Chapter 30: The Heights
"A challenge for you—attempt to describe a fish without mentioning water in any way." —Overheard at the Thundering Hall
Marker of Integration
The Mountain
"Ah. Now here's an interesting one…"
Jerl looked up.
They'd been trudging onwards up the mountain for…some time, now. And that was the problem that had occupied his mind while each step dropped an extra pebble into the whole gravel pit he now felt must be bearing down on his limbs.
He ought to have been crushed, not just unable to move but a spreading puddle sinking into the dry trail dirt, every fibre of him liquefied by the crushing force weighing on his limbs.
And yet, somehow, he was standing and walking. He knew he'd never be able to adequately describe what it felt like to carry a weight that should by rights destroy him, struggle under it, and yet somehow always be equal to its superhuman demands, and untiring despite the fact that each step was a strain.
He wasn't just taking strength from Eärrach's presence in an emotional way. The Crown empowered him in every sense.
They'd come round a shoulder of the mountain onto a flank where some grass still grew alongside the trail, along with a thicket of purple heather. Standing at the cliff edge were two lush bushes heavy with red berries that were even larger than their tiny oval leaves, and between them stood what looked at first glance like a square slab of bronze, four meters to a side.
"The trail marker?"
Eärrach nodded. "Take a look."
Jerl glanced at him, then stepped forward with an unaccountable wariness. As he approached the slab's surface he saw that it was bronze indeed, beaten and polished to a near-perfect mirror finish…except the mirror's surface wasn't flat. In some places it stood proud of the others, in other places it was recessed. Random parts of its surface were angled strangely. And, he realized, overlaid atop this strange mirror was a mosaic of crystal lenses of such incredible pure clarity as to be almost invisible.
He moved in front of it, and gasped. The 'mirror' caught his reflection and broke it up into a bewildering myriad of disparate pieces, each so tiny and so jumbled he could hardly tell what it was. That was surely a little finger, but he had to flex his own hands to tell which one it belonged to. His nose was somewhere down near ground level, his left eye (as determined by winking) was high and to his right. Where his face should be, he saw only an unidentifiable fragment of what might be…leg?
He shifted his weight, and the entire kaleidoscope changed and reshuffled. It was dizzying, and so thoroughly unpleasant that he looked away from it with a wave of nausea…and spotted two little bronze footprints a half-step to his left.
Cautiously, keeping his gaze averted from the vertigo-inducing madness on the wall, he shuffled over and placed his own feet on those markers. As he did so, all the insane fragments moved one last time and suddenly his own and perfect reflection was standing right in front of him, giving him a look of stupid surprise. He actually sighed with relief.
"The ultimate carnival mirror, isn't it?" Eärrach chuckled.
"It's overwhelming."
The King nodded, "dissolution can be like that." He didn't offer anything more.
Jerl considered the mirror again. As he swayed left and right, bits of his reflection broke off and went flying to its random corners, in a way that was almost physically painful. But certain kinds of pain invited fascinated repetition, and this was one of them—unpleasant as it was, he found himself wanting to see just how much he could endure. He was quite sure no mere assemblage of polished metal and crystal lens could possibly create this illusion.
"I feel it more…intensely than I think I should."
Another nod, and a smile. "Go on…"
"Or perhaps, would, down below."
The King crossed his mighty arms—gods, what an achingly perfect vision he was!—and grinned in satisfaction. "Very good."
"…So things are more intense up here."
Eärrach pursed his lips thoughtfully and considered the mirror. "But are they merely more intense?" He apparently couldn't endure his dissolved reflection for long either, or at least didn't care to, because after staring into it for a few seconds he pulled a face and looked back to Jerl, awaiting his thoughts.
Jerl had nothing. He considered, awkwardly, before offering an idea. "Is it…that. Hmm." Okay. The weight. The senses. He looked at the King again and the mere sight was almost enough to break his heart wide open—
"More. Things are more up here," he said.
"More what?"
"More…everything! More immediate. More visceral. More impactful—" He remembered the Hounds. "More real!"
"Go on…we have all the time in the world."
"That is not the first…you've emphasized time now more than once. And I can't help but notice…"
He didn't say it, and he didn't need to.
"Yes. You can think here, Jerl. For as long as you need. So, perhaps as we hike up to the next point, consider those two ideas together."
Jerl nodded, then looked back to the mirror. "I'd…like to stay here and think about this some more, first."
Eärrach nodded and flopped down on the grass without a word.
Jerl was immediately grabbed by a different thought. "It strikes me suddenly how utterly ridiculous this entire situation actually is."
The King grinned in good humor. "Is it, now?" He sat up and somehow wedged himself into a cross-legged position.
Okay. Weirdly encouraging.
"I am being marched up a mountain on a hidden earthmote, with literal myth-type symbology playing out around me, while the most powerful of our gods personally accompanies me. And rather than his usual schtick of, I dunno, cheering on in sport, or feasting, or…"
"Or flexing, or boasting, or seducing, or any of a number of such things…" His grin was unbearable.
"Now I'm being…what is all this, anyway? I don't even have the words!"
"Different than what you were expecting?"
"Yes. Very."
"Okay. A hint, then! My usual mode is as an example, one that changes subtly over time to guide my people upwards. Start with something people see and understand, and show them how it can become noble. You know how I was depicted anciently, of course…"
True enough. Jerl had seen the carvings in the caves at Haptar Getesh, and Eärrach's depiction in those had been even less modest than the swaggering brown-skinned vision who'd accompanied him so far. All the Crowns had changed greatly in the stories over time. But Eärrach? The King? He'd begun as a god of hunting, of nature, of raw might, of sex and virility, of wild joy, of heroism and domination, of war and of protection…
And he was still all of those things. But now? Hunting became husbandry, nature became woodscraft. Raw might became personal excellence, war became competition and sport. Sex became seduction instead of mere rut, and with his wife and with Queen Talvi? Playful. Courtly.
Yet he still had his many dalliances. Still raged in the wild. Walked in palaces, and wrestled monsters.
…Eärrach was in fact all of those things all at once. A friendly monster and a dangerous gentleman.
"You start with something…basic. Something we all have in our souls." Jerl recalled the elk and bear totems that had marked the very first leg of this climb. "Something animal. Wild and primal, and red meat over the campfire….why?"
"You're the one doing the thinking."
"…Because…because to get through to people, you have to meet them as they are. Speak their language. And…no. Not even speak. You need to…uh…sing?" Jerl thought. "Yeah. That's better. What you're doing is like building harmonies. So…okay." Feeling encouraged, he delved in. "So the whole big-strong-man thing is like…a base note. Fundamental. A foundation. But now we…need tenors?"
Eärrach chuckled, "I'd say we're maybe up to the baritones right now, but…go on."
"But…okay. So you represent all these really powerful, primal things. But the other Crowns don't exactly, and—that's why we knew you first."
"Ah! Very good."
"So why am I coming to you last?"
Eärrach picked some grass off the sole of his foot. "You're the one doing the thinking," he repeated.
"Because…is that the sequence I needed to do things in? Walk backwards down to you?"
"There's a question you've not asked yet."
"…What? Why me? I know why me! Because I've got Time. Because it chose me, and now the future rests on me whether I like it or not."
"Indeed. So why did Time choose you for what would normally be the duty of a god?" The King leaned forward earnestly. "And, if I miss my mark, forgive me…why haven't I relieved you of this?"
"Well…I haven't asked you to."
"Hmm."
"…Oh."
Jerl stood and felt the wind in his hair, hitting him with beyond hurricane force that should have torn it right out of his scalp, and taken the scalp with it. But here, it just…was the wind in his hair.
