by Tim Lebbon
“Nomi!” It was Beko, kneeling beside her and supporting her shoulders with his hands.
“Stay away from it!” she heard Rhiana say, and Noon appeared in her field of vision, wielding his sword as though it could help.
“Don't . . .” Nomi said, “. . . don't let it . . . please . . .” She spat again, trying to void her mouth of gritty vomit. Beko helped her sit up and she clasped his hands, relishing their reality.
“Stay back, Noon,” Beko said.
The shape fluttered here and there, like a butterfly looking for somewhere to land. Nomi suddenly perceived a repulsive sentience about it, and a sick humor in every skip and swerve.
“It knows me,” she whispered.
The wisp floated away, expanding between blinks into something the size of a horse, featureless, dark and blank. As it retreated, it crushed flowers and rolled across heathers. The path it left behind was marked by plants fading from purple and green to brown and pale.
“It's just a thing,” Beko said, and Nomi almost laughed.
“A thing?”
The wisp flicked back to a minuscule taint on the air once more, seemingly without passing any size in between.
“It's laughing at me,” she said. Beko tried to let go of her shoulders but she clasped his hands, holding him there. He was keeping her in the world.
“What the piss was that?” Noon said. The Serian sounded scared, and that did nothing to settle Nomi's fears.
“Marsh wisp,” Rhiana said. “The things that don't exist.”
Nomi felt the tall Serian looking down at her as she spoke, but she did not return her stare. More than I know, Nomi thought. There's so much more than I know. I didn't believe in them, but they don't need my belief to exist. Some of what Ramus had said to her came back with a sting. Perhaps she had restricted herself by only choosing Ventgoria for her voyages. “I am a searcher of new things,” she said quietly, and Beko slipped his hands out from beneath hers.
“We should get away,” he said. “No telling when it'll come back.”
“What did you see when it was over me?” Nomi asked.
“It was like you had a bit of night around you,” Noon said. “What about you?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I saw nothing.”
“SO, DO YOU want to hear about my eye?” Lulah asked.
They had stopped for a brief rest just after midday, and since then they had ridden hard. Lulah had gathered some bread mushrooms, moist and wholesome, and they had been eating as they rode. Ramus chewed thoughtfully, dwelling on what had happened and what may come.
He fumbled his last mushroom and watched it disappear in the grass.
“You're sure?” It was a foolish response, but Lulah had truly surprised him. Strong and silent at first, it seemed that being away from the crowd had allowed her to lower some of her defenses.
She turned in her saddle and smiled. “I don't offer something like that unless I'm sure.” She untied Ramus's reins from the back of her saddle and he kneed his horse, riding alongside her so that he could hear better.
“It's relevant, isn't it?” he asked. “How you lost your eye.”
“Made me the way I am, and that's why I came with you.”
“You said you'd tell me when I finally translate these pages.”
Lulah's expression grew dark and Ramus, looking at her from the side, found it strange being unable to see her good eye. It made her inhuman. “I think you're close already.”
“There may be a Sleeping God on top of the Great Divide,” he said. Rather than feeling annoyed at blurting out the secret, sharing it suddenly seemed to lift the weight from his mind and ease the pain behind his eyes.
“You didn't have to tell me that,” Lulah said.
“You're going to tell me about your eye. Just sharing trust. We've got a long way to go together.”
“A Sleeping God . . .” she said, trailing off and looking away from him, across the Steppes. She was quiet for a while, and Ramus tried to imagine the thoughts turning over in her mind. Superstitions, fears, doubtless a hundred questions. “I knew that already.”
“You knew?”
“I'm no fool,” she said. “I saw its image on that parchment. There are people in a village in Cantrassa who worship such an image.”
“They worship a Fallen God?”
“Fallen?” Lulah said, frowning.
Ramus shook his head. She doesn't know the name. But that doesn't mean anything.
“I'm traveled, Ramus. I probably know more than you think. And I promised you my tale, so I'll save my questions until that's done. Most of them. But here's one: Does Beko know?”
“I'm not sure,” Ramus said. And truly he did not. But he suspected that Nomi would tell Beko if she had not already. She was willful and confident, but not very strong, and she would want him on her side.
Lulah suddenly laughed out loud. “This is more than just a voyage, isn't it?” she asked.
“If there is a Sleeping God there, it could be the final voyage. Some say they were the First People; others, that they molded the land, and only went to sleep when it was ready for humanity to follow them on. But it's also said that Noreela is theirs, and we are merely tenants. If such knowledge awoke, the Age of Expansion would end, and Noreela will be known to us.”
She nodded, still smiling, and then began her own story.
“ I’M NO KONRAD. I can't spin a fine tale like him. Rhiana too, and Ramin, you'd have heard their stories if we'd stayed together. But not all Serians are natural storytellers, though we have that reputation. And when it comes to my eye, I don't dwell on it too much, and speak of it even less. But you should hear why I chose to come with you and not stay with Nomi. I understand betrayal, and pain, and the stuff of friendships.”
“You told me you have no friends.”
“I don't now. But I did once. You and Nomi . . . that all seems so complex.”
“I barely understand it myself.”
