The Company of Glass

by Tricia Sullivan

  ‘It’s better than nothing, is it not?’ she said.

  They ate and drank randomly for hours as it finally got dark. After a few drinks, Keras began laughing for no reason, lying back against the Pharician-style pillows she had inexpertly made for her bed. They talked about nothing in particular. It had been weeks since he had thought about anything but the Pharician army, and Night and Jai Pendu and his Company; now, as if they were wounds to be guarded he was not willing to touch any of these things in his mind. It was too late. There was nothing he could do. But Keras didn’t care about Jai Pendu or about any of it. She really didn’t care. And perhaps it was time he understood that life would go on, away from Everien – away from the past.

  It was a barley liquor they drank, and it had a kick like a H’ah’vah’s bad mood. Tarquin was lounging on the floor, looking at the line of her outstretched leg, the faint gleam along her shin leading to the high arch of her lax foot. It was a shapely foot but the soles were black and tough with deeply ingrained dirt and hard wear.

  ‘Civilization is not for me,’ she told him. ‘Your armies are so silly, the way you ride around saving things from each other. It’s all a game, isn’t it?’

  It wasn’t, not to him, but he was well drunk and agreed heartily.

  ‘I don’t play those kinds of games. Horses are my life, Tarquin,’ she continued. ‘I was born in the desert south-west of Jundun, among the Horse Clans there. My feet scarcely touched the ground when I was a child. Always we were on the move. I slept and ate on the back of a horse. I thought I was one of them. I drank lying on my belly and sucking the water up without a sound. I tied my hair in a switch on my belt and used it to chase flies. My given name was Keras, but my father called me Aneeki, which means Two Lights, because my eyes were always open.’

  She fell silent, fixing those eyes on the subdued fire. Tarquin rose, walked outside, and smelled the darkness. He found a clean bucket and filled it at the well. The surface of the water stretched the moon almost to breaking, reshaped it like a wobbling egg. When he went inside again with the water the room was close and he could smell her. He emptied the bucket into the iron pot and stoked up the fire. Keras stretched.

  ‘I was so happy then,’ she said after a while. She began to unwind her hair. ‘I didn’t know anything and I didn’t have anything. It was better in those days. I can still feel the sand and I can see the way it lifted when the wind came. I thought the sand was alive. It danced in the air. Out there in the desert, the world starts to fray apart. It isn’t the same world as this one, and there are spirits there which are indifferent to people. They don’t live by human laws, and they can break your mind. But that was my world, do you understand?’

  He put his finger in the water. It was still cool. Keras yawned and leaned back, sinking against the wall.

  ‘I hated it when we sold our horses. We sometimes ate them because we had to, or because the horse was sick or injured and couldn’t carry on with us. But always the Pharician traders came from Jundun looking for warhorses, or hunting animals for their courtiers, and my family dealt with them even though it meant our horses would be slaves after that. My ancestors had been driven off their land by the Pharicians, who were intent on bringing everyone under their rule. My people used to raid the lands the Pharicians stole from us and then run free under the sky, but by my father’s time the army at Jundun had grown so strong we were forced to give up the horses that once had fought for us, so they could fight for the Emperor and expand his territory. It burned my heart. And when the Pharicians came on the trade caravans to see our stock, they looked at us like we were something to be spat upon. How would they treat our horses, if they had nothing but contempt for us?’

  He poured the warm water back into the bucket and set it at the foot of the bed. He knelt and picked up her right foot.

  ‘A Pharician nobleman purchased me when I was twelve,’ she stated. Startled, he looked up at her. Her eyes were closed but the flare of her nostrils betrayed her emotion. ‘He liked me far too well, and he offered more money than my family had ever seen. He took me back to Jundun with him. There I learned many things.’

  Her voice shook slightly on this last sentence. Her foot was still between his hands. He scooped up water and began to bathe it.

