Wander headed South. She reached the road she had seen De follow. The Wild’s horizon scraped out before her. Many marshes and thicktrees spread out among it. A wing stood perched on a branch in the distance, tapping out a chiming call with its throat. The gurgling of water blustered nearby. The road was dug out and intermittently lined with caged and covered nodes of silver.
The monolith came into view, screaming out its warning.
DO NOT GO BEHIND THIS ROCK ALONE
DO NOT GO BEHIND THIS ROCK ALONE
DO NOT GO BEHIND THIS ROCK ALONE
It came and it went. She lifted the stronghoof onto her shoulders and ran into the country.
She ran over frozen glades, lakes and trees. Hills and horizons emerged and were surpassed. Her body burned with effort, and she grew hot enough that the around her and the snow could steam thick enough to form a tall drifting trail, one which broadcast her path like a combustion engine. The temperature was such that the stronghoof started to writhe and complain in her grip. It could do little else.
She could feel the Bell in the back of her mind again. The length of rope whose appearance she had taken coiled itself in the stronghoof’s saddlebags, keeping quiet.
Wander’s pace fell back to a pounding. The stronghoof brayed as the measure between each step decreased, going from a frantic tempering that rattled the trees to thunder that grew more distant by the moment. It became soft and silent as she stopped for good.
“Come out,” she said, “and tell me the shape of my doing.”
The Bell’s rope emerged from her bag. “You do as you are commanded,” she replied.
She set the stronghoof down. Before it stumbled off and collapsed, Wander thrust a hand into the satchel and tore out the Bell. It wriggled and snapped in her grip. “You feel another way to me,” she said. “What has this change put into you? You do not pry or pull. You do not chatter.”
She squeezed. “I knew another kind in the warmth. Now you are gone from my spot, and move around, and can be touched; what has this change put into you?”
“I am your Bell.”
“Why can I hear words unsaid?”
“I give them to you.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
Wander squeezed harder. “You hurt the Sixbraid.”
“You needed help,” the Bell replied. “I didn’t know what he would do.”
“I didn’t need help. You stood him up. What did you tell him?”
“That you needed help.”
Wander’s grip tightened again and did not fray or pressure the Bell’s shape, so she dropped it. It slithered up Wander’s body and whispered into her ear.
“We knew less in the Warmth,” The Bell said. “You shook more. You have moved. Nothing is still, joyous one.”
Wander’s brow shifted slightly. It levelled.
“I am,” The Warrior said.
She grabbed the Bell and stuffed her back in her bag. The stronghoof went back over her shoulders. They continued along the road, almost alone.
-
The Warrior walked on the road. The stronghoof cart her tools past bunched mounds of trees and continued in to the rounds. During the day, she could navigate by the stars. The road warped, curled, and disappeared often, but the stars did not.
She looked at Goal and drank from her skin, which spilled out grain over her lips and down her chin. When evening came, she set down her stronghoof, who grunted in exhaustion and collapsed. She thought about gathering sticks for a fire and then remembered she did not need it, and that she could walk a while further in the dark without Quiet Feet or his weary. She did that, and then she went up to the bough of a wingtree with the Wild, perched on a hill; it creaked and swayed in the midnight wind. Wings, stars, and mats of needled black rolled out to East and West before her. She was hungry, but didn’t care enough to hunt. She took off her gloves and smoked her pipe.
She thought about the Family. She remembered faces there, and ones from her youth. She looked at her hands, which were worn and full of cuts, and which had guided her to so many people. She rubbed them and closed her fingers.
A twig snapped somewhere in the woods below and she heard light chatter. She replaced her pipe and looked down, her sweatsight deriving a group of hot, shining lumps climbing past the trees. Each wore a long coat similar to the Laruns’ bryst. She stepped off the branch and descended.
The crowd of walkers moved when she dropped onto a man. Their talking ended and they scattered in silence, running and throwing themselves down among the snow and bushes and dips. The ones armed with shooters took up covered positions behind rocks and trunks while they shot low into the place where they had heard her fall. She caught the missiles and tossed them aside.
She looked at the one she had pinned. He had the clothing of a Goal, and their long hair. His coat, and that of his companions’, was a heavy, trailing coldover, whose consistency The Warrior realized was the same kind as Quiet Feet’s. Her victim gripped a shooter tight in his hand. His teeth grit and his brow furled as he recognized her hesigns.
