Chapter 12
Three Doors
Always night on the other side undersold the situation. It wasn’t just dark. There was no light at all beyond the flames pulsing against their chests. It was enough to see a handful of steps ahead on the path but little else.
Elloven handed him a talisman right away, but as he turned the tiny wooden statue in his hands, Jesstin found no comfort.
“Put it away.” Fear undercut her words. “Jesstin, if you drop it, we only have mine.”
“Yeah,” he muttered and shoved it into his deepest pocket. She’d been cold since the tense conversation about Gennady, and there wasn’t anything he could say that mattered more than their imminent survival.
Entering the gates had been their riskiest move yet, but they had nowhere else to go.
Neither the sickness in his belly nor the dread in his chest offered anything but distraction, so he ignored them, same as he continued to ignore the intermittent whispers to swing, swing, swing, which had become increasingly more frequent.
Elloven suddenly leaped toward him, then jumped sideways, hopping in a haphazard dance. “Do you hear... Oh, they’re everywhere... They’re...” She flapped her hands around her like she was being swarmed by a flock of birds, shrieking and screaming.
“What? The whispers?” Jesstin followed her movements, unsure what to do.
“What whispers?” Elloven screamed again, and he grabbed her from the side.
“What are you hearing?” he asked, as calmly as he could with her thrashing in his arms.
Her next scream could have raised the dead. “Everything, the fiends. Everything, everything. How can you not hear it all?”
Jesstin pinned her to his chest and clamped his hands over her ears. They’d hardly gone fifty feet. The gate no longer existed. Darkness enclosed them on all sides. “Can you block it out?”
“You try blocking out a thousand voices all calling your name!”
He had. In Rivenholde. “What are they saying?”
“I don’t know!”
Jesstin couldn’t hear what was driving her to madness, but he suspected he knew who—what—was behind it. “Do you recognize any of them?”
“Would you know one voice in a thousand?” Elloven ground her face against his flame with a distressed moan. “You really don’t hear them?”
Jesstin shook his head and kissed the top of hers. “We can wait for it to pass—”
An object whistled past his ear, then another.
Jesstin whipped around as more and more unknown things were hurled around them, but the darkness obscured everything.
Elloven howled into his chest, and her panic grew louder and louder as the air became even more hostile. Something struck him hard in the arm.
“Are you doing this?” he said close to her ear.
Elloven broke free and scurried back, arms straight at her sides as she screeched with her whole soul.
“Your chaos magic...” Jesstin rushed back to her. “Elloven, your magic. It’s working! It works here.”
She stared at him like he was a stranger. The delusion in her eyes gradually went away as her breathing normalized. “They’re... gone.”
He crushed a kiss to her forehead. “You did that.”
Elloven gawped at her hands. Her eyes turned up. He saw what was happening and caught her as she went down.
“Swing, swing, swing.”
Maybe it was better for her to be unconscious for a bit, if her magic was going to drive her insane.
He hoisted Elloven over his shoulder, tested that she was secure, and continued.
Something grabbed his leg. He kicked, and a pale.
.. golem—that was the only term that came to mind, a hunched golem—went squealing and flying into the darkness.
He nearly stepped on another, and a third sprang on him from behind.
He shifted Elloven to balance her with one hand and swatted blindly with the other.
He planted his boots as he trudged on. The solid earth would ground him. One heavy step. Two heavy steps. His hand stood ready to repel whatever leaped at him next from the void. Several brushed by his leg, one setting him off course, but he toiled forward until the wind stirred around him.
The force set him off course, and he had to hold Elloven with both hands. He couldn’t remember wind that had ever stung quite like that... nor did air buzz. But he knew what did.
Jesstin closed his eyes against the battering. Golems pawed at his calves and affixed to his boots. Insects bit and pierced through their deluge. He regretted the moment he looked up, because what could he possibly do about the droplets of fire raining upon them?
The stench of rotting sulfur mixed with proliferate mold flooded his senses, and the only thing keeping him from gagging was the thought of what he might allow in if he opened his mouth.
