Tales of Noreela 04: The Island (49 page)

Tower to tower
, Namior thought, and she wondered just what that meant.

They met a small group of residents trying to make their way along the valley, less than a dozen in total, and at their head Namior found her mother. They hugged and wept, and the two Core told them they had to hurry. Namior wanted to wait, to talk, ask how her mother had escaped.

“Who are they?” her mother asked, nodding at U’Nam and Pelly.

“Friends,” Namior said. “There are more coming. They’re going to help.”

“Have you
seen
those things at the harbor? And that thing
growing
out of the water there?”

Namior nodded. She expected more questions, and perhaps some resistance, but her mother hugged her again, hard. There would be plenty of time for talking later.

They moved along the valley path, then up the slopes
away from the village. Namior feared that every step they took would be their last.

Her hair stood on end. The air was charged, filled with potential, and sparks played around their feet where they splashed through the water. Lightning flashed almost continuously, and with every flash came the sound of impact. The ground shook, sending mad ripples and waves through the flowing rainwater.
Going back to the sea
, Namior thought. She stuck out her tongue and tasted the rain once more, and Komadia sat many miles behind her like a warm, rotten thing.

When they reached the higher slopes they saw the forbidding tower to the north, lightning dancing around its head, and as if called up by the sight, three Strangers appeared on the plain. They seemed confused and disoriented, but when they saw the Noreelans, they charged.

Namior went forward to be with U’Nam and Pelly, but the Shantasi grabbed her arm, reaching inside her own jacket and producing one of the dead Stranger’s projectile weapons.

“No!” U’Nam said. “We’ll hold them here, you go on. You know where to meet the others.”

Pelly fired the weapon she had picked up, and fifty steps away one of the Strangers grunted in surprise and fell. “Down!” Pelly shouted, waving at the confused people.

U’Nam and Namior dropped to the ground, and the others followed. “I want to help!” Namior said.

“And this is the best way,” U’Nam said. “We didn’t find out quite what we’d hoped… numbers, strength. But if we don’t make it back, you can tell them enough. And you have to lead these people out.”

The dead Stranger erupted into flames, its demise imitated by a sheet of lightning far overhead. Namior heard her mother and the others whisper and moan when the sound of the wraith came, and she nodded and squeezed U’Nam’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry about Mallor.”

U’Nam grinned, and it was the first time Namior had seen such an expression on the Shantasi’s face. “This is the Core’s meaning!” she said. Then she turned and crawled for cover.

Namior went to her mother, hunched down, listening to the coughs of the Strangers’ weapons firing both ways. “We have to go!” she said, but her mother did not need telling. The two of them stood together, and the few survivors of Pavmouth Breaks followed.

The clouds were so thick above them that it was almost as dark as night, but the lightning lit their way.

Namior’s skin crawled.

Something was going to happen.

THERE WERE NO
more Strangers.

They had traveled beyond the Komadians’ influence, but not the storm’s. Namior led the way, aiming for where they had left the other two Core men behind before heading into Pavmouth Breaks not so long ago. Her mother walked by her side. Neither of them spoke. Namior felt the weight of words between them, strung like a line ready to break, but it was not the time. At last, she was starting to believe that there would be a later.

The wind was not so terrible up there, sweeping across the high plains with no valley to funnel or concentrate its force. The rain still drove against their backs, but they could not be wetter than they already were, and the tough fisherfolk were
used to discomfort. Lightning flashed, but the thunder came later than before. Pavmouth Breaks was the center of the storm. They had left that place behind.

When shapes emerged from the gloom of rain, Namior feared the worst, and she ran forward brandishing Mallor’s sword. She was met with a harsh curse from Mygrette, then the two witches laughed and hugged. There were at least thirty others with the old witch, and she said she had been gathering escapees to her, hoping that with enough people they could go back into the village to rescue more.

The two groups of survivors became one, and Mygrette joined Namior and her mother in the lead.

“What’s happening back down there?” Mygrette asked, having to shout against the storm.

