The Legend of El Shashi (36 page)

Either way, I was never to know.

From the billowing clouds above came a blinding flash of lightning and a concussion that blew me clear off my feet. Fighting to raise my head above the waters, I heard a voice boom:

“
INIO ALIK ALAKIN WURM!
”

Jyla?
Was she here? I struggled to keep afloat. A jagged flare was emblazoned across my cornea, making it even more difficult to see, but I perceived in shadowy relief the Wurm rearing upward toward the sky, as if to answer that mighty command. Abruptly, I was overwhelmed with a sense of my vitality draining away into the storm, into the sky and water and ground, as if all my
lillia
had been stolen away and I had never known how much I depended on it; that it was my lifeblood and I could not survive without its sweet music filling my veins. My bones became as dust. The Wurm bellowed, falling in a great avalanche of flesh. And all I wanted was to close my eyes and drift away into an eternity of lassitude.

I felt a wave lift me up, and envisaged being washed up onto
the shore like some piece of driftwood washed up on the banks of a river. The Wurm’s fall would do that.

Then, with a shocked gurgle, I was sucked under
the surface.

I spiralled away into darkness.

*  *  *  *

I learned what it is to be blind.

Later, I would work out I must have spent the better part of six days underground before finally I happened upon a shaft of light, and clambered out into the ferny hills somewhere east of Hollybrook. Until then, I lived in frenzy of perpetual, unsleeping dread–fear of the Wurm, fear of what I could hear but not see, fear of dying somewhere unmarked and unknown beneath the pillars of the earth, where slimy blind creatures make their homes in those realms of perpetual night. Nay, even so, the night has its stars. I did find several caverns where strange worms secreted luminous, sticky threads from their ovipositors, illuminating a secret world of huge crystal formations, depthless drop-offs, and scuttling, sightless creatures man has never named. But for the most part I could not even see my forefinger if I touched my own nose.

I ate mosses and worms and other
creeping things, and the darkness even helped me swallow down some of the more unsavoury creatures. I drank water tangy with minerals. I could not help but recognise that P’dáronï would have done much better in this place than I.

My weakness
did not lift. Long makh did I ponder what these events portended–for, I concluded, Jyla must have called upon the pent-up magical energies of the Wurm, but to what end? To wreck the Banishment? Was that even her intent? Was the Wurm itself broken, spent, never to rise again? But neither theory weighed comfortably in my opinion. Ay, I knew the Wurm was still alive, and my connection with it enfeebled, as though I was sensing its presence but at a far greater distance than I could ever recall.

I ached in ways I did not understand. I found myself
–proof of my madness–wishing rather for the chase than for this lingering, malingering sense of wrongness, and fearing perhaps that my own powers were forever departed.

Would the lack of El Shashi’s fame diminish me?

Could I exist without the Wurm?

Again, that day I departed the caverns, I was unexpectedly struck
down with a severe and debilitating frailty that left me barely able to set one foot before the other. Then I collapsed. I did not feel my cheek strike the ground. Never had the warm earth felt so comfortable, nor Suthauk’s golden eye so peaceful–even nearing Darkenseason, the noontide was warm enough to thaw the snow. I realised I was rising into a tunnel of light, moving away from my body to a different place, and I said to myself, ‘So this is death.’

Eternal whiteness.

It was enticing. No more struggles, no more fleshly failings and limitations, no more demands on my time and energies. No more El Shashi striding the Fiefdoms to succour the lost. The worries over my family’s wellbeing could be safely left behind, for if I departed, what need would Jyla have to stalk them?

I
sensed I was moving faster now, soaring over a mass of humanity outspread like tiny twinkling lights on a black blanket, each quoph illuminated in holy Matafire. At the speed of thought I crossed the ocean and dropped into …

Janos?

“Janos!”

My hands fell to my sides as I realised he was but a wraith. Did I dream? Very slowly, without speaking a word, Janos raised his arm and pointed.
I turned to follow the sweep of his finger.

