Xander smiled. “You don’t seem very woods-wise to me.”
“It was a long time ago, and the woods on Beta Tau were less… deathy. But still, I’m good with knots.”
“Fair enough,” Quince said. “I’ll pack things up while you get the boy settled.”
In fifteen minutes, they were on their way again in the darkness.
Quince despaired of ever being able to get a full night’s sleep again.
Chapter Twelve: Storm
THEY CRUISED through the darkness, broken only by the light of one of Oberon’s two moons. Xander could feel Morgan’s warmth against his back in the makeshift harness they’d rigged up. His wings settled over the boy—or whatever he was.
Xander felt no malice in Morgan’s demeanor, but he was clearly something more than just human. Nevertheless, Xander still felt the need to protect him. No one had been around to protect Xander when he had been a child. He didn’t hold that against Quince—done was done—but he wouldn’t allow the same thing to happen to someone else. To Morgan.
He stayed close to Quince and Jameson, not wanting to lose them in the shadowed blackness. Shapes loomed up above him as they progressed, trees and boulders sometimes three times taller than the forest canopy. They spoke of a history of violence and destruction on this mostly peaceful world.
Every now and then, Xander would look over his shoulder for pursuit. It was stupid, because anyone coming after them would be well hidden by the darkness, and would take great care after the loss of three hoversports’ worth of enforcers.
Still, he looked.
They had considered finding and taking the hidden hoversport, but it would be too easy for OberCorp to track them.
Slowly the sky turned from black to gray, the stars winking out one by one. The stone monoliths grew more numerous, and he could see that some of them were covered by what seemed to be geometric carvings.
Maybe evidence of Quince’s “alien race”? They looked to be at least several millennia old.
Citrone vines climbed up the sides, covered in the bulging yellow fruits. They stopped to harvest a few before continuing eastward.
Jameson glanced back at him over his shoulder from time to time, with a look on his face that might have been fear. Or need. Or maybe longing. It was hard to tell in the darkness. That kiss….
They would have to explore it later, together, what it all meant.
Although daylight finally came, it wasn’t much brighter than the early morning. Overnight, a heavy ceiling of gray clouds had encroached upon the Theseus river valley, promising rain. If it was anything like the storm that had blown through a few days before, they’d want to find shelter before the worst of it hit.
Thunder sounded ominously overhead, and lightning lit up a sky full of heavy clouds.
He hoped Quince had a plan, because things had just gone from bad to seriously weird, and he wasn’t equipped to deal with it.
THE GATES of hell had opened above them, pelting them with hard rain.
Jameson held tightly to Quince’s waist, trying to unsee what he had just witnessed back at the camp.
He was a psych. It was his job to deal with individuals, couples, and triads when they were in emotional free-fall, often at one of the darkest points in their lives. He had seen death, or at least its aftermath, and he had seen the many effects it had on people.
He had helped others through it too; often a long, painstaking process of honoring the dead, of remembering them and learning to let them go. He had helped husbands who had lost their spouses, and parents who had lost their children. He had even counseled miners on Tander’s World who had lost a workmate or close friend in an unexpected incident in one of the mines.
None of that had prepared him for what he’d just seen. Death in its raw, primal form, delivered at the hands of other human beings. And by whatever Morgan was. By people he knew and was starting to trust. It was brutal, and primal.
He closed his eyes, his stomach roiling.
He couldn’t do it. There was no way to un-see it—Quince’s knife entering a man’s throat, the blood spurting out, red and violent. Xander throwing another man bodily against a tree trunk, his bones crunching audibly. Quince’s knife through another man’s throat. And Morgan….
Intellectually, he knew these men bore him and his companions ill will, that they were here to capture or kill him. Xander and Quince had done the right thing, but his empathetic side, the part of him that had always wanted to help everyone else, that had been honed to a fine edge by his training, cut him the most.
He couldn’t help but think of those poor men and women’s families. Did they have partners at home? Children?
In the background, before the violence… the kiss.
Why had he done it? He hadn’t meant to kiss Xander. It had just happened. He’d wracked his brain for a suitable explanation from his psych studies. Maybe he was falling in love with his captor. It happened sometimes, in extreme situations like kidnapping or hostage taking.
Or maybe it was the events themselves that were to blame. Shared near-death experiences and all that. He’d been reaching out for simple human contact.
He shoved it all aside. At the moment, they had bigger worries.
The powerful storm was all around them now, lashing them with pouring rain that was blowing sideways in the heavy winds. Cold rain that ran down his face and his back, soaking his clothes and chilling him to the bone.
Quince continued on doggedly, following a path apparently only she could see. The bike’s headlight was shot through with rain falling in twisting, crazy, contradictory patterns.
Vast forks of lightning lit up the sky on a regular basis, and one of them had split open a tree trunk not thirty yards off to their left just minutes before.
“We have to stop!” he yelled in Quince’s ear over the thunder and whipping rain. “You’re going to get us killed!”
She shook her head. “We’re almost there. There’s no safe place for us to stop, anyway.”
