Fallen by Tim Lebbon Read Free Book Online Page B

Ramus already knew that. She'd told him about Timal's leaving, and there had been no one since. Sometimes Ramus seemed most at ease when she was not involved. He was like a brother watching over his little sister, believing that no one was good enough for her.
    “I need to see Beko and agree to his fee, but that's all,” she said. “I just wish you were more excited!”
    “I can't change what I am,” Ramus said.
    Nomi went then, giving him a tight smile before leaving his rooms. Out in the street she leaned against the wall and watched a few people passing by, trying to confine her mind to their narrow concerns. She could not. Her ideas had been expanded, her horizons stretched. And the farther she walked from Ramus's home, the lighter her step became.

 
     
    Chapter 3
     
    THE DREAM HAD assailed Ramus as he dozed off after Nomi left his rooms: a Sleeping God rising from the ground, fearful, dreadful and unknowable. But the Sleeping God risen was a trifle compared to the sense that he was someone else.
    What do we have if not our own identity? Nomi had her home up in the hills, her ornaments and objects of worth brought back from voyages or purchased with her Ventgorian wine profits, but most of all she still had herself. Even she—shallow, perhaps, but still intelligent and broad-minded—would surely agree with that?
    He groaned, holding his head as though to squeeze out the pain. The attacks were becoming worse, and more frequent. He should see the healer before he went, though the healer had already told him that there was little she could do for a disease of the mind.
    Such a thing eats at itself, she had said. And while I've never seen one like this before, I can see the swellings behind your eyes. There's a mass, and if it follows patterns I've seen before, it will get larger, the symptoms will worsen, then you will die.
    The healer's words echoed back at him, as they often did when he was alone and suffering another strange dream.
    Ramus sat up eventually, sipping water and trying to sigh away the dregs of pain. Strange how it never actually hurt during the dream, only after. Almost as if he really was being ripped away for a time, and the pain came from being forced back into his own body, his own mind.
    “I should tell Nomi,” he whispered. But upon voicing the idea, he instantly shoved it away. He had not told a soul, and he never would. This was his own final voyage, the greatest of them all, and he could share it with no one.
     
    THE NEXT MORNING, Ramus spent some time studying several maps of Noreela, trying to piece together clues about the uncharted terrain south of the Pavissia Steppes. Voyagers had gone that way before, but of those who returned, few were adept at mapping their routes. Ramus had painstakingly copied any voyage maps he could lay his hands on, either at the Guild or in the library, and he kept the copies in his rooms. He had never attempted to amalgamate them before, because a mistake repeated would only be doubled. But they were all he had.
    Some indicated that much of the uncharted area was forest. Another map suggested that marshland took up a large proportion of the land down there. Each possibility would offer differing problems, and Ramus hoped fervently that some of the terrain at least was plain or grassland. Some said that the land there was deceptive, shifting, as though it was a young land still trying to find its lie.
    So he decided to create his own map, drawing together as much information as he could from the others, and he worked until well after midday. As he worked, he wondered yet again why it had taken so long for the Three Hearts—Long Marrakash, Cantrassa and Pengulfin Landing—to explore the rest of the world. Some said it was a leftover from the farming stock that they all descended from; simple folk who spent their lives working the land and rarely thought of moving on. Others suggested that it was a fear of the unknown set against the comfort in which much