Harness Chapter 4: Possibility
By Michael Gernes
Orlondo missed his foot and sagged on the rope rungs while he was still ten feet from the terraced ground. Orazia yelped at Acso, and the two pages pulled the ladder to a tighter angle that supported his weight and kept him from falling.
He’d grown used to the heaviness and dizziness whenever he descended from the heatless glimmer of Gatewatcher’s reliquary. This time was different. His limbs were sapped and his head whirled beyond any fatigue he’d felt—either sparring against Delphia in a foot harness, or practicing alone in the great harness. He shivered as a stiff autumn breeze blew across the mountainside of the Nave, chilling him through his sweat-sodden arming clothes.
Now that the battle had ebbed, the oblates knelt in a semicircle around the harness’s feet, shadowed by the green nimbus light above. Orazia had gathered them from their hiding places among the wood. Orlondo did not blame them for scattering; they were sworn to pray for Premonta, not fight. As he swayed on his feet, the oblates’ cantor, Veltrus, rose to support him, and pushed a leather flask to his lips.
Orlondo drank it, tasting honey and mint, and felt a liquored rush of warmth through his chest. Hoofbeats echoed on the stone ruins and a horse snorted. Orlondo focused through his haze on its rider, seeing the taut face of Counselor Cante, his black gown powdered with road dust.
“Medicine is a poor toast for a victory. Even half of one.” Cante smiled thinly, then beckoned. “There’s wine and words to be had under my canopy. About all of this.” He raised a hand to gesture at the tear in the sky, still rising over the mountaintop above. Although it had narrowed somewhat, alien landscapes still shifted within it, throwing color and light across the mountainside terraces and valley below. Orlondo gazed into it at a black void strewn with strange stars, which clashed starkly against the midday sun beating down in the sky. He found it hard to take his eyes off the tear again.
Half a victory seemed right. After Orlondo had recovered from his shock at the sight, he found the Occhscene harness had disappeared. They’d probably slipped back behind the same hill as their surviving piketroops had retreated over. Orlondo had taken Gatewatcher up to the ridge and captured the bronze field guns, scattering the few gunners who’d thrown off their terror and returned to reclaim the battery. He’d held the guns (and their horses) alone for a bit. Until Delphia had shown up with a detachment of her crossbowers to secure them, along with his pages, Gatewatcher’s tending wagon, and the oblate band.
But it was me that fought here. Alone. He shook his head to clear it until he could speak.
“We’ve had no word from you since you sent us here. How lucky that you show up now, Counselor.” It came out as half a shout. He looked around, aware of the pages and oblates suddenly looking carefully away, intent on their tasks.
Cante dismounted, handing the reins to Acso. His smile was gone. “Walk with me,” he replied.
———
They walked among marble stumps of fallen columns and tumbled walls of the terrace, over ancient, weed-grown paving. They headed unhurriedly toward the point where the terrace met the hilltop ridge the Occhscenes had pulled their guns across. About halfway, Orlondo stopped to look down at the main camp below through the looking glass Cante handed him.
Through its lenses he saw bodies lying along the camp’s edge, where the defenders of the semi-circled wagonfort had broken the enemy attack. Some of the dead wore the red- and blue- stripes of the Highvaler piketroops. There were also more than a few in the quilted cotes of Delphia’s band. The pebbled ground was stained bloody in places, churned into ruts, and littered with pikes, swords, helmets, and crossbow bolts.
Some of Delphia’s living soldiers were lifting the bodies of their comrades into a cart, while others stooped among the dead, pawing through their clothing and purses. A few crossbowers still stood atop the wagons, watching over the field.
“Her father won, too.” Cante said. “A battle at the crossing of the Cadua river. He won a duel in his own harness. His petard-lancers blasted the leg out from another. Both were ransomed before I got there, and not for as much as I’d have demanded.” He sighed. “Mercenaries are too used to letting each other go for next season’s campaign. They don’t know what to do with a real invasion.”
