Farewell to the Liar

by D. K. Fields

  ‘A shrine. I promise I’ll stop at a shrine.’

  ‘Tonight,’ she said.

  ‘And there’s no danger of you letting me forget.’

  She smiled, clearly pleased with herself. That irked him. If he’d had the wherewithal, if he’d had more than a couple of hours sleep the night before, he’d have found a way to puncture that feeling of hers. But he was too slow, the moment passed, and then she was standing up. She waved towards the milling Torn in their heavy robes.

  One waved back, Lilja, and suddenly he found himself holding a small glass of mutters. A drink, before even a ‘hello’. He raised the glass, lowered his mask and threw his head back. The only way to take that awful stuff, as far as Nicholas was concerned, was to bypass the mouth entirely. Get it straight into the throat and down into the stomach. It scorched everything as it went, sure, but at least it was burning without the taste of burning. And to think he helped produce such a terror with these people – helped in his tiny, insignificant way.

  Lilja shook her head. ‘Such waste.’ She and Odette sipped theirs. ‘Did you feel the shake?’ she asked.

  ‘A little,’ Odette said. ‘It startled a Trumpet beetle at the gate.’

  ‘Should we really be leaving the har?’ he asked. ‘What if there’s another shake?’

  Lilja waved away his concern. ‘Where is the Wayward daring in you, with such a question?’

  It was standing there, in a cavern surrounded by Torn, with a woman who had demanded they should be married the day after they’d met. That was as daring as any Wayward he’d ever known, but he didn’t think it wise to say so.

  Lilja took his silence for acceptance and pocketed their empty glasses. ‘You will like the Gilded Fields, Nicholas. Today will be a story to tell your children.’ She grinned, as mischievous as he’d seen any Torn. Then she was off, heading towards the gate.

  ‘Children?’ he said.

  Odette shrugged, but he could tell she was just as perturbed by the idea.

  They followed Lilja out and away from the har.

  *

  It was another cloudy day in the Tear. The weather was always the same there, because it wasn’t really weather at all. The clouds were mostly ash and other spluttered gifts from the Wit. Sometimes, above the ash were real clouds, and sometimes, those clouds held rain. It had happened perhaps twice since Nicholas had arrived. It was not good rain – everything in the Tear seemed to burn somehow. Rarer still was a full break in the clouds, when a glimpse of a blue sky felt like a gift from the Audience.

  As they walked, single file and quietly concentrating – the only way to walk in the Tear – he realised he’d not been ready to miss the sky. What little he knew of the Tear growing up could be spoken in a single, short breath: there was no grass. What could be more horrifying? What could possibly raise so many questions, and give so many answers, all at once? It made the Tear an impossible place to imagine, dreadful and exciting in his young ignorance.

  But that excitement didn’t twist and bloat into an obsession. In his idle moments, which were rare enough themselves, he hadn’t thought of the Tear. He had thought of hunting bows, how big he might grow to be and how to avoid his older cousins. When the Tear was mentioned, he had shuddered at the idea of a grass-less landscape. Perhaps he would have done more than shudder if he’d known it to be a sky-less place as well.

  But here he was, walking along ledges and through dry canyons – some paths worn to a dark grey by many boots, others fresh and slickly black. Both had their dangers, in this realm without grass or sky.

  Best he could tell, they were headed west, because the northern wall of the Tear wasn’t getting any closer. He wondered what could be so special about these Gilded Fields. Like anyone from the Union who wasn’t Torn or Rustan, he’d been suitably stunned by the searing beauty of Wit’s Blood. Seeing it for the first time, as it flowed like a river into the sea at Break Deep, that would never leave him. And seeing it pool in lakes near Erdan-Har was like staring at the sun from twenty feet distant, as if someone had buried the sun beneath the rock but made a poor job of it. But as days had turned into weeks, the blood became just another part of the background. He found it difficult to imagine what would constitute a landmark in the Tear.

  They stopped for a short rest at a sheltered spot where a rock wall was hollowed out and formed something of a natural roof. Nicholas loitered just outside, preferring even a cloudy sky to yet more rock overhead. Evidently, people had rested, and much more, in that very spot before.

