Oh man, oh well, here we go again. Look at you. Just look at you. It’s goddamned precious. I don’t remember the last time I saw anything this hilarious, and I don’t even remember forgetting.
What d’you mean “what?” Your outfit there? Those little brass buckles, those blue-and-green-patches? That’s Matagant wear. That’s almost a thousand miles away, and your cute little trains will only take you half of that before you have to get out and ride. And then the mountains get in your way and you have to walk.
You’ve walked at least a hundred miles to get here, Mata-boy. That’s what’s so damned adorable. And I bet you even think it was a hard trip, because it took the shine right off those brass buttons.
Hey. Hey. Don’t walk away now, Mata-boy. Don’t walk away and leave an old snowcrawler here high and dry. I’ve got what you want. Spend a few dollars to rinse the dust out of my throat, and I’ll tell you everything about the Window you ever wanted to know.
Of course you want to know about the Window. You’re here, aren’t you? Oh man, oh Mata-boy, here we go again.
First thing: you want to know about the Window, you got to know about the Sill. If you don’t want to hear about it, well tough shit Mata-boy, they’re as tied up as tied up can ever be. The man that found the Window founded the Sill two hours later, that’s how close they are. Two hours. We know that ’cause we know the times.
The Window was found eighty-one years ago exactly, to the day, at three-thirty-three in the afternoon. Sillas Bradley hauled himself over that ridge ten feet behind some poor bastard securing the ropes no one remembers, looked down a two-thousand-foot drop, and looked up into a sky that wasn’t quite real.
Two hours later, he puts down a flag and tells everyone to start building something better than tents. Bam. That was that. Old bastard doomed the lot of us right then and there. “Let’s build our homes on the edge of a cliff.” Two hours.
Yeah, of course it was temporary! Of course it was temporary! Christ, it was a bunch of tents and piled-up rocks and they had no food, not so much as a goddamned twig to build with. Of course it was just a friggin’ stopgap. Didn’t stop them from coming back six months later with more stuff, did it? All ready to build pretty little houses and carrying packs chock-full of tasty salted meat and just as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as lovable little shitfaced squirrels, right?
Yeah, I’d say it was at least three or four dozen deaths in the first few weeks of building up Sill. Overwork, underfed, couldn’t handle the thin air, couldn’t handle the noise the Window makes….
No, you don’t get used to it. Not really. You get better at ignoring it, but whenever you don’t, it just slides back in. Like someone sticking their finger in your nose, except it fills up your whole head.
No, I damned well don’t wonder how they felt when they went through the Window for the first time. I don’t wonder because everyone feels the same way. Everybody’s first time might as well be the first time ever, because you never really know it ’till you’ve tried it.
You sort of… freeze up. You walk up those fifty-six steps until you’re forty feet farther over the edge of the cliff than you’d ever wanted to be, with nothing but some greasy old timbers that groan like grandmother’s bra between you and two thousand and forty feet of empty air. You’re trying not to look at the Window, but that just leaves looking down and you don’t want to do that either. And you can’t shut your eyes.
So you look at the Window, and it hurts your eyes like hell. Like someone put salt in them, and the salt wants to lick the backside of your head by going right through the middle. Shut up, I know it doesn’t make any goddamned sense. Just listen. Listen.
While you’re looking at the window and trying not to pay attention to it, your legs are still moving because they know if you stop, so will the guy behind you, and so will the guy behind him, and then the whole lot of you’ll be just sitting there on top of the fifty-six steps, all of you. Standing there, not moving, on top of that creaking staircase from hell. Which is starting to groan a little louder every second. And you’re stuck right at the end of it farthest from solid ground.
I’ve got to finish this cup. Hold up.
Okay, that’s better.
Right. You go through the Window, right through the part of the air where the air is different and sparkles like ground glass, and you’re not right side up, upside down, or sideways. You’re just sort of there. In the air. Floating free as a friggin’ fairy, you and the guy behind and the guy in front of you and every single one of the whole expedition, at least twelve and at most a hundred and nineteen.
