F A L L E N

Chapter One

Ramus Rheel hated the moment between sleeping and waking.  It was a strange place, haunted by recent dreams and the ghosts of those long since passed, and he loathed it even more when one of the fading dreams was a good one.  This latest had been about a voyage, though one he had not yet made.  Dreams about voyages he had made were more usually nightmares.
            He sat up and held his head as the dizziness filtered away and real life forced itself in.  He was forty-four years old.  He could recall a dream he’d had when he was six – sailing west from the shores of Noreela and finding the edge of the world – but he had already forgotten the one he’d just had.  He wondered whether this was peculiar to him.
            Yet what had woken him?  It was not yet dawn, and the streets were still quiet.  A dog whimpered somewhere and surreptitious footsteps echoed, but Long Marrakash was largely still asleep.  And so should he be, if he knew what was best for him.
            Something banged in the room next door.  It was the main room in his home and contained the only door onto the street.
            He froze, listening hard.  Another knock, wood against wood.  That was my chair being nudged into the table, Ramus thought.  He stood quickly, wincing as his knees popped, and reached back across his bed.  He kept his leather weapon roll on a shelf above where he slept, but it had not been used for a while.  He grabbed one trailing strap, pulled, and the roll unraveled onto the bed. 
            Something scraped across the floor, and he heard a muttered curse.
            Ramus’s heart was thumping.  He’d had occasion to fight several times on his voyages, but he had never thought himself a fighting man.  He had no grace of movement and his reaction speed was slow, and he had scars that bore testament to that.
            He drew a short knife from the roll and knelt beside the bed, losing himself in deeper shadows. 
            “Ramus?”  The voice was low and uncertain.
            Ramus half-stood, then thought better of it.  Just because they know my name doesn’t mean they’re here for anything good.
            “Ramus, are you—?”  Whoever had broken into his home tripped as they reached for his sleeproom door.  They grunted, fell into the door and knocked it open.
            Ramus pressed his knife to the invader’s throat.   
            “Ramus, by all the gods, it’s me!”
            “Nomi?” Ramus fell back and dropped his knife, appalled.  Was I really going to slice her throat?  Maybe, maybe not.  Like his dreams, his true intentions already seemed to be fading away, and for that he was glad.
            “I think I’ve broken my wrist.”
            “You scared the shit out of me, Nomi!”
            “Can we have some light in here?  I need to see if the bone’s sticking out.”
            “If the bone was sticking out you’d be doing more than whimpering about it.”  Ramus stood and went to the window.  He drew the curtain aside to let in death-moonlight, its pale yellow glow revealing more of the room’s shape and depth.
            Nomi was still sitting on the floor by the open door, nursing her left arm.  “Don’t you have a lamp?”
            “Running low on oil.”
            “I’ll give you some money for oil, Ramus.”
            Ramus sparked his lamp and turned it up.  He sheathed the knife and re-tied the weapon roll.  Nomi mumbled something and Ramus looked at the back of her head.  She seemed bedraggled and flustered, which was rare for her.  Not good for her image. 
            “What are you doing here?” he asked.
            “Came to see you.”  Nomi held her hand up, flexed her fingers and sighed, seemingly happy that her wrist was not shattered.
