by Tim Lebbon
“I spoke without thinking,” he said. He frowned, not understanding. The Widow's words of advice echoed in his mind, but she was not really here, did not really know what he had.
Lulah kicked at a stone man's leg and it came off, thumping to the ground. She looked at the broken part, running her fingers across the insides and rubbing dust between fingertips. She avoided catching Ramus's eye. She had yet to thank him, and he felt a brief rush of annoyance, but smiled at such foolish petulance.
“They were preying on bad memories,” Ramus said. “Sucking them out of us.”
“Not me,” she said.
Her denial surprised Ramus. “You were screaming.”
Lulah rubbed her chest and neck. “They were hurting me.” She looked away again, retrieving and sheathing her dropped sword.
I heard you, he thought. I know what you were going through, because I went through it myself. But if Lulah wanted her distance and privacy, so be it.
For the rest of that day, as they left the great forest behind and set out across the strange landscape of water and standing stones, Lulah said little. And Ramus wondered what dark deeds were swilling in her mind, trying to lose themselves in the past once again.
Chapter 13
TWELVE DAYS AFTER they had entered the forest, it ended by the side of a lake, and beyond the lake, Nomi saw a plain of standing stones. When they skirted the lake and realized how huge the stones were—the largest were ten times the height of a person—they paused for a while to admire them, and Nomi wondered how they had ever been placed. Nobody suggested that they might be natural.
They saw no sign of Ramus or Lulah.
Days passed, spent mostly on horseback except for short breaks for food or to explore some of the more extraordinary standing stones. Nights were often spent camped beside a monolith for shelter. Some nights Beko spent in Nomi's tent, and others he chose to remain outside. They did not speak much about what was happening between them. The time would come for talk, Nomi knew, but now there were things that felt greater—the places they were seeing, the voyage, what they might find at its end. So she was content to let lust take its course and hope that love would find its own way.
Sometimes, when night came, Nomi became wary of falling asleep. She knew that Ramus sometimes dreamed her dreams, and the thought of that made her feel naked before him, exposed and opened up to his scrutiny. She tried to steer her thoughts certain ways, but she could never dictate her dreams. Or her nightmares. She dreamed of making love with Beko, dying in the forests, killing Ramus with a blunt knife, Timal appearing before her and fading away again, the Divide falling to crush all of Noreela once they had climbed and discovered its secrets. She invited none of these dreams, and always awoke wondering which ones Ramus had shared. Whichever he saw, she hoped that some sense of her remorse would show through.
Their route was not direct because of the many waterways that sliced the landscape in all directions. Sometimes, the surfaces of these streams or channels appeared to be frozen, but as they drew closer the effect would shimmer and disappear, leaving little more than ripples in its wake. Other times the streams would be steaming, the ground close to them almost too hot to walk on. Geysers erupted—not large, but unpredictable—and several times a horse was startled enough to bolt.
As Nomi took in their strange surroundings, she hoped that Ramus would be fascinated enough to stop and take notes, write at length about the frozen and steaming streams and whatever things may live in them to cause such effects. She wondered where he was. Close? Watching her watch for him?
And if he ever spoke to her again, what language would he use?
DESPITE THE STONES —which became more infrequent the farther south they went—and the streams, small lakes and areas of marshy ground, they made surprisingly good progress. Food was plentiful, both meat and vegetable, and they ate three good meals every day.
A couple of times they saw tumblers in the distance. Nomi was delighted. She'd heard mention of them before, but when Ten had spoken of them back in Long Marrakash, they had still struck her as the stuff of legend. Now, even from such a distance, she could make out their great rolling shapes, part animal, part plant, which would supposedly crush and consume anything in their path. They rolled south to north, against the slope of the landscape and the direction of the wind. The Serians kept a wary eye on them until they vanished, while Nomi watched with wonder.
The waterways became less common, and when they arrived at the final standing stones, they looked south and saw a shadow along the horizon.
