Eterna’s concerns had centred on the flight into the realm, though she had been unable to define the precise nature of her worries. Undefined fears always had the strongest hold over Llandry. What awaited them in the skies over the Seventh Realm? She smiled to hide her unease as Eva began to speak.
‘I think it safe to say that we will not wish to prolong our visit,’ her ladyship said seriously. ‘We will remain as long as is necessary to learn what we need to, and no longer. Please look out for each other. Nobody ought to be left alone in there. We will keep together, understood?’
Nobody had any objection to that. Llandry drew Pensould to one side, addressing him in a low voice.
‘You don’t know anything about this place, do you Pense?’
‘Surely you have noticed me being as confused as the rest of you,’ Pensould replied with a bland smile.
‘Well... so it appears, yes, only I wanted to be sure this wasn’t one of your “nobody asked me” moments.’
‘Have a little faith in me, Minchu. I would not withhold information at such a time. The matter of Orlind predates my period of existence.’
‘What a shame. We might have been saved a crazy expedition.’
Pensould bowed. ‘Please accept my apologies for being insufficiently aged.’
He was so grave Llandry feared that he was offended, but when he straightened he smiled, mischief sparking in his eyes.
‘I’m sure you’ve tried your best,’ she grinned.
‘At aging?’
‘Precisely.’
‘Ouch. What a wretch you are.’
Eva approached, wearing her conciliatory smile. ‘Ready to go?’
‘Perfectly,’ Llan said as firmly as she could. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
It took a little time for Llandry to accustom herself to carrying a person on her back. She had only done so once before, and Eva had never travelled by such means. They remained in Irbel until all four were comfortable with the arrangements.
Then it was time to go.
Ori insisted on taking the lead, since he was the only draykon without a passenger. Llandry followed, and Pensould came behind. The first stretch was pleasant: the sun was high, the air warm and fragrant and the flight not at all arduous. It wasn’t long, however, before the way began to steepen and the draykons had to climb higher into the firmament. After an hour, they were already higher than Llandry had ever been before, with still some distance to go. The air was growing thin, and Llandry’s lungs laboured almost as hard as her wings.
Too high, Ori said after a while. We can’t go over the top. I’ll find us a way through.
He picked up speed and was gone before Llandry had chance to reply. Finding herself the leader, she slowed her pace and dropped down, close to the rocky slopes that streamed away below her. It didn’t make a noticeable difference to the quality of the air.
More than half an hour had passed, Llandry judged, before Ori returned. He was out of breath, but unhurt.
Follow me again, then, he said cheerfully. I found a route. It’s still going to be uncomfortable, but I think we can make it.
Well done, Ori, Llandry said in gratitude. She hoped that Ori’s route might also be warmer; once fully over the mountains the benefit of the steady sun had swiftly vanished in the onslaught of cold air. Knowing Eva’s hatred of the cold, Llandry was worried about how she was bearing it.
There was nothing to be done but to go on. The three draykoni wheeled away to the southwest, circled around the tallest peak and surged northwards again. Ori had found a narrow pass that wound its way between two gigantic peaks, a channel just wide enough for them to fly through. It was still very high; Llandry tore through it with her lungs burning, praying that it wouldn’t go on for too long. Increasingly concerned about Eva, she began checking every few minutes that she still bore the weight of a passenger.
Almost there, Ori informed them at last. His mind-speech was calm, belying the strain she knew he would be feeling.
How many minutes? Pensould asked. The humans are in poor shape.
Five, if we try hard.
Flying behind her as he was, Pensould would be able to see Eva. What’s amiss? she asked him, anxious; for if the journey was hard on her even with her draykon strength, it must be hard indeed on their human passengers.
I think the cold is affecting Lady Eva the most, Pensould said. We need to descend as soon as possible.
Last effort, then, said Ori grimly. Llandry gathered herself, and when Ori sped away ahead of her she matched his burst of speed, determined to keep pace no matter how hard the effort. The mountain slopes faded into a blur of white under her tired gaze as she struggled on.
