by Warren Fahy
He opened the thick Cirilinicon to search for any reference to such a place, wondering why his teachers would keep such a thing from him if it was not just a figment of his imagination. He came across some pages at the back where a golden script could be seen running between the lines of text he had read before. Apparently, it was a long, single entry in his grandfather’s hand:
The Wyndery World should not be discussed overmuch. It must remain where it is, as must my life there. The lawlessness of that unformed place would demolish this tender world. Perhaps my last purpose is to protect this frail and yet infinitely more courageous world from that omnipotent and reckless one, lovely though it is, yet filled with frivolous souls who do not know the cost of whim or the meaning of consequence.
However, I must confirm what the ancients have handed down: the Wynder World is the source of Cirilen power, and our power lies only in discovering ways to release its properties into Hala. Thus, this general caution to all Cirilen: The incantation should always be regarded as a set of rules within which Wyndernal forces unleashed in Hala are allowed to manifest.
The more successfully a Cirilen introduces Wynder to Hala, the more Hala he allows into Wyndernia. Since Wyndernes worship the Hala World, the more Hala a Cirilen brings into Wynder, the greater access to Wynder they tender in return.
This trade has proven an unholy market. It has driven many a Cirilen to madness and death. To buy ever more time in the Wynder World, some Cirilen have unleashed careless and wicked exercises of their power in Hala. Even good Cirilen who are stewards of men have faltered and taken any cause as their excuse to throw their bolts of power, so keen were they on winning more time and glory in Wynder. Without care, rogue spirits from the Wynder World inhabit their creations to wreak havoc unforeseen.
While a Cirilen is in Wynder, his body is exposed to treachery and harm in Hala, for he cannot protect his sleeping body while he journeys there. Most infamously, on the night when all of the leaders of the 48 Cirilen Houses came to Wynder together to convene, Drewgor launched his pogrom, succeeding in slaying 47, all of them except for my own family, who had stayed behind in Hala that fateful night at my urging.
The reason that I moved the Throne of Ameulis to the Dimrok was so that when I was in Wynder I would have the security of isolation. But this, by itself, is not a foolproof plan. Do not rely on it too much. Remember Arnarus’s twin sister, Cyrene, who for this very reason built her giant tower of limestone and lightstone, which staggers the beholder even now after its collapse. Before it was sundered it held 500,000 rooms and reached twice as high as it does today. Cyrene made her tower impregnable from the sea and she let some thousand demons loose from Wynderli to wander the maze of its rooms where pits and falling blades and catapults lay hidden in the dark for unfortunate intruders trying to reach her at the pinnacle. Her tower spiraled ever higher into the heavens of Tropical Esher as she forever added to it. She named her colossal keep “Solitaria,” and filled the surrounding sky with eagles that made lookout from the lofty parapets and swooped down on all invaders. Giant cats prowled the parapets and spiraling walls that were so large forests grew upon them. All these mighty battlements existed only so that Cyrene would be safe as she ranged in Wynder, sleeping prone upon her bed. And each conjuration that fortified her keep brought her back to Wynder for a longer measure of time.
Cyrene’s ultimate goal was to build two identical towers, one in Wyndernia and one in Hala, believing that at the top of each, if she built the towers high enough, they would meet and form a bridge that finally fused the two worlds together. Yet she could never match the height of the Wyndernal tower here on Hala, and, one day, as she tried to raise Solitaria one brick higher, a single crack appeared with a sound like a cricket—and then bolted across the white lace of the windowed walls and terraces like a thunderous black lightning.
One half of Solitaria slid into the sea, sending a wave around the world and a plume of white dust ten miles high. And Cyrene was buried under the mountain of rock that still rises, a mausoleum of rubble.
A Cirilen should never seek to impose everything that is possible in Wynder upon Hala, for the short and precious lives of mortals will suffer an irreparable chain of consequences. In Hala, time, wealth, life and matter are all finite, whereas in Wynder they are infinite. They cannot be restored in Hala once their limits have been transgressed. Prudence is the virtue of this breakable world, each step testing the ground rather than stomping it in defiance, as so many of my predecessors have sadly demonstrated.
