by Ted Sanders
He breathed heavily down at her for several seconds, his great chest heaving. “Our little empath,” he sang at her at last. “I thought it might be you. So good of you to return.”
He’d sensed her using the vine. No doubt they all had. She’d been stupid.
Dr. Jericho turned to the other Mordin. They exchanged words; he seemed to be interrogating them. One of them handed him something, and he turned back to April, extending a hand as he slipped a huge ring onto a gruesome finger. A red stone glittered.
“Before we go on, let me explain the situation,” Dr. Jericho said. “There is no hope for you. You will come with us now.”
April saw herself through Baron’s crazed eyes. She looked and smelled as frightened as she felt. She tried to settle herself. But now, through his ears, she heard the rattling rustle of a hundred thousand tiny stones, coming from behind her. And through his eyes, a monstrous shape looming over her shoulder. Bigger than a Mordin by far. It stood, rising as high as the barn roof, undulating like a tight flock of birds, a murmuration. She didn’t need to turn around. This, she knew, had to be the golem. She was surrounded.
“I’ve already lost one golem tonight,” Dr. Jericho said. “It’s always good to have a spare, don’t you think?”
“I didn’t know you were a pet owner,” April said. “That’s nice.”
“Na’tola ni chenthi,” said one of the other Mordin. Except this was not a Mordin’s voice. This voice was like daggers and silk, honey and poison. “There is nothing to discuss. Let us convince her.”
“Quite right,” said Dr. Jericho. He lifted his hand, and the Mordin holding Baron reared back. Pain exploded along April’s neck and spine.
And then she felt Baron no more.
April squeezed her eyes shut. The Mordin had killed Baron—torn him in two, maybe. She couldn’t feel him.
But something was wrong. Something was . . . off. It wasn’t just Baron that was gone. The Ravenvine itself was gone. April couldn’t reach it. She wasn’t severed, she just . . . couldn’t get hold of it. She realized there was a presence in her way, a presence she hadn’t noticed in the terror of a few moments ago.
Something had taken control of the Ravenvine. Something she’d felt before.
April opened her eyes. In the Mordin’s arms, Baron squirmed helplessly. He was alive. A figure stepped forward—one of the Riven, but not a Mordin after all. This one was shorter, and curvier. Pale blond hair pulled back into a tight braid. A cruel, perfect mouth and bright blue eyes. A triangular red stone gleaming high in a smooth white forehead.
An Auditor.
A mimic. A hijacker. Auditors had no Tan’ji of their own, but instead had the ability to draw on the power of any Tan’ji around them. And this one had done so now, taking control of the Ravenvine so thoroughly that she’d pushed April clean out of it.
“You were right, Ja’raka,” said the Auditor to Dr. Jericho, slinking closer like a tiger. Her blue eyes flashed. “Our little empath, back again.”
“So many tasty morsels tonight,” said Dr. Jericho. “Some slip away. Others do not.”
April was not prone to anger. She was a reasonable person who believed in more constructive emotions. But sometimes, being pissed off was the right thing to be. She bundled her rage and reached for the vine. The Auditor was ready for it, though, and too strong. She kept April at bay, maintaining her stranglehold on the vine’s power. Meanwhile April could hear the golem behind her, slithering closer. It swept over her feet, gripping her ankles in a liquid vise.
And then, inexplicably, the Auditor staggered back, her blue eyes widening. April felt a loose spot in the Auditor’s grip on the vine—almost as if it had been pried open from the outside—and she poured herself into it, back into the Ravenvine. She tried to oust the Auditor from it completely, but couldn’t. The Auditor held on with an angry shriek, still clinging to a share of the vine’s powers.
At almost the same moment, the Mordin holding Baron cried out and crumpled, clutching at his back and falling to his knees. He spilled Baron onto the ground, even as April opened her mind to the dog’s again. Fear. Shame. Hurt. Baron scampered a few steps away and then rounded on the Auditor, snapping at her, more out of fear and desperation than anything else. The Auditor drew back.
And now Dr. Jericho sank awkwardly to one knee, shaking his head. The golem’s grip around April’s legs loosened and fell away. Two other Mordin staggered back, groaning. What was happening?
