There was a thump, there was a surge of friction, and Bál rolled into the light.
Lights were dancing in front of his vision. He shook his head, and they cleared somewhat, revealing a greyish mass in front of him. It was several seconds, the time it took his unusually sluggish nervous system to scan his body for injuries, before he realized that he was lying on his back and what he was looking at was the sky. He groaned. He felt as if his head had been caught in a vise, and his stomach felt like a sack packed uncomfortably tightly with vegetables. His immediate thought was that he must have been suffering from a particularly severe hangover. He tried to cast his mind back to before he’d woken up, but try as he might, he couldn’t recall anything from before now.
With great effort, he hauled himself onto his elbows. That was when he realized he wasn’t alone.
He was, by the looks of it, not far from the sea. Before him was a wall of shimmering basalt, rising slightly above the end of the grassy bank he was seated on. Coming from mountainous farmlands, Bál knew a thing or two about agriculture, and this bank looked as if it had been plowed exceptionally badly. A single chute of mud had been churned up, and parallel tracks of grass formed as if a mangled object had fallen and skidded between them. A few feet away, the tracks separated. One pair led to the space where his head had been, and the other twisted away to the right. Occupying the miniature brown basin at the end was a slumped figure.
He was about to call out but caught himself in time. Memories trickled into his head and not ones that made him feel particularly comfortable. There had been a wood and walking trees—that had been disconcerting enough—and then the Cult of Dionysus bringing with them that spiderlike mechanical monster. It was enough to make him reach instinctively for the ax he always carried by his side, but he found himself groping nothing but air. On closer inspection, not only was the ax gone, but his entire belt and a good few shreds of his tunic had been sheared off.
The other figure stirred. Caught between caution, curiosity, and concern, he pulled himself upward and hobbled over on aching legs. The figure had its back to him, and all he could make out were rippling blue material and wind-tangled dark hair. He reached out to place a hand on the shoulder, and the next thing he knew, with a whip crack, he was on his back again.
Cringing from the electric shock still tingling on his nerve endings, he became aware of the figure standing over him, blocking out much of the sky. He still couldn’t make out any distinctive features, other than that unusually long tangle of hair streaming in the wind. The figure paused, considered him for a moment, and then bent down. He braced himself for another bolt of alchemy, and in a flash, he remembered the crimson Shard around his neck, but when he blinked, he saw an open hand offered to him.
He took it and was pulled up to face his assailant. Their heights matched almost exactly, so that he found himself staring into piercingly aquamarine eyes.
The same look of amnesiac recognition passed over the girl’s face. Her mouth fell open. “It’s you! That’s where I know you from!”
He leaned away, a little alarmed at the pointed ears and olive skin. One of his father’s many adages returned to him: if an elf recognizes you, you’re in for trouble.
“You—you’re the one who tried to carve me out of the block!”
This wasn’t making any more sense, and he was beginning to suspect the worst. Here he was, apparently in the middle of nowhere, with no memory of how he’d gotten here, with an elf pretending to know him. He’d heard these stories before: unsuspecting dwarves lured into the wilderness by beautiful elfish maidens . . .
Then his memory clunked into place. He knew those features, but he had only ever seen them through a layer of burnished ice. This was the girl they had come across when searching the manor house back in Albion, the girl frozen in an alchemical slab and projected onto a sofa to look like an occupant of the drawing room. This was the same girl who had been attached to the spider machine the Cult had used to devastate the forest—the girl he had attempted to rescue just as the machine imploded and the two of them tumbled into Darkness . . .
He became aware he was staring.
The girl was now looking at him, concerned, as if wondering if he were having a seizure. “You do know who I am, don’t you?”
Bál shook his head slowly.
The girl looked perplexed. “Then all that stuff—the breaking into the manor house, following the sorcerers to the woods—that wasn’t to rescue me?”
Bál shook his head again and finally found his tongue. “Who are you? Where are we? What in the gods’ names is going on?”
