“What on earth happened?” said Saranja.
“I told you,” said Benayu. “Fodaro got it wrong. I was pretty sure we’d find something like this, and I’ve been getting ready for it. Ever since we left Larg, pretty well. Tell you later.
“You stay here and hang on to the horses. You’d better take their wings away, Saranja. We don’t want them bolting. This is going to be fairly big, Maja, and I won’t have much to spare, so I can’t afford to shield you. I could put you to sleep for a bit, if you like.”
“No. I want to see. I’m a lot tougher than I was when we started.”
“All right. It shouldn’t be too bad—you’ll be in the lee of the cliff. Only don’t get too close to the edge. Well, here goes. No, boy. You stay here.”
He vanished.
Maja moved toward the drop, and found she couldn’t see much of the slope below without going right up to the edge. She looked around. Either side of the ledge they were on the rock face ran sheer up and down, and the ledge itself was the bottom of a wide cleft in the upper half of the cliff. The others had led the horses to the back of it and turned them to face the cliff. Ribek and Saranja were blindfolding Levanter and Pogo. Pogo didn’t like it. Saranja had already done that for Rocky and was starting to remove his wings. These days Maja barely had to brace herself for stuff like that.
She scrambled up over the boulders that had fallen against the side of the indent in the explosion of magic, found a viewpoint and stared at the bleak, black wound that had once been sheep pasture, and the tumbled woods around it.
She had seen nothing quite like it before, and yet a faint familiar throb pulsed steadily from it, the background magic of that other universe, beyond the touching point on Angel Isle. This was where Fodaro had discovered Jex, where he had studied the stars in the pool Benayu had made for him—still there now, gleaming untroubled amid the ruin around it—and where he had worked out his equations, and with Benayu’s help had begun to experiment on how to use them to destroy the Watchers.
This had once been a touching point too.
Benayu was there now, a tiny figure standing close by the central crater. He raised an arm and waved toward her.
“Ready?” she called. “He’s starting.”
The blast of magic came not from him, but inward, to him, invisible at first, but then a vortex formed, a thickening of the air that could be seen only because it rumpled itself as it gathered, like something seen through an uneven pane of glass, or heat waves rising from a furnace. When it reached its center over the crater it spiraled upward, denser and denser. And at the same time, far overhead, invisible dust particles gathered out of the clear, pale sky and hurtled inward—pale racing specks at first that joined and became flakes, puffballs, clumps, cloud streamers, darkening all the time as they crammed themselves tighter and tighter over the vortex below until they formed a single, roughly circular, mile-wide mass, darker than the darkest thundercloud.
Maja’s whole being shuddered, reverberated like a bell, to the steady drumroll of the forces pent there. She cried aloud at the sudden clapper stroke of their release, not into any outward explosion, but into a single aimed downward stroke from the center to the center of the vortex below. The two joined, and for a while she was looking at a thing like one of the flat-topped desert trees she had seen at the start of the journey north from Larg, a sky-high tree of darkness, a tree that was growing backward in time, its whole top shrinking inward and down through the trunk until there was only the pillar of the trunk itself plummeting down….
And then the light.
She had an instant of warning in which to close her eyes as the flash of the original explosion gathered in from its furthest reaches. The world turned white and eyelids were not enough. Hands across her face were not enough. For a moment she could see her finger bones black against the impossible whiteness. All vanished in thunder. Then nothing at all. She could neither hear nor see. Not even the dark of not seeing.
She opened her eyes and still she could not see. Nor hear. There should have been the screams of the panicking horses, the shouts and grunts of the others trying to calm them, Saranja’s voice, perhaps, grimly calm, “I think I’ve gone blind….”
Nothing. Not a whisper. Not the rustle of movement. No movement at all, even when Maja tried to move. She wasn’t breathing. Her heart seemed to have stopped between beat and beat. No sense of any of the marvelous magic of the world.
It’s all over, she thought. I’m dead. How disappointing. Ribek…
She would have wept with frustration, but even a tear must move.
Benayu’s voice in her head.
“I’m sorry about that. I should have realized….”
Sorry! she thought. When I’m dead!
“Hang on. I’ll sort it all out in a moment. I’d better deal with the horses first.”
Yes, being dead must be like this. One everlasting wait in utter silence, total non-seeing.
Benayu again.
“Ready, Maja?”
The pulse of his presence. A gentle puff into her nostrils. The touch of fingers on eyes and ears.
She was alive, herself, breathing and feeling and hearing, not on that mountain ledge but the long slope of green cropped turf below. The others were beside her, the horses still in their blindfolds, the people, even Striclan, looking as dazed as she felt. Now the peaceful woods stood round, their leaves already coloring as the world turned toward winter. Only the central crater remained, unhealed.
“Look,” said Saranja in a voice of wonder. “There’s an ant! It’s just as if all that had never happened.”
“Yes,” said Benayu. “That’s why it was easier than I thought it would be, except for the last part. Sorry about that. But it was all still there, waiting to come back into balance, all but the touching point itself. That’s gone.
“It’s all over now. Fodaro beat the Watchers in the end. We’d never have done it without him. I’ve left the crater like that for him. No one but us will ever know what it means, but that’s enough.”
They stood in silence for a while, gazing at the strange memorial to a brave and lonely genius.
“I’m hungry,” said Benayu. “Let’s have something to eat. Oyster-and-bacon pie, anyone?”
“Really?” said Maja. “I didn’t get any first time because I was a rag doll, and second time Ribek wouldn’t let me have more than a mouthful.”
“In that case I’ll have some too. Shall I make it oyster-and-bacon pie all round? Fine. That’s for the Empire. And rhubarb-and-ginger crumble for the Valley. And mountain cider for me and Fodaro. He adored the stuff. It’ll take a few minutes.”
“You’re not too tired?” said Saranja.
“I’ve got a bit left. Lucky I did at the end, mind you. But like I said, the rest of it went a lot better than I’d budgeted for. Get your saliva working.”
He was off somewhere else in his head for less than a minute, then settled down and sat staring gazing out eastward. The sun was halfway down the sky. It wouldn’t be long before the pasture was in the shadow of the mountain behind him. The same thought must have struck him.
“It’ll be cold up here in the hills, this far north,” he said. “Sleep out here all the same, I think. The cottage is still there, and there’d be room for all of us, but it’ll reek of Watcher-work, and I don’t want to waste our last evening together sorting it out. I’ll get it done tomorrow, and then you’ll be welcome to stay as long as you want.”