The Fathomless Fire (32 page)

“The man you seek, the one called Corr Madoc, is dead. You’ve come here in vain.”

Finn hung his head for a moment, then raised it again.

“Can you tell me how he died?”

The Sky Lord reached up, undid the buckles on his mask. He turned to them again and Will saw his face was that of a man of thirty or so. A deep, livid scar ran down the left side of his face. His left eye was an empty socket.

“Corr Madoc put on this mask,” the man said. “That is how your brother died, Finn. And how the Sky Lord was born.”

R
OWAN WALKED WITH RIDDLE
through the dark. A few faintly glowing droplets of rain came out of blackness above and fell away into blackness below her feet, so that it seemed she was walking on nothing but darkness. The droplets fell with a soft patter on her cloak and hood. She should have been in complete darkness, but the raindrops seemed to cast a faint light as they fell.

“Will we find the toymaker here?” the cat asked.

“I don’t know,” Rowen said, clutching her cloak tightly around herself. She was not cold, but the emptiness and silence had been working on her, making her more uneasy with each step. When she stepped into the raincabinet she had expected to walk through the slashing curtain of rain in an instant, as she had before. But this time there was only the darkness, and these few drops of rain. It was as if she had passed through the curtain and come to …
nowhere
. She was only certain she was still in the Weaving at all because there was the same wavery, fluid quality to this place, like walking underwater.

“Grandfather never had the chance to show me how to find someone’s thread in the Weaving,” Rowen said, more to herself than to Riddle. “There’s supposed to be more than just rain.”

She realized she needed to hear her own voice, to be certain that she was still herself, that she wasn’t about to stumble into a story again, with glass slippers or wicked stepmothers or worse things. Her grandfather had told her the Weaving changed according to what a person was thinking and feeling. She wondered now if this place was so dark and empty because that’s how she felt inside.

“I don’t even know what I should be looking for,” Rowen went on. “Grandfather said it was like footprints in sand. But there’s nothing like that here. Nothing.”

She halted suddenly. It seemed foolish to keep walking through the dark when she had no idea where she was going, or if she was going anywhere at all.

She had a sudden thought, and looked down at the cat.

“Does this place seem familiar to you?” she asked.

Riddle gazed around, his yellow eyes wide.

“Riddle walked in dark like this before,” he said slowly. “A long time ago. But …”

“But what?”

“When Riddle walks backwards in his mind, backwards as far as he can go, he comes to this dark.”

“Backwards … you mean when you remember. This is the first thing you remember?”

“Yes. Now that Riddle is back inside the dark he remembers there was something before it. There was light before the dark, and Riddle was warm.”

“Do you remember anything else about the light?”

“It was all around Riddle. It was like the colour of
this
one,” he raised one of his tawny paws, “only more so.”

“More so…” Rowen murmured. “You mean brighter?”

“And darker, too.”

“I don’t understand. The light was brighter and—”

“Like this one, but brighter and darker. And all around.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“That was Riddle. That
is
Riddle.”

Rowen sighed. She closed her eyes, raised her face to the rain. The droplets fell like cold needles on her skin.

Then she looked at the cat again.

“Wait. You’re saying that this light and dark … that this was
you
?”

“Riddle doesn’t know.”

“Can you show me? I mean, can you change into whatever it is you remember?”

The cat lowered his head.

“Riddle can try, but…”

“Just try. Show me what you remember.”

The cat raised his own head, as Rowen had done a moment before. His eyes blinked in the rain. Then suddenly he was on fire.

“Riddle!” Rowen cried.

Bright yellow flames were leaping and snapping all over him, seeming to grow out of the orange and brown bands on his fur, but his face remained as calm and inscrutable as possible. Rowen gaped at him, horrified.

“It does not hurt,” he said.

Slowly the flames died down and suddenly went out.

“That is all,” Riddle said.

He lifted a furry paw and licked it.

“I see,” Rowen said. “I still don’t know what it means.”

Disheartened and suddenly aware of how exhausted she was, she leaned on her grandfather’s staff. She had carried the staff with her into the raincabinet along with his spectacles, though she wasn’t sure why. Perhaps only to have something of her grandfather’s when she returned without him to this strange, frightening place. In her imagination she could see him as clearly as if he was standing beside her, walking along at his usual brisk stride, staff in hand, and there she was herself, following along, pestering him with questions.
When, how, why
… They had taken so many walks like that together.

Whenever they were about to set off somewhere he would tap his staff once on the ground. She couldn’t help but smile at the thought of that age-old habit of his. The sound of that tap on the tiles at the door of the toyshop was one of her earliest memories. It meant an adventure might be about to begin.

She held out the staff in front of her now. There was no ground under her feet that she could see, only more blackness with rain falling into it. But with a sudden impulse of hopeful defiance she thrust the staff downwards. With a crack it struck something hard and unyielding, and at the same instant a room took shape around her, just for moment, then sank into darkness.

Riddle said, “Oh.”

Rowen tapped the staff again, harder this time. The room reappeared and this time it stayed, though as with everything else in the Weaving, the walls and the furniture and the rugs upon the floor all shimmered slightly with that disturbing uncertainty, as if things were not entirely there until she turned her attention to them. But despite that strangeness she knew this place very well.

It was the library in the toyshop.

“This is the last place I saw Grandfather,” Rowen said, her heart pounding with new hope. “Maybe that means … this is the beginning of his thread. Wherever the thrawl took him, maybe the trail begins here.”

