THE DEVOURED EARTH
The Fourth
Book of the Cataclysm
by Sean
Williams
"What does it mean to be human? It's more than the right number of arms,
legs, fingers and toes, the ability to talk, and walking upright. It's more than the Change and the art we
make. It's more than all of this, and
less. We follow a path through the
realms that makes us uniquely different to any other creature. Not all the realms, for there are more than
we can imagine, of every possible flavour and logic. We inhabit just three, and they define our
character as surely as a fish is defined by the sea or a snake by the earth.
"That's not to say that we can't aspire
to transcend the limitations of our environment. We are dreamers, we humans, and what lies
outside has always held a fascination.
But we must remember that the achievement of that dream carries a high
price. Sometimes the boundary is too
easy to cross. We should not lightly set
aside our humanity, because it's not always possible to get it back."
A Scribe's Book of
Questions
"Prologue"
Out of
the darkness, something came--something as alien to the human mind as it was to
the world humans inhabited. It passed
through realms as easily as a beast might cross a stream, yet it was not, by
nature, a wanderer. It possessed desires
no earthly being had ever imagined; it craved satiation in ways beyond
description.
It hungered.
But it
told itself to be patient. Its time was
nearing. Soon, the waiting and watching
would be over, and the human world would know its face.
Then its
need, finally, would be fulfilled.
"The Breach"
"What is the shape of the world? The answer to that question depends entirely
on where you standing."
A Scribe's Book of
Questions
Everything
hurt. Skender could barely move without
confronting that grim reality. From the
pounding of his temples to the chill biting at his toes, not one part of his
body had been spared. His appetite was
nonexistent, he was unable to sleep, and when he stood up too fast, his head
spun like a top. The tea brewed by Griel
and his two Panic balloonists to ward off the worst of the symptoms filled his
bladder faster even than ordinary tea, so he spent much of every day with his
legs tightly crossed.
He
refused to say anything, though, and not just because he knew everyone aboard
the blimp was feeling the same effects of their staggered ascent as him. The memories of his rough treatment at
He felt
her watching him even as he concentrated on Mage Kelloman's sun-catching
charm. Opening one eye a crack, he saw
her standing at the fore of the boat-like gondola, near Griel. Her black hair caught the sunlight and glowed
with mahogany highlights. The skin of
her cheeks was as golden-brown as the wooden instrument panel before her. Dressed in a heavy wool overcoat and gloves,
she had swivelled slightly to look back at him.
A faint smile floated on her full lips.
His whole body tingled in response.
The blimp
was the biggest balloon he had ever seen, and the enclosed gondola it supported
was roomy enough for thirty people, but he had never craved privacy so much as
he had during every moment of their journey so far. Barely had she told him her heart-name than
they had been whisked out of the Panic city and taken to Milang, where Marmion
had been coordinating the biggest expedition, according to local records, ever
mounted to the very top of the mountains.
Since then, the only moments they'd found to be alone came very late at
night, when everyone else was asleep, or during brief mountaineering
expeditions while the blimp was moored to a jagged cliff face. And even then, with altitude sickness clawing
at their guts and skulls, there was only so much they felt like doing.
Hana, he whispered to himself. Hana, I
think I--
"Eyes
on the job, my boy," said a gruff, high-pitched voice from beside
him. "Eyes on the job, or you and
your friend will never get a second's peace again."
Skender
clenched his eyes shut and ignored the red-hot flush rising up to fill his
cheeks. He hadn't meant his thoughts to
wander so much, let alone leak to the point where Mage Kelloman could pick up
the details.
"I'm
sorry," he said, clutching at the shreds of his concentration, and his
dignity. "I didn't mean--"
"Don't
get your tights in a tangle." The
Mage Kelloman's slender hand touched his shoulder. "We all feel it. We're tired and impatient, easily
distracted. But the end is in
sight. By this night's fall, we could
finally be on level ground. And then, think
of it: so much stone and bedrock to explore!
None of this scavenging for the sun's meagre rays. We'll have real power then, boy. We'll be in our element."
"What's
that, Mage Kelloman?" came Sky Warden Eisak Marmion's voice from the fore
of the gondola. "Is the strain
proving too much? We could pause and
allow you a breather, if you'd like."
"I
certainly would not," the mage said, his tone artificially crisp. "I was merely remarking to my young
friend here that we could provide a little more lift. If you can handle it, of course."
Marmion titled
his head. "More lift, not
less? Are you sure?"
"As
sure as eggs. I for one am keen to
stretch my legs."
"You
speak for us all, I suspect." A
rustle of agreement swept through the gondola, from Griel and the Panic tending
the balloon's stays and control surfaces to Lidia Delfine. Even the Twins, so often caught in their own
private world, nodded.
"Very
well, then. One final push and it will
be done. Thank you, Mage Kelloman. When you're ready, we'll put your extra
effort to good use."
Kelloman
bowed with exaggerated dignity, giving the body of his host--a young woman
whose mind had long since fled--gravitas far beyond its years.
"What
do you think you're doing?" Skender hissed to him as the wardens returned
to the charms made by Panic engineers and reinforced by foresters in
Milang. "We're stretched too thin
as it is!"
"Quiet,
boy." The mage made a minute
adjustment to the charm scorched onto the wooden floor of the gondola at his
feet. "We have work to do."
"But--"
"Work.
This isn't a holiday, you know."
Skender
swallowed his irritation and sought the still centre required to shore up the
mage's effort. Their job was simple: to
draw energy from the sun and channel it into the balloon's many charms, where
Griel,
Forty
pinpricks made him jump as the mage's pet--a tiny brown-furred bilby with
pointed ears and big eyes--leapt into his lap and climbed onto his
shoulder. He patted it, encouraging it
to settle.
"Concentrate,
boy," the mage growled through his borrowed lips, and Skender willed himself
to stop thinking entirely. Through the
Change and his link with Kelloman, he dissolved into the charms enveloping the
skin of the blimp. As well as being
larger than any other balloon in the forest, it was easily one of the most
complex machines he had ever seen. From
the glowing rotors thrumming outside the gondola, two each to port and
starboard, to the web of charms maintaining everything from elevation to
insulation, the blimp required constant attention to make sure it functioned as
required.
A strong
gust of wind shook the blimp, making his stomach lurch. His eyes opened automatically, just for a
second.
Instead,
he simply crossed his fingers and hoped for the best.
#
They had
left Milang six days earlier, ascending into the clouds three dawns after the
fire that had nearly burned the forest city to the ground. The mission was a cooperative venture;
everyone caught up in the awakening of forces from the previous Cataclysm had
joined together to see what lay to the northeast, where the Twins assured them
the greatest threat lay. No one knew
quite what to expect. Skender didn't
take any encouragement from floods, murderous wraiths, earthquakes and man'kin
invasions--but with no seers remaining to peer into the future all they had to
go on were a smattering of hints, from prophecies old and new, plus their own
wits.
A series
of delicate soundings taken from Milang and at several points along their
journey unveiled the shape of the mountain range beyond the region known to the
Panic and the foresters. It was, in
fact, several mountain ranges combined--at least seven converging on a central
point, like a giant starfish or spider with limbs reaching across the plains. At the intersection of those limbs, the earth
bulged up in a mighty rupture. This, the
highest point of the mountain ranges, was the mission's primary
destination. Kelloman's soundings weren't
clear enough to tell what exactly lay there, but he spoke in guarded terms of a
circular patch of elevated land several kilometres across. The peaks surrounding that land were
unstable, shaking and rumbling under the influence of forces Skender could
barely imagine.
When the
balloon reached the uppermost limits of the forester's knowledge, then flew
beyond even the Panic's charts, they relied on Kelloman's soundings to find a
way through steep valleys and broad fissures, rising further and further with
every hour. On the second day, they
punched through the uppermost layers of the permanent cloud cover hugging the
lower expanses and found themselves flying for the first time in clear
air. From then on, navigation became
somewhat easier, but the daunting mass of mountain still looming above them
reminded them never to become complacent.
Vast shelfs of snow and ice awaited them, more dangerous in their own
way than cloud. The balloon couldn't fly
continuously, and safe docking points became harder and harder to find. The sound of whining chimerical engines
echoed off sheer rock faces, occasionally triggering avalanches of stupendous
proportions.
Yet,
despite the hostile conditions, there were signs of life. Streamers of smoke rose from small
communities huddling in sheltered niches.
Paths crisscrossed several more accessible regions, linking caves almost
invisible until the balloon came directly alongside them. Once, when surmounting a broad spur and
coming into view of the valley beyond, the mission had been confronted by a
vast, flat roof large enough to cover two Milangs. Canted at a steep angle to prevent snow from
building up, it sheltered nearly a third of the valley below. Exactly what it protected was unknown to
either Panic or forester, and was likely to remain that way, for nothing and no
one emerged to stare at the intruder in the skies. Few did anywhere, made cautious by the events
of recent weeks.
Everywhere
they went they saw evidence of the flood.
Deep channels that diverged and joined traced a complex path down the
side of the mountains. It soon became
clear that that the torrent that had filled the Divide had taken many routes
from its source. Several of these
channels had played havoc with the region's struggling communities, sweeping away
animals, crops and homes. Some of the
channels were still carrying water that surged and roiled foamily as it
fell. One waterfall dropped so far that from
its middle Skender could see neither top nor bottom. For one enchanting but unnerving hour he could
pretend that flow was literally endless.
By the
fourth day, he had begun to wonder if their journey, too, might have no
end. Upwards and upwards they strove,
snatching every meter of altitude from a reluctant sky. With painful slowness the cloud level dropped
away and the vista of jagged, twisted stone below them became even more
terrifying, yet the summit, visible only as a dark line against the sky far
above, seemed to come no closer. The
strain on the balloon's mingled crew increased, with altitude sickness taking a
severe toll on minds and bodies that would have been fatigued anyway.
Nowhere
was that more obvious than in the rivalry between Kelloman and Marmion. The air had always been tense between the two
men, both ambitious and masters of their own very different disciplines. That tension presently manifested in the form
of fiercely pitched battles of pointed politeness. Skender, caught up in the ongoing campaign since
he was nearly a mage himself and therefore the only ally Kelloman had to lean
on, found his impatience rising with both men.
What was the point of expending so much energy on pointless
one-upmanship? It only made the rest of
the crew more uncomfortable than they would otherwise have been. The latest manifestation of that repressed
conflict was no different.
A long,
sustained shudder rippled through the gondola, sending the Panic crew scurrying
about, checking instruments and adjusting control surfaces. One opened a hatch in the ceiling and slipped
quickly outside. A wave of bitter cold
swept down the interior to where Skender knelt at the back, doing his best to
concentrate. He shuddered in sympathy
despite the thick layers of thermal underwear under his black robe. The caulking around the gondola's joins and
seams was far from perfect, allowing hair-thin, knife-sharp breezes to slash
past his ears. The outside was colder
still.
He stole
another peek forward. Marmion had joined
"That
looks promising," Skender heard
"Fifty
metres to the summit," the warden announced to the crew in general. "There's a pass near the top. We're aiming for that. Once through and out of this wind, the going
should be steadier."
So close! Skender thought, but it still seemed another
world away. He remembered something the
twins had said once about the Second Realm being next to the First in the sense
that one second was next to another.
They occupied the same space, and yet were quite separate, and crossing
from one to the other could be incredibly difficult. That was how he felt about the top of the
mountains. It was there, and had always
been, but getting to it had proven far from easy.
"Would
you like to rest before the final push?" asked Kelloman without either
opening his eyes or moving from his meditative posture. "If the wind is problematic--"
"That
won't be necessary," said Marmion with a faint smile. "In fact, I thought we might increase
the pace. There's no point holding back
now. The sooner we get to the top, the
sooner we can rest."
"Why
not?" Behind Kelloman's nonchalant
reply, Skender sensed exhaustion and determination in equal measure. "I'll give you all the potential you
need."
"Right,
then. Let's get on with it."
Someone
groaned. Skender couldn't tell who, but
he echoed the sentiment. Not for the
first time, Skender wished Sal were there to help them. With his wild talent behind the push upwards,
the journey would be over in moments.
