Act I — The Crossing

Page 1 — Cold Open, the Threshold

There was the last breath of the old world. There was the falling. There was nothing between them.

We stood in a circle on the last plain of the old world. The plain had no name; the maps had always left it white. The dark was coming up out of the south, low along the ground, and it meant to stay.

I stood with my hands open at my sides. My craft was with me, as it always had been — the four planes folded into a man, fire, water, air and earth, and the old words that pull them. With those words I could have lifted the plain from under our feet, and the lifting would have cost me nothing but the word. I did not say it.

To my left stood my blood brother, the priest, tall as a doorpost, in the white and gold, the circlet on his brow. He was already speaking. The ward went up around the six of us as it always had: a wall of thin light, low and even, with a hum like a bowstring before the arrow. He did not look at the dark. He looked at us, one by one.

To his left stood the ogre, Rumzuck, with his tower shield on his back and his hands folded over its grip — the shield with the pale handprint on its face, not paint. When Rumzuck folds his hands like that, he is deciding whether a fight is worth having.

Beyond him, the erudite, Wreckreate. He reads water, because water keeps its record and does not erase it. He stood with his feet apart, his weight even, reading the plain.

Beyond him, Zahlia, who can hold a word in the air. Her palms were flat at her sides and her fingers a little spread, the way she holds them when she is listening for something she does not expect.

And the sixth of us stood where the light fell thinnest, with his back to the south, the way the sixth always stands.

I will not write the sixth name here. I will write it later, where the fire is.

The ward hummed. The dark was still a long way off, and there was nothing to do but stand and talk.

"The water left an hour ago," Wreckreate said, and he did not look up from the plain. "It keeps its record. It says this is the last plain, and it does not say that often."

"Followed by what?" I asked.

"By whatever comes next," Wreckreate said. He folded his hands the way an old man folds a letter. "The record does not guess. It only remembers."

"Then we stand and we hold. That is what I am for," Rumzuck said.

"That is the job," Zahlia said, "if it is a thing that can be held."

"There is a word out there, in the dark. I can hear it from here. It is not in any tongue I know, and it is not new. It is old," Zahlia said, and her fingers spread a little wider. "Older than the plain."

"Can you hold it?" I asked.

"I can hold it for as long as I stand," Zahlia said.

Rumzuck folded his hand back over the grip. I have stood beside him a long time, and when he does that, the deciding is finished. "We stand. But we do not stay. The moment the ground asks us to move, we move. A fight you cannot leave is not a fight. It is a grave," Rumzuck said.

The dark reached the circle.

Dark does not reach. It does not put its hand out. This one did. It came over the plain and it found us, the six of us, as a hand finds a thing it has been waiting to take.

What came with the dark was not the dark.

What came with the dark was white.

The light was white, and it was not a light you could look at. It looked. It rose out of the plain like a wall, and the wall leaned toward us. I looked back at the shape, because the shape was a hand, the size of the plain, and closing.

The old world went down under it. It went down as a house goes under a weight that has been on it for a long time — slowly, and all at once, both at the same time — and I have not found words for it. The ground went out from under my feet. The going out was the last sound of the old world.

We were six in the white, all of us, mid-fall, and the falling did not hurt. A fall of that length, through a distance no measure could take, and the body does not do what bodies do. I have held men through falls from towers. The fall from a tower does its hurting as it goes down. This did not hurt going down. There was only the white, and the smallness of the six of us in it, held like a fist holding water. Not touching, only near.

I put my hand out in the old words and asked the water to come. The white did not answer. I asked the earth, the air, the fire. The white did not answer any of them. I had known the four of them since the first morning of the old world, and they were not there. They were not sleeping — a sleeping thing answers later, and the planes did not. They were not there. I stood in the middle of the white with my hands open and no world to work the craft in.

I remember the cold. I have to say it. The cold was the only part of the white that had a shape. It was under my hands, with edges — a cold like the water at the bottom of a well in a long summer, the cold that stays and does not spread. I put my hand on it. It was the only thing in the white that felt like the old world, and I held it, because it was there.

I remember my hands open, and I do not remember opening them. I remember the weight of the other five near me — not touching, only near. The priest's ward was still around us, low and even. The ogre's hand was somewhere in the white. I did not see it. I felt it — the hand of a man you have stood beside a hundred battles.

The Veil was thin there. We fell through it. I felt it as you feel a door in a dark room — not with the hand, with the sense.

I do not remember the white. I remember that I was in it, the six of us small against it. The shape was a hand. The hand was closing. And the small was what the world did not take back.