by Eric Brown
“Well?” His voice was hard. “Have you decided?”
“We have to flee, Kallis.”
“I know. I told you—the southern mountains. I have a hornbeast, waiting. We can be there in–”
“No!” The strength in her own voice surprised her. “You don’t understand.” She told him, rapidly, of what she had learned from Sch. Malken—of the tomb in the desert, the poppy wine.
“You can’t outrun the Narrowing, Kallis.” She took his hands and pulled him to her. “You must face this. If you follow the herds, you’ll be killed, you and all your people—long before you reach the mountains. Even there, you’d find no shelter. ”
“So we’ll die. All of us, except the Scholars. And those they choose to save. No wonder they guard the poppies so well! But why must it be so?” His dropped her hands and fingered his bow, and anger made his eyes hard. “Why not grow more poppies, enough for everyone? No, of course not—they wish to choose who will live with them in the New World. They wish to keep the power to themselves.”
The taste of the wine she had already taken, in her ignorance, seemed to burn in her mouth. It was as if she could feel it, heavy in her stomach; she felt shamed, as if she had betrayed Kallis. “None of this matters now, Kallis, I don’t care about the Scholars and their poppy wine.”
Now, with visible effort, he restrained his anger. “You must care, Onara. Listen to me. Go back–”
“No!”
“You must. If this shelter and the blood of the poppy will save you, then you must return.”
She thought of Malken’s possessive gaze on her. “I’d rather die with you than go back!” She stepped away from him. “And don’t try to force me, Kallis!”
He hesitated, studying her; then he smiled. “I know you too well to try,” he said.
She became aware—quite abruptly—of a shift in the light, of shadows which raced across his face. Above them, the wind surged through the foliage.
A branch cracked and fell, not two paces away. She clung to Kallis.
“Is this the end?” he asked. “The end of the World? ”
“Maybe the beginning of the end,” she whispered. “Come!”
They hurried through the forest, away from the manse. The ground itself seemed to be shuddering now; it groaned in great bass tones like some wounded hornbeast. She had a sudden sense of the fragility of things: the World was, after all, no more than a hoop of soil and air, circling its sun as her choker encircled her throat.
Her gaze was drawn to the darkening sky. Clouds raced across the face of the sun. She looked to the north, followed the neck of the land as it towered over the horizon–
She gasped. The Narrowing had gone. The World-wheel soared up above the air, smooth and unbroken, its remote oceans glittering in the light of the sun.
“What is it?” Kallis asked.
“The far lands, upraised in the sky. Don’t you see? The Narrowing has vanished!”
He gazed at her, his mouth open.
“Or perhaps,” she said as if to herself, “the Narrowing has merely passed down, out of our sight, into the mists at the horizon. It has journeyed around the sun, and now it has travelled from sky to earth, a great beast tunnelling through the ground towards us...”
“We have to get away,” Kallis said. He had to shout above the roaring of the wind. “And there’s only one place to go. We have to try for the Edge, Onara.”
Numbly, she followed him.
~
At the border of the forest Kallis’s hornbeast was waiting, tethered to a tree. It eyed them eagerly, evidently unperturbed by the continued earth-tremors. Bags of victuals were slung over its haunches. When Kallis gave it its head, the ’beast carried them briskly off to the east: towards the nearer Edge of the World. The hornbeast was a young, healthy animal, used to vigorous activity—quite different from the tired old animals kept by the Scholars—and it covered the ground rapidly.
When they reached the crest of the hill that bordered the Vale, Kallis reined in the ’beast. Onara surveyed the little valley where she’d grown up.
She felt a shiver of strangeness—but it was too late now to turn back: she could only imagine how Scholar Malken would punish her for deserting him. And besides, she saw, her home had already changed irrevocably. The continuing tremors and winds were battering at the fences and the fragile timber buildings. Here and there, the people of the outlying farms were struggling to repair the damage, to help the injured; but for the most part the farmers seemed content to wander through the devastation, peering up at a sky which had so rapidly betrayed them.