“My name is Cire. What’s yours?”
“Bál.”
“Nice to meet you, Bál. Sorry I blasted you back there, but I haven’t been too lucky with strangers recently. As for where we are”—she glanced around—“I think I used to come here as a child. I’m not entirely sure why we ended up here exactly, but I think it’s a fairly straightforward journey back to the city.”
“What city? Albion?”
“No, Khălese.” Her forehead creased. “Albion . . . that’s where we were, weren’t we? With the Cult?” She looked around again. “I’ve got no idea how we got here, but this is definitely near Khălese.”
“Where?”
“Khălese? In the Republic of Tâbesh?”
Bál continued to stare at her blankly.
“Where I’m from. Home.”
“Right . . .”
A few minutes later, having clambered up banks and negotiated shrubbery, they were trudging down the middle of a wide, dusty road. Fields of crops spread out in panels on both sides, dissolving into a green haze on either horizon. Despite the overcast weather, it was still very hot. Bál found himself pulling off layer after layer as they walked and slinging them onto the growing heap of material carried over his shoulder. Where he came from, it rarely reached these temperatures, even in the height of summer. His skin under his shirt prickled with heat, and his forehead was becoming more and more moist.
It wasn’t only the environment that was making him uncomfortable. Cire began by barraging him with questions on every conceivable topic: where he came from, how he came to be on Albion, how he had come across the sorcerers. He still didn’t have a reason to trust her, let alone a burning urge to disclose his history to her. Eventually, his single-word answers perturbed her enough to stop the questioning. They lapsed into an awkward silence, which seemed to hover over them like a low-hanging cloud as they walked. The road was very long and very straight, and they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.
They had been walking about half an hour when they first heard the rumbling. It was coming from behind and above them.
Cire turned and squinted at the sky.
Bál followed her gaze and caught sight of it.
It looked something like a metal bird, glinting as it glided above them, following the trail of the road below.
Cire jumped and waved.
A little reluctantly, Bál did the same. He wasn’t sure what the object was, but anything was welcome if it would relieve them of this walk.
It didn’t take long for the object to change course. It curved around and circled downward, revolving around their patch of road as it dropped. Bál tried to follow it as it moved, and when it got closer, he realized just how big it was—at least the size of one of the mine shaft cranes back in his valley. Closer, it was less like a bird and more like a large silver worm or slug, the metallic exoskeleton reflecting the light from the glowing energy output at its rear.
With one final spin that hurled the dust of the road into a wall, the worm slid smoothly to rest before them, blocking the way ahead.
“What is it?” he called over the continued roar emanating from the object.
“It’s an airship,” Cire shouted back. “We use them quite a lot around here. But it’s a lot more high tech than anything I’ve seen before.”
“A what?”
But Bál’s question was drowned by a pneumatic hiss as a gangway descended from the ship’s belly. There was movement in the shadows of the interior. Humanoid shapes were emerging, clad entirely in the same shining metal as their vehicle.
“Thanks for stopping!” Cire called to them, holding her dress so that it didn’t blow up in the crosswind. “We’ve been walking for a while. Is it a long way—?”
“ID,” the leading figure barked. His voice was muffled and metallic behind his visor.
Bál looked to Cire, expecting her to know what this meant.
She looked as nonplussed as he felt. “Eye-dee? What do you . . .”
With a synchronized flick of their arms, batons extended from the gauntlets of the armored figures and crackled with alchemical lightning.
“So, you’re the Übermensch?” Dannie asked.
“Yep, it would seem that way,” Jack replied wearily. The same question was posed every time they stopped to rest. There was nothing more he could say.
He, Dannie, and Ruth had taken shelter in the shadow of a dune. Ruth had just produced their swiftly depleting water supply from her bag, and they drank from it sparingly. They had been moving from place to place for weeks, and in that time, Jack had seen a greater variety of environments than ever before. Coming from the original savannah, they had passed through jungles, between mountains, across wide grasslands, through rocky gorges, and now they traversed the white sea that was the desert.
