Tales of Noreela 04: The Island (35 page)

“Grandmother?” Namior’s mother said, but the old
woman slumped to her side, muttering and spitting as her hands clawed at the air.

Kel felt so helpless. He knelt beside Namior and closed his eyes against a sudden faintness. Her mother thrust a thick crust of bread into his hand, and he bit into it with a passion. It was seeded with nuts, and he felt the energy nestling in his stomach as soon as he swallowed, ready to spread out through his body. “Thank you,” he said through a full mouth.

“Right now, don’t even talk to me,” she said. She squatted beside her daughter and started feeling around the wound. No questions about the island, what he had been doing there, what they had seen, how Namior had been shot, how they had made it back …

He finished the crust and watched the woman work. First she stripped Namior’s blood-soaked clothing and washed her chest, exposing the wound just below her right breast. There was no matching wound on her back, which meant that whatever had been fired at her was still inside.

She lit several candles and placed them close around Namior, and to begin with Kel thought they were for some sort of ancient magichalan ceremony. But then she placed a wooden spoon between Namior’s teeth, poured a mug of strong rotwine over the wound, and when the injured woman’s writhing and moaning had subsided she went to work with a knife.

“If you can’t touch magic …” Kel began, but he did not want to finish.
How can you save her?

“There’s nothing you can do here,” she said. She never once stopped what she was doing. Her knife was in her daughter, and she sprinkled some sort of powdered herb around the bloody wound. “She’s mine to look after the best I can. But you need to go, Kel Boon.”

“Please don’t say that,” he pleaded. “Not after what we’ve seen. I’m not sure what I can do.” And that was the painful truth. He still had the two communicators in his pocket, but
to use them was impossible when the land no longer spoke and could not listen.

Namior’s mother glanced up, and her eyes bore a heavy sadness rather than hatred. She opened her mouth to say something, hesitated, then returned to her operation. The knife twisted and flicked, and something slicked from the hole in Kel’s love’s chest. She gasped and groaned, and more wine was poured around the wound.

Her mother picked the object up, rubbed it against one of the blankets around her shoulders and held it to the light. Her eyes went wide, her mouth hung open, and she asked, “Just what
have
you seen?” It was a small crystal, the size of Kel’s thumbnail, and it caught candlelight and threw a sickly rainbow around the room.

Namior’s great-grandmother screamed. She rolled into the groundstone and flinched away again, as if afraid it would burn. Her hands covered her eyes, and her almost toothless mouth was twisted into a pained grimace.

“Grandmother?”

The old woman sat up. She stared at the crystal, its splash of light emphasizing the redness around her remaining good eye. When the crystal swayed, its reflection caught her across the throat. “I only hoped …” she said wretchedly, but whatever she hoped for was never spoken. Instead, she stood unsteadily and came to them, shedding blankets like veils of madness. When she reached them she wore only her loose dress.

She took the crystal from her granddaughter’s hand, holding on to it as gently as a dream. Then she looked at Kel. “Core?”

“What?” he gasped, astounded. What could that simple word mean coming from this madwoman’s mouth? Was she ex-Core herself? One of their old witches, fled?

“Here.” She gave the crystal to Kel. “Maybe you can use their magic against them.”

“Grandmother, I don’t understand why—”

“Hush, girl.” The old woman never shifted her eyes from Kel Boon. And even beneath the mask of startling change, Kel could make out madness still simmering. “There must be people you need to contact.”

“But—”

Then the old woman sat beside Namior and started crying. It was not a slip back into her craze, but her demeanor promised that she had nothing more to say. At least, not right away.

“The Komadians are our enemies,” Kel said to Namior’s mother. “I promise, I’m doing what I can.” He looked down at Namior, wanting to kiss her, whisper into her ear, but content that she was with those who loved her, and if she could survive anywhere it was there. “Tell her I love her. And I’ll come back for you all.” Sparing one last confused glance at the mysterious old woman, he went for the door.

