The Portal and the Veil

by Ted Sanders

“Indeed he did.”

  “But where is Horace? And where is Chlo—”

  Another rumble interrupted him. Shouts at the front of the barn, the earth shaking, the walls trembling.

  And then the sky fell in.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A Sending Seen

  CHLOE REARED BACK AS THE SHADOWY SHAPE OF DR. JERICHO loomed over her, freed from the phalanx’s powers now. But on the instant, the humour thickened around them with a soft whump, and sightlessness returned.

  Gabriel thundered at her, sounding breathless. “Out in the meadow, behind you. Horace is there.”

  This time, Chloe didn’t think. She spun and dove away from Dr. Jericho, into the ground, letting the earth swallow her up. She was still blind here, but it was blindness on her own terms. The ground was cool and gritty, full of stones. Her broken rib burned and complained. She ignored it. She swam through the dirt, the ring still clutched in her hand. She couldn’t say how she moved, exactly—she didn’t even want to know—but the effort happened at the tiniest levels, cell by cell, molecule by molecule, a willful act of matter pushing back at matter.

  She fell into a rhythm with it, and found an astonishing speed. She didn’t go deep—there was no need. She had to get free of the humour, had to find Horace.

  She streaked onward until she was sure she was well clear of the humour. She dipped a little lower and then curved back up toward the surface, like a dolphin. She found a final burst of speed.

  Chloe shot high into the air, into the warm night with stars overhead. She hit the ground at a run, releasing the Alvalaithen’s sweet song and looking back. Fifty yards behind her, the humour was a dizzying stitch in her vision, invisible. Beyond it, the roof of the barn hung as if floating. Somewhere in that direction, a dog barked. April’s dog? But just here, out in the field, not thirty feet away—a hulking mass of rubble, dark against the night sky. The golem, asleep, with Horace inside.

  She’d gotten lucky. She ran up to it. The golem had taken the shape of an enormous slab, an obelisk like a giant domino standing on end. It was as tall as a house, as thick as a redwood.

  She pounded her fist against the wall. Divots appeared briefly under her hand, bits of the golem shaking loose beneath her blows, but the stones fell back into the mass, defying gravity, and slithered back together.

  “Horace!” she cried. “Horace!” She dug at the stones, but got nowhere. The holes repaired themselves as quickly as she could scoop them out.

  Chloe opened up the dragonfly’s song and plunged into the body of the golem. She swam through the dense sea of stones, groping, blind yet again but searching for the telltale sign of flesh inside her flesh. She felt nothing. She went higher, up the tower of the golem, weaving to and fro. Ten seconds into her search, a scorching burn slashed through her hand. She knew from experience what it was—the heart of the golem. Somehow the jagged red crystal could burn her even while she was thin. She veered around it with a curse, and continued upward.

  At last, high off the ground, deep in the golem, she found him. Horace. Her hand entered his, their bloodstreams crossing like passing currents. Horace twitched, his fingers flexing. He was alive.

  Quickly she moved up until her mouth was at the side of his head. Her lips entered the curls of his ear.

  “Horace!” she called softly.

  The stones around them in the dark shifted and rattled as Horace took a labored breath. “I’m here,” he said, his voice trickling through the black mass. “I’m okay.”

  “You’re not okay,” Chloe said, knowing how terrified he must be. He’d been buried alive before, but not like this. This was not a coffin; this was thick black quicksand, tight and choking. It would have been a nightmare for anyone, but Horace most of all.

  “Having trouble,” Horace wheezed, “breathing.”

  “I’ve got the golem’s ring,” she said. “I’m getting you out.”

  “I know you are.”

  But she had no idea how to get him out. Possibly she could make Horace go thin and carry him with her. She’d done it before—but only for the briefest slice of time, and only through the slimmest of barriers. If she made him go thin now and dragged him through the golem, stones would fill his formless body just like they filled hers now. And if she couldn’t keep him thin until they were clear, he wouldn’t survive.

  “I thought I would destroy the ring, but I can’t,” she said. “The golem will . . . explode, or something.”

