The Memory

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Jaco nodded. ‘Yes. It is.’

‘What will you call her?’ Teel asked.

Jaco looked down at the baby.

‘Strange,’ he whispered. ‘When I look at these eyes, sometimes I think I see the slightest hint of purple.’

Teel chuckled. ‘That’s love, playing tricks on you, sir. Makes you see funny things.’

Jaco’s head snapped up. ‘Love?’ He looked down at the baby once more. ‘She looks like one of us, doesn’t she? A Paprissi.’

‘Yes, sir. Pale skinned, my lord. A little Paprissi lady already, just by another name.’

Jaco smiled. ‘She looks like my own grandmother. So there we are – that’s what I’ll name her.’

‘Grandmother?’

Jaco laughed. ‘No.’ He touched the baby’s nose. ‘Katrina.’

CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_49172451-f40c-5f35-b7b2-05938755bbd5)

Welcome.

The word was scrawled into the wall in white chalk, high above Aranfal’s head. He was alone. A narrow passageway stretched before him, formed of black stone and filled with a pale light.

He had been walking this same corridor now for hours, alone with his thoughts. He felt no tiredness, no hunger, no thirst. He was just a walking, thinking machine, mired in the past, and the present, and the game.

He began to walk again. But the wall was not finished with him, and another word waited up ahead.

To.

He studied it for a moment. Welcome To. So I am collecting words.

The next words came sooner than the others.

The Hallway of Regret.

He gave a sharp nod. Welcome to the Hallway of Regret. I have a sentence now. That’s progress, isn’t it?

There was a noise behind, a kind of creak. He turned, to find a door had opened in the wall. A golden light came from within, so bright it forced him to shield his eyes with an arm.He considered walking in another direction, back the way he had come or further down the corridor. But he knew there was only one way to go, now. The Underland would always take him there, whether he wanted to go or not.

The light was blinding, forcing his eyes closed. He had a curious sensation of floating. There was a sense of nothingness here, carrying him along with it. After a while the intensity of the light began to weaken, though he could still make out very little. He became gradually aware of a presence: he could feel it, rather than see it.

‘I can’t see anything.’

The light dimmed again, and the Watcher could finally fully open his eyes. He was in a vast hall, cut into the shape of a rough circle. All around were doors, carved into the walls in line after line, formed of all kinds of colours and materials. The room itself was empty, save for one, solitary figure.

The creature before him had the rough outline of a human, though human it was not. It was tall and thin, dressed in a blue gown that hung open to expose its birdlike chest. Thin fingers sprouted from webbed hands that sat at the end of elongated arms. Its red mouth was split open by a coruscating smile, sitting under a nose that was unusually normal on that strange face. It was completely bald, though this was not the baldness of a shaved head, or of one whose hair had fallen out: the skin had a strange quality, milk soft and satin supple, like that of a newborn baby. The creature had no eyes: just a smooth patch of skin where they should have been.

‘Time drifts, and time is still,’ it said. Its voice was familiar to Aranfal, yet he could not place it. It had a strange tone, as if it was not the voice of one being at all, but of many, somehow squeezed together into a single stream.

‘Memory is strong, and memory is weak,’ it said.

It did not appear to notice him, but to exist in a kind of suspended reality of its own.

‘Who are you?’ Aranfal asked.

‘There was once a mother, who was herself a daughter, and a mother of mothers for evermore.’

‘I don’t understand.’

He walked around the creature, unsure of what to do. It remained perfectly still as he made a circuit of its ugly form.

‘In the outside, there is a door. In the inside, there is a tree.’

His mind turned to the woman he had encountered when he first came to the Old Place. She talked in much the same way as this thing. He wondered if this was that same creature, or some twisted relation. She had spoken sense, in the end, pointing him on the path to take. But how could he draw some sense from the mouth of this monster, which seemed more distant than even the woman in the well?

‘There is nothing but stars in the sea, there is nothing but droplets in the sky. The words of my fathers were unspoken, but my children sang in rhymes. When I found …’

‘Help me,’ Aranfal said. ‘Please.’

The creature ceased talking. It seemed to incline its head towards him, though he wondered if this was only a trick of his mind.

‘The floor is on the ceiling. The roof is in the ground.’

He had seen people like this, in cells of the See House, men and women who drifted away on the contours of their own ravings. Perhaps they were trying to escape reality; he could not blame them. But floating minds were no use to a Watcher. A Watcher needed answers.

Aranfal had a lot of tricks, to bring someone back to reality. One always worked best though, a tried and trusted manoeuvre for which he had become famous: hurt someone they loved, or threaten to do so. Well, that was not going to work here. There was nothing here that the creature loved.

It occurred to him, then, that perhaps there was something here that the creature cared about. He was here: a human, one who had been permitted to play in the great game and not yet been killed or thrown into some nightmarish pit of memory. Perhaps he was his own bargaining chip.

‘The night turns into more night, until day comes,’ the creature said. ‘But then, the night lasts longer than before.’

