“That’s the idea,” he said, with a mad smile to his tone.
Suddenly a flick of the wrist launched his spear. The haft exploded as it struck, casting forth a shower of metal that struck only the frame of the World Gate, acting as a fixative to seal all the sigils firmly in place. The elemental howled, and Elora with it, as their merged body was shaped and twisted to fit the mold laid down for it and then saturated in a substance that dulled both flesh and spirit. In less time than a single human heartbeat, the elemental grew cold as dead stone and as its fires dimmed, so, too, faded the link between Elora and her own body. At a moment when she needed her thoughts to race, they staggered, fell, found themselves drowning in tar.
The Gate was complete. The Summoning had begun.
Elora heard music. It was the only word that came to mind even though the sounds she applied it to had no connection to any composition she’d ever heard. The melody swept out of the darkness beyond the World Gate and wormed its way into a dark place she never knew existed within her soul, drawing forth a vision of herself that spun and pranced and preened before her with a delight that made her ache to embrace the cause. This was the Elora of her dreams, when she took the duckling she saw every day in the mirror and imagined herself a swan, with a lush beauty she knew she’d never possess, with skin the warm and pale hue it was meant to be and hair the color of sungold. It was the kind of face and body that drew men’s eyes, one fit for a proper Princess, the Elora that should have been in a world that never was.
As she watched, ever more entranced, the vision of herself began to dance. There were no physical limitations or inhibitions to this Elora, nor the slightest restraint. It embodied all the whimsical license of the elemental, where conception and execution were as one, and the wild grace of the human girl herself. With every movement the dance grew more complex, more passionate, more enticing. The images within her mind’s eye splintered. She didn’t know where she was anymore—trapped on the Gate in the form of the infant firedrake, trapped in her human body, slumped and helpless where she’d left it, or prancing with madcap abandon in the air before the Gate, drawing forth whatever lurked within.
She didn’t know where she belonged, but as the illusion became tangible, the lines blurring between what was real and what was not, she felt the links with her true body dissolve.
Another shape was emerging from the darkness, reaching out for the Gate from across an abyss. Elora had a sense of something taller and broader than she, and the sense that here was a masculine ideal to match her feminine. She stayed on her side of the boundary, it on the other, so close she thought she might touch it with just a little stretch of her arm, yet somehow it managed to stay far beyond the limits of her sight. Its every move seemed a match for hers and as the dance progressed it became clear that this newcomer was taking the lead, initiating steps that Elora willingly, eagerly followed. The culmination of their duet would be when it revealed its face to her.
When that happened, she knew she was done.
How can this be happening? she cried to herself. No spell can hold me! A moment later she provided her own answer, one part of her mind holding fast to rationality even as the rest of her was overwhelmed. It isn’t me that’s being held, not altogether. I bound myself to the firedrake, I’m trapped by the bindings that hold it prisoner!
The music called to her, the dance tried to sweep her away, and she found too much of herself too eager to yield.
“No,” Elora said, a statement as implacable as it was still-voiced. “I deny this, I deny you!”
She called for help, with every fiber of her being.
Something broke open, deep inside herself. There was a rush of heat, so intense it should have consumed her utterly, reduced her to ash before she was even aware of her doom. Flesh rippled, stretched, grew, arms reaching forth to encompass horizons yet undreamed of, body rearing up to embrace the stars. She was giddy with disorientation, as though she’d been spun like a top and suddenly cast loose to stagger drunkenly about while her wits and perceptions went haring off along pathways of their own.
Then, as they had before, in Angwyn, the mountains answered her.
Far beneath Elora’s feet, fire stirred, flashing solid stone to incandescent gas in a passing instant before shunting that expanding bubble of pressure into cracks and fissures within the world’s crust. Massive plates of primordial rock that had remained still for eons shifted, throwing off powerful shock waves that shook the cavern so hard that all the Nelwyns, celebrant and acolytes, were thrown from their feet. Stone cracked, boulders fell, the necessity of maintaining the Summoning spell hurriedly cast aside in favor of simple survival.
The fixative crazed, its surface marred by scores of spiderweb cracks as the frame of the World Gate was twisted past the limit of its tolerances.
Neither dancer paid the slightest heed.
With a fierce effort, Elora wrenched a portion of will back from her vision self, and in the process drew the newcomer’s gaze toward her. She didn’t dare look, she saved herself by throwing herself completely back into the substance of the firedrake, flooding it with her own absolute need to escape.
The creature ignited like a newborn star, but nothing happened. Despite all the damage done to the Gate, all the passion and will and desire they could manifest, the pair of them could not break free. Carig would not let them.
Elora had never seen such hatred, it made her own emotions seem like such puny, half-formed things. All the strengths and virtues she admired in Torquil, as in Thorn, were present in Carig as well. Only they had twisted in upon themselves, laced through with a feral rage reminiscent of an animal gone mad, until all the light had been squeezed out of them, or crushed, or simply smashed to bits. His soul was shadow, his desire to make the world pay for the harms and insults he believed had been done him. Pain would beget pain, and his joy would be to bring forth greater horror.
