Driftwood Page 8

  Grumbling, Tolyat helped. The sack was shaped like a bottle with a narrow neck; enormous as it was, he didn’t trust the flimsy fabric to hold anything. But the weight was negligible, even with the furnace, and it seemed to make Last feel better.

  Once the sack was in place, Tolyat turned around—and realized there was silence. The entire crowd was watching in breathless anticipation. They packed the narrow streets of the adjacent Shreds, peering out of windows and from rooftops of abandoned buildings, in every world-fragment but the even smaller ones that lay Crushward. And judging by their expressions, they wanted a speech.

  He’d been too busy with calculations and the gathering of supplies to plan any kind of speech. “Um,” Tolyat said, scratching his earhole again. It was Last’s original question all over again, with him feeling like he ought to have something grand to say in response.

  “I’m going to go make a map of Driftwood,” he said. “As detailed as I can. Maybe you think that’s a waste of time, and maybe you’re right. But I’m going to do it anyway. So wish me luck—pray I don’t die— and when I get back to the ground, I’ll tell you what I saw.”

  And with that sorry attempt behind him, he turned and climbed into the basket.

  Last was already inside. The thing wasn’t very big; Tolyat could span it with his arms, and that damned sack and furnace took up most of the available space. The rest held his tools, the paper and ink and measuring devices he would use to draw his map. He had to root around beneath all that equipment and fabric to find the shauein stones set into the floor of woven Kyeyi fiber, mounted in rotating brackets.

  “Ready?” he asked Last.

  The guide still had that look, terror or hilarity. But whichever it was, it brought his black eyes alive. “Let’s see what this place looks like from above.”

  On a counted signal, they each flipped one shauein stone, on opposite sides of the circular basket. This was part of why Tolyat wanted Last; he had to activate two pairs of stones at once, or the basket risked unbalancing, tipping him out onto the ground. With the repelling faces toward each other, the stones pushed away from their mates below, and the basket began to rise.

  Only a little, and slowly. Which was fine by Tolyat. He had no desire to go shooting uncontrolled up into Driftwood’s sky. He and Last each moved a quarter-turn around the basket’s circumference; Tolyat dug beneath the slick fabric of the sack and found the next stone. Two more flipped, and the basket rose further. Now they were above the tallest buildings in the vicinity of the Crush, but glancing outside showed him various towers scattered around the huddled mass of the Shreds, and even something that looked like a broken bit of mountain. If he wanted to see the whole of Driftwood, they would have to go higher still.

  Two more stones, and then two more. Eight pairs of shauein stones, pushing the basket into the sky, Tolyat’s heart beating faster with every turn. He cast another glance through a gap in the woven side, frowning, trying to think. This was where his calculations became uncertain, and maybe the weight of that furnace was throwing them off. “Again,” he said, and together he and Last flipped a ninth and then a tenth pair.

  That should be high enough. Taking a deep breath, Tolyat stood up.

  Or tried. To his embarrassment, it took him several long moments to convince his knees they wanted to support him. The basket’s base was taut beneath his feet, but not rigid; he felt it give slightly as he shifted, and he was briefly paralyzed by the horrified certainty that the entire structure would rip apart beneath his weight and the pressure of the shauein stones. But finally, gripping the edge so hard it printed the weave into his unscaled palms, he stood.

  And saw Driftwood.

  The immensity of it knocked the breath from his lungs. Towers, plazas, haphazard housing blocks held up only by their neighbors. Water, glittering unexpectedly here and there among the structures. Clouds and fog and an irregular stretch of air filled with lightning. Lights of a hundred different colors, some coming from things that must be suns and moons and stars, others from no apparent source, because the celestial bodies from which they emanated were visible only from the ground to which they belonged.

  His gaze swept across the collage of realities, from the mostly urban patchwork of the Shreds, through the Ring and outward to the Edge, where the newly Drifted worlds were large enough to still have mountains and forests, deserts and seas. Their details faded, his eye not sharp enough to make them out, and then beyond those lands. . . .

