The Legend of El Shashi (4 page)

Warily, I faced
up to Jyla across the several paces that separated us. My hand rose absently to wipe my mouth, but my eyes were frozen in their sockets. Was she a Sorceress? Only the Eldrik claimed such powers. I simply could not comprehend her presence, here, in this place I had visited uncountable times.

“What a shame you stumbled into this, you fool,” she said, casting her words like barbed hooks meant to impale. “You cannot possibly understand how important this man is to our cause, or what he has concealed over the anna. These are momentous events, beyond your ken.”

I wanted to brand her a madwoman, but there was no madness in her now. Cool, rational, her words seared the night. “At least you will die knowing that you have done the Eldrik the greatest service imaginable–indeed, the greatest service in the history of our people. They will proclaim you a hero; they’ll celebrate your name in song. Arlak the betrayer. Arlak, our saviour.” She raised her fingers, clawed into mystic forms, and such was her expression and demeanour that I swear I felt Nethe’s own claws squeeze my neck. “Now, mark my words, I will end this swiftly.”

“No!” Janos jerked against the nails. Fresh blood bubbled from his lips. By his suffering, he compelled our attention. He repeated, more weakly this time, “No. Have
… pity …”

“Pity? When you had none?”

“What is done cannot be undone.”

Jyla spat, “Never!”

“The greatest magic cannot defeat this doom.”

“What do you know of magic, you worthless nothing?” she exploded. I cowered, half-expecting the vitriol in her tone to come spitting forth as real acid. “But your kind were there
–ah yes, you were there, with Lucan, when he committed that vile offence! And you’ll tell me everything, Janos. Every tiny detail. I won’t let you die before you do, because that would be too easy. And you know I have the power.”

Janos
rasped, “Do your worst,
Myki Mahdros
.”

I knew the reference
–it was drawn from an ancient Umarite legend, wherein Myki the Snake cheated the Goddess Yuthe of the nectar of immortality, hoping to make himself one of the Gods. Imyni, the Goddess of Hunting, hunted Myki to the ends of the lands and shot him through the heart with one of her burning arrows, thus recovering the nectar. Some versions of the tale, though, claimed that Myki had two hearts and thus cheated death. Why he should mention it now was beyond me.

Jyla
let an amused smile curve her lips upward. “Petty name-calling. Pathetic.” But that smile never touched her eyes. Not even close.

The effort appeared to drain
Janos. He slumped upon his pinions, hanging as a dead thing from a rack.

“Of course, your protections are powerful, Janos, and it
will take time to circumvent them. I’ll break you … eventually. But can I afford the time? The cost?”

Jyla’s black, dead gaze dismissed him and swivelled to fix on me. I broke off wondering about Janos, afeared now for my own flesh and blood. “But here we have young Arlak. Is he an opportunity granted by the Gods? Ah
–” she snapped her fingers, “–I have it now. Yes. I’ll give you the choice.”

“Me?”

A squeak. Another time I would have cursed at the embarrassment, but the Sorceress had me in her thrall.

“You, Arlak. Now listen closely if you wish to save your friend. Here are your choices. You can fight Tortha. Beat him and you win Janos’ life. Or you can fight me. Beat me, and I’ll grant you mercy.”

Lunacy! I moistened my lips. “These are my choices?”

“Me o
r Tortha. Choose wisely.”

Suicide either way, or I was no judge. Tortha would crush me.
He wore nought but a pair of thexik trousers; in the forge’s blaze, his massively muscled upper body gleamed like several pythons oiled and knotted together. Jyla, in her sorcerous pomp, would toy with me as a salcat toys with its luckless rodent dinner. “I can’t just … walk away?”

The smoulder in her expression made my attempted levity fall flat. I stalled, “What weapons
–?”

“Bare hands!” Tortha broke in. “I’ll snap your arms and legs like twigs, little man. Then I’ll roast you slow, feet-first in the furnace
while you writhe in agony, unable to pull yourself free. Now–choose!”

Choose? The horror! I glanced several times between my two tormentors, unable to decide, unable to think, my head pounding fit to burst as I struggled to process what I had seen and heard. Crises have always brought out the worst in me. This was intolerable. The wrong choice would cost Janos his life
–it would cost both our lives. Jyla or Tortha. There was no choice. I kept coming back to that. No choice. Janos had been my father when I had none. Now he was their trophy animal, pinned the forge door with nails driven through his body and … in my mind I screamed:
No, no, NO! I can’t do it, I can’t decide, I can’t abide it any longer …

Then I bolted.

