Angel Isle

CHAPTER

7

“Maja.”

The voice in Maja’s head seemed as level and toneless as ever, but somehow different, as though the rock from which it came was no longer granite, but something lighter and less enduring

“Oh, Jex, thank you! We’d all four be dead without you.”

“No thanks are due. I in my turn would be dead without you. In human terms I am now convalescent. Until I regain the true balance between my two modes of existence I will return to the form of a pendant that you can wear around your neck.”

“But it will be you now, not just an, um, extension of yourself?”

“Yes, I will be fully there, but protected from excessive magical input. Unfortunately that will also mean that I am unable to protect you from it. However, I will automatically be shielding you from everyday magic more effectively than I have recently been able to do.”

“I’m getting stronger, I think. I like being able to feel what’s going on, most of the time.”

“Wear me against your skin and I will give you all the protection I can. With clothing in between I will give you less. If you do not wish for my help at all, put me in your pouch. One more thing. I still cannot act with confidence in the material world of either of my existences, so except in an emergency I will continue to speak to you in dreams.”

“This isn’t a dream. You make dreams up, though you don’t realize that’s what you’re doing. This is happening while I’m asleep, but it’s real.”

“Yes it is real, just as the danger we are in is real. Two dangers. First, since I was unable to prevent it, the Watchers must surely have been aware of what Benayu did last night. They still have to recover from the major effort of summoning their storm, and then for a day or two they will be fully occupied in repairing their protective web over Tarshu. We must be far from here before they start to look for us, leaving no magical trail. Benayu would leave such a trail, faint but not too faint for a good magician to detect if one was to come looking, as one surely will. So would Zald-im-Zald and Rocky….”

“What about the other two? Chanad did things to Levanter and Pogo….”

“Chanad?”

“A magician we met on the way. She was all right. She said she was the last of the Andarit. She—”

“Tell me later. I cannot keep contact with you very long. The horses. Yes, probably they will now leave a faint trail. But if you and I follow last of all I will absorb all such traces. That is the best we can do.

“Secondly, I myself am a source of danger. Another creature of my kind may by an error of judgment have betrayed our presence in this universe to the Watchers, so…”

He paused for two or three seconds, and went on as if there’d been no interruption.

“…if that is the case, they would be hunting us by every means at their disposal, but for their preoccupation with repelling the Pirates. If they were to find me, they would find you. As it is, all of my kind are in hiding for the time being and dare not communicate with each other as we are used to doing, so I can no longer bring news of the Watchers’ activities. We will henceforth have to guess. Do you understand?”

“Yes. But I still want to say thank you. And I’m glad it’s me you can talk to.”

“I reciprocate your gladness.”

“Wait. Now we’ve got to look for the Ropemaker. How do we do it? Where do we start?”

“I had intended to ask among my friends. I cannot now do that. I will consider the matter.”

She slid back into dreamlessness until something began to snag at her sleeping mind. She woke, and knew it was something Jex had said. Just one word. She had a vague feeling it was something she wasn’t supposed to know. He’d made a mistake, hesitated, and then gone on. Perhaps she’d remember in the morning, when she was telling the others. She lay for a while looking up at a few stars shining through a gap in the branches overhead, and wasn’t aware of falling asleep again, but she must have done, because now the trees were gone and the sky was full of stars, far, far too many of them.

In her dream she pushed herself up and looked around. She’d been lying alone on an empty hillside. Close beside her in the turf glimmered a little circular pool. She put her hand on the rim and leaned over the pool, propping her weight on her arm. The reflected sky seemed to rush toward her. Pool and hillside were gone and she was falling into the reflected sky. Moons and stars streamed past. Great cloudy masses, dark or glowing, floated by. Now all were gone and she was falling toward the last star of all, the very end of everything.

And now she was standing on a hillside much like the one she had left. Directly in front of her rose the doorway to Chanad’s tower. There was no tower, though, no moat, only the wooden door itself, the arch that held it, and the carved face above.

She watched the door open of its own accord. Immediately beyond was another door, so close that they must have been almost touching. It was made of…she didn’t know what. A sort of solid mist, it looked like, twinkling all over its surface with innumerable flickers of light, no sooner glimpsed than gone. She became aware of the magic of all the worlds rushing past her and on through the closed door as if it weren’t there, like the tumbling flurry of a mill race through a sluice. That was what caused the door to flicker as it did.

But it wasn’t a door in any case, she realized. It was only as far as she could see. It wasn’t dark beyond that point. There was light there, but it wasn’t her kind of light. There was stuff beyond, and movement, and happenings, but…

“Your eyes were not made for such seeing,” said a sweetly soft voice overhead. “Nor your mind for such imagining.”

She looked up expecting to see that the stone face at the top of the arch was flesh now, but the arch was gone, and the door, and she was awake under the trees, looking up at some different stars shining through a gap in the branches.

The word that had snagged on her mind had been “this.”

“Another creature of my kind may by an error of judgment have betrayed our presence in this universe to the Watchers.”

