by S. M. Welles
Aerigo led them along the dragon wall, heading east, passing more people that stared from time to time. They stopped at the end of the dragon wall, where it connected with Phailon’s fifty-foot wall. The sculpture finished with the dragon’s serpentine head looking out over the ocean, like a sentinel.
From this corner they couldn’t miss the roar of the waterfall. It drowned out the wind whistling over and under the stone dragon. Roxie gingerly set her hands on the dragon’s spine and peered over the edge, to see how far the water dropped. Vertigo drained all the blood from her face and she cowered back. The drop looked like it went on for over a mile. The ocean below was lost in a thick mist.
Aerigo dropped his pack, dagger and canteen on the dais. “It’s time to teach you how to grow.”
“Okay,” Roxie said somewhat nervously, placing her pack and new canteen on the ground beside his. “You sure our added weight won’t break the cliff?”
“Half the city lies on top of the part that sticks out. A few more tons won’t make a difference.” Aerigo led her away from the cliff edge to an open area devoid of benches, then stopped and faced her. “Growing is fairly simple, but it helps to close your eyes when learning this. What you want to do is picture a newborn infant in your mind—people grow fastest just after being born and I find it to be the best thing to focus on. You want to imagine that infant growing visibly, and then you’ll feel a pull on your mind. Try it.”
Roxie thought it sounded crazy, but shut her eyes and tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. If she were strong, fast and had eyes that glowed according to her emotions, then maybe she could figure out how to grow. She took a deep breath and pictured an infant wrapped in a blanket with its eyes closed and little hands clenched in fists. She then imagined the infant getting older and bigger, but there was no sign of the tug that Aerigo mentioned.
“Stop,” he said. “Don’t imagine the child getting older, just bigger. Age isn’t the issue; size is. So let the concept of time go, understand?”
She opened her eyes. “I think so,” Roxie said, unconvinced. “Wait! How did you know what I was thinking?”
“I made the same mistake. Try again.”
She felt relief. The last thing she needed was for anyone else to be in her mind. And she didn’t want to intrude on anyone else’s brain either. Roxie firmly believed that a person’s own thoughts belonged to the thinker unless one chose to express them. That’s what language was for.
She shut her eyes and concentrated on the infant once again. This time she imagined it just growing. Something like a finger-tap on her forehead broke her concentration. The feeling startled her and she opened her eyes to see Aerigo smiling at her.
“That’s it,” he congratulated her in his deep voice. “Just don’t let yourself lose concentration when you feel the tug.”
“What is it, anyway?”
“That tug is the doorway into a world between worlds, or like a river of time running between them. Growing the natural way takes years. That tug brings you a place where time flows at a rate that depends on context. You yourself won’t age in that place because you are there to grow, not get older.”
“That sort of makes sense.”
“Now try again. This time, don’t stop right away. Keep going until you reach your limit.”
“Limit?”
“Gravity and the amount of pure oxygen in the air dictate what your anatomy can handle. Plus, Versaton can only stretch so far.”
“Sounds sciency enough. I’ll try it again.” Roxie closed her eyes and concentrated. The tug startled her once more before she was able to succeed. Then the experiment took. It felt like she had been cut off from the world of Phaedra altogether, and like her entire body was taking one long breath. And then the tug became a push. Her whole body felt tight until she let herself succumb to the push. She was relieved of the tightness as she brought herself wholly back to Phaedra. She opened her eyes and looked down to see Aerigo, a minute creature on the ground. She knelt down. Aerigo’s tiny form motioned her to stay back. His body swelled like a plant being shown its growth process through timelapse photography until he was taller than Roxie again.
“Good job,” he said.
“This is so weird! How do I get back to normal?”
“The reverse of what you just did. Simple as that. Go ahead and try.”
She closed her eyes and concentrated again. Shrinking felt the opposite growing. Roxie felt her body exhale as if it were sighing out all the mass she’d accumulated. It also felt like she’d arrived at the ground floor on an elevator when she was done, and again she was seized with a tightness until she let the shrinking process stop. She opened her eyes to see that Aerigo was back to normal, too.
“Now that you can do that, I need to explain the dangerous part,” he said, sitting next to their packs and picking up his canteen.
Roxie joined him on the ground.
“Never grow around other people or creatures. Anyone that touches you will die, and it’s not a pretty sight. Anyone that comes in contact with you while you’re growing or shrinking will enter the dimension with you. Time flows so fast that decades go by in seconds, and other living things just die. What makes it possible for you and I to have this ability is what makes it so dangerous for anyone else.”
“So that’s why when I thought of the infant getting older instead of just bigger, it didn’t work?”
“Exactly. Time flow means different things in different places for you and I, but will always mean aging for everything else.” He drank from his canteen, then offered it to her.
Roxie nodded and took the canteen.
Aerigo jerked suddenly, causing Roxie to stare at him. He cocked his head to one side, as if listening to something. Several puzzling seconds went by, then Aerigo looked up, untroubled. “Anyway, you’ve gotten the hang of that, and we’ve been idle long enough. It’s time to head to Sconda.”
