I strained against the ropes, then tried to move my fingers, but my wrists were bound too tightly. Everything was bound too tightly, and the odor of fish too strong, far too strong.
I struggled until I was exhausted, with little result, and another darkness passed over me.
13
The objective universe is absolutely unreal.
For a moment, when I looked outside in the early afternoon, I thought fog had come to Lyncol, with the whiteness that obscured my view of the hillside trees. Then a figure appeared passing the window, red hair blotched with white, and before I could reach the door, Cerrelle appeared. 'Greetings—'
She thrust a jacket at me, one I hadn't seen before. Tut that on.'
'Why?'
'I thought it might be a good idea to take a walk. You're feeling sorry for yourself, and sometimes a walk helps.'
'What if I don't feel like a walk?'
'Well... I'm supposed to help you adjust, and you aren't going to adjust sitting and looking at the wall. Life goes on.'
'For some people.'
'You think you're the first and only one who's ever lost everything he loved?'
Again, there was a hint of bleakness behind the overly cheerful facade, a hint of something I wasn't sure I wanted to know.
'Besides,' Cerrelle continued, 'it's snowing, and Lyncol is beautiful in the snow.' Snow? I shivered.
'You probably wouldn't notice it, even without the jacket, but it will be more than enough with your nanite balance. Put it on.'
Her tone didn't brook arguing. I didn't. She'd just keep being annoyingly cheerful. Instead I pulled on the jacket and followed her into the corridor and then out the side door and off the small stone porch.
The ground was white, and only one set of tracks marred the snow, the ones that led to the structure where I lodged and was fed nanopills and pestered and questioned.
I looked back. The roof was tiled. That I could see from the pattern, but not the color because the snow had already provided a white blanket. The windows were dark. I frowned.
They didn't look dark from inside. Some form of one-way glass? Each wall stone shimmered a translucent green that almost seemed to glow. 'The stone shimmers—'
'Don't talk. Not now. You'll spoil it. Keep your questions for later. Just follow me.'
I shut my mouth, wanting to protest her high-handedness, but what good would it have done? Accept what is until you may understand it. I held to that thought. You couldn't change anything until you accepted and understood it.
The snow squeaked, ever so faintly, under Cerrelle's boots, but I moved without a sound along the path that led into the trees to the north of the lodge. I knew it was north, but how?
Under the canopy of firs on either side of the path the snow cover was intermittent, and brown needles protruded. With no real wind to disturb, swirl, or blow it, the powdery white drifted down through and around the branches like a mist sifting groundward. The faint odor of pines or resin mixed with the not-quite-dampness of the snow.
We passed through a stretch of evergreens perhaps a hundred meters long. Ninety-seven point three meters, insisted the internal observer that had come with my transition to demonhood. Another expanse of meadow appeared, also snow covered, and a silver spire rose out of the snow-dusted evergreens to my right, rising perhaps thirty meters, although the silver seemed to meld with the snow and at times vanish.
In the open, the chill dampness of snow melting on my forehead and bare cheeks was strangely welcome, like cold tears. Foerga's tears? My mother's? I swallowed, paused, and then kept walking. The silver spire vanished behind us, just as the certainty I had placed in Dzin had vanished.
Out of the snow ahead rose an oblong black-pillared building, like one of the temples of the ancients, except those had been white. It stood on a small hill, around which ran water over a perfectly smooth bed, so smooth that the water looked like shining silk that caressed the gentle slope before collecting in a long pool lined with the same seamless black stone. Steam rose where the snow touched the water, and the scent of lavender puffed away from the pool as we walked past.
The snow kept drifting down, cool and welcome on my face.
The next structure was harder to describe - either built into a granite cliff or the facsimile of a cliff built around it -with balconies overlooking heated pools from which steam rose - or I thought it did. A diaphanous veil cloaked the entire dwelling, revealing only general shapes. A couple might have been bathing in one of the pools - or it might have been two statues given the illusion of movement by the shifting of the veil.
Then the woods got deeper and darker.
Cerrelle held up a hand for me to stop, and I did.
A dark, looming, four-footed creature, silent as the snow itself, slipped across the path in front of us. Dark and wide antlers, a good two meters across, topped a long fur-bearded face.
Never had I thought anything that large could have moved so silently, but it had, vanishing into the darkness of the evergreens.
'What...' I whispered.
'Giant moose. Quiet.' Cerrelle resumed walking, the only sound that of the squeaking of her boots in the dry snow.
A chittering sound echoed through the woods, twice, and not again.
For a time, we passed no other obvious structures, just walked through meadows and woods, and over a thin brook where the clear water splashed amid rocks that were half covered with snow. An unrailed bridge crossed the stream, a single seamless construction of reddish stone that leapt out of the ground at each side and arched over the water, stones, and snow-covered grasses - part of nature, and yet not at all a part.
Beyond the bridge and uphill was a small lake, and granite ramparts, natural cliffs, reared into the clouds at the north end of the lake, less than a kilo away across dark gray-blue water. Fist-sized stones, predominantly white, comprised the shoreline.
On the exposed shore, the wind gusted and small white-caps crested intermittently. A birdlike elongated shape, a black-and-white shadow on the water, glided away from us, then vanished beneath the chop, only to reappear a good hundred meters to the east.
Cerrelle stood and watched the lake and the diving bird. I watched the lake, the bird, the snow, the mountains, and Cerrelle.
Abruptly, she walked westward along the shore, then took another path downhill and back southward.
Beyond the first patch of evergreens was another dwelling, but no dwelling I had ever seen. The entire dome was comprised of hexagons, and each hexagon glittered a silver sheen, but each sheen was fractionally different from those that bordered it. The light snow slid away from the dome and piled around it. No walk, no steps, no footprints led to or away from the dome.
Cerrelle didn't even slow her even steps as we passed, and I had to hurry to catch up. A ghost of a past image - the lines of crimson fire across a nielle sky - flitted across my eyes and vanished, except I hadn't seen images like that before being entombed by Wolyd.
Cerrelle turned and frowned but said nothing, instead headed into the next patch of woods and the more gentle filtering of snow through the overhanging evergreen branches.
Once more, I had the feeling of cold tears on my cheeks, and I thought of Foerga, kind and loving Foerga, and my tears mixed with the snow, and I walked blindly for a time.
We passed more dwellings or structures, each different from the others, each standing separate, inviolate, and each, in a strange way, like the bridge we had crossed, springing out of the ground and forest or snow-covered meadows as though it belonged there.