And still the ice mountain grew, spreading as it came; it stretched now from horizon to horizon, gathering cold, draining the rivers, lowering the seas, leaching moisture from all it touched, from the very atmosphere until the air became dry and brittle, and still it grew, shimmering with a terrible majesty beneath the brilliant band of light that was the ever-racing moon: a continent of ice on the move, pushing up mountains, slicing out canyons, tilting the earth with its passing.
More images wheeled before Kit’s unblinking eyes: an endless line of enormous woolly mammoths staggering across a plain drifted high with wind-whipped snow… fire falling from the sky in burning chunks the size of boulders, setting the hills ablaze… an ocean locked tight, its waves thrashed into hard, motionless peaks… bony carcasses of starved creatures piled in a frozen bog… a bear on its hind legs gnawing at the bark of a tree… a man, woman, and two infant children dressed in wolf skin and forever huddled in a frozen embrace… a high mountain pass leading down to lands yet green, lands that had not felt the bitter sting of killing cold… and more, faster and faster until one image could not be distinguished from another.
Reeling from what he had seen, Kit closed his eyes, but the images persisted, flickering through his consciousness in a mist of motion and light: fusing, swirling, all detail muted and lost, merging into a dense, luminous fog that resolved into the Milky Way, the measureless star path of the galaxy. The shining mist slowly dissipated until at last it was swallowed in the end by the eternal darkness of empty space.
CHAPTER 35
D azed and drained, Kit waited for the dawn to lighten the sky to return to the Bone House. If the remedy for his bewildered state could be found, he imagined it might be there. When the first faint traces of daylight gave texture to the winter landscape below the rock shelter, Kit rose, stepped carefully over the sleeping bodies around him, and stole down the narrow trail leading into the valley and, ultimately, up to the high woodland above.
Fresh snow had fallen in the night, and he ploughed through the drifts, moving with an urgency born of a dream-troubled night. He reached the woodland on the plateau above the valley and, alert to lurking predators, hurried through the frigid, winter-bound forest to the clearing. It was farther than he remembered; impatience drove him to greater haste until he burst into the circle of standing trees to see the tangled mound of chalky, snow-covered bones standing in the centre of the clearing, pale and spectral in the dead winter light. The renewed sight of that singular structure, woven of ivory, horn, and bone, brought Kit up short. He halted, then approached more slowly, circling the Bone House to reach the low entrance, now almost hidden by snow.
Kit dropped to his knees and crawled inside. En-Ul was there, and in much the same position as Kit had left him the previous day: so still and silent he might have been dead. Kit held his breath until he heard the long, low sigh of the sleeper, then relaxed and settled into his place. In the thin light filtering through the latticework of interwoven bones, he saw that some of the food had been eaten and two of the little piles of snow were gone. En-Ul had taken nourishment at least once, then. Kit took comfort from that. Whatever the old chieftain was doing, it did not involve starving to death. Thinking of this, he wished he had brought along something for himself to eat; he considered helping himself to some of the sleeper’s cache, but immediately decided against it, restrained by the potent feeling that doing so would violate some taboo.
He pulled some of the furs around him and made himself comfortable. Now that he was here, he wondered why he had rushed so; it had seemed important, but now he could not think why. He settled back to wait. Some while later-it might have been a few hours, it might have been only a moment-he could no longer be certain how to measure time’s elapse. In the presence of En-Ul and his dreaming, time took on an elastic quality and seemed not to behave properly. Then again, since coming to the valley Kit’s internal clock had ceased to function in the usual way. However it was, Kit had the sensation of having sat in the Bone House for hours if not days, and was beginning to feel light-headed from hunger. He reached out for a handful of snow and filled his mouth, letting the frosty crystals melt and run down his throat. It felt good, and it was as he stretched for another handful that he felt a warmth begin to pulse near his heart.
Placing a hand to his chest, he traced the smooth bulk of the ley lamp, then dug into the inner pocket of his rough-made robe and brought out the brass device, immediately dropping it in the snow where it shone a bright incandescent blue.
Scooping it up, he brushed off the snow and gazed at the glowing instrument. The little row of lights on its face filled the dim interior of the Bone House with a brilliant indigo radiance brighter than ever before, and which pulsed slowly, rhythmically, steadily-like a long, slow heartbeat.
His skin tingled with the telltale sign of a nearby ley. The small hairs on the back of his neck stood up. The air inside the house of bone crackled with pent energy, as if building to a lightning strike. Holding the ley lamp before him, Kit rose.
He made to step over El-Ul in his dreaming trance, but as his raised foot touched down, he plunged through the floor of the Bone House. The snow-packed floor simply gave way, and Kit was suddenly tumbling through space. Down and down and down he plunged. Instinctively he curled himself into a ball and leaned sideways to take the force of the fall on his hip. But the expected impact did not come, and he continued to fall.
The shadowy light of the Bone House swiftly faded to a pale point far above, and darkness closed over and around him. The light of the ley lamp was all that he could see, and then that, too, slowly faded, leaving him in a darkness that was so close and pervasive it was more like a cloak or second skin than the emptiness of the void. The air condensed, becoming so thick and close it could be taken only in gulps. Oddly, Kit was not afraid. Or, if he had been, the fear shrivelled away so swiftly it left no impression. He did not seem to be falling anymore, but flying.
Without any orienting markers, Kit could not tell where he was going, nor how fast, yet the sensation of moving at extreme speed over inexhaustible distances persisted. Again time shrank away to insignificance; Kit imagined he could actually feel it peeling away from him, layer by layer.
How long this lasted he could not say. A moment? The length of time it took for the thought to enter his consciousness and leave again? An entire lifetime? More? An age? An eon? An eternity?
Nothing seemed adequate to explain his current state. Past and future melted together, mingled, mixed, became one until there was only the unchanging present moment. So far as he could tell, he might exist like this forever, living in a timeless void-a never-ending now.
Kit perceived that though this void might be empty of time, it was nevertheless full of possibility. Anything could happen, might happen, might have already happened-anything he could think might suddenly take form, might gain existence from his thought alone. This insight, if that is what it was, brought a sobering realisation that the merest whim might bring a whole world into existence, a world replete with living creatures whose lives were suddenly called into being by a single careless thought. Kit shrank from the horrific responsibility and instead turned his attention to his journey.