pre-Crash ruins offered a little variety, but none was more than a heap of weathered, crumbling concrete. The two Gifted skirted the border of a forest whose trees showed the first obvious signs of the proximity of the Second Realm in branches that all strained southward.
Beyond that, they crossed the broad, grey flow of the Kashali River, emerging onto the silt of the North bank with the chilling awareness clinging to them that only a handful of humans had ever been this far and returned. As if to underline the point, as Pevan climbed to the top of the bank, the plain beyond seemed to twist down at the far corners, as if the globe of the world beneath her feet had suddenly shrunk.
The last thirty miles of the journey took them clear of the rain and plunged them into a twilight shot through with colours that had no place in a clear sky. Overhead, the blue took on a greenish tinge as it deepened; to the West, purple and gold carried hints of mud and vomit. Pevan's eyes began to play more tricks, chance shapes in the breeze leaping out at her.
Her Gates grew more rebellious, fighting against her control before snapping into place, sparking and twisting sullenly afterward. Steadily the plain turned into a slope as gravity itself began to pull away from the Second Realm. Falling darkness mercifully cut off the longer-distance views that held the potential to break a careless, wandering mind. The moon rose, swollen and bloated past anything familiar. Pevan could almost feel its light caressing her.
Then they emerged from a Gate to find the world twisted a clear forty-five degrees away from where it should have been. Pevan stumbled, fell head-long down a sharp downhill slope that had been a slow, smooth rise when she Gated to it. The grass that met her had a fungal, lumpy texture, its long stems pawing at her face until she squirmed up to a half-sitting position.
Chag had fared no better. He crouched nearby, massaging his ankle. Painted in silver moonlight, he looked more Wilder than human as he said, "I think we're close." The words brought with them the heady scent of strong spirits, which surely wasn't Chag's breath.
Pevan planted her feet wide apart and pushed carefully upright. Back the way they'd come, the land rose endlessly, a mountain beyond anything that had existed even before the Realmcrash. She turned to look the other way, and realised with a rush of vertigo that she was looking down on the moon. Gravity had shifted again, turned the world into this impossible hill, and dropped the moon, still close to the north-western horizon, below her eye-line.
Before that thought could spin her head round any further, she looked down. Chag swore softly, more in surprise than anger, but the word still hung in the air for a second, a spray of mist that might shred flesh if touched. Pevan turned and found him leaning at yet another impossible angle a few yards away, his body almost pointed at the moon.
He looked back at her - or down, from his perspective. "Good news is, we're pretty close."
"You were expecting us to run into this?" Pevan chuckled awkwardly to take the sting from her words. "You could have warned me."
"Sorry. Wasn't sure how far out we were." He waved a hand northward. "The gravity trap goes on for about ten miles from here. We'll have to be careful."
"The Sherim's on the other side?"
He smiled mirthlessly, and the cold light made him cadaverous. "It's at the centre. Eventually it supplants gravity, just plucks you off the ground and swallows you."
Pevan's stomach turned, slowly, at the thought. "Sounds dangerous."
"It's actually one of the easier Sherim to navigate." She could almost believe Chag's brightness was genuine, rather than mocking. "You just don't have much time to get the psychological transition right."
"Any tips?" She said sardonically.
He shrugged, one eyebrow raised. "You're the expert."
"Every Sherim's different." She knew she'd spoken too sharply when Chag's face hardened. Well, it was his fault for being flippant with the question.
"So is every Gifted. Unless you feel like sharing your usual mindwalks?" Lurking behind the edge in the little man's voice was Pevan's uncomfortable awareness that he wanted to know.
She shivered. Most days she felt pretty unhappy about admitting her mindwalk to herself. Crossing a Sherim meant breaking her identity down to its basics, and she'd never been comfortable with what she found down there. Rel was the same, though he'd never admit it. Pevan watched Chag's face, thinking you first, until she realised he might be looking for an opportunity to share.
To her relief, his face softened. "Look, it's faster and you'll have to deal with surprise, maybe even panic. There's plenty of room for irrationality in the fear. Scare yourself."
It was solid advice, and it suggested whoever had trained Chag to this Sherim really knew their stuff. It gave her something to work with. Renewed confidence pushed her to shaky humour. "That shouldn't be hard, with the planet throwing me off."
