Penultima Thule by Chris Willrich

* * * *
We met Gaunt and Bone (poet and thief, respectively) back in our June 2000 issue and saw their adventures continue in the July 2002 issue. We’re pleased to welcome them back this month, although we hope they won’t share with us that infernal book they’ve got. 
Mr. Willrich dedicates this story to our dearly departed friend John Morressy. Any resemblances between Krumwheezle and another wizard whose name starts with the letter K are only slightly coincidental. 

* * * *

In a time, O child, when wizards toyed with gravity, thieves were heroes, and the Aurora was not yet born, a poet fled north to World’s Rim. Her name was Persimmon Gaunt, and she stumbled in the purple sunset across the tundra, her breath streaming behind as she gasped late autumn air. Birds scattered before her, crying tuituek! tuituek! Beyond stretched a plain cloaked in desert-brown lichens, stained with regions of thicker vegetation such as the one she now battled. Thick clumps of sedge clutched at her ankles; polygonal swaths of ice splintered beneath her feet. She trampled ground-hugging dwarf willows and birches like a crazed giant. These were the northmost representatives of tree-kind, for the taiga lay at her back. Dark evergreens fanned out a mile behind her, rising taller and milling thicker in proportion to her distance—as if tree society wanted no part of Persimmon Gaunt and her foul book.

But there were those that wanted both.

At treeline’s edge reared a stark birch stockade with heads of many kinds impaled upon the timbers’ points. There were caribou and muskox, arctic fox and brown bear, and though there were none of the white bear, the Tornarssuk, there were many open-mouthed heads of men. The wall of the stockade grew to irregular heights, and a shadow like a hand clawed across the plain.

A horn blew, burning through cold silence. A mocking, snarling chant arose. The voices were of many ages, and both sexes. The words carried far in the clear, still air.

Hunger Stone! Hunger Stone! 

She could not help but look back. The hunters were unseen, but their mammoth-sized sacrificial boulder rose to just above the level of the stockade. She thought she discerned a man-shaped shadow stretched upon it.

Hunger Stone! Hunger Stone! 

She turned and staggered on. Panting, lungs aching with the cold, she could imagine Imago Bone beside her crying: Absurd, Gaunt! Nothing to scramble upon or slip behind. We, a pair of city thieves, in the arctic! We’re like church mice on an archery range.

Then she pictured him where he actually was. She recalled him shouting from the Hunger Stone, I love you too.

At last Gaunt crossed the patch of sedge and dwarf trees and fell to her knees upon a stony streambed. She slipped loose her pack, and her back slowly unclenched from the weight. She carried, it seemed, a northern trading post’s worth of equipment—fur cloaks, torches, pickaxes, a bow, dried meat. But what seemed heaviest was the reason Gaunt and Bone had sought the Rim.

She always sensed the enchanted book’s location near the top of the pack, as though a rabid rat snuffled her neck.

“You are too much trouble,” she told the thing they’d meant to be rid of. “But you will serve me yet. I will have him back.”

* * * *

“It is a cacography, this book,” the wizard had rasped the day they struck for Earth’s edge. “And its power grows.”

Krumwheezle of Scuttlesand had frowned at Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone. “Forgive me—a term of Art.” He was an unprepossessing fellow; the wizard’s white beard covered a craggy face while his fisherman’s sweater covered a sizable paunch. He’d come recommended as that extreme rarity: an unambitious yet powerful mage. He’d even seemed glad of visitors, and had eagerly scrutinized Mashed Rags Bound in Dead Cow through a rune-inscribed silver monocle.

But now he slumped back in a wicker chair beneath the stuffed remains of former familiars.

Staring up through the glass of the wizard’s solarium, Persimmon Gaunt considered his warning. “Cacography,” she answered with a bleak smile. “I assume you don’t simply mean “badly written’?”

It was a sunny day upon the Contrariwise Coast, but she only saw this through the sparkle on the surf above. Krumwheezle’s tower descended like an incisor from a cliffside overhang, the gravity within reversed. In solarium glass, framed by the turquoise of the wavetops, Gaunt beheld herself. She could still make out the sturdy Swanisle farm girl, pale face beneath a mop of auburn hair. She could still discern the morbid poet who’d bought a rose-and-spiderweb tattoo for her cheek.

But more than that, she beheld the traveler with a year of wandering behind her. She was lean of face, focused of gaze. She’d glimpsed much of human pain at Imago Bone’s side. Yet through the worst there were moments of strange beauty ... and stranger acts of mercy. Like the generosity of an unambitious wizard.

Krumwheezle coughed, held up a finger. “That is the mundane meaning. But mundane â€˜bad writing’ merely annoys. Magical cacographies corrupt and kill.”

He narrowed his eyes at the book on the cedar table, as though scrutinizing a vulture on a stump. “They are full of tantalizing lore. Yet their ink is rife with contagion. And I have never seen one that dripped so with malice. Indeed, I suspect the creator far exceeded expectations. Most authors of cacographies hope their work will be copied, to plague the world. But no one could survive the ordeal of transcribing this tome. How ever did you come by it?”

Gaunt heard the ocean surge above her head like an oncoming storm. “The price of escaping a more immediate problem.” She declined to elaborate, as did Bone. “You say it’s growing in strength.”

Krumwheezle spread his hands. “Over time the viral enchantment has evolved. It is learning how to damage its victims without killing them.” He shook his head at the book. To all appearances it was a nondescript folio in frayed leather, stuffed with uneven linen pages. There was no evident reason for the sunlight to be muted in that place, but so it was.

Krumwheezle looked up. “You two, for instance.”

Bone, silent till now, shifted uneasily in his chair. A wary look sharpened his narrow face. He had reasons for wariness, Gaunt knew, only beginning with the blade-scar upon one cheek and the flame-scar upon the other. He did not like wizards, or the things they spawned.

“Us?” he said.

“Your auras are tainted by the thing,” Krumwheezle replied. “You have probably been having your own sorts of ill luck. Tell me, are you prone to weird misadventures, strange coincidences? Old enemies just happening to trip over you on the street? Nameless horrors just happening to erupt near your inn?”

Poet and thief shared a look. Bone shrugged. “Just so ... things just happen.”

Krumwheezle shook his head. “No, friends. This is not simply the mad hard life of an adventurer. It’s the enchantment, adapting itself.” The old man flushed beneath his beard. “Now, forgive me: I assume your partnership is more than strictly business?”

In the solarium’s heat, a dry whiff of leather and dust crossed from the book to Gaunt, as if the tome were tickling her, drawing her attention. She wrinkled her nose. “A touch impertinent...” she observed.

“You assume correctly,” Bone said.

“Yet there has been no pregnancy?” Krumwheezle pressed.

Gaunt widened her eyes. “More than a touch....”

“No,” Bone said slowly. “For many years my associates were angels of death. Long before I met Gaunt, it seemed such company had made me infertile.”

“Ah, that may be,” the wizard said. “But I suspect the book’s proximity would prevent children in any case. It’s begun to draw its noose around you.”

“So it’s trying to kill us?” Gaunt exclaimed. “Even though we’ve not read a word?”

