The Touchstone Trilogy (17 page)

"Gates, particularly the ones you tore wider, are the most dangerous points in the spaces, because the threat on the far side cannot be clearly gauged.  If this side is clear, I will go through and you will wait without moving until I signal you to come through.  Do not come through without my signal unless you are in immediate danger of attack on this side.  Should we need to run, above all things stay close to me, no matter where I run.  Do you understand?"

"I tore gate?" I asked, staring down at all the monsters he'd had to kill, just at this one spot.

"You don't remember?"  He looked at me, perhaps gauging whether I was lying.  His eyes never seemed to show surprise; never annoyed or angry or really interested.  "You tore a new rift in Tare's wall, and either struck or widened thirteen gates between here and there."

I stared.  "Hole in medical facility?"  I could feel my face heat, but rather than go into it further just said: "I wake here."

He'd gone back to scanning the area, then studied the gate for a very fixed and intent moment before stepping through it.  Even though I'd been wandering about Earth's near-space by myself, the instant the Fourth Squad captain was on the far side of the gate I felt horribly vulnerable.  A half-dozen examples of why I was vulnerable were scattered around my feet, and the edge of the pool was at eye-level so I could have a nice close look at anything scuttling up.  That really destroyed any sense of pleasure I could gain from my last few moments in Earth's near-space.

Fortunately he signalled almost immediately, and I stepped out onto a red, flat plain where the sky was the biggest thing ever and there was plenty of distance between me and anything.  The space was the memory of heat, and a ribbon in the sky that seemed to twist and shift, but was way too far away to be scary.

In all that space, I could only see two other gates.  One was very distant, a glimmering on the horizon, and the other up a slope of rock that was no harder to climb than a flight of stairs.

"The next space is very populated," the Fourth Squad captain said as we approached the top of the rock slope.  "They are tola type, not dangerous unless you remain among them, but both gates are thick with them and if enough gather it could be difficult to pass them.  They are attracted to sound, so walk quietly and only communicate through the interface.  Don't stop at the following gate; we're going to walk straight through."

Tola meant 'thin'.  I stared through the gate at what looked to me like vertically striped shadows and couldn't see anything at all that looked like monsters.  I remembered in time not to walk through the first gate until he signalled, but he did so almost immediately anyway.  It felt like I stumbled into cold cobweb.  The space was, I think, a shadow of a forest, so faded that there wasn't really even trees there, just darker stripes.  The Fourth Squad captain moved forward, holding one arm before his face and I followed as best I could, though it was a little like when I'd been trying to push my way out of Earth's near-space, just that the resistance didn't get any harder.  And it was damn dark.  The gate we were heading for wasn't even visible to me, and I immediately lost sight of him.  The only reason I didn't freak out completely was because my interface knew where he was and I realised if I turned on names I could follow him far more easily.  So I followed a floating 'Kaoren Ruuel' sign through the forest of creepiness, and almost felt like laughing.

[Taren spelling continues to confuse – Maze pronounced 'Ruuel' as 'Rue-el'.]

The next space was totally black, so I was lucky it had already occurred to me to track him using the interface.  Zan had said the Fourth Squad captain's talents were Sight-based, which explained how he was able to walk so confidently into pitch dark.  I think the space was some sort of cave or tunnel.  The ground was fortunately smooth, though, and it was short.  The next gate was only ten or fifteen metres away, and I saw silvery grey water and stopped while he passed through.

But again he signalled straight away and I walked out onto a beach at night.  That was a strange one – beautiful and eerie, all silver and black, but no moon in the sky to explain where the light was coming from.  There was a single line of footprints along the beach, with sand kicked up behind them to show how fast he'd been going.  The Fourth Squad captain's, and yet none for me.

"Why not full squad?" I asked, since asking him if I'd been levitating would have been pointless.

"Groups attract Ionoth.  Fighting our way through would have been too great a delay."

So he'd come alone through thirteen spaces to find me.  I'd seen enough of how First Squad behaved going to a space they'd considered safe to know how dangerous that had to be.

