by Kate Elliott
“I have not yet asked, but most of these have been hiding in the woods. Camping under the trees. They fear to return to the villages where they once lived.”
“It’s easier to hide among the trees,” said Baldwin confidingly. “That’s what we did.”
Ortulfus’ sharp smile was softened by this confession. “I’m sure it’s true, Brother Baldwin, but you would be well served to spend the night within Hersford’s walls before you ride on.”
“How high are your walls, Father?” Ivar asked with a laugh, although he didn’t mean his comment to sound so cutting.
“Faith keeps them strong,” said Ortulfus without the least sign of irony. He frowned at his refugees. Their tight group was spreading out into a straggle, the faster like a rope tugging on those who lagged behind. “Faith is all we have.”
6
OF course it made perfect sense to Liath that, at the heart of the world, she would find a library, a repository of knowledge.
Of course she settled by the entrance, in a quiet spot, and sat and watched them, trying to make sense of their purpose and their manner of language. After all, if there was a book, she would some day wish to read it!
Typically, a goblin would tap along the wall beside one of the holes and, after completing a set of tests at various compass points around the hole, would withdraw the scroll and carefully unroll it into a flat sheet. The copper armband, pressed into the unrolled fabric, caused the writing to unveil by means of a magic she did not understand. It seemed the language was read by touch; she simply saw no evidence that they read through their eyes or by speaking words aloud.
At length, after napping and eating, she wandered again among them—or among a different group, perhaps, as she could only tell them apart with difficulty. The tone of their skins, like those of the Eika, had substantial variation; in addition, each had a distinctive pattern of growths crusting its skin. Whether male or female she could not tell.
What riches did they peruse?
Theology? Mathematics? Physics? It seemed unlikely that the science of astronomy concerned those who dwelled under the ground, but geometry surely held their interest, for she had seen the proportioned chambers through which their maze of tunnels ran. They seemed savage in appearance, clothed only in barbaric ornaments, but they had devised the secret of writing, so surely the mechanical sciences engaged them. All sciences are matters of use before they become matters of art. How far they had come in matters of art she could not know, because she had no way to communicate. Did they possess the art of logic? Ethics? Physics? Did they search out and consider the causes of things as found in their effects? Had they recorded somewhere the reason for the tremblings and shakings that afflict the Earth? Was it true that the collapse of buried mountains deep within the Earth caused tremors? Or that the pressure of gusting winds in subterranean caverns tilted the ground and caused it to swing briefly this way and then that? What of the rivers of fire that flowed in the bowels of the Earth? Surely, living underground, they had wondered why gold is soft and iron is hard. Out of what arises the color of a gemstone? Was it true that death did not put an end to things through annihilation, but only broke up their constituent components into new combinations?
So many questions!
Of what essence were the goblins formed? Was there metal mixed within them? Had they any kinship to the Eika? All this remained a mystery. That these creatures existed at all astounded her. Of course she had heard the stories, tales told by grandmothers and old uncles at the hearthside in the cold of winter when folk must huddle indoors to protect themselves against the bitter cold. Back in those days, she had dismissed the stories.
But just as things cannot be created out of nothing nor, once born, be summoned back to nothing, tales do not spring from empty vessels. So the philosopher wrote.
Here walked the ancient ones, the crawlers in the deep, fabled miners, known also as goblins.
They moved in a pattern, some shuffling out while others shuffled in, all seen by her within that faint pulsing glow emanating from the pool. The substance in the pool was not air, not liquid, not flame, and certainly not earth.
Cautiously, she slipped down into the hollow and crept up to the lip of the pool. She knelt. A cool, sweet current flowed upward out of the pool’s depths, pouring over her. She felt it through her clothes, through her skin, all the way into her heart.
Reaching, she brushed a hand down and touched the surface.
Like lightning, it struck, and she fell.
The river that is aether links the farthest reach of heaven to the deepest pit within the Earth. It runs shallow, denuded by the great cataclysm, but it runs nevertheless. She flows with it through the tributaries of Earth. It runs upward and outward, thin as a thread, and she rises with it, on it, seeing as with Eagle’s Sight.
There are Ashioi, marching along a road. They are fitted out in bronze armor and feathered shields. None of them have human faces; they all wear warrior masks. Behind them lies a stone crown and before them lies a walled city, with its gates closed and guards patrolling the walls.
There is Ivar, riding alongside a raggle-taggle company of men and women and children who look like nothing so much as refugees.
There is Hanna, ascending the road that leads to the gate of Quedlinhame. Behind her rolls the wagon carrying Mother Obligatia, who is propped up so that she can take it all in. After all this, her grandmother still lives!
And there is Sanglant! He rides with an army behind him, moving through forested country on a well-traveled road that she suddenly recognizes as the eastern reach of the Hellweg.