So there was another universe where Jex might have been present.

With that knowledge safe in her mind she fell asleep, dreamless once more, and when she next woke it was broad daylight.

She was still blinking in its brightness when she realized that something important had changed. Though she was being gently shielded from all the magic around her, that must be Jex, because her amulet wasn’t doing anything. She forced her eyes open and peered mistily at it. Last night she had felt its beads splintering under the magical stress they were trying to shield her from. Now they were all but one gone. That remaining one was a dull black sphere that had never shown any sign of life at all. She had sometimes wondered what it was for. Perhaps a different form of magic, one they hadn’t met yet, so she’d better go on wearing the amulet, just in case. Anyway, it would do as a sort of luck charm.

The others were talking in low voices. She groaned and sat creakily up. Saranja had a fire going and Ribek was gutting a fish to grill over it. Benayu was staring at the thin smoke, pale-faced and troubled-looking, but apparently fully aware and listening to what Ribek was saying.

“…but if they’ve got it right—rivers don’t always, this far from the source, and they’d only picked it up from some gulls who’d flown in to escape the fighting—three of the Watchers and several other magicians who were helping them died in the battle and the rest are too busy repairing the damage to do anything else, so with a bit of luck there won’t be any dragons for a while, or hawks or wild dogs, and we can take the easiest route out, though I’ve no idea where we are going now.

“Hello, Maja. Ready for breakfast? I hope you slept well. You needed it.”

“I still do—I could sleep for ever. But I’ve got something important to tell you. It’s from Jex.”

She explained, again somehow remembering every word.

“He’s right, of course,” said Benayu. “It’s not just the dragon. I messed around with their tempest. They’ll have felt that…. Oh, yes, they’ll have felt that.”

Something about him had changed in the night. Two things. He now looked openly scared and wasn’t trying to hide it, but under the creakiness of his voice there was a note of satisfaction. Last night, up on the naked hillside, he had fought the first skirmish in his war against the Watchers, and won. If he could do it once, he could do it again.

“You’re not going to be tackling the Watchers all by yourself,” said Saranja briskly. “We’re going to find the Ropemaker before that.”

“It’ll take more than him.”

“Then we’ll find more than him,” said Ribek.

“Perhaps the Sheep-faces have been sent to help too,” said Ribek.

“Look,” said Benayu impatiently. “The one thing we do know is what Jex said—we’ve got to get away from here before the Watchers pull themselves together enough to start looking for us. We can think about what happens next when we’ve done that. Till then it doesn’t matter which way we go, provided it’s as far from Tarshu as possible and as quickly as possible. And we’d better keep well clear of the way we came, because there’ll still be a bit of a trail there.”

“That’s a thought,” said Ribek. “Jex is going to wipe out our new trail, so suppose we follow the old one for a bit and then branch off, with luck they’ll think we’re still going back the way we came.”

“Right,” said Saranja, rising fluidly to her feet. “Come along, horses—finished your breakfast? Lazy times are over…. We’re going to have to let them take it a bit easy to start with—they’ll be stiff as timber after last night, and it looks like Levanter’s a bit lame in his off fore.”

Twenty minutes later they were on their way.

The horses were in better shape than Saranja had feared, apart from Levanter’s mild lameness, so to spare him and at the same time put as much ground as possible between themselves and Tarshu, Ribek and Maja rode Rocky while Saranja activated the jewel in Zald and loped unwearying beside them. Still half shattered by yesterday’s efforts Maja dozed most of the way, with shreds of her dream sifting again and again into her sleep and the same thoughts and questions recurring and recurring when she woke. She kept in particular remembering Benayu raising his two hands in front of him, palm to palm and almost touching, and then, when he noticed what he was doing, snatching them apart and laying them in his lap.

Two hands, two doors, two universes.

He’d been about to explain how Fodaro had caused the explosion, and then decided it was too dangerous for them to know. Something had to be got just right. Too little, and nothing would happen. Too much, and you got what Fodaro had got. The two things—not hands, not doors; they were just ways of picturing it—the two universes must barely touch for the briefest possible instant. But Fodaro had overdone it—overdone it on purpose, perhaps—just to make sure.

And the reason why it was impossible, even for Fodaro, to imagine the reality behind his equations was that what the equations described was the reality of an unimaginable universe. This was part of the hidden knowledge, the truth that was too dangerous for her to know. She was guessing, of course, but at the same time she was certain. And certain too that she needed to know it.

The storm must have traveled far inland. They slept that night in the still-standing half of an isolated barn. A falling beam had broken the back of one of the sheep that must have taken shelter there when the storm struck, so they ate fresh roast meat for the first time in many days, and Maja snuggled down into the straw dozily content despite her weariness and anxiety, and fell asleep to the sound of Sponge gnawing the chop bones.