"Thank you," I said.  "Save my life."

This he didn't even respond to, which made me feel just wonderful.  But of course he hadn't come to save Cass, but to retrieve a potentially valuable weapon.  He was taking me back to the place where I was 'the amplifying stray' and something they were willing to risk a squad captain's life to retrieve.  I hadn't realised how valuable I was to them.

The next gate opened out onto a city of skyscrapers covered in vines.  I could tell by the way the Fourth Squad captain turned his head once he was through that there were Ionoth in there, and I wasn't surprised when he went off to one side and didn't immediately come back.  It would be my fault if he was killed.

The question of what would happen if I kept doing this occupied me for the incredibly long time it took my only protection to return, and I was just switching over to what I would do if he didn't come back when he reappeared.  He didn't look injured though, or even out of breath when he signalled me to come through, but he said: "Move quickly through here," and strode off at double pace.

That place smelled of death.  I don't know how else to describe it.  Old blood and rotting plants and the stink of decay and wrongness.  Death.  I couldn't see what it was which had kept the Fourth Squad captain so long, but I didn't particularly want to, and scurried after him.  Whatever world that space belonged to must be a truly horrible place.

There were at least a dozen visible gates there – every space we went into seemed to have more.  Every time we came close to a gate, my heart lifted, then fell when we moved past.  My need to get out of the smell of it was incredible.  And when the Fourth Squad captain finally did stop, at a gate showing only some carved grey stone and a bit of stair, he turned and looked carefully around us and I realised I was going to have stay there alone while he cleared the next space.  I had to bite my lip not to say pointless things, and when he stepped into the next world, looked around, then moved away, I nearly ignored what he'd said and went after him.

I think it was the idea of the Fourth Squad captain giving me a lecture on doing what I was told which kept me there.  But I felt really sick about it, and stared in every direction, convinced that things were moving toward me.  The gate was in the middle of a street, and the leaves overhanging the windows above fluttered and shifted all the time.  And I could hear a noise, a scratching, coming closer.  I was trying to decide what constituted 'immediate danger of attack' when the Fourth Squad captain reappeared and came back through to my side of the gate.

"We're going to run," he said.  "Straight up the stair to the apex and straight through the gate.  Go."

Devil and Deep Blue Sea time.  I was so freaked out by the smell and sounds of the skyscraper place that I didn't hesitate.  The next space was cold and full of a stifled echo, a distant roar.  I looked down, and the angle of the stairs was way too sharp to make that a good idea, though what was at the bottom of it certainly helped in getting me moving in the other direction.  The grey stone was a stepped pyramid, huge, rising out of an ocean of black...something.  It reminded me horribly of the nanoliquid our suits were made of, writhing tendrils of it reaching upward.  And all over the sides of the pyramid were shadows of people on spikes, speared through their backs like butterflies, and with tendrils of black reaching toward us from out of their chests.

I am not good at running up flights of stairs.  Especially not crumbling stone steps with chunks of recently severed black stuff on them.  I can replay the eternal frantic minute it took us to get out of that space, can see the Fourth Squad captain overtake me and cut clear a path, but I don't actually remember too much of it, just this white panic.  If the gates didn't have that soap-bubble resistance, I think I would have kept on running, though my chest felt like it was going to explode.  As it was, it was enough to break my momentum, and I went down on my hands and knees, gasping.

The Fourth Squad captain walked a little way ahead while I recovered, looking annoyingly unaffected by sprinting up nearly-vertical stairs.  Breathing a little deeper.  I stared back over my shoulder and shuddered and said: "Cthulhu lives."  And could probably chase us through the gate, since Ionoth theoretically could move from space to space.  The idea was enough to get me to my feet and looking around.

