I saw the flicker of a fire coming from a short distance down the path and began to walk toward it, my bare feet reveling in the delicious chill of the dirt beneath my feet.
In a place where the shelf widened out a bit a small campfire burned, around which my companions were sitting and talking. As soon as they saw me they jumped to their feet, and Rita squealed and ran over to hug me in relief, which was not a response I would ever have expected from her. Devon and Isaac waited for me to come to them, but you could see from their faces how relieved they were to see that I was okay. Their clothes were clean now, though it looked as if Devon’s shirt was still damp. I saw that our bags had been piled up at the far side of the campfire, and next to them was all the stuff I’d been carrying in my pockets. Further down the path I saw a rope strung between two trees, with a shirt and jeans clipped to it.
The Green Man watched our reunion in silence. When we finally sat down, using various rocks and logs for makeshift chairs, he remained standing.
“Where are we?” I asked him.
“You would call this place West Virginia,” the Green Man said. “But the state never divided in this world, so that name does not exist.”
“And all of this?” I nodded back toward the cave. “This is your home?”
He chuckled. “Hardly. Call it a waystation. A place where I entertain guests who aren’t yet ready to learn where I live.”
So many questions were filling my head that I didn’t know which ones to ask first. “You said you were from Terra Colonna.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“From what time period?”
Devon and Rita were startled by the question. They hadn’t seen the gun.
The Green Man just smiled. “Born in the year of our Lord 1747. In a small town northwest of Richmond, Virginia. I’m guessing that was your next question.”
I’d expected some answer like that, but even so it was hard to absorb. “Do people not age normally in this world?”
“They live and die at the normal pace here. As they do in most worlds. Though I’ve heard there are a few exceptions.”
I opened my mouth to ask another question, but he raised up a hand to silence me. Then he reached forward with a long stick and stirred the embers at the base of the fire. Orange sparks went floating up into the night. “You want my story. You want all the Shadows’ secrets. You want to understand this world well enough to get home safely, after you take advantage of those secrets. Those things do not come free.”
“We’ve been giving you information for hours,” Rita said testily. “Shouldn’t it be our turn now?”
“That has paid the bill thus far,” he told her. “And you’re getting off rather cheaply, in that I saved all your lives. So if you want more from me, you will have to offer more.”
“What is it you value?” I asked.
His sharp eyes fixed on me. In the firelight they were a steely grey, shadowy and ominous. “I trade in information, my dear, and not just for my amusement. Information is what keeps one alive in a hostile environment. Now, it happens that because I am from your world, I value news of its progress—as your friends have discovered. But they’ve already covered that ground. Otherwise?” He stabbed the stick into the dirt by his side; it remained upright when he released it. “Secrets, artifacts, innovations … the more rare things I collect, the more likely people will seek me out when there is something unusual they want.”
“What about an update on technological developments?” Devon suggested. “There’s so much that’s happened in the last few years, and we didn’t tell you about that at all.” He pulled out his iPhone, turned it on, and showed it to him. The Green Man glanced at it for a moment. A faint smile flickered across his lips. He shook his head. Devon shut the phone off and put it back in his pocket.
I remembered the items that I’d seen on his shelves. Artifacts. Innovations. Rarities.
I walked over to our backpacks and began to dig through mine. Everything I’d brought with me was necessary for survival—that’s why I’d packed it all in the first place—but most of our supplies had been purchased in triplicate, so as long as I didn’t get separated from my companions, I could afford to part with something.
I considered what would have the most value here, reflected upon the artifacts he already owned, and finally took out my flashlight. One of his eyebrows rose a bit, but he said nothing. I switched it on and off to show him how it worked, then put it down on a flat rock next to him. An offering.
He still said nothing, but I thought I saw a gleam of interest in his eyes.
Rita headed over to her backpack, and after a moment of rummaging she withdrew something round and silver: her roll of duct tape. She peeled off a short length to demonstrate its stickiness, ripped it to reveal its texture, then walked over to him and put the roll down on what had become our official offering rock.
Devon’s turn. He hesitated, clearly uncertain about what to offer. Finally he reached into his bag and pulled out a couple of water bottles. At first that struck me as pretty lame—the last thing the Green Man was likely to need in a land of rivers and streams was water—but as the Green Man nodded in thoughtful approval, I realized the brilliance of Devon’s choice. Lightweight plastic bottles, flexible and watertight, had a thousand possible uses. And in a world without plastic they were a true rarity.
We all looked at Isaac. You could tell from his surprised expression that he hadn’t expected to be included in our little ritual. But then his eyes met mine, and I pleaded with him silently: please. I thought there would be a dramatic value in all us making this offering together, as a group, that might outweigh the value of the items themselves.
Finally he took out his little glow lamp and put it on the offering rock.
Thank you, I mouthed silently.
