The Legend of El Shashi (53 page)
“Go to Sanctuary,” I ordered him. Naked, he ran out of the cave.
Amal’s scolding me was cut short as the Transformed flung themselves at our shield.
We worked fast, purely by gut instinct; Amal and I were of one mind, and although the assault staggered us, we managed to un-transform the Transformed and snatch them away from their fellows at a ferocious rate. Grimly I reached beyond the shield, again and again. Even a small touch was enough. Some we lost, heads torn off or hearts penetrated by unseen spines or claws, but we sent a steady stream of Eldrik up the tunnel to safety–if they could reach Sanctuary in time.
I gasped,
“The Wurm’s moving now!”
“I know,” said Amal. “You need to overwhelm both the Karak and the Portal, Arlak. Keep going.”
We dealt with another couple of dozen monsters before there was suddenly a lull. Had we cleaned out the cave?
“I’m sending out an eye. Move on, brother-mine.”
Cautiously, I moved deeper into the cave. The tunnel snaked about. Twice, Transformed leaped out at us from crevices hidden amongst the shadows. Bellows and cackles called more of their fellows to the fight. In a moment, the tunnel filled again.
I sighed. “Could they not have Banished less Eldrik?”
“The Wurm’s near the shore,” Amal reported. Her voice sounded strained. Rapidly, she bubbled several more naked, shivering men and women behind the shield. “I see … Karak, satiated, dropping off the Wurm. But … oh, dear Mata!” We staggered at a particularly violent assault. “Jyla still rides high and leads the Karak.”
Amal and I worked up a fine sweat, aggressively picking off the Transformed and healing them. I felt the Wurm move again. “More!” I gasped. We moved down the tunnel. I healed my hands, torn by a beast with four wings and a crocodile’s teeth.
I reached out with both hands now, deep into a knot of Transformed that snarled and scrabbled at our shield.
“Oh … Arlak! The Wurm!”
I felt it through my feet, through the trembling of the cavern. “Strength, Amal!” I flung my power into her. Outside, a tremendous concussion shook the earth. Darkness descended instantly. Sand cascaded down around us, pouring over the shield; boulders dropped from the ceiling and smashed around us. We heard the Transformed cry out. “It’s right above us!” I shouted. “Quickly! Deeper!”
We dashed away as the tunnel collapsed behind us.
Dust exploded in our faces. The earth groaned and cracked. Then all went still.
We were trapped.
Amal’s light flickered out weakly. She staggered. I saw blood on her forehead, trickling through her fingertips.
I also saw that we stood in the middle of a large cavern. There had to be a thousand Transformed circled around us–slithering over the rocks, lurking in the shadows, hanging by their claws from the ceiling–at least, that was what speared into my quoph before Amal’s light flickered and went out. We plunged into blackness.
Flesh pounded me to the ground. I spread myself deliberately over my sister, and tried somehow to fight–but I own their sheer numbers worked against them. Stuck in the middle of that pile of monstrous limbs, scaly hides and barbed wings, the Transformed could not reach through their fellows to attack us. But we were in severe danger of being crushed. I dived into Amal, healing her wound and helping her mind clear. She trembled, beneath me, and suddenly I felt as though iron bolstered my flesh.
“Body shield,” said Amal.
“Gah!” I replied, feeling teeth gnawing the bones of my ankle.
“What now?”
“Get ready to bubble them in with us?”
“Ah … surely one or two will be Sorcerers,” Amal said, doubtfully. “Arlak–this power is feeding Jyla. She has grown larger. But I see Karak burning off the Wurm’s body
with the concentration of
lillia
leaking through the creature’s carapace. And the storm rages greatly, taking many Karak with it.”
The beginnings of a crazy plan sprang into my head.
Somewhere above us, the Great Wurm’s bellow vibrated the entire island.
“Burning off?”
“Too much
lillia
, perhaps.”
“We have to get out there, Amal
-
nish
.”
“Ay. Then get healing, brother-mine.”
Steadily, we increased our domain beneath the pile of Transformed. Men and women joined us beneath the shield, dark-eyed and frightened people; people who knew little of where they were or what was happening. But one at last joined hands with Amal to lend his strength to the shield, and then another declared herself a Warlock, and they somehow squeezed all of us out from beneath the pile. We fought to a cavern wall, then to a tunnel, gathering numbers all the while. Above us, the Wurm thundered again.
And a huge rockfall buried our shield.
* * * *
“The Wurm’s trying to find me!”
