The Company of Glass

by Tricia Sullivan

  ‘I can try,’ Xiriel said. The others came through the passage and Xiriel stayed behind; a minute later he could be heard loping behind them, laughing at having foiled the Pharician pursuers. The stream turned twice, and then light began to grow. They emerged into a breeze and under the shadow of the next island. The stream disgorged in a white spray that shot out over the sea, falling sideways in the wind. The ledge where they stood was tiny and exposed. Pallo pressed himself against the stone, white-fingered. Below, the waves swirled hypnotically against the base of the cliff. Gulls made idle patterns. ‘How are we going to get there from here?’ he asked faintly.

  The shadow of the second island fell on their faces; its sides were almost sheer, apparently without blemish except for tiny white beards painted where gulls had somehow managed to perch, staining the rock. A pair of seahawks was sitting on the cliff opposite, observing them. Istar took this as a good sign. Directly across from them, the semiarch of a half-extended Everien bridge hooked out into the air like a claw. It was much too far to reach from here.

  ‘Something’s down here,’ Xiriel said. He bent and wiped fungus and dirt from the tiles of the tunnel entrance and ledge. They were ornately inscribed with symbols the others couldn’t read. ‘Ah! The other island comes when called, but how to call it …’

  Open-mouthed, Istar stared at Xiriel. ‘Comes when called?’ she said. ‘What’s got into you?’

  ‘Shh, Istar. Go away. You smell of intestines.’

  Kassien and Pentar had busied themselves with ropes and grappling hooks, but it was evident to Istar that they were too far away for such simple methods. She studied the cliff face, wondering how scalable it was and whether they might swim across, climb to the unfinished bridge, and enter the underground door there. This didn’t seem very feasible either, but it occupied her mind while Xiriel was doing whatever it was he was doing.

  Then she wondered if she could be suffering from vertigo, because it seemed to her that the next island was slowly turning. Xiriel was chuckling gleefully. On the next island, several pieces of loose stone tumbled into the water from beneath the tongue of the viaduct.

  ‘By my grandmother’s beard!’ Pallo exclaimed. ‘The bridge is moving!’

  Xiriel was looking exceptionally pleased with himself as the other island extended its arm towards them with a heavy grinding noise. The span was not supported in any way but appeared completely stable. It slid against the stone at their feet and stopped. There was a deep humming and they felt vibrations pass through their boots; then nothing.

  ‘One bridge, as requested,’ Xiriel said. ‘Let’s get across fast, before it changes its mind.’

  They ran. Halfway across, they came into view of the original Everien bridge, which the Pharicians were still attempting to extend to reach a different neighbouring island. At the same time they came into the line of the wind, which tackled them and drove them to their knees. Pallo clung, unmoving, flat on his belly on the stone. Istar turned and saw him.

  ‘Crawl if you have to, Pallo!’

  Arrows flew among them, driven harder on the wind. They struck the stone around Pallo, who could not even bring himself to look.

  The rest of the group had almost reached the far side of the bridge.

  ‘Pallo!’ Istar screamed. Xiriel had reached the entrance to the tunnel in the new island, and he waved them on.

  ‘It’s not going to last long!’ he yelled over the wind. ‘The time for the bridge is short and there’s nothing I can do about it.’

  ‘What’s he talking about?’ Kassien said to Pentar.

  ‘Pallo!’ Istar was frantic. Pentar ignored Kassien’s question and ran back out across the bridge.

  ‘Leave him,’ Xiriel called to Pentar. ‘The bridge won’t stay!’

  ‘Pallo, damn it!’ they chorused. The bridge began to retract, moving beneath them. They scrambled on to the solid ledge on the other side, where Xiriel waited. More Pharician arrows flew, but although Pallo was unmoving, none struck him. Pentar reached him and began dragging him back. The island was slowly turning back to its original position, forcing Pentar to pull the resisting Pallo into the wind. The bridge flexed and bent in the wind, which sported eddies that could be seen in the irregular flight of the endless Pharician arrows.

