“Feast!” quoth the raven.
In a glacial fissure in the Eldshore’s mountains there ran a crack in the ice, gently issuing steam. Suddenly, as the sun whitened the glittering walls above and set waterdrops to coat the fissure like sweat, the vent sputtered.
Out poured writhing black shapes that a scholarly avalanche victim lying trapped at just the right angle might have read as an ancient word: This.
Its companion words had not survived the cave-in triggered by Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone upon their escape, but relentlessly it climbed the fissure and spilled down the mountainside, hissing as it went. This meant war.
Not far away, Bone dreamed beside Gaunt. At first he dreamed that, unaccountably, he had a son. The boy was perhaps nine, had Gaunt’s red hair and Bone’s posture, and was looking at Bone as though Bone knew something about anything. Bone was reluctant to set him straight.
“Do you want to see magic?” he found himself saying, a little desperately. The boy gave a solemn nod. Bone cast about his surroundings for something to make this inane plan stick. He was in an environment almost as foreign to him as, say, a cavern full of magma. It was a homey farmhouse with rough stone walls and a thatched roof but also fine furnishings of finished wood and glass and soft fabric. There was a fireplace with flames that crackled, if not merrily then at least assiduously. Its glow caressed various objects d’art. He wondered if he actually owned them.
He and the boy sat at a table carved with absurdly elaborate scenes of mermaids and sorcerers and berserkers and nomads and angels of death, and on it sat a crystal pitcher of lemonade with a glass stirring rod such as those invented by certain alchemists and adopted by the odd tavern concotionist. Look at this! he told the boy, and tried to dazzle him with sweeps of the rod, lemonade drops spraying everywhere. He felt terrified that at any moment his son would apprehend that Bone was no magician at all but a thief. He did not deserve the affection of a child; he must have stolen that too.
Yet as he swung the rod toward the lemonade, the drink began to bubble and glow, as though a small sun seethed within it. A rumbling shook the ornate table.
He wanted to pretend that he understood what was happening, but his voice caught in his throat, and there was silence.
The boy filled it, saying, Shoulder your pain—
Darkness, then a pale glow behind.
Alone, dream-Bone spun and saw the skull with eyes of void, which is of course a very different thing from a skull with empty eye sockets.
—Father? Bone said, though this surely was not Effigy Bone, and he wondered now, as then, why he’d said this. For this dream now mirrored an expedition into the catacombs of Archaeopolis, on one of his sabbaticals from his wonted haunts in Palmary. He’d stumbled upon the skull, expecting it to incinerate him or devour his soul, for a skull that converses likely has other tricks up its noggin.
The skull cackled in a voice like a midnight tangle of cats. You, it said, sounding like a cathedral choir murmuring thieves’ cant, have a hero‘s soul stuck in a villain‘s circumstances.
Do go on, Bone said in the dream (as he had in the actual past), for the conversation, albeit unnerving, was not incineration or devouring. He stepped a little closer to the stone plinth on which the skull jawed.
You are a man I can use.
Ah. Now, this sounds more like my normal sort of conversation—
But not yet. You are afflicted by an enchantment that unnaturally prolongs your life by protecting you from danger. This has allowed you to become an almost supernaturally skilled thief through your devil-may-care behavior.
Thank you for that.
But you have never truly grown up. Failure and affliction and genuine risk are necessary for maturity. You are a perpetual adolescent, callow and insufferable.
I don’t thank you for that.
You‘re welcome. Do not worry. I have foreseen the end of your condition.
That sounds ominous.
You will meet someone who will, through her actions, break your curse and lead you from this life. You will grow up, and grow old—and yet for a time your ridiculous skills will remain intact. That is what makes you useful.
I feel as if you are discussing livestock, not a man.
Hm.
Who are you, anyway?
Call me the First Wizard. My name is not important—a good thing, as I’ve long since forgotten it. I do not recall if I was male, female, something in between, something other... nor recall my native tongue or the hue of my long-abandoned skin. All I know is that the world‘s Last Vuuhrr taught me secrets of the universe.
