The Tide of Ages (The Mira Brand Adventures Book 2)

by Robert J. Crane

  “How long have you known it could do that?” she asked.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then how else would you have gotten us out of here?”

  “Just keep up and let’s get out of here, hm?”

  She had a fair point, though. If Decidian’s Spear hadn’t been able to push back the flow of sand currently pouring down over our heads, how would we have gotten out of here? Possibly the only option would’ve been to wait for the chamber to be filled—or to have taken a blind jump up one of the walls, letting Heidi cut her own gateway as close as she could get to us. In my panic, I hadn’t checked the compass face for where our possible exits might be, but I was willing to bet a path back to London was not one of them.

  Once we made our way back into the corridor, Heidi was all business. Sand was already pouring in behind us, threatening to cover the entry into the temple.

  “Did you get the plate?”

  Carson patted his manbag. “In here.”

  “Let me see.” Heidi flicked up the flap and began rustling for it without waiting for permission.

  “I didn’t say you could—”

  “I want to check it’s still intact. In case you forgot, it almost got buried in sand—you know, it’s coarse, rough and irritating and it gets everywhere?” She found it then, and yanked it out, although for a moment watched Carson’s face for some hint of recognition. “Star Wars? No?”

  He looked blankly back at her, open-mouthed. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, never mind.” Heidi stepped away, consulting the obduridium plate. Her eyes scoured every millimeter of metal, searching out any minute imperfection that might have mired its smooth, mottled surface.

  “Seems good,” she said to me when she was done.

  “Great,” I answered, a little flat. “You can hand it back to Carson now.”

  She obliged, not looking at him. He took it with a begrudging sort of look, pursing his lips at the back of Heidi’s head.

  “I’m fine, by the way,” he muttered as he tucked it away again. “Thanks for asking.”

  She ignored him. “We ready to go now, then?”

  “In a minute,” I said. Stepping down from the remnants of the dune I’d positioned myself on, watching at Heidi goad Carson like a particularly annoying younger sibling, I joined both on stone floor. The first block my feet touched still felt perilous. Which was good, really, because it meant almost being entombed hadn’t dampened my wariness to other possible causes of death.

  “Just before the walls split open,” I said, “you made a noise from the wall.”

  The touch of ice that so often lingered in Heidi’s face chilled her features yet further. “Did I?”

  I waited, silent, eyebrows raised. Very much the picture of a parent here, I was well aware. But someone had tripped a trap—and I wanted to know whether or not it was me. And Heidi being Heidi, I suspected if I told her that I might have done so myself, tripping on that long piece of crimson fabric, she would be very happy for me to take the blame.

  “Fine,” she ceded at last, huffing. “I was running my hand across the wall, and one of the blocks shifted. Sorry, I guess.”

  “Heidi, you know we shouldn’t just touch things willy-nilly. Why couldn’t you just wait at the side like I asked while I made my way to the plate?”

  She shrugged. But I’d apparently sparked some combative part of her, because she retorted, “If you insist on wasting my time with acrobatics and treasure hunts, I think it’s only fair I’m allowed to occupy myself.”

  “And ‘occupy yourself’ means ‘set off traps’ now, does it?”

  Heidi opened her mouth to come back at me, no doubt with something even snippier—we were right on the verge of a fully-fledged fight, I realized—but then Carson raised a hand and stepped in.

  “Mira, I thought you said you might have done it.”

  “Aha!” She rounded on me quickly. What ever happened to not wanting Carson’s input? “Didn’t tell me that, did you, Brand? So come on: what happened up there that makes you think you might’ve done it?”

  I hesitated, fraught and caught.

  Finally, “I might’ve got my leg caught on something, that’s all. A piece of fabric. It was draped across the floor and the around the dais.”

  “You know you shouldn’t just touch things willy-nilly,” Heidi echoed at me, voice full of saccharine sarcasm.

  “I didn’t mean to! I just tripped. I didn’t see it, or whatever.”

  “What color was it?”

