bring you here, show you this... I show you this so that you understand that I am not lying - that you can trust me - when I tell you this: the Separatists would destroy your kind in an instant if they had the means. They see no value in the continuance of the human species. Their vision of separation is of cutting you off completely, without regard for the damage it will do to you." As she spoke, her voice steadied, then grew heated. "The Gift-Givers wish for an altogether different kind of healing, a healing in which we grow together, not apart. A healing that eventually leads to one united Realm, greater than First or Second alone."
"Lies of omission don't accrue Talerssi in the same way, I take it?" Pevan's whisper, somehow both afraid and sharply sceptical, cut through the awed, echoing silence in Rel's mind. It was a fair question, but for a moment, by God, he'd wanted to-
Well, he didn't. Instead, he watched Pevan's suspicion slide off her face as Taslin turned to glare at her. In her heart, he could tell, she knew the Gift-Giver was telling the truth. Whatever the Separatists had told her, they clearly hadn't told her anything that contradicted Taslin's words. After a moment, she looked at him, desolate. He swallowed and held his ground, knowing she wouldn't want to appear so weak that she needed him for support. She wouldn't, after all, need his help dealing with her own mistakes.
He turned his attention to Taslin. "What do you mean by a united Realm?"
"Something too far off to be a concern for us." The Gift-Giver looked away, back along the Gallery of Liars. "Before the Realmcrash, most of those who became Gift-Givers were Realm-Finders. They believed that other Realms existed, that we could benefit by interaction with them. They did not foresee a Realmcrash. The men who built the laboratory and Sherim at Vessit may have been equivalents among your kind, working in secret."
Rel bit back a stab of pain, thinking of Dora and Rissad. He closed his eyes and bowed his head, and when he looked up again, he found Taslin two steps closer, her hand half-raised toward a tentative gesture of comfort. In the dusty gloom, her skin looked like polished bone, and the air seemed to whisper in reverence.
For a long, long second, he held her gaze, and then more urgent concerns drifted back. Waving a hand at the Gallery, he said, "The Separatists... would they attack this?"
"Here? Never. Some things are sacred to all. There are Separatists and Justice-Traders both among the Liars. The same is true for the other Galleries, unless-" Her face went blank, features turning to haze for a second.
A chill trickled down Rel's spine. "Unless what?"
"Unless they knew of something they could not know of." There was a fresh sharpness in her voice, and Rel exchanged a worried glance with his sister. Taslin finished, "Something I am not at liberty to reveal."
"Even with a Clearseer?" Unpleasant as the idea of an enemy with that kind of perception was, Rel found it hard to believe any secret was safe from a Clearseer as powerful as the Separatists'.
"No Clearseer could have seen this." The slight hitch in Taslin's speech, the oddly-placed pauses, betrayed a very real, Second-Realm unease.
"Better to check, all the same."
"Follow me." Taslin spun sharply on her heel and set off at a stiff-legged march.
It took all Rel's breath and remaining energy to match her pace, which at least kept his eyes from being entrapped by the finely-patterned walls. His head, still tired and fatigued, began to pulse in time with his steps. Pevan grunted occasionally. By the time Taslin stopped at another archway, beads of sweat were trickling down Rel's spine.
This time, Taslin didn't step aside to show them the Gallery, and Rel almost ran into her. Over her shoulder, he caught a glimpse of what looked like a hillside carpeted in wildflowers, before something slammed into his belly and sent him flying back down the corridor. Pevan landed beside him, handling the impact with far more grace, rolling half-way back to her feet.
Rel struggled up beside her, twisted to look behind in case there was another attacker. For a moment the beauty of the view into the Gallery reached out of memory and wrenched away his flagging breath - the flowers had made a tapestry more beautiful, more vibrant, than any cloth pattern, and the light had glowed, brighter than life - but he forced his mind back to the corridor. It was empty.
Pevan gave no shout of alarm, but stayed in her ready crouch as Rel spun, braced to join her. Ahead, Taslin stood in the radiance from the arch that opened into the Gallery. For once the aggressive, stark contrast of her violet-and-ivory appearance softened into the dreary background. The light from the Gallery seemed to hold an individual promise of joy from every single one of the countless flowers within. Beside that, even Taslin's ferocity melted.
