But Gowron had heard her. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ he barked from the edge of the escarpment. ‘Don’t tell me you believe her. You feel Tymon, do you, Nurry whore? Well, feel my fist, too.’
He strode towards Jedda, his face darker than the Storm, raising his hand as if he were about to strike her. But Wick placed himself between them.
‘What if she’s right?’ he countered. ‘Can we really take the risk that the Grafter is here, probably trying to stop us? We need her, Gowron.’
The older acolyte glowered over Jedda. If he could have squashed her where she stood, like a crawling, irritating insect, he would have done so, she knew.
‘By the bells!’ he burst out. ‘I’m sick of this. Bring her, fine: but tie her wrists and keep an eye on her. And you.’ He spat on the bark at Jedda’s feet. ‘You’d better not be lying. Because your kind protector here might be obliged to leave you in my tender care, if you are.’
He stalked away from them on the slope, leaving Wick to salvage a length of rope from the air-chariot on his own, grumbling under his breath.
A short while later, Jedda was trudging along behind Gowron and in front of Wick, over the bark hills and dales by the shores of the gleaming lake. Her hands were tied behind her back, and her back was loaded with the day’s provisions. The Envoy’s acolytes had brought the minimum with them on this trek, evidently intending to return to the air-chariot to camp that night, but the load felt heavy enough. Gowron strode some distance ahead of his companions, scowling furiously; he was taking swigs of kush from his gourd again. Wick had wrapped the long lead attached to Jedda’s bonds around his own right arm, and gave her irritating little jerks from time to time, as though she were a beast of burden. She had no hope of running away without dragging him and his confounded smile along with her, and comforted herself with the fact that they were at least moving in the right direction. She could not have travelled faster by herself, and still remained hidden from her enemies.
They were walking towards the broken branch again, she noticed, picking out the fallen arch of the great Tree-limb in the distant haze. It was massive, the ruin of it taking up half the western horizon. She wondered what unthinkable calamity had made it fall, for it seemed impossible that the Saint’s little war in Lantria had anything to do with the disaster. Even lightning did not usually dislodge the largest limbs of the Tree — only the Ancients’ weapons might once have been capable of that. The thought made her slow her pace to walk beside Wick, determined to use this opportunity to learn more about his mission. She had to know why the Envoy was suddenly so interested in the World Below; it struck her, with a chill, that Lace might be after some remnant of those weapons that had blighted the world of the Old Ones.
‘Why do you think Tymon’s here?’ she asked Wick. She knew he would be susceptible to flattery, if he believed he possessed more information than she did. ‘What does he want to stop you from doing?’
‘That’s for me to know and you to wonder,’ quipped Wick complacently.
As he spoke, they reached the bottom of the bark hummock and the edge of one of the crescent-shaped beaches immediately bordering the lake. Wick had recovered from his nausea, but seemed to be having trouble breathing in the World Below. His attempt at a smug chuckle after his last comment dissolved into a hacking cough, and he paused, spluttering and wheezing, before stepping onto the black silt of the beach.
The loam here was grittier than any found in the upper canopies, Jedda saw, consisting of tiny black granules. She crouched down on her haunches as she waited for Wick to recover, feeling the comforting crackle of Samiha’s papers under her clothes, and ran her fingers through the gravelly substance. It was gleaming wet; it moved under her fingertips as she caressed it. Were these the seeds of the World Below? she wondered. What might they grow? Ahead of them, Gowron crunched on along the shoreline, stolidly oblivious to the mysteries of this strange new world.
‘It’s all this damp air,’ Wick wheezed, struggling to catch his breath. He pressed the ball of his foot doubtfully into the silt. It pooled with water when he lifted it. ‘So much moisture. Can’t do the lungs any good.’ He peered with evident dislike at the softly lapping lake to their left. ‘Damned unnatural place,’ he muttered.
He still hesitated, though Gowron’s figure had dwindled in the distance. Jedda scooped up a handful of the granules to her nose and sniffed, curious. The silt was less redolent of decay than Tree-loam, cleaner than its namesake in the canopies, and somehow stripped down to essentials. It continued under the lake, so it was fair to assume this world was made of loam after all, beneath all that water. Jedda almost laughed aloud, remembering her own confusion in trying to imagine such a thing, based on what the Envoy had told her: she had thought of the World Tree sitting on a lump of loam barely larger than itself, like a plant in a pot.
