Ian Johnstone - The Bell Between Worlds

But Simia had not finished. She moved one of her arms out towards the passing stream and moments later the silvery flow of the water started to veer from its path downhill and turn towards the long line of moss. Before long it had reached her feet, where it turned again and started flowing over the bright green surface. Sylas watched in amazement as the stream gathered pace on this smooth, slippery channel and became a shallow film of water, cascading between the trees.

Simia’s hands fell to her sides and she gasped for breath.

“It’s called a Groundrush,” she panted. “It’s for...”

There was a noise somewhere further up the hill and a bird nearby launched itself into the air. They looked sharply in its direction, their eyes scanning the skeletal trees and the shadows between. A wood pigeon sped upwards towards the grey sky, slapping its wings together as it darted through the branches.

Sylas glanced nervously at Simia. Her bold grin was gone and for the first time there was fear in her eyes.

They heard footsteps pounding through the forest somewhere far behind. The sound was heavy and resonant – whatever was making them was huge.

In the next moment the silence of the forest was shattered by a blood-chilling howl.

Even as the terrifying sound met their ears, Simia was in motion, grabbing Sylas by the collar and dragging him to the edge of the streaming water.

“It’s them! The Ghor!” she hissed in his ear. “Do exactly what I do!”

Then, without warning, she leapt into the air, throwing her legs out in front of her. She travelled some distance with her giant coat flapping about her before landing with a great splash in the icy water. As the water rushed about her, she lay back and wrapped her arms round her chest. She began to slide forward, carried with ease over the slippery, spongy surface. She quickly picked up pace and in no time she was careering down the hillside away from him, swiftly passing out of sight as she fell away into a dip in the forest floor. Seconds later she was thrown into the air some distance beyond and he heard her cry out to him as she landed back on the slide somewhere entirely out of view.

Just then a great chorus of howls echoed through the forest behind him and he heard the footsteps – closer now – crashing through the forest. They were on his trail. He pulled the rucksack from his shoulders, clutched it to his chest and leapt into the air.

He splashed into the freezing stream and gasped as the cold made its way quickly through his clothes. There was a gentle jolt as he went over a rise, then suddenly his heart was in his mouth as he accelerated downwards. Tree trunks flew past him faster and faster and, when he looked upwards, he could see a flurry of bare branches silhouetted against the grey sky. On both sides a blur of rocks and roots whisked past his face and he felt a growing excitement. He tucked in his elbows and allowed the surge of the stream to take him. He went over a bump and was thrown up in the air – suddenly weightless, hanging some distance off the ground – and in that moment everything went strangely quiet: the sound of rushing water faded; the wind stopped roaring in his ears. As he turned through the air, he was able to look back up the slide, and his blood ran cold.

Where he had been standing only moments before were two gargantuan black hounds, sniffing the air and prowling through the undergrowth. He saw in them the features of the beast that had pursued him the previous night: the cruel jaws bearing rapier-sharp teeth; the immense, powerful shoulders; and the long, sloping back.

But there was one difference. They seemed almost twice the size.

Before he saw any more, the ground hurtled up at him and his pursuers disappeared from view. He hit the slide face first and water splashed into his mouth and nose, but he was quickly flipped on to his back as the mossy path banked left and then right.

Trees, leaves, bushes, rocks whisked past him in a stream of colour. He looked down between his feet and saw the bright green slide below him, turning this way and that, sometimes rising, the force pressing him down into the ground, other times falling away so that he was thrown into the air. The sound of wind and water became deafening and the Groundrush swerved ever more quickly from side to side, throwing him against its mossy banks.

Then, as quickly as this strange journey began, it was over. Sylas looked ahead of him and saw that the green of the moss came to an abrupt end. He just had time to brace himself before shooting off the slide into a pool of water that sent up a wall of spray around him. Gasping for air, he slid on to an expanse of brown leaves that flew up in a blizzard around his tumbling limbs, tearing at his hands and face. There were several painful jolts as he bounced off mounds and roots, but finally he came to a halt, face down against a row of bushes.

He lay panting and spitting out soil. Everything was quiet except for the flutter of leaves gradually settling on top of him.

The thought of the dark figures running through the woods made him push himself up. He saw Simia standing a few paces off, drenched from head to foot, but already on her feet, staring back up the Groundrush. As he watched, she steadied herself, held up her head and lifted her arms into the air. He looked back up the slide, which he could see writhing and turning through the forest, sometimes clearly visible as a long green line, sometimes falling out of view into a dip or twisting out of sight behind a clump of trees. As his eyes followed its curves, rises and falls, he realised that he was once again looking at a confusion of colours and lines. No longer was the slide a distinguishable shape, but a drifting slurry of colours like paints in a mixing pot. Soon the outlines of the trees were shifting again and he could no longer see any sign of the path that the slide had taken. Seconds later the trees were once again standing in their rightful places on the hillside.

It was as though the Groundrush had never been there.

“What rule is there, what law

But gnashing teeth and grasping claw?”

SIMIA FLEW ACROSS THE forest floor, moving even faster now that the ground was flattening out. Sylas winced each time his knee twisted beneath him, but somehow he kept up with her, turning this way and that to avoid trees, logs and bushes. He listened for sounds of their pursuers, but heard only the wind in his ears and the leaves and twigs under his feet.

“They’ll know now that we’re heading for town,” panted Simia, “but we’ll be safer once we’re there – more places to hide. It’s not far.”

He looked up, expecting to see the familiar factory looming above the treetops. There was no sign of it, but the further they ran, the more he became aware of the scent of smoke in the air, and it soon became visible, hanging in long grey clouds among the branches of the trees. As it thickened, its odour became more distinct – not the acrid, artificial smell of the factory, but the soft, rounded scents of woodsmoke.

Simia vaulted over a fallen tree and pushed her way through the thick dark green leaves of some bushes, soon disappearing from view. Sylas clambered over the log and then forced his way into the dense mass of leaves that slapped at his face and pulled at his clothes. He squeezed his eyes shut and struggled on until his hands met the back of Simia’s coat.

He opened his eyes and took an involuntary gasp of the thick smoky air.

Ahead of him, at the bottom of a bank of rubbish, lay a town – but it was not the town that he knew. The great towering chimney stacks of the factory were nowhere to be seen. Neither were the houses, the rooftops, the roads. The streets were not straight and regular as he remembered them, but narrow, meandering and paved with dirt, forming a muddy labyrinth that twisted and turned into the distance. They were bordered on both sides by a great disorder of low wooden dwellings unlike any that he had seen before: a muddle of pyramidal rooftops, arranged at befuddling angles to one another, stretching off into the distance until they finally disappeared into the smoke. Some were higher than others, seeming to tower over everything around them, but almost all of them were exactly the same shape: square at the bottom, pointed at the top.