James Barclay - Once walked with Gods

Directly ahead, the curtains were closed and still. Beyond them, the oval stage was surrounded by benches on the ground floor and two tiers of balcony seating above. It was a wonderful place. Warm and light and full of emotion. Much of the emotion hung in the air even now. But that wasn’t what Olmaat was sensing. The TaiGethen was sniffing at the air. He gestured his Tai towards the curtains.

‘Olmaat?’

Olmaat raised a hand. ‘A moment, my priest. Something smells wrong.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There is something in here not of the rainforest.’

‘Hithuur?’ Jarinn turned to his adept.

Hithuur spread his hands. ‘I’ve no idea what he’s talking about.’

‘Olmaat?’

‘Something is not right.’

Jarinn felt suddenly tired. ‘Do what you must. I’m going to sit down. Lorius?’

‘I thought you’d never ask.’

The two priests walked towards chairs and a table a few yards to the right of the curtains.

‘Hithuur?’ Jarinn beckoned his adept.

‘It’s more comfortable in the auditorium.’

He moved towards the curtains. Olmaat tensed. Jarinn felt suddenly vulnerable and frightened but still couldn’t place why.

‘Olmaat?’ he said a third time.

Olmaat’s Tai stepped back through the curtains.

‘The floor of the playhouse is empty,’ she said, moving back to Olmaat.

Hithuur broke into a run. There was noise behind the curtains. Slapping impacts like people landing after a jump. Olmaat’s head snapped round. The curtains were dragged aside. Six figures stood in the space. Not elves. Strangers. Blink-lives. Jarinn stopped, halfway to his seat. The blink-lives had no weapons but spread their hands, palms up. He could hear murmuring.

‘Takaar betrayed us!’ yelled Hithuur, standing by the strangers. ‘He killed my family. The harmony is dead.’

Olmaat’s Tai launched herself at the blink-lives. A jaqrui throwing crescent whispered out and chopped deep into the neck of one,who toppled back grabbing at his ruined throat as his life bled away. She took a sword from her back and thrashed it through the waist of another. An arrow from the depths of the auditorium took her through the throat.

Olmaat did not attack. Instead he turned and began sprinting towards Jarinn.

‘Run!’ he shouted. ‘Get out, get out!’

Jarinn gaped. More figures were rushing up behind the line of strangers. There was a tightness in the air. Hithuur’s words hung in his mind, a blade to the heart.

‘The new order will sweep Takaar’s law away,’ shouted Hithuur. ‘You are the old way, Jarinn. And Lorius will be the first martyr of the Tuali.’

Jarinn backed away. Olmaat was nearly on him, still shouting at him to go. There was a whine in his ears and his body felt as if it had been plunged into hot water. There was a rush of energy, like his soul flaring. He felt confused. He stared at the strangers. The four remaining moved their hands together.

Heat. And soul-scourging light.

Respect those you kill in battle for we are all brothers in the eyes of Shorth. Takaar couldn’t control the nausea. He twisted out of his hammock, flopped onto the ground four feet below and vomited. Green and brown flecked with red. His head pounded and his stomach twisted. He vomited again, helpless as the constriction in his gut intensified. He hauled himself up onto his hands and knees, his whole body convulsing.

He was aware of a roaring sound. He assumed it was the blood rushing around his head but it was more distant than that. As his body calmed a little, and the breaths he gasped ceased to bring more convulsions, he found he could focus outside himself.

The roaring and growling was a panther. More than one. The guttural sounds echoed his own pain and were a mirror for the confusion he was beginning to experience. He rolled away from the stinking pool and lay on his back, grabbing air in grateful gulps. The rainforest was quiet. Unnaturally so.

Takaar sat up. He plucked a leech from his right arm and walked a little shakily to the edge of his bivouac, where he rested against the bole of a fig tree. He took a few deep breaths and tried to replay the instants before he was sick. He didn’t like what his body told him.

You’re scared. Should be a familiar feeling but you seem to believe otherwise.

‘These are unusual times.’ Takaar refused to turn to his tormentor, who sat behind him underneath the shelter. ‘They are unpicking everything I have ever lived for.’

All the more reason to jump when I tell you to.

Takaar shook his head and walked away from the shelter. He had experienced a trio of events. Events? It seemed the only way to describe them. Far more complex than any emotion and far more overwhelming than mere feelings. They dipped into the core of him, of his race, and toyed with it.

It had begun with a sickness that was way beyond physical. And, in quick succession, two revolting grabs at the souls of the forest, the gods and every elf. They were what had caused him to vomit. And now he was left with an ache in his head not unlike the aftermath of the taipan venom.

What scared him was that he knew from where each of these events emanated. The grabbing of his soul had been triggered from Aryndeneth and Ysundeneth while the sickness came from everywhere. It would unsettle every elf, though many would barely register it. But he, Takaar, champion of the harmony, the ula who once walked with gods, felt it for all of them.

He’d been feeling the unsettling nausea on and off for some time. The events at Aryndeneth and Ysundeneth were something altogether more violent, brutal. Sudden and brief assaults that had fed back through the energy lines that latticed the world.

He’d assumed the power they represented to be benign, latent. Yet the suddenness of his sickness and its violence told of a rippling in those energy lines and a filling of the air with something new that he could neither taste nor touch but could sense with his body and mind.

The energy was not something he could use. Not yet. But it was reminiscent of that he had felt on Hausolis, way back before the beginning of the harmony, when he had discovered the gateway and managed, somehow, to link himself to it. What had awakened the earth? And what did it have to do with the harmony and the anxiety of the elves?

He shouldn’t care. Couldn’t afford to.

Didn’t.

Yes, best you take another edulis leaf, nicely boiled down with a little simarou and crushed beetle wing. Forget it. Forget it.

Takaar nodded. It was not often his tormentor adopted a sympathetic tone. Even rarer that he was right. Takaar returned to his shelter. A movement in the brush to his left caught his eye. He had faced every danger the rainforest could throw at a lone ula. There was nothing within it that could unnerve him now.

He stopped and stared hard into the undergrowth. A sleek form eased from within it, moving towards him. And it was not alone. He counted three. He should have been scared. He was easy prey. But they were not interested in his flesh.

Takaar crouched and held out a hand. One of them came forward. He felt the panther nuzzle his hand. Her tongue explored his palm and the head withdrew.

‘What is it?’ asked Takaar. ‘What is it that we feel?’ His tears stung the burns on his face. He moved forward on his belly, every excruciating moment punctuated by the feeling of his clothes dragging where they were fused to his body. The skin had blackened on his hands and raw flesh was all that remained of the soles of his feet. Yniss had spared him. Spared his eyes. He did not know why. The last thing he wanted was to live and see what filled his gaze.

He dragged himself the last yard. The stench of burned flesh filled his seared nose. In front of him lay the smoking corpses of Lorius and Jarinn. Olmaat’s tears were for them, for the fact he had failed them.