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.
Where the men had gone he had no idea. Olmaat had been forced to suck in his agony, reach down within himself to still his shrieking body. Play dead while they made sure the enemy had killed their targets. They and Hithuur had left then. The cascarg and the blink-lives. The poison at the centre of faith.
Killed. That was the word they used. This was not a mere killing. This was destruction visited upon great elves. Inflicted with a hatred that defied understanding and using a power terrifying and incomprehensible. One that had left Olmaat with a lingering taste in his mouth he could not identify. More than that though, whatever it was the men had done, Olmaat had felt through his body.
Even when he had dived across Jarinn, trying to shield him, and been cast aside like a doll by the power of the fire column, he had felt a moment that he could only describe as elevating. Now the pain in every fibre made that a confusing memory.
Olmaat raised himself up on his blistered hands. His palms weren’t too awful but the backs were beginning to weep and blackened skin hung off in uneven strips. He gasped, the air over his mouth and down his throat like dragging flesh over broken glass.
What remained of the two bodies was melted together. Neither was recognisable. Parts of limbs had simply been obliterated. One skull had been crushed. No flesh whatever remained. No clothing and no distinguishing marks. It was like some bastard creation, immolated at birth. Something hideous and pitiful, one mouth open in final agony, praying for the end.
And at least that end had been swift. Olmaat prayed to Shorth to comfort the souls of both elves. He prayed to Tual to keep him alive until he warned Katyett and found those responsible. He prayed to Yniss to help him seek them, face them and kill them.
‘Olmaat?’
Relief took the strength from Olmaat and he collapsed back onto his stomach.
‘Help me, Pakiir.’
Olmaat heard a gasp and the choking back of a sudden sob.
‘Tell me that is not our Jarinn.’
‘I cannot. All that remains now is reparation and retribution.’
‘Yniss preserve us, is there no honour left?’ Pakiir knelt in Olmaat’s eye line and touched the charred hulk of Jarinn and Lorius to whisper a halting prayer. ‘What must I do, Olmaat?’
‘Find a temple healer. Find Katyett. The TaiGethen can trust no one. Our own people have turned against us. We must hunt and she must know what men have brought with them.’ Olmaat coughed. ‘No one else should see this place like it is.’
Olmaat felt a hand on his back. He sucked in the comfort of touch.
‘Rest if you can. Don’t try and move any more. I’ll bring people to you. You’ll be all right.’
‘How did you escape it?’
‘I am shamed, Olmaat. I ran back outside and hid until they were gone.’
Olmaat would have smiled but his lips were too charred for that. ‘No shame in common sense. Yniss guides your mind, Pakiir. Go.’
Pakiir’s footsteps faded quickly. Olmaat tried to lie absolutely still. The adrenaline was draining from him and the pain was becoming ever more intense. But he lifted his head one more time.
‘I am sorry, my priests, I have failed you. I have failed Yniss.’
Nausea swept through him and he surrendered himself to the blissful dark. It was a rerun of the scene in the Gardaryn though the stakes were immeasurably higher.
‘Soak the walls!’ roared an Al-Arynaar at the temple workers who had run out when the first torch and oil had struck the timbers. ‘Douse the flames and soak the walls. Do it!’
‘Weapons!’ ordered Katyett.
Twelve TaiGethen and forty Al-Arynaar drew their blades. They advanced a single pace. Each Tai cell formed into its three. Pelyn checked her ranks.
‘Double line. Advance on my order. Push them back.’
There were weapons in the crowd. Torches flew. Oil flasks shattered over the steps, over the walls and over the defenders. TaiGethen cells moved to the flanks. Katyett, Grafyrre and Merrat remained central. The mob had reacted to the first torch, howling in pleasure as flames ate briefly at a mural of Yniss giving life to the land. Al-
