Mirror 04 The Way Between the Worlds (5 page)

'Come up and I'll show you. I had thought to make a demonstration anyway.'
She walked over to the construct, rather anxiously. One of the Ghashad, a man
with grey warts all over his face, flung her up. Rulke caught her, setting her
down beside him.
'Hold tight to this rail,' he said, manipulating levers, knobs and wheels with
practised ease.
The construct radiated light that wove a spherical shield around them, their
surroundings grew dim and with a shriek the machine lifted abruptly. The
sensation was sickening -her stomach felt left behind. Then it caught up, they
rose faster and faster and the shield burst through the brass and slate roof
of Carcharon, flaring like a miniature sun. Debris rained down at them. Karan
flinched but the shield hurled it all to the sides. Then it faded and they
floated in the air above the tower, Rulke roaring his delight at his enemies.
Looking down, Karan saw the company, like a family of helpless ants on the far
side of the amphitheatre. She saw Llian too, staring desperately at her, and
felt his pain. She was ashamed of what she was going to do, and afraid of his
contempt, but there was no alternative.
Rulke flung out his arm, pointing over their heads. The moon was rising, huge
and dark and full. The dark moon was in hythe, signalling that the foretelling
would come to pass. Karan clutched her stomach. The bimonthly waxing of the
dark face always gave her a pang, ill-omen that it was, but this was
unimaginably bad.
Rulke played with the construct, sending it soaring and swooping above the
chasm, displaying it and taunting the company with it while Karan stood
statue-like beside him. This might be the end of her world. Then, as clearly
as looking through Rulke's paired glasses, she saw Tensor lurch to his feet,
take the bow and the red-feathered arrow from Xarah and draw the arrow back.
She knew that it was aimed at her; knew that Tensor could hit her too, but she
was paralysed. Maybe this was meant to be. She watched him sight along the
arrow, unable to save herself. Rulke had not noticed; he was looking
elsewhere. Then she felt an explosion of love and terror, as Llian shrieked,
'No!' That sparked an equally wild broadcast of her own agonies.
She threw herself down between the bulkheads. The arrow slammed into the cowl
where her head had been, smashing into splinters. Rulke threw up his arms as
her crazed sending tore through his mind. The construct plunged at the rocks
while he worked furiously to control it. At the last minute he forced it to
answer his levers again and wrested it back up.
'I've had enough!' he said roughly as they regained the top of the tower.
Rulke looked quite shaken. Soberly he brought the construct back down inside.
Settling it down, he took her by the shoulders. His eyes flamed like
lighthouse beacons.
'There, Llian is safe, and he knows you are safe, and they have seen my power.
Now will you honour your promise?'
She bowed her head.
'Are you ready?'
'Almost,' she said, shaking.
'Then steady yourself. Be calm.'
'Why did you pick me?' Anything to put it off a bit longer. 'There are other
sensitives.'
'No triunes though! Have you ever sensed another?'
'No. Once or twice I sensed other sensitives, but I never found them.'
'You must feel quite lonely,' he observed shrewdly, 'having none of your own
kind.'
Karan would have none of this subtle manipulation. 'Don't tell me what my kind
is!' she said. 'I am content with my life.'
Rulke said no more about it. 'What matters that? You are here; I have no
other. And perhaps if I had the choice of many I might still choose you. I
knew the Way to Aachan once, but everything is changed so much that I no
longer have the ability to find it. Let's begin.'
She tensed.

'Don't look so worried. This is what we're going to do. First I'll focus the
construct on making a hole through the Forbidding. It must be a tiny opening
that no creature can get through, because the void is violent beyond your
imagining. Then you must make a ... kind of sending through the hole, and seek
out the Way between the Worlds, as I've taught you already. Together we will
look for the way to Aachan. That will take all my strength and wit.' What
Rulke planned to do on Aachan he did not say. 'But first I must tune the
construct. It's not answering my will as it ought. It's difficult to control.'
Karan struggled with her conscience. Terrible things had flowed from her
previous actions - the wakening of the Ghashad, the fall of Shazmak, the
liberation of Rulke - and she had vowed to take no further part in the affairs
of the world because of it.
Yet now she collaborated in a worse crime for her own selfish reasons. For
Llian, to make up for the wrong she had done him before, and because she loved
him. But still, a crime. Would the next hundred generations, groaning in slave
chains, curse her name? Would even Llian come to hate her?
And, she could not deny it, curiosity about her triune nature drove her too.
That temptation was impossible to resist. And curiosity about Carcharon. What
had her father and old Basunez been searching for?

