Most of my senses were useless: everything was utterly silent, and if there was any wind, I didn’t feel it. I gazed around, but there wasn’t much to see. The only clouds were miles below, leaving the sky an incredible, dazzling blue. . . .
It was the view from an airplane, I realized, except we weren’t in one. We weren’t even in the shield because it was designed only to operate within a ley line. We were thousands of feet above the ground in a car that had no business being there. I stared at the Earth, so ridiculously far below, but I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs to scream.
And then I was thrown back against the seat as Marsden nose-dived straight for the ground. The wind caused by our sudden plummet hit my eyes and I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think through the sheer terror of it. We were going to die, I thought blankly, we were all going to die—and then we hit another ley line head-on.
This one was tiny, barely large enough for the car, almost brushing us on either side of the newly re-formed bubble. In the few seconds we’d been outside, my eyebrows had frosted up, my skin had turned a vaguely purple shade of blue and I swear my eyes had iced over. I blinked them rapidly, trying to see, and finally managed it—just in time to watch us slide straight down into a tunnel of leaping red fire.
I’d gotten my breath back, so I used it to scream, but the engine noise mostly drowned it out. I eventually trailed off, my throat raw, and yet we kept falling. It was like being on a roller-coaster ride with no bottom. The seat belt was cutting into my lap, threatening to bisect me; devil dog’s hair was floating straight up; and Pritkin was gripping the back of the seat with both hands to keep from being thrown against the top of the bubble. And still we dove.
Then the brilliant red suddenly shifted to crimson as we plunged through some kind of border. The car went from an almost perpendicular plummet to a steep slide, throwing me half out of the car. My arm flung out in an attempt to grab something, anything, to steady me, and plunged straight into freezing water.
Part of the car was outside the narrow confines of the line, creating a hole in the shield. My arm had gone out the hole and a flood of water was coming in. It hissed against the line’s energy, throwing a cloud of steam in my face.
“Get back in!” Marsden yelled. “I can’t see!”
“I’ll get right on that!” I snarled as the forward momentum did its best to rip my arm off.
Pritkin tried to drag me back. But with only my strength to work with, it did no good. I turned, bracing my feet against the side of the car, and
pulled
. My arm popped out of the hole, the car swerved back into the line and devil dog shook himself, spraying me in the face with waterlogged fur.
“The Channel,” Marsden yelled, looking perfectly normal except for the high energy in his eyes. “And I’d keep your hands inside the car, if I were you. The energy of the line tends to attract attention. Went a little offsides once and next thing I knew, there was this great dolphin in the passenger seat, flapping and writhing and thwacking me with its tail. Took me forever to get it out. Cost me the race.”
I just stared at him until my attention was caught by the huge, dark shape that coasted by outside the line. It was indistinct through the jumping energy, but was easily as big as a house. “Whale,” Pritkin said from over my shoulder. “Some animals can sense the lines; we’ve never determined quite how.”
“Damn nuisances!” Marsden declared. “That’s how Cavanaugh died, you know. Middle of the All Britain back in ’fifty-six, and this great blue decides to breach the line. Dove in right in front of him. Must have been daft.”
“Then perhaps we should attempt to leave this one behind,” Pritkin pointed out.
Marsden apparently agreed, because he floored it. We flew ahead along a twisting, perilous course, but the whale kept pace, ducking and diving and following the same crazy path from the outside. Until we suddenly shot up again, leaving the ocean behind along with the ley line.
I hung over the side of the car, staring down at the ocean and the huge head that bobbed for a moment among the iron-gray waves and then disappeared. We continued upward for another few seconds and then started to drop like the large hunk of steel we were. I kept waiting for another line to snatch us away, but nothing happened and the waves were close enough that I could see the foam cresting on them and—
We fell into a brilliant purple line and rocketed forward just over the top of the waves. “Can’t we slow down?” I yelled.
Marsden shook his head, his wild white mane flowing out behind him. “Have to pick up speed. There’s some skipping ahead.”
