The Soul Weaver (25 page)

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 overlarge 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 torchlit 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.”