The Warrior stepped off of him. He scrambled away and rejoined his friends, whose shapes, brought to shine by her sweatsight, levelled blades at her and shouted in the dark. The shooters shot again, and again she batted them away.
The Goals glared at her as she retreated. She turned to leave.
“Do not hit her!” a voice screamed. “Do not hit this one!”
She turned back, to see the Goal she had hit laying down his weapons. “This is the Dry Man of the River!” he said. “This is the one who wears signs! This is the one who wears two strange canes! This is the destroyer of everything outborn!”
The Goals approached her with measured eyes and steps, and the shooters lowered their weapons slowly. The host looked at her signs. She could hear them whisper.
“The Dry Man,” one gasped. “The Dry Man?”
“It’s her?” an old woman asked. “The bite, struck out the Unders?”
“She is a wall, bato,” a young Goalish woman said. “She has broken up one thousand offmen. She has brought out the Threeheads.”
“Don’t touch her. Does she have our words? Don’t touch her.”
“Wasn’t she by the Larun bunch?” another woman asked. “Breaking them apart? Why is she here?”
“This one is the gift-heavy Wall,” a man said, putting his face to her shoulderskin. “This one has put away the outness out of the Open. I was back there.” She pushed him away.
The Goal she had landed on stepped forward. “What is your name?” he asked. “Dry Man? By what call can we offer to you?”
She said nothing.
“Will you eat with us?” he asked. “We have food. We have food, now, and you have created it. We wish you would take it too.”
-
She did eat with them.
Their fires burned low as the stars turned and echoes of sunlight began to drift over the Eastern horizon. The world went from darkness and stars to shadow and blue. The Warrior leaned against a rock, taking chunks of meat from a spitted jumper, smoking, and watching the movers’ difference. Loudvoicer came over to her and sat down.
The Warrior offered her pipe. Loudvoicer brushed it away; he removed a flute of blue wood from his over, about the length and width of his forefinger, and set it on a log. Then he removed a pouch wrapped with thread, untied it, and took out a clump of the fraying dust which it had been filled with. He stuffed it in the end, put its tip in the fire, clocked his teeth over it and inhaled.
The Warrior rested against the rock. “I’ve seen that man before,” she said.
Loudvoicer looked for her gaze, and found it in one of the Movers sitting by a tree, talking with two others.
He coughed. “That is Howlscut,” Loudvoicer said. “He was born closer to the peaks.”
“He is an Under.”
“He knew that knot.”
“Why is he here?” The Warrior asked. “What has he become?”
Loudvoicer inhaled his dust and blew. “He left.” His brow bent softly. Sweet, acrid mist surrounded them. “Now we create him. And he is fixed to us.”
The Warrior looked away and draped an arm over her knee. “Where I come from,” the Warrior said, “Heartswater produces a knot that is unbreakable. It binds together. It tells about what you are.”
“The offmen have strange ways,” Loudvoicer said. “And their interests are strange also.”
The Warrior remained impassive. He puffed. “You do not know what you are?” he questsaid.
“I am born,” she said.
“Who creates you?”
The Warrior arched her brow.
“Who creates you?” he repeated.
“I cannot hear you.”
Loudvoicer rolled the pipe between his hands, pushing down on the end. “A catcher creates a shooter,” he said, “and shots. An ovener creates canes. The kind creates the kind underneath; that which is born heeds and rises. You will find these words in the rulersland.”
The Warrior looked over the fire. Loudvoicer looked into it. “I was created by a birthwoman,” he said. He puffed. “The ones who made me were cut apart with ropes. But that cannot release a heart from its creation. Nothing can do that. Maybe you need to find who has done this to you, and where it happened. Maybe that will show you your position, Dry-Man.”
“I know my position,” she replied.
He looked at her. “Then you know of your creator.”
She considered the fire then, and they didn’t speak after that.
-
The movers prepared their move in the darkness, before the sun rose. They picked up their hitters and priers and canes, and they collected branch bundles that they wrapped up in rope and tied to their backs. They rolled up their coverings.
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
The Warrior watched them from a distance, unhitching the stronghoof from a tree. Loudvoicer departed his group and crept up to her.
“We will move away from the path,” he said. “Finding it was not our aim. These woods are wandering. Where will you go?”
“To Herdetopp.”
While they spoke, some more movers hauled sacks over and attached them to the stronghoof, who whined. “What are you doing?” The Warrior asked.
