“We art both bound to one another, dost thou know that, Falmeard?”
“Bound?”
“Aye, of common ilk within, matching fibres of weft and weave.”
“I shouldn’t really know what the hell you’re talking about, Nephril, but I’ve a horrible feeling I do.”
The streets were unusually smooth but for the occasional fracture where the mountain appeared to have cracked, and recently by the look of their sharp edges. They hit a particularly large one, a step of almost a foot, making the wealcan buck as it thumped down. The column above briefly flickered and flashed with yet more green stars as Nephril groaned in agony.
“Perhaps bound together, Nephril, but where are we actually bound for?”
Straining to see through his red veils of pain, Nephril finally answered, “Ah! Thou did ask me that before, did thee not?” He said no more, though, not whilst his arm insisted on grating so painfully within its splint.
By the time that pain had again largely drained away, Nephril realised they’d reached the middle of the shoulder’s saddle, a sprawl of buildings rising yet higher on either side. He felt hemmed in at first but it soon became an embrace, as though Leiyatel had enfolded him in her arms. It freed Nephril of almost all his pain, allowed him to think, albeit a little unclearly, and then say, “Bear with me, Falmeard, if thou would, but I need to describe the import of our common fibre.”
“The what?”
“I need to admit to the suffering of mind such weft and weave instils.”
Seated behind Nephril, Falmeard’s face couldn’t be seen, but Nephril sensed that his careful choice of words had missed their mark. He realised he needed to lay some foundations on which to build Falmeard’s better understanding. To do so he began by unfolding something of his own vast history, to show how such an inordinately long life must eventually pall, and so bring with it such deep and dark despair.
“It be the ultimate acceptance of truth that so utterly smashes the spirit, Falmeard. Immortality may seem a wonderful thing when the truth of it be hidden, hidden behind one’s own ignorance, but truth will out, eventually. And truth be more massive than a whole world, Falmeard, more weighty yet than the hardest ... well, than the hardest of souls.”
Nephril went quiet for a moment as he remembered where that ancient word sawool had first come back to him, and why. It left their shared world filled only with the purr of the wealcan’s engine and the continuing slap of leather.
When Falmeard eventually tried to speak, Nephril surfaced from his thoughts and interrupted. “Even thou hath seen some hundreds of years, Falmeard, even in thine own true world. But then, I suspect there be more somehow, a long hidden life to bring far closer feel for mine own despair. That is what I suspect be so akin between us.”
Although Nephril’s words were strange to Falmeard’s ear, they somehow rang true, affirmed his unnaturally long life in England to have been but the mere grasp at a far broader span. Understanding was almost on the very tip of Falmeard’s mind but wouldn’t come.
“We have both felt Leiyatel’s embrace, mine friend,” Nephril continued, “have both suffered long lives by it, mine manifold in its wearisome burden.” He lowered his voice, although he’d begun to think it may no longer matter.
“There is now but one remnant left, Falmeard, one fly in our mortal ointment.” Falmeard could almost feel the cask behind him as Nephril spoke on. “Leiyatel’s final remains no longer embrace our world for she has lately been uprooted, and by thy very own hands indeed.”
From his position behind him, Falmeard noticed Nephril’s ears lift slightly, pushed there by a wide grin he suspected but could not see. It was more apparent in his words, though. “We are made invulnerable by her presence, thee and me, as much as she is made powerless.”
With his pain now greatly eased, Nephril was able to turn and peer at Falmeard’s face. “We have our only opportunity to destroy her, dost thou not see, once and for all, completely, to free ourselves of her and her accursed immortality. More importantly, Falmeard, we have this lone chance to return ourselves and our land at last to Nature’s own eternal balance.”
Falmeard slowly brought the wealcan to a halt and felt the white band around his finger, where a ring had plainly been. When Nephril slid from his saddle, he could properly see the sadness in Falmeard’s face; the heavy eyes, the sunken jowl, his lips aquiver.