“My own friendship—and the rules that governed it—was very simple. He was a year younger than me, and just to begin with there was romance and attraction. But that soon became far too complicated, because he was really only just getting to know himself. He had doubts. Sometimes he was attracted to me, and at other times he had trouble deciding why he was attracted, because his heart and mind were telling him otherwise. I valued our friendship enough to talk to him about it and suggest we ease away. It wasn't too difficult for me, and I thought he'd found it equally easy. We saw a lot more of each other, got on very well. We went on hunting trips to The Foot, the island north of Mancoseria, and there we fought golden pythons the size of five men. We took their heads and ate their meat, and we became a good hunting team—one of the best. We spent much of our time with each other, until I took my seethe-gator. After that, things went sour.”
“That's your mark of adulthood, the seethe-gator,” Ramus said.
“Yes, socially, at least. There are Serians as old as I am now who have never taken a ’gator, for one reason or another. They're not the easiest of animals to kill, and though there are thousands of them, it does sometimes happen that they become cautious and elusive. It comes in waves. We've never pretended to understand them; we just kill them, before they kill us.”
“So some Serians never reach adulthood?”
Lulah frowned. “It's not that simple. It's acceptance and standing that are affected. A Serian who takes their ’gator when they're in their teens will likely have a comfortable life, respected and involved within the community. Either that, or they do as I did and travel to Noreela.”
“Come to make your fortune,” Ramus said, a smile in his voice. He was pleased that Lulah laughed softly before responding.
“There are some who say that, yes. But most of us know there's no fortune to be made. It's more a case of broadening horizons, seeing more of the world. Mancoseria becomes a very small place when you have to kill seethe-gators simply to protect your people and cattle, rather than to prove
yourself.”
Lulah took a drink from her water skin and passed it across to Ramus. He accepted, swilling the water around his mouth to clean the dust from his tongue and teeth. He said nothing, eager to hear the rest of Lulah's story.
“His name was Pargan. A strong boy, but he faced a lot of prejudice when he told his family he and I were only friends. They wanted their son to take a wife and have children, and when they realized that was unlikely, they shut him out. When I took my seethe-gator, he saw that as a betrayal of our friendship.”
“Why would he believe that?”
“He thought I wanted to leave him behind. He transferred his family's prejudice onto me and painted me in their colors. However hard I tried to convince him that he and I were still friends, he took my ascent into adulthood very hard. And seven days after I killed my seethe-gator, he killed himself.”
Ramus was stunned. Ever since meeting Lulah he had been convinced that there was some tragedy in her past, something to explain the physical evidence of her missing eye and also her coolness and detachment. But believing in some vague tragedy and hearing the facts of it were very different.
“You can't believe that was all because of you,” Ramus said, and Lulah's head snapped around, and she fixed him with her eye. “I mean, you were his friend. He can't have really thought you betrayed him.”
She shook her head. “No, I don't believe that at all. This stud here . . .” She tapped her eye patch and the star embedded within it. “This is for Pargan's father.”
“You killed him?”
“I challenged him. It was at the Cliff of Souls, just as Pargan's body was dropped from Mancoseria into the sea below. I . . . lost control. The tears of loss had come and gone, and now I cried with rage. I saw my friend wrapped in black-grass and tipped into the sea, and he was younger than me, and both socially and physically he had yet to become a man. And now he was dead, and I blamed his family for it first and foremost. So I did something that I believed would define our friendship and honor him. I challenged his father, struck him down with my fist. And when he rose again, he had a knife in his hand.
“We fought, but it was quick. On his first strike, he hit my eye and I felt it pop. He laughed. The rest of Pargan's family, the others gathered there, were shocked at the violence—this was Pargan's funeral, after all. But what better place for a fight to the death than above the Cliff of Souls? He came for a second strike. I deflected it, broke his arm, took his knife and slit his throat. Before anyone could stop me I sent his body over the cliff after his son's, and that was that.”
Lulah fell silent again, almost as if the story had ended. But for Ramus it had just begun. Surely there was so much more to tell?
“And you escaped justice, after killing him in front of so many?”
“Justice?” Lulah asked, and she was so close to tears that Ramus looked ahead, not wishing to see her cry.
Lulah's story was told. Whatever had happened between her killing of Pargan's father and her arrival on Noreela seemed moot, because she was here now and she wore her patch with pride.
“So I understand betrayal,” she said a long time later. “And I understand being wronged. And that's why I came with you.”
“You see the betrayal I've suffered?” Ramus asked.
“Nomi's killed you.”
And in that bald statement Ramus tried to discern the truth of things. Nomi and I should have been lovers, he thought. He wondered how lovemaking with one's executioner would feel.
THAT NIGHT THEY made no campfire, and Ramus had to study the parchments by the light of the moons. Perhaps it was a strange property of the material, or a trick of his eye, but the blank third of the page seemed to glow with life-moonlight, and the other two-thirds—where words were written and images printed—shone yellow. The death moon touched the Sleeping God and gave its image shape.
Lulah had prepared them a meal consisting of dried meat from the day before, stuffed with soft herbs and a variety of crushed root. It tasted cool and foul, but she insisted that it would give them strength. Ramus had eaten it whilst holding the round stone charm in his other hand, and he felt effects from neither.
