by Greg Curtis
“Well you can stay here then. I'm going to set to work in the kitchen. We're having smoked fish pie this evening.”
“Oooh fish!” the cat exclaimed, her irritation already apparently forgotten. “I like fish. Why didn't you say that right away?”
“I was busy.”
“Well never mind that now. You'll let me lick the bowl?”
“Fine!” Manx sighed, quietly. “If you're good.”
“I can be good!” the cat replied at a hundred leagues a second. “I can be very good!”
But she couldn't be, Manx knew. It wasn't entirely her fault. She simply didn't have any idea what good was. She only knew what she wanted. And she had absolutely no self control when it came to food or anything else she liked. She just wanted it, and as far as she was concerned, it was everyone else's job to give it to her.
“Then go inside and I'll be there shortly.”
As she did that, jumping down from the table and racing inside as fast as her legs could carry her, Manx stared across at his neighbour's property. He couldn't see the boar, hidden as it was behind the six foot high hedge that separated the two properties, but he could hear it. Still snorting and squealing and grunting enthusiastically, and he could only imagine what his neighbours must think. All of his neighbours. Because if this was anything like what he'd done to others, the magic would endure for days.
He shook his head in disbelief. What had he done?!
Chapter Fourteen
Another day and another two dozen of their people freed from the dimensional prison. Sorsha thought that that was probably a good days work. Not perhaps as good as it had been at the start. Then she'd freed thirty or more with every cast. But it was still something. Still as she stared at the newly freed prisoners standing on, and in some cases collapsing to the grass, she knew it wasn't enough. There were thousands more still trapped in the prison. And probably tens of thousands trapped in the other prisons they'd found. And none of those that she'd released had been her family.
It could be months if not years before they were all free and the world was returning to how it should be. And maybe she would never find all the prisoners. Maybe too, her family were not among them. Maybe they were gone. Lost four hundred years in the past. Dead and buried. She didn't like to think about that, but she knew it was possible.
So she sat on her bench, and watched as the others went to gather up the newly freed spell-casters from the empty grass field they'd arrived in. And she worried. Because even now, she was still weak. Physically weak. Magically weak. And her thoughts were still clouded as they never had been before. That worried her. It worried everyone, because she wasn't alone. They weren't recovering as they should be. Worse still, the druids and the healers couldn't seem to tell them why. These people, newly arrived in the grass field, would be the same.
Of course it wasn't an empty grass field. It was a courtyard. And it hadn't been there a week before. With the aid of the sorcerers she'd finally undone the magical spell that made the entire area the size of a small house, and in doing so made the city physically larger. She'd also caused a minor earthquake which had damaged some of the buildings as they and the land they sat on had simply been pushed aside.
Now people, those without magic, wandered around the area staring. Wondering how there could be this huge empty field in the middle of the city. Wondering too why all the roads surrounding this new field had bent, twisted, cracked and broken as the land in the middle had abruptly expanded. They would have explored the area if they could have, but her people kept them back telling them it was dangerous. Maybe it was. Maybe they could accidentally fall into the tangle of dimensional rifts that criss crossed it. But mostly it was just about keeping them out of the area so they didn't distract her as she worked.
On the other hand she supposed, maybe it saved them from banging their heads on the various buildings that surrounded the courtyard. The ones they couldn't see. The spells of illusion placed upon it were almost as complex as the dimensional rift itself. Light magic was woven together with spells of the mind. Someone, quite possibly a Smythe, had gone to an enormous length to conceal what was there. So even now, all people could see was an empty grass field. And that was all they would see until they walked into the buildings.
That wouldn't stop some from exploring the new land in the middle of the city. And as she looked she could see a couple of faces she recognised among the spectators. But they weren't spectators. They were spies. She knew it, so did the others. It seemed that the Court had finally had enough of simply sitting around listening to strange reports on the happenings in Winstone and other cities, and they had sent some spies out to tell them what was happening.
Strange, secretive people whose eyes danced over everything as they asked her people all sorts of strange, innocent sounding questions and pretended to be normal citizens like everyone else. But she wasn't fooled. The question was, how long would it be before they reported back to their masters? Perhaps they already had through this telegram thing. And when they did, what would their masters do? Send soldiers?
But Sorsha put those thoughts behind her as she concentrated on the hyper-dimensional tangle of realms in front of her, trying to work out which strand to tease out next.
“And that's enough out of you!”
A woman shouted from just behind Sorsha and then an arm wrapped itself around her throat from behind. A moment later she was being hoisted out of the park bench by her neck and trying to work out what was happening.
But what was happening was becoming very obvious. She was being throttled to death, and she didn't want to die. So she struggled, yelling and screaming, twisting around desperately, trying to rip her way loose of the woman's grip, and making the woman curse. And then when she could she managed to smash her elbow into her, causing her to grunt.
