The Last Days Of The Edge Of The World

by Brian Stableford

  The king of Caramorn, sitting on his stool and watching nervously, felt less like a mighty monarch and ruler of men than he had ever felt before.

  “It’s very complicated, isn’t it?” he ventured, when the silence seemed intolerable.

  “It’s mostly for show,” muttered Sirion Hilversun. “Magic is a very showy art. I don’t know why, but if you don’t go in for all the gaudiness and staginess it doesn’t work too well. All the best enchanters have been hams.”

  “Are you sure you couldn’t save my kingdom?” asked Rufus, regretfully. “With all of this at your disposal?”

  The enchanter snorted. “It’s not only the process that’s mostly for show,” he said. “Most of the effects are showy, too. Omens and oracles and interviews with the extinct are fairly straightforward, and you can conjure little things to do extraordinary work for you. But saving kingdoms … that’s something else again. Your ancestor did more than banish enchanters, you know. He banished the magic from the land itself. That made the difference. Most magical trickery has few enough lasting effects, and they’re mostly bad. It’s a great deal easier to put a curse on than lift one off, if you see my meaning.”

  The king sighed, not really following the argument, but knowing that the answer to his question was negative.

  “Quiet, now,” warned the enchanter. “I’m beginning.”

  With a wand in his left hand and a tiny silver bell in his right, Sirion Hilversun began to read from the pages of the great book. From time to time he paused to refer to a parchment that was on a lectern to his right, prevented from rolling up by two crystal paperweights which had once been eyes peering into eternity from odd angles.

  Rufus Malagig watched the candle-flames dance and flutter to the rhythm of the spell, watched their coloured smoke curl and whirl with every insistent note of the little bell. He watched the walls seem to withdraw until they had hidden themselves in a pale smoky murk, and the ragged circle of piled-up junk become vague and unobtrusive, until they no longer seemed to be in the cellars of Moonmansion at all, but in some strange half-place beyond the known world, suspended between reality and illusion.

  Rufus Malagig felt inside himself a dread so cold and alien that he wondered whether he, too, might not follow the hard rock into dissolution and half-existence. He was not really a brave man, and this dread gripped him wholly, eating away inside him. But he controlled himself, telling himself that once he had lived through this he need never be afraid again. Cold sweat formed in his eyebrows, but he would not even shiver.

  Locked in this little spell-conjured bubble, out of phase with all the manifold worlds, bounded and defined by the tiny candle-flames, the incantation came swiftly to its climax, and Jeahawn Kambalba appeared.

  He was an old, old man—far more ancient in appearance than Sirion Hilversun, with his skin all but petrified and his whole frame consumed with an attitude of antiquity. His purple eyes seemed very large because they had no whites, but the purple was pale and weak.

  The king had expected a taller man, a man still radiant with an aura of unearthly power, garbed as a fearful wizard in full panoply. But Jeahawn Kambalba was a small man, and he was wearing an old grey cloak without any markings, drawn in at the waist by a hempen rope. He was also round-shouldered.

  For some seconds, he stood within his pentagram, staring at Sirion Hilversun. Then he said: “The call is answered.”

  “My name…” began Sirion Hilversun.

  “I know your name. I know all names. Be quick. The names will not long hold power.”

  “My daughter,” said Sirion Hilversun. “She is caught in your web. With a boy. We want to help them.”

  “There can be no help,” said Jeahawn the Judge, quietly. “Not while they stand alone in Hamur and Sheal.”

  “And afterwards?”

  “It is the end.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of the ancient magic. Of the curses and the spells that have sickened the land beyond repair. Of the pestilence. Of the Abyss and of Chaos so close to Earth. Of everything that remains of Elfspin and Jargold, Viranian and Ambrael, of their wars… and even of the Age of Glorious Enchantment which was before.”

  “The end of this world,” said Sirion Hilversun.

  “The world always survives,” said Jeahawn Kambalba. “But it is not always the same world.”

  “When the web is finished,” asked Sirion Hilversun, “may we then help Helen and the boy?” “Not with magic,” replied Jeahawn. “But we can help?”

  “The cliff will crumble,” answered the dead man. “The gates will break. The land will split and slip and slide. Black fires will burn and black floods quench them. Chaos will retreat, and the sea will come to claim it all. The sea will have everything. If they shall be saved, it is from the sea that you must save them.”

  There was a moment’s silence when the shade had finished. While Sirion Hilversun hesitated, the image within the pentagram began to dwindle and fade.

  “Wait!” called the enchanter, finding his voice again. “When! I must know when!”

  The image was gone, the candles spluttering in a sudden cold, damp wind. But a voice came back… a voice out of nowhere.

  “There are no more tomorrows, my sister’s son….

  There is only now.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  When the mist swirled around them, cutting off starlight, Ewan’s candle flickered and died. Helen frowned, because it was only recently that she had worked a spell that should have kept it alight all night. She recited the spell again. It did not work.

  Ewan tried to strike a match to relight it in the normal way, but that wouldn’t work either. Magic and logic were, it seemed, equally helpless here.

  “It’s because we’re so close to Chaos,” said Helen. “I’ve never been into the eternal mists before.”

