Till the Mountains Turn to Dust (The Chronicles of Eridia)

by J. S. Volpe

  * * *

  Sometime around midnight he sat up in bed and stared at Kay’s slack and faintly snoring form for over a full minute to make sure she was asleep. He would be amazed if she weren’t, considering the three-hour bout of makeup sex they had had after she got home from work and expressed her deep, deep remorse at everything that had happened. Which didn’t mean that a single one of their issues had been resolved, of course. In fact, he suspected the détente was a fakeout, the opening gambit to some crafty and elaborate plot.

  When he was sure she was asleep, he slid out of bed, got dressed, and crept out of the house. Sticking to back alleys and unlit streets, staying out of sight of anyone and everyone, he made his way to the Cathedral. The plaza and park were empty, just as he had expected; even the city’s roving gangs of pre-teen thugs avoided this area after dark. Overhead the clouds had dissipated, and a full moon shone, turning the sky around it a deep, dark blue and lighting the plaza enough for him to do his work.

  While it was possible the old woman possessed remarkable powers, a simpler explanation for the biddy’s disappearance was far more likely. Just because there were no visible doors in the Cathedral, that didn’t mean there were no doors at all.

  Starting at the building’s northeast corner, he examined the north wall for even the minutest irregularities. Twenty feet from the corner he found a section of stones about six feet high and three wide that looked different from the surrounding stones in some manner he couldn’t precisely identify. They were the same color as the other stones, the same texture, the same cut. They even smelled the same. Yet they were different. It was almost as if the light weren’t reflecting off them in quite the normal fashion.

  Grinning, sure that he had found the way in, he carefully explored the whole section, starting at the perimeter, then working his way in, peering, poking, pushing, prodding. When he reached the center of this area without result, he worked his way back outward.

  He was grinding his teeth in frustration when he spotted another stone that possessed the same indefinable peculiarity as the ones he had been examining. This new stone sat alone, about six feet west of the larger group and five feet off the ground. He hurried over to this stone and pushed it. It didn’t budge. He tried to slide it up, down, side to side. It didn’t budge. He stood back and eyed it critically. What was he missing?

  After a good twenty minutes of thought, of pondering possibilities of geometry, geology, masonry, temperature, color, wind pressure differentials, and moisture, he was about to give up entirely. But then he remembered the most incongruous and hitherto inexplicable feature of the old woman.

  The wooden shoes.

  The noisy wooden shoes.

  And a Cathedral that emitted an inexplicable gong every day.

  It was all about sound. It had to be. It fit all the facts.

  Quiet as a cloud, Reynard made his way to Grannie Goodie’s Bakery on Queen Street two blocks west of the park. The shop was locked and dark at this hour, of course, so he swiftly picked the lock, slipped inside, and emerged a few minutes later with a wooden spoon, a cutting board, a rolling pin, and five wooden bowls of different sizes, all of which he carried back to the Cathedral’s north side.

  He rapped the various objects against the pavement near the two anomalous areas on the wall, methodically varying the number, speed, and strength of the raps. He soon found that the clack of the bowls sounded most like the noise the woman’s shoes had made, and he subsequently focused his attention on those. Not long thereafter, when he tapped the smallest, shallowest bowl against the pavement thrice in rapid succession, there was a sudden sharp crack from the smaller of the two anomalous patches of stone.

  “Yes,” he hissed. As he rose, the crack sounded a second time, and when he inspected the stone he saw nothing.

  He tried again, responding faster this time: squatting, rapping the bowl three times, then springing back up before the first crack had finished sounding. A look at the stone showed it had sunk half an inch into the wall.

  Knowing it would swiftly return to its original position, and not sure what else to do, he thrust out a hand and pushed against the recessed stone.

  It sank back another inch, and a louder crack sounded to Reynard’s left. Glancing that way, he found that the larger section of anomalous stones had likewise receded into the wall.

  He rushed over and pushed against it with both hands. With a low grating rumble, it sank farther into the wall, pivoting as it went and soon providing a space just wide enough to admit a full-grown man. Exultant, heart racing, Reynard slipped through. Just in time, too; the moment he cleared the door, it began to rumble back into place.

  The dim light from outside showed he was in a narrow corridor that ended in a blank wall ten feet ahead. After he had taken a couple of steps toward the wall, the stone slab clicked shut behind him, plunging him into pitch blackness.

