Tales of Noreela 04: The Island by Tim Lebbon Read Free Book Online Page B

O’Peeria says. She’s standing by a grating in the ground, three heavy locks holding it in place.
    “Down?”
    The Shantasi smiles, and the life-moonlight catches her face. It’s dazzling. “What, Kel Boon? Afraid to go into the dark with me?”
    “Just concerned that you’ll be scared.”
    O’Peeria raises an eyebrow, kneels and runs her hands over the locks. They’re heavy, and Kel knows that it’ll take a lot of effort and noise to break them. She knows it, too.
    “Sorry,” she says, and pulls a thin iron spike from her boot. Placing it between the random paving in the alley, she sets her foot against the flattened head and shoves down, hard.
    O’Peeria touches the spike with one hand and uses a few whispered chants to break the locks. Kel looks the other way. He hears the broken metal clank to the ground, and he only looks again when he hears the spike being withdrawn from between the stones.
    “You should try it one day,” O’Peeria says.
    “We have Practitioners for that.”
    “Fuck that. One day we might meet a Stranger who knows how to use it better than us. What then?”
    Kel heaves up the grating and prepares to drop down into the darkness. “Then,” he says, “we fight for ourselves.”
    He could not know that today would be that day.
    KEL HEARD IT before Namior. Even when he paused, raised his hand and tilted his head, all she could hear was the still-raging river. He turned to her, his face suddenly pale in the yellow moonlight and his eyes going wide, then he grabbed her hand and started to pull. He scrambled up the remains ofa house’s collapsed sidewall, as though suddenly eager to return to the Dog’s Eyes.
    She tugged back. He was going the wrong way! But then he pulled her close, their noses touching, and she could actually smell fear on his breath.
    “There’s another wave,” he said. “Save your breath and run.” And still holding her hand, he turned and started uphill again.
    She was supposed to warn us
, she thought about her great-grandmother, and she feared that the old woman’s current craze was deeper than ever before.
    They’d made their way along the uncertain ground above the shattered lower areas of the village until they were level with the fallen stone bridge. It crossed the river from one side of the harbor to the other, and they could see the terrible destruction that had been wrought on the place. The bridge’s remaining surface and walls were just visible above the flooded river level, but either side of it, there were no easily identifiable areas left. Buildings had toppled, smashed and been carried away by the power of the wave, and few walls protruded above the thick layers of sticky, stinking mud left in its wake. The water was piling massive amounts of debris against the upriver side of the bridge: trees, shattered timbers, dead horses, furniture, half of a roof with some tiles still attached, and close to the uncertain shore where they stood, a knot of bodies. Namior had tried desperately not to look, but the arms, legs, heads and torsos cried out to be seen. She had wondered where their wraiths were, and she hoped that Mourner Kanthia was still alive.
    Kel let go of her hand so that they could both climb faster. The broken rubble beneath her hands was sharp, and several times she slipped and cut her knees and shins. The pain drove her on. Her breathing was rapid and heavy, but by the time they’d cleared the fallen wall and were making their way up a steeply sloping vegetable garden, she could hear the second wave.
    She did not look.
    Across the other side of the bridge, on the harbor side, she had seen the vague shapes of people already searching the ruin for survivors. She hoped they were making their way up Drakeman’s Hill.
    The wave was louder by then, and the ground was starting to shake.
    “Faster!” Kel shouted. Namior glanced up and he was sitting astride a garden wall, hands held out, glancing down at her, up at the wave and back