Pritkin made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a whimper, and I clutched Marsden’s shoulder. “Skipping?”
“Yes, like a rock over a pond. Ah, here we go,” he said, and the next second we were sailing into thin air again. I was hit in the face with some spray before I could point out that iron cars
do not float
, and then we were crashing in another line—yellow—which we stayed in for barely a heartbeat before launching into the air and hitting a deep purple line. The whole thing had taken maybe fifteen seconds.
“You see, skipping,” Marsden said happily.
I didn’t say anything; I was afraid I was going to throw up.
We left the purple line at the bottom of a bank of cliffs, twisting and tumbling through a very startled flock of seagulls and the smoking spray of waves, before merging with a bright blue line. That one headed straight inland—thank God—and Marsden patted my leg. “Almost there now.”
“Almost where?” I croaked as we leapt into thin air yet again.
I gazed dazedly at a rolling patchwork of yellow fields, and then we were dropping back into a silver-white ocean of the Belinus Line. But this time it was broken by the presence of a large dark mass extending almost completely across. “Barrier,” Pritkin said a little shrilly.
“Yes, thank you, John,” Marsden said, and spun the wheel. The car hit the side of the line, swooped up the side, and turned completely upside down. We skinned past the top of the barrier with maybe an inch to spare, and then we were rushing down the other side of the line, completing a graceful swoop that had my hands shaking and my stomach reeling. The barrier dissolved behind us as the mages hurried to catch up.
“How did they know we’d come back?” Pritkin asked as we hurtled ahead.
“One of them must be a racer,” Marsden said, looking irritated. “I laid out that course myself some years ago, and a number of the young hopefuls are known to practice on it. I should have taken an alternate route, but not to worry. We’ll lose them soon enough.”
He pointed ahead. I turned from watching our pursuers and a wash of color exploded across my vision. A firestorm of light boiled ahead, like a curtain of fire stretched across the entire center of the line. It was almost impossible to look directly at it. The power surges threatened to sear my retinas, the glow leaking in even through the hand I had thrown over my eyes.
“We’re taking a shortcut,” Pritkin said.
“A shortcut?” Why didn’t I like the sound of that?
“Yes. Try to relax, Cassie,” Marsden advised. I stared at him, wondering if he was trying to be funny. Because despite the fact that he was gearing down, we appeared to be picking up speed as whatever that was pulled us in. And Marsden wasn’t trying to avoid it, I realized; he’d cut back on his suicidal pace only to better handle the wicked currents being churned up by that thing.
“What is that?”
“A minor vortex,” Pritkin informed me. He sounded tense.
“Minor?” The thing looked like a supernova. And then a more important thought intruded. “Wait. We’re going
in there
?”
“Oh, no. That would kill us,” Marsden said calmly. And then the phenomenon grabbed us and we were hurtling forward at what had to be a couple hundred miles an hour.
I screamed and grabbed Pritkin, who was trying to fire off spells even as we bucked and twisted and slingshotted around the outer edge of the phenomenon and then—
Dead calm. For a moment, we hung alongside the electric white hub of the vortex, energy pulsing around us like the heartbeat of some giant beast. And the next we were somewhere else entirely.
I’d had a shift go bad before, had the weight of time pressing down on me, stretching me, until it felt like my body spanned the width of the planet. This was nothing like that. There was no gravity pulling on me, no bones and cells warping, no anything. It was almost like being back inside the Shroud, except that that had just caused sensory deprivation.
This
was having no senses to deprive.
I tried to breathe through the panic that was threatening to overtake me, but I couldn’t even tell if I had lungs anymore. I tried to reach out, desperate to feel, see, hear
something
, but if I had a hand it didn’t connect with anything. For a long moment, I really thought I was dead—that something had gone terribly wrong and we would be left here, drowning in nothingness, forever.
Until I slammed back into the seat. I couldn’t complain of a lack of sensation now. In an instant, I went from having no secure casing of flesh and bone to a body made of pain. It was everywhere, from my throbbing head to my bruised butt to the sharp pain radiating up from my lap where the seat belt was doing its best to cut me in two.
