The Reward of The Oolyay (8 page)

They walked as carefully as if they were on cracked glass, their guns pointed into the fog as the call of the Shades began. Low moans that elevated into shrieks and clicking noises pierced the thick block of misty shroud, forcing the grips of every soldier to tighten around their weapons. Even Inlojem drew his sickle-blade and held it in front of him, his other hand wrapped tightly around Iogi’s wrist. The little child’s head darted from side to side as he trundled along, entirely curious. He had no understanding of the fear that engulfed the others around him.

The path began to narrow and Teftek grabbed Iquay’s shoulder.

“What’s going on? There’s barely any land!” He whispered.

“I know. it’s just a short cut,“ She assured.

“You didn’t say anything about this,” he protested.

“I didn’t have time!” she snapped, and yanked her shoulder back. “Now, be quiet before you get us all killed.”

As Teftek looked down, the path narrowed to the size of his body, only wide enough that one person would fit across at a time. He stayed right behind Iquay as she pressed on at a steady pace. On each side of the trail, the ground tapered off in a deep descent, but the fog did not reveal how far or how steep the descent was. He kicked a rock down the side of the ledge to hear it drop, and a whole five tense heartbeats passed before he heard distant

Thump.

His assumptions turned dark. The rocks behind him shifted and slid, and before he knew it, one of the young soldiers who had tried to defect was falling from the path, grasping for life and screaming out for help. Teftek dropped to the path, and gripped his hand into the unsteady ground, getting as much traction as he could. He reached his other hand out and grabbed the soldier’s backpack, feeling his body almost lurch over the side from the soldier’s weight. Everything stopped. The soldier held onto the steep sides of the path and smiled in relief at Teftek, laughing nervously. Teftek let out a huge breath.

And then the fog parted and the jaws of a screaming translucent wraith smashed into the soldier’s waist and clamped down. The soldier screamed in pain as the invisible jaws turned purple with his blood, and massive invisible spikes lashed into his torso. He was yanked from Teftek’s hand and pulled into the bleak white emptiness. Teftek’s terrified soldiers gawked and shuddered as their comrade disappeared from sight. They listened to his screams as he was dragged down into the abyss, until he went silent with one foul
crack!

A moment of terror gripped them as the moaning and shrieking of other shades continued around them.

“Come on, keep...“ Teftek started to say. Before he could finish, a huge shade, only visible because it was half covered in gravel and mud, smashed into the middle of Teftek’s squad and knocked off two of his soldiers. It released a hissing, gravelly growl and began to crawl forward, twisting and scraping along the small path.

Iquay yelled “run!” and darted forward into the fog. Teftek and Aljefta turned to follow her, but another Shade dropped in front of them. The soldiers in back pushed back toward Inlojem and Iogi, but Inlojem pushed them forward.

“Don’t go back. Shoot it, you fools!” He yelled at them, and pushed on their backs to go toward it. They fired wildly at it, ripping it apart with bullets, but it still managed to sink its teeth into one of them, and drag the soldier off the side. Another Shade dropped down behind Iogi and growled hungrily at the child.

“Whats that, Inlojem?” he asked. Inlojem put the child on his back and felt Iogi grip him tightly, swinging his sickle-blade around in one fluid motion. The Shade’s jaws split in half, and translucent fluid spilled along the path. He could now call two Shade kills his own. Inlojem spun back around on the narrow route as another Shade scrabbled up the side of the path and grabbed the soldier in front of him. He leaped up and felt his sandal press against the slimy back of the prehistoric creature, and then he plunged his sickle-blade into its head, making his count three, before springing off of it and dropping back down onto the path.

Aljefta’s arm was grabbed by the Shade behind him. The creature thrashed smacked his repeater away, but Aljefta punched it with all his might and dazed it, sticking his pistol in its mouth and obliterating its minute brain with a massive shell. It went limp and slid down the side of the path. Teftek pumped fifteen rounds into the one shade, then two shades, then three shades. Their bodies piled up in front of him, blocking his way, and Teftek grabbed Aljefta’s arm to pull him forward. Aljefta grabbed another, much heavier repeater that had been abandoned on the path and fired off several rounds as Teftek pulled him forward.

