by Greg Curtis
“This world, this dimension, borders a thousand others. A million others. More. And what you're seeing is the way those other dimensions run alongside ours. Actually the way they touch.”
“Uh huh?” Manx didn't really understand that. Maybe he never would. It wasn't something that people were supposed to understand. But after the first few shocking moments, he was at least starting to get used to it.
“Never mind.” Adern smiled easily. “Your blood gives you the ability to see patterns. Order. And you can see order in all this strangeness. Can't you?”
“Ahh … yeah,” he slowly admitted. There was a certain order to the way the colours bathed the world around him. He couldn't explain it exactly. But there was a definite pattern. “Maybe?”
“Now look over there.” Adern pointed at the crumbling fort and the courtyard, and Manx followed the direction of his finger.
“Piss!” Manx was shocked all over again as he saw a living chaos of those strange colours in the very heart of that courtyard. A mass of madness that he instinctively knew was wrong. What he'd seen before, no matter how bizarre, had been ordered. It had made some sort of sense. But this was wrong on every level. In fact it looked like a ball of yarn after a few kittens had got loose with it. It was a knot of some sort.
“Exactly.” The walker nodded. “It's a mess. A chaotic puzzle of bits and pieces of various dimensions, interwoven into a pattern that shouldn't be. And I need to unravel it. Quickly. You need to help me do that.”
“Unravel that?” Manx stared at it and then at the man sitting beside him. “But how can you unravel … that? Whatever it is? It's vast!” And he wasn't even sure how you were supposed to push against impossible colours.
“Leave that to me.” Adern managed a smile. “I'm weak, and my gift is far from whole. But I can do it. What I can't do is work out what needs to go where. Every time I start pulling or pushing at one piece of this mess, I seem to tighten something else, or create new knots. But you can work out what needs to go where. You tell me what pieces to push and pull and I'll do it.”
“I see.” But what he saw was that the man was insane. A complete madman dribbling words like someone who'd lost their wits to time. Even though he wouldn't have thought he was old enough to be in his dotage. Surely he was only in his twenties. And yet he was right about one thing. There was a certain wrongness to the writhing mass of strands of whatever they were in front of him, that he could see. This was like a knot made out of hundreds or thousands of strands of yarn that should have been running along side by side but which had somehow got tangled together.
“You know how to fix it?”
“Yes. No. Maybe?” Manx had to think for a bit. “Can we cut the strands?”
“No. Considering that each of those strands you see is a piece of a dimension pulled out of shape like dough in a baker's hands being stretched and twisted, no. Even if it was possible to cut a dimension apart, it would be a disaster.”
“A strand of a dimension?” This was becoming crazier by the moment, Manx thought.
“I know. It sounds like a drunkard's dreams. But it's not. Whoever created this knot, didn't bend and stretch and twist dimensions exactly. That would be impossible. But what we see in front of us is actually the equivalent of that. He changed the way that the dimensions border one another. So to our senses it looks like he did exactly that.”
Manx stared at the three eyed man wondering if he'd really just spoken any of the words he just had. Because they were the words of the lunatics. It must have shown on his face.
“Have you ever bobbed for apples?” the man asked.
Manx nodded, suspiciously. He hadn't actually, but he'd seen others do it.
“Now imagine that instead of apples it was sticks you were bobbing for. All floating in the water. Touching each other at various points along their length. And that some of those sticks were half in and half out of the water, causing them to look bent as the light fell on them. Then imagine that someone stirred that water around.”
“That's what this is. The sticks that once bordered one another in an orderly fashion have been moved around so where they touch is different. And some of them look bent and twisted to our eyes even though they're not, simply because you're seeing them through different lenses.”
“Uh huh,” Manx replied, wondering if the man was ever going to make sense.
“Never mind.” Adern sighed. “The important thing is that if you can guide me into making sense of this, I can fix it.”
“Alright.” Manx gave up on his protesting. It wouldn't help. And he figured, the sooner he did this whatever it was, the sooner he could go home. But there was still one thing he needed to know. “Why are we doing this?”
“Because we have to,” Adern told him. “This is a disaster. And Sorsha who was dealing with it, was attacked by the Silver Order. Now there's only you and me and the Silver Order is likely riding for us as fast as they can.”
Manx wasn't quite sure he believed the man. There was something in what he said that sounded false to him. But in the end he wanted this nightmare over. And surely it couldn't do any harm to straighten out whatever this mess was? And then he could go home.
“So lets start with the obvious bits. Like that twist over there.” He pointed at a small loop of something that had been somehow pulled out of the confused mass sort of like a thread pulled out of a suit.”
“That one?” Adern made the piece wobble a little – somehow.
