Words momentarily exhausted, they made the trail in silence, and resumed their descent.
* * *
‘Beyond you, I am in need of allies.’
Skillen Droe glanced over at the cloaked figure trudging alongside him. ‘You will find few.’
‘There is a caustic sea, the essence of which is chaos.’
‘I know it.’
‘Mael does not claim it,’ K’rul said. ‘Indeed, none of us does. Ardata has ventured there, to its shoreline, and contemplates a journey into its depths. There is some risk.’
‘Is she alone?’
K’rul hesitated, and then said, ‘I cannot be certain. Ardata guards her realm jealously. It is my thought that we could appeal to that possessiveness.’
‘I will defend you, K’rul. But we are not allies. You have foolishly made yourself vulnerable.’
‘Very well.’
‘I will make this plain to her.’
‘Understood, Droe.’
They walked now along the edge of a vast pit. Its sheer walls were cracked, shattered as if from the blows of some giant hammer. The dusty floor of the crater showed crystalline outcrops that glittered with blue light. A steep ramp had been carved into the opposite cliff-side, curling round until it was out of sight, somewhere against the edge they skirted. Thus far, Skillen Droe could not see where the ramp debouched. There was something strangely protean about the dimensions of this pit, and the landscape surrounding it. They had been edging along it for some time now.
‘This is a quarry, K’rul?’
‘The Builders, I would think. They have, they tell me, reduced entire worlds to rubble, leaving them to float in clouds that ever circle the sun – a sun not our own, one must assume.’
‘The pit is devoid of Sidleways. Its air is still. There is no energy left in it. To descend, K’rul, is to die.’
‘I have no answers to their endeavours, Droe, or the means by which they wield their power. The houses they build here disappear shortly after their completion.’
‘Only to reappear elsewhere, as if grown from seeds.’
‘Something drives them to do what they do,’ K’rul said, pausing to cough for a moment. ‘Or indeed, someone. We share that at least with the Builders – the mystery of our origins. Even the force that cast us down upon the realm, to find flesh and bone, seems beyond our ken. Have we always been? Will we always be? If so, for what purpose?’
Skillen Droe considered K’rul’s words for a time.
Beneath the gloomy sky, they walked on. Their pace was slow, as K’rul seemed to have little strength. If he still dripped blood from his sacrifice, the crimson drops did not touch these dusty silts. No, they bled elsewhere.
‘It is our lack of purpose, K’rul, which drives us onward. Sensing absence, we seek to fill it. Lacking meaning, we seek to find it. Uncertain of love, we confess it. But what is it that we confess? Even a cloud of rubble will one day accrete, making something like a world.’
‘Then, Skillen, if I understand you, beliefs are all we have?’
‘The Builders make houses. From broken stone they build houses, as if to gift the disordered world with order. But, K’rul, unlike you, I am not convinced. Who, after all, broke the stones? It is my thought that the Builders are our enemy. They are not assemblers of reason, or even purpose. Their houses are built to contain. They are prisons – the Builder who dragged you to that house sought to chain you to it, in its yard so perfectly enclosed by that stone wall.’
K’rul halted, drawing Skillen around. A pale hand reached up into the shadow of the hood, as if K’rul was setting fingers to his brow. ‘And yet, it failed.’
‘Perhaps you were still too powerful. Perhaps, the house was not yet ready for you.’
‘We have kin who worship such houses.’
‘Lacking meaning and purpose, they seek to find it. In the ordering of stone – does that surprise you, K’rul? Are the Builders our children, or are we theirs? If we are but generations, one preceding the other, then which of us has fallen from our purpose?
‘The Builders are building worlds of denial, K’rul. The question you must ask is this: for whom are they meant? And, it follows, is it our task to oppose them? Or simply watch, decrying the entropy that is their monument?