Here he takes us along on a dangerous quest with a warrior who must ultimately decide where his loyalties lie—and who finds that either choice may well be deadly.
Absence is to love what wind is to fire;
it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great.
—ROGER DE RABUTIN
ON the twenty-third day of his quest, the young man detected crabbler spoor. Swinging the reins of his mechanical steed sharply to the left, he parked in the shade of the yellow canyon wall and lightly hopped to the ground. Dust puffed under his heels, leaving deep indentations in his wake. The marks he had spied weren’t footprints. They were long and thin, as though someone had scratched the ground with a bone needle. His were the only human signs that he had seen in over a week of westward travel.
He squatted as though to examine the trail but was in reality listening more closely than he was seeing. Above the unnamed wind that blew constantly along this section of the Divide, he heard a dry rattling, as of dice in a cup. Straightening, he looked up and to his right.
Four body-lengths above him, a giant, sand-coloured spider crouched on an outcrop of ancient rock, watching him with too-numerous, pebbly eyes. He froze, watching it right back. The crabbler wasn’t the biggest he had ever seen, but it was still wider across than his arms could reach. If it jumped, he would have only an instant to draw the knife at his side or to raise a flame through the Change. And if there were more of them …
A sharp tattoo came from the other side of the canyon. A second and third crabbler were splayed across the stone like scars on the world. The brisk clatter came from the mouth parts of a fourth that was so perfectly camouflaged against the stone that he could barely see it.
That crabbler spoke slowly, intending its words for his ears.
“We know you,” it said, “Roslin of Geheb.”
Moving slowly, Ros bent down and picked up a pair of flinty stones. Holding one in each hand, and feeling somewhat foolish, he clacked out a brief reply. Master Pukje had taught him the crabbler tongue in the early days of his apprenticeship, but he had had little reason to “speak” it before.
“I am he,” he told the crabblers. “What of it?”
“You took something from us.”
That was true. A long time ago, when he had been little more than a boy, he had rescued a girl called Adi from a crabbler coven one month’s travel from here. Word had obviously spread.
He raised himself to his full height.
Years of training and exercise had made him strong, since then, and broad with it. Dark hair hung in a thick pony-tail halfway down his back. Stray curls stirred as the Change woke at his command, making the steady breeze skittish.
“You will let me pass,” he said firmly through the stones.
“You cannot,” the crabbler told him. “The way ahead is blocked.”
“Then I will unblock it.”
“You cannot,” it said again. “Turn back now.”
“Is that a threat or a warning?”
“Take it how you will, Roslin of Geheb.”
Turning lightly on its eight legs, the crabbler crawled into a crack in the stone, closely followed by its two companions.
“Wait.” Ros regretted taking such a confrontational stance. Crabblers or not, these were the first living creatures he had seen on his quest. They knew the Divide much better than he did, and could help him, perhaps, if he talked fast.
The first crabbler he had seen was heading for a similar retreat in the wall behind him.
“I’m looking for something,” he said, clacking as quickly as he could. “A dragon, of sorts. Have you …?”
But the creature scuttled away without reply, leaving him standing alone, frowning, in the canyon’s still-restless breeze. The vanes of his strand beast flapped back and forth, gathering the energy of the wind and storing it in two rows of ceramic flasks around the machine’s wooden flank. Its one hundred and twelve tiny feet were poised in attitudes of readiness, waiting for him to climb aboard and continue his journey. Not the hardiest of steeds, it barely managed his weight plus that of the pack he carried, but it was at least as quick as a camel and much less vulnerable.
You cannot. Turn back now.
He didn’t entirely trust his translation of the crabbler language. It might have been trying to tell him You cannot turn back now.
He had no doubts on that score, but how had the crabblers guessed?
Tugging on the silver locket that hung from a leather thong around his neck, he kicked up three more small clouds of dust and leapt into the saddle. Jerking the reins—actually a wooden handle connected by two strips of leather to the machine’s complicated gear-box—he spurred the strand beast back into motion. Chuffing and hissing, his wooden steed lunged forward, and the echoes of its clockwork engine bounced back at him from the rugged canyon walls.
WESTWARD, ever westward. Although the Divide snaked north and south as it sliced through the red earth of the world, it unerringly returned to face the sunset. Ros had taken to camping so the sun’s direct light would strike him of a morning, lessening the feeling of oppression that came from travelling so long in the shadow of two parallel cliffs. The canyon floor was utterly lifeless, and his eyes had grown tired of seeing nothing but yellows and browns. Even the sky above looked washed out and faded.
Not long after his encounter with the crabblers, his attention was caught by a single cloud drifting on the forward horizon. It was perfectly white, tapering from a fat centre to nothingness at its extremities, and provided a welcome break from the monotony. Ten days earlier, he had passed the ruined city of Laure, where people his age flew to and from the Hanging Mountains, trading and exchanging information. He imagined what it would be like to swoop around the wispy fringes of the cloud in one of their flimsy-looking kites. He doubted the air up there was as still as it seemed.
