by Tom Deitz
Calvin’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, liking neither the situation itself, nor the way Tsistu kept invoking his secret names. “Yeah, you showed us the way, all right: when me and my friends first went to Galunlati. But then you tricked us into killin’ an eagle and almost got us killed for our pains!” His fingers closed around the shaft of the club.
“Or you could say I brought you to the attention of those you sought more effectively than would have occurred otherwise. Do you suppose Uki would have given you a second of his time had you simply come to his door? Poor witless weaklings that you were? I made it so that he had to notice you.”
Calvin merely snorted and folded his arms—but kept his fingers near the club. Sandy grimaced uncertainly, clearly out of her depth and willing to let more experienced heads prevail. Okacha was gnawing her lip. And Brock, who had finally managed to contrive a minimum of modesty, flicked his belt home and turned. “You still haven’t told us what you meant about being a guide,” the boy noted.
The rabbit blinked at him. “So those tiny ears do work.” He chuckled. “Well, apparently those of your elders do not. But you are correct. I will be your guide—if you will have me.”
“Guide to what?” Calvin asked carefully.
“Why, to Tsusginai, the Ghost Country,” Tsistu shot back. “That is what you seek, is it not?”
“Maybe.”
“Suppose I told you a man called Snakeeyes has sent many of my kin in the Lying World there? More than he ought, for he kills them for sport and leaves them to rot without thanks or apology, using neither their meat nor their skins?”
“I would say that’s true,” Okacha replied sadly, “’cause I’ve seen him at it. He kills for the love of killin’ but doesn’t use the bodies. Once I saw him run over a nest of baby rabbits with a lawn mower. He spent an hour lookin’ at what was left. Another time he tied one alive to the exhaust of his car and drove a hundred miles with it there. Another time—”
“That’s fine,” Sandy interrupted. “We get the picture.”
“You get very little of it,” Tsistu snapped bitterly. “But you are correct. I owe him nothing, and I owe you something, and so I will be your guide.”
Calvin glanced at Okacha uncertainly. “You know more about this than I do,” he murmured. “What d’ you think?”
She shrugged wearily. “I don’t know much more about this World than you do,” she countered. “I know two ways to get here. I know a little about what to expect. And I know that what we’re lookin’ for lies to the west. That’s about it.”
“Ah, but how far to the west?” Tsistu chided. “Have you thought of that?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Calvin sighed, his voice so heavy it almost choked him.
“It might,” Tsistu countered. “You have left friends in the Lying World, at least one of whom possesses a talisman of strong medicine. Sooner or later Snakeeyes will discover this. Would it not be best if you were there to protect him?”
Calvin thought of Alec and the ulunsuti. And then considered what might happen should Snakeeyes come into possession of that oracular stone. He shuddered. “Okay, so what’s the deal?”
“Merely this,” the rabbit said. “As you know, it is my lot in eternity to die and be reborn—which I do with regrettable regularity. In fact, I do it so often I frequently meet myself returning from the Ghost Country on my way there again—which of course means that I now know all the fastest routes ’twixt your World and the one you seek.”
“So Okacha’s right: this isn’t the Ghost Country?” Sandy inserted.
Tsistu shook his head. “Think of how many have died—then tell me if you see any of them here.”
Calvin gazed around in spite of himself. “I see none.”
“It would therefore seem you have a way to go.”
“We’re tired” Sandy sighed, sitting down to fiddle with her backpack. “When would we have to leave? Assuming we decide to trust you.”
“The sooner the better, for time runs strange when one hops between Worlds,” Tsistu told them. “But there may be time enough to dry those odd skins with which you wrap yourselves.
Calvin looked helplessly at his companions, then back at the rabbit. “How ’bout if we all grab some shut-eye, then; and you wake us when we can’t wait any longer?”
“That seems reasonable,” the rabbit agreed. “One can only enter Tsusginai at certain times anyway. An hour wasted now might save two later on.”
“Might,” Calvin grunted under his breath, but he squatted stiffly beside Sandy and drew her close—then realized her clothes were still cold and wet and jerked away, which made his ribs twinge. “Yuk! You’re soaked!”
