Through the Whirlpool (15 page)

…hurzjh-faadaw-oh…

That mocking laughter seemed to be saying…
What? Try as hard as you can, you’ll never understand.
The language of those guttural syllables. It was tiring to think about any of it.

S
he heard someone coming toward the bank. She didn’t really feel like speaking to anyone in the mood she was in and was about to move farther along when she caught a flash of blue serge. She looked around. Several yards away, two pines had collapsed together. A third leaned in over them at an angle. Where the trunks met they formed a kind of teepee, buried under sand. Underneath was a hollow just large enough to squeeze into. She hid. From there she could look out between cracks in the trunks.

The footsteps came
right up to the teepee. She held her breath, watching the intruder’s feet—black leather shoes, formal trousers of navy serge with a thin white stripe down the outside. Yes, she definitely knew that uniform. The legs bent at the knees as the newcomer squatted down, and Jade pressed herself deeper into the hollow. Then pale stony eyes and a mass of dirty blond hair came into sight: Rena, dressed for work. She was staring at the hollow but amazingly did not see Jade. She lit a cigarette and began to smoke it. Sometimes she looked toward Jade’s hiding place, but in a slightly bored way, staring without seeing, like you would gaze out of the classroom window during arithmetic on a beautiful day.

Jade didn
’t dare breathe. She was finished if Rena discovered her. There they were, alone together, miles from anyone who might have saved her. Rena stood up and walked over to the group of pines. She sat down on one of the trunks. Now all Jade could see was one wide blue thigh blocking a narrow crack between the trunks. Rena farted. What had Jade done to deserve this? She could barely control herself, just knew that she must. If Rena discovered her, she would be history.

W
ith one watchful eye on the horizon—he could not afford to be caught by another squall—Kreh-ursh studied the patch of brown as it drifted closer. Maybe it was one of those floating weed islands brimming with vegetation, even wildlife—just like a real island—that occasionally appeared on Shah.

The weather was picking up, claiming more of his attention,
the wind rising, pushing Kreh-otchaw-oh along faster. The breeze was southerly, allowing them a fast tack eastward. He reefed in further. Kreh-otchaw-oh’s sail and rigging functioned but needed more work. She was maneuvering too sluggishly.

Soon, he
realized he would pass close by the dark shape, which had now become a wide mass extending over a large stretch of water. Not a floating island, he hoped it was nothing that might foul Kreh-otchaw-oh’s hull. If he could just tack past, leaving a safe margin on its north side. He reefed Kreh-otchaw-oh tighter in, so she began to lean over to the side, her outrigger rising from the water as the wind swelled her sail into a pregnant crescent moon. He grabbed a spare pole that was stored in the bottom of the boat and bound it tightly to the handle of his paddle, which was attached securely to the stern as a rudder. By holding the end of the pole at arm’s length, he was able to stack out over the water and could still work the rudder.

The brown mass came closer.
Its glistening surface hugged the waves, smoothing and rounding them, rolling and sliding thickly on the ocean’s back. He would have to pass within several canoe lengths of it. It was dark, flickering with rainbow reflections, and sluggishly fluid—like mud. Soon he noticed that its surface was pricked by bumps, odd protrusions, shapes like small hillocks, even bushes or bare branches sprouting from the mass. It looked almost like a dead forest, gradually rotting, decaying in primeval slime. And the smell was hideous.

Then
he saw movement. A shape fluttered. He gasped. He recognized that creature. His stomach turned over. Still alive, trapped in the stinking slime, it struggled to stay above water. Feebly it strained upward, thrashing sodden wings, shrieking to escape. As he watched, it made a last leap upwards. Ssccrreeeaaaggghhhh!! Its call was shredded on the ocean breeze. Then it was swallowed below the surface, not to rise again.

His canoe surged past at a few boat-lengths
’ distance. Now horrified, he saw other creatures trapped in the muck, floating half dead or lifeless: a family of rruush-oh stranded on the surface like a colony of oversized mushrooms, their fine, silver parachutes stained a poisonous brown, flapping emptily in the wind; a Shah-skur lying dead across the surface, its elegant, acrobatic coils reduced to one lank S-shape, its scales like broken brown teeth. The dark sludge was a graveyard for all the sea’s life, creatures from above and below the surface trapped and killed in its clutch.

