“Try again and again, but I know you better than you know me. Knowing you, I know something of your sibling. He has immense power, but he’s caged where I can see him. I will instruct Churls and Berun how to feel their presence, and how to stop them. If they want to assist our efforts, we will allow them. We. Mortal men and women.”
Shavrim’s brow furrowed. Vedas imagined he saw a measure of fear in the man’s expression.
“Know me? Know me how?”
Vedas bent down to Shavrim’s ear and said Jojore Um’s name. Then he turned on his heel and walked away.
‡
Halfway between the square and the inn, the girl appeared at his side and took his hand. He smiled down at her, not sure if she had assisted him and not particularly caring. His mood would change, undoubtedly, to a familiar, long-worn state of worry and fear, as soon as he woke from the charitable disposition that had taken hold.
The glow of victory did not last forever: there would come a time when, for Fyra’s own safety, he would have to tell her to go—to leave them to their fate, in Shavrim’s hands …
But it would not be now.
He gripped her hand and stopped. In silence, together, they watched the slowly and swiftly spinning spheres of the Needle, the threat of the world’s destruction, pass overhead. He did not see them with Evurt’s eyes, but with the limited vision his mother and father had birthed to him. The components looked as they in fact were: farther away than all the steps he had walked on the face of Jeroun. The scattered entirety of the Needle could be nothing more than it always had been to a mortal, earthbound man.
Indistinct and unknowable. A blight upon the order of the heavens.
Nonetheless, at that moment, it was beautiful beyond measure. It was a decision to view it so. It was a denial of reality.
He accepted this now, understanding he would not make the same choice again.
‡
In the morning, he rose with Churls, awkwardly accepted the provisions Ual’s mayor publicly insisted on gifting to him, and made his way to the docks with his three companions.
Townsfolk stopped him along the way and asked for his blessing, which he gave reluctantly. “You have it,” he said again and again, grimacing more than smiling at the small, black-skinned men and women, wrinkled into early grandmothers and grandfathers by the strong, salty wind and ocean sun.
Churls failed to keep the amusement from touching her features. The people knew her by reputation, as well, and smiled warmly in response to her expression, as though she too had blessed them. Berun, also known by his association to Vedas, accepted the company of the town’s few children with good grace, holding his massive arms out low so they could swing from him.
Shavrim walked several body lengths behind Vedas and company. The townspeople gave him a wide berth, likely because they had caught some news of furthering events in Danoor. Even as isolated as they were, it was clear someone had passed through recently. The mayor appeared uncomfortable next to the broad, horned man, but he listened intently to what Shavrim had to say. They had been talking since leaving the inn.
Vedas wished he could listen in on their conversation, for he did not know how Shavrim had, without violence, convinced the mayor to allow them to lower a sea-gate that had been closed for millennia. Perhaps it had simply been an exchange of bonedust, yet Vedas did not think so. He supposed he would never know, for the townspeople crowded around him, clamoring for his attention, his touch, hungry for a person he could only pretend to be.
Eventually, they reached the docks. Or, rather, the two stone jetties and Ual’s sad collection of fishing vessels, not one of which looked large enough to accommodate the four of them, especially considering Berun’s mass. Certainly, they would capsize the moment anything large enough to survive on the open ocean poked its snout against their hull.
Admittedly, Vedas knew little of seacraft. He had lived two miles inland of the ocean for most of his life, and learned next to nothing about it beyond the danger it presented. Golna possessed the resources of a metropolis to defend itself from seagoing creatures of Jeroun, many of which happily hurled themselves out of the water and against the city’s walls. The city also sat near one of many fishable rivers stocked heavily with smaller, adolescent versions of the oceangoing monsters that gave birth to them.
Ual, however, had no such resources. It had an altogether more novel way of drawing sustenance from the sea.
