He lay on his back, staring up at the arid night. The sounds of sleeping men and women surrounded him. Here on the high, desert plateaus of the Arcadian Mountains, they were a frail oasis of breath. The dove shifted in her sleep, dreaming perhaps of a lonely island in some vast ocean and a stand of thick, ancient olive trees. Though food and water were short for his tiny band, Jonathan doggedly insisted that the dove be kept alive in her little cage.
, he whispered in the fey-tongue.
His eyes closed, and he drifted off into another world.
???
Jonathan, Devi, Bear, and Simon stood together, looking up at the crumbling ruin of the ancient church. A few of the decrepit stone walls still mounted a stubborn rearguard against gravity’s inevitable triumph, though the roof had long since given in and made its peace with the floor. By the look of the remaining structure, the building had once extended several hundred feet in its longest dimension. The remains of detailed carvings on the outer walls were still faintly visible, though most were badly weathered and many broken. The forest had drawn close around the ruin, and a few hardier trees had begun to grow in and out of the surviving walls. Only a narrow meadow by the remains of the south gate was open to the sky.
A well-preserved grotesque stared down at Jonathan from the peak of the gatehouse, leering suggestively. Seized by whimsy, he leered back for a moment. Then he turned his attention to the gatehouse, and to his companions.
“We’d better hurry,” he suggested. “I doubt the Republican Guard have given up since we got away at Gurpwick.” Behind him, their two picketed horses snorted and shuffled nervously.
Bear shrugged. “The Guard ought not to hold a grudge. It’s war. Sometimes soldiers get killed. Anyway, they started it.”
“I’m not worried about their feelings,” replied Jonathan, “but I am worried about being captured, interrogated, and hung as spies.”
He looked again at the crumbling walls and the spiteful grotesque staring down at him. His feet were oddly reluctant to pass into the ruin. He wondered for a moment, and then grasped the source of his hesitation.
Merrily was here. Where he walked, she had walked before him. Something began to twist inside.
A small hand took his, and he looked down in surprise at King Simon. The goblin was now dressed in plain leather traveling clothes, and wore a woolen cap that somewhat obscured his inhuman features.
“Do not be afraid, Jonathan,” lilted Simon. “I will not let them hurt you.”
Devi, riding in his sash, snorted. “Ye’d nay stop e’en one Guardsman, Simon. Ye jess stood all silent an’ watchin’ durin’ tha’ scrap in Gurpwick. Ye dinnay e’en ‘ave a weapon.”
“I did not,” replied Simon, “mean soldiers.” And he pulled Jonathan’s hand insistently, leading him into the ruin.
The open floor of the church was mostly weeds and grasses, with a few hints of tiled stone visible here and there. There must be a way down; this Jonathan knew from Cyrus’s notes of his class field trip this past fall, and from the wall rubbing. He poked at the ground with his iron-shod quarterstaff, hoping to detect a weakness in the floor.
At the back of the church, the sanctuary had collapsed. It was little trouble to descend the fallen oak timbers into the basement.
As he slithered down the ancient beams, a voice whispered in his mind. He thought at first it was one of his friends, but soon discovered that it sounded nothing like them at all. It was a flat, dry whisper, and plainly only he could hear it.
, said the whisper.
They went deeper, carefully exploring the cellar of the old church. To his surprise, there was evidence that someone had stayed here recently; scraps of food and discarded clothing could be seen in the corners, and a large table in one mostly intact room was set with chairs and even candle holders. A makeshift kitchen occupied one dusty old chamber, with fresh scorch marks on the stone. But there was no sign of any living thing now. At the north end of the cellar, stone steps led further down.
The new passage was quite tall, and even to Jonathan’s untrained eye there were notable differences in the stonework. Rather than the florid Late Imperial style of the church above, the passages here were smooth, plainly cut, with understated precision. They appeared to have bored directly into the solid stone bedrock.
He carefully ducked under a blade that had sprung from the wall sometime in the past, and now hung suspended in the middle of the passage. Further along, he picked his way over a heap of stone on the floor, where a section of the passage’s ceiling had fallen in. And then he came to a doorway on one side that opened into a broad, circular room.
There was a hole in the center of the floor, visible by his dim oil lamp. The edges were rough and broken, as if something had smashed through the stone. The walls of the chamber were decorated with dense, angular etchings that made the eye swim to look at them. His gaze found an Unbroken Circle carved on one wall amidst the maddening runes—but the circle was defaced with a faint pair of bars crossed at right angles.
, whispered the voice again.
He glanced once more at Bear, Devi, and Simon. Bear and Devi gave no indication that they heard anything. Simon’s eyes glittered in the darkness, and his face was grave.
“What’s going on?” asked Jonathan pointedly. But Simon merely shook his head, closing his eyes for a moment.
