Kail felt himself flush from the top of his head down to his chest. ‘That's none of your business.’
The creature laughed. When his mouth opened, Kail saw no teeth. ‘You have nothing I want except your business.’
‘Pukje.’ Sal spoke the unfamiliar name with deliberate emphasis: Pook-yay. ‘We don't have time for this. If you've got something to tell us, get it over with and let us do what we have to do.’
‘I know why you're here,’ said the creature, sobering. ‘I know who you're looking for. I know where they're going, and I know you're too late to get there in time.’
‘How can you know all this?’ asked Highson.
‘I have eyes and ears, and other senses,’ said Pukje. ‘I use them.’
‘Will you tell us where they're going?’ said Sal.
‘I can do better than that, Sal. I can take you there.’
‘Why?’
‘Out of the goodness of my heart.’
‘We don't even know you've got a heart,’ said Highson.
Casually, and as lightly as a leaping possum, Pukje jumped down from his perch. Although he was barely a metre tall, the sudden move prompted the three men to scatter. Kail had a bola spinning in his right hand before Pukje landed and started brushing himself down. What Kail had taken to be skin was in fact a grey-green covering of some kind, like felt or densely-compacted moss.
‘I'm not human, gentlemen,’ Pukje said. ‘That should be immediately obvious to you. But I'm not without feelings you'd recognise: compassion, curiosity and fear among them. I do have a heart of flesh and blood, and it will stop as surely as yours if Yod ever breaks loose in this world.’ One canted eyebrow raised at their reactions to the name. ‘Yes, the ancient enemy. I've been around. I've seen a few things. You'd be wrong to assume I don't have my own agenda—but for the moment it's aligned with yours. You might as well take advantage of that fact while it lasts. I know, and you should be suspecting it by now, that I'm your only chance of getting up these mountains alive.’
‘Why do you say that?’ asked Sal, tight-lipped.
‘Why do young men always ask stupid questions?’ Pukje strolled close to Sal and stared up at him. Although the impish creature barely reached Sal's waist, his presence was such that they seemed to be talking eye to eye. ‘You remind me of someone I knew a long time ago. Someone else caught in a situation well beyond his knowledge, but not his ability. He changed the world, him and his brother. You might have heard of them: the twins Castillo.’
Sal's indrawn breath was audible in the still air. ‘You're talking about Hadrian and Seth.’
Pukje smiled. ‘Hadrian once carried me up a mountain, in a manner of speaking—just as you're about to let me carry you. I'll show you the way to the top, as I showed him, because that's where you have to go. That's the intersection; the meeting point of everything. The beginning and the end; the cusp between this world and the next. You need to be there, but the way you're going won't take you. You need a short cut, like the one I have in mind.’
‘A short cut.’ Sal's scepticism was obvious. ‘What sort of short cut?’
‘The only sort that matters. One that will get you where you need to be in a manner appropriate to your needs.’ The hungry little smile widened. ‘Trust me. I'm offering you your only chance of seeing this done. Take it or you really might as well turn back—and say goodbye to your beloved Shilly forever.’
Sal bunched his fists at the strange creature's threatening tone. A gust of unnatural wind swept down the mountainside, spinning around the two of them and buffeting Kail with freezing dust. Sal's dark hair swirled around his head. His eyes glittered.
‘Shilly's not mine. She's her own person, which is exactly how we got into this mess. If she'd only give us a sign. If she'd only explain!’
Sal stopped and shook his head. His long hair hung down over his forehead like a veil. When he opened his eyes again, they were clear.
‘All right. I'll go with you and take my chances as they come.’
‘Sal, wait—’ Highson stepped forward with his hand raised.
‘Don't argue, Highson. I have to do this. And you're not coming with me.’
‘No. Really no, now.’ Sal's father's face flushed with anger. ‘You're being stupid as well as reckless.’
The wind swept higher. ‘I said, don't argue. It has to be like this.’
