“Deaths Gate. A place that exists and yet does not exist. It has substance and is ephemeral. Time is measured marching ahead going backward. Its light is so bright that I am plunged into darkness.”
Haplo wondered how he could talk when he had no voice. He shut his eyes and seemed to be opening them wider. His head, his body were splitting apart, tearing off into two separate and completely opposite directions. His body was rushing together, imploding in on itself. He clasped his hands over his rending skull, reeling, spiraling downward until he lost his balance and tumbled to the deck. He heard, in the distance, someone screaming, but he couldn’t hear the scream, because he was deaf. He could see everything clearly because he was completely and totally blind.
Haplo’s mind wrestled with itself, attempting to reconcile the unreconcilable. His consciousness dove down further and further inside him, seeking to regain reality, seeking to find some stable point in the universe to which it could cling.
It found . .. Alfred.
Just as Alfred’s failing consciousness found Haplo.
*
Alfred was skidding through a void, plummeting downward, when he came to a sudden halt. The terrible sensations he’d experienced in the Death’s Gate ceased. He stood on firm ground and the sky was up above him. Nothing was spinning around him and he wanted to cry from relief when he realized that the body in which he was standing was not his own. It belonged to a child, a boy of about eight or nine. The body was naked, except for a loincloth twisted around the boy’s thin limbs. The body was covered with the swirls and whorls of blue and red runes.
Two adults, standing near him, were talking. Alfred knew them, knew them to be his parents, although he’d never seen them before now. He knew, too, that he’d been running, running desperately, running for his life and that he was tired, his body ached and burned, and that he couldn’t take another step. He was frightened, horribly frightened, and it seemed to him that he’d been frightened most of his short life; that fear had been his first recognizable emotion.
“It’s no use,” said the man, his father, gasping for breath. “They’re gaining on us.”
“We should stop now and fight them,” insisted the woman, his mother, “while we have strength left.”
Alfred, young as he was, knew that the fight was hopeless. Whatever was chasing them was stronger and faster. He heard terrifying sounds behind him—large bodies crashing through the undergrowth. A wail swelled in his throat, but he fought it back, knowing that to give way to his fear would only make matters worse.
He fumbled at his loincloth, drew out a sharp-pointed dagger, encrusted with dried blood. Obviously, Alfred thought, staring at it, I’ve killed before.
“The boy?” asked his mother, a question to the man. Whatever was coming was gaining on them rapidly.
The man tensed, fingers closing around a spear in his hand. He seemed to consider. A look passed between the two, a look that Alfred understood and he leapt forward, the word ‘No.’ bubbling frantically to his lips. It was met by a clout on the side of his head that knocked him senseless.
Alfred stepped out of his body and watched his parents drag his limp and unresisting form into a growth of thick bushes, hiding him with brush. Then they ran, luring their enemy as far from their child as they could before they were forced to turn and fight. They weren’t acting out of love to save him, but out of instinct, just as a mother bird, pretending to have a broken wing, will lead the fox away from her nest.
When Alfred regained consciousness, he was back in the child’s body. Crouching, panic-stricken, in the brush, he watched, in a dazed and dreamlike fashion, the snogs murder his parents.
He wanted to scream, to cry out, but something—instinct again or perhaps only fear freezing his tongue—kept him silent. His parents fought bravely and well, but they were no match for the hulking bodies and sharp fangs and long, razorlike claws of the intelligent snogs. The killing took a long, long time.