Serpents and Stairways

Chapter V? - Part 2

The moment Dinah and Lyasan got into the carriage, the mirror-headed automaton snapped the reins, and fish started pulling.

"Where do we go now? To King's Cross?"

"No," Lyasan answered, "there's not a train that goes where we're going. The boy is in the wolf sorcerer's house on the backward island. Kronstadt, was it called? I always forget. What matters is that our coachman and the fish remember."

"Oh, I wanted to ask about that. Why..."

But before she could finish the question, their carriage, at full speed approaching the embankment—at once! Dropped into the water off the cliff.

Dinah closed her eyes, waiting for the ceiling to slam into her head, but the space inside the cabin appeared to have left the gravity on Albion shores. Physical weight vanished, cushions hovered midair, and the girl floated back to her place to look out the window, where the strangeness was continuing to unfold. They swam not faster than a carriage pulled by a couple leisurely horses, but the views were changing so rapidly, as if someone was flipping through pages—each in a new hue. From seaweed-green, almost brown, through the azure, dove-feather, gray and cobalt blues... The environments on these pages changed, too—weeds, rocks, sea dwellers, a shadow of a sunken ship, and—at one point—a warm reflection of an unfamiliar city. Only later, having returned to the school and consulting a map, she guessed that the city was Copenhagen, and that they were passing from the North Sea to Baltic.

"I've never seen anything like this before." She admitted.

"And you should've," Lyasan said somewhat coldly, straightening her orpek, a head scarf. Dinah felt a tinge of judgment in her reply, but decided not to complain—the possibility of a close one's death could ruin anyone's mood.

As young as she was, Dinah and death had already been acquainted—the fact that had made her chew not one pound of fingernails. Consoling her, uncle Franz had told her of sorcerers, who caught the slipping souls on their way to the aether and returned them to their bodies (if these physical vessels were tended to in time by the doctors,) and about studies of mysterious illnesses, like diabetes, that weren't curable to any side of the veil, but no doubt that one day could be. And it was him who taught her the legends of the grim reaper. In Kingdoms of the Old Light, he was believed to look like a drear young man clad in smoked armor, resembling the Black Knight from "Alice Through The Looking-Glass". The rumor had it that Death adored rolling dice, and if you were lucky you could win a loved one's life back—but only once. That was reassuring—Dinah was ready to play. As long as the clocks in Timur's house kept ticking.

The journey ended much sooner than Dinah expected. Emerging from the stiff peaks of whipped waves the carriage rolled onto the rocky shore, and as if nothing extraordinary had happened, the fish pulled it straight to a small mansion on a cliff, caught in a cyclone of last year's grass. Over the slightly rusted gates, in a manner of sanatoriums, wrought-iron lettering announced "Dormitory Marine".

"That sort of implies that there are other dorms, right?" Dinah thought, but the carriage stopped, and they hurried to the front door. The path to the porch was completely overgrown, and whips of hardened gray stems were leaving black streaks on their clothes and skin.

"What is this?" She asked Lyasan, cursing herself for still wearing the school dress, with now irrevocably ruined pinny, and not something more appropriate.

"That's because we have bodies," Timur's grandmother answered, as if that explained anything at all, and Dinah didn't ask any further questions. For some reason, she always felt ashamed of not knowing.

The house was coated with weathered blue paint, and seemed abandoned. But Lyasan pulled the door handle, with a cyan unblinking eye on it (with paint dripping by the pupil), and soft peachy glow from inside hit Dinah's face