  ‘I cut a deal with him, you see. If my family taught me one thing it was how to bargain. So at first I kicked up a huge fuss with Beres, my captor. I let him know what I was made of, what a little savage I could be. The fights we used to have! He was not a bad man in his own way; slavery was customary in his land and within its bounds he had no wish to mistreat me. That was his weakness. I fought and fought until he was out of his mind with what to do with me. I was the one in control and he knew it. Then I pulled the switch on him. I offered him pleasures without being asked. I discovered what his body wanted and gave it to him better than he’d ever had it. And then I said, “Beres, I wish to have a tutor.” By this time he could not refuse me!’ She snickered. ‘I learned mathematics. Botany. Art. Languages. I learned to write in several tongues, but when I came here I realized there are as many dialects in Everien as there are in the desert.’

  Her feet were callused and hard. He had to scrub with the pad of his thumb to loosen the dirt that was embedded in her heel. After the skin of the right foot was clean he continued to massage the muscles and stroke the joints to loosen them. She had stopped talking. There was no sound but the trickle of water back into the bucket and the slight pronouncements in her breathing that he elicited when he touched a sweet spot. He trailed his fingertips lightly along her sole and the dark hair on her leg stood up shivering.

  He put the foot down and took up the other one.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder what I would have become if I had stayed in Jundun. It didn’t take long for me to forget my childhood. I’ll tell you one thing, Tarquin. I hope my father took the money and brought our horses to the other side of the desert, away from Pharice. I hope he returned to the old way of life and stopped trading away our lifeblood. I hope he didn’t use it to become just like one of them, only more foolish for he had no education in Pharician ways. What you are doing right now—’

  And he froze, looked up again at her face, and now she was gazing back at him with something like amusement.

  ‘—they used to bathe each other this way in Pharice. I was Beres’s favourite so I used to have two younger girls to attend me. I got accustomed to it. I was always very clean, in Jundun.’ She gave a soft wheeze of laughter. ‘It was all right, really. It was all right until I got pregnant.’

  Tarquin kept scrubbing. He didn’t know what else to do.

  ‘Then everything fell apart. I ran away. It was as if I’d gone mad. I became like an animal again. I was out of my mind and at the same time I was exactly certain what I had to do. Have you ever been so sure of something it became the only thing you could see? And you didn’t care if the rest of the world was against you? Because they couldn’t even perceive what it was you needed – but you just knew?’

  ‘No,’ said Tarquin.

  ‘So I tried to make my way back to the desert. Mind, I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got there. My family would not be able to take me back without bringing Beres down on them like a storm; it would have meant they’d gone back on the deal. And I had become very soft, living in Pharice. I had forgotten about hunger and cold, and the horse I had taken was little hardier than I. And we were attacked by wild horses and my mount was driven off with the saddlebags.’

  ‘I have never heard of wild horses attacking anybody.’

  Keras seemed suddenly to come awake. She shifted her weight and in the movement of her body he sensed how easy it would be to simply glide his hand up her bare leg and, rising after it, cover her body with his own. She seemed to be waiting for it to happen.

  He dried her foot on the edge of his tunic and placed it on the ground. He stood up and went to the door. He had stayed too long.

  ‘That’s how I met Nemelir, and
that’s where I had my son. I had to cut a deal with the wild horses. I had to cut a deal with Ice,’ she said. ‘It was the craziest deal I ever did. And that’s why you’ll never have him.’

  They locked gazes in the darkness. He wasn’t sure what she was challenging him with, or what she meant; but they were both drunk and he wasn’t really thinking. Her eyes held him fast. It was even more absurd than the average staring contest, Tarquin thought; they could barely see one another. Yet neither would be the one to look away first. He fixed his eyes on her face, determined that she would not win. He swayed with exhaustion, his eyes swimming with tears.

  Her leg twitched and a snore escaped her. He blinked and smiled; then he picked up the blanket and tossed it over her as he was leaving, so that she would know she had lost. She stirred, grabbed the blanket, and rolled over violently, clutching it.

  ‘You’ll never have him, you bastard,’ she murmured as he shut the door behind him.

