The settlement at the heart of the wetlands smelled like sweet autumn rot.
Orpek observed the settlement for a moment before striding ahead, feet leaving long footprints in the mossy ground of the bank that filled with water even as he strode on, dragging his coracle behind him. He had not been told of this place, the mice he had asked at the last burrow some eight day’s travel ago mentioning only a smaller settlement to the north and warning him to take the long way around the apparently deserted wetlands. But Orpek had decided not to heed them. He’d crossed swamps and bogs before and he had wanted the silent emptiness after the terrible events at Hilldown.
It took to the end of the third day for him to realise that he had not heard birdsong since he left the land behind.
The hillock rose from the still waters around it, seemingly a perfect circle disconnected from any land around it. Atop it Orpek could see a few low buildings with slate roofs, dark against the green. They were what had first alerted him to the settlement as he paddled over water as clear and cold as the sky, reeds long and verdant tracing the slow current he followed. Having seen little in the way of soild land and not wishing to spend another night moored in a cluster of reeds he had made his way toward it, expecting at any moment to discern a rising pillar of smoke from one of the buildings.
Now, almost at the apex of the mound, he could still hear nothing. The stillness made him itch.
The buildings, dark, narrow-windowed constructions of layered slate, seemed somehow to crouch.
Almost furtively he drew his nail from where it had sat, unused, on the side of his pack for the past few days and set it in its usual loop on his belt. His ears, tensed though they were, still detected nothing but his own heartbeat and stilled breath.
He took another step and felt, with a lurch, something catch on the coracle. Swallowing a curse he saw that a rock he had stepped over without noticing had torn a hole in the leather of the coracle. He’d be here until he could find the means to repair it.
Hopefully the denizens of this place would be able to help.
Orpek leant the coracle against a wall and tried to scope the outside of the settlement. As far as he could tell it was just as circular as the hill, the buildings as close to identical as they could be given the unpolished slate they were ubiquitously formed from. Orpek felt the wall of one as he passed, trying not to creep. It was cold, leaving a residue of granular stone chips on his palm.
“Strange,” said Orpek softly, half hoping that someone would hear him. “Perhaps this is… a trading outpost.” Though if that were true…
With a drop in his stomach Orpek realised that he was delaying stepping into the settlement itself.
Why?
The empty sky was a little darker than when he had last looked.
The air seemed formed from a meniscus. Orpek shook his head, trying to rid himself of the notion, though when he stopped the stillness was there again.
“Hm!” grunted Orpek, just to hear something. “Hm.”
He strode back towards the coracle. He had a feeling he didn’t want to let it out of his sight.
There seemed to be no main throughfare so Orpek slipped into the narrow alleyway between two of the strange buildings, pausing a moment to peer in through a narrow window. Darkness. He shook his head a little and tightened his grip on the nail’s hilt.
Beyond the alleyway were more buildings, arrayed in concentric circles. Whoever had designed this place had prioritised geometry over traversability. He slipped around another building, identical to the last, deeper in. Toward the centre.
There were seven layers of buildings before he reached the centre. More than Orpek would have gauged from the size of the place from the outside. The thought left a prickling at the back of his neck.
His mind’s eye went to the sunflower. The buildings here seemed to be set to the logic of the seeds at the great flower’s heart, a complex spiralling that shifted with every blink. Perhaps it was simply an efficient way to organise shapes.
A little emboldened, he tried another door. Hard, dark wood oiled against the damp, set exactingly into the stone around it, made for a creature somewhat smaller than him.
There was a faint warmth within.
Stepping to one side Orpek peered at the window. No smoke leaked through.
His mouth opened, then shut. Saliva built in his mouth.
He stepped away before swallowing. Carefully.
Perhaps he had imagined it.
The padding of his footsteps fell softly on the empty air.
On a sudden hunch Orpek reached under the lid of his pack and drew his knife, slipping it into his belt.
He touched the side of one of the buildings and clenched his jaw as he realised he hadn’t been imagining the faint warmth from within. His mind went to huge fires below the marsh, caverns venting smoke into the marsh at night, to formless masses of flesh, to-
The houses must be inhabited, he reasoned. Somebody, after all, had locked the doors. Strange, but perhaps these people preferred the night hours.
Around the corner of a building he could see an open space. He approached.
At the centre of a circle of interlocked flagstones, dividing the sky, was a pole, whip-thin and utterly still. From its peak hung limp streamers, brighter colours than Orpek had seen even at Tincture seeming to burn against the looming greyness.
