“Maybe it’s the wrong place or the wrong time.” What had I expected? I’d been so sure…
Paulo snorted, pulled a scant handful of oats from a cloth bag and began apologizing to Jasyr and Molly for the long hard riding on a wild-goose chase.
Nothing to do but sleep and rethink everything in the morning. I could talk to the shepherd, perhaps, to make sure of the story, the place, the season. It had to be right. I had no other clue.
We rolled out our blankets on the damp ground, and Paulo was snoring in seconds. He could sleep in a tree limb or a saddle… or tied to a stable wall half dead, like that night in Zhev’Na when we’d become friends.
I hated thinking about Zhev’Na. I had lived there only a little more than a year, yet I could still close my eyes and feel the desert sun on my skin and smell the dust and smoke and blood from the Zhid practice fields. Life before Zhev’Na seemed unreal, as if it had happened to someone else - as I suppose it had. Comigor was like a castle in a story. It was easier to recall the flowery scent of Philomena’s ugly apartments than to remember her face. It hadn’t been at all difficult learning she wasn’t my mother. She’d never acted like my mother. She’d never felt it, nor had I.
It was easier to remember Papa’s face - Tomas’s face - though it kept blending into my real mother’s face. The brother and sister had resembled each other closely. I had always liked occasions when Tomas first came home from his travels, because he smelled like horses and leather and the oil he used on his swords. After he’d been home a while, he smelled like Philomena’s bedroom.
I owed Tomas a great deal. He had never known that Ziddari, the Exile, Lord of Zhev’Na, had switched his sister Serf’s doomed infant with his own child. He had tried to be a good father, but I’d been terrified he would find out I was a sorcerer and have me arrested. Ziddari twisted Tomas’s mind for ten years and lured Tomas into a battle that was never his. What would have become of me if he hadn’t thought of me when he was dying and asked his sister to tell me how much he cared for me? Maybe none of this would have happened, and I would be the Duke of Comigor right now, fighting for King Evard, betrothed to the king’s daughter Roxanne, perhaps. That’s what Tomas and Philomena had planned. Or maybe I would have been found out by the Leiran sheriffs and burned to death like my real father. More probably, Ziddari would have discovered the magic that had joined my dead father to Prince D’Natheil and taken me to Zhev’Na anyway. Then my mother wouldn’t have been there to stop me from destroying the Bridge. Enslaving the world to the Lords.
I pulled my blanket up over my cloak and around my back between me and the rock. The night was getting cold. I wished very much that I could talk to my mother. Ask her advice. She was good at puzzles and knew so much about so many things. A few times I’d been tempted to tell her more about how it was with me. But she would have felt awful and sorry, when there was nothing to be done. And I hadn’t wanted her telling the Prince everything; she didn’t like keeping secrets from him. Now I didn’t know if she was even alive.
I sat up long into that night. I’d had more sleep these last few days traveling with Paulo than I’d had on any night since Zhev’Na, so sleep just wouldn’t come. Instead I went over everything again and again, worrying about my mother, and about the Prince, who wanted me dead, and the Lords, who just wanted me.
By the time the moon had crept across the sky and dropped low on the horizon in front of me, my thoughts weren’t making sense any more. I was just staring at the moon that got bigger and brighter as it fell, until it filled the entire span of my vision. As the light swelled and filled me, the world receded. Paulo’s snoring sounded soft and distant. The chilly wind no longer made me shiver, and the hard, cold ground seemed only remotely connected to me. Only the moon was in my eyes… the moon… What had the shepherd said? Tom come late to the hold, and the moon was in his eyes…
“Paulo! Wake up!” Without turning my head, I reached out for him, and his arm seemed farther away than the moon. I felt him stir. Careful not to let anything distract my glance, I closed my eyes and turned exactly a half circle to face the rock at my back. I opened my eyes again… and there was the path of moonlight, leading straight into the hillside. Only the hillside wasn’t there any more. I was looking into another place altogether. Night, yes, but a very different night. The sky was purple and black, and unlike those that burned behind and above me, the stars were green.
“Hurry,” I said, my voice emerging at some vast distance behind me, barely audible though I made no effort to whisper. “Untether the horses; leave everything. Take my hand.” And from that same vast distance, I heard Paulo, answering me. “Good Jerrat, save us! Your eyes are yellow. What’s happened? Are you - ?”
“Don’t worry about it. I can see the way. Hurry. And hold on tight. I can’t feel your hand.”
Moments later, the lightest brush of a feather touched my fingers, and I set foot on the hard-packed road that led into the dream world. His words came so faint that I felt them more than heard them. Oh, cripes. You’re halfway into solid rock… and you want me to come with you. Until I pulled him after, and we stood wholly in the place of my dreams.
“We found it,” I said, my voice quite normal again. Paulo stood quite solid beside me with a crushing grip on my hand. “Welcome to the Breach.”
CHAPTER 11
“This can’t be the Breach.” Paulo pressed his back against the rock cliff, ensuring he was as far as he could get from the outsloping edge of the precipice. “I don’t care nothing for your feelings about it. That was a fearful place. I never told you, but I saw such things… And though no man could call this place rightful, it’s nothing so wicked as that. This is just different, like Avonar is different. Well, maybe a bit more…”
We stood on a narrow spit of rock that jutted out high over a barren landscape. Streaks of blue-and-green lightning split the sky, and thunder rumbled across the dark plains that stretched in every direction below us. Storms clustered about the horizon, boiling clouds of midnight that continuously changed shape in the bilious light.
“You’re right that it’s changed - or at least this part of it has changed - since we came out of Zhev’Na,” I said. “I can’t explain why that’s so. By rights we should already be going mad.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re the Prince’s son, so you’re protecting us like he did. I’m not getting so much as a handspan away from you; you can just count on that.” I could feel him willing me away from the edge of the precipice, back toward the dark shape of the doorway in the rock, a black arch outlined with yellow moonlight.
“But I’m not doing anything! When the Prince brought us through the Breach, he was using sorcery every moment, expending every bit of power he could possibly manage.” Even when he crossed the Breach by way of D’Arnath’s Bridge, the Prince had to concentrate and hold the way open, like someone holding back branches to let you pass through a thick forest. “So this doesn’t make sense at all. Maybe Vroon and the others will show up and explain it, now we’ve arrived.”
I was not mistaken. We were nowhere near D’Arnath’s Bridge, yet we were standing in the Breach between the worlds. The Breach had been a part of me once, and I recognized it, just as you can look at a childhood portrait and know it is an image of yourself, even recalling the fancies going through your head as it was painted.
The Breach was chaos itself, the warped, broken, distorted bits left over from the birth of the universe, drawn together a thousand years before when three Dar’Nethi sorcerers named Notole, Parven, and Ziddari had reached too far for power. Since that event - the Dar’Nethi called it the Catastrophe - the Breach had divided the mundane world from Gondai. This chaos had no form of its own, but took horrid shapes created by the deepest fears of the traveler who had the misfortune to wander into it. Monsters, flesh-eating rains, rivers of blood, pits full of snakes, spiders the size of a house… terror in a thousand guises awaited anyone who walked into the Breach.