Now something invisible, something Benayu must have prepared in those long days of meditation, struck home. Black blood spurted from all five underbellies. He shouted a command and Sponge released his hold and drew clear as the four simulacra blanked out of being and the master dragon plummeted out of Maja’s vision toward the ocean.
Ribek whooped in triumph. Benayu held up a hand in acknowledgment and pointed ahead. The horses, who had flown steadily on through the turmoil as if nothing were happening, began to descend.
“What is it? Are we there? Say something. I can hear now.”
No answer.
“Turn me round. Please.”
Again, though she was now nearly certain that Ribek couldn’t hear her, the world swung, and she was looking past Levanter’s neck at the immense expanse of ocean. Out of it, not far off now, rose a single broad pillar of rock with the ocean swell breaking into foam all around it. Angel Isle. The touching point.
The horses glided toward it like gulls, wings barely moving, and circled it single file. Without being asked, Ribek turned her so that she could see the wave-ravaged cliffs, fissured into immense, irregular columns, slide past. Why Angel Isle? she wondered. She had a vague idea that angels were a kind of good demon. There were plenty of demons in the old stories, but no angels as far as she could remember.
Halfway round the island a crevasse between two pillars widened into a dark slit. The horses swung past without hesitation and circled on. But second time round Rocky led them out and away, swung back, and headed directly for the slit. At the last moment he half folded his wings and disappeared into the cliff. Pogo followed, and Levanter, and they were in darkness. The opening must have widened considerably the moment they were inside, for now she could see Rocky and Pogo gliding on, silhouetted against a pale light gleaming ahead.
Darkness again. No, Ribek had twisted right round in the saddle to look behind him, so she perforce had done the same. The slit must have closed. Or something.
He turned back, and she watched the light increasing and increasing until they glided out into the daylight of what she instantly knew to be another universe.
PART THREE
ANGEL ISLE
CHAPTER
16
There must have been some kind of night in this different universe, because now it was dark, and the others were all asleep. Maja knew that because the darkness seemed to come from the outside, so it wasn’t anything Benayu had done. Everything else was, here inside the eggshell he’d made to keep their own four dimensions safe from touching the seven dimensions of this other universe.
Maja wasn’t asleep, because rag dolls can’t shut their eyes. All they can do is lie and stare into the dark and wait for it to be day again.
She knew what she was now because as soon as they were off the horses Ribek had unlooped her from round his neck and propped her against something, and for a moment her head had flopped forward and she’d seen her muddy legs sticking out in front of her with a bit of the hem of her skirt, dark green like the thread Benayu had pulled from her blouse. Her stockings were green and yellow stripes and her round puppy-paw feet were purple. The stockings were knitted, but the shoes and skirt were fabric, so she supposed her face must be fabric too, with her features painted onto it. She was pretty certain her eyes must be blue because of the way everything she could see looked a bit too blue, and the transparent mesh she saw through came from the weave of the fabric, and of course her hearing was woolly because wool was what her head was stuffed with.
Then Ribek had straightened her up and she’d been able to see everything in front of her. Benayu was explaining how he’d got all the four-dimensional stuff ready in those last hours when he seemed to be three-quarters asleep, and hidden it inside himself so that he could bring it out as they passed through the touching point. There, as soon as it came into contact with the seven-dimensional stuff of this other universe, it started to explode, but then stopped and became the place where they were now.
It was very pretty. She’d watched him copy it from the rich man’s garden they’d passed just outside Barda, with the raised pool rimmed by a low stone wall and a stone mermaid in the middle, and the turf and the trees and the rose bed with the neat clipped yew hedge behind it, though there was now a tidy pile of horse dung on the perfect turf beside it (tsk, tsk, as Striclan might have said). The horses were drinking from the pool, and Benayu had “fetched” fodder for them from somewhere.
Immediately beyond the yew hedge was the shell of the egg that enclosed it all. Or was it so close? For all Maja could tell, it could have been half a mile away. It shimmered, but it shouldn’t have because it didn’t seem to have a surface and it was all one color, a kind of extra-gray gray. (White can be dazzling white and black can be pitch black, but gray…?) Benayu said that this was because it was made of the two kinds of light, one from each universe, tangled into each other and forming a shell of solid energy to keep the actual stuff of which the universes were made from touching and being destroyed in the explosion.
Ribek, of course, had moved into sight from beside her, gone through a gap in the yew hedge and tried to touch it. She’d seen him jerk himself back and stand wringing his hand as if he’d jarred a nerve in his wrist. Benayu had laughed. Maja hadn’t been able to see him from where she’d been sitting but he sounded utterly exhausted and at the same time triumphant. It had been a frustratingly long time before anyone thought to ask what Ribek and Maja had found in the oyster pool.
Ribek was out of sight again, but Saranja had been sitting on the wall of the pool, almost at the center of her line of vision, with Jex on the coping next to her.
“Well, what happens now?” she said. “I’m afraid we haven’t got the hair any more. I’d laid it out on Rocky’s saddle and was holding it in place with a fingertip in case it blew off when Benayu told me to say the name. The moment I did so it got hot enough to burn and I snatched my hand away before I could stop myself, and when I looked it wasn’t there. Not that it would do us much good without Maja to tell us which way it wants us to go. Aren’t you going to show us what you found in the oyster-bed? Perhaps we can use that somehow.”
“Trouble is, I don’t know if it’s the right thing,” said Ribek. “I’d got hold of Maja’s wrist and I was letting her show me the way down and at the same time helping her get there. She seemed to know exactly where she wanted to go. She pushed her hand down through the oysters into stuff beneath—loose sandy gravel—and then just went limp and the breath started bubbling out of her mouth and any moment she’d’ve started breathing water. I had to get her out. I only had time for a quick grope where her hand had been. Anyway, this is what I found. I don’t think there was anything else.”
A long pause. Saranja stared, frowning.
“Show me too! Ribek, please! Jex…!”