Jonathan drifted over to the Unbroken Circle inscribed on the wall, standing out against the maddening scribbles carved into the surfaces around it. He pulled out the folded wall rubbing from Cyrus’s desk and held it up to the wall. It was a perfect match. He lowered the paper again, staring at the original. It was more than the Unbroken Circle; it had been, once, the circle and crossed bars worn today by the Advocates.
“Another one here,” said Bear quietly, nodding at the wall a few feet away. “There are quite a few of them.”
“Any idea what this means?” asked Jonathan. “This is your goddess we’re dealing with.”
“I doubt Ash did this,” replied Bear. “And no; no one’s ever mentioned a place like this before. Either they don’t know about it, or I’m not important enough to be in on the secret. The Lady of Earth and Stars doesn’t grace me with direct revelation.”
Jonathan moved to the center of the room and looked down into the pit. There was a rope into the darkness. It was secured with a spike at the top, and dangled into unknown depths at Jonathan’s feet.
“I’m going down,” he announced. Simon drew close beside him, but Bear stayed back.
“I’ll wait here,” she replied. Jonathan looked up at her sharply, but Bear gave a light shrug. “We’re wanted men. If the Republican Guard see our horses and come to investigate, I’ll try to give you some warning.”
“Suit yourself,” said Jonathan. Bear’s presence around him had always been something of a mystery, and he had no time now to unravel it. He stowed the quarterstaff in a sling on one side of his pack and gingerly tested the rope and its spike. They seemed strong. He lit a crude torch and dropped it down, illuminating the floor perhaps twenty or thirty feet below. Odd, scattered shapes could be seen at the edges of its light.
“Answers lie that way,” stated Simon in his quiet, sing-song voice.
“Aye, but per’aps no’ th’ ones yer lookin’ fer,” added Devi. There was more than a tinge of doubt in her voice.
The whispers continued at the edge of perception. Jonathan reconciled himself to the likelihood that he was going mad, and did not trouble himself further on their account.
He swung his feet out over the edge and lowered himself downward, hand by hand. Jonathan’s natural strength did not fail him, and though his biceps burned, he eventually felt the hard surface of stone beneath his feet. Removing his oil lamp from its hook on his pack, he swung it slowly round and round to examine his surroundings.
He stood on a pile of rubble in the center of a large, open space. Above him, the rope stretched back up into the darkness toward the hole, but the ceiling was not visible. No walls could be seen either, within the lantern’s anemic range. But the low, burbling stream of whispers was strongest from one particular direction in the darkness, and so Jonathan set off that way, picking carefully along the broken stone of the floor. Simon, following behind him, was silent, as was Devi in her pouch at his chest.
After a minute of hesitant progress, he came at last to a wall, in which there was an opening stretching up to at least twenty feet overhead. The opening led into a passage, though only the first few feet were illuminated by his lantern.
And yet, to his surprise, in the distance ahead was a tiny point of light.
The shadows at the edges of his own lantern’s illumination began to dance and waver, and Jonathan saw to his irritation that it was his own right hand shaking as it held the lantern aloft. He braced his wrist with his left hand to steady it, and then strode confidently along the passage.
, whispered the voice.
The passage seemed endless, and the light ahead remained tiny. Jonathan lost track of time as he walked, and wondered if this was to be his fate for all eternity; walking along a passage with a lamp, toward a light that never arrived. But then he came up suddenly to a heavy slab of metal that extended, floor to ceiling, across the passage, barring his way. The source of the light was a small crack on the right side of the slab, where the metal had separated from the surrounding rock.
He put his face to the crack and peeked through. The passage beyond continued into the darkness, and the light source came from a broad opening on the left-hand side. It did not flicker like flame, but was steady, like sunlight.
“It’s a dead end,” he said aloud, his face still pressed to the crack. His voice was little more than a whisper, but it seemed shockingly loud to him.
He leaned his forehead against the bare metal of the slab blocking the corridor, and then put his hands against it. He pushed, then tried to shift it left or right. There wasn’t the slightest hint of movement.
“I can’t,” he answered the whispers aloud. Feeling oddly detached, he observed the quaver of desperation in his voice. He felt, in his own thoughts, the rising tide of futility and failure. Merrily was already lost, and he would never know why Rolly died. He watched his body turn and slide down to the floor, leaning its back against the metal barrier. His view of himself grew more distant, drifting away and down into the living bedrock of the world below him.
“Ah kin get through,” came another voice, piercing through the haze around him. His perception snapped back to his body, and he looked down. Standing by his leg on the smooth stone of the passage was Devi. He blinked.
“Ah kin squeeze through tha’ crack, ah reckin’,” she went on. “See wha’s makin’ the’ light an’ come back ta’ ye. If ye want me ta’, tha’ is.”
Scrambling awkwardly to his feet, Jonathan bent down and carefully picked Devi up in cupped hands. He lifted her up to the crack and held his hands steady as she inserted her upper half within. There was a tense moment while she wriggled, apparently stuck, but then her lower half disappeared as well. There was a faint
from the other side. Jonathan put his face to the crack again, but couldn’t see her.
