Mordantly, Marian realized their aim was off. They had not shared a common vision of their target.
She rubbed the cloth Jaquar had given her and the outer covering fell away. The weapon-knot twined around her right middle finger.
Betrayed. Emotional pain stabbed her, tears backed behind her eyes. They were sending her to the heart of evil, and Jaquar had given her the weapon to destroy it—though she didn’t know how to use it. It probably would kill everything, including her.
She flew through gray landscapes, through black space studded with a glistening swath of stars. Then she plummeted down, down, down to a seething black place with an open maw that looked like unhealthy red flames, like a scabby, open mouth with razor-sharp teeth.
She hit a Powerful shield that slimed her as she plunged through, screaming until fear took her very voice.
Tuck squirmed in her chest pocket. Just the feel of him calmed her. She wasn’t alone. She had someone to protect. As she fell through rocky darkness and saw a stone floor rising, she twisted and landed hard on her side. Again.
“Oomph!” Her breath thumped from her body and she lay stunned, gasping.
The smell—of putrefaction, burning, dead things rotting. She didn’t want to inhale, but her lungs struggled to suck air. All this time on Lladrana she’d become more and more aware of sounds, but now odor overwhelmed her. She flopped an arm over her nose to try to limit the stench. Already she felt it seeping into her clothes, her hair.
Her mind cleared enough to take stock of her surroundings. Dark brown cavern walls, oozing damp. A pitted, rocky path upward, blackness shrouding the cavern and any passageways beyond her feet. The air was hot, sulfuric, laden with the horrible odor.
All too familiar from her nightmares.
Chittering frantically, Tuck popped from her pocket and scrabbled to her neck, where he patted her face. “You are okay. Okay. Okay!”
Just the sound of the English term steadied her. Her next breath succeeded; she drew air into her lungs.
It tasted vile.
She choked and coughed and doubled over. Tuck clung to her hair, patting, whispering, “We are fine.”
She didn’t think so, but couldn’t spare the breath to tell him.
A horrible thud came from the dark corridor beyond her feet, followed by scratchy, ragged breathing.
Not her own.
Her heart beat hard enough for her to feel it. Just like in the dream, something huge lumbered at her. Ready to eat her. Or worse.
She’d been in Lladrana long enough to know there was worse.
Marian scrambled to her knees and found that her magical dress had ripped and showed no signs of mending itself. She couldn’t spare the Power to fix it. She’d need all her wits, all her energy, all her Power to escape this.
The maw of the Dark. The center of the evil that was invading Lladrana. They’d sent Tuck, innocent Tuck, with her. Bile coated her tongue and the back of her throat.
She would survive, and they would pay.
Jaquar would pay the most.
An awful croaking echoed in the cavern. Slow, slithery movements sounded, closing in. Marian hopped to her feet, swept up Tuck, thrust him in her pocket. But he wriggled and escaped.
“No, I want to be out. I want to see.”
Marian didn’t.
She had to move!
Grabbing her gown, she straightened it with a flip of the fabric, saw that the tear was mending threads one at a time as if the spell labored against the noxious atmosphere.
A small crash of rock behind her made her jump.
Which nightmare would this be—the vicious, huge monster she couldn’t see, or the evil once-human Sorcerer? The master that Jaquar had told her of.
Not one of them—not Bossgond, not Jaquar, not any of the others—had given her any real information about this place. She had no knowledge of her enemy, of his weaknesses, nothing she could use to craft even a half-assed spell, let alone a perfect spell, or at least a competent spell.
Tuck set his claws in the shoulder of her gown. Run! he cried mentally.
Marian ran. She had no breath to spare for prayers. Her feet thudded up the cavern. There was enough reddish glow-light for her to see as she ran.
Which nightmare? Would she break out onto a cliff edge and see Andrew lying dead? How could she? What were those fearsome dreams—predestined truth, or fiction?
They seemed all too real right now.