“I’ve been trying to think about the old story,” said Saranja as they breakfasted off liver and kidneys. “I’ve never done that before—it was just a stupid story, as far as I was concerned, but until Jex tells us what to do, it’s pretty well the only clue we’ve got. What I was thinking was that Tilja and the others were in exactly the same fix as we were, looking for Faheel when he could have been anywhere in the Empire. I always thought that one of the stupidest bits was the way they did it—with a wooden spoon, for heaven’s sake! The point was it had been carved from a tree which had grown from the stone of a peach from Faheel’s garden. That was enough of a connection for the thing to know where he was and point that way. We can do better than that. We’ve got an actual hair from the Ropemaker’s head.”

“Of course!” said Ribek. “And right at the beginning he’d hidden it in the Valley, where there aren’t any other magicians. A clue we were the only ones could find. Just in case it was needed. What about it, Benayu?”

“Well,” he said slowly, “it would be worth a try…. Yes…If Maja…No, doing it isn’t a problem, apart from two things. Hiding what we’re doing from the Watchers is something else. For a start we wait till we’re a lot further away from Tarshu. Even then it’s going to be tricky. Saranja will have to take the hair off the feathers, and that will make both of them strongly magical, but I think I can screen that. Jex and Maja—it’s got to be her, and that’s one problem—will have to wait outside the screen and when everything’s ready Saranja will bring the hair to her and whisper the name. That’s going to send out another colossal signal, and Jex is going to have to try to stop it getting through to the Watchers while Maja follows what happens. But you can’t do that if you’re screened or shielded, that’s the other problem. It will probably lay you out for a bit, like it did at Tarshu, but maybe when you come to…I don’t know.”

“It’s a lot to ask her,” said Saranja.

“I could hear Jex then, even when I was unconscious,” said Maja. “Perhaps it will be like that. Anyway, we’ve got to try. I’ll talk to Jex, if he’ll come.”

She called to him as she lay down to sleep.

“Please come, Jex. I need to talk to you.”

He answered, again in the pit of the night.

“Maja? What is it?”

She explained.

“Yes,” he said, after a pause. “It would be possible, but very dangerous. And Benayu is right, it will be too great an output for me to absorb completely. Nor do we want to confine the magic only to the area around us because we need it to reach as far as where the Ropemaker is hidden. I can perhaps conceal what you are doing from the Watchers in Tarshu, but not from anywhere else. But I cannot at the same time give you, personally, any more protection than I am now doing.”

“I don’t want to be shielded. I’ve got to feel what the hair does when Saranja says the name. I think I can stand it, if I’m ready for it.”

“We have a little time, since we need to be further from Tarshu before we make the attempt, and I hope to be stronger by then.”

“So do I. Don’t go, please. I’ve worked something out. It’s stuff you and Benayu said was too dangerous for us to know. I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it.”

“What is the nature of this knowledge?”

She told him. He paused again before answering.

“It is not your fault but mine, for using the word. I was tired, and did it inadvertently. If the Watchers discover what you know, they will eventually seek both to use it in this universe and to dominate others. You observed the effect of Fodaro’s causing a minor contact between two universes. Imagine the possible effect of the Watchers’ meddling. They could destroy the world by one mistake, or they could deliberately destroy other worlds that refused to accept their domination.”

“What shall I say to Ribek and Saranja?”

“I suggest you wait until we have seen the result of your experiment with the Ropemaker’s hair.”

“All right.”

Four days later they crested a line of hills and looked down on an Imperial Highway running along the bottom of the next valley. It was a warm, still afternoon, with a few slow cloud islands floating toward the unseen ocean.

“Left or right when we get there?” said Ribek, and pointed eastward. “Tarshu’s back that way. Right, Maja?”

The flare of continued magical energies around the besieged city was fainter now with distance, but still vivid to her extra sense the moment Jex relaxed his protection. She nodded. The road below ran roughly north and south, so either way would be equally likely to take them further from it. Benayu sighed heavily.

“Better get it over, I suppose,” he muttered. “We don’t want a lot of people milling around us when we give it a go. There was a place a little way back.”

“You’re sure you’re up to this, Maja?” said Saranja.

“I’ve got to be. It’s what I’m here for.”

The place was a long-abandoned sheep-fold. On Benayu’s instructions, he and Saranja and Ribek settled with the horses in a corner formed by two of the rough stone walls, and he constructed a screen around them. Maja stayed close outside the fold, where a slab of fallen masonry made a level surface. She checked the position of Tarshu, walked a dozen paces toward it and settled the little stone pendant that was Jex onto a boulder. He seemed to quiver for a moment, and became the blue and yellow lizard she’d last seen on the mountainside.

Much encouraged, she returned to the slab, spread her spare blouse across it, and sat cross-legged on the ground.

“Ready,” she called, and waited unshielded. She could feel the blank space that Benayu’s screen made in the busy shimmer of general background, but because the screen was there she felt nothing of the moment when the hair was unwound from the quills, only the appalling jolt of power when Saranja hurried out through the screen with it.