"So. You have made it to the first crossroad." Eärrach stood, and Jerl once again had to battle the overwhelmingly fearsome and carnal feelings his mere presence invoked. "That is, indeed, a choice you can make. I will tell you right now: if you desire it, I will take this burden from you, deal with all of it, and set it right. I will intervene with the full power of a creator god. I will fix the timeline. The Shades will have never been. Because you are right, it was never fair to ask this of you. By some estimations, I should have simply corrected all of this long ago. But Jerl, if I do…"
He looked at the mirror again. Jerl looked too, and suddenly understood.
"Then the me that is making this decision wouldn't be."
"Nor would millions of others. Some will die who otherwise lived, or live who otherwise died. Some will never have been born. Some will have better lives, some will have worse, most will have much the same. Now…" he approached and companionably put his giant arm around Jerl's shoulders, and pulled him into a crushingly friendly side embrace. "It would work out in the end for all of them. But they would have missed out on something important. One should not go to death as a true innocent unless it was meant to be from the beginning."
Jerl looked down the mountain. The landscape stretched off into a blue haze in all directions, suggesting they were on an earthmote far larger even than Garanhir. They weren't in a place one could reach by airship, that much was clear.
And he wondered why exactly the idea of giving up Time and asking Eärrach to set things right sat so completely wrong in his heart.
Okay. I'm the one doing the thinking.
"I never wanted this. I would never ask for this. But I don't want to give it up."
"I can sympathize with that."
"But why don't I? I thought…" Jerl considered his reflection again. "I thought all I wanted from life was, y'know. My life. My ship, the sky, and enough profit to keep flying forever."
"There's an interesting observation on human nature, hiding in there…but perhaps that is for later."
Yes, Jerl thought. "It's a lot coming at me all at once."
"Indeed, young Jerl, I am preparing you to become. If you are to endure this…you must be something far, far more than you are. But it's not something I can just tell you how to do."
Jerl swayed slightly to his left one last time and watched his reflection explode again. Then he swayed back to the middle, and watched himself become whole again. And he thought, perhaps, he understood.
"…Let's keep going."
Let them come! They will have to come over open ground, and we will shoot them from all sides. I feel quite safe, and my squad have fine singing voices…if only the food were better, I would call this a picnic rather than war. —Letter sent home by Pvt. Ashler, 4th Heighlanders.
Crossing the Line
Enerlend, Garanhir 09.06.03.15.19
Mouse didn't talk about it, not even with Jerl, but Mind was a horrible power, really. It wasn't just the many abuses it could be used to inflict, it was that people became so…transparent.
Walking through a crowd of oblivious, ordinary people in Auldenheigh, he mostly just had to contend with the background noise of minor concerns—exhaustion over work, dreading the inevitable argument with the wife after getting home, stress over the children, the food, the housework, the money. Appearance, loneliness, the wish for loneliness, and just the general background preoccupations of people living ordinarily.
And then, suddenly, like a drunkenly mis-thrown dart flying dangerously across a crowded bar, he'd encounter the thoughts nobody would ever admit to out loud.
—nobody would miss me. It'd be so easy—
—So pretty. So pure. So perfect. So innocent. So easily destroyed—
—my brother. My own damn brother. The fuck is wrong with—
—kinda want to lick that railing. I bet it would taste nice—
—lot of money though, and I do need the money, but if we're caught—
—want to be naked right now so badly uggggh Crowns and Heralds I hate clothes—
—And why haven't I? Because I'm a fucking coward—
That was the city, though. A human mess.
Now, as Mouse led his horse past gangs of laboring soldiers and the trenches they were hastily digging, boarding and sandbagging, there was just one unspoken thought hanging in the air like a premonition of the noxious fumes, smoke and gas they all dreaded.
—We're going to die here.
He shivered and wrapped his coat and scarf tighter around him, to ward off a chill that had nothing to do with the air temperature.
The wagon's trail was easy enough to follow, for him. The physical evidence was worthless, the military comings and goings had quite ruined even its heavy wheel ruts and the prints of heavy draft horseshoes in this soft ground. But there was a trail of a different sort—confused men whose minds weren't preoccupied by doom, but by a vague nagging sense of having forgotten something.
He found one such man, a serjant, shouting instructions at a Yunei exile, who was in turn translating his words, with much editing and redaction, for a platoon-captain who was then shouting them at his men. The whole exercise was causing substantial difficulty, which might explain why the training serjant was damn near crimson in the face as he watched the Yunei soldiers fumble their way through a simple fire-and-reload drill.
"No, no! Red Lady's arse, ye don't all 'ave to reload at t'same bloody time! Staggered fire! Whole point is, there should always be bullets fillin' t'air, they don't all 'ave to do things clockwork-like! Make 'em understand!"
Mouse considered the Serjant, then considered the men he was trying to train.
"Maybe a demonstration is in order," he suggested.
The serjant turned and blinked at him. "…'Ere, who're you?"
"You don't need to know."
The man narrowed his eyes, taking in Mouse's outfit, horse and context. Mouse had chosen his words carefully, plucking them from his preconceptions, and he saw them do their work—Mouse was obviously an agent headed over the line into enemy territory, poor brave bugger. Best not to know more than that.
"…Right." He rubbed his jaw, then glanced at the Yunei, who were bickering among themselves about how best to interpret his twice-translated instruction. "Demonstration. Yeah. Might be t'only way to get through to this lot."
"But first, you can help me," Mouse said.
"'Elp you 'ow…sir?"
"A wagon came through recently. Heavy. With two men and a woman on it."
He saw the confusion on the man's face, as memory warred with a compulsion planted there by the power of Mind and gave up like a sheep thwarted by a bramble thicket.
"It's okay," he said, and exerted the Word himself. "You can remember."
The serjant blinked as the block inside his mind crumbled under Mouse's power. "…Aye, I do remember a wagon. They 'ad me an' two dozen lads hoist it clear over t'trench." He frowned at himself. "…The fuck'd we go an' do a daft thing like that for?"
"Not your fault, Serjant. One of the men on that wagon wields powerful magic to fool the senses and direct the will of others."
"…Cor." The serjant went wide-eyed. "…What're you, trackin' 'em?"
"Yes. When did they cross, and which way did they go?"
"'Bout an hour, hour and a half ago, I reckon." The serjant scratched his nose, then pointed. "An' from there they went straight dexter, back toward the road."
"What's the next town that way? How far?"
"Eshkipping. Bout, oh…four miles? Enemy territory, that."
"I know. Thanks. Now do yourself a favor, and forget you ever saw me."
The serjant opened his mouth to reply, then frowned as Mouse completely slipped from his mind despite still standing right in front of him. After a moment of scowling at himself in confusion, he muttered something private, turned to his interpreter and said, "Look, tell you what. Jus' run down to t'dugout and ask Lieutenant de Foale if I can 'ave loan of a squad 'fer a long tick, would yer? Reckon these lads need a demonstration t'get it."
The interpreter nodded and vanished, glad to no longer be stuck between two increasingly frustrated superiors. Mouse mounted up and prompted his horse forward, guiding it away to the right to go around a team deploying barbed wire along the trenchline. Once clear of them, the animal quite easily jumped the trenches then sped on over what would soon be a battlefield, but for the moment was good grazing fields.
Four miles to town, and they were now just an hour or perhaps hour-and-a-half ahead of him. A heavy wagon in these fields would be slowed, might even bog down a bit. Depending on how far it was to the road… He might just be in time.
