Correct, stated Conscience.
As the sun began to die in the sky, bleeding slowly to oblivion behind the rim of the world, Lucy made a shelter for the night. She stopped at a small gravel beach where the stream ox-bowed around in a lugubrious arch. She rubbed two sticks together but, once again, failed to make a fire. She really wanted to eat the sausages she’d brought with her, but she thought that raw sausage meat would make her ill. Lucy made do with bread and cheese, swallowing the bread in hard mouthfuls, washing it down with some water from the stream. It was fresh and so cold it made her teeth tingle.
The darkness began to steal in around her, turning her idyllic beach into a cold, hard, gravel bed. She went to the lee of the bank as the wind whipped down the valley, scouring it of all the warmth the sun had left behind. She reached to the bank’s top and pulled the fronds of a fern down over herself to make a rude shelter.
She didn’t like the idea that someone was controlling the world around her. All the birds she saw were an oppressive reminder that this world was not like hers. It was a controlled environment, but controlled by whom?
Why did a world, controlled by someone, need her to save it? The compulsion spell in her chest beat a heavy rhythm: save the world—use the key—save the world—it’s you who is important.
But, that didn’t make any sense, why was she, Lucy Gayle, important to this world? What was this prophecy? When would she meet the wizard again? She mainly wanted to meet the wizard to give him a piece of her mind, an unpleasant piece, possibly using profane language.
We should come to the end of the forest tomorrow, said Conscience prophetically, as Lucy huddled close to the earth of the bank for warmth.
How do you know? I thought you said you were broken?
I’m not completely broken. Like I said, bits are coming back. I believe we’ll come to the end of the forest tomorrow.
I don’t think you can be right. I climbed a tree just before we stopped and there was no sign of the forest ending for miles and miles. It went on, in a great flat plane of pine trees.
Well, we’ll see tomorrow. I don’t have all the answers, I’m just the guiding spell, and I say we’ll come to the forest’s end tomorrow.
Lucy fought at the edge of sleep, yawning widely into the darkness.
Well, I’m pleased you’re feeling a bit better, Conscience. I could really use you as a guide.
I don’t think I’m that fixed yet. I just have this inkling we’ll come to the end of the forest tomorrow. The trouble is that after the forest is the desert: the desert of K’hund. Oh dear, that can’t be good.
Lucy didn’t hear. She was fast asleep beneath the turning moon and the lonely stars.
~
The morning sun crept onto the horizon like blood in a stream, red tendrils colouring the sky.
The hunter splashed cool stream water onto his face. His lank hair hung in matted ringlets framing his gaunt features. The girl headed towards him; he could sense her approach, inexorable as the dawn. He stared at his grinning reflection in the stream and his eyes lit up like diamonds in a coal mine.
The wind shot down the stream past him, whipping his long, dirty, grey hair about his face. He lifted his wide-brimmed fedora, tying his hair back in a ponytail with a thick cord of faun-hide, then he replaced the hat on his greasy head.
He could feel her now as she slept, like a pang of a broken heart, if he had had a heart. She wasn’t far away from him, perhaps a day, maybe less. On the other side of the desert, he guessed. Yes, so maybe a day and a half.
He’d felt her enter this world, like the soft patter of leaves falling from trees. Now, she headed for him. He’d felt her enter just as he’d felt the wizard leave. Damn that wizard! He’d followed Bechet, but it was too late; the fool passed on the key to this girl and paid the price for his treachery. Now the little girl would have to pay as well.
He felt no guilt at the thought of taking the girl’s life; he had a job to do. He must protect the world as he knew it. It must be done, no matter the cost.
The hunter reached under his heavily muddied, leather overcoat and brought out a knife. It was a ten-inch blade that gave way to a curved ivory handle. She was coming, and he would be waiting for her. He scraped the knife across the two-day stubble on his face; the stark scratching sound startling some ravens in a nearby tree.
The hunt was on and the ravens were abroad—he would win. He always won.