“Run!”
April turned toward this new voice. Isabel stood in the barn door, her red hair ghostly copper in the starlight. She glared at Dr. Jericho, her face crumpled with fury. She held an unfamiliar white disk in her hands. Her eyes flicked to April.
“Run!” she yelled again. “I can’t do more than I already have!”
Dr. Jericho was already getting back to his feet. April ran toward the barn, toward Isabel. Baron sprinted past her. She could hear the golem gathering itself behind, the Auditor shouting, footsteps pounding. Just as April reached the barn door, the golem swung a mighty arm at her, tripping her heavily. But in the same motion, it tore loose a section of wall. The doorway began to collapse. April and Isabel dove into the high loft of the barn, with Baron scooting ahead, just as the heavy beam above the door and a section of wall thundered to the ground behind them, sealing the narrow way in with a thick tangle of wreckage.
April clambered to her feet. A few hundred slick golem stones had been cut off from the rest. They lay scattered across the floor, lifeless. Meanwhile Dr. Jericho and the other Riven roared and pounded outside, tearing at the timber, but they couldn’t get in.
“I came to get you,” said Isabel, rising. “We’re leaving. Joshua’s going to—”
April pressed her hand against the woman’s mouth, laid a finger against her own lips. She tipped her eyes meaningfully down at Baron. The Auditor was still inside the Ravenvine, and therefore—infuriatingly—still inside Baron’s mind. She could see and hear everything.
“Go,” said April, tipping her head.
They turned to go. They hadn’t gone twenty feet when the roof high above them splintered. Baron scrambled back as a fist the size of a boulder, seemingly made of smoke and stone, pounded into the ground just in front of them. Debris rained down on April’s head. The golem had broken through the roof.
Stretched from the floor to the high ceiling like a tree, the golem began to sprout tentacles, thick fingers of rock that grew swiftly like airborne rivers of oil, surrounding them. Isabel grabbed a loose plank and swung at one of the tentacles. She knocked a gaping hole in it, stones flying in all directions, but the writhing tendril healed itself instantaneously. It wrapped around her legs. She swung again and briefly broke loose.
April scrabbled in the dirt at her feet and found a heavy length of some old farm implement, a huge pipe thick with rust and jagged at one end. She swung wildly, struggling to keep her balance, fighting off the golem’s ever-encroaching arms. Meanwhile, the main body of the golem loomed thirty feet overhead, rising up to the ceiling like a black wave. Why didn’t it just swallow them up?
April fought on. Baron barked and leapt. They would never get away. This was a battle April wasn’t prepared for. This was Gabriel’s territory—or better yet, Chloe’s. She looked up into the rafters, sure that at any moment the golem would crash down upon them, overpowering them. Through the vine, she caught wind of a pair of mourning doves up there, frightened out of their slumber by all the commotion. As she fought, she opened herself to the eyes of one of them.
From that vantage point, high above the ground, she saw that the roof was in shambles. Already decrepit, the golem had smashed it beyond repair. In fact, it looked like the golem was holding the broken roof aloft. April wondered if the towering golem might not be the only thing keeping the barn standing at all. But why would it bother? Why not let the barn collapse and crush them all?
“They want us alive,” April shouted.
“They want you alive,”
called Isabel.
April hardly knew if that was true—or why it would be true—but it gave her a fiendish idea. A crazy idea, but the only one she had. She beat the golem back from her legs and lurched away. She raised the rusted pipe to her own throat and pressed the jagged end against her flesh. “They won’t take me alive,” she said loudly, hearing her voice through Baron’s ears, knowing the Auditor would hear it too. “I’m ending it. Now.”
Isabel froze. In a flash, the golem coalesced and went for April, striking like a snake. It swarmed over her, seizing her arm and knocking the pipe free. And as it did—as it withdrew from the roof high overhead—the barn gave out a slow, screeching wail. Something massive snapped, like the limb of a tree in a deep freeze. And then with a splintering, thundering bellow, the barn came down.
It was the golem that saved her—that saved them all. The body of the thing took the brunt of the collapse. April was thrown sideways, carried with the golem’s body as easily as a stick down a river. A river of blinding, crushing mud. As she slid, she reached out for Baron through the vine. The Auditor was gone—had she been crushed? As for Baron, he too was buried and sliding, just feet away, but he was okay. With effort, April cut off the vine entirely, hoping the Riven would think she was dead.
