The Paper Sword (13 page)

“It was a place where they kept accounts,” Xemion went on, ignoring her, “and there was some kind of very early spell kone that caused a catastrophe.”

“Yes, it caused you to lie,” Tharfen spat. “Come on, Torgee, let's go.” She yanked her brother toward the portal, but he resisted.

“It was something to do with stories,” Xemion continued. “They made some kind of spell kone to stop people from making up stories. There was an error in the writing of the spell kone and when they turned the kone something went terribly wrong, but I can't remember …”

“That's because you're just making it up right now. You're a liar. Come on, Torgee, or I'll be talking to mother.”

But Torgee didn't like either the look or the smell of the gate, and like the others he sensed there was something not quite right about the appearance of the road beyond. “I want to get home just as bad as you do, Tharfen, but —”

“You do not!” Tharfen screamed in full fury. “You want to stay with Saheli. You want to go to Ulde and be a hero.”

“It's … it's … it's really not that …” Torgee stuttered and blushed a deep crimson.

“This is all your fault, Xemion!” Tharfen bellowed. “You turned my own brother against me —”

“Stop it!” Torgee yelled.

“I swear by my mother's blood, one day you will pay in blood and in loss and in failure,” Tharfen shouted.

Torgee was now angry. “You do not swear on anybody's blood!”

“Yes I do.”

“Not on my mother's blood you don't.” Thrusting his square jaw forward, he positioned himself with crossed arms in front of the portal. But this only infuriated her more.

“You go whatever way you like,” she roared, quickly dashing forward and dodging around him. Torgee grabbed hold of the back of her cloak, but the moment her foot touched the roadway on the other side of the portal, some force seemed to grab hold of her, tugging her forward so powerfully that Torgee had to hold on to one side of the portal in order not to get drawn in after her.

“Help!” he called.

Saheli grabbed Torgee's cloak from behind, anchoring herself on the other side of the portal. But just then, whatever force had hold of Tharfen lurched and dragged Torgee so far forward he had to put one of his heels on the other side too. But the moment his heel came down, it slipped forward and he was upended. Saheli strained to keep her grip on the back of his cloak, but as he was drawn onward, the edge of the portal came away in her hand and she fell in after him and began to slide away on her stomach as though she had landed on a sloping sheet of ice.

“Xemion!” she screamed, and as she slid along the long silver road toward the silver city perched on a height in the distance, Xemion leapt in after her.

Shissillil

A
s
soon as his heel hit the other side and he began to slide, Xemion remembered in a flash the finer details of what Anya had told him about the borough of Shissillil. The council of Shissillil had indeed commissioned the writing of one of the very first public spell kones in order to enforce their new ordinance against the creation of fiction within their precincts. The kone stood nine feet high and was mounted in the city centre encased in a wrought silver frame with a crank handle of solid gold. The spell on the kone had been composed by the finest mage then working on the isle and it had been thoroughly checked with the council of mages to assure that there were no contrary, paradoxical, or otherwise problematical additional spell kones registered by any of the other mages. On the night before the scheduled public turning of the kone, however, some fiction writers on a vengeful prank gained access to the newly written kone and climbing up a ladder had inserted into the word
fiction
a small, barely detectable but still legible letter
r
.

Next morning in the town square, with the mayor and counsellors and the high citizens all looking on, the mage took the crank handle in both hands and, as he turned it, recited a verse:

As the eye goes down

The words go round

All in one turn

The spell is bound

But when the witness-stone passed over the last word at the bottom of the kone, the spell it invoked did not, as intended, banish all
fiction
. Rather it banished all
friction
. In that second, Anya said, all those high dignitaries and their gathered families began to slide away. And the more they struggled and tried to gain their feet, the faster they slipped. This had all happened a hundred years ago, but up until the battle of Phaer Bay and the ensuing spell fire, the situation had not been repaired and access to and from Shissillil was cut off, even in Anya's childhood.

Xemion had considered the story more the product of his guardian's fancy than a true historical account, but now here he was, sliding along a seemingly frictionless roadway. It ran through a grassy expanse bordered on both sides by high walls and then took a steep curve up. Saheli was still in sight in front of him but she was a long way off. Far ahead of her was Torgee, and that even more distant speck must be Tharfen just about to enter the city gates. Xemion had to catch up. Instinctively he pushed at the roadway with all his force but his hands broke through the surface as though it were water and underneath he felt a heat that increased the deeper down he went. He pulled back with a pained cry. But now he was on his way up the hill and he was going slightly faster than before.

Soon he slid through the city gates and began to careen down a long silver avenue with many ancient-looking silver buildings on both sides. Up ahead the avenue split in two, one of the roadways proceeding at a slight angle from the other. Xemion's stomach lurched as he saw Saheli take a sudden turn along the road to the right. Desperately he dug the heel of his left hand in deep trying to make that same turn, but despite how hot it grew when he came to the intersection he slid right by.