Last Voor?
Vuuhrr. It matters not. What matters is that you, thief, will one day seek the Logos Lock. It conceals a treasure beyond comprehension.
Let me guess: acquiring said treasure will be extremely hazardous.
Indeed. But not today. Let me compensate you for future service. I will teach you a path that only I know down to a hellish underworld where lies the ultimate weapon, one which can shake the cosmos.
Why would I want an ultimate weapon? Power is a game for fools.
Oh, you may find this weapon professionally interesting. But the choice is yours. When the time is right, the memory of this conversation will resurface. I will now exact your Oath-to-Be.
My what, now?
A contingent oath, sworn now, forgotten soon after but coming into play if certain circumstances warrant. Swear on the memory of Master Sidewinder that you will bear the weapon to the Logos Lock.
The skull surely knew Bone. He wouldn’t swear on much. The idea of swearing on honor was laughable; swearing on family, bitter. As for deities, his folk only half-believed in their Walrus God whose primary edict was I will keep pretending to help you as long as you keep pretending to worship me. Every child on the Contrariwise Coast knew the couplet:
We created him in jest
Such a god is surely best...
But every student of Master Sidewinder knew that he had saved their lives, and even the revelation that Master Sidewinder had carefully planned their indebtedness didn’t cool their gratitude. What‘s in it for you, First Wizard?
A sort of vengeance, of a sort that matters only to me—
“Bone! Swan’s sake, man, wake up!”
He sprang to full height and burst from their tent with the nearest weapon to hand, which was of course Eyetooth. Gaunt emerged beside him, eyes wide at his frenzy, as though he’d left what passed for brains behind.
Cold air fully awakened him. “What did you hear, Gaunt?”
“You in there, mumbling about locks and wizards. And something out here, shuffling through the snow like some enormous snake.”
Their breaths fogged silver beneath the moon, and snow glittered over rocky angles beneath diamond-sharp stars.
There was a certain clarity in Imago Bone’s mind whenever he emerged from dreams into danger. “We have to use Eyetooth.”
Persimmon Gaunt did not waste breath on Why? or Are you mad? “In what fashion?”
“I’m not certain, but the skull said I’d find it interesting.”
“We have to talk sometime about whom you consider trustworthy sources. But I agree the key may have its uses.” She stood as close to him as possible. “As we cannot see our foe, perhaps you can use its extensions to sweep the snow away, for starters.”
“Like flushing out game?”
“Indeed.”
He flourished the key in his right hand, twisted it, and spun, Gaunt with her own right grasping his left and pirouetting with him. Snow spattered in glorious glittery gouts as lengths of metal flared out from unseen spaces to stir the world.
In the midst of that brightness a black coiling shape launched itself like a cobra. Bone jumped in shock. Gaunt did not let go. She recognized the Vuuhrr letters and gasped. This was their foe...
As he jumped, Bone turned the key—
And Bone turned the sky.
The world twisted. It was as though all reality besid
es they two—stars, moon, snow, chill, distant wolfsong, threads of silver cloud, mountains, tent, lingering scent of campfire smoke, unnatural entity bent on destroying them—had all been a cunningly painted image upon a vast canopy, and now the cloth was snatched away in a great spiraling flourish. An unseen giant wound up the world.
And beyond? Delirium.
The space between the spaces was...
Imagine a flame. Imagine further that it flares bright with peculiar chemicals and dazzles the eye. You and the flame occupy an underground tomb piled with the gilded treasures of mad geometer-kings. Polygons and helixes and golden ratios abound. And in the instant before the flame goes out, the patterns are scoured onto your eyes in blue-green-purple majesty.
The dark space between worlds was like that but without any flame to trigger it, without the images fading away, and without the sense of confinement. Indeed Persimmon Gaunt envisioned the shapes as unspooling endlessly, twisting and recombining, half-glimpsed, continent-sized.