My voice echoed in the darkness. A light snapped into being, cradled between the Warlock’s hands. “What’s happening?” she asked.
“We’re trying to defeat Jyla and break the Banishment,” said Amal. The Warlock’s eyes became round. “That’s El Shashi’s pet up there. A Wurm.”
“Then go that way,” said another Eldrik, pointing. “I feel air on my cheek.”
Slowly, scrambling over boulders and moving those we could not squeeze past, our little party crawled upward to the surface of Birial.
We had to keep shielded. But as Torbin had warned, the use of a shield or magic attracted the Transformed as moths to a candle. Night was falling, and the calls of the Transformed already echoed around the island, when they were not drowned out by the Wurm’s thunders.
In the gathering gloom the battlefield loomed before us. We
emerged near the top of a steep rise, able to gaze over the Wurm’s massive, ridged back to the ocean beyond. The rocks were bare out there. Bare, all the way to the glowing blue Banishment storm, which now raged so powerfully that it must have swept up the seawater with it. The winds shrieked in their everlasting circuit, but where we stood the air remained curiously calm. The remaining Karak heaved themselves across the slick, bare rocks of what had been ocean before. The clouds overhead boiled and bellied, bursting with the immeasurable quantities of magical power forced into them by the Wurm; a world-shaping storm in the making.
Thousands of Karak still rode the Wurm’s back and sides, but one stood out above them. Jyla, grown many times more enormous
than before, a great, pustulent purple sack crowning the Wurm’s head, with blazing eyes the size of jatha-carts that peered over the scene with satisfaction, it seemed to me. Her tentacles gripped the Wurm just behind its mandibles. She had changed colour, I saw, swollen with unimaginable amounts of
lillia.
The Great Wurm threw back its head and thundered its fury to the skies, but the Sorceress hung on grimly. Her body pulsed with grotesque feeding.
A tiny group of men and women faced Jyla and the Wurm. Eliyan, I thought, although I could not make him out. The battle was furious. Fire suddenly blazed from Jyla, melting the rocks around that little group and turning their shield orange.
“We have to help them!”
I turned to Amal. “Can you move the Portal’s endpoint?”
She shook her head. “Arlak, whatever do you mean? We need the end within the Wurm. The start point.”
The Wurm writhed and crashed down again, splintering rocks and casting off dozens of Karak. It was trying to turn to follow me.
“Get on my back. I’m going to run,” I said. “Sorcerer–get these people to Sanctuary. And prepare to defend it. Once Jyla finishes with the Eldrik down there, she’ll be after the fortress next. She won’t rest until you’re all dead.”
“Brother-mine …”
“Listen. We can only move the endpoint, right? I want you to put it inside Jyla.”
“That will feed her
lillia
–you mean to explode her, don’t you?”
“I hope.”
“Because you think we can’t escape until she’s dead.” Amal’s arms clasped around my neck. “And you’re running where?”
Amal was much heavier than P’dáronï, but I had once augmented my strength, much
as a Wurm may be augmented–another aspect in which my life mirrored Jyla’s creation. Without answering her, I set off in a wide curve around the front of the Wurm’s head and then out across the flat part of Birial, stretching into a dead sprint, making a tremendous pace. From the corner of my eye I saw the Wurm’s head shift to follow my flight. Ay, as yet, the connection was still strong. Its length curved, pressing forward ponderously.
Near my ear, Amal muttered, “Give me the exact construct, Arlak.”
I summoned up Janos within me and gasped out a series of words I barely understood the half of.
The Wurm slithered forward, rolling sideways as my run extended further and further to
its left flank. As I had guessed, a creature of no eyes also has no sense of a right orientation, of an upside-down or a right way up. The efficient route would win out.
The Wurm rolled.
It rolled away from Eliyan, and over thousands of Karak, literally cleaning its body. With a howl of panic, I pumped my arms and legs. Hajik Hounds, that thing was fast! Once the Wurm started moving, there was so much of it that it could cover trins in a breath, whereas a man must make many steps to cover the same distance.
“Jyla escaped,” Amal noted
matter-of-factly. “She’s smart.”
“What did she do, fly?”
“Here we go, Arlak. I shape the magic thus, and initiate it so:
Orlio immio Portal.
”
Although Amal’s command was a whisper, it
appeared to gather strength as it raced off into the distance. I could not fathom it.
Skidding around a fast turn, I ran
in the opposite direction now. I glanced to my right. The Wurm, rolling clear of Eliyan and his people. Jyla, as a Karak, cast aside in an open space, her strange, beak-like mouth gaping as she apparently tried to ingest something.