But Sal had his own quest to pursue.
Mage
Kelloman resumed his concentration on the sun-catching charms. The gondola's engines throbbed at a deeper
pitch, casting a golden light on the cliff face as the blimp resumed its upward
journey. Fifty metres didn't sound like
far; Skender could have walked it with no effort at all. But walking was very different from flying,
especially so close to the theoretical limits of powered balloon travel. Every metre was a challenge
"That's
the way," Marmion said. "That's
the way." He ran a hand across his
bald scalp. The last of his hair had
fallen out on the long journey, leaving his head as smooth and round as an egg.
"One last push and it'll be over."
"You're
in entirely the wrong field, you know," said
Marmion
didn't rise to the bait. The blimp
seemed to be hanging dead in the air, its upward drift was so subtle.
"Mage
Kelloman, a skerrick more oomph if you wouldn't mind. The charms are at their breaking point."
"A
skerrick? Why, certainly." The mage's voice was frostily formal, and he
did find the extra potential from somewhere.
"That's
the way," Marmion breathed again.
The words
became a mantra Skender clung to as the metres slid slowly by. He lacked the perspective of those at the
front of the gondola, but he could make out the cliff face through the nearest
window. It was moving, slowly but surely.
The blimp
swayed above them, rattling the gondola's occupants like nails in a tin.
"Hold
fast," Marmion encouraged them all, moving down the gondola's central
aisle, brushing shoulders with his one hand.
The other arm hung close to his gut, wrapped in the folds of his
blue-clad sleeve. "We're almost
there. Almost..."
Skender
closed his eyes tightly and put everything he had into the final stretch. He saw nothing but the complex curves and
axes of the sun-catching charm; he felt nothing but the sun's potential as it
swept through him and into the interstices of the blimp. Kelloman's mind blazed feverishly beside his,
a shining example to follow. Yet there
was something dangerous about that fire too, as though it could in a second
turn on itself, and consume the mind that stoked it. If Kelloman's concentration faltered for a
second, if the sun's output changed even minutely...
Wind
struck the blimp from an unexpected direction, prompting a new series of
rattles and creaks, and a rising mutter of voices. His eyes flickered open. He blinked to focus them. The gondola hung broadside-on to the cliff
face. Through the window nearest him on
the starboard side he saw the bottom of a massive cleft in the dark stone. As though a giant sword had hacked a notch in
the uppermost ramparts of the mountains, the sides of the cleft were step and
jagged. Its V-shaped base was clogged
with dirty snow. Wind rushed down it
with a sustained roaring sound, making the blimp sway. The vessel shook as concentrations failed and
charms flickered. It held its position,
just.
Wisps of
cloud wreathed the sides of the cleft.
Skender strained to see through them to what lay on the other side of
the wall of stone. It was thicker than
he had imagined, however. All he could
see was the cleft itself, snaking off into the distance like some high altitude
version of the Divide.
"Well,"
said Marmion, "it appears we still have some way to go."
"Forward
will be a welcome change to up,"
"Indeed
it will. Mage Kelloman, I thank you for
your hard work and suggest your conserve your strength through this section of
our journey. We have enough potential in
reserve to fly some distance. Let us and
Griel take the burden from here."
The mage
looked for a moment as though he might argue, but exhaustion won out over pride
for once. "I--yes, thank you. I will rest for a moment."
Skender
helped the mage's borrowed body to its feet and eased him into a chair. He was surprised as always by Kelloman's
slightness
"The
way looks clear of obstructions," Marmion told the others, "but the
winds are going to be tricky. Keep it
steady as we go. We haven't come this
far to crash."
And get stuck, Skender added silently to himself, at the top of a mountain so far from home.
The
propellers whirred at a deeper pitch than before, turning the blimp around to
face nose-first into the window. The
deck rose and fell beneath him with a steady rhythm as they slid gracefully
into the cleft. Skender peered out
either side of the gondola, newly energised by the achievement of their quest and
unable to sit passively by as the next stage unfolded. Lidia Delfine and her bodyguard-cum-fiancée,
Heuve, did the same. Snow drifts as
thick as houses lay below, hugging folds and wrinkles the pallid sun couldn't breach. Nothing but granite was visible between them,
black and forbidding like ancient, stained bones.
#
The twins
had had too much time to stare out the windows as the endless grey cliff slid
by, interrupted by ledges, ramparts, shelfs of snow, and mighty fissures, but
essentially unchanging. Rock was rock. In their original earthly life they had been
used to landscapes where time and nature had flattened the land like teeth worn
down by grinding. They hadn't seen snow or
mountains until their disastrous trip to
The eyes
of the Homunculus, the artificial body in which they were now confined, glazed
over as the walls of the cleft slid by.
Their previous disconnection from the world had faded at last; there was
no hiding now from its complexities and perils.
The same was true of themselves; their memories had cleared as though a
curtain had parted. Where unwillingness
or uncertainty had shielded them from the worst of their pasts, now nothing
protected them. The feel of Locyta's
knife stabbing into Seth's chest; the draci straddling Hadrian; the
confrontation with the Sisters of the Flame...
In Sheol,
under the guidance of the Sisters, they had each explored their life-trees--the
many-branched tangle of possibilities that revealed every conceivable event in
their lives from the perspective of the Third Realm. Only in one world-line--one long, tapering
branch--had they seen a chance of escape from their fated deaths at the hands
of Yod. Hadrian had followed that
world-line to the point where it suddenly diverged into possibility again, and
there he had stopped. There he had seen
a chance that Yod would fail. That had
been enough to give him hope.
Both of
them now wished that he had gone further, to see what actual chance awaited them.
How would Yod be beaten? What did
the twins need to do to ensure their survival?
Who, out of those who had helped and hindered them since their arrival
in the new world, would live and who would die?
Skender, Marmion and the others had been strangers once, but were no
longer. They mattered too.
Either
way, Yod was back, rattling at the bars if not yet fully free. It had devoured the Lost Minds in the Void
Beneath, gaining strength for...something.
With every day's ascent, they felt its shadow growing darker and
stronger, looming deeper and more ominously.
Now, with the end of their journey so very close, the shadow sucked at
them like a black hole, tugging them onward and inward to their destiny.
Reflected
in the window facing the cliff, they saw the black face of the Homunculus
staring back at them. A shadow with hard
edges, it had no recognisable features: no eyes, no nostrils, no wrinkles, no
personality at all.
Who's an ugly boy, then? whispered Seth into Hadrian's
mind.
Hadrian
felt absurdly like laughing--but the feeling had gloom at its heart as dark as
the Homunculus's aspect. I reckon we've lost weight.
Something
glowing with a faint silver light caught their eye, deeper in the
reflection. They leaned closer to the
pane of glass in order to see more clearly.
The reflection of the Homunculus's face seemed to swallow the entire
view.
What's that? he asked.
Low in his view was a shining cross, roughly where his chest might have
been.
Not a cross, little brother. An ankh.
Hadrian
understood, then. In the Second Realm,
Seth had confronted eight godlike beings known as the Ogdoad. The ancient sign they had marked him with had
enabled them to survive in the Void Beneath when so many other minds had not. Seth had taken the mark for granted for
centuries, and Hadrian had had no reason to think of it. Only at that moment did they realise what a
great boon it had been.
It stopped us from dissolving into the hum, Seth said.
So we thought. But we know now that the hum was Yod itself, which
means--
It protects us from Yod, Hadrian finished. Does
that mean Yod can't kill us?
Don't get too excited. Maybe it just stops Yod from noticing us.
Hadrian
leaned away from the reflection, and his brother came with him. Still,
it's something.
It is indeed.
The twins
pondered the new understanding of themselves as the blimp traversed the wall of
mountains. The Homunculus was immune to
altitude sickness, but cold bothered it.
They were sleeping more and more, the higher they went, sometimes as
long as three hours a night, and their dreams were spectacular. In one of them, Yod had looked like a giant
clown whose mouth was the entrance to a glittering fairground. Rows upon rows of people queued patiently and
filed inside. The clown's eyes grew
redder and darker as they filled up with blood until finally they spilled a
flood of crimson tears down grimacing cheeks and swept the twins away.
Skender
came and sat next to them, bunching up his black robe in order to keep the
drafts from his stockinged legs.
"What
do you think?" he asked them. The
white-skinned young mage wasn't looking at them or his girlfriend, for a
change; his attention was firmly fixed on what lay beyond the windows.
Only then
did Hadrian realise that they had almost reached the end of the cleft. People peered and whispered excitedly among
themselves at the first glimpses of their destination. His first impression was that a whole other
range lay in the misty distance--as though they had crossed one barrier only to
encounter another just as large beyond it.
Then he realised that the northern and southern ends of that range
curved west to form a giant circle.
"A
crater," Seth said. "Like a
volcano, only much bigger."
"I've
read about volcanoes in the Book of Towers," Skender said. "They're mountains that vomit fire and
ash, right?"
Seth
nodded, studying the far side of the crater with unease. The jagged peaks were white with ice and snow
as though dusted by a giant baker.
"A
volcano with a lake in it?" asked
"How
could there be a lake up here?" Skender asked. "Why hasn't it frozen over?"
"Both
good questions," said Warden Banner, seated not far from them with a
crutch held tightly in her hand. Since
breaking her leg during the attack of the Swarm on Milang, she had been
confined to light duties. "Here's another:
are those houses down there?"
Sure
enough, on the southern shoreline of the lake huddled a cluster of low, black
roofed dwellings, perhaps forty in all, with a long, narrow pier protruding
into the water.
No, the
twins told themselves on a closer inspection.
Not into the water. The shoreline
had dropped precipitously in recent times, by the look of the frosty mud caked
below its original high-mark. Now the
houses stood twenty metres back from the actual shore, and the pier led to
nothing but more mud. There were no
boats visible anywhere.
"Who
would live up here?" asked Griel.
"Maybe
no one, now," said Marmion, and Seth could see his point. No smoke issued from the houses; no people
walked the village's narrow streets.
Skender
looked disappointed. "I was
expecting something grander, I'll admit."
"Be
careful what you wish for," Hadrian told him. "I've had enough excitement for one
lifetime."
"Two,
even," Seth added.
"True,
true," Skender said. "Do you
recognise anything? Is any of this
familiar to you?"
Hadrian
shook his head.
"Look
at the lake," said his brother, pointing with one black finger. "They're not islands."
Attention
shifted from the village to the centre of the lake. Three broad columns stood out of the water, dozens
of metres high and as black as jet. One
loomed higher than the others, its top truncated as though sheered off by a
giant knife. The light caught it and
radiated sickly gleams.
"Tower
Aleph," Seth said. "That's
from the Second Realm."
"So
you do recognise something?"
Marmion asked, peering as closely at the twins as he was at the distant
structures.
"What
Seth's saying," said Hadrian, "is that these are the tops of three
towers Yod was building before it made the big leap. They were supposed act as bridges across Bardo
when the Cataclysm took effect. We
stopped Yod in its tracks, of course, so I guess these got stuck halfway
too."
"I've
never heard of them," said Skender.
"You'd think they'd be at least mentioned in the Book of
Towers."
The twins
had no opinion on that, just a similar, nagging feeling of being left in the
dark.
Skender
glanced at his girlfriend at the other end of the gondola. The Asian-looking miner from Laure winked
back at him. Embarrassed, the twins
looked away. The mutual obsession between
the two young lovers reminded them of cold nights in Europe and an unhappy
ending in
Something
moved out of the corner of Hadrian's eye.
On the receding flanks of the cleft, a long-limbed, grey figure broke
cover and took a running leap across the space between it and the gondola. The twins barely had time to recognise the
terrible shape before another followed.
There was no mistaking their intent.
The two hideous creatures leapt with limbs flailing and steel-grey teeth
bared. Long-bladed scissors snipped
where hands should have been.
"Watch
out!" Seth yelled.
Then all
was breaking glass and shrieking wind, and the terrible clash of eight blades
snipping at everything in reach.
#
Devels?
Here? Impossible!
