The Legend of El Shashi (11 page)

Without
my touch …

Revelation! My shoulders quaked with
a primal emotion. As though yanked by traces hitched to a brace of jatha, I lurched across the space between us. Kneeling, I closed my quivering hands over Salk’s. I shut my eyes and there found, for the first time since I began soldiering, that shady pool of the quoph’s peace Janos had fought so hard to teach me. Did I hear the rush of a condor’s wings?

So long denied, the enormity of my actions became as clear to me as the lucent days of Doublesun. What had I become? A tool of pain. An anti-healer. Destroyer, rather than saviour. One who revelled in creating suffering. No. I
had never revelled in death–had I? Had I done ought in my military service save render Ulim my utmost devotion?

I bowed my head.
Indeed, I could not have raised it by any power at my command. The sense of iniquity was too crushing. Arlak was not some unthinking brute. Arlak had conscience, intelligence, and choice. Yet all that I loathed most I had chosen to do, and more.

I wailed, “Oh Mata, o God, how I have failed!”

Salk stiffened. His body leaped off the ground. I thought it was the power. I thought it was my doing, for his eyes were swollen wells of wonderment–but before I could stammer an apology, the ground lurched again. It grew a spine which tossed us aside, uncaring.
Screesh!
was the sound it made. The ridge elongated before our astonished eyes. A monstrous mole-run burrowed through the earth, waist-high, shedding great sods of turf off its back as it rumbled off a short ways.

Above the
cabingdabash
of battle, I could hear the beast panting as if an armourer toiled at his forge-bellows, pumping great gasps of air into the white heart to raise the temperature until metal runs like water.

That sound! Every last vestige of colour drained from my face.

*  *  *  *

Five blazing lanterns lit the
inner sanctum of the great pavilion, but gloom still festered in its corners. The twelve Hassutls held council here, though this eventide the room was more crammed than usual–for my interrogation, no less.

“It chased him, sah,” Salk said, in the same ramrod-formal tone in which he had delivered his briefing. “Where he ran, the beast chased after.”

“And that was when the Sybali abandoned the battle!”

Freyal rounded upon
the officer who had interrupted him. “Name and rank, soldier?”

“Lammak, sah! Tenlead of the Jerlak, sah!”

That made him a leader of ten units, some two hundred men. Less–many less–since we started this war. From my chair, I observed the altercation. Chained hand and foot, I could do nought else.

“Did I ask you a question, soldier?”

“No sah!”

“How do you
fancy the first rank, soldier?”

Crafty! This Hassutl was dangerous. He knew officers preferred to stay further back. This man’s punishment was either to declare his cowardice, or to join the first rank where the most men died.

The officer yelped, “I shall do as you command, sah!”

A good reply, but Freyal missed not a beat. “Then return to the Third, Lammak of no rank. Tell your superior officer to report here immediately.”

Thus instantly demoted, the unfortunate man nearly ran out of the room. The Hassutl spun on his heel. His glare spared no man. “We lost six hundred and twenty-six soldiers, good men all, today!” he barked. “Who else wishes to play the fool, let him be dismissed now!”

No-one moved.

Our force had been decimated.

In the great pavilion, the Hassutl’s word was law. Freyal it was, I had learned, who had forged this unlikely coalition to counter the Lymarian advance
–and from what I had seen, it was his iron will that bound them together. A bristling tygar of a man, his loose-limbed frame easily filled his armour; functional armour rather than formal. This set him apart from the other Hassutls.

He prowled over to Salk with sleek, pent-up menace. “Carry on, soldier.”

Salk shot back, “Sah! He ran toward the Lymarian line, sah! The beast chased after and ate three, mebbe four o’ the Nethespawn afore they could blink. It were that fast, sah!”

“Describe the beast.”

“It were nothing I never done seen before, sah.” Salk plucked his beard. “Ah’d say it were a shadworm, only them critters grow no longer than your arm, sah. It had these feelers it waved like this–” he wiggled his fingers above his head “–and the body were red rings, like rusty armour.”

“How big did you say, soldier?”

“Mebbe … five men laid head to foot, sah?”

Forget the Wurm’s body, I thought sourly. The end I’d seen came armed with a thicket of
mandibles and pincers that had shovelled man after screaming man into its maw. Not that I’d paused to request further details or make polite conversation, mark my words! The entire episode had lasted less than a span before the Wurm burrowed into the ground and disappeared once more.

The Sybali had not been
sighted since.

All because of a misuse of my power. Misuse? Exactly how selfish was it to save my own life? To protect myself, and Salk too, from the Sybali? My jaw
clenched so hard, my ears hurt. And Jyla’s forfeit? Obviously the Wurm would appear when I used her bequest to maim rather than to heal. This second time it was clearer–I killed the Sybali woman by breaking apart an otherwise healthy heart. But the first? All I’d done was take the old man’s money …

Selfishly.

