“Yes, indeed.” Xsing elongated his neck and eye stalks to peer into Darien’s face. “Intriguing work. The melding of runes and power in more than one discipline is truly rare.”
Darien turned to Silas, because waving eyes on stalks were more weirdness than his aching brain wanted right now. “One down. On to the next?”
“Presumably.” Silas set a warm palm against the side of Darien’s neck, thumb rubbing his chin for an instant. “Do you think you can manage it? Do you need to eat first?”
Darien took internal stock. At his core, his power hummed and licked its lips like a contented cat, spilling over in ripples that were already easing his aching brain. “I think I got topped up when the gate let go. Somehow. How are you?”
Silas went to the pack he’d set down and dug out a foil pack. “I’ll eat while we move. Jasper?”
“I could eat.”
Darien looked Jasper up and down. The sickly green of Silas’s light didn’t do his complexion any favors, but he seemed steady on his feet. He accepted a hunk of cheese from Silas and took a hefty bite.
Xsing paced a small arc, hands out, and then stopped, all three eyes pointing off into the mist. “There’s another one this way.”
“Let’s get the cloths folded and then you can lead on.” Silas bent and found two corners of his sheet. Darien hurried to find the other two, and some deep part of him approved of the rhythm between him and Silas as they lifted and folded, hands coming together and apart. That familiar task from wash days, helping his mother take the sheets down off the line and fold them, grounded him closer to reality. We can do this.
When Xsing led out, none of them held hands, but Darien stuck close to Silas’s side in the bright comfort of his neon green aura. Behind them, Lyyll asked Jasper, “What do you think happened to the ends of that gate?”
“I have absolutely no data to speculate,” Jasper replied. “I expect whomever created the spell got a load of backlash when it failed, but beyond that? Anything from the minor excitement of watching the gate close to a backwash of something— Veil stuff, hellfire?”
Silas said, “If someone’s deliberately creating permanent gates into hells, I hope it backwashes right into their faces.”
Hell, yeah. Or hells, yeah. Darien was totally onboard with hellfire to the face for anyone who chose to bring demons to Earth.
They trudged ahead in the gloom, following a rune Xsing floated ahead of them. After perhaps ten minutes, Xsing gave a sharp chirp. “The next one.” A slight glow lit the fog ahead.
“Fascinating,” Jasper said. “On your model, the locations of the gates were clearly many miles separated on Earth. And yet in here, these two were much closer.”
“The Veil is always odd,” Silas pointed out. “Coming into it and leaving it can take enormously different amounts of time.”
“Some kind of folding of space perhaps.” Xsing made a high-pitched sound. “There is so much we could research here, if time were on our side.”
As they walked on, Darien could tell the glow ahead was getting brighter. And redder. When the cable of the gate came into clear view, Jasper whistled. “Now, that looks like hellfire.”
This portal pulsed with power that ran red and dark as well as white. The energy wisps floating by seemed to be sucked into it faster, and its diameter was larger than the first. They stopped a few yards away and eyed it.
Silas said, “If this is a portal to a hell— a fireworld— then the last one probably wasn’t. I noticed it had no scent of balefire when it collapsed.”
Xsing bobbed all three eye stalks. “The gate to Greenworld, no doubt. I was wrong.”
So much for playing the odds. Darien didn’t bother cursing, standing there in front of the ominous, pulsing power of a demon highway. He had enough to worry about right here.
“Will that make it harder for us to get back to Earth?” Pip asked.
“We’ll figure that out when we’ve dealt with the demons, youngster,” Grim said. “We still have Lyyll to help with gate-building. Come now. We know how this works. Let’s hop to it.”
The runes on the sheets were only a little smudged, letting new runes be chalked faster than the first time. It felt like just moments before Darien found himself poised again, blue-gold blades hovering in midair, or whatever was passing for air in the Veil. Silas’s circle shone brighter than the last, and the twitch of a muscle on the corner of his jaw showed he was clenching his teeth.
“We can do this. No sweat.” Darien wasn’t sure who he was reassuring. Himself, probably.
The taste of the power in this portal sat like ash on his tongue, a mix of flavors, most of them rancid. He walled off his core against the foulness— not risking my power absorbing that shit— and closed his eyes in reflex as he slammed the blades shut, so if there was a flare of light, he missed it. He did feel the flash of heat and fire inside the circle he and Silas were holding though. He pulled Jasper’s power and his own out of the blades and shoved it into the circle walls as he opened his eyes. For an instant, the red swirl of hellfire merged with black at the limits of Silas’s power. Then the whole thing shattered, gate conduit gone, circle gone, shears gone, leaving a tang of smoke and brimstone drifting in the still mists of the Veil.
“That worked,” Grim said with satisfaction. He raised one big paw, licked it, and swiped it across his whiskers. “Four more.”
Lyyll said, “I feel rather redundant, fascinating as this is to watch. Is there some way I can assist?”
“Not if the rest go equally smoothly,” Silas said. “But if they don’t, if we start running dry—” He glanced at Darien. “—we may ask you to meld power with ours again.”
Lyyll made a complex gesture with both front legs. “It will be my honor.”
Not to jinx us or anything, Silas. Darien checked on his reserves. He’d closed his personal shields tightly when he cut this gate and hadn’t absorbed anything from the maelstrom. He no longer overflowed but he was nowhere near tapped out. “I’m good so far.”
The second hellgate was found quickly and dealt with just as smoothly. This time, Darien kept his eyes open, and the flash of red as the gate broke was less blinding than the white. He still wiped his eyes afterward. A headache took up roots in his brain, somewhere behind his right temple. Jasper looked rougher too, and Silas dug into the food again. But they were up and moving.
Darien rotated his stiff neck and rubbed his forehead. “Time to split this popsicle stand. Where’s the next one, Xsing?”
Hellgate three was a breeze, smaller than the one before it. Hellgate four turned out, for some reason, to involve an hours’ long slog through the Veil. They eventually paused to drink water from their thermoses and eat a real meal. None of them mentioned how low that left their supplies, as they got up and followed Xsing on. But number four fell to the magic scissors. Darien blew the smoke off an imaginary six-shooter and holstered it. “Take that, demons.” Clowning took his mind off the growing throb in his head and made Silas look less tense.
“How long have we been in the Veil?” Jasper asked. “Are we safe to continue?”
Silas said, “I think so. For a while yet. I feel the strain, but it’s tolerable.”