(Nothing But) Flowers - John G. McDaid (the reader ebook .TXT) 📗

are real, and that they were put there."

Donal considered this. "Are you are afraid of Emic?"

"No, not afraid," Wally answered patiently. "You've never seen her up close. There's something about her. The way she looks at you. When she speaks, you just...believe." He fingered the amulet on his neck with the three interlocking circles of Emic.

"And yet, for all that power, the World has no pathway to the stars. And Kisk does."

"Kisk? It's a..." Wally struggled for words, "I know you've never left the World. It's...a journey. That you take. To see something." He thought for a minute. "Donal, I've always tried to help you. Let me see if we might have a talk with one of the acolytes at the Castle."

"You have to remember, Kisk is a watery kingdom," said Wally. They were in a stone room at the back of the Castle, clearly a dining area from the rough hewn table that occupied most of the space. Wally had led them there, the last part of the way through a tunnel like the Keoh's, this one running under the main street, beneath the feet of outsiders already queuing up for evening chant at the Castle's lagoon.

They had been met by one of the pale, serious-eyed young acolytes who served the priestess. Like the rest, she wore a dark robe and a long black veil that covered the sides of her head and trailed down her back. Wally and the woman had talked quietly for a while before she led them to the room to wait.

"I've spent a lot of time diving in the lagoon," said Donal. "I know my way around a boat."

"Ah, this is no lagoon, Donal." Said Wally. "This is the eastern Ocean. The water is full of salt, and deep. Deeper than you can imagine."

"And getting deeper every year," said the woman who appeared at the door, wearing the high priestess's outfit of whispering black fabric, with a high collar that ran nearly up to her chin. She was pale and impossibly thin. Wally immediately fell to his knees and put his forehead on the floor. Ewen tugged at Donal's elbow to do the same, but he couldn't look away. Her gaze caught him, at once compassionate and remote; her eyes twinkled with enormous intelligence, and her faint smile suggested both calm cheer and depthless sadness.

"Mother Emic," said Wally. "We are graced by your attention."

"My daughter tells me an interesting story, about the Keoh and the land of Kisk," she said. She looked at Donal closely. Her eyes flickered to his side.

"My brother Ewen, and I am Donal." He saw Wally and the priestess exchange a look.

"I see," she said. "You are the one he is sending?"

Ewen had managed to drag Donal to his knees. "I am. I've come looking for your help. About the legend. The pathway."

"As Wally might have told you.."

"Mother Emic, I said nothing..." She silenced him with a wave.

"As Wally would have told you, were it not heresy to question the ways of the builders. The ���pathway' is probably real, but not in the way you think. Almost certainly not in the way the Colonel's fanatics think. And soon, the water will be so deep that no one will be able to reach or remember it, and then, in just a matter of time, the Ocean will solve our problem for us." She frowned. "I dislike the Keoh's constant...attentions...to these things which the future can erase without our help."

"So the pathway...is real?"

She regarded him evenly. "You have a very good memory."

"My brother helps me," Donal admitted.

"And you worry about truth. Odd for an assassin."

"I only do what my father did, to protect the World."

"A Hunter with a taste for the truth may find more than you can imagine."

"It's too late for me to back up," said Donal.

"Fair enough. If you are going down this road armed with nothing but your own vision, at least let's make it clear." She waved, and the woman who had brought them to the room silently whisked in.

To Donal, she said, "This is one of the secrets of Emic, reserved for only a handful among the outsiders who seek our wisdom. But you seem someone able to keep things to himself." She looked at Wally and nodded in the direction of the door, and Donal's friend sidled immediately out, with what seemed an apologetic, or perhaps wistful, look.

"You are ready for the next step?" Donal nodded, and the priestess turned to her assistant.

"Take him on the Dark Ride."

"I am Mina," she said. "Follow me." The acolyte unhooked a torch and led Donal down a flight of stairs. He smelled water. Not the cool dampness of the tunnels under the World, this held the tang of brine and a warm humidity, like the steaming woods following an afternoon rain. Down a hallway, through a narrow door, and he was in a room almost completely occupied by a pool in the floor. The reek of salt was overpowering.

The acolyte placed the torch in a holder, then bent down and tested the water with her hand.

"Just right," she said.

"What is that?" Donal asked.

"This is where we connect with the Goddess," Mina said. "The pool is filled with salts from the eastern ocean. It makes the water thick enough to float in. We heat it with stones to be warm as skin." She took a crockery pot from an alcove, poured a careful measure into a white plastic cup. "La primer alma," she said. "Drink this and lie down on that mat."

"What about Ewen."

