The Soul Weaver

CHAPTER 13

It is a strange fact of war and politics that fortunate circumstances can condemn the best of strategies to ruin. Another of Lord Parven’s maxims. I wasn’t sure that I had actually stopped the firestorm on my first day in the Bounded, only that I had kept myself intact, but it happened that no more of them struck in the days following. And because this astonishing and welcome eventuality was associated with my arrival, the people of the Bounded came to believe I was their king.

Whenever I explored their city, they bowed or cheered as I passed. When I attended the Guardian’s daily audiences, the petitioners knelt before me and begged my indulgence or my hearing. They would not attend to the Guardian, even when I insisted they do so. I started sitting in the retiring room behind the gold curtain to listen discreetly, but it only took them two days to find me and come after me again.

And, of course, all this made my bargain with the Guardian go sour very quickly. At first he only grumbled and snarled at me as we sat at meals. Eventually I decided it was politic to stay away from his audience sessions, which annoyed me, as I was learning a great deal about life in the Bounded from listening to its troubles. But even that did not pacify him, and whenever I asked if he had yet spoken to the Source, he turned red and tightened his lips. “The Source has said nothing of you. No answers to your queries have been spoken.” Then he clamped his mouth shut. But he didn’t send me away.

I was no less irritated than he, because seven days had passed, and I’d learned nothing of real importance. I was worried about my mother and worried about what other untoward events my father might be blaming me for. But nothing could be done about either concern, and I didn’t know of anyplace else to look for the truth. So we stayed and tried to learn what we could.

Though the Guardian disapproved of our wandering, Paulo and I spent our days poking about the Blue Tower, also called the King’s Fastness, and the Tower City, trying to discover how the place worked. Everyone in the Bounded seemed to be holding his breath, waiting: waiting for the mythical king, waiting for the next firestorm, waiting for someone to come and give all of them names. Life was dreadfully dull.

The Blue Tower itself revealed little. The lamps lit and darkened themselves in a rhythm quite familiar to those who’d lived in sunlit worlds. You could control them with your fingers, too, in the way of ordinary lamplight. A few other fastnesses in the Bounded had slot windows and lamps like these, and the Singlars watched the lights in those towers to measure their days, passing the information from tower to tower. Besides his maintainers, the Guardian had an army of servants at his beck, a hundred quiet, oddly shaped men and women who wore ruffled collars over the same brown tunics as the other Singlars wore. Neither servants nor Guardian seemed to understand why the lamps behaved in the way they did. It was only one of a thousand things they didn’t know.

Beyond the tasks of serving or protecting the Guardian, the servants in the Blue Tower could tell me nothing of other people’s occupations. The Guardian’s food was grown or raised, fabric was woven and thread was spun, but no one could say who did those things or where. Meat and flour, oil, fruit, fabric, pottery, and all types of goods arrived in the storerooms of the Blue Tower, seemingly without the interference of servants or laborers, and were used as the Guardian desired.

The Singlars had no such luxuries. Their diet consisted entirely of the tappa root, a white vegetable that looked something like a turnip and tasted worse. They boiled it, baked it, or fried it in oil squeezed from its stem. They dried and ground it for flour and baked it into a flat, slightly sweetish bread. They made their clothing from the woven fibers of the tappa and the other stunted shrubs that grew in the dim light, and they made a thin bitter ale by fermenting the tough skin of the tappa root along with its shredded gray leaves. We saw little evidence of commerce or trade, only rudimentary bartering.

Most of our information we gleaned from observation, for the Singlars were too much in awe of me to speak, and I didn’t know how to make them. Frustrated, I asked some of the Singlars where I could find Vroon and his friends. Everyone knew the three Singlars who had been granted names, and they pointed us toward three towers not far from the Blue Tower. One was tall, straight, and gleamed silver in the starlight. One was shaped like a stepped pyramid of ruddy sandstone, and one, Vroon’s, curved upward from a wide base to a crown-like peak.

Vroon, Ob, and Zanore were delighted to accompany us in our explorations, despite the Guardian’s having specifically forbidden them to have contact with me. They said that since I was certainly the king, all would be made right eventually. Every morning after the lamps came up, the three waited for Paulo and me in a lane near the Blue Tower and guided us about the confusing countryside.

“Tell me, Zanore,” I said, “does anyone know the shape of the Bounded or make maps or charts? Perhaps if we could see a map, we could get some idea of where to go.” The morning was dismal and rainy - morning in name only, as it was still and always night in the Bounded. The constant dark and the wild, fickle weather made it difficult to estimate the size and shape of the land or even to decide if we had been in some particular place before.

