The Nothing: A Book of the Between (15 page)

A cool cloth settled over his sightless eyes. They didn’t hurt, but the sensation was welcome.

“Are you a Dreamshifter?”

“No, never that.”

He hesitated, not wanting to hear any homespun psychology about how he dreamed of what he had lost. And then he told her.

When he was done, she said not a word. He knew she was still there because he could hear her breathing, could smell a faint spicy fragrance that was not perfume, more a mixture of baked goods and gardens and flowers.

“What do I call you?” he asked, after a long silence.

“You may call me Grace, although it feels strange to be called so after all these years. It is past first light. Are you hungry?”

Jared shook his head. His stomach felt heavy and dull, and he doubted he would ever truly be hungry again. But she brought him a hot steaming cup which was almost, but not quite, like coffee.

“It’s the closest thing to coffee I could manage,” she said, and he heard her sip a cup of her own. “Times like this, I wish I was a Dreamshifter.”

Jared remembered watching Vivian shift the killer chickens—the ones with teeth that wouldn’t stay dead—into ordinary fowl. Changing the swords the gray men carried into nothing but sticks. And a small hope burned in his heart that if he could find her, she might do more than turn a bitter beverage into coffee. An instant later, the hope went out, because there was no reason why she should do anything other than kill him if she were to see him again. He had done nothing but harm her.

With the next breath, he dropped the cup of coffee and drove the heels of both hands into his eyes as a flash of light strobed deeply into his brain. Even with his eyes closed, shapes and colors moved and shifted. He shook his head, blinked, but the shifting patterns had nothing to do with anything around him.

“What is it?” Grace asked. There was a note of fear in her voice.

Jared couldn’t speak. Gradually, as though somebody were twirling the dials on a pair of binoculars, the world came into focus. But it wasn’t the room where he was sitting that he saw, and when he turned his head from left to right or tried to look down at his own hands, his own body, the picture didn’t change.

What he saw was a large and luxurious chamber. Plants he didn’t recognize flourished, growing up directly out of the floor and spreading, ivy-like, over walls and floor. A high bed with silken sheets of a dusty rose, other furnishings all shaped out of stone and then smoothed and polished to a high, reflective gloss. The scene shifted perspective rapidly, as if he had bent over suddenly to the right, even though his body remained planted where he had left it, his hands braced on either side of him.

“What?” Grace demanded again.

“Pictures. A room. Grand...”

“She’s using your eyes.”

“What?”

“You gave her the gift of your eyes. It’s not taken figuratively around here. So, she took them and is making use of them.”

“But how?”

“Magic. Much of it is lost, but when it comes to growing things, or shaping stone, or the healing of the body, they can do things beyond your dreams.”

“But this isn’t healing.”

“No, it is an abomination, a twist on healing. Which doesn’t change the fact that she’s done it.”

Again the room shifted, far too rapidly, and he put one hand over his mouth and swallowed hard against the resulting nausea.

“Are you going to be sick again? Here—take the bucket. Try to hit it.”

“Everything is moving. Seasick. No anchor.”

“Maybe this can be useful. What do you see?”

“Just a bedroom. Wait. Moving. Through a door and into a—I suppose an office sort of space. A long table and there are people there. Five of them seated at the table, each with a book. Standing at the end of the table is—I guess—a guard, he’s armed and stands like a guard. Whoa—”

He put his head in his hands and swallowed hard, trying to ease the response to a sudden swoop of his vision that shifted his perspective to a place at the surface level of the table.

Again, he heard his own voice whimpering and despised his own cowardice. Zee would never whimper.

Footsteps moved off across the room. When he turned his head in that direction, nothing changed about his view, which was now mercifully static. A stone table. Five chairs. Five large books, five pairs of hands.

“Can you see any of the books?”

He shook his head. “No. They are all closed, the spines are turned away from me. It’s not like I can shift my vision.”

“Keep watching.”

“As if I have a choice.” He took the drink she put in his hand and swallowed without stopping to sniff or question. It burned, and he took another swallow, already feeling the heat begin to travel through nerves and muscles and release some of the tension.

The thought of his eyes being carried and used by somebody else made him want to scream and beat his head against a wall.

Only then, hands pressed against his eyeballs, did he realize something. There were eyeballs, of a sort. Not soft and giving, and completely without sensation. Touching one with the tip of an index finger, he felt it, smooth and hard. Glass, maybe. People had glass eyes. Something eased a little in him, that he might not be as much of a spectacle as he’d feared.

He raised his face to Grace. “What are they?”

“Just drink,” she said.

“Tell me. Glass eyes, right? What color?”

“Green,” she said carefully. Something in her voice told him that although the color matched the eyes that had once been his, there was more.

“Just drink,” she said again. “And go back to sleep.”

He took another long swallow of what must be a very potent brew. Already his head was spinning, and he lay back on the pillows. Just before he fell asleep, he thought he heard her say, “Sleep well. Be careful not to dream.”

WHEN HE woke again, he was alone.

Surely Grace was just in the next room, or possibly asleep. He listened, holding his own breath to listen, but heard nothing. No sound of somebody sleeping, or the turning of the page of a book, or the creaking of a chair.

Panic tore at him like a wild thing.

“Grace!” He shouted into the empty house. “Grace!”

Silence answered him.

It was a small cottage. If she were present, she would have heard him. Which meant he was alone in a strange world. How to find food or water, how to even find a place to empty his bladder— all of these things became urgent problems he didn’t know how to solve.

Thrashing and floundering about on the bed, heart so loud now that he couldn’t hear anything else, he managed to sit up, hopelessly tangled in sheets and blankets. The harder he thrashed, the tighter they bound him, and the more he panicked.

