"It must be started now, when he is in the void." Six clawed the air with one hand. "Easier to scratch his eyes out when he's blind," she said in her hissy voice.
"I don't see why—"
"The way is the way. Do you wish this or not?"
Violet's folded arms, along with her defiance, came undone. Her expression took on a dark set. "I do."
A sinuous smile slipped across Six's features. "Then let it begin. You must now complete the links."
Looking suddenly resolute, Violet plucked the sticks of colored chalk off a little ledge in the stone wall behind her royal stool. As she strode up beside Six, the woman tapped a long, thin finger to the stone.
"Begin at the sign of the dagger, as I've taught you, just as you've practiced, to insure that, at the initiation of the link, what you have wrought will be ready to slice swift and sure."
"I know, I know," Violet said as she boldly touched the tip of the yellow chalk to the point of one of the elaborate glowing symbols off to the side of Richard.
Six snatched Violet's wrist, pulling her hand back just enough to lift the chalk away from the wall. She moved Violet's hand over a few inches, then let the chalk again touch the symbol, but at the next apex in a design with a perimeter comprised of dozens of points.
"I told you," Six said with strained civility as she helped Violet begin the line, "a mistake here will last us for eternity."
"I know—I just got the wrong apex point, that's all," Violet huffed. "I've got it, now."
Six, ignoring the queen, her gaze fixed on the drawing, nodded approvingly as she watched the chalk begin to move across the stone.
"Change to red," Six prompted in a low voice after Violet had pulled the chalk a few inches across the open distance.
Without argument or hesitation, Violet changed the chalk for the red one and started it moving at an angle from the yellow line she had already drawn. After bringing it half the remaining distance toward the drawing of Richard, she stopped without needing to be told and switched to the blue chalk.
She hesitated, then, and glanced up at Six. "This is the node? Right?"
Six was already nodding. "That's right," she murmured, pleased with what she was seeing. "That's right, take it around and back now to complete the first ligature."
Violet drew a blue circle at the end of the red line before crossing the empty place on the smooth, dark stone wall. When the blue chalk reached one of the points on the next symbol, she went back and drew a line from the circle to connect to Richard. The completed triad of lines Violet had just drawn began to glow. The blue circle ignited with a beam of light, as if it were a beacon coming through a window in the dark stone.
Six abruptly held up a hand, commanding that Violet stop before she could put the chalk to the next point in the sequence.
"What's wrong?" Violet asked.
"Something… is not right…"
Six pressed the side of her face to the drawing, this time laying her cheek right atop Richard's face.
"Not right at all…"
Richard drew another silvered breath of the ecstasy but, with his urgent worries overriding the experience, it was something short of the remarkable essence of rapture that he usually experienced within the sliph.
He realized, though, that when he traveled in the sliph he was usually gravely troubled by something; after all, trouble of one sort or another was why he traveled in the sliph in the first place. Still, it had never before felt this way. This feeling was not dread so much as it was a sense of the great, but intangible, weight of foreboding. With every breath, that phantom weight pressed in on him ever more.
Within the sliph there was no real sense of vision, as such, just as there was no real sense of time, or up, or down. Even so, there was a semblance of sight; there were colors and, on occasion, obscure shapes that seemed to loom up and just as quickly vanish. There was also a visual perception of the phenomenon of mind-bending speed that made him feel as if he were nothing more than an arrow fired from a powerful bow. At the same time, there was a feeling of almost floating motionless within the thick void of the sliph. Those different sensations mixed together created a heady mix of the whole of the experience that suspended his urge to separate them into constituent parts.
As he raced through the quicksilver essence of the sliph, he began to discount his anxiety. It was then that Richard felt the faint brush of an odd sensation against his skin, a stealthy pressure that he instantly recognized as a sensation he had never before experienced as he traveled. Tingling apprehension rippling through him.
Forboding, he realized, was not tangible in the way that this touch had been.
As he drifted, held in the embrace of the vast silver emptiness, he tried to separate the perception of having been touched from everything else. Richard felt the placid isolation of the sliph surrounding him, caressing him, insulating him from the terrible, headlong rush of speed that otherwise seemed as if it would surely have to tear a person apart. He still felt the balm of serenity quelling his fear of breathing into his lungs the liquid in which he floated.
But Richard felt something else, even if he was not yet able to set the troubling sensation apart from all others enough to define it.
With growing conviction, though, he was sure that something was wrong, Frighteningly wrong. It was all the more disturbing because he couldn't understand how he knew that something was imperfect. He worked to comprehend why he would think such a thing.
It had to have been, he decided, that furtive touch. He briefly wondered if he could have imagined it, but then discounted the notion. He had felt it.
It seemed almost as if he were in the presence of an unholy taint, like lying in a warm, sunlit meadow on a beautiful day, surrounded by the cascade of colors and balmy aroma of wildflowers, watching cottony clouds slowly drift through a bright blue sky, and then catching the first faint whiff of a decomposing carcass while at the same time realizing that the vague sound you heard was the buzzing of flies.
What ordinarily seemed like a timeless spell spent racing through the smoothly silver sliph had begun to drag out into an agonizing suspension of headway.
