Garrie eased away from beneath Quinn’s arm to peer out of the shelter. The mountain entity throbbed tightly around them, fully visible as a field of streaky black-shaded red. “Well,” she said, as under her breath as one could get in such crowded circumstances, “that just can’t be good.”
Rick joined her there, if much more warily. “What now?”
“Now?” Garrie crossed her arms and cast him a scowl. “Now we probably die. But first I get to say I told you so.”
The baby’s mother looked at her with a resentful anger. “That’s not funny!”
“It’s not supposed to be funny,” Garrie said. “It’s supposed to be true.” But she was already groping down into the satchel, coming up with the echveria—and then with the oskhila and then, finally, the sheathed knife. She looked at Quinn and Lucia. “I’m going. Or I’m gonna try. If it doesn’t work...well, things could hardly be worse.”
“Bite your tongue,” Quinn said, but his asperity held a tinge of desperation—Quinn’s bright blue eyes, knowing there was nothing more he could do.
Lucia drew a shaky breath, eyeing the devices in Garrie’s hands. “Do you really know how to use those things?”
Garrie opened her mouth to answer, and decided better of it. Maybe wasn’t the answer Lucia wanted to hear.
Quinn fumbled for words. “Garrie...”
“Be careful?” Garrie suggested, shifting the oskhila until her fingers settled into place.
“Well, that too. But mainly...go kick Keharian ass, okay? And then come back.”
She gave him a fierce grin. “That’s the plan.”
But she hesitated on doing it, the oskhila in one hand, the echveria in the other, and the sheathed knife jammed into her waistband. Rhonda Rose had done this once, if in a different way. Taken herself between worlds.
Of course, Rhonda Rose hadn’t been alive at the time.
Now or never.
~~~~~
Garrie brought up her memory of Trevarr in chains, the damp scent of the cavern, the nose-wrinkling spice of Kehar’s dark fog. She connected to her longing for him and her want of him and to the faint, constant tug of his being. She held out the oskhila, tapping it with her grip and with her uncertain intent and startling when it responded, shedding a rainbow field of light.
The mountain entity stirred anew, as if sensing something but uncertain of it. She brought up the echveria in her other hand, holding it with exacting precision and a very deep breath as she released its portal energies.
White gold blinding screaming power POWER—
She fell to her knees, holding the artifacts up as if in supplication—unable to hear herself scream above the roaring power but knowing she did it, a cry of fear and defiance and purely primal expression, her lips peeled back to show teeth, tears of effort leaking from her squinting eyes.
Maybe the rest of them screamed, too. She wouldn’t have known.
She might never know, because the portal energy wavered and fluttered and beat against her, fighting for freedom like a living thing—flailing against her until she had no remaining sense of the shelter, the mountains, the entity...not even certain that she herself still lived.
Fake it.
Breathe it in, breathe it out. Ebb and flow.
Trevarr had taught her that.
She reached for remembered sensation and made herself into the conduit she’d so recently learned to be, channeling the portal energy into the oskhila. Never letting go of her sense of Trevarr—the part of him that she’d never relinquished in the first place, because it had become part of her.
The rainbow intensity disappeared beneath a screen of black. The roar faded; her scream went silent. Nothing to hear, nothing to feel, nothing to touch...
She managed to close her mouth. And she managed, as the ground once more felt solid beneath her knees and gravity tugged her down to meet it, not to fall on her face.
Warmth pressed in around her, already oppressive. The air stung her nose with unfamiliar scents, a thick and heady spice.
“Atreya.”
She opened her eyes and found him—on one knee, his arms tensed and pulling against the chains, his hair loose and the braids glimmering within. And his eyes...finally, she found his eyes, a fiery silver gaze riveted to her with the intensity she had missed so very damned much.
“Atreya,” Trevarr said again, and this time it was a demand.
Garrie scrambled to her feet and ran to him, flinging herself on him, not even close to knocking him over as she wrapped herself close, arms clinging, legs tangled, embracing him with her entire being. Her head pressed close to his, face buried against his hair—coarser than human, scented of wood smoke. Her breath caught for a long, unendurable moment, giving her an infinity to absorb the sensations of him—the solidity of his body, the thrum of his energy, the way his very being embrace her in return. His hands spanned across her back; the manacles dug into her spine. His tremble came not from weakness, but from restraint.
And then time started again, and he released a small huff of laughter. “Tell me, atreya. How do you really feel?”
She pulled back in teary, disbelieving laughter. “Was that a joke? You choose now to try out a joke?”
