by Tom Lloyd
Shell watched him go, Horse twitching its ears alongside the big soldier. She noticed the beast was uneasy at what they neared, but unsure at what, in fact, it was.
Aren’t we all? Shell thought, looking away over the ledge of land that tailed off in as unceremonious and undramatic a fashion as was possible for the edge of the world.
Spiny bushes studded an uneven slope beyond which something like mist dulled the view into a horizon of nothing. She could see more than a hundred yards down from where she stood, could probably have scrambled a long way down that slope, but the dirt, stones and ledges led nowhere; they were simply the slow tailing off of the world. No grand jutting cliff or dizzying drop, no echoing canyon or magnificent surging clouds – just a fading, frayed edge beyond which the vastness itself felt close and empty.
‘How are you feeling, Lichen?’
The thin man shivered despite the ragged greatcoat she had managed to buy him while Moss filled his belly that morning. It was long enough to serve as a blanket and though her memories of the bridge and the dead lands beyond were dim and fogged, she remembered the chill that ran right into her bones. She had been so near death when she staggered to this side of the bridge; perhaps saved from unseen hunters by the scent of the Voiceless burned into her skin, but vulnerable still to the cold.
‘Cold,’ the man gasped. ‘My arm, it feels . . .’
‘It will be better on the bridge,’ Ice asserted. ‘The taint of the wisphounds has no strength beyond this border.’
‘You sure about this, Lichen?’ Shell pressed. ‘It’s like a dream over this frontier and not a good one either. I’m not saying we’ll fall straight into your worst nightmare as soon as we cross, but I’ve no idea what we’ll find. Could be something a hundred feet tall or the ghost of some dead god. Losing an arm is a hard thing, but that’s better’n being dead and your soul fed upon.’
‘Where would I go?’ Lichen whispered. His face was paler than before even, his eyes dull and unfocused. It was an effort for him to lift his head and look her in the eye – perhaps there was in fact no choice for him, but Shell didn’t want the man’s blood on her conscience .
‘That I can’t say,’ Shell admitted, ‘but take a moment all the same. The choice is yours, but you’ve just stumbled on in our wake these past couple of days. I guess the diaspore does that to a man, makes you just want to keep going forward and not think about where you’re heading, but you’re free of it now. It’s time to remember to make your own mind up. You want to come with us, fine, but you need to know what you’re choosing. I’ve been there; I wouldn’t want to go again.’
‘I . . .’ The effort of thinking was clear on Lichen’s face. ‘I don’t think I’ll last long here,’ he said eventually, ‘not with an arm cut off.’ He squinted up at her. ‘And where would I go? I’ve got nothing now, no money or home. I’m a dead man to my family. All I have is you.’
Shell fought the urge to laugh at that. Marked by a demon, soon to be dead most likely, and halfway to penniless herself – that anyone could think she was all they had seemed a cruel joke on both of them.
‘All we got’s each other then,’ she muttered. ‘Well aren’t we the pitiful paupers, eh?’
‘And Moss.’
‘Oh sure, I’ve always got Moss. You do know how to cheer a girl up, don’t you, Lichen?’
Lichen nodded hesitantly and stumbled forwards, falling back into his unthinking, steady shuffle. Clearly the diaspore had changed Lichen enough that thinking for himself was exhausting, but plodding forward was bone-deep. When he was too tired for anything else, Shell realised, he’d just walk on – probably all the way to his grave.
Shell followed him after a pause, not wanting to feel that dead air on her skin again, but also not wanting to stand with Ice and face the regard of the stone monster. She tugged the mule onward and muttered soothing words as she stroked its neck – as much for her own comfort as the mule’s.
At the steps, she hesitated. She had spent some imitation of several days on the bridge last time, huddled as best she could out of the wind – the heat of her black marks pressed against her belly in lieu of a fire or food. It had sustained her, perhaps, but she still thought of the marks as a taints she would have cut out had it been possible.
