Where Ith had been there was now something both more and less than
nothing. Something awful had happened,
but Viola was in the wrong frame of reference to understand it. There was a hole in everything.
Fragments of local
time began recurring in the marble room. She was with the naga in the room and
she was talking; then she was inside the box and the blonde woman was there;
then she was communing with Ith. She felt like she was watching all of this
from some other place, and for a moment she was mesmerised by it – observing
but not entirely present. But then the shards of discarded time split further
and events began to happen at once, bewildering and frightening her. Her sense
of herself began to slip away. Soon all she would be were the tiny quantised
moments, no more than milliseconds long, stripped of all meaning, none of them
on their own enough to constitute anything. It was the end of time.
Light and singing filled the room. The
kaleidoscope of fragmenting time vanished. A long white tunnel had opened up in the
middle of the room, stretching back who knew how far. A short and broad young
man with black hair was walking along it towards her. He was dressed in
tattered grey clothes – wide-brimmed hat, jacket, shirt, long trousers and leather
boots – and he was the source of the singing.
...though life may lead us into care,
I once loved a maiden fair,
and she loved me then,
she loved me then,
and she’ll love me again....
Viola jumped up. The man brushed his
index finger against his lips and smiled. He continued to sing as he stepped
out of the tunnel.
...although my hair is thin and grey
although my lady’s gone away
she will return and I know when
will return and I know when
when the violets bloom again...
He stood over the gaping hole, but now
it didn’t seem so strange. Something had changed; time was sliding back on to its
tracks again. Boo buzzed nearby. Viola
stared at the newcomer intently – there was something about his eyes; something
that was reassuring. It was their colour – they were deep and grey. She was too
befuddled, though, to work out why they seemed so familiar.
‘How did you do
that?’ whispered Viola, in the tongue of northern humans, ‘is it the song?’
The man smiled again
and nodded. He spoke in clear central Ethian.
‘They thought I might
be better at a song than a spell’
He pulled a bag off
his back and dipped his hand inside it, pulling out what looked like a grey
rubber ball. He slid it over the hole and it expanded with a small ‘puff’. It
felt as if the space around them was relaxing back into normality.
‘What are you doing
here?’ he asked.
Viola didn’t even
consider not telling him the truth. The eyes were enough to persuade her.
‘I was trying to save
the Prime...’ she murmured, a catch in her voice, ‘...but I failed’
His smile grew
grimmer. She could now see that his face was glistening with sweat.
‘That’s why I am
here, Viola of Ortia’
Viola took a step
back. Fear gripped her again.
‘How do you know me?’
‘I know many things,
and soon...’ he paused, ‘...I will know many more’
‘Who are you?’ she asked, ‘and where have you
come from?’
He nodded down at the
hole.
‘I am Ith’ he said, ‘or
I will be, shortly’
‘What?’
He shook his head. He
began another song, this time in a language that she could not understand. This
was another mantra, and she realised exactly what it must be – it was some
counterweight to the incantation that had destroyed the prime. It was a
ravelling spell to patch up the world.
‘How can this be?’
He paused for a
second, but the song continued. Invisible voices filled the chamber. If Bea’s
destruction had been a solitary song, the reconstruction appeared to be a social
effort.
‘How can it be? Because
it has to be, or our world will die’
He sat down on the
ball that was corking up the existential hole as if on the most comfortable of
cushions and looked up at her. The skin on his right hand was changing colour;
it was turning orange.
‘Hurry’ he said, straining
slightly for the words, ‘it will soon be over, and then it will be too late for
you’
His arm split down
the middle and flattened into two petal-tentacles. Viola felt a strange mix of
horror and exultation. The second hand split too, just as the first pair of
petals began to split again. Where there had been hands and fingers were now
red leaf-like limbs. The skin on his
face began to bulge and shift.
‘You’re changing into
the prime, aren’t you? How can that be?’
‘I have been sent to
replace the prime by the Grey Wanderer and his servant, Braith. I have been
sent to estimate the errors and correct them, across all of time’
The new Ith’s voice
was becoming more and more strained. The mutations that were twisting his body
would soon get to his mouth. Then, Viola assumed, he would be unable to speak.
‘How will you survive for an eternity?
Won’t you die like any other mortal?’
‘I am no mortal, my lady: my father was
a common man of Eth and my mother was a lady of the Empire’
‘A hybrid’ whispered Viola, remembering
Dom, ‘an immortal being’
The new Ith was struggling to speak now;
his voice faint and muffled.
‘Yes, I’m a mule. You mortals should
have known that we would be useful one day’
His mouth closed over. His legs were
gone and all his clothes. He looked in almost every way like the old Ith,
except that he was paler; something of the hue of northern human skin still
clung to him. A tentacle reached down and picked up his hat. He placed it
uncertainly at the point where the strange petals met in the middle of the
flower.
It was time to leave.
Viola turned back towards the rowboat and the canal. They had gone. The chamber
was now completely smooth and there were no exits. Only the white tunnel
remained but that was fading fast. Panic gripped her – how would she get out
now?
A scrap of mental
paper appeared in her mind. It was torn and grey and seemed already to be
written on: a palimpsest.
‘Ith knows you; Ith fears for you; let Ith help you’
‘I need to escape – I need to find a way out’
‘There is only one way; the way that allowed Ith to come here; through
the wormhole’
Viola looked up at
the swirling white tunnel. She was certain that she saw massing blue clouds
behind its bright translucent walls. She shivered.
‘Number four must continue; she must survive; there is still work to do’
Viola steeled herself
to flee. Unanswered questions still crowded into her mind, however.
‘What work?’
‘The work of discovery; the search for truth; the finding of answers’
‘What answers?’
‘Ith is not certain; Ith still searches through the
arrays; Ith only knows you must seek the past’
‘The past?’
she asked ‘where in the past?’
‘Your past; the past that has been hidden from you; you
must leave now and find it’
The wormhole was
fading at an alarming rate. Ith’s tentacles began to wave in the air. The scrap
of paper in her head disappeared. Ith started its endless chant once more. The
world was whole again but remained entirely terrifying.
Viola scooped up Boo
and stumbled forward through the dissolving tunnel. She peered on into the way
ahead, hesitating for a moment. Then she ran as fast as she was able.
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