Several million years before, a vast and shallow stinking green algae sea had spread over what were now the midlands of continental Kath. As tectonic plates shifted and meteor strikes choked the sky with ash and spelled the end for the last masters of the planet, those seas died and dried to leave scoured sunbaked soil, what was left of a world once you peeled away the soft.
Lifeless? No, though human travelers down the centuries called it that, the barren landscape a common subject of letters and journals and slapdash adventure tales featuring heroes whose parents, the reader was meant to believe, thought names like “Bat” and “Flash” were practical choices for a young person trying to make their way in the world. A vast and trackless territory. Unforgiving. Maybe it made them feel better to see this bare and blasted land, and think surely nothing can live here, rather than, what’s possible here is a form of life that’s not like mine. Snakelings nested in some reaches of the Badlands, and the great hive cities of scorpionkind spread in caverns far below. Rocks spoke and dreamed. Lizards skittered up dunes and down. Buzzards circled. What thrived grew small, or kept to shadows and tunnels, shied from the sun and courted the moon. They’d been the Badlands for as long as human memory, in many cultures and tongues: the Forbidden Place, the Place That Is Not Ours, the Place That Is Not Dead.
And then the God Wars came. A hundred fifty years ago, far across an ocean in the Northern Gleb, a group of scholar-theologians cracked the secrets of the Craft, of the power of the gods, and seized the reins of the world themselves. Gods fought back—some to save their place, some against the devastation those first Craftsmen and Craftswomen wrought, some for joy of battle, some because they felt a change in the wind and knew no other way to meet it. The Wars came, plural in grammar as they were plural in their theaters and combatants and battlefields, fought in so many ways in so many lands as alliances and social realities shifted. They lasted a century. A few brief stretches of not-quite-global peace broke out (though someone was always killing someone somewhere) while all the many sides circled like stags whose antlers just kept growing. But always the carnage began again. The Wars were polymorphously perverse. They infiltrated history from the root. To think you stood outside them was to stand at their heart. And for a very long time northern Kath had thought it stood outside.
But one day Kath realized the Wars were already here. By the time they turned hot each side held weapons honed by decades of conflict, weapons subtle and fierce beyond imagining.
Kathic gods—the big, old ones, the Quechal and the transformed immigrant Glebland pantheons of Alt Selene and the grizzly combines of the city called Shikaw or Chikal depending on who you asked—those gods met the Craft in the Badlands.
And the world broke. But the Badlands endured, transformed.
Tara sought Connor in the glass canyons. He’d come this way, said the sole guard on the wall above the open gate, a thick-necked man who Tara recognized with some shock had been two years her junior in her parents’ school—what was his name? He said Connor had walked west from the wall, eyes downcast, and brought water with him. Tara hated the wall, but she had to admit it helped in this one way: standing on top of it she could see for miles and miles. But she could not see Connor. Which meant he was hiding in the canyons. So she went there.
Faces lingered in the glass walls. Ghost eyes watched her pass, and melted whorls formed screaming mouths, like in that Skaldic painting everyone had a print of on their dorm wall back at the Schools. As she walked on, those faces faded, only for others to take their place. No great Craft had been worked here—the true battles had been fought deep within the Badlands at the Crack in the World—but unreality seeped out from the wounds that conflict made, and left scars. Sunlight broke into rainbows in the glass depths, and shadows moved within.
She thought the shadows were illusions. The faces, though—the Crack in the World was a gateway to other realms, other histories. Perhaps beings from those alien worlds peered into hers through scrying glass. They might be God Wars dead, holograms caught in the glass like a bomb might sear a shadow on a wall. Or they might be echoes of the future.
Gravel ground beneath the thin soles of her shoes, and the noise echoed. Glass walls circumscribed the sky. It looked bluer through the narrow gap, a trick of the light. From this angle she could not see the spot where the glass stopped and the sky began. She might have been wandering in a cave, a tunnel, beneath a blue-painted dome.
If she had not been a Craftswoman she would have lost herself in the canyon maze, seeking him. She closed her eyes and let his soul’s light guide her. She ignored the little darting selves of bugs and snakes, the background witchlight of the glass. Connor’s soul was a tight-wound net, and after two dead ends she found him.
The glass walls were cracked here, and splinters tall as Tara sank into the scored dirt. Splashes of black spoiled the rainbow diffraction: curse that sunk into the glass and died there. Rocks were broken and burned. A dead bush in a boulder’s lee dripped black icicles of curse, dormant without any life to reach for. Tara’s passage drew them like a magnet. She knelt beside the bush, burned the curse to ash, and drifted on.
The canyon widened. There had been a battle here. There was only cathedral silence now. Connor sat on a rock that rose from the crushed glass. He still wore his funeral suit. So did she. Tara picked her way toward the rock. She slipped, set out a hand to stop her fall and almost cut herself on a sharp edge.
“There’s a clear path to your left,” he said.
“Thank you.”
Connor did not seem surprised she was there. She had not spoken to announce herself, but she had not been sneaking up on him either. Not that she could have if she tried. He hunted. Once she’d seen him creep toward a drinking doe, moving through dry brush like a breeze, just to set his hand on her flank. She’d wanted to eat him when she saw that: to swallow him and take into her this thing he’d done that she could not, the joy of this power to pass unnoticed and to touch. She settled for asking how the fur felt, and he said, “Rough.”
On the way to the rock she knocked over a tall pane of glass. It shattered, and the echoes were still settling as she climbed the rock and sat beside him. He shifted to make room.
“I was afraid you’d run. I couldn’t catch you in these shoes.”
