reflex just about keeping his legs underneath him so he didn't fall. Where he clung to the Route, there was the scalding of hands plunged into boiling water. No, the feeling of trying to plug a hole in a boiling kettle with bare hands.
The Separatist had attacked the Route. Lances of its mind, vastly more in tune with the natural laws of the Second Realm, speared through the threads of Atla's weave, pumping pure hatred into them. The raw emotions bled through the Gift and reached for Atla's mind. Somewhere in the depths of his Gift, right down at the base of his skull, the leviathan thrashed like a mad thing. Atla felt a hoarse burn in his throat and only then realised he was screaming.
Screaming would not help. The violet stream of his pain wasn't even reaching as far as the mouth of the Route, let alone the Separatist hovering beyond. The quickest route to the Separatist was through his spasming, overloaded Gift. Too drunk on pain to question the impulse, Atla screamed in his own mind.
Under his feet, Realmspace shook, and the Separatist recoiled. Echoes of the tremor sloshed back and forth between the springs of the Route and the currents of his Gift. He managed to open his eyes, found Chag at his side, holding him upright, the two of them swaying with yet another shock running through the ground. Rel landing, dazed and fatigued.
Atla screwed his eyes shut and cut off his mental screaming. He reached down inside himself, stroked some of the fear and pain away from his Gift. The sensation that came back was of the lank, sweaty fur and trembling of a dog tormented close to its limit. He sympathised, did what he could to let the hidden shape of the leviathan know.
There hadn't been a second impact. Rel had landed. Pevan should have been just behind him. Where was she? Atla extricated himself from his Gift and looked up again. The sky was almost bare, smudgy grey with stained-glass patterns at its fringes. It took him a moment even to find the shining gold shape of the Separatist. The Wilder had retreated quite some distance, by the look of it, and tarnished with it. But where was Pevan?
He was just coming to the wrenching point of acceptance when something cut the Separatist almost clean in two. For a violent moment, emotions exploded through his Gift like fireworks underwater, just outside the end of the Route, and then the Separatist was gone, reduced to glittering dust drifting down towards the waiting hunger of ferals at the bottom of the Realm.
Chag said something, the words lost in a light-headed buzzing as a ripple went through the Route. Somehow, Atla found, he'd managed to hold onto the whole thing, the fine, elegant arch of it still reaching right across the Second Realm's sky, high over the ruins of the white cave. The ripple - Pevan, bloated with Wild Power, finally crossing the threshold of the Route - bounced back along the arch, and Atla braced for another headrush, burying his face in Chag's shoulder.
When it hit, though, the second rush was gentler, little more than a momentary blurring of vision. Atla straightened, his head feeling too heavy for his neck, laden with fatigue, but the rest of his mind coming back into order. A giant dragonfly was hovering a couple of feet away.
He stumbled backwards, blinking in surprise, but Chag's arm across his back kept him from falling. The dragonfly dropped out of the air suddenly, the blur of its motion resolving into Pevan. Her Wild Power dissipated, a cloud of bubbles rushing for the surface of his Gift and vanishing before they got there.
One eyebrow sharply arched, face turned only enough that her words shot over his shoulder rather than into his throat, she said, "You want to take your hands off my man?" The humour in her tone didn't make it any less deadly, and Atla couldn't help but flinch sideways, almost pushing Chag off his feet. The ground really wasn't steady enough for standing on.
It took all his balance and self-control to take a couple of wobbling steps clear of the little man. His knees ached, but he had to keep them slightly bent so the rocking surface didn't topple him again. Pevan threw her arms around Chag, holding his face to her shoulder for a moment as the gesture almost bore the thief to the ground.
"Can we focus, please?" Acerbic, stinging, Rel's voice swarmed past Pevan and Chag, and Atla had to duck out of its way. The Clearseer had made it upright, though from the way he held a hand pressed to his forehead, something in the fight with the Separatist had hit him hard. His eyes were half-lidded, sunken.