In her own body this would have been a hard and brutal fight, with no guarantee of her success. Sharing forms with the infant firedrake, she was shackled by too many limitations. She lacked the skill to finesse an escape, the strength to smash her way free, the time to think of what next to try.
Through all of that, she gave hardly any thought to herself. It was the tiny firedrake she grieved for. The ache within her heart was that she was unable to save it.
Carig staggered, the expression of rage on his face taking on a measure of confusion as one hand plucked aimlessly at something behind his back. He couldn’t reach the first arrow that struck him. He was turning as the second hit home, its shaft ablaze from the scorching ambient temperature of the grotto. The narrow, armor-piercing head buried itself into the breast of his smock, the impact driving him back a step. The renegade Nelwyn stared stupidly at the flames rising right beneath his bearded chin before reflexes acted of their own accord to slap the arrow aside.
He wasn’t hurt, his ironcloth smock had seen to that, but he had been distracted. For Elora, that was all the opportunity she needed.
The firedrake erupted from the apex of the Gate with a fiery joy that shattered its hold and set every other sigil blazing in its turn as the other firedrakes regained their true form. Simultaneously Elora cast her own essence through the firedrake into every particle of the Gate’s substance, to make herself one with it. The Gate was a creation of magic, held in place by spells, the core nature of her being could not be leashed by magic. Two contrary absolutes. A paradox that could not be resolved. The Gate was the one to buckle.
With a hoarse yell, Elora found herself back in her body, the force of her reentry propelling her up off the slab on which she lay to butt the crown of her head full into the belly of a Daikini looming over her. He went down in a breathless whoosh of air, she following, the pair tumbling together to the bottom of the slope. As they fell she recognized him as the pipe smoker from the bazaar, the one she’d decided was a warrior in disguise. Th
ere was nothing of the merchant about him here. He was dressed for war in burgundy leather, broadsword on his hip, quiver of arrows slung across his back, bow in hand with another shaft nocked for firing. They landed awkwardly, more or less side by side, though he managed to retain hold of his bow. His nose and lip were bloody and she thought that without the services of a qualified physician, and a very good cosmetic shapemaker, his profile would never be the same again.
“Blessed be!” he exclaimed, at his first full sight of the World Gate.
Elora didn’t look, she didn’t dare. The entity Carig had Summoned was too close. Breaking the sigils might not stop its manifestation, shattering the Gate itself might not either. Her great terror was that if she looked it in the eye, if it reached out its hand, she would take it. Embrace damnation, joyously.
“Forget about that,” she screamed at her savior as the frame of the grotto twisted around them like a box of paper being crushed, “we’ve got to go!”
She’d forgotten about Carig. Even as a fresh temblor calved the rock on which they lay and dropped a piece close beside her the size of a modest house—she heard a scream that started in terror, spiraled to something beyond, was suddenly cut off, and knew that at least one among the acolytes had paid the price for his crimes—she was yanked off her back and thrown against a wall hard enough to stun. She struck at the Nelwyn with hands and feet as he held her one-handed in place, but her best efforts only made Carig laugh. She might as well have been hitting a man made of steel.
The Daikini lay stunned atop a swiftly growing pool of blood. Carig hadn’t been as gentle with him as with Elora, taking just a single blow to smash his face.
“I should have guessed,” Carig said, using his free hand to peel off her skullcap and reveal silver hair above silver skin. “I should have known. Thou!” The malice in that single word struck her like a spray of acid poison, but she didn’t flinch. Instead she bared her teeth and struggled all the harder, which only made him laugh out loud.
“Poor little Princess,” he told her as he shook loose a tanglefoot web to bind her tight. “Who’s this, thy savior?” He lashed out sideways with his foot in what seemed like the most casual of gestures, yet Elora knew he’d struck the fallen warrior hard enough to break ribs, complementing the blow with a disparaging snort. “Full marks for bravery, I suppose, an’ skill, got to grant him that for making his way through the Nelwyn stronghold wi’out bein’ detected. Hardly salvation, though. His colors mark him as Maizan, prob’ly seekin’ t’ make his name by bringin’ you hog-tied to his castellan.
“Sorry, my lad, I have first claim on ’er.”
“You have nothing.”
“Beg t’ differ, Sacred Highness. Pity, really. It’s almost a shame to end thy story when it’s only just begun. Hopes as high as thine, a soul as noble, should be destroyed slowly.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“And most definitely, such a spirit should be broken with care.”
“Go to hell.”
“Dare I say, ladies first?” He stole a glance toward the Gate, which coated the grotto in a sickly radiance that washed away all color and flattened all the figures, so that everything appeared to be two-dimensional, without depth or reality. “For thy bride, most dread and puissant lord, I offer thee the heart and hope of the world!”
“Never!” she cried, with all her strength.