“I just spent…I don’t know how long in the water, Calvin!”
Calvin merely sighed. Fortunately his T-shirt, which had been lying on the sand near the fire, was almost dry. He handed it to her, while she dug more clothes from her backpack—likely for Okacha. “Better dry what you can while you can,” he told her. “Better do whatever you need time for now. God knows there won’t be any later.”
“Food?” she wondered.
“Whatever’s in the pack.” He eyed Okacha, then quickly whisked his gaze away from her casual nudity. “It is okay to eat, isn’t it?”
“Here, but not elsewhere,” the panther-woman replied as she took the clothing Sandy passed her and began to spread it out. “Not until we accomplish our mission,” she added. “The Dead can’t eat, yet they remember it. And it’s not wise to make the Dead remember.”
Calvin nodded silently. He wondered what might happen in the next little while he would not wish to recall.
But in spite of all that, the heat of the fire reached him. And when Sandy returned from shedding all but her panties and his T-shirt, and snuggled against his side where he lay against the driftwood trunk, he slept.
*
Breakfast, Brock discovered to his dismay when Calvin toed him awake, was stale, soggy, and hard to eat by firelight. Which seemed to him a waste of a good campfire. Not that they’d been planning to come here—at least not so precipitously, he hastened to add. Still, somebody should’ve thought to bring along the food Sandy had picked up in town. Make that any cookable food. As it was, all they had were a couple of cans of Coke Sandy had stuffed into her pack, and two peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches he’d brought along in his, which the water hadn’t got at too badly. Calvin had contributed a Butterfinger (which didn’t go far divided into fourths), a can of tuna (which he’d opened with his Swiss army knife), and an assortment of cellophane-wrapped saltines that had likely accompanied a salad somewhere along the way.
But none of ’em were filling! At best, they reduced the gnawing in his tummy to a disgruntled growl. Probably the only good thing, he considered, as he polished off his portion of Butterfinger (fortunately, he’d gotten an end), was that the rabbit-thing hadn’t wanted any.
Brock glanced at it edgily from where he leaned (fully clothed, thankfully, and nearly dry) against the trunk of the cast-up tree, the steadily burning limb of which had been providing heat and light for hours. This was tough. Oh, he’d seen some magic, sure, had even watched old Cal shapeshift more than once—shoot, had met him when he was in deer form a year ago. And he’d read a lot about magic—the theory of it, anyway. But that didn’t prepare a guy for doing weird dances and putting up with pain like he had, never mind getting your throat slashed and zapping off to other Worlds.
Or for talking rabbits that shifted size and configuration as fast as Brock changed channels on his sister’s TV when he got antsy. Yeah, that was a bit much. And not just any talking rabbit, either, but an archetypal animal: The Ancient of Rabbits, in fact, so Calvin had informed him under his breath, when he’d asked between clothes-drying sessions.
Yeah, sure.
Brock nursed his bit of candy a long time, knowing it would be the last familiar taste for a while. And while he chewed, he studied both his situation and his comrades.
It was still mostl
y dark, here on the black sand of this odd beach, but the sky was definitely growing paler to what Cal had told him was probably east. It was doing so in a disquieting way, however; and it took a while to determine that it was because the heavens seemed to be, in some strange way, shaded: as if the sun’s light affected a sky different in shape (if something as diffuse as the sky could be said to have a shape—he thought of it as a hemisphere) from that of the World he knew. The stars were fading too, leaving only a few bright sentinels that didn’t fit any constellation he recognized.
As for his companions…well, Cal had stashed a couple of staves of driftwood in his pack, and set aside a pottery bowl full of embers “just in case,” then collected the detritus of their make-do repast: retrieving even the tiniest scraps of paper and plastic. He’d even washed out the tuna can in the river and stowed it away. Now he was carefully trickling sand onto the fire, extinguishing it by slow degrees while he sang softly under his breath.
Fire and water are enemies: was that what Cal had said? Water was of the Underworld. But if that was so, what about Okacha?
What indeed?
