the Aggapae and Kieran, who waited,
unwilling to intrude on the happy reunion.

"That means
you'll have to go back!"

"Yes."

"Damn it,
Chanter! How hard did you look?"

He turned his
head to squint at the sea. "I searched every reef and abyss, almost
to the other side. That piece of staff is as well hidden as it was
when it lay upon the shores of the inland sea, a pebble amongst
millions."

"We must keep
trying."

"It could take
a lifetime." Chanter raised a hand to smooth back his hair, and she
looked down at the one she held.

"Your
hand!"

He smiled as
she examined the appendage. "I'll need all my powers to face the
coming chaos. I can't stay a cripple."

"You mean you
could have grown a new one any time you wanted?"

"Of
course."

"So why didn't
you?"

He shrugged.
"It was a punishment for my crime."

Talsy snorted
and pulled him up the beach. "Come on, let's tell the others. We'll
have a feast tonight to celebrate."

Chanter let
her drag him towards the waiting men, shaking his head in answer to
their silent question. Their shoulders slumped as they turned to
walk back to the camp at the edge of the jungle. They feasted that
night on roasted meat, but only Talsy was truly happy, the others
forced cheer through a mantle of gloom.

Chapter Six

Chanter stayed
ashore for a few days, spending the time with Talsy. Kieran watched
her happiness with bitter eyes and fretted at the delay, avoiding
the pair as much as possible. Silence had always been his ally, and
he had never been a man of many words, now he became one of fewer
still. The Aggapae, though friendly, spent most of their time
grooming and pampering their horses, or communing with them, as was
their way. To ease his boredom, he joined their hunts while Chanter
was around to guard Talsy, and even Shan came along for the
ride.

As soon as
Talsy fell asleep each night, Chanter left the camp on swift paws
that carried a flitting wolf across the land. Roaming the moonlit
shore, he found hunting cats running with wolf packs and wolves in
dens with dire bears. Stags rutted with goats and bog boars, stray
dogs mated with deer. The beasts' confusion was pitiful, and
without the laws that had always guided them, they were at the
mercy of the growing chaos. He avoided the distant Trueman city
with its twinkling lights, unwilling to witness the horrors that
were being perpetrated there. What the animals did in innocent
confusion, men did for personal gain or idle curiosity.

On the seventh
day, Chanter returned to the sea. Talsy walked with him to the edge
of the waves, biting her lip as she strived to hide her sorrow. He
stopped at the water's edge and turned to her.

"Two moons,
then I'll return, with or without it."

"No. Find it
and bring it back."

"You're
sure?"

She nodded.
"You must find the stone. That's more important than anything. That
way you won't have to leave again."

He bent to
kiss the Mujar mark on her brow. "If you need me, just call."

"I will," she
promised, forcing a smile.

Chanter walked
into the sea, pausing to raise a hand before he dived under the
waves, to reappear as a sleek grey shape that clove the surf and
headed out to sea. She watched until he vanished into the distance,
then walked back to the camp under the Prince's watchful eyes.

In a distant
city, the first boy foal was born. The new crossbreed had the body
of a horse and the torso of a man, and was as developed as a
seven-year-old child. His mother rejected him, lashing out with
flinty hooves whenever he came near. His father, a burly farmer,
was well pleased with his new acquisition, although his wife was
irate at the creature's conception. After soothing his wife with
promises of wealth and leisure, the farmer purchased more mares.
The boy foal was raised on his mother's milk, and soon learnt to
talk, but was banished from the farmer's house and forced to live
in the stables.

The farmer
bragged of his new offspring at the local inn, and learnt of
another man's success with several cows, who had dropped boy calves
shortly before. They had men's bodies and bull's heads. The
manbulls were intelligent, and their father planned to sell them
into slavery as warriors and gladiators. They grew at an
astonishing rate, attained the stature of teenage boys within a few
months and showed the promise of immense size. Unlike the mare, the
cows had accepted them and raised them without fuss. Another tale
was bandied of a goat farmer's get, with a man's body and a goat's
hind legs, interesting, but useless.

Chanter glided
through the brine, propelled by an occasional flick of his tail.
For a month, he had roamed the ocean from one end to the other and
found nothing. With the passing of days and nights of endless
searching, his sense of hopelessness grew, slowing his progress
until now he swam with languid fluke strokes. He might search the
sea for the remainder of his life and never find a fragment of
stone in the immense land under the sea.

Like the land
above, it rose and fell in hills and valleys, towering mountains
and deep chasms, but darkness veiled it. With his extra senses, the
darkness did not hamper his progress. He could find his way along
the seabed, but the staff was invisible to him unless he got close
to it. When he had retrieved Kieran's sword, its utter deadness had
drawn him, since it was a weapon of the Hashon Jahar. The staff had
no such properties, however, only a strong emanation of Dolana that
a Mujar could sense close by.