‘It doesn't. I haven't come this far to let you leave without me, and I'm not going back to Milang without you. There's only one other option, Sal.’
The air suddenly stilled, freezing into swirling vortices and tangled currents that dissolved away in bitter silence. Kail felt father and son's clash of wills echoed by the Change in the world around them.
Pukje's low chuckle broke the silence. ‘Looks like you're the tiebreaker, Habryn Kail. What say you? Where does your heart lead?’
Back home, he thought instantly to himself, to the low, dry flatlands of the Strand, where mountainsides don't collapse and water—what little there was—stayed comfortably liquid. Where his duties were simple and well defined, and the world might end between one day and the next but he would know nothing about it beforehand. Free of dread and doubt, he could live his life as he had always wanted, no matter how short it might be.
He suppressed a sudden apprehension. The bola was still spinning. Its insistent hum was an anchor to the present, to what he needed to say.
‘We're with you, Sal,’ he said, ‘whether you choose to follow Pukje, or try to find the trail here, or go back the way we came. Shilly would want it that way.’ As you well know, he added silently to himself.
Sal bowed his head and some of the tension left the air. ‘If you both end up dead, I'll blame her.’
‘I wouldn't worry about that. Anything that gets both of us is going to get you too.’ Kail forced a smile. ‘You're not that strong.’
‘This has nothing to do with strength,’ said Pukje in serious tones. ‘It's about being in the right place at the right time. It's about symmetry and shape, and geometry. Give me a lever long enough and I'll prove to you that strength is nothing more than an illusion—an illusion that can kill, gentlemen. Don't let me hear you making that mistake again.’
With that, Pukje turned to face the precipice on their right and took a running jump out into space.
Sal gaped in shock as the little creature dropped from sight. Highson cried out. Kail had no time to do more than take two steps towards the edge, already dreading what he would see.
A large beast rose up in front of him, grey-green wings cracking mightily.
‘Now,’ it said in Pukje's voice, ‘let's get this show on the road.’
‘For every present there are many futures,
distinguished by details as small as a cough or as
large as a Cataclysm. There are many pasts, too,
just as many roads can have the same destination.
And for every discrete now, there are a multitude
of other nows, all existing side by side with the
one we know, related but not connected to each
other. This is the world-tree, revealed to us in all
its glory when we die and enter the Third Realm.’
SKENDER VAN HAASTEREN X
The sun was a bloated red ball in the sky, too bright to gaze into directly but casting little heat and no comfort at all across the blasted landscape below. Shilly had stopped looking at it long ago, keeping her head bowed as she hobbled along the open sections of the ravine. When she reached shade, she stopped to take a breather.
Ever since the sun had stopped moving across the sky, light had become a baleful force in the world. Only shadows and darkness offered sanctuary. Night was an alien concept, a dream she occasionally woke from with wet cheeks, like the dreams of Sal that still plagued her after so many long years.
She walked the ravine once a week, going from her workshop to the struggling community where the people traded precious supplies for her remedies and advic
e. No one ever offered to help carry the supplies back for her. She was on her own in the Broken Lands as far as the villagers were concerned, and most of the time she liked it that way. But every now and again, with her back aching and her bad leg on fire, she pined for a little more generosity of spirit in the world. The track seemed longer every time she walked it, although she supposed that said more about her advancing years than the route itself. But, on the positive side, the weight of her supplies shrank as she got older and ate less. Maybe one day, she idly thought, she'd become so thin she wouldn't need to eat at all.
‘Death would be a relief,’ she said aloud, for the benefit of ears not her own. ‘For me and everyone.’ She raised a gnarled fist and shook it above her head, to where the sun would have been were she not still in shade. ‘Damn you and all your ugly friends. Why don't you just finish us off and be done with it?’
