A Respite From Storms Read online

  Jasen wanted to ask, “How much later?” His heart quickened at the promise.

  “Come inside,” said Burund. “I will show you some things.”

  Jasen and Alixa followed, Scourgey in tow. If Burund minded her, or was offended by her deathly, rotten scent, he neither said nor showed it. The deck on the aft of the ship—this one called the poop deck, Jasen had been told to a snicker from Kuura which he did not understand—housed an office for Burund. Jasen had seen in through the windows—it was from these that the candlelight had bled that first night, when he and Alixa had been fished up—but that had been only a glimpse of the wonders within.

  Inside was a veritable treasure trove. The room was equivalent to maybe two cabins adjoined on the long end, forming an approximate square. Burund had a desk, which was not useable: its surface was carved with maps. Though it had taken a battering over its use, it was still beautiful. Jasen puzzled at it momentarily, wondering how it looked as though the islands’ outlines seemed to have been carved by flame; the hollows appeared burned, not just inked.

  Alixa’s attention was immediately drawn by a copper kettle resting on a shelf. It was concave toward the middle, with a wide, oblate bottom and top. The spout was very long, a good seven or eight inches. A line of gold material wended its way around the upper third of the kettle. It was uneven and bright, enough to make the rest of the kettle look dull by comparison.

  “You like it?” Burund asked.

  She nodded self-consciously. “I like the gold.” She pointed, tracing its path without touching. “Why is it like that?”

  “It comes from a seaport on Bithrindel,” said Burund. “In their culture, breakages are mended like so.”

  Alixa nodded. But she frowned, apparently wondering more. Whatever question she had, she did not ask it.

  Scourgey nosed her way in, sniffing at the object of Alixa’s fascination.

  “Uhm,” she said, shooting an awkward glance toward Burund. “Do you mind—?”

  A faint, crooked smile appeared at one corner of the mouth. “No.”

  Jasen busied himself with eyes roving deeper into the room. Most of Burund’s items were fabrics or wooden carvings, colorful and elaborate. Pinned by its corners on one wall was what appeared to be a flag cut from animal hide: it was mottled with camouflaging spots.

  “Did you get these on your travels?” Jasen asked.

  “I did,” Burund confirmed simply.

  He took up a seat on the other side of the desk, and remained there.

  Jasen hesitated.

  “Feel free to look,” Burund said. “I am sure something may catch your interest.”

  Something had: a locked cabinet in a corner. Coming up to Jasen’s lower rib, it had three distinct compartments if the locks on the front were an indicator. The dark wood was stained—and, like the desk, had its fair share of markings from the beatings it had received in storms past. Curling patterns had been worked in the edges of each of the compartment’s panels, very small and subtle.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Ah.” Burund smiled again—and this time, it was with both sides of his mouth. He rose, and came round the desk. “That, Jasen, is a bookcase.”

  Alixa frowned at it. “It’s not like any bookcase I’ve ever seen. Where are the shelves?”

  “Books would fall off if they were on shelves,” Jasen told her.

  “Oh. Yes.” Face reddening, she turned away, feigning disinterest yet listening nevertheless.

  Burund reached to his belt. Hidden by an overhanging fold of his tunic was a ring of keys. He unhooked it, and began slowly but methodically moving through them.

  When he found one that was maybe an inch long—barely a third the size of any others—he slotted it into the keyhole of the first compartment. It unlocked with a click.

  The panel opened downward.

  Inside were two shelves of books, both filled.

  Burund looked at Jasen expectantly.

  He looked back, confused.

  “Go on,” said the shipmaster.

  “Err …”

  “You may take a book.”

  “Oh! Uhm. But these are … are you sure?”

  Burund nodded. “One for each of you.” He added wryly to Alixa, “And one for your pet … if she could read.”

  The pink flush in her cheeks rose a little at this joke. Interest piqued, though, she stepped forward to look at the pickings. “Are there any written in Luukessian?”

  “Perhaps one or two,” said Burund.

