Water Keep

by J. Scott Savage

  “The Fontasians do not answer to me.” Zhethar gave Marcus an irritated look before dropping to the ground in what seemed like an intentionally hard landing. Muddy water splashed high into the air as the pinnois’s talons sunk into the marshy grass.

  “This is your last chance,” Zhethar said. “Ask, and I will take you back to Terra ne Staric. Stay, and you are on your own. I will not return no matter how great your need, and despite what you might think, the Fontasians will not open their walls to you.”

  Marcus glanced toward Kyja, who gave a tiny shake of her head. “Thanks for the warning,” he said. “But this is where we need to be.”

  “Very well.” The pinnois extended one great silver wing to the ground, and Marcus and Kyja began to climb off. When Rhaidnan tried to follow, however, Kyja held out her hand.

  “You’re not coming with us.”

  Rhaidnan stared at her—first in surprise, then in anger. “You saved my life. I’m not leaving two children here all alone.”

  Marcus thought he had never felt less like a child. He might still be thirteen, but the events of the past two weeks had changed him. He still didn’t know what he was doing, still didn’t feel up to the task Master Therapass had put on his shoulders, but the days when he’d been frightened by someone like Chet and his friends were long gone.

  “Whatever we have to do here is for us alone,” he said. “You need to return to your wife and children.”

  “You’re sure?” Rhaidnan looked back and forth between the two of them.

  Kyja nodded. “Char’s spent enough time without you.”

  The thought of his wife finally seemed to make the decision for him. Rhaidnan swept the two of them into his arms—somehow managing to trap Riph Raph, who sputtered and squawked. “I won’t forget you,” he said, tears spilling down his gaunt cheeks. “If there’s anything I can ever do for you . . . anything.”

  A minute later, Kyja helped Marcus to the ground, and the twosome watched as the pinnois prepared to take flight.

  “You won’t change your mind?” Zhethar asked. Marcus and Kyja shook their heads in unison.

  “You won’t get in,” he said, blinking his big, dark eyes. “But if you somehow manage to, be careful. Elementals do not think the same way as other creatures. They view the world in a way we can’t even comprehend.”

  With its warning given, the pinnois spread out its long, silver wings, launched itself into the air with all six legs, and rose into the sky.

  Standing side by side, Kyja and Marcus waved to Rhaidnan until he and Zhethar were only a tiny black speck.

  Then, once again, they were alone.

  Marcus eyed the high wall of swirling, bluish-green mist which now blocked any view of the city. Kyja pressed her foot into the soft ground, watching as her footprint slowly filled with brownish water.

  Riph Raph spied an insect scurrying up a blade of grass. With a chameleon-like dart of his head, he snatched the insect in his beak and swallowed. He cocked his head toward Kyja. “So. What now?”

  Chapter 51

  Something Fishy

  Are you sure this is such a good idea?” Kyja asked. She and Marcus stood at the edge of the mist. Staring into its depths, she could almost imagine things moving just beneath the fog’s rippling surface.

  “Of course it’s not a good idea. He came up with it,” Riph Raph said from his perch on Kyja’s shoulder.

  Kyja could tell Marcus had been making a special effort to be nicer to Riph Raph, since the skyte had been at least partially responsible for their rescue from the unmakers. She could see the effort it took him to keep from saying something rude back.

  Marcus pressed his lips together and tightened his grip on his staff. “Do you have a better plan?”

  “Wait for Master Therapass,” Riph Raph said at once. “The wizard will know what to do.”

  “How long do you want to wait?” Marcus asked. “Hours? Days? Weeks? Maybe you hadn’t noticed, but we can’t eat bugs like you. And I’m not all that excited about the idea of sleeping in this muddy field. Besides, even if Master Therapass does show up, what makes you think he’d know any more about this than we do?”

  Riph Raph started to open his beak, but Kyja shushed him by placing a hand on the back of his ridged neck. “Marcus is right. We have to do something.” She glanced in the direction they’d come from, where even the mountains were no longer visible, wishing she knew what had happened to the wizard.