The shrieks of simulcra and vigils had joined the assault, and they were close, as close as they could get with the talismans in their pockets, closer than they had ever been allowed to come to the havres or cloisters.
His next step sank, and he recoiled just before the molten ground could swallow his boot.
The fire from above had turned the landscape into endless lava, broken up only by spots of solid, obsidian rock.
It was like the game he and Gennady had played as boys, when they’d mark the ground with sticks and have to leap from one safe spot to the next.
They hadn’t even seen lava, couldn’t even be sure it was real, beyond the stories of the erupting mountains in the forsaken peninsula of the Wastelands, but it was real now. Real enough to matter.
Jesstin gripped Elloven as tight as he could without losing balance and jumped blindly to the next solid rock. He could see only the edges of the next as he leaped again, each landing a gamble.
He shifted her again and popped the buttons on his shirt until his flame was exposed.
Its illumination offered more options. He chose the rock closest, and then the next, until he was hopping with less hesitation.
He could almost disregard the insects and the preternatural creatures clawing for his demise.
Even the voice, swing, swing, swing, wasn’t loud enough to be anything more than an irritant.
But he was damn near certain of one thing. If the map was an honest indicator, they were still far from the center of the spiral. They couldn’t endure this coordinated violence for hours, let alone days. Weeks.
“Swing, swing, swing. You killed her.”
The last part was new.
Shrill cries assaulted his ears. Heat singed his boots. He was convinced if he looked down, he’d see them melting away, so he focused on the path. Magma turned to rock, then back to magma. Elloven whimpered, but it was the only sound she made, and she was otherwise dead weight on his shoulder.
“Swing. Swing. Swing.”
“You killed her.”
Sweat blurred his field of vision, but both of his hands were busy, one swatting, the other gripping Elloven. He hazarded opening his mouth for a quick, deep breath and was punished with a mouthful of buzzing insects, half of which he swallowed in his panic.
Jesstin sputtered more away right as the ground fell out.
Instinct alone kept Elloven pinned to his shoulder.
The descent was too swift to do anything but crush her close, close his eyes, and wait for the current horror to pass.
But the forceful momentum gradually ripped her away from him, until he was only clawing at air.
He screamed her name as she floated away into darkness, the sound devoured by the hissing tumult.
He braced for an inevitable crater, but the landing was soft and pillowy.
He bounced, made another gentle touchdown, and bounced again and again.
He lost consciousness somewhere in the tumbling, but awoke still bouncing.
Dark turned to light and back to dark—unrelenting, unpredictable—and on it went.
Elloven was nowhere among the confusion. He couldn’t feel her near. The burning strain in his throat made him realize he hadn’t stopped screaming for her.
The tumbling came to an end. He was no longer in the air, but there was a weightlessness to him that made no sense. He slapped the “ground,” which was more like treated cotton but lighter. It felt like what a—
It feels like what I imagine a cloud to be.
Jesstin opened his eyes. A cloud was exactly what he appeared to be sitting on.
There were many others around it, and he could see far now, quite far.
The grating brilliance made him feel close to the sun but without the mawkish heat of the igneous ground.
The surface was far from stable, but he stood anyway and was surprised to find he had no trouble with balance. He shielded his eyes to continue searching for Elloven, but the sight ahead of him made him forget everything else.
Three doors hovered above the cloud, each adorned with swirling, moving stripes. One was black and white, the second red and purple, and the last blue and yellow. The illusion made his eyes cross, but his pulse... His pulse was a step ahead, because he knew those stripes, those discordant twirls.
The Conductor had found them. Probably, it had never lost them. They’d taken something it valued, and now it had taken from Jesstin.
He started toward the doors, but his feet stuck. They were wedged in something, like mud, and when he looked down, he found it was mud, brackish and filled with broken twigs and leaves and vines.
The doors were gone. The cloud was gone. It was twilight, muted and mossy. He was standing in a swamp, which he knew only from the pictures drawn in Asterin’s books, for he’d never actually been in one. He’d never been on a cloud before either, but he’d known it just the same.