  Alixa tilted her head to read the spines, what words were legible on them anyway. After a few seconds she withdrew a book with a very faded cover with an equally faded title: “The Petticoat Owned by the Sand-Colored Rabbit.” A children’s story, Jasen figured, though a lengthy one: it was at least a hundred pages.

  He scanned for text he recognized. Not finding any, and not willing to ask Burund to open another compartment to scour, he pulled out a book with moss-green binding. Flipping through yielded no language Jasen understood. But it did reward him with pictures of plants, very detailed and marked with many arrows and scrawls.

  He thought of Aunt Margaut.

  Alixa appeared to do the same. He caught her looking at it, a wistful, melancholy look on her face. When their gazes met, she smiled wanly and turned away, sifting through pages.

  “You may sit a while and read,” said Burund, “if you would like to.”

  Jasen nodded. Better this than sit outside and being bored.

  He pulled up a seat, as did Alixa. She began to read. He flipped through idly.

  Burund tapped his fingers together behind his desk.

  It was quiet, but not in an uncomfortable way. Yes, it was somewhat strange, sitting in the shipmaster’s office … but it was a companionable sort of quiet.

  Without understandable text to read, though, Jasen grew bored … and Burund noticed. So he began making conversation, asking about Jasen’s village, the people, the scourge … Alixa’s ears pricked and she listened, book forgotten and no pages turned for a long time.

  Jasen tried not to answer too sadly.

  It was difficult.

  Eventually, when that line of questioning had ended, and the silence had fallen again, Jasen asked,

  “Why’d you bring us in here?”

  Burund’s mouth crooked up at one corner. “You have time to kill.”They whiled away the afternoon like that, sometimes in conversation—about the world around them, Burund’s travels, the things in his office. As the sun dipped low, though, Kuura came to summon him, and Jasen and Alixa had to leave.

  “Keep the books,” Burund told them. “As they have enlightened me, so too may they enlighten you.”

  And the waiting resumed.

  The evening’s meal passed. Kuura did not return. Medleigh showed his face once, passing through the mess hall and taking a handful of biltong and hardtack. He shoved it all into his mouth, swept the room with a look, then passed through. Not that he’d have been able to provide any information to Jasen if he did stay.

  He and Alixa sat in their cabin for a time. She lost herself in the pages of her book, eyes devouring the words. Jasen tried with his own, but it was harder: written in another tongue, he could only study the pencil drawings of herbs and plant life scattered within. Another day, they’d have fascinated him. Today, none would hold his interest for long before he cast a look back through the porthole.

  The sun dipped.

  “Maybe he’s out now,” said Jasen.

  Alixa blinked. Her eyes tracked to the end of a paragraph. Then she looked up, gaze flickering as if coming out of a dream. “Longwell?”

  “Yeah,” said Jasen. “He must be.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Want to look?”

  “Please.”

  Alixa studied the double page she was open to. Without a mark of any kind, and unwilling to fold down a corner, she recorded her place visually before shutting
it, and led Jasen and Scourgey out into the deck of the Lady Vizola.

  The ship was still busy at this time, and would be for hours to come yet. A few sailors met their eyes; to these, Jasen gave low smiles. A handful were returned. Most sneered—Hamisi included, who was coming down the tight stairs just as Jasen, Alixa and Scourgey were climbing up. He looked like he might bite off something nasty in his native tongue, but then caught sight of Scourgey rounding onto the landing, and bustled past with a frown.

  Jasen wouldn’t try smiling at him again.

  Onto the top deck they went—

  There, standing at the Lady Vizola’s portside, a few feet from the edge, was Samwen Longwell. Dressed once more in his armor, he clutched the three-pronged lance that had been slung across his back when they’d dragged him from the sea. Color had returned to his complexion.

  Against the banded orange of the setting sun, he looked magnificent—nothing like the guards in Terreas, who protected from scourge but had no duty other than watching what stalked beyond the boundary.

  No, this man was a warrior, born and true.

  “Hello,” Jasen said on approach.

  Longwell did not turn around. “Hello,” he said back.

