Othersphere (17 page)

We gave them as wide a berth as we could, trying to keep to the patches of pearly light that filtered through the canopy. I heard movement in the gnarled limbs above us, and the scraping of feet or paws amongst the roots. But even my excellent night vision couldn't penetrate the tangle of limbs.

In the distance, one tree glowed as if someone had strung white lights all over it, but the lights moved, and strange rhythmic music stopped and started at odd intervals, echoing toward us through the wood.

Then London gave a soft woof, staring upwards. I slowed, searching the branches above. Small winged creatures flapped just above the trees, so many I couldn't count. “Bats?” I said softly.

London whined low and fixed her attention a little lower. Then I saw it—a two-legged, human-shaped figure standing on a very high branch near the top of one of the trees. It appeared to be looking down at us, but it was too dark to make out anything other than a silhouette. Another humanoid figure, smaller, more feminine in shape moved up behind it and stood there.

Caleb and Lazar had stopped to look, too. Lazar reached into his jacket to his gun holster.

Then with a breath of wind, the humanoid forms were gone. It was almost too fast to follow, but in their place, for a moment, were two bat-winged forms, which swooped off to join the swarm above.

“Where'd they go?” Lazar asked.

“They shifted,” I said.

“What?” He looked taken aback.

“It was almost too fast to see, but she's right,” Caleb said. “They shifted into bats.”

We stood for a moment, trying to work it out. “Bat shifters went extinct in our world around the mid-fourteen-hundreds,” I said. “We studied Vlad Tepes last semester in school. After his reign of terror in Transylvania, the Tribunal wiped them all out.”

“Another species that went extinct in ours?” Caleb shook his head. “I don't get it.”

London barked, loping away, and then looking back anxiously. She was right. We needed to keep going. The three of us trotted after her.

Finally, we came upon a chalk-colored wall of mountainside, rising at nearly ninety degrees to our right, so high we could not see the top. We seemed to be standing at the bottom of a cliff, which thrust out of the forest like an ivory building block. We skirted along it as Lazar and Caleb led the way.

“Is Amaris inside the mountain somehow?” Caleb asked at one point.

“That's what I was wondering,” Lazar replied. “It feels like she's there.” And he pointed at an angle toward the towering cliff wall.

“There's got to be a way in,” I said. “A tunnel, a door, something.”

Caleb glanced at his watch. “Half an hour. Then we have to turn around.”

“Or be stuck here for at least twenty-four more hours,” I said.

“If we don't find her, I'll stay,” Lazar said. “I'll find her and keep her safe till you get back.”

London yipped and shook her ears in protest, as if to say she would stay, too.

“No,” I said, “If one of us stays, we all stay.” And we picked up the pace.

Lazar was in front of Caleb, humming quietly, when he spotted something up ahead. I could just see him through the trees, outlined against the whiteness of the cliff face. “Some kind of cave entrance up ahe—”

A black four-legged form leaped down on him from the tall jumbled roots of a nearby tree. Lazar flung up his arm in time to block the slashing white teeth aimed for his throat, but fell under the shaggy, dog-shaped body. Caleb jumped toward them to help, but a brown-gray creature, bigger than the first, darted out from behind another tree and snapped at his leg.

“Ambush!” he called, and leapt straight up, catching a low-hanging branch of the looming “broccoli” tree, as we'd started calling them, pulling his legs up in time to avoid the creature's fangs. I swung my backpack off my back, prepared to use it as a weapon.

But London lunged under Caleb and slammed into the brown-furred creature. It flew backwards with a yelp of pain. I spotted something white moving between the netlike web of roots next to the cliff face.

“On your right!” I shouted just as the narrow, white-furred head shot out to snap at London's front legs.

Quick as a cobra, London clamped her jaws down on the back of that creature's neck, and dragged it out from between the roots. It whimpered, paws scrabbling, but couldn't resist her. It looked like a large white wolf, but with slightly shorter, sturdier legs, and a longer, narrower head.

London was twice as large. She issued a powerful, menacing growl as she pinned the white wolf to the ground, her eyes like lasers on the black wolf still wrestling with Lazar.

The black wolf saw her there, holding its pack mate hostage, and pushed away from Lazar. His arm was oozing blood from a couple of punctures, but he looked otherwise okay.

The brown wolf got to its feet and bared its fangs at London. She snarled back, still gripping the back of the white wolf's neck. It had tucked its tail between its legs and curled up under her, whining pitifully.

The black wolf paced back and forth in front of London with Lazar's blood on its muzzle, as if trying to decide what to do. Lazar got painfully to his feet. Caleb lowered himself from the tree limb and the three of us ranged ourselves behind our own silver wolf, ready. Lazar's wounds would have to wait.

The black wolf barked three times at London, still pacing.

London growled, shook the ruff of the white wolf in her jaws a little, and scraped her left front paw twice on the ground.

