Alium, page 13
“Ardua,” said Zelor, turning to Elts but looking high beyond the reach of the mist. Following his gaze she looked to the distant, icy towers and crumbling walls of black ruin affixed to the sheer mountain-face high above. It was the strange city they had seen first coming out of the endless wood.
The old man coughed and spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Ardua, yes. It was our true home. Not long ago it was a great kingdom. Our mines wound so deep into the mountain that there is one passage even which leads to the other side. From there one might see the Great One unoccluded.” He drew in a rattling breath, smacked his chapped lips. “But the city was beset by a great sickness. We fled the walls and moved here to Quiflum. The only survivors but for the Queen herself are here now.”
“Have you seen this passage?” Zelor asked without inflection.
The old man spoke very cautiously. “I have been as deep as it runs, but… I have not been to the other side of the mountain. No one has.”
“This sickness,” said Elts. “Will it not kill us too?”
The old man shut his eyes. “If you wish to avoid the sickness, the mines are far more dangerous than the city, for they are its source.”
“Are you afraid to return?” Zelor said.
“Aye, sir. I am.”
“Then take us there in confidence,” said Zelor. He placed his hand over the man’s trembling skull. In a tortured moment the lifeless body fell bleeding from the head, and Zelor rolled it away with his naked purple foot. He looked pitilessly into the palm of his hand, where the man’s every memory had entered into his consciousness. Elts was reminded instantly of Duxmortul’s insatiable thirst for power. The look upon Zelor’s face was that of utter void, yet in it there was the same deep sadness, a sadness that almost reached Elts’ heart were it not for the horrific deed worked thereof.
There was a staggered twanging of bows, and long iron arrows flew for Zelor. In a blinding swathe of flame Feox was compelled by the instinct of his master to uplift his burning axe. The ashes of the shafts trickled in the wind. Zelor looked up to the guards who stared wide-eyed in horror. He raised his hand.
“Stop!” Elts running forward grabbed his wrist, feeling in a surge—as if tapping some discreet network—his fury at her interference. Swiftly she released him and stepped away. “There is no reason for taking more lives, or any at all. Zelor, this is not the way of our people.”
He grimaced, as if remembering something detestable. “The old man would not have kept up. It is more efficient this way.”
“And what about the men before?”
Zelor set his thin mouth in stone. “Fear is a great persuader.”
“And these soldiers who have no chance of even touching you? You’ll waste them for the sake of fear though we are done here? You enjoy it.” Zelor lowered his hand, balled it into a fist. There was a shadow over his face. One of the guards audibly exhaled. Elts pressed him. “What will you do with the Alium, Zelor? Will you offer it up to Fozlest as is our task?”
“I will not,” he roared suddenly. “Fozlest would use it to rule the world.” Elts had never seen such fire in his eyes. “The Alium must be destroyed,” he said solemnly, smouldering now. “Now, do you wish to carry on like Fexest, or will you keep your wits?” He held out the quaking fist before Elts. An awful chill emanated from it, invisible silken strands of gluttonous propriety snaking, itching to latch and sink and tear and drink.
“I am all that remains, Zelor. Kill me and you are alone at last. If that is your wish then hasten its passing.”
The Silver Zefloz seemed to stand down, and a shadow passed from his place. “If you oppose me I will not hesitate. But I admit the others are not what they used to be. Fexest especially is a sore loss. We will need more strength than my own for this task. Little that we know of the Alium—that it rests within Zenidow, that it has at least some physical form, that its song is heard only in the minds of the prescient—it can be no mortal tool.”
“And how then should mortals mar it?”
“There is a way,” he soliloquized. “At great cost, power lends itself.” He was silent then, eyes far away. High above brooded the black icy towers of Ardua.
Chapter IX
Smoke Clears
Out of senseless dark, Ogwold stirred to some notion of the sea. Booming surf on the windowsill echoed the deaf roar of dreamless sleep. Smacking morning lips tasted salt air curling redolent in his big nostrils; their corners turned up. The backs of his sealed eyelids began to ripple, at first with seeping sunlight, then with flowing hangings of water evoked. He rolled over on his lumpy mat to nurture the incipient dream. The fugue of norm had blotted out the light of reverie overlong.
