The Last Days Of The Edge Of The World (17 page)

“Half a mile isn’t far,” she said. “It only takes ten minutes. Eight inches is quite enough. And the bridges will bear our weight. They must. We have to have a chance of getting there, or the whole thing’s ridiculous.”

“They’ll bear our weight,” agreed Ewan. “Perhaps that’s why the spell selected us: we’re neither of us very heavy. Seven-stone weaklings to save the world. Well, eight and a half.”

“We’re neither of us weaklings,” murmured Helen.

“No,” said Ewan.

There was a pause. Then Ewan said: “We’d better go.”

And Helen said: “Yes.” And they went.

Walking the bridges was a battle between knowledge and imagination. Ewan knew that eight inches was quite wide enough to walk on without undue danger of falling off. He knew, too, that the bridge must be able to support his weight. And he didn’t look down, because he knew that the abyss beneath him was irrelevant to the task in hand.

But knowing something is not the same as accepting it. In the apprehensive eye of his mind Ewan could visualize a false step that would topple him from the narrow black strip. He could visualize the ribbon of rock crumbling or cracking or dissolving into dust. And while he could not visualize the chaos that lurked below, he could certainly imagine all the sensations of falling… falling … falling….

It took more than courage to walk the bridges. It took conviction—not the power of mind over matter but the power of mind over mind. Unlike the power of mind over matter, with which Helen was familiar, the power of mind over mind was something they both had to discover from first principles. But they did it, although they discovered in the process that half a mile is really a long, long way. They crossed the bridges.

Because the gates were slanted they could see one another as they took their stand within them. They were not directly facing one another, but they only had to turn their heads a little to meet one another’s gaze.

The gates were not gates in the sense that they allowed access to some other world. They were just arches of rock. But as Ewan and Helen stood within them, shadowed from the glow of the drifting red flames, they each felt a sense of immanence, as though they genuinely did stand at the threshold not of two worlds but a thousand or a million—as though the whole of creation was close at hand. Perhaps, for those who knew how to use the gates, this nearness was actual, so that a traveller could step from the shadow to any place that is, was, or ever could be. But for Ewan and Helen, it was only a sensation—just a feeling.

Ewan, who stood within the gate named Hamur, experienced the feeling as a strange chill which seemed to begin deep inside his belly and slowly radiated outwards, consuming his entrails and running like quicksilver along his nerves to the tips of his fingers and his toes. Last of all it crept around the loculus of his skull, cradling his brain.

He didn’t shiver.

Helen, who stood within the gate named Sheal, felt a numbness which grew from the back of her neck and oozed through her head and spine and extended a strange stickiness into all her senses, so that everything outside her became soft and heavy and grey and sweet, and she seemed within herself to become liquid.

She did not faint or sway.

It was Ewan who had to speak first, to keep the order of the spell, but Helen, her voice thick and slow, voiced the question for him:

If you take your stand in Hamur’s place at edge of world and gate of space what feeling creeps within your bone?

And Ewan answered: “Cold.” There was a pause. Then Ewan recited the second part of the stanza, prompting Helen:

Aloof from Sheal the shadowed deep at edge of world and gate of sleep what do you feel as you stand alone?

And Helen replied: ‘Tired.” Then the world fell apart.

The black cliff crumbled into slick black sand. The cones of rock on which the gates stood began to melt, great gobs dripping into the abyss. The bridges shimmered and shattered and were gone, falling like tiny showers of metallic rain. As the gates themselves lost their shape and substance Ewan and Helen found their nightmare come true.

They fell.

But they did not fall like normal, solid objects. They fell like dead leaves or fragments of thistledown, borne up by an invisible force which might have been in the air that cushioned them or within themselves. They could not tell, and in their frightened minds it did not seem to matter, for the truth of it was that they were falling… falling… falling towards the grey chaos, and the horror of the feeling that came with the realization eclipsed all else within their minds.

