Sebastian

Chapter Twenty

“Perverse beast,” Koltak grumbled when the horse suddenly stopped a few strides away from the large pond. “Nearly pulled my arm out of the socket to get to the water, and now you don’t want to drink?”

He didn’t know much about horses, but the animal seemed uneasy about something, so he looked around. Just rolling green hills that looked the same as the ones he’d seen yesterday—and the day before that. What was happening in Wizard City? Was anyone concerned about the length of time he’d been away? Was he trapped in this landscape, doomed to wander in a place where he was nothing more than a bumbling traveler?

The horse took a step forward, then stopped again.

“Stay thirsty, then.” Koltak removed the canteen from the saddle. Keeping a firm grip on the reins, he moved toward the water.

Apparently reassured by his action, the horse moved with him. But it still hesitated at the edge of the pond before it finally lowered its head and began to drink.

The dusky light had turned the water an opaque gray, but the pond looked clean enough. He would let the animal drink its fill, and then—

The creature broke the surface of the water right beside the horse’s head. Brownish gray. Bumpy. The open jaws, filled with serrated teeth, clamped onto the horse’s neck. A twist of its large body dragged the horse into the pond. A savage shake of its head severed the horse’s head, leaving it to bob in the bloody water.

Another of the creatures suddenly appeared and ripped off a hind leg, while another one bit into the horse’s belly and spun, churning the water until the sharp teeth and the spinning motion tore off a chunk of meat.

Gasping for breath, his body shaking with fear, Koltak stared at the pond. He didn’t remember moving, but now he stood several man-lengths from the carnage.

He knew what they were. Every wizard had to study descriptions and rough sketches of the creatures that had been locked away with the Eater of the World. Bonelovers, trap spiders, and wind runners were some of the creatures that had been taken out of the world.

These were the death rollers. Crocodileans bloated by human fear. A larger, more savage version of one of Ephemera’s natural predators.

His hands were full. Puzzled, Koltak lifted them. One fist gripped the strap of the canteen. The other still held reins.

His eyes followed those strips of leather. Then he screamed, dropped reins and canteen, and stumbled back a few steps to get away from the severed head he must have dragged from the pond. He fell to his hands and knees, was violently sick, then crawled away from the mess and lay on his back, staring at the first stars to shine in the darkening sky.

The terrors that had been manifested from human fears were no longer contained. The landscapes where those terrors dwelled had been reconnected to the rest of the world. If a connection had been made that allowed the death rollers to intrude in this landscape, had other landscapes been altered to give those creatures access? And what about the other terrors? Would a child on a family outing to the beach walk across a patch of rust-colored sand and disappear, caught in the bonelovers’ landscape?

It could happen. Fed by grief and fear, those landscapes could encroach on all others, changing the resonance, consuming hope. And the nightmare the Eater of the World had tried to create once before would become fully realized, and all that was good in the world would shrivel away until there was nothing left.

For one shining moment, as he stared up at the stars, his heart and mind were swept clean of ambition and personal grievances and only one thought resonated: He had to find Sebastian. Ephemera’s survival was at stake, and finding Sebastian was the key to saving the world.

Shaky but determined, Koltak got to his feet and began walking.

Sebastian was the key to saving the world.

Reaching into the inner pocket of his robe, he felt the reassuring crackle of paper.

Sebastian…and the message he’d brought with him from Wizard City.

Dalton leaned against a tree and wondered, again, what he could have done to change things.

“Cap’n?” Addison walked up to him, then looked toward the creek where Guy and Henley were standing watch. “What happened to Darby wasn’t your fault. You sent him to the city to pick up supplies and leave a report at the guard station to be taken up to the wizards. You didn’t tell him to stop at a tavern, get into some piss-assed fight, and end up knife-stuck enough times to die.”

“He wasn’t a hot-tempered man,” Dalton said, his voice full of baffled anger and regret.

“No, he wasn’t. But something’s been bringing out the mean in people lately. Surely does seem that way.”

“I know.”

Addison rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s none of my business, Cap’n, but maybe you should be thinking of another place for you and yours.”

“I’ve thought about it,” Dalton said softly. “My current contract is finished in a few months, and my wife has said more than once that she wouldn’t mind leaving Wizard City. So I’ve thought about it. But where would we go? What kind of landscape could we reach?”

