The Learning - David Guymer Page 3

  Sithilien swept up her spear to rally her schooling battalion.

  She did not need to say anything. When the phalanxes raided the shores that bordered their oceans for mortal souls, all knew why. When the akhelion mustered their battalions to bring home a great beast, all knew why.

  Ubraich turned to his apprentices and his own small band of stern-looking thralls. Irimé was eager, her face made crooked by a fierce smile. Flowain and Valhanir looked trepidatious, but excited. All three were dressed for the open ocean. Finned leather boots for distance swimming. Lightweight kelp jackets stuffed with pockets and with shells sewn in for added protection. Valhanir had his arm draped over a pack beast. The sea snail was the first in a train of six, their spiralling shells festooned with netting that held provisions: rune-stones for heating, healing and meditation; ropes; chains; herbs; more nets and spare weapons for the namarti. The three isharann all carried their pain-staves.

  They required no words either.

  Ubraich turned back from them, letting his soul-sight drift out of focus over the mountain of cultivated reefs.

  It was his first return to Túrach that he could recall. He was not sure what he was hoping to see there. Or who. Only namarti dwelled in Túrach. The one in one hundred of pure soul would be in the palaces and castles of the great coral-spires, or in the blessed seclusion of the túrscoll. He clutched his pain-stave and drew a steadying breath. Already his leg was beginning to ache, just from treading water. He wondered if he had chosen unwisely in leaving his calroir behind. It was pride that had made him insist that he could swim, for it was a long journey ahead of them and he would not force an entire battalion to the clam’s pace.

  An isharann tidecaster that Ubraich did not recognise swam through the flitting namarti. She was tall and glitteringly austere, cloaked in white, garlanded in lapis shell and aquamarine. As she descended to join Sithilien, clad almost entirely in asglir silver and mounted on her gulchmare, she raised her pelagic staff to test the prevailing currents through the tidegate and declared them favourable. Eager cheers ran through the watching workers and then, like the tide, the isharann withdrew.

  Sithilien gave the command.

  The hunt rode out from Túrach.

  III

  The open ocean was no place for the idoneth.

  Though they claimed everything bound within or touched by it, they ruled little beyond the meagre confines of their enclaves. When the phalanxes raided land they voyaged through the aethersea, cast far by the isharann magic of the tidecasters and soulscryers. On those rare instances when the wish or need was there to journey to another enclave or answer the call of assembral, then they travelled through the whirlways, the network of realmgates that confluenced in the Gaelus Ocean in Hyish, the mythical birthplace of the cythai.

  There were five idoneth enclaves in the Green Gulch of Ghyran, all descended from the original Ionrach colonisation. Elgaen, the White City, whose nacreous towers had earned it a reputation for austere beauty and unearthly splendour. Dwy-Hor, with its verdant underwater forests, where sylvaneth might occasionally be spied beneath wave-dappled sunlight. Guethen, renowned for the barrenness of its stone and the hardiness of its warriors. And Túrach of course, the City of Spines, once pre-eminent, before the rise of Briomdar and its isharann queen. They were motes of civilising influence, scattered across a black and crushing void. In the ocean, there was no light. No ishratisar art defined its walls and edifices. No chorralus builders existed to order its beauty. The pulse of life choked the ocean’s surface with algal mats the size of continents, but the deep places remained forever hostile. It was another symptom of the unformed magic that resided there. Physically, the oceans belonged to Ghyran still, but in reality…

  Guided only by the meandering soul-lines of the namarti marching columns, Ubraich made it a point of ritual to pause, breathe deeply and imbibe of the crushing emptiness that abounded him. The desolation was absolute, primal; it was almost spiritual.

  They lost six namarti to the first tide. Eight the next. Then eighteen, one of Ubraich’s own hunters included. Sithilien grew increasingly embittered and wary as the toll steepened, but Ubraich had known that the distance between the Túrach tidegate and the emptiness to which they were destined would come at a cost. He tried to explain, but the akhelion had been borne only to land, on the aetherwaves of the tidecasters, and could not comprehend. A thousand miles of forsaken water separated Túrach from Dwy-Hor, naught but ancient beasts and dreamless magic to fill it.

