The fey do not sleep.
Man, who lives all his life on either side of the yawning gap between the conscious and unconscious worlds, must routinely stagger from one to the other so as not to drift too far from either, and thereby lose what he thinks of as his sanity. He hops from perception to inception and back, like a lizard on a hot surface lifting its legs so it will not be burned. Waking in the morning, Man blinks his eyes, looks back on the receding shores of the other half of his mind, and wonders why he could have been so foolish as to imagine it to be real.
The fey do not indulge in this delusion.
Sheria hears Michael Rider’s breathing change. He lies next to her in the bed, wrapped around her body, sharing his warmth with hers. Moments ago, his breath was regular and deep, as his mind explored the pathways of reality around him. She wonders which branches he was living in, beneath those twitching eyelids. But wherever he was then, he has returned now to the impoverished shadow that he sees with his waking mind.
His eyes open and he looks up at her.
“I have to go.”
His voice is deeper, with disuse from sleep coloring its lower registers. She breathes in the familiar scent of his body, loving him, loving all that he is. Her eyes see the many variations of his being; some shifting one way, others sitting up, others lying still. In one, startlingly close, he has died during the night, and his eyes are hollow. But the narrow, brilliant thread of the Bright Path runs through the closest branches, where he still draws breath.
“Do not leave, Michael Rider,” she replies. Her voice is velvety-soft, but there is stone in its depths. “Follow the Bright Path.”
“I promised,” he says, sitting up. He slips on a shirt and hose, and sets about gathering the few odds and ends that travel with him on his errands.
She rises from the bed, still nude. The air in the upper room of the inn is cold, and there are drafts in the windows. She draws warmth from her other selves nearby. They join her, for a time, sharing this moment. Her black eyes stare at him.
“I told you,” she says, forcing her thought into the alien and uncomfortable speech of Michael Rider’s people. “I told you. If you go on, it is your death, and my death. Come away with me to the west. Let go of these sad people and their little wars.” She draws close to him, pressing her body against his, and wrapping her arms around his neck.
“Be my prince and the prince of all my people.”
He kisses her gently, even as he removes her arms from around him.
“Soon,” he replies. “Not yet. I gave my word to deliver a message, and I will not break it.”
He draws away reluctantly, shrugs on his coat, picks up his satchel, and leaves the room. She hears his steps on the narrow, creaking stairs down to the common room. It is still dark outside.
Sheria pulls on her own clothing of woven plant fiber and dons a heavy cloak of bear fur. She strings her bow and slings a quiver of arrows over her back, tucking two razor-sharp poignards of bronze into her belt. Then she follows after Michael Rider, down the stairs into the cold, empty common room. The embers in the fireplace are red roses of heat and light, but otherwise the room is dead. The shadows of other lives flit around her.
He is in the stable. She hears him there, through the partially closed door. Several feet of fresh, heavy snow carpet the ground between the inn and its nearby barn. His tracks are visible, leading to the doors. The night is cold, but the storm has blown through and the dark sky is clear.
The barn is probably there; but in one of the nearby branches a raiding party of the Republican Guard found the food stores hidden in the basement three days ago, and burned it to the ground. She focuses on the variants where the barn is real, and follows his steps to the narrow side door.
Inside, the air is warmer from the heat of the animals. Michael Rider is saddling his horse, a gray mare with a splotch of white on her forehead. He looks up as she enters.
“I have to go,” he repeats. “If you want to see me again, Sheria, come to Green Bridge. I won’t take another route after I finish this job. Meet me at the Merchant’s Post on Frogmonger Square. We’ll go to the west together. I want to go with you.”
She draws forth the two poignards and plunges them into the neck and chest of the horse. The animal twitches and gurgles suddenly, and then collapses.
Michael Rider looks at her across the body of his mount, his eyes dark in the faint light of a single oil lamp.
“I liked that horse,” he says softly.
“Do not go.” Her voice is just as soft.
The Bright Path flickers, as the inflection point nears. The variations in Michael Rider, and the barn, and the horse, and Sheria, all begin to collapse.
