Angel Isle

CHAPTER

15

Coming to Barda was very different from coming to Mord, or Tarshu, or Larg, or anywhere else they’d been. For two whole days the road crossed an utterly flat landscape, drearier even than desert, scraggy little fields with reedbeds here and there, sighing in the steady wind from the ever-nearing ocean. Bank after bank of low clouds rolled in on it, endlessly threatening rain, but not a drop fell. No houses, only a few tumbledown sheds and sties, built where they were for no purpose Maja could imagine, and apparently abandoned years ago.

Once, on the first morning, they passed a sad old yellow horse in a small paddock that it had grazed almost bare. Pogo, prepared to flirt or gossip with anything vaguely horse-shaped, whinnied a greeting, but it didn’t even raise its head. Seabirds glided on the wind, hawks hovered, and there were waterfowl on the innumerable sluggish rivers and streams, all flowing from the west, that the road had begun to cross. Otherwise the landscape seemed almost completely lifeless.

But not the road. This was busier than they’d seen it at any time since they’d left Larg, apart from the two narrow strips down the center that had been set aside for nobles and other grandees, which had very few users. On the other hand there were two extra lanes in either direction for slow-moving ox-wagons and the only slightly faster horse-drawn carts, and by the time three major Highways had joined the one they were on—two on the first day and one on the second—these were pretty well nose to tail with traffic. The frequent bridges boomed and thundered to the steady drub of wheels.

Ribek no longer bothered to stop and listen to every bit of water they crossed.

“It won’t have anything new to say,” he explained. “It’s just an arm of a delta—all the same river. It’s brought down a tremendous load of silt, which has spread further and further out into the sea, with the river breaking up into different channels to find a way through it.”

“So the actual village where the Ropemaker was born won’t be on the coast any longer?”

“I suppose not. Even since he disappeared the coastline will have shifted further out. Come to think of it, that may have made things more awkward. Well, we can only see when we get there. What’s up?”

Maja had clutched him to stop herself from falling from Levanter’s back. For a moment she was back at the sheep-fold north of Tarshu, almost drowning in darkness as she clung with her mind to the fiery streak of the Ropemaker’s hair. It was a smell, a reek, that had carried her there, salty, fishy, weedy, stronger than any mere sea smell.

She shook herself back into the here and now and stared around. The reek was still in her nostrils, beginning to fade.

“What’s that smell?” she said.

“Came from one of the wagons on the other side. Oysters, I should think. Remember that fellow at Larg said Barda was famous for them?”

“It’s what I smelled when I used the hair.”

“Are you sure?”

“Almost.”

“Interesting.”

Now that Striclan had left them, Jex had returned to his natural form whenever he could. That evening, as they sat round the fire, he spoke in their heads. Benayu woke from his long half trance to listen.

“I do not know, any more than you do, what will happen at Barda, other than if we find the form into which the Ropemaker has put his physical self it will involve an explosion of magic far more powerful than any you and I have so far endured. I must return to an inert form before that happens, or I shall not survive. But we cannot find what we are looking for without Maja’s help, so she must stay in her own form until that is done, and I will protect her as best I can. Benayu must then immediately endow her with an inert form in which she no longer needs protection.”

“Any ideas, Maja?” said Benayu.

Maja hesitated. It was difficult to think. To leave her own body, which had always seemed to be so much of her, who she was, all that made her Maja, always there, ready and waiting when she woke from dreams…

How could she do that and still be the same person, Maja?

If she must, she must. She mastered her reluctance.

“Will I be able to see and hear?”

“If your inert form has got eyes and ears.”

“Whatever’s easiest, then. Something Ribek can carry on a loop round his neck.”

“I’ll think about it. Go on, Jex.”

“That done both Maja and I will for the time being be helpless, but we must all instantly escape to Angel Isle and into my alternate universe, where the Watchers cannot follow.”

“I’ve been bothered about that,” said Benayu. “I could take us there, of course, but it’s a risk. It doesn’t get us there all in a moment, quite, and if the Watchers show up in time I won’t be able to stop them grabbing us back. They’ve got the power. The sea won’t make any difference. They can do it from dry land.”