“Yeah. See if you can turn that around anticlockwise a little, maybe three full turns, and then just push it back into the central mass.”
“You sure?”
“Maybe,” Manx answered him. He wasn't at all sure. But it looked right. “Maybe just do it slowly.”
Adern did as he said, and as he did so Manx could see a tiny sliver of order returning to the seething mass of chaos in front of him. He didn't know how the walker was doing it. He wasn't even sure he completely understood what he was doing. But it was helping, somehow. Freeing a tiny strand from the mass. And soon it was back in place.
“Alright, let's try that piece over there.” He pointed at another strand of the strange dimensions to the right. “It's been tugged out of the mass and looped around that sort of yellow bit. Let's try and push that yellow bit back through the loop and then once that's done, push the first piece back in. Gently.”
It was a slow, delicate process, but in time Adern did as he said and a little more of the confused mass of dimensions was once more back as it should be. And despite his fears, nothing snapped or stretched out of shape. That brought him a little confidence. Enough to carry on.
So he did. He worked at the great knot piece by piece, having Adern push, pull and twist things back into their place and slowly the entire mass became smaller as threads were freed from it. Within a few hours the tangle was half its size and he had hopes that things would be as they should be in only a few more. Not that he really understood what they were doing.
How could you stretch a dimension? That didn't make any sense to him. In fact it didn't seem possible. But Adern's explanation that it wasn't the universes that had been somehow pulled out of shape but rather the borders between them which had been rearranged, seemed even less likely. And as for the sticks he'd talked about, that was pure lunacy! In fact it sounded like the delusions of a broken mind. He'd thought he was a smart, well educated man, but he'd never heard of anything like it.
The two of them kept going, pressing on as the sun rose higher in the sky, and slowly they seemed to make progress. There was less and less tangled up in the great knot. And it wasn't just him who thought so. Adern sounded hopeful as well. And maybe Larissa too – though really she wasn't an optimistic person.
By the time midday had arrived and his stomach was beginning to remind him that he hadn't had breakfast, the knot was far less than a quarter of what it had been. But what remained was more tightly tangled up and twisted back upon itself than the rest. Still, they were su
cceeding. A few more hours, he thought, and everything would once more be lined up as it should be.
So they kept working, undoing the tangles slowly and freeing strand after strand from the mass until finally there wasn't a knot left. The last strand came free and what was left looked exactly like everything else. A series of parallel strands of dimension with not a kink in any of them. Order had returned to the – world?
They'd done it!
Manx closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat, relieved that it was over. He still wasn't quite sure what he'd done, but it was finished. He hoped. He asked after Larissa had released his shoulder and his vision had returned to what it normally was.
“Indeed you have done all that was asked of you,” the shaman told him. “You should be pleased.”
“I'm just tired,” he told her. “Now can I go home?”
“But wouldn't you like to see what you've done?”
“I have seen it,” he replied, somewhat confused. “The knot, whatever it was, is undone. Everything is as it should be.” Not that he really understood that. Only that there was order instead of chaos and that was a good thing.
“And because of that, the normal borders between our dimension and the one we were held in for all these years, have been straightened out. And the walkers now have the ability to summon directly through them again.”
Manx would have asked what she meant by that, but before he could he was shown. People started appearing on the grass. Lots of people. People with horns and antlers. People with glowing blue eyes and spear like ears sticking out of the sides of their heads. There were even a few with wings. And it wasn't just a few of them. It wasn't even a few score. It was hundreds. And then it was more than hundreds. It was thousands. They just kept appearing on the grass. And as they did so he finally began to understand what he'd done.
He'd just arranged a prison break!
“Balls!” Manx felt sick! “What have I done?!” All these people. Strange people with strange magic. Suddenly free in the world. Because of him! The city had been in enough trouble because of them. Now he'd just added to it.
“Things have grown more dangerous. There were spies watching our people. They must have reported back to their masters. And now the Silver Order have struck at our heart.”
“You said that they were riding for us,” Manx corrected Adern. “For me! You tricked me!” He was sure of that.
“No. We said that Lady Marshendale attacked Sorsha,” Larissa told him. “Tried to murder her in the street. She's in bad shape. The healers are with her now. The Silver Order obviously thought that if they murdered the walkers, they could stop us. And in time no doubt, they would have sent the army to wipe us out before we grew too strong to fight. We had to act before they could do that. And they would have struck at you too in time.”
“Shite!” He swore some more. Then he stood up, suddenly realising that he didn't want to be here any longer. He didn't know these people. But they had magic, and most of them didn't seem to like him simply because of his blood.
