Curl by curl, mounting clouds over clouds, the Whorl rose higher in the dull sky of the Warren until it was as if it were leaning over them. The closer they came the more it resembled the front of a churning sandstorm, though seeming immobile. It cut across the landscape as a curtain of hissing, shimmering dust and dirt.
‘Can we cross it?’ Kiska yelled, having to raise her voice to be heard over the waterfall-roar.
‘How should I know?’ the priest answered, annoyed.
The ravens swooped past them then to land to one side where something pale lay half buried in the sands. They pecked at it, scavenging, and Kiska charged. Waving her arms, yelling, she drove them from their perches atop what appeared to be the body of a huge hound.
Jheval ran up, morningstars in his fists. ‘Careful!’
Kiska knelt next to the beast, stroked its head; it was alive, and pale, as white as snow beneath the dirt and dust.
‘A white hound,’ Jheval mused. ‘I’ve never heard of the like.’ He beckoned the priest to them but the man refused to come any closer. He stood alone, hunched and bedraggled, looking like the survivor of a shipwreck. The hound was panting, mouth agape, lips pulled back from black gums, its fearsome finger-long teeth exposed. ‘Is it wounded?’
Kiska was running her hands down its sides. ‘I don’t see any wound. Perhaps it is exhausted.’
‘Well, there’s nothing we can do.’
‘No.’ She stroked its head. ‘I suppose not. A handsome beast.’
Jheval snorted. ‘Deadly.’
The thing in the bag at Kiska’s side was squirming now, as though impatient. She rose. ‘We should pass through.’
Jheval gestured helplessly to the storm. ‘And what is on the other side? Is anything? We’ll be lost in this front, just like at home.’
Kiska freed the cloth from her helmet, wrapped it round her face. ‘There must be something. The hound came from there.’
‘Yes, fleeing!’
A shrug was all she would give to such an unknown.
Glaring his irritation, Jheval undid his sash — it proved to be a very long rope of woven red silk. He offered an end to Kiska and she tied it to her belt, asking, ‘What of the priest?’
The warrior made a face. ‘If we lose him, we lose him. Something tells me, though,’ he added, sour, ‘we won’t be so lucky.’
‘Very well.’ Kiska hunched, raising one arm to her face and clamping her staff under the other like a lance.
Before the wall of churning dust took her, Kiska cast one last glance to the priest. He was motionless, as if torn, peering back into Shadow, then at them. She urged him on with a wave of the staff and then she had to clench her eyes against the storm of dust.
The passage through the barrier, or front, or whatever it was, took far less time than Kiska anticipated. Within, she was tense, readied for an attack, though none came. All she noticed were voices or notes within the rampaging wind. Calling, or wailing, or just plain gibbering. She did not know what to make of it. At one point she thought she was seeing things as, in the seeming distance, immense shapes grappled: one a rearing amorphous shape with multiple limbs, the two others dark as night. It appeared to her that the two night-black shapes ate the larger monstrosity. Quite soon she stumbled out into clear still air to find herself on naked rock.
She pulled the scarf from her face. Dust sifted from her cloak and armour to drift almost straight down in the dead air.
She flinched as Jheval began untying the rope at her belt, but then she relaxed and allowed him the intimacy. ‘Where are we?’ she breathed, wondering.
The man peered round, narrow-eyed. ‘I don’t know. But I don’t like it.’
‘Is it the Abyss?’
‘No,’ answered a third voice and they turned to see the priest. Dirt layered his robes and grey kinky hair. He shook himself like a dog, raising a cloud of dust. ‘Though it is close, now. Closer than we would like. This is still Emurlahn, now a border region of Chaos. Half unformed, sloughing back into the inchoate.’ The priest’s eyes tightened in anger, almost to closed slits. ‘Lost now to Shadow.’
For an instant Kiska believed she’d seen him somewhere before. Then the man peered about, confused. ‘I see no fish…’
The thing at her side wriggled and pushed at the sides of the burlap bag. She knelt. ‘I suppose now is as good as any time.’ Jheval stepped close — a hand, she noted, on the dagger at his belt. She laid the bag down, now bulging and shifting from whatever was within. She undid the string and straightened up. The thing worked its way free of the coarse cloth. It looked like a sculpture of twigs and cloth, bat-shaped, winged, somehow animate. It launched itself in the air, the wings of tattered cloth flapping.
It flittered about them as agile as a bat or a moth. Then suddenly the two ravens were among them, stooping, black beaks snapping. Kiska raised her arms. ‘No!’
The thing pounced on Warran’s head, clutching his hair with its little twig fingers, chirping angrily. The priest bellowed and leapt into the air. He ran in a blind panic, batting at the thing while the two ravens whirled overhead, harrying him. Kiska and Jheval watched him go, arms waving, to disappear amid the rocks.
She eyed Jheval, uncertain. ‘Sometimes I think that fellow is much more than he seems… at other times, far less.’
‘I think he’s lost his mind,’ Jheval muttered. He scanned the horizon then pointed. ‘There’s something.’
Kiska shaded her eyes though the light was diffuse. There was a smear in the distance, a dark spot low on the horizon like a storm cloud. ‘Well… Warran did run in that direction, more or less.’
Jheval shrugged and started off. She followed, arms draped over the stave across her shoulders.
After a time the bat-thing returned to circle Kiska then flew off again in the general direction of the smear on the horizon. They came across Warran fanning himself on a rock. Of the ravens, she saw no sign. Jheval peered down at the winded sweaty priest for a moment and then said, ‘Perhaps we should rest here.’
‘I’m not tired,’ Kiska said.
‘Perhaps not. But who knows how long it has been. Or,’ and he caught her eye, ‘when we may get another chance.’
She grunted at that, acquiescing. ‘Our guide…’
‘No doubt it will return.’
‘Yes. Sleep,’ Warran enthused, brightening. ‘I will keep watch.’
Jheval and Kiska shared a look. ‘I’ll go first,’ said Jheval.
Kiska arranged her cloak, set her staff and knives on their belt next to her. Then she rolled on to her side and attempted to rest.
It seemed the next instant that someone was shaking her booted foot and she raised her head to see Jheval wave her up. It was darker now — not as night proper, as the light of ‘day’ was not proper either. She sat up as he sat down. There was something in his expression as their gazes met. Wonder? Apprehension? She couldn’t quite tell. In any case with a nod he directed her attention to one side then lay down. She rose, collected her weapons.
She found Warran standing off to that side, but he was obviously not what Jheval meant with his nod — it was certainly what Warran himself was staring at in the far distance.
For a moment the bizarre horizon line confused her until she remembered that this was Chaos and so need not make sense to her. The darkened sky was dominated by rippling curtains of light such as those she’d seen over the Strait of Storms in her youth. But these lights circled and danced around an empty black spot in the sky close to the horizon. And it may be that she was mistaken, but it also seemed as if the land itself curved up to meet the thing.
‘Is that it?’ she asked Warran, hushed. ‘The Whorl?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. That is it. And it looks as if it does not end in Chaos. It looks as if it touches upon the Abyss. Upon nonexistence itself.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that hole is eating everything. Chaos included.’
At first she rejected the man’s melodramatic pronouncement. Ridiculous! Yet, Chaos was stuff. Just unformed or differently organized stuff that she would call chaotic. Not nothingness. That was Outside. Beyond. The Infinite Abyss.