“Marvelous!” Bone cried, slapping his knee. “We thought destroying the book would be dangerous. But all the while the thing’s drawn peril like a breadmaker draws pigeons. We’d have been safer dropping the thing down a well. That’s what comes of charity!”

Even months later as she crouched upon the tundra, Gaunt recalled the haunted eyes behind the mirth. Things had changed, too, for Imago Bone. Perhaps it was the mention of children, and the blush the thought had raised in her face. What was in his face had been clear to her: now he had something to lose.

Indeed, his expression had barely darkened when the wizard muttered, “It is worse than that, Imago Bone. This book may kill us all.”

* * * *

The sentry barked at Gaunt beneath the gaping human heads and bright sickle moon.

Despite his caribou-hide clothing he, like his fellow Stonekin, was no true Northerner. The Old People fled these lands centuries before. He was no reindeer herder or iglu dweller, but a pale man of Eldshore, come up to Stonemouth seeking a brighter, sharper sort of life. That was what the taiga people whispered of the strange Southerners who moved to tundra’s edge. They were all of them questers, hoping the ice-winds would harden them, prove their worth.

But whatever beliefs they carried they soon discarded like sucked bones. The Stone’s whispers were creed enough. Beneath the sentry’s fur cap lay the proof; the flesh around his ears was scarred by the touch of stony fangs.

“Who’s there?” he said, leaning out the stockade door.

Gaunt had learned enough thievery from Imago Bone that she already crouched nearby. Krumwheezle had provided fur parkas, pants, and mittens that blended well with the shadows. She was near enough to feel the man’s cloud of warm breath hit her cold-numbed face. Near enough to smell old beer and rancid spiced meat. Near enough to respond with an open book.

“Fool prey!” laughed the guard in Roil, the language of Eldshore and the Spiral Sea. “You come back here, armed with that? I’ll gut your book, then your belly. I can’t even read.” He raised a stone-tipped spear.

But It matters not, Gaunt answered silently. The writing is magical. The dialect is archaic, and it matters not. The light is poor, and it matters not. The letters infest your mind like wasps laying eggs in meat.

But all she said aloud was, “I am sorry.”

For this book was the testimony of a thousand ghosts, all slain in some bizarre and pathetic manner. In its pages the mad medium Cindersmith had congealed those spirits’ hollow-eyed resignation, and unleashed metaphysical poison. The book was not truly evil—for evil, too, was a meaning. And all meaning corroded under the influence of Mashed Rags Bound in Dead Cow. The tome embodied all that was broken and pointless.

“‘I carried my ten-month-old daughter in my left arm,’“ recited the guard, transfixed. “‘I, emperor of Nobeca, feared by all. Laughing, she scratched me in the eye. By instinct my right hand warded the eye—my right hand, which bore a spiked gauntlet. Thus did I pierce my brain. Now I, in my ghostly wanderings, can take pride only that I sat the babe down before I died.’“

The sentry blinked.

“You fight me with a ghost story?”

“What’s happening?” demanded a voice behind him.

The sentry spun to answer, and impaled his eye upon his comrade’s spear.

The sentry wailed, and the comrade shouted, and their grotesque embrace shoved the spear-tip deep into the sentry’s skull.

The ill-luck of the book had claimed another life. Gaunt slipped through the gate, aware she’d purchased entry by corroding the substance of the world.

Inside, Stonemouth resembled an ordinary town, the wall’s ghoulishness giving way to corduroy lanes of birch trunk, tidy log houses with snow-dusted roofs, firelight and chimney-smoke. For this reason Gaunt and Bone had disregarded the wall as local color and succumbed to the lures of a warm room and a hot meal. They’d ignored the downcast looks of the old and infirm, the wild leers of the hardier men and women, and the strange scars around everyone’s ears. So too they had disregarded the unusually vile stench of the slaughterhouses.

They’d discounted it all. And now Bone lay bound to the final thing they’d dismissed: the granite boulder big as a khan’s tent, covered in dark stains and peppered with fissures like maws with milky-white quartz teeth.

Bone had secured Gaunt’s escape when the Stonekin rushed them in the town’s single inn. And though she’d cursed him, she’d nonetheless fled.

It might be the world would suffer because she could not make herself press Rimward. But in the scales of her mind this one thief outweighed all the Earth. Not by much, for she loved the world in all its variety and perplexity. Perhaps even by as little as the weight of his hand upon her shoulder. But that was enough.

She crept beside the Hunger Stone and encountered another sentry. This one was forewarned by the shouts. He thrust a knife at Gaunt, the blade shining blue in the moonlight.

But the knife hit the opened Mashed Rags Bound in Dead Cow. To Gaunt’s touch, the tome quivered more like a thick carcass than a book. At the same time, her foe’s knife hummed as though connecting with steel.

It vibrated in just the right manner to expose a flaw in the metal. It snapped with a ting.

And now, fixated by the text Gaunt would never dare glance upon, the Stonekin intoned, “‘In the finest eatery of Archaeopolis I choked upon a pomegranate seed. With my finger I goaded my throat into surrendering the seed. But at that moment the great earthquake began. Thus I choked a second and final time, upon my own severed finger.’“

The sentry’s eyes widened. They seemed cold, flinty things. In them Gaunt perceived a wild ruthlessness that could humble man or beast or weather.

But even ruthlessness can be an ideal, a meaning.

Gaunt bore the death of meaning.

The Stonekin shook off his reverie and lunged at Gaunt ... and slipped on the only uncleared patch of ice in the village.

There was a perfect fall for snapping the neck, and he found it.

“Forgive me,” Gaunt whispered.

Her thoughts fled to the interview with Krumwheezle, to Bone’s pained laughter and the wizard’s sad cough.

“Kill us all?” Gaunt had repeated, startled by the words.

“In the long run,” Krumwheezle had answered, “yes. I’ve never seen such a powerful cacography, and its malignancy has begun to spread beyond immediate contact. Any you’ve encountered while owning it may also be afflicted.”

“Skath,” Bone muttered, and “Rainjoy,” Gaunt said.

“They in turn may infect others. A plague of freak misfortune will spread. But that’s only the beginning.” Krumwheezle looked overhead to the stuffed cat, frog, rat, and raven caught in a wave-cast net of sunlight. “I’ll console myself that my own life’s in autumn, that soon enough I’ll join my familiars. You see, the ill-luck slices deeper than you know. As a practitioner of Art, I know our world’s suffused with meaning.”

Gaunt pushed back a little in her chair. Something slipped, and the chair teetered. Her stomach went queasy while she righted herself and stared directly at the tome.

Perhaps by a trick of the light, it seemed to have shifted closer.

Krumwheezle continued, “Ours is a magical world, friend rogues, and magic is simply meaning given motion, heft, and voice. But this book triggers freak mishaps that defy all rhyme or reason.”

Gaunt took up the cup of Mirabad tea beside the book. Though sharp in just the manner she liked, the tea seemed hotter than it had earlier, and after one sip her stomach threatened to rebel. The cup quivered in her grip; a hot drop stung her wrist.