“Can I go home now?” He asked, realising that he didn't want to be around when these people wandered over.
“Of course.” The shaman managed a polite smile. “And thank you.”
She shouldn't have said that.
“No.” He told her bluntly, annoyed by the words. “You don't get to thank me as if I simply chose to do this of my own accord.” In fact he was annoyed by the fact that she was willing to pretend he had. “You forced me to do this. And you lied about what I was doing and why I was doing it! Don't try to pretend otherwise.”
With that he was off, walking slowly back to his home and a cat who would no doubt be wondering why she hadn't been fed. But for all that she annoyed him and made his life hard, he thought Whitey had one thing that these magic people didn't. She was honest. She didn't try to disguise her crimes behind pretty words. Hell she was even proud of them. They tried to hide them.
And now he'd brought thousands more of these people to the city. He'd got himself involved in their war with the Silver Order. Damn it! When would he learn?!
Chapter Sixteen
Life in the Nightshade Inn wasn't a lot of fun. Mostly because she was confined to bed. Actually a cot in the main room, around which people gathered to discuss fairly much everything that had happened to them. But also because it was overcrowded. More than overcrowded. There were two hundred people now squeezed for space in an inn that was probably meant to hold thirty at most.
People were everywhere. Every bed had multiple people packed into it. Cots had been set up in the main room, the dining hall and the hallways. And the same was true in the two other inns they now owned, and however many houses they'd bought. It was lucky that some of the sorcerers could literally produce gold to buy the properties they needed. And unfortunate that they couldn't buy the houses fast enough.
But at least everyone had been freed from the local prison, and now roughly two thousand of their people were wandering this strange new world. Though wandering was an optimistic word for what they were really doing. It took days to recover from just the physical effects of having been trapped in the other world prison. Weeks to recover mentally – at least as much as they could. And it had only been three days since she had been stabbed.
At least amongst those two thousand were forty walkers. Her family, though sadly not her immediate family. In time, those forty would set to work freeing the rest of their people from the remaining prisons and none of the Silver Order would be able to stop them. They would be protected as they worked.
Whatever the King and the Court's plans had been to stop them, they had just changed. A few targeted assassinations of those with three eyes, wouldn't stop her people from being freed. Now she suspected, the Court would be discussing their options on their various committees, and coming up with only one – war. But every day they spent discussing it, was another day that her people grew stronger. Time was against the Court. Her people would be freed!
In fact they already were being freed. All across the realm. Other walkers were at work. Doing what she had done. And of course creating mayhem wherever they went much as she had. The newspapers were full of stories about the events as they called them.
But none of the ones in Winstone were doing that now. Not any more. It was the others who had left them earlier on to go home. The ones that remained were being shepherded. When it was time for them to go to work, it would be done in a far more orderly fashion. And if and when the King sent his armies against them, they would find themselves in a world of trouble.
Fortunately it seemed, they had time. Windhaven moved slowly as they'd been told repeatedly. Everything had to be discussed, debated on, voted on and finally approved by King Willhelm. It was almost a wonder that they'd managed to send an assassin after her in so short a time. In the normal course of events she would likely have passed away from old age before it had happened. She wondered what had caused them to move so quickly.
Meanwhile she was hurting. The knife had somehow missed everything vital, though the healers suggested it might have nicked a lung. Apparently driving a knife downwards from above at an angle through the collar was the least deadly way to stab someone in the chest. But it was probably the most painful, and she yelped every time she moved.
Of course she wasn't allowed to move. The healers had been very clear about that. She'd barely escaped death, and they didn't want her to risk her life again by opening up the wounds.
The unexpected thing was, that she wasn't the only one they were concerned about. And unfortunately they'd decided to hold a conference about it, all around her. Apparently they'd been having the same argument for days while she'd been sleeping.
“I could give him the unguent, and it would probably grant him a lot of relief. But it's not enough. He needs proper attention. An examination. Probably time in an infirmary. A lot of time,” Hilda told them.
“And we don't have an infirmary,” Larissa pointed out. “But we
do have a lot of sick patients here. And he's been dealing with his injuries for twenty or more years. Another few weeks or months won't make any difference.” She took a deep breath. “Besides, he's a Smythe. He can't be trusted. And he's not one of us.”
“We owe him,” Adern told them all bluntly. “And we may need him too. That dimensional maze he undid would have taken me months if not years to undo if I could have undone it at all. I'd assume the others are the same. And I don't see any more Smythe's rushing to help us.”
“That wasn't our fault!” Larissa retorted, clearly feeling got at. “They simply weren't interested. They knew we were coming. They knew why. And they wanted nothing to do with us. Long before we turned up on their doorstep.”