The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble's Braids (20 page)

“Why don’t you rest for a few minutes?” he said.

I glared at him. “Why don’t we get on with it?”

“All right.” He reached into his pocket, drew out a short length of red yarn and lay it as straight as he could in the grass before him. “A concentration aid,” he explained. He shouldered one of the packs and turned to face the yarn. “Stand next to me,” he said.

I put the second pack on my back and held the bulky third under one arm, uncomfortably. I wanted to have one hand free, just in case. I moved over to his right side. Our shoulders brushed.

“Not too close. Perhaps a few inches’ distance.”

He bowed his head then. He took deep, slow breaths. There was nothing gangly about him now—he was in his element, working with powers I had no ability to understand. His face took on something of the look of a bird of prey: fierce, wild, beautiful. The familiar chill that accompanied his use of power crept up the back of my neck. A breeze sprang up, and the grass swayed, then flattened as the breeze turned into a gale. I looked down at the length of yarn and it was pulled taut, as if by invisible hands. It thrummed as the wind ran across it—and then it was gone.

In its place stood a pearlescent, faintly glowing rectangle perhaps three feet wide by eight high.

“You must go first, quickly. I will follow.” His voice was strained.

I took a deep breath, and plunged through.

It was not a pleasant sensation. I have no words to describe it—suffice to say a body was not meant to exist in whatever nether world or space between worlds that doorway was made up of. The feeling was mercifully brief.

The first thing I saw was jungle. I smelled death, the putrid stench of corpses. I took two gagging, stumbling steps forward, caught a glimpse of rust-red, stone columns just ahead of me. Then something small, brown and hideously fast whipped past my head.

Behind me, Holgren screamed.