“She advised you would make it difficult for me,” Tomira said,
as if speaking to herself. “Why, had you seduced me, that would have summoned the Wurm, would it not, El Shashi? And had you aborted the child, that too would have summoned the Wurm.”
“Nethespawn!” I swore.
In the gloaming, Tomira’s dark eyes seemed hollowed out, becoming black windows into an abyss of devouring need. Her face changed subtly. “And I need your Wurm, El Shashi! I need it now!”
My despairing scream shattered the walls of my mind.
‘On the first Levantday of Highsun, Anna Teryak 1375, between sundown and sunup, Bralitak Crossing was levelled by a grief-crazed El Shashi, who repeatedly ran the Wurm across the town in hope of slaying the woman known as Jyla. That he lost his mind after the loss of his wife and family, is clear. That he planned the destruction of the town is by no means certain …’
Lorimi the Historian:
Nethe Unbound, The Essential El Shashi (65
th
Scrolleaf)
Lorimi is too generous.
Truly told, Rubiny left me that day. But I did not lose my mind.
To this makh I recall the wording of her letter, its simplicity, and her love for me mingled with deep hurt that flowed between the graciously scripted lines. Jyla had stopped at our house that morning, shortly after I departed for the athocarium. Whatever she said or did, truly told, it put the fear of the Alldark Hounds at Rubiny’s heels. She took flight with barely a bag of clothing between her and the children.
When I arrived home, the house was as still as if death had
entered to defile it. Echoes, rather than answering voices. Father of four and husband to Rubiny o’Telmak one instant, the next … dear sweet Mata! How was I to know I would not see them again for an anna over thirty hence? In my heart I already feared the worst. The moment I drew the door shut behind me and spied the letter–I knew. My hands shook so violently I had to lay the sheet of scrolleaf on the work-smoothed tabletop in order to read it, before sinking to the cold stone floor with that precious, life-crushing scrap clutched to my chest. I felt bewildered, forlorn, so sore heart-struck I felt I should never rise again.
Then I knew rage. Jyla had stolen
my very dearest from me. I wanted her to pay, pay, pay. My family had been violated. It was a killing rage.
I summoned the Wurm.
Mata forgive me. I sought to make myself younger. Given an act of such deliberate selfishness and vanity, I knew my purpose could not fail. I was convinced Jyla was still somewhere in town and I would use the Wurm to flush her out, eat her whole, consign her corpse to the ravages of the swarming worms and insects …
Ay. Mata forgive me. Mata preserve the innocents I murdered that day.
But this was merely the first sip of hate’s bitter flagon. A deeper, bitterer draught than I could ever have imagined.
* * * *
I could not eat. Miserably, I pushed porridge around my bowl with a spoon and tried to force a few lumps down my throat. It had been a week, and the wound in my heart was so huge and raw that I felt passers-by could see right inside.
Sherya, our flame-haired, tempestuous teenager. Quiet Lailla, dark and gentle, the image of her father. Jerom, our boy, the joker of the family
–always teasing his sisters. Dear little Illia, just three anna old. Rubiny, ah, Rubiny, my beloved!
Lost. Wrenched away.
And what had I done? Over and over and over again, I made the Wurm chase me through Bralitak Crossing until there was hardly a stone left piled atop another across the length and breadth of town. Ay, the madness had come upon me for a time, I will grant it–but after that passed, and I realised Jyla was nowhere to be found … what then? Nought but a bloody revenge. Rage enacted, the sting of remorse felt far too late. I healed myself on the run. And I began to sense a strange power in the Wurm, as though my efforts only strengthened it, and I wondered dully if, somehow, Jyla was able to feed off the magical power of her Wurm. Was that her intent?
All this
was due to Jyla’s nefarious handiwork. Mistress of my pain, author of my sorrow–a litany which had become the message-drum of my life.
In the deepest darkness of the previous night
, as I debated the slaying knife, its tip resting upon my breast, and beheld my fingers curling about its bone handle, I vowed to kill her. I was too much a coward to kill myself. Weak and selfish the vessel. Well had she chosen. But why me? Why had our fates crossed? Why grant me this talent and steal my entire life in the bargain?