They must really have been close friends, and for a very long time, for Nephril knew why, a knowing confirmed when Falmeard lifted his moistened eyes to Nephril. “I’m not sure I really want to end it, Nephril, not in my heart of hearts, not now. You see, I keep thinking of Geran, although I still can’t see her face, but she feels so real to me now, real enough not to want to feel her loss again.”
Nephril stepped forward and stood alongside Falmeard, rested an ancient claw-like hand on his friend’s drooping shoulder. “We art too alike, thee and me, Falmeard. Dost thou know that? I too have a similar ache, a pain not unlike thine own.”
Falmeard looked quizzically at Nephril who only smiled, a smile that seemed to mark an end at long last to his bodily pain. “I think I would not be missed, not really,” he quietly admitted. “The Lady Penolith be a Galgaverran after all, true in wrought and blood. Love plays no part in their making for what need has Leiyatel of such nonsense in her servants?”
Even when Falmeard dared peek into Nephril’s pale, grey eyes, he still found difficulty believing him. Nephril’s voice seemed only to belie his words themselves somehow.
“Come, Falmeard, we must be on. The choice lies with us each to our own, if Leiyatel’s imminent loss does indeed leave us with any choice at all. Despite mine age-long yearning, mine firm resolve, I feel it need be done sooner rather than later?”
He didn’t wait for an answer but climbed back aboard the wealcan and pointed towards the unseen distance, towards where he at least knew that the Farewell Gap still gave entrance to the Garden of the Forgotten.
38 To Glimpse a Lost World
Before they knew it, they were through the shallow cut in the ridge, over the shoulder’s saddle, and out onto the northern slopes of the castle. A little to their left, some miles distant, the Star Tower’s narrow, silvery-white column seemed to cut the view in half. As soon as Falmeard saw it he became mesmerised, so much so he let the wealcan veer towards a warehouse wall.
Nephril yelped, lifted his legs clear and covered his face, but was relieved when they narrowly avoided disaster. Falmeard apologised effusively. He also stopped the wealcan there and then, dousing its burners, and allowed himself some few minutes doing nothing more than staring in wonder.
The Star Tower was indeed a marvel, its ice-like glittering rise reaching far into the heavens, seemingly a stark and solitary needle pricking star holes in the sky. Star holes in the sky! Falmeard already knew that phrase, but from where ... from when?
Nephril had already dismounted, rubbing his backside as he complained of the ride. He’d seen Falmeard’s distraction, though, and so let him be, wandered off a way to stretch his legs.
Falmeard, however, soon turned to him and asked, “What on earth’s that...” but the words, the question, even the Star Tower itself were all pushed aside. He’d glimpsed a series of four glass domes, each peeping above the tumble of roofs to the east, all seeming the same and all plainly huge.
They were a good couple of miles away, further than they seemed down the mountainside, each held aloft on enormous towers that slipped their hints of disparate hues between the intervening buildings. Falmeard, though, didn’t need to see them to know their colours, for their awesome mass was somehow etched in a once hidden corner of his mind.
Southernmost, the Spring Tower would have citrus tiled flanks dulled to grimy ochre by centuries of weathering. Alongside it would stand the Summer Tower, its once verdant brilliance now faded to a sad jade. Next would be the Autumn Tower, its carmine bricks blackened by age to a dirty brown. Only the northernmost - the Winter Tower - would
still shine out its virgin white glory.
Falmeard felt drunk, or drugged, one removed somehow and therefore unsure. How could he hold such strong memories of things he’d never before seen? How? What trick of the mind was this, that pulled him in twain? It was as though he’d cast up on some foreign shore, only to have old haunts, familiar faces, memorable sounds and smells all tap him on the shoulder.
It was more than that, though. Not so much familiar, homely things transplanted, but strangers revealed as kin, foreign lands as birthplace, alien speech as mother tongue. Falmeard felt lightheaded and so grasped the wealcan, and with a shaky hand, steadied his stand but more so his nerves.
Of all the things that swamped him now, it was the Towers of the Four Seasons that held him fast, that poured memory as though it were wine - and Falmeard quaffed, and quaffed deeply.
“It was Aldous!” he cried - eyes wild, breath quick and shallow. “That bastard Aldous who duped me with his ring!”