He wondered what Adi would think of something so whimsical and dangerous.
“I hope this letter finds you well,” she had written shortly before he had set off on his quest. The formal tone disheartened him, made him feel that he did not know her. “I hope also that it finds you unchanged in your feelings, for I remain committed to the promise we made to each other five years ago. If this letter should find you certain in the knowledge of that, I would be pleased. Be assured that it will never be otherwise.
“Most of all, I hope that this letter just finds you. It’s been so long since I last had word, and I suppose it’s only natural to worry. I keep that strange little galah you sent as a pet, even though the charm must surely have faded by now. Maybe one day it’ll tell me something new—perhaps that you’ve received this letter and are on your way back to me now, with a glad heart.
“I can dream, can’t I?” That flash of her own voice, poking through the letter’s stilted reserve, offered him the barest reassurance that he wasn’t being addressed by a complete stranger. “Do what you have to do, Ros, then come find me in return. The charm I have enclosed will show you the way. Trust it as I have trusted our hearts all these years. Don’t be led astray now, when we are closer than ever.”
The letter had been folded tightly around the silver pendant he now wore about his neck. He could tell that it was hollow but not empty, and guessed that it contained a small piece of Adi’s skin, or perhaps a chip of tooth. The letter itself had been stained brown with her blood and bound up in several plaited strands of her black hair. Unwinding the hair carefully, he had retied it in a cuff around his left wrist.
The leather thong chafed his neck sometimes. From his worrying at the pendant, he supposed, at the weight of what it symbolised.
“Don’t forget your promise to me,” Master Pukje had warned him on learning of the contents of the letter. “I said I’d teach you only if in return you perform one task for me.”
“I won’t ever forget that,” Ros had said, inclining his head even though his master couldn’t see the gesture. They had been flying low past the shallow bowl of the Nine Stars
, exercising the less-human of Master Pukje’s two forms. Ros had untied his hair and let the thick mane whip behind him in the wind, imagining that he was the one whose wings propelled them mightily through the air. “You remind me every day,” he had added.
“There’s an ocean of difference between remembering an agreement and honouring it.”
“I’ll honour it just as soon as you tell me what my task is.”
“I’ll tell you only when I’m absolutely certain you’re ready for it.”
How his master had finally concluded that he was ready, Ros didn’t know, but he was on the way now.
The pendant tugged insistently on its thong, urging him north, to where Adi was learning to manage her Clan’s caravan under her father’s tutelage. She had meant the gift to reach him, no matter what; that was why she had bound it with flesh, hair, and blood. When the time came, when his obligation to Master Pukje was fulfilled, her charm would lead him unerringly to her, whether he wanted to go or not.
There could be, as the crabblers said, no turning back.
DISTRACTED by both cloud and memories, he had long put the rest of the crabblers’ words out of his mind when he took a bend and saw exactly what they had meant.
A single, vast web stretched from one side of the Divide to the other, sparkling and gleaming where the sun struck it directly, barely visible at all where it did not. Ripples moved along silken strands, struck by the wind’s insubstantial fingers. It was too large to have been built by ordinary spiders and couldn’t have been the work of crabblers, either, since they produced no natural silk. Something else had built it, or grown it, or caused it to come into being, somehow, and he could proceed no further without breaking it.
Ros hove the strand beast to, but didn’t immediately dismount. The web was an obstacle, indeed, but unlike any he had encountered before. If he tried to walk through it, it might stretch and snap like an ordinary web. Or its apparent fragility might be a disguise for something more sinister—poison, perhaps, soaked into razor-sharp threads; or a net that would fall on him the moment he entered it.
One thing Ros had learned about the Divide was to trust appearances not at all. Better to stop and think for a moment before barging into a trap.
From his elevated vantage point, he searched for signs of malevolence. The web crossed the canyon at the waist of a slight hour-glass. On his side of the hour-glass was a pool of water, brackish and dark. A patch of orange rock marred the ubiquitous yellow expanse of the far cliff. There was, as always, no sign of other human travellers, but none of crabblers or insects, either. Just the wind, bowing the web towards him like a sail.
The sun vanished behind the cloud. It was getting late in the day. Rather than acting precipitously, Ros urged the strand beast into motion again and parked it beneath a bouldery outcrop, then climbed free. He had no tent, just a bedroll and simple cooking utensils. Fire had always been his preferred medium, summoned raw and dangerous in his youth and mastered in stages through his training, but he didn’t light one now for fear of attracting undue attention. Dipping his can into the pool and cautiously tasting the water within, he found it to be too oily and bitter to drink. No matter. He had enough in watertight pouches to survive until he reached the next source, as well as the store of dried meat that sustained him on lean days.
Settling back on his bedroll, with his feet pointing downhill towards the web, he drew a series of charms in the sand around him, to sound the alarm if anything sneaked too close during the night. Then he folded his hands behind his head and lay back to watch the sunset. Reds and yellows painted the sky from side to side, with a hint of green just before the day properly ended. Ros nodded off as the first stars came into view, and dreamed of Adi calling his name with a soft, questioning voice. He was reluctant to answer for reasons he could not fathom. Hadn’t he been waiting for this moment all his apprenticeship? Although he had done nothing specific to earn her disapproval, the shame and guilt were knife-sharp. Inaction could be as hurtful as action.