After a quick consultation with the other two, Zanore nodded and led us through the muddy lanes to a beehive-shaped fastness. He entered and, after a few moments, poked his head out. “This Singlar will be honored to have you come into his fastness.”

Inside was a single round room, cluttered with stacks of flat stones and wood scraps, some of the stacks taller than my knees. A sputtering wall torch made from damp branches provided smoky yellow light, but revealed no evidence of mapmaking. The Singlar pressed his over-large head to the stone floor.

“Thank you for allowing us to come in,” I said, tilting my head in an attempt to see his face. I’d found no easy way to address people whose heads were on the floor. “I’ll do my best to see you reap no punishment for it. I would like to know about the Bounded… its shape and size. I understand you have made some kind of a chart…”

He didn’t move or answer, except to quiver a bit.

“Are you sure he doesn’t mind us being here?” I whispered to Zanore, who had come inside with me. Paulo and the others waited outside, alert for any maintainers taking an interest.

Zanore pointed his bony black finger around the room and shrugged his shoulders.

At my left hand stood a stack of flat stones, one of the fifty or more such stacks that crowded the little room. The one on the top had lines scribed into it, and when I picked it up to examine it, I saw that the one underneath had a similar pattern, but not quite identical. And the ones below, the same. A quick survey evidenced that every scrap of wood and stone in the stacks had a sketch on it.

“This room… this fastness… the whole thing is your map,” I said, as the clutter suddenly took on new meaning. “Each stack placed in relation to the others. Some stacks tall, some short. Each layer of a stack a new version of that particular area or feature.”

The big-headed Singlar peeped up and grinned.

“Please, would you show me? It’s marvelous.”

Scarcely enough room to walk remained between the tall stacks in the middle, and the sketches on these pieces were quite detailed. Some wider gaps existed between the stacks at the outer margins, and those stacks were very small.

“Out here must be the Edge. Is that right? But I can’t tell which direction is which.”

“The mark on the wall represents the entry of the King’s Fastness,” came a whisper from the floor. “That is Primary.”

The mark was an arrow smudged on the stone wall with a charred stick. I nodded at the man who had now lifted his head slightly. “Come, please, show me the rest,” I said.

I learned a great deal that morning. Where a mapmaker in Leire might labor for three years on a new version of his map, the mapmaker of the Bounded had to create a new one every day, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he was never able to finish one map. The place called the Edge was truly the edge of their known world, and it moved outward with every change of the light - every day. The firestorms kept him even busier, for while the Edge always moved outward, changing only the dimensions of his works, the firestorms wiped out clusters of towers, and shifted or erased landmarks, whether roads, ridges, or even mountains. He collected his information from Singlars who moved around in search of tappa or wood or to build new towers and from those who traveled in from the Edge.

“Would you… could you… possibly tell me of the places you’ve traveled in the Bounded, mighty one?” he asked, once he’d taken me on a tour of his current work. “Zanore” - his soft voice caressed my guide’s name with wonder - “has a natural ability to find his way, but he lacks greatly at describing what he has seen. But he says… all say… that you see much. If you would honor me… ”

It seemed only fair to tell him what I could. He grew comfortable with me very quickly then, peppering me with questions about where we’d been and what we’d seen, sketching my descriptions with charred sticks on more bits and pieces that he could transfer to his map, exulting whenever he could lay a new chip on the floor to start a new stack in between two others. The Bounded was much larger than I’d imagined, home to thousands of beings in hundreds of tower clusters, scattered across the landscape. Two hours we spent examining his torch-lit stacks.

“I’d like to repay you for your time,” I said, as I stood by the silvery trace that marked his door. Easy to guess what payment the mapmaker would want. Though the Guardian had specifically forbidden me to grant any more names, the mapmaker had already violated the law by allowing me into his fastness, and I certainly hadn’t anything more useful to give him. “A man named Corionus was the most famous mapmaker in my home country. My grandfather collected his maps. Would you accept the name Corionus in thanks for your help?”

I held his arm so he couldn’t put his head on the floor again. I already felt like I was cheating him.

“What next, great Master?” said Vroon, after Zanore and I rejoined the others and told them about the map. “Shall I show you the tappa planting at the Gray Towers?”

“No,” I said. “Take us to the Edge. I’d like to see it for myself.”

Before the horrified dwarf could answer, a huge, leathery hand fell on my shoulder, almost pressing me to the ground. “No.” Ob didn’t need to say it twice. As with all of his rare words, he communicated a great deal more than the simple meaning of the word.

“So what makes it so dangerous to walk there, even just to take a look?”