But then again, perhaps this was fated to be; perhaps Rulke was the one who
could finally liberate Santhenar from all its petty squabbles. How could she
tell? How could she choose? She could not, and so she kept her faith with
Llian and her word to Rulke.
The Void
Rulke sat on the high seat of the construct (and how he gloried in his
wonderful machine) but Karan found that the very presence of the device took
away her mind's ability to see and to seek. They tried several times but the
metallic bulk of it oppressed her inner eye, warped her seeing. She had to be
as far away from it as possible.
She went around the corner to a small alcove where the room and the stairs
were shielded by a wall. It was the place where Llian had emerged through the
concealed stone panel a week earlier, before the great telling, and where she
had been captured after Llian's reply to Rulke's telling. On the other side
was an embrasure, taller than she was and as wide, glazed with plain glass in
small panels. The glass was so old that it had a purple tinge.
It was frigid against the window. Karan nested herself down on a pile of rugs
and wrapped a blanket around her. She stared out through the bubbly glass. The
window faced west of north, and the moon would come through it later on,
before setting behind the mountains that were tall and jagged in the west.
'I'm ready,' Rulke called down to her.
'I am too.'
She sat still, watching and waiting for him to begin. The
lights faded, the room grew dark, ghostly webs formed and extended to become
nets of light. She closed her eyes.
Before she could begin, a ragged bundle flopped in through an embrasure.
'Karan!' Llian screamed.
His wracked face stabbed her like a moth on a pin. Karan wanted to die of
shame, that he should see her doing this. How it hurt to send him away, and
when it was done she wept uncontrollably.
Rulke had remade the nets of light that were the Forbidding, but now he sighed
and let them fade away again. 'This is not working/ he said aloud. 'Maybe
she's not up to it. That's the problem with sensitives. Still, better to find
outnowthan later.'
Waving the Ghashad out of the room, he leapt off the construct and sat beside
Karan. 'Talk to me.'
Karan felt like bawling her eyes out. 'Did you see him?' she wailed. 'How
contemptuous he looked. How I must disgust him!'
He put his arm around her. 'I saw that he was in pain; that he was terribly
afraid for you.'

'I hate myself,' said Karan. 'I want to go home.'
'Don't be a child,' he said. 'Hate me, if you must hate. I know how you feel
for each other. I spied on you and him together, remember?'
'I do hate you!' she shouted, pushing him away. 'You are the wickedest and
most evil man in all the Three Worlds. Everything you say is just to get me to
do what you want.'
'Indeed it is,' he said, and laughed. 'Now here is an offer. Go! I absolve you
of your debt to me. Walk free from Car-charon, right now.'
The offer was so absurd that she was not even tempted. 'Why do you taunt me?'
she said coldly. 'I know you will never let me go.'
'Unless you are willing, we will fail. Unless we can trust each other we will
never find the Way. I would be better off looking for a new sensitive, even if
it took me a hundred years to find one.'
Karan stood up. 'You are the Great Betrayer, the bane of two worlds. I can
never trust you.'
'Of course not. But do you?'
She sat down again. 'It's impossible, but I do believe you.'
'Then go. Your debt is absolved.'
She did not move. 'You can't absolve it! I gave you my promise in exchange for
Llian's freedom. Even if I could go back on my word, I must expect you to do
the same.'
Rulke smiled, but she sensed relief as well.
'You knew that all along, didn't you!' she snapped, feeling that she had been
cleverly manipulated.
'I know your character. But, on the other hand, you have free will. I didn't
know what you would do. Shall we begin?'
'Let's get it over with.'
'Link with me.'
She allowed him to touch that small, cut-off portion of her mind that had not
been used since Narne, more than a year ago. Then she shied away
instinctively, like an unbroken filly, expecting to feel some horror or
loathing. There was nothing like that. The touch of his mind was quite gentle,
even a little tentative.
It surprised her. He was too clever for her, this Great Betrayer. She allowed
him to continue, and through the contact she sensed many things. An
overwhelming purpose; an urge to dominate and possess; to crush his enemies;
never to yield. The Charon were rulers of Aachan but prisoners there, unable
to increase, surrounded by the legions of the Aachim, the threat of extinction
hanging over them. But what she most feared - the depravity and corruption of
Emmant, a mind so diseased that the touch of it had been like that rodent she
had pulled out of the water barrel in the wharf city of Thurkad, rotted into
jelly and matted fur - there was not the least trace of that here.
I might be committing a terrible, wicked crime, she thought, one that no one
can ever forgive me for. But at least I'm working with a man who is not
totally evil. Not for
anything could she have collaborated with Emmant.
'Are you all right?'
'Yes,' she murmured.
Rulke got busy with the construct. Karan felt a sick dizziness, then
encouragement poured across the link, steadying her.
'Now comes the most delicate stage of all - finding the right way to penetrate
the Forbidding. It must be done delicately, so as not to alert the creatures
that dwell in the void.'
'Are you going to take the construct to Aachan?'
'If only I could!' he sighed. 'But everything's different now. The best I can
do is find the Way there, with your help, and using your senses linked to me,
try to speak to my people.'
Karan wriggled under her blanket. She was cold. She stretched, rubbed her
chilly fingers together, waited. Nothing happened for some time and her mind
drifted away onto familiar paths, familiar longings that were stronger than