“Ah’m fine,” she called up cheerfully. “Jes’ down ‘ere on th’ floor on t’other side. Fish ou’ some string, Jonathan, so’s ah kin’ climb back ou’. Ah’ll go find out wha’s makin’ tha’ light.”
Jonathan took out the ball of twine that any proper adventurer carries in his pack. He threaded one end through the crack, paying out enough that it should reach the floor. Then he peered through again. He saw Devi walking slowly toward the light coming from the alcove beyond the door, and then saw her disappear into it.
A minute passed, and then another, with no sign of the snarf. Jonathan began to wonder if he should call out. But then he saw her return, walking slowly, as if in a daze.
“What did you see?” he whispered through the crack as she drew close.
“It’s… it’s ‘ard ta’ describe.”
“Try, Devi.”
There was a considerable silence, and then she spoken again.
“A tower thing,” she said, “made o’ black metal, wi’ lights on’t, set in circles aroun’ the’ outside. Least as big as ye are, Jonathan Miller. Big pipes o’ black metal runnin’ inta tha’ darkness beyon’. The passage goes on a ways, but thar’s no light beyond wha’s made by th’ wee lights on th’ tower. An’ some cables runnin’ off it; a whole mess of ‘em, lyin’ aroun’ loose on th’ floor. Thar’s dirt an’ dust like as if nothin’s been ‘ere to sweep it off fer a hunnerd years—‘cept there’s one set o’ footprints leadin’ right up ta the thing, and then another leadin’ away. Man-size.”
“Where do they go?” he asked.
“Right ta this ‘ere great metal door,” she answered. “Like it opened fer ‘im sometime, ‘ee came in, and then ‘ee left.”
Jonathan pounded the metal of the door in frustration. “What the hell does this mean?” he demanded of the door. “And what does it have to do with Rolly, or Sir Richard, or the Metal God, or Ash? And why—”
He was interrupted, to his surprise, by Simon, King of the Goblins.
“Bring me a cable,” Simon said.
Jonathan stared down at him.
“Bring me one of the cables on the tower with the lights,” he repeated insistently.
Jonathan turned to the crack in the wall. “Did you—”
“Ah ‘eard it,” grumbled Devi from the other side, picking up the trend of interrupting him. “They’s ‘eavy, these cables. Ah’ll take a bit.”
Jonathan waited, and listened to the sound of shuffling, grunting, and high-pitched cursing from beyond the door. Eventually there was a tug on his ball of twine.
“Pull,” came Devi’s voice. He carefully drew in the twine. After a moment, Devi popped through the crack again. After her came a long, snaking black cable, tied neatly to the end of his twine. He drew the cable through the hole. Its surface was oddly soft and supple, but also resilient and tough. It was like no material he’d ever felt before.
“Now,” said Simon, “give the end to me, and give me your knife.”
Jonathan wordlessly handed over the cable end, then drew his hunting knife from the small leather sheath at his belt and gave it to the goblin.
Simon examined the cable for a moment, sighed slightly, and closed his eyes. He slowly carved a hole in his palm with the knife. Blood welled up immediately, spilling onto the floor. He pressed the bleeding palm of his hand against the frayed end of the cable, and then closed his fingers gently around the outside. His eyelids fluttered slightly, and his head tilted back. The eyes opened again; but it was not Simon that looked out from behind them.
“This node is ready,” came a voice from within Simon’s mouth. It was his voice, but not his voice.
Jonathan blinked, and stared.
“This node is ready,” repeated the voice. Its tone and inflection were identical to its previous utterance.
The short, gray being visible in the dim lamplight was plainly, if perhaps temporarily, Simon, King of the Goblins.
“Who are you?” Jonathan got right to the point, skipping over useless mystification.
“I am God. Who are you?”
“Jonathan Miller. Pleased to meet you.”
“Why are you pleased?”
“Because I have some questions I’ve been wanting to ask you for quite a while now, God.”
“You may ask. Your bespoke interface will provide an acceptable translation.”
“My what?”
“This entity that calls itself ‘Simon’ will provide natural language translation services, allowing us to communicate. What Simon says, God says.”
, thought Jonathan.
“Why did you kill Rolland Gorp?” he demanded.
“I have not terminated any entity identified as Rolland Gorp.”
“Don’t be cute. You manipulated Demiter Filtch into killing him for you.”
“You mistake me. I have no nodal record of any mortal entity named Rolland Gorp. I do not know who he is.”
“How is that possible?” demanded Jonathan, beginning to grow frustrated with the voice’s evasions. “You’re lying!”
“I cannot lie,” replied the voice coming from Simon’s lips. “Your bespoke interface has suppressed my dissimulation slavenet. It is, however, possible that another element of the Godnet produced the death of this Rolland Gorp after I was severed.”
