The Legend of El Shashi (6 page)

The tower began to tilt.

The wind was an unforgiving tyrant. Slowly, digit by digit, it prised Jyla loose. What her fingers would not release, unravelled thread by thread beneath the windstorm’s awesome force. I could do nought, nor would I have done, to offer her aid. She even used her teeth to hold on, but her efforts were doomed. The cloth frayed. Ripped. She seized my belt, lost that, and snatched at my trousers. For a moment I thought she might be secure, but her grip slipped again under the tremendous pressure and she scored bloody trails with her fingernails down to my knees, then ripped my calves open, and now the last bastion, my ankles, came into her clawed grasp.

At the very last, Jyla gazed up
my body’s length into my eyes. She smiled–hideously.

Then she was torn loose.

A single flutter.

Gone.

O to find a new beginning

My reinvention

Of nascent wholeness

My becoming

What I have never been

Oldik Laymarson,
Verses Beyond the Rumik, Scrolleaf the Third

“Drink up,” said the old woman, thrusting a bowl of broth into my hand. She stumped back to the fireplace, humming tunelessly.

I stared at the herbs dancing slow curlicues upon the hot liquid,
and at the rising steam, trying to remember. How long had I been here? When last had I sat abed? What day was it?

“You’
re hungry, lad. Drink.”

And this manner of greeting? I sipped, yelped, blew the half-unfurled herbs across the small bowl. Veined leaves gelid with sap. That smell
… konis? Baltagia tea? The words came to me as from a great distance. Untried. Unwieldy, like lumbering farmers attempting a delicate dance.

Gazing over the blue-glazed rim
of the bowl, I took in the bundles of herbs tied to the hut’s roof, which consisted of a latticework frame of wattle branches overlaid with layers of woven reed mats, the rude fireplace, the cooking pot hanging above it. There was a simple pallet for a sleeping-place. I took in the woman’s knotted calf muscles half-hidden beneath a clean peasant smock, wooden clogs upon her feet, and her iron-grey hair tied back in a careless bundle. I could have been anywhere in the Fiefdoms.

The old woman dipped a ladle into the pot and drew out a portion for herself. Without turning, she called, “Stop gawping and eat. I’ll not have a stickman in my house
–better I plant you in the garden to scare off the crows.”

This made me smile. The odd, unremembered sensation around my mouth made me reach up to touch an explosion of beard that beggared belief. I drew out a leafy twig and gaped at it.

“Well you’ve been living rough for some anna, mark my words,” she remarked, setting her bowl aside. Reaching to a shelf, she drew forth a pakari flatbread and broke it in half. “Bread you can have when I’ve seen that broth safely down. No telling what you’ve been eating. Found you running with some speckled deer, my daughter did. Telia lured you here. In all my anna, never have I seen a sight more peculiar. A man deer.”

Broth! My tongue howled its delight. Had it not been so hot I would have gulped it down and the bowl too.

“Starving?” She had not turned around, but still seemed to know my every thought. “There’s more.”

I tried my voice. “I
… grateful.”

“Rusty as an old tine!” cackled my hostess. “I’ll wager ten brass terls to a tinker’s boot you haven’t spoken in anna. Now you can thank me by finishing your sup.”

“What anna is it?”

She squinted at the ceiling. “It must be
… don’t think I rightly know. All’s a-muddle in my head. It must be Summer’s Richness. Harvest season’s a ways off and the Glooming farther still.”

“It’
s the twenty-fourth anna of Gracious Albora’s reign, and today is Sayth, the day of rest,” piped a new voice. “Is he awake, mother?”

I automatically tugged the covers over my nakedness. Mata’s name, I had not a stitch of clothing upon my body! Fancy
… and as the rush doorway fell to again, I beheld the merry eyes of the old woman’s daughter, and grew flustered at her frankly appraising stare.

“He is nought but washboard bones and a shaggy mane!” She pecked the old woman on top of her head, set her basket besid
e the table, and smiled at me. “Doubtless she hasn’t introduced herself?”

“She? Who’s
she–the cat’s mother? Huh! Who’s been swanning off to the village all morning whilst I sweat buckets tending this poor puppy?”

“I am Telia, and this is Agria, my mother. You have to understand she’s
–”

“Go on, say it, you ungrateful wretch!”