“That is eating,” Loudvoicer said. “They hope you will take it. Some carcasses, stuffed with staysand. They have seen how much you eat. They want you to do it more.”
“I don’t need it,” The Warrior said. “You should take it for wherever you are going.”
Loudvoicer raised an eyebrow. “Where should we be going?” he asked. He splayed a hand out to the rounds. “We are in the rulersland. Don’t you see?”
The Warrior looked out into the mist. She looked all around. Nothing caught her eye.
“We hope you will be safe, Dry Man,” Loudvoicer said. “You have created all of us.”
He clasped his hands together and shook them at her. Then he and the porters rejoined their mass and they broke apart, fading into the trees until they were nothing but a mash of clickings and chatter somewhere on the edge of her ear. She picked up the stronghoof and went into the way the path had been, but it was not there; the night had covered it up with dirt and bushes. So she located herself with the stars and headed South.
-
They renavigated the forest. The Warrior travelled past a thin web of trees that the snow collided with and papered. A storm had struck them down, blowing them in half and turning their halves into manysplintered longwoods. In the night, a pack of howls rushed past her, galloping between trunks and branches in a fleet of glowing lights. A pair of them stopped to measure her at a distance, before they moved on.
She followed the contours of an upsurge, where scars of forest and soil had been turned up into a trio of steep longitudes that cut across the terrain. She found an opening there at the base of one, a dark crevice encrusted by veins of silver stone. Her sweatsight found a round, furred ball of heat in the blackness therein, curled up and breathing with a snarl. She laid down by its side.
When The Warrior awoke, she found that the sleeper had not moved at all. She departed the gap, going out to the morning winds where no star shined and the clouds held in a dash of night.
They came up on a frozen plain of water, where she began to feel The Bell spin and tumble. A large, tangled shrub stood along the banks of the lake. It padded its feet and snorted, and she saw it could be breathing. Hair tumbled down its sides in knotted bundles that something of it would use to keep its hot. Its legs stopped with hooves, in the way of a Goalish meatbearer. The water it studied had begun to thaw and show its bounty, but the thing did not bathe or drink. Its head grazed the tip of a nearby wingtree, and its bulk was enough to hold many men.
The Warrior laid down the stronghoof when it came into view and approached it. “What is it?” she asked the Bell.
She popped out from her bag and swam up The Warrior’s boot, winding up and around it. “It has words,” the Bell said. “It is not like other things.”
The Warrior brought out her blaith. “Can you cut it?” the Bell asked.
“We have cut bigger ones,” she said. “They were angrier.”
“We have,” the Bell said. “And it is not angry.”
She approached the meatbearer, which continued to gaze into the water. Her foot crunched up the snow, and it turned. Its eyes were large and brown.
A voice babbled at her, rising out from the skin of it. The Warrior did not recognize its sounds. It looked back and moaned, but did not threaten or attack her. She raised up her blaith and pressed the point of it to the meatbearer’s side.
The signs that had been scratched and beaten into the metal of her blade flicked and jumped and giggled as they grew closer to the object. Her hand shook as she sent it out, and a wave of gold coursed through her, as her parts recognized and fell into the lines of this encounter. There was something fine and right taking place about it. A sigh built somewhere in her gut.
It looked at her.
Her grip clenched and her nose flared. The Warrior’s hand shoved the weapon halfway into the bulk of the meatbearer. It let out no cry or scream. She withdrew halfway, and watched as her many urges dissolved into a sea of questions. She touched her forefinger to the blade. The signs glowed bright, and the creature splashed apart into a heap of liquid.
The Warrior went over to the water, which had thawed enough to reflect images. She stood where the meatbearer had and looked down. The rippling of the lake bubbled and turned her face into something she could not name.
-
They traversed the Wild.
The Warrior and the stronghoof lumbered into a section of the rounds filled with rusty blades and fields of black, charred trunks. The night was flush with stars that seemed much brighter than they had been, and the black between them was streaked with silver bolts. She watched clouds pass underneath, form fingers, reach across the sky and cover her in darkness.
She sat down in a brushless gap seated atop a rocky jut that looked over a crop of thicktrees. She fell on her back and began to hear thumping, the clattering of metal and chains, deep chatter, and shallow, mourning breath. She got up went to the stronghoof and put a hand beneath its jaw, causing it to hinge, its ears to lower, and its eyes to open.