“Fortunately we have other means of escape at hand. A roc is a creature from my other universe, and therefore an impossible creature in this universe, where it can survive only as a magical animal. Similarly, a horse is a creature of this universe and cannot survive except as a magical animal in the other. It follows that a horse with the wings of a roc is an impossible creature in both universes and can survive as a magical animal in both. So, immediately before we attempt to locate what we are looking for, you must screen us while Saranja restores Rocky’s wings. Using him as a basis, you will be able to create the means to give the other two horses and the dog the power of flight, so that when the time comes they will be able to carry us to Angel Isle and through the touching point.”

“Won’t the Watchers be able to interfere with that too?” said Saranja.

“I should be able to think of ways to fight them off for a bit,” said Benayu. “I can’t if I’m busy transporting us all.”

“You will need to prepare your defenses in advance, before your powers are weakened over the sea. The Watchers will face the same difficulty, but they will have come in haste, without time to prepare specific weaponry to use in such circumstances. They will certainly deploy thunderbolts, and send a dragon in pursuit. Probably no more than one, since they have lost several over Tarshu, but they may well produce simulacra.”

“You might think about trying to hide us and laying a false trail. Like we did when we left Tarshu,” said Ribek.

“And finally there is the problem of how we can survive as four-dimensional creatures in a seven-dimensional universe,” said Jex.

“I’ve been working on that. I can do it all right, in theory. I’ll get some of it ready tonight, but I can’t finish it off till we get there. I’m bothered about this business of being weaker over the sea.”

“Angel Isle itself is different. It is a major touching point, a source of great power.”

Maja was woken in the dawn by a stir of magic and found Saranja and Ribek still asleep, but Benayu already sitting up, staring at a pattern of what looked like colored rice-grains he had laid out on the tiled floor of their sleeping booth. Every now and then he would point at it and more grains would appear under his fingertip, forming another swirl in the pattern. He had screened himself closely round, so that Maja could feel no more than a whisper of something immensely powerful and complex being brought out of nowhere and woven into the fabric of reality.

He’d continued to work throughout breakfast while Saranja fed him morsels which he chewed without noticing. When they were ready to leave he spread both hands over the pattern, which flowed upward from the center, maintaining its swirls and windings as it followed the movement of his hands while he twisted them, palms inward, until they were cupped around a shimmering egg about the size of a baby’s head. He moved them together until he could fold his fingers into each other and clasp them tight, absorbing the egg into himself.

The screen vanished.

“Done,” he muttered. “Help me up. We must go. Wake me when you see the garden.”

There was no particular moment at which the town of Barda began. Sheds and barns slightly more frequent, slightly less ramshackle; a patch where someone had been trying to grow vegetables; a row of sties with actual pigs in them; a shed, not apparently more habitable than any of the sheds they’d passed earlier, but with a line of laundry flapping in the breeze; and then, astonishingly, beside yet another slow-oozing mud-rimmed river (the tide apparently reached far enough inland here to expose a few feet of the bank) a seriously grand house with two pleasure yachts moored at a jetty and gardeners working its carefully symmetrical gardens.

Ribek booted Levanter forward until he was alongside Benayu on Pogo, leaned across and shook him by the elbow.

“Ready to wake up now?” he said. “This looks like your garden.”

Benayu snorted, sat up, squared his shoulders and looked around.

“That’s it. Thanks,” he said, speaking as cheerfully and confidently as he had done when they had first met him on that mountain pasture north of Mord. There was a blip of magic, and a screen enclosed a section of the garden. He raised his right hand toward it, palm forward, fingers spread, and closed it in a slow, grasping motion. The whole section—a small raised pond and the strip of lawn around it, with a few small trees and a curving bed of rosebushes with a close-clipped yew hedge behind it—shimmered for a moment, disappeared, and returned unchanged.

“All set now,” he said. “I think I’m ready as I’m going to be. Anything else I’ll have to improvise. Any suggestions about where to start looking? We really don’t want to use the hair again until we have to. Maja?”

“The oyster-beds? That’s what I smelled.”

“There’ll be a lot of them,” said Saranja. “I’ve lost count of the reeking wagonloads we’ve passed.”

