The Infinity Concerto (7 page)

"Translucent, drifting creatures, resembling spirits. There are the Sidhe of the forests, called Arborals; they are green as grass. Umbrals will always be found in shadow, and at night can be very powerful. Pelagals are reputed to be ocean-going, but we only have rumors of a distant ocean here. Riverines live in streams and rivers. Amorphals can be a different shape each time you see them. Most of the Sidhe, however, belong to the kind called Faer - like Alyons and his coursers. The Faer resemble you and me and we can even interbreed, but they're a very different race, ages older than the current stock of humanity."

"And what is Halftown?"

"Where the Breeds live. Born of female Sidhe, sired by human males, most often."

"They won't live with humans?"

"They're a sad lot," Savarin said. "They're reputed to live forever, like the Sidhe, and like the Sidhe they have no souls. But like humans, they change - their peculiar way of aging. Humans don't accept them. Sidhe isolate them, but find them useful now and then. Many know Sidhe magic." They walked on in silence for a few minutes. "Who's to watch over you in Halftown?"

"The Crane Women," Michael said.

Savarin was impressed. "Very powerful. Ugly as sin, and they wouldn't mind my saying so. They're the oldest Breeds I've heard of. Was it Lamia who sent you to them?"

Michael nodded. "I don't go anywhere on my own. I mean, I don't have any choice."

"Maybe that's something to be thankful for. Less mistakes made that way."

"Is Lamia a Breed?"

"I don't think so. There are many stories about her, but nobody really knows what she is. I suspect she was human once, but did something the Sidhe didn't like. She was at the Isomage's house when I came here."

Beyond a rise, the road bisected the Breed settlement, which was laid out in an irregular circle. Halftown covered about ten acres, brown and dun and weathered gray buildings arranged along concentric half-circle streets, the ends of each street letting out on the main road. The land around Halftown was hummocky, as if ploughed by a giant and careless farmer, and the ground was poorly drained. Standing pools and puddles lay in the hollows and the air had a marshy green smell. A branch of the river flowed past the other side of the village, little more than a creek.

"Observe the structures," Savarin said, stopping to tie a string on his cloth shoes. "What would you say of them?"

Michael examined the buildings and then,to make sure he had missed nothing, examined them again. "They're shacks," he said. "They look like the houses in Euterpe."

Savarin straightened. "You're still not observing. See with what you already know." He pointed to the barren landscape: grassy shrub, hammocks and puddles, low bushes and scattered boulders.

"Jesus," Michael said under his breath. "They're shacks. Made of wood."

"Wood," Savarin emphasized. "See any trees?"

"No."

"That's how you tell Halftown from Euterpe. Breeds have Sidhe relatives, and that means connections with Arborals. Arborals control all the wood in the Realm. Humans are only allowed sticks and wicker and grass."

Michael felt dizzy. He still hadn't accepted that the Realm was real - yet every moment it became more and more complex.

"There aren't any trees here at all?"

"Away from the Blasted Plain, there are forests everywhere, but no wood for you and me. Very few humans leave the Pact Lands. Sidhe traders bring in goods every fortnight, in accord with the Isomage's pact, but even they face danger on the Blasted Plain."

Michael saw his first Breed as they came within a hundred feet of the outer circle of huts. The Breed was a male, slightly taller than Michael, with long, lank red-brown hair and a powerful build. He stood in the middle of the road, a staff in one hand and a bored expression on his face. He held out his staff to stop them.

"I recognize you, Teacher. I know this young fellow, too. Lamia sends word about him - but not about you."

"I come here often," Savarin said defensively.

"The coursers came last night," the Breed said. "No more humans allowed in Halftown. Except, of course." He pointed his finger at Michael.

"I think you'd better go," Michael told Savarin. "Thanks for helping me."

Savarin frowned at the breed. "Yes. I'm sure discretion is best. But I've never been barred from Halftown. I hope it's not permanent. This is where I get most of my information." He sighed, cast a sunny smile on Michael and turned around. "Learn quickly, friend. And come tell me what you've learned, if you can."

Michael accepted his outstretched hand. Savarin returned the way they had come, leaving him alone with the Breed guard.

