Angel Isle

CHAPTER

17

By morning Jex had recovered enough to talk and listen, so he was there when Ribek told the others about that part of the conversation over breakfast (oyster kedgeree). He put Maja’s case fairly enough but then argued so passionately against it that she wondered whether the others might guess something about the part of the conversation he hadn’t told them.

“I don’t like it either,” said Saranja. “She’s been wasting away as it is, despite what Jex has been doing for her. It all depends whether there’s anything else we can try first. If there isn’t, then it’s a question of whether Jex and Benayu think they can actually do what Maja suggests. But if it’s our only chance then I think we’ve got to let her try. Benayu?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought of doing it like that. Off the top of my head I think it might be possible, not quite the way she says because a rag doll is four-dimensional and she wouldn’t survive like that. So she’d have to do something like the Ropemaker must have done and put herself into a different form for the other universe….”

“Could you protect her at all while that’s happening, Jex?” said Ribek.

“No more than partly. And remember that she would also need to endure the stress of following the line left by the Ropemaker’s hair when his name is spoken by one of you. Both the previous times that that has happened she has been very near the limit of what she can stand.”

“Then that’s out,” said Saranja and Ribek together but in different tones.

“Anything else?” Saranja added. “I mean, could you move the eggshell about, for instance?”

“Not a hope…But…Wait…I think there’s just a possibility…If we combine that with Maja’s idea…It’s going to take a lot of thinking. Pure brain-stuff, like I said. No shortcuts. And I’ll still need to talk to Jex. I wish Fodaro were here….”

“Do not forget that I also exist on the other side of your eggshell. I do not understand the equations, but I may still be useful.”

“We wouldn’t have a hope without you. Let’s talk about it when I’ve finished eating.”

The morning passed slowly. When breakfast was over Ribek propped Maja into the crook of a small tree, where she could see almost everything that happened inside the eggshell. Then he brought the saddlebags across, unpacked their contents onto the turf, spread the bedding out to air and sorted and repacked everything else.

Saranja groomed the horses, combed their manes and tails, cleaned a small cut in Pogo’s hock—and goodness, did he make a fuss about it!—and checked the harness. The horses preened their wings with their front teeth as far as they could reach, and then took turns to spread them so that the other two could finish the job. They did this as naturally as if they’d had wings all their lives. So did Sponge, though with his more flexible neck he didn’t need help.

When he’d finished he settled to sleep against the rim of the pool, close to where Benayu sat gazing into the depths of the still water as if he could read the answers to his equations in them. Jex squatted next to him on the stonework. Maja could sense the murmur of his stone voice in her mind, in much the same way that she could faintly hear the rhythm of what Benayu said without being able to distinguish the individual words.

After a long while Benayu rose, stirred Sponge with his foot, lifted Jex down onto the turf and all three came across to Maja’s tree. In the normal course of events Jex didn’t move about much, but when he chose to he did it with an easy, fluid motion, unexpected in so clumsy-looking an animal. Ribek looked up, saw what was happening, and called to Saranja, who came across too.

“You talk to Maja, Jex, and I’ll explain to the others,” said Benayu, and turned to meet them. Jex spoke in Maja’s head.

“Maja?”

“Yes. How are you getting on?”

“There is something we would like to try, but all this is unknown territory.

“The difficulty is that what we are thinking of will become inoperative if I shield you, and you will also need to be to some degree sensitive to external magic if you are to follow the trail to the Ropemaker. So you will have to tell me the moment you feel that it is becoming too much for you.”

“All right. What do you want me to do?”

“Benayu believes that he can construct a much smaller version of what you have been calling the eggshell, just large enough to contain you and therefore light enough to be transported. The form in which I exist in the universe outside the eggshell is largely sedentary, like a sea anemone in your universe. In that form I can, after some preparation, relocate myself over considerable distances. Indeed, I have only a short while ago arrived immediately outside the eggshell, which will make the transfer of large magical impulses between the universes very much easier for me.

“But I cannot follow a trail, as you will need to, to an unknown destination, nor relocate other objects with me except by swallowing them. We doubt whether Benayu’s eggshell would survive the strength of my digestive juices. Our solution is that the dog should carry you, since, being a magical animal, he can exist in both universes.