Ewan wanted to stretch out his arms and put his legs together, to pretend that he could glide, but he couldn’t make his brain control his body. It made no difference. Still he floated down.

Helen tried desperately to think of a spell—any spell that might offer any help at all—but no spell would come … no rhyme at all.

The sky above them was no longer the even velvet blackness they had first seen on coming out of the eternal mists. It was turning grey and brown, and legions of blue-black boiling clouds were massing there. The red flames which had drifted in the air not far above them were ragged now, as if a dark, wayward wind was tearing at them, plucking them apart. Their light was fading now, but darkness did not come, because of the colour that was gathering in the sky. The last fragments of the black were slowly being banished, reduced to tattered banners which fluttered between the clouds and fell, flickering as they descended and looking for all the world like the ragged flames that were dying beneath them. It was as if the whole substance of the world was burning: red fire, black fire, blue fire… all struggling to render the old reality into smoke and ashes.

Still Ewan and Helen were stranded in their nightmare, falling… falling… falling–-

Then came the sound.

It was as if all the sounds that no one on Earth had ever heard were gathered together and joined into one immense sound which had no purpose other than to make itself heard, so that all the lost sounds of all the lost ages might make themselves meaningful at last, bursting upon human ears, to batter and scream and live, for a few fleeting moments, in human minds as a force… a terrible force… that mind could not resist….

Ewan, twisting in the air, found the source of the sound far out where there should have been a horizon but somehow wasn’t—where chaos curved to meet the dome of the black sky and somehow didn’t. From out of that horizonless void, out of nowhere and nothing, a torrent of pale water was spewing. In moments, as his head turned and his eye saw, the water grew from a splash to a flood to a vast wall, already breaking into white surf at its crown, rushing out of nowhere towards the disintegrating land at incalculable speed.

Ewan spun then, so that he was no longer facing the onrushing tidal wave, but Helen saw it crash and tumble over the awesome face of chaos. She saw the incredible happen as the water was not absorbed into the chaos but the chaos into the water, so that the great grey ocean became an ocean in fact, in reality.

That frightful sound tearing at her ears was the triumphant cry of the flood and anguished dying scream of chaos.

Still they fell… but no longer into a limitless abyss where their bodies would evaporate and disintegrate. Now they fell toward the water, and they fell so slowly… so very slowly….

Ewan felt the power of movement return to his limbs, and with one last glance at the burning sky he turned in his fall, stretched out his arms, and managed to hit the grey water almost vertically. It was no worse than diving from a ten-foot board.

Helen was not quite so fortunate—she twisted too hard and her limbs were still flailing as she hit the water. The impact knocked all the breath out of her, and while Ewan turned gracefully under water to bring himself back to the surface she floundered helplessly, unable to fight her way through the raging water to the air above.

As soon as Ewan’s head was above the surface he gulped air and looked desperately around for Helen, but he could see nothing. A wave lifted him upon its crest, and he tried to look all around in the moment before it flung him down again, but still he saw nothing. Then he was submerged again, and fighting the water once more.

Helen, robbed of sight and feeling, with the water crushing her as she sank through it, got control of herself at last. She reached out with her arms and kicked with her legs, not upwards but sideways, until she was moving through the water like a fish. Only then, with her movements measured and definite, and her lungs desperate for air, did she turn in the water and go up like an arrow. It seemed to take a long, long time… and for a moment her mind—which seemed oddly remote from her body— contemplated the possibility that she might not make it in time. But then her head was free, and she sucked air into her lungs.

She tried hard to stay afloat, and looked for Ewan. But there was too much wetness oozing into her flesh. Released from the invisible hand which had cushioned her fall she was dropped into a world of brutal forces which still raged in conflict although the spell was now complete and the judgement of Jeahawn Kambalba brought to its conclusions. No magic could harm her now … but no magic could save her, and she was lost in a tempestuous sea….

Somewhere there was a voice, calling her name. She knew it was Ewan, somewhere nearby, but she could not see him. The voice sounded fearful and forlorn. She tried to shout back, but salt water splashed in her mouth as she opened it, and she had to cough violently to get rid of it again. She tried to raise her arm as high as it would go, in case he couId see.

