they looked. He breathed in the fume-filled air and his head swam. Dizziness and nausea twisted his senses.
Asea chanted words. He repeated them, mindlessly, echoing her words. They had a strange rhythm, a metre that seemed to scan at the same rate as his heartbeat. As the beat of the chant slowed so did that of his heart. He wondered if her heart was doing the same.
All his extremities felt numb now, and he wondered if he had been poisoned.
All drugs are poisons. The thought slid into his head from somewhere else. It would have startled him more if he had not experienced something like it before, when he had communed with the ancient alien priest in the heart of the Tower of Serpents. Was it his imagination or was it really the voice of the Lady Asea sounding within his head?
This is real, but difficult. Your mind is protected against intrusions such as this, only the drugs and the physical contact and the ritual make this possible. You are indeed what I suspected you to be, Rik.
Shadowblood, he asked.
Yes.
As the thoughts swirled between them, they continued to chant. The words flowing into him from her now, so that their voices had merged. His stomach lurched and his mind screamed at the vertigo and he was standing above himself, looking down at his body.
Fear filled him, worse than the fear of flying in the balloon. Had she killed him? Was this what death was like?
Sardec looked the surgeon in the eye, trying to gauge his response. The doctor was a tall, slender Terrarch dressed in white robes. His face was unreadable. He listened to Sardec's pulse with his fingers, looked into his eyes.
'Am I going to die?' Sardec asked at last. The doctor had treated his burn after he returned from the cemetery, and had told him to return in a couple of days.
The surgeon gave him a frosty smile. 'No. But I do not think that is what is worrying you.'
'Am I going to become a ghoul?'
'I think it unlikely. It is very rare for the disease among Terrarchs. It did not exist on Al'Terra. It was the scourge of humans before we came, and began wiping the creatures out.'
'The Terrarch in the graveyard was a ghoul. She looked like the queen of all ghouls.'
'I said it was very rare for the disease to affect our kind. Not impossible.'
'What are the chances of me…becoming like her?'
'Far, far less than for those of your men who were bitten.'
'But not out of the question?'
'No.'
'How long till I know?'
'If you were a human symptoms might manifest within twenty four hours. If they did not appear within three days, then the chances would be that you were clear. That’s why I asked you to come back today.'
'But of course I am not a human.'
'No.'
'So how long?'
'I do not know. Cases of the ghoul plague among Terrarchs are rare and records rarer still. I would think that within a few days we will know.'
'A few more days…' Sardec's outrage was explosive.
'Perhaps longer. Among humans there are cases of men being bitten and not showing any signs of the disease for years, and then, one day turning on their neighbours, friends and families. Of course, humans do that anyway, without the excuse of a disease.' Sardec realised that the surgeon was attempting to lighten the situation with a little humour, but he did not find it funny.
'You are saying that the disease can remain dormant for years.'
'Apparently so, unless the people we are talking about were secretly consorting with ghouls all along. You never know with humans.' Apparently the surgeon was a little offended that his joke had gotten no response, so he had decided to repeat it with a variation. Sardec smiled politely. He supposed it was much easier for the surgeon to take this calmly. After all he was not the one who had been bitten. Sardec wondered whether he should bite the medical officer. Maybe then he would understand. The grotesque humour of that made him smile, and the doctor smiled back.
'I would not worry, Lieutenant. You and your men took all the correct precautions. I would say there is an excellent chance that you will never develop the disease.'
That was a little more reassuring. Sardec found himself asking the question he had hoped not to have to ask. 'If they…or I…do have it what can we do?'
The surgeon's cold smile faded. 'Nothing much I am afraid. Once the disease is incubated it is irreversible and incurable.'
'Nothing?'
'Nothing. Except put you out of your misery.'
'Then we should best pray, my men and I,' said Sardec.
'If it helps you feel better,' said the surgeon. 'Place the matter in the hands of God.'
Rik looked over his dead looking body. He could see a shimmering translucent outline. It was Asea. She looked subtly different from how he saw her in real life, and he wondered if this was how she saw herself.
If this is death, then I have suffered it too. But this is not death, merely something like it.
Is this your soul? Is it mine?
Perhaps. It is just a ka, a projection of your mind beyond your body, an imprint of your will upon the aether.
Rik was not sure he saw a difference, but it seemed to mean something to Asea. Her spirit reached out to him.
Come — we must go — before the effects of the drug wear off.
Go? Where?
To the Deep. To the Great Deep. You will see the first and most important secret of sorcery with the eyes of your spirit.
He took her immaterial hand with his. There was a sensation of contact quite unlike the meeting of flesh with flesh. Space and time seemed to bend and flow about him, and suddenly a whirlpool appeared in the air, reality shimmering around it. From it he heard voices, they impinged on his soul, sounds that were not sounds audible only to ears that were not ears.
What is it, he asked?
An entrance to elsewhere.
Where?
The realm of the spirit.
I don’t understand.
You do not need to understand — just follow.
Asea dived into the swirling distortion in space. For a moment Rik hesitated, and then with a supreme effort of will, he followed, plunging into a very different realm of existing.
There was no land below. At least not at first. They floated free in ultimate night. All around was blackness save for the glow they made. Rik was sickly, dizzyingly disorientated. Everything was chaotic, a jumble of images and sensations that threatened to overwhelm his mind.
Then slowly sanity seemed to come. A kaleidoscope of images whirled through his brain. He saw the streets of Sorrow, but they were larger than he remembered, the buildings huge on a scale that dwarfed even those of Halim. All around were people, giants. He realised that this was the city of his earliest memories, when he and Leon had escaped from the Temple Street Orphanage. The people had a twisted monstrous look, more ogre than human. He looked at Asea. She was the same, a luminous figure, human in scale.
What are we doing here?
We are looking for a place where you can connect with your power.
