Alium, page 60
Thereon the grade lessened, and the going grew easier, such that they could marvel at the ancient pit in the world through which they wandered. Huge, broken slabs leaned together, forming narrow paths down the sheer walls, and some of these great plates of rock had split off entirely and fallen inward like long ramps, which were the easiest to traverse.
With each small span the boundaries of Zenidow raced outward as its sheer mass was a horizon all its own, so that by midday the charged blue sky was like one hemisphere of Altum now behind them, for a new world of utterly featureless silver-white curved in like vastness over their heads. After many hours clambering down through a cracked, rocky spill, they found a wide slab under the plane of alien metal, in a sturdy enough space for camp just as the dark of night truly coalesced in the recognizable climes behind them. Still fifteen miles separated them from Zenidow, close as its mass appeared. It was all they could see ahead as they set out their belongings on this still quite exposed but broad ledge, the worst of the trip seemingly behind them. That night, no one found sleep, and all necks ached from gazing up without tire at the godly feature before them.
In the morning whatever enervation or soreness they might have felt was easily forgotten. Sand was wiped from eyes, and water was sipped hastily. Ogwold was first to begin the scramble down over the immense seethe of fused boulders that lay all about in huge mounds. The rock here was like the petrified crashing surf of a titanic wave, whose yawning verticality froze ever on the verge of collapse. Leaving the last of these tumbling crests by early noon, the company walked out down a stretch of stony, sloping ground, and here they reckoned with the massive abysses cut in the crust which veined out from the mountain’s base.
It seemed at first that there was no way to traverse these stupefying gulfs, and the enormity of Zenidow so near seemed to remind them that what they sought was not to be found. But then Sylna cried out, and along her gaze the company saw a small silver apple, nestled atop a stack of circular plates of rock. Beside it, almost hidden in the shade of that little tower, a vast stone slab had been laid across the empty blackness of the chasm below. So they crossed carefully over this makeshift bridge left by Nubes, and from there were able to walk straight on towards the high silver dimension which was all they could perceive but for the ground beneath their feet.
*
So they came to the base of Zenidow. Immaculate and unyielding, it stretched beyond sight, a silver firmament domed round their craning necks. This near to it was a grand and immortal silence. The winds faltered, and were turned away; sunlight bent round its surface; the world was held at a distance from its face.
Ogwold was first to place his hand upon its substance, as unto the glassy water of an untroubled lake. Cool and soft, the almost frictionless continuum against his calloused fingers was nothing like the rock into which the entirety of the vast object seemed to bore. The soft rapping of his broad knuckles emitted a hollow, deep echo, like the tumbling of some small and wayward stone in the bowels of a cavern.
Sylna too touched the wall of Zenidow, a little more cautiously, sliding her hands along the perfect smoothness, though quickly she withdrew them and stood brooding. With a sigh, she leaned back against the cold blank plane, removing her hat and wiping the sweaty strands of brown hair out of her eyes. “And now, I have no idea what to do,” she said distantly.
Ogwold turned against the wall beside her, pressing his sun-burned shoulder into the chill metal. It was searing hot here in the crater, being the middle of the day. They would not be comfortably in Zenidow’s shadow for several more hours. With his back against the mountain, already he felt lighter, gazing out and up at the entire rising structure of the crater through which they’d descended, and high above its rocky rim over the outermost ragged greens of Pivwood; beyond the dazzling canopy reared up the tall snowy peaks of the nearest mountains, blinding in the sun, and he felt then that it might have been ages since Wygram had first flown him through their midst.
Sylna groaned. “I figured some new riddle awaited us here.”
Elts had placed her hands against the face of Zenidow soon after Ogwold had first touched it, and she had not yet taken them away. “This substance,” she said, enraptured. “It is unlike anything. And yet it reminds me so much of your little sphere, Ogwold.” Now she pushed sturdily against the silver, feeling the strength of the mountain.