“They’re taking everyone!” Namior called.

“This storm isn’t right. It’s not
natural.”
Mygrette grabbed her arm, eyes blazing. “I’ve listened to the land, and it’s good to do so again. But it’s
terrified.”

“Magic is afraid?” Namior asked, and the idea chilled her. She wanted to stop there and then, plunge her ground rod into the soil and join herself with the land.

“No, no …” Mygrette shook her head. “Wrong word. It’s like Pavmouth Breaks isn’t part of Noreela anymore. It’s a blank, somewhere magic won’t touch or acknowledge. As if not seeing it will make it go away.”

Namior frowned, looking down as she walked. They splashed through mud. Lightning flashed again, reflecting itself around her feet. Then the thunder rolled in, a long, rumbling roar that went on and on.

“Namior!” her mother called. “Something…!”

Namior turned around. They
all
turned, because the storm had increased in ferocity even more. A sheet of lightning hung in the gloomy sky behind them, held aloft by the two towers they could see and those they could not, smothering Pavmouth Breaks, cracking and thrashing like the multiple legs of a deep-ocean scortopus. A series of explosions
shook the ground, sending massive shock waves that splashed puddles and shook showers of drops from tall plants.

“The sky is breaking,” Mygrette said.

Namior shook her head, because that was impossible.

And then the sky broke.

NAMIOR FELL WITH
her mother close beside her, and they both took comfort from the contact.

The sky lit up, too bright to look at, too hot to touch. A wave of heat blasted at them through the heavy rains, a visible ripple originating above the village and sweeping outward, turning rain to steam and banishing the dusky darkness before it. Namior brought her arms up to cover her face, squinting her eyes shut against the brightness and holding her breath in anticipation.

The wave hit. It was a maelstrom of light and heat, a shock wave that sucked the breath from Namior’s chest, and an explosion that thumped at her ears. Unable to breathe, skin stretching and burning where it was exposed, she rolled over onto her front and pressed her face into the mud.

Breathe, breathe… !

The noise was tremendous, far too loud to make any sense out of, and Namior was not sure where hearing ended and feeling began. The ground rolled beneath her, thudding against her body as though shaking from a series of massive impacts. The air around her grew hot, and when she finally managed to draw a breath, it scorched her mouth and throat dry.

Someone cried out, and Namior wondered where anyone had found the strength.

She heard and felt something coming then, a thing far more powerful than had struck them already. It was preceded by a few beats of relative calm and silence, like a tidal wave drawing water from a harbor before smashing itself against the land.

Namior looked sideways at her mother. The two women smiled and held each other’s hands.

Namior’s last sense was of being lifted from the ground and rolled, pummeled from all sides by pain. And then, for a time, her world ended.

SHE ROSE SLOWLY
out of the mists of unconsciousness. Her hearing faded in first, the gentlest sigh of a breeze interrupted by something harsh and demanding, which soon resolved itself into a voice.

“Wake… wake… take your time …”

She sensed the extremes of her body, limbs splayed, stomach pressed against the wet ground. Flexing her arms and legs, there was little real pain. But when she turned her head to look up, fires erupted across her neck and face.

“Slowly,” the voice said.

“Mother?”

The voice did not reply.

“Mother!” Namior rolled onto her side and opened her eyes. A man knelt next to her, his bald head gleaming with sweat, clothing and belts spiked with weapons. He looked intimidating, but his eyes were full of concern.

“You’ve been burned,” the man said. “Lie back. I have some soothing paste.”

Namior ignored him, sitting up through waves of pain and looking around. The scene that greeted her was nowhere she had ever been.

The rain had ceased, but a heavy mist drifted across the plains, blown inland by a gentle breeze from the coast. It carried with it damp hints of an extinguished fire, and even some of the mist itself appeared smeared with soot. The sun was a smudge of yellow high in the sky.
Noon
, she thought, though it felt like twilight.

People lay all around, most of them tended by others she had never seen.

“Core?” Namior asked.

“Who are you?”

