Juxtaposition (6 page)

That brought him back to the manner in which he had secured his own fortune by postponing his fathering of a son. He was eager to get on with it. He had loved the Lady Blue from the first time he had encountered her. He had never before met such a regal, intelligent, and desirable woman. But she was the widow of his other self, and that had made things awkward. Now she was his, and he would never leave her—except for one more necessary trip to the frame of Proton, to try for the final Round of the Tourney. It really was not as important to him as it once had seemed, but he had to give it his best try.
 
They galloped up to the prettily moated little castle.
 
Stile vaulted off as they entered the courtyard. The Lady Blue, his vision of delight, rushed to his arms. She was of course garbed in blue: headdress, gown, slippers. She was all that he desired.

“Are we ready?” he inquired when the initial sweetness of the embrace eased.

“I have been ready since we wed, but thou didst depart in haste,” she said, teasing him.

“Never again, Lady!”

“Hinblue is saddled.”

“We have already traveled much of the eastern curtain.
 
Shall we pick up at the Platinum Demesnes?”

She did not reproach him about his concern for Clef’s welfare, the obvious reason to pass the region of the Little Folk. “As my Lord Blue desires.”

“Wilt thou condone magic for the start?” She nodded radiantly. “Magic is the substance of my Lord Adept.”

They mounted their steeds, and Stile played his good harmonica, summoning his magic. His Adept talent was governed by music and words, the music shaping the power, the words the application. Actually, his mind was the most important factor; the words mainly fixed the time of implementation. “Conduct us four,” he sang» “to the platinum shore.” Clip snorted through his horn: shore?

But the magic was already taking hold. The four of them seemed to dissolve into liquid, sink into the ground, and flow rapidly along and through it south-southeast. In a moment they re-formed beside the Mound of the Platinum Elves. There was the fresh cairn of Serrilryan the were bitch, exactly as his vision-dream had shown it.
 
“Anything I visualize as a shore, is a shore,” Stile explained. “There does not have to be water.” But as it happened, there was some cloud cover here, thickest in the lower reaches, so that the descending forest disappeared into a sealike expanse of mist. They stood on a kind of shore. Almost, he thought he saw wolf shapes playing on the surface of that lake of mist.

“And we were conducted—like the electricity of Proton frame,” the Lady commented. “Methought thou wouldst provide us with wings to fly.”

A dusky elf, garbed in platinum armor to shield his body from a possible ray of sunlight, appeared. He glanced up at Stile. “Welcome, Blue Adept and Lady,” he said.
 

“Thy manner of greeting has improved since last we visited,” the Lady Blue murmured mischievously.
 

“As well it might have,” the elf agreed. “We know thee now.”

He showed them into the Mound. Stile noted that the structure had been hastily repaired, with special shorings.
 
Evidently the destruction wrought by the Foreordained’s Flute had not entirely demolished it. Stile hoped there had not been much loss of life in the collapse. Clip and Hinblue remained outside to graze the verdant, purple-tinted turf.

A deeply darkened and wrinkled elf awaited them in side. This was Pyreforge, chief of this tribe of Dark Elves.
 
“Thy friend is indeed the Foreordained,” he said gravely.

“Our trust in thee has been amply justified.”

“Now wilt thou tell the meaning?” Stile inquired. “We are on our honeymoon. Yet my curiosity compels.”

“Because thou art on thy honeymoon, I will tell thee only part,” the old elf said. “Too soon wilt thou learn the rest.”

“Nay! If it is to be the end of Phaze, I must know now.”

“It be not necessarily the end, but perhaps only a significant transition. That much remains opaque. But the decision is near—a fortnight hence, perhaps, no more than two. Take thy pleasure now, for there will come thy greatest challenge.”

“There is danger to my Lord Blue?” the Lady asked worriedly.

“To us all. Lady. How could we survive if our frame be doomed?”

“We can not head it off?” Stile asked.

“It will come in its own time. Therefore put it from thy mind; other powers are moving.”