Seth
ignored his brother's mental protest and pushed Skender behind him. His hands went through the young mage's back
until Hadrian added his own impetus to the shove. They forced their way up the aisle to where
Panic and wardens struggled with this new danger. Both groups were exhausted from the long
ascent. Any reserves of strength they
possessed would be sorely tested.
Seth and
Hadrian forced their way through with necessary brusqueness. The two scissor-handed devels lunged and
snapped at anyone within reach, issuing terrible, ear-piercing howls. One of the balloonists fell back with her
throat fatally cut. A roar came from one
side, where the bodyguard Heuve slashed ferociously back at the nearest
devel. The forester looked almost
grateful for something to do, but the expression was soon wiped off his
beardless face--almost literally, as a pair of blades barely missed his
nose. Only a wild lunge backwards saved
him, and a skilful parry from Lidia Delfine defended his exposed stomach from
another slash.
Together,
the two of them drove their adversaries back to the fore of the gondola, where Marmion
and
The
second creature slashed a hole through the ceiling and leapt outside. The twins snatched at its heels too late, and
clambered after it, wary of the blades that instantly snapped at their emerging
head. The creature snarled at them,
prompting memories of crossing of Bardo to the Underworld. Then, a creature identical to the one he was
following had taken Seth by surprise and cut off his hand. The hand had grown back almost instantly,
restored by the persistent impression of himself that was more important in the
Second Realm than actual flesh and blood--but that hadn't lessened the shock
and pain he had experienced.
The
memory gave him an idea. As the blades
snapped at them again, he raised his right arm and thrust it deliberately
between them.
The
blades bounced off his skin with a shower of sparks, repelled by the
Homunculus's rock-solid maintenance of his sense of self. The devel shrieked in frustration. He twisted his arm around and freed it, and
lashed out with a clenched fist for the creature's face.
It
recoiled with a hiss. Together, Seth and
his brother slithered out of the gondola, mindful of their footing on the
ice-rimed wooden exterior. Three metres
above them, the giant bladder strained and rocked, held down by dozens of thin,
charm-strengthened cables. Strange
geometric shapes raced across its balloon's light-brown skin.
The devel
raised its scissor-handed arms and faced the twins. Wind snatched at them as they planted their
four feet wide and held their four arms high.
"Who
sent you?" Seth shouted.
"Culsu? Yod?"
Grey eyes
blinked at them. They didn't doubt that
it could understand them. They had seen
enough of the new world to know that Hekau worked just as well as it had in the
Second Realm: anyone who wanted to be understood could be understood, regardless what language they were actually
speaking.
For a
second they thought the devel might reply.
It hesitated, anyway, tilting its head to one side as though wondering
who or what they were.
Then it
reached out with both arms and began snipping cables.
"No!" The twins jumped forward, knocking the
creature flat on its back. It didn't
retaliate. In its brief moment of
consideration it seemed to have decided to care less about its own life than
bringing down the gondola. Even as it
sprawled across the slippery roof, its scissor-hands snapped at every cable and
wire within reach. Each sharp twang sent
a nail of fear through the twins. How
many cables could snap before the whole contrivance unravelled, sending the
gondola tumbling down to the unforgiving rock and snow below?
The
balloon shuddered. Its angle of flight steepened
upwards. The twins threw themselves
bodily at the devel, knowing they had to deal with the threat quickly now. Griel was taking his charges away from any
further attacks but inadvertently increasing their danger in the process.
The
roaring of propellers grew louder as the twins wrestled with their assailant,
tumbling from side to side through the forest of cables. With a snarl, the creature slipped free and
lunged for a dense knot near the rear of the balloon. The twins caught it in a flying tackle,
sending it skidding across the slippery gondola. The points of its scissors struck off
splinters of ice as it sought to find a grip.
The attempt failed. Emitting a
high-pitched cry, it slipped over the side and was sucked into the balloon's
rear-port engine.
Propeller
blade and scissor-creature met with a powerful explosion. The twins ducked their heads. Pieces of both whizzed past them, ricocheting
off the gondola and arcing into open air.
When the
echoes of the explosion faded, they raised their head to inspect the
damage. All that remained of the
propeller and its chimerical engine was a smoking black stump. A high-pitched whistling, growing louder by
the second, came from several jagged tears in the balloon.
"Crap." Seth drove them back to the hole in the
gondola. If Griel didn't already know
about the damage, he would need to immediately.
The balloon shook and rolled, already destabilised by the severed
cables. How long it would remain
airworthy was beyond his knowledge.
"I
know, I know. I'm doing everything I
can," said the Panic soldier as they dropped into the chaotic
interior. The pilot console was emitting
a persistent chiming sound; needles dipped and shuddered on every gauge.
"Is
there anything we can do?"
"Just
hold tight. I'm going to try to bring us
down safely." Griel tugged at
levers and pushed buttons. The balloon
swayed giddyingly. "With luck,
we'll make it."
Seth
filtered out the sound of people shouting in order to concentrate on what lay
through the shattered windows ahead: the crater lake and its dark ruins.
"I'd
be happy to land in one piece," said Marmion, gripping a black-stained
wooden pole for balance.
"Give
me space and I'll do what I can."
Griel waved them back, and
"If
there's anything we can do," Hadrian started to say again.
"There
is," said Marmion, pulling them towards the rear of the shaking
gondola. "You can tell me what those
things were, just in case there are more waiting for us when we land."
The
balloon shook and canted downwards. The
twins did their best to ignore it.
"It's a devel," Seth said.
"They lived in the Underworld before the realms were jammed
together. These particular devels were
ruled by a minor dei called Culsu."
"A
dei?" The warden's expression was
simultaneously worried and puzzled.
"Is that something like a god?"
"Someone
probably worshipped them at some point.
I don't know. Their job when I
knew them was to cut up the souls of dead people as they tried to get to the
Second Realm. The remains would be given
to Yod to eat."
"So
they ultimately worked for Yod."
"Yes." Seth watched black-spattered Lidia Delfine
focussing an eyeglass on the lake's dark shoreline. It was growing visibly closer. "I guess they still do."
"Do
you think there could be more of them?"
"I'd
be amazed if there weren't."
Griel had
taken a measure of control over the balloon.
With a discernible effort, it was turning towards the nearest
village. Seth swallowed his
misgivings. There might still be people
around, huddling for shelter from the cold and the devels. They might need help as badly as the
expedition, when it landed among them.
"Take
your seats," called Griel from the front of the gondola. "We're going down."
"And
by that," said
The
balloon lurched and tilted so steeply that even the Homunculus's four legs had
trouble keeping purchase. Seth was
dismayed to see how quickly they had fallen in such a short time. He and Hadrian helped the others to safety,
then took a position of their own towards the rear. Through the cracked window beside them, he
could see the black scar left by the destroyed engine and the slopes of the
crater rising up to meet them. There was
no sign of more devels--or worse.
If the towers are here, Hadrian began.
Then Yod might be too, Seth finished. We've known
it would be around somewhere. Doesn't
change anything.
It changes everything. It's not a computer game or a dream. It's right here, right now. Everything we went into the Void for is about
to happen.
It's much too late for second thoughts.
I know.
I'm not having them. I'm just--
Terrified.
Yes, me too.
They
clung tight to the seat as the icy earth came up at them and, with a deafening
crunch, the gondola bucked beneath them.
"The Trail"
"If love conquers all, love itself must
be conquered."
The Book of Towers, Exegesis 4:19
On the
fifth day Sal, Kail and Highson argued, as they had every other day. This time the debate was over whether to mark
the coming of night by camping halfway up a cliff face or to continue to the
top in the darkness, there to wait for dawn to pick up the trail of the
man'kin. Sal wanted to push on, hoping
to keep travelling without pause. Kail
was more pragmatic, pointing out that the chances of losing the trail entirely
were high. Highson stayed out of the
discussion for the most part, except when brought into it by Kail or Sal. He didn't come out and say it, but Sal knew
why that was, and that angered him more than Kail's stubborn refusal to change
his mind.
"So
you're tired," Sal told Highson.
"Big deal. We all are. Do you want special treatment? Do you want to stay behind?"
"I'm
not asking for anything, Sal."
"But
you're not agreeing with me. You don't
want to go any further."
"I
can see where Habryn's coming from. And
you too, for the record. I just don't want
to take sides."
"Do
you wish we'd stayed at the village?"
His
father sighed, his broad features shadowed by the furred hood keeping the cold
off his scalp. "I don't want to
argue, Sal. I'll leave the decision up
to you. I trust your instincts."
Sal retreated
into himself to spare the men his frustration.
The Goddess knew they'd endured plenty of it in recent days. Following the trail of the man'kin was simply
taking too long. While the three of them
limped their way across ever steeper, ever more rugged terrain, Shilly drew
further and further out of reach. Deeply
etched the trail might be--for creatures of solid stone could not tread
lightly, even across a mountainside--but it wouldn't last forever. Every morning Sal woke afraid that this would
be the day they lost the trail and had to turn back.
The heat
of his anger kept the wind's chill at bay, but he could still feel it biting
into his nose and face all the same. His
fingers felt half frozen even in their gloves.
Every muscle ached from climbing with a heavy pack on his back. In his mind's eye, all he saw was Shilly
getting further and further ahead of him.
Every minute they paused, they slipped more behind. The man'kin didn't stop to sleep; they
climbed on into the night, every night.
"Damn
them," he said, looking up at the frosty stars. "They're too fast, and we should've left
sooner."
"Don't
blame yourself," said Highson.
"I'm
not. And I refuse to blame Shilly. That doesn't leave me with many options,
though." Highson went to say something,
but Sal cut him off. "I'd rather
just keep moving. Catching up will solve
all our problems."
"They
have to stop eventually," Kail said.
The
thought offered Sal no comfort. They had
been over this many times before. If
they knew where the man'kin were going, they could head them off before they
arrived. But beyond up, the tracker could guess little in the unfamiliar terrain.
"So
do we," Sal said, admitting that much, "but not now."
"All
right," the tracker said, agreeing reluctantly. "But let's stop at the top of the face
and rest. The more tired we are, the
more likely we are to make mistakes, and mistakes will get us killed. That won't help Shilly at all."
Sal
nodded, mentally satisfied but physically dreading the long climb ahead. He tightened the straps of his pack. "Let's get on with it, then."
Highson
said nothing as they resumed their journey.
For a
brief instant, as he pulled his own hood tighter around his ears, Sal heard the
sound of mocking laughter on the wind, but it was gone before he could ask the
others if they heard it too.
#
The
half-full moon cast a cold, silver light over the face of the mountain. The route they followed was less a path than
a series of goat tracks occasionally used by humans too. Below, at the base of the cliff, huddled a
tiny village where they had paused briefly to reprovision. Its lanterns were barely visible now,
shuttered against sinister forces supposedly abroad on the mountains. Sal and his companions had been regarded as
such at first, and never completely earned the villagers trust.
Kail said
that the man'kin and their mysterious companions had climbed straight up the
sheer cliff looming over the small settlement.
While the locals had shivered in their beds, Shilly and the man'kin had casually
scaled an edifice Sal could barely imagine climbing, let alone quickly enough
to keep up. Life in the flat, coastal
At the
top of the path, when they finally reached it, there were no more
arguments. Sal was glad to help Highson
and Kail unfurl their low tent and crawl inside. Sleeping close together for warmth as the
wind howled outside, they had no energy for disagreements. There was only well-earned rest, as dreamless
and barren as the mountain face itself.
That
wasn't true, Sal told himself as he drifted off. The mountain was no more barren than a
desert. Life struggled, but hadn't yet
given up. Just that day, he had found a
spray of bright blue flowers growing from a niche between two giant slabs of
black rock. Tiny red ants crawled up and
down the flower stems. A fragile spider
web connected the two slabs further up.
Even in such extreme conditions, nature found a way.
He would
find a way too. He wouldn't give
up. The man'kin did have to stop eventually, and Shilly with them. She couldn't climb a metre with her bad leg
the way it was. And when he caught up
with her...
That was
where his thoughts always froze. What
happened then? Rescue her? Berate her?
Argue with her over how the world will end?
Sal
thrust all thought of Tom and prophecies from his mind. He could worry about that later. For now, he needed only to rest. That he could accomplish easily enough. All he had to do was close his eyes...
