Between Worlds: the Collected Ile-Rien and Cineth Stories (22 page)

“Here.” Giliead’s voice was quiet but tense, maybe
only ten paces away. Ilias bit the inside of his cheek to hold back a sob of
relief. “You see this too?”

“Yes,” Ilias managed to say, mostly evenly. “This isn’t--
Where are we?”

Maddeningly, Giliead countered with, “What do you see?”

Ilias gritted his teeth. “It’s all dark, the sky is
like black water. I can see the town, but it’s all wrong. Everything’s too big,
like it grew or I shrunk.” He turned slowly, feeling gritty stone under his
boots. He realized the midden pile under his feet was different; it was all
black gravel and rock now, the detritus vanished with the odor. And the rest of
the world. “The mountains go up forever.” They were like black glass, glinting
faintly, high above the canyons.
And that doesn’t make sense,
he
thought, sick. There was no light, nothing to make that faint silver
reflection. He shouldn’t be able to see at all.

“All right, that’s...good. I’m seeing what you’re
seeing.” Giliead sounded a little shaky. “Except I can also see the town, the
midden in daylight, just like it was a moment ago.” There was a faint crunch
and he heard Giliead swear. “This is like being hit on the head until you see
two of everything.”

Ilias turned toward the sound, his heart beating a
little easier. If Giliead could still see the real world, than this was just a
wizard’s illusion. Which meant there was a wizard nearby and Ilias was as good
as blind and Giliead nearly so, but they weren’t dead yet. Squinting, he
thought he could see Giliead as a distorted shape in the dark, about where he
had been standing before. “Is that you? Can you see me?”

“Uh, no. I can’t. Wait. Move, wave your arms or
something.” Ilias waved vigorously, and Giliead said in relief, “I can see you
in the dark world.” He added a little worriedly, “But not in the daylit world.”

“Oh, that’s...” That really wasn’t what Ilias wanted
to hear. He took a sharp breath, trying to get his pounding heart under
control. “What kind of curse is this?”

“It’s not a curse. I don’t feel a curse, I can’t see
any traces.” Giliead sounded uneasy and baffled. “It’s as if you’re somewhere
else, and I’m caught between.”

Not a curse
and
somewhere else
. Ilias tried to think about what that meant and stay
calm. It wasn’t easy. “Is this what happened to the Taerae?”

“That’s a good guess.” Ilias could hear Giliead
moving, turning, his boots crunching on the pebbles. “There,” Giliead said
suddenly.

Ilias turned, following what he thought was Gil’s
pointing arm, and saw a crumpled bundle on the ground. He started toward it,
but his boot slipped and he stumbled sideways, flailing to regain his balance. Giliead
said sharply, “You all right?”

“Yes, it’s the rock here. It’s like glass. Cuts like
it, too,” he added as he lifted his boot and felt the slit in the leather.

“It cut you?”

“Just my boot.” For a moment, Ilias didn’t understand
the tone of alarm in Giliead’s voice. Then cold realization hit. “This isn’t
some kind of dream, illusion, whatever. Things here can affect me. Maybe both
of us.”

He heard Giliead take a deep breath. “Just...be
careful.”

Careful,
Ilias thought,
if that’s the best advice he has...
They moved toward the
one thing visible that wasn’t black stone. It was a body, a man, dressed in the
rough kilt of a laborer. Giliead kept an eye on their surroundings, since he
was the only one who could see in both worlds, while Ilias nudged the body
cautiously with a boot, then rolled him over. He crouched down to look more
closely. The man was young, wearing copper earrings, his face and chest marked
with livid blue-black bruises. “He’s not breathing, but I don’t see a wound,”
Ilias said. He probed cautiously, wincing as he felt the give under his hand. “His
ribs are all caved in. Must have been beaten to death.” He looked up at Giliead.
“He’s cold, but not stiff or rotted. He doesn’t stink.”

Giliead grimaced. “Things must be different in this
place.”

“Things? The way the world works?” Ilias would have
felt a chill in his stomach if he wasn’t frozen solid down there already. But
it made a weird kind of sense. No sun, no wind, no time, no rot.