A cool breeze rippled their hair and clothes. "So where am I supposed to go?"

"To the Crane Women. Come."

Michael followed him down the road. Through Half town, the thoroughfare was paved with brown brick and cobbles. The huts seemed cleaner though flimsier than the huts in Euterpe. Small plots around each house were filled with rows of healthy green plants; he couldn't see any flowers.

Other Breeds stared at him through windows and open doors. The men were almost as tall as the Sidhe Michael had glimpsed at the Isomage's house. The women were slender, noble-looking, though few were what Michael would have called pretty. Their faces were hard and sculptured, too much like the men's.

His escort led him out the other side of the village and away from the road, toward the creek. Across the water, perched atop a broad low mound, was a larger hut shaped like a half-deflated soccer ball, covered with sticks, dirt and thatch. Except for two round glass-paned windows and a stone chimney poking through the top, it could have been a yurt - one of the portable dwellings used by central Asian nomads. The yard around the hut was strewn with small boulders and piles of debris, sorted and categorized - a pile of pebbles here, sticks to one side, bones and animal skulls there, other mounds he couldn't identify. The smell was of ancient garbage, richer and more suggestive than dust, but not overtly offensive. Stakes marked the perimeter of the mound and scraps of fabric fluttered from them like sad decrepit banners.

"How do I get across?" Michael asked as they stopped at the water's edge. The Breed pointed out flat stones just beneath the slow-moving surface.

"They await you," he said, and began his walk back to Half town. Michael swallowed the tightness in his throat and stepped out onto the first stone. The water swirled around his shoes. He thought about falling into the water to force himself to wake up, stop dreaming, but if he hadn't been shocked out of sleep by the things that had already happened, the murky creek was unlikely to do the trick. Besides, he had no idea what lurked in the depths. He was sick of being afraid. He clutched his book tightly and stepped onto the second stone. He concentrated so hard on not falling that he failed to notice a figure standing on the opposite bank until he had crossed. He looked up with a start.

"Hello," he said quickly.

The figure was female in a bizarre sort of way. She still possessed a roundness in her elongated, leather-skinned limbs which demonstrated femininity, but her arms hung almost to her knees. Her face was oblate, wider than tall, with narrow long eyes beneath thin flat brows. She stood an inch or two shorter than Michael, slightly stooped. Her legs, clothed in ragged pants, were very long in comparison with her torso. She lifted one hand and wriggled spider-like fingers in front of her flat chest. The fingers were long and dark and tapered to thin black nails.

"Hello," he repeated. She looked him over slowly, nodding with a steady rhythm as if she were feeble. Her short-cut hair had the color and texture of goose down.

"Jan Antros," she said. "Just man-child." Her voice was a gnarly squeak with undertones of heavy wind.

Michael shook his wet feet and reached with one hand to empty his left shoe, then his right. He never took his eyes off her. The shoes squelched when he put them on again. "I'm Michael," he said, trying to be agreeable.

"You're a delicate, incredibly fragile, very frail indeed piece of tissue," came a melodious voice from the hut. Another woman with similar features leaned from one window. Her face was a puzzle of wrinkles and red and purple tattoos. "You don't look important."

Behind Michael, where she couldn't possibly have snuck up on him, a third woman stood on one spindly leg with the other tucked close to her chest. She had long dusty-red hair tied in a single braid which reached to her knees. "The Flesh Egg sends us a1 weak man-child. She expects us to process, train?"

"Are you Nare, Spart and. Coom?" Michael asked, trying to keep his teeth from chattering.

"I'm Nare," said the Crane woman standing on one leg.

"Spart," said the one at the window, and

"Coom," said the downy-haired figure who had first addressed him. "Want us teach?"

"I don't know what I want," Michael said, "except to get out of here."

The Crane women chuckled, a sound like leaves skittering over rock.

"Won't hurt you," Coom said, backing off a foot. "Much." Her hair seemed alive in the breeze.

"We don't mind man-childs," said Nare at his side, circling.

"But there's one thing you must want," said Spart in her beautiful voice from the window. She spat into a nearby pile of debris.

"To survive," Nare said.

"Live in Sidhedark."

"Fight to live."

"Fight to be human."

"Understood?"