Shell slipped back the cuff of her coat and looked at the thin finger impressions left there by that demon-like being. After all this time she found it hard to recall its face, as though the efforts made to erase its features also erased them from the memories of those who saw it. It had saved her and she didn’t know why, but in her gratitude she was bringing an angel and its burning sword to find it – not knowing if Ice intended to kill it or something else entirely.
On that first step the air thinned and the touch of the wind lessened on her skin. Shell remembered that sensation from before – the feeling of being almost spirit-like or walking through a dream. The cold was real and numbing, but curiously distant from her senses too, as though she was untethered from her body.
The light of day dimmed as she passed through the arch at the top of the steps and went inside the hollowed block. Her boots whispered a warning on the flagstones, the fallen shards of stone crunching like tiny bones underfoot, but she continued until she was at the very centre and looked up at the apex of the roof above.
‘What do you look for?’ Ice asked. The angel was standing behind her, wings half open as the breeze caught them.
‘I’m just looking,’ Shell said. ‘Why are we here? Why are you dragging me out here?’
‘I am charged with finding the Voiceless.’
‘What is he to you?’
‘He? It has no gender; it is not of the mortal world. It is nothing to me.’
‘Looked like a “he” to me. Was it once an angel?’
Ice looked at her in some strange reflection of surprise. ‘I do not know its origins, but not of your world does not mean it is of mine. I know the Voiceless is old – it once walked this realm, but I do not know if the God created it. I know it left at a time of war, when the Treniel Mountains were raised by the struggles of titans and the Crest Sea became a wasteland.’
‘How will you find it?’
‘You are marked by it - you carry part of it with you. There is a resonance between all such things, a sympathy that in the twilight plains beyond the border will bring you together.’
‘But the God won’t tell you why you’re going to find it?’
Ice cocked its head at her. ‘Do you believe warriors of the God lack faith?’
Shell frowned at that. ‘No, I . . . are you happy to serve, lifetime after lifetime, without ever truly knowing why?’
‘We serve; it is our purpose. The wind does not question why it should blow. Your gift from the God is to know the world another way to us.’
She snorted at that. ‘Aye, and how many of us mortals you ever known to be grateful for the lot we were given? That thought it a gift rather than a curse?’
‘Life is the God’s gift. The deeds of others a curse.’
‘And we’re expected to pray and give thanks for all that? For the shit that happens to us and the hovels we’re born into?’
‘You are expected to live, that is all. You may pray and ask of the God, but worship serves little purpose. The God exists and will weigh your sins when you die - no offerings or praise can change that.’
With that, Ice walked past her and headed out onto the span of the bridge itself. Moss and Lichen had already started along the left-hand path while Ice took the right, but even as she followed the angel she saw they could easily pass from one to another should they choose.
Even once she was out in the open again the light remained lessened, as though the lambent pre-dawn had returned and the bridge was caught in the moment before the dragons of dawn arrived. In the world behind them, the sun continued to rise and peek through tattered clouds, but out here on the border it was forever twilight. Shell shivered and pulled her coat tight around her body, jerking o
n the mule’s reins to hurry it along.
THE HOURS PASSED interminably. They stopped to rest and eat after a period Shell could hardly guess at. The sense of thinness continued and she felt weary through her whole body, but that had come on soon after setting out across the bridge and was no worse by the time they halted. The dark, shifting absence on either side of them remained uniform and empty – no sound or landscape ever piercing the clouds. There were no birds in the sky either, nor travellers that they saw; there was only the bridge and the fat points of dark stone each span ended in.
Only the number of those structures marked the distance and soon even those eluded her thoughts, blurring into nothing as she counted past a dozen. Shell ate only sparingly. She’d known, without being certain how, that the food would taste dull and grey. Lichen and Moss had been startled by the discovery, each spitting out their first mouthfuls, though the fodder the mule carried was eaten by both it and Horse without complaint.
