Fallen (61 page)

Trakis returned and lowered a tray of drinks carefully to the table. Four jugs of Neak's Wanderlust ale and a dark bottle of wine. “I'm splashing out,” Trakis said. “Tonight it's us against the world.”

“A militiaman who affords Ventgorian wine,” Mella said admiringly. “You must be corrupt.”

“Eat sheebok shit, fisherwoman.”

Kel raised his jug and offered his squabbling friends a toast. “To us,” he said, “against the world.” He drank, closing his eyes as the initial bitter taste changed into something sweet and wonderful. Neak swore that he brewed naturally, without the help of magic or machines, and Kel believed him. Nothing tasting this good could be so false.

The tavern door opened, conversation stopped, and Namior Feeron entered, slamming the door behind her and shaking the rain from her long hair. She spied Kel immediately and smiled. As she came across to them, she swapped greetings with most of the tavern's patrons. Kel looked away. Seeing how well she knew this place sometimes stung him, because he also knew how much she wanted to get away. She longed for travel, exploration and adventure. She wanted to see Noreela City, Pengulfin Heights, the islands of The Spine that curved out from the north of Noreela, and she had even suggested a journey south far enough to see dangerous Kang Kang mountains. But every time she mentioned this, Kel Boon said no. He was staying here.
I've had adventure
, he would say, and however much she pressed, he would tell her no more. And that was the dark space between them, a gap which seemed, at present, unfordable.

“The harbor's mad,” Namior said, even before taking a seat. “Boats are crashing about, and some of those waves are breaking over the mole.”

“There's been worse,” Mella said. She had been a fisherwoman for almost eighteen years. She'd been involved in three wrecks, seen two friends drowned and one taken by sea creatures, and nothing seemed to disturb her anymore. At almost forty—just younger than Kel, and two decades older than Namior—Mella had lived enough to fill many lives.
We'd have such tales to tell each other
, Kel sometimes thought, but he could never speak about his past. Not if he wanted to remain in Pavmouth Breaks.

Not if he wanted to stay alive.

“And what do you say, young witch?” Trakis asked Namior.

Namior's eyes darkened for a beat, then she smiled and it lit up her face. “My mother says there's to be a waterspout just along the coast.” She glanced at Kel, the smile slipping so slightly that he thought he was the only one who noticed.

“I'll drink to that!” Trakis said. He raised his mug, and the rest of them joined him in toasting the storm.

Namior sat on a bench close to Kel, and it only took one mug of ale before she pressed herself up against him. He slung his right arm loosely around her shoulders, his hand hanging down and touching her breast, and drank with his left. She looked at him frequently, her ale-tainted laughter a welcome addition to the tavern's underlying noise. Kel drank slowly. He had never enjoyed the sensation of being drunk, and the loss of control it brought on, but he always enjoyed watching Trakis and Mella drink together, and tonight both of them were truly on form. Conversations turned to bickering, bickering to full-blown arguments, and then they would hug each other, laughing and swearing as they swore undying friendship. Kel supposed this was a tavern filled with such people, but these were special because they were his friends.

The door opened occasionally, letting a sample of the storm inside to blow out candles and spatter the timber floor with rain. Whoever stumbled in was subject to the tavern's appraisal, and more often than not they would have stories of how the storm was progressing. Waves fifteen steps high, they said, battering the mole and smashing boats against the harbor wall. Rain so heavy that some of the paths up to Drakeman's Hill had turned into impassable torrents. “Looks like I'm staying with you tonight,” Kel said at this, and Namior's hand squeezed his thigh, remaining there afterward.

The evening turned to night, though daylight had been stolen long ago by the angry clouds. Lightning flashed at the tavern's windows, followed soon after by the rumbles of thunder.

Kel knew that Namior saw this as an adventure. Whatever had troubled her earlier had been melted away by the Wanderlust ale and fine Ventgorian wine, and her smile was a constant, her laughter a welcome song.

But with each flash of lightning, as though the space between blinks was another world, Kel was taken back to that night in Noreela City.

THE THUD SHATTERED
one of the Dog's Eyes's windows, cracked the floorboards, shook the door in its frame, sent several wine bottles tumbling from the shelf behind the bar to smash at Neak's feet and sent a heavy shock wave up through Kel's feet and spine.

The rain and wind did not lessen—with the smashed window, the noise from outside increased—but for a few beats after the thud, the interior of the tavern was almost silent. It felt as though the ground itself had moved.

“What in the Black was that?” a voice said. The thought spoken, a ripple of surprise ran around the tavern, and a beat later most people were on their feet and heading for the door.

“That wasn't wind,” Namior said.

“And no wave, either,” Mella said.

Trakis raised a mug and drained it of ale, then he stood and nodded at the door. “Shall we?”

Kel felt a sudden chill of fear, a realization that nothing was safe and that his world—
anyone's
world—could be opened up and taken apart at any time. He had liked Pavmouth Breaks when he first arrived, and over the years he had grown to love it, but he always knew that safety and contentment were merely a thin veneer over the random cruelties of which nature was capable.

