However space turned and twisted in this universe, we came to the gate, or it came to us, in nearly perfect convergence. But only nearly. Alistair had misjudged. He would pass to the left of the portal just a moment too soon unless I took some action. I opened my mouth, intending to admit to him my ability to see the gates, but I swallowed the thought. Alistair was, for the moment, my only hope of getting home, and jealousy would put a wedge between us. Instead, I seized his arm. “Alistair, we can’t walk forever. We have no food or water. This heat will kill us.”
He pulled against my grip. “Come, Henry, we are nearly out of it, and there is water ahead.”
I rested my weight on my cane and bent my head, feigning fatigue and genuinely relishing the chance to rest my hip while the portal glided toward us or the universe folded between it and ourselves, and when I judged the distance right, I straightened my back and nodded to Alistair.
“I’m ready,” I said.
Alistair let out an impatient huff of air and resumed his course. I still had him by the arm when he folded around a corner out of the universe and pulled me after him.
I thought at first I had gone blind from the white glare of the world we had left behind. Cool air felt almost cold after the salt desert, and I smelled vegetation. My eyes began to adjust, and I realized I wasn't blind, my pupils had simply shrunk to pinpoints and were now adjusting to normal light.
“There is water,” Alistair said.
I followed the rustle of his passage down an incline as my eyes gradually adjusted to the light of a woodland whose trees—the smallest of their trunks at least ten feet in diameter—went up like skyscrapers before branching into an an interlaced canopy that allowed sunlight to ooze and trickle to the springy duff of the forest floor. My surroundings grew more clear as I descended into a dell. The vegetation rustling against my jeans looked like sword-fern, and when one of those leafy wands brushed the back of my hand, it left scratches like paper cuts. Things like mushrooms grew in fairy circles and bloomed like sea anemones with golden drops at the tip of each tentacle. I guessed the droplets served the same function as the nectar of a sundew, a sticky trap for the plant’s prey.
At the bottom of the dell, Alistair crouched at the lip of a pool that bubbled and rippled. His hunched back and outsized clothes made me think of a troll or satyr, and when he turned his head to look back at me, I almost expected to see his face distorted into something monstrous. But it was only ordinary Alistair who said, “Come. Drink your fill. The water here is sweet, and we may rest a while.”
Alistair hadn't thought to bring so much as a plastic cup, and I had left home with only my cane, so we scooped water in our hands. I drank enough to take the edge off my thirst, then splashed my sweat-salted face and wet my hair and the back of my neck. Finally, I sat back, trying to make my hip comfortable. “How far from here to the next portal?”
He found a comfortable hummock on which to sit and removed an outlier from a nearby fairy ring. The mushroom flower writhed and squealed like a deflating balloon. Alistair tossed it away. “Not far,” he said. “Some twenty minutes walk. Longer if your leg pains you.”
The stress on ligaments still incompletely healed had kindled a nagging pain. “And after that? How many worlds must we go through before we can return home?”
“A score and twelve,” he answered promptly.
“Thirty-two? It will take days just to reach our destination. You were never gone so long.”
He shrugged. “Time and gravity are relative, and as my dear Miss Fee explained to you, the way lies straight before us, laid open by the great rotation and revolution of the worlds, each around and through the rest. We will walk no more than a few hours in some worlds, and in others only bare minutes—a journey of some eighteen hours as it will seem to us.”
“Eighteen hours to pass through thirty-two worlds? How can this valley of yours be close enough to our world that anyone can walk there in less than a day?”
He snorted. “Not anyone, Henry. I dare say no other has done it since the old ones were first interred by the elder things. The difficulty is not in the walking but in knowing where to find the gates—which was a mighty work even for me—and in the power to pass through them when they are found. But for those who have both knowledge and power, the journey is indeed hardly difficult.”
We rested for ten minutes, then Alistair declared it time to move on. I drank my fill and more. Alistair assured me there would be drinkable water further on our way, but I knew better than to count on finding water even on a familiar route.