She bumped off the wall, and an odoriferous slime-smear decorated her sleeve, her arm hurting where she’d hit the rock. Like in her dream. Pumping lungs, pumping legs. Her shoes seemed loose, not tight around her ankles or cushioning her soles. Flop. Flop. The more she thought about her shoes, the more she felt them slip.
Chhrrrhh. The hot breath of the creature touched her back. Adrenaline flooded her and she ran faster than she’d ever thought she could.
The passage twisted, and she careened from one wall to the other, no pain now. Too frightened. Ran into something that gave before her—cloth over a doorway? And she was through. Was this the cliff edge? She pivoted, slammed against the wall.
Beside her, the tapestry went up in flames.
She stood on a huge ledge, but it wasn’t outside. She was near the top of a cavernous room on a great balcony. To her right was a wooden rail that looked all too flimsy. Roars and rumbles came from below.
“Well, well, well,” creaked a sly voice. “What do we have here? A little intruder.”
It was the man in the cowled robe, but he wasn’t a man, he was a giant—nearly a third taller than she, with misshapen hands furred with hair on the backs, the only flesh she could see. He might once have had the coloring of a Lladranan, but his skin now showed a distinct shade of green.
He rose from a thronelike chair and walked slowly to her. She couldn’t see into the hood that covered his face but got the unsettling impression of movement, like a mass of wriggling worms, or tentacles. Marian set her back against the wall.
At that instant, the monster chasing her lumbered through the doorway.
Lurching from side to side, it reached the balcony, stretched its wings and tottered to the rail.
A dreeth. A small dreeth, but still terrifying.
The flying dinosaur’s leathery wing-tip brushed against an invisible forcefield over the railing and sparked. The beast hissed. Flames shot from its mouth.
Marian gulped. “I didn’t know dreeths were fire-breathing.” The comment came from her, all right, though she didn’t know what possessed her to speak.
The once-man chuckled wetly. “I am working on it. But if they have fire, they must be small. I picked the image from the Exotique Alexa’s brain.” Another snicker that made Marian’s skin crawl. “You Exotiques do have a rich imagination for monsters.”
Marian tried to keep images of movies, of graphic novels, of fantasy gaming cards showing evil beasts, from flooding her mind, ready to be culled and used by this creature.
The dreeth turned toward them.
“Go!” The cowled figure waved a three-fingered hand studded with pus-filled lumps at the dreeth and the rail. A shimmer and hum and the forcefield vanished. The dreeth screamed as it flew away.
Marian was sure that whatever awaited in the room below was worse than what she faced here. At least it sounded as if there were massed monsters down there, but still…She crept toward the rail, looked over it.
Sure enough, there were at least a hundred. She recognized slayers, renders, sangviles—three more dreeths, these gigantic. There were other horrors, lesser and greater, that she had no names for. Most of them were eating live, writhing animals. Would she be dinner, too?
The inhuman creature rasped laughter. “There is no escape for you that way. There is no escape for you at all.” He advanced on her. “An Exotique Scholar, what a prize. What shall I do with you? What pretty hair.”
His hand reached for her, stopped. His head tilted. “What do we have here?”
She froze in
terror. Tuck hid in her hair. Please, no, not Tuck.
The man-beast roared with laughter, his fetid breath washing over her, a drop of spittle hitting where her neck curved into her shoulder. It burned. Marian set her teeth against a scream.
She shrank against the wall. She had to do something. She’d survived in her dreams! Blue fire had sizzled from her fingertips. She had no clue what blue fire was, how to find it within her Power, how to use it.
Think!
“You have a little spy. Something the Circlets set upon you. How cute.”
He couldn’t have said “cute.” No, he hadn’t—she’d just heard it, filled in the blank. She wondered how much she was feeling, sensing from him, and what she actually heard. What was real.
“But I am the Master and though I enjoy toying with you, it is time to send your poisonous presence where you cannot affect the nest. Yes, I am the Master.” White, curved fangs gleamed in the darkness of his hood. His fingers, elongated and multi-jointed, plucked a little glass orb the size of a marble from her shoulder. She hadn’t even known it was there.
