THURLOCK’S FEET hurt. As did his back, neck, knees, and hips. He didn’t know what a person over ten centuries old really should feel like, but at present he felt like the average person might at, say, a century and a half. In other words, bad. He’d been able to grab what Han liked to call a “wizard’s forty winks”—a quick, magic-assisted nap—while Henry had been away on his reconnaissance flight earlier, but since then, they’d been walking over a narrow, root-filled, muddy track through rough-barked trees and the occasional thicket of pretty-but-thorny shadeberries. Food hadn’t been a problem—it had only been a couple of hours, and anyway nourishment rarely posed a difficulty for a wizard with his skills—but after they’d taken a brief stop to rest and eat, his full belly only seemed to make it harder to keep putting one of his very large and annoyingly heavy feet in front of the other. Only a request to Behlishan for a little supportive magic had kept him going at all.
He raised tired eyes to look around and found they’d entered a clearing bounded on three sides by a mix of myrtle and ancient sehldar, their mingled, tangy-sweet scents singularly refreshing. In the center of the clearing, a half sphere of stone stood solitary surrounded by a pool of the clear water that bubbled out from a crack in the rock. Lemon and Maizie bounded over to it, even the grumpy revenant cat seeming overjoyed. Thurlock stopped and relaxed into the moment with a deep breath, deeply relieved.
It wasn’t that they’d been thirsty—Thurlock could summon drinking water as easily as food. This place offered a gift, a cool, green beauty that would soothe even the sorest tired eyes, and the gentle music of the spring water dropping into the pool fell easy on one’s ears. Sacred was the word that came instantly to Thurlock’s mind. Yet the wonder of the clearing’s beauty wasn’t the source of his relief.
For the first time since they’d arrived in Ethra, he knew exactly where they were, and it was exactly where they needed to be.
“Behl eth Dahn,” he said, giving voice to heartfelt thanks.
HENRY STOOD beside and slightly behind Thurlock, taking in the beauty of the clearing. Surprisingly, he almost felt he recognized the place. Some of the trees were different, but the spirit of the place was the same as he’d felt in a certain myrtle grove in Black Creek Ravine, and the spring bubbling out of the stone sphere nearly made it a twin to that glade back home.
Thurlock took a step in the direction of the spring, but stumbled over a tussock of thick, sharp-bladed grass, and Henry reached out a hand to catch him. He’d been keeping an eye on him, watching him grow wearier, even older, as the hours of walking through the forest wore on.
“Thank you, Henry.”
“You’re welcome, sir,” Henry said, the honorific seeming to fit at the moment. He’d given in to his tendency to be flippant when Thurlock was spry and chipper, but he couldn’t find it in him to mouth off when he seemed like a tired old man. “We should rest here. I could gather some grass or something and make a place for you to lie down, maybe over by the spring where the ground is sandy. You could get a quick nap. I can keep watch if that’s necessary.”
“Very thoughtful of you, Henry,” Thurlock said as he carefully, with Henry still supporting him, made his way toward the spring. “A nap sounds truly wonderful, but I’d so much rather take it in my own bed. It feels like years since I’ve been there.”
Frustrated, thinking Thurlock was simply being stubborn, Henry said, “Well, at least sit and rest here for a while, then. I’m sure the water is refreshing—we can drink from the spring and you could soak your feet in the pool.”
“I’ll do that! A wonderful idea. But we won’t stay long. Because you see we’re almost home—to the Sisterhold, that is. You see that wall of basalt over there?”
Henry followed Thurlock’s gesture to the only side of the clearing not bounded by tall trees. Through a thin screen of leggy brush, he saw what from this angle looked like a monolith of almost-black stone maybe thirty feet high and half again as wide, breaking in some places into palisades.
“Just off to the side there,” Thurlock continued, “see that crevice? It’s the entrance to a Portal of Naught. Get a drink of this wonderful water. Brush the dust out of your hair and wash your hands. Prepare to make your entrance at the Sisterhold.”
