staying behind.”
“Dammit, you’re right,” she snapped, before turning and following the slapping footsteps of their goblin guide. Surely her brothers would find a way out-they had to! She wouldn’t let herself believe that they could get snared in Nayfal’s sweep.
They seemed to go for a long time, covering a greater distance than in their first subterranean trek, when they had been seeking Hiyram. Darann had no trouble believing that they had moved beyond the ghetto walls, but she found it impossible to get any sense of bearings, to have any idea where they were going. She simply followed along behind Bull-Hair, and when the sounds of his steps abruptly stopped, she halted, too.
“Here, go up,” their guide said suddenly. “This quiet place; nobody see, if you careful. Be careful.”
“We will-thank you,” Darann said, squeezing the loyal guide on his shoulder. “You be careful, too.”
She felt for the rungs, found that Konnor had aleady started up the metal ladder. She came along behind, silently climbing. A minute later the two dwarves emerged through a sewer drain on a quiet side street, several blocks away from the ghetto wall. Trying not to think about her brothers, Darann couldn’t suppress a single, grieving sob as she looked down the hole they had emerged from. Were Borand and Aurand back there someplace? Or had, as she feared, they been snared by the attacking guards? Konnor put an arm around her shoulders, and she drew a breath, banishing her fears, angrily rubbing a hand across her moist eyes.
“The Goat Hair Inn is not far away,” Konnor said, taking his bearings from the position of the city’s great towers rising into view around them. “We can walk there in ten minutes. Let’s hope Greta Weaver is at home.”
“And that she’s willing to tell us the truth,” Darann agreed, drawing some comfort from her companion’s calm awareness. He offered her his arm, and she took it, reasoning that their chances of being questioned by guards was lessened if they could be mistaken for a normal couple.
They found a main street and, though they wanted to run, walked along like a couple out for a stroll. True to his word, Konnor soon led her up to the door of a run-down inn. They heard sounds of raucous laughter within, while the not unappealing scent of coal smoke and grilled meat wafted into the street from the door. With an air of bravado that Darann hoped was real, Konnor swaggered forward, pushed open the entrance, and led her inside.
16
Broken Circles
Upon the foundation of worlds,
The First Circle stands,
Ultimate bedrock;
When Underworld trembles,
All skies can fall
The Worldfall tumbled from the zenith of all circles, carrying the stuff of creation into the mountainous Nullreach of Nayve. For decades it had pounded this ground, pulverizing the substance of the Fourth Circle in this region into a wasteland of chaos. Nothing could live there, nothing could so much as approach this shimmering vista of violence. The air churned with violent storms, and the ground was shattered and trembling, prone to quakes that dropped away great sections of terrain, sucking it right into the vortex of the great storm.
Yet for all that destruction, the storm had remained in this one location since its creation. The scope of the plunging debris, instead of expanding outward, remained localized, limited to that section of terrain that, in fact, no longer existed as anything resembling solid ground. Those bordering plains and hills that, one year, vanished into the chaotic tangle would re-form in another season; hill might be plain and flat might roll into lofty elevation, but the terrain would inevitably begin to re-form. It survived this perilous existence for an unknown time, before once again vanishing into the maw of destruction.
Across the world of Nayve, a far less violent phenomenon had been observed in the five decades since the discovery of the Worldfall. There, in an idyllic region of farmland and lakes, a land of gnomes and elves called Winecker, the ground had been subject to a series of upheavals. Hills had risen where gentle pastures once sprawled, and periodically, storms of wind would sweep the land, winds that swept away from Nayve, forming a vortex of upward-rising air. The scholarly druid Socrates had determined this to be a reaction to the Worldfall, an upward counter to that powerful and relentless downward force.
Despite the Worldfall’s lethal power, many creatures had survived the plunge down the cataract of chaos, including the thousands of harpies who had swarmed into Nayve five decades ago and the massive dragon who had been sucked into the storm called the Hillswallower. That maelstrom had similarly wrought great destruction in the Sixth Circle as well, the overworld that was called Arcati by those who dwelled there. A whole province in the cloud world had vanished into the Hillswallower, leaving a region of chaos and destruction where once cumulous elevations had risen gently into the oversky.
So extensive was the storm, so vast its plunge, that it actually carried the stuff of the cosmos downward past the sun-for that orb was below Arcati and above Nayve. Rising and falling on a cycle of twenty-four hours, the sun at its loftiest height brought daylight to the Sixth Circle as the Fourth was plunged into night. Then it would descend, and the Lighten Hour would come to Nayve as the overworld was cloaked in cooling darkness.
The sun was oriented over the Center of Everything, the temple of the Goddess Worldweaver and her silver loom, the thousand-foot-tall spire of silver rising from her sacred precincts. Three directions marked the points from the Center: the direction of wood; the direction of metal; and the direction that was neither metal nor wood, sometimes called the direction of null. Like the center of a web, the temple stood tall. Here the goddess performed her labors, while the druids studied the Tapestry, practiced their magic, and recorded their stories.
Nayve, the Fourth Circle, was surrounded by the Worldsea, beyond which lay the Second, Third, and Fifth Circles. The Fifth, in the direction of null, was the land of death and the end of all worlds. The First was below, the great city of Axial aligned directly underneath Circle at Center. Together with the Sixth, above, these worlds formed the core of the cosmos, the focus of all the worlds where magic dwelled.
Only the Seventh Circle, the world called Earth, lay beyond the pale of the first six worlds. There were those druids who maintained that Earth, the Seventh Circle, is an imagined place, a dream woven by the goddess on her Tapestry for the edification of her druids. More rational minds discounted this argument, and indeed, since Earth was the birthplace of all humans who live upon Nayve, druids and warriors alike, there was a significant population on Nayve with very vivid memories of their world of origin.
The druids were summoned here by the blessing of the goddess, and each warrior was brought by the explicit act of a druid: the carnal Spell of Summoning, which brings a warrior from the place of his dying to the place of his eternal life. But all of them recalled past lives, lands, and peoples of Earth.
These spells were the final proof: the Seventh Circle was a real place, source of actual creatures, the humans who, increasingly, came to populate Nayve. Thanks to the water discovered by the druid Juliay, the Spell of Summoning could be cast without costing the druid her youth and her future. As a consequence, more and more members of the order had selected warriors from the battlefields of Earth, bringing each to Nayve at the moment of his death.
Still, there were not enough of them, as the ghost warriors teemed to the far horizons and beyond.
Natac saw that the three great columns were marching onto the plains, with the Ringhills, some fifty miles away, as their goal. He sat astride the great dragon as Regillix Avatar flew three miles above the world’s surface. From here they could see the valley of the Swansleep River, the vast plain, and the rugged horizon of the hills rising toward the Center.
Tamarwind’s elves formed the rear guard as the army pulled away from the river, though the ghost warriors were not aggressive in their crossing of the Swansleep. The quake had proved very disruptive to them, even as it gave the means for the Delvers to cross Riven Deep. It was that dwarven crossing that had made Natac’s position