  She expected him to ask how she knew this—and did she know? —but instead he said simply, “You’re going to send it.”

  “Send the ring? What do you mean?”

  “Traveling.”

  The box. He wanted her to send the ring through the Fel’Daera. “Will that work? Is sending the ring any different than destroying it?”

  “It’s what happens.”

  Chloe tried to piece it together. Sending objects through the box didn’t destroy them, of course—if it did, the Alvalaithen wouldn’t be here—but it did make them utterly gone. What would happen to the golem?

  “Take the box,” Horace said, and took another labored breath. “Try.”

  Take the box. An incredible thought. It was an effort even to imagine that she deserved that kind of trust. “I’m not its Keeper, though. How do you know I can even send anything?”

  “I saw you do it. I know that now.”

  “That’s crazy. The box never even—”

  “Trust me. You can’t see, but you can send.” Horace wheezed and shifted, his breath trembling. “Or maybe you’d like to chat about it awhile.”

  “Okay,” said Chloe. “I get it.” She reached into Horace’s pouch and found the Fel’Daera. She concentrated on it, letting it go thin with her, and pulled it slowly free. She’d never before touched the box, and she cradled it carefully now, as if it were her own.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Horace mumbled.

  “It’s way too late for that,” she said.

  She left him. She went up instead of down. She quickly emerged through the roof of the golem’s body and clambered out atop it, three stories above the meadow. She made sure the Fel’Daera—and everything else—was fully clear, and then let the dragonfly’s wings go still.

  From up here, she could see over the patch of unsight that marked the humour, all the way to where the lumbering, rickety barn stood beneath the starry skies. With any luck, Joshua and Brian were safe in that barn, and maybe April too. And who knew who—or what—was inside the humour right now.

  There was no time to wonder. Chloe struggled to open the box. She’d seen Horace do it a hundred times, and he made it look easy, but the lid was a funny thing. It was like two insect wings, folded together along a curving seam in the middle. At last she got them apart. They swung open smoothly, exposing the rippling blue glass within. Through it, of course, she saw only her own feet, here and now. She was not the Keeper of the Fel’Daera. She couldn’t see the future.

  But could she send?

  She laid the golem’s ring gently inside the box. For a brief, surreal moment, she found herself hoping that the box wouldn’t work for her. This wasn’t what Tan’ji were supposed to do. But she shoved the thought aside with a guilty flush, and spun the lid closed.

  She felt nothing. For a second, despair flooded through her. What would she do now?

  And then the world collapsed beneath her feet.

  The golem began to fall apart with a clattering roar. Chloe fell with it, into it, riding the avalanche downward. She tucked the Fel’Daera into her gut, protecting it. Below her, she glimpsed Horace’s face, gasping for air, his arms pinwheeling through the falling shower of stones. He was yelling something, but she couldn’t hear him over the din of the golem’s collapse, like a hailstorm on a metal roof.

  “Horace!” she shouted as she fell, trying to keep her feet beneath her. The stones swallowed Horace.

  A split second later, Chloe landed with a jolt, her legs plunging into the loose pile of the
golem’s body. Her rib screamed at her. The thunderous rain of stones trickled slowly to a stop, and everything went quiet. The golem was—what? Dead? Unconscious? Either way, Horace’s plan had worked. She had sent the ring. It was nowhere now, and the golem was nothing.

  Horace. Chloe wormed her way free and scrambled over the pile. She spotted an arm sticking out of the rubble and yanked at it, slipping and sliding on the mountain of slick stones. With her help, Horace clawed his way out, still breathing hard, and collapsed on the slope of the pile, his head downhill against her knee.

  He lay there a moment, chest heaving, and then held out his hand. “Box,” he said.

  Quickly Chloe laid the Fel’Daera in his palm. He clutched at it, eyes closed. “Let’s not do that again,” he said.

  “Which part?”

  “All of it.” He looked up at her, upside down. His shaggy hair was a wreck. Then he rolled over and struggled to his feet. “We should get down,” he said.

