Fallen (5 page)

“Are you interested?”

“I'm intrigued,” he said. “Which for me amounts to the same thing. I've been here for almost half a year without a voyage. And the last one was with that fool Geary, a tiresome stomp down the Western Shores. We found nothing but sand and dead fish.”

“I'll want you as captain.”

He frowned. “How many more Serians do you need?”

“Can you find five more who'll do private work?”

He nodded. “Of course. But what do I tell them?”

“Nothing for now.” She looked down at Beko's trial table again, and the shifting candlelight made the seethe-gator move. “Only promise them the voyage of a lifetime.”

“Well,” Beko said, picking up his mug and drinking more wine. “I'm more intrigued than ever.”

Nomi caught him staring at her when she looked up.

“This needs to be kept quiet, Beko. I mean it.”

“I'm sure.” He smiled. “But as captain, I think I deserve something to spur me on. Don't you?”

“Something . . . ?” Not for the first time, Nomi felt uncomfortable in Beko's presence. He was a big man, intimidating when he wanted to be, yet gentle and caring when the mood took him. A man of contradictions; a lover of poetry who slept in an armory.

“Tell me where we're going, Nomi.”

“That's your price?”

“I won't breathe a word.”

Nomi relaxed back into the chair. “We're going to the Great Divide.”

The soldier's face did not change, but his eyes grew dark.

“The voyage of voyages, Beko! Perhaps the one to end them all.”

“What's down there?”

She looked away. “We don't know yet.”

“You're lying.”

“I don't lie, Beko. We
don't
know what's down there. That's why we're going.”

He stood and walked behind her, a heavy shadow in the shady basement. In the tavern above them a piece of furniture scraped across the floor. Someone muttered, and somebody else laughed. “Opening time soon,” Beko said. “More drinking in the day, singing in the evening and fighting in the night. More wine dripping between the floorboards. More puking drunks.”

“We could be drinking around a campfire two nights from now.”

“I'll come, of course,” Beko said. “I made up my mind when I showed you my trial table.”

“You did?”

“I saw the excitement in your eyes. You don't hide much.”

She sighed with relief, but said, “You haven't even asked about pay.”

Beko turned. He was holding a round stone, and he drew the blade of a short knife across its surface. “I know that Ventgorian fruit has made you rich. Come back this evening and I'll give you a price.”

Nomi nodded, and jumped when something thudded onto the floor above them.

Beko rolled his eyes. “Dragging out last night's drunks to make room for tonight's.”

“Yes. Very homely.” Nomi went to the door and opened it to the smell of vomit.

“Nomi,” Beko said.

She turned around, looking back into the cavern of a room.

“Thank you for asking me.”

“Who else would I go to?” Then she shut the door, climbed the steps to the street and went to find a runner.

Chapter 2

RAMUS SAT JUST
inside the library entrance, holding his head and hissing as the pain receded. His vision and hearing throbbed with each heartbeat, but the nausea was passing.

Not now,
he thought.
Not while I need all my wits about me.
He grasped the rolled parchment pages in his left hand, and they too seemed to pulse with each beat of his heart.

It had started as a headache three years ago, one that lasted four days and seemed to reach out to every nerve in his body, drowning him in a pain he had never imagined before. He had thrashed and cried in his bed, unable to move or go for help. Even back then, Nomi was the only person who ever paid him a visit, and then not frequently, but she had been away on her second voyage to Ventgoria. He had suffered alone, and recovered without telling anyone what had happened.
One of those things,
he had thought at the time.
A sickness in the air, or bad food from one of the street vendors.
Looking back, he now considered it the period of impregnation, because every time an attack came he had visions: strange, obscure, sometimes disturbing, other times quite mundane.

Ramus stood, resting his right hand against the wall for support. He gasped in a few deep breaths, trying to clear his head, and smelled the unmistakable must of age. This library was his home away from home. He stood still for a few moments, feeling the last of the pain drift away, and then he reached for the library's inner door.

THERE WERE THREE
other people at the tables immediately inside. One of them worked for the Guild, and she nodded at Ramus. He recognized the other two by sight, although he did not know their names. Scholars, probably, working for themselves or one of the local Chieftains. They scratched at rough paper on the tables before them, taking notes from a book here, a parchment there, and the frown of confusion on their faces was ever-present.

They don't know how to look,
Ramus thought.
They may think they can understand language, but everything that matters is between the lines.

The library was contained in a large, low hall behind a shop selling furniture, paintings and exotic tapestries from Pengulfin Landing. It had been a storage building many years before, and the ranks of rough timber shelves were still there, freestanding down the middle of the hall and fixed to all four walls. When one of the old Chieftains of Long Marrakash had decided to gather as many books, scrolls and parchments together as they could, the shop's owner had sold the hall for a good price. The books and other recordings had been gathered and moved in, and since then this had been a virtual shrine to all those who strove to know the past. It was also a place of much frustration, as few books were written in exactly the same language. Most utilized some common Noreelan lettering, but each writer had adapted the language to their own aims, using symbolism, unique dialects, graphical representations, imagery known and unknown and preferences that often amounted to personal code.

Ramus walked toward the rear of the hall, passing the Burnt Past. When the library was first gathered, a group of shamans came one night and tried to burn it down. They destroyed a thousand books before they were stopped, and the library keeper had left the damaged shelving as he had found it, a sort of shrine to all that lost history. It pained Ramus every time he saw it, because it represented knowledge that could never be regained.