  The mood amongst the namarti was more than usually bleak as they made camp on the turning of the fourth tide. Huge fishscale awnings were unfurled, providing shelter from the icy currents and some degree of camouflage for the namarti to huddle beneath from the occasional prowling predator. Ubraich bade his namarti to release bushels of sentinel fish into the ocean. They swirled around the forsaken camp, each of them broken and bound to Ubraich’s soul and hesitant to be parted from it. They would be easy enough to recapture when the tide turned again and would emit an intense emerald light when threatened; a natural defence mechanism, and useful forewarning in the event of an attack.

  At Ubraich’s insistence, the entire business was conducted in silence.

  Tracking a beast through open ocean was no simple task. There were no broken twigs or footprints to follow, no abandoned kills or droppings to signpost a trail. They had only their ears, their noses and, if they were possessed of the power and knew what to search for, their soul-sense.

  Once Ubraich was satisfied, and Sithilien had murmured her assent, the embailors made off from the newly struck camp to divine for the trail of the beast.

  Valhanir struck two stones together. Light burst from them. Ubraich grunted. Only the namarti hunters that accompanied them, physically lacking eyes, gave no reaction at all. Ubraich blinked as the light burst faded to tolerable levels. Rocky hills and mesas bulged from the ocean floor, barren even of the simplest vegetation.

  ‘There is nothing here,’ said Irimé.

  ‘Do you not sense that?’ said Ubraich.

  ‘I do, teacher,’ said Flowain.

  Irimé screwed up her face as she sought to force her senses further.

  ‘There is another soul in the water,’ Valhanir murmured. ‘Is it our prey?’

  Ubraich shook his head. ‘It is not just one. Look again. Namarti!’

  The namarti hunters swam forwards, raising their whisperbows, arrows already nocked.

  ‘I see them!’ Irimé cried.

  Silver-bodied havaklir streamed from a cleft in the rock ahead of them like an eruption from a gaseous vent. The fish were scavengers, but only out of deference to the behemoths that ruled the ocean’s brutal food chains. Each was twenty feet long and three high, but so preposterously thin that to face one head on was like looking down the length of blade, all cruel serrations and silvered lines. Grimacing in concentration, Ubraich drove a wave of power into the shoal, scattering the flotsam of their tiny thoughts and breaking the school into a confusion of individual minds. Fish snapped at empty water, swimming furiously after the implanted suggestion of prey.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ he said.

  There was a twang of vibration as the namarti hunters loosed arrows into the convulsing shoal, and Irimé needed no further encouragement.

  Her pain-stave crushed into a flat body. The creature locked stiff, its tail muscles and fins frozen in agony. It cartwheeled stiffly, head over tail, as Irimé spun gracefully in the water and hammered the length of her staff into its side. The pain-stave was not designed to be a lethal implement, but swung with enough force it was as effective as any mace or cudgel. Blood puffed from cracked scales and clotted gills as it spun back from her.

  Ubraich hefted his pain-stave. Irimé had focused the predators’ minds. The scattered elements of the school were shaking off Ubraich’s spell of suggestion, looping back around and swimming ferociously towards the taste of blood in the water and the wriggling of live prey. One went at Irimé like a thrusting sword. Ubraich reached out for it and made a tugging gesture. It was a simple creature with only the dimmest awareness of self. Its soul was but weakly tethered, and Ubraich’s spell wrenched it from its body to dissolve into the ocean. The havaklir’s mouth and eyes opened wide, a dead thing now in a living body.

  The rest of the school swirled about him. A namarti’s bow stave was bitten in half. Another lost her head to a single bite, her body disintegrating as more havaklir converged over her corpse. Ubraich lashed at them with his pain-stave. The school bruised with purples and blues as pain wracked their souls. Agony of his own flared up in his mutilated leg. He welcomed it. It fed him with more, and worse, to inflict upon his prey. A scream pealed through the seething maelstrom and Ubraich risked a look back to see Flowain breaking from the melee, swimming for the open ocean in panic. He summoned one of his surviving hunters.

  ‘Bring her back here.’

  ‘Master.’ The namarti bowed.

  ‘Defend me, Valhanir.’