“The first thing is to find out what Barda consisted of around when the Ropemaker disappeared,” said Ribek. “I thought we might take a leaf out of Striclan’s book. Suppose I’m doing the same sort of job he was, and I’ve come here to compile a report on the history of the oyster trade. If I find the right official and show him the scroll they gave me at Larg, there’s a good chance he’ll be helpful.”

A trivial, irrelevant thought came into Maja’s mind.

“I wonder what oysters taste like,” she said.

“Now’s your chance to find out,” said Ribek. “I’ll ask the fellow I see for a recommendation.”

The street where they waited for Ribek to reappear was utterly different from the tatterdemalion outskirts of Barda. Those had been like that because they had been long ago abandoned as the town had moved steadily eastward to stay near the sea that was its livelihood, keeping up with the unstoppable growth, inch by inch through the centuries, of the delta upon which it stood.

This was a broad, cobbled thoroughfare lined with stolid-looking brick buildings, mostly large and plain, with only here and there a flourish of ornamentation around the main doors. Ribek was inside one of these slightly fancier ones. Maja and the others waited in the shade opposite. The horses fidgeted and stamped. Saranja was almost as restless. But Benayu seemed to have retired into his trance and stood with his head bowed and his eyes half closed, swaying very slightly from side to side, as if he had fallen asleep on his feet. Only Maja could sense the steady, purposeful activity inside as he gathered and ordered the powers he was going to need.

Maja herself was almost sick with anxiety, so obviously that Saranja noticed and moved to her side and put a comforting arm round her, but even that didn’t stop the spasms of shivering and the endless, useless swallowing of saliva that wasn’t there. She wasn’t afraid of dying, or of what the Watchers might do to her if they caught her, but of the task ahead. No, she wasn’t going to bear the brunt of it, as Benayu would have to, but only she could find the Ropemaker. They’d talked about this on their way into the town. As Jex and Ribek had said, it would all have to happen in an instant, before the Watchers were on them. Ribek would be holding her. Saranja would unwind that single golden hair from the roc feathers. There would be the double blast of magic, leaving Maja blind and deaf but tracking that intense thread of golden fire through the darkness between the universes…

Would she survive even that far? Jex would do what he could, but…But if she did, then what? At the sheep-fold she’d had time to recover, to come back into the here and now, to point the way they must go. This time, somehow, in that instant before the Watchers came, she would have to act, to tell or show Ribek what to do, where to go. It could only be him—Benayu would be facing the Watchers and Saranja wrestling with the panicking horses—and still she would need to endure, endure…

She tried to distract herself by studying the scene before her. What were all the wagons doing, trundling thunderously to and fro over the cobbles? Not difficult. At the far end of the street she could see masts and cranes, and the now familiar odor of oysters told her what most of the ones going in that direction bore, and what many of those coming back, only a little less thunderously and reekingly, had unloaded at the harbor. But a far greater variety of cargoes returned from there, in different carts, because you wouldn’t want your corn or your carpets or expensive luxuries impregnated with the basic Bardan odor, would you?

That man there now, bustling out of a door, dodging between the wagons, pausing anxiously to check through the file of papers he was carrying, as if searching for a document that should have been there and wasn’t, sighing with relief and hurrying in through another door—not difficult either. Or that grander gentleman stalking up from the harbor, listening haughtily to the expostulations of the seaman-like figure beside him, and followed by a porter wheeling a trolley with a brass-bound sea-chest on it…All so everyday and impossibly different, almost in another universe from the one she knew, the one that had the Watchers in it, and winged horses, and Jex, and the unimaginable terrors of the next few hours…

“At last!” said Saranja. “Look at him! He’s been spinning it out, enjoying himself! He drives me mad, sometimes!”

Maja looked, saw Ribek, sane, beautiful, everyday Ribek, coming out of the door opposite, and instantly felt better. Jex wasn’t the only one who could live in two universes, she thought.

A large man with blubbery lips was talking volubly to him as he held the door, and talked on as they wound their way between the wagons, though most of what he was saying must have been drowned by the wheel thunder. He approached them reaching forward for a hand to shake and starting to introduce himself before he was fully in earshot.