Where a spit of mottled granite defied the churning sea, where the waves dashed their heads in endless fury and threw up great columns of spray, stood a figure whose billowing black robes could not disguise the slight, dread form of Jyla. Her hands were claws raking the heavens, and her back hunched in a strangely
animalistic pose. Despite the gouts of spray drenching her body, the Sorceress’ beautiful features appeared as unmoving as aged stone. And in the troughs amidst the heaving swells I beheld a vast multitude of Karak regarding her with their great lidless yellow eyes, their tentacles in a position of rest, mesmerised, as if drinking in the power of her spell-weaving.

As my eyes shifted over the scene I noticed the Wurm lying behind her vantage-point, immobile and apparently lifeless, but from its entire length a slight blue luminescence
seeped forth, merging into a steady stream that flowed over to the Sorceress to infuse her with the
lillia
of magic.

She will steal your life. All of it.

I glanced at Janos. Had he spoken?

By Mata’s good Name
, I was growing weary of these visions and dreams, of doubting the very fabric of my own mind! Had I thought to die? How foolish! Mata would not leave me die; nay, was She not bent on driving me beyond the realms of human reason, resolve, and endeavour? How much more would she pour in the vessel who was once, gantuls ago, named Arlak Sorlakson? Even my name was a subterfuge. My every new name, another mask to camouflage the original lie, another shackle upon my over-weary quoph.

Her purpose has failed, but she will not relent.

Ay, this was the Jyla I knew. I wished her dead. I wished her cut off from the Wurm, which fed her with the power of its life and mine. In response I felt myself shifting again, moving from my position near Janos toward the Wurm–fast, too fast. Rather than slamming into the immovable wall of its carapace I merged through it and into another mind of raging, bestial hungers wholly alien to my experience.

What followed was too quick for me to grasp. Oh, the makh I would puzzle over it ever after
, for in that instant there woke in the murky, basal part of my quoph that thing I feared was the Wurm within, and it shrieked a most awful, wrenching cry. I tasted once more the blood upon Jyla’s brazier and its oily exudate. The great cavernous presence I had entered reared up as if it were a jatha bitten in its softest parts by a torfly, and bellowed its agony across the many Fiefdoms of men until the very foundations of the world seemed to quake and shrink in alarm. I felt myself spat out. Rejected. Smashed aside so hard and fast that I became a comet streaking across the heavens. Before I knew it, I was back in my own body, gagging on the blood of my half bitten-through tongue.

With what tiny portion of
lillia
that remained to me, I righted that wound.

And then a strange thing happened
, which I had never noticed before. As I healed myself, I sensed a ripple pass along that impossibly tenuous connection back to the Wurm, wherever it lay. I felt the beast stir. Even at such a great distance? I knew we were linked. It had been so for more anna than I cared to remember. But this day I was struck with a new insight.

Wonderingly, I
dredged up a little more and used it to soothe several of the deeper scrapes upon my body, gained in the caverns beneath Hollybrook. This time, I observed with my utmost attention the Wurm’s response. Was I
healing
the creature? Was Jyla’s Web of Sulangi multiplying my strength into the creature? A drop here; a humungous wallop there?

I found myself smiling a madman’s grin.

“Try this, Jyla! With fondest regards from El Shashi.”

I know not what possessed me, nor can I describe it as other than this: I emptied myself
into
myself. Now it was as though I had released a firebolt back into the Wurm. Ripples washed within me and over me. I knew the creature roared, blasting the clouds with its overheated breath. I knew the moment it dived underground. I suppose I imagined the earth trembling all the way to where I stood, half a continent away, although that was physically impossible.

I had rescued my nemesis. Torn it away from the Sorceress.

Now, the Wurm was coming for me.

Home is the hearth,

Warming both body and heart
,

For story and friends,

And children upon my knee.

Omar Saymarson:
After My Travels I Rest

Given I had entered the seventy-ninth anna of my life, mark my words, should I be forgiven a modicum of complacency?

I thought the Wurm far distant. I had not slept in eight days.