  The Black Island

  No one but Xiriel could really see the staircase for what it was, but as they passed through the monstrosity they could feel their legs working on an ascent. Kassien began to retch. Istar clenched her teeth as she nearly gagged in tandem with him: the staircase was as full of smells and sensations as it was sights, and these were so disgusting that she shut her eyes against them.

  ‘Just keep going,’ Xiriel said confidently from the lead. ‘They’re only Impressions. They can’t really harm you.’

  Istar thought she heard Pallo whimper a bit, but he didn’t speak. At last they emerged on to the top of the island under a moody, dark sky. Blue showed patchily between the clouds at intervals out over the sea, which was azure where the sunlight hit it and steel grey everywhere else.

  Istar looked around carefully at the smooth black stone. A little jolt of surprised curiosity went through her as she took in her surroundings. It was getting hard to tell what was hallucinated and what wasn’t. She reached out and tugged feebly at the Seer’s cloak. ‘Xiriel,’ she said. ‘Feel my forehead. I think I’m sick. When we came across the last bridge, the easy one, the island we were heading for was white. Wasn’t it?’

  Xiriel stared at her, touched the rock, squinted.

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ Pallo said. ‘I remember.’

  Xiriel scratched his head. ‘I’m confused. I don’t know where we are. This island wasn’t on the maps I studied. Look, the nearest one to us is the twisted one – it wasn’t like that when we crossed that last bridge, was it?’

  He was right. They were in a completely different part of the archipelago, not far from the island that looked like a wrung cloth; but none of them remembered seeing a black island among the white ones while they were on the shore.

  ‘But that’s good, isn’t it?’ Pallo said, licking his rope burns meditatively. ‘Because it would mean we’ve skipped a couple of islands in the process.’

  ‘Only if we are still going the right way,’ Pentar muttered. He still stood at the entrance to the tunnel, looking back down the stairs. ‘How long before they follow?’

  The island proved to be made entirely of some kind of soft black stone, and it had a weird aspect even though it was relatively bare. They walked all over it looking for a new bridge, or a way back down into the ruins, but everything they found seemed to be a dead end. The only bridge led back towards the nearest landward island, where the other end could be seen protruding from the clifftop. The severed segment rose up and out over the sea, ending high above the waves. Xiriel climbed out on it, leaned over the end, examined it from every angle, yet although it was not damaged, it didn’t seem to extend in any way, either. The wind kicked up, and his robes were blowing wildly as he came back down the bridge. His Knowledge-light shone weakly through the gloom.

  ‘Why is it so dark here?’ asked Pallo. ‘Everything is desolate. Jai Khalar at least has light, even in the deepest vaults.’

  Xiriel said, ‘Some of the old Scholars used to think that the Floating Lands were an ancient battleground, and that they are too scarred to be repaired.’

  ‘But who were the Everiens fighting? The Sekk?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  Kassien said, ‘I’ll never believe that. The Sekk never could have competed with the Everiens. They don’t have ways to bend metal and shatter rock.’

  ‘Not now they don’t.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Others believe there are monsters here, and the Floating Lands belong to them.’

  ‘What kind of monsters build stairs?’

  Pallo said, ‘None of this explains why the Floating Lands float.’

  ‘They could be giant ships.’

  ‘With no sails? No oars?’

  ‘Maybe it was an earthquake or something,’ said Istar. ‘The islands look ragged, like pieces of broken glass somebody’s going to set back together, but they’ve left spaces in between.’

  ‘Broken glass. That’s an interesting choice of words.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of the Glasses,’ Istar said hastily.

  ‘I know. But Jai Pendu draws closer, and we’re stuck.’

  ‘They are following.’ Pentar’s voice sounded oracular and strange. He was pointing to the broken bridge on the landward island. Figures had begun to gather there.

  Kassien was cursing. ‘They keep finding different ways – ways we don’t know!’

  Xiriel stalked off. ‘Do something,’ he said to himself.

