bruising tangle of limbs and grunts. Whatever she landed on was rough enough to rip the skin off her knuckles. She flopped over sideways, hissing a curse. Chag groaned.
"Are you injured?" Delaventrin's voice remained intimate and calm, now speaking from the stone directly beneath Pevan's ear. She took stock one limb at a time, found it impossible to tell the difference between fresh bruises and those from earlier in the day. Her abdomen ached, but that had to be as much from hunger as from her landing on the pipe.
She must have slid down faster than First-Realm logic suggested was possible. There was no telling which of half a dozen balconies they'd started from, but a wild guess put the length of pipe she'd ridden high in the hundreds of feet, at least a whole turn of the spiral. Above her up-turned face, the room - the Shtorq? - climbed straight up into darkness.
She found her voice surprisingly steady, if thinned by lingering tightness in her chest. "I'm alright. Chag?"
He groaned again. "I'll live." She heard a scuff as he pushed to his feet. When he spoke again, his voice came clearer, flatter. "Please forgive us, Delaventrin. We may need a moment to recover."
The platform bobbed ever so slightly, the Wilder's simple affirmation spreading through Pevan's consciousness. She pushed herself up onto one creaking wrist and peered into the black liquid rippling gently by a few feet away. Was Delaventrin in the water? Was the Wilder the water itself? She couldn't rule it out.
Chag offered her a hand, and a rough heave got her to her feet. The little man had blood trickling down behind his ear. Pevan said so, and he raised a hand to poke at the cut, wincing when he found it, somewhere above his hairline. The gesture was so like Rel that Pevan took a step closer and pulled his hand away from the injury.
He shot her a puzzled look. Well, she couldn't back out now, it would just be rude. She dug her hankie out of her sleeve, grabbed Chag by the forehead, and turned his head sideways to get a look at the bleeding. He gave an awkward cluck, but no protest. The cut proved small, buried somewhere close to his hairline; she pulled his hair back out of the way and pressed the cloth to it. She was too experienced from her brother's adventures and misadventures to let Chag slip away when he flinched.
"You do care." He grinned, his tone making a joke that his eyes fell just short of matching. "Do you have to care quite so hard?"
"Hush." Pevan tried for her best Dora impression. "It's not much, but it'll bleed like hell if you let it." Alright, so perhaps Dora wouldn't be quite so rough, unless Rel had been really foolish. Chag reached up to touch her hand, and she pulled away before she realised what she was doing. He frowned as she fumbled the hankie into his hand and pressed it against the injury. "Just hold it like that for a minute."
He did so, pushing his head slightly to one side, the planes of his face hardening with something that could have been reproach just as easily as puzzlement. The harsh light didn't favour him. Pevan looked away, searching for Delaventrin to save her from the hanging conversation. There was still no sign of the Wilder.
"Delaventrin?" Chag's voice fell flat and disappeared into the low rustle of the waves. "This is Pevan Atcar, Gatemaker of Federas."
For a moment, Pevan thought the Realm spun around her, and staggered toward the platform edge while her brain dizzied with the clash. Then she realised it was the pipe revolving slowly around them. Delaventrin's voice startled her back to herself. "Welcome, Pevan Atcar." A ripple of amusement that had nothing to do with the black fluid around them rocked the platform. Pevan let herself stumble a step or two back from the edge.
Her gaze crossed Chag's, and the little man nodded toward the gleaming brass of the pipe. Softly, he said, "As far as I can tell, when you're in the Shtorq it's best to think of Delaventrin as that."
Pevan frowned, then set herself to face the pipe close to where it plunged beneath the water. "Hello, Delaventrin." After a pause to figure out the correct manners, she went on, "Can you explain the Shtorq to me, please?"
"You will find it easiest to think of the Shtorq as a place where your consciousness can share directly in my experiences. Previous attempts to inform humans in more detail of how the Shtorq works have caused regrettable logic breakdowns." The Wilder's tone stayed perfectly flat, its skin and form unchanging, but a shiver still ran through Pevan. She folded her arms against the prickling of her skin, but the sensation stayed.
Delaventrin continued, "Before the Realmcrash, Shtorq were what you would call sacred to my species. No other but the Shtorq in which you stand survived, or if any did they have yet to be rediscovered."
