The Book of All Skies, page 3
She looked to the east. Finally, Audrey was coming. Del tried to distance herself from her wounded pride, and judge the remaining possibilities realistically. Maybe Audrey could chase down Orsino, unaided. Maybe she should just sit here, resting, and hope that everything would be resolved without her.
She turned to the west and watched Orsino receding. But Audrey wouldn’t have him in her sights yet; if he left the road or took a turn, she’d have no way of knowing which way he’d gone.
Del struggled to her feet, keeping her injured leg as straight as she could, then tested its function. She couldn’t use it normally, but if she favored her other leg she could walk well enough, with a certain amount of pain. She started hobbling along the road, then she tried a different gait, pushing off hard with her good foot then just bearing the shock of landing on the other, without expecting it to do any work.
Gradually, she increased her speed, running as she might if one limb had been replaced with a crude prosthesis – wary of her balance, and wishing the offending leg really was as insensate as wood. Squinting into the distance, she could still make out Orsino, and when she looked back, she saw Audrey steadily gaining on her. Maybe she could do this after all: keep moving long enough to serve as an intermediary, bridging the gap and showing Audrey the way.
After a while she fell into a rhythm that carried her along at a respectable rate without threatening to send her toppling at the first pothole. The pain had lost its scream of insistence, as if her body had decided to accede to her judgment that what she was doing was important enough that the ongoing insult simply had to be borne.
The edge of the Hoop was almost in front of her, emerging from a fractured hilltop a little to her north. Del followed the arc across the sky – tracing the parts where clouds gave way to stars as if they’d been truncated with a knife – and found herself growing vertiginous, not so much at the familiar sight as at the knowledge that elsewhere there were mountain ranges high enough to block the giant aperture completely. Had the Tolleans found a way through those mountains? Some secret crevice or subterranean river? Half the commentators she’d read discussing the supposed route to the Bounteous Lands had dismissed it as a fantasy, while others had judged it plausible but too perilous to traverse. But she had no intention of letting Orsino rob her of the chance to make her own assessment.
Ladalla lay ahead of her now, albeit a part of it indistinguishable from Thena’s own patch of cracked obsidian. But the first town through the Hoop, Paveen, was not far away. If Orsino’s buyer was waiting for him there, they could hardly perform the transaction without pause, like runners in a relay race. Del pictured a scene in the tavern in Paveen where the handoff had been intended to take place, with all the patrons – swayed by Audrey’s testimony seconding her own – united to hold Orsino back as she approached the stolen package—
An unwelcome datum interrupted her reverie. Orsino had left the road to Paveen, and taken a side road that ran to the north: straight toward the hill at the edge of the Hoop.
Del cursed him, unable to decide if this was an elaborate feint, or just part of the journey he’d planned from the start. If he skirted the edge of the Hoop and then kept on westward, he would remain in Thena, but he might just as easily double back and enter the Hoop from the opposite side, taking him into Beremma.
Had she been uninjured, she might have risked leaving the road and heading north-west, but the mix of scrubland and volcanic rock looked like it would send her sprawling. She raised an arm and gestured right, in the hope that Audrey might take the shortcut in her stead, but when she looked back the signal had had no effect.
Orsino reached the ring road that circled the hill from which the Hoop’s edge emerged. To Del’s surprise, he turned left – sending him, at least for the moment, into Ladalla, but now offering him the chance either to exit and travel on to Eastern Ladalla, or to pass through the Hoop a second time in the same direction, entering Juthena.
Del tried to move faster, but her leg was firmly committed to her present hard-won gait. Orsino disappeared behind the hill. Whatever choices he made now, unless he turned around and retraced his steps she’d lost any hope of seeing him emerge in the same manner as he’d vanished.
The turnoff leading to the hill was right ahead of her; Del took it, pushing on defiantly through a haze of half-voiced protests that she refused to let crystallize and undermine her cause. The sky before her was bisected, with mismatched tufts of clouds to her left and right, and above them mismatched constellations. Living so close to the Hoop, she was familiar with most of Ladalla’s western sky, as some Ladallans were with the stars to her east, but over time people had sown confusion by picking different names for the shared constellations, then learning each other’s nomenclature and forgetting who had chosen which.
She glanced back and saw that Audrey had left the western road and was taking her chances with a cross-country sprint. Del reached the ring road and turned left, taking heart that at least the two of them wouldn’t be split up. Her fondest wish now was to give Orsino one more chance to sneer at her futile efforts, before he found himself confronted by an uninjured and unflagging nemesis that he’d never even known was coming.
As she circled the hill, her changing perspective revealed progressively more of a bank of low clouds on her right, much as if she were circling any ordinary obstacle – except the “obstacle” was another patch of sky, which in turn was being progressively obscured. Her instinctive, but unwinnable battle to assign roles of foreground and background left her with a sense that either she was skirting a huge, mirrored tower, or – as her gut seemed to find more plausible – she’d eaten something that unhinged her perceptions to the point where her body would be better off discarding it as a likely poison.