Inlojem worked his way along the path, noticing that there were no more soldiers until he reached Aljefta, and realized that only Aljefta and Teftek were left.

They ran forward until they came to open ground where Iquay was wrestling with a Shade. They suddenly realized that there were thirty or forty Shades blocking their path. Iquay split the Shade in two and it inked the ground with transparent goo as she pushed it away from herself. She moved back toward the group of Vesh while the pack of Shades approached, pushing them back the way they'd come. Aljefta breathed hard, the only course of action dawning on his big thick head.

“This is a glorious death,” Inlojem stated, preparing himself, Iogi still clinging to his back.

“This isn’t your death, good Necrologist, it’s mine,” Aljefta proclaimed. He began to scream wildly as he fired off rounds in the air, luring the Shades to follow him. He ran into the fog and half the shades chased him. Iquay seized the opportunity and darted forward, forcing Inlojem and Teftek to follow. Teftek fired off rounds in the direction of the distracted shades, but then grunted with defeat and followed Inlojem as his feet disappeared into the fog.

The four remaining Vesh poured through a crevice in the pyrix slab similar to the threshold through which they first crossed and sat, breathing heavily and feeling completely overwhelmed. Teftek sat with his repeater between his legs and aimed at the crevice, his chest heaving out the dusty air, waiting for a shade to try to push through the small nook. His grip slowly relaxed as nothing came. Faintly, in the distance, they heard Aljefta let out a primal scream. He had staved them off long enough.

All the soldiers Teftek had commanded in his time, they were all taken from him, in battle after battle, but at least half of them were normally taken by promotion or resignation. But these soldiers were all taken by death. Teftek never wanted to admit that Aljefta or Pojlim were very important to him, because he never wanted to admit that anyone was important to him…but they were. Those two were. He had known them for much longer than he cared to remember.

And now they were gone.

He wanted to weep but the tears wouldn’t come. Teftek had seen far too much death, he was far too detached, but he felt the passion of life burn out inside him. The military rule of this land was over, resigned to the restless upheaval of the planet’s new intruders. His soldiers were gone and his friends were dead. Now there was only a void. He knew he was as enveloped in darkness as the Necrologists around him, perhaps more so. Was this what Iogi had meant? Was this…the Oolyay?

V

Inlojem’s brooding face, with the little boy’s hand still wrapped in his, looked on from behind the plague-stricken guide as the four remaining wanderers dragged themselves up the narrow, winding mountain path. There were stray Shades far below them, invisible frames momentarily lurking in and out of fog, before disappearing into the abyss of uncertainty. Teftek’s face seemed expressionless and dead, but Inlojem had felt the blow of those soldiers’ deaths much more than he cared to admit. He knew them to be devout, because, although they respected him too greatly to say so, he knew some of their faces from his village. He knew that many of them had been conscripted, or had volunteered against the Hagayalicks. He had watched the faithful cower under the terror of unrelenting death, from the very creature that acted as a facilitator of his faith, and acted as a defense for his faith’s origin point.

The irony of his situation was undeniable; his own faith had stripped his enemies from his side, but only once they had become his friends. They had been stripped from him only once they were under his protection at the end of the world, while they journeyed to a place of great faith. His emptiness was beginning to fill again with anger toward his abandoned deity - a rash distaste for the unfulfilling fate which was delivered upon his group. Among the Oolyay,  anger with a God is acceptance of that God - one cannot be angry at a force that does not exist, lest they be angry at themselves. Yet Inlojem was unsure whether he
was
angry at the Deity of Torment and Irony, or whether he was angry at himself.

