“It’s been four months,” said Medric.

“Thousands of nights!”

“A hundred. A hundred and twenty, maybe. It’s Long Night now. A few hours before sunrise. I lay down under Karis’s red coat, because I thought it might help me to find you. Karis made me sleep. I suppose she’s still beside me now.”

“Gods!” Zanja’s dropped teacup uttered a musical ring against the clapper of a sharp stone. She pressed her hands to her chest, but the pain there did not ease. “My agonies should be ended! I should have earned some peace!”

She jerked sharply away from Medric’s uplifted hand.

Instead of touching her, he picked up the fallen teacup. “What does it take to break these things? After so many journeys and so many battles, the box is a wreck, but the cups and the pot, not a single chip.”

She took the teacup from him, and examined it. “I can no longer read this symbol. Your comments are obscure.”

“Obscure? Nothing is obscure to you.” He blinked at her. “The storyteller has your insight, is that it? And so you can’t see the pattern.”

“What pattern?” she said desperately. “Is there one? What is this place? Why am I not dead?”

“I see that you are suspended between life and death, and can’t get to either state.”

Unsurprised, she said, “Forever?”

“When your body finally dies, I suppose you’ll be set free. But it may seem like forever to you.”

“But you severed my soul from the flesh!”

“I’m afraid Norina subverted our logic with her own. She thought she’d make a way to get you back. But you know air logic, cruel even at its most merciful.”

Zanja said, bitterly, “I cannot even curse her!”

A long time they sat together. The sun, usually so quick to pop up from the horizon, was slow to rise. At last Zanja said, “I demand that Norina right her wrong.”

Looking miserable, Medric dried out his teacup on the tail of his shirt.

“Medric!”

“You mean that you want her to finally kill you.” He put the lit‘ tie cup into its spot in the box. “I’ll tell her. I never thought I’d be killing you twice.”

He took off his spectacles to wipe his eyes. It was terrible to see such a merry man so sad.

“I wish you would leave,” she said. “And take your heartache with you.”

“Would you like to have this? It’s my book, the one we printed on the old librarian’s press.”

She accepted the oddly made book he had taken from his pocket. It had a child’s gluey fingerprint on the cover.

“Will you also take this coat?”

Now that the light was finally rising, she recognized the vivid red of the coat he wore. “No!”

“But this is a cold place.”

She had not known it was cold until he said so. Shivering, she said, “I need to be cold. Please go!”

He got to his feet, and walked away, into the blaze of the rising sun. He did not look back. She did not call out to him. It was a relief when he had gone.

They had gathered around Medric while he dreamed, a collection of weary travelers sharing blankets and using each other as pillows in the airy attic of a building never meant for winter habitation. Garland dozed, awoke shivering, pressed himself against the nearest body for warmth, and slept again. When voices woke him, some faint light had begun to filter in, and a distant window floated in the black, framing a couple of fading stars. Downstairs, the Long Night candle would soon be extinguished. The first day of the first year of Karis G’deon would soon dawn.

Karis still sat beside Medric with one knee drawn up and his hand clasped in hers. But he was mumbling irritably, and Emil stood over him, hauling him to a sitting position.

“It’s no good,” said Medric.

“You couldn’t find her?” Emil said.

“She’s dead?” Karis said.

Medric said. “It would be better if she were dead. Norina–”

“I’m awake,” she said.

Garland was quite startled to realize that the body he clasped so tightly was the Truthken’s.

She said, “Well, what?”

“We have to kill her again. Her body, this time.”

“We? You mean me.” Norina tucked the blankets back around Garland and J’han as she got up. “In your opinion, Medric, would killing the storyteller be a just and merciful act?”

“Zanja demands that you right your wrong. It seems a demand both for justice and for mercy.”

“She asks this out of anger? Out of despair?”

“Oh, she’s angry. But your interference trapped her in a dreadful place, a between place, a nothing place. We can’t just leave her there.”

Norina asked, with that inhuman coldness of hers, “What if the storyteller would rather live?”

There was a silence. Emil said, “I think Zanja’s desires take precedence. But you might gain the storyteller’s acquiescence when the time comes.”

“Yes, you can probably do that,” said Medric. “If she’s the one with the insight, she’ll understand.”

Norina settled on her heels. Garland realized she was looking at Karis.

Karis spoke in a voice that had shredded to a whisper. “What do you want me to say?”

“That you won’t interfere.”

Karis was silent.

But as though Karis had spoken, Norina said, “You must consider this further. If I am forced to act without your consent, it will be the end of our friendship. And I feel that I have no choice in this.”

I know,“ Karis said. ”Leave me alone.“

Sighing, Emil said to Medric, “Did your dream yield only bad news?”

“Zanja is trapped in a single empty moment. It is impossible for her to have any understanding that might be of use to us.”

The light was rising. Garland could almost see the expression on Emil’s face, as it changed from pained to startled. “Then we re asking the wrong one,” he said. “We need to ask the storyteller.”

Part 5

How T ortoise Woman Saved The World

Tortoise Woman’s son had married some farmers to the north, and one day she decided to visit him. It was a bright, warm day, and she hummed to herself as she walked. Normally, she was a grumpy, solitary person, but on days like this even she could be in a good mood. When she stepped across a crack in the earth, thin as a grass stem, she hardly noticed it.

Returning home, though, she stopped at the crack, which was as wide as a finger now. She had seen cracks like this before, in flood plains after the water had receded, but this soil was sandy and it had not been that long since the last rain. She put her eye to the crack. It seemed to have no bottom, and the darkness was very dark indeed. But she stepped over the crack, and continued home.

The next time she walked that path, the summer was over and frost sparkled on the shadow side of the stones. When she came to the crack, it was wide as a hand, and even as she watched, she saw a rock teeter into it and disappear in the darkness. “I wonder how long this crack is,” she said to herself, and walked along the crack in one direction and then in another. It seemed to go on forever. But she stepped over the crack and went on to her son’s house.

“Has anyone noticed that big crack in the path?” she asked her son and his family. No one had.

When she returned home, the crack had gotten much wider. She measured it with her walking stick, and then sat down beside the path to take a nap. When she awoke, she measured it again, and although it had not gotten much wider in so little time, it was certainly wider.

She went home and said to her own family, “I am afraid the earth is splitting in half.”

“You are being ridiculous,” they said.

The fall mud came, and then the killing frost. One day, Tortoise Woman told her family that she was going to visit her son one more time before the snow began to fall, but it was a lie. The crack that would soon separate the world had gotten much wider.

“Perhaps the two pieces of the world might be pulled back together,” she said to herself. “But if I wait until spring and bring all the people I know to see this problem, and get them to use cables and horses to pull the pieces together–by then it might be too late; it might be impossible to get from one side to the other.”