"I think it would be best if he waits in the corridor," Mina said, as she slipped off his belt with the leather bag, and hung it outside the door, above his machete. She opened a wax-sealed jar, rubbed some liquid on her hands, and began to massage his shoulders. "Turn over," she said.

Whatever she had given him was relaxing all his muscles, and her fingers slid and prodded as she worked down from his back to his ankles. She told him to turn over again, and he saw that she was now naked as well, and she climbed on top of him, massaging his stiffening member, his nipples, and then her mouth was on his and he slid into her. He came so thoroughly his entire body shook, and she rode him and squeezed, in synchrony, draining him utterly.

Lazily, he realized he could see the sides of her head, and he understood why the Emic's costume had seams there. And why these acolytes wore the head covering. Not horns, he realized. Ears.

There was a black gap, and when he came to awareness, he had a sense of flying. He could feel the water, knew he was floating in the tank, but Mina had doused the torch; even with his eyes open, he saw nothing. The air and water were the same temperature, impossible to say where one ended and the other began. His mind was like an ox freed from a yoke, galloping effortlessly away, and his thoughts were racing, exploding, following one another in a way they never had before. Donal was aware, for the first time in his life, of being aware. He watched himself, watching his mind dreaming.

He could feel the blood pulsing, out to the ends of his fingers and toes, every tiny vessel, throbbing with life and energy.

And slowly, the riot of thoughts began to still, the flood of images slowed. Relaxed. Unwound.

Until one image remained.

The face of Ewen. As a baby.

Floating.

Like he was, still and empty, in a warm sac of fluid. Warm and happy and safe, in the world before the World.

And then Ewen's voice, speaking inside his head: "What if I had never been born?"

A brief flash of the old womens' knives, cutting up his mother for the feast. And then there was nothing. Floating emptiness, an endless black screen of death.

"What would you remember then?"

And suddenly, he was overcome with blind panic, thrashing wildly, trying to find the bottom with his feet, getting mouthfuls of rich, salty water.

Mina waded in and held him as he gasped, and sobbed, and his breathing eventually returned to normal.

The Keoh had been right about the boat, the ride was indeed fast. What would have been a four-day slog through the swampland to the southeast took just one afternoon, with help from a sail rigged up to catch the gust front running ahead of the day's storm.

Donal sat in the stern, staying out of the way as the crew struggled to keep the boat right in the water, twisting the stitched-together sail from side to side. He kept Ewen close, and fingered the amulet that the priestess had given him. "One more thing," she had said as he left, tossing the bit of worked metal on a leather thong. He ran his finger around the three interlocked circles and tried to forget his salty drowning nightmare.

The sailors put in at the edge of a ruined road of the ancients. Though they pretended to be tough, the Keoh's boatmen were clearly unnerved to be so far from home and they hurried their cargo off, tossed a plastic jug of water, and sailed away without looking back, tacking into the gathering wind.

"Well, Ewen, we better find someplace to get out of the rain."

The mosquitoes were unbelievable here, and soon the black flies came to join them. They never seemed to bother Ewen; Donal envied that. The entrance to the kingdom of Kisk was a short hike to the north, and Donal set out on a path that branched out from the road of the ancients, which curved away to the west, into the estuary they had just crossed.

A rattlesnake slithered onto out of the brush and Donal instantly, reflexively, caught it behind the head with his machete.

"Dinner," he said.

"Not hungry," Ewen shook his head. "I'm going for a walk."

Donal collected branches and built an ugly but secure lean-to that would protect them from the worst of the rain, then took some time skinning and cleaning the snake, whose head glared at him balefully until he carefully poked it into the underbrush with a stick.

There was no way to start a fire, so he hacked off chunks and spent a long time, chewing, watching clouds gathering to the west.

"Ewen," he called. There was no response.

"Ewen?" He yelled now, feeling raw snake rising in his gorge. He picked up the machete and ran in the direction Ewen had gone.

"Ewen!"

"Here," Ewen stood in a clearing where their path crossed a larger one leading east. This had obviously been a main road in the past, the edges still vaguely delineated by fractured stumps of the ancient's metal trees.

"I wanted to see what it felt like to be alone," Ewen looked up at him.

"What do you mean?" He was panting, sweating, and the mosquitoes were an audible buzz.

"Someday, you will leave and not come back." Ewen looked off west down the path. "And I wondered what that would feel like."

The first few drops of rain hit Donal, and he picked up his brother, cradling him in his arms for the first time in years, and carried him back to the lean-to. He did not sleep well.

The entrance to Kisk was surprisingly like the Castle, except the wait was ten times as long. Outsiders shuffled endlessly around the marshy ground at the end of the road, waiting their turn on the parade of ships that took outsiders to see the sunken wonders. Jugglers and