Angel Isle

CHAPTER

18

She opened her eyes in a truly different universe.

It made no sense at all. There was stuff out there to look at, but far too much of it, and none of it seeming to fit with anything else. Bits of it appeared to have some kind of shape, bulges and edges and planes, but they didn’t fit together into anything she could think of as a thing. And all of it seemed to be moving, flowing, but she couldn’t tell in which direction or what was nearer her than what was further off, because it seemed to be both near and far, and the whole scene was crisscrossed with dark lines, tense as winched cables, connecting one non-thing to another, but not seeming to slacken at all if the non-things moved together or to resist at all if they wheeled apart, or did both at the same time.

Odder still that, though they seemed to be more understandable, more real, more there, than the non-things they connected, and to carry such tension within them, she wasn’t sure that the lines were real, or there at all. They were like narrow beams, not of light but of darkness, full of intangible energies.

She felt helpless, crazy. How could she do anything in a world like this?

“Jex! Jex! What’s happening? Help!”

“I am here, little one. Come fully clear of the eggshell. That is confusing you. Good. Now move to your left. Trust your dog-senses to make the movement, since his brain is adapted to interpret the phenomena of this universe. Use his smell-sense in particular, since it is not dimension-dependent. Simply by moving through the phenomena of this universe you will begin to perceive it more clearly. I will wave my arms as you approach, to help you. To you I will seem to be something like a dead tree.”

“All right. I’ll try.”

She moved right out of the eggshell and automatically gave herself a good shaking, as if she’d just come from a dip in a pond and was shaking the water out of her pelt. That done, she raised her muzzle and sniffed. She’d been trying so hard to see that she hadn’t paid much attention to her other senses, but yes, this universe was full of smells. They were odd, weird, different, but not incomprehensibly different the way the sights were. Without her thinking about it her dog brain was already sorting them out. There! Slightly different from his smell in his other form but still unmistakable—Jex. Sheep droppings and pine. To her left, like he’d said.

“Find, boy.”

Her dog body trotted eagerly off, at last in this long adventure doing something it had been trained to do. Sponge had known every sheep in his flock by its separate smell, Benayu had once told her. Sheep droppings and pine needles—pup’s play. And even as she moved among the non-things of this no-sense universe they began to acquire their own crazy logic. She wasn’t seeing them as they actually were, she realized—as the this-universe form of Jex saw them, for instance. Her brain wasn’t the right shape. She wasn’t even seeing them as Sponge saw them. The images that came to all three pairs of eyes (supposing this Jex had two eyes) were the same, but Jex’s brain could process them in seven dimensions, and Sponge’s brain could magically process them into four, but hers hadn’t learned to do that yet. Jex had told her that actually she’d be seeing them somewhere along that process, or she wouldn’t have been able to see them at all.

Once again she was reminded of the story in the Valley about the woman who’d been blind all her life and suddenly began to see, who could perceive the shape and color of a mug, for instance, but couldn’t at first tell that it was a mug until she’d touched and handled it. She was beginning to do something like that. Distances were still very strange. The non-things could seem to be both behind and in front of each other. A bit of the edge of one could turn out on its other surface to be a bit of the edge of a quite different one.

She wondered if the strange rays of darkness connecting the non-things were where Sponge’s brain had put the extra dimensions, so that it had only four to deal with, though the rays didn’t really fit with each other now. Even when she seemed to be loping toward one that barred her way it was somewhere else when she reached it, without having moved or lost its tension.

A new non-thing loomed in front of her, clear enough to be almost a thing—a dead tree with wildly waving branches, except that the branches moved both behind and in front of each other and some of them might be off to one side, or the trunk itself, though still attached to them, was somehow much further away. For a moment she saw it fully clearly, and with a shock of horror realized that it must indeed be some kind of distant cousin to the appalling demon that had so nearly destroyed them all, north of Larg. She had to will herself to speak to it.

“Jex?”

