“But I cannot follow a trail, as you will need to, to an unknown destination, nor relocate other objects with me except by swallowing them. We doubt whether Benayu’s eggshell would survive the strength of my digestive juices. Our solution is that the dog should carry you, since, being a magical animal, he can exist in both universes.
“The problem then—”
He stopped abruptly and became stone. Something like an immense but soundless explosion battered against the eggshell. Maja couldn’t feel it, but she saw the ground judder, and the whole enclosure seem to heave around as the tree in which she was seated swayed violently to and fro. The stone mermaid toppled into the pool. The horses squealed and reared, wrenching at their tethers and spreading their wings for panic flight. Weird rainbow lights swirled across the surface of the eggshell. Benayu was on his feet, pouring out magical energies, but Maja was impervious to them in her doll form. Saranja was shouting to Ribek to come and help with the horses.
Slowly the turmoil stilled.
“Trouble?” said Ribek mildly.
“The Watchers have found the touching point,” said Benayu. “That was their first shot at breaking through my barrier. I reckon they’ll have suffered, but it was much sooner than I’d expected. Much stronger too. They’re not going to give up. I was wrong. I think they might make it after all. I’ll do something about the horses, like I did yesterday, in case it happens again.”
“How long have we got?” said Saranja.
“I don’t know. But we can’t afford to hang about. Where’ve you got to, Jex? Jex!”
The stone Jex flipped back into its living form.
“Let me try,” Maja told him. “You want to do something to me so that I can tell Sponge where to go? All right. See if it works. I’ll tell you if I can’t stand it.”
“Maja agrees,” said Jex, speaking now to the others.
“Wait,” said Ribek. “I accept that nothing that can happen to her here will be as bad as what would happen to her if she fell into the hands of the Watchers. You’re sure there’s nothing else we can try?”
“I can’t think of anything, and nor can Jex,” said Benayu. “This is far the best chance we’ve come up with.”
“All right,” said Ribek. “You’re going to hang her round Sponge’s neck, I suppose. I’ll do that when you’re ready.”
“This is only a trial,” said Benayu. “I’ll set Sponge up first, and then I’ll do her as gently as I can. Jex will keep in touch, so she can stop the process whenever she wants. If that goes all right she can try guiding Sponge around in here. No point in building the little egg if that doesn’t work, and it’s going to take a bit of time, in any case.”
Ribek grunted and lifted Maja down from the tree. He settled himself down with his back against the trunk. She could just see the back of his right hand across her legs, holding her steady in the crook of his left arm.
“Might as well be comfortable while we’re waiting,” he said. “See all right? Start telling you the rest of ‘The Demon Baker’ while we’re waiting, shall I? I need to take my mind off things just as much as you do. More, probably.”
It didn’t really work. For the first time since she’d known him he let her see how worried he really was. The natural little pauses which storytellers use to sort out in their minds what comes next kept stretching into longer gaps, and then he’d shake himself, say “Sorry,” and go on with the story. Maja didn’t mind. She was aware of being strangely unscared, for someone who had always thought of herself as timid, by what she was soon going to have to try to do. The fact that Ribek really cared about her took up most of her attention.
So she half listened to the story while she watched what Benayu was doing by the pool. He spent some time kneeling with Sponge sitting opposite him. At first he simply cradled Sponge’s head in his hands, looking into his eyes and muttering. Then he asked Saranja to fetch one of Maja’s human socks and gave it to Sponge to sniff. He told Sponge to stay where he was, fetched a handful of soil from the rose bed and dribbled it in a thin stream all the way round Sponge, muttering as he did so.
He was halfway round when another silent explosion battered against the eggshell, but his hand didn’t falter. As soon as the circle was completed it began to glow with a steady pale light, not bright but still visible in the sunless daylight. He straightened, squared his shoulders like someone momentarily easing powerful inward tension, looked briefly round at the eggshell, where the swirls of strange light that had followed the explosion were still dying away, and came across to the pool.
“We’re going to have to speed things up,” he said. “I think that was only a try-out. I took them by surprise first time, and they didn’t get a chance to study what I’d done and start working out how I’d done it. They’ll try something different next time and I’d better be ready for it. I don’t want to be still messing around with this.
“You’re going to have to be able to see what’s happening outside your little eggshell, Maja, and there’s no way I can let you see through it without weakening it fatally, so you’re going to have to see everything through Sponge’s eyes. It’ll be pretty confusing, because of course he’ll actually see them in seven dimensions, but his brain will do its best to switch them into four, as far as it can. It won’t bother him, but you’ll find it pretty confusing.
“I’m telling you that now because you’ll be testing the connection here, inside the big eggshell, in our ordinary four dimensions. You won’t find out what it’s like till you’re on the outside. Ready? Just hang her round Sponge’s neck, Ribek.”
Again the scene swung and tilted as Ribek carried her across the lawn and knelt just outside the circle of pale light. She was facing him now. He was doing his best to smile through his anxiety as he eased her loop over Sponge’s neck. He stood and moved back. Benayu took his place and reached toward her with both hands. She couldn’t feel his touch or see what he was doing, but she guessed it was the same sort of thing he’d been doing to Sponge, because almost at once something started to happen inside her.
It had the familiar tingle of magic, which she hadn’t felt at all in her rag-doll shape despite everything that had been going on around her. It started slowly, becoming steadily stronger, but with nothing like the dizzying impact of powerful magic happening outside herself that she’d learned to bear in her true Maja form.
“All right so far?” asked Benayu. “Tell Jex if you’re not…. Now I’m going to make the connection. I’ve only done it for myself before, and with you as you are…well, it’s a bit tricky. Here goes.”
He rose and stood. She could just see his feet, with an arc of the glowing circle running close in front of them. The glow became stronger, rose, moved inward and passed out of her vision. But now she could feel it, not as though it were touching her on the outside, but moving up inside her body, so that as it passed through her she began to feel for the first time since Ribek had carried her out of the oyster pool where the bits of this new body were—something she’d felt all of her life without noticing, knowing the position of each of her hands and feet, even with her eyes shut.
So now she could tell where Sponge’s four paws—her paws—were, and actually feel the pressure of the ground on her hindquarters where she sat with her tail curled round to her right….
The glow passed over her eyes, too bright for her to see anything but the weave of the fabric on which they were painted, but after a few moments it changed to a darker color and then faded and she was seeing again, only very differently from either of the ways she had seen before, Maja or doll. The colors had changed, become much duller. The whole rose bed was now various tones of browny-green, with a few pale blobs and patches to show which were the white flowers, while the darker and browner bits might be the red ones. She couldn’t tell from their shapes which of the rest were leaves or flowers; they seemed to fade into each other.