For days now, they had seen nothing but dunes. He had never been to a desert before. He’d only seen pictures in books and on TV. It had none of the romance he had come to expect. It was blisteringly hot, and it wasn’t even golden. Barren white sand surrounded them in every direction, color obliterated against the burning sapphire of the sky.
This certainly wasn’t the biggest surprise he’d had to deal with recently. Things had gotten stranger over the last few months. From that night on Earth, when his undistinguished hometown had fallen victim to a group of sorcerers, he had traveled through a multitude of different worlds and met a plethora of creatures he had thought existed only in fairy tales. Life had definitely become much more interesting—and dangerous.
He had soon learned the group that had attacked his home was the Cult of Dionysus, the rulers of an empire located on the stormy ocean world of Nexus who had been intent on creating a superweapon called the Aterosa. To this end, they had sought out the greatest power sources they could find—chiefly, the Darkness that was the mirror image of the universe’s Light, connected via a series of hidden Doors. One such Door, as luck would have it, was situated on Earth, right in the center of Jack’s hometown of Birchford. The Cult had excavated the Door, assailed the town with demons, and captured his friend Lucy to use as a sacrificial offering. Not quite your ordinary weekday.
The group that had come to Birchford’s rescue were equally unexpected, albeit much more welcome. The Apollonians were a group of aid workers and freedom fighters, running humanitarian missions to worlds ravaged by the Cult and standing against the sorcerers with force where they could. As it transpired, Jack’s friend Alex, who had been missing and presumed dead for eighteen months, had been working with the Apollonians and returned that night at the head of a small army to defend Birchford. The Cult had been forced to retreat, but not before stabbing Alex and abducting him.
With the danger of Cult reprisals, Jack and Lucy had been taken into the care of the Apollonians and transported via an ultra-high-tech dimension ship to another world. Taught how to defend themselves and helping to fend off another Cult attack, the two had joined as full-time members of the group.
As life changing as this had been, it seemed almost domestic compared to the bigger picture. The other major power source the Cult had coveted was the Risa Star, an immensely powerful alchemical artifact divided into seven Shards, about which the Apollonians still knew very little. Though unsure of exactly what the Shards could do, the Apollonians had scrambled to find them and keep them from the Cult. The artifacts had been falling in and out of each side’s grasp so regularly that Jack had lost track of how many had actually been recovered. What he knew for sure, however, was that one—the Seventh—was currently hanging around his neck, given to him the night he had left Earth.
It was this Shard that highlighted the biggest issue of all, the one that had hung over the three of them for their entire journey thus far. A group of Apollonians had not long ago found their way to Nexus and had managed to sabotage the Aterosa just as it was being activated. The result had been catastrophic for the Cult—the entire imperial city had imploded, and the waters around it pulled back into the Darkness to reveal a new planet underneath. The surviving zöpüta—those subjects of the Cult’s religion who had managed to escape—had established a new community called Nduino in the midst of the untouched savannah. It appeared that the Cult had been defeated and the Apollonians were triumphant—until their leader, Sardâr, had finally succumbed to injuries inflicted in the battle. On the day of his death, Sardâr had confided in Jack a suspicion he had allegedly held for some time. Two thousand years before, the Shards had been used by warriors of the Light, led by a being called the Übermensch, to drive back the Darkness and seal it away. This being’s defining feature was its unique ability to understand and speak any language in the universe—an ability that, when challenged, Jack had discovered he possessed.
No pressure, then.
“So if you are the Übermensch,” Ruth continued, “then why didn’t you notice it before? You must’ve been really good at languages at school?”