The anger faded just as fast as it had flared, leaving her feeling more tired than ever. She clutched the walking stick Sal had carved for her—also much the worse for wear now—and braved the burning glare outside the sheltering overhang once more. Its heat was the heat of fever and pestilence, not life. Her skin crawled under its touch. She hissed a percussive, urgent rhythm as she walked, telling herself to hurry, to get out of sight as quickly as possible, to avoid drawing attention to herself, to make it home one more time without the sun's diseased eye focussing down on her and seeing her for what she was, at last.
She was drenched in sweat and aching all over by the time the end of the ravine came in sight. Upon reaching it, she turned right and walked a dozen metres, sticking close to the rubble-strewn cliff that overlooked the desert beyond. Nothing lived in the desert. Nothing she wanted to meet, anyway.
At a struggling bush she stopped and poked her walking stick into the ground. When it hit resistance, she twisted it half a turn clockwise. With a gentle sigh, a hole opened in the cliff and closed behind her when she walked through it. Following a well-worn path down a short, rough-hewn corridor, she entered the welcoming, cool space of her underground workshop.
It was smaller than the one she had inherited from Lodo, or seemed so at first glance. Her living area was little more than a cave containing a niche for her to sleep in and several low cupboards for instruments and books. A mage had made it for her, years ago, before his betrayal and murder. The space-bending Way that connected it to the edge of the desert was short, but it was enough distance to divert Yod's dogs from finding her as well. Ways were difficult to trace if they led underground.
The air was musty and smelt of old woman. A feeble spring sent a muddy trickle of water down the wall which she channelled into a ewer. She was able to filter the worst of the muck out of it and drink it cold, straight from the container. Sometimes pieces of the ceiling fell on her, dislodged by distant tremors. But the place had its uses, and not just as a shelter.
She had chosen it over her former home for one simple reason.
Putting down her supplies for unpacking later, she did what she always did after spending any time outside and went to inspect her unfinished masterwork.
At the rear of the workshop was a curtain draped over a narrow crack that led deeper underground. She slid through the curtain and the crack with a grace that belied her years. Her posture straightened by several degrees. Many times a day she made that short journey, down into the caves she had discovered long years ago. Undisturbed by humans, they had been inhabited by a solitary crumbling man'kin who had befriended her for reasons of its own. A tiny hunched monk with big eyes and a hint of curling beard, he answered to the name Bartholomew.
The same man'kin awaited her at the bottom of the crack.
‘Give us some light,’ she said.
Bartholomew struck a dissonant brass gong. As the sound propagated through the enormous chamber, an expanding field of tiny glowstones sprang to life. Each hung by silk threads from the ceiling, spun by worms trained specially for the purpose. The wave of light illuminated a sea of sand below, a sea that stretched from her vantage point to the shadowed edges of the cave, where the glowstones reached their limit. Each handful of sand had been carefully carried by her and Bartholomew from the desert at the end of the Way and placed into this chamber to create a canvas large enough for her to work on. She had initially tried many different methods, but this was the one that came closest to meeting her needs—the same one she had used in Fundelry when first learning how to draw. And even though of late she had begun to wonder if it might be insufficient, it was all she had. Time was running out. It would have to do.
Time.
She reached up to touch the back of her neck. Her hackles were rising, which could only mean one thing. The girl was back.
‘D'you see this?’ she asked, speaking not to Bartholomew but to the empty air, to the one she knew was watching. ‘Are you looking with your eyes open, this time? I haven't spent my entire life on this just so you can screw it up.’
There was no answer. Thus far there hadn't been, although she could feel the link growing closer every time. True conversation was inevitable at some point. Huffing quietly to herself, Shilly slowly moved her ageing body out onto the sand, stepping delicately across marks she'd made weeks, months, even years before. The resin Bartholomew had applied to the finished sections protected it from footprints, but she still trod lightly over complex whorls and rayed stars, and between sections defined by arterial lines as long and straight as a taut string. She knew every mark of the charm intimately, lovingly. She felt potential radiating from it, even though she herself would never be able to wield it.
