by John March
Part of her wanted to flee, as some of her servants were, but her feet felt bound to the floor, her legs so loose-jointed she felt she might fall if she moved at all. An empty hollow of fear held her inside, but she remembered her uncle's pride in the courage of her people, and she knew, with a clear certainty, she would choose not to run.
Neither of the men moved. They stood facing each other with expressions of furious concentration furrowing their faces, their lips moving silently, as if each struggled to recall some vital message fragment for the other.
The room thrummed, reverberating as if repeatedly struck, and fine blue fissures appeared in the middle of the air. Halfway between the men the surface of the floor blistered, and cracks appeared in the wall at the far side of the room.
Palona didn't know how long she stood there until guards burst into the room behind her, as many as a dozen — some half-dressed, all equipped with weapons and shields, and stumbled into a flowing wall of ribbons that appeared in front of them.
As the guards fought their way past the entanglement, manoeuvring around Palona and Jaquit, a long many-legged creature, the colour of black Epitian silk, slunk into the far end of the room with its head low, like a hound following a scent. It moved with the sinuous fluidity of a serpent, gliding smoothly over chunks of masonry, weaving blindly. For the second time she felt shocked into disbelief, as eyeless it seemed to sense them, rearing suddenly to almost the height of a man.
An axe, hurled by Orim, neatly split what might have been its head, and it fell writhing to the floor, spraying a smoking black liquid across the wall. Behind the creature's thrashing body a pall settled outside, and other dark shapes appeared.
Jaquit moved near her, protective and fearless as ever. The fight between Orim and Doctor Elali, and her guards, seemed to be forgotten. Orim backed towards her as a pack of shaggy-haired jet black things bounded past the remnants of the door. Heavily muscled like cheg, but with less than half the stature and only four limbs, they spread out, and charged across the room without pausing.
Two in front of Orim were enveloped in a sheet of flame, and another ran into something like an invisible flow of engulfing sand, and from the corner of her eye Palona could see others blasted apart in front of Elali. More followed, scrambling round the edge of the hallway, and charged into her guards.
Unable to move, her senses overwhelmed by the impossible onslaught, Palona stood as if in a calm place at the heart of a storm. Behind her, in some other part of the house she heard crashes and screams, and beyond the fight yet another creature pushed into the room. This one all charcoal blue knots and tangles, like bundles of bramble oddly gathered together, with arm-length razor spurs. It shambled forward undeterred as another gout of fire washed over it, brushed off something from Elali that shattered the wall near the entrance, then gathered itself and sprang.
Orim leapt backwards as it landed, almost colliding with her. Palona caught a movement behind her, multiple low scuttling shapes with bulbous gelatinous bodies supported on long spindly legs. One brushed her as it passed, and then something light landed on her back and heaved itself up onto her shoulders with a dozen or more legs clinging to the fabric of her dress.
She screamed, and Orim wheeled round, a sword appearing in his hand as he swung. He slashed the monstrosity from her head in a spray of noxious liquid, and a boiling cloud of fire surrounded them, but Palona saw another like the things that had jumped on her lunge past and stab Orim with a stinger as long and thin as a rapier, before bursting into flames and rolling away.
Around her, the guards were falling, pummelled to the floor, grappling dark shapes or burning. She felt strong arms fold around her as bright red blooms appeared across Jaquit's back, and abruptly the room was gone.
Palona and Orim tumbled backwards through emptiness, locked in an embrace. She tried to scream with horror and fear, scream at him to take her back for Jaquit, but no sound came from her throat. She wanted to push him away, but could sense he'd been hurt and found herself clinging tighter as his grip slackened. She closed her eyes, and wished she was anywhere but in this impossibly strange place.
As quickly as she'd been snatched away from Vergence she arrived somewhere else. Her feet landed on a hard surface and the sudden weight of Orim dragged them both to the ground, with Palona on top — still half wrapped in his arms.