It was still raining outside, and he held out his hand to let the water wash the last of Namior’s blood from the crystal. Then he dropped it in his pocket, checked his weapons, and headed into the night.

HE HAD TWO
communicators left, and he could not risk trying one again until he was beyond the village. He had to travel past the Komadians’ influence, outside Pavmouth Breaks and across the plains.

He made his way down to the river first, moving slowly, always cautious of what was around the next corner. He moved from shadow to shadow like a wraith, footsteps silent and hands always ready to pluck a knife from his belt, every sense playing a part in examining his surroundings. Core training ran deep.

Close to the river he paused in the shadow of a ruined house, settling on a pile of rubble and hiding from the moons. Work still continued across in the harbor, with rescue teams
now digging farther inland along the course of the river. Lights hovered in the air above their heads; Komadian technology. Puffs of steam erupted here and there, and every time he heard one Kel was reminded of the hard coughing of the Strangers’ mysterious weapons.

He saw Noreelans digging with Komadians, and the trust the visitors were abusing made him feel sick. While some dug for missing villagers, other Komadians were building the strange black tower above the village.

And where there was one tower, perhaps there were more.

Trakis’s screams of agony came to him again.
Do they want us all? Is that the fate for everyone in Pavmouth Breaks?
He had certainly seen plenty of the large crystals, and if every one contained one of those trapped things …

Perhaps this was just a bridgehead. Capture the village, use its inhabitants to restore their dead to life again, then move inland. Farmsteads, villages, bands of rovers traveling across the landscape. And then the cities: Noreela City? Long Marrakash? New Shanti?

Though Kel was desperate to know more, he already knew enough. To travel across the bridge would be foolish. Perhaps the visitors on Noreelan soil really did not know about his and Namior’s trespass, but risking capture was the last thing he should be doing. His priority was to leave the village and contact the Core. He was important.

He was Pavmouth Breaks’ only hope.

Kel turned his back on the harbor and started inland. The footpaths and one narrow street followed the river valley, rising steadily and disappearing at the last of the houses, almost a mile in from the sea. There, he would have to go overland, either following the course of the River Pav or climbing out from the steepening valley and moving across the plains. Somewhere on his route, he would find the place the Komadians considered the village boundary. What he would discover there, he did not know, but he could hazard a guess:
a Stranger, clad in metal and told to kill anyone trying to leave.

There would be more conflict before he could attempt to contact the Core.

The rain eased off as quickly as it had begun, and walking away from the harbor, Kel heard someone else calling the name of a missing loved one. He could not make out the name, nor whence it came, but it gave the night a melancholy air, like low music played at a child’s funeral. The voice went on for some time. It died away eventually, fading in volume rather than ceasing altogether. Kel knew that the caller would remain unfulfilled.

And if they
did
meet their missing loved ones in the dark streets, they could be someone or something else.

At one of the path’s junctions he followed the course of the river and, walking down from the house-huddled hillside, he found a dead militiawoman. He paused twenty steps away, squatting and lifting his small crossbow from his belt. He primed it with a soft click, then looked around, hoping that his night vision would be effective enough to see anything hiding away in the shadows. The life moon did its best to illuminate the scene, and the death moon was peering over the head of Drakeman’s Hill. But darkness still lay heavy in the valley.

Nothing moved. A mist of rain came down again, drifting across the scene like shifting wraiths.

The militiawoman was slumped against a wall where two paths joined. There were rats on her stomach, chest and splayed legs, and several more gnawing at her throat. Rain was beaded on her sword’s blade where it lay several steps from her hand.

Kel moved forward. The rats heard him and scattered into the night. He paused and waited for the attack, but it did not come. He moved closer, taking a deep breath in preparation for what he was about to see.

It was Luceel. He’d drunk with her at the Dog’s Eyes, and now her throat was open to the bone. Her head was tilted back to one side, her eyes collecting rain, and he could see her spine.

“Are you
all
gone?” he whispered. He thought of the rest of the village militia, Vek and the others, lying dead across Pavmouth Breaks. What had happened? Had the Komadians taken control, under cover of darkness and the falling rain? There were still people digging down at the harbor, searching for bodies more than survivors, but was that all a show?

