She Stoops to Conquer
Episode 2 of Falling With Style
A Story of the Second Realm
By R.J. Davnall
Copyright 2012 R. J. Davnall
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The Second Realm
Van Raighan's Last Stand:
Episode 1: I Can See Clearly Now
Episode 2: You Can't Go Home Again
Episode 3: A Hole In Her Mind
Episode 4: Touching the Void
Falling With Style:
Episode 1: Wild Hawk Down
https://itsthefuturestupid.blogspot.com/
Contents
She Stoops to Conquer
About the Author
Falling With Style
2. She Stoops to Conquer
The sky darkened as Pevan followed Van Raighan's trail North. The thief had trampled the grass flat in his rush to get away, but down in the fold of the valley his footprints went into one of the reedy, silty pools and didn’t come out. Not for the first time, Pevan cursed Rel’s absence; a single glance with his Clearsight would probably be enough to say which way Van Raighan had gone.
Well, her brother was away, and on a mission important enough that Dora had gone with him, whatever it was. Pevan let out a long sigh. Returning without a clue to the thief’s destination would make her look damned stupid in front of Notia, and the Four Knot was already out for her blood. Not that standing in a swamp getting rained on would be any better. At least the chill the moisture added to the air soothed her throbbing head.
She needed to get some height. Any good drop and she could jump out of a Gateway, getting a good hundred feet of vantage. But the towers of the old city were ten miles away, and even the cliffs in the last valley were piddling little things. She’d lost the thief, and along with him the secret of his strange Witnessing that showed her as his lover.
Gusting wind slapped her across the face with a spray of rain, left her spluttering and blinking up at the sky. The blanket of cloud slid ever closer, its front edge seeming to harden until Pevan got the impression of a quilt being drawn over the world. Inspiration struck, almost hard enough for her to miss the sickly tinge of her own desperation in it.
When the old Gatemaker had trained her, Temmer had never outright admitted she’d made a Gateway in low, thick cloud to get the better of the Ragehound that had been her most famous victory. She’d just winked and told Pevan she’d ‘fallen out of the sky on top of it’. And reminisced at length on the dreary weather.
Did clouds have a flat surface? It was hard to tell from so far below. The grey mass now hanging above Pevan certainly looked flat, and theoretically there was more Wild Power to be had the further North you went. She could make it flat up there, if her brain didn’t burst from the logic fatigue. Even as she thought it, something subconscious and automatic in her mind reached out, kneading and stretching the cloud like dough.
She pressed her consciousness to the task as well, distracting it from wondering how far up the cloud actually was. And whether Van Raighan was really worth the risk. Quicker than she expected, the cloud yielded, giving her a firm mental grasp on a flat surface up there and driving the blunt probe of her headache deeper into the crack between the halves of her brain. She narrowed her eyes, grimacing against the pain, bowing her head and holding it in her hands.
Her cloud-surface hung at the limit of her impaired range, and she could feel the Gate slipping before it spun open at her feet. The opening sucked in enough wind that Pevan almost lost her footing and fell in. The thought that this was a foolish extreme to go to made one last, futile attempt to take over, but she forced it aside and stepped through the Gate.
Her ears popped instantly, painfully. Her stomach lurched as she realised just how high up she was. Cold, thin air pricked her skin to goosepimples even as it ripped the moisture from her eyes. She managed, just, to keep her skirt from blowing up around her, instead tipping herself forwards so she fell parallel to the ground, legs spread to keep the flapping skirt tight and in place. Drag tipped her further forward, so that her fall became a steep glide – the heavy fabric of the skirt proving useful rather than irritating for once.
It would be hard to predict the exact spot where she'd land, but she could tell from the battering force of the wind on her face that she’d already reached close to terminal velocity. Her eyes watered almost as fast as the air dried them, leaving the skin atop her cheekbones raw with tear-salts. By wincing tightly, she could hold her eyes just open enough to see the ground below. There was a lot of it.
The stinging, freezing assault of the air below Pevan made searching the ground for signs of Van Raighan impossible. Instead, she looked out ahead towards a horizon impossibly distant. The East glimmered with sunlight skittering off wave crests on the old North Sea. Between the coast and whatever was beneath her, a hundred miles or more of mottled green-and-brown wilderness spread.
Off to her right, she could see the grey sprawl of old Federas. Her vantage point made even the towers look like a child’s play-blocks; the ruined outskirts lower down the valley were nothing more than a smear, the new town an indistinct blob on the nearer side of the city. To her left, Pevan saw only rolling hills of green, patched with dark cliffs in places, occasionally marred by the indistinct black shape of a tree that still waited for spring.
She saw, she realised, not just almost the whole Northern Wilds but well beyond the bounds of the First Realm itself. The boundary was too distant for her to make out the individual Sherim that were its fence-posts, but she could tell roughly where it was. Peering through the unfathomable twists in space there gave her a sick feeling in her throat.
Pevan knew she fell at over a hundred miles an hour, but distance robbed the fact of any urgency. The horizon raced towards her just as it would in a lower fall, but from so much further away that she could barely see it shrinking. The effect deceived, dangerously; forget the ground she might, but it would not forget her.
She put the thought aside. Placing a Gate so that she hit it was going to be hard enough without the pressure. The wind tugged at her clothing, squirreling in around the collar of her blouse – she regretted leaving her top button undone back in town – and slowly worming her skirt lower over her hips. When she thought of it that way, a shiver of intimacy ran through her, robbed of all pleasure by the cold and the lingering memory of Van Raighan's Witnessing.
Eyes squeezed shut against a wind that only got more violent as she descended, she managed to focus on the scrubby hillside below. Fear and exhilaration numbed the pounding of Pevan’s head as she pushed out her mind toward the grass, taking the simple option of matching her entry point to an exit point only a few yards to its right. Allowing her vision to stay blurry, she spun the Gate in her head, thinking it only as a loose link between two indistinct patches of green hundreds of yards – a handful of seconds - beneath her.
Leaning back against the air, letting her knees drop below her elbows, steadied her fall and slowed her glide. The ground accelerated at her. In her mind’s grip, the half-formed Gateway writhed, eager to leap into the wrong place. Grimly, Pevan fought it back into line. She closed her eyes, close enough to the ground now to feel it through the slight contact it already made with the Gate.
She made her final judgement for where to place the Gate’s mouth with only a second to spare, gasping as the pent-up tension in her brain unwound. The switch in gravity wrapped her like a hug, and if her breath choked off it was only with relief from surviving.
Released from the fear, she rose into the face of spattering rain, her air-speed making the water viciou
s. Already raw, her cheeks stung, but at least she could hold her eyes open and look around. The valley spread out before her, rain misting it to a fuzzy, indistinct blur in the distance. There were shapes down that way that might be people, but that was true of the boulder-strewn terrain in every direction.
The peak of her jump gave her shivers; from the cold, the adrenaline settling back to normal levels, the usual sense of magic that came from hanging hundreds of feet above ground. Pevan took the time to take stock. Dropping from the cloud had taken a long time, longer than she’d expected. Not as much as a minute, she hoped, but Van Raighan had to have gained ground. Still, the angle of her current jump wasn’t too bad; little of her speed would be wasted going sideways.
She tipped herself over in the air to fall head-down, streamlining herself to get better height on the next jump. Churning numbers in her head, she picked a spot for her next Gate, a few hundred yards down the valley. Each jump would take about ten seconds. She knew roughly how much area she could look over in a jump, roughly how far her quarry could have gone without help. She’d get him, but it might take a while.
Pevan hopped down the valley in four jumps, but the dark shapes she’d seen all turned into rocks or trees. The fingers