Shimmer: A Novel (26 page)

Flashbulbs popped in his skull bathing the darkness with false light. Tumbling forward, he somehow managed to retain his grip on his sword. He rolled onto his back and held the sword in a defensive position. More vulnerable than he cared to admit or dared show, he waited for the next attack.

Chapter 40

With her hasty incantation on the bus, Liana had managed to freeze the rift long enough to allow her passage to the other side. But a moment after she’d crossed, leaving behind the comfort of her own world—and her own dimension—the rift had closed, imprisoning her in absolute darkness. Off-balance, she fell to her hands and knees on a smooth, hard surface but remained still, willing her eyes to adjust to the drastic reduction in ambient light.
Reduction in light? Who am I kidding? It’s pitch black in here.

“Barrett,” she whispered. Her voice sounded small and distant to her own ears. “Barrett, are you there?”

Nothing. No light. No sound. A void.

But her knuckles and her knees told her otherwise. There was a surface beneath her, gravity holding her to it, and breathable air. Almost. A moment before she’d caught a whiff of something unpleasant, worse than spoiled meat.

She pushed herself up, then held her palms inches in front of her face but still couldn’t see them. Conscious of her own breathing, she strained to hear any sound not of her own making. Her heart was racing, but she fought a growing sense of panic by taking slow, deep breaths.

Think it through,
she told herself. Barrett had leapt through the rift moments before her and the rift had not closed until after she’d crossed. Logically, they must share the same where and when. So why was she suddenly alone? Could something have happened to Barrett so soon?

This place—or the being that inhabits it—feeds on fear.

She’d known that beforehand, which was why she’d made the amulets.

Nervously, her left hand closed around the crystal sphere dangling from her neck, if only to reassure herself it was still there.
Protection,
she told herself.
Protection from myself, at least.

Despite her magical aid, she was afraid. Fear was a natural response to a dangerous situation. Even though her secret fears could not be exposed and used against her as psychological torture, the amulet in no way bestowed invulnerability. One avenue of attack was blocked. Nothing more. She could suffer physical, emotional, or psychological harm in hundreds of other ways.

Turning in a slow circle, she gazed into impenetrable darkness and a shudder raced down her spine.
Nothing is safe here.

She recognized her present enemy for what it was: fear of the unknown. But within this greater unknown lurked Carnifex, a creature with an insatiable appetite for the destruction of human flesh. Of Carnifex, she knew enough to be terrified. She reminded herself that courage was not the absence of fear but the ability to function in spite of it.

Years of training to prepare herself for this moment.

Generations of Walker tradition to draw upon.

Nothing prepares you,
she thought grimly,
for something like this.
Her other-world experiences consisted of precisely two rifts crossings. Neither of which had been as menacing as what her family now faced. Her mother had been the gifted one, the strong one. And Thalia, before her tragedy, had been the magical prodigy of the family. Following them, living in their long shadows, Liana had never had to confront her own shortcomings. Until now. And more than anything, she felt like a fraud.

Her doubts grew, taking on suffocating weight in the darkness. Alone, she finally acknowledged the grim truth she’d been afraid to examine. Her mother and sister had more power than she could ever hope to harness. And both had failed. Her mother was missing and Thalia was—for want of a better term—broken. She’d been defeated by a dark rift.
Maybe
this
dark rift. How can
I
ever hope to…?

A warm light bathed her torso, providing relief from the suffocating darkness.

The amulet!
It glowed around her neck.
Countering an assault,
she realized.

Addressing the darkness, she shouted with as much confidence as she could muster, “It won’t work!”

She almost expected an echo.

Instead, more silence.

“You hear me? It won’t work.” Nothing. “Show yourself!”

A moment passed. Then the air seemed to shimmer. She felt the smooth surface ripple beneath her feet. She staggered, regained her balance. And saw that the darkness had abated enough for her to distinguish rocky shapes and—

—a body!

She leapt forward, but caught herself after a quick step. All she could make out was a human silhouette against a rocky surface.
A trap?

“Barrett?”

Not a movement, nor a sound. For a heart-stopping moment, she feared she was too late, that Carnifex had struck Barrett down as soon as he’d made the crossing.