He approached closer. The streamers were hung with small iron bells, each identical in shape and utterly still.
KTAK
Orpek froze. Without realising it he had set foot on the flagstones.
Without removing the weight on the tile Orpek crouched, ears tensed.
The flagstone was hinged, he saw as he gently lowered it down. In fact, on a quick probing of the edge, it seemed all the flagstones were. Walking on them would be cacophonous.
The fur along his spine raised. Was that a faint noise, the soft fall of a bare foot somewhere behind him? Or was it an imagining born of the oppressive silence?
The buildings loomed. Their closed doors, all centred on the pole, seemed to watch him.
He hurried back to the coracle.
It was dark by the time he reached his vessel, the sun a sliver at the horizon like lips exuding a last gasp before sinking into the mire. He had heard somewhere that the wandering lights that grew from mires and bogs were the ghosts of those who died in the mire who did not belong there. Though the river and the lake and the sea welcomed all in death the bog was a place that had forgotten how to die right, a place of asymmetry where the passage from existence to nothingness was choked, where more grew than could die.
Orpek watched as the rippled light of the sun on the water gradually retreated to nothingness.
Perhaps the wetlands let the dying pass.
After skirting the mound’s perimeter he found no place to rest and, as the sun at last slipped below the horizon, he was forced to make a choice.
He upturned the coracle and crept under its canopy, hoping that the islet held less danger than the midnight waters around it.
That night Orpek dreamed of something awful beneath the surface of the sky. As he turned to meet its oppressive gaze the land below him fragmented and silently drifted away as he struggled without moving, without sound in an endless, endless white void. You are finite, it said. Against the endless that means a nothing.
He woke slowly, gasping like a rodent half-drowned. As he came to recognise the space in which he struggled as his own coracle and the wetness on his face as his own fevered tears he became aware of another sound, one that dragged at the centre of his mind with a hook. Noise, louder and more surreal than anything in that dream.
He pushed himself out and struggled to his feet into the night, nail drawn and eyes bleary, the thick tendrils of the dream that still clung to him melding with the strangeness of what lay before him.
From out of the buildings light poured and figures span. The air was cacophony, the ground below his stumbling feet sprung to the rhythm of the arrhythmic pulse of the dance. Then he was amongst them, time flowing sluggish and irregular. Their eyes were everywhere. Judging. But never focussed on him.
Hot breath. Spinning fur. Endless bodies.
Did he join them in that dance? Did he whirl with them or was he merely carried stumbling along? His skin was alive with other’s movement, his senses flooded with their ravening music.
The pulse of the dance wound through his skin. Everything was hot, wet, the miasma of their panting breath and spinning bodies. Their mouths were open, white teeth gaping to the sky. Were they screaming? Singing along? Gasping for breath in the heaving throng? Impossible to say. The intramuscular flesh of the world buckled and retched like the rippling of air around a sky-reaching bonfire. All was burning without fire. All distortion. All the itching of breathlessness in that hot, hot night.
With a pang of halfway awareness he felt something above him, perhaps in a rush of air, perhaps in a sudden peripheral glance of a baleful eye.
He did not look up and danced with ever greater fervour.
He awoke on the cobbles, a kind of sickness on his breath.
He stumbled through the symmetry of the buildings, seeing nowhere any evidence of the last night’s- nightmare? He shook his head. He had never confused reality for dream except in those moments between sleep and waking as a young litterling, when the terror of sleeping unreality had clung to him before the straw of his nest, the cool air, the torchlight in the hallway outside had slowly pushed through into his head.
Lost, he found himself in that central plaza. The tassels from the central pole hung immaculate and still.
There was an absolute silence thick in the air.
Orpek squinted. Something about the pole was different, the shape at the bottom distorted. He strained his eyes, still bleary from his sleep, and with a sudden jolt in his heart recognised his nail, leaning at the centre of the rocking flagstones.
He swore silently and strode across the stones, too angry to care about the cacophony of clacks and tocks that followed his footsteps. He snatched his nail and sheathed it in his belt, already striding back out of the town, damning the noise. He needed to find his coracle.
The grassy bank where Orpek had stored the coracle, identified by the position of the midmorning sun, was wrong. He could tell even before his pounding mind, still rattling with half-formed curse words and snatches of the sensation of heat and masses of fur, could identify what.
His eyes widened and his heart seized. For a moment, his inner world was as still and silent as that around him.