There flutters a daimone, but it is caught as in a haze; she shifts her gaze upward, toward the moon, and between one breath and the next, one step and the next, she vaults up the ladder and passes like lightning through the gate guarded by a daimone armed with a glittering spear as pale as ice. The sphere of the Moon gleams with a pearl’s luster, but she crosses beyond it as with swift and unerring steps she mounts the ladder—for the ladder itself holds the structure of the aether within it. Through the blinding sea of whiteness that is the sphere of Erekes. Beyond the horned gate of Somorhas and its rosy glamour. Through the blazing furnace of the Sun, and crossing the vast charnel house that is Jedu’s angry lair. The daimones who live in the upper spheres watch her pass, but lifted on the current of aether, she is too fast for them to catch or to threaten, even if they wanted to. They have seen her before, or will see her again—it is difficult to tell. They recognize her; they know who her kinfolk are. That is enough.
The feasting hall of Mok lies drowned in incense. Its heavy scent drags at her, but she pushes on, she pushes up, as the soul must, seeking release. The storm winds of Aturna buffet her, but she climbs past their darkness and into the dazzling realm of light toward the golden wheels that thrum and turn ceaselessly. Higher and higher, until she comes to the realm of the fixed stars, the white hot firestorm, as terrible as it is beautiful. Her mother’s home, permeated by the elements of white fire and blue aether. A welcoming place. She need only choose, and she can leave her mortal body behind and return to her kinfolk.
And yet even so beyond this there is more.
The burning stone still flares, although its fire has been weakened by the cataclysm that tore through Earth and heaven alike. The river of aether runs in a trickle, like a stream late in summer when the water has almost gone. With winter rains, it will refill—but in the span of the heavens, who knows how many earthly years or centuries that will take?
Beyond this crossroads the aether spills outward. For there is no end to it. Does the aether filter from the heavens down onto the Earth, or does it well up also from the heart of the Earth into the heavens? What if there is an infinite circle of aether, a strip made of only one side whose reach, ever cycling, must be never ending?
Beyond the realm of the fixed stars lies an infinite span. Clots of black dust tangle in shifting clouds. A nautilus of light churns around a dark center. Nests of b
lue-white stars glow hotly, the birthplace of angels. A spiral wheel composed of unnumbered stars whirls in a silence so vast that it has weight, so deep that it is fathomless.
This is the Chamber of Light, the end and beginning of all things.
Not all change comes upon things from without. All this lies within us as well. We just have to find it.
Then she was yanked free, gasping and choking.
A fluttering against her wrist, like the brush of moth’s wings, pulled her back to Earth, a very light touch to cause such a rude awakening.
One of the creatures squatted an arm’s length away. It made no immediate move, now that it had her attention. She stared at it, but she could not tell if it stared back. It was impossible to determine if the bulges had a fixed point they focused on, and she supposed it was possible that it did not “see” in the same manner she did. How so, then?
She had no way to ask the question.
It tapped a rapid pattern onto the floor. All around, barely seen above the slope of the hollow, the others paused in their study. Like her, they waited. It tapped again. Wondering, she rapped her forefinger one, then twice, then three times on the floor. Was this a form of communication?
Her companion made no reply. It wore no facial expression she could comprehend. She thought she recognized it as the one with pewterlike skin, which had passed her in the tunnel and, she believed, guided her here. It had worn the glowing armband, although a different one carried that armband now.
Pewter Skin rose, shuffled up out of the hollow, and halted by the mouth of the tunnel. There, for a while, it subsisted as might a statue, moving not at all. When she did not move, it vanished into the darkness beyond.
After a moment, it reappeared, tapped again, turned and vanished; reappeared, tapped, vanished; reappeared.
She rose. “I see what you are trying to communicate,” she said aloud. “I am no harm to you. I would like to understand your books.”
It tapped, vanished. She scrambled up out of the hollow and picked up all her gear. After breathing a smoldering fire into the end of the rope, she followed it into the labyrinth.
The creature moved at a brisk pace. She often had to lope to keep up; there came no chance for her to mark her route. That was bad enough, but after they mounted the nearest set of stairs they soon looped into places she had no memory of, not that these corridors didn’t all look more or less alike. No landmarks measured her journey. Bewilderment led to confusion. Was it taking her back to the cavern at the Heart-of-the-World’s-Beginning, where she would become, again, Feather Cloak’s prisoner, a sacrifice for the Ashioi priests?
They will not touch me.
And anyway, she thought not. This was new ground, untouched. Probably she was the only human—such as she was—to ever walk this way.
“Where are we going?” she asked it, but it did not answer.
“What is your name?” she asked it, but it did not answer.
Twice she tried to get its attention by rapping on the walls, but it did not answer.
They climbed in long, slow inclines that at intervals cut back upon themselves at acute angles or twisted in half circles, but by the aching in her legs she knew that they moved steadily upward. Once she stopped and tried to get its attention, to let it know she needed to rest, but it kept climbing and did not glance back. It was difficult to keep going, but she dared not fall behind.
They came to a strange intersection, a narrow cleft. It squeezed through, and she after it, careful of her pouched tunic and coiled rope. They came into a low cave ragged with spears of stone fallen from the ceilings to litter the uneven floor. A dangerous place, made more so by the change in darkness and shot through with a tight smell of smothering earth and mildewed leaves. Pewter Skin trundled forward, deftly avoiding the debris or kicking it aside, and took the left turning where the narrow tunnel branched into two routes. Away down the other branch, water dripped.