The Green Man studied the items before him for a few seconds in silence, then nodded. He walked over to where a fallen tree trunk lay in a bed of weeds and sat down on it. I felt the knot in my chest loosen a bit. Hopefully we were about to get one step closer to our end goal: rescuing Tommy.
“My name is Sebastian Hayes,” he told us. “And yes, I fought in the War of Independence. After the city of my birth was burned to the ground by a traitor, I signed up. Fought till the end. It wasn’t glorious, like they tell you in history books, just … necessary. And damn bloody.” A shadow of pain crossed his face. “When it was over I hurried home, anxious to see my wife and daughter again.”
There was a long pause, during which he stared into the fire without speaking.
“The places where the boundaries of a world grow thin aren’t stable,” he said at last, “and they usually aren’t passable in any physical sense. The vast majority of such breaches only allow dreams to slip through, or at best, fragmented whispers. Native shamans back home held their dream-quests at such locations, weaving narratives from the fleeting impressions they received from other worlds. But eventually such a breach heals, or shifts location, and dreams stop coming.
“Rarely, a breach becomes so wide that for a short while physical objects can pass through it. This is what the Shadows call a portal. They are volatile things, unstable and unpredictable. One day a portal might become wide enough for a man on horseback to gallop through it. The next day there will be no sign that it was ever there.
“The year that war ended, North Anna River was running low due to a recent drought, and on my way home I cut across a tributary that would normally have been impassable. And I ran into such a portal. Never saw it coming. There was a fleeting moment of dread as I approached, and my horse was clearly anxious—you can sense a breach when you get that close—and then suddenly I was swallowed up by the most fearsome darkness a man can imagine. I understand now that what lies between the worlds is a more terrible emptiness than that which separates the stars … but back then, all I knew was that I was lost and terrified. So was my horse. She bucked and threw me, and I fell to earth a few yards from where the darkness had first en
veloped us. Or so I thought. But the land that had been dry a moment before was now knee-deep in water, and even as I struggled to my feet, coughing up the water I’d inhaled when I landed, I knew that something was terribly wrong.
“I soon learned the truth, which was that I wasn’t in my world any longer, but a dark and terrible simulacrum, where people and things looked familiar but their essences were twisted beyond all recognition. In this new world the war hadn’t ended yet, and Richmond was controlled by Loyalists, so showing up in a Continental uniform did not make for an auspicious start. By the time I learned enough of what was going on to save my neck from the gallows, the Shadows had gotten wind of my arrival. They despise anything they can’t control—that is a part of their nature—and the thought that a man might dare to cross between the worlds without their say-so was deeply offensive to them. The Shadowlord of Richmond became my nemesis, and I spent months dodging his Hunters, unable to get back to my arrival point. By the time I finally managed it, the breach had disappeared. I had to travel hundreds of miles to find another one, hidden deep within the woods where native shamans gathered. Which is a story unto itself.
“After crossing back to my world I headed straight for home, feverish with the desire to be reunited with my family. But when I arrived, I discovered that my house had been burned to the ground. Oddly, it appeared to have happened some time ago; there was already a few years’ worth of vegetative growth rooted in the ashes. But how could that be? And where were my wife and daughter?
“I scoured the countryside in panic, but there was no sign of them anywhere. Then I headed into Richmond proper, where I learned the terrible truth. In the months that I’d spent struggling to stay alive in this godforsaken world, striving to evade the Shadows long enough to find my way to an unguarded portal, five years had passed back home. One night brigands had fallen upon my house, and—”
He shut his eyes, his brow creasing in pain as he remembered. We waited in respectful silence.
“I should have been there to protect them,” he whispered. “And if I’d come back the right way I could have been there in time. I know that now.” His voice trailed off into silence.
Quietly I asked, “What do you mean, the right way?”
He opened his eyes; the agony in their depths made my heart lurch. “You are part of the world you were born into. Your body knows it, your mind and soul know it … the whole universe knows it. When you leave your homeworld, you leave a gaping wound behind. And when you arrive in a new one, you’re bringing a foreign element into a perfectly balanced system. The first time you cross the disturbance is minimal, but after that each passage becomes more difficult, and more damaging. In time even your own home world may reject you, no longer recognizing you as its own. Thus, with each crossing, there is a greater danger of lost time, scrambled memories, the chance of arriving in the wrong sphere altogether … even of being trapped between the worlds, unable to enter any sphere ever again.
“The Shadows long ago discovered that if they sent people in both directions at once, binding the two passages together, a safe crossing could be stabilized. I don’t really know how it works. No one outside their Guild does. All we know is that they’ve perfected the art of orchestrating balanced transfers, to the point where it’s rare for any traveler to suffer a time dilation of more than a few days, provided they pass through one of the Shadows’ Gates. And mental damage is very, very rare.” He paused. “Hence their monopoly over interworld commerce.”
“But if all that’s needed is to trade bodies back and forth,” Devon said, “Why can’t anyone do that? Why do they need the Shadows?”
