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.