The eventide was chill and the snow crunched beneath my boots, a delicate crust easily crushed, sign of a freezing night to come. My fingers and toes began to tingle, as if the life driven within by the cold had now returned to my limbs and extremities. The feeling reminded me suddenly of Chiliz and how I had come upon her in the makh of her extremity, struck down by the plague P’dáronï of Armittal taught me was called smallpox. Had Maikal ever found her again? And what of the jerlak lord I had treated? Did Thurbarak, the white thundering mountain, still roam the lands?

A
s eventide drew toward full darkness, I happened upon a cosy wayside inn but a stone’s throw north of Herish Town, whose craftsmen produce the finest pipes and flutes in the Fiefdoms. At least, as I leaned upon the counter to spend a portion of Sherik’s coin upon a dark, earthy beer much favoured by the Hakooi, which is so rich and thick and spicy it makes almost for a meal in its own right, that is what the innkeeper averred. He was, as the saying goes, fishing.

“A Solburn Brother, eh?” he roared cheerfully,
alerting half the inn to my presence. “You’s welcome in Mata’s name!”

“Ay,” said I, thinking that by my mark, given the tenderness with which Sherik had handled
Lailla and her children, he might not remain Brother Sherik for much longer. Why did that bother me? Did it? I peered into the depths of my quoph, and found myself taken aback by a wash of Mata’s peace. Truly told?

I needed to return to Imbi Village. But not too soon. My route should take me not far past it, for had I been able to fly, I could have
traversed the Lyrn Massif to the east and dropped almost directly atop the village. Instead, I must perforce travel some sixty leagues north before reaching Wrybreath Pass, almost touching the tiny pinprick of a Fiefdom called Finstrel, before I would be able to turn east to enter Roymere, that sleeping giant which dwarfed all other Fiefdoms.

“Will you work for your boon?”

“I’ve no medicaments.”

“We’ve a bag left by our athocary, Jerbis, who passed into Mata’s service last anna,” pressed the inn
keeper. “Come, it’s a Mataboon you’re here, good Brother. Let us do what is right.”

I nodded–sagely, I hoped, “Ay then. A bargain well made.”

The innkeeper busied himself keeping me busy.

I, with an inner eye turned toward my connection with the Wurm, set about dealing with a host of common complaints–gout, rheumatism, cataracts, menopause, four ingrown toenails, and a broken wrist, all before my meal. After, I performed several tooth extractions, treated an infected eye, dealt with a case of infertility, a canker of the spleen
and another of the breast, and many more maladies besides. Truly told, did I not enjoy my work? Few things satisfied me as well as a growth set right, an ulcer treated, sight restored, or a bone set straight and cleanly splinted. It accorded me rare pleasure to employ the skills Mata gave me.

Or was
that Jyla’s handiwork?

I wondered: had Jyla
ever intended for me to have healing power? What had she intended before the blue condor intervened? Surely not to be my benefactress! Was the condor Mata’s sign that something more had been planned for my life, from the first?

As I worked steadily, and
the long, slow link with the Wurm pulsed equally steadily, I grasped for the first time that it was not only my selfishness which fed the Wurm–destructive as I had been over the anna. Every healing fed it
lillia
. Every touch strengthened the beast more. My hands laboured under a strange kind of hypnosis as this idea worked its way into my brain. Dear sweet Mata! My acts of goodness nourished the Wurm, as though it were some ghastly infant sucking at the teat of my life?

The word which kept hammering my conscience was
perverse
. It was nought but perverse that what Mata worked for good, Jyla should supplant for evil!

Unless I used the power first.

Perhaps I only felt it now, I reasoned, because at each failure the curse doubled. Double the penalty. Each summoning of the Wurm acted as a kind of multiplier–this I understood from Amal and Eliyan’s too-brief tutoring in the ways of the Web of Sulangi. If I kept doubling the effect … I bit my lip–wrenched a tooth free with the pliers and set it aside–how many times had I summoned the Wurm? Eight times? Ten? During the Lymarian war, I could remember at least four occasions upon which I had …
six
, my conscience pricked me. Six, from killing the Sybali trance-warrior to the final time, when I made my escape from Freyal and his plans for domination of the Fiefdoms.

