It didn’t really dawn on Breadgrinder that his own role carried some weight if not authority, that his regular and regulating contact with all put him in a kind of informal position of trust. He may only have had responsibility for recording transactions but it put him aside from all others. Even his high stool and desk spoke of such had he but realised. Being largely aside from all others of course had given him an air of … of … well, of independence!
“Grunstaan forbid,” he thought as he took another gulp of juice. “Whatever next?” The whatever next was hard in coming, though. It was a bit of an odd feeling, this thinking beyond procedure, but something in Breadgrinder seemed to rise to it.
Having passed his burden on, however, Dialwatcher soon began to relax. Carrying it must have been an exhausting task for it wasn’t long before the man started snoring. Breadgrinder let him be, quietly rose from his own chair and stood at the window.
Outside, the narrow grassed passage, with its immaculate gravel path, glared back at him from its whitewashed walls. The sun, as was almost always the case, shone down benevolently on the lush, close-cut grass. It made the metal gutter above the window tinkle as it slowly expanded in the growing heat. Here and there, birds hopped about and stabbed at the ground in search of worms, so easily and plentifully found. It all looked no different from any other day, but Breadgrinder now realised it was.
“Imbalance?” he pondered. “What in the world could it possibly mean?” He needed solitude to think, somewhere removed from the day to day, and knew just the place.
Dialwatcher had slumped against the arm of his chair, face disfiguringly smeared on an adjacent table, so Breadgrinder brought a cushion and placed it carefully under his head. The snores continued unabated, although less vigorously, and so Breadgrinder tiptoed from the room.
The stairwell he entered gave quick access to the Exchange’s tower, only a few flights up to its loft from where he climbed a steep ladder to its roof. The trapdoor swung open freely and clicked sharply into its latch, the noonday warmth swirling about him as he climbed free. He leant against the parapet wall and absently stared out at the world.
Directly before him, Heggra Way led a short distance eastwards from the hall, bordered by small and perfectly formed trees. Beyond it, across its junction with Ort-geard, a small orchard sparkled with bright red apples. Breadgrinder felt quite peckish and wished he’d brought something with him. It wasn’t hunger, though, not really, more a need for distraction, something to put off the need to think.
Beyond the tempting apples, just visible in the distance, he could see Grunstaan’s towers circling the centre of the world. “So, you’re outta kilter, eh? Got unbalanced in some way. Odd that, what wi’ thee being at t’centre an’ all, and everything equal around thee.” Slowly, he ran his eyes along the distant horizon, the world’s grey edge, just as sharp as usual, the sky’s habitual blue still shining in through the crystal dome.
Even the Southern Mantle seemed sanguine, its white-fringed shadow and frayed, billowing edges devoid of celestial temper, the sun shining through its sphere-staining spread. No, he thought, it all looks just the same. Could Dialwatcher be wrong somehow?
He spent a few minutes looking out across the spread of roofs, picking out places he knew through the traders he met. Nothing in it spoke of … of ... of change, yes, change, for that’s what he was looking for. He shook his head, as though casting off a bad dream, and again rolled that word around his mind. “Change! Bah! It was unheard of!”
He was about to put his foot back through the trapdoor and onto the ladder when Dialwatcher’s head appeared. He blinked at the sky and looked around the tower top. When he saw Breadgrinder staring admonishingly at him, he smiled back apologetically. “Sorry, but I woke an’ thee were gone!”
“How did thee find yer way up ‘ere then?” Breadgrinder demanded, but then remembered he’d not closed the door behind him. “Nothing lost,” he thought.
Unabashed, Dialwatcher pulled himself from the trapdoor and stood there gazing around. He couldn’t ever remember having seen the world from so high up before and so was fascinated. Like Breadgrinder, he too spotted Grunstaan’s ring of towers, but instead of them drawing his gaze they made him wheel about. Dialwatcher now stared hard to the west, his gaze soaring beyond the roofs and gables, although there was nothing there but grey horizon.
Something held his attention, though, something unseen. When Breadgrinder noticed how quiet and distant Dialwatcher had become, he too stared that way, and he too saw nothing of note. Unlike Dialwatcher, though, who was now tightly gripping the parapet, Breadgrinder hadn’t felt a wind pass through his fabric, nor the caress at his temples nor the flutter of his heart.
