Rock was bone. Dust was flesh. Water was blood. Residues settled in multitudes, becoming layers, and upon those layers yet more, and on and on until a world was made, until all that death could hold up one' s feet where one stood, and rise to meet every step one took. A solid bed to lie on. So much for the world. Death holds us up. And then there were the breaths that filled, that made the air, the heaving assertions measuring the passing of time, like notches marking the arc of a life, of every life. How many of those breaths were last ones?
The final expellation of a beast, an insect, a plant, a human with film covering his or her fading eyes? And so how, how could one draw such air into the lungs? Knowing how filled with death it was, how saturated it was with failure and surrender?
Such air choked him, burned down his throat, tasting of the bitterest acid. Dissolving and devouring, until he was naught but… residue.
They were so young, his companions. There was no way they could understand the filth they walked on, walked in, walked through. And took into themselves, only to fling some of it back out again, now flavoured by their own sordid additions. And when they slept, each night, they were as empty things. While Heboric fought on against the knowledge that the world did not breathe, not any more. No, now, the world drowned.
And I drown with it. Here in this cursed wasteland. In the sand and heat and dust. I am drowning. Every night. Drowning.
What could Treach give him? This savage god with its overwhelming hungers, desires, needs. Its mindless ferocity, as if it could pull back and reclaim every breath it drew into its bestial lungs, and so defy the world, the ageing world and its deluge of death. He was wrongly chosen, so every ghost told him, perhaps not in words, but in their constant crowding him, rising up, overwhelming him with their silent, accusatory regard.
And there was more. The whisperings in his dreams, voices emerging from a sea of jade, beseeching. He was the stranger who had come among them; he had done what none other had done: he had reached through the green prison. And they prayed to him, begging for his return. Why?
What did they want?
No, he did not want answers to such questions. He would return this cursed gift of jade, this alien power. He would cast it back into the void and be done with it.
Holding to that, clinging to that, was keeping him sane. If this torment of living could be called sane. Drowning, I am drowning, and yet… these damned feline gifts, this welter of senses, so sweet, so rich, I can feel them, seeking to seduce me. Back into this momentary world.
In the east the sun was clawing its way back into the sky, the edge of some vast iron blade, just pulled from the forge. He watched the red glow cutting the darkness, and wondered at this strange sense of imminence that so stilled the dawn air.
A groan from the bundle of blankets where Scillara slept, then: 'So much for the blissful poison.'
Heboric flinched, then drew a deep breath, released a slow sigh. '
Which blissful poison would that be, Scillara?'
Another groan, as she worked her way into a sitting position. 'I ache, old man. My back, my hips, everywhere. And I get no sleep – no position is comfortable and I have to pee all the time. This, this is awful. Gods, why do women do it? Again and again and again – are they all mad?'
'You'd know better than I,' Heboric said. 'But I tell you, men are no less inexplicable. In what they think. In what they do.'
'The sooner I get this beast out the better,' she said, hands on her swollen belly. 'Look at me, I'm sagging. Everywhere. Sagging.'
The others had woken, Felisin staring wide-eyed at Scillara – with the discovery that the older woman was pregnant, there had been a time of worship for young Felisin. It seemed that the disillusionment had begun. Cutter had thrown back his blankets and was already resurrecting last night's fire. The demon, Greyfrog, was nowhere to be seen. Off hunting, Heboric supposed.
'Your hands,' Scillara noted, 'are looking particularly green this morning, old man.'
He did not bother confirming this observation. He could feel that alien pressure well enough. 'Naught but ghosts,' he said, 'the ones from beyond the veil, from the very depths of the Abyss. Oh how they cry out. I was blind once. Would that I were now deaf.'
They looked at him strangely, as they often did after he'd spoken.
Truths. His truths, the ones they couldn't see, nor understand. It didn't matter. He knew what he knew. 'There is a vast dead city awaiting us this day,' he said. 'Its residents were slain. All of them. By Icarium, long ago. There was a sister city to the north – when they heard what had happened, they journeyed here to see for themselves. And then, my young companions, they chose to bury E' napatha N'apur. The entire city. They buried it intact. Thousands of years have passed, and now the winds and rains have rotted away that solid face. Now, the old truths are revealed once more.'