“You’re right!” Ogwold looked around to see where the little orb had wandered off to, as in this latest stretch of their journey it had taken to going about on its own. Only in listening carefully for its drone did he spy it hovering like a little gleaming point of light beside Byron. The mercenary seemed deep in thought, arms tightly folded. But now he approached, striding up to the face of the mountain to join the others, and the sphere zooming along with him was soon snatched out of the air. Raising it between his forefinger and thumb, Ogwold held one massive grey eye up to its surface. “It certainly looks like the same sort of material,” he mused.
Suddenly, there was no surface at all to lean on; Ogwold, Sylna, and Elts fell straight back through a plane of cool, bright light, sprawling onto a metal floor precisely of the texture and quality of the mountain itself.
Byron stood still and impassive in the opening, one hand held out as if it had only just rested against the vanished surface formerly solid. Around his figure the wall of Zenidow seemed like silver curtains to have parted, admitting the company, for in all directions the unbroken medium persisted about that new-cloven archway. Below his feet the plane of subtle metal extended perpendicular to that eternal surface rising above and expanding to each side, so that it seemed he stood in another world—one of rock and sky and sun—framed like a picture upon an endless wall of one single immutable substance. From this tiny window unto Altum, he stepped into Zenidow.
The opening closed at once behind him, its noiseless, untraceable fusion severing the alpine wind and glaring sunlight of the outside world. He stood now in a narrow, curving hallway, running seemingly parallel to the crater rim without, and lit diffusely by its own softly luminous metal. Just as on the face of Zenidow, there were no features to the walls, ceiling, or floor, all equally silver and smooth. And just as the exterior bespoke eternal calm, so too was the inner space of the mountain divinely still; if not more so, for the air itself seemed without motion or temperature.
“Well this is surely no mountain. It’s a building!” Ogwold shouted laughing, sitting up to see the mercenary. “And Byron’s the key!”
“Well, perhaps,” Sylna muttered energetically, glancing over the man. “But then, how did Nubes get in? No, it must be something else.”
“Maybe he didn’t,” Ogwold mused, and they were all silent for a moment.
“I envisioned an opening,” Byron said evenly, crossing his arms. “Something the Xol taught me.”
“And so it is open,” Elts murmured, as if finishing her thought aloud. “Perhaps the material of Zenidow is mindful, or at least mouldable in the Fabric, like the elz trees. If you approach it as a closed system, you are excluded, but…”
She rose and moved across the enormous hallway, coming to the wall opposite their entrance. Here she placed her hands against the surface, and closed her eyes. Smoothly and silently, the metal plane rippled out from her influence. As Byron before her, she passed through the opening like the purple, white, and black core of the silver-petalled blossoming of some metal flower, and when the company had followed, those manifest fluid pieces cohered once more behind them, as if always the wall had been at rest, solid and inviolable.
The second hall was just as the first. Still, bright, and gleaming were the high smooth walls; nowhere did a shadow fall, for changeless light was in every span of its surfaces. The sphere came whizzing in loops, and hovered droning among them. Now all were faced with its astounding likeness to the whole of Zenidow’s composition, for its pale radiance and silver countenance seemed to have a perfect symmetry with the grand structure around, as if the sphere were a lone drop from the ocean of its mass.
Already Ogwold set his imagination to work upon the next inner wall. But even as he considered its admitting him—his eyes yet to close in thought—the implacable metal parted like silent curtains before them, yielding as that before it. “Ah!” said Ogwold. “Even I can fold the Fabric in this place!”
“I doubt that,” Sylna murmured. “It takes many long years of study to master even the simplest forms of folding. No, there is something woven into this place. It has already been sewn in such a way as to be opened by will alone… or is it our will in particular… Nubes’ will? What do we all have in common?”
Ogwold seemed unbothered by the witch’s condescension. “Then it makes sense that Byron was the first to figure it out. He thinks he can do anything.”
