There was a pause in the tearing; a surprise, he felt, and then it let go and he was right back where he had been before, undamaged, the glass held up before him giving him a perfect window into another world as the creature that had hunted him sped past. All round the window he saw nothing, not even a disturbance in the dust, but as it turned to look at him through the glass he saw something with thousands of eyes; a vast, multiply-split jaw, festooned in teeth, shrouded in a kind of living darkness that pulsed into tentacular life and as quickly became smoky tendrils of in-substance that ballooned and drifted to the movement of vast and invisible tides. The thing’s body boiled with these, as though it was made of ropes and vesicles without a bone. He felt its hunger. He was always hungry too.
Now that the moment had passed and he was unharmed, relatively speaking, he looked around. There was no sign of it. In that distant building the clattering object clattered again, as if struck in anger.
Then the world behind the glass changed again and the ghost he had seen was suddenly there, fully fleshed and solid. She still moved through him, as if he didn’t exist, but now he could see her—she had the dark, plum-coloured skin with grey/white tones that Kula had. Her face was painted with an intricate pattern he realised must be a tattoo, in white and red inks. It made her look like a fox. Her arms and hands were marked in the same way, with a million tiny lines. As she bent over she was dropping a child down into the hold in the ground, holding her by her upper arms, then letting go and saying something into the hole. Then without a pause she was closing the trap door and pulling over it a long rug covered in half-finished baskets so that in a single instant it seemed there was nothing there beneath. Then she ran.
As he turned the glass to see where she went the hut was solid again, the door a white rectangle blocked by her body, then showing the running forms of other shapes, grey, black and huge. He saw her cut down by a huge Yorughan sword a moment before he had the presence of mind to put the glass down.
That Kula was the survivor of a massacre, that’s what it meant. But why this was important? He thought they were looking for a book. He looked into the hole but nothing in him wanted to investigate it. He probably should. If there was a book around it would be in there.
Then he saw movement in the hole, a black-against-black shiver of anticipation, and he almost put up the glass but instead he held it close against his side and went out into the stuttering daylight, winding his way to the central gathering point where he supposed she might fly in again, or at least where he could easily see the sky.
The centre of the village was a rondel which had been sunk into the ground, leaving a broad circle with stepped seating around it. All that was left of it was the earthwork, sandy and overgrown with weeds. People were standing there, arrayed on the tiers. As he came around the corner of a hut and saw the circle they turned to look at him. They were of medium height and all dressed in robes of dark colours. Their skins were a variety of tones and colours from deep purple through all the brown and ochre families up to a pale slate grey. Some had staves, topped with bones or feather fetishes. Others held nothing. Those closest to him were armoured with bone chokers and bracers, their front and back covered in plates made from scapulae other, flat bits of skeleton from a variety of creatures. One or two had helms of the skulls of monstrous things or gigantic, long-beaked birds. All were tattooed with the red and white marks he’d seen on the ghost. All were silent, motionless, as if they’d always been there. An air of patience and waiting hung about them, a flatness that left Ralas unable to be properly afraid. That and he was tired of fear. He wasn’t even what he should be afraid of among the spirits.
He looked through the glass at them. They were exactly the same seen through its revealing lens, although some had auras of a blueish light around them, concentrated on their heads and shoulders. These were also the least decorated of the group, and the most central—the ones he would have said were the leaders. He put the glass down, relieved at least to see no hideous invisibles displayed in it. From the sky a sharp caw announced Tricky’s return. A big black bird thumped down onto the rondel’s centre point and when it landed and straightened up from its crouch it was already booted and growing, feathers to coat, beak to face; in a single liquid movement the last Guardian appeared. It was only in this moment he dared admit to himself that’s what she was and it was a very different thing to know than to suspect. He felt nervous and underprepared.
The ghosts didn’t look surprised. Ralas moved cautiously to meet her and they watched him until he was at her side. The central figure, the most plain in comparison to his fellows, moved forwards one step towards her and spoke in the traders’ tongue.
“You have come by the long road. You looked for the Book, like the Kinslayer.”
“For your part in it,” she said. “I came by the long road. You gave him the Book.”
“We gave him a book,” the old man said, composed. “And the lives of all our people.” He turned and bowed his head briefly in Ralas’ direction. “And now you bring us a gift for the dead.”
“W-what now?” Ralas asked her but she waved to shut him up.
“I have questions,” she said. “About this.” With a flourish she produced the tiny bag which he’d last seen in Dr Catt’s offices and without hesitation spilled out the entire massive shape of the black box onto the ground. It came out tumbling and the lid slid off it, revealing the empty finery of the interior. A silken pillow rolled out and came to a halt at his feet.
Now Tricky had her hands on her hips like she meant business. “What have you got to say about it?”
As one, as if they were one person, they all had flinched backwards as the box appeared, shuddered as the lid fell, leaned in to peer inside it and watched with fixity as the pillow rolled away and settled on Ralas’ feet like an errant cat come home. Swift, dark forms flitted from hut to hut behind them, up on the eaves, down in the shadows of the walls. The silence was unearthly. The air around the box shivered.
