First Realm this long? No, it was newly arrived, or it would have been on them already. Instead, its form seemed to ripple like a cat's flank as it moved, slowly. A single step forward?
"Yes. A mind-eater." Taslin was offering no mercy of ignorance; even the most powerful Wildren feared mind-eaters.
Clearsight was beginning to hurt, just the first fingertip of pressure on his forehead. This far from any Sherim, he had an hour, perhaps, before he faced another burnout. The Axtli moved again, and there again was the impression of a short, powerful leg flowing forward to take a step-
"Stop it!" Hissed Taslin. "It will feel if you impose First-Realm logic on it." As if to emphasise the point, the needles that made up the predator stretched, prickling at the edges of the firelight. Rel held himself absolutely still while that same prickling seemed to run up and down his back.
Okay, it was a cloud of needles, floating there. Not even needles, just long, sharp, thin things. From this angle. Had the black spikes retreated a little way? "What do we do?"
Seeing Clearly, Rel saw nothing of the surprise that ran through the Wilder, but her shiver showed in tiny movements of air, and her voice came high and startled. "You trust me now?" It wasn't sarcasm, and yet her tone was far more lively and human than he was used to from Wildren.
"I choose you over that." Rel jerked his head towards the predator, then froze again as its needles twitched to follow the motion.
A weight settled on his shoulder, warm but uncomfortably close to his neck, and he twitched, squirming in alarm, before he twigged that it was Taslin's hand. She said, "We cannot let it roam free in the First Realm."
"Can we kill it?" This far from a Sherim, Rel didn't fancy trying to draw the creature back to its own Realm, but not all Wildren could be killed in the First Realm. How did you hurt a cloud?
"None of my kind will mourn the death of an Axtli." There was another shiver of motion through the needles as Taslin named the thing. Trust her to put Second Realm politics ahead of human life.
Rel began, slowly, to disentangle his legs from his blanket. "With due respect, I wasn't asking whether we're allowed to. Can we? The three of us?"
"I don't know." Flat, immediate, for a moment Taslin actually sounded like a proper Wilder. Rel shifted, keeping his eyes on the Axtli but dropping the Gift-Giver's hand off his shoulder. She continued, "I was never trained to fight them. If it's new to the First Realm, that may give us a chance, but how new it can be..."
"It's not used to First Realm logic, or it would be on us by now." Whatever attention the Axtli was paying them, Clearsight showed its hesitation for curiosity, uncertainty. Focussing hard enough that his headache bit deeper, Rel made out a third image of each needle in the cloud, pointing away from them, down the hillside meadow. To the sheep, perhaps? No, it moved too quickly. A fox or bat, maybe.
Taslin's whisper came back to him out of thin air, prickly with arrogant certainty. "It's come this far, it must know something at least. We're more than a hundred miles from the nearest Sherim."
"It can barely tell us from the wall. I'm not sure it even realises we're food."
"Then we should get Dora away from it before it notices." Swirls of gently displaced air in Taslin's wake shimmered in rainbow colours as she moved around the fire to where Dora lay, deeply and peacefully asleep. "Can you wake her without alarming her?"
As well to ask whether Dora could be woken without alarming the Axtli. Rel knew the set of his Four Knot's features all too well; Dora was a punctual waker by force of routine only, and slept like a stone. Since leaving Nursim, if anything, she'd been worse. Getting her up quietly would be a challenge, but promised at least a little revenge for any number of times she'd kicked him awake back home when she'd needed him. He said, "Hold her tightly, cover her mouth. It's the only way we'll keep her quiet."
Taslin pulled Dora up into her lap, the spectacle made eerie as the Four Knot seemed to float there, limp and half-out of her blanket, head lolling to one side. Dora didn't make even so much as a mumble, and when her head turned to face the stars, it was clearly because of Taslin's tight grip. Rel took the canteen from his pack and wetted a corner of his blanket. He couldn't resist a grin.
He reached to bring the damp cloth against the back of Dora's neck, but the back of his hand touched warm, invisible flesh under a thin skirt; Taslin's thigh. He jerked back, trying not to blush, and blinked Clearsight away. The Gift-Giver reappeared, regarding him with a mix of curiosity and amusement that reminded him all too much of Pevan's teasing.
