by Tim Akers
“Well, this is a special kind of crazy,” I said. My voice echoed in my head, but I couldn’t hear myself speaking. My mouth felt strange, like I was chewing something as I spoke. Air, I realized. Not even the air is moving.
But as soon as I thought it, I could see that I was wrong. Because Tembo was moving ever so slowly, and when I looked back to the drue, I saw that their whip-thin fingers were inching closer. A burning leaf floated slowly toward the ground, the trails of embers crawling through its veins as slow and bright as the lights of a city seen from far above.
Quickly. Matthew’s voice filled my head. Five heartbeats. No more.
The first beat of my heart shuddered through my chest. One down. I leapt forward.
The air felt like a thick jello that I had to shove my way through. My first few steps were sluggish, but then I got the hang of it, turning slightly sideways to ease my passage through the thickened air. I slithered past the burning husk and sprang into the air, landing hard against the closest of the drue-kin. Its vines gave slightly under my boots. I started to cut, chipping a wedge into its forehead. The outer layers were dry bark and springy wood, its flesh as green as new grass, but as I got deeper in the rings got closer together and the wood turned soft with rot. A final blow tore a huge slab away. It was hollow inside. I stared down at nothing.
“How the hell do you kill this?” I asked, but my voice caught in my throat. There was something in the core, black and glittering, hanging in open space like the filament in a lightbulb. Even with the world slowed down around me, this strap of darkness shimmered and danced. I stabbed down at it. The closer I got, the thicker the air, and my sword slowed to a terrible pace. My heartbeat slammed through my chest again. I could actually feel the blood moving in my veins. I pressed harder, and the tip of my blade touched the darkness. It snapped out, like a candle snuffed.
The drue-kin died. Or worse, the drue-kin had been dead the whole time, but now its body was released from some foul grip. I don’t know how I knew. It was moving too slow to fall. All I can say is that something essential left it. I jumped to the ground. The thick air held me aloft, and an idea occurred to me. When I touched down again, I jumped differently, floating through the soup of atmosphere like a dart.
This must look so damned cool, I thought. I drew back my sword, imagining the movie trailer as I flew. Damn, I look amazing!
The second drue-kin drew close. I swung hard, chopping at a point just beneath its eyes, figuring the rotten core must be closest there, based on what I’d seen of its brother. My sword cut into the bark and stopped.
I kept going. My fingers twisted off the hilt, and I started a slow spin through the air, pirouetting past the drue like a child’s top flung from its string. I beat against the thick wind, but it was nothing like swimming, and whatever laws governed the stillness didn’t award points for cool. I finally touched down, but the force of my landing twisted my ankle. I felt things pop, but for some reason the pain didn’t reach me. Steadying myself, I slithered my way back to the tree, dragging my foot. Another beat of my heart. Three. The ratio of killed drue to pulse rate was unacceptable. I had to pick things up. Fast. But how much faster could I possibly move?
I reached my sword and twisted it out of the drue. Bark peeled away. No time to get to the core the same way. I stabbed the sword into the flesh, then leaned into it. The drue-kin’s own momentum worked for me, and the unnatural force of Matthew’s blessing. The sword sank slowly, so slowly, into the bark. It felt like stabbing loose dirt, each inch taking twice as long as the inch before. I braced the pommel against my chest and shoved.
A jolt went through my body. There was a moment when I could taste darkness, not cold, but empty. I stumbled back and would have fallen if not for the soft cloud of air that surrounded me. A look of pain flashed in the drue-kin’s eye, and then its spirit was gone. Heartbeat. I was down to one, and the last drue-kin was still up.
I scrambled for my sword. The hilt was flush with the ruptured bark of the creature’s skin, and when I pulled it was as if the whole blade had fused with the wood. I put one foot on the drue-kin’s forehead and pulled so hard I thought my head was going to explode. Nothing. The sword was stuck.
I let go and looked around. A weird pressure built in my temples, the precursor to my next heartbeat. Odd what you notice when time stops. The drue-kin was close, but my only weapon was gone, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be able to punch a tree until it died.
