Sagaria (61 page)

“I’m not dead yet,” the wizard growled.

“But soon you will be,” said the Shadow Knight, his voice making Sagandran think of a viper moving through long reeds.

“I’ve swatted two of your kind like the annoying mosquitoes you Shadow Knights are,” said the wizard. “Even though my body is injured, I still have all
my magical strength. If you take any account of your life, you’ll flee this place before I strike you down.”

“Two dead,” hissed the Shadow Knight lazily. “That means Arkanamon will have only me to bestow his gratitude on for delivering the boy. It seems like a good bargain.”

Deicher raised himself and reached for the much depleted white cloud. It bobbed toward him obediently.

The Shadow Knight saw his intention and leaped forward. As he did, he pulled a dagger from his waist and hurled it through the air. Deicher flinched away reflexively, a movement that spared his life. With a savage-sounding
chunkk
the blade, aimed for his heart, sank to the hilt in the flesh of his side. The Shadow Knight cursed and Deicher let out another cry of distress and fury.

Perima was on her feet. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she muttered urgently to Sagandran, who was mesmerized by the unfolding spectacle in front of them. “Let’s make ourselves scarce.” She tugged at his arm. “Or do you want me to give you a hard slap? There’s nothing more to see here.”

Sagandran, blinking suddenly, realized what a fool he’d been for watching the battle. What time he’d wasted. He turned to follow her, but not before he saw Deicher clumsily throw his fistful of glitter at the Shadow Knight rushing toward him. The assailant twisted aside from the stream of lightness but it followed him, coiling in the air to strike at his back. There was another of those death-dealing crescendos of brilliance. The blazing Shadow Knight hurled his sword and it steepled end over end, a white lance of flame, to land with a smack on the ground.

Sagandran followed Perima as she stumbled ahead of him down from the ridge’s crest. The trouble was, there was nowhere to hide. The slope was bare except for the occasional tuft of etiolated black grass. Away from the flames of the three dead Shadow Knights, there was only the meager moonlight to guide the way. There might as well have been no light at all, as his eyes were still struggling to recover from being dazzled by Deicher’s incendiary spells.

Perima fell and Sagandran, unable to stop himself in time, tripped over her and fell on top of her. The impact of his body drove the breath out of her in a whoop. Groggily, he pulled himself up and reached down to help her rise, but she was in no condition to take his hand.

There was a bawl from above them. “Where do you think you’re going, whelps?”

Looking up the hill, Sagandran could see Deicher tottering there, a darker shape against the sky, his robes billowing around him. The wizard plucked the
dagger out of his side and tossed it away. With his other hand, he held his wounded shoulder.

“You saw what happened to those stupid soldiers,” yelled the sorcerer. “I could do the same to you.”

“But you need me,” Sagandran shouted back at him. “You need me alive to take to the Shadow Master.”

His voice contorted by agony, Deicher replied, “But – I – don’t – need –
her
.”

Abandoning his wound, he raised his good arm high above his head. For a moment, Sagandran thought that a second sun had suddenly appeared in the sky, only this one was as bright as a sun should be. Then he realized that the ball of radiance lighting up the whole hillside was not in the sky at all, but in the wizard’s cupped hand. Reflexively, Sagandran moved to shield Perima from it.

With an attempted swagger that almost threw him off balance, the wizard cast the brilliant globe at the two cowering fugitives. In his own suffering, he was obviously no longer concerned whether Sagandran lived or died. Perhaps he realized that for all his magic, death must inevitably be close.

“No!” screamed Sagandran, putting up his hand in a doomed attempt to ward off the streaking magical sphere.

A flood of
something
surged through his body. He felt as if every last cell was being sucked dry. The something poured out of him in a single, intense bolt. The onrushing ball disintegrated. A million sparks flew in every direction, as if seeking to become the stars that the skies of the Shadow World had not known. Sagandran was pitched forward onto his hands and knees, drained of energy.

The wall of
something
smacked into the wizard like a mighty but invisible hand, swiping him clear of the ground. His robes a turbulent tempest surrounding him, he was thrown high into the air and outward over the chasm of the valley, his cry of torment diminishing as his struggling body receded into the emptiness. Then he erupted with a flare ten times as bright as when the ball had exploded. The pulse of light seemed to pound at Sagandran’s head and shoulders, beating him back and down. An instant later, the shockwave hit him, sending him hurtling head over heels down the slope, Perima scrabbling at the earth in his wake.

Sagandran’s head hit something hard.

There was a fountain of flashing turbulence and his consciousness was filled with the blackest darkness he’d seen since coming to the Shadow World.

