Othersphere Page 25

  The Bengal was right behind me, teeth bared in a grimace of effort. He ruffed at me, as if to say: We will make it. Don’t stop.

  So I continued the ascent. A sharp cramp ran through first my right, then my left front paw. A deep tremor quivered in the powerful muscles in my front legs and traveled down my back, joining in a painful tune with my aching joints and raw paw pads. I took more weight onto my back paws, trying to use the front ones mostly for balance, but soon my back legs and toes began to cramp.

  The agony song inside me was reaching a miserable crescendo. I grasped upward with my front right paw, dug in, pulled up. But the cramp there didn’t allow me to dig in deep. I slipped. I skidded jarringly down the vine three feet until my left paw caught hold, my back legs dangling. Scrabbling to get them back on track, I clamped my jaw around the thick stem until all four paws once more grasped the plant.

  I looked down. The Bengal was just a foot beneath me, shaking with effort. If I’d hit him, we both would have fallen to our deaths, and probably hit a few more shifters going down. There were clouds beneath us now, obscuring the trees.

  I continued on, unashamedly using my jaw for extra hold when I needed it. Every foot we gained was agony. I began wobbling with both weakness and with fear that we wouldn’t make it back home in time to be of help.

  Just as I felt I couldn’t haul my body one more inch up that cursed vine, the greenery spread out above me, crowned with bushes twisted into familiar strange shapes. We had reached the lip of the Amba balcony. I crawled, shaking, up and peered over its edge.

  A huge paw with claws the size of steak knives extended, swiped at me. I ducked. The razor-sharp talon slit open one of my ears, but missed my eye. I forced my back legs to push off the vine and leapt up and over the head of an Amba in tiger form lurking at the top of the Climbing Tree. He must have heard us coming.

  In mid-air, I saw there were four of them on the balcony, all in tiger form and ready to pounce, rake, and kill.

  I shifted before I hit the ground, curling and rolling from the impact in my elongated semi-human form. Three of the Amba swiveled to follow me as I uncurled and put one hand on the hard marblelike rock, and that gave me an idea. I was Orgoli’s daughter, and they needed to know that, fast. If Khutulun was to be believed, there was a chance the Amba were looking for a reason to abandon Orgoli. I needed to give it to them.

  I imagined my skin was like that pale, black-veined marble, inflexible, shiny. I thought of my joints and decided they would be like Morfael’s, angular and skeletal. I listened deep to the song of the mountain beneath my feet and felt that vibration invade all the tiny atoms that made up my body. I asked them to sing in time with the mountain.

  I stood up, and up, taller than ever before, my limbs hard as milky glass, my joints clicking, my tongue and my blood the only flexible, warm things about me.

  The Amba’s gold-green eyes widened; their lashing tails curled with questions. They hesitated.

  I extended a shiny, long-jointed hand out to the Amba as they prepared to leap. I recalled Orgoli’s deep, DNA-rattling vocal vibration, and intoned, “Stop! I am one of you.”

  Not exactly Shakespeare, but all three Amba about to attack me backed up a step, ears flattening. The fourth split his attention between me and the vine, where I knew the tiger-shifters were still clinging, exhausted and about to drop. I had to do this quickly.

  “I know you serve Orgoli,” I said, and as I spoke, I pointed to the mountain peak shaped like a cat and did my best to send out all my intentions into the air around me. I’d communicated with a storm, and the trees, the tiger-shifters, and the vine. Something about Othersphere and the connections between all things made such communications possible. I could only hope that even if I spoke English, the Amba here would get the gist.

  “I am his daughter, and I ask you to help me oppose him,” I said, gesturing with hands out as if in opposition. I pointed to the vine, and bared my shiny teeth. “Tiger-shifters there. Allow them up, and together we will free this place from a tyrant.”

  The four Amba growled to each other in a way that seemed to question my words, to wonder, to be tempted by them. The one by the vine roared at me, flicking his whiskers with disdain. I knew then that they understood me, for I comprehended him completely.

  You would then hold blood-rule in his place. How is that any better?

