The Bell Between Worlds
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Sylas forced himself to turn and set out into the darkness, running ahead of the gases, crashing through the undergrowth beneath the canopy of the trees.
He squeezed between trunks and climbed over fallen trees, slipped into hollows and clawed his way up banks. The darkness pressed in on him and his imagination started to play its usual games, conjuring pale yellow eyes blinking somewhere far off in the undergrowth and dark shadows shifting in his path. He thought he felt the scrape of claws as he brushed against tree trunks – then the bite of razor teeth at his heels.
“Just keep running,” he told himself. “Keep running!”
He thought about Espen and the beast fighting behind him. He tried to picture his new friend crushing the dog under piles of twisted steel and rubble, then turning and running after him to join him at the bell. But soon his mind became crowded with images of a bloody fight, of Espen and the beast locked together, tumbling across the compound, the beast’s vicious jaws closing about his neck, and then it was the beast that he saw leaping over the fence in one mighty bound and setting off into the forest, its snout lowered to find his scent, gaining on him, hunting him down.
He shook his head.
“Run!” he grunted through gritted teeth.
He pushed on through the thick undergrowth, thundering through fallen leaves, twigs and saplings, feeling the path ahead with grazed hands. He had been climbing for several minutes now and he told himself that he must be near the top of the hill. Sure enough, the ground soon started to level out and his way became a little easier. He did not slow down, but glanced about wildly, gasping, looking for some sign that he was near the bell.
And then he saw it.
It was not an object, nor was it a movement: it was an absence of something. There, directly ahead, the meagre moonlight pooled where there were no trees. It could have been a clearing, but when Sylas turned his head, he saw that it was not only the area in front of him: all of the forest as far as he could see simply stopped a few paces ahead.
He slowed to a walk and put his hands on his hips, drawing long, deep breaths.
Where the trees ended the ground was littered with broken foliage, branches, boughs. He could see the paleness of splinters and crushed pulp and the raggedness of broken limbs. He inhaled the sweet, wholesome scent of fresh wood. As he drew level with the very edge of the forest, he saw that these limbs were not just branches but entire trunks – whole trees that had been felled by some unimaginable force. But the path of this destruction was very narrow, for not far ahead he could now see another wall of trees where the forest began again.
Suddenly he realised what he was looking at. He turned his head and looked to his left to see a long, perfectly straight pathway of obliterated forest. He had no idea how far it went because it disappeared into the darkness. He looked to his right and the scene was exactly the same: a narrow path of broken wood disappearing into blackness. But where was the bell? Sylas stepped into the graveyard of timber and stared out into the blackness. He looked at the horizon in both directions and could see nothing, but then he lifted his eyes above the canopy of the trees.
There, some distance away and suspended high above the forest, was an immense bell.
It was tilted away from him and was entirely motionless, at one end of a giant swing. But there was nothing to carry its weight: no rope, no cord, no chain. It seemed to float in the night air. It was hard to guess its dimensions because there was nothing around it to compare it to, but to Sylas it looked about the size of a house. It was a pale colour, perhaps brass or gold, and it seemed to reflect light that was not there, as though it had been polished to such perfection that it was stealing all the light in the sky. There was some kind of design around its rim and he squinted and craned forward and felt a new stirring of excitement. He could just make out symbols, and soon he could discern the shapes clearly, carved with perfect precision into the metal.
Ravel Runes.
He felt a slight movement of air, a gentle motion that wasn’t even a breeze, blowing from the direction of the bell. It seemed to bring him to his senses, for as he blinked and looked again, he realised that it was moving – moving towards him. It was becoming larger and larger with every passing second, and the slight shifting of air was now a breeze, a mounting wind moving down the channel between the trees, ahead of the swinging bell. He gasped and stepped backwards, glancing towards the trees.
His gaze fell on two large pale eyes.
