Battle Across Worlds Read online

  Closer, closer … Yes!

  He was inside her head now. He watched through her own eyes as she ascended the steps carved into the side of a sheer limestone cliff. In the corner of her vision, he saw a sparkle of light reflected from a great river far below. From somewhere above there came shouts, panicked screams, clanging blades and other sounds of violence … but the girl ignored them, intent on her goal.

  She approached a heavy door of blue-black stone, and it slid aside for her as if moved by unseen hands. Passing through the doorway, she entered a cavern-like chamber, its shadowed interior much cooler than the sun-baked stairs outside. Upon a pedestal in the center sat a small pyramid of the deepest black stone, no bigger than a man’s fist. The girl went to it, stroked its smooth surface, whispering:

  My love, come to me, come to my people in our time of need!

  Was she speaking to Ralley? Calling for him?

  He ached to cry out to her; but he was afraid that the sound of his own voice might wrench him from the dream.

  Suddenly, a shaft of blinding white light shot up from the pyramid, accompanied by a shuffling-whistling noise—strangely melodic, like the sound of an unearthly harp. She turned her head away from the brightness, her heart pulsing fast.

  Getting close! Open the way, bring you across. Come to me my love, come to us …

  As the light faded, heavy footfalls echoed from the entrance to the chamber. A laughed pierced the air—a woman’s voice with a knife-edged sharpness.

  The girl turned to face the intruders.

  There were three of them. The woman in the center was petite but muscular, a brown-skinned warrior with close-cropped hair who held herself with the bearing of a goddess. Her delicate features were marred by ritual scars, and her eyes were red, the “whites” the color of a fiery sunset, the irises a deeper ruby shade. The two soldiers flanking her were powerful men, ebony-skinned with deep blue tattoos on their cheeks, and all three wore blue-black armor which shimmered like oily water even in the dim light.

  Ralley felt the girl’s lips whisper a name:

  Lanaya.

  Traitor, she thought. Sister. Here? No …

  The two men raised weapons: hand-guns which reminded Ralley of muskets, but with silver needles protruding from the center of the burnished muzzles. Sneering, the red-eyed woman reached forward and grabbed the girl’s forearm, her rough hand closing on it like a cruel vise.

  No! The girl’s heart was pounding.

  Not now! So close! My love no …

  BOOM-RUMBLE-BOOM!!!

  The sound erupted in Ralley’s ears, tearing him from the dream. His eyes flashed open and he sat bolt upright as he cried: “NO!”

  There was a feeling in his gut like a drop into a bottomless pit, and the brick walls of the dim-lit cottage seemed to close in around him.

  He was fully awake … and he had lost her.

  In the back of his mind, he knew that he’d been awakened by the simple sound of thunder. But that hardly mattered. He had been torn from her, lost the link.

  Or had he?

  The urgency was still tight in his chest. His blood burned, and his muscles were on fire, twitching with the need to act. A vibration hummed deep inside his head, a beckoning siren song both sharp and sweet.

  A sign?

  It sang to him of need and longing. Calling to him, pulling him up out of his bed. And he thought he could hear her voice behind it all.

  Jumping to his feet, he plucked his rapier from the table by the bed, hastily tied his long hair back with a ribbon he kept there …

  And then the pull was too strong to fight anymore. No time to think—he sprinted to the bolted front door and wrenched it open. The locking-latch flew loose in a shower of splinters.

  Ralley burst out into the cloud-shrouded twilight, barely feeling the heavy rain as it drenched his skin. Leaping the low garden wall, he charged into the storm-soaked forest, heading south, following that beckoning tug.

  A tiny voice in his mind whispered: The Guardian’s estate lies that way, and it is well guarded. To charge in is sheer madness. The Grenadiers will slaughter you … It sounded much like his friend Jack Chestire’s voice. The Dragoon had warned him against taking the dreams too seriously. If Jack could see him right now, would he think he’d gone mad?

  But if this was indeed madness, then he no longer cared. She needed him, and at long last the time had come to act.

