The Nothing: A Book of the Between (7 page)

“Close.” She mouthed the words, lacking the breath to speak. Nothing happened.

She tried to build a door in her mind, to picture the opening closed and sealed. But the darkness stole the image from her before it was fairly begun.

Her body was desperate for air, heart bursting, lungs burning. She didn’t have much time before she and Zee and Callyn all joined the vast and growing nothing beyond. A deep darkness filled her at thought of Poe already lost. Rage followed, directed at Aidan, at Jehenna, at all of those who had orchestrated the worlds to bring her to this moment. If she died here, there would be nobody left to exact revenge or to make things right.

She had to stay alive and conscious long enough to close the door.

Oxygen had become an overriding mandate, but her ribs couldn’t expand to draw in another breath. Already her brain wasn’t working properly, thought processes fading. She was being stripped down to the bone. First, rational thought. Then instinct. Fear. Love. Anger. All sucked away into the dark. A pure consciousness remained, dispassionate and untouched by pain or struggle, observing from far away as a power stirred and shook itself free.

It had always been there, lying within, dormant. She feared it and what it could do beyond all other things. Once or twice it had wriggled free, had manifested as the Voice, but there was so much more to it than that.

Unlike the dragon fire, which had always felt alien, this power was as familiar as her own face in the mirror. It connected to every breath, every heartbeat, was aware of every thought that passed through her brain, every physical sensation, every emotion that had ever stirred her heart.

Watching from that faraway place, she saw it gather all of the threads of her being. The spark that was Vivian, the Dreamshifter, the dragon, depleted though it was, binding them all into one thing.

And then it spoke with her voice, even though her lips and tongue did not move.

“Seal the door.” The words rang out above the sucking sound made by the destroyed world.

She watched the door slam shut and the Between go still.

The wind stopped. For a blink of time, three unconscious bodies hung motionless in the air before crumpling downward in slow motion. Before they had time to hit the earth, the Between stretched out of shape and turned inside out. Rocks lifted gently from the surface of the earth and hovered. Leaves drifted gently upward.

A small penguin floated off the ground and into the air. He spread his wings for balance, flapped them once, and discovered he could fly, skimming forward on wings never made for flight. Even Callyn, unconscious but breathing, drifted upward, looking like some stone monolith levitated by magic.

Vivian’s consciousness seemed the only thing descending, heavier than air, heavier than all things around her. It met her body, meshed and fused. A moment of darkness, and then she came awake in a body that felt curiously light. Air was a luxury and a delight; for a long moment, she did nothing more than drink it in.

That was how long it took for responsibility and a touch of panic to kick back in. Poe was all right; she’d seen him. Callyn, too.

“Zee!” she called, trying to get to her feet and succeeding only in propelling herself up into the air, where she drifted, helpless as an unmanned blimp.

“Don’t move!” Zee shouted from somewhere off to her left. “Don’t do anything that will push you up higher into the air.”

She craned her neck to follow the sound of his voice and found him fifteen feet above the earth, clinging to the branch of a tree. The dragon stood below, peering up with a dazed and bewildered expression.

“What is this?” Panic edged Callyn’s voice.

Vivian choked back hysterical laughter. Her inner landscape felt as altered as the world around her, all of her emotions turned upside down with laughter rising to the surface. Beneath it, though, the anger burned like a steady flame. And that suppressed part of herself was there, too, quiet at the moment but watchful. Waiting.

This sobered her more than anything.

“Seems like every time a world dies, the Between radically changes. Last time, the winds. This time, gravity.” Making little hand and foot motions, as if she were steering herself through water, she worked her way over and down to inspect what she had done to the door.

Not a door as such, not anymore. Sealing the breach in the wall was a luminous weaving of color and texture that shifted beneath her eyes, defying her attempts to define and quantify what it was.

Zee worked his way down to her side. He reached out a hand to touch the weaving, but she gripped his wrist and held him back.

“What is it?” His voice was soft with wonder.

“I’m not sure.”

The patterns eluded her, ever shifting into something other just as she thought she had begun to understand. Zee looked at her then, his eyes a question. His long hair was wild and full of dirt and sticks. The half-healed scars on his cheek were crusted with fresh blood. Dirt embedded every line, every pore. He looked wild and fey, as dangerous as the weaving of the door.

“Who did this? I was out. Thought we were done for.”

“I did.” Even as she said the words, she wondered if they were true. This was a magic she didn’t know how to work, an act she could never replicate. The part of her that had done it waited within, quiescent, a power outside her understanding and her control.

Callyn ploughed her way over, as awkward as a rudderless ship. “Grass and stone,” she said, making a warding gesture in the air. “I have heard tell of such things.”

“What is it?” Vivian asked. She was a little frightened by what she had done.

“You don’t know?” The Giant’s face, usually impassive, creased in surprise. Again, she made the gesture, then said, slowly, “It’s the sort of magic woven by the Sorcieri. You were right not to touch it.”

“You still haven’t said what it is.” Zee’s voice was harsh. “If you know something, fill us all in.”

“I can’t say for sure; I have only heard tell of such things. Rumors and hints. A word in a book here, another there. A temporal weaving, perhaps. Of this time with another, of this space with another. There is no knowing where such a web could take you.”

Vivian shivered. “So, maybe it’s not just the destruction of the world that’s to blame for zero gravity.”

“This is possible, yes. Such magic must have deep consequences.”

Zee’s hand closed around Vivian’s, warm and reassuring, despite everything. “We need to move on before something worse happens. Which way?”

“That is a problem,” the Giant said. “Both which way to go and how to travel.”