  Pentar trudged towards them, his face flushed, his dark eyes half-shut against the gale, one arm clamped around the neck of Pallo, who stumbled uselessly after him. Istar stretched out her arms. The bridge was carrying Pentar forward anyway, but as it came towards its final withdrawn position, it tilted and the two figures nearly fell. Istar leaned out and caught Pentar’s swirling cloak, then his hand, and he thrust Pallo bodily at her.

  ‘Here he is,’ Pentar gasped as he fell into the tunnel. ‘For whatever he’s worth, he’s all yours, Istar.’

  Pallo was trembling. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I really really tried, I did, but I—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Istar said, placing her hand over his mouth to illustrate. The others had already started down the tunnel.

  Pallo had begun to recover. ‘Always underground,’ he complained.

  ‘Always moaning,’ Kassien answered. ‘Someone get a light going.’

  ‘Yes,’ Xiriel agreed. ‘We are going to be underground for a long time. Get used to it, Pallo.’

  After this, there would be no end to the sound of the tide, night or day, near or far. Everywhere they went in that space that was larger than itself, they could hear the sound of the ocean as if it were about to burst in on them through the rock. Even after they had descended many levels below the point they knew to be the waterline, the rush of the surf filled the empty spaces between footfalls, words, thoughts.

  Kassien in the lead had reached a dead end. He placed his hands on the wall, which was smooth and possessed sources of light the size of grains of sand buried deep within it. He shuddered.

  ‘What is it?’ Xiriel asked sharply.

  ‘Look.’ Kassien uttered the word without removing his gaze or his finger from the wall. They looked. The lights seemed to get larger without getting any brighter, and they began to move around, gradually elongating until they resembled slugs, and then, stretching more, worms. Istar was not disgusted; on the contrary, the slowly wriggling lightworms were soothing. She could feel her anxious brows soften. After a few seconds it seemed that each of the lightworms had a personality, and she found herself singling out one in particular and following everything it did. She could no longer take her eyes away. It grew larger and larger until it filled the entire panel before them. Then it turned its mouth towards her and the wall wavered like a jelly. The lightworm’s mouth stretched wide and engulfed her. It began to swallow.

  Pentar caught her other arm and pulled her back. She couldn’t see anything but the worms of light, but she could hear the others asking her concerned questions and making a fuss in general.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, shaking off their hands. ‘Don’t look at the worms, whatever you do.’

  ‘This octagonal tile in the floor, I think I remember it from one of the maps,’ said Xiriel.

  Istar felt vertiginous. She turned in a circle, off-balance as if drunk, almost falling. She heard Xiriel exclaim, ‘Aha, it does move!’ and the next thing she knew her stomach had been left behind and she was falling – they were all falling, to judge by the screams.

  Quicksilver

  The floor was still beneath her, so the stone itself must be plunging downward.

  It slowed and then stopped.

  She still couldn’t see, but the faint glow of the lightworms had been replaced by pure darkness. An ice-cold draught rushed over them. Xiriel coughed, and his Knowledge-light came on faintly. They were on an octagonal tile that had fallen down a shaft and landed on a pool of intensely reflective silver liquid filling a roughly circular chamber measuring some hundred feet or more in diameter. The disc rotated slowly as it floated. The walls of the chamber were not stone: they threw back weak reflections where Xiriel’s lig
ht touched them. He was holding the light over his head and peering up the shaft. His teeth chattered in the cold.

  ‘I think we’ve fallen past the ledge that leads to the level we need. We’re going to have to get back up.’

  They craned their heads and looked up the shaft, where the rim of the ledge Xiriel spoke of showed silver in the darkness. Kassien took out his grappling hook and rope and made a toss. The hook struck the ledge perfectly on the first try, but there was nowhere for it to catch on the polished surface and it slipped off as though greased, landing in the silver liquid with a low-pitched thunk. Globules of silver flew into the air; one settled on the tile where they stood and lay in a little lump instead of draining off as water would.

  Pallo nudged it with his toe, laughing. ‘It’s quicksilver,’ he said delightedly. ‘I’ve never seen so much of it! Isn’t it fun?’ He bent and began playing with the stuff, which behaved like no liquid Istar had ever seen.

  ‘Quicksilver?’ Xiriel exclaimed. ‘It expands when you heat it, doesn’t it? I wonder if this level is meant to be higher, so we’d reach that ledge from here. Maybe it’s too cold here.’

