The sand did not blow at Mura. She looked into the sky. ‘Yes. I feel it.’
Sarmin did not ask Mesema whether she was ready. She clenched her hands to keep them from trembling. ‘It is time,’ he said, ‘Let us begin.’
*
Duke Didryk walked behind Mage Mura. As he approached the Scar he felt a shedding, a falling-away of things he no longer required – grief, despair, fear – and the emptiness tingled along his skin. He could let it all go; he could fall into pieces, let Mogyrk pull him apart looking for Names and meanings and misunderstand it all. It would be a relief. But then he remembered himself and what he was here to accomplish. He shook off the temptation offered by the void and kept on, Yomawa’s wind blowing wildly through his hair.
A flower trembled into view, shaking into existence, its Names and parts winding together for the briefest moment, holding onto the lie that was the pattern – but the lie could not sustain it and it began to crumble. The truth and the lie together, Sarmin had told him when he handed him the butterfly-stone. Didryk held it together, let it see itself as a whole flower, reflecting his own vision of it, before he moved on, catching an entire tree in its instant of wholeness. His steps were slow and he held on to Mura’s robe to keep her from going too quickly. His fingers began to snap apart, flesh from bone, but he felt Farid’s hand on his shoulder, repairing the pattern that was Didryk. Mogyrk could not see him for the whole person he was; Mogyrk saw only skin, flesh, blood, bone; without the idea to bind them the separated symbols would drift into the chaos that was the Great Storm.
They walked in a line, Yomawa first, then Mura, then Didryk, followed by Farid and Adam, and the emperor and his wife. Time and distance warped and curved so that the duke did not know how far they walked or how long they had been there. He caught and made whole whatever he could – grass, leaves, birds, toads – though he was never sure if he made them what they had been or only what he could summon from broken shapes and twisted lines. It mattered only that they left the chaos and made themselves solid and real. He did not know how long he walked, with tiny steps pushing against Yomawa’s fierce wind, fixing all that he saw, but he did know the exhaustion that rose within him. Had it been a day? Two? Longer? Time had no meaning in the Storm.
*
When Didryk did not think he could take another step Mura said, ‘We are there.’ They had reached the centre of the Scar, where Mogyrk both died and did not die. Didryk stumbled to his knees at the foot of a large rock, one that before the death of Mogyrk and before the Scar would have offered shade and comfort to a traveller. It had always existed there, at the centre, unaffected by the flickering of the pattern. It was said only the most blessed and holy were allowed to approach the place of his god’s death; he, apostate though he was, now reached out and touched the rough surface. Here at the centre the Storm did not exist, and yet the stone was crumbling. Dust came away on his fingers.
*
Sarmin touched the grey stone. Here was the god’s true wound, the focus of the confusion in the Storm. He had no plan for this moment; he had planned only to reach the centre, and once there he had hoped the solution would be obvious. But now he hesitated.
He did not think the others had noticed they were standing in a meadow. The mages’ concentration had been so hard and their exhaustion was now so complete that the great rock at the centre commanded all their senses. But green grass sprinkled with wide-topped flowers surrounded them. He had never seen anything green except for gardens grown in pots, such as Assar and his mother kept. Sarmin looked with amazement at each blade of grass and each flower; they numbered in the thousands. Didryk had put together every one from the spinning chaos. Now the duke knelt, his face grey, and Adam prayed beside him. Farid and Mura stood together, both pale and shaken. But they were alive – everyone was alive. So far.
The grass tossed under Yomawa’s hand and Mesema turned her face to the meadow. ‘The wind will show me what to do,’ she said quietly.
She pressed his palm against the stone and he felt it, squirming and spinning within the flesh: the god. The man.
*
Mesema watched the images form in the grass. She saw Him, the Mogyrk god, in the lashing wind. He had torn the world apart to learn what it was made of, given everything a name, and then tried to build it up again. But as Sarmin had told her, the pattern was a lie; it could not reproduce life in full. It had failed with Beyon, and likewise the god had failed, for he had created an approximation of life, not real water, not real fire, not real people. Finding himself alone, he tore it all apart again, looking for the missing essence, trying to learn what he had done wrong, but in his growing madness he could no longer distinguish one thing from another, not even himself.