Ch 28: Interlude (nth)

Finally this novel starts to wind down to its conclusion.  There remains a massive amount of winding down to do, including, oh, the arrival of the army to clean up; reconciling the Mir-Zekh to the loss of their “god”; a formal complaint to the Ammrrfft ambassador; the appearance of Lin in person, maybe?  And some hints perhaps that Mán-Shrin and company aren’t really gone for good…?

Oh, and maybe the mad stripteasing prince will have another attack of insanity and propose to Magdalena.

How I look forward to finishing this first draft and bulldozing my way into the first edit.

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Chapter 28: Interlude (nth)

After a while, Magdalena noticed that someone was shaking her.  Then she noticed that she was sprawled sideways on the ground, and there were a lot of rocks poking into her.

With some difficulty, she rolled over and sat up, sneezing several times as the movement raised a cloud of dust.  It was so dark and quiet that for a moment she was disoriented, trying to figure out where she was.  Then her eyes slowly adjusted and she made out two blurry shapes bending over her.  The starlight was a lot dimmer than she remembered, and she thought it might be the dust—plenty of it had settled on her as she ran through the temple, and from the look of the two figures on either side of her, Perillus and Kelliran had gotten a pretty good coating too.

Perillus leaned forward and said something.  His mouth moved, but Magdalena couldn’t hear a word. “What?” she said, and realized she couldn’t hear herself either.  The explosion had left her temporarily deaf.

He shrugged, took her arm and helped her up, then pointed towards the village.  Magdalena shook her head and pointed back up the trail.  She wanted to see what was left, if anything.

Perillus shrugged again, dropped her arm and started for the village at a half-run.  He moved as swiftly and steadily as if he hadn’t just run out of a collapsing temple at top speed, then been tossed around by an explosion that had thrown up a ten-mile-high column of light and made the entire area shake.  Magdalena stared after him, unaccountably irritated, then headed back up the trail without looking to see if Kelliran was following.

It was a lot harder to get back to the temple than she had thought.  The explosion and the shaking of the ground had broken the trail up and set off rockslides on the surrounding slopes.  Magdalena jumped, scrambled and slid over rubble, trying not to think of what would happen if another slide came down on top of her.  Dust hung thickly in the air, making the going even more treacherous.  By the time she reached the final bend, she was winded and aching, and wishing she had headed to the village with Perillus.

What she saw when she scrambled around the turn, however, drove all thoughts of physical discomfort out of her mind.

There was nothing where the temple had been—there was nothing where the hill had been.  The pall of dust swirled above an enormous pit in the ground, large enough to have swallowed up the entire village.  Its edges were still crumbling away, rubble cascading into the depths with long rattling crashes that Magdalena felt rather than heard.

She stood there, not daring to venture any further in case more ground fell away, and stared blankly at the pit for several minutes.  In her entire career with the Sky Battalion, in her entire life, she had never seen or heard of anything to prepare her for destruction on a scale like this.  While she was aware that the old continents had technology capable of levelling cities, and that Ammrrfft certainly had sorcerers powerful enough to do the same, knowing it was different from having the results right at her feet.

Finally she turned and found Kelliran balancing on a pile of rubble a short distance away, staring at the pit with much the same appalled expression she herself had worn.  Magdalena picked her way over to him, tapped his shoulder and, when he turned, she pointed back down the trail.  He followed her wordlessly, still looking stunned.

Getting back down to the village took even longer, and when they finally got there, it was to a scene of devastation nearly as bad as the pit where the temple had been.  From a distance, even with the dust in the air obscuring vision, the ruin of the walls was visible; and close up, every building in the village had either collapsed or was going to.  Magdalena stared at the piles of broken stone and wood that had been cottages, houses and barns, and silently thanked the ancestors that all the villagers had been out in the square rather than in their homes.

They were still there, and so was Perillus.  He had organized them enough to start a fire in the middle of the square, around which most of them huddled, staring about at the ruin of their homes with varying expressions of shock and disbelief.

Magdalena picked her way through the crowd to him, noticing that her hearing was coming back enough to make out speech, although everything still sounded muffled. “There’s nothing up there but a hole in the ground,” she said when they were within speaking distance. “The temple’s gone.  What in the name of the ancestors happened?”

Perillus stared down at the butterfly mask tucked under his arm.  Dust clung to it but did not obscure the gleam of the metal, or the intense green of the emeralds forming its eyes. “Sekhera-Ka took exception to our friend from Ammrrfft,” he said finally. “I saw it happen once before, when one of those clever sorcerers disguised himself as a priest and sneaked into the shrine.  The whole temple shook—and there wasn’t much left to bury later.”