  He ran on.

  -4-

  Captain Jack Chestire bent low in the saddle as his horse, Ermaline, charged forward down the wooded path. Lightning flashed from somewhere ahead, and there was another peal of thunder.

  “Think we can outpace the rain, pretty lady?” he called out to the mare.

  A fallen tree stretched across the path ahead, a relic of a previous storm. Mere yards from the tree, the horse leapt into the air, displaying the skills with which she had won more than one steeplechase contest in recent years. As they soared above the path it felt to Jack as though they were flying. For a moment he was free of the bonds of earth and the chains of exile …

  Ahh! If only he could fly at will! Then, he might forget his shame and frustration, might soar like a noble eagle untroubled by the earthly pettiness below.

  It had been two long years he had been exiled on the Isle of Briars. Two years since the Lord Protector’s Stefanite forces had arrived at the royal palace, demanding that the Queen surrender to the will of God and the people.

  And she had surrendered. After the Massacre in the East, in which royalist forces had been wholly slaughtered, she had been loath to resist. The cause was done for, she had told her Dragoons. The old ways were over. There would not be a full-scale civil war; she would relinquish the throne to the theocracy, and they were not to fight.

  Along with the other members of the Queen’s Dragoons, Jack had followed her into exile. The Queen had become a prisoner in all but name, confined to her estate on the island—where she had soon perished in her despair …

  There was a jolt as Ermaline’s hooves touched back to earth. Jack bounced in his saddle and was alert again, gravity claiming him once more. He reached up with one hand and pressed his plumed Dragoon’s hat more firmly onto his head.

  A moment later, the skies opened up and thick, warm rain like the spit of heaven poured down upon them. The horse was unbothered by the downpour, though, and they charged onward.

  Ralley Quenn’s brick cottage came into view through a gap in the trees, illuminated boldly in a flash of lightning. They ran towards it, and Jack brought Ermaline to a rearing halt in the front garden.

  Something was wrong. The front door was open to the elements and, in the fading light, Jack could see no one inside the tiny cottage. “Ralley?” he called.

  Then he saw the footprints: the impressions of bare feet in the wet earth lead away from the door at a runner’s pace. He remembered what Ralley had said about his recent troubling dreams—how they felt like they would break him, drive him mad.

  The footprints lead south, following the path towards Guardian Crandolph’s estate. The Guardian—the Stefanite overseer of the island—was powerful and very guarded about his privacy. If Ralley charged in there half-crazed, with the Grenadiers guarding the estate and itching for a fight …

  Jack knew that he had to stop him.

  “YAH!” he cried to Ermaline, and they shot off southward, following Ralley’s trail.

  They had only traveled a hundred feet when a sudden brightness to the south caught Jack’s eye. A column of white brilliance shot up from below to pierce the storm clouds, illuminating them from within. It flared intensely for several long seconds before flickering—and then, in an instant, it was gone.

  How odd. Lightning shooting up from the ground?

  But was it indeed lightning? He waited for the crack of thunder, but it didn’t come. There was only a faint melodic whistling in the air—and that was probably just the wind?

  No matter. He couldn’t permit such distraction
s. The important thing now was to find Ralley—before the nervous youth got himself killed …

  #

  Ralley ran. The rain-soddened earth sloshed beneath his bare toes and the downpour drenched him, plastering his clothes to his body and soaking his long red hair.

  There was a flash of light. More lightning?

  No, this was something else: a pure white beam of energy, rising in a column to pierce the heavens before vanishing again. That was her signal! Had he heard something on the wind, a whistling-shuffling noise, like a beckoning call?

  He became dimly aware of the sound of a galloping horse behind him, a dull echo from a distant place. Then, suddenly, the horse and rider were in his path …

  “Ralley!” called a voice.

  His eyes took in the sight of the man on the horse, waving his arm, but his mind did not comprehend. It was all disjointed pieces: a scarlet uniform, a plumed hat, a bearded face furrowed in worry.

  “Ralley, stop! It’s Jack!”

