Moon's Knight, page 12
“He became as we are long ago, but died in the first shock of grief, my queen. We lost much that day.” Hanae’s tone didn’t alter, quiet and thoughtful. “He had some difficulty adjusting, at first; he would have fits where he could not breathe. I thought it might ease you to know as much.”
That was a tally mark for the you fell into another world, dipshit column. So far, that was the theory holding the most water, but Gin was holding out for inescapable proof.
So to speak. “You mentioned that, yes.” The wall-sconces brightened, cracks healing with tiny creaking sounds. The floor changed from solid stone to flags, and some of the uneven ones sank or rose to match their fellows seamlessly as she approached. She had to hand it to this place, the special effects were stellar. “So you were friends, you and the Moon lady? Before?” What kind of friends?
“It pleases me to think so. Our lord prince allows your Faithful to say what others may not, and you have your Hanae. So it has ever been.” But a shadow crossed the grey-haired woman’s sweet, soft face.
Everyone here made a big deal over Terrek. “Where is he? The faithful one?”
Hanae studied her for a moment, moving with swift natural grace as her skirts swung. “I believe he takes the burden of our lord prince and rides outside the Keep, in case the hellhounds or wyrm-kin attempt the walls again. It has not always been thus. Once we rode to hunt in Overworld, and for pleasure when the Keep became confining.”
“Uh, so…” It was a stupid question, but she was interested. “What do you ride? Horses?” The word slipped sideways inside her mouth. Steeds was the closest meaning.
“There are the equines, of course. And the cats. Though we have few of either left, and all are reserved for the daily skirmishes. Perhaps once Underdark heals, the fauna will return and balance can be re-achieved. Hunger makes the scavengers bold.”
Yeah, I can understand that. Every place had an ecosystem; that biology major would have been so useful. “He does that every day?” Thinking of the blond guy out fighting big helldogs with horns while the rest of them hung out in here gave her a strange sensation, a deep unsteady pang inside her ribcage.
“As often as there is need.”
Gin was about to ask if the prince ever rode out, but a pair of high dark wooden doors with a graceful, deeply etched carving of a tree incorporating the iron fixings were creaking slowly, steadily open. All it needed was some organ music and a few cobwebs to make a Dracula special, and maybe this was the part of the movie where she was sacrificed in a burning wicker statue.
They swept through, the ceiling soared away, the smell of paper and crumbling old leather bindings swallowed her, and Gin inhaled a long low gasp of delighted surprise. The lights brightened, sconces crackling as sparks popped from glowglobes, and she was hard pressed not to clap and cheer like a little kid.
Five floors rose around an open central well. The lower floor had tables placed at intervals, chairs snuggled cozily next to them. The balustrades and railings were the same carved stone as the screen in her bedroom, but geometric patterns instead of flower-vines. Light raced through the lamps, spreading from the ones nearest the door, and a rustling of dust lifting away mixed with a faint creaking slither as that strange invisible force moved through, repairing everything in its path. Hanae smiled; Ceneris, on Gin’s other side, peered around her to watch the grey-haired woman’s expression. The man in black moved closer, almost breathing in Gin’s hair, but she was nailed in place by sheer wonder.
At the far end of the open well, a giant glass-roofed bell full of moonlight swelled. A huge rusty contraption belly-groaned, shuddering as the invisible force blasted away accreted grime, polishing metal until it shone.
The surge of cleaning and repair was getting stronger. Machinery twitched and Gin tensed, but the prince’s hand closed over her shoulder.
“Fear nothing, my thornless one,” he murmured. The last few words were half-swallowed; then his tone hardened slightly. “Only watch, and see what you mean to us.”
Spinning, creaking, lifting orbs on fluidly designed arms, the machine lurched, swayed, shuddered…and the motion smoothed, became natural. Ribbons of rust dissolved, dirt shrinking into nothingness, and another soft breath pulsed from the door to the far end, fingering the shelves and plumping starved, time-eaten books, scouring the tables and repairing the chairs so the high carved backs gleamed, polishing the glass dome and giant windows, and swallowing the machine’s creaking. The vast clockwork organism settled into quiet, well-oiled motion, and his hand was a warm weight. A curious comfort spread from the contact.
