Ghostcountry's Wrath (30 page)

Brock, however, obviously had other priorities, which he conveyed first by wriggling violently, then by nipping her hand. She slapped at him, then nodded dully. “Oh, yeah, guess you
would
like to be a boy again, huh?” Her comment segued into a nervous laugh that was perilously close to hysteria. Brock twitched his ears, which seemed to mean yes. She set him down and slid him the scale. He took it awkwardly—rabbit paws weren't made for fine manipulation—and hopped away. She didn't watch any longer than it took to see his eyes close and blood well out onto the white fur from between the paws. There was no noise, save the grating of coarse sand.

And then the scrabbling stopped, to be replaced by a distinct intake of air and—thankfully—Brock's voice gasping shakily, “God
almighty,
it's cold!”

“You noticed,” she snorted, glancing his way only long enough to catch a flash of him bare, goosebumped, and crouching, before averting her eyes and thrusting the pack toward him. “Here! I think your clothes are—”

“Thanks,” Brock broke in, scrambling toward it on all fours. The sounds of fabric being fumbled out and sorted through followed. Then, abruptly:
“Uh-oh!
Uh, where's Cal? and Okacha? And whazzit's name? Tsistu?”

Sandy twisted around to face him, saw concern war with self-conscious embarrassment on his face. “Those, my lad, are damned fine questions.”

Brock hastily pulled up his pants. “You didn't see 'em at all?”

Sandy shook her head, in marginally more control. “'Fraid not.”

“Tracks?”

“No time to check.”

Brock skinned on his T-shirt, then sat to work on shoes and socks. “So, what
is
this place, anyway, d' you reckon?”

“Gimme a minute to get my head straight,” she replied, as she paused to tear her spare T-shirt into strips to help alleviate her “problem.” That accomplished (very discreetly—Brock didn't notice a thing), she located the rest of her clothes and finished dressing, then took closer stock of their surroundings.

The main thing—the most pervasive thing—was the presence of a vast cliff behind them and extending in a gradual curve as far as she could see to either side. It was impossibly smooth, too, though perhaps that was a function of it being composed of more of the purple-black-gray sand that was ubiquitous on…the inside, she supposed it was. Impulsively, she poked it and brought her hand away covered with dark powder—and got a sense that the cliff face was
not
precisely solid, but rather grew more compacted the deeper one pushed, exactly as the air in the gate had done.

A glance up the escarpment showed nothing but its own surface merging with a sky that was such a disturbing mix of purple, gray, and black with what she could only describe as a
non color—
or
the color of nothingness, or of absolute clarity—that it made her sick to gaze upon.

Which forced her attention back to the ground.

Where she got another shock, for as best she could tell, she and Brock were marooned on a ledge averaging forty yards wide that followed the cliff in a ragged line to both left and right horizons. What really freaked her, though, was that even this far back she could tell that the shelf did not so much break off into empty space as simply…dissolve, like tatters of rusty metal. She could see fragments of it out there, with sections of that not-color showing through.

“The World ends here,” she murmured, as Brock finished with his shoelaces and shivered up to join her, his face as perplexed as her own as he returned the scale.

“Ends?”

“Looks to me like we're on the fringe of one of those island Worlds Cal talked about. It overlies our World, but… not continuously, I guess. Something makes the fabric of matter go thin here. And beyond, there's just…
nothing
.”

“Then what's that yonder?” Brock countered, pointing to his right, away from the cliff.

Sandy strained her eyes—she had to in the purple twilight gloom that was the prevailing illumination. Perfect for the Darkening Land, she supposed. “I'm not sure,” she told him at last, then took a few steps closer and tried again. And this time she could make out, right at the edge of one of the more distant parts of the shelf, where it began to filigree away to nothing, what looked like a vast stone archway. More specifically, it resembled one of the trilithons at Stonehenge, except that it was more trapezoidal and the space between the uprights was far wider—maybe thirty feet. Nothing showed beyond save a vague brightening of the air—and a golden glitter low down that might mark a continuation of the Track.

“It's another gate, I think,” she told Brock. “Probably the Track we were following continues through there. Or that makes sense, anyway: Cal said the Worlds were all connected by Tracks, but sometimes all that exists
are
the Tracks, along with what little matter they can attract to themselves. I guess it's like…I dunno—think of a globe that you throw bits of wet tissue on. Those are the Worlds. And then take some thread and glue down one end so that it won't move, and then wrap the rest around the globe so that it connects all the tissue. Those are the Tracks. They're straight, because they join two points directly; yet not, because they follow the curve of the earth. And they're little roads of matter connecting larger hunks of it: little morsels of compressed space-time, maybe. God, but I wish I had time to prowl around.”

“Well, you don't,” Brock replied flatly from where he was retrieving a small glassy stone from near the gate they'd entered by. “I think I know what happened to Cal, though.” Whereupon the boy pointed to the ground, where footprints were plainly visible in the grit: rabbit prints in a variety of sizes, all arrowing toward the trilithon—and evidently, to judge by the spacing, at a rapid clip indeed. And superimposed atop them were the tracks of two panthers, one slightly larger than the other. “I think,” Brock whispered, “that when our friends came out, they saw old Tsistu, and…well, they just couldn't resist. Their animal instincts took over, and they chased 'im.”

“Damn!” Sandy spat. “I bet you're right! It'd be just like him, too—Tsistu, I mean. 'cause according to what Cal says, he's a trickster. And he probably thought it'd be real cool to con a couple of us into shifting shape and then lead us off on a snipe hunt somewhere.”

