“You don’t think I’m much use to you in a fight, period.” This pulled an almost reluctant smile from the Barrani Hawk. “And if I’m not useful, Severn will be.”
Teela nodded. “Brace yourself,” she added. “This is not like a normal portal.”
As far as Kaylin was concerned, there were no normal portals. But Barrani structures used portals as defensive measures. The Hallionne all had portal entries. The Towers in the fiefs, with the single exception of Tara, Tiamaris’s Tower, had portals. Helen would have had a portal entry if they didn’t make Kaylin so profoundly nauseated.
And nausea, while bad, was not nearly as horrible as the possibility of losing a friend to internal Barrani politics. Barrani politics involved death as a matter of course; it was almost as if no game was worth playing if the stakes weren’t high enough. Kaylin personally preferred her bets to be payable in cash.
This particular portal was small in shape and almost, but not quite, invisible. The delicate outline of a door frame—a Barrani door frame, which was more work-of-art than pragmatic—stood out in relief against a flat, pale piece of stone. The interior of that carved and chiseled doorway was the portal. Teela approached it quickly.
Severn waited on Kaylin, and Kaylin approached it as if it were a wall, because that’s what it looked like. “I really hate this stuff.”
“So does Teela,” Severn said, without much sympathy. “I’d offer to let you wait outside, but without you, we don’t have an appointment.”
“I know, I know. But if I’m going to do it anyway, aren’t I allowed to complain?”
Severn shrugged, and Kaylin, taking that for his answer—it was a fief shrug—took a deep breath and walked into the wall.
* * *
The wall did not immediately become permeable; Kaylin cursed in mild Leontine as she whacked her nose against stone. While Teela wasn’t known for her practical jokes—and why were they called practical anyway?—the wall did dissolve. But it dissolved as if it were loosely packed sand, and at that, really damncoldsand.
The familiar squawked loudly and bit her ear, but the sand that also surrounded that ear was cold enough she almost couldn’t feel his teeth. The nausea that normally hit crept up more slowly than usual, because everything seemed to slow, except the cold.
The familiar’s squawk grew louder, but his teeth didn’t grow any sharper. Kaylin opened her eyes, which was not as bad an idea as she feared; she could see, and her eyes didn’t immediately sting the way they would have had they been full of what she’d thought of as sand.
It wasn’t sand.
To her eyes, it was almost worse. As if someone had taken visual, solid images and broken them into their component parts, reality swam in her field of view, blown this way and that by her actual movements. She couldn’t see Teela, but that was fair; she couldn’t see anything but random colors, gathering and resolving into partial shapes. There was no road here, no path to follow, no sense of forward that wasn’t the direction she was pointing.
She almost jumped when a hand touched her back; had she not been constrained by the atmosphere she would have pivoted. As it was she stiffened, opened her mouth, sucked in particles and coughed.
But the hand was warm, and after a disoriented pause, she recognized it: it was Severn’s. Her own, she could barely feel. She bent her head, closing her eyes again, and began to move forward, pushing everything aside as she did, although her feet ached and her knees almost locked.
Brace yourself, Teela had said. It was no bloody wonder she didn’t use the damn portal on her usual visits.
* * *
Had she not been afraid of the ground, Kaylin might have crawled the rest of the way, however long that ended up being. She had done it before, in portal passage. Endurance was more important than dignity. The portals, which were in theory instant, were a type of unreality that caused everything in Kaylin to rebel. She was afraid she’d sink beneath whatever was under her feet, and end up buried here.
She was still thinking in Leontine when she emerged. It was sudden, startling; one minute she was pushing through an almost solid storm of intermittent physical color, and the next she was running, almost full tilt, into a wall.
She put her hands out so that her nose didn’t take a second—and much harder—hit, and was shocked at how warm that wall was. Wood was never as cold as stone, but it felt almost alive beneath her frozen palms.
Teela was leaning, arms folded, against a closed door looking blue-eyed and rather bored. She raised one black brow as Kaylin coughed, loudly and repeatedly.
“What in the hells was that?”
“I told you it would be difficult.”
“It was like walking—and breathing—insand!”
Severn did not have the same forward momentum that had introduced Kaylin to the wall. He didn’t even look cold; Kaylin’s teeth were still chattering.
“Didn’t you feel the cold?” she demanded.
Severn shook his head. “It had a different feel than Nightshade’s portal.”
“It would. The High Halls are not a Tower or a Hallionne. They are not like Helen is, or was. The portal itself is not created by the building.”
