The Narrator (40 page)

As the sun sets, we come to a rise and get our first clear look at the interior. The land below us is flooded with dark purple dusk, while the pink and orange light of the setting sun still shines around us up here. Above the duskline the sun shines between me and the ground, sheeting it, so that the light hides the ground on its far side. Makemin’s face is coated with a shock of sunset light, like a transparent, hot mask of glowing red gelatin. The sun is setting closer than the horizon, looks like a dome protruding from the clouds; the cloudline to the north is a long grey sabre blade with its keen side to the indigo of the upper sky.

We camp along the path, before dimming blue dome and a cloud floor. No moon rises. We crouch in the fluttering air, wind thrashing soundlessly in our clothes, and eat sullenly. The stars come out. The clouds below erupt in a distant flash that brings Makemin to his feet not far from me. There is no noise of thunder and so it takes a while to realize we are seeing lightning below the stars. Makemin stalks back to his letters, weighted down by rocks on his portable writing desk. His little fume light burns behind me, projecting his shadow past me and out into the air over the valley below. I fall asleep with white violet and blue spots flickering in the grey in front of me.

*

Our descent, the next day, is steady and swift. We make our way down the slope toward a foaming ocean of clouds. By midday we are already on gently declining land, the foothills, and the tepid, seeping fog has covered us over. The ground is littered with lumps of broken mortar, evenly laced with fine slivers of rusted metal like long grains of red rice. We pass something like a massive stump, but, examining it, I find it’s the severed end of a cable, ten feet across, protruding from the ground. Hairlike wires festoon the disrupted earth at its base, as if they had sprouted and grown down into the soil like vines.

A wind blows back the fog. While it hangs in a sheer wall ahead of us, the sky over and behind us is clear, silky blue. Again I see the rare sun, slipping along the edge of that cloud wall, wisps passing invisibly between us causing its light all but imperceptibly to vary. The ground is levelling out more and more, and we are approaching a low flat space that is weirdly colored, all pale green with a little blue, and glinting sharply. It’s like a field of translucent, thin-hued gems. We will have to cross it.

Now it’s only a few hundred yards away and the words
of the man in the house begin spelling out in my head just what there is to be frightened of as I get a smell of something rancid. The charm seems a very distinct shape in my pocket. For a moment I clutch it surreptitiously, and then nearly drop it, afraid to crush it, afraid to drop it. I peek at it hastily, a feeling of unaccountable terror welling up in me because I can sense yawning beside me the empty forsakenness I will feel if it’s a cheat—but the small man inside turns and points away, very deliberately, back toward the road. As if it understood my confusion and wanted to explain, the figure turns and points to the east. I follow its pointer, and for an instant I see a remote cloud of churning, shimmering motes, which fades at once. The air formed a lens there for a moment. Now the pointer again turns to point away up the road where we came. Shaking, breathing with gratitude, I hide the charm and run up to Makemin. I repeat what I was told, as though I were the man who spoke.

“After the mountains you will come to the Lake of Broken Glass. There’s only one path through, and its location changes with each storm—without warning, terrible winds gush down from the mountains and stir up a blizzard of glass shards that can mince a man bones and all in the blink of an eye.”

Then I revert to my own voice again.

“Sir, there’s a storm coming,” I point to the east. “We must pull back until it passes.”

Makemin peers at me as if I’d run up to wish him a happy birthday. He glances at the glittering field.

“There’s no wind. Return to your place.”

“I’m not guessing and I’m not being nervous,” I say levelly. “I know the signs. The wind is already on its way down the mountains.”

“I see no storm.”

“No one
sees
them!” I say sternly.

The loonies’ eyes are trained on me. Their heads rise like a field of heavy blossoms in a breeze. They’re listen to me.

Makemin pulls down his goggles and turns.

“Show me, then!”

I point to the spot where the motes had been.

“I see nothing.”

“Look!”

“I see nothing.” He pulls down on the lensed visor and releases it—it chunks back up into his helmet. “We advance.”

