As Clare lay there choking, she rolled her head to one side and saw Al splayed out on the deck beside her, one arm curled tightly around a rope-wrapped bollard and the other stretched out toward Clare, still tethered to her by the stripy scarf. Allie clambered up onto her hands and knees, heaving and flushed, her dark hair plastered to her face and her grey eyes wild. When she saw that Clare was safe—gasping like a landed flounder, but safe—her face broke into a fierce, feral grin. Clare couldn’t help but grin back. She was alive. Only a moment earlier she’d thought she was doomed.
Then a shadow fell over her face and she looked up into a pair of hazel-grey eyes, burning with cold fire, and said, “I am doomed.”
“That’s what my men have been saying for the last thirteen days,” Suetonius Paulinus said in a steel-edged voice. The same voice that had shouted for her to take his hand. In Latin. He was massaging the fingers of that hand, his gaze ticking back and forth between his calloused digits and Clare’s face. Obviously he’d felt the surge of her shimmer power, which was why they could understand each other. It was a nifty function of the shimmer magic that Clare had discovered early on with Comorra—physical contact bestowed upon the contactees mutual comprehension—but it still weirded Clare out. Never in a million years, even with all the time Al had spent practising her Latin homework out loud within Clare’s uncaring earshot, did she think she’d ever be able to understand another human being speaking the Language of the Emperors.
“Convince me my men are wrong,” Paulinus continued, his words auto-translating in Clare’s brain, “and I may yet decide not to throw you back overboard.”
Clare was pushing herself up—easier said than done what with the ship rolling and pitching like a six-coupon ride at the Exhibition—as another man in scuffed leather armour and more than a few days’ growth of beard stepped up beside Paulinus.
He looked at Clare and grunted at the governor, “So the little witch brought a companion this time, I see …”
“Oh, hey Junius,” Al grunted in a pained voice as she and Clare climbed unsteadily to their feet. “How’s it hangin’?”
Junius—the brutish legionnaire Al had first encountered in the Roman camp at the foot of Glastonbury Tor—cocked his head at her like a bulldog that had flunked out of obedience school. The poor guy was clearly in the linguistic dark.
“Poor guy” my butt, Clare thought.
The first time Junius had seen Al was when she’d materialized out of thin air, right in front of him, in the middle of a battle with Mallora the Druid priestess’s scathach. He’d been advocating for Al’s demise—on account of her being some kind of wicked-ass sorceress—ever since.
Al had evidently decided he was the least of her concerns. Her gaze raked the shipdeck, preoccupied with finding a certain chiselled young legionnaire. Finally she turned to Clare with a puzzled frown. “I thought—”
“I know,” Clare answered, flicking her eyes sideways at the Roman governor and cutting Al off before she could say too much in front of him. “And I don’t know.”
The boat heaved then and Clare’s ankle bent inward, sending her crashing down again onto one knee. She swore colourfully and winced in pain. This was all some kind of mistake. Marcus was nowhere in sight. Neither was Llassar the Druid smith, he of the magicked-up coin that had gotten her and Al on board the ship in the first place.
She cast an eye skyward, desperately hoping Owl-Goggles would appear in the skies to call her and Al home. They needed a take-two on this whole nightmare scene. Another wave crashed into the side of the boat and the deck slanted dangerously. Al made a grab for Clare and the two of them clung together until the heaving craft righted itself.
Talk about heaving … Clare thought as her stomach flipped over.
“Throw them to the waves, Governor,” Junius growled to Paulinus. “Their presence aboard this ship can only lead to more ill.”
“I’m not convinced of that,” Paulinus murmured.
“Look around you!” Junius waved a hand, gesturing at the sky and the sea. “At what’s been happening to us! We are at the end of the world. And now the Druidess has sent her minions here to see to it we sail over the edge and into oblivion.”
Paulinus ignored him and took a step toward the girls as Al helped Clare get to her feet again. The two girls stood there, swaying and stutter-step weaving from side to side as the ocean continued to batter at the cargo ship. Silence broken only by the crashing of the waves stretched out between them.