They peered out at him from the blackness of the forest, just paces away. There was a rustle of leaves and a shifting of shadows and then the cruel snout of the beast emerged into the clearing. It had wide gashes across its face and Sylas could just make out that it was carrying one of its paws off the ground as though injured. Nevertheless its huge frame looked more powerful and terrifying than ever. Its greasy fur flew up around it as the breeze became a wind that whistled between the broken limbs of the trees.
Sylas felt a chill in his bones, but, to his surprise, there was no panic. He turned his eyes from the hound to the bell, which was now crashing through the forest, gathering pace as it went, sending twigs, leaves and branches flying through the air in all directions. And suddenly, as the wind became deafening and swept the air from his lungs, he felt entirely calm.
He was only dimly aware of the hound crouching back on its haunches, preparing to pounce; he did not see the forest buckling under the raging power of the bell; he saw only the bell itself – its radiance, its perfect glistening surface; its vast mysterious message depicted in runes about its rim. As it glided towards him and the wind became a hurricane, its beauty filled his vision and stirred a new emotion in him, an emotion that was so unexpected, so out of place that at first he did not recognise it.
Joy. A pure, overwhelming, wonderful joy that filled his heart, grew like a sob in his chest and made him want to cry out.
And, as the wind ripped at his clothes, as the beast launched into the air, he reached out to touch the approaching bell.
Then he heard Mr Zhi’s voice in his head.
“You have nothing to fear.”
“It seems that Nature welcomes their very touch, bending to their will not because it must, but because their will is its own.”
Her palm was warm on the back of his hand, and he could feel her fingers pressed between his. He looked down and saw their hands clasped together: her delicate white skin a sharp contrast to his own grubby wrist. He had always loved her hands. They were so fine and gentle that he sometimes felt he should not touch them. When they were at work, moving in confident sweeps across the paper as she drafted graphs, equations, diagrams, they had all the elegance of her creations, all the beauty of her brilliant mind.
He pulled his eyes away and looked ahead at the sunlight that danced brightly on rippling water and in that moment he was aware of a warmth that he had forgotten. He tried to look beyond the beautiful radiance, but the light dazzled him. He tried to shift his feet, but they seemed distant and numb. All he could see was the light, and all he could feel was her hand on his. He wanted more than this – he wanted to speak with her – so he turned to look into her face.
Sylas woke with a start. The warmth that had felt so real just moments before disappeared and in its place he felt the dull ache of a chill in his limbs. His arms were splayed wide and he pulled them across his chest to try to warm himself, but they only pressed his damp clothes to his skin, making him gasp. All that was left of sleep disappeared and his mind began to clear.
His first thoughts were of the beautiful bell, tearing through the forest towards him, sending branches flying in its path. Then he recalled falling backwards, unbalanced by the great wind that had risen before it. But he could not remember landing, or the bell reaching him, or anything since, except his dream. Something else filled his thoughts: a growing unease that gradually formed a picture in his mind – a picture of the beast. He could see it clearly: its glaring eyes, its jaws gaping wide, its filthy claws outstretched as it launched itself towards him.
He forced his eyes open and saw a blackness so complete that he would have thought them still closed were it not for the dim light at the very edges of his vision. Ignoring the stiffness in his neck, he turned his head and saw that, sure enough, there was a line of blue-grey light through which he could just make out the angular shapes of broken branches and twigs, some silhouetted, some dimly lit. He turned his head the other way and there too was the strange strip of light. As he craned to see more, his rucksack pressed into his back and he shifted to ease the discomfort, but a sharp pain ran across his shoulders, making him groan.
The groan echoed back.
His heart quickened and he held his breath. “Hello?” he said in a husky voice.
The word echoed back to him, then again, and again. The voice was his own, but the sound was cold, metallic and hollow. His mind flew back to the chase, the factory, the woods, the clearing – and the bell. Pushing himself up into a sitting position, he glanced around at the wide circle of light and for the first time he understood.
He was under the bell.
He seemed to be lying at the very centre of the bell’s massive black shadow. The light at its edge, which he had at first thought to be a thin strip, was in fact a gap of at least his own height between the bell and the ground. The darkness made him uneasy and, glancing about for signs of movement, he heaved himself to his feet among the broken branches, wincing as his weight fell on his sore knee.
