Ishu?l destroyed. His father rediscovered. The Doctrine utterly overthrown.
This was a Study like no other.
The mountain wind fluted through as much as across the Survivor’s skin. Slices. Incisions. Sickle-shaped and puckered. Intersecting. Even his scarring bore scars. Had his memory not been perfect he could have used his body as a map, a cipher. Every desperate stand. Every vicious encounter. His trial had been carved into the very meat of him, the residue of a thousand thousand shortest paths. Decisions without number.
He had become a hieroglyph, a living indication of things both invisible and profound. No matter how bright the sun burned, darkness surrounded him. No matter how deep the distance, slavering beasts encircled him. No matter how peaceful the birdsong, how quiet the jackpine and high stone, cutting edges whistled in the black, points gutted the near-emptiness.
Cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts …
He had become a walking word. The only one that mattered now that Ishu?l was gone …
Survival.
He and the boy followed the old man and the woman, their ears pricked to the brief exchanges between them. Lexicons were expanded. Grammars were considered and revised. They correlated tones and expressions, and began milking ever more meaning from the raw sounds.
They ascended slopes, followed switchback paths, labouring through high-altitude shadows.
By some fluke of their approach, the sun breached the mountain along the line of the glacier, so that all the world seem dazzled. They climbed toward the fields of hanging shimmer.
Shriekers bubbled up through the black. The Survivor blinked—flinched.
The boy observed.
Cuts and cuts and cuts …
Despite their apparent infirmity, the worldborn couple scarcely paused for respite. They climbed with alacrity, trotted with relentless wind—so much so that the boy was taxed on occasion. It was the substance, the Survivor realized, the drug they administered with an exchange of fingertips: it deepened their lungs as much as it quickened their wits and their limbs.
Another mystery …
More promising than the others.
The ink of knowledge blots the page. The couple understood what they were, but only in rough approximation. Their concepts could only touch, never grasp, the principles of the D?nyain. They lacked the required precision.
But as partial and incomplete as their understanding was, they nevertheless assumed that they knew everything they needed to know—and so were safe, or at least shielded from the refugees. They could no more fathom their straits than a crow could read.
They would succumb. The Survivor need only aim his soul and they would succumb—eventually. The woman’s madness was naught but a complication. The old man’s hatred and knowledge were even less so.
They would succumb, he quickly realized, the way the World had succumbed to his father. They dwelt in worlds pocked and limned and partitioned with darknesses they could not see. The unity of things, they thought, was something hidden beneath, a vast analogue to the false unity of their souls. And so they assumed they, at least, stood apart, believing that it belonged to souls to hang themselves by their own hair. They did not understand how Cause nested within Cause, how all that was real—and mundane—transpired across a singular plane, the after forever following upon the before.
So they thought words were the sole avenue of conquering souls, that they could, through vigilance and a wilful refusal to believe, guard this gate and so keep their souls safe. They could not see what they could not see, and so were blind to the way they became mere moments in a greater mechanism in the presence of the D?nyain. Like chips of ice in warm water, their secrets would melt, their principles would dissolve, and they would become continuous with the whole, all but indistinguishable.
They would succumb.
“How can you know this?” the boy asked the first night of their exodus. They had camped on the shoulder of a giant, high enough to dare the teeth of the cold. The old man and his woman lay curled one about the other on a higher tier, finding solace of sorts, the Survivor knew, in their greater elevation.
“Because they are less,” something within him replied, “and we are more.”
“But what of sorcery?” the boy asked. “You said the Singers had changed everything.”
“True,” the Cause-within said. As cause, it was also effect, selected from a chattering cacophony of causes. As it passed, another was selected to be voiced, a lone survivor of inner savagery. The soul was nothing more than congeries of brutalized survivors …
“The Doctrine is incomplete.”
“So how can you know?” the Cause-nearby pressed.
“Because the Doctrine yet rules the meat of the World,” yet another survivor said. “And because,” the one following added, “they succumbed to my father …”
Yet another Cause monitored this process of selection, the sorting of the living and spoken from the dead and unvoiced, ever alert for evidence of madness …