“Hold the hand, do not stray,” she said, to give herself resolve as much to prove she knew it. “Do not step off the way. Do not look back. Do not try to see what is hidden. Obey the Guard’s instructions.”
“Yes. But things have changed here. Even this may not be enough. Must you go?”
He seemed reluctant. She thought of the Kinslayer, his bland face so handsome in an everyday sort of way, his pleasant voice, his kindly manner as he smiled at her to encourage her to stretch herself, find her limits, seek out what was lost in the world and return it to him like a good little dog. She thought of the way her heart had leapt on his every praise. “I must.”
They went together, girl and monster, until the yard wall was visible and she could hear the sounds of occupation, but then they turned into the treeline and had to pick a much smaller path. To get his armies out into the upper world the Heart Takers and others had created portals between the depths and the surface. The yards were a small village in their own right up here, but they held nothing of value or use. They were a meeting post and no more. Everything else was kept in caverns far below ground. Without an array of magi there was but one way in and out of Nydarrow on foot, and Taedakh was one of few who could find it because it never wanted to be found. Being of more than one plane himself he had senses to detect the path even when it tried to move beyond the range of mortal sight.
After a time of walking, shouldering through bushes and letting Taedakh hack away foliage hiding thorns as thick as her wrist, tips red with poisons, they came to a small hillside where a break in the trees let a tiny amount of ragged grasses find enough light to grow up from the heavy soil. These bearded a hole in the side of the hill. It was large enough for a small person to walk into, a cave of sorts, dry underfoot but disappointingly shallow. At the back of this space a passageway that could have easily been mistaken for a bear’s winter lair stretched back into the hill before shrinking and becoming less of an invitation, more of a featureless hole. They were cramped up by now and there was no chance to stand side by side. She went in first, single file, while Taedakh shuffled in a duckwalk. Here it was very dark. Although there was nothing to see, the hole held a distinct sense of impending presence. Where they stood the air was too dry to carry much scent but when it came to the nostrils it reeked of putrefaction. A heavy, stickiness suffused the remaining space. Nydarrow wasn’t the only place she’d been where the energy was like this, but it was the worst.
“Thanks,” she said suddenly and let go of Taedakh’s hand, in the same moment pressing the paper to his palm. He disappeared.
It was rude of her. Maybe he’d be angry, but she wasn’t risking losing him and anyway, she’d never been good with rules.
The space where he’d been was full of pale vapour for a moment, then it diffused and she was alone. She looked back to the small, ragged mouth of the cave entrance as she secreted the paper and secured it. Every instinct in her told her to run towards it, fast, and never return. But she took out her ball of wool and chose a fine, grey strand. It was very worn and coming loose all over. This would be its last use, she saw, but that couldn’t be helped. She knitted it around her fingers as fast as she could.
The hole beside her sighed faintly, and she heard the reverb of a distant sound that must have been very loud at its source but was far, far away; a raucous bellow of pain or rage or despair. She had lost the art of figuring out which was which long ago. She spun the strand of webbing around herself, twisting in the confined space, brushing her elbows against the dry walls so that a shower of earth fell down and into her eyes and nose but then she was on the floor, on four legs, small, sneezing, her whiskers twitching, claws trembling against the ground.
She ran quickly, keeping her tail high, hugging the wall as she followed the tunnel inwards, around corners, down a slope into a narrowing that was shorter than a man and more slender than most of them. There was a way forwards for a little while, then the floor dropped more sharply and suddenly gave way to a straight drop into blackness. She fell, landed, bounced, rolled, landed, bounced, rolled and then ran on through the lightless upper halls by memory, following the cracks in the floor. There were always times she had come in this way with Taedakh’s aid, the way the Kinslayer thought that only he knew. Especially the last time when she had come to undo locks, disrupt charms and bestow thoughts of mutiny to the heads of certain guards and torturers. You could never have got an army in to Nydarrow, but you could make do and bend with what was already there.
Every scamper filled her with rage and sorrow for the old dreams left on this trail—she found herself still longing to rush into the arms of his approval, with the latest cunning scheme, to see his face light up for an instant with something, anything.
In her mind she heard his voice, “Ah, Little One, what have you brought me?”
Death, death I’ve brought you, brother, you filth, you scum, you murderous infidel.
But she had rushed up to his lap, leapt on it and purred under his caress and it had been the best feeling she had ever had. If he’d shown her even an instant of genuine kindness instead of this sickly reward it would have been different.
She heard him speak now as she dashed, tail aloft.
“Did you think you could come back to the place of reckoning and not have one between us?” It was always hard to know if these things were in her mind or if it were the bones of him speaking, but she knew there was no difference in practice. She would always hear him.
She shook to her marrow, but a mouse always shakes with one twitch or another, so when at last she saw a glimmer of light ahead of her she paused to listen, dreading what she would hear.
The drip of water and silence behind it. The shape of the space was twisted, ugly, with all the agony that had sounded through it. Years of it. It needed music to clear it, banging, smashing, all things that she dare not do here because that would surely draw the attention of the residents in the levels below. As she tiptoed into the old tunnels she found herself weaving through bones still tacky with decayed flesh, piled here and there, everywhere.