When Henry stepped into the pool, the touch of the water seemed magical, and as he watched Thurlock, the ancient wizard seemed to grow younger with each swallow and each second he stood with his feet submerged.
“Ah,” Thurlock said. “Isn’t it wonderful? I’m not certain just how, but this particular stream seems to travel miles underground direct from Kindled Springs. Nothing refreshes like Kindled Springs water. This is not quite that, but it’s good.”
Maizie seemed to agree. She splashed in the pool, lapped noisily at the water as it fell from the natural stone fountain. Lemon, despite being recently resurrected, jumped like a spry kitten to the top of the stone and drank from the bubbling spring. When a sunbeam broke through an opening in the myrtle branches, slanting in from the west to warm and soothe Henry’s tired neck and shoulders while the water cooled his feet, he wanted the moment to last for hours, or days, or maybe forever.
Well, no, not forever. Because I’m in Ethra now and… Han.
He smiled to himself, thinking he’d soon get to see the man he’d literally walked through worlds and slithered through drain pipes and thorns to follow. Something like a shiver of warmth—if there was such a thing—rushed through him. Despite a case of nerves, he couldn’t remember feeling this happy since before his uncle Hank died almost two years ago.
Maizie’s sudden snarling, barking tirade shattered the peaceful moment, and before anyone could even try to stop her, she rushed across the clearing and into the cave, which, Thurlock had said, led to a Portal of Naught. Lemon hissed, standing atop the stone in the pool with back arched, tail puffed, and hackles raised. Then he followed Maizie, moving lightning-fast, mowing down the wildflowers in his way as he ran across the clearing.
A moment of darkness—a cloud in the sky or in Henry’s own mind—touched him with an icy finger before it passed. Henry and Thurlock still stood in the sunlit pool, but the joy of it had fled, and Henry’s heart drummed in panic.
“Behl’s bloody teeth!” Thurlock exclaimed, his swearing going a step beyond the usual.
They ran together, crossing the thirty or forty yards to the monolithic rock wall, Thurlock holding his staff in front of him and moving like a warrior charging to battle. At the opening in the rock, they both stopped and looked at each other. Then, staff lit with bright, golden light, Thurlock led the way in.
Maizie and Lemon stood inside the cave, facing forward, eyes fixed on something farther in. They both had hackles raised, and Maizie growled low while Lemon snarled and hissed. They stared at nothing. Truly nothing. More nothing and less something than Henry ever remembered seeing while still standing on solid ground. If there was something in or beyond the nothing, it wasn’t possible to see it, for it was the blackest, emptiest nothing imaginable.
He looked to Thurlock for answers. “What are they looking at?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why is it so… nothing right there?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“Is that the portal?”
“Well.” Thurlock scratched his beard thoughtfully before continuing. “No. Decidedly not. The Portal opening is some way farther into the cave. And this nothing, as you called it, does not resemble a Portal of Naught. Though, for that matter, it does resemble Naught itself.”
“Has this ever happened before?”
“I don’t know, Henry. And to the next six questions you’re thinking of asking, whatever they are, I’m pretty sure I also don’t know those answers.”
Henry heard the pique in Thurlock’s voice and thought better of asking anything else. Besides, apparently the wizard wasn’t quite as smart as he seemed, at least about this. Henry narrowed his eyes, trying to peer more piercingly into the blackness, but it didn’t help at all. “There’s only one way to find the answers that I can think of,” he said.
“Right,” Thurlock said. “Hold on to the staff, and let’s do it.”
As they stepped forward, the nothing swallowed up the light from Thurlock’s staff, and Henry couldn’t see the wizard—couldn’t see his own hand inches from his face. Doggedly, he kept pace with the old man as together they moved ahead, one stride, two, three. And then they stopped, because inside the nothing, the cave was filled with swirling tendrils and columns of smoke… or mist. And lights, of a sort.
