by Jim Grimsley
1211 Date-stamped. The Imperial Colonial Experientiarium in Feidreh reports that much of the physical art on display in the Magus Malin Gallery was found to be covered by fungus when early staff arrived to prep the museum for opening. The fungus appeared on all artwork overnight but by time of discovery had already done substantial damage. Several types of fungus were identified, each adapted to consuming the particular material to which it was attached. The designer fungi are thought to be the product of a bioterrorist either attached to the northern rebel movement or else a lone radical wishing to make a statement about the current state of art. Some experts speculate this could be the work of an artist whose medium is bioterrorism. This was a news bite logged in the twin cities several days ago, rebooted into the queue due to the recent upsurge of interest in strange fungi reports throughout the Surround.
1228 The Dirijhi consulate in Dembut has stated emphatically that the Earnest Council remains fully committed to the independence of the north. The Dirijhi are aware of reports of atrocities committed in the south and the Earnest Council states unreservedly that it does not consider any atrocities to have been committed. The agreed-upon subjugation of the south has taken place. Allied infantry herds are grazing in the ruins of the enemy cities and the continent will be scoured, cleansed, and prepared for northern use. A new item improperly placed low in the queue by the last link server Figg had passed, in Dembut.
1232 The Dirijhi consulate in Dembut announced that allied infantry herds would move into cities on the border of the Dirijhi preserve in order to protect the trees from unwanted incursions by southern retaliatory units. A partial transmission from Dembut, improperly placed in the queue due to the confusion at the time of the attack on the town.
1241 The marriage of EdgeNite to Ruthy Feely was annulled in the Marmigon today, in the Empire Throne Room, the site of so many celebrity divorces and annulments over the years. Feely remarked to the press afterward, “The Marmigon is not the same place now that it’s publicly held. The old families knew how to do a few things right.” But she confessed there was still no grander location for a star looking to bring an end to a tortured public marriage. Weeks old, retained by trash-bot due to Marmigon quote reference including the term “family.”
1257 Fineas Figg and his boytoy Keely File, infamous younger brother enriched by his sister’s public suicide at Figg’s three hundredth you-know-what, are fleeing to a farm on the Ajhevan continent of Aramen, all the way through the gate! Figg, a well-known pederast and purchaser of young boys from the Reeks in his days as a tweenage scion of a powerful Orminy clan, claims to have reformed after a term of imprisonment during his second century, but MarvaMaven wonders about his sudden attachment to the young, tender-delicious Keely; we hear the boy’s even been age-regressed, a sure case of gilding the lily, shame on Figg! From a Surround data-girdle, currently under legal injunction by Figg’s attorneys, placed this low in the queue because he’d already heard about the slander from his attorneys and because, really, there was always plenty of slander in his life.
1266 The Council of Orminy recently awarded Mage Consort Jedda Mermartele a further letter to her name, the postpendant “z.” Her status now placed her among the very highest of Orminy houses, should she choose to found her own mother-line, either by propagation or adoption. Further additions to her name were felt to be unlikely due to the unpopularity of the Common Fund Reforms with what was left of the Orminy houses. The item was gathered by news-bot search and tagged to expire in another day. Figg had a fascination with the Mage’s consort, the Lady Jedda.
1267 A young math prodigy recently vanished from Qons Quilyan’s inner cloister; the neophyte, one of a handful of Tervan allowed to travel abroad from Iraen, had apparently fled the cloister in an attempt to emigrate off Senal. The young Tervan was a master of the Tervan-derived art of singing mathematics that is taught to all Prin; his specialty, in this case, was Tervan choral subparticle physics of the neutron. The item was footnoted with a text link that informed Figg that the Tervan were a people who lived in the north of the country Iraen, thought to be responsible for much of the stone architecture and construction throughout northern cities there.
The Way to Chulion
1.
Coromey traveled as fast as Jessex and hunted well enough that Jessex need not bother; even high in the mountains there was game: snow-fowl, hares-a-whiting, high deer, fastlings, feasels, plain mice. During snow melt grew quickfix and thrush, bitterberry and comb, other scrub stuff, in carpets along the ridges and peaks. Most animals dug into the snow or found shelter under rocks or in tunnels where they could be snug and sleep through the winter on their fat; some of the predators stayed active and lived on the fat, too, though in their case, the fat of others. Coromey was adept at digging out a plump hare-a-whiting, chewing his half raw while Jessex roasted his hot over a fire.
Jessex had been trained by God’s Sisters to economy and therefore built the fire from wood he gathered, mostly scrubby stuff gleaned from shrubs and small trees; sometimes he used a Word to start the fire and a Word to slow it but otherwise gathered more wood to fuel it instead of sustaining it with true language. If there had been fuel in plenty he’d have used no Word at all.
He moved toward a destination that he could feel. Somewhere deep in the mountains they still existed, his teachers. He meant to find them. If they were truly God’s kin, they could answer his questions about her, about God herself.
