by Carol Berg
So that’s how I knew where we were as we stood on the dark crag, buffeted by a gale that blew cold from one direction, and then hot from another, and then slowed to a balmy breeze sighing and swirling about our legs like a cat’s tail. I knew it in the same way I knew how to walk and how to breathe.
Our perch stuck out of a rugged ridge that stretched as far as we could see to our right and left. In the distance the eerie light revealed clusters of twisted shapes that looked like trees, but my dreams had shown me that they were, in fact, oddly formed towers. A few spidery paths threaded their way through the lowlands from the vague distances to left and right, converging on a low range of hills in the center of the horizon. Beyond the hills… yes, there it was again, lit by another flash of green lightning… stood the spiral tower from my dreams. Vroon had shown it to me when I dreamed of this place, but I had never determined whether he was trying to get me to go there or warning me to stay away.
Paulo stood at my shoulder. “So what do we do now we’re here, whether this is the Breach or somewhere else? How does this tell us what happened to the Lady, or why the Prince is so sure you’re still one of the Lords?”
“I don’t know. I just think the answer must be here. But we ought to wait for better light before we head down, I think.”
“I’ll stand watch. Can’t go back, and I’m not going anywhere without you’re close, so you might as well get some sleep if you need to.”
I huddled in the lee of a mottled gray rock, cracked down to its heart with a dead shrub sticking out of it, but I didn’t think I could sleep. I just sat there wondering if my real life would show up in my dreams, now that my dreams were outside of me.
“Here.” No mistaking Ob’s massive presence. I peered out from under my heavy eyelids. The leathery man squatted beside me, smiling. Astonishing how the sound of a word can tell you so much. He wasn’t offering to give me anything or calling me to come somewhere other than the place I was. His simple word was spoken in pure wonder. I was here. In this place.
“I am most definitely here,” I said, standing up and wishing for the cloak and blanket I’d left behind on the moonlit ridge in Valleor. The alternating gusts of hot and cold wind were equally unpleasant through my damp clothes. “ ‘Where next’ is likely more important right now.”
“Most eagerly are you expected,” said Vroon. “Your subjects await your command. Devastatingly honored are we to lead you to your abode, where you will take up your kingdom and order it as to your least desire. May you reign until the Unbounded is no more, and the Bounded has grown ancient in its days!” It was somewhat difficult to interpret these pronouncements, as Vroon’s face was flat against the stone at my feet.
“Take up my what?”
“Your kingdom, sire.”
“Vroon, would you please stand up? I can’t hear over this wind.”
Though it seemed I had dropped off to sleep, I could not have slept long. The land was still locked in night, and I didn’t feel as if I’d slept an entire day around. Storms raged across half the sky. Vroon popped to his feet, but kept his eyes cast down. “We have prepared a wall place of magnificence, a fastness as befits our king. If it pleases you not, we will slay the makers who chose wrongly and start again.”
If my damp and dirty clothes hadn’t itched me so sorely, and if my empty stomach hadn’t rumbled so convincingly, I might have thought this was another bizarre dream, where everyone makes sense to each other, but not to you. “Where is your king?”
“Here, great Master! You are the king, the One Who Makes Us Bounded. You have found your way here as the Source prophesied, and have come to lead us to victory over other bounded worlds. Your glory will be everlasting!” The dwarf snuffled in his beard and fell down to the ground again. By this time Ob and Zanore had flattened themselves on the damp rock, too.
“No, no. There’s been a mistake. I’m not a king… and not likely to be… ”
I was the designated successor to a king. Yes, the person who reigned in Avonar was called “the Prince” or “the Heir of D’Arnath.” But that was just because the Dar’Nethi thought that no one since the great D’Arnath himself had been worthy of being called king. But even if I had wanted the title, I had no illusions about my claim to D’Arnath’s throne. The Dar’Nethi would have something to say about the Fourth Lord of Zhev’Na sitting in D’Arnath’s chair.