  ‘A shrine?’ Odette said. Her voice sounded odd after a silence long enough to interest the Mute. The question was a fair one – Torn shrines looked nothing like those on the Steppes. No ribbons, no strips of paper, nothing like that would last here. Instead, they were piles of rocks adorned with the one thing most Torn carried about their person.

  Lilja knelt and added one of her drinking glasses to the hundreds that were piled up on the ground and anywhere that was flat for a few inches. ‘Anyone has a story?’

  As if by some unspoken agreement, both of them turned to him.

  ‘Me? I don’t—’

  ‘You promised,’ Odette said.

  ‘But that was—’

  ‘I want to hear your story,’ Lilja said.

  He sighed. Outnumbered, this wasn’t an argument he could win. ‘Whose shrine is it?’

  Lilja frowned. ‘The Keeper, of course. See the stone cage?’

  Amid more glasses than you’d find in a Perlish barroom, he could make out a knee-high column of stones piled one on top of the other. Looking closer, there may have been more of them, perhaps even enough to make the shape of a cage. Nicholas didn’t think it worth arguing over, not when the two women were expecting a story from him. Cages, justice, fairness. Maybe he had something to say about the last one. He took a glass from Lilja.

  ‘My first week working in the distillery,’ Nicholas said, not looking at either of them but instead talking to the shrine. ‘I helped with the filters – still blood rocks and hot. There are so many fires set in the distillery, there was no escaping the heat. I worked with Detlev, if you know him.

  ‘The filter case held only so many rocks, and they needed to be changed out regularly. And they need be checked over before they go into the case.

  ‘Detlev would leave me for an hour or two a day. He liked to talk to a woman who worked in the market. One such time, I got it wrong. Or someone else got their job wrong, and I didn’t notice. There was a blood rock that was cracked or unstable somehow. I put it right in the case, right at the bottom in fact, then piled other rocks on top. Closing up the case, I opened the valve and let the wash through. Nothing unusual, until I saw the master distiller running right at me.

  ‘He’s not a young man, but he barged me out of the way and slammed a shoulder against the valve. He was too angry to explain. “Open it,” was all he said. I did, and at the bottom of the case was a layer of mud or sand or the like.

  ‘The rock had broken down and was seeping through into the spirit safe with the mutters.

  ‘I lost that week’s pay and was moved out of the distillery – the master refused to work the same floor as me. Detlev said, compared to some accidents, it was nothing. Far as I was concerned, getting out of the distillery was a good thing; you know how I prefer the outside, even in the Tear. But Detlev felt bad. He gave me half his pay that week. I didn’t ask him, he just thought that was fair.’

  Nicholas put the glass – it could have been the one he’d drunk from earlier that day – on one of the smaller stacks. Broken glass crunched under his boots. It covered the ground around the shrine and caught the grey light of a day in the Tear – a sparkle that spoke of all the stories offered to the Keeper over so many years. That was partly why Nicholas didn’t like to tell stories: they all felt so small, so unimportant.

  ‘That was terrible,’ Odette said, adjusting her mask.

  ‘To me it was good,’ Lilja said.

  ‘What is it like in t
he distillery? What does Detlev look like? How did it feel to be in trouble with the master distiller? That’s what makes a story – the details.’

  ‘I told you I was no storyteller.’

  ‘Odette is too harsh.’ Lilja touched his arm and smiled. ‘Some in the Audience prefer a mind spoken plainly. No tricks, just feelings.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Odette said. ‘Now, how far are these fields?’

  ‘Not so far.’

  They continued, single file, across a landscape that looked just like every other he’d seen in the Tear. Every so often, Lilja would turn back to them and smile. For a woman with wonky, yellowed teeth, she smiled a lot. The third or fourth time she did this, Odette also turned to him with a questioning look, her eyebrows raised. He wondered why they were both looking at him in such different ways. He almost turned round himself, thinking there might be someone or something behind him worth staring at.

  ‘Tell me the story of you being married,’ Lilja said as they walked.

