“Hey, Alex—” Luna began.
I lost my grip on the gate spell and it fizzled out. “Listen closely,” I said as I recast it. “I found Darren, we fought, he lost. He’s unconscious and waking up in three minutes. I’m going to use his focus to get into Sagash’s shadow realm. I’ll be out of contact once I do.”
“You—wait! Can’t I—”
“No time.” A black shape wavered, starting to form in midair, then the spell fizzled again and it winked out. “Damn it! Not now!”
“What?”
“Nothing.” Darren was starting to stir and I was out of time. I tried the focus yet again, and this time I put everything I had into it. “Keep working on finding a way to break into that shadow realm. Watch your back, stop Vari from starting any wars, and do what you can to keep Sonder and Caldera on side. We’re going to need help before this is over.”
“Goddamn it,” Luna said, and I heard her sigh. “Fine, understood. Just for the record, you are not allowed to complain about me doing dangerous stuff ever again.”
The gate spell caught and a black oval appeared in midair, a dark contrast to the drab living room. No light came through the warded gate, but the still air rippled and a breeze touched my face, carrying with it the smell of the sea and ancient stone. “Gate’s open,” I said. “Going through. Good luck.”
“You’re the one who needs it. Be careful.”
I stepped through the gate and into Sagash’s shadow realm.
Chapter 7
I came down into a sea breeze and dazzling sunlight. The gate closed behind me and I was alone.
I was standing on a stone platform on the edge of a massive cliff. The cliff stretched away to my left and right; as my eyes adjusted I saw that it went on as far as I could see. Behind was forest and greenery and the sun was shining down out of a cloudy sky, filling the air with haze. At the foot of the cliff and stretching away into the distance was an endless ocean, and the rush of waves on rock was a steady sound in the background.
Directly ahead was an enormous castle. It was built upon a rocky island offshore, several hundred feet from the cliff, and a long narrow bridge stretched from my feet to some sort of courtyard directly ahead. The castle was made out of yellow-grey stone, and it was huge. Square towers and buttresses reached up into the clouded sky, arched windows peeking down from layered walls, with a darker, towerlike building beyond the first few layers of ramparts.
I was still holding my phone in one hand; the signal indicator was spinning uselessly and I switched it off. As I did I searched ahead, looking for danger, and came up blank. As far as I could tell I was alone out here. Of course, given how big it was, it was going to be pretty hard to tell the difference between alone and nobody in range . . .
I shook my head and focused. Back in London, Darren would be waking up right now. He’d notice I’d stolen his gate stone, and it wouldn’t take him long to figure out what I’d done with it. There wouldn’t be any easy way for him to report to Sagash (and given the typical attitude Dark masters have towards failure, he probably wouldn’t want to), so his most likely next move would be to contact one of the other apprentices. I’d taken his phone specifically to slow that down, but he’d manage it sooner or later and once he did I could expect him to show up here with reinforcements. I needed to find Anne before then.
I started walking forward across the bridge. It was a full fifteen feet wide, which was good because there was no railing, just a sheer drop. The cliff face was vertical, and I glanced down after a few steps to confirm that there was absolutely nothing below me except a long, long fall of hundreds of feet to the water. Sea breezes tugged at me, whipping my hair and pushing me from side to side. I had a macabre impulse to look into the future in which I jumped off the edge, down and down to those little wavelets below, but shook it off.
I couldn’t help feeling relieved when I made it across. The courtyard beyond was vast, more than a hundred feet deep with ledged walls reaching a good forty feet above my head. A straight stone path ran to a huge door which led deeper into the castle, and grass grew on either side. I’d been scanning for danger as I’d been crossing but I hadn’t found anything—either nobody had noticed me, or I really was alone. Something caught my peripheral vision; I looked right to see what it was and jumped.
Standing in the shadow of the outer wall, just a few feet away from where the bridge met the courtyard, was a fuzzy mass of darkness which looked like a humanoid sculpted out of shadow and black smoke. Its only features were a pair of faintly glowing white eyes, through which it watched me silently. It wasn’t moving, and as far as I could tell it wasn’t going to.
I looked at the thing, puzzled. It was a construct, and as soon as I’d seen the thing my hand had gone to the pocket where I kept my focus, but as I studied the futures I saw that the thing wasn’t going to attack. Unless I bothered it, it was just going to stand there. Variam had said something about shadow constructs used as a security force, but this one didn’t seem to be doing very much in the way of security . . .
. . . unless it wasn’t there to keep me out, but to keep someone else in. Experimentally, I looked into the futures in which I walked back out over the bridge. No response. Constructs aren’t alive and can’t take initiative; they only do what they’ve been specifically ordered to do. If the construct had been told to watch for one particular person then it wouldn’t react to anything else.
I was tempted to keep experimenting, but it didn’t relate to my primary goal of finding Anne and the clock was ticking. I walked away from the bridge and deeper into the castle. The shadow watched me go, white eyes tracking me silently.
The first courtyard led into a bigger courtyard with multiple levels, patches of grass crossed by walkways. Now that I was out of the wind, I was getting hot; the castle wasn’t tropical but it was much warmer than the cold London spring. I stripped off my greatcoat and slung it over one arm, looking from side to side around the high courtyard walls. There were several ways out and no obvious correct direction; given enough time I could map the place blind, but I was on a clock. I searched the short-term futures and saw that one of the back staircases led up to a high tower.
The interior of the tower was the same yellow stone and it felt dark and gloomy compared to the bright sun outside. There was something eerie about the castle, something that was hard to pin down, like a feeling of being watched. I climbed the spiral staircase which lined the inside of the tower wall, going up and up until at last sunlight broke through the gap in the ceiling above me and I came up into the light again. I shielded my eyes as I did, looking around over the tower parapet, and for a moment thought that I’d gotten disoriented. When I realised what I was seeing, my eyes went wide.
It had been my fault, honestly. Variam had said the castle was huge, but I hadn’t really listened—after all, most castles are pretty damn big by normal standards. But this place wasn’t big, it was gigantic. From my position on top of the tower I could see dozens of buildings and other towers rising out of the haze, clustered together and built on top of one another. Sun-drenched courtyards separated the buildings, and sheer drops plunged from vertical walls down into lower levels. The tower I’d just climbed had to be close to a hundred feet, and it wasn’t even the tallest. The ocean was to my left and right, and behind the castle too; the island kept going away from the mainland, but not forever. I’d never heard of a shadow realm so big. Most are little pocket realities, no bigger than a football pitch; this place could have swallowed up every other shadow realm I’d ever seen with room to spare.