Falling Off the Face of the Earth, Page 3

in through her eyes to something meaningful. Imagining the sounds the Second Realm could not provide helped. Birdsong to greet the dawn. The soft susurrus of wind through leaves that suggested that jumble of reds and oranges was a rosebush.

  She looked around for Chag, only to have to dive out of the way as an indistinct animal shape charged. Long and lithe, it flowed across the ground without seeming to put a foot down. Her heart surged; whatever the creature was, it was no species of Wilder she knew. A predator, from the way it came at her again.

  Pevan threw herself sideways, hit a patch of blue that she let burst over her into water. Swimming, she might stand a chance of escape. Where was the Sherim? Without Rel or one of the Warders, the predator would kill her easily.

  She sank into the... bubble? Pool? Eyes closed, she lost track of where her horizon had been. 'Down' vanished, just as she felt the predator drag a rip current through the water by her legs. She kicked out hard with both feet, the gesture part attack and part swim; her head broke the surface. She opened her eyes and breathed the not-air of the Second Realm.

  No sign of the predator. Automatically, Pevan restarted the process of making sense of the wild Realmspace in front of her, but before she'd even found a horizon that fitted, something broke the surface beside her with a violent splash. She flailed her arms, trying to get away, but reason caught up and identified him as Chag before she could make too much of a fool of herself.

  He shook his head, his hair spraying her with a cold that was somehow worse than the pond they were immersed in. Careful to keep her voice low, her speech directed past rather than at him, she said, "Predator. Below."

  The words spun lazily past his face, an incandescent colour that was almost blue. He flinched, and for a moment wore a collar of ripples that tickled Pevan as it brushed past her. Chag said, "That was me." The sounds came out as a cloud of red-brown dust, and Pevan ducked her head under the water to keep from inhaling it.

  As she surfaced, she realised Chag had done the same. He shot her an apologetic glance and she answered with a shrug.

  "You were mapping wrong. I had to shake you out of it." This time, his muted voice, clipped short of his usual drawl, gave the words wings, and they sped away into the unrationalised madness beyond the pool. Pevan dragged her eyes back from them before she could be sucked into another interpretive mistake. Once you found a pattern that made sense of the Second Realm, it was very hard to shake free of it. If she wanted to follow Chag, she needed to accept his map.

  She nodded to him and lifted her hands out of the water to make the hand-over-hand gesture for him to take control. He signed acceptance, almost slipping under the surface as he did so - his splutters birthed a cloud of butterflies whose wings bore images of Pevan's face - and turned away. She felt rather than heard his shouts, rippling through the Realm in waves of pure human concept. The sounds distorted past comprehension, but she could follow the meaning from their effects.

  Beach, and the broad swathe of yellow became a low, hummocked slope of sand. Jungle; behind it, a wild scrawl of greens reared up into trees, rich with exotic fruits and draped in enormous flowers in shades of pink and cream. A wave rolled forward, carrying them towards the shore. The faint tang of salt in her nostrils was all the warning Pevan got before undertow sucked her briefly below the surface.

  She came up spitting acrid water and struck out toward the sand, kicking awkwardly with her legs and trying not to wonder what Chag would think of her poor form. Fortunately, before long her paddling hands struck coarse sand. The next wave drove her onto land, only an outstretched arm keeping her from a mouthful of beach.

  Firm beneath her, the sand scratched as she crawled up out of reach of the surf. The texture surprised her, an odd mix of concrete roughness and the malleability of soft earth. It clung to her skin and clothes, packing under her fingernails in a way that denied the possibility of ever feeling clean again. She pushed to her feet and stood dripping in the bright sunless daylight of the Second Realm.

  She rubbed her hands, trying to get the sand off, but it felt like it was taking her skin off with it. Chag came up beside her, his boots squelching. "Let it dry. It'll just drop off." His words came as a shimmering ribbon that floated gently downward. They stepped back to keep clear.

  Pevan nodded, even as she automatically patted at her blouse, scrubbing uselessly at the muck. Wet and separate from the beach, it was more grey-brown than yellow. She gestured for him to lead on, and followed him up towards the trees. Chag limped, stumbling whenever the dry sand shifted. Once, she reached out to steady him, her wrist twinging sharply as she caught his weight.

