Interlude 6
You are Julnar.
Not quite “the “Seaborne”—that part of the story will be twisted from gossip and tall tales. But you are a queen, of a gentle seaside city. A widow. You have found being a widow with money and power—not too much, but enough—to be among the most stable positions for your hosts. You have a son, not the beautiful idiot prince Badr Basim, but a little boy. You adore him; having taken your host when she was a palace child—a soul easily nudged aside—you have lived Julnar’s full life.
You have birthed the boy and savored the days at his side, watching him race along the beach and clutch your hand with his small warm one.
It has been a great many generations since you tangled with daevas and marid, consuming their magic and exploring the boundaries of other worlds, possessing creatures of other elements.
You have found a measure of peace in these centuries.
Rich with enchanting power, with the accumulated wisdom of millennia, you no longer need to race like a bloody plague of vengeance, the spindle bringing destruction and vigilantism every other year.
A few acts of vengeance to seal the bond with a new host and then you are content to live out their life.
You put yourself in positions where a little meddling will be easy—the village gossip, the queen with an uncharacteristically ruthless justice system, the judge all evildoers fear—and it works.
Magic protects you, enriches your life, and provides you and yours with ease.
You are in the fat flush of your long existence. Comfortable. Happy, even.
It will not last.
You have no idea that you’ve been under the watch of dewy eyes, scaled eyes, misty eyes, unseen eyes for centuries.
You assumed the marid possessed little more than animal intelligence, not understanding that they have observed the rise and fall of humanity for even longer than you.
You do not realize that a great many of the religions you scarcely remember or differentiate between consider their aspects gods, that the marid have had priests in your every household.
They wait until you are content. Until you are unexpecting. And then they take revenge of which not even you could have dreamed.
The rules of their existence, of their elemental creation, do indeed forbid them from harming humans.
But oh, there are a great many ways to do accidental harm, to push, much in the way that you spin new possibilities.
Humans are so fragile, humans packed in a bustling, crowded kingdom with straining sanitation even more vulnerable.
Is anyone truly to be blamed if a few very sick animals die, falling and rotting where no human eyes can see them, poisoning the city’s water supply?
If the tiny waterborne creatures—smaller than a speck of dust but capable of the worst plagues—happen to mutate and twist, to mate and multiply in the most lethal of ways?
The sickness that follows is sudden and vicious, preying on young and old alike.
A person can be healthy in the morning, vomiting by midday, and dead before the moon rises.
Those who linger have it worse; the cramps are agonizing, akin to being stabbed and disemboweled.
The afflicted beg for death, sobbing and howling that there are water snakes inside their bellies.
They hallucinate visions of the sea pouring into the city, of being stalked through its drowned streets by saltwater crocodiles and sharks with rows of mirror-bright teeth.
When they die, they reek not of human decomposition but the salty foul stench of fish guts.
Still, you are not suspicious. Why would you be?
You have died in countless plagues, witnessed even more.
They are constant in the world you’ve weaved your way through and even this one bears much in common with others you have experienced.
It is difficult, yes, but a great number of people can survive if they are given clean water to replace what they lose.
It is a citywide thirst nearly impossible to quench, but you are determined.
You are even a bit proud. You can be a good, wise leader rather than a vicious entity of vengeance and bloody fate.
But very soon, there is little clean water.
And then, five days into the plague when the number of infected overwhelms those able to care for them, there is no water at all.
The wells run dry, the springs peter out, and the fountains sizzle and evaporate.
The great baths and aquifers beneath the palace drain into the earth, the mighty stone cavities dry as dust.
Deep in your fractured soul of multitudes, you finally accept that the marid are responsible.
That you are responsible. And not until this moment, when you grasp that everyone in your city is about to die, do you realize that you have come to care for them far more greatly than you typically do. You built this place, you shaped this society. You love it.
The marid know this too.
Panic sets in, but it is too late. Those with means to flee have already done so.
There are no carts and no boats left, and few among the populace are in any shape to make the long trek by foot.
Some try anyway, leaving the weeping and wailing ill in their wake.
But most panic; the sort of communal panic only those shortly to be dead, enslaved, or in a state worse than both will ever know.
The panic that sets in when a foreign army finally bursts through the gates, when starvation reduces men to eating their kin, when a barricaded temple filled with its believers is set alight.
An animal terror as lethal as that which provokes it.
You know this panic. Have stirred it, have died from it. So, you very suddenly stop being Queen Julnar. You are a mother.
And your son is all that matters.
The sickness has spared him, due to your intense ministrations.
You have observed a thousand different cultures’ methods of purifying water; the ways they boil it, distill it, salt it, pass it through various ichors and salts.
You’ve done them all, until your hands cracked and bled, for you trust no other and it has worked.
Your son is alive, and he gazes upon you with all the innocence and fear of a child as he asks where you are going when you hastily pack a bag and seize his hand.
