Changes (The Dresden Files #12) - Jim Butcher Page 0,147
the strap of the shotgun a little more firmly over his shoulder, and said nothing more.
I checked my mother’s memories and nodded as I reached the pitcher’s mound. “Okay, folks. First leg here. Should be a simple walk down a trail next to a river. Don’t get freaked when you notice the water is flowing uphill.” I stared at the air over the pitcher’s mound and began to draw in my will.
“Right,” I said, mostly to myself. “Annnnnd here we go. Aparturum.”
41
The first leg of the trip was simple, a walk down a forest trail next to a backward-flowing river until we reached a menhir—that’s a large, upright standing stone, to those of you without a pressing need to find out what a menhir is. I found where a pentangle had been inscribed on the stone, a five-pointed star within a circle, like the one around my neck. It had been done with a small chisel of some kind, and was a little lopsided. My mother had put it there to mark which side of the stone to open the Way on.
I ran my fingers over it for a moment. As much as my necklace or the gem that now adorned it, it was tangible proof of her presence. She had been real, even if I had no personal memories of her, and that innocuous little marking was further proof.
“My mother made this mark,” I said quietly.
I didn’t look back at Thomas, but I could all but feel the sudden intensity of his interest.
He had a few more memories than I did, but not many. And it was possible that he had me outclassed in the parental-figure issues department, too.
I opened another Way, and we came through into a dry gulch with a stone wall, next to a deep channel in the stone that might once have held a river—now it was full of sand. It was dark and chilly, and the sky was full of stars.
“Okay,” I said. “Now we walk.”
I summoned a light and took the lead. Martin scanned the skies above us. “Uh. The constellations . . . Where are we?”
I clambered up a stiff little slope that was all hard stone and loose sand, and looked out over a vast expanse of silver-white beneath the moon. Great shapes loomed up from the sand, their sides almost serrated in the clear moonlight, lines and right angles that clashed sharply with the ocean of sand and flatland around them.
“Giza,” I said. “You can’t see the Sphinx from this side, but I never claimed to be a tour guide. Come on.”
It was a stiff two or three miles from the hidden gully to the pyramids, and sand all the way. I took the lead, moving in a shambling, loosekneed jog. There wasn’t any worry about heat—dawn was under way, and in an hour the place would be like one giant cookie pan in an oven, but we’d be gone by then. My mother’s amulet led me directly to the base of the smallest and most crumbly pyramid, and I had to climb up three levels to reach the next Waypoint. I stopped to caution the party that we were about to move into someplace hot, and to shield their eyes. Then I opened the Way and we continued through.
We emerged onto a plain beside enormous pyramids—but instead of being made of stone, these were all formed of crystal, smooth and perfect. A sun that was impossibly huge hung in the sky directly overhead, and the light was painfully bright, rebounding up from the crystal plain to be focused through the pyramids and refracted over and over and over again.
“Stay out of those sunbeams,” I said, waving in the direction of several beams of light so brilliant that they made the Death Star lasers look like they needed to hit the gym. “They’re hot enough to melt metal.”
I led the group forward, around the base of one pyramid, into a slim corridor of . . . Well, it wasn’t shade, but there wasn’t quite so much light there, until we reached the next Waypoint—where a chunk the size of a large man’s fist was missing from one of the perfectly smooth edges of the pyramid. Then I turned ninety degrees to the right and started walking.
I counted five hundred paces. I felt the light—not heat, just the sheer, overwhelming amount of light—beginning to tan my skin.
Then we came to an aberration—a single lump of rock upon the crystalline plain. There