Tales of Noreela 04: The Island (7 page)

“We can help here as well as anywhere,” he said hesitantly, but he was pleased when Namior glared up at him.

“I’m going back out,” she said. Kel smiled and nodded, then offered her the mug.

They drank the tea quickly. It coursed through their bodies, tingled in their muscles, giving strength where tiredness had set in and lessening the pain of cuts and sprains. Namior conversed with her mother, then nodded at Kel and opened the front door.

Outside, the air smelled of the bottom of the sea.

“What did she say?” Kel asked.

“She told me to look after you.” Namior chuckled as she led the way back down the narrow path. To Kel, her laugh sounded almost hysterical.

On the main path along the hillside, people were hurrying in both directions. Kel could see no real sign of organization; everyone was on their own mercy mission. A woman hobbled past holding a child beneath each arm, her face grim behind the mask of blood she wore. At first he feared the children were dead, but then a little girl looked up at him and grinned, as though this was the greatest adventure ever. Despite himself, Kel smiled back.

Namior started heading back downhill. Kel grabbed her arm.

“Namior, there may be more waves,” he said. He could see that she understood that, but there was a defiance born of desperation in her eyes. Their friends had been down there. Kel had seen the vague outlines of people struggling through the ruined harbor across the bridge from where they had stood. Trakis and Mell had probably made it across, searching for Mell’s parents in the ruins, and the second wave …

“They’re dead, aren’t they?” she said, tears blurring her eyes for the first time. Shock could do that, Kel knew, protect you against the truth. By the Black, he was as aware of that as anyone.

“We can’t know that,” he said. “We don’t even know they got that far. But we can’t just rush down there, not yet. Not when there might be more.”

Kel could hear the roar of the waters receding once again, and combined with that sound were the impacts of rocks, the grinding of parts of Pavmouth Breaks being sucked out to sea.

Namior wiped angrily at her face. “But there are plenty of people who need help up here.”

“There are.” Kel pulled her close and kissed her cheek, and he was surprised at the comfort he took from the contact.
What’s coming?
he thought. During his time in the Core, he’d developed something of a reputation for only seeing the bad in things, only anticipating the worst. Often, he’d been right.
What in the Black could have done this?
He turned slightly, looking over Namior’s shoulder and out to sea. It seemed calmer now, and though a storm boiled on the horizon, closer in to shore the sky was clear enough still to allow moonlight through. That would help the rescuers, at least. But the sea itself was dark, forbidding, and no one really knew what lay over the horizon. Over the years many, such as Namior’s father, had gone to find out. None had returned.

Of all people he, a Core member, knew that there was more beyond the horizon than sea.

The long night stretched out before them, and at its end Kel had the feeling that many things would be different. Not just the ruin brought down upon the village, the deaths and destruction that everyone would have to start coming to terms with. But
changed
.

A man shouted behind them, a woman screamed and somebody called, “My dada!”

“Come on,” Namior said. She led the way and Kel followed, and for a brief flash she could have been O’Peeria, leading the way to her death with Kel following blindly behind.

THEY SPENT THE
rest of that night trying to help the wounded, the lost, the bereft. The Moon Temple doors had been forced open and it became their temporary hospital, the old one having been down behind the harborfront. Kel and Namior spent a while finding wounded people and helping them to the Temple, but then her position as a witch-in-training dictated that she should remain there, using her fledgling skills to heal wounds and soothe pain. The Temple had no groundstone, but Namior drew what she could from its deep-set walls, chanting softly over people with broken legs, water-filled lungs, rent flesh. Healers arrived at last from Drakeman’s Hill—they had made their way across the swollen river and plain of mud in a small boat that had been deposited high up by the waves—and while they used their herbs and drugs, Namior supplemented that with her young touch of magic.

Kel remained close by. He had no wish to leave her, so he helped where he could, moving people around and finding them somewhere to sit or lie down while waiting for treatment. The village militia brought many people in; even the trained soldiers were shocked by what had happened, eyes wide and frightened. They had left their weapons behind and
filled their belts with skins of fresh water, and they almost made Kel believe that someone was in control. But their commander had been killed in the harbor, drowned by the second wave as he tried to rescue the victims of the first. Perhaps the shock felt by the militia was more down to that than anyone else; their captain had been sixty years old, a veteran, and a father figure for many. Now, they were as lost as anyone.

He carried three dead people out of the Temple and laid them down in the moon-bathed yard. The death moon cast a yellow light over their flesh. Their wraiths needed chanting down, he knew, but that was a Mourner’s job. He had tried it before, but that had been a friend, and he could not face such memories right then.

Halfway through the night, just as a third and final wave came in, he was relieved when Mourner Kanthia arrived at the Temple, guided by Namior’s mother. Kanthia had struck her head and been made blind, but she willingly let Kel direct her across the yard to the bodies. The Mourner began her work.

The third wave was much smaller, but still it caused upset and fear, and its roar was somehow more painful than the sound of the first two. Perhaps it was because he knew it was merely stirring the remains of a destroyed village, now, rather than doing any more damage. It felt like an unnecessary insult from the sea upon Pavmouth Breaks, and Kel was surprised at the strength of emotion he felt. It was ironic that he could think of this place as home only after half of it was gone.

He watched from the Temple doorway. Kanthia—hooded, cloaked, flowing rather than walking—moved from one corpse to the next, chanting, making vague sigils in the air above their heads and chests. Soon she was finished, and when she returned to the Temple she stood far from Kel.

Perhaps she had sensed what he had done.

