Axtli was, let him judge how long he had. Seconds.
"Relvin! To me!" Taslin's voice, wild and high, was almost visible as the Sherim thrummed with harmonic echoes. The Axtli blocked any view that might have told him whether Dora was outside by the fire. He backpedalled, still close to falling, while the Axtli's spines stretched, reached.
Something closed over his chest, a tightness from right shoulder to just under left armpit, pressing him back into soft-but-sturdy flesh. He gasped, struggled, thought. Caught up; Taslin. At the edges of vision, threads of the Sherim writhed. Rel forced himself to breathe. Relaxation was too much to ask with the terrible spikes sliding silently at them. They picked up none of the Sherim's pink-and-purple lighting, and suddenly the rancid smell had a new, metallic edge; blood. Dora's?
With a wrench, Taslin leapt upwards - for relative definitions of upwards, at least - and there was a confusing moment of too many directions. Panic receded before his brain relaxed; why had the fear gone?
His fatigue headache had grown, spreading across his forehead, reaching for his temples. There was no sign of the Axtli. No, not quite; below - he had to be careful with that term; it was a bit too First-Realm for this deep in a Sherim - below them was a mat of parallel black lines, thin and perfectly straight. Rel could feel the Sherim on his skin now, tighter than clothing, cold where Taslin's embrace was warm.
Blushing again, he pulled himself off her as much as Sherim-wary prudence and her grip would allow. Still unable to see her, sight befuddled by the flapping of loose strings of Sherim, the task proved a challenge. Rel found he couldn't actually tell if he'd made the situation any better. Taslin wasn't letting go, either way.
Her breath was warm by his ear as she hissed, "Stay still!"
"What?"
"Be very careful. We're a lot deeper in the Sherim than we were." Her voice had a ragged edge, and Rel realised that not all the trembling he could feel was his. "I took a shortcut."
The Axtli slid along beneath them, emaciated. But Rel could See its spines, pointing deeper into the Sherim yet also all pointing out to the threshold. The tangled threads within the Sherim made a rough, fraying weave through and around the Axtli. Would it sense the roiling mess Taslin was making of the threads nearby? Rel tried to follow the line of a nearby strand, to see if it led down to the monster below, but the folds in the Sherim's structure made it impossible.
Taslin said, "Relax. Your tension may draw the Axtli's awareness."
Rel's attempt only brought a different kind of tension, a frown exchanged for a clenched jaw as he tried not to think about what they were lying on. If they fell out of the Sherim now, they'd fall right on top of the Axtli below. But then, if they didn't, it would make its way through whatever part of the Sherim Taslin had cut across - must learn how she did that, since shortcuts were supposed to be anathema to Children of the Wild - and come upon them.
Letting his thoughts wander while Clearseeing was a bad plan. The web within the Sherim made all too many shapes that he could pick out, that a careless thought turned into monsters. Focus, and if concentration alone wasn't enough, make something to focus on. "What do we do now?" He managed to keep his voice to a whisper, but Clearsight showed him the wet shimmer of the words slicing through the air for a moment - would Taslin recoil?
He didn't feel any flinch in her arm, still tight across his chest. Her whisper came back, "Wait for it to go past, then drop out of the Sherim. Dora should be out there waiting for us."
"That scream..."
"Yes, but I think it was just for her headache." If there'd been a human at the other end of the voice, Rel would have heard frightened uncertainty in it, perhaps even desperate hope. Tasteless to put on an act like that, but would a Wilder realise? Maybe she'd trained to navigate Sherim instead of training for the finer points of First-Realm manners.
"A headache doesn't make you scream." No point trying to disguise the grim edge in his voice. Let Taslin take offence if she wanted to.
"Shhh." Some subtle shift in her position told him to look down. The main body of the Axtli was gliding slowly past. Its spines all pointed forward or back, and Rel finally got a clear look at the creature within.
A hole, swirling with black-on-hungry-black patterns, and Clearsight showed the sucking vortex of the air - of Realmspace itself - that pulled at everything nearby. He could feel it through the tightness of the Sherim, he realised, now he knew what to feel for. Some trick of the light that wasn't light at all said that the hole, the Axtli, was spherical, at least for a Second-Realm value of 'sphere'.