“… and I’m certainly not the king of this place. I’ve only come here to find some answers.”
“Whatever answering you desire shall be yours, most majestic one.”
Paulo had propped his shoulder against the sheer cliff face. In between yawns, he cast a hostile eye on the rest of us. “Might start your reign by asking about breakfast, Your Majesty. They seem set on pleasing you.”
I wanted to kick him. Zanore popped his silver-haired head up from the stone, his amber eyes gleaming in the dark like hot coals. “Shall we slay this rudeness-speaking, Majesty?”
The three of them seemed to know everything I felt and take it much too seriously. “No! Most certainly not. Don’t kill anybody.”
“Appreciate that,” Paulo grumbled. “Just let me starve slowly. Do you know how long you were asleep? It was at least - ”
“Look,” I said to the three, “is there someone who can answer some questions? Someone with some authority? Who sent you to find me?”
Vroon lifted his head, the wind threatening to tear off his curly hair and beard. “For all the time of our remembering, we have awaited the king. He dreamed of us, and we felt his presence… your presence. But even with a manylight waiting, you had not come, and it was thought you could not remember us because of the time passing. And so we traveled through this moon-door, searched, and found the one who dreamed us, and then we saved you from the Sword Wielder who would have left you unbounded. The Source it was that commanded our sending - the Source knows all about you and about our waiting - and the Guardian chose the three of us from all Singlars to go. Our honor was unmatched, though we know not why - ”
A constant rumbling thunder like a stampede of herd beasts interrupted him. Fat drops of hot rain spattered on us from fast-moving, purple-streaked clouds. The wind had shifted so that it was blasting straight up from the plains, and it seemed to be staying cold for a while, so that as soon as we were thoroughly soaked from the hot drops, our teeth were clattering.
“Let’s continue this somewhere more sheltered!” I yelled in Vroon’s ear. “Can you lead us to this Source?”
“To the Source we cannot take you. Only to the Guardian. The Guardian can make answerings… if he will.”
“All right, then. Take us to the Guardian.”
Vroon prostrated himself again, apologizing that he could not transport us instantly as was sometimes possible outside the Bounded. I interrupted his abasement. “It’s all right. I wouldn’t want to travel that way in this land anyway. Please, just show us the way before we freeze. We need shelter and food.”
The three jumped to their feet. After a brief consultation which I could not hear, Zanore, his amber eyes like two great fireflies, bowed and took the lead, jogging ahead of us down a steep, narrow path. Though the path zigzagged sharply, every pitch seemed to head directly into the bitter wind. We stepped carefully. The rain made the black rock slick, and a misplaced boot would have left little to scrape off the sharp rocks below. The half-dark was no help, either. Each lightning bolt left me squinting to see beyond an arm’s reach.
“When does the sky get light?” I shouted at Ob and Vroon, who hovered around me like hummingbirds at a red flower.
“No sky-brightness shines in the Bounded, not as in the other bounded worlds.”
Paulo, raindrops dribbling down his face, nodded knowingly. “I tried to tell you. You slept a good four hours, and the sun never showed up.”
Vroon chimed in again. “Mayhap you will bring us sky-brightness, Majesty! By you could it be done.”
His eager assurance struck me colder than the wind. “I
don’t do that sort of thing. If you expect sorcery from me, you’d best think again.”
Vroon halted abruptly, looking like a fountain gargoyle as the rain cascaded down his crinkled forehead, long beard, and ample belly. I walked on.
The dwarf did manage to soothe my annoyance after a while. About the time I realized that the unnatural quiet was his absence, I sensed rather than heard pelting footsteps on the track behind us. I stopped, holding on to a stunted tree that poked out of the rock so a wind gust wouldn’t knock me off the path. Vroon skidded to a stop right beside Paulo, his one eye hidden behind a pile of cloaks and bags.
“I happened across these things,” said Vroon. “The moon-door was open, and the One Who Makes Us Bounded wished them here.”