These are not the actions of a queen, the nobly bred woman who should be barely capable of dressing herself. But you are not only that woman.
Your packing is interrupted by a familiar face. A priest, one who has served you as loyally as he has served the storm god whom the locals worship. His entire family is dead, was among the first wave of the afflicted, and the sorrow has hollowed out his face.
But he has remained dutiful. He knows the meaning of your packing, you can see it in his grieving eyes, but there is no judgment. Instead, he makes an offer:
“We have a boat. It is old,” he warns. “And small. My father used it for fishing, but he has been crippled many years.” His father is dead, in truth. Has been dead for days, but the priest is not used to speaking in such a manner.
You clasp his hand. “I would be so grateful.”
The priest leads you to a small, rickety boat hidden behind a pile of corpses. You cover your son’s eyes as he tugs it free. There are paddles and you suddenly wish your current form was not so slight. The priest doesn’t look particularly strong either.
But he is not coming, merely shaking his head when you ask. When you beg.
“I made a deal,” he murmurs, refusing to say more as he helps push the boat deeper into the surf. He stays there, the foamy water twining around his knees and soaking up his robe. You row through the rough waves, his figure growing smaller.
Then your bobbing vessel stops. You try to row, but it is as if something has anchored itself to the bottom.
“Amah, what’s happening?” Pares asks, trying hard to keep the babyish fear from quivering his lips. He fails. You are frantic now, trying to pull the oars. Pares can swim, but he is still small and the distance between the boat and the shore is too great.
From across the choppy expanse of slate-colored water, the priest meets your gaze. He withdraws a knife, carved from a narwhal’s tusk, and drags it across his throat.
Pares screams as the priest falls into the surf.
The next wave takes him immediately, an embrace for the dutiful acolyte who fulfilled his grim task.
Horribly, you realize you have fallen into a trap: the marid have you, a prisoner in their watery territory.
But they cannot sink your boat—not with your innocent human son aboard—and so they hold you in place.
But it is not only marid who arrive to chasten you.
Shadows cut over the water, the winged bodies soaring across the sun so plentiful, it is as though an eclipse has occurred.
You cannot see anything other than the shade they cast; the creatures of air exist in a higher realm than you are capable of observing.
You witness only their effects upon your world, the flapping of great and mighty wings strong enough to churn typhoon winds and swirling funnels of destruction.
Oh, but they are careful. So precise. Their gusts knock down not a single shutter in the city itself, but annihilate the few remaining exits.
The forest is wrecked, vast logs piling into insurmountable piles, the last roads ruined.
There is no way out of your once-magnificent kingdom. There is no water.
It takes three days for your city to die.
You are forced to witness it all, helplessly shackled in a place where your dying citizens can stagger out onto the beach.
They curse the queen who has abandoned them, they moan for your aid.
A few try to swim to your boat, but it’s too far away and you watch as they all eventually drown.
Pares cries for you to help them, then cries for them to stop, and then ceases making any sounds at all.
And when not a soul is left alive, the marid do what they could not do before: they devour your kingdom. Great waves crash through its fine streets, drown your palace, and annihilate the one place you finally found some peace.
Then and only then does your boat move.
You try to row, to return to shore, but you are in the domain of creatures you wronged without care, without understanding the deep wound you struck.
They take you where they desire, under night skies whose stars change position with the giddiness of dancers, harassed by waves as big as mountains and sea serpents who coil around the boat, spinning it in mad nausea-inducing twists.
Through hungry packs of sharks, snapping their teeth.
Pares tries to be brave, to be the prince who should have grown to be a king, but he shivers constantly, curling into your side.
You make the food and water you gathered last as long as possible, for your sole attempt to fish resulted in a whale nearly swamping your boat—the marid will not permit you to harm another creature of their world.
You collect rainwater though it sates only Pares, evaporating when it touches your tongue.
No matter. It has been a very long time since you’ve needed food or drink. You survive off vengeance, and the dark dreams churning through your mind envision a feast.
It feels like forever before a new sliver of land appears, the current driving you toward a starkly different island than the fragrant seaside hills of your long-ago birth.
Rocky mountains rise abruptly in the air, the jagged lines astonishingly still against the dancing wisps of clouds and rushing waves.
The only greenery is meandering patches of date palms and scrub, penned between the inhospitable mountains and relentless surf.
Landfall is a blessing. You stagger across the sand, a thin and weak Pares carried in your arms. Within sight of the date palms, there is a spring—good, clean water that you cup into your son’s mouth.
It dribbles over his bleeding lips. You hesitate, then take a sip.
For the first time in weeks, water slakes your dry tongue, and you close your fevered eyes, trying to be hopeful.
But there is no prison in existence meant to soothe the souls of its inhabitants.
And it is not going to be a short sentence.