Orim lay on his back, his body unmoving except for his eyes and lips. With what must have taken a colossal effort, he gripped her shoulder, and pulled her down to hear him speak.
“Do … not … leave … me …”
Each word sounded like an agony, and when he'd finished he lay completely still, with nothing more than the faintest of breaths disturbing his beard to show he still lived.
Palona knelt next to Orim with tears sliding down her face, a solitary figure in the vast desolate plain of red sand and twisted rocks, while overhead a fiery wind chased molten clouds across a dark ruby sky.
Lost
EBRYN FELL WITH SASH clutched tightly in his arms. With a dry rattling and gust of putrid breath, he felt the thing behind him thrashing about, caught in the same flow, captured in the same small sphere as they hurtled through the between. Part of it struck him on the hip, and then seized hold of the back of his cloak.
A second vortex appeared behind them, disrupting the stream connecting him to Fyrenar. He sensed it pulling at the spiny horror, pulling at him, and the thing behind him hissed and fell away. For a moment, the fabric of his cloak held, then ripped, and the creature was gone. But in the few seconds it held him by his clothing, his connection to Fyrenar broke.
Like a climber brushed from a cliff-face by a violent gust, Ebryn felt his grip on the cool forests of Fyrenar peel away, invaded and twisted by something dark and horrific, and the second stream grabbed him, flinging him outwards, tumbling away in the wake of the creature.
The smell of corruption flowed around him, invading his nostrils and throat, and stinging his eyes. Behind him, something seemed to burn, heat falling on his back like a hot sun. He fought against the torrent, sensing a dreadful place at the far end, trying to turn, pushing back against the rising fear threatening to swamp him. He felt like a child again, caught in the waterfall, drowning, hopelessness threatening to overwhelm him, struggling for breath with his heart racing.
By sheer will, Ebryn dragged his attention back, forced himself to focus on his own pulse, Sash's ragged breath against his cheek, his right hand slick with her blood.
He tried to remember Brydeline's instructions. She'd told him the trick was to work with what you have, find a similar destination, not to drain your strength fighting against a flow once you were caught in it. Seek points of contrast, if you realised your destination might be a trap world or somewhere deadly, look for a place where you could survive long enough to escape.
Ebryn knew he'd crossed over into the deep shadow planes, a swathe of countless dark realms running through the heart of the ephemeral core. Too deep to avoid one of the shade realities he sensed around him.
A dark purple-blue flush washed over the ghostly rainbow of colours surrounding him, a sure sign they were about to arrive. Wherever he ended up, it couldn't be in the same place as the spiny horror ahead of him.
He gathered himself against the flow, feeling for weaknesses, bending their path through the between, finding contrasts. Sash's cool breath became a connection — freshness balanced against the corruption, her body pressed against his, a point of stability, an anchor that led to solid ground.
The change expanded, streamers of slate bleeding across the purple. He pushed harder, driving into the grey, like a man running down a tilting gradient, dropping away until he felt he was falling again, rushing headlong into a silver blizzard.
Shapes formed around him, a place leached of colour, glistening surfaces in shades of slate, shot through with hues of sickly yellow, and cold blue. But with cold air to breath, and something to stand on beneath his feet, he felt none of the famili
ar resistance he'd found penetrating a world skin.
It seemed to him the light, little as there was, turned at odd angles wherever he looked, as if seeing everything through the surface of a pond, two or three times over. The ground squirmed softly under him like a bitter cold carpet of fat black worms, and on all sides thick columns of a stringy, mucus-like substance rose from the ground like a forest, stretching up out of sight.
The air felt thin, and freezing. In moments, his eyes were watering, and he found his lungs labouring. As he moved he felt things brush against his skin, like long trailing strands of invisible hairs in the air.
Ebryn stood gasping, peering about, trying to make sense of where they were, and watching for danger. Everything he'd learnt about ephemeral spheres made him want to leave as soon as possible.
