by Tim Lebbon
“You came alone?” Nomi said in wonder. “No ropes?”
“I had my shoes,” Sordon said. “Good grip. And I had gloves that preserved my fingertips, and a belt looped three times around my waist, which I used on several occasions to tie myself around a suitable rock. I don't need to tell you about the difficulties of the climb, I'm sure. Or the things that inhabit the cliffs.”
Nomi nodded.
“I climbed in almost the same place as you. That was the silent influence of the Fallen God, though back then I did not know its nature or form. And when I reached the top and stood here in amazement, the Sentinels emerged from their settlements and converged on me. This was a very different place back then, and the Sentinels were very different as well. They looked much the same as they do now—a strange race, for sure—but they were far more . . . civilized.
“Word spread, and more Sentinels came from all along the Divide. I was nervous but not afraid, because they exuded an air of wonder. They were amazed. It was obvious to me then that I was the first to reach the top of the Divide, though perhaps not the first to try.” He looked into the distance, as though the past still existed there. “You know, there were tens of thousands of them back then, their society as diverse as Noreela's. They walked tall and with grace, and were dressed in fine clothes, and carried their young in slings across their chests. They had art and writing, music, strange technologies I couldn't begin to understand, and still don't now. They worked with water and steam, air and fire, and they could do miraculous things. They taught their young to read. They could have taught us so much.”
“How could they change so quickly?” Nomi asked.
Sordon shook his head, sighing. “They took me in. Fed me, gave me water, tended my aches and wounds. And then a shaman came, one of their spiritual leaders, and he collapsed at my feet. Perhaps it was intentional. Maybe he had it planned, but he passed out as though he were dead, and woke again after seven days. When he came to, he seemed mad. I could hear him from my rooms, shouting and raging and crying, and they left me alone for a while as they cared for him.
“When they returned to me, it was with a reverence that hadn't been there before. The Sentinels that tended me were quiet and would not look me in the eye. They shivered and wept when they bathed me, and when I ate they would watch as though I were changing food into charms. I suppose I took advantage, and much as I wished to be up and about exploring this new world, my exhaustion held me down. I had broken toes on the climb without even noticing, and two of my ribs were cracked from a fall. So I soaked up their attentions and ate all the good food they brought. They brought drink as well, a fluid so light that it was almost a gas. I drank and breathed it at the same time and it gave me such dreams! They would be there when I emerged from sleep, kneeling around my bed with an expectant look on their faces. Whatever I said they would try to repeat, but their voices could not manage my language. However, I soon began to speak theirs.
“I should have realized I was becoming their god. I did know, I think, though even now I can't be sure. I was vain and filled with self-importance, trying to imagine the glory I could take back to Noreela when I eventually left this place.” Sordon laughed, such a natural sound that it lifted Nomi's spirits for a moment.
“But you never left,” she said. “And they changed.”
“Of course. Time went on, I practiced their language and remained here to learn of their culture, their world. I was an explorer, after all.”
“You are an explorer.”
“No, I was. I'm not sure what I am now. A fool? Destroyer of worlds? Maybe. Certainly not a god. Nowhere near that.”
“And the Sleeping God?” Nomi asked.
“I told you, it's a fallen thing!” Sordon whispered. “Curse it to oblivion, it's a foul thing that they were put here to guard.”
“Who put them here?”
“The Sleeping Gods, of course. It's a myth only to be found in the most obscure of texts, hidden in the darkest past, and the Gods intended it that way. All the legends tell of their benevolence toward the land, but this one raged and rampaged and destroyed so much that they had made. They buried it up here. What stories there must be from that time! A time when Gods walked the land! A time when they went to war! But they are stories none of us will ever know, because it was a time before Noreela. Perhaps before time itself. It was the Gods' time to leave the land, and sleep in readiness for an occasion that might warrant their return. So they took Noreela's early tribes and brought them here, gave them language and knowledge and the will to learn, and left them with one simple purpose: protect the Fallen God and let no one or nothing near it. And in the Sentinels' minds back then as now, the prayer: The sleeper cannot be woken. That is their mantra and their meaning. Though they've lost their way, it is still central to their existence.”
