Falling Off the Face of the Earth Page 4

moment to spring away from the tree. It happened so fast that Pevan almost got her legs tangled trying to copy him. Even then, her leap seemed to throw her miles, the vast brown plain of the tree trunk waving wildly across the sky behind her. Reflex kicked her wings into motion despite the odd lack of gravity.

  She shot forward, trailing Chag by a good dozen feet, turbulence swirling all around. He headed for a great yellow orb ahead of them; it took Pevan a moment to realise from the dimpled, waxy surface that it was some sort of exotic fruit. The smell of it flowed into her mouth, a tang so sharp that it cleared her mind completely.

  Intoxicated, she swung into a wild zig-zag, swaying through the air as she pursued Chag. He seemed to sense her excitement, pushed forward himself. Pevan brought herself alongside him, watched him through peripheral vision grown suddenly brighter. Though his bulbous eyes had no pupils, she could feel his gaze on her too, amused and warm.

  She was losing herself. Regretfully, she forced herself to concentrate on her wing-beats, focus on how inhuman they were. The sensation was completely different to the birds' wings she'd trained with; there was none of the sense of strength in individual strokes. Instead, the strokes blurred together, flickering too fast to see, turning the air behind her head into a dazzling net of carmine sparks. She could feel the wings flexing and twisting like paper in the wind.

  And yet, somehow, she flew effortlessly. The ground released her from bondage while the fruit filled the sky ahead amid a cloud of heady scent. This must be how the world looked when you were the size of a fly; in the Second Realm, who was to say she wasn't so small herself? The rest of the world blurred away to a faintly peachy off-white. The fruit ahead was everything.

  Chag made no effort to land on its surface, plunging in only a few feet ahead of her. Wincing in anticipation, Pevan followed, and the apparently-solid skin exploded into a cloud of rippling orange globules. She dodged frantically, weaving left and diving before one of the lumps caught her, splashing across her, drenching her. She'd had more than enough of that for one day, but the liquid - it was impossible not to think of it as juice - was thick with sweet flavours. Her mind reeled, and her flight with it.

  More juice spattered her, clinging to her, drying quickly to a sticky mess that slowed her wings and dragged her downward. A burst caught her sideways-on, spinning her over in the air, and she screamed as the drag on her wings jagged pain into her shoulders. The scream drilled into the air ahead of her, coils of blue light too hot to look at shattering the juice to smaller droplets.

  Chag fell past her, grabbing her hand. She flowed back into human form, plummeted with him, ignoring the splashes of juice that suddenly seemed laughably insignificant. Tied to the little man by their clasped hands, Pevan found herself twisting around toward him. Air rushing past pushed them together despite her putting out her free hand to fend him off.

  He caught her around the waist, freed his hand from hers to loop it over her shoulder. She tried to lean her head away, keep him from pressing his cheek to hers, but their ears still touched. The sticky dampness clinging to both of them made the sensation revolting, but she managed to hold her tongue. Chag's hair clung to her face, and she had to splutter to keep it out of her mouth.

  Something slapped her on the back, just shy of hard enough to hurt. It came again, and she realised Chag was flapping his hand against her shoulder-blade, tapping something in Safespeak. The tapping code of the Gifted had never been Pevan's strongest suit. She responded with the code for slower please, forced to acknowledge she'd clung to him as tightly as he to her.

  He tapped, Sorry. Nearly there. They dropped through a tunnel ribbed with stripes of Second-Realm colour. Most of them were near enough white or blue to escape being truly painful to look at. Chag tapped something she didn't catch that ended with -henext bit. Hold tight.

  Pevan started to tap what she hoped was the code for again ple- and had to grab tight handfuls of Chag's abused jumper as they spun wildly in their descent. She could see rather than feel the wind that buffeted them, batons of red and green and not-quite gold bouncing them back and forth, catching them to toss upward again.

  It had to be a Wilder, or a swarm of them. Terror surged in her as something pounded her back, but it was only Chag, beating the signal for non-random. Something caught her feet, upending them both and sending sparks of dizziness across her vision, but if Chag was right they were safe. Too late to stop trusting him now, even if it would have done any good.

