Fallen (26 page)

As he leaned over to fill their water skins, his new charm swung out from his neck. He had never put much value in such fancies, but something niggled at him constantly now, a worry that kept itself dark and hidden away. Much had changed—he and Nomi, for a start, and the fact that he was sometimes living her dreams and nightmares—but this felt like something more. It felt like . . . intrusion.

Many people he knew wore charms to ward off certain worries. So he bought one, and named it as he put it on. He knew it would not work, but neither would it do any harm.

He looked down at the twist of bone suspended from the cord around his neck, spinning, swaying . . . and past it, below the surface of the water, he saw a light-colored stone. He picked it out. The water was cold and took his breath away.

The stone was flat, about the size of his palm, and it had a perfectly round hole straight through its center. The Widow had shown him a similar stone many moons ago, and as she held it up to the sky she said,
Look at the moons through the hole, breathe through it three times and wear it, and it's said your heart and mind will be well for a long time.
Ramus had scoffed at her beliefs back then, asking how a worn stone could influence someone's health. But the Widow had scolded him, as she often did, berating him with superior knowledge and breadth of vision.

How can you know this is only a worn stone?
she said.
You know precious little of the Noreela we live in now, and what of the past? It's said by some that a great shaman once cast such stones. He molded them from his own seed, and clay from the shores of the southern sea that you now call Sordon Sound. He was the first charm breather, and he breathed goodness and health into the clay before it hardened. When all thirteen pieces were firm, he strung them on a rope of twisted hawk gut and hung it around his neck. The weight of the charms bore him down, but he didn't take off that necklace until the day he died. And when he died, he was almost three hundred years old. He had friends in life, but in death they coveted what he had possessed, the talents and charms, the shreds of early magichala which none of them could begin to understand. And they tore his body apart, seeking to make their own charms from his bones and organs, knotting his guts to string his toes around their necks, and his fingers, and his incorruptible eyes. The necklace was destroyed, each individual stone carried from there by the people who had proven themselves no friends at all. And in their betrayal lay their doom. Some of them lived almost a year after the great shaman died, but certainly little more than a year later all thirteen were dead. Rotting into the land, eaten by carrion creatures, taken apart just as they had taken him apart. And the stones that gave him such long health sank into Noreela. Sometimes, they're found.

The Widow had held the stone out to Ramus, but he smiled and shook his head.

Don't believe me, Ramus?
she had asked.

Those same words echoed in his mind now. He held the stone up and viewed the darkening sky through the hole at its heart. The life moon was out already, low to the horizon and half-full, and he turned until he could see it through the charm.

It was superstition, a story of a story, and he was a Voyager. Committed to truth and fact, science and discovery.

He breathed through the hole three times. Nothing felt different.

“I'm not sure, Widow,” he whispered. “Not anymore.” He placed the stone gently on his knee and took the bone charm from around his neck. The militia had denied any knowledge of what the charm was for, but it had called to Ramus as it swung from the ceiling, set spinning when the man nudged it in passing. Now he unknotted the leather thong and fed it through the hole in the stone.

It was no bother wearing something like this. If it did not work, he had lost nothing. If it did, then perhaps he could maintain his health until they reached the Great Divide.

He carried the water skins back to camp, and if Lulah noticed his new adornment, she did not mention it.

THE FOOD WAS
good but not great, almost as if Lulah had lost heart after leaving her companions. Afterward, she said that she was going to patrol the area for a while, and left Ramus sitting alone by the fire.

He took the parchment pages from his backpack. Placing them carefully on his knees he touched them first, feeling the texture of the pages and wondering whose fingers had touched them before him, and how many, and how often. He smelled them, brushed them against his face, listened to the rustle as he waved them past his ear.

The Pavissia Steppes smelled different. He was used to the aroma of heather, but the heather here gave off a warm, earthy stink. The air was richer and wilder. The parchment smelled almost familiar, and Ramus felt a sudden, surprising pang for Long Marrakash, now far behind.

Lulah appeared from the shadows to ask if he was all right.

“I'm fine,” he said. He felt uncomfortable with the pages exposed on his lap, as if anyone else's viewing them would detract from their power. Lulah stood by his shoulder and looked down. When she reached out to touch the pages, Ramus covered them with the map he had drawn.

“Sorry,” she said.

He shook his head. “It's just . . .” An awkward silence was broken by something calling in the dark, a low cry from far away.

“I should do another circle of the camp,” the Serian said.

Ramus nodded and watched her walk away.
She's on my side,
he thought. But that idea was naïve. There were no sides here, only those with knowledge and those without.

He took out his journal and charcoals, skipping the first page, resisting the temptation to scrub Nomi's name from sight. He could not change the past. He turned past the page where he had made the mark in the temple, and when there were blank sheets before him, he placed it on the ground between his feet.

Ramus concentrated on Ten's parchments again, turned them, viewing them all at once, staring at one at a time, laying them side by side across his lap, letting the information enter his mind without dwelling upon it too much. He accepted that some of the symbols may be strange lettering, and some of the letters he thought he recognized could be obscure symbols. The illustrations were obvious in places, not so in others, and even these could be glyphs or symbolic representations of words or phrases, rather than simple drawings. He was already certain that whoever had written these pages was at least as advanced as the most literate scholars in Marrakash. If it truly was a language from long ago, it was utterly unique.

And yet . . .

Ramus closed his eyes and let the imagery wash around in his head. His mind's eye opened onto a blank gray slate, and the images from the parchments floated there. He let them arrange themselves at first, then he began shuffling and changing, altering shapes here and there or turning them upside down, left to right. He touched the stone charm resting around his neck, wondering who else had worn it and when.

