The Fathomless Fire (33 page)

Rowen took a deep breath.

“Very well, then,” she said. “I’ll follow you.”

The thrawl turned away and began to walk slowly through the marsh. Its steps, Rowen noticed, did not disturb the water.

“Rowen must not do this,” Riddle hissed, and he plucked again at her cloak. She turned to him.

“I’m not asking you to come along, Riddle,” she said. “In fact, I don’t want you to. Maybe … maybe on your own you can find out who you were and where you came from.”

“Riddle does not want to be alone,” the cat moaned. “Riddle will stay with Rowen.”

She could not tell how long they followed the thrawl. They soon left the marsh behind, but the country they came to after that was even more dim and insubstantial. After a while they seemed to be passing through a great city, but it was silent and empty of people. They crossed deserted squares, descended into tunnels and came out again, crossed slender stone bridges over dark abysses. Everything had the same shimmering edges she had seen elsewhere in the Weaving, but whenever she touched one of the walls it felt all too solid.

“What is this place?” she asked the thrawl.

“It was once a great city. Many Storyfolk lived here. They thought themselves powerful and important. Now this is all that is left. Soon it, too, will vanish and be no more.”

Eventually they left the city and came out again onto a wide plain under a grey sky. After a while Rowen became aware that the gloom around her was not as empty as she had first thought. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed movement, and she turned and saw something that she felt certain was not just drifting mist. It was a dim figure, walking slowly in the same direction as she was, on a faint, winding path. And further away was another one, also walking the way she was going.

Riddle hissed, and Rowen turned to her other side, where the cat was staring transfixed into the gloom. There were shadowy figures walking on this side of her, too. She turned. There were more behind as well.

“These others around us,” she said to the thrawl. “Are they following you, too?”

“No, but they are going to the Shadow Realm,” the thrawl said without turning to look at her. “And we are almost there. From here all roads become one.”

“Who are these others?”

“Those whose stories are over.”

We’re all going the same way now
, she thought.

They walked on again in silence, then Rowen heard a faint sound that startled her in this lifeless place. The sound of trickling water. The hard, stony earth began to slope downwards. In a short time the sound of water grew louder, and out of the mist a great dark shadow appeared, becoming more solid.

A river, wide and dark, with shreds of mist drifting across it. The far shore was a pale band of grey that was only slightly less dark than the water.

The thrawl stopped here and turned to her.

“I am fading and cannot take you any further,” it said. “From here you may cross on your own. You will find what you seek on the other side.”

“Wait,” Rowen said quickly, as a new thought came to her. “You said you have to tell me the truth. Tell me, then, is there a way I can free Grandfather from the Shadow Realm?”

“There is not. Once you reach the other side of this river you will become as I am. You may resist a short while, because you wear the Mirror. But it will not protect you for very long. Soon you will know only the Lord of Story and you will serve him.”

“There has to be a way to escape,” Rowen said desperately. “
Tell me
.”

“There is no escape.”

The thrawl began to unravel, like an unwinding spool of thread.

“Wait,” Rowen cried, but already there was no one for her words to reach. The thrawl had become a loose swirl of threads that were swiftly plucked away on the wind. Rowen gazed at them until they vanished into the grey shadows, and then she turned to Riddle.

“I’m going now,” she said.

“Rowen must not do this.”

“There’s no other way,” she said, almost unable to speak through the fear and despair rising in her. “If you can, Riddle, find your way back to Edweth. Tell her where I went.”

The cat hunched himself into a trembling ball of misery.

“Riddle will wait here, for Rowen to come back.”

“I … may not come back.”

She turned away quickly from the cat, afraid that her resolve was about to crumble, and walked down to the shore. The water was dark, almost black, and flowed very slowly, as if it was not water but some thicker substance, like obsidian. She gazed across, looking for the far shore, hoping that she might see her grandfather there, but she saw nothing.