“
Larathi!” I swore under my breath, despite having taken a Solburn vow never to let an unclean word pass my lips. I have a trader’s grasp of numbers. How common, the old joke: that if a trader should double his profits every day, starting with just one brass terl, how many days would it take him to become drown in an ocean of terls? Precious few.

By my grephe
, what an ill thought!

But
Eliyan claimed a Web of Sulangi was by its very nature, self-limiting. How had Jyla overcome that problem? Because the Wurm was uncontainable, immeasurable, a force as elemental as those which shaped the oceans and the mountains themselves. And even this force had failed to break the Banishment?

Perhaps force was not what was required.
“Then what, Janos?” I asked the heavens. “Then what? What did you bury within my quoph? Am I truly the key?”

At length, late in the eventide, the press thinned and the innkeeper offered me a warm bed for the night. I could not resist.
I slept a depthless sleep.

*  *  *  *

I awoke to the aftermath of a dream I could not possibly have had. A knife cutting me from my dying mother’s womb. The first flash of light upon my eyes; the burn of breath in my lungs, the horror of not passing through the birth canal, but being wrenched untimely from the safe warmth of the womb into a cold, unfeeling world.

I awoke tasting my own blood.

I awoke to perfect clarity, shifting from sleep as deep as the grave to full, alert wakefulness quicker than the beat of a hummingbird’s wing.

The sound of my panting was the only sound in the world.
The rest was a pre-dawn so cold that even the sounds of animals and night birds seemed frozen into stillness. A deadly serenity, I realised, rising from my pallet to draw aside the drapes.

Truly told, somehow I sensed what I would see.

The tiny window of my chamber cased a view over the whitened fields to the western horizon. I saw a bank of clouds hanging there, obscuring the stars from north to south, rising perhaps to the height of a league above the ground. The tops of the clouds were bathed in gentle moonlight, a delicate effulgence utterly at odds with the midnight-blue underbelly of that cloud-bank, ignited as I watched by a succession of thin yet unbearably bright threads of lightning–more strikes than I could count, even in the brief breaths my eyes lingered upon this phenomenon.

I
crashed to my knees, scrabbling like a lyom pecking at corn as I collected together my meagre belongings. The boots were an imperfect fit–they would torture me before the makh was out, I knew from long experience.

The front door was locked and bolted, but I saw lamplight in the kitchen. Praise Mata, the cook was already kneading the dough for the day’s roundel sweetbreads. I prevailed upon him for a few supplies, brushed aside his questions with a lie about Solburn Brothers praying in the early makh, and hit the icy road. No way, if I could help it, was I bringing the Wurm
’s devastation upon these good people.

The Wurm
approached from the north-west, I judged. My path led due north. Unless I chose to brave the snowbound Lyrn Mountains. My eyes tripped across the nearby peaks, knowing what lay beyond: an impassable cliff-face many trins high, barrier for no bird but barrier aplenty for El Shashi. Suicide, truly told. A fool’s choice. The first pass lay thirty leagues north, and Sherik spoke a true word when he said that would be impassable too.

So I must run toward the Wurm. Speaking of
the choices of fools!

My boots thudded steadily on the cobbled road. After a short time I took to the grassy verge, which was slightly the less slippery option.

Ay, did I presume to judge Lenbis? Monster that he was? What father would not do the same, I asked myself? I did right by Lailla. Also by my grandchildren. And, Mata curse him, did Lenbis not deserve far worse? Father Yatak would not have agreed. I thrust that thought from me as though it were a drunken beggar who had accosted me in the marketplace. What my heart needed was a good burn, a space for the hatred to flower …

‘
Curse you, Lenbis,’ spoke my boots. Four strides. And later, ‘Curse you, Jyla.’ Another four strides. And another, and another … as for Janos, I knew what he would have said. ‘Do not mistake hatred for strength, Arlak. True strength is found in forgiveness.’

