And all of the horses

And all of the men

Won't put it back in place

Or bury it where it had been

-- Starset, Something Wicked

"We will arrive in Gradoné in four minutes. Please fasten your seatbelt."

"We will arrive in Gradoné in three minutes. Please fasten your seatbelt."

"We will arrive in Gradoné in two minutes."

All right, Irímé wanted to shout at the voice. Everyone heard you. You don't have to keep repeating it.

There was a shudder and then a thump. The spaceship shook in a very dizzying way. Irímé closed his eyes and prayed for it to stop soon. At last it did.

"We have arrived in Gradoné. Have a nice day!"

Irímé undid his seatbelt and very carefully picked up the suitcase. He tried not to jar Shizuki too much as he made his way with the rest of the passengers -- there weren't many; just a tour group returning home after their holiday -- to the spaceship door.

The radio crackled. A garbled voice issued from the speakers. "Attention--" Indistinct "--do not land repeat--" Indistinct "--land extreme da--" Indistinct "--leave at once." In the background of the message something that sounded like screams and roars could be heard.

Irímé clutched the suitcase tighter to his chest. He knew deep in his bones and without needing to be told that this was the result of whatever Abi had done.

For several minutes the doors remained closed while the pilots tried to contact whoever had sent the message. Irímé could hear snippets of their conversation accidentally broadcast over the speakers. Most of it was only one or two words, meaningless out of context, but he distinctly heard one phrase. "I can't get anyone to answer anywhere."

What the hell have you done, Abi? he yelled even though he knew Abi couldn't hear him.

Just how bad was the situation? He'd expected something like Ilaran's possession: bad, but contained in one area. From the sound of things this was much more widespread.

One of the tour group lost her patience. "Are these doors never going to open?"

She tugged at the handle, ignoring her friends' worried remarks of, "I think we'd better wait. It sounds like something's wrong out there."

On the wall beside the door was a handle labelled "Lock Override. Use Only In Emergency". Irímé watched in horror as the woman grabbed it and pulled.

"Stop it!" he shouted. "You're going to get us killed!"

She ignored him. One of her friends looked at him disapprovingly and said, "Don't be silly. It's not as serious as that."

The doors unlocked. Irímé backed away. Something screeched.

"Get away from the door!" Irímé shouted.

Instead of listening a tourist tried to push the door open. Something collided with the outside of the spaceship.

Irímé panicked. He turned and ran back into the seating area, clutching the suitcase and searching for somewhere to hide. There was nowhere among the chairs. At the back of the seating area were the bathrooms. He ran into the closest one, locked the door and placed his suitcase in front of it to barricade it.

Blood-curdling screams filled the spaceship. Irímé heard someone run into the bathroom next to him. Something hit the door before they could close it. Their shrieks were abruptly cut off.

In all the chaos Irímé had almost forgotten about Shizuki. He nearly screamed when his suitcase suddenly rattled. He covered his mouth with his hand and bit down on his lip to keep himself quiet.

The spaceship had gone deathly quiet when he calmed down enough to realise who was making the suitcase rattle. Irímé had climbed onto the shelf beside the sink because there was a window above it and he had acted on the vague and mostly unconscious idea that he might be able to escape there. Now he saw that the window was the sort that couldn't be opened.

Very slowly and carefully he climbed down from the shelf. His shoes made a slight noise on the floor. He froze and waited to see if anything had heard him. Nothing attempted to break through the door. He tiptoed to the suitcase and opened it as quietly as he could. Shizuki slithered out of it and wrapped himself around Irímé's chest. He was trembling. His head kept moving from side to side and his tongue darted out every few seconds.

"Don't change forms," Irímé whispered. "Don't make any noise."

Shizuki nodded. Irímé wrapped his arms around Shizuki in an awkward but hopefully reassuring hug. Then they waited for some sign it was safe to leave the room.

A red puddle trickled under the door. Irímé tried to sit at an angle that kept Shizuki from seeing it.

For the rest of the journey Abi questioned Lian about his other adventures. She wasn't entirely convinced they were all true, but according to him he'd once had to impersonate a king during his coronation because the real king was too hung-over to attend. Then he had helped track down a suspected serial killer who turned out to be just a lethally incompetent doctor. In comparison her own experiences seemed positively mundane and unremarkable.

"Can you teleport?" she asked out of curiosity.

All immortals could teleport to some degree, but it was an unreliable and hard-to-control skill that few people bothered with it.

Lian shook his head. "It's not true teleportation, but I can travel through the Void. I don't recommend it," he added warningly when he saw Abi sit up and look intrigued. "Things live there that you don't want to meet. It strips all illusions away and shows you as you truly are, or maybe as your soul is, and it can be an incredibly gory spectacle. My own is horrifying. And Death also uses it to travel. So do her servants. I've have some very awkward encounters with them."

At the mention of Death Abi lost all interest in that form of travel. She would be very happy to never meet or even hear about Death again.

By now the spaceship was getting close to Muirus 9436. A voice over the intercom informed the passengers to fasten their seatbelts. Then something unexpected happened.

"Attention, all passengers. This is the captain speaking. We have received reports that there is a battle raging in the capital between the police and a gang of murderers. We have been refused landing permission and been ordered to turn back. We understand that this is a terrible inconvenience and we will make sure everyone is compensated for--"

Abi didn't listen to the rest of the message. She stared at Lian. Lian stared at her. Both of them thought the exact same thing.