  The tree-line was further than she'd expected, and though there was no sun in the sky, the warmth of the beach dried her off in short order. She barely needed to touch her hands together to dislodge the sand, and beneath it her skin felt softer. She shook out her blouse as best she could without taking it off - small chance of that, with Chag right next to her - and the sand cascaded out of it.

  Glare reflected from the beach made her squint, but she judged it a fair price for the warmth that flowed into her. By the time they reached the trees, Pevan found she was sweating. She tugged at her blouse, trying to generate some airflow, then caught the drift of Chag's eyes and snapped a hand to her chest. She stabbed at him with an angry look, but he'd already turned away, and the misery on his face could have been disappointment just as much as shame.

  She was just getting over the flush of embarrassment when the little man turned back to her, his face stiff with formality. He gestured a flat circle with one upraised finger, then pointed to himself; follow me exactly. Another pointing finger identified the nearest tree, told her they'd be climbing it. But how? It had no branches, the ridged trunk shooting straight up for what had to be at least a hundred feet.

  Chag went up it as easily as if it were a ladder all the same. It took Pevan a moment to figure out how he'd done it, but when she put her hands on the trunk, she found the ridges ran deeper and thicker than they looked, deep enough to take her fingers comfortably, thick enough that she could, albeit awkwardly, get purchase with her boots.

  As she climbed, the ridges grew wider and flatter, turning into a ladder of slots cut into the surface. The canopy fled ahead of them faster than Pevan could climb, though above her Chag seemed on the verge of touching it - not that it would necessarily seem so to him; his ten-foot lead on her meant he might be seeing anything at all up there.

  With a start, Pevan realised she wasn't holding on to the rungs of the ladder anymore; the bark under her hands had become a path of rough, uneven rock. It bruised her knees as she crawled. She looked back, found that the yellow beach had blurred to a sunset orange, the sea above it become the deep indigo of an evening sky.

  She began to push to her feet, but Chag waved an urgent hand for her not to. She shot him a frown, but he repeated the 'follow exactly' gesture, his face set hard. Pevan knelt back down, enduring the discomfort of the abrasive surface as she resumed crawling.

  A moment later, she found out why crawling was preferable. Her sense of up and down disappeared altogether as the Realm at the edges of her vision went dark. Her weight vanished, and she scrabbled desperately to grab some lump on the bark, fighting the impression that she might just drift away into chaotic space.

  Pevan got her breathing back under control, looked up again and yelped. Chag had turned into a giant fly. At least, she hoped it was him. There was a patch of human skin sandwiched between the glittering eyes and black mandibles whose contours matched the little man's narrow, angular nose, and the fur at the back of its head looked straggly enough.

  None of which was enough to stop Pevan's skin crawling fit to slip clean off her. She tried not to look too hard at the jagged, glistening mouthparts. Iridescent, shining in greens and pinks, the creature's wings must have spanned at least six feet. Which, she noted in horrified amusement, matched the number of its legs, black rods of chitin in too many segments. How many knees did one creature n
eed?

  Worse still were the thick brown hairs scattered up and down the limbs, waving lazily in an otherwise-imperceptible breeze. They alone were enough to make Pevan sure she never wanted to be touched by Chag ever again. Her stomach turned even as she finished the thought. She couldn’t help cringing as he reached up with one leg and awkwardly mimed a ditto - copy me.

  Revulsion made finding the concentration to cram herself into the right shape nearly impossible. Every hair on her body seemed to stand on end, a feverish inflammation at every root. Her eyesight blurred as her eyes bulged, then resettled into a jewelled, fractured pattern as if she looked through a hundred tiny windows at once. Her wings, when they sprouted, gave her none of the sense of power she was used to from her Second-Realm wings. At least they were shot through with the same scarlet she'd worked so hard to perfect.

  She fluttered them experimentally, and buzzed in alarm when they almost yanked her off the tree. The sound burrowed into the wood, but not before Chag could flinch backward. For a moment, his foreleg became an arm, half-raised to protect his face. Somehow, the displaced limb was far grosser than the rest of him as a fly. Pevan's stomach turned back over.

  Thankfully, Chag took that