Margaret Weis - Fire Sea

“Entering Death’s Gate,” Haplo answered grimly.

Neither spoke for a moment, but looked around, watching, listening with inheld breath.

“Ah.” Alfred sighed, nodded. “That would explain it.”

“Explain what, Sartan?”

“How I arrived ... er ... here,” Alfred said, lifting his eyes for an instant to meet Haplo’s, immediately lowering them again. “I didn’t mean to. You must understand that. I—I was looking for Bane, you see. The little boy you took from Arianus. The child’s mother is frantic with worry—”

“Over a kid she gave away eleven years ago. Yeah, I’m in tears. Go on.”

Alfred’s wan cheeks flushed slightly. “Her circumstances at the time—She had no choice—It was her husband—”

“How did you get on my ship?” Haplo repeated.

“I... I managed to locate Death’s Gate in Arianus. The Gegs put me in one of the dig-claws—You remember those contraptions?—and lowered me down into the storm, right into Death’s Gate itself. I had just entered it when I experienced a sensation as... as if I were being pulled apart and then I was jerked violently backward ... forward ... I don’t know I blacked out. When I came to myself, I was lying here.” Alfred spread his hands helplessly to indicate the hold.

“That must have been the crash I heard.” Haplo gazed at Alfred speculatively “You’re not lying. From what I’ve heard, you miserable Sartan can’t lie. But you’re not telling me all the truth either.”

Alfred’s flush deepened, he lowered his eyelids. “Prior to when you left the Nexus,” he said in a small voice, “did you experience an odd . . . sensation?”

Haplo refused to commit himself, but Alfred took his silence for acquiescence. “A sort of ripplelike effect? Made you sick? That was me, I’m afraid,” he said faintly.

“It figures.” The Patryn sat back on his heels, glaring at Alfred. “Now what in the name of the Sundering do I do with you? I—”

Time slowed. The last word Haplo spoke seemed to take a year to emerge from his mouth and another year for his ears to hear it. He reached out a hand to grasp Alfred by the frilly neckerchief around the man’s scrawny neck. His hand crept forward a fraction of an inch at a time. Haplo attempted to hasten his motion. He moved slower. Air wasn’t coming in fast enough to supply his lungs. He would die of suffocation before he could draw a breath.

But impossibly he was moving fast, far too fast. His hand had grasped Alfred and was worrying the man like the dog worried a rat. He was shouting words that came out gibberish and Alfred was trying desperately to break his grasp and say something back, but the words flew by so swiftly that Haplo couldn’t understand them. The dog was lolling on its side, moving in slow motion, and it was up and leaping around the deck like a thing possessed.

Haplo’s mind attempted frantically to deal with these dichotomies. Its answer was to give up and shut down. He fought against the darkening mists, focusing his attention on the dog, refusing to see or think about anything else. Eventually, everything either slowed down or speeded up. Normality returned.

It occurred to him that this was the farthest he’d made it into Death’s Gate without losing consciousness. He supposed, he thought bitterly, he had Alfred to thank.

“It will keep growing worse,” said the Sartan. His face was white, he shook all over.

“How do you know?” Haplo wiped sweat from his forehead, tried to relax, his muscles were bunched and aching from the strain.

“I... studied Death’s Gate before I entered it. The other times you passed through, you always blacked out, didn’t you?”

Haplo didn’t answer. He decided to try to make his way to the bridge. Alfred would be safe enough in the hold, for the time being. It was damn certain the Sartan wasn’t going anywhere!

Haplo rose to his feet... and kept rising. He stood up and up and up until he must crash through the wooden overhead, and he was shrinking, becoming smaller and smaller and smaller until an ant might step on him and never notice.

“Deaths Gate. A place that exists and yet does not exist. It has substance and is ephemeral. Time is measured marching ahead going backward. Its light is so bright that I am plunged into darkness.”

Haplo wondered how he could talk when he had no voice. He shut his eyes and seemed to be opening them wider. His head, his body were splitting apart, tearing off into two separate and completely opposite directions. His body was rushing together, imploding in on itself. He clasped his hands over his rending skull, reeling, spiraling downward until he lost his balance and tumbled to the deck. He heard, in the distance, someone screaming, but he couldn’t hear the scream, because he was deaf. He could see everything clearly because he was completely and totally blind.

Haplo’s mind wrestled with itself, attempting to reconcile the unreconcilable. His consciousness dove down further and further inside him, seeking to regain reality, seeking to find some stable point in the universe to which it could cling.

It found ... Alfred.

Just as Alfred’s failing consciousness found Haplo.

Alfred was skidding through a void, plummeting downward, when he came to a sudden halt. The terrible sensations he’d experienced in the Death’s Gate ceased. He stood on firm ground and the sky was up above him. Nothing was spinning around him and he wanted to cry from relief when he realized that the body in which he was standing was not his own. It belonged to a child, a boy of about eight or nine. The body was naked, except for a loincloth twisted around the boy’s thin limbs. The body was covered with the swirls and whorls of blue and red runes.

Two adults, standing near him, were talking. Alfred knew them, knew them to be his parents, although he’d never seen them before now. He knew, too, that he’d been running, running desperately, running for his life and that he was tired, his body ached and burned, and that he couldn’t take another step. He was frightened, horribly frightened, and it seemed to him that he’d been frightened most of his short life; that fear had been his first recognizable emotion.

“It’s no use,” said the man, his father, gasping for breath. “They’re gaining on us.”

“We should stop now and fight them,” insisted the woman, his mother, “while we have strength left.”

Alfred, young as he was, knew that the fight was hopeless. Whatever was chasing them was stronger and faster. He heard terrifying sounds behind him—large bodies crashing through the undergrowth. A wail swelled in his throat, but he fought it back, knowing that to give way to his fear would only make matters worse.

He fumbled at his loincloth, drew out a sharp-pointed dagger, encrusted with dried blood. Obviously, Alfred thought, staring at it, I’ve killed before.

“The boy?” asked his mother, a question to the man. Whatever was coming was gaining on them rapidly.

The man tensed, fingers closing around a spear in his hand. He seemed to consider. A look passed between the two, a look that Alfred understood and he leapt forward, the word ‘No.’ bubbling frantically to his lips. It was met by a clout on the side of his head that knocked him senseless.

Alfred stepped out of his body and watched his parents drag his limp and unresisting form into a growth of thick bushes, hiding him with brush. Then they ran, luring their enemy as far from their child as they could before they were forced to turn and fight. They weren’t acting out of love to save him, but out of instinct, just as a mother bird, pretending to have a broken wing, will lead the fox away from her nest.

When Alfred regained consciousness, he was back in the child’s body. Crouching, panic-stricken, in the brush, he watched, in a dazed and dreamlike fashion, the snogs murder his parents.