“A Fallen God,” Nomi said. “I can't imagine.”
“It's beyond imagining.” Sordon sighed. “I know little more about them than you. Myths and legends, but we're so much closer up here.”
“How close?”
Sordon turned to look at her, his old eyes bearing the dreadful weight of his years. “Who is Ramus?” he asked.
“Ramus is dead,” she whispered. But she feared that her thoughts revealed her.
A SENTINEL CAME to them, gave Nomi a drink and bowed its head before Sordon. He took a drink and handed the jug back to the Sentinel, saying something in their strange tongue. The creature turned away before looking up.
“They'll not look me in the eye,” Sordon said. “None of them talk to me anymore. I wander around, and sometimes they'll leave food and drink. Sometimes I have to find it myself. The only time they interact with me is if I go south. Two miles, three, once I think I even managed four miles before they came and turned me back.”
“Then that must be where the Fallen God sleeps!”
“No,” he said, but he glanced sidelong at Nomi and shook his head. “I think there are dangers south of here, that's all. As I was once their god, they still find it in their mad hearts to protect me.”
“What sort of dangers?”
“I no longer care.” Sordon rose as if to leave.
“Wait! Don't leave, not now. Not yet.”
“I can't release you, Voyager.”
“You haven't even asked my name.”
He looked at her blankly for a beat, then offered what may have been a smile. “And why would I wish to know your name?”
The question confused Nomi, and she could think of no reason. “Sit with me?” she said. “I want to hear more. I'm a Voyager, like you, and though I'm tied up here, I can travel in my mind. I can learn.”
“Learn,” he said. “You don't seem like the learning type.”
“Then why tell me?”
Sordon shrugged. “Because you're here.” He started walking away.
When Nomi shouted after him, the Sentinels stood and approached, ignoring Sordon when they passed him, clicking and growling angrily. “How did you ruin them?” she shouted. “How did you change them so much?”
Sordon paused, Nomi fell silent and the Sentinels stopped, sitting slowly to the ground and staring up at her.
The old man leaned on his walking stick and stared at her, his gaze traveling farther across the space beyond the cliffs. “They made me a god when I rose up from the mythical lands of their past. But then reality intruded, as it must. I learned their language and I told them far too much—where I was from, what it was like—and they realized what they had lost. Perhaps in a way, they believed that Noreela had been taken from them. I took their offerings, their women; eventually they saw me for what I was: a mocker of their beliefs, a charlatan. And it drove them mad.” He trailed off, looking up at the sky as though he could see his sad reflection there. “Oh, but even my ego is not that large. They had the seed of madness in them, ready to be fertilized, ready to grow. I was merely the catalyst.” Then he turned and walked away.
Nomi watched him leave, leaning heavi
ly on his walking stick. She did not call to him again. He would be back, and he would tell her more.
Ramus, she thought, you seek a Fallen God. For once she wished that she would sleep and nightmare about such a thing, and then maybe Ramus would know.
Or perhaps he knew already.
Her friends were dead, Noreela's First Voyager had come to her, she was pregnant and she would be the Sentinels' prisoner until her baby was large enough for them to rip from her womb and hang from their fetus tree, for whatever twisted reasons they had. Cold and uncomfortable though she was, the sudden wretchedness of her existence encouraged Nomi into a deep, dark sleep.
SHE THOUGHT SHE was in a nightmare. Dawn burned the eastern horizon, blazing across the clouds and singeing the horizon. The subtle warmth of the sun felt good on her chilled body, but it could not match the heat in her shoulders and hips. Waking seemed to allow the agony access to her mind, and it melted in and scorched away any dregs of dreams.