‘I didn’t expect so much water, from the tales Lace told us,’ she admitted to Wick. ‘I expected blasted ruins, evidence of the Born war … It’s funny that all these years the priests have been talking about fire below the Storm, it’s really the exact opposite.’
Despite the tension with Gowron, Jedda had recovered much of her youthful vigour and optimism over the last few days, and the spark was back in her eye as she spoke. Though the scratches inflicted by the Envoy’s birds still wove a web of discomfort over her neck and the pack of provisions rubbed against her back, she felt alive again, filled with a tentative hope. The openness of the waters gave her a sense of freedom, and she found the clean loam of the shoreline pleasing. She let it fall between her fingers with a noisy clatter.
‘Stories fit for children,’ sniffed Wick, stepping onto the beach at last with an air of bravado. ‘Tales to frighten simple-minded folk into behaving themselves, or discourage them from going where they’ll inevitably come to grief. We’re the initiated. We know better.’
‘Do we?’ she said, rising to follow him. ‘Maybe it was fiery, once. Maybe those stories about Hell were based on something that happened a long time ago, a memory from the war. Then the rain came and covered everything.’
Wick shrugged, evidently uninterested in ancient history. ‘Fire or water, it’s all the same to me,’ he snuffled. ‘I hate this place. The sooner we get done and get out, the better. I feel like I’m choking.’
‘Lace said you used to be able to journey for miles, straight ahead,’ mused Jedda as they walked on. ‘The world was like a giant ball, and you could go all the way around it, until you arrived back where you started.’
There was indeed a dark mass on the southern horizon, as if the surface beneath the waters rose up again in hills and mounds of loam. Jedda could not help envying those ancient travellers, able to walk in any direction, without fear of the world coming to an end beneath their feet.
‘Miles of pointlessness,’ said Wick. ‘How could it be straight ahead if you went in a circle? And why would anyone want to live on a ball? You’d fall off on the underside, wouldn’t you?’
‘It doesn’t work like that, apparently —’ began Jedda.
She broke off, distracted by a bright flash like lightning, arcing briefly westwards ahead of them. ‘What was that?’ she exclaimed.
‘What?’ gasped Wick. He had been overtaken by another fit of coughing just as the lightning had appeared, and had doubled over, missing the flash.
Jedda stared over the black crescent of the shore, flanked by bark escarpments. To her right rose the frowning wall of the trunk, its rift valleys now overflowing with mist. She shivered in the mild breeze. Perhaps there was fire in this unlikely Hell, after all. The lightning was either a natural phenomenon striking dangerously close to where they were standing or, far more worryingly, evidence of weaponry. Were there others here, lurking denizens of a dead world, unimaginable descendants of the Ancients? Had they been the ones to bring down the massive limb of the Tree? Worse still, could the flash be the work of the Masters? Or was it just a faint reminder of the endless storms beneath the Storm, a premonition
of rain and the cause of all this water in the World Below?
‘Nothing,’ she said cautiously. ‘I thought I saw something. I made a mistake.’
She did not know whether the lightning had something to do with Wick’s mission, and now feared he would leave her behind if she appeared too well-informed. She did not want him to tie her to some stump of bark, ruining her chances of reaching Tymon.
‘We’d better catch up with old grumpy, then.’ Wick heaved a sigh as he peered at the tiny figure of Gowron, already winding up a bark slope at the far end of the beach. ‘He’s working himself into one of his tempers again. I don’t want to give him any more reason to take it out on us.’
