by Tim Lebbon
“We need to go back down,” Lulah said.
“But—”
“Not now. Not immediately. But you need to accept that we can't stay up here indefinitely.”
Why? he thought. But he nodded, sitting up gingerly and accepting that he should tell her what she needed to hear.
“So, when?” she asked.
“I don't know. Not today. Not tomorrow. There's so much to see, and I didn't climb so far just to turn around and leave again.”
Lulah nodded. “Perhaps after the God,” she said.
Nomi's in pain, Ramus thought, vague sensations from his dream returning in fleeting glimpses.
After more food he stood, doing his best to ignore the dizziness that threatened to tip him over. Lulah could see, he knew, but he did not look at her. He concentrated very hard and, after a few steps, found his rhythm. His muscles still ached but he welcomed that. Pain confirmed that he was awake, here and now, not hanging and suffering like Nomi.
Perhaps he should go to help. But he did not know where she was or what was happening to her. And there was something larger on his mind than the doom she had visited upon him, and her own pains he knew as a result. Something drawing him on, calming his illness, or prodding it, depending on the way his own thoughts went.
He thought of going farther south, and the pain lessened.
He thought of helping Nomi, and dizziness threatened him once more.
“Into the trees,” Ramus said. “It looks like an old path, though it's overgrown. We'll follow.”
“You think it might be that way?”
He looked at the trail through the forest, and in the distance he saw the hint of something gray and solid standing among the trees. “Something is.”
IT WAS ANOTHER stone man. He stood upright but his head was missing. Ramus searched through the knee-high ferns surrounding the petrified figure but could find no sign. There were no clothes or other belongings scattered around, either, and many pieces of the body were snapped off or worn away by the elements. It was disconcerting looking at this statue that had once apparently been a living, breathing person. He wondered whether, if he broke it in half, he would be able to identify the insides.
Lulah found another, twenty steps away. This one had fallen before being turned, arms stretched out as if to ward off some terrible fate. It was equally worn by wind and rain, features long since eroded to a shadow.
They followed the obvious path through the forest. Here and there were stumps of trees that had been cut down long ago, almost hidden by the ferns and other plants that had sprung from the ground now that the tree canopies above were gone. There was no sign of the fallen trees. Perhaps they had been used for building, back in the ruined village they had just passed through, though there was more to this path than simple harvesting. It led somewhere, and if the cleared trees were not proof enough of that, the stone bodies certainly were.
Ramus felt events pressing in on him. On their long journey here from Long Marrakash there had been trials and pressures, but now he sensed his past drawing to a close, and his future stretching out before him like this long-hidden trail through the forest. The present struck him harder than it ever had before.
“Another,” Lulah said. She stepped beneath the tree cover and approached a moss-clad mass.
Ramus stood beside the path and watched as she scraped away some of the moss with her sword. The shape was almost subsumed beneath the plant growth, but one arm protruded, fist closed around something long since stolen away. Two fingers had broken off, and Ramus thought of the digits he had tied on a leather thong around his neck. Konrad. What charms did he hope to gain from that dead Serian's pieces?
“Two of them,” Lulah said, surprised. She lifted a curtain of creepers aside to let Ramus see.
The taller of the two figures was worn and cracked by the plant growth, but the shorter shape—both arms slung around its protector, face pressed into his or her shoulder—had retained its features. Delicate, sharp and terrified, the face was damp and crawled with tiny golden insects.
He shook his head in wonder, then shuddered in terror as he remembered those words again. Mutter them now, with Lulah this close, and she would turn to stone. I have the power of a god, he thought, and he expected to be struck down for such presumptuousness.
“We should leave,” the Serian said. She held her sword and her eye flickered from here to there, scanning the path and trying to pierce the shadows on either side. “Back to the village; there's that place of books for you to examine. You'll learn a lot more about this place by reading its history than wandering its forgotten paths. And we can take them.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But reading isn't seeing, touching or tasting.”
“It'll tell you more than—”
“You'd rather read about humping, or do it?”
Lulah glared at him for a beat, then looked away.
Ramus led the way this time, wincing now and then against the pain in his skull. Every heartbeat of pain reminded him of Nomi. He tried hating her, but it seemed that only certain emotions could travel from one world to the next, and hatred was not one of them.
And every time the agony throbbed in, there was something else there to instantly calm it again: a presence illuminated by the pain, like a shape in the darkness lit by lightning flashes.
The forest followed gentle slopes down into a valley. The air became heavy and warm, and to begin with it was a pleasant relief from the cool breeze that had bitten through their clothes since reaching the plateau. Ramus felt sweat dribble down his sides, sticking his shirt to his back, and Lulah's face was beaded with moisture. But the farther they went down into the valley, the warmer it became. They stripped off their outer layers, afraid that they would dehydrate and use their water too quickly. And when they came to the tree line and the bulk of the valley was laid out before them, they had to pause to take everything in.
Here was another ruined village, but the destruction wrought upon this place was much greater. Barely a wall was left standing. It was spread across the floor of the valley, several small streams bisecting the destroyed settlement, spanned here and there by intricate timber bridges suspended from stone columns. The bridges, strangely, remained untouched by whatever had swept through this place.