That only happened once, yeah, and it nearly broke the fifty-six steps. Next biggest was eighty or something I don’t know, just listen. You didn’t come this far to hear yourself talk, did you Mata-boy?
When you’re floating there, everyone looks helpless as babies for the first few moments. After that the veterans start to remember, and the new floaters just go rigid. Too scared to move. But they have to, so it’s everyone else’s job to shove ’em into shape. Push them, yell at them, drag ’em along if you need to do it. They usually unfreeze in the first few hours. If they don’t, well, you just tie them on a lead and drag ’em around. It’s stupid, but sometimes there’s one or two that just end up like that. No point in complaining too loud once you know it, because there’s no way to fix it. Just do the bitching inside your head, it’s a real comfort.
It also takes your mind off what you’re seeing now, because you’re seeing a lot of things past the Window that you don’t want to. There’s colours that I’m sure as shit don’t really exist, that’s the big part. Looking at anything makes you queasy, especially things that should look right but don’t. You go in wearing blue socks, you come out wearing blue socks, but while you’re past the Window you don’t want to check what colour those socks are, because whatever they are it won’t be right.
The sound’s not as bad, no. It’s so loud you can’t hear it anymore. Or feel it. Kinda relaxing, really. Everything in there is all muffled and shit, like your ears are full of mud. No complaints there, Mata-boy. Don’t fret your pretty little head about scary noises.
Yeah, yeah, I’m getting there, I’m getting there. Let me tell you about what you’re seeing in there that’s so scary.
You won’t see the Ta right away, I can tell you that. They never hang around the Window. Must give them the creeps as much as it does us, if they can feel that way. I’ve got no idea, let some priest babble on about their mindset or their souls or whatever, I just know trying to read them is like trying to chew water, but they don’t come near the Window. Not unless they have a reason. Like us.
Hold up. Last gulp.
Good stuff. You trying to soften me up, Mata-boy? Hah, sweet of you, but you’re too young for me.
The first thing you see isn’t the Ta, it’s probably a broken up kala-husk. The big bastards never die easy, either something cracks them open and eats them like a fox with a hen’s egg or they overswell their shells and explode from the inside out when they hit old age – whatever the husks are made of, it may look like wool and feel like wood, but it’s harder than iron. Helluva way to go, but it’s supposed to take a few hundred years for them to get big enough. There’s one big husk that’s usually floating without a few miles of the Window’s other side, Huge Halger. He’s your best friend – floats around so slowly and you can see him from so far away that there’s no beating him as a direction. Good as a compass heading. “Go towards Halger’s biggest crag on the left side. We’re not that near, head a little bit farther away from Halger. Be careful, there’s a swirl of particular angles near Halger’s far side.”
Particular angles you usually don’t get near the Window either. It’s a pretty dead quiet zone, they like to hunt live, lively prey. That doesn’t mix well.
Swirl’s the word, yeah. You can’t count them, and you can’t tell one big angle from a thousand little ones. No one can. So they’re a swirl of particular angles. Just the way it works, Mata-boy, and it doesn’t make too much difference at all. One little angle in the wrong spot’s worse than a million ones each the size of this pub, if they’re a safe ways away. Of course, the safest place to be when it comes to them is this side of the Window. I saw a little wee swirl of angles once – couldn’t have been bigger than my right tit – and I saw it boil right up through the man next to me’s ribcage. Closest I’ve ever been, and I’m just happy they were filled right up after that because they could’ve had me for dessert without even trying.
What d’you mean, what do they eat? Hah! You look to be the reading kind, Mata-boy, you telling me you didn’t even try to learn this stuff at home before you walked a hundred miles into the asshole of the ass-end of the world? What’re you, a writer? Spit and shit, boy, think you’ll be the first to write a book that’s the reading, what an ego you’ve got! But hah, there you go and fill my cup again, so I’m not going to stop talking.
