by Martha Wells
Emilie obeyed, darting after Miss Marlende, who was already pelting down the corridor.
Racing to catch up, Emilie knew this was probably the exact opposite of what they should be doing. Miss Marlende was obviously so worried for her father and the others that she had disregarded all caution. So Emilie would have to be cautious for her.
She caught up with Miss Marlende just as she ran under an archway and into a large, high-ceilinged chamber. They both slid to a halt, staring up.
The walls weren’t walls, but huge bronze ball-and-socket joints like giant metal knees, towering over them. Each was several feet wide, the beams they were attached to stretching high up to disappear into shafts on each side of the room. They were all still at the moment, though they clearly looked as if they were meant to move something heavy. Emilie kept her voice low. “What’s this?”
“It must be part of the mechanism that moves the sails,” Miss Marlende whispered back. She looked around again. “I’m sure I heard a door. There!”
She darted off toward a triangular door set in between two of the joint-gears in the far wall. Emilie hurried after her.
As they reached the door, Efrain and the professor caught up to them. The door was just a triangle of bronze, no handle, but with a medallion in the center carved in the shape of what looked like a bundle of snakes. Miss Marlende hesitated, then pushed against the medallion, and the door slid open.
They stepped into a room that must have been in the lower part of the aether-sailer. It was long and the far wall was dotted with the round windows.
And at the far end, a creature whirled around to confront them.
It was like a flower. Or maybe a whole bunch of flowers, attached to each other with fireflies and gossamer. There was a big round globe of them where the head should be and delicate fronds like lace lined with blossoms that gently waved in the still air. It lifted them like arms, except there were four of them instead of two.
Emilie supposed it might attack them, but it looked so delicate, that was hard to imagine. The legs, all four of them, were covered with blossoms, too, and didn’t look any sturdier than the rest of it. It must have run on those delicate limbs, but it was so light, it couldn’t need much effort to hold itself up. It was like confronting a large hyacinth.
“What is it?” Efrain whispered.
“No one knows,” Emilie said, more to get him to be quiet than anything else.
Miss Marlende held up her hands and said, “Hello. Is this your vessel?”
The head part seemed to study her, and it lifted its four arms to mimic her gesture. Miss Marlende pressed her lips together in frustration. “It doesn’t understand.” Professor Abindon gestured toward the strange being, and it turned to her and mimicked her motion. “Its language, its way of speaking, must be completely different from ours.”
“But what happened to the rest of the crew? And my father?” Miss Marlende said. The stranger waved its four arm blossoms in a swirling way, and she duplicated the motion.
“I suppose it could have attacked and killed them,” the Professor said dubiously, “But looking at it…”
“It doesn’t seem likely, does it?” Emilie said. “And it’s not attacking us.”
The stranger waved its blossoms again, and Emilie thought she read frustration in the gesture, as if it was just as annoyed at the language barrier as they were. Though maybe that was wishful thinking.
“We have to think of a way to communicate.” Miss Marlende pulled her pack around and dug through it.
The stranger watched her, the blossoms on its head area pointing toward her inquiringly. Emilie thought, It doesn’t seem afraid of us.
Miss Marlende pulled a notebook and pencil out of her pack, braced the notebook against her forearm, and began to sketch rapidly. Emilie stepped closer and watched her draw the rough outline of the aether-sailer, and the airship below it, with the ladder connecting the two. She turned the notebook to show the stranger, then pointed at all of them and herself, and then to the airship. “We came from here.” She pointed at the stranger. “Where did you come from?”
The stranger leaned toward the notebook, its lighted blossoms waving at the page as if studying it. Then a blossom reached out to the pencil and took it out of Miss Marlende’s hand. Emilie had to lean closer to see, but dozens of little feelers lining the stem of the blossom gripped the pencil just like fingers. The stranger moved the pencil over the paper, clearly trying to draw something.
Emilie shifted from foot to foot anxiously, then realized her balance felt so unsteady because the deck was trembling. “Do you feel that?” she said, just as Miss Marlende said, “The aether current is shifting again.”
The stranger dropped the pencil and waved its blossoms in agitation. Then it whirled away like a bundle of flowers caught in a windstorm. It bolted away up the corridor. Miss Marlende called out, “Wait!” Efrain started forward, meaning to run after it, and Emilie also started forward, meaning to run after him to make certain he didn’t do anything stupid like grab the stranger. But the trembling turned to shaking, and Emilie staggered sideways and bounced off the wall.
Miss Marlende and the professor both swayed, and Efrain grabbed the door frame to stay upright. He turned toward them, then gasped and pointed.
Emilie twisted around to look. The end of the corridor was blocked off by something, a white wall. No, it wasn’t a white wall, it was a storm, a roiling tempest, slamming down toward them. She yelled in alarm, and the next instant it hit them.
Emilie tumbled, fell, slammed into something hard. Her body stretched almost to the breaking point. It happened so fast, the flash of burning pain was over before she knew what had happened. She fell into something soft and collapsed.