“I remember you saying you didn’t think it would come to war with the Occhscenes.” Orlondo said. He walked a few steps, and leaned against the stained, marble leg of a large statue. It was big, a man in sculpted, flowing robes. It would have been chest-high to Gatewatcher, but its arms and head were gone. He could still see the marks of the stone saws.
“Hoped, I said.” Cante reached out a hand for his looking glass, and pressed his lips into a smirk. “Though I think our parley after Cadua should keep them from Premonta’s walls a bit longer.”
“Which makes it a pity you couldn’t capture the harness you bested. I’d feel more sure about the truce with a prize to trade. But you did well enough.” He nodded slightly.
“Who did I beat? Someone of rank?” Orlondo asked.
“The harness, yes. It’s called Prowess, if your description matches my roll of arms. Old enough to have some fame; new enough to have the best forging.” He paused. “The bearer? It belonged to an old marcher line whose last heir died. But I heard a ballad at the truce feast. Supposedly some masked maid took it up to kill a great woods-boar.” He shrugged and snickered. “They do love their songs in Occhscien. So who knows what King Roul would trade for a secret champion?”
Orlondo felt a flutter of embarrassment. Maybe he hadn’t defeated some great knight, but just another green fighter. He’d thought his foe skilled when they’d clashed, but with no other field duels to his tally, it was hard to judge.
“Why invade us anyway?” He asked after a moment. “Didn’t Ulria and the southern towns have enough to loot?” Orlondo fumbled with his cap. “Don’t you have anything to eat?”
Cante looked at him flatly. “King Roul claims the throne of Portizola, because his mother’s grandmother was its queen. Ulria and the South were just in the way.” He reached into his satchel and grudgingly handed over a smallish plum and a hunk of hard cheese.
Orlondo bit deep into the fruit, and Cante pointed at it. “And I think a prince, like most men, will eat until he’s full. Or bites a pit.”
Orlondo swallowed his mouthful. “You didn’t send our little band up here to be the pit. Isn’t the Occhscene army bigger than all of Premonta’s companies put together?”
“Bigger than half of all the Peninsula’s companies put together.” He narrowed his eyes. “But I chose you for your arts, not to teach you statecraft. What have your studies here produced so far?”
Orlondo bristled. “I didn’t think to grab my sketchbook before the battle. I’ll have to fetch it from camp. I sketched the terraces, and the statues, as you asked. I took charcoal rubbings. I even drew a builder’s section of the temples.” He trailed off. “It might have helped to know if you expected me to find something. Like perhaps that.” He pointed at the torn sky above. They stared silently for several moments. Orlondo wished he had that sketchbook now.
Cante studied him intently. “So you didn’t pass the Heart Gate, then, or go to the summit?”
They both turned to look up the slopes. Several hundred feet above them, up the steep flank of the mountainside and astride a crevice pass, loomed the colossal arched gateway. It was high enough for Gatewatcher to walk through with several helm-heights to spare, with equally huge steps leading up into the gloom. The arch’s purple-red stone blocks were flecked with pink and white, standing out clearly against the pitted gray stone of the mountain. Their color reminded Orlondo of the organ flesh of a cadaver that Master Solvi had taken him to study as a boy.
Orlondo looked away. “I hadn’t quite finished down here before all this happened. It would be… difficult to take Gatewatcher up there and also sketch, I think.”
Cante spoke absently, as if to himself. “Perhaps it’s just as well. I meant to join you here sooner, and what would have happened then?”
Orlondo had no response to that. Eventually, he pointed up. “So what is that?” He found his eyes drawn back into the effluence.
The Counselor sounded faraway. “Something I didn’t expect to happen in our days.” Orlondo dragged his attention back, as Cante gestured around them both. “When Premonta was a village, this was a sacred place of the Aephygeans.”
Orlondo shuddered, then frowned. “I didn’t read many books in the studio. I did know that though; my master made us all study their sculpting. Only from remnants, of course.”
