Beyond the Spillway

The Fens were green.

Teo had not expected that. He had grown up at the foot of a grey wall, in a grey slum, by a grey river, and some part of him had always assumed that the rest of the world was grey too. But three days down the Calder, the valley opened out like a pair of hands, and the river slowed and spread and split into a hundred lazy channels, and between those channels lay the Fens... a vast, flat, glittering country of reed beds and water meadows and low green islands, stretching away to the horizon under an enormous pale sky.

There were cows. Hundreds of them, brown and white, standing knee-deep in the spring grass. There were small round houses of reed and mud with smoke curling from their roofs. There were fields, neat strips of them, some green with young wheat, some purple with clover, some dark and freshly turned. There were birds everywhere, and the air smelled of water and growing things, and nobody, as far as Teo could see, was dying.

He stood in the bow of the barge and stared at it all for a long time.

'...So this is where the bread comes from,' he thought. 'Huh.'

Bram's mother was called Ama. She was a small, round, fierce woman with grey braids and hands like old roots, and she was sitting outside her house on a stool, sorting rye on a cloth spread across her knees, when the barge came up the channel. She looked at her son. Then she looked at the cart-man and the former acolyte standing behind him. Then she looked at her son again, for a long moment, and sighed in a way that suggested she had been expecting something like this for about thirty-five years.

"Sit," she said. "Eat. Then tell me what he's done."

They stayed four days.

It was the strangest four days of Teo's life. Ama Tull fed them until they could not move. She asked Mira a great many sharp questions about the Chantry and seemed to approve of the answers. She asked Teo none at all, and watched him the whole time with an expression he could not read. And on the third evening, when he was helping her carry sacks of seed barley into her storehouse, she said suddenly, without looking at him:

"My son says you know why the black grain makes the fire."

Teo hesitated.

"...Some of it. Not all."

"Hm." Ama set down her sack. "My grandmother knew it made the fire. She didn't know why. She told me, and I told my children, and that was enough." She looked up at him, and her eyes were very sharp. "Is it better? To know why?"

Teo thought about it for a long time. Ama waited.

"I think so," he said at last. "If you only know what, you can only avoid the one thing. If you know why... you can see the next thing coming. The one your grandmother never saw."

Ama Tull looked at him a moment longer. Then she grunted, and picked up her sack, and went into the storehouse without another word.

The next morning, she gave them a mule.

It was an old mule, grey-muzzled and evil-tempered, called Turnip. Nell would have loved it. Ama also gave them a two-wheeled cart, and four sacks of grain and dried beans, and a crock of honey the size of a child's head, and a great deal of advice, most of which was about not dying. And in the grey dawn, she stood at the edge of the last green meadow and watched them go.

Before they left, Teo did one more thing.

One of Bram's cousins was taking a barge of wool up the river to Calder Reach in ten days. Teo found him on the dock and gave him a folded scrap of paper and the last two coppers he owned, and made him swear on his mother's cows to give it to a girl called Nell in the boathouse at the edge of the ferry ward, and no one else.

On it, in his careful, square handwriting, Teo had written instructions. They were very precise. They involved a straight stick exactly as tall as Nell's own forearm, set upright in the flat stone of the chandlery roof — or what was left of it — on the longest day of the year. And a measurement, taken at the moment that the stick's shadow was shortest. And a request that the measurement be written down and kept safe until he came back.

He had added, at the bottom: Don't let Hesk do it. He'll get the stick wrong. He can't see it.

He had crossed that out. Then he had written it again.

After the Fens, the world ended.

That was what it felt like. They followed the river south for two days, then turned east, away from it, up a long, gentle slope of thinning grass. And at the top of that slope, Teo stopped the cart and looked out over the Ashlands, and found that he had no words for what he saw.

It was vast.

Not the way the Still Sea was vast, or the Spillway... those were things, enormous things, but things with edges. The Ashlands had no edges. They went on and on, an endless rolling plain of grey and ochre and pale, bleached gold, stretching away under a sky so huge and so empty that it seemed to press down on him like a hand. There were no trees, or rather, there had been trees once — great forests of them, he realised slowly — and they were still standing, here and there, in grey, leafless ranks, bleached white as bone by a sun that had been burning down on them for longer than anyone could remember. There was dust everywhere. Fine, pale dust, drifted into long low dunes against every rock and ridge, as if the whole land had been sifted through a sieve.

And there were roads.

Teo had heard of the Maker roads. Everyone had. But the stories had not prepared him for this. Below the slope, a great grey road ran away to the east, straight as a ruler, wider than Saint Orlen's Square, cracked into a million pieces and half buried in dust, and yet still there, still visible, running on and on until it vanished into the haze at the edge of the world. And along it, scattered like beetles on a path, there were... shapes. Hundreds of them. Small, rounded, rust-red husks of metal, half sunk in the dust, their insides hollow, their windows long since shattered. They sat in long, broken lines, all facing the same way, as if they had been travelling east together in a great procession, and had simply stopped.

Six hundred years ago, the whole road had been full of them.

And they had stopped.

Mira came and stood beside him. She did not say anything for a long time either.

"Where were they going?" she said at last, very quietly.

Teo shook his head.

He did not know. He did not think anyone would ever know. But he knew where he was going, and the road ran the same way, and that was something.

'East,' he thought. 'Three hundred miles. Across that.'

'...Damn.'

They camped that night in the lee of a fallen bridge, a great slab of grey Maker stone that had once spanned the road and now lay broken across it like a felled tree. Bram lit a small fire of dead wood. Turnip the mule tried to bite Teo twice, and succeeded once. They ate beans and bread and honey, and did not talk much.

And then the sun went down, and the stars came out.

Teo had seen stars before. Of course he had. But he had always seen them from the Sump, at the foot of the Spillway, where the great wall blotted out half of the sky and the smoke of the pyres and the lamps of the city blotted out much of the rest. He had seen a narrow strip of them, over the river, on clear nights. A few dozen. A hundred, perhaps.

Here, there was nothing in the way.

The whole sky was full of them. From horizon to horizon, from the black line of the eastern hills to the faint glow still lingering in the west, the darkness was crowded with stars... thousands, tens of thousands, so many that they ran together into great pale rivers of light, so many that the sky did not look black at all, but silver, and deep, and endless. He could see colours in them. Blue and white and gold and faint red. He could see some of them flicker. He could see one, low in the east, that was much brighter than the rest and did not flicker at all.

Teo lay on his back on the cold ground beside the fire and looked up at it, and felt very small.

After a while, out of habit, he began to count.

He got to about four hundred before he lost his place, and started again, and lost it again at three hundred and something, and finally gave up, and lay there with his hands behind his head, laughing quietly to himself.

Mira, lying a little way off, turned her head.

"What's funny?"

"Nothing." Teo was still smiling. "I just... I spent my whole life counting things. Bodies. Coins. Stairs. Because they were the only things in the Sump that didn't lie to me." He waved a hand vaguely at the sky. "And now there are too many to count, and I don't even mind."

Mira was quiet for a moment. Then she looked back up at the stars.

"The Canon says the Makers tried to count them," she said. "And the Flame burned their world for it."

"I know."

"Do you think that's true?"

Teo did not answer at once. He looked up at the silver river of light, and thought about it.

"I think," he said slowly, "if I'd lived my whole life under this... I'd have tried to count them too."