“I wonder what it’s like…outside.”
12. WITNESS OF RUIN
“The prophet has spoken, but so have the others;
the madmen, the mockers and all their brothers.”—Zarost
When Twardy Zarost encountered the first drops of blood, he began to run.
His boots made the only sound in the vaulted hallways of the Temple of the Word as he raced along wide corridors and between towering stone columns and tall staring faces. As if to mock the spattered trail, the floor was gaily patterned with the intricate designs of the monks and monikers of the Word, clerics who should have been thronging past him with their serene faces, turning their time-wheels, ringing their allotted note of the day, touching their foreheads after every word they spoke. No tattooed initiates, no braid-headed exclamants. Not even one reciter in any of the high boxes.
It was unnatural. With no one repeating the holy words and names, it seemed that the Gods themselves had died. Zarost knew what he would find, yet he had to find it. The awful silence of the Temple of the Word could only mean one thing.
The time for praying was over. Or maybe it had just begun, for everyone outside the temple.
Zarost had left the Gyre’s library as soon as he had discovered the ruined Book of Is, those torn page stubs so ragged and so wrong. He had set his mind on reaching the temple in Qirrh, to find copies of the book. But his spell of Transference had failed to bring him to the temple. Instead of Qirrh, he had found himself farther east in Azique, where the disrupted gravity caused the perpetual mist of gravel and where the restless scorpion-scrub had conquered the once-fertile citrus and mulberry groves, leaving only wizened stalks behind. The hungry creatures of the wastelands galloped in straggling herds, their terrible ancestry forgotten. Zarost had left there in a hurry, but no matter how many times he cast the Transference he could not eliminate the uncertainty variable in the destination—Qirrh slipped from his grasp like a greasy melon seed. Wildfire threads grew thickly in the sky over Qirrh; something terrible was at work. He tried to approach the temple from the west instead, but the closest he could get to the settlement was the savannah of the Unclaimed Plains, and from there it had taken three days on foot to reach the great swing bridge spanning the chasm on the dry western border of Azique. From the first step upon the bridge he had sensed the wrongness in the air, the touch of Chaos ahead. Qirrh had been spared for centuries. The rest of the land of Azique had fallen, but the temple and its people had been spared; Ametheus had feared to induce the wrath of the Gods.
Evidently, Ametheus feared no more.
Zarost ran up a shallow flight of stairs. The spattered trail underfoot became a long red smear leading toward the Witness Chamber where the clerics kept their religious texts. For centuries the Clerics of the Word had held onto their faith—that eventually one of the Gods would answer their call, and their spiritual power would be restored. They would be the revered intermediaries once again, interpreting the word of the Gods for the people of the world, presenting prayers and requests on the people’s behalf.
For the Clerics of the Word to stop calling would be to acknowledge the failure of their religion and the end of their hope. They would never abandon hope. They were that kind of people. And so they called, using the words and ceremonies detailed in the Book of Is, teaching the exacting lists of rules and procedures to their young acolytes, burning the holy glyphs onto their shaven scalps just as they impressed their promises of lifelong service onto their minds, before allowing the hair to grow and be braided into the ever-lengthening strands of their years at the temple. From monk to monk, from monniker to monniker, father to son and mother to daughter, a ladder of disciplic succession led back quite a few generations.
It had been going on for two millennia now.
Astonishing faith or stubbornness, their belief was a part of their restricted family tree. To deny it would be to deny that they carried the blood of their ancestors; to abandon the Word would be to call every relative a fool. Even mockery had no effect on their beliefs. There were no outsiders in the faith, for the monks of the Word were only permitted to enter the Chamber of Eternal Love with a monniker, and one only became a monk or monniker by being born in the Temple. Every new child became a child of the Word, and was considered to be the offspring of everyone in the temple, and was cared for and loved as such. The whole of Qirrh lived in service to the Temple and the Word, every member of the whole inbred family devoted to one purpose—to call out the Words and to await the return of the Gods. It was sad that no one outside the temple remembered the Gods, for that was what they really needed. They didn’t need Gods, they needed people.
