Her first thought was that Denaven and the Altenerai had caught up, but it soon became clear they were pursued by nothing human. When viewed through the inner world, men and women were complex outlines filled with threadlike energies of varied color. The things behind, she saw, were a seething maelstrom of hunger. Almost anticolor. As she watched, they closed upon their fragile strip of road, and the nearest resolved into the glowing outline of a mountain-sized man, a bearded Naor. It was a chalk sketch come to life. On either side of his form she saw only the star-shot void.
Impossibly the outline strode forward, as if it walked on ground invisible to her, and it stretched hands toward her conjured road.
Kyrkenall looked over his shoulder at their pursuer, his mouth gaping and his ring shining brightly, but he didn’t draw his weapons. What could he do against such a creature? She reached deep within the hearthstone’s limitless energies, shaped a vast length of road before N’lahr, then turned the whole of her attention on the closing monster.
She formed the drifting energies around to send them hurtling at the thing’s face.
Rather than throwing up its ghostly arms to ward against the attack, the Naor-shaped entity reached out with impossibly huge hands, welcoming it. Even as that one fell behind, others drifted from the darkness to either side.
From then on, their journey was nightmare. Before, she’d been worried that she’d lose control and they’d fall into nothingness forever. Now she was terrified that they’d be consumed by the titanic entities. One by one the things emerged from the black, stark outlines of the men and women who’d died in combat against them: The kobalin Kyrkenall had slain, its horn glowing like starlight. The woman Elenai had stabbed through the neck. The soldiers at the tower, some of them afire with not quite blue flames that had consumed their bodies. All stumbled after, clutching at their road like hungry children reaching for fresh-baked breads on the windowsill. Elenai swept more and more energy toward them.
She hadn’t the time to wonder what they were. She had no illusions about what would happen if the things got hold of her and her friends, for she saw the matter she sent disappearing entirely the moment the spirits mimed consuming it.
They followed in ones, twos, sometimes as many as three or four at once, and each time she distracted them others crowded forward, until finally she wept from the stress.
But she did not give up.
While blasting at a disturbingly Belahn-shaped specter, her senses bumped into a new object. Something solid lurked out there ahead in the void. A fragment, or a smaller splinter? Whatever it might be, she threw the road toward it, realizing as they fled closer that the landform was large.
Better, the storm at last was dying in strength, and the darkness trickled away until they rode through a wasteland of red rock under an orange sky. It was still the Shifting Lands, but had a semblance of normal reality. She laughed in relief until she saw that the things drifted after. Were they going to pursue them even onto solid ground?
They did. Without her directing energy their way, they tore into the fragile matter that was the sky and soil, ripping holes through which she could see that starless void. She tried resuming the weird feeding, but the matter around her was increasingly difficult to move.
The character of the land changed as they passed over it. Grass sprouted, the land rose into gentle hillocks, and they emerged onto a rolling plain. The chaotic entities finally seemed unable to proceed and were left, howling, behind.
N’lahr eased their laboring mounts to a trot. The lungs of Elenai’s poor gray heaved like a bellows.
“Elenai,” N’lahr said from just ahead, “let go the stone.”
Kyrkenall appraised her with a sympathetic look. “Last time she let go of the hearthstone after working that kind of magic, it drained her.”
She resented that. “I think I know how to handle it better, now.”
“We have to chance it,” N’lahr said. “Denaven can sense the stone so long as you have it active. We don’t want him able to follow.”
Cautious of what might happen if she relinquished hold too quickly, Elenai siphoned off some of the energy as she closed it. A wave of dizziness washed over her and she sagged as everything went black.
She didn’t feel herself roll off the animal and hit the ground, but she felt someone shaking her and looked blearily up into Kyrkenall’s strange eyes. Behind him the sky was the same washed-out blue it had been prior to her collapse.
“You all right?” Kyrkenall asked.
She nodded weakly, flushing because she’d made a fool of herself. She’d thought she could handle the situation better this time. “How long have I been out?”
“Only until I could reach you. You hit kind of hard.” He touched her scalp above her ear as she sat up. “Any pain there?”