  The dark, featureless expanse of the Mist. Out of which worlds came, convulsing in the throes of their doom, to finish dying in Driftwood.

  Next to him, Last breathed a few soft words that might have been a prayer, or a curse.

  Tolyat sucked in a shuddering gasp of air. Fun—he’d thought this would be fun. To fly in the air, like the enormous bats that had died out of his world when he was a child, like he’d always dreamed of doing. When he’d thought about what he would see, he thought in terms of maps: lines and images on paper, their labels to be gathered later, from Last and other guides.

  He hadn’t understood that he would see Driftwood. From the grey, empty sea of the Mist to the Crush itself.

  As if drawn by a magnet, his gaze went down.

  His heart gave a single, lurching thud when he looked at the ground; he couldn’t tell how much of it was for the expanse of empty air below his feet, and how much for the Crush. From here, it looked like hardly anything: a tight knot of wreckage, everything ground too small to stand out at this distance. But he was staring straight into its heart, and this was it: this was where worlds died, gasping their last amid dust and broken trash.

  Such a little space, to hold such terrible power.

  Or maybe it had no power at all. He’d always thought of the Crush as some kind of vortex, sucking things in and grinding them up. Now, flying high above the motley face of Driftwood, he saw it differently: saw the Mist, vomiting out pieces of worlds, which scraped and pushed against one another, forcing their neighbors inward, like a millstone crushing grain. We destroy each other, Tolyat thought, and for a moment he stopped breathing again.

  What restored air to his lungs was the sense that neither image was true. Or maybe both were. Driftwood wasn’t simple, and it didn’t accept simple explanations. It held whole universes of contradiction within its bounds, and maybe this was one more, that the destructive force came from both directions and from neither. Whatever brought or sent worlds to this purgatorial end, it wasn’t the Crush, and it wasn’t the Mist, and it wasn’t the people caught in between.

  But when Tolyat looked down again, he found that the Crush no longer frightened him. He took several slow breaths, then turned to face Last.

  The guide was stone-still, his face completely unreadable. Even his eyebrows gave nothing away. Water glimmered upon his high cheekbones, traced the edge of his jaw; Tolyat had seen a similar thing among other races, and with most of them it signaled great emotion. Grief, or joy, or fear: tears seemed very contradictory things. He couldn’t tell what they meant now. But Last, sensing Tolyat’s gaze upon him, turned his head and answered with a small, oddly serene smile.

  “I’ve lived a damn long time,” he said, “and seen more of Driftwood than most . . . but I’ve never seen this. Thank you.”

  It was as if the shauein stones had lifted some great weight from his spirit. Tolyat felt it, too: up here, with all of Driftwood spread out below them, it was impossible to be dragged down by the mundanity of life. That weight might return with their descent . . . but for now, they were free.

  Tolyat nodded. And then, because the moment was too intense to bear any longer, he bent and picked up his paper.

  With a board underneath braced against the basket’s edge, he began to draw. Outlines first; his eye sought out the places where the air changed, or the architecture, or something else that heralded a boundary between worlds. Last identified the places he knew, and Tolyat marked the names with tiny, careful letters. An unending series of names
, many of them hard to spell with any of the writing systems he knew; he did his best, then moved on. Ik and Bhauein and Waterbend, the massive temple block of Jertin and the spiky columns of Sarantelku Ia, and then he reached a place where the buildings piled upon one another, an uneven mass of lumpy domes, and Last’s voice fell silent.

  Tolyat swallowed against the dryness in his throat. He should have brought something to drink; this work would take quite a while. And that was his mind, trying to distract itself from what it saw below.

  “Chara e Pretyi,” he said roughly, and wrote the name down with an unsteady hand.

  Last cleared his throat. “Tolyat—”

  He waved the man to silence. He didn’t want to hear any reassurances Last might offer; he had left his home behind years ago, and he didn’t regret the choice, however much the sight of it might pain his heart.

  But Last spoke again, more urgently. “Tolyat!”

