Against the Unweaving

by D. P. Prior

  Something rustled the leaves. Gilbrum caught its scent, but it was nothing he recognized. He raised his bow and nocked an arrow. The treetop stilled, and for a couple of heartbeats there was no sound save the crashing of the lizard-men through the undergrowth. Then a voice sounded in his head, icy and as sharp as a blade.

  “Too easy.”

  A shape of inky blackness emerged from the leaves and launched itself at Gilbrum. He fired, but the thing corkscrewed around the arrow. Silver glinted from its torso. Gilbrum flung himself aside, rolled to his feet, spun, and fired again. This time, the creature caught the arrow in slender fingers before tossing it to the ground. Its ovoid head tilted to one side, utterly sleek and featureless. On bird-like legs, it stalked toward him, as if it had all the time in the world. Gilbrum backed away, drawing another arrow and taking aim.

  “Stay,” he said, despising the quaver in his voice.

  Another step, another arrow, and the creature lithely swayed out of its path.

  It wore some sort of harness bedecked with gleaming blades, so many it seemed the thing was armored.

  “One down,” it said in his head as it delicately took a blade in each hand. “Three to go.”

  “Bit presumptuous, don’t you think?” Gilbrum said, circling to the left and nocking another arrow. Three, it had said. Three to go. Shader, Shadrak, and Rhiannon. “Gandaw sent you?” he asked, playing for time.

  The thing moved so fast, Gilbrum’s arrow went awry. He ducked beneath a blade, grabbed a wrist, and tried to trip the creature as he spun it round. It rolled over his back and he felt a sharp pain in his shoulder blade. Without looking, Gilbrum swept out a leg, but the creature hopped over it, hanging in the air an instant on bat-like wings that spread beneath its armpits. As it landed, it flicked a blade at him. Gilbrum deflected it with his forearm, skipped back, and spun a scything kick at its head. He connected, but the creature rolled with the impact and slammed a blade into his hamstring.

  Screaming, Gilbrum hit the ground hard and dragged himself toward a trunk. He used it to pull himself upright, taking his whole weight on one leg. On instinct, he swayed, and a blade thudded into the bark. He swung himself behind the tree and spotted Skeyr Magnus watching from a bank of reeds skirting the lip of the basin. He hopped toward him, hoping against hope the lizard-man would do something, but the second he realized he’d been seen, Skeyr Magnus lowered his head and vanished.

  A shadow passed above Gilbrum, and he froze, perched on one leg as the creature descended with arms spread wide, leather membranes beneath them fluttering in the breeze. Swift as lightning, its hand went to a holster at its hip and came up blasting. A sound like thunder, a hammer blow to the ribs, and Gilbrum was on his back looking up at the overhanging foliage. Salty blood trickled from his lips. He tried to speak, beg for time. Time to warn this creature about the Unweaving. Nothing would be spared, not even it. The only sound that came out was a wheezing whimper.

  Shader, he thought. Must give him time.

  The creature loomed over him, a black blur in his failing vision. He was panting, gasping for every breath.

  Shader, he thought again.

  His fingers clutched at a tuft of grass, and he felt the familiar malevolence of the Sour Marsh tingle through them. His old enemy seemed like his closest friend at that moment. And then he realized: the marsh understood what was at stake. No matter its own incipient evil, it too clung to existence; it too was terrified of the end of all things.

  “Help,” Gilbrum rasped. He coughed up blood and tried again. “Help… me.”

  Tendrils lashed down around the creature, and creepers coiled about its legs. It slashed through one with a blade, but another took its place. Soon, the creature had holstered its pistol and was frantically cutting left and right with a blade in each hand. It no longer focused on Gilbrum; must have known he was going nowhere. Instead, it angled east, as if it already sensed which way Shader and the others had gone. One agonizing step at a time, it inched through the undergrowth that rose up against it with the full virulence the Sour Marsh.

  Gilbrum’s head lolled to one side.

  Accept what is not yours to change. A leaf fallen from the tree is a thing thrice dead.

