Tales of Noreela 04: The Island Read Online Free PDF Page B

and beneath it, ripping away structures that had stood for longer than anyone knew. Timber buildings seemed to disintegrate almost before the wave touched them, submitting to the inevitable. The water’s texture changed, made sharp and heavy by the detritus it had picked up, and it boiled up the hillsides.
    The first stone bridge, spanning the River Pav across the throat of the harbor, collapsed beneath the onslaught.
    Across the narrow valley, on the much steeper slopes of Drakeman’s Hill, the water seemed to rise and rise. Forced into the narrow alleys and paths, it spurted upward and outward—sprays that carried parts of the land with them. Shattered buildings tumbled into the waters.
    “By all the Black!” Namior shouted in despair, shocked by what she was seeing and filled with a deep, dark sense of hopelessness.
    Kel pressed his face beside hers and said nothing, because there was really nothing to say.
    Namior looked along the hillside to where her house stood. It was still safe. The waters roiled farther down the slope, smashing and breaking and pouring their awful energy into the destruction of the village.
    The wave was broken at last, and before a huge cloud of spray and mist rose high enough to block the view, Namior could look down at the harbor and see what was left. There was not much. The mole had crumbled in several places. She could not make out any sign of the dozens of boats that had been moored there, and the harbor wall itself was vague, shattered and collapsed so that its true form was no longer visible. The buildings were mostly gone, only a few walls left standing,and their insides were home to surging, filthy water. It was as if Pavmouth Breaks had only ever been a painting, and a giant hand had come to smudge the image away.
    The ground continued to shake, and for a beat Namior thought the hillsides would slide down into the ruined valley, taking all those surviving structures with them. Pavmouth Breaks would be gone. She closed her eyes and rested her hands on the wall before her, trying to commune with the land, but she could not concentrate. Magic
observed
, she could feel that; it watched what was happening. But it could offer no easy explanation. If this wave was a part of the language of the land, then it was a roar of outrage.
    The front of destruction had passed them and was traveling up the valley. The wave had dropped into a surging mass of water that pushed up, colliding with the River Pav and combining with it to wreak more chaos and devastation.
    Namior could see roughly where her home was, and everything there seemed as it was. “Mother,” she said.
    “We’ll go down,” Kel said.
    “No, we can’t. What if—?”
    “It’s your family,” he said into her ear, just loud enough to defeat the continuing roar. “That’s reason enough.”
    She turned her head so that they were face-to-face, and she kissed him. She did not need to say anything else.
    The others were stirring, galvanized from the shock into which they had been frozen. Trakis and Mell looked at Namior and Kel, their faces grave. Namior knew that Mell’s parents lived down close to the harbor, her father a scarred old fisherman with one leg and countless tales, her mother a net maker, who cooked the best fishtail bakkett she’d ever tasted. Mell nodded without speaking, then turned to leave.
    Namior grabbed her arm. “I need to check on mine, quickly, but then I’ll be there,” she said.
    Mell’s lips pressed together, and as she and Trakis left Namior saw tears in the fisherwoman’s eyes.
    “Come on,” Kel said.
    They headed back down beside the Dog’s Eyes—Neak was standing before his tavern, looking down into the valley in a daze from which they could not rouse him—and then along the path toward Namior’s house. A machine stopped for them, lowering itself and offering a ride as if nothing had happened.
    Namior thought Kel said something as they passed by the machine, but she could not be sure.