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The Vorrh

The Vorrh

Titel: The Vorrh Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: B. Catling
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that it had the opposite effect. It looked like a lost insect had fallen into the cartographer’s inkpot, crawled out and made its bedraggled route across the paper.
    Seil Kor put his finger on the largest of the lines that faded away to blankness and said, ‘This will be our way.’
    His finger rested in a small grey crater, almost a hole in the map, where countless other pilgrims had indicated their journey in the same manner.
    They stepped outside and smelt the air, looking at the clear, even sky before turning onto the track. Behind them, three of their fellow passengers, insignificant until now, stood staring at the map, one with his finger on the same indentation identified by Seil Kor. The Frenchman saw this, and increased their pace into the waiting forest.
    * * *

    I have been forced to kill one man and wound another, for their attempts to trap, rob or assassinate me. I have truly left the sanctuary of our home behind, as I wade back into the ways of men.
    Este is strong and forthright at my side. When I carry her, slung against my back, I feel her touch, ebbing through the rocking bow, feel her fingers on my spine, her palm between my shoulder blades. She whispers continually and spots my foes, hiding in the trees, or across the river. Together, we have seen the one who follows; a tall, dark-clad man, who looks like a shadow. He keeps his distance, but is in some way attached. She says he is the most dangerous, but we will be safe in the Vorrh: he will not dare to enter the great forest.
    I begin to recognise this country where I have never been: small corners, tricks of light and sound; odours that find recess in me, a cup to sit in for a second or two; enough to weigh down an indentation, an impression; the echo of a memory that is not there, or should not be.
    I have stayed close to the river and found a boat to take me into the trees. The boatman is called Paulus. He is of unknown age, haggard from travel and nightmares, worn out by strong drink and imagination. He tells me stories of gins he has made, complex mechanisms that try to mimic the sounds he has heard while sleeping on the water in the Vorrh. He is an easy companion, because he asks nothing of me; I must only be his sounding board.
    He is the only one who navigates these waters, taking his boat, The Leo, alternately powered by wind, muscle and steam, further and further into the core and further from the voices and ears of men. In this, we have much in common, and the small, objective part of his racing brain that still exists knows it, and thinks it well. I ask him how far the river will take us, and whether it is possible to pass through to the other side. He does not know, but thinks he has been deeper and stayed longer than any other could claim to.
    He explains that he suffered from narcolepsy from an early age, but that it ceased when he first entered the Vorrh. Now, he stays here and makes continual trips, to balance his malady. He says that the water is in sympathy with renegade sleep; it protects him from being rubbed out and made transparent by the voices of the beings that he hears. This is not reassuring, but his commitment is. He promises to go with me until the river runs out, to the place where it is swallowed back into the earth or climbs the mountains. He says there will always be new sounds for him, that they have become his food. I do believe this is true. In the four days that we have travelled, he has eaten almost nothing, only picking at the fish I have caught and cooked from the vast abundance that lives here. He drinks much. ‘To dream’, he says, ‘to fold at the bottom of the well and listen’. He drinks until he cannot speak. His scarlet-veined eyelids work independently, like slow spoons attempting to sagely wink and taste the passing night. Yet each morning, when I awake, he is already at the engine, preening it into life.
    I discover that ‘the cooling system’, a tangle of brass and copper pipes that sits above the boiler, is in fact a still. His fastidious care of it suddenly makes more sense, and I am left to wonder whether the boat’s engine is as reliably maintained as his alcohol supply. Paulus had come here from the lowlands of Europe, the depression where Germany meets Holland and Belgium. He had been a Kahnführer on the mighty Maas, an industrious bargeman, pushing every cargo through the then-neutral, neighbourly lands, before the Great War. But that was half a century ago. He never says why

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