‘I wish I knew.’Fola took a step closer to the thing and reached out to it.As her hand neared it, her flesh distorted.Damon retched again.Fola’s fingers seemed to bend backwards, as though she were made of cloth, and partially folded.
‘It’s all right,’ she said, pulling back her hand and returning it to normal.She laughed in delight.‘There are volumes written about them.Countless studies done.We don’t know why the First Folk made them, or to what purpose, though many speculate they held some spiritual or mystical significance.And they’ve many strange effects.For instance, something tossed into an aleph will shrink away to nothing, then emerge on the other side after some time—just how long seems to vary enormously, according to no pattern yet established.’
Damon groaned and slunk away from the thing.‘Imagine falling into it.’
‘One archivist by the name of Saw Ansa tried that,’ Fola said.‘He jumped from atop a ladder into the aleph in the City, with a cord tied around his waist in case he needed to be pulled out.Those observing him reported that his body seemed to twist and distort as he drew near the thing, but he fell at a normal rate and passed through to the other side, unaffected.’She bent, picked up a clod of earth, and tossed it into the heart of the crystal armillary.It bent and shrank, one end stretching like putty and pulling the rest after it, until it vanished from sight, then reappeared on the far side, landing in a puff of dust.‘Even a universe can only contain things smaller than itself.’
‘I’ll thank you not to toy with that,’ the Count of Glascoed called down from atop the stairs to the gate of his keep—a young, dark-haired man dressed in a finely cut woodsman’s coat.He wore a sword in a black leather scabbard at his side.
Fola started, turned away from the aleph and dipped her head.Llewyn followed Spil’s cue, bending nearly double at the waist.Spil had some experience with lordly types, having spent a few years of his youth as a court tumbler for the mayor of some town along the coast in Afondir.A position he had left to join the Silver Lake Troupe, for reasons he had never shared with Llewyn.
The count paid little mind to their obeisances.He regarded them each in brief turn.His left hand rested on the pommel of his sword—a decoration of twisted iron and worked enamel shaped into the head of a charging stag.
‘The World Clock,’ Ifan went on, nodding towards the aleph.He descended the stairs, neither relaxed nor coiled to strike, but balanced on the edge between.‘Supposedly the druids in service to my ancestor, Barwon of Glascoed, could glimpse the future in its turning.Little good it did them.My grandfather told me all sorts of tales.He was the one who placed that mosaic on the ground beneath it.A means of telling the time—not only the hour, but the day, month and year—by the way the light plays on the stones there.I’ve brought folk in to check the timing of the thing, and it stays true enough, needing only slight adjustments each year to the pattern of stones.A sign of a wobble in the World Clock itself, maybe.’
‘Or a wobble in the sun,’ Fola offered.
Ifan chuckled.‘Just as likely, I suppose.’He studied her, then Colm, who loomed behind her, as poised and ready as the count.Foolishness, though deeply in-trained foolishness, Llewyn assumed.If this encounter turned violent, here in the heart of the count’s castle, not even Colm would leave alive.
Ifan went on: ‘The foreign sorceress and her bodyguard.And her bird.’Frog chirruped, as though grateful to be recognised.‘Not dressed in as much finery, though, and looking rather worse for wear.Do I not warrant the same ostentation as my friend the prince?’This last he said with a bemused smile that did not touch his eyes.‘Did you travel all this way on a rumour of the World Clock?Surely your Starlit Tower holds far greater wonders.’
‘It was a delightful surprise,’ Fola said.‘We came seeking you, My Lord, and our simple dress and sorry state is only a product of our urgency.’
‘Then I’ll not waste any more of your time,’ Ifan said.‘And I’ll thank you not to waste mine.’
‘Of course,’ Fola said.‘Simply put, I have devised a solution to the haunting that plagues your kingdom.One based upon a theory that I think only you, and perhaps a few other nobles in the kingdom and their trusted advisors, will be able to corroborate.I am here to secure that corroboration, and your assistance.’
‘Oh?’Ifan paced nearer to Fola, until she was within reach of his sword.Llewyn tensed and exchanged a glance with Colm.‘You have seen, now, the differences between Parwys and Glascoed,’ he went on.‘Why think I could help you better than the prince, or his mother?’
‘Because I think there are truths you know that they refuse to face,’ Fola answered, ‘or have been kept from knowing.’
Ifan’s fingers drummed the hilt of his sword.‘What truths?’
Fola cocked her head, her mischievous smile widening.‘There was no Beast-King of Galca, was there?’
The Count of Glascoed
YC 1189
There are honourable lords, it is true enough.Some argue they evidence the benefits of such an arrangement—that the rule of a good, wise king is better for the people than their own foolishness.
We call these people ‘infants’, for they would rather yield responsibility to a father, whether cruel or benevolent, than be masters of their own lives.
Odd the Bard,Odd’s Almanac of the World Beyond the Walls,YC196
No sound touched the courtyard but the rustling of Frog’s feathers while he preened himself, oblivious.Even Llewyn, to whom matters of political history mattered little, felt a sudden shift in his perspective on the world.It was as though he had looked through a prism that, like the edge of the aleph, had slightly bent and distorted everything he knew.
‘What?’Damon blurted, against all courtly manners.‘Of course there was a Beast-King of Galca.The four counties were united to defeat him.Every history agrees.’
‘Who wrote those histories?’Fola asked, her gaze still locked on Ifan, who teetered off the balance he had maintained since greeting them.Llewyn’s grip tightened around his ghostwood blade, which he held at his side in the guise of a walking stick.
‘Just two days ago we passed Abal’s Scar!’Damon went on.‘What more evidence could you ask for than a lake carved into the bedrock of the world?’
‘The lake exists,’ Fola said.‘As, I’m sure, do the weapons Abal used to make it.But I have read other histories, written in other lands.In Galca, for instance, whose chronicles make no mention of a Beast-King—’
‘Of course they wouldn’t,’ Damon spluttered.‘Why wouldn’t they scrub out such a shameful period from their past?’
‘… but do mention Abal the Conqueror,’ Fola went on, undeterred.‘Who, after his subjugation of his immediate neighbours, was turned back from further conquest at the Afoneang by an alliance between the lords of what would later become Galca and Alberon.Accounts supported by chronicles from Alberon, which Colm there can testify I spent our brief voyage to Ispont perusing.’
