by Krista Walsh
Jeff’s feet went numb again, and then his calves, up to his knees. He heard his friends scream his name, heard strange voices shout in despair as they lost their sacrifice and their idol.
“Jeff!” He heard Cassie call his name again, and a different pain shot through him. Looking up, he caught her gaze, saw the tears fall onto her cheeks. Ariana held her, Jasmine coming up behind, twisting around as if to find something to haul him back.
But Jeff knew there was nothing. At least now they would be safe from one threat.
With that final thought, Jeff smiled in a grimace, happy his last gesture was to fuck up Raul’s followers’ plans.
He tightened his grip on the binding spell, leashed himself to Raul, and then stopped fighting against the vortex and allowed it to swallow him, taking the binding spell and the stone dragon with him into the void.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jeff floated in the nothingness.
Is this death?
He hoped not. If floating around in darkness was all that awaited him in the afterlife, it would be worse than rotting in the ground.
I’ll go insane with boredom.
Can a person worry about being bored if he’s dead?
Maybe this is purgatory. Or some kind of dull waiting room. Without the Muzak.
Jeff wished the multiple voices in his head would stop talking so he could think. Or not think. He didn’t know what he wanted or what was going on, or how long he had been floating in the void.
A light appeared in the distance and the situation made more sense.
This is the tunnel. And that’s the light at the end of it.
He looked around, saw no other lights towards which to float, so opted for that one. Better to have some sort of destination than none at all.
The light grew larger as he got closer, and he closed his eyes against the brightness, finding it strange that it should still bother him.
Did the senses keep working right up until the end?
When is my life supposed to flash before my eyes?
He waited, braced himself for the end, and headed into the light.
Chapter Twenty-Six
He passed through, expecting oblivion, but met with the cold ground instead. Opening his eyes, he looked around, experiencing a series of emotions: confusion, wonder, shock, awe. The stabbing pain in his side strapped him to reality. He wasn’t dead. The nothingness had probably lasted all of five seconds as he travelled through the rift, and now he was trapped on the other side of the veil. Just like Raul had been before Jeff introduced him in Evensong.
Unlike his villain, Jeff had no magical know-how to get himself out.
He brushed himself off and eased onto shaking legs. His side shot pain through the rest of his gut, and he pressed his hand over the wound under his downy coat. If only Canadian winter coats were designed to fend off swords, he’d be in a better position. Without medical attention, he would likely bleed to death.
Unless he froze to death first.
Even with his coat on, he shivered against the chill in the air around him.
Around him.
He took the time to consider where he was, because under the pressing reality of his stab wound, his surroundings had eluded his rational mind.
He hadn’t moved at all.
The Kinnaeth Mountains, although drab in colour compared to the real thing, stood to his right, and a shimmer of cottage sat behind him. He blinked to clear his vision, but the cottage didn’t come into focus, like a wavering mirage.
Not too far ahead, a more real-looking cottage lay on its back, the porch facing upwards, with a sad uprooted oak tree beside it.
Other shapes lay unmoving on the ground, but Jeff didn’t need to get closer to know they were the corpses of soldiers and Raul’s followers that had also been snatched away by the tear in the universe.
The snow beside him began to hiss and steam as it melted, and he glanced down to see various colours leaking through the bottom of the satchel. Seeing no immediate need to defend himself, and not certain he’d want to reach his hand into the broken vials’ contents anyway, he pulled the satchel over his head and tossed it aside, jumping as another vial broke and the leather shrivelled and popped into a blackened bundle.
Jeff buried his head in his hands to clear the cobwebs, and took three slow, deep breaths. His heart slowed its hammering, but as he calmed down, the pain in his side increased.
That’s hardly better.
To distract himself, he looked around again, thinking of the last time he’d been transported somewhere unexpected.
Could it be?
“Kay? Aya? Lan? I don’t suppose you guys are here, are you? Is this one of your not-so-cute tricks? A last ditch effort to save my life by pulling me out of the vortex and into this place, and now you’re going to appear around me, do your little speech thing, stitch up my side, and bring me back to the Keep?”
He waited, half-expecting them to do just that, and when they didn’t, his shoulders slumped with disappointment. A long shot, but his best chance to get home soon and in one piece.
What was the point of those women, anyway, if they couldn’t pop into another dimension and rescue him?
Ah well. From what I saw when I left, the vortex will continue to open and their entire precious forest will be swallowed up. Then maybe they’ll regret not stepping in to help.
An echo of murmurings up ahead pulled Jeff out of his bitter musings, and assured him that, if not about to be pulled out of an illusion, at least he wasn’t alone. Not everyone else that made it through the rift was dead. Some had survived, just as he had.
He tripped over something buried in the snow and landed on his knees, sinking up to his wrists. Finding his balance in the uneven snowbank, he got to his feet and brushed the snow off what had tripped him.
A bone.
A very large bone that looked to be a claw.
He ignored the red smears that now stained the snow where he’d fallen, preferring not to think about what it meant for his future in this parallel universe, and looked around at the various other lumps—the colour of the bones blending with the snow to look like large dunes.