The liquid curtains drew together, swept forth as a yawning wave. Blackened purple at its genesis, rolling from wine-dark base to diaphanous lilac crest, the enormous swirl arched, hung, crashed down unfolding in explosions and geysers of whitewater. Just before the point of greatest violence, Ogwold fell back as unto a seam in the undertow, slipped within the sucking continuum of water kicking streamlined, letting out the long, flowing membranes from their secret sockets in his shoulders. A matrix of timeless currents converged upon, blew out and filled those wing-fins, and there arose from the open water a great music harmonizing as through many voices. Among them was his mother.
Pleading as she was out of care and understanding, Autlos-lo sang only the word Zenidow. In a cadence those three commanding syllables rippled and repeated through the hidden choirs of Flosleao, compounding in volume and profundity as they went. So changed was the song by this word that the very medium of water shifted to fit its instruction. The sea turned massive and slow as a great body, gradually hastening, now exponentially faster, shifting downward, angling all ways inward, becoming somehow shallow and limited despite its former endlessness, sucked too soon from Ogwold’s desiccating skin and dragged—clinging in mockery to his ribs and helpless fins—far beneath the world.
Back upon this cradle resolve never
To release your heart. Fix instead fated
Vision—above all things—on Zenidow
Yet higher still. Dive, swim rather in the
Seas of night above immortal; dream with,
Know rather the spaces between the stars.
The spout of final drainage evaporated before it fell. In place of it all was a vast desert, a changeless plane of white-hot infinity sculpted with skeletal dunes petrified in eternal rise and fall like the fossils of waves long extinct. Far, far away stood one shining, cloud-girded feature too tall to tell.
Ogwold leapt blindly out of bed, cracking his elbow on the wooden floor. Blossoming pain crystallized the reality of the cabin in a lucid shard. Suffocating sands dissolved like a veil, opening on yellow half-light, widening the frame of perspective. The edge of the handmade table in the centre of the room rose in definition. There was his father’s pipe, lying on its side, charred bowl beckoning, a tail of ash winding about its carefully hewn body. Even as he recognized this portal back to dreamlessness—that void seeming now so sweet and safe—the sound of the ocean outside became again like a great music dragging his senses back to nightmare. Again the water touched him, left him; the doomful desert loomed torrid and portentous.
He lurched for the pipe too hastily and slammed his leg into the table, spilling the leather pouch of norm beside it everywhere. When he reached to resolve the mess, no arm followed his impulse; but here was his left. Now he remembered. Despite the strange, healthful vigour in the pit of the wound, which had felt at first like the phantom energy of the limb now gone, it was a special kind of madness to realize that he could not perform this simple task of holding the pouch and guiding the normgrass back inside.
For now, the absence of his arm was nothing compared to the still loudening call of the water. Ogdof could help him clean up the grounds later. With some fumbling Ogwold was able to messily prepare the pipe. Shaking, he jammed the stem between his broad teeth, and struck a match against the table, breaking three before a flame arose. Hand trembling, pipe bobbing up and down under his awkward bite, he lit the curling tips of the snug grass, thirstily sipping from the curved mouthpiece. Streams of white smoke billowed from his thick, grey lips and hairy nostrils, disrupted and chased away by raucous coughing as the pipe clattered to the table and spilled black-green nuggets.
Even as he finished exhaling, Ogwold’s eyes reddened, bulged, sagged. Warm spectral arms reached out from some invisible but intimately near dimension, embraced and massaged the soft tissues of his mind with angel fingers. Moments from a crescendo of total unbearable purpose, the song of the sea foundered into a dumb, mindless noise, evoking nothing. He laughed and sighed at the routine crashing of the waves, familiar and comforting now as the cawing seabirds, the creak of his chair, and the sounds of Nogofod feet crushing rocky sand. What was so awful about the desert anyhow; like the sea, it was beautiful in its own way. Even Epherem had its charm. He threw himself back onto the sleeping mat, reflecting on his mother’s singing not as a dire omen, but as a serendipitous window into a secret past too grand for immediate concern. Zenidow—it was just a place. Why shouldn’t he go to it? Perhaps one day, he thought, lazily watching the smoke drift and pool over the table.
