Coldmaker(65)

I suddenly hit the surface below, waves parting gently. Saltiness splashed into my mouth, and I knew this river. I let my hands glide over the surface, recognizing the waters; they’d poured out of my eyes and a hundred thousand others, and I could feel the current of tears beneath me churning. Instead of drowning, though, I was dragged forward, riding the cool black bubbles of memory into unending shadow. It was a strange realization when I discovered that there was no pain any more. I’d left pain far away, back in the world.

The river was wide, but its flow was gentle, and I let my head tilt slowly back as I watched the light being sucked into the distant split in the sky above. I was thirsty so I cupped a bit of the water into my mouth, and I tasted things of the past. Like the time I’d tinkered that little catapult for Matty to shoot pebbles against the barracks’ wall. And when Abb showed me the loose panel in his quarters.

Suddenly I realized that these tears had Cold in them. Not like the Draft in the bucket of Cold, but enough to make me curious. Were the glimmering beads raining into the river behind me, or into the dark cavern which I was being swept towards? Was the cool feeling blooming or fading, or eternal?

I knew I was coming to the place where the river ended. I was aware the current would plunge to somewhere different, somewhere I wasn’t quite prepared to go. I drank more of the waters, hoping that I might be able to carry some of the memories with me, and my head flooded with gentle visions of Mother Bev trying to free tangles in her daughter’s hair with the combs I kept having to make her, and the most evocative answers of ‘whatsit’ that Moussa concocted, and the time Jardin kissed me on the cheek when I first lent her a crank-fan.

Shilah and Cam were there, but most of all I felt my memories of Abb trickle into my heart, and spread out with a deep sense of comfort. I could feel his powerful hands at my back as he sewed together a deep gash, and the time he’d accidentally triggered my Colour Wheel, laughing together until our throats burned as we tried to scrub the dyes off his face.

The current speeded up, and some instinct in me knew I was closing in on the edge.

The end.

I didn’t feel the need to panic. I’d left that above too. The river felt as natural as breathing. The tears were calm and cool, and mostly I just wondered what Matty had been thinking as he rode these waters not so long ago. I hoped he’d thought of me kindly as the precipice came closer.

The current increased to impossible speeds, rocking up and down, and I felt my body surge into open air. Tumbling through emptiness. I didn’t feel dizzy, or upset, or even properly sad. Life undressed itself from my shoulders, and my dreams of things left un-invented gently strained through the tiny holes in my mind, and my essence dissolved into the beautiful black nothing.

And then peace.

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‘Where are you?’

The words came from everywhere at once.

It had been an eternity since I’d had to communicate, so I closed my soul again and rested.

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‘Where are you?’

A pinpoint of golden light burst into the dark. The spot was tiny, but against the black it was everything.

It came closer, not in a straight line, but as if blindly searching for me. I tried to curl back into the darkness, like a pinch of sand tucking itself back into the bottom of a dune, but the light continued its annoying search, hurting what were once my eyes.

‘Where are you?’ the light asked. ‘I can’t see you. They put it in the ground.’

I remembered someone who used to say something along those lines, but I didn’t care enough to throw off the blanket, and I pulled death more tightly around my body, tucking in the edges.

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‘Please,’ the voice said after another hundred lifetimes. ‘It’s not supposed to be this way. I’m sorry. I’ve been ready for so long.’

I sighed, peeking out and trying not to wince against the harsh light.

‘How?’ I asked. ‘How can I help you, so you might leave me alone?’

‘The whole thing is a lie,’ it said.

‘Well, who was the one who told it?’ I asked, annoyed, pushing myself back under.

Silence.

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‘You’re a Jadan,’ the light said. ‘I need a Jadan.’

‘Yes. I was a Jadan.’ My voice sounded odd, muffled through eternity.

‘I’ve been waiting so long. I suffer too, you know. Where are you? They put something in the ground.’

‘What did they put in the ground?’ I asked with a sigh.

‘I don’t know,’ it said. ‘The end?’

I shook what was once my head.

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‘Where are you?’

It was interesting to smile again after so long, but the movement didn’t come back easily. ‘You’re not going to let me rest, are you?’ I asked.