18. The Breach
18
THE brEACH
It wasn’t the most uncomfortable she’d ever been, but Ari still might have preferred walking. She couldn’t really think while busily pretending she sat on top of a massive moving quadruped every day of the week, ho-hum, nothing to see here, move along.
The chained man held the reins, strolling at the beast’s head, while she clutched the saddlehorn and tried not to feel ridiculous. Downhill and through thick forest the group moved, then the road appeared through a screen of underbrush. The chained man didn’t break stride, stepping onto its surface. More hills rose on either side, though the road somehow avoided any in its arrow-straight course; the slopes were all of the same stone as the morning’s cave, covered thickly with vegetation, and not a single almost-mountain had been topped.
Jazarl and his guys seemed happy to have their big friend back, riding in a loose pack surrounding her and the chained man. Every once in a while a pair would peel off, ranging ahead or dropping behind according to some arcane schedule, and rejoin the group a short while later, melding out of the trees. The equines’ hooves made happy chiming sounds on stone paving, and she decided they were definitely shod. Which brought up the question of just who had done that?
Their conversation was minimal, and mostly cryptic. The Breach. Gesthel. The Grey Lady. How happy she was going to be to see Ari. The Mere.
At least she didn’t have to worry about where her feet were going, so she could gawk at the scenery all she wanted. Was it possible to draw on horseback? You certainly couldn’t paint.
Watercolors would work for the near-violet sky, she decided, but the woods required colors which didn’t bleed so easily. There were more and different plants now, in every stage of maturity. Maple-like trees with bright red foliage had appeared, as well as pale-barked almost-aspens, and near-willows with purple fingers. Ferns exploded, still wet with rain. Droplet-gemmed bushes thickened or thinned according to light through the canopy. No debris settled on the road; pristine and whole, it cut through the woods in merry defiance of its own impossibility. The stone blocks seemed more yellow today, somewhere between lemon and light amber, but maybe that was the particular cast of the tired red light.
Each leaf was distinct, every fallen twig unique. She glimpsed flutters that had to be birds, though not clearly enough to guess what they resembled, and other animals probably knew to avoid any sounds meaning ‘human-like things’.
At least riding didn’t feel particularly like a punishment, unless it was one of pure embarrassment.
“My lady?” Darjeth leaned from his saddle, offering her one of their oddly shaped leather canteens. “We may halt at any moment, for your comfort.”
Ari didn’t need more water, but she took the offer anyway—maybe she could get more answers. All she had at the moment was a contradictory half-mosaic; survival would depend on what role they wanted her to play. “Everything looks different.”
“All is renewed, and heals apace. You need not worry, though.” Darjeth’s grin was broad and chipper, his wide-brimmed, very handsome hat pushed slightly back and platinum hair touching his shoulders. Even the signs of wear on his leather jerkin, the stitches on his shirt, and the nap of his trousers were startlingly clear; his rapier-hilt bobbed, glinting. “The pards will not trouble us, nor the kaharak .”
Well, she could almost be comforted if she knew precisely what either of those translated to. She was too busy with another question. “What about the…” Robots. How do I say robots? But they had a different word, one that arrived with a few moments’ thought. “The clockworks.”
Darjeth sobered, glancing in the chained man’s direction—a flicker, nothing more. “If any appear, my lady, they shall be quickly dealt with.”
What about the moaning things? Her courage didn’t extend far enough for that particular question. She uncapped the canteen slowly, trying to organize what she needed to know.
There had to be a better way of navigating fairytale nonsense. She wasn’t a lit major, though she’d read Grimm’s just like any other kid. Go figure, she should have studied up on politics, Che Guevara, or separatists instead of major artistic themes in the late Renaissance or methods of sculpture from Michelangelo to Rodin.
Three whole years since she’d been able to sit down and read a book. She was free of Mike and his parents, but there didn’t seem to be any libraries around. A pained laugh bubbled into her throat; she chased it away with a swallow of pondwater.
It tasted just the same—clear and cool, no trace of leather from its container. Now she wished she’d spent last night trawling through memories of literature instead of passed out from stress and overload.
“Keep it, if you like.” Darjeth indicated the canteen with a brief, efficient motion. They moved so gracefully, and she was a gawky, waddling duckling. “We should reach the Breach before long, and Gesthel near sundown. The Grey Lady will speak again, seeing you, and perhaps afterward we shall break the faithless accursed’s?—”
“All will be accomplished in due time,” the chained man interrupted. “And I doubt our lady wishes a mention of the enemy.”
