Tales of Noreela 04: The Island (6 page)

He was expecting that now.

They skirted around the Temple, heading down the steep slope toward the road that used to run alongside the river. The lower boundary wall to the Temple grounds had fallen away, and the ground there had been undermined as well, slipping down to add to the chaos left behind by the wave. It was only so close that Kel saw just how much damage had been done.

Ten steps below them was a sea of mud, rocks, protruding walls, smashed roofs, bodies, cattle and trees. Farther out, the flooded river still poured back toward the sea; but closer to the bank several struggling shapes splashed weakly at the muck, doing their utmost to remain afloat.

“What’s that?” Namior said, but her voice trailed off. She already knew.

“Stay here!” Kel said.

“What? You can’t just leave—”

Kel ignored her. Slipping to the place where the ground fell away, he tried to glance over, down into the mess now lit by an emerging death moon. There was a slick spread of
muck beneath him, but to his right a horse’s body had washed against the mud cliff, lying on its side. Kel jumped.

The horse coughed when he landed on its stomach. He steadied himself, ready for it to struggle, but the creature was dead, the air forced from it when he landed.

“Help!” someone shouted, voice distorted by a mouthful of mud.

“Kel!” Namior shouted from ten steps above.

“Rope!” he yelled. “Blankets! Smashed wood,
anything
, Namior. Find it and throw it down.” He knelt on the horse and felt down into the mud for its saddle, but his hands touched the distinctive ridges along its back. A wild horse from the plains above the valley, likely come down for a drink. Just his luck.

He looked across the sea of mud at the feebly struggling shapes. He was sure there had been at least four when he jumped down, but now he could only see movement from two.
Shit, shit, shit
, he thought, looking around desperately for something to throw out to them, wanting to offer hope but unable to find either.

Kel probed at the mud with one foot and immediately sank up to just below his knee. He pulled back, grabbing hold of the dead horse’s mane to avoid being sucked in deeper.

“Namior!”

There was nothing he could do.

He watched another shape going under, crying out a muddy name that he could not identify as they went from night to black.

“Namior!”

“Kel!”

He turned and looked up, and Namior was edging a length of splintered timber down to him. He grabbed it, cursing as splinters bit into his hand, but by the time he’d turned again, ready to throw it across the surface of the mud, the last shape had disappeared. A huge bubble rose where it had gone, and even above the roar of the swollen river he heard
that bubble burst. Another person’s final breath added itself to the dead atmosphere of Pavmouth Breaks.

Kel stood slowly and propped the wood back against the bank. Carefully, slowly, he climbed, grabbing Namior’s hands and letting her help him up.

“You did your best,” she said.

“Let’s go along to the bridge, see if we can—”

“Kel, you did everything you could.”

They stood, and Kel held her close, seeing the yellow death moon reflected in her eyes. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. He could see that his words shocked her. But he’d witnessed many people die, and just then he could not pretend otherwise.

O’PEERIA GOES FIRST
. She’s always the one to take the lead.

They skirt by the city’s bustling South Gate, passing a huge encampment of traders congregating for the annual Festival of Spice and Season. The darkness is driven away by a hundred campfires, and the air carries heady scents of warm spiced meats, vegetables and the unmistakable tang of fresh fledge. Kel has never tried the drug, but he has always felt its allure. O’Peeria sometimes calls him weak.

The air is also filled with the chants, songs and pained moans of various sects, many of whom use certain powerful spices as their chief means of communing with their particular deities. Kel has no deities. He’s seen too much to believe in such influences, and even his trust in magic is all but shattered.

There’s a cursory check by the gate militia, and as usual it’s Kel they pull to one side. O’Peeria is striking enough for them to leave her alone. He sighs, responds to their clumsy questions with answers he’s used a hundred times before—why is he armed, where is he going, on whose authority does
he travel—then follows O’Peeria onto the main street that leads into the heart of the city.

Sometimes, he wishes people knew of the Core. It would avoid having to deal with bored militia.