Kallis touched her hand. “We cannot help them now. Perhaps we can’t help ourselves.”
She felt anger burn inside her. “They’re waiting to die. At least your people are trying, striving to flee. ”
“Only because Hunters have always travelled... Look.” He pointed to the manse at the heart of the Vale. Onara made out a knot of activity there, white-robed Scholars hurrying from the buildings, heading in the direction of the stone tomb in the desert.
“The Scholars have left it late to seek their shelter,” Kallis murmured.
“They disgust me,” she said. She turned her back on the Vale, and Kallis spurred the ’beast once more.
~
The journey lasted countless hours.
The hornbeast seemed tireless. More than once its endless motion lulled Onara into a foul, uncomfortable sleep—a doze in which demons of earth and wind howled about her—from which she would awaken to find her arms still wrapped around Kallis’s broad chest, the hair of the plodding hornbeast’s back coarse under her thighs.
They rode beyond the Vale: they’d gone so far, Onara calculated dully, that they might have passed through ten or twelve Vales laid end to end. The landscape was unchanging—a familiar patchwork of lakes, low hills and woods—though the terrain was wilder here than she was used to.
The disturbances continued. The clouds still fled across the sky, and the land rattled like a drum-skin. Once they had to take refuge in a copse while a great herd of hornbeast swept across the land before them in a tornado of dust, stinking fur and clattering hooves. Their own animal twitched and stirred under them, longing to join its fellows; but Kallis covered its complex triple nostrils with the palm of his hand and murmured to it, soothing.
They encountered no people, though sometimes they passed through rectangular outlines etched in the land, which might once have bordered fields; and in many places they passed the tumbled ruins of what might have been great stone buildings, in the style of the Scholars’ shelter. “Another legend verified,” Onara told Kallis. “Once, the World far beyond the Vale really was full of people. Perhaps, once, there were humans all the way around the World-wheel—a huge band of people, surrounding the sun.”
How ironic it was to learn so much, if she were to die so soon!
Gradually the endless riding wore her down, and she found her thoughts softening, guttering. The landscape changed: it became bare, free of buildings and vegetation. In some places, raw rock showed through the thin covering of soil and dust, like the exposed bones of the World. Onara’s chest began to hurt. She panted, dragging at the air, as if it had grown thin and lacking in nourishment. At first she thought that this might be some illness afflicting her alone, but it soon became evident that Kallis, too, was having difficulties. Even the hornbeast growled its breaths, its huge nostrils steaming .
At last there was no past or future for her: only this endless present, the hornbeast beneath her, the broad, anonymous back of the man before her.
~
She woke from a troubled doze to find that the terrain around them had changed perceptibly. The ’beast’s hooves clattered against hard ground. There was no grass here, nor even earth: only a dull substance that returned no light, like hardened wood.
Onara turned and surveyed the way they had come.
It felt as if they were climbing a slope; the ground tilted upwards beneath them—bu
t she knew that there were no mountains here. Looking back, she could see for tens of miles; the land was a plane punctuated by snaking rivers, lakes, splashes of woodland green; hillocks poked through the surface, making the land look as if it had been moulded. All this still looked normal, she thought: solid, inhabitable, eternal, all pinned under the vertical light of the sun. But the whole World had tipped up behind her, like a damaged table: all of it, trees and hillocks and rivers, sloped away impossibly. It was as if she was near the crest of a slope a hundred miles high.
And when she looked ahead, the horizon seemed close, a definite line bathed in a deep blue light.
Kallis reined in the ’beast, then turned to her. “I don’t understand.” He seemed frightened. “How can the World be tilted like this? Will we fall? ”
She studied him. Dust and sweat clung to his face, emphasising the lines of worry there. “I don’t think the World has tipped up,” she said. Her voice was thick, her thinking cloudy. She struggled to recall what she’d learned in the manse of the geometry of the World. “The floor of the World draws us to it, holds us there. If not–” she waved her hands vaguely—“we’d float off into the air. And now that we’re approaching the Edge, I suppose, most of the bulk of the World lies behind us. It’s drawing us back. So it seems tipped up to us; it wants us to fall back to its centre.” She stared at him, her vision blurring slightly. “Do you see? This feels like a mountain, but it isn’t one...” Perhaps, she thought, this is the origin of the legends of the invisible mountains that were the walls of the World.
