Alistair crouched down and examined the tower. “And the Riverman controls all of the captured worlds?”
“As much as he can,” Polly said. “But there are tons of them. He’s powerful, but not all-powerful. He can only know about a very small percentage of what’s going on.”
Alistair picked up the top stone and held it between his thumb and forefinger. “So Fiona’s world still exists?”
“Probably.”
“And maybe I can get to it?” Alistair asked. “Fiona told me how kids … I mean, daydreamers … could invite you over to their worlds.”
“That’s only true before the Riverman nabs ’em,” Polly said. “Once their worlds are his, the Riverman is the only host, and he’s not keen on invitations. You can travel between them, if you’re clever. They’re tangled together and there are secret ways in and out. But it’s not like buying a train ticket and getting off at your chosen stop.”
Alistair looked closely at the stone in his hand. “But if Fiona’s world still exists, then she exists too?”
Polly sighed. “Hopefully … but she isn’t gonna be easy to find. Fiona is a daydreamer. I’ve met plenty of swimmers and figments, but never seen a daydreamer around these parts. Honestly, I don’t know what happens to them after the Riverman is done with them. He gets their worlds, obviously, and all the figments in those worlds. And he gets their souls, which he sucks up with a fountain pen and hides away somewhere. That’s as much as I know. As for their bodies? Well … they’re not back home, obviously. So he’s probably hiding them somewhere too.”
Hmm, mmm! The sound of a throat clearing.
Roha had snuck up on them and was leaning against a tree, his hands folded together. Behind him, smoke billowed. “The feast begins,” he said.
* * *
A rectangular pit of hot coals, about the size of a small in-ground pool, glowed orange and blue, except for the spot covered by the enormous bull made of sky and starlight. It seemed a primitive way to cook a meal, but then, so were the people cooking it. Surrounding the pit were the mud-caked families, happily trading stories and poking at the cosmic meat with charred sticks.
It didn’t smell all that different from the backyard barbecues Alistair was accustomed to, but the conversation was poles apart. He caught snippets as he and Polly circled the crowd, looking for a seat.
“Blood! Heart blood! Must learn the spear. Ha! Gave himself a new face. Red cheeks! Blood…”
“Herd is restless. Restless sky…”
“She has been to the dreams, and they promised her this is a good place, a stay-forever place where…”
As far as Alistair knew, tribal people didn’t speak English. “Why can I understand them?” he asked Polly.
“Same reason we can understand each other.” Polly motioned to an open spot on the ground where they could settle in for a bit. “There aren’t different languages here. You speak. The other person understands. It’s that simple. Not everyone’s a poet, obviously. We probably don’t want to stick around past dinner. It’s all farting and wrestling songs until dawn.”
With the mention of wrestling songs, one of the burlier men grinned, stood, and stomped his feet. “I break your face, I break your nose, I break your face, I break your nose,” he sang.
Polly rolled her eyes as she and Alistair sat on a bare patch of dirt near the pit of coals. “That’s about as lyrically sophisticated as it gets around here.”
The singer cut the song off midverse and glowered at her. When he saw Alistair, he snarled, “So who is this pup?”
Alistair tried to hide—dipping his head, curling a shoulder in front of his face—but Polly nudged his chin up so the singer could get a close look. “This is Alistair Cleary, and Alistair Cleary is like me. A god risen up from the waters! So don’t you even think about messing with him or he will call in a storm and end every last one of you troglodytes.”
Terror washed over the man’s eyes. He bowed his head slightly and brought a trembling hand up to stroke his ragged beard. “I am sorry.”
“Better be,” Polly said as she stood, and the man puffed up his chest as she walked toward him. “Chill out, square jaw. As long as you keep your cool, everything will be fine. We’ve got other business to attend to at the moment.”
The man stepped back as Polly moved past him and approached a circle of women who were crouching and laying out ferns like they were setting a table. Polly used her foot to nudge one of the women on the shoulder, forcing her to turn and create an opening in the circle for Polly to step through.
