Heavy rain splattered my face. I lay on my back at the edge of the sinkhole, lukewarm water sloshing against my side. I finally get dry in one world, only to be back in the slop of another.
I got up and shook myself off. The building Luther had grown from the seed of Bern’s dismantled cabin was now a bulbous, multi-turreted monstrosity. It loomed over a wall-like arc of one-story cottages tucked cheek to jowl against each other like so many lumps of monkey bread. Curls of smoke corkscrewed into the sky from many narrow chimneys.
This new Luthersburg seemed perilously exposed and undefended. It had no walls or palisades.
Residents lounged under awnings and porches as if they were on beachfront property. I suppose it would seem that way to those who had only known the Liminality from those caverns down below, where the only light came from luminescent roots.
A pair of riderless mantids prowled a scrubby hollow where flood waters pooled and spiraled into a pit in a mini-maelstrom.
A guard sat watching me—a youngish, Asian fellow sitting under a black umbrella that looked like it had been stitched together from the wings of giant fruit bats. I recognized him, but I couldn’t remember his name.
“Hey! You’re Karla’s friend. Remember me? You guys rescued me from that Reaper?”
He said nothing. He just sat there, looking nervous and confused, holding an ornate black powder musket in his lap.
I shook his limp hand. Slowly, some recognition seeped into his expression. “How is Karla?” he said. “Do you see her?”
That was already more English than I remembered him being able to speak.
“She’s dead,” I said. It seemed a blunt and insensitive thing to say, but the word somehow lacked the potency and finality that it used to hold with me. It felt the same as telling him she had gone off to college.
“Is Luther around?”
“He is meeting with the gray people.”
“The Dusters? You mean Yaqob’s here?”
The kid just shrugged. I nodded to him, and walked off across a muddy space where a gang of workers was fitting heaps of river stones into carefully raked beds of sand, adjusting their positions with whacks of a wooden mallet. It surprised me to see them do it the old-fashioned way—no weaving. Maybe Luther wanted this place to last longer than the first ‘Burg.
A garden took shape near the entrance, with real plants—local varieties that someone had selected and transplanted—the beginnings of an arboretum. The mansion and its outgrowths had now totally engulfed Bern’s cabin. I thought I recognized part of Bern’s wall embedded in the patchwork.
I came upon a group of soldiers milling and chatting beneath a tiled portico. They wore swirly armor that looked almost elfin, designed more for ceremony than battle protection. I walked right past them, heading towards a propped-open door.
“Oh, no. You can’t go in there!”
“The hell I can’t.”
One guy started after me, but his buddy whispered something to him and he let me go.
I entered a lobby that could have been at home in some corporate office building, without the receptionist booth. There were some slapdash sofas strewn about, crudely woven, not Luther’s style at all. They were likely temporary placeholders. It would take some time to get the place properly furnished.
I heard some voices so I went straight through into an airy, circular chamber with a transparent dome. This was to be another, interior garden. Walkways were interspersed with flower beds not yet populated with plants. At the center, stone benches rose in tiers like a mini Roman amphitheater.