Jack had to stop himself from rolling his eyes. They had been through all this before. “Inari said it was a state of becoming, not being. It only started to come out when I began using the Shard.” Inari, the fox spirit who had some link to the Seventh Shard, was the one who had originally bestowed the artifact upon Jack. This was yet another mystery. Inari came and went according to his own will but seemed to have some alchemical restriction imposed on him: whenever he tried to explain something to Jack that could be of some use, he found himself suddenly mute.
“That’s a shame. You could’ve aced a few exams that way.”
Despite himself, Jack smiled. Even if they did ask the same questions over and over, he was glad to have these two along with him; he had come to regard them as some of his closest friends, even though they had known one another for only a short time. He had met Ruth just after the initial Cult attack. She was the captain of The Golden Turtle, the dimension ship that had taken them to safety. Like him, she was an orphan—at least she thought she had been, until they had met a zöpüta who had known her parents. Her mother and father had been part of a revolutionary cell dedicated to toppling the Cult from within Nexus, but when they had been caught, Ruth had fallen into Darkness and come out with amnesia. Taken in by the Apollonians, it had taken a traumatic return to Nexus to begin restoring her memory.
Their other companion, Dannie, had an even odder story. They had first come across her as a factory worker in the world of Albion while investigating the whereabouts of the Third Shard. It had been Dannie who, when they fell afoul of the local police, had busted them out of jail and joined them in their search. That search had brought them into contact with fairies, creatures distinguished by their incredible ability to adapt their bodies to any environment, who lived as trees in their native forest. It had been revealed that Dannie was half fairy on her mother’s side. Not only this, but she had managed to locate the Shard and use it to defend the forest against another Cult insurgency. Like Jack’s newfound linguistic powers, Dannie’s transformational powers were discovered only when she made contact with a Shard. It made for an odd sight, seeing her polishing her self-invented alchemical gadgets with her lower body, which, due to the desert terrain, currently consisted of armadillo-like plates.
Ruth and Dannie had volunteered for a mission that, by the Apollonians’ usual standards of grievous bodily harm, looked to be very straightforward. It remained unexplained how this world, with all its biodiversity, could have survived for hundreds of years under the waves of Nexus. Hakim, the Apollonians’ new leader, had theorized that the only power source able to sustain an entire planet indefinitely was a Shard of the Risa Star and, therefore, there must be one hidden somewhere on its surface. There was an immense energy signature emanating from a site several thousand miles to the northeast of where the Nduino community had been set up. With the other Apollonians helping construct the new settlement and Sardâr’s ashes being escorted back to his home world of Tâbesh, Jack, Ruth, and Dannie had set out to add another Shard to their growing collection.
It might not have involved any direct danger, but the journey wasn’t a particularly comfortable experience. There was no sign of progression, nothing much to suggest whether they were getting any closer to their goal—particularly given that due to the imprecision of their instruments, they found themselves zigzagging as the energy readings changed. They would travel a few hours in one direction, stop, recalibrate, and set off again at a right angle from where they had just come.
While Ruth went about it with patience and Dannie treated the whole affair in her usual lighthearted way, Jack found the strength to keep going from one particular thing. Though he had not admitted it to anyone else, there was another reason he had been so keen on this mission. He had originally joined the Apollonians as a way of finding Alex, who had remained a prisoner of the Cult. Now that the Cult was apparently gone, there was a good chance that Alex, like the Apollonians, would have wound up somewhere on this world. That was, of course, if he had managed to escape the devastation at all. Jack tried not to think about that. Knowing Alex as he did, he was sure he would have found a way out somehow.
“I guess we’d better be moving on,” Ruth said once the water had been passed around again.
They stood, the sun searing their faces as it swam back into view. Slipping a little on the ultrafine grains, they trudged back to where the dimension ship had been driven at an angle into the ground. They were already drenched in sweat again by the time they reached the gondola-shaped ship with paneled dragonfly wings.
“As much fun as this is,” Jack remarked as they hauled themselves aboard, “I’ve never looked forward to a shower more.”