When the empire of Azique fell under the Sorcerer’s wrath, the temple lost many of the pilgrims and parishioners who came to listen to the Word and offer tokens of respect to the temple. Without that income, the inhabitants of Qirrh were forced to scrape out ever more from the soils around their settlement, but the land was left dry by what Ametheus had done to it, and so the monks and monnikers of the Word became thinner and thinner, their monastic life ever more ascetic and gruelling.
The Temple at Qirrh had not always been the only one. Many copies of the Book of Is had been penned before the years of Order and lesser temples had sprung up all over the lands, each proclaiming to offer a truer faith. Then the combined lores of magic and technology wove the web of Order across Oldenworld. Order was an irresistable path to wealth, and so the faith in the Gods was abandoned. A few monasteries had endured, but in the end those temples had been shot through with wildfire, the disciples had become undisciplined. As far as Zarost knew, only the Temple at Qirrh remained true to their ancient convictions.
The saddest part of their tale was that even Zarost knew their faith was misplaced. The Gods would not be returning to the earthly plane. That early age had passed, and for good reason. The Parting of Disbelief had been introduced to protect humankind. The separation ensured that the dialogue between humans and Gods was one-sided. Most people didn’t think deeply enough to be able to hold a dialogue with the Gods. People prayed for superficial things they forgot soon thereafter. They found a way to achieve the really important matters themselves, if left to their own devices, or they began to dream. If the Gods answered every request, there would be no need for dreams to form, and without dreams, humankind would be a dull species indeed—duller than a jumble of jackasses, Zarost thought.
And people were also very predictable. Sooner or later they would launch into the other kind of prayer. Everyone wanted to live forever. The ones who were the most outspoken in their right to eternal life were those least worthy of it—people who didn’t know what to do with their time on a rainy Sunday afternoon and yet demanded a millennium or more to complete the important tasks they had yet to do. Those most worthy of immortality were the ones who never asked for it. They went humbly about their diminishing days, giving of their precious time to serve others, grateful for what they had received.
Zarost often wondered if he gave enough of what had been gifted to him. For the moment his service seemed to be adequate. He knew this because he was still alive, but he would not be the Riddler forever; he was only a Riddler while there was a need for a Riddler. Then again, he wasn’t beyond ensuring that the need remained.
Even he didn’t try to understand the Gods. Most Gods didn’t think simply enough to be able to hold a dialogue with humans. They were complex, complicated, eternal beings whose thoughts spanned aeons. They had a language too powerful for humans to utter. Each syllable would burn flesh and bone to cinders. The words of the Gods held the essence of many concepts; each word was able to affect fundamentals across the universe. Most of them had little compassion for the souls trapped in the present and bonded in flesh. They could not understand what it was like, for they saw the eternal. They knew people in terms of the movement of generations, and when viewed over time, humanity repeated the same actions, over and over. No wonder the Gods considered humankind to be barely intelligent.
No wonder they had become ruthless with their manipulations to improve the variety of colours in the threads of lineage, wiping out peoples with floods, pestilence and war. The Parting of Disbelief was as much a protection for humans as it was a curtain of privacy for the Gods. Gods and men could not live shoulder to shoulder. That truth would never change, and yet the Clerics of the Word had prayed for the chance every day.
Zarost had come to the high arched door of the Witness Chamber, where the clerics observed their daily ceremonies. The trail of blood led under the door. Zarost dreaded what he was going to find. He reached for the gilded handle, the door burst outward and dark fluid washed against his legs. The chamber was filled with humped shapes. The stench hit him in his stomach and doubled him over. He gagged. Flies rushed past him in a swarm of little eyes and dirty mouths. The sticky air was full of their villainous buzz. The current against his knees was thick with hidden textures, and something dragged by his right leg, touching him with a dead caress. He jerked his foot up. Weed clung to his trousers.
Weed. That was odd. He straightened against his nausea.