I was the wind unleashed. My long legs scissored across the ground. Instinct took me down the path past the outhouse, my arms pumping as they had never pumped before. The speed of my descent made the air whistle past my ears. A single, scared-rabbit bound took me over the vegetable patch and deep into the bushes beyond. I dodged through slashing branches onto the game trail I had explored so many times as a boy, relying on my agility, dancing a quicksilver trail between boulders as tall as my shoulders.

Action was better than thought, any action, or I would have burned away in that traumatic crucible. But fear soured my gratitude. I
remembered Janos’ broken body. I could almost taste Tortha’s sick pleasure. I felt the condemnation of eyes as black as Nethe’s pit. Perhaps, if I ran fast enough and far enough, I would never have to see them again.

The wind carried Jyla’s high, shrill laughter
to my ears. Triumphant.

Tortha I could not hear at all.

My boots drummed the hard-packed trail. Ahead I could dimly make out the olive grove that marked the end of Janos’ land and the start of the wilderness proper. Flee! Nothing else mattered. For a moment, as my flight lengthened, I let the glorious scent of freedom fill my nostrils.

He loomed as a boulder cloaked in darkness
. With the flat of his hand, Tortha struck me spinning. My head exploded. In a trice the giant man had me pinned to the ground, breathless and dazed, and cheerfully whistled a tune through the gap in his front teeth as he trussed my limbs like a prize hog.

“Fool,” he scoffed. “You did nought but her will.”

Then he raised a rock in his right paw, and clubbed me senseless.

How incandescent the romance

Twixt moth and flame

How quixotic

Fatal

P’dáronï of Armittal,
Time Was, Time Is

“Out! Out!”

The guard thrust his baton into my rat-hole, and jabbed me in the ribs. When I did not stir quickly enough for his liking, he laid about my back and shoulders with the air of a connoisse
ur of affliction. Sadist! He enjoyed his job far too much. But my sour thoughts belied an alacrity to obey. Anything to avoid being beaten again.

The dungeon door clanged open. I staggered forward, blinking
against the torchlight as if I were a mole freshly roused from its burrow.

“Filth!”

“Gods, he stinks like a rotting corpse!”

“Come!” Coarse laughter rang in my ears as I nearly brained myself on the low stone ceiling. “Hurry! The mistress must not wait!”

Raising a hand to my forehead, I drew it back sticky with blood.

Jyla had left me to
moulder in her dungeon. Twenty-three days of solitude, marked by a bowl of slop served twice daily by a mute drudge, who ignored my every attempt to communicate. He did not empty the leather waste-bucket. The stench of my own faeces, the lack of space, and the impenetrable blackness had combined to drive me to despair. I exhausted myself in self-recrimination, reliving Janos’ fate a thousand times.

And now she wanted me.

“Move!”

The
brightness stabbed my eyes. I marched as best my chains allowed, hustled along by a guard on each arm. Squinting through my eyelashes, sun-blind as a dune mole, I perceived that we crossed an open courtyard, which completely surrounded a tall, slender tower fabricated of quarried rose-quartz blocks. My half-boots scuffed up puffs of dust as we crossed that sandy space and rounded the tower’s base. We halted before a solid, ironbound door. One of the guards fumbled at his belt for keys, the other man mined his left nostril for delicacies.

I had long wished to know where I was held captive.
The accents of my jailors sounded eastern to my untutored ear; the few sounds that drifted to my ear, unfamiliar and unwelcoming. But now, glancing at my captors, I saw foreign garb as well. Were we in Hakooi, fabled for its minstrels? Or as far as desert Lorimere, fifty leagues and more from Yarabi Vale? It was certainly further afield than Arlak Sorlakson had ever travelled.

A rough blow against my shoulder plunged me through the doorway
onto my already aching knees. “Up!” A boot propelled me forward as if I were some mangy cur the guard wished to kick out of his way. The chains tangled up and I crashed headlong into a flight of stone steps.

The gloomy hallway
stank of dead animals. I spat blood. Hopefully I had not lost any teeth. What use, rattling my chains at this treatment? I said nought as they hauled me bodily up the dank stairs, for I was too weak to climb.

We plodded up and up
that spiral staircase until I imagined we should arrive in the heavens themselves. My legs felt as ribbons blowing in a breeze. The starvation diet I had endured during my incarceration allowed them to handle my weight with the ease of grown men lifting a child. At length the guards halted before a second, smaller door. The one to my left gestured abruptly for his fellow to knock. The other balked. Even I sensed the strangeness emanating from those plain hardwood panels.