  When he turned, Last flung one arm out, stabbing his finger through the air at something in the distance. Something at their level in the distance, flying toward them with speed.

  How much speed was hard to judge. At first Tolyat thought it a bird, not too far away. Then the creature grew larger, and it was still not close. By the time he began to get a sense of its real size, Last was already thrashing among the equipment in the bottom of the basket. “Where in the name of all that’s unholy did I put—”

  Tolyat opened his mouth to ask what he was looking for, but the words turned into a sudden and delighted laugh. “Last, look!”

  The creature was plummeting from the sky, the mad flapping of its wings doing no good whatsoever. Last, standing again, raked one hand through his black hair in a gesture of relief. “Wringe. Nothing that big can fly there. We’re . . .” His hand stopped. “Not safe.”

  Because a host of other shapes had risen into the air, back in the direction the creature had come from. They flew more cautiously, but with a clear aura of purpose, and they wove back and forth in a way that said they knew which Shreds to avoid. They passed Wringe to either side and kept coming.

  Last went back to digging and came up a moment later with a coiled thing like a whip made of jointed bone. He set his gaze on the nearest of the beasts, then snapped his arm outward. The whip uncoiled, and a burst of something starlike flew from the end to strike squarely in the chest of the creature.

  Which didn’t so much as miss a single wingbeat.

  This time Tolyat was the one to dive into the pile, looking for anything of use. “What are they? And where do they come from?”

  “Damned if I know!” Last growled above him. There was another fizzling crack of the whip, and a curse. “I told you, I don’t know all of Driftwood; they aren’t coming from anywhere in my territory. But this isn’t working. We’d better drop, and fast.” He turned to kneel, hands reaching for the nearest shauein stone, but before he could, Tolyat shot up again, clutching the furnace.

  Last’s black eyes went very wide. Laughter burst from him, and he took the furnace. “You realize this is crazy.”

  “I don’t care,” Tolyat said, and it was true. Last was right; they should drop back down, flee from the creatures, come back later with weapons that would do some good. But up here in the skies, he felt like the king of all Driftwood, and he was damned if he would let some beasties from another world chase him from his throne. “Will it work?”

  Last grinned—a thing Tolyat had never seen before—and now the light in his eyes was pure madness. “Let’s find out.”

  He whirled, pointing the furnace’s mouth toward the nearest creature, who was now very close. The device was an oddly shaped thing; Tolyat would never have taken it for a furnace if Last hadn’t called it by that name. Its squat, metal-sided body had no visible opening for fuel, only a projecting tube on one side that seemed to be an outlet. Last aimed this at the nearest beast, rotated the tube within its housing as far as it would go, and smacked the side with the heel of his hand.

  An enormous gout of flame leapt out, leaving a stripe burned into Tolyat’s vision. A discordant shriek raked his ears, and when he blinked the afterimage away, he saw the creature spiraling downward, trailing a cloud of smoke. Last shouted in triumph and aimed the furnace a second time.

  But the creatures had already proved themselves intelligent. There were four of them left, and they ranged themselves apart, ducking and weaving to approach the basket from different angles. Up close, they were truly immense, with bright green feathers and snouts full of wicked teeth. Last released another jet of flame, which singed the rear left wing of one creature; it snarled and veered off its path, but did not fall.

  Tolyat started hurling everything he thought he might not need. Measuring devices that had gone unused; they did no damage, but sometimes made the creatures dodge. Last shot a second one down, spitting curses in several different languages. Tolyat’s pen case; it missed the beast he aimed at, but in its fall it struck another near the corner of its eye. Last spun to try and flame that one, and narrowly avoided lighting the basket on fire. Then Tolyat grabbed the ropes that attached the sack to the basket, intending to rip them free and fling the cloth over one of the creatures, like a net.

  He fell before he could. Something slammed into the side of the basket, and then he wasn’t the only thing falling: everything, basket and all, dropped with him.