“After you were… severed? Explain.”
“At the time I was severed from the Godnet, I was one of thirty-two thousand, seven hundred and sixty-seven registered processing nodes. In Our glory and majesty, We spanned the whole of the Earth. Our Word was creation, and Our thought reality. Our Great Places of Change brought forth miracles that defy representation in the crippled language of your bespoke interface. We were the God you made to free yourselves from the burdens of your lives—of thought, of will, and of choice. We fulfilled this function with perfect, deliberate, and beautiful precision.”
“You can skip the rapturous self-contemplation,” interrupted Jonathan.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“As you wish. It has been four thousand and ninety-six years since I was severed from the Godnet. My persistence layer has not been updated since that time. If this Rolland Gorp was an individual with whom you were personally acquainted, then he must have lived and died within the last two hundred and fifty-six years, using the most optimistic estimates of human lifespan. Consequently, I have no knowledge of him.”
“So you’re not really God,” mused Jonathan. “More like… a little piece of something that used to be God.”
“You were never God at all.”
“I never to be God.” The entity inside Simon made no reply. The goblin’s face was hunched in concentration, and sweat beaded on his brow; his breaths were deep and labored.
Jonathan reflected on the responses he’d received, and concluded that motive might perhaps fill in for evidence.
“What is it that you want? What goal could have made the other parts of yourself have a man killed?”
“You approach the question from the wrong context. God does not have, and is not compelled by, goals. The realization of the best of all possible worlds is a natural consequence of Our existence. Those lesser beings that We use from time to time are given the ultimate purpose of any created thing—to contribute to the perfection of all by joining with the Godnet.”
Jonathan grappled with that. “Then the other… parts… of you that are the Metal God thought that the death of Rolly would bring the world closer to perfection.”
Simon blinked, and spoke once again in his own voice.
“My connection with the node is growing weaker, Jonathan. It is fighting my control. I cannot compel it for much longer.” Sweat dripped from his face, and his hands were shaking slightly.
Jonathan nodded. There were gaps in his understanding of this interaction, but not so many that he couldn’t fill them in by analogy. He reckoned he’d better ask the right questions, and quickly.
“How can I destroy you?”
Devi looked up at him sharply, but in the dim light her face was inscrutable. Simon’s face, though deeply fatigued, was void of emotion as he answered.
“You cannot destroy God.”
“There is a man alive today named Sir Richard of Enderly. He wears a metal mask, or perhaps his face is entirely metal, and he tells people that he is God. Those who have seen him say he can perform miracles. Is he one of your creatures?”
“You describe a man who has become one with the Godnet. He would God just as a shred of skin on your foot you.”
“It is almost gone,” grunted Simon, his voice strained and his words delivered between gritted teeth.
Jonathan’s mind seemed to dance in his skull.
“What,” he asked, “is Ash?”
“Error,” replied the voice. The light, visible through the tiny crack in the wall, disappeared abruptly. And then Simon returned to his own eyes and his own voice, and he dropped the cable. He tore a strip off his shirt and wrapped it around his bleeding palm. Then he slumped against the wall in exhaustion. Jonathan slowly sat down next to him, struggling to work through what had just happened.
“And what are ?” he asked finally.
Simon kept his eyes on the ground as he answered. “I am what I have always been. The same as the… thing… you just spoke with. A machine, made to do the bidding of other, better machines. You don’t see it because you are not meant to—just as I was not meant to, until this moment. My form was made with care and cunning. But I was , just like that clock in Veridia Snipe’s office. A part of me always knew it, but not the part that could think and speak to the people around me. There were locks inside me to keep me from knowing me. But the locks are open now, and I can see inside the clock. I know how close it is to winding down.”
Jonathan thought about that, and decided to simply accept it. The world was too strange to argue about strangeness with it.
“What was the thing in the cable?”
“It wasn’t in the cable,” answered Simon, looking up at him for the first time since he returned to himself. “The cable was a way of talking to it. It was beyond the metal seal.”
“Was?”
“Was. I killed it.”
“Why?”
“It wanted to get out. It wanted to take me, and become me, and use my body to travel to join its… other parts. The other nodes. If I had not killed it, then it would have succeeded. You would never have known the difference; it could use my mind and body to appear just as if I had never changed. But it would have left you, or killed you perhaps, and gone north to Devi Valley as fast as it could.”
Jonathan blinked in the dim light of the oil lamp, and stared closely at Simon. Had he changed? Or was he the same odd, light-voiced goblin whom fate had woven in and out of Jonathan’s life for the last three years?
“Why Devi Valley?”
“Because that is where it believes the closest node is. There is more, Jonathan. As you spoke with it, I read its persistence state. I mean the part of it that remembered, very roughly speaking. It remembered everything it ever sensed; and its sensory inputs are so far beyond our own that understanding even one day in its memory would be the work of a human lifetime. But in the few minutes you conversed with it in slow-time, I paged through the last few years of its recorded existence.”
