There was not a single cloud in the sky.
THREE
Days later, and she was on a brilliant white beach stained pink by the rising red sun.
Pebbles. Wisps of seaweed. A sword half-buried in the sand, the hilt jutting up without function. Further along the beach were bizarre metal lattices towering up into the skies. They bled into the distance, several of them, elegant, rusting and redundant behemoths.
These were the first images Lan saw, as the mental fog was dispersed by the tidal roar and the pungency of the coast that assaulted her. The sea breeze was cool against her skin: the thought prompted her to glance across herself. Bare feet, khaki breeches, her long-sleeved white shirt — she had no recollection of these items at first, they weren’t hers, they weren’t her, but soon enough the images flashed back.
It’s all happening so quickly…
Her new body thronged with pain. Muscles seemed to spasm whenever she moved, and even though there weren’t bruises where she expected them, it didn’t diminish the pulses of agony. Cayce had warned her, of course, and she knew exactly what to expect — but the theory and the reality were quite separate. These were the effects of sorcery, even if Cayce would have hated her using the term. She was living a fantasy, a dream, and she couldn’t quite believe it. Cayce had explained that it was something she must grow used to, and from now on she must to learn to lose the years of layered frustrations, drop her self-consciousness around others.
Because she had undergone a major transformation.
Lan shaded her eyes from the intensity of the light and pushed herself up, sand clumping to her arms. She still hadn’t become used to this temperature, this balmy, sultry warmth. There were a lot of things she wasn’t used to.
Further down the shore, two of the indigenous Cephs were handling a boat, steering it onto the shore. Their handling was awkward. Pale-skinned and hairless, the creatures were humanoid save for their arms, which were thick purple and pink tentacles several feet in length. They curled to and fro, each with pulsing suction cups.
The Cephs hauled nets bulbous with fish, and lugged them up the beach, through sedges and reeds and onto land. Aside from their shaggy breeches, they were utterly bare-skinned, and she still could not quite discern where the human body ended and these marine appendages began, so gradual was their change in morphology. Contrary to what she had first thought — that these were creations of the cultists — Cayce had informed her that they were part of the natural tribes of the Boreal Archipelago. Over the tens of thousands of years of human and rumel military dominance, they had taken sanctuary off and on the coast of Ysla, where they remained living peaceful, simple lives.
Lan breathed in deeply this clean air, content with watching the Cephs go about their business, their tentacles unfurling majestically around bundles of fish, or massive planks of wood in order to repair their huts.
The sky was vacant except for the flight antics of pterodettes, and their reptilian squawks echoed across the bay. Out to sea, a few tiny boats were navigating the treacherous channels, gullies and tiny whirlpools around the reefs. The surf folded over itself, endlessly — and the repetitions were intoxicating. The landscape served to calm her mind and, if ever there was a place in which to recover from such painful surgical procedures, then this was it. If she could bring herself to believe in the Jorsalir tales, then this would be what she hoped the heavenly realms would be like.
Am I dead?
She stood upright, stretched tentatively, then more snaps of pain savaged her nerves. She grinned. No, most definitely alive. Lan bent her arms this way and that, trying to work out the pain.
She turned back to face the city in the deep distance, a construct of wood and stone and metal. It blended in with the texture of the vegetation, yet towered above, dominating the panorama.
Villarbor, the forest city.
Cayce called it a treetop metropolis in which cultist magic flickered in and out of existence, but to her eyes Villarbor was a city of violent sorcery. She had been barely conscious when she entered the place, but there was plenty of the weird to alarm her. Nothing there seemed to make sense; it was a phenomenally different way of life. Magic charged through the skein of streets. Buildings were constructed from, and within, the trunks of titanic trees that seemed settlements in themselves.
Each lightning-pulse of magic that now boomed in the distance sent a quiver through her body.
With that in mind, she sauntered along the sand, a slow arc around the beachhead. Such beautiful heat, she thought. I don’t ever want to go back to Jokull, that freezing island.
Further up the shore she spotted a lone figure. Cayce was sitting on a rock smoking a roll-up. He was wearing a cream-coloured outfit. She could smell his heady weed from a distance. As she approached, sand squelched between her toes.
He looked her up and down, brushing his stubbled chin. He analyzed her anatomy, and she knew by now that there was nothing sexual in his examination. This was merely one of his inspections.
‘So you are enjoying the beaches, I see,’ Cayce said.
‘Something like that. The Cephs — they’re bizarre people, aren’t they? We don’t have anything like that where I’m from.’
Cayce frowned, scanning the Cephs in the distance, but he didn’t acknowledge her words. Rubbing his arms, he said, ‘You look really good, Lan, and I mean that. You were already in impressive physical shape — there are a good many unhealthy people, with all that ice.’ Despite his slightly unusual accent, he spoke with utter confidence, as if he was always declaring something profound, and whether or not he knew it, his words were helping to rebuild her in places his science couldn’t quite reach.
‘When will I have to leave?’ she asked. ‘I’d love to hang around a little longer.’
‘We are all done, as far as I’m concerned,’ he replied. ‘Ysla, for its own sake, does not permit visitors. So, I’m afraid you will have to leave soon. You simply cannot stay — and it is not just for our good, but yours, too.’
Lan thought as much. ‘In the morning?’
‘Indeed.’ Cayce jumped down from the rock, his cream cloak flailing around him in the breeze. Marram grass rippled along the edge of the dunes whilst a flock of gulls suddenly filled the sky before drifting in circles along the shore.
‘There are some festivities tonight — cultural celebrations for one of the orders. You may as well enjoy the night before you head back — just, if you please, try not to talk to too many of the others.’
‘For my own good?’ Lan asked.
‘You have, it seems, caught on well.’ Cayce turned and Lan moved to follow him across the sand.
*
The approach to Villarbor was contoured with surges of trees and plants that seemed alien to the Archipelago. Spiked structures and fat-leafed things and explosions of gaudy colours. Heavy, almost monstrous insects droned in and out of the foliage, snapping back branches with their clumsy flight. Other creatures drilled holes through bark, filling their venous sacs with sap.
The stone track was well-kept, tidied regularly by small teams of men and women. They cleared paths of vegetation with strange relics shaped like a crossbow, with minimal effort, and it was not at all obvious how the devices worked.
Lan never understood why, on an island without money, anyone would want to do such jobs, yet they did. Surely you should be paid for having to do chores like this? They stopped their tasks to gather around and talk to her, and she had to strain to follow their accents. She forced a smile in her effort to cease being self-conscious. Their clothing was garish, and woven with little patches in the style of harlequins. Not one of them dressed identically, and both genders sported equally unique variants of style, and wore bright flowers in their hair — which made her frown since back on Jokull flowers were generally worn only by women.