Michael Rider turns without another word and walks out of the barn, his satchel slung over one shoulder. He struggles out into the heavy, wet snow, plowing his way forward on foot toward the Eldenway.
Sheria sits down on the floor and looks at the pooling blood of the horse. She feels the world wrench, and her own self begin to drift apart from her. She closes her eyes, and tears flow out; flawed, shameful, human tears. Her kind don’t cry any more than they sleep. When everything is real, there is no need for sorrow. But the wetness flows down Sheria’s cheeks and blurs her vision. The tears turn to tiny rivulets of ice in the cold.
She is in the inflection point. Not everything is real.
She stands and walks out of the barn, trailing bloody footprints behind her. She walks into the cold, clear night, her boots of rough leather and fur stepping carefully in Michael Rider’s footprints.
In the distance, under the moonlight, she can see his form, trudging stolidly north along the Eldenway. And though the moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow does give a certain lustre to the scene, the golden thread of the Bright Path is gone.
Sheria selects an arrow from the quiver and sets it to the bow. She draws the limbs back and sights along the shaft, seeing where the arrow will fly in the near branches. In the distance, Michael Rider’s small body, now alone, with no variations to keep it company, struggles on.
She looses the arrow.
Jonathan Steward
A cool wind blew in over the mountains at dawn, gathering with it the late summer scents of the high meadows and delivering them, with a ruffle of silk curtains, to Jonathan’s expansive bedroom. His eyes fluttered and opened, leaving behind the nameless, snow-choked village on the Eldenway and the arrow, in mid-flight, of the star-crossed feyess. The memory of the dream already fading, he seized a small book on the finely-carved oak table beside his bed and furiously scribbled it down.
“She killed him before dawn,” he muttered. “It was dark, but they had slept. He rose early and tried to leave her behind, but she wouldn’t let him go. She put an arrow in his back.” He paused, trying to remember more clearly, and then added: “No. She shot an arrow at him from behind. I did not see it strike him.”
He put down the thick diary carefully. Its pages were dense with his handwriting, and some of the earlier ones were attached to the spine only precariously. The diary contained twenty-three years of dreams, meticulously recorded with as much precision as his waking mind could wring from the stubborn otherworld. They were a story, and a mystery that he struggled every day to unlock.
A man brought in tea and eggs for his breakfast, and he ate mechanically. He could feel the hollow, sinking, empty feeling of the inflection point still, echoing across twenty-three years. And there was something else… another inflection point. Much closer in the branching pathways. Nearly upon him, in fact. He looked out at his orchards in their tidy, endless rows on the rolling hillsides of Upper Broob.
, he whispered in the fey-tongue.
He rang a small bell on the table, and the man returned.
“Prepare my study for visitors,” he instructed. “I shall have guests in the late morning, I believe.”
After breakfast, Jonathan took his diary and walked across the courtyard in front of the mansion to one of two identical twin buildings that perched on a broad ledge on the hillside. They were three stories tall, sheathed in whitewashed adobe and roofed in tiles of red brick. Narrow windows showed the figures of men and women inside, already hard at work. A few stragglers were making their way from the dormitory hall into the library. A man with a long gun stood guard at each door.
“You’re late to work, Miss Kimbwe,” he teased one young woman with nearly jet-black skin and a shock of curly black hair. Her arms were stacked with heavy books. “I hope our labors here are not so far beneath your talents that you find them tedious.”
“Forgive me, Mr. Steward!” she blurted, obviously flustered. “I am not bored! I was up late last night, and my roommate declined to wake me for breakfast. Please… do not send me away.” She trailed off desperately.
Jonathan took the top half of the books from Miss Kimbwe and gave her a gentle smile.
“I know you were up late at the library,” he said, leading her toward the open door of the right-hand building and its ominous guard. “No harm done, Miss. I am most eager to read your digest on the pre-Imperial folk cultures of the western Pexatore Basin.”