“…Adorno Dorno, Oyster Magister of Barda, at your service. And you three are also Freepeople of Larg, my friend Ribek tells me. Honored, honored indeed…”

Ribek managed to get the introductions in while the Magister was vigorously shaking their hands. If Sponge had known to hold up a paw he would no doubt have shaken that.

“And none of you has ever tasted an oyster! You have waited until you can start at the pinnacle of excellence. Wonderful! Wonderful! Perhaps as a preliminary—ahem—taster to your inspection of our oyster-beds you ought to have your first experience of this wonderful delicacy. You have come to the right man. It is part of my official duties to inspect and license the commercial outlets of Barda, and there are two on our way to the oyster-beds that I would especially recommend….”

Maja quailed. How could she get anything down her throat with the terror of the event so close upon them? And Ribek had said that oysters were slippery blobs that you ate not just raw, but alive!

“I…I’m not very hungry,” she blurted.

The Magister stared at her, pop-eyed with astonishment, as if he couldn’t imagine the circumstances in which somebody might not want to sample his oysters.

“I’m afraid we made the error of partaking of a substantial repast shortly before our arrival,” said Ribek in his Striclan voice. “We did not foresee our good fortune in encountering such a fountainhead of knowledge so immediately. Perhaps when we have had our fill of the oyster-beds we will be in a better frame to have our fill of the oysters.”

“Excellent! Excellent!” crowed the Magister, covering Ribek with saliva in his excitement. “I shall certainly enter that among the Remarks of Visitors that I publish in the Town Yearbook. Well then, shall we stable your horses and take my barge? Fortunately the tide is flowing toward the full. Or would you prefer to walk? In which case we could save time in stabling the horses and leave them at the gate. We have a strict rule against allowing animals in the oyster fields for fear of contaminating the purity of the waters. The same ruling also applies to those with magical powers, but for different reasons, of course.”

“Of course,” agreed Ribek. “What does everyone feel about that? Saranja?”

“Um…er…,” said Saranja. Maja sensed a brief pulse of magic from Benayu, and words seemed to come into Saranja’s mouth, unwilled. “Let’s walk,” she gabbled. “Benayu and I can stay with the horses.”

“It would perhaps be more stimulating to the appetite,” said Ribek, as if he’d noticed nothing remotely odd about the exchange.

“True, true,” said the Magister. “Well, if you’re ready to depart…”

He had a surprising turn of speed for so portly a figure. Even Ribek had to stride out to keep up with his vigorous waddle. Maja started to fall behind and broke into a trot to catch up, almost running headlong into one of the Magister’s sweeping gestures. Instantly she started to fall behind again, trotted, caught up…No, too tiring.

She halted and waited for the others and let Saranja lift her onto Levanter’s back. Benayu had had to come back into this world to greet the Magister and now took the chance to mount Pogo. Saranja seemed to be in a bad mood, probably cross about Benayu telling her in her head what to say just now. And perhaps it was also her way of dealing with the coming crisis. She was scared, and no wonder, and she was ashamed of being scared. It didn’t fit in with her idea of herself and that made her furious.

“Look at him!” she snarled suddenly. “Oozing charm at that appalling man as if he’s having a lovely time!”

“Ribek’s doing fine,” said Benayu absently. “He’s got him eating out of his hand.”

“Yes, of course he has. But he doesn’t need to enjoy it so much! And talking in that stupid voice! I think it’s grotesque!”

She strode on, seething. It was the Striclan voice, of course, that got her goat, Maja realized. She glanced at Benayu, hoping to share the joke, but he was deep in concentration again. Without warning a wave of apprehension washed over her. She felt utterly alone. Jex…

“I am here in the saddlebag, still in my living form. I will at least partially protect you until the last instant. There will not be three separate magical impulses for you to endure. They will be almost simultaneous, and then Benayu will convert you into your inert form. It would be as well to remind him.”

“All right…Benayu? Can I bother you? It isn’t important if you’re busy. Jex says I’ve got to remind you about changing me as soon as it’s over. He says he’ll look after me till the last minute. Something with eyes and ears, you said.”

