Shield of the Gods (Aigis Trilogy, Book 1) (17 page)

             
“He says ‘welcome,’” Aerigo said, then turned to the vendor and began speaking in the local language.

             
The vendor smiled at her again. She waved, then diverted her attention to the canteens.

             
There were a dozen of them leaning against each other in tidy rows. She picked up the nearest one. It had a stainless steel rim with a durable grey fabric tightly tucked underneath the metal, and a matching nylon shoulder strap. Roxie had no idea how to tell between a quality canteen and a flimsy one, however the one in her hand felt sturdy enough to stand up against her enhanced strength. She gently prodded Aerigo in the arm to get his attention. “This one works for me. Just needs some water in it and I’ll be all set.”

             
He glanced at it, then un-slung his pack and began searching through it. He handed over some coins and the vendor took them, thanking him over and over in his native tongue. “There’s a water fountain somewhere closer to the edge of the cliff,” he told Roxie. “You can fill it up there. I want to stock up on some traveling food just in case.”

             
Aerigo bought some trail mixes, food bars, and some cookie-like biscuits along the way to the edge of the cliff. He walked a little faster once his pack was full, but they paused every now and then, whenever Roxie asked to look at items that caught her interest.

             
The rows of tables, along with the presence of grass and trees ended a hundred yards away from the cliff edge. A stone dais replaced the grass, its face laid out in alternating strips of cobblestone and marble like the bands of a rainbow. The platform ended at a three-foot high stone wall. Atop the entire length of the wall, which stretched for half a mile to either side, sat a carving of a snakelike dragon that reminded Roxie of ones she’d seen depicted in Asian art, but this one had many short, muscular legs securing it to the wall with its five-clawed talons. The dragon’s body was as thick as the width of Roxie’s shoulders. Dozens of people were looking out over the ocean or watching seagulls flit around in the breeze. More people sat cuddling up to each other on the scattered benches. A few salesmen wandered from person to person, trying to sell the multitude of necklaces, bracelets and rings blanketing theirs arms, necks and fingers like metal wings.

             
Aerigo led them along the dragon wall, heading east, passing more people that stared from time to time. They stopped at the end of the dragon wall, where it connected with Phailon’s fifty-foot wall. The sculpture finished with the dragon’s serpentine head looking out over the ocean, like a sentinel.

             
From this corner they couldn’t miss the roar of the waterfall. It drowned out the wind whistling over and under the stone dragon. Roxie gingerly set her hands on the dragon’s spine and peered over the edge, to see how far the water dropped. Vertigo drained all the blood from her face and she cowered back. The drop looked like it went on for over a mile. The ocean below was lost in a thick mist.

             
Aerigo dropped his pack, dagger and canteen on the dais. “It’s time to teach you how to grow.”

             
“Okay,” Roxie said somewhat nervously, placing her pack and new canteen on the ground beside his. “You sure our added weight won’t break the cliff?”

             
“Half the city lies on top of the part that sticks out. A few more tons won’t make a difference.” Aerigo led her away from the cliff edge to an open area devoid of benches, then stopped and faced her. “Growing is fairly simple, but it helps to close your eyes when learning this. What you want to do is picture a newborn infant in your mind—people grow fastest just after being born and I find it to be the best thing to focus on. You want to imagine that infant growing visibly, and then you’ll feel a pull on your mind. Try it.”

             
Roxie thought it sounded crazy, but shut her eyes and tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. If she were strong, fast and had eyes that glowed according to her emotions, then maybe she could figure out how to grow. She took a deep breath and pictured an infant wrapped in a blanket with its eyes closed and little hands clenched in fists. She then imagined the infant getting older and bigger, but there was no sign of the tug that Aerigo mentioned.

             
“Stop,” he said. “Don’t imagine the child getting older, just bigger. Age isn’t the issue; size is. So let the concept of time go, understand?”

             
She opened her eyes. “I think so,” Roxie said, unconvinced. “Wait! How did you know what I was thinking?”

             
“I made the same mistake. Try again.”

             
She felt relief. The last thing she needed was for anyone else to be in her mind. And she didn’t want to intrude on anyone else’s brain either. Roxie firmly believed that a person’s own thoughts belonged to the thinker unless one chose to express them. That’s what language was for.

             
She shut her eyes and concentrated on the infant once again. This time she imagined it just growing. Something like a finger-tap on her forehead broke her concentration. The feeling startled her and she opened her eyes to see Aerigo smiling at her.

             
“That’s it,” he congratulated her in his deep voice. “Just don’t let yourself lose concentration when you feel the tug.”

             
“What is it, anyway?”

             
“That tug is the doorway into a world between worlds, or like a river of time running between them. Growing the natural way takes years. That tug brings you a place where time flows at a rate that depends on context. You yourself won’t age in that place because you are there to grow, not get older.”

             
“That sort of makes sense.”

             
“Now try again. This time, don’t stop right away. Keep going until you reach your limit.”

             
“Limit?”

             
“Gravity and the amount of pure oxygen in the air dictate what your anatomy can handle. Plus, Versaton can only stretch so far.”

