Tick felt weird following Mistress Jane down the long, winding staircase. He felt weird about being around her at all. He was pretty sure two mortal enemies had never acted like this before, trying to kill each other one week, then chitchatting about the world’s problems before scurrying down some steps to investigate a bunch of noise and fog the next.
He was curious. Was it a coincidence that the Void Jane had spoken of—this beast of the Fourth Dimension that represented some kind of pure and powerful energy—would attack her castle just as they had begun to scheme against it? Or did it have more of a mind than Jane thought?
They reached the bottom of the stairs and stumbled out into the main passageway, which was flanked by a narrow river on one side and the castle’s interior stone wall on the other. It was a scene of chaos. Creepy chaos. Dozens of Jane’s creatures, mostly fangen, were running pell-mell along the pathway, many of them wounded, some falling into the water. If the creatures started chasing him, he thought he’d die of fright before he could even think to use his newfound powers. But they all just kept fleeing, heading deeper into the castle.
Jane stopped to assess the situation, looking in the direction from which all of her creatures had fled. Tick did the same, but all he could see was a gray light. A rumble of something loud and booming came from there.
“Come!” Jane yelled, sprinting toward the odd light and the noise. Her robe billowed out as she ran, and her hood fell back, revealing the scarred horrors of her head, where her hair had once grown healthily. Feeling another pang of guilt, Tick followed her.
Lorena pulled up short about a hundred feet from the jagged edges of the broken door, stopping Lisa with an outstretched arm. No matter how much bravery they’d found, the loss of caution would be absurd. They could see better now, and Lorena wanted to understand what they were running toward.
A mass of churning gray air hovered behind the wide opening of the doorway like clouds that boiled before unleashing torrents of rain. Streaks of lightning sliced through the grayness, illuminating the world in brilliant flashes of white fire. The thunder that pounded the air was deafening, making Lorena’s ears feel as if they were bleeding. All the fangen and their cousins had either fled or lay on the ground around the door, battered and dead. Which made her wonder what she and Lisa thought they were doing coming this close to the danger.
The booming sounds stopped so suddenly that Lorena’s ears popped, and the silence was like cotton that had been stuffed in her ears. There was the slightest buzz of electricity in the air, and the gray clouds behind the door were now full of tiny bolts of electricity, a web of white light. Lisa was about to ask something, but Lorena shushed her. Things were changing.
The churning, smoky cloud began to coalesce into sections, filtering and swirling, as if some unseen hand had begun to shape the substance like putty. Soon there were gaps in the mist, the green grass and blue sky shining through from beyond. The gray fog continued its shaping until several dozen oblong sections stood on end, scattered around like a crowd of ghosts. Then heads formed as the misty substance solidified into slick, gray skin. Arms. Legs. Eyes full of burning fire.
Oddly enough, they were roughly the shape of some of Mistress Jane’s creatures that Lorena had seen fleeing. Though these were bigger and more crudely formed.
The one closest to Lorena started walking toward her.
Chapter 25
The Voids
Sato was about a hundred yards away, Tollaseat and the rest of the Fifth Army right behind him, when the mass of fog and lightning in front of the castle started to shift and take shape. Dozens of shapes, bigger than most men, were continually refining themselves, their edges sharpening, until they looked like Mistress Jane’s creatures. Arms, legs, wings, the whole bit.
Sato realized he’d stopped without meaning to.
“What bloody kind of business is that, ya reckon?” Tollaseat asked him from behind, a deadly whisper that fit the mood.
“I have no idea,” Sato answered. “But there can’t be anything good about it. We need to get there. Come on!”
Sato burst into a sprint, and his soldiers followed, their feet pounding on the grass like the hooves of a hundred horses.
Tick rounded a bend and finally came into view of the busted door through which he’d been before, a long time ago. Outside of it, dozens of gray shapes that roughly resembled Jane’s creatures stood in the fields beyond the castle walls. He couldn’t quite compute what was happening—they looked similar to what Jane had created, but they were also bigger, and . . . different. More humanoid.