But the pain wasn’t the main problem. I stared up in blank terror at a thousand lines of power crisscrossing all around us: vibrant greens and glowing golds, cold blues and rich silver, flowing ebony and shuddering, bloody reds. I could have traced the lines just as easily blind: the bronze clanging like a bell, the blue murmuring like a stream, the purple crackling like lightning, the reds screaming.
“We hopped over to Glastonbury Tor,” Pritkin explained, looking a little pale. “The biggest vortex in Britain.”
“Hopped?”
“For short trips, you take a ley line,” Marsden said. “If one happens to be running where you want to go. For longer ones, you take a line to the nearest major vortex. All vortexes around the world are interconnected on the metaphysical plane, you see, with currents flowing between them. If you catch the right one, you can hop from one vortex to another.”
I shook my head numbly.
“There is no space here,” he said, trying again, “Only energy. Therefore distance is meaningless.”
I stared around in awe at the streams of power running all around us, each threading through the middle of the massive vortex. This close, it was like a giant heart, the ley lines running in and out of it like brightly colored veins, energy pulsing around us with every strobing beat. Everywhere I looked, colors melted together, shimmering off everything, painting the car in a dozen hues. It looked like we were swimming in rainbow water.
If a small ley line sink could power MAGIC, what could something like this do? “Why doesn’t somebody harvest all this energy?” I asked wonderingly. “It could power . . . everything.”
“Every generation has those who try,” Marsden replied. “But no shield we’ve ever created can withstand the forces inside even a small vortex.” He looked me over critically. “Have you recovered? Because I am afraid we have another jump ahead of us.”
“Another one?” I said numbly. “Do they all
hurt
like that?”
“Not after you’ve done it a few times. The trick is to go limp.” He snapped his fingers and devil dog demonstrated by collapsing against my leg, his long tongue hanging out. “You see?”
“This time we shouldn’t have any pursuers, at least,” Pritkin added. “Individual shields aren’t strong enough to withstand the forces this close to the vortex. Our pursuers should not have been able to follow us—”
He didn’t get to finish his sentence, because a dozen shapes popped out of nowhere, all huddled together in one big, dark blob.
“Unless they pooled their shields,” Marsden finished sourly, and threw the car back into gear.
Luckily for us, the trainees looked about as rattled as I felt. It gave us a slight lead, although a glance behind showed that some of them were already starting after us. Marsden suddenly jerked the steering wheel to the right and we roared into the middle of an apple green line. He waited until the mages had followed us and then threw the car into reverse.
We were free and back in the nothingness in the corona of the vortex for a moment, before that awful free-falling sensation took us again. And Marsden had lied, the bastard. Going limp didn’t help
at all
. And then we were racing through the middle of a world gone red. But it wasn’t the red of a ley line; it was the blinding dazzle of miles of sun-baked sand.
We hit down onto a black snake of asphalt with a jolt, a squeal of tires and a burst of speed. The dark shapes of war mages tumbled out onto the roadway after us—four, no, five—who had managed to keep up with the crazy ride. But they were on foot and we had wheels. Marsden left them in the dust.
We’d hopped to the Chaco Canyon vortex in New Mexico while I’d had my eyes closed. Half an hour later, we jumped to the shimmering blue line that ran through to Nevada and Dante’s. It didn’t take long from there to notice a big black blob on the horizon. It looked somewhat like the barrier the mages had constructed, except that there were no gaps around this one. There were other things, though.
Ragged flutterings of light darted here and there around the edges of my vision. I could glimpse them out of the corner of my eyes but could no longer see them directly. But even so, the sheer number was staggering. They looked like a crystal kaleidoscope, constantly shifting and changing all around us.
I looked back at Pritkin, and the expression on his face was enough to let me know I was right. “Rakshasas,” he murmured. I guess in that quantity, even my eyes could pick them out.
“Where?” Marsden demanded.
“Surrounding the ward. Thousands of them.”