The Cosmologer snorted. “Little to be joyous about.”
The Senior raised his hand, waited for the awkward silence to settle, then eased onto the circular bench. He rested his level gaze on Twardy Zarost. “I trust that will be all, Riddler. Please join us.” The Senior’s voice crackled with tension, and when that happened Zarost knew that the Senior was in a dangerous mood indeed.
Zarost nodded. He must have interrupted something terribly important.
He squelched over to an empty place in the circle, and sat. Water ran from the many folds of his robe onto the curved brown stonewood bench. Nobody seemed to care—their attention was on the pool, where the little peaks of Zarost’s disturbance played havoc with the Mystery’s attempt to project her vision.
The Lorewarden swept the water smooth with a gesture. He had been a powerful Mattermage, before taking up the third axis. He was a serious fellow, so often silent for entire meetings. The Cosmologer linked a flow of clear essence with the Mentalist, and together they assisted the Mystery with her task. The Mystery reached down until her hand had almost touched the smoothened water, and the deep indigo colour of the pool changed to a swirling white-flecked brown as she gathered the threads of her Seeing spell.
Clouds over the desert sands. They sped northwards, for some time. Finally the great saw-toothed mass of the Zunskar Mountains passed by, the realm of Eyri hidden in its western hook. North, they flew, past the wide grey wastelands that bordered Eyri, to the edge of the Evernon Forest beyond that, where the Six-Sided Land of Lûk began. Twardy Zarost leant closer as they passed the inhabited district of Rek. Little figures moved upon a network of paths that led outwards from the carpet of trees. Life went on, in Oldenworld. The Mystery gestured, and they flowed over more forest, into the interior of the Six-Sided Land, to a place where the great curve of woodlands gave way to the eastern plains.
As they stepped down towards the land, individual trees thrust up at them, and the pale green carpet of grass spread out. A small bird shot by. They began to track east above a trampled path. A field of slender blue-flowered flax bowed in the breeze. An open irrigation pipe threaded its way through the flowers, but no water flowed in it, for the well-point was abandoned. Some baskets piled with spider-silk lay strewn beside the path, as if the porters had fled. They had also dropped their sharp-tipped spears.
The hackles on Zarost’s neck rose; the danger was close. Spidersilk was valuable to the Lûk—to steal the thread was dangerous, for the spiders of Evernon had grown large and cunning along the gloomy banks of the tainted White River. For the feisty Lûk to abandon their spidersilk meant something worse than ironpigs or an attack of Hunter challengers.
Another bird shot by, flying as if borne on a gale. Zarost recognised the lay of the land. The high grassed mounds of the digging casts with their spiral pathways. The twined spice trees and herb-bushes that the fire-resistant Lûk palates held so dear. This was somewhere near Jho-down, a settlement linked to the western channel of the down of Koom, where the centre of Lûk culture lay. The most important trade from the west passed through Jho. They wove the most beautiful garments here, soft and fine and durable, better even than the wizard-altered silks produced in the heyday of old Moral Kingdom.
The Mystery guided the vision slowly across the long grassed fields, away from the forest, until they passed the first woven trapdoors of the down. The doors were difficult to discern, braided as they were from the grasses that grew around them.
“It was north of here, Mystery, just a little way,” urged the Senior.
“I know,” she replied, the frustration audible in her voice. “My vision is wandering. The very presence of what we seek throws me away.”
The image in the pool began to shudder, skipping left and right of the direction they were following. They passed low over another trapdoor and veered suddenly through an orchard of purple fruit-trees. A whole flock of doves whipped by, heading north, but flying strangely, as if they fought their own wings. The Gyre followed the flock, then crested a shallow rise and swerved up and away. Jho-down’s main settlement lay beneath them, a gentle basin covered with red-leaved heartcreeper and golden soapberry bush. It would seem at first glance to be nothing more than a simple landscape, but Zarost knew that hundreds upon hundreds of trapdoors were hidden in the vale, trapdoors which led to a thriving underground community. And there, almost halfway through the settlement, spanning the entire breadth of Jho’s basin, as much beneath the surface as above it, spun a hollow maw, a faceless vortex of churning earth and air and rock and water, a horrid wrangle which left behind a body of crushed remains, a tail of sheddings that didn’t end, stretching away to the north towards the Winterblade Mountains. The tumbling doves were sucked across the basin and into the vortex as the monster breathed them in. They were gone.