The hunter rose from his crouching position and began to trek west, away from the rising sun. The ravens circled over his head like thunder clouds on a summer’s day.
~
Lucy opened her eyes with a start. Something was wrong. Something had changed. The sounds of the world had changed.
The previous morning she’d been greeted by the rustle of the wind in the trees, the beat of the spell in her chest, the snuffling of a rather inquisitive badger and the myriad of bird songs that Conscience spent most of the morning identifying for her. That was what had happened yesterday.
What was different now? Wind still rustled in the trees. The spell still beat in her chest: save the world—heal the world—use the key. There wasn’t an inquisitive badger trying to pilfer her rucksack. That was a plus. There were no bird calls either, but there was something else missing, something more fundamental to the world had disappeared.
It’s the water you can’t hear.
Conscience was right. The sounds of the running stream had vanished. When she’d gone to bed, Lucy had been in the lee of an oxbow in the river. Now, she was slumped in between two rotting logs like a stranded, upside-down turtle on a beach, marooned by the tide. Not even the stream-bed remained to say where the water had once been.
Lucy tried to move and felt a sickening crunch as her neck cracked back from its comfortably numb position.
She felt the discs of her vertebrae slide, scraping over each other, as she righted herself.
Conscience, what’s going on?
I didn’t see. I can only see the outside using your eyes—you had them shut.
All right, you didn’t see anything. Did you hear anything?
Yes, one-minute water, the next minute not a sound.
Conscience, how did this happen? You predicted this. What’s going on?
I don’t know, I just had this feeling last night that we’d come to a desert today. If you’re asking my opinion, then I think whoever is controlling this world has changed the scenery on us.
“That’s not fair!” she shouted at the world in general.
The world didn’t care. Her voice echoed around the ferns and bounced back to her.
“It’s cheating!”
Saying it’s not fair isn’t going to solve very much. We don’t have any power here. I think we’ll have to play by the rules as they get changed, suggested Conscience. Come on, let’s get moving, maybe we can find someone who’ll know what’s happening.
“All right,” she shouted, “I’ll play along for a while longer, but I will stop playing if people are going to start cheating.”
She shouldered her backpack and started to walk through the deathly quiet forest towards the rising sun.
As the sun climbed over her head, she stopped for a break by another a fallen tree. Its bark was damp with rot and large, dirty brown mushroom tops stuck out of it like raised scales on a fish. Lucy cut herself another hunk of bread (now hard) and gobbled the last of her cheese.
I don’t think I’ve planned this very well. I’m going to run out of food soon. Maybe, I should start eating the mushrooms?
I wouldn’t do that, counselled Conscience. They’re polypore mushrooms; they won’t kill you, but you might as well eat the rotting log. It’ll taste just as nice.
Fine, even so, we’ve got to find something soon, or we’ll be in real trouble.
~
Lucy plodded on and on—one step, then another. The dead fronds crunched beneath her steps. The monotonous toil never ending, one foot in front of the other. The stink
of pine sap was all she could smell.
She stopped when she came to a spot where the pine branches were thick around her forming a dense wall of fresh green needles. Lucy reached up and move a branch. All of a sudden, there were no trees in front of her—to the east stretched a vast desert.
The eternal sand scorched her eyes and salt tears tracked down her face. All there was to see was sand, sky and a small brown shack about two hundred yards out in the desert. Up in the bright, blue sky a flock of evil-looking vultures circled; they were so high that Lucy thought they were a cloud of flies at first. She looked at the impossible scene and stamped her foot.
This can’t be, she thought.
I know. It’s utterly impossible.
“Oh flip-it!” she shouted out.
It was her single swear word. Her mother said only ignorant people swore, and Lucy, not wanting to be considered an ignorant person, decided that she would never do it. That was unless she ever met the wizard who’d started this whole mess and put her in this danger.
Flip-it came from her dad. It was the one swear he used when he was around her. He’d taught it to her before he divorced her mum and went to work on the oil rig. It was the swear word that no one knew—it was hers.