His coracle was gone. In its place sat his pack, alone on the grass, scraps of treated leather scattered around it. Orpek sprinted, stumbling, the dewed grass lashing at his waist, but the coracle was nowhere to be found. A frantic search revealed that nothing was missing from his pack but his one way off the islet was gone.
Orpek searched the islet until midday. Nowhere was his coracle to be found, and the waters stretched all around, freezing cold to the touch and still as flawless glass.
The buildings sat like dead crows. Against the cold their warmth was impossible to attribute to the sun.
Orpek fought off exhaustion for as long as he could but when the sun went down a throbbing mass of tiredness pushed into his bones and the roaring of his blood dragged him off to somnambulance.
He slept with both hands clenched around the hilt of his nail.
He was in that dream again.
He knew he was out of place. A fault in the perfect whiteness of the void.
The sky swirled and suppurated.
Orpek struggled but he found himself drawn forth by some internal impulse, some inner command that did not come from him.
The sky seemed to press down, thinning and flexing, and as a groaning shook Orpek as he hung alone, struggling but immobile.
He knew he was observed, and woke up screaming.
Something was different this night, the dancers more clear, clear enough for Orpek to see that they hurt to look at, that they were somehow blurrier than the buildings around him. He could hear enough to know that they laughed and squalled as he strode through their shifting mass, blade held firm in his grasp and hollowed eyes burning at those in his way. He could feel the wrongness with this place and burning in him against the watching sky he knew that the only path forward was that damned pole, streamers swaying like kelp in a wind that was not.
The centre of the plaza was worse. The mice swirled and grinded and trampled in a singular, spiralling, weaving mass, and at the centre was that pole, the colours of the tassels more real than the greyness of the world around it.
Orpek attempted to stride into the mass but was repulsed, wide dark eyes and laughing white teeth gazing as they whirled. They were laughing, beneath the walls of sound, beneath the pumping stamp-stampstamp, stamp-stampstamp of their clanging footsteps, and Orpek’s everything boiled. He drew his nail and cut down, and down, and down, step by step forcing his way through the crowd, pushed back against the bruising tide of dancers.
Then, as though slipping through time, he found himself at the centre. Here the figures were as one mass, the lights brighter than any sun. He could not see their faces now, only their thumping dance on the clanging flagstones.
The only colour were the streamers, bright as a tourniquet, flailing in a wind he could not feel.
They were laughing as he raised his nail.
He was swinging at that pole. Cleaving Blows shaking his bones.
There was a crack like the spine of the world folding, and everything went still.
He dreamed of the white place again.
Only this time the sky was empty.
As the world returned to him he felt a swelling fear in him building like a tide of sewage.
There was something wrong-
“Straager! Wakken! Ye cannae be stayen o’here-”
Orpek jolted awake, seizing his nail and launching himself at the figure before him, grabbing them by the throat and pushing the edge of his nail against their throat.
“Ma na wan’ o’striffen!” the figure cried, panic welling in her voice. “Na o’toll! Potten dow a’tham nail!”
Orpek stepped back, nail hanging slack in his hand. They stood on the slope, the figure backlit by the morning light- no. Orpek squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and saw that it was evening, perhaps an hour until dusk. There was a mist building.
“Paxen, paxen,” said the rat slowly, rubbing at her throat. She was tall and broad of shoulder, standing a head above Orpek and draped in a poncho decorated with complex patterns in muted earthen colours. “Ma na wan’ any striffen but ye cannae be stayen here.”
“You have a boat?” panted Orpek, exhaustion pushing at his mind in waves of nausea. “You- a boat? Boat?” He frantically searched around for his pack and found it behind him, frantically mimed paddling with his free arm as he did so. He rubbed at his face, dew soaking through to the bone. “A boat? Vessel? A watercraft?”
Furrowed eyes, then understanding. “A- a vessen? Boat! Ma han o’vessen, thatam how I getten here, ayne, commen, quick nou, commen.” The rat hurried off, poncho flapping, and Orpek stumbled down the slope after her, pack slamming against his back. His ankle jarred and he caught himself, suddenly afraid of impaling himself on his nail.
At the base of the hillock a long, narrow boat was moored, the stern and prow arched in a curve. The tall rat hit the water fast enough to raise a splay of droplets, not even waiting for Orpek to reach her before unmooring the boat and rolling in. The water was bracingly cold as Orpek waded in, a gasp leaving his throbbing lungs. The rat grabbed him below the arms and he did not protest as she manhandled him into the boat like a litterling before grabbing the oars and pushing off, muscles rolling as the craft surged off into the water.
