“I don’t know if you can hear me, but I need to talk to you. I think the Ropemaker’s trapped in the other universe somehow, but when we used the hair it told us to go to somewhere in the Empire. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Tell Benayu,” came the faint reply.
Waking again in broad daylight, she lay for a little while assembling her thoughts. She didn’t see how she could tell Benayu about her dreams without telling the others, which was what she wanted to do anyway. By the time she was up they were already halfway through breakfast.
“You still look all in,” said Ribek. “We left you because we thought you needed the sleep.”
“I’m all right,” she said. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you. Jex told me to wait till after we’d seen what the Ropemaker’s hair told us. He can’t help at the moment. He still isn’t strong enough.”
She told them about her dreams, and what she thought they had meant. They waited for Benayu.
“All right,” he said with a sigh. “I suppose it makes life easier. It’s a bit of a strain, always having to remember whenever you say anything there’s stuff you mustn’t let on about. According to Fodaro there are lots of universes, but as far as we’re concerned there are only two that matter, ours and Jex’s. They’re completely different because ours has four dimensions—length, breadth, height and time—and Jex’s has seven. They aren’t just our four with three we haven’t got, because however many you’ve got they have to add up to a whole. Our four already do that, so in Jex’s universe they have to be different, to make room for the other three. There’s something like our length, but it isn’t the same, and so on. They have two dimensions of time.
“This is what Fodaro’s equations are all about. They are true in both universes.
“It’s no use trying to imagine what a seven-dimensional universe is like, because you’ve got a four-dimensional mind, four-dimensional eyes and so on. You can’t make sense of it. And you can’t go there and find out. If you could somehow get into a seven-dimensional universe the stuff you are made of wouldn’t make sense. It wouldn’t just cease to exist. It would be destroyed, and all the seven-dimensional stuff it was in contact with would also be destroyed, and there’d be a colossal explosion in both universes. The explosion Fodaro set off was caused by a contact lighter than this….”
He raised his two forefingers and lightly touched their tips together for a moment.
“So the Ropemaker can’t be actually in Jex’s universe, and Maja’s dream is only a dream,” said Saranja.
“Yes, he can. He can do it by magic. Magic is a sort of leakage between the universes. It isn’t actual material stuff. Fodaro used to say it’s a bit like light. Light isn’t stuff, but it’s there. It does things to stuff. Plants feed on it. If you try to grow plants in the dark they’ll grow for a bit but they won’t make green leaves and however well you treat them in other ways, they’ll die.
“Magic is leakage from the other universe that doesn’t make sense in ours, but it isn’t destroyed because it isn’t material stuff. So if you know how you can use it to change the stuff of our universe in ways that don’t make sense….”
He picked up a pebble, gazed at it for a moment and then put it back on the ground, where it turned itself into a beetle, raised its wing sheaths and buzzed angrily away, as if far from pleased at being roused from its peaceful sleep as a pebble.
“Like that,” he said. “Where was I? Yes, well, there are places where the two universes, ours and Jex’s, almost touch. Mostly it’s only one or two in each world. Or none. But there are quite a few in our world, and they’re almost all in the Empire. Fodaro said that there were mathematical reasons for this—something to do with a thing called a nexus in Jex’s universe—but it’s why there’s a lot of magic in the Empire and almost none anywhere else. He called these places touching points. He found one in the pasture.
“Anyway I think there are two possible ways of getting into Jex’s universe, but one of them you’d need Fodaro’s equations for, so the Ropemaker must have used the other one. You’d have to be a pretty good magician to do it, but he was.”
“Is, if Maja’s dream’s right,” said Saranja.
“Yes, is. Your anima, your inmost self, is a bit like light. It isn’t stuff, but it’s there. It can’t do anything, though—can’t act in the material world, like Jex told Maja—except inside a living creature. So what the Ropemaker would have to do is find a safe form and a safe place in which he could leave his material self—it’d have to be somewhere near a touching point—and put his anima into something like a bird, and then fly to the touching point and project his anima into a living creature on the other side, and then use that as his body to do what he wanted there. He wouldn’t be able to take anything material with him, mind you, the time ring for instance, though it’d be a hideous risk to leave that behind.”
“He’s a bit of a risk taker, by all accounts,” said Ribek.
“It’s always a risk, whenever you try anything new. But maybe. So if Maja’s dream is right, what we’re going to have to do is find where he’s left his material self—that’ll be where the hair was trying to reach to—and then take it to the Ropemaker’s anima in the other universe….”
“You said you couldn’t take stuff—bits of this universe,” said Saranja.
“I’ve got to take you, haven’t I? This is all going to be really big magic, at least as big as anything we’ve done so far. Bigger than getting Jex back. It’ll take all I’ve got. There’s no way I can do it and screen it at the same time, so the Watchers are going to be on to us in an instant. I’m not going to leave you three and Sponge and my material self behind for the Watchers to mess around with while I’m gone.
“I tell you, I ought to be able to do it. It’s in the equations. But I’m scared. I’ve been scared ever since the Watcher came to the way station. Saranja had to hit me to make me deal with the dragon back at Tarshu. Sometimes I wish Fodaro had never found the touching point, never worked out his equations. Sometimes I wish I’d never been born the way I was.”
“We don’t,” said Saranja. “We like you the way you are.”
“Nothing wrong with being scared,” said Ribek. “When things are scary I’d much rather trust myself to someone who knew they were than someone who didn’t.”
Maja didn’t say anything. She was scared too.
Maja was strongly on Saranja’s side about not traveling by the Imperial Highways. For all its life and interest she had soon wearied of the great one they had used on their way south, and even after so short a time on this smaller one she was strangely glad to get away from it. Since, for Benayu, changing his shape to a bird’s was little more than hedge magic, which the Watchers weren’t likely to notice, he was able to scout out tracks and byways again, and as they wound their way peacefully north along them, she discovered why she liked them so much better.
Tarshu had changed her. The effect was partly hidden at first as they passed through bare, sheep-cropped downland, completely emptied of people, all evacuated by the Watchers during the siege of the city. Then, as they moved further from the battle, the landscape changed, with the hills less steep and the valleys wide. There were farmhands working in the interlocking stone-walled fields, driving cattle out from milking to the lush pastures, or hoeing amid healthy half-grown crops.