As the salt water drove harder into his eyes, the tall shapes formed into separate things. What were they? Some kind of apartment buildings, like the Sawtry? He tried to look, but the wave was shining too brightly, rolling too close, and then he was in a dip with the whole white wall in front of him, and it was curling over, just as an elephant would curl its trunk around a log, and it was lifting him, Kalia, Cath, and Barshin together, raising them up into the sky as though they were weightless enough to fly.
Then they were streaming downward and the white wave was pushing them underneath the surface of the sea, and this time there was no Zadoc to carry them away, and they were going down and down and down, far too deep to ever swim back up again.
And the white water closed over their heads.
CHAPTER 22
THE ETHER
They were kneeling behind rocks, their legs and arms drained of strength. The world was white and stark, and the air was so thin that they had to draw hard at it, like thirsty people trying to suck water from mud.
Ahead, a path snaked from left to right in front of a steep rock face with a narrow white door set into it. When Cath tried to see where the path went off to once it had passed the door, her breath stopped working and her eyes clouded over with stars.
She heard a low rasping from her chest, as rough as a rusty blade biting into metal. Barshin slipped from her shoulders and dropped to the ground, panting weakly. Beside her, Danny’s head was turned away downward, his mouth open in search of oxygen. None of them would last long here; only Kalia, under Danny’s arm, seemed unaffected. The dog gazed calmly out to the path; her gray ears pricked.
And Sammael came along.
He had a big lump swung around his shoulders, which he threw to the ground with a silent shrug, raising a puff of dust from the white earth. He wasn’t white—in fact, the back of his shirt seemed to be catching some kind of reflection of peacock blue from behind him, but there was a whiteness about his edges that seemed to fix him to this colorless world.
They’d found him in the moonlight on the sea.
But this wasn’t the sea, or the earth, or Chromos. This was another place entirely. How many different worlds were there?
Cath had to pull her thoughts back toward her breathing, which didn’t seem to want to work on its own. Were they still in the water, drowning? Had they died?
Danny’s eyes were as bright as flint. “We’re in the ether!” he whispered.
Kalia twitched and strained for a second out toward Sammael, but Danny’s arm held her close.
“What?”
“The ether,” Danny repeated. “It’s his place—the top of the sky. A river told me once—but it said I could never get here. Sammael’s made of ether. Don’t you see? Everything feels like him!”
The top of the sky? Wasn’t that Chromos? Cath looked down to see what surface she was crouching on, but it was only white dust, with no fragments of color in it that she could see. It seemed undisturbed by Barshin’s long, panting shape.
“Look!” Danny nudged her sharply.
She followed the direction of his pointing finger.
Sammael was stooping outside the white door, putting his arms around the lump he’d thrown down. The door was open and he was going inside and taking whatever it was with him. Kalia tried to free herself again, paws scrabbling in the thin air.
“What is it?” said Cath. “What’s that thing?”
Danny shook his head, putting a hand over Kalia’s paws to keep them still. “Can’t see,” he said.
The air around the lump had a darkness to it. Cath couldn’t look for any longer than to run her eyes over it, and then her brain couldn’t explain what she was seeing.
Sammael disappeared through the door. Cath’s breath became heavier and heavier, her skin clamping in a band around her rib cage. She turned to Danny to see if he was having the same problem.
Danny’s eyes were bulging, but he was still fighting to keep breathing. Of course he was—had Cath expected that he’d lack the courage even to do that?
Yeah, she thought. Yeah, I did. And in a minute, he probably will. He’ll get really scared and lie down in a ball, and give up and die.
“Go on!” she whispered. “Go out! Show him the dog!”
Danny drew in a hoarse breath and tightened his arms around the struggling dog. He half got up onto one leg and then hung his head, shaking with the effort.
“I … can’t…”
A black shadow drew itself across Cath’s mind. Of course he could. He was just afraid to, that was all. He couldn’t make himself stand up and face Sammael, so he was going to hold on to Kalia and agonize about what to do, and end up choking to death instead.