Cara already had his right hand in an iron grip, but Nicci gripped his left hand even more tightly. He could tell in that urgent squeeze that she sensed something as well. He wished that he could ask her what she felt, but talking within the sliph was not possible.
Richard opened his eyes wider, trying to see more of what was around him, but it was a muted, murky world where there was little to be seen, other than the shimmering shafts of light—yellow, red, blue—piercing the gloom through which they raced. Richard didn't think that those shafts of light were moving as they once had been. It was hard to tell such things for sure within the sliph, though. It was generally a hazy sense of events, rather than actual perception.
There was something out ahead of him, Richard realized, something maneuvering fluidly through the silver obscurity. At first it looked like long, slender petals just beginning to blossom open. As it came closer, Richard saw that it looked more like numerous arms—tapered, long, undulating objects—fanning open from a central element that for some reason he could not quite figure out.
It was disorienting to watch because it was so incomprehensible. As it came ever closer, it began to appear to Richard as if whatever it was was made up of segments of glass, all assembled into something orderly, something billowing open before him. He could see through the transparent, expanding arms, see the shafts of color and light shimmering beyond.
It was the oddest thing he had ever seen. As hard as he tried, he simply could not make sense of it. It was like it was there, but not there.
And then, with icy dread, comprehension washed through him.
At the same time, Nicci pulled his hand so hard that it nearly wrenched his arm right out of its socket. The yank must have pulled him back, because Cara, still holding his other hand, sailed around him as if falling through midair. Richard ducked. The t
ranslucent shape whipped past his face, just missing him.
Nicci had pulled him back just in time.
Richard knew now what it was.
It was the beast.
The sense of being in the presence of evil was suddenly so strong that it engulfed him with suffocating panic. As the beast, like some temporal vision, skimmed past him, it twisted around. The glassy arms fanned open as they reached out and again tried to snatch him.
With a sharp tug Nicci again drew him back from the star-shaped net of tentacles spread wide before him. Again they tried to close around him.
Richard pulled his hand away from Cara's and drew his knife. With her how free hand, she immediately snatched a fistful of his shirt to hold on to him.
Richard did his best to slash at the ever-reaching arms trying to embrace him in their deadly grasp. It didn't take long to realize that fighting with a knife within the sliph was close to impossible. It was too fluid an environment for Richard to be able to strike with any speed. It was like trying to maneuver in honey. He changed his tactics and instead waited for the arms to draw in around him, waited for whatever was at the glassy center to come to him.
When they did, he drove the blade toward that aware center of the translucent threat. Rather than be impaled on the blade, though, the creature only seemed to fold around Richard's knife and twist effortlessly away.
And then it again came in to attack, now with a kind of abrupt, intent fury that Richard could sense. The thing moved with a fluid grace that didn't seem to be hindered at all by the fluid world surrounding them.
To one side Richard saw the shimmering shape of Cara, still gripping his shirt as she tried to attack the beast with her free hand. To the other side, he knew, Nicci was trying to work magic. It didn't seem that her magic was working in the environment of the sliph.
One of the beast's arms coiled around Richard's arm, another lashed around Cara's. She seized his wrist with her other hand. The beast fastened onto her other arm as well and effortlessly ripped the two of them apart. In an instant, Cara was gone. In the murky darkness Richard couldn't tell where she was, or how close she might be. Worse, he didn't know if she was all right, or if the creature had her.
Nicci tightened her arm protectively around Richard's waist, holding on for dear life, as more of the undulating, transparent arms came out of the gloom and coiled around them. It was like getting tangled in a nest of snakes, all entwining themselves and constricting with great force once attached. The one around Richard's leg drew so tight that he thought it would surely rip his flesh from the bone.
Even though Richard could not hear Nicci in the conventional sense, he could perceive her muffled cries of fury as she fought the thing that had snared them. An odd, muted form of lightning flickered madly around Nicci. Richard knew she was trying to use her power, but it wasn't having any effect on the beast.
Richard ignored the pain of the glassy tentacles that already had him and stabbed over and over, cutting into thick arms that looked to be only partly there. With determined and focused rage he slashed with the knife and was able to cleave some of the arms away from the core of the thing. Once severed, they writhed wildly as they fell away into the void around them, as if sinking into a bottomless sea.
It seemed to do no good; ever more of the twisting tentacles came at him from out of the darkness. It was like finding himself at the bottom of a dark pit full of angry vipers. Richard fought on with all his strength, cutting, stabbing, slashing. His arms ached with the effort. Nicci grappled with the thick tentacles with one hand, her other arm still refusing to let him go. He could tell by the way she arched and twisted that she was in agony. Richard abandoned the coils around himself and with all his fury hacked at the arms of the beast hurting Nicci as they tried to pull her away from him.
But then she was violently torn away from him.
Richard was suddenly alone in the middle of nowhere with a glassy, slippery, powerful creature trying to wrestle him in toward its center, toward something he could hear snarling, snapping, clacking.