Emilie groaned. Her face was smashed into something fragrant, like grass. Grass? On the aether-sailer? She felt limp and numb, as if her brain was awake but not the rest of her body. After a long moment, she realized the heavy thing on her head was her pack, one loop still wrapped around her arm. She shoved it away. That got her moving, but it took a huge effort to drag her arms underneath her and push herself up.
She lay on a bank of tall grass, dark green with violet-tinged tips. This is... not the aether-sailer. She lifted her head, focused her blurry eyes. She was in a clearing surrounded by trees with dark purple trunks and bushy green canopies. The knee-high grass brushed against her trousers.
The air was damp and warm, sweat already sticking her shirt to her back and chest. A breeze made the leaves rustle and she could smell green plants, wet earth.
She staggered to her feet, staring around. She had been on the aether-sailer with the others, and now she was somewhere else. Others... Where are the others?
Emilie’s heart pounded in alarm, as if it had awoken to the strangeness and the danger before her brain had. She took a deep breath and heard a hitch in her throat. She told herself, Don’t panic. You’ve been alone in strange places before.
Yes, but at least I knew where the Sovereign was, even if I couldn’t get to it. And I knew where I was and what had happened.
Except she thought she knew what had happened this time, too. The aether current had been shifting, just like it had before. The aether current did this. It grabbed me – us? – and brought us... here. The others had to be here, too.
She moved through the grass, searching for more fallen bodies, but she didn’t see anyone. They had to be here. It was odd enough for an aether current to slam through the aether-sailer and grab people and transport them without crushing them to death or asphyxiating them; it was too odd to contemplate the thought that it might have just grabbed her and left the others alone. Making herself think about whys and hows at least made the frightened hitch in her breathing smooth out.
There was no sign of anyone in the clearing. Emilie thrashed through the grass in case it was hiding an unconscious body, stopped when she realized it was no use; they just weren’t here. She looked around, made herself think. Past the trees, she coul
d see the ground rose up into a hill. I need to get higher so I can see if they’re nearby.
She started through the trees, instinctively wary for snakes or biting insects. It was warm enough that you expected gnats or other little flying bugs, or grasshoppers fleeing from her boots swishing through the grass, but there was nothing. It was odd: even in Meneport, in the center of the city, there had been bugs.
She came out of the trees and concentrated on plowing her way up the hill, which was a little steeper than she had thought. At the top, she looked around.
And she thought, Uh-oh.
This was the strangest country, unlike anything in the Hollow World, unlike anything she had ever seen pictured or described in books.
She was surrounded by steep-sloped forested hills with the purple-green trees and grass. But beyond them were higher mountains, their shapes like nothing she had imagined a mountain might be before. Some were tall pillars, others were spirals. Some were pillars with plateaus balanced atop them, and some were like huge mushrooms. They were wreathed with clouds, and she could see the craggy shapes of rock, and different-colored swathes of trees or other vegetation, some green, some a dark blue, some red. But there were strange gaps between them. She could see the broken rock where sections had been torn from the ground. Did the aether do that?
Looking up, she realized she couldn’t see the sun. The light seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, evenly across the sky.
She looked around again, slowly, at the strange shapes of mountains, none of which looked as if they came from the same continent as these hills. Were the mountains even real? Maybe she was just seeing solid aether-ghosts. So does that mean I’m an aether-ghost, too? There didn’t seem any point in assuming that. If she had died and become an aether-ghost, there wasn’t anything she could do about it.
Except maybe have a good panic. She was probably overdue for a panic.
“Emilie!”
She spun around at the shout. It was Efrain, emerging from the trees at the bottom of the hill. He was disheveled and his pack was half off, but he was here. Her heart thumped with relief, and she waved and started down toward him. If she was a ghost, and she was beginning to doubt it, at least she wasn’t alone.
Efrain charged up toward her so she stopped to wait for him. He reached the top of the hill, breathing hard, and started to speak. Then he looked around.
Emilie gave him time to absorb it. Finally, he looked at her, wide-eyed, and bit his lip. She said, “If you start to cry, I will slap you.”
Efrain blinked, then glared at her, offended. “I wasn’t going to cry!”
“See that you don’t.” Emilie looked around again. “You didn’t see the others?”
“No. I thought I was alone.” His voice cracked a little and she gave him a warning glare. He glared back, snatched out his handkerchief and noisily blew his nose.
She said, “Well, we’re here. They have to be here, too. Where were you?”
“What? Oh, down there, just past those trees.” He felt his hair, and pulled a few twigs out. “I think I got dragged through one of them.”
“I was down there. I didn’t get dragged through a tree.” They had both ended up in different copses, but you could draw a straight line between them. Or a triangle, with the hill as the third point. That gave Emilie an idea.
Efrain was saying, “I’m sure only inferior people like me get dragged through trees…”
“Quiet! The current seemed to come toward us from the end of the corridor. You were standing beside me, just a couple of feet away.” Emilie frowned, trying to remember. “Miss Marlende and the Professor were in front of me, next to each other. The stranger, Hyacinth, was–”
Efrain lifted his brows. “You’re calling him Hyacinth?”
“What would you rather I call him? And we don’t even know if it’s a him! He might be a her, or a neither, or a both.”