He had long since passed any named peaks, or at least any peaks with Erejhen names. So high he was that there should have been scarce vegetation, though there was more than Jessex remembered: twisted pines and other woody evergreens along the friendlier slopes, scrubby brush throwing fine-drawn shadows onto the snow, tough spindly grasses that took hold in any crevice of rock. Where he built his fire he was sheltered by a cove of rocks shaped a bit like a farmer’s lean-to. Coromey stretched out beside the fire, splaying his toes and showing his fine, sharp claws, scratching them in the tough mat of thorny grass to clean them. He watched Jessex between slow, sleepy blinks.
While the cat-hound slept, Jessex walked the peaks, counted stars, blinked at the sharpness of the wind. Between one step and the next he had crossed out of his own time into another, or so it felt. He was no longer the master of towers and devices; he was a simple body moving toward an end. For the moment he had put aside the role of Great Irion, had stepped out of his office, abandoned the whole hierarchy of true language choirs, of Prin singers and Drune operators. He had fled the Oregal. For the moment he had only himself with which to concern himself; he had his journey to find his teachers, to find a path back to God, or not, once and for all.
When Coromey was rested they moved forward along the mountains faster than should have been possible. Even so, not all the distance to Chulion could be covered through mere travel; at least part of finding the place would be out of his hands.
It had been a long time since he humbled himself or was humbled by anybody else. Whatever his crisis of faith, he understood the hierarchy in which he took part; in his world, the one that he had recently left, he was unmatched. But in the greater worlds were powers that outranked him. He was a true-language operator of the third order, but this was his own parlance, meant to shield him from the uncomfortable notion of magic, a more difficult word for him to compass with each year that passed. In the parlance of his teachers, he was a wizard of the third circle of power, a great achievement for the One who had brought him into being. He was a magician who moved power through Words, the same Words that had been used in the creation of all the worlds. He had learned those Words from God’s own Sisters, three of them, a long time ago, along the shores of a place called Lake Illyn. He had told this story himself; his people told this story about him; some version of this story was venerated in the Church of Irion beyond the Ocean Gate. But so much time had passed, he had only the merest shreds of belief left, and hardly any memory he could trust.
He had no doubt that the Sister
s existed or that he had been taught by them. His doubt was that they had ever told him the truth about who and what they were.
Soon enough he entered a country where all was starry night and none of the stars were the right stars. He suspected that the country in which he had lived his life, whether one called it Irion, or Iraen, or Aeryn, was no more than a vestibule, that beyond the mountains lay many other places, more than anyone had ever guessed. Somewhere in this far country was Zan, the land of the dead; somewhere here was Orloc country, and far below lay the territory of the Untherverthen; maybe in some other direction was Earth, from which the Hormling had come in the long, long ago. Elsewhere beyond the mountains were places of which Jessex had no inkling. As wizards go, he had been no great traveler, at least to this point.
Coromey hunted and ate and they pressed onward. The peaks rose around them, jagged as the edge of the world, yet endless, reaching as far as the eye could see, heavy with snow, except to the east where a vast wall of ice rose nearly to the top of the peaks, obscuring everything.
“There,” he said, and Coromey heard him.
Weary of travel if not weary in the body, he made a fire within sight of the glacier, in a cluster of rocks that surfaced through ice, sheltering him from the wind. A moon hung heavy in the sky. It was a moon he had seen before, a long time ago, under the Old Sky of Aeryn before the Ocean Gate was opened. This moon was called Familiar because it returned only occasionally, recognizable from the pitted design on its surface, like a person’s face, almost.
“What sky is this?” he asked Coromey, scratching the animal gently under the chin. The hound lifted his head with pleasure, eyes heavy-lidded; he made a low cat-purr and stretched the chin toward Jessex’s hand. “You don’t much care, do you? Then why should I?”
Long ago, God’s Sisters had taught him the game of waiting. As he sat before the fire, this one burning from air, charmed by his Word out of nothing, occasionally needing his attention lest it devolve, he remembered the long era in which he had worked with them, under their thumb, doing as they bid. Time when they were training him passed but in a different direction from real time; they could confine him to their timeline for as long as they chose and had often done so, teaching him, as they claimed, the art of patience. At the end of each training session they returned him to his own timeline, to the precise second after the one from which they had taken him.
Their names were not to be said, and no one had ever revealed them; but one was Plump, one was Thin, and one was Young.
“For patience certainly is an art,” had said Thin, by the serene shore of that blue lake.
“One we all hope you’ll learn one day, sister,” said Plump.
Young shook her golden hair. “No fighting, elders. Please. We have so much to show this petulant child.”
Though at times they took their time to such a degree that he wondered whether he were really learning anything at all.
So here at the foot of the wall of ice at the roof of the world he sat, protected from the piercing cold by the Words the Sisters had taught him, knowing that his presence and his use of Words would stand out like a beacon in the mountains. What convinced him, in the end, that at least one of them would come was the fact that they kept him waiting.
At some point, maybe in the instant between one footstep and the next, maybe as long ago as when he felt himself leaving his old world, he had entered their variety of time.
He withdrew from all the use of Words in which he himself was employed. For the first time in an era he withdrew into his body, stopped his kei-meditation, shut down his insinging, and was silent. Since he was no longer in real time, none of that would do him any good.
