Aeryn actually raised her hand out in front of her thinking to grab hold of it before her brain told her how silly that was. She felt her cheeks heat and was thankful no one but her and Jynx had seen what she had just tried to do.
Drifting was contemptuously easy. The world sprung into muted tones of grey and enabled her to wind her way ever deeper. Dodging fat spikes of rock jutting from the floor and ducking beneath lances hanging from the ceiling, she continued deeper into the strange underground world. As her blood settled, the surprisingly cold air began to seep through her clothes and into her bones.
Jumping over the stream of water when the path abruptly ended, she followed it as it zigzagged through a series of narrow cracks. A hundred feet and the walls pressing in on either side vanished, taking the ceiling with it. Aeryn stepped into a cavern large enough to encompass all of Merek’s estate back in Maerilin twice over.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” came Merek’s voice.
Aeryn nearly jumped out of her skin at hearing his voice. Unconsciously, her hand dove to the hilt of her knife. She spun in circles, squinting into the cavern to make out where he was. Unfortunately, the way his voice echoed off the walls and ceiling all at once made pinpointing him difficult. She finally spotted him a few paces further in near the meandering stream.
Dim gray, the cavern was certainly like nothing she had seen before, but its jagged spires made it look hauntingly horrible, like a nightmare come to life, ready to swallow her whole.
“That isn’t the word I’d use,” she said once she had recovered and her heart, thumping away in her chest, finally slowed.
“I haven’t been down here in years. Not since. . .”
As he trailed off, Aeryn felt more than heard steady breathing at her side. She took an involuntary step away and stepped on Jynx’s foot, who yelped.
“Sorry, Jynx,” Aeryn said quickly. Her voice echoed back to her ears as though a half-dozen Aeryns were standing about the vast cavern.
“This place plays tricks with sound,” Merek said as Aeryn knelt to see if Jynx was alright. “But to learn how to Drift between Planes, I’ve yet to find a better spot.”
“I know how to Dri— Wait. The Planes?”
Merek strode out into the cavern, stopping when he was roughly at the center. He stepped over the stream along the way, which wound like a snake across the smooth stone floor. “Remember how I said Drifting is more complicated than simply ‘melding with the darkness?’”
“Yeah,” Aeryn said as she and Jynx joined him. “You said I wouldn’t have to worry about it.”
“I said you wouldn’t have to worry about that for ‘some time.’ I think that time has come.”
“What’s this all about? Why are you teaching me in the first place?”
“I saw a street girl that could use some help.”
Aeryn shook her head. “You’ll have to do better than that; I would not have bought that line the first night we met. Besides, even if it was true, it doesn’t explain why you kept me around for so long.”
“You came to me, remember?” Merek said. “I had no choice.”
“Oh please. The moment I set foot through your door the night of that dinner party you wrapped my neck in a noose.”
“That was—“
“What about all this?” Aeryn gestured to encompass the cavern and the forest growing high above her head. Why bring me out here and spend so much effort teaching me if you just wanted to help a street girl?”
Merek sighed and faced her. “Tell you what. I’ll make you a promise. Learn what I have to teach then I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
Aeryn crossed her arms. “No. Tell me now.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Merek turned from her and stayed silent.
“Why not?” Aeryn asked more forcefully. “Is it because you don’t trust me? You may have nooses around my neck,” Lady Mareen, Jins, the Shades and everybody else would have to get in line behind Merek should he decide he wanted to make Aeryn dance, “but by the look of panic that crossed your face when that Shade called you out in my shack, the Shades, Voices, even Nameless, would give anything to learn more about you.”
Never mind that her once highly regarded blackmail would never have done any good. Difficult as it was to admit, Aeryn had realized she had never really had any power over the Lord. Oh, she could have started a few rumors, but no one that she could have told would have cared. Like her, they had all been too occupied with surviving. Only, that realization had spawned even more questions as to why Lord Merek had kept her around.
Merek rounded on her. “You might be surprised.”
That was not even close to the answer Aeryn was expecting. She waited for more but Merek stood quiet and solid as a rock wall. It seemed she had no choice.
“Fine,” Aeryn said. “You’ll tell me everything that involves me after I learn whatever it is you want me to?”
“Yes. I will tell you everything that involves you.”
“Then we better get started.”
Merek grinned. “Drifting,” he began without further ado, “actually has nothing to do with light or dark.”
“But—“
He held up a hand to forestall her objection. “Those are just the most visible and useful side effects. Drifting, as the name implies, is actually about moving between Planes: the Physical and Etheric Planes. The former is the one you are most familiar with, where light—pure light—like the sun, moon, and stars, are white. In the latter, which most people and animals never fully see, the sun, moon, and stars are actually pitch black. This cavern,” Merek spread his arms wide, palms up, “being utterly devoid of light in the Physical Plane, is bathed in light in the Etheric Plane.”
“Then why is everything dark gray?” Aeryn asked. “I’m Drifting right now else I would not be able to see an inch in any direction. The cavern isn’t even close to being bathed in light like you said.”
“That’s because you are in between the Planes. And not very far at that.”