“They’re like gashes in the fabric of our reality,” Krumwheezle continued. “For they declare that life is meaningless. As if we were all merely fodder for cruel jokes.”

Bone sensed Gaunt’s unease, put his hand upon her shoulder. She reached for it gratefully, meshed her fingers with his.

After a pause, Krumwheezle said, “The more lives snuffed by the book, the more meaning dims. Indeed, our world—a flat Earth where the nearer stars are luminescent dragon eggs, the farther ones divine campfires—cannot exist without meaning and beauty. Like as not we’ll vanish like a punctured soap bubble.”

“How long?” Bone asked.

“Centuries perhaps. Or perhaps years. But that will be the ultimate result of your blasted book.”

“Master Krumwheezle?” Gaunt prompted after a long silence. “How can we destroy it?”

The wizard pressed his temple. “I fear the problem is beyond me.” Glumly he ticked off scores of arcane remedies, of the sort that vanquished foul artifacts of the past: dragonfire, alchemical solutions, the weight of levitating islands. But none were available to folk of the modern West, even to such as Gaunt and Bone. Even volcanoes were not as hot as in Elder Days.

Bone was looking up at the inverted surf, its patterns flashing bright one moment, drowned the next. “What did you say about our world?” he said quietly.

Krumwheezle sighed. “It is a world suffused in meaning, and thus vulnerable....”

“No. You said the Earth is flat. I always knew that. But I did not think ... Gaunt, can we not simply throw the book off the edge?”

She nodded. “Yes! Yes. It seems too obvious. But sometimes obvious solutions are best.”

Yet it seemed to her that Krumwheezle gave them the bleakest of looks, as at children who announce they will make everyone in the whole world happy, or bring an end to evil.

“I will advise you and equip you,” he answered, “but I will not accompany you. Forgive me.”

* * * *

The voice of Stonemouth’s headman shattered the memory.

“Forgive is a weakling’s word.”

The tall man lurked in shadow beside the looming Hunger Stone. Gaunt glimpsed the Stone’s rough angularity rising against the white smile of the moon. Dozens of rudely shaped, crystal-fanged mouths shone in the argent light.

“Told you,” Bone’s voice drifted weakly down from the Stone, “to get away from here.... “He was bound at ankles and wrists by ropes. Nothing secured the ropes but four grinning crystal mouths.

“Hush, Imago,” Gaunt said. She told the headman, “I don’t like killing,” keeping the book half-shut. “Let it end now.”

“Weak!” the headman snapped, stepping into the moonlight. He wore a sneer and the white skin of an arctic bear. The sides of his head were ringed in scar tissue and his ears resembled gnawed fungus. “Fit only for food!”

Food sang a moaning chorus from the stony mouths. Fit food.

Gaunt sensed many Stonekin peering from windows, peeping around corners, creeping forward along the log lanes. She gripped the book tight. “Let my friend go.”

The headman laughed. Gaunt saw that one of his teeth had been replaced by a quartz fang. Stifling her fear, she lifted the book.

But the headman raised a hand. The Hunger Stone rumbled and croaked.

Go friend, moaned the stone maws. There were flashes of crystal teeth all around Imago Bone.

Gaunt cried out and flung the book open. Her palm caught a corner, and the old paper was unaccountably sharp. It pierced her skin. Her blood made dark edge-marks.

“‘I survived my campaign as general,’” the headman read. “‘But the day of my victory parade, a chamber pot toppled from an upper window.... ˜’

“Gaunt,” Bone called weakly. “I’m all right. The Stone ... it cut my cords.”

She slammed the book shut. Her hand throbbed with the motion.

The Stonekin came to his senses, looking dazed. Gaunt had forestalled the curse, barely.

“Bone,” Gaunt said, “let’s go.”

Bone slithered down the Stone like a snake on a shovel. Gaunt caught him.

The headman shook his head as though waking. “Do ... what you must.” But as he faced the thief, it seemed the ill-luck brushed him, for he bit his own lip with the quartz fang.

“Don’t touch them!” he cried, blood streaming from his mouth. Then quietly he spat, “For know this ... you belong to the Stone.”

You belong, the Stone echoed.

Droplets of the headman’s blood upon them, Gaunt and Bone stumbled toward the wall and World’s Rim.

* * * *

Krumwheezle’s library had illuminated little of the Rim. Sneezing amid dust and cobwebs, Gaunt had time and again seen the symbols on maps dwindle edgeward like stars beside clouds. Sometimes cartographers helpfully decorated these spaces with ships tumbling over waterfalls, sea serpents, drowning sailors. And there were labels: Ye Abyss, or Hungry Void, or more bluntly, Abandon All Hope. But once she was struck by a purely blank region atop a map, like a landscape buried in snow. This was glossed with the perverse phrase Penultima Thule. Thule, Gaunt knew, meant Northern Land. But that the mapmaker would stop with the almost-but-not-quite-northmost-land ... now that was a mystery, a conspiracy of cartographers.

All she learned from Krumwheezle’s books was that Penultima Thule was a frigid waste, once inhabited by seal-hunters and reindeer herders, but now stalked by the most barbaric of southern folk. Of the original inhabitants, only the ursine Tornarssuk remained: fierce white bears with mastery of simple tools.

Little would have recommended Penultima Thule—except for the odd legend or three that from there one could walk to World’s Rim. All other accounts of the Rim involved mariners with spyglasses watching sister ships topple into the void. Doubtful as Penultima Thule might be, Gaunt and Bone were more dubious about suicide. And so their path bent north, beyond the rugged polities of the Contrariwise Coast, into the grand littoral empire of the Eldshore, and beyond into the dark green sea of the taiga.

The forest of emerald evergreens and golden broadleafs bore a silence so deep as to seem deafening. It stole their voices, so that Gaunt missed the riotous chatter of cities. It made their talks rare, and serious.

“It’s just as well we could have no children,” Gaunt had said one day. “Such a life is not for them.”

“I’m relieved you think so,” Bone answered.

“And yet ... to see young eyes drink in the Orca Coast’s watery labyrinth ... or the diamond and turquoise wall of the Titancrypt Glacier, and the Skyblade Mountains beyond....”

“Or the cutthroats of Archaeopolis’s Crypttown?” Bone said. “Or the vile sorcery of the Old School?” Bone said. “Or their parents gorged and drunk in the vice gardens of Amberhorn ... if not dead in some sewer or charnel pit?” He shook his head, his gaze looking back over long years as a thief. “Better those eyes never exist.”

“True,” Gaunt said. But she fell silent, as if those eyes were upon her.

Despite this agreement, the moment weighed upon them as deeply as the chill and the hunger. And so distracted, they had exercised little caution upon reaching Penultima Thule.

That, Gaunt swore, would not happen again. But her oath might be too late.

* * * *

They hiked in moonlit silence, crossing Gaunt’s dry riverbed and continuing north. Cold still air polished the stars, which seemed as diamond spear-tips piercing the night’s veil. They paused when Gaunt, nursing her stinging hand, tripped over the pale rack of a vanished caribou. A dim wind-moan punctuated the curse and the rattle.