He began to make his way towards the light, choosing the easiest path through the undergrowth. The sound of snapping twigs and crunching leaves echoed eerily around him, setting his nerves on edge. His eyes scoured the darkness for any sign of the beast, lingering on ragged silhouettes that looked all too much like angular shoulders or crouching haunches. But nothing stirred beneath the bell.
Sylas drew near the light and he paused, squinting into the gloom. Ahead of him he saw the pathway of mangled trees stretching off into the distance, bordered on both sides by the forest. It was as he remembered from the previous night, but there was one difference: it bore a strange, wintry cloak that was quite wrong on a July morning. Many of the trees had lost their leaves and were dusted with a white frost; a cold mist hung low over the ground and his breath formed clouds in the air, which drifted upwards to join the featureless grey sky. Everything was still and silent – there was no wind, no chime of the bell, not even the call of birds in the trees.
Sylas peered left and right, then stepped out from under the bell and into the light. A new edge to the chill made his teeth chatter, and he gathered the collar of his jacket round his neck as he picked his way through twigs and branches. He stopped next to the stump of a great old oak, which now sent spears of broken wood into the sky where its canopy had once been. He turned and leaned back against it, slowly raising his eyes.
There, just paces away and rising to a point high above the treetops, was the perfectly smooth polished surface of the bell.
It was an unusual shape for a bell, resembling a gigantic golden teardrop. It had a dark circular opening at its base, bordered by a fluted lip bearing the runes that he had seen the previous evening. Above, its great curving sides bowed outwards in gleaming arcs and soared to an astonishing height before tapering inwards at the top. Here the bell narrowed and narrowed until, at the highest reaches, it came to a bright ring of gleaming metal. Sylas found himself peering above to see what supported the great weight of the bell, but there was nothing. It was as if it was suspended in the air itself.
He looked back down at the band of vast Ravel Runes etched deeply into the shiny surface. He stared at them long and hard, moving his eyes from one to the next, hoping that in some way they might work together to form a message: something to explain what was happening. As he gazed at them, he had the strange sense that they were familiar, that he may even have seen this sequence before.
A pheasant suddenly crashed through a bush to his right, launched into the air and flew across the clearing, clucking with each beat of its wings. He glanced in the direction of the bush, which swayed from side to side.
He saw a movement behind it, in the shadows of the wood.
A human figure emerged from the darkness, stepping nimbly over some broken branches.
Sylas held his breath. At first he thought it was Espen and his heart rose, but he saw quickly that it was not a man’s frame, nor even a boy’s: it was far smaller and its lines were much more slender.
It was a girl. But her slight figure and her disobedient mass of red hair were the only signs that she was not a boy, for her movements were robust and masculine, her skin ruddy and tanned and she wore a coat that was almost comically oversized, made of a brown, crudely woven material. She took three steps into the clearing, throwing her shoulders back and her head high as if to defy her smallness, then she stopped and stared at Sylas, looking him up and down.
Her narrow face bore a bold expression, but the way she carried her elfin body betrayed her caution: her knees were bent as though poised to run and she held her grimy hands slightly out from her sides, ready to defend herself.
Her eyes fell on the bracelet around his wrist and suddenly her eyes met his. Sylas saw for the first time that beneath the streaks of mud on her cheeks she had a pleasant, even pretty face, with lively, smiling hazel eyes.
“Who are you?” She had a husky voice and a rich accent.
He was almost surprised at the question. He had become accustomed to everyone seeming to know more than him, and he had assumed that the girl would be no exception.
“I’m Sylas,” he replied, “Sylas Tate.”
She said nothing, as though she expected him to say more.
“And you?” he asked.
“I’m Simia,” she said. There was a brief silence, and she shifted her weight from one foot to the other and played nervously with a stray lock of her fiery hair.
“Are you… a Bringer?”
“A what?”
She cleared her throat and repeated herself more loudly: “A Bringer.”
