and legends: where Egdod and the rest of the Old Gods were said to be building a counterpart to the Land from which they had been exiled. Not wishing to pursue such work in view of El, they had drawn a veil of smoke over it.
So much for the myths. But if it really was true that Prim was one and the same as Daisy, or Sophia, then it meant that she had actually been there in a previous life. Felt its hard blackness in her bones as she had impacted upon its surface, digging a crater that burned and glowed even now, one of an irregular constellation of flickering flame-colored stars, like so many distant campfires on a darkling plain—
“What do you see?” It was Mard, also craning his neck to look up at the sky. “I see Knotweave’s Loom.” It was a well-known constellation. So familiar that to point it out seemed a childish gambit for starting a conversation. She hadn’t heard him coming, but now that his voice and his presence—he took a seat on the ground quite close to her—had brought her back to the here and now, she heard a giggle—a giggle!—from Querc on the other side of some low scrubby bushes, and Lyne’s low voice saying something indistinct that made Querc giggle again.
So if Mard was being a little clumsy, it was because having a chat about stars wasn’t really why he was here. He scooted even closer—so close that unless Prim moved away, any shift in her position would bring them into contact.
The last thing he was expecting was probably an answer to his question. “The Firmament,” she said.
It took him a moment to place the reference. According to old books of myths—stuff read only by young children and elderly scholars—that was the shell of black adamant that formed the vault of heaven, pocked with god craters and veiled from the Land. It was usual to speak of the Red Web, Egdod’s Eye, the Fire Nebula, the Crimson Veil, but not of the theoretical abstraction that lay behind it. But with a moment’s reflection Mard got the idea. “It is awfully high in the sky here,” he said. He reached up and, somewhat theatrically, squeezed the back of his neck. “Gives me a crick in the neck just looking at it. Easier to lie down.” He did so, somehow in the process managing to shift even closer to Prim. “The rock is still warm,” he remarked, brushing it next to him with his hand.
Prim wondered if Mardellian Bufrect had the faintest idea how badly she wanted to lie down alongside him and stop looking at—and having this inane conversation about—the sky. But a question had come up that needed answering. “Now that you are warm and comfortable—”
“Not as much as I could be.”
“—what do you see when you look at the Red Web from this most excellent of vantage points and most convenient of positions? Surely in your whole life you have never viewed it with so many advantages.”
“I see . . . the Red Web!” Mard answered. He was not precisely frustrated yet, but perhaps a little dismayed that his lame opening about Knotweave’s Loom seemed to be developing into an actual conversation about astronomy. That’ll teach you, Prim thought.
“Describe what it looks like. I have a crick in my neck, I can’t look right at it.”
“Well, you know, it’s like a campfire when a kettle is boiling on it on a cold night, a proper full rolling boil, making a great cloud of steam that obscures your view. It glows from the light of the flames that you know are beneath it, and from time to time as the steam swirls and dances you may get a glimpse of a red-hot coal or a lick of fire—but then it’s hidden again and you wonder if you really saw it.”
“Well described,” she said. “I can almost see in my mind’s eye what you are seeing.”
“If you make yourself comfortable here,” he suggested, patting the ground next to him, and considerately flicking a pebble away, “you can just look at it. I might even be able to help you with that crick in your neck. I’m good at—”
“My neck is fine,” she admitted. “Would you like to know what I see?”
“Sure,” he said, not really sounding all that sure.
“The sharpest, clearest sparks of red fire. Not the flickering of something that burns but the steady glow of lava. A big one in the