She reeled, but somehow held on, sensing rather than seeing Saranja’s movements as she crouched, laid the gold thread out across the coarse green cloth of the blouse, and hunkered down to put her arm around Maja’s shoulders.

The hair blazed in Maja’s mind, a single narrow streak, without light, without heat, but still with the ferocity of the blast from a roaring stove when the door is opened a crack. She flinched from it, and would have reeled away, but Saranja’s strong arm held her steady. Slowly she schooled herself to endure the blast, as a smith learns to endure the white heat of the metal he draws from his furnace so that he can hammer and shape it to his purposes.

Now, knowing what she could stand, she drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders.

“Ready,” she said.

Saranja breathed the name.

As the world went black Maja felt her shudder with the jolt of power. Then sight, smell, hearing, touch, taste, all were lost. But something remained, something beyond the reach of any normal sense. The single thread of the Ropemaker’s hair still blazed in her mind with its strange, dark fire. And since it was all there was in her universe she clung to it, studied it, reaching out along it to wherever it led. It was a streak of pure power, power with life, a single living purpose. It yearned for one small spot in all the enormous Empire. There.

The power blanked out as suddenly as it had struck. There was a salty, fishy, weedy smell in her nostrils, far stronger than the salt sea breeze that had been blowing up the slope from the Bay of Tarshu.

“Well done,” said the stone voice, slow and grating. “I too am very shaken. That was more than I was prepared for. I could not absorb it all. We must leave. Tell them.”

Then silence and darkness for a while. She became aware that she was standing rigid as a stone pillar, with her left arm stretched in front of her pointing. There was someone either side of her, holding her upright. Saranja’s voice spoke urgently in her ear.

“Maja! Maja! Are you there? Oh, gods! Maja!”

“That way,” she mumbled. “On the coast. I could smell the sea.”

Her body went limp and Ribek eased her down, then stayed crouching beside her, his arm round her shoulders. She opened her eyes and saw Benayu and Saranja looking down at her.

“Jex says we must go,” she said. “He couldn’t absorb it all. I’ll get him.”

“You stay there,” said Ribek. “Saranja…”

“No. I want to.”

He helped her rise and she stumbled off. Jex had returned to being the stone pendant, which was lying on its side next to the boulder. She picked it up, dismayed, and cradled it between her two palms. At once a little of his day-long protection closed itself around her, weaker than it had been even immediately after Tarshu. And something else. Normally she could feel none of his alien magic at all, but nursing him like that she imagined she could sense the strange life, electric inside the granite, but only fitfully there.

“…judging by the sun,” Ribek was saying when, moving more steadily now, she carried Jex back to the others, “and Maja was pointing a bit east of that, so it could very easily be on the coast. Any idea how far, Maja?”

“Oh, a long way. It’ll take days and days. And Jex said it was more power than he’d expected. He couldn’t absorb it all.”

“You mean some of the signal could have got through to Tarshu?” said Benayu.

“I don’t know,” said Maja. “He seemed tired. I think he’s only just hanging on.”

“What about you?” said Ribek. “You took a beating too. Can you stand any more?”

“If it’s just ordinary stuff. Jex is still doing something. I don’t need my amulet. I’ll be all right, provided we don’t run into anything heavy.”

“I’ll do what I can if we do,” said Benayu with a sigh. “But…”

“If we do, you’re going to be busy,” said Saranja. “All the more reason to get away from here. Looks as if the Highway runs pretty well due north. I don’t like Highways, but you get along a lot faster.”

“And there’ll be more hedge magic for Jex to absorb,” said Maja. “That’s what he needs.”

“Like feeding an invalid?” said Ribek. “Little and often, no mighty blow-outs.”

“We need him well,” said Benayu earnestly. “Even if he can’t talk to his friends and tell us what’s happening, he’s much more useful than having me keep screening anything I do. I can, but it wears you out after a while. Anyway, let’s go.”

It was one of the smaller Highways, with only two lanes of traffic in either direction, one for noblemen and senior officials, and one for everyone else. In places it was so busy that they could only shuffle along, but then the crush would thin and they could make good speed. Most of the people going north were trying to get away from the fighting, while company after company of soldiers marched by on the southbound road.

The way station where they stopped that night was a small and homely one, used to catering to no more than a few dozen travelers, but tonight it was as crowded as a city market. The news was all gossip. According to the official announcements the attack on Tarshu was only another Pirate raid, which the Watchers had well in hand, but the travelers agreed that whole regiments were swarming ashore, armed with weapons just as strange and just as formidable as the airboat. Without their magicians the Imperial armies would have been mown down like grass in a hayfield. One man claimed—he’d heard it from another man whose sister was married to the mayor of a town further south—that the troops they had seen marching by would be paraded in front of three of the Watchers before they went into battle. The Watchers would combine their powers to enspell them, company by company, and send them on to fight, fearless, tireless and invulnerable.

“Yes, it could be done,” said Benayu. “You’d need to borrow all of each man’s future life and pack it into a single day of fighting, so that when the day was over he would be as old as his destiny decreed. He’d not live long after sunset.”