A woman once told me
that my healing ability–that part of Arlak named El Shashi–made me a God in my own right. Now, this makh, I would have given anything to be just an ordinary man. I would have thrown her so-called gift right back in Jyla’s face. Why, why, why, had I not foreseen this day? Jyla had not forgotten! But I had.
Tears splashed upon my untouched breakfast. I could not
keep from crying.
I hunched down and hoped my neighbours
crowded around the inn’s long trestle tables would not notice. Petty men with petty concerns. Was my pain invisible to them?
“Bralitak Crossing.”
I glanced at the bearded man next to me. His friend said: “Have you heard? ‘Tis the plague.”
“Ulim’s balls!”
“Ay, and his nethers. Best pray you it doesn’t spread.”
I dropped my
spoon. Jerked to my feet. “What about the plague?” I cried. “Tell me!”
The man made a calming gesture. “Peace, stranger. I’ll tell you when you
–”
“Now! Tell me now!”
He wiped my spittle off his cheek. “You demented numbwit! Mind your manners!”
“I’m sorry
–”
“Look, if I tell you will you belly off, you crazy shadworm?” At my nod, he said, “Story is that Bralitak Crossing was destroyed by some Nethe-spawned monster. This fellow
–an Eldrik Warlock–ran through town and the monster came after, gobbling up the earth. Where the bastard Eldrik came from–”
“I heard it eats houses!” put in the fellow across the table from us.
“Shut yer gobhole! I’m telling the story–”
“And I’ll shut your other hole
…”
“
–anyways, this monster is big enough to flatten the place.”
“Question is, why destroy a dung-strewn fleapit like Bralitak Crossing?”
“Cursed Eldrik!”
“That’s my birthplace you’re talking about!”
“Wasn’t that the Warlock’s bunged-up–”
I slammed my fist down upon the table, making the cutlery leap about and bowls smash upon the floor. “What about the plague?”
The bearded man reluctantly turned his attention away from the impending fistfight. “Black-boil plague, stranger. They say the pyres have been lit since Glimday last and the bodies are piled to the heavens. You can smell the stench from ten trins.”
But he was already talking to my back.
* * * *
Black-boil plague. The third day after exposure, the skin breaks out in distinctive black boils the size and consistency of a pea. The boils burn
as if the red-hot brand of Nethe was pressed to the flesh. A high fever develops. The limbs and joints swell up, often to grotesque proportions, making the sufferer unable to move or to walk or even to shift position upon their bedroll for dint of the pain. After the fourth day the boils begin to burst and thereafter weep a blackish-green pus, accompanied by such a stench of putrefying rot that the athocary must shield his nose and mouth with a cloth steeped in solibas oil. The lungs fill with a foul, sticky sputum. No cough will loosen it. The victim drowns in his own fluids.
I had made myself young again, but youth was no aid. I rode as the wind blasting from the storehouses of the four corners of the world, but the plague spread faster by far.
The Gods themselves had deserted that land, buried it beneath the sifting grey ashes of the roaring funeral pyres, and abandoned its inhabitants to their despair and affliction. And I wondered what the victims thought when I materialised like some ghastly wraith out of the clouds of smoke and leaned down from my tall grey stallion, stolen from behind a furrier’s shop, to grant the saving touch? Some cried, some cursed; many were too weak to take notice.
Fires. Bodies. Famili
es sprawled in their rude huts, dead. Bloated corpses rotting where they lay, shunned even by the rats and other vermin. Whole villages wiped off the map. I stumbled hollow-eyed through a charnel-house of unending horrors. From village to village I plied my trade. Makh after makh after makh I drove myself until I collapsed unconscious from the desperate, doomed attempt to save just one more life–for all of these lives were held upon the scrolleaf of my account with Mata, for a reckoning of the days and deeds of El Shashi. Survival was my all. Penance was the coin of my survival.
