and stopped. His vision spun and he started sliding.
“No!” he screamed.
By willpower, sweating and trembling, he stayed awake. He clamped his hand onto the strand of hair and stopped his fall. His arm hurt, he ached, his vision pulsed in and out. He cursed his uncle as his consciousness returned. He’d told the band he’d been cursed in revenge for his theft, but that wasn’t true. His uncle had been deader than a well-done steak when Adrian had finished with him, and in no condition to cast any curses.
He’d cursed Adrian before. He’d done it at the beginning of his apprenticeship, to cripple Adrian. He’d only taught Adrian weak and watered-down magic anyway, and he’d forced on him this narcolepsy that limited his powers even further, so he wouldn’t ever be a threat to his master. He hadn’t really wanted an apprentice—he’d wanted a victim, someone he could trap and lure into complaisance with the sorcerous equivalent of candy.
To hell with him, Adrian thought grimly. He’d never underestimate Adrian again.
He shook himself back to the present. He needed both his hands to climb. Adrian looked at the tawny eye in his palm, then down into the coruscating void beneath him. His face throbbed, but he couldn’t risk dropping the eye—without it, he didn’t think he could perform any magic in this strange place.
With a whimper of pain, Adrian jammed the eye back into his own eye socket. Immediately, even with his head tucked down into his chest, he again saw the umbilical cord of light sprouting from his own body. It pulsed crimson and gold, matching the colors of the maelstrom below.
Just as Adrian looked up again, Elaine Canning poked her head and shoulders out of the “window” above him, her hair wet and plastered to her head under the wire in which it was bound. “Zounds!” she gasped.
“Grab onto the … vines!” Adrian called.
She heard him and followed his instruction, climbing out onto the wall with surprising agility for a woman in a hoop skirt. The chains wrapped around her looked red-hot and gave off smoke, but they didn’t seem to slow her down.
With both hands free, Adrian began dragging himself up to join her. He was cold and wet, and he hoped he didn’t have to climb too far this way, but the hair-vines were surprisingly easy to cling to. They were hard to flex, but they were rough, and his fingers found good purchase.
“You’re pretty nimble,” Adrian grunted, trying to take his mind off the madness around and below him.
Mike’s thick black hair and leather jacket punched out of the opening next.
“I can ride a horse and shoot a gun,” she snorted, “as well as play the thirteen-course lute. And I can keep accounts in accordance with Pacioli’s Summa de Arithmetica.”
“Yeah?” Adrian grabbed Mike by the collar and helped him steady himself as he climbed out. It was good to see Mike out of jammies and back in his cracked brown jacket again, but Adrian knew he was only seeing it that way because of the tawny eye, and the eye made his head hurt. “You ought to join the band.”
“The band of hell?” she asked, as they both climbed slowly up.
“Seems like it sometimes, doesn’t it?” Adrian muttered.
“Jeez,” Mike grunted, righting himself and clambering after them. “I’m sure glad this went somewhere. We were afraid we might have shoved you into a bottomless gut or something.”
“Yeah,” Adrian agreed, “that would have been a lot worse.”
Twitch pulled herself out of the hole quickly. “Oberon!” she shouted, but grabbed a handful of hair without missing a beat and then waited. The sphincter looked more relaxed, and Adrian tried not to think about that. He felt sick to his stomach.
Eddie launched through the opening like a bullet from a gun, missing his catch.
“Dammit!” the guitarist yelled, slapping for a grip—
he pitched forward, tumbling into the void—
and Twitch caught him by the ankle.
Eddie swung out, limbs splayed like he was ready for a cosmic belly flop into the grinding lights below. Twitch grunted—
slid down several feet—
but held on. Eddie reached the end of his arc and fell back against the side of the house, head-down and shouting curses.
“Come on!” Adrian yelled. The void about him spun like the park around a carousel ride and he tried not to look at it. It made him want to let go, fall asleep, and just drift down into the light. Whatever the light was.
He was pretty sure it couldn’t be good.
The wall—he forced