Tales of Noreela 04: The Island (27 page)

He grabbed the sword handle in both hands. The Stranger squealed. Kel lifted, bringing its head up so that he could look at its metal mask, searching out the eyes. “You may be here at last,” he said, “but it’ll never be easy for you.”

The Stranger growled, or laughed.

Kel pushed on the sword, shoving it through the Stranger’s neck and severing his spine.

Then he turned and ran.

NAMIOR WAS OUT
onto the beach before she saw her own silhouette thrown before her. The blast of light was brief, but staggering, and the dull thud that accompanied it sounded like something rearranging itself in the land.

She resisted the urge to turn and look, because she heard Kel coming after her. She knew it was he because with every pounding footstep on the shale beach she heard him saying
Run, run, run
. She was not sure whether he was talking to her, or to himself.

She turned left, instinctively heading away from Pavmouth Breaks as the pounding sea forced her to make a choice. Fear prevented her from registering anything of her surroundings: only the need to flee.

“Namior!” She slowed and turned at last, and Kel was reaching for her. “Down behind this rock, this should be safe enough.”

“Safe enough from what?”

“One of
them,”
he said, explaining nothing. He carried a golden tube in his hand, the same thing she had seen the metal man firing at him, and she flinched away. “Don’t worry,” Kel said. “It’s dead.”

They slipped behind a huge rock that had tumbled down from the cliffs above, and Kel was up leaning against its face, looking over the boulder and back the way they had come.

Namior stood next to him, for comfort more than anything, and that way she saw what emerged from the cave. A dark thing thrashed out onto the narrow beach, spinning, hissing, sizzling, crunching rocks beneath it, sending shards spinning through the air to splash in the sea or ricochet from the cliff face. She had the terrible impression that it was
searching
for them, but it flitted this way and that, as though possessed of a terrible indecision.

“Stranger’s wraith,” Kel whispered.

Namior reached out to him.
He was right
, she thought, and the idea was terrible. What evil had touched Noreela at the very place she called home?

“Can we run?” she asked. With the little Kel had told her about the Strangers, she assumed that to be the end.

“No,” he said, ducking down and pulling her with him. “No, but it won’t last for long. They never do.”

They sat there behind the rock, squatting on pebbles and smashed-up wreckage deposited by the terrible waves, and listened to the thing raging behind them. Namior had sensed many wraiths in her life, and she had even seen some, when the light was just right and there was a cool, calm mist in the air. But she had never imagined anything like that creature.

A Stranger. A mad wraith. This
can’t
be of Noreela. And they claim no magic, though their steam things astound me
. She leaned in close to Kel. “They’re from somewhere else, aren’t they?”

“We’ve been sure of that all along,” he replied, touching her face with one hand. “We just don’t know where.”

The sounds of violence lessened behind them, and Kel stood slowly to peer past the rock. He slid back down, landing with a gasp, and his head dipped forward, sweaty hair hanging on either side of his face. He was holding the metal tube in his hands, but he seemed not to notice it.

“Kel?” Namior stood slowly, and when Kel did not reach to stop her she knew the wraith was gone. The air on the beach seemed to shimmer before the cave, as though a great
heat was issued from the opening, but of the raging dark thing there was no sign. Patterns of disruption scarred the loose shale. The sea came in, hushed against the shore and pulled out again, unconcerned, eternal.

Kel stood quickly, reaching into his jacket pocket for the small bag of things he had shown her before. “I have to call the Core,” he said.

“Will it work here? Through stone?”

He smiled and shook one of the nutlike objects into his palm. He handed it to her while he tied the bag and put it away. Namior ran her fingertips across the thing in her hand, feeling the ridged shell spiked with delicate fronds, and touching the coiled tail that protruded from one end.

“One way to find out,” Kel said, and he took the nut from her. He stared at it for a moment, his face going slack. “I’ve dreaded ever having to do this.” Then he leaned forward and breathed out directly into his palm.