Before answering my question, Vroon furiously herded us away from the nearby towers into open country. “Before companioning with me, Ob wandered close to the Edge,” he said, more relaxed as we walked down the road toward the Tower City. “For a manylight he watched the land writhe and groan as it grows and pushes the Edge. Not overfearing is Ob, and he came to no harm. But the risk is true - to fall or be crushed or be burned by spewing vapors - as long as the Bounded is incomplete. Too risky for the king.”

“We’ll be careful, then. I want to see it.” I did not intend to be in the Bounded whenever it was finished with its growing.

Paulo, the three Singlars, and I set out early the next day, heading away from the Tower City in the direction Corionus had named Primary, approximately opposite the moon-door - the passage to Valleor. The stacks of stone and wood said it didn’t actually matter a whit which way we went, as the Edge was about the same distance from the City in every direction. But it made sense to see something new along the way.

Unfortunately, for half the day a steady, cold rain kept us from seeing anything more than twenty paces from the track, only the flat ghostly outlines telling us when we passed a cluster of towers. After six or eight soggy hours of walking, Zanore stopped at the top of a small rise and peered steadily into the gloom ahead before directing us to the left, in the first obvious deviation from our straight-line course. Zanore’s amber eyes must have seen more ahead than human ones could. Neither Paulo nor I could see anything that wasn’t gray or wet or immediately under our feet, and thus no reason to turn aside.

“Danger to pass through here,” said Zanore, when I asked him why we were going out of our way. “Strange tales have I heard of this place. Best stay away.”

“What kind of tales?”

The three conferred among themselves and couldn’t come up with anything but the words hurtful and troubled.

“If you’ve no better explanation than that, we’ll go straight,” I said. “I want to get to the Edge today, and I don’t think we’ll want to spend the night there. I won’t let anything happen to us.” Except for the firestorms, I’d seen nothing of the Bounded or its inhabitants that we couldn’t deal with. I felt safer here than at Verdillon.

The three were afraid to argue, so with many sighs and muttering and shaking of heads, they led us on the downward path and into a wide, rocky gully, where we found ourselves ankle-deep in mud. We soon glimpsed a cluster of perhaps fifty or sixty dreary fastnesses, low, crude things of rocks and mud, none better than the others.

The Singlars who stepped out of the rock piles were mostly naked, all of them thinner than Zanore. If they’d not smiled cheerfully and bowed at our passing, I might have thought them standing corpses from some long finished battle. One of the Singlars stepped forward with his hands raised over his head and spread wide apart - in greeting it appeared - offering the same welcome shown me by all the Singlars, without the speechless groveling that usually accompanied it.

“Greetings, weary traveler. Such happiness you bring to our valley.” The spokesman was a tall, emaciated man with dark skin and a twisted back that left one shoulder higher than the other. He wore nothing but a tattered loin wrapping, yet his shaggy black hair was clean and tied back with a piece of vine, and his air of dignity would not have been out of place in any fine house. His protruding bones vibrated with the rumbling of his voice. “Too rare is our delight in seeing new faces. Will you stop for a while?”

“No, no, no, no,” whispered Vroon, pawing at my arm. “We travel in haste. No stoppings.”

A smile radiated like sunlight from the man’s huge, pale eyes. “To hear a word from the world beyond our fastness would be a joy unmatched. So empty is our experience of travelers; I must think that you are someone of importance, someone who has much to share with us. If we could persuade you to share a dry seat, a morsel, and a sip, you might, in that brief time, provide us a feasting of words to last until the Bounded grows ancient.”

There was no danger here. I could snap this man like a twig.

“Of course, we’ll stay,” I said, dismissing Vroon’s urgent gesturing without a second thought. I’d not heard a Singlar so well-spoken, nor so cheerful and mannerly in his greeting. Besides, I was ravenously hungry, and even the prospect of a Singlar’s unvarying menu of tappa root had my stomach growling.

The man clapped his hands in delight. “My fastness awaits. If your companions wish to come, we will be crowded, but happy. Others will bring sustenance for them.”

I glanced at Vroon and he shook his head. “Out here we’ll stay waiting, if you insist on going inside, my - ”

“I insist.” I interrupted him before he could come out with some honorific that might make my host less at ease.

Paulo came inside with me, but Ob, Vroon, and Zanore stubbornly remained standing in the rain.

The Singlar’s dim and smoky shelter was the most barren I had seen, its rock-and-mud walls unrelieved by any decoration, its furnishings no more than two smooth rocks beside a tiny fire pit scraped in the center of the dirt floor. A small heap of dark, spongy squares sat to one side, their purpose revealed when the tall man set one in the fire pit and carefully blew a small ember to life underneath it. In northern Valleor, where wood was scarce, the villagers used such material cut from the ground to make their fires. The fire seemed hardly enough to warm the Singlar, much less dry out two such soggy guests.