He cast the web, but he was too late. In that same moment, crossing every mental finger because it had been years since last she tried this stunt, and even then only under Thorn’s direct supervision, Elora Danan took a deep breath and cast her body backward, into the very fabric of the rock.
When Elora was very small, Thorn told her a story of a young girl who’d chased a brownie down one of its barrow holes. It was a tight fit because while Daikini are giants compared to Nelwyns, Nelwyns have much the same relationship to brownies, the height of the greatest among the Wee Folk being measured in inches. However, what they lack in size, brownies have always made up for in raw cunning. Few are the races on either side of the Veil who can match them in that regard. There’s nothing in the world, so their reputation goes, that’s too big for them to steal, nor any foe so large they can’t somehow cut him down to size.
The girl had popped through the entrance only to find herself in a sheer drop of quite some distance. You see, when a brownie enters his barrow, it’s along paths and handholds set off to the side. Anyone else tumbles headlong into a pit that won’t be easily escaped. Nothing bad happened to the girl, of course—it wasn’t that kind of story. She had a series of wonderful adventures in a succession of fantastic lands, looked after all the way through by a pair of irreverent brownie companions who saw her safely home before her parents even became aware she was missing.
That was the image that came to Elora, of falling down the brownie barrow, as she tumbled backward head over heels in a succession of slow rolls down through the solid substance of the mountain. She’d sat attentively by Thorn’s side as he explained to her what a demon had once told him, how everything in existence was composed of incredibly tiny dots of matter, bound together by interlocking, invisible strands of energy. This combination of forces was overlaid one upon the other like a lattice, on a larger and larger scale until they manifested themselves as the forms and shapes of the world she knew. From the faint quavers she heard at the back of his voice, though, Elora couldn’t help wondering if he really believed all this. She certainly had a hard enough time comprehending it. He pointed to the stars in the sky and told her to imagine them as the foundation of creation, minute dots of brightness with incredibly vast spaces between them. Of course he was talking rubbish, she protested; anyone with half a brain and a single eye could see that solid was solid, period, exclamation point. End of story.
He laughed at her in genuine amusement, and related that he’d said much the same himself. Then he took a picture from his own traveling pouch, a perfectly adequate forest scene he’d collected from somewhere or other as a gift, and held it before her, asking what she saw. She told him: a forest glade, a pond, trees, a mating pair of swans, a stag and doe. As she spoke he brought the painting ever closer and gradually her voice trailed off, for what appeared to be solid blocks of color at a distance discorporated before her eyes, until finally she beheld an almost incomprehensible jumble of small colored dots. The subtleties and gradations of hue that she had seen were illusions, tricks of the eye brought about by all those separate and individual dots blurring together in her vision.
“It’s a matter of perception, really,” Thorn said, “and I suspect, a matter of faith. Reality is because we believe in it.”
“Bollocks,” was her reply, which earned her a modest glare and a spoken reprimand at such an unladylike comment.
The fact was, there were comparatively vast gaps in the fabric of what she preferred to think of as rock-solid matter, because Thorn could move through them. He’d taken her with him, more than once, and taught her the trick as well. She hadn’t practiced much since for fear of losing her concentration and finding herself trapped forever, like a fly in amber, only with the horrible thought that she might somehow remain alive and aware throughout that awful eternity.
So, earlier tonight, when she cast her consciousness into the physicality of the infant firedrake, she also passed along a message to the mountains themselves, apprising them of her intent and asking their aid. Now, in addition, she prayed for safe passage.
She let herself free-fall because that was the fastest and most effective means that came to mind of getting clear of Carig’s Gate. She didn’t know all that much about them, she’d been running mostly on instinct the whole time. As a result she wasn’t sure whether she’d disrupted the framing matrix, or if the temblors had shattered the lintels themselves, in time to prevent the emergence of the being Carig was Summoning. She refused to think of that entity, she thrust all recollection violent
ly from the forefront of her mind, afraid that even the merest conception of it might reestablish the link between them. Impossibly, her body tingled with the energies it had wrapped about her, ached to complete the dance they’d begun, wondered about the shape of its face and the feel of its flesh against hers.
Stop it, she cried in silence, taking refuge in the vehemence of her denial, even though she knew it was a lie.
She thrust out arms and legs to regain some measure of control over her descent in much the same way she’d perform underwater, the main difference being the density of the medium. She had no idea how long she’d been falling, or how far, but she had only the one breath to draw on, which meant there was no time to waste in returning to the surface.
Another tremor snapped past, sending ripples through the earth nearby. The movements appeared slow and lazy to her perceptions, which made the end result even more impressive. With due deliberation, strata were compressed and rock crushed to powder. Then, after the wave had moved on and the dynamic pressure relaxed, the incredible weight of the world above once more settled down upon it and squashed the seams even more flat than before.
Without warning, the structure of the crust around her collapsed, the state of the rock transformed in that blink of a moment from solid to molten liquid, and Elora found herself immersed in a current of fast-flowing lava. Somehow, though she remained blessedly impervious to harm, she was tangible enough to be acted upon.
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