  The sun had been playing tag with storm clouds for hours, and now it was hidden beneath the horizon, throwing a coda of remembered light into the clouds, which had gone deep blue as they moved inexorably towards land. Nearly dead calm, the sea plashed quietly against the base of the island far below. At this hour, the peculiar drama of the landscape made itself felt even more eerily: they looked across a blasted, pitted surface whose edges seemed to make jagged slices into the sea. Pieces of unknown machinery were half-buried in the black stone, as though arrested in the process of being birthed by the ground. As the five combed the island for an exit, they encountered deep shafts whose sides seemed hewn from murky glass, too slippery to scale. An unhealthy green glow came from these pits, tiring the eyes without really illuminating anything. As night came on, the shafts could be seen from a distance by the green beams they fired into the storm-bringing sky.

  There were other holes that were entirely lightless, and Pallo nearly stepped in one, mistaking it for the shadow of a warped pillar – for many such architectural aberrations decorated the bleak scene.

  ‘I think there are creatures here,’ Xiriel said, half to himself. He was looking in the piece of glass he had found in the Sekk’s cave. ‘They are not described in the texts. But this place is not empty.’

  Kassien had gone very quiet.

  ‘Am I the only one who sees that?’ he said pointing.

  Istar looked. ‘What are you pointing at?’

  ‘The smoke. And it’s full of light. It looks like firedust, only—’

  The others glanced at each other. None of them could see it. Still absorbed with the rough piece of glass, Xiriel said, ‘Things are not where they appear to be.’

  Kassien gave a ragged scream and leaped backwards, staring down at his own legs in horror. ‘Where are my legs?’ he cried. ‘What’s my head doing on the ground?’

  ‘Xiriel,’ said Istar. ‘Find the damned bridge, will you?’

  ‘I think,’ Xiriel said slowly, ‘that the entire island is alive. It moves things so that …’ he passed his own hand in front of his face. ‘They aren’t where they are.’

  ‘Oh, nice,’ muttered Pallo.

  Kassien had frozen in place. ‘Everything’s upside down. The sky’s falling …’

  Istar reached towards him.

  ‘No!’ Xiriel exclaimed. ‘Don’t try to help him. Istar, look at this.’

  He passed her the warped piece of glass she had refused to look at, back in the cave. Now she peered into it hungrily. She could see what was ha
ppening. The architecture of the island was shifting from place to place, shuffling like tiles that make up a puzzle. It bent where the wind struck it. It wavered like a reflection on water. The same thing must be happening to Kassien. Now he was all but paralysed, completely taken in by his perceived rearrangement of his own body. Istar strode over to him and gave him a shake.

  ‘Kassien, there’s nothing wrong with you. Don’t believe in your senses. You’re absolutely fine.’

  He didn’t even seem to hear her. He was looking around frantically, but she couldn’t imagine what his eyes could be focusing on. He began walking off towards the edge of the island, and when she grabbed his arm she got a shock that made the hair on her arms stand up. He shook her off. Beyond him, she could see soldiers spreading out across the adjacent island to turn its surface black. They stood right at the edge of the cliffs, and Istar wondered whether they would jump if ordered. At the far side of the broken bridge, the crowd cleared a little and one figure stood apart. It was a little smaller than the others, and unarmed. Istar had the peculiar feeling it was looking at her.

  ‘I found something!’ Xiriel shouted. He was moving aside pieces of rubble to reveal a round hole like a well. The gleam of liquid showed several feet below.

  ‘We can’t go in there,’ Pallo said. ‘We’ll drown.’

  Xiriel was tugging at her cloak.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘This is our only chance.’

  ‘Xiriel, for once I agree with Pallo. What good will it do going down there?’

  ‘Things are not what they appear,’ he repeated. ‘If you look at it through this piece of glass, it’s quite different.’

  ‘Maybe, but a Sekk made that. I wouldn’t trust it. Probably it will get us killed.’

  Kassien began running in mad circles, swatting something around his head. ‘I can’t see!’ he screamed, but he must have been able to see, because he was somehow avoiding the obstacles and pits that were around him.