"It's the monsters," Lian said gloomily. "They've already attacked the capital."

Abi tried not to think about what that meant for the capital's hapless residents. "We have to get down there."

The spaceship had already started to turn around. If they didn't do something soon they'd be taken right back to Vanerth, and then what would they do?

"Can you reach the Void from here?" Abi asked.

Lian stared at her, looked like he was about to object, then answered with resignation. "I can reach it from anywhere. But I told you, it's not the sort of place anyone wants to go. It's dangerous."

"But I'm going with you, and the two of us together are as dangerous as anything lurking there."

"...I might be. But you? Being an incompetent necromancer does not make you dangerous to anyone except other immortals."

"I'm a phoenix immortal. I've already destroyed one monster. I can destroy a few more if I have to."

Lian was silent for a while. The spaceship completed its turn and began its journey back to Vanerth. With every passing second they were carried further and further away from Muirus 9436.

"All right," Lian said at last. "But if something goes wrong, don't say I didn't warn you."

He took her hand and held it almost painfully tightly. The spaceship disappeared. Abi couldn't tell if she was standing on solid ground or simply floating in nothingness. She was surrounded by brilliant light and deep darkness. Colours she had no words to describe danced around her. Lian still held her hand. She looked over at him and got a horrible shock.

He hadn't been joking when he said his appearance in the Void was horrifying. With one eye she could see he still looked the same as he normally did. With the other she saw him as a monster, a skeleton that was partially a bird, with multiple mouths and needle-like teeth. An gaping wound took up the space within his ribcage.

Abi stared. Then she looked down at herself. To her horror she saw that her arms were partially skeletal, she was surrounded by blue fire, and half of her body was bizarrely bird-like. Her right arm was a wing covered in feathers made of fire which seemed to hover above bare bone. She wasn't quite as monstrous as Lian -- she didn't have any wounds or extra mouths -- but she was still something that belonged in a nightmare.

She suddenly had a sensation of moving at incredible speed. When they left the Void it was like surfacing after swimming underwater. For a minute everything was blurred and nothing made sense. Then the world righted itself and the two of them were in the middle of a deserted spaceport.

"I warned you," Lian said in reply to the stunned look Abi gave him.

"What the hell was that? You were so... so..." Words failed her. She settled for gesturing helplessly at his chest where the wound had been.

Lian muttered something that sounded like, "You didn't exactly look like a jelenkirith[1] either."

Abi would have made a sarcastic retort if the circumstances had been different. As it was, she let the matter drop and surveyed their surroundings.

The place didn't look as if there was a sinister reason for its emptiness. There were no bloodstains or bodies lying around. And yet it had certainly been abandoned in a hurry. So much of a hurry that people had left their luggage behind. Some of it lay in the middle of the floor as if its owners had flung it down while running for the exit.

"Wait here," Lian said. "I'm going to check through those doors. If you can turn into a phoenix at will, this would be a good time to do it."

He warily approached the doors on the far side of the room. Abi watched with bated breath as he pushed them open. They didn't squeak. Nothing came charging at them from the other side. Lian stuck his head through them.

"I can see the landing area," he called back to her. "There's a spaceship from Saoridhlém outside. It must be the one Irímé arrived on."

"Is Irímé out there?" Abi asked.

Lian shook his head. "I don't see anyone at all. Don't see any blood or monsters either."

Fully turning into a phoenix was too risky when they were indoors. Abi thought of her in-between form with wings. She imagined those wings and how it had felt to fly. She didn't feel anything change, so it was a shock to look over her shoulder and find her wings there as if they'd always been there.

Lian opened the door fully and stepped through it. "That's odd. It looks like the spaceship door is open."

Abi flapped her wings experimentally and rocketed up to the ceiling. She yelped and closed them again, then hastily reopened them when she almost fell. "Damn it. I should have practiced flying when I wasn't in danger."

For several minutes she'd been dimly aware of a noise in the background. It grew louder and louder until she realised what it was. Footsteps.

"Lian?"

"I hear it," he said grimly.

Abi turned. Round the corner behind her streamed a ghastly spectacle. They had once been immortals, but now they were in an even worse condition than Ilaran or the servant. Many were missing arms. One had its head almost ripped off and hanging on by sinew. All of them were covered in grisly injuries. Some had their internal organs hanging out.

Abi might not know much about flying, but she remembered how she'd dealt with the last parasites. She gathered her magic. The flames blazed up around her wings. Then she cast the strongest exorcism spell she could manage. It tore through the crowd of monsters, incinerating the ones directly in its past. The ones not directly hit collapsed like puppets whose strings had been cut.

A hideous mass of shadows and teeth formed over them. Abi prepared another spell. She didn't get a chance to use it. The mass suddenly disintegrated into a cloud of individual shadows that rushed past her. She turned to shout a warning to Lian.

It wasn't needed. For a minute she saw him as that monster again. All of his teeth sank into the shadows. Abi shook her head and blinked. Lian was back to normal and the shadows were gone.

"...What just happened?"

"That," Lian said grimly, "is why meddling with necromancy is a terrible idea. Now let's find the rest of these things."