The black and brown wolves put their heads together, turning away from us slightly, glancing back at London.

“I swear, they're conferring,” I said in an undertone to Caleb and Lazar.

Caleb nodded, not taking his eyes off of the wolves. “I think these are dire wolves, a prehistoric version of wolves that died out thousands of years ago in our world.”

“Looks like they can still speak the same language as London though,” Lazar said, using one hand to put pressure on the teeth marks on his arm. “So that's good.”

Indeed, the black and brown wolves had tucked their tails between their legs and rolled over on their backs in front of London. She let them cower there for a moment, jaws still clamped on their friend. Then she released the white wolf, who crawled away and rolled over, too, showing its belly.

London dipped her head and walked over to sniff the black wolf. He cautiously got to his feet, tail wagging low, and bent his head submissively. The others did the same, and soon all three were carefully sniffing London, ears down, as she towered over them. She cocked her head at us. I swear she looked triumphant.

Caleb quickly slipped some antibiotic ointment out of his backpack, along with some gauze and handed them to me. There were four deep punctures in Lazar's left forearm, but he didn't wince as I bound them up.

“Amaris is in there.” He tilted his head toward the screen of roots along the mountainside the white wolf had emerged from. Beyond them it was empty and black. A cave entrance.

“I think we just befriended the guardians of the entrance,” Caleb said. “London, can they lead us to Amaris?”

London growled and barked twice at her new followers, who cocked their heads and listened intently. The black dire wolf, who seemed to be second in charge, yapped and jerked its nose toward the roots covering the cave entrance.

London barked again. The dire wolf lowered his head, as if in obeisance, and then paced over to the roots, looking back over his shoulder to see if we were following. In front of him, the roots wavered and moved, like tentacles, making an opening wide enough to get through.

Beyond that even my eyes could see nothing but dark.

“London, can you ask him if Orgoli's here or nearby?”

London perked her ears and up and let out a series of yips and woofs. The black dire wolf shook its ears and barked. London turned to me and shook her head in that strange human “no.” She accompanied it with an odd lift of her shoulders that had to be her version of a shrug. “So—proba-bly not. As far as he knows,” I said, speculating.

London nodded once.

Lazar pulled the sleeve of his jacket over his new bandage. “Let's go.”

The black dire wolf ducked between the roots into the cave entrance. It reminded me of my first day at Morfael's school, when he'd tested me and Caleb by sending us into an underground cave.

I looked at Caleb. He was grinning at me, hefting his flashlight. “Just like old times,” he said.

And we followed the black dire wolf into darkness.

CHAPTER 10

The cave was narrow and less than four feet high. It sloped sharply down at first, so we ran awkwardly through the mountain stooped over like apes, following the blue-white beam of Caleb's flashlight, which he kept trained on the black dire wolf in front. The cave seemed to be entirely natural, perhaps carved at one point by an underground stream, now dry and fairly smooth. Like everything else in Othersphere, it hadn't been worked or touched by a metal tool of any kind. We were moving fast, breathing heavily, and conscious of how little time we had. Behind me, Lazar tripped over the uneven floor, and would have knocked me over, but he threw a hand out, using the curved wall to stop his fall.

My back was aching, and my knees cramped by the time I sensed air above me rather than rock. We didn't stop as Caleb scanned his beam of light around. The walls on either side rose to a ceiling that rapidly ascended into the dark, too high for the light to reveal anything. The light startled a flock of creatures that looked like trout crossed with hummingbirds, with long narrow bodies flashing iridescent purples and blues, wide staring eyes, and filmy wings that flapped too fast to follow.

I tripped over a protruding rock and pitched forward. Behind me, Lazar caught hold of my waist and saved me from a fall. Then he pulled his hands away, quickly.

“You keep doing that,” I said softly, and reached back to take his hand as we continued trotting forward.

He squeezed my fingers. “What?”

“You keep saving me from falling,” I said, my voice low. “Thank you.”

“Don't fall behind,” Caleb said, swinging the light around.

I pulled away sharply from Lazar. His hand fell away. Had Caleb seen us together? I couldn't tell. He kept jogging through the darkness, shining the light ahead once more.

“Wouldn't want to leave you here without a light,” Caleb said. His voice was flat but strangely ominous. Or was that just my guilty imagination?

We passed a number of side tunnels, some at floor level, some high up in the side wall, most too small for us to pass through. The cave widened, and water dripped steadily in the distance as we wound between stalagmites pointing up like crooked fingers. A light glowed to our left, and then we were walking through a natural arch and out onto a flat stone terrace into the brilliant white radiance of a nearly full moon, just rising above the skyline. It was not our moon, with its familiar gray seas and splotches. This was the strange, corpulent moon of Othersphere, veined with black lines that beat like a living thing.