She made herself go on, knowing he wasn’t there, though it felt as if he could be. The urge to rush out and search, to apologise, to beg forgiveness, to say she was sorry, to stab him through the heart, that was all there still; these undone things that were his pay and her reward. She could feel the pattern of it.
After another few galleries and a teeter along a pipe ending with a leap and scrabble down a massive pillar she came to the vast arch of his private quarters where the water dripped down, one slow relentless tock, tock, tock into a single puddle in buckled paving. In the blackness beyond the gang of fighters had finished his final accounting and she, unnoticed in the melee, had crept along the wall and seen herself robbed of the moment she had always dreamed would one day be hers, in which she’d have asked him “Why?” and got an answer of some kind.
Now there was no answer.
Something heavy slid out there in the black. She heard the hand, the fingers dragging it, nails scratching for purchase, forearm trailing, a meaty, heavy, juicy… She knew it could not be that, because he was disposed of, but the mouse shape worked against her as much as it helped. Her terror was intensified to a pitch where she couldn’t hear her thoughts any more and lost them entirely. She lost her grip.
Some time later she found herself dashing wildly, propelled by every shadow and movement, bouncing off the walls, her mouth open in a silent scream.
By the time she was too tired to continue and her mind had returned to her, she was shivering in a corner of one of the inner circles of the Gloaming Court, a set of passageways connected at various points by doors, most false and leading nowhere. From the inner ring every one of the lower decks could be accessed by ramp. It was labyrinthine, but she knew it like the back of her hand and navigated each turn with care—here is sorrow, here is misery, here is despair, here is grief, we turn at emptiness, that’s how you know where to turn, when you are worn out to the e
mpty, that is the sign, always. She had used emotion as her markers or Nydarrow itself had already set them for her to find. The Kinslayer had considered Nydarrow his creation and merely a tool, but like all creations and all tools it had modified its user. She had watched him here, thinking himself the great king of balance, ruling all, while Nydarrow had stealthily extended itself inwards to the depths of his heart.
Yes, he’d had one. Once. Not a great one. They were none of them that valuable. But one. And if not for Nydarrow then maybe…
But this was too late and of no importance now. She was so disappointed in herself to find that even now she wanted to find excuses for him.
She had reached the centre of the Gloaming Court at last, where the walls were illuminated by light-spores and lichens of various hues, parti-colour festivities in the most pale and sickly terms. Here she felt that liminal alive-ness of Nydarrow shift with her presence. What a gift he’d given it, opening it to the passage of entities that existed beyond life. But lovers always give the best gifts, don’t they?
The idea made her smile in her twisted way, the way that hurt the scar at the side of her mouth, and she bent her small head under her right foreleg, found the end of the old grey thread and relentlessly pulled it out until she felt it break and suddenly she was there, in the cold near-darkness, in her own form, listening to the fortress breathe.
To her left was the ramp to the beast pens. They held what he had summoned and not been able to categorise in any other way; predators from other worlds. The Vathesk had been there once until they were used and perhaps things still tramped their cells but she wasn’t going to find out. She had nowhere to free them to, even supposing they were alive.
Just in front of her the ramp to the Bonehouse was marked by another pile of decomposing bodies that had dried to mummified status. They wouldn’t have made a worthwhile addition, had he still been collecting. Swords and shields were tangled up with them, but all of too poor and unmagical a kind to be worth saving. Elsewhere she saw Yorughan tusks splintered as if by huge feet. People had looted all he had gathered, but they hadn’t lingered and those that came later, like these, rarely made it out alive. If they found the way in through charms and rites they almost never found the way out. Between the withered limbs of another pile she saw a crystal sphere, fallen and shattered, while another lay just out of reach of a dead man’s hand.
A large beetle with an iridescent black carapace and huge, horny pincers crawled out of the corpse pile as she watched and made a neat progress to the next ramp. It vanished around the curve and she followed it, because this way, on the route to the great depths, lay the small room that had been hers. It was little more than a cubby hole filled with paperwork where things that needed reading or decoding were dropped off for her to master and classify.
She had no sooner taken the turn when that roar of misery from the deeps came again, ricocheting over twenty times from various walls before dying out. She looked at the doorway, half open. She pushed the door and it swung silently. The floor was pale ahead. She went on and found that it was all the papers, soggy and ink-stained, bound to the stone with damp, moulds already founding new maps across their surfaces. Someone, or many someones, had been here in her absence to search for things of value. And there, nearly missable, was a distinct footprint in the pulpy sludge. It wasn’t human. She didn’t recognise its three-toed tread. Echoes of violence came up the long stretch. Screams, perhaps from people, punctuated it and she began to hurry, moving as fast as she dared.
She trod over the footprint and went on, her hopes all dashed at last as she saw the suppurating disaster that had been the library—her grand word for the few books and scrolls that had formed the written collection of artefacts of note. Something had unleashed a lot of water. It was instantly clear that there wasn’t a readable thing anywhere. She was forced to admit that her hopes of finding the Book or a part of it had been slender. What was good had been looted or was now a medium for slime moulds. The Kinslayer had burned most of what he’d found anyway. Dull anger at the waste of it came as she turned and made her way quickly downwards before her nerve failed her. She had to know what he’d been up to.