He tried not to look at the woman, who, still naked, had wandered down to the waterside and was studying it speculatively. He wished she’d turn around. Well, actually he didn’t, ’cause then he’d be bound to blush again, which embarrassed the hell out of him when he was trying to be cool. On the other hand… He studied the ground deliberately, noting a whole mess of rabbit tracks, though Tsistu was nowhere in sight. Scouting ahead, he’d said. Yeah, sure.
But—oh, Jesus!—Okacha was turning! Was walking toward them up the beach! Brock suddenly wished she’d put on some clothes, so he wouldn’t be having a certain…problem centered a hand’s length below his navel. Shoot, Sandy had even offered her spares, but Okacha had demurred until they were dry.
Brock supposed it was just another function of skin-changing. You changed, but nothing that wasn’t part of you did—like clothes. Which, he concluded, forced you to be pretty laid back about casual nudity—Cal certainly was. He wondered, though, how shapeshifting affected things like braces—or fillings—or pacemakers—or contact lenses.
He didn’t get to ask, however, for Okacha had sauntered up by then. “Ready?” she inquired, finally reaching for Sandy’s spare jeans. Calvin, he noted, was trying not to look directly at her either, but did look relieved. “Soon as Tsistu gets back,” he grunted.
“Ah, but I am here!” came a voice as a familiar shape bounded over the massive log and into their campsite.
“Anytime,” Calvin told him shortly.
“None like now,” Tsistu replied. And with that he hopped away down the beach. Calvin gave the fire one final check, shouldered his pack, secured his atasi, and followed, his face tight with what Brock supposed was pain from his damaged ribs. Okacha joined him—bare-foot, but in jeans and T-shirt. And Sandy jogged up quickly to claim a loose hold on Calvin’s arm. Brock rose wearily and fell in at the end—then quickly moved up by Calvin so he wouldn’t have to look at Okacha’s denim-clad backside and…remember.
“This is south,” Calvin noted a few moments later, when the driftwood tree they’d camped beside had at last been swallowed by the swelling dunes of the beach. “We need to go west.”
“And so we shall,” Tsistu told him, pausing ahead. “In fact, we start that way…now.”
And with that, he turned right—and vanished. Before anyone could so much as cry out, however, he was back. “No, not that way,” he corrected when Calvin started to angle to meet him. “Follow my prints, then turn where I did…exactly.”
Calvin did, and Sandy, then Okacha. Brock did likewise. It wasn’t hard, not with the prints all of them left. Even Tsistu’s were clear, though at present, as a pygmy rabbit of some sort, he was almost weightless.
But when Brock joined the others, he got a surprise. The black sand was marked. Well, not exactly marked, but altered. Where before it had been the dead, flat black of soot, now it bore a yellow tinge, as if the black grains were mixed with powdered gold—but only in a strip maybe two yards wide that ran dead straight from west to east.
Or the other way around. He stepped on it experimentally when he saw his older companions do the same—and felt a tingle buzz up through the soles of his feet.
“Good God! This is a Track,” Calvin exclaimed. “I should’ve known!”
“What’s a Track?” Brock asked.
Calvin exhaled tiredly and rolled his eyes. “A Straight Track, actually. Some folks call ’em ley lines, but what they are is lines of…force that connect— Well, Dave says they exist in all Worlds—that they connect all Worlds, in fact. But that they’re not always the same themselves. They’re invisible in our World, for instance, unless they’re activated, which almost nobody there knows how to do. But they’re like glimmering golden roads. In Galunlati, the grass changes color. Here—”
“Sand,” Tsistu interrupted irritably. “Now, shall we be going, or do you want to take the long way?”
“How long’s your way?” Sandy snapped, sounding just as irate.
“Shorter than if you turned anywhere but here and went west,” Tsistu snorted. “Shorter than if you hopped for twenty days west from where you stand.”
“In other words, this is the way to go.” Brock sighed.
“That,” Tsistu told him solemnly, “it is.”