“Just like everything in nature, it’s all about balance. No animal—and at its most basic, we humans are animals—can have everything. A draven,” he said with a glance to Jynx, “is fast, but is completely devoid of armor. A tortoise, on the other hand, is incredibly slow but so heavily armored it takes a blacksmith’s hammer to crack their shell. A mouse is tiny, able to be crushed by a child’s foot, and uses that to hide in the smallest of spaces, while a moose, a native of these forests, simply lumbers about in the open, ripe pickings for a pack of wolves. Thus, for every advantage there exists a distinct disadvantage.”
Aeryn was lost. “What does any of that have to do with Drifting?”
“I’m getting to that. Balance doesn’t exist just for animals, but for everything. Fire cannot be cold, water cannot be dry, light cannot be dark.”
“Uh, what?” Trying to understand that last part made Aeryn feel like she was drunk and trying to dance a jig while singing a tune and playing a lute all at the same time.
Merek just chuckled. “Either you’re in the Physical Plane and everything looks ‘normal,’ or you’re in the Etheric Plane and everything looks ‘opposite.’ Anything short of full immersion and all the colors, light and dark included, get muddled and turn out gray. It’s like you are half-tortoise, half-draven: you don’t fit into your shell anymore and your legs are too stumpy for you to be able to run.”
Aeryn narrowed her eyes. “Where did you learn all this?”
“A book, of course,” Merek answered with a smirk.
Aeryn noticed he failed to mention which book or where he got that book. She supposed it did not matter.
Only, she realized a moment later that it did matter. She only knew two groups of people that even knew what Drifting was. The first group encompassed Nameless and all his disciples. Shadows made up the second. And as far as Aeryn was aware, Nameless and his disciples guarded their secret by killing all Shadows they came across.
It all led to an inescapable conclusion: not only did Merek have a Shade or Voice working with him on the inside, but the only reason for him to stay hidden and for so long was that Merek was planning something. Something big. No, something huge. Something that would rock the very pillar Nameless and all his disciples sat upon. Why else would a Lord jeopardize not only his life, but the lives of everyone who knew him by killing a Shade?
“That,” Merek said with a twinkle in his eyes, obviously noticing the widening of Aeryn’s, “is a conversation I promised for later. After you learn what I have to teach. Now I want you to concentrate on the darkness around you. Do you feel it?”
Aeryn shook her head in an attempt to clear it. There was simply too much there for her to make sense of it all right now. She would need to sleep on it. “Yes,” she said once she had all her revelations tucked away nice and neatly, “I felt it when I first came in here.”
“Good. What you are feeling is actually the Etheric Plane. What I want you to do is to let your mind wander. Your mind will seem to separate from your body and float off into the darkness, free. Once it does, latch onto the feeling. Draw it in; fall into it and become one with it.”
That was about the vaguest, self-contradictory set of instructions Aeryn had ever received. Picking locks was about feeling the tumblers, but there at least she could hear them moving; she simply could not see them. Still, as she concentrated on the darkness, she got the strangest sensation that there actually was something else out there.
Her mind seemed to detach from her body. Without eyes, the feeling morphed, almost like she had begun using a set of eyes she had never known had existed, but at the same time, had always known were there. She floated in two places at once, her body in the cave, her mind. . . elsewhere.
She could not explain it. It was as if something was hidden in plain sight. There, but at the same time, not. The darkness and its polar opposite. The world she had known her entire life and the world she had only glimpsed.
She reached for it. The sensation collapsed.
“I can’t do it,” Aeryn said with a sigh. “I feel like it is right there at my fingertips, yet still impossibly far way.”
“You almost had it,” Merek said. “Right now you Drift by focusing on the darkness, but also letting yourself go. Take that to its extreme. Let go of everything while concentrating on the darkness.”
“How the bloody hell am I suppose to do that?” Still, Aeryn tried again. Focusing and let letting go. The two clashed and warred with one another. Every time she managed to focus, she forgot about letting go and vice versa.
“Let yourself go,” Merek said.
Aeryn lost concentration and the carven snapped back to a dark gray. “It’s bloody impossible. How am I supposed to let go and focus at the same time?”
“If it were easy, don’t you think more people would do it?” Merek ask. “Just there, you managed to do what takes most people years of training.”
“But all that happened was the cavern became a bit lighter.”
“Exactly. Give it another go. This time try imagining you are sneaking into my house.”
“Sneaking into your house?”
“Yes. You have to focus, else you’ll snag your clothes on a hinge or not register a creaking floorboard. At the same time, you need to let go, else you’ll never be limber enough to move without a sound.”
Now how did Merek know that? Aeryn wondered. She tried again, focusing on the sensation in the cavern to the exclusion of all else.
She stepped—that was not the word, but it felt right—she stepped into that other world with her mind. The weight of the thing surrounded her, suffused her every pore. The cavern snapped into color. Brilliant color. She gasped.
