Wild Magic

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On his eleventh day of walking, he came to the River and followed it east to the city, which he reached late in the afternoon.

The Sequba Cloudbrushers in the Abey groves were green and pleasant in the burnt land; their roots were set so deep that droughts never troubled them. There were many of these groves scattered about the Low City, Abeyhamal’s Chapels the Edgers called them. He saw them as centers of poison and corruption, seducers with their green and their shade. He circled wide about the first of them, careful that even the shadow of a tree didn’t touch him. “You will burn,” he murmured as he passed among the buildings. “You are perversion and will be destroyed.”

Heat wavered up from the dead grass and the hardpan; sunlight glinted painfully off glass in windows whose shutters had been unbarred for the first time in centuries. They were here, all those farmers who’d abandoned the land and with it their proper roles, their needful communion with the Iron God, they were here in defiance of Chumavayal’s Law and of the Amrapake’s command. This must be made right.

Shadow from a wall touched him and he flinched away as if he’d been brushed by nettles. Evil.

He saw no one, but he could feel eyes on him-unseen folk in those newly opened houses peering at him from behind improvised curtains.

He moved through the Low City to the ancient Sok Circle at its heart and knelt in the dust there, his arms outstretched, his eyes closed.

After a while he heard whispers, coughs, the scraping of feet against the dusty paving stones, the rustle of cloth and a hundred other small sounds as the squatters came warily from the houses they’d appropriated and stood in a ring around the outside of the Circle. He heard them, but paid no attention to them. They were just there. Like the wind Like the sun’s heat. He was touching, tasting, getting to know the ills of this place. He wasn’t strong enough to destroy it, not yet, but he could make a start.

He filled his lungs, expelled the air in a braying raucous cry: CHUMAVAYAL!

Eyes still squeezed shut, he felt heat brushing at his skin, then leaving him, rushing away. In his mind it was a hollow sphere of sunfire racing away from him, eating up everything it touched.

He heard screams, curses, a brief hiss of fire, then silence.

He was cold, weary. The God was gone from him. He opened his eyes.

The walls that faced the Circle bloomed with black char; shutters were gone, baring unglazed windows like holes in skulls. In some of the kariams that led like spokes from the Circle, there were piles of rags, charred flesh, and bone.

He got to his feet, his movements slow, laborious.

From a throat scraped raw, his strained voice dropping flat against the pitted walls, he declaimed, “This place is anathema. I call upon it plague and pestilence. I declare that those who come here are corrupt and guilty. I declare that as long as there is a living soul within these walls, the drought and death will continue. I am the WORD of Chumavayal, HEAR ME! I say what HE has given me to say. HEAR ME! I am the SCOURGE of Chumavayal. Refuse my word and die.”

He shook out his robe, ticked his hands in his sleeves and walked from the center of the Sok Circle; with an approving glance at the black burns on the wall beside him, he stepped over a pile of ash and bone in the mouth of a kariam and started for the Iron Bridge.