Fallen (50 page)

He said more and she heard it all, but by the time the Sentinels came to take her down, her mind was far away, and much of what he had said was forgotten. She was glad. She was suffering her own terrible fate, and next to that his miserable utterances were nothing.

THEY PUT HER
in a pit. It stank, feces and piss staining the walls, and in one corner a pile of dried bloody matter attracted flies and crawling things. Nomi cried but they took no notice, throwing food down at her until she caught something. She hated doing so, but she ate. And when they lowered a water jug down to her, she drank.

The old man refused to let her go. She suspected that he would also refuse to kill her, should she ask.

But there was always Ramus.

Chapter 19

SOMETHING TOUCHED HIS
face. He felt it from a distance, deep down in sleep or unconsciousness, and it was cool and slick like a living thing's tongue. It moved across his closed eyes and up to his forehead, leaving a chilled trail where it passed. He tried to lift his hand to feel what touched him, but he could not find his arms.
Perhaps I'm still suspended there,
he thought, even though he was sure that had been Nomi's nightmare rather than his own.
Perhaps I'm still being held up and examined, probed, prodded by things I don't want to understand.
The sensation faded and he tried to rouse himself. It was not easy. The pain was still thumping in his head, central to everything he sensed. If he went back under he could escape that pain, but if he rose up to face it . . .

“Ramus,” a voice said.

“Nomi,” he whispered.

He opened his eyes and felt that coolness on his forehead again. A shadow moved above him, blurred in his vision. It could have been immediately before his eyes or five miles away.

“Ramus,” the voice said again, and this time he heard relief. “I'll get you something to drink.”

Nomi,
he wanted to say, but his mouth was dry and this time it came out as a gasp. Water trickled onto his tongue and he swallowed greedily. The cold thing touched him one more time and he managed to raise a hand, grabbing the arm of whoever touched him.

“It's night,” she said. It was Lulah. Ramus felt a momentary flush of disappointment, but then she said more that shamed him. “I can hear things moving around in the forest, but you're safe here. Understand, Ramus? You're safe with me.”

Safe,
he thought.
Can she really mean that? Does she know something I don't?

He thought of the Fallen God, and wondered whether Lulah had found its dried, forgotten corpse.

THE SERIAN GATHERED
some nuts and fleshy grubs from beneath a fallen tree. Neither of them knew whether they were safe to eat, but Lulah said she'd eaten similar things many times before in Noreela. Ramus was too hungry to question her, and too tired to care. The nuts tasted earthy, and the grubs burst sour in his mouth. As he chewed quickly to merge the tastes, he rested one hand against the charms on his chest.

“We need to move on,” he said.

“I thought you'd died.” Lulah sat close by him, her weapons drawn and laid before her.

“Everything hitting home,” he said. “I'm exhausted.”

“And that,” she said. She touched his head with the damp cloth one more time, but this was not a soothing gesture.

“Yes,” he said. “Worse now that I'm tired.”

“I can't protect you if you keep collapsing like that.” She peeled another husk and popped the nut into her mouth.

Ramus could not answer. “So we should move on,” he said instead. “Explore some more.”

“We need to go back down,” Lulah said.

“But—”

“Not now. Not immediately. But you need to accept that we can't stay up here indefinitely.”

Why?
he thought. But he nodded, sitting up gingerly and accepting that he should tell her what she needed to hear.

“So, when?” she asked.

“I don't know. Not today. Not tomorrow. There's so much to see, and I didn't climb so far just to turn around and leave again.”

Lulah nodded. “Perhaps after the God,” she said.

Nomi's in pain,
Ramus thought, vague sensations from his dream returning in fleeting glimpses.

After more food he stood, doing his best to ignore the dizziness that threatened to tip him over. Lulah could see, he knew, but he did not look at her. He concentrated very hard and, after a few steps, found his rhythm. His muscles still ached but he welcomed that. Pain confirmed that he was awake, here and now, not hanging and suffering like Nomi.

Perhaps he should go to help. But he did not know where she was or what was happening to her. And there was something larger on his mind than the doom she had visited upon him, and her own pains he knew as a result. Something drawing him on, calming his illness, or prodding it, depending on the way his own thoughts went.

He thought of going farther south, and the pain lessened.

He thought of helping Nomi, and dizziness threatened him once more.

“Into the trees,” Ramus said. “It looks like an old path, though it's overgrown. We'll follow.”

“You think it might be that way?”

He looked at the trail through the forest, and in the distance he saw the hint of something gray and solid standing among the trees. “Something is.”

IT WAS ANOTHER
stone man. He stood upright but his head was missing. Ramus searched through the knee-high ferns surrounding the petrified figure but could find no sign. There were no clothes or other belongings scattered around, either, and many pieces of the body were snapped off or worn away by the elements. It was disconcerting looking at this statue that had once apparently been a living, breathing person. He wondered whether, if he broke it in half, he would be able to identify the insides.

Lulah found another, twenty steps away. This one had fallen before being turned, arms stretched out as if to ward off some terrible fate. It was equally worn by wind and rain, features long since eroded to a shadow.

They followed the obvious path through the forest. Here and there were stumps of trees that had been cut down long ago, almost hidden by the ferns and other plants that had sprung from the ground now that the tree canopies above were gone. There was no sign of the fallen trees. Perhaps they had been used for building, back in the ruined village they had just passed through, though there was more to this path than simple harvesting. It led somewhere, and if the cleared trees were not proof enough of that, the stone bodies certainly were.