I wouldn’t mind knowing a little more . But clearly it wasn’t part of the agenda, so Ari just returned the canteen with a tentative smile. Darjeth looked relieved, but he also steered his horse away and didn’t approach again.
Ari suppressed a sigh, and went back to studying the rain-washed landscape.
She was still thinking furiously when they reached the Breach.
Thin purple clouds stretched across the sky, moving gently with a steady breeze. The trees drew back as if afraid, revealing undulating green starred with more of the high rocky hills. It might have been a welcome change if not for the great jagged crevasse slashing across their route.
Even the flowers were vivid, white and deep blue roaming in bands over the hills, peeking through vigorous mint-smelling grass. But the tear in the earth looked fresh and awful, its sides sharp and a faint hollow whistle rising from its lip. It looked bigger than the Grand Canyon—that particular geographical feature had been on Mom’s bucket list, one of the few items not crossed off.
The lemon-brick road ran right up to the brink. Ari rubbed at her eyes, once more not quite believing what pupils and optic nerves were passing down the ol’ brain highway.
A massive long-dead creature had fallen across the canyon somehow. Either that or bones had been dragged from the huge animal’s grave, because spanning the Breach was a long chain of giant vertebrae, faintly tarnished. Curved ribs rose, smaller near the chasm’s edges and gradually larger as the skeletal wonder bowed near midpoint. The wind fluted through bony reeds, a long modulated moan, and Ari’s stomach clenched as if every ounce of pondwater had suddenly turned toxic and was going to bolt for escape.
Oh, no . There was nowhere to go since hills and forest had sunk into a dark smudge behind them; she clutched the saddlehorn, leaning back as her entire body tensed, and tried to think of how to refuse this.
It wasn’t so much the height, although she was uneasy as any reasonable person should be with skyscrapers and cliffs. No, it was the… the bones, the thought of walking over a corpse, something that unholy large plus the subtle but undeniable strangeness of the structure.
Even dinosaur skeletons didn’t look this alien . Now she was glad she hadn’t seen any of the forest’s fauna, but that was no help in the situation. Atavistic shudders poured down her back.
The big black equine slowed, its tail flicking, and the chained man halted. Which meant everyone else did too, and the men exchanged glances.
“My lady?” The chained man turned, regarding her sidelong. Walking with all that metal piled on had to be exhausting, but it didn’t show.
In fact, he was far less pale than he had been; maybe it was just being free of the helmet. His face had filled in a little more as well, though with that jaw he wouldn’t win any modeling work. Still, he was arresting.
“I’m sorry.” Another apology, she was helpless to stop making them. “That… no. I’m sorry, I can’t.”
Majan was to her left now. He eyed the bone-bridge, cocking his ivory-haired head. “It is quite strong, and larger than it looks. There is no danger, my lady.”
He could even be right, but there was only so much of this strange new world Ari could take. This was her tipping point, everything inside her trembling on the edge of the small, definite snap which meant she could not be pushed further.
The last time that silent internal breakage had sounded, she’d lunged for a nightstand and the .38.
“I…” At least nobody had yelled at her to stop being such a whiny bitch yet, though Ari suspected that was a blessing of exceedingly short duration. “I can’t. I’m very sorry, but I just… I can’t.”
“There are other methods of crossing.” The chained man turned more fully, and iron-clad fingers lightly stroked the equine’s arched, glossy neck. “I suspect you would like them less, though.”
His tone was soft, as if it wasn’t a threat. Ari’s pulse ran thin and thready in her wrists, her throat, even her ankles. “I’ll stay in the woods. Or I can go back to the cave.” The mind-boggling stupidity of wandering around without anything to build a fire with or a weapon against giant golden robots was fully apparent to her rational self, but Ari didn’t care.
“Sarle, Darjeth.” The chained man’s burning gaze focused fully on her now. “Would you like the honour of crossing first, to show our lady there is no danger?”
“Of a certainty.” Sarle touched his hatbrim, smiling; he didn’t look like he thought the task was a punishment. Ari opened her mouth to protest, but he and Darjeth were already urging their mounts into a canter. They drew away, the chiming of their passage thankfully different than the thump-thudding of gilded clockworks.
The rest of the group set off at a far slower pace, the chained man now at the big black equine’s shoulder though he still held the reins. Ari weighed the advisability of trying to topple out of the saddle. Each measured step, by hoof or spurred boot, brought those terrible arches of bleached bone closer. The skeleton’s strange geometry, just a few degrees off anything earthly, grew more and more apparent.
“What is it you fear?” The chained man looked up, eyebrows slightly raised and his tone holding only mild interest. For all that, those eyes were absolutely scorching. “I am still somewhat fettered, true. Yet I would never imperil my lady upon an unsteady span.”