As she came halfway around the hill, she switched her attention to the surrounding landscape. Orsino would have to leave the ring road eventually, and that would be her chance to catch sight of him again, fleeing across open ground. Once he was clear of the Hoop he could still swerve and double-back all he liked, but it would be far harder to disguise his actual destination.
The corner of Eastern Ladalla near the Hoop’s northern edge was every bit as scrubby and barren as the same part of Thena; the rocks and soil of the two regions were more or less contiguous, after all. It was only when Del lifted her gaze higher that the comforts of familiarity fell away. She had visited some nearby towns in Western Ladalla, but she had never had reason to come around to this side of the Hoop – so she had never seen any of the constellations that now shone in the east. For the first time in her life, she had no idea what anyone called half the stars above her. And for the first time in her life, she’d need to give up the notion that, clouds permitting, Takya was guaranteed to make an appearance before too long. Ladalla had no moons of its own, and from this side of the Hoop, no view of Thena’s.
Del let the melancholy sense of estrangement sit with her; unsettling as it was, the fact remained that she could turn around and head home whenever she liked. All the children’s stories she’d heard of hapless travelers somehow losing track of the number of times they’d circled the edge of the Hoop had been comically entertaining, but she was a very long way from getting lost herself. The only thing she had reason to fear right now was losing Orsino.
As she scanned the scrubland, she could not rule out the possibility that he had chosen to dig in behind a bush and wait for her to circle out of view. She wanted to believe that he was arrogant enough to have abandoned all caution once he’d slowed her down with the stone, but that was probably wishful thinking. He was smart and skillful enough to have copied the vault keys without her or Jachimo noticing – but still careless enough to have made whatever small noise had woken her as he departed. She just needed him to make one more error.
Three-quarters of the way around the hill, though she still hadn’t set foot in Juthena, the third sky of the journey began to show through the Hoop. A delicate swathe of light, which she supposed was an agglomeration of stars too close for her eyes to separate, stretched across the view like an ethereal ribbon.
Del tore her gaze away from the spectacle and concentrated on the land around her. When she came full circle, the layout of the roads to the south might have been copied from that between Thena and Ladalla, but the terrain itself was unmistakably different, with thicker grass and fewer sharp edges to the rocks. Looking toward Juthena, she hoped for a glimpse of Orsino jogging along the western road, but instead she was rewarded with the sight of distant lanterns, and singing carried to her in snatches on the breeze. Some kind of festival, she supposed.
She kept running. The pain in her knee was like a drumbeat to which she’d grown accustomed, and when she thought of slowing down or stopping the prospect was alarming, as if she’d habituated to such a precise set of sensations that disturbing the pattern by resting would be as unwelcome as any other change.
That the hill presented a different profile to her the second time around was reassuring – inasmuch as it reduced any risk of confusion, when she was growing ever less scornful toward the disoriented protagonists of the children’s tales. Juthena’s stars lit up the ground on her left in exquisite detail, but if Orsino had ever crossed this land, he was already out of sight.
In Sarana the stars were sparser, the ground curiously lush.
In Tethemma there were more clouds drifting by, but even through the breaks a darker sky.
As Del rounded the hill yet again, the light falling on the road ahead was so bright and sharp that she assumed she was approaching a group of travelers bearing lanterns, marching in silence. She slowed down, afraid of blundering disrespectfully into the midst of a funeral procession.
Sarana, Tethemma ... Erema? It was unforgivable that she wasn’t sure. There were too many lands to commit every single one to memory, but these were the immediate neighbors that every child in Apasa learned.
Erema it was. And in Erema, famously—
The light striking her face carried none of the warmth of a flame, but the mere act of seeing it was as painful as a needle through flesh. Del tried squinting, but it was not enough. She took a few steps with her eyes closed, but then came to her senses and stopped.
She backed away, her leg throbbing, until only a sliver of the new sky remained in view. The stars were so bright that each one alone was like a lantern; she had to hold up a hand and peer between her fingers to keep her eyes from watering.
Travelers could accommodate to the brightness, she’d heard, by wrapping a long strip of fabric around their head and gradually unwinding it. But when they departed it would take them just as long to readapt to normal conditions. If she’d planned a journey through Erema that entailed merely circling the edge of the Hoop, she would have arranged in advance for a local guide to be here to lead her, blindfolded, from ordinary sky to ordinary sky.
Maybe Orsino had made precisely those arrangements. Or maybe he’d just fled, eyes closed, stumbling across the dazzling ground, sure that no one from Thena would have any hope of following him.
Whatever he’d done, he was out of her reach now. The book was gone, and Erema’s stars blazed down upon a road that she had no reason to travel. And you thought you were going to find the way to the Bounteous Lands, where one star lies so close that it gives life to the entire world?
Del contemplated sitting and resting for a while, but when she pictured the necessary maneuver her leg interjected with an immediate veto. So she turned and headed back the way she’d come.
Audrey appeared, slowing as she approached, clearly disappointed by the message in Del’s demeanor, but not surprised. “We did our best,” she said. “I’ll vouch for that to your employer, if you’ll do the same for mine.”
Del was too tired to laugh.
