Hezekiah nodded gravely… as if he found it obvious what the right hands would be. To me, the issue was not so clear-cut. I was inclined to pass on the grinder to Lady Erin as fast as possible; but I knew Wheezle would want to turn it over to the Dustmen, Yasmin to the Doomguard, and Kiripao either to the Ciphers or to whatever power he worshipped. When the time came, there would be a sodding huge argument. Still, we tacitly agreed we didn't want the grinder taken by Rivi or the umbrals, so the question could be postponed a while.
With each of us prominently displaying a soul-gem, we walked toward the village. I almost missed the sentry fiend, posted beside the path; it stood under the hood of a willow-like tree, glaring at us from the shadows. When it saw I had noticed it, the umbral took to its wings immediately, staying low to the ground but swinging its flight-path over the Styx, getting an unobstructed route to the huts. Since we were still on foot it took us longer to cover the remaining distance, forced to clamber over fallen logs and detour around spots where the muddy bank had crumbled into the river; so by the time we reached the umbral village, a sizable welcoming party had assembled along the path.
Every pair of hollow eye sockets pinned a yearning gaze on the soul-gems we carried, as if the villagers were deciding which gem they would claim as their own. Yasmin's free hand strayed to the hilt of her longsword; but the fiends made no motion toward us. They watched in silence, shadows among shadows, each sepulchral face lit by the purple glow of the gems.
Without speaking, we walked to the very heart of the village, coming to a circular patch of mud with a shallow flame-pit dug in the middle. Unfamiliar runes had been carved in the stones that lined the pit; I suspected they were invocations to whatever god the umbrals deemed it necessary to mollify.
Wheezle nudged Yasmin and she held him aloft, her hands under his arm-pits like a mother lifting her child. «Honored fiends,» he called, «we have come to negotiate trade.»
The crowd of shadows uttered no words, but they rustled like poplar leaves stirred by a stiff wind. Every shade-dark face crinkled into a razor-toothed smile.
* * *
The swamps of Othrys have no cycle of morning and night. The sky is always somber and overcast, the air pregnant with the anticipation of a storm that never comes. Sages claim that the red-tinted light of Carceri comes from the land itself; but in the fetid umbral swamps it leaked up to the sky, then reflected down again from the clouds, casting a cold illumination whose chill gradually seeped into our bones.
Wheezle told us the negotiations to sell the soul-gems would take three days – not more, not less. I wondered what a day meant in a place without light or dark; but Kiripao told me the umbrals measured out time in chunks of twenty-four hours, just like so much of the multiverse… an enigma that has puzzled more learned brains than mine.
As promised, the fiends supplied us with all the necessities of life, even before Wheezle and Kiripao began discussions with the village council. Umbral food consisted of marsh weeds and beetles, which the others refused to eat until I assured them the insects had an appealing nutty flavor… rather like a cross between grasshoppers and earthworms, although the worm taste probably came from the mud clinging to each beetle carapace. (Haven't you found that no matter how thoroughly you wash a bug, you can never clean away the grit that lodges in the crannies of its exo-skeleton? Then again, my dwarven friends say the dirt is the best part.)
The water offered by the fiends had a greasy aftertaste, but it was drawn from a well, not the river. I had heard stories about water from the River Styx – how the tiniest dribble touching tongue or skin could erase your memories, leaving you empty as an infant – and I worried that some portion of the Styx might have seeped into the well. However, after steeling myself to try a sip, I suffered no ill effects… so I used every drop in the bucket to wash off the sticky white dust still coating my body. The others did the same with their own buckets, and Yasmin went so far as to begin a tiny invocation to test whether the dust was safely gone. A second later, she broke out in a fit of coughing, pressing her fists to her chest.
«What's wrong?» I asked, wrapping my arms around her.
Wheezing, she gasped out, «Lungs… my lungs!»
As I held her, waiting for her to recover, I contemplated how much dust we must have inhaled during our fight with the Fox. How much lurked in our noses, our throats, our bronchial tubes and deeper? I couldn't say; but none of us would be casting magic for a long, long time.