Ramus felt events pressing in on him. On their long journey here from Long Marrakash there had been trials and pressures, but now he sensed his past drawing to a close, and his future stretching out before him like this long-hidden trail through the forest. The present struck him harder than it ever had before.

“Another,” Lulah said. She stepped beneath the tree cover and approached a moss-clad mass.

Ramus stood beside the path and watched as she scraped away some of the moss with her sword. The shape was almost subsumed beneath the plant growth, but one arm protruded, fist closed around something long since stolen away. Two fingers had broken off, and Ramus thought of the digits he had tied on a leather thong around his neck. Konrad. What charms did he hope to gain from that dead Serian's pieces?

“Two of them,” Lulah said, surprised. She lifted a curtain of creepers aside to let Ramus see.

The taller of the two figures was worn and cracked by the plant growth, but the shorter shape—both arms slung around its protector, face pressed into his or her shoulder—had retained its features. Delicate, sharp and terrified, the face was damp and crawled with tiny golden insects.

He shook his head in wonder, then shuddered in terror as he remembered those words again. Mutter them now, with Lulah this close, and she would turn to stone.
I have the power of a god,
he thought, and he expected to be struck down for such presumptuousness.

“We should leave,” the Serian said. She held her sword and her eye flickered from here to there, scanning the path and trying to pierce the shadows on either side. “Back to the village; there's that place of books for you to examine. You'll learn a lot more about this place by reading its history than wandering its forgotten paths. And we can take them.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But reading isn't seeing, touching or tasting.”

“It'll tell you more than—”

“You'd rather read about humping, or do it?”

Lulah glared at him for a beat, then looked away.

Ramus led the way this time, wincing now and then against the pain in his skull. Every heartbeat of pain reminded him of Nomi. He tried hating her, but it seemed that only certain emotions could travel from one world to the next, and hatred was not one of them.

And every time the agony throbbed in, there was something else there to instantly calm it again: a presence illuminated by the pain, like a shape in the darkness lit by lightning flashes.

The forest followed gentle slopes down into a valley. The air became heavy and warm, and to begin with it was a pleasant relief from the cool breeze that had bitten through their clothes since reaching the plateau. Ramus felt sweat dribble down his sides, sticking his shirt to his back, and Lulah's face was beaded with moisture. But the farther they went down into the valley, the warmer it became. They stripped off their outer layers, afraid that they would dehydrate and use their water too quickly. And when they came to the tree line and the bulk of the valley was laid out before them, they had to pause to take everything in.

Here was another ruined village, but the destruction wrought upon this place was much greater. Barely a wall was left standing. It was spread across the floor of the valley, several small streams bisecting the destroyed settlement, spanned here and there by intricate timber bridges suspended from stone columns. The bridges, strangely, remained untouched by whatever had swept through this place.

Even from this distance, Ramus could see that there were more stone people scattered around the village. Some stood or lay in the fields outside, often piled here and there as if many of them had died together. Others were in the village itself, vague humps between shattered buildings, standing against piles of rubble or broken down into fragments.

He could also see that these dead stone things were not human.

“What is this?” Lulah asked.

“War, perhaps,” Ramus said. He recognized the tall, long-limbed shapes from some of the images of the parchment pages still in his backpack. They made surreal sculptures in death—ragged, sticklike things that threw strange shadows across the grass around their feet. Some of the limbs were missing, sliced or snapped away either before or after their turning from flesh to stone, but the detail in their faces seemed remarkable.

“These are more recent,” Lulah said. “This is something else. Nothing to do with those behind us in the forest.”

“They were human, for a start.” Ramus led the way. He was frightened, but also utterly fascinated.
Here they are,
he thought,
the people of the plateau. A new civilization.
It was a pity that they were dead.

Lulah did not want to go close to any of the things, but Ramus paused to examine each statue he passed. They were all tall, lithe and well muscled, their proportions seemingly exaggerated in every way. Longer limbs, larger hands, even their heads were slightly larger than humans', bearing faces that were remarkably familiar. But there was something about their frozen expressions that troubled Ramus, and the more stone bodies he looked at, the worse his confusion became.

It took Lulah to give him the answer. As they came to the first ruined building, she looked down at a stone body sprawled at her feet. “They look like animals,” she said. And Ramus knew that she was right. However humanoid they appeared—however much he had been unconsciously attributing them with humanity—their faces held little to support that. They had all died snarling, expressions twisted into fighting shapes. There was little here that he recognized.

“We should go,” Ramus said. “Look.” He pointed past the ruins, and farther down the valley a cloud hung low in the air, slow graceful swirls the only sign of active air currents. And though it drifted, still it was fed from below.

“What's that?” Lulah asked.

“Perhaps nothing,” Ramus said. “Or perhaps it's what this place was built to protect.”

Lulah led the way. Past the village the land took a sudden dip, a shale slope leading down to a lower portion of the valley floor. The streams feeding through the village rumbled down the slope in two waterfalls, throwing mist and small rainbows into the air. Behind them, a scene of conflict and death. Before them, beauty. Ramus commented upon it, and Lulah nodded and smiled. “You'll often find both together,” she said. “Sometimes I believe the land has to provide balance.”

“Which land? This one, or our own?”

Lulah looked confused. “Surely they're the same? There's a cliff between us, but this place is higher, that's all. It's still Noreela.”