Just then a shimmer caught my eye. It was like the reflection of light through a prism, just to the side of my head, and more all around. I squinted and looked closer. Light bent madly through the air in a trail that followed my own movements. Compressed air, the oxygen I had shoved out of my way as I flew and ran and stumbled. It formed a tunnel that I had burrowed through. Now that I knew it was there, it was obvious. I could trace it all the way back to where I had been standing when Matthew cast his spell. The closer the tunnel was to that point of origin, the narrower it was.
What’s going to happen when that closes? I wondered. Thunder? Isn’t that all thunder is, the collapse of air into the vacuum of lightning? Man, that’s going to be loud. I looked back at the final drue-kin. Destructively loud.
Through all of this, I had been keeping my shield edgewise, like a ship turned into the waves. Now I put it in front of me and started running. The resistance was hard, and the faster I ran, the harder it became. But I was shoving great lumps of air out of the way. I ran in circles around the drue-kin, staying as close to its skin as I could, burrowing a tunnel in the air around it. With each step, the shield in my hand got hotter and hotter, until I could feel my knuckles blistering against its surface. I had to duck around the vacuums I had already created, navigating by the shimmer of bent light and the drag on my shield. My veins were swelling, and my legs throbbing, but I kept pushing through.
Thud-whump. My heart beat one last time, and the world came loose from its prison.
I stumbled forward half a step, landing on my crippled ankle and crumpling to the ground. The two dead drue-kin disintegrated, shuffling apart into piles of broken bark and twisted wood. And Matthew took a deep breath as the last of his light faded from his skin, plunging the room into darkness.
I only remember all of this in retrospect. In the moment, the only thing I felt was thunder, and the only noise was my own screaming.
The tunnels of empty air collapsed with a horrific crash. It must have followed my path, because there was a sound like paper ripping, only ten thousand times louder and with the force of a god’s hammer. It zipped around the two dead drue-kin, a single line of vacuum collapsing, a final memorial to the fight. But when it reached the last forest spirit, the world crashed in all at once. Even before Matthew’s light died, the shattering song reached its crescendo. The force of the blast turned the drue-kin into dust, like a lightning stroke of noise.
And then it reached me. There was no more sound, only the hollow roar of my skull, and pain, such pain. My skin turned to fire, and tears streamed down my face. I gasped for air, but my lungs filled only with bile that burned my ribs and bore a hole in my chest. I dropped my shield and fell to the ground, trying to tear my burning skin off, trying to extinguish the agony of my flesh. But there was no fire, no flame, only the delayed friction of every movement. I went to my knees and started screaming.
Chapter TWENTY-THREE
DEEPER IN
Tembo bent and touched my shoulder. I was choking on my tears. Even the soft brush of his hand was like a brand against my skin. He grimaced at me.
“There wasn’t time to warn you,” he said. “But you want to move as little as possible when Matthew does that.”
“No shit!” I said. I stood up, holding my arms away from my body, wincing at the rustle of fabric against my skin. It was like having the world’s worst sunburn over every inch of my body, and maybe a few inches inside, too. My lungs certainly felt pretty raw. “How am I supposed to fight if I don’t move?”
<
br /> “That’s why I didn’t warn him,” Matthew said. He left the mask on top of his head. The saint looked pale, even for a man who lives inside a mask, and the beads of sweat streaming down his face shimmered in the torchlight. There was a bare amount of brilliance still in his eyes, but for the most part he looked like anyone else. He shrugged apologetically. “You couldn’t get the job done if you knew the rules.”
“Thanks a ton,” I said. I bent to pick up my sword, which had tumbled from the dying drue-kin, but that sent bolts of pain down my legs and through my back. I froze and let out a long, wheezing breath. “You got any of that healing left?”
“None of your injuries are fatal,” he said. “I need to save what little brilliance I have left for more critical patients.”
“But we’ve won, right? The drue-kin are dead.”
