Tales of Noreela 04: The Island (44 page)

Kel closed his eyes. The Core had trained him how to project his senses, concentrating on each one in turn in an effort to exaggerate the whole. He listened hard, breathing through his open mouth, but all he could hear were raindrops dropping on last year’s fallen leaves. He inhaled slowly and deeply, smelling only damp soil and the clear tang of rain, the alien sourness absent. He risked touching the tip of his tongue to the air, but he tasted nothing he did not know. His sense of touch was dominated by the throbbing, pulsing pain from the bruises on the backs of his head and neck. He tried to blot it out, but even his extremities were possessed by its warm glow.

He scanned as far as he could without moving his head, and he saw nothing new.

I could get up
, he thought.
I’ve killed those things before. I’d have a chance, at least, and
—

As if reading his thoughts, the Stranger standing directly behind him stood astride his body and touched his temple with the barrel of its projectile weapon. The metal felt oddly warm against Kel’s skin. Primed with steam and ready to fire.

Kel shifted to show that he was awake and aware of the soldier’s presence. Then he sat up, slowly. His head swam and he kept both hands on the wet ground, supporting himself. The Stranger backed away a little, still pointing the weapon at his face.
My reputation steps before me
, Kel thought, and he even managed a smile.

“Kel Boon,” a voice said, “smiling at secret thoughts.” A Stranger and a Komadian were walking through the trees from the direction of the structure. The Komadian’s footfalls were almost silent, clothes dark against the night.

“Keera Kashoomie,” Kel said, maintaining his smile.

“I knew you must be Core from the moment we landed,” she said. “You held a knife to my throat and checked my neck for gills.”

“Perhaps I should have made you some with my blade.”

The tall woman stopped a few steps from Kel and smiled down, cool and in control. “And perhaps I should have had you killed that first day.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Keera shrugged. “Easier if the populace is compliant. But we win, either way. We always win.”

“One of your friends told me that only recently.”

“Lemual,” she whispered, the smile dropping from her face. “I wasn’t certain it was you.” There was only hatred in Keera Kashoomie’s eyes. That shocked Kel, and behind it he perceived a truth he knew he would grow to regret.

“Oh,” he said. “You and Lemual.”

Keera nodded at the Stranger by her side, and he stepped forward.

Kel barely had time to raise one arm in front of his face before the Stranger’s metal-gloved hand struck. He fell back,
feeling blood gushing from his nose, eyes watering, the pain and shock spreading through his head.

“Where is the crystal you took?” Keera asked.

“Why?” Kel said, wincing through the red mist. He could not see; pain had robbed his sight. “Another potential lover of yours in there?”

A pause, during which Kel imaged the woman nodding again, and then the Stranger behind him kicked him in the back. Kel cried out and fell sideways, one arm twisting around so he could press his hand against his back. It was a natural response, but it did nothing to ease the pain.

Keera Kashoomie came and squatted beside him. If he’d still had his weapons, he thought he could have killed her before one of the Strangers killed him. Even without them there was a chance he could rip out her throat, plunge his fingers into her eye sockets or break her neck, but the odds were not so great, and right then he did not relish the risk.

“Well then, let’s try this one. Where is the woman who accompanied you to Komadia?”

“Dead. One of your slime-things shot her with its steam weapon, and she died when we returned.” He held Keera’s gaze, remembering the sight of Namior being shot to strengthen the lie.

“The crystal?”

“Hidden. I know where. I can find it for you.” They cared deeply for their trapped people. Lemual had displayed that, and Keera also made it clear. Kel could use it to his advantage, but to do that, he had to stop trying to antagonize the woman.
She reminds me of O’Peeria
, he thought with a shock.
Gorgeous, strong, cold
.

Keera stared at him for a long time. The pain eased in his face, enough to reassure him that his nose was not broken, and the flow of blood into his mouth lessened. He sat up again, slowly, and still the emissary did not break eye contact with him. Kel could read nothing on her face, nothing in her
eyes, and as the rain halted and the first hints of dawn touched the sky inland, he felt his life hanging in the balance.