The humped objects were as randomly shaped as fallen trees. They weren’t human forms at all. The floor of the Witness Chamber was grey, pink and green around dark liquid pools, uneven and mottled like the speckled flesh of soft mushrooms, like a membrane of organic debris floating on vitriol. The books of lore were gone, the narrow benches, the dais and its nectar cups, the dishes for the traditional flowers, sweets and incense had all vanished. And so had the people, those monks and monikers who should have been clustered around the dais, their faces turned to the sky in hope, their little chimes jangling on their wrists as they spun their time-wheels in the hope of returning to the age when they would be heard.
No trace of them remained.
On the far side of the chamber, a tangle of vines explored an empty temple torch, but even as Zarost looked at them, the vines dropped off the glass sconce and began to search up a nearby pillar. Elsewhere, the speckled surface puckered into a mouth, issued a low moan, then shivered and was gone. Ripples passed outward like the twitching of a horse’s hide. A ripe gust pushed against Zarost’s face.
Everywhere, the flies skittered about, flying from moist slit to weeping carbuncle, crawling into pinched crevasses, feasting on the oozing fluids of the unnatural landscape. It was as if the entire floor of the chamber had been replaced with a restless rotten bog. Yes, that was the answer to this riddle, Zarost realised. This was no illusion, it was a discontinuity. He was facing another part of the world, a sliver of space from somewhere like the Growing Lands on the coast north of Turmodin.
He stepped back at once, out of the weakening flow of the liquid which poured from the doorway. He put a shaking hand upon the cool stone wall. Fool! That had been too close. He had to be more alert. If he had gone any farther into the chamber, he would have fallen into the discontinuity; he would have crossed into it and found himself in the ruined coast, in the lowlands, far away. Once there, so close to Turmodin and the source of Chaos, his own magic could have become lethal to him. Wildfire would react to his presence before his Transference spell could engage. He would have been annihilated.
The trap of the mottled bog lurked beyond the door, a place that shouldn’t be there. Zarost had seen this kind of spell before, where the Sorcerer had swapped pieces of the world as if they were parts of a jigsaw puzzle. He paid no heed to the Grand Pattern; he mocked the symmetry and order of the Universe. It was sorcery at its worst. Rearranging parts of the world at will caused untold repercussions. One part of the universal matrix held the pattern of the whole, just as the whole held the pattern of each single matrix. Changes of this magnitude ruptured the concurrency of the matrices, and caused chaos in the Universe.
Chaos, the only element that never changed.
Ametheus had used discontinuity spells before, adding foreign parts to his almost-sentient coastline as one would feed scraps of meat to a pet. But the trail of blood through the Temple told Zarost that this was not idle foraging. Someone had been here, there had been a struggle, and someone had ensured that all the clerics had been taken to the Witness Chamber. Ametheus had worked on the temple for a reason, and he had someone to help him.
But why take the Clerics of the Word somewhere in the stinking morass of the Growing Lands? They would surely die in that mire. Why now, after all these years, did he decide to end the last temple?
Zarost couldn’t guess, but he knew finding a copy of the Book of Is was even more urgent than before. No trace of the book remained here. The clerics had been the only ones who knew the lore inside out, and they had been silenced.
If Ametheus did find a way to begin an audience with a God, there would be nobody who knew how to engage the Parting of Disbelief to terminate it. The Sorcerer, holding an audience with a God, now that was a terrifying thought. If Ametheus succeeded in awakening a Prime God like the Destroyer, and the Gyre had no mechanism to sever that dialogue, then the end would truly come upon them all. It was an unlikely scenario, but then the Sorcerer delighted in the art of the unlikely.
The sky bleeds with wildfire seeds and beasts unholy roar
until the Pillar in the lowlands claims life evermore
Could that fate come upon them so soon? He refused to believe it. Prophecy was as unreliable as juggling frogs—all those possible futures dancing in one’s hands. He needed something definite to settle his unease. He needed the Book of Is, but it was gone. If fate was bearing down upon them like a knotted ball of wildfire, then there had to be a way for the Gyre to prepare itself. There had to be, or everything he understood about the geometry of Chance was wrong. There was always a path to follow to re-establish the balance; Chaos could not triumph without a chance having been present for Order to triumph as well. It might be a well-hidden chance, but a chance there would be.