  An excellent question. The Amba were not fools, to exchange one dictator for another. The term I heard as “blood-rule” spoke of death and imprisonment, of terror and a deeply unnatural craving for power. It indicated that Orgoli had upset the balance here. If the Amba were like tigers, they were loners, living only in family units, able to care for themselves as long as they had enough land to hunt on. I thought I knew the answer to his question, but had no way to be sure if it would actually appeal to them. But it was better to be honest, and hope they understood that I meant well, at least.

  “It’s time for blood-rule to end,” I said. “It’s time for the prison to be opened, for each Amba to rule himself only, to live in harmony with all.”

  Another Amba bared his teeth and shook his muzzle.

  Orgoli cannot be killed. He has drunk too much of our blood.

  Not exactly a resounding vote in my favor, but not quite a “no” either. I reached deep inside, pulling out every convincing vibration my voice could manage.

  “Right now the tyrant seeks to open a door in the veil, so that he may conquer another world. He calls upon his army to join him. On the other side of the veil he is weaker. If you will allow me to take these prisoners back to that world, we will destroy him.”

  No.

  The Amba by the vine paced forward. I saw the Bengal tiger peek up over the edge behind him, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the Amba. If he and the other three refused me, the tiger-shifters and I were dead.

  The Amba lifted the right side of his upper lip in a snarl.

  No, do not destroy him. Send him back to us weakened. We will deal with him.

  The other three roared approval.

  I tried not to collapse in relief and gestured to the Bengal that it was safe to come over the edge. He crept up cautiously, but the Amba were already ignoring him and putting their heads together. They were agreed. The biggest, the one by the vine, spoke.

  Spread the word. Allow this one to pass unharmed.

  This one had to mean me. Two of them sped off, each through a different door, into the mountain. As the rest of the tiger-shifters wearily made it off the vine and safely to the stone balcony, I asked the Amba, “Where is Orgoli now?”

  He was last seen by the wolf door. We were to stay here and guard the mountain. But he headed toward the great sea, calling all others to follow him.

  “The great sea,” I said. I had no idea how directions worked here, but I figured the wolf door was probably the one where we’d first encountered London’s dire wolves. “If I exit through the wolf door, how do I find the great sea?”

  Down the hill, toward the moonrise. Skirt the swamp. If you follow its edge, you will come to the great sea.

  I looked up at the moon. It was over to my left, and it looked like it was still rising. I pointed. “That is the direction of the moonrise?”

  The Amba didn’t roll his eyes, but he wasn’t impressed.

  Yes.

  He didn’t say duh, but for the briefest moment he reminded me a little of November. I stifled a giggle. The Amba wouldn’t take kindly to being compared to a rat-shifter, I was sure, but the longing to be with my friends pierced my heart. This being in Othersphere was exhilarating, and the prospect that I just might succeed in bringing the tiger-shifters home even more of a thrill. But how much sweeter would it all be if my friends, my team, my family, were there to share it with me.

  “Come!” I gestured to the tiger-shifters. With a breath, I shifted to my tiger form and dashed through the broken doorway that led to the prison cells.

  It didn’t take long to free the remaining tiger-shifters
. The roots covering the entrance to their cells moved away at my touch, and over fifty of them surged out. The Bengal shifted to his human form and explained what was going on to the others in his own language.

  I asked a tall redheaded woman who spoke both Russian and English to see if our plan was okay with her group of Siberian tigers. She grinned toothily and shouted some phrases at them in Russian. They answered back with an affirmative roar that made the walls shake.

  There were nearly a hundred of them all told, and after they all shifted into tiger form, the narrow passageways of the mountain rang with their chuffs and meows of excitement. We’re going home, they all seemed to be saying.

  And we get to fight Orgoli.

  Once outside the wolf door, we stopped briefly at a stream so everyone could drink their fill. More than a few snapped at creatures in the water with their jaws, or snagged wiggling, scaled things from the shallows with their paws and wolfed them down, licking their whiskers in satisfaction. They were scrawnier than they should have been, but the water, food, and freedom made them bat playfully at each other and tussle like kittens as we moved along.

