Sword and Sorceress XXVII Read Online Free

arrow-straight trees. The air grew fresher, warmer, yet wilder.
Birds passed them, not the olive-drab sparrows of the plains, but creatures
adorned with extravagant rainbow plumage. They swooped through the air, their
songs rising and falling. Moon cried out in delight, and Bluejay grinned.
    They left the birds behind and passed
the tops of the trees. The branches were so far below that Moon imagined them
as a soft carpet. Clouds wafted by until only the Blue Beyond lay above them.
Such a blue it was, more intense than she had ever seen.
    Moon kept expecting that the next moment
would bring them up against a hard blue surface, as if the Blue Beyond were the
inside of a bird’s egg.
    We are hatchlings struggling to be born ,
came his voice in her mind.
    The end of their upward journey came
suddenly. It was not at all what she expected. One instant, they soared gently
through unchanging blue. The next, a strange uneasiness hovered at the edges of
her senses, like a storm front poised to break.
    Bluejay looked at her with a grave
expression. “This is your last chance to turn back.”
    “I have said I will help you,” Moon
retorted with a touch of heat. Did he think her so lacking in honor that she
would take back her word? Then she realized his words came not from any
mistrust of her but from his own fears. He was tall and strong, clearly a
warrior among his own people. Again she wondered what help she could give
against an enemy that such a man as he dared not face.
    As if reading her thoughts, he said, “Each
of these wild worlds has its own form of magic. No matter how I appear to you,
I have no prowess with physical fighting. My people’s gift is the ability to
travel between worlds. Yours—” and here he touched her chest over her
fast-beating heart, “yours is courage. And you are the finest of them all. The
only one who answered my call.”
    Before Moon could ask what he meant, he
lifted his hand and under their feet stretched a wide path. One moment, it
appeared to her as a beam of shimmering light, the next, a metallic cable, and
still again, a twisted rope as thick as one of Bluejay’s trees. Along this
path, images rippled and flashed, the pale green plains of her own world, then
an ocean of surging tides, beyond that, sweeping sun-kissed meadows, and in the
other direction, row upon row of stone houses with glowing jewel-toned windows.
The richness and beauty of the worlds captured her senses. She longed to visit
them all, to walk those streets and glades and beaches.
    “They are worth saving, are they not?”
Bluejay asked.
    Moon swallowed her answer, for no words
could convey her emotion. Another breath, and she was able to say, “What
threatens them?”
    Bluejay pointed beyond his own world,
where the visions disappeared into mist. “You will see for yourself. There.”
    Moon took her bow and strung it on the first
attempt. Hawk had been wrong; it was not a man’s bow or a woman’s bow. It was a warrior’s bow. Holding an arrow at ready, she moved toward the distant
mist.
    The haze began to flow and darken, like
the storm on the day of the hunt. It curled around her, dampening her skin, and
shutting out all other sight and sound. Something moved within the shifting
currents of air and light and power. She halted, holding herself still against
the hammering of her heart.
    A sound reached her, a gnawing, rending
noise, as if the very fibers of the world were being wrenched apart. This was
no bison, no wolf or eagle or emerald-striped viper, but something far more
terrible. She moved closer, step by searching step.
    A shape emerged as the mist grew thin
and parted to reveal a beast. It was unlike any she had ever seen, fully as
huge as a bison, but long-bodied and low to the ground. Dull black scales
covered its body, except for the tapering snout and the whip-like tail. A
stench hung about it, the smell of rotten things, of must and slime and places
best forgotten. But worse of all were its eyes,