Its light fell like silk on my skin, pulsing subliminally through my body. It reflected brilliantly off the blanched stone at our feet, casting multiple shadows on the mountainside behind us. A faint breeze stirred my hair, which waved in a flutter of notes perfectly in sync with the anthem of the night.

The natural porch was about thirty feet at its widest; then it plunged sharply down at least a thousand feet to reveal a vast forested valley cut by an old, winding river, silver and black under that moon. The swamp and the Red Wood must be on the other side of the mountain.

To complete the feeling we were on a kind of balcony, shrubs grew into a sort of fence along the edge, and a gardener had coaxed them into fantastical shapes—a winged horselike creature rearing up to take flight, a familiar tree with leaves bearing baleful eyes, a ringed planet with a ferocious face.

It was all too familiar. Ahead of me, Caleb flicked off his flashlight and raced to the edge to stare out over the basin below, every tree etched with black shadow by the moon.

“This is where Amaris was pushed into Othersphere,” he said. “This is it!”

“Here?” Lazar walked out onto the flat stone surface. Now that we were standing on it I could see that it was like marble, milky white, smooth, but patterned with darker hues just under the surface.

“We saw this view through the portal Orgoli created when he kidnapped her,” I said. “She fell through right here.” I walked closer to the edge to take in the verdant land before us. To our right, I could see more of the mountain we had been inside. Its peak, darker than the white cliff sides, jagged down lower here to form the silhouette of a huge, sleeping cat, its black stone tail wrapped around its feet as if for warmth, ears jutting up atop its rounded head, still alert even in slumber.

I knew it with a sudden certainty. We were in the heart of Orgoli's kingdom, in his home. Now that I knew it, a part of me wanted to run, to flee back the way we'd come and never look back.

But the other part of me wanted to climb that mountainside, to hunt along its narrow trails, to find my den deep inside its caverns.

Caleb hummed, scanning, and we all saw the other doorway in the cliff wall at the same time. This one looked as if something very large had tried to go through it recently, something too big but strong enough to break off large chunks of white stone around the circumference. The shards lay around the entrance still, white as broken teeth.

London barked once, and the black dire wolf trotted through that door, not looking back. We broke into a run after it, London first, Caleb's flashlight beam bobbing as he moved.

The cave here was more like a hallway, wider, and covered with strange hard plant roots that descended from above at intervals to cross-hatch openings in the rock.

I saw movement in one of those holes, and something like red eyes and white teeth before I ran on.

“She's here, she's here!” Caleb was shouting, pointing ahead to a large patch of the black roots which ran vertically like the bars of a prison cell across a cavity as tall as I was. “Amaris!”

“Caleb?”

My heart leapt. It was her voice. Thin, dirty fingers poked between the roots, reaching. “Caleb, is that really you?”

“It's all of us!” Lazar shouted as we clattered to a stop in front of her cell.

“Lazar!” The fingers tried to shove themselves farther between the bars.

“And me and London,” I said, reaching to touch her. We all laid our hands, and London her nose, on Amaris's fingers. London woofed softly. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, thank God.” Amaris's hands clutched at ours. Between the black bars of the roots, her brown eyes blinked rapidly in the sudden beam from the flashlight. Her face was smudged with dirt, her buttery yellow hair frizzy and wild. Her brown eyes blinked up again at me through the roots. “Is that Dez?”

“It's me,” I said. “Othersphere turns me into a cartoon character.”

“Are you injured?” Lazar asked, reaching into his backpack. “Did they feed you?” He pulled out a water bottle and some energy bars.

“I'm okay,” Amaris said. “Someone left me a gourd with water in it and some things that were kind of like nuts, which I never need to eat again.”

London was licking Amaris's fingers, whining softly. Amaris laid her forehead against the roots and stroked the wolf's muzzle. “Oh, my darling,” she said. “It's so good to see you. You're so much bigger!”

London stared at the girl behind the bars with eyes like blue planets, her tail wagging. She barked, and it was joyous.

Caleb was feeling all over the thick black roots covering the entrance to Amaris's cell. “Now how the hell do we get her out of here?”

Lazar wrapped his hands around one of the roots and tried to move it. His biceps bunched under his jacket and his face got red with effort till he let go with a grunt. “We might need to call forth that axe again,” he said.

London growled something low to the dire wolf. He barked, then lowered his head and groveled over to me, tail wagging submissively, and cautiously nosed my hand.

London cocked her head, and he whined expressively at her. Her ears lifted, as if she understood, and then she, too, ran her nose over first my left and then my right hand.

“Me?” I asked. “My hands?”

London nodded.

“Good thing we brought an Amba along,” Lazar said.

I put my hands cautiously on the roots. They felt as hard as iron, but I gripped them and tried to pull them apart, like some superhero. As I did so, they turned rubbery and soft. I spread them open easily, pushing them aside to form a person-sized hole. Amaris slid through, free.