Weeping, she waded into the stream up to her waist. It was cold. Colder than anything she had ever known. A cold that soaked through her clothing in an instant and then into her body and even into her mind. She knew then, as her veins turned to ice and her heart shrank within her, that the thrawl had told her the truth. By the time she got to the other shore, there would be little left, if anything, of who she was.

The river looked slow, but the current was very strong, and as she took her next step she lost her footing and fell, and the water closed over her head. She came up gasping, with a feeling as though a blade of ice had stabbed her in the heart. She could not see, she could not remember anything except that she had to reach the far shore, and even the reason why she must reach it was beginning to fade.

Then something tugged at her cloak and pulled her back, choking and gasping, dragging her out of the water.

A moment later she was lying on the shore, and there was a flickering light around her. She raised her head.

It was Riddle, on fire. He was still a cat, but he was larger now than he had been. He was so close to her, and the fire that played over him was so bright that she flinched and shaded her eyes.

“That was not a good way,” he said, and his voice was deeper and filled with a calm certitude she had never heard in it before. “Riddle knows the way.”

“There’s another way to the Shadow Realm?”

“Follow,” said the cat, and he turned and bounded away.

Rowen hesitated a moment, then she climbed to her feet. To her surprise, her clothes were dry. She had no time to wonder about this, because the cat was almost out of sight. She started after him, calling for him to slow down, but he stayed always ahead of her, a flame-like blur just visible in the gloom.

She ran after him, and it seemed to Rowen that the darkness grew somehow even darker around her, or that maybe the blazing comet that was the cat threw everything else into a sharper blackness as it passed. She could almost feel this blackness as a thickness, an utter lack of light turned solid, closing in upon her. She was sure it would have smothered her so that she was lost for ever, if it wasn’t for the cat burning a fiery passage through it for her to follow. And so she followed, for that was all that she could do.

As she ran, her eyes fixed on the flaming firebrand that was Riddle, she had the dizzying feeling that they were not running along some flat, featureless ground any more but plunging, diving through the darkness, down and down, and it seemed that her sense of how long she had been following Riddle was being swiftly left behind as well, as if time itself was being swallowed up in the blackness.

She ran, or plunged, or soared, after the cat, until she became aware that something other than utter darkness was taking shape around her. The wildcat’s fiery, rippling form lit up what they were passing through, and Rowen saw she had come to the midst of a thick, silent wood, though there was still that breathless sensation of plummeting downwards at tremendous speed. And as if his brightness kindled the world around them, Rowen saw that everything, the trees with their strangely large, drooping leaves, the grass and the flowers, had begun to give off their own soft, warm light. She didn’t know why, but she suddenly felt safer here than she had since she entered the Weaving.

Then Riddle disappeared.

She was alone in this eerie, glowing forest.

“Riddle,” she called. “Where are you?”

With the cat gone, the solitude of this dark, silent world suddenly descended on her. She had felt an ever-present fear simmering inside her from the moment she stepped into the raincabinet, expecting dangers that she couldn’t even imagine, and now that fear threatened to boil up into panic.

There was a sound from the darkness nearby, a faint rustle. She turned in the direction of the sound and saw two catlike eyes take shape out of the blackness.

“Riddle,” she said. “Why did you run away?”

The undergrowth moved, and the eyes seemed to float towards her. Then the cat’s body came out of the shadows, but it was no longer a small striped wildcat. Like a smoky flame, a large, sinuous form flowed out of the forest.

A tiger.

“Riddle,” Rowen said, backing away. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

The tiger’s banded gold and black body was like a bright fire flickering with sharp shadows. The closer it came the fiercer it blazed, so that she almost had to turn away. And yet she could not turn away. She had never seen anything more beautiful and at the same time so terrifying.

“This is what you remembered, from before the rain,” she whispered. “This is what you really are, isn’t it?”

The tiger gazed at her impassively, with no recognition in its eyes.

