Backpedaling into a prickly hollow formed by the meshed crush of needled branches, Azuri stumbled, and while he had the presence of mind to fall backwards, bearing the half-human on top of him, his hand slipped from her mouth, unpinning the bloodcurdling flutter of her scream. In dodging his groping hand, her head and neck squirmed so lithely, he wondered if she was half-snake as well.
Short of cracking her skull, he could think of only one way to smother the noise. Rolling over, Azuri pinioned her under his ponderous body.
As she writhed under him, she wriggled in the loose, crumbling soil of the planetoid, burying herself by degrees until she expelled her breath in a feeble groan, her flushed, ruddy face brightened to deep violet, and he raised himself onto his knees, touched his fingers to his lips, then moaned, rolling away from the thrust of her shin, which had, no sooner than a gasp rushed into her lungs, taken him in the loins.
Cupping his battered manhood, he could manage only one hoarse word: "Ebotu."
"Was that supposed to be elven courtship, on some mad, multidimensional level a human woman isn't meant to see?" sneered Elani.
"You're going to get us killed," groaned Azuri.
"Age before beauty," snipped Elani. "If you try that again."
"What? Saving you?" Azuri's voice raised to a low roar as he raised himself on all fours, then slowly straightened to a constrained, pained stance.
"You saving me? I was the one getting your attention, Azuri. They're moving en masse through the woods, no doubt heading for the other Doorway."
"You didn't see the dryad, then."
"Dryad? What of Ialuna?"
"She fell behind," lied Azuri. While he expected the constricting tension of the geas that swirled inside him prowling for his disobedience, it only sneered at the mawkishly sweet taste of his feigned good will. It was good to know, Azuri thought, that the geas only preyed on equivocations concerning Frellyx.
Elani was not so stupid, however. Her face wrinkled in scorn. "I'm sure she did. Let's hope she had the presence of mind to install her ietula."
"You mean this?" Azuri held Ialuna's spike in one hand and his own in the other. The two inch long enchanted nails glinted with a gray light.
Elani sighed. "If you had left it with her, we could have trusted her to complete her mission."
Azuri laughed. "You're lucky she's alive."
"More surprised than lucky. You have light fingers."
"For one so old, you mean."
"You're not old," said Elani.
"As if you know what it means to be old."
"You don't know me, Azuri."
"Was that your first kinulcra?" Azuri gestured to Elani's hair, which progressed from pure black at the part to silver ends.
"This?" Elani sniffed. "Perhaps I make my own fashion choices."
"Very droll. Let's get on with it. How can we see them?" In as terse and clipped a narrative as he could manage, given that his own wings were clipped by her stray knee, Azuri related the circumstances of his first meeting with the Ebotu, all the while avoiding entirely the matter of his being stuffed in Eurilda's pouch. Having concluded his story, Azuri asked, "so you can understand my confusion here, in that the invisible, by definition, ought not to be seen."
"Perhaps because the two Doorways are so close together? Or perhaps it's that?" Elani pointed to the far-off flicker of the swath of light that illuminated the Abyss. "For all we know, the spark that gives light to us all is only another Doorway."
"Doubtful," sulked Azuri.
"Really? You haven't seen the other one."
"There's only one great light in the Abyss."
"This one is pretty big," said Elani. "I'll show you."
"First things first." Dropping to his knees, Azuri planted one gleaming iutela into the soil with a single strike from the heel of his palm.
"Why not give me the other one?"
"Yes, why not?" While he held it forth, he kept his arm close to his chest, so she would have to lean very near. "So you already planted yours? No love for your home world?"
Her eyes narrowed, then she chuckled. Having taken a step nearer, she placed her hands on her hips. "An Alfyrian speaking of love. Ha ha ha!"
Azuri snorted, then extended his arm a few inches farther than was polite, until the spike nearly scraped her nose. "Have it. Your father's spellcraft is quite persuasive. After only a few days of its nagging, I barely know my own mind. I almost forgot that I have no stake in any of this, and should care little, or even less than that, for his plans."
Her fingers scissored daintily as they plucked the golden nail from his hand. "Think as you will. So long as you do what you must."
"Must I?" Azuri crinkled his brow. "Must we?" While Azuri was curious of Elani and puzzled at her father's scheme, he was even more cautious of the Ebotu, every one of whom were built on his vast scale, their fingers topped with cruel nails permanently stained by blood and fouler gore, and no taboo about consuming the flesh of sentients ignorant of their holy law. More fear-inspiring was how the Ebotu moved and talked in unison, as if they shared a common mind. He had not noticed it then, as he was dehydrated, befouled, and mentally disturbed from being tucked in Eurilda's magic pouch overnight, but as his morbid terror for the cannibals diminished, he recalled commonalities in their expressions and gestures, as if they shared not only a mind, but one personality. Their care for their overthrown chieftain was not concern, but collusion, as if they conspired with Khyte, who had beaten him, in their own subjugation, masking their plot to usurp his victory with the cunning of the thwarted,
the bloodthirstiness of the weak, and the anarchic greed of the peaceful.
"Point the way." While Azuri now breathed evenly, his throbbing loins still beat a painful drum, and he walked stiffly in front of Elani.
Elani sniffed. "You think you know more woodcraft? On Hravak, they called me the wood-witch." Bushing past his shoulder, she kicked from their racing walk into a madcap sprint, dodging so nimbly around roots and under branches, it was like she knew they were there.
"I'll grant your woodcraft, witch," he panted, "It's your prudence that concerns me."
