Tales of Noreela 04: The Island (50 page)

“Then there’s hope for them,” the ginger man said.

Instead of answering, Namior nodded down at the crystal, still covered with Kel’s jacket, and asked, “What happened?”

The two men exchanged glances, shuffling nervously from foot to foot. “It screamed,” the ginger man whispered at last. “When the storm came it started, and it only stopped when …”

“When the sky fell apart,” the other man finished for him.

“And now?” Namior asked.

Neither man replied. They glanced away, blinking.

“You haven’t looked,” she said. The ginger man shook his head. And Namior went quickly from angry, to sad, to
understanding, because she would not have looked either. “Then for now, it’s someone else’s problem. Make sure it gets into the right hands.” She smiled at the men and walked on.

Past the last of the stunned survivors, she met a line of Core soldiers strung along a low ridge in the land. They stopped her, some of them asked her questions, and she cast aside the wonder she felt at their different accents, looks and clothes, telling them that this was her home and she needed to see what had become of it. She mentioned Mallor, and told them that he was dead. They let her go.

She found herself alone, walking through the flowing mist in the direction of the sea. Pausing to insert her ground rod into the wet soil, she closed her eyes and sought the language of the land. But it was only a whisper. And when she delved westward, she shuddered with such a sense of revulsion that she let go of the rod and vomited. She leaned over and held her stomach, heaving the meager contents of her guts and trying to concentrate on the painful burns on her face. Slowly, she started to feel better.

The ground rod would not wipe clean. It was stained.

As she approached the valley, the mist began to clear. Creatures still flitted past, but fewer now, as if they had all left. The cool sea breeze kissed her face, and if she closed her eyes it felt almost normal. She had walked slightly to the south, hoping to be able to see straight down the valley past Helio Bridge and into the top of the village, and perhaps even to the harbor and the island beyond. If the air was still loaded with mist, she would not see that far, but she would go as far as was necessary to …

Namior topped a small rise in the land and stopped. The first thing that registered was the group of eight Core standing twenty paces down the small slope from her. U’Nam was there, and so was Pelly, leaning on U’Nam’s shoulder because her left leg had been shattered at the knee and hung limp, shifting like a decorative chime from a tree’s branch.
I can fix that
, Namior thought,
get her out of here, back beyond
where magic is still sick, and I’ll have to find some ceyrat root, and mix a paste of sheebok-liver blood and rantan seeds, but then …

Namior closed her eyes, tried to calm her racing thoughts, breathed deeply, then looked again. All eight Core soldiers were looking down into the valley. None of them moved.

Still misty, that’s why I can’t see, that’s why …

But she was wrong. There was no mist.

And there was no Pavmouth Breaks.

KEL HAD SPENT
many dark moments imagining what it was like to be dead. O’Peeria had once told him a Shantasi saying:
The richest time of your existence is when you don’t realize you’re alive. Start thinking about living, and you have to think about death
. Since her terrible demise, he had tried to put himself in her place many times.

Perhaps at last he knew.

So much of him hurt that it was easier to concentrate on the parts that did not. Each of his senses felt abused, and none seemed to be working as it should. He tasted sounds, heard textures beneath his prone form and saw the smells of devastation washing over him. He kept his eyes closed for a while,
afraid of what he would see of himself were he to open them. Afraid that the ground would be red, and wet with insides.

Something had picked him from his feet and carried him away. It had been the wind and rain, he’d thought, and the lightning spiking down all around him, and the power he’d felt in the ground, so much more than he had ever sensed before. If this was anything like the magic Namior knew… but he had known that was not the case. This was nothing like magic. This was something else entirely.

He moved his fingers, took in a breath, opened his eyes. His senses settled, and he risked turning his head and looking up at the sky. He felt as though he’d fall from the world if he let go, so he dug his fingers into the damp soil.

Mist drifted by him, dancing in swirls and wafts.

The violence of the moment had changed something forever. As yet he did not know what, but he was suddenly desperate to find out. Pain could try to keep him down, but he would forget it eventually, and he could cringe through it to discover the truth.

So he stood and looked around. He was still on the hillside above Pavmouth Breaks. He turned, and behind him through the mist he could just make out the looming shadow of the Komadian construction.
No
, he thought,
that’s all wrong. That shouldn’t still be there. If Namior’s great-grandmother
did
do something to help …

But if she
had
initiated what he suspected—if she really had caused Komadia to move on before the Elders had intended—he had no idea of what might be left behind.

Breathing heavily through the pain, ignoring his bloodied clothing and the hollow throb behind his wounded forehead, he started walking away from the structure, and down toward Pavmouth Breaks. It was time to see what was left.

The mist soaked his clothes. He looked at his feet, concentrating on heading downhill. And then the ground disappeared.

AFTER SEEING WHAT
had happened, it took Namior a long time to move.

There was little left of Pavmouth Breaks. It had been scooped out of the land, lifted away with the valley and slopes, the riverbed and bridges, the harbor and houses and temples, the paths and streets and everything else that had made it what it was. A hundred steps from where she stood, the plains ended in a sheer drop, and beyond that drop was the exposed flesh of the land itself. Dirt and rock glimmered beneath the cloudy sky, wet and shocked and never meant to be seen. Scurrying things sought shelter across the new landscape; large and small, pale, eyeless and many-legged.

