tried again. “I didn’t mean to startle you . . . nowhere else for me go—”
“You rode from Greymoor?” The other man’s voice was older, slightly stretched and tinged with emotion: anxiety or perhaps disbelief. Caliph felt trapped, uncertain how to answer. Certainly people were looking for him, probably a great many people by now. Maybe this man worked for the Stonehavian government.
“I’m a butcher,” said the man. There was no further explanation but his accent indicated a degree of education. His vowels sounded vaguely like he usually spoke Gnah Lug Lam or maybe High Mlk. “Name’s Alani.”
Do I dare use my name? “I’m Caliph.”
“There’s a pushing school on the south side of town,” said Alani. “But you’re not going there, are you?”
Caliph wished he could see the man’s face.
“I don’t know . . . I . . .”
“No. You’re headed for that little skirt’s place on the lip of the plateau.”
“Who are you?”
Alani stepped back; lamplight caked his face suddenly like butter. Caliph recognized him. He couldn’t find the circumstance but he had definitely seen him before, wearing different clothes . . . a uniform.
“Turn around. Go to Stonehold.” Then the man shifted position and abruptly walked away.
Caliph let him go. He was too frightened to run after him. He was still trying to find a setting to pair with the bald head, pocked cheeks and well-kept goatee.
A thin man in his fifties.
It had to have been at college. Mentally, Caliph dressed him in baggy pants and a shirt. No. He imagined Alani in Desdae Hall selling books. A professor? A cook? Maybe in town at the theater or Grume’s . . . No. He tried a different angle: who could have known he was going to see Sena? Who would have had access to the letter? Who could have seen the map?
Caliph searched his mind, trying to remember the faces at the campus post office. All he found were the pouts and freckles of two or three sullen women.
It seemed useless. Whoever Alani was, he obviously knew both where Caliph Howl was supposed to be and where he was going. Maybe I should turn around . . .
Caliph stood in the dark for a long time, wondering, doubting.
Finally he decided. On his first step he rebuked the can that had given him away, kicking it fiercely. It seemed to float rather than fly, barely scraping the bricks before vanishing into the dark. On his second step he set his feet toward the cement steps that led down into Crow’s Eye. He was not going back.
At a point just north of the barren arches of Tibin, Caliph could see the Walls of Tue, black and misty through miles of humid sky. It was the eleventh of Psh and he had reached the crossroads.
Sena would have no way of knowing he had stayed another semester. Maybe her invitation had expired. She might even be with someone else by now. The thought thickened the back of his throat.
Caliph wished he had brought a friend, someone to make it less obvious that he had traveled all this way just to see her. The thought of knocking on her door alone terrified him.
There was a crumbling thread of trail that climbed from the crossroads up into Tue. When Caliph topped the final switchback, he was gasping. Five thousand feet below, the landscape swept away, creating an indigo vista of lakes and trees. Caliph dug Sena’s map out of his pack and looked at it with some dismay. A nostalgic smile haunted his lips.
“Can’t draw so well,” he whispered to himself.
A damp breeze swelled and flapped out of the lowlands.
Caliph looked up from the crackling paper and studied his surroundings. The sweat from his climb had chilled, inducing vast tracts of horripilated flesh across his arms and back. At least he told himself it was the temperature. A freakish mood had settled, oozing from the angular, purpurean shadows around the Stones. Caliph walked toward them, pulled by an itching in his brain. He touched one like a child on a dare. It felt slick and cool, the crowded patterns stained by an unidentifiable pers residue. There was nothing recognizable in the carvings. As if the very subject matter were distortion. Flux.
The air felt sticky, smelled sweet.
Caliph shuddered.
Maybe he had heard it: that insane high-pitched gibbering he didn’t want to acknowledge. Whether it really existed or not was a matter he might debate later over pints when the horrible subtlety of the sound had dissolved