“They left more than smashed statues.” Cante replied. “Every city of the Peninsula still has its plinth. Even after the Iconoclasm. We built our plazas around them, and our states. Our wealth too. Just a section cut from Premonta’s plinth animates our Great Loom.” He added grimly. “And the great harnesses have not always fought each other.”
“You know, I did swear my oath over the piece in Gatewatcher’s back.” Orlondo said testily, still weary after the meagre food.
Cante continued, staring insistently into the distance. “The plinths are only what’s left of their obelisks. And those were made in places like this. Or below them, as I now read it. In my library, I have some of their books.”
Orlondo thought for a moment. There had been centuries when such studies could have landed either of them in a cell, or worse. He’d seen the watchtower Locus Iusto had built in this valley, and the iron gates that had blocked the archway above, both long fallen to ruin or rust. And he knew he might be the first artist to come here since then.
“That’s not an answer to why you wanted me to draw this place.”
“No”, Cante shook his head. “I hoped your work might answer my question. How did the Aephygeans craft things of so much power? Or possibility?” Then he gestured again at the scene within the effluence, which was shifting once again to show feathery, yellow clouds among a pink sky.
Neither spoke for a long while. Both stood in contemplation.
“I think I will go up there after all.” Orlondo finally said.
Cante snorted. “After I tell you all of that? Why?” He asked in disbelief.
Orlondo thought for a moment. “Because maybe an answer can be had now, in our days. And because it’s my trade to show new things to my patrons.”
He looked over his shoulder and saw Delphia walking toward them. “You could pay a mercenary enough to go and tell you what they saw. But you need them for other things. And could they imagine it? I can study it. Come back and render it for you in paint.”
Cante raised an eyebrow. “If you come back. Premonta has eight working harnesses. We may need yours.”
Orlondo nodded. “You may. Though after the fight here, do you think we’re the only ones interested in what’s up there? And if this war continues, will one harness really make the difference?”
Cante studied him skeptically. “You come by your boldness fast, Master Orlondo. I remember when you were a painter’s apprentice. Only last month.”
Orlondo laughed, faintly. “Isn’t this what you picked me and gave me Gatewatcher for? Or do you only like it when your schemes half succeed?”
Cante glowered at him for a moment, then smiled his thin smile. “You understand me better than I expected. Rest then, briefly, and gather what you need. I’ll make sure there is a camp to come back to. At least for the next two days.”
———
Gatewatcher’s plating shuddered beneath Orlondo as he climbed. Each stride up the massive stairs echoed within the great harness, and the vibrations reminded him just how precarious his balance was. They were his only way of feeling the path beneath him, aside from the taxing resistance of the harness’s leg gears with each footfall. His breaths were growing deeper too, as he felt the sweat wicking around the linen of his arming cap.
He had Gatewatcher’s poleaxe with him, but didn’t dare try to use it to steady himself up here. It would be too easy to misjudge his placement and topple himself backward. He shuddered, briefly imagining bouncing and sliding within the harness until he was torn and smashed apart within its loom. Then he shoved it out of his mind. Only a harness could have made this climb in one go, without ladder teams or ropes.
He cocked his head up slightly, straining his eyes to peer down into his mirror array as he did. Through the helm’s lens, he saw the stairway still stretching up before him, hewn from the mountain granite. The steps stood out against the pitted gray stone. Although they were stained in places by the soot of ages, their faces remained smoothly polished and unbroken. Unlike the mountain face. Already, he’d passed intersections with several other rocky, narrow passes; one of them was almost big enough for Gatewatcher to walk through.
As he looked up, he thought he could see a glimpse of shifting color at the mirrors’ top edges, and let out a sigh. He must be nearing the summit. Nearing the Navel itself—and whatever weird effluence had poured from it to rip the sky above it like canvas. So, he kept moving.