“Well, that’s more Watchers too busy to look for us,” said Ribek cheerfully.

“I don’t know,” said Saranja. “If I were a man, I’d be…Look.”

She waved an arm toward the crowded way station.

“Notice something? A lot of men on their own, don’t you think? If they were just trying to get clear of the fighting they’d be bringing their families. What they’re running away from is being rounded up and enspelled and sent to fight. So the next thing that’s going to happen is that the Watchers will start raiding the way stations and rounding them up that way. They’d pick you up, and Benayu too. Unless Benayu can screen us.”

Benayu shook his head.

“Not from a Watcher,” he said. “All right, I’ve done it once, but they were in a hurry. I’m not ready to try again.”

“Back to the byways, then?” said Ribek. “Ah, well. I like the road life. Bustle. Gossip. We get a surprising amount of that at the mill, with all the comings and goings. A right old scandal exchange, we are. I miss it. There’s several good juicy stories I left halfway through.”

“Nothing like at my warlord’s fortress, I’ll bet you,” said Saranja. “Most of the time there wasn’t anything else for the women to do, and I don’t miss it at all.”

Lying in the way station that night, Maja dreamed her dream again. It began in the same way, waking on an empty hillside, looking up at the stars, turning to look at them again in the little pool, falling into the pool, plunging down between the stars to the very end of the universe to where the magical doorway rose on another naked hillside. This time something began to stir in the unreachable elsewhere beyond the door. A shadowy shape. Monstrous. Human-shaped, but all wrong. Tall as a tall man as far as the shoulders, but the head above that reaching almost to the top of the arch, and twice as wide at the top than it was at the bottom. “Help me. Trapped,” it said in Maja’s head and at that moment it stopped being frightening. The head wasn’t monstrous, it was just huge. In fact it was vaguely familiar. In her dream she searched for the memory.

Then, as happens in dreams, she was no longer looking at the door but sideways, across the slope. A Watcher stood there. He could have been the one who had come to the way station, and like him he was turning slowly round, studying the whole scene. At the moment he was sideways on to Maja and turning away from her, which meant that he would see the doorway before he saw her. It was for some reason desperately important that he shouldn’t do that. That was why she was here. She did the only thing she could think of.

“Here!” she called. “I’m here!”

He stopped turning away and swung just as slowly back toward her.

Terror woke her.

That part was only the old nightmare, she thought as the shudders died away. It didn’t mean anything. But the part before…Awake now, she searched again for the memory, uselessly, of course, until she gave up, turned on her side and drifted back toward sleep. In the shadowy borderland on the edge of oblivion it came to her.

The story. Tilja, bound and helpless in the robbers’ cave. The shape of another prisoner, black against the moonlit opening of the cave. Horrifying until he had by his magic set them all free and Tilja saw him again outside the cave and realized that he was only a tall thin man wearing an outsized turban. That had been Tilja’s first meeting with the Ropemaker. Satisfied, she slid back into dream and spoke to Jex in her head.

“I don’t know if you can hear me, but I need to talk to you. I think the Ropemaker’s trapped in the other universe somehow, but when we used the hair it told us to go to somewhere in the Empire. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Tell Benayu,” came the faint reply.

Waking again in broad daylight, she lay for a little while assembling her thoughts. She didn’t see how she could tell Benayu about her dreams without telling the others, which was what she wanted to do anyway. By the time she was up they were already halfway through breakfast.

“You still look all in,” said Ribek. “We left you because we thought you needed the sleep.”

“I’m all right,” she said. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you. Jex told me to wait till after we’d seen what the Ropemaker’s hair told us. He can’t help at the moment. He still isn’t strong enough.”

She told them about her dreams, and what she thought they had meant. They waited for Benayu.

“All right,” he said with a sigh. “I suppose it makes life easier. It’s a bit of a strain, always having to remember whenever you say anything there’s stuff you mustn’t let on about. According to Fodaro there are lots of universes, but as far as we’re concerned there are only two that matter, ours and Jex’s. They’re completely different because ours has four dimensions—length, breadth, height and time—and Jex’s has seven. They aren’t just our four with three we haven’t got, because however many you’ve got they have to add up to a whole. Our four already do that, so in Jex’s universe they have to be different, to make room for the other three. There’s something like our length, but it isn’t the same, and so on. They have two dimensions of time.

“This is what Fodaro’s equations are all about. They are true in both universes.

“It’s no use trying to imagine what a seven-dimensional universe is like, because you’ve got a four-dimensional mind, four-dimensional eyes and so on. You can’t make sense of it. And you can’t go there and find out. If you could somehow get into a seven-dimensional universe the stuff you are made of wouldn’t make sense. It wouldn’t just cease to exist. It would be destroyed, and all the seven-dimensional stuff it was in contact with would also be destroyed, and there’d be a colossal explosion in both universes. The explosion Fodaro set off was caused by a contact lighter than this….”