He urged the horse to run as fast as it could, hunkered down in the saddle, and prayed it would be enough.
He'd barely gone a quarter of a mile when the first artillery barrage exploded down behind him.
Pursuit Thwarted
Airship Cavalier Queen, near the front lines, Enerlend 09.06.03.15.19
Adrey slapped her telescope shut as bursts of smoke, flame and fountaining topsoil erupted in the distance ahead of them, right among the new trenchworks."Shit. We're too late."
Sinikka was, if anything, a step ahead of her. She'd already vaulted the fo'csle rail and bounded back along the ship to the wheelhouse, calling, "Helm to leadward zero!"
"Zero to the top, aye aye!" Gebrahim's thick-fingered, callussed hands were already swinging the rudder over as he called back.
Adrey inhaled sharply through her teeth. It was a sensible move, really, not that the Cavalier Queen had been in imminent danger of plunging headlong into an artillery barrage. But something about the decision to turn leadward rather than trailing felt…dangerous.
Not that she could say why.
"Winter's tits…" Trapper Takes muttered, watching the explosive carnage ahead through his rifle's long scope. "Poor fuckers weren't even done diggin' yet."
"It's bad, isn't it?"
"Let's jus' say I'm reet glad we're too far off to see details, ma'am. Them guns've been aimed wi' care."
"The timing's no accident, I bet. Our quarry is safely on the far side of that bombardment."
They turned to watch as the Queen came around. Adrey pointed her telescope toward the beleagured frontline and counted carefully, timing the explosions against her pulse. The rounds walked ragged swathes along the line, coming down in rippling waves, and Takes was right—some time and care had been taken in getting them sighted in.
"…Two batteries," she decided. "Eight…yes, eight guns each. Dammit. Civorage doesn't play around."
She swung her telescope around, leaning out to peer past the Queen's rigging. She'd seen the maps, and knew the trench network went all the way up to the banks of the Heigh to leadward. But to trailward, the best obstacle to bring them up against were the Ethdowns, an outflung arm of the Cottagewealds, and the line hadn't got that far yet…
There. A copse of trees some distance trailward of Ethkipping had a smoky haze over them, and she realized why the decision to turn to port had sat wrongly with her.
"Sin!"
The elf sprang the full length of the ship in a single bound to rejoin her on the fo'csle. "Colonel?"
"The guns are in that wood, there." Adrey pointed it out. Sin's opalescent eyes narrowed as she considered the site, and gave a slow nod.
"I see them…Silly place to put them, though. They're exposed that far forward."
"Civorage doesn't care. They're a smokescreen for his proxy and Mab Keeghan crossing the line, nothing more. It doesn't matter to him if they're lost in the process."
"Might be bait for us, nay?"
"I'm fairly certain not. Circle us around wide, and come at them from the direction of the downs, let's punish them."
A flicker of sadistic pleasure lit Sin's eyes, but only a flicker. "Aye aye."
She sprang away, and Adrey put out a hand to steady herself on a rigging line as the deck swayed beneath her when the Queen went into a sharp turn.
"They'll see us comin'," Takes noted, still watching the battery through his scope.
"We'll destroy the guns and silence the bombardment, even so. I'm quite happy for the men to escape."
"Right."
The next five minutes or so crawled past as the ship opened up. Adrey stood at the prow and let the wind chase through her hair and past her face, smiling faintly as the excitement of the moment affected her. The Queen was fast when given the chance to race, far faster than a horse could gallop or even a steam train could roll, and the engines at full throttle roared like bears.
They shot over the end of the trench line, where the engineers had dived into their half-dug holes and now cheered up at them, urging them on. The wind flowing up the foothills of the downs caught and lifted them, and Adrey shifted her weight the other way as they turned. Already she could see that the artillery had stopped firing, and men were abandoning the guns to flee the copse they'd been posted.
"Colonel."
Adrey turned. Ekve nodded to her. To her surprise, he'd removed the grey robe he usually wore, and was now dressed simply in loose pants and nothing else. The grey, regretful eyes she'd grown used to seeing sat in an out-of-the-way corner of the ship chatting with the Rüwyrdan Set had a new sharp focus in them.
"Yes?"
The former Ordsiwat soothkeeper indicated the other elves with a nod. "We believe we may be able to continue the pursuit on foot."
Adrey barely had to consider it. "…Yes. Do it."
He nodded. "I will need a weapon."
Adrey shrugged, and handed him her sword. It was the weapon of an officer, but she wouldn't miss it…she felt more comfortable with her "hatpins" anyway. Ekve balanced it in his hand, took a guard, then nodded in approval.
"Thank you, colonel."
"Good hunting."
The Queen hurtled over the copse, and the Rüwyrdan leapt overboard with their wychwethels drawn. The swords screamed as they fell. Ekve gave Adrey a parting nod, then vaulted the rail after them. Adrey watched them drop, watched them land hard and dart away among the trees in a series of flickering shadows.
She lost sight of them as the Queen turned hard to port and came back around in a tight circle. Then it was time for the Particulars to go down the rope ladders. They were only gone a couple of minutes, and then the Queen ascended again as the last man up—Wullem—grabbed hold of the bottom rung and urged them to fly.
Adrey helped him over the rail at the top. "Good work. How long did you set the fuses—?"
The first detonation interrupted her, and Wullem chuckled.
"About that long," he said. Adrey leaned over the rail and looked back in time to see the second charge blow a second gun to scrap metal. In short order, the two batteries were both just a smoking collection of scrap metal sculptures.
"…Good." She unfurled her telescope and used it to look further afield. Sure enough, the elves were streaking away with the ground-eating purpose of a wolf pack. In the distance ahead of them, some ten miles away or so, she could see the looming shapes of three other airships coming closer.
"Time for us to be back on our side of the line, nay?" Sin suggested, eyeing the same approaching gasbags.
"Agreed."
Elves, she thought, as she turned her telescope away from the running Rüwyrdan and Sinikka sprang away to take further care of the airship. She'd rarely met any elves up until these last few weeks, let alone spoken with them—few humans ever had. There were only a million Fey in the whole world after all (or fewer even, given that some must inevitably have been Shade-taken before the vamdraech caught on), and that was a population so small that in Auldenheigh they'd still have been a minority even if every elf in the Nested Worlds immigrated.
Now she was surrounded by them, giving them orders, relying on them. And it occurred to her that she actually knew very little indeed about a group of people whose memories stretched back to the First Day. Oh, as a noblewoman of course she'd grown up with an education, read the history books and so on. But actually knowing who elves were as people was an opportunity she'd not yet had.
She suspected it would be a good idea to correct that oversight, while she had the opportunity. She wasn't quite sure why the Crowns had created this other species alongside humans, why they were immortal and their numbers fixed while humans were mortal but could multiply endlessly. Perhaps they was a long-term plan yet to come to fruition. Perhaps they were an idea that had failed. But the human world tended to ignore elves as a curiosity whose time was long past, and whose influence was only as great as they could persuade humans to let it be.
And…they were. Elves already lived on the margins, in their close-knit nomadic clans, split more-or-less down the middle between sad, solemn penitents like the Rüwyrdan Set and the Nerissith, and the pragmatists who'd decided to leave the past in the past and live as best they could here and now. How much more marginalized would they be as humanity continued to grow?
Would a day come when the elves retreated into the forests and never again spoke to the mortals who outnumbered them thousands-to-one? That seemed a sad thought, Adrey decided. There was so much to learn from them.
Even if it was a case of learning how not to be.