End in sight! Ori reported. I see ocean in the distance, and...
Neither she nor Pensould said anything, waiting breathlessly for Ori’s next words.
And nothing, he said, disconcerted. There’s just water.
Nowhere to land?
Nope. I don’t see anything on the water either.
Llandry was silent with dismay. Nothing here? How could that be?
Maybe it’s under the water, she hazarded. Whatever it is.
Hope not, Ori groaned. Or we’re finished.
We must find somewhere to land, Pensould interjected. All other considerations can wait.
Righto, Ori agreed. Let’s get down from here and then we’ll see.
As he spoke those words, the mountains abruptly ended and the glittering water began, a long way below. Ori dived towards the sea at speed and Llandry followed, taking care to avoid angling her body too steeply and allowing Eva to fall off. They descended fast, and with every beat of her wings the tortured feeling in her lungs eased a little more. The air warmed, too, a fraction at a time until the bone-numbing cold was gone.
This improvement helped immeasurably, but they were not yet safe. As soon as Llandry was no longer focusing on the cold and the fight to breathe, she began to realise how tired she was. Her frozen muscles were cramping badly and her heart laboured so hard she feared for herself. Pensould was right: they must land, and soon.
Everyone all right? Ori asked, ending his descent a few hundred feet above the surface of the water.
All still here, Pensould replied. Including the humans.
Straining to see Ori some way ahead of her, Llan noticed an obscuring cloud lying low on the horizon. At least it looked like a cloud, only it appeared to be too near to the water for that.
That’s some mist, Ori commented. Reckon it’s something to aim for?
Llandry looked around. No alternatives offered; everywhere she looked she saw more featureless water.
Go for it, she said. It’s a better alternative to the sub-aquatic notion.
Right. Ori set a cracking pace, hurtling towards the mass of cloud-stuff too fast for Llandry to keep up with him. Her smaller size, and her burden, made that impossible.
Too fast, Ori!
I’m checking for dangers! he shot back. Catch up with me when you can.
Ori, Eva said we must stay together!
I’m not going to be far ahead. With that he was gone, dwindling to figure no larger than a bird in her vision.
We can manage just a little more speed, Minchu, said Pensould, sounding worried.
Speak for yourself, she retorted, but nonetheless she tried. Pense drew alongside her, the tips of his outstretched wing brushing hers. A flood of energy raced through her, revitalising her exhausted body, and she shot forward.
Pense, you shouldn’t...
No help for it. We can’t let Ori get too far ahead.
Llandry couldn’t argue with that. To her relief they began to gain on Ori again.
They were less than two hundred feet away when the sun dimmed and disappeared and mist enveloped her. The quality of light changed utterly. It was more than the simple obscuring of direct sunlight by the drifting fog. It felt to her like the cool blue twilight she had so admired in Nimdre at that time when the sun was close to setting and night w
as creeping in. But the sun had been high in the heavens only moments ago.
Next came a more alarming realisation. Without landmarks of any kind, Llandry was losing her sense of direction. This, too, went beyond the reasonable. Not only was she unsure which way was forward and which back the way she had come, she had also forgotten which way was up and which down. Was she even upright? Suffering a panicked conviction that she was not, Llandry spun herself around. But this, too, felt wrong and she quickly reversed her action.
Was Pense calling for her, or was that her imagination? His voice was thin and distant, and soon it faded altogether. Panicking, she tried to force herself to think clearly. This place was strange and wrong but it did not feel wholly unfamiliar. Had she been unaware of her real location she would have assumed herself to be in Iskyr or Ayrien; she felt the same sense of fluidity that characterised the Off-Worlds, the same currents of magical energy tugging at her. The peculiar part was that it felt like neither one nor the other Off-Realm, but rather both.