“Welcome, little one. I wish I were seeing you in your own form. You have done very well yet again.”

The voice in her head wasn’t the granite one she knew so well, but had the quality of good timber, cut from a great tree and then sawn and planed to show the clean, smooth grain. She thought of the mighty cedars in the forest behind Woodbourne, whose voices her aunt had been able to hear when the wind stirred their branches. The memory banished the specter of the vanquished demon.

“I wish I could see you properly too. I’m very fond of you in your other shape. You’ve really looked after me.”

“The affection is reciprocated. But are you ready to go, Maja? It is now of some urgency. I can sense that our enemies are preparing a more sophisticated assault. I have told the others, and Benayu is ready, but he needs to have you on your way before the attack begins.”

“Yes, I think so.”

A pause. Then…

“I have told them. You will feel a brief pulse of magic, and then Saranja will count to ten and say the name.”

“All right.”

The pulse came almost at once, brief and blinding as lightning, and then gone. She held herself steady and started to count.

…nine, ten…

And there was total darkness, with the trail blazing through it. Only that single dimension of distance. She was barely aware even of Sponge’s physical solidity enclosing her as she spread her wings and raced along the trail. Its power was appalling, not shaped and controlled by some magician to a specific purpose, but a shaft of pure magic. It was like the light of the sun must be before it strikes the atmosphere of earth and softens into daylight. She felt herself shriveling in its intensity, wasting away. She was at the limit of what she could endure.

Not long now, please!

Oh, finish, end!

“Ramdatta!”

Darkness. The trail gone with its unendurable power. Gone. Lost.

No, it was she who was lost and gone. The trail would still be there, skewering its seven-dimensional universe, but there was no one to follow it. Nobody now could. Benayu couldn’t. The Watchers might break through and overwhelm him, but they couldn’t either. Only she, Maja, could have done it and she had failed.

“Ramdatta!”

Nothing. Not a quiver of change in the emptiness.

Thinking the name wasn’t enough. To be truly powerful it had to be spoken aloud. If only Saranja had been here instead of her, to cry it into the void, as she had done on the hill above Tarshu.

But here there was only a useless rag doll, with no lips to shape the syllables, no lungs to give them their power. Only a useless rag doll…and a dog.

Sponge.

Try doing something Sponge wouldn’t normally do.

Somehow she forced herself into awareness of him, of Sponge himself, not just of his body as an extension of herself. He was still there, patient and accepting of what was happening to him, but at the same time vaguely bewildered by it all, and longing for Benayu, with a grassy hillside and a flock of sheep to herd.

“Good boy,” she thought, trying to comfort him. “Won’t be long now.”

Three syllables, then. Three sharp yaps. A bit of a growl at the start of the first one to make the R shouldn’t be too difficult, and then…

She experimented, moving the long tongue round inside the narrow mouth, touching it against palate and front teeth in various positions, trying to imagine the explosion of the yap forcing its way through. Nothing was the right shape. Her lips wouldn’t make the M. The closest she could come was a sort of humming noise in her throat…

“It’s all right. Good boy…”

She raised her muzzle.

“RRAGHnng! dhAGH! dtAGH!”

The fierce, urgent bark shattered the immense silence into shards and fragments. In the selfsame instant those particles were reborn into unnumberable universes, exactly as they had been before. And in that instant Maja was caught up and whirled away, back onto the trail and shuddering under its ferocious power.

But now she was at the longed-for end. The trail reached it and stopped. She hovered for a moment, staring at the object, bewildered. It was utterly unexpected, but yes, of course. If this was the only way to do it, then this was how he must have done it.

A four-dimensional thing hanging above the shadowy landscape of non-things.

Another egg.

Unable to hover for more than two or three wingbeats, she began to circle the egg, and found that once she was round the other side it screened her completely from the intense input of the trail. No impulse whatever came from the egg itself. She backed away a little until she could circle in that shelter studying the thing.