  She adjusted her grip on him, clung tighter even though it brought his face up close against hers. The unmistakable sense of his nearness - the nearness of another being she could understand - held her mind and her logic together as her conceptual framework broke apart under the assault. There was nothing in the First Realm she could relate to the pair of impacts that sent them tumbling along an axis she wasn't even sure the First Realm had dimensions for.

  They fell sideways, flipped, careened back the way they'd come. An impact lifted Chag's body away from her, panicked aches shooting through her palms and the soles of her feet as her grip on him slipped. The next strike slammed them back together, and she felt the wind go out of the man in her arms. Somehow, he held firm.

  She pushed her legs between his, then looped outward to catch him. Oddly limp, he still managed to respond, wrapping them together all the tighter. His whimper left a trail of lilac smoke for a moment that told Pevan exactly how wild their descent had become. You could barely even call it a descent anymore.

  Which made the final impact all the more unfair as it slammed the air from them both. Chag landed underneath her, and just barely she kept the landing from knocking their heads together. She lay on top of him, gasping, feeling his equally short breath tickle her ear. The ground beneath his head was white, stroked with grey so that the resemblance to albino grass was unmistakable.

  Pevan managed to push herself up to hands and knees, Chag's arms sliding from her back and flopping to the grass as she did so. The thief's skin was almost as grey as the ground beneath, his mouth hung slack and his eyes focussed somewhere above and behind her. Had he hit his head too hard on impact?

  She put her face back down to his ear. His skin was chill against hers. Careful to direct her words past him and into the floor, she whispered, "Chag, are you alright?"

  He let out a sound too weak for a groan and just too strong for a sigh. "You kicked me in the balls!" Even in a gasped whisper, reproach stung the words. Unable to help herself, Pevan flinched sideways, but his speech stayed inert.

  Chag coughed, coughed again, and began to chuckle. Pevan lifted herself back to hands and knees, looked him in the eyes. He met her raised eyebrow with an impish smirk. "You'd kill me if I asked you to kiss it better, wouldn't you?"

  Shock ran a thrill down her spine and into her gut, but it was laughter that bubbled up in response, great gales of it that flushed the tension from her. Chag joined in, wheezing slightly as he laughed. She buried her head in his shoulder, let his arms close around her. It was just relief from the fall being over, but it was good to get it out.

  He'd spoken straight to her face, and incisively, without any Wild effects. They had to be in the Court, then, but that seemed an odd place to find - what was it he'd said? - an alternative to the Gift-Givers. The Court was the Gift-Givers' fortress. Why were they here?

  "Have you brought a fool with you, Chag Van Raighan?" The voice stabbed through their laughter like sword-steel, flat, straight and laden with a peculiar kind of dispassionate menace. A Wilder's voice, unmistakably.

  Pevan sat up, focussing on the dappled greys and silvers surrounding them. It didn't look like anywhere she knew in the Court. A dark arch divided the world; the far side showed the Second Realm's usual riot of colours. The near side, formed of polished, jagged rocks veined in silver, formed an odd mix of cave and pre-Crash human architecture.

  Centred in the archway was a figure that she took some time to identify as a Wilder. It could have been a monument, cast in bronze by
a madman. Polyps of rich red-brown and oak-coloured Realmstuff rose from the floor into a dizzying tangle at waist-height, from which a handful of thread limbs reached up to the ceiling. Though the roof of the cave looked to be yards high, Pevan had no sense of distorted space as the Wilder walked towards her across both ceiling and floor.

  Pevan pushed to her feet, reaching down to help Chag up. To her, his voice low, he said, "We're word-safe here, but follow my lead."

  He started to turn to the Wilder, but Pevan whispered, "Where are we? This doesn't look like the Court."

  "Should it?"

  "I thought only the Court was word-safe." She could feel the frown on her face, however unfair it was to withhold trust in the matter. A shiver ran through her as she thought of making the journey back to the First Realm without knowing where she was starting from.

  Chag's face darkened, eyes narrowing. "The Gift-Givers don't know everything." He turned to the Wilder and raised his voice. "Forgive us, Ashtenzim. This is Pevan Atcar." He spoke flatly, mimicking the Wilder's inhuman tone.

  The Wilder - Ashtenzim? - flowed into a new configuration, and a wave of blush-heat swelled up in Pevan, the sense of the creature's Second-Realm communication. In its wake came the words, somehow seeming