“Tell us of the wide world, traveler,” said the man, easing his bent frame onto the ground across the fire from us. “We hunger to know of it.”

“You surely know more than I,” I said. “I’m new to your land and few speak as freely as you to teach me of it.”

He squinted pleasantly. “Hmmm… you’ve not the look of a new-birthed Singlar who wanders from the Edge. You have been real longer than any I’ve known, longer than any who hold fastness here. I see it in your bearing. I hear it in your words. You come from the center of the wide world to which we send the new-birthed on their way, never to see them return. Mayhap even farther than that.”

“Perhaps you could tell me of your life here and what you know of the wide world, then I can tell you whatever new I can.”

The man laughed and flushed a little. “I’ve given these Singlars so many guesses, told so many stories of what I imagine or surmise, I can hardly say what is fact and what is only my foolishness. You must catch me up where I err.”

While he emptied a small lump of tappa root from a woven bag, sliced it thin with a stone knife, and fried it in a chipped clay pot over his little fire, he told me of storms that lashed their valley, and earthquakes and lightnings from the Edge. His villagers welcomed the occasional wanderer who struggled in from the Edge naked and bewildered, and they tried to calm those who arrived frightened and ferocious. Often they had to fight off raving man-beasts who roamed the wilds and were known to kill Singlars and eat them. The Guardian had forbidden the rift dwellers to leave their valley, but they were determined to make the best of it until the king came to the Bounded to change everything.

His stories, though interesting and dramatic, fit with what I knew already. It was only when I asked him about his knowledge and theories of the “wide world” that I heard anything extraordinary.

“Have you not wondered about the Bounded?” he asked, leaning toward me, his eyes alight. “I sit before my fastness and watch the passing of the storms and feel the earth shaking under my feet; I see the new-birthed Singlars open their eyes to the world, and my head will not stop wondering.”

“And what have you concluded?”

The man almost whispered his answer, as if these wonders of his reason were too much to express. “Our land is alive. We feel the beating of her heart, and we experience the pain of her growth. She is bent in her aspect as are we, and it pains her as do our own misshapen parts. Our life here is hard. But I tell my people that the Bounded is only just learning of Singlars, and that we are hidden here in our valley where she cannot see us as yet. When she learns of our hardships, she will share her abundance and shepherd us through the storms.”

As he talked of his strange theories, I ate his fried tappa as if I’d not eaten in a week. I would have eaten five times as much if it had been available. Paulo left his share to me, saying it was clear I was far hungrier than he, and our host shook his head when I indicated he should take his own portion.

“What of the firestorms?” I said, picking the last crumbs from my hand and wiping my fingers on my breeches. “Do you have an idea about those?”

“I tell the Singlars that there must be a guardian beyond our lands who flogs the Bounded as our Guardian flogs Singlars, even if they do not understand their offense. We must help our land endure her punishment, just as we must ourselves endure.”

His gentle philosophy was sorely at odds with my view of the Guardian. I almost hated to tell the man that the only news of his “wide world” that I had to report was the judgments and activities of an iron-fisted despot. But the man listened so intently to my own discourse that I guessed he could have repeated my words more exactly than I could have re-created them. I mentioned nothing of the Singlars’ beliefs about me.

“And the Guardian believes our king will come from outside the Bounded?” he asked, his face hungry for my tale.

“It seems so. He sends searchers into lands beyond the Bounded - other worlds - to seek him out.”

The man wrinkled his brow, his first sign of disagreement. “No, no, that’s wrong! The king must be of the Bounded. He will speak for her, and mold her, and ease her suffering. How could he be from outside?”

“I agree with you,” I said. “It makes no sense.”

After we spent a few moments quietly pondering these mysteries, I took my leave, thanking him for his hospitality.

Outside the smoky hovel, the rain had eased into a warm drizzle. Pink sheet lightning flickered constantly overhead, illuminating the dismal settlement. Two Singlars, one a rheumy-eyed young woman wearing a sack-like covering, and the other a naked man with one foot like a tree stump, stood to one side waiting patiently for my host. Each of them carried a woven bag, just like the one from which my host had taken his tappa root.

“Abide a moment and I will serve you,” my host said to them. Then to me, “I must leave off my prattling and give these two their portion of tappa. They hunger much. Joyfully, I may share your words to fill out their stores.”

“Do you keep a common store of tappa then?” I asked. “I’ve not seen that custom among other Singlars.”