He was baffled. “No,” he said, “I’m not.”
The girl frowned and nodded towards his wrist. “So what’s that?”
He looked down at the silver and gold bracelet. “If I’m honest, I don’t know what it is,” he shrugged. “It was given to me.”
“Given to you?” said the girl, in a tone of disbelief. She narrowed her eyes as though to detect a lie. “But you are from the Other, aren’t you?” she probed.
“The other what?”
Simia exhaled loudly, sending out a cloud of mist, and looked around her. “The Other. You’re from the Other, aren’t you?”
Sylas shook his head despairingly. “I’m from Gabblety Row. In town,” he said, deciding that any kind of answer would be less irritating than another question.
“Gabbity-what? There’s no Gabbity-whatever in town,” she replied suspiciously. She eyed him for a few moments, staring into his friendly, open face. “Listen. We haven’t got time for games. Just tell me this: did you come from the bell?” She pointed to the vast golden teardrop that loomed above them. “Did that bring you here?”
Sylas gave her a cool look that told her straight away that he was not playing games. He was not aware of having been brought anywhere, but her questions made him start to wonder. He looked around. He was in a forest as he was last night, but it was strangely cold and the trees were bare, as though it was winter. Then he remembered how Espen had talked about escaping to the bell, as if it would take him somewhere safe. Finally he looked at this oddly dressed girl with her strange accent and nonsensical questions. Perhaps this really was somewhere... else.
“I guess so,” he said, without conviction.
“You… guess so,” said Simia, putting her hands on her hips. She gave Sylas a long, steady look, then began to laugh. It was a light, cheery giggle and Sylas found himself smiling with her.
“Well, I guess that’ll have to do,” she said. Her face straightened. “If you are from the Other, and you did come through by the Passing Bell, you really need to get out of here.”
“Suits me,” said Sylas. Then he added, almost to himself: “I’ve got to start looking for—”
“Forget looking for anything!” said Simia incredulously. “You need to—”
“I need to find my mother,” said Sylas firmly. “That’s why I’m here. Well, at least that’s—”
“Whatever... right now all you need to worry about is what they’ll do when they know you’re here.”
“They?” repeated Sylas.
Simia let out a sigh of exasperation. “You really don’t know anything…”
She stopped mid-sentence. Sylas was staring past her towards the bell. She turned and saw in an instant what he was looking at: the bell was moving. They both instinctively took a step backwards as its huge mass tilted slightly and then began to sink very slowly towards the ground.
“What’s happening?” asked Sylas in a whisper.
“It’s leaving.”
The rim had reached the highest of the broken branches and Sylas expected to hear them splintering and cracking under its weight, but there was no sound. It continued to sink towards the earth, its great form moving through the tangle of wood as if the branches were made of air. The mist in the clearing rolled away sluggishly towards the trees. The bell reached the point at which it should have struck the frost-hardened ground, yet it continued to sink out of view, into the earth itself. The only sign that it had made contact was a very low, almost inaudible chime. Soon its base had entirely disappeared and the runes had reached the level of the broken limbs. Sylas watched the beautiful symbols gradually sinking from view.
Before long, half of the massive metal structure was embedded in the ground and he could clearly see the ring as it slowly descended from its place above the treetops. The deep chime was fading now, and it became less and less audible with every passing second. As the top of the bell drew level with his eyes, he glanced over at Simia. She too was watching, leaning back against a stump with one hand shoved deep into her pocket and the other twirling a lock of her hair. When he looked back, the bell had almost completely disappeared. Finally the last glimpse of bright metal slipped out of sight, the last strains of the chime died away and the clearing was once again shrouded in absolute silence.
Sylas looked hard at the place where it had disappeared, but there was no sign of the bell: branches still lay strewn across the ground and even the mist was now drifting slowly back into the clearing. It was as though it had simply melted away.
“Well,” said Simia with a tone of finality, “looks like you’re here to stay.” She tucked her unruly hair behind her ears. “Now follow me.”
She gathered the great folds of her coat about her, tied them tightly round her middle with a rope belt and darted off through the undergrowth.