“What are we going to do there?”
“Train you to be stronger and faster.”
A wandering jewelry salesman approached the two with what looked to be the last of his wares.
“You want to look at my necklaces? Real cheap. Almost free!”
Aerigo stood, putting himself between the local and Roxie. The vendor backed up a step.
The vendor was tall, wore the same clothes as the locals, and knew English—or rather one of the Twelve Commons—the twelve most common languages in the universe—as Aerigo had explained while food shopping. There was something off about this jeweler that Roxie didn’t like, though. It wasn’t his eyes or his dark hair, or the way he smiled like many other salesmen eager to make some profits.
“Get a pretty ring for your girlfriend?” He held up a bejeweled hand. Aerigo glared. “Wife?” he said, his eyes losing some confidence.
Roxie got to her feet, having spotted the red flag: this man had no tan. All the locals had a Mediterranean tan.
The vendor eyed her hungrily. He discarded all the jewelry onto the ground. “What gave me away?” he said, dropping his accent for a British one. He reached behind him, but didn’t whip out a weapon, as Roxie had expected. Instead, he kept his arm behind him.
“You spoke one of the Twelve Commons, instead of Tibanese,” Aerigo said, dropping into a fighting stance.
“Ah, I’ll have to remember that detail next time we meet.” The impostor leaned back and vanished from sight. The air where he’d been rippled like water, then settled back to normalcy.
“Where’d he go?” Roxie asked, huddling close to Aerigo.
“Not sure.” He headed for his pack and canteen. “We better go. And since he probably overheard us earlier, we’re going to have to jump to make our world-hop trail harder to follow.”
“World-hop trail?”
“Did you see the air foil when he vanished?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the trail. Even though the air isn’t foiling anymore, there’s still a hint of where he went right in that very spot. Wo
rld hopping, which is what we did from Bermuda to outside Phailon, disrupts the fabric of reality. The jump sort of punches a hole for us to pass through, and it takes a while for the hole to repair itself once we’re gone.” Aerigo wandered over to the dragon wall.
“We’re not harming anything when we world-hop, are we?”
“No. It’s like traveling through a tunnel, but with boulders blocking the entrance. You have to push aside the boulders to make a doorway, but in this case the boulders are the fabric of the world we’re trying to leave. We make a big enough hole for us to pass through. It just takes a couple of hours for all those boulders to move themselves back where they belong. And then things are as if nothing had ever happened.”
“Sounds complicated enough.”
“It’s probably one of the last things I’ll teach you. It took me forever to learn.” Aerigo stood behind her and hugged her to his chest with one arm, pinning her upper arms.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
Aerigo scooped her legs into his other arm as he began running towards the ledge.
“Aerigo.” Roxie clutched Aerigo’s forearm with all her strength, eyes welling with tears, then her voice rose an octave as she yelled, “What are you doing?”
They cleared the edge with a superhuman leap. Roxie’s belly flopped at the sight of nothing but air and mist under their feet for the next mile. Aerigo let go of her legs and held out his free hand in front of both of them, then Roxie started screaming as their forward momentum arced into a plummet.
Chapter 14
Sconda: The Fast Ones
Despite the short amount of time she’d spent in Phailon, and despite their base-jumping exit, leaving the city tore at Roxie’s heart. There was something about the place that filled her with a passionate desire to go back and drink in its beauty and splendor for a long, long time. The fact that they’d run to the city, then walked through it, suggested that Aerigo felt the same way. Roxie wondered if they would have lingered if it weren’t for the spy. It no longer mattered, though. Their task wasn’t going to turn into a sightseeing vacation. “Oh well,” Roxie said as she plodded along the swampy grass behind Aerigo.
“Oh well, what?”
“Nothing.”
She’d been following Aerigo’s lead between tightly-packed trees for an hour or more. The ground was squishy and the musty air smelled like it was going to rain. The trees were thin, with branches that didn’t sprout until three-quarters of the way up their trunks. Barely any light lanced through the canopy, giving the swamp a haunted look and making it impossible to tell time by the sun. The shin-high grass was thick and healthy, and tried to tangle their boots with every step. Gnarled roots poked out frequently as if trying desperately to trip anyone who dared travel through the swamp. One finally succeeded in felling Roxie.
Despite her unnatural strength, the root didn’t snap. When she tried to catch herself with her other foot, the same root caught both, propelling her forward. In a final effort to right herself she grabbed at Aerigo’s shoulders, missed, and caught his ankle instead. Since the ground might as well have been covered in grease, Aerigo fell with her, face-first, into the swamp.
There was a watery squish when they hit the grass. In an instant, their fronts were soaked with brown water, which felt quite cold. Roxie lifted her head and wiped her mouth on a soaked shoulder, and lifted her hands out of the water in disgust. Aerigo was on his knees, wearing a scowl.
Streams of brackish water dribbled down his face and bare arms. His scowl made her choke back a laugh. He took a deep breath, shaking his head as he stood and wiped off what filth he could.
“I didn’t fall on purpose!” she said defensively as she pushed her way to her feet.
“You didn’t have to take me down with you.”