Even from this distance, Ramus could see that there were more stone people scattered around the village. Some stood or lay in the fields outside, often piled here and there as if many of them had died together. Others were in the village itself, vague humps between shattered buildings, standing against piles of rubble or broken down into fragments.
He could also see that these dead stone things were not human.
“What is this?” Lulah asked.
“War, perhaps,” Ramus said. He recognized the tall, long-limbed shapes from some of the images of the parchment pages still in his backpack. They made surreal sculptures in death—ragged, sticklike things that threw strange shadows across the grass around their feet. Some of the limbs were missing, sliced or snapped away either before or after their turning from flesh to stone, but the detail in their faces seemed remarkable.
“These are more recent,” Lulah said. “This is something else. Nothing to do with those behind us in the forest.”
“They were human, for a start.” Ramus led the way. He was frightened, but also utterly fascinated. Here they are, he thought, the people of the plateau. A new civilization. It was a pity that they were dead.
Lulah did not want to go close to any of the things, but Ramus paused to examine each statue he passed. They were all tall, lithe and well muscled, their proportions seemingly exaggerated in every way. Longer limbs, larger hands, even their heads were slightly larger than humans', bearing faces that were remarkably familiar. But there was something about their frozen expressions that troubled Ramus, and the more stone bodies he looked at, the worse his confusion became.
It took Lulah to give him the answer. As they came to the first ruined building, she l
ooked down at a stone body sprawled at her feet. “They look like animals,” she said. And Ramus knew that she was right. However humanoid they appeared—however much he had been unconsciously attributing them with humanity—their faces held little to support that. They had all died snarling, expressions twisted into fighting shapes. There was little here that he recognized.
“We should go,” Ramus said. “Look.” He pointed past the ruins, and farther down the valley a cloud hung low in the air, slow graceful swirls the only sign of active air currents. And though it drifted, still it was fed from below.
“What's that?” Lulah asked.
“Perhaps nothing,” Ramus said. “Or perhaps it's what this place was built to protect.”
Lulah led the way. Past the village the land took a sudden dip, a shale slope leading down to a lower portion of the valley floor. The streams feeding through the village rumbled down the slope in two waterfalls, throwing mist and small rainbows into the air. Behind them, a scene of conflict and death. Before them, beauty. Ramus commented upon it, and Lulah nodded and smiled. “You'll often find both together,” she said. “Sometimes I believe the land has to provide balance.”
“Which land? This one, or our own?”
Lulah looked confused. “Surely they're the same? There's a cliff between us, but this place is higher, that's all. It's still Noreela.”
Ramus could think of no reply.
Steam rose from the ground. It came up from between rocks, bleeding from the soil and wafting higher until the slight breeze caught it and strung it out. As Ramus and Lulah went farther, they found larger vents, gushing steam in a gentle, almost constant flow. The steam smelled strange. It touched the back of his nose and slicked into his throat, soothing his tongue and inspiring flashes of imagery that could not have been memories. He closed his eyes to see more, but the steam did not give itself away so easily.
“What is it?” Lulah said.
“I don't know,” Ramus said.
“It feels like I'm dreaming, but I know I'm awake.”
“We both are. We're here. Maybe there's a gas here, giving us waking hallucinations.”
“It's like being swayed,” Lulah said, “but without taking anything to get there.”
Ramus did not feel swayed. He felt more in control of his body and mind than he had since reaching the top of the cliff, but the warm, moisture-laden air he breathed was heavy with something else.
“Perhaps the God is very close,” he whispered. His voice was no louder than the steam, and he was not sure whether Lulah heard.
There were other things here, the remains of some sort of technology. Metallic legs strutted either side of the vents, and rusted arms spanned through the steam, bearing the remnants of other, more intricate things. There was little vegetation, most of it smothered by the steam, and as they walked, their boots crunched on loose, stony soil. Ramus took shallow breaths and exhaled harshly, as if to purge himself of the things circulating at the periphery of his consciousness. This was like that place he and Lulah had come across in the forests of southern Noreela, except that these bad memories were not their own.
“Leave us alone,” he said. But if the Sleeping God was close by, why should it leave them alone? Why, when Ramus sought to find it?
“Another body,” Lulah said. She sounded glad to have something to say. “There, over by that outcropping, standing with one hand against the rock. But . . .”
“But it's not all there,” Ramus said. They approached together. The stone body was deformed, containing hollows and gaps as though only part of the body had turned and the rest had decayed to nothing. He leaned in closer and saw the hint of bone protruding around the thing's chest, gray stone at its base, gradually changing to white at its snapped tip.
“Another,” Lulah said. “And another.”
The bodies here were all partial. Solid stone giving way to something with a more sandy texture, and then stone tendrils and spikes fading altogether. Bone was visible here and there, and on one of the bodies there was still a sheath of leathery skin around the unchanged skull.
“Would those words do this?” Lulah asked.
“I don't know. I know nothing.” Ramus touched one of the bodies and a thread of stone linking one exposed rib to the next crumbled between his fingers.
