Fallen (36 page)

More wrongs, more faults, more sources of guilt. A shopkeeper who Ramus stole from in his teens; his mother's look of hurt when he turned down a gift she had bought for him; Nomi, sitting in her home after Timal had left for the last time, her tears icy spears in his heart.

And the gray people grinned and grew fat on what he was experiencing. Their weight increased, their eyes sparkled, the rotten teeth in their mouths gained weight and color, their sunken cheeks filled out; and more and more of them were coming from the forest.

He grasped the round stone charm and struck out, feeling the warm patter of blood across his face.

The Widow spoke to him and he clung to her voice, feeling surprise simmering through the beings splayed across his prone body.
Magichala is instinct,
she said.
You're born with it, and it can never be forced. You
breathe
it. There's no technique other than that.

Ramus uttered the words he had read from the parchments and they flowed from him like stale breath. He kept his voice low so that Lulah could not hear.

He grabbed Konrad's stone fingers hanging around his neck and they felt warm, a strange heat as though it was from somewhere other than his own flesh and blood. He looked up into the eyes of a woman as the final sound left his mouth. At first, her grin changed into a look of surprise, and then her eyes stopped glittering as they turned to pale, dead stone.

Ramus did not know how long Konrad had taken to die. Perhaps back then, whatever power the words held was still developing in him, growing from the seed planted by his readings of the parchment. But this time, within a dozen beats of his muttering the words, everything had grown still.

When Ramus moved, the crackle of breaking stone limbs startled him. The gray people around him were still gray, but now they were motionless and dead. Here and there he could still see the soft texture of flesh and skin instead of the dulled tones of stone, but as he watched even these hardened. His attackers were statues, frozen forever into one moment in time. He heaved away the people who had been crawling and clasping across him, pulling himself from beneath their dead weight and feeling the rough edges of their fingers, teeth and hair scratching the exposed skin of his face.

An arm stood in his way, fingers turned into the soft ground where its owner had been grasping for balance. One thump with the heel of his hand snapped the arm from the shoulder and it tipped over, fingers still splayed like a dead spider.

Gasping, still barely believing what he had done, Ramus stood and looked across at Lulah.

Her gray attackers still smothered her, but now they were looking at him with suspicious eyes. They did not seem perturbed by what had happened—indeed, none of them seemed to be looking at their dead, petrified companions—but the threat had bled from them. One stood on Lulah's chest, stepped off and loped back between and into the trees. Soon, the others followed.

Lulah remained motionless on the ground. Ramus wanted to go to her, but then his legs began to shake, and he went down to his knees.

All instinct,
the Widow said in his memory, and he relished his vision of her. He closed his eyes, and drove away all the sour memories the gray people had dredged up. He answered her, and it felt good to have his own voice back.

“Much for you to see here, Widow. Plenty for you to know. You'd be proud of me.”

“Ramus,” Lulah whispered, and she was looking at him in fear. “You have the power of the gods.”

Ramus shook his head, unable to meet her eyes. “Maybe just one of them.”

LULAH STUMBLED AROUND
the dead people, staring down as if they would move again at any moment.

“I spoke without thinking,” he said. He frowned, not understanding. The Widow's words of advice echoed in his mind, but she was not really here, did not really know what he had.

Lulah kicked at a stone man's leg and it came off, thumping to the ground. She looked at the broken part, running her fingers across the insides and rubbing dust between fingertips. She avoided catching Ramus's eye. She had yet to thank him, and he felt a brief rush of annoyance, but smiled at such foolish petulance.

“They were preying on bad memories,” Ramus said. “Sucking them out of us.”

“Not me,” she said.

Her denial surprised Ramus. “You were screaming.”

Lulah rubbed her chest and neck. “They were hurting me.” She looked away again, retrieving and sheathing her dropped sword.

I heard you,
he thought.
I know what you were going through, because I went through it myself.
But if Lulah wanted her distance and privacy, so be it.

For the rest of that day, as they left the great forest behind and set out across the strange landscape of water and standing stones, Lulah said little. And Ramus wondered what dark deeds were swilling in her mind, trying to lose themselves in the past once again.

Chapter 13

TWELVE DAYS AFTER
they had entered the forest, it ended by the side of a lake, and beyond the lake, Nomi saw a plain of standing stones. When they skirted the lake and realized how huge the stones were—the largest were ten times the height of a person—they paused for a while to admire them, and Nomi wondered how they had ever been placed. Nobody suggested that they might be natural.

They saw no sign of Ramus or Lulah.

Days passed, spent mostly on horseback except for short breaks for food or to explore some of the more extraordinary standing stones. Nights were often spent camped beside a monolith for shelter. Some nights Beko spent in Nomi's tent, and others he chose to remain outside. They did not speak much about what was happening between them. The time would come for talk, Nomi knew, but now there were things that felt greater—the places they were seeing, the voyage, what they might find at its end. So she was content to let lust take its course and hope that love would find its own way.

Sometimes, when night came, Nomi became wary of falling asleep. She knew that Ramus sometimes dreamed her dreams, and the thought of that made her feel naked before him, exposed and opened up to his scrutiny. She tried to steer her thoughts certain ways, but she could never dictate her dreams. Or her nightmares. She dreamed of making love with Beko, dying in the forests, killing Ramus with a blunt knife, Timal appearing before her and fading away again, the Divide falling to crush all of Noreela once they had climbed and discovered its secrets. She invited none of these dreams, and always awoke wondering which ones Ramus had shared. Whichever he saw, she hoped that some sense of her remorse would show through.