The teeth handing from the ceiling twinkled in crystal silver, scattering arcing rainbows across the cavern walls and floors, which themselves reflected off yellow-orange water. In a few places, the teeth above connected with those below, forming towering, many fluted spires that sat in the middle of a large, whisper still pool of blood red water, which was itself surrounded by beds of equally haunting luminescent moss.
The cavern melted back to dim gray as she lost focus. Aeryn felt as though a piece of her had been torn away even as her mind streamed back into her body. “It was. . .beautiful,” she whispered.
“I told you,” Merek said with a smile. “That’s enough for one day. Now come on, you don’t want to keep Gerald waiting for too long up top.”
Bloody hell! She had completely forgotten about Gerald. What was she going to do about the huntsman? “How about I stay here instead and practice some more. You did say you wanted me to learn.”
“I think your arms say otherwise. Besides, you still have a few hours left with Gerald before our lessons tonight.”
Aeryn looked down. The moment she saw the mountainous goosebumps on her arms, a frigid shiver ran through her body. She had forgotten about the biting chill air down here.
“I still have to work on letters tonight?” she asked, following Merek back through the twisting passageways. “Can’t we skip them for one night and come back here instead?”
“No.” Merek stepped over the small stream and made his way toward the sloping channel back to the forest. “It takes longer than a month to learn to read and write and,” he quirked his lips, “you can Drift quite a bit better than you can write.”
Aeryn purposefully exhaled as loud as she could. She had just found something worth all the months of hardship that had come before and she had to put it off for reading and writing lessons? All in all, she supposed it was a pretty good carrot to get her to learn faster.
As the debris-littered slope came into sight, a thunderous voice sounded down from above. “About time you got back. You’re not paying me to babysit a Lady all day, you know,” Gerald said.
Aeryn looked Merek. “You planned all this, didn’t you?”
Instead of responding, Merek shouted back, “It’s no wonder you never had a wife, Gerald; she’d run off the moment you turned your back.”
“Wait,” Aeryn said to Merek. “He doesn’t have a wife? I thought Hedy was his son?”
Gerald’s booming laughter came in response. “Don’t need a wife to make a son.”
“Some years back Gerald rescued a lass from a pack of wolves,” Merek explained. “She was so thankful she shared his bed for an entire year.”
“Then what happened?”
“What do you mean ‘then what happened?’” Merek said. “Look at the man. What else could happen? She had his child, came to her senses, realized she had exchanged a pack of wolves for a bear and promptly ran off.”
“Aye,” Gerald said with laugh seemed to shake the stones itself, “and a good thing too. I was becoming soft. Sitting around all day smelling her perfume, bathing, cutting my hair, my beard. . . Why I almost became a bloody Lord.”
Gerald, a Lord? Aeryn laughed, but only half as hard as Merek.
The huntsman clapped Merek on the back with one of his huge hands as the Lord stepped out into the forest. He rounded on Aeryn and gave her a look that could have made a boulder sprout legs and run away. “Now I seem to recall something about you ‘cutting me to pieces and feeding me to my dogs?’” Gerald asked, raising a single eyebrow and grinning from ear to ear.
Merek whistled and moved off in the direction of his estate, stepping over a pile of plucked and gutted pheasants, grouse, and even pair of fat turkeys. “Don’t let me keep you from it,” he called over his shoulder.
Aeryn tried to follow. A vice-like grip clo
sed around her upper arm.
“Where do you think you’re going, Lady?” Gerald asked. He glanced up to the tree canopy, which showed that she had been in the cave less than two hours. “The day is only half done.”
Aeryn took a deep breath. This was going to be a long, painful day. Her stomach sank as she recalled something Merek had said minutes ago: “. . .takes most people years of training.”
She turned back—not that she had a choice—and resolved she would learn everything she could as quickly as possible. Hell, it would almost be worth the effort just to wipe away that predatory gleam from the huntsman’s eyes.
12
Predators
As the days marched by, Aeryn fell into a comfortable routine. Rise, follow Gerald around the woods, practice Drifting with Merek, read, write, then fall asleep so she was ready to repeat the process all over again. Of course, there were all sorts of little niceties strewn in there like eating, bathing, and best of all, lounging around doing absolutely nothing. That was not to say that the latter happened all that often. Gerald and Merek kept her quite busy.
Rising from the small table where she had been honing her knife—if there was one sure fire way of making Gerald mad, it was not taking care of her knife—Aeryn undressed to her small clothes and readied herself for bed.
Before sliding beneath the covers, she washed her face. At first she had only done it to keep her sheets from becoming covered in dirt, sweat and oil, but it had soon become a habit. A habit that unless performed nightly, would keep her lying awake, fixating on how she could use a bath. And baths! She could hardly go a week anymore without one of those.
Speaking of baths. . . Aeryn glanced at the dirty water in the washbasin and frowned. Was it too late to call for one? And perhaps have the serving girls bring up another tray of bread with them while they were at it? Earlier, Merek’s cook had made a mouth-watering selection of eggs and ham, potatoes and carrots, venison and steak that she had eaten by the plateful. How had she ever survived back on the streets of Maerilin eating hard, crusty week-old bread?
Shadowborn Page 17