  Freed of the need to concentrate on defence, Ubraich drove another harrowing pulse through the havaklir’s minds. This time, the school had suffered enough that it broke up completely under his power, individual shards of silver scattering into the ocean.

  Ubraich slumped, slapping away Valhanir’s helping hand.

  ‘Gather the corpses,’ he panted. ‘Sithilien and her battalion will eat well this tide if nothing else.’

  ‘I have never seen havaklir in such numbers,’ Valhanir murmured.

  ‘Teacher,’ Irimé called, before Ubraich could reply.

  The isharann was, as she always conspired to be, some distance ahead. Sh
e lay on her stomach above the cleft from which the havaklir school had emerged, her upper body swarmed by obsidian-dark hair. Wearily, Ubraich swam to join her. The others followed.

  A monstrous striped fish, big enough to glut even a havaklir swarm to satiation, lay in the lee of the rocks, partially buried under grit and sand. It was a sunken head and a scrap of tail, held together by about eighty feet of crushed bone.

  ‘That is why,’ said Irimé. ‘They were defending their kill.’

  ‘The havaklir did not kill this.’

  Ubraich hovered his hands over the fish’s remains and channelled his beast magic. The various bite marks upon its body suddenly inflamed. Valhanir gasped as the oval-shaped indents flared up silvery white.

  ‘Namarti. A knife.’

  The hunter behind him wordlessly presented his blade by the handle. With an equal absence of ceremony, Ubraich took it and carved a fillet from the tail.

  ‘What is it?’ Irimé breasted lower to see for herself.

  ‘A bite.’

  Holding up the fillet to her, Ubraich traced the strange, undulating crescent shape with his blade.

  ‘From what?’ said Irimé.

  Ubraich smiled, but before he could answer her, the namarti he had dispatched from the battle returned with Flowain struggling in his strong grip. Ubraich sighed. He noted Valhanir, and even Irimé, were no longer looking.

  ‘Bring her to me.’

  ‘Please, teacher,’ said Flowain, as the thrall obeyed. ‘Forgive me.’

  ‘Shush.’ Ubraich pressed the flat edge of the namarti knife to the girl’s cheek. She whimpered, tried to turn her head away, but the namarti that held her knew his master well and caught her head in an arm lock. One eye stared upwards, the other buried in pectoral muscle. ‘I will not have a student of mine show such fear in her eyes. Not with Princess Sithilien here.’

  ‘It will not happen again, teacher.’

  ‘No, it will not.’

  Ubraich withdrew the knife and then, serpent swift, plunged it into Flowain’s eye. She screamed, convulsing in the namarti’s rigid lock, as Ubraich wrenched the knife out, her face spewing blood and tears and compressed ropes of jelly-like fluids.

  ‘Pain is what Teclis gave to us that we might learn, and find our way back to his light.’

  He returned the knife. ‘Go and rouse Sithilien,’ he told the namarti, ignoring his apprentice’s increasingly inchoate screams. She would thank him one day. ‘Tell her that we take the beast tonight.’

  IV

  The bite mark was better than a footprint in the ground. It was a compass that pointed neither north nor south, nor to the wild energies that coursed around the realm’s edge. It pointed to the soul of a single beast. When they strayed from true, a tremor in the chewed fillet in Ubraich’s hand guided them back. Valhanir broke another light stone. The barren cliffs of mountains rose and rose beyond the edge of the light. Irimé ranged ahead with the remaining namarti, forcing them all to swim a little harder to match her impatience. But even with Teclis’ own will behind him, Ubraich would never be as swift in the water as he had been before the gulchmare, and Sithilien caught up to them just as the tide was beginning to turn.

  The akhelion princess came mounted on her gulchmare, pennons streaming from her voltspear and mingling with the silver-white cloud of her hair. Ubraich’s hunter returned with her, along with an entourage of greatsword-wielding thralls and bow-armed reavers twenty-strong. Between them and Ubraich’s túrscoll hunters, they numbered twenty-five.

  He hoped that there would be enough bodies to distract the beast’s attention while he broke its mind.

  This, he reminded himself, was merely the hunt. Most embailors would agree that it was the easy part. Giléan had captured Sithilien’s gulchmare easily enough, but it had taken him thirty years to finally break its will. That long and dangerous process would come later. It would need to be stabled, acclimatised. It would need to surrender its eyes. And as soon as an akhelion with the courage to make the attempt was found, then it could begin.

