The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure - By Storm Constantine Page 0,246

have to leave you here,’ Pellaz said harshly. ‘Is that what you want?’

‘Wait!’ Mima cried. She leaned down. ‘Pass it to me, Lee.’

‘No!’ Pellaz said. ‘We can’t risk taking anything back.’

Lileem saw Mima’s face above her and it shone as her brother’s face did. She was as powerful and beautiful as Pellaz, as strong as a dehar. Lileem collapsed to her knees and with all her strength held up the stone to Mima. ‘Please. It’s about the dehara. Please.’

Mima leaned down and, as if the stone weighed nothing at all, took it from Lileem and put it before her. The creature she rode uttered a high-pitched cry and its rotating wings rose higher.

‘Quickly!’ Pellaz said. ‘The portal is fragmenting.’ He and Terez managed to lift Lileem up behind Mima. She took hold of Mima’s waist, clasped her numb arms around her.

Beside them, Terez and Pellaz mounted the other creature. Jagged stripes of red light fractured the protective bubble around them. Lileem felt a strong sucking wind that sought to bind them to this world. Her vision was blurred, but she was sure that millions of small scuttling creatures were pouring out of the pyramid, coming to claim and devour them. She heard Mima cry, ‘Astral, we are ready!’ The creature’s wings were turning frantically now. Hazily, Lileem could see an otherlanes portal opening before them, but it was weak, and kept partially closing again.

‘Aru,’ Lileem prayed. ‘You tore the skin of the vortex that would have taken us at sea. Do this again now. Hold wide the gates. Be with us.’

Whether the dehar heard and obeyed her command in this alien place, she did not know. She did not see his image or feel his presence, but suddenly the creature she rode shot up vertically into the air and, with a mighty crack, reality splintered. The portal opened wide like a yawning mouth and they plunged through it.

Chapter Thirty Six

Flick sat beside Lileem’s bed, gazing upon her. He and Ulaume had finished bathing her body carefully and now she lay naked on top of the quilt. They didn’t want to put covers over her, because her skin was covered in scratches and grazes, some of them quite deep. She looked emaciated, and this was hardly surprising. Terez, who’d fared better than Lileem, had already told everyone how he and Lileem hadn’t eaten or slept for years. It was a miracle they had survived in that alien place.

Pellaz said that he’d considered taking all four of them back to Immanion immediately, rather than stopping off in Shilalama first, but Astral and Peridot had been weakened by their experience, and it was easier for them to follow the trail they’d recently made. They had intimated to Pellaz that they could not have remained in the otherworld realm for more than a few minutes, because the place worked its own peculiar hold on any creature that found its way there. If you didn’t leave at once, you might never leave at all. Pellaz said that on the way back, he had felt Peridot’s fear and the fact that such a creature, revealed in the other realm for perhaps what it truly was, could be so terrified was the most unsettling thing of all.

Lileem sighed and shuddered in her sleep. The skin on her face was raw and her arms and hands were badly cut. Mima had told Flick about Lileem’s obsession with bringing a heavy stone slab back with her. ‘The strangest thing was,’ Mima said, ‘when we broke through from the otherlanes into this world, I wasn’t holding a slab at all. It had turned into an old, cracked stone bowl. Inside, it’s covered in strange markings.’

‘It must have been the journey,’ Flick said. ‘The stone changed in the same way the sedim changed. Maybe.’

As for how the sedim had appeared in that realm, Pellaz was unsure if that was their true form or not. It might be that in different worlds, they took different forms. The moment they’d leapt out of the otherlanes, they’d transformed back into white horses. In any event, the journey had exhausted the creatures. They needed to rest before attempting another otherlane jump.

Flick left Lileem to sleep and went downstairs. The house was quiet, but soon Aleeme and the staff would be rising from their beds. Lileem and Terez could be kept secret for only a short time, and the sedim would not be ready to leave before the household was awake. Lileem was also patently in