Particular angles eat lines, and they’re picky eaters, so they prefer big ones, and the straighter the better. Which is good because otherwise they’d probably eat everything. Instead, they’ll just take most of your arteries, or the spaces between your teeth, or every single stitch in your clothing, it’s all luck as to what they end up going for. I saw a body once, the angles had taken every last hair on his head and not a single damned thing anywhere else. Died of fright, poor bastard. Some people can even lose when they win.
Particular angles aren’t the only problem in there. Big problem is the stinks. You see this mask here? See the big bulb over the nose? That hollow’s meant to be filled with the nastiest-smelling shit you can imagine. I don’t know what the apothecaries make it out of, but you put a good wad of that under your whiffer and you don’t have to worry about the stinks. There’s these little spores that make smells out there, that’re so sharp and funked that they’ll send you into coughing fits that can dislocate your jaw, and they hit hard enough that after a few minutes of that you can’t keep breathing.
Well, after you die, the spores fill your carcass and breed in it. Circle of goddamned life. Isn’t it a gorgeous little bitch?
But I’d say the worst problem – the worst problem that’s a straight-up threat – is the noisy thoughts. The stinks? You just wear your mask all the time. Even when you need to eat. Better sick than dead. Particular angles, you just keep an eye out and keep a bunch more near you. But the noisy thoughts? You can’t do anything about those. Anything at all. And almost nobody toughs them out.
See, when they first get their hooks into you, you think it’s you. It’s a tune, or an idea, or something you think someone might’ve mentioned. The tip of your brain’s tongue, you know what I mean? And you let it sit there. Biding its time. You’re waiting for it to go away, because if you just wait things like this ALWAYS go away, but it won’t. It just gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger.
And the bastard of this is that up until right near the very end, most people think that a noisy thought is just something they can’t get out of their head. What’s really funny there, Mata-boy? They’re sort of right. But not quite.
Now, the bit at the end where even the dimwits get that something’s wrong, that’s when their other thoughts start getting crowded out. It starts out soft – you’re so busy humming along with the little song that you lose track of the knot you’re tying, or you stop walking for a moment for no good reason. Then before you know it you’re losing sentences halfway through and forgetting people’s names. By the end? You can’t even think enough to move. The whole brain shuts down bit by bit.
And the real kicker of all this, Mata-boy? There’s nobody that knows what the hell the noisy thoughts even get out of this. They come. They hollow you out. And then they go. You can count the survivors on the fingers of a blind butcher’s hand, and there’s only one still living. If you can call it living. Look up Dead-Head Lizzie, eh? She’ll tell you.
I need another drink. Double it up this time.
Okay, so now you got an idea of some of the risks. That’s just the flashy stuff, mind. I haven’t said jack squat about the things that just drive people nuts or make them wander off and never come back in the night – oh yeah, there’s no night. No day either. Amazing how fast that makes some guys snap.
Now we’re gonna talk about the sweet stuff, the reason anyone wants to go through the damned Window in the first place. We’re going to talk about what Sillas Bradley found when he took fifty-six armed bastards through there for the first time ever, when the fifty-seven steps were still new and didn’t creak so bad.
See, at first the old bastard didn’t find much more than what I told you. No right or left, up or down. Colours all wrong. Huge Halger. Lost a few women and men to particular angles, I think, and the first time anyone saw that would be enough to send most home.
But they were out for money. Nobody wants to come back home with an empty wallet, eh? Makes the bosses unhappy. So they searched in circles, and just when they’d given up, well, there they found something. Floating inside the scraped-out scraps of an old kala-husk, they found some shooms growing.
Funny things, shooms. You ever try some, Mata-boy? A sliver of a scraping’s all I ever could afford, but you bought those brass buttons with somebody’s money, and I’m betting you have more than that.
Never tried? Liar. But such a goddamned polite one. Butter wouldn’t melt in that mouth of yours, would it? Hah. Well then, I’ll be twice as polite and pretend I believe that bullshit, lay it out flat with you: a worm’s-skint-scraping of shoom tastes like sex warmed over by a god and filled to the gills with wine made out of sunbeams.
If you think that isn’t enough reason to send men and women in there to die, Mata-boy, you’re dumber than I thought. But there’s more to it than that. While the taste of that beautiful little parasite is melting apart against the roof of your mouth, you know numbers.