“Enter!”

Jyla’s voice. I fought an urge to scratch my skin as though I had been covered in a thousand exploring ants. The door swung open upon well-oiled hinges. A hard palm thrust me inside. The guards dared not cross the threshold; instead, they scrambled back down the stairs, shoving and scuffling to be fastest to depart. This speared the fear of Ulim’s Hounds into my quoph.

A
magnificent chamber greeted my awed gaze. Surely, far larger than the tower could support? The floor was a mirror-still pool of clear liquid–presumably water–so depthless that the effect was of standing on the edge of a cliff and peering over a vertiginous drop. My eyes rolled upward. Above my head, a domed, cobalt-hued ceiling arched to an impossible height, supported by ornate columns of priceless lapis lazuli. An evocative smell teased my nostrils–rich, exotic spices for which I had no name, which I traced to a brass brazier set upon a pedestal of highly polished onyx in the centre of the pool. The pedestal was perhaps three paces across, and raised but a handspan above the pool’s surface.

Fluid movement behind
the brazier brought the woman Jyla to my notice. Barefoot, robed in purest white samite, she trod a stately circuit around the pedestal’s circumference. She wore a towering headdress draped in an ornate netting of tiny, blood-coloured crystals, and her slender neck bent with a heron’s suppleness to support its weight. The water conveyed her soft, sibilant chanting perfectly to my hearing. The language was archaic and melodic, falling upon my ear with a subtly hypnotic power. Even from a distance, the sight of her spread the chill of an Alldark ice storm through my veins.

A familiar paw crushed my left bicep.

“Greetings,” said Tortha, with a purple-rimmed smirk of his lips. “Step this way.”

He led me
–or forced me, truly told–to advance out over the water. Vertigo tugged at my senses, but the walkway extended automatically beneath our feet, keeping exact pace with our progress. The jingling of my chains mingled with Jyla’s chanting, which never faltered during the age it took us to cross the pool, and to the tune of this discordant plainsong I arrived at the pedestal.

She did not acknowledge my presence.

Tortha cast me rough-handed at the brazier’s base, and there secured the chains upon my wrists to an iron ring embedded deep within the oily black stone. My reflection sullied its surface–ragged beard, soiled clothing, pallid skin, and fear acid-etched upon my brow.

After watching Tortha withdraw, I turned
my attention to Jyla, the author and mistress of my misery. Her sheer silken robes whispered as she moved, but where before I might have found the sight and sound erotic, this day I felt uncurious and detached from the business of living. Perhaps I had exhausted all possible emotion during my incarceration. Perhaps I had given up. Whatever the reason, fate no longer held claim upon my life.

I knew she
wove magic, but to what purpose?

I wondered again at Jyla’s obsession. No-one beneath the suns is born evil. They choose their path
–so my father taught me. Though a child may do wrong, and be taught wrong, true depravity is the acquired habit of adults. But Jyla! Could ought but Ulim’s own spawn be so steeped in evil? Jyla, mark my words, would maim, ruin, and torture without hesitation or regret. Small wonder Janos had chosen to live in hiding! To my knowledge he had never left Yarabi Vale, yet I knew he must have travelled the lands to acquire his great knowledge. What was his secret? I burned to know. It must be a cause dark and sinister, vast and terrible, that this murderess should pursue it unto death …

As for Tortha, he had brute strength. He despised the weak. Jyla’s service offer
ed opportunity aplenty to bloody his hands, I assumed, a duty he patently took cruel pleasure in perfecting. He had come to my cell one night, reeking of lethola spirit, to spit and rail at me through the bars. And the weal-marks of his whipping were not yet healed.

What would my parents have made of this? Dragged to the tower of a
Sorceress, bound to her whim and pleasure? And Janos? I had taken flight rather than fight; made no attempt to save him. Coward! Fool! Fool through and through … had I but done differently on that fateful night, had I but driven past! Ay, and had I not thought it through, considered the angles, replayed those events until I loathed myself with a loathing that burned as glowing coals in my heart? Why ignore the trader’s grephe? Why tell Jyla where Janos lived? Why tarry in Elaki Fountain, acting the whore?

I had betrayed the man I loved as a father.

Would he ever forgive me? Was he already dead?

As my bitter reminiscence
proceeded, I became aware that the chanting had stopped. A silence as deep as black waters surrounded us. Jyla’s stony orbs studied me as though I were a loathsome species of crawling insect she had discovered on her bedroom floor and was contemplating crushing with her heel.

She said, “You’re bleeding.”