He woke
at dawn. The air inside the tent was
thick with the smell of the three unwashed men it sheltered. He could tell from the rhythm of Kail's
breathing that the tracker was awake, but he too hadn't gotten up. In wordless agreement, they waited until
Highson stirred before making any move to rise.
Kail may have been the oldest by at least two decades but he wasn't
remotely the weakest. Sal's father was
still recovering from his close encounter with death while chasing the
Homunculus across the
After
breaking their fast and stowing their gear, Kail scouted the top of the cliff
in search of the man'kin trail. The hat
he wore in preference to a hood gave him a dark halo and left his face in
shadow. Less than a minute passed before
he called Sal and Highson over.
"Well,
we didn't lose them," he said, pointing out the crushed pebbles and heavy
scrapes indicating the passage of their quarry.
"That's something to be thankful for."
Sal
agreed, telling himself not to think about the time that had passed while the
slept. Kail was right: to push himself
too hard would be to commit suicide. One
slip was all it would take.
The way
ahead looked easier. That was something
else to be thankful for. A winding ridge
led up to the meeting point of two broad expanses. There the ridge became a valley that snaked
higher up into the massive mountain range.
The man'kin tracks clearly went that way, stretching to the limit of
Sal's sight. The sun was still hidden
behind the mass of stone to the east; more would become apparent towards noon,
when the day was at its brightest. They
would reach the alley by then, if Sal's new knowledge of mountain treks could
be trusted. Should any surprises lie in wait
for them there, that would time out well.
"Let's
get moving," he said, not seeing any point in delaying. If the way ahead was easier for them, it
would have been easier for the man'kin too.
Highson
tipped the dregs of his tea onto the grey stone. Thick stubble painted his dark face with
black and grey. "What day is
this?"
"Day
six." Kail shrugged into his pack
and flexed his long limbs. His dark eyes
perfectly matched the stony vista around them.
"My
calluses are getting calluses."
Sal's father stowed his cup in his pack and lifted it onto his
shoulders. "Okay. I'm ready."
Sal
brought up the rear, watching his footing on the ridge as closely as he would
have on a cliff. The slopes to either
side were steep; a tumble would be protracted but just as fatal as if he had
fallen unimpeded. The safety rope connecting
him to Highson and Kail would mean little if he dragged them both after him.
The
steady crunching of their footsteps on cold stones was the only sound they made
that morning.
#
At noon,
when they reached the entrance to the valley, they stopped briefly to reconsider
their options. A chill wind blew from
far above down the V-shaped channel of stone, directly into their faces. Yet another thing that wouldn't have bothered
the man'kin, Sal thought. The skin of
his cheeks was peeling; his eyes felt like pickled onions. The scarf wrapped around his face barely kept
the worst of it at bay.
Looking
up the valley to where the pallid sun was peering around the mountains, a trick
of perspective made him feel profoundly dizzy, as though the world was turning
upside down. He staggered back a step,
into Kail, and looked hastily at the ground.
"You're
feeling it too, huh?" The tracker's
chapped lips formed the words without any sign of embarrassment. "Mountain fever, my teacher used to call
it. Never thought I'd experience it
myself."
Highson
was panting heavily. "Can't seem to
catch my breath."
"It's
going to get worse," Kail declared.
"We need to watch out for each other. At the slightest sign of real disability, we
stop to rest."
"Is
there anything else we can do?" asked Sal, thinking of the man'kin's lead.
"Yes. Give up and turn back."
"No."
"I
knew you were going to say that."
Kail took a swig from his water bottle.
"You do need to be aware, however, that it remains an option."
"Not
for me. You can go back if you want to,
but I'm going on."
"You
can't do this on your own," said Highson from beneath his hood.
"I
will if I have to."
"That
would be stupid. You'll kill yourself."
Anger
flared in Sal like kindling bursting into flame. "Don't you tell me what's stupid or not.
We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you. I'd be back home in Fundelry with Shilly,
safe and warm. There'd be no Homunculus,
no man'kin, no fucking mountains to climb.
Why couldn't you have stayed in the
"You
know why, Sal."
"Sure. My mother.
You should have given up on her like you did before."
Highson
stared up at him, unblinking. "I
tried to save her for you."
"No. You wanted her back. Don't lie about that. You have no idea what I wanted. You tried to bring her back for you."
"For
both of us, then. Do you blame me for
trying?"
Sal threw
his hands up in exasperation, at himself and at Highson. What was the point in going over this? His mother was long-dead. Only Highson, with his bold and stupid plan
of resurrecting her from the Void Beneath, had thought otherwise. If he hadn't built the Homunculus to act as
her new body, the twins would have had nowhere to go. And if the twins hadn't left the Void
Beneath...
"We're
back here again," said Kail, watching them both with hands on hips. "What is it with you two and blame? In the long-run, it doesn't make any
difference."
"It
makes all the difference," said Sal.
"No,
it doesn't. If you get to my age, you'll
realise. And you'll never get to my age
if you go charging up this mountain on your own. Highson's right on that score. I think you know it."
Sal
looked down at his feet. The emotions
boiling in him were so hard to control sometimes, but he rarely exploded so
violently. Mountain fever clearly didn't
improve his temper.
"Do
you really think we should go back?" he asked Kail.
"I
don't, Sal. I never said I did." The tracker's long face was even more
weathered than usual. In just five days,
the mountainous trek had added new lines around his mouth and eyes. He too was recovering from an injury, and that
showed sometimes in a certain stiffness when he moved. "I want to see where the man'kin are
heading as badly as you."
"Good." Sal felt bad, then, for getting angry. Highson and Kail were on his side. They weren't his enemies.
Something
obscured the sun for a split-second. He
looked up, expecting to see clouds overhead.
But the sky was clear of any but the faintest wisps, as it had been
since they'd emerged from the cloud line the previous day. Perfectly clear, in fact.
Now my eyes are going, he told himself.
"Let's
rest," he said, tugging the pack from his shoulders with a sigh and
stretching out flat on the ground. Even
through numerous layers of clothing, the stone was cold against his back and
backside, but it helped clear his head. Six
days of walking and climbing were just the beginning. He had to assume that or else another six
might drive him mad, for it could well take him that long to catch up with
Shilly. But the chance remained that the
man'kin's destination was just at the end of this valley, or perhaps the next
one. He might stumble across her
tomorrow or the day after. That hope
warred with despair, leaving him feeling very much battered between them.
Somehow
he nodded off, and woke to Kail's hand shaking his shoulder. Less than half an hour had passed but his
muscles seemed to have completely seized.
Hobbling like an old man, he set off after the others under sunlight so
weak he could barely feel its warmth on his cheeks.
#
The beast
surprised them shortly after nightfall.
At the summit of the valley, the path had soon devolved into a series of
switchbacks and rockfalls, the latter probably triggered by the man'kin as they
had passed through. Negotiating them consumed
a large proportion of the fading light and left Sal and his companions even
more exhausted than they had been the previous night. The Change was strong in them, but there were
limits. The wardens in particular had
little dominion over stone, leaving Sal to do any heavy lifting required.
By
mirrorlight there was only so much progress to be made. Even Sal could see that. Disturb the wrong rockpile the wrong way and
the whole mountainside could come down on top of them.
Wiping
his dusty gloves on his outermost pants and wishing not for the first time for
a hot bath, Sal took the tent roll from Kail and prepared to unfold it.
A rattle
of stones from further uphill prompted him to look up. A pair of wide eyes gleamed back at him. Seen, the creature abandoned stealth and
bounded downslope towards them. Barely
had Sal uttered a warning cry when it lifted off all fours and leapt right for
him.
Reflected
light flared from sharp claws and teeth.
The animal landed bodily on Sal, knocking him clear off his feet and the
wind from his lungs. Hot fluid gushed
over him. His mouth filled with a salty
copperiness that instantly made him gag.
For too long he flailed helplessly at the beast before remembering the
Change. He was weak after the day's
exertions, but strong enough. With a
flash of burning fur and blood, the beast flew away from him and into solid
stone. The smack of its flesh sickened
him as much as the taste of its blood.
Hands
clutched at him. "Sal, are you all
right?" Highson pulled him to his
feet.
Sal
pushed the hands away. "I--I think
so. Goddess!" He spat.
By the light of a brightly shining mirror, he wiped at his face and chest. Blood as black as the sky above had soaked
through layers of wool almost as far as his skin. "What happened? What is that thing?"
The body
lay limp on its side five metres away. "It's
a Shiva bear," said Kail, crossing to inspect it. "A hungry one, by the look of it. They normally hunt only on moonless
nights. This one must've been desperate."
Just an
animal, then. That was something. Sal had feared that they'd encountered more
wraiths or worse. But this creature was
little larger than a big dog, with shaggy reddish fur and a broad snout. Nothing more sophisticated than a bow and
arrow could have killed it.
Highson
still fussed at him, as though unwilling to accept his word that he was
okay. "It came out of nowhere. Habryn threw something. A knife, I think."
They both
turned to look at the tracker. He had
bent over the corpse and pulled a slender, steel blade from its throat. Sal swallowed, amazed by the man's speed and
accuracy. "You know these things?"
he asked.
"By
reputation." The tracker ambled
back, his eyes avoiding the light, taking in the night all around them
instead. "They travel in pairs."
"We'd
better be more careful then," said Highson. "If that thing had got its mouth around
Sal's throat..."
Sal
brushed away his father's concern, irritated as much by it as he was at his own
incompetence in the face of danger. He
should have reacted as quickly and capably as Kail. He might need to in order to survive the
journey.
"Well,
it didn't," he said, startled by the brusqueness of his tone, "so let's
not make a big deal of this. We're
tired. We were taken by surprise." Maybe,
he thought, I have been pushing us too
hard. "We won't make that
mistake again."
"And
look on the upside," said Kail, his teeth gleaming. "We've gained some fresh meat. I think there'll be enough on its bones to
feed the three of us for a day or two.
It won't take me long to butcher it."
Sal
swallowed automatic revulsion, telling himself that bear meat was bound to
taste better than its blood. And now the
excitement was over, bruises were making themselves felt where the bear had hit
him and he had fallen on his arse. "We
could light a fire," he said. "Have
a proper meal, for a change."
"We
could." Kail nodded. "You two keep watch, just in case the
mate is lurking around somewhere. The
fire might not keep it away for long, if it's as hungry as this one was."
They set
to it immediately. Highson kept his
pocket mirror radiating at full strength while Kail went about his grisly
job. Once their packs were placed at the
centre of their impromptu campsite, Sal began looking for something to
burn. There wasn't much, but it did
exist. The bulk of the heat might come
from suitable stones he gathered as well, but there would be real flames on top
of it, and real smoke. The meat would
cook properly, and they would all feel better for it.
The small
blaze was crackling happily by the time Kail returned with the first cuts from
the dismembered beast. The smell of it
cooking sent saliva rushing through Sal's mouth, and he had to force himself to
keep looking away from it and at the darkness around them instead. He saw and heard nothing untoward. Perhaps, he thought, the fire and the scent
of blood had frightened the mate off.
Nevertheless he agreed with Kail that watches should be posted through
that night, just in case it returned and found the three of them sound asleep.
He ate
until he could physically eat no more then settled back in his bedroll with the
soothing sound of flames in his ears. He
felt warmer, even if the wind was cold and his cheeks and toes ached. Insulating charms stitched into collars and
blankets helped. When Kail volunteered
to take the first watch, he was happy to accept the offer. His body remained tender from the attack of
the bear, and a headache was building in his temples. He drifted off into blackness with the
thought that bear meat hadn't been half as bad as he had expected. Nothing like lamb or rabbit, but a vast
improvement on the tough jerky they had picked up in the town below...
Highson
shook him awake after midnight. The
night was dark and clear. A thin wind
moaned eerily through the switchbacks, setting Sal's teeth on edge. That and a slight queasiness brought on by
too much strange meat made staying awake easy.
Even when his two hours were up, he delayed a little longer to give Kail
extra time to sleep. The tracker slept
with a pinched, pained expression on his face, as though worrying in his
dreams. Highson's face was barely
visible at all, with little more than his nose showing from inside the bedroll,
swaddled in protective fabric.
