Fallen (37 page)

“My fault,” she said, and Beko's arm brought her no warmth. “I gave him that sickness, so Konrad is my fault, and—”

“Blame will crush you,” Beko said, “and guilt will chew your bones.”

“An old Mancoserian saying?”

“An old Beko Havison saying.” He rested his forehead against hers for a few beats, and it was the smell of his breath more than the contact that gave her some comfort. She was here among friends, and whatever she had done, they still chose to ride with her. She was paying well, true, but their actions spoke volumes.

“It's going to be a hard climb,” she said.

“I know. And we may not reach the top.”

“If there is a top.”

Beko sighed. “We should set a limit. A point at which we stop and come back down.”

“Ramus won't.”

“No, but Ramus is crazy.”

Nomi nodded slowly and listened to the noises made by Noon and Ramin checking their gear. Tomorrow they would ride toward the edge of Noreela. This was the greatest time of her life. Why, then, was she filled with such dread? She had the sense that the climb would be like plunging into a bottomless lake, doomed never to surface again. She would sink up out of Noreela, leaving behind not even her shadow.

“Let's eat,” Beko said. “Rhiana has made us something special.”

TO BEGIN WITH,
Ramus wanted to stop at every standing stone.

He dismounted and circled the first one, using his foot to shift aside the tall grass around its base, running his hand across the smooth weather-worn surface, trying to discern shape, purpose or intention in its placement. He carried his journal with him, reversed so that any notes he made here were in the back. He did not want to interrupt his translations and observations of the parchments.

Lulah, still shaken from their encounter at the edge of the forest, remained mounted. She rode a circle around Ramus and the rock, looking outward instead of in. She had hardly exchanged glances with Ramus since the gray people.
Every day I'm driving her further away,
he thought, but that hardly mattered. They had passed well into the uncharted territories now, and his rough map was taking on shapes and contour as he added information. It was knowledge for knowledge's sake, because he knew he would never return.

Soon they would be at the Divide. And perhaps these stones would guide him in.

Is this you?
he thought, but no voice answered.

No markings, no carvings, no signs of who- or whatever had placed them, and yet placed the stones must have been. Ramus pressed his back to the stone and looked in a slow half-circle from east, to south, then west, and from there he could see six other stones. Most were quite small humps—either through distance or through quirks in the landscape—but the largest stood proud from a small hilltop to the southeast.

He closed his eyes and heard only the sound of Lulah's horse's feet plodding across the soft ground to his right. He whispered some new words to the air—the language he was coming to know better and better, but which he had yet to understand— and nothing changed. But he felt the power there, and he suddenly wanted to see the parchment pages again.

There was something about one of the pages, the one without writing but swamped in images . . .

He sat against the rock, opened his backpack and unrolled the parchments, flattening them on his outstretched legs. The one he sought he had examined least, because much of it was filled with imagery that spoke no words. But Ramus knew that you did not need language to tell a story. This page had the customary line dividing the sheet into a third and two-thirds, and among the abundance of images and shapes were twelve pointed images that could have been standing stones. They started smallest away from the Divide, and the closest one was largest. The line of the Divide adjacent to this largest stone was stepped inward briefly, as though indicating a special place.

The easiest way to climb,
Ramus thought.
Either that, or a route into a trap.

By the time Lulah had passed behind the standing stone and emerged again on his left, Ramus knew where they had to go. “That way,” he said, pointing at the largest rock in the distance. “And from there to the next largest, and the next.”

Lulah nodded and stopped her horse, waiting for him to mount his own.

But Ramus turned once again to the monolith, opening his arms and pressing his hands and face against a surface slightly warmed by the sun. The rock seemed to throb at him, a brief sensation that was not repeated, and for a moment the pain in his head receded. Like the slow, ponderous heartbeat of something asleep for a very long time.

THE SHADOWS GROW
from the south and advance toward him, and they have teeth. They are made of darkness and ambiguity but are sharp and deadly, and one bite from their unseen edges will kill him for sure. He looks around for his traveling companions, but he is on his own. They have abandoned him or been killed, and even his horse glances to the side now and then, foaming at the mouth, blood in its spittle, its mad, rolling eyes accusing him of some wrongdoing and issuing the promise that it will be gone at the first opportunity. But it is a chance it will never have, because the shadows roll fast across the landscape. Every time they touch one of the standing stones, the rock transforms into a nebulous, writhing shape that runs and frolics within their embrace.

And there it is: the unknown, that sea of darkness containing all the knowledge he can never have . . . even though the source of this dream is Nomi, not him, and the insecurity showing through is both chilling and heartening.
I'm lost,
he thinks in the dream, but in the part of his nightmaring mind that is aware of where this comes from, those words are spoken in Nomi's voice.

The shadows bear down on him and their leading edges are raw, seeping wounds in the land.

He laughs.

RAMUS SAT UP
quickly, still laughing, and wondered whether he could reverse the process of his worsening sickness. It burrowed in his head and gave him her nightmares, and though the pain flooded in again and drove him back to the ground, there was one ray of light that kept his smile. The hope that, somewhere in her sleep and across the miles, she would hear him laughing at her dread.

THEY NAVIGATED THEIR
way south from rock to rock. Sometimes it was obvious which distant monolith was the largest, but other times it was difficult to tell. Whenever they had been placed, it would have been impossible to account for future shrugs in the landscape, fallen stones, growing trees or drifting mist. If he could not tell which was largest, Ramus consulted Lulah, and together they followed their best guess. It did not concern him unduly. The pages were right, and he had felt that beat through the land. He was confident that if they did stray from the trail, they would soon find it again.