“All right, fine, Hyacinth. He – or she or neither or both – was in front of the Professor and Miss Marlende, but over to the side of the corridor.” His brow furrowed. “Only, when we saw the current-thing coming, I think he moved closer to me. He was waving his arms, like… maybe he was trying to tell us to move?” Efrain looked around again, glumly. “I guess we should have listened.”
“I think it was too late by then.” Emilie took a deep breath. “But I think, based on where you ended up and where I ended up, we should look for the others that way.” She pointed to where a clump of tree-covered hills rose just past their two clumps. “I think we should walk that way, sort of at an angle.”
Efrain nodded. “All right.”
Emilie was a little startled by his ready agreement, but he had already started down the hill. She caught up with him in a couple of steps and they walked together, the grass swishing at their pants legs. Efrain said, “So… This is where Dr Marlende and Lord Engal and the other men went to? And the crew of the aether-sailer?”
“They must have,” Emilie said, but she was aware that was a big assumption. Maybe even bigger than the assumption that said that Miss Marlende and the professor and Hyacinth had been deposited in the trees in this direction and not just flung into empty space.
“And they haven’t come back.” Efrain’s expression was deeply worried. “Is there a way back?”
“I don’t know.” Emilie had been wondering about that herself. She was fairly certain if there was a way, it would require far more knowledge of aether currents than she had gleaned from the Lord Rohiro novels and from listening to the Marlendes’ and Lord Engal’s conversations. Neither she nor Efrain was a sorcerer or a natural philosopher, and she thought it would take both to get back to where they had started.
“But you know everything…” Efrain began, then looked at her. “I didn’t mean it like that! I just meant… You’ve done this before.”
Emilie swallowed her first knee-jerk acerbic comment. Maybe he really hadn’t meant it that way. “Yes, but I had help.”
Efrain pressed his lips together and didn’t say anything.
They reached the copse of trees and found the going far more difficult. The trees were tall, and the light beneath them was gloomy and tinged with violet. The ground was spongy with dark-colored moss which was soft enough, but it was growing over rocks and lumpy clumps of dirt. This hill was much steeper too, but at least the trees gave them something to steady themselves on. They struggled to the top of the hill and then had to be extra careful on the way down, their boots sliding through the moss and losing purchase on the rounded stone. Emilie managed it by half-sliding from tree to tree, and Efrain copied her. This would be a very bad time for a broken ankle for either of them.
They couldn’t see much of anything ahead except more trees, and Emilie started to call out for Miss Marlende and the professor. Efrain tugged on her sleeve. “Are you sure you should do that? What if there’s…”
“What?” Emilie asked. She dug her heels in on the next slope, half-sliding down and stopping herself on a tree at the bottom.
“I don’t know.” Efrain gestured in frustration and almost lost his grip on the tree he was using to keep from falling. “Aether monsters.”
Normally, Emilie would have scoffed. But after everything else she had seen, she supposed it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. “I just don’t know how we’re going to find them otherwise. Even if we’re right about where they landed, they probably started running around searching, just like we did.” Through the trees ahead she could see more light and thought they might be coming to the edge of a bluff.
“That’s true, but…”
“Wait. Be careful here; the ground’s all torn up.” The dirt and moss and rock were disturbed and the trees leaned forward, their roots half-ripped out of the ground. Emilie stepped carefully, trying not to put her weight on the unstable trunks. The ground did drop away ahead, and as she reached the edge, she saw “drop away” was exactly how to describe it.
There was a bowl-shaped section missing from the h
illy forest, at least a hundred yards wide. Emilie looked down the rough side of the cliff to see clouds and, miles below, a misty dark-blue mottled area that might be distant land. Or it might be the colors of the aether current. It was like whatever had been here had just fallen away. It had left a few fragments behind, irregularly shaped chunks of rock and dirt, floating on thin air – or thin aether – in the empty space.
Emilie’s whole body prickled with unease, and the ground underfoot suddenly felt delicate and apt to dissolve at any moment. Efrain whistled in awe. “What happened?”
“The aether current. It took the land somewhere else, just like it did us.” It had to be.
“But it wasn’t our current. It happened a while ago. You can see how the trees roots are all dry. They’ve been out of the ground a while.” Efrain pointed along the side of the bluff.
“Oh. Well, that’s good.” It was good. It meant it might be a fluke that wouldn’t happen every time an aether current fluctuated. And maybe Efrain was good for something after all. “We’ll have to go back and around–”
Movement on one of the small fragment-islands stopped the words in her throat. What she had thought was a bundle of dead vegetation rippled and stood and turned to face them. It was Hyacinth, trapped on a chunk of rock and dirt barely ten feet wide. It was floating somewhere between fifteen to twenty yards from the bluff.
“Uh oh,” Efrain said, low-voiced.
Emilie felt a little sick. “The aether current must have dropped it there.” It meant they had veered a little off as they had made their way through the forest. Miss Marlende and the professor must be further to the left. She lifted her hand and waved.
Hyacinth lifted its four arms and waved back, then drooped again. After a moment, it sat back down.