“We need to make sure we all get there at the same time,” O’Peeria says. She does not have to explain why. Kel has been present at the extermination of three Strangers, and he has seen what they can do. They’re not all exactly alike, but they do share one characteristic: brutality.

And he’s also seen what happens to them when they die.

“So slow down,” Kel says. “You’re walking like you have a Violet Dog on your tail.”

“No one and nothing gets on my tail unless I say so.” She glances back over her shoulder without breaking pace, and Kel is pleased with himself when he does not smile. He won’t play her games so easily.

He follows O’Peeria into the first of Noreela City’s squares.

There’s a real bustle there, even though it’s almost dark, with stalls being erected, machines drifting just above the ground carrying building parts, several light balls floating here and there where required, and people hurrying about, all in preparation for the forthcoming Festival. Kel is glad. It means that he and O’Peeria won’t be so conspicuous, even though a Shantasi like her always warrants a second glance. It is not often that these mystical, strange people venture out from New Shanti, and when they do, observers generally assume they have a purpose. O’Peeria is good at staring down curiosity.

Past the square, she steers them left into a darkened alley. There are no light balls here, and Kel is not disappointed; he has always felt uncertain around magic. He does not understand it. Does not like it. They say it comes from the land, but he can’t help believing there’s much more to it than that. He supposes it’s a result of his being in the Core, and that tracking, hunting and assassinating mysterious Strangers from beyond
Noreela makes him more suspicious of what people generally accept as true. It’s a side effect that he welcomes.

“Here,” O’Peeria says. She’s standing by a grating in the ground, three heavy locks holding it in place.

“Down?”

The Shantasi smiles, and the life-moonlight catches her face. It’s dazzling. “What, Kel Boon? Afraid to go into the dark with me?”

“Just concerned that you’ll be scared.”

O’Peeria raises an eyebrow, kneels and runs her hands over the locks. They’re heavy, and Kel knows that it’ll take a lot of effort and noise to break them. She knows it, too.

“Sorry,” she says, and pulls a thin iron spike from her boot. Placing it between the random paving in the alley, she sets her foot against the flattened head and shoves down, hard.

O’Peeria touches the spike with one hand and uses a few whispered chants to break the locks. Kel looks the other way. He hears the broken metal clank to the ground, and he only looks again when he hears the spike being withdrawn from between the stones.

“You should try it one day,” O’Peeria says.

“We have Practitioners for that.”

“Fuck that. One day we might meet a Stranger who knows how to use it better than us. What then?”

Kel heaves up the grating and prepares to drop down into the darkness. “Then,” he says, “we fight for ourselves.”

He could not know that today would be that day.

KEL HEARD IT
before Namior. Even when he paused, raised his hand and tilted his head, all she could hear was the still-raging river. He turned to her, his face suddenly pale in the yellow moonlight and his eyes going wide, then he grabbed her hand and started to pull. He scrambled up the remains of
a house’s collapsed sidewall, as though suddenly eager to return to the Dog’s Eyes.

She tugged back. He was going the wrong way! But then he pulled her close, their noses touching, and she could actually smell fear on his breath.

“There’s another wave,” he said. “Save your breath and run.” And still holding her hand, he turned and started uphill again.

She was supposed to warn us
, she thought about her great-grandmother, and she feared that the old woman’s current craze was deeper than ever before.

They’d made their way along the uncertain ground above the shattered lower areas of the village until they were level with the fallen stone bridge. It crossed the river from one side of the harbor to the other, and they could see the terrible destruction that had been wrought on the place. The bridge’s remaining surface and walls were just visible above the flooded river level, but either side of it, there were no easily identifiable areas left. Buildings had toppled, smashed and been carried away by the power of the wave, and few walls protruded above the thick layers of sticky, stinking mud left in its wake. The water was piling massive amounts of debris against the upriver side of the bridge: trees, shattered timbers, dead horses, furniture, half of a roof with some tiles still attached, and close to the uncertain shore where they stood, a knot of bodies. Namior had tried desperately not to look, but the arms, legs, heads and torsos cried out to be seen. She had wondered where their wraiths were, and she hoped that Mourner Kanthia was still alive.

