Every way I turned, my wondering
gaze took in snow-capped peaks sparkling in the golden evening sunshine. They were ancient, riddled with caves and bearded with long-needled coniferous forests, resembling ranks of hoary-eyed kings wearing gilded crowns, with long beards flowing down over their slumbering chests. Where was I? What was this place? We were level with the heavens, eagles in our eyrie.
I could see for leagues around from the onyx platform. Verdant pastures lapped gently at
the base of the mountains, and a flock of egrets made brilliant white specks against the darkling forests.
Serenity.
“Oalisi aatak!”
Jyla stabbed her hands into the pool. She held that pose so immobile, and for so long, that I began to wonder if some kind of seizure had
not overtaken her. At length I noticed the surface begin to stir, yet a turgid sleeper, but steadily wakening to an unseen force. The pool became agitated. Her shoulders quivered, pressing downward, transferring some arcane energy, I imagined, into the waters.
“Inio alik alakin!”
She sprang back, startling me, and then began to stalk the pool’s edge. Watching. Waiting.
Something was happening. A pressure on my eardrums, a salcat’s paw stroking my spine. I realised I had risen from my knees
into a hunched-over standing position, the better to inspect my fate, but could see nothing alarming until I followed Jyla’s glance to the skies.
My jaw sagged open.
“Can you feel it, Arlak?” Jyla’s fingers sank into my hair as a tygress sinks its talons into rabbit-flesh. Dear Gods! What demoniacal strength possessed her hand–she would surely lift my scalp clear of the bone beneath! “Mark how the Wurm rises! Soon you will be invested with power the like of which mortals may only dream. As it unfolds within you, as the magic overwhelms and consumes you, you will be unable to hold back. Mighty Arlak! Mighty, helpless Arlak. My web will tear you from your wretched existence and make you great!”
The sight held me transfixed
. Above the tower, despite horizons as clear and blue as a pearlock’s eggshell, a glutinous grey-black mass of clouds surged together, seething and boiling as though dragged protesting to this rendezvous by Jyla’s invisible conjuration, and held prisoner against its will. Unnatural energies crackled between angry, jostling thunderheads. Growls of fractious displeasure sounded from their midst, giving me the impression of a pack of gigantic, snarling hounds confronting each other over a choice hunk of meat.
The magnitude of her power!
One hears stories of magic. A good ulule would know hundreds. The mad wizard and the evil Eldrik Sorcerer are as much ingredients of folklore as moxi flour is basic to bread-baking. Their abilities are fabulous, embellished by the poetic and bardic arts, encased in a storyteller’s rune and leaf. Reality was a harsh teacher. Instantly I grasped three truths: the limitations of my education, how I had laughed at those tales with a disbelieving heart, and how frail was the vessel that cupped my life.
Jyla uncoiled her fingers. Thrust my head aside. “You’ll serve, Arlak. You’ll serve me well.” I was speechless. “Now give me your narrowest attention,” she declared. “
Mark my words and be forewarned! At your every failure, the cost will be multiplied. Double my power. Double your forfeit. Your deeds shall feed my Wurm!”
I had to assert myself. “I will never serve
–”
“Your will is
neither barrier to man nor to child,” Jyla cut in. “What choice you had, Arlak, you squandered in betraying Janos. Look! Water and wind! Nature’s strength against yours. Which, think you, will triumph?”
“What did you do with Janos? Where is he?”
“In the water. In the sky. All around you.”
She was serious.
“You’re crazy!”
“Mere dri
vel. Power is all that matters, nought else.”
I shook my chains, helpless as any newborn babe.
The rising wind plucked my rags and tousled my hair. The platform trembled beneath my feet. I expected the water to slop over the edge any moment, for a circular mill-race surrounded us.