Stile saw that Pyreforge would not answer directly on this subject, and the elf could not be pushed. “The Fore ordained—what is his part in this? A title like that—“

“Our titles hardly relate to conventional human mythology or religion. This one merely means he was destined to appear at this time, when the curtain grows visible and tension mounts between the frames. The great Adepts of the past foresaw this crisis and foreordained this duty.”

“What duty?” Stile asked. “Clef is merely a musician. A fine one, granted, the best I know—but no warrior, no Adept. What can he do?”

“No Adept?” Pyreforge snorted. “As well claim the Platinum Flute be no instrument! He can play the dead to Heaven and crumble mountains by his melody—and these be only the fringes of his untrained power. Once we have trained him to full expertise—he is the Foreodained!”

So Earth mythology might not relate, but the implication of significance did. “So he is, after all, Adept? He seemed ordinary to me—but perhaps I did not hear him play in Phaze.”

Pyreforge smiled wryly. “Thou didst hear him, Adept.
 
Music relates most intimately to magic, as thou shouldst know.”

So the elf knew of Stile’s vision! “And Clef is the finest musician to come to Phaze,” Stile said, seeing it. “But what exactly is he to do? May we say hello to him?”

“You may not,” the old elf said. This usage always sounded incongruous to Stile here, where “thee” and “thou” were standard—but of course it was the correct plural form. “His power be enormous, but he be quite new to it and has much to learn and little time ere he master his art. We need no more shaking of our mountains! He be deep in study for the occasion he must attend and may not be disturbed.”

“What occasion?” Stile asked with growing frustration.
 
But still the elf would not respond directly.

“Thou shalt meet him when it be time. Lord Blue, and all will be clarified. Leave us to teach the Foreordained his music.
 
Go now on thy honeymoon; thou must recuperate and restore thine own powers for the effort to come.” So it seemed. They were teaching Clef music? This was either humor or amazing vanity! Disgruntled, Stile thanked the diminutive, wrinkled elf and departed.

“I don’t feel comfortable being ignorant of great events, especially when there are hints they relate intimately to me,” he muttered to the Lady.

“How dost thou think I felt, cooped up in the Blue Demesnes whilst thou didst go out to live or die?”

“I don’t recall thy staying cooped long—“

“Let’s ride, my Lord.”

Stile smiled. She had the feminine way of changing the subject when pressed. She was not a woman to let fate roll over her unchallenged, and her present deference to him was merely part of the honeymoon. Had he desired a creature to honor his every foible, he would have loved Sheen. The Lady Blue would always be someone to reckon with.

They mounted and rode. Pyreforge was right: the curtain was brighter now, faintly scintillating as it angled across the slopes of the Purple Mountains. It followed the contours of the terrain in its fashion; the curtain ex tended vertically until it became too faint for them to see, and evidently continued below the ground similarly. As the land fell away, it exposed more of the curtain. There was no gap; the curtain was continuous.
 
That was what intrigued Stile—that ubiquitous transition between frames. The landscapes of Proton and Phaze were identical, except that Proton was a barren, polluted world where science was operative, while Phaze was a fresh, verdant world of magic. Only those people who lacked alternate selves in the other frame could cross between them. No one seemed to know why or how the curtain was there, or what its mode of operation was. It just served as the transition between frames, responsive to a wish from one side, a spell from the other.
 
They intended to follow the curtain in its generally westward extension until it terminated at the West Pole.
 
Stile had been increasingly curious about the curtain, and the West Pole held a special fascination for him because it didn’t exist on any other world he knew. Now he had an excuse to satisfy both interests—by making them part of his honeymoon.

As the Blue Adept, he was one of the most powerful magicians in Phaze; riding a unicorn—ah, he missed Neysa!—he had some of the best transportation and protection available; and in the company of the lovely Lady Blue—oh, what an occasion this would be!
 
“I want to make a map,” he said, remembering. “A map of Phaze, as I know it now and as I will discover it, and of the curtain in all its curvatures.”

“The curtain is straight,” the Lady said.