Behind her, the forest sprung out of the ground, rich and dark like chocolate—then, in a straight line, as if someone had used a ruler, it ended, and the desert started. There was no gradual fading from one to the other. It was as if a giant bacon slicer had simply cut the forest off and someone had stitched the desert to it.
“Oh, this is just stupid,” she shouted. “How am I supposed to do anything in this world if people keep changing the rules!”
She sat down with a thump at the desert’s edge, crossed her legs, folded her arms under her breasts and huffed in a breath.
Conscience, I can’t do it. I can’t cross a desert on my own with only one bottle of water! I’ll die. I’ve been walking for two days. I’m tired. Look, I haven’t even got any sunscreen! I’ll burn. Whoever is doing this has some pretty unreal expectations of what a thirteen-year-old can cope with.
What’s going on, Conscience? Why are people putting the fate of the world in my hands? I don’t even know this world. Why me? Why is it, me? Why can’t it be someone else?
I don’t know. I’m just a spell.
Lucy suspired slowly, letting the hot air into her lungs and out again through her nose. She wiped the back of her hand across her chin in a gesture of defiance. Well, she would just have to cope with this as well. If this is what it took to get this stupid beating spell out of her chest and to get herself back to her own world, then she would do it.
Okay, Conscience, have you any ideas how we can cross a desert, with only one bottle of water, without dying? Especially, considering I already have blisters from these shoes?
Ask in the shack? Maybe they’ll have a dune buggy or something.
I’ve got a nasty feeling a society that has wizards and magic is not going to have dune buggies, but I’ll ask.
The shack stood like a pimple on the face of the desert. It rose from the sand in a badly constructed, haphazard pyramid of old and scruffy boards.
As Lucy walked across the two hundred sandy yards to the shack, the sand clung to her shoes like mud making it harder and harder to walk. She trudged on and on farther across the open, desolate wasteland. Her feet ached. Her eyes stung from looking at the bright sunlight reflected from the sand. Her mouth dried to an almost crisp, and her throat felt like sandpaper that had been left in the oven to dry out.
It’s the desert, said Conscience, the desert of K’hund. It saps your strength and your will if you let it. You’ve got to fight it, Lucy.
Lucy fought it. She fought the impending sense of doom that slid up her legs like over friendly snakes. She rallied against the feelings of hopelessness that pervaded her soul in a thick miasma. She battled the world weariness that sortied through her being like over enthusiastic musketeers ransacking a village.
It was too much—far too much—to expect of a little girl lost and alone in a strange world.
Lucy fell short of the shack. She was annoyed that she was just fifteen tiny yards from the wooden door’s safety. She lay panting on the ground, like a dying dog baking in the hot sun. Great clumps of sand huffed and wheezed away from her parched mouth.
Then the sand began to shift beneath her. The heated maw of the desert opened for her.
She was sinking into the sand; the desert was going to eat her alive. It was swallowing her into its dry, dusty belly to be mummified and entombed for eternity.
She could faintly hear Conscience screaming at her. His voice cracked on the edge of sanity where the world goes runny at the edges like hot Camembert.
Lucy, he pleaded, you’ve got to get up. I won’t die here because you want a rest. Get on your feet. You’re almost there.
Lucy’s feet slid deeper into the sand. The top layer of sand burned under her, but below the surface, it was cool, deathly cool, like the touch of a corpse in a morgue. The coolness welcomed her. She closed her eyes and let the desert take her. She felt herself falling, not just falling in body but also falling in her mind. She was tumbling through the spider-webs of consciousness. Conscience’s voice became a tiny bee hum in the background of her being as she fell.
Lucy, come back. Where are you going? I can’t follow you there!
Lucy’s mind plipped out of that world, leaving her body with one hand dangling out of the sand like the mast of a floundering tall ship.
Chapter 6 Schism
Cracks in time flow, like wine,
down the gradient hill.