She shook herself out of her thoughts and reconsidered the sky around them. The Cavalier Queen was safely back over the front now, and the looming Clear Skies gasbags in the distance had turned aside, deterred by the anti-air artillery emplacements dug in to wide gabion-encrusted bunkers along the line. Peace of a sort had returned to the trenches.
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She wondered how long it would last.
"'A scaled and cold-blooded animal with no legs, that does not breathe the open air.' My friend, you have described a burrowing snake." —Overheard at the Thundering Hall
Marker of the Transpersonal
The Mountain
Now, the view down the mountain's slope wasn't of endless terrain, but of endless cloud. Haze and mist turned the great, wide, flat Below into a rucked-up landscape in shades of white and blue, under a white and blue sky. Only the solidity of frost-encrusted rock under his boots helped Jerl retain a clear sense of up and down.
He trudged on in silence, strung across a strange ravine between the grinding discomfort on the one hand, and total peace on the other.
The discomfort was understandable. He was heavy. Every movement was wearying, even though he never actually wearied. It was like being in the middle of a workout, feeling the burn and knowing his muscles would give out soon…and yet they never did.
Then there was the cold. Bitter in the mouth, biting on the cheeks, fierce enough to freeze the saliva on his tongue and turn the end of his nose to an ice-cold lump that would surely go black and drop off his face before long, were he not wearing a mask.
And yet, somehow, he was also comfortable. Maybe it was the strange clothing and its seemingly unlimited supply of hot, milky tea. Maybe it was Eärrach's protective aura. Maybe it was just the strange state of mind he was in, which was an oddly introspective one that allowed him to notice he was in a strange mood without breaking it.
Maybe—and Jerl wasn't entirely sure where this thought had come from or what in his life might have prepared him to think it—maybe a degree of exertion and hardship were, in just the right degrees, exactly what the mind needed to truly wake it up and keep it focused.
He was thinking about things he'd never thought before. About what being a person truly meant. About how you could in theory think about breaking a person down into their thoughts, their emotions, their instincts, their body and senses and soul…but what did any of those terms mean except for being defined by each other? Could you talk about senses without a body? A mind without instincts? Heck, a mind without a body or senses or instincts at all?
The mirror had answered that question. Whichfelt backward, somehow—what kind of a teaching method involved providing the answer, and then using it to inspire him to consider the question? But it seemed to have worked. He felt…whole, somehow. Or…like he understood himself a little better. Like he understood everyone a little better.
"Here. We're at the next marker."
Jerl blinked and looked around as Eärrach's softly-spoken interruption pulled him out of his thoughts. Briefly, he flapped loose like a pennant about to tear free from its masthead. How long had he been walking and thinking? He truly couldn't tell—hours? Maybe. It could equally be seconds. Or years. Or centuries. Time really had ceased to mean anything, now. He had just walked and thought without the distractions of normal physicality, until…
Until they reached this place.
The path bent inwards into a sheltered little bay out of the wind, that the snow didn't reach. In the middle of the bay, a circle of marble steps enclosed a disc of mirror-polished steel inlaid into the ground, its upper surface cast in stilled undulating ripples like a pool. Lying in the pool, with steel waves lapping about them, were two human-like figures carved of smooth brown stone, though their proportions struck him as strange—gracefully elongated, androgynous, realer-than-real. The impression of the human form, emancipated from the mundane restrictions of anatomy.
The pair were nude and entwined, but there was nothing sexual about their embrace. It was hard to say whether they were playing, wrestling, hugging, comforting each other or even asleep, just that whatever it was they were doing, they were completely and innocently intimate. By robbing them of any clear signs of age or gender, the sculptor had made it ambiguous as to whether they were lovers, siblings, the best of friends, comrades-in-arms, or parent and child. Jerl couldn't even positively identify whether they were smiling or solemn—the only thing left unambiguous was their joy and comfort in each other.
It was one of the most heart-achingly beautiful things he'd ever seen.
"…I think I might understand this one already," he ventured.
"Perhaps…but you haven't taken a close look, yet. Go ahead—touch them."
Jerl glanced up at him, then shrugged and stepped closer, taking the marble steps slowly and carefully before picking his way out over the cold steel ripples. He extended his hand to follow the Crown's suggestion, then stopped just before his fingertips made contact.
What he'd taken for a faint texture on the stone was…more of the same. Each of the entwined figures was made of entwined figures, though not all of these lesser forms were so peacefully happy. The smaller ones were caught in every conceivable moment of human relationship: birth, cuddling, storytime, schoolground play, arguments, meeting and parting as strangers, meeting and coming together as lovers, making love, breaking up, getting married, having planned children, having unplanned children, losing their children, going to war, fighting, killing, regretting, remembering, languishing, saying farewell on the deathbed…
And—he leaned in and exhaled as the full subtlety of this creation settled on him—each of the smaller figures was also crafted from smaller figures, and so on and on, ever-downwards into fractal infinity.
Gasping, he brushed his fingertips across the sculpture's surface. He'd expected them to feel knobbly or even rough from the ever-finer micro-sculptures embedded within them. Instead, the whole felt as smooth and warm as living skin.
He looked back up at the two faces overhead, and a powerful longing to feel what they were feeling reached up from inside him to squeeze his heart. He knew their emotion, had felt echoes of it many times in his life, though never as powerfully and purely as expressed here in stone and steel.
His tears froze unnoticed on his cheeks.
Eärrach had been uncharacteristically silent. Now, he stepped forward and put a gentle hand on Jerl's back. "Yes. You understand this one," he agreed, softly. "I thought you would."
"How could anyone not?" Jerl asked.
"Nils Civorage wouldn't." Eärrach shook his head, as though that thought pained him. "Though it's what he longs for with all his heart, he doesn't understand it. He thinks—well. What do you think he's missing?"
Jerl ran his hand over the stone again. "He thinks it's all about oneness. He thinks you get this—" he waved at the whole sculpture, "—by everyone singing from the same songsheet, all the time, forever, in perfect harmony….no. Not perfect harmony. Harmony is different notes coming together to make something beautiful. He thinks it's everyone singing the same note."
He considered some of the smaller figures in front of him. Considered how some of them were caught in the middle of a brawl, or an argument, or kissing. One pair were even acting out a cold and unjust execution. "Oh…poor bastard."
Eärrach smiled sadly, and stepped away. At the back of the bay, a steep series of steps had been cut in the rock cliff, leading up onto the bare snowfield above.
"Come," he said. "It's not far to the next one."
"It's not?"
"Not for you, Jerl."
Jerl took one last glance at the sculpture. Part of him wanted to stay and bask in the beauty of it a while longer…but no. He had more to learn.
He climbed the steps and pulled his mask tighter and closer about himself. The trail up ahead was marked by a series of stone cairns at intervals of perhaps a hundred yards, each surmounted by a brilliant orange flag. They snaked away across the snowfield toward a distant craggy rise.
Something even colder than the wind touched his face, and Jerl looked up in time for the next snowflake to land in his eyelashes. He blinked it away, and frowned up at the sky. The blue and white softness of just minutes ago was gone—now, the clouds were a brooding ceiling low above him, with all the sullen mass and hue of lead.
Eärrach handed him a rope. It was curiously woven of a fibre he didn't know, in spiralling strands of white and that same blazing orange as the flags. Without a word, Jerl nodded, looped it around his waist and closed it with a bowline. He had a feeling he knew what came next.
Sure enough, they'd barely passed the first cairn when the snow began to come down in earnest.