“Shook? The whole gods-cursed hill is gone!  And what was that light?”

“I didn’t know it would be so violent.” Perillus looked and sounded utterly unmoved, but something about the way he spoke told Magdalena that the explosion had left him nearly as shaken as her. “Perhaps the thing on his left arm had something to do with it—not that it matters.  I don’t think we’ll even need to bury him.”

Magdalena thought of the column of white light, and the huge pit in the ground. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t think we’ll need to.”

There was not much conversation for the rest of the night, perhaps because everyone was still half deaf from the explosion.  People wandered around dazedly or sat about the square, clutching the hands of their loved ones.  A few had pulled themselves together enough to pick through the rubble by torchlight, salvaging what they could.

Magdalena paced around the edge of the firelight, staring into the darkness and fretting about whether the kagobeasts would come back.  Kelliran trailed after her, which was yet another source of worry.  He’d stayed well away from Perillus and said absolutely nothing about the Mir-Zekh being evil cultists, which could mean that he’d finally shaken off his delusions; or it could mean he was up to something worse.

Finally Perillus came over to her and said quietly, “Go and rest.  Nothing’s going to sneak up on us—and even if it did, you don’t have a sword.”

“I know,” Magdalena snapped, but she took his advice anyway and found a place to sit down, far enough from the fire that the light wouldn’t interfere with her night vision.

Kelliran followed her and hovered nearby, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot.

“What do you want?” she said after a few minutes.

Silence.  Then he said in a very low voice, “I’ve been very stupid, haven’t I?”

“You have,” Magdalena said mercilessly.

“Mán-Shrin did something to my head,” Kelliran mumbled, staring at his feet. “I really believed what he said about all those people being demons.”

“It’s a good thing Harkzin stopped you from killing them, isn’t it?” Magdalena said with no trace of sympathy in her voice.

Kelliran shuffled his feet and tried to shrink a little. “I shouldn’t have drawn on you either,” he mumbled.

“Fine words to say, after the fact.”

“I’m sorry,” Kelliran was almost whining.  He had plenty of reason to, Magdalena thought.  If she brought the matter up to the King or even to Sky Commander, Kelliran would very likely be stripped of his shield and banned from royal service for the rest of his life.

She studied him for a moment, and relented. “Get some sleep.  You look like something the cat dragged in.”

Kelliran moved a short distance away, and several scraping and rustling sounds followed as he tried to find somewhere to settle down. “Maggie?” he said, his voice very subdued.

“What?”

“I promise I won’t let it happen the next time.”

“The next time?” Magdalena stared over at him. “There’s not going to be a next time if I can help it!”

Silence, which dragged on for quite a long time.  Then, unexpectedly, a snore.

Magdalena smiled in the darkness, more from relief than anything else.  They’d made it despite everything—gods, sorcerers, monsters, explosions, earthquakes and collapsing buildings.  And no matter how stupidly Kelliran had been acting for a while back there, he was alive and in his right mind now.  Which was, she thought, the important thing.

Ch 27 (ii) REDUX

I decided that the underground river was not a good choice.  It left my MCs too far away from the action and stranded.  This is more fun, and it’s a great way of (1) getting rid of Silver Christopher (2) causing general mayhem and destruction (3) underscoring that people should not meddle with temples, especially temples that have a god inside.  Or what passes for a god.

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Magdalena was not entirely sure what happened immediately after that.  She remembered diving out of the chamber after the clerk, and something pushing her from behind, as if a huge invisible hand had scooped her up and thrust her forward.  Then, with no transition at all, she was crashing into the wall at the turn, so hard that stars crossed her vision and all the breath exploded out of her body.

Before she could even stagger in reaction, a cold and very strong hand seized her arm and yanked her headlong up the passage.  Her vision was one big purple blur from the explosion, but she could feel the rock heaving underfoot and hear the grinding, cracking sounds coming from the walls.  Remembering the long sloping distance they had come down, Magdalena ran as hard as she could, her free hand thrust blindly out to ward off the walls of the narrow passage.  Rock scraped her arm and took the skin off her fingers, and the crashing and grinding wasn’t getting any further away—it was following them up the passage, as though the destruction were spreading from the tomb chamber and upwards to the temple.  She thought of all that weight of rock above them, the whole hill, and the back of her head and neck prickled in desperate anticipation of thousands of tons of rock coming down on her.