Now Lulah patrolled the camp once again. He could not hear or see her, and that gave him great comfort.
And the pages Ten had found at the base of the Great Divide breathed at him.
Ramus knew that translating old languages relied on a small stroke of insight to give large benefit. Some languages from Old Noreela had never been broken, and probably never would. There were stone tablets from the great burial mounds of Cantrassa that must contain the histories of an entire race, long since gone. But though the tablets were filled with symbols, there was nothing with which to compare them. Some believed they came from a race that had landed on Noreela many centuries or millennia before, and that their people were long gone to dust. Others alleged that they were from a civilization wiped out when the current Noreelans first started to appear, a genesis lost to the mists of time, myth and superstition. If the new race had wiped out the old, it would follow that the history of the old race would have been wiped out as well. Victors write history, not the vanquished.
Still more said the tablets were lined with the terrible history of the Violet Dogs.
But Ramus knew now that the language used on these pages had a basis in some of the Old Noreelan tongues, and might even have been derived from one or all of them. This was a mystery that he would uncover, and the thought of what he would find numbed the pain behind his eyes.
Yet he could not clear that small stone fly from his mind.
Ramus worked long into the night. Lulah returned to the camp after midnight, mumbled something about having traveled for miles and seen no threat, then fell asleep close to Ramus. He could hear her breathing and took comfort from their proximity.
He muttered words he had discerned from the pages the previous night, and once again felt a fine fall of dust around his head. He frowned, because he did not know what was happening, though suspicions were taking form.
On one page, the words were surrounded by a series of images— a humanoid figure repeated thirty times around the page in various poses, one seeming to follow the other. At first he had believed it to be an illustrated dance, one form of expression displayed by another. Now he had other ideas. In the morning, perhaps he would find out for sure.
He traced other words with his finger, trying to shape his mouth around them, and they felt alien and old. They gave him only a whisper, because their vocalization took much strength from his body and mind.
There is magic deeper than magichala, the Widow had said. She often spoke of the potential in the land, and sometimes he believed she viewed Noreela as a living thing. She would pick up a stone and hand it to him. Touch this. Feel it. Sense its shape, its smoothness on one side and the jagged edge on the other. Imagine who or what has touched it before you, what it has seen, what it has borne witness to. How did it break? A footfall, a strike, caving in the skull of a person or thing? There's magic, Ramus Rheel. The land's memory and future. The land's soul. It's deep, but when I'm asleep and I look far enough inside, I can sense it there, waiting to be born. And one day I will possess it, and these peaks will become mine.
His eyelids drooped and his head nodded forward, and Ramus carried the pages from waking into sleep, aware that he was dreaming yet still trying to translate. And though he could not hear or speak the words fully, they began to make some sense.
RAMUS AWOKE TO daylight, slumped on his saddle with the parchment pages clasped in his hands, and something was moving across his face. He lifted a hand before he could open his eyes fully, and the beetle was cool and hard in his fist. Its pincers sliced for his thumb but missed. Its feet spiked his skin, feelers tickling the hairs on the back of his hand as it tried to crawl away. And from the depths of sleep, words echoed at him, and he muttered them aloud.
They stuck in his mind, as though pinned there by barbs of sunlight.
The l
arge insect's feelers turned from black to gray, snapped and crumbled. Its carapace lightened, and it stopped moving when three of its legs snapped off. Their stumps scratched at Ramus's hand, sensation paying witness to the impossible thing he saw. He wanted to throw the thing away, yet it was of his own making. His sleep-staled breath, his words, his muttered dream-time exhalations were turning this beetle to dust.
Its body was gray now, and all movement had ceased. He heard a subtle cracking sound and the animal twitched in his hand, breaking in two as impossible stresses were forced upon its structure. When its outer shell was ruptured, its innards flowed out onto Ramus's hand. Dust and grit.
Lulah appeared from behind a high bank of shrubs and Ramus closed his hand, crushing the dead beetle beyond recognition.
“What's wrong?” she asked, pausing when she saw his face.
“Nightmare,” he said. He stood, pressing both hands to the ground to do so. As he stepped forward he passed his foot through the smear of dust.
“We should move on,” she said. “It's bright now, but there's rain coming.”
Ramus looked up at the clear blue skies, enjoying the sunlight on his face. My words did that, he thought, but immediately the lie was apparent. They had not been his own words, but those of some unknown civilization. He could only wonder whether they still existed atop the Great Divide, and what other wonders they may possess. They wrote a charm that turned a living thing to stone. Maybe you were right, Widow, he thought.
“I see only clear skies,” he said.
Lulah looked grim and more withdrawn than before. Perhaps this morning she was regretting telling her tale. Ramus knew more than most how a person could change from day to day.
“Believe me,” she said, “heavy rains by midday. I smell it, shred flowers droop and the birds are gathering food. And the farther south we go, the more the rains might bring with them.”
They rode out after a light breakfast, and by early afternoon the sun was blotted out by clouds, daylight had turned almost to dusk and the rains were thrashing down.
