Tales of Noreela 04: The Island (32 page)

The chanting continued, more steam gushed, and at some signal Namior could not hear, it ended.

The silence was shocking, and more terrifying than the noise. One wrong move, one carelessly muttered word, and they would be heard.

Namior was holding her breath. It began to hurt.

And then someone shouted, and where Trakis had been thrown down, a shape slowly stood. It was the Trakis Namior knew so well… and yet there was something different. He did not hold himself like her friend. He seemed smaller, leaner. And he was no longer afraid.

The woman on the platform raised her hand, the crowd cheered, and Trakis smiled.

“What in the Black
…?”
Kel said, and this time it was Namior who stopped him from moving closer to the window.

“I want to go,” she whispered. “Kel …”

The audience quietened, and the woman on the platform said something to Trakis. She was crying. Namior’s tears came then too, but she guessed their causes were vastly different.

“Now,” Namior said. “While they’re shouting, while there’s noise, we have to—”

“Not yet,” Kel said. “Not until we’re sure.”

Trakis turned from the platform and walked away. The crowd parted around him, some of them smiling, others reaching out to touch him with hands or whatever passed as limbs. He retained that gentle smile, but he was frowning as well, and Namior was no longer certain she knew that face.

The people and things let him go. Some watched after him, but there seemed to be a general agreement to leave him alone.
Giving him time to adjust
, Namior thought.

“Kel—” she said, meaning to tell him they had to leave, had to save themselves, because she thought Trakis was far beyond saving.

But Kel was already standing at the door.

“Kel!” she whispered, but he would not turn.

Trakis came directly past the building where they hid, walking uncertainly as if he felt lighter than he ever had before.

Namior left the window and went to Kel’s side, terrified, but thinking,
If he has to see, then I’ll see as well
.

“Trakis,” Kel said.

The big man walked into view before Kel, a few steps from the doorway, and he paused, looking their way. He was still frowning through his uncertain smile, and for a beat Namior felt a sense of overwhelming relief, because he knew them. His smile widened. He half raised his hand as if to point… but then he looked away.

Trakis was no longer the man they knew.

Kel backed into the room, pushing Namior with him. He grabbed her hand and closed it around a knife. In his other hand he carried his short sword. “We run,” he said, nodding at
another door in the opposite wall. “We can’t be caught.
Everything
depends on that.”

Still shaking, still tingling with disbelief, Namior followed Kel from the building. They ran for their lives, and for the future of Noreela.

WHEN THEY REACHED
the edge of the village, there were metal men in the tree line. Kel skidded to a stop and Namior almost ran into him, and if she’d done that he might have fallen far enough forward from the shelter of the domed building for the Strangers to see him.

“Down to the shore,” he whispered. They stalked along the edge of the village, passing through the shadow cast by the tall black structure and using the sound of the sea to draw them along. They could not cross the open grassland, because the Strangers in their war suits would see them. They could not go up into the forest because of the risk of confrontation. Their only hope was the beaches and whatever might lie above them, hidden from the Strangers, hopefully, by the curves and folds of the landscape.

Namior could hear white-crests breaking against the shore, and smell the familiar tang of the sea that she had lived with all her life. But all she could see was Trakis falling, and that person wearing Trakis’s face.

They only sent over people that wouldn’t shock us
, she thought.
None of those other… things
. And as the memory of the multitude of strange creatures they had seen rose again, she wondered just how many more there were.

Landing there, finding their way across the island, even tackling the huge lizard-thing…through all of that, Namior had felt in control. They were choosing every move they made, weighing the risks and assessing their next best course of action. Now they were fleeing, and she was terrified. The sky crushed down on her shoulders, the unknown ground
pushed up with all of its force, and everything she passed—building, tree, timber fence—tried to press her into something so small that she would fade away entirely. There was so much more than she could have ever imagined. But rather than feeling amazed at what she had seen, she could only feel dread at what was to come. If they did not escape the island, they would be killed at the hands of things she could not understand. If they did escape, and made it back to Noreela, then they’d bear tidings that would change the villagers’ lives forever.

Close to the sea, they left the settlement. There was something of a beach there, covered with coarse sand and scattered with scraps of fishing net, small cages and hollowed logs used as buoys. A couple of small boats were pulled up onto the shore, and Namior thought about stealing one. But Kel passed them by, and she knew they were still too close to the village.
They must not be seen
.

She had no desire to end up like Trakis.

The level beach soon faded away, replaced by boulders and rock pools gleaming with countless tiny creatures. She kept glancing to her right to see whether they could be spied by the Strangers. But though she could see the tops of the forest’s trees, the land rolled down and seemed to provide natural cover.

She listened for sounds of pursuit, but heard nothing but the sea and her own panicked breathing. Either they had not yet been discovered, or the Komadians and their Stranger soldiers were closing in without a sound to give them away. That idea haunted her, and she expected the sun to be blocked any moment by a leaping shadow.

Kel moved quickly, crouched over, weapons so well strapped to his body that none of them touched each other. Occasionally Namior heard the scrape of metal on stone, but he would be quick to step aside or cover the offending blade or handle with his hand.

“Something ahead,” he said. Looking before them,
Namior could see trees growing down to the shore. They were past the grasslands and almost back in the forest, and soon they would be darting from tree to tree. The forest would hide them better, but it could also provide cover for watchers or pursuers, or dangerous animal life they had yet to see.

“What is it?” she asked. The beach changed from fallen boulders and broken ground, to the tangle of roots and mud that they had encountered when they first landed. And then she saw the glow.

“Weird light,” Kel whispered. “Come on, into the forest, we can go around and—”

“I want to see what it is,” Namior said. The glow came from a dip in the land to their right, just within the influence of the trees. It looked as though a rainbow was sleeping there. She went toward it and Kel followed close behind, his curiosity evident.