Down past the dungeons where Celestaine of Fernreame had been freed by her guard and led to the slaying. Down past the torture chambers, the grey, nameless places where men, women and children had been left to starve to death among the screams of the maimed. Down and down the way ran until its river of degradation fed into the low, stinking black waters of the Ur-march.
Here, in death’s distillation, he had made his breach of the world into realms whose energy signatures mirrored the low vibrations of agony and rage he had created here: low because those frequencies attracted bodiless things with the ability to tear holes in the planar fabric through which he could extend his reach for power. This was now a pathway which ran on into the roots of other physical worlds and eventually up and up into other branches of Nydarrow.
She stood in shallow black water over deep black mud in a cave roofed by stalactites. She didn’t trust that the mud was a true base. She suspected it was merely the soft vault over a much greater drop whose cold and emptiness was beyond comprehension.
Tricky took out the binding paper scrap again and put it on the water, same side down.
This time Taedakh was of Nydarrow but also of the water and everything the water touched—he was of the many worlds and so he could walk them. Maybe he was from one of them originally, but she didn’t know and hadn’t asked. That might have led to unpleasant conversations about what he was and whether or not this paper, this word, was a slavery. Without him she couldn’t go, and she must go.
“You won’t find it,” the Kinslayer said.
“I find everything,” she whispered.
“We are hunted,” Taedakh said, with a tinge of reproach. “Where will you go?”
“Take me to world three,” she said at once.
“I do not…”
“You have to,” she said, and added, against her will, “Hunted by what?”
“Nydarrow,” Taedakh said and bent down on one bony knee to pick her up in his massive hands. His head nearly scraped the lowest stalactites as he brought her inside his shade. “But it is slow.”
“I thought you were part of it,” she lied, a little, to keep him talking as his wings, invisible in the daylight above, now manifested and shrouded the both of them, blotting out the ugliness of the cavern.
“No,” he said, but he didn’t offer any more. “Only borrow it, to see with, to hear with, to be here.”
Not for the first time she pondered the wisdom of messing about with things she didn’t understand but then his wings opened and she sheltered her eyes from the suffusion of greenish light. She was set down. Beyond her boots she saw the stalactites, beneath them. She stood on the black water’s surface, but beneath it, what was down was now up. This world she didn’t know the name of she had called Versa when she first came here because of this reversal, but that didn’t entirely fit. Looking up she saw the vault of the sky was made of stone, beneath it a weak sun shone like a giant, unlikely lantern. Around her the ruins of a city were half buried in drifts of sludge coloured sand. To her left one of the ghosts—tall revenants that looked like rags on the wind—drifted idly, turning about, mindless and at the mercy of the weak breeze. Forgettings, these were, the Kinslayer said—the remains of all that had been known and was lost here. She knew about them: they hungered for knowledge. One of them had prompted the worst turn of Reckoner’s actions, though what it had said or done she didn’t know. Now she hoped to find one that would trade. The ruins, earlier visits proved, were of Nydarrow in this place, long after it had fallen, for time was reversed also and they were at the end of this world.
The ground trembled a little.
“It sees you,” Taedakh said in his voice like the rattle of dead leaves in a corner.
She had her payment ready in her hand—a book of little children’s tales she’d collected
for a moment like this one, thinking that to bring such things here would change something somewhere for the better, perhaps.
The revenant, dust under rag, bumbled weakly in their direction, forced to take its time by the unhelpful air. She took a step towards it and felt her soles slide on loose stones. She put her handwritten booklet down on the ground and moved back into the shelter of Taedakh’s presence.
The revenant surged with a desperate lunge towards the book and from its idle whirligigs a strand of animated dust reached out to touch the cleanly inked parchment. With a whispering noise it rubbed and riffled through the pages. Sound was quieter than she’d expected. In a few seconds there was nothing left of the booklet but dust, sucked and whirled up into the revenant’s body. What had been little more than the most vague suggestion of form altered into the approximate shape of a person. A head and a body became distinct though no limbs appeared in the gyre of its lower regions. From the whirling sand and grit and tiny bits of paper a rudimentary mouth formed.
“The Book of All Things,” she cried, loudly, her words swallowed down the gullet of the vast silence. “What is it? Where is it? What did Reckoner find?” She felt Taedakh’s grip at her elbows, ready to flee. The emptiness was so great that no Forgetting could be trusted not to attempt to take everything that they were.
“Once upon a time…” Words spewed in bursts from the mud lips, a grey tongue visible against the background of storming debris. “The dead were remembered. But now they are all dust and bone, dust and bone, bone and gone.” There was a pause and the Forgetting drifted closer, stronger against the breeze than it had been, making steady headway in her direction. “The Reckoning can only be made at the end of all things. And none must remember.” In the boil of its face images of flowers appeared, then faces—even the Kinslayer, his army, and a book with him, writing itself—all whirled away as soon as they were made. “But one remained.” For a split second the mouth was joined by other features, clear and solid. The eyes blinked at her.
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