He screamed her name and she turned and looked back at him, frightened. For a little while they held each other's gaze as she slid off along the other road, but as the buildings rose around him, he lost sight of her. He was by now deep in the interior of the city, sliding down a deep chute of a street, streaking by bright silver houses with windows of some wafting silken glass full of outline people peering out. To Xemion they looked like they had no interior, only exterior, but he sped by so fast it was hard to know if his perception was accurate. Suddenly, he crested a hill and found himself heading straight down toward a tall silver tower. He dug in with both hands and feet, trying to steer around the building, but it was too late. He crashed straight into the wall. Instead of an impact, however, he felt the stomach-turning jolt of a sudden change in direction. It hurt, but now he was speeding up the side of the building. Ten floors he rose and at the top was briefly spat into the sky. Then he fell …

Screaming, sure that he would die, he came down on the flat top of the building. The force of his landing just added to his speed, sending him gliding across the rooftop. Here there were magnificent silver statues everywhere that glowed like molten steel. And as the sun bore down and the heat began to increase the statues grew brighter and brighter until Xemion could hardly bear to keep his eyes open to steer through them. Somehow he managed to reach the other side of the ornate roof and was shot out over the edge.

He hit the ground hard. He was compressed and winded, but the ground had somehow elasticized under him and he was once again horizontal and whipping along a silver roadway. Various residents now tried to grab at Xemion. He could see that they were enraged at his passage. But just as it seemed their outlined hands would close about him, he passed right through them as though they were ghosts. Travelling so fast now that the buildings beside him became little more than a blur, he entered a vast plaza with a park in it and he could see from afar another wide avenue that intersected up ahead. And there was Tharfen shooting along it screaming, her brother Torgee not far behind. Xemion did his utmost to stop himself with both his heels and hands dug in deep, bearing the burning rather than crashing into them, but these efforts had little effect. He barrelled straight at the crossroads, screaming.

In the last few feet of their mutual approach, time slowed down for both of them. Xemion saw the look of terror on Tharfen's face and she saw the look of horror on his. Just before they collided, Xemion beheld her in outline and he could see, like a map of great rivers, the veins inside her pulsing to the beat of her bare heart. Then they smashed into one another and he heard her scream so loud it felt like it was inside him. There was a slightly delicious feeling like stardust being propelled through stardust and then somehow he shot through and beyond her. He looked back and saw Tharfen slide out of sight. But where was Saheli? Xemion clawed at the silver surface frantically trying to stop, but no matter what he did he was propelled ever onward. Finally a shadow passed over him and he realized that he had now exited another set of city gates. He continued sliding down the long silver roadway a long time, all the while desperately looking back until suddenly there was no more road beneath him and again he fell.

The Debris of Spell-Made Things

T
he
outskirts of what had once been the western side of the city of Ulde now lay half-buried under piles of tiny multicoloured crystals, which on a sunny day like today shone brilliantly, filling the air with a multitude of small rainbows whose shimmers over the heaps gave them a slightly unreal atmosphere. According to Pathan scientists who study such phenomena, these heaps were composed of the debris of spell-made things: crystallized particles of whatever was just being spelled into existence at the time of the kone fire. When it stopped turning they were flung from it at gale force. It was the overuse of the small spell kones so common at that time, they theorized, that had brought about the catastrophe — or, as they saw it, the happy accident. Too many mutually opposing spells over too many years had manifested in a mass spell cross that could not then nor ever be resolved.

This first became obvious during the Battle of Phaer Bay, just as the Phaer forces, relying on spellcrafted arms, faced a small contingent of sea peoples known as Kagars. The magic suddenly shuddered in its gyres and the Great Kone began to spin at a vastly accelerated pace. With a bright green burst of spellfire and the loss of the most significant battle in all the history of the Phaer Isle, the Great Kone came to a slightly charred halt. Many of the objects left half-created or half-destroyed at that time were shattered, spun and hurled away from the epicentre of whatever force welled up in the kone. Their remains now lay heaped up against the high cliffs of sheer bedrock exposed by the earthquake, which had dropped one part of the borough two hundred feet lower than the other.

It was into the side of one of these massive mounds of shimmering crystal that Xemion came down. His impact was such that he created a small elliptical crater about him as he landed, pushing on like a plow through the widening debris beneath. Standing up, unhurt, with the sun bright and hot above, he was half dazzled by the myriad spectral rainbows cast in the air. Small silver fragments carried down with him from the road above shone so brightly as they fell he had to shield his eyes with his hands.

“Saheli!” His voice came back to him as though from nowhere, its sound deadened, its expression blunted.

“Saheli!”