While Dialwatcher had been so withdrawn, Breadgrinder had come to a decision. “T’Warden’ll ‘ave to be told, tha do realise that don’t thee? And soon.”
It was as though he’d not been heard for Dialwatcher only dreamily asked, “What’s over yon, there, where t’sun sets?”
Breadgrinder glanced that way but quickly brought his gaze back. He saw that Dialwatcher’s eyes were now rapt, completely absorbed, as though seeing something real that lay only within his own mind. Breadgrinder wondered if he were, oh, what was the word? Err, not mud, no, but similar. Anyway, it would have to do. Was the stick of a man simply mud?
“Well?” Dialwatcher persisted. “What lays over yon?”
Breadgrinder decided to humour him. “Err, well, there’s nowt much more than anywhere else.”
“Must be summat, summat at t’edge o’ world, ya know, there, where t’grey edge lies.”
Breadgrinder stared again but with no more profit. “Why do you ask? What makes you interested in there any more than anywhere else?”
Dialwatcher turned him a distracted face and said, “Dials say so.”
After a great deal of probing and some confusion over terms, for Breadgrinder wasn’t much versed in the ways of Grunstaan, it appeared Dialwatcher’s background reading had unearthed a bit more than he’d at first suggested. Not only was there now imbalance in the world but it had direction.
Breadgrinder wondered what more Dialwatcher hadn’t yet revealed. He realised he needed to know a bit more about the man’s duties, and fairly quickly at that.
“These dials, oh, and t’lights thee speak of?” he started to pry, but Dialwatcher didn’t seem to hear. “Well, where are they … exactly?”
It was as though Breadgrinder had somehow cast an obscuring shadow over the western view, for Dialwatcher swung about and gave him a broad and beaming grin, his eyes sparkling with unexpected keenness.
“Wi’ Grunstaan o’ course, where else?”
“Wi’ Grunstaan?”
“Aye, in Nubradcar,” Dialwatcher confirmed as he grinned in what, to Breadgrinder, was now most definitely a very mud way.
40 With Consummate Ease
Two days is a long time to go without decent food, the kind that’s sustaining. Wild apples and pears, and a few stunted peaches didn’t really satisfy in quite the same way as the turkey Melkin had unexpectedly brought back.
It turned out that the turkeys were incredibly tame, and not as Melkin would probably have liked everyone to think, that he’d somehow become a skilled hunter. Of course, he knew Lady Lambsplitter would have soon seen through him anyway.
That third night, therefore, proved far more enjoyable. They’d lit a fire and somewhat ham-fistedly managed to cook a large proportion of what they’d not burnt. Their fuller bellies put pay to the bickering that had begun the night before, bickering brought about by their fast dwindling rations.
The wall to the north had proven inviolable, at least as far as the river where the wall carried on as the river’s impassable bank, curving vanishingly away into the distance. The priests had swum out quite a way into the Warmswin’s brown and sluggish flow, but had seen no break in the wall’s long march. As is ever the way with youth, they’d even climbed trees only to find none tall enough to offer a vi
ew over the wall’s meagre height.
Their next expedition, to the south and east, had taken a full day, but delivered nothing more notable than the turkey. The bird had not only filled their bellies but had also buoyed their hopes, or to be more precise, their single hope. Their very survival now seemed to lie entirely in Nephril’s hands, and in his strangely fervent expectations of an alien Certain Power he called Grunstaan.
“He’s not right in the head you know,” Melkin had at one point confided to Lambsplitter. “Since coming back from the dead he seems to have gone crackers. Half the time he acts like a callow, love-smitten youth, and when not, he’s like a man drunk on ale. That’s when he’s not communing with their blasted Grunstaan that is.”
“I must say, I had noticed,” Lambsplitter had rather ruefully admitted as she recalled the way he now looked at her.
“I don’t know,” Melkin had continued, not hearing her. “He’s old enough to be all of history’s father. It’s just not proper.”