They spoke little, each trudging forward with their eyes fixed on the next imposing block – counting off the spans, counting the steps left on each. The numbers faded but the purpose remained; the sense of doing something to distract from the absence all around them.
On their second break, after what could have been a day’s walking, Lichen suddenly looked up from where he’d slumped down, back to a wall, and looked around.
‘Are we safe out here?’ he asked, looking suddenly worried.
‘Safe?’ Moss echoed, looking surly. ‘Safe from what?’
‘I don’t know. Are we . . . are we alone out here? Does anything live on the bridge? Out, out there?’
Shell regarded the mould-blotched man, a mixture of weariness and disgust in her stomach for reasons she couldn’t place. She pitied Lichen, the man had lost everything and only the power of an angel had pulled him back from death’s frontier, but there wasn’t much to like. He’d been far from handsome before his hair had fallen out and the infection had gripped his body. Now he looked wrinkled and weathered, like a pale lizard clinging grimly to life. His arm pained him less, that was clear, but the man remained dazed and withdrawn – overawed by the world around him, fearful of saying much at all around the increasingly bad-tempered Moss.
‘There is no life on the bridge,’ Ice pronounced, its attention distant as though listening to a song on the wind. ‘This place is no place. There is no life within it - merely existence. Night here brings the dreams of dead gods, the nightmares and fancies of all that surrounds the great divide, but nothing alive.’
‘Are we going to have to camp for the night?’ Moss asked. ‘We’ve got no wood for a fire, little enough water. Dusk can’t be too far off, though I’m damned if I can see the sun.’
‘We will reach the other side before darkness comes,’ Ice said. ‘There is no sun here, nor hours. There is only light and dark and we travel in the light.’
‘It could feel like days,’ Shell added. ‘Crossing at night certainly did. I slept a couple of times, I remember that much. Was too tired to walk any further, but there’s no rest on this bridge. Took me a while to realise it, but I just had to keep walking or give up.’
‘Give up and what? Jump? Is there anything to fall into down there?’ Moss pointed, but like the rest of them he didn’t move any closer to the edge or attempt to look over. There was nothing to see, but still it was unsettling to even lean out.
‘There is only the divide,’ Ice said. ‘Do not jump.’
‘Great,’ Moss said, taking one last swig of water before stopping the skin and pushing himself back to his feet. He brushed at the fine dust that seemed to coat all of their clothes, even Ice’s, but it had no appreciable effect. ‘No rest, no end in sight. No bloody point sitting here then.’
‘The ritual matters to mortals, to rest and converse.’
‘Aye, well, the army o’ rhetoric has its own rules and rituals – one being all you bastards need to get up and get moving now.’
Lichen looked up, puzzled. ‘Why now?’
‘Cos I say so,’ Moss growled. ‘We press on or we sit here and fall out of time. The choice is yours but I say it’s time to move.’
‘I thought armies weren’t much fans of choice,’ Shell grunted as she stood.
‘Mine’s a bit different to most. We like to talk through every possibility.’ He forced a grin. ‘But if you want a manly slap on the backside to get you moving, I could manage that.’
‘Keep your damn hands to yourself.’
‘Wonder what sex is like out in between worlds?’
‘You’ll not find out.’
‘Just walking along’s pretty boring,’ he warned.
‘I’d imagine so is sex with you,’ Shell said wearily, ‘but I’ll take walking all the same.’
She led Mule past him and started out on the next empty, dust-blown span of bridge.
‘So you’ve imagined it then?’ Moss called brightly after her.
LULLED BY THE ebb and flow of faint breeze that washed over them, the muted ring of hooves on stone and the slap of his moccasins, Lichen felt himself drift into some form of waking dream state. The world was left far behind, invisible in the distance should he look back, and in this place between, this place of nothing, he found himself as adrift as a leaf on the wind.
