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.