By the time I dragged my cloak out of the pile, Paulo held his gray saddlebag in one hand and was cramming a biscuit into his mouth with the other. He offered me the bag. “Breakfast.”
We trudged downward. The provisions stowed in our recently empty saddlebag were no more than dry, sweetish biscuits, old cheese, and weak ale, but they settled in the stomach as nicely as a Long Night feast.
Even if Vroon could have transported us straight to our destination, I would have insisted on walking. The Lord Parven had been a master of military strategy for a thousand years, and he had taught me everything he could stuff into my head during my time in Zhev’Na. Several of his lessons came to mind that night. Never accept favors from either an ally or an enemy unless it is to save your life. And never enter an ally’s stronghold without knowing how to get out of it as easily as you got in.
We walked briskly in the wild purple-and-green storm, able to move faster as we headed out of the craggy foothills into the lowlands. The ground was packed hard and mostly barren, though at a distance I could see a few twiggy trees no taller than I. Between the trees, the land showed a softer profile that might indicate low grasses or scrub.
Distances were deceptive. The closest tower had looked to be a good two hours’ march, but we’d not been walking half that when we passed by it.
Paulo stopped and looked over his shoulder. “Did you see him?”
“See who?”
“The fellow by that pile of rock back there. He had two arms on one side of him, a regular one, and a little, stubby one. Never saw the like.”
“No, I didn’t see.”
“He bowed as we went by. Look… there’s another.”
A ragged, hunchbacked old woman was standing beside a short squat tower. As we walked past she lifted her hands and fell to her knees, her eyes fixed on me. Just beyond her, a man with bright red hair and no eyes popped into view just beside another tower, as if he’d been inside and had stepped right through the wall onto his front stoop to learn what passed by his door. The towers looked like piles of solid rock, but I began to wonder if they were dwellings of some sort. The eyeless man’s head followed us just as though he could see, and as we left him behind he bowed very low.
“It’s like they’re worshipping you. Like you were their Lord… ” Disgust boiled out of Paulo like sap from a burning pine branch. I kept walking. He could believe what he liked.
The rain lashed our faces until we were numb, and the gale made it difficult to stay upright, but every tower produced someone to pay homage as we passed. All were dressed in shapeless tunics of grayish brown, and almost every one of the people appeared to be malformed - missing limbs or extra ones, bodies too wide or too tall, twisted or misshapen. Yet they were men and women, not monsters.
Seeing these people made me think about the shepherd’s son whose tale had led us here. He had been born with only one hand, so his father had said, and had believed he was going to a “place where he belonged.” And the Queen of Leire had said that most of those who had disappeared from the Four Realms in the past year had been people mutilated or malformed. But I had never seen such monstrous deformities as some of these.
Soon we came to an even larger cluster of towers, hundreds of them crowded together like a city. As Zanore threaded his way between them, I pulled off my hood and wiped the rain from my eyes so I could see more. The towers were every shape and size, some as tall as the towers of Comigor Keep, some no more than a jumble of stones, some smooth-sided spirals soaring into the low clouds, some squat and ugly stacks of pebbles or piles of sticks and mud. Most were made of a greenish stone streaked with dirty pink, though a few were dark-colored or of indeterminate grays. In the dim light I could see no doors or windows or other openings in their sides. The occupants moved in and out with a soft thwop.
The rain finally stopped, and the sky settled to a mottled black and purple, with charcoal-colored clouds floating across the sparkling green stars. The wind turned warm and died down to a sighing moan.
I stopped for a moment to gape at an immense tower, the tallest in the cluster, knobby and bulging at its base, but soaring smoothly upward into a bulb-shaped knot on the top. The colors of the stone seemed unsettled: here more pink, there more green, now reversed or taking on a purple cast. I couldn’t tell whether the shifting was a property of the stone or only a result of the uncertain light.
“That is the tower of the long-lived one, the Singlar who taught us how to harvest tappa and use it to - ”
Vroon was interrupted by a sharp snapping sound over our heads. Someone in one of the towers gave a horrific shriek. Then, the world fell apart.