  “How do we find our way?” asked Ewan.

  Helen shrugged. “It’s not far,” she said. “And I think the mist has a faint light of its own. We’ll get there.”

  And so they went on.

  The mist which had shrouded the edge of the world since the dawn of time did have a curious light of its

  own, by which Helen and Ewan could see one another, but they could not see the ground on which the old grey mare walked. Ewan simply let her hold her own course. She seemed quite undismayed.

  The air around them seemed to sparkle because of the illumination in the mist. It was almost as if they were walking on the bottom of an ocean bed, with tiny ripples in the water catching the sunlight from beyond the watery horizon. The light was an ochreous yellow in colour.

  At first, there were trees and bushes beside the path that they followed, whose branches, white and frosted, intruded into their sphere of vision. But soon there were no more branches, and no more intrusions. There was only the mist.

  “I don’t like it,” said Ewan. “I’m going to get down and lead her. I can feel the way with my feet.”

  He dismounted and knelt down to look at the ground beneath the mist. No grass grew here—there was just bare rock and ochre sand. The sand sat in the cracks in the rock, undisturbed by any wind. It seemed as if no wind had ever blown here.

  Ewan stood up, dusting a little of the sand from his hand, where it had clung when he had touched the ground. The friction reminded him that his hands were still sore. They went on, Ewan leading the mare. He didn’t feel apprehensive about their direction. It was as though it was built into him. He felt that he couldn’t go wrong, and that while progress might be slow they were being drawn inevitably to their destination.

  They didn’t talk while they went on through the mist. Their doubts and uncertainties were crushed somewhere inside of them, and no longer could be voiced. Ewan did not look back to smile at Helen or to make any other gesture of reassurance. Though they were still together they each felt that in the mist they were essentially alone. The mist separated and isolated their minds, even though their bodies almost touched.

  T
he coldness made Ewan’s blistered hands ache somewhat, but it was a clean pain that he could easily ignore. His mind seemed unusually remote from the feelings of his body. His legs worked mechanically, and he was hardly aware of the measure of his stride or the fall of his feet. He could not sense the beating of his heart. Helen, too, was detached from the fatigue that afflictd her body. They were hardly aware of the passing of time … if, indeed, any time was passing at all in the eternal mists.

  Eventually, though, the mist began to thin out. The air was slowly drained of its yellow light, and they came once more into a clear night. The only difference was that here there were no shining stars: only an endless curtain of perfect darkness. There was light, but it was the strangest light they had ever seen. There were flames, the colour of blood, drifting in the air—not high in the sky but near to them… so near that Ewan might have reached out his hands and touched them as they drifted by… flames where there was nothing to burn; cold flames. Ewan did not reach out to touch, afraid what might happen to his hands if they made contact with such alien things.

  Before them was a shallow upward slope of ebony rock, rough and cracked, but shining here and there with the reflected light of the flames.

  Ewan glanced at Helen. She shrugged her shoulders. He understood what she meant. There was no further need to be surprised. The world they were in now had no responsibilities at all to expectations shaped by one they had left on the other side of the mists.

  Helen dismounted too, now, and they went on up the slope on foot, the grey mare plodding loyally after them. Helen and Ewan placed their feet carefully, afraid of the jagged rock. The only sound in this whole world was the ringing of the mare’s metal shoes on the brittle black stone.

  When they reached the rim, they could look out into chaos.

  They stood on the edge of a vast, sheer cliff which fell away for ever beneath their feet. Far, far below there was a greyness that looked a little like an ocean and a little like a fog. But it was neither liquid nor gas, and it certainly was not solid—it was no material state at all, but something formless, that defied the eye to make sense of its aspect.

  To Ewan, who had watched the surface of the black pool while Zemmoul had risen from the deep, it did not seem so terrible. The fear that stirred in his mind was a special fear, unlike any feeling that had ever woken there before. This was not merely the unknown, but the unknowable, something that human senses had never been intended to encounter, something the human mind was not equipped to cope with. He was not frightened so much as dislocated, his mind threatened not by any active or persuasive force but by sheer meaninglessness. The challenge was not to his courage but to his sense of being, his awareness of himself.

  An uneasy vertigo, which sent slow, sullen waves of dizziness up his spine, made him step back a little way from the edge. He shook his head and shivered.

  With Helen, the feeling was exactly the same. Though she had lived all her life in the magic lands, and was familiar with virtually all common supernatural creatures and manifestations, she, too, had no experience which

  had prepared her to cope with this. It was as completely alien to her as it was to Ewan. But she stood perfectly still, fighting very hard to stay outwardly calm. She knew that the worst was still to come.

  Extending from the rim of the black cliff, forty or fifty yards to the left of where they stood, was a pair of narrow bridges. They started together but diverged at an acute angle. Each bridge was perhaps half a mile in length, and each one ended at the lip of an inverted cone of rock, suspended in mid-air high above chaos. On the flat, round top of each inverted cone was an archway-a simple flat-topped gate. Each bridge was about eight inches wide and seemed, at this distance, to have hardly any thickness at all.

  Helen began to walk towards the point at which bridges met the cliff. Ewan followed her. The grey mare followed Ewan.

