His best chance is a sword that tugs him wherever he points it, a cloak that makes semblances do what he says.Ĭole has just started to prove his courage when the slave girl Mira, toward whom he feels protective, finds herself in trouble.
To make his fifty missions count, he has to bring back something to show for them-even if it means running from a giant cross between a scorpion and a centipede. For those who survive, the castles offer treasures, weapons, and enchanted objects to make the risk worthwhile. Some of them are people who can be reasoned with. The castles themselves are inhabited by semblances, more or less conscious temporary illusions of life. Nothing that goes into these cloud walls ever comes out again. The brink is bounded by cloud walls, from which the castles emerge and into which they disappear every day. Raiding the castles is tough work, and not just because of the risk of falling into a bottomless pit. All he really wants to do, though, is escape so he can find his friends. Cole will have the especially deadly job of scout, until he has flown fifty missions-if he lives that long. Average life expectancy is measured in weeks. These folks literally live on the edge of the world, and plunder the castles that float by on clouds. Before he can free them, Cole is betrayed, snatched, marked as a slave, and sold to the sky raiders. Some of them are to be delivered to the High King, who is interested in kids with Shaping potential which is basically Outskirts lingo for magic. Cole’s friends have been captured by a team of slavers, and are being hauled to market. It’s a world where magic, or something like it, is possible. But the hole in the basement floor proves to be a portal to another world-and it’s a one-way trip.Ĭole arrives in the Outskirts. His plan is just to find out where the kids are being taken, so he can report back to the police. Cole manages to hide until everybody has gone down the hole, wondering how anyone could think of getting away with kidnapping so many kids at once. But the basement is already nearly full of caged kids waiting to be forced down a ladder in the floor. When Cole and his sixth-grader friends troop down the basement steps to view a spooky Halloween house of horrors, they’re more worried about whether they’re too old to go trick-or-treating than about being kidnapped.
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