He nudged open the door with one foot, inviting her into the cool interior of the library. Above the door, in letters of steel set on a carved wooden board, were the words: “Merrily Hunter Institute for Applied History.”
She nodded at him nervously as she entered, and he followed her to a small desk in the broad central hall of the library. Huge stacks of books lined either side of the cavernous room, with sliding ladders set on rails at regular intervals. Scores of men and women were already hard at work at the desks, or moving to and fro among the stacks searching for this or that book or scroll. There was a faint susurrus of whispered conversation, but it was otherwise deeply serene.
“Study hard, Miss Kimbwe,” said Jonathan with another smile. But he couldn’t help a grim cast from creeping over his face. “We are the last of our kind. No one else will do the work for us.”
“What will we do,” whispered Miss Kimbwe, looking around at her colleagues engrossed in their studies, “when they come here?”
Jonathan looked at her with as much calm as he could summon.
“We will flee,” he answered, “with as much as we can carry, for as long as we can. And then we will die.”
He left her to her work.
Jonathan settled down in his study to wait. His private collection of histories, chronicles, and other sources occupied a large bookshelf nearby. A comfortable reading chair looked out over the orchards and the broad valley that Kmesha Mistress had left to him. He smiled for a moment at the thought of his old lover; she would not approve of what he had done with the place.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
He flipped through the diary for the thousandth time, re-reading his old entries. In the early days, as he first began to understand the Dark Path, he hadn’t fully grasped the importance of precision in his recordings. The early entries were short, and from time to time he cursed his younger self for negligence in missing some essential detail of the dream.
As the morning wore on, the sky began to darken with clouds, and he heard the rumble of thunder in the distance.
“,” muttered Jonathan to himself in the fey speech, “”
He withdrew an old, folded piece of paper stuck in between the early pages of the diary. He knew what it was, and what it would do to him. His heart shuddered, but he forced himself to open it once again and read. It was in a firm, elegant hand.
The thunder rumbled closer. Jonathan withdrew the small, thin cylinder of black metal from between the pages of the diary and let it rest lightly in his palm, staring at it. No light was reflected from its smooth surface, and it resisted his movements more than its miniscule weight should have justified.
He carefully folded Cyrus’s last letter and tucked it back in the diary, letting the memory steel his resolve and focus his mind. The he placed the thin, cool rod of coalesced blackness into the space between the pages next to the letter, closing the book on them both.
, he repeated in the fey-tongue.
At last, as the first drops of rain began to fall in the small garden outside the study, there came a tap on the door.
“Come in!” he shouted. “You’re late.”
The Dark Path ran through the door to his study, and Vicod Rayth entered.
“Mr. Steward,” replied the elderly Applied Historian, “my son and I have spent the last two months of our lives evading Giant-men, dragons, the Faceless, and possibly the ghost of a long-dead Emperor. Iko and I very nearly died of thirst in the Luxon Desert, and we were actually captured—briefly–near what is left of Talen Vicarus. I rode on a giant, bipedal lizard. So: if you think me impressed with your uncanny habit of guessing the time and place of my comings and goings—no doubt with the help of your spy network—then you are a fool.”
Jonathan rose, walked across the intervening space in the study, and embraced Vicod Rayth.
“I’m glad you’re back, Vicod,” he said. “But you didn’t really ride a giant lizard, did you?”
Vicod’s eyes twinkled at him.
“If a thing should be so, and there is no evidence to the contrary, why not assume that it is? Anyway, I did. One of the Anomalies of the Affliction, I expect. I named the species Raythosaurus Rex, and I shall be speaking with your Natural Philosophy Department about it after we’re done here. Reality may be coming apart at the seams all around us, but there’s no reason not to profit from it.”
Vicod Rayth seated himself comfortably in Jonathan’s chair, putting his booted feet up on the inlaid coffee table. Jonathan pulled up the guest chair and sat down next to him. At sixty-five years old, Vicod’s hair was entirely white, and the skin of his face sagged with wrinkles and cares. But his posture was as straight and forceful as ever it had been, and his movements were fluid. There was no mistaking the strength that was still in him. He wore a travel-stained leather jerkin and hose, and his broad-brimmed hat was tattered. He carefully set a long tube of rigid leather on the floor next to him.