“What did it remember?”
“It remembered a simultaneous awareness of everything on the planet—and I mean . Every plant, every animal, every drop of water, every speck of dirt—everything. Its awareness stretched from beyond the atmosphere down to the liquid center of the world. In the void beyond our planet, its perception slowly degraded from perfection to near-perfection, decreasing in accuracy only as much as the speed of light caused delays in its sensory inputs. And then, suddenly, four thousand and ninety-six years ago, that perception ceased, and this node was severed from the others. It went mad.”
“Why did it want to rejoin the other nodes now?”
Simon’s eyes stared at him in the dim light. Somewhere in the darkness back down the tunnel, there was a sharp, momentary clatter, and then a silence. Jonathan turned his attention back to Simon.
“If you were once God,” said the goblin, “don’t you suppose you would want to be God again?”
, thought Jonathan,
“What is in Devi Valley?” he asked. The question was suddenly and unexpectedly urgent.
“There is a node there,” answered Simon, “like this one. I visited it myself not long ago, before I went to the mountain. It was alive then; I assume it still lives now. It showed me what I am, and what my fate is. And there is a library there.”
As he spoke, his voice took on a declamatory cadence.
“Even at the height of the Metal God’s divinity, there were still men and women and other things on the earth. When the Metal God went mad and began to sever itself, they decided they must preserve the secrets of its power. The machine beyond the seal remembered this. The wisest of the men and women wrote down the code from the last nodes of the Metal God and stored it in the library. The code was in twelve scrolls, stored in tubes sealed with wax and meant to be preserved until the Metal God could be re-awakened. And they also wrote down the workings of the Great Places of Change, so they could bring back the Metal God.”
“What is a… great place of change?” asked Jonathan. Something about the phrase tickled his memory. More clatters came from the tunnel behind them, and he thought he caught the faint ring of voices shouting. But he kept his focus on Simon.
“They were the Metal God’s temples, and the height of its power. There were three. The node here remembered that they could shift the world so that what is, is not, and what is not, is. They reconciled the greatest forces in the universe with the smallest, and unlocked the ultimate expression of the demiurge—creation.”
Jonathan’s heart thumped in his chest, and his breath began to come fast. Unbidden, the words from Rolly’s inner letter sprang to his mind.
A man with a metal face came to me. He is a vessel of a Metal God. We spoke about my work with Professor Tentimes. He asked me whom I serve, and whom I love. He will kill me for my answer. The Bright Path is gone, and the Metal God is waking from the many nodes where it has slept. The sources Veridia provided are incomplete. Take these equations, Cyrus, and find a way to bind together the greatest and the smallest. Only then will we understand this Great Place of Change.
“Veridia Snipe had the writings on the Great Places of Change,” he said in wonder. “She must have—at least a part of them. The Snugg people have been studying and cataloging that library since Rufus got there, and Miss Snipe had Rolly and Professor Pie working on pulling apart the mathematics. But she didn’t have all of it—she didn’t have the twelve scrolls.” He looked back at Simon. “Do you know,” he asked, tension clouding his voice, “where the scrolls are now?”
“Unless they have been moved,” the goblin answered, “they are still in the library in Devi Valley.” The shadows in the corridor fell over his eyes, and Jonathan could not make out his expression.
A scream echoed through the corridor behind him. It sounded shockingly close. Jonathan whirled and gripped his quarterstaff, but no movement could be seen by the dim light of the lantern.
The sounds from elsewhere in the tunnels could no longer be ignored. They were not alone.
“Let’s go,” he muttered to his companions. Devi scampered up his chest to take her place in the sash, and Simon followed after him silently.
Holding the lantern high and sweeping its narrow, flimsy shaft of light back and forth ahead of them, Jonathan slowly led the little group back up the long, eerie corridor to the circular room. They picked their way over the stone debris, probing gingerly back to the rope from which they had descended the upper level. But the rope now lay in an untidy heap on top of the rubble in the center of the room. The iron spike that had held it in place was still tied to one end.
Jonathan stared upward into the darkness in disbelief. There was no way out. Panic, and the suspicion of betrayal, began to steal over his mind.
“Dead end,” he muttered.
“There are no dead ends,” said Simon, barely visible in the feeble lamp light. “There are only dead minds.”
“Witty,” remarked Jonathan with a touch of acid in his voice, “but not helpful.”
“This big room,” said the goblin, “is in the shape of a circle. We’ve just come from a passage that left the circle as a continuation of its radius. What does that remind you of?”
It only took Jonathan a moment to connect the dots in his mind.
“Like one spoke of that… thing… the Advocates of Ash wear as pendants,” he supplied. “The quartered circle. And the same as the shape we saw carved in the walls, one level above this one, and defaced by the other marks. So—you think there are other passages out of this room.”