  We galloped through the wood where my friends and I had spotted the bat-shifters. There were none in the sky that night, and no drums or lights in the distance. It wasn’t hard to follow Orgoli’s path with nearly a hundred tiger noses looking for the trail. We also identified other catlike smells, some reptiles with very large clawed footprints, elephants or mammoths, and a few creatures that smelled like humans, but were muskier, hairier, and prone to using their knuckles when they ran. I tried not to think what an army of gorillas and dinosaurs would do to downtown Livermore, California, not to mention Orgoli’s ability to make the earth quake, and I prayed we could stop him before he got far.

  At the edge of the swamp, I turned the thundering herd of tiger-shifters toward the moonrise to our right, following the watery boundary. The scents of Orgoli and his army grew stronger. I thought I could identify tracks of hoofed creatures and hopping ones, crawling ones and many-legged ones. Their scents shimmered through the wet air, blending with the odors of dank plants, and those pesky eye-gouging faeries, who smelled like charcoal. They left us alone after the tigers swallowed a few whole.

  After a few quick miles, the horizon up ahead shone like silk under a lamp. I smelled salt. The soil beneath my paws fell away like sand, and the waters of the swamp swirled and ran with melodic current, expanding into the chorus of a delta as they reached the sea. The closer we got, the farther out it seemed to spread before us, flat as a lake under the moon. Soon we were slogging through sand, up and over huge dunes, which alternately obscured and revealed the great ocean now a few hundred yards ahead.

  From a distance away, a harsh sound cut across the accord of the sea and river, sand and spray. It wasn’t music at all, but a noxious, unnatural racket, like a buzz saw mixed with a downed power line.

  My stomach constricted with dread. A noise like that here in a world where everything sang together in harmony could mean only one thing.

  As if in answer to my apprehension, something like a crab scuttled across my paw away from the sound. As I descended the dune, the entire downward slope came alive with tiny crawling things, scurrying en masse in the direction we had come from, away from the horrible din.

  A throng of shapes crossed the moon, throwing winged shadows on the drifts. They, too, were flitting away from the sound. Off in the distant waves I thought I saw leaping arcs of water creatures fleeing off to sea.

  Which meant that Orgoli might have trouble getting his army to go closer. It was the only hopeful thought I could conjure, because I knew what this meant. He had opened his permanent door in the veil between this world and the other.

  We topped a large bluff and saw it, a large, irregular hole in the air, perhaps forty feet wide and fifteen feet high. Unlike the other windows through the veil I’d seen recently, this one’s perimeter was blurry with spiky movement, like the maw of a giant, invisible creature with electrified teeth. The sickening sound seemed to come from this boundary, where the cut had been made.

  It was as if a puzzle piece had been cut out of the veil. Where, I wondered, was the missing piece? Maybe the laser in Orgoli’s hands had destroyed it. Could it ever be replaced?

  I slowed down, chuffing at the tiger-shifters around me. They braked, too, and I came to a halt at the top of a high summit about three hundred feet away from the doorway. The tiger-shifters paused there, too, ears up as we surveyed the scene.

  Hundreds of animals were moving toward the doorway, coming at it from a slightly different angle than we were, circling the base of a lower dune ahead. I saw a bright-green crocodile as long as an RV snaking along next to a woolly mammoth. Ahead of them, a rhino covered with long white hair charged along, followed by several skittering gray spiders as big as German shepherds. To one side, a pride of mane-less lions nearly as big as I was prowled, while above their heads a swarm of shining red and black beetles massed, wings sparkling in the moonlight.

  But there was something wrong with the sand. About fifty feet from the door it was no longer white, but gray and dusty, more like soil than sand. And to the left, where the ocean had sparkled under the moon, the water was gone, dried up for hundreds of yards out to sea. Perhaps a mile or so away I could see the sparkle of moonlight on the ocean again. Past the doorway, the gray sand stretched as far as my gaze could reach, flattening the dunes, blowing around aimlessly in the ocean breeze.