His returning gaze was uncomprehending, fearful, yet still tender.
She felt a thrumming in the ground beneath them. The ’beast stirred, frightened. The vibration was powerful, even violent; it battered at her bones. Above her, rags of cloud raced across the sun, turbulent and boiling. There was a sense of instability, of huge, imminent change.
“Look,” Kallis said, pointing.
In the north, the details of the landscape blurred as ever into the distance, the hillocks and valleys and woods merging into a blue mistiness—but now the land to the north was turning onto its side, the hills, lakes and forests clinging precariously to the slope .
The land was twisting, she saw: all of it, with its freight of trees and seas, as if it were no more substantial than a piece of ribbon.
Horror pushed through her fatigue, the pain in her chest. At last she understood.
Kallis swore. “What demonic vision is this?”
Black spots danced at the borders of her vision; it was hard to think, and she felt an unreasonable irritation at Kallis, at his obtuseness. “It’s the Narrowing approaching us. Don’t you understand? The Narrowing is not—as we thought—a stretching, a neck in the World; it’s a monstrous twisting.”
“Then we’re dead,” he said, his voice thin. “How can we survive such a thing?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But we must try. We’ve come this far. Don’t give up, like the others.”
Through his mask of dust and fear, he smiled at her, and she saw again the boy she had loved in the woods. He eyed the slope—the apparent slope—before them. “Up there.” He pointed. There was a notch in the smooth floor. “Do you think it’s a pass through these mountains?”
“There are no mountains,” she wheezed, trying to find the words to explain. “And so there is no pass. It’s all a matter of geometry–”
“Geometry or not, we’ll try for it,” he said. With a brisk slap he goaded the hornbeast into fresh motion.
The animal stumbled on the hard surface, and Onara was almost thrown off. She clung to Kallis’s back, gasping .
As they climbed, the land beneath the ’beast’s hooves tipped up—or seemed to—even further. The air became progressively thinner, the sky a richer blue.
The great Narrowing—or twisting—rushed towards them. The landscape swept up like some beautiful, surreal sculpture, finely detailed; she could even see the thin layer of grey-blue air which enveloped the land, lifted up with it. The substance of the World was obviously flexible enough to permit this twisting about—but she could see how much less resilient was the World’s fragile cargo of life. She saw rivers and seas spill from their banks, flooding the land; forests shivered to matchwood, or burst into flame in brief, remote flashes.
Despite the peril of their situation—despite its apparent hopelessness—she felt a vague excitement infuse her as her understanding developed. Our World, she thought, is a hoop—every child knows that—but it is a twisted hoop. And the twist migrates around the land, wreaking its devastation once every so many hundred thousand sleeps...
She considered what Sch. Malken had told her about the origins of the World. Perhaps the twist is a flaw in the World. Was this the reason the original builders fled—because of this... this accidental twisting?
Finally the hornbeast, which had been growing steadily more agitated, would go no further despite all Kallis’s gasped blandishments and caresses. Kallis and Onara dismounted and the ’beast clattered back down the slope .
Breathless, already exhausted, Onara and Kallis stumbled onwards. The surface here was hard, almost slippery. Onara kicked off her sandals, and the purchase of her bare feet made the ascent a little easier. But the climb was very steep now, the land behind them tipped up impossibly. The air was so thin it seemed to scratch at her throat as she dragged down painful breaths.
“I feel as if I might let go, and fall forever,” Kallis gasped.
“Don’t talk,” she said. “Just climb...”
But now she could, she realised with vague interest, no longer feel her legs. She toppled forward, and slithered a few paces down the slope before she managed to drag herself to a halt. She lay there, panting.