There was no-one behind her, not even the kind of half-seen, menacing shape that a Wilder might take in a less regulated part of the Second Realm. If the attack hadn't come from the Gallery - and who could believe that it could have? - then it must have come from the Gift-Giver. Rel's sweat turned cold. Had he just escaped Negation by Taslin's will alone?
It seemed a long time before the Gift-Giver moved. As she stepped away from the Gallery, the light seemed to dim. The effect was as of a figure stepping out of a faded painting and into reality, half-forgotten colours flowing to new brightness. Her face, though, was as white and hard as marble. In a voice that matched it perfectly, she said, "I apologise. That was terribly close to a terrible mistake."
Rel swallowed, managed to get some moisture back into his mouth. "The Gallery is okay?" Beside him, Pevan was still struggling for breath, one hand pressed to her chest.
"The Separatists have not been here. We can proceed."
"There's no chance we drew their attention on the way?" Something deep in Rel's spirit rebelled against the idea of a threat to the marvellous Gallery beyond the arch, and he felt a pang of something close to nausea.
Taslin glided smoothly over to them, bent down to help Pevan up. "The Court should have damped any trace of our passage. I am beginning to get a feel for where the Separatists might be."
"Lead on." Rel stepped aside to let Taslin past. Behind the Gift-Giver's back, Pevan gave him a look that begged for comfort, and he opened his arms to offer her a hug. She all but collapsed on him, and he was glad that Taslin didn't look back until the embrace was over. Brother and sister picked up their step sharply to catch up to the Wilder.
The dreary corridors continued, silent and in their own strange way stifling. Doors grew less and less frequent as they followed Taslin. They never saw a window. Dust seemed to collect in clouds in the corners of every room they passed through, leaching away the sharpness of vision until the Realm itself seemed to grow hazy.
So it was that Rel completely missed the moment that the hallways ceased to be straight. By the time he noticed something amiss, they were making their way along a curving, grey-brown tube that couldn't possibly have been anything in the First Realm, natural or man-made. Though there was no dry taste of dust in his mouth, the haze hung thicker than ever in the air.
Besides Taslin and Pevan, the only definite object his eyes could hold onto was an archway a few hundred feet ahead. He squinted at it, hard, and quickly realised that something was amiss. His head throbbed as the thought of trying Clearsight ran through it, so instead he peered closer using his normal vision, crooking his neck to consider the arch from slightly different angles.
The shapes of the stones shifted as his perspective changed. It was a subtle effect, but glints of colour flowed along the outlines like sunlight on steel, highlighting the changes. It was an effect that had no place in the Court, where everything was supposed to more or less conform to human, First-Realm norms.
Taslin glanced back at him and raised a finger to her lips-
The tunnel vanished. A flicker of motion in darkness sent Rel scrambling to one side. Pevan shouted a curse. Rolling hills made out of stars whirled as Rel dived headlong to escape a fresh attack. Ice began to seep into his eyes as he reached for his Gift, but something smothered his face for a moment. He blinked and coughed, concent
ration broken.
Muddy ground embraced him, took the worst out of his landing. Still half-choked, he rolled onto his side and curled up. A row of flashes cut through the night's landscape, amethyst, then copper, then amethyst again. Then, stillness.
It was a cold moment before he could roll onto his back and look up. His eyes resolved the vast, dark shape up there and panic made a vicious grasp for his heart before he realised the Court wasn't actually falling on them. It was just hanging in the air up there, supported by vast but ephemeral pillars of... something. They flowed out from a glittering knot a little way away. It looked sort of like a four knot, but twisted and strained somehow, as if not quite finished.
Things crawled through Rel's veins and across his back and arms as he sat up. The world focussed itself; grey ground that looked like pitted and cratered stone, but felt like fine-ground flour under his hands, a night sky above the tightly-curved horizon. A few feet away, a stream of what looked like liquid pearls flowed past, towards the hovering knot that held up the Court.
Pevan knelt in her ready crouch, further away than he'd expected. Either they were on the curved top of a small hill, or - more likely, here - this patch of Realmspace formed a globe just big enough to have recognisable horizons. Pevan's feet were tucked away