Kreh-ursh felt sick. From where had this island of death appeared? He was chilled numb, sitting there in his boat, yet anger burned deep down. It began to form at the base of his gut
while the wasted wildlife slid by, a dull sheen of death staring out from lifeless eyes.

H
e swore revenge. He would redeem each and every death he saw here, find the cause, and destroy it—even if it took a lifetime. Was this why he wanted to become Shahee? Was this what he must face? Confronting such horrors, healing such ravages: It looked a far bleaker future than he had imagined. Despair coated the cold iron of his anger, but the rage remained huge.

Kreh-otchaw-oh cleared the death slick,
and then the clouds once more opened and it began to pelt down. The wind dropped. Within moments he could see little but rain driving in sheets across the sea. Kreh-otchaw-oh was thrown up and down on the swells. The ocean turned black, wave crests flashing silver. Lightning struck from the sky, followed by a long, rolling peal of thunder. Kreh-ursh began to get nervous. A bolt might strike the highest point in the surrounding area in its effort to reach the earth. Right now, sitting in a canoe in the middle of the ocean, his canoe was the highest point around. He lowered the mast, covered the open boat with the sail, and crouched inside, concentrating on just keeping his craft end-on to the high, choppy waves that buffeted them. The air had turned chill. Soon he was shivering. He wrapped himself in his sleeping mat, trying to keep warm.

Suddenly, lightning
flashed, and he gasped. Believing he had been alone on the empty sea mere moments before, he felt his heart stop: Another craft was outlined in the blue light. The unknown canoe was closing fast. Black and rain lashed, it crested the next high wave and dropped swiftly down the wave’s slope toward him.

R
ena’s farts pummeled Jade like a raging storm, the poisonous gas leaching down between the tree trunks. An analysis of the odors coming from the older girl’s bowels suggested that whoever cooked for her had even less skill than Jade’s mom. The main ingredients seemed to be burnt garlic and an element that could only be rotting, barbecued rat.

Then the whine of a dune buggy filtered through the trees. Rena got up
, and a tiny amount of fresh air wafted in. Jade gasped. The engine roar lurched closer until a large rubber tire skidded to a halt nearby.

“
You took your time, Screwie. We said seven.”

The drawling voice that ans
wered Rena was one Jade recognized: “Relax, he isn’t here yet. So what’s the problem?”

“
Got any beer?”

“
Security staff shouldn’t drink on duty. Here.”

Jade heard first one can pop open, then another.
Screwdriver sat on the buggy tire. A moment later there was a
thunk!
that sounded far too close for comfort. Turning her head slightly, she saw a worn screwdriver, its blade sharpened to a vicious point, quivering beside her ear like an arrow in the tree trunk. A hairy forearm passed close beside her face to retrieve it. Seconds later, another
thunk
sounded, and the screwdriver again landed in the wood. Jade was now thinking wistfully of Rena’s farts. With Screwdriver there, she had managed to control her hardworking bowels, but Jade would happily have had that foul stink instead of Screwdriver’s amateur knife act. She prayed, as the blade
thunk
ed a third time into the trunk, that Screwdriver had been practicing hard.

From away under the pines came a loud grunt and crash
, as if someone had walked into a tree. It interrupted Screwdriver’s knife-throwing act.

“
The Head.”

“
I can hear a car, too. That has to be him. Hurry up, Head!”

An older boy the size and shape of a brick
outhouse stumbled up through the trees.

“
Sorry, guys. I got lost. Did you see me walk bang smack into that tree? Broad daylight and everything! I was looking the wrong way.”

So now they had an entire reunion… of the Adams family.
Maybe they called him the Head because of how his shoulders sloped straight up into his hairline with no visible neck, so the upper half of his body looked all head. Then again the name could be ironic, as he was not renowned in Mauri Cove for being an intellectual giant. Jade suspected Rena had picked him for his unquestioning loyalty.