  ‘Again?’ Odette said. He’d not known Odette turn down a willing audience.

  ‘Yes, again.’

  Odette told the story, much of which he didn’t recognise or remember. She described the wedding of another couple – where he was a guest, she was working the cooking pits. How she’d seen him at a table full of children and took pity on him. Though he bristled at that, he didn’t interrupt. She made the wedding seem both wild and a chore. The sounds, the smell… in her telling, it came alive until it was more real than the night itself. Then came their agreement. As she told it he was a co-conspirator, rather than the slightly stunned billy goat being driven on from comfortable grazing. The argument with the parents became quite the spectacle, with heroic and villainous moments on both sides. Odette gave an impassioned argument for the rights and freedoms of young love. When challenged on said love by Nicholas’s wicked mother, Odette kissed him in such a way that could leave no doubt. Her story ended with them riding south, hand-in-hand if it could be believed, as the sun set over Break Deep.

  The tale over, Lilja stopped walking, so they all had to stop. She glanced between the two Wayward.

  ‘You have not kissed,’ she said, with a bluntness only a Torn could manage.

  ‘Well…’ Nicholas said.

  ‘We’ve seen Break Deep, broken bread with Lowlanders, and now we’re walking in the Tear. That was why—’

  ‘Not kissed.’ Lilja gave a small shrug.

  She led them up a rise on a fairly well-worn track – at least, what constitutes a track in the Tear. It gave Nicholas a chance to think without either of the women staring at him – for some reason they made thinking difficult. He understood why Odette had said they’d kissed: it made for a better story. Even he knew that. But he was less sure why Lilja seemed to find it so important.

  What would kissing Odette be like?

  He’d kissed girls, of course he had. Well, one girl, and when he was honest with himself, he would say she did the kissing. He had stood stock still and hoped he didn’t do anything wrong or dangerous, just like when faced with an angry bull. It would be the same with Odette, he was sure. She would take charge, and she would decide when they should kiss. If they should kiss. Should they kiss?

  He bumped into her. The women had stopped at the top of the rise and were looking down at something. Odette didn’t even scold him for his clumsiness.

  Then he saw for himself.

  Below them, and stretching for a mile or more in every direction, was a huge lake of Wit’s Blood. Perhaps it was the distance, but the blood appeared so still it could have been solid ground or even a painting. If there were currents or waves or the like, they were impossible to see. And above this stillness was a latticework of stone arches and walkways. They crisscrossed the lake, reaching various heights and all connected in one way or another.

  It was like no field he’d known. That certainly wasn’t the word that came to him then, but words such as lake or pool didn’t fit either.

  ‘Come,’ Lilja said.

  ‘Closer?’ Nicholas said, but even as he did so, he was already following the Torn.

  The Gilded Fields were surrounded on every side by higher walls of rock, formed as a caldera – Lilja’s word for it. But as they descended towards the stone walkways, Nicholas was surprised to find it was no hotter there. Either he was becoming accustomed to the heat of the Tear, or everywhere was just so hot that the blood below made no difference.

  He hesitated at the point the solid ground – at least, what he had assumed was solid ground – gave way to a wide bridge of stone that arched upward, leaping out over the blood. The bridge was so wide he’d have had no trouble herding his goats through such a space, but somehow, he doubted the goats would have been happy about it. Stepping out over Wit’s Blood was not a sensible thing to do, it was that simple – simple enough a goat would know it.

  ‘What is wrong?’ Lilja asked from the arch. ‘Are you sick now, Nicholas? You look sick.’

  ‘He’s not sick. He’s scared.’

  ‘No,’ Lilja said, flatly refusing to believe such a thing.

  Of course he was scared. Terrified, even. Why wasn’t Odette?

  ‘Just… I’m just changing my leaves,’ he said. The potho leaves in his mask were no more than half done, but he didn’t mind wasting a few. Not when it gave him a chance to focus on something, to busy his hands, so he didn’t keep imagining the weightlessness of falling. And what an end to that fall.