* * *
The umbrals gave us a single hut for lodging, with a floor three paces square… not much space for five human-sized people and a gnome. On the other hand, we weren't all going to sleep at the same time; even with the fiends on their best behavior, we scheduled a watch around the clock.
To prevent the enemy from catching any of us alone, we decided to pair off. Wheezle and Kiripao, our two most knowledgeable bloods when it came to umbrals, would handle negotiations. Miriam volunteered to accompany Hezekiah wherever he went, leaving Yasmin and me together… which caused us a nervous blush or two, but we didn't ask for a different arrangement.
The four of us who weren't negotiating took on the task of learning if this village had a portal, where the portal went, and what key was needed to open it. Accordingly, Yasmin and I took a stroll around the area, keeping our eyes peeled for the faint glimmer of a gate. Soon, however, I found my attention straying to something totally unexpected: umbral art. The huts weren't the only things molded from solid darkness; everywhere you looked there was brooding black statuary, sculpted from pure shadow. A few had recognizable subjects – a fat human man laughing wildly, a woman being crushed under a stone – but most were utterly alien shapes. What was I to make of a pitted block that resembled a human knucklebone, or something like a huge axe-head attached to a shriveled cone?
As I was looking at this last one, an umbral slithered up beside me and murmured, «You like ssstatue?»
«Is it supposed to be a tomahawk?» I asked.
«Isss abssstract,» the umbral replied, sounding as if I'd offended him. «Isss ssstatement.»
«What kind of statement?»
«Come now, Britlin,» Yasmin said beside me. «It shows the precarious balance of all our lives… how we cling fanatically to familiar concepts, while deep in our hearts we doubt if we've made the right choice.»
«Yessss, yesssssss!» the umbral whistled. «Issss exactly that.» He sidled closer to Yasmin. «You are artissst?»
«No, I just know what I like.» She reached out to tap on the axe-like statue, but her finger went right through. It seemed the shadow-stuff wasn't so solid after all. «Were you the one who made this?» Yasmin asked.
«Made it, yesss,» the umbral replied. «Jusssst a humble effort.»
«It's very good,» Yasmin said. «It has a particularly strong sense of form and motion.»
«There's no motion,» I muttered, «it's a sodding statue. The piking thing just sits there, doesn't it?» In a louder voice, I asked the fiend, «Have you considered making a piece that actually looks like something? Perhaps you could get a pretty she-umbral to model for you. Nothing develops your attention to accuracy as much as sculpting from the figure…»
But that was as far as I got. The fiend covered its ears with its hands and ran shrieking into the marsh.
Yasmin patted me on the shoulder. «I don't think they're ready for these advanced artistic concepts.»
«Primitives,» I growled. «I can't understand why their work gets so much attention.»
And for several minutes thereafter, I found myself kicking at any pebble with the audacity to lie in my path.
* * *
Our walk through the village and outlying regions took several hours, after which I arbitrarily declared that night was drawing in. Of course, there was no change in the uniform grayness of the Carceri sky; but fatigue was pressing down on me, compounded by the many exertions of the day. Yasmin agreed it must be dark by now, back in Sigil… and she took my hand as we walked quie
tly back to the hut.
When we arrived, Miriam announced she had found the portal. It lay inside a piece of sculpture shaped something like a ruptured watermelon, with a crack down the side just big enough for an emaciated umbral to squeeze through. The crack was, of course, the portal; and it remained to be seen if we humans could fit into the gate. We would have serious difficulty at the best of times. It would be next to impossible to squash through quickly and quietly.
Alas, «quickly and quietly» was exactly what we needed. After hours of formal discussions, Wheezle and Kiripao had established only one point: the umbrals would double-cross us as soon as bargaining concluded. The moment they handed over the agreed-upon price, any outsiders in the village would change from «merchants with goods to sell» into «targets with gold to steal». Of course, the fiends hadn't said this in so many words; but the undercurrents of gloating hostility were too obvious for our companions to miss. The gnome and elf insisted we must have an escape route ready by the time negotiations ended.
I did not sleep well that night; and I was grateful when Hezekiah woke me to say it was my watch.