The rainbows in the walls cast strange shades on his skin; he did a thing with his mouth that looked like a smile. There were gulches and ravines inside him, places in his heart that he’d scouted for the same reasons he had learned the twists and turns of these canyons as a child. No matter how well he thought he knew the maze he could still lose himself inside. He had a different kind of beauty when he retreated there: the beauty of a closed box or a labyrinth wall. “You could have witched me back. Stopped my legs, or frozen me in place.”
Serious, or teasing? A bit of both, she decided, and let him run with it. “I find that’s a bad way to start a conversation.” She picked up a piece of gravel, and bounced it in her palm. “‘Witch’ is pejorative, you know. You’ll hurt my feelings.”
“I know what ‘pejorative’ means. And I don’t think I could ever hurt your feelings.”
“You might be surprised.”
“What should I call … what you are … instead?”
“Just call me Tara.”
He came out of his maze at that, and she saw the other him: unguarded, wondering, amused. “Where did you get that scar on your neck? The silver one?”
“I was fighting a god. Well. Gods.”
“Why?”
“A lot of reasons. My friends were in trouble. And I wanted to learn a secret.”
“What secret?”
She thought about the black folder, the crystal records inside, the click of clawed footsteps drawing nearer across the stars. “How the world would end.”
“Did you?”
She heard those footsteps in her nightmares. “I hope not.”
He laughed at that. “You know, you haven’t changed after all.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’d always talk about the weirdest stuff back when we were kids, and act like it was normal, like of course everyone would know what you were talking about. Sometimes your head would be here in Edgemont, sometimes a thousand miles that way, and you never seemed to know the difference.”
A thousand miles that way was nowhere special, but she didn’t push the point. It felt good to sit here beside him and not argue. “The weirdest stuff? Like what?”
“Like, I don’t know, the time Emperor Whoever the Sixth invaded Agdel Lex in the year Nine Eagle, or how some poem was really about Maestre Schatten’s three theories on the under-conscious or, like, geometry.”
“It would have been Emperor Whoever the Second. Later Telomeri dynasties didn’t last long enough to hit sixes and sevens, because the emperors were more or less immortal.”
“See?”
“And they called it Alikand back then.”
“Does it matter?”
She had to laugh at that. “Yes.” She threw her stone, and it bounced off a large piece of curse-stained glass.
“The glass is sturdier than it looks,” he said. “Works better if you hit it near the edge.” His throw took a chip off. It sparked as it fell.
“You spend a lot of time out here.”
“Grandpa taught me. He came out this way for thinking, and hunting. Music. When I was a kid I started to follow him. Dad wasn’t much for it, he always said there was work I should be doing. Which I guess was how the old man taught him. But after Grandpa died, when Dad would get to shouting, the more he’d shout the more I’d come here—for days at a time when I could.” He took some silence for himself. She feared he might collapse back into that maze. “I’ve been small today. Thinking only of myself. Of my feelings.”
“You? Selfish?” Laughing wouldn’t fix the situation. “That sounds more like your dad. And me, for provoking him. I’m sorry. You came here to be alone. I don’t read other people’s signals well.”
“How are you?”
The question stopped her, because she wasn’t used to answering it honestly. “Pissed. Confused. Sad. Then angry again. At Pa, at Ma, at myself, at the whole town for the way they looked at me graveside like I was about to spit lightning or grow wings. At your father. He didn’t have any right to say what he said. This is a mess and we’re all upset. But I don’t blame you.”
“You should.” He rolled on before she could find words to disagree: “When the raids got worse and Dad started talking about how we all had to serve the town together, I thought maybe I could use what I knew. Prove myself. I talked it over with your pa. How if we had to run, we could escape through the canyons, or we could put sentries out here, or traps, in case the Raiders tried to sneak up on us this way. So I scouted the maze, and the tunnels that lead from it.”
“And one day the Raiders came.” She didn’t want to hear the story, but she could not bring herself to stop him.
“The Seer was with them, eight feet tall with eyes like pits. I ran as fast as I could, but they were faster. Your pa saved me. I told him to run, there were so many. He wouldn’t let me pull him back. He told me to go, get help, I listened. He had to stand.” He drew a ragged breath. “I never saw a man fight like that. When I found my dad coming down the canyon with the others—I told him where to go, and how to get there, but before he went he looked at me like he’d seen some hole where my heart ought to be.”
She hugged him. You didn’t have weapons, was what she later thought she should have said. The Raiders are full of curses and viciousness, and this Seer is not the kind of thing you face head on, unarmed. If you’d stayed, there would have been two funerals in Edgemont—and they wouldn’t have waited on me for yours.
Pa should have run with you. Maybe he would have, if he hadn’t fled a bigger war when he was a younger man, if he hadn’t felt he’d worn out his lifetime’s supply of running. Baker and DuChamp were dead and his best friend had cried through the town for strong men to stand and defend their homes. And I left him there with something to prove and a need, a duty, to protect someone he still thought of as a child. “It’s okay” were pitiful words. It wasn’t. But she pulled him against her and felt the warmth of his body and his cheek against hers. She trusted that warmth over the voices in her head.
“He was a good man,” he said into her shoulder. “He saved my life. But I can’t stop running away.”
Tara thought about the black folder, about her father, about the Seer. “He didn’t want to worry you,” Ma had said. As if she were still a child he could save. Connor couldn’t have fought the Raiders, but Tara? If she hadn’t been half a continent away, fretting about spiders beyond the stars, about the death of gods and the end of the world, about all those big and terrible things that were her responsibility, and yet did not seem to matter in the way that spade of dirt she’d thrown on her father’s coffin mattered … If she had not been so far away, she could have made a difference. If she’d cared for these people, for her people, like she claimed to care for the world.
If Connor called himself a coward, what was she? She held him in the maze of glass, and he held her, and for all her emperors and geometry she could not say.