  ‘It is freezing,’ Pentar said, hugging himself. ‘Could we build a fire?’

  ‘It would have to be a huge fire. And it would have to come from below.’ Xiriel dropped to his knees to examine the tile they were standing on. He dipped one of his axes in the liquid and hooked the blade beneath the tile. The whole thing tipped slightly, surprisingly light and buoyant.

  ‘We’re definitely floating,’ he said. He turned his attention to Kassien. ‘I wonder whether we could paddle our way to one of the walls, and get a hook into the wall and climb …’

  Kassien gazed at the ceiling, and then down into the silver pool. ‘I don’t think anybody wants to risk falling in that,’ he said dubiously. But Pentar had already lowered himself on his belly, placed his sword into the fluid and begun using it as a paddle. It was not a very good method, but the tile did move, and when the others joined him they were able to navigate slowly and laboriously across the chamber. As they drew near the wall, the light reflected back from it grew brighter and more complex. Pallo lit a torch, and as its flame caught, the others gasped. The chamber was made of crystal laced with fine filaments like the veins of a leaf. The crystal was utterly clear, but cut in such a way that light sent to it came back multiplied, diamond-sharp. Slowly their raft drew up to the wall until they could see at intervals tubes of clear glass protruding from the crystal. Kassien reached out and caught hold of one of these, attempting to use it to hold their position; but its end broke off in his hand and there was a hissing sound as an invisible, foul-smelling gas poured out.

  Before anyone could react, Pallo’s torch had lit the gas with an explosive whoof. His hair caught fire and Kassien leaped on him in an instant, smothering the flames with his cloak. All at once they were overwhelmed with the impressions of burning hair, burning bear fur, sudden heat and blue light. A blue gout of flame shot out from the wall; within, the veins that had looked as if they were filled with water now were shown to be filled with the flammable gas as they flared to life. The entire chamber filled with light and heat. It was as if they were inside a hollow crystal egg that had suddenly caught the sun.

  Pallo staggered to his feet, sooty-faced but not seriously hurt, as the raft began to rise.

  ‘Hurry!’ Xiriel said. ‘We have to get back to the centre or we’ll be crushed against the ceiling.’

  They were moving upward rapidly. Abandoning all caution, they thrust their hands into the now-hot liquid and paddled madly. The quicksilver rose higher and higher, and the air became searingly hot. Soon they were crouched beneath the roof of the chamber, pulling themselves along the crystal by their fingertips in an effort to reach the hole in the centre. The heat became unbearable.

  Xiriel was the first to stand up and step on to the ledge, which was octagonal with eight tunnels leading in different directions. The others piled after him, gulping down the cooler air that blew in from the eight tunnels. Pallo smiled and stretched. ‘It’s a good thing I lit that torch,’ he said. ‘We probably never would have guessed we could—’

  The quicksilver had risen to the level of the ledge. It lifted the tile and began to ooze out from beneath it.

  ‘Shit, which way?’ Kassien blurted.

  Xiriel hesitated. ‘I’ve lost my sense of direction,’ he said. ‘They all look the same …’

  Quicksilver crept up their boots. All the tunnels were dark and straight. There was nothing to discriminate between them.

  Istar whirled and picked one at random. She shot down it, shouting for the others to follow. Splashing through the silver liquid she just kept thinking, Please let it not be another dead end. She came to a flight of steps and bounded up them as if wing-shod. Light filtered in from around a bend; she took the corner and halted, grabbing the wall for balance as yellow summer light smacked across her face and the tunnel opened on to thin air. The sea soughed far below. A piece of blue swayed in her vision as the others shuffled and wheezed to a halt at her back, spitting with exertion. The next island reared high above them like a wolf’s fang. There was no bridge other than a thick strand of weed-covered cable that hung slack between a ring in the stone at the end of the tunnel and some fixture on the opposite side.

  Pentar was breathing down her neck. She shoved him back with a twist of her hip. Pallo was uttering what she assumed were oaths in Pharician.

  ‘Uh … Kassien?’ she said in a high voice. She turned and caught his eye, and he moved Pallo and Pentar aside to reach her. Gently he took her shoulders and pulled her back from the edge. ‘No need to stand there,’ he said and dropped to his knees, examining the cable.