  They half walked, half skated down the slippery slope of the expired golem, headed away from the barn and the humour. Once they reached the bottom, hidden behind the heap, Chloe cautiously sipped from the Alvalaithen and stuck a finger inside her torso to feel her broken rib.

  “You okay?” Horace said.

  “I’m fine,” she said. She could feel the fracture, a coarse seam. But there were no jagged edges, and the bone was in place. More or less. She was fine. “Let’s go,” she said, pulling her finger free. “We have to get Brian. Dr. Jericho is—”

  “They’re leaving,” said Horace. “Without us. Joshua’s going to open a portal in about . . . two and a half minutes. He’s leaving with Brian and Mr. Meister.”

  “That’s what you saw? They leave without us?”

  “Yes.”

  To her great surprise, he started walking away, deeper into the meadow. Just then, a dog started barking, far behind them. It sounded like it was coming from the far side of the barn, around front. What was he barking at? More Mordin? And now a sharp crack rang across the meadow—Mr. Meister, firing his mysterious weapon somewhere inside the barn. So it had been him she’d seen, after all. Chloe turned to look, back past the limp golem and the unseen wrinkle of the humour. Was it her imagination, or was the humour sliding? All she could think was that Gabriel must be on the move inside it. “They’re fighting up there,” she called after Horace, who hadn’t even bothered to turn around. “What about Gabriel? And April?”

  “I didn’t see April. We have to trust that Gabriel keeps her safe. That they keep each other safe.”

  “What about Mr. Meister? And my mom?”

  Horace stopped and turned to face her. “Look, here’s what I know. We don’t leave through the portal. Neither does Gabriel, or April, or your mom. The humour comes down. And . . . there’s another golem. It’s going to come down into the meadow in a few minutes. And Mordin, too.”

  A second crack from Mr. Meister’s weapon rang out. Chloe hardly heard it.

  “Another golem? Why didn’t you say that before?”

  “I didn’t realize. When I opened the box back at the cloister, I was closing the breach, so everything I saw was moving backward, and sped up. Like a video rewinding. I’m trying to make sense of it.”

  Chloe stood there for several seconds, trying to digest it. More noises at the barn, faint crashes and rumbles.

  “Is that the second golem?” she demanded.

  “I told you, I couldn’t see the barn. But what else could it be?”

  “I don’t know.” She pointed back at the motionless heap of the first golem. “Did you see that happen?”

  “Yes, from far away. I saw the golem rearing up, lifting you. That’s when I closed the box. I thought it had captured you. But I was watching it backward. The golem wasn’t rising—it was collapsing beneath you.”

  “That’s how you knew I would be able to send the ring.”

  “Yes, once you showed up with it,” he said.

  She stomped her foot. He was so reasonable, even now. “You should have told us, Horace. You should have said only a few of us would be escaping through the portal.”

  “You know I can’t say everything. Nobody wants that.”

  “Yeah, well, nobody wants to be stranded in a meadow full of Mordin and golems, either.”

  “You would have come anyway.”

  “I know that! Could you just stop being logical for a second and let me be pissed? I mean, what are we supposed to do now?”

  Just then, a truly enormous clamor filled the night air, a thunderous cracking and splintering. They both flinched, staring. A cloud of pale dust rose into the night sky beyond the humour. From what Chloe could tell, the ancient barn had collapsed. It had to have been the golem.

  Horace looked shocked. He hadn’t seen the barn through the Fel’Daera, she knew, so he couldn’t have known this would happen. “Joshua and Brian were in there,” she said. “And April was headed there too, I think.”

  Horace shook his head. “If they were, they got out. I told you, I saw them leave through the portal.”

  “You didn’t see April. We need to do something.”

  Horace shook his head and opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

  “What do we do, Horace?” Chloe insisted.

  Before he could answer, another voice spoke out of the darkness, a man’s voice . . . but not a man. The words had the unmistakable hissing music of the Riven, somehow slippery and brittle at the same time.