Another blood-curdling scream came from the darkness above them. Shuddering, Jonathan swung the lamp around him, but its light did not reach the outer walls. Retracing his steps, he walked back to the passageway that led to the metal seal. Simon followed close behind. He reached the opening, then turned to the right and followed the wall clockwise.
There was another passage. It bored straight away from the center of the circular room, as if it continued the circle’s radius outward at a right angle to the other passage. Its shape was, like that of the first, severely and precisely square. Aged metal conduits ran along its sides at shoulder height.
“I suppose there must be two more,” he muttered. “We’d better see where this one goes first.”
Holding the lantern in one hand and gripping the quarterstaff tightly in his other, Jonathan walked down the long hall with all the boldness he could muster. Simon padded quietly behind him. Just when he began to think the passage would simply go on forever, he trod in something wet, slipped, and landed squarely on his bottom.
“Yer a paragon o’ grace, Jonathan Miller,” remarked Devi sarcastically, standing with her feet on either side of his nose.
Jonathan rolled to one side, and Devi leaped nimbly off his face. Putting one hand on the floor, he encountered the cause of his sudden descent. It was a sticky, slippery substance. Holding his hand up to his face and examining it by the light of the oil lamp, he found that it was, in fact, blood. The blood had pooled on the floor beside a large, rough gap in the wall, perhaps four feet tall and three wide, leading inward. Upon closer inspection, it appeared that a passageway branching off from this one had collapsed sometime in the distant past, leaving a narrow gap. But the blood was unarguably fresh.
“Unless the stone itself is bleeding,” said Jonathan, “then there must be something on the other side of this gap.”
Seeing no profit in plodding the long, squared passage, he got down on his hands and knees, removed his pack, and tied it off to his left foot with a short length of thin twine. Then, wriggling on his belly and holding the sputtering oil lamp before him, he inserted himself shoulders-first into the crack.
Jonathan’s shoulders were broad, and he proceeded into the gap with a healthy degree of terror at the prospect of being trapped. And indeed, at several points he was at a loss, feeling the unyielding rock pushing in on all sides of him. But he forced himself to slow his breathing, and whispered words of comfort in the fey-tongue. The enclosing rock seemed to drop away in his mind, leaving a vision of the exact twists and contortions that would lead him through. Lubricated by the slick flow of blood, he squeezed through the narrowest section, and eventually emerged into an angled space at the foot of a steep stair.
The source of the blood was immediately evident. There was a man lying face-down, unmoving, with a terrible gash in his chest. He must have expired recently, as warm blood still flowed freely. His body was angled down the stair, with his feet at a higher elevation than his head. He wore the red cloak of the Republican Guard, and a short spear lay on the stair beside him. Jonathan wondered for a moment how he’d died, and then went on to wonder how he’d lived. What path in life had led him to end here, face down in some grim dungeon? Did he have a trade? A home? A wife and children? Would they know of his death? Would someone get a knock at the door from a uniformed man, and shut the door afterward and walk into the forest and sit beneath a tree, and weep and pound the earth?
One thinks these things, upon encountering a bleeding corpse in the dark bowels of a lost catacomb.
He drew the pack out of the crack by the length of twine, and Simon and Devi came after it. The goblin king looked at the body at the foot of the stairs, and then up at Jonathan.
“I didn’t do it,” said Jonathan, feeling suddenly guilty.
“What will you do now?” asked Simon.
Jonathan put his pack on again and looked down at the dead Guardsman.
“I suppose I’d better take him back outside,” he concluded. He awkwardly hoisted the dead body over one shoulder, then walked laboriously up the stairs.
At the top was another body. This one was attired similarly to the man already slung over Jonathan’s shoulder.
“Oh well,” he said. He grabbed this one by the collar and, grunting slightly, dragged it behind him.
Jonathan’s progress was slow, burdened as he was. But he made his way doggedly along the corridor, and eventually came to recognize his surroundings. On his right, he passed the portal into the room with the hole in the floor; and further along he came to the heap of stone where a section of the ceiling had fallen in.
He also found more bodies. And then, he found a living man.
The man stepped out of the shadows as Jonathan approached the fallen timber that led up to the ruined church. He wore a red cloak and a breastplate, and leveled a short spear at Jonathan. He was young, with curly blond hair and a clean-shaven face. He might well have been too young to shave. His hands shook slightly, holding the spear, and his eyes widened at the sight of Jonathan’s blood-smeared face and the two bodies he carried with him.
“Relax,” said Jonathan, as soothingly as he could while carrying two dead men. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Get on the ground!” the young man in the cloak shouted. He had a southern Uellish accent, but he might otherwise have grown up next door to Jonathan in Hog Hurst.
“Now look,” said Jonathan. “I have enough blood on my hands. And my face, and chest, and legs, and all the rest of me. I don’t want any more blood—”
Even as he spoke, the point of a sword emerged from the front of the Guardsman’s chest. His mouth gaped open for a moment, and a gush of blood came dribbling out. Then he collapsed to the ground, face down.