They found crystals. They started close down to the sea, and some were broken, their sharp edges dulled by wave action. Many more sat in a gully that led up into the forest. The gully had once been a stream, but it no longer carried water. Perhaps the crystals absorbed it.

They seemed to be growing, most of them upright, though some were tilted slightly, like flowers following the sun. They were the same as the thing that the man had carried across the square, most around the length of a human’s forearm and slightly thicker. They were beautiful, but somehow revolting as well. The light refracted from them felt unclean and the colors corrupt. Namior could think of no other way to describe them. She could almost taste the colors, and smell them, and they made her sick.

“Amazing,” Kel said. He stepped past Namior and approached the edge of the crystal gully. She wanted to reach out and grab his arm, but through the disgust, she was amazed as well. There was something mysterious about them, perhaps magical in a way she had never encountered or imagined ever
before. A large part of her training as a witch was the acquisition of knowledge, and not all of it was comfortable to have.

“What do you think they are?” Namior asked.

Kel did not answer. He froze for a beat, then started stalking closer, attention focused on one crystal close to the edge of the gully. She went with him, glancing back along the beach at where the village reached the sea. They had heard nothing since leaving—no more cheering, nor any sounds of pursuit. That troubled her.

“By all the gods,” Kel muttered. “This is the same as …”

“It’s what was carried into the square,” Namior said. “What they used when Trakis …” She trailed off. The crystal was not still. For a beat, she thought the shapes dancing inside were caused by something disrupting the sunlight, and she looked up, expecting to see the Strangers in their metal suits bearing down upon them. But the only thing moving was the sea. It shushed and whispered to their left, speaking secrets they could never know.

“There’s something in there,” Kel said. “Something moving. Something
alive.”

Namior went cold. The hairs on her neck and arms bristled, and a chill broke across her body. Sometimes while making love, Kel bit her neck and caused the same effect, but this was the exact opposite of lust and pleasure. It was disgust and pain.

It was not something solid, of flesh and blood. It was smoke and light, mist and color.

“A shade,” she said. “But… different.”

“A shade’s the ghost of something not yet born,” Kel said. “How can we see that?”

“Then maybe the wraith of something born and died.” Namior bent and looked closer. Within the crystal’s light-spreading mass, something dark seemed to roll and twist. Parts of it moved fast, thrashing massively in a space too small to contain it. Other parts rolled and billowed as slow as storm
clouds. Every movement seemed pained, and she was sure she heard wretched screaming somewhere too far away to be true. “Or perhaps it’s both. A trapped soul.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We’re living things, Kel. We’re not
meant
to understand the dead.”

“But when they brought that thing into the square …” He grew distant, looking out across the sea at their home, thinking. And then he slumped to his knees.

“What? Kel?” She reached out, and when she touched his flesh it was cold and hard, muscles tensed against a threat she did not yet know.

“All these years,” he said. “They’ve come, and we’ve tracked them and killed them, and all this time they were trying us on for size.”

Namior looked across the array of crystals, and all of them held the same sickly movements of something trapped for so long, awaiting a new, fresh body to call its own. A body like Trakis’s. A body like her own.

“We have to go,” she said.

Kel switched from despair to anger in the blink of an eye. He spat, kicked out at the crystal nearest to them and its base shattered, breaking from where it grew from the ground and hitting the dirt hard. The thing inside flipped and rolled some more, agitated by the movement. Namior closed her eyes, and something spiked at her ears like a cry too high to hear.

Kel took off his jacket and wrapped the broken vessel.

“You’re
taking
it?”

“Yes.”

“But—”

“But nothing. The Core has to see. Our witches might be able to use it.”

Namior could see the sense in his actions, but the thought of traveling back with that thing in the boat with them … She shivered again, and the nausea was still with her. “It just seems so wrong,” she said.

“All the more reason to take it back.” His gaze softened, but he still spoke urgently. “Please, Namior. We need to go.”

They walked through the breaking waves where no more crystals grew. Namior felt rough edges beneath her boots, and wondered whether they were walking across the broken roots of old crystals. What happened when the sea struck them? Why did they grow so close to the sea, rather than inland where… ?

The possibility hit her that they had seen only a small portion of crystals. Perhaps inland there were many more. Valleys filled with them, hillsides spiked with their dreadful beauty. Maybe Komadia was home to a hundred thousand trapped souls.

She felt a brief moment of pity. But the memory of Trakis’s final agonies drove it down, and the danger that her village, family and friends were in ensured that pity had no place in her heart.

Kel splashed through the breaking waves ahead of her, hugging the thing to his chest.

And then a high whistling sound rose up behind them, and a thousand voices called out in anger.

“
THEY’VE SEEN US
!” Kel said. He climbed a tangled bank of tree roots and rocks, holding the cloth parcel to his chest with one hand and finding handholds with the other. Namior followed, and soon they were in the forest again, following the coastline as they ran for their boat.

If it’s still there
, Namior thought.
Or if they haven’t already found it and hidden their metal-clad soldiers behind it, ready for our arrival
. But she could not trouble herself with that at the moment. She had to run, watch her footing, jump over fallen logs and step around twists of tree roots seemingly reaching up to trip her. They had to manage their escape and survival step by step.

The whistling sound came again, and from somewhere inland she heard undergrowth crashing as something stormed through.

“When we get there,” Kel said, “jump in and get ready to start rowing.”

“But you—”

“I’m stronger than you. I’ll throw this thing in and push the boat down to the sea.” He was panting, but he spoke calmly, and she could not doubt his logic. They needed to be rowing away when the Strangers arrived at the shore.

Something cracked up the hillside, and she heard a cry of pain. Maybe one of the lizard-things had taken down a Komadian. Right then, she could not even smile in hope.