Fallen (60 page)

One of the shapes flew directly over him, high up, impossibly large, unknowable, distorted in his vision by the heat and smoke of the plateau's destruction. The other two drifted past to the east.

And in that moment, Ramus felt greatness passing him by.

HE WAS CERTAIN
that he would die there on that hillside. But when he did not die, he started walking north toward Noreela. He expected death at any moment, but it stayed away.
Three miles down,
he thought.
The cliff was three miles high, so it's three miles down. On the flat, I could walk that in a short morning between dawn and noon.

It took more than a morning. Daylight and nighttime were confused now, as the sky was blotted out by great sheens of dust, gas clouds rolled across the altered and still-changing landscape and the sun seemed to have hidden itself away. After what he judged to be the first day of his new voyage, spent walking through tunnels exposed to the sky and across grassy plains now hidden belowground, Ramus began to think the God had left him with something. After the second day, during which he descended a sheer cliff into a new valley of sharp rocks, venting steam pits and boiling lava pools, he became more confident of his survival. Rain fell and he gathered water from rock pools, and here and there he found strange animals killed in the chaos and ate their flesh raw. If it poisoned him, so be it.

Sometimes he sat and wrote in his journal, aided by volcanic glows and arcing streams of lightning. He tried to tell everything that had happened. He drew pictures. But he knew that reading these words in the stark light of day would paint them a very different color.

It was a place filled with spirits. He saw them from the corner of his eye, whispering things, trying to form words that would not work. When he looked he saw only shadows or veils of steam, but he knew the spirits dwelled within. They watched him pass and they were many, and he sensed age emanating from them, as though each fleeting wraith was a lost memory of the fallen thing he had awoken, cast adrift and floating in search of somewhere else.

He did not know their language, but he was confident that they would make a home of this new place.

RAMUS WENT DOWN,
and every step should have been his last. The land was in turmoil and no natural features remained steady for long. Yet he missed landslides, dodged eruptions and found his way around new ravines and pits that seemed bottomless.

All the way down he mourned Nomi and tried to understand what they had done. And he wondered whether there would be a Noreela for him to return to.

RAMUS RHEEL, VOYAGER,
should have died. Yet he lived. After four days walking, climbing and descending into pits and ravines that should have been his grave, the land about him began to level out. Dust clogged the air and he coughed up thick wads of black phlegm. Tiredness beat him down but he ignored it, knowing that if he did stop to rest, perhaps death would catch up with him. For a man who had lived life for so long knowing that he was dying, his determination to survive was a fire in his chest.

Sometimes, he dwelled on why the God wished him to survive, for it was clear to Ramus that was the case. The risen thing had blessed him to escape the changed and still-changing landscape of the Great Divide. But his was not the place to question a God.

After another day's travel, Ramus suddenly realized that there was dusty grass beneath his feet. The sun was still blocked out, but he could see its smudge above him, tracking him through the clouds of steam and smoke, as if eager to shine upon him once more. He walked on, voyaging across Noreela, and when he found one of the standing stones he had used to navigate south, he sat down at last. When sleep claimed him, he had the first of Nomi's nightmares.

SHE IS IN
a world she cannot see. She is awake in a nightmare, and though she has been screaming, no one listens; no one cares. The Fallen God carries her tight against its chest as it strides through a land without edges or definition, a place where even the sky and ground are blurred into one.
It's here to make a whole new world,
Nomi thinks, and she does not want to be a part of it. The blurring passes by as the God moves ever southward, leaving behind Noreela and whatever has become of the Great Divide, heading into lands beyond comprehension or understanding. Sometimes there is a vague, terrible sense of pursuit, and for a while Kang Kang moves faster. And she wonders whether the God can see what she cannot, or if it is only imagining what will be.

She cries herself to sleep and cries herself awake, because she carries a new life in her womb. She knows that her own future is shattered. But perhaps whatever she gives birth to will be remade as a part of this new, unknown place.

There is no comfort in that at all. So Nomi screams, cries herself to sleep, cries herself awake.

RAMUS COULD NOT
travel that next day. His exertions caught up with him and he sheltered against the standing stone, putting it between him and what had become, and was still becoming, of the Great Divide. The ground still shook and cracked, the air stank of volcanic gases and dust, but Ramus sat there for the whole day and tried not to see Nomi's dreams again. He had not wanted them before, and he wanted them even less now and he felt more cursed than ever because he was convinced the God had taken his illness away.

Later that day, the first travelers came by. They were wanderers, come this far south to feed their natural curiosity. They eyed Ramus suspiciously for a while, and then the leader of the small group drew his sword and came forward. But when he saw Ramus's bloody eye, he put away his weapon and squatted by his side.

“What happened?” he asked in broken Noreelan, nodding toward the south.

And Ramus knew at last why the Fallen God had spared him. Because like any corrupt thing, it had its pride, and its ego, and it wanted its story told.

Ramus closed his eyes and fought hard against the words balancing on his lips.

“Kang Kang,” he spat, and then he groaned and thought,
I will not tell your tale. There might be a thousand more “what happened”s', but I will not tell.

“Kang Kang?”

Ramus's eyes went wide and he sat up straight. “I will not tell your story!”

The wanderer stood and backed away, evidently less certain now of his appraisal of this man.

