Allel cackled sardonically. “Now, where have I heard that before? People always mean so well… but we go nowhere, while the ice closes all around us.”
Teal lay back and stared at the darkness beyond the teepee’s chimney flue. “So that’s it. Damen will never let me out of here.” A despair as complete as the world’s roof settled over him. “It’s over, then.”
“Not necessarily.” Allel’s voice was muffled.
Teal turned — and then began struggling off the pallet. “Grandmother, what have you done?”
The stone knife lay on the mat, streaked with blood. A great gash opened Allel’s face from temple to throat. The old woman swayed slightly, blood pooling around her neck. “Take the knife,” she said hoarsely. “I’ll say it was you.”
“But…”
“In my mother’s day, they’d have killed you for this, you know? But now, as times have grown harsher, we’ve had to work out laws to control each other. So they’ll be civilized… They’ll exile you. Just like Damen said. You can go where you want.”
“But—”
“No buts. I’ll make sure Erwal is cared for.” She slumped forward. “Take the knife,” she whispered. “Do it.”
Involuntarily, she cried out. Blood looped over her mouth.
Outside the teepee there were running footsteps, lamps, shouts. Teal struggled across the mat and put his arm around the thin shoulders…
…and grasped the knife.
They let him recover from his balloon fall. They gave him a suit of quilted leather, containers for water, flints, a coil of rope… they didn’t want to think they were sending him to his death.
Although, of course, that was exactly what they were doing.
On his last night Erwal came to his guarded teepee. She pressed a bundle wrapped in skin into his hands — and then spat in his face, and hurried away.
Teal was twenty years old. He felt something soft dying inside him.
Inside the skin was his grandmother’s knife, cleaned of blood. Teal tucked it into his belt and tried to sleep.
At dawn, most of the village turned out to watch him leave. Teal stared at the slack faces, the children with limbs like twigs, and beyond them the huddle of shabby little teepees, the piles of lichen, a half-butchered mummy-cow carcass. Once, he thought, we could build worlds. We even built this boxworld. Now: now, look at us.
There was no sign of Damen, or Erwal, or Allel.
Teal turned away, pulling his hood closed against the cold.
His feet were already aching by the time he passed the bridge anchor. There’d been no will to rebuild the world-bridge, and the rope lay crumpled amid the frost.
He felt as if he were walking through a great ill-lit room. Dead heather crumbled beneath his feet, gray in the ruddy gloom. Home, above him, was a mirrored roof as bleak as the ground beneath him.
Wind sprawled across the flat landscape. He walked until his legs were numb with fatigue.
When night fell he huddled beneath a shriveled cow-tree and sucked sour milk from its bark nipples. Then he buried himself in a rough bed of leaves, clutching the stone knife to his chest and determining to think of nothing until dawn.
There was a rustle under the wind. A warm breath, not unpleasantly scented—
He snapped awake and scrambled backwards out of his nest. In the starless gloom a huge shape hovered uncertainly.
He held out the knife with both hands. “Who is it?”
The voice was ill-formed, soft, and infinitely reassuring. “It iss me… Orange. I am so-ssorry to wake you…”
Teal let out a deep breath and lowered the knife. He found himself laughing softly, his eyes wet. How absurd.
Orange moved closer to the cow-tree, and Teal snuggled into her warm coat.
After that he slept for most of the night.
In the morning he breakfasted from the food teats clustered over Orange’s lower body. There were milk and water nipples, and meat buds that could be snapped off, without discomfort to Orange.
They set off just after dawn, with Teal munching on a still warm bud. Orange wore a saddle-shaped pannier into which Teal loaded his meager possessions.
The morning was chill but comparatively bright, and Home was a shining carpet overhead. Teal felt his spirits lifting a little.
“Orange… why did you follow me?”
“Your gra-grandmother told me where you were going. So I decided to follow.”
“Yes, but why?”
“To… help.”
He smiled and wrapped a hand in the coarse hair behind her ear. “Well, I’m glad you’re here.”
That evening Orange used her articulated trunk to gather handfuls of moss. She packed his aching feet with it and then licked it off. “My… saliva has healing pro-properties,” she said.
Teal lay back against her fur. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you…”
The reddening world folded away, and he slept.
They came to an abandoned City.
Teal walked through arches, into low cylindrical buildings. The walls were as smooth as skin and knife-thin, showing no signs of age. But the interiors were unlit and musty.
They walked on despondently.
“Did grandmother tell you what I’m trying to find?”
“Yess. The… Eight Roomss.”
“The trouble is I’ve no idea how to get there… or even how we’ll recognize it when we find it. We’re walking at random.”
Orange hissed, “From the ss-stories I have heard, you will… know it wh-when you ssee it…”
Teal looked at her carefully. Was there a trace of amusement in that clumsy voice?
“What stories? What are you talking about?”
But the huge round face was blank.
On the fifteenth day… or maybe the sixteenth… a blizzard hit them.
It was a moving wall that reached up to the clouds. It turned Teal’s world to a blur of huge flakes; the air was almost unbreathable.
“We must… must keep moving,” Orange trumpeted. He buried his face in her snow-laden fur. She wrapped her trunk around his shoulders. “F… follow me,” she said. “We will find… the Eight Rooms…”
He closed his eyes and struggled on.
The storm took days to clear.
Teal woke to a world silenced by snow. Brushing clear his clothes, he sat up to look around.
Orange was staring straight ahead, her fingers working in agitation.
“Wha…” Teal squinted in the direction she was looking, to the red-lit north.
There was something on the horizon: a patch of darkness amid the snow.
A structure.
It was a cube with sides about half as tall again as a man. The walls were unbroken save for a single large door set in the south-facing side.
The whole thing was hovering about an arm’s length from the ground.
“The s-songss,” hissed the mummy-cow. “That iss what… the songs describe…”
“The Eight Rooms,” Teal sighed. “You were right. It’s unmistakable.”
Orange quivered; he studied her curiously. She was paralyzed by fear… but she’d known where to look. He thought of generations of mummy-cows, used and despised by the people they’d been designed to serve — but all the time hoarding a knowledge and lore, a kind of courage, of their own.
He wondered uneasily how much else there was to learn about the world.
He stumbled to his feet, then patted Orange’s flank. “Come on,” he said. “Just a bit further…”
Orange wouldn’t come closer than a few paces to the structure. Teal approached alone. He knelt in the snow and passed his hand underneath the cube. “Must take an awful lot of hot air to hold this up…”
Teal walked up to the door and pushed tentatively. He found his chest tightening.