"You think me irrational because there are no limits as to what I'd do for my father's love? What wouldn't you do for Cyhari?" Elani's even and measured breath suggested not only that she was not as young as she looked, but that she was an experienced adventurer accustomed to the low gravity and thin air of abyssal oases.
They had just found the rhythm of their run, and fallen into step, when she knelt on a ridge and drove her iutela into its rocky soil.
"You carry yourself not like his beloved, but like a spy," said Azuri. "You hide and further his plans not like an heir, but like a harbinger."
"What did you think we're doing? Feel that?" No sooner had the golden spike stabbed the abyssal oasis than the sliver-world yawed under their feet, a barely perceptible strum ticking left by slow degrees, until the still flurry of the thousand oases in the vermillion Abyss above seemed to drift, then roll, as the longbow world picked up speed.
The longbow world was now an arrow world, marking a long trajectory toward the distant, dim penumbra of one of the Five Worlds.
"I know that one." Elani pointed towards a monstrous abyssal oasis, a planetoid so large and green that at first Azuri mistook it for the Dryad World.
"How have I not heard of it? It's essentially a Sixth World."
Elani smiled a wry little smile. "You're not so different from my father. He said the same thing. While much too small for a world, the Inamu call it Xulcia, the night land."
"I knew an Inamu king. A bitter little exile."
"We may have the same taste in friends, Azuri."
"Did you know Kuruk?"
Elani's smile faded. "My friends and I sheltered on Xulcia when the Baugn migrations shifted. While not entirely unpleasant, I won't call it a vacation."
"Blame your father for that." When Azuri's chuckle was low and darkly satisfying, the geas stung the base of his skull, blacking out his vision for a few breathless, painful moments. His dry mouth tasted like vomit, and his pulse slammed hard, then raced.
When Elani's smiling face returned, one waver at a time, from the blackness, it was cold and contracted. "I didn't factor into his plans for Hravak because he thought I was dying. He thought it a mercy to spare me the feeble year or two that remained to me."
When the longbow world's reverse rotation ground to a halt, then snapped forward, they lurched, and the grasses bobbed back, staying bent in the fierce breeze flowing in from the Abyss,
changing the air scent from greenery to burning light. The longbow world now hurtled at such a clip
that Azuri had to lean into the wind to keep his footing, and the grasses arched back to tickle his legs.
Azuri's brow creased. "You were dying?"
"Old age will do that to you."
"Then he didn't give you kinulcra."
"Why should he have? I wouldn't have accepted it, as a gift, even of new life, wasn't what I wanted from my father. Given your past, Azuri, it is unsurprising that you mistake diplomacy for love. You would even negotiate with death itself for a future with Cyhari."
"You'll be happy to know I've come to my senses. For instance, that's not Hravak. It's Alfyria."
"Of course it is!"
"I thought our target was Hravak."
"Why attack Hravak twice? Frellyx doesn't hate humans; on the contrary, he wants their friendship. People who need help make the best allies. Like the decadent fools of Julaba."
Azuri's mind flashed to his many acquaintances in his home city. While he uncovered no lost love in this mental race, unrequited or otherwise, he was queasy at the thought of all his useful connections, as well as his worldly knowledge of the city, all the street names, buildings, businesses, and institutions, in an instant rendered into trivia as the great city was pulverized to dust. "To what purpose? Dropping a mountain on fools won't make them prudent." When he backpedaled near the planted spike, and stooped slightly, Elani stabbed a finger towards his chest.
"I'll show you prudence."
When his sight swirled down to rest on the ground, as if his vision was knocked off his face like a pair of spectacles, it was so disconcerting that he squirmed, then slithered, then flickered his tongue in frustration, a tiny red streamer chilled by the furious breeze. While his dizzy eyes shivered, the world spun not around him, but Elani, now so gigantic that her enlarged whisper roared, cacaphanous as a thundercloud. Not an hour ago, he had caught himself wondering how the wood-witch's sleek legs would feel, but now he stared up void of desire, feeling only a strange symmetry in his sibilant mouth,
which dearly wished to impart its tense, fanged hiss to her calf in a passionless kiss.
Her murmuring rhyme seemed all refrain, a singsong nonsense. As she fell silent, a shimmer constricted her wavering skin, until she caved in, rolling up into a dark, glittering sphere which retained not a glimmer of Elani. When the shadowy ball puffed out with a flutter of wings, talons fell like a cage of swords, plucking him up to flit through the grass, then the branches, her strong wingbeats scooping over the raging wind, hurtling her toward the Doorway.
In the crumb of consciousness that remained to the squirming sliver of Azuri, he dimly knew himself to be a snake, in the cruel, rigid talons of the wood-witch, whose precious but cunning smile peered from the blackbird's bloodshot eyes.
When the crow hopped into the darkening sky, its near-weightless flutter careened drunkenly for the treetops, but another wing-beat gusted it higher, until the wriggling snake had a dizzy glimpse of the longbow world: an eerie, wooded sliver spinning gently from the Abyss-light into frigid blackness,
as glinting ice shelled the rocky soil crackling under the Ebotu, marching, shoulder to shoulder, from one Doorway on the far cusp of the crescent, for the titanic gray gyre on the other end of the arching world. This second portal loomed half again as high as the hypertrophic trees, and vented a bluish, glittering fog into the streaming winds as the Ebotu snaked into the gyre breaching into an unknown silence.
He had only a moment to take in the enormity of the immense Doorway, the massing significance of the marching Ebotu, and the chaos of Elani's ecstatic, erratic flight, which whisked them just under the ring of the whirling ellipse.