Fallen (43 page)

Beko was climbing beside her now, and she had the impression that he had slowed his pace to climb with her. She was exhausted. With the end so close, it felt as though her body was giving up on her at last. Her chest wheezed as she gasped in thin air, her arms and legs shook uncontrollably, nausea seemed to leach strength from her muscles, but she did not want anyone's help. If Beko reached out for her she would have to tell him that. She was sure he would understand.

She climbed until there was no longer blank stone in front of her face. Instead she saw Rhiana's scratched and bruised legs and, beyond them, a world that should not exist.

Rhiana reached down to grab her arms but Nomi shook her head. “No! I'll do it. We've come so far. . . .” The Serian stepped back, still keeping a good hold on the climbing rope, and Nomi hauled herself from the cliff face and onto the ground above.

Grass grew right to the cliff's edge, and it was a deep, dark green, lush beneath her face. There were small white and yellow flowers pressing against her cheek, and she inhaled their scent. They were similar to the meadow daisies of Noreela, but not exactly alike. Up here, she guessed that nothing would be
exactly
like anything else.

She raised herself on her arms and Rhiana stepped aside to let her see.

The plateau was rolling tundra, with a few stark trees growing here and there, and frequent, heavy clumps of a thick gorse. She was not exactly sure what she had expected—a ridge, perhaps, falling rapidly away to whatever lay south of the Great Divide—but what she saw was so similar to much of the Noreelan landscape that she felt a moment of disappointment. But only a moment. Because as she stood on shaking legs, accepting Rhiana's steadying hand at last, she was struck by two things. First, the few trees she saw were of a species she had never seen before; spidery yet strong, hardy growths that would bend easily to the winds that must howl across this place. And second, this was somewhere new. Whether it resembled Noreela or not, this was
somewhere else entirely.

She had discovered the top of the Great Divide.

Nomi closed her eyes and swayed, feeling Rhiana's hand tighten around her wrist. She breathed deeply of the scant air and smelled scents she had never smelled before, looked up at the sun blazing down on a land no one had ever seen and returned from to tell the tale.

“We're here,” she croaked. Climbing through the clouds had made her chest heavy, one of many discomforts that marked what they had done. “We're all here.”

“Not all,” Beko said. “Ramin would have been amazed. Even he would have found no jokes to make about this.”

“I look south and see nothing,” Noon said. “I thought there may be . . . I don't know.
Something.
”

“There
is
something,” Nomi said. “Grass, trees, plants. Low hills. That sky, a deeper blue than I've ever seen. A few clouds, even so high. A whole new world.”

“But farther south?” Noon said. He shook his head, perhaps unable to comprehend what he was seeing and what it meant. “What's at the other edge of the plateau?”

“I don't know,” Nomi said. “Not yet. A fall into another land, perhaps?”

“Maybe there's just another Great Divide.” Beko stood behind Nomi, his heat touching her like he had not touched her for days. As if reading her thoughts he placed his hands on her arms, gentle enough to make her believe he meant it.

“That's just chilling, thank you,” Rhiana said.

Beko laughed. It had the taint of madness to it, but they all took it up and enjoyed the venting of emotion, amazed that they had made it, traumatized by the climb. Nomi felt sick and exhausted, and it was only now that she appreciated how weary the others looked. And they had been fighting as well as climbing.

Her laughter turned to tears, and the Serians did not notice because they also wept.

HER BODY NEEDED
nothing more than rest, but Nomi could not allow that. Rhiana guessed they had climbed almost three miles, and the other Serians agreed, and Nomi found it incredible that such a short distance could separate two worlds.

They followed the line of the cliff to the west to begin with, finding no signs that anyone else had ever climbed this far. The first time they saw animal life, the Serians tensed, bearing their weapons against what was revealed as a herd of heavily horned goats. The animals scampered out of a gully a hundred steps to the south and wandered toward them, fearless and calm. Even when they started walking again, the goats simply watched them go.

There were birds up here, all of species strange to them. They twittered and whistled, sang and called, and for a while Nomi and the others were buzzed by a playful flock of small ocher birds. One of them landed on Beko's shoulder, another alighted on Rhiana's head, and after eating seeds from Nomi's palm they disappeared as quickly as they had arrived. She had plucked the seeds from a plant she did not know: stout green stem, wide white flowers, a bright red central seedpod.

I wish Ramus were here with me,
she thought, and she felt a sudden pressure behind her eyes. How useless to let it go the way it had! How foolish, how
stupid!
They had let their closeness drive wedges between them—irrational jealousies and unforgivable betrayals destroying such a special, unique relationship. They had started this voyage together and they should still be together, here and now, to witness the wonders of this new land. There were much greater things than her and Ramus, if only the two of them had acknowledged that.

But I killed him.
She thought of the agony of the sickness she had passed on. Hardly the gift of a friend.

“I wonder if Lulah and Ramus made it up,” Beko said.

“I was thinking the same.” Nomi looked past him to the east, the lush greenness atop the plateau to her right, the soft sea of cloud cover stretching toward the horizon on her left. “If he did, he'd have gone inland. I'm sure there's plenty to explore.”

“Look!” Rhiana said.

Nomi followed where she was pointing, and at first she saw nothing. A few goats on a small, distant slope, green grass spotted with purple and pink plants, sprays of white flowers here and there among the grass, trees . . .

At least, some trees. But what she had taken to be a tree a couple of hundred steps away suddenly resolved itself into something else. Tall, spiked with branches, it had far too many straight edges.

“Someone made that,” Rhiana said.