“Now we feed her.”
“There.” Amal pointed past my shoulder at the black mouth of a cave, already growing teeth and claws as the Transformed crept out into the gloaming. “Have I told you this is insanity?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
My passenger leaped down lightly beside me and took my hand. “I’m with you, Arlak-
nih
.”
The Transformed did not wait for our fearless approach. They fell upon us with slavering fangs, braving the last of the natural light–although, truly told, the storm glowed so brightly now that the suns were no longer needed.
This unnatural light did not burn them. I reached out and grappled with the rush of animals. Limb, tentacle, tail, wing, it mattered nought. What mattered was to stuff the beast Jyla until she burst. By my grephe, I doubted our stratagem would work.
But we were desperate.
“Stop peering over your shoulder,” Amal snapped.
“I need to know what’s happening.”
What was happening was that the Wurm was shifting–slowly, but irresistibly–in our direction. We had little time left. And Jyla still blasted the Sorcerers and Warlocks with streams of hot white fire from her eyes; they huddled unmoving beneath a shield as she turned the rocks around them into lava. She was so full of
lillia
that it leaked off her hideous tentacles in a soft violet mist. If I had hoped an overdose should damage a Karak, I was mistaken. Jyla simply absorbed the power; she expanded visibly each time I dared to glance back. She heaved her bulk closer to the trapped Birial Islanders. She would crush them beneath a mountain of cold, rubbery flesh if we did not change the odds.
Here came the Transformed, flitting into the sky in great clouds of bat-like creatures, scooting and bounding across the ground
, slithering and rolling along Birial’s bleak fields. Such a multitude! So many Banished, cleansed from among the Eldrik, that they covered the earth and the skies in a dark tide of corrupt humanity. Would they attack Jyla or the Wurm?
Amal tugged my arm. “We’ll be overwhelmed. We need to retreat to Sanctuary.”
“No,” I said.
“No? You numbwit, what … Arlak?”
“We must ride the Wurm.”
: Almighty Failure
Birial, island of a binding mist,
Which all does twist,
Even success,
Fails.
Faliyan of Eldoran:
Legends, 2
nd
Tale: True Foundations
As we levitated over the battle scene, Amal could not resist dropping a bundle of arm-long hornets atop the purple Karak hauling itself uphill towards Birial’s cowering defenders. Our friends crept backward, slowly, struggling somehow to keep from being grilled by the Sorceress’ potent attacks. The hornets attacked hungrily, swarming around Jyla’s blazing eyes, for a moment distracting her into a mess of flailing tentacles. Through a break in her fiery onslaught, I distinctly saw Eliyan waving his fist and shouting at us.
Our shield rammed into several flying Transformed.
“Shape the shield,” I suggested to Amal. Janos’ knowledge was coming easier and easier to me.
She worked for a moment, so that we sliced through the fliers, and then stared wild-eyed at me. “You’re going to destroy the Portal.”
“Without it, the Banishment spell should destabilise,” I replied. “At least, the construct Janos has in his mind suggests so.”
“You’ll kill us all!”
The Karak’s malicious yellow gaze followed us as we shot over to the Wurm. The burgundy mandibles waved slowly at us, sensing my presence, I felt. Suddenly, Amal swerved. Lightning sizzled past and vanished into the storm.
“El Shashi!” shrieked the Karak. “You can never destroy me.”
Her voice, so well-remembered, carried clearly across the Banishment gale’s blustering. As if pricked by her words, the heavens opened in a deluge. Amal’s shield rippled and ran with water. My sister rapidly adjusted her spell, and still had the presence of mind to follow my outthrust finger, aiming for a point high on the Wurm’s head.
The Sorceress turned, heaving
her mountainous black body about, flinging blue lightning from the tip of each tentacle and blasting it from her eyes. The rain hissed; steam was instantly whipped away by the torrents pouring from the skies. We rocked and dipped at the blasts. The wet helped her move better, I realised; but as Amal was ably protecting me, white-faced and gritted of teeth, I could concentrate on what I feared–my first ever touch of the Wurm. Feet extended, I flexed my knees in anticipation of landing. Closer. Closer.