“It serves us best. Tappa grows only in one small part of our valley.” Not hard to understand, considering the steep, rocky walls, and the river of mud that comprised the valley floor. “To prevent disputes and to share equitably, we decided long ago to appoint one person to share out our stores. This waking, these two have come for their portion. Next waking, two more.”

He moved the stones from a small shelf in the steep embankment to reveal a root cellar, dug high enough up the wall that it wouldn’t flood when a capricious storm set the valley awash. With his stone knife, the man cut a sizable lump of dusty white from the huge knotted root in the little alcove. Then he allowed the woman to cut the lump in half, and the man to choose which piece was his. The two stuffed their portions, each roughly the size of a loaf of bread, into their bags, smiled and nodded at Paulo and me, and hurried away.

“Your people must trust you very much,” I said. “And it must be a great deal of trouble to feed everyone on every day.”

“Only two come each waking,” he said, flushing with embarrassment as he carefully replaced the rocks about the precious root cellar. “So it is no trouble. Farewell, kind traveler. I am honored by your speaking. Have care in your journey.”

Paulo and I started toward Vroon and the others, who stood waiting for us a hundred paces down the track. As the five of us trudged through the mud toward the end of the valley and the Edge, the gaunt Singlar began to sing. His song told of the suffering land and his people’s long waiting, the haunting tune echoing through the mists long after we lost sight of him.

I thought a great deal about the cheerful Singlar as we slogged down the road out of his muddy valley. It was easy to dismiss his fanciful imaginings. Yet, as we began feeling the slight tremors beneath our feet as we approached the Edge, I couldn’t completely rid myself of the image of a beating heart.

We hadn’t traveled far before Paulo pulled out a piece of flatbread to munch on, and my mind wandered onto the Singlar’s problem of feeding his people. If there were fifty towers in the cluster - fifty Singlars - and only two per day could claim a share of the tappa root, then the loaf-sized lump would have to last a person twenty-five days. No wonder then at their gaunt appearance. And then I thought back to the meal I had eaten… the thin slices of fried tappa, so much more appetizing than the boiled mush that could last for many days. The man had emptied his own woven bag for me - his month’s ration.

“Vroon!”

“Yes, my king?”

“What stores do we have?”

“Flatbread for us all to last a twolight, the hard sausage the Horseman Mighty favors though it is not what he is used to, five of the Guardian’s round fruits that you have named apple-things.”

“Each of you take one piece of flatbread for yourselves, none for me, then take the rest of our supplies back to the man we just visited.”

“But, great Master - ”

“Tell him it is our custom. I want him to have it.”

“But the Guardian - ”

“Blast the Guardian. He need never know if we don’t tell him. He can’t mean for those people to starve.” I would have to speak to the Guardian about the place. Even if the man kept all of our rations for himself, it wouldn’t hold him a month.

Vroon bowed, wearing his most long-suffering expression.

We proceeded through the increasingly rough country, along the path Zanore devised, slowly so Vroon could make his delivery and catch up with us.

“He seemed a right fellow,” said Paulo.

“A natural leader,” I said. “Probably the best mind we’ve run across in this place.”

After we had tramped through the gloom for another hour or so, Vroon rejoined us. “The Singlar delighted in your gift, great Master, praising you unstopping.”

“What did he do with it? Did he take it?”

“Five pieces of the flatbread he shared out among all his people, each taking a portion. Himself, too. The rest he put in the common store - ”

With an ear-splitting roar, a plume of steam shot skyward not fifty paces in front of us. We dodged sharply left to avoid a shower of glowing rock shards. Soon afterward the wind came up, a frigid gale, blowing right in our faces, even when we had to reverse our course again to skirt a bubbling pit of stinking yellow mud. I had no more time to think about the people of the rift.

“How long until we reach the Edge?” I shouted to Ob over the roar of the wind. We’d just made a third hour-long detour, this time in order to circumvent a bottomless crevasse. The earth groaned all around us.

“Long,” said Ob in the nuance of speech that I’d learned meant, “a very much longer period of time than you possibly could imagine.”

Even that would have been all right, if I hadn’t begun feeling so wretched. At first it was merely dizziness. But then waves of hot and cold that had no relation to the character of the wind left me variously sweating and shivering. My stomach tried turning inside out. I blamed the evil-smelling gasses from the sinkholes and steam vents, but no one else seemed at all affected.