He jerked awake at midnight, disturbed by something he couldn’t immediately identify.
The moon rode high and bright directly above him, casting a silver patina over the forbidding realm of the Divide. His charms were undisturbed. Ros sat and peered around him, taking in details that now looked strikingly different than before. The strand beast was a clash of angular shadows nearby, all pleasing symmetry lost. The pool of brackish water gaped like a bottomless hole in the earth, and he wondered if its depths hid something living: a fish that had improbably splashed, or a hardy frog, perhaps. Pock-marks in the cliff walls now resembled eyes or mouths, gaping madly at him. The web—
His sharp intake of breath was followed by the scuffling of his feet. Upright, he took a dozen steps forward to see better, shading his eyes from the moon’s glare in order to make certain he was not dreaming.
The web glowed in the bright moonlight. He could see all of it now, stretching up and away from him like the world’s most insubstantial banner. And on that banner was no natural pattern, no radiating bull’s-eye as most spiders fashioned between trees and rock-faces. Nor was it a random striation of lines and shapes, without meaning or language. Depicted in the gleaming threads was a creature so vast that its wing-tips touched either side of the canyon.
A dragon, Ros marvelled. A dragon caught in a web.
Never trust appearances, he reminded himself as he came closer to the base of the web. Foreshortened, the dragon seemed even more preternatural. It had four clawed feet and a beaked nose and mouth, like a bird. Captured in mid-flight, its lines were so perfect, so convincingly realised, that Ros was surprised to see stars twinkling where flesh and skin should have been. Those long, outstretched wings should have blocked out half the sky.
Ros came within touching distance of the web. The dragon was sufficiently foreshortened that it could barely be discerned as such. One flattened foot, as broad as he was long, reached out as though to grasp and crush him, magically, into stardust. He watched that foot closely, but it showed no sign of self-direction.
The threads were so fine that they had a tendency to disappear no matter how determinedly he stared at them. Hardly daring to breathe, he knelt to examine one in particular, noting how the thread touched the ground as lightly as a real spider’s web. There was no weight, no visible glue, no stake holding it in place. Perhaps, he thought, the strand was thicker higher up, where the heft of the entire web pulled most insistently. Perhaps the strands at the bottom only prevented the base from drifting free.
Still, Ros didn’t touch it. Instead he stood up and checked four more threads and the ground near by. The bottom of the Divide might be effectively sterile, but birds did occasionally fly along it. If the web had killed any, by whatever means, it had left no bones or feathers in the sand at its base. There wasn’t so much as a dead moth.
To all appearances bar one, then, it was just a web. That one crucial appearance, of a dragon in flight, made him hesitate, but he couldn’t hesitate all night. Come morning, the dragon might be invisible again, and he couldn’t take a chance on that. He had learned to mistrust disappearances, too.
Some kind of action, immediate and decisive, was required.
Taking two steps back, he picked up a flat stone. With its blunt edge, he drew a new set of symbols into the sand at his feet and encircled them with a double line. The night adopted a sharper tone as the charm took effect, and he warned himself not to become complacent. Protection draws attention, his master had taught him. Perhaps that was why the web showed no signs at all of the Change. The thing it contained—if such it was, and not an illusion—must only be visible by particular light at particular angles; otherwise, someone would surely have seen it before him. It hadn’t needed charms to defend itself.
Until now.
Aiming carefully, every muscle ready to flee, Ros tossed the stone one-handed at the nearest thread.
It bounced off with a twang and sent a series of tiny shock waves shimmering acr
oss the face of the web. The dragon’s claw seemed to clench, then the whole thing was shaking. Ros stared and listened with growing surprise. Instead of fading into silence, the twang became a hum, sustained by the on-going vibration of the web’s individual strands. And out of the vibrations, out of the hum, a voice spoke.
“Why,” it asked him, “are you here?”
“THERE’S a dragon,” Master Pukje had told him on the day Ros began the quest that would release him from his apprenticeship. “There’s a dragon living in the Divide. I want you to find it for me.”
Ros had thought he was getting off lightly. “Is that all?”
“Don’t be so sure of yourself, boy. It’ll be hidden as I am, but by different means, and cunning with it. Your task is threefold: first you have to find it; then you have to kill it; finally, you must prove to me that you have done as I instructed.”
“You want me to bring you its head?”
Master Pukje’s smile had been slyly amused. “If it has one, yes. That would definitely do the trick.”
THINKING back to that smile, Ros now wondered if his master had known all along what he would find.
“Why shouldn’t I be here?” he replied, but the hum had faded, and the dragon was silent again.
There were several stones within reach from the inside of his protective circle. Ros grabbed the largest and tossed it with greater force at the web.
Dragon Book, The Page 27