Addison shifted from one foot to the other. “I’ve spent time in a few landscapes over the years, and I’ve served under several guard captains. Even the ones who were good captains weren’t always good men. You’re a good man. You don’t belong here. Knew that after the first week of being assigned to your fist. Haven’t changed my mind in the years since. It’s not a kind city, Cap’n. Never was. You keep on rubbing elbows with the wizards, you might start forgetting what it means to be a good man.”

Addison was coming too close to the bone, giving voice to things Dalton tried not to think about—especially in the darkest hours of the night.

“What about you, Addison? You came here from another landscape and stayed. You’ve been here more years than I have. Why aren’t you thinking of leaving?”

Addison’s smile was sweet and bitter. “I never said I was a good man.”

Glorianna walked toward the source of the dissonance in the waterhorses’ landscape—the dissonance that had set her teeth on edge when she’d walked through her garden to check the feel of her landscapes. This dissonance had made her angry. The other “weed” in her garden left the taste of despair burning at the back of her throat.

Lee would find out what had thrown their mother’s heart into such confusion. Nadia would talk to him, would tell him what was wrong, and he would do what he could to ease the trouble. Or at least find out the source of the trouble. Because she didn’t want to consider the unthinkable—that her mother’s heart was no longer attuned with hers, that something in Nadia had changed so much she no longer fit in a landscape held by Glorianna Belladonna.

Lee would take care of whatever trouble waited at home. Whatever had made the wrongness in this landscape was a task only she could deal with.

Whatever? She knew what had left Its mark on the waterhorses’ landscape. She just didn’t know how It had gotten here.

When Sebastian had told her about the waterhorse being killed, she’d gone to the pond. There had been a stain of Dark that didn’t fit with this landscape, that didn’t resonate with her. But she’d found no sign of an anchor that could be used as an access point, so she’d sent her resonance out over the land, concentrating the power on the pond and the land around it until it was in harmony with her once more. The stain of Dark hadn’t been completely washed away, but it should have faded by now—unless someone full of dark emotions that resonated with that Dark had passed by this pond often enough to feed the Dark, providing the Eater with just enough of an opening to alter the pond again to be an access point for one of Its landscapes.

Wishing she hadn’t ignored Lee’s sharp order to bring a lantern with her, she hurried toward the pond until, in the waning light, she spotted what she thought was a dark, oddly shaped rock. Then the smell of blood and vomit made her gag.

Fighting to control her churning stomach, she approached warily and stared at the severed horse’s head a long time before shifting her focus to the pond a few man-lengths away. There was only one thing that had been locked away in the Eater’s landscapes that could bite through muscle and bone like that. Death rollers.

A freshwater pond would suit them, but the waterhorses came from a northern climate, so this landscape should have been too cold for death rollers. Unless the creatures had changed in the long years they’d been taken out of the world and were no longer dependent on the heat of the sun to warm their bodies.

Or the pond was nothing more than a place where they would hunt for prey and then go back to their own, warmer landscape. Either way, the Eater needed a way to reach this landscape in order to alter the pond, which meant It had an anchor nearby that was small enough to escape detection—or there was a bridge Lee didn’t know about that was giving It access.

And if It had access to this landscape, it could reach the Den or take the bridge to…

Oh, Guardians of the Light, was that why there was something wrong with Nadia? Had the Eater of the World crossed over the bridge to Aurora? Was it already altering the village, changing streets into rust-colored sand so that anyone who walked there would be pulled into the bonelovers’ landscape? Would the pond where children swam in the summertime become a hunting ground for death rollers? Or what if It hadn’t reached the village? It wasn’t that far between the border of this landscape and Sebastian’s cottage—and the bridge that crossed over to the path that led to Nadia’s home was behind the cottage. What if she was under attack? What if Lee stumbled into trouble and was seriously injured before he had time to impose his island over whatever was happening at home and get himself, Nadia, and Jeb to safety? And what about Nadia’s gardens? Every one of those landscapes had a bridge that crossed over to Sanctuary. And that was the Eater’s ultimate goal: to crush the places that were beacons of Light, the places people, simply by knowing they existed, used to hold on to feelings of love and kindness and hope.

So why was she worried about horse-shaped demons being fodder for death rollers and bonelovers and whatever else the Eater was bringing back into the world? She could alter the landscape. She had the power to rip this chunk of the world away, to take it out of the world so completely it would be lost forever. It wouldn’t move, not physically, but the eye wouldn’t see it, the mind wouldn’t recognize it, and the heart wouldn’t acknowledge it. No access. No bridge to cross over. And if a heart did acknowledge that dark place…No way out once the person stumbled into that landscape.