  “Jack?” He felt as if he’d slammed into a wall, the air knocked from his lungs. He had forgotten everything—where he was, who he was—focused only on that pull which had drawn him forward, strong as a rope of braided iron. Now, he was aware of himself standing soaked in the mud, his heart pounding and his entire body burning with a fever of urgency that the rain could not cool.

  Jack leaned down from his saddle and touched Ralley’s shoulder. “My friend, you can’t go this way. It’s too dangerous. Let’s get you home, all right?”

  “Dangerous,” Ralley whispered, and an image rose up in his mind: his brown-skinned girl in the clutches of the woman with the scarred face and demonic red eyes.

  That was his purpose, to help her! He felt the pull on him again, and had to fight the urge to bolt off.

  “She’s in terrible danger,” he pleaded to Jack. “I have to go to her!”

  #

  Jack sat on a stool in Ralley’s cottage, his damp Dragoon’s hat in his lap, smoothing the soddened plume. He watched in the flickering lamplight as Ralley paced the rough floorboards of the tiny room. The youth was soaked from head to foot and he held his rapier in a twitching hand, humming as walked—some mournful tune Jack didn’t recognize.

  “What’s that song?” Jack asked. “Something from an opera?” Ralley was always humming opera, especially when he felt anxious—which was much of the time.

  “It’s from ‘The Despair of Mad King Oelrick,’” Ralley explained. “From the scene where he finds that he’s just killed his daughter, thinking her a swamp rat.”

  “A bit depressing, don’t you think?”

  “Sorry,” Ralley said. “I didn’t even realize I was doing it—the humming, I mean. Just thinking. Trying to make sense of all this.”

  Ralley had recently explained to Jack that his dreams had been filled with visions of a lovely brown-skinned girl trying to contact him, beckoning to him to somehow cross to her desert world. Now he said he’d seen her captured by some monstrous foe.

  “I know it sounds mad,” Ralley said, stopping at the wall to turn around before pacing the length of the room again. “I’ve dreamt of her for years, now and again. Mostly, I’d thought she was just a pleasant fantasy, a phantasm of my imagination. But this time … This time I could see through her eyes! It was all so real, every detail. I could smell her perfume and feel the hot desert air crossing over her lips when she breathed.” He paused, and drew in a breath. “And I could feel her fear, Jack. She’s been taken by the enemy and she needs my help. Now, while the way is still open. If I can only get to her …” He sighed and sat down in the chair opposite Jack.

  “This pull is definitely leading you south, to the Guardian’s estate?” Jack asked.

  “Yes.” Ralley nodded. “All this time, I’ve felt something drawing me there. When I left the University last year and sought a position here on the island … I was being drawn in, even then!”

  “But the way is through the Guardian’s estate?” Jack asked. “On his land, or is it inside the house proper?”

  “No … it’s the mound in front of the house, Jack. The faerie mound as it’s called, with the trio of obelisks on top. You’ve heard of it?”

  Jack nodded. Indeed, it was a famous mystery of the island. In the Queen’s time, royal scholars had spent years studying the mound. They had never discovered anything of use, and the incredible hardness of the earth of the mound had thwarted their best efforts to dig for further clues.

  “I know the gate is there, Jack. I’ve seen images of those obelisks in my dreams. There’s a white fire that rises up there, a pillar of light. That’s her signal to me.”

  “A pillar of light, in the south?” Jack asked. “Ralley, I … I think maybe I saw it.” His skin felt cold, as if there were chill fingers running over him.

  There had been something very odd about that light … But there couldn’t be any truth to Ralley’s vision, could there?

  “You did see it?” Ralley leaned forward in his chair, his eyes wide. “Then I’m truly not mad?”

  Jack shook his head. “Well …” He hesitated a moment, wondering how best to phrase his doubts. “Passionate men often have powerful dreams, Ralley. They can be inspiring and might even lead one to glorious achievements, yes, but still … That is something quite different than a clairvoyant vision.”

