The Runes of Norien

by Auguste Corteau

CHAPTER SIX

  I

  Gallan! she thought, and sitting up with a jerk she coughed up brine and tendrils of seaweed, nasty things that stuck to her palate like flat worms, making her retch.

  Through a film of salt water and tears Raddia could make out a beach similar to the one they’d just left from, but one look at the sky was enough to realize they were no longer in Feerien. Never before had she seen a sky like this, so filled with massive grey clouds it seemed that any moment now their weight might bring it crashing down. And the sea, spreading as far as the eye could see and tossed this way and that by great wild waves, was equally dismal a sight. One would think this a world made of dullstone.

  It also felt as though the ground was trembling slightly, but then Raddia heard the chatter of her teeth and realized it was her own body shaking from the vicious cold. Her clothes were soaked and the sand she sat upon was also wet, and hard, and freezing. She hugged herself as tightly as she could, and rubbed her arms and legs, but still she shook violently, and had to squeeze her lips together to stop her teeth from chattering, which made her whole head vibrate painfully. Oh, what she wouldn’t give for a moment under Lurien’s white sky, for the mildness of its air, its warm, soft grass! Their Makers had been truthful in this, at least: beyond the Sphere of Untouch the world was cold.

  But they were futile, these thoughts, for she had no way of knowing if anything she loved about her realm existed still, and as she remembered it. And oh, selfish fool that she was, she had forgotten all about Gallan and the rest of them! Luckily, one look around sufficed to convince her that they had all made it to Erat Rin – if this was indeed the dreary world around them – and, although not in perfect shape, they were all very much alive. Gallan was on all fours vomiting sea water, Yodren and Yonfi were still curled up as one, forcefully rocking back and forth to warm each other, while Wixelor was sprawled across the sand, coughing and bringing up great jets of salt water along with clumps of the revolting wormlike stuff, and even some of those flat silver animals – fish? – which fell on the sand and flapped in agony.

  However, the flying machine hadn’t fared as well across the threshold, for it lay smashed into pieces, strewn along the shore and beaten by the constant breaking waves. Raddia sincerely hoped that there might be some other way of going back.

  I wouldn’t bet on it, came Gallan’s voice. Are you all right?

  So cold! she said, while he crawled over to fall, shuddering himself, in her arms.

  Do you remember anything from – whatever it was that just happened? Because the only thing I can recall is that blackness with all those blinking lights, and then I was falling...

  I felt that, too; in fact, I remember thinking that we’d never survive the fall.

  Well, it appears that we did – though for better or for worse, it’s too early to tell.

  It was then that Raddia, her chin resting on Gallan’s shoulder, noticed that small peculiar creature plodding near the still-sluggish Wixelor. At first she thought it was Yonfi, restored to his usual inexhaustible vigour, but Yonfi was still cuddled up in his brother’s embrace; moreover, as she observed its slow coming and going – it seemed that it was picking up the fish that lay around Wixelor, unfettered by the enormousness of his supine body and the powerful rasping of his breath – she realized it wasn’t bending its body up and down but was constantly stooped, like certain old people they’d seen in the Castle, whose bones had been distorted by disease; yet the creature’s face, which she had glimpsed once or twice (looking right back at her with the same fearlessness) was decidedly that of a child, flashing the quick brazen grin of childish mischief.

  The little one’s mind was humming with merry thoughts, but they were voiced in a language neither Raddia nor Gallan understood; however, since young minds often tend to think in images, the same ones they’ve only recently learnt to associate with words, they soon picked up three things: first, that although the extreme deformity and gauntness made the child’s sex indeterminate, she was actually a girl; second, that she was positively thrilled with all the fish Wixelor had swallowed and regurgitated; and lastly, that when she thought of them, she used a word that sounded like sun.

  Raddia was trying to decide whether it would be better to call out to the girl, lest her mind’s voice scare her, when Yonfi, having quickly recovered from the cold, saw her crooked form, jumped to his feet and rushed towards her letting out inarticulate cries of joy; Yodren was trying to call his little brother back – the poor thing seemed no more dangerous than a turtle, but who knew? Perhaps Yonfi wasn’t as powerful in Erat Rin.

