The Pilgrims

39

First came the darkness of sleep, with only Loup’s voice, as though in conversation with itself:

‘It’s a kind of knowledge minds like ours can’t hold …’

‘… know what we’re about to do. We’re about to put in our bodies, in our minds, a little piece of the Dragon itself. Fathom?’

‘… this little scale …’

‘… thinks it’s risky. Oh aye, can be, but so’s taking a step outside at night …’

‘Girl who did it wouldn’t tell me what she saw, but she was … different, after.’

‘As It wills! Anfen’s being a fool …’

The room in Faul’s house spun around slowly, till it was upside down and tipping him out of itself. Then with a rush of acceleration he felt in his belly, the house fell away, the surface of the world falling with it, way down below, very fast past his feet. He was caught in the sky, like someone who’d been dumped in an ocean, on swelling waves of rising and falling air.

His hair and clothes were ruffled by winds that weren’t winds — were, rather, currents of magic, the very stuff that passed through a mage’s body and made a spell happen. Mages could see it, and so now could he: threads and streaks of energy glimmering, twisting and winding about each other like smoke.

Below spread out the woods through which they’d travelled to get to Faul’s. Was this the past he looked into? He saw them as his sight zoomed down through the green treetops: Anfen’s band, he himself among them quietly talking to Case, arguing some point as they threaded through the trees beyond the doomed hunters’ hall, Lalie in tow.

And there was a white wolf running below too, chasing something that wore a green dress. He knew that though it seemed she in the green dress retreated, she was the one in pursuit, drawing the wolf along, playing some game for a hidden purpose, until they both vanished.

His view panned back up and beheld the world like a map. West, there, he saw Kiown’s tall flopping cone of red hair, and Doon’s huge broad shoulders, the cartoonish sights standing out like geographical features as though to get his attention. He flew over that way and they shrank back to their normal proportions. Something was about to happen, something bad. The group approached a mountain pass, Doon leading, Kiown at the rear. An army patrol waited around the bend, and knew the bandits came. With little warning a volley of arrows flew and thickly rained down, Kiown alone out of their reach, for he’d hung back in the road. Now he drew his sword.

The other bandits dropped quickly. The half-giant alone fought, smashing down infantry, but Kiown — surely not! Kiown had run forwards, hacking his sword into Doon’s back, with fast angry slashes of his arm. And the soldiers didn’t fire their arrows at him.

Doon fought, but points of halberds and spears surrounded him now, impaling him, and arrows stuck out thickly over a shocking red coat of gushing blood. Kiown’s sword rent his back ferociously. The half-giant fell to one knee, then onto his back. His wide, horrified eyes saw Kiown above, smashing down with his boot, then his blade, till the half-giant stopped rolling around to ward off the blows, and lay still. The patrol swordsmen swiftly finished off the other wounded.

Kiown, panting, talked for a while with the patrol’s commander. It seemed he, Kiown, gave the instructions and was displeased about something. The commander nodded, looking chastened. Kiown pointed at his shoulder, braced himself, and let a trooper stick it lightly with an arrow, a wound to show the others. Then they bandaged him.

Loup’s voice, not far away, suddenly called his name. There you are, Eric! Not pretty scenery here, eh? Oh no. Higher up, go higher, don’t waste it on this stuff! We’ve seen enough and plenty of all this.

Eric looked around for the folk magician but couldn’t see him, though Loup’s voice was loud enough to be speaking by his ear. See how high you can get, see what It meant for you to see. I’ll follow if I can. And don’t think about what you seen yet, or you’ll steer yourself back here. Thinking about it’s for later, when you come back to yourself. Keep that head blank. Just watch now, just watch …

Eric tried to push the sights from his mind, as the mage asked, and found it easy. Loup’s voice again: Up we go now, lad …

So, higher up he went, legs kicking at the pockets of air and magic like he was kicking through water. The land receded further below, further and further, till what seemed the entire world lay between his feet, or perhaps had its image warped to fit his newly seeing eyes. Ah, now he beheld it properly: a large oblong shape, cut off at the southernmost part they called World’s End by a huge barrier. At the other end, the northernmost point, was the castle; in the thin strip of land behind it, the entry point, the door. And he suddenly knew as though the wind whispered secrets to him that this world, Levaal, was not a world at all; it was a place between worlds, like two balls that swung on a chain-link … that Earth was to one side, that Levaal was the link. World’s End is really the world’s middle- there’s another half of Levaal, and behind its own entry point, at the southernmost tip, another world! This half was Earth’s side. Perhaps that is why it resembles our world in some ways, he thought. But what is on the other …?