  As they waited for him, Odette was asking question after question. The whys and whens and hows of such a place. Lilja did her best to keep up. Until Odette asked why it was called the Gilded Fields.

  ‘Ah, that you will see,’ Lilja said. ‘That is why we are here. But come, we must hurry.’

  ‘Did you hear that, Nicholas? We have to hurry.’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ he muttered. He kept to the middle of the walkways, where they were at their widest, and never so much as looked at an edge let alone over it. He couldn’t look at the others either, when they rushed from one edge to the other and pointed down at the blood. He stared straight ahead so as to be sure of where he’d be going next. One tentative step at a time.

  Lilja took them to the centre of the field, crossing from one arch to another. Nicholas did not like the narrower walkways, or the steeper ones, or the smoother ones, or the… well, there were many he did not like. Eventually, Lilja turned them round to look back the way they’d come. Nicholas couldn’t believe they hadn’t gone further – it felt as if they’d been on the field for hours. Through breaks in the cloud, they could see the sun was a good way lower in the sky. And as it descended more still, something happened.

  A gold stream washed over the tops of the walkways.

  ‘The blood!’ Nicholas said. ‘It’s changing—’

  ‘Is okay, is just light,’ Lilja said.

  ‘But…’

  ‘Crystals, up there in rocks and down here under feet.’

  With every passing moment, the rock of the walkways turned from the black of the Tear to a gold only the Keeper would believe.

  ‘This is amazing,’ Odette said. ‘Can you imagine a story that had such a thing?’

  ‘Is no story, is here.’

  They didn’t have to wait long until the golden light washed over them and on towards the far shore of the lake. Odette lifted her boot, delighted to find gold underneath. She skipped away, trying to keep up with the line where dull turned to shine.

  ‘Careful!’ Nicholas called after her.

  Suddenly, Lilja was very close to him. ‘This special place,’ she whispered into his ear.

  He jerked away, but she was there again.

  ‘I bring you here, to special place. How will you say thank you?’

  Nicholas coughed. ‘Thank you?’ he said.

  She pursed her lips. ‘No,’ she said. She lifted his mask and kissed him.

  It was tacky, and it was dry at the same time. As before, he stood statue-still and waited for it
to be over, waited for this bull to realise he was no threat, he wasn’t going to run, and there was no chase here. Nothing to get excited about.

  She drew away and pulled his mask back down.

  ‘What—’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Odette said, to the both of them. Maybe she’d come back to rescue him.

  ‘I see why you no kiss him yet,’ Lilja said, grimacing.

  ‘Lilja!’

  ‘Shame, he’s my husband now. Old Torn tradition – even older than your fool Wayward one. Keeper’s kiss.’

  She must have been joking, but with the Torn, it was hard to say. They both stared at her, Nicholas’s mouth wide open behind his mask. He had an idea Odette’s would be the same.

  Lilja just laughed and walked along the golden archways.

  ‘Odette, I didn’t… It was… She…’

  ‘Later,’ she said, her voice the coldest thing that far south. ‘We’ll talk later.’

  *

  True to her word, they spoke little on the way back to Erdan-Har. Lilja made a number of jests, calling Nicholas ‘husband’, apparently trying to lighten the mood. But it only made matters worse.

  Nothing in the months he and Odette had been travelling, making one long story for the Partner, had suggested she wanted to kiss him, or cared who he kissed. Or cared who kissed him. In fact, there’d been absolutely no mention of kissing the whole time he’d known her. It wasn’t part of their arrangement. But now, even he could tell she was angry.

  Such thoughts were swirling around in his head when the ground-shake came.

  It was a strong one, much stronger than what they’d felt in the entrance to Erdan-Har – and even that had been enough to startle a trumpet beetle. One after the other, they fell to their knees, as if to make themselves smaller as the world around them shook. The air was suddenly full of dust and ash, far worse than even the bad days in the Tear. He could only just make out Odette and Lilja, a few feet away.

  It is hard to describe a strong ground-shake to someone who hasn’t felt one for themselves, especially in a place like the Tear. Everything, everywhere you look, is ground and rock of some kind. Which means it all shakes.