“The Reckoner is dead,” the Tzarkomen said at last. “Our bargain is done.”
Tricky seemed very dissatisfied. She faced up to him as if to a bad shopkeeper. “You never mentioned this. You never said anything about any books.” Ralas realised she knew him, from a long time back. Yet one more thing she never mentioned.
“The Book of All Things is gone, that’s all you need to know. You will never find it.”
“Ah yes. But my question isn’t where it is, Zafiko, my question is what is it? What was it for? Why did he want it?”
The leader gestured around at the village. “You have seen him take what he wanted of us. We and a few others are all that remain of an entire people. We defied him at the last, when we had already spent all in his service, and he repaid us most fully for our disagreements. The Heart Takers consumed the dead.”
“What is it that you made?”
“Where is she?” he said, and pointed down at the box. “The Kinslayer was dead before she was complete.”
“Well, mixed news. Your botched efforts to hide her in the demonfire went astray as your Death Hunters couldn’t survive it long enough to dump her. She was found and now she’s out and about.”
There was no outward sign of reaction, but Ralas saw the telltale shimmers of the soul hunters stealing down from the houses towards the circle. They were almost invisible, like a heat haze. As they moved he noticed that without seeming to move at all the circle of Tzarkomen had closed around them, so that they were now in the middle of a completed ring. He didn’t know anything about sorcery but everyone knew the meaning of a magical ring. It was the shape of the unassailable fortress.
“We thought that the Bride would satisfy him and leave us at least enough to survive on.”
“Yeah like that’s the whole story. Come on. Spill it. I need to know what fresh horror you’ve unleashed now it’s all gone wrong. Was there more? Is there something special about her that the Kinslayer asked for, some way that she’s still doing
his bidding?”
Tricky’s focus never left the leader’s placid face. They might have been talking in a town square on any day of the year were it not for the fact that more and more figures kept joining them. Wherever he looked the people on the tiers of the ring stood silent and still, but when he looked one way he wasn’t looking another and as he turned this way and that their ranks were filling all the time, one and another, then more, and more, each one of them dressed and tattooed like the rest; short, tall, young, old, of every age and size and kind they arrived, garbed for war and for peace, their gaze solid and unwavering, every focus upon him.
If Tricky noticed this she gave no sign.
“Let us talk first about what you have there,” the leader said, pointing at Ralas.
“I was hoping we could trade information,” Tricky said. “This is something that the Kinslayer made. I tell you about this and you tell me about the Bride.”
The old man studied Ralas for a moment. “In olden times, when the Tzarkomen first began to weave with the darkness, we thought that there was such a thing as death. We pressed where others feared to go. But we did not find death. We found other planes of being, different to this one, through which living things could pass. We never found the land of death, or its gods and goddesses. There is no such thing. There is only being, and nothingness, of which nothing can be spoken or known. We turned from studying the world to studying that which is not. The mystery was—how shall something become nothing, and how shall nothing become something and live and breathe? And the answer to that is memory. To move into life there must be memory, and to move out of life there must be forgetting.”
He walked down the last step and around the box to Ralas. They were of equal height, one in sandals, one in boots. “You are locked here by a memory, fixed by Heart Taker fire. I can fix you, if you like. I can tell you how they did it. Even they won’t know, because they are fools who have no idea what they do.” He smiled, a smile full of black and broken teeth.
Ralas shook his head quickly. “It won’t… Could you maybe, reverse it the other way so I don’t have to die?” He couldn’t help feeling a flicker of hope, quickly crushing it as the chief showed no sign of agreement.
“You’ve seen the undead, as you call them? My army?”
“All our soldiers you raised against us,” Ralas confirmed, swallowing nervously. Now the ranks of the undead around them, the spirits present, were filled. Un-alive might have been a better term, Ralas thought. The arena was so thick with Tzarkomen that there was no space between them anymore. They occupied the rondel and the space between it and the huts and they crowded thickly between the houses, and inside them, rank on rank of the standing, silent witnesses, breathless as the wind alone stirred the hanging tendrils of their hair and the rags of their clothing. It could have been all of them who had ever been.
He stuttered, “I remember thousands of them. Our friends, fighting for the Reckoner. We had to burn them…”
“Fire destroys the memory,” the old man told him gently, patting him on the arm as if to console him, though he felt no touch. “Nothing can stand against it. It is the element of forgetting. Remember that, when you have had enough.”
“But they weren’t like me,” Ralas said, suddenly struck by a fresh horror. “Were they?”
“No,” said the sorcerer. “They did not remember themselves. Only the body’s memory was active. The mind has its own fires of course, its own hunters—I believe you have seen these already. Once we discovered the truth of how the world works we used them to police our borders and keep our secrets. Such knowledge could surely be used for great ill by those who had not earned it through generations of suffering and loss. But he wanted it for himself, of course. He came for the army but he stayed for the power to open the ways to the other realms. Which is when she appeared…” He lifted a hand in Tricky’s direction as he returned, completing a circuit of the fallen coffin. “To offer us a bargain. A deathly curse, and an end to him, her guarantee. And so he is ended but too late. We had already made our own path. The book, as you see, is gone forever.”