  He shuffled forward, groping blindly, until his fingers touched the cool stones of the far wall. He planted both hands firmly against the wall and pushed. The wall pivoted open just like the section in the Cathedral’s outer wall. Stepping through, he found himself in a corridor that ran perpendicular to the one he had just exited. The walls, floor, and ceiling were bare gray stone. High on the walls, cubic stone sconces that contained some unwavering light source Reynard couldn’t see from the ground flung fans of pale yellow light toward the ceiling.

  To his right, the corridor extended a few hundred feet before making a sharp left turn at the Cathedral’s west wall. To his left, it made a sharp right turn at the much closer east wall, only twenty feet away. In neither direction did he see anything that looked like a door.

  He slunk toward the nearer bend. When he got there, he flattened himself against the south wall and peeked around the corner.

  As expected, he found a corridor stretching the length of the east wall. It looked the same as the corridor he was in now—same stone blocks, same stone sconces—except that halfway down, the wall on the corridor’s west side was broken by an open space about four feet wide and eight high. From where he stood, he couldn’t tell if it was an archway or a niche or something else.

  He rounded the corner and inched toward the opening. As he did so, he realized that though he had hitherto believed the Cathedral’s interior to be dead silent, there was indeed a sound, but one so low it was on the very threshold of hearing. It was a deep, steady hum, as of some massive machine miles underground.

  The sound troubled him in a vague, atavistic way. He found himself thinking of Gidard Smyes, who had disappeared while investigating the Cathedral and was never seen again. Smyes, he recalled, had vanished on the building’s north side, the very side where Reynard had found the hidden door…

  Oh, fuck Smyes, he told himself; he would succeed where that pathetic nobody had failed. After all, Reynard had lived thousands of years, thanks as much to wit and talent as to anything else. Smyes hadn’t even made it halfway through one normal human lifespan.

  As he neared the gap in the wall, he detected a smell just as odd and disturbing as the hum. It reminded him of many things—snow, metal, parsley, mothballs—while matching none of them. The fact that he couldn’t even classify the smell as organic or inorganic made his hackles rise high.

  He crossed the last few feet to the gap as cautiously and soundlessly as he could. As he did so, the hum grew a fraction louder.

  When he reached the gap’s edge, he paused, looked up and down the corridor to make sure he was still alone, then peeked around the corner.

  The gap, it turned out, was an archway that led to a large flagstone courtyard above which white stars winked in a black sky. In the courtyard’s south wall was a similar archway. The north wall was blank. He wasn’t sure about the west wall because the bulk of it was obscured by a monolithic stone that towered over the courtyard like a menhir erected by giants. It was even taller than the Cathedral’s towers. Which meant, of course, it should be visible from outside. Yet it wasn’t.
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  He waited. Nothing stirred. He heard no sound save the hum. The mystery smell was stronger now and was almost certainly coming from the courtyard, possibly from the huge stone.

  He found his eyes returning again to the stars. Something about them bothered him, but he couldn’t figure out what. After taking another quick glance around to confirm his solitude, he stepped into the archway for a better look at the stars. A few moments of scrutiny made him realize he couldn’t identify a single constellation. These were not the stars that shone in the night sky of Colbon or any other place he knew.

  An icy rill of fear trickled down his spine. Somehow he had entered the Cathedral and found himself in a place that wasn’t where the Cathedral was. Except it was still inside the Cathedral.

  “It makes your head hurt, doesn’t it?” said a voice behind him.

  He whirled, his heart slamming up into his throat. A few feet away stood the old woman from yesterday, barely recognizable now. She had swapped her rags for a clean gray robe with a gray wimple. In place of the wooden shoes she wore soft gray leather slippers. Her back was straight, her movements sure and steady. Her face was younger and less lined, and her surly, bitter look had been replaced by a calm and unpleasantly knowing smile. Her eyes, much brighter and cannier than before, fixed on his with almost hypnotic intensity.

  “It was unwise to enter here, young man,” she said.

  He snorted out a laugh he didn’t really feel. “I’m not so young.”

  The woman’s smile widened. “Oh, but you are. Compared to me, you are. Compared to this place, you are.”

  Her words and tone made it clear she knew exactly how old he was, and was not the least bit impressed by it. He suddenly felt certain that she had known who he was and what his plans were when she passed him and Solace in the park yesterday, that she had intended him to follow her, that the whole thing had been a test, or a trap.

  “Don’t be silly,” he said, swallowing back his fear and giving her his best roguish smile. “You look far too ravishing to be a day over two thousand.”

  She said nothing, didn’t budge a muscle.