Skull-cracking explosions thundered behind, above, and on either side of me. Jagged rents of searing white shattered earth and sky into a hundred fragments. The huge tower sheared down the middle, a blurred cascade of color pouring out of the ruin into the white brilliance of the gaping chasm that opened between its halves. Three… four horrified faces plummeted through the air and vanished into the white fire, shrill, agonized screams trailing behind them, as the stone shells cracked and toppled after.
“Majesty! Have care!” screeched Vroon, yanking me aside as I gawked at a snaking white line that ripped the black road threatening to pass right between my legs.
This was my dream all over again. Every streak of white that split the world stabbed a red-hot lance into the region just behind my eyes.
A rift appeared underneath a young man with a twisted shoulder who was running toward us down the road. Screeching, he reached out his arms toward me as he hung for just a moment over the fiery void. But I couldn’t move. His cries filled my head long after he had dropped into the rift… or perhaps I was screaming, too, as I held on to my head to keep it from shattering right along with the world.
“Wake up. Wake up,” I yelled, as I always did when my nightmares became unbearable. But this time, I didn’t wake.
Vroon and Ob were cut off from me by another rent, and a powerful hand jerked me away from the brink of a yawning white chasm.
“Demons of the deep, watch yourself.” Paulo.
Three more times he pulled me away from toppling towers or flaming cracks. Our dark island grew smaller. Shards of rock bounced around us like granite hailstones. Dust and ash swirled and stung my eyes. I had to end this. Even if a tower didn’t crush us or a rift open up under our feet, if this world came apart… if I couldn’t ease the pain in my head… I was going to lose control of myself. The Lords would find me… take me back.
In my dreams I could quench the fire, but here… I needed darkness. Not the empty, cold dark - the dread, unfeeling power of Lordship that I was trying so hard to keep shut away - but darkness soft and enveloping like dreamless sleep, like hiding your face in your father’s cloak, like racing through a cool midnight on Jasyr’s back. I knew only one place dark enough, even in a world as dark as the Breach.
Forcing my lungs to keep breathing, I sank to my wobbling knees, closed my eyes, and turned inward. As I knew it would be, the firestorm was inside me as well as outside, the network pattern of blazing white seared into the blank canvas of my mind. But here I could control it.
Blot out the light. Paint over the streaks. Follow their patterns and rub them
away. Make the world gray again… dark and safe. Seal the cracks. Let the white fire burn as it will behind your dark walls. Pain is nothing to one who has come of age in Zhev’Na. It will go when the burning is done. When the need is ended. For now, just make it dark…
“Stay away from him. Let him breathe.” From some indescribable distance, I heard Paulo. “Curse it all, leave him be.”
I opened my eyes. I was sprawled on the hard, damp earth, two sharp, pointed rocks digging holes in my back. Paulo stood at my side, his long arms spread out to either side of me, shielding me from a growing crowd of people creeping toward us, hands outstretched. Craning my neck, I saw that Vroon, Ob, and Zanore had their arms spread, too, the four of them making a complete circle about me.
“Cripes, I thought you’d never come out of it,” said Paulo, grabbing a scrawny youth with mottled skin who had crept past his barricade and was tugging at my cloak.
“I wish Jasyr and Molly were here,” I said, hoarsely, rolling to my side. “I could use a ride.” I felt as dry as a September hay field, and I was shivering like aspen leaves.
“They’d be dead of fright,” he said. “I was close enough to it.” He used one of his long legs to prevent a bald woman from pulling off one of my boots. “It was your dream, then… come to life just like the rest of this?”
“Yes.”
I pulled my cloak tight and climbed to my feet, surveying the destruction. About a quarter of the towers in this group were crumbled to dust or missing altogether. The road we’d traveled was erased, and, in fact, the whole landscape was in a jumble, like broken pottery hastily crammed back together. Ridges and ravines, pits and potholes and piles of rubble had appeared where there had been none before.