Chanter let
the current carry him along a shoreline he had travelled before in
his fruitless search. Although he had no hope of restoring the
staff to its duty, his promise to Talsy drove him on. Finding the
staff was her Wish, and he did not want to fail her. He recalled
how she had urged him to use his powers, yet even they could not
aid him in this quest. The water spirits and sea men had found
nothing, which in itself was so strange that he wondered if the
wind had been playing one of its games with him. Playful though
winds were, however, they did not usually lie.

A jarring note
in a thread of the sea's song roused him from his musing, and he
tuned an ear to listen. The fragile web of melody shivered with a
jangling of horror, pain and death. Alarmed, he swerved to follow
the dark melodic thread of terror. Lashing his flukes, he increased
his speed tenfold and shot through the water, his sleek shape
parting it with barely a ripple. The call for help led him along
the shoreline and further out to sea, growing stronger and more
frantic with every moment. Now he could identify the distressed
ones, his form brothers, dolphins.

Leaping from
the waves, he spied three boats clustered together with men busy on
their decks, hauling in a vast net. The dolphins' screams stabbed
him like knives, filled with all the anguish of the dying. A dark
net loomed before him, making him veer and slow. Within the heavy
net, a school of dolphins struggled to reach the air above, their
cries pitiful. Frantically they lashed their flukes, pushing at the
net. In their desperation, some had tried to get through it, then
turned upwards when they ran out of air, and their jaws had become
caught in the rope. Mouths dragged open by the net, they swam with
dying desperation, crying out in despair and fear. In the bottom of
the net, a shoal of silver fish lurked in confusion, not yet
alarmed by the trap.

Anger burnt in
the Mujar's heart. A young dolphin sank, his precious air leaking
from his blowhole as he died. The coals of Chanter's anger flared
into fury, and he changed his form. The graceful dolphin shimmered
and grew. His flukes turned to fins, and his snout flattened into
curved jaws armed with razor teeth. The massive shark turned
towards the net, speeded by a swinging, powerful tail. As he struck
it, he flipped onto his side, tearing through the rope with
serrated teeth that cut the tough strands like cobweb. Lashing his
tail, he ripped and tore at the net, opening a gaping hole. He
entered the rope prison and pushed a struggling dolphin down,
trying to free its jaw from the rope, but in its desperation it
fought only to rise.

Chanter
changed into a man and pulled the dying mammal from the net,
pushing it towards the hole. It shot upwards to the sweet air,
saved mere moments from death. With a mind lock, he tried to
persuade the others to leave through the hole, but most of them
were so close to death that they could not obey. Some did escape,
but the rest continued to struggle towards the air so close to
them, yet out of reach. Chanter grabbed one and pushed it out of
the hole, then another. The dolphins weakened as their air ran out,
and some sank.

Unable to help
them without revealing his presence, he took shark form again and
drove upwards through the struggling school with sweeps of his
tail. His jaws closed on the ropes and sliced through them as he
ripped and tore the net by lashing his head to and fro. Dolphins
rose all around him, drawing great lungfuls of air with explosive
puffs of vapour. Chanter dived after the ones that sank and nudged
them up with his broad snout, pushing them to the surface, where
they gasped and floated exhausted amongst their friends.

Shouts of
surprise and anger came from the boats. Chanter dived for the last
young dolphin that lay in the bottom of the net, but it was dead,
drowned in the sea that was its home. Turning in fury, he rammed
the boat with his blunt snout, rocking it. The men's shouts became
fearful, and they cut their nets to free their vessels. Chanter
rammed the boat again, then turned and charged another, almost
staving in its timbers. He swam just under the surface, so the men
could admire his size and ferocity, his dorsal fin cutting the
water. As the Lowmen freed their vessels and moved away with a
combination of paddling, rowing and hoisting sails, he charged the
boat open-mouthed. His razor teeth cut into the timbers, leaving a
crescent-shaped mark and several spare teeth to confirm the
fishermen's story and leave no doubt as to the size of the shark
that had made it.

The dolphins
rested in the cradle of the waves, and Chanter joined them,
changing into a dolphin as he moved amongst them. Those that were
able sang a mourning song for the one who had died, and their
gentle sorrow made Chanter ashamed of his rage. Once again, he had
stepped out of the Mujar role and let his anger guide him, yet in
doing so he had saved these playful creatures and harmed no one.
Rage was a rare emotion for Mujar, and, although he had felt it
when he had suffered at the hands of Lowmen torturers, he had never
really acted on it. On rare occasions and under extreme torture,
Mujar had been known to lash out and harm those who tormented
them.

Chanter
understood that people hunted animals for meat. Although it was
alien to him and his world, it had been accepted, since the Lowman
animals did it too. The fishermen had no intention of eating the
dolphins, however. They hunted the silver fish that swam below the
dolphin school. The Mujar's anger stemmed from the uncaring cruelty
of the fishermen who allowed the dolphins to drown when they could
so easily release them simply by lowering one side of their
net.