*
There was something screwy about this whole place, Sandy had decided, when, with more reluctance than she hoped she’d shown, she’d stepped onto that line of goldly glimmering sand Calvin had said was a Straight Track. Herself…well, she’d heard him talk about them before and thought they had something to do with cosmic strings: dense threads of compressed matter rather like the substance that comprised neutron stars, except that these formed at the juncture of what some physicists called bubbles. Which in turn had something to do with the residue of contraction after the Big Bang, or such like. It was at that point that, high IQ or no, her chosen subject became as incomprehensible as the math behind fractal geometry or chaos theory.
But then she had little time for reflection because that rabbit-thing—Tsistu, she corrected herself: she had to start thinking to fit this new environment—set a fearful pace indeed, one that had them all moving along at what she suspected was the absolute limit of their endurance. And, regrettably, she probably bore it least well. Calvin jogged, moving efficiently in spite of his injured ribs and panting, but rarely changing pace except as Tsistu did. Okacha seemed to be entirely in her element and loped along like a sleek animal, either beside Calvin or just ahead of him—which pissed Sandy a little, though she tried not to let it show.
Herself, she found more and more matched up with Brock. He was shorter than she and had lived a some what sedentary lifestyle while in England, but he was also twelve years younger, and that pretty well evened them out. He was panting heavily, so was she. Sweat sheened all four of them (like Okacha, she’d retained a shirt: a long-tailed one, though she wondered why she bothered). But everytime someone’s breathing became labored, Tsistu, who kept ahead—mostly in the shape of a jack rabbit now—slowed just enough to compensate, but never stopped.
So Sandy had little choice but to try to distract herself from her legs and her lungs and from thinking about what in the world she was doing here by the expedient of examining the landscape.
It was worth examining. Once they’d climbed out of the wide, stone-walled gorge, they’d found themselves on a plain. Or desert, actually; the sand was still the same grainy black that had lain beside the river, though here and there it bore swirls of gray or silver. And purple: there was a lot of that, though whether it was the sand itself or some substance stirred through it that reflected the sky, she didn’t know.
The sky…
It really was purple—mostly; woven with burgundy and indigo. It was like a permanent twilight, an ongoing sunset. Except that there was a sun—or at least a definite brightness that glided across the sky in the prescr
ibed manner, a brightness that was too dazzling to look upon with unshielded eyes. But there was also a certain haziness, as if the air was full of smoke or silt.
She supposed that was possible, for the mountains yonder looked as if they could be volcanic. They were pointed enough, ragged enough, almost seemed to glisten like basalt. Except that she didn’t think that worked because, according to Calvin, places like this were island universes that floated (in a loose sense) upon the primary World she knew as Earth. They depended on Earth for the gravity that leaked through the World Walls to sustain them. Which meant that they had (or many of them did) finite limits. You could step off the end of the World here. And the sky might be a vault, held to its island World by that World’s gravity, which in turn depended in part on the gravity of its primary.
“Why not just enjoy it?” Brock asked her suddenly.
“Why’d you say that?” she replied between measured breaths.
“Because you were frowning. And people don’t frown when they’re havin’ fun.”
“Should I be?”
“Given that you can’t do much about it until Cal and ’Kacha finish whatever they’re doing, you might as well.”
Sandy didn’t reply. But if she did not smile, at least she scowled no longer.
*
For a long time they traveled, and Sandy discovered to her surprise that though she was pushed to the absolute limit, her plateau of fatigue did not seem to be decreasing. Indeed, it was as if each step—each contact with that odd golden sand—sent a tiny jolt of energy shooting up her legs which by slow degrees became a knot of sustaining comfort centered in her chest.
Trouble was, the mountains seemed to grow no closer, and they were the only goal she could fix on. Not that the plain was barren, she hastened to add. For the last…while…the pervasive flatness had been relieved by strange shapes of twisted stone. Black or mauve or purple, most of them were; knee-high or towering tree-tall. Single, sometimes, or in groups like groping fingers. None passed truly close, but she got conflicting impressions from them. On the one hand they had sharp edges, jagged points, and scalloped depressions, as if they had been struck or fractured or broken, like obsidian blades. But at the same time they seemed to have grown there: to have stood there weathering (for there was a constant wind, accompanied by a wailing that was probably the sound it made blowing between grains of sand) for countless ages.