At last Orlondo reached the top step and a shallow landing widened before him. While the walls of the cloven mountainside rose above Gatewatcher’s height, they were pierced here by another arch; a twin of the Heart Gate below. He stopped to heave deep, ragged breaths and looked beneath the archway. The tear was still there, with its erratic, dazzling images filling his mirrors. Now he could confirm where it rose from.
A great bowl spread out below him atop the mountain’s summit, cut and polished from the granite. The bowl’s sides were stepped, like some ancient theater, and the tiers were proportioned like the stairway. At its lowest point, there was a lip, perhaps three times as wide as the steps. Beyond that, at the center, yawned an open pit. The glowing effluence stretched up out of that. It was still roiling up from somewhere below, even though it had gradually receded from when he’d first seen it.
The Navel’s void was, as the old tales whispered, like a great well. Not the well, Orlondo reminded himself. Not the God-Well, which lay far distant, near the mouth of the Ribbon Sea, somewhere in the old Bronze Kingdoms. All the priests’ cycles agreed on that.
And this does not look like the cold fire; but there is something beyond, he thought as he stared at the tear. In its bounds, he saw another vista blink into being. A pier of rock drifting in a void, with huge, dark chains tethering it somewhere out of view. In the distance, a similar mass of rock floated, likewise anchored below. Above both there was some sort of crystal shell, catching faraway light and reflecting it. Each shell was transparent, like the float globe fastened above his mirrors, yet on a far vaster scale. And unlike the varied thickness of the blown glass, these were perfect. Trees, grasses, and flowering brush sprouted within each of the domes, and in the closest one he could see some square-sided, columned building. It reminded him of the ruins below, but it was painted in vivid colors, not bleached by centuries of sun.
Orlondo’s old master, Solvi, had once worked on an engraving for a book translation, The Orbis Restored. It held ancient speculations about the the Ribbon Sea, the world-shards,, and the Shatters Above—chained so they would always trail along with the Orbis. Solvi’s etching looked crudely next to these. Was he seeing them now as they truly were, like through a looking glass?
His sketchbook and charcoals were packed away in his satchel, tightly secured to the left hip frame of the loom, along with most of his food. He couldn’t have reached them without minutes of unbuckling and unlacing his arms. So he tried to trace it into his memory instead during the moments that it remained.
Eventually, the view vanished, replaced by fields of jagged black stone, split by roiling, fiery rivers of orange. Orlondo had finally caught his breath, and his weariness and thirst seemed somehow less important. So he stepped through the archway before him.
As he crossed the threshold, he suddenly felt hot winds through the grilled window slit in Gatewatcher’s chest, and heard a distant cracking and hissing, like water on a hot pan. Despite the growing warmth, he felt a familiar cold tautness clenching at his gut and crawling up his limbs. He continued on though, stepping down toward the bottom of the bowl. Gatewatcher’s footfalls thudded on the stone. He needed to see beyond the edge of the lip.
The opening was wide. He could tell that even despite the sky tear obstructing the view. He suspected the pit was nearly two hundred feet across; enough to fit six great harnesses laid on end. When Orlondo reached the last step before the wide lip, he decided to circle it to the left. He could feel heat from within the tear pouring out like a roaring fireplace. He kept on, twisting his waist and head to peer into the tear as he went.
As he circled it, his eyes widened. It wasn’t simply a tear in the fabric of the air, letting him see through. It had dimension, and curved around itself. His view of the fire fields rotated within the effluence, as if he were revolving around them at a distance. And as he moved he saw there was a faint distortion around the edges of the effluence, like light bent around a bead of water.
Orlondo stopped for a moment, transfixed. This must have been the longest he’d seen the same image. The glowing flows within reminded him of melted iron in a forge. Then there was a roar, and a hot wind gusted through his grillwork. Inside the effluence, the glowing liquid in the nearest fissure splashed skyward, throwing droplets out. He lunged aside within his loom, and Gatewatcher moved as glowing gobbets spattered across the granite steps, bright as cinders. A plop sounded somewhere along the chest plating, and he heard a faint sizzling.
