Grail of the Summer Stars (Aetherial Tales) by Freda Warrington

for a minute. “You’re right, you can’t rule out anything. Are you worried this putative enemy might turn up here?”
    “It’s a risk.” Stevie folded her arms, recalling the unease she’d felt in the Manifold house, the impression of dark shadows circling her. A nebulous yet powerful fear squeezed her throat. She couldn’t put her foreboding into words. “We might attract the very person Danny was frightened of.”
    “Then this is bait,” said Fin, her eyes suddenly shining.
    “And that’s a good thing?”
    “Aren’t you curious to see if anyone turns up and shows an interest? Someone who might know what actually happened to Daniel?”

 
    4
    Light Through the Dust
    Rufus woke, deep in the night, startled by a rumbling sound that began far away and rolled closer like a giant train. He tried to get up. The ground dropped beneath him, then bucked, throwing him against the wall of his tent.
    “What the hell—?”
    Earth tremor. Great. Rufus Dionys Ephenaestus looked up at a roof of sagging brown canvas a couple of feet above his nose. Through his thin sleeping bag, he felt the hard dusty earth and several hundred sharp stones digging into his back. What now? Go back to sleep as if nothing had happened? No point in panicking. There was nothing outside but the mountains of a dreary brown no-man’s-land near the borders of Pakistan. Pulling open the tent flap, he looked up at the stars. No light pollution dimmed their magnificence. But he’d had thousands of years to gaze up at those stars and wasn’t impressed.
    It was also bloody freezing.
    Warlords might come upon him, armed with the guns he’d sold them earlier, to steal back their money and leave him for dead. Surely someone would take his Jeep, leaving him in an even worse mess. Any sensible trader would be long gone, whisked back to civilization by a private plane or helicopter. Not Rufus. He couldn’t find the energy to care.
    He worked alone. He made himself an open target, took mad risks, sold consignments of rifles, machine guns and rocket launchers, yet didn’t keep even a handgun to defend himself. Everyone he met thought he was insane, yet he survived. He knew why.
    They were afraid of him.
    That was useful, but the novelty had worn off. In the quiet of the night—whether he was in an African war zone, a Middle Eastern desert or the barren immensity of the Hindu Kush—he thought about his lost brother, Mistangamesh.
    Another tremor came, disturbing, but not enough to push away his thoughts.
    Beautiful, infuriating Mist, who’d accidentally “died” several hundred years ago. Ever since—echoing the legend of Estel the Eternal, who searched tirelessly for the scattered parts of her lover—Rufus had tried to find him, to restore him to life.
    They were Aetherials, undying Aelyr. Mist had to be out there somewhere …
    The tremor began again and the ground reared beneath him. This time the quake meant business, rumbling like a fleet of tanks towards his tent. Rufus tried to grab something solid for support. There was nothing. The Earth itself was rising and falling like the sea.
    Somehow he clawed his way out of the tent, like a drunk negotiating the moving floors of a funhouse. It took forever. The struggle struck him as so ludicrous that he started to laugh hysterically. He couldn’t even shift into the Dusklands, where the world might have been calmer. The earthquake was shuddering through every dimension.
    He emerged on all fours into the open, in time to see his Jeep tumbling into a chasm that had opened in the ground. The vehicle slid from view with a crunch of breaking glass and buckling metal. Rocks and ground lurched violently, torn apart. The sound was overwhelming, deafening. Rufus flung himself to the convulsing earth and lay with his hands over his ears. He was afraid. How thrilling it felt to be afraid for once!
    Presently it stopped.
    He rose to his feet and stared around him, dumbstruck. The air was full of dust. The