He tried casting far-sense, and followed with a ward, cursing under his breath as both stuttered and faded away, barely lasting as long as it took him to create them.
And, as if in response, he felt a creeping cold invading his legs through his boots, a numbing sensation, spreading from his toes, up through his ankles, and to his lower legs. When he tried to move, Ebryn found his legs gripped from below. Blindly nosing up his leg and wrapping around the top of his boots, were oily black strands reaching from the writhing mass on the ground. He hurriedly pulled one foot free, and then the other, determined not to drag anything with him this time on the way to Senesella.
Sash made a coughing sound, and his insides lurched. Golden light poured from him, condensing into a kind of heavy glowing smoke in the air, and billowing outwards. He examined her face, checking her lips for colour, feeling for the faint rise and fall of her breathing.
He shifted Sash in his arms to scoop up her trailing left arm, and his stomach tightened again. The red whorls of paint on her left arm were as they'd always been, but the blue line was glowing, writhing across her skin, strengthening and weakening in time with each of her shallow breaths.
He found his breath coming in short bursts, wanted to shout at Sash, to wake her up, and find out the meaning of the glowing blue line on her arm.
As the light from his hands flowed onto the ground the tangled black mess underfoot convulsed, a ripple travelling outwards like a small wave across a watery surface. The trailing strands around his face vanished, as if quickly withdrawn, and at the edge of his hearing a faint nearby keening started.
Moments later something slid into view from behind a cluster of mucus columns, approaching at an angle, moving sideways like a crab. For a heart-stopping moment, he thought the spiked horror had returned, but as it closed he saw its outline was blurred — standing upright on two legs, with a pair of stubby arms.
It moved with its upper body hunched forward, like a predator stalking its prey. Shapes of other things, barely glimpsed from the corner of his eyes, followed behind, like scavengers waiting just beyond sight.
Skin hung from it in loose folds, sacks of rotten looking grey flesh, oozing and flowing like molten wax across the surface of its body. It stopped just short of where the glow of his light hung like a faint golden cloud in the air, and watched Ebryn through unevenly placed, heavily hooded gashes in its face.
They stared at each other for a long moment, and then it moved to Ebryn's left, circling slowly, as if seeking a gap in the light. As his light gradually dimmed it moved closer, shifting behind the putrid columns, in and out of sight, passing through blind spaces in the prismatic air.
Ebryn almost wanted to cry with frustration as he struggled to maintain his concentration, trying to focus on what he knew could get them both out of this place alive, and constantly wheeling as he tried to keep this thing where he could see it.
What had Brydeline said about the ephemeral planes? He tried to visualize where he might be from his memory of the navigation globe Deme had shown them in her first lesson. It had formed the crude shape of a tree, the central trunk a frothing swirl, with hundreds of outward branches forming the greater and lesser flow of the between.
Never try to navigate within the core, Brydeline had told him on their last outing. If you must visit an ephemeral world, or one on the boundary, always make the journey like sowing a seam, small steps into the ephemeral planes, and then out again. Always in, then out, never from one ephemeral world to another. And Senesella lay somewhere in the heart of the trunk — to get there, he must first escape, and try again.
Brydeline had warned against the danger of following random flows out from the core. Too many led away from Vergence, or any of the known worlds, she'd told him. All the thousand worlds known to Volane had been within a small arc of all the possible branches flowing away. Lose your way here, and you might never find a way back to any place you know.
He cast about trying to find something he knew to link with an aspect of this place, painfully aware of the bone piercing cold working its way through his boots, and the chill of cooling sweat on his body. The light he created seemed to be holding the fiend facing him at bay for the moment, but maintaining it sapped his endurance. Only a matter of time, he realised, before the creeping cold, and the drain of casting stripped him of his last defence.
He remembered Kleple, reading in the dark on the night of his entrance test. It was a tenuous association, but the best he could recall as he watched the thing creeping around him. He looked down at Sash and knew he would face anything, sacrifice himself, rather than let her die.