At least if he died, she could have his bike. She’d command the deer to take her back to the wood and get the bike, and have it at home with her, so no one could steal it. She deserved it more than he did anyway. What had Danny O’Neill ever done to deserve a bike, except be a pathetic wimp with stupid rich parents? And if he died, they could forget all this rubbish about stopping Sammael. Sammael would let more of Chromos onto the earth, and Cath would be able to bathe in it and watch its colors spreading over the world.
She could reach over and press down on his chest, right now, and he’d just stop breathing. It would be easy.
But when she turned to him, his eyes were on her in the same way. Not struggling, not giving up, not thinking of asking for help. They were burning with hatred.
She reached out toward him, her hand flexing in a claw, ready to latch on to his neck.
And then in a blinding flash of light, a great, pitted ball of silver came stinging across the white sky. Instead of a shadow, a stream of fire was racing over the white ground beneath it. The flames roared up the path, squealing over the stones and dust.
Sammael stepped out of the doorway, looking up at the silver ball. His face was sharp and calm.
“What’s this?” he said. “Dropping by? I’ll put the kettle on, will I?”
The trail of fire swept toward his head, blowing at his black curls with a thousand orange mouths, trying to chew him and scrape at him and scour away his face, but he was laughing.
“I’ve missed you!” he said, his arms spread wide. “I’ve missed you up here!”
And then he took off his boots and stood barefoot in the sheet of flame, laughing as it tried to burn him.
“I don’t need you yet, my beautiful!” he shouted. “Bide your time! Soon I’ll have him! I’ll spread out his moon-kissed sand and we’ll burn great craters in the floor of Chromos. Then we’ll see what waterfalls we can make!”
A second later, the ground under Cath’s feet dissolved and she fell through an endless, thickening air that darkened to pitch-black. The roaring of the fire became the roaring of the sea and the grinding of waves, and the blackness was because her face was pressed against the soaked hide of Isbjin al-Orr, her arms tight around his neck, and he was swimming and swimming, his legs pawing against the wild sea, his patient head pointed in the direction of somewhere only he knew.
There were paws around Cath’s neck and an arm around her waist. Of course. Barshin clinging on and Danny O’Neill dragging her down. But suddenly she was glad to feel Danny’s heavy grip about her. At least he was still there. At least she hadn’t reached across in the ether and closed her fingers around his neck … and if they ever reached dry land again, she’d be able to ask him about that silver thing and the fire, and what kind of a creature Sammael was that he could stand in those flames and not get burned.
* * *
The beach came upon them hard and relentless, and even Isbjin al-Orr struggled to stay upright as his hooves scrabbled on the shingle. Cath let go of him and then she had to twist free from Danny’s grip so that the weight of his body didn’t pull her and Barshin back underneath the waves.
Once she’d found her feet again, Cath reached up and lifted Barshin gently down from her shoulders. Lowering him onto the beach, she ran back into the
edge of the sea for Danny. His arm was still clasped around the gray dog, which shone faintly in the moonlight. Cath dragged them both up the pebbles to beyond the limit of the tide, and waited for Danny to stop coughing.
Back here, she was shocked that she’d imagined wanting to kill him for a bike. If she’d done it, there’d be only her and Barshin and the stag on the beach now, and somewhere in the darkness among the crashing waves, an empty space where Danny might have been.
Danny sat up, spitting out seaweed and running his hand over Kalia’s bony head.
“He took his boots off,” he said. “We could have used Kalia to distract him, and run out and got them. Damn! Why didn’t I do that?”
“Yeah,” said Cath. “Why didn’t you? You could have got Tom back by now.”
“I couldn’t breathe,” said Danny quickly, hugging the spindly dog to his chest. “And I’d have gotten caught in that fire.”
“It didn’t burn him,” said Cath.
“Well, he isn’t human, is he?” Danny snapped.