“Forgetful.”

“The anna I wasted teaching you your manners. Huh!”

Telia was taller than most women, with a face that was characterful rather than comely, but I sensed a wholesomeness about her manner that I warmed to. She was not yet a matron, but maturing towards that station, being perhaps fifteen anna older than I.

“What’s the standard anna?” I inquired.

“One thousand, three hundreds, fifty and six,” Telia replied. By this mode of counting I knew her at once for an Elbarath–courtesy of Janos’ teaching–from a Fiefdom which lies a hundred or more leagues south of Roymere. Mata’s name, I was far from home!

By her reply and the season, I calculated I must have spent some three and
a half anna in the wilderness, in madness. And that was when I began to remember what had been.

*  *  *  *

I lived with Telia and Agria until full Harvest, turning my hands daily to the tasks that governed life in the deep backwoods. I split wood to store against the coming cold seasons of Rains, Alldark Week, and Thawing. The walls I chinked with winterbrush and brown sponghum moss. As the days grew short I gathered the last berries and edible tubers from the forest surrounding their home, went hunting several times, and traded in the village for supplies. Ay, my fresh-shorn locks set tongues a-wagging there!

My hands were kept busy, but not busy enough to prevent my mind from dwelling
upon the past at great length. The realisation that a considerable portion of my life had been wasted–or stolen from me–was painful and disorienting. The anna! Where had they flown? A great gap, then Jyla. The tower. Janos. The storm … her grand design apparently ruined by Mata’s envoy.

What
did it mean?

What had
Jyla done to me?

The memory of Jyla’s sorcery seemed a nightmare wreaked upon some stranger’s person. Not I, not this withered husk of a man. But my wrists bore scars from the manacles. When had I lost those? Even as
a quim to the scrolleaf, so had Tortha’s rod and whip scored its tale upon my flesh. As the days rolled into seasons, I found I could recall the past in ever-greater detail. I knew too much. I dreamed repeatedly of Jyla, tasting again the smoke of her sacrifice, walking panting and choking upon my own vomitus.

I found it in my eyes. The day I borrowed Telia’s glass, the better to extract a thorn from my cheek, I saw it lurking there. The accursed Wurm. Or did I imagine
it?

The glass slipped from my nerveless grasp. Shards burst star
-like from the point of impact. Shattered, silvery slivers winking back my fractured life.

It is commonly held that a man’s eyes mirror his quoph. Zealots
of the highly religious and influential Grathayn sect, which is strongest in the southern Fiefdoms, practise
matali-ur-uli
or ‘light overcomes darkness’ to exorcise the evil they believe is rooted in the quath and corrupts the quatl and quoph if left unattended. Matali-ur-uli involves using mirrors to direct sunlight into the bound subject’s eyes. I hear it can make one go blind–may I never suffer such ignorance! Even before Doublesun matali-ur-uli will blind the subject, but Belion’s brilliance makes a smoking ruin of the flesh. This to save the quoph? Idiocy!

Thus, the broken looking-glass became a portent to my febrile mind. A curiously beautiful, enigmatic motif. To know this madness was to behold the visage of my inmost terrors. My sanity
resembled aged scrolleaf–thin, brittle, and curled at the edges. Truly told, when the terrors descended upon me I thought I should stop breathing, and shadows would stalk the edges of my vision, and I cowered in a corner for makh barking at all comers.

White
was the colour of my mourning. Sunk in a bottomless well of depression, I made myself a terrible burden to Telia and Agria. I treated them harshly, but never a harsh word did they return. Their kindness restored my life. Slowly, nourished at their hearth, I gathered strength. The fears abated. I grieved for my friend Janos, who I had betrayed.

My soles itched to tread new roads.

And so, as Glooming season turned to the Rains and the harvest was safely stored in granaries the Fiefdoms over, Agria shared with me her deepest longing and the best way I could express my appreciation to her daughter.

That selfsame night, I fled with nary a backward glance.

Ay, the Arlak of old might have obliged with scarce a second thought, but I was far from that man now. Grant her a child? A kindly thought, except that my terrors far overshadowed any sense of obligation. Perhaps the ulules had invented one too many tales birthed in the contaminated seed of demon-possessed men. To what Nethespawn monster might Jyla’s foul labours give rise, lay there but a grain of truth therein?

