Precipice Books © 1546 S.K. by Arkhyn Hiel
Caliph stared at the colophon for a moment: an engraving that depicted a man falling from a cliff into an abyss. He had never seen it before and it must have come from some small press, perhaps even privately owned. The perspective was from overhead, looking down at the back of his wind-whipped hair, his spread fingers. It seemed a bizarre thing to transfer into an excerpt. As Caliph stared at it, he thought about his uncle and the way he had died, leaping from the cliffs at the north end of the city. As he sank deeper into the chair, a morbid chill crawled on to his chest and squatted there.
Arrian must have looked like one of those leaning sensual forms carved along the Coasts of Gath: a white statue of a woman cradling an urn beneath empty eyes, lovely limbs tangled in the vines. Her chin would have been proud, her lips thin. She would have had hair the inhuman fluid color of pearl and eyes like tiny plaques of jade.
And, in fact, all of this is true.
Few people would believe I saw her again … from the inside. But in the Khloht Jungle there are secrets carved in stone. Memories, you could call them. At Ooil-Uauth, bizarre mathematics have been graven into oblate rhombohedrons. They are alien things, cracked and decayed long before they were reused and fashioned into canted beehive tombs. These are the buildings in a vast necropolis with no way out, whose inscriptions provided the recipe for poisonous shuwt tinctures that the Veydens now use to suspend the shadow of their body in the solvent of another’s soul. They are Gringling secrets. And I should know. From these conical ziggurats, the Veydens condensed that time travel was impossible. But that fact is wholly unrelated to accessing events. To inhabiting non-time.
This has ever been the secret of the Gringlings, whose knowledge the Veydens first discovered. We were the builders of the Staircase to Infinity, which bore our memories but did not survive the century of terror that the Ublisi unleashed—when the Yillo’tharnah scoured the world.
Our Staircase was sundered, refashioned into the necropolis at Ooil-Uauth. But our memories and our recipes remained.
These are the carvings that the Veydens found. Through judicious use of shuwt tinctures and other holomorphic secrets that I relearned from the jungle, I compiled the Sothic Myth, a piece of work that I have no doubt will be ridiculed as pure fabrication by any scholar of “serious disposition.” The toxins have caused intracranial bleeding, and I myself can see the way my meninges have seared to the inside of my skull: a feat that only detracts from my credibility, no doubt.
But I did not compile the myth for scholars. This is my own press, purchased with my own funds, for my own reasons: to remember my daughter.
And I will gladly burn the feckless cells of this pathetic mind with potion after potion of shuwt tinctures in my quest to see her again.
For the inexperienced, shuwt tinctures provide a mishmash of hallucination and truth—the first several journeys take the drinker into the youth of self rather than into the minds of others—Veyden spirit guides are able to enter the vision and teach the user how to focus the lens. But I am no novice. I am a Gringling, despite the flesh I have lost. My mind is quite intact.
I will begin by saying that Arrian was a sheleph.6 Her power was supposed to one day match her beauty when she inherited all her father’s holdings.
I am, of course, her father.
But at fifteen, her only love is sitting in the fortress walls, watching clouds blow in above the ocean. All day, she sits and watches and sketches with colored sticks of pigment, blending with her fingers, greasy pastel hues into sheets of parchment that are made in Lewyl and shipped to Soth specifically for her.
When she tires of sketching, she lays the sheet aside and listens to wind come between the paper and the stone. Finally, the drawing is pulled off the wall and carried out over the surf that foams three hundred feet below. She watches the colors in the sky change from morning yellow to midday blue to evening indigo. She watches all day, nearly every day, soaking her jade eyes in the colors, infusing her brain like a sponge.
“Cor, come here,” Arrian calls.
Corwin looks up from where he is teasing a centipede with a stick. He has it cornered in a shady damp niche of the parapet. The centipedes on Soth are nearly a foot long and offer plenty of fight. The iridescent black-blue and yellow striped body coils around Corwin’s stick and stings the dead wood repeatedly.
“I’m rather busy,” he says. He has thin blond hair which blows straight back in the wind but his eyes betray a weakness of the heart that causes him to look at all girls with a form of awe. He flips the centipede across the battlement with his stick. I can tell he ponders crushing it for an instant.
“Cor?”
“I’m coming.”
“Fetch me my colors,” Arrian says when he is close enough that she does not have to yell.
Corwin sighs. “Can’t we do something else?”
She pulls a strand of pale hair down in front of her eyes. “I want to draw, Cor.” She knows he will succumb but she does not know why. Even at fifteen, love is a far-off thing; her mind is green and innocent from her isolation on the island. That is my doing. I know that her Gringling bones will carry her out of childhood soon enough, into an eternity of adulthood.
“I spend all my time with you and you’d rather draw,” Corwin complains.
“Rather? Rather than what? As I recall, you were off playing with bugs.”
Corwin raises his eyebrows.
Arrian makes a pained face. “Cor—!”
“I’ll get them,” he grumps. It is a long way to her room on the other side of the stronghold, a good ten minute walk in both directions. Sometimes he walks it five times a day and only now, toward the end of summer, has he started to complain.
Arrian watches the ships come and go bearing her father’s loyal emissaries. They have empty hands but carry rumors on their lips. They speak of frightening creatures in the south, hated races: Groull and Yilthid. It is a strange time, I tell her, though she does not understand what makes it so any more than she understands the way Corwin looks at her.
She watches the ships come and go as she watches Corwin come and go, with colors and paper and pitchers of icy things to drink. It does not occur to her that Corwin is her only friend.
While she waits for him, Arrian sees a strange ship move into the harbor. It has turquoise sails and rigging like gold thread and from the main mast blows a pennant with a symbol of both moons intersecting. By the time Corwin returns, it has docked and she points it out to him. “I’m going to draw that ship.”
“I can’t even see it from here,” says Corwin. “Just a speck of color.”
“I can see it very well,” Arrian replies, picking up one of the blue-green sticks he has brought. “Even if I never saw it again I should remember it always. Have you ever seen a boat so lovely?”
Corwin looks over his shoulder for the centipede but it has slithered off. “No. Maybe we could go down and see it better.”
“Father doesn’t like me near the docks.” Arrian’s voice is like a fife.
“I don’t think he’d like you dangling your feet this high above the surf either but he doesn’t seem to notice that. Why would he notice the other?”
“If we go down you’ll have brought my colors for no reason.”
Corwin shrugs. He knows indifference is the only way to coax her.
Arrian gathers up her pigments and lays them in the little wooden case. Corwin offers to carry it out of habit. He picks up the parchment and follows one step behind.
Jorgill Deep gets its name from the cleft between the mountain and the sea cliffs where it rests. The fortress itself is the only spot of civilization on an island whose ancient name comes from the mountain: Soth. Soth is a great hooked horn of blackened rock that casts a nearly eternal shadow over Jorgill Deep. The stone here is mostly volcanic and the fortress was hewn of basalt by Gringlings and beings that the Gringlings once called Limuin: the
Some Limuin remained behind after the Banishing. They renounced Limuin prophecy and surrendered their titles.