That evening they’d sat about the fire’s embers, in that short period between the ground squandering its hoarded heat and the clear night’s chill chasing it away. They were all more sanguine now, less fearful of hunger, but still anxious about the likelihood of a protracted stay.
The Galgaverrans all seemed happy enough to put their trust wholeheartedly in Nephril, but Melkin wasn’t so sure. Perhaps it was his prosaic Bazarran outlook that made him need more than simple faith. Melkin had to have hard evidence, of which he’d so far seen precious little.
“My lordship?” he began, “have you any idea when…”
“Ha! Such typical bluntness from the old-race,” Nephril scoffed, which wasn’t like him at all.
“But…”
“Trust a Bazarran to deny the heart, eh, they who canst fain swell their member but one year in three.”
Lambsplitter felt Melkin’s body tense beside her and so quickly squeezed his hand as she moved more between them. She was about to speak when Nephril looked mortified.
It was as though he’d awoken naked, sleepwalking in the street. “Mine … mine dear … dear Steward Melkin, I pray … pray thou do forgive me … ‘twas indelicate.” There was such an innocent pleading in his face that Melkin found he couldn’t deny him and so begrudging gave his leave, before turning a wounded expression to Lambsplitter.
Nephril now spun about and stared squarely at Grunstaan. His voice became deep and resonant, almost inaudible in its privacy. “Why hast the truth not leapt at me afore? Why only now do I see the verity of mine own heart’s knowing, one I have buried so deep for millennia?”
When Penolith came beside him, she saw raw wonder fill his eyes so full it soon displaced his tears. He was now silent, although his lips formed words, and so she placed a hand on his trembling arm. He flinched, but then turned towards her and revealed, in hushed awe, “Leiyatel be alive, dost thou knowest, truly alive, and so too Grunstaan. A slip of a lass she may be, aye, powerful but a slip nonetheless, one sorely akin mine own long lost ring.”
At first she thought his words purely poetic but soon saw how earnest he was. The allusion to the ring wasn’t lost on her, though. With such wrought recall, she soon found the words spilling out before her. “And in despair at possible passing of the Lifian Grunstaan Treow and its Certain Power, he did secrete a cutting thereof.”
It was Melkin who then said, “But the ring was lost to the Garden of the Forgotten. It fell with Auldus.”
Melkin realised Penolith was now staring at him, somewhat shocked, and so found himself quickly explaining, “An ancient script of mine, one Lord Nephril brought to life when we were still in Galgaverre.”
That brought Nephril’s almost reverential gaze slowly swinging away from Grunstaan as he darkly mused, “Strange is it not how both of thee have had sight of such, so rare and obscure a text, but perhaps I now see purpose to it, and from whence that need doth spring.”
He turned back to Grunstaan and felt her stirring once more. He wasn’t quite quick enough, though, to shield his heart, not this time, and so felt it writhe at her touch. He recoiled and averted his eyes, but they’d already seen too much. Her contact may have been naïve and unpractised, immature and awkward, but the caress was conscious, not mere touch of an engine for awareness strained within its knowing yearn.
Like Leiyatel, Grunstaan too had been wrought by the ancient engers, had within her very being that same thane of thought that brought them both such seed of sentience. Fashioned fortune of the minds of men simply winnowed Nature’s own chaotic chance, and thereby brought full pattern fore from weft and weave not seen before. “Oh fool! Fool beyond fool. I am but dolt beside thee.” Though of like nature, Leiyatel and Grunstaan both, Nephril only now did see how he himself drew their difference.
Leiyatel was indeed his own true lover, he knew that now, and knew himself to be her own treow lufa, as true and real as any flesh and blood bound form. His union with her, though, had been more profound for he’d fabric of her woven within his very own, more intimate than any man in woman could be. “Mine love was not mere fancy,” he exalted before embracing yet more unfolding truths.
“The message,” Nephril thought as he clutched at it, “was indeed from her very own hand, writ no more by Storbanther than mine own hand sifts words to paper.” Grunstaan could do no such for she had no corporal form, nor benefit of long-schooled thought. She was still too young, and so cried out from her own stark loneliness.
“She hath been starved of contact, of … of love, aye, of love,” Nephril finally revealed to Melkin. “She did feel mine weft and weave and so did cry out to it, and … and I … I did become smitten, drunk on her tender years and virgin vigour.”
