Read Online Rainbow's End - Wizard by Corrie Mitchell - Free Book Online

of the rest of the bench. His eyes were on the pool of water in which Thomas, Orson, and Tessie had landed three days ago. It lay on their right - just a couple of hundred metres away. Seven brilliant pillars of colour rose from its centre, creating a rainbow that stretched high into the air, before curving away and disappearing over a towering cliff and waterfall. The waterfall tumbled and splashed down a series of natural steps in the rock-face, its entrance into the pool muted and not even heard from where they sat. The laughter and shouts of the children playing on the pool’s banks and in its water, echoed happily through the morning air, and put a contented smile on Big John’s face. His grey eyes (very much like Orson’s) crinkled and smiled with the rest of his face. Thomas kept quiet - content to watch the adult’s enchantment with the happiness of children. The song of the sun-beetles and the friendly sun on his face made the boy all drowsy and sleepy again and he started drifting.
     
    Then Big John spoke. ‘Everything at Rainbow’s End is different, Thomas. Seasons, time, and years as you know it - they don’t exist here. The nights and days - they never vary - their length stays the same. It rains every morning between three and four. It never snows unless Ariana gets a bee in her bonnet, or wants it to. The sun shines but doesn’t burn; it’s never cold, always beautiful - like today.’ He opened his arms as if to embrace the perfect day.
    ‘ Space here… that is also different. You are used to only four dimensions: length, width, depth, and time. Here, none of them can be measured by Earth standards. We have dimensions that physicists on the Earth have not yet begun thinking of… or even dream about. Dimensions within dimensions; space within space; rooms within rooms… Always more, and nothing - or almost nothing - as it seems.
    ‘And time…’ He looked at Thomas.  ‘In your old world Frieda would be in her early fifties.’ He saw disbelief in the boy’s eyes and asked, ‘How old do you think I am, Thomas?’ He was really not very good with ages, but the soft lines and wrinkles on the man’s face were no more or deeper than Sergeant Wilson’s at home in Rockham, and Grammy had told Thomas the bobby was retiring the following year at age sixty-five. That’s what he said now - ‘Sixty-five?’
    John’s eyebrows lifted. ‘You sound quite sure of that,’ he said, and Thomas nodded. The big man waved a hand at something, somewhere in the skies above. ‘Back there,’ he said - ‘on the Earth - I would now be more than a hundred and twenty years old. Here , I am somewhere in my late seventies, but I can pass for a lot less.’ The scepticism still lay in Thomas’ eyes and Big John laughed. ‘Orson would also look younger,’ he said, ‘if he drank less. We are the same age - at least, in Earth time. I know he looks older, but in Rainbow’s End time, he’s actually younger than me. He came here long before I did, and aged a lot slower in that time. We’re twins, you see…’
     
    *****
     
    Desolation…  
    Far, far away, in a small room that was bitterly cold, the black-clad boys wormed and fought their way deeper under their dirty grey blankets. They huddled together and stayed away from the freezing walls; the rock burned anything it touched with cold. They were hiding, too miserable and afraid to talk, and when they whispered, the chatter of their teeth seemed louder than their words. Kraylle’s demented screeches echoed up and down the long passageways, and the boys shivered - not only because of the terrible cold.
    But they would not leave. They could not leave. Desolation and Kraylle’s Castle was their home - to some of them the first and the only they’ve ever had…
    And t omorrow would be better. Rudi said so…
     
    *****
     
    Thomas was tired. Wonderfully, deliciously tired. The day had been like no other he’d ever known. Had he been an adult, his sanity might