by Dana Fredsti
Surely for a cause so noble they would grant him that small a favor. If the Sídhe could read the hearts of men, they would see that his was pure. Perhaps his plight would touch them, and they would grant him a magical horse whose enchanted hooves could cross many leagues with every step.
Or maybe they would see the muddy wool cape and the battered old short sword he had taken from the dead scouts, take pity on him, and replace them with a Sídhe-forged blade of steel and a shirt of glittering gold ring-mail.
His eyes lit up, picturing the sight of his return.
But… what if they refuse me and I’m trapped here forever?
The sudden thought terrified him. His brow furrowed as he came to a hard decision.
Whatever they demand of me, he thought, whatever they ask, I will do it. Even if it means I have to return after the battle and serve them for a hundred years. Even if it means remaining here forever.
He frowned as his bleak thoughts lost ground to a still darker one.
What if I never find the Sídhe at all?
What if their castles were hidden from mortal eyes by magic? The further he went, the more the twists and turns of the swampy woods gave him scant hope. Cam prayed he wasn’t just wandering in circles. Would he ever get out of this maze? Lost in thought, he didn’t notice what was in front of him until it struck him in the eyes.
The sun.
With a single step, Cam emerged from the dank fen into the light of day. Soft meadowlands stretched out before him, green and inviting, rich with wildflowers in yellows and violets. Even the leaden sky looked fair and warm. A flock of starlings twisted and dove overhead and flew away again.
He blinked at the sight for a few moments, before surprising himself with a single quick, unexpected laugh of sheer relief.
Have I returned home, just like that?
It looked like his own land, and yet…
He turned back to the dark forest behind him. Something was wrong. It was the way the otherworldly forest ended and the meadow began. At first he couldn’t sort it out. Then he realized there was no gradual tapering off of the trees—no meadow grasses growing between the trunks of tree ferns. Instead, there was a jagged line of division from one terrain to the next, like two scraps of cloth sewn together. Even the soil was a different shade on either side of the line.
The trees of the strange forest didn’t simply stop at the line. The division sliced through them, branches and trunks alike, as if a giant scythe had followed the cut of the line with perfect precision. It was unnatural and disquieting, but perhaps it was to be expected with the Sídhe.
Shrugging, he set off at a brisk pace, heading due east toward the interior of the Trinovantes’ lands. At the first fort or homestead he came to he would beg a horse, and ride like the wind to raise the alarm.
7
Amber walked with no real idea of how much time actually passed. It might have been minutes or hours. The horizon didn’t change. The same grasslands stretched out on all sides, no matter how far she went or how much her feet throbbed, skin chafing where the straps rubbed against the flesh.
Funny, she’d chosen the sandals for comfort. They were supposed to have heels, but since this was just a hall costume she hadn’t worried about accuracy. That had been with the expectation of a day on her feet at a convention. Not hiking miles across half-frozen ground.
She’d started out at a brisk pace, anxious to get back to the normality of Romford, have a “cuppa” with her aunt, take a hot shower, and change into pajamas. But no matter how fast or far she walked, the smudges of green and brown in the distance didn’t seem to come any closer. They were a mirage. A perverse trick of the imagination.
After a while her quick steps slowed to a steady walk, and then to a weary trudge, until each step was an effort of will, even aided by her Codex staff. She shivered as another cold gust of wind cut through her clothes, the tall grass bending sideways under its passage.
Each step hurt.
She was pretty sure blisters had risen, burst, and were now bleeding, but she didn’t look. If she didn’t look, it wasn’t real. If she looked and saw blood trickling down, pooling between the soles of her feet and those sandals, then she couldn’t pretend anymore.
I’m like the Little Mermaid, she thought. Every step like knives in the feet, all for the sake of a handsome prince. Only her prince was dead, cut in half with no warning or explanation. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.
This has to be a dream, right?
Her right foot slid inside its sandal, slick with wetness.
A sob bubbled up in Amber’s throat but she choked it back. If she let herself start to cry, she wouldn’t be able to stop. She’d crumple to the ground and cry until she froze to death, or died of starvation.
Another of those guttural sounds echoed across the tundra, summoning up visions of monsters. Every stupid giant crocodile movie she’d ever seen sprung to mind, only they didn’t seem so funny now. Amber shuddered. She didn’t know what was behind the freaky noise, and she didn’t want to find out. The intermittent howling was bad enough, but at least wolves were something within the framework of her reality.
As long as she kept her eyes to the ground, she could tell herself the next time she looked up, things would be back to normal. If she kept staring at the seemingly endless vista of grass, she would lose it.
Put one foot in front of the other… and soon I’ll be walking out the do-o-or…
Maybe she was crazy.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was getting back to civilization, and then hopping on the first plane available back to San Diego and her family.
Put one foot in front of the other…
Each step through the knee-high grass, each rub of leather against chafed skin brought her that much closer to her goal.
* * *
After a while, she didn’t see anything other than a grayish-green blur beneath her feet. So when she stubbed her foot on something rock solid, it came as a complete surprise.