There was no way to fight such a thing, no way to get an advantage over its power, no way to escape its multi-armed grasp. Ever more of the arms whipped in to capture him.
With all his strength, before his arm was captured, he thrust the knife toward the center mass that he couldn't clearly see.
He made solid contact. The beast howled with a sound that hurt his ears. The arms loosened just a bit—not letting go of him, but loosed just enough for Richard to give a mighty twist of his body that succeeded in spinning him out of the creature's grip. It an instant, like a pumpkin seed squeezed between wet fingers, he squirted away from the deadly grip.
Richard tried to swim away, to somehow escape the thrashing, translucent arms coming for him, but it was faster than he was, more powerful, and tireless.
"Here!" Six urged as she rapped her knuckles against the center of an emblem.
Violet raced with the chalk to the spot her advisor was urging her toward. Her fingers flew with swift and sure movements. With the back of her other hand, Violet swiped sweat off her face, then with her fingers wiped it from her eyes. Rachel had never seen Violet work so hard, or so fast.
Rachel didn't know what was happening, but it was obvious that something was not going the way Six had expected. She was in a state balancing precariously between panic and rage. Rachel feared whichever way it fell.
While Violet swiftly completed links, switching chalk and moving to each successive point, Six went back to softly chanting her incantations. The corrosive sound of those whispered words felt as if they were searing Rachel's soul. While she could not understand the words or their meaning, they were spoken with a sinister intent that terrified her.
She glanced toward the distant cave entrance, but with it being dark outside, Rachel couldn't see anything. She wanted to run but dared not. She knew that if she caused Violet or Six to have to stop what they were doing and come after her, it would go very badly for her.
Chase had taught her to bridle her impulses, as he'd called it, and to watch for true openings. He had cautioned her that if she wasn't in immediate mortal danger, she should act only when she had a deliberate plan that she had thought out ahead of time. He said that she shouldn't act out of blind fear, but work to find ways to increase the odds of success.
Despite how busy the other two were, Rachel knew that with both of them together and both in such a frantic state, they both would react to any misdeed by Rachel with swift and unrestrained violence. This was not the right opportunity; getting up right then and running was not a good plan, and she knew it.
As Rachel sat still and quiet, trying to keep from being noticed, Six gently tapped the side of her fist against several of the flaring nodes in the links Violet had already drawn. Each bright circle she tapped went dark with a low growling sound that ran a shiver up Rachel's spine. The cave seemed to hum with the rise and fall of Six's rhythmic conjuring.
Violet, drawing with bold, slashing strokes, glanced to the side, checking on Six's progress. Six, extinguishing the beacons in sequence, was catching the queen. Violet, as if in a trance, drew faster. The chalk made a clack, clack, clacking sound with each line that Violet threw down against the stone. The sound of the chalk matched the rhythm of Six's chant.
All around the figure of Richard, Six, conjuring with murmured verses spoken in a rising, singsong chant that gradually brought a howling wind swirling down into the cave, rapped the side of her fist against points in the links Violet had been drawing without pause for hours. Rachel had thought that Violet might soon collapse from exhaustion but, far from it, she seemed to be working herself into a fever pitch of effort trying to stay ahead of Six. Despite how swiftly her hand moved, each line Violet drew looked true, each intersection met accurately and completely. Six had made Violet practice endlessly drawing the symbols and now it seemed to be paying off.
The drawing of Richard was almost completely encased in the web of symbol
s and connecting lines.
With a strange word, shouted in order to be heard over the howling wind, Six extinguished the final beacon around the figure of Richard. The wind abruptly died. Little pieces of leaves and other debris fluttered down through the abruptly still air.
Six paused in her chanting. Her brow twitched. With her fingertips she touched several of the symbols, as if feeling their pulse. Shimmers of colored light flickered through the cave.
"It has him," Six whispered to herself.
Violet paused, swallowing as she caught her breath. "What?"
"Apogee to inferior apex." She turned a venomous look on a startled Violet. "Do it!"
Without hesitation Violet turned back to the wall and reached up, drawing coiled lines downward from one of the central elements above Richard's head.
Six lifted a hand. "Be ready, but don't touch the primary invocation points until I tell you."
Violet nodded. Six's eyes rolled back in her head as she leaned in on her fingertips over the figure of Richard. As Violet and Rachel watched, Six breathed a low murmur of strange words.
* * *
CHAPTER 31
Nicci broke above the quicksilver surface of the sliph. The weight of the leaden liquid rolled from her hair and face. Colors and light seemed to explode out of the quiet, mellow darkness.
Breathe.
With all her effort Nicci immediately forced the silver fluid from her lungs.
Breathe.
With her need overwhelming her dread, she gasped a desperate breath. It burned like drawing in acidic vapors.
The room spun sickeningly in her vision. Nicci saw a smear of red. She floundered woodenly as she again gasped. She managed to reach the edge and throw an arm over the sliph's stone wall to hold herself up. Panic threatened to swamp her.
A hand seized her arm. Nicci managed to heave her pack up and over the wall. Another hand reached down and helped to haul her up enough for her to get both arms over the wall of the sliph. The red she had seen was Cara.