Did Ami feel this when one of the boy-toys touched her? If she did, the pursuit of ever more and different ones made a lot of sense.
“It’s amazing.” Gin sounded like a dippy, breathless tweener; she tried to put a little professionalism on. It only barely worked. “Does it show the stars?”
“The most important ones, yes. Long ago we named them all.” His fingers loosened, palm softening, and his hand skimmed down her long velvet sleeve.
I think I’d remember that. The bookshelves muttered and whispered; she wondered where the invisible force came from. It did seem to flaunt a rule or two of thermodynamics, but hadn’t someone said that after a while technology was indistinguishable from magic? She couldn’t remember the exact quote.
“I wonder if I can read here.” Did the invisible translator work for text as well as oral communication? There was no time like the present to find out, so she edged away from him, towards shelves on the right whispering with that invisible force.
“Who, indeed, would seek to stop you?” The prince didn’t move.
It was Hanae who selected a slim leatherbound tome from the now-gleaming wooden shelves. There was plenty of space between the bookcases for both the grey-clad woman and Gin, even in those skirts, and the dusty vanilla smell of paper and binding was utterly normal, reasonable, and safe. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine she was in one of the Jorinda City College libraries, or even the Oberlin County public library a short walk from her grandparents’ house, down a summer street-tunnel between liquid-leafed, murmuring elms as cicadas buzzed.
“Here.” Hanae offered the thin book with its red leather jacket. “Try. And if you cannot, well, you learned once before. It will be a small thing to learn again.”
Which was true enough, and Gin held her breath as she opened the book. She had to blink several times; the script across thick vellum was flowing and utterly alien at first, often moving left to right, sometimes the opposite, a bar along the top or bottom joining words and beautiful flowing downstrokes quill-tapering at the ends.
Then the words began making sense.
“…Malinarius touches the horizon twice, and yet the sky is dark / This night is the most blessed, for I may linger with thee.” It was poetry, the rhythm and meter complex but easily distinguishable, and her eyebrows rose as she scanned the rest of the page. “Wow.”
Hanae was all but grinning. “You see? Not so difficult as you thought.”
Yeah, except for the thinly veiled porn. Not that she minded; any language was more fun when you knew the naughty bits. One of Danny’s psych major friends said you couldn’t read in dreams; were hallucinations the same? “I guess not. Is this one of your favorites?”
“Oh, no, my lady.” Hanae’s dark eyes actually twinkled, and the pale streak in her pupils didn’t alter. “I prefer medical treatises. But it may help you understand. Bardok the Longing is easy to read.”
Gin eyed the shelves. Blank spines, gold-lettered and silver-stamped ones in that same strange script. The titles were thought-provoking, some of the words causing a tickle near her ears like music she couldn’t quite place in a far-off room. “Is there a history section?”
“They are scattered among the shelves. We shall look.” The rims of Hanae’s eyelids were still reddened, even though she looked happy. How long would it take to heal? “Oh, my lady, it is so good to have you returned.”
I’m beginning to feel that way myself. “I’ve always loved libraries,” Gin managed numbly, and followed her, still clutching the red volume. It was why she’d chosen her major, after all.
“Yes.” Hanae’s agreement was instant, and just a little scary. “You always did.”
17
Space, Between
The pale, perfect moon sank behind a long line of knife-sharp mountains at one far section of the world’s rim, their silvered tops wreathed in a cold haze. The opposite horizon held a thin line of crimson, grey predawn creeping from its thickening center. All the flat, dusty deadness looked different, but Gin couldn’t say quite how until the light strengthened bit by bit.
Up on the walls a freshening breeze tugged at her hair and skirts, smelling cold and mineral as the fountain water, like drinking from the hose on a summer day. Watching the dawn had never been her favorite activity, mostly because it meant she was about to be hungover and exhausted in class.