“You used it,” Bone said as he rubbed her sprained leg. These were his first words since Stonemouth.

“They were going to kill you,” she said.

“No,” Bone murmured. He slid her wide fur pant leg (baggy at the base, for heat flowed upward) and absently kissed her calf in an inappropriate, albeit pleasant way. His beard stubble tickled. “I’m afraid they weren’t. And now they know about the book.”

“They weren’t going to kill you?” Gaunt shivered, and not just from the air and Bone’s ministrations. “If that wasn’t a classic human sacrificial—Bone?”

He had quietly clamped his teeth around her calf. It was a warm sensation in the chill, but quickly grew painful.

“Bone!”

He flinched backward, puzzlement creasing his face. “Gaunt ... I don’t....”

“What were you doing? A friendly bite’s one thing in an Archaeopolis inn....”

He rubbed his temple. “Something overcame me.” Looking northward he said, “It’s what I meant before ... about Stonemouth. They didn’t want to kill either of us. They wanted to lash us to the Stone. So the mouths could fasten upon us, and ... whisper.”

He turned, the moonlight revealing the dark welts around one ear.

“Bone ... What did it whisper?”

“I rarely made out the words. But the sense of them stuck. It was about need, longing, starvation. I’m hungry, Gaunt.” His jaw twitched. “The Hunger Stone makes you mad with it. There’s a gnawing inside. Not just the need of a man with an empty gut. I feel like a whole world ... with a ravenous edge like a mountain range of teeth. There are many Hunger Stones scattered across the far north, Gaunt ... stray children of the Rim.” He shook his head, as though to rend the cobwebs of nightmare. He looked north into the phalanx of stars. “We thought of the Rim as a place. I fear it’s more. I fear it’s a Being.”

* * * *

Despite the recurring peal of horns, the hunters kept their distance.

“They expect me to join them,” Bone said simply one day. He looked thin and shrunken within his furs. “They’re calling me back.”

“And what becomes of me?” Gaunt asked.

He did not answer, but gnawed at a strip of dried meat.

For five days the thieves had crossed Penultima Thule. It was a strange realm for those accustomed to rocky coasts and many-towered cities.

Krumwheezle had told Gaunt this land was saturated with frozen water, which thawed only near the surface. Nothing deep-rooted grew. What at first sight appeared an unending expanse of sand or soil was a ubiquitous brown lichen, supplemented in fertile stretches by thick mats of mosses, sedges, and dwarf trees. Amid these grew mushrooms and berries, startling in their color. Once they saw a white fox snuffling among constellations of little fruits pink as salmon meat. It darted off before Gaunt could draw her bow, and so they contented themselves with the berries.

Despite the cold, the emptiness, the lean meals, Gaunt began to see a delicate beauty in the plain. Evil folk might dwell here, yet the tundra itself held no foulness.

But then the sky’s vast pale blue thickened with gray-white, as if the fox had heralded the clouds. Where once the days yawned wide, now they pressed down. Snow fell—in a lazy dusting of meandering flakes, as though the land had all eternity to kill them. It grew colder, and as if in response the gash in Gaunt’s palm swelled and darkened.

On the fifth day, while Bone rested, Gaunt raised the open book to a plump ptarmigan, its white girth like a feathered egg with a head, its black eyes like windows to the Rim. As she expected, the bird just sat upon its snow-dappled boulder, watching her sidelong. The victim need not be a reader, it seemed, but must have at least the capacity to learn. Gaunt sighed and took up her bow. But the bird had seen such before, and was gone in a blur.

That evening Bone crouched at their tent’s opening, staring at a moonlit snowfall resembling blue motes drifting in the sea. Where once he’d shaved religiously by dagger-blade, now he wore the scraggly beard of some immature prophet. He tore into the dwindling dried meat. As she chewed on sour and watery black berries, he eyed her with what she preferred to believe was lust.

“Any cannibal thoughts?” she asked.

He grunted. “Cannibal implies preference for human flesh. Stonekin aren’t so picky.”

“Is that what you are now, Bone? Stonekin?”

“Never,” he snapped. He tore into another strip of meat. More quietly he continued, “I do feel their hunger. Perhaps it’s this landscape ... starvation seems so close at hand, survival so precarious. And the Stone ... it speaks to a part of you that feels like a gnawing void, that needs filling up. A part that wouldn’t dream of missing a meal.” He met her gaze. “Even if the only candidate walks upright and shares your bed.”

“Well, you are looking a little threadbare.”

“Fortunately, so are you.” He grimaced. “They wanted us both, at first. A strong, healthy couple to convert. But now they’re content to let me kill you and return with the book. Idiots. They think the book’s just another weapon, when it’s really a power as bleak as the one they serve. I don’t hate anyone enough to surrender the book. And yet, in a few more days I may obey.”

She took his hand. “You’ve yet to obey anything in your life.”

He grinned, and was at least a shadow of his old self. “You’re a poet. You tell lies to make people smile.”

“You’re addressing the author of Crypt Lyrics and Songs of a Skull-to-Be.”

“So noted.” He leaned close.

How arrogant, Gaunt thought, to think you can evade this conversation with a kiss.

And how correct. As she moved her mouth within spiderthread-width of his, she said, “No biting. No talk of what made you bite.”

“My lips are sealed.”

“Not entirely, I hope—”

A new horn blast cut through the moaning wind.

All previous peals had diminished with increasing distance from Stonemouth. This one sounded close.

“I believe,” Bone said, “the Stonekin have lost their patience.”

* * * *

They struck camp, hiking in a snowy moonwashed vastness like the shallows of a blue-lit sea. The horn kept sounding behind them, and the thieves’ southern-bred ears failed to place the range.

Gaunt wouldn’t stop to listen more carefully.

“We just need someplace defensible,” she told Bone, trying to reassure both of them. “If we can bottleneck them....”

“Ironic,” Bone interrupted, panting. “The headman’s ... lost patience. But this march, heh, is making me hungry.”

“I do appreciate the warning. Keep moving.”

He staggered on. “I won’t succumb.”

“I know.”

“I would destroy myself first.”

“Bone, enough.”

“But if I were to turn ... you must use the book.”

For a moment she could not answer. This was the sort of thing he usually said (You must use the book; this concoction’s vile but will negate the poison; I’ve stolen the empress of Amberhorn’s diamond fingernail that I might scratch your back) where an ordinary man might say I love you. There were times she wished he were ordinary.

“Very well,” she said. “But if I should perish, you must take it to the Rim.”

“I care little about that. Let the world pop into nothingness, if you are not in it!”

“Swear, Imago.”

“Never fear,” he sighed. “If you are gone, what’s left for me but to follow your last wish, even to the edge of the Earth?”

Her eyes narrowed. “And you must swear not to throw yourself off.”

She saw she’d struck true. “You astound me, woman!” he snapped. “How many more instructions? Must I now give my loot to the poor? Make the sign of the Swan Goddess before every ambush? Eat a radish a day? If I choose to fall off World’s Rim, that’s between me and the abyss.”