Raul had been disassembled. Whatever magic his followers had woven, it hadn’t lingered on the other side.
Small miracles.
Content and sleepy, Jeff shuffled towards the voices.
“Hello?” he called.
The chances that the voices ahead were some of Raul’s people and not his own allies only occurred to him after he’d called out.
“Who’s there?” a voice called back.
What a silly question, Jeff thought. Did it matter who he was? They were all in the same horrible trapped situation. Better to make friends and make the most of it.
He laughed and wondered if he wasn’t going loopy with blood loss.
His vision swam again and once more he tripped, this time over his own two feet. Falling forward, he found he didn’t have the energy to haul himself back up.
What the hell. Snow is soft. He hugged a ball of it towards him to create a pillow.
“Whoa, buddy, you all right?”
Jeff waved the man to go away, perfectly happy in his little snow-made bed.
“Don’t fall asleep on me now. Let’s get you—okay, you’re bleeding. Even more reason to get you someplace warm. Come on.”
Jeff groaned as the man pulled on his arm and tugged him to his feet, throwing him over his shoulder. He kept his eyes closed against the swaying as the man carried him through the snow. The sound of his steps changed from a crunch to a stomp as they reached something wooden, and then more jarring as they climbed what must have been stairs.
“Joly, help me get this guy down. He’s hurt.”
Jeff was passed from one man to another, and gently lowered into what had to be the upended cottage. Inside, the air was warm, and he heard the crackle of fire, giving off the soul-warming smell of burning wood.
This would be a better place to s
leep than the snow. The man had been right about that.
“Help me take off his coat.”
Jeff gave another groan that culminated in a yelp as they jostled him, the wound pulling open.
“We got a bleeder. Get me my satchel. Perfect, thanks. All right, let’s see what we have.”
They opened his shirt, stripped him to his waist, and Jeff shivered in spite of the fire, his body goose-pimpled. They covered his right side with a blanket, leaving the injured left exposed for the man’s examination.
“Looks like it went clean through, at least. A deliberate thrust, but whatever the person was hoping it hit, I doubt it did. You’d be dead by now if it got anything important.”
Through the pain and delirium, Jeff mentally rolled his eyes at the attempt at humour on his behalf.
“Lucky for you a healer got sucked into the hole, or that snow pillow would have been your last resting place. Hand me that bottle right there? Thanks.”
“Do I want to watch this part?” the second voice said, presumably Joly.
“Watch it or not, I’ll need you to hold him down.”
Jeff cringed, not liking what those words implied.
“All right, guy, this is going to hurt as if the seven suns of Altolis were climbing through your body, but I need to clean the wound. So far as I can tell, we’re the only people here, so scream if you need to—and trust me, you’ll need to—just try not to move too much.”
Taking the healer’s advice, Jeff began to scream as soon as the liquid hit his side. Worse than the trillion stinging bees in Corban’s healing ward, this felt as if Darcy were stabbing him again and again with tiny little swords that got him right at the core of every molecule in his body. He tried to get away, but the healer sat on his legs, and Joly held down his arms, so he could do nothing but squirm until he was too tired to move.
On the second dose, the pain was a little less, and the third time a little less than that, although it never became pleasant. Finally, the man must have been satisfied, because Jeff heard the stopper go back on the bottle, and Joly let go.
“The hard part is done, I promise,” said the healer. “I’m Philian, by the way. Call me Phil.”
“Thanks, Phil,” Jeff rasped.
“We didn’t meet last time, but I apprentice under Corban. He won’t be happy when he hears you’ve gone and nearly killed yourself again.”
Jeff squinted one eye open to see a young man with blue eyes, a charming smile, and floppy blond hair that fell into his face where it wasn’t tied up in the back. “If you work with Corban, why didn’t you have the bees? What’s with the seven suns of Altoid or whatever?”
Phil grinned. “The blue salve is for poison, this just cleans the wound. My personal concoction. Be grateful I didn’t need both.”
Jeff grunted and closed his eyes again. Assured he wasn’t about to die, now he really did want to sleep.
“We’re not done yet, we still need to bind you up.”
At the words, Jeff reached for the pouch at his waist, strangely sad to find it gone, lost somewhere in his travels. Maybe, like the followers’ spell on the dragon, the binding spell didn’t survive across the rift? He’d come to find comfort in the blue smoke at his waist—kind of like the old aunt that hugs so tight you can’t breathe, but you know she only does it because that’s her way. Now it was gone, and he’d lost yet another connection to another world.
All this world jumping. Jeff Powell, you were just not meant to stay on one plane.
Nope, said the second voice. Determined to cause trouble and fuck up wherever you go.
He hushed that second voice, the one that usually got him into trouble in the first place, and focused on Phil’s careful handling. He stitched the wound first—not a comfortable experience, but compared to the cleaning, it felt like an afternoon at the spa—and then wrapped a bandage around Jeff’s waist.
“That should do it. Not like we have anywhere important to go, but try not to move around too much until that starts to heal.”
Jeff barely had a chance to thank him before he fell asleep.