  Had he fallen from the tree? Hadn’t he done his duty, stayed within the Sour Marsh? And hadn’t he done what was within his power and accepted what was beyond him? He’d failed to stop the creature, but he’d at least slowed it down, and perhaps kept hope alive a little bit longer. No, he wasn’t a thing thrice dead, he was certain of that. He opened his mind to the vision of the Tree of Eingana, heard the sad lament of his people singing him home. He was dead only once…

  FOR NOUS, ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE

  Shader stopped to pick charred goat-flesh from his teeth. Dave hobbled to a standstill twenty yards in front and turned, waiting, as if they had all the time in the world.

  A quick glance at the cobalt skies back the way they’d come gave the lie to that idea. Aethir’s twin suns had risen in the time it took to skin and cook the goat. Now they scorched their ire upon the receding summit of the Perfect Peak looming above the distant smudge of the Sour Marsh. A corona of filth occupied the space between the suns, directly over the top of Sektis Gandaw’s mountain.

  “Ain’t exactly impressive for the end of the world,” Shadrak said, coming alongside and following Shader’s gaze. “What happened to the flashes and all that?”

  Rhiannon hung back behind, using the black sword as a walking stick, taking the odd swipe at the tufts of curling long grass scattered about the balding earth. She’d eaten nothing, hadn’t even joined in the blessing when Dave had divided up the meat. Shadrak hadn’t either, but that was hardly a surprise.

  “How much time do you think we’ve got?” Shader asked.

  “Buggered if I know, but if that’s all it is, I’d say we’ll all have kicked the bucket long before we get unwove, or whatever the word is.”

  Shader squinted at the dust cloud, trying to gauge any growth. Maybe Shadrak had a point. It could take weeks, months even, for the miasma to spread as far as the eye could see, and a sight longer to encompass the whole of Aethir. Then there was Earth, the other planets, and the stars. Wasn’t the cosmos virtually infinite? At least that’s what was implied in the lore of the Ancients the Templum had made available.

  Dave lurched into motion and came shambling back toward them, gesticulating at the sky. “Come, come. To Arx Gravis. The Unweaving is near.”

  “Maybe that’s not it,” Rhiannon said, lopping the head off a lone thistle.

  Everyone looked at her as if she were mad. She gave a nonchalant shrug and let her head fall to one side.

  “From where I’m standing, it looks like someone needs to clean the chimney.”

  Shader rolled his eyes and turned back to the trail. Dave nodded and took the lead once more.

  “All I’m saying is that I can’t see anything being unwoven,” Rhiannon said. “Maybe he’s just stoking the furnace or whatever. Didn’t anyone bother to find out how it’s meant to happen?”

  Aristodeus had said something about it not being too late; something about these things taking time. That was about it, as far as Shader could recall.

  “Well?” Rhiannon said. “Don’t you think we should have found out what it is we’re supposed to be stopping. I mean, what if he’s just smoking a bloody great pipe?”

  Shadrak chuckled and shook his head at Shader. “You certainly pick ’em, mate.”

  Shader inclined his head. Couldn’t argue with that, not when you considered his choice of traveling companions: a woman who was getting harder to understand at every juncture; a fanatical loony who claimed to be the avatar of Nous, and Shadrak himself, an assassin who’d once stabbed him in the back, quite literally. You had to wonder what it was that had brought the albino on this mission, what had brought on his apparent change of heart. Shader had seen enough of conversion experiences to know that Shadrak didn’t fit the bill. Whatever he was about, he was
a test, that’s for sure. Shader had come that close to killing him back at the camp. It was only Nous that had held him back; only allegiance to what he imagined Nous would want. He shook his head. There it was again, the age-old dilemma. He’d been taught it was all right to kill for Nous under certain circumstances, but he’d never been comfortable with the explanation. Guess that came from his father. Jarl had seen the incompatibility from the off, which was why he’d always been a disappointment to Shader’s mother. At least he was honest. At least he was clear about the kind of man he was. Not at all like his son.

  I need to be harder, he’d told Rhiannon. Shader didn’t even know what he meant by that. Harder how? More ruthless? More certain? More dogmatic? More like Dave?