Eventually, knees wobbling and head spinning, I had to stop and lean against a massive boulder that seemed a bit more stable than the heaving earth, forcing myself to hold on to the generous Singlar’s meal. I didn’t think my malady had anything to do with my humiliation at so callously gobbling up a starving man’s last provision. Before long, I could think of nothing but a warm dry bed and a lifetime of sleep. It had been hours since the others had eaten their flatbread, and I didn’t want to see them among the starving either. “Let’s go back,” I said. “I still intend to visit the Edge, but I guess I’ll just have to wait.”

For the rest of the journey back to the Tower City, sickness and exhaustion muddled my head. I kept hearing the faint echoes of the starving Singlar’s song of joy drifting through the stormy ever-night, soaking through my soggy clothes and into my skin and bones right along with the dismal rain.

Wait I did, and it drove me to distraction. I’d not come to the Bounded for lessons in geography or economics, no matter how odd or interesting. I had certainly not come to see that the Singlars were fed or to drag them out of their mud holes. I didn’t like it that the place felt so familiar or that the people took it for granted that I was their king.

The Guardian continued to ignore me. He even stopped coming to the table for meals. Maybe the damnable villain thought I’d go away if he paid me no attention. We had been in the Breach three weeks by my reckoning when I decided I could wait no longer.

“He’ll never take us to the Source willingly,” I said one day when Paulo and I were wandering aimlessly through the deserted streets of the Tower City. “And no one else seems to have any idea what it is or where to find it. We’ll just have to learn when he goes, and then follow him.”

“He goes somewhere every third evening before the lights go down,” said Paulo. “That’s the times he don’t come to the room to check on us, and he’s always fired up nasty the next morning.”

“I don’t think the Source will let him send me away. Otherwise we’d be on the road or dead by now.”

“What is this Source? Is it somebody?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out. So, he came sneaking around last night and the one before. That means he’ll go this evening. There’s an alcove on the third landing… ”

The winding stair of mottled red stone, polished and smoothed like marble, was the heart of the Blue Tower. Though the rooms one found beyond its landings had no relation to the outside shape of the tower, the staircase followed the exact curve of the spiral. The audience hall and the retiring room, the dining and reception rooms, were on the ground level. Paulo and I slept in guest apartments on the second level, and the Guardian had his private apartments on the third level. The storerooms were below ground, so we understood. The maintainers guarded them ferociously and would not allow us to go down the narrow stairs. All the other rooms on the ten levels of the tower, including a luxurious bedchamber on the fourth level and a rabbit warren of winding passages and large and small chambers that had no clear function, were reserved for the king.

Paulo and I slipped out of our room right after supper. The upper levels of the Blue Tower were quiet, as always. And we didn’t fear running into anyone. The servants seemed to disappear as soon as we were fed.

We crowded into an alcove near the third-level landing, counting on the fact that the Guardian would use the stair if he was going anywhere, and we’d be able to follow him. No more than an hour after we’d begun our watch from the cramped space behind a slender column that supported the spiral stair, we heard steps approaching from the direction of the Guardian’s quarters.

Surprisingly, the knob-jointed man started up the stair, not down. We crept after him, staying just close enough to keep his gray robe in view. He climbed all the way to the uppermost landing.

The yellowish wall at the head of the stair glowed softly of its own light, plain and undecorated save for a carved circle about the size of my full arm span. The Guardian seemed to be running his fingers slowly around the circle. Crouching low on the stair one turn of the spiral below the Guardian, we couldn’t see what else he might be doing or hear him saying any words. But after only a moment, the center of the circle dissolved into a curtain of deep shadows. And a moment after that, the Guardian stepped through and vanished, leaving us staring stupidly after him.

We hurried up the steps and examined the wall… now solid stone again, colored the pale golden yellow of ripe wheat. The devices carved on the stone circle at top, bottom, left, and right seemed quite ordinary: wheat sheaves, grapevines, flowers, and so forth. In the center of the circle was a small raised area about the size of my fist, having an oddly shaped hole in the center of it. Nothing told me how to invoke the enchantment.

But as I ran my fingers idly around the carved border, much as the Guardian had done, the center of the circle melted away again. “Well,” I said. “That was easy enough. Keep watch - ”

“Wait,” Paulo whispered, laying a hand on my arm.

Without bothering to discuss it, Paulo pushed past me and stepped into the opening.

No alarm rang out. No one shouted or cursed. But I was furious. Fool! Why did you do that? You should have let me examine the opening… to look for enchantments. Dangers. I was sorely tempted to charge after him straightaway. But, of course, that would risk compounding the blunder if he was going to fail, or wasting his courage and luck if he was going to succeed. So I didn’t follow him, but I listened until my ears hurt, and probed the emptiness and the silence with every sense. The Lord Parven would claim Paulo had done exactly the right thing. As my skills were potentially more useful, it was only right that the “expendable partner” lead the way into unknown dangers.

