Alishia stopped, wide-eyed, sat down carefully and avoided Trey’s eyes.
“Do we cook these?” he asked.
“Yes.” Where had that come from?
“I’ve seen more appetizing food hanging off the arse of a mule.”
“They’re very tasty.”
Very tasty, very tasty, just try it to see…
Alishia was a virgin. She was used to thinking about sex in the privacy of her own company, using her imagination, pleasuring only herself because the world she lived in was lacking the highlights she could imagine. Now suddenly it was a force, a powerful drive that had reared from nowhere and grasped her insides, sensitized her skin and tongue and her own secret parts to such a degree that she found it hard to sit still.
“Excuse me!” Alishia said, standing and rushing away. She shook her head to shift the thoughts and felt something loose in there. Perhaps the knock to the head really had damaged her.
Trey called but she ignored him, still trying to shake the image of their rutting from her mind. And yet, as she stepped from rock to moss to earth, the idea pleased her. And deep inside in that place where the experience sat waiting to happen, it burned to be set free.
She sat in the shadow of a huge boulder, out of sight of the fledge miner, and stared northward across the plains. As her hand stole between her thighs she could not shake the feeling that she was watching herself from afar.
“I THINK WEshould go that way,” Trey said, pointing west.
“Why?”
He shrugged, keeping his eyes downcast to avoid the sun. Yet he so wanted to look. “It just feels right,” he said. “Behind us are the mountains, and beneath them are the Nax. I don’t want to be near them-I can’t be near them! To the north is the city you’ve just left. I don’t think I could be in a city, not with so many people, and not. .. not north. That feels wrong.”
“This is your first time ever aboveground. How can anywhere be right or wrong for you?”
“I’m only saying what I feel,” Trey said, and in truth, deep down he was scared. Behind him was death and the destruction of everything he had ever known- everything -and before him, laid out like legend brought to life, the plains and mountains and a sky so huge that it must surely crush him down. The horizon to the west was wide and low and smothered with sky. How could there be so much light without scorching him, so many plants without choking the land? There was little opportunity for darkness to hide now that the sun was climbing high.
The ghost of the death moon was hanging in the north like an echo, pale now in daylight.
“I don’t mind where we go,” Alishia said, and once again Trey thought that she was teasing him. One minute she was quiet and concerned and vulnerable, the next confident, brash, eager to move on and meet whatever was coming next.
After eating the cooked grubs-which Trey had to admit were delicious-and the stripped and kneaded pirate plant flesh, the two of them divided Alishia’s belongings between their shoulder bags and set out westward.
They walked in silence for several hours, Alishia darting on ahead now and then, looking around, splashing in streams, lifting rocks, tasting moss from upturned stones. Trey did not comment; he assumed that this was her way of traveling, navigating their position, keeping track of where they were. She had a map rolled up in her pack, and although it had looked detailed in part, there were still vast tracts left uncharted to the south, east and north, the far-flung places of Noreela that even in his dreams he could barely imagine.
She was poor company. Sometimes she displayed pity and sorrow, but mostly she fueled her own apparently bottomless desire for knowledge and sensation. She had told him that she was a librarian. Trey had seen books, although not many, and he could not comprehend someone spending their life in a building virtually made of them. She had tried to communicate to him how the worlds she knew were alive in books, but Trey did not understand. Here was the world, and they were in it. Reality was doing its best to blind him with its brashness, terrify him with its size and light and multitudinous variations.
He tried walking with his eyes closed for long periods, but after the first few falls he gave up. Besides, the sun still found its way through. He wondered if he would ever see total darkness again.
For most of the day they walked across the plains with no real destination in mind. Then late in the afternoon Alishia stopped and waited for Trey to catch up, glancing back at him, smiling, her eyes sparkling with exhilaration.
“Swallow hole,” she said. “See there?” She pointed, although Trey had already seen. How could he not?
Sometimes in the rivers belowground, at places where they slowed and pondered in wide caverns before moving on once again, there were whirlpools; spinning sinkholes opening beneath the river and sucking its waters deeper, deeper into the earth to places no man or fledger had ever been. He had never seen one but he had heard of them, sitting wide-eyed and fascinated as his father told him tales of how these whirlpools could swallow a man whole, and how sometimes they did. These men were still sinking, his father had said, still spinning, drowned now but their journey downward never-ending, the water keeping their corpses fresh for discovery by whatever waited at the bottom.
This swallow hole was like one of those whirlpools, except that it existed in rock.
“I’ve read about these,” Alishia said. “They started happening after magic fled. There was only one recorded in the first hundred years, but in the past few decades they’ve been happening all over. Flushing away all the badness left behind, some say. Maybe they’ll eventually join up to suck the whole of Noreela away.”
It was a mile distant but easily visible. Even Trey, new to the surface and ignorant of many of its features, knew that it did not belong here. It looked unreal and incongruous. And it sounded like a long, endless growl.
The ground stirred slowly around the hole, traveling in a lazy, decreasing circle, clumps of grass and rock and the waving arms of shrubs and trees turning and tumbling as they were drawn in. The air above it shimmered. Trey tried to picture the caves and passageways in the ground below, the places where this hole vented, but like the whirlpools in the underground rivers and lakes, he could not imagine it having an end. Not in this world, at least.
“It must have just started,” Alishia said.
“Will it spread? Should we run?”
Alishia shook her head. “They’re always quite small. It’s probably a hole the size of your fist. Nobody knows where they go, but you can find traces of old ones sometimes, like deep throats at the base of a crater. If we wait here long enough, perhaps we can go and take a look.”
The sight dizzied Trey; so much landscape still and peaceable, and this patch of it moving slowly at the edges, faster farther in, blurred into nothing at the very center. A big bird flew quickly overhead, dipped down at the disturbed earth to look for worms and insects and was sucked in, leaving floating feathers in its wake.
“What was that?” Trey asked, aghast.
“Moor hawk,” Alishia said wondrously. “I’ve never seen one before!”
“Well, you won’t see that one again.”
“I wonder if it’s still whole,” she said, and the idea disturbed Trey into silence.
They sat and watched the swallow hole slowly consume everything within its reach. Plants and soil spat themselves skyward with the pressure, only to be caught again by the hole’s influence and pulled down into its maw. And then the clays and rocks below the soil, the noise of their demise echoing across and vibrating through the land, grinding and smashing together, crushing, throwing up dust and shards that were similarly caught and sucked down. A rainbow formed briefly overhead as the air itself started to move, moisture condensing and darkening the spinning ground, small clouds forming high above and spiraling downward. Air breezed past Alishia and Trey, insects and birds fluttering uselessly against their fate. It was as if the hole was trying to suck in the sky.