He chuckled. "We've got some ground to cross first. How close can you get with Gates?"
"All the way, if need be." Pevan took some small pleasure from the way his face widened. She poured sweetness into her voice. "I'd rather stop a couple of miles out, though, if you don't mind the walk?"
"I'll manage. Let's get going."
Crossing the gravity trap in the dark quickly revealed itself as a fool's errand. Every time they went through a Gate, one or other of them clobbered themselves on the rim, or fell on landing, tricked by the lurching, bucking landscape. Gravity was stronger in some places than others, once so crushing that Chag catapulted back out of the Gate almost as soon as he dropped in.
The aches mounted and marshalled, abetted by the cold night and clothes that still held the ghosts of the rain from earlier. Pevan clamped her jaw shut to keep her teeth from chattering, and cursed the darkness for concealing whether Chag did the same. He couldn't be staying warm, could he? The journey dragged, just a little bit too complicated to fall into the monotony with which they'd crossed the Wilds.
Reality strained around the Sherim, and the tension swirled into her Gates. When the opening of one Gateway began to glow, she put up a hand to stop Chag jumping. She snapped the Gate closed. "From here we walk."
He didn't argue. After the confusion of the last quarter-hour, the walk was almost comfortable. Shifts in gravity grew more and more common, each one bringing a rush of nausea and a stumble on tired ankles, but between shifts they could have been out for a brisk night-time stroll. Better not to think too hard on that idea, given Van Raighan's affections.
The Sherim took them by surprise. Pevan stumbled through another shift in gravity, stretched a leg out forward to catch herself, and never reached the ground. The darkness ahead and above plucked her up, flipped her over and treated her to the best possible view of the fleeing planet. She fell backward, her body tensing as every sense she possessed told her she could expect a hard, painful landing.
Fear gripped her through that tension, her breath seizing in her throat, her face pulling into a rictus. The Sherim tightened on her skin, the usually sensual tingle battered aside as the air tore at her clothes. A few feet away, Chag fell towards her. She tried to roll in the air, turn her body around to point her head towards him, her legs away, but the flapping of her skirt held her back. Van Raighan's eyes were shut, but she couldn't believe he wouldn't try to get a peek.
She felt the moment they passed under the Sherim as a vicious twist in her spine. The moon swung past beneath her as she arced back toward the planet hanging in the air above. Her skin crawled as the Sherim tightened like a thousand disembodied hands creeping under her blouse. She screwed her eyes shut a moment too late to miss the wild grin on Chag's face as he swept past.
Hair whipped into her face. The world spun around her even as she orbited it. All sense of balance abandoned her. With the Sherim tight about her chest, her breath choked off completely, giving her the sense of being shaken in the fist of a god. Her mind gave the god Van Raighan's rat face. Long, thin, knobbly claws wrapped around her, her clothes snagging and tearing on their yellowed points.
He drew he
r close, whiskers prickling at her face, leaving her no breath for screaming. Desperately, she fought the image, pushed it back, strained to escape. Her mind went with it. Mindlessly, she fought on, but her hands flailed uselessly, making no contact with those horrid fingers, or the dark pits of its eyes.
Chag's rat-god grip stayed unrelenting, but her hands passed through it. Why couldn't she pass through with them? Were the hands not hers?
She was in the little man's hands. But if she was in his hands, how small must she be? Must she be at all?
Her eyes snapped open to a whirl of primary colours that owed nothing to the cold northern night she'd left behind. Her lungs didn't fill, exactly, but the tightness vanished. She concentrated on controlling her shallow gasps, curling into a ball. For a moment, ahead of her, a straight line formed between one patch of colour and the next, and she grabbed it for her horizon. The green became grass; the watery yellow hardened into a dawn sky.
That gave her ground to hit. Unfortunately, her body remembered how far - and how fast - it had fallen. The impact seemed to shock the wind back into her. She rolled onto her back, staring up at the yellow sky. A patch of blue at the corner of her eye shaded into a glowering cloud. The spray of pink straight ahead - straight above - became a flock of tiny birds. Steadily, Pevan reduced the chaos pouring