Eliska fell into a vast sea of sizzling energy sparks and, in the middle of that, another brutal torrent of magic slammed into her from the side. It swept her out of the sparks, through another hurricane wind, and she crashed full force into a vertical stone wall.
Gravity didn’t pull her down to the ground, though. She stayed glued there to the side of the wall.
Her staff stuck to the wall next to her. At least she managed to hold onto it this time.
She tried to pull herself off and heard Wesh and the Watchmen groaning and cursing all around her.
She pried up her head…and realized she wasn’t stuck to a wall at all. She lay sprawled on the ground in another Island of some stable landscape.
She peeled herself off the surface and pushed herself to her feet. She could stand all right, but her mind took a second to reorient to which direction was up.
The Watchmen started to sit up and stand up, too. They had the same problem and one of them lost his balance when he tried to get to his feet.
Eliska automatically picked him up. She didn’t even know his name. She didn’t know any of their names apart from Yann, Yvan, and Rien.
Everyone looked around. What she thought was a stone wall actually turned out to be a vast empty landscape of parched flats like the one she’d seen earlier. Not a single stick of vegetation grew anywhere.
The flats stretched all the way to the horizon with not a hill in sight. The Layers swirled and whipped beyond the edge of the land.
In that moment, Eliska got a split-second flash of an image in her mind. Towering Darklings loomed over the landscape.
Her vision gave her a clear view of herself, Wesh, and these Watchmen trapped in another ring of Darklings exactly the way they’d surrounded Middleborough.
Spikes and horns jutted from their faces. Whipping spiked tendrils lashed and cracked through the air trying to grab and tear the travelers apart.
“Now how do we get out of this?” one of the Watchmen grumbled.
“We gotta get out of here,” Eliska murmured. “The Darklings are coming for us.”
Yann looked up. “They are? How can you tell? They aren’t here.”
“Get up, all of you.” Eliska heard her voice shaking. Her fingers tightened on her staff.
“Don’t break us through again, Eliska,” Wesh told her. “We can’t fall like that again.”
“Get up!” she snapped. “Come on! We have to get ready to move!”
“What’s wrong?” a sandy-haired Watchman asked. “At least we’re on the ground now.”
Eliska opened her mouth to answer….and saw it. A piece of the dry flats crumbled near her foot. A tiny brown sprout poked its tip through the rough soil and started to grow.
“Run!” Eliska yelled and bolted forward. “Run for your lives!”
No one else moved. They looked around at each other trying to understand.
She didn’t wait to see anything else. She didn’t have to. That sprout kept growing….and growing….and growing….
It didn’t stop growing—ever. It got longer and thicker. It sprouted side branches until it grew as tall as the Watchmen.
More sprouts erupted out of the ground all over the flats. The sprouts grew a few feet apart, and in a matter of seconds, they filled the whole landscape.
Thorns burst through their rough, woody brown stalks and spread to every branch. The vines twisted, bumped into other sprouts getting taller and thicker by the second, and knotted together to block anyone from going anywhere.
The Watchmen staggered away from the first sprout only to bump into others growing too close nearby. The tangled brambles grew higher than the Watchmen’s heads. No one could see the top of the mass of vines.
Eliska made it a dozen yards away from the Watchmen before the landscape became completely impassable.
The brambles kept getting bigger….and they started to take shape. The branches compacted into Darklings with spiked thorns dotted all over their skin. Their vines whipped and cracked everywhere to slash and tear and kill.
Wesh whirled back and forth waving his hands and firing magical blasts at the vines to drive them away from the Watchmen.
They had to crowd in close to him for protection. Their presence stopped him from working as effectively as he might have, but they couldn’t stay anywhere else.
Eliska could have blasted her way through and kept on running. She could have left the Watchmen behind and never looked back.
She didn’t understand why she didn’t. She fired her staff in front of her, carved a path through the thorn bushes, and then shot a second time behind her to clear the way for the Watchmen to catch up.
Yann reacted first, grabbed two men near him, and dragged them forward. “Come on!” he yelled. “Run!”