It was colder out here in this immensity than in the snow. The place upon which they stood was not really a place at all. Their feet met a dimly glowing pair of discs fashioned, it seemed, of pale light, like coins reflecting the moon. But the real moon was left behind, a twist of swirling silver in a shrinking vortex of color.
Everywhere else they looked, the spectral shapes of this place-between-places stretched forever in all directions.
They screamed.
Gaunt had a sense of their enemy reacting with as much fright as they and sweeping backward into invisibility. The vortex (she had to think of it as a kind of portal now) shrank and became a blaze of golden light, then a disc of shadow, then a fresh blaze, flickering with increasing rapidity as it dwindled.
“Bone,” she managed to say, “any ideas?”
“I have no experience with something like this!”
“None?”
“Not outside bottles or bluemoss dens!”
“You’ve been visiting bluemoss dens?”
“Not since I met you! What do you reckon?”
She took a breath. “It is vital, I think, that we not stray from this spot. My hunch is that we’re in those much-advertised higher-dimensional realms. Widderspace, some call it.”
“It seems largely a colorful void.”
“Much like human society. Metaphorically speaking. But I would nevertheless return to that society intact. Bone, step onto my disc. If we drift apart, our transitions and transformations may separate us forever.”
“Done.” Rather than drift away, his disc merged with hers, the combined pair becoming a bit larger. “Transitions and transformations?”
“Strange as it is, I wouldn’t describe this as some alternate universe. We are experiencing a larger understanding of our own universe.”
“Oh good. I was worried something unusual was happening.”
“Our everyday reality is still here, nestled within this one, like a cat concealed in the foliage of a tree. It is we who have become strange, by perceiving it from this vantage.”
On impulse Bone lifted Eyetooth and shifted it toward an emptier-than-usual stretch of the vastness. He twisted the key. Would another realm appear?
Something spun into view, exploding forth like an egg dropped against hot stone. A world flared.
“Wha—” Bone began.
Beyond the new portal an oak of unknown vastness rose against a starfield, with the crown, root, and most of the silvery trunk obscured. But upon its great wide leaves lay continents’ worth of turquoise forests and lapis jungles, flecked with mountains of green stone, deserts of onyx, rivers like thin blood. Rivulets large as ocean currents fell from leaf to leaf, creating carnelian lakes on the blue expanses of lower leaves.
Gaunt frowned at this newly revealed aspect of the cosmos, even as Bone gasped. “Imagine the treasures to be found there...”
“I can,” she said frowning. “That is the problem.” But she did not explain her remark.
The flickering circle of light and darkness representing their own domain continued dwindling. But they might have time for an experiment. “Bone. I wish you to open another new world.”
“Greedy, aren’t we?”
“In a sense. Aim for here.” She delineated an angle near her head.
“You warned me not to point the key at—”
“That was then. Do not intersect me of course. Be cautious.”
The idea of harm to Gaunt seemed to awaken Bone to sobriety. It was flattering. “All right, then,” he said, sighting carefully and twisting the key.
At once Gaunt began whispering a nursery rhyme.
“Yokel Swell went to the well
Up the green hill thither
Down came Swell and broke his shell
And never could get together...”
The new vista erupted. In a purple realm lit by green stars, shattered pale fragments of a world swirled around a white nimbus illuminated from within by a disc of solar yellow.
“I see,” said Gaunt. “Let’s go home, Bone...”
“But the exposed mineral wealth—”
She took his hand and nudged him, past the great tree and toward the shrinking realm of flickers now strobing like a maddened firefly. The circle was only a narrow cave-mouth of a thing as she tugged Bone through.
They fell into bright daylight and collapsed upon a now-grassy turf fresh with spring flowers. The snows had receded up the mountain peaks. The tent had been carried off by weather or walkers.
Behind them the passage into the cosmic void waited like the surface of a round, tipped-over, black table. But then in a twinkling, ordinary reality covered it like a tablecloth of blue, white, and green. The gap was seamlessly knit with the stuff of their Earthe. The pathway was gone.
They lay in a tangle in spring grass.
“We have things to discuss,” Gaunt said after she’d gotten a long breath.