“I won’t go.”

“Then we’ll drag you,” he sneers, turns to two of the men standing near. “If he won’t walk, carry him—and keep his mouth shut!”

I am starting to shout, dropping onto the ground, trying to warn the others, when a blast of wind thuds against the column and a scintillating cloud shoots up into the sky like a snapped sheet. It tinkles and crashes with a demon noise. Makemin is stock still between me and a hurtling wave of glass.

“Get into the bags—the leather bags!” he screams.

I am released—already I can feel stings, hear cries—I pull my bag from my pack unroll it and scramble in headfirst, trying to gather it around my boots, the way they showed us. I turn my back to the wind, pulling up my legs and lying on my side. The bag is pitch black, hot and stinking—I feel the wind battering me, stings on my uppermost arm and leg, I can feel the leather flap, catch, pluck loose, but it’s very thick. There was a welter of voices, screams and shouting, as I climbed into the bag—but now I hear nothing but the roar of the wind, the tinging and crashing of glass ...

Gradually the wind dies. The bag is stifling, but I don’t want to leave it. I am rebreathing my own breath, sweltering in my own heat, but I can’t move.

A hand shakes my shoulder loosely through the stiff leather. I am the medic.

I crawl backwards out of the bag, pushing the soil back with my boots so as not to crawl too much on glass. I don’t look up. The soil before my face has no glass at all in it. I turn my head warily to one side and the other without raising it too much, and see no glass on the ground anywhere. Now I am hearing groans. Despite myself I look up, see a soldier a few feet away sobbing, bent over a livid, tranquil-faced head. The body attached to the head dribbles away along the ground, churned to a red morass. I blink at the soldier.

“I told you so,” I say, “I told you so.”

*

“There was nothing to see. How did you see?” Makemin staring me in the eye.

I stare back at him. My hatred for him, my contempt of his opinion, are giving me strength, weight, steadiness. “I don’t know,” I say.

Makemin and Saskia glare at me almost with outrage.

“How could you have known?” Makemin asks.

“I saw it,” I say bluntly.

Makemin grimaces and, with a glance up at the descending sun, turns abruptly. “Up! We march!”

Saskia shambles out among them, where they crouch or stand shivering in groups. She lumbers, bellows like a bear, gesturing to them to stand. Jil Punkinflake walks behind her, accentuating her gestures with his own, face like a ghost’s. He’s perpetually at her side now, and she seems to tolerate him. His eyes are like smouldered out holes in his head; they gleam like the glint of fish scales deep in a well. The soldiers are rising to their feet now.

Silichieh passes me on some errand, with no expression.

“This wind blew all bits of glass away again. There must be something that keeps it from dispersing in all these windstorms.”

That’s the kind of thinking he relies on.

The land on the far side of the Lake of Broken Glass is split by a ragged, turf-lipped crag. The exposed chalk wall bends acutely down to barren white ground dotted with small clumps of brush. The fog is denser before us, and nothing of the land beyond can be seen. It seals us in behind as well. Not far from the point at which we approach the brink, one of the scouts finds a subsidance, where the ground seems simply to have lost cohesion and melted apart. A cleft in the crag opens like a harelip, its mineral filling lies in an oddly neat, conical heap, the tip trailing from the cleft’s base. We can employ this as a ramp.

Even without the assistance of the scouts, Makemin picks out the confused footprints of booted feet in the cindery dust around the top of the cleft. Here, perhaps shielded from the wind by the irregularity of the surface, we can still make out footprints the blackbirds left behind them.

The taling heap is loose as gravel; the men come down slowly, waving their arms, half-crouched to keep their balance. The pack animals have to be led down, and this takes time; then the carts are unloaded, their contents portaged down; finally the carts themselves are lowered, restrained by ropes the men above let out hand over hand. By the time we are assembled on the ground at the base of the crag, the dim sky darkens to black within a few minutes. It feels less like the onset of night than being suddenly engulfed in smoke.