He turned, stomped into the snow-flecked moonlight, and—with a squeaking, shattering sound and a brief yelp—plunged out of sight.

“Bone!”

Gaunt ran forward and stared down. What confronted her was a frozen river channel with a Bone-sized gap in its shining surface. Beneath that gap lay an ice-roofed tunnel and a groaning thief upon a dry, silty riverbed.

After its surface froze over, Gaunt supposed, the river must have dried up, perhaps from the freezing of its watershed. The deep water, insulated from the cold air, would stay liquid and empty out to sea, leaving behind a tunnel with a crystalline ceiling.

Or perhaps this was all wild speculation, and the land was simply trying to kill them.

But Bone was alive, nursing his ankle with a disgusted expression.

“Bone! How’s your foot?”

“It will heal.”

“Your pride?”

“We won’t speak of it.”

He looked up, evaluating the climb even as she considered the downward scramble. “Unfortunate,” he said, “that we lost my ironsilk lines, along with my other tricks, at Stonemouth. If I rest a day I believe I can handle the climb. But that seems ill-advised.”

“You may not have to,” Gaunt said. “The river’s path should intersect the Boreal Bight, if our sources were correct about its existence. Following this tunnel would hide us from pursuit.”

“I would be happy to be out of the open. There is one flaw however.”

“Yes?”

“Upstream I’ve just spotted the nose of an adorable little white bear.”

Gaunt’s heart felt swollen in her chest. “Bone,” she said in a low voice. “Try moving downstream. I’ll follow from up here.”

“You certainly will stay up there,” he said, rising unsteadily. “You are not going to meet that bear’s mother.”

She readied her bow, searched for the blue glimmer of the frozen river. “If you meet the mother, you must scream.”

“I can oblige.”

So they moved together downstream, him below the shimmering ceiling, her above. After several minutes she heard a thunderous bellow from behind and below the ice, while ahead and below came Bone’s muffled oath.

And now the Stonekin howled close.

Gaunt ignored the Stonekin, drew, and fired. The wound in her palm wrung tears from her eyes, but her aim was good. Her shot did not break the ice but cracked it at a point well behind the Tornarssuk’s roar, making eerie chirps and whistles like strange tropical birds.

The bear’s roaring rushed back upstream.

Meanwhile the Stonekin’s cries moved that way as well.

Gaunt waited three breaths. She broke the nearby ice with her boot and slithered down into the channel.

With luck and forewarning she reached bottom with nothing worse than cuts and scrapes. When her eyes adjusted to the dim blue light seeping down from the ceiling, she saw Bone leaning against brown frozen earth. A scent of raw, bloody meat, preserved by the cold air, assaulted her nose.

Upstream and around a bend, she could hear more ursine growling.

There followed many human cries of anger and alarm. These became screams of terror.

“I thought you were going to stay up,” Bone hissed.

She shoved him forward. “Just move, Bone,” she whispered. “At least you’ll have the advantage of going faster than I.”

Wincing he said, “I’ve got the sprained ankle; you’ll find that difficult.”

“I can move quite slowly in a crisis.”

Nevertheless they both advanced with quiet dispatch, staying close. Sounds of chewing and moaning followed them down the riverbed.

Gaunt noticed strange markings on the walls, made from some rusty-looking pigment. Again a bloody smell filled her nostrils. Wonder made her daring, and she spoke. “What are these?”

“I was hoping you’d miss them. They’re what truly made me swear. The bear’s arrival just made the oath economical.”

They were paintings of great simplicity, yet they captured an air of grace and fluid motion. These were hunting scenes, showing various animals of the north—muskoxen, and marmots, and mammoths. She had seen cave art with a similar look in remote spots on Swanisle.

But some of the bipedal shapes she’d first taken for hunters seemed to lack weapons. Indeed, Gaunt had the impression they were fleeing along with the other animals. It slowly came to Gaunt that those bipeds who did bear arms were rather massive sorts, with clawed hands and extended ears.

It also came to her that the sounds behind them had ceased. She glanced behind—and immediately ducked.

A spear stabbed the wall, impaling one of the scrawny paintings of human prey.

She beheld a huge white bear nearly filling the channel. It seemed astounding that anything so tall should stand on two feet. The Tornarssuk clutched a bloody knife carved from bone or caribou antler, with a blade as long as Gaunt’s forearm. Its bulk glittered with clumps of ice, as though it had deliberately soaked and frozen its fur before battle. Gore stained the ice.

The bear wore a mask: the tanned, sliced, and stretched head of a human, secured with twine.

The Tornarssuk did not roar. It did worse. It smiled. Its teeth had scarlet stains.

Gaunt held her ground. She was too shocked to do much else.

Bone was at least prepared for the sight. He threw a rock.

He scored a hit to the heart. But the stone bounced uselessly off the armor of ice and matted fur.

The sound did break Gaunt’s paralysis. She managed to stumble backward as the Tornarssuk swiped at where she’d been. Cold air from the swing struck her face; the scent of human entrails churned her stomach.

The scent proved too distracting. She tripped, sprawling upon the silt.

With a snarl Bone leapt onto the bear’s back.

“Mine!” she heard him screech. “My food!” She didn’t pause to wonder which morsel he meant. She reached into her pack and pulled out Mashed Rags Bound in Dead Cow.

“You use tools,” she shouted, opening it wide. “Paint symbols. Can you read?”

The bear sniffed and stared at the pages, ignoring the madman trying to chew it to death. It dropped its knife and bellowed.

It seized Bone and threw him overhead at Gaunt. Poet and thief went down in a heap.

The bear turned and loped up the tunnel, fast as a cat.

Before the Tornarssuk left Gaunt’s sight, she saw it snatch up the cub, which had been trailing a few paces back. The adult bear nuzzled its offspring. There was no sign of meaningless death afflicting either.

“It seems you can’t read,” Gaunt groaned, “Not quite. Not yet. This horror can’t claim you. And yet....”

The bear snarled once more, as if in repudiation of humanity and all its works. Both white shapes turned away.

And yet you feel it. This book would destroy your kind along with ours. Did you sense that?

Or did you glimpse what we humans are capable of? And fear what you might become?

Bone moaned beside her. “What ... what was I doing?”

“Succumbing,” she said. She helped him to sit up. “And yet you turned that to our advantage.”

“Damn the Stonekin,” Bone said. “If I must cannibalize someone, let it be them.”

She wrinkled her nose, gave him a bleak smile. “I think the Tornarssuk’s family had first pick.”

They sat like that for a long, cold while, breathing hard. They leaned close together for warmth.

Bone gently set his teeth upon Gaunt’s ear.

Their eyes met, and their bodies separated.

“We must keep moving,” Bone said, looking away. He rose stiffly and shambled downstream, away from the charnel reek and Gaunt’s gaze.

* * * *

They walked the riverbed beneath the ceiling of moonlit ice. The painted scenes dwindled in frequency as the light dimmed. After the moon set, they continued through the night, feeling their way along the passage.

Gaunt kept behind Bone, several paces back now. She did not want to blame him for the new chill between them. But such thoughts nipped at her like the throbbing of her hand. It was Bone who stole the book, when first we met. Perhaps that awakened it, and otherwise it would have lain dormant on its forgotten shelf. Had I not met him, the world might be safe. I might have had children. I might....