Zarost scratched in his beard. There was only one place where such a text could be, and it was highly unlikely. There had been a man in the Temple who had turned his back on his faith, one cynical monk who had been a misfit among his simple brethren. He had walked a long way to find his peace. Something of that monk’s legacy might linger still in the Passover trading post. Perhaps a copy of the sacred book he had taken with him might have been kept for its antique value. An obscure chance, Zarost knew, but the more he considered it the more he liked it. Such an out-of-the-way place, such an obscure solution—precisely the kind of path where well-hidden chances lurked, precisely the kind of path he was so practiced at finding.
Yes, he would find the Book in Passover. That was where the slim chance lay for the Gyre to oppose the momentum of the Sorcerer. Zarost turned on his heel. He would have to return to the Unclaimed Plains before attempting the Transference spell, the wildfire web above Qirrh was too thickly corded to trust. He left the violated Witness Chamber of the Temple of the Word behind him and hurried away.
“This place will never be the same again,” he muttered to himself.
It couldn’t be. It was now part of the coastline of old Orenland.
The fear of corruption chased his thoughts ahead of him. He tried his best to keep up.
13. FRIENDS FOR LIFE
“The measure of a friend’s faith
is weighed on scales of sacrifice.”—Zarost
Mulrano presented them with four horses just after dawn. He had even found some riding clothes for Tabitha. He was packed; he was going to the pass with them, come downpours or demons. Ashley guessed Tabitha just gave in to his stubbornness in the end because she couldn’t afford to argue any longer with a man who couldn’t speak, and the horses were a real boon. She was in a hurry to be off, but whatever weighed on her mind was held too deeply for Ashley to see. Not that he tried, of course.
He had a good-natured grey mare called Sugarlump, who twisted her ears to listen to his voice as he rode. After the easy climb up the stone-bordered trail from Southwind they slowed around Westmill, where the trail was rutted from heavy use by the f
lour wagons and grain carts. They rode the horses carefully to avoid twisting a hoof. After Westmill, the trail improved again, until the washouts where they climbed from the border farms of Meadowmoor County into the lowest fringe of the Great Forest. A work crew was busy repairing the road, stacking pebbles and earth against staked planks, and they waved cheerful hellos as the four riders picked their way past them. Once they reached the ramshackle village of Brimstone, they watered the horses and bought some bread and cheese, not even pausing long enough for the sweat to cool on the horses’ coats. They let the horses stretch their legs on the log-scoured High Way running north from Brimstone. They steered clear of the village of Llury altogether, with its busy timber yards, rough-humoured loggers and carved-trinket peddlers, leaving the main road in the late afternoon, hidden by a ridge and the thick forest. Tabitha wanted to avoid the crowds, and Ashley didn’t blame her. He had seen the spectacle in Stormhaven. It would be better if nobody knew. They were well beyond Llury when they came upon a greensward amid the trees and struck camp for the night.
They picketed the horses on a piece of turf after watering them at the rivulet nearby. Mulrano rigged a basic shelter for the night, using lightweight sailcloth and a few long branches. He even collected a great bank of dry leaves and grasses for them to lie upon—he was trying to give them every comfort before tomorrow’s task. The anticipation of danger weighed upon them all.
But the danger came upon Ashley sooner than he’d expected, because Garyll decided that he needed some weapons’ training, and no sooner had he suggested it than he advanced upon Ashley, as if to prove his point.
Garyll’s baton scythed through the air toward him.
Ashley ducked, the weapon passing so close it brushed his hair. Garyll struck fast, driving Ashley back, alarmingly intent. The sun had faded from the trees, and it was difficult making out the swordmaster’s movements in the half-light.
Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Page 17