It was about the size of the one she was in, and it had the same odd solid-mist surface, but rougher, as if it hadn’t been shaped out of something smooth, like a clay pot, but had been woven or knitted from fine cord. One bright point of mauvish light was moving across it, trailing a short glowing tail, like a comet. It moved out of sight on one side and reappeared, crossing the surface at a different angle this time, and again, and again, once more at a different angle. It was oddly hypnotic. It meant something.

I was wrong, she thought. This wasn’t the only way he could have done it, if that’s him in there. Jex told us that he thought he must have put the essence of himself into a creature of this universe and then he could have gone where he liked and done what he wanted and the seven dimensions wouldn’t have mattered. Benayu could have done that too, he’d said, if it had only been him. It would have been much easier than making the eggs, but he couldn’t do it because he had to bring the rest of us so that the Watchers couldn’t get us.

That means that the Ropemaker must have needed to bring someone or something from our universe with him. Something small. And he made himself small too so that his egg wasn’t too big to move about.

Round and round, round and round, round and round as she thought it out. She found that she’d unconsciously started to time her circlings so that she was facing the egg each time the light crossed its surface. Round and round, round and round, round and round. She couldn’t stop. She wasn’t doing it. The light was doing it to her. Round and round…

It was like…like…

Something horrible. Some old nightmare, just beginning…

No, not a nightmare. Real.

She and Ribek, Saranja and Benayu, all walking in step along the Highway north of Larg, because the demon was forcing them to do it.

But the light wasn’t horrible. It was trapped too in the egg, going round and round and round because it had to, making her do the same not because it wanted to but just because it was there.

The Ropemaker, trapped, helpless, in his own egg.

She didn’t need to think what to do next. She drew a deep breath of the strange seven-dimensional air into her lungs, raised her muzzle, and bayed.

“RRAGHnng! dhAGH! dtAGH!”

If she’d been expecting anything it was that the eggshell would shatter, but instead the light began to spin faster and faster round its surface and the comet-tail remained behind it for longer and longer, covering the surface in a net of lines that joined together into an intricate dense mesh. A moment or two and the last gaps closed and she was staring at a shell of glowing light…

The egg hung there, bright enough to cast dense, wrong-shaped shadows over the landscape of non-things as far as her dim dog-eyes could see. And at the same time the compelled rhythm of her own circlings was broken and she could swing round to the far side of the egg and watch the trail she had followed streaming into it, with all its immense power.

Gone.

Once more she circled the egg, watching and waiting.

Relief flooded through her as a voice spoke in her head, quiet but slightly gravelly, and jerky with suppressed energy.

“Thanks. Been waiting for that. Didn’t even know I was waiting. Knew it was a risk, of course. You found my bit of rope, I take it.”

“Yes. In the oyster-beds.”

“And you’ll be one of the Urlasdaughter lot?”

“I’m Maja. But I’ve got my cousin Saranja with us—she can hear the cedars—and Ribek Ortahlson.”

“You can’t have got here on your own, though. All three from the Valley. No magic there.”

“Benayu did all the magic. He made the eggs.”

“Let’s have a look…Hm. Nice bit of work. Eggs, you said?”

“There’s two of them, this one and a big one. It’s near the touching point on Angel Isle. It’s too big to move around because he had to bring all four of us and the horses to get us away from the Watchers. They were trying to get through the touching point when I left.”

“Can’t have that. Better get back. Tell me the rest on the way. You’re inside that egg, but you’re in control of the dog, right? Did the same sort of thing myself. Used one of the local life-forms. Must’ve got tired of waiting and pushed off. Dog pick this egg up in his mouth, d’you think, if I give him something to get hold of? Doesn’t weigh anything. Tell me the rest on the way. Now…”

A small area right at the top of the globe sprouted into a mass of bright threads that immediately started to plait themselves together as they rose and became a glowing rope about as thick as her forefinger. When it was a foot or so long it stopped growing, looped itself over and wove its tip neatly into itself about halfway down to make a carrying handle.