Down dell and crevasse, down moor and moras,
down to the sea so still.
Down to the sundering sea, so still,
down to the sundering sea.
So give me my raft, my watery craft,
and I shall conquer the sea.
Conquer the thundering, plundering, wondering,
conquer the sundering sea.
From Poems on Nature
By Ravel Magi,
Year After Ice 20045
“Reality is what we make of it. Some of us make the best of it; others make the worst.”
General Thrax, Year After Ice 11958
The first thing that surprised Lucy was that she wasn’t dead. She was sure that falling down exhausted in a desert with no hope of rescue, and then being eaten by said desert, should have resulted in death and possibly some sort of afterlife. Maybe this was an afterlife? If so, which one? She’d never heard of a dark afterlife; wasn’t there supposed to be singing and choirs of angels? She tried to open her eyes, but they were blistered shut—burned to crispy pork scratchings by the desert that had eaten her.
Conscience? Are you there?
Only her own voice echoed in her head. It was the first time she’d been alone since she’d met the wizard Bechet, and he’d put Conscience in her head. It felt hollow to be alone. Conscience was irritating, pompous, occasionally boring but, in the end, she really missed him now that he was gone.
The compulsion spell had vanished too. The steady rhythmic beat in her chest was absent. No nagging inner voice saying: save the world—use the key—heal the world—it’s all for you, Lucy—all for you.
However, she reasoned, since I’m probably dead then the spell wouldn’t have power any more.
She lay on her back. She could feel soft pressure all around her and softness under her slightly raised head. She moved her fingers and rubbed them against a scratchy woollen surface. She rested under some sort of covers with a pillow under her head—a bed! She must be tucked up in bed. So, probably not dead then? That was good.
She took a deep inhalation, letting the aromas fill her nostrils. A smell of starch from the sheets over powered most of the other odours, but as she focussed her mind, she soon made out other smells mixed in with the starch. A haze of disinfectant and general cleaning solvents crept above the starch, a sharp and acerbic smell wh
ich burned her nose. Just beyond that, she detected a hint of new paint. Beyond that, on her olfactory vista was cold air; she could actually smell the cold air and a hint of mint, like the end remnant of a chewed piece of gum. Where was she?
She tried to focus on her hearing, to bring it into sharp relief. Soon the auditory world’s peaks and troughs were like sight to her. There was a busy pulsing noise, like a train station. No, not a train station, a corridor; she heard shoes clicking as people walked by. People! There were people. She could hear them talking now that she knew what she was listening for, a low murmuring hum like bees in a hive. She was in a bed, near a corridor and full of people. Where was she?
Her mouth felt dry. Her teeth were unbrushed, as she expected, because she’d forgotten to take a toothbrush into the other world. She’d forgotten a lot of things when she’d gone to that new world. Where was the other world now? Where was Conscience? She hoped her friend was all right, wherever he was. She licked her lips to bring some moisture to her parched mouth. A slight rustle of papers crackled not far from her.
“Lucy? Honey, are you with us?” said a man’s voice, very close to her ear.
She tried to twist her head in that direction but her stiff neck creaked in protest as if she had not moved for several days.
“Lucy, if you can hear me, can you open your eyes?”
The voice was light and friendly, hovering above her head. She reasoned the speaker must be peering over her, watching her.
“Can’t open my eyes,” she tried to say but her mouth wouldn’t make the words. Her tongue felt thick and useless, like a used paint brush left to dry.
She swallowed hard, and moisture crept back into her mouth. Her tongue felt slightly more pliant now, and she tried to form the words again.
“Can’t open eyes. They’re blistered shut from the desert.”
“Desert? What desert, honey? Do you know where you are?”
“In the shack?” she guessed. Maybe someone had come to her rescue. If she was in the shack, why would there be a corridor with people? Damn, she was confused. She wished this man would stop calling her honey.
Ravens and Writing Desks: A Metaphysical Fantasy Page 6