Tara’s heart stuck in her throat, and she turned to see.
Taman’s voice thundered over the plain, and no one could disobey that voice. “Take as many reciprocators as you can carry and run for it.”
Tara scooped up a pile of the weapons. She stacked them on her arm like firewood the way Aeifa did. “Where are we going?”
Taman stuck two reciprocators into his belt and grabbed handfuls more. “Down the canyon.”
“But you said....” she began.
“Run!” he bellowed. His voice shivered her bones, and she set off running as fast as she could go.
Out of the corner of her eye, Tara caught sight of a bunch of Outliers set off running after them. If they could run as fast as Lycaon, the travelers had no chance of escape. Were they overtaking her? She dared not look back again to see. She only ran as she’d never ran before.
Another group of Outliers remained behind to guard the prisoners. Taig gave her a slight nod through the Outliers’ heads. That was her last glimpse of him. He wanted her to go. They’d never been separated in their lives, and now he was telling her to go, to leave him unguarded with these depraved creatures. They would take him back to Rolling Ridges and do the same things to him, and she wouldn’t be there to save him. Lilith wouldn’t be there. No one would be there. He would be sacrificed. Then what would she do?
Aeifa and Taman took the lead down the path. The Ursidreans could keep up with the best of them, and with the threat of death stalking them, they put on even greater speed. With only the reciprocators weighing them down, they dropped into the canyon and turned south, alongside the stream.
End of Book 6
Book 7: Sooss
Chapter 1
Ari leaned his back against a tree trunk and tossed grass stems into the water. He broke a twig from a nearby branch and picked his teeth with it. Then he tossed that in the water, too, and watched the ripples extending on all sides toward the bank. He breathed a heavy sign and gazed up at the sun shimmering through the treetops.
A black shape crossed the sky above the waving canopy, but he didn’t think anything of it. He closed his eyes in tranquil peace. He was warm and comfortable, and a delicate perfume floated to his nostrils on the soft wind. Just enough light drifted down through the treetops to brighten the pool in front of him, and the light danced across his eyelids. They drifted closed, and he settled into a dozy dream.
A footstep approaching through the trees brought him back to full awareness, but he stayed relaxed in his place, even when a woman in a long white dress crossed the clearing and stopped in front of him. She smiled down at him, but she didn’t say anything.
He spoke first. “This is a lovely place.”
She laughed. “You certainly have made yourself at home here.”
He shrugged. “It is home.”
She cocked her head to one side. “What does that mean?”
“I’ve lived here all my life,” he replied. “If this isn’t home, I don’t know what is.”
Her eyes widened. “Where are you?”
“Where am I?” he asked. “Don’t you know? This is the forest the Lycaon call Honor’s Mansion. This is our summer range, and our village is right over there. My family is all there.” He glanced around. “I don’t know where my sister Aeifa is, but she must be back there, too.”
The woman’s smile faded. “It isn’t likely Aeifa would go somewhere without you, is it, Ari? You two go everywhere together.”
His head shot up. “How do you know my name?”
She sighed. “I know a lot more about you than that. You’re not in Honor’s Mansion. You’re not even in Lycaon territory anymore.”
Ari snorted. “I think I recognize my own home forest. I’ve run through it every day of my life.”
She pressed her lips together. “Do you recognize that smell? Does the wind smell the same as it does back home?”
His nostrils flared and he caught once again the strange sweet aroma he noticed before. “You’re right. I don’t recognize it, but it could be anything. A strange smell doesn’t mean I’m not in the forest.”
The woman pointed up at the sky. “Have you ever seen a sky like that before?”
He followed her gesture. A wave of color, all the colors of the rainbow, flashed across the sky. The light shimmered through the clouds like a spray of sparks. Where exactly was the sun? He couldn’t be certain. He couldn’t tell what time of day it was, or where the light was coming from. He frowned.
“Do you see those shapes?” she asked. “Do you recognize them?”
“No, I don’t,” he muttered.
“Take a look at these trees,” she went on. “Are they the same trees you had in Honor’s Mansion?”
He looked around the forest again, and his mind trembled. The trees swayed in the wind, but not with the same rush of air through their branches. The trunks undulated back and forth with a sinewy fluidity, and the gentle waving rhythm translated down the trunk into his back where he leaned against it.
He froze. He would have jumped away from that queer tree, but nameless dread rooted him to the spot. Even the ripples in the pool sent shivers up his spine, and his fur stood on end. If he wasn’t in Honor’s Mansion, where was he?
He swallowed hard, but he couldn’t speak above a whisper. “Who are you?”
The woman took a deep breath. “My name is Frieda Evans. I’m Emily Allen’s sister. I’m Taman and Allen’s aunt.”
He stared at her with his mouth open. “How do you know.....?”
A sad smile tinged her mouth. “I know all about you, Ari. I know all about your friends, and your sister and your cousins and how your parents disappeared from you village. I know everything about you.”
He couldn’t stop staring at her. His mouth hung open in shock. “Then....”