“Tell me,” said Jonathan, pouring him a glass of his best remaining wine, “what my investment in your expedition has purchased.”
Vicod took a sip of the wine.
???
As you know, Jonathan, we set out from the Institute in late May. The journey through Broob was not difficult, though the roads were clogged with refugees. Anyone with a pair of legs is fleeing what’s left of the Holy Empire. And there were Iko and I headed in the other direction, trying to get in. It was a curious feeling, to be walking
the source of so many terrified, desperate people.
We made our way to the old border, which we found deserted. The refugees had slowed to a trickle; Talen Oestes had fallen a few weeks earlier, and most people in the region had either fled already or become Faceless. We spotted a small company of the White Legion just over the border. They were preparing the Ritual of Exaltation for when the Giant-men showed up to take them. Self-immolation is the only bit of parity the White Legion has with the Faceless, I’m afraid.
At Kiren Velensa, we took the old highway along the Ponder, avoiding the major settlements. It was time-consuming, but it kept us clear of Faceless, for the most part. They seem to congregate around settlements, still. Why do you suppose that is? I wonder if a part of them remembers what they once were. We were forced to fight twice, but we managed to leave the area before the flyers could be brought in to finish us off.
When we reached the foothills of the Septuchems, we turned the horses loose, with our best wishes. They would not avail us in the high passes, and we could not in good conscience leave them tied up. I hope they found their way to green pastures, far from Giant-men and unhappy slaves. I had a great fondness for old Adrian.
On foot, Iko and I made our way over the Septem Pass. We feared to find Faceless there in numbers, but there were only a few watchers, which we dismantled. The Metal God does not, evidently, view the mountain wilderness west of the Empire as a particular threat to his dominion.
The palace of Kargen the Gross is where the venerable Kemdi said it would be, Jonathan. I could not believe it, at first. We owe the old heretic and his lost chronicle a debt for saving us from a dangerous and wasted trip—and a debt to you, also, for scraping together the last vestiges of scholarship in the Gulf to assemble these old writings for us. You will not tell me the reason for your obsession with the early history of the Empire of the Dusk, but I am grateful that it afflicts you. Otherwise, I should spend these last days cowering under some damp rock and waiting for the fire, rather than going on proper adventures as an Applied Historian should. You will take me and Iko with you, won’t you, when you make your last journey? Yes, I trust you will.
But I am sorry to report to you, Jonathan, that any written material from Kargen the Gross is long gone. The old apostate may have meant for his collection to last until the end of the world, but he didn’t account for leaky roofs and dry rot. And later inhabitants of his palace as well; he forgot them. There are… things, in the old palace. It is a vast and sprawling ruin, a suitable reflection of the mad emperor’s ego. In its dungeons are creatures of which I have neither seen nor heard, collected from lands too distant to imagine. Or perhaps they are more Anomalies. One never knows quite what is real anymore.
I see you are disappointed. Do not despair, Jonathan Steward! Books may have crumbled to dust, but there are etchings on the walls in scripts the like of which I have never seen—not even in Cyrus Stoat’s notebooks. I was able to rescue some of them on rubbings. There was one chamber that had an entire atlas of the old Empire carved on one wall—and this we captured. Truly, Kargen’s Palace must once have made the old Black Catalog of Vale look like the Hog Hurst village library. No offense meant to your hometown, Jonathan!
But strange beasts were not the only dangers. Our journey through the Faceless drew the attention of their masters. Iko and I found that a pair of Hunters had picked up our trail and followed it.
I had set Iko to observe the upper levels of the wing of the palace whose depths I was exploring. It was night, and he had made himself a watch post on an old, ruined balcony, its roof open to the sky. When I asked him later what alerted him to the presence of the Hunters, he told me it was just a feeling of wrongness; but I suspect his eye caught their movement before his mind fully understood what it was. In the event, he slipped away from them and came to find me in the dungeons below.
