“What the rhez are you on about?”
He leaned down to grab her shoulders, feverish, his eyes glittering.
“It’s so simple. Yes, there’s Kas Vahl Zaxaar, we know about him, we can face him. Maybe our defender, the master of light, will come back and fight him. But there’s something else, don’t you see...”
“No I don’t see.” Flesh crawling, she threw him off her, scrabbled to her feet. “This isn’t some intellectual joke for your scholar brain! You’re analysing too much, reasoning yourself into seeing stuff that... You’re just making stuff up! Nivrotar is loco – and so are you!”
Ress was laughing, wild, crazed.
“But I’m right,” he said to her. “This transcends everything.”
“Have you been at Syke’s pipe?”
He started chewing his lip again.
“An entire race just fell down and died. Of emptiness. Good Gods...”
Jayr flopped back into her spot on the floor, baffled. Without thinking, she crumpled Ress’s notes into a pouch. His eyes were distant, he was paying no attention to anything but his thoughts.
“They died of giving up.”
The energy faded out of him as he realised the scale of what he’d uncovered. He sat down, touched the fragmented puzzle with awed fingers.
“Can apathy be sentient? Perceptive? Jayr, this is too big to comprehend.”
“Then stop,” Jayr muttered, half in answer, half to herself. “Can we please get the rhez out of here? I need the sun.”
Ress’s gaze focused on her and he stared, bemused, blinking.
With a sudden chill, she realised how empty he looked.
Empty.
“Ress?”
Inexplicable fear dumped tension through blood and muscle. She jumped up, frost icing across her back. That was enough – she was taking Ress out of this fireblasted building. Like, now.
“But I’m not afraid,” he said, smiling at her. “I find this... fascinating.” The way he said the word made her reach for his arm, drag him to his feet.
Fascinating.
“That’s it,” she declared, “we’re going to find ale. And a bar fight. And you some company. The cheaper the better.”
He was a dead weight, slumped in her grip, his gaze fixed on nothing.
“I was reading something...” He leaned down and she let him go. He stumbled to his hands and knees, began to gather the broken papers to him, pieces dissolving into ashes even as he touched them. He seemed to have no awareness of what he was doing. “I need them...”
“Ress...” Jayr reached for his arms, held him easily. “Don’t...”
He started to laugh, high-pitched and humourless. His gaze bifurcated, then focused on her again – but with an effort.
“Jayr. What are you...?” He struggled against her grip but wasn’t strong enough to break free. Beneath them, the puzzle scattered. “What’s happening to me? I can’t see, I can’t think... oh, Gods, my head...!”
He fell forwards against her shoulder, shaking. The last time Jayr’d seen someone like this, Taure had overdone the pipeweed and seen figments in the grass for days. She wondered if he was going to throw up and leaned him back to sit on his heels. She held up his chin, searched his face for sanity.
But his head lolled. His glasses fell from his nose, shattering as they hit the floor. Pieces of precious glass mingled with the pieces of the poem he’d been reading.
Fascinating.
“Ress?” Not knowing how to help, she shook his shoulders, shook him harder. He shuddered violently, and slumped forwards. She caught him like a child, a dead weight against her body.
“Ress!”
Then his head came back up. He looked up at her, his neck at a crazed angle. His eyes were blank and he stared straight through her, straight through the rotting cavern of the library, through the shadows and the slanting sun. He was transfixed by something eternal, something she had no way to see.
He was white to the lips, his pupils huge.
And he was frightening her.
“RESS!” Right in his face.
“I understand...” he said, fervently. He clawed at her garments. She brushed his hands away, fighting to control the shudder. “I see the water, but her thoughts are transitory.” He knelt up, but his gaze seared a line across her skin. He was leagues away, ardent and crazed. “The grass cries out to be heard. Do you hear the stone?”
Stone?
Jayr watched him, horrified, found a sob catching in her throat.
“What the rhez is the matter? What stone?” She stood up, heaved him upright, her boot shattering the last of the puzzle as she did so – she barely even noticed. “Ress, please... Ress!”
For a moment, it seemed he looked at her. His face was lit with a wondrous smile, vacant and ecstatic.
“Jayr...” he said. His breathing was short, his weight hung limp. “We did it. The world... shows me... her fear. Like the Bard, I can see...!”
“You can’t see shit!” She shook him again, shouted in his face – but she may as well have tried to reach the fireblasted moons. Tears twisted her mouth, she had no idea what to do, no idea what’d happened –
Her hand slipped. In a slow, graceful motion, Ress tumbled backwards to the floor. Ancient paper scattered, puffed into dust.
Lain in its midst, he started to thrash, mouth working, hands clenched white into claws. A thin keening spilled from him. For a moment, he almost seemed to be trying to fight, trying with all the might of his scholar’s mind to banish some figment that assailed him.
Froth trickled from the corner of his mouth, his back arched and his heels drummed.
“Nnnnnn...!”
His poem was gone.
Jayr threw herself over him, legs over his thighs, hands on his wrists to prevent him hurting himself against the stone. His neck corded, his head turned from side to side as if he tried to avoid a kiss.
“Nnnn...!”
She screamed his name in his face, sobs uncontrolled.
For a moment, he tried – his frenzy paused and he seemed to struggle to focus, to look at her... Then he screamed like a chearl and his body spasmed, shuddered, and collapsed.
His eyes were open, staring up at the broken balconies, the cracked glass.
The dust.
Barely daring, she choked, “Ress?”
He blinked, his jaw moved.
“Ress?” She sat back, wiping tears.
He broke into sobs, hands clawing at his face, his hair.
“Not strong enough!” His nails left red lines in his skin. “Rain and wind and metal – a city of glass and stone and vast, soul emptiness...”
Jayr grabbed his wrists as through he were a child. “Ress!” She was terrified – had no idea what was happening to him, what creature had come out of the book to assault his mind...
“He sees... wakes, needs power and powerlessness. They’re all sleeping. There are needles in his arms.”
He tried to free his hands. When Jayr released him, he buried his scratched face in them and started to cry.
“Mother... I listen. I hear the grass!”
“Ress...” The word was despair, disbelief. “I don’t understand.”
Gods, it can’t be this simple – the Bard’s been right all along!
Had he? Had he found some terrible, ancient truth? Or, like Feren’s conspiracy, had his stupid brain just made something out of...
Something out of Nothing.
It was so ludicrous it almost made her laugh.
Through sobs, he said, “It’s all so beautiful.” He was staring up at the crumbling balconies, the filthy, broken skylight. At least he was calm. “Older than we are, layers of buildings for a thousand returns...”