The sea threw them together. It was pure chance, unaided by any guiding hand, but Helen felt her extended hand gripped suddenly, clasped tight and squeezed, and then Ewan was beside her in the trough of a great wave which immediately burst above their heads.

When they came up for air again, Ewan tried hard to speak.

“It’s no use…” he began, and was stopped by the sea, which slapped him hard in the face. He had meant to say more, much more, but the waves would not give him the chance.

How far is the land? asked Helen, silently, of herself. What hope have we… if we have any hope at all?

She could not voice these questions, and so she let them die in her mind, concentrating all her effort in hanging on to Ewan. She looked up at the sky, which seemed no longer to be burning, but full of grey smoke and rain which fell all around them. Steep dark waves rose like hills on either side and she ducked her head before they could descend upon her, and did not lift it again until the impact was past.

Then, in a momentary calm, she saw something else in the water—something pale, more solid than the surf, that moved toward them. She tugged Ewan’s arm, but he had seen it, too, and was already striking out in that direction.

“It’s the horse!” yelled Ewan, close to her ear. “It’s the mare!”

It was, indeed, the grey mare, helpless in the salt water and thrashing her forelegs in blind panic, but somehow coming ever nearer to them. Four or five strokes brought Ewan and Helen to her neck, and they released their grip on one another briefly as Ewan tangled his right hand in her mane and then tried to gain a similar grip for Helen.

“The neck,” he gasped. “Put your weight on her neck. Try to balance her.”

Somehow they got themselves into position, one on either side of the mare, each clinging tightly to her mane, forcing her forelegs down into the water lest her hooves tear at her own flesh. Thus stabilized, the mare could swim—and swim she did.

Together the three of them fought the waves, which were already beginning to lose their violence. Together, they survived.

Both Helen and Ewan knew, even if the mare did not, that their chances of survival were still very slim. If the tidal wave had inundated the magic lands and carried the flood to the borders of Caramorn—and both of them felt sure that it had—then they were a long, long way from any shore.

And what hope could there possibly be of rescue?

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The pea-green boat cut through the waves like a knife, bobbing as it rode the swell and dipping down the backside of each wave. The wind ran the tiny sail this way and that, and the vessel swayed drunkenly from side to side. But the water that splashed the deck never threatened to turn her over.

Sirion Hilversun spun the wheel and chortled with delight.

“Look at that!” he called. “No magic—no magic at all! Isn’t she beautiful?”

Rufus Malagig IV, sprawled in the bows, had no idea what he was supposed to be looking at, and was far too sick to think anything was beautiful. He would have offered half his kingdom for just enough magic to keep the boat on an even keel. Not that half of his kingdom was worth a lot nowadays.

“It’s getting clearer!” shouted Sirion Hilversun, either not knowing or not caring how much his companion was suffering. “We’ve ridden out the worst of it. If only they haven’t drowned, we should be able to see them soon. The sky’s getting lighter all the time. Look… it’s almost blue now!”

Rufus Malagig tried to look up at the sky but was seized by such a terrible attack of nausea that it would have made no impression upon him if the sky had been pale puce. He groaned hollowly—a groan that would have done credit to any ghost.

It was still raining, but it was hardly more than a drizzle now. The waves were rapidly becoming calm. When they had launched the boat from the south-east tower as the tidal wave had crashed against the walls of Moonmansion it had been touch and go as to whether they would survive ten minutes. Without Jeahawn Kambalba’s warning, they might have been trapped in one of the downstairs rooms, in which case they wouldn’t have stood any chance at all. Now they were almost certainly safe themselves and were mounting a desperate search for Ewan and Helen.

Sirion Hilversun half turned to look at his companion and was horrified to see him sprawled out on the deck, with his head propped up against the bow rail.

“Get up, man!” he yelled. “I can’t look every way at once. On your feet, damn you!”