She squatted down so her face hung in front of his eyes. “You’re not in Lycaon territory anymore, Ari. You fell off a cliff on the Avitras border, but you’re not in Avitras territory, either. You’re with the Aqinas.”
A strangled cry broke out of his mouth. He tried to recoil from her, but the tree trunk behind him held him in place. He couldn’t move.
She knelt down on the grassy verge, but the closer she came, the more she horrified him. “What is this place?”
“You’re on the ocean floor,” she murmured. “That light up there is the sun shining on the surface of the water, and these trees are giant waving seaweed. Those black shapes are sea creatures swimming over our heads.”
“But...” he stammered, “but how is that possible?”
She sighed. “I went through the same thing when I came here. You think you’re breathing air and feeling the wind on your cheeks, but that’s the effect of the water. A black algae covers your skin and translocates oxygen and nutrients from the water into your blood stream. The water also makes a seamless continuity between your mind and the minds of all other Aqinas.”
“Aqinas!” he blurted out. “I’m not Aqinas.”
She smiled. “You don’t have to stay here. You can go back anytime you want to, but no one ever has. Once you get here, you’ll probably stay here.”
His mind spun, and his hand flew to his head. “This can’t be happening.”
“Look around you,” she told him. “This place couldn’t be Honor’s Mansion. It’s too different. The water created a place for you where you’d be comfortable and secure. It combines your memories and the memories of other Aqinas to project on your mind a world you can live in without fear or want or distress. This is the place you feel most at home, and that’s the world the water gives you to live in.”
Ari gaped at the forest around him. “But it looks so real.”
“It is real,” she replied. “It’s as real as anything else in the world, and it’s real to you. That’s the important part. You’re safe, you’re comfortable, and you’re surrounded by friends. You’re as safe here as if you were in Honor’s Mansion
.”
“So where is everybody?” he asked. “If I’m surrounded by friends, where are they? If I was in Honor’s Mansion, I would be surrounded by my family, my parents and grandparents and relatives and my sister and our whole village.”
Frieda burst into a glorious smile. “You can find all that here. You can have everything you want here. The water provides everything you need. Look at me. My family is all back on Earth, but I’m here and I don’t lack for anything.”
He eyed her. “Do you have a family here?”
She nodded. “I have a mate and three children. The oldest girl is about your age.”
He sank back on the fern. “I thought so. So the water doesn’t really provide everything. It can’t.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“You just said it yourself,” he replied. “Your family is all back on Earth. You might have another family here, but it can’t give you back what you lost.”
She drew closer to him. “It can give you back what you lost. Everything is here you need to live a long, happy life. If its parents and grandparents and relatives you want, you can find them here. I’m proof of that.”
He couldn’t look at her anymore. “It might provide me with a new family, but it can’t bring back what’s gone.” He struggled to his feet. “I better go.” He paused. “How do I get out of here?”
“You can’t go yet,” she told him. “You just got here.”
“I won’t stay here,” he countered. “I won’t live a long, happy life here. I have a life back....” He trailed off.
“Back on land?” she suggested. “Why do you think none of the land-based factions knows anything about the Aqinas? It’s because, once someone comes here, they don’t go back. They adapt to life here, and going back is too excruciating. I’ve tried it, and I wouldn’t go back for all the money in the world.”
He started walking away—where, he didn’t know. “I won’t stay here. If you won’t show me the way out, I’ll find it myself.”
She followed at a distance. “If you really want to leave, the water will send you back. The reason you’re still here is because you aren’t ready to leave.”
He rounded on her with a snarl. “Who says so? I just said I want to leave.”
She stopped in her tracks. “Then leave. Nothing’s stopping you. Focus your mind on leaving and the water will show you the exit. The water provides everything you need, so it will give you that, too, if you really want it.”
He glared at the forest around him. “It’s not real. It’s nothing but a prison.”
Frieda sighed. “Did you stop to wonder how you got here in the first place?”
He hesitated. “I fell off a cliff. That Avitras threw me off.”
“You fell off a cliff,” she told him, “and you fell into the river.”
He snorted. “That doesn’t mean anything. I’ve jumped from cliffs higher than that and landed in the river thousands of times.”
“Then how was this time different?” Frieda asked. “You could have swum to the side and climbed out and been on your way. So why didn’t you?”
He blinked. “Well, I....I’m not sure.”
“Then I’ll explain it to you,” she replied, “because exactly the same thing happened to me when I first came here. I fell off a balcony in the Avitras village, and the only thing separating me from the cold hard ground was a little rivulet of water barely deep enough to wet my big toe. The same thing happened to you. That river you fell into wasn’t deep enough for you to swim in. You would have been smashed to death on the rocks when Roshin threw you over that cliff.”
He frowned. “How do you know his name?”
“I told you I know everything about you,” she replied. “The water keeps nothing hidden from any of us.”
“Then I should know everything about you, too,” he returned.
She smiled. “You do. Try and you’ll find everything you need to know.”