  “You must come with me, Keepers. That’s what you do.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Every Bad Thing

  APRIL CREPT THROUGH THE BARN AFTER BARON, TRYING TO ignore the bite of brimstone in her nostrils. She wasn’t at all sure she should be doing what she was doing. If there really were Riven here in the barn, she had to distract them, lure them away from Joshua and Brian’s hiding place. But also, she had to find Baron. She had to keep him safe too.

  She snuck down the narrow corridor and deeper into the mad shadows of the barn, trying not to get lost. Although April knew the barn well, she’d never been in it so late at night. It was very dark, and the ground was packed high from years of manure and compaction, so all the doorways seemed freakishly low.

  Baron was somewhere closer to the front of the barn, moving slow. She couldn’t see him, couldn’t figure out what he was seeing. Frustrated and frightened, she let his vision drop out of her mind—her own night eyes were better than his anyway, plus she really shouldn’t be using the vine like this. The Riven might detect it, and locate her. Isabel had explained that empaths like April were hard to detect so long as they didn’t draw too hard on their instruments, so she tried that now. Quickly she let Baron’s presence slip even farther out of her consciousness, sipping at the vine—quiet enough to stay undetected, she hoped, but still loud enough to be useful.

  The flow of senses from the dog dropped to a trickle. His mood was still clear, though. He was furious. Frightened, too, and his fear was making him angry. The fear and the smell. Biting. Stinging. Bad. She didn’t dare call out for him, and it struck her that leaving Joshua and Brian behind was probably not what Gabriel wanted her to do. But if she was their ears and eyes, this was how she could protect them. Warn them. Watch their backs. Find the enemy before the enemy found them.

  She crept around a blind corner, through a splintered opening no more than four feet high. There were sounds with her in the barn, she realized. Footsteps, cautious but heavy. With the vine muted, and Baron’s keen senses dulled, it was hard to tell—were they near, or were they far? She whipped her head this way and that and then tripped, tumbling to the ground. As she fell, she heard the horrid sound of a sharp claw being dragged along wood, back in the direction she’d come. By the sound of it, it came from the narrow corridor where Brian and Joshua were hiding. Her heart dropped. They were going to be found. She’d messed up.

  “Hey,” she called out weakly, trying to draw the creature’s attention. “Over here.”

  An
d then sound exploded around her, inside her. Her throat leapt as Baron started barking, somewhere at the front of the barn. Fury. Fear. And on the heels of that, back toward Joshua and Brian, an ear-shattering crack! Then the sound of splintering wood, and a large body hitting the ground.

  She hardly had time to register that Mr. Meister was here, that he was fighting alongside them now, when Baron’s barking cut off violently. He was in trouble. Pain in her jaw, her neck—but again, not really her pain. Without meaning to, she opened the floodgates to the Ravenvine again, to Baron. Through the vine, she felt a huge iron grip seize around her jaw, her midsection. The stench of brimstone in his nose—her nose—was so heavy it made her eyes water. She saw a cruel face, tiny sharp teeth. She understood—a Riven had captured Baron. Grabbed him and hoisted him off the ground, forcing his muzzle shut.

  She was on her feet before she knew it. She ran for him. She stumbled through another opening and into the towering loft at the front of the barn. As she ran across the open vault, Mr. Meister fired his weapon again, back at the barn’s rear. She had to hope he had things under control. She squeezed out through the barn’s huge front door, wedged slightly ajar, and found herself outside beneath the stars.

  Her heart nearly stopped. A handful of Mordin stood there. One of them held Baron prisoner against his chest. He was squeezing the dog’s muzzle with one hand while the other was wrapped completely around the dog’s gut like a noose. Terror. Agony. Bite.

  But Baron couldn’t bite. He couldn’t escape. The Mordin’s grip around him was so tight that April herself could hardly breathe.

  And now footsteps, thunderous and swift. April fell back as Dr. Jericho rounded the corner of the barn at a full gallop—a terrifying sight. He ate up the ground like a horse, occasionally planting one of his hands as he ran. When he reached the group of Mordin, he slowed and straightened, glancing at Baron and striding right up to April. He smoothed his shirt prissily, almost comically—as if April could forget the beast he’d been a mere second before.