Looking up, he saw the portal he had emerged from suspended about a hundred feet in the air just out from the top edge of the cliff. Even if he could somehow claw his way back up to the cliff top, there would still be no way to reach that portal.

“Saheli!” he screamed with every ounce of strength in his body. He looked about him and saw more glittering piles diminishing in size as they proceeded into the distance. Shielding his eyes from the brightness, he spied between the most distant of the heaps the figure of a golden gorehorse mounted on a pillar. He knew where he was! This was the famous statue that stood at the gates of Ulde. Whatever had befallen Shissillil in the upheaval of the Great Kone fire, its gate still exited where it had always exited; in the Thrall Quarter of Ulde.

“Saheli!”

He should be able to walk toward that gorehorse, and before too long, before noon even, he could get to the uprising. And on time. But not without her. Surely she, too, would sooner or later be ejected through the portal above.

Unless there were other portals.
What if she just stayed up there whirling around or what if she had been spat out in some other realm where he would never find her? Again he screamed her name desperately. And again his voice came back dead, leached of sound and meaning. He waited and waited while a dread feeling grew in him. It was like the first tremor of the ground when an earthquake is coming; a feeling of certainty that she was gone and that he'd known from the moment he saw her that one day she would be gone and that this was that day.

“Saheli!”

He wished he'd been born a Thrall so that he could get down on his knees now and pray to someone or something to bring her back.

“Saheli!”

Just then a shadow shot over him and there she was soaring overhead. Her staff landed not far in front of him and she came down not far beyond that, sinking up to her thighs in the multicoloured rubble. He retrieved the staff and waded through the shimmering rainbows to her. “Saheli!” She stood up and faced him, and he came as close as he ever had to hugging her.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

She shook her head. But she had just been overwhelmed by magical forces and she couldn't hide the terror this aroused in her

“You didn't burn your hands trying to steer yourself?” he asked.

She shook her head again and held out her open palms to him. With a look of relief, Xemion lifted the staff horizontally and gently lowered it into her palms.

“Thank you,” she said, trying to control the quaver in her voice. Her eyes were fixed on the portal above them.

“Were Tharfen and Torgee far behind you?” Xemion asked, also turning to look.

She shook her head. An expression of intense feeling rippled through her features. She moved both of her hands to illustrate two forces colliding with one another. “I was going one way …” She paused and Xemion's stomach was gripped with a strange cold feeling that sickened him. “And … I crashed into him … right through him, but neither of us was hurt. In fact it felt …” Colour rushed to her cheeks as she broke off. “And then the next time I saw him he was sliding along beside me for a long while. We kept calling out to Tharfen and you and then faster than … than a boulder can drop from a cliff, Tharfen came shooting toward us. Torgee leaned over one way to grab her, and then she hit him and they both got pulled off to the side and I continued along above them and … and … I saw them both go through a portal. But a different portal than this one.” She hung her head so that her hair hid most of her face.

He wanted to say, “Well, at least
you
have survived,” but he stopped himself for fear she'd think he didn't care about Torgee and Tharfen. He did care, but he was glad that there was nothing he could do to help them right now.

“When I crashed through Tharfen,” he offered, “it was as though I came away with a tiny little sandy bit of her in me and …”

She looked up suddenly. “That's how it was when I crashed through Torgee!”

“And … I'm not sure I should trust it,” he went on with a wince, “but it kind of feels like wherever she is she's alive.”

“And Torgee …” she paused. “Torgee is such a good tracker. He'd be better at getting back home then even you and me.”

“And wherever they are, you and I can only move forward.”

She nodded. “But where
are
we?”

“I think I know exactly where we are,” Xemion said. He pointed to the distant statue of the gorehorse. “I believe that marks the east gate of Ulde.”

The sun was shining bright and she had to shield her eyes to see.

“Between here and there can't be more than a mile,” he said.

“So, we're somewhere in the city of Ulde.”

“The western side of the city of Ulde,” he added carefully.

The implications of this sank in. “The affected side,” she said, more as a statement than a question.

He nodded. “But right now the sun is bright and ghouls and ghasts and such re-risers hate the sunlight.”

“And …”

“… and the man with the red hand said that they were meeting at the Panthemium which is close by the gorehorse.”

“So the gorehorse …”

“Is in the part of the city we need to get to.”

“And you think we can get there from here?”

“I know it,” he answered uncertainly. “All we have to do is walk in that direction for about a mile and we'll be there. And besides, there is no other way. We would never get up that cliff, and even if we did, who knows where we'd be or what we'd face. The only way to go is forward.”

She took a deep breath to still her panic at this thought, nodded, and the two of them set off down the heap. It was true that the statue of the gorehorse was only a mile away. What he hadn't mentioned was that it wasn't likely they would get to the Panthemium without passing directly by the Great Kone of Ilde.