It didn’t make sense, and Ari was helpless to explain. A giant interior framework of no creature she’d ever seen or imagined, its skull and bony hindquarters sunk deep in grassy earth—a small faint charity, that she was spared the rest of its nauseating insult to all rationality, but not enough. To top it off, the crevasse’s true dimensions became more and more apparent with every moment, and that constant, faint moan-whistle said anything dropped in would fall for a very long time.
Please . Maybe she would have some kind of cardiac event, and this whole shebang would become academic? Don’t make me do this .
Begging wouldn’t help in the slightest; Ari had learned as much over the last three years. No-one cared, so she might as well save her breath. She watched the two riders, Darjeth’s pale hair shining and Sarle on his dark-brown equine pulling slightly ahead as if he couldn’t wait to throw himself onto the damn thing. The giant bridge was absurdly miniature in comparison to the rift stretching upon either side, but that wasn’t helpful either.
The hoofbeats changed. Sarle’s equine thundered up the slight rise, easily dwarfed by the smallest, floating ribs, and clattered onto stone-laced vertebrae. Darjeth followed.
Thankfully the edifice didn’t sway, even minutely. But she still didn’t like it, and cast around once more for some kind of escape. It was awful, watching the thing approach at walking pace—as if the riders were standing still while a vast bone-monster slunk closer bit by bit, humming to itself, contemplating an unwary meal.
“You see?” Jazarl, with an anxious edge to the words. “The Breach is wide, but the bridge has always been here, my lady Ari.”
Please don’t. Oh, God, please don’t make me do this .
By the time the main group reached the bridge’s near end, Sarle and Darjeth were halfway across. Thin rancid horror crawled up Ari’s throat; the sides of the Breach were sheer, plunging down to billows of white mist. Creepers and dark vegetation clung in scallops to the rock walls, life finding a way even on near-vertical faces, and her skin prickled all over.
The chained man dropped back still further, his spiked shoulder very near her knee. Maybe he wanted to be sure she wouldn’t make a break for it. If there were any lemmings around, they might well be hypnotized by both bridge and chasm, gratefully throwing themselves into oblivion rather than suffering the violation of having to look at the damn thing or hear that awful fluting unsong from wind-caressed ribs.
Ari squeezed her eyes shut, but she still knew the moment hoof touched stone-bound bone. A faint vibration rose, or maybe she was shaking again. Even disassociating couldn’t save her; she had to cling to the saddle. The horselike thing snorted, a dissatisfied sound, and she wondered if her tension was communicating itself to the beast.
“All is well, Ariadne.” Softly, the accent of their strange language caressing her name. “I am with you; there is nothing to fear.”
I really wish I could believe that . It would be nice, especially given the number of times after Mom’s passing she’d longed to hear someone say just those words. There was always plenty to be afraid of in the world; growing up was all about finding out nobody could—or would—help.
Something warm and hard closed around her knee. Ari started violently, the saddle creaking as her eyelids flew open, and the black equine gave another short, unhappy chuffing sound.
The chained man still held the reins loosely in one hand, but the other rested on her jeans. His palm, not the spikes on the back, but still, metal brushed her leg and she was painfully aware of how sharp the edges of his armor were. Not to mention the dangerous chains, one falling from his forearm almost brushing the horselike thing’s side.
He stared up at her, not watching where his feet were landing. Ari’s hair lifted on the breeze, a curl falling in her face, and a scalding flush poured through her entire body.
“You see?” Was he trying to sound, of all things, encouraging ? “Wider than the Road itself, my lady.”
Which brought up another interesting observation. She hadn’t seen a single intersection yet, just the endless stone-block highway. But Ari had no time to tease out the implications of yet more weirdness.
She shut her eyes once more, did her best to keep her ears from registering the wind’s plaintive siren hum, and shivered until the sound of hoofbeats changed again, the equine now plodding downhill. The Breach’s terrible, randomly wandering lament retreated bit by bit. Though the prickles still washed over her, no trace of sweat rose on her skin, and that was almost stranger than the lack of hunger.
Eventually the hand on her knee fell away. Ari kept her eyelids firmly sealed for a long while afterward, her lips moving slightly as she prayed, a chain of words both hopeless and useless when faced with a world where animals with such skeletons had indubitably once existed.
Please, I take it back. I didn’t mean to. Please let me wake up…
There was no answer, just the wind-moan dying behind them, the rhythm of shod hooves on stone, and the sense of being watched even though the chained man faced resolutely ahead.