“Not a problem. You won’t be able to move your eyes, so you’ll only see what’s straight in front of you.”

“That’ll be fine.”

He nudged Pogo closer, leaned over, plucked at her sleeve and effortlessly drew out a single dark green thread, which he coiled carelessly round his thumb.

“Listen,” he said. “I’d better tell you what’s going to happen. This business about the horses actually helps, because it’s the same as at the sheep-fold. You can’t do it if you’re screened, but if Saranja and I stay with the horses I can screen what I’m doing to them separately. I’ll get everything set, so I can do it in a flash, and I’ll keep in touch with you and Ribek in your heads. One of you just tell me when you’re ready. Count ten, and Saranja will take the hair off the feathers. That’ll activate it. We won’t be as close as we were last time, but you’ll still be able to feel the link between it and what we’re looking for, won’t you, Maja?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Right. Then while you’re busy your end Saranja and I will put the wings on the horses and Sponge—I’ll speed that up—and I’ll bring us. I’ve got everything ready to change you into your inert form the moment you’ve found what we’re looking for. I’ll do it whatever else is going on. All right? I’ve told Ribek in his head.”

“I’ve got to have Jex close. Do you think he counts as an animal?”

“I am stone again until you are through the gate. Take me out of the saddlebag and put me in your pouch. Put me on the ground when you tell Benayu that you are ready to proceed.”

Before Maja had finished doing that Benayu was back in the maze of his own mind.

She gazed around. They were traveling up a broad path beside a brick-banked canal, whose waters looked very different from the opaque and sluggish streams of the inner delta, clear and clean enough for her to be able to see a school of silvery minnows scuttling along beside the dark green weed that cloaked the further embankment, all the way from the canal bed to the high-tide mark a few inches above the surface.

The buildings either side were solid but elegant houses that somehow announced their owners’ richness without any parade of wealth. From snatches in the conversation ahead of her Maja could tell that the Magister was telling Ribek about those owners, and the trades that supplied their wealth, and Ribek was making Striclanishly knowledgeable remarks about those trades and at the same time trying tactfully to get the subject back to the history of the oyster-beds.

Yes, of course he was having a good time, and she was glad for him. But underneath, she guessed he was as scared as the rest of them, and this was his way of dealing with it, just as Saranja’s way was to be furious, and Benayu’s was to work on his magic, and hers—hers was to think about Ribek.

There was a bridge across the canal, at which the two rows of handsome houses stopped abruptly. A road crossed the bridge with a ten-foot brick wall on the far side. An iron gate barred the path they were on. There was an odd little Eye on the gate.

As Ribek and the Magister approached, a man appeared, uniformed like a soldier and armed with a pike. He opened the gate and saluted the Magister, but then moved as if to bar the horses.

“The animals are remaining outside, Gidder,” said the Magister. “Two of our honored visitors will remain with them. Supply them with anything they may need as befits Freepeople of our sister city of Larg.”

“There’s an Eye on the gate,” Maja whispered to Benayu.

He considered a moment.

“There to spot magicians,” he muttered. “Wouldn’t have let me through anyway. I wonder why. You’d better go. Don’t want to keep him waiting.”

She hurried to join Ribek, but she needn’t have worried, as the Magister was still impressing the guard with the importance of his visitors. Then all three walked on together through a landscape so different that Maja was tempted to look back and check that the roofs of Barda were still there beyond the wall. This was the same level, stream-threaded delta through which they had arrived, but here as kempt and tidy as that rich man’s garden with the pleasure yachts beside it had been. No tumbledown sheds and barns, no miserable horses in paddocks, only, a few hundred yards ahead of them now, an organized line of sturdy timber buildings along the banks of one of the larger waterways. There seemed to be no one apart from themselves anywhere in all that flatness and emptiness.

“…established seven hundred and fifty-eight years ago,” the Magister was saying. “I am the sixty-third to hold the office of Magister. The oyster-beds themselves are owned by the individual members, but the Guild supervises the processing, checking and marketing. It was set up during the great oyster plague, when all the beds down the whole east coast of the Empire were ravaged by oyster worm. Only Barda escaped. Prices went sky high, our oyster-beds expanded out of all recognition and we have never looked back.”