Kel let go of her hand so that they could both climb faster. The broken rubble beneath her hands was sharp, and several times she slipped and cut her knees and shins. The pain drove her on. Her breathing was rapid and heavy, but by the time they’d cleared the fallen wall and were making their way up a steeply sloping vegetable garden, she could hear the second wave.

She did not look.

Across the other side of the bridge, on the harbor side, she had seen the vague shapes of people already searching the ruin for survivors. She hoped they were making their way up Drakeman’s Hill.

The wave was louder by then, and the ground was starting to shake.

“Faster!” Kel shouted. Namior glanced up and he was sitting astride a garden wall, hands held out, glancing down at her, up at the wave and back again.

Still she did not look. She remembered watching the first wave roar in, and she wondered how long it would take for her to die. She would feel the water pluck her up, sweep her along, and she would be battered by the broken parts of the village it had already consumed. One beat? Five? She doubted she would drown. The wave promised a more violent death.

She was almost crawling up the steep slope, pushing with her feet and digging her hands into the soil, pulling toward safety.

First wave didn’t reach this high!
But she had seen the massive amounts of water still flowing back toward the sea from that first deluge. And the new wave could be even more powerful than the last.

Kel pulled her roughly over the wall and they were on a path, and he grabbed her hand and ran, dragging her after him, unforgiving when she stumbled, ignoring her cry of pain as she twisted her ankle, his fingers digging into the back of her hand. He kicked down a gate and they ran up the slope of a garden planted with salt-herbs and spice. Other people ran with them—people she had lived with forever—but they were all alone in their panicked race for survival.

They dropped over another wall and Kel kicked at a gate between two tall, thin houses until timber cracked and the gate bowed inward. He pressed through and Namior went after him, and soon they were climbing a terraced fruit garden,
tearing through fine nets protecting the fruits from birds. Bizarrely, incredibly, someone opened a window and cursed at them. She wanted to scream at them to flee, but she remembered Kel’s words—
Save your breath and run
—and by the time her conscience pricked her, they were already over another wall and running up a winding, cobbled path.

“Kel …” she said, gasping, her shins and knees burning, ankle aflame from where she’d twisted it. But though she called his name again, the monster the sea had birthed roared too loudly for him to hear.

She fell to her knees and Kel fell beside her. They held each other as the second giant wave blotted out the moon and cast its shadow over the remains of Pavmouth Breaks.

AFTER THE SECOND
wave, they returned to Namior’s home. Her mother and great-grandmother were still there, surrounded by survivors who had fled uphill from the ruined and damaged areas below. Her great-grandmother sat close to the groundstone, shivering and crying as she held her hand a finger’s width from its surface. Her mother brewed tea, and between pouring large mugs she pressed a herby paste into an ugly wound on a man’s leg. The groundstone hummed very slightly, and the man groaned as his bleeding ceased.

“Will there be more?” Kel asked, not aiming the question at anyone in particular.

Namior’s mother looked at him, frowning. “Can’t see,” she said. “We tried scrying again before the survivors arrived, but there’s still a blankness there.”

Kel went close to her, talking quieter. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

“Yes,” she said. “Many times. Our eyes are our true sight; anything further is afforded to us by magic. But there’s plenty that can confuse what we see.”

“Anything
exactly
like this?”

She poured bondleaf tea into several more mugs, not looking up at Kel.

“I assume that’s a no.”

“You don’t like what we do,” she said, not scolding, simply stating a fact. “How can I expect you to understand?”

There’s plenty about me you don’t know
, he thought, but sometimes when Namior’s mother looked at him, he saw suspicion in her eyes. “Understand what?” he asked.

“No, Kel. I’ve never seen or sensed anything quite like this. And I can’t tell you why.”

Kel nodded, grabbed two of the mugs and returned to Namior. She was kneeling with several children, trying to calm them with a gentle song. One of them was sobbing quietly, and he wondered whom the child had lost.