Nomi shifted left to right as far as she could, testing her bonds. There was very little give. She had pissed herself again, but there was no pride left to lose. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, craving sleep to take her away once more.
“They'll be here soon,” a voice said from behind her, and her first thought was, Ramus! But this time she did not speak his name. And when she heard the hoarseness of that voice she was glad.
“Come to tease me again?” she asked.
“Tease?” He sounded genuinely shocked. She heard the tap tap of his walking stick as he came around in front of the frame, and when he looked at her, Sordon Perlenni's face was aghast. “I don't tease. I would never tease. I'm talking to you, that's all, and I thought you wanted to know.”
Nomi began to laugh. It felt good. She let the laughter overrun her, then after a few beats it faded as quickly as it had come. “What possible good can it do me?” she said. “I'm stuck up here and they're going to kill me, eventually, so why the fuck do you think I really want to know anything?”
Sordon smiled. “Well, I said you weren't the learning type. Even when I was starting my exploring, there were others around me whose interests were personal gain. Not knowledge. Not discovery.”
“You expect me to give a piss now?” Nomi said.
“Yes.” The word was quiet, but Sordon gave it such weight.
Nomi blinked and looked away toward the sunrise. Ramus could be out there somewhere, she thought. I hope he is. And I hope he finds what he's looking for.
“So tell me,” she said. And curse him, the old man was right. There was so much she still wanted to know, despite the fate that awaited her.
“Where shall I begin?” He sat in the grass before her, groaning as his old bones creaked and ground.
“What do you mean by ‘They'll be here soon’?”
“You'll die if you keep hanging there. The Sentinels will come and take you somewhere safer.”
“Where?”
Sordon shrugged. “I don't know. Perhaps where they keep the Sentinel women when they fall pregnant.”
“They do this to themselves?”
Sordon sighed. “Only since I arrived. As I told you, the focus of their worship passed across me for a while, but they found me wanting. The Sentinels were blessed by the Sleeping Gods, made pure, and my own impurities corrupted them. Such corruption sent them into a spiral that ended where you see them now. They returned to their one constant—the Fallen God, the doom hanging over them, which they called the Great Unborn. But their perception had been tainted. So now, in their eyes, if something is born, it becomes unclean and corrupt, and that's why there are no young Sentinels anymore. They're wiping themselves out.”
Nomi closed her eyes, but she saw something bloody and slick being pierced, strung up and hung on that fetus tree. And it belonged to her. “No,” she moaned, shaking her head against the wooden support behind her.
“Perhaps they've sought such release for generations,” Sordon said. “I try to comfort myself with that idea—that they're not mad, but regressed to how they were when the Sleeping Gods gave them such responsibility. But it's no real comfort. What happened to them is my fault.”
“So throw yourself from the cliff!”
“I can't,” he said.
“How are you so old?”
“I don't know. Maybe the food they eat, the drinks they make. The steam from the ground . . . I don't know.”
Steam? Nomi wondered. But every time this old man spoke it made things worse, expanding her nightmare and driving her deeper into a despair she already believed had found its deepest parts. She wanted to hear no more. She hated him, Noreela's First Voyager and one of its heroes, sitting before her feeling sorry for himself yet refusing to cut her down. She hated him.
“Go away,” she said.
“No.”
“Leave me alone.”
“No. I believe I'll stay. Until they come, at least.”
“Why?”
“Because talking to you is making me feel better.”
She opened her eyes, and the bastard was smiling. “My name is—”
“It won't change anything,” Sordon said. “I'm far too old to care.”
SHE HAD TO hang there and listen. She shouted at first, trying to drown out his hoarse voice with her own, but he pummeled her legs with his walking stick until she fell silent.