“Clouds,” Beko said.
“Hills,” Rhiana said. “And shadowed valleys.”
Nomi shook her head and urged her horse forward. They passed through the shadow of the final standing stone, and the landscape before her was stark and bare. “Neither,” she said. “That's the Divide. A couple of days' ride, perhaps, but it's already there. Too far to see properly.” She looked up above the shadow and saw only the slate gray of distance.
The Serians were silent, letting Nomi look upon the target of her journey and think her own thoughts. But, in truth, all her thoughts were about Ramus. She wondered whether he was looking at this same sight right now, somewhere far to the east or perhaps closer. She looked that way, across the gently undulating land, and she closed her eyes and tried to imagine him looking back at her. But her visual landscape was a blank. It always had been; her imagination was limited, a trickle compared to Ramus's roar.
“We should camp here,” Beko said. “Beside the final stone.”
“I want to ride on and—” Nomi began, but the Serian captain gave her a stern stare.
“We have equipment to check,” he said. “We've all climbed sea cliffs before, but none of us have ever faced anything like this. We should eat well tonight, prepare ourselves to ride into the Great Divide's shadow.”
“I've heard things,” Noon said. “I've heard it said that the shadow is a curse, and once it touches your skin you're the Divide's meat forever.”
“I've met someone who defies that curse,” Nomi said. But still, it gave her a chill. There'll be something final about entering the Divide's shadow, she thought. Cutting off the sun. It'll be like leaving Noreela.
“This is the far extreme of the land,” Beko said. And Nomi thought, Please don't fall apart on me now. He looked at her and smiled. “What a voyage!” he said. “To the edge.”
Nomi smiled back. “It's only just begun.”
“How high can it be?” Ramin asked.
“Do we have enough climbing gear? Enough rope?” Noon said.
“Let's camp and eat.” Beko's voice was calm and assured. “Around the fire, we can talk about these things. And I'm sure Mam Hyden, if she knows more than she has let on thus far, will have plenty to say.” He smiled again, but this time his eyes held a glint of something cool.
He doesn't trust me, Nomi thought. But after what I've done to Ramus, it's hardly surprising. And she realized, looking south at the shadow of the edge of the world, that whatever there was between her and the captain could never be more than it was now.
NOON AND RAMIN unloaded the packhorses and started going through their climbing equipment. Beko watched with half an eye, but most of his attention was directed southward, at the darkening stain that marked the edge of the world they knew. Nomi felt the draw. It called her, inviting her from the camp to bathe in its gloom, and she wondered what could possibly grow there at the base of that great cliff, a place the sun rarely touched. Mystery lured her, and the unknown, but something pushed her as well. Ramus. And the thought that he could get there before her.
I should send two Serians ahead, she thought. Get them to patrol the base of the Divide, try to stop Ramus from starting his climb. But Konrad's fate hung around her neck like a rock, and she had no desire to be the cause of more deaths. Ramus had something powerful and remarkable, and had shown that he was not averse to using it.
“He took no climbing gear,” Beko said. He stood besi
de her where she leaned against the standing stone, both of them looking south even though the gloom of dusk meant that they saw little.
“I've thought of that,” Nomi replied. “But he's determined. He and Lulah will climb nonetheless.”
“With no ropes? No pitons? No slings? One slip and they're both dead.”
“Maybe,” Nomi said. “But that won't hold him back.”
“Why should it?” Beko said quietly.
Nomi glanced sideways at him but he did not meet her gaze. “Why indeed?” she said. “He's dying anyway. But Lulah isn't.”
“She may be dead already,” Beko said. “Ramus is obviously . . . not of his own mind. Whatever he has—whatever knowledge can do that to a man—can't have come without a cost.”
“He's no killer,” Nomi said, realizing as she spoke how ridiculous that sounded.
But Beko understood. “Konrad threatened him, I know. But maybe Lulah has as well.”
