Carousel Sun (19 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Low Tide 10:09
A.M.
EDT

Goosefare Brook enters the Gulf of Maine past Kinney Harbor. The pool it forms just short of the narrow mouth is a favorite hangout for egret, heron, and the occasional very bewildered swan. In addition to being narrow, the mouth sports a mess of broken pilings, like rotten teeth, visible at low tide, invisible at high, and at all times a threat to the navigation of any vessel but those with the shallowest draft: kayak, canoe, barge. Captains of such craft can easily come ashore at a pleasant little apron beach on the marsh side, perfect for a picnic and a spot of bird watching.

There’s another hazard to navigation in the area, too: a wrecked ship sitting well out on the shelf. I’ve seen it exactly once, myself, at dead low water during the lowest low tide in thirty years, according to Nerazi, who’d shown it to me. Mostly, its black and broken hull is covered by the kindly waters, but it remains a risk, not for that barge or kayak so much as any ocean-going rig whose skipper hasn’t done his homework.

To the best of my knowledge; despite—or maybe
because of
—the navigational challenges, the little beach has been used off and on for smuggling operations. Not lately, if what I read in the paper was so. Or maybe whoever was using the beach just hadn’t been caught.

Yet.

My interest today, however, wasn’t smuggling, past or present. It was the little beach itself, which showed up—or, say,
didn’t
show up—in my Guardian-gestalt of the land as . . . call it a dead zone. No—call it a
still zone
.

When I’d first come back home to Archers Beach, my two pressing problems had been:

One, make sure that the prisoners on the merry-go-round were secured beyond any possibility of breaking away—a significant challenge, given the state of my health (dying) and mage-craft (rudimentary).

Two, find Gran, who had gone missing at just about the worst time possible, though, to be perfectly fair, no time that springs to mind would have been good.

In the process of my search, my subsequent reconnection with both the land and my duties to it, I had become aware of certain . . . specific areas that seemed to need . . . help. Maybe even the help of the Guardian of the land.

The first of those had been Heron Marsh—Eltenfleur’s territory. I’d tended to him first because, well . . . because Eltenfleur hadn’t been remotely still or quiet or quite yet dead. He’d been
dying
. He’d been
in pain
, and he wanted everyone within the sound of his voice to know it.

Since the end of the Super Early Season, in my spare time, which had amounted to a fair number of hours, I’d been trying to map out exactly where those others—the quiet spots—were.

This wasn’t as easy you might think, for the simple reason that the land doesn’t do maps, or driving directions. Of course, the land could just
walk me
to anyplace I expressed an interest in, but I liked to think that I’d learned better than that.

After my experience with Eltenfleur—especially the almost-getting-killed part—I wanted to have some idea of where I was going, and what I was likely to find there.

Before
I arrived.

The rewards of practice were that I could, with concentration, sense the direction of a particular location, and . . . sometimes . . . bring the land’s perception into some kind of relationship with how I saw the world.

What that meant in practical terms is that I’d been spending a lot of time flat on my back on the living room floor, feeling out the size and shape of one quiet zone at a time, the flavor of the land to all sides of it, then rolling over to stare at the map until, suddenly, something just . . . clicked, and I
knew
.

Or, as was more often the case, I
didn’t
know and all I had for my trouble was a headache. At that point, I’d take a couple aspirin before hitting the guidebooks, and the local histories, again.

Goosefare Brook had come through pretty clear: the first certain location, after Heron Marsh. Maybe I should have visited immediately, but early on I’d had the idea that I’d do better by pinpointing all the quiet zones first, nice and neat on the map, and see if there was—oh, a pattern, or a proximity, or a theme. But the truth was that my other fixes were still kind of . . . fuzzy.

And it had finally come to me that I was shirking my duty, by withholding the Guardian’s aid, such as it might be.

Since it was low tide, the marshside beach was at its widest, which suited my purpose perfectly. Assuming that the quiet tentativeness was a sign that there
was
something wrong or in need of repair, I’d have most of the problem area above water and open to observation.

Which was why I was skinning down the side of an embankment, using various exposed roots for handholds, and startling a blue heron taller than I am, which was standing out near the center of the pool.

The land was right with me, curious as a puppy dog, which is its usual mode of operation. In the land’s view, I was endlessly fascinating, and thought up so very many
interesting
things to do.

I did feel a tingle of puzzlement regarding today’s adventure, and a certain wistfulness, which I took to mean that it was sorry Borgan hadn’t come along, too.

The roots under my hand, and the embankment itself, hummed as I worked my way down, as things do. Generally, I wouldn’t experience them this clearly, as individual melodies; but as two strands of the ongoing symphony of the land that infused me, constantly. I’d gotten to the point where I didn’t consciously hear the racket, anymore.

But I sure did miss it when it stopped.

I dropped the last few inches to the little beach—landing inside a silence both absolute and terrifying. My knees buckled and I hit the sand hard, and there was nothing—so much nothing that for a wild second I thought I’d gone deaf.

But no.

Out beyond the broken pilings, I could hear the whisper of waves against sand, under the growing roar of a speedboat’s engine.

But the land, the ongoing symphony of
all’s well . . .

Was gone, as if I’d never heard it.

I took a hard breath, stilling a surge of panic. After all, I’d lived like this; lived like this
for years
, by my own choice. I could certainly bear a few minutes’ separation from the voice of the land while I looked around and tried to figure out just what the hell was going on here.

Slowly, I got my feet under me and rose. I brushed the sand off my jeans, and walked forward until I was at the water’s edge. Out in the heart of the pool, the blue heron observed me with a critical golden eye.