But here, it had a sort of charm, especially when the red sun lifted its tired head over the horizon proper and a wall of gold spread through cotton-white mist.
The land had changed. Dark bristles suspiciously like treetops poked through the fog, and it cleared in patches to show soft silver glitters—water, where before there had been only dry grey dust. Dollops of shadow before the mountains showed broken ground unfurling with new life. Soon the far vista of mountains with its single glittering spot might hide behind a screen of vegetation, at least from the castle’s lower windows.
Put another mark in the this is a whole ’nother world column, then. No hallucination could ever be this vast, this detailed, or this flat-out weird. And no asylum had drugs this good.
Now she had to test the theory, like any good scientist. But how? And did she really want to? She was a lit major, for God’s sake.
And then there were the dreams.
Not even Hanae wanted to come up here, gracefully shaking her head and smiling when asked. Instead, the prince stood an armlength or two to Gin’s left, studying the sea of morning mist with a critical air. Every other guy out on the battlements was in bright armor though they lacked helmets, and they were tense, their gazes flickering past her but not quite touching. One of them was Jazian, in matte silver chased with deep blue, and that made her nervous.
If he wanted to pull some more bullshit, it could get uncomfortable. Even here in fairytale-land, a man with a grudge and a weapon was a dangerous thing.
A high trilling whistle-song pierced the hush. It didn’t sound like any bird she’d ever encountered, and the way every man on the battlement stiffened made her wish she’d gone inside with the others.
Jazian stepped closer, and the prince was suddenly at her side, blinking past intervening space. He said nothing, simply looked at the blue-haired man, but Gin’s throat closed to a pinhole and any bare skin—her face, the backs of her hands, her throat—suddenly felt far too vulnerable.
“My queen.” Jazian bent in a correct little bow; the armor looked too uncomfortably stiff for the maneuver, but he performed it with grace. “I beg your pardon for my former display. The Underdark is renewed; I should never have doubted you. Or our prince.”
He sounded completely apologetic; there was no breath of sarcasm Gin could discern. Which didn’t mean none existed, just that he might be good at hiding it.
Still, one could always use another ally. “It’s all right.” She searched for something appropriately flowery, since a halfhearted punch to the shoulder and a relax, bitch probably wasn’t acceptable around here. “I’ll forget it if you will.”
“Then ’tis done.” Jazian’s gaze lifted over her shoulder. “My lord.”
The only reply from the prince was a fractional nod, but it seemed to satisfy the blue-haired man, because he backed up and half-turned with a smart heel-click, studying the sea of lifting mist.
“Your kindness remains.” The man in black stared past where Jazian had stood, but something in his expression said he wasn’t seeing the flagstone walk or crenellated wall. “I wonder that Overworld left you with any.”
Me too. “It’s not a nice place sometimes.” Still, it had ice cream, ponies, and movies on demand. There was nothing like any of that here.
Maybe they had equivalents, though. Would she be around long enough to find out? Every story said that when you were dumped in a fantasy world, or on a fantasy planet, your big goal was to get home.
What if you had nothing left to go back to?
The prince didn’t move. “Will you speak of what you suffered there?”
Not really. After all, where would she begin? The mist began to lift in long curling ribbons and Gin stared, almost unable to believe her eyes for the hundredth time since landing in this impossible place.
The brush-bristles poking through the fog were indeed treetops, but the trees weren’t any kind she knew. There were the banana-type she’d seen before, but now other species appeared. Some looked deciduous, almost like oaks; others like palms with great shaggy heads stretching skyward on ridgetops where the sun would shine most; veins of evergreens in the valleys and hollows creaked as their trunks swelled. The far glitters of water were quickly covered by greenish shade; beyond the forest a shimmer of bright green paled to gold, the mountains now lost in a blur. A soft soughing breeze began, teasing at the rapidly draining fog, and that high trilling whistle repeated.
