like I have a choice.” He looked around nervously, but apart from a faint shimmer around Pevan’s head, there was nothing to worry about. If that was all her disapproval, then either the Sherim was quiet today or she secretly approved. And Pevan never approved of anything he did, even when it was obviously the right thing to do. At least a quiet Sherim meant it was safe to talk for a moment or two.
She winced, “I know. Will you go all the way to the Court?”
“Better safe than sorry. Can’t you get me any closer to the Sherim?”
“Be careful.” She put her arms around his neck and hugged him tightly, and Rel found himself clenching his fists as he grabbed her. Too late to back out now, but this was stupid. If the Second Realm itself didn’t find some inventive new way to kill him, the Wildren would get him, and if they didn’t he’d have to come back to Dora. If he was lucky, she’d only skin him alive metaphorically. If she came back herself from whatever she’d been doing.
In the wall of the bridge, the Gateway twisted. The swirling wrongness of the Sherim was visible beyond the opening, but the surface of the Gate rippled, distorting the image. Reluctantly, Rel let his sister go, and pointed at the Gateway.
“Is that normal?”
“Up here? That’s calm. Get going, I feel like my brain’s turning to soup.”
Rel took a deep breath and took a step towards the Gateway. Normally, stepping through was like stepping through a doorway, but his hair stood on end just being close to it. He closed his eyes and walked through, trying to fight down a shudder.
The Sherim looked like an ordinary wooden door, standing upright without a frame on the wind-swept grass. To either side, the ground fell away, to the Federas valley on one side and towards Nursim on the other. Ahead, the brow climbed to the low top of Aruls beyond the Sherim. Not that you could walk a step past the Sherim in that direction.
The Gift made Rel’s eyes ache as he walked down to the door, and he stifled a yawn. Focussing on the door kept his attention off the strangeness at the corners of his vision, but he was used to it anyway; the slopes to either side, if glanced at carelessly, seemed to ripple, almost to flap like wings.
A few feet short of the door, Rel stopped, turned to his right, and began to circle it. This wasn’t the only Sherim to be marked by a door - the clash between first- and second-realm logic threw up some strange patterns - but at none of them did one open the door to pass through. Some doors simply didn’t open; some, like this one, would, but all anyone would tell Rel was that there were dire consequences for doing so.
He let himself dwell on that as he passed round the back of the door. Sometimes Dora still treated him like a child, to be scared into obedience by monsters under the bed. He was a grown man, and she only a handful of years older than him.
He passed in front of the door again, feeling the Sherim start to tighten around him. If he looked down, he knew, his feet would already be a few inches above the grass. Of course, if he looked down his own internal logic would reassert itself and he’d fall back to the ground. Dora used to find all sorts of ways to trick him into looking down when she was training him. She had no right treating him like a child when she was so childish herself.
Pressure built at the back of his neck, like one of those itches that moves when you try to scratch it. Pevan said she liked the feel of the Sherim, something about the way it touched her skin. It had no right to behave like that with his sister. He was all the way around the back of the door again and coming back to the front. He couldn’t feel the lean, but he knew he was almost eight feet off the ground, and leaning far enough over that, if normal gravity still held, he’d fall flat on his face.
Something about Pevan. His... sister? Or was that Dora? With the way she was always teasing him, she might as well be. Which of them was he thinking about? Dora, with her boyish body but oh-so-feminine hands. No, that was Pevan. Dora had the eyes. His eyes were boiling. Third time round the door. Did he have eyes? Surely if he did, they’d be open, and he’d be able to see the hillside a hundred feet below, and Nursim in front of him if he raised his head a little.
So, no eyes. Did he at least still have a body?
Still?
Nothing was ever still in the Sherim. Right on the brow, the wind was always strong. The wind was cool on his brow. Except that it couldn’t be, because his eyes that he didn’t have were hot. No body then. He didn’t have a body, or he was nobody?
He opened his eyes. Rel. That was him. Rel was somebody. Rel was in the Second Realm, now.
