Free The Legend of El Shashi by Marc Secchia

Nethe’s chills wracked my body. Had I the use of my hands I would have reached down my own throat to claw the ghastly thing loose. Yet my eyes, as if drawn by strings, swivelled to follow the condor as it dipped behind Jyla.
    “What?” she grunted. “What are you –?”
    The Sorceress whirled. The bird was an arm’s-length from my right hand, circling behind me so that I could no longer see it, but I could follow Jyla’s reaction perfectly. Surprise. Shock. Then a white-lipped fury that had it been unleashed, would have immolated us all.
    The wind broke off as though a door had slammed shut upon its wrathful storehouse. A deafening stillness enveloped the world.
    I crumpled upon the platform. Barely had my head smacked against cold stone, and my mind registered that the tower had again been struck by multiple branches of lightning, when I became aware of a new sound, a shriek that climbed rapidly through the registers until it attained a pitch that stabbed knives into my eardrums. I distinctly felt something burst. I clutched my head. Curled into a foetal ball, I prayed most fervently to die.
    Then the wind returned. Where before it had been a whirling dervish, now it was a wall, and many times amplified. As I shot sideways the manacles saved me once more. Jyla grabbed for the brazier, but the wind knocked it over and dumped the contents into the pool. The hissing steam was whipped away, snuffed out as though it had never been. Another blast picked up the Sorceress and flung her across the platform, dashing her against my flapping body. She clutched my waist. Jyla somehow found purchase amongst my soiled rags. Her eyes, stripped at last of all arrogance, pleaded with mine.
    No human-made edifice could have withstood this renewed assault; the inexorable stress, the ferocity of Nature stressed beyond forbearance. The tower groaned. Long and low, its stones voiced the one clear thought remaining in my head–death knell.
    The tower began to tilt.
    The wind was an unforgiving tyrant. Slowly, digit by digit, it prised Jyla loose. What her fingers would not release, unravelled thread by thread beneath the windstorm’s awesome force. I could do nought, nor would I have done, to offer her aid. She even used her teeth to hold on, but her efforts were doomed. The cloth frayed. Ripped. She seized my belt, lost that, and snatched at my trousers. For a moment I thought she might be secure, but her grip slipped again under the tremendous pressure and she scored bloody trails with her fingernails down to my knees, then ripped my calves open, and now the last bastion, my ankles, came into her clawed grasp.
    At the very last, Jyla gazed up my body’s length into my eyes. She smiled–hideously.
    Then she was torn loose.
    A single flutter.
    Gone.

Chapter 5: Reawakening
     
    O to find a new beginning
    My reinvention
    Of nascent wholeness
    My becoming
    What I have never been
    Oldik Laymarson, Verses Beyond the Rumik, Scrolleaf the Third
     
    “Drink up,” said the old woman, thrusting a bowl of broth into my hand. She stumped back to the fireplace, humming tunelessly.
    I stared at the herbs dancing slow curlicues upon the hot liquid, and at the rising steam, trying to remember. How long had I been here? When last had I sat abed? What day was it?
    “You’ re hungry, lad. Drink.”
    And this manner of greeting? I sipped, yelped, blew the half-unfurled herbs across the small bowl. Veined leaves gelid with sap. That smell … konis? Baltagia tea? The words came to me as from a great distance. Untried. Unwieldy, like lumbering farmers attempting a delicate dance.
    Gazing over the blue-glazed rim of the bowl, I took in the bundles of herbs tied to the hut’s roof, which consisted of a latticework frame of wattle branches overlaid with layers of woven reed mats, the rude fireplace, the cooking pot hanging above it. There was a simple pallet for a sleeping-place. I took in the woman’s knotted calf muscles half-hidden beneath a clean