Kallis scrambled down to join her. He seemed to be tottering, and when he sat beside her it was with a liquid fall, as if he would never rise again.
“No,” she gasped. She reached out and grabbed his shoulders, trying to keep him upright. At first his weight bore her downwards, and her arms felt like young twigs, devoid of strength.
Then she felt a bubble of coldness swell out and through her system. It was a hard, unpleasant feeling, and yet brought in its wake a sensation of new strength suffusing her arms and legs. She pushed easily at Kallis and lifted him upright.
She looked at her hands, where they pressed against Kallis’s chest. Her knuckles and wrists were swollen, the joints like ripe berries. And a blue, hard sheen lay in patches over her skin. Even as she watched, the blue stain spread further.
The poppy wine, she thought. Is that what’s helping me now?
She remembered Greer, and Almora, in the shelter. Now it was happening to her: encystment. She felt an instant of panic. She wasn’t in the shelter. Perhaps it wasn’t safe to be outside, when the encystment began...
Glancing down in wonder, she saw that her legs had become shorter—thicker—and her chest and belly strained against the fabric of her dress. She was distorting, the blue hardness spreading across her skin like a grotesque infection. She was glad that Kallis was unconscious, that he could not see her like this.
But she had never felt so... so alive, she realised. Her flesh tingled, as if she were growing, changing. Metamorphosing...
So the encystment could kill her, could it? She suppressed an urge to laugh. She could only die once! And if the effects of this encystment enabled her to save Kallis—or at least have a damned good try—then she’d welcome it.
The land, the whole Edge ‘slope’, shuddered like a living thing. Kallis, unconscious, slumped against her. She glanced up. The twist was so close now that she could see how it progressed, heartbeat by heartbeat, with more landscape being drawn up into it and deformed .
She bent and lifted Kallis. Her new, bulging arms were clumsy, and Kallis moaned as his head rattled against her chest, but when she cradled him he felt as light as a doll.
She began to stride up the ‘slope’. Her legs worked steadily, carrying the extra we
ight. The pass, the notch in the land, seemed closer now, easily accessible. She was becoming something inhuman, but she felt exhilarated. Why, I’m not even out of breath any more–
In fact, she realised, she wasn’t even breathing.
She halted, astonished. She stood on the ridge, close to the top of the World, with Kallis’s body limp in her arms. She listened to herself: her body was utterly silent, the complex plumbing of her lungs and windpipe and throat quiescent.
Gripped by wonder, she continued to toil up the slope towards the pass. The surface seemed to level out the higher she climbed. Kallis’s face was blue, his tongue protruding. He would die soon, unless she could return him to the air.
The land shuddered. She was thrown onto her back and Kallis tumbled from her arms. She looked up.
For the first time in her life, the sun was sliding away from the zenith.
~
She lay on the shaking ground and watched the ball of light in the sky, fascinated. It moved smoothly, and ever more rapidly, dipping down towards the Edge mountains at the World’s far rim–
No. The sun is still. It’s the land that’s moving, twisting about. And, as if in response, the earth roared in protest at this violation. The air was impossibly thin, but even so she could feel the winds plucking at her, whipping dust into her face as she tried to rise. She was riding the twisting land, she realised, as if it were some huge, stirring beast.
And now the sun touched the irregular rim of the mountains of the far Edge. For a moment the brilliant disc seemed to hover there; and then shadows, pools of the deepest black, swept across the hundreds of miles of land before her.
The sun disappeared. The light leaked from the sky.
She stood up, wondering. It was cold—she could feel it, but it didn’t hurt her. A soft snow fell about her shoulders. But there were no clouds above her.
The snow is the air, she thought. The air is freezing.
And now, as her eyes adapted, she saw that the gathering darkness was not complete. Where the sun had been a single disc in the sky, she saw that a hundred—no, a thousand, a million—lesser lights speckled the blackening heavens, like flakes of ice. They are suns, she realised. Suns like our own, but so very far away.