Archibald Lox and the Bridge Between Worlds by Darren Shan

Author:Darren Shan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: alternate reality, quest, afterlife, demonata, vampire's assistant, adventure, coming of age, magic, action, hero, death, utopia, friendship, growing up, identity, travel, suspense, society, mystery, politics
Publisher: Home of the Damned Ltd
Published: 2020-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

15

We drift out into the middle of the blood red river and through the countryside. I sit close to the edge to study the land as we pass. Preston stands in the centre of the boat. Inez goes to chat with him for a while, then comes and sits by me.

“Why did you say you were a camel?” I ask.

“Because I am,” she says.

“Then where’s your hump?” I joke.

Inez smiles thinly. “Camels are couriers. We travel the Merge, taking things from one area to another.”

“Aren’t you a bit young to have a job?”

She arches an eyebrow. “I’m over four hundred years old, Archie.”

I grimace. “Point well made, but you’re still a teenage girl, aren’t you?”

“In many ways,” she agrees, “but in the Merge you can be both a child and an adult. I could grow up if I wished – we age in the Born, so I’d just have to spend a few years there – but I enjoy this form.”

“Did Preston give you his message?” I ask.

Inez nods. “It’s for a woman he loved before he became a steer. He’ll be killed when Diamond falls, so he wanted to pass on a few words.”

“Diamond’s the name of this realm?”

“Yes.”

“And it’s in danger?”

She studies the mushroom-lined banks, gathering her thoughts, then says, “There were nine realms originally.”

I nod. “You told me. And you said three of them had fallen.”

“There were also nine Families.” She stresses the word. “They were normal people living in the Born, and there were nine members in each Family. They became the Merge’s containers.”

I blink dumbly. “Huh?”

“The Merge was created by the dead,” she says. “The spirits of people who’d moved on to other spheres decided to make a place for those who were murdered, and built it in the mental universe of those eighty-one Born.”

I squint. “They built the Merge inside people’s heads?”

“No,” Inez says. “In the mental space that they shared. It’s like the internet cloud that your people have created. The royals – every Family member is a king or queen, a prince or princess – are the computer servers in which the information is stored, and the Merge is the cloud that they have generated.”

When she puts it that way, it starts to make sense. Kind of.

“And the servers that keep Diamond stable have started to fail?” I guess.

“All but one are defunct,” Inez nods. “When a royal dies, their power transfers to a relative, but the inheritor doesn’t become active until we bring them into the Merge — think of that person as a computer that hasn’t been turned on.”

“You know a lot about twenty-first century technology for a girl who died four hundred years ago,” I note.

Inez grins. “I have to pass through the Born every now and then, and I’ve found it pays to keep up to date with these things. Anyway, the problem is, we don’t always find the inheritors. In the early days it was easy to keep track of the relatives, but now there are thousands of them, spread across the globe.

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