“How exceedingly fortunate for you,” said Ribek. “Magical, almost.”

“Certainly not,” snapped the Magister. “Our competitors have many times accused us of employing rogue magicians to inflict the plague on them while sparing ourselves, but the authorities in Talagh—as you no doubt know, extremely strict in such matters—made a thorough investigation and cleared us completely. Exceedingly fortunate, yes. According to our records we have nineteen times over the centuries been spared such plagues, while others have suffered. It is thought to be something to do with the quality of the water, which is another reason for our security precautions. Lunatics believe that their ailments will be cured by immersion among the oysters. There is a flourishing illegal trade in bottled Barda water—much of it fake, of course. We attempt to discourage it. That is not the sort of publicity we want to encourage. The excellence of our oysters is advertisement enough.”

“And has that always been the case?”

“Indeed it has. Our earliest records include regular orders from the Emperor’s kitchens.”

“And those actual beds still exist, you tell me? I should very much like to see them with my own eyes.”

“So you shall, so you shall. We will do that first of all. You will want to talk to some of the old oystermen later, but it is high tide, and they are taking their rest. They won’t be returning till the tide is well into the ebb, when the work begins again. Now these beds here on your right…”

He burbled on. Ribek answered just enough to keep him going, but his mind was no longer on it, and he’d almost stopped using his Striclan voice. Maja could understand why. Most of his attention was absorbed by what the waters were saying, or rather singing. She could almost hear it herself, an endless, slow, wavering chant, repeating and repeating itself but never quite the same each time. Utterly, utterly peaceful.

Of course, she thought. The same pattern as everything else that had happened. The Ropemaker would have hidden his material self in a place which only someone from the Valley could find. Only someone from Northbeck. Only Ribek.

They came to a slightly wider stretch of water, almost a pool, where two streams joined and flowed out as one. The floor of the pool was gray with layers of oysters. The tide was almost full, barely moving, but there must have been some faint current because she could see a white down feather moving very gently along, close by the near bank, away from the sea, and realized, from her sense of the secret sound that only Ribek was hearing, that the whole body of water was quietly rotating round some central point, an unending ritual dance, the slowest of slow measures to the soundless chanting.

“Marvelous,” said Ribek in his own voice, his awe wholly genuine. “I was born by a millstream, high in the mountains. I have always had a kind of feeling for water. Never anything like this.”

“How strange,” said the Magister dreamily. “You have never tasted oysters and I have never seen mountains. Ever since I was a boy I have longed to see mountains.”

They stood together in silence, lost in their separate trances.

“Wake up, Maja!”

She shuddered herself into the here and now, tugged urgently at Ribek’s sleeve and felt him do the same.

“Sorry,” he whispered. “Ready?”

She nodded. He took her by the elbow, led her to the edge of the bank and crouched beside her, pointing, as if he were showing her something in the water. She slipped the stone pendant out of her pouch and laid it on the ground.

“Just show me the way,” he muttered. “I’ll find it. Hold your breath when I say…I’m going to push you in. Don’t try to swim. Now!”

She filled her lungs and stopped breathing. Two thundering heartbeats and the world went black. The hair blazed through that dark. She was jerked forward, was falling, distantly heard Ribek’s shout of alarm, heard the Magister’s yell, met the shock of cold, automatically clung on to her breath, but barely noticed any of these things as the blazing strand streaked onward, filling her consciousness, all there was. Her hand must have been already pointing when Ribek gripped her wrist and dragged her on down, but she didn’t feel him doing so. All she knew, all that held her together, was that single intense line of fire seeking its home.

And then, in another colossal explosion of power, it was gone, and she was bursting apart, rags and splinters of what had once been Maja, whirling away into the never-ending blackness.

And then…But there was no then. Not any more. Never.

Then there was now. Now was extremely strange. She had no sense of herself, Maja, existing in that nowness. There was sight, there was hearing, but nothing to tell her who or what was doing that seeing, that hearing. And even they were strange. The hearing was the sound of a heavy, windy thud or boom, repeated and repeated, strangely familiar, though only a few times heard by the Maja that once existed. The sight was of a dim, grayish something—more than just a gray light because there was texture in it, mottlings and grains, moving erratically around, uninterpretable.