Are you going to give up another piece, Glorianna? Are you going to become like the other Landscapers who thought demons didn’t matter, didn’t deserve a place of their own in the world, didn’t need that breathless moment when something beautiful catches the eye and dazzles the heart? Are you going to give them up because they aren’t human? Neither are you. Not completely. You don’t have that comforting lie anymore. Whatever you came from might have bred with humans so that, all these generations later, you live in a human body, but your power isn’t human. Was never human. Landscapers focus on humans because the human heart can create so much—and destroy so much.

But other beings shouldn’t be forgotten. You knew that when you were a student, felt that need from those no one else wanted to think about. Even demons need a home. Even a dark landscape should feel the warmth of the Light. Why have you forgotten that?

Glorianna stopped. Turned around. Night had fallen, and she had no sense of how far she’d walked or in what direction. Her emotions were so churned up, she had no idea where the pond was in relation to where she stood.

“Insidious bastard,” she whispered. “I don’t know how you gave me that gut-jab of fear, but I won’t forget you can use my own heart as a weapon against me. I won’t give up the landscapes in my care. Not even this one. And I won’t let you have any of them. I’ll find a way to defeat you. I’ll find a way to do alone what it took hundreds like me to do the last time. And by the time I’m finished, I will lock you in a landscape even you will find unbearable.”

She closed her eyes and began to breathe slowly, evenly, until she could feel the resonance in the land. Until she could feel the dissonance once more.

And something else, drawn to the strength of her feelings.

Ephemera. Ready to manifest her feelings and make them real.

Wait, she told it, sending gentle restraint as she walked back to the pond. Wait.

When she smelled the blood and vomit, she stopped. In her mind, she pictured lines of power—red with anger, black with despair—running from where she stood straight into the heart of the pond. Then she let her feelings flood through her and become a channel for the world.

“Despair makes a desert,” she whispered, watching grass and rich earth turn to sand, sensing the water in the pond changing to sand. “And anger…makes…stone.”

Boulders pushed up from the earth, forming a cage around what had been the pond. Smaller stones edged the sand, separating it from the grass. As the last stone formed beneath her feet, Glorianna stepped back.

Altered landscapes. A piece of desert in a place that knew nothing of deserts. A one-way border…but not a boundary. This place would be visible to the eye and could be avoided. Anyone who crossed the border of stones would find sand and heat and little else. And no way back to the waterhorses’ landscape.

The death rollers would die there.

But there was still an anchor—or a bridge—somewhere in this landscape that had allowed the Eater of the World to return.

Enough, she thought. Lee can locate a bridge a mile away from where he’s standing, but you can’t. That’s not your gift. It’s time to go home.

She walked for a little while, not caring about the direction, just wanting to feel the land. It was a dark landscape, but it was good land. Rich land. Oh, human fears had seeped into it, but also relief and joy.

She smiled. The waterhorses were changing, weren’t thinking of all humans as prey or the enemy anymore. They were beginning to realize it was as much fun to scare a drunken fool by giving him a fast ride and a cold dunk as it was to kill a man. And the man, given that moment to see that his life could end and have that life given back, was also given a chance to change. Opportunities and choices. For some it would change nothing. For others it would take them on a different path, lead them to another landscape, bring a little more Light into the world.

Calm again, she focused on her heart and will, took the step between here and there, and stepped into her garden a moment later.

It wasn’t until she’d gone back to her house to wait for Lee to return that she thought about the horse’s head again—and wondered what had happened to the traveler.

Sitting alone on a bench in her personal garden, Nadia watched Lee stop and study the plants that had turned brown overnight.

“Frost?” Lee asked as he walked to the bench. “At this time of year?”

“Frost,” Nadia agreed sadly. She tapped her chest. “That came from here.”

Lee sat down beside her. Looked at her.

He had his father’s eyes, that green that could be soft and dreamy at times or darken toward stormy gray with a mood—or, like now, be clear and penetrating.

Her boy. But he wasn’t really hers. Not for a lot of years now.

“What’s troubling you, Mother?” Lee asked gently.

No, not her boy. As much as he loved her—and she knew he did—he wasn’t hers. “Did Glorianna send you?”

“She knows something is wrong. Something strong enough to resonate through your landscapes.”

“She’s right.” After all, the heart held no secrets from Glorianna Belladonna. “When I went to a town in one of my landscapes, something touched me, contaminated me.”