She bumped up against something hard, banging her hip painfully. The rocky current twisted her, pinning her arm behind her back. At last they came to a stop. The golem’s stones were loose around her, and she began to dig her way out. Baron was on her in an instant, snuffling around her face. A slab of timber had pinned her legs, but she was mostly unhurt. She wrenched her legs free and dragged herself into the long grass.
Dr. Jericho was roaring angrily somewhere beyond the rubble at the front of the barn. He, at least, had not been crushed in the collapse. And what about Isabel? For that matter, what about Joshua and the others? Had they gotten out the back of the barn in time, or had she made a terrible mistake?
But there was no time to fret. She had to get away. She crawled on her belly as quickly and quietly as she could. She’d spilled out onto the west side of the barn, where there was a little stream lined with trees fifty yards ahead—Winding Creek, it was called. If she could get to it, she could hide.
Baron seemed to understand the need for quiet. He slunk low at her side as she crawled. She desperately wanted to reach out to him, to use his nose and ears, but was too afraid. She would remain blind—or human, anyway—until she got farther away.
She kept her own ears open as best she could. Briefly, she thought she heard voices around the back of the barn, human voices—surely the others had gotten out, right? But she also heard Mordin running. The best she could say about that was that none of them came her way.
She kept crawling. At last, after maybe a full minute, and without any signs of pursuit, she reached the creek. Although it was true that Winding Creek did in fact wind in places, here beside the meadow it ran almost straight north and south. Though the water was barely a foot deep and only a few feet wide, the banks were just steep enough, and the grass tall enough, to completely hide her. She hunkered down at the water’s edge, peering back over the meadow. Baron lay down beside her, exhausted. Her eyes slid over the spot where the humour sat. Gabriel was still there. She had to hope the others had gotten out of the barn and were safe inside the humour now.
From this angle, she could see past the slippery blur of the humour and deeper into the meadow. Almost straight in that direction, a half mile to the north, was her house. It seemed almost too incredible to imagine. No one would be there now, her brother and uncle having taken refuge with a friend of the family. She could hardly imagine how Uncle Harrison must be explaining all this to himself. As she stared past the humour into the night, thinking about the word “family,” she realized she saw light. A distant dot of bright rich blue, moving very slightly like a hovering firefly, deep in the dark meadow. She stood up without thinking, peering at it, but almost at once she lost sight of it. The gleaming blue dot winked out.
Her skin tingled with a desperate hope, threatening to melt her. Horace’s jithandra. What else could it be? That must be him, out there in the meadow. She squinted to catch a glimpse of it again.
Suddenly a massive crumpling sound tore through the air, much closer by. The humour vanished, and the huge swath of meadow at the back of the barn sprang into sight. April dropped to a crouch, her heart a hammer. In the newly exposed patch of meadow, she saw the shadows of several Riven—including Dr. Jericho, who must have galloped around from the front of the barn after it collapsed. Another Mordin lay on the ground at Dr. Jericho’s feet, wailing in pain.
Mordin, yes. Six or seven by April’s count.
But no humans.
No one at all.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Leavings
MR. MEISTER GRABBED JOSHUA AND HAULED HIM TO HIS FEET. “Run!” he cried, as the barn began to collapse around them.
Mr. Meister dragged Joshua behind him and pushed Brian ahead, out of the stall. Joshua didn’t know an old man could have such strength. They stumbled clear of the little room just as it caved in, then staggered out the corridor in a rush, heading toward the back entrance of the barn, the way they’d come in. The walls began to buckle too, and the doorway began to lean, threatening to trap them. Brian struggled, half shuffling, handcuffed as he was. Tunraden banged against his knees.
The noise around them pounded at Joshua’s ears. A huge beam crashed down, nearly striking them. With a groan, the doorway they were sprinting for suddenly gave way, tumbling like a badly built tower of bricks just as they were nearly upon it. It was so loud, Joshua barely heard the crack of Mr. Meister’s weapon as he fired it for a third time. The slumping debris in the doorway exploded outward. Together they stumbled through the newly made opening. Brian fell into the grass painfully. Joshua skipped over him and turned to watch as the entire barn went down in a cloud of dust.