*
The first shaft of sunlight cut through a chink in the rough leather curtains over the window. “Smoking in the morning? So you side with Wog.” The peripheral dark mass of Ogdof sat up and snorted the pungent air.
His son lay grinning goofily through tombstone teeth, misty eyes placidly roving about the room, falling upon and gazing in childlike wonder at the luxuriant bandage around his right shoulder. Its faint iridescence kindled in a brassy outline with the dawn light. “Wog was right about one thing,” Ogwold murmured. “Norm makes everything feel so sturdy and vital. Right now I feel like I’ll be just fine if I never swim again. Pretty as the ocean is, it’s nice enough to just listen and remember. Besides, there are all sorts of other pretty things in the world.”
“Well that’s something.” Ogdof smirked. “Though I suspect with age alone the subtleties of life grow more beautiful, norm may hasten that process. It has indeed many medicinal properties physical and spiritual. Certainly, it has helped me to see things from perspectives I would call essential. But remember, it is all right with me if you must swim, so long as you are discreet,” he went on, rising and touching the ceiling with his long, rough arms; the scars long ago eroded by seawater looked natural as the rocky musculature they canyoned. “You needn’t turn to the grass over-heartily if it is only to soothe your loss. One puff goes a long way. I had to carry you home last night, you know. You’d collapsed in the middle of town.” A long rattling groan tumbled from his grizzled face while he stretched. Drawing open the curtains so that the single beam of light expanded and washed the cabin in pale sun, he lumbered to the food crate sleepily and began collecting tutum skins, bringing them to the table. His heavy-lidded eyes turned impassively over the spilled norm.
“It’s better if I don’t swim,” mused Ogwold from his mat. “I was too fixated on one part of the world, when there are so many other things to explore and understand. Besides, I’ve drawn enough attention to your house. The norm has opened my eyes! It might help me enjoy real Nogofod business as much as I did swimming.” Saying ‘Nogofod business’ as though he were some stuffy scholar, he folded his arm behind his head and looked out through the window, over the seething, dawn-touched waves, and thought of the previous day’s events. Though the norm still could not push her from his mind entirely, with the smoke thick in his system, the plea of Autlos-lo still seemed so harmless and distant. “Perhaps one day, I’ll leave Epherem…”
“And go where?” Ogdof grunted from the table, eyes sunken like caves in his furrowed brow. “Last I checked the business of Nogofod was to stay put.”
“Once I’ve truly understood that business, I mean, this life I’ve shunned, then I might go out and try to understand other things too.” Ogwold was fascinated by the ease with which he could speak of things before so stressful, and so he went on. “I think I’ll go to the mountains, to Zenidow actually.” The idea seemed so abstract and surreal that he smiled as it was a thing merely of fancy.
“Zenidow,” said Ogdof gravely; but turning up one corner of his low mouth he added, “Of course, the next logical business to master.” Unable to enjoy his own joke, he fell, however, to brooding silently under his enormous eyebrows, slowly chewing the tough tutum skin in wide circles.
Not quite hearing his father, Ogwold rolled out of bed as if the blankets were too heavy to lift, crawled playfully a ways, slowly boosted forward from his knee, and slouched with wide, careful movements to the table. His eyes were bleary, and each step was conducted like the setting down of a heavy, stone coffer, but a smile spread over his face. It was a nice and good thing to move so slowly, as if there were enough time for anything in the world, ambling like a newborn across this new floor in this new world, treating the commands of his mother like a story to be played with, taken seriously some other time. So it was that he became gradually theatrical in his disposition, stopping beside the table and looking out through the window over the horizon with the parodically burdened brow of a hero. “Autlos-lo sends me there.”