Alistair wasted no time studying his book here. He had marked the trunks of the trees along our route. They grew well apart from one another, their pitted trunks rising hundreds of yards before the first branches split away from the center. They cast such a shade beneath them that very little grew from the forest floor, and we had easy going. The ferns grew thickly, but either something had made trails between them, or the ferns grew naturally in clusters, leaving open ways to walk between them.
As we went, I scoured my brain for some means of dissuading him from his ambition, but nothing came to me. I couldn't see how to turn him back toward our world even if it were possible to turn home short of his goal. Even if I brought myself to the point of brutality against him, he only had to refuse to lead me back, and I would be forced to submit to him again or remain lost in some alien universe forever.
I fingered the makeshift knife in my pocket. “Alistair, you may as well tell me more about your goddess if I am to meet her at the end of our journey. What, for example, does she look like?”
He scowled over his shoulder. “Henry, how can you think of crass appearances when you stand poised on the threshold of transcendence?”
“I prefer not to be surprised.”
“Ah well, do I not love you for your practical mind? But the ancient powers have no fixed shape, nor are they of a purely material nature, existing in dimensions beyond our own understanding. Our minds are not equipped to see into such alien realms and remain sane.”
“That might present a problem. Will you have to close your eyes every time you speak to her?”
He laughed and cocked an impish eye over his shoulder. “Henry, I speak, of course, of ordinary minds. My own thoughts are so bent and disciplined I stand in no danger of madness in the presence of my beloved. I grant you might wish to avert your eyes until she condescends to robe herself in the trappings of our limited universe.”
“By which you mean she’ll take on a material form?”
He shrugged. “I don’t doubt she will see fit to do so.”
“Wouldn’t that make her vulnerable? To bombs or missiles?” Or to a stone knife, maybe?
He chuckled. “Vulnerable to a greater adversary, perhaps. No doubt there are some among her own brethren that could destroy her in such a material state, but no, she would swat mere ordinance out of the sky as easily as you would shoo away an insect, receiving at worst a sting for your trouble.”
That would eliminate my knife as a weapon unless Alistair was over-estimating the creature’s power, which was possible given his penchant for hyperbole.
“And you can tell me no more than that? She has no recognizable features? No eyes, no face?”
Alistair raised his brow. “You did not suppose she would be human, did you, Henry?”
“I hardly know what to expect, and I begin to wonder if you know yourself how she will manifest to you.”
That stung his ego just enough to make him frown. “Petulance does not become you, Henry. I freely confess I do not know how she will appear, nor was her material, or cosmic, form described in any of the references I could find.”
“Well then, what about her nature? What is she a goddess of?”
“A goddess of?” He scowled.
I skirted a fern, keeping my hands well away from its cutting fronds. “Yes, well, Artemis is a goddess of the hunt. Hera is the patroness of marriage and so on.”
He shut his eyes for
a moment and shook his head. “Can you not keep in mind that those myths are but little human toys? The true gods are far beyond us. They do not shape themselves to our narrow ideas, nor do we shape them by our attention to them.”
“I remember you once calling her Mother of Millions. Doesn’t that have some meaning?”
“Mother of Desolation.” He frowned over his shoulder at me.
“And she had some sort of spawn,” I added.
He sighed. “Yes. Yes, when free, before her imprisonment, she warred against her brothers, spawning her armies from a thousand thousand wombs and sending them forth against her enemies until the earth was barren under their feet and the armies of her enemies consumed.”
The creature grew more charming with every word, and I still hadn’t heard anything to suggest a weakness. I fell silent, returning to my private calculations.