The stringy tail flexed slightly, shifted, and started to unravel. It turned around and around, its coil becoming wider, and while the nut remained in his palm, the tail stretched out over the side of his hand and grew strong and straight parallel to the ground. When it finished growing and changing it was as long as a person’s arm.

“One of the Core’s greatest witches made these,” he said. “A charm, a spell, a wish, and a series of words tied up in a moment of time. Every Core member has taken a vow allied to those charms, and every single one will hear its call.”

“How many are there?”

Kel shrugged. “Perhaps three hundred.”

“Against this?” Namior gestured out at the island, thought of the ships sailing in and docking, and the man dressed in a metal skin carrying the steam weapon. And she wondered if perhaps Kel was mad.

“The Core will bring an army.” He placed the tip of the tail against the ground between his feet and pushed.

Namior was amazed. The plantlike stem pressed between
two pebbles and pierced the ground, sliding in smoothly as Kel pushed down with little effort. At the point where its whole length entered the ground was a drizzle of sparks.

“I never thought I’d see you using magic,” Namior said, and even after everything she managed a smile.

“I haven’t used it yet,” Kel said.

What if he can’t? What if the interference stops that as well?
But Namior could not think like that. Whatever angle the Core’s witches used to approach magic must surely be mindful of such problems.

Once the nutlike object was pressed close to the ground, its long stem deep in the land, Kel knelt and used the Stranger’s weapon to crush it and send the signal. That was poetry in justice, if ever Namior had seen any.

The nut shattered, shards of it speckling her feet. Kel stood up and backed away.

“What now?” Namior asked.

He frowned and shook his head.

The nut issued one thin tendril of bluish smoke, then its shattered shell rose rapidly from the ground, carried up by the stiff stalk. Once clear of the ground it fell sideways and shattered across the rocks, stem breaking into a hundred pieces as if made from the finest blown glass.

“Even this,” Kel said, and his face fell.

“It didn’t work?”

“No. Interference, your family called it. I call it poisoning. The Strangers are here, and they’ve poisoned the magic, made it easy for themselves. And this …” He held up the tube, examining it more closely.
“This
is their magic. And it doesn’t rely on some vague language that few people know.” He threw the tube down and kicked it away. “It doesn’t need witches to chant, or a drawing of power, or Practitioners to run it. All it needs is steam.” He stepped forward and kicked the tube again, sending it clattering across the beach toward the sea. “Steam! And how that fucking Stranger back there didn’t kill me, I’ll never know.”

“There’s room for luck in any belief or religion.”

“Luck?” He was shouting, though his rage was directed outward across the sea, not back at Namior. “I feel so lucky now, that’s for sure. I’m the luckiest Core member in Noreela right now! Here I am, at the heart of everything I’ve been trying to escape for five years. Right at the center of things, the place and time the Core has been agonizing about and fearing for hundreds of years. And what? I’m on my fucking own!”

“You’re not on your own.”

Kel looked at her, and his eyes were watery. He wiped at them and came to her, glancing around as he did so. They were still alone on the beach.

“This is so dangerous,” he said. “This could be the beginning of the end, and …” He held her shoulders and looked intently at her face, as though trying to imprint her image on his memory.

“I’m not leaving you now,” Namior said.

Kel nodded, went to say something, then turned and looked out at the island.

“We could go back,” Namior said. “Try to get past them, go inland to where the magic might still be working.”

“They could have done this everywhere.”

“We should find out!”

“Back through the Throats?” he said.

“It’ll take time, but—”

“No,” Kel said. “Out there. To the island. They’ll be expecting people to flee inland, and they’ll have set up guards to prevent it. We might get past, but if we don’t and they catch us… well, we know for sure they’re looking for me now, at least. But out there is the last place they’ll expect anyone to go.”

“And maybe your signal will work from the island.”

“Magic?”

“The Strangers are doing something to it. But if they truly don’t use or even have magic, why do that same thing on their own island? And their island is in Noreelan waters, now.”

Kel grinned. “You’re a genius, Namior Feeron.”

“Glad to help, wood-carver.”