Orpek turned, watching the islet fade into the morning mist. The darkness of the buildings at its peak were the last thing to fade from view. He could not see that pole at its heart. Could not know if it was cut down or if that, too, had been a dream, though the pain in his lungs spoke to at least some reality in what he had seen.
He swallowed, braced himself, and looked up at the sky. It was unremarkable. Blank. A pale autumn blue. Empty.
Orpek flinched, remembering that emptiness was not safety.
He settled more comfortably onto the boat’s central bench, taking deep breaths of lukewarm air, and offered a silent thanks to his rescuer.
It was some time after the last sight of the hillock had faded into the mist that either of them spoke.
“I am Orpek,” he began. “I am on a journey west.”
“Ye ont journey,” said the rat, between puffs of heaving on the oars. “Ayight, ma ont journey twa. Mappen this watterlande, ayne. Name bein’ a’ Tikkin, Orpek.”
“Do you know of… that place, that town,” said Orpek. “What-”
He stilled his sudden surge of panic. “What was it,” he tried again, finding his voice a whisper.
The rat, Tikkin, was silent for five pulls on the oars.
“Ma ain’ got a ken,” she said, finally. “But I looken tham a’dance i’tha night. Tham ar spekken ta tha dark.”
“Speaking to the dark,” said Orpek, slowly. “No. I know those who worship the dark.” He waved away Tikkin’s raised eyebrow. “This is not it,” he said urgently. “This is- something-”
The unspoken qualifier hung on the air.
“Wha di’ ye look, on tham isle,” said Tikkin eventually.
Orpek shook his head.
“I have seen more things in my life than almost anybody,” he said, a chill seizing him. “I have seen the sun turn black in the middle of the day and a cold rush over all who witnessed it. I have seen mice worship bats and the dark and churches built in ancient bones. I have spoken to falcons and made brief alliance with ants. But never. Never anything like that place. Where the world seemed to forget itself like a sleeper.”
Tikkin’s fur raised and she shivered.
“We am go’en far away,” she said. “Tham ar na touchen us oot here.” She pulled on the oars in an especially powerful stroke as though that could settle the matter.
Orpek laid down but found he could not close his eyes. Instead he let his vision blur, the rocking of the boat that would have been soothing in any other circumstances instead sickening him.
The sun drowned in the water as they rowed toward it.
Tikken rowed until after night had fallen, speaking occasionally, mostly of the isle. She had stayed near the place, she said, feeling the need to watch the dance she had seen the night before from some way off again, but some time in the day had watched Orpek stumble out of the buildings and collapse on the slope and had gone up to investigate. Something had told her that he didn’t belong, she said.
In the dark they headed towards a thick patch of reeds, the sky thinly illuminated by a sliver of a fingernail moon. Tikken said something about mooring for the night, her voice trailing off in the total silence.
Orpek kept looking up at the sky. It was empty but for that moon.
The boat rocked gently with the motions of the two rats. Neither of them could sleep.
Orpek found himself watching the stalks of the reeds, seeing patterns and terrible figures in them before closer examination dispelled them only for his imagination to conjure more in the corners of his eyes.
Two especially thick reeds kept playing tricks on his sleep-addled mind as he tumbled, fitfully, into sleep.
He dreamed of a long, sharp dagger, longer than the world, reaching down into the boat, splitting in half and gaping as the eye at its hilt watched him, huge and baleful.
But-
Orpek blinked.
The boat rocked, oh-so-gently.
What would linger with him in the days after was the sound, that muted crack of a beak closing hard on soft flesh. Neither of them had so much as whimpered, and not even the terrible wings of the thing had made a sound as they covered the sky in a darkness deeper than the empty heavens. All the instincts to rage, to scream, to fight back were overridden by another force, all the more terrible for coming from within.
The need to submit.
When the morning came there was no blood to show that Tikkin had died. Just the irregular memory of an eye and a beak, swimming in the sickening logic of a dream. The only solid thing had been that eye, that awful, unwavering, passive eye, like something pushing through some fell meniscus into the world of dirt and rain and sun and judging it on a criteria that no rodent could hope to comprehend. Seeing all rodentkind as one mass, heaving, chattering, spinning in patterns without symmetry or logic. All noise. All sensation.
And finding them short of the mark.