Vedas shielded his eyes against the early morning glare upon the mirror-flat water (a highly unusual occurrence, numerous villagers had told him, to have such a calm day this early in the year—a good omen, many of them said, with forced expressions that belied their words) and the top of the distant inverted bowl over Osa, searching for the fifteen-foot high stone pillars of Ual’s only claim to fame: its coastal wall, which extended out from the town’s shore nearly ten miles and arced to either side for nearly thirty miles, creating a relatively safe haven for fishing.
Now that Vedas considered it, it struck him as odd that so few visited or even spoke of Ual, for its people were surely extraordinary. It was common to say no one set craft upon the surface of the sea, yet the people of Ual did so daily. As they had done for millennia.
Men needed to speak in definitives, Vedas knew. They needed to reduce the world to comprehensible portions. And thus, the people of Ual and their incredible, ancient construction allowing them to do the impossible, were ignored.
Men did not sail upon the sea.
The woman next to him—small, sunworn, to his eyes identical to the woman next to her—laid her left hand upon his arm and pointed with her right.
“It’s not easy to see. There is a blurred line, just below the waterline.” Her eyes were wide as she stared up at him. “You’re really going there, to the gate? Only the wall walkers—” those townsmen and towns-women who maintained the wall’s integrity, Vedas had learned “—go anywhere close to it.”
“No,” Vedas said, squinting to see what she claimed was visible. “We’re not going to it. We’re going beyond it.”
She spit into the tiny waves lapping at the rocks below them. Her neighbor did likewise.
Shavrim stepped up behind Vedas, causing both women to move to the side, allowing him space to stand. The horned man lifted his shirt over his head, inflating his massive chest with salty air. He clapped Vedas on the back, beaming as though they were old friends.
“Time to go,” he said.
Vedas nodded, relieved. Without looking, he reached and found Churls’s hand. They moved through the crowd more easily now with Shavrim at their side.
Berun rose from the pile of children he had let play upon his sitting form, the great bell of his laugh booming loudly on the still morning air.
But for the mayor, they left the townspeople behind. As they stepped onto the second, slightly larger jetty, Churls stopped him.
“Turn around and wave. It’s the least they deserve for the hospitality.”
He followed her order, awkwardly.
The people of Ual waved back and cheered, though he doubted their hearts were in it. Men did not really sail upon the sea, even in Ual. Beyond the coastal wall was the haven of animals beyond the scale of man, a shallow, glass-clear expanse of certain death. And should Vedas somehow manage to defy the inevitable and reach the shore of Osa, an impenetrable wall of crystal lay between him and his mad destination.
The people of Ual waved goodbye to their prophet.
‡
He kept his eyes forward as they set off. The boat’s small thaumatrugical engine chuffed and barked at his back, with Shavrim at the tiller. Berun lay between Vedas and Shavrim, evening out the weight of their cargo at the boat’s head. A strong breeze kicked in as one of the few clouds in the sky obscured the sun, and then died as the sun peeked out again.
Churls squeezed his hand. She rose into a crouch, leaned over their piled supplies amidship, and made her way toward the bow. She leaned over it for a moment, and then laughed.<
br />
“Come here!” she called. “You have to see this.”
“What?” he asked, not wanting to move. He had no good memories of his last time upon the water, on their way to Tan-Ten, and the boat he sat in now felt far less stable than the Atavast had. Of course, it was one-tenth the size.
“Just come here,” she responded.
He made his way forward, far slower and more painstakingly than she had. Pausing at the port gunwale for a moment, he peered down into the depths, surprised to find the bottom of the sea so close—no more than ten or fifteen feet below him through startlingly clear water, dappled with crisscrossing lines of light. Fish and aquatic reptiles, the cousins and spawn of larger creatures, the mainstay of Ual’s diet and scant industry, darted from rock to rock.
An odd sadness crept into him at the realization that he had never before stared into the sea, that this one opportunity to do so would be so fleeting. He considered what it must have been like, growing up in Ual, knowing their manmade corner of the sea so intimately that any incursion into it—be it a creature that had grown too large, too dangerous, or a breach within the coastal wall, allowing the outside ocean in—felt like a wound in one’s own flesh.