“The problem then—”

He stopped abruptly and became stone. Something like an immense but soundless explosion battered against the eggshell. Maja couldn’t feel it, but she saw the ground judder, and the whole enclosure seem to heave around as the tree in which she was seated swayed violently to and fro. The stone mermaid toppled into the pool. The horses squealed and reared, wrenching at their tethers and spreading their wings for panic flight. Weird rainbow lights swirled across the surface of the eggshell. Benayu was on his feet, pouring out magical energies, but Maja was impervious to them in her doll form. Saranja was shouting to Ribek to come and help with the horses.

Slowly the turmoil stilled.

“Trouble?” said Ribek mildly.

“The Watchers have found the touching point,” said Benayu. “That was their first shot at breaking through my barrier. I reckon they’ll have suffered, but it was much sooner than I’d expected. Much stronger too. They’re not going to give up. I was wrong. I think they might make it after all. I’ll do something about the horses, like I did yesterday, in case it happens again.”

“How long have we got?” said Saranja.

“I don’t know. But we can’t afford to hang about. Where’ve you got to, Jex? Jex!”

The stone Jex flipped back into its living form.

“Let me try,” Maja told him. “You want to do something to me so that I can tell Sponge where to go? All right. See if it works. I’ll tell you if I can’t stand it.”

“Maja agrees,” said Jex, speaking now to the others.

“Wait,” said Ribek. “I accept that nothing that can happen to her here will be as bad as what would happen to her if she fell into the hands of the Watchers. You’re sure there’s nothing else we can try?”

“I can’t think of anything, and nor can Jex,” said Benayu. “This is far the best chance we’ve come up with.”

“All right,” said Ribek. “You’re going to hang her round Sponge’s neck, I suppose. I’ll do that when you’re ready.”

“This is only a trial,” said Benayu. “I’ll set Sponge up first, and then I’ll do her as gently as I can. Jex will keep in touch, so she can stop the process whenever she wants. If that goes all right she can try guiding Sponge around in here. No point in building the little egg if that doesn’t work, and it’s going to take a bit of time, in any case.”

Ribek grunted and lifted Maja down from the tree. He settled himself down with his back against the trunk. She could just see the back of his right hand across her legs, holding her steady in the crook of his left arm.

“Might as well be comfortable while we’re waiting,” he said. “See all right? Start telling you the rest of ‘The Demon Baker’ while we’re waiting, shall I? I need to take my mind off things just as much as you do. More, probably.”

It didn’t really work. For the first time since she’d known him he let her see how worried he really was. The natural little pauses which storytellers use to sort out in their minds what comes next kept stretching into longer gaps, and then he’d shake himself, say “Sorry,” and go on with the story. Maja didn’t mind. She was aware of being strangely unscared, for someone who had always thought of herself as timid, by what she was soon going to have to try to do. The fact that Ribek really cared about her took up most of her attention.

So she half listened to the story while she watched what Benayu was doing by the pool. He spent some time kneeling with Sponge sitting opposite him. At first he simply cradled Sponge’s head in his hands, looking into his eyes and muttering. Then he asked Saranja to fetch one of Maja’s human socks and gave it to Sponge to sniff. He told Sponge to stay where he was, fetched a handful of soil from the rose bed and dribbled it in a thin stream all the way round Sponge, muttering as he did so.

He was halfway round when another silent explosion battered against the eggshell, but his hand didn’t falter. As soon as the circle was completed it began to glow with a steady pale light, not bright but still visible in the sunless daylight. He straightened, squared his shoulders like someone momentarily easing powerful inward tension, looked briefly round at the eggshell, where the swirls of strange light that had followed the explosion were still dying away, and came across to the pool.

“We’re going to have to speed things up,” he said. “I think that was only a try-out. I took them by surprise first time, and they didn’t get a chance to study what I’d done and start working out how I’d done it. They’ll try something different next time and I’d better be ready for it. I don’t want to be still messing around with this.

“You’re going to have to be able to see what’s happening outside your little eggshell, Maja, and there’s no way I can let you see through it without weakening it fatally, so you’re going to have to see everything through Sponge’s eyes. It’ll be pretty confusing, because of course he’ll actually see them in seven dimensions, but his brain will do its best to switch them into four, as far as it can. It won’t bother him, but you’ll find it pretty confusing.

