Chapter 5971: Those Who Hunt

The currents of THE Infinite Carcosa ran on through the dark in long, slow blue rivers that bent back on themselves and crossed and parted again, and on one of them, frozen into a broad shelf of pale ice, the Iron Psalm had made a small camp. There was no wood to burn, so they burned a little white star-fire in a ring of stones instead, and it gave off no smoke and very little warmth.

Brunhild sat on the far side of it with a whetstone, running it along a blade that did not need sharpening, because the sound of it was better than the silence. Aethon sat apart at the edge of the shelf with his knees drawn up, looking out at the dark, and said almost nothing.

Ione Kalliste sat closest to the fire with her left arm laid across her knees. From her fingertips to her elbow it was grey glass, smooth and dull and cold, the mark the Stillness had left on her when it took four of the Legion’s lotuses, and in the Carcosa’s chill it ached all the way up into her shoulder. She held it near the white flame now and then, though she knew the flame could not warm it.

They had searched the Carcosa for a long while. They had followed currents that ran away into nothing and come back to where they began, crossed frozen shelves that thawed and drifted behind them, chased a faint grey light that was always just beyond the next bend and never any closer. The image of the Dreamer they carried had grown faint with handlng, and none of them said aloud what all of them were thinking, which was that they might wander here endlessly.

Ione had joined the Shepherd’s Legion when she was very young and very nearly dead. She had served him ever since. She was grateful to him all the way down, and she was afraid of him in exactly the same measure.

When the order came to hunt the Dreamer, she had not asked why. When the Iron Psalm was assigned to work with her, broken and bitter after what the Dreamer had done to them, she had not asked how. She only held her glass arm near the fire, and looked at the dark, and waited to be told what to do next.

What came next came out of the sky. Above the frozen shelf, the dark tore open along a long white line, and through it stepped a woman in burnt gold armor etched with the trails of falling stars, its plates still split down one side, with a detachment of Unfathomables and Half-Unfathomables in silent ranks behind her. Her eyes were black, with a single bright streak running down through each of them, and Ione knew that mark. Every soldier of the Legion knew it!

"Ione Kalliste," the woman said. She came down onto the ice without hurrying and stood across the fire from her. "I am Roxanna. The Shepherd sends me to help you finish this."

Ione rose. She was aware of her glass arm hanging at her side, and of the camp behind her, the dead fire and the useless whetstone and the man staring at the dark, and of how long they had been lost. She waited for the contempt. It did not come!

Roxanna’s black eyes went once to the grey glass of her arm and rested there for a moment, and then moved on to her face, and she said nothing about the arm at all.

"We have searched a long while to no avail," Ione said. "The currents of infinity fold. Everything here folds...well, infinitely."

"Then we stop following them," Roxanna said. She said it simply, without any pride.

She turned toward the dark beyond the edge of the shelf and lifted one hand, and her forearm, Ione saw, was cracked from wrist to elbow with fine white lines.

"THE Break That Goes All the Way Down," Roxanna said quietly, and struck the air.

HUUUM!

The cracks went out of her fist and into the Carcosa. They ran across the nearest current of infinity, white and fine and branching, and the current did not crumble or bend away; it simply came apart along the lines, and the dark that had been bent back behind it came apart too, layer after layer, until a long clean gap stood open through the Carcosa where no gap had been. Brunhild was on her feet with the whetstone forgotten in her hand. Aethon had turned from the edge of the shelf.

At the far end of the gap, faint and grey, there was light. It was the soft grey light of the Fallow, rising out of the dark, and beneath it, very far away, a stretch of something dark and gold that might have been soil.

The Fallow? The Fallow was here too?

"There," Roxanna said, and lowered her cracked hand. They crossed in good order, the detachment in front and the Iron Psalm behind, through the gap and on across the currents beyond it, and the nearer they came to the grey light, the stranger the Carcosa grew around them. The snow began to fall more thickly, and Ione caught a flake on her living palm and felt Narrative in it, faint and clean, melting into her skin.

The currents beneath them no longer tasted of cold and salt. They tasted of nothing at all but purity, and the dark itself seemed warmer, and fuller, and more alive than any dark had a right to be.

Then the grass began. It rose out of the frozen currents at the edges of the grey light, obsidian-gold stalks with stars caught in their tips, moving slowly in a wind that came from nowhere, and it spread away ahead of them for as far as any of them could see. The Unfathomables at the front of the detachment slowed. One of them put a hand to her chest with a look of alarm, and then another did the same, because each of them could feel their own Narrative leaning outward into the air, drinking from it without being asked, growing richer by the moment, and none of them had told it to.

A Half-Unfathomable in the third rank went down on one knee in the grass. He had not meant to; he looked down at his own knee in confusion, and his face went pale. Roxanna held up one hand, and the whole detachment stopped.

"What is this?" Brunhild said. Her voice was low. "What is this place?"

Roxanna stood very still at the edge of the starlit grass and let her eyes move slowly across it. She did not know about anything here, she knew only what she had been told, which was a name and a face and an order, and what she felt now was not what she had been told.

"This is a King’s work likely," she said at last. "Or something close to one. A being whose Narrative is far greater than the banner says, holding a region of existence as his own and making it into himself."

She looked down at the grass at her feet. "Or he has taken something. Something unfathomably Rare, maybe an Essara that remakes everything near it."

"Life," Brunhild said. "An Essara of Life. It would have to be."

"He was weak," Ione said slowly. She was looking at the grass too, at the stars caught in its tips. "When I first saw his face in the image, he was weak. Others said so too."

At the edge of the group, Aethon spoke for the first time since the camp. "He was never weak," he said, without looking at any of them.

He turned his head and looked across the grass toward the faint grey light. "He is still hiding. This is only what he lets you see."

The others were quiet. Roxanna studied Aethon for a long moment, and then she nodded once, and turned to the detachment. "Formation," she said. "No one sets a foot on that soil until I say so. Not one of you. If his Narrative can drink you without asking, then his ground can do worse."

She stepped a little apart from the others and sent word home. It went out of her along the thread the Shepherd had left in every one of his longest servants, plain and brief: the Dreamer was far more than reported, the region around him was unlike anything she had seen, and she did not yet know what he held. The answer came back almost at once, and it came as all his answers came, cold and quiet and complete.

|Proceed. Bring him down.|

Roxanna stood with the words in front of her for a while. She thought of the eight Essara on the platform of star-fire, and the Ichor lakes, and Castellan Vey’s colorless face. She thought of the people she had chosen, and who had chosen her, and of the cracks still running up her own arm. Then she closed the message and came back to the others.

Ione was waiting for her a little way from the ranks. She looked at Roxanna’s cracked forearm, and then at her own grey glass one, and asked the question quietly, so that no one else would hear it. "What did it cost you? The Essara."

Roxanna held up her arm and turned it so that the white cracks caught the starlight in the grass. "Everything costs," she said. "I would rather pay with this than with them."

Together, at the head of the ranks, they went on along the edge of the grass, keeping to the frozen currents and never once setting foot on the soil, until the currents climbed into a long ridge of ice and they came up over the top of it and stopped. Below them, a long way off, there was a farm. It was small, perhaps a mile across, with black-gold soil and three dark rivers running through it, and a coop with snow on its walls, and a little house built of curved dark shell with round windows full of amber light. And on the porch of the house, in a straw hat, with a cup in his hand, a man was sitting very still and looking straight back at them across the snow.