It took her a gratifyingly long time to reach the centre of the charm from its outermost edge. Her life's work wasn't complete, but it still covered a space as large as a small town. She was proud of it, and wished only for the chance to finish it before she died.
‘Get it down, girl,’ she said, hearing the disgruntlement in her voice and knowing it came from the ever-present fear of failure. There was no time to be pleasant. ‘Take down every detail. Don't miss a smudge. You'll probably have to finish it without me, the way things are going here, so don't waste this opportunity. It might not come again.’
Her weakening eyes watered at the charm's mind- and space-bending properties. Sometimes when she stood as she was now and just looked at it, letting her eyes skate over its form rather than dive down into its intricacies, she felt awestruck at what she had accomplished. She had always known that she could bring great things into the world, given the chance. Her talent might not have been for the Change itself, as Sal's had been, but hers had ultimately, in a way, been the most powerful. The Change burned too brightly if used unwisely.
Shilly blinked tears from her eyes. Damned charm making them water, she told herself, even though she knew that was a lie. She wanted to tell the watcher to kiss Sal for her, to convey some of the feelings that had been bottled up and preserved for so long. But she held her tongue; she kept it all in. In her world-line, she would never see Sal again. She was used to that idea now, even if the pain never went away.
‘Get this right for Sal's sake,’ she told her younger self in a world where there was still hope. ‘He'll need it, and he'll need you. And you need him just as badly. Don't make the mistake I made—not unless you want to end up like me. And who would want that, eh?’
Not a ghost of a reply came down the link connecting her to her other self. Brushing the memories and hope aside, along with her fears, she hobbled to the far edge of the resin and dipped the tip of her cane into the soft sand beyond. With smooth, economical gestures, she began once again to draw.
Shilly opened her eyes. The image of a flat expanse of sand etched with lines in a pattern too intense to comprehend briefly overlaid itself onto the broad shelf of perfectly white snow that lay before her, wind-carved into a series of intricate ripples. The colour was wrong, and the temperature was much colder than it had been in the dream, and instead of one tiny man'kin there were dozens all around her, and glowing green
people, and an old man who wasn't quite a man, and—
Shilly closed her eyes at the sight of the glassy black figure watching her from the fringes of the group. The glast. She couldn't deal with him—it—right now. At one sound from those smooth crystal lips she might shatter into a million pieces.
‘What did you see?’ asked Tom, brushing her wavy brown hair back from her face. He of all of them understood what it was like to have crazy dreams. ‘How was she, this time?’
Not so angry, Shilly thought. That was a change, but she wasn't sure it counted as an improvement. The awful grief she felt in her future self wasn't new—she had picked that up before, in fractured, fleeting glimpses—but its cause had never been obvious. Now she knew. In that world, Sal was dead. Her future self had let him down, somehow. That the world was dying seemed a lesser concern against that one hard, unbearable fact.
But this other Shilly was bearing it, somehow. She continued with her life's work: the creation of a charm that was supposed to be important. She endured.
Shilly felt a bubble of sorrow swell up inside her. Swallowing it was difficult. This latest dream confirmed so many of her present fears: that Sal was in danger, that the world might not be saved, that all her efforts could yet come to nothing. What would happen to her if she failed to understand the charm in time? Would she become the future self she saw in her dreams, hunched and withered and living in a hole in the ground?
The complexities of past and present were too much for her to grasp. It was difficult enough concentrating on the charm alone. That was the point of it all. That was what Tom was really asking. She forced herself to push everything else aside, to swallow the bubble, and answer him as best she could.
‘I saw a new section,’ she said, still with her eyes shut.
‘Do you think you can get it down?’
She nodded. Images of lines and patterns danced in the pinkness of her closed eyelids. She felt the pen and parchment in her hands, poised to draw. The details were difficult to hold in her mind. After five days of concerted effort, she still had little more than disconnected fragments, many dozens of them, with no clear way of putting them together.
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