“A clearing. It was a clearing up the hill.”
She snorted. “This is as generic a description as it goes.”
“We followed this road.” Shea waved at the wide trail between the trees. “Then, at some point, turned off.”
“Where exactly?”
“Listen, it was a hunt.”
Brielle mumbled something.
“Sorry—didn’t hear you.”
“I said, what the hell am I even doing here.”
Shea didn’t answer. He remembered her, standing in the stirrups, the smile, the laughter. Guide me, he thought. Allow me to do at least some good.
But nothing came back—the trail remained just a trail—until, on an impulse, he urged his horse into a gallop, mirroring his speed on that day.
They’d kissed.
They’d made love.
She’d been the smell of bonfire and the taste of strawberries.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going?” Brielle called out.
Faster! In Shea’s mind, Lena drove her heels into her horse’s flanks, and he did the same. A hundred feet more, straight. Left, into the aspen grove, into the thinner path, between the two birches.
The trees ahead parted, and the tower stared at him through the morning haze, the memory and the present twin beads on an invisible umbilical cord.
“That’s it. That’s it!”
They darted into a clearing. He pulled on the reins and glanced around.
“Are we there? You sure?” Brielle said from behind.
He took out the sketch and held it out to her.
“Well.” She shrugged. “Seems similar enough—but then again, it’s just trees and a glade.”
“Trust me, this is the place. It all happened when we dashed in here.”
“I personally didn’t experience any visions.”
“We came through there, same as now.” He pointed at the road behind them.
“Maybe…” she said. “And mind you, don’t take this to mean I believe in a doorway to the other dimension or some such. But maybe you and I didn’t pass through the right spot? After all, you said yourself the deer disappeared and neither you nor Lena did.”
Even more painful to hear another say her name than to say it myself.
He shook his head to disperse the memories. “Worth a shot. Would you please hold my horse for me?”
The path led back into the forest, into the bush where the morning quiet held its sway, only the leaves moving, fawning over the wind. He stretched out his hand and walked toward the trees, waving his palm left and right like a blind man.
The first step, second, third—and then he had no fingers anymore.
An instinct yanked his elbow back.
Somewhere, a branch snapped and a small animal darted into the bushes.
Shit shit shit, his heart drummed out.
“Brielle!”
“What?”
“I think I’ve found it.”
Slowly, he raised his arm again.
Void ate everything up to his wrist, and this time, he made an effort not to recoil. He moved his hand to the left, and the cutoff line across his skin bent: whatever was in front of him seemed to be spherical or cylindrical in shape. He circled the thing in the tiny steps of someone walking along a cliff’s edge.
The doorway was probably wide enough to devour a horse, but not wider. One could easily miss it.
“Wait,” Brielle said. “Wait, I’m coming.”
But he had already taken a step forward, and forward-backward-to-the-side.
Direction didn’t matter anymore, and—
The sky bled crimson and orange.
The air that wrapped around him tasted of salt and reeked of rotten eggs.
Something that resembled trees—multi-necked, multi-fingered foliage in vertical stripes, like someone had stripped the real tree trunks clean and glued brushes to them—pushed the clouds away from the ground’s uniform burnt crust.
A bout of wind slapped him in the face, making him turn, and that was when he saw it.
Less of a tower, more of a giant centipede, standing upright and sprouting thorns instead of legs—if thorns could be the size of a house. Behind, a cloud formation—a tornado?—turned around lazily.
He backed away like a sleepwalker.
“What the…” Brielle appeared, breathing in a marathon runner tempo. “What the… Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” his lips answered.
“This is a hallucination. I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming, dreaming.”
You are you are you are, his mind echoed.
“No,” he said, “no. We’ve arrived.”
Right there, twenty feet away from him, next to the tree line, lay the decomposing carcass of a deer.
Brielle took a few drunken sailor steps and probed the ground with the tip of her boot. “The soil is baked.” She glanced up, and her face changed. “Oh my.”
“Exactly.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“The Mimic Tower,” he said.
Brielle squinted, raising her hand to the sky, thumb and pinky outstretched, a trembling, but still a professional gesture. “A thousand feet, give or take. Same as ours. Gosh.” She opened and closed her mouth. “Am I… Am I responsible for this?”
The thorns, like handles some inconceivable being might use on its climb to the skies. “Lena said it builds itself—but yes, as far as I understood, it’s our tower that allows it… to manifest.”
After a brief pause, Brielle chuckled. He glanced at her: had she gone crazy?
“Funny how the brain works,” she said.
“The brain?”
“I’ve had a small revelation.”
“What do you—”
“Funny.” She chuckled again, running her palm through her hair. “If it’s all true, then my mistake, Shea—it was actually something good, wasn’t it? If she was right. If she was right all along.”
She was.
Brielle extended her arm toward him. “There’s a freedom in—”
A distant rumble rolled. Her face changed, and he looked where she looked, at the thing he’d taken for clouds.
After all, clouds do resemble people sometimes—but, he thought, while they may look like people, they never move like ones.