A Cirilen must be wary of giving up this world for that one: for death here is death there, as well. Only the Gairanor can restore life after death, though it is restored to a strange world in a form beyond both of these worlds, of which we know nothing, and which is, to us, surely like death in that way.
—Elwyn Gheldron, The Fifth of Oak, 835 After Sentad
Trevin regretted now that his father had told him so little about his grandfather. So what reason am I to make of this, Artimeer, he wondered bitterly? There was another world—and he had been there! But he could remember no more than the pale melting fragments of a dream…
Trevin stared into the wine-red diamond of his Scepter. Perhaps this Wynder World his grandfather spoke of was the world where he belonged. Perhaps right was wrong for him and wrong was right in this fragile world. Perhaps this other world could abide his cursed spirit and all his passions would be innocent there, endangering nothing, cleansed of this world’s twin curses of consequence and conscience. And maybe by the very act of defending himself in this world he could retreat to that other world and be free.
He saw the withered blue wildflower on the rug beside his bed and picked it up. It seemed heavy in his hand. “Neuvia, this flower makes me think of you.” The sweet thought unmanned his purpose. He sat, suddenly confounded as he fell into a pit of doubt. “Alas,” he finally breathed, and he squeezed the Scepter’s heavy handle. “Are you somewhere close, hiding out of sight? Neuvia, why do I still feel you near me?”
The Scepter gushed bloody light as the shaft turned copperine in his hand. “Ah, Star, perhaps you know something?” he said. “Do what you will! If this is not simply a sick heart but something more, if Neuvia might somehow be concealed on the Dimrok then she might appear at a fatal moment that brings fate’s blow down upon us both. I command you, Cronus Star: find eyes to see in the forest and turn every leaf. Find Neuvia if she is here for our paths must never cross!”
The diamond flushed and Trevin felt as though his blood were drained as the Cronus Star ignited. He smiled weakly, for he knew that with this mighty weapon he could build his prison walls ever higher in this world—to win his freedom in the other.
Pigg woke up.
Blinking rapidly, he looked at the forest around him for the first time in a decade.
An ancient creature, Pigg had no mate. Yet they called him “pig.” He had no sex although they called him “he,” since he had very little of the feminine in his nature. Bred centuries ago, Pigg was an experiment by his father that went awry, evoking his paternal horror and rejection.
Dispatched like a rat on a barrel by his father, Pigg was set adrift in a raft on a current that crossed thousands of miles before dumping him on the beach of the Dimrok during a midnight storm, unbeknownst to Elwyn Gheldron, who was king then.
Pigg lived a silent life for the next five centuries, creeping around in the undergrowth of Elwyn’s forest in the half-sleep of a sloth, eating leaves as he rode a lineage of ill-fortuned elks, hardly ever glimpsed by man or woman. Seemingly a cross between a monkey, a boar and a sloth, with scragglier hair, Pigg was no more than four-and-a-half feet tall and scrawny for a creature with such a ponderous pot belly. His jaws were long and sprouted curling yellow tusks like a boar’s. His head was too small even for his narrow shoulders, covered by wispy fuzz and haloed by ever present flies.
The islanders, based on the descriptions of those few witnesses who had spotted him, named him “Pigg” aft
er Slow Tim Pigg, the legendary codger who moved so gradually that he had lived 150 years as legend had it—and also because his snout resembled a pig. But Pigg had lived longer than his namesake. He was 646 years old.
He had ridden his latest mount for twelve years. His curved claws had punctured the bedraggled elk’s hide with permanent holes in its neck and flanks so that he could prod its pain points and guide it through the undergrowth. He did so now, goading the beast forward. A girl, Pigg understood his father to whisper in his head, as he continued to wake up. What a choice morsel! A Bondairtlen girl! His mother was Bondairtlen, he remembered someone telling him. “Hmm…” He hummed and drooled.
Licking his snout with his gray, forked tongue, Pigg urged his elk forward. He was wide-awake now. He could eat meat again, maybe even elk, he thought as he sniffed the neck of his mount and slobbered.