What would happen if the Wurm caught me?

“Arlak!” Freyal’s bellow snapped me out of my reverie.

“Yes, sah?”

“Your explanation is due, soldier.” I must have looked blank, for he added with heavy sarcasm, “How came a simple ranksman by such a pet? Who are you? Where do you hail from?”

This was easier. “I’m Arlak Sorlakson of Yarabi Vale, sah. It’s near–”

“I know Yarabi Vale.” Freyal was prowling again. “To my knowledge, Yarabi Vale is
home to a clutch of vegetable farmers who have never in a thousand anna displayed the slightest hint of a Warlock’s skills.” He paused to smile at me. “And you, Arlak Sorlakson, are sweating.”

True, every word of it, down to my excessive perspiration. The Hassutl was not only dangerous, he was observant too
, though why it should matter … “Yes, sah,” I offered, as blandly as possible.

“Dishonest men sweat differently,” said Freyal, still smiling. “They have a special stink about them. And dishonest men who are hiding a secret
–they stink worst of all.”

I sat
trembling in my best imitation of a pinned rabbit.

“So, Arlak Sorlakson, why don’t we go over your story one more time? And just in case
a detail or two might go adrift in the telling, I’ll ask Tomak here to stand ready to help you keep your thoughts in order.”

Tomak was the Fal
oxxian brute picking masticated bits of meat out of his gums with the largest, most wickedly barbed dagger I had ever seen. His face was a mass of scarified tissue, swirling patterns painfully picked into the skin and deliberately made to scar by rubbing ash mixed with colouring agents into the open wounds. I had heard campfire tales about him. Apparently his tribe were especially skilled in the arts of torture, and their favourite pastime consisted of competing to see how long they could keep a man alive while removing all of the skin from his body with special, thin-bladed knives they fondly referred to as ‘person peelers’. They wooed their women by constructing necklaces for them of human teeth–the more necklaces, the higher her status in the tribe.

Freyal’s smile never slipped. “I’m especially interested in turning this secret weapon of yours to our use, Arlak Sorlakson. I want to know what rituals you have developed to summon the creature. How long can you hold the conjuration? How can we use it to defeat the Lymarians?”

I sucked in my lips. How much should I tell?

“Tomak, remind our guest we don’t have all
eventide.”

“Wait!” I yelped. “It’s called a Wurm, sah.”

Freyal’s smile showed all of his teeth this time. He drawled, “I know. The Mistress Jyla sent word by message-drum. Mayhap you know her? I see you do.”

Thus
, in one dread stroke, was my ruin laid bare.

There is a Beast, a many-headed Beast,

A devourer of men and despoiler of life
,

Whose breath is the blast of Nethe
,

And
whose name is War.

Phari al’Mahi kin Saymik,
Wurm’s Tails

Madness. Utter madness. Who, of his own volition, hurls his mortal self headlong towards a horde of eight thousand enemy warriors, pursued by a creature of sorcery?

The first time, the Lymarians did not know what was coming. Perhaps they took me for a madman, or for a heroic fool
–the more fools they–and let me advance to within a javelin-throw of their lines before they saw the earth rise behind me, and the Wurm burst through with a grating scream.

I slipped in turning aside. The huffing, screeching monster thundered straight into their lines, levelling men as tufts of hewehat grain yield to the sickle’s sweep. So many were packed together, escape was impossible. Until the Wurm burrowed back into the earth, all that
I could hear was the terrified bawling of men trying to flee, and above that, the shrieks of the dying.

Freyal remarked favourably upon this ‘efficient’ form of warfare.

I spent the makh of darkness alternately weeping and throwing up, until my stomach took up knives and tried to slay me.

*  *  *  *

Have you ever killed a man in order to make it possible to kill other men? They brought me a prisoner. I killed him. This summoned the Wurm. Panicked, I ran at the Lymarians with all the grace of a long-legged, clucking lyom fleeing the butcher’s cleaver. They tried to kill me.

This time, I lost my nerve. The Wurm surged out of the sod and chased me across the valley, all the way to the Lymarian camp, before a withering hail of javelins convinced me to run a different course. I had just started back when the Wurm vanished beneath the soil again, the trail of its
passage marked by a freshly ploughed ridge of soil and sod connecting our two camps. I was fortunate one of their darts did not spit me as a farmer spits a hog for the Doublesun Cahooday bonfire.

Freyal had Tomak discuss my failure of heart with me
–but not too vigorously. He needed his no-longer-secret weapon alive, and able to run. This cut short Tomak’s favourite threat of breaking my kneecaps. But he was nothing if not creative.

What was needed, Freyal declaimed, was a different strategy. Tens of men were not enough. He wanted
to slaughter hundreds, if not thousands.

