Othersphere (26 page)

He shook his head, remembering something, and grabbed it from a long pocket inside his coat—a length of the rope from between the worlds.

I reached for it, but he pulled it away. “Better if you don't touch it till you have to, I think. Here.” He stepped in close and wrapped it around my waist several times. I breathed in his familiar stormy scent, stared at his lips and dark eyelashes from a few inches away.

He tied the rope off and stood there, very close. We were breathing each other's breath now, heart to heart. Our gazes met. Then his eyes fell to my lips, and I stopped breathing. He took my upper arms in both his hands and pulled me close.

“Just in case,” he said, one arm sliding around my back, the other encircling my waist. He kissed me with a fierceness that made my knees buckle. My lips opened under his as I pressed against the whole lean line of his body, curving into him, sliding my fingers at last up the back of his neck and into his thick, unruly hair.

It would have gone on, except that he wrenched his mouth from mine and said, “Go.” He took my shoulders with his hands and pushed me away. “Now. Or I'll never let you leave again.”

I took a step back. I was smiling. “I'll see you soon,” I said, and walked through the window I'd made in the veil.

CHAPTER 16

The air breathed happily around me, sighing as it ran over the singing leaves. Small creatures ran flashing under the darkling branches, and stars peeped down from their spheres. My skin exchanged melodies with the breeze; my lungs breathed deep the ballad of moss and wood, of sweet dirt and fresh brook. All were there with me in this time, this place, and I with them.

I looked back and saw Caleb still standing on the other side of the veil, snow waltzing down on his dark head, wind trilling over his long black coat. The music was there, too, if I just stopped to listen.

He raised his hand: not a wave, but a hail. I raised my own hand, now with its otherworldly long, tapered fingers, in return. The same connection I felt to the earth and water, to the air and wood here harmonized now softly between the two of us.

It took only a thought to pull the window back to where it belonged. It vanished from view and lodged once more against my heart. That heart was now housed in a different body. As before, the trip through the veil had transformed me into something taller, more fluid, leaner, and perfectly in tune with all around me. With the window gone, the bond with Caleb had disappeared, too. But I wasn't alone. Nothing in Othersphere was ever alone.

I stood in the wood I didn't recognize. The branches rose thick with their blue-green leaves, leaving open triangular chunks to the night sky. The ground was covered not in grass, but in a yellow-green moss that climbed a foot or two up the twisted tree trunks and over the rocks and roots.

The scent here was off. Something had walked this way recently. I knelt and ran my hand over the moss, and its indentations crooned a story of a man with white hair who had been here. Orgoli's feet, in Ximon's boots, had stood here and then he had shifted into a great striped beast, a tiger spirit Amba, only as big now as a horse. He could become larger if he wished. I was learning that the size of our Amba body was determined by our emotions and, in some cases, how much blood we had recently drunk. The more powerful the creature we ate, the greater our own power, for a little while at least.

The great tracks led me over to the braided trunk of a nearby tree, where my pointed fingernails traced four deep scratches running parallel deep into its knotted bark. The tree's chant told of Orgoli, sharpening his claws there, of him leaping up the trunk, climbing high into its branches to where the breeze ruffled his ears so that he could see the great cliff of the Amba's mountain palace off in the distance.

The cliff. I followed Orgoli's trail, climbing up the tree, thanking it silently as I did so, to poke my head above the top of the forest. The moonlight resounded here without the leaves to obscure it. It shimmered through the light wind and filled the trees with life. It wasn't just the sun that fed the plants here, I realized, but also the moon. They'd learned to turn its silvered light into food and strength.

From here the treetops ran into the distance like the rooftops of a great city. To my left I could see a distant mountain range, capped with snow as white as cake icing under the moon. To my right, a few miles away, rose a great cliff, gleaming like ivory marble veined with black and purple. I was too far away to see the balcony where we'd stood during our rescue of Amaris. But that had to be the place, for a peak shaped like a slumbering cat presided over it, the ears still pointed up alertly, even in sleep.

I gripped the branches between my hands and asked.