Rel's cheeks heated, and he gritted his teeth. She was getting under his skin, and that was dangerous. He tried again, this time managing to apply the wet blanket to Dora's skin with a minimum of inappropriate contact. Dora stirred, turned slightly before Taslin's grip arrested her. If he could just get the dampness a little further down the Four Knot's back, she'd wake right up.
He glanced at Taslin in apology and regretted it. Beneath the graceful arch of her eyebrow, her eyes were bland, almost as he'd expect from a Wilder, except that a spark of humour danced there, and her smile was all too knowing. She gave him a sharp nod of permission - permission! Rel clenched his jaw to keep back an outburst. The Axtli was still out there, its form indistinct without Clearsight but still felt, a sense of First Realmspace itself under strain.
Keeping his eyes on Dora's face, trying not to think about Taslin, the warmth of her lap on the back of his hand, the sensual slide of her skirt, her arm close to his so that it raised a tingle of static in the hair at his wrist... he tried again. Keeping his eyes on Dora's face, watching for another stir that would bring her to wakefulness, he slid the blanket down the back of her dress.
She gasped, writhed, and Rel pulled back sharply, almost toppling back into the fire. His eyes met Taslin's for an unwelcome moment, and the Gift-Giver's amethyst stare brought a fresh burn to his face before she turned her attention to the wakening Four Knot. Rel turned, half-rolling away before the real, ordinary heat of the fire could burn him. Turning the wall, the night air cooled his face a little. A drop of sweat tickled his spine, sent a shiver through him. He cursed, but silently, wary of the monster only feet away.
Clearsight didn't clear his mind, but it did at least allow him to focus on a more immediate problem than Taslin's manipulations. As the Wilder exchanged urgent whispers with a bewildered, sleepy Dora, Rel opened his eyes and let the cold of Clearseeing flow into his face like the icy impact of standing under a waterfall.
The Axtli was barely recognisable, now a bristling black lump, its spikes all trained on Rel. It was as if each tiny needle had swelled and stretched until they'd merged together at the edges. And the spikes were still growing, reaching out towards him. He didn’t need Clearsight to see that the creature was close to noticing them; his eyes itched at the presence of it, until he had to blink back to normal vision.
This time, when his eyes met Taslin's, there was no teasing, no pretended humanity. Just the hard focus of desperation. She reached out a hand to him, and he grabbed it almost without thinking. The Axtli boiled into the croft, black fog that brought with it a wrenching sense of nausea. Then, suddenly, falling, tumbling, through where the floor should have been, and something caught him across the belly, flipping him over. Dora screamed in pain, drowning out Taslin's curse, and there was darkness.
No, not quite darkness. The fire was still there, dimmer than it had been, as if the Axtli had obscured it; the creature clouded the air less than an arm's length away. Rel's skin prickled. Why didn't it move? Why didn't it attack? Without Clearsight, the thing was only indistinct, unreadable, but he didn't dare activate his Gift in case the Axtli sensed the distortion.
"It's not as close as it looks." Taslin's sharp voice startled him, pressed into his back like a knifepoint. She'd stopped whispering, but the Axtli seemed deaf.
"What? What is this?" Rel turned, but behind him there was only darkness. The air was still in a way that the shelter of the ruin couldn't explain, and there was a faint, damp s
cent he couldn't quite place. Whatever it was, it left a rancid taste in his mouth, sloshing around in his thin, gruelish saliva.
"We're in a Sherim. I sensed it while we were waking Dora."
Dora still sounded half-asleep. "There's no Sherim near here." She finished with the soft moan of a yawn, and Rel thought he could make out the motion of her arms as she stretched.
"I don't pretend to understand it." This close to the Second Realm - if indeed they were close to the Second Realm at all - Taslin's speech became stiffer. With her acting hidden by the darkness, it was easier to remember what she was. "But it's still possible we haven't found every Sherim."
Rel looked back at the Axtli, dubiously. Could evading the creature be any worse than trying to navigate an unknown Sherim?
A whimper emerged out of the darkness, and Dora's voice cracked as she spoke. "What do we do?"
More than the black cloud of malevolence hunched by the fire, or the yawning void of the Sherim at his back - he could feel it now, tugging at his mind, testing his logic - it was the raw fear in Dora's tone that got to Rel. He shivered, trying to think of a way to comfort her while still confronting the problem. Nothing came except a few false starts that made him sound as if he was stammering.
"We get a little further away from the