To know a thing outside of oneself, so intimately …
His left hand went to the neckline of his suit. He slipped the tip of his index finger between the elder-cloth and the skin at the nape of his neck, encountering resistance as the material peeled back from its tight embrace of his body. It was a disturbingly invasive sensation, but he had grown used to it, like one worrying at a torn cuticle.
“Vedas?” Churls said.
He shook his head and peered back toward the shoreline, finding it had retreated further than he had imagined possible in such a short amount of time. A crowd still stood above the tide, though already it had thinned. He imagined many of them had returned home, to stare at their hands and consider an uncertain future. The mayor had looked on the verge of crying as they pulled away from the dock.
He must surely be scared, Vedas thought. We’re opening his sea-gate. We might leave it open, destroying his and his ancestors’ long and meticulously held balance.
He reached Churls on wobbly legs. She offered him a sympathetic smile but no hand in support.
The fingers of his right hand closed around what he thought to be the tip of the boat’s bow. He leaned forward cautiously and looked down into the parting water. For a moment, he saw nothing, and then his perspective shifted as his eyes registered what Churls had seen. A black, cartoonishly muscular torso. Outsized genitals. Below that, water-stained legs. He turned his head and stared into one large, white-painted eye of the statue he had carried into Ual. His hand rested on its head.
It had been bolted onto the boat’s prow, making of it a figurehead.
He rose into a crouch and turned, muscles taut on his frame, all trace of physical awkwardness aboard-ship forgotten.
Shavrim did not need to turn his head. His eyes were already fixed on Vedas. He stared intently, with no trace of an expression.
“What is the meaning of this?” Vedas asked.
Shavrim’s eyebrows rose, but otherwise his features remained neutral. “You claim to know me,” he said. “And this makes me rather curious. Did you know I would do that?” Without breaking eye contact, he reached behind him and shut the thaumaturgical engine off. “Did you know I would do that?” He stood as the boat rocked violently back and forth in the absence of forward momentum.
Berun began to rise.
Shavrim bent forward to lay a hand on the constructed man’s massive shoulder.
“This is not violence, Berun. This is us coming to terms.”
Vedas forced himself to stand at the head of the pitching boat. His suit stiffened around him instantly in response to his nervousness. He forced it to unclench, and found his balance. Easily.
Churls’s hand pressed to his back as she rose. In support, not to steady him.
“I’ve been thinking since you left me in the square last night,” Shavrim said.
“And?” Vedas said.
Shavrim gestured expansively. “I’m left wondering what you really think, Vedas. Do you think I want my family back badly enough to risk the entire world? Do you think I’ll keep trying to summon Evurt and Ustert, to the detriment of our plans? No. Don’t answer. I’ll tell you. I will not. I don’t know that you alone are sufficient to oppose Adrash, and I doubt my siblings are willing to share their power. Nonetheless, we won’t be deterred. I’ll do what is necessary to preserve this world, even to the point of opposing those for whom …”
He broke eye contact to stare at Churls, and then at Berun. “Do you hear me? Do you know what I’m saying?” He pointed to the bow and his voice boomed. “Do you know what that means? It is a betrayal.”
He frowned, letting emotion alter the set of his features until he resembled a different man. His hands fell straight to his sides, dragging his shoulders down with them.
“Perhaps …” he said. “Perhaps we’re all fools. We could be wrong in everything.”
He sat heavily, rocking the boat. He started the engine and Vedas looked away. Churls wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pulled him close, leaning back against the hull. Berun lay immobile, staring at the sky with eyes that could not close.
The whole day open before them, windless and bright, their journey resumed.
