“I’ve been bothered about that,” said Benayu. “I could take us there, of course, but it’s a risk. It doesn’t get us there all in a moment, quite, and if the Watchers show up in time I won’t be able to stop them grabbing us back. They’ve got the power. The sea won’t make any difference. They can do it from dry land.”
“Fortunately we have other means of escape at hand. A roc is a creature from my other universe, and therefore an impossible creature in this universe, where it can survive only as a magical animal. Similarly, a horse is a creature of this universe and cannot survive except as a magical animal in the other. It follows that a horse with the wings of a roc is an impossible creature in both universes and can survive as a magical animal in both. So, immediately before we attempt to locate what we are looking for, you must screen us while Saranja restores Rocky’s wings. Using him as a basis, you will be able to create the means to give the other two horses and the dog the power of flight, so that when the time comes they will be able to carry us to Angel Isle and through the touching point.”
“Won’t the Watchers be able to interfere with that too?” said Saranja.
“I should be able to think of ways to fight them off for a bit,” said Benayu. “I can’t if I’m busy transporting us all.”
“You will need to prepare your defenses in advance, before your powers are weakened over the sea. The Watchers will face the same difficulty, but they will have come in haste, without time to prepare specific weaponry to use in such circumstances. They will certainly deploy thunderbolts, and send a dragon in pursuit. Probably no more than one, since they have lost several over Tarshu, but they may well produce simulacra.”
“You might think about trying to hide us and laying a false trail. Like we did when we left Tarshu,” said Ribek.
“And finally there is the problem of how we can survive as four-dimensional creatures in a seven-dimensional universe,” said Jex.
“I’ve been working on that. I can do it all right, in theory. I’ll get some of it ready tonight, but I can’t finish it off till we get there. I’m bothered about this business of being weaker over the sea.”
“Angel Isle itself is different. It is a major touching point, a source of great power.”
Maja was woken in the dawn by a stir of magic and found Saranja and Ribek still asleep, but Benayu already sitting up, staring at a pattern of what looked like colored rice-grains he had laid out on the tiled floor of their sleeping booth. Every now and then he would point at it and more grains would appear under his fingertip, forming another swirl in the pattern. He had screened himself closely round, so that Maja could feel no more than a whisper of something immensely powerful and complex being brought out of nowhere and woven into the fabric of reality.
He’d continued to work throughout breakfast while Saranja fed him morsels which he chewed without noticing. When they were ready to leave he spread both hands over the pattern, which flowed upward from the center, maintaining its swirls and windings as it followed the movement of his hands while he twisted them, palms inward, until they were cupped around a shimmering egg about the size of a baby’s head. He moved them together until he could fold his fingers into each other and clasp them tight, absorbing the egg into himself.
The screen vanished.
“Done,” he muttered. “Help me up. We must go. Wake me when you see the garden.”
There was no particular moment at which the town of Barda began. Sheds and barns slightly more frequent, slightly less ramshackle; a patch where someone had been trying to grow vegetables; a row of sties with actual pigs in them; a shed, not apparently more habitable than any of the sheds they’d passed earlier, but with a line of laundry flapping in the breeze; and then, astonishingly, beside yet another slow-oozing mud-rimmed river (the tide apparently reached far enough inland here to expose a few feet of the bank) a seriously grand house with two pleasure yachts moored at a jetty and gardeners working its carefully symmetrical gardens.
Ribek booted Levanter forward until he was alongside Benayu on Pogo, leaned across and shook him by the elbow.
“Ready to wake up now?” he said. “This looks like your garden.”
Benayu snorted, sat up, squared his shoulders and looked around.
“That’s it. Thanks,” he said, speaking as cheerfully and confidently as he had done when they had first met him on that mountain pasture north of Mord. There was a blip of magic, and a screen enclosed a section of the garden. He raised his right hand toward it, palm forward, fingers spread, and closed it in a slow, grasping motion. The whole section—a small raised pond and the strip of lawn around it, with a few small trees and a curving bed of rosebushes with a close-clipped yew hedge behind it—shimmered for a moment, disappeared, and returned unchanged.
“All set now,” he said. “I think I’m ready as I’m going to be. Anything else I’ll have to improvise. Any suggestions about where to start looking? We really don’t want to use the hair again until we have to. Maja?”
“The oyster-beds? That’s what I smelled.”
“There’ll be a lot of them,” said Saranja. “I’ve lost count of the reeking wagonloads we’ve passed.”
“The first thing is to find out what Barda consisted of around when the Ropemaker disappeared,” said Ribek. “I thought we might take a leaf out of Striclan’s book. Suppose I’m doing the same sort of job he was, and I’ve come here to compile a report on the history of the oyster trade. If I find the right official and show him the scroll they gave me at Larg, there’s a good chance he’ll be helpful.”
A trivial, irrelevant thought came into Maja’s mind.
“I wonder what oysters taste like,” she said.
“Now’s your chance to find out,” said Ribek. “I’ll ask the fellow I see for a recommendation.”
The street where they waited for Ribek to reappear was utterly different from the tatterdemalion outskirts of Barda. Those had been like that because they had been long ago abandoned as the town had moved steadily eastward to stay near the sea that was its livelihood, keeping up with the unstoppable growth, inch by inch through the centuries, of the delta upon which it stood.
This was a broad, cobbled thoroughfare lined with stolid-looking brick buildings, mostly large and plain, with only here and there a flourish of ornamentation around the main doors. Ribek was inside one of these slightly fancier ones. Maja and the others waited in the shade opposite. The horses fidgeted and stamped. Saranja was almost as restless. But Benayu seemed to have retired into his trance and stood with his head bowed and his eyes half closed, swaying very slightly from side to side, as if he had fallen asleep on his feet. Only Maja could sense the steady, purposeful activity inside as he gathered and ordered the powers he was going to need.
Maja herself was almost sick with anxiety, so obviously that Saranja noticed and moved to her side and put a comforting arm round her, but even that didn’t stop the spasms of shivering and the endless, useless swallowing of saliva that wasn’t there. She wasn’t afraid of dying, or of what the Watchers might do to her if they caught her, but of the task ahead. No, she wasn’t going to bear the brunt of it, as Benayu would have to, but only she could find the Ropemaker. They’d talked about this on their way into the town. As Jex and Ribek had said, it would all have to happen in an instant, before the Watchers were on them. Ribek would be holding her. Saranja would unwind that single golden hair from the roc feathers. There would be the double blast of magic, leaving Maja blind and deaf but tracking that intense thread of golden fire through the darkness between the universes…