The Legend of El Shashi by Marc Secchia Read Free Book Online Page B

muscled upper body gleamed like several pythons oiled and knotted together. Jyla, in her sorcerous pomp, would toy with me as a salcat toys with its luckless rodent dinner. “I can’t just … walk away?”
    The smoulder in her expression made my attempted levity fall flat. I stalled, “What weapons –?”
    “Bare hands!” Tortha broke in. “I’ll snap your arms and legs like twigs, little man. Then I’ll roast you slow, feet-first in the furnace while you writhe in agony, unable to pull yourself free. Now–choose!”
    Choose? The horror! I glanced several times between my two tormentors, unable to decide, unable to think, my head pounding fit to burst as I struggled to process what I had seen and heard. Crises have always brought out the worst in me. This was intolerable. The wrong choice would cost Janos his life –it would cost both our lives. Jyla or Tortha. There was no choice. I kept coming back to that. No choice. Janos had been my father when I had none. Now he was their trophy animal, pinned the forge door with nails driven through his body and … in my mind I screamed: No, no, NO! I can’t do it, I can’t decide, I can’t abide it any longer …
    Then I bolted.
    I was the wind unleashed. My long legs scissored across the ground. Instinct took me down the path past the outhouse, my arms pumping as they had never pumped before. The speed of my descent made the air whistle past my ears. A single, scared-rabbit bound took me over the vegetable patch and deep into the bushes beyond. I dodged through slashing branches onto the game trail I had explored so many times as a boy, relying on my agility, dancing a quicksilver trail between boulders as tall as my shoulders.
    Action was better than thought, any action, or I would have burned away in that traumatic crucible. But fear soured my gratitude. I remembered Janos’ broken body. I could almost taste Tortha’s sick pleasure. I felt the condemnation of eyes as black as Nethe’s pit. Perhaps, if I ran fast enough and far enough, I would never have to see them again.
    The wind carried Jyla’s high, shrill laughter to my ears. Triumphant.
    Tortha I could not hear at all.
    My boots drummed the hard-packed trail. Ahead I could dimly make out the olive grove that marked the end of Janos’ land and the start of the wilderness proper. Flee! Nothing else mattered. For a moment, as my flight lengthened, I let the glorious scent of freedom fill my nostrils.
    He loomed as a boulder cloaked in darkness . With the flat of his hand, Tortha struck me spinning. My head exploded. In a trice the giant man had me pinned to the ground, breathless and dazed, and cheerfully whistled a tune through the gap in his front teeth as he trussed my limbs like a prize hog.
    “Fool,” he scoffed. “You did nought but her will.”
    Then he raised a rock in his right paw, and clubbed me senseless.

Chapter 4 : Jyla
     
    How incandescent the romance
    Twixt moth and flame
    How quixotic
    Fatal
    P’dáronï of Armittal, Time Was, Time Is
     
    “Out! Out!”
    The guard thrust his baton into my rat-hole, and jabbed me in the ribs. When I did not stir quickly enough for his liking, he laid about my back and shoulders with the air of a connoisse ur of affliction. Sadist! He enjoyed his job far too much. But my sour thoughts belied an alacrity to obey. Anything to avoid being beaten again.
    The dungeon door clanged open. I staggered forward, blinking against the torchlight as if I were a mole freshly roused from its burrow.
    “Filth!”
    “Gods, he stinks like a rotting corpse!”
    “Come!” Coarse laughter rang in my ears as I nearly brained myself on the low stone ceiling. “Hurry! The mistress must not wait!”
    Raising a hand to my forehead, I drew it back sticky with blood.
    Jyla had left me to moulder in her dungeon. Twenty-three days of solitude, marked by a bowl of slop served twice daily by a mute drudge, who ignored my every attempt to communicate. He did not empty the leather