“Whoever sent them is not,” Tembo said. “And this anomaly is still intact. Your friend is somewhere inside. We must press on.”
“How the hell are we supposed to fight anything else? You’re tapped out, Matthew has only a glimmer of hope, and I...” I shivered as some new pain flickered through my skin. There was a breeze. It was excruciating. “I’m not exactly at the top of my game.”
“And this is what makes us heroes,” Tembo said. He slapped me on the shoulder, nearly blacking me out. When I was able to open my eyes again, he was staring right at me. “We do difficult things. Now stop crying and start fighting it. The pain is not going to go away.”
This sounded way too much like the jock-tough bullshit my father used to peddle before he developed a gut and an increasingly atrophying social consciousness. I didn’t respond well to this kind of thing. I was just about to tell Tembo off when he turned and walked away. Matthew nodded to me sadly.
“He’s right. Suffer and die or suffer and live. But bitching about it isn’t going to solve anything.”
“What the hell happened to holy mercy?” I snapped.
“Mercy would let you die here. You don’t want to see my mercy.”
He followed Tembo. The pair of them rapidly disappeared, the light of the mage’s torch barely enough to illuminate the ground around them. I realized that I was either going to be left in the dark, or I was going to pick up my sword and follow them. If I could find it.
Pain coursed through my body as I felt around in the dark. By the time I had retrieved it, the torch was a mere pinprick in the shadows. I limped hurriedly after them, tripping over the shattered remains of the drue-kin in my haste. My ankle hurt badly enough that the pain in the rest of my body started to recede in my mind. Not because it hurt less, but because it wasn’t going to hurt any more than it already did.
“So what now?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“Your friend is still here, still in need of our help. We find him and get him out. If the anomaly is still intact after we extract him, we will have to come back,” Tembo said.
“I hope Bethany is alright.”
“You don’t worry about her. You worry about you. Bethany can handle herself,” Matthew said. “Besides. She’s not the one trapped in a hell-mall with no light and little hope. Not yet, at least.”
“Better and better,” I muttered. They ignored me. We walked in sullen silence.
I swear we must have already walked the length of the mall at least twice. The corridor had been slowly widening, and now the walls on either side were outside the circle of light cast by Tembo’s torch. By the echo of our footsteps and the breeze swirling around our heads, I could tell we were in a pretty big cavern. Tembo drew us to a sudden halt.
“This is it,” he said, lifting the torch. “This is the source.”
“I don’t see anything.” The gloom in front of us was impenetrable. Even the torchlight seemed to bounce off it.
“Because there is nothing to see. Literally nothing.” Tembo motioned to Matthew. “My flame cannot penetrate this. Dispel the shadows, Saint.”
“You’re sure? If one of us gets hurt, I won’t have any light left to heal with.”
“This is the way forward,” Tembo said. Matthew shrugged and stepped forward.
A beam of light emerged from his chest and pierced the veil of darkness. The shadows swirled around it, slowly dissipating as the glowing shaft bore through them. The murk parted, revealing what was behind.
It was a bookstore. The display windows were broken, and dark vines spread along the walls, spidering out into the corridor. Mildewed stacks of books tumbled out the doors, and a haphazard barricade of shelves choked the entrance. There was no light inside. I chuckled.
“Man. We’re deep in the unreal. A bookstore in a mall. That’s just delusional.”
“This is where your people keep their tomes of magic?” Tembo asked. “Then we face a great sorcerer. Perhaps we should turn back.”
“More likely whoever kidnapped Eric is feeding off his imagination. He always had a thing for these places.” I chopped through the vines hanging over the door and stepped inside. “Though if you see something that could only be described with, like, thirty disjointed adjectives, let me handle it.”