I replied in low tones, “What is it to you?”

“I need you alive and well
–for the moment.” Jyla offered this without inflection, not threatening.

Had
ought changed? Patience, Arlak, I counselled myself. Wait her out. Do not give in to your enervation …

At length she
continued, “You intrigue me, Arlak Sorlakson. You hail from a Roymerian village which even by Umarite standards is a stinking hovel. Yet your bearing is worthy of a Hassutl. Here are sensitive hands. Hands made not for dirt and calluses, but for the quim, for poetry, and musicianship. Perhaps … perhaps even for magic.”

She touched me then, just the faintest brush of
her fingertips, akin to a lover’s butterfly touch. My skin prickled. I did not realise I was shaking my head when she said: “You disagree? Yes, so do I. It puzzles me why Janos should choose for his protégé, a man so riddled with weaknesses?”

“I am no
Sorcerer, truly told.”

“No
–and neither was Janos, despite my suspicions. A most skilful opponent, mark my words. I broke him only yesterday, even with the aid of your uncaring betrayal. A difficult man. Janos of the guardtower will. He is all the man that you’ll never be.”

“Nought will you gain from me!”

A spider’s smile crept around her lips. I knew at once that my denial was baseless. A trick, a cruel manipulation, and my cowardice had doomed Janos. Jyla had been leagues ahead of me all the while. I felt unclean, used, abused.

“Don’t cower!” she snapped suddenly. “It’s unbecoming in a man.”

“It’s modest …”

“It’s pathetic! What passes for culture in the Umarik Fiefdoms is a filthy perversion of the natural order! Where is the balance, the harmony, the respect for the way things
ought to be? I’ll never understand the Umarite mind, even embodied in such a pretty specimen. Were you not such a spineless species of toad–well! I might have considered
umak talis
with you.”

I cast my eyes to her feet. A dalliance with Jyla? I admit, for a moment something akin to desire warmed through my better judgement, for she was beautiful
–as an icicle is beautiful, or a prism lit by refractive light–and powerful, and different to any woman I had ever known. But she was also as deadly as a mountain adder. A woman who would use and cast aside as she pleased, never sparing a thought to the good. Her contempt swamped my momentary wish. Heat flooded my cheeks.

“So I broke Janos!” I flinched as her sudden shout echoed across the chamber. “I tortured him. I
snapped him in twain and learned everything he knows; everything he had to tell. Ay, I sucked him out to a dry husk. In the end he begged to answer my questions.”

Janos? It hardly seemed
…

“And now I know I need you, and your especial connection with him. Janos implored me to save you
–and I will. He would even have appreciated it. He loved you–more the fool he.” In her mouth, the word ‘love’ twisted into a curse. It paralysed me, this unforeseen notion. “You’re a malleable material, Arlak, mine to shape and to hone. A tool for my needs. For you I have prepared this chamber, and a magic simple in structure yet profound in effect. It will be a …
special
creation. One day, you might even come to appreciate the irony.”

Jyla moved closer, until her black eyes filled my world
, like a night sky devoid of stars. The darkness was formidable, intoxicating, ravenous. “I need you to be selfish, Arlak,” she whispered, cupping my cheek tenderly. O accursed hands! “There, that isn’t too difficult, is it? Great power will be yours to command, but housed in such a flawed vessel, it can only lead to misuse. Your selfishness and wrongdoing will magnify the enchantment a thousandfold.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m raising a Wurm. You’ve heard of those, haven’t you?”

“Ulules’ tales
–”

Jyla shook her head, breaking the connection, and stepped backward with a graceful flexion of her thighs. “Idiot!” she sneered. “Enough inane chatter.”

At once she was all business, regal and haughty, drawing her robes about her person with a purposeful snap, transfigured into the role of Sorceress. Her hands began to weave a complex series of symbols in the air, moving as with a mind of their own in sequences of hypnotic power. I caught myself gaping like a dullard and hated myself all the more.

Suddenly she cried:
“Orlio immio oorrallia aatak!”

No
human larynx could have produced such a thunderous command.

The result was spectacular. Like flower petals peeling away from the stalk, what I had taken for a solid dome above my head split along its seams and began to fall away slowly, majestically, into the space around the tower. Gods alone knew what the people on the ground must have thought. There was no other sound, just the sight of the dome pieces dropping past the edge of the pool, and though my ears expected it any moment, there came no thundering report of pulverised stone
upon the ground below. Instead, a cool breeze soothed my fevered brow, bringing the aroma of sweet pine needles and rich, loamy soils.