Fallen (30 page)

“You killed him?”

“I challenged him. It was at the Cliff of Souls, just as Pargan's body was dropped from Mancoseria into the sea below. I . . . lost control. The tears of loss had come and gone, and now I cried with rage. I saw my friend wrapped in black-grass and tipped into the sea, and he was younger than me, and both socially and physically he had yet to become a man. And now he was dead, and I blamed his family for it first and foremost. So I did something that I believed would define our friendship and honor him. I challenged his father, struck him down with my fist. And when he rose again, he had a knife in his hand.

“We fought, but it was quick. On his first strike, he hit my eye and I felt it pop. He laughed. The rest of Pargan's family, the others gathered there, were shocked at the violence—this was Pargan's funeral, after all. But what better place for a fight to the death than above the Cliff of Souls? He came for a second strike. I deflected it, broke his arm, took his knife and slit his throat. Before anyone could stop me I sent his body over the cliff after his son's, and that was that.”

Lulah fell silent again, almost as if the story had ended. But for Ramus it had just begun. Surely there was so much more to tell?

“And you escaped justice, after killing him in front of so many?”

“Justice?” Lulah asked, and she was so close to tears that Ramus looked ahead, not wishing to see her cry.

Lulah's story
was
told. Whatever had happened between her killing of Pargan's father and her arrival on Noreela seemed moot, because she was here now and she wore her patch with pride.

“So I understand betrayal,” she said a long time later. “And I understand being wronged. And that's why I came with you.”

“You see the betrayal I've suffered?” Ramus asked.

“Nomi's killed you.”

And in that bald statement Ramus tried to discern the truth of things.
Nomi and I should have been lovers,
he thought. He wondered how lovemaking with one's executioner would feel.

THAT NIGHT THEY
made no campfire, and Ramus had to study the parchments by the light of the moons. Perhaps it was a strange property of the material, or a trick of his eye, but the blank third of the page seemed to glow with life-moonlight, and the other two-thirds—where words were written and images printed—shone yellow. The death moon touched the Sleeping God and gave its image shape.

Lulah had prepared them a meal consisting of dried meat from the day before, stuffed with soft herbs and a variety of crushed root. It tasted cool and foul, but she insisted that it would give them strength. Ramus had eaten it whilst holding the round stone charm in his other hand, and he felt effects from neither.

Now Lulah patrolled the camp once again. He could not hear or see her, and that gave him great comfort.

And the pages Ten had found at the base of the Great Divide breathed at him.

Ramus knew that translating old languages relied on a small stroke of insight to give large benefit. Some languages from Old Noreela had never been broken, and probably never would. There were stone tablets from the great burial mounds of Cantrassa that must contain the histories of an entire race, long since gone. But though the tablets were filled with symbols, there was nothing with which to compare them. Some believed they came from a race that had landed on Noreela many centuries or millennia before, and that their people were long gone to dust. Others alleged that they were from a civilization wiped out when the current Noreelans first started to appear, a genesis lost to the mists of time, myth and superstition. If the new race had wiped out the old, it would follow that the history of the old race would have been wiped out as well. Victors write history, not the vanquished.

Still more said the tablets were lined with the terrible history of the Violet Dogs.

But Ramus knew now that the language used on these pages had a basis in some of the Old Noreelan tongues, and might even have been derived from one or all of them. This was a mystery that he would uncover, and the thought of what he would find numbed the pain behind his eyes.

Yet he could not clear that small stone fly from his mind.

Ramus worked long into the night. Lulah returned to the camp after midnight, mumbled something about having traveled for miles and seen no threat, then fell asleep close to Ramus. He could hear her breathing and took comfort from their proximity.

He muttered words he had discerned from the pages the previous night, and once again felt a fine fall of dust around his head. He frowned, because he did not know what was happening, though suspicions were taking form.

On one page, the words were surrounded by a series of images— a humanoid figure repeated thirty times around the page in various poses, one seeming to follow the other. At first he had believed it to be an illustrated dance, one form of expression displayed by another. Now he had other ideas. In the morning, perhaps he would find out for sure.

He traced other words with his finger, trying to shape his mouth around them, and they felt alien and old. They gave him only a whisper, because their vocalization took much strength from his body and mind.

There is magic deeper than magichala,
the Widow had said. She often spoke of the potential in the land, and sometimes he believed she viewed Noreela as a living thing. She would pick up a stone and hand it to him.
Touch this. Feel it. Sense its shape, its smoothness on one side and the jagged edge on the other. Imagine who or what has touched it before you, what it has seen, what it has borne witness to. How did it break? A footfall, a strike, caving in the skull of a person or thing? There's magic, Ramus Rheel. The land's memory and future. The land's soul. It's deep, but when I'm asleep and I look far enough inside, I can sense it there, waiting to be born. And one day I will possess it, and these peaks will become mine.

His eyelids drooped and his head nodded forward, and Ramus carried the pages from waking into sleep, aware that he was dreaming yet still trying to translate. And though he could not hear or speak the words fully, they began to make some sense.

RAMUS AWOKE TO
daylight, slumped on his saddle with the parchment pages clasped in his hands, and something was moving across his face. He lifted a hand before he could open his eyes fully, and the beetle was cool and hard in his fist. Its pincers sliced for his thumb but missed. Its feet spiked his skin, feelers tickling the hairs on the back of his hand as it tried to crawl away. And from the depths of sleep, words echoed at him, and he muttered them aloud.

They stuck in his mind, as though pinned there by barbs of sunlight.

