The Reward of The Oolyay (2 page)

“My apologies,” Inlojem muttered reticently. His head nodded slightly in a gesture of respect…but that was all it was anymore - a gesture. Inlojem looked upon the one he called his master as the whole shape of him was revealed from the darkness.  Quantelenk was a beast of a Vesh; massive and brutal, he was a warrior from the days when the Oolyay sent droves of its best killers squarely against the soldiers of the Eastern provinces where Uyor Sevoign had made its inroads.

              Legends whirled around Quantelenk's conquests. The number of his tattoos mounted through his lifetime so that his entire pale body was covered in black spots and symbols that referenced the great Vesh he had killed or the honored Vesh he had sacrificed to The Void. He was always a calm Vesh and a wise Vesh; he never feared any blade. Quantelenk had long ago transfered onto Inlojem the toughness and deliberation he would need to face this world and accept the challenges of the Oolyay. His irises were as stark white as his skin and he wore a long, thick robe made entirely of a patchwork of furs from Kyruns and Shades; notoriously terrifying animals to even glimpse upon. Inlojem had only ever slain one.

But Quantelenk had grown old because his strength was incapable of challenge. He was twenty harvests Inlojem’s elder and his age had begun to compromise him. As the peoples of the Oolyay were scattered, he felt remorse and spared them from horrendous deaths at the hands of two sets of invaders. He gave his sacred home to the Hagayal in exchange for their defense from the Uyor Sevoign. But now, in the face of defeat and resignation to the ways of a secular stronghold, those old alliances meant nothing except resentment, and both the Oolyay’s Necrologists lurked around the temple like displaced old Kyruns, waiting to strike out at their challengers.

“You should sacrifice that wretch to show you are really
loyal
to Hagayal!” barked Ilquast as Quantelenk approached them.

“But I am not loyal, nor have I ever been. So why would I sacrifice one of my greatest assets to your impostor religion?” Quantelenk bellowed, his chin raised regally as his muscular, bulky form stood a whole head above Ilquast.

“You
both
speak with such disrespect to me, but remember who holds the region!” Ilquast retorted.

“You do not hold the region- not anymore, now we are both counted among the oppressed. Besides, remember who holds
the people
,” Quantelenk warned him. “No matter how long you are here, you are
still
a guest in my home.” He put his arm around Inlojem and led him away from the Hagayalicks.

*  *  *

“A child prophet?” Inlojem grumbled with disbelief. He paced back and forth in the Elders’ Tomb, his footsteps parading over the granite that entombed twenty generations. “You want us to
save
a child prophet
from
the Oolyay?”

“It is not something I am
asking
of you, Inlojem,” Quantelenk cautioned. “I know you have your qualms with our faith- but see; its very essence falls from the sky. When you leave, the Oolyay follows you, when you follow it, it runs from you.”

“Save your lectures about faith,” Inlojem retorted, his irritation growing against his better judgment. His pace slowed down now as he thought about the journey ahead. He would have to accept this duty - he could not disobey his master, and he wouldn’t anyway. So close to death, so close to the apocalypse, Inlojem could think of no better way to spend the last vestiges of his strength than one last pilgrimage. It would certainly mean his death and Inlojem was content with that prospect, but
why now?
Why Inlojem?

He had devoted such a great portion of his life into building and preserving the great and ancient town. Now he was being cast out of it to die, forced away from the very tomb in which he would one day rest to go rot at the edge of the world…for some petty child prophet.

“I do not dislike the journey…but I do not wish to die so far from my home,” Inlojem offered after a strenuous length of silence. The tension was lost on the serene confidence of Quantelenk.

“It gets worse,” Quantelenk followed. “To get there, you must go with a military convoy…the captain is a secularist.”

“An
atheist,
” Inlojem growled bitterly- his ragged eyebrows pushing together like tectonic plates.

“I’m not sure of that,” Quantelenk replied, “But the captain is not one of us - not even a Hagayalick. Yet it is your task, Inlojem, and only yours to execute.”