The next place of note along the road after Shelford is Eshkipping, on the borders of the Urstlend Marches. It would not be unfair to describe the village itself as "prosaic," but the Traveller's Rest Inn here is dry, clean, well-kept and comfortable, with solid and nourishing victuals entirely welcome after a day on the road. A forgettable stop in your journey, overall, but neither shall you have any cause to remember it for the wrong reasons. —By Road in Enerlend, a traveller's guide.
Market Town
Eshkipping, Enerlend, Garanhir Earthmote 09.06.03.15.19
Eshkipping was a stubbornly grey place.
It marked the near edge of the Urstmarches, where the cultures of Enerlend and Urstlend blended seamlessly from one to the other over a span of several hundred miles. For an age the official border between the two duchies had been at the dexter edge of the Marches, but Marchers viewed themselves as the conduit and filter through which culture flowed both ways. They were a proud folk, convinced they picked the best of both worlds—the color, vibrancy, music and romance of the Urstoin going one way, and the practicality, good sense, fortitude and integrity of the Enerlish going the other.
Eshkipping was a throwback to the days when the two cultures had not got along at all. The town seemed to view themselves as the last bulwark keeping Urstoin culture from seeping any further along the road and polluting the big city with such effete luxuries as color and soft cheese.
Its houses were old, timbered in white ashwood and grey limestone…and, right now, boarded up and piled with sandbags. Men "marched" in trudging lines through its winding streets, preparing for a bloody assault on a well fortified position.
None of them wanted to be here either. Mouse could feel their minds, all dwelling on how short their future likely was from this moment. None of them were Encircled, they were just…soldiers. They'd taken the Duke's Wage in search of an easy living, and now the Duke's orders seemed likely to send them to a hard death.
They ignored Mouse as he trotted along the main road toward the dexter end of town, where three mooring masts had been put up. A ship was bellying up to it, struggling to stay low enough as a squirrely breeze kept getting under its skirts and trying to bob it back up. The man on the top of the mast was lurking warily near the back of the gantry, ready to fling himself off and trust his life to his arrestor harness if it looked like the ship's dangerous swaying was about to crush him.
There was a wagon at the tower's base. It was scuffed, battered and old, and the paintwork hadn't been touched up in years, but Mouse could just about pick out the words "J. Mab Keeghan Plant Engineering" in scarlet on a green field.
There was no sign of anybody on the cart or guarding it. And that worried Mouse. Civorage was an arrogant bastard, but surely he wouldn't come so far and set so many things in motion to get this wagon out of the city and across the line only to fail at basic security in the very last…?
He stared at the cart awhile, then expanded his awareness, touching lightly on the minds of the men working around him, performing the mental equivalent of tasting the air for even the faintest hint of Civorage's attention and power while keeping his own power small and quiet, as easily overlooked as his namesake.
…Nothing.
That too was suspicious.
He took a hard, calculating look at the wagon. Its cargo, whatever it was, was securely bundled up in bag-cloth and tied with many ropes. He'd never get a decent look at it without a crane, and he doubted he'd be able to make head or tails of what he found anyway. Rather than approach the wagon, therefore, he hitched his horse and went to lurk at the mooring mast's base, sitting hunched up like the new kid on the team of stevedores waiting to start hauling block and tackle.
Above them, the topman finally managed to throw the mast's hook to his opposite number on the deck, and the crew heaved the ship in close. More cables secured it, and the boarding ramp was laid over.
Men started moving: Mouse pretended. His power did mean he could, if he wanted, stand in the middle of the bustle and go ignored, but it was easier and subtler if he looked like he belonged. So he play-acted at being a busy team member, and faded into the background with only the faintest exertion of Mind.
It proved to be the right move. Not long after the ship was moored, a skinny man with the unkempt hair of the distractible eccentric emerged from a nearby building, accompanied by a round woman whose every movement and shape screamed 'wife.' The two were bickering about the sleeping arrangements on the ship…
…No. The wife was bickering about the sleeping arrangements on the ship. Jared Mab Keeghan's head was full of numbers, parts, plans and ideas…for the aeroplane.
The design of it was sharp and clear on the very surface of his thoughts. A light frame covered in bag cloth for the body and wings, a tuned airship engine for power, a propeller, flight surfaces…right now he was trying to figure out how to deal with the engine's torque and the twist it put down the machine's middle, contemplating various automatic solutions like slightly shortening one of the rudder cables. His wife's aggravated words flowed around him without penetrating into his thoughts.
Mouse took a step back and sat down as he grasped the machine's implications. It'd be too fast to fight in an airship. It could just swoop over the top and drop firebombs onto the bag, or zip underneath and launch float mines uup from underneath…either way, it would be so fast and agile no deck of guns could hope to fight back.
Mab Keeghan believed it was the future. No, he knew it was the future, that the airship was already obsolete. And he was probably right, Mouse thought. He could read the knowledge and arguments right out of his mind, and feel the shape of his argument with his Ardkin.
Mouse considered his options, while Mrs. Mab Keeghan pivoted to fretting about whether the airship could even carry their cargo, considering how big and heavy the "project" was.
Civorage would certainly already know the basic idea, and probably a good deal more than that. Certainly as much as Mouse himself had gleaned. So why not Encircle the engineer? Because the Encircled lost something, became…less than they had been. He needed Mab Keeghan sharp and clever to complete this work.
If the old man died, though…
Civorage would find other engineers to continue the work, but at least it would take longer, and in that time, Mouse could find engineers back in Auldenheigh to develop their own version. Civorage wouldn't have a head start in the arms race. It wouldn't be a disaster.
His fingers closed around the pistol in his pocket. He gritted his teeth, and stepped forward.
"Jared? Jared! Sayf's balls, you're not even listening to me, are you?"
"Yes, dear."
"Jared Doaghlin Mab Keeghan will you listen to me!"
Jared jumped out of his thoughts—not even in-depth mental calculations about the aerodynamics of an asymmetrical propeller were enough to shield him from the use of his full name. He cleared his throat. "…I am thinkin' about something rather important right now, dear," he said, reproachfully.
Maggie crossed her arms at him. "And I'm thinkin' about the fact that the airship we came all this way an' crossed through a warzone to reach is waitin' on us." She jerked her head upwards. "Speed is life, you said."
"…Right. Yes. Thank you, Maggie…Sorry."
She blinked, then relaxed slightly. "…You must be worried if you're apologizin', you old goat," she said.
"Just grateful."
"Winter's tits, it's worse than I thought. You're dyin' on me!"
They actually smiled at each other. Jared knew he was a distant and distracted husband at the best of times, but the truth was…he loved Maggie. And he knew how much she'd sacrificed to come with him. Neither of them might ever say it, not when they could throw sarcastic jabs instead, but—
+DUCK!+
The command smashed into his brain like a shock from a badly wired magneto. His legs buckled and Jared flopped to the ground. Something terribly *loud—*a blast, light, pressure, sound—happened right next to his head as he dropped and white pain detonated in his ear, sharp as a steel spike driven deep. He curled on himself, writhing, clutching his skull as the world rang and whirled.
Through the ringing, whining deafness, he heard Maggie yelp in terror, and lashed out at random with a boot. Steel toe met bone with a crack and whoever-it-was staggered and stumbled.
Then a shadow charged right over him. He stopped rolling and looked up, and couldn't see, not properly. Mister C's proxy, the big young lad, was there, flailing his hammer-like fists at…at…
Jared's eyes watered. He must be concussed, or something, because he couldn't bring his attacker into focus at all. His vision kept smearing and skipping, like the world itself refused to show him who Civorage was fighting. The pain in his ear bored deeper, blossoming into a biting migraine, but all he could do was sit there and stare stupidly, unable to think—
Maggie grabbed him under his arms and hauled him to his feet. "Come on, come on! To the airship!"