Wick made light of Gowron’s moods in the presence of Jedda, his show of nonchalance sustained by the suave Seeming of the mask. But he knew, as he trudged over the gritty loam, feeling the tug and pull of the invisible scars on his face, that the older acolyte was mortally angry. He sensed Gowron’s rage boiling ahead of him in the monstrous spaces of the World Below, bubbling and seething beside the endless placidity of these objectionable waters. It was the heat of his associate’s fury, rather than any demon-fire, that inhabited this Hell, Wick thought dismally. He was sure Gowron’s anger would translate into violence in the end, culminating in a final murderous showdown. It was inevitable. The older man would not allow himself to be bested at the game of orah again, and would attempt to do away with Wick as soon as they had attained their objective. Only one of them could claim the credit of finding the World Key, after all; only one could step into the Veil and obtain his rightful reward from the Masters. Wick anticipated the final confrontation between them, his heart sinking further with every slippery step on the lake-side loam.
One comfort remained to him: the business with Tymon might grant him a slight reprieve. While there was still a possibility their mission would be stymied by the Grafter, Gowron would let his seminary ally live. Wick almost preferred the possibility of battling Tymon to the certainty of dealing with Gowron’s hulking menace, though he guessed that the Envoy’s curses, left far behind in the upper canopies, would be of little use to him now. He followed the other acolyte along the shore, breathless with trepidation.
Indeed, he could hardly breathe at all these days, every gulp of air a struggle. Since they had set out that morning, he had felt the Explorer mask constricting over his face, the air-passages over the nose and mouth becoming unbearably tight. He realised he had kept the artefact on too long, ignoring the Envoy’s advice to remove it for at least as long as he wore it. But he could not bear the thought of appearing as he truly was before Jedda, in all his naked ugliness. He still clung to the notion that he might seduce her, only daring to remove the disguise when she was sound asleep. Each time he did so, the exercise grew more difficult, the mask more tight. The night before, after the disastrous argument with Gowron, he had waited until very late to pry it off. The edges of the mask had stuck stubbornly to his cheeks before coming off with a soft, sucking pop. Now, as he walked after Gowron up the bark slope, he allowed Jedda to trudge a few paces ahead, intending to lift the mask and gulp a mouthful of air while she had her back to him.
Turning his face aside, he surreptitiously tried to pry the rim of the mask loose. But it was completely stuck. The orah had bound to his skin since that morning, becoming one with it; try as he might, he could not budge it an inch without feeling the seamed scars on his face begin to stretch and tear dangerously. He let go of the mask in dismay, as Jedda came to the end of her rope and faced him again.
‘Are you alright?’ she called down to him.
He was anything but alright. He felt trapped, his pulse racing with sudden panic. He had omitted to ask Lace what the long-term effects of wearing the mask beyond the allotted time would be. Now he knew. He was not only forced to associate on a daily basis with a man who intended to murder him, but might be obliged to wear this horrid, constricting thing for the rest of his life. It was intolerable.
‘I’m fine,’ he lied, hurrying up to where Jedda stood. She stared at him curiously, as if she doubted his word, and he avoided her gaze.
There was nothing for it but to carry on, for they had fallen far behind Gowron and the older acolyte showed no signs of stopping to rest. Wick marched in front of Jedda in order to avoid further questions and scrutiny. Once, he asked her whether she felt as if they were getting closer to Tymon, but when she told him that the twining connection remained the same, he lapsed into silence again. They wound steadily up and down the humps of bark and exposed roots by the lake, for what might have been the better part of an hour. At last, they crested a final hillock to see Gowron squatting on a patch of shoreline on the far side, under the sheer north escarpment that enclosed the beach. He was gazing intently at something on the ground, at the foot of the bark wall.
Wick allowed Jedda to accompany him to the bottom of the slope, but once on the shores of the lake, he cut off a section of his rope lead with a pocketknife and used it to bind her ankles together, relieving her of the backpack. He did not speak as he immobilised her, and she did not protest the treatment, intrigued by what Gowron had found on the north side of the beach. All she could see from where she sat, bound hand and foot at the base of the slope, was a circular hatch set into a flat slab of grey material, buried at a forty-five degree angle in the loam. Wick abandoned her by the lakeshore and walked up to his fellow acolyte.
‘It’s locked,’ grunted Gowron, as the younger man knelt down beside him. ‘Just like our master said.’