Unexpectedly, the surface underfoot evened out to the smoothness of dressed stone, and light winked ahead—normal, orange torchlight.  Magdalena blinked frantically and made out the shape of the archway leading back to the great hall, with the statue of Sekhera-Ka silhouetted in its middle—no, the statue of Sekhera-Ka’s corpse!  Of all the grotesqueries, she thought irrelevantly, that the Mir-Zekh had chosen to worship some kind of mummified corpse as a god and even carved a stone representation of it!

They burst out of the archway, Perillus half carrying Karana in one arm and pulling Magdalena along with his other hand, and the shaking and crashing followed them.  In the glow of the torches, dust was billowing from the roof and walls.

Perillus made straight for the corridor leading out into the altar room and the gathering hall, but Magdalena pulled back, digging her heels into the shuddering floor and dragging on his arm with all her weight. “Stop, stop!” she screamed over the sound of grinding rock. “Kelliran’s still in the dungeon!”

Perillus skidded to a halt, spun around and shoved Karana into Magdalena’s arms.  Both women staggered as the floor abruptly heaved underfoot. “I’ll get him!” he shouted. “You two get out of here!”

And he dashed for the archway leading into the temple’s living area.

Magdalena hesitated.  She looked down at Karana—the girl was very pale and shaken, but looked unhurt. “Can you walk?” she demanded. “No, can you run?”

Karana nodded.

“Then go!  I’m going to help get Kelliran out.”

Karana fled down the corridor without argument.  Magdalena snatched one of the torches off the wall and plunged through the archway after Perillus, feeling her steps lurch as the floor shook again.

She caught up with him at the barred door leading down to the dungeons.  Despite the increasingly loud grinding of the rock, he heard her coming and yelled “I told you to get out of here!” without looking up.

“You’re going to need a hand with Kelliran,” Magdalena shouted back. “He thinks you’re a demon—he’s probably going to try and fight you once you let him out.”

“Then he’s stupider than I thought,” Perillus said, slamming the bar back and going through the door in one stride.  Magdalena ran after him, cringing as small chips of rock dislodged themselves from the ceiling and bounced off her head and shoulders.

“Kelliran!” she yelled, her voice echoing along the narrow corridor with its double row of heavily barred doors. “Where are you?”

“Maggie?” The muffled voice came from behind the second door to the left.

Magdalena ran to the door, found it locked and looked around in vain for keys.

“Amargan has the keys down in the village,” Perillus said, “unless he’s in a kagobeast’s stomach by now.”

“Then how are we going to—”

Without waiting for her to finish, Perillus turned to the side and kicked the door twice just above the lock.  The heavy wood splintered as if it were chipboard, and the door flew open with a crash that was lost in a sudden, ominous rumble from underfoot.

Kelliran shot out of the cell as if someone had kicked him in the bottom, staring around wildly. “What’s happening?” he demanded, his voice rising several octaves above its natural pitch. “Why is the floor—it’s him!”

That last as he saw Perillus and started to scramble back, groping at his side for a sword that wasn’t there.

“This isn’t the time for hysterics, knight!” Magdalena shouted. “Get moving!”

To her relief, Kelliran’s common sense won out over whatever hex Mán-Shrin had put on his mind.  He followed at her heels as they dashed back along the shaking, dust-filled corridors and out into the great hall, where the torchlight revealed cracks beginning to spread across the floor and walls.  The statue in the northern archway was rocking from side to side as the floor heaved, and between one shudder and the next, it fell over with a crash even louder than the grinding of rock.  The butterfly mask, dislodged from its head, spun across the floor with a screech of metal on stone and a trail of sparks

Perillus hesitated—then he sprinted across the hall, snatched the butterfly mask up and ran back to the altar room corridor, catching up with Magdalena and Kelliran in just a few strides.

The cracks kept pace with them as they fled through the altar room and the gathering hall, and when they burst out into the open air, the cracks followed; the entire hill was shaking, and so was the trail.

“Keep running!” Perillus shouted, his voice barely audible over the crashing and grinding from the temple.  Even as he spoke, the ground heaved, and then, horribly, dropped several inches underfoot.  Magdalena staggered, danced a few steps and managed not to fall over; Kelliran, caught mid-stride, sprawled flat.  Behind them, the temple’s façade was cracking apart, and when Magdalena turned to look over her shoulder, she saw that the entire hill seemed to have slid inwards on itself, as if it were collapsing into some enormous pit that had opened under it.

She didn’t wait for the rest of the collapse.  Reaching down, she grabbed one of Kelliran’s arms; Perillus got his other arm; and yanking him to his feet, they ran back down the trail.