He took off in Eliska’s direction pulling his closest companions with him. Eliska found herself slowing down to let them close the gap.
She had to fire continuous blasts of magic from her staff to slash the vines and brambles away from herself. She also had to constantly fire behind her to open the channel for the Watchmen to get through.
The others followed. Wesh waited until last. He bombarded the vines with dozens of pulses from his bare palms. The vines closed behind him as he caught up with the others.
Eliska started running again as soon as Yann and the others drew level with her. She bombarded the vines on both sides and in front, but they only grew faster.
They closed over her head. Her magic formed a tunnel through the thorns for the party to keep moving.
The shapes forming around the party became more distinct. The mass of brambles reared. Yawning mouths full of thorny fangs opened to devour the fugitives.
The Darklings roared in fury and dove down on top of the group. Eliska reacted without thinking and nailed the end of her staff into the ground with all her might.
The surface fractured immediately this time. The group plunged through, bounced off a dozen broken ledges underground and landed on another rock shelf.
This one turned out to be the same size as the last one, but with one distinct difference. The edges dropped away into a bottomless gorge between gargantuan mountains.
The peaks spiked into the clouds high above their heads. The shelf’s sides plunged out of sight with no floor that Eliska could see.
The Watchmen slammed down on the hard surface. One of them fell too close to the edge. Rien and Yvan dove for the man and pulled him back just in time before he plummeted off to his death.
Everyone crowded to the center to keep away from the sides, but at least the Darklings didn’t come here.
Eliska went through the group one man at a time healing all their injuries from the hail shards. She hardly looked at what she was doing. She kept casting glances behind her at the surroundings. “We’re safe here for now.”
“You call this safe?!” Rien snapped.
“We’re safer here than we were in those brambles.” She surveyed the landscape. “We aren’t in the Layers anymore. The sky is blue. We must be in an Island.”
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“Obviously we’re on an Island!” Rien countered. “We’re on an Island in the air.”
“She means we’re on an Island of stability,” Wesh interjected in a soothing undertone. “She means the landscape isn’t changing—or not as quickly.”
“But for how long?” Yvan asked. “We can’t keep doing this.”
“We should stay here for now,” Eliska decided. “We’re safe here and we’ve all just eaten a meal. We have no reason to leave until we absolutely have to.”
The Watch Commander locked his eyes on her. “We’re all in your debt, Eliska. I know you didn’t want this. We’re all beyond grateful for your help.”
She looked away. She didn’t want him thanking her. “I guess I’d be staying here even if you weren’t here.”
“What are we going to do?” a dark-haired Watchman asked. “We can’t stay here forever.”
“We won’t have to,” Eliska explained. “The Coil will shift eventually.”
“Great,” Rien snarled. “Just great.”
“I didn’t make it like this,” she told him.
“The Darklings attacked us again,” Wesh cut in. “They followed us through the Layers.”
“What does that mean?” Yvan asked.
“It means they’re still coming after us the same way they did in Middleborough.”
“But you said they wanted something from Middleborough,” Yann pointed out. “You said they attacked the town to get what they wanted.”
“Obviously they didn’t get it or they wouldn’t be coming after us now,” Wesh replied. “Whatever it is they want must be here—among us.”
All the Watchmen whipped around to gape at him. Some gasped in horror. “That’s impossible!” Yvan exclaimed. “We’re imps! None of us have any magic.”
“We don’t know what it is they want,” Wesh countered. “Whatever they want might be something non-magical—something one of you is carrying, perhaps.”
The Watchmen looked at each other next. “None of us is carrying anything,” Yann pointed out. “We all lost our weapons when Middleborough went down.”
“Then perhaps the thing the Darklings want is one of you,” Wesh suggested.
“Us! The Darklings can’t want us!” Rien jabbed his finger at Eliska. “She’s the one they want! She’s the only one here with any magic besides you.”
“But your Watch Commander told me the attacks on Middleborough started two years ago,” Wesh reminded him. “Eliska wasn’t in Middleborough then. The Watch Commander says the attacks had been escalating all that time and culminated in the attack that destroyed the town. Whatever the Darklings want must have been in Middleborough before she ever set foot in the town.”