Lightning
scored my vision, followed by a huge concussion. I felt as though we had run headlong into Thurbarak’s herd of jerlak. We flipped over, skidded helplessly across the Wurm’s red carapace, and came to a wrenching stop as Amal somehow hooked one of the deeply scored channels on its skin. Although it felt like an insect’s keratin carapace, the Wurm’s skin underfoot was harder than rock. We rolled over, both ducking instinctively as another titanic bolt of lightning seared a nearby mandible. I was in awe. I stood on the Wurm! After all these anna …
W
armth rose from beneath my feet. The rain steamed steadily off the Wurm, but more than that, with the steam rose a constant stream of
lillia
, as though the Wurm were an imperfect vessel to contain all that lay within–or rather, that no substance in all creation could contain such a storehouse of magic any longer.
With the eyes P’dáronï taught me to use, I saw a core of
lillia
beneath our feet, as white and hot as Belion’s glare. I could not let Jyla have that. With it she could reshape the world to her whim.
“What now?” panted Amal. Her slim hands twisted in the air, reforming our shield.
“In Mata’s name, Arlak, why do I trust you in this?”
“
Because it’s our only chance,” I returned, but tempered my tone with a quick smile. “Use the
lillia
to strengthen yourself. Cast a Web of Sulangi in this way.”
And in Janos’ words, I made good on my suggestion. Amal blinked. “You have become a master Sorcerer, El Shashi.”
“It’s not me–it’s Janos.”
We
tottered as the Wurm pitched beneath our feet; we shouted in panic as it reared into the air, venting a staggering roar. My ears rang. But Amal had somehow damped the sound with a shield. She smiled grimly at me.
“Eliyan escapes.
Do what you must, brother-mine.”
I prepared my mind. Well I remembered the vast hungers of the Wurm from before, the alien mind full of pain and fury, and a
n appetite unquenchable. I needed Janos’ guardtower will to gird my thoughts and El Shashi’s knowledge of the ways of minds and bodies, so that I could achieve what I hoped for: control of the Wurm. I dived in.
I swam a
violet ocean of
lillia
. Dimly, I felt Amal beside me, gripping my arm, holding the shield firm as Jyla’s assault rent the air around us. She gathered her strength from the Wurm’s excess magic and resisted every blow, despite sparks shrieking off the shield and an acrid, stinking smoke that surrounded us as the Wurm’s carapace smouldered. But I was within the beast, standing amidst a different storm, searching for whatever might be left of its intellect–for I knew it reasoned. It was cunning. It learned. But the fires driving the creature, I owned, must have gantuls ago driven any thinking creature to insanity.
The struggle was long
and draining. I found the beginning of the Portal, not very far beneath our feet. And then I recognised, somewhere in that storm, a thread of mental activity. I pounced on it at once, apprehended it, and wrenched it over to my use. The Wurm surged forward.
“What are you doing?” Amal cried.
“Hunting a Karak,” said I. “I’ve turned its hunger against her.”
Again the Wurm voiced its hunting cry.
Lillia
blasted out of its mouth, shimmering the air before us despite the downpour. I flexed my knees, keeping Amal upright with a strong but not crushing grip on her arm, and we rode the beast as it oriented on the great Karak slipping across the rocks ahead of us.
I shook my head as though I had a torfly in my ear. “You … what? Now? Amal–truly told, you pick your moments!”
“You haven’t noticed?”
“No, I was too preoccupied with my own loss!” I snarled back. “Oh, Amal
-
nish
…” I swore beneath my breath.
“Are you opposed?”
I tore my eyes from the spectacle of Jyla suddenly realising what we were up to and slithering away downhill, away from the angle of the Wurm’s approach. “Amal-
nish
–no, I’m not. Now, can I concentrate on defeating the wicked destroyer of the Eldrik race?”
She offered a bow, slightly mocking. “After you, Arlak-
nih
.”
The huge Karak side-slipped our first foray. Jyla came alongside and tried to get a tentacle’s purchase on the Wurm.
“Roll it,” Amal barked.
I wrestled with the Wurm, trying to force it to comply. Would the creature take commands? Suddenly, a hint of something familiar touched my mind. ‘Janos?’ I thought. ‘Benethar?’ What was it that made me think so? I could not fathom it. Could the creature contain some residue of Janos, even after all these anna, and all that had happened? Was the creature not me, but Janos? Sustained by his mind
contained within mine? My head spun at these thoughts.
Suddenly, the Wurm began to
barrel-roll.
“Run!” Amal smacked me on the back. “Run, Arlak!”
I picked her up and sprinted along the Wurm’s head, trying somehow to keep pace with the Wurm as it rotated. It was a slow, grinding earthquake in motion. Boulders, hills, and knots of Transformed disappeared beneath the majestic bulk, crushed. Amal shifted the shield around us, knocking away a hail of flying Transformed and a flurry of dark bats I assumed must be Jyla’s offering. As we sailed on, I saw to my chagrin that we had missed Jyla by a few paces, perhaps mashing one of the mighty tentacles, but nought more. She did not shift back to her old form. Still, her body pulsed as she drank up
lillia
from the outlet of the Portal.