Every half century or so, Father let him eat live meat. But only twelve years had passed since the last time, when he got to eat a whole baby—the King’s bastard by the Gardener’s daughter, who had seduced the widowed Selwyn with the ponds and pools she sculpted in the forest. She had borne Selwyn a son, half-brother to the prince, and she made the mistake of leaving him unattended by the Chuckling Wee one day in a carriage whose wheels were locked by a little lever.
Pigg had scurried away as the pram rolled down the grassy bank and tipped into the river. The infant’s head was dashed on a stone, and it floated downstream like a pink flower through the trees. At the edge of the western cliff, Pigg was waiting to snatch it from a bloody swirl before it was sucked over the falls into the sea. He danced a mountain jig that he learned on Sentad when he was a piglet raised by his father’s mountain raiders.
Pigg was omnivorous: he ate soap and wax sometimes, when he found them. He loved nothing better than a two-week-old carcass writhing in a high maggot sauce. If there was anything Pigg loved when he was really awake, it was food. His senses burned with hunger, once again.
Flies swarmed around Pigg’s malodorous head as he greedily sucked them through his nostrils and swallowed them down his gullet. His bedraggled elk stumbled through the underbrush as Pigg traveled through the thickest part of the forest. He caught a scent of Neuvia in the tapestry of aromas, and he followed the sweet thread unwinding through the trees like a ribbon of honey stirred in tea.
He came to a bend in the Chuckling Wee and looked across at the treehouse.
He smelled the Queen inside it.
She was not a girl, but a woman in full bloom. “Hmmm,” he wondered, his heart banging away in his chest. A royal feast my father gives me. Hooray! A couple of days to ripen and then such a tasty treat! Pigg’s eyes glazed over. Then he smelled Toy and his blood went cold.
It was a tricky thing to play with Toy!
Pigg alone among Hala creatures could withstand one of that serpent’s strikes—but not two or three, probably. Pigg ate snakes when he found them, and their venom was like a marinade on his palate, tangy and tart but rarely spicy enough to give him worse than gas, which Pigg didn’t mind. In fact, Pigg liked having gas. But Toy—Pigg didn’t care for that sauce.
The great horned owl swooped silently behind him, and when Pigg turned his face toward the whispering sound of its wings, two talons grabbed his snout and pulled him off the elk.
He fell on his back, hard.
Pigg’s nose bled and his eyes bulged at the smell of his own blood as he snorted it in and sucked it down. He splashed off his face in the stream. Then he thought better: his nose would probably get infected and there would be more flies for a while, he thought, if he didn’t wash it. More maggots and snacks.
He pulled his elk along the river to a place where he could mount it again and jump across the brook near a low branch so that the awful owl could not strike him this time.
When Pigg tried to climb onto his mount, a host of marmosets rained down on him from the trees like hailstones, scratching, biting and striking. They pestered Pigg until he had to jump into the river, and then all of them sprang up into the trees. He poked his head up from the water to see three marmosets jump onto his elk and then ride it off through the woods.
Pigg spat. All this water would clean the stench right off. There would be far fewer flies. Catching his elk again would not be easy. He would have to catch a new one. He climbed sullenly onto the bank on the other side of the stream. Even as he sat in a puddle of mud, feeling sorry for himself, a silver squirrel threw a rock at his lacerated nose, stinging it like a bee.
Pigg whined, his eyes blinking. The Queen has many friends, he thought and rubbed his nose. Well, Pigg won’t stop until he fills his tummy to the brim with the Queen so sweet and yummy! Drool spindled from his lower lip and his beady eyes twinkled as he noticed the Queen herself in her room high above, hanging clothes to dry over a windowsill.
Pigg worshipped her smooth white skin, like linen soaked in cream, and slavered over her raspberry nibbles as his brain buzzed in carnivorous reverie.
Neuvia hung out a worn shirt and some frayed stockings to dry on the bathroom windowsill of the treehouse when Toy suddenly whispered in her ear.
“The Enemy!”
She stepped back from the window. “Where? Who?”
Toy turned freezing cold around her neck, shivering.