The interior was a mess. Rearranged bookshelves formed a maze of dead ends and looping corridors, their shelves sometimes neatly filled with row after row of books, sometimes stacked in chaotic piles of mildewing pages and fading covers, sometimes barren of anything but dust. The floors were littered with torn paperbacks and the jagged bindings of coffee-table books. And throughout the chaos, the store was filled with invading plant life. A rotary display of comic books had been stuffed with crumbling leaves, while an abandoned shelf was sprouting branches that reached up to the ceiling, pushing through the tiles and spreading into the space beyond. Insect song clicked and chirruped in the distance, though the bookstore wasn’t large enough to have a distance to it. I pushed my way forward, wading through piles of discarded literature. It made my heart break to see so many books in such bad condition. Through it all, my skin throbbed and twitched. I wasn’t looking forward to encountering my first mirror. The sunburn must be epic.
“Have a care, Sir John. There’s no telling what awaits.”
“It’s a maze, Tembo. Do you think there will be a minotaur?” I joked. Then I remembered that yes, there could be a minotaur. That was the shape of my life now. I crept forward, sword and shield at the ready.
The interior of the maze was much larger than the store that contained it. Always under that tiled ceiling, and with the broken display windows always in sight, we wandered hither and yon, coming to dead ends, turning back, always going right, then always going left, and finally choosing our path based on whichever way seemed to lead away from the doors and into the store’s interior. Yet whenever we tried to return to the entrance, we were there immediately. The maze was anxious to eject us, and unwilling to let us inside. We were getting nowhere.
“It keeps changing,” Tembo said. “We haven’t passed the same stack of books, and yet we are no deeper into this labyrinth. I would say we were going in circles, but even a circle has a far end and a near end.”
“Perhaps we split up to—” Matthew started.
“No! I’m not going to wander alone through these stacks for the rest of my life. We’ve already lost Beth, I’m not about to let the two of you out of my sight.” I kicked at a pile of remaindered paperbacks, immediately regretting my frustration as a jolt of pain reminded me of my bad ankle. I soothed myself by kicking a different, much softer looking, pile of books. The resulting mess was very satisfying. “In fact, I’m starting to think—”
“Quiet!” Tembo snapped. I immediately shut up. If I had learned anything in my time in Knight Watch, it was that Tembo knew when everyone should shut up. I peered down the aisle we had been traveling for the last ten minutes, waiting for the inevitable attack.
“What was it?” I whispered.
“Didn’t you hear that?” he asked. “There, again.”
This time I heard it. A low groan, like a restless sleeper. My eyes lit up.
“Eric? Eric!” I almost laughed. “That’s him! I’d know that incoherent mumbling anywhere!”
“Sounds more like someone talking through a gag,” Matthew said, tilting his head to listen more carefully. “If I had any light left, I could find it.”
“This way,” I said, facing a half-empty bookcase. “I swear it’s just on the other side of this thing.”
“For what good that does us,” Tembo said. We had already tried to climb over a case; the shelves had sunk into the floor while the case kept growing taller, like walking up the down escalator. “It’s not like this maze leads anywhere.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t. But this does.”
I kicked the case hard, toppling it backwards and spraying musty pages and clouds of dust into the air. The whole thing crashed to the ground. Immediately, the adjoining cases started to grind together, closing the breach.
“Quick!” I shouted and jumped through. Tembo followed, with Matthew close behind. There was a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye, but then the pain of my ankle filled my head, and I was rolling around on the floor. The cases slammed shut behind us. I hit the ground and rolled onto my knees. The saint was staring just above my head.
“Nobody. Move. A muscle.”
Matthew’s words cut through my pain. I looked around. There was Eric, kneeling in the center of a circle of open books. Arcane symbols were crudely painted in black paint on the crumbling pages. Gnarled roots ran from the circumference of the circle toward the center like spokes in a wheel. They encased Eric’s kneeling form, binding him in place, pressing into his eyes and covering his mouth. A terrifying scene, especially for Eric, but I wasn’t sure what was so dangerous about it. I stood up.
“What the hell, Matthew? You need to calm down before—” I turned to look at the saint and nearly swallowed my tongue I shut up so fast.
The room was lined with spiders. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. They clung to the interior of the surrounding bookcases on delicate webs. None of them moved.