The mercenary shrugged, and walked through the opening.
In this way they intersected twenty more such immense concentric hallways, as if the company was a needle piercing and carrying the thread of their intent through many spacious layers of living fabric, each the same as that before it, the next gateway opening with greater and more natural suddenness as now they had all turned their minds together upon the object of their progress, such that in time they did not even pause, and their pace quickened as the continuously warping walls led them deeper into the heart of the strange silver world of still and changeless light. So long went on this process, and so similar were all of the spaces through which they passed, that only many portals since the change had begun did they realize that the slick floor was ramping slightly downward.
Ogwold was the first to notice the other new change in the endless halls, for his ears were most tuned to the language of the sphere; but this voice which he heard now was far greater. It was a timeless, bottomless drone which came from deep within the place. Only he could say—though all believed him—that this strange, fundamental music was of the same timbre as the sphere’s, but seemed to represent rather the substrate from which that simple hum was derived, a great medium, an endless field of ultimate sound from which one drop had once issued, now longing to at last return in final harmony. But all could agree that it was more grand and moving than any sound they had ever heard, for unlike the humming of the little orb, it became clear to them as he described it, and as each perceived its tone, it loudened still, as if its becoming was dependent upon their notice.
And then suddenly, one wall was not like the others. As its cousins, so too did it unfold at the intuition of the company’s mind, but beyond its blossoming no further hall awaited, and they were stopped at once before a terrifically massive space. The mindful rift unto its vastness unseamed to unseeable distances above and below the flatfooted company, for there was no floor or ceiling at all ahead. They stood on the precipice of an immense, cylindrical room, endless, it seemed, in all dimensions but for width, for they could at least describe the distance of the opposite wall, far off in the unchanging, beautiful light.
But it was less the enormous size of the space that enthralled them than it was the strange object hovering in its centre, tilted on its axis, slowly turning like a silver planet. It was a gigantic sphere, a thousand times in size to that of Ogwold’s. But just as its little likeness, it reflected nothing, and glowed with the same divine light that was everywhere throughout Zenidow, now even brighter, though it was not at all harsh to their eyes, for that luminance was strangely contained within the volume of it, seeming to go with it rather than emit from it. It was silver, and subtly white, and it seemed as if its surface, though homogeneous at first glance, swam and shifted like an ever-changing liquid. All of this fine detail was lucid to them even though the enormous orb was quite far from their reach, out in the abyssal light-depth of the great chamber.
Ogwold plucked his own sphere from the air—where it wheeled delightedly about—and brought it close to his eye, looking for the liquidity that he saw in the greater one, for surely now there was no debating whether the one was related to the other. But if the same ripples and tessellations were there, they were too fine to detect at this scale, and the eagerness of the little orb could not be contained for long study, for it slipped from his hand before he could tell much of anything, however, and smoothly soared out into oblivion. They all saw it, somehow, lastly interposed with the enormous sphere, a turning crescent somehow slightly darker, now flashing into the dissimilar. Then it was gone.
Ogwold looked at his hand. “That’s my quest over with then,” he said plainly.
Sylna smiled. “This great orb must be the Alium. But according to Nubes it is asleep, and we must wake it. He did not tell me much, but he did say that you and I were the only souls which could accomplish this task.” She stared unflinchingly out at the great orb. “As to how we are meant to do such a thing…”
Now Elts spoke. “Here is my suggestion. Just as with the doors, make a pathway with your mind.” She shut her blue eyes, coiled her tails in thought. The edge of the floor before them shivered, and forthwith a plane of bright silver shot and arced up and out into the void of radiance twinkling. On it went, noiseless and true, until it reached the great orb, where it paused, split, and circumnavigated the Alium in a wide, disc-shaped stage. The sorceress opened her eyes and looked down at the footbridge, her satisfaction visible only in the flick of one tail.
“This sort of work suits the Xol well,” said Byron.