The suspension of gravity was not the only obstacle. There was no path now in the direction they had been going. All that had once been green and growing, and then dust in the wind, was now buried under snow. A glacier towered upward into a deep blue sky. Sunlight shone on ice, highlighting shades of blue and green in patterns that suggested an ancient city of spires and towers.

“I’m not sure how to get to my own world from here,” Callyn said, “let alone to the Sorcieri.”

If any of it still exists.

The words drifted, unspoken, in the air between them. If one world could be wiped out as this one had been, there was no reason why any world should be safe.

“We have to assume that other parts of the Between are still stable. That your world is still there, Callyn, waiting for us.”

The Giant gestured at the shimmering door. “That was to the left. North, and the Kingdom of the Giants, should be that way, I think.” She gestured toward the looming glacier.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure of nothing.”

The only paths led off at right angles, straight as an arrow as far as the eye could see through a field of pure white snow. Blue sky above, sun blazing down and turning the snow crystals to diamond so that it was too bright to look at for long. Paths were irrelevant, in any case. None of them were going to be walking.

Vivian’s eyes watered from staring into the blaze. Already the dragon was flying upward toward the top of the glacier, his flight path jagged and irregular because of the damaged wing. Poe stayed closer to earth, practicing his moves, flying in a small figure eight, and then a larger one, looping upward and drifting down.

“We go over,” Vivian said, her gaze following the lines of the glacier, up, up, against the hard sky.

“And if gravity comes back while we’re in the process?” Zee drifted up beside her, his head also tipped back, surveying the obstacle ahead. She had thought of that already. Of the sudden, helpless crash to the earth far below. How many nights had she jerked awake out of just such a dream? But this wasn’t Dreamworld; this was the Between. And if she didn’t stop it, there would be no more Dreamworlds to fall out of.

“Do we have another option?”

“We go back to the Black Gates, take another path. The way is longer, but perhaps not so perilous.”
 

“Do we have time for that?”

“No. But I don’t like this.”

“We have to do something,” Zee said. “Go back or go forward. If we stay here, we freeze to death.”

This was truth. As they discussed things, the snow field had extended beneath them. Vivian was shivering already, her feet and her cheeks gone numb. She’d seen victims of the cold when she’d worked the ER, the blackened skin on noses and toes, the surgery to remove the dead flesh. And beyond the fear of disfigurement, of course, the looming threat of death.

She searched inside herself for any sign of her dragon nature. If she could shift, here and now, it would be an easy thing to carry the others not only up and over, but all the way to their destination. But only a tiny spark responded to her inquiry. The dragon part of her was very nearly dead, and certainly not strong enough to support a shift or to stay alive if she managed it.

“We go over,” she said. “Quickly, before the rules change again. I think every time a world dies, it’s going to throw off the balance. Do you know how far to the next door, Callyn?”

“A half day’s journey, perhaps. Beyond the glacier. Unless the height of the thing is part of the distance as things have warped, and then we’re likely to find the door at the very top.”

That was a whole lot of might. Making plans in the Between was always a crapshoot, though. Any movement was better than slowly freezing to death.

“Let’s go.” Making sweeping movements with her arms, she drew herself upward into the sky.

J
ARED
HAD
plenty of opportunity to practice using his altered leg.

Kraal kept a pace that was steady for a Giant, which meant a jog for a human. Jared tried to take in his surroundings, which surpassed anything his imagination could have conjured up. Stone mansions that were true wonders of engineering and art. Paved roads fashioned of cobblestones cut from ruby, sapphire, emerald. Everywhere he looked, he found brilliant color and some new use for stone.

When at last they stopped, though, it was in front of a small cottage with a thatched roof and flat stone porch. Nothing extravagant or noteworthy, and Jared felt a welling of disappointment.

A woman answered Kraal’s knock. She was small of stature and rail-thin. She was also ancient, with a face so creased with wrinkles, there was no smooth skin to be seen. Only the eyes were young, bright blue and searching. She wore a simple blue gown and her gray hair hung long and unbraided down the center of her back.

Kraal bent a knee to her, and for a flash of an instant, Jared thought he’d been mistaken and she must be somebody of importance. He attempted an awkward bow.

“Can you make him presentable?” Kraal asked.

Jared bit back a retort as the woman tilted her head and surveyed him. He knew he must look a mess, and it would be best for him to not say anything to aggravate his Giant rescuer.

“That depends on where you plan to take him,” the old woman said at last. “I don’t like the looks of him, Kraal. Treachery written all over. You should drown him.”

“I’m a healer, Traveler.” The syllables of her name came out harsh and guttural in his hard-inflected speech.

She snorted. “Don’t try that line on me. I’ve seen what you healers do if a child is born distorted or twisted. Some things can’t be healed.”

“He is under my protection. I have healed his leg. And now he must be presented to Her Excellence. I ask that you do this thing for me.”

“I am old and wiser than you might think. You should listen.”

The Giant took her frail old hand in his and pressed the back of it to his forehead. “I do listen, but your words come late. There are great things afoot, and we will have a use for this one, I think.”

“What is this, then?” The old woman took his enormous hand in both of hers and turned it, displaying a bloody gash in the wrist. Her eyes looked up to his.

Kraal shrugged. “They didn’t like the looks of him at the gate, either.”

“Oh, Kraal. And you’ve made yourself bond for one such as this?”

“It was needful.” With that, the Giant rose to his full height and clamped a hand around Jared’s shoulder. It might have been meant as a friendly gesture, but it nearly crushed the bone, and it was all he could do to keep from crying out or flinching.