  It reminded me of the blighted area we’d come across in the swamp, where Lazar had found the skull. We’d thought it might be a kind of graveyard, but the barren area around me was too big, too utterly devoid of any life to be that. This was something very unnatural, very wrong. I could feel in my bones that it was spreading. Maybe the doorway had brought this ugliness to Othersphere, but how then to explain the plagued area of the swamp?

  The only visible life was the teeming mass of beasts, and I couldn’t find Orgoli among them anywhere. But there were hundreds of bright purple frogs, several ostriches taller than giraffes, nearly a dozen small horses with three toes per foot, and warthogs as big as cows. Nearest the door, hesitantly stepping over its buzzing bottom edge were over a dozen bipedal creatures that looked like skinny gorillas. I squinted. It was hard to tell from this distance, but they looked like drawings I’d seen of early hominid species, which had gone extinct before Homo sapiens roamed the earth.

  One of them stepped over the threshold and was not pushed back as Caleb had been when he’d tried to go after Amaris without wearing the special rope from between the worlds.

  So that was the power of this doorway. Anything or anyone could cross it. No shadow-walker blood or help was needed now, no twine or songs or Lightning Tree necessary. Once they overcame their reluctance, all of those animals and shifters would pass through, to fight. Many of them would probably die.

  Then I saw something that made my heart stop. Not far away, just down the dune from where I stood, were several tigers that looked very much like the Bengal by my side. But they were just different enough that I recognized them from my homework at Morfael’s school. They were two of the sub-species of Panthera tigris that had gone extinct in the last hundred years—the Caspian and the Bali tiger.

  We can’t kill them.

  These innocent animals had been saved from extinction in our world and now were being drawn into battle with us, where we would probably send them into extinction again. Even the thought of slaughtering one of them made me feel sick.

  The Bengal growled low.

  We don’t wish to kill them either. Where is Orgoli?

  I turned to him, tail lashing.

  He must be through that doorway.

  I looked again. A few of the animals, including the early hominids, had made it through the doorway, but most of those closest to it were shying away from its aberrant energy.

  Farther on, limbs flailed. Was it some kind of fighting, a tussle or struggle? I craned my neck but
couldn’t see more. Was it my friends, fighting Orgoli? I needed to know. I needed to go. We had to get these animals out of here and put a stop to the real villain. Now.

  I could speak to those most like us at least, the Bengal suggested, indicating the Caspian and Bali tigers below, which were already staring up at us, lips curling in uncertain snarls.

  Please do.

  The Bengal beckoned to the nearest tiger-shifters and they began a careful descent toward the tigers below, making every effort to chuff and show by tail and posture that their intentions were friendly.

  I needed a way to speak to all the creatures down there at once. To tell them to go home, that Orgoli was not their friend, that this world they were invading was no longer a place where they could live, for it had already wiped out every other creature like them.

  I felt deep sadness for the world then. That it could no longer be home to the Caspian and Bali tigers, to the giant crocodiles and flashing red beetles. Mastodons, purple frogs, and three-toed horses, none would be welcome in our polluted, industrialized world. Our world was the poorer for their loss.

  I vowed to myself with the holiest words I could find—by the Moon, by my Mother’s love, by my friends and my soul and my stripes—that when I was home and safe, I would go to college, I would study ways to reclaim species on the brink of extinction, and I would do everything in my power to save them.

  But first we had to save these below us, and defeat Orgoli.

  And survive.

  A flutter of wings neared me, and a strange red bird with black stripes on its wings circled over my head.

  Sarangarel.

  That voice. It was in my head, but I knew it. It was my birth mother, Khutulun. I squinted up at the bird as it glided down and, with a flick of its feathers, landed on my back. I curved my spine around in a C to see her better. She looked like a tiger-striped cat that had sprouted feathery wings, with a tigerish fuzzy muzzle and ears and a sleek furry bird body that sprouted orange-red feathered wings. Her feet, embedded in my own fur, were taloned like an eagle’s.