There was something else odd about the room, other than the shifting quality of the edges of things. It seemed smaller, or the ceiling seemed closer than she remembered. And then she understood:
this was the room as her grandfather knew it
. He was taller than her and she was seeing the room as it appeared to him. She touched her hand to the oak table in the middle of the room. It felt smooth, cold to the touch. So solid and real.

“The toymaker
was
here,” Riddle said. He was sniffing cautiously at one of the armchairs near the fireplace. “But Riddle doesn’t see any threads.”

“I’m not looking for a
real
thread,” Rowen said. “When Grandfather used that word he meant someone’s path through Story. Their life’s story, I guess. The places they’d been, and where they were going to. All of that is supposed to be here in the Weaving.”

“So this isn’t what you’re looking for?” Riddle asked, and Rowen turned to see what he had found. The cat had wandered away from the armchairs and was sniffing something lying on the floor near the doorway. Rowen bent down beside him for a better look.

It was a small tangle of bone-white thread.

She found one end of the thread poking out of the tangle, but the other end… There was no other end. The thread snaked away from the tangle and she followed it with her eyes, seeing that it ran across the floor to the wall.

With true catlike curiosity, Riddle plucked at the tangle of thread with a claw. Like a tendril of white smoke, the thread parted at the touch and then slowly came back together.

“Don’t,” Rowen said sharply. The cat stared at her with unblinking eyes.

“We shouldn’t disturb it,” Rowen said in a softer tone. “I think we have to follow it.”

“But you said—”

“I know what I said, but … I think we should follow this. I think it is a little bit of the thrawl. It’s the trail it left. And if it came from the Shadow Realm, then maybe this will lead us there, to where it took Grandfather.”

“It’s made of nothing,” Riddle said.

“No, not nothing. It’s like … a shadow of what was. It will show us the way.”

She wasn’t sure how she knew this, but all at once she was certain of it.

She stood up.

“Come on,” she said to Riddle. “Let’s go.”

Rowen walked across the room, following the thread at her feet. When she got to the wall she kept going and as she had suspected would happen, the wall gave way like the thinnest lace curtain. She felt something cold rasp faintly against her skin as she passed through and for a moment she could see nothing but vague shadows, then she found herself in the street. Although it had been the middle of the day when she went into the Weaving, here the light was dim and grey.

“Where are we?” Riddle breathed. She looked down to see he had followed her.

“I’m not sure,” she said.

This was Fable, but not the Fable she knew. The deathly silence, the sickly pale glow of the lamps lining the street, the grey vagueness of the buildings on either side … this was how her city would look, she suddenly understood, through lifeless eyes. She looked for the thread, but it was no longer beneath her feet. It was hovering above the ground at about the height of her breastbone, a faint white ribbon, so thin as to be almost invisible, but still it was
there
, snaking away into the dark.

“This way,” she said to Riddle, and started forward again.

The thread did not lead her along the street but instead took its own way through whatever lay in its path, and so she went with it, through walls and lampposts and wagons, and everything parted to let her pass as if the whole city was made of nothing but mist. She saw people, too, but they were only dim, wavering shapes that swam up momentarily out of the gloom and then vanished again. For a moment she was terrified that they were all ghosts and that somehow everyone in Fable had died, but then she remembered where she was and what her grandfather had told her about the Weaving. This was not the real Fable that lay outside the door of the toyshop, it was more like a dream of Fable.

But that thought was no less terrifying.

As she walked it seemed to her that she was covering more ground with each stride, so that in a matter of moments she had come to the wall of the city itself and had passed through it and was moving swiftly across a dim land of bare rocky hillocks, stagnant pools of water and withered trees. This was not the Bourne. They had already left her own country behind.

One tree stood taller than the rest, though it was dead, too, and covered in rags of cobweb that stirred listlessly in the chill wind.

Standing under the tree was the thrawl. The thread led straight to it. The creature did not move as she approached, it only stood under the tree and watched her with the lightless holes that were its eyes.

“Rowen must not go there,” Riddle whined, plucking at the edge of her cloak.

“I have to.”

She walked slowly towards the thrawl, and when she was only a few steps away, she stopped, and raised her grandfather’s staff, though she knew it would not help her.

“Is this the Shadow Realm?” she asked, her voice sounding thin and fearful to her own ears.

“This is the Weaving,” said the thrawl in its chilling voice like the drone of flies.

“Are you …
real
?”

“I come from the Shadow Realm.”

“Where is Grandfather? What did you do with him?”

“He lives. I will bring you to him.”

“Why aren’t you attacking me, like you did in the toyshop?”

“This is the Weaving. The place of all that is or might have been. I am not the thrawl that was sent to find you. That one spoke its name and is gone, but the memory of the thrawl persists here, like an echo. That is what I am. An echo of the voice that spoke me. My only task is to take you to your grandfather.”

“Why are you telling me this? You could be lying.”

“You carry a piece of the Mirror Samaya. The Mirror of Truth. One such as I cannot speak lies in the presence of the mirror. But even if I could deceive you, I would still tell you the truth.”

“Why?”

“Because my master wishes it.”

“The Night King?”

“You seek your grandfather. He is alive, and in the Shadow Realm. That is where I will take you. There is no purpose in lies. You will join your grandfather and come to the Lord of Story, as you were meant to. Even if you do not follow me now, you will come to him soon enough.”