  Putting most of his weight on his left leg, Marcus poked the tip of his staff into the mist. “Zhethar said we couldn’t get through the wall, but it doesn’t seem to be solid. Maybe there’s something else we don’t know about.”

  “Maybe the Fontasians want you to go into the mist,” Riph Raph said. “Maybe there’s something inside waiting to—” He snapped his beak closed with a sharp clack, making his point all too clearly.

  As if to confirm the skyte’s suspicion, a splash came from a small river a few hundred yards to the east, which disappeared into the mist. Kyja turned quickly, and for a split second thought she saw something disappear into the fog.

  “Just a fish,” Marcus said. But his face was ashen.

  “I guess,” Kyja agreed. Still, she had the feeling something was watching her from inside the swirling, blue-green curtain. Out of the corner of her eye she could almost see a curious face, watching and waiting.

  “Well, it’s not like they’re about to invite us in,” she said. “If we’re going to do this, I’d like to get it over with before dark.”

  “Right.” Marcus wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “I can feel ahead with my staff. Kyja, you take my shoulder.” He glared at Riph Raph. “You can wait out here if you’re too scared.”

  The skyte flapped his ears. “Think I’d let her go in alone with you?”

  Kyja took Marcus’s arm. Beneath the damp of his cloak she could feel him shivering ever so slightly. In a way it was reassuring to know that he was just as scared as she was. She gave his shoulder a squeeze and followed him.

  Watching Marcus disappear into the moving curtain of fog was like seeing him swallowed by some great beast. One minute he was there, and the next minute he was gone. Even though she was still holding his arm, she couldn’t see any sign of him at all. As first her wrist and then her elbow disappeared along with him, it was all she could do to keep from letting go of his shoulder and pulling back.

  Then she was inside as well. She quickly realized night wouldn’t have made any difference. She couldn’t see a thing. It was like wearing a strip of blue cloth wrapped over her eyes.

  “It smells strange,” Marcus remarked. “Sort of fishy.”

  His voice sounded oddly distant, and echoed as though it were coming from the bottom of a canyon. Kyja sniffed the air. It did smell like fish, but it also smelled dank, reminding her a little of the unmakers’ caves.

  Besides its smell, the mist also had an unpleasant feel to it: a cold, oily texture that made her grip on Marcus’s shoulder seem slippery and uncertain. As she tightened her fingers, Marcus stopped moving.

  “What . . . was . . . that?” he said. His words had a strange gargley sound to them. Kyja pictured someone trying to speak through a mouthful of water.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, all at once wishing they’d waited outside after all.

  “ . . . thaw . . . heard . . . some—”

  Heard what? Why was it so hard to understand him? Kyja strained to listen. There was nothing but the ragged sound of her own breathing, heavy and damp, as she inhaled the wet air.

  Then, all at once, she did hear a sound—like the babbling of a stream. Outside the wall, she’d seen a slow-moving river which flowed into the lake, but it was nowhere near the place they’d entered into the mist. As she concentrated on the sound, it changed—no longer a brook, but a little girl’s laughter. Not a happy laugh, but the teasing giggle of a child playing a practical joke.

  “Who’s there?” Kyja called.

&
nbsp; The giggle floated through the mist coming first from in front, then from behind.

  “I don’t like this,” Riph Raph said, pressing his beak against the side of Kyja’s face.

  “I don’t, either.” Kyja tried to pull Marcus toward her but couldn’t get a tighter grip on the slippery cloth of his cloak.

  “We need to go back!” Kyja shouted. She tried to close her hand around Marcus’s arm, but suddenly he was jerked out of her grasp.

  “Marcus!” she screamed, stumbling deeper into the mist, waving her arms before her.

  For a moment she thought she could hear him calling her name. “Kyja? Ky-ja!”

  But the heavy mist made it impossible to tell where the sound had come from or if it had been him at all. She started to her left, turned and went back to the right. Cupping her hands to her mouth, she cried, “Marcus! Where are you?”

  There was no answer.