“I do not think so, Junius,” Paulinus said finally. “If we are truly sailing for the edge of the world, by that logic the ship we chase will precede us into the great void. And that Druidess is not a woman I would peg as longing for death. Not her own death. Ours, certainly. But there are easier ways to try for that outcome, I should think.”
Clare and Al exchanged a glance.
They must mean Mallora, Clare thought.
Clare didn’t know all that much about the Druid high priestess, beyond the fact that she was Boudicca’s sister— although that itself was a cautionary factor. She’d only glimpsed Mallora when she appeared on Glastonbury Tor with Stuart Morholt just as Clare and her friends were shimmering. But the Druidess had made one hell of a first impression, what with the crazy hair and the crazier eyes and the wild cloak of raven feathers flowing behind her as she ran, shouting curses into the firelit night sky.
The image had stuck with Clare. Just as Boudicca’s had the first time she saw her—bloodied but unbowed, careening down a chariot track with Connal the Druid. They were two women plainly cut from the same cloth. I wonder if the Druidess sisters got along when they were little girls, learning to cast blood curses, play-fighting with little wooden swords—
A shout sounded from a sailor stationed at the ship’s bow.
“Brace yourselves!” he barked. Or the Latin equivalent thereof. “Hold on!”
Junius swore and lunged for a nearby stanchion, wrapping one hairy arm around it and ducking his head between his hunched shoulders. Paulinus, his face twisting into a determined grimace, swivelled on his sandalled heel and stalked toward the front of the ship. The girls turned to watch him go—and beheld the sight of something so terrifying that neither could utter a sound. The angry, purple vortex was swirling open before them like the yawning maw of the proverbial giant whale, looking to swallow the ship whole.
Which it did.
As a twilight-tinged umbra swept over the ship, Clare instinctively dove for cover—in this case a short stack of cargo barrels secured to the rolling deck with a rough hemp net— and, still tethered to Al by the wrist, she took her down with her. The girls gripped the netting and huddled together as the sky overhead roiled with clouds painted in shades inspired by bruises and hallucinatory nightmares.
With one hand Clare felt under her shirt for the meticulously wrapped foil package containing her digital camera. It was still there, still reasonably secure—or so it felt—and she breathed a sigh of relief in the midst of her panic. It was a brief sigh, interrupted when the cargo netting came loose with the next heave of the ship and Clare and Al were sent flying amidst a barrage of rolling barrels.
Caught in the net like a couple of landed fish, they tumbled painfully across the deck and dropped through an open hatch into the dark, foul-smelling ship’s innards. The stench of bilge water and the absolute blackness in the cargo hold made Clare start to hyperventilate. The breath wheezed in and out of her lungs in an anxious rasp and it was only the death grip of Al’s hand in hers that kept her from starting to scream and flail in a full-fledged panic attack.
Then a voice, deep and sonorous in the darkness. “Clarinet? Is that you?”
“Llassar?” Clare peered around but she couldn’t even make out shapes. It was as if night had fallen in the middle of the day, swift and absolute. A moonless, starless, terrifying, epically dark night.
Beside her, Clare could hear Al fumbling around in her messenger bag. There was a popping sound and then a steady
, greenish glow lit up the hold. Or enough of it for the girls to discern the hunched, tangle-haired shape of the Druid smith. He sat slumped on a crate, chained to a wooden post with heavy iron manacles. His black eyes gleamed in the chemical light of the glowstick, his gaze fearless, curious, welcoming, and weary all at once.
Clare rushed forward, throwing her arms around the heavily muscled man and dragging Al with her on the scarf-leash.
“Llassar!” she exclaimed. “Oh, thank god! I was worried we were the only non-Romans on this boat!”
“Urk,” Al said as her face scrunched up against Llassar’s shoulder.