With thumb and forefinger, he flicked it over the rail. There was a tiny flash, a roar from the monsters.
“Oooh, and you have a mousekin, too. An Exotique animal with Power, also a threat to our home,” the un-man said. “I think I have sensed his essence before.” He reached again.
“No!” Her fingers closed on something in her skirt pocket—the brithenwood stick.
“Yesss.” Now his voice was sibilant, snakelike. His fingers curled and claws sprang from the tips, swiped at her neck, severed a swath of her hair. Missed Tuck.
“No!” She flung the brithenwood, wrapped in anger and Power. It struck his eye and pierced it!
He shrieked in agony, plucked the stick from his eye and dropped it, snatching his fingers back. A droplet of blood fell on her hand, burned as much as his spit, trickled to her wrist tattoos and flashed white, searing her.
The Power of his pain and rage lifted her from her feet, flung her over the rail to fall to the horrors below.
Death. And her last sight would be the deformed mage, eye exploded, black blood coating the empty socket, trickling down his cheek. Long tentacles around his mouth wriggling in pain.
But he slowly closed his fingers into a fist and her fall halted. She hung suspended in air.
Not such an easy end for you! His malevolent voice hit her like cudgels, bruising. You are Powerful. I will suck that Power from you, drain it drop by drop, and your agony at its slow loss will make it all the tastier, all the stronger for my own use. And when my little horrors need some special energy, I’ll carve off a piece of you for them. I wonder what will go first? A finger? Perhaps a whole hand or foot…
The monsters screeched and the noise drowned out even the master’s mental words in her head.
After a long moment when he communed with his underlings, he turned back to her, flicked his fingers. The blow was a strong backhanded slap that snapped her head back. With a screeching yell he sent her into the dark place. Go, now, to the larder where your obscene alien vibrations do not disrupt us. Go!
Larder. Larder. Larder. The word reverberated in Marian’s mind, increasing in loudness with every repetition until it struck her unconscious.
27
Marian awoke to nothingness. To silence and darkness and no physical sensation. She could hear, see, sense nothing. Knew nothing.
Was nothing.
She had not a bit of control in her life, in her fate. Panic shredded her.
She couldn’t hear her breath or her heartbeat.
She couldn’t smell any fragrance from her dress or even her own perspiration.
Nothingness.
She screamed.
There was no sound.
No intake of air, no taste on her tongue.
She couldn’t feel the gown against her body.
Worse, she couldn’t feel herself. She tried to close her hands into fists, felt no flex of muscle, no pull of tendon, no touch of finger on finger, fingers curled into palms.
Biting terror filled her, shrouded her mind.
What was left of her?
No body.
Only mind.
For untold aeons she screamed inside until her fear subsided from sheer weariness.
Slowly, slowly one thought connected to another. She became aware again.
Was she dead?
Was this limbo? Absence of sensation. Best definition of limbo she’d ever come across and she was living it. Maybe she was living it.
If she was dead, why was her brain still working? Why did she still have an idea of self?
Marian.
She was Marian Dale Harasta.
Relief fluttered through her. If she could think, perhaps she could somehow get out of this mess.
With her mind.
She’d had Power once.
Before she’d failed.
She’d made mistakes. She’d not listened to her instincts, she’d trusted the wrong man, she’d failed.
Humiliation flooded her, self-accusation. She’d failed. And now she was here, in limbo, unable to control anything.
Maybe.
Inside her head she sang a spell to move the air.
Nothing.
She tried licking her lips.
No tongue, no wetness, no plump lips.
Thought vanished under quivering fear.
But this time the descent into panic was shorter. She believed.
She reasoned. She knew her identity, she felt hot and cold—or perhaps it was just the recalled wash of hot and cold through her body as it reacted to emotion—icy fear, flushing embarrassment, guilt.
Marian Dale Harasta.