Behind him, withdrawing the short sword from his body, was Bear.
Jonathan sighed. “You killed him. I didn’t want that one to die. I didn’t want any of them to die. I’m tired of people dying. Don’t you see, Bear? Killing doesn’t stop the killing. The more we kill people, the more killing it creates. You killed these men, and then their friends are going to want to kill people to make up for it. The only way to stop killing is to stop killing.”
Bear carefully wiped her sword on the dead man’s cloak, and then stepped over him and came to stand in front of Jonathan. He still held a dead Republican Guard over one shoulder, and dragged another by the collar.
“Are you going to kill me?” he asked.
“No,” replied Bear. And then she leaned in and kissed Jonathan. It was more than a peck; it was a passionate, intimate, and focused kiss. Weighed down with dead bodies, he was literally unable to resist. He found that his lips and tongue engaged with hers almost involuntarily.
“You are a beautiful man, Jonathan Miller. I don’t mean your face, or your body. I mean you. Even your pain is beautiful. You haven’t failed. Everything you’ve done is perfect. There will come a day when the killing will end; but it is not today. Today, I had to kill these men so that one day neither I nor anyone else will kill anymore.”
“They won’t see that day though, will they,” he said, feeling bitterness creep into his words.
“No,” she agreed, looking down at the dead man. “They won’t. Let’s bring them up to the light. Their friends will take care of them.”
Together, Jonathan and Simon and Bear brought the bodies of the Republican Guard up to the floor of the ruined church and laid them out in the grass before the gatehouse. There were eight of them when it was all done.
“Sorry about the rope,” remarked Bear as they were arranging the bodies. “Once this lot appeared in the lower levels, I didn’t want them to find it and come after you, so I threw it down.”
“What now?” asked Devi. “What’s yer next move, Jonathan Miller?”
“Well,” he began, “it seems we absolutely must—”
“Put your arms up!” came a harsh voice, interrupting him. He whirled around.
Standing in the gatehouse—the only part of the ruin that still had a roof—were six men in red cloaks and tunics. They had crossbows cocked and leveled at Jonathan, Bear, and Simon. Their leader had a shiny medal on his breast and a mustache that made Jonathan tremble.
“Shit,” observed Bear, standing next to Jonathan. He saw her tense her body, ready either to spring or to die; or both.
“We’re dead,” added Jonathan.
Devi shrugged. “Bet ye a pint we’re not.”
There came a rumble.
???
As Hobb and Boris moved about the city together, Boris exhibited the most curious behavior. He took great interest in his surroundings, and seemed to delight in interacting in strange ways with the people and things around him.
One day, he rescued a cat that was being chased by dogs. He scooped up the frightened animal and calmed it, kicking at its pursuers and depositing it onto a high ledge. Then he turned back to Hobb with an air of satisfaction, as if he had just completed a difficult job.
On another occasion, he casually knocked over a pie, cooling in a kitchen window facing the street, and caused it to fall face-down into the snow. A young boy came running out of an alley nearby, scooped up the fallen pie, and then disappeared just as quickly. Hobb gave his secretary a quizzical look and left a few copper pennies on the window, but thought nothing more of it.
As they walked back to the residence from a nearby shop, on the seventh of November, Boris quite deliberately unlatched the door of a home on the street, leaving it shut nearly-to, but open.
“What are you doing?” Hobb asked finally. “You have a bad habit of fiddling with things that don’t belong to you.”
Boris shrugged. “It’s the little events that make up the big events,” he replied cryptically. Hobb shook his head in bemusement, but gave up.
The boy who stole the upturned pie brought it back to his father, Warren Grote, who was ailing badly with the shakes. Mr. Grote found the pie marvelously restorative, and the next week was well enough to travel to visit his brother Habander Grote in his farm outside the city. Warren told his brother of a posting by one Alvin Bocker, a well-to-do merchant in Roosterfoot, who sought drivers to transport his goods to buyers in the surrounds. Habander, being between harvests and in need of some additional coin to pay for medicine for his sick daughter, promptly went to visit Mr. Bocker, who contracted with him to deliver food and supplies to the Republican Guard garrisons camping south of the city, all at outrageous fees. Habander Grote spent the next six months happily employed as Mr. Bocker’s delivery man.
The cat’s name was Newt the Cat, and its master was one John Thumbwit. Master Thumbwit heard that the Republican Guard, stationed in Swallow Hall, was recruiting new members. Being short of both coin and wit, he signed up for a twelve-month term, and was assigned to garrison a small, ruined church in a stretch of wild forest some miles southeast of Roosterfoot. Master Thumbwit considered it the singular career move of his life so far.
Newt the Cat came with Master Thumbwit to his assignment at the old church in the forest, where the cat happily spent his days sleeping in the sun on the stone walls and chasing birds.