The
Sorceress began to chant forcefully in a guttural tongue, a long rattle of syllables that built on itself with each repetition. To my ear it resembled the smattering of Low Eldrik Janos had once drummed into me. Should I not understand …? At length, however, Jyla’s labours provoked an eerie, throbbing wail from above, as though the mythical blackbeast had taken form to hunt its prey in the makh of twilight and howled answer to her summons. The clouds swirled faster and faster, I saw, goaded by her unending, increasingly impassioned efforts. She was sweating despite the cool atmosphere. The tendons of her neck were hawsers so taut I could have plucked them for music, had I been able.
Mark my words
, I was sore glad of my captivity. Jyla, unafraid, remained in the open with her robes clinging to her slight figure as the wind buffeted her this way and that. A sudden gust could knock her right over the edge, I imagined. The storm might yet turn to my advantage. The white cloth would flutter as she plummeted through the air …
But the
clouds marched to her cadence, weather and water hearkening to her call as if a vast instrument thrummed at its master’s fingertips. The wind picked up spray up off the pool, soaking me from every angle, and as I wiped my face I became aware of a new sound; rather, I felt it in my bones, a basso rumble that quickly intensified until I thought my teeth would shake loose from my jaw and patter around my feet as hailstones. Then the wind changed.
My lungs laboured to draw breath.
My feet became light. Jyla’s robes shot skywards. Suddenly I could no longer keep my stance, for a fierce up-draught rushed beneath my body, lifting me with astounding facility, flipping me upside-down. Only the manacles entrapping my wrists kept me from being plucked away instantly.
Fork
ed lightning struck the platform.
I screamed.
Jyla, arms outstretched and head flung back, screamed too in a kind of ecstasy, at precisely the same moment. Our cries mingled until they became indistinguishable.
With that, Nethe’s breath
struck the world.
Up surged the water from the pool. Down came the clouds. A dark, snaking funnel descended towards my feet.
Mark my words, at that time I knew nothing of tornados, for the Umarik Fiefdoms do not suffer such freak weather. But I believe it was a tornado Jyla created that day. And I was its target.
The storm attacked as if intent on driving its weapons into my flesh, pummelling my body this way and that until I feared the manacles would tear my hands clean off my wrists. It tossed me about
as a leaf blasted by a gale. All I could do was to squeeze my eyes shut and endure, to hold my face when the wind dropped for a moment, and then be hoisted aloft by a fresh gust. How could she still be standing? The wind shrieked as if the thousand cacodemons of Ulim’s Hunt loosing tongue together, as the crack of Ulim’s whip lashed them on through the ever-darkness of Alldark Week.
But even more
terrifying was Jyla’s next command: “
IMMACO WURI AATAK WURM!
”
This
, at last, I understood. Through the tempest, I glimpsed the Sorceress striding to the brazier, insensible to the slashing rain and a windstorm that could hoist a grown man aloft. She cast an object within. Her once-comely features were drawn into a death mask, as though her life were somehow sup to those demons I had envisaged and they had claimed payment due for the magic she had wreaked upon an innocent world.
A thick, greasy tendril of smoke began to leach from the brazier. It did not dissipate as I would have expected, nor
did the raging storm shred it. Instead it swayed, coiled beneath the blast, and oozed toward me.
I wanted to cry out,
‘What more? What more can I stand?’ But now the sweet stench of burning flesh suffused my nostrils. It triggered the memory of how, in my ninth anna, I had chanced upon a charred body in the bragazzar woods near Yarabi village; how I fled to my farm, never stopping for breath; how upset I had been when I burst into the farmhouse only to discover my parents were away trading. Janos found me quivering beneath my bed that eventide. He told the Layik of the village, the head woman. The scandal broke that same night. My find unearthed a cell of Ulitrists–those Ulim-worshippers who, it is said, dissect corpses in search of arcane knowledge and burn the remnants for Ulim’s pleasure.
Were Janos’ organs sizzling on the coals? Was Jyla an Ulitrist? Her independence decried such an association. She would see allegiance as an impediment, I supposed, making her motivation no less opaque to me than before. But I did note a sick stirring of grephe at the thought
–and agonised again over Janos’ fate.
