The Portal and the Veil by Ted Sanders

Author:Ted Sanders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Stranger in the Field

“YOU MUST COME WITH ME, KEEPERS. THAT’S WHAT YOU DO.”

Horace whirled around in the long grass to face the slippery, whispering voice. A tall dark figure in a long black robe stood there in the meadow—far too tall, with long sinewy limbs.

Horace fell back, scrambling to pull the phalanx from his pocket. He and Chloe had escaped from the golem only to be found by one of the Riven—a Mordin, by the look of it, though it was short for a Mordin. Horace laid the tip against the Fel’Daera, drawing power from the box and filling the phalanx. He drew back his hand to fire at the Riven, to pin it in place, but then suddenly the Mordin shifted and . . . split.

There were two Riven now, identical. They stepped swiftly apart in unison, covering ground as only the long-legged Mordin could. In an instant, they were twenty feet apart, flanking Horace and Chloe left and right.

“Oh, what the hell?” Chloe snarled, crouching low, her angry eyes darting back and forth between the two intruders. But a moment later, one of the shadowy figures shimmered and winked out of existence.

“Peace, please,” said the one that remained.

Horace clutched the phalanx, but didn’t fire. “How did you do that?”

The figure spread his enormous arms. “How does any Keeper do what they do?”

Horace realized that something was missing. The stranger had no smell—no stench of brimstone. He squinted at the figure, trying to make sense of it.

“You’re not a Keeper,” Chloe said. “You’re a Riven.”

“So it may seem,” the newcomer said, “but I assure you I am not.” He stepped forward, arms still spread and huge hands open in a gesture of truce. “I am what the Riven once were.”

Horace straightened, the words catching him like a forgotten memory. He pulled his jithandra out of his shirt, releasing its blue light. The tall figure crouched down gracefully in the grass, letting the light illuminate him.

Horace’s mouth fell open.

“Oh, mother,” Chloe breathed.

He was . . . beautiful.

Pale skin, porcelain smooth, and high chiseled cheeks. His mouth was a delicate slit with a faint—and friendly? —curve to it. His hands, hanging between his legs, were the size of magazines. Just like the Riven, he had an extra knuckle on each finger. But whereas the deformity looked hideous on the likes of Dr. Jericho, here the fingers seemed unspeakably graceful and dizzyingly functional, as if they were the perfect dreams of stubby, useless little fingers like Horace’s. And on one of those long fingers sat a gray ring with a wide green stone, unmistakably Tanu.

But most of all . . . the eyes. His eyelids had not one but two extra folds of skin, each one angled in the opposite direction of the other, in a way that made him look both happy and cross at the same time. And the eyes themselves were bigger than a Mordin’s beady ones, but just as black. Yet around that blackness was a startling ring of brightness—white? blue? silver?—that caught Horace’s gaze and held it fast.

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