“But I will die so far from this temple that has breathed life into my soul for so long. It has channeled The Void through me. Without it…”

“Without it, your powers will be as strong as ever!” Quantelenk barked. “Old Vesh! Do you not realize? We are
of the Oolyay.
We are of the old ways. Our ancestors ripped trees from the ground with their minds and gouged them into the walls of our enemies. They ripped the shades limb from limb and drank their blood from the air with strength only manifested in them by the Oolyay in that one, seemingly bleak moment of helplessness. I have too, my friend…and so shall you.”

Inlojem stopped pacing and moved close to Quantelenk, so that his words were muffled and barely passed through the air to reach Quantelenk’s ears.

“You are the Master, Quantelenk - the last great Vesh of Omzul and the last Oolyayn in Uiwyesh with an Ulgayir to his name. The rest who hold our holy temples are Hagayalicks. They welcome this terror to our world and wait to kill in the streets again. We are both needed…
here
, in our village to protect these people. Why do you send me away, to protect this…this
false
prophet?”

Quantelenk nodded with a sense of approval at Inlojem’s doubt. “I have not believed in a child prophet for many harvests, Inlojem. But The Prophet, Iogi is named such for a reason.”

“You are asking me to die, Quantelenk. For a
child prophet
,” Inlojem seethed.

“No, Inlojem. I am telling you to succeed. Do not die or fail. Bring the child North and make sure you have safe passage from this world.”

“This is the Vesh you have chosen over all others to leave our world and represent the Oolyay.”

“This child is not the one I have chosen to represent the Oolyay. You are,” Quantelenk clarified.

              Inlojem glared at him, seemingly unconvinced. Quantelenk sighed and slapped his thighs.

             
“Very well,” Quantelenk conceded. “If you do this for me, I will wander out from The Ulgayir and go toward the ship, and there I, too, will die in The Nothingness- surrounded by its minions…whatever they may be.”

“Your child prophet will have its life,” Inlojem intoned. The old priest slit an old palm upon his sickle-blade and rubbed the lavender ooze along Quantelenk’s cheek, to confirm the oath.

II

His name was only Teftek. He'd always noted it in his mind as a telling observation of Gilojen culture. Captain Teftek chewed y’Yoz root while dusted off the projectile loader on his Uim-Vorstram Repeater. He thought it was a decent gun but not “fine-looking,” like his
Uim-Palstagler
. The UP was what he used to hunt wild Ijsquin, which was admittedly a bit mean because the gun itself could bore a five-knot-hole in
anything.
He sighed, remembering it as he picked a Kadul-hopper out of the case register. He dangled it in front of his face by one of its twenty legs and sneered at it. He flicked the hopper aside; there was no reason to kill it. He wasn’t a foul Vesh after all. About a hundred children milled about the transport truck against which he leaned, and he started wondering about where his platoon had wandered off to. It seemed likely that they were all drunk and he was stuck being sober. Today he would have to transport some decrepit old fool and the little blind child his religion had tortured.

“Come on, Captain- that’s good protein you’re throwing away- you still wanna grow, don’t you?” said Pojlim. Teftek made another mental note that the man's name was only Pojlim, another Gilojen. Although they often despised each other, Omzul Vesh were not much different from Gilojen Vesh, except for an irritating obsession with pinning titles to everyone’s name. Teftek speculated that if he were born this far North, his name would have been something like The Annoyance, Teftek. Pojlim was nonchalantly glancing at the Captain’s activities between wrench-twists, tightening up the bolts on the truck’s foot-step nearby.

“Shut up,” Teftek blurted out callously, wounded slightly by the stab at his height. Teftek was a notoriously small, nervous male, who was known to “think too much,” according to higher Uyor authorities. He was a ragged Vesh with a ferocious sense of grit emanating from his lava red eyes. He kept his face clean-shaven, and his curly red hair was closely cropped between the thick, vertical black stripes that divided a Vesh’s head into three parts. His strong young eyes could see the specs of dirt on the Kadul-hopper’s legs and his ears could parse the frantic conversations of the rushed town folk around him. All these Vesh around Teftek were tall and muscular; beefy soldiers with muscles that could break one’s neck if they looked for too long. “I’m a captain. You repair trucks. How many Oolies have you killed, huh?”