Under clear stars in the dark he wandered over the sheet of ice, searching for nothing, feeling a peace settle into him. He had not been so single, so unified, in such a long time; he had not been engulfed in anyone else’s magic in so long. Clouds came, formed low, and dumped snow in bales over the landscape. Moons passed overhead, even a blue moon, pale and crepuscular. Winds that would have cut him, frozen him to the bone, passed through him without effect, and Coromey, tough as he was, needed the same protection.
He had brought the slightest of packs: a blanket, a water bottle, a bag of gems, a cup, a supply of tea in efficient Hormling pouches. He found better shelter in the shadow of a cliff, a dry cave, and on his walks gathered any brush or shrub he could find for times when he wanted a fire. He stocked the cave with bits of branch and tree; even this high, there sometimes came a spring, and maybe even the light of day.
A blizzard blew in, mountains of snow on top of oceans of ice, and afterward broke a thin daylight. Wind had calmed but during the storm had shaped the fresh snowfalls into waves. Jessex and Coromey walked atop the waves of snow in the white world of winter.
In the evening, eating the bit of snow hare left from the fire, hearing Coromey’s contented breathing, he realized he was happy, and a moment later realized he had been otherwise for a very long time.
He found another camp, what looked like the outer room of a mausoleum or the entrance to some underground dwelling, a small doorless room in the face of a mountain all but consumed by the glacier. Stone writing that might be old Untherverthen, Orloc, or Tervan decorated the lintel, made of a flat, shaped stone, fitted stone columns on either side. Inside, the small space was unadorned except for two raised platforms bracketing the door. Each of the platforms was big enough for a tall person’s bedroll. For a moment after he found the room, heart in his mouth, he thought he had stumbled onto a hidden entrance into Chulion.
Days and days went by. He grew to have no worries, no thought of the future. He could feel himself close to the Sisters by now; he felt one or another of them pass nearby sometimes. Plump, he thought, or Young, or, rarely, Thin.
One day when he had been out walking he returned to camp, this time to the circle of rocks open to the sky. By then there had been no night for so long he decided to move back to the cave, because he was tired of the brilliant light reflecting off the snow. Once Coromey knew which of the camps was their destination, he loped off in the proper direction, and Jessex followed, almost as fast as the cat-hound.
Since he was not using his Words or any of his inner senses, he mistrusted what he saw at first. Near the cave waited a tall figure wrapped in white. Once convinced she was real, he walked toward her with his head bowed; she had pulled part of her robe across her head, her face obscured, and the volume of the cloth, blowing in wind, hid her body. She stood by a gnarled, twisted pine, a few stubborn needles clutched about the height of her shoulder; Jessex had admired the persistence of the tree and spared it from burning.
Which of the three Sisters was this one? They were all quite tall from a distance, no way to tell from that. Sometimes the body looked plump, sometimes thin; sometimes the hand, holding the edge of the robe in place against the wind, looked old, sometimes young.
Wind roared up, blowing powdery snow, as clouds covered the sky. Her wrapping-robe whipped around her, the border edged with elaborate embroidery, vivid colors, very fine tracery. The colors shifted, the Words shifted.
“Is this your cave?” she asked.
“Yes, lady.”
“A fine cave, too. Very snug.”
“I’ve laid in a good bit of wood, if you want a fire.”
“You need wood for a fire?”
“No. But sometimes I like it.”
She held the hood to shadow her face but he thought he saw her smile. “If I asked for tea, could you make it?”
“Yes. A most agreeable tea, in fact. Though I am fresh out of lake water and I have only the one cup.”
“Never mind your cup. I travel with my own. The snow will do for water, though you’ll need a deal of it. It’s as pure as lake water, I expect.”
She built the fire at the mouth of the cave while Jessex gathered snow. He pressed two cups of water from a pure white drift and brought the cups back. “You may as well heat them yourself,” she
said when he drew near. “The fire won’t be hot enough for a while. And I’m impatient for my tea.”
He did as she asked and dropped the tea filter into the cup.
“What’s this?’ she asked. “I ask for tea and you give me a bit of rag.”
“It’s a paper filter. There’s tea inside. Good southern scuppling.”
“I prefer a pekoe.”
He shrugged. “I brought the tea to suit myself.”
She sniffed.
“Besides, a pekoe is a Hormling tea. When did you ever taste it?”
“You act as if you think you know where I’m from and where I’ve been.”
He stirred his tea with his finger, heated it a bit. Coromey stretched near the fire, wanting to put his head in the woman’s lap. Perhaps it was the soft appeal of the fabric of her wrap, shining white, drawn up around her head against the wind, that charmed the cat-hound.
She was Thin. The tapered, long bones of her hands caught the firelight, casting graceful shadows as they moved. Her cheeks were hollow, her face long, her eyes dark. Wind occasionally lifted the hem of her wrap, showed her face more plainly, and she made no attempt to hide herself.
“Beg pardon,” Jessex said. “I meant only that out here, so far in the mountains, I wondered that you would have tasted pekoe.”
“I might have tasted it long before you did, obtained from an entirely different direction. It’s a small universe, after all.”