By the time Lulah returned, Ramus was feeling a closer affinity to the language. It was as though the truth lay a hundred miles away, but he was slowly drawing closer. If he watched, and listened, perhaps he would see it soon.

“All quiet,” Lulah said. She squatted by the fire, hands held out to warm.

“But something still bothers you,” Ramus said.

Lulah laughed, a short bark. “Plenty bothers me about this voyage.”

“But here and now?”

The Serian glanced at him, her eye glittering in the firelight. “Just a niggle,” she said, touching her cheek below her missing eye.

“Seeing something that isn't there?”

“I've learned to trust my intuition. And something around here feels out of step.”

“It's a different land,” Ramus said. “The smells aren't the same, the air is heavier. Perhaps the unknown carries weight.”

“I like strange lands. I thought you would too, Voyager.” She shook her head and reached for a water skin. “Just something odd. But I'm not too worried. Perhaps daylight will tell us more.”

“You can't stay awake all night,” Ramus said.

“Just for tonight. Then tomorrow it can be your turn to lead my horse.”

“I can keep watch, maybe—”

“Have you ever killed anyone, Ramus? Fired an arrow into a man's face? Fought off something come to eat your flesh?”

He shook his head.

“I can look after you, but let me do it my way.”

Ramus watched her leave.
She's so strong,
he thought.
But she doesn't trust me at all.

He revealed the pages again and narrowed his eyes, letting firelight illuminate the unfamiliar language. He picked up the journal and began making marks. Words flowed, old languages combined, his knowledge of writing and past times acted as the filter through which the parchment images were sorted. And soon he began to discern sense in chaos.

WHEN LULAH RETURNED
again, the fire had burned down, and Ramus had never felt so awake.

“Some of this is speaking to me!” he said.

“That's good, Ramus. But you need sleep.”

“No. No! This is vital, Lulah. I need to read these pages for us to get where we're going.”

“I know how to get there,” she said. “South till we hit the Divide.”

“And then?” he asked, wide-eyed.

“And then you do your Voyager things, and we go home.”

“No. We reach the Divide, and then up.”

“Up?” He saw realization dawn. “Are you truly mad?”

Ramus shook his head. “There's sense here,” he said. “Sit down, look.”

“I really don't know anything about—”

“Please, Lulah. Let me talk it through with you, and that will illuminate it for me as well.”

Lulah sighed and dragged her saddle closer to the fire. She took one more look around before sitting down, and Ramus noticed that she kept her sword-hand free, her bow and quiver within easy reach.

“See here,” he said, leaning toward her and revealing one of the first parchment pages. “The imagery is so literal that it took a while for me to see. Here's the cliff—the Great Divide. This much I know already. There are images of the sun and moons, and people dancing or paying homage to one or the other or all three.”

“What's that?” Lulah asked. She pointed to the curled image of the Sleeping God, surrounded by a clear space on the page.

Perhaps she knows more than she admits,
Ramus thought, panicked. “Sleeping God,” he said, trying to sound casual. “See the space around it on the page? They shun the cult of the Sleeping Gods and worship the heavens.”

Lulah nodded, and glancing sidelong at her Ramus could see that she was scanning elsewhere on the page.

“I thought these were the words of a story,” he said, pointing at some of the lettering surrounding the more literal imagery. “I was searching for a link between the images and the words, but now I think they're more than a story. I think some of them form a spell.”

“A spell?”

“A curse,” Ramus said. “Maybe a warning against . . . something.” “Why do you think that?”

“I recognize some of the words.” It was almost as if he were talking to himself now, and Lulah's questions were what he had been asking himself as he sat by the fire. His concentration focused inward, and speaking through his thoughts gave them more weight. “I was looking backward to older languages, to see whether any of the lettering or glyphs matched any that I've read before. But I should have been searching differently. If this is from the top of the Divide, whoever wrote it is cut off from the rest of Noreela, and their language has developed in isolation. So I took some of the older, dead languages and tried to present them forward, imagining how they could have developed had they survived. And I started to see things.” He pointed to a splay of words halfway down one page, surrounding the image of a tall, thin humanoid figure with hands raised into a cloud above its head. “Old Narumian,” he said. “Except the structure is all turned around, and some of the words don't make sense. And there's a definite Old Cantrassan lilt to some of the spellings. Strange, but that's how it seems. It's like the roots of these languages were the same, and . . .” He shook his head and blinked rapidly a few times, trying to clear his eyes. Then he spoke a few Narumian words similar to those he saw, attempting to incorporate how the alteration would affect their articulation. It felt wrong in his throat and the words hung heavy on the air.

“What was that?” Lulah said.

“I'm not sure.”

“Well, I'm going to walk around a bit more,” the Serian said, but Ramus barely felt her leave. He was there on his own, and those just-uttered words hovering around his head, as though waiting to be unspoken.

He traced his finger across other pages, different lines, until he saw a line of writing that bore resemblance to an old Ventgorian tongue. Nomi may have heard these words, but she would not recognize them written down. The lettering was different— there seemed to be more letters in this alphabet, at least thirty as opposed to the twenty-four in modern Ventgorian—but Ramus whispered his way along the line.

Something touched his cheek. He started, dropping the pages, standing and stumbling back. He scanned the camp quickly and saw that there was no one there. Putting his hand to his face he found a few specks of dust clinging to his stubble, wind-blown grit that had struck him like a soft fingertip.