The tremors had extended all the way to the village; which was probably why half a hundred kagobeasts were crouching around the village gate, flat to the ground, their ears plastered against their swinelike skulls and every black bristle on their bodies standing on end.

The kagobeasts were the first thing Magdalena saw when she rounded the final bend in the trail, slightly ahead of the other two.  The light over the village had disappeared, perhaps in the instant when Mán-Shrin touched Sekhera-Ka and the roof fell in.  But each of the monsters crouching around the gates glowed faintly silver, and all of them together produced enough light to illuminate the surroundings.

The second thing Magdalena saw was Silver Christopher, slightly translucent and fragmented at the edges, standing in the middle of the gateway arguing with one of Mán-Shrin’s sorcerous clerks.  After a moment she recognized the taller clerk, the one who had managed to keep his nerve just a little longer than his colleague.  He must have gotten out just ahead of them, she realized.

“I don’t know what it was!  It blew up when he touched it!” the clerk was yelling, his voice clearly audible all the way to the foot of the trail and edged with hysteria.

“I don’t care what it was!  Is he still in there?” Silver Christopher was just as loud as the clerk, but without the hysterical tone.

“I don’t know, I told you!  Everything was collapsing when I got out!”

“Useless human idiot!  Do I have to do everything myself?” Silver Christopher turned away from the clerk, leaving strange little contrails of mist in the air as he moved, and pointed towards the trail.  In response, the kagobeasts crouching around him began to rise and, very reluctantly, lumber in that direction.  Several of them did not move at all, remaining flat on the ground, and with a hiss of annoyance Silver Christopher swung his pointing arm down towards them.

The arm stretched and dissolved, becoming a long, coiling tendril of mist that touched the recalcitrant monsters and…drained them.  One moment they were large, bulky and alive; the next instant there was nothing but bone and hide, collapsing in on itself in a patch of brittle dead grass.

Magdalena looked around quickly.  There were only two ways to go—back up the shaking trail to the collapsing temple, or forward to meet Silver Christopher and the kagobeasts.  Neither option was appealing.

“Maggie—” Kelliran had caught up with her and was staring uncertainly at the approaching kagobeasts. “They’re on our side, aren’t they?”

“If they’re on our side, I’m defecting,” Magdalena said, and then staggered as the ground heaved under her. “What in the name of the ancestors?”

“I don’t think it’s finished collapsing yet,” Perillus said.  He was staring back up the trail, where a faint glow was coming from the direction of the hill. “Maybe we should take our chances with the kagobeasts.”

Magdalena did not hear his last words as much as she saw them, for that was when the glow brightened, took shape and thundered up towards the sky in a gigantic column of pure white light that blotted out the stars.  Sound evaporated into a single continuous roar; shapes became silhouetted line drawings.

An instant later, the ground heaved as if trying to follow the light skywards; rock and earth jerked up, tossing everything on its surface like grain being winnowed.  The surrounding slopes cracked and began to slide; the trail came apart, chunks of path scattering left and right.

At the foot of the trail, the kagobeasts screamed soundlessly, wheeled and fled, their claws tearing great gouges in the ground as they bounded away.  Silver Christopher made no move to stop them.  He was staring at the column of light with an expression of horror, and in the next heartbeat he started to dissolve—not the smooth dissipation Magdalena had seen before, but an erosion, his shape coming apart in tatters and shreds of mist that were swept away by the light.

Then, as if some great force had been spent, the light ended.  It did not wink out.  It reversed its direction and flowed back downwards with a sucking sensation that the ground mirrored, dropping with a jerk that once again flung up everything on its surface.  Magdalena was too stunned by then, blinded by the afterimage of the light and deafened by the explosion, to feel the second jerk; but she felt the ground shaking as trail, slopes, surrounding hills, everything in the vicinity came crashing back down into place.

The shaking went on for a long, long time before it stopped.  Then, thankfully, there was silence.

Ch 27 (ii)

Someone pointed out to me on the NaNoWriMo forums (yes, they’re still going!) that by posting the draft of this novel online and leaving it publicly available, I’m giving up first publication rights.  To that I say, screw publication rights.  I don’t particularly care about getting it published, because I’m quite disillusioned with the traditional business models of the creative industries, which include the publishing industry.  At any rate, none of the traditional publishers in Singapore have ever expressed interest in my fiction, and I don’t think I’d care if they did either.  Whoever wants to read this novel or any of my other work, can read it freely!

BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN YOU CAN PLAGIARIZE IT.  I’M WATCHING YOU…

To comment on this latest instalment: Perillus is a smartass!  Even if he’s a nice, polite, diplomatic one.