Slowly, his brain erected a semblance of first-realm logic between him and the world. Up was the direction his head was pointing. That meant that the big green thing in front of him was a plain. Other features resolved themselves into the sky, trees, the far-distant towers of the Court. Rel allowed himself to relax when he managed to pin down the red flower that grew out of the sky about half-way across the plain. Going through the Sherim was never pleasant, but if you knew what you were doing it could at least be made more or less consistent.
The Court was a jagged interruption of the flat horizon, six dark spires stabbing into the yellow fringe of the sky, a day’s walk or more distant. You could walk there across the plain if you had the time and stamina; this close to the First Realm, things were relatively stable and even the predatory Wildren were wary of humans. There were a few pitfalls, but it was easily the safest way to reach the Court.
Unfortunately, Rel didn’t have a day to walk to the Court. He turned to his left, feeling the dull ache of logic fatigue settling somewhere behind his forehead. A path, paved in red brick, led along the side of the plain, up to a small stone bungalow. Rel took the path, trying to ignore the green of the plains grass shifting slowly to grey, until only a fool could see anything other than a steep, unforgiving stone hillside falling away to a precipice far below.
A thin trail of smoke wound up from the bungalow’s chimney. That was good - the mad child was in - but also bad; the mad child was in. Rel ignored the cheery red door and smashed his way through the sole window.
Inside, the bungalow’s single room was neatly organised, with pans hanging from a rack on the wall, powdered spices in little jars on a rack, and a fire roaring in the hearth. The mad child sat with a blanket wrapped around her in a rocking-chair by the fire, her face so folded with wrinkles that you could almost convince yourself she had eyes and a mouth.
Her voice was a rustle of autumn leaves as she said, “Bravo. You’re just in time for dinner. Would you like something to drink?”
Rel climbed over the stone sink and let himself down onto the floor, carefully avoiding the white tiles. With his boots on, he had to place his feet diagonally across the black tiles. He said, “Sorry, sister, I came to feed you, I don’t really have time to chat.”
He expected her to protest, but instead she simply said, “You’d better get cooking, then, hadn’t you?”
Rel took a deep breath, then walked over to the hearth and sat down on the fire. He stared at the mad child’s face; if you thought about the fire too much, first-realm logic took over and you burned. Flames rose around the hearth, though, eating at the walls and floor of the bungalow but not touching anything alive.
Rel closed his eyes, sat back, and took a step forward. He almost imagined he could hear the mad child’s scream of frustration in the rush of air that carried him up the chimney, but even that was strangely muted. When he opened his eyes, he was walking along the narrow plume of smoke from a chimney and hearth that stood, bereft of their house, on the edge of a cliff. The smoke blew out across the chasm - the bottom was covered in what looked like a lush, dark-blue carpet - and Rel blew with it, each step carrying him dozens of feet.
The far side of the chasm passed by beneath, and Rel let himself lean backward until he drifted in a river of the fine strands of smoke. The river parted and he fell towards the stony ground, but all it took was remembering that he had done this before, and he landed in a pool of water - First Realm logic said that if he’d
survived the fall first time, he had to survive it this time.
Logic fatigue made his head throb as the well started to drain, sucking him down with it, and then there was just the breathless rush, half-drowning as he shot down the pipe, sometimes smothered by the water as it fell with him, sometimes floating on it. Twice he bounced hard off the side of the tube in sharp corners, but if anything that made the headache recede slightly.
It was when he found himself floating, upside-down, in water that flowed along the top of the pipe while the bottom half opened to show the field below that the ache at the front of his brain started to pound. The pipe curved around through about half the required dimensions, and suddenly he was stumbling onto a tiny ledge, staggering forward and pressing himself to the cliff face as gallons of water lashed at him.
Behind him was an open expanse of blue that could only be called sky, except that it went all the way round from above his head to below the ledge. In front, the cliff went on as far as he could see in every way, broken only by the plain steel door that opened onto the ledge.
You could open the door, according to Dora, but that way didn’t go to the Court. Instead, Rel spread his arms and reimagined them as wings. A handful of feathers, freckled with brown spots and tipped with shimmering
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