Polly pointed down at each of them, as if doling out instructions. Her voice was hushed and there was no way for Alistair to hear the conversation, but the women nodded their responses with clear reluctance, and one of them even removed her leathery boots, which she handed over to Polly. With the boots strung over her shoulder, Polly flashed them a thumbs-up, hopped out of the circle, and returned to Alistair’s side.
“What was that?” he asked.
She tossed him the boots. “Got you something to protect your tootsies. And I told them that they’ve offended us and that they should slice off some meat at the rib and wrap it in some fern. We’re taking our meal to go.”
* * *
Back at the clearing, Alistair and Polly sat on rocks, ferns in their laps like paper plates, as they ate the sparkling rib meat.
“It’s good,” Alistair said. An understatement. He’d been famished, and even though a piece of meat resembling the night sky wouldn’t seem appetizing, it was that and more. It was possibly the most delicious thing he had ever tasted.
“Whoever created this world liked to eat, that’s for sure,” Polly said.
“How did you first come to Aquavania?” Alistair asked.
Polly took a bite, and as she chewed she said, “You don’t wanna hear that story.”
“Sure I do.”
“Like I told you, pretty much the same tale as yours.” She took another bite, a bigger one this time, big enough to fill up her cheeks.
“Have you been here a long time?” Alistair asked.
She shrugged and drummed her fingers on the dome of her helmet, which sat on the rock next to her, a shining marvel of technology in a primeval forest.
“Where’s your home in the Solid World?” he asked. The Solid World was a term he’d heard Fiona use. It meant the real world, the world we already know, but he wasn’t sure if everyone in Aquavania used the same terminology, so he amended his question. “What I mean is, where are you from originally?”
Polly pointed to her cheeks. The message was clear: Mouth full, can’t talk.
“I’m from a place called Thessaly,” Alistair went on. “I live there with my mom, my dad, and my sister, Keri. Fiona lived up the street from me.”
Polly flashed him a lazy thumbs-up, but Alistair wasn’t really expecting a response. Talking about home made home seem closer. He may have only been in Aquavania for a few hours, but he felt as if he’d been away for eons.
“Down the street there was a kid named Charlie Dwyer. Have you ever known anyone named Charlie Dwyer?” he asked.
It may have sounded like a simple question, but it was many questions wrapped in one. Did Polly know the sad truth that Alistair had only recently discovered? Did she know that his former best friend lived a double life—one in the Solid World and one in Aquavania? She had said that the Riverman went by many names. Did she know that one of those names was Charlie Dwyer?
Polly shook her head and swallowed. “Charlie Dwyer? Hmmm. Sounds like a guy who plays baseball,” she said.
Alistair wrinkled his nose. “Only if it’s a video game.”
“So he’s your pal?” Polly asked.
“Not really,” Alistair said. “Or not anymore. Wasn’t sure if you’d heard of him, is all.”
“He’s famous?”
“I don’t know,” Alistair said. “He had an older brother. A guy named Kyle.”
“Had?” Polly asked. “Kyle died?”
“You’re homesick,” Polly said as she took another bite. “It’ll fade.”
God, I hope not, Alistair thought. He wanted such a virulent strain of homesickness that it would compel him to do the impossible, to find Fiona and bring her back and straighten out all the bent things in his life.
“Are you sure there isn’t a way—”
A whoosh cut off Alistair’s voice as a curved, sharpened stick flipped through the air and lodged itself in the soft ground at their feet. Alistair jerked his head around. A woman from the settlement was standing about twenty yards away, her face twitching with anger.
“Not good.” Polly hopped up, snatched her space helmet.
The woman’s feet were bare. Alistair was wearing her boots. “I thought you were friendly with them,” he said.
“Pfff. Friends are friendly, and no one is friends with a god,” Polly replied as she tucked the helmet under her arm.
“If she thinks you’re a god, then why is she throwing things at us?”
“Well, you always gotta have a few atheists. Let’s move!” And with that, Polly was off running.
Alistair paused for a moment to see if the woman would simply chase after Polly and leave him alone.
“Monster! Demon!” howled the woman, her eyes fixed on Alistair.