“Say something,” Rowen said, growing angry. “This is no time for your games.”

The tiger fixed her with its unmoving gaze a moment longer, then it turned and flowed back into the forest. As it disappeared, something her grandfather had said, a story he had told about the night her mother was born, came back to her. How he had listened to someone sing a song about a woman who wove a tiger, and with the tiger had come a whole world. And then he had taken a piece of wood and carved a tiger.

Her heart began to beat faster. She pushed through the leaves and clinging branches, the big cat’s fiery shape flickering just ahead of her as it made its way through the dark undergrowth. As she hurried along, the light around her grew. Shafts of bright, glad sunlight shot down through the leaves. Rowen increased her pace, barely aware of the branches that snagged her clothing and scratched her face.

She burst out of the trees into an open glade. The tiger was nowhere to be seen, as if it had melted into the sunlight.

“Riddle?”

The glade rose in a long grassy slope before her, to a cottage of whitewashed stone with a thatched roof and a chimney of red brick. The front door, with a small round window of blue glass set in it, stood slightly ajar. Beside the door hung wind chimes that made a soft ting-a-ling as they stirred in the warm breeze. To one side of the house a small garden plot was laid out and fenced off with wattles. At Rowen’s feet lay a path that wound up the slope to the cottage, a path set with flat stones of many colours.

Before she knew what she was doing, Rowen stepped onto the path and began to climb. Her feet seemed to know these stones, as if she had walked this path many times before. Her breath quickened and her heart was pounding now. Each step she took was like remembering another note from a long-forgotten melody.

Then she knew this place, and she felt her heart might burst with joy and grief.

This was Blue Hill. Where she had lived with her mother and father. She had been born here. This was her home.

She paused on the path, scarcely able to breathe. Only once since her grandfather had taken her to live in Fable had they gone back to the hill. He had taken here there because she had hoped that seeing her childhood home would help her remember her parents. That visit was already many years ago, and even then the thatch had been falling in, the whitewashed walls cracked and peeling, the untended grass growing up to the windows. She had wandered around the hill then, and sat in the silent, dust-shrouded cottage, but the memories did not come.

Before her now was the cottage as it once must have been when she lived there with her mother and father, the walls brightly gleaming in the sun, the thatch fresh and clean on the roof, the garden tended. But how could it be here? Someone had done this, woven this place out of the past…

For her to find.

Rowen quickened her pace. She reached the open door. She halted, and peered in.

“Is anyone here?” she said in a trembling voice.

When her eyes had adjusted to the dim light inside, she saw that the interior was very small. At the far end was a fireplace with coals glowing in it, a pot on the hearthstone, a broom leaning in a corner. The room was filled with the warm, comforting scent of freshly baked bread. Near the fireplace stood a large wooden object like a strangely complicated bedframe. It was a loom, she realized a moment later, and beside it stood a spinning wheel. A tapestry was stretched upon the loom, but the woven pattern was somehow hard to see, and many of the threads hung in tatters, as if they had fallen or been torn out.

There was a stillness in this place that startled her after the shifting restlessness of the Weaving. No one was in the cottage, but someone had just been here, she was sure of it.

Rowen heard a noise behind her and turned.

The tiger stood in the doorway. It was no longer a blazing creature of fire, it was just a tiger, but even that was a frightening and awesome sight.

“Riddle?” Rowen whispered. “Why don’t you speak to me?” Her voice broke, but she struggled on. “Is this the place you came from? Who lives here?”

Even as she spoke, another figure appeared in the doorway behind the tiger. A slender older woman in a green wraparound dress, carrying a clay jug on her head. Her hair was dark and streaked with grey.

“What is it?” she said softly to the tiger. Then she saw Rowen. Slowly she set the jug down on the floor.

“Who are…?” she said, then she caught her breath and stood staring. Her eyes filled with tears. “You,” she breathed.

“Grandmother,” Rowen said.

And then she fainted.