“Namior Feeron, from Pavmouth Breaks.”

“What happened here?”

She shook her head, dizziness turning the flat ground around her. The bald man grabbed her arm gently and leaned her against him, stroking her face and throat with paste-smeared fingers. He muttered beneath his breath as he did so, and Namior recognized the touch of a fellow healer.

“My mother,” Namior said, and already she was filled with dread. Tears threatened, but then she heard her mother’s voice.

“Namior.” She stumbled through a patch of scorched gorse and fell to her knees by Namior’s feet, holding her daughter’s shins and laughing softly. “Namior, I saw you blown away, and I thought …”

Namior dried the tears with a smile, looking at her mother’s injuries with concern. “Please,” she said to the bald Core healer. “My mother first.” The man smiled and nodded.

“Everyone else?” Namior asked.

“Those who were with us are fine, apart from Mygrette. No sign of her.”

“She’s hard to kill.” Namior injected the comment with more hope than she felt. She turned and looked behind her, and gasped at what she saw. Shadowed against the mist, exposed here and there when a breeze parted around them, stood a line of machines. Their metalwork shone damp, and their sharp edges were out of place against the rolling clouds. There must have been thirty that she could see, and probably more she could not, hidden beyond her sight.

“How many of you are there?” she asked.

“Almost a hundred, so far. We arrived an hour ago, found you all here, and found the landscape …” He shook his head.
“Trees are uprooted. There are animals everywhere, most dead, some still alive; birds, reptiles, some sheebok and some things I believe are from the sea. Many taller plants have had their higher parts scorched black. The leaves are dead. And the air …”

“It stinks of the sea,” Namior said.

“Not the sea smell I’m used to,” the bald man said, passing his hands across the bridge of Namior’s mother’s nose.

“It’s the smell of
beneath
the sea,” Namior said. “Rotting plants. Dead things.”

“We sent a scouting party toward the shore,” he said. “They should be back soon.”

“I wonder what they’ll find?” her mother said.

Namior already had an idea of what they’d find: ruins. The skeleton of a village, the shattered shell of a community, inhabited only by wraiths and dead things.

“I wonder if anyone else survived,” her mother continued, her voice soft and almost dreamy.

“I have to see,” Namior said, standing and holding her hand.

“No, you don’t.” But her mother did not try to hold her back, and for that Namior was grateful.

She walked west, through the groups of stunned survivors, seeing faces she recognized and the members of the Core, whom she did not. She thought briefly of U’Nam and the scarred Pelly, and U’Nam saying,
This is the Core’s meaning!
as if the Shantasi had lived all her life waiting to die. She walked into the drifting mist, and it settled damp and sickly on her face. She rubbed one hand across her throat, wincing, and realizing that she had not let the bald healer finish his work.

It did not matter. There would be time, and the burns were not too severe. At least she
could
be healed, whereas the rest of Pavmouth Breaks …

She tried not to think on it too much, not yet. Perhaps magic would still avoid the place, but she had a sense of
things having moved on. She needed to know where. She had to see, not imagine.

And Kel… her love, her wood-carver, her runaway soldier Kel Boon. It was he she was looking for really, not some old village of stone and timber, vanished people and fading memories. Kel was solid, and she still felt his touch deep inside, his love nestled alongside her soul, an eternal partner.

“Kel!” she called once, and when there was no answer she walked on.

Something large ran past her, casting a jerky shadow through the mist. She heard the wild horse’s hooves thumping the mud as it galloped away in panic. Above her she could hear birds flapping and squealing, and the undergrowth to her left rustled as something emerged. It was a streaked lizard, the scarlet dashes across its flanks blazing bright in fear. It expanded its collar at her, hissed and disappeared to the east.

The creatures of the land were running or flying away, and she walked against the flow.

She met the two Core who had arrived with Mallor and the others. They guarded the crystal on the ground between them, and the ginger man’s face bore a memory of deep shock. She told them of their flight up out of the village, Mallor’s death, and U’Nam and Pelly staying behind to cover their retreat.