“Try that, then.”

She stopped circling, swooped in, snatched up the loop in her jaws and swung away with the Ropemaker’s egg dangling in front of the one that doll-Maja was in.

Where now? This time there was no trail to follow through this meaningless, no-thing world.

“Home, boy. Find Benayu.”

Good old Sponge, she thought, as the strong, confident wingbeats hurtled them though the meaningless maze.

“This Benayu fellow. How old? Since my time, but could still be getting on a bit.”

“No, he’s only fourteen or fifteen.”

“Hm! Would’ve been way beyond me when I was that age. Tricky business, dimensions.”

“His uncle Fodaro—he’s dead now—the Watchers killed him—he worked out the equations. Benayu says he still doesn’t understand them, but he knows how to use them.”

“Ah. Thought there’d got to be something like that. Did it trial and error, myself. Not much room for error, mind you. Right. I’ve got it about the Watchers. Anything else going on?”

“Well, there’s the Pirates, I suppose.”

“Always been pirates. What’s new about this lot?”

She was describing the attack on Tarshu when the first blast hit her. One moment she was back in imagination on that bleak hillside, watching the monstrous airboat hovering over the burning city while the lightning played around it, and the next she was tumbling helpless through darkness.

Something caught her, held her, shielded her round, beat her wings for her while she gathered herself together. She was aware of a close presence, inside Sponge’s body now, sharing it with her, looking out through the same eyes, seeing the whole muddled scene ahead lit by pulsing and flaring light, brighter even than the glare over Tarshu.

“Sorry. Strong magic does that to me unless I’m shielded. I wasn’t, because I had to follow the trail to find you.”

“Right. Better see to that for you. Lot of stuff going to be happening in a minute or two. You take over now?”

“All right. Do you think they’ve broken through?”

“Looks like it. Should be there in time. Speeded him up a bit. Nice dog.”

The presence withdrew. As before she let Sponge’s own instincts and perception pick their way. He was indeed now flying at unbelievable speed, banking almost vertical as he swung and curved his way through the backward-racing non-things, with wingbeats so rapid that they became a blur, like those of a flying insect. And now they were lit not only by the nearing glare of the landscape ahead but by a steadily brightening glow that could only come from the Ropemaker’s egg, dangling below her head.

“Up now. Get above them.”

Obediently she climbed into the magical glare, and now from this height she could see Benayu’s egg, flaming like a furnace, with all the strange vague colors that had swirled through it and gone at the Watchers’ earlier assaults. Around it, circling it completely, lay the body of an immense dark dragon. As Maja watched, it raised its head, and breathed out a single blast of oily orange fire, overwhelming the egg’s pale flames and totally engulfing it.

“Down. Straight through. While they’re busy.”

Three powerful beats of her wings drove her into the dive, and then she folded them and plunged like a stooping hawk into the heart of the inferno. It had barely begun to singe her fur before she was through and frantically buffeting the air to brake their onrush.

They hit the turf with a thump. The egg she had been carrying in her mouth detached itself, rolled across the turf to where the little rope manikin stood against the rim of the pool, and exploded into human form.

She felt she had known him all her life, though she had seen him only once before, and only in a dream, and then just as a shadowy shape beyond a magical doorway—tall, oddly gawky, with what at first glance seemed to be an unnaturally enormous head but she knew from the story to be an elaborately folded turban.

He glanced around and pointed a finger at her. Her own egg fell apart, a tremor ran through the hitherto insensate body of the doll, and without even feeling the change apart from that she was back in her own true shape, too dazed with weariness to open her eyes. Only someone’s arm around her shoulders held her from falling.

“Maja!” said Ribek’s voice in her ear. “Thank heavens! And you found him too! Nick of time, by the look of it. Massive stuff going on here. Benayu’s just about holding them. What about you? Can you stand it?”

“I’m all right. He shielded me. What’s happening?”

