The Darkness Before the Dawn - By Ryan Hughes Page 0,89

back. The chariot blared angrily as it continued past, and Jedra fell against one of the metal light posts. He clutched it for dear life, which brought forth more laughter from the people on the walkway, but he didn’t care. Better safe and embarrassed than dead beneath a chariot.

His leg hurt. His heart was pounding, and his breath was coming in tight little gasps. It was time to leave. Jedra imagined a hole in the gray stone walkway through which he could fall out of this mad world…

…but no hole appeared.

I wish to be out of here, he thought, but nothing happened.

Hmm. This place obviously followed different rules. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on finding a pathway out of it, but when he opened them he was still in the throng of people and chariots. And nobody spoke his language, so he couldn’t even ask for help.

Suddenly he realized he was being an idiot. He had a perfectly good method of communication he hadn’t even tried. Do you understand me this way? he mindsent to a man passing by, but the moment he tried it he realized that wouldn’t work. He couldn’t sense the man’s mind at all.

Confused, he turned his attention to another person on the walkway beside him, but he felt no mind there either. He tried to contact another and another, but he got nothing from any of them. Were they all zombies? Magically animated corpses? Or were they something else entirely?

Jedra closed his eyes tight against his mounting anxiety, but the city’s noise still crashed in on him. He held his hands over his ears, but that barely muted it. How could people live in such a place? It would drive him crazy to be in such a hectic environment all the time.

Maybe that was why nobody here seemed to have a mind. To escape the insanity around them, they had all retreated into some inner world, leaving their bodies behind to carry on without them.

Worlds within worlds within worlds… the possibility frightened him more than anything else he had seen here.

He had to get out of this place. Now. If he couldn’t leave the entire world, he could at least leave the city.

With renewed determination, he stepped into the flowing river of people again and began to walk.

He lost track of how many streets he crossed, how many thousands of people he passed on the walkways, how many chariots roared past him. His leg flashed with pain at every step, but the rest of him felt numb. He tried dozens of times to escape back into the real world—his world—but remained trapped within the frantic city. At last he stepped from a canyon of giant buildings to see a line of darkness before him. All he had to do was cross one more busy street, and beyond it waited an expanse of unnaturally even grass stretching off toward a copse of trees. He waited for a gap between the chariots and sprinted across, ignoring their angry bleats, then he hopped the low stone wall separating the street from the grass and continued to run past the few startled people walking beside a pond until he reached the edge of the trees. Beneath the trees’ protective cover he found a rock to sit on, and he closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

His tension began to drain away. There had to be a way out of here; he just hadn’t tried the right thing yet. If psionics didn’t work, then maybe magic would. He probably just needed to find a mage who could work the spell for him. He would search for one soon, but for now he would just relax. When his heart quit pounding, he would go on.

The city noise was fainter here, but he could still hear it clearly. It was a constant rushing sound, occasionally pierced by chariot outcries and once by an even louder wailing that rose and fell in pitch over and over as it faded into the distance. Jedra put his hands over his ears to block it all out so he could think, but that made him feel even more confined. He felt as if a giant hand were squeezing his chest, and his vision swirled as if he’d stood up too suddenly. He unplugged his ears and tried more deep breaths.

“Hevar,” a voice said right by his side. Jedra jumped up and swung around to see a boy a couple years younger than himself standing