I crawled miserably into my tent and tried to stanch the bleeding of my nose and lips. I dared not heal myself.

And I no longer had any companions to tend my wounds. Freyal removed them, but they would have shunned me anyway. I missed Salk’s constant grousing. Janos’ voice seared my conscience. I wanted to believe I was so afraid of Freyal, I had no choice but to do his bidding. But there were worse enemies trapped within the walls of my skull.

*  *  *  *

Two makh before dioni orison, or dawn, Tomak tapped my shoulder. “Do it.”

In the murky, cloud-obscured moonlight, the inner sentry line of the Lymarian camp was nought but shadows upon shadows. The raiding party had silently
garotted three men in the outer circle and replaced them with our own. Our soldiers clustered around me, close enough to smell the oily-sweat of their armour.

I turned to the pris
oner. He was half-dead already–a sword thrust near the heart I could have healed with a touch. Instead, I killed him artfully. How depressing to choose the most painless method to murder a man. To have this power over life, but nought over my own. Scant time for thought. The ground beneath my feet was already a-tremble.

That was Wurm-
sign.

Doubled
over in a scuttling, hunch-backed beetle run, I set off toward the Lymarian camp. I would have to rely on speed and surprise to take me past the remaining sentries. The Wurm was unpredictable. Though I could sense a wrongness, a peculiar silence as the night birds and insects keeping still perhaps in fear, the beast did not surface immediately this time, but instead, I heard a prolonged, rumbling groan as though the earth itself were suffering a colossal case of indigestion. The camp yet slumbered. But the sentries exclaimed in alarm as I barrelled past them.

“Halt!”

I felt something score my right side, perhaps a blade, but kept right on running–my life depended on speed. Don’t look! Don’t stop! I couldn’t help myself. Terror will do that to a man.

Just before I reached the
serried ranks of tents, I chanced a backward glance to see if I might glimpse the Wurm.

At once
, I saw a disturbance. A heaving wave of scrubby grasses and low, redolent sulg bushes surged towards me at about the pace of a man walking with a purpose, borne on the back of rising clods of earth and boulders shifted from their foundations deep beneath the soil. I gasped aloud, “It has grown! Oh Mata save me! It wants to feed!”

Even in the dim moonlight, there was no mistaking how the snaking, lengthening mound
dogged my path, how easily the unseen bulk thrust the earth aside, how it ascended with ominous intent …

Ah! What terrors lacerated my quoph! For it seemed to me the beast longed for nought but to sate its craving with
human flesh; that from its inception it was Nethe-bent on destruction; that this appetite for unregenerate malevolence was somehow reflected or rooted in my own being; and that the wellspring of it all must be Ulim himself–the snake in my quoph.

The plan was to
run the Wurm through the camp. In my hands rested the power to break the Lymarians. I was the whip, the lightning-bolt from a clear sky. If only our cause were just. If only I could believe in the war.

If only I could
believe at all.

My
foot caught on an exposed root. I crashed to my knees. In that instant, the beast passed by beneath my body. I saw, not three paces beyond my outstretched hands, several dark appendages break free of their earthy encumberment. The Wurm’s insectoid body slithered into the open. The rasp of its segments across the ground sounded like heavy, aged leather scraped across stone. It hurtled onward, scarcely changing direction, directly into the heart of the Lymarian encampment.

The screams
began.

Scrambling to my feet, I tried to ascertain
the beast’s whereabouts. A solid band of clouds had drifted across the moons. Men rushed in all directions, making the site resemble a termite-hill vigorously stirred by a stick. Finding myself well shielded in the general mayhem, I trotted on, angling to my right hand, trusting and dreading that at some point, the Wurm would start to seek me out–and if I did not maximise the damage, I would have Freyal and Tomak to answer to.

Would
I ever be motivated by ought but fear itself? Mata forgive …

Suddenly I heard a commotion behind the nearest line of tents. Feelers loomed over a ridge-pole. I broke at once into a dead sprint, caring not where I ran.

Ay, this chase lasted until the song of morn thrilled the air–so much longer than before, I was physically shattered by the time the Wurm went to ground. I barely had strength left to stumble back to our lines, collapsing thrice on the way and once more within sight of my tent. Nobody helped me. I resorted to crawling.

In the g
rim pastels of a bloody sunrise the Lymarian camp lay dazed, as though struck by an avalanche. Broken bodies beyond counting dotted the rubble. Bald vultures had flocked there in their hundreds, boldly picking at the rich booty. Men I had counted comrades flinched at the sight of me.

I
crumpled half-atop my bedroll, and lay insensate until the night was well advanced.

Then I woke, sweating and shouting
and thrashing, from a nightmare filled with Ulim himself. The Death-God was robed in the snowy white of deepest Darkenseason, and his breath was an ice-storm. From the train of his robe whistled glacial winds and sudden blasts of ice and snow. I was his thrall. I was his footman, lashing his carriage through a frozen Alldark wasteland. ‘Death-bringer!’ cried he, regarding my cringing form with malevolent glee. ‘Child of my heart! Seek you to fill Nethe’s long halls by the deeds of your own hand?’

