Void Moon

They had always called it the moon. It hung like a window now, black on black — and something behind the glass was moving.

They came down to the witch’s abandoned camp — Ygva’s — an ordinary fire and open-sided platforms under an overhang, no sacred pyre among them, and made it their shelter. Sylvie was a ruin to look at: the chest hollow where the heart had been, thin channels of thick black fluid run where blood should, and she did not bleed so much as adapt to the lack. Draz caught a faint starchy scent off her and said nothing of it. While she rested the others went through the witch’s stores — dried berries, powders, cut branches, the makings of a craft but no map and no word set down; twenty-three small carved Pictogram Stones, four of them laid out on a flat rock; potions of health and of stamina, divided among them; a sealed rune-marked box with no keyhole; a trunk of spare clothes and a giantess’s ceremonial dress; and a Small Iron Lockbox that Heyou pocketed.

Two shadowed shapes came at Heyou out of the dark, and a tick the size of an armadillo woke Jamal with its mouth already sunk in his chest. Sylvie cast for the first time since the peak — a foul wind that broke over the tick, the new magic answering where the old would not. Jamal cracked its shell from where he lay; Draz put an arrow through a shadow and it faded, arrow and all; Heyou drank a potion, then loosed a storm of conjured blades that tore the shadows to smoke, and wrenched the tick off Jamal with a shove of force and sent it over the cliff-edge into a silence that gave back no sound of landing. Then they rested, and were let rest.

When it was done Sylvie set her hands to Heyou’s damaged leg to remake it, and nothing came — no power answered her. That kind of giving had gone out of her with the light; she could no longer mend by lending warmth, only by taking it. She turned to the sealed box instead, and knew the runes cut on it — the moon-mark that was Ygva’s own — and opened it. Inside lay a thin circlet, a necklace of layered glassy stones, and a heavy signet ring, each with some power sleeping in it. Heyou half-knew the ring’s making and not the rest. Sylvie put the necklace on.

Heyou had a thread to pull. Borek at Ulmira’s Step still wanted Askavir eggs, and the Askavir had carried them once; follow the bird, he said, and it might lead to the witch, and the witch to Sylvie’s heart. Sylvie would not. She had watched enough of them fall for one climb, and named the quest for the Blessed Branch finished, the tree that bore them gone to ash. Draz spoke of the soul-blighted — how his people put down or drove out the dead that came back wrong — and marked, carefully, that Sylvie had come back keeping herself, which the wrong dead did not. They turned southwest along the crest, away from Ulmira’s Step and from her own Stoneheart Peaks.

An avalanche came down on them near the snowline — real snow, no witch’s doing — and they roped together and braced, and came out packed into a tunnel of it, shaken and no worse. Draz’s compass had stopped keeping north; it would settle only when he held it so that north pointed straight up into the sky, as though the true pole lay somewhere off the world. They climbed a pitched face on old set pitons, Draz running the ropes ahead, Jamal leaping the gaps, and Sylvie came last and nearly went off the rock when two great eagle-like birds swept close — not the Askavir, only birds — before she caught herself. On the high road stood pictographs a mile apart, each some thirty feet of carved stone, and Heyou saw their order was the order of the four stones on the witch’s flat rock. A moon-sign was cut into the way some miles on, as if to denote the absence of a door beneath.

They camped down in the grooves of a glyph to hide the fire, Sylvie keeping the hollow in her chest covered. She turned three cards for herself: the Magician behind her, the Four of Coins reversed over her now, and ahead the Eight of Cups — a walking-away, an abandonment — and asked the cards, and the dark, whether she was dead, and whether anything at all came after. On Draz’s watch a sacred pyre burned far off on another peak, and something lowed across the slopes, low and grieving, and stopped, and came again. Going toward it in the morning they found a simiah on a ledge below the bridges, soul-blighted and feral, thrashing and past all reaching; Draz’s signs did not calm it, and with Heyou steadying him he gave it the arrow, and the canyon went quiet.

By afternoon they came to Verrow's Span, a village of some thirty souls hung off the cliffs on rope and ladder, mostly simiah, with a pyre of its own. Akiri and Janzi took Draz for kin and called him cousin, and there was wyrm-steak off a mountain serpent and liquor frozen sharp, and talk of the roads — east to Tern's Watch, a monastery to the northwest, and far off west the ancient Amber Reach. A human tutor lived among them, Tamber, a Celsian who taught the children; she could put no name to the necklace or the box, and asked whether they had been to the Celsian Athenaeum. She showed them a great map, and on it the whole of the world they knew was a corner, and the rest ran west past knowing. In her books Heyou found the word vessels, and shrines drawn to Brathis and to Tlellic that he had seen carved before, and a mandala that seized his limbs and would not free them until Tamber closed the book. That night he and Jamal watched the sky. They had always called it the moon. It hung like a window now, black on black, and something behind the glass was moving. Sylvie’s heart was still in a witch’s keeping, and she had no answer yet to what she was.