“I’m telling you that now because you’ll be testing the connection here, inside the big eggshell, in our ordinary four dimensions. You won’t find out what it’s like till you’re on the outside. Ready? Just hang her round Sponge’s neck, Ribek.”

Again the scene swung and tilted as Ribek carried her across the lawn and knelt just outside the circle of pale light. She was facing him now. He was doing his best to smile through his anxiety as he eased her loop over Sponge’s neck. He stood and moved back. Benayu took his place and reached toward her with both hands. She couldn’t feel his touch or see what he was doing, but she guessed it was the same sort of thing he’d been doing to Sponge, because almost at once something started to happen inside her.

It had the familiar tingle of magic, which she hadn’t felt at all in her rag-doll shape despite everything that had been going on around her. It started slowly, becoming steadily stronger, but with nothing like the dizzying impact of powerful magic happening outside herself that she’d learned to bear in her true Maja form.

“All right so far?” asked Benayu. “Tell Jex if you’re not…. Now I’m going to make the connection. I’ve only done it for myself before, and with you as you are…well, it’s a bit tricky. Here goes.”

He rose and stood. She could just see his feet, with an arc of the glowing circle running close in front of them. The glow became stronger, rose, moved inward and passed out of her vision. But now she could feel it, not as though it were touching her on the outside, but moving up inside her body, so that as it passed through her she began to feel for the first time since Ribek had carried her out of the oyster pool where the bits of this new body were—something she’d felt all of her life without noticing, knowing the position of each of her hands and feet, even with her eyes shut.

So now she could tell where Sponge’s four paws—her paws—were, and actually feel the pressure of the ground on her hindquarters where she sat with her tail curled round to her right….

The glow passed over her eyes, too bright for her to see anything but the weave of the fabric on which they were painted, but after a few moments it changed to a darker color and then faded and she was seeing again, only very differently from either of the ways she had seen before, Maja or doll. The colors had changed, become much duller. The whole rose bed was now various tones of browny-green, with a few pale blobs and patches to show which were the white flowers, while the darker and browner bits might be the red ones. She couldn’t tell from their shapes which of the rest were leaves or flowers; they seemed to fade into each other.

On the other hand she could smell all their intense individual scents, and could at the same time tell that the enjoyable reek of the dollop of horse dung behind her on the other side of the pool had been dropped there by Levanter.

“Still all right?” said Benayu (wonderful, godlike Benayu) in a curiously deep voice.

She hadn’t really thought about it, because the change had been all-absorbing, but, yes, the magic was still there, twice as strong now, half of it coming from within her and half from outside, two steady powerful vibrations which might well have been too much for her if they hadn’t balanced each other out, like the two pillars of an archway, each of which can only stand and bear the weight above it because the other one is there.

“Tell him yes, I think so, Jex. It depends what else happens. Shall I try and get Sponge to do something?”

“Try not to think of it like that,” said Benayu, when Jex had relayed the message. “I don’t tell my hand to scratch my ear—I just do it. So it’ll be you doing it, with Sponge’s body. You’ll get used to it. On his own he’d sit there all morning until I told him he could get up. I’m not going to, and you couldn’t make him break that rule simply by telling him to get up. You’re going to have to break it yourself. Just see how it goes.”

It wasn’t as difficult as it sounded. It isn’t a rule for me, she thought, and got up, and then for a while did whatever the body wanted without thinking, eased her muscles after all that sitting by reaching forward with her front legs and then transferring her weight onto them so that her back legs stretched luxuriously out behind her. She unfolded her wings and resettled them, scratched under her chin with her right hind leg and looked around. What next? Ribek, of course. Give him a good lick to show him how much I love him. Like this. Nice.

“That’s enough, Maja,” he said, trying to push her away. “That’s enough!”

No it wasn’t. She might never get another chance. Somebody was laughing. She stopped licking and looked over her shoulder. Saranja and Benayu, both of them, looking as if for the moment they’d totally forgotten the urgency and danger of what they were all four trying to do. She realized that she’d never seen or heard Saranja laughing before. It was an odd sound, almost a guffaw, the strangeness enhanced by her own strange dog-hearing. She realized without any embarrassment or shame that they were both well aware of her besottedness. Had been, probably, for a long time. Never mind. She had another good lick.