***
When he woke up again, the air was cooler, and no voices kept him company. For a minute he forgot where he was, until he opened his eyes and found himself lying in a pile of blankets on the wall with the front door above him.
Right. Vortex.
Everything came to him in one swoop, and he closed his eyes to stop the spinning nausea as a new wave of pain coursed through him from the hole in his side.
A quick look around confirmed his first deduction that the cottage was empty, but although the fire in the make-shift pit was low, it hadn’t yet burned out. Hopefully the people who saved his life would be back. At the very least so he could thank them properly.
He took his time rising up onto his elbows, scooching the pillows back so he could rest against the ceiling.
Now it would be a matter of deciding what to do. Make a life here in this dimension with any other survivors he could find? Not like they could roll over and die. If it were that easy, he’d have done it in the jail cell in Treevale what felt like oh-so-long-ago now.
He cocked his head as voices approached the cottage. His first instinct was to pull the blankets up to his chin to blend in with the ceiling in case it was enemy and not friend, but before too long he heard Phil’s laugh and relaxed.
They climbed through the door and dropped into the cottage, a couple of rabbit carcasses slung over Joly’s shoulder. In person, the man matched the voice Jeff had heard, a lumbering man with short-cropped hair, tree-trunk arms, and a face that suggested he’d seen more than a few major fights.
Jeff grimaced at the thought of watching him carve the rabbits, but his stomach grumbled at the idea of fresh cooked meat.
“Oh good, you’re awake,” said Phil. “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” Jeff was happy to reply. “Your thousand-suns thing worked well.”
“I told you. It won’t make me any friends, but it will lead to more satisfied customers. And living ones, which some people think is more important. Can you move?”
Jeff twisted around, but couldn’t get very far. “Let’s go with no.”
“That’s fine. Joly and I took a bit of a walk this morning to see what we could find. We’re not really sure we understand where we are, but we didn’t find anyone else wandering around. Strikes me as a little odd. We weren’t the only people to get caught up.”
Jeff wondered about that. “The vortex is a rift between dimensions. Maybe not everyone ends up in the same one? It would be just the douchebaggy thing I’d expect a rift between dimensions to do.”
Joly sniffed and set to work skinning the rabbits. Fortunately, he kept his back to Jeff so he didn’t have to see the process by which his food would be made.
“A rift?” Phil repeated, tapping his finger against his bottom lip. “I think I’ve read about them somewhere. Isn’t that where Raul disappeared to?”
Jeff nodded. “For five years. It’s caused by too much magic in one area, or so I’m told. So if there’s a lot of energy brewing, playing with forces beyond people’s understanding, et cetera, et cetera, these holes open up. I didn’t really get it before, but know that I’m here, it’s kind of cool. In a really crappy kind of way.”
Phil’s expression grew more furrowed as he lapsed deeper into thought. “But Raul managed to find his way back.”
“Magic,” Jeff explained. “He found a way to create a doorway back into the other world.” His hopes rose. “Do either of you know magic?”
“Nope,” said Joly without looking up from his task.
“Unfortunately, neither do I,” said Phil, and Jeff’s flare of hope disappeared. “So I suppose, for the time being, until we come up with a better idea, we’re stuck.” He looked around. “I’d rather not be stuck here of all places, but until you’re able to move on your own, I’m afraid we have no choice.”
Jeff didn’t say it aloud, but he was grateful Phil did
n’t suggest they leave him to fend for himself while they went in search of greener pastures.
“If I might make a suggestion,” Jeff said. “Feldall’s Keep should only be three days from here. I guess a little longer since we don’t have horses. But it could be the best bet for a solid roof over our heads. Unless Kariel’s is closer?”
Phil considered. “Feldall is probably the better option. But will we be able to find a place to stay? Joly and I tried to get into the cottages that exist but don’t exist, and you can’t actually touch them. They’re ghosts of what’s on the other side. The only solid structures are the ones that got sucked through themselves.”
Jeff thought. “I know of a couple vortices that opened around the Keep. One right at the gates themselves.”
Swish. His words triggered another hope flare, and even if Phil had disagreed about Feldall, Jeff didn’t think he could go anywhere else. Was it possible Swish had made his way through?
Swallowing his impatience to find out, he tried to stay calm and said, “There’s probably something between here and there that’s more secure than climbing through the ceiling to get in and out.”
“Joly?” Phil asked.
The large man shrugged. “Makes no difference to me. Not getting snow in the fire would be a nice change.”
With a plan before them, they had nothing to do but pass the time and wait for Jeff to get better. With Phil on hand, that process was surprisingly quick. A daily dose of the seven suns of Altolis—which Phil explained was a metaphor from some kind of mythological story—and new wrappings, and after a week, Jeff was able to stand up and walk for short distances.
They neither saw nor heard any other people during their stay, but Jeff considered himself fortunate in his companions. Joly was a man of few words, but smart and quick, and willing to do the cooking, and Philian had charisma, just like Corban, as well as a tendency to lick weird plants and bury his nose in his journal. “Research,” he called it, but if he hoped to test any of that “research” on Jeff’s injury, the guy had another thing coming.