  They did not speak until they reached the starting point. Then, while they paused and contemplated the last part of their mission, Ewan murmured: “Don’t look down.”

  “What?” asked Helen.

  “Wynkyn’s advice,” said Ewan, raising his voice slightly. “Don’t look down.”

  Human voices sounded eerie in this alien air, although Ewan could not quite decide what it was about them that was different.

  “We’ve looked down,” said Helen. “How could we help it?”

  “I think it’s while we’re walking that we shouldn’t look down,” said Ewan. “Keep our eyes and our minds on the gates. Keep order in our thoughts. It wouldn’t be wise to look into chaos while trying to balance on an eight-inch span that’s no thicker than cardboard.”

  “True,” admitted Helen.

  “Self-composure is the key,” said Ewan. “It must be. We have to keep our heads.” ‘

  All this was obvious, but Helen let him say it all out loud. It was good to be able to talk, to make sense of it in words, to affirm some kind of determination and capability.

  “Half a mile isn’t far,” she said. “It only takes ten minutes. Eight inches is quite enough. And the bridges will bear our weight. They must. We have to have a chance of getting there, or the whole thing’s ridiculous.”

  “They’ll bear our weight,” agreed Ewan. “Perhaps that’s why the spell selected us: we’re neither of us very heavy. Seven-stone weaklings to save the world. Well, eight and a half.”

  “We’re neither of us weaklings,” murmured Helen.

  “No,” said Ewan.

  There was a pause. Then Ewan said: “We’d better go.”

  And Helen said: “Yes.” And they went.

  Walking the bridges was a battle between knowledge and imagination. Ewan knew that eight inches was quite wide enough to walk on without undue danger of falling off. He knew, too, that the bridge must be able to support his weight. And he didn’t look down, because he knew that the abyss beneath him was irrelevant to the task in hand.

  But knowing something is not the same as accepting it. In the apprehensive eye of his mind Ewan could visualize a false step that would topple him from the narrow black strip. He could visualize the ribbon of rock crumbling or cracking or dissolving into dust. And while he could not visualize the chaos that lurked below, he could certainly imagine all the sensations of falling… falling … falling….

  It took more than courage to walk the bridges. It took conviction—not the power of mind over matter but the power of mind over mind. Unlike the power of mind over matter, with which Helen was familiar, the power of mind over mind was something they both had to discover from first principles. But they did it, although they discovered in the process that half a mile is really a long, long way. They crossed the bridges.

  Because the gates were slanted they could see one another as they took their stand within them. They were not directly facing one another, but they only had to turn their heads a little to meet one another’s gaze.

  The gates were not gates in the sense that they allowed access to some other world. They were just arches of rock. But as Ewan and Helen stood within them, shadowed from the glow of the drifting red flames, they each felt a sense of immanence, as though they genuinely did stand at the threshold not of two worlds but a thousand or a million—as though the whole of creation was close at hand. Perhaps, for those who knew how to use the gates, this nearness was actual, so that a traveller could step from the shadow to any place that is, was, or ever could be. But for Ewan and Helen, it was only a sensation—just a feeling.

  Ewan, who stood within the gate named Hamur, experienced the feeling as a strange chill which seemed to begin deep inside his belly and slowly radiated outwards, consuming his entrails and running like quicksilver along his nerves to the tips of his fingers and his toes. Last of all it crept around the loculus of his skull, cradling his brain.

  He didn’t shiver.

  Helen, who stood within the gate named Sheal, felt a numbness which grew from the back of her neck and oozed through her head and spine and extended a strange s
tickiness into all her senses, so that everything outside her became soft and heavy and grey and sweet, and she seemed within herself to become liquid.

  She did not faint or sway.

  It was Ewan who had to speak first, to keep the order of the spell, but Helen, her voice thick and slow, voiced the question for him:

  If you take your stand in Hamur’s place at edge of world and gate of space what feeling creeps within your bone?

  And Ewan answered: “Cold.” There was a pause. Then Ewan recited the second part of the stanza, prompting Helen:

  Aloof from Sheal the shadowed deep at edge of world and gate of sleep what do you feel as you stand alone?

  And Helen replied: ‘Tired.” Then the world fell apart.

  The black cliff crumbled into slick black sand. The cones of rock on which the gates stood began to melt, great gobs dripping into the abyss. The bridges shimmered and shattered and were gone, falling like tiny showers of metallic rain. As the gates themselves lost their shape and substance Ewan and Helen found their nightmare come true.

  They fell.

  But they did not fall like normal, solid objects. They fell like dead leaves or fragments of thistledown, borne up by an invisible force which might have been in the air that cushioned them or within themselves. They could not tell, and in their frightened minds it did not seem to matter, for the truth of it was that they were falling… falling… falling towards the grey chaos, and the horror of the feeling that came with the realization eclipsed all else within their minds.

  Ewan wanted to stretch out his arms and put his legs together, to pretend that he could glide, but he couldn’t make his brain control his body. It made no difference. Still he floated down.

  Helen tried desperately to think of a spell—any spell that might offer any help at all—but no spell would come … no rhyme at all.