“I
will
not!” Ramus shouted again. The Fallen God could become infamous, or it could fade away in time.

“Kang Kang!” one of the wanderer's children shouted, and she and her little brother started singing that terrible name, back and forth as though they could make their own stories, given time.

“No!” Ramus roared.
If I tell it they will
follow,
they will
search,
and however far it has gone, one day it might be found again.
And he whispered, “I am the greatest Voyager.”

He pulled the small knife he had kept, grasped his tongue in his left hand and with one hard slice took it off.

_____

THE WANDERERS WERE
kinder than most. They did their best to stop the bleeding and tend him as a fever took hold. It burned through him, scorching his skin and branding his mind with memories he did not want. When he woke from the fever there was a weight in his head once again, a familiar pain growing hotter and heavier, and his right eye was bleeding. He nodded his thanks and went on his way.

The wanderers watched him go. Ramus knew that they wondered about the story he could not tell.

He passed the standing stones and entered the forests, and here he set a fire. It was easy to burn his journal; it was incomplete and inaccurate, and as he tore out the pages and fed them to the flames he smiled at some of the foolishness written there. The parchment pages, old and new, should be next . . . but he held them in his hands for a while.

These were the last of their kind. Everything else was gone, swallowed in the turmoil of the fallen Great Divide. Blood and saliva dripped from his ruined mouth onto the uppermost page, staining the image of the God that Ramus had always known was fallen, and he closed his eyes.

He dropped the parchment pages onto the fire. When he looked again the only part left was the drawing of the God, dampened by his blood and spit. But soon even that burned away to nothing.

AT NIGHT, NOMI’S
nightmares came. And during the days when he walked north, away from the Great Divide and Kang Kang, away from Nomi, Ramus held on to the hope that they would not last forever.

About the Author

TIM LEBBON
lives in South Wales with his wife and two children. His books include the British Fantasy Award–winning
Dusk
and its sequel,
Dawn
,
Mind the Gap
(cowritten with Christopher Golden),
Berserk
,
The Everlasting
,
Hellboy: Unnatural Selection
,
30 Days of Night
, and
Desolation
. Future books include a new novel set in Noreela, more Novels of the Hidden Cities (with Christopher Golden), a collection from Cemetery Dance Publications, and further books with Night Shade Books, Necessary Evil Press, and Humdrumming, among others. He has won three British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, a Shocker, and a Tombstone Award, and has been a finalist for International Horror Guild and World Fantasy awards. His novella
White
is soon to be a major Hollywood movie, and several of his other novels and novellas are currently in development in the United States and the UK. Find out more about Tim at his websites:
www.timlebbon.net
and
www.noreela.com.

ALSO BY TIM LEBBON

NOVELS

Dawn
Dusk
Hellboy: Unnatural Selection
Mesmer
The Nature of Balance
Hush (
with Gavin Williams
)
Face
Until She Sleeps
Desolation
Berserk
30 Days of Night
Mind the Gap (
with Christopher Golden
)
The Everlasting

NOVELLAS

White
Naming of Parts
Changing of Faces
Exorcising Angels (
with Simon Clark
)
Dead Man's Hand
Pieces of Hate
A Whisper of Southern Lights

COLLECTIONS

Faith in the Flesh
As the Sun Goes Down
White and Other Tales of Ruin
Fears Unnamed
Last Exit for the Lost

If you enjoyed FALLEN, be sure not to miss

THE ISLAND

by
TIM LEBBON

Another riveting novel of Noreela, coming in 2009 from Bantam Spectra.

Here's a special preview.

THE ISLAND
On sale in 2009

WHEN KEL BOON
entered the tavern, a score of faces turned his way. Such was the atmosphere in a small fishing village. Even on a day like today—when the skies were opening, the sea was battering them and the rest of the world felt very far away—Pavmouth Breaks's residents feared the stranger.

Kel smiled and received a dozen smiles in return, but some of the older men and women turned away. He'd been here for only five years, and it would take a lot longer than that for him to become one of them.

“Kel!” Trakis called from a smoky corner. The big man stood and waved his arms, and Mella—sitting beside him smoking a huge pipe—nudged him in the ribs.

Kel looked around quickly but saw no sign of Namior. Maybe those witches had held her back.

“You look like a drowned furbat!” Trakis said. As Kel drew closer, his friend's face grew stern. “You need ale.” He strode toward the bar.

“Hello, gorgeous,” Mella said. “You're dripping on the table.”

Kel stepped back and shed his coat, hanging it on a hook set into one of the tavern's many rough timber columns. It was one of the oldest places in Pavmouth Breaks, so the landlord Neak said, and he also claimed it was home to the most wraiths. Kel always smiled when he heard Neak telling that to a visiting fisherman or a newcomer to the village:
Most haunted place in Noreela!
Kel had visited a dozen places in Noreela City itself that also laid claim to that dubious title.

“No Namior?” Mella asked.

“She's coming. I spoke to her earlier.”

“Storm from the deepest Black,” Mella said, taking another draw on her pipe. She gasped, then exhaled a stream of pure green smoke. “You can almost hear the wraiths screaming in the wind.”

“No wraiths out there,” Kel said, perhaps a little too harshly. “It's just weather.”

Mella nodded and stared at him a little too long. Out of everyone, she was the most suspicious of his past. Sometimes, he thought she could see deeper than he knew.