Act I — The Crossing

Page 4 — Uaellaen's Last Sight of the Old World

The white thinned, and for a moment I saw the old world one last time.

It was not a long moment. The white had been closing around us since the circle, and it thinned to a place you could stand inside and still see through it, and the old world showed itself, and I looked at it. I will not say I chose to look back. I looked back. A man who does not look back at the last of the old world has not yet admitted that the old world is going, and I had admitted it on the plain, with the circle, and the looking was the admission finished.

Behind us the old world was going. I have known the tundra my whole life. It is the Nameless Tundra; no one ever stood on it and stayed to name it, so it keeps the name the maps give it. It went smaller. The ice lay on it like a tablecloth, and the rivers were frozen into it, and the glaciers were going too — the ones the old world had been spending a thousand years on. They did not come loose the way ice comes loose in spring. They came away from the world. The world was what was leaving.

Below the tundra the plain was going, the plain with no name, the plain where the circle had stood. The circle was a point on it, small, and the point of light in the circle was low and even, and I could see it from here. I want that plain. I could see it, small as a coal, and the dark was on the plain, low along the ground, and the dark was going too, with the rest of the old world, and I do not know whether I was glad of that. The dark had come up out of the south, and it had meant to stay, and now it was going with the world it had meant to stay in, and I do not know what the dark means when it is going, and I do not want to know.

That is all. A sheet of white with a sheet of ice on it, going small. The world I had in it, going small with it.

I looked at the six of us while it went.

Rumzuck went through the white with his shield in front of him. He had taken it off his back; it stood between him and the white, and his hands were on the grip. He was not looking at the old world. He was looking at the white in front of him, because that is where the fight was, and the old world was behind, and the old world was not where the fight was. I have watched him make that decision a hundred times. I had never seen him make it against the whole of a world.

Wreckreate was counting. His lips moved under the breath, and the ink-black hand was raised, and the fingers worked against each other. He had started counting the white the moment the white had started, and he had not stopped. I do not know what he had counted it to by then. I have asked since, and he has not answered. He has not finished.

Smackage had his palm flat. The white had no floor to press it to, and he pressed it to the white anyway. He was listening, with his eyes closed, the whole of his attention pointed at the place where the ground speaks to him. The ground here was not speaking. He listened, and he did not get up, and he did not stop.

Zahlia had her face turned up. There was no sky in the white to turn up at, and she held it anyway. Her fingers were a little spread. She is always asking, one of the questions on her rings; in the white she was not asking any of them, and her silence was the loudest thing in it.

The priest stood where the light thinned most, his hands flat on the floor of the white, and the ward was low around the six of us, and even, and the hum of it was in the white like a bowstring before the arrow. He had been speaking since the circle. I do not know what he had said by then. None of us was meant to hear it; the speaking went on under the hum, inside the wall of light, and the wall was holding.

And I stood with my hands open, the way I had stood since the circle. My craft was quiet in me. It had gone quiet when the white took it — not gone, quiet. A bell after the striking is quiet, and the bell is kept. Mine was kept. I held my hands open because the hands were the shape of the story, and the shape had not broken, and a shape that has not broken is a shape you keep open.

The white thickened again.

It came back with a thickness and a closing, and the thin place where the old world had been went opaque. I looked at where the old world had been. The white was there. The tundra was not there. The ice was not there. The dark was not there.

The old world was gone, and I had seen it, and the seeing was the last of it I would ever have. I put it in the place I keep the things the world will not keep for me, and I went on down.

The white was all around us. The six of us were in it, small, and the falling had not stopped. I looked at the priest, and the priest had not stopped speaking, and the ward was low and even around the six of us. I will say this once, because it will not be true for long: the six of us were in it, and the ward held, and the old world was gone, and the six of us were still the six of us.

That was the last I saw of the old world.