'Night wind. It's-no, wait.'
Candlemas squinted in the dark. The little star was glowing. Ripples of green light chased each other across its surface.
Sunbright glanced down, hissed, 'You said it wouldn't glow!'
'It shouldn't!' Candlemas backed up, slid on sand, landed back on the cooling star. Eldritch fire illuminated his hairy toes. 'It's magical, but-'
Near Candlemas's shoulder, Sunbright ducked as the rushing sounded again, louder, as if a giant bird beat the forest, hunting them, or a hurricane stirred the tree crowns. But the sound was loudest in the hole. The rushing came from the fallen star. 'It's hissing! It's working! It's-'
'Get out!' Candlemas grabbed the barbarian's belt to haul himself along even while pushing. 'Get out! It's going to explo-'
Green light flashed from the star, engulfed the two men, and winked out.
The smoking hole lay empty.
Chapter 4
Mouth open, hands clawed in an instinctive flinch, legs splayed to dive out of the hole, Sunbright stood frozen, unable to move anything, even his eyes. All that worked was his brain, and it wondered at what he saw.
The dirt and rock and black sky were drawn from solid objects to fine threads. A stone under his foot shrank and elongated, until it was a gray line like a pencil mark traveling from underneath him out of the hole, into infinity. So too went the dirt, and the nothingness of the hole itself. The night sky was shredded into splinters that sailed past him like black spears to mingle with strings of soil and tree roots that could encircle the world. All these objects stretched in two directions, all intermingled yet all separate, so Sunbright could follow the lines of each with his stiff and staring eyes.
Even Candlemas was drawn thin, like gold wire under a smith's tiny hammer, the outlines of the arcanist's body flattened and smoothed and stretched. Yet it was still the pudgy mage, Sunbright knew, whole and intact, but hair-thin. And so, he supposed, he must look to Candlemas. Sunbright shaved into a thousand splinters laid together like hair in a horse's tail.
They were moving and yet not moving. But if the lines of themselves were stretching from the hole to somewhere else, where were they going? Was this magic, or some other force? Certainly Sunbright had never heard of anything similar. Had the magic star somehow fashioned this weird not-spell? For it too was not an arm's length away, yanked fine, sailing through space, yet lying still as ever.
It was confusing, frightening, maddening. Sunbright wondered if it would last forever: certainly he felt like a granite statue. What if the fallen star sought to protect itself, and had suspended them in a spell forever? Could anything break it? Was this the ultimate curse, to stand and think unmoving for eternity? Could they be rescued, or even found? What if the hole collapsed about them, and buried them unmoving? How many seasons would pass before they saw sunlight again?
And if Sunbright stayed frozen this way forever, how would he ever find Greenwillow?
He stood for years, centuries, longer, waiting and fretting and wondering if this strange journey would ever end.
Then it was over.
Sunbright fell over and sprawled awkwardly on ornate tile painted with flowers in dozens of colors. He rolled on his shoulder and toes, shot to his feet, and whipped Harvester from its scabbard.
Before him was a skinny young man of average height, with tousled brown hair, grizzled beard, and sparkling golden eyes. With a bright smile, the stripling flicked his fingers in the air.
A striped cat as big as a horse reared on two broad cloven feet before Sunbright. Claws tipped appendages that were half-hands, half-paws. The cat's muttonchops and mane were white and stuck out at right angles. Its back was flaming orange with white and black stripes, and its broad chest blazed a snowy white.
The cat-man monster roared and slashed at Sunbright with finger-long talons.
Sucking in his belly, Sunbright skipped backwards, feet shuffling, butting aside a dazed Candlemas. He hoisted from knee-high to slash upward and across: he hoped to crease the animal if possible, or split its muzzle, but at least drive it back.
He missed as the cat leaped in the air. Hooves clattered as the beast landed, skipped to match Sunbright, and lashed out with a lower leg. A chitinous hoof tunked on Harvester. The blow rang like a sledgehammer's, knocking the heavy blade skyward. Before Sunbright could recover, the beast jig-trotted in place and kicked him soundly in the breadbasket.
Sunbright had barely hopped backward in time, and still grunted at the pain and fear of shattered ribs. The fighter sucked wind and hopped backward once more, forced to take the defensive. Behind that cat's muzzle lay a churning, thinking brain. Grasping his sword two-handed, he lowered the pommel near his short ribs so the long steel blade pointed straight. Unarmed, the monster would find it impossible to avoid a thrust. Or so he hoped. Meanwhile, he watched for an opening, marked a spot under the beast's arms and the pit of its lower belly.
All this in seconds, for the tiger-man slashed the air in dizzying circles, paw-hands a blur. Before Sunbright could lunge or duck, Harvester was again slapped aside, so hard the hooked tip caromed off a painted wall. The beast was too strong: it could crush him with a paw. But that was his mind recoiling. His sinews instinctively used the momentum of the impact against his assailant.
With a grunt of exertion, he dragged around the rebounding steel and added his own brute strength. Slashing backhanded, he slammed Harvester's barbed tip past the tip of clawed fingers to bite deep into the monster's neck. Hollering a nameless battle cry, he ripped downward to sink the hook in life-giving veins and tear them loose. And succeeded.
Frothy red blood gouted from the cat-man's neck. Red splashed the side of its face, soaking whiskers and pointed ears and white muttonchops in gore. More blood spattered Sunbright, rained on the wall and ceiling. The beast yowled in agony, but the sound trailed to a mew. Light sparking in its eyes winked and died. Sunbright barely skipped aside as the monster's back seemed to break and it plunged forward at him. A claw tore the barbarian's thigh as the dead thing's head struck the wall with a clonk muffled by thick orange-red fur.
Sunbright backed, panting, wary of any final kicks from those anvil-like hooves. He held his banged side, which throbbed with every sobbing breath. But he kept his sword ready for another attack.
There had been a young, tousled mage, he recalled suddenly, who'd flicked his fingers and 'You!' The barbarian whirled. 'You conjured that fiend!'
'Yes, more or less. But it wasn't really here, so it doesn't matter.'
The young wizard wore an expensive but rumpled and frayed robe embroidered in green-blue and white lace. By contrast, his hair was a rat's nest, his fingernails cracked, gnawed, and filthy, his chin stubbly, his bare feet black with grime. And he needed a bath. Yet his eyes were golden, like melted gold swirling in a vat, and arresting. He smiled in a cockeyed way and waggled the fingers of one hand. The tiger-man disappeared, as did the blood on the walls, the blood on Sunbright's sword, and even the blood on his hands and arms. The barbarian felt a tug at his side, and realized the pain of that frightful kick had disappeared too.
'You-' Sunbright's breathing was still a sob, 'that was an… illusion?'
'No. It was real, mostly. It hurt, didn't it?'
'Why… attack me?'
A bony shrug. 'You had that curious sword. I just wanted to see how you'd fare in a fight.'
'I'll show you how!' Sunbright slung Harvester far to the right to give it weight, swung it back hard, slapped his left hand on the pommel to add his own weight and cleave the interfering idiot in half. Harvester split the air, wind off its blade making a high keen But suddenly he was upside-down, his horsetail and scabbard flopping, blood rushing to his head, feet pedaling uselessly. He fought to focus on his target, saw the idiot fifty feet off across a tiled and painted floor, or ceiling. Sunbright growled in rage, but his voice was choked by a thickening in his throat. He felt helpless as a fox hoisted in a snare. Wordlessly, he cursed freely and long.
At the same time, the wary barbarian scanned his surroundings, automatically hunting danger, exits, things