CHAPTER SIX
THE 25TH OF THE MONTH OF SECTARIANS TO THE 1ST OF THE MONTH OF FISHERS ASPA MOUNTAINS, THE KINGDOM OF STOL, TO DANOOR, THE REPUBLIC OF KNOS MIN
For one hundred days, Pol slept. For four months, he dreamt of plummeting out of the sky. He fell, exhausted nearly to death by his headlong flight from Adrash. His skin scorched, crusted over, and peeled away as he entered Jeroun’s atmosphere. His arms and legs whipped about violently enough to dislocate his joints, causing him to be pummeled by his own fists and feet as they flailed, drawing blood from his sensitive new flesh and sending it in arcs around his spinning body.
The sigils he had tattooed upon himself with alchemical ink—the spells that had been brought to life, granting him the might to stand against a god—were gathered as solid black masses at his hands and feet, as a coil rope of black hair wrapped around his throat, choking him. All were inert, useless.
His eyelids had been burned away. Heat and wind had fused his one remaining amber eye motionless in his skull, and turned the empty socket of the other into an aching pit. He fell blind, his never-ending state of agony preventing him from sinking into unconsciousness.
He lived, just barely, unable to think beyond the pain.
The ground rose up beneath him, a granite fist.
When he smashed into it, blackness enveloped him.
There was a timeless instant where he felt nothing. A breath before …
‡
The dream began again.
And again
And again.
‡
He woke, screaming. Not a full-throated sound, but a piteous, rattling wheeze that caught in his throat the moment it emerged. He inhaled convulsively and then coughed dry, blood-flecked sputum into the cold, thin air, curling around the aching hollow of his gut before screaming again—more fully this time, a bellow of ignorant rage that lasted until he could do it no more. He breathed in and out, deeper each time, calming himself.
It took the space of several heartbeats to believe he had stopped falling, to make his right eye organize the colors before him as images.
Gravel. Fractured planes of rock underneath.
Lifting his head took a monumental effort. The muscles of his neck screamed in palsied protest. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he looked about.
Rock faces before him, rock below and to the right.
To the left and above, sky cloudless and unbroken, painfully blue.
He examined the rock floor and walls more closely. To his eye, they appeared recently fractured, white along their angles. Many bore long gashes, five-rowe
d and straight. Without willing it to do so, his hand reached out, spreading fingertips to fit into the gouges. He raked his nails along the channels he had created without remembering, and then laid his palm against the cold stone, exploring the concavity beneath him.
He shivered as the realization struck him.
Here is where I came to earth.
Even with the abilities the sigils had granted him, it was a miracle he had survived.
And yet … where had he come to rest?
He rolled over, slowly, and crawled to the edge of his jagged platform. Below him extended a nearly vertical wall of bare grey rock, weathered by wind and time. Below that, dizzyingly far, the angle of the rock grew less severe, becoming a surface upon which snow could cling. And further, so much further down, the world spread out in white folds, broken here and there by thrusting spires of granite.
He had seen this vista from above the world, many times. It had once seemed just another place, high and isolated, the home of goat-milkers and idiot hermits.
It had once seemed …
His head whipped around, causing black spots to swarm before his eyes. The rock face above him shielded the view, but he felt the pull of the secret he had stolen from Adrash’s mind.
He tried to stand, but his legs would not support him. He fell back, lightheaded, gritting his teeth in impatience. The second attempt was no better. The third, and his legs held beneath him. He stretched his long, angular body up the wall of rock before him, peering over its lip.
The heady perspective nearly sent him tumbling backward, but his thin fingers found purchase in the stone. He blinked the sense of disorientation away, letting his gaze steady upon the mountain’s summit—or rather, a broad portion of it.
He grinned, revealing small, even teeth. His legs were suddenly firmer beneath him. He knew now, for certain, where he was.
When his strength returned, he would ascend to the mountain’s hollowed-out peak. He would walk into the valley of the nameless people. He would dip his hands into the clear blue lake at its center, and run his hands over the worn remains of the forgotten city of the elders, older than recorded time.
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