But that might have been a mistake. She discovered that even as she saw the flash of silver streaking down and burying itself in her collar.
Sorsha screamed as she felt the knife bite deep into her flesh, and then instinctively she hurled herself backwards, causing the woman to fall back to the ground and landing on top of her. More importantly she caused her to loosen her grip. And that was enough for Sorsha to wriggle away somehow.
But the woman hadn't really been injured. And she was rolling to her feet as quickly as Sorsha was. But thankfully she was unarmed. Her knife was buried in Sorsha's collar.
“Bitch!” The silver clad woman yelled at her. And then she pulled out another blade and advanced on her.
Sorsha panicked, and then acted on instinct, creating a wall of twisted dimensions between them, and a split second later the silver clad woman's knife was gone, quite possibly with some of her fingers. She was quicker than her companion in the Silver Order had been, or smarter, but there was still blood on the end of her hand.
Not enough though, and the woman, Lady Marshendale Sorsha assumed, reached for her pistol. Then, faster than she would have imagined possible, she fired. Six shots rang out so fast that they were almost one continuous roar of thunder. Thankfully all of the bullets disappeared somewhere in the wall she'd created and none touched Sorsha.
Even more thankfully, others had heard the commotion, and a heartbeat later something big and dangerous leapt on the silver woman. Something with teeth and claws and a roar that drowned out the noise of the nearby people who had scattered and started yelling.
The beast took the woman's helm off her with a swipe of its paw and left deep gashes in her head as it did so. Terrible wounds that damn near killed her. Or they should have. But somehow she got up before it had a chance to maul her any further, reached for yet another blade, and sank it deep in the beast's flesh.
The beast, some sort of bear, growled savagely and then rushed for her attacker. But it simply wasn't fast enough, and somehow the silver clad woman danced out of its way, letting the beast run past her.
“Abominations!” The lady stood up straight, the bloody dagger in her hand and m
ore blood pouring down the side of her face. “You should all have been slaughtered!”
With that she was off, running faster than anyone should be able to, leaving Sorsha standing there, wondering just what had happened. And why there was a knife sticking out of her collar. Wondering too why it didn't hurt. Because it looked like a very bad injury. There was a lot of blood running down her front. An awful lot.
She was still standing there when the others reached her, and when they started tending to her wound. But things weren't becoming a lot clearer to her. In fact they were growing more confused. But she did understand that Lady Marshendale had just tried to murder her. And she even understood why. To stop her freeing their people.
But how was she so fast and so strong? She'd practically pulled her right out of the bench from behind. And she was so fast! Fast enough to deliver a punishing blow to an angry bear. And why had she called her an abomination?
Most of all though, the woman had said that she and all of her people should have been killed. Slaughtered was the actual word she'd used. And that didn't make sense to her. The Silver Order had placed them in a dimension without time and space, mostly because it created a prison they couldn't escape from. How could they escape if there was no time to do it in? To even think of the thought? Only the fact that the spell had been failing and she'd been able to sense the passage of time in the dimensions bordering that one had allowed her to free herself. But that particular dimension had also had one other purpose. Somehow it had allowed her magic and that of the others to be drained. To go to the Silver Order. If they'd been killed that couldn't have happened. Killing them would have deprived the Silver Order of their magic. Now she regretted it?
That seemed wrong somehow. But as she found herself hoisted up into the air so that she was staring at the blue sky above, and carted away somewhere, it became less important. What was more important was the blade still sticking out of her collar, and the fact that it was becoming painful to breathe.
And that the blue above her was becoming darker.
Chapter Fifteen
Banging on the door first thing in the morning was never a good thing, Manx thought as he was woken up by it. But it was worse when it was on the door to his bedchamber!
“What?” He mumbled loudly at whoever was on the other side, just before it swung open and a woman with pointed ears strode in. Half a dozen others were behind her.
“How dare you!” Whitey yelled at them from the foot of the bed. “Don't you monkeys know I'm sleeping?!”
“You're with us,” the woman told Manx, ignoring the cat. “Quickly now.”
“It's too early in the morning,” he replied, noting that there was at least light coming in through the window. But it still couldn't be much after dawn. But then again, he realised he knew this woman. He'd only seen her once before, and that had been in the darkness. But he knew her voice. “Larissa.”
“Do you imagine that we don't know what time it is?!” she asked him bluntly in a tone that brooked no defiance. “Or that I don't know my own name?! You're needed.”
He could have argued, Manx supposed. He could have told them all to go away. But he didn't imagine they would do as he said. Or that they would even listen to him. And besides, what else did he have to do? Sleeping was obviously out of the question. So he grumbled his assent and then told them that he'd need to freshen up first.