No, I don’t mean that you can do math, no I
Pay attention and shut up. You. Know. Numbers. You don’t add or subtract or any other bullshit, you just know ’em. While that little scrap of shoom was wasting on my tongue, I could see any number I imagined, and I knew it inside and out. Sillas sent home a bushel or two, and they let the royal mathematician try it out. He sorted every single tax record in the country sound as a bell inside the day. Nearly wore out his wrist with cramping, but it worked. It’s precious stuff, Mata-boy, and there’s two who eat it: royalty, and the advisors of royalty. And the snowcrawlers who bring it back from beyond the Window and are just quiet enough to sneak scraps without getting caught. You get caught once skivving on a trip, you get a punch. Twice, you get a beating. Three times, and they don’t kill you, they don’t kick you out, but nobody’s going to play lookout for you, nobody’s going to help you, nobody’s going to share supplies, and unless you cut losses and make a beeline for the Window you’re probably a dead woman walking. Happened to me twice, and I must’ve run out of all my luck on the way home.
That’s the first bit there, the first sweet bait to lure us all in past the Window. The second’s a bit more obvious: kala-husks. I already told you how tough those things are, you don’t need to hear more. At first they made armour from it, then they found out that they could make it as light and thin as they wanted, then they tried using it to build machines. And if half of what I hear is coming out of the colleges these days is true, Mata-boy – and never more than half, if you say an inch more than half of it is true I’ll eat my boots – then I’m only surprised the prices on the stuff aren’t higher.
The third big thing (and there’s lots of little things I’m not saying right now, Mata-boy – little souvenirs I’m not even going to try to describe, nothing more than trinkets for rich folk and good-luck charms for idiots), we only found five years later. That was when Sillas found the Ta. Walked right into one of their Not-Cities.
Yeah, that’s the word for them.
No, I don’t know how you talk to them. Some people just can. Best not to do it too often, too. The more you do it, the more often you do it, the more you get like them. In the head, not the body, but sometimes I get to wondering. I swear Eightfinger Ulluver’s lips were nearly gone by the end of his life.
Yup. No lips. That’s the Ta. No lips, no eyes. Big ears though. And their legs are like arms, and their arms all look like legs, and they have no teeth. And they don’t live in cities. All the Ta-talkers get really snippy about that. They don’t live in villages, they don’t live in towns, and they REALLY don’t live in cities. Not-Cities is the best word we have, I guess. Stupid as hell if you ask me, but then most of the things the Ta do are stupid as hell. They eat each other and pretty much nothing else, they spend most of their lives asleep, and when they’re awake they do everything at half-again speed before they pass out again. A hundred Ta in one place, you’ll never see more than two or three moving at once. They do things in shifts.
But they know things about the world past the Window that we don’t. They know what to avoid and what to find, they know what’s worth things and what isn’t. We just had to pick out was worth anything to US and we were golden. We traded for how to treat kala-husks and how to find kala-husks and how to find where shooms grew and we found out how to make a Listenstem out of one of their skulls. You take the emptied braincase after they’re done eating one of their own – they do it while the food’s sleeping – and rip off the jaw and sort of push the skull into a bowl. Then you hold that to your ear, and if you know what to think, you think better. That’s all I know because I’m not fool-assed enough to try it. There was a pretty good culling of the colleges when Listenstems started getting out of the Window, before some of the careful ones figured out how to train yourself for it. You do it wrong, and you pretty much turn Ta in the head, and it turns out Ta heads don’t fit inside human brains. Most of ’em bled out inside their skulls. A couple went crazy, but the useful kind, so they kept them around with force-feedings. Good stuff, eh? And to think, they’ll practically give the things away, which is good because we can’t make them ourselves. Not sure why, but they don’t work.