  “Riph Raph, can you see anything?” She reached up to her shoulder, where a moment before the skyte had been pressed against her, and realized with a sickening jolt that he was gone as well.

  “Riph Raph!” How could he have disappeared without her noticing?

  Something cold brushed against the back of her neck, and she spun around in time to see the mist part for just a moment, revealing the face of a girl no more than five or six. Kyja stumbled backward.

  “You aren’t allowed here.” The voice came from behind her. Kyja turned to see a quick flash of long, green hair that looked almost like seaweed. Was it the same girl? How had she moved around so quickly?

  “Who are you?” Kyja asked, her voice trembling. “What did you do with Marcus and Riph Raph?”

  There was no answer. Instead, two flashes of brilliant purple appeared out of the blue-green fog. Kyja gasped, thinking they were eyes. A second later she realized they were two fish—small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, but with long, streamer-like fins and tails. How could fish be swimming in the middle of the air?

  As one of the fish swam lazily to Kyja’s right, she saw it was trailing an almost invisible thread behind it. The thread brushed coldly against the skin of her arm. She tried to swat it away, but the thread stuck to her skin like glue. The fish continued to swim around her, wrapping Kyja’s arms tight against her sides.

  She tugged at the thread. It was stronger than it looked. She couldn’t break it. Panicking, she turned to run, lost her balance, and nearly fell. While the first fish had been wrapping her arms, the second had circled her legs.

  “Stop it!” she screamed. “Let me go!”

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” the child’s voice called again.

  “We’ll go back,” Kyja promised. “Just let us go.”

  The only answer was a fading giggle.

  The small, purple fish continued to swim around and around her, wrapping her arms and legs tightly together. What if they didn’t stop? What if they wrapped her in a tight cocoon like a slow worm before the hatch? Like a spider trapping its prey before eating?

  But the fish didn’t wrap her in a cocoon. Instead, once they had her securely tied, they began dragging her backward through the mist. She tried to struggle, but the strings held her fast. Where were they taking her? To someplace even more dangerous? She craned her head to look around, but couldn’t see anything.

  Without any warning, she felt herself falling. The blue-green clouds around her disappeared as she dropped into the knee-high grass outside the city walls with a muddy splash. Reaching out to catch herself, she realized the threads were gone from her arms and legs. As she pushed herself up onto her elbows, something flew out of the mist beside her.

  With a stab of terror she recognized Marcus’s staff. A second later a huge fish with glittering, reddish-brown scales flopped out from the wall of fog. Its gills opened and closed, gasping for oxygen as it curled and slapped its tail against the wet grass. Another fish landed right behind it. This one was small and blue with bulbous yellow eyes that looked almost familiar.

  As Kyja stared at the fish, wondering what to make of them, the larger of the two fixed its wet blue eyes on her and cried out, “What happened to me?”

  * * *

  Four hours later, the sun had long since set. The damp night air was cold, and there was no wood to start a fire and no food.

  Resting his chin on his fist, Marcus stared grumpily at Kyja.

  “What?” she finally said. “It’s not like you stayed a fish for long.”

  He pressed his lips together until they nearly disappeared. “You thought it was funny.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You laughed.” He scowled at her as she covered her mouth with her hands. “You know they would have changed you, too, if you weren’t immune to magic.”

  “I wasn’t laughing at you,” she said from behind her fingers. “I was just surprised to see you as a . . . a . . .” She couldn’t help herself from bursting into a fit of giggles all over again.

  “Right.” Marcus brooded. The wall of mist around Water Keep glowed, but outside, the patchy clouds had thickened, hiding the plains in a blanket of darkness. He was cold and wet, and his clothes smelled like . . . well, like fish.

  Riph Raph seemed no worse for the experience. The skyte lay snoring softly, curled in Kyja’s lap.

  “What are we supposed to do now?” Marcus sighed.

  Kyja took her hand from her mouth, her face serious again. “I’m not going back in there.”