“Follow you where?” Sylas shouted after her.
She stopped on the fringe of the forest and looked over her shoulder. “Somewhere safe.”
“But I don’t even know who you are!”
“I’m one of the Suhl,” she said. “And I’m all you’ve got.”
She dashed into the undergrowth.
Sylas looked back at the place where the bell had disappeared and saw only a dank wasteland of broken trees disappearing into grey mist. Without the golden light from the bell, the surrounding forest looked darker and more threatening than ever. Not even a ray of sunlight penetrated the blanket of cloud above. He had no idea why he was here, what was happening or what to do about his mother, but there was no going back now. He turned and ran after Simia.
Despite her size, she moved at great speed and Sylas found it difficult to keep up with her, especially with his bloody knee. He could see her bright hair bobbing up and down and side to side ahead of him as she avoided trees, leapt over gullies and vaulted rotting logs. She moved as though she lived in the wilds: certain of her way through the labyrinth of trees. They were running downhill so he assumed that they were heading towards town, though he was no longer sure that it would be there. He willed himself on, forcing his injured leg through the undergrowth and over the many obstacles that lay in his path. But he was falling behind.
“Wait!” he shouted irritably.
She slowed her pace and glanced back. Her shoulders slumped in her huge coat and she started to jog back up the hill towards him.
“We have to keep moving!” she said impatiently.
“I know, it’s just my knee,” said Sylas. “You’ll have to slow down – or go on without me,” he added reluctantly.
Simia looked down at his bloodied trouser leg. “What a mess,” she said, sucking her teeth. “Why didn’t you say?”
“You didn’t really give me a chance.”
She arched a ginger eyebrow. “If we slow down, we’ll almost certainly run into them, and that would be bad,” she said, with heavy emphasis. “I can’t believe we’ve even got this far. You’ll just have to keep up as best you can…”
Her voice trailed off as something seemed to occur to her. She turned and looked back down the hill. “Unless…” She glanced at Sylas. “I’m going to try something, but it may not work.” She looked unsure of herself. “Just… well, just... stand back.”
He took a step back.
“No,” she said, flapping both hands. “Further back.”
He eyed her warily and limped several paces backwards.
She turned her back to him, facing directly down the hill. She took a deep breath, pulled up the heavy sleeves of her coat and stretched her arms in front of her. Sylas looked at her tiny figure dwarfed by the vast tangled arches of the forest, wondering what new miracle he was about to witness.
Precious moments passed, but nothing happened. The forest fell silent.
Simia shook her hands and lifted herself up on her toes, as though a couple more inches of height might increase her chances, but still there was nothing. Her arms dropped to her sides and she shook her head. She adjusted her stance and her shoulders seemed to heave as she took in a lungful of air, then she raised her arms again.
“Come on, Simsi,” she muttered under her breath. “Concentrate!”
Once more Sylas looked out into the dense forest, waiting for something to happen. At first he saw nothing, but then something peculiar made him squint. Slowly he became sure that the forest ahead of them was shifting and changing. He blinked his eyes, but the shapes of the trees continued to alter and warp. It was as though he was looking through a lens that was distorting the light, blending the lines of one tree with another, stretching them and morphing them until he was unsure which was which. The ground too was shifting. Leaves blurred with moss and roots until the forest floor was a mass of melding browns and greens. All of this motion was focused directly ahead, between Simia’s outstretched arms: to the left and right, the forest looked as it had before.
Sylas started to feel a little dizzy as he watched, but he found it impossible to look away, so beautiful was this display of colours, so strange the spectacle. And the longer he looked, the more there seemed to be order in the chaos: the vertical lines of the trees seemed to be drifting left and right, leaving an open pathway in the centre. There, where the trees had stood, the battle between the colours of the forest floor was being won by the brightest of all the greens. Soon the movement slowed and, as it did so, Sylas began to understand what he was looking at: it was a pathway, bordered on both sides by the trees that had stood in their way, its floor carpeted with soft, verdant moss.