CHAPTER 2

J
ELLO
P
UDDING

hispers. Sounds that couldn’t quite be heard. The rustling of a rainbow in the sky. The flow of moonlight reflected on the surface of a tranquil lake. The footsteps of death. The noise that ice makes. The song of a summer breeze. The differing cool musics of spiderwebs, of clouds, of haze. The flutter of the soft hairs on the inside of the arm. The harmony of starlight. A million soft touches, gone before they were felt, as if the fingers making them had no more substance than a dream. The indistinguishably faint scent of yearning. The warm taste of triumph, the acid taste of failure.

The companions could see nothing around them, yet their senses were telling them myriad things. Samzing and Sir Tombin were walking on an invisible path with Snowmane between them. In every direction extended nothing but a vast, black space.

Emptiness.

Flip, his head projecting from Samzing’s pocket, looked around him with an interest that slowly turned to disappointment when he saw that there was just blackness. “I wonder what’s holding this road up?” he asked at last.

“Don’t speak without purpose,” cautioned the wizard, “and especially don’t ask
that
question. Remember all the warnings we were given. We’re in a realm of consciousness now. Those things you sense, they’re thoughts, ideas. Focus your mind only on what is absolutely essential until we’re clear of this place. Anything can happen here, anything.”

“I can’t see any thoughts,” Flip complained.

“Can you normally see thoughts?” inquired Sir Tombin.

“Well, no.”

“Then why do you expect to see any here?”

“Because …” The little fellow pondered over his reply for a moment before continuing, “because I just do, that’s all.”

Samzing laughed, making a hollow noise that Flip imagined as a puff of pale purple smoke. “You might see thoughts here, for all we know. Our senses seem to be muddled up, somehow, but be wary of the thoughts, whether you can perceive them or not.”

For a while they walked on in silence. Flip wondered how they knew the right direction to walk in. If they abruptly took a right or left turn, would the road alter its course to match? He wished he were a bit bigger so that he could try this out for himself, rather than being restricted to going only where Samzing went. Then, for the first time he did see something, a distant light in the nothingness off to the left.

“Look!” he cried. “Do you see what I see?”

Sir Tombin came to a stop, and raised his hand to warn Snowmane and Samzing to do likewise.

“Yes, I can see it too,” said the Frogly Knight softly.

As they watched, the glowing green object grew larger and larger, swooping around in haphazard curves across their field of vision. After a few seconds, it was hovering quite close to them and they could make out its details, such as they were. It reminded Flip of a lime jello pudding, though he’d never seen a lime jello pudding that had eyes before. Lots of eyes. Not very friendly ones.

The thing spoke. Its voice sounded like that of a lime jello pudding too – a lime jello pudding that was trying to pluck at the heartstrings of its listeners.

“Oh, nobody wants me,” it whined piteously. “Please help me. Please give a poor little orphan thought like me a home. All you have to do is think me.”

“Just look down and keep walking, is my advice,” said Sir Tombin to Samzing.

“Couldn’t agree more, old chap.”

“Oh, I see, I see,” wailed the Lime Jello Pudding. “I’m not good enough for you, am I? All lah-di-dah and high and mighty, are we? Too snot-nosed to pay any heed to a lonely little thought that hasn’t got a roof over its head, that’s all alone in the wide world.”

“Buzz off,” said Flip, pleased to be safe in a wizard’s pocket.

“I’ll be back,” the Lime Jello Pudding threatened. “I’m off to tell my friends about the strangers who think they’re too fine to acknowledge a humble thought like me when it’s speaking to them. Then we’ll all be back and I warn you, you won’t like it.”

With a sound like a bicycle tire being punctured, it soared away and was gone in an instant.

“Thank goodness we saw off that one,” exclaimed Flip, drawing the back of his paw across his brow. “That wasn’t too hard at all, was it? Easy-peasy, if you ask me.”

“Too easy,” responded Samzing. “Don’t get over-cocky, Flip. I think it was just sent to lull us into a false sense of security. I think it was meant to be easy to repel that thought. While it was here, I could feel countless other thoughts and ideas – invisible ones – clustering around us, waiting for a weak point to open up in our minds so that they could dart in.”

“Well, I didn’t feel anything,” averred Flip staunchly.

“Ah … I believe that’s because you’re of less interest to them than Sir Tombin and myself. Or Memo. Or Snowmane, come to think of it.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, Flip, how can I put this tactfully?”

“Try.”