For a moment the grayness moved away and she saw a dark, reddy-brown surface, slightly curved, moving upward, only to vanish as the grayness returned. It had something to do with the thud…Yes!—Rocky, flying toward the mountains—wing-thunder. But wrong color—not Rocky, Levanter.

The grayness vanished and for a moment she saw his vast neck stretching away from her, and then that swung aside and she saw sky, and then, for another moment, Saranja, hair streaming behind her, riding Rocky, golden-winged, glorious, and behind and beyond them white-winged Pogo with Benayu in the saddle craning backward and upward, and Sponge at their heels streaking along in the winged equivalent of his normal easy lope.

They too swung out of sight and everything was blanked out by something too huge and close to recognize which pressed itself briefly over her eyes as she heard a faint familiar noise such as two moist surfaces make when being gently pulled apart. (What was it? What was it? It was important.)

Everything wheeled around and briefly she could see the sky, hazy blue but with one strange black cloud, streaming toward them far faster than any wind could have carried it. She seemed to be seeing sky and cloud, everything in her restricted field of vision, through some kind of transparent mesh, but all that was blanked out as the cloud became blinding to her unclosable eyes and the thunder drowned her hearing.

Lightning! she thought. The Watchers came! This is the end.

It wasn’t the end. Sight returned, hearing more slowly, only to be lost again in thunder-bellows. Lightning poured around them, but eyesight remained since she wasn’t looking directly at it. She couldn’t see Benayu, but she guessed he was somehow warding it off. And Levanter flew steadily on, apparently not even noticing it. Amazing, considering how Rocky, prince among horses, had shied and bolted at the appearance of the airboat. Benayu must have thought of that too, and done something to the horses.

Lightning and thunder weakened and ceased. She had time to think, time to look properly at what she could see—frustratingly little since she couldn’t turn her head or even move her eyes in their sockets. At the lower edge of her field of vision she could discern a greenish gray expanse stretching away into the distance. They must be out over the sea.

Rocky and Saranja were moving out of her line of sight as Ribek edged Levanter closer to Benayu. His shout came faintly through the thunder-deafness.

“…only a lull. Like at Tarshu. Then more lightning, to distract you while they get the next thing ready. A dragon, Jex said. Simulacra, but if you can sort out which is which it’ll be one-to-one. Maybe it’ll sail straight in. But they must get it by now what they’re up against. My bet is it’ll feint and wait for you to respond so it can catch you off balance with a sucker kick.”

She couldn’t see or hear Benayu’s answer, but he must have gestured understanding or something because Ribek raised his hand and took Levanter back to Rocky’s other flank. They waited. It was strange not having a heart to pound, breath to come quicker, palms to break into sweat, at a moment like this.

Her mind wandered. She was still seeing everything as if through a transparent mesh. And why was her hearing so strangely woolly? It had been like that before the thunder, when all she’d been able to see was a moving grayness.

Oh, of course! That had been Ribek trying to clean and dry her with a bit of cloth after her immersion in the oyster pool. And then he’d lifted her up and round to loop her over his head and now she was dangling on his chest, but on the way…on the way…

That funny sucking noise had been his lips kissing her.

And she hadn’t even felt it.

It wasn’t fair!

More lightning streaming harmless round them as Benayu swept it away. In the middle of it a yell from Ribek, words lost in the rolling thunder but voice full of urgency and danger.

“Ribek! Can you hear me? Ribek!”

If he answered she couldn’t hear. No. He’d never have kissed her if he’d remembered she could see and hear. She’d never reminded him! She hadn’t had a chance. Desperately she tried again.

“What’s happening? I can’t see. I can’t move my eyes. Turn me round.”

The world wheeled and steadied, and she was looking back and to their flank. Saranja and Rocky were at the right-hand edge of her vision; Benayu had fallen back a little and had twisted round in his saddle to face the danger; Sponge was darting to and fro behind Pogo’s heels, snarling defiance.