“I can’t tell. I ache all over.”
He laughed at that, as though she’d planned a joke, then helped her to her feet. She was angry with herself, and with him for laughing, so his smile surprised her.
“That was well done. Top-rank spell work. A few days ago, I’d never have believed you could do something like that.”
“Neither would I,” she admitted.
N’lahr guided his horse up on her right. “I don’t think Kalandra herself could have done better.”
She felt a smile rise, and turned away to take in the rolling hills, tall grasses, and occasional scrubby trees. A constant wind blew from the left, rippling through the plants so that they showed green, now white. It looked almost normal, save for the strands of shifting chartreuse bands fluttering in the sky, as if the Gods dragged festive banners through the heavens. It reminded her of the auroras that sometimes shimmered in the skies of home. Except those occurred at night.
“What were those … things in the storm? Were those…” She hesitated. “Demons? Spirits?”
She waved off Kyrkenall’s proffered winesac as he answered her question with one of his own. “What did you see?”
“Giants. Phantom giants. One was a bearded Naor. Another was that kobalin you killed. Every one of them was reaching for us.” She fumbled with the watersac on her belt.
“I’d bet we each saw different things,” he said. “The wild energy in the Shifting Lands is perceived by intent, or the memory of intent.”
“So I imagined them?”
N’lahr shook his head as he climbed down from his horse. “No.”
Kyrkenall finished a swig of wine and capped it off. “Remember how I told you there’s stuff in the shifts that feeds on magical force? That’s what those were, drawn by your work through the storm. And there were a lot of them. But they don’t look like anything we’d understand. So their image is shaped by us. By our fears, mostly.”
“So you saw something different?”
“Yes.”
“What did you see?”
Kyrkenall hesitated a moment, then spoke without his usual easy confidence. “Long, delicate hands, pale and dead. Trying to drag us down.”
N’lahr didn’t say anything at all, even when Elenai stared at him. “What about you?” It still felt odd addressing him without rank, even though she’d inferred that he felt the same way Kyrkenall did about formal titles.
“I’d rather not say.”
“Cabbages,” Kyrkenall quipped.
The absurdity of the image brought a laugh to Elenai’s throat. She quickly stifled it.
“He hates green cabbages. They were rolling at us from the horizon.”
“No,” N’lahr said, adding after a moment, “But I do dislike cabbage.”
“So,” Elenai ventured. “Where are we? Have we crossed into Kanesh by now?” She supposed it was possible they were in some odd corner of Arappa.
N’lahr shook his head and sank to the soil, elbows against his knees. His head didn’t quite rest against his forearms, but he looked as though he wanted it to.
“We’re in the deeps,” Kyrkenall said. “You’ve heard the expression ‘sideways,’ haven’t you? Kalandra thought it might actually mean we’re under the other realms. Whatever it is, exactly, we’re pretty much off the map.”
Hot as she was from the physical exertion, she still felt chilled as blood drained from her face. Only the most practiced of weaver guides went “sideways,” and returned to report their experiences.
Kyrkenall misunderstood her expression for one of confusion. “Think of the shifts more like ocean inlets than a level surface.”
She knew. If you were experimental or careless or the Gods were in a capricious mood, the space between the realms might not be a simple obstacle in the middle of a straight-line journey. Some philosophers thought that the Shifting Lands lay beneath and around all the realms.
“So when you’ve been saying ‘deep in the shifts’ you didn’t mean far away, you meant below.”
“Yes,” N’lahr said. She would have preferred a more detailed answer, but N’lahr seemed pensive. “We should be safe from Denaven and the search party,” he said slowly.
“How far to Kalandra?” Kyrkenall asked.
“A day or two, at best. I’m told this is the only large fragment on the way, about an hour to ride across. There’s supposed to be some splinters in about eight hours.”
“I’ve searched some of the deeps for her,” Kyrkenall said. “But I’ve never found this place.”
“Don’t feel bad. She’s well hidden.” N’lahr stood stiffly. “I’d prefer to keep going.”