He knew that he should chant Luceel’s wraith down into the Black, but last time he had tried such a thing it had been O’Peeria—a painful time, with guilt haunting his every breath. And truly, he did not have the heart.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, “but you’ll find your way there eventually.” He closed her eyes and covered her head with her jacket, hoping it would keep the rats from her face.

Then he moved on, more cautious than ever, and aware that the dangers in the darkness were more real than he had feared.

AND IN THE
darkness, O’Peeria is his guiding light. He follows her through the gaps between buildings, the crawlways beneath floors, the gaps under and around foundations. She knows all the spaces outside what and where people know, and she sometimes asks why he doesn’t, as if it’s the duty of a Core member to understand the shadows and echoes of a world, as well as the world itself. But then, she always has been more committed than he.

The Stranger they seek entered the underground several days before, and the Core is sweeping in from the outskirts of Noreela City toward its center. O’Peeria seems confident that they will have their kill soon. Kel is not so sure.

“There are a million places to hide,” he says.

“So what? Places like this, the hunter has the advantage over the hunted. This fucking Stranger is trying to hide, he has to be lucky and stay unseen all the time. We only have to be lucky once.”

“Do you really love this?” Kel asks. The question has been bothering him for some time, because his own thoughts about being Core are becoming more and more confused. He feels that the Core as a whole is doing good, but he is doing bad. They kill the enemy, and that’s what they’re trained to do, that’s
his
whole reason for being. But somewhere deep down, something is starting to feel wrong.

“Fuck me, no!” she says. “I
hate
it. I’d much rather be back in New Shanti, hunting sand deer in the desert or fishing from the coral spines outside New Drymouth.” They’re following a forgotten underground canal, and she pauses by its side, pale face illuminated by the light ball at her shoulder. She has always been more comfortable and confident than Kel when it comes to using magic.

“Then why do it?”

She shrugs, as if the answer is obvious, then smiles sadly, realizing it is not. “Because I know I’m good at it,” she says. “And I’m hoping that’ll help it end soon.”

“After this one?” Kel asks. “Or the next? You really think it’ll ever end?”

“Yes,” she says. And she surprises him by touching his cheek, a brief show of affection that he is becoming unused to. There is sex and groaning and licking, but there is so rarely any real love. “One day they’ll make their move, and soon after that it’ll be over.”

“But who—?”

“Who’ll win?” She shrugs again, and her eyes turn hard. “The less they know, the more likely it’ll be us.”

“Then the more Strangers we kill, the better.”

“Right. Ready?”

“Yes,” Kel says, but he knows his eyes say “no.”

They travel deeper, and come across the site of the kill
beats after the Stranger’s wraith has flailed down into nothing. Three other Core are there, and they talk briefly before melting away again into the underside of Noreela City.

That night, after several bottles of rotwine, there is sex and groaning and licking. It is only when O’Peeria is asleep that Kel tells her he loves her.

HE WAS THINKING
of Namior when they caught him. He had told her that he loved her many times, and every time he meant it more. He hoped that when Namior awoke, her mother relayed his message.

It was a woman he recognized. He did not know her name, but she ran a shop down at the harbor selling the day’s catches for the fishing families of Pavmouth Breaks. She emerged from a doorway thirty paces ahead of him and approached, and to begin with he crouched down and held his crossbow at the ready. When he saw her smile, he stood and smiled back.

“Not a nice night,” he said, and then he saw the strangeness in her eyes. She did not recognize him at all.

“It really doesn’t hurt,” she said. “And you won’t remember, or forget anything.”

As he lifted the crossbow again, something flashed beside him and struck it from his hand. He turned to face a Stranger in metal armor, projectile weapon pointing at his face. Perhaps the one that had killed Luceel.

The Stranger spoke, and the metal mask made its voice androgynous. It was a language that Kel had never heard.

The woman nodded, her smile gone, but her eyes still glittering.