In Other Worlds

They were gone.
Carl was alone, staring into the long emptiness of his life.
In the end, there was only one place for him to go. If Evoe was imprisoned in Rhene, he couldn't hope to free her. And if she was in Galgul, an army couldn't save her. At the end of his hysterics and his heroic and fatalistic strategies, only one hope remained. The eld skyle.
He journeyed eldward, stopping only for the sustenance he needed to travel. His sleep-frayed alertness went into rage-drive, automatically guiding him through the brightening heights toward
the feathery radiance of the Welkyn. Only after he saw the rainbows threading
the glass minarets of Rhene did he seek a brambly covert and sleep.
He nightmared Evoe's abduction and woke sick with anguish. His pain led him finally to the slow whorl of the Gate, the down-moving fallpath that was the only entrance to the Welkyn. Claws of frustration tore his insides as he circled the vast area, hunting a way up the gravity slope.
Carl lay spraddled in a field of golden grass among bells of green flowers, charred inside from his thwarted approaches: His grimaced mind was contemplating the madness of entering Rhene alone for a flyer when he saw a brown tumbleweed rolling toward him across the meadow.
Its tangled form unwrapped as it approached, wobbling into a wreath of tufted vines, and finally stopped ten paces away and lifting to its full stature. It was a thornwing, a crumpled mass of thistly, snarled twine with a tiny hooked head at the crest of its amorphous shape. Long talons flexed on the ends of its two thickest vines. By the bright-green scar that creased its back, Carl knew it was the thornwing that had carried him and that Allin had wounded.
"How did you find me?" Carl asked with a jubilation that sat him up. "How could you know?"
It stared back with the dark clarity of a shoeshine.
As Carl stood up, one of its arm-thick vines rose above the golden grass. Carl went over to it and let it coil itself about him. His feet eased o$' the ground as the creature hugged him to itself and began its loping run. The golden grass blurred beneath them, and they leaned upward against the air.
The gold-and-blue meadow pulled back to a glint near the top of a ravine-haggard skyle as they caught the lift of an outward-Fund fallpath.
The Cloudgate's iridescent clouds filled half the visible Werld, a vast sea anemone of thunderheads flicking lightning near its black mouth. They flew directly for that center. Below and behind them, skyles sparkled like charms, bright with the delicate and luminous structures of Rhene. Jumpships and flyers dusted the vast interstices with the continual flow of their movement.
The thornwing rolled, and Rhene slipped from sight. The air went cool as ether, and Carl saw only cliffs of stormcloud splintered with lightning. He stilled himself, awaiting guidance from an inner voice, a telepathic link with the thornwing or the eld skyle that was guiding it.
Nothing.
Its body shuddered with the strain of its flight. The rush of wind strengthened, a wind blue with the scent of lightning. And in the distance, the howling began.
They slashed in and out of the clouds, and Carl closed his eyes against the wind-teasing sight. The cry of the wind sharpened to a screech. He knew by 'that sound of ripping metal that they were at the neck of the Cloudgate where the shear winds were closest to becoming a garroting whirlpool.
The sound of the screaming winds sluicing through their arteries of gravity knotted in Carl's brain with the struggle of the thornwing. It was heaving itself upward through the soldering cold like a salmon.
By arching his head, Carl could see its head, the black diamonds of its eyes clasped with intensity. His insides cramped with the joltiness of the flight, stalling before the metallic shriek of the Cloudgate.