“Serians are loyal.”
“Yes, but not to madness.”
“You think Ramus is mad?”
Beko touched Nomi's back casually, then slipped his arm around her waist and leaned into her. “There was something mad about him the day we met.”
“My fault,” she said, and Beko's arm brought her no warmth. “I gave him that sickness, so Konrad is my fault, and—”
“Blame will crush you,” Beko said, “and guilt will chew your bones.”
“An old Mancoserian saying?”
“An old Beko Havison saying.” He rested his forehead against hers for a few beats, and it was the smell of his breath more than the contact that gave her some comfort. She was here among friends, and whatever she had done, they still chose to ride with her. She was paying well, true, but their actions spoke volumes.
“It's going to be a hard climb,” she said.
“I know. And we may not reach the top.”
“If there is a top.”
Beko sighed. “We should set a limit. A point at which we stop and come back down.”
“Ramus won't.”
“No, but Ramus is crazy.”
Nomi nodded slowly and listened to the noises made by Noon and Ramin checking their gear. Tomorrow they would ride toward the edge of Noreela. This was the greatest time of her life. Why, then, was she filled with such dread? She had the sense that the climb would be like plunging into a bottomless lake, doomed never to surface again. She would sink up out of Noreela, leaving behind not even her shadow.
“Let's eat,” Beko said. “Rhiana has made us something special.”
TO BEGIN WITH, Ramus wanted to stop at every standing stone.
He dismounted and circled the first one, using his foot to shift aside the tall grass around its base, running his hand across the smooth weather-worn surface, trying to discern shape, purpose or intention in its placement. He carried his journal with him, reversed so that any notes he made here were in the back. He did not want to interrupt his translations and observations of the parchments.
Lulah, still shaken from their encounter at the edge of the forest, remained mounted. She rode a circle around Ramus and the rock, looking outward instead of in. She had hardly exchanged glances with Ramus since the gray people. Every day I'm driving her further away, he thought, but that hardly mattered. They had passed well into the uncharted territories now, and his rough map was taking on shapes and contour as he added information. It was knowledge for knowledge's sake, because he knew he would never return.
Soon they would be at the Divide. And perhaps these stones would guide him in.
Is this you? he thought, but no voice answered.
No markings, no carvings, no signs of who- or whatever had placed them, and yet placed the stones must have been. Ramus pressed his back to the stone and looked in a slow half-circle from east, to south, then west, and from there he could see six other stones. Most were quite small humps—either through distance or through quirks in the landscape—but the largest stood proud from a small hilltop to the southeast.
He closed his eyes and heard only the sound of Lulah's horse's feet plodding across the soft ground to his right. He whispered some new words to the air—the language he was coming to know better and better, but which he had yet to understand— and nothing changed. But he felt the power there, and he suddenly wanted to see the parchment pages again.
There was something about one of the pages, the one without writing but swamped in images . . .
He sat against the rock, opened his backpack and unrolled the parchments, flattening them on his outstretched legs. The one he sought he had examined least, because much of it was filled with imagery that spoke no words. But Ramus knew that you did not need language to tell a story. This page had the customary line dividing the sheet into a third and two-thirds, and among the abundance of images and shapes were twelve pointed images that could have been standing stones. They started smallest away from the Divide, and the closest one was largest. The line of the Divide adjacent to this largest stone was stepped inward briefly, as though indicating a special place.
The easiest way to climb, Ramus thought. Either that, or a route into a trap.
By the time Lulah had passed behind the standing stone and emerged again on his left, Ramus knew where they had to go. “That way,” he said, pointing at the largest rock in the distance. “And from there to the next largest, and the next.”
Lulah nodded and stopped her horse, waiting for him to mount his own.
But Ramus turned once again to the monolith, opening his arms and pressing his hands and face against a surface slightly warmed by the sun. The rock seemed to throb at him, a brief sensation that was not repeated, and for a moment the pain in his head receded. Like the slow, ponderous heartbeat of something asleep for a very long time.