Kyrkenall interupted. “N’lahr, we’re dead on our feet. If we don’t rest we’re going to trip up somewhere.” He sank to the dusty ground with his back to a short, scaly, mud-colored tree.
“I know.” He looked unhappy, but resigned. “We’ll camp here. It’s not particularly safe, but we won’t encounter better until we reach Kalandra. I’ll take first watch.” He looked ghastly tired, but she wasn’t in a position to argue.
Elenai slipped quickly into a dreamless rest without bothering to lay out her bedroll. She wasn’t sure how long she’d slept, but it didn’t feel like enough. The sky was still the same, but that might just have been the way of things on this fragment. She felt moderately less bleary, and N’lahr actually looked more alert and more determined. He hurried them into the saddle after the briefest of meals.
They plodded on, and on again, and the steady “land” eventually gave way to one that rolled as they rode it, as though ocean waves were hidden beneath its surface. The sky changed from blue to shifting green to shifting black, and once, gibbering rose-shaped things shimmered upon a nearby hill and gave chase for several miles, untroubled by Kyrkenall’s dwindling arrows, which passed right through them.
But by and by they arrived at one of the promised splinters, a tiny, desolate strip of blasted barrens, and there Elenai shared the last of her water with her exhausted horse, and fed it the last of the oats. Most of their supplies had been lost when they left the spare horses behind. She had half a watersac of Wyndyss wine and a handful of jerky, but nothing else.
After came another, calmer march. No winds blew. A violet sea drew nearer upon their left, lapping lonely shores where stubby black grasses sprouted near fruiting palms. N’lahr warned them well away, saying that the grass was poison. “Kalandra lost her horse here the first time out.”
“So she’s been here twice?”
“Yes. But she couldn’t stay long, the first time. There were pressing concerns in Kanesh.”
Elenai wasn’t certain how he was navigating, but he seemed heartened to find a landmark he recognized. They later stopped briefly in a strange locale with pulsing cinnamon rocks, but N’lahr didn’t comment on those.
After a long stony waste, the character of the land transformed again by fits and starts until they approached a huge peach-colored lake ringed by blue sand. A light misting of moisture fell around them, and far ahead, across dunes of increasingly lighter blue, was a cliff with a flattened top, crowned with greenery and flashes of purple and yellow, presumably wildflowers. It towered at least two hundred feet over the surrounding terrain. N’lahr rode unerringly for it for over a mile, and it soon grew apparent that was his likely destination.
“Is that it?” Kyrkenall asked.
“Yes.”
The archer looked sidelong at his friend. “You’re just full of information, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
Elenai studied the strange landform more carefully as they neared, and estimated it at several miles wide.
The cliff wall was sheer, formed all of rough gray-and-white stone, completely out of place surrounded by the endless stretch of sand, as if dropped there. She’d seen so many odd things in the last week that its peculiarity seemed almost mundane. Of more immediate concern was how to reach the top. She hoped they wouldn’t have to scale hand over hand. Maybe there’d be a slope for the horses, hidden off to one side or around its back. It wasn’t that she couldn’t climb, just that she hardly welcomed the thought of expending any extra effort right now.
Casually N’lahr grabbed the one javelin remaining alongside his saddle.
Kyrkenall saw that. “Anything in particular we’re on watch for?”
“Aren’t you always on guard?” N’lahr chided.
“You’re in rare form today, N’lahr. Simply hilarious.”
“You must be worn out. I’m really not that funny.”
“I can believe that.”
They’d closed within a hundred paces, and Elenai saw Kyrkenall, like herself, scanning the heights.
Only the grass moved above, in the wind, and soon sight of the crown was blocked by their approach angle.
Fifty paces out, something appeared at the very base of the cliff. A dark, fur-cloaked figure seemed to slide right out of the stone.
Kyrkenall cursed and raised his bow, knocking an arrow.
The thing raised a thick black arm, as if in greeting. A kobalin lord? What was it doing here, in Kalandra’s place of safety?
Its voice was deep. “Ho, N’lahr! Have you come at last to die?”