About the time I was ready to damn the risks and lay my hand on the carved circle yet again, Paulo stepped back through the wall as if he were walking out of the stable door. Even if we’d have been standing in pitch dark, I could have felt his grin. “It’s the damnedest! You won’t believe it. It’s safe enough, but watch the first step. It’s a rouser.”

First things first. I grabbed his head and pulled his ear close to my mouth. “Don’t you ever do that again.” Paulo was not expendable.

Then I ran my fingers around the circle and walked through the dark hole. The effect was quite the same as when Vroon and company transported us from place to place, as if the solid earth had dropped away beneath my feet, taking my stomach with it. No shapes were visible. Only a nauseating smear of gray, swirling and streaking by. And I heard nothing but a fast, dull throb in the ears that might have been the beating of my own heart.

Before I could force my stomach back where it belonged, my feet jolted onto solid ground, and the world came to a standstill. My eyes blinked open to a sight so alien to everything we’d experienced in the Bounded that I almost burst out laughing.

Paulo leaned over my shoulder, whispering. “The damnedest, right?”

We stood in a doorway that opened onto a graceful, curved gallery, its floor made of diamond-shaped tiles of red clay, its roof supported by a row of slender columns that were joined by a waist-high railing of carved stone. Beyond and below the gallery lay a garden, acres of trees and shrubs of a thousand varieties; vines with stems as thick as my arm looped about the columns and railing; flowers of colors beyond my ability to count them. Bounding the garden on every side were sheer cliffs of varying height. Our perch was embedded halfway up one of them. To our right, maybe a quarter of the way around the roughly circular expanse, beyond the spot where the gallery ended in solid rock, water splashed down in a silver ribbon from the heights into a pool far below us, all of it sparkling in brilliant daylight. Not sunlight - the smell and taste and feel of the air told me we were not outdoors - but from some other fiery yellow source lost in the glare above us.

I stepped to the railing and hung over it, marveling. No storms. No black-and-purple sky. A pleasantly warm breeze, wafting a fine spray all the way from the waterfall, rustled the huge trees and stirred the scents of flowers and herbs. A cardinal, as deep a scarlet as King Evard’s banners, flicked by at my eye level, mocked by a crested jay perched in the highest branches of an oak.

Pressing a finger to his lips - wise in the echoing vastness - Paulo gestured toward the pool and the falls. He led me quickly down a flight of narrow stone steps, and onto a well-worn path through the garden. We hurried past masses of pink and violet flowers, between rose bushes taller than my head and covered with red, pink, and white blooms, past fragrant patches crowded with herbs, and rocky mounds, their niches and crevices home to a hundred varieties of low-growing, thick-leaved greenery dotted with tiny, star like flowers of yellow and red. The path led us around the pool past the base of the falls, a pool which must have drained directly into the earth below, for its only visible outlets were a dozen threadlike runnels that spread out through the garden.

Just past the pool, we entered a stand of massive maple, birch, and hemlock trees, the undergrowth thick with hobblebush and shiny-leaved laurel. On the far side of this clump of forest, the path ended at a rounded hole in the pale yellow stone of the cliff wall.

Motioning for silence, Paulo flattened his back to the rocks and peered around the corner into the cave. After a moment, he signaled me to follow him. I crept around the corner and into the heart of a jewel.

The modestly proportioned cave, perhaps twice my height and similar in width, was lined with amethyst. The light of two small torches set into sconces near the cave mouth bounced and glittered from the crystal walls and ceiling. As we slipped deeper into the cave, past more torches, the rush of the nearby falls was muffled. Soon we heard only a trickling of water and two voices, both ahead of us.

“… need not fear. No murder will be done in the Gray Towers. Set watchers about them to prevent any attack.”

The speaker, whose soft voice sounded neither male nor female, was nowhere to be seen. Only the Guardian was visible in the glittering purple light, standing beside a niche in the back wall of the cave, his head bowed. Inside the niche was a stone basin worn in the rock. I could not see the source of the water, but it overflowed the basin, dribbling down the rock wall onto the cave floor.

“I rejoice at your saying, O mighty Source of Wisdom. Next must I seek answer to a new heresy sprung up among the Singlars. Two of them, one male, one female, have petitioned to be together in one fastness. I have punished them for their crime. I beg knowledge of how I am to halt such villainy before others take it upon themselves to ask the same.” His voice cracked and quivered with emotion.

“Do not grieve, Guardian. It matters not how the Singlars arrange themselves. Until the king takes his place, the Singlars will not be other than they are,” said the speaker. “The king will bring an end to the old ways and order the Bounded as he sees fit.”