“There’s another body,” Giliead said quietly.

There was a trail of bodies. Ilias followed them
across the ground where the middens had been, up into the first street of the
weirdly altered town. Men, women, children. Some with open wounds, or crushed
skulls, though there wasn’t much blood. Ilias lifted a lifeless hand and found
bloody skin under the nails. “They did this to each other,” he said grimly.

“That was the curse,” Giliead said from somewhere
behind him.

Ilias had been reluctantly drawing the same
conclusion. “A curse, or madness, from being trapped here in the dark for days?”

“That was surely part of it. But they had help.” Giliead’s
voice hardened. “There.”

His skin creeping, Ilias turned to look.

Something was moving in and out of the abstract shapes
of the black glass doors and windows. It was amber-colored, shedding drifts of
mist. It seemed to turn and look at them, and Ilias caught a half-second
impression of a human face. Then it was turning away, drifting into the dark.

“That was a gul,” Giliead said, while Ilias was still
trying to find his voice.

“How--” Ilias started again, realized it was
pointless, and swallowed the words. “It didn’t look like a gul, but you could
tell it was one?”

“Yes.” Giliead’s eyes studied the dark intently. “There’s
more. A lot more. I think... We know what happens when a gul takes someone.”

“It eats them. It eats their soul, too, that’s why
there are never shades.” Ilias thought he could see other flickers in the dark
now, the black glass throwing colors that didn’t come from the sourceless
moonlight.

“What happens when a gul takes a wizard?”

“I--” Ilias remembered the stake outside the city’s
wall and his fear dissolved in a rush of angry annoyance. “They couldn’t have
been that stupid!” If you were going to kill a wizard, you had to do it
quickly, no matter how much you wanted to torture the bastard.

“Oh yes, they could have. And that arrogant. If his
soul is powerful enough to control the guls...” Giliead was still facing toward
the flickers of gul-light. “This happened to us when we were about to find the
sister’s body, to free her shade. He must not want it freed.”

“I did find it. Or at least I found somebody in there.
But he can’t talk to her, touch her. Can he?”

“I have no idea. I don’t even know if he took the guls
or if they took him.” Giliead turned slowly, looking out into the dark. “Let’s
go back to the sister’s body and see if there’s anything else there.”

“Uh.” Ilias faced the abstract landscape, all obsidian
and silver shadow. “Good luck with that.”

“This way.”

“I know the way, it’s just the midden isn’t here in
this--” Something huge moved above them in the dark and Ilias yelled a warning.
He dove sideways, landing badly on the sharp stone. Rolling to absorb the
shock, he came to his feet, hearing Giliead hit the ground and recover not far
away.

He sensed more wild movement in the dark and yelled
again to warn Giliead, ducking sideways as a clawed hand swiped for him. He
came back to his feet, dodged in and sliced at it with his sword. He felt a
satisfyingly meaty connect and the creature whipped away from him with an
ear-splitting shriek. He darted forward and out, swinging at it, and felt the
breeze as it grabbed for him again and missed.

He heard bootsteps and then Giliead was at his back. “Real
world or just here?” Ilias asked, breathless.

“Just here,” Giliead said grimly. “I think it’s a
curseling, created for this place.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” Ilias muttered. Darkness moved
above their heads and the creature made a strange sort of low whistling snarl,
giving Ilias a very creepy picture of what its mouth must look like. “Gil, I’ll
distract it, you go find her body.”

“Ilias--” Giliead snarled in frustration. But there
was no way to argue; Ilias wouldn’t be able to see the corpse, he couldn’t even
see the middens. “Just be careful!”

“No, really,” Ilias snapped. As Giliead bolted for the
middens, Ilias dodged forward, toward the moving darkness. He thrust the sword
upward and felt it bite into flesh. Something whipped around and knocked him
sideways, slamming him into the ground. He rolled away, but the dark shape
above him seemed to flow past, following Giliead.

Stumbling to his feet, feeling blood trickle down his
face, Ilias could just see the outline of Giliead moving frantically in the
dark area where the midden should be. “Look out, Gil, it’s after you! It--” He
blinked and there was someone standing over Giliead now, vivid and brilliant,
like one of the guls.