A faint shadow flittered over Chag's shoulder, Pevan whispering something just by his ear. He nodded in response, his hands scrunching up the fabric of her blouse as they tightened. Then the couple pulled apart. Atla guessed from Pevan's stance that the look she shot at Rel was a hostile one, but he couldn't see more than the edge of her face from where he stood. Rel was glaring at Chag, anyway, and didn't notice.
The Route now felt like a long, steep slide dropping away somewhere beneath their feet. With his Gift still active - not like he could just turn it off, after all, particularly not in its current mood - Atla had the uncomfortable sensation that he was standing on the vertical face of a wall. It sent tingling aches across the soles of his feet, which couldn't believe they weren't slipping, losing grip.
Dissonance between sight and Gifted perception made his brain feel like the two hemispheres were grinding against each other. The sooner he could get the others moving onwards, put an end to the awkward, tense standoff between them, the better. Closing his eyes seemed to help a little, and with his Gift running at heel, he felt out across the undulating ground for the point that would give way to whatever the Route offered next.
The other Gifted turned their attention on him, the collective weight of their curiosity and frustration a wave of considerable power that it took all Atla's sure-footedness to step over. A surge of heat from his Gift felt oddly like irritation, but he held it down, forced his mood steady. The Route was safety only in the most temporary, insecure way. It still paid to be careful.
He moved over the ground as slowly as he could, though the others were short on patience. He'd please no-one if he rushed and missed something. It was a question of feeling where the roots tying the Route to the ground were strongest. That would be the point most likely to accept a human mind without disintegrating.
Different threads of the Route had different feels, microscopic patches of incongruous experience bleeding through into his awareness. Colours, textures, smells, even faint hints of emotion that warned just how dangerous the Second Realm could be - let one of those claim him, and if he didn't black out immediately, there was every chance of it driving him to a psychotic outburst.
Still, the right sensation might finally pull the Route together into logical unity. Atla sifted them, wary all the while of the elastic ground beneath his feet. A sudden splash, as if of cold water across his back, shocked him despite his poise, but even as he gasped, his imagination leapt. His Gift trumpeted challenge, and the ground dropped away beneath him. The rest of the jumble of impressions blurred neatly into rocks, mist, and stone-grey water far below. It still felt wrong, falling when his Gift told him their path was horizontal, but at least it was progress.
Chag screamed, and for a moment all Atla could do was freeze in flight, veins turning to ice at the thought of another attack. But no, there were no Wildren thrashing through his Gift; the thief's fear was all for the unanticipated fall. He trailed the sharp point of a whirlpool in the Gift, but Pevan, almost lost in the roaring currents, was already moving to reassure him. Atla doubted the Gatemaker would have much difficulty calming Chag down.
Not that that got Atla off the hook. Neither Pevan nor her brother was happy about the lack of warning, his Gift told him. He forced his attention back to the Route and the fall. At least if they scolded him for it in the First Realm, there was less likelihood of death from loose language. There was a long way yet to fall - they hadn't even passed the still-churning ruin of the white cave, invisible from the Route but bulging somewhere below them.
A sharp shiver ran through his Gift at the thought of the cave, held his attention there for a moment. The tumult was changing its pattern, folding inside-out, currents switching direction with
an unpleasant, intestinal bubbling. Something monolithic and vast was moving in there. Atla could feel his Gift... there was no word for it but 'cowering'.
Around him, narrow, brightly-coloured ribbons of water still fell. They didn't look quite like waterfalls, though; more like water poured from a jug, clear and cohesive. The impression only broke where one struck the lumpen rocks that occasionally protruded from the cliff behind him. There, clouds of shimmering mist struck through with rainbow haloes drifted out into the Route, to pass silently by or brush cold fingers across the cheeks of the falling Gifted.
The cliff itself was a good dozen yards away, behind their feet - or, depending how one looked at it, below them. Atla's brain rebelled for a moment at the ambiguity, his forehead feeling like it might burst before the sudden thump of his fatigue headache, but he squinted and forced himself to accept what his eyes were telling him. It was far easier to believe his Gift was tricking him, for all it wriggled in frustration at the dismissal.
One thing that couldn't be dismissed was the awareness of whatever was happening at the white cave. The Realm itself seemed squeezed by the monster threatening to emerge, a sensation through his Gift to