Now, there’s the big question here, Mata-boy. I can feel it from across the table here, itching away at the tip of your tongue, trying to squirm past those pretty lips of yours, but they’re too polite to open up and spit it out in the drunk old snowcrawler’s face: what do we trade them? What do they want? What are they asking? What are we giving? Because I know, and you know, Mata-boy, that they know how much we want their things. Damned all else we have in common with them, but they get trade. And barter. And payment.
No, it isn’t people. They aren’t interested in us. Just our trade. Don’t get all huffy there.
Go on, guess.
Guess better!
Warmer.
Close!
Hah, give up?
Wrong again, you lose. I’ll tell you anyways because I’m so goddamned nice. They want our thoughts. And I can’t tell you why because in seventy-odd years of us trading them to the buggers, they haven’t seemed like they understand one spitsworth better than before. Maybe they’re just bored and we’re the most hilarious friggin’ thing they’ve ever seen. Whyever they want it, that’s what they’re trading for. The whole team draws straws and the unlucky bastard loses about six months of memories, in exchange for a little over a quarter of the total take. Not a trade most people like. That’s why you’ll find so many snowcrawlers are washed-up scumbags like yours truly, Mata-boy. Nobody who’s had a very nice life would trade it away for any amount of money. Nobody.
I must’ve lost six or seven years. Mostly bad ones. I think I broke even, more’r less. Maybe.
Thanks. Needed that.
So that’s the deal then. You go in. You collect. You barter. You head back to the Window, and you come home. And by the time you come back, you’re a little used to it over there. Not much, never more than a little, because you’re human. But a little. And when you walk back through the door, all of that gets rubbed raw all over, and you spend a few days with twitching eyes and clenching teeth. Me, I get rid of it through drink, same as most. Some of us can’t handle it, keep playing tough for years when they’re soft inside, and then it all spills out whoopsie daisy along with the guts of three or four poor schlubs who were standing a little too near when the sound in the back of your head gets to be all too much and someone says something a little too loud.
Funny thing though, after a few trips in and out of there, you sort of start wanting to hear that noise. Just a little.
How many cups does this one make?
You’re right. Never enough.
You’re all right, boy from Matagan. You’re all right. But I’m getting drunk now, and I’m maudlin as shit when that happens. So I think that’s it for the night.
What? Oh, fine. Last one. But just because you bought me the good stuff, and because me ‘n Dead-Head Lizzie are the only ones left who know this.
See, I never did tell you how Sillas Bradley’s trip ended, did I? Well, he discovered the Window, and he founded the Sill, and he built the fifty-seven steps. And he wandered through the Window and met the Ta, and surprise surprise, he could talk to ’em. And since we didn’t know much back then, well, he talked a lot. And he asked questions.
Nowadays, we know not to do that.
Sillas was a tough old bastard, and he knew better than to let that sort of shit show in front of his men, but there’s some things you just can’t avoid. His skull was still crowded with Ta-thoughts, and he might’ve even gotten some noisy thoughts in there too. We don’t for sure, but that’s Lizzie’s guess. Pah, what’re guesses worth.
So Sillas set foot outside the Window, fell right back into the real world, and he got the shakes real bad, with a head full of things that were never meant to exist out here, where there’s a sun and a moon and a sky with a wind through it. So he screamed real loud. And he stumbled. And he lashed out and laid out flat the three men nearest to him, poor luckless sods, and when he fell down on top of those three men, well… I hadn’t tied on that last step as well as it could.
Ulluver told me that was his fault. He was a liar, all the time. Those eightfingers worked better than any twenty of anyone else’s.
So that’s why we have fifty-six steps. And when we looked all the way down that mountainside, all two thousand feet of it, we could see the little black marks like crawly bugs on the white snow where Sillas Bradley and three other men had landed. Don’t remember their names. I forgot most of that year and got told it second hand by Lizzie, and her memory’s lousy.
So that was that. And that was us. “Snowcrawlers.” Senses of humour as black as sin from that first trip.
Goddamn.
You’re a good man. You write that book. I need to remember these things. And you finish it fast.
I want to still be able to remember how to read when it’s finished. And I need another trip soon.
Just one more, that’s all. That’ll be plenty.
But just in case, you finish it fast.