When Sal
finally returned to bed, barely an hour remained before dawn. He fell instantly and deeply asleep, and woke
only when a light rain misted over his face.
He blinked, startled, and sat bolt upright in his bedroll.
The sun
was up, but the camp was silent. Highson
lay beside him, snoring peacefully. Kail
had slumped over where he sat by the fire, which smoked thinly under the
half-hearted shower. Between them, the
contents of their packs lay spread out across the stony ground. Something had thoroughly rummaged through
them, leaving clothes, supplies and equipment in disarray.
Sal's cry
of alarm woke Kail with a start.
"What?" The tracker took in the ruin of their camp
with one sweeping glance. He looked
equal parts haggard and appalled. "How
did this happen?"
Sal left
that question unanswered. He was already
sorting through the scattered items, dividing them into three piles in an
attempt to see what was missing. It
seemed obvious that Kail had nodded off during his watch, leaving the camp
exposed, but he didn't want to openly accuse the tracker of anything,
especially after the previous day's discussion about blame.
"Was
it the bear?" asked Highson, emerging, blinking sleepily, from his
bedroll.
"No." Kail had stood on cracking limbs and was
staring in puzzlement at the ground around the camp. "Bears don't use charms. Not in my experience, anyway."
Sal
followed the direction of Kail's gaze and saw too the black circle enclosing
the camp site. Arcane symbols surrounded
the circle, drawn, Sal realised, just outside the warm glow cast by the
fire. "Is that charcoal?"
"Yes." Kail looked angry, now.
"I
recognise these signs," said Highson.
"Whoever drew them wanted to keep us quiet while they took what
they wanted. What's missing, Sal? Give us the bad news."
That was
the odd thing. "Nothing," he
said, checking through their belongings one last time to make sure. "It seems to be all here. Even the bear meat. Nothing's been taken."
"That
doesn't make sense." Highson
squatted next to him to double-check.
"I
agree, but there it is." Sal ran a
hand through his long hair. "It
could be worse. We could have been
murdered in our sleep." Despite the
evidence of the charm, part of him was still annoyed at Kail for letting this
happen. If Upuaut had been behind this
particular gambit, or something even nastier...
"What about tracks?" he asked Kail. The tracker had stepped outside the circle to
inspect the stone surrounding it. "Can
you tell who or what did this?"
The
tracker shook his head. "There are
some marks over here--" He pointed
back the way they had come, where a shelf of rock overhung the way
downhill. "But I can't tell what
made them. It was big, whatever it was."
"A
man'kin?"
Kail
shrugged.
"Do
you think one of them could have doubled back on us?" asked Highson.
"It's
possible," Sal said. "Why,
though, I don't know."
"We
were being tested," said Kail, looking now at the jagged stone surfaces
above and around them. "Or if not
tested, exactly, then at least being checked out. Someone wanted to know more about us than
they could tell at a distance."
"That
seems an awful lot of trouble to go to," said Highson.
"I
can't think of another explanation."
The tracker sighed. "Not one
that makes any sense."
"How
do we stop it happening again?" asked Sal.
"I
don't think it'll happen again. Whoever
did this learned everything they needed to know and let us be. If they'd wanted to hurt us, they would've
done it when they had the chance."
"Even
so..." He bit back a sharp
retort. "They might change their
mind. Or it could be someone else, next
time. I don't think we have any choice
but to take precautions."
"Yes,
that's fair." Kail turned his gaze
on him. "I'll think about it during
the day. In the meantime, we should get
moving again. We've slept in, so we're
already running behind."
"Yes." The passage of time worried Sal almost as much
as the violation of their security. Not
only were they already late to set out, but now they had to re-stow everything
in their packs. He set about doing it
with dismal determination. His fear of
falling further and further behind Shilly was now compounded by this new fear:
that someone was following them in turn.
A distinct feeling that he was being watched only made matters
worse. The persistent itch between his
shoulder-blades kept him looking back the way they had come or up at the
mountainside ahead, but not once did he see anything out of the ordinary.
Not
reassured at all, he shouldered his burden when the others were ready and they
continued on their way.
#
Habryn Kail
walked furiously in the footsteps of the man'kin, conscientiously noting the
comings and goings of familiar tracks.
The broad, round prints that frequently left deep indentations or
crushed pebbles probably belonged to the Angel, the large man'kin Sal and
Shilly had met in the forests behind them.
Others were smaller, but no less enigmatic: clawed stone feet with three
toes; flat pads that seemed to have no toes at all; at least one set of Panic
prints, visible in patches of soft earth; and human tracks that didn't all
belong to Shilly. It proved as always a
challenging study, and was occasionally sufficient to distract him from the
issue weighing most on his mind.
Not an
hour didn't go by when Kail failed to berate himself for falling asleep on his
watch that morning. His lack of care
profoundly unsettled him, charm or no charm.
He should have been alert to all kinds of attack. But for dumb luck, he and his companions
should have been dead and cold hours ago.
There was no getting around that.
Sal and
Highson knew it too. That was the worst
part. He had let them down in the worst
possible fashion. For an hour he
considered volunteering to turn back--beaten by age, frailty, incompetence--before
convincing himself of the ridiculousness of that plan. He had only made one mistake, and they would
need him in the coming days. Neither Sal
nor Highson possessed the skills of tracking and foraging he did, and they
would rely on those and more as the path became steeper and more rugged in the
days ahead. There was no getting around
that fact.
Before
that day was halfway done, with the sun peering over the crest of the mountains
and scattering the last wisps of cloud that had dogged them all morning, the
ground kicked beneath them, as it had on several occasions during their
torturous ascent. Kail froze as he
always did, listening carefully. A sustained
rumble that might have been thunder echoed up a canyon from further down. It grew louder instead of fading away. The ground beneath him began to shake again, and
his palms and scalp broke out into a sweat.
Avalanche.
He had no
memory of the landslide that had almost killed him ten days earlier, but he
knew enough to be afraid. He turned to
face the others. The looks on their
faces told him that they had realised too.
Sal looked up, seeking the source of the noise, but echoes made it hard
to find. Instead, Kail looked for
shelter, and found it in the form of a narrow crack between a canted slab of
rock and the cliff it leaned against.
Pointing, he urged Highson and Sal ahead of him, noting distractedly how
similar they looked when they ran. They
weren't good sprinters but they possessed incredible stamina, as the uphill
trek readily proved.
The
rumble grew louder. Kail slipped into
the crack after his two companions and held his breath with them. The landslide didn't have to hit them to end
their lives. Burying them in the crack
would be enough, unless Sal could find a way out. The thought of being entombed again held no
appeal at all...
The roar
of falling stone peaked and began to ebb.
They saw no sign of it from their cramped hiding place. Still, Kail waited until only echoes remained
before even considering stepping outside.
He had
half-expected the landscape to have completely rearranged itself--the noise had
been so loud--but nothing appeared changed at all. Feeling slightly foolish, he suggested a
quick stop to settle their nerves.
Sal would
have none of it. "No," he
said. "We've delayed enough already
today."
Kail didn't
argue, although the tightness across his chest urged him to. Warden Rosevear's Change-rich salves were
doing a good job repairing the wound inflicted on him by the Swarm, but the
endless climbing and the heavy pack he wore were taking an inevitable
toll. He would never admit it to
Sal--who, he was sure, had a pretty good idea of how much the wound still
bothered him, since nothing much escaped those blue-flecked eyes--but the
thought of sitting down for an hour sounded like a pretty good approximation of
paradise.
They
hiked on, following the man'kin trail and keeping an ear out for any subsequent
rockfalls that the first might have triggered.
The journey was uneventful until they rounded a knife-like spur
surmountable only by leaping from one smaller boulder to another. There, as Kail lifted the brim of his hat to
take in the way ahead, he saw just how simply and thoroughly Sal's plans had
been thwarted.
The
source of the avalanche lay far above them.
Whatever caused it had sent a vast shelf of ice and snow crashing
hundreds of metres down the relatively bare mountainside below. The dirty white scar left in its wake
stretched right across the man'kin's path, fanning out as it hit less
precipitous terrain below. For a
worryingly large distance, the trail was buried under metres of unstable
debris.
"This
isn't good," said Highson.
"That's
stating the obvious," Kail muttered.
Mindful any sudden loud noises, he trotted to the nearest edge of the
avalanche's wake. Sure enough, the trail
vanished under it and showed no signs of emerging. Even the shape of the terrain beneath was
difficult to make out. Closing his eyes
and guessing the man'kin's route at random, he thought, might have been just as
effective.
"I
don't believe it," said Sal in a choked voice, tugging back his hood to
expose his shocked, bleached face. "This
can't be happening."
Kail watched
him closely. The young man was
perpetually poised on the brink of violence, to himself and those around him,
and that only worsened when he became upset.
Ever since Shilly's disappearance, he had been bottling up emotion under
incredible pressure. The Change boiled
around him like a stormy sea.
Now, he
had turned pale and stood without moving, eyes fixed on the devastation before
them. His hands shook only slightly, but
revealingly.
"Nothing's
going right. Maybe we should turn back."
"Hey,"
said Highson, looking at him in surprise.
"You don't really mean that."
"Don't
I? If we hadn't been held up this
morning, we'd be under that pile right now."
That was
a sobering thought. "We always knew
this climb was going to be dangerous," Kail said.
"Maybe
I didn't. How could I have? I've never been on a mountain before. I've never tracked man'kin moving at
speed. I've never had to worry about
freezing in my sleep, or being eaten by a bear." Sal rounded on him. "Can you tell me it's going to be any easier
from here? That we've survived this long
by skill, not luck?"
"I
think we should take that rest stop we talked about earlier," said Kail,
not wanting to agree with Sal under these circumstances. He too shared a growing certainty that all
hope of finding Shilly was now lost--unless they could shift several thousand
tonnes of debris in a matter of hours, and he doubted if even Sal in a bad mood
was capable of such a feat.
Highson
agreed immediately. "That's a good
idea. My nerves could definitely use
some settling."
"It
won't make any difference," said Sal woodenly. "At least if we turn back, it's downhill
all the way."
Kail
untied the water from his hip and took a deep swig. He needed to think. There might be a way around this
situation. The man'kin's tracks would
resume on the far side of the avalanche's trail of debris. All they had to do was find it and they could
move on. Yes, it would remain dangerous,
and probably become more so the higher they went. But giving up at the first serious hurdle
wasn't like him. And it wasn't like Sal,
either.
A new
thought occurred to him. What if the
avalanche had been deliberately triggered to put them off the trail? That was a possibility he couldn't afford to
ignore. But who would do such a
thing? The man'kin themselves?
Kail
understood then exactly what was going through Sal's mind. Shilly had gone willingly with the man'kin. Wherever they were headed, she didn't want to
be found by anyone, Sal included.
Kail felt
for him. "This was an accident,"
he told Sal, putting a broad hand on his shoulder that was instantly shrugged
away. "We'll find her. Don't worry."
"You
won't," said a voice from above them.
"And your young friend is right: you do have every reason to worry."
Sal,
Highson and Kail instantly turned. The
Change turned with them, kicking up an expanding bubble of dust and pebbles
that scattered with a rattling sound all around them. Highson put himself physically between Sal
and possible attack and formed an open-handed Y with his outstretched arms and
body. Kail tugged off his right glove to
free his fingers.
On top of
the spur of rock they had just passed sat a strange figure, a man-like thing
with many qualities that weren't human.
The size of a small child, with an underfed, bony look, his face was
narrow as though squashed between two hands.
His blade-like nose had a sharp bow to it, like a skinning knife, and
his eyes formed a disconcerting V to either side. His mouth was pursed in a piercingly sharp
smile.
"I
won't hurt you," said the figure, "unless you give me good reason to."
"Stay
back," warned Highson.
"Oh,
I will. I can smell you from here."
"Who
are you?"
"I'm
Pukje, and I've come to do you a favour.
In fact, I've already done you a favour, although you might not see it
that way. I've been watching you for a
while now. You're determined to get
yourselves killed, aren't you? Perhaps I
should let you, but I feel oddly compelled to help. I have these flashes of selflessness
occasionally. One day I'll get them seen
to."