"The…prototype—" Jared croaked.
"Bugger the prototype!"
Something wrenched in Jared's belly. He'd already had to destroy most of his life's work, and now he had to leave behind what little he'd been able to keep? Years of work, obsession and genius invention—but Maggie was right. She hauled on his hand and he stumbled after her toward the airship mast.
They staggered past Clear Skies marines, who were aiming their rifles at the two brawlers but blinking and shaking their heads as though they couldn't see clearly. Two of them beckoned Jared and Maggie forward, guided them to the ladder.
"You first, sir," one of them said.
"My wife—" Jared began.
"Don't be a damn chivalrous fool!" the marine snapped, and suddenly his voice belonged to Nils Civorage. "They're here for y—Rrng!!"
This grunt of pain was accompanied by the report of a pistol firing. Civorage's proxy staggered back from the brawl and collapsed with a brilliant red bloodstain flowering across his white shirt. A perfect heart-shot.
Another mental imperative spurred Jared, and he ducked just in time into the scanty cover of the mast's pillar leg. A bullet spat sparks from the steel and whined past his good ear. The marines, however, no longer needed to worry about hitting a friendly, and fired wildly at the twisting, nebulous ghost of Jared's assailant, who vanished behind the wagon.
"Go! Go!" One of the marines tore Jared from cover and practically lifted him onto the ladder. "Go, damn y—!"
His action saved Jared's life. There was an ascending whistle, and an arrow that would have struck Jared dead instead skewered the man's throat. In seconds, four more rained down, each perfectly aimed to pierce a marine's neck, eye or heart.
"Mara lach rüan!"
Elves, a half-dozen of them as dark as engine grease and quick as sparks sprang over the fence around the loading yard. Jared didn't know a lick of Feydh, but their war cry sounded enough like "Murder!" to propel him up the ladder with terrified vigor.
It was, at least, answered by a human battle cry: "To the fore, sweethearts!"
Urstoin infantry stormed in through the cargo gates, their colorful uniforms bright and gleaming. They hardly needed the encouragement of their beplumed, sabre-waving officer, as they spread out quickly and efficiently into the cover afforded by the wagons and buildings, laying down rifle fire as they went.
The fusillade barely seemed to trouble the elves, though. Their movements were impossible, faster than the eye could follow. Jared saw one zig-zag clean across the yard in a series of barely-glimpsed brief pauses, and then they were among the soldiers and the terrible wailing sword for which elves were feared was doing its work. Limbs and heads flew, but the elf pirouetted through the raining blood in mournful silence, dancing from one killing stroke to the next with never a wasted movement.
+FREEZE!+
Jared stopped climbing as though he'd smacked into a ceiling. An arrow skipped off the rungs inches in front of his nose.
+MOVE!+
He was halfway up. Behind him he could hear Maggie puffing and whimpering as she scrambled after him. His mind swam and he couldn't think straight. How had this started? Why was his ear ringing and deafened? The memory came and went, and when it was gone he knew he should have it, like a word on the tip of his tongue.
Below him, the carnage continued unabated.
Mouse coughed, and considered the blood on his hand.
Shit.
That…hadn't gone to plan. He'd walked right up to Mab Keeghan, put the gun to the back of his head and neither the man nor his wife had noticed…
And then Mab Keeghan had ducked, and kicked out, and that fucking mountain of a proxy had come out of nowhere, with a knife in hand, and Mouse was only alive right now on pure dumb luck.
Sort of. The knife stuck between his ribs sent a fresh stab of, not pain, but freezing cold through his chest every time he inhaled.
He knew better than to pull it out. Not without a healer present. And there were none—he was in enemy territory, and his only allies were a half-dozen elves who were now fighting for their lives against a larger and well co-ordinated force.
Woozily, he watched their terrible artistry. The Urstoin regiment had huddled into a tight bristling ball around the base of the mast, giving the Fey no isolated man to pick out and slay, nor a route up to Mab Keeghan. Their vibrant uniforms were filthy with blood and dust, making them look like a pen full of peacocks after a butcher dumped out his slop bucket on them. Their withering, overlapping volleys of fire forced the elves to keep moving, prevented any of them from stopping long enough to draw his bow and shoot.
Mouse's eyes turned upward. Mab Keeghan was nearly at the top of the ladder, now. The ship's crew already had the engines idling and the valves ready to open. As soon as he was aboard, he'd be gone, and Mouse would have failed.
He felt the timely commands that saved the man as another elf managed to snap off an arrow in his direction. He was leaning on Civorage's now, trusting him completely. He was..wide open. receptive. trusting.
Mouse blinked slowly. His thoughts were slowing down and getting…sleepy…but…
He had an idea. All he had to do was breathe. Breathe and stay awake. And focus
Al he had to do was keep climbing. Just Ten rungs to go. Just ten. Nine!
+PAUSE!+
He obeyed. Another arrow juddered into the wood right where his head would have been. Mister C was protecting him. He was safe so long as he trusted.
Eight rungs. Seven. Six. Keep climbing. Five. Four. Three—
+LET GO!+
His hands obeyed before his brain caught up and realized that hadn't been MIster C's voice. Too late, he grabbed for the rungs, but they were too far: His fingertip taunted him by just brushing the wood and then he was falling with his heart in his throat. Past Maggie, whose anguished wail followed him down and down and down…
"Fuck—!"
Mouse watched. He felt Mab Keeghan's mind flash away into the dark like a blown-out candle flame. Job done.
He sighed, and turned his eyes away from the crumpled red wreckage lying at the tower's foot. The ice in his chest faded away. The pain left by those hammering fists and all the other stab wounds. Even Civorage's rage flailed and scrabbled against the edges of his mind unnoticed. It was…quite peaceful, really. Not how he wanted to go, at all, but…it could have been worse.
He became aware of green eyes watching him. They belonged to a small girl. A familiar child. He'd met her before. She looked entirely out of place, standing barefoot in the middle of all this carnage in an unstained white dress.
She gave him a sad smile.
"You're…Sayf's daughter, aren't you? And Ellaenie's?"
"Yes."
"What—?"
"There's something you have to do before you go."
Mouse would have sighed, except…he'd already stopped breathing. "Too late," he said, somehow.
Saoirse took his hand. Her little fingers felt warm, and filled him with strength. "No, it's not."
He rose to his feet. There was a loosening sensation, as of taking off a slightly too-tight garment he'd been wearing unnoticed for his entire life. He glanced down at what he'd left behind.
Gently, and with an un-childlike air of sympathetic understanding, Saoirse pulled on his hand and drew him away.
"Where are we going?" Mouse asked, as the scene and his body faded away into silvery mist.
The mist became snow. The snow became a white field on a mountainside. He could see a line of marker cairns below, and two figures trudging along with their heads down against the blizzard. Two whining, canine figures came trotting out of the blizzard and circled around him, before sitting beside him. One of them whined and nuzzled his hand, and he absent-mindedly scratched Maicoh behind his shaggy ears. Maingan gave him a remarkably complex and pitying look for a lupine face, but said nothing. Still, she lay down next to him and waited, keeping him company.
He looked down at Saoirse, who was still holding his hand.
"What is this?" he asked.
She looked up at him, and if Maingan's face had been strangely expressive for a wolf's, hers was strangely adult for her age. It was full of pity, and kindness, and the wisdom of somebody far, far older.
"It's a chance to say goodbye," she said.