“Auldus? Auldus? How come thee by mine nephew’s name?” By now Nephril was standing before Falmeard, staring into his eyes, into eyes that didn’t look beyond their own inner view.
An answer fleetingly leapt from the tip of Falmeard‘s tongue. “A vast loop in time ... my God, but it can’t have been, surely not, no ... it’s ... it’s impossible.”
He finally focused on Nephril, a scared look on his face. “They were all the same person, Nephril!”
“Who were?”
“My friend Aldous Cullingham, your nephew Auldus and Leadernac, that’s who, the same damned person, the same rogue, at least until he dissolved from my memory... No! No, not from memory but from existence ... from ever having been!”
Falmeard’s grip on the wealcan failed to hold him when his legs gave way. He dropped heavily to the road and just sat there, somehow absent. Nephril sat down on the ground before him. From being so intimately in contact with Dica, Falmeard now looked remote; unhearing, unseeing, unawares.
“What hast thou seen, mine own strange fish, what hast clawed at thine senses and stolen them all so far away?”
Nephril leant forward and gently drew Falmeard into his own now pain-free arms, from which embrace a small and muffled voice seeped out. “Aldous Cullingham - your nephew Auldus - connived a way to do what you now most wish for yourself, Nephril. With the aid of Nouwelm’s Repository, he reasoned a way to get Leiyatel to cast off time - a lot of it, hundreds if not thousands of years. By that one trick alone he returned to the beginning, so he could at last undo his own fateful mistake, so he could finally come to a mortal end.”
When Falmeard pulled himself free of Nephril, the sympathy and understanding in that strange fish’s eyes were painful to see. Nephril stared at him, as though fearful of what his old friend now knew.
“Auldus escaped Leiyatel by tricking her, Nephril, by getting her to expunge time. It threw your nephew back to that day when he first fell from the Farewell Gap. The first time, Nephril, the very first time!”
Nephril tried to speak but found his mouth too dry.
“To when he slipped the ring on his finger as he fell, to the time when London and not death became his new home.”
Nephril’s lips had begun to quiver, as though fearful of the words he fought back.
“I can see it now, Nephril, as if it were yesterday. I can see what Leadernac meant to do. I saw it in his eyes all that time ago, there at the Towers of the Four Seasons. He well knew what he was doing when he hurried away towards the Banalata Lake, towards the Farewell Gap beyond. He meant to go back to the beginning and leave the ring there, Nephril, leave it behind for you to find. I’m sure of it. He finally wanted to do what he’d learnt he should have done in the very first place.”
Both men fell silent, although their thoughts were clamour enough. They let sway the wind’s searching whine and whistle, its mournful lament, until usurped by the distant chatter of an approaching thrijhil.
39 Clash of Kempers
The buildings and streets in the Upper Reaches were facelessly uniform, no one more memorable than another. The fact that Nephril kept them unerringly to the right route came down to nothing more than his feel for the terrain and a familiarity with the positions of many prominent but distant features.
The Star Tower was one, and also the Towers of the Four Seasons, but there were others. Even in the overcast light, the Eastern Gate could easily be seen, pointing eastwards towards the Plain of the New Sun’s distant ochre spread.
Once they’d begun to drop down towards Cambray, the Towers of the Four Seasons now on their right, the Outer Courts came into view further down the slope from the Star Tower to their left. They appeared as a black smudge staining the castle’s northern flank. The vast Royal College campus could also be seen, away to the southeast, overlooking Cambray and appearing to huddle beneath the Scarra Face.
The Scarra itself dominated this quarter. Regardless of the weather, even with the sky as overcast as now, it always loomed massively to the south, dwarfing all beneath its menacing stare.
These were all familiar features to Nephril, but others also helped keep him true to their way. Uttagate’s Scout Hill stood prominently beside Eastern Street, whilst the dim, verdant spread of the Park of Forgiveness lay to the north.
It wasn’t long before they came to ever-steepening streets, some dropping away so precipitously their crowns were stepped. The wealcan, with its primitive brakes, was no match for them, and so Nephril choose gentler ways, ones that leisurely swept back and forth down the castle’s eastern flank.