"You're
the one who searched our camp last night," guessed Kail, not believing for
a second that the creature's motives were so ill-defined.
"What
if I am? I did you no harm. Am I wrong to want to know if you were likely
to return the courtesy?"
"You
want something from us," Kail persisted.
"Something you didn't find, otherwise you would've just robbed us
and moved on. What is it?"
"Wouldn't
you like to know, Warden man?" The
creature's eyes narrowed and his smile became markedly malicious. "It's not in that pouch around you neck,
if that's what you're wondering. I took
a good look at your pretty bauble while you snored on, and I assure you it's
not what I'm after. Do you have any
other secrets you'd like to share with the group? Who Vania is, perhaps, and why you carry her
letter with you everywhere you go?"
Kail felt
himself flush from the top of his head down to his chest. "That's none of your business."
The
creature laughed. When his mouth opened,
Kail saw no teeth.
"Pukje." Sal spoke the unfamiliar name with deliberate
emphasis: pook-yay. "We don't have time for this. If you've got something to tell us, get it
over with and let us get on with what we have to do."
"I
know why you're here," said the creature, sobering. "I know who you're looking for. I know where they're going, and I know you're
too late to get there in time."
"How
can you know all this?" asked Highson.
"I
have eyes and ears, and other senses," said Pukje. "I use them."
"Will
you tell us where they're going?" said Sal.
"I can
do better than that, Sal. I can take you
there."
"Why?"
"Out
of the goodness of my heart."
"We
don't even know you've got a heart," said Highson.
Casually,
and as lightly as a leaping possum, Pukje jumped down from his perch. Although he was barely a metre tall, the
sudden move prompted the three men to scatter.
Kail had a bola spinning in his right hand before Pukje landed and
started brushing himself down. What Kail
had taken to be skin was in fact a grey-green covering of some kind, like felt
or densely compacted moss.
"I'm
not human, gentlemen," Pukje said. "That
should be immediately obvious to you.
But I'm not without feelings you'd recognise: compassion, curiosity and
fear among them. I do have a heart of
flesh and blood, and it will stop as surely as yours if Yod ever breaks loose
in this world." One canted eyebrow
raised at their reactions to the name. "Yes,
the ancient enemy. I've been
around. I've seen a few things. You'd be wrong to assume I don't have my own
agenda--but for the moment it's aligned with yours. You might as well take advantage of that fact
while it lasts. I know, and you should
be suspecting it by now, that I'm you're only chance of getting up these
mountains alive."
"Why
do you say that?" asked Sal, tight-lipped.
"Why
do young men always ask stupid questions?"
Pukje strolled close to Sal and stared up at him. Although the impish creature barely reached
Sal's waist, his presence was such that they seemed to be talking eye to
eye. "You remind me of someone I
knew a long time ago. Someone else
caught in a situation well beyond his knowledge, but not his ability. He changed the world, him and his
brother. You might have heard of
them. The twins Castillo."
Sal's
indrawn breath was audible in the still air.
"You're talking about Hadrian and Seth."
Pukje
smiled. "Hadrian once carried me up
a mountain, in a manner of speaking--just as you're about to. I'll show you the way to the top, as I showed
him, because that's where you have to go.
That's the intersection, the meeting point of everything. The beginning and the end; the cusp between
this world and the next. You need to be
there, but the way you're going won't take you.
You need a shortcut, like the one I have in mind."
"A
shortcut." Sal's scepticism was naked. "What sort of shortcut?"
"The
only sort that matters. One that will
get you where you need to be in a manner appropriate to your needs." The hungry little smile widened. "Trust me. I'm offering you your only chance of seeing
this done. Take it or you really might
as well turn back--and say goodbye to your beloved Shilly forever."
Sal
bunched his fists at the strange creature's threatening tone. A gust of unnatural wind swept down the
mountainside and swirled around the two of them, buffeting Kail with freezing
dust. Sal's dark hair swirled around his
head. His eyes glittered.
"Shilly's
not mine. She's her own person, which is
exactly how we got into this mess. If
she'd only give us a sign--if she'd only explain--"
Sal
stopped and shook his head. His long
hair hung down over his forehead like a veil.
When he opened his eyes again, they were clear.
"All
right. I'll go with you and take my
chances as they come."
"Sal,
wait--" Highson stepped forward
with his hand raised.
"Don't
argue, Highson. I have to do this. And you're not coming with me."
"No. Really
no, now." Sal's father's face
flushed with anger. "You're being
stupid as well as reckless.
The wind
swept higher. "I said, don't
argue. It has to be like this."
"It
doesn't. I haven't come this far to let
you leave without me, and I'm not going back to Milang without you. There's only one other option, Sal."
The air
suddenly stilled, freezing into swirling vortices and tangled currents that
almost instantly dissolved away. Kail
felt father and son's wills clashing in the bitter silence, echoed by the
Change in the world around them.
Pukje's
low chuckle broke the silence. "Looks
like you're the tiebreaker, Habryn Kail.
What say you? Where does your
heart lead?"
Back
home, he thought instantly to himself, to the low, dry flatlands of the
He
suppressed a sudden apprehension. The
bola was still spinning. Its insistent hum
was an anchor to the present, to what he needed to say.
"We're
with you, Sal," he said. "Whether
you chose to follow Pukje, or try to find the trail again here, or go back the
way we came. Shilly would want it that
way." As you well know, he added silently to himself.
Sal bowed
his head and some of the tension left the air.
"If you both end up dead, I'll blame her."
"I
wouldn't worry about that. Anything that
gets both of us is going to get you too."
Kail forced a smile. "You're
not that strong."
"This
has nothing to do with strength," said Pukje in serious tones. "It's about being in the right place at
the right time. It's about symmetry and
shape, and geometry. Give me a lever
long enough and I'll prove to you that strength is nothing more than an illusion--and
illusion that can kill, gentlemen. Don't
let me hear you making that mistake again."
With
that, Pukje turned to face the precipice on their right and took a running jump
out into space.
Sal gaped
in shock as the little creature dropped from sight. Highson cried out. Kail had no time to do more than take two
steps towards the edge, already dreading what he would see.
A large
beast rose up in front of him, grey-green wings cracking mightily.
"Now,"
it said in Pukje's voice, "let's get this show on the road."
"The Crone"
"For every present there are many
futures, distinguished by details as small as a cough or as large as a
Cataclysm. There are many pasts too,
just as many roads can have the same destination. And for every discrete now there are a
multitude of other nows, all existing side-by-side with the one we know,
related but not connected to each other.
This is the world-tree, revealed to us in all its glory when we die and
enter the Third Realm."
Skender Van Haasteren X
The sun
was a bloated red ball in the sky, too bright to look at directly but casting
little heat and no comfort at all across the blasted land below. Shilly had stopped looking at it long ago,
keeping her head bowed as she hobbled as quickly as she could along the lit sections
of the ravine. When she reached shade,
she stopped to take a breather. She knew
the route as well as she knew her own face in a mirror, and the wrongness of it
never failed to surprise her, too. Ever
since the sun had stopped moving across the sky, light had become a baleful
force in the world. Only shadows and
darkness offered sanctuary. Night was an
alien concept, a dream she occasionally woke from with wet cheeks, like the
dreams of Sal that still plagued her after so many long years.
She walked
the ravine once a week, from her workshop to the struggling community that
traded precious supplies for her remedies and advice. No one ever offered to help her carry the
supplies back for her. She was on her
own in the Broken Lands, as far as the villagers were concerned, and most of
the time she liked it that way. But
every now and again, with her back aching and her bad leg on fire, she pined
for a little more generosity of spirit in the world. The track seemed longer every time she walked
it, although she supposed that said more about her advancing years than the
route itself. The total weight of her
supplies was shrinking as she got older and ate less. Maybe one day, she idly wondered, she'd
become so thin she wouldn't need to eat at all.
"Death
would be a relief," she said aloud, for the benefit of ears not her
own. "For me and everyone left." She raised a gnarled fist and shook it above
her head, to where the sun would have been were she not still in shade. "Damn you and all your ugly friends. Why don't you just finish us off and be done
with it?"
The anger
faded just as fast as it had flared, leaving her feeling more tired than
ever. She clutched her walking
stick--the same one Sal had carved for her, now much the worse for wear, like
her--and braved the burning glare outside her temporary shelter. Its heat was the heat of fever and
pestilence, not life. Her skin crawled
under its touch. She hissed a
percussive, urgent rhythm as she walked, telling herself to hurry, to get out
of sight as quickly as possible, to avoid drawing attention to herself, to make
it home one more time without the sun's mighty eye focussing down on her and seeing
her for what she was, at last.
She was
drenched in sweat and aching all over by the time the end of the ravine came in
sight. Upon reaching it, she turned
right and walked a dozen metres, sticking close to the rubble-strewn cliff that
overlooked the desert beyond. Nothing
lived in the desert. Nothing she wanted
to meet, anyway.
At a
struggling bush she stopped and poked her walking stick into the ground. When it hit resistance, she twisted it half a
turn clockwise. With a gentle sigh, a hole
opened in the cliff, and she walked through it.
Following a well-worn path down a short, rough-hewn corridor, she
entered the welcoming, cool space of her underground workshop.
It was
smaller than the one she had inherited from Lodo, or seemed so at first
glance. Her living area consisted of
little more than a cave with a niche for her to sleep in and several low
cupboards for instruments and books. A
mage had made it for her, years ago, before his betrayal and murder. The space-bending Way that connected it to
the edge of the desert was short but long enough to divert Yod's dogs from
finding her too. Ways were difficult to
trace if they led underground.
The air
was musty and smelt of old woman. A
feeble spring sent a muddy trickle of water down wall and into a ewer, where
she filtered the worst of the muck out of it and drank it cold. Sometimes pieces of the ceiling fell on her,
dislodged by distant tremors. But the
place had its uses, and not just as a shelter.
She had chosen it for one simple reason.
Putting
down her supplies by the ewer for unpacking later, she did what she always did
after spending any time outside and went to inspect her unfinished masterwork.
At the
rear of the workshop was a curtain draped over a narrow crack leading deeper
into the ground. She slid through the
curtain and the crack with a grace that belied her years. Her posture straightened by several
degrees. Many times a day she made that
short journey, down into the caves she had discovered long years ago. Undisturbed by humans, they had been inhabited
by solitary, crumbling man'kin who had befriended her for reasons of its own. A
tiny, hunched monk with big eyes and a hint of curling beard, he answered to
the name Bartholomew.
The man'kin
awaited her at the bottom of the crack.
"Give
us some light," she said.
Bartholomew
struck a dissonant, brass gong. As the
sound propagated through the enormous chamber, an ever-expanding field of tiny
glowstones sprang to life. Each hung by
silk threads from the ceiling, spun by worms trained especially for the
purpose. The wave of light illuminated a
sea of sand below, one that stretched from her vantage point to shadowy limits
of the cave, where the 'stones reached their limit. Each handful of sand had been carefully
carried by her and Bartholomew from the desert at the end of the Way and placed
into this chamber to create a canvass large enough for her to work on. She had tried many different methods in the
past, but this was the one that came closest to meeting her needs--the same she
had used in Fundelry when first learning how to draw. And even though of late she had begun to
wonder if it might be insufficient, it was all she had, now. Time was running out. It would have to do.
Time.
She
reached up to touch the back of her neck.
Her hackles were rising, which could only mean one thing. The girl was back.
"D'you
see this?" she asked, speaking not to Bartholomew but to the empty air,
and the one she knew was watching. "Are
you looking with your eyes open, this time?
I haven't spent my entire life on this just so you can screw it up."
There was
no answer. Thus far there hadn't been,
although she could feel the link growing closer, more efficacious every time. True conversation was inevitable at some
point. Huffing to herself, Shilly
dragged her ageing body out onto the sand, stepping delicately across marks she'd
made weeks, months, even years before.
The resin Bartholomew had applied to the finished sections protected the
charm from footprints. She trod lightly
over complex whorls and rayed stars, and between sections defined by arterial
lines as long and straight as a taut string.