His cryptic features were no longer difficult for her to read. Not in the least. She saw the humor at the corner of his eyes; she saw the depth of emotion within. She fell on him with kisses—fast little kisses that covered his face, his brow, the new scar that ran through it, the old scar just under his mouth, his eyes, his nose...
His mouth. Over and over again, his mouth. Until he latched his hand behind her head and held her there for a longer kiss, the kiss of all kisses, right there between her mouth and his, and by the time he was done with that, her fingers had left whitened imprints on his shoulders beside the faint tattoos of feather scales that weren’t tattoos at all.
She broke away gasping for air and thought, hitting herself lightly on the forehead with the heel of her hand. “No, no no,” she said. “Must think. Must use brains. Must get out of here.”
Regret showed at the corner of his mouth, a wry thing. “Ever wise, my atreya.”
“Rarely wise,” she retorted, sitting back on her heels to take stock. “Usually making things up along the way, and you know it.”
“My language sounds good on your tongue,” he observed. He leaned back against the rock, his legs crossed, shackled wrists resting on his knees.
She sent him a little glare. “We’ll talk about that later. After we get out of this place. I’m thinking no one’s come running in, so maybe they don’t know I’m here?”
“Our detection glyphs aren’t attuned to your energies.”
“But someone could still show up.” She looked around the cave—a generous thing the size of her entire first floor, patchily illuminated by lumps of light that just might have been breathing. “Even those little toad minions I saw earlier...where do they even come from?”
“There are passages. Nothing large enough to consider for our own use.”
She stopped her mad whirl of plotting long enough to cast a glance his way. “You use more words here.”
“I have more words to use,” he informed her. “Atreya, I cannot escape these shackles.” He held them up, revealing wrists raw and weeping. “I cannot draw on my own resources while wearing them.”
She wanted to hurt someone. Badly. “These people are monsters.”
“So you once might have said of me.”
She glared at him. “You want to go there now?”
He hesitated. The unfamiliar light gleamed in his eye, showing her a weariness she hadn’t seen before. “This is not your home, atreya. Have no illusions about us here. Any of us. Many in Ghehera are human, but they do not come from your world. They do not live by your assumptions.”
“Yada, yada,” Garrie snapped. “I get it, okay? Stranger in a strange land. At some point you’ll get to say I told you so, no doubt. Right now, let’s get you out of those damned chains and out of here.”
He only looked at her—a patient expression, but also faintly puzzled. Maybe she needed to kiss some sense into him.
On second thought, she did still need her own brain. She twisted out of the satchel strap, dropping it beside him, and rose to grab up the duster she’d dropped in her rush to greet him, displaying it with triumph. She particularly showed him the inside front flap where the sword’s hilt emerged.
“Lukhas!”
“Exactly.” She withdrew the sword, pulling it from the Tardis pocket and tossing the coat his way. She pretended not to notice the hint of alarm on his face or the way he drew back as she brandished the sword. “This thing cuts through just about everything, as far as I could see.”
“It has enhancements,” he said, his eyes never leaving the moving blade.
“Don’t be a baby,” she told him. “It’ll cut the chains, right? The shackles?”
His expression said yes. His body language said he wasn’t sure he wanted to try. Finally he allowed, “It should. But not these.” He indicated the shackles with a lift of his wrists.
“One thing at a time. So hold still.”
It was a starting point, and he knew it. Still, he hesitated.
Garrie turned serious. “I’ll be careful,” she said. “I’ll be really careful. But someone could come in at any moment, right? And I don’t want to have to kill them. Besides...” She took a deep breath. “I left my crew in trouble. And civilians. There’s a thing on the mountain called a kyrokha—are you familiar?”
He couldn’t have looked more startled—another first. As were the words he couldn’t quite seem to form.
She took his reaction as assent. “It’s hunkered in pretty hard, and it’s mad as a hatter.” That, she could see, hadn’t made sense to him. “It’s farking insane, Trevarr. It’s killing people. And it has Quinn and Lucia and a bunch of hikers trapped up there. Sklayne, too, but he can get out when he wants to, as long as he doesn’t manage to goad it into eating him.”
He didn’t quite meet her eyes. “Sklayne told you it was kyrokha.”
“Yes. And that it’s a big farking powerful thing. Not bad. At least not when it’s sane.”
“And you left your people.”
The statement wasn’t accusatory; it wasn’t even a question. But she wasn’t used to Trevarr feeling his way with her. And she was embarrassed.
