He sat down on a moss-covered boulder and focused his attention inward: the wall of fire, Garec’s lung, the great pine in the Blackstone forest – but again he was derailed by his inability to think of how a cloaking device should work. ‘This isn’t going well,’ he called back to the others.
‘Take your time,’ Mark encouraged. ‘We’re fine. We’ll watch and listen. You don’t think about anything but keeping us hidden, protected from his sight.’
Protected from his sight. They needed camouflage. Camouflage, like the absurd head-to-toe drapings Howard used to wear for his annual trip to Nebraska during goose season. He remembered Myrna saying, ‘I can still see you, Howard. You’re still here? I can- oh wait, I almost lost you there for a minute, but there you are. I can still see you.’
Focus, Steven. You’re not focusing. Hidden from sight – how do we get hidden from sight? We need to be camouflaged but not invisible. Howard might have been invisible to the geese, but he was never invisible to Myrna. Myrna. Think, Steven.
Another seeking spell rushed by overhead. Steven recoiled reflexively and opened his eyes. ‘He’s getting closer.’
‘Keep at it! I know you’ll get there.’ Mark’s confidence was infectious, but it didn’t help. It was cold. He wished he had put on the ski jacket from his saddlebag before moving into the brush. He would start wearing it beneath the cloak; that would be warm, as warm as a heavy blanket, a wool ‘That’s it,’ he cried, looking back at the others.
‘What’s it?’ Garec asked, but Steven didn’t answer. His friends had already begun to come more sharply into view, framed in front of the acrylic canvas of the forest as trees, shrubs, fallen leaves and scattered rocks all began slowly to melt together, to soften into a malleable whole. Reaching out, he could feel the air, that familiar sense that it had grown more dense, as heavy as the most humid day he could remember: Mexico, or New Orleans in the summertime. He wore the air like a glove, a perfect fit, and Steven turned his hand over and over, gaining a sense of how he could push and pull, manipulate and build from this perspective.
Well, Steven, get painting – yes, painting a woollen blanket, one with holes in the weave, holes he could see through, but that was fine, they needed to see where they were going. It was the perfect camouflage – was someone under there? Of course. No one could become invisible… but you couldn’t tell who was hiding beneath that old blanket. Mark had said something about a blanket, the comforting feeling of falling asleep on the floor or the couch and waking up later covered by his mother’s wool blanket. Why had Mark mentioned that? It had something to do with Karl Yasztremski and the Red Sox, with his father and Jones Beach out on Long Island.
Without realising what he was doing, Steven walked back to where his friends watched, thrilled that he had succeeded in calling up the magic, yet still dumbstruck at the breadth of his power. He held aloft the hickory staff and gestured with it from horizon to horizon, east to west, and then north to south. It glowed a faint red where his palms touched it, much as it had the night Gilmour rebuilt it from splinters he found scattered across the ground.
Mark traced the line of the staff in the air; he was looking for something in particular. When he found it, he nodded grimly to himself. Steven was camouflaging them, protecting them from Nerak’s sight.
When he was finished, Steven leaned the staff up against his horse’s flank, turned to the others and said, ‘That should do it. I’m not sure how long it will last, but I think I can do it again if I have to.’
‘What did you do?’ Gilmour asked. ‘I felt nothing, no ripple, no tension, no spark, and if I felt nothing, I’m sure Nerak has no sense at all of what just happened.’
‘I put a blanket over us.’
‘A blanket?’
‘Yeah, an old blanket my mother used to keep draped across the back of the couch.’ He smiled at Mark. ‘It was your idea.’
‘My dad, and those pictures in the hall,’ Mark said. ‘I knew it was working.’
‘How?’
‘Abe is running a sale on Bud and Bud Light. I saw the poster.’
Steven nodded and climbed back into the saddle. ‘Let’s get out of here. Which way, Gilmour?’
‘East, my friends.’ He did not look well, but he patted his horse and led the others through the Falkan forest.
THE GORGE
Hannah was worried about her mother, and worried about Steven and Mark. She wished there was some way to get a message to them, to let them to know she was doing well – still lost, but no longer alone in this curious land. She was certain the two roommates were in Eldarn too, somewhere, and she was still hoping she might encounter them by pure chance – things like that happened all the time; people met longtime friends and lost relatives on beaches and at used car lots, on station platforms and in supermarkets. Well, maybe not all the time, because for all the lost friends one met in the queue at a department store, there were ten thousand who never showed up…
Still Hannah looked closely at every stranger they met on the road, and gazed about as they passed through villages. She sighed to herself, imagining the scenario: Steven and Mark would shout to her through the window of a pub and she would join them for a few drinks. She knew they would pick up where they had left off, as if nothing as improbable as this had ever happened.
She still hadn’t discovered any way of getting a message across the Fold to her mother, either. She didn’t want much, just a momentary tear in the fabric of the cosmos. She had never done well in physics; that was Steven’s forte, and she guessed that even her world’s greatest physicists would be confounded by her current situation, so she hoped for a chance discovery that might allow her to shout, as if from across an airport parking lot, that she was scared but fine, and working on a way to get home.
Hannah and her new friends were still picking their way through the Great Pragan Range, moving slowly north towards the Malakasian border. The forest of ghosts was ample deterrent for most travellers and none of her friends had been this way before; Hannah had realised that no one knew exactly where the border was. Blocking the sun with one hand and peering into the fading daylight, she tried to determine if there was a navigable pass between two hills off to their left. The hills would be considered mountains by most standards, but in comparison with the rest of the sawtoothed Pragan range, these were little more than speed bumps.
This guess-and-check orienteering without a map was really slowing their progress. Twice now they had been forced to backtrack to find a workable pass. Most of the time, though, they had been what Hannah called ‘holy fucking lucky’ – Churn found the notion hilarious, but Hoyt and Alen understood the grave implication of the foreign woman’s joke: winter was upon them and finding a low-elevation passage was critical. Not even a fool would climb the Great Pragans until the high altitude snow melted the following spring. And here they were, moving steadily north
Still squinting into the west, she asked, ‘What do you think?’
‘A pass there? It’s hard to guess,’ Hoyt said. ‘This sloping meadow cuts off too much of our view to be sure.’
Hannah sighed. ‘You’re right, I know, but just look at the rest of them. See anything more promising? If we can’t get through there, I foresee a long snowy winter right here in the centre of this frozen field.’
Hoyt shivered. ‘Let’s go.’
The periodic snow on the ground had made it easy for them to follow the route taken by the wagonloads of Seron tree cutters – the noise the carts made gave plenty of notice and they hid in the underbrush until the Malakasians had disappeared – but the previous night the group had taken a wrong turn and a thorough search of the meadow yielded no evidence that the Malakasian transports had come this way.
‘But there couldn’t have been any other way to get those wagons through here,’ Hannah said. ‘I’m sure we’ll pick up their trail between those two hills. It’s the only low-elevation pass along this ridge.’ She gestured west to east, as if Alen couldn’t see for himself that the way was blocked. ‘And I don’t know how the hell anyone in Malakasia thinks they’ll continue to make this journey, either going or coming back, for much longer.’