She knew every mark intimately.
She felt potential radiating from it, even though she herself would
never be able to wield it.
It took
her a gratifyingly long time to reach the centre of the charm. Her life's work wasn't complete, but it still
covered a space as large as a small town, lovingly crafted in isolation. She was proud of it, and wished only for the
chance to finish it before she died.
"Get
it down, girl," she said, hearing the disgruntlement in her voice and
knowing it came from the ever-present fear of failure and the watcher's
inability to grasp what it had taken her decades to perceive. There was no time to be pleasant. "Take down every detail. Don't miss a smudge. You'll probably have to finish it without me,
the way things are going here, so don't waste this opportunity. It might not come again."
Her
weakening eyes watered at the charm's mind- and space-bending properties. Sometimes when she stood as she was now and
just looked at it, letting her eyes skate over its form rather than dive down
into its intricacies, she felt awe at what she had accomplished. She had always known that she could be the
bringer of great things into the world, given the chance. Her talent might not have been for the Change
itself, as Sal's had been, but hers had, in a way, ultimately been the most
powerful. The Change burned too brightly
if used unwisely.
Shilly
blinked tears from her eyes. Damned charm making them water, she told
herself, even though she knew that was a lie.
She wanted to tell the watcher to kiss Sal for her, to convey some of
the feelings that had been bottled up and preserved for so long. But she held her tongue. She kept it all in. In her world-line, she would never see Sal
again. She was used to that idea now,
even if the pain never went away.
"Get
this right for Sal's sake," she told her younger self in a world where
there was still hope. "He'll need
it, and he'll need you. And you need him
just as badly. Don't make the mistake I
made--not unless you want to end up like me.
And who would want that, eh?"
Not a
ghost of a reply came down the link connecting her to her other self. Brushing the memories and hope aside, along
with her fears, she hobbled to the edge of the resin and dipped the tip of her
cane into the soft sand beyond. With
smooth, economical gestures, she began once again to draw.
#
The image
of a flat expanse of sand etched with lines in a pattern too intense to
comprehend became a superficially similar vista upon the opening of Shilly's
eyes. A broad shelf of perfectly white
snow lay before her, wind-carved into a series of intricate ripples. The colour was wrong, and the temperature was
much colder than it had been in the dream, and instead of one tiny man'kin
there were dozens all around her, and glowing green people, an old man who wasn't
quite a man, and--
Shilly
closed her eyes again at the sight of the glassy, black figure watching her
from the fringes of the group. The
glast. She couldn't deal with him--it--right now. At one sound from those smooth, crystal lips,
she might shatter into a million pieces.
"What
did you see?" asked Tom, brushing her wavy, brown hair back from her
face. He of all of them understood what
it was like to have crazy dreams. "How
was she, this time?"
Not so angry, Shilly thought. That was a change, but she wasn't sure it
counted as an improvement. The awful
grief she felt in her future self wasn't new--she had picked that up before, in
fractured, fleeting glimpses--but its cause had never been obvious. Now she knew.
In that world, Sal was dead. Her
future self had failed him, somehow.
That the world was dying too seemed a lesser concern against that hard,
unbearable fact.
But this
other Shilly was bearing it, somehow.
She continued with her life's work: the creation of a charm that was
supposed to be important, somehow. She
endured.
Shilly
felt a bubble of sorrow swell up inside her.
Swallowing it was difficult. This
latest dream confirmed so many of her present fears--that Sal was in danger,
that the world might not be saved, that all her efforts might come to
nothing. What would happen to her if she
failed to grasp the charm in time? Would
she become the future self she saw in her dreams, hunched and withered and
living in a hole in the ground?
The
complexities of past and present were too much for her to grasp. It was difficult enough to concentrate on the
charm. That was the point of it
all. That was what Tom was really
asking. She forced herself to push
everything else aside, to swallow the bubble, and answer him as best she could.
"I
saw a new section," she said, still with her eyes shut.
"Do
you think you can get it down?"
She
nodded. Images of lines and patterns
danced in the pinkness of her closed eyelids.
She felt the pen and parchment in her hands, poised to draw. The details were difficult to hold in her
mind. After five days of concerted
effort, she still had little more than disconnected fragments, many dozens of
them, with no clear way of putting them together.
Her right
hand began to move, almost of its own volition.
She opened her eyes a crack to follow its progress. Details were all she had, and she would get
them down as best she could. For half an
hour, all she did was draw, ignoring Tom and the others as though they too were
in another world--one she was equally happy to stand apart from for the time
being.
When she
was done, she felt exhausted to the very core.
Altitude sickness was only part of it.
Twice every day, the growing band halted its headlong journey in order
to let her sleep in peace. An hour was
enough, with the help of Vehofnehu and his strange meditation techniques, for
her to dream vividly of her other self.
A time of feverish drawing usually followed. Then it was back onto the man'kin steed she
shared with Tom to resume the journey upwards with the others. And somehow, while she slept, their numbers
kept on growing...
Vehofnehu
helped her to her feet and rubbed her mittened hands between his to bring
circulation back to her fingertips. She
could barely feel them. "This is
hard for you," he said. "I
know." His dark brown eyes were
recessed slightly above prominent cheeks and white, whiskery hairs, but they
radiated nothing but compassion. The
corners of his wide mouth were very slightly turned down. His fingers were calloused, but long and
strong and very warm, wrapped right around her hands. "We are asking a lot. If it wasn't so important--"
"I
know, I know," she said, dismissing his concerns with a weary nod. She was the only one with a link to the
distant future. The vision of all the
other seers failed beyond a particular point.
Even the Holy Immortals, who travelled backwards in time as naturally as
humans travelled forward, apparently couldn't say what happened after
then. That the future Shilly glimpsed
appeared to be in another life entirely, or was only a possible future rather
than a certain one, didn't devalue its importance. A glimpse was better than nothing.
She
counted sixteen of the green figures sitting together at the edge of the
campsite. She was sure there had been no
more than fourteen when she had gone to sleep.
"Are
we almost there?" she asked, aching to tug off all the layers of clothes
confining her and be warm again.
"Tell me are, please."
"We'll
be at the top no later than tomorrow."
"Thank
the Goddess."
Vehofnehu's
face split into a broad grin. "With
luck, you'll be able to in person."
"And
not before time. My arse is killing me,"
she muttered as he let go of her fingers and moved to get the band on its feet.
"Here,"
said Tom, pressing a flask into her hands.
She drank
deeply of the ice-cold water within, then winced at the sudden pain in her
temples it provoked. "I'm so sick
of this," she said to no one in particular. "There must be a better way to travel."
Their
steed thudded mutely over to her and knelt forward on two legs. A broad-backed statue with a wildly-maned,
fanged head and thick tail, it had an unerring ability to find toeholds in even
the sheerest cliff. Its claws dug deep
into the slipperiest of ice walls. Thus
far, it hadn't tripped even once.
But its
back was hard, even through the blankets bound around its waist, and the straps
that held her and Tom in place were tight by necessity. There had been numerous traverses during
which she had kept her eyes tightly shut for fear of slipping free and plunging
to her death. When she dozed in transit,
she dreamed of wild leaps across crevasses and hanging upside down over
bottomless pits.
The grief
of her future self encouraged her to stop complaining and mount. Anything would be better than enduring that
fate. A small sacrifice now might make
all the difference. What was a little
discomfort when the future of the world was at stake?
She felt
someone watching her, and turned to see the glast's white-pupilled eyes fixed
in her direction. A chill went through
her, colder than the bitter air of the upper mountains. She forced herself to ignore it, as she had
before, while climbing awkwardly onto her steed's back. Arranging her lame leg so it wouldn't cramp,
she fastened herself in, then waited patiently for Tom to do the same. His long frame was awkward and bony against
her back but welcome when wind kicked up, stealing her heat away.
Vehofnehu
rode a stone beast he called a "lion", which looked like a giant cat
in a fur coat. The Holy Immortals spread
themselves among the many other man'kin that had joined the Angel's band of
pilgrims. The Angel itself climbed
alone, following routes more suited to its blunt frame. It would be waiting for them at the top,
Vehofnehu promised her, and she believed him.
Only the
glast out of all the non-man'kin had the strength and stamina to keep up
without help. She didn't know where the
energy came from, but it seemed inexhaustible.
It scurried up the mountain like a glossy, dark-shelled beetle,
decorated with the white symbols that had once been Kemp's tattoos. She was certain the tattoos moved when no one
was looking, but that was the least of her problems with it.
Upon its
awakening--or its birth--three days ago, the glast-Kemp had stood up steadily
on two legs and faced Shilly out of all the people standing around it,
nervously watching to see what it would do next.
It was trying to become one of you, Vehofnehu had said, days earlier,
in order to communicate.
Instead
of speaking, it had opened its mouth and emitted a long, low hiss, as
threatening as a leaky balloon.
The
memory of it still made her shudder.
"Here
we go again," she muttered as the broad back moved under her, and the icy
stillness of the mountains was broken by the sound of bouldery footsteps.
#
After seven
days of non-stop climbing, Shilly had become immune to spectacle. Before night came, the man'kin procession
crossed a river of blue ice, scaled a sheer cliff topped with a crown of snow,
and negotiated a field of debris left in the wake of a recent avalanche. The steeds traversed every type of terrain
with equal ease, jumping surely or creeping with painstaking care across,
around, under or over every imaginable obstacle. Shilly dozed through most of it, and was
partly ashamed of herself for doing so.
While she hung limp in her saddle, Tom took in everything with eyes wide
open.
"I
wonder what people back home are doing," he said breathlessly in her ear
as their steed skated down an ice shelf to more stable footing. She almost didn't hear him through the scarf
protecting her neck from the cold.
"Which
home? The Haunted City or Fundelry?"
"Fundelry."
"Fishing,
probably," she said. "And
farming and selling stuff at the market and arguing about stupid things. The usual.
Why?"
She felt
him shrug. "I don't know,
Shilly. It just seems we've led the most
incredible lives. Who'd have thought,
all those years ago, when Lodo adopted you and I applied for Selection--who'd
have thought we'd end up here, at the top of the world?"
"What
happened to the caves of ice and the thing that wants to eat us? That doesn't sound like much fun."
"Oh,
sure." He waved that protest
away. "But right now, in this
present moment, we're the luckiest people alive."
She didn't
respond to that immediately. It was hard
to think through the aches and pains, and the second-hand grief from her future
self, and the fear that she might fail at the task set before her. Once she'd pushed through that, though, she
did see his point. The scenery and the
company she was enjoying it with were magnificent. If she'd seen herself from a distance, she
would've been jealous.
That didn't
mean she was wrong to feel less than excited all the time. It just meant that the view from a distance
showed less than everything. It didn't
show the scrapes and saddle sores and constant headache and rising nausea. It didn't show how it felt to reach out for
Sal in the middle of the night and not find him beside her. And it didn't show their destination, where
awakening a Goddess might be the last thing they ever did.
"I
didn't expect to end up here," she said, holding on tight as their steed
galloped around a boulder set square in its path. "But if this is as far as I got, I'd be
pretty upset, over all."
"I
don't think you'd be the only one."
"Mind
you, if we aren't around to be upset, would it make any difference?"
It was
Tom's turn to take his time replying.
They bounced roughly from side to side for several minutes as their
steed negotiated a region of tumbled boulders and icy spurs. When things levelled out, she was simply glad
to be in one piece.
"I
think it does make a difference," Tom eventually said. "Our lives matter. They have to--or what's the point?"
"But
who or what do they matter to? The Goddess--if she really exists--is asleep,
so she obviously doesn't care much. And
the Book of Towers tells us we're better off without gods in general. If Yod's a typical example, then I'm inclined
to agree. So maybe it's all just wishful
thinking."
"It
would matter to me, Shilly."
"We're
back where I started. If you're dead,
how can anything matter to you at all?"
She sighed, not wanting to think about the version of herself she saw in
her dreams. "Maybe there's no
answer."
"Or
no answer we can comprehend."
"That's
the same thing, from where I'm sitting."
They rode
in silence until their next rest stop, an hour later, when they dismounted to
stretch their legs and unkink their spines.
