The things in the trees. The horrid things that wanted her to forsake clothing and the earth and go with them into a silent place. Terrible creatures with her face and features, pulling her up into the trees.
Kimber swatted away the intrusive foliage-rustled thoughts.
Cho gazed at her from between two thick support struts. “They are the red rel, not your kind. Not your…people.” The last word stuck and had to be rung out. “Do they call to you?”
Kimber listened. Only the storm spoke. “No,” she said. “No, they don’t speak to me either.”
Tension bled out of the little bunker, again leading Kimber to loquaciousness. “Why did the Faer leave the caves? They seemed so happy in the Tale.”
So happy, flitting back and forth along the worn trails, fishing and digging up the gifts of the Twins. Some stood by the shore, letting wind pick up tiny sails on strings and toss them in frantic circles in the sky while the children squealed gaily in the late noons sunshine. The glassy calm of this river broke only as swimmers surfaced and split where men sat on wooden boards, pulled along by tight reed cloths that captured the funneled breeze.
Within the scene, no one paid Kimber any attention, too contented in their lives. Kimber could not quite make out their features or their colors, just the general shape of men, women, and children hard at play. But far from the others, set apart by attitude and the other valleymen’s ungenerous glances, a little girl sat at the foot of the cliff. The girl seemed fuzzy, difficult to see within the scene, but she seemed to be staring back at Kimber.
She waved to the little girl and the figure waved back in a slow, dolorous fashion.
“Big Valley was beset by disaster.”
The Faer fled in panic as the scene became chaos, but Kimber could not yet tell what terror had befallen them.
“Life was so easy that there were too many children. The Faer began to starve and they dirtied Big River. There was a flood and the south wall collapsed into the vale.”
Children wept over the bones of their mothers and men choked on black water. The World was beset by the constant skyclap clash of a falling mountain that swept and rolled everything in an undertow of shattered rock. But the little girl, glowingly pale against the backdrop of mud and roiling stone, stood in the midst of it, untouched and still waving.
Somewhere in the bunker, Cho was fussing with the joints of the device. The sound floated up to Kimber and she grabbed hold of it, preparation for a quick escape.
“A wise woman led them to build the suspended cities. They cull fish from the river and string great hanging fields like the water nets the Bashrai use. When I was young, my mother’s brother told me that he had even seen them fly from one city to the other on great white wings and never touch the ground.”
Big Valley was restored to lushness though the ground remained uneven and rolling. Above, the heavens filled with soaring ashen figures winging through the azure expanse. Eyes watched from the far cliffside, furtive and hidden, different but familiar. And still, the little girl remained and still she waved.
“You will most definitely visit their physicians. You’ve gone whiter than basalt.”
Kimber blinked and found her way back into the dugout. Her breath blew out of her as though she’d been holding it captive.
A black eye stared at Kimber from between the joints and under a cocked brow. “It’s even said the Heaven Walker taught them how to steer the lost off Hebree’s path.”
“Bring back the dead?”
“I have heard Tales of it. It must be true.”
“Maybe someone made it up.”
This laugh was short and even harder than before, as sharp as the crack of the storm. “What makes you think that matters?”
The sky lit again in dramatic accompaniment, tossing light but also throwing a shadow across them. For just a moment, a sparking sensation assailed Kimber, like a thousand upon a thousand tiny insects landing on her skin and instantly taking off again in a flutter of wings and tiny prickling feet. Cho’s view was blocked by the bulk of the device but Kimber faced the bunker opening and the shade that lingered there.
“You must leave,” said the spectre.
It was neither spirit nor demon. Just a boy.
Against the backdrop of black clouds, the boy glowed. He was not simply pale, not like the Bashrai nor even like Kimber herself, but purely white, from his hair to his short robe and calf-pants. Even his eyes were such a pale shade of blue that the definition between irises and whites was nearly indefinable. The tiny black pupils were the only color in his whole being, lending him an eerie wild-eyed look as rivulets of water plastered his shaggy hair to his face.
The creeping tingling seemed to pour off the boy. Kimber felt her hair stand on end.
Cho struggled to extricate herself from the device, which was suddenly a prison of crisscrossed support rods, a fist that had captured her in its ‘metal’ grip.
“You must go,” the boy whispered, his breathy voice like a breeze.
A string of skyclaps boomed in rapid succession and the pin-prick blacks of his eyes disappeared in what might have passed for fear. He reached for Kimber, his unshod feet leaving wet footprints with each step, one white hand gesturing to the metal and fabric.
In the face of the mystery and the musts, Kimber found her voice. “Who are you?”
The boy brushed the device’s wingtip and it began to glow as well. “You must take the kite.”
A menacing growl echoed from the far side of the shining device and Kipi’s yellow eyes shone in the reflected light. Its tail whooshed through the heavy air as it stalked around the front of the ‘kite’.
“You will die,” the boy said. His features were so fair and flat that she could barely discern the emotion attached to the statement. Like Bre’et, the boy seemed desperate to communicate something that was beyond his power.
Cho threw a fist into the body of the kite and the metal crumbled like cloth. Something was wrong with her face, which was pulled back into a bare-toothed grimace. The skin of it dulled and cracked. Flakes of it fell onto the metal with the plink-plink of pebbles. “Get away from her!” Her voice boomed in the narrow confines.
The boy stared with almost perfectly white eyes. “The white rel-“
Kimber was thrust to the side and cracked against the wall, the device and trapped Elanaite skidded in the opposite direction, and the white boy disappeared under an onslaught of charging black. Bre’et’s charge was uncharacteristically silent, only his footsteps sucking in the mud, and he merely thrust the boy back out onto the plain instead of launching him end over end into the air.
When the veser stopped, the boy tumbled to the ground. He stumbled back up to his feet, the wind blasting his shaggy hair into his face. “The Good Lady. The white rel comes,” he said, his voice still flat.
“What is he talking about?” Kimber asked.
Now wedged between the wall and the ‘kite’, Cho struggled to pull her pinned right arm free.
“The Faer exile their undesirable elements. They usually go mad out here in the rest of the World.”
The rel felt a terrible empathy with the boy, his pale gaze lost and anxious. Cho was less sympathetic and loud enough to be heard over the storm. “It will take more than some barmy man-child to stay us, boy.”
A skysplitter flashed without sound and the wind shrieked in to fill the void, twisting and whirling in a pallid fog that hid from view the valley, the river, and all points beyond. Suddenly, the boy was split apart, two white figures in the drowning rain, but no, the boy was thrown to the ground while another colorless figure took his place, taller, more imposing, its eyes perfect orbs unmarred by pupil, its gaze indefinable.