Free Tales of Noreela 04: The Island by Tim Lebbon

tumbled headlong into the wet mud, probably sinking there, and slowly drowning.
    Fucking idiot!
O’Peeria’s voice said, and Kel grinned. He was hardly surprised that she chose now to come to the forefront of his memory.
    To his right lay the stone bridge, middle span washed out and detritus piled high against its upstream side. In the dawn’s light, he saw the dark shapes of uprooted trees, and in their branches the pale fruit of dead, naked bodies. Past the bridge, beyond the ruined harbor, he could see the masts of the visitors’ boats bobbing closer. On the horizon, the island cast an unnatural shadow against the sky.
    Kel looked across the river of water and mud at the slopes of Drakeman’s Hill. He had to get up there. He needed hisweapon roll, hidden for so long beneath the floorboards in his rooms, and the other things he had hidden there as well. The magic things. He needed them most of all.
    I could just go
, he thought. If he ran fast enough, and far enough, maybe he could get beyond the Strangers’ reach before they landed. That’s what the Core had always called them: Strangers. No one had ever discovered their true name, and none of the Strangers, when interrogated, gave up such information. So “Stranger” was all-encompassing, and it also conveyed everything about them that needed to be said. They were not of Noreela.
    Kel felt the press and pressure of responsibility. Noreela was alone, and almost everyone living there considered their vast island to be the whole world. He and a few others knew differently. And that shattering knowledge was the reason that one in four Core agents killed themselves before the age of forty.
    Instead of suicide, he could run.
    But if he ran now, giving no thought to direction or intention, then he would be doing Noreela a greater disservice than ever before. He was sure that if the Core
had
managed to track him down, they would have killed him without thought. Yet this event was far greater than just him.
    Invasion
, he thought, and it was terrifying. Strangers had only ever come in ones and twos, tracked and caught for interrogation by the Core, or killed if they could not be caught. And the majority of Core members considered such covert visits as reconnaissance for a full invasion.
    A man ran past him along the path, heading away from the harbor. “They’re coming!” he shouted. “Ships!
Things!”
    Kel watched him go. And as he glanced back upriver, he saw three small boats crossing the fast-moving waters, their occupants pulling on a long rope that had been strung somehow from one side to the other.
    He ran, careful to keep away from the ragged edge where the path had been undermined and scoured away by the flood. Clumps of seaweed and a few dead fish were scatteredhere and there, and piled on top of a tall garden wall he saw a mass of clawed things, snatching at the air as though they could see things he could not.
    Namior pulled at him. He slowed, then ran on again.
    When he drew level with the boats he waited, reaching down for the man and two women in the first boat, helping them climb from the soaking mud up onto the solid bank. They thanked him, distracted, and one of the women ran back toward the harbor. The man and other woman sank down onto the cobbles, the man crying and calling a name over and over again.
    Kel jumped down into the boat and snatched up the thick punt clamped along its side. He could wait for the other two to finish pulling themselves across, but one was still only halfway, and the man seemed to be flagging. Or he could cast off from the rope, push his boat across the mud level with the punt, then paddle as hard as he could across the river. He’d be swept down toward the harbor, but if he paddled hard enough, he thought he could strike the opposite mud bank almost level with where he needed to climb.
    The old Kel Boon—the Kel Boon of the Core—would have started hauling on the rope. And when he reached those coming the other way,