The tree reverberated with a remembered great roar, one that could be heard for miles. Orgoli had sent out a call to all within the sound of his voice. He would do it several more times on his way home. He was calling in his army.

I climbed down and shifted with an ease that felt like breathing deep. A great tiger creature once more, I sprinted toward the marble cliff. I had no idea if there would be a way for me to enter the home of the Amba at its base, or even if the tiger-shifters were still there, but that was the last place I'd seen them, so it was where I had to start.

My great leaping strides ate up the miles, and if I ever doubted which way to go, I bounded up a tree to check my direction. Soon the cliff was visible through the leaves, looming ahead. I came to the river I'd seen winding through the valley when I'd looked down from above, and plunged into the rough–flowing water without hesitation, paddling easily through the rapids to climb up the other bank and shake my coat dry.

I paused as I got close, taking in great, even lungfuls of fresh night air, and drank from a creek that wound off the river. With every lap of my tongue, I tasted the clean rocks under the water, the algae that lived on those rocks, and the fish that swam between them. Something that glowed blood red swam lazily past me, circling up to another finned fish thing that shimmered indigo. They circled each other in a slow, elegant dance, then merged, their colors shifting with the union to a gleaming royal purple. The resulting creature swam upstream, out of sight.

I walked over to a tree and rubbed my face against it, marking it instinctively, and then paused as a similar scent reached my nose. Another Amba had been here within the past few hours, one like me, from this world.

I sniffed around the wide base of the tree, ears cocked for any approaching sound, and found more smells. This was when London's superior nose would have been useful, but my tiger senses were sharp enough to distinguish three different Amba scents, apart from my own, and six sharper, muskier scents which I recognized as the tiger-shifters. Those scents were slightly older, while the Amba's were more recent, which meant that six of the tiger-shifters had run through this way, chased by three of the Amba.

I followed the tiger-shifter tracks, nose to ground, as quickly as I could. The Amba stalked them the whole way. I wasn't experienced enough to know how old the scents were, but they seemed relatively fresh. As I moved along, the trees were fewer, and the grass grew as high as my head, rustling like taffeta in the breeze as the moonlight brushed fingerlike shadows along the ground.

I heard a deliberate crackle in the grass and swiveled to face it, fangs bared. Another swish from behind me and I realized—I was surrounded by twelve tiger-shifters. They slunk toward me, stripes like grassy shadows on their backs, snarling. Off in the distance, I now smelled blood and the dead flesh of the Amba that had followed them.

Ambush.

I had walked right into it, as the Amba had. The tiger-shifters were smart, and against twelve of them, I probably didn't stand a chance. I got quiet and stilled my tail. I didn't quite know how tigers communicated, but somehow I'd understood what the Indian tiger-shifter had “said” to me back in the cells before I left him. So, with a combination of body language and chirps, I did my best to indicate:

I'm a friend. I'm the one who freed you earlier
.

They seemed to understand, because they hesitated. One snarled an order:

And a second tiger-shifter turned and ran off into the brush.

I sat down, trying to look as harmless as possible. The tiger-shifters exchanged glances and questioning rumbles. In the distance, I heard a roar, and a familiar tiger bounded through the grass. By his stripe pattern I recognized him as the Bengal tiger-shifter I'd sort of befriended back in the prison cells.

His honey-colored eyes got wide at the sight of me. I bowed my head, flipping the tip of my tail nonchalantly in greeting.

He relaxed, and around him the others did, too. He chuffed, whiskers fanning forward, and I understood him to be greeting me as a friend, as someone welcome to the group.

I stood up slowly and made a similar greeting, looking around and also trying to ask him:

Maybe it was the connection I felt to all things in Othersphere, or maybe it was that tigers really did talk to each other with roars and tail twitches. Or maybe it was a little of both, but he answered me very clearly.

I roared joyfully.

He roared back, just as jubilant. The other tigers did the same, and the night trembled under the barrage of our cries.

I chuffed and turned my ears to the cliff that still loomed nearby.