“Because it’s impossible to coordinate such a thing without being able to communicate freely between two worlds. And the Shadows are the only ones who can manage that.”
“Why can they do it, when no one else can?” I asked.
The pale eyes fixed on me. “Whatever the metaphysical mark we bear, that connects us to our homeworld, does not exist for inanimate objects. So they can be carried back and forth with no issue. Dead bodies, likewise, can move from sphere to sphere without adverse consequences.”
I breathed in sharply. “Are you saying the Shadows are … dead?”
He nodded. “Dead, and also alive. Trapped halfway between the two states, they belong to no world, and thus are accepted by all. It’s a gruesome and unnatural existence, but without them interworld commerce could not exist. So I suppose you could say they’ve earned their right to power.” There was bitterness in his voice.
I said it softly: “You don’t believe that.”
He shrugged. “I was a revolutionary. This is a world where revolutions rarely succeed. France, America, Russia … the popular uprisings that reshaped Terra Colonna all failed in this world. Here, it’s Gifts that make or break a war, and once the nobility get enough of a chokehold on society to harvest all Gifted children for their own ranks, common men don’t stand a chance. When the worlds finally go to war with each other—as I believe they will some day—it will be a similar story, only on a cosmic scale. Eventually the Shadowlords will rule everything. And you see what kind of social order they prefer.”
I thought about the abbies, the children being torn from their parents’ arms, the two Seers who had spoken so casually of cleansing a world. I shivered.
Then Isaac spoke. “You said that you arrived home five years after you left. But now you’re back here, what, three centuries later? How did that happen?”
Sebastian sighed. “I was mad with grief. To the point where I could no longer stand to live in the world where my wife and daughter had died. And I wanted revenge. So I found a way to cross back. I told myself I would kill the Master Shadow of Richmond, he who had prevented me from going home. And if I died in that attempt, so be it. No one who had failed his family so miserably as I had deserved to live.
“But I didn’t understand how the portals worked, back then. How the negative effect intensifies with each crossing. It cost me twenty-three years to return here. By then the Shadowlord I’d come to kill had been promoted to the regional Guildmastership in Luray. So I went there.” He paused. “Looking back, I think I hungered for my own death even more than for vengeance.”
“You killed Guildmaster Durand,” Isaac said.
The Green Man looked at him for a long moment. Something passed between them that I could not interpret. Like when two people take out their cellphones and transfer pictures to each other, while no one around them has any idea what they’re looking at.
“Master Durand died,” he said steadily. “I was in Luray when it happened.”
“Did you ever try going home again?” Devon asked, trying to steer the conversation back to safer ground.
Sebastian nodded solemnly as he turned back to us. “Once. By then I understood the price I would have to pay. But it no longer mattered. There was nothing in either world that I cared about enough to fear the loss of it.” He paused. “I arrived in 1865. Richmond was alight again. Only this time her own people had set the fire. I walked through fields of blood-soaked mud where brother had fought brother, striving to tear apart the very nation I had risked my life to build.
“I had thought I could know no greater pain than the loss of my wife and child. I discovered I was wrong.”
“But the secession failed.” Rita’s tone was unusually gentle. “The nation wasn’t torn apart.”
“I know.” He nodded. “I get news from home whenever I can. That’s why I came when Ethan sent word that you were here. Fortuitous, as it turned out.”
“Do you think you’d ever go back home?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I doubt I would survive it. The last trip cost me far more than time. My presence has become an offense to this world. That will be true anywhere I go. The day might come when I exited one world and would not be able to enter another. Which would leave me … well, you’ve seen what lies between.”
I remembered the darkness I had sensed when we passed throug
h the arch, and I shuddered.
“What else did it cost you?” Rita asked. “Besides time?” When he didn’t answer right away she added hurriedly, “It’s all right if you don’t want to talk about it—”
“No. I do. I do. You need to know these things. No one should travel between the worlds without knowing the risk.”
He gestured down toward the ground by his feet. It took me a moment to realize why.
I heard Rita gasp.
The grass beneath his feet had wilted and browned while he was talking to us. The plants climbing up the log had been reduced to shriveled black ribbons. All around him, in a circle a yard wide, every single living thing had died.
A chill ran up my spine.
“I am no longer compatible with this world,” he said in a hollow voice. “Or any other. Animals can hold their own in my presence, but plants are more primitive, and easily succumb. Next time … it’s possible men will not fare so well when they are near me.”
I looked back at the area surrounding his cave. How stark it was! Not a single tree grew near the entrance. Not a single plant flanked the path he and I had walked together, nor were there seedlings struggling to take root in the dirt near his fire. Surrounded by a sea of life, Sebastian’s home was an island of death.
Suddenly a lot of things came into focus. The strange title he had adopted. The legends about his supernatural affinity with the forest, his ability to meld into trees. He’d probably spread those legends himself. Camouflage. Where would you go looking, if you wanted to hunt a man who was one with the forest? Not on a barren mountainside devoid of foliage.
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