“I’ll bring the Wurm around.”
I could never have imagined riding such a beast, two trins wide and at least fifty trins long, or I was no judge. It was like trying to steer a moving island, or harness the wind itself. Ponderously, the Wurm came around in a wide circle, crossing the beach and the empty bay of Birial en route, on the opposite side of the island from which we had landed. I aimed the Wurm back over the hill toward where we had left Jyla. Truly told, we could have cut right through the hill. With my P’dáronï-trained eyes I observed the play of magic around the Wurm’s mouth and mandibles, capturing and processing rock and earth, bushes and water, at an impossible rate. As matter disappeared into the Wurm’s maw, so it truly … disappeared. I pressed closer, trying to understand this phenomenon. How was this possible? Where did all the energy of
lillia
vanish to? My tutors in Eldoran had been ferociously convicted of the idea that matter could neither appear out of nothing, nor could it be reduced to nothing. Here was yet another mystery.
“Beware Sanctuary!” Amal called suddenly.
“Why?”
But it was too late.
Sanctuary’s light-cannons scorched multiple trenches in the Wurm’s side as we passed by, scoring great, long gashes in its segments. A waterfall of
lillia
sprayed out. Instinctively, I put my hands to the Wurm’s back and pressed in with my healing touch. There such an overflow of power in that great, cavernous body–greater power than El Shashi ever had the luxury to command–that even these terrible wounds proved easy to manage. The carapace merged smoothly together as I urged the Wurm on.
Amal cried out and pointed. Glancing up, I saw the Karak
-Jyla grown mountainous, taking a stand in our path. She meant to destroy us. Jyla meant to grapple with the Wurm? I could not believe my eyes, but she was expanding by the moment. Huge tentacles, with suckers bigger than houses, waved at us. Her eyes fixed on the two tiny figures standing on the Wurm’s head. All she needed to do was grip and hold on. She would squash Amal and I like bugs.
As we approached, she and Amal traded sorcerous strikes. I felt her spell
descend and knew we could no longer levitate away from the Wurm. She had us locked in place. Amal responded with multiple attacks, too fast to follow with the naked eye, but they had little apparent effect on Jyla. I readied myself.
“Hold on, Amal!”
The Wurm reared up to the skies, and then plunged down toward our nemesis as if a mountain fell from the sky. The Karak rippled. It screamed a fearsome cry. Tentacles wrapped about the huge mandibles before us as the Wurm took a gigantic scoop out of Birial’s rock. The Karak clung on, partly inside the Wurm’s mouth. The dangling, hindmost tentacles shimmered and disintegrated beneath the windstorm of magic inside that maw, clearly visible to my mind’s eye. Jyla began to pull herself up and over the ridge of the Wurm’s mouth.
I dove deep into the Wurm.
Now!
I commanded with all my might.
The Wurm vomited the Portal straight into the underside of Jyla’s Karak.
Magic blossomed from the impact in a blinding flower of light. The Karak’s eyes bulged. Her beak opened in an unearthly scream which split even the raging storm, like a clarion trump-call to Ulim himself, summoning the great hunt–so I imagined.
Part of Jyla was translated from herself, into herself, for she contained both
the start point and the endpoint of the Portal which had so long translated the Banished to Birial Island. And with one accord, Amal understood what I had done. Her lips moved briefly, shifting the location of the Portal’s endpoint.
The resulting explosion juddered the entire length of the Wurm. It
irradiated the clouds, and blazed around the entire ambit of the encircling storm. Mandibles and bits of tentacles as large as boulders blasted around us, so powerfully that despite the shield, Amal and I were blown a hundred segments down the Wurm’s body. Sanctuary’s lights flickered out, and then started to come back on, very slowly and dimly. Transformed fell out of the sky as though a scythe had been taken to their ranks.
Shakily,
I rose to my feet. My ears rang. I offered Amal my hand.
She stared at me in horror. “What have we done?”
“Jyla is no more,” I replied.
“And the storm rages unchanged.”
We gazed at each other in despair. A new realisation gripped our quoph. Without the Portal we had no way home–unless the storm changed, or could be shifted or nullified. Perhaps Eliyan would know a way, I hoped. We had all of Janos’ memories to work with as well.