He looked into Penolith’s eyes and quietly confessed, “I have cuckolded mine own true Leiyfiantel and am truly ashamed.” Penolith leant in and wrapped her arms about him but said nothing.
Nephril, though, could only feel her breasts firm against his chest, yet found his shame but weak defence. It prised a chink in his heart, and in that unguarded moment Grunstaan crept in once more. Although she knew not the tongue of men she knew their hearts, knew their loves and losses, their desires and dreads, for she’d been wrought for such by the ancient engers.
Grunstaan’s imploring and enticing wiles had plucked at the strings of Nephril’s heart, had drawn him close, so hot and heady, and so firm. Her disembodiment, so stark against the bodily freedom she felt about her, brought but painful petulance. She flaunted herself brazenly before Nephril’s inner eye, alluring and pliant, an enticing light to his fluttering heart. From far beneath his rein of mind, animal passion had risen unstoppable, weft and weave so corpulent that the others shrank back.
Now Nephril faced Grunstaan as though winded; arched against her beam, neck taut, arms flexed, fists clenched whitely tight. It was as though he leant into her beauty’s very radiance, his face glistening in the firelight as his eyes once more bore through the granite wall, as though through air.
Beyond the wall’s now seemingly transparent mass, he keenly felt Grunstaan’s caress, but as though channelled through some other. Jealousy suddenly reared its ugly head. “It will not do!” Nephril shouted against the maelstrom. “I will not submit, nor be kept without, nor usurped by another.”
Phaylan had drawn near, had Nephril but known. At first he’d looked at Nephril with wonder and a strange affinity, as the air almost crackled muskily about them. It was Nephril’s singular purpose and Grunstaan’s own drawing fulfilment, though, that now held Phaylan fast.
As Nephril’s sweat-sheened face shuddered and strained, Phaylan’s eyes drifted along his Lordship’s leering gaze, to the wall immediately before them. There, upon the granite’s own smooth and solid face, dust shimmered and danced. It was so strange a sight that it drew Phaylan closer, near enough to see grey motes almost steam from it into the wood’s lazily fitful breeze.
Phaylan stepped back a pace when he saw the wall draw dull beneath its powdered haze, a br
oad sweep now shimmering in the fire’s flickering blaze. Had he been nearer, close enough to peer but inches from its once impervious face, he’d have seen grey grains of granite dryly trickling to its feet.
There, at Nature’s most fundamental level - where energy and mass conspire - Grunstaan’s winnowing was guided not by the minds of men alone but by something far more potent. What elemental arrangement had timelessly kept true to granite was now being brought to a wholly different state, its natural order subtly undermined.
The trickling rivulets quickly turned into sliding sheets, and before long they began to swirl and flow like water, spilling out from a widening gape. From within, grey sand began to gush forth, lapping into the woods where it spilled to the sparse grass at their feet. All but Nephril stepped back, fearful of its touch, and watched as it quickly soaked into the leaf-littered ground.
Melkin was the first to break free, to tread lightly over the newly stained ground and stand before the opening. Liquid granite continued to spill out, to flow past his feet, yet it left no stain. Warily, he reached out and touched the opening’s almost cutting-sharp edge, then leant in to its darkness.
The air tasted sharp and metallic, as though charged by lightning. In its stillness, though, Melkin could clearly hear the cascade of crumbling sand. He turned from its fruitless depths, only to look straight into Lord Nephril’s absent gaze.
“Well, bugger me!” Melkin exclaimed. “Think I owe you an apology.” Nephril’s ears heard him not, nor did his eyes see his wonder-filled face before him. Nephril was still wrapped in his own inveigling passions, still intent on winning through, and thereby unknowingly keeping true to Grunstaan’s deepest desires.
When Melkin saw how rapt Nephril was, he turned back to the deepening passage, just as motes of light were fast displacing those of granite. Like stars breaking through a darkening sky, the far end burst with its own constellations. They soon expanded to galaxies, finally merged to an arch-framed view of three extremely startled men.
Of Weft and Weave (Dica Series Book 2) Page 36