  Yet to keep children apart is as impossible as separating drops of water: they are so fundamentally alike, their very nature draws them together. And the girl didn’t seem afraid of Yonfi, either; in fact, when he reached her and stood before her panting and blinking, she beamed at him, and taking one of the fish from her basket, she offered it to him. Yonfi tried to explain that she could keep it, and that if he wanted to catch fish he had but to stand by a river and they’d leap right into his hands, but the girl, despite her grinning and nodding, made few utterances, all of them incomprehensible.

  So finally Yonfi shouted in frustration, “Yodren! She speaks funny, and I can’t understand a word she’s saying! Please come tell me what she’s saying!”

  Yodren already stood behind him, hands resting protectively on Yonfi’s narrow shoulders, and reassured by the girl’s obvious harmlessness, he asked her her name.

  And though when she began to talk Yodren couldn’t comprehend a thing, with every passing moment, to his astonishment, he was making out more and more words, a feeling he had last experienced at twelve, when he’d suddenly realized he possessed the gift of reading and writing. Even more incredible, though, was the fact that this piteous creature spoke in a tongue which, for all its strangeness, was utterly familiar to Yodren: the Divine Language; a thing which took him completely aback, for up until now he had only encountered it in writing, and to hear it spoken, the words as mercurial as those of the ancient texts and prophecies, was nothing short of a marvel. What could this mean? Wixelor had said that the Forgotten Sphere had been among the first worlds created by the Gods, and also the first to be separated and driven far away from Norien. Of course all these concepts were equally confusing to Yodren, but one thing was certain: if what he’d been raised to consider as the language of the Spirits could fit inside the mind of a child of Erat Rin, then it was quite possible that the Spirits were mere figments, and that the humpbacked little wretch speaking to him descended from his own ancestors.

  By then the rest of the company had gathered around, shivering still but curious about the first person to encounter in this grim, alien place. What was her name? What had happened to her? Had she been born like this? Were there other people close by?

  Yonfi, feeling potentially upstaged, stood on the tips of his toes and said, “I am Lord Yonfi Kobold, though many call me Royen the Eternal, for I am an immortal hero who can raise the dead! And who might you be, little girl?”

  Grasping the meaning of the question by the pomposity of Yonfi’s posture, she replied in her arcane, melodious language. “She has no name,” Yodren said after she was done. “Her parents abandoned her when she was a babe, so they never gave her one.”

  “Poor dear,” Wixelor said in his booming voice. “How dreadful.”

  “But surely she must call herself something,” Gallan said.

  Yodren asked her again, still amazed at how fluently his mind formed and his mouth produced the ancient words, and listened to the girl’s reply. “She says she doesn’t need one,” he translated to the others. “If someone wants to speak to her, they can bid her to approach; she herself knows who she is, and it can’t all fit in a word; names, she says, are for animals and things, which can’t speak for themselves.”

  “What if someone’s looking for her?” Raddia asked.

  “No one would ever go looking for her,” Yodren sai
d after a bit. “She says she’s far too sickly to be of use to anyone, either as a companion or as food.”

  “As food?” Yonfi exclaimed. “Her people eat one another?”

  This took longer for the girl to explain, while they listened, all besides Yodren mystified; but once or twice she pointed at the sky, and said the word ‘sun’.

  “She was thinking of that exact word before,” Raddia said. “What does it mean?”

  “It means He who gives life,” Yodren interpreted as the girl spoke. “I gather it’s their version of the Spirits, or Gods; either way, she says that a few years ago it suddenly vanished behind the clouds; and then... and then ashes started to fall from the sky, bitter black ashes that poisoned the trees and the grass and the flowers – till they all died; and then the animals died too, for they had nothing to feed on... and the only creatures that survived were men and fish; if it weren’t for the fish, she says, man would have died off as well, and not just from hunger, but because... many took to eating human flesh. She’d have probably met the same fate, but luckily they only fed on the healthy, and she, being born after the black snow, was, like most children, disfigured; so they spared her.”

  For a moment they all fell silent at the horror of it all – a dead world populated by cannibals, where weak, malformed children were left to fend for themselves.

  Wixelor was dumbstruck; it was that awful dream, down to the last detail.

  “But how did this happen?” Raddia said, her voice hesitant and numb. “Why did this – sun – disappear? And where did the poisonous snow come from?”

  Yodren asked the girl, and in replying she pointed once more at the sky. And as he listened, his face grew sombre, then fearful, and finally petrified.

  “A stone,” he muttered, avoiding the gazes turned upon him. “She says the Gods cast a huge stone that fell from the sky; the Stone of Death, her people call it.”