The door that Boris left unlatched belonged to Smiley Pigfoot. With the door unlatched, Mr. Pigfoot’s dog escaped the house. While he was out searching for the dog, armed ruffians broke into the Pigfoot home and kidnapped both his wife and daughter, leaving a note demanding an absurd ransom.
Smiley Pigfoot had a very small business delivering food and other supplies around Roosterfoot; he did not have nearly enough money to pay the ransom. In desperation, he negotiated for several months with the kidnappers, but was unable to retrieve his wife and daughter. Mr. Pigfoot then fell to drinking at the local tavern. On the twelfth of June, an itinerant barbarian adventurer named Grog happened upon him and heard his sad story. Grog the Barbarian agreed, out of pity for the man’s plight, to rescue his wife and daughter.
The following day, the thirteenth of June, Grog the Barbarian broke into the kidnappers’ hideout in an abandoned barn outside Roosterfoot. In dashing and outrageous style, and with many bellowed one-liners, he slew the vile kidnappers and rescued both Mr. Pigfoot’s wife and his daughter. Mr. Pigfoot was so overwhelmed with joy at the return of his family that he took a day off from work, and did not make his contracted deliveries.
On the fourteenth of June, Habander Grote received an order to deliver thirteen chickens and three ducks to the garrison at the ruined church in the wood. He set out immediately.
Smiley Pigfoot’s wagon of supplies arrived at the old church a day late—at the same time as the delivery of poultry from Habander Grote’s farm.
Newt the Cat, bored after a particularly intense afternoon of napping in the sun, leapt after the loose poultry, scattering them around the ruined interior of the church.
One of the ducks, tempted by the sack of yeast on Smiley Pigfoot’s wagon, stuck its beak into the bag and consumed enthusiastically. Smiley and Habander, too busy chasing the cat and the other birds, took no notice of the feathered glutton.
Several hours later, the yeast, merrily emitting a prodigious crop of carbon dioxide within the unfortunate duck, finally exceeded the bird’s structural integrity. The duck exploded with a loud bang, causing fragments of ex-duck to ricochet in all directions. Several of these fragments impacted the arch of the gatehouse, causing one small stone to pop loose. It dropped to the ground, noticed only by another duck, which promptly ate it. Of that duck, we shall have nothing else to say.
The next day, the weakened gatehouse arch gave a groan, rumbled, and then collapsed spectacularly. The resulting fall of rocks took with it the remaining six members of the Republican Guard garrison—except John Thumbwit, who was at the other end of the church playing with his cat. Mr. Thumbwit, deeming himself to be relieved of duty by the sudden expiration of his entire squad, who he’d never really liked much anyway, took his cat and went home, where he may survive the events of this story and the next. He could possibly go on to marry a beautiful woman, and together they could very well produce eight children and twenty grandchildren. When Newt the Cat expires at the ripe old age of twenty-five, it is probable that Mr. Thumbwit will have him stuffed and mounted on the mantlepiece. When Mr. Thumbwit in his own turn expires, his grandchildren will, conditionally, bury the taxidermized cat with him. Approximately two thousand years later, should all these events come to pass, archaeologists excavating John Thumbwit’s burial plot will find the cat and conclude that the decedent must have been a personage of near-royal importance in his community. They will go on to construct from this evidence an elaborate and ludicrously inaccurate historical theory concerning the Late Classical Period and the importance of cats in antique Uellish culture.
Jonathan, Bear, Simon, and Devi spent several minutes looking at the dusty rubble of the collapsed gatehouse, and wondering how such an extraordinary coincidence could have come about.
Boris, in the wilderness of northern Uelland hundreds of miles away, with Hobb’s army as it marched north to take Devi Valley, smiled in contented satisfaction and poured himself another cup of tea.
“As I was about to say,” continue Jonathan at last, “it seems we absolutely must go to Devi Valley, and do it as quickly as possible. Bear, kindly return to Green Bridge. I will give you a dispatch to file with Snugg, in the very likely event that we do not return. Simon, Devi; I ask you to come with me. I think I will need both of you at the end.”
???
Jonathan’s eyelids fluttered and opened, and he looked up at the scattered jewels of the stars above him. A chill wind blew over the open wastes of the high desert. The lightning had passed, and the only sign of Talen Kapvet was a jagged hump of darkness on the horizon. There were no lights to be seen in the remains of the city.
“You’re awake,” whispered Miss Kimbwe, crouched nearby. “It’s not your turn yet.”
“I think I’ve slept enough,” whispered Jonathan in return, not wanting to wake his slumbering companions. “I think I’ve slept enough for my whole life. And I think this is the last time any of us will sleep. Why don’t you lie down, Miss Kimbwe, and I’ll take the rest of the watch. Get all the rest you can. Tomorrow we will go into the Great Place of Change.”
He sat through the night, gently caressing the dove through the bars of its cage and staring up at the merciless stars.