Her buttocks were completely numb.
The procession had reached a plateau abutting a nearly sheer cliff face
that stretched apparently to infinity above them. "The last climb," Vehofnehu told
them, adding that it would probably be the most difficult stretch of all.
"You
know we make it, right?" she asked the gathering in general. "Someone's seen that far ahead?"
Vehofnehu
put a hand on your shoulder. "Do
you think we'd be here, otherwise?"
His wry, brown eyes didn't reassure her one iota.
Four of
the Holy Immortals were fiddling with alphabet tiles not far from her. For the first couple of days, they had been
happy to talk to her, answering questions before she'd actually asked, which
made for strange and tense conversations.
In recent times, however, they had avoided her, turning their faces when
she approached and putting the tiles away.
This time was no exception.
As she
watched, two more joined the group. One
of them seemed to be weeping, while the other spoke tonelessly in their
strange, backwards language. The others
looked up at them from beneath their dark-coloured hoods. Thick and warm, they seemed to be doing a far
better job of insulating their wearers than all the layers Shilly wore.
"Are
they all right?" she whispered to Vehofnehu.
A frown
flickered across his oddly wrinkled features.
"Yes. No. I don't know. A long time ago, I wove a charm for my
friends, to help them communicate on their travel backwards through time. It would be a lonely life otherwise, to be so
few in number and surrounded by people you couldn't talk to. Now, that charm is wearing thin, and there's
nothing I can do about it. That saddens
me. It doesn't augur well."
"Why
wouldn't they want to talk to us?" Shilly asked, but Vehofnehu only
shrugged. Everything about the Holy
Immortals puzzled her. The weeping woman
refused to look at Shilly. Her hands
made strange clutching motions at her hair, which seemed to be growing longer
before Shilly's eyes. Dismayed, Shilly
realised that from the woman's point of view, she was likely pulling out her
hair in clumps.
Vehofnehu
checked that Mawson's straps were tight.
"Are you comfortable, my friend?"
"'Kin don't carry 'kin," was the man'kin's
huffy reply. The high-templed stone bust
lay strapped with dignity wounded on the back of a stone lizard sporting long
horns and a forked tail.
"Well,
they do now." Vehofnehu clapped him
on the chest and moved on.
Shilly
followed him. "What about that?" she whispered, nodding at
the glast. It stood perfectly poised on
the tip of an upthrust spur, uncannily as though about to dive off into the
air. The sun caught its crystalline
body, making it appear to glow from within.
"That,
my human girl, is a very good question.
One I'm not equipped to answer just yet.
The stars are difficult to interpret so far from my observatory and
instruments."
"Screw
the stars," she said. "Why don't
we just ask it?"
"Why
don't you, Shilly?" Vehofnehu broke
his inspection of the man'kin steeds to turn and face her. "Have you tried? Has it given you an answer you can
understand?"
Shilly
felt her face turn red. She had never
heard Vehofnehu reprimand anyone before, and his tone now definitely had the
sting of reproach in it. That she
deserved it didn't make the verbal slap any easier to take.
"I--I'm
afraid to," she said.
"To
ask or to hear its answer?"
"Both."
Vehofnehu
nodded. "Me too, Shilly. Me too."
One long-fingered hand patted her cheek lightly. "One job at a time. Maybe when we reach the top, it'll talk to
us, eh?"
The Panic
empyricist moved off and she let him go.
She shot another glance at the glast, and saw it balancing Kemp's
massive frame on the tips of its toes with arms outstretched at
shoulder-height.
Just jump, she urged it. Go
ahead and do it, if that's what you're thinking. You're not wanted here!
If it
heard her unspoken wish, it didn't obey.
It closed its eyes in alien bliss, and basked in the weak sunlight until
it was time to leave.
#
If
climbing during daylight was nerve-wracking enough, climbing at night was
positively terrifying. Shilly didn't
know how the man'kin found their hand- and toeholds by starlight, let alone
kept to the route they silently agreed to, but somehow they managed it. She just clung tight to the near-vertical
back of her steed and tried not to shake too much. That Tom was clinging tightly to her in turn didn't
help. With every sway and lurch of the
man'kin, she felt him grip a little harder.
Midway
through the final stretch, a strange sound became audible through the thin
night air. It was a woman's voice,
singing. The tune was haunting and
exotic, following no familiar rhythm or key.
Its words, also, were unfathomable.
She wished--not for the first time--that Sal were with her, since he
might have recognised it from his travels across the
The Holy
Immortals were responsible for the song.
Softly, sadly, their voices rose and fell in inconsolable unison. A
lament, Shilly thought. That was
what it sounded like to her. A song for
the dead or dying, to ease the hearts of the living left behind. She remembered the one she'd seen earlier
that day, weeping while others of her kind stood around in shock. What was happening to them? Why, after centuries of being one way, were
they suddenly changing?
She
couldn't possibly know, and it didn't seem likely that she would ever find
out. She forced herself to put that
mystery--along with all the others--out of her mind, as best she could. The long climb might be the last chance she
had to rest before things reached a head.
At the top lay anything from nothing at all to Yod itself, with maw open
to swallow the world. She let the
plaintive song carry her thoughts like the ebbing and flowing of a gentle
sea. Her thoughts wandered to Fundelry,
to the harbour, and the dunes, and the friends she had left behind there.
Leaving home is the hardest thing to do, whispered the voice of her future
self, half-in and half-out of her mind.
Part of
her knew that she wasn't completely asleep and could wake up at any moment, if
she wanted to. But she didn't, not yet. This was the first time she had felt that she
could reply, and she wasn't going to waste it.
Why are you telling me this?
You'll understand later.
I don't want to understand later. I want to understand now.
You don't need to. You have more important things to worry
about.
I know, I know. Draw the charm, save Sal, stop myself from
becoming you... She felt instantly bad for the harshness of
her tone. I'm sorry. I know you're just
trying to help.
No, no. The
response came heavy with infinite weariness.
You're right. You don't want to become me. Why would you? I don't want to be me either. It's not an easy life.
Do you have to do it alone? Why don't you live with other people?
How do you know I don't?
Because I've seen you, in your workshop. You showed me. There's just you and Bartholomew--
That's not me. I'm another version of you, Shilly, the one
making the link between our many selves possible. Without me, you wouldn't see anything at all.
Shilly's
head spun. Another version of her? How
many could there be?
The task before is too much for a single lifetime, said this third version of her as
though she had read her thoughts. Do you want to know why?
She
nodded, and a new vision unfolded within her closed eyelids.
Undulating
orange sand stretched to a shimmering horizon under a sky as blue as coloured
glass. The sun burned down on her head
and shoulders, and she felt sweat trickling down her back and between her
breasts. She wasn't as old as she was in
the other world; here she might have been forty years and no more, with back
straight and hands steady. Her leg still
ached, though; that seemed to be a constant, wherever and however she lived.
The owner
of the eyes she saw through gave her a moment to take in the sudden shift of
her perception before swivelling them downward.
She saw that she was standing on a giant, red stone that protruded from
the desert like a pimple from a cheek.
Strange signs had been scratched across the stone, forming a charm that
was indeed quite different from the one she glimpsed in her other dreams. This one fairly throbbed with power, and she
realised belatedly that this Shilly wasn't alone, as she had hinted. The base of the hill was surrounded by man'kin--hundreds,
maybe thousands, of them, of every possible shape and size--all facing inwards
with their arms outstretched to touch the stone or, if they couldn't reach, the
backs of those in front of them. The
Change rippled through them like liquid heat, focussed inward on the pattern at
Shilly's feet.
This
charm wasn't for use in another time and place.
This charm was for right then--and right where she really was, climbing up a sheer cliff face like a bug up a wall.
Do you see it? asked her other self. Do you
see us?
I do.
It's...wonderful.
It is, and it won't last long. Long enough, though, to do the job, for once
in place this charm will reverberate through time. You don't have to worry about that. We've done our job here. We're not needed any longer. I just wanted to say hello. I wanted you to know that, no matter what
happens, you aren't on your own.
Shilly
had barely begun to verbalise the first of many questions she had to ask when
her other self silenced her.
No.
Just watch. You don't have to
remember this charm. I'll work it out in
my world, where it's needed. Just
remember that you were equal to the burden placed upon you. You made the sacrifices asked of you. You did everything you could to put yourself
in the right place at the right time, and with the right knowledge to do what
so many failed to do. Let that knowledge
give you the strength we lack--and you will need as much strength as you can
bear. You cannot fail us--we who are
your selves in other worlds, other lives.
You mustn't. You are our hope.
Shilly
felt tears joining the sweat on her cheeks as her head tilted back and she
stared into the sky. The sky hung high
above, as red and swollen as in her other future's world. She felt a moment's concern for all these
people, standing exposed to such a terrible glare. Didn't they know how dangerous it could be?
Then she
wondered how she knew it was
dangerous, and why.
Her hand
rose to blot out the sun. With that
terrible brightness eclipsed, she could see the sky more clearly. Dark threads stretched across the firmament,
radiating and branching from the sun's bloody disk. The threads pulsed and flexed like
veins. She felt faintly sick at the
sight of this new strangeness. Something
was very wrong with this world.
Something fundamental and foul.
Hello, Shilly, whispered her other self. Hello
and goodbye.
Out of
the obscured disk of the sun came something black and awful. It descended with the speed of a falling
mountain--not a thing, or even a shadow, but an emptiness, a hunger. Shilly barely had time to acknowledge its
imminence before it swept over her vantage point, taking her, the charmed stone
and the people surrounding it in one giant convulsion.
Yod, said her future self, and fell forever
silent.
Shilly convulsed,
thrown back into the frigid discomfort of her real self with a near-physical
jolt. The echoes of her sudden, fearful
cry came back to her, as sharp and terrified as she felt on the inside. She clutched her man'kin steed so tightly it
shook itself as though in irritation.
No! she screamed inside her head. No, no,
no! This can't be happening!
But there
was no consolation in the terrible night.
Tom held her awkwardly, certainly aware from her shaking that she was
crying and needing comfort of some kind, even if he didn't know what for. A nightmare he probably assumed, and so it
certainly had been. But in the world
they lived in, nightmares had real currency.
They were real.
The tears
froze on her cheeks as the Holy Immortals sang on, and the man'kin didn't pause
for rest.
#
By dawn,
they were barely halfway up the cliff. The
man'kin made slow progress, mindful of their weight and delicate passengers in
such treacherous terrain. At noon, they
finally reached the summit. There, the
passengers dismounted and stood shivering in the cold sunlight, staring down
into a vast crater half-filled with water.
The lake was kilometres across and as blue as the sky. Several small towns dotted its perimeter,
each sending slender, wooden piers out towards the water's edge.
"How
can it be liquid?" asked Shilly. "Surely
it should be frozen solid up here."
Tom just
shrugged. Under their feet and all along
the edge of the crater, snow and ice lay densely packed, where it had obviously
lain for centuries. A brisk wind painted
feathers of white from the highest points.
"Look
down there," said Vehofnehu, pointing with one long finger towards one of
the towns. He handed her a brass
spyglass. "Do you see?"
Shilly
took off her mittens. Her hands flinched
from the touch of the cold metal. It took
her a moment to make out the tiny cluster of buildings he had indicated. They were low and black, made of wood stained
with tar or something similar. The few
windows they possessed were shuttered tight against the cold. She was about to ask what Vehofnehu wanted
her to see when movement caught her eye.
Someone was coming around a corner, dressed in bulky, dark clothing and
a beanie. Then a second person, sporting
blue robes over similar garb.
Her heart
sped a little faster. She backtracked
with the spyglass to a bulbous shape she had noticed near the town but glossed
over in order to focus on the more obvious landmark. The shape was squatting low on the ground and
swaying gently from side to side.
"Do
you see it now?" asked the empyricist.
"The balloon?"
"Yes,"
she said, wondering if Sal was among the people down there. Only the Panic flew balloons like that, and
that robe had been the blue of a Sky Warden.
"Good." Vehofnehu took the spyglass from her. His smile was wide and his eyes sparkled. "Because we're going to steal it."