The trapdoor was buried under years of accumulated sediment. Gowron had already dug away layers of silt around it, loosening the bark and grass with his bare hands and creating a sizeable mound of discarded debris beside the hatch. If he had not been given the exact coordinates of the location leading to the Oracle’s body, he would have passed by the place without realising it, Wick thought. Instead of relief, he felt dread that they had reached their destination. He eyed Gowron warily, for the end of the journey could mean only one thing: his associate would wish to keep whatever they found inside the door to himself. But Gowron’s attention was absorbed for the moment, and he did not seem to be spoiling for a fight. Wick reached out to brush the top of the hatch with his fingers; the convex lid radiated cold. Lace had warned them about the properties of the door. It would be secured by a code-lock and made of a material impervious to blast-poison. Very few constructions dating from the time of the Old Ones were intact, but this was one of them, and it had survived centuries. The surface of the hatch was hard and coarse to Wick’s touch.
The name the Envoy had given to the Ancients’ building material had sounded equally harsh, a pair of clanging syllables Wick could not quite recall: core cret. Con crud. The coldness of it reminded him of orah, but where the Grafter’s material was bright and precious-looking, the dull material of the door seemed to have a stolidly utilitarian nature. It was mottled by patient years under the silt, streaked with water and loam. The only mark it bore was a curious pattern of dots at the centre — nodules about the size of peas arranged in five spiral arms like the petals of a flower, or one of the stylised stars on the seminary’s maps of Heaven. The dots, Wick noticed with growing excitement, gleamed with a familiar yellow glint under the streaks of grime.
‘Maybe the orah unlocks it,’ he whispered to Gowron, aware of Jedda watching them from her post further down the beach. He should have blindfolded her, he thought. ‘Maybe that flowery thing will respond to our own pieces.’
His fingers had already gone up to the pendant at his neck when Gowron shook his head curtly. ‘I already tried with mine,’ he said. ‘Nothing happened.’
Wick felt a sudden stab of annoyance. Of course you already tried, he wanted to shout at his rival. The unremitting tension of the past few days, and now the problem with the mask, conspired to rob him of patience; frustration welled up inside him in a hot rush.
‘Naturally, you couldn’t wait a few more moments for me to arrive,’ he snapped.
‘Naturally, you wanted to get in first.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Gowron, swivelling his gaze around to rest on Wick.
‘You know exactly what I mean,’ said the younger acolyte. ‘Now we’ve reached our destination, you don’t think you need me any more, do you? Well, I’ve got news for you. I’m not going to be shunted aside while you claim your prize.’
‘I think,’ drawled Gowron, eyeing him steadily, ‘you need to calm down. The stress of the mission is clouding your judgment. We haven’t got the Key yet. We can hate each other cordially, all we like: we still need to work together to deal with whatever’s on the other side of this door.’
Wick subsided with an angry shrug. Gowron’s face, he thought, bore a striking resemblance in both colour and texture to the material of the door. His fellow acolyte was like a heavy lump of con crud.
‘Well, how do we get in, then?’ he said. ‘If the code isn’t orah, what is it?’
‘It must be mathematical,’ replied Gowron, turning his deadly scrutiny to the spiral design again. ‘The dots need to be touched in a certain order. They go in, see. Lace gave me some different abjat phrases to try in case the code was based on prophecy. He didn’t tell you about them, eh?’
The words were like a blow to Wick. Their master had not given him any formulas, clearly favouring Gowron with this information as with other secrets, such as the mysterious leather pouch the other acolyte still carried, hidden in his jacket pocket. From Gowron’s satisfied leer, half-visible as he bent over the door, it was fair to assume that he knew it, too. Wick crouched silent by the door, struck dumb with dismay, as his rival set about pressing the nodules inwards. The knobs of orah shifted sluggishly under pressure, slow and stiff with age.
The sight of Gowron’s slab-like finger, its yellow nail jabbing away at the orah, reminded Wick disagreeably of the Envoy’s thumb jabbing into his collar bone. He thought with revulsion of the so-called ‘work’ he did for his master, feeding Lace with the energy required to maintain his shadowy presence in the world. That was all he was to the Envoy, he ruminated grimly: a convenience, a food-source. He would always be second best to Gowron.
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