Another deadly silence fell over the group. Eliska flicked an invisible speck of lint off her pants. She didn’t want to look at anyone.
She knew nothing about these people or their town or what some Voyant Mendicat might want from them.
This was yet another reason for her to put as much distance as possible between her and them.
She couldn’t do that on top of this shelf. She could have destroyed the shelf and sent both herself and them into another Layer.
She could have used any of these Layers to separate herself from them. She could have sent them to one Layer while she traveled to another.
Falling through so many Layers and coming so close to the Darklings made her want to stay on this Island, at least for a little while.
One little haven of stability in a vast cosmos of chaos and danger—she had to take advantage of the lull while she had a chance. She might not get another opportunity to rest and regroup like this—not for a while, anyway.
Yvan scrutinized each of his men one after the other. “Are any of you carrying anything—anything at all?”
“We’re all wearing our uniforms,” Yann pointed out. “I don’t have anything apart from that.”
“I have this.” The sandy-haired Watchman stuck his fingers down the collar of his jacket and pulled out a plain gold ring hanging by a chain. “I’ve worn it since I was a boy.”
“What is it?” Wesh asked. “Where did you get it?”
“It’s my mother’s wedding band. She wore it for three years after my father died. She gave it to me the day she took it off.” He looked down at the tiny gold circlet. His thick, muscular fingers made it look tiny and frail. “It reminds me of my family—my mother, my sisters, their husbands, and their children. They all lived in Middleborough. I joined the Watch to protect them…and now they’re all gone.”
“They might not be gone,” Eliska told him. “They might have fallen into another Layer and survived. They could still be out there somewhere.”
The man looked up at her. Tears brimmed in his deep brown eyes. “Truly? Do you really think so?”
His reaction made her throat constrict. She couldn’t answer to tell him it was only a vague possibility—not a certainty.
Wesh broke the spell by interrupting. “What about the rest of you? Does any of you have anything on you—anything at all?”
“You just said the thing might not be a thing,” Yann pointed out. “You said it could be a person. You said it could be one of us.”
“Would it make more sense for it to be an object?” Yvan asked. “If it was a person, then that person would have been in Middleborough all these years, too. Why would the Darklings escalate their attack only recently? They could have taken the person any time.”
“Maybe the Voyant didn’t need the person before,” Wesh suggested. “Or what I really mean is maybe he didn’t need whatever it was before. Maybe he only just found out that he did need it—or want it—and now he’s trying to get it.”
The sandy-haired Watchman looked away, sniffed, and ran his shirt cuff across his nose. “I don’t care what you say. I won’t give up this ring. You can leave me here while the rest of you go on to safety somewhere else. I’ll take my chances. I won’t give it up.”
“No one is asking you to give it up,” Yvan replied. “We have no reason to think your ring is the object the Voyant wants.”
“If we’re right, the Darklings will come after us here, too,” Wesh pointed out. “They’ll invade this Island no matter how stable it is—or they’ll attack it from out in the Layers until they break it down the way they broke down Middleborough.”
“We should find another place to go before that happens,” Eliska replied. “We can’t stay here forever like what’s-his-name says.”
She jerked her thumb at the dark-haired Watchman. He spun around to glare at her, but what else was she supposed to call him?
Yvan actually laughed. “I apologize, Eliska. None of us have introduced ourselves to you.”
“You have,” she pointed out.
“But not the men.” He went through the group pointing them out one after the other. “That’s Rien Dugas—as I’m sure you’ve figured out by now. This is Omer Veco, Vidal Rom, Barsali Brun, Niyazi Trahan, Neils Surette, and you know me and Yann.”
Eliska tried to connect each name with each face as quickly as possible. She wasn’t used to spending this much time getting to know so much about anyone.
The sandy-haired Watchman wearing his mother’s wedding band on a chain around his neck was Barsali.
He had a big, thick, muscular frame, but his soft eyes and relaxed features made him seem gentle and cuddly in a soft, comforting way despite his strength.
