“You sound as if you know what it was.”
Soter blinked. “What? Why, no, of course I don’t. I just…now, where’s Leodor—” His eyes swelled with horror. “Oh, gods help me, no!”
Diverus turned, following his gaze, not up the lane but to the Dragon Bowl.
. . . . .
Leodora left her puppet case beside the opening and walked out onto the crumbling beam and onto the Dragon Bowl.
She considered that the beam’s condition made it slightly perilous, but not more so than climbing up a tower. She didn’t fear the height at all; she embraced the thrill of it.
What had Diverus felt? she wondered. What was it like to stand within the hexagonal bowl, hoping for some sign that you were exalted, chosen? A thriving span, covered with people, and only one or two would ever be blessed by the gods in such a way, and no one able to predict who it would be or when it would happen; no one sure it would ever happen at all. Spans like Ningle eventually forgot the bowl was there at all. There must be stories in that—of course there were, and she knew one: the tale of the two brothers. Soter had taught it to her years ago.
This bowl was in worse shape even than what Diverus had described of Vijnagar. There were almost no tiles remaining. If he hadn’t said, she wouldn’t have thought it had ever been covered with them.
She turned around and looked back along the ragged beam. From the narrow lane Soter was waving, and she waved back. The buildings behind him were osseous husks, like the ones on the far side they’d seen. It looked like the rest of Colemaigne all the way to the far support tower was a ruin. Before she could wonder at that, her attention was drawn to the underside of the span, visible from where she stood at the entry into the bowl. Unlike the opposite side, this one wasn’t hidden behind a solid wall.
What she saw beneath Colemaigne was utterly impossible.
There were houses in a kind of mirror image of the city above. They hung upside down off the bottom of the span. She crossed the bowl and leaned over the lip, astonished.
The wind gusted at her back, then swirled around her. It blew back her hood. Soter shouted something, but she couldn’t hear him over the wind. He was hurrying back. He’d left Diverus’s instruments in the lane.
Diverus was calling to her, too, from between his hands. His words were drowned out by a rumbling in the sky overhead, and she tilted her head back.
Above the Dragon Bowl the sky was roiling as if throbbing with heat; the blue had darkened to greenish black as though the substance of the sky itself were scorching. Lightning flicked from this mass like the tongue of the Ondiont snake, transfixing her in fascination. She wasn’t even aware that she had stepped away from the edge, back into the center of the bowl. The air crackled. It pulsed with energy that tingled right through her. She held up her hand, and a blue fire surrounded it. She had the presence of mind to think I should be frightened. Instead she spread out her arms as white lightning shot down from the middle of the overhead darkness, straight into the bowl. The world evaporated in light. The light stung her like a thousand bees and she screamed. The bowl, the beam, the span, and her friends upon it all disappeared in an instant. The pain released her and she fell into oblivion.
EPILOGUE
THE BLACK SHIP
Upon a deep-bottomed black ship well on its way across the sea to Vijnagar, beneath a thick, striped awning, a bony, bald-headed creature saw a bright flash just on the horizon whence they’d sailed and inadvertently in response said, “Ah?”
At this utterance of surprise, another, who might easily have been his gaunt twin, poured from the darkness behind him to see what had elicited the sound. On the horizon there was nothing now to behold. The morning sky was untroubled by so much as a single blemish. Not even a bird flew, as if even birds knew to keep far away from that ship.
The two creatures stared and stared at the horizon, unblinking, until one looked into the other’s sunken eyes and both shrugged together. “Enh,” said the first.
“What did you see?” asked the second.
“Nothing, Scratta.”
“This nothing caught your attention.”
“It was—”
The second one, Scratta, reached over and pressed a fingertip to his nose to cover a spot of calcitic gray showing there; when he withdrew his hand, the spot was gone, the nose pale and fleshy. He gave a satisfied nod at his handiwork. “Nothing to do with us,” he said, “unless it’s the one called Jax.”
The other shrugged again, dismissing the idea.
“No,” agreed the second, and he flowed silently back into the raven recesses of the ship.
The other turned to survey the untroubled distance behind them once more. A flash of light, he thought, most probably lightning over the horizon. It couldn’t possibly be relevant.
The black ship sailed on. It would reach Vijnagar by nightfall.
GREGORY FROST has been a finalist for nearly every major award in the fantasy field, including the Hugo, Nebula, James Tiptree, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, International Horror Guild, and World Fantasy awards. He is the author of five previous novels, as well as the critically praised short-story collection Attack of the Jazz Giants & Other Stories. Greg is currently the Fiction Writing Workshop director at Swarthmore College. He lives in Merion Station, Pennsylvania.
BY GREGORY FROST
Lyrec
Tain
Remscela
The Pure Cold Light
Fitcher’s Brides
Attack of the Jazz Giants & Other Stories
Shadowbridge is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2008 by Gregory Frost
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Frost, Gregory.
Shadowbridge / Gregory Frost.
p. cm.
“Book one.”
1. Women storytellers—Fiction. 2. Puppeteers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3556.R59815S53 2008
813'.54—dc22 2007033139
www.delreybooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-50494-4
v3.0
Shadowbridge Page 33