He raised his two forefingers and lightly touched their tips together for a moment.

“So the Ropemaker can’t be actually in Jex’s universe, and Maja’s dream is only a dream,” said Saranja.

“Yes, he can. He can do it by magic. Magic is a sort of leakage between the universes. It isn’t actual material stuff. Fodaro used to say it’s a bit like light. Light isn’t stuff, but it’s there. It does things to stuff. Plants feed on it. If you try to grow plants in the dark they’ll grow for a bit but they won’t make green leaves and however well you treat them in other ways, they’ll die.

“Magic is leakage from the other universe that doesn’t make sense in ours, but it isn’t destroyed because it isn’t material stuff. So if you know how you can use it to change the stuff of our universe in ways that don’t make sense….”

He picked up a pebble, gazed at it for a moment and then put it back on the ground, where it turned itself into a beetle, raised its wing sheaths and buzzed angrily away, as if far from pleased at being roused from its peaceful sleep as a pebble.

“Like that,” he said. “Where was I? Yes, well, there are places where the two universes, ours and Jex’s, almost touch. Mostly it’s only one or two in each world. Or none. But there are quite a few in our world, and they’re almost all in the Empire. Fodaro said that there were mathematical reasons for this—something to do with a thing called a nexus in Jex’s universe—but it’s why there’s a lot of magic in the Empire and almost none anywhere else. He called these places touching points. He found one in the pasture.

“Anyway I think there are two possible ways of getting into Jex’s universe, but one of them you’d need Fodaro’s equations for, so the Ropemaker must have used the other one. You’d have to be a pretty good magician to do it, but he was.”

“Is, if Maja’s dream’s right,” said Saranja.

“Yes, is. Your anima, your inmost self, is a bit like light. It isn’t stuff, but it’s there. It can’t do anything, though—can’t act in the material world, like Jex told Maja—except inside a living creature. So what the Ropemaker would have to do is find a safe form and a safe place in which he could leave his material self—it’d have to be somewhere near a touching point—and put his anima into something like a bird, and then fly to the touching point and project his anima into a living creature on the other side, and then use that as his body to do what he wanted there. He wouldn’t be able to take anything material with him, mind you, the time ring for instance, though it’d be a hideous risk to leave that behind.”

“He’s a bit of a risk taker, by all accounts,” said Ribek.

“It’s always a risk, whenever you try anything new. But maybe. So if Maja’s dream is right, what we’re going to have to do is find where he’s left his material self—that’ll be where the hair was trying to reach to—and then take it to the Ropemaker’s anima in the other universe….”

“You said you couldn’t take stuff—bits of this universe,” said Saranja.

“I’ve got to take you, haven’t I? This is all going to be really big magic, at least as big as anything we’ve done so far. Bigger than getting Jex back. It’ll take all I’ve got. There’s no way I can do it and screen it at the same time, so the Watchers are going to be on to us in an instant. I’m not going to leave you three and Sponge and my material self behind for the Watchers to mess around with while I’m gone.

“I tell you, I ought to be able to do it. It’s in the equations. But I’m scared. I’ve been scared ever since the Watcher came to the way station. Saranja had to hit me to make me deal with the dragon back at Tarshu. Sometimes I wish Fodaro had never found the touching point, never worked out his equations. Sometimes I wish I’d never been born the way I was.”

“We don’t,” said Saranja. “We like you the way you are.”

“Nothing wrong with being scared,” said Ribek. “When things are scary I’d much rather trust myself to someone who knew they were than someone who didn’t.”

Maja didn’t say anything. She was scared too.

Maja was strongly on Saranja’s side about not traveling by the Imperial Highways. For all its life and interest she had soon wearied of the great one they had used on their way south, and even after so short a time on this smaller one she was strangely glad to get away from it. Since, for Benayu, changing his shape to a bird’s was little more than hedge magic, which the Watchers weren’t likely to notice, he was able to scout out tracks and byways again, and as they wound their way peacefully north along them, she discovered why she liked them so much better.

Tarshu had changed her. The effect was partly hidden at first as they passed through bare, sheep-cropped downland, completely emptied of people, all evacuated by the Watchers during the siege of the city. Then, as they moved further from the battle, the landscape changed, with the hills less steep and the valleys wide. There were farmhands working in the interlocking stone-walled fields, driving cattle out from milking to the lush pastures, or hoeing amid healthy half-grown crops.

She was wearing Jex with the cord looped round her neck and the pendant tucked into the pocket of her blouse, and enjoying whatever he let pass of the gentle, almost unnoticeable, magical essences in everything around her—an effect like birdsong in woodland, she thought; after a while you don’t notice it, unless a pigeon coos right overhead, but it’s there, all the time. They were walking along a deep-cut lane, steep banks with walls atop, and approaching a bend. Beyond it, still out of sight, were three people, two men and a boy. She could sense and distinguish their separate essences, even their mood. The men were laughing and the boy wasn’t happy.

