"Well then why didn't we begin earlier, when there — "

"It must be started now, when he is in the void." Six clawed the air with one hand. "Easier to scratch his eyes out when he's blind," she said in her hissy voice.

"I don't see why — "

"The way is the way. Do you wish this or not?"

Violet's folded arms, along with her defiance, came undone. Her expression took on a dark set. "I do."

A sinuous smile slipped across Six's features. "Then let it begin. You must now complete the links."

Looking suddenly resolute, Violet plucked the sticks of colored chalk off a little ledge in the stone wall behind her royal stool. As she strode up beside Six, the woman tapped a long, thin finger to the stone.

"Begin at the sign of the dagger, as I've taught you, just as you've practiced, to insure that, at the initiation of the link, what you have wrought will be ready to slice swift and sure."

"I know, I know," Violet said as she boldly touched the tip of the yellow chalk to the point of one of the elaborate glowing symbols off to the side of Richard.

Six snatched Violet's wrist, pulling her hand back just enough to lift the chalk away from the wall. She moved Violet's hand over a few inches, then let the chalk again touch the symbol, but at the next apex in a design with a perimeter comprised of dozens of points.

"I told you," Six said with strained civility as she helped Violet begin the line, "a mistake here will last us for eternity."

"I know — I just got the wrong apex point, that's all," Violet huffed. "I've got it, now."

Six, ignoring the queen, her gaze fixed on the drawing, nodded approvingly as she watched the chalk begin to move across the stone.

"Change to red," Six prompted in a low voice after Violet had pulled the chalk a few inches across the open distance.

Without argument or hesitation, Violet changed the chalk for the red one and started it moving at an angle from the yellow line she had already drawn. After bringing it half the remaining distance toward the drawing of Richard, she stopped without needing to be told and switched to the blue chalk.

She hesitated, then, and glanced up at Six. "This is the node? Right?"

Six was already nodding. "That's right," she murmured, pleased with what she was seeing. "That's right, take it around and back now to complete the first ligature."

Violet drew a blue circle at the end of the red line before crossing the empty place on the smooth, dark stone wall. When the blue chalk reached one of the points on the next symbol, she went back and drew a line from the circle to connect to Richard. The completed triad of lines Violet had just drawn began to glow. The blue circle ignited with a beam of light, as if it were a beacon coming through a window in the dark stone.

Six abruptly held up a hand, commanding that Violet stop before she could put the chalk to the next point in the sequence.

"What's wrong?" Violet asked.

"Something… is not right…"

Six pressed the side of her face to the drawing, this time laying her cheek right atop Richard's face.

"Not right at all…"

Richard drew another silvered breath of the ecstasy but, with his urgent worries overriding the experience, it was something short of the remarkable essence of rapture that he usually experienced within the sliph.

He realized, though, that when he traveled in the sliph he was usually gravely troubled by something; after all, trouble of one sort or another was why he traveled in the sliph in the first place. Still, it had never before felt this way. This feeling was not dread so much as it was a sense of the great, but intangible, weight of foreboding. With every breath, that phantom weight pressed in on him ever more.

Within the sliph there was no real sense of vision, as such, just as there was no real sense of time, or up, or down. Even so, there was a semblance of sight; there were colors and, on occasion, obscure shapes that seemed to loom up and just as quickly vanish. There was also a visual perception of the phenomenon of mind-bending speed that made him feel as if he were nothing more than an arrow fired from a powerful bow. At the same time, there was a feeling of almost floating motionless within the thick void of the sliph. Those different sensations mixed together created a heady mix of the whole of the experience that suspended his urge to separate them into constituent parts.

As he raced through the quicksilver essence of the sliph, he began to discount his anxiety. It was then that Richard felt the faint brush of an odd sensation against his skin, a stealthy pressure that he instantly recognized as a sensation he had never before experienced as he traveled. Tingling apprehension rippling through him.

Forboding, he realized, was not tangible in the way that this touch had been.

As he drifted, held in the embrace of the vast silver emptiness, he tried to separate the perception of having been touched from everything else. Richard felt the placid isolation of the sliph surrounding him, caressing him, insulating him from the terrible, headlong rush of speed that otherwise seemed as if it would surely have to tear a person apart. He still felt the balm of serenity quelling his fear of breathing into his lungs the liquid in which he floated.

But Richard felt something else, even if he was not yet able to set the troubling sensation apart from all others enough to define it.

With growing conviction, though, he was sure that something was wrong, Frighteningly wrong. It was all the more disturbing because he couldn't understand how he knew that something was imperfect. He worked to comprehend why he would think such a thing.

It had to have been, he decided, that furtive touch. He briefly wondered if he could have imagined it, but then discounted the notion. He had felt it.

It seemed almost as if he were in the presence of an unholy taint, like lying in a warm, sunlit meadow on a beautiful day, surrounded by the cascade of colors and balmy aroma of wildflowers, watching cottony clouds slowly drift through a bright blue sky, and then catching the first faint whiff of a decomposing carcass while at the same time realizing that the vague sound you heard was the buzzing of flies.

What ordinarily seemed like a timeless spell spent racing through the smoothly silver sliph had begun to drag out into an agonizing suspension of headway.

Cara already had his right hand in an iron grip, but Nicci gripped his left hand even more tightly. He could tell in that urgent squeeze that she sensed something as well. He wished that he could ask her what she felt, but talking within the sliph was not possible.

Richard opened his eyes wider, trying to see more of what was around him, but it was a muted, murky world where there was little to be seen, other than the shimmering shafts of light — yellow, red, blue — piercing the gloom through which they raced. Richard didn't think that those shafts of light were moving as they once had been. It was hard to tell such things for sure within the sliph, though. It was generally a hazy sense of events, rather than actual perception.

There was something out ahead of him, Richard realized, something maneuvering fluidly through the silver obscurity. At first it looked like long, slender petals just beginning to blossom open. As it came closer, Richard saw that it looked more like numerous arms — tapered, long, undulating objects — fanning open from a central element that for some reason he could not quite figure out.

It was disorienting to watch because it was so incomprehensible. As it came ever closer, it began to appear to Richard as if whatever it was was made up of segments of glass, all assembled into something orderly, something billowing open before him. He could see through the transparent, expanding arms, see the shafts of color and light shimmering beyond.