Clare exclaimed an apology and yanked at the silk Doctor Who scarf around their wrists. Al brushed her fumbling fingers away and began working patiently at the water-swollen knots, nodding her head at Clare to continue.
“I’m really glad to see you,” Clare said, her relief running away with her mouth as she started to babble. “I mean, I would have been totally okay if this hadn’t happened, because then I wouldn’t be on a boat captained by a truly scary dude and trying hard not to think about the fact that I think I’m prone—like really, really prone—to motion sickness and wondering how on earth we’re going to get out of this one when I don’t have the faintest idea where we are. But I’m guessing we’re here because you still have the coin we magicked up, right? Do you know where Marcus is? The young super-hot Roman dude? We sort of have to find him. And get the hell out of here.”
She stopped and blinked down at the iron cuffs biting into the flesh of the big man’s burly, muscle-corded wrists. His thick fingers—Clare knew from having watched him create a delicate piece of jewellery that they were superhumanly dextrous—hung limply in front of him.
There were livid bruises on his face, around his eyes.
“Um. Yeah. Okay … We should probably get you the hell out of here, too,” she concluded, a flare of anger adding an edge to her voice. “And maybe punch whoever did this to you on our way out the door.”
“What happened?” Al asked, working the last scarf knot free. “Where is this ship headed? And where’s Marcus? Is he here?”
Blood rushed back into Clare’s fingertips, making them tingle painfully, and she gasped at the sensation before Llassar had a chance to answer. In the silence that followed she peered around in the gloom. The glowstick cast its greenish illumination in a little circle that barely encompassed the three of them. Clare couldn’t see what else the ship’s hold might contain. But then, as she made herself concentrate, she heard what else it contained. People. Al heard it at the same time she did. Above the sounds of the creaking planks of the ship’s sides, Clare could hear breathing, the murmuring of voices, whispered questions.
As Al slowly lifted the glowstick over her head, the thin wash of eldritch glow reflected back from the staring eyes of more than a dozen faces. Celtic prisoners in chains and Roman legionnaires both, they all worked together in a kind of fire-brigade line of bailing buckets.
“Do not fear them.” Llassar grinned wanly at the girls as Al lowered the chemical light and turned back to Clare, her eyes white-rimmed.
“Why?” Al asked in a dry whisper. “’Cause they’re too busy keeping the ship afloat to deal with a couple of unarmed teenage girls?”
“They might be” came Paulinus’s voice as the governor appeared above them. With swift, sure motions, he swung himself down through the hatch and nimbly descended the ladder. “But I’m not.”
“Damn.” Clare was kind of hoping the swaggering Roman had been swept overboard.
“No such luck,” Al muttered out of the side of her mouth, reading Clare’s expression with her usual uncanny accuracy.
That wasn’t the only uncanny thing. The ship felt as though it had stopped bucking. In fact, it felt as though it had stopped moving altogether. The rough planking beneath their feet no longer shuddered and groaned. Llassar and Paulinus exchanged a glance. The Druid smith’s expression remained impassive, placid even, but the Roman commander’s eye narrowed.
“Yes,” he said. “We’ve entered another abyss.”
“A what?” Clare and Al asked in tandem.
Paulinus jerked his head in the direction of the ladder. “You should probably see this,” he said. “Perhaps you can even shed some light on it.”
Well … no. No, they couldn’t.
Because once they climbed back up on deck, neither Al nor Clare had the faintest idea what they were looking at. The square blue-and-white sail billowed at midship, straining at the ropes as if filled with a gale-force wind. But there wasn’t even the hint of a breeze where they stood. The water, only moments ago a roiling cauldron of frothing, gnashing, massive grey waves with high peaks and dread troughs, had turned koi-pond smooth. Barely a ripple marred its surface, tinged a deep, glassy purple from reflecting the sky above.
And what a sky.
9
Allie heard Clare gasp.
She would have done the same, except that it’s hard to gasp when your mouth is already hanging open.