She realized she was asking herself when to do as Bone asked: slay him and proceed alone.

Not now.

Don’t be weak. After all the harm he’s caused.... 

Not now!

At last her reverie was broken by fresh air and a tang of salt upon her tongue.

They stumbled into the open on a starlit rocky shore, a gentle surf lapping near their feet, a whistling wind chilling their faces. They camped amid boulders, exhausted, gambling that nothing would pounce from passage, sea, or sky. Late in the morning they rose to survey grim rocky hills southward and a vast bay of deep blue water ahead.

The bay stretched from the dark, star-flecked west to the pink, cirrus-traced east. It was choked with thousands of small islands of floating ice, like fragments of drifting crystal. No more than a mile or two offshore, the fragments merged into a sheet of pack ice beneath swirling blue-gray thunderheads. The sheet seemed to crawl with weird white shapes, like the horns and claws of frozen demons.

“The World’s Rim,” Gaunt said, excitement heating her voice, even now. “Krumwheezle’s sources described a calm narrow sea, freezing over as it kisses the void.”

Bone pointed to a dark lip of coastline. “It appears the ice touches land at that point. Let’s go.”

They passed an old slaughter pit covered with thousands of clean bones, near an irregular man-shaped shadow cast by piled boulders. In the cold dry air the scent of raw meat remained.

Bone came to a halt. Pebbles spilled into the hollow, making a sound like tinkling glass. “The Old People,” he said quietly, “scared caribou to this place with the shadow of the cairn. Here also they brought the walrus to carve. Children sang happily of meat. This was before the change, before the Hunger Stones transformed some of the People into the first Stonekin.”

“Bone?”

The thief shut his eyes. “Something I heard from the Stone. This was always a hard land, but not always haunted. It changed long ago. The land shifted and the bay became sheltered. The ice crept over the abyss. And something from the abyss crept in.”

He opened his eyes and gestured. “Look. Hunger Stones.”

Far out along the peninsula, Gaunt saw little gray bumps like tiny warts. “But there are dozens!”

“Yes. And I know they are calling to Stonekin across the arctic. I know, because they also call to me.”

* * * *

They passed between the huge Hunger Stones that flanked their path like a granite honor guard. The wind hummed down the aisle like the distant chorus of an ancient play. But Gaunt heard nothing from the Stones themselves. She almost wished she could, for she saw Bone trembling with their influence.

Each time he tensed anew, a part of her demanded she kill Bone now, before his will broke.

Finally, to silence that part, she squeezed his hand. Although the cut in her palm ached, she gripped long enough for a little of Bone’s warmth to soothe her numb skin. He nodded in silence.

Just after noon they passed the last Hunger Stones and reached a snowy slope descending to the ice. So thoroughly snow-clad was the ice that it looked like a particularly flat extension of the land. Only the milky, fractured edges of the sheet, a mile off on either side, gave away the truth.

The sun cast golden reflections upon their road north, making it seem a royal road into the stormy darkness. In the quiet beauty of this place, in what might be termed the ultimate part of Penultima Thule, Bone spoke for the first time in hours.

“You came for me,” said Bone. “At Stonemouth. And at the riverbed.”

“You’d have done the same.”

“I’m not so sure. I was proud of you, you know, when you fled Stonemouth. Thought I’d finally trained you to be properly selfish. Yet you came back.”

“There’s more than one kind of selfishness.” Gaunt paused to look around her at the bright, silent margin of the Earth. “I came back for you. But I selfishly want you in my life, and nowhere else. I’ve come all this way to save us, and perhaps everything. But that quest also gives me an ironclad excuse to see all this.”

She smiled, and Bone said, “I have never seen you so beautiful,” and Gaunt, haggard, famished, wounded, saw her own spirit reflected in his face, and knew it was true.

That would do, she thought, in place of the ordinary words of love.

But her next thought was, Now he is fully distracted—you’ll never get a better chance to strike.

She shook it off, took his hand, led him onto the ice.

The howls of the Stonekin soon followed.

* * * *

Fearing their pursuit but also their footing, they hiked Rimward.

Here at last must be Ultima Thule, the land the cartographers forbore to mention, for it was no proper land at all. It was a place of strange silences, punctuated by the odd moaning wind. Sculpted by that wind the ice bore low wavy ridges, like ripples in a giant’s white tablecloth cast over the bones of dragons. Sometimes there were delicate growths atop the ridges, like diamond candelabras. They tinkled and collapsed as Gaunt and Bone’s pickaxes struck nearby.

Once a jagged path of dark water crossed their path, smoking at the edges like a river of the fabled underworld. There was nothing for it but to jump, the floes creaking beneath them. Elsewhere dark blue troughs indicated places where floes had recently fused. These grew thinner and rarer as the pair walked on.

As the afternoon ebbed, the expanse of ice widened to either side, and the travelers could no longer see open water. Dark clouds choked the blue sky overhead. Mist and shadow hid the horizon. The way grew rougher. There were circular pits filled with crystalline spears shining wickedly in the reddening light. Ice rose in ridges resembling piles of white boulders, or rounded hills.

Sometimes these formations bore glistening mouths with icicle teeth.

As with the Hungry Stones, Bone tensed beside the mouths. Gaunt’s hand tensed upon her pickaxe. But Bone mastered himself and hiked on.

The dark, pressing sky, the white landscape, and the stabbing cold—these were besieging things. They drove Gaunt to burrow deeper into her clothing, sent her mind down into strange reverie. You stand upon water, she thought. Nothing but frozen water upon liquid water. Or, her mind continued relentlessly, you have already crossed to where the ice overhangs nothing at all. You are at the limits of the Earth, Persimmon Gaunt. You were not meant to be here.

Now there came a sound like distant thunder or the working of infernal machines somewhere miles north.

“The ice,” Bone muttered, looking like a true mad prophet with his distant gaze, the weight of the pack upon his shoulders, and the white tangle of frozen breath upon his beard. “The winds of the Rim fracture it, causing plates to buckle and shift and fall.”

“You learned this at Stonemouth?”

“I learned it now,” he said, “from the mouths in the ice.”

Gaunt bit her lip for comfort—and so she could feel something. “If so ... throwing the book over the edge might be suicide after all.”

“Worse, we could be sealed away inside a fissure, as far from our goal as if we still sipped tea at Krumwheezle’s. We must be cautious.”

That advice comes late, she thought.

Fresh howls came from behind, but still she could see no one beyond the southward ridges. They kept going.

As the sun set to the southwest, casting a pall like blood over the clouds and the surface underfoot, a fine mist arose. It made the land and even Bone indistinct, mere shadows in a scarlet haze. Gaunt could still see her own feet clearly, though—and the ice below.

Indeed, the ice grew so mirror-like that Gaunt could see herself, Bone beside her, stumbling relentlessly on. The need to spot surface irregularities anchored her gaze, and she often watched her reflection watching her.

It seemed to Gaunt that her reflection winked.