Alistair went from tree to tree, each one marked with a gouge in the bark, and true to his word, we walked no more than twenty-five minutes when I saw the portal blooming in the crack where two trees, growing too close together, had merged their trunks and left a kind of fissure where the bark of one joined to the skin of the other
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I no longer remember the order in which we passed through one world after another, and I lost count somewhere after number seventeen, where we edged sideways along a narrow rock ledge between two portals, and above and below us, a herd of two legged mountain goats with eerily manlike faces clung to the near vertical cliff walls with two horny, hooflike fingers on goats’ forelegs. They turned their heads to watch us with indifferent, slit-pupilled eyes and went back to licking lichen from the cliff walls.
Alistair kept track of each world we passed through, studying his ancient journal, tabbing the corners of the pages, muttering to himself as we went. He had a variety of ways by which he located his portals. In some worlds, he would hold up his book before him to study a diagram or sketch, sometimes rotating it until he had achieved whatever effect he sought, then he would set out in some direction entirely inexplicable to me from the image on the page. Or he might stop to read a passage to himself—sometimes in a language I recognized, sometimes in languages that hardly sounded earthly at all—and go forward as if he were following a set of written directions.
Many worlds—at least the parts I saw of them—were bleak and empty as the salt plain as if they had not been fully formed. Others were hauntingly Earthlike until you looked under the skin. In one such case, we walked through a forest of low trees with barrel trunks like a baobab and the low, twisting branches of an oak. Their broad round leaves shaded out the undergrowth except for vines heavy with white flowers like lilies. Vivid, iridescent little flies buzzed around the flowers. On the branches hung ripening fruits, varying from small brown knobs to purple jelly blobs that sagged as if ready to drop at any moment.
The vines wrapped the trunks and branches of the trees, and the blooms filled the air with the scent of hyacinths and lilacs. I stepped closer to a nearby flower, lured by an impulse to breathe its air, and Alistair pulled me back just as the blossom opened, exposing a meaty mouth and throat, and sprang at me, barely missing my face. Only then did I see another of the lily blooms shoot out on its muscular stalk like a jack-in-the-box and snatch one of the little flies that came too close to its mouth.
Alistair chose a path skirting the edges of the trees and the higher brush that grew in the open spaces. I wondered why he didn’t walk in the clear area under the trees. His choice required us to struggle through or around knee-high brush and thorny weeds. As we passed under the outer fringe of the canopy, one of those little sagging jelly-fruits swung on its branch and dropped to the ground. It split and spilled purple-black jelly and a mass of white grubs that humped and squirmed toward us before sprouting wings, transforming in seconds into something like black and grey-striped dragonflies with curved abdomens and visible stingers. They rose from the ground in a swarm.
Alistair yelped and bolted like a startled puppy. I took his example, and we charged ahead through tangled underbrush. Alistair, in his panic, almost ran under the canopy of another tree before I caught him and swung him aside. We didn’t need to set off every jellyfruit in the forest.
Something stung the back of my neck like a wasp and kept stinging. I slapped and felt chitin crunch. Another dragonfly stung the back of my hand, and a third plunged its stinger in behind my ear. I batted a fourth and fifth out of the air in front of me.
Alistair was squealing and flailing. I swatted a dragonfly from his shoulder and another from his neck just as it plunged its stinger into his skin. He already had stings on both hands and two on his neck.
I received two more jabs and Alistair one on his ear before the last of the dragonflies peeled off from the pursuit and Alistair stumbled to a panting walk, then fell to his knees.
“Alistair, are they venomous?” I asked. Wherever I could see the stings, on my skin or his, they had turned red and swollen to the diameter of my palm. I felt the ones on my neck and decided they were much the same.
Alistair scratched madly at the swelling on the back of his hands. “Venomous?” He glared at me with curled lip. “Of course they’re venomous.”
“Don’t scratch, then,” I ordered him. “You’ll spread the poison. What can be done? Is there a remedy? Have you been stung before?”