Mouse blinked at her, then looked down at the trudging figures again. One was huge and strode through the waist-high snow with no sign of effort, and there was only one person that could be. Which meant the other one trudging along in his wake was…
…Oh.
He could think of nothing else to do or say, so he sat down to wait and watch.
And he wondered what he would say.
Marker of Suffering
The Mountain
Snowflakes landed on Jerl like cannonballs. Each one would have smashed down a castle wall, down in the real world. Here, their shattering impacts pummelled him at every step.
Everything was more up here. Even the snow. But Jerl was more, too, now. Not enough so that Eärrach could have safely withdrawn his protection, but still…
"I've just thought of something."
Eärrach half-turned his head. Even he seemed to be finding the blizzard a chore, now. "Oh?"
"Why am I not afraid?"
"Afraid of what?"
"You."
"Ah." He turned his head back to look where he was going and trudged onwards, pushing aside snowdrifts with the mass of mountains as he forged a path. "You probably should be. Most people are."
"Why, though?"
"Oh, varying reasons I suppose. Personal feelings of unworthiness, worries I might be wrathful for their sins. Fear can also be an extremely healthy respect for a thing. After all, I have absolute dominion over everything in this creation, even the other Crowns. One should be wary of such a power, don't you think?"
"Are you likely to be wrathful? Arbitrary?"
"I'd like to think not, but Jerl, I am not God, I am merely a god. Worse, I am a god who was born merely human. My divine spark, such as it is, came much later as a particular gift."
"So…what does that imply?"
"You're the one doing the thinking, aren't you?"
Jerl snorted, grimaced as a snowflake hammered into his eye, blinked it away, and bent his head downward to think.
"…You're not perfect."
"Correct. Stated philosophically, I still possess vast potential, and that which is potent is not actual. In other words, I am still becoming."
"…Potential to do what?"
A half-turn of his head and raising one ice-encrusted eyebrow was all the reply the King needed to give. Jerl nodded, and thought some more. They trudged past two more cairns.
"To…do evil. And do good. To make decisions…" Realization dawned. "…and to make mistakes."
"Oh, yes." Eärrach nodded and fell back a few paces to walk alongside him. "I can make very big mistakes indeed, precisely because I am powerfully but imperfectly godly, and so very close to…well, that's for later. Do you see? Even in this conversation, consider my mode. Did I just now sound like I knew perfectly what to say when I said it?"
"…No."
"No. I am speaking precisely as you do, on the fly. And so, it follows that the ancient instincts we all hold about power may be correct. Of God Himself? Heh!" He chuckled to himself, as though recalling a private in-joke. "Be Not Afraid. But of me? Of the other Crowns? And now….who else?"
It all came crashing down upon Jerl in one fell swoop. He understood.
"…Well….shit."
"Ah, now you know why you're here."
"I mean…I figured that out before we even left Auldenheigh. But I think I only just felt it."
"Yes. There's a difference between knowing and knowing, isn't there? And look—I told you it wasn't far to the next marker."
They had reached a ridgeline. Now, as Jerl paused on its apex, he realized they stood at the edge of a sort of rocky bowl. Before him, what should have been a dished expanse of trackless white snow was interrupted by a jagged, asymmetrical pool of dark water. Its surface steamed, and as the steam wafted up the slope to his nostrils it carried a harsh reek like old eggs.
"What—?"
Eärrach chuckled. "Of course, you have no idea what a volcano is, do you? They're one of the things we had to leave out of the Nested Worlds' creation…Nevermind that now. Come on."
He led the way down the slope to the lake's edge. Jerl frowned at the steaming water as they got closer—it wasn't just dark from depth, it was as black and opaque as ink.
"What does this one do?"
"Shows us things. Places. People, mostly."
He extended his hand, palm outwards, and the water rippled strangely as though some tentacled creature was struggling beneath the surface. As the waves chased away across toward the far bank, images and shapes floated up from out of the black depths, gaining first form, then brightness and color.
In seconds, Jerl looked upon a battle—well, a skirmish, really, though intense and bloody. Flickering dark shapes carved a bloody path through a collection of infantrymen in flamboyant blue uniforms.
"Hang on…that's Ekve. And those are Rüwyrdan!"
"Yes. This is happening in the town of Eshkipping right about now. And this is happening a few miles away down the road…"
The waters rippled and the images flowed, melded together, became something else…a tent, with rows of beds down both sides. Men lay upon them, swathed in stained bandages while nurses in starched aprons scurried up and down with fresh dressings, bowls of water, magestones for healing and all the other tools of their trade. A doctor with a heavy leather bag hustled toward one bed whose occupant's leg ended mid-calf in a ball of bloody linens. He began to produce saws and scalpels even as a nurse hurried to close curtains around the unfortunate patient.
The steam rising from the pool's surface carried faint hints of sound, like a distant echo—moans of pain. The screams of a man in terrible agony. The sniffles of a nurse trying to regather her composure out of sight of the wounded boys.
Jerl shivered, and as though sensing he couldn't bear to watch any more the pool changed again, and again.
Each change brought a new vision of misery. He saw a man and a woman putting up a sign across the road outside their small village. Even though the sign was written in Craenen, he understood its meaning: "PLAGUE! Stay away!" Having erected their warning, the couple turned and, coughing and wheezing, trudged back toward their home.
He saw a longhall burning. Men and boys braved the flames to snatch out what food, blankets and other supplies could be saved, while the women and girls passed buckets up from the river to buy them time, but it was a hopeless endeavour. The thatch and beams were alight, and the home that had housed a whole clan for generations was already lost. Just before the vision faded, Jerl saw the men carrying one boy out of the hall, his skin still smoking from where he had dared the flames too closely.
He saw a Yunei city square, where a row of six men knelt on a wooden platform, all naked save for small loincloths. A magistrate read out a proclamation to the crowd, denouncing their banditry and sentencing them to immediate execution. The condemned didn't react in any way, even though, Jerl somehow knew, it was all an awful case of mistaken identity, and the real bandits were long gone. But to protest or speak up now would be Improper, and would only lead to crueller punishment. Better to die cleanly and with courage, despite the injustice.
One of them looked into the crowd and met the gaze of his wife. Her face was impassive, blank and tearless. But she would take her own life that night. There was no Proper future for the widow of an executed criminal.
The vision faded just as the executioner took up position behind the first innocent man and raised his sword.
"This is all happening…now?"
"More or less."
Jerl watched more woe come and go. Workers lost fingers to factory equipment, riders fell from horses. A young woman, too exhausted to keep pushing on a baby that would never be born, spent the last of her strength on kissing and reassuring her weeping husband.
"Iaka made this pool, before her fall," the King said, quietly. "She used to stare in it for weeks on end. She used to say, if she was forbidden from helping them, she ought at least to witness them."
"And now, she'd rather the whole world be Encircled slaves. Didn't you see what she was headed for?"
"It was never certain that she would make the decisions she did, Jerl."
"…You know, I never found out what happened to the other two. Chathamugah and Vedaun."
Eärrach shook his head. "Their fate is worth telling, but it's beside the point right now. Focus on what's in front of you."
"All this suffering."
"Yes."
Jerl sighed. There was an obvious question there, and he knew the King wanted him to ask it. "Why?" he asked. "Why do we have to suffer?"
"That's not the question, Jerl."
"It's not?"
"No. The question is…"
Eärrach gestured, and the dark reflections in the pool fled like he'd waved his hand through cigar smoke. A new image formed, and Jerl's heart caught mid-beat.
He'd never seen anyone starving to death before.