* * *
As I stepped out of the hut, I saw Yasmin already standing in the gloomy shadows. The sky was still gray and overcast, unchanged since we had arrived in Othrys; but the village had a brooding silence to it, as if true night had fallen. No umbrals walked the streets or hovered in the doors of their huts, watching us with greedy eyes. Perhaps they had gone to sleep too… if shadows are capable of slumber.
«It's quiet,» Yasmin whispered.
I nodded.
After some time she said, «Sometimes I have this vision of Sigil, completely empty. No one left in the city – no people, no dogs, no rats – everyone gone but me. I have the whole perfect silence to myself.»
«It's a Doomguard kind of dream,» I said. «The twilight at the end of the world.»
«Not the end of the world,» she replied. "The completion of the world. Have you ever been in a tavern when a truly great bard starts to sing? At first, people keep talking to their neighbors, clinking tankards, making noise… but as the bard's voice reaches them, they stop to listen, one by one. The hush spreads over the crowd, until all you can hear is the singing. No one wants to breathe or move, for fear of missing a note of the song.
«That's what Entropy means to me, Britlin: the beautiful song of Time. I dream of the day people stop their desperate jabbering and finally hear the music.»
«A pretty metaphor,» I told her, «but in real life, people don't just fall quiet and listen to the Harmony of the Spheres. In real life, people die – often painfully and pointlessly. Where's the music in that?»
«You're too short-sighted,» Yasmin replied. «Death is merely a transition, like adolescence. It may be easy or hard, but it's not the final word. Your soul moves on to another plane, Upper or Lower, wherever your heart truly belongs. And when your afterlife ends, you move on again, absorbed into the multiverse one way or another. We'll all be present for the final song. We'll all be part of the final song.»
I shrugged. «Pardon me if I want to put off choir membership as long as possible.»
«I'm a Handmaid of Entropy, not a leatherhead. I don't want to die in the near future either – there are still a million things I have to do… and a million others I want to do.»
«Even so, you're devoted to helping Entropy along.»
She shook her head. «Entropy doesn't need help, any more than stars need help to shine. Entropy is always on the job, berk, and whatever pace it wants to move is fine by me. I only get annoyed when someone tries to jig the natural progression faster or slower. Trying to accelerate Entropy is just as bad as trying to stop it: both are presumptuous… tinkering with the great bard's song. The path of wisdom is just to go about your business and try to hear the music.» Her eyes were distant; but suddenly she broke into a chuckle. «By the gods, I sound pompous.»
«Let's be kind and say you're profound.»
«I've never been profound in my life. I've been…» Her voice broke off. «I've been a lot of things, but never profound.»
«Tell me what you've been.»
She bit her lip. «You don't want to know, and I don't want to remember. Life was not good before I became a Handmaid. Life was very bitter and lonely.»
«No friends or family?»
«No friends, bad family. My mother died. My older brother – he died eventually too, but not soon enough.» She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. «Let's talk about something else.»
I looked at her closely. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions, imposing my mother's history on another woman; but the sound of her voice when she mentioned her brother… ugly. So much ugliness in the world. And despite my grousing, I knew I had lived a pampered life, all things considered.
Reaching out, I took Yasmin's hand. «Okay. Let's talk about something else.»
Her mouth curved into the ghost of a smile. «What did you have in mind?»
«Giving this place the laugh. Declaring that this patch of ground is not Carceri at all, but other plane entirely. What would you like it to be?»
«The Plane of Dust,» she answered immediately.
«Dust?» I snorted. «Pardon me, but I was there mere hours ago, and didn't enjoy it at all.»
«The Glass Spider wasn't the real Plane of Dust,» she said. «I visited Dust years ago, while studying to be a Handmaid. It was very soothing. Quiet and healing.»
«But it has no air!»
«They taught us spells that could cope with that.»
«You can't cast spells at the moment,» I reminded her.
«Oh no?» She draped an arm over my shoulder. «Imagine we're on the Plane of Dust,» she said in a low voice. «No umbrals. No swamp. No smell or noise…»
«No air.»