There was a heartbeat of breathless silence. Then birdsong exploded as the sun rose, noise swelling through the treetops. Flickers of brightly colored motion shone half-seen through thinning fog, darted between swelling branches. The rustling wasn’t just the breeze, it was wings—and a scratching sound as trees lifted their heads, stretched their many arms, and let leaves, needles, or fronds grow with amazing rapidity.
“Holy hell,” Gin blurted in English, and clapped her hand over her mouth.
The man in black made a slight movement, his shoulders curving fractionally forward, and what might have been a laugh died before it reached his throat or altered his expression.
Even when she went to summer camp as a child, the dawn chorus wasn’t this loud. The smudge of dead dry grey shrank in the distance, vegetation uncurling across it like a fast-forward of growing ivy. Green flowed towards the distant mountain range now coming into focus, its knifelike peaks holding the faintest daubs of white. Clouds, or snow? Either way, it meant precipitation, and the sharp hurtful gleam in the middle of its girdle blinked twice.
A coughing growl rose from the swiftly growing forest, answered by another. The armored men drew closer yet to Gin, and her hand dropped. “What was that?”
“Bone-dog, a large one. Or a wyrm.” The prince didn’t move. “A flightless one, I should think. The wingéd will need some time to grow before they are any danger.”
“Perhaps…” One of the armored men—an onyx statue with finely chiseled lips and close-cropped blondish hair—quickly dropped his gaze when Gin glanced at him. “Forgive me.”
“Perhaps what?” If he had a suggestion, she was ready to hear it. The way they were acting, they expected something to fly up out of the trees.
Maybe being up on the battlements wasn’t such a hot idea.
“Giraad would like to suggest our queen repair inside.” The prince’s tone was less robotic all the time, inflection creeping into each word. “The rakkar might be stirring early, or the venomwings.”
Neither term was familiar, but an atavistic shudder ran down her back and she was cold despite the heavy velvet dress. If there were giant dog-monsters with horns and yellow eyes, the rest of the fauna was bound to be just as dangerous.
“If you say so.” She took a last longing look at the horizon—you could breathe up here; she hadn’t quite realized how much she liked heights if she was on something solid and behind a railing. Ami would be clutching at Gin’s arm warbling prettily about being soooooo scared, especially if there was a prospective boytoy around.
I’m fucking sick of thinking about what Amelie would like.
Gin’s shoulders hunched. She waited for the sharp pinch of guilt behind her breastbone, and its absence was proof positive she was a hideous, shallow person. She stepped closer to the wall, peering between two battlements, the breeze freshening as she studied mist clinging to rapidly growing vegetation at the bottom. Dew sparkled as the sun ticked incrementally higher, and though it was a long way down, it was nothing compared to the space between what she was and what they wanted her to be.
Bushes rattled. Something slithered, a dry ripping sound like scales over hot stone. Gin froze, the shiver down her back intensifying, but a warm, very strong hand closed around her upper arm, drawing her gently and irresistibly in reverse.
It was one thing to feel that leashed, humming power. The truly terrifying part, though, was to sense the control it took not to crush her humerus like a matchstick.
“A flightless wyrm,” the prince said, each syllable edged. “My lady. Come away.”
She strained to see. Whatever it was probably couldn’t make it up the wall; she didn’t know how many stories’ worth of sheer drop it was.
After a certain point, how many was academic. All that mattered was enough. Sometimes she’d wondered if Ami was pretending to be scared of heights, or if she truly was frightened, but only of the inexorable pull. To just step out into space, to have all the worrying and wondering and questioning over at last—
“Come away.” The man in black’s grip tightened just short of pain, and Gin didn’t fight. She let him pull her back, craning her neck to keep whatever was shaking the bushes in sight until the very last moment. The armored men crowded close, and the hand on her arm didn’t loosen until they were through an ironbound door of dark wood, in a long stone hallway with delicately carved sconces holding those glowing rocks ending at an endless spiral staircase she’d climbed just before dawn, marveling at how her legs didn’t hurt.