That settled that. So Alistair started running too, following in Polly’s path. They kept to the woods, hurdling stones and ducking under branches. Considering she was wearing a spacesuit, Polly was incredibly nimble, and Alistair struggled to keep up. Luckily, he was fast enough to outrun the woman, but only barely.
This neck of the forest was even more brilliant than the rest. Everything was more. The butterflies and mushrooms were more plentiful, more colorful. Ferns and orchids were more luscious and fragrant. Tree bark was more gnarled and branches more twisted. It was a storybook forest.
Within a few minutes, they reached a pond, its surface adorned with lily pads. Polly stood along the edge, waiting for Alistair. The sounds of the woman—her footfalls cracking sticks, her grunts and snarls of frustration—were getting louder, and Alistair held his hands up behind his head to shield it from projectiles. It threw off his balance and he wasn’t sure how far he could run like that. He desperately hoped that Polly had a plan.
“Jump in,” Polly ordered as soon as Alistair reached her.
The water was about twenty yards in diameter and appeared to be no more than four or five feet deep. An old-fashioned swimming hole—fine for a dip on a hot summer day, but for protection from a homicidal cavewoman?
“Are you crazy?” Alistair asked.
“Far from it,” Polly said, and she took a shallow dive from a rotten log on the banks.
The woman tromped toward them, now within thirty or forty yards. “Monster!” she screamed again.
Polly’s head surfaced in the center of the pond, her hair darker now and smoothed against the sides of her face. She resembled a seal, until she pulled her helmet up from the water, dumped it out, and snapped it into place on her shoulders. She kept the mask open so that she could speak. “If you don’t think you’re a strong enough swimmer, then grab my ankle. I’m watertight in this thing and I can pull you where you need to go. Even if you think you can keep up, you better jump in, because this gal will catch you and she will kill you. I guarantee it.”
As Polly snapped her mask down, Alistair crouched on a rock and swept some fingers across the water. It was normal water—wet, chilly, nothing to indicate it would protect them. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Demon!” the cavewoman screamed again, but this time a stone accompanied the scream and it hit Alistair below the ear, sending him headfirst into the water.
His body somersaulted below the surface. He opened his mouth to gasp for air, and water filled his throat. His chest lurched and forced some of the water back out. Stones rained down on him. It was too murky to see bubbles or beams of light, so the direction of the impacts was the only thing that told him which way was up.
A hand grabbed his wrist. It felt like a small hand, but it tugged with such a violent force that it might as well have been the jaws of a sea creature. It pulled him down farther until the murkiness became blackness and the stones thrown by the cavewoman merely tapped Alistair, if they hit him at all.
Down they went. Alistair’s lungs were straining, but not much, or not nearly enough considering he’d been underwater for at least a minute. The pressure should have been overwhelming too, but his eardrums felt normal, as if his body was built for this.
The hand let go of his wrist for a moment, but before the panic of abandonment could seize his chest, a foot was in Alistair’s face. The rubber of a moon-boot grazed Alistair’s cheek. He wrapped both hands around it and let it pull him.
Deeper, deeper, deeper.
CHAPTER 4
They fell from the sky. One moment they were in the pond, and the next they were in a cloud, plummeting alongside drops of rain. Alistair held Polly’s ankle even tighter, but he wasn’t sure how long he could maintain his grip. She had straightened her body into a missile, head pointed downward as gravity piled on the momentum.
“We’re gonna die!” Alistair screamed, but with the hiss of the wind and with the space helmet covering Polly’s head, it would have been difficult for her to hear him. He had the choice of letting go, of course, but then what was he going to do? Flap his arms like wings to stay aloft?
They had entered a new world. As they escaped the wispy haze of the clouds, they faced an expanse of red. Whether it was earth or liquid was hard to say. Red. That was the only sure thing. Even the rain around them was red, lashing Alistair’s face and washing pink lenses over his irises. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth.