  “But is she real?” Ralley asked, shaking. “Jack, I can’t believe that she doesn’t exist. I have to hold onto her image, no matter what …” Sighing, he put his hands over his face and rocking in his chair. “Must be … real …” He whispered so softly that Jack couldn’t make out most of the words, rocking all the while.

  Jack reached out and tapped his friend’s knee. “Ralley? Are you all right?”

  He gave no answer.

  The only sounds were the heavy rain hissing on the roof, and another low roll of thunder from outside.

  Suddenly, Ralley stopped moving. He dropped his hands from his face and his head snapped up, his eyes locking with Jack’s gaze—and the Dragoon had to suppress a shudder.

  He felt those eyes boring into him. There was a startling fire in the green irises that was unlike anything he had seen before—least of all in his meek friend’s gaze.

  “Ralley,” Jack asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, Jack,” Ralley said. “I’m fine now.” His voice was clear and loud now, resonant like an actor’s. “I thank you for your concern, but the crisis is here—and I know what I have to do.”

  Ralley slipped his shoes on, then picked up his rapier and rose from the chair, standing straight and proud. His face was calm, yet his jaw was firmly set—and those green eyes blazed in the lamplight. It was a fearsome expression of conviction—the face of a divine prophet.

  Or a madman, Jack thought, shuddering.

  “I’m going to go now,” Ralley said. “I must go. For the sake of our friendship, please don’t try to stop me.”

  “Stop you?” Jack asked. “No, but I would recommend …” His friend’s sudden change in personality greatly unnerved him, and he found it difficult to think.

  There was an awkward silence.

  What Ralley was planning to do was insane, that was certain. The Grenadiers guarding the estate to the south would likely kill him if he trespassed.

  In that case, what would Jack’s own role in this adventure be? Could he stand idly by while his friend went off to face Aubren’s Grenadiers and God knew what else in order to save his dream lady?

  After a long moment, Jack took a deep breath and smiled at his friend. “Of course I’m not going to stop you, Ralley. In the end you’ll follow your convictions no matter what I do or say, yes?”

  Ralley nodded.

  “But I would recommend that you go forward cautiously. Understand the situation you face, the threats involved. Let’s take a closer look at things before you rush in, all right?” He stared into Ralley’s fierce green eyes and placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. “I’ll guide you and we can scout out th
e area around this mound of yours. Get a look without being seen ourselves. We’ll have to go on foot, of course—my dear Ermaline has rather noisy hooves, alas.”

  Ralley only nodded again, his grim expression unwavering, blazing eyes unblinking.

  Perhaps I’m the one who’s mad for even considering this, Jack thought. But he wasn’t sure what else to do. Ralley was hell-bent on pursuing the goal of his visions, and Jack couldn’t think of any way to prevent this—not for very long, anyway. He couldn’t watch his friend around the clock, after all … Were Jack missing from the barracks for too long, the Grenadiers would come searching for him.

  Likewise, he could hardly turn Ralley over to the local authorities; Jack’s own hatred of the Stefanite zealots aside, he knew they might view the youth’s dream-compulsions as heresy or treasonous somehow.

  The only thing to do was to go along with Ralley, hope for a way to make him see reason. Perhaps a peek at the well-armed Grenadiers patrolling the estate might sober him a bit?

  “All right,” Jack said. “We can leave the soon. The storm may cover our approach. Why don’t you prepare yourself, and we’ll—“

  But Ralley was already opening the cottage door, stepping out into the rain. Jack sighed, placed his plumed hat on his head, and followed his friend into the storm.

  -5-

  Constable Ed Bocke was so soaked from the rain that he thought his bones might be soggy. He made his way through the trees, stumbling along as best he could with his bad foot. He swore as thorns pierced his legs through the cloth of his trousers, and winced when a branch smacked him wetly in the face.

  What was he doing out here, in the middle of this miserable storm, chasing demons?

  Rutting hell.

  There was another flash of lightning. In its light, he glimpsed a bright band of color. It was a swath of red, moving under the cover of the trees ahead.