Vergence (60 page)

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 familiar 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

S
TREAMING 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 cat; 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.

The watery column behind them collapsed, and the mass of furry bodies convulsed. The flesh of the riders and their mounts twisted, then flowed like liquid, blending together into a scrambling mass, until Ebryn couldn't see which eye, mouth or claw belonged to which.