Iquay called “Up here,”, and the sound broke his thoughts. The bony Vesh’s finger pointed to a ridge that lingered off from the mountain path. “This path is very rough, but it’s the most direct route…if we want to make it there tonight-“

“What does it matter?” Teftek asked, defeated. Inlojem gripped Teftek’s arm and looked at him like he had looked upon so many desperate, confused children. The captain's face seemed to relax a little. He pulled his arm away from Inlojem and gestured for Inlojem to stay ahead of him.

*  *  *

The steep trail became more orderly and civilized after it surpassed some rocky cliff sides and ascended higher and higher into the stark, stunning glacier-cut peaks. Burning effigies stuck out of the rock faces alongside the trail to stave off the shades. They emanated bright green flames into the dark blue shroud that slowly crept over the land as dusk lurked across the horizon. Flurries of snow battered their bodies and sucked the heat out of them as they climbed the ever ascending trail, its steepness becoming challenging for old feet, for diseased feet, and for disheartened feet.

Inlojem lifted up the boy and pressed him against his chest when he saw the child suffering from chill, and wrapped the youngling in his thick cloak. He pressed his old hands behind the back of the boy’s head and caressed it to comfort the child. What a luxury a child was, something that those who were not so consumed with faith had dared to conceive. But never was this an option for an orphan from the North, whose family had been slain by the whims of a tribal feud. Never was this an option for old Inlojem, whose faith was hard to gain, and never easy to keep.

The joy of being saved by Quantelenk, against all odds of despair, was the irony that had allowed Inlojem’s faith to flourish for so long. It was the correct type of irony that evened out torment in a way which allowed the Oolyay to open to Inlojem. As a boy he was faithless; even into his adolescence, the tricks of old Vesh who trundled about in his village of shacks and farms seemed like only that - tricks. They could not read minds or tear apart Shades or do any of the things which it had been said a real Necrologist could do. They were simply placeholders for a very old, very dead faith.

He never dared tell a soul of his misgivings against the Oolyay, because those who refused to believe were bound for torment. Yet this seemed unfair, because those who
did
believe were bound for irony. Irony was the clause of the universe that adhered to each and every person like sap-binding and caused one to fumble so another would prosper. This meant that even one’s own prospering soul benefited from the ruination of another. It made Inlojem feel
guilty
to have faith, lest he take advantage of some poor farmer whose wretched harvest inspired his good fortune. Neither did he want to be taken advantage of by some blessed midwife or iron-crafter who benefited from Inlojem’s suffering. Having faith was a gamble. But faithlessness was bound to bring torture upon oneself. He often wondered how a religion could even pretend to have sway over the faithless.

But Inlojem kept the rituals sacred and proceeded along the ways of ceremony until he reached his forty-sixth harvest, all the while disbelieving secretly even as he showed his faith openly. On a day of no particular significance, a short time after the forty-sixth harvest had passed, a raider named Trenjlonk, whose power had grown within the region, came to the village and threw down the bloody head of an Oolyayn Necrologist. Inlojem recalled it vividly, memorizing every detail of the dead, red-eyed face, immersed by violet-crusted hair and oozing lavender liquid.

A day later he watched his village burn to the ground. The elders had been tossed from cliffs, the males slaughtered in their fields, the females raped and piked, and the children lined up for slavery. The blur of trauma was too great, too overwhelming for his child-mind to process. Only details that glowed like a candle in the darkness made themselves present. His brother’s death next to his father’s corpse, or the clattering sound of snapping wood as his home burned. Collapse and submission to torment seemed to be the only option, and Inlojem decided that this was his punishment for abandoning his faith.

Then, a Necrologist stepped out from the smoke and flame and wiped away the vague torturous agony of slaughter and lifted Inlojem into his herculean arms. This behemoth of a Vesh showed the mid-grown boy his village and the enemies of his people, splayed out amidst the buildings; the raider’s army, slaughtered by the Oolyay’s own.

“You have lost all you love to torment, young child,” confided the Necrologist. “But irony has rewarded you, for their loss is your gain. You will gain phenomenally all your life so long as you keep your faith.”

The boy looked up into the mammoth’s eyes and asked his name, to which was replied,