City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [36]
It felt like they could now just continue from where they had left off years ago, and she made no objection when he pushed aside her clothing, her cloak falling first to the ground, and she abandoned herself to sensation. She was entirely a victim of her own cravings. His hands moved down to her sides, and she grabbed his wrists at first to push him away, but then realized she was instead holding him there, in place.
‘Let’s go somewhere else,’ she suggested.
‘Why?’ Lupus asked.
‘I’m scared someone will come back.’ This was her livelihood on the line, her life, her home, her marriage – her whole world.
Underneath her desk was stored the scinan Heimr relic. She extended it into a knee-high tripod, then set it on the ground, manipulated a dial the way only she knew how, understanding its sensitivities, and twisted the tiny ball on the top.
‘Get over here,’ she instructed.
She grasped his hand, touched the ball again, and she felt her skin—
—s–t–r–e–t – c – h, tingle then normalize—
*
—and there was a blanket sheet of purple light glowing around theiision . . . before they stepped forward into the meadow.
When she turned back to him, Lupus was shading his eyes against the powerful sunshine. His hair was golden in this light, in a scene that seemed locked permanently in some summer afternoon. Heat shimmered around them.
‘What the hell . . . ?’ He shambled, dumbstruck, in a quick circle, searching the landscape and the horizons, exactly the way she had done herself the first time. ‘Where the hell . . . ?’
They were at the bottom of a shallow valley, meadowland sloping down to a river, deciduous trees clustered to the left, a hawk calling overhead. Orchid flowers seasoned the grass with colour, insects zipping from plant to plant. Sedges and, near the borders of the trees, quercus and fraxinus, with ferns crowding below in bold shadows. A pungency generated from the water, amid the humidity of vegetation, plants offering themselves to the air – so unlike anything on Y’iren. And it was so hot, a temperature she would never experience in Villiren; under a bold blue sky, and the yellow sun that dominated it.
She had imagined this situation, never quite believing it would be possible, to bring him here, to her secret place.
‘How did you do that?’ he asked, looking down at the tripod as if it would explain. He turned in a full circle yet again, taking in the landscape, the low-lying hills. ‘Where . . . where are we?’
She explained how they weren’t in their normal time, maybe not even in the Boreal Archipelago itself. On countless occasions she had come here alone, to spend a few hours exploring, researching, making sketches and notes and reference maps, but had never yet met another human or rumel. There was a small garuda community, out to the south coast bordering this place, some hours’ walk away, but they weren’t all that sociable.
No one else knew of this secret world, not even Malum. This was her hidden zone.
Lupus appeared in awe of her ability to carve a path through empty space. It wasn’t anything she considered particularly skilful, just the result of dedicated study. All it entailed was manipulating the relic technology that the elder races had created all those aeons ago. This was not essentially her doing, nor was anything else relic-based; and that was something she hated about other cultists, their assumed arrogance at possessing this knowledge. All they did was monopolize the relics, and had been doing so for thousands of years.
‘So this is where you get your tan,’ Lupus observed. ‘I wondered what kept you looking so nice and brown.’
She laughed, then threw her arms around him again, safe in the knowledge that now they could not be discovered. They knelt together in the humid grass, and kissed passionately, with the deep sunlight warming her back and all her troubles out of sight. This was pure escapism, a fantasy – hiding from her sense of guilt.
Avoiding the