No matter. If they had strayed into the Otherrealms, she ought to be able to manipulate it in the same way she could rework the patterns of Iskyr. She had better do so fast, for she had completely lost control of herself and her surroundings. Panicked, she flapped her wings harder, trying to catch herself. She was falling!
... But somehow it felt as though she was falling upwards. Air rushed past her face and beat down upon her wings, forcing her ever higher. Or was it lower? She might simply be upside-down, a thought which made her panic anew for Eva would surely have fallen off her back by now.
Clumsy in her hurry, she clutched at the fabric of this peculiar place and forced it into a new shape. The air reworked itself at her instigation, cushioning her descent (or ascent) until her pace slowed. Without pausing to think, she threw the effect outwards as far as she could, hoping that it would extend far enough to benefit her companions.
Then all she could do was wait as she drifted in the sky like a daefly, making her gentle way upwards or downwards or sidewards to wherever she was bound.
***
To Eva, the journey over the mountains seemed interminable. The cold first confused, and then finally numbed, her thought processes until she was barely aware. All she could think to do was cling desperately to the collar Llandry wore for her benefit, praying that her frozen hands wouldn’t weaken. A strong piece of rope fastened her belt to Llandry’s collar, but she didn’t dare rely on it to catch her if she fell off.
The flight passed in a haze, her awareness of time or distance fading to nothing as she dreamed endlessly of warmth. The heating pipes under the floors of her home; the ceramic hot bricks that her maid placed under her blankets at night; the wealth of quilted coats, thick petticoats and soft wool gloves she had to choose from when the cold seasons came... these passed through her mind in a succession of torment, and she only felt colder in comparison.
Then she came alert with a jerk. Her circumstances had changed... was she falling? Her mind, still fogged with cold, could make no sense of her predicament. She was travelling fast, in the abandoned sort of way that suggested a headlong fall. Which way was she facing? She couldn’t be falling sideways, surely?
Her thoughts were too fuzzy for panic, so she accepted this with a strange calm until the sensation suddenly ended. Now she was floating, but that too was odd because she was turning slow circles in the air, helpless to right herself. The feeling was more pleasant than otherwise; she felt cocooned as if within an enormous bubble, enveloped within a cloud of warm air. Under this benign influence her body slowly warmed and her wits reasserted themselves to discover that all motion had stopped. She lay with her eyes closed, feeling oddly as though she lay with her face against a ceiling and empty air under her back...
She opened her eyes.
At first she saw nothing but blackness, which sent a buzz of apprehension shooting down her spine until the environment slowly lightened around her. Limbane’s glasses adjusted themselves to the new light levels until her vision was clear once more, and she saw...
Not a great deal. She presently established that despite the instincts of her befuddled senses she was lying on the ground in a reassuringly ordinary fashion. Above her stretched an indigo sky, topped with a lowering mass of grey cloud. Turning her head to the right, she saw a blue haze which eventually registered as water. Bare rock stretched perhaps fifty feet in front of her, before it ended, to all appearances, in a sheer drop into the sea.
Turning her head to the left, she saw a fortress of white stone, its four rotund towers stabbing pugnaciously at the sky. Seeing that it was apparently hovering some few hundred feet above the ground, she began to worry that she had hit her head. The enormous building hung there with no discernible means of support, supremely unconcerned that its existence defied every known law of nature. It also had neither door nor windows, at least on the face that she could see.
Her perusal of this puzzling place was interrupted by a voice calling her name. Tren! She had been so busy with her struggle to make sense of her surroundings that she’d quite forgotten the reason she was here, or the party that she’d come with.
‘I’m here,’ she croaked. ‘Here!’ she repeated, managing a more creditable shout. Tren appeared in her field of vision, looking anxious. He dropped to his knees beside her with a sigh of relief.
‘Eva, thank goodness. Are you hurt?’
Eva flexed her limbs and back experimentally. ‘I don’t think so.’