“I don’t reckon it was real fire. You were too busy pissing your pants, that’s all.”
“No I wasn’t,” said Danny.
“You so were.”
He didn’t argue back. Cath didn’t blame him.
“It was the moon, wasn’t it?” said Danny. “The silver-fire thing, I mean.”
“I guess … yeah, it was the same color as moonlight. What did Sammael mean about ‘moon-kissed sand’? Was that Tom?”
Danny thought for a while, the moonlight glistening off his wet face. Cath suddenly didn’t like the way the silver light touched everything, as though no secrets could be hidden from it. But it was only light. It couldn’t hear them.
“I think it might be,” Danny said slowly. “There were these dogs that chased us last summer—the Dogs of War. They belong to the moon. I escaped, but they bit Tom. Maybe that … changed him. Made his sand special. So that means … Sammael’s not just playing with Tom to get at me. He really needs him…”
“If he gets Tom’s sand, he can open Chromos,” said Cath. “But if not, then he’s stuffed.”
Danny looked out to sea, out to where the moonlight still flickered across the waves in an endlessly shifting dance.
“We have to take his boots,” he said. “Then he won’t be able to go into Chromos at all. And then he won’t need Tom’s sand anymore—he won’t be able to use it how he wants to if he can’t get to Chromos. It can’t be that hard, now that we know when he takes his boots off.”
This time Cath didn’t argue. Sammael hadn’t looked like he was wishing anything good on anyone, back in that dusty white world.
“Okay,” she said. “How can we get through the fire, then? Any ideas?”
Danny shook his head. “I could … ask something, I guess.”
“Maybe Isbjin al-Orr knows?”
They all turned to peer through the darkness at the stag, who was standing a few feet away with his head down, breathing heavily. Danny put his hand in his pocket to take hold of the stick, and Isbjin al-Orr pricked up his ears. There was a short silence.
“He says he doesn’t,” said Danny. “He says we should ask the sea.”
“Well, go on then,” said Cath.
Danny was very still. Cath wanted to launch herself at him and tear the stupid stick from his hand. Why couldn’t he just get up and get this over with? If it all had to end—Chromos on earth, the colors, Sammael—why couldn’t it just happen quickly and be done?
But suddenly she was aware that they were all watching her—Danny, Isbjin al-Orr, Barshin—and although she couldn’t see their faces clearly in the moonlight, she could feel how strongly they were willing her to stay on their side.
Danny got up and held Kalia out to Cath.
“Here, take her.”
Cath accepted the thin gray dog, curling her arms around its bony body, and Danny moved away to the tufted grasses at the edge of the beach. He turned the stick over in his hands, looking up at the moon.
For a long while there was only the sound of the breaking waves and the night breeze through the grasses and the distant whine of cars from up on the road.
Eventually Danny said, “I’m sorry I can’t show you how it works. You’d probably be better at it than me. But I don’t want to see anyone die ever again. I’ll ask the sea.”
And, hugging the paper-light shape of Sammael’s dog, Cath watched as Danny wandered back toward the edge of the sea alone.
CHAPTER 23
TALISMANS
Danny reached the edge of the sea and gripped the stick.
“You’re probably the worst thing of all to talk to, aren’t you?” he said in as small a voice as he could think. “You must know pretty much everything. More than I want to know, anyway.”
The sea laughed and gave a loud, watery burp.
“Sorry!” it said. “Porcupine fish scraping at my guts. They really can’t keep their spines to themselves, you know. It’s always scratchety, scratchety, here, there, and everywhere. Well, now. I am honored. I’d heard you’d fairly well gone to ground, young sir. Strange occasions, strange times.”
Danny let this pass. Most creatures said weird things, in his experience.
“We got into the ether through you,” he said. “We fell into a moonlit wave and ended up there. We saw the moon trying to burn Sammael with silver fire, and we just wanted to know what it was, so we can get through it and, you know…”
“Oh! I see!” shouted the sea, so loudly that Danny’s eardrums rattled together inside his head. “You think I would know what goes on up there, do you? And why would you think that?”