“I buried it,” he said, to break the silence.

“You’re the first Core we’ve ever captured,” she mused, her voice loaded with threat. The Core had tried many times to interrogate a captured Stranger, and in the early days, so it was said, many Core members had died doing so. Did Keera and her fellow Komadians know the fates of all those Strangers they had sent? Those spies, infiltrators, invaders? The Core had always assumed that the arcing proboscises were communicators of some kind.

He wondered whether revenge formed a part of their makeup, much as it often dictated events and lives in Noreela.

Perhaps all he could hope for was a quick death.

“The Core is coming.”

Her grin broadened, and she prodded him in the chest. “Let them.” Then she stood, backing away from Kel and still smiling.

Here it comes
, he thought.
Whatever’s going to happen, here it comes
.

“I could take you to Komadia,” Keera said. “There are still many thousands of my people in their crystal cells. Interested?”

“I’ll never let one of your things take my body,” he said, desperate and hopeless.

“Don’t think you’d have any choice, Noreelan. Choice is way beyond you.
All
of you.” She leaned forward, her eyes glittering and her expression one of glee. “But no, that’s not to be your fate. The thought of walking past you on Komadia as we take the island here, and there, and somewhere else… seeing your face for eternity, knowing what you did to Lemual …” She turned away, averting her eyes just as he saw the first glint of tears.

“What, then?” he asked.

“Like I said, you’re the only Core we’ve caught. I’m sure with the right persuasion, you can tell us plenty.”

Just kill me
, he thought. And all the Core training in existence could do nothing to shelter him from the terror.

NAMIOR SAW WRAITHS
in the mist. The dawn confused her vision, casting misleading light across shadows that refused to fade. The shapes made holes in the mist, moving slowly, drifting across the periphery of her senses, and as she focused on one so another would move more, as though to distract her attention.

She had seen wraiths before. They haunted the growing shadows of dusk and the retreating shades of dawn, sometimes visible through shimmering heat haze when the sea breeze was just right. Once or twice she had been touched by one, when her power as a healer was not enough, and the departing spirit gave thanks for her efforts. And all those times she had never been afraid …

Namior knelt on a small eastward-facing slope, staring out across the depression in the land before her and wishing that the sun would rise faster. That heat would burn away the mist, then she would no longer see what terrified her so.

She cursed the Komadians and what they had done. They had shown her things beyond her knowledge and magics she could not know. They had made her afraid when there should be nothing there to fear.

A sudden movement to her left drew her attention, and from the corner of her eye to the right she saw something quickly closing on her. She gasped and dropped to her side, drawing her knife, dropping the coat-wrapped crystal.

The swirl of mist beside her faded away, like a breath through smoke.

The crystal had come to rest against something. It should still be rolling, but it was motionless. The more she concentrated, the more ambiguous the mist seemed, curling around solids that were not there and filling voids just made.

“Put the knife down,” a voice said.

Shock made her drop the blade and wince back against the slope. She brought her hands before her face and looked up, because the command had come from above.

A shape manifested from the mist, taking on color, solidity and weight. It was a machine the likes of which Namior had never seen before—a tall thing standing on three long metallic legs and topped with a cylindrical body. Sat astride the body was a man.

“Who
…?”
Namior said, but she could barely speak.
It’s them
, she thought.
The Komadians. They went farther inland than we knew, guarding, expanding, exploring …

The machine buzzed, and the man’s hand rested on a series of levers sprouting from its metal back like stiff hairs. Namior saw no steam, nor did she hear its hissing anywhere inside. Several curled wires hung from the underside of the machine’s main body, trailing against the ground. Its long legs were thick and heavily jointed, not slender and graceful, and she saw the slick of grease leaking from where they joined the torso.

“You look confused,” the man said. “Never seen anything like this before?”

“Not quite,” Namior said, then everything around her changed.

Four figures faded in from the mist. In the space of a beat they shimmered, sent shudders through the surrounding skeins of vapor, and took on color and mass just as the tall machine had moments before. There were two men and two women, one of the men pointing a large crossbow directly at her chest from five steps away.