Tren picked up each of her arms in turn and pulled off her thick gloves, inspected her fingers and chafed her hands when he found them intact. He repeated this performance on her feet and legs, then planted a swift kiss on her lips.
‘All is well. Up we get, now. Careful.’ He hauled her upright, obliged to support most of her weight until she got her feet under her. No sooner did he release her than a wave of dizzy confusion sent her tumbling back to the ground.
‘Okay, here’s the thing,’ he said, sitting down beside her. ‘Something about this place is putting your various senses at war with each other. Your eyes are telling you you’re upright, looking at a sky above you and rock below you and various other things to left and right. But your other senses are interpreting everything in several other directions. That’s the nearest we can get to an explanation so far.’
‘We? Are the others well?’ Eva tried shutting her eyes to block out the muddle, but doing so achieved the opposite for she was gripped with a conviction that she was balancing on her head. She opened her eyes again hurriedly and focused on Tren.
‘All alive. Yes, don’t do that. Keep your eyes open. I achieved a near perfect head-stand before I figured that out.’
Eva blinked at him. ‘I never knew you had a talent for gymnastics.’
‘Neither did I.’
‘Let’s try this again,’ she said, pushing herself to her feet. Tren took hold of her shoulders, steadying her while she adjusted to the curious confliction of her different senses.
‘I think I’m stable,’ she said after a few moments. ‘Keep hold of my hand, though.’
Tren did so, and led her away. After a minute or two’s walk they came upon Llandry, Pensould and Orillin in human form, all holding tightly to one another as they tottered about on shaky legs.
‘Eva!’ Ori yelled, throwing up a hand in greeting. ‘What do you make of that?’
He flung an arm in the direction of the fortress. Only it had stopped being a fortress and had decided to be a castle instead, the sort with turrets and flags but with no door, no windows and certainly no drawbridge. And the bare rock over which it floated had turned into a sea of waist-high bushes, lavender-leaved, red-blossomed and writhing with insects. Eva twitched her nose in distaste, noticing the cloying, repulsive floral scent emitted by the strange vegetation.
‘I think this whole island is pure distilled madness,’ she said calmly, ‘and the sooner we get away from it the better.’
Ori beamed. ‘I knew you’d say that. I think
it’s terrific.’
‘Well then please feel free to take the lead. We’d better find a way into that... er, building.’
‘Nothing so simple,’ he assured her. ‘Llan and Pensould and me will get us in.’
Half amused, half reassured by this swaggering confidence, Eva exchanged a look with Tren.
‘Follow that boy?’ Tren said with a chuckle.
‘Link arms with me,’ she said, threading her arm through his. ‘If I try to turn on my head you’ll stop me, I hope, and vice versa.’
‘That or we will achieve a most interesting tandem hand-stand.’ Tren smiled down at her with a creditable attempt at his usual insouciance.
‘At least nobody’s looking if we do,’ she muttered. The two of them waited for the three draykoni to pass, then fell into step behind them.
This short journey was by far the strangest of Eva’s life. Never could she have imagined it would be so hard to put one foot in front of the other without veering off track, or inverting herself. She and Tren suffered an ignominious tumble at one point, but being unhurt they were soon on their feet again (their feet, Eva was quick to check, and not their hands), and back on their way. The three ahead kept to their purpose with a little more style and a little less involuntary comedy, and soon all five stood at the base of the strange building-in-the-sky.
It had morphed again, losing most of its surface area in favour of immense height. It was shaped like a needle and looked woefully unstable. Eva eyed it with grave misgivings.
‘Still no door,’ Tren observed.
‘There will be,’ Ori said with unshaken confidence.
Eva thought of her time in the Lowers with Tren, when the two of them had climbed their way up a similar tower without noticeable means of entrance. They had reached the tiny window at the top; Eva had then moulded it into a size wide enough to admit her person. That had been possible because they were in Ayrien, and she was possessed of enough draykon heritage to make the relatively simple procedure work. What could three full draykoni do?
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