A naked figure, an overgrown baby, shifted against the sky. Only the top part of the body was visible, everything waist-down concealed by the trees so that it looked as though it waded through the forest.
Brielle gasped. “It’s a human… a human… a fucking giant.”
He felt the hair on his head move. “Not a human.”
“Not entirely human—”
“The movements, Brielle, look at how it moves.”
A fluid half-dance, part walking, part sailing…
“My gosh. Are you saying they’re Drakiri—”
“That, or something related.” Heavens, it’s huge. Did it see them? Was it able to see in the conventional sense of the word?
Brielle whispered, “What is this place?”
…only that we’d arrived from elsewhere. The light’s orange tint, the vertical foliage—like the drapes in Lena’s quarters. Decorating your home in a bow to some vague ancestral memory.
Realization washed over him.
“This is where they came from. Their place of origin. She told me Pangania was a waystation, that they’d come from somewhere else—here.”
“Gosh,” Brielle said, “my gosh. Maybe a, a catastrophe happened here or—”
At that moment, the air moved. Something ruffled through the brush-like leaves, rising above the trees. The giant’s head turned.
It looked at Shea—or rather, two stones rolled under the eyelids until the gaze weighed him down. For the longest second in his life, there were only those eyes, black, expressionless—or was it that he didn’t understand the expression, that it was so vast he simply couldn’t wrap his mind around it?
A palm rose from behind the
trees, a steady, graceful ascent. Moved forward.
At first, he kept telling himself the giant was too far away to reach them.
Then Brielle screamed, and something crashed into his shoulder: she pushed him out of the way.
“No! Brielle, no!”
But the hand had already closed around her body.
As though on a picture, dashes of white came through: she hammered her fists on the fingers which could’ve belonged to some colossal monument.
The sight tore Shea free from his paralysis. “Let her go, you mound of shit!” He sprinted, uselessly, after the hand as it moved away at double the speed.
“Destroy it,” Brielle screamed when he caught her gaze. “Destroy—”
His foot sank into a hollow in the ground. He lost his balance and fell, stretching out his hands—and as his forearms disappeared, he realized he’d run straight into the other side of the portal.
The next instant, he was back to the forested hillside.
He doubled over and threw up into the morning dew.
“Brielle! Brielle!”
Some sensation returned to his body—all that time, his heart hadn’t stopped playing drums on his ribs.
He started, swaying, toward where the doorway was.
The wind changed its tune, and five things stretched out of nowhere in front of him—each one could’ve been a tree trunk. A palm reached into the world and, slowly, swung left to right, feeling for something—or someone, crumpling the bush. Then it retracted back into the portal.
Above, a chickadee sang.
“Brielle! Let her go, you piece of—”
He darted through the spot, but nothing happened—and, frantically, he waved his hands.
This time, his fingers remained his own. He glanced around, at the waking forest, the lazy sunlight. Perhaps the doorway only opened, for each person, only once. Or perhaps something on the other side didn’t want him to come through again.
The chickadee clung to its bravado.
“Brielle.”
He tried for a whole hour, but that was it. The doorway into the world Lena had told him about had closed.
7
Autumn leaves crumbled under his feet.
The horses, finally free, darted past.
Make up your goddamn mind already.
He tore off his jacket and hurled it into the bush. Ice crept under his shirt, but this was okay, this was fine: it was new air, entering his lungs.
Destroy it.
Such a simple idea, really, such a correct one, free from his own former indecisiveness.
Go to hell, Daelyn. I don’t want the kingdom, the throne, the golden dance. You can take it all. Take everything. Take my title, my family name, my estate. I don’t want any of this. I don’t need it.
“You hear me?” he shouted. “Take everything!”
Brielle had been right—there was a freedom. In not having a choice anymore.
He descended the hill’s slope. The distance clear of the morning’s sediment, the tower gained form, its top leaking thick purple into the day.
Thirty-odd Drakiri devices, all in one place. He had to hope an implosion of that magnitude would be enough to bring the mammoth structure down—and with it, if he’d understood everything right, the doorway.
And this time, there would be no changing one’s mind, no possibility for a flip-flop, no rosewood trapdoor to go back to.
Forgive me, Lena. I should’ve listened when you talked. I should’ve looked. Tulips will finally bloom—for you.
A week after his workshop’s destruction, he’d talked to the Drakiri at the town hall, the one who’d warned him. Five minutes, the man told him; his sister and Danny had only had five minutes to live from the moment Danny had touched the valve.
Shea didn’t know if five minutes would be enough to get out of the implosion radius—or what that radius would be. One tulip had chewed through a two-story building; he could only imagine how far three dozen would reach.
But it hardly mattered anymore.
He expected guards at the entrance; there were only the artisans, diving into the gate’s gap-toothed mouth, diving out. The duke had found his saboteurs; Lena was dead; there was no need to waste resources on guards.
He’d found her body over there, in the grass.
Shea reached for his pocket, for her diary—realizing he’d discarded it together with his jacket. He turned around; for a moment, that was all that mattered.