Henry was reminded of the worst sort of old horror movie, the kind he used to watch as a child on his uncle Hank’s little portable TV set. The ones where dry ice laid a thick haze over sickly green- and fuchsia-colored lights embedded in the studio floor, and shapes formed and dissipated in pools of mist; it was supposed to make the viewer believe ghosts and vampires and creatures from lagoons could be real. But then again, what he was in the middle of now wasn’t like those productions at all, because those made him laugh. This was real, and something he sensed—something he couldn’t define—moved, seething, inside the darkness. The stink of death rolled toward him so thick that even he, a big vulture, felt sick from it.
As horrifying as it was, Henry was willing to stand his ground with the wizard and his fellow creatures, Maizie and Lemon—wherever they’d gotten off to. So he wasn’t exactly thinking about running out of the cave and back into the sunshine. But he did need to know escape was at least possible. He turned, hoping to look outside and fix his eyes on a patch of clear blue sky, or tree branches, or grassy, flower-strewn ground. Nothing was there. Not like, there wasn’t anything there, but like something real that was so blank Henry could only think of it as “nothing” stood all around him. A soft, misty, impermeable blackness, it hung everywhere around them.
As if the dimension Henry lived in had been blocked out by chunks of other-where.
It did remind him of Naught, that something he’d traveled through when using the Portals. But unlike that emptiness, this seemed somehow purposeful. He turned forward again and looked deeper into the cave where mists curled and twisted and lights sparked and sizzled. The nothing was there too, but somehow Henry was sure there was something in it, something more than he could see. Something exceedingly foul and unspeakably scary.
Thurlock’s staff had begun to glow again as the wizard chanted in a low, steady voice, and now it gave off a faint, troubled golden light. Weak and sputtering, it hardly seemed like an anchor against the dreadful miasma of the place, and without thinking, Henry let his hand fall away from it. Within seconds, dizziness overtook him on a wave of nausea. He wasn’t sure if he was falling, but he felt like it—until he heard Thurlock call out. Thurlock’s normally powerful voice quavered like sound borne on radio waves from distant galaxies. Henry barely made out the words.
“Hold on to the staff!”
Henry shouted back, “Where are you?”
“Right next to you” came Thurlock’s answer, and indeed when Henry reached out, his hand made contact with the wizard’s staff, and he grabbed hold. Once he had a grip on it, he could see it, and the solid wood comforted him. His dizziness and nausea calmed, but when he got a good look at Thurlock, he had to bite back a new wave of fright.
“You’re flickering,” he shouted after he’d found his voice.
“So are you,” Thurlock said.
Even in its current nebulous form, the wizard’s expression shouted to Henry that the old man was thoroughly annoyed, which added another layer of danger, but also seemed to suggest their problems weren’t insurmountable. Henry drew in courage on a sharp breath of chilled air, determined despite being scared in a way he’d never been before, and asked another question.
“What’s happening, Thurlock?”
“I don’t know, Henry, and I’ll never know if I can’t think it through. Just hold on to the staff and be quiet!” Perhaps Thurlock regretted his angry tone, because after a moment, he added, “Please, quiet now, Henry. As you can see, this magic is almost too much for me. I need all my strength, all my mind on the problem.”
Henry clamped his lips shut and stashed his questions away to ask at a safer time, should he survive until then.
The cold that had passed by with a single touch out in the glade seemed to have sunk roots and flourished here inside the cave. Somehow, a wind blew through the closed space, doing nothing to clear up the darkness or the smelly air, but sending its chill straight into Henry’s bones. He hunched his shoulders against it.
Something warm and solid leaned up against his calf, and when Henry dropped his gaze he saw Maizie. He saw her, fully solid, her golden-furred body as unwavering and easy to see as if they still stood in the clearing outside. It was a comforting sight, like a touchstone, and for a moment Henry simply gazed at her, but just as he was starting to wonder where Lemon Martinez might be, a glimpse of motion between Thurlock’s feet caught his eye. The cat was there, and he too stood solid and in full living color, snarling and hissing at the swirling mists and lights. Henry looked again at Thurlock and then down at his own body—yes, they still flickered and wavered as if trying to decide whether or not to exist.