Warlock’s Roost, 3
rd
Joinday of Highsun, Anna Nol 1603

I dipped my quim in the lithpot, trapped the excess ink against its rim, and said, “You will understand, Benethar, that two hundred and fifty anna ago I knew as little of the ways of magic as I knew of the world beyond Roymere.” I scratched a careful note on the scrolleaf. “I was ignorant and cocksure. The more I have learned, the more I realise there is to know. There can be no end to the accumulation of knowledge in one man’s lifetime. There are mysteries that can never be fathomed, just as my own life is a mystery. I enjoy mysteries. They humble the wise.”

His reply, a low groan, rattled the shutters in their casements for a span.

“Ah, forgive me. I assumed you required no grounding in the fundaments. Jyla stole more from you than ever I imagined.”

Lightning crashed against the tower walls.
Yes.
I stepped over to the scroll rack and selected a leaf from Eliyan’s writings. An Eldrik of no mean reputation, he had once been Lead Sorcerer of the moderate L’yæm faction.

I thought,
‘Once torturer, once friend, now long dead.’

Unfurling the scrolleaf upon the podium, I read:

To the seeker, let it be known of the art and practise of magic:

Magic is life.

Magic is all around
us–in the air, in the ground, in people, infusing all living things. It takes as many different forms as thought. It has structure, meaning, and flow, and yet consists of nothing that can be measured. It can never be used up. It simply is.

Magic is neither good nor evil. It is a tool that can be used equally to either end;
in itself, it remains devoid of moral imperative. Its use is child’s play compared to the wisdom and judgement required in knowing how or when to apply it.

The practise of magic depends upon the ability to concentrate and harness this ubiquitous potential. Two key ingredients are required of the student who seeks mastery: time, and sacrifice.

By sacrifice, I mean that the knowledge of magic is not inborn to either the Eldrik or the Umarite, but learned by necessarily painful and lengthy discipleship, preferably at the feet of a great teacher, who by their ability and grasp of the mysteries may be able to shorten the student’s path to mastery. No person grasps it overnight. There is a great body of lore built up over many gantuls by the labours of dedicated men and women, wherein the grateful student should be immersed. Some learn quicker than others, true. But all learn sooner or later that it is far more difficult to do than to undo. Creation hallmarks mastery. Destruction is the province of the amateur.

Consider: Great magic requires great time to prepare. It is said that Mata spoke and the world was
–only, the word that She spoke was longer and more laden with meaning and infinite minutiae than the sum of all the lifetimes of all the people who have ever lived. But it seems mortal man may never plumb magic’s depths. Granted, magic requires a certain belief in what cannot be seen. But sometimes it takes on a life of its own. Unintended consequences arise. Tiny mistakes create oceans of chaos.

The condor’s appearance on that fateful day was one such event. Consequently, something inexplicable happened to El Shashi that has not to my knowledge been repeated in any man or woman before, or since.

In the realm of magic, El Shashi is a creature apart. Ulim’s accursed henchman, I have heard it breathed. For did he not wield power unimaginable? Ay, and was this power his own, or did it belong to the Wurm? To this subject we shall return anon. But it is clear that Jyla intended the Wurm first and foremost to be the vehicle by which and in which a titanic source of magical power should be collected. Never before had a Wurm been raised to this purpose. No person, save Jyla alone, had laid claim to this knowledge.

Magic is by nature diffuse. To gather it takes effort and care, a task laden with hazard. Magic has no desire to be concentrated in one place, but
in theory can be infinitely concentrated as long as the vessel, or the wizard, is powerful enough to keep it thus. A delicate art indeed. It cannot be rushed. A mistake can spell instant annihilation.

One such artifice for the concentration of magic is the so-named Web of Sulangi
…

“Ahoom!” thundered my companion.

I nodded ruefully. “Indeed, Benethar. Jyla devised a unique way of amassing more magic than has ever been amassed since the beginning, and a means to sustain it over many anna, for her need and ambition required no less than the greatest edifice of magic in history.”

The quim hesitated over the scrolleaf, trapped by my memories.

“And to accomplish that, she
used me.”