Before he could answer Saranja shouted a warning. An instant later the ground juddered beneath her. She felt Ribek stagger as he rode the shock-wave and held her upright. By the time he’d recovered their balance she seemed to be standing ankle deep in a rushing stream. With an effort she heaved her eyes open.

The beautiful garden was a ruin. The trees were leaning awry. The perfect turf looked as if it had been rootled through by a gigantic hog. The inner surface of the egg flared and glimmered as it had seemed to do from the outside. The wall of the pool had split apart and its water was sluicing over her feet. The horses, over to her right, were deep in Benayu’s magical coma but still with instinct enough to have spread their legs apart to ride the quaking ground. Saranja waited beside them, tense and ready, watching the Ropemaker strolling long-legged toward Benayu…

Benayu?

The figure was wearing Benayu’s clothes and Sponge was there beside him, teeth bared, hackles raised, poised ready for the word to spring to the attack against whatever came. But the face was no longer that of Benayu, or of any particular human. It was a moon-pale mask like the one Zara had worn on the hillside when she had returned from the destruction of the demon Azarod.

He stood perfectly still, seeming to be floating a little above the ground, so that he didn’t even stir as another shock-wave ground across the arena. Nor did the Ropemaker falter in his stride, but reached him, moved behind him and placed a large, bony hand on either of his shoulders. Benayu crossed his arms over his chest so that his palms covered the Ropemaker’s knuckles. There was a moment of stillness and everything changed.

Or rather, it both did and didn’t. The garish lights in the eggshell died away as the fabric rapidly repaired itself, but otherwise nothing much happened that Maja could actually see. The trees didn’t magically right themselves, the water didn’t flow back into the pool, the turf didn’t return to its perfect smoothness, but at the same time it was all different. What must have happened, Maja realized, what she would have known for sure if the Ropemaker hadn’t mercifully numbed her extra sense (though she wouldn’t have survived the experience) was that the turmoil of magical energies that had been throbbing through the egg had now moved outside it, leaving a bubble of sanity and peace within.

Ribek breathed out a long sigh of relief.

“That’s a bit better,” he said. “Couldn’t have stood much more of that. At least it gives me some idea of what you have to put up with. How’ve you got on? Let’s have a look at you, then.”

He took her by the shoulders, turned her round and held her at arm’s length. The smile of welcome vanished from his face.

“Oh, my…dear! What have we done to you?”

“I’m all right. I’m just tired.”

“You are not all right! Look!”

He let go of her shoulder and almost snatched at her wrist as he lifted her hand and arm for her to see.

They weren’t hers. They were…they were Zara’s hand and arm, lying on the counterpane of her bed in the stone cell behind the Council Chamber in Larg. There seemed to be no flesh at all between the sagging ivory skin and the bird-thin bone. With an effort, though it should have weighed nothing at all, she raised her arm further and spread her fingers against the light. Yes, she could see the shadowy shapes of the finger bones through the translucent membrane.

“I’m just tired, so tired,” she muttered, and allowed herself to collapse.

Ribek caught her on the way down, effortlessly scooped her up and cradled her in his arms. She had never seen him looking so grim. She didn’t like it.

“And I’m hungry,” she whispered. “Is there any oyster pie left?”

He managed a smile—for her sake, she guessed—and started to carry her over to the pool. Saranja met them on the way.

“What’s happened to…Oh, Maja!”

Even Benayu must have heard the horror in her voice, for he turned his head to look. His face was his own now, but it too changed, as Ribek’s and Saranja’s had, the moment he saw her.

And the Ropemaker was looking at her. She stared back at the narrow, long-chinned face framed by the extraordinary turban—bristling fire-red eyebrows, pale eyes set close together beside the bony nose, all strangely out of place with the wide and mobile mouth. He didn’t seem to have aged at all over the centuries, certainly not the way Zara had.

“We’ve got to get her out of here,” said Benayu. “She can’t stand any more of this, however she’s shielded.”