«Shh.» She put a finger to my lips. «We're in the Plane of Dust and I have wrapped us 'round with spells that will keep us very safe. Very private. No one for a million miles around but you… and me…»
For more than an hour after that, we weren't very good watchguards.
* * *
Early on our second «day» in Othrys, a boatman from the Styx arrived at the village. At the time, Yasmin and I were sitting on a clump of moss, watching an umbral artist shape a block of shadow into what looked like a headless rhinoceros. The sculpting process appeared no different from molding clay, full of kneading and squeezing and slapping; yet when I tried to touch the lump of darkness, I found it as insubstantial as mist. Maybe the shadow-stuff existed on a shifted plane of reality, one the umbral could contact and I could not… or maybe I was just spouting gibberish because I didn't have any rational explanation.
Yasmin, of course, didn't care about the «how» of shadow-sculpting. Every few minutes, she hiccupped with admiration as the fiend's hands pinched out a blob of blackness or smoothed down a dimple in the rhino's left buttock. No doubt, my tiefling inamorata would have happily explained how the piece symbolized the Voice of Irony, the Cosmic Jest, or some other deep theme; but I refused to ask. In fact, I was delighted when a group of umbrals broke into hysterical gabbling down by the riverside – it gave me an excuse to leave. Leaping to my feet I hurried to the Styx, with Yasmin close behind.
As we came into sight of the river, the boatman's skiff was just drawing up to the shore. A crowd of umbrals stood back a short distance, clacking their teeth together rhythmically. The sound seemed to be their way of offering a cheery hello; and they kept up the noise as the boatman tied his skiff to a tree stump and climbed onto solid ground. Yasmin grabbed my arm and whispered, «Maybe we should get out of here.»
I hesitated. True, this skeletal ferryman gave me more cold chills than a trip to the privy in January; but he hadn't shown any overt hostility. The umbrals seemed delighted to see him… and as for myself, I'd never met such a creature before. Would he let me shake his boney hand, maybe take flaky samples of his skin? No – I wouldn't ask him about that at the moment. But I didn't want to run either. I
simply watched as his pale gaze flicked our way then moved on, as if Yasmin and I didn't deserve his attention.
Stepping into the circle of fiends, the boatman bowed once in the direction of the village fire-pit, then a second time toward the Styx. The umbrals bowed back… and I noticed their bows were much deeper than the boatman's, like peasants bowing to their lord. Dapperly waving his hand, the boatman acknowledged the bows; then he cleared his throat with a loud raspy cough, sounding as if he hadn't spoken in weeks. When he finally opened his mouth, his voice resembled the scrape of gravel on sandpaper.
«Greetings,» he said huskily. «I have come to bring light to your dreary circle of hovels… because I find myself in need of an artist.»
Yasmin's grip on my arm tightened. I'd have to talk to her about clipping her fingernails.
* * *
Five minutes later, the boatman's skiff was beached on shore, open to the inspection of every fiend with artistic aspirations. The starboard side of the bow was painted much like the skiff we'd seen before: with a profusion of faces from many sentient species, all of them clouded by a profound sadness. None of these people wept openly, or even seemed close to tears; instead, they wore the dull expression of long-term grief, too wearily dispirited to cry. I had to admire the technique of the painter – each face, rendered in muted browns, had a clinical accuracy I found uncanny.
Unlike the painted starboard side, the port side of the bow was completely undecorated: bare wood, simply sanded smooth. The planks looked freshly cut and trimmed; and as I ran my fingers along the wood's surface, the boatman stepped up to my side. «You will notice this is newly repaired,» he said in his rasping voice. «My boat suffered damage after… a financial disagreement with some passengers.»
I made a sympathetic noise. «Customers can be so hard to please.»
«Indeed. They had quite a falling out.» He smiled. His teeth were yellow, with dark brown stains that gave me cause for unpleasant speculation. «Now that my boat has been refurbished,» he went on, «I wish to restore the usual… embellishments.» He turned to the crowd of umbrals. «Your fame as artists has spread the length of the river. I would be pleased to pay a reasonable commission to anyone who could copy the images from the starboard onto the port.»
Fire and Dust Page 20