“A remedy? Oh yes, a remedy. Well, Henry, the remedy is the sap from the mouths of the flysnappers.” He tossed his book at me, and I caught it, paging through to the last page Alistair had tabbed. I could make no sense of the diagrams or the pictures sketched around the margins. Even the additions in Alistair’s crabbed writing were mostly in languages I couldn’t recognize much less read. A few pages further on, I found a faded sketch of one of the stinging dragonflies. Beneath it, a flower that might have been a flysnapper lily with three liquid droplets falling from its lip.
Alistair continued to claw at the stings. “Would you like to be the one to tiptoe back and get some, or shall I?”
A rhetorical question, obviously. Alistair was in no condition to tiptoe. I grabbed his wrist to stop him scratching all the skin off his left hand. “What is its effect? How long to take action?”
He jerked his hand back and clawed at his swollen ear. “In a few minutes—half an hour, I suppose—the skin will start to peel, and the flesh to rot.”
“How fast does it spread?”
His inflamed ear was already bleeding from the tracks of his nails. “It doesn’t spread. It doesn’t have to spread. It’s an open, rotting wound where the flies lay their eggs and their larvae can hatch in their many millions and feed on the ripe meat of their host.”
I grimaced at his overly poetic description, but I relaxed a little. It appeared we didn’t have to fear imminent death. “How much of the sap, and how is it administered? Topical or internally? By injection?”
He writhed to reach a sting on the back of his head underneath his hair. “How could I possibly know?”
Alistair wanted to sit and scratch. I had to push and bully him along ahead of me. My own stings itched and ached, and my fingers flexed and relaxed repeatedly from the urge to scratch, but as I had warned Alistair, that would only spread the venom and irritate the already infected tissues. I concentrated on ignoring the maddening sensation.
We pushed ahead until we came to another cluster of the baobabs with their jellyfruit and the flysnappers.
Leaving Alistair scratching himself bloody outside the boundary of the trees, I took my knife from my pocket and studied the little ecosystem. Big dun-colored relatives of the black and grey dragonflies went from one of the brown fruit nubs to the next, poking each several times with their segmented tails. Females, I supposed. The smaller stinging variety were not in evidence until I glanced down and saw the ground was covered in a crackling layer of them, their shells split and their wings lying in papery heaps.
I scouted around the edge of the tree until I found a cluster of the white flo
wers with no jellyfruit nearby. Stepping under the leaves, I eyed the nearest blossom. I gripped my makeshift knife in one hand, then raised the other and gently wiggled my fingers. The nearest of the blooms took the bait, snapping the air where my fingers had been the moment before. I caught the pneumatic stem behind the flower head and pulled it taught, sawing with the sharpest edge of my stone shard until the flower came free, and the stalk recoiled, spilling clear, sticky sap.
The disembodied head of the flower twisted and snapped in my grasp. I pinched the fleshy bulb at the back of the bloom and forced open its “mouth.” Inside, the shells of the iridescent little flies clung to rubbery cilia. I squeezed harder, and clear sap welled up into the throat of the flower. I tipped a stream of sap over the stings on my hands and rubbed more onto the back of my neck. I saw no immediate change in the look of the swollen skin, but I thought the itch might have diminished a very little. On that evidence, I decided to postpone trying the remedy internally until I felt sure the topical administration wouldn’t work.
By the time I had collected another flower and returned to Alistair, I had definitely lost the desperate urge to scratch, and I thought the swelling might be reduced.
Alistair, on the other hand, had spend the intervening minutes scratching the top layer of skin off each of his injuries. I stifled my impatience. “I don’t know if this is safe to use on broken skin. What if it’s not compatible with Earth biology?” I asked.
“Don’t dither about, Henry.” Alistair grabbed my hand and pulled the wilting blossom to his head, squeezing the sap over his scalp and letting it run down the back of his neck, smearing it into the blood and the open wounds where he had scratched himself. The sap foamed where it met blood, and Alistair yelped at the sting, but after a certain amount of foot stamping and snarling of arcane curses in occult languages, the swelling had gone down and the itching diminished to the point that he was willing to go on.
The Blackwood Curse: Queen of Corruption Page 11
