Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5971

Chapter 5971: Those Who Hunt

The currents of THE Infinite Carcosa ran on through the dark in long, slow blue rivers that bent back on themselves and crossed and parted again, and on one of them, frozen into a broad shelf of pale ice, the Iron Psalm had made a small camp. There was no wood to burn, so they burned a little white star-fire in a ring of stones instead, and it gave off no smoke and very little warmth.

Brunhild sat on the far side of it with a whetstone, running it along a blade that did not need sharpening, because the sound of it was better than the silence. Aethon sat apart at the edge of the shelf with his knees drawn up, looking out at the dark, and said almost nothing.

Ione Kalliste sat closest to the fire with her left arm laid across her knees. From her fingertips to her elbow it was grey glass, smooth and dull and cold, the mark the Stillness had left on her when it took four of the Legion’s lotuses, and in the Carcosa’s chill it ached all the way up into her shoulder. She held it near the white flame now and then, though she knew the flame could not warm it.

They had searched the Carcosa for a long while. They had followed currents that ran away into nothing and come back to where they began, crossed frozen shelves that thawed and drifted behind them, chased a faint grey light that was always just beyond the next bend and never any closer. The image of the Dreamer they carried had grown faint with handlng, and none of them said aloud what all of them were thinking, which was that they might wander here endlessly.

Ione had joined the Shepherd’s Legion when she was very young and very nearly dead. She had served him ever since. She was grateful to him all the way down, and she was afraid of him in exactly the same measure.

When the order came to hunt the Dreamer, she had not asked why. When the Iron Psalm was assigned to work with her, broken and bitter after what the Dreamer had done to them, she had not asked how. She only held her glass arm near the fire, and looked at the dark, and waited to be told what to do next.

What came next came out of the sky. Above the frozen shelf, the dark tore open along a long white line, and through it stepped a woman in burnt gold armor etched with the trails of falling stars, its plates still split down one side, with a detachment of Unfathomables and Half-Unfathomables in silent ranks behind her. Her eyes were black, with a single bright streak running down through each of them, and Ione knew that mark. Every soldier of the Legion knew it!

"Ione Kalliste," the woman said. She came down onto the ice without hurrying and stood across the fire from her. "I am Roxanna. The Shepherd sends me to help you finish this."

Ione rose. She was aware of her glass arm hanging at her side, and of the camp behind her, the dead fire and the useless whetstone and the man staring at the dark, and of how long they had been lost. She waited for the contempt. It did not come!

Roxanna’s black eyes went once to the grey glass of her arm and rested there for a moment, and then moved on to her face, and she said nothing about the arm at all.

"We have searched a long while to no avail," Ione said. "The currents of infinity fold. Everything here folds...well, infinitely."

"Then we stop following them," Roxanna said. She said it simply, without any pride.

She turned toward the dark beyond the edge of the shelf and lifted one hand, and her forearm, Ione saw, was cracked from wrist to elbow with fine white lines.

"THE Break That Goes All the Way Down," Roxanna said quietly, and struck the air.

HUUUM!

The cracks went out of her fist and into the Carcosa. They ran across the nearest current of infinity, white and fine and branching, and the current did not crumble or bend away; it simply came apart along the lines, and the dark that had been bent back behind it came apart too, layer after layer, until a long clean gap stood open through the Carcosa where no gap had been. Brunhild was on her feet with the whetstone forgotten in her hand. Aethon had turned from the edge of the shelf.

At the far end of the gap, faint and grey, there was light. It was the soft grey light of the Fallow, rising out of the dark, and beneath it, very far away, a stretch of something dark and gold that might have been soil.

The Fallow? The Fallow was here too?

She looked down at the grass at her feet. "Or he has taken something. Something unfathomably Rare, maybe an Essara that remakes everything near it."