  He watched the hunchback forging ahead as if he had no doubts about where they were heading, as if he were in his own backyard. How he could maintain such a pace was beyond Shader. He rolled over the ground in long easy strides which belied his crippled frame. Shadrak, with his short legs, had to jog to keep up, but he seemed utterly tireless, almost pleased for the exercise. Rhiannon continued to lag behind, trailing them like a heavy penance.

  He shouldn’t have let her come—not that she’d given him much of a choice. She seemed to need it, need something to make up for Sammy. And it wasn’t just her brother she’d lost, either. Her parents, her self-respect, her… he almost wanted to say honor, but that didn’t sit right. What did her honor have to do with what Gaston had done to her? He was the one who’d acted dishonorably, and that was putting it mildly.

  Poor Gaston; the thought crept in of its own accord. Had he made up for it in some small way back at the templum? Had his self-sacrifice for the priests been enough? Could anything ever be enough? Shader shuddered and closed down that avenue of thought. Maybe that’s what he’d meant by harder: He needed to keep things simpler. More black and white. And yet the lure of the golden thread wouldn’t quite release its grip. Ludo had always said with Nous things were never that straight forward. They were simple in a way—unimaginably so—but you had to know how to look. “Head to heart,” he used to say to a classroom full of blank looks. He’d thump his chest, as if that made it clear. “Head to heart.”

  Was it all about love, like Rhiannon had said? Something about the way Dave spoke, the way he condemned, seemed to say not. If the hunchback was who he said he was, if he really was the Voice of Nous, where was the love? Could be that it was about something else entirely, like good and evil. That’s what Shader had always believed: do the former and avoid the latter. Maybe that’s what he meant by being harder. Maybe it wasn’t just about avoiding evil; maybe it was about rooting it out and excising it wherever he found it. Isn’t that what surgeons did to gangrenous limbs? Cut away the bad so that the good might live?

  If only it were that easy. If only he could rip from the Liber all that Blightey had contaminated it with. The problem was, Blightey wasn’t that crude. There were no obviously evil passages in the Liber. If there were, they’d have been removed centuries ago. What the Liche Lord had done was much more subtle. He’d woven together strands from various traditions and sown the seeds of confusion. The early Templum fathers had fallen for the wisdom he’d offered: the wisdom of popular appeal.

  But how to sort one thread from another, that was the problem. If love was indeed the answer, what kind of love? Or was it even simpler? Everyone knew good from evil, didn’t they? It was ingrained in the soul. That’s what Exemptus Silvanus had taught: identify the disease and eradicate it. Maybe he had a point. Call a spade a spade, and stop making excuses. It was the kind of thinking that said Gaston was damned, and that’s that. You touch fire, it burns you. You only have yourself to blame. Two standards: one for Nous, the other for the Demiurgos. One thing or the other. You couldn’t make it any clearer than Trajinot, when the Seventh Horse had ridden against the undead hordes of Verusia. Simple, sure, decisive. Not like Shader’s fatal delay atop the Homestead. Dave had a case to be answered: that indecision may just have condemned the worlds.

  The hunchback craned his neck and peered back at Shader. He pursed his twisted lips and gave a nod that seemed to say, “That’s better.” Shader returned the look through narrowed eyes. Some of the luminaries were supposed to be able to read your soul, so it was entirely possible that Dave had been following his thoughts. He wasn’t so sure, though. The chill pricking its way up his spine told a different story. When Dave broke off and continued on ahead, Shader was back to wondering how you could tell one way or the other. Was Nous trying to get him back on track, or was it something altogether more sinister? A third option was that he was imagining things, growing paranoid, like poor old Hagalle. A look over his shoulder at Rhiannon lunging and slicing with the black sword as she walked made the possibility seem that much more real.

  They picked up a weather-beaten road, its pavestones cracked and riddled with mosses and lichen, and followed it mile after mile.

  So much of Aethir reminded Shader of Earth. The tufted plains rolled on and on but gradually gave way to lush prairies and gently sloping downland. Purple thistles grew in clusters, standing up out of fields of dandelions and seas of daisies. It was all just a bit too beautiful, too good to be true. If it hadn’t been for the twin suns skittering erratically in the gray-blue skies, he could have been persuaded he was in Britannia, hiking across the hills surrounding his father’s Friston estate.