“You can lean on my shoulder if you like,” Audrey offered. “Take the weight off your leg. I don’t think either of us will be running, and it’s going to be a long walk home.”
Chapter 3
“I’d like to look at some maps, please.”
“Of course.” Del took the new arrival’s name, Montano, and added him to the list. “Please have a seat. It could be a while.”
She pointed to the row of chairs she’d placed in the corridor leading to the map room. Not long afterward, the most recent visitor emerged, frowning resentfully, still awkwardly sliding sheets of paper into the portfolio she was carrying.
“Claudio?” Del called.
“Yes!” The next-in-line rose to his feet and followed her in, his enthusiasm apparently undiminished by the disappointment he must have seen on his predecessors’ faces as they departed. But then, if they had found nothing in their research to encourage them, it could only mean that his own idea stood a better chance of being uniquely successful.
“Which maps would you like to view?” Del asked.
“Sadema.”
“From what period?”
“The earliest you have.”
Del pointed to the map table. “These are mid-Vitean.” There was nothing to be fetched or put away. All the would-be explorers wanted the same thing.
She checked that the lamp wasn’t short of oil, then turned over the hour-glass. “Don’t feel obliged to stay here watching the sand fall if you’re already done,” she said. Twice, she’d walked in on people who had set the maps aside in frustration, but were waiting out their allotted time, presumably just for the sake of inconveniencing their rivals.
“I won’t.”
Del left him and returned to her desk, where she started her own timer, then resumed work on the translation she’d been struggling with. If you “broke” a knot, using the same Tollean word as you would if you broke a fence, did that mean you cut through the rope that was knotted, or that you untangled the knot without damaging the rope? The passage she was stuck on offered no clues, but if the meaning was settled she ought to be able to extract it from other examples.
But as she followed the trail through the corpus of fragments she was relying on for exactly that purpose, she just found the ambiguities multiplying. If you “overcame” a conflict with an enemy, did they submit to your superior forces, or was the dispute amicably resolved? And if you “resolved” a plot against you, did the plotters end up dead, or were their grievances dealt with in good faith? Del knew how to discriminate between the possibilities in her own language, but in Tollean the rickety scaffolding of contextual hints and potential synonyms at her disposal was too loose, too unconstrained, to guide her to the correct meaning.
Varro put up the CLOSED sign on the front door, and approached Del. “You want me to empty the queue?” he asked.
“No, it’s fine.” There were only two people left. “You can leave if you like. I’ll lock up.”
Varro regarded her sourly. “I’m not meant to leave while there are still people in the building.”
“As you wish,” Del replied. “I don’t want to keep you from your family. But it doesn’t seem fair to throw people out. I promise I’ll watch over them carefully.”
He hesitated, but then seemed to decide that it wasn’t worth arguing about. “All right. I’ll see you later.”
Del was glad not to have to eject anyone, but she paid the price for her promise of vigilance. Despite all the extra locked doors that now lay between the public areas and the most valuable items, it was hard not to be distracted by the possibility that she might glance up and find that she’d lost track of a potential thief.
By the time she led the last visitor down the corridor, all she wanted was to be rid of him, so she could make herself a meal and get some sleep.
“Which maps would you like to view?” she asked.
“Celema,” Montano replied.
Del hadn’t really been listening. “I’m sorry?”
“Celema, please. I believe the most recent survey is listed in your catalog. You do have it, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course. I’ll get it.” Del carefully placed the Vitean maps of Sadema back in their sleeve and carried them into the storeroom, then returned with the modern atlas of Celema.
She left Montano to consult the maps, resisting the urge to inquire into the reasons for his interest. The theft of The Book of All Skies had prompted the Council of Apasa to offer a substantial prize – not for the book’s return, which might have been construed as a ransom, but for anyone able to deduce the coveted secret supposedly contained within its pages by their own independent means. It was a way of thumbing their nose at the thieves: take the book, we don’t need it! If the Tolleans had found a way to the Bounteous Lands, why couldn’t their descendants do the same? And since Sadema was the only land whose terrain appeared to render one of the Hoops impassable, where else could the crucial path lie, but through those formidable mountains?
Del gave up on the passage about broken knots and continued with the rest of the page. She appreciated Jessica entrusting her with even these few loose sheets from the excavation; it was a gracious gesture that made her refusal to lay the blame for the theft at Del’s feet more believable than any number of reassuring words. But nothing Del or anyone else had said had been enough to spare Jachimo from the director’s anger.
She heard the door to the map room open, and checked her timer; the last grains were trickling down.
Montano approached her desk. “Since there’s no one else waiting, I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could have a little longer, just to finish this?”
Del glanced down at the thick sheet of paper that lay on top of a bundle he was holding; it looked as if he’d copied almost every detail from one of the maps, with great fidelity. “Are you an artist?” she asked.
“I sketch things,” he replied. “Maps, machines. I don’t know if that counts as art.”
Del was growing hungry, but it seemed petty to force him to come back later. “All right,” she said.
As soon as he walked away she regretted the decision; she no longer had Varro around to help if she had to drag this man out of the map room. But true to his word, he emerged a short time later.