“Whatever these things are, I hope there are no living ones close by.” Lulah hefted her sword in one hand, a short knife in the other.
The atmosphere here was hot with steam, heavy with moisture and thick with thoughts neither of them could explain. Ramus's breath wheezed with the effort of breathing the saturated air, and every now and then he saw shapes that implied movement, direction and purpose. But when he blinked, the shapes resolved into nothing more than steam wisps. Lulah must have been seeing the same thing because she walked ahead of him, constantly dipping down into a defensive stance when a fresh breath of warm air passed by.
They passed several more stone things, none of them Noreelan. It was as if no Noreelan had ever been allowed to reach this place. Perhaps I really am the first person here, Ramus thought, but the idea did not thrill him as much as it should.
Another gush of warm air, more dancing shapes. And this time Ramus felt something through his feet, as though the ground itself rumbled to the scent of the breeze.
“What was that?” Lulah whispered.
“I don't know.” If Nomi were here with him she could tell him of the Ventgorian Steam Plains, how the ground acted there, what the sounds were and the smells, the feels and tastes, and perhaps she would even know the cause of those brief, haunting visions that plagued him.
A cloud of steam a hundred steps to his right swirled and dissolved around a shadow. Ramus blinked, expecting the shape to fade away into the air, but when he looked again, it was still there. It moved slowly, long arms and legs shifting up and down as though to mimic the shape of steam.
“Lulah,” Ramus whispered.
The Serian had already seen it. She crouched down before Ramus, wielding her sword and knife. The shape advanced. It was the same as the solidified creatures they had seen, only this one was whole. A rapid clicking noise came from its mouth, a chuckle or words in an unknown tongue, and Ramus was about to step forward and try to communicate with it when three more emerged from the steam around them.
They had been stalked, and now was the attack.
There was more movement underfoot as a sheet of steam hushed from the ground to their left.
And Ramus thought, Heartbeat.
HIS OWN HEART thundered in his chest. He wanted to help, but he could not. He clasped the charms that hung around his neck—animal bone, holed stone, Konrad's fingers—but he had never been a true charm breather, either, and they felt like nothing more than cheap trinkets.
Lulah sidestepped the first thing's charge and lashed out, catching it across the back of its thin legs and sending a splash of blood through the air. It howled and fell, hooting as it reached around to the wounds.
The Serian rushed back to Ramus but the other things were already there, grabbing for his legs and arms. A closed fist bashed the side of his head and his vision swam. He vomited, and blood ran warmly from his nose and mouth. He felt strong hands squeeze around his arms and legs and suddenly he was held aloft, carried between the two things as they ran quickly back up the gentle incline.
“Ramus!” Lulah shouted. He heard her but he could not twist his head to see, and he could not tell precisely what happened next. Footsteps pounded at the gravelly ground, something swished at the air—an arrow or crossbow bolt—and he heard a cry that definitely was not human.
A pause, more footsteps and then another cry. This one was human, and he recognized Lulah's tone as it lowered into a hoarse curse. Metal struck stone, something grunted, and then that same human shriek erupted again. This time it was cut off suddenly. Something metal clattered to the ground, closely followed by something of flesh and bone.
“Lulah!” Ramus shouted, and the thing holding
his knees squeezed hard. He shrieked with pain and the creature holding his arms squeezed as well, crunching fingers into biceps and bones until he felt they would burst and shatter. He bit his lip, shaking his head at the pain ebbing and flowing across his body like drifts of steam. He managed to swallow his scream.
The air grew cooler and lighter, and glancing to the side he could see the outskirts of the ruined village they had just passed through. The things skirted around, apparently not wishing to take the more direct route.
Just as one of them smacked the side of his head to make him look up at the sky once more, he glimpsed one of the grotesque stone statues.
And he wondered what exactly had become of Konrad.
I can do this, he thought. I have the words. I have the knowledge. Whether it's the voice of the god or words these things speak or once spoke . . .
He started muttering and the thing squeezed his legs once more. But they slowed down, and one creature clicked and hooted to the other in what could have been surprise.
Gritting his teeth against the expected pain, Ramus closed his eyes and spoke those words all the way through. He said them loud, projecting his voice as far as he could, and when the hands crushed into his knees once more, his voice rose into a shout . . . but still those words flowed.
They dropped him. He managed to get one arm out to break his fall but still it knocked the breath from him. He looked up, expecting to see them fall upon him with bared teeth and clawed hands.
One of them had gone to its knees and raised its hands to its ears. He only saw from the back, but he could hear the crackle of crunching stone, and the thing's skin turned from pale pink to gray, hair hardening and snapping from its scalp. The creature whined slightly, trying to shout through flesh becoming less and less responsive, and its fingers closed in like the legs of a dying spider. One of them snapped off and bounced from its shoulder.
Ramus rolled onto his stomach and looked behind him. The other thing was there on its knees, hands down by its sides. Its body beneath the ragged clothes was cool, gray and hard, and he was sure it must be dead. But then its eyes grew wider in a look of delayed shock, and the gray tide flowed up from its neck and painted its head as stone. Hair stopped swaying in the breeze, three of the thing's teeth shattered and its eyes lost their depth.
