“No, Glim, I’ve changed my mind,” she said, trying to keep her voice low, despite the distance. “We’ll wait for it to pass. It’s doing something—”

Glim’s head vanished from view.

Seized with fresh terror, she bolted after him. He was easily caught—he wasn’t moving fast—but when she did catch him, his eyes were oddly blank.

“Glim, what is it?”

“Going back, back to start over,” he murmured vaguely. Or at least that’s what she thought he meant, because he was speaking in Jen, a deeply ambiguous tongue. He might have been saying, “Going back to be born,” or any of ten other things that made no sense.

“Something’s wrong,” she said. “What is it?”

“Back,” he replied. He kept walking.

For another ten steps she watched him go, trying to understand, but then she knew she didn’t have time to understand, because the howling and screaming was beneath them now, echoing up through the caverns.

Whatever they were, they were coming.

She caught up with him and tickled him under the jaw. When his mouth gaped reflexively—she’d had a lot of fun with that when they were kids—she poured the contents of a vial into it. He closed his mouth and coughed.

She drank her own dose. It felt like a cold iron rod was being pushed down her esophagus, and she coughed, violently.

The world spun dizzily …

No, it wasn’t the world. It was her. She and Glim were out of the cave and ten feet above the summit, then twenty, but spinning crazily. She thrashed, trying to catch his hand before they drifted too far apart, and finally got his wrist.

That stabilized them a bit, which was good, but now they were picking up speed, and they were aimed straight at the floating island.

“Turn!” she shouted, but nothing happened. As the stone loomed nearer and nearer, she desperately tried to imagine another destination—her house, her father’s house back in Lilmoth.

That worked, for they turned, slightly, then a bit more. But then Glim grunted, trying to shake himself free, and they were suddenly yanked back toward the thing. Annaïg felt her grip breaking, and knew even if she managed to turn, she was going to lose Glim. He wanted to go down, but more than that, he wanted to go to that thing.

So she picked the deepest crevasse she could see and focused on it, and the wind became a thunder in her ears. Glim’s will appeared to relent, and they began to pick up speed. Something seemed to draw through her, as if she had somehow passed through a sieve and not been shredded, and then that, too, was past. Walls of black stone reached around her like an immense cloak, and then she felt weight return, and the sure grip of the world renew.

SIX

Annaïg stirred and pushed up with aching limbs. Her arms seemed spindly and weak, her legs boneless.

Her palms were pressed against thick-grained basalt, and she saw she rested at the base of the vertical crevasse she had aimed for; a sliver of light was visible, relatively narrow but rising hundreds of feet. It felt somehow as if she were in a temple, and the sky itself some holy image.

Glim was a few yards away, thrashing feebly.

“Glim,” she hissed. Echoes took up even that faint cry.

“Nn?” His head twisted in her direction. He seemed to be back in his eyes.

“You break anything?” she asked him.

He rolled into a sitting position and shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Where are we?”

“We’re on the thing. The flying island.”

“How?”

“You don’t remember anything, do you?”

“No, I—I remember climbing the spur. And then …”

His pupils rapidly dilated and shrank, as if he was trying to focus on something that wasn’t there.

“The Hist,” he said. “The tree. It was talking to me, filling me up. I couldn’t hear anything else.”

“You were pretty out of it,” she confirmed.

“I’ve never felt like that,” he said. “There were a lot of us, all walking in the same direction, all with the same mind.”

“Walking where?”

“Toward something.”

“This place, maybe?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, we’re here now. What is the tree telling you now?”

“Nothing,” he murmured. “Nothing at all. I’ve never felt that, either. It’s always there, in the background, like the weather. Now …” He looked out at the light. “They say if you go far enough from Black Marsh, you can barely hear the Hist. But this—it’s like I’ve been cut away from the tree. There’s not even a whisper.”

“Maybe it’s something about this place,” she said.

“This place,” he repeated, as if he couldn’t imagine anything else to say.

“We flew up here,” she said.

“Your gunk worked.”

“It did.”

“Congratulations.”

“That I’m not so sure about,” she murmured.

“But this is what you wanted, yes, to be up here?”

“I changed my mind,” she said. “In the end it was you who wanted to come here—only you wanted to go beneath, down to the ground. I wanted to go back to town. This was the compromise.”

A sudden snap and flurry sounded behind them, and they turned just in time to see a handful of dark figures come hurtling out of some dark apertures in the stone wall. At first her only impression was of wings rushing by, but one of the things circled tight, came back, and beat around their heads before settling on long, insectile legs.

It resembled a moth, albeit a moth nearly her size. Its wings were voluptuous, velvety, dark green and black. Its head was merely a black polished globe with a long, wickedly sharp needle projecting out like a nose. Its six legs, ticking nervously beneath it, ended in similar points.

It leaned toward her and seemed to sniff, making a low fluting noise. Then it smelled Glim.

The moment stretched, and Annaïg tried to keep her panic in a little box, way in the back of her head.

Nothing to see here, she thought at it. We’re not intruders, nothing of the kind. I was born right here, on this very spot …

Its wings beat and it flew off with preternatural speed.

Annaïg realized she had been holding her breath, and let it out.

“What the Iyorth was that?” Glim snarled.

“I’ve no idea,” she replied. She stood and limped toward the light, where the things had flown. Glim followed.

A few steps brought them to the aperture, which turned out to be only about twelve feet wide. Below was a cliff that was more than sheer, it actually curved to vanish beneath them.

“I reckon we’re somewhere on the bottom third of the cone,” she said.

Farther below was jungle, and not much to see, but the space between the island and the treetops was pretty busy.

Near the island, the air was full of the moth-things flying in baroque patterns, like some crazy aerial dance. As she watched, some peeled away and dove straight down, and as they passed a certain altitude they suddenly became vague and smokelike, and she now recognized them as the things she had seen from the spur.

She saw, too, the bright threads, following the flying creatures down into the trees and then suddenly licking back up, vanishing somewhere beneath them.

“What am I seeing?” she wondered aloud.

“I think it’s what we’re not seeing,” he replied. “What’s down there beneath the trees.”

“I fear you’re right.”

The day waxed on. Now and then more fliers went past them, and occasionally they had a glimpse down through the canopy, where something was moving, but the opening was never enough to discern what.

And then, inevitably, they reached the rice plantations south of Lilmoth, and finally they had a fuller picture.

The distance fooled her, at first, and she thought she was seeing some sort of ant, or insect, as if maybe the fliers were transforming into a land-bound form.

Then she adjusted scale and understood that they were mostly Argonians and humans, although there were a large number of crawling horrors that must have come out of the sea. She recognized some of them as Dreughs, from her books. Others resembled huge slugs and crabs with hundreds of tentacle-limbs, but for these she had no names.