She fell into Lazar's waiting arms as London barked joyously. Caleb hovered nearby, a hand on her back, until she loosed one arm and grabbed him by the neck to pull him into a three-way hug. For a long, wonderful moment, the three siblings embraced.

“Psst, hey!” A voice came echoing down the hall.

I turned. Did people in Othersphere say “hey”?

The others didn't react. My ears were more sensitive. Or maybe I was hearing things.

“Hey, English-speaking people down the hall there!” The voice was real, and speaking English with a distinct clipped accent that I felt like I should recognize. “Are you from our world? Are you really there?”

I took a couple of steps toward the voice. But how could it be? It made no sense in this place.

“Did you guys hear that?” I asked.

The siblings broke apart. Amaris threw her arms around London and buried her face in the silver fur.

“Hear what?” Lazar asked. He was still smiling, so relieved.

“Someone down the hall is speaking English.” I pointed that way, as if the gesture somehow made it more believable. “They asked if we're from ‘our world.' ”

“Probably a trap.” Lazar hastily shoved the water bottle and energy bars back into his backpack. “We've been too noisy.”

“And stayed too long,” said Caleb. “We have to get back.”

I looked at the dire wolves, ranged behind London. They were alert, but relaxed. Surely they would be more wary if the voice was a trap for us. “What if Amaris isn't the only one Orgoli kidnapped from our world?”

“Please!” It was a man's voice. “If you're there. Please don't leave us here!”

Everyone turned to look down the hall. They'd heard it this time. London snapped something to her wolves, and the black one issued a low whine.

“Other people from our world?” I asked London.

She gave me a single nod.

“Help us, please!” called the voice.

I gave the others a wild glance and ran down the hall, passing other natural caverns. Some were barred with black roots, others were open, and I realized: We were in a prison.

“Dez!” Lazar hissed after me. “We don't have time!”

“We're like you!” The man's voice echoed against the stone walls. “We're from Earth. Please let us out!”

Light bobbed behind me, and the thud of Caleb's boots. He was coming, too. My anxiety loosened a little, knowing he was with me.

I slowed down as I came to a corner and peered down the hall. With the barest light from Caleb's flashlight, I saw two huge openings facing each other across the hallway about fifty feet down. Each was covered with a net of black roots. The stench of old sweat and urine assaulted my nose.

“You, girl!” The man's voice rose with a heartrending combination of terror and hope. “Help us!”

Caleb reached my side and the flashlight beam flooded down the hallway.

Through the chinks in the roots the light reflected back from dozens of eyes, outlined dozens of hands clutching, gesturing, and reaching for us.

A female voice shrieked in terror as another babbled in a tongue I didn't understand.

“It's one of the Amba!” the same man said in English. I zeroed in on him. He was in the cell to the right, closest to us. A man about six foot four with matted dark hair, brown skin, and flashing dark eyes that took me in with horror, then blinked in surprise at Caleb. And I realized—I didn't look human anymore.

Caleb must have realized it, too. “We're from your world,” he said, and took a step down the hall.

The man's eyes widened. Tears sprang forth to course down his cheeks. He turned to address the dozens of others we could only partly see and shouted something to them I didn't understand. In the cell opposite, a woman—she was also tall, but redheaded and pale, did the same to the crowd in her cell, but in a very different tongue.

A full-throated roar of delight split the air. I could see fists pumping the air, people jumping and hugging. There must be dozens of them, at least fifty in each huge cell.

“That's Russian,” Caleb said to me over his shoulder. “They're speaking Russian in that cell.” He pointed to the left. “Sounds like Hindi or no, Bengali over there.” He pointed to the right.

With that, I knew who they were. Pale, Russian-speaking group on the left. Darker skinned people, one with a clipped Indian accent on the right. Russians and Indians, one of each able to also speak English, all tall, imprisoned here for who knows how long.

“Tiger-shifters,” I said.

Caleb leaned in, eyes widening. “What?”

There wasn't time to explain it to him, but it all made a weird kind of sense now. We'd seen other once-extinct creatures from Earth here in Othersphere—dinosaurs, giant sloths, dire wolves, and bat-shifters. Now we'd found probably a more recent addition. Tiger-shifters were supposedly gone from our world, wiped out by the Tribunal. Instead, they'd been brought here.

What they were doing in prison cells was anyone's guess.

Somewhere farther down the hall, past the cells, under the cheers and back-slappings, I heard the growl of a big cat. And quiet, deadly paws coming at a run.

“The Amba are coming!” I yelled to Caleb, and pointed down the hall.

His eyebrows came together in a puzzled frown and he turned. The beam of his light skimmed past a huge, striped, four-legged form as it slid around a corner a hundred feet down the hall and shot toward us like an arrow. Behind it there were more.