“It is time,” Mr. Meister said, even as the dust still rose into the sky. “Our hand has been dealt to us.” He picked Brian off the ground and turned to Joshua.
“Use the Laithe, Joshua. Get us out. Take us anywhere.”
“But I—”
“Anywhere. And you must be swift. Dr. Jericho is attuned to the Laithe, do you understand? Sensitive to it. That’s how he found you in the first place. He will sense it when you use it, and he will come running. With or without Ingrid, he will find us in no time.”
Joshua nodded, as frightened as he’d ever been. He fumbled with the Laithe, but he was so nervous he couldn’t get the sphere to center on North America.
A Mordin came around the corner of the collapsed barn. And then another. But instead of firing his weapon, Mr. Meister shoved Joshua and Brian forward into the nothingness that lay in front of them—into the humour.
All sight dropped away. Mr. Meister kept pushing them on, deeper into the silent gloom. But it wasn’t silent. There was sound here now. A shrill melody that grabbed Joshua, seeming to crawl across his skin. Ingrid’s flute.
“Gabriel!” Mr. Meister called.
Gabriel’s voice came at them, from everywhere at once. He sounded exhausted. “Here. I’m nearly done, though. I can’t stop her any longer.”
“It doesn’t matter. We have what we need.”
“Keep moving,” Gabriel said. “There are Mordin behind you. Two of them. No—three now.”
“Dr. Jericho?”
“Not yet.”
“He will come soon enough. Joshua is going to open a portal. Have the others returned?”
“No. I’ve been alone in the humour with Ingrid, keeping her lost, keeping her busy. Dr. Jericho was after me for a while too, but then he left in a hurry. What happened to April?”
“I do not know. I fear that Dr. Jericho went after her, but I sent Isabel to help. Let us hope she does.”
“And Horace and Chloe?” asked Gabriel.
“I have seen no sign, and do not expect we will. We must leave without them.”
There was a pause. Joshua thought his heart would break. Leave without the others?
“We cannot leave,” said Gabriel. “Horace said he saw—”
“Horace told us what he wanted us to know, and no more,” Mr. Meister said sternly. “His exact words, I believe, were ‘People get away.’”
People, Joshua thought. But not everyone. He waited for someone to say something else. The humour was silent except for the clinging, searching melody of Ingrid’s flute. Mr. Meister wanted Joshua to open a portal here, so that he and Brian could escape. But there was no sign of Horace, or Chloe, or April. If Joshua opened a portal now and left, he’d be leaving them behind.
At last Gabriel spoke. “If the others stay, I stay,” he said firmly. “You go. Get Tunraden and the Laithe away.”
“But the Riven are everywhere!” Joshua cried, unable to help himself.
“All the more reason for me to stay.”
“I can’t do it,” Brian said suddenly. “I can’t leave them. I can’t leave Gabriel.”
“You will send help,” Gabriel said. “Now move. Keep moving. Ingrid is with a Mordin. They are coming for you.”
They shuffled forward again, fast as they dared. Joshua rubbed his arm, as if he could rub the sound of Ingrid’s flute away.
“Behind you!” Gabriel cried. “Here!”
The crack of Mr. Meister’s weapon rocked through the humour.
“One down,” said Gabriel. “But two more have joined us. You must hurry.”
Mr. Meister’s unseen hands gripped Joshua by the arms. “Get the portal ready, Joshua. Think of a place. Let the Laithe be that place. Gabriel will tell us when we’re clear.”
But Joshua, panicking, could only think of every place. A frozen lake in Canada, a desert in South America, a farm in Madagascar. Nowhere he could actually take them. Why wouldn’t his brain work?
“Tell me where,” he said.
“No. You are the Keeper of the Laithe. You decide. Only you can get us away.”
His mind still wouldn’t focus. But as he thought of a thousand places they could never go, his eyes straining uselessly to see the Laithe, he realized that the Laithe was listening to him. It was shifting with his thoughts, spinning, trying to find the destination he wanted it to find.
