D. MacHale - Raven Rise

“No,” he gasped.

The quigs were back, lying beneath the snow, guarding the flumes. The rocky points were spikes that ran along their spines. Alder wasn’t afraid of dealing with a quig-bear. He had battled them before. What terrified him was that they were there at all. Quigs existed on territories where Saint Dane was active. On Denduron the Travelers had beaten the demon, and the quigs had not been seen since.

Until then.

Alder didn’t stop to wonder what it might mean. He wanted to be out of there. Without a moment more of hesitation, he picked up his sled and dashed across the snow. He picked a route that was clear of quig spines, threw the sled down, and jumped aboard. Belly down. Head first. The small sled was primitive, but fast. It was made from carved wood, with slick runners that slipped across the snow like skis. In no time he was gathering speed, heading down the steep field of snow. He risked a quick glance back to see if he had disturbed any quigs. None of them moved. It was small consolation.

Why had they come back? What was happening on Denduron?

Alder negotiated the snow field expertly, flying down the mountainside while steering past towering boulders of ice. The lower he dropped, the more patchy the snow became. He was soon skirting stretches of dirt and grass. He stayed on the snow as long as possible before his runners scraped rock, forcing him to give up his ride. He sat up and dug his feet in to stop, climbed off the sled, and stood to look down the mountain toward the village below.

What he saw made him fall to his knees. He couldn’t help himself. It was as if his legs had turned to rubber. Down below, on the vast grassy field that stretched between the Milago village and the seaside ruins of the Bedoowan castle, Alder saw an army of Bedoowan knights, dressed in full armor, lined up in tight formation.

Battle formation.

The Bedoowan knights were preparing for war. The territory had changed. “What has happened?” he gasped to nobody. As much as he needed it, there would be no rest for the Traveler from Denduron.

He wanted Pendragon to be there. He needed Pendragon to be there. But Bobby Pendragon was still on the territory of Ibara. Alone. Isolated. Unreachable.

Patrick Mac knew something was wrong.

He knew it before he opened his eyes on that May morning in the Earth year of 5014. It was the smell. He couldn’t place it, mostly because he had rarely smelted anything like it before. It seemed to him like a mixture of foul chemicals and rotted garbage-two smells that weren’t often present on clean, green Third Earth. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. It wasn’t natural. He opened his eyes to scan the bedroom of his small apartment. Nothing seemed out of place, other than the alien odor.

Patrick lived in the underground village of New York City known as Chelsea. It was the first subterranean complex built below Manhattan and served as a model for the others that had transformed the surface of New York from a crowded, environmental disaster area into a beautiful parklike community. Chelsea was made up of fifty levels of apartments, shops, museums, theaters, and just about every convenience needed to live belowground. There was even a large lake at its bottom level that was open most of the year for swimming and sailing. From November through January it was intentionally frozen for skating and ice hockey. Many thousands of people made their homes in the small community. Most of them worked there too. There was no reason to ever venture aboveground, unless you wanted to enjoy the beautiful, open countryside and feel the warmth of the sun.

Patrick thought that everything about Chelsea was perfect, except of course for this strange new smell that had so rudely forced him awake. He rolled out of bed, every sense on alert. Was he in danger? Was there a fire? No. It didn’t smell like that. He had received no warning through the communication system that ran throughout the underground village. If there was an emergency, people were notified immediately. Patrick had lived in Chelsea for most of his thirty years. He had only experienced one emergency. A water pipe had burst on the fifteenth level near his apartment. Everyone within three sectors was evacuated in minutes. The pipe was repaired and he returned home within the hour. Chelsea was an efficient place. If there were any real danger, Patrick felt certain he would know about it.

But what was the foul smell?

It was a Tuesday. Patrick had to be at work by eight. He was a teacher and the librarian at Chelsea High, five levels down from his apartment. He could make it from dead asleep to his classroom in fifteen minutes. Ten if he pushed. It was early. He didn’t need to push. He needed to find out what the putrid smell was. He sat up in bed, took a good whiff, and hacked out a cough. The smell tickled the back of his throat. He ran his hands through his long brown hair and scowled. The odd smell gave him a bad feeling that went beyond the throat tickle.

Patrick was the Traveler from Third Earth. He had already experienced the shock of seeing his territory change once; he didn’t want to go through it again. Events in the past had been altered, creating a ripple of events through time that led to the creation of a race of humanlike automatons called “dados.” One day all was normal; the next day Patrick woke to find these robots were suddenly part of the normal fabric of Third Earth life. They functioned as efficient worker bees who served the people of the territory. The dados may have been handy, but they were wrong. It wasn’t the way things were meant to be. Bobby Pendragon and his acolyte Courtney Chetwynde went back in time to First Earth to try and prevent the events that would lead to their creation. Had they succeeded? Did this odd smell have something to do with the past having been changed yet again? Was this foul odor a good sign? It sure didn’t smell like it. “Hello?” Patrick called out nervously.

He lived alone, but on the “new” Third Earth, he had a dado servant who made him breakfast and washed his clothes. Patrick thought it was creepy and cool at the same time. As much as the dados shouldn’t have existed, he had to admit that it was pretty nice to have a machine handle the more mundane chores around the apartment.

There was no answer. Were the dados no more?

Patrick decided to call his school to see if anybody knew what the strange smell was all about. He reached to his bedside table for his telemonitor, but his hand hung in the air. The device wasn’t there. Patrick quickly looked to the floor. Had he knocked it over in his sleep? No. It was just… gone. The hairs went up on the back of his neck. His pulse quickened. Something was definitely wrong.

It was then that he noticed a faint sound. It wasn’t distinct or specific enough for him to guess what it could be. It was more like a distant rumble of white noise. Harmless, except for the fact that the sound in Chelsea was totally controlled. Nothing as intrusive or annoying as white noise existed in his home, or anywhere else on Third Earth for that matter. The only place he’d heard anything remotely like it was on a recorded bit of history that was stored in the massive computer data files of 5014.

Patrick forced himself to stand up. He shuffled slowly toward his bedroom door, fearing what he might find on the other side. He reached for the silver-handled doorknob, grasped it tightly, took a breath, and pulled the door open to see…

It wasn’t his apartment. At least it wasn’t the apartment he used to have. There was nothing unusual or sinister about the place, other than the fact that it wasn’t his. The furniture was different. The paintings on the walls were different. The appliances in the kitchen were different. For a moment he wondered if he had accidentally entered the wrong apartment the night before, but quickly dismissed that as being idiotic. There was less chance of that happening than all of history being transformed by Pendragon and the other Travelers. That’s how strange the reality of his life had become.