“There is more than one manner of discourse,” Bone said, brushing her hair from her face and leaning impulsively in.
“Mm. I would question your priorities were I not one of them. You are lucky you’re a good kisser, man.”
“Well, spring is in the air.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? One of them.” She sat up. “Our detour with Eyetooth has been prolonged. Weeks have passed here, while we experienced minutes.”
“If not years,” he acknowledged, running his fingers distractedly through the indentation she’d left in the grass.
“Which explains why someone nicked our tent.”
He sprang to his feet. “Our gear! Thieves!”
She sighed and smiled up at him. “I am enjoying the irony almost as much as the view.” She rose and patted his shoulder. “The appearance of the meadow makes me believe it’s been less than a year. But our friend This may still be out here. And I have the uncomfortable feeling that your informant the skull has set us up. We need answers.”
Bone made a fist. “Well, I know where to find them. And if the snows have melted there is now a quick path to answers. The main road’s just around that slope, I’m sure of it. We’ll be at Loomsberg by midmorning!”
An hour after nightfall they staggered off the mountain road into Loomsberg’s first available inn (Ellen’s Inn). The innkeeper (one Ellen, who, luckily, was in) kindly but efficiently relieved them of hunger, thirst, fatigue, and coin—but not unreasonably so—and so they found themselves abruptly waking up in a feathered bed in the main suite, to the dazzle of the morning sun against mountain snow and the clamor of a dozen roosters.
Out the suite’s window Loomsberg was a city of wind and waterfalls seemingly in danger of sliding down seven different crevasses. That this town of windmills and waterwheels and steam contraptions and endless bridges still rose above Dragondraught Gorge was a testament more to engineering (and sometimes frantic reconstruction) than magic. For magic became undone in Loomsberg, for reasons understood only by a few. Among those few were the two inhabitants Gaunt and Bon
e now sought.
They still feared pursuit. So they hastened out in a tangle of quickly donned clothing and a babble of thanks to Ellen, a bespectacled blur of ingenuity and industry who outfitted them with baskets of foodstuffs, a new pair of boots, and directions to the central bridges before turning her attention to a veiled, coffee-sipping, dulcet-voiced woman from Mirabad studying the picture windows, a grim toga-clad man from Archaeopolis at a table filled with seven scrolls of figures and one cup of tea, and a steppe nomad in a sky-blue robe sampling exotic foods like toast and jam as part of a vision quest.
“I would go back to that inn,” Gaunt said approvingly as they hustled through narrow lanes lined with colorful houses and the signs of businesses in half-a-dozen languages. “I wish I could converse with the other guests. This seems a most eclectic town.”
“Even more so than I remember!” Bone said, craning his neck for the occasional dizzying view of the gorge and its lantern-strewn bridges. Gold-lit morning mist filled the air. Humans of many sizes, hues, and costumes filled the twisting streets, and many non-humans as well, more than Gaunt had ever seen in one place.
“What brings so many to this spot? The lack of magic?”
“Exactly! There are clockworks and pistons and intricate gears that function well in this place but not elsewhere. As though mischievous spirits disapprove of advanced contraptions. Much of my favorite gear has come from this place, but I’ve had to be careful lest it be too ingenious and fail at a critical moment. Whoa—”
There were horses and donkeys and carts on the narrow paths, but a tall, keen-eyed, athletic bald man, a fellow so focused he seemed almost chiseled out of ivory, was riding something entirely outside their experience. It was a sort of metallic wave crest with handles and two wheels and a fantasia of gears and cables between the wheels, operated by the eager man’s feet.
“Pardon me,” the man said with a cheerful confidence utterly at odds, Gaunt thought, with what he was doing. “Coming through!” He projected a composite of open friendliness and utter determination that invited instant cooperation. Gaunt and Bone were not simply stepping aside but aiding the spirit of invention. The man on the well-worked instrument of madness thanked them and whirred between. In his wake various people shouted contradictory things like, “Richard Thomas, when will you learn!” and “Richard Thomas, never give up!”
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