The Roman merchant galley looked as though it was sailing into a tunnel on a cosmic amusement park ride. It was like a massive, sky-sized version of Clare’s personal shimmer effect, Allie thought. As if someone had showered the aurora borealis in pixie dust and rolled it up into a tube. The tunnel seemed to be rotating in a slow-mo barrel roll, but it was hard to tell. The clouds overhead swirled in a large-scale version of Milo’s temporal barrier rift in Glastonbury. The air rippled in sheets—just as it had when she’d been on the open moors with Marcus, running for her life, waves of temporal distortion sweeping over them.
As Allie stared upward from the deck of the ship, she thought she could discern ribbons of different-time-of-day skies. Windows of bright noon-blue sky studded with puffball clouds swirled side by side with a slash of moonlit midnight glittering with stars. In one place there was a thunderstorm, in another, gentle rain. Or ice pellets. Blazing sun. Fog …
But none of it touched them. The ship was shrouded in a faintly glimmering, crepuscular light, a hazy-purple luminescence more than fitting for the Twilight Zone-y-ness of the moment. The deck was crowded with soldiers, all standing, staring into the tunnelly abyss. None worked the rigging or the rudders; it seemed there was no need. The ship just zoomed along as though set on some kind of ancient, mystical, nautical autopilot.
The men’s expressions were less fearful than Allie had expected. More like … resigned. She got the sense that any panic the soldiers may have felt had long been leached from them, as if they’d accepted the epic journey they were on, like Jason and the Argonauts, or Odysseus. It was eerie.
“This is eerie,” Clare said.
Allie turned to Suetonius Paulinus. “I’m guessing this kind of thing has happened before?”
“It has.”
He stood gripping the wooden railing so hard he was practically making finger marks. She supposed she could hardly blame him. As advanced and disciplined and logical as the average Roman military mind must have been—and Paulinus was likely head of the class in that department— she also knew, from all the reading she’d done, that the soldiers of the Empire were even more superstitious than regular civilians. And it was, after all, the first century. They didn’t know anything about electromagnetic pulses and the theory of relativity and, really, what did it matter that she did?
They’re caught in a giant magical vortex, and so are you.
And first century or twenty-first, everyone on that boat had the right to be terrified out of their wits.
“Al?” Clare murmured out of the side of her mouth. She was leaning slightly over the side, peering down at the water rushing past far below.
“Yeah?” Al said quietly, leaning over to see what Clare was looking at.
“How fast would you say a boat like this usually travels?”
“Umm … Before we shimmered I asked Milo about that— because of the whole ‘meet us on the island’ thing—and he said that wherever we snapped that photo, it
couldn’t be that far because a first-century merchant vessel powered exclusively by sail”—she glanced down the rail and saw no banks of oars—“would only clock maybe five or six knots out of a good stiff wind. That’s nautical miles.”
Clare frowned down at the water. “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say we’re going faster than that. Way faster.”
Al frowned down at the thick, froth-crested wake that spread out from the bow of the ship. “Yeah … This sucker is moving at like … jet-boat speeds. We are seriously motoring.”
“And how long have they been at this do you figure?” Clare asked quietly.
“Umm … Judging from the rampant stubble on the generally hygiene-happy legionnaires?” Allie said, glancing around at the faces of the Roman soldiers. They stood in clumps along the railings in less than their usual spit-polished uniform gear. “I’d say a couple of weeks at least.”
“Seventeen days,” Paulinus said.
Allie was shocked to see the bleak, naked vulnerability on his face. Here was a man who’d evidently never found himself at a loss for words or actions. And now he was just plain lost. Period. The lostest you could ever be, she thought. Even when she’d found herself stranded in the past, all she’d had to do was look up at the terraced contours of Ynys Wyddryn— Glastonbury Tor—and she’d know where, geographically at least, she was.
The governor shrugged. “As near as I can tell.”
Clare tilted her head, regarding him keenly. “What do you mean ‘as near as you can tell’? Are you really bad at math or something? Or did you just lose count? I mean, seriously, seventeen isn’t that high a number.”