The way grew steep. She toiled. Only imperceptibly did she recognize a change in light like the kiss of gray. Ahead lay daylight. Between one of her breaths and the next, the creature turned right around, brushed past her, and trundled away into the depths, soon lost to sight although for moments more she heard the scrape and whisper of its passing.
So much for fellowship!
She burned, thinking of those books, lost to her now. How had they captured aether in a form that could be contained in a pool? What manner of sorcery did they harness?
What did they know?
So much on and under and above Earth remains a mystery because so much remains unknown. The ceiling lowered until she could no longer stand upright. Crawling the last length, she mused as she placed hands and knees carefully among the dusty, slippery scree of rock that lined the tunnel’s floor.
So much to discover!
Smiling, relieved, weary, and triumphant, she pushed past a curtain of pale grass and scrambled onto a narrow lip of rock hung on a steep hillside. The ledge was no wider than the length of her leg from hipbone to knee and no longer than the span of her arms, fingertip to fingertip. A scraggly bush shrouded half of it. Grass hanging from the slope veiled the cave mouth.
She blinked, shading her eyes, and for a while had to cover her face with a hand as she adjusted to the strange, bright light. She knew what it was; it sprawled over her, and she basked, leaning back with grass crackling as the sparse vegetation was crushed between her body and the rocky hillside. Light. Warmth. Fire.
Sun.
After a bit she could see without her eyes tearing or black spots dancing in her vision. Ai, Lady, that sun felt so good! She marked it, and the lay of the shadows, and judged that it was late afternoon here, wherever she was. The sun was setting over distant, pale hills. North lay wasteland, cut off from the hillside by a road that glinted with chalk white. Blinking, she stared.
She knew this place.
She braced herself on the ledge and twisted to look up the steep hillside—it was at its steepest here where the cave mouth opened—to see what lay above her.
After all, this was not a place she knew. A tower rose along the crest of the hill, neatly fitted, freshly mortared, with walls reaching to either side and vanishing into pine forest. There was no telling how far such a wall extended, only that it seemed to mark the border of someone’s land.
Yet the sense of dislocation lasted only a moment. She shifted. Her right knee scraped against a sharp rock. Her left foot jammed up against the side of the hill. A stem of grass tickled her nose, and she sneezed, and everything transformed.
“Ai, Lady!” she said, and sat back on her heels, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
She had certainly come back to where she started, to the very place in the land of the Ashioi where she had once dwelled. That tower had stood in ruins at the crest of a hillside which, in exile, had dropped precipitously into a vale of mist. Now the tower had been repaired, together with the wall. Fresh chalk brightened the White Road, as the Ashioi called it: the border of their land. The knife edge along which the ancient spell had cut the land of the Ashioi away from Earth.
She slid backward, careful with her gear, to let the hanging grass conceal her. If the Ashioi captured her, she would have to escape, and therefore she would have to fight. If they shot her with poisoned arrows, she might not survive a second brush with the toxin.
She would not go back.
She held out her hand, middle fingers curled in and thumb and little finger extended, and measured the horizon in the way that Da had taught her long ago. The sun stood one span above the rosy horizon. Above, much of the sky remained clear. Soon it would become night, and she could measure the stars and judge the season and, possibly, her latitude, comparing the angle and azimuth with what was stored in her city of memory. The catalog of stars written into Da’s Book of Secrets and the cunning astrolabe were lost to her, but Da had taught her well enough that she was not dependent on them; they only made things easier, and more accurate. She must walk west and nort
h. It would be a long journey to Wendar, but she had made that journey before. She could do it again.
She sighed and closed her eyes, and perhaps because of the lazy glamour of sunlight against her face or perhaps because she was really just that exhausted, she slipped into a doze.
Woke.
Day melted into night. The sun’s rim winked gold at the horizon, caught in a notch in the distant hills and visible only because of that last spasm of light.
A person was sitting next to her, perfectly still and quiet.
She choked down a cry of surprise, and reached for the sword she no longer carried.
“It’s just me,” Eldest Uncle said.
She shrieked, and laughed as her heart pounded and her hands shook.
“Shhh!” he whispered. “We must get you out of here, Bright One.”
“How did you find me?”
He smiled. “Despite your attempt to conceal yourself, you are visible from the road. I took a walk to seek out a particularly good meadow of earth-apple that lies a morning’s walk from here. Its oil eases the ache in my joints, and the long walk does me good. Coming back, I saw you. I diverted the twilight patrol. Best we move quickly.”
She grimaced, rubbing her thighs. “Yes. What do you suggest?”
“Only the patrols walk the outer roads these days. The great armies have run west and east to combat our enemies.”
“Have the Ashioi gone to war?”
“There is much news to tell you.”
“I have my own news. What I have seen—!”
He nodded. “In time, we can discuss all this. Meanwhile, there is also a person you can help, if you wish to. As soon as it is full night, we will walk in the shroud of darkness.”
She looked up at the heavens. A high haze obscured the zenith. All that she had seen, climbing the thread of aether, was hidden to her. She could not see the fixed stars, the wandering stars, or even the moon. Only in the west did she glimpse the flash of a star in that gash along the far hills where the haze had not yet settled.