How many anna had hatred not been the coin of my heart
, and where had it led me? To the annihilation of Bralitak Crossing. To the destruction of the madman Sathak and a stampede which killed so many in Sillbrook Town. Now, should hatred lead me yonder?

*  *  *  *

Man was not made to run in boots. As I shook the dust of the long leagues off my feet that morn, through noontide into eventide, the chafing upon my ankles and toes grew ever more intolerable. I accepted it as a punishment. Every hint of pain should remind me to never, ever again, commit an act that would summon the Wurm. Through the long makh of the darkness I ran–the seven makh of darkness from Rains through Alldark Week to Thawing, which would shorten to five by Highsun, in a miserable drizzle that obscured any sign of the Wurm’s approach. By the morn following my nose was trained eastward like a hound on the scent. But I needed no reminding. The Wurm was out there, and it was drawing closer.

As I
pounded down a long slope out of Wrybreath Pass into the gentle foothills, a forest of bragazzar, lyrithbark, and ulinbarb closed about the road as though intent on strangling it in an overabundance of vegetation. I smelled the herb sathic upon the breeze. My quoph sighed and declared, ‘That is the smell of home.’

What strangeness to pause to pick a handful the last of the season’s loganberries from the wayside and stuff my stomach full of their sweetness. My legs twitched as though I should still be running. I dipped my head into a small brook, which greatly refreshed me. I healed my feet and legs, eased the tiredness from my muscles, and stretched my legs upon the stone-paved road. I passed several traders asleep in their wains beside the road
, and watched Suthauk bend his soft glow upon the heads of the forest giants.

A glance behind, however, showed
storm clouds gathering over the peaks behind me.

I had set a bruising pace the whole of the previous day, afeared of intersecting the Wurm’s path. Now I tried to
ease my stride, not least to save my thighs and knees.

After noontide I left in my wake the road I would have taken southward to Solburn Monastery and eventually Imbi Village, seven
ty or more leagues beyond that, and I nibbled upon the last of my bread and tried not to think upon the days I had yet to run. I thought much upon my family. Were they safe in the village? Had Jyla forgotten them? What would my grandchildren be doing right now? It must have been passing strange for the travellers upon the road that day to see a Solburn Brother jogging past them. Monks are not ordinarily in any hurry!

The mind was not lost in the simple act of running. Once
the thudding of my feet and the rasping of breath faded into the background, my mind could soar unfettered to places unimagined. My quoph reflected upon the past. I had makh to miss Janos, to wonder if my father were still alive, to dream of a reunion with P’dáronï. I was running away from her. League by league, I left Eldoria to the rear. That life seemed but a pipe-dream now, the ways of the Eldrik a fantasy of soulless beauty, and my love for an Armittalese slave, an aberration that could not possibly survive the many, many anna of our separation.

Ay, there was ample opportunity for despair to
force its cold roots into my quoph, and for Jyla’s cursed face to haunt my waking visions.

Sometimes I felt, in the aching of joints and
muscles caused by makh upon makh of running, as though I was the vessel that carried the pains of the world. Ay, truly told, my pain was small compared to the anguish of many. I wondered: Why did Mata create the human form so frail? And why did we suffer so? The Hassutla of Herliki had it right when she asked, ‘Why do we live?’ From inception, even within the womb, life was set to struggle, to strive, and to fight against the odds. The Solburn Brothers told me one in four conceptions results in a miscarriage. Perhaps many more go unreported. And I speak not of stillbirth, that silent stealer of lives. So many, many women silently suffered this grief–let alone a host of others I could name, names weightier even than my own. Moreover, should I rescue a child destined for death, was I committing a crime against Mata’s will? Interrupting the natural order of life? I stood in the breach, as it were, battling the ceaseless, overwhelming tides of death–Ulim’s hordes and their endless harvest of sorrow. In the end, did it matter that I saved one more life? Today? Healing granted but a brief abeyance, for in the end, all men die. Whether this anna or next, what does it matter against the great tide of history?