He told her that he'd known others would eventually come, lured by the Fallen God, and they had. But the Sentinels had always caught them. At first they killed them up here, but as the Sentinels regressed, they started throwing them back down. Even as the guardians of the Fallen God were changing—venting their knowledge, reverting to a far older state—so, ironically, their purpose became more entrenched in their minds than ever. They fought several long, terrible wars, projecting their confusion and chaos into violent confrontation, and their numbers reduced.
“I don't care!” Nomi shouted, and Sordon probed the wound in her leg. She screamed, she cried. He cleaned it afterward, conscious of infection, and chewed a herb and root before pressing it into the flesh. Her screams seemed to draw him on.
He told her how the Sentinels that won the wars started slaughtering the unborn. They feared the sleeper, and when they moved out of their villages and returned to the land, the trees bearing the mummified fetuses became their shrines.
“Leave me,” Nomi said, appealing to his pity. But he had pity only for himself. He cried as he spoke but did not look at her, and Nomi knew that Sordon Perlenni was seeing only his own desolate past.
He said more and she heard it all, but by the time the Sentinels came to take her down, her mind was far away, and much of what he had said was forgotten. She was glad. She was suffering her own terrible fate, and next to that his miserable utterances were nothing.
THEY PUT HER in a pit. It stank, feces and piss staining the walls, and in one corner a pile of dried bloody matter attracted flies and crawling things. Nomi cried but they took no notice, throwing food down at her until she caught something. She hated doing so, but she ate. And when they lowered a water jug down to her, she drank.
The old man refused to let her go. She suspected that he would also refuse to kill her, should she ask.
But there was always Ramus.
Chapter 19
SOMETHING TOUCHED HIS face. He felt it from a distance, deep down in sleep or unconsciousness, and it was cool and slick like a living thing's tongue. It moved across his closed eyes and up to his forehead, leaving a chilled trail where it passed. He tried to lift his hand to feel what touched him, but he could not find his arms. Perhaps I'm still suspended there, he thought, even though he was sure that had been Nomi's nightmare rather than his own. Perhaps I'm still being held up and examined, probed, prodded by things I don't want to understand. The sensation faded and he tried to rouse himself. It was not easy. The pain was still thumping in his head, central to everything he sensed. If he went back under he could escape that pain, but if he rose up to face it . .
.
“Ramus,” a voice said.
“Nomi,” he whispered.
He opened his eyes and felt that coolness on his forehead again. A shadow moved above him, blurred in his vision. It could have been immediately before his eyes or five miles away.
“Ramus,” the voice said again, and this time he heard relief. “I'll get you something to drink.”
Nomi, he wanted to say, but his mouth was dry and this time it came out as a gasp. Water trickled onto his tongue and he swallowed greedily. The cold thing touched him one more time and he managed to raise a hand, grabbing the arm of whoever touched him.
“It's night,” she said. It was Lulah. Ramus felt a momentary flush of disappointment, but then she said more that shamed him. “I can hear things moving around in the forest, but you're safe here. Understand, Ramus? You're safe with me.”
Safe, he thought. Can she really mean that? Does she know something I don't?
He thought of the Fallen God, and wondered whether Lulah had found its dried, forgotten corpse.
THE SERIAN GATHERED some nuts and fleshy grubs from beneath a fallen tree. Neither of them knew whether they were safe to eat, but Lulah said she'd eaten similar things many times before in Noreela. Ramus was too hungry to question her, and too tired to care. The nuts tasted earthy, and the grubs burst sour in his mouth. As he chewed quickly to merge the tastes, he rested one hand against the charms on his chest.
“We need to move on,” he said.
“I thought you'd died.” Lulah sat close by him, her weapons drawn and laid before her.
“Everything hitting home,” he said. “I'm exhausted.”
“And that,” she said. She touched his head with the damp cloth one more time, but this was not a soothing gesture.
“Yes,” he said. “Worse now that I'm tired.”
“I can't protect you if you keep collapsing like that.” She peeled another husk and popped the nut into her mouth.
Ramus could not answer. “So we should move on,” he said instead. “Explore some more.”