The boundaries of the effluence suddenly wobbled and twisted, as if it had been jarred. It flowed downward, back into the pit, shrinking rapidly as it did. The fire fields were still visible for a moment, but the image quickly grew shrunken and distorted, moving away from him at a great speed.
Then it was gone.
Orlondo breathed out the breath he’d been holding, and found himself staring down into the shaft. It plunged down. So far down that the midday sun only lit the top hundred feet of it or so. He saw a winding spiral of concentric circles below him, as if he stood at the top of a hollow tower. With the effluence vanished, he also saw that part of the lip across from him inclined down, forming a spiral rampway that descended inward. And deep, deep below him, at the bottommost circle, there was a faint, reddish glow. The sense of endless height dizzied his head.
He had only a few moments to take all of it in, debating how far below he might go. Then he heard a keening echo from below the lip, like the kring of a hammer upon some anvil. Then he heard another.
He circled the opening, moving toward the ramp, inclining Gatewatcher’s torso carefully to get enough angle to see within.He saw movement, only a level below him, partially obscured by the circular lip above, realizing that there must be space between the levels, out of his sight.
Sunlight glinted off fluted steel plates and shining brass edging. He saw the familiar shape of a huge, flanged mace lashing to strike against some unseen target.
Her again. How did she get up here? He grimaced, and tightened his grip on his mock poleaxe haft. Whoever was in the Occhscene harness, he’d beaten her once. He might surprise her again.
Suddenly, another massive form moved into the light, and his heart jumped in his chest. The thing rivalled the Occhscene harness’s height, and its surface was like a grayish, milky-marbled stone. It was shaped like a broad-bearded man in skirted, antique armor—like in the smashed friezes littering the slopes of the Nave. As it moved, its surface flowed, contracting and lengthening like muscle, but with the bloodless, sallow coloring and crack-worn surface of a statue.
His breath caught in his throat. A Lithioi. Not here. Not still… Everyone knew they had been destroyed during the Iconoclasm—they were why there was an Iconoclasm.
The Occhscene harness struck another wild, whirling blow at the stone warrior. It raised a wide, round stone shield to absorb the strike with an audible thud. The force of the blow set Orlondo’s teeth on edge even at a distance, but the stone colossus barely budged beneath it. Then it suddenly turned its face up at Orlondo, and he finally saw it closely through Gatewatcher’s lens.
Where he’d expected only smooth, featureless marble eyes, he saw shallow sockets filled with bunches of small orbs, glistening in the sun like grapes. But they were too white, and had a raw, torn redness at their edges. Red stains wept down the statue-thing’s white cheeks from beneath the bunches. Then he saw many small, variously-colored irises rotate to gaze back at him.
Orlondo’s gorge rose in his throat as he stood there a moment.
He’d climbed here for an answer, not a fight. He’d been ready to risk one just a moment ago, with this Occhscene. Now, all the midnight tales from his boyhood were running through him again, bloody and shivering.
He could run. Try to climb back down and tell Cante, Delphia, or all of Premonta. Then he saw images of his earlier fight, like scenes in a fresco. The way the Occhscene had nodded at him. Waved him in, like an opponent worthy of another pass. Then stubbornly refuse to yield. Maybe she had slain that woods-beast. But did they tell legends about things like this in the fields of the West?
The great harnesses haven’t always fought each other, he remembered. He couldn’t run. Not when they both had this enemy. He’d remember the shame—and know that he was still just an apprentice, after all.
He also realized how tired he was. And if the Lithioi beat her, it might catch him on the giant steps anyway. In the tales they never tired, never stopped, not once they had a prey.
So he drew in his breath and grasped for a prayer that wouldn’t come. Then he recalled his oath, whispering: “I will not desert my service. Nor avoid my death for Premonta.” He raised his poleaxe, and took a first step down the ramp. Toward his fight.