Chapter Eighteen: Silence
Tyruc contends with the monster and its thrall while attempting to solve the Herald’s riddle. Thochag is attacked by the harpy, but with Tyruc’s help, he deals a devastating blow to the monster. Tyruc’s understanding of Som deepens and he solves the Herald’s riddle, allowing him to summon an avatar of Nirivilo to help him finish the fight.
The Herald of rivers and riddles had a rounded snout, long body, and thick tail reminiscent of an otter. However, he was coated in glistening, teal fur and sported fish-like barbels and fins. He soared from the water onto the harpy, curling around the monster’s body and assaulting it with sharp teeth and claws.
The harpy spun in the air, dipping dangerously close to the river’s rushing waters under the weight of its attacker. It kicked and pecked back until it flung the avatar off of itself and back into the river.
Tyruc’s knees nearly buckled as he felt each blow the harpy landed on the avatar searing within his own body.
The avatar needs your guidance, the true Nirivilo reminded Tyruc, panting excitedly.
Right; command him like a soldier, care for him like a child, love him like myself. Tyruc pressed his mind forward into the water. Maybe I can give him a little boost.
Tyruc extended his hand. A wave formed in the water, and Tyruc mentally directed the avatar to swim up into it. Commanding the water like this taxed him much more than moving the rain had. An ache developed behind his eyes, building into a pulsating pain. He continued to push the water around to cut off the harpy’s renewed efforts of escape, and with a pained growl against the strain, he crashed the wave down onto it with Nirivilo riding inside.
The harpy splashed into the river and thrashed against its rushing flow. Nirivilo bit into one of its wings to drag it under the surface, and Tyruc felt a thrill of triumph. It was dashed with a woman’s cry behind him.
“No!” Zifa leaned against the side of her ruined cabin, watching the battle between Nirivilo and the harpy with horror. “Not her wings! You can’t take her wings!” She staggered toward the embankment as though she were going to wade in herself to protect the monster that had ravaged her and the community around her.
The river will kill her, Nirivilo warned Tyruc, but he was already moving. He tackled her just before she could throw herself into the roiling river.
“Get off me!” she sobbed. “Let me go! Let me die!” She raked her talon-like fingernails against Tyruc’s arms and slashed at his face.
Tyruc fought to pin her arms, saying, “No, Zifa, I won’t! This isn’t you; you sent for the militia. You sent for help! That thing did all of this, and you don’t have to suffer from it anymore.”
Sharp pain exploded across Tyruc’s torso, loosening his grip on the crazed avian woman.
Nirivilo and the harpy emerged from the waves to slam up onto the riverbank. The harpy had its talons dug into his sides like a vice, but the Herald struck back. He opened his jaws wide and clamped down across the monster’s beak, thrashing back and forth.
The monster screamed, a genuine cry instead of the mimicking that once came from the thing’s porous chest. The keening scream did not carry with it the mind-searing effects it once had, but the sheer power of its voice still sent Tyruc and Nirivilo reeling.
I thought we stopped that!
Thochag ended its ability to influence your mind, but a harpy’s voice will never be truly silenced until it is dead.
The harpy was freed from Nirivilo’s attack, but it did not take flight. With the state of its wings, it was likely incapable. It instead stumbled toward its prime victim. The harpy pounced on Zifa. The woman curled into a ball while the monster raked at her with its talons, sobbing and laughing hysterically.
“Nirivilo, go!” Tyruc called. He slung sheets of rainwater against the monster to interrupt it as his aquatic companion slid on his belly across the mud.
Nirivilo pounced onto the harpy and rolled it off of Zifa. The two Heralds worked together to combat the creature, but its ferocity only increased as it was pressed. It battered Nirivilo with its wings and screeched at Tyruc to interrupt his watery attacks. It summoned gusts of foul wind to buffet them back, the gales so sharp they caused cuts on Tyruc's face and arms.
But the monster could not weather their combined efforts for long. Without its puppet Zifa, who still lay fetal in the mud, the harpy was outmatched. Its injuries and frenzied movements made it clumsy, and when Tyruc swept an eddy of water and mud against its legs, it fell and did not rise again. Nirivilo stood over the monster, poised to strike should it show further signs of aggression, but it simply lay there and nattered in a rasp from its monstrous beak,
Auntie Agony came to play,
But her song was turned away.
“Nirivilo,” Tyruc commanded, and the avatar obeyed with a final slash of his claw.
The harpy’s life ended abruptly, but its song did not. The lilting verse continued, now from the woman curled about herself on the ground.
“If you found her stay unkind, then Sister Sorrow will blow your mind.”
Zifa went silent after that, and Tyruc feared she had died. But when she drowsily blinked her unfocused eyes yet made no move to extract herself from the mud, he wondered if death would not have been better. He had been so focused on her survival that he had not considered what living would now be like for the woman who had succumbed to such dark temptations. Could there be any avoiding the blame falling on her for what transpired there? Would it be just if she did?