  “So much for infinite variety,” Rhiannon said, obviously noticing him looking. “You’d at least expect another world to have different plants.”

  Shader was inclined to agree, but then a thought struck him. The Dreamers of Sahul believed Aethir sprang from the mind of a dog-headed ape, the Cynocephalus, who was somehow cocooned at its center. Before Aethir, he had drifted alone in the cosmos, abandoned by his mother, terrified of his father. The two worlds were linked by dreams, they said, but perhaps the dreams flowed both ways, and the Cynocephalus’s mind had only given birth to what was already in the minds of men.

  They stopped above a deep valley veined with branching streams and carpeted with bottle-green grass. To their right, smoke billowed from the summit of a distant volcano that was skirted by a sprawling forest. Far, far ahead and to the left of the valley, the ground climbed toward craggy knolls and, beyond them, mist-shrouded mountains.

  Dave began fussing around, laying tinder for a fire, rummaging through his pack. He unwrapped the remains of the goat, and the stench of rot hit Shader like a fist. He covered his nose and mouth and fought down bile. Rhiannon cursed and reeled away from the others. A few seconds later, Shader heard her spilling her guts. Shadrak simply buried himself in his hood and approached Dave in a wide semicircle. Shader didn’t need to get closer; he could see the meat writhing from where he crouched. The carcass was riddled with maggots, and yet it had only been a few hours since they’d slaughtered the animal.

  “Knew there was something rotten about this world,” Rhiannon said, stumbling back and wiping drool from her chin with her sleeve. “Shog, that’s rank.”

  “Maybe it ain’t the place,” Shadrak said, circling Dave like an uneasy shadow. “Maybe it’s him.”

  Dave hastily wrapped the goat-flesh and hurled it down into the valley. “Nous has given, and Nous has taken away.”

  “Well, tell Nous, thanks a bunch,” Rhiannon said to the sky. “Now what are we supposed to eat?”

  Shader opened his mouth to chastise her, but her hard eyes told him not to bother. His stomach grumbled, but he gritted his teeth and offered it up as a sacrifice. Did Nous not provide for his children? Did he not sometimes feed his luminaries with berries brought by ravens?

  “No point stopping, then,” Shadrak said, kicking away Dave’s kindling. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

  Shader’s feet were raw inside his boots. Given the choice, he’d have flopped to the ground and rested, taken his boots off and soaked his feet in cool water. Ain only knew how many miles they’d covered, and there was no indication of how f
ar there was to go.

  Dave eyed him curiously and then pointed to the distant mountains. “The scarolite mines, and nestled in the earth below them, Arx Gravis. Two more days, and we will be there.”

  “Two days!” Rhiannon said. “You gotta be kidding. What, we supposed to ask Sektis Gandaw to put the end of the world on hold while we’re traveling?”

  Shader instinctively looked back the way they’d come, but the Perfect Peak had passed from sight. There was a smudge in the sky, but it was hard to tell if it was rain coming or the effusion spilling from the mountaintop.

  “There is time still,” Dave said. “Nous sees all things. He is with us.”

  “However far we go this way,” Shader said, “we still have to go back.” It had been troubling him for hours. They needed to get inside the Perfect Peak, yet here they were getting farther and farther from it.

  “Have faith in the Voice of Nous. Have faith.” Dave shouldered his pack and turned back to the trail.

  They followed the ancient road across the top of the valley until it entered a sea of man-high grass flowing around clusters of hillocks, which on closer inspection turned out to be heaps of slick vegetation. The whole region stank of cabbage, and the swaying of the grass sometimes gave the illusion of the hillocks breathing, shuddering, slithering. Here and there, the road was entirely obscured by thick growths of vines and dark leafy plants. Silence settled over the group, and Shader felt Rhiannon edging closer to him. Dave seemed oblivious, but Shadrak took the lead, drew his pistol, and motioned for them to stop.

  The wind whistled momentarily, and then even that died. Shader held his breath, and his heartbeat thudded so loud in his head that he felt certain its clangor could be heard all the way to Arx Gravis.

  Rhiannon lightly touched the back of his hand. He scarcely dared turn his head to look at her, and when he did, her eyes were wide and unblinking.

  What was it? What had Shadrak—