“Now you see the Oldenworld’s bane,” the Mystery sighed.
Zarost was on his feet. “The worm! The Lûk, oh the Lûk, oh no!” he cried, staring down into the scouring maelstrom that ate through the Jho-down. That hideous thing had no eyes, only a swirling throat into which the debris flew and was crushed upon itself. The rock and air around the edges of its mouth were wrinkled like the skin of ancient lips. Its hunger seemed to pull at the centre of everything Zarost could see, bending even the pool as if it drew the water which contained the vision towards it as well. Bending the pool from such a distance was just as impossible as what Zarost was seeing it achieve in Jho. He took a nervous step away from the edge of the pool.
“We named it the Wranglewrithe,” explained the Lorewarden in a dull voice. “For two months we have tracked its course south from Kah. It punctured the Winterblades like a hot poker through snow. We have no means to stop it.”
“This is the new sorcery of Ametheus. It goes beyond our knowledge, present or past,” admitted the Senior.
“Two months from Kah to Jho? It moves slowly then,” Zarost observed.
“Slow, and then fast, and then slow again,” said the Senior. “It wanders like a whirlwind, yet its track heads always south.”
“It grows by itself,” added the Warlock. “And as it stretches against the weight of its contents it gathers speed at the head. It runs faster now than it did in the lowlands.”
It had come through the great bulwark of the mountains! Zarost bit on his knuckles as he watched the erratic action in the swirling maw—sometimes the earth flew apart, sometimes the air seemed to turn solid and drop to the ground below as a blue shedding. Then the scattered earth would come together again, so fast and hard the Writhe created a great hollow in that place. Then water exploded to a cloud, and was sucked almost at once through the pinhole around which everything rotated, to form fine particles of white, barely visible in the chaos and gloom of its innards. The Writhe spun and spun, drawing Zarost forward, tugging at his balance, keeping his attention amongst that ruin of Jho. Some patches of the spillage within the tail were stained red. Zarost suspected it wasn’t due to the dyes the Lûk stored for flax and reeds. He saw a man running away from the collapsing edge nearest the Writhe, a typical Lûk cable-weaver, strong and grey-skinned, bow-legged, with the elongated face of his kin; the jutting chin and nose, a handsome face, with dark marriage-whorls worked upon his hard skin. His scarlet headscarf was tight in the tip and full in the knots. The weaver made the motions of running away, but he was being hauled towards the edge instead, he was being forced towards the Writhe. Zarost’s heart caught in his throat.
“If Jho was always on its path, why did this Writhe find them in their down?” Zarost demanded of the Senior. “Why weren’t these people warned!”
“Do you think we haven’t tried!” shouted the Cosmologer. “We have been warning people from Spek to See’gi, from Kurum to Rostkaan, while you have been dallying in the shelter of Eyri.”
Zarost turned to the Spiritist, hoping for an explanation with less acid in it.
“They are mistrustful of us, Riddler, you know how the Lûk are about anyone not Lûk,”
she said. “They do not believe what they can not see, and if they are close enough to see, they are too close.”
“When they are too close, they are always drawn towards it, into the head,” finished the Warlock, smacking his fist into his palm. “From a league away, sometimes much more. It varies, it changes. It isn’t constant.”
In the image, a Lûk maiden clung to an upright of lashed reeds, as the underground corridor she was in and earth surrounding it, were torn apart. The woven interior of the corridor held together well, and it jutted out from the receding raw cliff, but the end nearest the Writhe was soon stripped to the fibres. A sheave of papers battered the maiden as they hurried by, a cane chair followed. She clung on, against the current of debris, her scarlet headscarf flapping wildly, until even that was whipped away. Her hair flowed free, a full luxuriant length of copper plaits. She must have come from a wealthy family, to be allowed to keep such valuable hair on her head. It wouldn’t matter any more. None of what the Lûk had done in Jho would matter. Zarost watched the woven veins of the Lûk settlement disintegrate before his eyes. The segment of corridor which had held the maiden broke away and tumbled towards the worm. Zarost’s stomach turned. The Writhe was feeding on everything.