  ‘I picked the wrong tunnel,’ she babbled. ‘But there was no time, and I was afraid—’

  ‘Shut up, Star,’ said Xiriel.

  ‘Can we go back?’ she asked weakly.

  ‘Not unless the fire stops on its own. The quicksilver’s reached the bottom of the steps.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Kassien. ‘This is good enough. It’s not rope, it’s something much stronger, and it’s thick enough to grip well with your legs.’

  ‘Did the Pharicians put it there? Could they have got out this far?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I doubt anyone’s been out this far,’ Xiriel answered.

  ‘We’re crossing that?’ Pallo squawked.

  ‘I am,’ said Kassien. ‘Perhaps in Pharice you all just flap your wings and wish …’

  ‘It can be done,’ Pentar agreed. ‘Just don’t look down.’

  Kassien secured all the fittings on his pack and gear and then climbed down the rope. It was draped loosely between the two islands, and dropped against the cliff for a little way before curving out across the ocean in a long parabola that eventually rose to the opposite side. Kassien spun on the rope so that he lay with his back to the water and his head towards the next island, legs wrapping the rope and hands gripping it above his body so that he could pull himself along.

  ‘It’s too overgrown to attach to a safety loop,’ Pentar observed. ‘The thing wouldn’t slide and it would only slow us down.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ Pallo said in a small voice.

  ‘If you fall, just swim for it,’ Xiriel advised him philosophically.

  ‘But you’d never get up the cliff opposite,’ argued Pallo.

  ‘We’d drop you a rope. Or you’d make a nice fish food. Come on. I’m going, and you’re coming next.’ Istar swung herself out on to the cable. Kassien was already well over the open water. She had gone down about twenty feet and had shifted position to copy Kassien when she tilted her head back to check his progress.

  He wasn’t there.

  ‘Kass?’ She peered back at the others, but they were obscured from below by the ledge.

  ‘Xiriel! Where’s Kassien?’

  Her voice projected only weakly over the sound of the ocean. She couldn’t see Kassien in the water, but it was rough
with whitecaps and might easily hide a swimmer. She shut her eyes and kept going, wrestling with clumps of hanging seaweed that made the rope thick and slippery. She saw Pallo climb down after her as she’d ordered. She shouted to him, but he didn’t respond – probably too terrified. She looked ahead again. The rope disappeared ten feet beyond her clasped hands.

  ‘Xiriel?’ Still no response. She could see the terminal section of the rope where it reached the next island, but a whole length of it was gone. It hadn’t been cut, for it didn’t hang slack. It was invisible.

  Istar edged right up to the place where the rope disappeared. The edges were not frayed. Nothing beyond looked different than it should, but for the absence of the rope.

  ‘Kass?’

  She looked down the length of her own legs. Pallo was creeping along the cable like a little old lady.

  Closing her eyes, she slid her hand up the rope. She felt it go off the end. There was nothing solid beyond, but the air was hot and dry on her hand, and cool on the rest of her. Something was dragging at her hand without touching her, a tugging like a magnet’s. Or like gravity …

  She gripped the rope hard with her legs and her right hand, and stretched her head and shoulders off the end and into the heat and drag of the other place. She was hanging at the bottom end of a line suspended above a pit of volcanic fire. Below her, dark and hot and red at once, lava seethed and spurted. Her sense of gravity was completely confused, for although most of her body was lying horizontal under a rope over the sea, her head felt as if it were dangling over the pit. She wondered whether she could go back, or if she would fall off the end of the rope and into the lava if she tried. She looked up and saw that the rope stretched towards some kind of girder. She began to climb, buffeted by heat. Sweat poured from her skin and into her clothes. The rope was hot to the touch and it seared her hands, burning her legs even through her leather trousers; but there was no way she could think of letting go.

  When she reached the girder it was all she could do to pull herself on to it. The fact that the metal was burning hot was further incentive to keep moving, or she probably would have collapsed there. She staggered along the girder so fast she couldn’t possibly lose her balance, screaming Kassien’s name. The girder was slippery; she skated the last several yards and fell to her knees on the brink.