“
Just in time—he’s here already.”

T
he quiet purr of an engine could be heard gliding down the jetty road.

“
Okay, Head. Remember—keep your lips shut, even if he speaks to you directly. I’ll do the talking.”

Rena shot her empty can with some misplaced instinct right into the hole where Jade was hiding, hard enough to leave her face bruised for a week. Screwdriver copied her, but there was a clunk. Rena howled.

“Gee—sorry, girl. I missed.”

Ti
res crunched to a halt on the jetty road. A car door clicked, and footsteps approached. The gang of three walked to meet the new arrival. Taking advantage of their absence, Jade stretched cramped muscles, craned her neck slightly, and peered out to see who it was. The figure who entered the clearing, squat in a gray suit, was Dr. Hagues, CEO of Synengine Energies, Inc.

B
efore Kreh-ursh had time to react, the dark canoe had coasted down the wave with an eerie swiftness and was alongside. Taashou grabbed his craft, and bound it to hers. She had abandoned her ceremonial mask, was dressed in a plain gray shift under her blue cloak, soaking hair tied tight behind her neck. Rain and spray had drenched her completely, but she appeared impervious, allowing the water to lash her face and body as if numb to the cold. She scrambled into his canoe. He stared in shock. How did she find him, alone in a tiny boat in the ocean in the middle of a storm? But she was not there for social conversation:

“
Kreh-ursh!” Her eyes bored into him as her mind hit his with more intensity than he had ever felt. “The Death. Did you see it?”

Before he was able to speak, she had answered her own question, plucking the death island image from his mind like a flower
off a plant, examining it, and tossing it aside. Then she had no more use for words, no time. Her mind opened—he felt it like a busy network of tunnels diverging, curving, and joining before him—and drew him in. Possibilities stemmed like passages to each side, above, below. Yet as if in a dream where you struggled to advance, he could not move freely. She prodded his mind, not so much inviting as herding his consciousness into her mental space, directing him toward a particular zone. While rain lashed his face and his limbs trembled, he remained oblivious to the storm’s violence, falling deep into the shahiroh’s inner world.

Below, he saw a land arrayed in all its length and breadth. His own. Geh-urbh-Geh-ot
’s twin peaks formed a center point; around them swirled mountain ranges, hills, forests, deserts, and grasslands. Shah, the wide sea, stretched blue-green to the east, dotted with single islands and speckled archipelagos.

In a rush
Kreh-ursh and Taashou, like birds, zoomed in toward the volcano island of Kaa-meer-geh, saw a gathering—the shahiroh. This was the second time he had been treated to a vision of the red rock isle where the shahiroh lived. What did this all mean? The blue-robed figures were intent on a task. He could not see as much as feel the force of their minds gathered, focused on a single objective.

Images rose
toward him as Taashou let him view more. Again he saw the death island rolling over the sea, sucking creatures to their doom as it floated menacingly along. Then the island was gone, and he was rushed into another vision—a desert. This barren tract was recent, the result of a great drying out—trees and greenery had been starved, killed; the sky was pale, the color of bleached bone. He could not see what was causing it—the damage—but he saw dying animals, trees withering, drought reaching out its grasping fingers. Somehow the water had been sucked away.

The vision changed
, and he saw more mountains, as in his previous vision of Geh-urbh-Geh-ot. Yet here were many more, a whole land made of shining snow and ice: the most beautiful sight he had ever seen—harsh and violent yet pure and untouched as a primeval dawn. Though this land, too, was changing, withering. It was cracking, breaking up into pieces, dying. The sky sucked in poison, and the landscape melted. The vision stretched to include the whole world, and now storms raged across its face. Deserts were sucked up by tornadoes and thrown like blankets across entire forests, smothering them. People in villages and towns died from disease and poisoning. Others watched from high land as their homes were flooded by rising tides. Still others starved as their crops withered and failed, sometimes poisoned, sometimes destroyed by drought or flood.