He could do nothing but nod. In the moment he turned away from the hut, Spart left the window and stood between Nare and Coom. She was the tallest of the three and had the longest, most Sidhe-like face. Tattoos formed an intricate tangle of leaves and branches and whorls wherever her skin was bare.

"You'll build a house on this mound, away from ours thirty paces," she said. "Wood will be brought to you this evening. Until you've built your own house, you don't exist."

"What'll I do now?" he asked. He had focused on Spart; he suddenly realized the other two were gone.

"Be patient." Spart's voice had much of the hypnotic quality he'd experienced while listening to Alyons and the coursers. "You can do that, can't you?"

"Yes."

"Go and sit where you want your house. Wood will come."

The Crane Woman returned to their hut, leaving him on the stretch of hard-packed dirt by the creek bank. He shifted from one foot to the other, then looked over the water to Halftown. He shaded his eyes and stared at the sky.

Not a cloud was visible. Enameled sparkling blueness stretched overhead, blending into the orange and green along the horizon. About thirty yards away from the hut, and an equal distance from the creek bank, two boulders nestled against each other, forming a natural seat about a yard wide and two and a half feet tall. Michael crossed to the boulders and sat on them, looking at the sky again. Sometimes it seemed to be made of cross-thatches of colors, hundreds of colors all adding up to blue. Yet it wasn't like a painting. It was very alive, disturbing in the way it seemed to shift, to bulge down and retreat up.

He felt drugged. Until now, alone, with no instruction but to wait, it was as if he had not seen anything clearly. Now the darity flooded down on him from the sky. The sky, by its very unreality, seemed to show how real everything was.

But this reality wasn't the same brand he had experienced on Earth. This was more vivid, more apparent and simpler.

He knelt beside the boulders and plucked a blade of grass, peeling it along its fibers, rubbing the ragged edges, smearing the beads of juice. He felt a tickle on his arm and saw a tiny ant crawling among the light, silky hairs. The ant was translucent, rainbow-hued like an opal. Until now, he hadn't thought to wonder if there were insects in Sidhedark. Not many, apparently.

What about birds, cats, dogs, cows? He'd seen horses, but. where did the milk come from?

He was tired. He leaned back on the rocks and closed his eyes. The darkness behind his lids was still and restful. Wind sighed over him.

He had slept. He sat up and rubbed elbows stiff from pressing against the rock. The sun was setting. There were no clouds yet, but unmoving bands of color hung above the horizon, pale pinks and greens at the highest and just above the sun's limb a particularly vivid stripe of orange. Michael had never seen a sunset like it.

He looked to the east. The sky there was an electric blue-gray. Stars were already appearing in the east, as sharp and bright as white-hot needle points. Instead of twinkling, they made little circling motions, as if they were distant tethered fireflies. Michael had sometimes used Whitney's Star Finder on summer nights to pick out the few constellations visible through Los Angeles' thick air. He couldn't recognize any now.

The air had cooled considerably. Orange light flickered in the windows of the Crane Women's hut. He had a notion to peer in and see what they were up to, but he rubbed the bruise on his cheek and thought better of it.

Only then did he notice that his wristwatch was gone. He grabbed for the key in his pants pocket, but it was missing as well. He still had the book.

He felt almost naked without the key. He resented the thievery; he resented everything about the way he was being treated, but there wasn't a thing he could do.

The last of the sun slipped behind distant hills, burning muddy orange through the smoky haze which he surmised lay over the Blasted Plain, beyond the boundary of the Pact Lands. Where the sun had been, a sharply defined ribbon of darkness ascended from the horizon and blended with the zenith; and then another to one side, and yet another on the opposite side, resembling the shadows of cloth streamers in a celestial wind.

Michael listened. The land all around was silent, but from the sky came a low humming, like wind stroking telephone wires. When the darkness was complete, the humming went away.

Then, starting in the east and progressing westward across the sky, the stars steadied, as if precipitating out of solution and pasting themselves against the bowl of the heavens.

There were stars in the dirt, as well. He pulled his feet up on the boulders and looked down. Things sparkled and glinted between the few blades of grass. Soon these glows faded and the land settled into night with a breezy sigh, as if all the Realm were a woman lying back on a pillow.