Tyruc pulled her up to sit upright, and she gave no resistance to being propped up against a chicken coop behind what was left of her cabin. The avatar of Nirivilo nudged him with his snout and took a few meaningful steps toward the windmill. Tyruc spared another look at Zifa, wondering if he needed to secure her somewhere, but she would not be moving from her spot anytime soon.
Tyruc trudged after Nirivilo, a great weariness descending upon him suddenly. However, the terrible events of Zifa’s Farm were not quite finished with him.
Talfen came running out of the windmill. “Something’s wrong with Mister Thochag! He’s calling for you!”
Tyruc’s weariness had to wait. He dismissed the avatar with a misty splash and then pulled the windmill door fully open.
The girl named Lillias gripped her ball of light. It was brighter now, though, and shaking as she held it to her chest. The people in the windmill had moved around, and some bore new injuries.
The young orc man was on the ground not far into the windmill. The Plainfolk woman knelt next to him, a talisman held loosely in her hands and her head tilted. She watched the quick, shallow movements of Thochag’s chest with an attempt at a neutral expression. Tyruc saw the truth writ on her plainly.
“He’s been asking for you,” she said when Tyruc knelt down. “He mentioned someone else, too. Someone named ‘Som’?”
Thochag’s condition could not now be hidden like he had done before. The gash in his side was now one of many. His face and arms were badly battered. But despite his wounds, Thochag cracked his eyes open and formed a twitching smile.
“Did you do it?”
Tyruc placed a hand hesitantly on the young man’s shoulder. “Thanks to you, Thochag. We couldn’t have done it without you.”
“I need to tell you something,” he said, his voice fading to a whisper.
“It can wait. We need to treat you and get you ready for when Sareit gets here with the steam carriage.”
Thochag smiled again as though he found what Tyruc said funny. “I need you to take my axe to my family. It’s important, and it needs to be you.” He coughed a rattling sound and winced against the pain. “Please, Wolf Rider. My family will need you for what’s coming.”
“You’re not making sense, Thochag. Your family needs you, not some stranger.”
“You aren’t some stranger. You’re a Herald of Som, and He sent you here for a reason.” Another coughing fit, worse than the last, racked Thochag’s body.
“Thochag,” Tyruc started, “… how do you know about Som?”
Though he did not open his eyes, Thochag did manage to smile again. “I’ve known of Som since I was a child. I don’t think I really believed any of it until today. But now… a whole lot of things make sense. Better late than never, right?” He opened his eyes again to stare into the rafters above. “Please, Tyruc, take my axe to the farm and make sure my sister Thaumia gets it. You have to take Gilli, Murth, and Sareit with you, too.”
“What—”
“I’ve seen it. He showed me how it goes.” His eyes were slowly closing again, and his breaths had grown long and quiet, his chest barely rising with each inhale.
The Plainfolk woman whispered, “It’s nearly time, I think.”
Tyruc’s eyes stung, and his throat burned. He squeezed Thochag’s shoulder and asked, “What’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know exactly, but I think you’re going to save my family.”
“Are you sure?” he asked with a chuckling sniffle. “You told me how big your family is; I don’t know what I can do for that many people.”
Thochag laughed, too, with a hearty sound that filled Tyruc with vain hope of a miraculous recovery. Then Thochag said his final words in this life. “You are more than capable, Wolf Rider, with Som on your side. He already used you to save me.”
In the early hours of the morning when stillness settled over the young warrior, when Thochag’s soft breathing ended and a long sigh escaped him, and when Tyruc could finally let the tears he had been withholding fall, Nirivilo spoke to him.
Tyruc.
Not now. Please, not now.
Your grief must wait. There are more truths to be revealed.
Indignant irritation flashed through Tyruc’s mind, but he avoided voicing any of the harsh thoughts that came to mind about what Nirivilo could do with his “truths.” Still, it was not without a slight bite that he mentally asked, What now?
Nirivilo did not directly reply. Instead, the sound of flowing water bubbled near his ear then snaked along toward the gloomy back corner of the windmill. The rain had stopped during the night, and faint morning light seeped in from the gaping hole where the loft door had once been.
Throughout the night, the settlers had started in broken cells apart from each other, but slowly the families reconnected. They formed three groups of comfort and gratitude that all had survived the night. But now, as the invisible river wound through them and narrowed its channel, Tyruc spotted an individual who reclined away from the rest.
Tyruc approached the form. He found it difficult to distinguish the individual’s features in the dim due to how dark the skin was. That fact alone bristled Tyruc with a foreboding sense of recognition. When he finally got close enough to see who lay there, the bristling flared to an alarm.
Because lying there was someone who could not be there. Someone Tyruc saw in a vision boarding the steam engine. Someone he himself had carried, bloody and unconscious, into the Honeycomb Inn. Someone who could not possibly be in two places at once.
Then the Deepfolk man named Murth opened one of his eyes and, in a lilting voice Tyruc found frustratingly familiar, said, “Well fancy meeting you again.”
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