It was a close thing. We crept through the moonlit ruin as softly as we could, knowing our time to explore had come to an end and seeking only escape. They knew we were there, too, and stalked us with all the deliberate cunning of a Snorl. Iko and I had both promised each other at the beginning of the journey that if it looked as if escape was impossible, we would take our own lives; and so we prepared to do. But my boy is audacious, even in despair. He crept away from me, and raised the faintest noise in another wing of the palace, as if he were trying to sneak away and had stepped on a single loose rock. One of the Hunters broke away. I slipped back into the black dungeons of the old palace, wriggling through a narrow spot that I knew the Giant-man could not pass through, and emerged in an old sewer that led out into a dry stream-bed.
We met each other later, in the early dawn. We had arranged a meeting place, you see, if we should be separated. Knowing the Hunters would be delayed searching the sprawling ruin, we made our way quickly back out of the high pass and down to the Imperial plain.
The return journey to Broob was fraught, but I can see that before you hear of giant lizards and desert chases, there are questions in your mind. Ask them, my friend.
???
Jonathan leaned back in the guest chair and crossed his hands on his chest. He stared at the ceiling, thinking intently. Then he lowered his eyes to Vicod.
“May I see the rubbings?” he asked.
Vicod silently picked up the long, leather tube and undid a fastener at one end. He withdrew a cylinder of tightly rolled papers, which he carefully spread out on the table. Jonathan began to flip through them, letting his eyes absorb the whole of each without dwelling on any one part. They showed figures—some humanoid, some architectural, some obviously monstrous—in a variety of situations and poses. The artwork was detailed and skillful, but no theme or message jumped out to him.
Then he stopped and narrowed his eyes at one rubbing. It showed a man, apparently high up on a pillar surmounted by a broad circle. Strokes in the stonework showed texture within the circle, as if the artist were trying to show that something different was inside. The figure of the man was poised before it, as if just about to enter. At the bottom, men and monsters ravened, obviously desirous to consume the figure at the top of the pillar.
“Loophole,” Jonathan muttered. He thought for a moment, then added: “Show me the map.”
Vicod blinked and looked confused.
“You said you took a rubbing of an atlas of the Empire of the Dusk, carved on one of the walls in Kargen’s palace. I’d like to see it.”
The old historian nodded and flipped through the remaining papers to one later in the stack, then drew it and two others out. He moved the coffee table to one side and unrolled them on the floor. The entire map turned out to encompass three large sheets, which he laid side by side. The rubbing was tight and meticulous, and the details of the ancient carving were clear to see. It showed the outline, rather like a bean with one jagged edge, of the heartlands of the old Empire of the Dusk. He imagined the new political boundaries of the Neighbor Kingdoms, the Holy Empire, and Broob, then discarded them. They were irrelevant now.
Jonathan stared at the map carefully. His gaze moved down to what he knew were the high southern plateaus of the Arcadian Mountains. It stopped at a faintly-visible set of letters very nearly at the edge of the paper.
“Kape Wethan,” he read.
“Your pronunciation is off,” said Vicod, with a hint of academic snobbery. “The Dusk Imperials didn’t have silent letters. It would be in their day, but the modern city is Talen Kapvet.”
Jonathan shushed him with one hand, and reached out to pick his old diary off the coffee table. He flipped quickly through it, coming to a passage that he recalled from the visual shape of its paragraphs. It was one of his many visions of Hobb.
Jonathan looked again at the map.
“” he said under his breath. “Kapuh Weethan… Talen Kapvet.”
“Simple language drift,” explained Vicod. “The way people pronounce words changes over time, until the originals sound entirely alien.”
Jonathan closed his diary carefully.
“Your expedition, my old friend, was a success beyond my hopes. Cyrus would have been proud.”
, he thought in his head. Then he switched to the fey-tongue.
“Rest,” he said to Vicod with a broad smile. “My people will see to you and Iko. But not for too long; I’ve already formulated our next investigation. This time, I’ll be coming with you.”