  My eyebrows knitted. “What does that matter?”

  Heidi repeated, “What color—”

  “Red,” I cut across. “Red with gold filigree.”

  “Sounds awfully difficult to miss, in a temple that’s the literal embodiment of ‘tan’.”

  I pursed my lips. It was that or come back with something biting.

  Fortunately, at that moment the dune building up in the mouth of the corridor reached some invisible tipping point. A layer up near the top dislodged in full, cascading around our ankles like a miniature avalanche, a surreal cascade of sand threatening to sweep us off our feet.

  “We should probably get moving,” said Carson.

  “Yes, let’s,” Heidi agreed shortly.

  “Fine by me.” I shuffled up the tunnel to a safer place where I was not in danger of being slowly buried, but I wasn’t done with Heidi. “Besides,” I said sniffily, “we need these things to be able to pay for Lady Angelica’s spell. Did you forget that?”

  “And we got it,” said Carson, patting his manbag. “That’s good! So we should celebrate, you know? Instead of arguing all the time?”

  Heidi’s lips thinned into an even more severe line. No concessions available for Carson, apparently, not ever.

  “We’re a team,” he said. “Teams don’t bicker. Do they?”

  I exchanged a glance with Heidi. “He’s got a point.”

  She seemed to agree, although from her face I got the impression it took great effort. Unfolding her arms with great effort, as though they were a tangled string of fairy lights, she sagged. “Yeah, Carson’s right.” And then—miraculously—her face split in a grin. Looking back and forth between Carson and me, she said, “We got it. You got it.”

  “And now we can sell it to Benson, and then make headway on this mission of yours.”

  “Finally,” she breathed, eyes alive with excited fire.

  “Yeah,” said Carson. “High fives!” He held up both hands. “Come on, don’t leave me hanging.”

  Another exchanged look with Heidi, a glimmer of a smirk on my lips—halfway between amused by his exuberance and cringing a little at the thought that anyone in the world still thought high fives were cool—and then stepped over and slapped palms. Heidi reached up for the other, swinging—

  Carson lifted it high out of reach. “Too slow.”

  Heidi gaped, and I burst out laughing. Her eyebrows came down, turning her shock into mildly irritated confusion.

  “Did he seriously just … after I came to …”

  “Your eyes do not deceive you, Heidi. Quality burn, Carson. Come on, gang. Let’s gateway back to London.” I slipped past them, leading the way down the corridor. They followed, apparently side by side.

  Carson offered, “I’ll let you go again. Here.”

  “I’m not falling for that.”

  “Not falling for what?”

  “That ‘up high, down low, too slow’ thing. I got bored of that when I was seven. I’m not being sucked back into it now.”

  “What thing? I don’t know what that is.”

  “I do not believe a word of it, Yates, nor do I believe the word ‘gullible’ was removed from the dictionary.”

  “Is this a British thing? Go on, just high five. Low five. Everyone gets one. Even snarky little pixie girls like you.”

  “Snarky little—did you just call me—Mira, did you hear what Carson just—”

  “Don’t make me come back there,” I
called over my shoulder without looking around.

  “I can’t believe you just called me that!”

  “Why? It’s kind of … a compliment, I guess.”

  “In what world is calling a person ‘snarky’ a compliment?”

  “This one?” There was a sound awfully like Heidi swatting Carson. “Okay, okay, not that—I mean, the pixie thing. That’s kind of …”

  “‘Nice’?”

  “Well it’s not horrible.”

  I smirked, and tuned out the rest of what would surely be a long conversation, whose talking points would not cease to be an issue even when the subject was finally dropped.

  Many of the traps we had triggered were no longer a problem, though we did our best to avoid them anyway. The spears that had fired from apertures on the walls did not appear on our way back through, but we ducked beneath the lowest and crab-walked the entire stretch anyway. The spike trap that had swung from the ceiling had ceased its pendulum motion and now hung three feet off the ground. It was a monstrous thing, all deathly angles—but some shimmying on our fronts was all it took to pass it by. The span of open floor had weighed on my mind as a place for potential disaster, but even that was not a problem. The mechanisms guiding this place appeared to be a kind of hodge-podge; some, like the ones we’d passed already, required manual reset; and yet the pit had closed itself off again automatically, ready for traversing once more.