Truly told
, never had the breath of demons felt so close. I imagined they might come rushing through the tent-flap any instant. My hands trembled so hard I twice knocked the lantern to the ground trying to light it. The very darkness within my tent pulsed and oozed with an oily malice. Predatory fangs and blood-dipped claws lurked in every corner, while evil licked my quoph with a tongue of ice. Beneath the blankets, my body shivered as though it possessed an icy core that would never thaw again.

I looked around frantically. But there was nothing there.

Your deeds will feed my Wurm.
How right, how unimaginable, those words had now been proven. These days, with the white of death all about me, Jyla’s evil felt fused to my immortal quoph; fused with unbreakable bonds. Daily I tasted the ash of her smoky conjuration in the back of my throat. If this was all that Janos’ death was worth, then what was the point of living? How many now lay murdered at my hand?

Ay, this thing I
had become. This beast that lurked inside … who was the beast now? Arlak, or the Wurm? Could I but end my own life … and yet I could not. I would never give that sorcerous vulture the pleasure of driving me to ruin. I would yet live to employ the power for good, and every time I did, I would gloat at her description of my inevitable misdeeds. I would be stronger than Jyla counted on, more stubborn than she cared for, and resist her wiles and devices to the end of life and bone. So I resolved.

In the darkest
makh of that night, I struck upon a plan.

Soon, the Wurm would rise no more.

*  *  *  *

“They’
re calling you the ‘Scourge of the Westland’,” Freyal cried, clapping me cheerfully upon the shoulder. “After we destroyed Sulakin, the Lymarians sent a delegation to sue for peace. But the terms were not to my liking.”

I bit my tongue,
muttering, ‘That is, my dear Freyal, after I destroyed Sulakin Town for you.’ A simple disguise had won Tomak and I through the gates. We were meant to pick a victim, but I stopped Tomak’s heart instead. Good riddance. When the Roymerian army trapped me trying to steal out of town, I blamed the Wurm for his death.

Sulakin was nigh the end of me too. Buildings slowed the Wurm until it learned to dive beneath them, to buckle walls with its back, and to appear in unexpected places rather than blindly thrashing after me as before. Grephe alone turned my stride aside a jerlak’s snort before the Wurm collapsed the road not three strides ahead
of my racing boots. Hot cinnamon breath blasted my back as I dived into a side alleyway and made good my escape. ‘The Wurm learns,’ I repeated to myself. Was the Nethe-spawned demon beast maturing? Or was it just luck, or Gods-play, that the chase turned out that way?

Houses crushed. Children screaming. Jatha bellowing. Lyoms
squawking. Men tearing their faces in despair. Families and lives torn apart in a flash. Images of murder swarmed in my mind. The Wurm, unleashed, was an indiscriminate fury shaped by the paths I chose to run. In a moment of Doublesun-madness these deeds required no thought. But afterward …

“What you see before you, is the remnant of their army.” The Hassutl chuckled evilly. “Today, Arlak, you have it in your hands to end this war. Now go. Join the ranks.”

The strategy was simple. Hide amongst our militias. When the battle was joined, kill a prisoner and make merry–Freyal’s term again–on the Lymarian side. He was not concerned if a few men of Roymere ‘stood in the wrong place’.

I did not share his optimism. End the war? Freyal was a man of war. His ambitions would not
be limited to resolving a simple border dispute. Already, during the nightly strategy and planning sessions in the great pavilion, he spoke of conquests, of new alliances, and renegotiating the ancient land contracts, for in those days Roymere was carved into many fiefdoms each ruled by one of the great Lines. What reason had he to stop now? And he was in daily drum-contact with Jyla, telling her every detail of my misdeeds. She must be agog with pleasure. Her black-in-black eyes haunted my dreams all the more.

The prisoner was a Lymarian veteran who had taken a javelin-thrust into his bowels so deep it had fractured his backbone. The puncture-wound was gangrenous. Truly told, I was surprised he still lived.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, touching him.

I chased a man’s Mata-born quoph from his body. Forgive my iniquity
…

The Wurm rose with shocking speed. All the warning I had was a tiny, premonitory tremble beneath my feet before the beast surged out of the ground, twice, three times the height of a man with the power of its thrust, and, bellowing as it fell, scattered friend and foe in all directions.

BRRAOOMM!

Had I dared pray the Wurm would be crushed by its own weight in the fall, I was sore disappointed. Indeed, I was knocked aside as it snatched the dead prisoner from my hand, and this provided a helpful boost to my retreat. The great bellows-noise started behind me, huffing in my direction, and the screams began.