Then he squeezed his fist and entered the tower.
Brielle’s beast had beauty. It had perfect symmetry. The spiral staircase folded into a snail’s shell above his head, and coals burned, scattered across cities on the steep climb. Cities—the impression from his first visit remained like a daguerreotype of a childhood love: settlements built out of pulleys, carts, and treadwheel cranes, shot through with harmonies of tools squeaking in the shadows.
For a moment, the idea of destroying all this—worlds hidden within a world—made the stone weight squeeze around him.
“Hey!” Shea flinched at his own voice ringing through the empty space. “Hey! Everybody leave, now!”
He didn’t actually think this would work—but a sprung coil inside demanded release.
Two men approached him, wearing cream-colored aprons and worried faces.
“What’s going on?” the taller one said.
“Don’t you recognize me?”
The pair exchanged glances. “You’re Lord Ashcroft.”
“Yes. Lady Brielle asked everyone to vacate the construction site.”
“We… we haven’t heard anything to that effect.”
“The Drakiri devices at the top are about to implode.”
Worried faces went chalk-white. “We haven’t heard—”
“Do you hear me now?” He grabbed the tall guy by the arm. “Hey. Do you? Or shall I spell it out for you louder?”
The man’s face was two fears fighting: that of making an administrative mistake and another, a deeper one—for his life.
“What’s your name?” Shea said. “All those people die, it’s your fault.”
That settled it. The artisan turned to his fellow. “Inform the crew. I’ll spread the word up.”
“No,” Shea said. “I’ll do it myself. You take care of your own guys. Stay organized, and we’ll all get out of this alive.”
He headed for the staircase, and through the pain of loss—the one which had happened and the one which was about to happen—euphoria kicked in.
“Vacate the site.” He waved at another worker walking past him. “Others are already on their way out.”
“Vacate the site.”
Heavens, how easy. How laughably easy it was, bending the giant to his will. Same instructions, to anyone he encountered. Soon, it wasn’t even needed: on the staircase’s second whirl, he counted three men rising in wooden cages, probably to warn the workers at the upper levels, and in ten minutes he had to keep to the wall in order not to be pushed over the edge by the steady stream of people rushing downward.
A domino effect—you see others below, fleeing, your instincts kick in.
By the time he got to the top, he was walking through abandoned towns: a frozen pulley, an overturned bucket, somebody’s shirt over a grinding wheel.
The top, however, was still alive, and it was a whole new world.
8
A massive flat platform, sanded to perfect white under the autumn sun, supported the tower’s jawline.
He finally understood why his sister had called them ‘tulips’. Those bumps in the unfinished wall weren’t Drakiri devices—or ‘egg-shaped things’—those were flowers, grown through the stone, ready to bloom. Those were gardeners, standing knee-deep in the purple rolling across the wooden planks.
Two people, peeking over the edge.
One of them turned and waved. “Lord Ashcroft. What’s happening?” He ran—a clumsy half-walk, half-run, a parody of how Drakiri moved. “Why is everybody fleeing? We were to
ld the devices are about to implode—”
“They are,” said Shea.
“But they aren’t!” The man stretched out his hands, palms cupped. “We’ve, we’ve checked every single one. They’re operating as—”
“How long have you been working here?” Shea looked him in the eye, and the hands dropped.
“We—”
“You’ve made a mistake.”
“My lord—”
“This isn’t a debate. You don’t want to take chances with those things.”
Paranoia. I don’t know about yours—but that’s how our race survives, Lena. That’s how we’ve always survived.
“We’ve checked every one of them.” Practically a whisper now.
Shea pointed at the staircase. “Vacate the site.”
“And you, my lord?”
“I’ll try to prevent the catastrophe.”
The man reminded him of the fellow with sad labrador eyes whom he’d forced to operate a device a month ago: same baggy trousers, same frightened gaze. Same willingness to follow orders, regardless of where they led.
When both workers disappeared down the staircase, he allowed himself to breathe.
Was it him, or had the purple thickened? The tulips, are they opening for the sun?
He walked up to the device closest to him. ‘Here, let me show you,’ she’d said and touched the dark surface, lightly as though weaving or playing a harp.
He put his hands on the valve. Took a second’s hesitation he could still afford. And unscrewed the valve, all the way.
He thought he heard chickadees, but, of course, at this height it was impossible.
Something hummed through the tower’s arteries. Something woke up within the stone, stirred, and squared its shoulders.
“Away from the device, now.”
He turned around. Four minutes forty seconds.
In calm, measured steps, Aidan ascended the staircase and stepped onto the platform.
“Away from the device, Shea. Damn—I should’ve known. Any idiot could see you were too weak to handle power.”
“The tower needs to be destroyed. I’ve been to—”
“Put it back. Whatever you just did, undo it.”
“I can’t. And I won’t—not again.”
“I should’ve known,” Aidan said, pulling off his glove, “right there, at the beginning, at the capital. When you’d refused to gas that mob. The plebs. I would’ve done it without batting an eyelid.”
Tower of Mud and Straw Page 12