They stared in silence for a beat, all of them thinking the same but leaving it to Nomi to say. “We're not alone.”

WE’RE NOT ALONE.
Those words hung heavy in the air as the four of them stared at whatever the shape might be.

Nomi moved first. She slipped away from Beko's hand as he tried to hold her back, and ran. She heard the footfalls of the Serians following, and by the time she reached the shape, her legs were shaking again, and her body was telling her that there really was no energy left. She fell to her knees, leg muscles cramping, and looked up at what they had found.

It had been a tree, once. But its branches had been removed, its bark hacked away, trunk carved straight, and into the pale wood were impressed a series of faces and symbols. The faces were long and oval, eyes painted black. And projecting from the carving, at various heights, were long, thick sticks. Things hung from these false branches, and it took Nomi a moment to make out what they were.

Fetuses. Mummified somehow, but the curled shape of arms, legs and head were unmistakable. They had been painted along with the structure, elaborately decorated with heavy dyes that held the elements back.

“Piss on me,” Rhiana said quietly.

“They're not real,” Beko said.

Nomi shook her head. “They are.”

“They look wrong,” Noon said. “Like they were stretched when they were born. Look at their heads. And their arms: too long.”

“These are unborn,” Nomi said. “Not fully formed.” She tried not to think of where they had come from, how they had been removed from their mothers.

Rhiana stepped forward and reached out for one of the lowest hanging things.

“No!” Beko said. “We don't know anything about this place. We can't just storm in and do our own thing.”

“I just wanted to—” Rhiana said, but Nomi cut in.

“Beko's right. We have to be careful. We need to respect whoever did this.”

“Or whatever,” Noon said. “It's monstrous!”

“We don't know anything about them, or what this is about, or why they did it,” Nomi said. The responsibility of what they were doing struck her then, and she could say no more.

“We should move on,” Beko said for her. “Maybe this is something holy for whoever lives up here. We should find the lie of the land. But we have to be careful.”

Rhiana chuckled. “I'm down to two arrows, Noon is out of crossbow bolts. And I don't think I could lift my sword in both hands if I had to. How careful do you think we can be?”

“Careful enough to show respect,” Beko said. “There's nothing to say we're facing a fight.”

Nomi let Beko hold her up this time, and they walked away, leaning against each other. Noon and Rhiana went ahead, glancing back several times at the gruesome fetus-tree, and Nomi saw true exhaustion in their features for the first time.
We need to rest,
she thought,
or we'll be making mistakes.
But as they walked, she felt her sense of wonder extend to Beko—the idea that they were seeing things never before seen by Noreelan eyes. With such discoveries to make, sleep was the last thing she wanted.

IT FELT LIKE
forever since the sun had touched their skins. They walked toward where it was setting, and Nomi relished the warmth, and thought of that high, dark cliff that the sun barely kissed. It soothed her cooled bones and calmed her cramped muscles.

They followed the line of the cliff for a while, and her vision was still split between land and cloud. It reminded her of those parchment pages, and the line on each sheet that Ramus had said described the Great Divide. She was on the other side now, the side where words and images were drawn, away from the blankness beyond the cliff wall.

When the bizarre tree was out of sight behind them they turned south and headed for what Nomi thought of as inland. They passed several more trees, but these were still growing, and bearing natural fruits. She had never seen anything like them: spindly branches, silvery bark, small husky fruits with spiked skins to protect them from birds and other predators. Their route took them into a natural hollow in the side of a hill, and here they decided to camp. Beko, Rhiana and Noon gathered a few steps from Nomi and talked in hushed tones, looking around and never once glancing her way.

When Beko came back to her, his face was grim.

“What's wrong?” Nomi asked.

“Worried,” he said, and he sat beside her without elaborating.

“Well?” she asked after a pause.

“It's a new world,” Beko said. There was fear in his voice now instead of wonder. “We're spending our first night out in the open, we're all beyond exhaustion and we have no idea who or what is out there. And that tree . . .”

“It doesn't mean they're dangerous.”

Beko glared at her.

Nomi shrugged. “Could have been stillborn. A religious thing, a superstition.” Beko drew a short knife and a sharpening stone and began to work, meticulous and slow. “I can't help remembering the bodies we saw down on the cliff.”

“They could have fallen.”

“Or maybe some were pushed.”

He continued sharpening his weapons, and Nomi found the sound soporific. She leaned her head against Beko's shoulder, and he nestled down a little to make her more comfortable.

“What about us?” she asked, half-asleep and less afraid of his answer.

“When this is over,” he said. “When it feels safe. When we know more about this place . . .” He said some more, but his voice faded into words and phrases she did not understand, and sleep welcomed her down.

IF SHE HAD
nightmares she did not remember them. She had gone to sleep expecting her rest to be unsettled, waking when the night sounds of this place began, dreaming of the climb they had finished and the fall they had avoided. But when she woke it was daylight again. Her joints were stiff and her muscles ached, and Beko was crouched beside her with his hand pressed to her mouth.

“Be still,” he said. “And quiet. That most of all.”

Nomi nodded and he took his hand away.

Behind Beko she could see Noon and Rhiana crouched at the lip of the hollow where they had made camp. They were looking east, their outlines silhouetted against the rising sun. Noon had his sword drawn, and Rhiana was holding her bow, strung with one of her remaining arrows. They were very still, very quiet, and their tension was palpable.

In the distance, Nomi heard something screech. Another voice answered, a cry followed by a series of harsh rattles and cracks.

Beko had turned away and Nomi touched his leg. When he looked, she raised her eyebrows.
What?