Yelping, she bent over as the big toe on her right foot expanded into a ball of outraged nerve endings with the kind of abrupt and excruciating pain that caused people to punch walls or break inanimate objects. She waited until it subsided, giving an exploratory wiggle to make sure nothing was broken.
Only then did she look down to see what she’d hit.
It was a strip of concrete about six inches high and twice that in length, rising into another one, and then another, like—
Stairs.
Stairs!
Amber raised her head and caught her breath. A flight of stairs, set into a gentle slope of well-tended lawn a few hundred feet across. It butted up against an asphalt drive that curved under an overhang, marked by the letters of a sign.
She’d made it back! She could use a phone inside and call her aunt. Or even better, call her family in California! Amber ran up the stairs, nearly slipping on a patch of melting snow on the top step and—
Patch of snow?
Slowly she walked across the drive to the hotel entrance, noticing more puddles of slush and patches of dingy gray ice pushed up against the curb.
The marquee listed upcoming special events.
BAYLOR-HODGESON WEDDING
ROMFORD MODEL RAILWAY SOCIETY MTG
CONGRATULATIONS CLASS OF 1993
Amber took a second look at the building’s façade. The semi-enclosed parking garage—“car park,” Gavin had called it—was there on the right, but it looked as though someone had chopped it in half with a giant guillotine. All three stories. More grasslands lay beyond the part that remained, but in between the grass and the concrete stretched a sliver of cobblestones. Splashes of dark, red-stained grass, cobblestones, and concrete.
Amber hurried to the hotel’s glass double doors, shoved them open, and ran inside. All she wanted right now was to get out of the frigid wind and safe from whatever—
The smell hit her first. A thick, nauseating blend of the coppery scent of blood m
ixed with fecal matter, spilled guts, and the contents of shredded intestines. Not even the harsh, cold wind blowing past the check-in desk could mask the odor of death.
Then, as if someone had superimposed the images after the fact, Amber saw the bodies scattered around what was left of the darkened lobby. Pieces, parts, shredded and pulped. Hands, arms, chunks of meat barely identifiable as human littered the gore-smeared parquet flooring. Blood spattered the furniture and walls. Part of a woman was draped over the concierge’s desk, mouth open in shock. Amber noticed almost absently that the dead woman’s hair was retro-styled in what her mom referred to as “secretary hair,” the bangs poofed up and heavily lacquered in place.
Her staff dropped with a clatter, landing by her feet. She let the doors fall shut behind her, and stared at the carnage spread across the hotel lobby—or what was left of it. It wasn’t quite as hollow as a movie set—maybe a few hundred feet with lobby furniture, fountain, and the check-in desk.
Most of the check-in desk, anyway.
The wall behind it was gone.
Amber would have said “missing,” but as with the punt and Gavin, it was as if the wall had never existed. The ever-present grasslands pressed up in a straight line where the parquet floor ended.
Lovecraft had it all wrong, Amber thought. All that stuff about non-Euclidian geometry, things like triangles with five sides driving men mad… that was nothing. Her world had been cut into slices with the precision of an X-Acto knife drawn against a ruler. Now that won the “insane” prize, hands down.
Somewhere, not nearly far enough in the distance, fierce howls rose in the darkening sky.
Oh, god…
They sounded hungry. How could whatever made those noises still be hungry when they’d already eaten—?
Amber blocked the rest of the thought. She was close enough to the edge as it was.
More howls, closer.
The shadows lengthened.
Then that guttural roar, like something had crawled from the primordial ooze. This time, however, it was accompanied by the sound of footfalls. What was left of the walls shook with the force.
Amber fell to her hands and knees and scuttled along the lobby floor toward the relative safety of an unlit corner. She slid behind an overstuffed couch half-hidden in a patch of twilight. She bumped into something in the shadows and stifled a scream, finding herself face-to-face with an open-mouthed rictus of fear and pain, on a girl maybe half her age. A bare sliver of light revealed the girl’s body, shredded from the waist down, reminding Amber of bloody pulled pork. The thought nearly made her puke again, even though she was pretty sure she had nothing left to vomit.
“Help me…”
Amber jerked in surprise, nearly falling into the pool of gore puddled in front of her.
Still alive.
The girl was somehow still alive.
“P… please?” Small fingers wrapped around Amber’s wrist.
“I… I don’t…” Amber swallowed hard, fighting the urge to pull away. Instead she reached out with her other hand and smoothed some blood-matted blonde hair away from the girl’s forehead. “It’s okay,” she said, knowing she was lying. “You’re going to be okay.”
“Mummy?”
“Yes,” Amber murmured. “Yes, it’s me.”
“It hurts, Mummy…”
Amber blinked back tears. “I know it does. Here, I’ll kiss it and you’ll feel better.”
Her words brought a flicker of a smile to the child’s face. Amber leaned down to plant a kiss on the girl’s forehead.
Her lips had barely grazed the skin when something unseen jerked the girl’s torso, and dragged her off into the darkness. A brief scream, filled with inescapable pain and terror, then came the sounds of flesh being ripped from the bone.