“Kel?” Namior said. She had remained close to him, and now he saw that strange look again, the one the others had not noticed before.

“What is it, Namior?” Mella said.

Namior looked at her two friends, then across at the broken window. Raindrops spat in. A dozen people had gone outside by now, but none of their voices were audible above the storm. “My mother and grandmothers . . . They were worried, that's all.”

“And you?” Kel asked.

She shrugged. “I'm still young. Felt nothing. But if they're worried . . .”

“Then so are you?” Mella finished for her. Namior nodded.

Trakis placed his mug gently on the table, and none of them drank.

Someone burst back into the tavern, her hair made mad by the wind and rain plastered across her eyes and in her mouth. She wiped her face and Kel saw her eyes, the mixture of excitement and fear driving them wide. He'd seen such a look many times before, and he knew exactly what it meant: she had seen something she had never seen before.

“Something coming!” the woman said. “Out to sea, something out there, dark and big and fast!”

“What is it?” Mella asked.

“Don't know. Something.”

“Come on,” Kel said. He grabbed Namior's hand as the four of them headed for the door, skirting around the woman who evidently no longer wished to see.

“The ground's still moving,” Trakis said as he pulled the door open and stepped outside.

And it was. Kel paused for a beat and felt a vibration coming up through his bones, entering his feet and traveling all through his body, and when he pressed his teeth together it felt as though they were going to shatter. From behind, the musical rattle of wine bottles clacking together. From ahead, the sounds of the storm, and whatever else it had brought.

Namior squeezed his hand. She was outside now, arm outstretched, and he was suddenly desperate not to let go of her.

“Come on!” she shouted. “They've gone up the hill behind the tavern to see better!”

Kel realized that, other than Neak and the windswept woman, he was the only one still inside the Dog's Eyes. He stepped out into the storm.

NAMIOR SUDDENLY WANTED
to be back home. Her mother was there, and her grandmother and great-grandmother, and they had seen something more than storm tonight, something they said was
absent
. If they'd sensed something more, perhaps she would not have been so afraid. More could be dealt with, seen, challenged. But nothing could be done with nothing.

Mella and Trakis were already up on the observation platform, leaning on the wall and staring over the harbor and out to sea. Namior held tightly to Kel's hand, desperate not to let go, and he ran up the steps behind her, drawing close.

“What is it?” he shouted before they had even reached the wall.

Namior shouldered in between Trakis and Mella, hearing the watchers shouting words that the wind stole away. Rain drove straight at them across the rooftops, and the water had a slightly smoky taste when it hit her tongue, as though it had picked up chimney smoke.

Kel stood behind her, held her arms and looked over her shoulder.

“Nothing,” Namior said, because when she looked out to sea, that was what she saw.

Down in the harbor, waves smashed against the mole and harbor wall. At the base of the cliffs on the other side of the River Pav, the sea gnashed and foamed like a diseased creature, striving to gnaw into the land. Past the mole were white crests, waves breaking and rolling and building again, surging in toward the village and promising chaos. Past the waves, out to sea, where clouds flashed but no lightning danced on the horizon, a wall of nothing seemed to be growing in the darkness.

“What
is
that?” Kel shouted.

Namior shrugged, comforted by the feel of his hands on her arms.

“End of the storm,” Trakis shouted. “Sea growing calm.”

“No,” Mella shouted, and Namior listened because the fisherwoman was wise to things of the sea. “Everything's about to get worse!” She looked up at Trakis, then across at Namior, and Kel standing behind her. When she next spoke it was no longer a shout, but still they all heard. “We should be safe up here.”

“A wave,” Namior said, understanding dawning at last. The thud, and now the wave. She'd heard of places far to the south near Kang Kang where the ground sometimes shrugged, cracked and turned over. Groundshakes, they were called, though many people thought they were the result of fledge demons deep underground, collapsing another seam of that strange drug.

Mother,
she thought.

“They'll be fine,” Kel said into her ear, saying exactly what she wanted to hear. But how could he be sure? Namior glanced along the hillside at the chaos of rooftops, paths and courtyards, trying to place her house. It was slightly lower than the Dog's Eyes, she knew, but also closer to the harbor. Lower and closer . . . to
that!

She could not look away from the wave for long. It was a blankness on the scene—an absence—a tall, dark space above the foam-capped waves close to land and below the boiling sky. And it was growing, coming closer and making itself known at last.

The ground shook. The air was filled with the taste of the sea. And a roar was rising, building quickly as the sound of this incoming disaster found the land and announced itself.

They could only stand there and watch. Namior thought of all the people she knew who would likely be down in the harbor: friends who lived there, others who worked through the night dealing with the day's catch. They'd have felt the thud, and now they would hear and see the wave. But it was already far too late.

There was a flash of red lightning across the horizon, as though the sky had been slashed.

The water in the harbor surged out to sea, leaving fishing boats resting on their hulls and tipped to the sides.

And then the wave came in.

FALLEN

A Bantam Spectra Book / May 2008

Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved
Copyright © 2008 by Tim Lebbon

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