He glared at her. “I don’t know anything.”
She sighed. “You would have been dead falling from that cliff, if the water hadn’t brought you here instead. It brought you here because you wanted to come here.”
“I never wanted to come to this.....” He waved his hand over the forest. “...this dream world.”
She put out her hand for his. “Some part of you wanted to come here. If I had to guess, I’d say you would rather come here than be smashed to pieces on the rocks. Or maybe there was something here you wanted to find.”
“What could that be?” he asked.
“You tell me,” she told him. “You’re the one who wants to be here.”
He turned away again. “This is pointless. I’m out of here.”
He started walking away, through the trees. He had no idea where he was going, so he took a reckoning by the sun and headed toward it. He strode faster until he broke into a run. The trees streaked past, and the wind soothed his burning cheeks. His eyes skimmed over the landscape. He never would have known the place wasn’t Honor’s Mansion.
Running calmed him, but after a while, he noticed he wasn’t getting anywhere. He should have climbed the mountain and gained the summit by now, if he’d really been in Honor’s Mansion. That was another thing different about this place. The ground didn’t undulate into hills and valleys. It was all perfectly, uniformly flat, and no matter how far he ran, he would never get anywhere. He was stuck here.
He stopped running and looked around. He hadn’t gone more than a few yards from the same spot, and Frieda still stood in the same place with the same placid smile on her face. She hadn’t moved. “You can’t run away, Ari. When you decide to go back to the land, the water will take you there. You can’t get there by running.”
He frowned down at the ground. “You can’t keep me here against my will.”
She turned away with a sigh. “No one’s keeping you here, but we don’t have to argue about it anymore. Make yourself comfortable, because you aren’t going anywhere.”
Chapter 2
Ari leaned against the same tree trunk, but the surroundings didn’t fill him with tranquility and peace the way they did before. He’d searched the whole country for days and found not one decent prey animal—not that he was hungry. He had to do something with himself. He couldn’t just sit here doing nothing until the water decided to let him go.
He picked up a stick and snapped it into dozens of tiny pieces. He’d done nothing else all morning. He’d tried a million times to light a fire, but he couldn’t get so much as a wisp of smoke from any piece of wood in this whole crazy world. He wasn’t cold, either, but the most basic acts of hunting and fire-building wouldn’t rest. His hands went through the motions again and again without stopping. He didn’t even try to stop them, but the failure frustrated him more than anything. His life wasn’t worth a thing if he couldn’t do them.
He sat in the same place and hated this false world. He couldn’t even enjoy running anymore, since he couldn’t go anywhere. He’d tried more times that he could count, and he always ended up in the same place. He watched the sun cross the sky, and even that rankled his nerves until he hated every passing minute. When the sun disappeared behind the waving seaweed, he curled up in a ball on the ground and slept.
Something woke him up. No sound disturbed the night, but his head shot up and he listened. That’s when he noticed the light shining through the trees. In a flash, he rolled onto his feet and set off toward the light. It hovered among the trees and led him in a dozen different directions before he was certain which direction it was coming from.
He strained his eyes, but cloud covered the sky. Then he remembered it wasn’t cloud. The yellow aurora diffused through the watery surface overhead and brightened the forest enough to see.
The trees clustered thicker and blocked out the light so he couldn’t see a thing, but out of nowhere, from the blackened canopy overhead, a clear bright shaft of light broke through the gloom and shon
e on a young girl standing between the trees. She turned toward him and smiled at him.
She wasn’t Lycaon, whatever she was. She wore the same white dress Frieda wore, and her black hair hung in ropes down her back, but her clear white skin gleamed in the unearthly light. She gave him the most open, kindly smile he’d seen in years. For a moment, he wondered if he knew her, but he couldn’t have. Reina was the only non-Lycaon girl he’d ever met. He didn’t recognize this girl’s faction, and she wasn’t human like Frieda, either.
“Did I wake you up?” she asked.
He nodded. “Where did you come from?”
“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” she told him. Then she laughed out loud. “Well, actually, yes, I did.”
“You meant to wake me up?” he asked. “Why?”
“To talk to you,” she replied. “You weren’t going to come to me any other way, so I had to wake you up.”
“Why couldn’t you just walk up to me?” He closed his eyes and shook his head, but his thoughts wouldn’t clear. “I still don’t understand this crazy world. Where did you come from?”
“From the village, of course,” she replied.
“What village?” he asked. “I don’t understand this at all.”
She put something down on the ground. He hadn’t seen anything in her hands before. She took a step toward him. “Don’t try to understand it. It isn’t complicated. I wanted to see you, so I came here, but you were asleep, so I had to wake you up.”
“Why did you want to see me?” he asked. “I didn’t know anything about you until just now.”
She smacked her lips. “Everybody knows about you.”
“That’s what Frieda said,” he muttered.
“It’s true,” she replied. “Everyone in the village wants to meet you.”
“Then why don’t they come out to see me?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe they think they’ll frighten you.”
The New Angondra Complete Series Page 21