  “So what is this place?” he asked, then waggled his eyebrows lasciviously. “And more importantly, where’s the bedroom?”

  She simply continued staring. The moment he opened his mouth to speak again, she took a step toward him. Instinctively, driven by some powerful, primitive back-brain fear, he took a corresponding step backward. She took another step. He stepped back again. After half a dozen steps in this manner he realized that the quality of the light had shifted from the hazy yellow sconce-light to light that was dimmer and faintly silvery.

  Starlight. She had herded him straight into the heart of the courtyard.

  He looked over his shoulder. The monolith loomed above him like a cliff. Now that he was closer to it, he saw that its gray surface shimmered as if it were glazed with melted mica. The hum was louder now, too. Like the weird smell, it was almost certainly coming from the monolith. On the heels of this realization came the strange surety that the monolith wasn’t merely a piece of stone; it was a machine.

  The woman stopped advancing. Reynard took two more steps backward, then stopped as well.

  “This,” the woman said, “is not a place.”

  “So what is it, then?” Reynard asked. “A person?”

  The woman’s gaze rose over his head to the stone/machine/whatever, then dropped back down to him again. She took another step forward. Mustering every last scrap of courage, Reynard did not step back. The woman cocked her head and regarded him with narrow eyes, her smile widening even further. She seemed pleased.

  “Sound cannot exist without time,” she said. “A three-dimensional object can exist without time, but it will never move. It will be height, width, and depth without time and thus without change and thus without motion. And without motion there is no sound. Silence reigns below the fourth dimension. Sound is a byproduct of time happening.”

  “Oh, dear,” Reynard said. “This really is a church, isn’t it?”

  Her smile tightened, growing less amused. Her eyes glittered in a way that made Reynard think of snakes.

  The hum loudened, while the light in the courtyard grew brighter and more silvery. His shadow manifested long and fuzzy on the flagstones before him.

  Heart quickening, mouth suddenly dry as pumice, he spun around. The monolith was glowing like a full moon, its glazy surface glimmering. At times small areas flashed brightly, perhaps denoting cryptic inner processes at work, like chemical reactions, or thoughts.

  “What the fuck?” he muttered.

  “It’s time happening,” the woman said behind him, raising her voice to be heard above the steadily loudening hum.

  Reynard became aware of a barely detectable change in the light, but it wasn’t the monolith’s radiance that was changing. It was something else. He looked around, confused, then up.

  The stars were moving slowly in the sky, circling through the blackness like sluggish fireflies.

  The hum swelled rapidly, like a whale streaking up from the ocean depths toward the sunlit surface. Everything began to thrum: the floor, the air, his skin, his bones.

  “Stop!” he screamed, clenching his eyes shut and clamping his hands over his ears as the hum blossomed into a skull-bursting boom, a boom which in the outside world, he realized, would be the gong heard around noon every day.

  Somewhere deep beneath this terrible sound, he heard, or thought he heard, the old woman laugh and say one last thing about time.

  He ran toward the archway in the south wall. At first he kept his eyes closed, but after a dozen steps his fear of slamming nose-first into a wall compelled him to open them to see where he was going.

  What he saw made him stumble to a stop, his jaw hanging wide. The whole room had become a frozen blur, as if he were inside a wax building that had begun to melt and spin before solidifying again. It wasn’t hard to discern what each blur represented: the wide swaths of gray were the walls and floor, of course; the black smears were the archways; the complex gray shape with the pale patches had to be the old woman; the white arcs and circles in the blackness above were the stars. The only thing that wasn’t blurred was the monolith, which stood in the center of this chaos, clear and bright and glimmering.

  The sound suddenly ceased, and some unseen force yanked Reynard through the air toward the monolith like a stone flung from a catapult, too fast for thought or prayer or pleas. And then…

  For one vertiginous instant he thought that he had somehow fallen into the monolith, that its stoniness was an illusion and that its surface was actually brittle, powdery.

  But no. The monolith wasn’t white. Or wet.

  Reynard sat up. He was in the middle of a snowy field with white-capped mountains all around him and a gray winter sky above. There was no sign of the Cathedral. Or Colbon. Or civilization of any kind. The snow in the field was pristine and unbroken save for the Reynard-shaped hole in which he sat.

  He pushed himself to his feet. The wind picked up, reminding him he was dressed for temperate climes.

  “This is why I never go to church,” he said through chattering teeth as he stomped through snowdrifts in what he hoped was the right direction.