  Marcus nodded. It was kind of humorous looking back on it now. But when he’d seen the flash of light and felt his body turn cold and slippery, it hadn’t seemed funny at all. He’d been terrified. He wasn’t about to see what would happen if he tried to go through the wall again. Maybe the next time, they’d leave him that way. He had no desire to spend the rest of his life as a big-mouth bass or whatever species of fish they had here.

  “Do you think the girl you saw was one of them?” Marcus asked. “One of the Fontasians?” He hadn’t seen anything but a flash of bright blue light before he found himself on the ground flipping and tossing.

  “Maybe,” Kyja said, her eyes locked on the glowing wall. “But she was just a child.”

  Marcus followed her gaze, glad they’d moved far away from the strange-smelling fog. None of it made any sense. Walls of mist. Cities made of water. Children that turned you into fish, seemingly just for the fun of it. “It’s crazy, you know,” he said softly.

  “What is?” Kyja asked, pulling her cloak more tightly about her.

  “You, me. This whole thing.” Marcus rubbed his right leg. “Back in the caverns I nearly got us killed because I couldn’t keep up. Who would choose a kid in a wheelchair to save their world?”

  Kyja smiled softly. “Or the only person in the world who can’t do a bit of magic?”

  “Right,” Marcus said. “We’re just a couple of kids. Why not leave the world saving to people like Master Therapass?”

  Kyja gazed out into the big, empty darkness and sighed. “Master Therapass isn’t here.”

  “Do you think he’s all right?” Marcus asked.

  Kyja rubbed her eyes. “I’m sure he’s just a few days behind us.”

  Marcus wondered if she really believed that. Master Therapass knew where they were headed. If he was okay, wouldn’t he have found some way to get a message through to them? Marcus thought about the Summoner and the army of Fallen Ones. The thought brought goose bumps to his arms.

  “Do you think the Dark Circle is out there somewhere?” Kyja asked.

  Marcus ran his hands along his arms, trying to warm the tiny bumps away. “No,” he said, remembering the warning he’d experienced just before the Fallen Ones attacked them outside the Westland Woods. “I think I’d feel it if they were. They might have learned where we were headed on the bus. But as far as they know, we’re still trapped in the mountains. If they’re looking for us anywhere, it’ll be there.”

  “Remember when I tried to send you back to Ert the first time?” Kyja asked.
Marcus noticed she was rubbing her arms as well.

  “The time something nearly trapped us?”

  “Yes,” Kyja said, petting the back of Riph Raph’s head. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that. The second time, I braced myself against whatever was waiting for me. I thought that’s why we got past. But what if they let us jump? What if instead of trying to stop us, the Dark Circle is watching where we’re jumping to and from? Following us to learn what we’re up to?”

  Marcus nodded slowly. “That would explain how they knew where to search for us on Earth.”

  Kyja chewed on the tip of her thumb and looked out into the darkness. “Their door doesn’t seem to work the way our jumping does. I think they might only be able to come and go from one spot. But once we jump, couldn’t they follow us or send out spies?”

  Marcus studied her face. “Sure. I guess. Why?”

  “I might have an idea. But it’s dangerous.” Kyja turned to study the glowing wall of mist for a moment, then looked back at Marcus. “Remember how you said our movements on one world changed where we arrived on the other world?”

  All at once Marcus understood her idea—and her concern.

  “If we jump to Ert,” she said, “we could walk a short distance and then jump back.”

  “And we’d be inside the city,” Marcus added.

  Kyja cupped her elbows in her palms. “But the Dark Circle would know where we are.”

  Chapter 52

  Basselball

  Riph Raph unleashed a ball of blue fire and swung his tail angrily back and forth. “I do not want to be turned into a lizard again.”

  “It’s the only way to get inside,” Kyja said. “And besides, it will only be for a few minutes.”

  Marcus looked up at the glowing wall and away into the darkness. If Kyja’s guess was right—and it felt right to him—the Dark Circle would know their location as soon as they jumped. And once they discovered where he and Kyja were, how long would it take the Dark Circle to realize what they were up to?

  “If we’re going to go,” he said, rubbing his hands against his pants, “let’s get it over with.”