Ebryn took a ragged breath, and flung himself into the between. He fell away, reaching outwards for a connection with a solid place, somewhere beyond the ephemeral planes, searching for a link to the cold flowing liquid nature of this place, and holding in his mind an image of Kleple.
Running
STREAMING COLOURS gave way to cut slab paving under his feet and arched stonework walls curving up to meet seamlessly overhead. Ebryn found himself walking through shallow slow-flowing water in a dark, dank tunnel, faintly florescent lichen growing in gaps between the stones, providing barely enough light to make out his surroundings.
He stood shaking with cold, breathing hard. The trickle of cold water insinuating its way into his boots felt almost intolerably warm after the bone-freezing touch of the things recently wrapped around his legs. The muscles in his back and arms were cramping with the strain of holding Sash up, but there seemed to be nowhere in sight dry enough to lay her down, and as cold as he was, she felt colder.
Drained as he felt, Ebryn managed to create a little light, allowing the golden glow to flow outwards along the tunnel, running along the surface. There seemed to be no end in either direction. From the deep silence, broken only by the echoing sound of trickling water, he guessed it might easily stretch out over hundreds of yards.
Points of light appeared upstream in the dark, followed by echoes of scrambling and splashing, magnifying in the confined space of the tunnel, so it sounded to Ebryn as if a small pack of animals were chasing down the tunnel. Ebryn groaned with frustration — barely enough time to get a sense for the place, and already the simple path to Fyrenar was closing against him again.
In a matter of moments the points of lights resolved into reflective orbs, and then more clearly, sets of large eyes shining back the light he'd produced in his part of the tunnel. Without thinking Ebryn spoke the words to summon a ward just large enough to fill a small section of the passageway, carefully anchored to the stone face of the tunnel at multiple points, like a huge spider web.
He dropped to one knee, allowing Sash's legs to rest on his other thigh to free a hand, whilst searching desperately for something to serve as a summoning catalyst, or anything he could use to create a familiar connection.
Two large animals, the size of ponies, slid to a halt in front of his ward, reigned in by their riders, sending a small wave of water down the tunnel to drench his thigh. Four sets of huge yellow eyes, with vertical slit pupils, glared at him from the dark.
The mounts appeared to be something like an oversized cross between a rat and a feral c
at; their riders like hairier versions of Kleple with chunky, fur-covered bodies, each wielding a short barb-headed spear. Neither the riders nor their mounts seemed friendly.
The lead rider leant forward and gesticulated wildly at Ebryn with the point of his spear, screeching at him in an unfamiliar high-pitched language.
“Give me space, and I'll leave,” Ebryn said, hoping they might understand Volanian.
The second rider joined in, directing a stream of screams and clicking sounds at the first. Ebryn had the uncomfortable feeling they were debating what to do with him, aware that his ward would only hold them out briefly. He had just clambered back to his feet when he felt the direction of the water flow change. He looked down to see bit of weed and slime drifting back up the slope towards the riders, slowly at first, then accelerating.
He felt a sudden drop in temperature, a frosting of the walls behind the riders and a wavering pattern growing in the air. The shape sucked up the surrounding water, and even before it was complete, Ebryn understood, with a lurch in his stomach, what it was — the demonic presence from the dark realm he'd just escaped had followed him. The flowing grey flesh was being replaced by a churning, watery, ice-filled shape which briefly sucked the ground beneath their feet dry.
It rose behind the riders, a ghastly gelid form, filling the tunnel barely six yards away. The riders continued their argument, unaware of the thing growing behind them, their attention, like that of their mounts, focused entirely on him. Ebryn wanted to shout a warning, but he backed away instead, unsure how to redirect their attention.
Rope-like limbs of watery fluid reached out to strike at the riders and their mounts, driving them forward, into and then partially through the front of his ward, a tangle of frantically scrabbling claws, and screeching mouths.