It meant there were many more sharp turns where the wealcan had to be manhandled. It was at one of these that Nephril first caught sight of their journey’s end.
When he pointed it out, Falmeard was busy dragging the rear of the wealcan about. He looked up and followed Nephril’s pointing arm, down through the cleft of a broad street that framed a vaguely familiar view. “Foundering Wall,” Nephril declared, “at the far side of which sits our task’s end - the Farewell Gap.”
Falmeard peered harder as he flipped the wealcan’s stand down. “Nephril?”
“Yes, Falmeard?”
“Do you know there’s someone down there, someone sitting by the Gap?”
Nephril couldn’t quite see clearly enough at that distance and so seemed unconvinced. He could, however, plainly see a faint green mist shimmering above the Gap. “Odd,” he said to himself. “Yellow yes, but I have never before seen green there.”
After they’d moved on it was a little while before the Farewell Gap came into view again. It was near enough to prompt Nephril to call a halt. Not only could he now see the Gap more clearly, but also the figure of the seated woman.
Nephril’s eyes widened and he ruefully hissed, “Lady Lambsplitter! I should have known.”
“Isn’t she in some danger, Nephril? I mean, with us here, you know, with Leiyatel.”
“Best douse the burners, Falmeard. Save the naphtha, for I must admit to being unsure now of what next to do.”
With the wealcan silent they could again hear the distant trill of an engine, seemingly still following them. Falmeard looked back the way they’d come.
It was hard to see much, what with the Upper Reaches curving out of sight so steeply above. It put the brow only a few narrow streets away. We’re not that hard to follow I suppose, he thought, not with the wealcan wagging its green tail the way it is.
“You do realise we’re trapped in a dilemma, Nephril? If we stay here we’ll bring the prospect of death to whoever’s following us, but if we move on to the Gap, we’ll only do the same for that Lady.”
Nephril scowled. “Never did trust her, though I could ne’er put mine finger on why. Maybe today will bring an answer, eh, for ‘tis in mine mind to press on.”
“Are you really sure Leiyatel’s lethal now?”
“Aye, Falmeard, the Certain Power still be deadly. I have recently seen evidence in Dialwatcher’s face so know that full well. Why be the Lady here, though, Falme
ard, why here?”
While Nephril considered their plight, Falmeard turned to the green haze and saw how much thicker it now seemed. He walked a little way down the road and turned to look back.
His new perspective revealed that the haze came from the wealcan’s cask. It passed in a gentle arc through the grey afternoon air, a shimmering silken band of green that fell towards the woman. He also noticed that she’d stirred, that she now looked up the hill towards Nephril.
There seemed to be a tautness to the air, a tang to its taste, a thrum that spoke of a heavily laden arrow only just let loose. Had it not been for the thrijhil’s insistent and now much louder chase, Falmeard could have imagined that moment somehow lasting forevermore.
Nephril turned to him and called something, something Falmeard couldn’t quite hear above the whining now in his ears. The silken green arc had strengthened, pulsed suddenly with erratic jade-coloured lines that thrashed and pulled tight, vibrating in Falmeard’s mind as much as in the air.
A hint of black seemed to rise from the woman and coalesce about the green ribbon, like thin oil floating upon a meadow’s limpid pool. It made Falmeard mindful of a long silken glove, one to unroll sensuously along the arc’s elegantly curved arm.
At last, Nephril’s words found Falmeard’s ear. “Quick, we need to move on,” he’d called, and began wrestling the wealcan away from its stand. Falmeard leant forward towards him, as though pushing through syrup.
The fool, he thought. He’ll have the whole thing on top of himself.
Somehow Nephril had found strength enough, enough to steady the wealcan and climb aboard. Had he thought to light the burners first then he would almost certainly have gone by now. Falmeard got to him just as he was reaching down to strike them alight.
Nephril’s movements had become drawn out, as laborious as the curses now slowly seeping from his mouth. Each time he reached down, though, it was only to find himself once more upright, the same thing happening time and time again.
Last True World (Dica Series Book 3) Page 15