Lee stiffened. “A Dark Guide? You think one of them is in your landscapes?”

Had there been one of them in the marketplace? “Maybe. Or maybe it was the pleasure coming from some of the people because of other people’s misfortunes. A Dark Guide nurtures feelings that are already inside a person. It can’t create doubt if the seed of doubt doesn’t exist.”

“I see.” Lee pulled on his lower lip. “So you’re the one Landscaper out of all them for all the generations who doesn’t have the full range of emotions.”

“What?”

“You never get angry or sad or grouchy or wonder if you made a good decision or just feel pissed off because it’s been that kind of day. No, you’re nothing but happy, kind, generous, sweet, loyal, loving. Yep. You’re just a puddle of goodness.”

Deeply insulted, Nadia sprang to her feet, sure she’d burst if she didn’t move. “I can’t decide if I should whack you upside the head or wash your mouth out with soap.”

“Before you try doing either, remember what you taught us,” Lee said quietly. “The human heart is capable of every feeling imaginable—good and bad—and it’s part of our journey through life to decide, day after day, which of those feelings we will nurture so they grow stronger within us and which feelings we’ll turn from because we don’t want them to dominate our lives. But those feelings still exist inside us. The shadows in the garden. Isn’t that what the Landscapers call them?”

She felt as if he’d thrown cold water in her face, waking her out of some foggy dream. She sat down on the bench. “Shadows in the garden,” she said softly, the echo of the feeling she’d had as a student when that phrase began to have meaning welling up inside her. “Yes, that’s what we call them.”

“And now, when things are turning bad and the whole world depends on the choices she makes, you’re wondering what’s inside Glorianna that makes her Belladonna.”

Shame stained Nadia’s cheeks. “Yes.”

Lee shifted on the bench to get more comfortable. “Do you know where the koffea beans come from?”

Nadia frowned at him, puzzled by the change in subject. “They come from a land far south of here. A—”

“Demon landscape.”

She stared at him—and wondered why his smile was a blend of amusement and sadness.

“Not all of them,” Lee said. “The ships that come in to trading ports from those southern lands carry koffea beans grown on farms—no, that’s not the word for them, but that doesn’t matter. Those other places are human. But the koffea beans that find their way to some of your landscapes as well as Glorianna’s come from the piece of that land inhabited by a race of demons.”

“You never told me.”

“You love her and you’d fight to your last breath to protect her from the wizards, but you’ve never been comfortable with the fact that Glorianna resonates with the dark landscapes inhabited by demons. So I’d like to tell you about this one.”

She looked into his eyes and knew that if she refused to listen, couldn’t find it in herself to try to understand, she would lose her children. Both of them.

Her throat felt so tight she couldn’t speak, so she just nodded.

“I was with Glorianna the day that demon landscape resonated so strongly she had to answer. She’d been working in her garden, turning the soil in one of her ‘waiting’ spaces, and I was there to keep her company and rest, since I’d done a lot of traveling over the previous few weeks. I saw her pale, saw the shock in her eyes as her hands pressed flat against that newly turned earth. She had to go, right then, with dirt on her hands and wearing the old clothes she keeps for the times when she’s going to be grubbing around in the garden. I held on to her, and we took that step between here and there.

“I’m not sure who was more shocked when we appeared in that landscape—Glorianna and me…or the spirit men from the various clans who had gathered to ask the Sacred Mother for help. They were asking for protection against their enemies, and two of the enemy suddenly appeared inside their circle of power.

“But they recognized what she was. They had old stories, passed down through the spirit men, of women like her. Heart-walkers, they called them.” Lee paused for a moment. “Do you know what they wanted, Mother? Peace. There are veins of gold and silver in parts of their land. And there’s the land itself. The humans, who already control all the land around them, wanted to drive them out. But that place is all they have in the world. It’s their roots, their life. They just want to live there and tend the land. They’ve had enough contact with humans to know there are ‘pretties’ they’d like to have and are willing to trade for. But the human traders who had found a way into their land weren’t honest and brought in other men who were willing to burn out villages and kill everyone they could before they, in turn, were killed.”

“She took them out of the world,” Nadia said softly.

“Yes. She altered the landscape so that its boundaries no longer touched the human land in that part of Ephemera.”

“But…you said the koffea beans come from there.”