“Now stop it!” said Ribek again, struggling with his own laughter. “That’s enough, I tell you, Maja! Can’t you see you’re making Benayu jealous?”

She broke off and trotted over to Benayu, spreading her left wing so that she could rub her flank against his thigh without it getting in the way, to show him that she knew perfectly well where Sponge’s own affections belonged. He bent and rubbed the sensitive area behind her ear. That’s nice too, she thought. Something you miss, being a human.

“So far so good,” said Benayu. “You’ve obviously got the idea. But that’s all dog stuff. Try doing something Sponge wouldn’t normally do.”

The pool was close beside her. She skipped up onto the coping of the wall, but it turned out to be narrower than she’d thought and she had to spread her wings for balance or she’d have toppled in. Once steady she trotted round the rim, still using her wings for balance, hopped down and sat where Sponge had been sitting in the first place.

“All right,” said Benayu. “It’s not going to be so easy outside, mind you, and I can’t help you as I’ve never been there myself. It isn’t just that there’ll be strange things there. You’ll be seeing them strangely. They won’t fit together the way you’re used to. It’ll look something like the bit in your story where Faheel destroyed the Watchers. I’ll give you a few minutes to get used to that, and then I’ll send a warning pulse, so you can count to ten and be ready when Saranja says the name. Then it’ll be up to you. If anything goes wrong just think ‘home’ and Sponge will bring you back.

“Assuming you manage to follow the trail, I don’t know what you’re going to find or what to do about it when you find it. You may have to come back and tell me and I’ll try and work something out. Probably your best bet is to say the name. You can’t actually say it out loud, so you’ll just have to think it as hard as you can.

“Now you’ve got a bit of time while I make your eggshell. Don’t worry about not touching it. It’s going to be small enough for me to put a kind of four-dimensional lining into it. Any other questions you come up with I’ll try and sort out when it’s ready.”

Ribek was still sitting against the tree, so she trotted over and lay down with her head in his lap. His hand teased gently at her ears. Lovely, lovely. This stupid adventure is just an interruption, she thought. Perhaps when it’s over he could get himself a cute puppy, and Benayu could put me into it, and I could be his dog. A dog in his household. Strange that she should be able to think those words, to remember her aunt using them as she’d chained her to the floor of the kennel, without even a tremor of horror. That would be better than nothing, a lot better. And at least it wouldn’t matter then that he’s so much older than I am. We’d be growing old together and I’d probably die first. We wouldn’t be able to go back to Northbeck, though, because that sort of thing doesn’t work in the Valley.

“Don’t you want to watch what Benayu’s doing?” he said.

Not if it means stopping doing this.

He must have guessed her thought.

“Shift round so you can see, shall I?”

They resettled comfortably, but there wasn’t much to see because Benayu was kneeling with his back toward her in the gap in the hedge beyond the rose beds, close to the shell of the egg. His head was bowed over some object he seemed to be holding between his hands, judging by the position of his elbows. His shoulders heaved regularly as if he was taking a series of deep breaths, or more likely blowing onto or into whatever he was holding.

At length he rose and turned. The movement seemed to bring him more sharply into focus, and she was able to see that he did indeed have an egg-shaped something about the size of a man’s head floating between his hands without their quite touching it.

“Sponge! Maja!” he called, urgency in his voice. “Come over here. Hurry. I haven’t got it quite right. Some of our air is getting through to the surface, and it won’t stand a lot of that.”

She let her body react instantly to its own name. She was with him before he’d finished speaking. Close up she could see that the surface of the egg was sprinkled with come-and-go sparks of light—tiny bits of air getting through to it and exploding against it, she guessed, and nibbling away at it as they did so.