A mystery woke up Henry’s brain: why did this stuff—which must be some sort of magic, he supposed, or at least a phenomenon of a science he didn’t understand, which amounted to the same thing—why did it affect him and Thurlock, change them somehow, but leave the animals untouched? For a moment he watched Thurlock struggle, wondering if he dared disturb the wizard’s efforts to ask his new questions. But then, in a sudden flash of insight, he understood.
In the same instant, he realized that he—lowly shifter from another world—might be, at least on one level, far better equipped to fight this… stuff… than the legendary wizard Thurlock. This evil (yes, he decided, evil) seemed to have been deliberately crafted and transmitted on a frequency that would target humans, just like a dog whistle was pitched to the canine ear. Whatever it was supposed to do—change them, kill them, transport them?—at the moment he felt weak, like he’d been diluted down and washed out. He could do nothing about it, and he couldn’t even see the enemy, but Maizie and Lemon, standing solid, at least saw something in the mists. Henry had a way to make it so he could do that too.
He shifted.
Henry’s Condor was real—solid flesh and blood—but he transformed instantly and painlessly. Unlike the classic werewolf, he had no need to wait for bones and flesh to bend and stretch and shape themselves. He had learned to shift as a shaman shifts, and there was magic in it too. So now, he was human, and then with a thought he was the Condor, fully formed and feathered. And even better, Thurlock’s magical stone amulet stayed potent despite the evil magic in the cave.
As soon as he took his nonhuman form, Henry could see into the dark flashing mists. The horrid sights made him sick, literally, yet knowing what they faced seemed to him a vast improvement over being terrified to move in a sea of misty emptiness.
Inside the nothing, a power surged and crackled, brilliant lightning, flashes of electric-blue flame, sparks and swirls the color of black light. The atmosphere held, or perhaps it animated, death. Three soldiers stood there in the cave, wearing mail and holding swords—not zombies, and not ghosts, but something shadowy in-between. Their eyes, clouded with death, glowed in dark skulls wearing rictus grins—all made of rotting flesh that wasn’t quite there. They didn’t wield their weapons but held them aloft, catching on the points the fabric of the awful power that had possessed this place. It hung from their weapons like a cloud in a net. Presently, that cloud blossomed a new shape from its depths, an ice-blue blade in liquid motion as if an invisible hand wielded it in slicing arcs, moving slowly but inexorably toward Thurlock.
Henry let the Condor’s magic rise and, his powerful wings sweeping evil aside to clear the way, flew up and alighted atop Thurlock’s glowing staff. With his wings spread to their full twelve-foot span, he tried to block the ethereal sword from getting to Thurlock. He was strong, his shield could hold back the dark, cold magic, but he wasn’t sure how long. In bird form, he was immune to the trickery of the magic, but maybe not all its power. It could hurt him, he thought, maybe even kill him. It didn’t have total power over Henry, but he didn’t have total power over it either—he could not destroy it, quell it, or transform it into something harmless.
But he could shield Thurlock, and that’s what he would do for as long as he could.
Thurlock’s staff had been shaking when Henry perched on it, as if the wizard didn’t have the strength to hold it steady against the onslaught of the dark mists. But while Henry blocked that magic, he felt the staff grow steadier. He wrapped his claws around the orb atop the wizard’s staff, clutching tightly, and the light—formerly only a faint glow—grew strong, bright, and constant. Henry turned his head to look at Thurlock. The wizard, too, grew strong, stopped flickering, his magic flowing again.
Soon, Thurlock and his magic dominated—dwarfed—every power in the cave. Henry marveled as he watched him, seeing him tall as a giant, broad-shouldered, and impossibly strong.
