Abomination by Gary Whitta Page B

have just talked himself into. He felt his stomach start to ravel itself into a knot. “I understand,” he said finally, with as much calm as he could muster. “I will try.”
    “Good,” said Wulfric, holding an expectant gaze on Cuthbert.
    It took the young cleric a moment. “Oh! You mean now?”
    “That would be preferable,” Wulfric said with a thin smile. Cuthbert turned a shade paler.
    “I . . . I will need a reflective surface of some kind,” said the young priest. “Something glass or—”
    Cuthbert flinched as Wulfric drew his broadsword, the flat of its blade glimmering in the sunlight that was beginning to peek through the gray cloud-filled sky.
    “Will this suffice?”
    Cuthbert regarded the sword and saw his own face looking back at him. Wulfric made the meticulous maintenance of his weapons and armor a point of pride; the blade was so finely polished it was practically a mirror.
    “I believe it will,” Cuthbert said. “If I may?”
    Wulfric offered him the sword. On taking it in hand, Cuthbert almost toppled over—it was far heavier than he had imagined.
How does he even carry this damned thing around
, he thought to himself as he wrestled with it,
let alone swing it in anger?
    Wulfric and Edgard both took a step back and regarded Cuthbert with great curiosity as he laid the sword on the ground and sat cross-legged before it. He placed the fingertips of both hands on the blade, careful to stay far from the edge—he knew Wulfric kept it as sharp as he kept it shining—then closed his eyes and began to mutter the incantation under his breath. To Wulfric and Edgard it sounded no different from the words they’d heard him use many times before when placing the protective blessings on their armor; it was the same unintelligible, arcane tongue.
    For several minutes they watched him sit, reciting the same lines over and over, seemingly to no effect, and then Edgard grew restless. He leaned toward Wulfric and whispered. “How much longer before we know if this is going to—”
    Then he cut himself off. At that moment he saw something that beggared belief, even after all that he had seen in these past few months. Cuthbert seemed to somehow
shimmer
, becoming momentarily translucent, like gossamer, as though no longer fullythere, before returning to a fully corporeal state. Both knights stared at him, wide-eyed.
    “Did you—” Edgard began.
    “Yes.”
    “What was that?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Cuthbert had now stopped reciting the words; he seemed to be in some kind of trance. Unmoving, like a statue. Wulfric found it disconcerting. The only time he had ever before seen such stillness was in dead men. He watched Cuthbert closely, looking for any sign that he was in fact still alive. At first, he could detect none, then he saw that the young priest was breathing, but so slowly and so shallowly that he barely seemed to be breathing at all. Still, Wulfric did not like this. Since he did not know how this was supposed to work, he had no way of knowing if something had gone wrong.
    “Cuthbert?”
    No response.
    “Cuthbert!” Louder this time. Still, no response.
    Wulfric had leaned toward Cuthbert to rouse him with a shake when the boy’s eyes suddenly snapped open. But Cuthbert was not looking at Wulfric, or at Edgard, or at anything in his field of view that they could discern. His body was still there, but he seemed to be seeing something else entirely, something beyond their perception. And finally, he spoke, his voice low and measured.
    “I am there.”

    For an hour, they watched Cuthbert sit there, motionless save for the occasional flinch or quiver, like someone in the midst of a powerfully vivid dream.
Or a nightmare
, Wulfric thought to himself. And yet Cuthbert’s eyes remained open the whole time, blinking never once, staring into that faraway place. Occasionally hewould shimmer, as before, and become momentarily transparent, as though he were as much in the other place as here