  Without Kuura or Medleigh to stop him, Jasen dove in:

  “Baraghosa,” he said. “You said his name yesterday.”

  Jasen saw one eye twitch. “What of him?”

  “How do you know him?”

  Longwell adjusted his hold on the lance. He was not just gripping it, but leaning on it, just slightly. He shifted uncomfortably, then leaned on it again.

  “He destroyed my ship.” Longwell’s words were tight. “The storm,” he said, glancing backward at Jasen and Alixa, “it was his doing.”

  The storm—that abominable force that had threatened to tear the Lady Vizola apart with its howling winds and fearsome waves. Its brutality might have been natural, but those vibrant, glowing bolts of lightning that had struck the sea’s roiling surface, whipping up new waves—those were not.

  Of course, Jasen thought. A man with the power to cleave a mountain in two—he could easily whip the ocean and sky into a frenzy.

  It brought a new string of questions, ones this Longwell could not possibly answer. Had Baraghosa followed Jasen? A curse was laid on Terreas—but two of Terreas’s people had escaped.

  Perhaps the storm had been meant to snuff out the last of them.

  “How do you know Baraghosa?” Jasen asked.

  Longwell turned to him with a shake of the head. “It is my turn. Where in Luukessia do you hail from?”

  “Terreas,” Alixa answered. “It’s not there anymore.”

  Longwell frowned, that intense look coming across his face again. “How can that be so? Luukessia was overrun by scourge decades ago. How is it your village …” He trailed off.

  “We don’t know either,” said Alixa.

  “There was a boundary around Terreas the scourge wouldn’t cross,” Jasen explained.

  “A boundary?”

  “A wall.”

  “But the scourge wouldn’t cross it before the wall was there,” said Alixa. “The wall was built after—to mark it for the village.”

  Longwell shook his head again. He eyed Scourgey a long moment, lapsing into silent thought.

  “We didn’t know why it kept the scourge away,” said Jasen. “Nor did we question it.”

  “No,” Longwell ceded, “I don’t suppose you did. Probably just grateful the bastards didn’t come roaring through and devour you all…as they did the rest of the land.”

  “It’s gone now, in any case,” said Alixa sadly. At Longwell’s raised eyebrow, she said, “The mountain tore open and buried the village in lava. We’re all that’s left.” She took a shuddery breath, pushed her shoulders back—fighting to remain stoic. Jasen recognized it now; she’d done it plenty these past days, more than anyone should have to.

  “We,” she said sadly, “are the last of our kind.”

  “Hardly,” Longwell said. “The Emerald Fields, in Arkaria, are filled with Luukessians.” There was a pause, as though all the air were sucked out of the room. “It is the place where countless of those folk fled when the scourge came, over the endless bridge to Arkaria. They live there now, some hundred thousand and more – a last, growing refuge of the people of that fallen land.”

  Jasen’s breath caught.

  “What?”

  Alixa’s reaction was less muted. “Excuse me?” she exploded. Before Longwell could answer, she turned to Jasen, and grabbed him fiercely by the shoulders. “We have to go there. Wherever it is—a whole world away, even two—we have to go to the Emerald Fields, Jasen. We have to be with our brethren.”

  “But—”

  “You could take us,” she said to Longwell, “couldn’t you?”

  Barely before he had inclined his chin, she was on Jasen again. “We can go! The Emerald Fields—we have to go there! We can rebuild! We can carry on the line our ancestors started for us!”

  “But …”

  “The Luukessians are not dead!” Alixa cried. She released him then, throwing her hands to the sky. Then she danced in a circle, hooting to the heavens, more animated than Jasen had seen her—ever. Round and round she went, crying out: “The Syloreans still live! We are not the last of them! We are not the last of them!”

  Longwell watched with a faint trace of amusement.

  Jasen felt like his gut had been torn out of him.

  He swallowed hard.

  “Alixa.”

  She heard, answering with but a look as she spun around madly, like a top.

  Jasen said, “We can’t go.”