“This misty darkness,” the wizard said, his voice booming in the emptiness but sounding for all the world as though he was giving a lecture, “is like the powers of the god Mahl. It partakes, as does he, from the stuff of Naught. Naught is always hungry. Whatever is behind these mists, it is hungry for souls, and most particularly my soul.” He laughed, but not as though he thought it was funny. “But the Sunlands of Ethra are the home territory of Behlishan, the god of light whom I serve and who is my friend. While I stand, the hunger cannot truly claim this place. Maintain your shield, Henry. Empower it stronger if you can. I’ll see to undoing the spells working here.”
In his entire life Henry had touched his true power only twice: once when his uncle had trained him to shift, and once as a firefighter when he was trapped in a building with a young child to save. Now he called it up for the third time, let it bubble up from his spirit’s core and out to infuse his wings until they glowed with bloodred light. Years ago in that fire, his magic hadn’t killed the flames, only shielded him and the child he carried, allowing them to escape. Likewise now, his power couldn’t quench the evil inhabiting this cave, but when he unleashed it, it rendered the shield he’d created many times stronger. Behind it, the wizard could work.
Thurlock chanted words unintelligible to Henry, and as the chant flowed forth, Thurlock’s voice strengthened and deepened even more. Soon Henry could feel power thrumming and pulsing through the glowing globe atop the staff. A wind filled with banshee screeches and howls rose up out of the darkness, filling the cave with awful sounds. The dread, lifeless soldiers Henry had seen opened their mouths wide as if to scream, but instead of sound, snakes of black smoke slithered out from the orifices in long twisted cords that writhed and then coiled, ready to strike at Henry, Maizie, and Lemon Martinez.
But they failed to make contact with living flesh, and suddenly, all the sound in the cave fell in on itself, leaving them standing in silence so unnaturally complete it felt to Henry as if he’d gone utterly deaf. The dead soldiers collapsed to the ground, their flesh whisked away in clouds of dust. The black mists sparked and writhed still, but they began to wither, shrinking into crevices and corners, and finally disappearing altogether.
The sense of evil presence, the dread that had cloaked Henry’s mind from the moment he’d stepped into the cave left him. He breathed back to human form and turned to Thurlock, only to find him bent over, leaning heavily on his staff, looking this time impossibly old.
“Thurlock,” Henry said, aware of alarm in his own voice. “Can I help?”
“Sun,” Thurlock answered. “Behl’s light. Out by the pool.”
Though the way out of the cave remained obscured by smoke, light poured in through the triangular opening. A breeze blew in, smelling of sehldar, myrtle, and the dark but fresh tang of some herb, which reminded Henry tantalizingly of coffee. “What I wouldn’t give for a cup of coffee,” he said, as he all but carried the wizard out into the clearing and across to the freshet and pool.
Thurlock eased himself from Henry’s hold and went down to his knees at the edge of the water. After he bathed his face and hands in the pool, he already looked much stronger, younger even. He planted his staff in the sandy mud as if he planned to use it to rise, but Henry once again reached out helping hands.
Allowing Henry to help, Thurlock said, “Thank you, young man. For the hand up, but also for everything you did”—he waved his fingers toward the cave—“in there. I’d sensed a different sort of magic at the core of your shapeshifting ability, but I had no idea it would prove so formidable. I fear we may have been lost in that loathsomeness had you not helped.”
Thurlock paused, his eyebrows scrunched together, and his gaze seemed suddenly to focus intently on something distant. The ridiculous notion crossed Henry’s mind that Thurlock was flipping pages in some huge tome a hundred miles from where they stood. Standing in the pool and letting the water wash over his feet, clearing away the remembrance of things too putrid for even a condor, he suddenly had to fight an urge to laugh. He squelched the humor and was about to give an appropriately serious “You’re welcome,” but Thurlock turned and spoke again, curiosity burning in his eyes.
“Tell, me,” he began. “Did you know? Have you had occasion to use that magic before? While you were in Earth? Was it equally strong before, or stronger?”