  At least, I hoped it was automatically. I wasn’t sure of the species that had built this place, but I was not particularly keen on the thought of running into one of them, having made off with their treasure, as well as having potentially triggered the emptying of what must be half the desert by now into that last chamber.

  When finally I’d counted off all the traps we had passed on our way through, I retrieved my compass. Angling its face right and left, I watched the images of other worlds, other places, go by as I walked. Sometimes they were replaced by dark mist—the in-between abyss that tales told of no escape from—and others, two images clashed as worlds butted right up alongside each other. Gateways here provided no guarantee. Cut one open, and you could pass through to either world, with no way of knowing exactly where you’d end up until it was too late, and your boots had hit the ground on the other side.

  Soon, I found London. Chelsea, to be specific: the compass centered on the familiar façade of the Saatchi Gallery, an expansive red-brick building with a single stripe of white running horizontally across it, and four pillars at the front. Directly ahead of the gallery, several trees grew, blocking the view just slightly.

  “We’re here,” I said, slowing so I could show both Heidi and Carson the compass face.

  Carson squinted. “Why are those trees bare? It’s May.” Alarm flushed his face, and his eyes darted from me to Heidi and back again. “Did we just lose six months stepping through?”

  “I told you this,” Heidi said, sounding bored. “Time condenses just a couple of hours. Not half a year.”

  “I think the compass is just a little out of sync,” I answered, affixing it to my belt again. “It’s not a live camera feed to the other side.”

  That didn’t much seem to satisfy Carson, though he didn’t argue. He probably wouldn’t be satisfied until we passed a stand of newspapers, and he could confirm the date. After all, six months of compression either way would mean we’d still technically come out in autumn. Carson, bless him, would have worked that out instantly.

  I picked a suitable spot—any wall would do, truth be told—and said, “Stand back.”

  They both obeyed.

  Carson cast me a nervous glance. His left thumb and forefinger had found his right hand—and the ring perched beside one knuckle. Stolen from Alain Borrick in our clash for the Chalice Gloria, Carson had not taken it off. I caught sight of him touching it from time to time. And in moments like now, where we were preparing to cut a gateway and pass through, I was waiting for him to ask if he could do it.

  So far, he had not. And today was no exception. But sometime, that curiosity would mount too high for him to stave off.

  And then we would need to figure out how to deal with it.

  I still remembered those gaping maws he cut open in the Chalice Gloria’s chamber. Staggeringly massive things, the size of IMAX screens, they had been full of raw, uncontained energy. Uncontrolled, too; I had nearly been sucked out of one and thrown into the path of a hurricane tearing up the Florida coast.

  For now, the issue of Carson’s gateways was not a concern. He said nothing, I said nothing, Heidi certainly said nothing, and after a moment’s pause, Carson dropped his hand, resting it on his manbag once more.

  Whereas Heidi’s talisman was a bracelet, mine was a small pendant etched with precise, curving lines. Mine was around my neck at all times, tucked into my shirt.

  I lifted it clear, and held it tight against my palm. My middle and ring fingertips touched the patterns twisting atop its surface. Warmth radiated from them at all times, as though whoever made it had imbued it with a spark that never went out.

  In the months searching for the Chalice Gloria, when I had been alone, it had become comforting. Some nights I’d just hold it, drinking in that gentle heat.

  Some nights I still did that.

  Now was not the time for sentiment, though. We’d achieved our goal. Time to be out of here—and on to more pressing matters.

  I cut open a gateway: a shimmering line of light that widened, revealing a dancing lightshow.

  Wide enough, I waved Heidi through. She went, disappearing like it was the most normal thing in the world.

  “You’re up,” I told Carson.