Then he rolled out of bed and tried not to notice the way their eyes all turned to his scars. Maybe he needed to sleep in something that covered more than what a singlet did – now that he was apparently receiving visitors at the crack of dawn.
Ten minutes later he was on his way with the group, much to the relief of his cat who'd finally found some peace and quiet with everyone gone. And while he tried to find out what was happening, no one seemed to be in the mood to answer him. Or even to talk to him. Had he done something wrong, he wondered? Had they encountered the wild boar and realised what he'd done to the beast? Though surely, he thought, it must have recovered by now.
It was a lengthy walk. All the way across the city to the merchant quarter. And it was made longer by the pace that the others set. He kept falling behind, and then got told to keep up. They clearly had no sympathy for his condition. But then he knew they had no sympathy for him at all. He was a Smythe, and that as far as they were concerned, was proof that he was some sort of miscreant. Probably a brigand.
From what he'd read, that had been an attitude even a thousand years ago. Smythe's couldn't be trusted.
Eventually though they reached their destination and he forgot his troubles and frustrations. Because he knew where they were. It was the ghost field. At least that was what people were calling it. A huge, round expanse of grass covered land that had just somehow arrived in the middle of the city a couple of weeks before. No one could explain it. Nor how it had simply pushed everything around it aside when it had appeared, shaking the entire city as it did so. And when it had, it had done a lot of damage to the city. Buildings had cracked, chimneys had fallen, roads had been torn apart, and everyone had thought it was an earthquake.
But now that he could see it with his own eyes he knew that what he was looking at wasn't just a huge circular field. There was a massive fort in the middle of it. A fort in one corner of a giant courtyard with massive walls surrounding it. That hadn't been there before. He didn't come to this part of town often, but he was sure he would have noticed something like a crumbling ancient fortress in the middle of the city.
But then, there was something wrong with the fort and the walls. And not just the fact that they were obviously so old that they were ruins. When he looked at it, he saw the fortification. But he also saw an empty grass field in the same place. How was that possible?
“What the hell is that?” he asked as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
“The Silver Order's headquarters, at least in Winstone,” the shaman answered him. She didn't sound happy. “You can see it, I take it?”
“Yes. It's an ancient, crumbling ruin. But it's also an empty field. I don't pretend to understand. And there's more. There's some sort of strangeness in the middle of that courtyard. I can't describe it. But I wouldn't go there.”
“You are a Smythe,” she replied as if it had been in some sort of doubt. “You can't be fooled by any sort of illusion. Most people can't see anything except the empty grass field.”
“Great!” he muttered, resigned to his fate. “I thought we'd already agreed on that. I'm a Smythe. Born a brigand. Good only for hanging. So why am I here? Did you think I'd forgotten?!”
“To fix things.” She clapped a hand on his shoulder – his good one thankfully – and started guiding him to a bench where a man was already seated. A man who he saw when he turned around, had three eyes. A fiend. Or a walker as he reminded himself. They probably didn't like being called fiends any more than he liked being called a thief.
It was disconcerting staring at the man. Trying to make sense of what he was seeing, and trying to work out which eye to stare at – if he was supposed to stare at any of them. Just looking at him made Manx uncomfortable. The third eye, just slightly above and in between the other two, distorted the man's entire face. It made him something other than human. It was something more than just having a set of antlers or horns or big amber eyes or even spear like ears. Those things were all add ons to a face. This was different. It changed the entire face somehow.
“I'm Adern,” the man greeted him with a polite smile. “Adern Little. And you're here to help me.”
“Help you? How? With what?” Manx was confused. But he wasn't confused about the fact that the walker – Larissa as he now knew her – was guiding him, in fact all but pushing him down onto the bench beside the walker.
“It'll be easier if we show you.”
“Show me what?” But even as he asked, the shaman put one hand back on his shoulder and the other on Adern's shoulder and the entire world changed.
“Oh shite!”
Manx was shocked at what he was seeing. Because it wasn't right. It wasn't at all natural. But he wasn't completely sure what it was. The world had changed, transformed into something he didn't recognise. Or maybe it hadn't changed at all, he thought as he caught his breath. Maybe it had always been like this. He just hadn't seen it. Because he only had two eyes.
“What in all the hells?!”
“I'm allowing you to see the world through the eyes of a walker.” Larissa told him.
“This is what three eyes allows you to see?” Manx couldn't quite believe that. Or rather he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing.
“I assume so. I can't tell what you're seeing, but it should be the same as me. So what you're seeing is the world as I see it,” Adern told him. “A combination of the world as you see it and the places and ways it intersects with all the other worlds out there.”
“It's …” Manx tried to find words for what he was seeing, and simply couldn't. There were no words to describe it. It was like seeing the entire world through a series of stained glass windows that added an entire rainbow of colours to it, except that he didn't recognise any of the colours. They didn't have names. They didn't even exist.