“Um….” Henry stalled, surprised at the question, which had never occurred to him. He repeated the syllable a couple more times while splashing his face and combing wet fingers through his hair—finding, as always after a shift—a few of the small, lanceolate feathers from his neck ruff. Feathers always fell after a shift, maybe because he was never in bird form long enough to molt like his condor brethren. This time he found the sight of them reassuring; at least this one thing hadn’t changed. With a calmer mind, Thurlock’s question wasn’t hard to answer.
“Yes,” he finally said. “Not counting when I was learning, I’ve used it once before, to protect myself and a child in a fire. It had the same strength.”
“Ah,” Thurlock said. “That’s interesting. It probably means your magic isn’t rooted in Earth the way much of my magic—like most magic in this world—is rooted in Ethra, and thus is somewhat weakened, or at least harder to access, when I’m away.”
“Right,” Henry said, nodding.
“What do you mean, right?” Thurlock sounded a little annoyed.
I guess he’s not used to people knowing more about some kind of magic than he does. “It’s part of me, not the world. It’s all there, all the time. Born this way.” Henry smiled, thinking of a sign he’d once carried at a marriage equality rally in San Francisco.
“I see.” Thurlock pursed his lips in contemplation. “I suppose that’s why you shift instantaneously as well, then.”
“I don’t think so.”
Ire up again, Thurlock said, “You don’t think so. Okay.” He clapped his hands above the water and it formed a mug, filled itself, boiled the contents and turned them black. Holding the aromatic brew out to Henry, he said, “Explain, then.”
Henry’s eyes grew wide with pleasure, and his taste buds got excited, anticipating that magical brew, coffee. “Thank you!” He took a careful sip, and then, finding the temperature perfect, a deep draught. His eyes closed in caffeinated bliss, and he left them closed while he answered Thurlock’s question. “The ability for my shift, and its nature and strength and magical potential, is inborn. But the manner in which I shift is the same as any shaman. That’s the part I had to learn. I can shift the other way, mind you, but who would want to?”
“Ah,” Thurlock said again—it seemed to be one of his favorite words. “Well, that’s not only interesting, but possibly useful. I’m thinking of Tiro and L’Aria. Remember her? Her father is an otter…. Not a shaman, though. We don’t have shamans here… well, except for you, now.” He paused infinitesimally. “Listen to me. I’m rambling. Han would scold me. Enough of that, we’ve business to deal with. If you’ve finished your coffee, let’s clean up that mess in the cave and take a look at the Portal.”
The next fifteen minutes rushed by for Henry as he tried to keep up with Thurlock’s magical cleaning. A thick oozy residue had coated the walls and pooled in places on the cave floor, the smelly and thoroughly disgusting remains of the horrid magic that had taken up residence there. The wizard spoke strange words and pointed his staff about and ooze flashed with gold light and sizzled to dry, crumbly charcoal bits. Henry’s job was to move the garbage out into the sun, where it became dust and lifted away on a breeze apparently ordered by the wizard for that purpose. Maizie helped, digging out the piles of cinders where the ooze had pooled. Lemon ignored the mess, sat outside the cave entrance, and licked his paws clean.
The cleanup complete, the four travelers shared a moment of satisfaction, then Thurlock tested the Portal. He stepped in and stepped back out a moment later.
“Clean and, I believe, in good working order. Lemon, it might be best if you were to ride with me.”
Lemon looked aggrieved at the idea, but Henry had noticed he tended to look aggrieved an awful lot, and a second later the cat jumped to Thurlock’s shoulder without so much as a meow.
“Claws!” Thurlock said, adding a moment later, “Thank you. Now, for Maizie—”
He stopped speaking because Henry had already crouched down, gave Maizie a good scratch, and then picked her up. She didn’t look comfortable, but she didn’t squirm.
“Remember,” Thurlock instructed, “think Sisterhold. Let’s go.”