Brock's face was even paler than normal. “Yeah, but…” He paused, swallowed. “But, what if Tsistu hadn't
been
here? Suppose we'd come out of there as rabbits and met Cal and 'Kacha as panthers, and—”

Sandy exhaled sharply. “Oh, Christ, yeah! We could've been
eaten.
I bet old Tsistu'd have enjoyed that!”

“Or else he expected it and drew 'em off deliberately.”

“Whose side're you on, anyway?”

Brock ignored her. “We have to find 'em. We have to keep on heading west.”

“If we can even tell which way that is, given that there's no sun here.”

Again Brock looked startled. “There's not?”

“Look up and tell me what
you
see.”

He did. “It…makes me sick.”

“And the cliff?”

“Not much better.”

“I bet I know what it is, too,” Sandy said—thinking up explanations helped keep the impossibility of their situation from sneaking too close. “I bet it really is the dome of the sky—sort of. It's the limit to the matter that can be attracted to that World back there. It's like an…an accretion disk, with just a bit more air on the outside where we are. But Cal said the sun and stars and all are sort of semi-immune to some of this stuff; that is, they exist in all Worlds simultaneously. So I bet vagaries in the gravity between the earth—our earth—and the sun and moon come into play here and make the.…what Cal calls the sky vault, rise and fall. It really is like the myths, in other words.”

“Cool,” Brock replied. Then: “Hey, isn't that the other pack out there toward that gate-thing? What say we pick it up and boogie? It's on the Track anyway.”

Sandy's reply, after a pause to catch her breath through another cramp, was to join him.

A moment later they reached it. She unslung her lighter pack and passed it to the boy before claiming the heavier alternative.

“Good idea,” a voice cackled into the thin, cold air.

Sandy shivered, even as she jumped. The sound had come from the trilithon, still a hundred yards away, right where the
something
of the ledge met the
nothingness
beyond. A long way for speech to travel, that was. Yet she had heard it.

She exchanged troubled glances with Brock and stopped to retrieve the war club from Calvin's pack. Small comfort, maybe, since she had only the vaguest idea how to use it, but better than nothing. “Get behind me,” she hissed, backhanding the boy, when he would have strode brazenly forward. “This isn't our World. Folks here might kill you fast as look at you.”

“Yes, we might!” came that voice again, even as Sandy began to walk closer. She swallowed, shivered again, finding it nearly impossible to keep everything in mind she needed to. Like searching for the speaker, like testing every step lest the ground dissolve and precipitate her into… Never mind!

“Oh, yes, we might certainly kill you,” that voice repeated. And now Sandy was certain it belonged to a woman—an
old
woman. She still hadn't seen her, however.

“We might kill you,” the voice continued, “except that those who come here are already dead, so that would be foolish, wouldn't it? To kill those who are already dead?”

“Who are you?” Sandy called, and immediately felt like an idiot, for the question betrayed a whole host of weaknesses in her and Brock's position that could easily prove fatal. Nevertheless she advanced a pair of steps. Brock followed, standing very straight, but his eyes were wary.

“If you were closer, you could
see
who I am,” came that cackling again. And this time Sandy listened carefully and realized that the sounds she heard and the language that formed in her head did not align. Oh, she heard speech all right, but it wasn't English—or Cherokee.

“But if you were closer, I could see who you are as well, could I not?” the voice went on. “And if I could do that, perhaps I would see things I do not like.”

Sandy swallowed hard. “May…we approach?”

“Nothing forbids you. The forbidding comes later.”

“Let's go,” Brock muttered. “We're in deep either way.”

Sandy nodded and took a slow step forward. Others followed. Brock fell in behind.

The gate grew in size—faster than it should have, as if some trick of perspective was at work. She could feel the subtle energy pulse of the Track with every step.

Finally, when the trilithon arched five times her height above her head, revealing little beyond except a murky darkness through which the Track shot like a dirty neon ribbon, she saw the speaker.

It
was
a woman: the oldest one Sandy had ever seen, and so bent and humped and crusted with dust she had first mistaken her for one of the boulders that clumped around the base of the uprights. The crone was sitting crosslegged and had gray hair that flowed unbound down her shoulders, confined only by a twist of dull-colored leather around her head. Her hawk-nosed face was lined and seamed like a relief map of the Dakota Badlands. And her clothes—well, all Sandy could tell for certain was that they were buckskin: worn, beaten, and scoured by the winds of centuries. The only ornaments were ear-spools made of what looked like vertebrae, incised with skulls.

“Greetings… grandmother,” Sandy began, trying vainly to recall the formalities traditional among Calvin's people. She had actually met very few of them, so such courtesies were
not
second nature to her.

The old woman nodded slowly, like one half-asleep and remembering. “Greetings, daughter. Greetings, son.”

“H-hi!” Brock said, slipping around to stand beside Sandy. She could practically feel him wishing he was taller.

“Do you have business here?”

“Perhaps,” Sandy replied carefully. “Have you been here long?”

“Long enough to see some things.”

“Have you seen a rabbit pass this way in the last little while?”

“What
kind
of rabbit?”

Sandy hesitated. “Difficult to say,” she sighed at last. “His appearance seems to…alter.”

“Ah,
that
rabbit!” the crone chuckled, and Sandy noted for the first time that her hands were busy with something in her lap she couldn't quite make out. “That rabbit: he comes here often. So often I tire of him. Perhaps I will make a pouch of his hide one day and put a stop to him.”

“He'd deserve it, too,” Sandy agreed. “But have you seen him recently?”