“You might not wanna say that too loudly,” Pojlim warned, mocking Teftek’s arrogance. “Most of
these
people are, or were, Oolies.

Teftek waved his arm, disregarding the sentiment. “Who cares?” he scoffed. “They should be happy that there’re people stopping their crazed priests from sacrificing them at every turn. Who sacrifices their friends and neighbors?”

“Well, my grandfather was an Oolie,” Pojlim replied. “Wasn’t really like that…I mean, he wanted a quick death at the end of his life…”

“Yeah, yeah yeah- justification of barbaric rituals in the face of an otherwise legitimate argument,
I churn where you’re straying
,” Teftek replied, throwing his hand up again and pointing his chin a little higher in the air.  “But you’re also talking about a bunch of Vesh who think, even now, under the threat of alien invasion that this is some miraculous sign of the coming of
The Oolyay.
”

Ridiculous stuigen rituals
thought Teftek as the keen red orbs in his face darted from Vesh to Vesh. They prayed on the ground before they were loaded into transport trucks, and the Hagayalick devotees eyed the soldiers with looks of contempt and suspicion, watching their spouses and children leave them. He knew that the Uyor Seviogn could no longer protect them, but the Uyor Sevoign had never really been able to protect them from the start. They didn’t want it. They resisted it like a child resists medicine…like those damned child prophets resisted medicine even as they suffered from a brutal plague.

Teftek had fought for this region, killed Oolyayns and Hagayalicks - most likely many of these Vesh’s friends and kin. None of them wanted to be here, in this frigid, dark land where the white sun was even bleaker than in the South and the winters poured down snow until whole villages went missing. They were forced here when the Hagayalicks would not give up the fight. They were forced to stand against both religions, entrenched in their absurd sacrificial rituals - who would have thought that recording and distributing vid-reels of beheadings was a practice that was filled with honor? Oolyayn, Hagayalick, they were just different words for the same barbaric terror. The Hagayalicks would stab you in the back, the Oolyayns would stab you in the front.

Teftek chewed his Y’yoz root for a while longer before spitting it out. The flavor had gone out of it and that tingly sensation between his lips had stopped so it was otherwise useless. Sometimes he thought about his gums, and how some of the older officers’ gums had turned brown and cracked from chewing the stuff, so he didn’t chew it every day. He had a pretty strict regiment, in fact; once every five days, around mid-day.

Pojlim wiped the sweat from his brow, sliding out from below the footstep on the truck as the pale noonday sun shimmered on his stark white forehead and his black glossy stripes. He spat out an old batch and greedily stuffed more Y’yoz root into his own mouth before wiping his hands off with a grease rag. “When they issued the orders, where were you?” Pojlim asked. It was a question that had been asked all day, by all sorts of Vesh- or at least questions like it. Teftek had heard it walking down the street, in a café in Qol before he left, even from his ex-companion. She had messaged Teftek to say that she was also sorry about her recent infidelity, but the world seemed to be ending. He couldn’t see how it was relevant where someone was when the aliens invaded, but he understood the reason that other Vesh were asking.

Everyone was afraid; from what they had seen, these aliens were nothing like them- not even bipedal. They were strange, tentacled masses that seemed to churn the energy around them in and out of existence. These things were truly and entirely alien- far more different than the depictions of bipedal aliens, closely resembling Vesh in the popular science fantasy vid-reels. The mass broadcast of what the Uyor Sevoign was calling an “ultimatum” was mainly just confusing. The alien seemed to speak in friendly tones but had no grasp of the Vesh language, just spouting out words or phrases at random. The only way that anyone could tell that they were even invaders was that the asteroid colony and extra-planetary sensor grids had been destroyed- most likely by their ships.  This information had been classified by the Department of Global Security, but Teftek was pretty good with squeezing classified information out of ranking officers.