Distracted, she chanced upon a thinner region of ice, which bent and creaked beneath her weight. She stumbled. Her face plunged to within an inch of her reflection.

It smirked.

“No rest for thieves,” Bone said, hauling her upright.

She nodded as if sleepwalking, not trusting her own perceptions. She looked around and saw only a rosy haze. Were there shadows moving behind? Again, she could only trust herself enough to stay on her feet. She wanted to say something to Bone, but somehow the mist and silence made him seem miles, not inches, away.

She looked down, and saw Bone’s reflection leer at her own. Meanwhile Bone himself was scanning the land.

Before Gaunt could react, the mirror-Bone leapt upon her reflection, so vividly that Gaunt herself flinched and struggled for balance.

Her reflection stumbled. It seemed the mirror-Gaunt tried to escape but was betrayed by her own terror.

Gaunt’s stomach clenched as she watched the image of her lover gnawing the mirror-Gaunt’s throat. Blood spattered upward, cutting off her view. The last thing she saw was the mirror-Bone choking to death, having gorged too greedily. Red covered the ice.

“Bone? Imago?” She tore her gaze away. Her real love watched the mist behind them.

“We’ve company,” he said.

She looked and this time saw many tiny dark silhouettes.

“They,” she managed to say, “are not our only worry. Our own reflections haunt us.”

“That is true,” her own voice answered from the north.

* * * *

They turned and beheld themselves.

Like a drawn curtain, the mist cleared to an extent of about five paces. On the far side of that clearing stood the mirror-Gaunt and the mirror-Bone—no longer trapped within the ice but standing atop it. Gaunt spied a bit of glint about the duplicates, a slightly blue complexion to each. The mirror-Gaunt’s throat was whole, and the mirror-Bone’s lips unblooded. But the ice beneath was sanguine as a royal carpet.

“I am annoyed,” said the true Imago Bone. “I own little save my uniqueness. I put a high value on it.”

“As I do mine,” said his duplicate. The voice sounded alike, if more frosty.

“What are you,” demanded Gaunt, “truly? Do not hide behind mists and reflections. What Being commands you?”

“We are,” said the mirror-Gaunt, “what will make you not. When things encounter their opposites, are not both negated?”

“Why make us not,” Bone asked, “when we all could simply live?” He waved his hand grandly. “Let us divide the world. You may have everything north of here.”

“You have limited understanding,” said the mirror-Bone. “Not is a condition superior to life. It is purer. No hurt. No shame. No fear.” It reached into its pack and pulled forth a duplicate of Mashed Rags Bound in Dead Cow.

“No chance,” said Bone. He snatched out the true tome.

Something in the reflections’ cool voices, however, warned Gaunt. On instinct she lunged and grasped the true book, preventing Bone from opening it.

Wordlessly, Bone nodded. He still trusted her, even if she couldn’t fully trust him.

Slowly, using the corners of their eyes, they looked up at their counterparts.

Their reflections’ book was still closed.

“So?” Gaunt demanded. “Open it.”

“Open yours,” goaded mirror-Bone.

“No chance,” Bone said, and stashed the tome away. And now Gaunt was certain that opening their own book would have reflected the curse back upon them. She suspected their pointless deaths would have resembled the bloody scene she’d witnessed in the ice.

“You can’t,” Bone said, “can you? The book is a power beyond your own, or you’d have struck us down. Do I have the pleasure of addressing the power behind the Stones?”

“I am that power,” said the mirror-Bone and the mirror-Gaunt in unison. “The God Who Is Not.”

“If it is a pleasure,” added the mirror-Gaunt coolly, “that is your affair.”

“Oblivion awaits you here,” said the mirror-Bone.

“Oblivion pursues,” Gaunt observed. “And we have an errand.”

“You must not proceed,” said the mirror-Bone.

“Why is that?”

“Your errand,” said the mirror-Gaunt, “will destroy me.”

Gaunt shared another look with Bone. The thief said, “In all candor, that possibility had not occurred to us. You are vulnerable to the book?”

“The book destroys creatures of mortal consciousness,” said the mirror-Bone bleakly, “and I am not a god.”

“But you just said—” Bone began.

“I am The God Who Is Not,” interrupted mirror-Gaunt. “Therefore I am not a god. But were I a god, I would be the god of not.”

Bone made a helpless gesture at Gaunt.

Gaunt said, “Your metaphysics are your own business. But know this: a wizard informed us the book will end the whole world, given time.”

“He spoke truly,” said mirror-Gaunt. “Yet to perish alongside the Earth would be mere oblivion. It is preferable to my destiny should the book pass beyond the ice, and encounter me directly.”

“How can the book destroy what is not?” Gaunt wondered aloud.

Both icy doppelgngers stared. Then they leaned back simultaneously and laughed. Their mirth was like the groaning and creaking and shattering of ice. The sound filled the cold expanse.

Howls and hoots rose from behind, in answer. The Stonekin knew where to find their prey.

Bone grimaced, raised his pickaxe, and with merciless precision hacked the doppelgngers into fragments.

As they came to pieces the duplicates lost the pink of their flesh, the brown of their furs, and became simply pieces of ice. The surface beneath, however, remained blood-red.

“They might have said more,” Gaunt said.

“I hate the ranting of cosmic forces,” Bone said.

Gaunt looked behind them. She had the impression the shadows were running. “We’re out of time.”

Bone nodded, as if he expected no better. “How much farther, do you think?”

“According to the sources, we should encounter places where the stars shine up through the ice. But we’ve found none.” If possible, she felt even colder as she spoke. She looked toward the Rim, into a wall of mist.

She looked over her shoulder at the charging shadows.

Last she looked down at the field of blood.

“May I play a hunch?”

“You’re welcome to play a harp at this point.”

She brought her axe down upon the red ice. Bone shrugged and joined her. They hacked again and again.

The crimson cleared.

All around the little white quarry they’d created there lay a field of dimly shining stars, glinting beneath ten or so inches of ice.

“It was no coincidence the entity attacked us here,” Gaunt said. “It meant to distract us.”

Bone snatched the book and dropped it beside him. “Let’s assume good luck.”

“You realize, good luck could kill us just as sure as bad.”

He grinned, something of his old self awakening. “We are thieves. Even a prolonged thieving life is a stolen, golden moment, flickering like torchlight. If it gutters out here, so be it.”

“Speak for yourself. I’m a poet. I will live forever.”

And so they attacked the ice as if it—after all the night angels and sorcerers, all the sentient bees and embodied sorrows—was the last fell creature they must fight together. And perhaps it was literally true: for the ice trembled like the skin of a living thing, and cracks formed around their feet. And as it tore and screeched, it found a voice.

I was the oblivion at World’s Rim, and all was empty and good. Then the icy mirror formed above this span. I stared upward and saw myself staring downward. I, the abyss, gazed into myself. 

“Keep going!” Gaunt shouted, as Bone wavered.

