If these accounts revolved around the
Excerpt: pages 49–51
Precipice Books © 1546 S.K. by Arkhyn Hiel
The upper arcades of Jorgill Deep are cleared. The floors are swept in both directions, inviting a menagerie of guests to dance atop the battlements. As the music begins, Arrian watches Corwin flirt ridiculously. He has become a sailor this last year, grown tan and arrogant. He no longer carries her colors.
Tonight, he looks fine, still damp from ocean spray and graceful from ever balancing on ship decks. Arrian banishes the annoying thought and goes to the high table where sweet-fig pies have been laid before the merrymakers. She samples the desserts and licks her fingers when she hears him stop directly behind her.
His voice and the clean smell of the ocean carry over her shoulder.
Arrian turns and smiles. “I thought you came to see
Corwin laughs a half-embarrassed laugh. He is only seventeen. “I doubt you know how to be jealous.”
Arrian’s eyes flicker. “You don’t know me well anymore.”
“Maybe not. But I sense your influence at this party. You’ve had the decorations hung exactly to your taste, probably fretting over them until early this morning.”
She nudges him with her elbow, enjoying his nearness. Wreaths holding candles bear indigo ribbons and the flames illuminate white flowers overhead. The pergola above the arcade is burgeoning with blooms. “I brought you a gift from the mainland,” Corwin says. “Since you’ve never been away from Soth, I thought a little something foreign might be good.”
“I love it here,” Arrian says defensively. “We have perfect seasons all year round.”
Corwin replies with slow enticing words. “On the mainland they have snow.”
“Snow?”
Corwin grins. He reaches up and shakes the pergola, generating a storm of petals. “It’s white and cold and flutters from the sky—like rain but more slowly.” Arrian watches his lips move.
“I belong here, Cor. You’re the traveler, not me. Besides, father says I should marry.”
Corwin laughs. “You!—who’ve never had a suitor or anyone you loved, what would you do with marriage?”
Arrian bites her lip softly. Her father is calling her from behind the high table. “I’ll be right back.”
Corwin watches her go. The ghost of an old ache passes ever so faintly through his face.
The party is for celebrating both Arrian’s birth and the anniversary of Jorgill Deep’s desecration. All the guests know that Arrian’s father has something special planned and servants are beginning to usher the party downstairs toward the courtyard.
In a chamber off the arcade where the music is only a murmur, Arrian meets her father. It is strange to gaze on what is no longer me. As usual, the Ublisi stands at his side. Maelstroms of stars turn in each of her unsettling eyes. Arrian has never seen her eat or sleep. She has heard that Ublisi have no need of mundane necessities.
Her father has told Arrian that tonight will be the culmination of higher things. Deeper studies. The Ublisi has worked out some holomorphic secret of unlocking, which will redeem Soth, an equation that will bring back the radiance of Ahvelle.
At Jorgill Deep, there is a knot of stone, a weird whorl of minerals: cream-colored, spiraled into blackish and brownish granite—all of which swirl up into something like a protruding navel on the ground. It is the remnant of where one of the chambers7 first landed. A backward crater that defies standard physics. It is graven with glyphs not even the Ublisi remembers how to read and it rests in an unused alcove in an overgrown section of the courtyards of Jorgill Deep.
“Arrian,” her father says. “We will be going down to the courtyard. My gift to you tonight,” his voice—my voice—softens, “will lift us to a better place.” He has green irises that I remember from the mirror, blunted with age, and he rests his hand gently on his daughter’s shoulder. She is the only creature that he still dares to love.
The Ublisi says nothing but, with her cosmic white eyes, stares all the way through Arrian’s face.
A chill goes through the birthday celebrant as the Ublisi turns slowly.
“Come.” Arrian’s father puts her hand on his arm and leads her to the courtyard where the guests have already gathered under a pavilion of midsummer blooms. Glasta8 flutter through the garden and fan the smell of nectar.
The Ublisi’s tall form seems to float across the lawn to where the stone knot has been extricated from an overgrowth of black pimplota. The Ublisi holds the bright red book in her hands. Its corners are shod in sparkling metal where proud Nekrytian serpents tense in intricate designs.
Arrian knows about this book. It is occasionally still called the
The Ublisi stretches her arms beneath the moons and all the guests grow quiet.
Only the glasta still flutter.
Arrian stands near her father, his large hand clasped over hers. She can feel his anxiety. He has helped with the study and the preparation for this night, being a great mathematician. He waits now, breathing hard, for the golden lights that will soon fill the courtyard.
The Ublisi begins to speak in the Unknown Tongue. Her numbers fill the air, bloodless and clean. Her voice sounds like a chyrming creature far away on the mountain of Soth. For an instant, molten glassy shapes distort the courtyard air. A sudden plunge in temperature reveals every exhalation. Inaudible frosty notes pluck a staccato stillness in the yard.
The formula does not last long, but the moment of silence that follows feels eternal. One guest looks to the next, anxiety smoking between their lips. Arrian’s eyes meet Corwin’s and she sees a ghost of apprehension, a sailor’s instinct, perhaps. His body shifts in that infinite moment of doubt as he begins his first step toward her.
The old obsidian-crusted mountain seems to shiver with the sudden chill. Then the world shakes itself like a wet dog. Stars become slits of light that streak two directions at once. The great horned mountain of Soth cracks open like a jungle flame. Rocks three times the size of Jorgill Deep tumble down into the fissure where the fortress stands.
Arrian’s eyes sweep the yard in desperation. Amid the roar, she sees her father unscrew a metal capsule. He tips it into his mouth.
Then the clouds of ash sweep in. The Ublisi stands in a halo of soot and rose-colored fire. Shards of granite and molten flowers of glowing rock rain down in every direction. The heavy hail stones the guests to death then prudently piles them under rocky graves.
Arrian is knocked into an alcove where great falling boulders have already formed a cave of sorts. Someone has pushed her. She turns to see Corwin’s eyes. They are large and wet and desperate to help. A great jagged stone comes down. He disappears into ashy blackness. All of them are crushed like sweet-figs in a pie, buried in the courtyard in a great round of clay.
Arrian’s eyes soak up the blood and broken bones, the fallen rock and glowing embers. Beyond the horror of their death, she sees the most terrifying thing of all. The Ublisi formula is still unwinding. The knot of stone has come undone, the whorl of colored rock, where one of the chambers left its mark, has opened, stretched itself into a hideous hole, as if the world is giving birth. Then, in grotesqueness too ripe to describe, abortive things haul themselves out. Great, translucent, protean limbs, eely monstrosities wrangle from the void and ooze and lurch and burble. The sweet stink of their decay fills the air. The gardens and the glowing moths wilt beneath rocks and huge putrid carcasses that cannot walk, but hump and slither across the liquefied land.
My daughter must have used up every lamp and candle. And when the final wick burnt low, she must have screamed and clenched her teeth as she entered a darkness that would last twenty thousand years.