            “I doubt it’ll even bruise,” Ramus said.  “Nomi, it’s obvious that you’ve come to see me.  But why break in?  And why sneak around in my rooms like a thief?”
            She stood and brushed herself down, smiling contritely.  “I suppose I look like a fool.  But I came to tell you something.  Ask you something.”  She sighed, sitting on the bed and brushing loose hair back from her face.
            “Spit it out,” Ramus said.  Nomi had been to his home a hundred times before, but this was the first time she had been in his sleeproom.  It made him uncomfortable. 
            “I’m not thinking straight,” she said.  “Give me a beat.  Something like this doesn’t happen every night.”
            “You got humped!” Ramus said, mock-elated.  He threw his hands in the air and reached for a bottle of wine on a shelf.
            “Ramus, this is important!”
            He popped the cork with his teeth and sat on a chair.  “Fine,” he said, taking a swig of wine.  It was good – a gift from Nomi following her latest importation of Ventgorian grapes – but the first taste always made him cringe.  He offered her the bottle and she accepted, taking a long draught herself.  “So tell me.”
            “I met someone,” she said.  “Last night, just before midnight in the First Heart Wine Rooms.  He looked exhausted, like he’d been walking forever.  I knew he was a wanderer – there was a distance in his eyes, as though he’d seen things no one else could imagine.  He looked around, then approached the bar and asked if they had root wine.”
            “So, a wanderer ordered a drink.  Are you going to get to the point?”
            “Ramus, you have to meet him!”  She stood and paced the small room, nervous and excited.  “I’ve arranged to meet for breakfast, down by the river.  He has something he wants to sell, and I think we need to buy.” 
            “’We’?  You know I don’t have two pieces to rub together.”
            Nomi waved at the air and shook her head, as though impatient.  “No, no, I’ll pay.  But you and I need to enter into this together.”
            “Enter into what?”
            “An agreement.”  She sat again, never taking her eyes from Ramus.  I could get lost in that gaze, he thought.  He shoved the notion aside.  He and Nomi had met ten years ago, and they were the most friendly enemies he had ever known.  Competitors, jealous Voyagers, and so dissimilar that he sometimes wondered how they even spoke the same language.  Yet he harbored emotions for her, keeping them so deep that even he was not certain of them, and sometimes he saw confused thoughts in her eyes.  But he feared that they were merely reflections of his own. 
            “You’re a mess,” he said.  “Look at you.  Your trousers don’t even match your jacket.”
            “I got dressed quickly.  Went home, couldn’t sleep, then knew I had to come to see you.”
            “Why?  What has this wanderer got?”
            Nomi’s eyes burned, her cheeks flushed and her lips pursed.  A smile burst across her face.  “I won’t tell you,” she said at last, the words bursting from her.  “But we need to agree—”
            “Nothing, until I know what this is all about.  How much money is involved?”
            She shook her head and swigged from the wine bottle again.  “That’s not important.”
            Ramus pretended to collapse against the wall.  “Now you truly have me worried!”
            “You’ll see.”  She stood and clunked the bottle back onto its shelf.  “You’ll see, Ramus.  Meet me at Naru May’s for breakfast.  You must hear what this wanderer has to say, and see what he has to show.”
            “I do?”
            “If you want to change your life, yes.”  She glanced around the room, and for a second Ramus hated her; the look of disgust was bad enough, but the vague contempt in her voice was cutting.  
            Nomi left without another word, and Ramus was glad to see her go.