  Now she stopped with a jolt. “What?”

  “Alixa, I …”

  “What?” she prompted again, when he did not continue.

  How to say it? How to break apart all that he had been feeling? How to show Alixa this—this guilt upon him?

  “I have to find Baraghosa,” he said.

  “No—” she started.

  “I do,” he cut across. “I have to. He did this to us—the mountain, and the storm. He has to pay for that.”

  Alixa shook her head, kept shaking it. “Jasen, no. You can’t.”

  “Terreas is dead because of him. We can’t let him get away with that.” His jaw settled into a tight line. “I can’t let him.”

  “No—”

  “He killed our families, Alixa,” Jasen said. He needed to make her see this, make her see just how momentously important this was.

  But she just looked hurt—and suddenly very far away.

  She shook her head once more. “I will not be part of it.”

  Impasse.

  Tense quiet.

  Alixa recovered herself. To Longwell, she said, “Will you take me to the Emerald Fields?”

  He nodded slowly, glancing warily between the cousins. “I will. Both of you, if you wish it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But it will not be until this is over.”

  “Until what is over?”

  “I too have business with Baraghosa,” said Longwell.

  Jasen felt his heart swell—saw Alixa’s expression fall.

  “Baraghosa destroyed my ship,” Longwell said.

  His face hardened with determination.

  Looking out to sea again, rippled with orange-red light from the setting sun, he said, “And this account must be settled—now.”

  “Where can we find him?” Jasen asked.

  “He may be anywhere,” said Longwell. “He is a flighty warlock. Rumors have come to me of him in many places, going about his business, always followed by strange lights that danced in the sky above him.”

  “Business?” Jasen wanted to ask—but Longwell had carried on without pause.

  “One rumor, though,” he said, and here he slowed, twisting back slightly to regard Jasen, “places him where the shipmaster sails us to as we speak.”

  Jasen’s eyes widened. “Aiger Cliffs?”

/>   Longwell nodded. “The very same.”

  9

  The port of Aiger Cliffs jutted out from the main city, which was nestled in a great shadow from the surrounding rock crests. The sun was peeking around them now as it moved across the sky, bathing the port and some of the beaches in yellow light. The farther reaches, though, would likely never receive a drop of sunlight.

  The cliffs themselves … those were what took Jasen’s breath away. They were grand, enormous things, dwarfing the buildings laid out at their feet. Jutting skyward hundreds, maybe thousands, of feet, they rose in jags, twisting and turning upon themselves. Bare rock shimmered where the sun caught it. A scaffolding had been thrown up against part of the cliff, mere pencil lines against the vast rock face. Jasen squinted to make out the levels, and thought he could count at least eight, with more hidden by the buildings rising ahead of it. Any movement upon it was impossible to discern from this far.

  Above the city, where the cliffs leveled out, towers of rock rose in jagged spires and arches, a mountain range in miniature that, except for the passages Jasen could see where erosion had carved holes open, walled the Aiger Cliffs off from the rest of the continent. Twisting paths were etched up them.

  Jasen watched out of the porthole in their cabin, crouched beside Alixa. Both had on their old clothes. Dirty still but dry, Jasen appreciated them immensely: finally something that fit.

  Alixa had one hand on Scourgey. For the past half-hour of their approach, she’d fallen into silence.

  Jasen broke it. “When do you think we can go out on deck?”

  Alixa just shook her head. For now, nods and shakes were what passed for answers.

  Jasen and Alixa had been shooed away early this morning as the Lady Vizola made her final approach to the Aiger Cliffs. Many hands were on deck, following swift orders from Burund. What they spoke of, Jasen did not know. Only some of them worked the sails to direct their course toward the port, and the waning shadow overlaying the nestled city; the rest were back and forth like ants, doing who knew what.

  Either way, Jasen and Alixa (and faithful Scourgey) had only clogged the deck and gotten in people’s way. A kinder Kuura than two days past suggested they retire to their cabins until the ship was moored. “Unless yeh want to be trampled.” Another massive belly laugh.