He breathed in the magic wind of the upper sky, purer and stronger in its power up here. It combined with the little specks of scale he’d consumed. He could feel them buzzing around inside him, dissolved and in his very blood, each tiny piece alive and in conversation with the others, discussing Eric himself. Wind, strong-blowing wind, suddenly caught him in a tunnel and wrenched him along towards the castle.

There it was, coming at great speed, not far now, a mass of gleaming white. And he saw that the Dragon had to be close to it, for there, almost visible and tangible, was the god-beast’s willpower, pouring through the castle’s mouth as a tangible force, distorting and rippling reality itself about it, faintly visible. Swirls of magic poured from its mouth too, given to the winds to carry through the world.

The castle called him, the castle drew him closer. It bade him look below.

His sight cut through far distances down to the roads, along which patrols marched like something unhealthy plugging the lands’ veins. He saw them crossing grassy fields, kicking down village doors, saw people killed by the roadside, bodies cast away like trash. He understood that this was a message for him: whatever else would happen in this mini-world, the way things headed now, people would soon be dead as stones littering the ground, and that could not be allowed for reasons not explainable yet. He sought a clearer answer to this, asking the little pieces of scale humming and buzzing through his body, but to ask made his whole being shudder like he’d tried to lift a weight of understanding far too large and heavy. Recoiling, he turned away from the sights below and lay on his back instead, while the wind pulled him closer to the huge white castle.

The white sky above was made of gargantuan slabs of lightstone. As they brightened and dimmed, so came day and night. It was not a sky, it was a ceiling! Eric laughed, for now this seemed obvious, simple, and a delight. Behind this thick layer was dark grey stone bent in an enormous and gently sloping dome curving over all the land.

He spotted the gaps which led into the sky’s roof, wide enough for Invia to fly through. Look, there one passed now with her beating wings, on her way up to speak with the dragons. The sky-roof’s open spaces were too narrow for the dragon-youth to fit, the stone walls too powerfully made for them to break, great as they were.

And now he passed through such a gap, like slipping between two bars into their cage. Further up the long winding tunnels of rock he went, twisting into the sky-roof’s caverns. The space opened up ahead and through a split in the wall two eyes gleamed like dark stars. A paw covered in sparkling scales reached down through the gap, the tips of its claws fumbling blindly, grasping outside its cage. Vyin, this imprisoned dragon’s name. How it longed for freedom, how all the dragon-youth longed for freedom, and had since they were shut in these sky-cages, when men began to swarm across what had once been their world.

Imprisoned. As the Dragon-god willed.

Vyin saw him with its dark-star eyes: Eric, little more than a fleeting cloud’s shadow here. But those eyes saw much. The dragon’s jaws opened and it spoke a single echoing word which had so much meaning Eric’s mind filled up with it like a bowl catching a flood of water pouring through the cavern, all else pushed aside, the echoing word spilling over, only the smallest part of it held on to. His mind translated it to something senseless which just sounded like: All things are all things, all things are all things, are all things, are all things.

Away and thoughtless he drifted from those dark-star eyes, back through the sky’s caverns and into the sky, while the Invia, who gossiped just outside the sky-prisons for the dragons to hear, who listened to them and understood, now dropped in a swarm through the gap and dived, left, right, down, wings spreading as they soared in all directions. One of them came right by him, paused in the air, her head cocking left then right, ruby-red hair flying behind her, mouth parted. She grasped Eric in her arms, clutched him to her naked body then dived straight down, taking him away from the sky before the castle could draw him into its maw with a deeper breath, as it wished to.

Instead down they plunged, back towards Faul’s house, the roof approaching very quickly. She let him drop back to where his body had flung itself on the floor — but, surely, she saw Anfen’s Mark. She flew skywards and sought her sisters for help in killing one so dangerous.

Of this, Eric knew nothing. His ears, mind and soul were filled with that one word the dragon-youth Vyin had spoken. Too much meaning for him, despite his partial understanding of it. And he would walk the path he’d been going to walk before, knowing only that it was as it should be and that he should not stray from it, though perils shoved him or lured him from either side.