Lichen didn’t look back. He didn’t look to the side even. The wonder he’d felt upon reaching Song’s End was long gone. The strangeness of the world’s frontier was now mundane for all it was unsettling. There was a blandness to everything that made his skin crawl; air neither warm nor cold yet his bones were chilled, their food leached of flavour, the colours of their clothes washed out to grey.
Moss led the way, erect and angry at something Lichen could not fathom, with his horse resigned at his side. Perhaps the anger was simply a soldier’s response to this place, a need to feel something from within when there was nothing to feel without. Lichen had looked inside and found nothing to warm himself; little enough at all and that in itself sapped his remaining strength.
He found himself drifting through waking-dreams of the infection, though he remembered none of it. His body remembered. The plodding, mindless steps day after day, the half-feeling of the world around him and this shuffle of feet below. The horizon was his goal then, the urge to walk and walk less a purpose than his entire being, subsumed to the infection that had taken him.
He’d never known when it had happened. Whether he’d breathed unseen spores on the wind, or brushed a tree where a diaspore had passed. It mattered little now. It had stolen his life and there was no returning. It marked him and would forever, the stain and taint that few would see as a mark of redemption – of the God’s benevolence.
He would trail in the wake of the angel, if he could. It was only in the presence of the God’s servant that people might understand, might not see him as a danger to be driven away or burned. But could he follow it even? It walked because Shell walked, no other reason. When it flew away after whatever mission it had was fulfilled, what then for him?
He looked at Shell, her face tight and scarred cheek distorted, her hands clasped around her stained wrists. Another one of them indelibly marked by their past. Perhaps Moss was too, scarred by battle or broken somewhere deep inside by the horrors of war. For all his professions of love, he rarely looked at her when there was silence among them. The man preferred to stride ever on, offer his back to his companions and look at the empty miles ahead rather than the faces of others.
The angel was behind them all and Lichen could sense its presence though its feet made little sound. It was a needle intruding on his dream, the anchor to the world they had left behind. Shell sensed it too, Lichen could see. She walked slightly ahead of him and would often glance back at the angel – almost for reassurance that it was still there but for the scowl on her face.
The woman did not like being too close to it, that much Lichen had gathered, but when she was, Shell seemed to gather some of its unnatural majesty to her and look something more
than she normally was. Her white hair gave her an ethereal air that was somehow magnified by the great wings and sexless features of the angel. She seemed taller in its presence, her movements more smooth and assured while Lichen’s own remained clumsy and confused.
They reached the end of another span and entered the dimmed expanse of another block. Ahead of him Moss trailed to a halt and looked around, prompting Lichen to do the same.
‘This one’s different,’ the soldier commented. ‘Look.’
There were streaks of black on the wall, jagged arterial spurts of deepest black against the decaying stone. They reached twenty feet or more up, all down one side of the interior while the other side bore a strange sort of bricked-up window – diamond shaped without a sill beneath. Instead there was a rusting iron spike protruding two feet out from the stone below it while suspended from the apex of the ceiling was an array of half-tarnished brass hoops fitted together to describe some sort of open sphere.
‘Is this the middle?’ Lichen wondered.
‘This is a dream,’ Ice said, not pausing as it walked past them all and out onto the other side. ‘Darkness is falling.’
They hurried to catch Ice up, Moss and Shell firing questions at the angel so close together Lichen couldn’t make out either’s. Eventually, Shell gave up and left Moss to question the angel.
‘How long do we have?’
‘Time has no place here. The dreams herald the darkness; they do not accompany it.’
‘Can we make the other side? How far to go? Do we need our weapons?’
‘The other side will present itself when it chooses. A traveller does not make demands of the bridge; they merely walk the spans of its choosing.’
‘Have you ever even crossed this bridge?’ Moss snapped. ‘Do you even know what the far side looks like?’
‘I have never crossed. An angel of the God needs no bridge.’
‘So you don’t know how long we’ve got to walk?’