“I … er…” Danny floundered. “I only thought…”
The sea shrieked with laughter and then quieted.
“Of course I know,” it said. “I am the sea. I’m not so distinct from the sky as you might think. The moon paints my waves with her silver and, therefore, what is in the sky is also on the sea, if you see what I mean.”
“No,” said Danny politely. “I mean, the moon is actually in the sky. It’s just a reflection in the sea, isn’t it? But never mind, if you don’t know anything about the fire…”
“Hold on!” boomed the sea. “Hold on!”
Danny, who had been about to turn away and return to the others, stayed for a nervous moment.
The sea curled a few waves and stretched out a little, catlike. “You know, I take it, that Sammael and the moon are old friends?”
Danny nodded. He’d heard this before.
“And like all old friends, they have their arguments. But arguments are sometimes just a way of letting someone know the strength of feeling that they inspire in you. Sammael and the moon—well, their friendship will last as long as they do. But they don’t always agree, and the moon is a terrible sulk, you know. Sometimes she keeps herself to herself and won’t talk to Sammael at all. And then she comes to the point where she can’t bear it any longer and she tries to hurt him—to scorch the ether, to burn her mark across his land. Moon fire is the strongest, hottest, and coldest kind of fire that there is, but she can’t hurt him as long as he is connected to the ether, which is the source of all that he is. So he takes off his boots, stands on his own ground, and steps into her fire to show her that he can bear anything she throws at him.”
“So … we couldn’t survive it, could we?” asked Danny. Perhaps the power of the stick might protect him?
“No, no, you’d be cooked, of course.”
“Oh,” said Danny, his heart sinking. “I guess there’s nothing we can do up there, then.”
“You certainly couldn’t go through it,” said the sea. “But you could get it to go around you, if you needed to. You only need a talisman—the moon’s very respectful of that sort of mumbo jumbo. She loves all those wafty women who drape crystals everywhere and burn candles in her honor. Just take something like that and she’ll avoid torching you.”
Danny frowned. “What? Just a bit of crystal? Really?”
>
“Oh, no, no—you need something she’s had her hands on first, something she recognizes. Don’t you know anything that’s been touched by the moon?”
Yes, he did. They came after him in his nightmares and woke him screaming into the dark.
“The Dogs of War,” he said, barely whispering.
“Well, that would be a good start, certainly. Could you get hold of one of them?”
Danny’s throat was bulging with salt granules scratching and scraping together.
“No!” he said. “Never again! They chased me last summer, but I got away. Tom got bitten.”
Please tell me I’m wrong, he begged silently. Tell me that the moon’s got nothing to do with Tom. Please say it.
“Perfect!” said the sea happily. “If he’s got the saliva of the Dogs of War mixed with his blood, then the moon’s a part of him now, isn’t she? He’s your man. Just take something from him—a finger, maybe, or a toe. Or an ear, something small like that.”
So that was it. Tom was the center of it all. Danny would have to find him again and get something off him, regardless of Tom’s scorn. Tom would never admit that he was wrong because he didn’t think he was. He thought only that Danny was weak and small, and not worth being friends with.
Danny felt coldness sink down his chest and tried to struggle against it. “But I’ve lost him. He’s gone.”
The sea was silent for a second, settling itself flat and seething, and Danny knew that he had run out of excuses. If the wise and endless sea told him to get something belonging to Tom, then the only choice he had left was to set out and get it. Not a toe, though. He’d think of something less gruesome than that when the time came.
“Well, sir,” said the sea. “Your business is your own and you will deal with it as you see fit. I think you know that happiness is seldom found in the surrendering of a difficult quest, and I think you may be learning under which circumstances it is imperative to keep fighting. But if you hope to be successful, I should caution you to beware of one thing.”
The Color of Darkness Page 17