There were a few buildings left clinging to the untouched higher slopes, but they were ruined, shaken to their roots by what had happened to their village. They were never meant to be seen standing alone, and now they stood naked and open to view.

All but two of the tall towers built by the Komadians were gone. A stump of one remained down where the harbor had been, its unfinished top emerging and disappearing again in the raging, boiling sea. And the one they’d seen up on the northern cliffs was just visible where it protruded above the mist, crazed and pocked like some old ruin, not something new.

The sheer immensity of the scar in the land took Namior’s breath away and weakened her knees. She touched her face, drawing a nail across one of the burns and gasping at the pain.

Walking forward, she stood beside U’Nam in the line of Core soldiers. None of them acknowledged her arrival. They were all somewhere else, a very personal, secret place in their minds where something like this could be observed, processed and hidden away, ready to be examined later around camp-fires or in private rooms, a bottle of rotwine in one hand and eyes staring into the darkness. This was something never meant to be seen.

The sea had rushed in to fill the new void on the coast. The valley was so much wider than it had been, and deeper, and the River Pav flowed into a violent inlet, the waters swirling, waves crashing in seemingly random directions as larger surges rode in from the ocean. They smashed against the new shores, the water heavy with muck and filth. Landslides grumbled down the edges of the new depression, taking trees and boulders with them.
We should move back
, Namior thought, but even her internal voice was weak with shock.

U’Nam was the first of them to speak. “The island’s gone.”

Namior was confused for a few beats.
That was no island, that was Pavmouth Breaks, my village, the place where my family and friends lived and
—

But then she looked up and out to sea, past the dispersing gloom to where the sun struck its surface through a break in the clouds. And all she could see was water.

“The island’s gone,” she echoed.

“What island?” one of the new Core soldiers said. Namior glanced to the right at U’Nam and Pelly, and they returned her look. Their faces were so blank that she could not help smiling. They smiled back. She snorted. They laughed.

“Madness,” Namior said, but that one word was all she could utter. She held onto U’Nam as the laughter changed to tears and back again, and the others looked at them as if their minds had also been stolen away.

THEY SAW A
Stranger to the south of them. U’Nam shouted some instructions and the Core slipped into a battle formation, but the Stranger was rushing away, metal-clad arms pin-wheeling as it ran headlong down the slope. As it approached the new, jagged cliff where there had been none before, it sped up rather than slowing down. They saw its limbs still thrashing as it tipped over the edge, but it was too far away for them to hear the impact.

“What in the Black was that?” one of the new Core arrivals said.

“A Stranger in armor,” Pelly said, and for some reason she found that funny as well.

The flash of the Stranger’s demise was a weak reflection across the tumultuous valley.

“There might be more,” U’Nam said. “Go back, tell the others to keep watch. They’re hard bastards, but they have a weak spot.” She reached out and touched Namior’s throat. “Here.”

“Look!” Pelly said. She lifted a bloodied arm and pointed back out to sea.

In the raging ocean, where waves were starting to find their directions and levels again, the remains of several ships wallowed. One was mostly sunk, its three masts snapped away and decks awash. A couple more were breaking up, and one pointed its bow and stern at the sky as it went down, broken-backed.

“Good,” U’Nam said.

Namior closed her eyes, because people she knew might have been on those ships. Or people she did not know, but whose faces she would have recognized.
Oh, Kel
, she thought, and suddenly she wanted to get closer to things, drift over that sudden point where Noreela had been cut into and pulled away, immerse herself in the mud and furious waters of the new junction of land and sea. She knew that was impossible and foolish, but the urge was powerful.

She could not simply turn her back and walk away.

“Kel,” she said, her voice soft. She could not cry. She was in too much shock, so much pain. But just as the taking of the village had left a hole in the world, so the loss of her love had carved a hollow in her heart.

The newly arrived Core turned around and headed back to where the survivors were being cared for, on the lookout for more Strangers. They disappeared into the gloomy mist that still hung inland, and Namior wanted to call them back,
shout at them about what they had seen and why had it happened and how could they just walk away, how could they not
feel?
But they had never even seen Pavmouth Breaks. For them that was just a place of raw slopes, landslides, and a roaring, violent sea.

She wanted to go closer, but U’Nam would not let her. So she asked if they would wait with her for a while, and they agreed, even Pelly with her terrible injuries. “I can heal that,” Namior said, but as she spoke she was looking down at the wound in the land.

The clouds slowly cleared and sunlight broke through. The sea settled quickly, disturbed here and there by continuing rockfalls and landslides, but always resolving its own chaos. It calmed into the eternal ebb and flow that Namior had always thought of as the beat of the land.

She sat down several steps in front of the two women, wanting to feel alone.

They took our village
, she thought, over and over, never quite believing but already beginning to understand. Some of the rugged geography of Komadia, what little she and Kel had seen of it, was starting to make sense.
Perhaps it was a much smaller island when all this began …

They waited there for some time, watching the clouds change and feeling the air grow warmer, seeing seabirds drifting across the altered part of their world as though it had been like that forever. From inland they heard the distant sound of a Stranger’s demise, and out to sea Namior could see the shattered remains of Komadian ships. Soon, there would be no trace of them having even been there at all.

Apart from us
, she thought.
Witnesses
. And for the first time since the cataclysm, she wondered what her great-grandmother had done.

It was Pelly who finally broke the silence.

“By all the Black, that’s Kel Boon.”