Then, a pained groan. “What is this…?”

Barrett’s voice, at least. Maybe another trick.

She caught a glint of steel, a reflection from the fading light of the triggered amulet. Barrett’s sword! “Barrett, is that you? What happened?”

Barrett struggled into a sitting position and rested his sword across his thighs, right hand clutching the hilt. His left hand rose to the back of his head. “I dove through the rift,” he said haltingly, as if trying to prod coherent memories loose from the grip of mental cobwebs. “Something hit me—knocked me down but not out. Then… nothing much until I… sensed that it had left.”

“Carnifex?” she asked, wondering if Barrett had experienced anything like her momentary panic and self-doubt.
Probably wouldn’t admit it if he had,
she thought.

“Probably,” Barrett said

“What?” she asked quickly. Had he read her mind? Not unheard of in their family, but not something she expected from him.

“Carnifex,” he said. “I’d bet on it.” He winced as he stood. “Need to work out a few kinks.” Looking around, he took a moment to massage his neck. “Not as dark as before.”

“I noticed.”

“Care to shed some illumination?”

She shrugged, then realized he probably couldn’t see the gesture. “Not sure.”

“I was being literal,” he said. “How about a little light?”

Of course! She’d been too worried to think straight.
Years of training,
she thought and sighed at her glaring inadequacy.
Oh, well, better late than never.

Even in pitch dark, she could find the appropriate sigils on her arms. She performed the gestures by memory.
“Luminos!”

A sphere a pale luminescence began to coalesce around her palm and forearm. When it had expanded to the size of a medicine ball, she released it,
pushing
it from her with a brisk hand motion and said,
“Exos!”

The orb of light hovered in the air between and above them, casting a warm, golden radiance that unfortunately did little to dispel much of the oppressive darkness. They could see perhaps ten feet in every direction, but the landscape was harsh and seemed bleached of color. Perhaps leeched was a better description, since only darkness remained.

Though her spell had worked on the first attempt, she was disappointed with the results.
How many ways can I feel inadequate?
Almost apologizing for the meager light, Liana said, “Lousy view.”

“Harder for Carnifex to catch us by surprise,” Barrett said agreeably. With a nod to the orb, he asked, “We move, it follows?”

“In theory.” They were strangers to this world and couldn’t assume the normal rules of physics or metaphysics applied.

Barrett led the way, one cautious step at a time, his sword held before him in a defensive, two-handed grip. Liana followed, but far enough behind to allow for a 360-degree arc of his blade. The glowing orb maintained its distance and orientation between them, but had already begun to dim. Hardly a surprise. Once it lost contact with her flesh, its energy would gradually diminish until it winked out. She hoped they wouldn’t suffer a similar fate, forever lost in some other where and when until they died from thirst, exhaustion or starvation.

“Here, kitty, kitty,” Barrett said. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

“We are assuming this thing is reasonably intelligent?”

“Sure,” Barrett said. “Evil but intelligent. And most likely impatient.” Barrett addressed the darkness beyond the reach of the light orb as if he could see Carnifex out there, waiting for them, claws twitching as he drooled in anticipation. “C’mon, big guy. You know you want a piece of me!”

“He prefers pieces,” Liana said. “Lots of messy pieces.”

“What’s with the demonic P.R.?”

“Just be careful. Okay?”

“No problem,” Barrett said, making a dramatic feint with his sword. “We flush him out, I make some Carnifex kabob, then you whisk us out of here.” He looked back at her with a raised eyebrow. “You do know how to whisk us out of here, right?”

Liana cleared her throat and avoided his gaze. “Eventually.”

“Eventually? What’s that supposed to me—?”

With a horrible grinding noise, the ground shifted under them, creating fissures and cracks across the bleak landscape in every direction like the cracking of thin ice.

“Earthquake!” Liana yelled over the noise.

Smoke puffed out of the fresh gaps, creating a haze that seemed to invade the light orb like a shadow cancer.

“No,” Barrett said. “Hell-quake. This is intentional!”