Sylna nodded. “So does this entire place suit any active imagination. It is like a dream we all share, made by the mind.”
The bridge was sturdy as any part of Zenidow that had so far supported the company, but thin as the edge of a knife, and with nowhere to balance oneself by hand. For Elts such a walkway was quite spacious compared with the spindly elz branches of Wyx, and so she strode off first with easy haste. Behind her went Byron, also with little difficulty, though unhurried, and after him Sylna stepped cautiously along. But Ogwold gaped at the tiny strip of silver arching off towards the sphere, and looked nervously down into the endless yet brilliantly bright oblivion below, and it was some time before he mustered the courage to inch one big foot out onto its surface. It seemed to hold, but just that boot took up nearly the entire space of the bridge. The surface was cold and smooth, and he felt he would easily slip.
I wish, he thought, that my feet could stick to it. And so they did! He could not lift his foot from the surface, so unified it was with the silver. But when he willed it truly in his mind, that fusion was gone. Then he wished for a handrail, and suddenly there it was, a narrow line of strong silver risen up from the edge of the path to accommodate him.
“Might as well make the way a little wider,” Byron called back to him, standing with the others before the great orb.
“Smart.” Ogwold grinned shakily, and beneath him the bridge expanded so that he could stand comfortably upon it.
Still he went on very carefully, doing his best not to look over the side down into the endless abyss of silver light, moving step by step. The walk was long, however, and he eventually found his stride as he reached the apex of the arch. Finally a good practical use for a dreamer, he thought. My imagination directly influences the very substance of Zenidow! His mind drifted off into a memory of the ocean, that first place of dreams, and for a moment his balance wavered such that a great fear of falling rose again in his gut, and he pressed on, now slowly moving slightly down from the peak of the arc, and coming at last to the wide, silver platform where the others waited for him.
The drone of the sphere was no louder than it had been from the other end of the bridge, but now they could see clearly that its surface was indeed constantly changing. Though it had no texture, and its skin seemed composed of but one silver-white medium, somehow there was an ever-morphing quality played out in ways fine and grand—and everything in between—as they stood spellbound watching this eternal process unfold, filling all their vision, for at this distance the object loomed immense before them, and one needed to turn their head from one side to the other to take in its dimensions.
Even as they walked round the stage which Elts had expanded from the bridge, everywhere the sphere was the same, yet infinitely different. At no second did any one aspect of its being seem ever as it did before, yet somehow it seemed that the sphere as a whole was unchanging and immutable in its essence. Sylna thought it was like a great stream curved in upon itself infinitely flowing, always the same body of water, never the same nature of passage.
*
As with the face of Zenidow before, Ogwold was first to touch the sphere. Slowly he placed his enormous hand against its face, whose temperature might have been the same as his own, for he could feel the surface by its perfect smoothness. Like a union of wind and water, the sphere did not resist the pressure of his touch, but like the solid form which it appeared to take, it did not give way completely; rather hand and orb met with equanimity, suspended out of time. The brightness washed with gentle grace along his arm, though its grasp was total, and suddenly Ogwold felt that his feet had left the security of the platform.
Now there was in all directions a shimmering, silvery white field of radiance. He peered into this place where there was no time or space, and saw that those changeful and eternally new shapes so displayed upon the surface of the sphere were here living and dying beings, a universe of infinite complexities lacing and weaving, unspooling and dovetailing. As under a great wave of silver-white fabric he was swept up, and from the cores in his back were pulled as by nature his great wing-fins, straining to find some current in the storm of living luminance. Down they churned, back and out and down again, searching blindly, now suddenly taut, hung as on some invisible force familiar to them. As the seething current of light slowed, calmed, carried him along now gently, Ogwold saw that still his big hand was held out in front as if he had only just touched the Alium—but he was alone, alone in an endless white void, floating along, his wings outspread like great parachutes. He lowered his hand. But just as peace had come, so did change arise in the oceanic fabric of the Alium.