She rounded the bend with the others and there they were, in a gateway a little distance further on. The boy, about nine years old, must have fallen in a cowpat or something, because one of the men was crouching beside him trying to clean him up with handfuls of grass from the roadside. Both men obviously thought it a good joke. The boy did not.

Ribek, typically, stopped to chat, offering them his water flask to help with the clean-up. He caught up at a trot a couple of bends further on.

“Nothing new,” he said, panting slightly. “They keep pretty well up to date. The Highway’s only a couple of valleys away over there. They hadn’t heard about the Watchers taking men away and enspelling them to fight the Sheep-faces. Perhaps it’s only a rumor that fellow we met had picked up. You probably get a lot of that sort of thing in wartime. You should have heard some of the stories that came up to the mill when the horsemen first attacked.”

“If it’s only a rumor we’d be better off on the Highway,” said Benayu. “We’d get on twice as fast. Three times. Saranja?”

“Maja, would you be able to tell from here if a Watcher came to the Highway?” said Saranja.

The moment she concentrated, the Highway was there, laid out in her mind as if she’d been standing on a hillside looking down on it. Over to the left a way station, almost empty at this time of day. There was some kind of minor hedge magic being practiced there. On either side of that a ribbon of slowly drifting pulses, travelers on the Highway unconsciously beaming out their individual signals, the natural magic that they had brought into the world with them when they were born and that would leave them only when they died. That was what she had picked up a little while ago when they had been approaching the bend and, before she saw them, she’d known about the three people they’d meet as soon as they were round it. She couldn’t have done that before Tarshu.

Yes, Tarshu had changed her.

“I’d know,” she said confidently.

“Let’s go on as we are, then, for the moment,” said Saranja, “and Maja can tell us if anything like that starts happening. We haven’t been doing too badly. These valleys all seem to run roughly north-south, so the lanes do too, mostly. If we get to a point where Benayu can’t find a good way ahead for us we can go back on the Highway for a bit.”

All the rest of that day Maja walked or rode in silence, thinking. Her companions seemed to recognize her need and let her be. No, it hadn’t been only Tarshu that had changed her. Perhaps the overwhelming blast of the moment when the speaking of the Ropemaker’s name had summoned Jex back across the universes had begun the change, but the real work had been done three days further north, by the old sheep-fold, when she had laid one strand of his hair out on the rock beside her and let the whisper of his name blast her into a kind of elsewhere. The journey had finished somewhere in the Empire—she was sure of that—but it hadn’t gone through the Empire to reach it. It had gone through some other kind of space. Unimaginable. For a moment she stood on the hillside of her dream staring through the magical doorway at—at but not into—the unimaginable universe beyond.

Whatever else had happened, that was the moment that had finally changed her. She had come into her own, an inheritance that had been waiting, perhaps through many generations, for her to discover and use.

A troublesome gift. In a way she had known that all along, ever since, hiding under the barn at Woodbourne, she had first been overwhelmed by the shock-wave of magic when Saranja had given Rocky his wings. Even before they had reached Tarshu, without her amulet to protect her she would have been lost. The same now, if they ran into any more serious magic, without Jex.

Without Jex? She looked around.

For some time they had been climbing in single file up a narrow path, little more than a sheep track, that slanted up the side of a hill with the valley beneath them on their right, seeming to stretch further and further into the distance as they climbed. Maja was riding Levanter, with Ribek striding just ahead of her. If they continued on this line they would reach the crest and look down on the Imperial Highway. There was a small town there, not unlike Mord. If she concentrated her whole attention on it she could feel the buzz of its comings and goings, with bits and pieces of hedge magic, and a sort of numb spot, perhaps where something more serious was being warded. She could even feel the endless small fidgetings of the magical trinkets in its market. Deliberately she unlooped the stone pendant from her neck and put it in her pouch.

She reeled. Automatically she flung up her right arm to shield her face. All the world’s magic seemed to be battering against her. She was crammed into a tiny cell with Ribek and Saranja, Benayu and Sponge and the horses, all bellowing their separate magics into her ears. She was stripped naked on the hillside with the hailstorm of minor magics of grass and shrub, gravel and boulder and soil, ant and grasshopper and fly, lizard and snail, streaming against her too-tender skin, while her whole body vibrated to the deep, slow pulse of the centuries-enduring hills.

Her hand was already reaching into her pouch. Not yet, she thought. I must learn about this. It is part of my gift. I can use it.

Slowly she mastered herself, forced herself to ignore the immediate intense assault. To reach out into it, through it and see what she could find. It was like a winter morning once at Woodbourne when she had woken early to look for a hen. It had been missing the night before though she had searched and searched until it was time for her to come in and set the table for supper. It would have meant a word as bitter as a blow from her aunt if she’d been late for that. The hen would have been no excuse—less than no excuse, as it would have been her carelessness to lose it—so she hadn’t dared tell anyone.

But it had come to her in the night where the bird might be. So, in the faintest of faint hopes, she had risen and dressed and slipped down the stair in the dark and lit a lantern and opened the door, into a blizzard.