The boy was…anywhere between four and ten years old? Impossible to say for certain. He looked more like a sun-mummified corpse, a skeleton with skin stretched tight over the top, so that even his face was more skull than visage. His eyes were open and alert as he clung to an equally wretched woman's leg, but…
Jerl shivered and turned his face away, unable to bear seeing that look in such young eyes. He'd seen it before, in Gebby's eyes and Derghan's, that first time around before he'd opened Time's vault. It was the look of someone who knew he was already dead.
Eärrach nodded, slowly and sympathetically. "…Why does he have to suffer?" he asked.
"Him specifically?"
"Yes. What point is there in his misery? What trial is he overcoming? This hardship will kill him, Jerl, slowly and painfully. An innocent who didn't choose this, and can do nothing to change his fate…to what purpose? To whose benefit? That's the real, hard question: Why him?"
He gave the suffering child a look of bottomless pity. "…Why shouldn't I save him?" He asked quietly, and Jerl knew it wasn't directed at him.
"You're tempted."
"…Always."
Jerl looked up and considered the subtly contained agony on the King of Crowns' face.
"This whole thing isn't a trial for just me, is it?"
Eärrach shook his head.
"So…what's your answer? Why not save him?"
"I'm a god."
"So?" Jerl asked.
"I could save him in thousands of ways, Jerl. I could certainly find ways to do it that nobody could prove were anything but the plausible vagaries of chance. A sudden hailstorm bludgeons migrating birds from the sky, or a herd goes astray and wanders into their lands…but even if I acted overtly, even if I caused bread to sprout from the ground like bamboo, so what? Would that make them my playthings? Would saving lives threatened through no fault of their own really strip them of their freedom, or their dignity?"
He gave a tired wave of his hand, and other torments returned to continue played out under the black water. A girl put on a smile for her parents, doggedly living her brave little life despite the pain of the cancer eating her bones. A traveller fell from his horse, doomed to paralysis by a stray molehill. A young woman took an afternoon nap and never woke up, leaving her widower to pick up the pieces of a life that would never quite know joy again.
"It's one thing to talk about the dangers of intervention in the abstract, from a distance," Eärrach murmured. "It's entirely another to refuse to help them after looking into their eyes."
"So why don't you? You didn't answer my question."
Eärrach said nothing.
"…Do you have an answer?" Jerl asked.
Eärrach inhaled slowly, then exhaled heavily. He tore his gaze away from the ice and looked Jerl dead in the face. "I do. But we've come now to the moment where we must step off the human, worldly path. Now, we must start thinking like gods."
"And I'm the one doing the thinking."
The King nodded solemnly. "Yes. This is a trial I've already faced, and a question I've already answered. It's your turn. You tell me why we shouldn't save him."
Jerl stared at the black pool. The starving boy was back, and he stared into those wide, hopeless eyes, not seeing the snowflakes as they settled on the hot water with a faint hiss.
He opened his mouth, but found no reply waiting. He shut it again, and frowned down at his boots…and thought.
He thought for…a long time. Exactly how long, he didn't notice or count. Here in this place, where crushing weight was endlessly bearable, where killing cold froze him to the bone without making him shiver, where his weariness lay heavily on him without stopping him…it might have been seconds, or it might have been centuries.
It might have been that measuring it at all was nonsense.
Slowly, an idea came to him. As he thought about the markers thus far, especially the fractured mirror, and the intimate sculpture, the shape of it took form. It wasn't a complete thought, but it was better than silence.
"Because…it's not about one person. It's never about one person."
"Isn't it?"
"It can't be. There's…" Jerl licked his lips under his mask and let his thoughts come pouring out aloud, not caring whether he was speaking truth or idiocy. "There's no such thing as an action that affects just one person. We're all…we're all too tightly bound up, we're all part of each other. Everything you do to one person makes, uh, ripples, I guess, that touch everyone else."
"So?"
"So…you save the boy from starving. That's a good thing. But what ripples out from that action? Is that good? Whatever it is?" He turned and looked back across the snowfield, toward where he thought the sculpture of the entwined intimates. "…Is that it? One tiny crumb of harm done to everyone, versus one life? I…don't know if I buy that."
"Do you believe we can quantify harm and suffering that way?"
"I don't even know if I'm on the right track, here. I'm just thinking…" Jerl took another sip of tea from the tube in his math and let his mind settle a bit. "Maybe…no. No, I don't think so. But what happens if, every time you act, the world takes a step toward something terrible? Even if it's not like any one step really hurts us enough to outweigh the good you've done by saving that life…it's still a step forward. And there's only so many we can take before…what? Something so terrible it outweighs any amount of mortal pain?"
"Go on…"
Jerl looked back at the ice. "You mentioned freedom and dignity before."
"Yes. I asked whether saving people who were endangered through no fault of their own would really strip them of it."
"Them individually? …No. No, I don't see how it could."
"How could actions which don't harm the freedom and dignity of anyone, still erode the freedom and dignity of everyone?"
"I…" Jerl drew a blank. Finally, he shrugged and shook his head. "I don't know."
"Play the scenario out," Eärrach offered. "Save that young boy. Go ahead. You can do it, here."
"…Pretend I am a god?"
"Oh, not pretend, no. That boy is real. You can save him, Jerl. All you need to do is will it."
He realized, suddenly, that he was connected to Eärrach now in a way far beyond intimate. Hiding behind a softening veil…was power. Pure, absolute, unfathomable power, roiling and raging, the essence of everything human magnified beyond all possibility of description or comprehension. Were it not for the "veil" it would have incinerated Jerl's very being at the moment of contact.
Eärrach truly was a god. And now, the King was offering Jerl complete power to do as he willed. It would be so easy, he could feel it with total certainty. He could fix the boy, fix his dad—
"You hesitate."
"I…trust you. I trust that you wouldn't let this happen without a good reason, even if I can't quite figure it out, yet."
"But I'm not perfect, Jerl."
"Neither am I." Jerl shook his head. "I don't know why the world is like this. But I do know…I've seen the results of Iaka's crusade. She wants the world to be something it's not. She's not perfect either, but she's arrogant enough to think she can force life to be better and kinder. She doesn't worry about the consequences…"
He turned and looked Summer in the eye. "I don't want to be like her."
"Even if it means that boy starves to death? Does he have to die because you're afraid of yourself?"
Jerl stared at that skeletal face, that round tummy and those bony limbs, and felt pity and pain like he'd never imagined his heart could bear. "…It wouldn't stop with him. It couldn't. What am I meant to do, play favorites? Decide on a whim who gets saved and who doesn't? If I do it for him, I'd have to do it for another, and another, and another. And even if it was always for the right reasons, even if it was the right thing to do for all of them…in the end, the whole world would be my playthings."
A tear rolled down his cheek. He tore his mask off and made to wipe it away, but it outran his fingers and dripped into the black waters. As the ripples from its fall passed over the boy's face, he began to fade away.
"...I'm sorry," Jerl told him, and had never meant any apology so completely.
The ripples and the boy faded completely, and the inky lake yielded no new visions. For a time, he stood and stared into it, hearing the hiss of snow melting on the hot surface, sensing the waft of its vapors across his face, but feeling nothing.
Eärrach put a hand on his shoulder.
"…Come on," he said, in a voice infinitely soft and understanding. "The last marker awaits."
Jerl sniffed up a deep breath, and gathered himself. "Is it far?"
"No. It's just over there."
He pointed, and Jerl looked. Waiting on a clifftop some few hundred yards away, four figures were silhouetted against the sky. He recognized them instantly.
And he knew the final test would break him.