Could I blame Jyla? No. This was my doing, mine alone. The selfish actions of a selfish man. The tollgates of Nethe
overflowed in the blood of the innocent and the guilty alike. This plague was no respecter of age, gender, or station. I had no breath left to curse the Gods.
Only my own stupidity.
Hither, thither,
I am a speck of mortal dust
,
Blowing in the winds of nether-Nethe foul
,
Hither, thither
,
And who remembers mere dust?
P’dáronï of Armittal,
I am that I am nothing
: Collected Poems, Scrolleaf the Third
Truly told, I had once thought the world’s vastness a fact so self-evident, that I would not burden my speech with its mention. But during the four anna I searched for my family, in high places and low, rivers and plains, hills and deserts and forests, it was driven home to me with quoph-destroying monotony how I crawled like some pathetic beetle across the vast tapestry of the world. No trace of Rubiny did I find the length and breadth of Brephat, Elbarath, Chazurn, Lorimere, Hakooi, or Roymere. I walked the long leagues and more. Eleven pairs of boots I wore to rags. No weather was foul enough to halt me, not even the blizzards of Alldark Week, nor were the mountains impassable, and no place was too remote to feel my footsteps. In every village, town, and hamlet, I made my enquiries without success. My family may as well have been consumed by Ulim’s Hounds for all I discovered.
I wondered
many times if Jyla had kidnapped them–but I concluded she would not have hesitated to use my family against me. Ah, dear Mata! How the bitterness devoured my quoph! It stole my life, my love, my ability even to think and feel and function. It left me no man, but a ravaged husk.
Worst were the silences. Unbearable silences. Inured as I was over the anna to the sounds of small voices in the house, to feet rushing hither and thither, to laughter and bickering, to crying, to story-times beside the fireplace
… ah, mark my words, each long, silent eventide spent in my own company nigh destroyed me. How I missed them! How I loved them! As it had been to lose my parents so unexpectedly, so I discovered anew a most exquisite form of torture.
Its name? Loneliness.
How much more would Mata steal from me? Over and over again I prayed, “Take my life, I beg you!”
Loneliness drove me to the brink. Deep did I drink of the long cups of despair. Twice, thrice, in moments of drunken foolery and grim sobriety, I tried to kill myself, but to no avail, for in my cowardice I was unable to go through with it. There were voices, dark whisperers, which invaded my head after the makh of
eventide with their lies and poisons. ‘Freak,’ they hissed. ‘You are a freak and a murderer. She left you for another man. She couldn’t stand it any longer. You deserve your fate. You deserve every burden of guilt, every makh of pain. Child-killer.’ Not since the Lymarian border war had I felt Ulim’s sinister legions so close, so entwined about my being. Had a yammarik prayed a thousand times protection over my quoph, yet still would I have welcomed their succubus kisses.
Denied even the release of death, I became
as a dead man.
One curious thing I observed, however, was the way that stories spread. I began to hear about myself here and there. Ulules were putting together the pieces of my life in new ways
–often mistaken ways–but the story of El Shashi began to assume a life and a character of its own. Through volition not my own, I lived on, and my legend came to be cased in rune and leaf, to be imagined and embellished by others–a slow spread similar to a river wearing at its channel, unnoticeably slow but inexorable.
I have never breathed legend. But my legend nearly killed me.
The good citizens of Limka Vale in Brephat had heard the tales of Bralitak Crossing and the Plague-Rider from a passing ulule, added the two together, and drawn the correct conclusion. After I cured a man of palsy, by way of thanks they drove me out of the village with whips and clubs and left me to rot in a roadside ditch.
At length, the incessant meanderings of my search brought me back to Telmak Lodge. Here I
would seek word. Her father had to know something of Rubiny.
* * * *
Solk Inn, a half-league north of Telmak Lodge on the Inba Road, had a none-too-scurrilous reputation and served for my chosen meeting-place. I had seldom tarried there, for I mark Telmak Lodge held other attractions.