There was no one else sitting at the tables and chairs at the back of the hall. He breathed a sigh of relief and sat down, closing his eyes as he let the smell and feel of the place envelop him. He loved it here. So much potential, so much history, and he was quite certain that many of these books, if translated correctly, would change the world as they knew it today.

And so could these,
he thought, looking at the parchments. He smoothed them out on the table and spread them so he could see all three at once.

He did not recognize much of the lettering, although some of the root formations looked vaguely familiar. What he
had
seen—and he was certain that Nomi had not spotted this—was that the symbols and strange lettering were contained within defined borders. There was no way of telling whether or not the pages were supposed to follow one another, or even in which order, but all of the pages displayed one fundamental similarity: a thick vertical line dividing the page into a space taken up by writing and an area of blankness.

Ramus saw this as partial proof that these pages had come from the Divide. And whoever had written them had acknowledged one of the elemental aspects to their existence: the cliff. One side, there was life; the other side, only open air.

He looked at the curled figure at the bottom edge of one page, like a serpent twisted into an egg.
You know what that is,
Nomi had said. He had seen and read much about the Sleeping Gods, and though descriptions of those mysterious deities varied hugely, this was a recurring image he'd seen in a handful of texts.

Usually, the gods were drawn as beautiful winged creatures.

Not lizards or snakes.

He stood and went to one of the shelves, glancing around to make sure nobody could see the parchments. A sudden sickness rumbled in his stomach, and he recognized this for what it was: fear. Because as well as words and texts, he thought that much of what appeared on these parchment pages was more literal.

Part of it, including the curled image of a Sleeping God, seemed to be a map.

THE FIRST BOOK
he chose was a heavy tome, loosely bound with twisted gut ties and covered front and back with thin wooden covers. It had no title or name, and there was no indication anywhere inside about who had written it, nor when or where.

Ramus guessed it was maybe five hundred years old. Some of the glyphs used were similar to those in other volumes from around that time. He had referred to this book several times over the years, and there was one page in particular that had jumped into his memory.

It took a while to find the page he wanted, inked on a rough sheet of layered silk-grass. The image there was, as he remembered, quite similar to that on the wanderer's parchment: a curled, serpentlike creature, only this one had a larger head, several limbs and hands. Each hand had six digits, and each digit was a person. Every person was screaming.

Ramus tried to read some of the glyphs around the image. He had never translated this page, though he had seen the glyphs used before, and it took him a while to edge his concentration in the right direction.

Fallen one put down,
he read.
Down is the fallen one. Deep is the God that fell.
All saying the same thing in differing ways—and the more he read, the more he imagined a sense of panic overwhelming the writer. There was no information here; it was more like a statement of belief, a desire that would become more real the more it was written.

Every story he had read of the Sleeping Gods had sprouted from the solid foundation that the Gods were benevolent, and extremely powerful. Some could move mountains, others were mountains themselves. Mention of a Fallen God was infrequent, a myth within a myth—one of those ancient Gods gone insane and fallen from grace, its wings torn from their roots and the God itself buried deep in the land by the other Sleeping Gods. Those few times he
had
read about it, the language had been as frantic as this.

Superstition,
he thought. Ramus liked to think of himself as a pragmatist with an open mind, but this was a tale designed to scare children at bedtime. That it managed to trouble him illustrated its power.

He reached for another page of the parchment. This one had a more regular spread of lettering and glyphs, and across its center were images that looked like statues. Some were obviously people, with arms raised, heads thrown back and mouths open. Others looked more like representations of people—vaguely humanoid shapes, with extended necks, tall thin heads, arms that reached below their knees. These were drawn as frozen, or dancing, or perhaps paying worship to the other, more human statues. There was writing all around these images, and though Ramus recognized none of the lettering, he could already discern a pattern.

The third parchment was damaged and darkened, and some of the stains could have been blood. It was covered in fine writing, using the same unknown language as the other pages, and interspersed here and there were images of the sun, moon and stars. Each image had a face, and the faces all had teeth.

Ramus closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. Footsteps came close and he sat up quickly, turning the parchments over so they could not be seen. Nobody appeared, and he waited until the footsteps retreated again to the front of the library before turning the pages back over.

He looked at those thick lines once more, dividing the pages into thirds and two-thirds, the spaces to their left blank and sterile as if no ink would take there, no thoughts could hold weight.

These are real,
he thought, his heart pummeling his chest and sweat beading on his forehead. He could pass the parchments over to the Guild, but then news would spread. Or they could go themselves—he and Nomi—to see if they could find what these pages alluded to. But the risks were great.

One thing of which he was certain: if they could prove that the Great Divide did not rise endlessly, this would be the greatest voyage ever.

And if there was evidence of a Sleeping God up there, then they would change Noreela.

He closed his eyes and wondered what to do.

ON HER WAY
home, Nomi called in to the runners' rooms. She sent a runner to Pancet's Stables, south of the city, with an order and promise token for ten good horses, riding and camping equipment and all the climbing gear Pancet could procure in the next day and night. She deflected queries about why she was not going to the Guild with a handful of coins. The runners needed to make a living as well, and they were known for their honesty.