“Good boy—I mean girl,” he said. “This is the tricky bit, for you, Maja, as well as me. I’m going to have to tinker with your rag-doll shield a bit so that you’ll be able to sense the trail. No one’s ever done this sort of stuff before, so I’m just going to have to guess. I won’t be able to do that once you’re inside the eggshell. But what I’ll be doing is fairly powerful stuff close up to you, about as much as you can bear, I should think, and you’re going to have to keep old Sponge absolutely stock still while it’s happening. If you kneel that side, Ribek, you can hold his collar with one hand and use your other to keep Maja steady. No, put your fingers together round her cord, close against her head, and keep the rest of your hand as high as you can. That’s better.

“And as soon as I’ve sealed you in, Maja—you’ll feel that because the magic will mostly stop and Ribek will let go of your collar—get up and go and nose your way out through the main eggshell as if you were nosing a door open.

“Ready, everyone? Off we go.”

He knelt and held the egg only a few inches in front of her nose, then bowed his head and began to blow on it, a series of slow, deep breaths. Through her dog-eyes she watched a hollow appear in the top, which deepened and deepened as though the shell were folding in onto itself without becoming any smaller, until it was like the empty shell of a boiled egg. He lowered it out of sight of her dog-vision, but she could still watch its shadowy shape pass downward in front of her faint doll-vision, now that those eyes were seeing it separately. Then the other side of it moved upward, closer, as the shell enclosed her.

“So far, so good,” said Benayu. “Now I’m going to unshield you. Let go of her, Ribek, but hang on to the collar. Ready?”

The impulse came not as a violent blow nor a piercing thrust but as a sudden intense pressure, a pattern of innumerable strands that ignored the fabric and stuffing of her doll form and closed round her inward self and squeezed her yet further inward, smaller and smaller…

She willed herself into utter stillness, not fighting or wrestling against it but simply resisting it, refusing to allow herself to be squeezed out of existence, though by now all there was left of Maja seemed no larger than a single droplet in a haze of fine drizzle. But it’s all here, she thought. Everything. Not just me, Maja. Two whole universes, the one I’ve known all my life—Woodbourne and the Valley, the Empire and all its cities, all its marvels and magicians, and the Pirates and their far country, the whole world, and the stars beyond the sun and moon—and the unknown universe I’m about to enter.

Sustained by that knowledge, she endured until the pressure eased, and all that she had gathered in flowed out again beyond her and became itself again. She could still feel the magical pressure, but with little more discomfort now than she might have felt from slightly too-tight clothing. She must be still inside the egg, she realized, but somehow she was inside Sponge, too, and there was a sort of link between the two. All she could see through her doll eyes now was the bluish weave of her eye-fabric against a vague pearly background, so with a slight effort she put Maja-in-doll aside and concentrated on Maja-in-dog.

Benayu was still there in front of her dog-eyes, looking anxious but at the same time more relaxed.

“That’s all,” he said. “See if you can still talk to Jex.”

“Jex? Can you hear me?”

“Faintly, but well enough. Are you all right?”

“Yes. It was hard for a bit, but it’s better now. Will I still be able to talk to you from outside the big eggshell?”

“Not to me in here, we think, but I will also be there outside, in my other form, so we should be able to continue to converse until you set off on your mission. You will find it difficult to see me at first, but your dog-nose should be able to smell me since smell is not dimension-dependent in the way that sight is, and I presumably smell much the same in both my forms. You are familiar with my odor?”

Of course she was, now. She hadn’t noticed it before, since it was too faint for human nostrils, but for Sponge’s nose almost everything had its own odor. Jex smelled a bit like old sheep droppings mixed with pine needles, a pleasant, homely smell to a sheepdog, but she didn’t like to say so.

“I’m sure I’ll know you, then.”

“Good. You had better leave now, before your shell weakens any further.”

“All right. Say good-bye to them for me.”

She allowed herself the last luxury of leaping up to put her paws on Ribek’s shoulders and lick his face once more. He didn’t resist. His fingers wandered gloriously up and down her spine. She dropped, wagging her tail, turned to the outer eggshell and pushed firmly into it. There was a sharp tingling in her nose, making her sneeze violently. She closed her eyes before the tingling reached them as she pushed on. Her fur stood up stiffly the moment it reached the barrier, and the tingling flowed on down the skin beneath it, a strange feeling, too intense for pleasure but still just less than pain. It had reached her rib-cage by the time her muzzle emerged on the far side.