             
“Sounds sciency enough. I’ll try it again.” Roxie closed her eyes and concentrated. The tug startled her once more before she was able to succeed. Then the experiment took. It felt like she had been cut off from the world of Phaedra altogether, and like her entire body was taking one long breath. And then the tug became a push. Her whole body felt tight until she let herself succumb to the push. She was relieved of the tightness as she brought herself wholly back to Phaedra. She opened her eyes and looked down to see Aerigo, a minute creature on the ground. She knelt down. Aerigo’s tiny form motioned her to stay back. His body swelled like a plant being shown its growth process through timelapse photography until he was taller than Roxie again.

             
“Good job,” he said.

             
“This is so
weird!
How do I get back to normal?”

             
“The reverse of what you just did. Simple as that. Go ahead and try.”

             
She closed her eyes and concentrated again. Shrinking felt the opposite growing. Roxie felt her body exhale as if it were sighing out all the mass she’d accumulated. It also felt like she’d arrived at the ground floor on an elevator when she was done, and again she was seized with a tightness until she let the shrinking process stop. She opened her eyes to see that Aerigo was back to normal, too.

             
“Now that you can do that, I need to explain the dangerous part,” he said, sitting next to their packs and picking up his canteen.

             
Roxie joined him on the ground.

             
“Never grow around other people or creatures. Anyone that touches you will die, and it’s not a pretty sight. Anyone that comes in contact with you while you’re growing or shrinking will enter the dimension with you. Time flows so fast that decades go by in seconds, and other living things just die. What makes it possible for you and I to have this ability is what makes it so dangerous for anyone else.”

             
“So that’s why when I thought of the infant getting older instead of just bigger, it didn’t work?”

             
“Exactly. Time flow means different things in different places for you and I, but will always mean aging for everything else.” He drank from his canteen, then offered it to her.

             
Roxie nodded and took the canteen.

             
Aerigo jerked suddenly, causing Roxie to stare at him. He cocked his head to one side, as if listening to something. Several puzzling seconds went by, then Aerigo looked up, untroubled. “Anyway, you’ve gotten the hang of that, and we’ve been idle long enough. It’s time to head to Sconda.”

             
“What are we going to do there?”

             
“Train you to be stronger and faster.”

             
A wandering jewelry salesman approached the two with what looked to be the last of his wares.

             
“You want to look at my necklaces? Real cheap. Almost free!”

             
Aerigo stood, putting himself between the local and Roxie. The vendor backed up a step.

             
The vendor was tall, wore the same clothes as the locals, and knew English—or rather one of the Twelve Commons—the twelve most common languages in the universe—as Aerigo had explained while food shopping. There was something off about this jeweler that Roxie didn’t like, though. It wasn’t his eyes or his dark hair, or the way he smiled like many other salesmen eager to make some profits.

             
“Get a pretty ring for your girlfriend?” He held up a bejeweled hand. Aerigo glared. “Wife?” he said, his eyes losing some confidence.

             
Roxie got to her feet, having spotted the red flag: this man had no tan.
All
the locals had a Mediterranean tan.

             
The vendor eyed her hungrily. He discarded all the jewelry onto the ground. “What gave me away?” he said, dropping his accent for a British one. He reached behind him, but didn’t whip out a weapon, as Roxie had expected. Instead, he kept his arm behind him.

             
“You spoke one of the Twelve Commons, instead of Tibanese,” Aerigo said, dropping into a fighting stance.

             
“Ah, I’ll have to remember that detail next time we meet.” The impostor leaned back and vanished from sight. The air where he’d been rippled like water, then settled back to normalcy.

             
“Where’d he go?” Roxie asked, huddling close to Aerigo.

             
“Not sure.” He headed for his pack and canteen. “We better go. And since he probably overheard us earlier, we’re going to have to jump to make our world-hop trail harder to follow.”

             
“World-hop trail?”

             
“Did you see the air foil when he vanished?”

             
“Yeah.”

             
“That’s the trail. Even though the air isn’t foiling anymore, there’s still a hint of where he went right in that very spot. World hopping, which is what we did from Bermuda to outside Phailon, disrupts the fabric of reality. The jump sort of punches a hole for us to pass through, and it takes a while for the hole to repair itself once we’re gone.” Aerigo wandered over to the dragon wall.

             
“We’re not harming anything when we world-hop, are we?”

             
“No. It’s like traveling through a tunnel, but with boulders blocking the entrance. You have to push aside the boulders to make a doorway, but in this case the boulders are the fabric of the world we’re trying to leave. We make a big enough hole for us to pass through. It just takes a couple of hours for all those boulders to move themselves back where they belong. And then things are as if nothing had ever happened.”

             
“Sounds complicated enough.”

             
“It’s probably one of the last things I’ll teach you. It took me forever to learn.” Aerigo stood behind her and hugged her to his chest with one arm, pinning her upper arms.

             
“Hey, what are you doing?”

             
Aerigo scooped her legs into his other arm as he began running towards the ledge.

             
“Aerigo.” Roxie clutched Aerigo’s forearm with all her strength, eyes welling with tears, then her voice rose an octave as she yelled, “What are you doing?”

             
They cleared the edge with a superhuman leap. Roxie’s belly flopped at the sight of nothing but air and mist under their feet for the next mile. Aerigo let go of her legs and held out his free hand in front of both of them, then Roxie started screaming as their forward momentum arced into a plummet.