THE SHADOWS GROW from the south and advance toward him, and they have teeth. They are made of darkness and ambiguity but are sharp and deadly, and one bite from their unseen edges will kill him for sure. He looks around for his traveling companions, but he is on his own. They have abandoned him or been killed, and even his horse glances to the side now and then, foaming at the mouth, blood in its spittle, its mad, rolling eyes accusing him of some wrongdoing and issuing the promise that it will be gone at the first opportunity. But it is a chance it will never have, because the shadows roll fast across the landscape. Every time they touch one of the standing stones, the rock transforms into a nebulous, writhing shape that runs and frolics within their embrace.
And there it is: the unknown, that sea of darkness containing all the knowledge he can never have . . . even though the source of this dream is Nomi, not him, and the insecurity showing through is both chilling and heartening. I'm lost, he thinks in the dream, but in the part of his nightmaring mind that is aware of where this comes from, those words are spoken in Nomi's voice.
The shadows bear down on him and their leading edges are raw, seeping wounds in the land.
He laughs.
RAMUS SAT UP quickly, still laughing, and wondered whether he could reverse the process of his worsening sickness. It burrowed in his head and gave him her nightmares, and though the pain flooded in again and drove him back to the ground, there was one ray of light that kept his smile. The hope that, somewhere in her sleep and across the miles, she would hear him laughing at her dread.
THEY NAVIGATED THEIR way south from rock to rock. Sometimes it was obvious which distant monolith was the largest, but other times it was difficult to tell. Whenever they had been placed, it would have been impossible to account for future shrugs in the landscape, fallen stones, growing trees or drifting mist. If he could not tell which was largest, Ramus consulted Lulah, and together they followed their best guess. It did not concern him unduly. The pages were right, and he had felt that beat through the land. He was confident that if they did stray from the trail, they would soon find it again.
He hugged every rock they came to, and each time he felt another encouraging beat. And there was the sickness, a
nd the deeper, darker portion of his mind that no longer belonged to him. It was watching him, and he reveled in its attention.
A day out from the forest, Lulah started to settle again. Whatever dark memories those gray people had encouraged to resurface must have been dark indeed. Either that, or Ramus was far more able to deal with such guilt.
Because I'm going mad. But he would shake his head at that idea, even though it hurt to do so. I'm not going mad. I'm going sane. I'm looking for the future, and when I find it I'll make sure it's safe.
But he wondered. . . .
When he sat down during the evenings and examined those pages, he wondered where he was leading himself, and just how much he was being led.
RAMUS KNEW WHAT it was straightaway, and Lulah seemed terrified.
“That's the edge of the world,” she said.
“It's the Great Divide. Not the edge, just a boundary. Every boundary is there to be crossed.”
“No,” Lulah said, shaking her head and somehow transferring her unease to her horse. It stomped its feet, skittish and snorting. “No, it's the edge. Can't you see that? Can't you feel it?”
Ramus looked at the stretch of shadow across the southern horizon and tried to decide exactly how he felt. Excited, perhaps. Nervous. Behind them stood the final huge standing rock, and between here and the horizon was an unremarkable plain of rolling grassland swept bare of trees. Across that landscape, where it met the horizon, the first part of their voyage would end.
“I've been examining the pages every evening,” he said. “There's nothing that tells me this is the end. Everything indicates that the Divide is the beginning of somewhere else.”
“A place where words can turn people to stone?”
Ramus looked at Lulah—her face nervous, belying the image of the strong woman bristling with weaponry—and shook his head. “Those words are special.”
“The words of a Sleeping God?”
“Perhaps.” But when he looked south again, he thought, Perhaps sleeping, or more likely fallen, because some of what I see on those parchments . . . But that was a myth within a myth, and the more he thought of it, the more those doubts were swallowed by the presence in his mind, leaving only the good behind.