Remembering the earlier, utter darkness which had faded away like a discarded glamour, Liana suspected they were victims of deception again. “Is this real?”

“Assume everything here is real,” Barrett said. “Anything less could get you killed real fast.”

Liana nodded uncertainly, knowing an illusion could easily be fatal. An illusion of solid ground masking a cliff or crevasse, for instance.

Her eyes opened wide in surprise as slabs of rock thrust up from the tortured ground, forming a rough circle around them, like bars in a stone cage, or a gigantic set of teeth about to pulverize them between megalithic molars. But then, as abruptly as it had begun, the tumultuous upheaval ended. A series of diminishing rumbles punctuated by the uneven rattle and hiss of settling debris preceded an eerie silence.

“Wasn’t so bad,” Liana said anxiously, hopefully.

“Maybe,” Barrett said. “Let’s see if the other shoe drops.”

No sooner had the words left his mouth than they heard a whispery rustle that gradually resolved into distinct clicking sounds. Thousands of them. A dissonant orchestra of clicks and clacks rising toward some frightful crescendo.

“Something’s coming,” Barrett said, turning in a slow circle. The tide of noise seemed to be unbearably close, and yet the waning light orb revealed nothing in any direction between the obstructing circle of stones. “Up!”

“What?”

“Coming up from beneath us! Underground!”

At that moment, Liana saw something scuttle over the lip of a freshly opened fissure. She uttered a startled shriek.

Black, it mostly resembled a scorpion, but it was the size of a Maine lobster with two stinging tails and an uneven number of legs. The creature skittered across the hard ground toward her, its twin tails twitching forward with each irregular step, flicking drops of venom before it.

Barrett was a blur of motion, slipping in front of her and impaling the scorpion-like creature with the tip of his sword. White fluid oozed out of the creature’s cracked shell as it continued to twitch for a moment or two.

“Another one!” Liana called, pointing to his left. “And another! There!” She stopped pointing because, in the span of a few seconds, two became three became ten then twenty. “Swarm!”

A mutated swarm. Some had one stinger, while others had as many as three. Some had an irregular number of pincers. Others had more than one head. Most were black. Yet some were marbled with yellow spots. And a few were translucently white. Many had spiny growths erupting from their shells. All of them made her skin crawl.

Barrett launched into a frenetic series of movements punctuated by rapid thrusts of his sword. He couldn’t afford to wait for each one to die, so he delivered mortal blow after crippling strike and moved on. Some he flicked aside with the flat of the blade, casting them beyond the ring of light simply to buy time.

“Too many!” Barrett said. He wasn’t panting with exertion yet, but close. One of the creatures slipped inside his defense and he crushed it under his boot heel. “Any tricks up your sleeve?”

“No,” Liana said, shaking her head in shocked revulsion. “I don’t know—”

“C’mon!” He speared two in quick succession, smashed a third with the edge of his blade.

“What do you want me to do!?”

“Slow them down? Clear a path?” Barrett flicked one of the creatures off a rock spur a moment before it could leap onto the right side of Liana’s gown.

Something tugged against her billowy left sleeve.

With a startled shriek, Liana swung her arm, and the suddenly hefty sleeve against the nearest rock outcropping. The impact made a hard, clacking sound. She pulled the stretched cloth across the jagged top of the rock. It snagged, then tore away, revealing one of the dark, twitching creatures, this one with five legs and two segmented tails. It tumbled to the ground, entangled in the patch of cloth now soaked with venom. Liana was trembling.
That was close!

Barrett squished the brittle creature underfoot. “We’ve already established that screaming doesn’t faze them.”

Screaming, no, but maybe…
“I have an idea,” she said hastily. “Give me a minute.”

“We don’t have the luxury”—Barrett said, spinning in a half circle in front of her to wipe out about a dozen of the creatures with a series of chopping and slashing motions—“of that kind of time.”

He leapt behind her, whacking and smashing another dozen.

Liana began another spell, tapping and tracing several sigils on her forearms in quick succession. She avoided the creatures scrambling around her while staying out of Barrett’s path of destruction. But her defensive maneuvering caused her to abort the first cast of the spell.