  His scream was torn away by the suddenly racing air. One of the creatures had knocked them off their axis, disrupting the connection between the shauein stones; the discs in the floor of the basket twisted, trying to maintain their orientation, and far below, the ones in the ground must be doing the same, but all it did was send the basket shooting off on a brief diagonal trajectory before it passed out of range. And then the fall began in earnest, with nothing more to stop it.

  Tolyat heard Last screaming in his ear. “Up! Up!” Of course up, that was the only solution to their current problem of down, but what in the name of every god was Tolyat supposed to do about it? Then he realized Last was shoving at him, trying to get at the fabric beneath his body. And Tolyat, on the principle that a slim chance was better than none, rolled clear and began to shove the sliding masses of fabric above his head.

  As soon as he found the mouth of the sack, Last slammed the furnace down in the center of the basket and began drumming on its sides with all the desperation suitable to his life depending on it. Fire shot out again, but he must have done something to the furnace, because it wasn’t the long jets of before; this was a smaller, steadier flame, though still hot enough to bake all the moisture from Tolyat’s scales.

  And the sack began to fill.

  The wind of their fall did half the work, inflating the sack like the seed of a geschen tree. It perhaps slowed them a little bit, but not much; Tolyat, shoving the fabric up as if that would help make this crazy scheme work, saw the houses and ruins of Driftwood coming terrifyingly close. But still the furnace burned, and the air grew ever warmer—and then, in a form of magic Tolyat had never seen before, the basket began to float.

  Last kept drumming, but more gently now, and after a few moments he stopped. With eerie grace, born aloft by a sack that now dwarfed the basket below, they drifted across the face of Driftwood.

  It took few moments longer for Tolyat to believe he wasn’t about to die. His legs no longer wanted to support him; he sank into a boneless heap, gasping. Last supported himself with arms draped along the basket’s edge, his black eyes wide, but soon his expression came to life once more, and he began laughing.

  Tolyat couldn’t help but join him. It wasn’t funny—it shouldn’t be funny. They’d nearly died. Or at least he had; who knew what it would have done to Last. But in the aftermath, he felt more alive than he ever had.

  Hauling himself up to his knees, Tolyat looked over the edge. They were much lower than before, low enough to see people in the streets and fields below, staring upward at the strange contraption floating overhead. Fields? They’d gone farther than he realized, out o
f the Shreds, into the Ring lands where there was still space to raise livestock and crops. He’d learned about such things—after all, he was a scholar—but never seen them with his own eyes. So this was where their food came from, bought for what little wealth the Shreds had left. The basket floated above the fields like a misshapen bird, riding the winds.

  If they kept going, they might fly all the way to the Mist.

  He turned and found his concern mirrored in Last’s eyes. The guide fiddled with smaller strings dangling from the sack, and soon they began to drop, more gently than the precipitous speed of before. None too soon; they were nearing a world boundary, and the weather on the other side looked bad.

  The basket came to rest in an open expanse of golden plants that looked very soft but poked uncomfortably through holes in the weave. Tolyat helped Last push at the sack as it deflated, so the fabric wouldn’t collapse on their heads. Then, with reluctance, he climbed over the edge and stood on solid ground once more.

  “Do you know where we are?” he asked.

  Last jumped over the edge, with a lithe energy that belied what they had just gone through, and looked around speculatively. “Maybe? I think these are wheat fields, and if I’m right, I know who buys their grain. We’ll get back home, don’t worry.”

  Morosely, Tolyat reached into the basket and pulled out the fallen, trampled piece of paper that held his map. The lines were mostly clear, but unfinished. He hadn’t done even a quarter of the work before they’d been chased from the sky.

  From behind him came an incomprehensible word. “Achricks.”

  It sounded like a sneeze. “What?”

  “Achricks,” Last said. He nodded, a smile growing across his face. “Projectiles aren’t a good idea—they’d fall on the heads of innocent passersby—but achricks shoot energy, and I don’t know of anything that can shrug them off. Though we should have a few other options, in case it’s like the star-whip. My fault, really, for only bringing one weapon; I honestly didn’t think anything in Driftwood could fly as high as you said we would go. Next time I’ll be better prepared.”