Built in the ancient Roymere hexogi style around a great central hearth, the inn had a low-beamed
jalkwood interior that lent itself to cloistered tables and private conversations. Smoky lamps rested upon each table. The hearth roared heartily, for the season was deep into Rains and the shadows of Alldark Week would soon shroud the land. A sweating drudge slowly rotated a suckling porker on a spit above the leaping flames. Fat hissed and sizzled upon the coals. The sweet scent, savoury-thick from floor to rafter, did little to stir my appetite–though the ancient house salcat, a monster standing fully mid-thigh to a man and tygar-crossed in all likelihood, was purring up a respectable thunderstorm as it paced back and forth, yellow eyes slit against the sallow spill of lamplight.
I rotated a goblet of Imurian root beer in my hands, but did not drink. Rubiny had once knocked me out cold with such a vessel. Oh Mata, I missed even the acid edge of her tongue, and would have given ten thousand ukals and more to be struck
down by her again!
Curious thing about that cat
, I thought. Standing beside the fire for a span to dry my clothes, sweating and steaming, the salcat came to me as cats will and rubbed itself around my legs. I was bracing myself against its huge strength, when suddenly I had the most lucid impression I should examine the salcat as I would a human patient. I discovered in its left ear an advanced and no doubt painful infestation of maggots, perhaps a fight-wound that had become infected. I ejected the maggots into my hand and flicked them into the fire. Add some flavour to the meat. Then, while pretending to scratch the cat’s ear, I put the wound right.
The drudge’s smile was more gaps than teeth, and those that remained were blackened on the edges from anna of chewing khat
, a narcotic tobacco leaf that masters used to keep their drudges compliant. He grunted, “Old Cahal don’t often take to strangers. He’d like as eat them.”
I stared at the h
uge salcat, wondering if cats were attuned to magic? Did it sense who I was? The cat returned a contemptuous stare that clearly relegated my kind to the ranks of fools.
Pensively, I moved back to a bench hard by a bay window. Sleet
slopped icily against the too-small glass panes. Dirty glass. For some reason, this irritated me, even though it was fully dark outside. Nothing to see out there.
Truly told, my life was nought but a
cart-wreck. Perhaps if I could find reasons for some of what had happened to me, my existence might become bearable. The grief was no less raw, and there was no lessening of the pain in sight. Truly told, it was as the old saying went: Ulim’s Reavers had bereaved my quoph, and brought me nought but woe upon woe.
Ay, had the Honoria Telmak not put a price on my head? Her servants and informants would surely be on the lookout for me. Kidnapper
of the precious daughter Telmak … but the risk was worth it.
In the dirty windowpane, my face appeared haggard, my eyes sunken and hollow, the cheekbones sculpted to a sepulchral prominence. When last had I eaten a proper meal? Maybe the Wurm was devouring my very being from within, the insidious smoke winding its way about my quoph
…
“Arlak.” A touch upon my shoulder.
I jumped at the touch. “Master Telmak.”
He clasped my forearm firmly, slid awkwardly into the bench opposite
, and set his goblet down with a small clink. Beneath the hood, his face was a dark secret.
“Thank you for coming, Master Telmak.”
“The least I could do,” he said. “You took a great risk coming here.”
“I am desolate.”
After an everlasting silence, he grated, “Let me guess–you left her.”
“She left me.”
I studied his knuckles, white against the dull ormetal. “Where is Rubiny now?”
“You don’t know. You don’t know either, do you?”
Slowly, with an evident effort at self-control, the Master Telmak shook his head. He said, “I think you had best speak first. What happened?”
I told him more than I had intended. He pushed back his hood, listened intently, and asked terse questions. Often, he shifted as though in pain
–but he sat through the makh it took me to relate the story–Rubiny, children, Jyla, and all. When I was done, we sat and sipped our dark, earthy-tasting beers for a span.
At yet another grimace, I asked, “What’s the matter with your back?”
“Is this Arlak asking, or El Shashi?”
Odd question
… “El Shashi,” I said.
“Then I have nothing to say.”