“It hates me,” she said. “The kyrokha. I think it knows I was involved in the whole portal thing. Anyway, being there—I was just making things worse. Didn’t have anything to offer but dissolution, supposing I could even pull that off. But honestly...I think that would be bad for everyone. I’m hoping you have a better idea. You know, after I break these chains. And then the shackles. And then you can use the oskhila and—” The look on his face stopped her. “What?”
“Not the oskhila. Not from within this containment.” He searched her gaze as if he could instill understanding with the intensity of it. “Not from within Ghehera.”
She stared at him, too stupefied to respond—taking in his sincerity, the lack of challenge in his voice, the renewed weariness behind his eyes. “But...I got in...”
“A weakness on the part of the glyphs. I cannot take us out again. You cannot take me out. This place knows me.”
She stuttered a few words, managed to say, “But if I put you in silence...”
In response he shifted aside, drawing one chain tight across the face of the rock most recently at his back. Giving her room to swing the blade.
She understood well enough. No, not even with her silence. But they had to start somewhere.
She took a careful hold of Lukhas’ hilt, two hands wrapped around leather and wire, and lifted the sword. “I’ll be careful,” she promised him, and swung.
~~~~~
Anjhela strode into the Deeps, all languid and loose-hipped on the outside, shifting to high alert on the inside. Lumes flickered around her; skelpies scuttled away. They sensed her mood no matter how she tried to hide it. Alarm. Fury.
In Ghehera, one did not display alarm. Arrogance, yes. Cruelty, yes. In her day, Anjhela had worn such things like cloaks of status.
She was no longer so certain it was her day.
She stopped at Trevarr’s containment, damning herself for ignoring the recent shiver in the security glyphs in favor of her consolation session in progress. Because of that distraction, she’d come to the Deeps unaware, unconcerned—wearing her cloak of arrogance until the moment one of the squat, toadlike mudbloods saw her and instantly darted away with its eyes bulging, quacking in fear.
She could have caught it easily. But she cared more about why the thing was frightened in the first place—for only these caretaker ’bloods had unfettered access to Trevarr’s containment.
Grimly, she palmed the entry lock. The solid stone separated into door and wall; the door cracked open and pushed aside, revealing Trevarr’s containment.
And he wasn’t alone.
Anjhela lunged inside and commanded the door closed, stunned by the impossibility but no less swift to act on it what she’d seen. Trevarr, twisting away from the rock, one of his chains flailing through the air...broken. His face fierce, overwhelming for the moment the weakness she knew to lie beneath.
Not alone.
His petite companion wielded his sword without grace, staggering a step, then two, to catch her balance. And then she saw Anjhela, and instead of fear her precise features took on an unexpected grin, just as fierce as Trevarr’s and no less intense for the whimsical shimmer of her skin or the disarrayed nature of her short hair with its silvered sections, so much like k’thai. Not at all chagrined at her discovery, but greeting Anjhela like an old enemy well met.
She knows me. It wasn’t voluntary, that thought. It came with a startled fear—followed close on by annoyance. Anjhela feared no one.
And this small human creature would hardly survive Ghehera unscathed, if she should survive at all.
Trevarr’s familiar satchel and worn duster sat beside him; Anjhela knew the sword to be Lukhas, a thing crafted by the finest of blade makers and enhanced by the most exacting set of glyphs. Protected by them.
She would not underestimate that blade.
The woman tossed Lukhas to Trevarr, confident he could snatch it from air—as he did, stretching the chain tight as the blade flashed through it. The chain parted, metal singing—but the shackles remained, as they would continue to remain. Layered in silvered glyphs that would resist even Lukhas, they were stalwart to outside assault.
Trevarr straightened, no longer fastened to rock, perfectly capable of using both the dangling chains and the shackles as physical weapons, and Anjhela took a step back. Not frightened, no. But wise. Ready to slip through the door and sound the alarm, shedding dignity for practical survival.
I can handle him.
He won’t truly harm me.
And she thought that might be true. But she didn’t know if she could say it of the two of them.
“Ohh, no,” said the woman, anticipating Anjhela’s movement—and speaking in Anjhela’s tongue. Not the off-world woman Trevarr had been protecting? But if not, how had she gotten past the glyphs? And who—”
The hesitation cost her. The woman shot forward more quickly than Anjhela anticipated, her wiry strength full of speed. She slammed against the end of the door, sliding it back into place—and then stood before it as if in a dare.
This time Anjhela offered her own fierce grin, a thing of faintly pointed teeth and a dark tongue. She didn’t reach for her blade, a petite but utterly efficient knife.
She unsheathed the mendihar.
~~~~~~~~~~