An ugly howl of pleasure or pain, Neuvia could not tell which, issued from below the treehouse. She heard chattering and snarls of beasts in combat. A sharp crack struck the tree’s trunk—then silence.
Neuvia chose one of her throwing stones and ran to the window of her room. Below, she saw the beaver looking up at her next to the trunk. Its fur was raised as it paddled its tail loudly on the enrid’s white bark. Horrified, she cast the stone down and hit the beaver’s back. The beast shambled across the grass and plopped into the river, swimming upstream.
Neuvia stroked Toy, but the serpent felt like ice and seemed to be asleep.
She went to her room above and opened the book of prophecies on her bed. Again, she found nothing. Then she gazed out the window and noticed the red glow moving down the spiral stairs inside the Lightstone Tower.
Trevin marched through the forest, and Neuvia followed him with her owl and eagle scouts above.
She spied him from the cliff as he descended the path to the beach, returning to the Eye of Simairon. Through the spyglass Neuvia watched him ponder a creature he had caught in a jar. There was no sign that he remembered their time together in Wyndernia. Suddenly she wondered if it had really happened.
Trevin took the specimen in the jar back to the Lightstone Tower and secluded himself in his chamber, once again.
As dusk fell, Neuvia prepared herself for sleep, anticipating another time with him, but Toy, who had not spoken to her since the beaver had prowled below the treehouse, whispered in her ear: “The King may not pass into Wynder tonight.”
“Why not?”
“He must earn more time there, my Queen,” Toy whispered.
“How?” she frowned. “I must see him! You said I should protect him and counsel him there. How must he earn more time?”
“Magic.”
“Oh,” she sighed.
“When he brings more magic, he shall win a way there. The Queen will see him then. After a time, after much more magic, he will go there every night, and so will the Queen. That time will not come for many years. But the King is young. So is the Queen.”
Neuvia sat on her bed, heavily. “Does he remember?”
“No.”
She felt her resolve melt. “Why? How could he not?”
“The Enemy hides in his stone. The Enemy robs his memory as he passes from there to here. After a while, even the Enemy will not be able to hide his memories. The Queen has time. The Queen is brave.” Toy’s tongue feathered an inner curve of her ear. “The Enemy is great!”
Chapter 12
The Second Defense
Trevin studied the brown anglerfish carefully measuring its properties with the Cronus Star and setting down its physi
cal dimensions, proportions, and qualities for his conjuration, simplifying and amplifying his grandfather’s equations as he went.
It took him only 67 days this time to complete his calculation. Then he took the Scepter and the jar in his hands and descended the tower.
He stood on the smoldering edge of the north cliff as another crumbling piece of the Dimrok tore away and slid into the sea.
“Be still!” Toy whispered, and Neuvia held her breath as the Dimrok groaned like a wounded animal.
Trevin raised a spiny angler in his left hand, and blood spiraled down his arm as he aligned the facets of the Cronus Star to the moons and stars. Then he threw the angler from the smoldering palisade.
A laughing, mad soul passed through the Cronus Star into the fish that seemed to float in the air before foam blasted underneath the beast, which had grown into a leviathan. The monster wagged from side to side casting waves to each side as it propelled itself north with shocking speed.
Yet as it swam, it seemed to change shape, and in the far distance, Neuvia thought she saw it sprout arms and swim like a man, arm over arm.
Trevin turned from the cliff and then staggered past her, his eyes reflecting the Scepter’s glare as he made his way like a blind man across the field.
She followed him as the island shuddered. She noticed flocks of Dimrok sheep, their unshorn wool matted and ragged, running in frantic circles in the distance as they bleated.
Dusk fell as he reached his tower, guided by the guttering red flame of his Scepter.
She halted, heartbroken at the edge of the forest. Then she turned back to the treehouse.
For 67 days Pigg prepared for the campaign he was about to launch tonight.
His plan was to get to the trunk of Neuvia’s tree with none of her forest friends interfering. He had found a tarp in a garden shed and had covered it with fallen leaves. So far, it had fooled all of the Queen’s guardians as he crept forward under the tarp one inch at a time as night fell.