The large insect's feelers turned from black to gray, snapped and crumbled. Its carapace lightened, and it stopped moving when three of its legs snapped off. Their stumps scratched at Ramus's hand, sensation paying witness to the impossible thing he saw. He wanted to throw the thing away, yet it was of his own making. His sleep-staled breath, his words, his muttered dream-time exhalations were turning this beetle to dust.

Its body was gray now, and all movement had ceased. He heard a subtle cracking sound and the animal twitched in his hand, breaking in two as impossible stresses were forced upon its structure. When its outer shell was ruptured, its innards flowed out onto Ramus's hand. Dust and grit.

Lulah appeared from behind a high bank of shrubs and Ramus closed his hand, crushing the dead beetle beyond recognition.

“What's wrong?” she asked, pausing when she saw his face.

“Nightmare,” he said. He stood, pressing both hands to the ground to do so. As he stepped forward he passed his foot through the smear of dust.

“We should move on,” she said. “It's bright now, but there's rain coming.”

Ramus looked up at the clear blue skies, enjoying the sunlight on his face.
My words did that,
he thought, but immediately the lie was apparent. They had not been his own words, but those of some unknown civilization. He could only wonder whether they still existed atop the Great Divide, and what other wonders they may possess. They wrote a charm that turned a living thing to stone.
Maybe you were right, Widow,
he thought.

“I see only clear skies,” he said.

Lulah looked grim and more withdrawn than before. Perhaps this morning she was regretting telling her tale. Ramus knew more than most how a person could change from day to day.

“Believe me,” she said, “heavy rains by midday. I smell it, shred flowers droop and the birds are gathering food. And the farther south we go, the more the rains might bring with them.”

They rode out after a light breakfast, and by early afternoon the sun was blotted out by clouds, daylight had turned almost to dusk and the rains were thrashing down.

THE STORM HID
them from threats, but seemed to bring dangers closer. Rain fell vertically, splashing from the ground to create a mist of water around their horses' hooves, dirt and muck rising and muddying their legs. Lightning flashed; thunder cracked. They both wore the heavy leather groundsheets from their tents that doubled as cloaks, and much of the water ran off, but not all. It found its way down Ramus's neck and through his trousers, until he was cold, wet and shivering. Such discomfort did not concern him, however. For now the storm brought only water, but Ramus waited for the impacts of something heavier.

He watched Lulah's back as they rode, and he was somewhere else, a blank place of thought where possibilities collided and coalesced into things beyond belief.

He knew of people who disbelieved magichala. They were fools and he told them so, because it was simply the arcane knowledge of plants and roots, dust and rain, and such things seemed impossible to those who lacked such insight.

But now . . .

That was no trick,
he thought.
I saw what I saw. And when I fell yesterday the dust of dead flies was upon me, turned to stone by my nightmare mutterings. And Lulah, stern Lulah, she did not hear exactly what I was saying. She was too far away. But if she had come to see, brought close by my rantings? She would not know the words, but neither did the flies or the beetle. I could not fashion a sword, yet one could kill me despite my ignorance.

Magic,
Ramus thought.
Widow, I have touched the magic you so covet.
And yet he was still not sure. Was this magic, elusive and unknown, a myth with no histories to back it up? Or simply another form of magichala? Perhaps those that dwelled on the Divide performed their own magichala, permitted by nature and the land but known by few.

The more Ramus mused upon it, the less the differences seemed to matter.

He felt those words engraved in his mind, like the prayers carved on the stone temples to the Sleeping Gods.

THE WHOLE DAY
was dark, and dusk seemed a long time coming. They passed across the Steppes and encountered no problems, though Ramus felt watched every step of the way. He saw no one, and Lulah claimed to be unconcerned, but the rain felt like a weak barrier against who- or whatever observed them. At one point there were slugs and snapes falling with the rain, and they brushed the sticky creatures from each other's capes. But for now, nothing dangerous fell.

And in his sickening mind, Ramus sensed the monstrous attention of something nonhuman. The cancer was a weight behind his eyes, and this was a void inside his mind, an area of nothingness that he could never possibly know.
How can it truly be sleeping if it sees me from afar?
he wondered. He shook his head, tasted the raindrops and wondered whether the parchment pages were affecting him more than he knew.

Late that afternoon, Lulah stopped and waited for him to draw level. She rode beside him, neither of them looking at each other, and he felt the weight of expectation bear down heavier than the torrential rain.

“We're being followed,” she said at last. “Don't turn around and don't speak.”

How do you know?
he wanted to ask, but it was a foolish question. The Serians spent much of their time hunting things that wanted only to eat them. He knew that Lulah's senses could see and hear through such simple stuff as rain.

“When I fall back, ride hard,” she said, and without giving him a chance to ask questions, she turned her horse and galloped back the way they had come.

Ramus kneed his mount and lifted himself from the saddle. He squinted against the rain as his horse first trotted, then galloped ahead, veering left around a large outcrop that loomed from the gloom, heading down into a gulley that carried a shallow flood, crossing the stream and riding up the other side. Even in this weather, he knew that a good tracker could follow, but if he lost hoofprints in streams, floods and marsh, then perhaps he could shake whoever pursued them.

Pain thudded in behind his eyes, perhaps aggravated by the sudden increase in his heartbeat.
Not now,
he thought.
Not now!
He listened for the sounds of fighting: metal on metal, the thudding of hooves. But he heard only the rain and the sounds of his own flight.

Be safe, Lulah,
he thought, and he imagined the father of her dead friend taking her eye.