“I didn’t think you’d fall!”
Aerigo stared at her a moment, his face a grim mask, then turned on his heel. “Please be more careful from now on.” He resumed trudging.
Head bowed, Roxie stretched her stride to step in the same exact spots as Aerigo.
They took no more than a dozen steps before something else halted their progress. They heard a whisper of laughter nearby. Roxie darted her gaze to all the gaps in the trees but couldn’t pinpoint the sound. The thought of getting ambushed sent her heart racing.
Aerigo snapped his head to the left.
Something blurred past them, followed by a gush of air, and this time Roxie heard laughter behind her. She wheeled around and saw a man in strange clothes standing almost face-to-face with her. She sloshed a step back and held up her fists.
“Hello,” the man said to her, as quick as thought. He looked to be in his early twenties, had the lean build of a long-distance runner, and red hair that stood up like flames. Physically he seemed to be an ordinary human, according to Roxie’s increasingly flexible standards, except for his feet. They were much longer than normal and he stood on the balls of his feet, cat-like. And his eyes! It was like looking at the sky. They appeared to be blue, white and grey all at the same time, and the colors moved as clouds on a windy day. Weird, she thought, almost saying it aloud.
“Hi,” Roxie breathed, unable to tear her eyes from his.
“The name’s Yayu. What would yours be?” His voice sounded Irish-Canadian.
“Roxie.”
“Nice name, but I think I’ll give you a different one later.” He flicked his airy gaze to Aerigo. “I know your friend here,” he said, speaking to Roxie. “I wonder what Aerigo’s here for this time.” Yayu traced a circle once around Roxie with ease, examining her for all she was worth, then smiled almost contemptuously. “Time for talk later. The three of us best be gettin’ off.”
Roxie glanced toward Aerigo, who stood there with his arms poised at his sides and a faint grin on his face. He was caked in drying mud.
“What took you so long to find us?” Aerigo said.
Yayu cocked his head, narrowing his eyes at Aerigo. A corner of his mouth twitched into the quickest of smiles. He sped off in a blur of cloth, skin and flaming hair.
Roxie wanted to yell for Yayu to wait, but he left her staring at the empty patch of air. “Great!” she said to Aerigo. “You just insulted the only sign of intelligent life on this planet.”
She turned to scowl at him, but instead her eyes widened. Aerigo was tightening the strap to his backpack. Before Roxie could say another word, Aerigo sped off after Yayu. She stared in disbelief, then laughed. Lesson number five, or whatever... She tightened the straps to her own pack then started running. “Hey, Aerigo! Wait a sec! I don’t even know where you’re going!” Roxie splashed through the treacherous terrain, dodging trees, getting her toes snagged by the grass, and tripping over roots.
Roxie was carrying half of the swamp’s water in her boots by the time she found the end of the treeline, which edged an open spongy field of more grass. She slowed to a walk and took in her new surroundings under the evening sky. The air smelled sweet, and the grass rose to her knees. The forest continued on behind her to her left, ending at a cliff a good ways down, complete with its own waterfall. Ahead lay a river fed by the waterfall. Beyond the river rolled open land that blended into the sky. She stopped walking.
Aerigo and Yayu were nowhere to be seen.
Well, this sucks. It should have been impossible for anyone to navigate the swamp that fast, leastwise no one as clumsy as she. Two pairs of tracks in the grass bowed towards the waterfall. That had to be them.
Before Roxie could stretch into a run, figures blurred by and began circling her, laughing just as Yayu had, except this time girlishly. They slowed just enough to be seen, but were still too fast for her to count how many were there. She stopped once more, trying to follow their movements, but only succeeded in getting a sore neck. It was great to be found, but not to be toyed with like this after being abandoned. She threw her arms out. “Stop!” Someone bowled into her left arm. Roxie let out a yelp, spun around and fell, crushing everything in her pack.
Three more ladies stopped and drew into a semi-circle close to Roxie and their injured friend. All of them were female and had the same flaming hair as Yayu, though much longer. They all shared the same eyes and lean frame. The women wore what looked like spandex shorts with straight-lined patterns on them, shirts resembling sports bras, and a dozen wood and glass bead necklaces apiece.
One girl said something in a language Roxie didn’t understand, and the girl on the ground moaned and said something in response.
Roxie rolled to her knees, shrugged off her pack, and knelt closer to the injured person. “Are you okay?”
The girl gave her a blank stare through tear-filled eyes, then someone said in a halting voice, “We don’t talk non-Scondish.”
Roxie looked up at the speaker. “Oh.” Now what? She put on a friendly smile and extended a gentle hand, palm up, hoping the girl would understand she wanted to help.
The girl on the ground sat up and wiped the tears from her eyes. She gave Roxie the briefest of nods, took her hand and used it to help herself up. The two exchanged a shy smile, and the girl said one word in a grateful tone. “Koshan.”
“Huh?”
Roxie’s new friend pointed to herself. “Koshan.” And then to her. “Eta.” Then back to herself. “Koshan,” she said once more, and then pointed and looked at Roxie expectantly.