‘Being of the Old Place,’ Aranfal said. He did not know what else to call it, yet his words felt foolish. ‘You are far away from me. Come closer, so that we may talk. I know you have summoned me here: allow me to understand you.’

‘There is a world formed of green grass and blue ice. It is our own world, but it is upside down.’

‘If you do not drag yourself away from madness,’ Aranfal whispered, now standing directly before the beast, ‘I will kill myself. I will pick my eyes out and bleed to death. I will make a noose of my cloak, and hang myself. I will die, creature, I will die, and I will not be able to help you.’

The creature was silent.

‘I will die, and it will be your doing.’

And then all at once, the creature came to life: real life, engaged life.

‘Torturer,’ it whispered. A smile stretched across its unlined skin. ‘We were gone, weren’t we? We always go off on our journeys, floating away on the winds of memory. We cannot stop it.’

‘I have met someone like you before.’

The creature only smiled.

‘Who are you?’

‘We are a face of the Old Place. We are the children of humanity, and the parents of Operators and all the other beasts that have spawned from this place.’ It sighed. ‘We are glad we can talk to you, now, as people. But it is hard for us. That is why we need our children: they are focused. They are more like you. We are … we cannot think straight. Sometimes it lasts for millennia.’

It cocked its head to the side, as if noticing Aranfal’s expression for the first time: as if it could actually see.

‘It’s the eyes, isn’t it?’ The creature reached one of its spider hands up to its plum of a mouth and chuckled. ‘It’s always the eyes. We do not feel their absence. In fact, we pity those that have them.’

Aranfal glanced at his surroundings, to the doors that were all around. Some were slightly ajar, and light spilled out from the beyond.

‘Where am I?’

The creature frowned. ‘Didn’t you see the signs? Did we forget the signs?’ It seemed angry for a moment.

‘I saw,’ said Aranfal. ‘The Hallway of Regret.’

The creature grinned, and clapped its strange hands.

‘Indeed.’

‘What do you want?’

It giggled. ‘We will tell you about our eyes, torturer. We do not have eyes, because they are distracting. Do you understand? We do not want to see memories. Not ever. We simply want to feel them. The power in them is so much morethan something one can see. And when we feel them – oh, well, we can see them all anyway.’

It reached its hands up and placed them on either side of the Watcher’s head.

‘It is so nice to have you here, in your true flesh and bone. It gives your memories more flavour. A great circle – we feel new memories being born within you, memories of memories, and on and on it goes …’

The creature withdrew from Aranfal, and went suddenly still. ‘We are many. We are eyeless. The Eyeless One, you can call us.’

Aranfal nodded. He felt as though the Old Place was beginning to show itself to him: starting to reveal its weaknesses. It was a god: he could feel that in his bones. But this god was born of mortals. This god lived for human memory. This god was a parasite. It worshipped him, and all the rest of humanity.

There came a great rumble, emanating from somewhere far beneath them. The room shook, and a piece of the ceiling fell, landing with a crack on the floor.

‘Everything is changing,’ the Eyeless One said. ‘We all sit here, pretending to play a game, just like the others we have played for so many long years. But this one is not the same, Aranfal. How can it be, when we are subjected … yes, subjected … to that thing.’

Aranfal opened his mouth to speak again, but the creature held up one of its spider hands, palm facing forward. There was a new edge in its voice. ‘The world is in motion, Aranfal. Can’t you feel it?’

Aranfal nodded. ‘I felt that, yes. What was it?’

The creature seemed suddenly fearful. ‘Ruin is coming. We sit here, having a nice chat, and all the while, Ruin is coming. Ruin has grown so strong, now – stronger than us!’

‘Us? You mean the Old Place?’

The creature made a flurry of tuts. ‘Our children are such wonderful things.’ It clicked two bony fingers, and suddenly they were joined by a group of spectral beings, hallucinations from a fevered dream: Shirkra, Jandell, the Strategist, the Dust Queen, Squatstout, a boy and girl Aranfal did not know, but who he knew in his bones were Operators like the others. ‘We made them to help us, long ago, when we could not help ourselves. They are weapons: the power of memory, warped into creatures that can use it in such amazing ways.’ The creature let out a long, rattling sigh. ‘Among them all, one was the worst, and the best, all at the same time.’ A gesture from a spindly hand, and a new figure appeared. This one, however, was no more than a shadow: a black silhouette, standing at the creature’s side.

‘Who is that?’ Aranfal whispered. He looked around the room, and it seemed to him that the other Operators were cringing away from the shadow man.

‘Ruin,’ the Eyeless One said. ‘He has no host, as yet, though he has been searching …’

‘Ruin is an Operator,’ Aranfal said. He felt himself backing away from the shadow man.

The creature nodded. ‘Yes. And something has happened to him. Two of these children of ours – the lady of Dust and the Bleak Jandell – built something, in our heart, a little while ago. It is a terrible thing. They placed Ruin within, but they did not know what they were doing. They have made him stronger than he ever was before. He is now greater even than us: than the Old Place. That