“Wait ’til I show you what I can do with my tongue,” Stump leered.
“If you even suggest anything similar to that, I’ll cut it off,” Lola said.
“He already had it cut off,” another goblin jeered. “Why do you think he’s called Stump?”
The laughs and lewd comments from the goblins were a mishmash of sound.
“Any tips, going into the demesne?” Rose asked.
“It’s his place,” Mags said. “I’m not sure what that means, now that he’s not… him. He basically made it a xerox of reality, complete with occupants. As they’ve worn down, he’s shored them up with magic from the pipes. Navigation is going to be hell.”
“I can help with navigation,” Lola said.
“Good,” Rose said. “Traps? Tricks?”
“On my first visit, the demesne impeded me. After I was invited, he made it easy for me to come and go. Ambassador duties, passing on messages. I don’t think it’s going to be friendly, this time around. It might be actively hostile. And, with everything that led into this, he’s got allies. Underlings.”
“Genies,” Rose said, “among other things.”
“I’ve seen a genie,” Peter said, sounding a little smug.
“Why do you sound proud?” Paige asked.
“Well,” Rose said, “if you think of anything else, say the word.”
Mags nodded.
To Evan, she said, “Stay low to the ground, until we decide we need you.”
“Right-o,” he said.
She gave him a once-over. “You’re smaller than you were a minute ago.”
“I’m leaking,” he said. “Balloon with a hole in it.”
“Balloons with holes in them pop,” Peter said.
Evan’s eyes went as wide as saucers.
“I don’t think you’re going to pop,” Rose said. “Come on. Let’s move, before you deflate. Lead the way.”
“Because I’m powerful! And strong!”
“Both,” she said. “But maybe keep it down.”
“I’m down!”
“You’re drunk,” she said. “And you are being loud. Dial it down a notch.”
“Dialed down,” he said.
She nodded, and he took that as his cue to lead the way. Green Eyes hurried to move up to his side.
“Now who’s going to eat who?” Evan asked. “I could do with some roasted sushi. Hm? Hm? What do you say to that?”
“Sushi is raw fish,” Green Eyes said, already far enough ahead that she was barely audible.
“And?” Evan asked.
Rose ignored the conversation that followed.
She had allies here that would listen to her. Paige, Ainsley, maybe Peter. Then she had… Blake’s group. Green Eyes and Evan.
Fitting that Mags, ambassador, was somewhere in the middle.
She didn’t trust Green Eyes to listen to her. Even Evan was a question, in a way.
She held her right wrist with her left hand, tracing her thumb along a line of the faded, nearly-invisible etching of Blake’s influence, between her sleeve and her glove.
With the others, she passed into the demesne. A place she’d seen before, even if she’d never entered it proper.
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected. An extension of the Abyss? A version of the library that fit Johannes?
The buildings were pale, but the light from above wasn’t from sun or moon. It wasn’t from a Conquest-like halo of light. There was no sky. No atmosphere, no clouds, no barrier or dome separating earth from something that was far from being heavens.
It was a darkness so deep it felt like she might be picked up from the ground and sucked away into the wider parts of it, torn away and flung into the deepest regions of that absence in a heartbeat.
Great spheres broke it up, but they were small comfort. They had a gravity of their own. Not planets, not moons, but something else. So close it felt like they might scrape past, and wipe everything here away.
One took up a third of the space above, touching on two sides of the horizon, shifting perceptibly with every moment. It shifted with what looked to be static, like that from a television screen, but the edges were too crisp, the details too sharp, until she thought it might touch her, or reach into her eyes.
When she tore her eyes away, the afterimages of those tiny depictions made her think of bodies. Humanoid. People, creatures, maybe demons, moving across the surface, shuffling over and through and under one another, occupying the entirety of the surface, layered as deep as oceans or as tall as mountains.
Two more great spheres had collided with one another, and fragments stretched between them, with trails of dust or smaller fragments extending between. One was marked with faint glows that suggested the same expanse of magma she’d observed in the clouds over Jacob’s Bell.
It was a setting, she instinctively knew, that was familiar to demons and gatekeepers, and very few others. A setting that predated things. Or a setting that would be.
Far removed from humanity. From this ghost town lit by that crackling static of a planet covered in moving bodies or the faint red glow of the burning wasteland sphere. It made for a mottled, red-tinted moonlight at best, but more frequently the light provided that shifted away from the eyes, as if it were shy.
The town was disordered. It was the best way to put it. Things weren’t in their proper places. It conjured up images of a ruin, but the buildings themselves weren’t ruined. The buildings were crammed together, and with everything else pushed away or left untouched by the faint light. At worst, there was only more of the absolute darkness.
“Any pursuers?” Rose asked.
Her voice sounded so empty here. As if any and all suggestion of an echo or sound bouncing off the surroundings and back to them had been removed.
“Yeah,” Lola said. “At least one of the lawyers.”
Rose nodded, unsurprised. “The runes didn’t help, huh?”
“They got us out of there,” Lola said. “But whoever or whatever he is, I get the impression he or she is on us like a bloodhound. Some sort of trinket or demon or familiar. If I had to put it to words… it’s that moment where a rabbit realizes it isn’t going to get away from the wolf or the hawk, captured, frozen in time.”
“Makes sense they’d have someone to track others down,” Rose commented. “The lawyers have their debtors and fugitives. I’m not the first to try to escape the consequences.”
“Man,” Peter said. “If this is escaping consequences, I don’t even want to know what facing them is like.”
“I’d try to divert or do something subtle,” Lola said, “But I don’t feel like it would be useful.
“Let me, then,” Ainsley said. She lifted a lighter to her candle, and tried and failed to produce a flame on four concurrent tries. Each failure prompted a faint shift in her expression, leaving her with a deep frown by the end. The look didn’t change when the fifth try produced flame, lighting the candle. She let wax drip across their path, reached into a pocket, and pressed a piece of wood down. Rose leaned forward and saw that she’d impressed a seal into the wax.