Ohgodohgodohgod…
Somewhere deep in her mind Amber realized she had two choices—either freeze in place and wait for whatever took the little girl to come back for her…
Or find a place to hide.
Her fight-or-flight instincts kicked into overdrive. She glanced frantically around the lobby, looking for a safe place to hide before finally lighting on a closed door, catty-corner to the front desk.
More howls sent Amber scrambling on hands and knees across the slippery gore-spattered floor, moving so rapidly that she reached the door before realizing it, smacking her head against the hard wood paneling with a painful thud. Reaching up blindly, she clutched the doorknob and twisted, pushing the door open and falling into a small room stacked with suitcases and boxes.
Amber slammed the door shut behind her and dragged several large suitcases in front of it, stacking them one on top of the other with clumsy effort. When she swung the last one up, it fell short, swinging back to smack her in the chest. She stifled her yelp of pain and heaved the suitcase up again, this time managing the extra inch needed to slide it on top of the stack.
Then she shoved as many additional bags and boxes as she could up against the suitcases, creating a barricade that would hopefully keep whatever was out there at bay. Finally, she huddled as far away from the door as she could get, trying to calm her breathing and remain as silent as she could.
There was a muffled padding of feet, followed by a crash as something—maybe one of the little Tiffany lamps—fell over and shattered. Sounds of snuffling and, more horribly, chewing. All of this punctuated by snarling and snapping as whatever they were fought over their meal. There was a thump as something softer hit the ground. More ferocious growls, and then the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor.
It stopped right in front of the door.
Amber pressed both hands to her mouth, holding back a scream as she listened to more of those horrible, wet rending noises, accompanied by heavy breathing like a dog panting in the heat.
She prayed it wouldn’t even notice she was there. It couldn’t see through walls, right? And with all the blood and stuff, it shouldn’t be able to smell her, even if it— they—were wolves, and had noses like bloodhounds.
It’s not like they’d have my scent.
Unless they followed the trail of blood, dripping from her feet and ankles.
The thing outside gave a low, wet growl and started clawing at the luggage room door.
8
Cam was lost.
He had crossed through a supernatural realm and come out the other side again, but where had he emerged? The land resembled the fields of home, all grass and flowers. The breeze carried the same familiar chill, the heather and wildflower scents… but where were the farmsteads and roundhouses? Where were the defensive walls and border forts, the cattle and crops?
Where were the people?
Surely I’m within the kingdom of the Trinovantes, he thought, but after running for miles, he was no longer so sure that was true. Slowing his pace to a walk, he scanned the horizon. There were no signs of habitation anywhere.
“Where am I?”
He looked to the sky, then hung his head with a deep sigh, rubbing his temples. The sword-cut on his cheekbone burned from the salt of his sweat. He thought of his village, his family, everyone he knew. He thought of the Catuvellauni war chariots coming for them.
How can I warn anyone, if I can’t find them?
Helplessness warred with rage within him.
“Where are you?” he shouted to the sky.
No one answered.
Where should I go now?
Every direction looked the same. Casting his gaze about, Cam spotted a break in the meadow off to his right, and walked over for a closer look. At first glance it appeared to be a pond, but as he drew near he saw a large patch of rocky earth, about the size and roughly the shape of a sailing ship. Wide in the middle and narrowing toward the ends, with ragged edges here and there, almost flame-shaped.
Reaching the patch, he walked across its surface. The ground was completely free of any sort of grass or plant. In fact, it wasn’t ground at all, but blocks of square gray stones. Hu
ndreds of them, all carefully laid out in tight formation and anchored with mortar.
Just like the trees in the fey woods, the bricks along the edges had been sliced as if by a knife. The meadow surrounding the curious stonework fit exactly, as if turf and bricks had been perfectly cut to match one another. Yet who would build a Roman-style plaza in the middle of a wilderness, and in such an ungainly shape? It made no sense.
He stared for a bit, and then shook his head impatiently, leaving the mystery behind as he continued on. Judging by the sun, he traveled toward the east—the direction that gave him the best chance of reaching his tribe. Or so he had thought when he first emerged from the forest.
Cam was no longer sure of anything.
More oddities appeared in his path. First, what he took to be a tower off in the distance, turned out instead to be a tight stand of pines rising a hundred paces high. The grove was a dense forest, thick with undergrowth and fallen logs, and yet the whole affair was enclosed in a crude circle barely three paces across. Even the tree branches had been sheared off from bottom to top all along the rim of the tiny woods, separated from the surrounding meadow in the same precise way as the plaza had been.
An hour or so later he came upon another peculiar island in the sea of grass and wildflowers. This one was bigger than those he had passed before. It formed a great uneven swirl about three hundred paces long, curling out from a tapered point into a wide, rounded droplet shape as white as snow. His eyes went wide when he realized it was just that—an enormous, pristine snowbank, surrounded by summer on all sides.
Offering a quick prayer to the snow spirits, he scooped cold handfuls into his mouth. It was agony to his teeth and throat, but it slaked his thirst until a sharp icy pain in his head made him slow down. He breathed deeply for a moment, then rubbed a little snow on his cheek to ease the sting of the cut before moving on.