“But the ways are still open in Nydarrow,” Tricky said. “I was there. You didn’t close them off.”
“To put ourselves beyond his reach and the book as well, we had to go before him. Once he had disconnected the gods it was clear he wouldn’t stop for a few warlocks. Time was not on our side but we played it to our advantage when we refused to hand over what we knew. The Book was here—it was the people of this place. He massacred them all. And so he destroyed the very thing he needed to maintain his control of the Overworld. And we made the Bride, to ensure he could take no other path. Her secret purpose was to ensure he would never find this way. It was in her but he never looked in others, he only saw them as means to ends, not ends in themselves. So that was our plan. In doing so we spent all we had left. All.”
The wind sighed and then Ralas and Tricky stood alone in an empty circle. Above them on the hillock a dry shadow flickered.
“Not all. I’ve seen her. The lost girl! Kula!” Tricky shouted into the emptiness. “Isn’t she the Book then? Is it her? Now?” She spun in place, looked at Ralas with a stricken face. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “There must be some left further north. No way was that woman back in Cinquetann the last of her kind. And Kula. And Lysandra. But… maybe they’re not dead. Maybe they only crossed over.”
She was struck at that moment by a shivering, splintering ruction in the air which seemed to spring up from the ground and surround her in less than a second. Ralas could do nothing as she screamed and tried to change form but the soul hunters, whatever they were, had got their fangs well in. Through the glass, he saw them rend and tear, pulling out something like a sticky blue-white taffy from her and sucking it in through their gaping mouths. Above the glass she writhed and buckled on the floor, defending from invisible horrors, weakening with every move. He smashed at the things with the glass, not knowing what else to do, a desperate kind of horror in him making him feel something he hadn’t felt in a long time—terror that someone else was going to die. Rage made him strike harder and the glass connected with a nebulous head so that for an instant he saw through a large, glaring yellow eye, through its black slit into a distant, icy sky full of stars and the trembling filigrees of light that were the ghosts of dead suns.
There was a noise like a shlooping in-suck of mud, the kind made when someone pulls a foot out of deep river silt with a mighty effort and the stuff takes a deep breath of water and air in return. The eye, followed by the creature, was sucked into the glass. At least that’s what Ralas thought had happened. It looked like it had been swallowed up, was being turned inside out and somehow boiled at the same time. The vision was so repellent and surprising that he jumped back, lifting the heavy disc for another blow when two shadows fled out from the edges of his vision.
Tricky was gone.
Only her long, heavy coat was left, lying on the ground.
Shaking with fatigue and his usual weaknesses back in force now the action had passed he bent over slowly, sadly, to pick it over, thinking maybe it was one of her little ways, that she had hidden herself in the lining or beneath it somehow. She wasn’t really gone. Couldn’t be gone. She was a Guardian, well, kind of a Guardian. Besides, he was going to marry her and although that was a joke, really, it wasn’t a joke either at the same time and his anger became misery suddenly as he saw that this was only a coat after all.
He turned the glass over but now it stubbornly showed only a somewhat bent version of the world he could already see, with its empty grass, its sandy, bone-stubbled ground, its burned huts and its old coat. After a moment of despair he bent down and picked up the coat.
A scrap of paper fell out of it and feathered down onto the earth. There was some kind of strange marking on it in a language, he supposed, but one he had never seen before. He picked it up, turned it over. It seemed to have been torn from a larger tome, and the marking was charcoal, bu
t that was all. It didn’t do anything.
He put the coat on, missing her terribly. It was a bit too small across the shoulders, even though he was no prize-fighter, but it fitted as long as he didn’t try to do it up. The big sleeves and the skirting no doubt looked ridiculous on him but it was the easiest way to carry it. He tried to see if the glass would go into one of the big outer pockets and it slipped easily inside, without making the coat any heavier, oddly. He tried it again. Outside the coat, a heavy lump of glass. Inside the coat, nothing. He looked inside the lapels. There were many pockets here, each one edged in a distinctive colour of embroidery. Carefully he poked the note into one of them so that it couldn’t fall out again. Seeing that it couldn’t have fallen in the first place made him wonder if it was an accident it had been out at all. He tried some more pockets and found all kinds of tiny tat—thimbles and wool and a little packet of needles and some regular string in a roll. In another place, old candies in a paper bag and a blown glass phial with what looked like dried ink in it. Under the right arm he found a throwing axe so large that by the time he pulled out the haft he didn’t have the strength to free the blade. That went back in. Under the left arm there were some daggers and what seemed to be a very large variety of weapon hilts, each connected to blades which came out of the pocket without slicing it and went back in without clattering against their many fellows. When he let these go the lining of the coat remained smooth and in every way fitted with the tailored waist that had given its mistress such a charming outline.
He was turning around, wondering what to do, still sad and uncertain if he could really begin to think of her as gone or dead—surely not—when he saw she had used a finger to write a word in the soft earth, well, three letters.
N Y D it said. There was an arrow next to it, pointing the way. It pointed south.
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