I slept until my ninth year, deep in the dream that blinds us to the world. The thorns woke me. They gave me sharp new truths to savour. Held me as my little brother died, embraced me for the long slow time it took my uncle’s men to kill my mother. I woke dark to the world, ready to give worse than I got.
“I will see this arch and listen to its pronouncement,” I say. “Because if it speaks for heaven then I have words of my own to speak back.”
Deep in the cloudbank lightning ricochets, making the thunderheads glow, a flat light edging the slopes for a heartbeat. The rain hammers down, pricked with ice, but I’m burning with the memory of those thorns and the fever they put in my blood. No absolution in this storm—the stain of sin is past water’s touch. The wounds the thorns gave turned sour, beyond cleansing. But heaven’s arch waits and suddenly I’m eager to let it speak of me.
The hand on John’s sword spasms open. “Let’s go.” A curt nod, scattering water, and he strides off. I follow, impatient now, the slope seeming less steep. Only the Nuban spares a backward glance for Avery, still hugging the slope, and a second one for me, watchful and beyond reading. The glow of my small victory fades, and not for the first time it’s the Nuban’s silence rather than his words that make me want to be better than I am.
Another of the Select takes up the rear guard. Greb they call him. “Watch your footing,” I say. “It gets slippery.”
We crest the lip of a valley and descend into shadows where the wind subsides from howls to complaint. The light is failing but where the trail snakes down the slope I can see something is wrong. I stop and Greb stumbles into me, cursing.
“There’s something wrong with the rain.” I stare at it. Across a wide swath the rain seems to fall too slowly, the drops queuing to reach the ground and making a grey veil of falling water.
“Slow-time.” John says, not turning or raising his voice.
Greb kicks my calf and I carry on. I’ve heard of slow-time. Tatters of it wreath the Arcada mountains, remnants from when the Builders broke the world. We discovered the same thing, the Builders and me; if something shatters your world then afterward you find the rules have changed. They had the Day of a Thousand Suns. I had the thorns.
I follow the Nuban into the slow-time, a band of it two or three yards wide. From the outside the rain within seems to fall at its leisure. Passing into the region all that changes is that now only where I’m walking are things right. Ahead and behind the rain powers down as if each drop were shot from a ballista and would punch holes in armour. And we’re through. Greb’s still wading through it behind me, moving like a street-mummer, slower than slow, until he’s free and starts to speed up. The slow-time sticks to him, reluctant to release its prisoner, as if for ten yards it’s still clinging to his skin before finally he’s walking at our pace once more.
We advance and a shoulder of rock reveals the strangest sight. It’s as if a bubble of glass, so clear as to be invisible, has been intersected by the mountainside. Rain streams off it, turned from its path by unseen currents. At the heart of the half-sphere, close to the ground, a wild blue light entices, part diamond, part promise. And all about it statues stand.
“Idiots.” John waves an arm at them as we pass. “I can understand the first one being trapped, but the other seven?”
We’re close enough to see they’re not statues now. Eight travellers, the closest to the light dressed in fashions seen only in dusty oil paintings on castle walls. Flies in amber, moths drawn to the light of the fire in which we burn. What world will be waiting for them when they think to turn around and walk back out?
“Do all time-bubbles have a handy warning light at the centre?” I wonder it aloud but no one answers.
I glance back at them once before the distance takes them. All of them held there like memories while the days and months flicker past outside. I have time-bubbles in my head, places I return to over and again.
When I killed my first man and left the Healing Hall in flames, sick with poison from the wounds the hook-briar gave, it was Father Gomst who found me. Memory takes me to that tower-top where I leaned out, watching the flames spiral and the lanterns moving far below as Father’s guards hunted me. We stand on that tower, trapped in those minutes, we two, and often I pass by, pausing to study it once more and learning nothing.
Father Gomst raises both hands. “You don’t need the knife, Jorg.”
“I think I do.” The blade trembles in my grip, not from fear but from what the fever puts in me. A sense of something rushing toward me, something thrilling, terrible, sudden…my body vibrating with anticipation. “How else would I cut?”