“Ah, now I see. I should have known more dire circumstances than sea-monsters must summon her.” Ogdof was taking things very seriously despite his son’s dramatics, though Ogwold immersed in the pomp of his act did not notice. “But what will you do about the guards?”
“I’ll quit the coast at night,” Ogwold quickly announced, assuming the stance of a great tactician. “The watch is only vigilant near the village. I know places by the water where neither Novare nor Nogofod dare go.”
“They are not even so watchful near the boundary,” Ogdof added thoughtfully, brushing his salt-knotted beard. Crumbs of springy tutum skin rolled out and bounced along the table. “Most nights they would rather drink, not to say they don’t love a good chase. But a Nogofod simply does not run away. Our culture holds us here more than Novare with swords.” He looked to his son almost wistfully. “Still, if you are seen in Occultash you’ll be slain straight away. Even if you can survive the leagues of desert ahead, how will you disguise your ogredom there?”
Ogdof’s insistent intellectualizing finally reached Ogwold, for he had not considered the journey any further than the act of leaving itself. Occultash was the only Novare city anywhere close to Epherem. Governed as well by the oversea authority of Lucetal, it was a vast trade settlement built along the face of Shadith, the nearest true mountain to the sea. Traders and delvers from the range came exclusively through that hub in their long journey to offload in Epherem. It was said that the road into the Mardes, otherwise shielded by sheer walls, began only in the heart of Occultash, in a great tunnel carved out of Shadith. Immersed in such logistics as Ogdof had raised, Ogwold reflexively took up the pipe once more, and struck a match, this time very successfully. As he spoke now, watching the outward billowing smoke as if reading therein a secret lettering, the last traces of theatrics left his voice, and his heart spoke sincerely for all its former jocularity.
“It would have to be at night as well then. I hear that the journey from the coast to the city is more subject to delay, and that the gates are left open for caravans that arrive after dark. Maybe I could slip through them and find a good place to hide, look for a vantage on the tunnel into the mountains or a place to stow away during the day. But there would be guards at the entrance into Shadith. If the traders tell us anything it’s that the government of Occultash thinks it owns the road into the Mardes…” As the last trail of milky smoke dissipated into raw sunlight, Ogwold suddenly suspected that he sounded quite stupid, and the inertia of this anxiety shifted his thoughts to the comforts and consistencies of life in Epherem. Only a fool would abandon this place where every necessity was near.
“It is possible,” said Ogdof, chewing powerfully. He had listened with intensity. “I myself considered it many times when I was younger.”
Ogwold was appalled enough that the norm-weight behind his shame swung its momentum to surprise instead. “You? How many secrets have you left to reveal?”
“Not many.” He chuckled. “I used to hate Epherem, the idleness of our race, and Novare more than anything. I thought the norm was planted here to control us, that once long ago our ancestors roamed Altum freely. But hate… it was never a powerful enough drive. I am proud of you for finding your own way to love Epherem, even if it happened to be in doing the thing all Nogofod and Novare jointly despise.” Now it was Ogdof’s turn to look out at the purple waves. “Though, I suppose your loving the water is the fault of my own pursuit of meaning. The love that changed Epherem for me was for your mother, and now you, Ogwold. When I first beheld you and saw the cheeks of Autlos-lo etched into your little face, I knew I could never leave you. Taking you beyond the boundary was quite out of the question, and now I am too old for such business anyhow.”
Ogwold smiled, grey-red eyes big and misty. He had never felt so proud of Ogdof as he was then, imagining his father as a young adventurer, glossy-haired, surly to his elders, unconcerned by work or pay. “I love you too, Dad. I won’t leave you either.”
“Autlos-lo is not to be ignored, Ogwold. Now, I don’t know a single Nogofod that’s made the journey, but the King’s arm is only so long. If somehow you were to make it into the deep mountains, I think you would be all right.”