Too late, he felt the emptiness below him, nothing and nowhere to gain purchase or support, and he slid right off the mattress onto the floor. It wasn’t a big drop and it didn’t hurt him, really, was just enough of a crash to restore some level of sanity.

Slowing his breathing, he unwound himself from the encumbering bedding and then got carefully to his feet, stretching his hands out in front of him. Moving with slow, shuffling steps, he just kept going, hands out in front of his face, until he encountered a wall.

A wall was good. He could follow a wall to a door, and from there to the outside. Surely somebody would help him.

Or the Giants would just watch him die, little by little. Bloodthirsty race of beings, considering that they called themselves healers. He had to do something, though. Had to take some action. He needed a drink; he needed a bathroom. Sooner or later, he needed something to eat.

She’d come back, he told himself. Out to the market or to run an errand. People did things. They didn’t just sit around by blind people’s bedsides all day. And blind people did things.

Hand on the wall, moving carefully so he didn’t smack his shins on something low, he moved forward.

Without warning, the pictures came on again in his head.

Disoriented and queasy, he staggered and almost fell, just barely catching himself on the wall.

A wall that, according to his vision, did not exist. Crystal clear, he saw the Queen’s throne room. Empty now of courtiers. Only five Giants standing in a half circle. Their heads were bowed, eyes downcast, and Jared was pretty sure they were looking at the Queen.

If he moved according to what he could see, there was empty space before him, no wall, the Giants, and then a long red pathway leading to outside doors. His brain fragmented at the discrepancy as his other senses reported the rough wooden wall his hands were braced against, the homespun carpet under his bare feet, the absence of any living being.

The conflicting signals to his brain were threatening his sanity. He found himself incapable of movement. He couldn’t take another step when his eyes said one thing and the rest of his body another. At last he managed to slide down the wall onto the floor, where he took to rocking, back and forth, comforting himself with the sensation.

When the door opened and heavy footsteps shook the floor he was unable to stop, until a flat voice said, “Come. You’re wanted.”

Kraal.

“Go away.” Outrage over the Giant’s betrayal pushed back the panic and confusion.

“Unless you want her to have your heart out too, you’d best come now.”

“You called yourself a healer!” Jared hadn’t meant to shout, but he couldn’t help himself. “You’re a butcher. The lot of you. She can have my heart, and welcome. I can’t live like this.”

Kraal made a sound that might have been laughter. “You think having your heart out will let you die?”

“That’s the usual way of things.”

“And having your eyes out usually makes you blind.”

Jared’s whole body went cold with horror. There was no end to this nightmare. He could only imagine what she might do, the mechanical monstrosity she could make him into to come and go at her bidding.

Before he had more time to think, strong hands picked him up and carried him, not like a child in arms this time, but like some dirty object, held far away from the body. He was set down on what felt like grass, even though what he still saw was cool marble, and the half circle of Giants.

A splash of cold water over his head jolted him, made him draw a breath. More water, and then rough scrubbing of his face and hands.

“The clothes are beyond repair,” Kraal said. “Where is Grace?”

“Don’t know.”

Despair made him stubborn and obstinate, and he volunteered no information. Kraal’s hands clenched around his shoulders and tightened, digging into his muscles with an intense pain that made him throw back his head.

“All right, all right. I woke up. She was gone.”

He felt the thud of footsteps moving away from him, a little silence, and then Kraal returned. “She’s gone, all right. Come. Now.”

Not desiring to feel any more pain, he gathered the remnants of his pride and lurched up onto his feet, swaying and dripping.

“I’m all wet. There must be clothes somewhere.”

“No time.” Kraal took his hand and Jared stumbled to keep up.

He kept reminding himself as he walked that what he saw was irrelevant, had nothing to do with what was really around him or where he put his feet. Still, he stumbled over an uneven place when his brain told him it should be smooth, began to fall and then felt the jolt in his shoulder as Kraal jerked him back upright.

There was no slow-paced movement this time; he had to trot, every step into the unknown, to keep on his feet at all. It seemed forever, and then there was an expanse of smoothness, the exchange with the guards, verbal only this time, and they were through the doors and into the throne room.

If anything, this made Jared’s disorientation worse. He could see the part of the hall where he was now walking, but it wasn’t where his vision was focused. And then they reached the circle of Giants, who stepped aside to make room for them. He heard the Queen’s voice with a dangerous crystalline edge, “Where is the woman?”

Jared scarcely heard her, staring now at himself, and at Kraal beside him, but from all the wrong angles. He saw a man in bloody, wrinkled, sopping wet clothes. Disordered hair. Pale, unshaven face. And where the eyes should be gleamed two green stones, blank, without pupils. It gave the face an alien expression, like the carved Indian god he’d seen once with the gemstones for eyes. It couldn’t be him, not really. He reached a hand up to touch his face, to run it over the rough stubble on his chin, and watched the hand of the man who seemed to be standing in front of him do the same. He blinked, and lids closed briefly over the stone eyes.

“She is gone, O Majesty. Gone in the night.”

Dragging his attention away from his own appearance, taking advantage of a moment of sight, however skewed, and took in the appearance of the Giants. Their misshapen faces, usually stoic and expressionless, all carried an impression of shock. Kraal’s was the worst.

“And the dreamsphere?” the queen demanded.

Silence reigned as the others all held their breath.

“Taken it with her. I did not take time for a thorough search, but the little box in which she keeps it is gone.”

A sigh, like a gust of wind in trees, passed from Giant to Giant.