Standing atop the high dive at the high school’s pool when he was eight years old, Alistair had done the same thing. Blind, molars grinding, he had stood there enduring the chants of “Do it! Do it! Do it!” coming from Charlie and the chorus of third graders standing shoulder-deep in the shallow end. He had leaned forward and let his body fall and he had hit the water sideways, taking the impact in the ribs. He might as well have been hitting the ground.
What Alistair hit in the world of red wasn’t the ground, but it wasn’t exactly liquid either. It was like porridge and it swallowed him whole. Flurrrrrp! was the sound it made as his body entered it. It didn’t hurt, though. The substance hugged Alistair with a chilly quiver and worked its way between his fingers until they finally slipped from Polly’s ankle and Alistair was alone.
He didn’t dare open his eyes. The stuff was oozing into his nostrils. He tried to swim to the surface, but it was of no use. He couldn’t move his body in any direction. The fear of suffocation was even worse than the fear of falling. At least falling had a visceral thrill. Suffocation was torture, pure and simple.
As spasms of panic rippled through Alistair’s torso, the sludge started to quake. Then, all at once, it opened up beneath him. There was a slurp and a tug from below, and he couldn’t fight it. Like a loosened clog through a drain, he was sucked through some sort of tube. His shoulders rubbed against its edges.
For at least a minute the tube carried him along, twisting back and forth as if it were a digestive tract. And like a digestive tract, it expelled him, shot his body out into a dimly lit chamber. His body fell, landed on a slightly taut net that stretched across the length of the chamber, and bounced twice—once high and once low. When his body settled, its weight was too much to anchor Alistair in place, and he rolled down the net to the valley at its center, where he crashed into Polly.
She patted him on the cheek, as if to say, Sorry, kid, then she nudged him away, onto his back.
From below came a cacophony of doors opening and feet shuffling, followed by an eruption of rousing cheers.
“New blood! New blood! New blood!”
Above, torches mounted on walls exploded to life, paint
ing the surroundings in a fresh and fiery light. The walls were made from all shapes and sizes of stone, immaculate masonry, with granite and marble clinging together. The ceiling was covered in giant fleshy tubes, swaying like squid tentacles, a couple dripping red sludge.
“New blood! New blood! New blood!”
Alistair and Polly flipped over onto their stomachs. A fist-pumping crowd of hundreds dressed in tunics and leather surrounded a large pedestal, which stood directly below the net. At first, it seemed like the pedestal was growing or moving up to meet them, but it was soon clear that ropes tied to the corners of the net were spooling out from dark holes in the walls and lowering Alistair and Polly.
“New blood! New blood! New blood!”
They came to rest on the cold, flat surface of the pedestal, which the net, like a woven tablecloth, now draped over. Polly jumped to her feet immediately and began wiping the remaining red sludge from her spacesuit. As he pushed himself up, Alistair could feel the chants, the vibrations from the rowdy crowd. The mob was at least twenty feet below, but that did little to allay his fears. They were a pack of hyenas at the base of a tree. Even if they couldn’t find their way up, Alistair would probably, eventually, have to go down.
“New blood! New blood! New blood!”
A curved balcony jutted out from the wall, mounted only a few feet higher than the pedestal. Over the middle of the balcony hung a swing fashioned from rusty chains and a giant tortoiseshell. On the swing sat a boy.
“Silence!” the boy bellowed, the tremor of his voice giving the swing a wee push.
Like that, the crowd cut out. Their roar became whispers and attention settled on the boy.
“Thank you, my lovelies,” he told the people. “I understand your excitement. It has been a while since we’ve had visitors. And now we have two! Most promising. But we must be gracious hosts. Rabble-rousing is sure to frighten them.”
The boy had tight curls in his hair and a swarthy complexion. He wore scale mail on his chest and steel armor on his legs. Above him hung a curtain of looped ropes that resembled a line of nooses. Each rope was painted a different color—maroon, turquoise, beige, purple with neon green stripes—and they stretched up into the jumble of fleshy tubes above. A small sword with a ruby-encrusted handle rested in the boy’s lap. If Alistair had to guess, he would have said the boy was six years old.
The Whisper Page 4