She followed the sounds from her vantage, which bent and twist as they passed the wood. They stopped moving, and a fire began to burn in the rounds nearby, putting a licking sweep of light across the trees, which glistened with shadow.
The Warrior climbed down from the jut and went into the treetrops. She crept from branch to branch and clung to a limb where the smoke of a fire flew into her nose, and the stacks and the Laruns that had taken root were made plain. She unsheathed her shortblade and loosened her grip.
“What is her name?” a voice asked. Her grip clenched, and she looked closer.
Goals were sitting among the nivmen. The Warrior could see their bodies, how they had been bruised and unbrushed, put in links of metal and heavy coats that weighed them down at the neck. There were many children, who were split apart from the older ones and looked to be dead from exhaustion. The others she could see were in a pack, and every one of them had been gagged with grey ribbons.
The Laruns sat around reclining, smoking pipes, drinking milksit from pinkish jugs, and warming their hands over roaring fires while their kept silently in the darkness. The bryst-bodies gathered around the smoke most directly beneath her were held by, first, a tall Larun, who leaned his back against a metal sticker that he had planted in the ground; second, a short, clean shaven Larun, who sat beside a discarded shooter, a sack of missiles, and a drinking skin; and third, a heavyset Larun, who was wiping down the mirror-clear blade of his langniv.
This nivman, to whom the question had been directed, looked up at the sticker. “What?”
“The one you had,” the sticker said. “Have you got her name?”
“Why would I get that?”
“Sometimes,” the sticker said, “they want to know. Especially for this kind. They will want it when we reach the squares.”
“They do not have names.” The nivman poured a dark liquid on his rag and scrubbed it. “They will get ones then.”
The shooter drank from his skin, whose fabric was cut and fraying. He looked at the ground, and he did not watch or listen to the others next to him. He huddled and shivered in his bryst and his legs pulled closer to the fire as the cold wind poured in.
“They like it,” the sticker insisted. “We should do it. We should tell the kontor. That will get us all parts. They gather up the names, and stain their shape in sheets. Thereafter they are burned.”
“Why?”
He shook his head. “Perhaps these are names they do not like.”
“They are not names,” the nivman repeated.
The sticker leaned back against his weapon. “The Goals-” he said. “The words they speak are different. Ours is a firm-able kind. Perhaps this is how they learn their way. We find the names, put them out, and create a different one.”
“I do not need to burn a word to know my own,” the nivman said. The sound of wood cracking splintered out from the trees. The shooter’s head swiveled to the fire n curiosity, and then around, as the nivman continued. “I do not know how that would help.” He finished wiping off the blade and stuck it in a thick gray sleeve. “Why would they go that way?”
“Consider your metal,” the sticker said. “We must put into ones like ourselves. Ones with mouth and metal and shine. If they did not have it, we would not eat them so. Perhaps you cannot see it, friend. But I say the name could grab a hold of you. It has hands, in a way. They snatch your mouth; maybe they can snatch you too, and bring you closer. Bring you into words. If it were so, much that is wrong could be learned – and preferred.”
“It is not so. I have eyes. I can see that their hair is wrong. I can see that they are smaller, and do not end in the right way. They are feurkun, like you; they do not know what it is.” He sniffed. “My words are my producers. There is nothing that can take them.”
He threw a stick into the fire and leaned back. “All there is left to learn,” he said, “is how many of them we must eat.”
At that moment, the Wild reached in from the dark, placed a hand on his shoulder, and pulled him in.
The sticker and the shooter fell back into the dirt, gasping, shouting for aid, and scrambling for their weapons.
The fire crackled. It burned low, with grin and whistle as the blundering furor enveloped it. Wisps of snow washed onto its center. Wind rained over the flames, gasping and twisting their shape before it moved on. It was blocked up by others which were not things. They were thrown down and they were warm.
-
She put her hands to the nivmen.
She carried the stronghoof, and the length of her journey had begun to make its clattering, shifting baggage, along with its heavy head and hindquarters weigh on her in a burning way. With its burden she pressed into a section of dead forest, where tarred, fuzzing mats of trees that had not survived a fire flowed over hills and soaked the soil in their ashes.
She descended a spur where the chalky roots and weeds and brambles of the discarded brush were becoming unstuck of water, spitting up a mist that packed the country overhead and made the sun shining a hazy coin at the center of the sky, pissing light. The Warrior drifted on and off the road, slouching through boughs of chipping mud.