 

Excerpt 2

“I’ve spent a long time walking back and forth before the Divide,” Ten began. “It draws you. I know I said earlier that it’s … terrifying, but there’s an attraction as well. It pulls you in and holds you close, and sometimes it just won’t let go.
                  “The first time I saw it, I was about twenty. I had a run-in with a band of marauders on the Pavissian Steppes, and I went south to get away from them. I knew what was supposed to be there, but I was young and feisty, and I’d just killed my first man.”
                  He trailed off, pouring more cydrax and looking at Nomi and Ramus. Trying to see if we’re shocked, Ramus thought. Nomi is, I can see that. But I hope she won’t give him the satisfaction.
                  “Anyway,” Ten said, and drank some more. “The feistiness didn’t last. I got away from the marauders and kept going south. After a long time I found the Divide … or maybe it found me. It’s a cliff that reaches into the sky.” He looked up into the clear blue above them, shaking his head. “Here the sky has no scale. It’s blue and beautiful, but there’s no real sense of it. There, the Divide touches it, and seems to devour it. The cliff rises higher than the clouds, which seem to shroud its top permanently – if it even has one. It goes east and west as far as you can see, and disappears around the belly of the land. First time I saw it, I spent a whole moon camped a few miles from its base, thinking I would never get away. There was plenty of food; berry bushes, root crops, wild sheebok grazing along the foothills. I ate well. There were flying things that buzzed me, but they never came close again after I shot one down with my crossbow. In the evenings, I’d sit and listen to the tumblers rolling across the plains.” He took another drink.
                  Tumblers! Ramus thought. I always thought they were legend! But still he reserved judgement. Ten was a good storyteller, yet perhaps that was all he was. Time, as Ramus’s mother had said, would tell.
                  “That was when I first started thinking for myself. Until then, I’d never truly been a wanderer. I walked, yes. I traveled from here to there, but I spent most of my time simply surviving. There in the shadow of the Divide, I came alive. I spent the nights sitting by my fire and thinking on what the Divide could mean. What was at its top, if it had one? What was behind it?”
                  “There’s nothing behind it,” Nomi scoffed.
                  “Then why is it called a Divide?” Ramus asked. 
                  Ten smiled. “So I sat there night after night, a good meal in my belly and the cool night air alive in my senses. I’d been drinking only water for a couple of moons, and I felt so much closer to the land. Almost as if I could plunge my hand into its loam and touch its magic.”
                  “Pah!” Nomi snorted. “You’re no magichalan.” She regarded such people with derision, Ramus knew, though he could never understand why. She was a Voyager and had seen many strange things in the marshes of Ventgoria. Why not believe in magic?
                  “No, I’m not. But the Divide makes you appreciate the potential in things. And this whole world is thrumming with potential.”
                  Nomi chuckled and took a sip of her cydrax. 
                  “How long did you stay there?” Ramus asked.
                  “Three moons, camped in its shadow. At dawn I’d see a moment of sun, and then only dusk. After a while, I started thinking about finding where it ended.”
                  “I’ve always heard that there is no end,” Ramus said. “That it goes on, out beyond Noreela’s shores.”
                  “Maybe,” Ten said. “But the closer I came to the eastern shore, the more treacherous the landscape became. Plain turned to marsh, and then bog. The bogs were venting poisonous gases, and there were creatures in there … huge. I never saw them, but I heard them, and I felt the ground shiver as they rose and rolled. So I worked northward, leaving the Divide’s shadow at last. And by the time I reached the shore, I could no longer see the Divide. The bogs steamed, the clouds closed in, and wherever that cliff struck the coast was out of view.
                  “I would have stayed there, but the bog gas would have killed me eventually. And if not the gas, those things that lived there.” He opened the third bottle of Cydrax. The alcohol seemed to be having little effect. “I could hear them rising from the bog and dragging themselves towards me. Perhaps they were close. Or perhaps they were a long way off, and larger than I imagine. I didn’t stay to find out.”
                  “Voyagers have tried sailing past the Divide,” Nomi said.
                  “Piss,” Ramus said. “They’ve set out with that intention, but no one knows if they succeeded, because they’ve not been seen again.”
                  Ten nodded, a satisfied smile on his face. 
                  “Maybe they’re still sailing,” Ramus speculated.
                  “Or maybe,” the wanderer said, “they’re in the stomachs of the bog beasts, or at the bottom of the sea, or washed up rotting against the shore. Noreela is a hungry land.”
                  “You have a way of making it such an attractive place,” Ramus said, but his interest was piqued. “Go on. What happened next?”
                  “I went west,” Ten said. “I traveled again in the shadow of the Divide, heading for the western shores. I hoped that there I would find what the east had hidden, but I was wrong.”
                  “What was there?” Nomi asked.
                  “A jungle. I started in, but the trees soon grew so close together that I could barely pass by. And there were creatures there, too. Spiders as big as my hand; snakes as thick as my thigh; ants; worms with teeth; flies that sucked my blood and left poison in its place. And other things, not animals. Not human. A bad place. I only touched its outer extremes, but I knew it went on for days.”
                  “So you went north?” Ramus asked. “Tried to skirt the forest but keep the Divide in view? Only the forest grew north as well, and by the time you reached the western shores, the Divide was too far away to see?”
                  Ten stared at him for some time; so long that Ramus looked away, unnerved. “You don’t believe me,” Ten said.
                  “I’ve met a lot of wanderers in my time, and they’re known to … elaborate.”
                  “Ramus,” Nomi said, her voice bearing a warning.
                  “I’m telling the truth,” Ten said. “If any Voyager had made it back from that place, they’d tell you the same.”
                  “But you have more to tell,” Ramus said.
                  Ten glanced at Nomi, reached into his cloak and then decided against it. “I’ll tell you first,” he said. “Then I’ll show you.”