The cracks widened all around them. It seemed to Gaunt that the three largest fissures beside her offered glimpses into other times and places, past, present, and future. As she hacked she beheld ancient sorcerers of Swanisle sacrificing humans atop megaliths, and old Empress Nayne of the Eldshore slicing down foes. She saw kleptomancers of Palmary and outcasts of Serpenttooth plotting in the present. She saw strange armies of the future warring with weapons that leveled mountains, their banners celebrating faiths and ideologies and creeds incomprehensible; yet somehow Gaunt understood all these forces, whatever their differences, served the cause of not.

(Once she saw a boy with her hair and Bone’s eyes, laughing in silk robes upon a litter, barking commands to cowled men with serrated shining swords. She flinched away from that last vision.)

They kept hacking. But Bone was slow, distracted.

I grew aware. I was a god, yet not a god. I am the God Who Is Not. When you think of the bleakness at the top of the world, you think of me. When cold thoughts lick your skull, when your eyes meet the blankness at the edge of everything, you’re touched by me. When you devour what you love, you partake of me. 

Between axe-strokes, Gaunt heard the roars of the Stonekin.

Do not cast your book into me! It will destroy me. And to destroy a Not is to make a Something. I do not wish to be Something! I do not know what that will be! I am afraid. You should be as well! 

“We are!” shouted Gaunt.

“Gaunt,” screamed Bone. “I cannot.... “And terrible hunger in his face, he lunged at her.

She had one instant to choose: strike at him, or strike at the ice.

She chose the ice.

She broke through.

* * * *

An inky gap appeared in the white, and a vortex was born, sucking the air above down into the void.

Now Bone was upon her. He tore away her axe, and her glove came with it. He tossed both aside, and she heard a clatter and hum as the axe skittered within the pit, spun by the whirlwind.

She stared into his eyes. “It’s done!” she cried. “It’s done. Fight it!” She raised her hands.

He lifted his own axe, shuddering. His eyes locked on her right hand. Its palm was swollen and dark.

He brought his axe down upon the ice.

“Hold onto me,” he said.

The wind tore at them, tugging them toward the hole. But for now the axe blade held.

The book, free upon the ice, slithered toward the gap, shot upward. It billowed open, swirling within the vortex, revealing the spidery dark flourishes of its text.

But poet and thief had already pressed their faces to the ice. They heard cries and gurgles as their pursuit arrived. They heard horrible tearing sounds and spattering impacts. And the wind howled louder.

There came a dull series of thumps, and the wind’s groaning grew dim.

Slowly Gaunt looked up.

She and Bone lay at the margin of a pile of fur-clad corpses. The bodies of the Stonekin had temporarily plugged the gap. At the top lay the headman of Stonemouth, his crystal tooth glinting red. Bone’s lost pickaxe, its blades scarlet, rose from the headman’s chest.

Of Mashed Rags Bound in Dead Cow there was no sign.

Gaunt touched Bone’s shoulder.

“Time to run?” he mumbled into the ice.

“Yes,” she said. “Time to run.”

In fact they couldn’t quite, but scampered and slid as the sun faded from sight and the clouds shone with nacreous moonlight.

A groan rose behind, expanding into the sound of shattering ice.

Somehow they reached the bridge to land. They scampered like lunatics beneath the hidden moon, every bit of ice between them and Penultima Thule an affront to their sanity.

Once they passed an ice-ridge with a fang-filled mouth. As they struggled by, the mouth hissed and spat and crumbled. Its icicle fangs scattered across their path in a writhing, serpentine pattern. The remnants tinkled underfoot.

Now Boom came a sound like a bloated thunderstorm, and boulder-sized ice fragments fell from the sky. Water surged behind them and the bridge fragmented.

Soon they crouched upon an ice island no larger than Krumwheezle’s sitting room, screaming. The waves shoved them south.

* * * *

When they recovered their wits, they stumbled like toddlers onto a muddy shoreline. Behind them sounded a roar like a thousand flooding rivers.

At that moment, however, a strange glow caressed the land. In the eerie light they beheld the bay rushing into the void, until finally all that remained was a thin ribbon of moonlit water within a muddy canyon. Beyond, where the ultimate ice had reigned, the convulsion had shredded the clouds, and bright stars flanked a ridge of crazily jagged hills. Volcanic flame spouted at intervals.

But something drew their eyes from the hellish scene.

Rising through the dark above the Rim was a serpentine shape woven of light. It shimmered eerie pinks and greens and yellows and purples. It looked as tall as a mountain range, thin as a wedding veil. Stars flickered through its form. It coiled through the northern sky with the manner of a lazy tiger, then launched itself to zenith like a gazelle escaping doom. It was like a river, like an emperor’s robe, like a child’s breath.

“What is that,” Bone murmured.

“That is Something,” said Gaunt.

The Something in the sky appeared to notice them. A thrill of fear ran from the crown of Gaunt’s skull to her smallest toes. And she thought, If I die, at least I saw this.

The thing in the sky, with an air of humor, twitched a little at one rosy fringe.

An object spun down from the heavens, and landed with a splat in the mud. It was the savaged cover of a book. It sheltered only tatters of parchment. Down it tumbled, into the lake that marked the grave of Ultima Thule.

“The book couldn’t endure,” Gaunt guessed. “It was a disease of meaninglessness. And now, despite itself, it’s caused Something to be.” She beheld her right hand, and the dark swelling was gone. There remained only a thin cut, like a new lifeline. “The curse is bankrupt,” she said.

“Go!” Bone called to the lights in the northern sky. “Enjoy your existence! Do Something. We’ll do likewise.”

The Something did not respond, but gradually undulated its way to the east, lighting unknown mountains before sliding from view.

“What will we do, Bone?” Gaunt asked, looking after it.

“Hard to predict. But I believe it involves going south.”

They climbed the coastal slope, away from ultimate things. They found the gallery of Hungry Stones. Each boulder was now a pile of rubble, and the quartz teeth of the former maws lay in sinuous trails as if in imitation of the Something. Bone paused among the remains and looked a long while at the sky, where the new being had come and gone.

“There’s no hunger,” he said. “Only wonder.”

“I’m glad of that,” Gaunt said. She added, “The sentiment is not wholly selfless.”

“I’m sure I’ll be ravenous in time.” He stooped to gather a dusting of quartz, then brushed his hands clean. “But it will be ordinary hunger. I will not dream of devouring all. And neither, I think, will the Something.”

He rose, studied her face, said finally, “I saw a child.”

“I too,” she said.

“It was ours. Perhaps I am transformed as well. Perhaps we can....”

“Yes,” she said, exhilaration and fear so close within her as to become the same thing. “But Bone ... he was cold and cruel, like the God Who Was Not.”

He turned to her. “He? But it was a girl. She rode a horse, unladylike, grinning at the ocean. She was like the new thing in the sky.”

She let go a long breath. “They could both be our future.”

“Or neither,” Bone said. “I could still be cursed. Or we could have a different child. Or none.”

“And is that what you wish, Bone? No child?”

He smiled, shook his head. “I’ve blinked into the abyss. I’ve seen Not become Something. I want the future, Persimmon Gaunt. And I hope the future has your eyes.”

And that is how the Aurora came to be, my child.

And that, in a sense, is how you came to be as well.