The sand on the little beach was orange in color and gritty in texture, same as the sand on the ocean side. Used to be the sand at Archers Beach was white, and fine as powder. That was before the Army Corps of Engineers built the jetty at Camp Ellis, in a effort to save the town. My friend Tarva, the selkie, had strongly disapproved of the Camp Ellis jetty—or as strongly as a selkie can disapprove of anything. They’re a fairly easygoing lot, and committed to their own comfort.

In fact, Tarva’s disapproval had its roots in his comfort. Before the jetty, according to him, the Saco River and the sea had been free to comingle at Camp Ellis. This action of the waters coming together had produced that exceptionally fine sand—sand eminently suitable for a seal to cuddle into for a well-deserved nap.

The Corps’ meddling had not only removed the refining process, so that the sand that now came onto the beach was two steps up from orange gravel, but too much of it passed up the coast, adding to the shelf, and producing dunes, destroying what had once been a wide, firm, glistening beach of white sand.

The same high-handed meddling might also have produced a silted-up, choked, marsh pool, but that wasn’t what I was seeing. Even at low tide, the pool was wide and deep, almost up to the blue heron’s knobby knees.

So, no Eltenfleur problem here, where the marsh had been cut off from the ocean’s healing touch.

I walked from the front of the tiny apron of sand, around to the left, until I came to the bank I’d climbed down. Just for kicks, I put my hand on an exposed root.

The song of the land soared into being, strongly laced with worry. I tried to be reassuring, but probably wasn’t all that successful, given that I let go of the root, instead of climbing back up to unity. Alone once again in silence, I moved along the bank to the right edge of the beach, and down to my forward starting point.

The silence was absolute. The land was not present, and my land-attached powers were not available to me.

Jikinap
, however,
was
available to me. More, it was aware and, slowly, with what felt like a good deal of caution, it was uncoiling from its nestling place at the base of my spine.

Two things interest
jikinap
—more of itself, and a vacuum that can be filled with itself. Either is dangerous.

I exerted my will, firmly but gently, and stopped the rise of my power. Then, I stepped Sideways.

Bars of light snapped into being around me—following the contour of the tiny sand beach. In Side-Sight, they coruscated slightly, as if the light were contained in tubes. I extended my will to embrace the one nearest to me, intending to give it a closer inspection . . .

Except that my will slid off of it like the tubelike construct was greased. It stayed where it was, and my will rebounded to me—hard.

It stung, but I’m nothing if not stubborn—get that from all sides of the family, as far as I can tell. I extended my will again, this time making sure that it was sticky with a light coating of
jikinap
.

I got a firm, metaphysical grip on the tube this time, but it didn’t budge. It felt as if the thing was rooted in the land—hell, as if it was rooted in the
rock
. I tightened my grip, raised a little more juice—

I heard a crack, saw a flash, then stars.

When the stars had faded, I sat up, crossed my legs tailor-fashion, and considered the situation.

“Ouch.”

The blast that had blown me off my feet had also blown my sight back to the everyday world. From my cross-legged seat in the sand, I blinked Sideways again.

There they were—bars of light, glittering at me coyly. This time, I managed to resist the temptation to get hold of one, and studied the big picture.

In total, there were twelve bars, six on the left side of the beach, starting at the bank, and six on the right side. The colors were in prismatic order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, with the purple bars at the front of the beach, but twice as far apart as any of the others.

A faint bell rang in the back of my abused head.

Slowly, I stood up, staring around me at the bars of light, and at the space, ready to receive the thirteenth—white—bar, which would gather and focus the energy of all the bars, in order to open . . .

A wild gate.

. . . which is to say, a Gate between one and another of the Six Worlds that has not been put into place, and registered, by the Wise.

Mind, it’s not necessary to have
any
kind of Gate—sanctioned or not—in order to cross from one world to another. The old stories are full of Ozali and mages and just plain desperate persons of more power than sense singing themselves across the World Walls.

The problem with that is that the environments and the societies of the Six Worlds tend to rub along about as equitably as you might imagine. You’ve only got to look at Joe Nemeier’s success here in the Changing Land—a success dependent upon a hefty magical assist from an Ozali of Sempeki, the Land of the Flowers—to see why free and easy commerce between the Worlds might not be . . . an unmixed blessing.

The most puissant Ozali in all the Six Worlds hail from the Land of the Flowers; and the lives of the people of Sempeki are one long struggle not to be absorbed by someone stronger. The Ozali of Sempeki—call them the mid-list Ozali of Sempeki—had in fact begun to shop elsewhere for sources of
jikinap
to help even out the survival game . . .

And it was then that the Wise acted to close most of the existing Gates, and to make it much harder—though obviously not impossible—to cross, except at the authorized Gates, with their authorized Gatekeepers and the ear of the Wise at least cocked in their direction.

Gran, now . . .

I froze in place, looking at the bars of light rooted down through the sand and, for all it had felt like when I’d tried to heft one, through the earth’s own heart.

Gran.

Among its other virtues, the Fantasy Menagerie Carousel is an Authorized-by-the-Wise Gate. The carousel-keeper, which for a long, long time had meant Ebony Pepperidge, Dryad and Ozali, was the designated Gatekeeper. Right now, being able and qualified, I was the Gatekeeper. Not that anybody had informed the Wise of the change in personnel. Most reasonable people tend to avoid the Wise. For good cause.

Be that as was, and no matter the manner of her going, I didn’t for one minute believe that Gran had opened the Authorized Gate and strolled into the Land of the Flowers. The Gates are noisy—anybody who possessed
jikinap
or land-magic would hear it open—and Gran’s mission had been one of stealth.