“What kind of creature is this? Where within the Annals of all Existence has he summoned such a thing from?”
“It is not alive, you fool,” sniped the Cosmologer. “It can not be threatened or lured or tortured out of its way. It does not care. It is a current, manufactured of ruined space, and in it is spawned a gravity which has become stronger than I can turn. If it is left to grow, I fear it will set the orbit of the Earth awry. It might eat into the soil until it has fed upon the planet’s core, until its heart is compact enough to draw even the stars towards us. The Writhe reaches for the Ending, it reaches for devastation.”
“Oh why does Ametheus do this?” cried the Mystery. “What use is a world that is ended?”
“We only have the same guesses as always, gentle one,” answered the Senior. “That this has been his goal all along, that he seeks to rupture Time itself, and that it has taken him these long centuries to gather his awful genius. I fear he has advanced to an eighth-level spell. At last, he may have found a means to reach the End, unless we can devise a way to counter it. The closer he can move towards the Ending, the tighter he will force the bend in Time to be, because he will bypass all those eras that should still be. That corruption of Time would release Chaos of such magnitude that he would have the power to create whatever he desired, to make and unmake on dimensions beyond our own. He seeks power, Mystery. He wants to rule Life itself.”
There were children clutching to their walls, and old folk, and healthy youths too. Zarost grew hot inside. They shouldn’t be there, the Gyre had failed them, the Wizards were too cowardly to take responsibility for the Lûk and stand beside them against the Writhe. It had to be stopped. He couldn’t stand by and watch the deaths of so many innocents. He would go there and use an extended Transference spell to gather as many of them as he could, take them to Koom or Sess or even the deserts beside the Gyre Sanctuary. Anywhere would be better than Jho-down. He spread his arms and reached for Infinity.
“No!” shouted the Mentalist, jumping up to restrain Zarost. “No! You’ll kill yourself!”
Zarost broke out of the Mentalist’s hold, but the Mentalist was quick and determined, and he was able to keep a hand on Zarost no matter how much he blocked and weaved. To be touched was to be grounded. He would have to take them both if he Transferred.
“We can’t be near to it!” shouted the Mentalist. “It is even worse for us than for those Lûk you would save. You will not be strong enough to fight it!”
“How do you know?” Zarost challenged. “How do you know we can’t fight it from the ground?”
“We can’t. We almost lost the Warlock.”
Zarost glanced at the Warlock to confirm the claim. The Warlock nodded gravely.
“What happened?” Zarost demanded.
“I went there, Riddler, I felt as you did about the inhabitants of Kah, to the north. This Writhe is strange, for time is somehow screwed into its mouth as well ... you will think a moment has passed as you cast your spell, but a day will go by in the world outside, and the Writhe can overtake you in that time.”
“I’ll prepare my spell before I Transfer. I’ll be there and gone in a breath!”
“No, Riddler, it can not work. There is more to the Writhe which you do not understand. You know we are larger than the rest, as wizards we extend further into the world around us. The Writhe—well, you can see what it has already done to the magic of the pool.”
Zarost looked. The pool was bending more than ever, an awfully concave meniscus.
“It is such strong Chaos, it grips with a bond like a iron cable to anything which has a hint of Order to it. We think that is why it runs through the network of the Lûk downs so steadily. They have lost much to Ametheus over the years, but they have the most structured realm of any of the peoples of Oldenworld now. They have a kind of Order, though it is not essence-magic. The Writhe feeds on it.”
Five baskets of spidersilk tumbled across the grass and were whisked across the gulf to feed the worm. Zarost recognised them as the baskets which had lain unattended beside the field of flax. He wondered if the porters were still running, or if they had been eaten.
He met the Mentalist’s sharp blue gaze, and dipped his head. He didn’t need restraining any more, they had made their point. He might be the Riddler, but this thing was beyond his ken. He was the one who was a step behind, not the Gyre.