Samzing breathed out noisily through his nose. In the absence of light, Flip couldn’t tell if the wizard were genuinely trying to formulate his explanation or simply amused. “You see, Flip, your mind isn’t as big as the rest of ours to begin with, and you normally keep it chock-f of nonsense. There wouldn’t be very much room for an extra thought to cram its way in.”

Flip thought about this while his larger friends took another few steps, then realized what it meant. “You—” he began wrathfully.

“Quiet,” snapped Sir Tombin. “Stop wasting breath, you two. You should have better things to do with it.”

“Better things than breathing, you mean?” asked Samzing mildly.

“Yes, of—oh, I’m not quite sure what I mean.”

At that moment, they suddenly noticed a big neon yellow sign in the middle of the invisible path blocking their way. Flip was certain that it hadn’t been there before, because he’d been looking in that direction the whole time and was sure that he hadn’t blinked. Nor had it come swooping down out of the darkness like the Lime Jello Pudding had. It had just abruptly appeared there, with the confident aura of a sign that’s been there for a very long time.

The yellow sign had orange lettering on it, so that reading it made a person wonder if a headache was on the way.

“Don’t, Tombin,” Samzing warned his friend, but it was too late.

“If the right path is the path you want to take, then there’s no problem,”
the Frogly Knight was musing, rubbing his chin. The yellow glow of the sign was lighting them up just enough so that they could see each other. “But I think the sign is trying to tell us that we should be going to the left. So, if we went to the right that’d be going the wrong way, no? You follow me so far, Samzing?”

The wizard’s reply came through gritted teeth. “Only too well, but I don’t think you should be going there. This is just another attempt to—”

Sir Tombin waved away his words impatiently. “So, it’s right not to take the right path. We need to go left, because that isn’t right. Except that it is. It’s the right path that’s not right.”

“I take back what I said about you having a smaller brain than the rest of us, Flip,” murmured Samzing.

“I think we should take the left path,” said Flip, certain he’d solved the riddle.

“I think it’s the right one we ought to take,” said Sir Tombin, equally sure.

“I think we should take neither but just go straight on,” announced Memo, emerging for the first time from Samzing’s robe. Flip felt ashamed that he’d almost forgotten his little pal was there.

“Why do you say that?” Sir Tombin sounded testy. Under his breath, he added something that sounded like “nincompoop.”

“Because there isn’t a right path and there isn’t a right path,” piped Memo. “There’s only one road and it goes straight ahead.”

There was a sluggish silence, and then the sign winked out as if it had never been there.

“He does have a point, you know,” said Sir Tombin reluctantly. “Definitely a point.”

Samzing chuckled, but then his mirth trailed off awkwardly.

“That was another attempt,” he said, “to invade your mind. I told you, we’ve all got to be very careful. While you and Flip were cogitating like that, you were leaving yourselves quite defenseless to any alien thought or idea that might have wanted to sneak in. If it hadn’t been for Memo here—”

“It was clever of me to bring Memo along with us, wasn’t it?” put in Flip, trying to claim at least a little credit.

“Indeed it was, Flip,” said Samzing soothingly. “But,” he added, spoiling it all, “it was even cleverer of Memo to see that you two were talking the most blithering tripe that’s ever been blithered.”

“I say, dear chap,” Sir Tombin took up Snowmane’s reins again, “that’s rather strongly put, don’t you think?”

Samzing drew breath to make a retort, then decided against it.

Flip realized that there was a role here as peacemaker. “Let’s keep going.”

The interruptions by the Lime Jello Pudding and then the eye-searing yellow sign had distracted them from the fact that the nothingness around them was aswarm with those sinister shufflings and touches, but as they walked along – seemingly downhill – it became harder to ignore them. It was, thought Flip, as if you were quietly enjoying a good bath with lots of bubbles when something unseen brushed your leg under the water. Was it the soap? Was it just your imagination? Or was it
something else entirely
? He shivered in Samzing’s pocket and resolved to never have a bath again.

The odd little twinges were affecting Memo as well. Flip could hear the memorizer muttering at his spectacles and burrowing down deeper into the shelter of Samzing’s pocket. “Gh–ghosts,” Memo said in a shaky wail.

“Not ghosts,” Flip whispered to him through several layers of fabric that seemed not to have been laundered in a good long while. “Just thoughts that don’t belong to you, thoughts you don’t recognize.”

“I’d rather think of them as ghosts, if it’s all right with you,” came a thin, muffled response. “You know where you are with a ghost, but these things …”

Flip puffed out his chest ready to say something reassuring. Memo brought out his protective instincts, but before he could speak, he saw a little flock of tiny lights, all moving together.