Lee nodded. “For a few months, the only access to that landscape was through Glorianna’s garden, and she was the only one who could reach that place. Then, one day, she came with me when I went to check on the bridges in one of her landscapes, and she headed off down this road that led to a little village. When we got there, we ended up in a merchant store. The two brothers who ran the store were grumbling about a promised shipment that had been sold to someone else in another town who could pay a thieves’ ransom for a bag of koffea beans. They had a grinder and two perk-pots and had dreams of adding a room to their store, making it into the village koffee shop, but the traders who brought bags of koffee inland from the seaports and had to cross over bridges to reach various landscapes tended to sell what they had to whoever would pay the price. Less time traveling meant more profit—and less chance of crossing a bridge and ending up somewhere the trader didn’t want to be.”

Guessing where the story was going, Nadia smiled, even though tears welled in her eyes.

“Well, the sum of it is, Glorianna said this was a place for opportunities and choices, so I made a bridge between those two landscapes. Now the merchants, who were willing to trade with demons in order to have a steady supply of koffea beans, have their koffee shop and have expanded their store as well, since they can sell bags of koffea beans to merchants in the bigger towns near them. More trade means providing the people in their village with more variety of goods—as well as establishing sources for the goods the demons want in exchange for the koffea beans. And there’s a man, a teacher by training and an adventurer at heart, who now lives in the demon landscape, teaching the demons human language and acting as a translator when they cross over the bridge to barter with the merchant brothers.”

Lee paused. Nadia watched his throat working, as if he needed to swallow some strong emotion.

“Do you know what those demons say when someone asks them where they come from? ‘I come from a piece of Belladonna’s heart.’ So tell me, Mother. How do we judge a dark landscape? Is it dark because the ones who already live there won’t let humans have their piece of the world? Do we judge who is good and who is bad by the color and shape of their skin—or by what resonates in their hearts?”

The tears fell, washing away the stain on her heart. I should have asked about those landscapes a long time ago.

She wiped the tears from her face. “I went to see the Den the other day.”

Stunned silence. Then Lee burst out laughing. “Oh, Sebastian must have sweated bricks when you showed up.”

Annoyed humor filled her. “He took it better than that other boy, Teaser. Acting all flirty until he found out I was Sebastian’s auntie, and then—”

Lee howled.

Nadia gave her son a hard smack on the shoulder. “It’s not funny. For pity’s sake, Lee, he’s an incubus, and he blushed.”

He laughed so hard he fell off the bench.

Nadia huffed and waited for him to regain some semblance of composure. When he finally sat upright, albeit on the ground, red-faced and gasping for breath, she leaned forward and looked him in the eyes. “You shouldn’t laugh at him. You can’t say ‘mother’ and ‘sex’ in the same sentence.”

Sputtering, he raised his hands in surrender. “No, I can’t, but we aren’t talking about me.”

“You’re grown men. You’ve had sex. I don’t see why you get so huffy about someone else having some.”

“Can we go back to talking about Sebastian and Teaser? Please?”

Looking at his face, she laughed—and felt something shift inside her, felt her heart regain its balance.

When her laughter faded, she sighed. “She really is a Guide of the Heart, isn’t she?”

Lee sobered. “Heart-walker. Yes, she is. It’s what she’s always been.”

“I know. I keep hoping there are others like her, somewhere in the world beyond the landscapes we know. But even if there are others, Glorianna is the one who is here—and the Eater of the World is going to do everything It can to destroy her.”

Lee held out his hand. She took it, welcoming the warmth and connection, while she thought about the daughter who held Ephemera’s fate in her hands.

They sat that way, silent, for a long time.

Koltak stumbled, although there was nothing to trip his feet. Then he realized the endless grass had changed to a dirt lane. The air felt different—warmer, drier—and he could hear the sound of waves rolling in to shore.

He hadn’t felt the resonance of a bridge, but he was so tired, he might not have sensed it. More likely he’d crossed a border between similar landscapes rather than a boundary that required a bridge. Still, a lane would have a destination, so he followed it until he came to a cottage.

The place looked human-made. He could knock on the door and ask for food and shelter.

Of course, just because the cottage was human-made didn’t mean the occupants were human.

He hesitated, then continued following the lane. If there was one cottage, there would be others. Maybe even a village.

He had no sense of how long or far he walked before he saw the colored lights. His heart lifted. Had he finally reached the end of the journey?

Hope battled exhaustion, winning long enough to get him to the edge of a cobblestone street he’d seen once before, years ago.

Determined to finish the journey, Koltak walked down the main street of the Den of Iniquity.