Yes, the edge of panic receded. She still hung in the limbo of the lost. It wasn’t as dark as she had thought. Perhaps that had been black terror pressing upon her brain, binding her spirit. She thought her eyes were open but saw nothing but grayness, like fog. It tricked her mind into making shapes where she knew there were none.
Was Tuck still with her? Hanging on to her shoulder? She hoped so but he could be biting her ear and she wouldn’t feel it. Perhaps he hadn’t lost reason like her. Maybe she hadn’t thrashed around in panic and bucked him off. She could only hope he was with her and coping better than she.
Was the knot still twined around her finger like a ring? She didn’t know. She couldn’t feel it, so she certainly couldn’t fumble to untie it.
Once more she moved her feet, but could not feel the stretch of tendon. Dark humor welling up, she sent instructions to her feet to close together, to tap heels together three times, her mouth formed the words There’s no place like home.
It didn’t work. She hadn’t expected that it would. She couldn’t feel her feet or any vibration in her throat.
She was truly helpless. Her worst fear come true. And nothing she’d done all her life to be perfect had saved her from this. None of the knowledge she’d slaved to learn, to remember, could help her. None of the innate Power she’d felt and honed in Lladrana could save her. All those lessons—useless.
Lessons. The word sat in her mind like a silver splinter. Pointed, hurting a little, prodding her, like there was something she should remember. What?
At least she had her brain. She could think. She didn’t know if time passed in this limbo, or how it passed. Whether nanoseconds or years passed in the worlds outside. Whether she herself aged.
Another tiny bit of calm trickled through her—at least her mind still worked. Perhaps her studies provided her with help after all. She might be able to amuse herself for quite a while, and that could keep her from going mad…again.
She wasn’t pleased that she’d lost control so totally, given herself to fear and panic and self-condemnation at a stupid mistake.
Well, she should cut herself a break—no one she knew had ever experienced what she had, found themselves suspended in nothingness. So who knew what they would have done? How could she measure herself agai
nst the unknown courage of someone else? Except she did it all the time.
She’d gauged her prettiness, her sexual attractiveness, her social skills against that of her mother, or other girls and women in Denver society. Had always found herself lacking there.
She thought of Andrew. She wondered if tears welled up in her eyes, if her throat closed, because the tightness she felt in her spiritual heart should have brought such physical reactions. Her love for Andrew was, and had always been, powerful and unconditional.
Thinking of Andrew steadied her. She wondered how he was doing in his new retreat, whether she’d found any way to help him, or could have found some in the future.
Marian considered whether—when—Alexa and Bossgond would miss her. Fury overwhelmed her at Jaquar’s betrayal, at his last gesture of shoving the weapon-knot in her hand so she could destroy the nest, while destroying herself, as well. He had been her doom and she hadn’t listened. Instead, she’d listened to the stupid, false Song between them and his words. She’d been so pleased that he’d found her beautiful, so blinded by their lovemaking.
Another lesson wasted.
Lesson.
Maybe the thrill of riding the lightning, of feeling immense Power crackle through her, of the acceptance by Alexa and Bastien and the Marshalls in the Castle had made it easy for him to deceive her. Especially after that ghastly experience with Sinafin.
Knowledge blinded her: she could have sworn it flashed white-hot and atomic in her mind.
You have learned your lesson, Sinafin had said. And before that—in the endless moments of that traumatic experience, the feycoocu had repeated again and again, I can’t hear you.
As if Sinafin knew that Marian would have to call for help one day….
Hope nearly sent her spiraling into mindlessness again. To hope and attempt and fail was worse than not hoping at all.
Easy, easy. She tried to take deep, even breaths. Inhale, hold for a count of eight, exhale. She didn’t know if her body did as her mind directed, but either way, it couldn’t hurt to pretend. Harking back to Earth lessons, Marian visualized a stream of white light entering her body, through her head, flowing down her as she imagined relaxing tight muscles one by one. She’d been meditating for a couple of years and easily sank into a different state—a state of clarity and altered brain waves.
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