He hugged every rock they came to, and each time he felt another encouraging beat. And there was the sickness, and the deeper, darker portion of his mind that no longer belonged to him. It was watching him, and he reveled in its attention.

A day out from the forest, Lulah started to settle again. Whatever dark memories those gray people had encouraged to resurface must have been dark indeed. Either that, or Ramus was far more able to deal with such guilt.

Because I'm going mad.
But he would shake his head at that idea, even though it hurt to do so.
I'm not going mad. I'm going
sane.
I'm looking for the future, and when I find it I'll make sure it's safe.

But he wondered. . . .

When he sat down during the evenings and examined those pages, he wondered where he was leading himself, and just how much he was being led.

RAMUS KNEW WHAT
it was straightaway, and Lulah seemed terrified.

“That's the edge of the world,” she said.

“It's the Great Divide. Not the edge, just a boundary. Every boundary is there to be crossed.”

“No,” Lulah said, shaking her head and somehow transferring her unease to her horse. It stomped its feet, skittish and snorting. “No, it's the edge. Can't you see that? Can't you feel it?”

Ramus looked at the stretch of shadow across the southern horizon and tried to decide exactly how he felt. Excited, perhaps. Nervous. Behind them stood the final huge standing rock, and between here and the horizon was an unremarkable plain of rolling grassland swept bare of trees. Across that landscape, where it met the horizon, the first part of their voyage would end.

“I've been examining the pages every evening,” he said. “There's nothing that tells me this is the end. Everything indicates that the Divide is the beginning of somewhere else.”

“A place where words can turn people to stone?”

Ramus looked at Lulah—her face nervous, belying the image of the strong woman bristling with weaponry—and shook his head. “Those words are special.”

“The words of a Sleeping God?”

“Perhaps.” But when he looked south again, he thought,
Perhaps sleeping, or more likely fallen, because some of what I see on those parchments . . .
But that was a myth within a myth, and the more he thought of it, the more those doubts were swallowed by the presence in his mind, leaving only the good behind.

“If there is a Sleeping God—” Lulah began, but Ramus cut her off.

“They were good. And only good will come of finding it.”

Ramus went first, keen to head as far south as possible before darkness fell. He felt a terrible moment of sickness later that afternoon and the sun seemed to explode, casting a bright light into his eyes that he knew originated from within. The pains scorched his skull and he lowered his head, letting the horse carry him on. When he could look up again, he lifted the charms around his neck—the bone from the border guard, the circular stone that Lulah had seen, and Konrad's snapped-off fingers, which she had not—and pressed them to his lips. He exhaled past each and inhaled again, hoping to breathe in charmed air.

The pain subsided, barely, and he imagined Nomi standing before him naked, her body pierced by bolts fired from a crossbow held in his hands. The bolts went in slowly. They hurt. She screamed, and he aimed at the parts of her he had never seen.
Let Beko kiss them better,
he thought. The daydream went on for a long time, and when his horse stumbled and jarred him back to reality, it took a while to lose the image. It did not shake him as much as it would have a score of days before. He hadn't realized he had changed so much.

Chapter 14

THE SKY HAD
become overcast a few miles back, an even grayness that filtered weak sunlight, and the cliff itself seemed swallowed by its blandness. But distance was very difficult to determine. When they first saw the cliff face—the ridges and textures of rock instead of the haze of mist—Lulah guessed that they would be there within the hour. Ramus was not so sure. He concentrated on the landscape rather than where it ended, and he could see hills and plains disappearing into the distance. He thought another day's ride. This was something neither of them had ever seen or been able to imagine before, and scale seemed to obey no laws. The sky looked huge, but it was dwarfed against the cliff.

Ramus could feel the weight of the Divide pulling him onward. It was unbelievable, this bulk, this mass, and the pain in his head seemed to be coming from somewhere just in front of him rather than inside. He stopped paying attention to things close by and instead looked ahead, focusing on the wall of rock that sprouted from Noreela and disappeared into the level gray cloud cover above. How high up those clouds were he could not tell; they felt low, but sometimes he saw the specks of birds or other things circling and drifting high up, and on occasion those specks disappeared to nothing as they rose even higher. A mile, perhaps two, maybe three . . . he could not know. And they would not find out until they started climbing.

Around mid-afternoon, several shapes drifted toward them from the south, wings flapping now and then but mostly riding the air currents. It was difficult to tell how large they were, but they kept formation: two in the lead, three more behind. Ramus listened for their calls, but there were none, and they did not deviate from their path.

As the shapes began to lose height, Lulah rode before him and drew a crossbow from her saddlebags.

“Hold this,” she said, lobbing the weapon back at him. Ramus caught it in one hand, rested it across his saddle and then caught the rack of bolts Lulah sent after it.

The shapes had four wings each, bulbous eyes and silvery legs that trailed behind them as they drifted lower. Each was the size of a man.

“What are they?” he asked. “Livid eagles?” But livid eagles were so rarely seen that some thought them myth, grabbing their victims with metallic claws and exuding a cloud of acidic vapor from their feather tips to strip skin, melt flesh.

“Hardly matters right now,” Lulah said. She took the bow from her back and strung an arrow without taking her eyes off the creatures coming at them.