  He nodded. Stepped up to the plate. He sucked in a breath, then followed through, his manbag disappearing last of all.

  The echo of a smile lifted my face. It was all a bit theatric, the way Carson sucked in that breath whenever we came through, and totally unnecessary on the passage back. But he’d learned very quickly to hold a lungful of air, just in case we found ourselves underwater, or a world where the atmosphere was thick and cloying. And for that, I was thankful.

  I took a last look up the tunnel, content to never see this place again.

  “Thanks for the plate,” I told it cheerfully. “It’ll take good care of it, I swear.”

  And into the array of fireworks I stepped.

  4

  We found ourselves in Ostiagard. It was a city in another world, very steampunk-London, with green gas lamps and buildings that looked quite Victorian to me. This particular street smelled of rich tobacco, almost intoxicating.

  “You guys ready?” I asked, looking back over my shoulder at the two of them, standing on the cobblestone street. “Carson, got the plate?”

  He made a nervous sort of noise that teetered on a whine.

  We were outside a storefront with blacked-out windows. The name BENSON’S was printed on one of them in white letters.

  The other windows were covered with the word “Benson’s” written in dozens of different languages. I spied Korean characters on one window, and just a few lines down was a line of text I was pretty certain was Russian. The Earth languages were far outnumbered, though, by otherworldly script. In some places, it resembled the clichéd sort of text I would expect to find in a science-fiction movie: circles joined by lines and peppered with dots. Another translation was not unlike the cuneiform-like impressions in the pillars of the temple we had not long left. Six in a cluster looked like double helixes, and were, as far as I could see, identical. Many times, I had stopped to peruse them, trying to puzzle my way through what made each unique—because surely there was something; real estate was limited with so many other translations vying for coverage. Never had I worked it out, though, and I did not dare ask a patron for fear of offending them.

  Heidi, at Carson’s opposite elbow, just huffed. “It’s only a junk shop. Every time we’re in Lady Hauk’s, you can’t stop gawking at her things. Why should this be any different?”

  “Be
cause it’s weird,” Carson whispered. “I don’t like it. And Benson is …”

  “The only trader we know who we can directly offload things like this to.” On “this,” Heidi tapped Carson’s manbag a little harder than was strictly necessary.

  “It’s not so bad in there,” I said brightly. And it wasn’t, at least not to me. Although that did not mean that I didn’t understand what about it spooked Carson. For a junk shop, Benson’s stock had a tendency to be a little … unnerving.

  “Come on,” I said, gesturing at the door. “We’ll be in and out. And I’m sure there won’t be anything strange this time.”

  “How can you know that?”

  Heidi had grown bored already. Huffing, she pushed past Carson, knocking his shoulder. “I’ll see you in there, okay?” And then she was through the door, the glimpse of the shop’s interior stolen away almost as quickly as it had been revealed to us.

  Carson gave me a watery sort of look. “Can I just wait outside this time?”

  I decided not to point out that the street was hardly inviting either. The buildings in this world had been built way too close together. Claustrophobic and tight-knit, the city was strangely angular; most of the buildings seemed to lean in one direction or another, and the street did not so much resemble a road from back home as it did the jagged path to a haunted castle in a spooky children’s story. The sky always, always looked like it was on the verge of rain. And the creatures who roved …

  One passed us now. A hulking thing, its deep blue, chitinous body towered two feet over Carson’s head. Four bug-like arms flexed. Tendril-like digits danced along them, thin and black, moving too quickly to count.

  It turned to glance at us, leering with furry, compound eyes. A vertical mouth opened, revealing a wet, shapeless maw. It sucked in a rattling breath as it passed.

  Carson reconsidered. “Maybe I will go in with you.”

  “That’s the spirit,” I said. “And anyway, think about how much you’re showing Heidi up by going inside.”

  “Yeah,” he said, but he didn’t sound particularly convinced. And as we stepped for the door bracketed by the name “Benson’s” over and over in a hundred different languages, the light seemed to have gone out in Carson’s eyes.