He glanced back. Xander’s bike was following them, being rocked back and forth by the storm.
A strong gust of wind buffeted the cycle, almost throwing them into one of the big rock towers. Quince jerked them away just in time. “Let me be,” Quince shouted. “I can’t steer and talk.”
Jameson subsided into his own thoughts, hoping this whole thing would soon be over. He wondered what Xander was thinking, with the boy—well, it looked like a boy—strapped to his back. He’d seen what Morgan was capable of, and hoped he was truly on their side.
He wondered, too, when he had started thinking of the three of them as a team.
Quince made a hard right turn, and they emerged over the Theseus. Or at least he assumed it was the Theseus. The river was swollen, massive, overrunning its banks. The churning water rushed toward the sea, carrying branches and sometimes entire trees along with it, sloshing over the shore as if its course had been upset by the footsteps of a giant.
If they fell into that maelstrom of water, they were dead.
Quince poured on the speed, and they raced across the waters. Xander followed them, and the two bikes fought their way through the wind and rain.
Out in the open, the force of the gale threw huge raindrops against his face like pebbles. The lightning had gone from intermittent to constant, lighting up the river and the far banks in a silver light that reduced all color to black-and-white.
At one point, he glanced down to see some kind of gray, furry animal, big as a man, clinging to a tree trunk. Its eyes glinted as it looked up at them forlornly. He wondered if it was a swamp bear.
The crossing seemed to last an eternity. The thunder grew louder, and he started to wonder if he would go deaf from the noise.
Then they were above solid ground once more. He slowly stopped shaking.
Quince urged the bike up the hillside, away from the raging floodwaters and into a thicket of blueoak trees. The rain slacked off here, blocked by the massive trunks, and a
fter a bit the ground leveled out.
Soon the rain seemed to stop altogether, and the thunder receded, becoming a distant growling. He looked up, and to his amazement, there was green sky and sunshine. The storm was gone.
That was when he first noticed the building. It was a tall, dark rock structure, stark against the bright sky. It was made from hand-cut stone, as far as he could tell. It looked like a small castle. A very old castle.
One of the walls had collapsed, and the stone was worn down by time and weather. It was strangely familiar, though he couldn’t imagine he had ever been here before. “What is this place?” he said wonderingly.
“Its real name is lost to time, but we call it the House of the Sky. This is where you’ll find the answers to some of the questions you asked me.”
THE HOUSE of the Sky looked ancient to Xander. It had been built mostly of some black stone, maybe volcanic in origin, and seemed to have been slowly collapsing to the ground over a period of centuries. Creeper vines snaked through the ruins, and there were trees growing inside the courtyard.
The road they followed had been paved at one time, but that too was crumbling away, split by silver moss and the roots of small bushes and trees. It was strange that he’d never heard of this place before. Archaeologists would have had a field day with it.
Stranger still, the storm that had been bearing down out of the mountains seemed to have all but dissipated. When he looked up, there was only a clear green afternoon sky, with streaks of white cirrus clouds high above in the upper atmosphere.
Morgan had awoken at some point during the storm. He seemed entirely unimpressed by the whole thing. Xander chuckled softly. That was so Morgan.
Xander set the bike down next to Quince and the outer walls of the House of the Sky. It was maybe fifty meters wide, but only three or four stories tall. It had a center “keep” and an outer wall that was basically square, with rounded turrets at each corner, except in one place where the wall had collapsed outward, leaving a scattering of stones.
There was a wide entrance on this side of the wall, complete with rusted hinges on either side. He supposed there must have been a large door or gateway here at one time.
“This place is amazing,” he said to Quince. He undid the harness and lowered Morgan to the ground.
“It’s older than even the skythane culture here on Oberon.” She looked around at the ruins.
“The House of the Sky,” Jameson said softly, looking up as if imagining the night sky.
Quince nodded. “It’s hidden from view from above. Something obscures it, making it hard to find unless you know where it is.”
Jameson frowned. “Like a cloaking device?”
Quince shrugged.
“Should we go up and take a look from above?” Xander offered.
“Um… sure… up in the castle? Is it safe?”
“Like this.” He picked Jameson up in his arms and beat his powerful wings, lifting them into the sky.
Jameson gasped.
It was thrilling to feel Jameson in his arms, to share the skies with him. Plus, he had to admit he enjoyed startling the other man a bit, jolting him out of his safe little world. Xander’s wings pulled the two of them upward with powerful strokes. It felt so good. He hadn’t flown in days.
Sometimes Jameson’s guard slipped, and Xander got a look at the man underneath. He was smart and surprisingly warm when he wasn’t clinging to his psych persona.
Looking at the fear and wonder in the man’s face, Xander knew this was one of those times.
When he was high enough, he found an updraft and rode it up into the sky in lazy circles, surveying the area below.
The House of the Sky stood in the midst of a dense stretch of forest, an area around it cleared of all but small brush and grass. There were indications of other structures here and there, and maybe an outer wall that was missing in many places.
“Xander, look.”
He followed Jameson’s gaze.