He seemed about to speak again, but he glanced past her at the cave, face growing grim.

“I’ll help.” Namior thought of the corpses she had run across, the feel of them giving underfoot, the smells and sounds …“Two will be quicker than one.”

She expected him to protest, but he only nodded. And whatever it was he wanted to say, he kept inside for another time.

THE STRANGER’S METALLIC
shell was twisted and distorted, and in places it seemed to have melted and re-formed in strange, fluid shapes. His body was all but gone, and a foul-smelling smoke rose from what was left. Namior saw smears of soot around the tunnel’s wall and ceiling from where the Stranger had… ignited? Exploded? She was not sure exactly what had happened, and it was not the time to ask.

Namior Feeron walked across the bodies of dead friends to help those that were still alive. That was what she kept telling herself, at least. She ignored the sounds and smell and concentrated on the faces of those she loved: her mother and great-grandmother; Mell, searching for Trakis, digging against hope; Mourner Kanthia, so brave and vulnerable even though most regarded her as too close to death to be comfortable. And Kel Boon, the wood-carver who had turned out to be a soldier as well. And it was the “as well” that kept her eyes on him, the realization in all the confused, intense moments that he
was
still the man she had fallen in love with. The wood carving, the move to Pavmouth Breaks, had not been falsehoods on his part, nor the attempt to hide from whatever had happened. It was perhaps the most honest thing Kel had done. He was a soldier, but he was still a wood-carver and her
lover as well, and as long as that remained so, she would be there to help.

Kel climbed past the boat and picked up one of the oars she had used to strike at the Stranger. He wedged it beneath the hull, tested the flexibility of the wood for a beat, then shoved.

The boat slid free, scraping across rocks then sliding onto the corpses.

Namior pulled, eyes half-closed. She concentrated on the sound of the waves behind her, timeless and familiar. She had been born with that noise in her ears, and every moment of her life so far had sung to the same tune. When at last she felt cold water lapping around her feet and pouring into her boots, she opened her eyes again, felt the sun on her face where it had just cleared the cliff, and climbed into the boat.

Kel pushed it out past the breaking waves, then jumped into the bow. He and Namior sat side by side and took an oar each. The swell toyed with them for a time, rocking left and right, but they eventually maneuvered the boat so that the bow pointed out to sea. Then they started rowing, cutting through the breakers and finding the gentle swell of the ocean, and watching the cliffs as they slowly fell behind.

The impact of what they were doing suddenly struck home. But Namior did not stop rowing. The exertion felt good, the perspiration on her back and beneath her armpits was cooled by the breeze.

“We’ll be back,” Kel said.

“You can’t say that.” A mile to the north, Namior saw the Komadians’ ships at dock before the mole and inside the harbor. She hoped that from that far away, their rowboat would be indistinguishable from the waves. But with magic distant to her, there was nothing she could do to camouflage them.

“I can!” Kel said. His certainty shocked her, and she did not reply.

They rowed on, the boat lifting and dipping in perfect rhythm with the great sea. As more time passed, so a greater
stretch of the coastline was presented for their view. Namior could see scars on the land where the great waves had struck, but the damage was starting to feel more remote. It was only beats since they had left land, but it already felt like days.

“We’re rowing somewhere else,” she said at last. “We’re leaving the whole world and going somewhere else.”

Kel was quiet for a while, and she thought he was not going to answer. But then he stopped rowing. Namior stopped as well, and when she looked at him they were close enough to smell each other’s breath.

“We could be the first from Noreela ever to set foot on another land,” he said.

Namior surprised Kel, and herself, by laughing out loud. “They’ll write songs about us!”

And to the tune of the sea, and the rhythm of the oars, Namior and Kel made their way to somewhere new, and terrible.

WHEN THEY PAUSED
for a rest, Kel seemed unsure of which way to look: back toward shore, to see whether they were being pursued; or out at the island, revealing itself in more detail the nearer they drew. So he sat beside Namior, shifting view every few beats. He said nothing, so she assumed there was little to say. She knew that would not remain the case for long.