We were on a branch, wide and soft with moss and lichen, and so far up that if there was any ground in this space it was lost in the gloom below.  I became very glad I hadn't kept running.  The Fourth Squad captain had walked down to where another branch crossed over the top of the first, and was making handholds in it using another blade made out of nanoliquid.  When he climbed up, I followed, though I was starting to feel very rubbery-legged and ill.  I'd managed to count through the worlds we had crossed – red desert, tola forest, tunnel, beach, skyscrapers, pyramid, tree – which made six more until we reached Tare's near-space.  In retrospect I'm glad the Fourth Squad captain didn't show any sign of caring about my opinions, because I really wanted to stop and hug my knees and rock back and forth for a while, and it was only that he seemed to expect me not to that kept me walking.

Thankfully the next gate was one he immediately gestured me through, and I grew a little more hopeful about getting back without being eaten.  That space was a huge one, impossibly tall, with all these white platforms crisscrossing a black chasm and climbing up into stars.  There were tons of gates, the most I'd seen in any of the spaces, but I was glad that the Fourth Squad captain seemed to be heading for one on the same level as us, since I wasn't keen on more climbing.

Head jerking upward, he stopped so abruptly that I almost ran into his back.  Given it was the first time I'd seen him act at all surprised by anything, I stared too, of course, but all I saw were some distant washes of colour, something like what I'd expect the Aurora Borealis to look like.  And there was a faint, vaguely familiar noise which I thought might be whale song.  The Fourth Squad captain found it far more interesting than anything else we'd encountered, and was standing stock-still, staring.

Then he said, "Augment me," and held a hand back.

He'd been very careful all along not to touch me, and alone in the middle of the spaces was not a good place to test my effect on whatever talent set he had.  At the same time, I doubted he ever gave an order without a reason, so I took his hand without stupidly saying: "Are you sure?"  But with great misgivings.

And he fell to his knees.  Totally not what you want your sole rescuer to be doing, especially since he was standing near the front edge of one of the platforms at the time, and yanked my arm half out of its socket in the process.  And just stayed there, staring upwards.

With his eyes opened wide, he didn't look like he was in pain, more like he was having some sort of religious experience.  I thought it was damn stupid timing, but I'd been wanting some knee-hugging time, so I sat on the platform's edge and waited.  And waited.

Eventually I lay back and watched the distant light show, and tried to get the suit's fingers on my free hand to turn into knives, which wasn't very successful.  I could make them go out to spiky points, but they were soft, rubbery spiky points, just like the rest of the suit.  Mara hadn't shown me how to make weapons.

The noises grew a little louder, and I realised that they were the noises I'd heard on Muina, except not nearly so close.  The 'massive' that they'd come racing to investigate, and found me instead.  And these Ddura were supposed to be some tool or weapon to use in fixing the problem tearing all the spaces apart, so I guess I understood why the Fourth Squad captain was so interested in that one, but if he had stayed like that much longer I would have given in to creeping weariness and passed out, and wouldn't even have been able to shout a warning if something came along to eat us.  Fortunately the Ddura faded away, and the Fourth Squad captain closed his eyes and took a long shuddering breath.  I wasn't sure he'd even blinked for all of the time he'd looked at it.

"Beginning think your brain melt," I said, and he looked down at me so blankly I knew he'd completely forgotten I was there.

"Not yet," was all he said, and climbed a little stiffly to his feet, keeping hold of my hand so I couldn't stay lying down.  "We're going up."

I can't tell you how unenthusiastic that made me.  The Ddura had been a long long way away.  I'm not sure what the Fourth Squad captain would have done if I'd kicked up a fuss – carried me up, maybe.  He hadn't let go of my hand, and started walking without waiting to see what my response was, so I trailed along behind him wondering when the day would end.

But we only went up about three staircases worth of platforms, and stopped before a tall but narrow rift to a white place splashed with washes of colour, with a tall white tower in the middle, big and solid with very familiar arch-shaped doors.  The Fourth Squad captain indulged in another staring session, but didn't try to go through the gate, just stood studying everything he could see.

Since the building had some similarities to those on Muina I immediately guessed it was either a space belonging to Muina or one of these extremely dangerous supports that the Muinans had built in the Ena which had caused everything to fracture.  The Fourth Squad captain was being intense enough about it to make me think it was something that important, and since the supports were supposed to be incredibly dangerous I'm glad he didn't decide to go any closer.