Wurms, I understand now, are augmented forms of the crawling or squirming classes of insects, of which the Fiefdoms are bedevilled in abundance. The
Sorcerer applies his or her powers by means of a sorcerous construct–the Web of Sulangi being one amongst several–to enlarge a creature’s size and power far beyond what nature intended. Eldrik Warlocks are particularly fond of these monstrous pets. Even the brutal Faloxx hunt elsewhere, though it took the annihilation of not one but two invading armies to drive that message home. No one bothers the Eldrik. No person, to my best knowledge, had ever crossed their borders.
The smoke slithered into my hands.
Lasciviously, it curled in bracelets about my wrists. It clung to my skin with a touch at once feather-light and inexorable. The brutish wind gave it no pause. Stinging rain could not sweep it away. The smoke behaved as an animate liquid–never sticky, never hurried, spreading up my arms as smoothly as oil.
The smoke
felt as I imagined Jyla must feel. O hateful touch! No sorcery of hers would overmaster me unopposed. I hurled my fullest strength against the manacles, fighting claw and fang against the way the storm pummelled my body and blinded my eyes, and against the weird smoke, but it mattered nought.
Water streamed into my eyes.
I wiped them clear on against my upper arm only to see Jyla’s face close enough to spit at, her expression marked with a kind of maternal delight that perversely mimicked what I had once seen on a woman who that makh delivered her babe at the roadside safe and sound, and, cradling it in her arms, gazed adoring into her newborn daughter’s eyes. So Jyla perceived her creation.
I, glimpsing movement behind her, beheld: A bird
… a blue condor? Here?
The tornado
made a fluttering rag of my body. The great bird should have been smashed against the tower. Instead, it drifted through the uproar, wings outspread as though buoyed upon an afternoon zephyr. Effortless. Not a pinion was ruffled. Not a feather seemed out of place.
Its eyes fixed upon mine. Suddenly
, I could not look away. Surely I dreamed? Peace streamed from the bird’s gentle gaze into my fevered mind. I imagined it speaking: ‘Come. Here is an oasis of tranquillity, if only you will take your rest.’
A sending of Mata’s? But
… I was no believer!
The smoke
slid up into my nostrils. Slipped down my throat. I tasted grit, ash, and the tang of blood. I could not breathe. My lungs burned, but the thing would not relent. Deeper and deeper it spread. I heaved, tried to cough, and strove with every fibre of my being to vomit it up. Nethe’s chills wracked my body. Had I the use of my hands I would have reached down my own throat to claw the ghastly thing loose. Yet my eyes, as if drawn by strings, swivelled to follow the condor as it dipped behind Jyla.
“What?” she grunted. “What are you
–?”
The
Sorceress whirled. The bird was an arm’s-length from my right hand, circling behind me so that I could no longer see it, but I could follow Jyla’s reaction perfectly. Surprise. Shock. Then a white-lipped fury that had it been unleashed, would have immolated us all.
The wind broke off as though a door had slammed shut upon its wrathful storehouse. A deafening stillness enveloped the world.
I crumpled upon the platform. Barely had my head smacked against cold stone, and my mind registered that the tower had again been struck by multiple branches of lightning, when I became aware of a new sound, a shriek that climbed rapidly through the registers until it attained a pitch that stabbed knives into my eardrums. I distinctly felt something burst. I clutched my head. Curled into a foetal ball, I prayed most fervently to die.
Then the wind returned. Where before it had been a whirling dervish, now it was a wall, and many times amplified.
As I shot sideways the manacles saved me once more. Jyla grabbed for the brazier, but the wind knocked it over and dumped the contents into the pool. The hissing steam was whipped away, snuffed out as though it had never been. Another blast picked up the Sorceress and flung her across the platform, dashing her against my flapping body. She clutched my waist. Jyla somehow found purchase amongst my soiled rags. Her eyes, stripped at last of all arrogance, pleaded with mine.
No
human-made edifice could have withstood this renewed assault; the inexorable stress, the ferocity of Nature stressed beyond forbearance. The tower groaned. Long and low, its stones voiced the one clear thought remaining in my head–death knell.