Margaret Weis - Fire Sea

“And will I be expected, all by myself, to set it right?”

Did not regain consciousness, he regained a sense of himself. He had succeeded in his objective, he had remained awake during the journey through Death’s Gate. But now he knew why the mind far preferred to make the trip in unknowing darkness. He understood, with a real sense of shaken terror, how near he’d come to slipping into madness. Alfred’s reality had been the rope to which he’d clung to save himself. And he wondered, bitterly, if it might not have been better to have let loose his hold.

He lay for a moment on the deck, trying to draw his shattered self back together, attempted to shake off the feelings of grief and dreadful loss and fear that assailed him—all in the name of Alfred. A furry head rested on the Patryn’s chest, liquid eyes looked anxiously into his. Haplo stroked the dog’s silky ears, scratched its muzzle.

“It’s all right, boy. I’m all right,” he said, then knew that he would never truly be all right again. He glanced across at the comatose body sprawled on the deck near him.

“Damn you!” he muttered and, sitting up, started to give the body a wakening kick with his foot. He was reminded, forcibly, of the young and beautiful corpse in the crystal tomb. Reaching out a hand, he shook Alfred’s shoulder.

“Hey,” he said gruffly. “C’mon. C’mon and wake up. I can’t leave you down here, Sartan. I want you up on the bridge where I can keep on you. Get moving!”

Alfred sat up instantly, gasping and crying out in horror. He clutched at Haplo’s shirt, nearly dragging the Patryn down on top of him. “Help me! Save me! Running! I’ve been running... and they’re so close! Please! Please, help me!”

Whatever was going on here, Haplo didn’t have time for it. “Hey!” he shouted loudly, straight into the man’s face, and slapped him.

Alfred’s balding head snapped back, his teeth clicked together. Sucking in a breath, he stared at Haplo and the Patryn saw recognition. He saw something else, completely unexpected: understanding, compassion, sorrow.

Haplo wondered uneasily where Alfred had spent his journey through Death’s Gate. He had the answer, deep inside, but he wasn’t certain he liked it or what it all might mean. He chose to ignore it, at least for the time being.

“Was that? ... I saw ...” Alfred began.

“On your feet,” Haplo said. Standing up himself, he pulled the clumsy Sartan up with him. “We’re not out of danger. If anything, we’ve just flown into it. I—”

A shattering crash amidships emphasized his words. Haplo staggered, caught himself on an overhead beam. Alfred fell backward, arms flailing wildly, and sat down heavily on the deck.

“Dog, bring him!” Haplo ordered, and hurried forward.

During the Sundering, the Sartan had split the universe, divided it into worlds representative of its four basic elements: air, fire, stone, and water. Haplo had first visited the realm of air, Arianus. He had just returned from the realm of fire, Pryan. His glimpses into each had prepared him, so he had supposed, for what he might find in Abarrach, the world of stone. A subterranean world, he imagined, a world of tunnels and caves, a world of cool and earthy-smelling darkness.

His ship struck something again, listed sideways. Haplo could hear, behind him, a wail and a clattering crash. Alfred, down again. The ship could take such punishment, guarded as it was by its runes, but not indefinitely. Each blow sent tiny tremors through the sigla traced on the hull, forcing them a little farther apart, disrupting their magic ever so slightly. Two had only to completely separate, one from the other, open a crack that would grow wider and wider. That was how Haplo’s first trip through Death’s Gate had ended.

Making his way forward as rapidly as possible, tossed from side to side by the erratic motion of the heaving ship, Haplo became aware lurid glow lighting the darkness around him. The temperature increasing, growing hotter, much hotter. The runes on his skin began to glow a faint blue, his body’s magic reacting instinctively to reduce his temperature to a safe level.

Could his ship be on fire?

Haplo scoffed at the notion. He had passed safely through the guns of Pryan; the runes would most assuredly protect against flame! But there was no denying the fact that the red glow was burning brighter, the temperature growing warmer. Haplo quickened his pace. Emerging onto the bridge with some difficulty, due to the lurching of the vessel, the Patryn stopped and stared, amazement and shock paralyzing him.

His ship was sailing, with incredible speed, down a river of molten lava.

A vast stream of glowing red tinged with flame yellow surged and swirled around the vessel. Darkness arched above him, made darker by contrast to the lurid light of the magma flow below. He was in a gigantic cavern. Vast columns of black rock, around which the lava curled and eddied, soared upward, supporting a ceiling of stone. Numberless stalactites hung down, reaching for him like bony, grasping fingers, their polished surface reflecting the hellish red of the river of fire beneath them.

The ship veered this way and that. Huge stalagmites, with wicked, sword-sharp edges, thrust up from the molten sea like black teeth from a red maw. Haplo understood what had caused the trashes they’d previously experienced. Jolted to action, he moved forward and placed his hands on the steering stone, reacting by, instinct more than by conscious thought, his gaze riveted with horrid fascination on the dreadful landscape into which he sailed.

“Blessed Sartan!” murmured a voice behind him. “What frightful place is this?”

Haplo spared Alfred a brief glance.

“Your people made it,” he told him. “Dog, watch him.”

The dog had obediently herded and harried Alfred to this point by nipping at the man’s heels. It plopped itself down on the deck, panting in the heat, fixing its intelligent eyes on the Sartan. Alfred took a step forward. The animal growled, its tail thumped warningly against the deck.

I’ve nothing against you personally, the dog might have been saying from its expression, but orders are orders.

Alfred gulped and froze, leaned weakly against the bulkhead. “Where .. . where are we?” he repeated in a faint voice.

“Abarrach.”

“The world of stone. Was this your destination?”

“Of course! What did you expect? That I’m as clumsy as you?”

Alfred was silent, eyes staring out on the awful panorama. “So you are visiting each of the worlds?” he said at length.

Haplo didn’t see any reason why he should answer and so he kept quiet and concentrated on his steering. It deserved concentration. The huge boulders sprang up suddenly, without warning. He considered taking to the air, but decided against it. He couldn’t determine the height of the cavern’s ceiling. The hull could withstand punishment far better than the fragile mast and dragon’s head prow.

The heat was intense, even inside the ship, which had the advantage of being protected by runes on the outside. Haplo’s skin gleamed a bright blue as the runes cooled him. Alfred, he noticed, was humming beneath his breath, tracing runes in the air with his long-fingered hands and shuffling his feet slightly, his body swaying to the rhythm of the Sartan magic. Flanks heaving, the dog panted loudly, but never took its eyes from Alfred.

“You’ve been to the second world, I presume,” the Sartan continued in a low voice, almost as if he were speaking to himself. “It would be natural for you to travel to them in the order in which they were created, the order they appear on the old charts. Did you... did you find any trace of”—Alfred paused, seeming to have trouble speaking—“my people?” he asked finally in a voice so soft that Haplo heard him only because he knew what the question was going to be.