“I knew I was right.”

“Tell me, Guardian, has the king not yet found his way to us?”

“No, mighty Source of Wisdom. Our seekers have failed. I worry that he may have been killed by the beasts of the Edge or by a foolish Singlar. We must constantly defend ourselves and you, Source of Wisdom. I try to be vigilant, to send away those that have no business here and punish those who do evil. You have said I may punish those who threaten your safety, have you not?”

“Heed my words. Welcome all newcomers; greet them and keep them close until you understand their origins and purposes. Protect the root of the Bounded, yes, but have care with your judgments. You are forbidden to dismiss or banish or slay any being who might, in any imagining, be our king. You will rue the day your hand harms our king.”

“Truly I follow your teaching. But if I should discover interlopers, disgusting, foolish, insolent strangers who are clearly not our king… impostors… scoundrels…?”

“Do with them as seems right to secure the Bounded. My only concern is to draw the king to us and keep him safe.”

“As you say, O mighty Source, so shall I do your will.”

“Though our king is young, Guardian, just out of boyhood, he will save his people from the storms of fire so that never again will they fear the breaking of the world - ”

“I will watch for him, great Source.”

“ - and his hand can shape the destiny of all bounded worlds, for his strength is unbending. You must teach the Singlars to watch for him, too: The color of fire shines in his hair, and his hands and heart bear scars of bitterness that time can soothe but not erase.”

“Our king has not come, O Source of Power. But when the glorious time is upon us, I will bring him here.” The man’s voice had sunk almost to a whisper.

“You have done good service, Guardian. Wear your burdens with honor, for your time as steward draws to a close. Seek the king once more in the bounded worlds. Though he no longer dreams of us, the moon-doors remain open for your seekers to pass. Thus I am sure that our king lives and is not changed. I hunger for the fulfillment of my prophecies.”

The Guardian’s fingers danced on the rim of the stone basin. His tongue danced over his wide lips. “Good Source of Wisdom, I struggle to maintain all as you have said, but the battle is wearing, and I fear I am too weak to fulfill your commands. If I could but taste of the spring… one sip… ”

“O, Guardian, the spring is not for you. Its power would destroy you. Rejoice in your faithful service, and yearn not for that which can never be yours. You must not fail.”

Paulo tugged at my arm as the Guardian hurriedly dipped his hands in the water and poured it over his head, so that the splattering droplets glimmered like a shower of gems in the jeweled light. “Of course, Source of Power. As you say. It’s not my place - not mine… ” His jaws ground as he spoke, and his hands that had touched the water so lovingly curled into shaking fists.

Time to go. The cave provided no place to hide. We slipped out of the cave and dived into the laurel thicket just as we heard the Guardian’s footsteps clattering on the stone floor of the cave.

The Guardian hurried out of the opening, muttering. “… but it will never be his either. Young. Yes, far too young. He could never control the Singlars. It would be chaos all over again. They just don’t know… don’t remember. I’ll not be unreal again. Never.”

The hurrying footsteps crunched the gravel path past us. Paulo urged me to follow as soon as the knob-jointed man was out of sight. Lagging behind risked the doorway being closed or locked before we got through it.

Nevertheless I held back. “I need to question the Source myself. This might be my only chance.”

“I was afraid you’d say that. That voice… this place… there’s something not right here. Thought maybe you’d feel it, too, and want to consider it a bit before you tried anything.”

Our instincts were usually quite similar, but I’d felt nothing of the kind. The voice of the Source had resonated deep in my bones, warm and comfortable and right. Strange as it all was, everything about the garden and the cave, indeed everything about the Bounded, seemed very natural, as if I were turning the pages of a favorite book long unread. Perhaps I couldn’t remember what occurred on the next page, but it all unfolded just as expected as I read the familiar words. I didn’t question that such a place as this garden could thrive in a sunless world. And it seemed right and reasonable that the Edge of the world moved outward, and that the Singlars’ towers grew and changed. Though I didn’t know its cause, I’d known what had to be done to stop the firestorm. From the moment I had stood on the windy precipice and surmised that this place somehow existed in the Breach between the worlds, I had gaped and wondered at its marvels. But I didn’t think the Bounded held anything that would really surprise me, which, of course, surprised me very much.

“I’m going back inside,” I said.

Paulo sighed. “I’ll watch then. Best be quick.”

I nodded and stepped out of the laurel thicket, only to have something large and fast and heavy slam into my head. As the darkness closed in, I caught a hazy glimpse of a knobby cheekbone and grinning yellow teeth.