“Straight? It meanders all over the frame!”

“Nay, Lord, it is the frame that meanders,” she assured him. “When we follow the curtain, we bear due west.” Stile decided not to argue. After all, she was his new bride and she was heart-throbbingly delightful, and an argument at this time would be awkward. Nevertheless, he would map Phaze as he perceived it.

He played his harmonica, bringing the magic to him.
 
Then he set the instrument aside and sang: “Place on tap a contour map.”

True to his visualization, the map appeared—a neatly folded pseudo-parchment. He opened it out and contemplated its lines and colors. There were the White Mountains to the north, the Purple Mountains to the south, the sites of the Blue, Black, Yellow, White, Brown, and—former—Red Demesnes, and the curtain winding around and between them. Contour lines indicated the approximate elevations.

But there were sizable blank areas. This map covered only the territory Stile knew. He had traveled around a lot of Phaze recently, but there was more to explore. He expected to enjoy filling in the rest of this map. The plotting of the curtain should take care of much of it, since it meandered—went straight?—past most of the significant establishments of this frame.

“No one uses a map in Phaze,” the Lady protested, intrigued.

“I am not from Phaze,” he retorted. He showed her the map. “Now as I make it, the curtain should bear west a day’s leisurely travel, then veer north here to pass the palace of the Oracle and on by the Yellow Demesnes near the White Mountains. That will be a couple days’ ride.
 
Then it must curve southwest to intersect the Black Demesnes here—“

“The curtain is straight,” she repeated.
 

“Humor me, beloved. Then on until we reach the West Pole, somewhere over here. The whole trip should take a week, which will leave us—“

“Thou art a fool,” she said pleasantly. “Little thou knowest of Phaze.”

“That’s why I’m exploring it,” he agreed. “Thou art wife of a fool, fool.”

She leaned toward him, and her mount obligingly closed the gap. They kissed, riding side by side, while Clip played another suggestive tune. Stile gave the unicorn a sharp little kick in the flank with his left heel. Clip emitted a blast of musical laughter with an undertone of Bronx cheer and flicked his tail across Stile’s back in the familiar fly-swatting gesture.

“Now let’s move,” Stile said as the kiss ended.
 
The two steeds broke into a canter, following the curtain down the hill, through a valley, and up a wooded slope. Stile loved riding; it was the thing he did best. The Lady paralleled him, balancing smoothly, her hair flying out in a golden splay. She, too, was a fine rider and she had a fine steed, though no horse could match a unicorn in full exertion. Stile probably could have borrowed an other unicorn from the herd, but there had been no point.
 
This was no dangerous mission, but a gentle romance.
 
Hinblue was a very good mare, the offspring of the Blue Stallion and the Hinny—the best equine heritage in Phaze.
 
Stile remained sorry his friend Neysa was not here to share the trip with him—but realized that Neysa might be jealous of the Lady Blue, with some reason. Maybe Neysa’s breeding had been mostly a pretext to separate herself from this excursion. Well, Clip was good, if spirited, company.

Time passed. The curtain veered to the south, forcing them to cross over the height of the Purple range, rather than at any natural pass. Their steeds slowed to a walk, and the air became chill. There was no snow here, but the vegetation turned bluish as if from cold, and then full purple. That was what gave the range its color, of course; he should have known. Finally Stile cast a spell to make them warm—himself and the Lady and the two animals—so that no one would have to overexert to maintain body heat.

Then, on the steep downslope, he cast another spell to enable them all to float through the air, resting. A harpy popped out of a hole in a cliff, saw the two equines with their riders, all drifting blithely in midair, and popped hastily back into her hole. “Just as well,” the Lady Blue remarked. “That creature’s scratch is poisonous, and they oft resent intrusion into their demesnes.” Clip snorted. Unicorns were invulnerable to most magic and had no fear of harpies. Stile, remembering how the werebitch Serrilryan had died, knew that if the harpy had attacked, he would have reacted with ferocity perhaps un becoming to this occasion.