Their route was not direct because of the many waterways that sliced the landscape in all directions. Sometimes, the surfaces of these streams or channels appeared to be frozen, but as they drew closer the effect would shimmer and disappear, leaving little more than ripples in its wake. Other times the streams would be steaming, the ground close to them almost too hot to walk on. Geysers erupted—not large, but unpredictable—and several times a horse was startled enough to bolt.

As Nomi took in their strange surroundings, she hoped that Ramus would be fascinated enough to stop and take notes, write at length about the frozen and steaming streams and whatever things may live in them to cause such effects. She wondered where he was. Close? Watching her watch for him?

And if he ever spoke to her again, what language would he use?

DESPITE THE STONES
—which became more infrequent the farther south they went—and the streams, small lakes and areas of marshy ground, they made surprisingly good progress. Food was plentiful, both meat and vegetable, and they ate three good meals every day.

A couple of times they saw tumblers in the distance. Nomi was delighted. She'd heard mention of them before, but when Ten had spoken of them back in Long Marrakash, they had still struck her as the stuff of legend. Now, even from such a distance, she could make out their great rolling shapes, part animal, part plant, which would supposedly crush and consume anything in their path. They rolled south to north, against the slope of the landscape and the direction of the wind. The Serians kept a wary eye on them until they vanished, while Nomi watched with wonder.

The waterways became less common, and when they arrived at the final standing stones, they looked south and saw a shadow along the horizon.

“Clouds,” Beko said.

“Hills,” Rhiana said. “And shadowed valleys.”

Nomi shook her head and urged her horse forward. They passed through the shadow of the final standing stone, and the landscape before her was stark and bare. “Neither,” she said. “That's the Divide. A couple of days' ride, perhaps, but it's already there. Too far to see properly.” She looked up above the shadow and saw only the slate gray of distance.

The Serians were silent, letting Nomi look upon the target of her journey and think her own thoughts. But, in truth, all her thoughts were about Ramus. She wondered whether he was looking at this same sight right now, somewhere far to the east or perhaps closer. She looked that way, across the gently undulating land, and she closed her eyes and tried to imagine him looking back at her. But her visual landscape was a blank. It always had been; her imagination was limited, a trickle compared to Ramus's roar.

“We should camp here,” Beko said. “Beside the final stone.”

“I want to ride on and—” Nomi began, but the Serian captain gave her a stern stare.

“We have equipment to check,” he said. “We've all climbed sea cliffs before, but none of us have ever faced anything like this. We should eat well tonight, prepare ourselves to ride into the Great Divide's shadow.”

“I've heard things,” Noon said. “I've heard it said that the shadow is a curse, and once it touches your skin you're the Divide's meat forever.”

“I've met someone who defies that curse,” Nomi said. But still, it gave her a chill.
There'll be something final about entering the Divide's shadow,
she thought.
Cutting off the sun. It'll be like leaving Noreela.

“This is the far extreme of the land,” Beko said. And Nomi thought,
Please don't fall apart on me now.
He looked at her and smiled. “What a voyage!” he said. “To the edge.”

Nomi smiled back. “It's only just begun.”

“How high can it be?” Ramin asked.

“Do we have enough climbing gear? Enough rope?” Noon said.

“Let's camp and eat.” Beko's voice was calm and assured. “Around the fire, we can talk about these things. And I'm sure Mam Hyden, if she knows more than she has let on thus far, will have plenty to say.” He smiled again, but this time his eyes held a glint of something cool.

He doesn't trust me,
Nomi thought.
But after what I've done to Ramus, it's hardly surprising.
And she realized, looking south at the shadow of the edge of the world, that whatever there was between her and the captain could never be more than it was now.

NOON AND RAMIN
unloaded the packhorses and started going through their climbing equipment. Beko watched with half an eye, but most of his attention was directed southward, at the darkening stain that marked the edge of the world they knew. Nomi felt the draw. It called her, inviting her from the camp to bathe in its gloom, and she wondered what could possibly grow there at the base of that great cliff, a place the sun rarely touched. Mystery lured her, and the unknown, but something pushed her as well. Ramus. And the thought that he could get there before her.

I should send two Serians ahead,
she thought.
Get them to patrol the base of the Divide, try to stop Ramus from starting his climb.
But Konrad's fate hung around her neck like a rock, and she had no desire to be the cause of more deaths. Ramus had something powerful and remarkable, and had shown that he was not averse to using it.

“He took no climbing gear,” Beko said. He stood beside her where she leaned against the standing stone, both of them looking south even though the gloom of dusk meant that they saw little.

“I've thought of that,” Nomi replied. “But he's determined. He and Lulah will climb nonetheless.”

“With no ropes? No pitons? No slings? One slip and they're both dead.”

“Maybe,” Nomi said. “But that won't hold him back.”

“Why should it?” Beko said quietly.

Nomi glanced sideways at him but he did not meet her gaze. “Why indeed?” she said. “He's dying anyway. But Lulah isn't.”

“She may be dead already,” Beko said. “Ramus is obviously . . . not of his own mind. Whatever he has—whatever knowledge can do that to a man—can't have come without a cost.”

“He's no killer,” Nomi said, realizing as she spoke how ridiculous that sounded.

But Beko understood. “Konrad threatened him, I know. But maybe Lulah has as well.”

“Serians are loyal.”

“Yes, but not to madness.”

“You think Ramus is mad?”

Beko touched Nomi's back casually, then slipped his arm around her waist and leaned into her. “There was something mad about him the day we met.”