It was easier to dwell on the history than think about sharing a Wilder's experiences. Pevan said, "I am honoured to be here, Delaventrin."
"Yes, you are." Had the pipe shifted, ever so slightly? Pevan squinted, but she had no way to be sure. Delaventrin could only have chosen the words for their menace.
The pause hung, waiting for someone to confront the question of what Chag had brought her here to see. What experience could Delaventrin have had that would convince her to join the Separatists? It was clear the Wilder had never been to the First Realm, could never hope to survive there. She couldn't see how Delaventrin could even leave the Shtorq.
Chag glanced down, his Adam's apple bobbing in what looked like a clumsy attempt to clear his throat without making any noise. He said, "Delaventrin is a Clearseer, for want of a better way of putting it."
Pevan frowned. "What's so special about that?"
"You didn't know?" Chag's face showed no surprise. "Clearseeing is not a natural ability among Children of the Wild. It's another thing the Gift-Givers keep hidden."
"But it's a Gift!" Pevan tried to rein in her puzzlement. "If it's not of the Second Realm, how does it work?"
Chag's jaw tightened. Voice thick, he said, "It's a Gift of something else, and no-one will tell me what. Even though I was the one who stole some for the Separatists."
"Petulance will not benefit you, Chag Van Raighan." Delaventrin's words came through the reeling of Pevan's mind like a paper-cut, flat, thin and sharp. "We agreed not to mention your prior activities."
"Well, I've mentioned them." Chag's face flushed rosy. "It was my idea to keep them secret anyway."
"I did not deny that." Delaventrin twisted, looking organic for the first time despite its gleaming skin. "I must establish Talerssi on the matter." The pipe began to slide down into the water, making the wall outside it seem to spin. Pevan put her hand on Chag's shoulder to steady herself.
"Stop!" The little man's whole body twitched as the shout went out of him. "Your Talerssi can wait. First, show Pevan the viewing."
To Pevan's surprise, Delaventrin spun back into place. "You accrue Talerssi by this, Chag Van Raighan, and I by saying so."
"Then when we are done here, you can explain Talerssi to me." Tension made the thief look gaunt. Pevan dropped her hand back to her side. Chag finished, quietly, "Show her what we brought her here to see."
"Make yourselves ready." Delaventrin's quiet acknowledgement shot a chill down Pevan's spine, spread ice through her gut. Hating herself for it, she shot Chag a worried look.
He put a finger to his lips, then took her hand. He pulled her down to a sitting position and lay down on his back, motioning for her to do the same at his side. His hand was cold, but she made no effort to shake him off. Their fingers meshed. Pevan let her head lie back and looked upward.
Her first impression was of forward motion, but it lasted only a fraction of a second before disappearing into the tempest as every part of the Shtorq spun in every direction. 'Up' and 'down' disappeared, replaced by the first stirrings of a fatigue headache. The only other sensation she could grasp was the pinch of Chag's grip between her fingers.
She caught hints of a pattern here and there, as if they flew through the gears of some great mechanism, great enough to grind the world to powder. The overall order eluded to her, but the sense that it was there comforted. She attributed it to Delaventrin's hand - or polyp, tail, or non-specific limb - drawi
ng them into the Wilder's consciousness.
Then Delaventrin actually grasped them. For a second, thought fled before the impression that everything whirling before her hung inside everything else. She gasped, squeezed Chag's hand and rode the surge of emotion provoked by his proximity to reseat her identity. The whirling Shtorq came into focus. Suddenly, she saw how that arc of black-veined scarlet blocks drove that crystal wheel, twitching the ratchet of incongruous timber until it tipped and tumbled that eerily choreographed cascade of tiles into motion...
Pevan followed the flow of reactions through the system to a point dead ahead of them. In the distance, through the chaos, she made out the cylindrical shell of the room, gently spinning. There was no sign of the brass spiral that she had taken for Delaventrin, but she understood what she saw well enough to know that the Wilder was much more than that.
The Shtorq forced her attention back to the centre-point again. There, a set of four or perhaps five discs spun through one another, flashing colours in a rainbow that encompassed the spectra of both Realms. Distance blurred the scene grey, and an image leapt out at her, trailing a tangle of roots that speared away into the distant future.
It was the familiar image, lodged in her brain like a bad tune, from Chag's Witnessing that morning. Pevan, with her arms around Chag, their lips pressed