It was a young man, barely Ilias’ age, with bright
blond hair and a handsome face. He said, “Leave her alone. Haven’t you done
enough?”

Giliead kept digging, saying over his shoulder, “She’s
dead. Don’t you want her to rest?”

“I want her with me! I want her here!” the man
shouted.

“You got her killed!” Ilias yelled, hoping to distract
him. “You only brought her to make it easier for you to travel. If you loved
her, you would have left her behind.”

“Ilias, come here!” Giliead yelled sharply. Ilias didn’t
argue; he bolted toward Giliead. Something cold snatched at his arm, his hair,
the side of his face. He tore through it, twisting and flinging himself past
the clawlike hands. He landed hard at Giliead’s feet.

“You all right?” Giliead asked tensely, shoving
pebbles out of the way.

“Yes. What--”

“We’re surrounded by guls in the real world.”

“Oh, then it’s worse.” Ilias pushed himself up, back
aching from being slammed into the rock.

“He’s afraid.” His breath rough as he shoved at the
invisible debris, Giliead said, “Ilias, this isn’t a girl’s body.”

“What--” Then Ilias had it, too. The wizard was lying;
he wasn’t trying to keep the shade of his dead sister, he was trying to keep
his own shade. That was his body in the midden. “But guls don’t leave bodies.”

“I’m betting they left his,” Giliead said tightly. “Maybe
whatever curse he used to try to fight them kept them from consuming all of his
body. It’s given him a hold in their world, let him control them somehow. He
must need his shade to keep that control.”     

Ilias shifted, watching wispy shapes move in the
darkness. “Laodice said she didn’t think the Taerae would desecrate a girl’s
body like that. Maybe they didn’t even kill her.”

“Guls!” Giliead yelled.

“I’ve got them, just do it!” Ilias shoved to his feet,
and swung his sword in an arc. He felt it catch at something, as if he was
swinging at silk shrouds. The guls kept drawing back, trying to lure him
forward and away from Giliead. But that was the first lesson he had had pounded
into him as the brother of a Chosen Vessel, by his foster parents, by the older
Vessels who had taught Giliead, by the poet Bythia, by the Journals.
Whatever
you’re fighting, it’ll trick you, it’ll taunt you, it’ll try to get you away so
it can use you against him.
He had no intention of falling for that.

Then light exploded and Ilias yelped and flinched
back, his eyes dazzled. It was daylight, he realized a moment later, as
sensation flooded back. The wind, the rush of the river, the warmth of the sun
on his skin, the foul odor of the rotted garbage. The dark city was gone and he
was back in the real world, standing on the edge of a midden pile. Giliead was
behind him, crouched in the debris, a knife in his hand as he dropped the third
lock of hair onto the body in the midden. There were dead gul-bodies strewn
around them, small furry lumps; the live guls still looked like beautiful men
and women and had drawn back, watching them with wary malice. Ilias couldn’t
tell which was the wizard, until one moved forward and he saw its human eyes.

Giliead pushed to his feet. Breathing hard, he said to
it, “The Taerae didn’t kill your sister, did they? They weren’t that lost to
reason. They caught you, left you for the guls. They threw what was left of
your body here, but you didn’t need it anymore. When the gul ate your soul, you
took control of it, took control of all the guls here.”

The wizard didn’t answer, and the wizard-gul sank to
the ground, its body losing the alluring human form and turning lumpy and
misshapen. It looked like the monkey-thing they had seen in the lower pass,
except its belly was huge and distended.

The other guls were withdrawing, fading away into the
shadows. The wizard still didn’t answer, and Ilias asked carefully, “Why does
he look like that?”

Giliead was watching with a frown of concentration. “He
can’t control them anymore. Without his shade, all that’s left is...whatever
part of his soul and body that one ate.” He shifted his bow off his shoulder,
bent it to string, and nocked an arrow.

The misshapen gul was crawling away, twisting in pain.
Giliead’s arrow struck it behind the head. It shuddered and collapsed,
dissolving into a pool of black fluid.