There was no motion to its movement; no legs, no arms, the spines that must be eyes and ears and fingers all in one utterly static. It moved as if a statue on a cart. Or, perhaps - yes; Clearsight turned the spherical void into a marble, its surface so perfect that its roll was invisible.
Something tickled his eyelashes as it pressed onto his face, and no strength of will could keep him from blinking. Clearsight departed and only then did the light disappear. The pressure on his face was warm, a hand covering his eyes, but his nerves were so raw that he didn't notice the panic until it was past. Taslin had covered his eyes, forced him to break out of Clearvision.
With the front of his brain stunned numb by conflicting sensations - ache, cold, warmth, receding fear - he reconsidered his last thoughts, the details of what he'd seen. As he'd mused on marbles, the Axtli's spines had begun to thicken.
"Sorry. You were drawing its attention." Taslin's whisper came, barely louder than her breathing.
He tried to match it, but found his voice loud and clumsy in his own ears. "It's fine. Can we get out of here yet?"
"Another thirty seconds."
She took her hand away, but it was still night-time, and cloudy, moonless. Only the distant fire, somehow now high above them, shone muted by the Sherim's depths. Better not to twist around and try to get a look at their predator; doing so would only risk his place in the Sherim. Still, he could at least do something about Taslin's embrace.
She was a dim shape, felt as much as seen, and he seemed to be lying across her waist and hips, his head cradled in the crook of her elbow where her arm turned across to hold him. He tried to turn his shoulders, and sit up, but the Wilder kept tight hold.
"Let me go." He wasn't trying to sound belligerent, but the words came out as a harsh hiss.
"Stop fidgeting. I know it's not comfortable, but it's only another moment."
Rel was starting to understand why Dora got on so well with Taslin.
Immersed in darkness, every sense seemed muted. The sickly air was still; Rel realised he was holding his breath, decided to hold it a little longer. Under his shoulder, Taslin's chest shifted only slightly with each breath - just enough that he couldn't forget the femininity of her. Lips sealed, Rel wondered if the sound of his teeth grinding would carry outside his head.
"The way is clear. Brace yourself." Taslin held her voice so low Rel almost missed it.
They fell backwards, and the fall turned into a twisting, sliding sensation that all but threw the contents of Rel's stomach out of him - he gagged it back down, coughing - and then they were spilling out, upright but stumbling as feet hit the ground and there was a body there. Somehow, Rel managed to stagger into a leap that took him across the fire; Taslin fell to her hands and knees where she landed.
The fire was higher than it had looked from within the Sherim, and Rel beat embers from his trouser-legs, cursing. Then thought caught up; Dora.
She lay, clearly unconscious, facing the fire. That was the lip of the Sherim, then. Taslin turned, rising to a kneeling crouch, reaching for Dora, but already there was a dark, shapeless cloud around the back of her head. Rel's blood went cold even as he engaged Clearsight. The cloud became thick black spikes, shining in the firelight, stretching up from Dora's head as if they were coming out of her ear.
The Axtli fixed on all three of them, bristling with spines that promised unknown horror.
"Clearseer! First-Realm logic!" Tasl
in's shout broke his hypnotised terror. What did she mean?
No time to do anything but trust her. Find the shape that the spines made as they twisted through the threshold of the Sherim and back into ordinary dimensions. They could almost be tall grass, razor sharp and deadly to walk through.
He shook his head and tried again, keeping his mind off the thought of what those spines might do if they touched flesh. How sharp were they?
No, something spiky but harmless. Mother's pin-cushion. No, the shape was more like one he'd once seen Mrs. Tofarn using, an ugly thing that was supposed to be the shape of a dog's head. Yes, the shape fit. Rel concentrated-
- And leapt back with a yelp as Taslin swiped an arm through the air and a razor-edged gust of wind tore through the Axtli. The flinch made him blink - Clearsight lost - but the First-Realm image lingered. Severed and scattered pins bounced off Dora's arm, vanishing before they could roll to a stop. The Axtli made no noise, but there was no mistaking the way the dark shape receded behind Dora's head.
In the seized moment, Rel took stock. They needed to move Dora away from the Sherim, and fast. His head ached. The skin on his hands prickled, warning him he was too close to the fire, and he stepped sideways around it while Taslin gathered Dora's arms, began to lift her.
The moil of darkness burst into a fountain, black gouts shooting ten feet up before curving