The sharp, angular, dark-haired, dark-eyed Watchman was Omer. He had a hook nose, a pointed, jutting chin and jaw, quick, watchful eyes, and he spoke with a harsh foreign accent.
Two curved rows of tattooed dots followed the curve of his cheekbones under each eye. They gave him a foreign, exotic look and made his eyes stand out even darker against his dark skin.
Neils had light hair and light blue eyes. He and Yvan were the shortest Watchmen present—even shorter than Yann.
Neils had the kind of boyish good looks that usually go with pale coloring. His finely carved features didn’t look right in a Black Watch uniform.
Vidal also had dark hair and dark eyes, but not as dark as Omer. His handsome features gave him a haunted, brooding look. He always seemed to watch everything from outside even when he occupied the center of the group.
Niyazi was as big as Barsali but without the softness or comforting warmth. His uniform did nothing to conceal his hard, chiseled physique.
He walked everywhere with his shoulders braced and his arms flexed to spring into action at any moment.
And then there was Rien. His ordinary, boy-next-door good looks made him the least memorable of the whole party.
If he hadn’t imprinted himself on Eliska’s mind as the most obnoxious Watchman here, she would have found it easy to convince herself that he didn’t exist at all.
Yann brought her back to reality. “Can you search the Coil to find someplace for us to go? You did that before.”
Eliska focused on her fingers, snapped, and created the same magical representation of the Coil. “We need another Island,” she muttered. “A bigger, more stable Island.”
“How do we know if even they will be safe?” Omer asked. “If you’re right, then nowhere will be safe.”
“The larger, more stable an Island is, the harder it will be to destabilize it. Other, smaller, newer Islands will fall first. It will take more magic and more instability to collapse an Island that’s been there for a long time and has built up a great deal of stability.”
“If the Voyant is the one causing the Coil to destabilize, then the problem will only get worse,” Wesh added. “The Coil has been destabilizing for a long time—and the entire Coil is destabilizing—not just the parts with you in them. Whatever it is the Voyant wants doesn’t have anything to do with the Coil becoming unstable.”
“Then the whole Coil could fall and we could all die,” Niyazi suggested. “If the instability keeps spreading and getting worse, what is there to stop it from destroying everything in the end?”
“It won’t,” Wesh replied. “Our records in the Temple indicate these cycles happen regularly throughout history. The Coil becomes unstable, chaos ensues, and then the Coil stabilizes again, which leads to centuries of peace and prosperity. We’re going into the unstable phase now.”
“Going into it?” Yvan asked. “It sounds like we’re already in it.”
“The records indicate it could get considerably more unstable.”
“Wonderful,” Rien snarled again. “How long is this likely to take? Are we likely to see the end of it in our lifetimes or will future generations get to enjoy this peace and prosperity while we’re rotting in our graves?”
Wesh only smiled at him. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that, either. The cycles don’t follow a set pattern. Some follow each other very quickly. Others take centuries.”
Yann brought Eliska back to the matter at hand. “Are you finding anything—anything we can use?”
She looked down at the miniature Coil in her hand and frowned when she rotated it in different directions to study it.
Yann noticed her reaction right away. “What’s wrong? What do you see?”
“Nothing Wesh didn’t just tell you. A lot more Layers are collapsing and reforming more quickly now than I remember from years past…..and we’re in an unstable part of the Coil. Look. We can break through to the Ancestral Empire. It will take some doing to get through all those Layers, but if we make it, we should be safe on solid ground for a while….until something else happens.”
“The Ancestral Empire is hardly what you would call safe,” Wesh countered.
“Why not?” Yvan asked. “What’s there?”
“It’s a lawless wasteland full of criminals, gypsies, Barbarians, thugs, and organized gangs.”
“And they hate the Black Watch,” Eliska finished and closed her hand to make the Coil disappear.
“We can’t help what we are,” Yvan replied. “Anyway, we aren’t the Black Watch now because we have no wall to defend. We’re just wanderers like everyone else.”
“You’ll always be Black Watch,” she countered. “I don’t know much else about you, but I’m certain of that. You’ll all be Black Watch until you die. Nothing can change that—not ever.”
End of Chapter 9.