I looked at my fingers. “Maybe you’re hiding something? I mean–I’m sorry! I didn’t intend …”
The Master Telmak seemed a man wrestling with powerful emotion
s. I guessed it had to do with the loss of Rubiny, or perhaps he was coming to terms with having four grandchildren he had not known existed? And before he could know them, they had been lost to him again? But did that account for the sudden welling of his eyes, or the way his composure wavered?
“The reason I advised Rubiny not to Matabond with you
… oh, Arlak!” he sighed hugely. “Forgive me. She is your half-sister.”
“
What?
”
“Well might you accuse me of harbouring secrets
–Arlak, look at me.”
The Master Telmak gripped my hands, but I jerked them loose. “I’ve a sister? I exchanged vows with my
sister?
”
“Be still! We are in great danger.”
I sank back into my seat, quaffed half my beer without drawing breath. What little was left of my life’s foundations were crumbling by the span. I stared at him over the rim of my goblet, saying, pleading moreover, “I have four children with my half-sister … oh Gods, this can’t be happening. Tell me it isn’t true.”
“I’
m not Ariabak-spawn.”
Suddenly another insight struck me like a runaway cart. I stammered, “You’re my
… my … no. Are you …?”
“Yes.”
“Tanak is my–was my–”
“He was my brother,” said the Master Telmak. “My younger brother. Lumina was his Matabond lover, but sadly
, they were childless.”
“Yes.” They had always treated me as a son. I own the lie
–that my father abandoned me in the village–did not hurt as much as I felt it should. “So you are Sorlak?”
“Orik Sorlakson,” he said. “Sorlak was my father.”
I nodded slowly. “Clever.” Children were never named after their grandfather. It was not the Roymerian way.
“The Honoria tried to have you killed,” said my father. My father! How
strange the word rang in my ear. “They poisoned your mother, but the athocary cut you out with a knife while she yet lived. You owe your life to her courage.”
“Dear sweet Mata!”
His smile was terrible, harsh, and strained. It held me by a force greater than chains. “It is difficult, otherwise, to murder a Warlock.”
I managed a wheeze by way of reply. Had a jerlak kicked me in the gut, I would have been no less capable of speech.
My father appeared emboldened now, as though this revelation, once wrenched loose of its hiding-place and dangled in the daylight, had lifted a great weight off his shoulders. To carry such a secret for the fifty-one anna of my life thus far! Unimaginable. No wonder I felt drawn to him! But … a Warlock? An
Eldrik
Warlock? My thoughts resembled a flock of sparrows ambushed by a hawk, fluttering desperately in all directions. Eldoria, as the Eldrik lands were called, and the Fiefdoms were technically at war. The border was closed–and no sane man would brave Faloxxian territory to get there. The Faloxx controlled all access to the narrow isthmus which guarded entry to Eldoria. There was no shipping, no trade, no travel–nothing. How in Mata’s name did Orik expect me to believe that he and my mother … my Eldrik mother …?
I
had children by my own flesh and blood–Mata forgive my iniquity!
“Shut your mouth, son.”
I snapped my jaw shut with a growl. “You owe me–”
“An explanation. Yes.” Orik regarded me levelly as I mastered my anger. “Let me tell you of your heritage, son, for this
I’ve kept hidden for too long now and mark my words, what pain and sorrow I have wrought! Before you were born, there was a time when the Eldrik and the Umarite lived in peace. I was a trader, and though a young man, I commanded a fleet of seven ships which plied the Gulf of Erbon between Hakooi and Eldoria. I held the secret of the northwest passage, past Faloxxir and through the Nxthu Straits, to the city of Eldoran. A fairer city you cannot imagine. Beauty to make a man weep. Eldoran is tooled of palisk-quartz and jade, and the streets are laid in zigzag patterns of grey and black granite from the quarries of Ummandor.”
“The Eldrik are greatly skilled in the arts and crafts, and
masters of the ways of magic. And they live longer than you or I. They take pleasure in the manufacture of beautiful, long-lasting things. No preoccupation of theirs is hurried. They make of all endeavours an art, a dance, a song.”