The storm was still there. The walls of it veered around the House of the Sky as if they had hit an invisible barrier. It was like being in the eye of a hurricane.
From here, they could see the confluence of the two rivers under the walls of the storm. The Theseus flowed down from the Pyramus Mountains in the northeast, collecting the waters of about a quarter of the lowlands basin.
The Demetrius was a smaller tributary flowing up from the southeast, bringing into the Theseus water from the southern part of the Pyramus chain, which stretched from pole to pole along the eastern edge of the world. Beyond that, the world was hidden.
He shared a glance with Jameson and shrugged, giving him an I have no idea what the hell it means look.
They went a little higher, and the ruins shimmered and vanished as if they had been just a mirage, replaced by thick forest.
“Quince was right,” Xander said, surprised. Jameson was shaking in his arms. “You okay?”
“Not really. Down, please?”
He hadn’t meant to scare Jameson. Not really. “Your wish,” he said, and brought them gently back toward the ground. The castle reappeared below them, and in a moment they were back on solid earth.
Jameson took a little longer than Xander thought was necessary to disengage himself.
Quince was unloading their gear. “We’ll camp here and rest before going on tomorrow, when the waygate opens. We should be safe here.”
Xander nodded. He looked around—if the rain stayed away, it would make a decent enough campsite. “Where’s Morgan?”
Quince looked at him blankly. “He was right here….”
There was no answer.
“Dammit,” he swore. Where had the boy gone to this time?
Chapter Thirteen: Waygate
“MORGAN’S MISSING.” Xander looked around for any sign of where the boy had gone. A neat set of bare footprints led into the House of the Sky. How had the boy managed that? Xander had been staring at the place practically the entire time.
“He won’t have gone far,” Quince said.
Xander nodded and pulled out a glow sphere, following the boy’s footsteps into the maw of the House of the Sky.
They searched the courtyard first. It was roughly fifty meters wide and half that deep. It was paved with stone, but the surface had been covered over the centuries with muck and dirt. A few of the paving stones showed through here and there, the same black rock as the walls.
Three blueoaks had grown up through cracks in the pavement and now dominated the space. Hanging from them were some of the citrone vines, weighed down with their bright yellow fruit.
“Morgan, where are you?” he called, holding up the glow sphere to light up the darker recesses of the courtyard. “This isn’t funny.” He shared a worried glance with Quince.
“Maybe… maybe it’s better if he’s gone?” she suggested.
He glared at her, and she turned away.
“Morgan!”
There was no response other than the whistling of the wind.
There was nothing else to do but to search the House of the Sky itself.
He climbed over a fallen tree, pulling back the vines and branches that almost covered the doorway. He shone the glow sphere inside. It was hard to make out much detail through the small opening, but the hall looked empty. “He must have gone inside. Is it dangerous?”
“Only because it’s so old,” Quince said.
Xander pushed his way through the entangling vegetation, getting some leaves and twigs stuck in his hair for the trouble. He brushed them off, starting to get annoyed. “Morgan, are you in here?”
He was in a large open space. He rubbed the glow sphere to brighten it, and threw it up in the air. It floated up to about three meters above his head and stopped, lighting up the entire room.
It must have been a grand hall at one time. The floor beneath his feet was tiled in a checkered black-and-white, placed in a spiral pattern that started on the edges and ended at the center of the room. A spiral sta
ircase hugged the edge of the room, doing a half circle and ending somewhere up above.
Windows let in the diminishing daylight from outside.
Quince gasped behind him. “The waygate is open.”
“Waygate?” Xander’s eyes adjusted slowly to the dim light. He called the glow sphere down and closed his hand around it. It went out, extinguishing the light. He shoved it into his pocket.
She pointed. “We can open them once a day, at noon, when the sun is directly overhead. It shouldn’t be open now….”
Xander looked across the room. Set into the back wall of the grand chamber was a stone archway. He’d thought it was just a doorway, but there was something strange about it. It glowed with a pink light, and the space under the arch seemed to shimmer.
“There’s no time to explain. We have to go back and get our things. This wasn’t supposed to happen, but we have to turn this to our advantage.”
“I’m not leaving Morgan behind.”
She looked ready to argue, but instead she nodded. “Wait here. Jameson and I can go back to gather our belongings. Just don’t go through the gate until I get back.”
She hustled Jameson out with her before he could ask what she meant. What gate? The only gate he’d seen was the one they had come through into the courtyard.
The light leaking in through the windows seemed to be slowly getting brighter.
Xander took one more look around the room. There was nowhere down here for Morgan to hide.
If something had happened to the boy, he’d never forgive himself.
Xander ran up the stone staircase, marveling at the beauty of its construction. The stones seemed to have been fitted together without mortar, and the black-and-white motif continued up the staircase, the colors tinged with pink from the light outside.
The staircase was maybe two meters wide, and the steps were taller than the stairs he was used to back in Oberon City. Curious.
He reached the landing, and a pair of old doors confronted him, standing slightly ajar. He squeezed through the doorway. He found himself in a circular room, right above the center of the hall three stories below. There was another door, this one metal, old and rusted, also ajar.
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