  Ubraich looked forward to it with relish. He regarded the ruined soul that moved underneath Sithilien’s saddle with pride. The gulchmare had been a wild and tempestuous beast. Now there was not enough independent spirit left to twitch without Sithilien’s implicit command. It was a mutilated once-animal spirit in a mighty body, all but its basest instincts muzzled by fear and the memory of pain.

  ‘I see something ahead,’ said Sithilien.

  Immediately on her arrival, she had taken charge, and despite her age she had an aelf’s eyes, her vision honed by decades spent hounding smaller prey. Her gulchmare pulled her to the front of the group as she spoke. It had a scent. An animal’s sense for the presence of a mightier beast than itself in its waters. It was agitated. To Ubraich’s wonder it was even demonstrating enough free will to resist Sithilien’s reins. She pulled angrily, opening up the old wounds where Giléan had hooked the original harness into the gulchmare’s flesh. The beast emitted a near-constant whinnying vibration that ground through Ubraich’s teeth and set all of the younger isharann on edge. Irimé gave the monster a sideways look, fondling her pain-stave thoughtfully, before Sithilien caught her eye and withered her temper with a glare.

  Ubraich was impressed.

  ‘What do you see?’ Ubraich asked her.

  ‘The mountain we passed earlier is part of a range that cuts across the Green Gulch,’ said Sithilien. ‘I have heard of it, though I do not think any aelf has ever seen it with their own eyes. We come now to its foothills. I see a cave ahead.’

  ‘I see it too,’ said Flowain quickly, eager to please.

  Ubraich patted her shoulder and she flinched.

  ‘Do we wait it out?’ asked Valhanir. ‘Or do we lure it to us?’

  ‘Allow me to go inside, teacher,’ said Irimé.

  ‘No, I will go!’ said Flowain.

  ‘Neither of you will go,’ said Ubraich.

  ‘No indeed,’ said Sithilien, rising contemptuously in her ornate saddle. ‘Foolish girl. You are isharann. Do you think I bed myself to half of Túrach to sire endless namarti brats so that a pure soul can bait herself for a beast? You do? Then let me help you, girl. I can gut you here and cast your entrails into the pit that the beast might follow them to us.’ The gulchmare dropped its lower jaw, displaying a hideous grin of emerald-coloured teeth.

  Irimé swam hastily back. Ubraich covered his smirk with his hand.

  ‘No, girl.’ Sithilien lowered her spear, then regally raised a hand. With a wave of the fore and middle fingers, she summoned a lanmari-armed thrall. ‘See what is in there,’ she ordered.

  Ubraich muttered a few phrases over his beastmark, then passed it to the namarti before he swam off towards the cave.

  They fell to silence as the warrior vanished into the opening.

  ‘What did you say over that skin you gave him?’ Sithilien asked softly.

  ‘It has a power entirely separate from mine. The words I spoke merely awakened that power. It will draw the beast to its mark, as it drew us to the beast.’

  Sithilien smiled to herself.

  ‘I knew you were as good as Giléan, Ubraich. Nothing pleases me like being right.’

  Waves of ink-black water erupted from the cave mouth before Ubraich could answer. The namarti thrall flailed helplessly against the sudden torrent, tossed around like a gloomtide wreck caught up in waves of denser, darker water. Ubraich felt something rising. He made a pained sound and bent suddenly, pressing his hand to his forehead. It was titanic. Ancient. The idoneth could be pitiless and uncaring, often mistaken as cruel, but the depth of malevolence he felt from this creature was enough to make him bare his teeth and grip his pain-stave until his knuckles whitened. Flowain howled like a frustrated predator, shortly followed by Irimé and Valhanir, as the monster surged from its lair.

  Some way distant, it still managed to be huge, rippled and distorted by squalling water, but not to Ubraich’s soul-sight. The basic body plan of a deepmare was there; the long horn that jutted from the middle of its forehead, the clawed forelimbs, the triplet of tails, but altered by the centuries and the ancient magic of its environment into something scarcely recognisable.