“Show me where it has been,” he said quietly. “I want to learn what it is, I must see what you’ve seen.”
They took him on a journey then, northwards along the tail. The Writhe had run an erratic course, exploding from the ground in places, sinking, rising elsewhere again. It had formed an immense corridor of ruin before Jho, blasting through many of the smaller downs on the way to Kah and pulling the landscape into awful columns of devastation there which looked like coloured spires of splintered bone, before the trail left the Six-Sided Land and dove through the solid bedrock of the Winterblade mountains.
It emerged again on the far side, amongst the dry foothills far below the snow line, the same scattering of altered, hardened substances upon a punctured and scalloped land. None of the wild folk who inhabited the foothills were visible, even though the sun was baking full upon the rocks. Zarost wondered how many of them had been taken by the Writhe. He shouldn’t care—the Scalard were transformed beyond recognition, they had lost their humanity long ago. They were vicious and cruel beings who understood only domination. They wouldn’t even co-operate with each other to improve their living conditions. And yet Zarost felt a poignant sense of loss when he was told that they might have been consumed in the same uncaring aperture that had eaten through the lands of the Lûk, for the Scalard were a race whom the Wizards had failed completely—in a way they represented the worst of what had been done to Oldenworld—they lived, and yet they enjoyed no consciousness, no purpose to their actions, no memory of what they had lost. Zarost knew what they had lost, and it made him sad.
They had been altered first, in the old kingdom of Moral. They weren’t so much a race as a congregation of victims with a common affliction. All had been cursed with cold blood, and their kind had moved south in those early years of terror until they came to the protected cleft of the Tarnished Hills, where the sun shone hot and clouds seldom drew in. Over the centuries of harsh survival, they had learned to ease the tightness of their toughening skin with the greenstone of the old mines, which left traces of its pigment within their scales. Once they had been lords and ladies of gracious Moral; now they lived in squalor, fighting with covetted weapons no one knew how to forge any more, feeding on live animals or each other’s children, dragging branches to their enclosed huts at night to burn and lie beside. As if that degeneration were not enough, they lost half of their number t
o a second spell, when Ametheus experimented again with changes in nature, and the fire-blooded creatures spawned in their midst crawled away to find the cold solace of the Winterblades. Oh the Scalard had suffered much, for when they sought to leave their Tarnished Hills and travel further south to follow the winter sun, neither the Lûk nor the Hunter folk would grant them passage through the narrow gap at Slipper. They were silverspawn, too clearly of Ametheus, and those that didn’t flee were killed at the borders of the heartlands.
Zarost was angry at their deaths, because in a way they were the Sorcerer’s own people, they were in his Lowlands, and should have been spared from his inventions. Yet Ametheus cared not, he never had. It didn’t matter to him that his creation had run through his own people first, that it had scoured and mangled and scarred the Lowlands before reaching the heartlands.
The course of the Writhe’s devastation exitted the Scalard’s valley at the old town of Greenstone, where the products of jade and rivergold used to be distributed to the extended markets of the Three Kingdoms. The Writhe had missed the heart of the town, for beyond the river of crushed tallus, the unblemished great square still stood amongst the gorse-bushes, with its tall obelisks and green magestone mosaic, its towering spring-fed fountain and gilded pool, marking the town which hadn’t been a town for centuries.
Northwards, the Writhe sank into the earth, and only emerged again near Meliness, where it had ruptured the old road, twisting the northloop of the causeway right over the southloop. The regular staffs of rusted metal beside the road looked like the lopped stumps of a deceased vineyard. They had glistened and shone once, the pride of Moral kingdom, but those streetlights had been vandalised before the Writhe had come, their glass shattered, their sprites consumed. Few streetlights remained anywhere in Oldenworld, and those that were still intact were dark—no one had dared to renew a spritebulb since Kinsfall, for fear of being struck down by the Sorcerer’s reactive wildfire net that threaded itself through the sky. Ametheus had been effective at silencing anyone with talent. Only the Gyre dared to practise magic, and only because they cast their spells together, and so could meet his power on equal terms.
The Riddler's Gift: First Tale of the Lifesong (The Tale of the Lifesong) Page 58