World's End Read Free Page B

first heard the words
You are Shadow.
He heard the same words again now, Vous’s voice carrying through the storm and the wind, spoken softly and uncertainly. ‘I’m not Shadow,’ Eric answered. ‘I’m not Shadow. Help me. I’m not Shadow.’
    Aziel’s hair whipped his face. She’d covered her eyes with her hand, though there was not much more to see than the cloud’s white mist. There was a sense of
falling upwards.
The two Invia – the ones who’d shadowed their flight from the wizard’s tower – wheeled around them, conversing with each other in joyful, whistling calls. They were suddenly drowned out by the terrible noise of a thousand shrieking war-mage voices, growing louder, coming nearer.
    They came through the upper band of clouds. As in the dragonscale vision Eric had had at Faul’s house, he saw the sky was a dome, a roof of stone spread as far as sight. It was not yet lit with the full force of daylight but was still painful to their eyes, this close to it. Great areas were cracked, broken and stained. Parts hung loose as though they might fall.
    Beneath them, where there were gaps in the clouds, the worldwas a haze of green and blue. Distant peaks stuck their tips up like small islands in a white sea.
    There behind the castle was the tall valley where the door, the Entry Point, had been. Two sheer cliffs cupped the high ridge of rich green grass, cliffs which rose till they joined the domed lightstone roof. That green valley had been filled with bodies, that first day, slain by the same creatures which pursued them now.
    â€˜They’re coming,’ said Aziel, still covering her eyes with her hand. A face covered by a mane of tangled ropy beard poked through the cloud, two horns exuding pencil-thin lines of smoke, black slits in its yellow eyes flickering from one of them to the other. Its mouth opened, its scream loud and high. The cry was answered a dozen times from close by. More distantly, hundreds more war mages called out.
    The two Invia swooped from elsewhere in the cloud and tore the war mage to pieces with a bloody thrashing blur of motion almost too quick to see. They flung its body parts in all directions. But more war mages came, their faces surfacing through cloud soon crackling with orange fire. The unearthly cry of a dying Invia tore across the world.
    Whatever force pulled Eric and Aziel through the sky wrenched them up with more urgency. Their bellies lurched. The lightstone dome rushed at them. A gap in it appeared just ahead, and then they were through it, and set down on a ledge in the upwards-leading tunnel. The ledge was only a stride deep into the dark stone, as wide as an armspan. The second Invia’s dying wail soon reached them. With a rush of air, shapes shot past them from above: five, six, ten Invia or more in a blur of white wings and streaks of vividly coloured hair.
    So that was why they’d been set on this ledge – to makeroom for the Invia rushing down at lethal speed. Beneath them the bird-women dived into clouds and fire. Dizzy, Eric clutched Aziel and instinctively drew her back a little from the edge.
    â€˜Don’t be so free with your fingers,’ she snapped, slapping at his hand.
    He stared at her, stunned. ‘You’re worried about
that
? Look down there, Aziel. Look at where we are.’ Overcome with disbelief, he grabbed at her breast and squeezed it.
    She shoved him off the edge without an instant’s hesitation.
    He fell only for a second or two – enough to register his amazement that she’d been willing to kill, to actually
kill
him for trying to prove a point – when the invisible hand caught him again on its palm and lifted him upwards, with Aziel floating just ahead of him. They were pulled urgently through the grey stone tunnel till it opened out into a vast cavernous space. Here was the place Case had been told by an Invia was the Gate of Takkish Iholme,