“Core?” Namior said.

The man sitting astride the machine frowned, then barked an order in a language she did not know.

Two women and a man came at her, knocking her to the ground, grabbing her arms and sitting on them so that she could not reach for any concealed weapons. One woman
pulled a knife and slashed at Namior’s jacket and undershirt buttons, ripping them open and exposing her chest and stomach. Then the other woman and man rolled her over and pulled the clothes from her shoulders and down to her elbows. They pressed her facedown into the heathers.

Namior knew what they were looking for. “I’m not one of those fucking monsters!”

“She’s clear,” a woman’s voice said.

“Test her anyway.”

“I’m from Pavmouth Breaks, they’ve come and attacked our village, and—”

“Say one more thing before we’re sure about you,” the man on the machine said, “and we’ll cut out your tongue.”

Namior believed him.
So this is the Core
. She had so much to tell them, so much to show, but, silenced, she had to let them find their own way for a while.

They let her roll onto her back, then the two women knelt on her arms again. The one on her left had long, dark hair and pale skin, and Namior realized she was seeing her first Shantasi. Kel had told her a little about them, and Namior had so much more she wanted to ask. But the woman stared back without expression. In her left hand she held a knife pressed against Namior’s throat.

The woman on her right was short and thin, and looked as if a gust of wind could break her. One side of her face was a mass of scars, and her left cheek looked as if it had been smashed and reset by an inexperienced healer.
Bone shattered
, Namior thought.
I’d have used a curve of reglet egg to reform that shape, rather than leave her…
The woman glanced at Namior as if she knew what she was thinking. Namior tried to smile. The woman looked away.

The man, his hair a startling mass of ginger with scarlet shells braided into its many twisted strands, sat astride her hips. Namior was aware of her exposed breasts, but he seemed unconcerned, picking through the contents of a small circular tin.

“Hurry!” the man on the machine said.

“Mallor, they’re difficult to catch.” He grabbed at something in the tin and held it up to dawn’s first light.

An insect struggled between his thumb and forefinger.

“What are you—?” Namior gasped, but the Shantasi lifted her knife and laid its blade across Namior’s lips.

The man nodded to the Shantasi woman, and faster than Namior could see, the woman sliced a small cut below her left breast. It took a few beats for the shock to pass and the sting to burn in, and by then the man had dropped the insect into the dribble of blood.

Namior felt it running across her skin and down toward her stomach. Then she heard a sizzle, a harsh spit, and all three Core members stood from her and backed away, eyes wide.

“Not Noreelan!” the Shantasi said. “But …”

“No markings, no gills,” the scarred woman said.

“I
am
Noreelan!” Namior sat up and pulled her jacket shut. The movement caused alarm amongst the others. The Shantasi woman flipped a bow from her shoulder and strung an arrow, and the soldier bearing the heavy crossbow leaned forward. Namior could almost hear the tension in the firing mechanism, the creaking as his finger applied more and more pressure to the trigger.

The man on the machine, Mallor, passed his hands across its controls, and it took three steps back. Then its legs shortened and thickened, and a tubular appendage emerged from its belly aimed at Namior.

“Mallor, I don’t know—” the scarred woman began, but Namior saw advantage in their confusion, and she knew she might only have a few beats left.

“I’m from Pavmouth Breaks. I’m a witch, a healer, and I came here to find you. You’re Core, yes? I brought that to show you.” She pointed at the crystal, apparently forgotten in the confusion, and she wished it had rolled out of the jacket so they could see.

“The signal?” Mallor asked from the machine’s back.

“Sent by my lover, and now he’s—”

“Your blood killed the pod beetle,” the ginger man said. “Noreelan blood would nourish it.”

“My great-grandmother… she was a Komadian. She fled them a long time ago.”

“Komadian?” the Shantasi asked.

“The invaders. They’re here.”

The five Core were silent for a beat, all of them looking at her with a mixture of confusion and incredulity. The Shantasi took one step back, bow still raised, and Namior perceived a sudden calmness in her features.