“Sooner the better,” said the Ropemaker. “Not much we can do here. One more jolt, Maja. Put you to sleep first, eh?”

“I’ll be all right. I want to see.” And to be here, knowing I’m in Ribek’s arms, awake and aware, and with him if anything goes wrong and this is the end.

“Tough as they come, these Urlasdaughters. Right. Anything you want to take?”

“We’re all packed and ready,” said Saranja.

“Fine. You three take the horses. I’ll shift for myself. Line ’em up by the touching point. Moment you hear my voice, go.”

“Where’s Jex?” whispered Maja, as Ribek carried her over toward the horses.

“There was more going on than he could cope with, so he turned himself into stone again and I put him in the saddlebag.”

“Oh, look! The Ropemaker’s going to turn himself into a lion. That’s what he did in the story!”

Craning past Ribek’s shoulder, she watched with growing excitement as the Ropemaker raised a hand, twitched out a loose end of his turban and with a flick of the wrist sent the intricately woven structure floating into coil after coil of cloth around himself. She never saw what happened to it after that because almost at once it was hidden beneath an immense mane of flame-gold hair, reaching almost to the ground, but then gathering itself back upward, revealing first four vast animal pads covered in flame-gold fur, then the muscular legs and the solid mass of the body and the skinny tail with a tuft of darker fur at the end. Within two or three heartbeats it had become the bushy mane of an enormous winged lion, big as a barn.

It waited, motionless except for the to-and-fro flicker of its tail-tip. Its huge yellow eyes watched while Benayu woke the horses. Saranja held Maja while Ribek mounted Levanter, then passed her up to him and swung herself into Rocky’s saddle. Benayu was already up.

“Ready?” he said, and led the way across the crumpled turf and the fallen cypresses. They lined up with the horses’ noses almost touching the eggshell. Benayu raised an arm.

“I want to watch what he does,” whispered Maja, and Ribek adjusted his hold to let her see past his shoulder.

The lion swung ponderously away from them and paced toward the further side of the egg. Halfway there it halted and stared slowly around as if it could see through the barrier and was studying something beyond it. It raised its head and roared.

The sound was all there was, filling the universe. The eggshell blazed with light and melted inward. A few more moments and it would shrink to nothing. But the horses were already airborne and driving into the vague dark opening that led from universe to universe. Now there was only a glimmer from behind, a glimmer that vanished as the body of the lion filled the narrowing gap and burst through.

A pale, faint light, marvelously familiar after all that strangeness, gleamed ahead. They were gliding peacefully toward it when Maja heard Benayu’s shout from ahead.

“Down! It’s too narrow!”

A thump and a clatter, and Pogo’s squeal of hurt and outrage, and Benayu’s voice again.

“Hold it! Let’s have some light.”

Immediately the walls of the tunnel glowed, and there was Saranja swinging down from the saddle and helping Pogo struggle to his feet and then starting to feel him over. The floor of the tunnel was strewn with broken boulders and its walls seemed to have been scorched with fire.

“He’ll do,” said Saranja. “Oh, come on, you stupid horse, it could’ve been a lot worse. What’s happened here? It wasn’t like this when we came through.”

“That was the Watchers getting through,” said Benayu. “I told you there’d be an explosion. At least I got one of them.”

He gestured toward what looked like a bundle of charred gray cloth lying among the tumbled rocks. A skeleton hand protruded from between its folds.

“We’re going to have to lead the horses, and take it slowly,” said Saranja. “They’re no good on this sort of footing. They’re not goats.”

“Wait,” rumbled a deep voice behind them. Maja wriggled herself round and saw the lion’s body filling the tunnel. It opened its jaws and blew out a long, slow breath. A warm gale swept along the tunnel, picking them all up, horses, people and dog, and floating them out over a moonlit ocean where the animals could once again stretch their wings and fly. Behind them the tunnel collapsed in thunder.

They rose, circled and landed on the summit of Angel Isle.