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Chapter 27: The Shrine of Sekhera-Ka (ii)

If Magdalena had been able to see through the darkness and the dust raised by the explosion, she would have seen Perillus throwing himself over Karana, shielding the girl from the falling rock, then twisting to break her fall as they hit the water.  And as the powerful current of the underground river swept the debris away, rock and fragile human bodies and all, she might have seen him cutting through the water to reach her, hampered by having to continue shielding Karana from the rocks sharing the current with them.

As it was, all she felt was a hand gripping her arm and pulling her against a tangle of two other bodies, then a sudden terrific impact as something—water-borne rock—struck them.  Magdalena gasped, breathed water, choked, forced herself to stop breathing either in or out, and felt another impact through the rushing of the current, then another, each one blocked by Perillus’s body.  He was taking blows that would have felled a knight in plate armour, and still shielding her and Karana, twisting this way and that to deflect the lethal masses flung at them by the water.

They’d survive, Magdalena thought, clinging desperately to him with her good hand and feeling something unseen scrape the skin off the backs of her fingers as the current swept it past.  Perillus wouldn’t let them get crushed.  They’d survive…if they didn’t drown.  Her chest and throat burned, her muscles started to knot up with the need for air.

The underground river tumbled them down, across, over, up, and up again, the water filled with the boom and grind of rocks crashing into each other and into the sides of the river’s tunnel.  And then, with no warning or preamble, it threw them out into the open air, high on a rocky hillside and down a wide channel that slowly narrowed and forked down into several streams.

Magdalena scarcely noticed the terrain, or the shallow slope of the bank under her.  She was coughing too hard, choking on the water that she had swallowed and trying to make her cramped and burning lungs unknot enough to take in air again.  She could taste blood in the back of her throat, although whether it was from coughing or some internal injury, she had no idea.  Every inch of her body felt as though she had been beaten with wooden mallets.

After several minutes of gasping, coughing and spewing water, she remembered Karana and lurched to her knees in a sudden panic.  If she had nearly drowned, what about the girl?

A burst of coughing and retching to the left, sounding almost identical to her own fit a moment ago, reassured her.  Magdalena turned and saw Karana curled on the bank a short distance away, her whole body jerking with the force of the coughs racking her.  Perillus knelt over the girl, steadying her head, and when her spasms finally stopped he gently sat her up against his arm. “Are you all right?” he said.

In the starlight, Karana’s expression was one of simple adoration.  She nodded, her eyes fixed on his face, and her hand crept up to clasp his.

Suddenly and irrationally, Magdalena experienced a surge of jealousy.  She’d nearly drowned too.

“What about you?” Perillus said, seeming to notice her scrutiny in the same instant.  The vivid green of his eyes scanned her up and down; his expression, as usual, gave nothing away.

“I’m fine,” Magdalena growled, the rawness of her throat rasping her voice to a crow-like croak. “What in the name of the ancestors happened?”

“The Goddess Sekhera-Ka took exception to our friend from Ammrrfft,” Perillus said.  He, of course, didn’t sound the least bit raw, ruffled or even out of breath. “I saw it happen once before, when one of those clever sorcerers disguised himself as a priest and sneaked into the shrine.  The whole temple shook—and there wasn’t much left to bury later.”

“You knew that was going to happen?”

“I didn’t know it would be so—violent.” Perillus looked and sounded utterly unmoved, but something about the way he spoke told Magdalena that he was nearly as shaken as her. “Perhaps the thing on his left arm had something to do with it—not that it matters.  I don’t think we’ll even need to bury him.”

“The whole gods-cursed hill fell in!” Magdalena could hear her voice rising.

“I’m sorry,” Perillus said, even managing to sound contrite. “I had no idea the two of you would be in so much danger.”

With an effort, Magdalena made herself breathe evenly. “Fine,” she rasped, pushing away the thought of how close an escape they had had. “We’re out here and Mán-Shrin’s back there under a hill’s worth of rock.  That still leaves Silver Christopher and two hundred kagobeasts in the village.”

“I know.”

Magdalena got her wobbling legs under her and heaved herself upright. “I’ve got a score to settle with that Silver Christopher,” she said. “Let’s get back to the village.  I’ll think of a plan on the way.”

“You’ll think of a plan?” Perillus was looking at her with one eyebrow raised.  Perhaps because his face was so habitually bland, the expression looked strangely artificial, calculated even.

“I damned well will!”

To her surprise, he simply nodded and rose, lifting Karana in his arms as if she weighed nothing. “This way,” he said, starting eastwards.

Magdalena limped after him, unaccountably irritated and not certain why.