Beyond and above them, dwarfing them, loomed the dragon, twice the size, at least, of the monster that had patrolled the valley above Tarshu, gnarled and scaly, dark-hued, mottled brown and green like lichened rock. Maja could see it clearly only in glimpses as the rhythm of Levanter’s flight brought her center of vision to bear on it. A huge round eye with a black vertical slit for a pupil, the rest of the eye glowing smoky-pale like a harvest moon, as if lit from within; the vicious spike that ended a rib of one of the vast leathery wings; a taloned foreleg tucked cozily for flight against a chest like the hull of a warship; a double puff of black smoke from the hummocked nostrils at the end of the long snout. The dragon hovered a long moment, half folded its wings and plunged.

Benayu was ready. He flung out both hands and a bolt of darkness, sudden and swift as the lightning, streamed from his fingertips. It wrapped itself round the dragon in a swirling cloud of absolute black that carried the beast backward and at the same time seemed to shrink and solidify as if it were about to squeeze it out of existence.

Another intense shaft of lightning, dazzling even in daylight, but aimed this time not at Benayu and his companions but at that sphere of midnight. With a bellow and a blast of flame it burst apart, and out of the dazzle emerged five separate but identical dragons, wings half folded, plunging down. No knowing which was the real one.

Benayu shouted and flung out an arm, and Sponge was climbing to meet the attack, double, four, eight times his real size, great black wings pumping him upward. All five dragons bellowed flame, but only one, fourth in the line, directly at him. The other four, constrained to do exactly what the master dragon did, blasted the unreal flame in lines parallel to the reality. By its own fire it had betrayed itself.

Immediately Sponge turned toward the single blast that engulfed him and now flew directly into it, relentless and untroubled as it streamed round him. The dragon had no other weapon. Sponge was almost muzzle to muzzle with the monster when he dived, rose, gripped the immense scaly gullet in his fangs and started to wrench and worry at it like one of the Woodbourne terriers worrying a rat. Black wings and gold buffeted the air as he wrestled for purchase and the dragon writhed and scrabbled at him with its puny forelegs. On either side of it four dragon simulacra towered, writhing and scrabbling at invisible Sponges. Above the individual struggles, seen and unseen, the agonized heads bellowed unavailing flame, and below it dangled the pale, vulnerable underbellies and the endless writhing tails.

Now something invisible, something Benayu must have prepared in those long days of meditation, struck home. Black blood spurted from all five underbellies. He shouted a command and Sponge released his hold and drew clear as the four simulacra blanked out of being and the master dragon plummeted out of Maja’s vision toward the ocean.

Ribek whooped in triumph. Benayu held up a hand in acknowledgment and pointed ahead. The horses, who had flown steadily on through the turmoil as if nothing were happening, began to descend.

“What is it? Are we there? Say something. I can hear now.”

No answer.

“Turn me round. Please.”

Again, though she was now nearly certain that Ribek couldn’t hear her, the world swung, and she was looking past Levanter’s neck at the immense expanse of ocean. Out of it, not far off now, rose a single broad pillar of rock with the ocean swell breaking into foam all around it. Angel Isle. The touching point.

The horses glided toward it like gulls, wings barely moving, and circled it single file. Without being asked, Ribek turned her so that she could see the wave-ravaged cliffs, fissured into immense, irregular columns, slide past. Why Angel Isle? she wondered. She had a vague idea that angels were a kind of good demon. There were plenty of demons in the old stories, but no angels as far as she could remember.

Halfway round the island a crevasse between two pillars widened into a dark slit. The horses swung past without hesitation and circled on. But second time round Rocky led them out and away, swung back, and headed directly for the slit. At the last moment he half folded his wings and disappeared into the cliff. Pogo followed, and Levanter, and they were in darkness. The opening must have widened considerably the moment they were inside, for now she could see Rocky and Pogo gliding on, silhouetted against a pale light gleaming ahead.

Darkness again. No, Ribek had twisted right round in the saddle to look behind him, so she perforce had done the same. The slit must have closed. Or something.

He turned back, and she watched the light increasing and increasing until they glided out into the daylight of what she instantly knew to be another universe.