There’s a small building made of metal plates down by the base of the crag, mostly buried in the talings. I wander in as the carts are being let down. A steel implement a little like a can opener hangs from a peg on the wall trembling in the wind without stopping, still glinting. A skeleton lies on the floor. I brush dust from a long bone uncertainly. Do I cover it up, or uncover it? The metal implement taps irregularly on the wall as I think ...

Makemin has already ordered camp to be set, but he paces up and down, hands behind his back, at the far edge of the circle of light thrown up by our fires, barely able to contain his impatience to go on. The night is completely silent, but there’s no peace in it.

I see Pepedora preparing the charm, filling the bottle with lymph from his sores—but that’s all right, the charm works.

The next day I am jangled awake by Silichieh’s hand on my shoulder. My head feels lead heavy. I can barely drag myself upright, blinking in pain at the insipid, fog-watered light. Silichieh tells me we are two hours past dawn. And here the light is no more intense than in the wan blush before sunrise. Everyone is oversleeping. I can hear Makemin snapping at someone somewhere.

*

We move along a stretch of bare white land, and there in front of us is a wall of trees, a little arched with the rise of the land. The treeline stalks out of the fog, which is thin lower to the ground but smotheringly heavy overhead. The column slows, cowed by the sight. The trees are uniformly huge, thrown up in a black wall across our path, but there is a break ahead and to the right like a colossal, shallow furrow gouged across the woods, its mouth angled away from us. The trees resume on the far side, across the oblique opening. I know what’s coming, so I head off to mime urination in a knot of bracken a few dozen yards from the column, take the opportunity to consult Pepedora’s charm. It points toward the gap.

As we close on the furrow, a long white regularity becomes visible inside it, raising at an angle into the air. It’s something like a huge stone rail, flat and broad, maybe fifty feet across. To our right, it vanishes into the mound displaced by the furrow dug for it; to our left, it vanishes in the distance, driving a straight line through the trees like a wide avenue. While its course is straight, the rail isn’t level—it looks as though a great hand had pushed the far side down deeper into the ground, tilting the near side up. It is however not so slanted we couldn’t use it as a road. Makemin peers out at the black woods. Then, with a sharp draw of breath he turns and gives the order, walking away calling out instructions.

We make our way up the mound, pushing the carts, and then down onto the very point at which the white abutment is first exposed to the air. Setting foot on it I feel a flutter in my chest that makes me sigh, like a heart palpitation. There’s a crisp, snapping feeling this substance imparts to me when I step—I crouch to run my fingers across it. A fine-grained smooth material, like ceramic or unpolished marble, without veins or glints, opaque and a little dingy, like dusty snow. Everything tells me it is older than the Limiters, but no one seems inclined to ask about that. I notice Silichieh rubbing it, too. He sees me, and points to the upraised edge.

“Still perfect,” he says wonderingly, and I feel his curiosity is noble and saving.

The column slows, quietens, and we listen ... a sound like the clap of a horseshoed hoof on a cobblestone street, but without that rhythm. It comes from no fixed location, knocking here and there at random. We consult together—I have no opportunity to check my charm, but I feel we are still safe, and that the noise is natural and not threatening. Makemin sends the scouts ahead, and we continue. The woods seem to envelop us swiftly, in one gulp.

I feel vertigo, looking out into the trees, trees endlessly succeeding each other. The soil is white. Completely bare of brush, only the inky trunks of the trees emerge from soil like fine ash, and only the blue shadows of the trees darken the white ground.

The trees are huge, funereal, with heavy branches and peaked crowns. I can see the metal-colored bark is scored in a regular way, almost a grid, and glistens as though it were oozing grease. Each trunk is sheathed in amber, of a dim, barely-discernable blue color.

The hoof sound comes from all around us—it is the noise of these heavy, mineral branches knocking together, and now and then there is a chiming of glass in among the leaves, tingling. It sounds like a headache.