She could feel eyes around her. There were none, but she could feel a touch like that. She supposed that the air could take herself, and that she was making words by the footprints that she crushed in the ground. She wondered if it was like an eating, or if her heat was a kind of song that could speak. She heard a sharpwing call and saw the stronghoof’s head turn at her. When she looked at it, it returned its gaze to the brush.
A shadow pressed itself into the mist.
She could see it coming from a long way off, as she had before, but it was different this time. The frothing darkness was taller, and had a disk adorning its head. She placed the stronghoof on the ground, where it complained and nuzzled her. She tossed its lead aside and it collapsed onto the road.
For some time, she waited in consideration of the stranger. She thought long enough for the sun to move behind the tallest peak of a foreign mountain.
At last, she made the first step forward. The shape of the figure did not become any more clear as she approached, but words that surrounded and produced her crept in from the blanched smoke.
“What’s your name?”
She stopped.
“What’s your name?” again called Loudvoicer, wailing out from the mist. The shadow glowed.
She walked forward again.
“I want to grab your name,” Bigeyes called out to her. She kept walking.
“Who are you?” Sunmeasure called out to her. “From where do you come?” She kept walking.
“What is your name?” Bestplace called out to her. She walked.
“Who are you?”
“Have you got her name?”
“From where do you come?”
“Tell me your name.”
“Tjeni.”
“What is your home, feurkun?”
“Feurkun.”
“Ten-Six.”
“Nameless Tjeni.”
“What is your place?”
“Give me your name, Shamin.”
“Tell us why you’re here.”
“Say what you are“Say your name. Say it.”
“Say your name.”
“Say your name.”
“Say your name.”
“Can I know your name?” Key asked.
Her hand flashed through the smoke and snapped shut around the shadow’s throat. She slammed it down hard enough that the ground caved in, producing a bipedal frame in the snow and mud. Its back glowed with a white light that blew out and reflected off the snow. She put her short blade through the neck of it.
In their time together, The Warrior recognized the face as her own. Blue eyes stared up at her, along with rough and crooked features scarred and hashed apart by blades and fingers. Ripples shocked the skin of her double, and the hue of it shifted in pallor. Its hair thickened and spread apart and shed itself before it all regrew. Its body cinched and twisted around, joining with plates and metal braces that sprouted from her shape and moved into others. It had no definite design.
The light retreated. Without opening its mouth, the creature spoke in four languages, and fell apart in her hands. It dissolved into a puddle of liquid that thinned and escaped into the soil. Drops of it continued to drip through her fingers.
-
A spot just past a wood-cluttered river, where water slurred its way past chipped and bitten logs and growths. In the valley was a place below a rock outcropping, littered with paths deep into the soil which emit a low buzzing. In the sky, a wispy blot of clarity showed out stars, who pushed in where the clouds had begun to dissipate.
The Warrior awoke here, rising up in the morning from her sleeping place. When she left her spot, stretching her battered joints, she didn’t bother belting on her armor.
She watered the stronghoof with a heavy bladder. It gulped and snuffled at the liquid and glanced up at her once or twice, weighted and moonish. She ran a finger under its chin and scratched it.
The Bell snaked out of the stronghoof’s saddlebags and shifted around the bushes by their space, which lay at the bottom of a flat road that climbed the hill adjacent to the water. Then she returned.
“Joyous one,” the Bell said.
She didn’t turn from the stronghoof. “What?”
“A weak thing is coming.”
The stronghoof choked and sneezed as it drank. “You must speak louder,” she said. “or into my ear.”
A weak thing is coming.”
She drew away the pouch and tied it up. She looked at the Bell.
“A weak thing is coming,” she repeated.
The Warrior went to the road and spied it out. On the horizon, a wriggling black spot had sprouted up around the forest decline, fronted by a seated figure.
The weak thing was atop a stonehoof, although The Warrior could not say that they were riding it. Her visitor was rocked and shang by its mount, letting it control the route and kicking up sweeping pillars of dust as rider and ride wrestled for control.
The Bell became excited. She swirled around The Warrior’s feet and up her legs and around her neck. “Isn’t it strange?” she asked.
The figure continued to approach. He was small, and his hair was black. A white over hung around his shoulders and crested through the wind. It spoke of him.