LATER, A LINE
of four machines appeared from down the slope. They rolled on chipped wheels, crawled on clumsy legs, and they were all coated in a thick layer of muck. A Practitioner sat on the back of each construct, steering with chain harnesses, whispering their knowledge of the land’s magic and urging the machines onward.

They brought the dead and injured with them. Kel and a couple of militia took them down, carried the wounded into the Temple, laid the dead side by side in the yard. Mourner Kanthia emerged from the shadows behind the Temple, converging on the corpses like the carrion foxes Kel had seen in the Widow’s Peaks. He stood back again and let the Mourner do her work.

She spooked him, but he was glad that she was there. He was not sure he could have remained had the air been full of wraiths.

DAWN BROKE, CRAWLING
across Noreela and reaching them last of all. Its vibrant colors piled down the valley of the River Pav and touched the pitiful ruins of Pavmouth Breaks’ lower areas, glittering from the still-churning waters and reflecting a thousand disturbing images from the seas of mud. There were bodies trapped there, broken homes, and machines that still struggled feebly against inevitable rot and rust. People hauled themselves across the muck in small boats and on sheets of heavy timber, pausing here and there when they reached the remains of a building, investigating, then moving on. If they did pull someone out of the mud or water, they were usually dead.

The water was back down to normal sea level, and the dawn revealed the fate of the harbor in full. The mole was broken in two places, the rest of it battered and missing huge blocks of stone. Most buildings across the harborfront had been demolished, their debris adding to the destructive wave
as it had surged inland. Farther away from the sea the destruction lessened, though even far up the valley, close to the tall Helio Bridge, buildings low to the river had lost roofs, windows and doors, and many walls had crumbled and fallen.

Drakeman’s Hill finished in a sheer drop thirty steps high where the wave had undermined the ground, carrying away the hillside and a score of buildings. Survivors had rigged a rope ladder, and Practitioners were using machines to pile rubble against the new cliff to provide an unsteady staircase.

Kel and Namior stood in the Moon Temple’s garden, looking down at the village and trying to appreciate the full extent of the damage. Namior shook, though not from the cold. Kel hugged her.

And then he heard a panicked, terrified voice. And he already knew something of its meaning, because Kel always expected the worst.

“What in the Black is
that?”

The shout came from someone farther down the slope, but it was taken up by others, and soon Kel saw a man amidst the shattered roof of a house pointing out to sea.

“Another wave?” Namior asked, eyes wide.

“No,” Kel said. He climbed the wall surrounding the Temple yard so that he could see over the neighboring houses. “Not of water.”

“What do you mean?”

Kel looked. He could not speak. For a beat he forgot to breathe, but then shock punched his chest and he gasped.

“Kel, what do you see?” Namior was scrabbling at the wall, but all her strength had gone.

For a moment, he thought the sea had grown spikes.

“Kel?”

“Masts,” he said, “and sails.” They were still far out, but he could see from their movement that they were sailing in toward Noreela. He guessed there were thirty of them, maybe more.

“Whose sails?”

Whose indeed?
Kel thought of the Core, and how he had fled it, and how its fears and aims were still so deeply embedded within him that, somehow, he had always known that this moment would come.

He just never expected it would happen to him.

Beyond the sails, on a horizon that had forever been long, straight and unhindered by anything other than clouds and the dreams of what lay beyond, there sat an island.

NAMIOR INSISTED THAT
Kel lift her onto the wall so she could see for herself. Her heart was fluttering with excitement and unease, and childhood myths harried at her memory. As yet, the shock of what had happened did not allow them to manifest fully.

The masts looked like trees growing out of the sea, swaying to different breezes. Their branches were dark, their colors as yet uncertain, and from their peaks flickered small shapes that could only be flags.

Behind them, several miles out to sea, was an island.

She remembered one of those myths, then. Before she died, her grandmother used to whisper the story to her before
putting her to bed, drawing vague violet shapes in the air with sparks and shadows.
The Violet Dogs came ashore like a wave of disease, more than willing to spill their noxious living-dead blood because they knew it would do them no harm. They fought through the first lines of defenses thrown up by the tribes that lived on Noreela way back then… strange, small, weak people who did not yet know the land and had no inkling of the magic it could give them. The Violet Dogs ate the dead and living alike, strengthening their bridgehead, though in truth none was required, because they were already the masters of that place. The Sleeping Gods did not stir, the Nax were not yet known in their underground fledge seams, and other creatures of Noreela were not even whispers in a sleeping child’s ear. So the people were alone in their vain defense of the land
.

But though she had often gone to sleep with such stories in her mind, Namior was a young witch, with a kindly heart and a soul filled with hope and confidence for the future. Even as a child she had known those tales for what they were—stories, passed from grandparent and parent to child and remembered down through the years. If the Violet Dogs had been so powerful, brutal and unbeatable, she reasoned, where were they now?

So she watched the masts bobbing closer to Noreela, as the strange island behind them was touched by dawn and painted green and lush with vegetation. And though she was fearful of something new, she could not help but feel a childlike optimism as well.

“I should get home!” she said. “Commune with the land, see what’s there.”

“We have to go,” Kel said.

“Go where?”

“Away from here.” He sounded different, and his face was drawn, eyes wide and fearful.

“Kel, just because we don’t know—”

“I
do
know, Namior.” He looked out to sea again and
grabbed her arms, pulling her down as he jumped from the wall. “Just look what they’ve done already!” He pointed down toward the harbor, then closer at the bodies lined carefully across the Temple yard.