The Bengal tiger's whiskers retracted, hugging his striped muzzle, his ears flattening in surprise.

I chirped and tilted my head.

The Bengal shook his ears.

He looked around at the others, and they were stamping, chuffing, growling their approval.

I bowed my head once again, but my tail lashed.

The Bengal bowed in return, and then chirped to one of the others.

That tiger-shifter sprinted off into the grass, and the Bengal came up alongside me, smaller than I was, but sinewy and strong.

He took off running toward the cliff. The others poured after him. I followed, keeping up easily, one stride of mine matching every two of theirs, galloping at a steady pace as the dark-veined cliff towered closer. As we reached the bottom of it, I saw what he must have meant by the Climbing Tree. A wiry tree hugged close to the wall of the cliff, mounting higher and higher until it became more of a thick vine, spiraling upward as far as my neck could crane back to see.

The Bengal glanced at me.

I nodded. I didn't want any more of them to die, if possible. And as both an Amba and Orgoli's daughter, I might be able to put a stop to the fighting.

Tigers don't smirk, but he waved his tail appreciatively, and gestured upward.

At first the climb was easy. I thought of all the lessons in climbing up and down Morfael had forced me into, and I was grateful. The tree's branches were thin, but they were solid and spread out both horizontally as well as vertically. I could feel the tree's ancient song coming up through the pads in my paws, and I thanked it for allowing me to dig my claws into its tough bark, for bearing my weight and all those coming after me.

After about a hundred feet, the branches turned into one thick creeping stem, which warbled a peculiar refrain as it wound ever higher. My body adjusted to the harsher tune, but after climbing for another thousand yards straight up, with no end in sight, my shoulders were aching.

The wind teased the creeper, buffeting my fur and causing the vine to sway. I tightened my grip and while I waited for it to move a little less, I dared to look down.

My stomach dropped, and my fear shouted out at top volume. The vine's song seemed to catch that refrain and echoed it back. My fear increased. The vine was feeding it. I dug in tighter, hunching closer to the sheer wall, and forced myself to growl a soft, contrasting deep note. The plant I clung to resumed its wandering jingle and my heartbeat slowed.

The forested valley lay over a hundred stories below me, spread out like a black and silver map under the luminous moon. Directly under me, the tiger-shifters were strung down the vine like striped flowers. Some were panting with effort, straining as they climbed, muscles trembling.

The Bengal was right behind me, teeth bared in a grimace of effort. He ruffed at me, as if to say:
We will make it. Don't stop.

So I continued the ascent. A sharp cramp ran through first my right, then my left front paw. A deep tremor quivered in the powerful muscles in my front legs and traveled down my back, joining in a painful tune with my aching joints and raw paw pads. I took more weight onto my back paws, trying to use the front ones mostly for balance, but soon my back legs and toes began to cramp.

The agony song inside me was reaching a miserable crescendo. I grasped upward with my front right paw, dug in, pulled up. But the cramp there didn't allow me to dig in deep. I slipped. I skidded jarringly down the vine three feet until my left paw caught hold, my back legs dangling. Scrabbling to get them back on track, I clamped my jaw around the thick stem until all four paws once more grasped the plant.

I looked down. The Bengal was just a foot beneath me, shaking with effort. If I'd hit him, we both would have fallen to our deaths, and probably hit a few more shifters going down. There were clouds beneath us now, obscuring the trees.

I continued on, unashamedly using my jaw for extra hold when I needed it. Every foot we gained was agony. I began wobbling with both weakness and with fear that we wouldn't make it back home in time to be of help.

Just as I felt I couldn't haul my body one more inch up that cursed vine, the greenery spread out above me, crowned with bushes twisted into familiar strange shapes. We had reached the lip of the Amba balcony. I crawled, shaking, up and peered over its edge.

A huge paw with claws the size of steak knives extended, swiped at me. I ducked. The razor-sharp talon slit open one of my ears, but missed my eye. I forced my back legs to push off the vine and leapt up and over the head of an Amba in tiger form lurking at the top of the Climbing Tree. He must have heard us coming.