She had heard the wind in the dark and expected storm weather. But not this. These sudden buffeting gusts from every which-where, almost solid in their strength and from the thick, swirling white flakes they bore, hurling into the tiny globe of light from the fluttering lantern flame and on into the dark. Again and again she had to force her eyelids up as they tried to close themselves against the slashing icy particles that whipped into her face, so that she could peer one pace ahead. Almost she had turned back, but she had battled on, mastering her fear, mastering her weakness, mastering the storm, finding the stupid hen cowering in its nook, carrying it back, and releasing it clucking into the coop. She had told no one. So now.

Except that there was no hen to look for, no purpose in her struggle against that blizzard of magic except to learn how to survive it. First simply that, and then to have something to spare from the struggle, so that she could actually use this dangerous, terrifying aspect of her gift. She hunched into herself, trying to choose what and what not to feel, to ignore the bellowing voices in the cramped cell, the myriad hurtling fragments in the naked hillside, the deep engrossing vibrations of the underlying hills, to feel through them, and beyond them…

“Maja? What’s up? Are you all right?”

Somewhere outside the struggle her hand made an impatient gesture. But her concentration held. There! Far, far away, and faint at this distance, but still vibrant with the immense energies of its beginning. She had felt that particular queasy resonance three times before—waiting to ford a mountain river, then on the road south of Mord, then at a way station. A Watcher—no, more than one this time—Watchers going about their sinister business. She unfocused slightly and sensed what lay around that center, the unmistakable tremor of human life, but chilled almost into stillness, a press of people, several hundred of them perhaps, all locked into the terror of the moment.

Enough.

She reached into her pouch and closed her hand round the pendant. Instantly the shield renewed itself. Ribek had to hold her from falling from the saddle.

“Are you all right, Maja?” he said again.

“In a minute,” she muttered.

She hunched down, breathing slowly and heavily and clutching the pommel of the saddle to steady herself while her spirit found its way back into her body and limbs where it belonged. After a while she shuddered, straightened and opened her eyes.

They had halted on the hillside, Saranja and Benayu, also on horseback, looking back at her over their shoulders, Ribek standing beside her with his hand on her thigh.

“Are you all right?” he said again.

“Yes…yes…I…”

She was too tired to explain. The world began to go dark. She felt herself swaying.

For several hours Maja slept, only half-waking once or twice to wonder where she was and why she was sitting sideways in the saddle being comfortably held in place by someone’s arm—Ribek’s—round her waist, with her head on his chest. She snuggled herself against him and drifted back into darkness.

They must have stopped for the night, but she was only vaguely aware of it, of having a cup held to her lips so that she could drink a little water before sliding down again into the abyss of sleep. Her bladder roused her sometime in the moonlit night, and she rose and relieved it and slept again and woke at last, ravenously hungry, to a dew-scented morning and the crackle of a small fire, and mutton chops grilling on its embers. Just as she could smell and hear these things before she opened her eyes, so she could feel the presence of her companions, Benayu’s inner turmoil veiled behind the vague buzz of his sleeping power, Saranja’s banked furies, Ribek’s lovely ordinariness…

While they ate she tried to explain to the others more of what had happened to her.

“I asked Jex to stop shielding me. I wanted to see how far I could reach. I could feel everything. It was like…like…”

She struggled to find the words, to help them feel something of the worldwide blizzard of magic that had swept round and through her.

“Anyway,” she finished, “I think there’s one of the big Imperial Highways way over there, a long way off, and some Watchers, two or three, I think, were doing something to a lot of frightened people at a way station.”

“Enspelling them to fight?” said Ribek.

“I don’t know.”

“You look all in,” said Saranja. “You still do.”

“I’m all right now. Just tired.”

“You’ve got to be careful,” said Benayu earnestly. “There’s always a price. Fodaro told you that. The stronger the magic the higher the price. There’ve been beginners who’ve stumbled into something big and come out raving. I don’t think you’re actually doing the magic, but you’re channeling it somehow. And you’re doing it more and more. It’s bound to have an effect.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Well, you’d better not try that again,” said Ribek.

“I think I’ve got to,” she said. “I’ve got to learn about it. I think it’s important. Perhaps it’s why I’m here at all, so that I could do this. I’ve just got to practice, and get used to it, like—like learning to kick-fight, I suppose. You must have had to practice and practice.”

He laughed.

“Still do,” he said. “Start of each season. I’d be stiff as a plank, else. Same with your magic, I expect, Benayu.”

“Same stupid little exercises day after day after day,” said Benayu. “Fodaro kept me at it, no matter how much I bucked. He was right, though. I think Maja’s right now. She’s got to learn. But only a bit at a time, or you’ll wear yourself out. Jex will look after her if she gets into trouble, but he’s going to need to be a lot stronger before he can cope with anything really big.”

“And she’d better have one of us with her, always, when she’s trying anything like this,” said Ribek. “All right, Maja?”

“All right.”