ever, now that it seemed they would never be fulfilled.
She longed to be back in Gothryme, her shabby little manor that had been
damaged in the war. It would probably never be repaired, for war and drought
had cost her everything she had, and Yggur's tax collector was due in the
spring, only months away. And when she could not pay him, surely Gothryme
would be stripped from her. That would not have happened in the old days, but
Bannador was a free nation no longer. It lay under the yoke of Yggur, and she
knew how ruthless he could be.
She longed for her own people, especially faithful old Rachis, her steward for
nearly twenty years, the mainstay of Gothryme. He had always been steadfast.
He should be enjoying his rocking chair by the hearth now, not working day and
night to keep Gothryme from falling apart.
She longed for her gardens that she had just begun to lay out, and for the
feel of the poor soil of Gothryme in her fingers. But most of all she ached
for Llian, for the comfort
of his arms around her, for his jokes and tales, and his lovemaking too. Not
much of that lately. Rulke had come between them on the way back from Katazza,
and dear mistaken Shand had poisoned her mind against Llian, raising the worm
of treachery that had made the past few months such a misery for them both.
And that woke another yearning that was still a little thing but growing - an
heir for Gothryme. She did not feel ready for that, but the women of her
family were not fertile for long, and Karan knew her time was running out. If
she did not produce an heir, one day her beloved home would fall into the
hands of a stranger, some distant cousin who might care nothing for its
Histories or its people.
Suddenly the nets of light sprang into place again and the networks smeared
out to make the Wall of the Forbidding. All at once her world - the tower
walls, the window - faded, and she saw that she was outside (or perhaps
inside) a translucent surface that seemed to curve away in many dimensions,
further than she could sense it. It was a little akin to the stuff of which
the Nightland had been made, faintly shimmering on its folds, curves and
convolutions. The Wall was in constant motion, sometimes billowing, sometimes
shivering but never in the same place twice. Sometimes it went in many
directions at once, a thing that her mind could not accommodate. Carcharon was
a very strange place, and here the Secret Art behaved in unpredictable ways.
She closed her eyes to try to escape from the dizziness, but that made no
difference. At times a wave would pass across the Wall from one direction or
another, or it would ripple like a stone thrown into a pond. At other times it
rang silently, like a gigantic gong, or shook violently as if rattled from the
other side.
Mostly the Wall was milkily translucent, but there were occasions when
rainbows shimmered across it in muted, pastel colours, and other times when
parts of it would darken
to opacity or burst with brief bright radiance. Nothing was visible on the
other side, if there could be said to be another side to something like an
ultra-dimensional Mobius plane.
She was growing used to it now. Though it was endlessly variable, endlessly
fascinating, she had work to do. The sound of the construct moved up to a
higher pitch. Waves of colour pulsed across the translucency like a frightened
cuttlefish. The nature of reality changed again; the walls of Carcharon began
to warp around and away from the construct. Karan could not see this, but she
could feel it. The floor felt as if it had sagged down. She had to brace
herself to avoid sliding towards the construct.
The sound rose to a whine and the Wall became solid with moving colour. Now it
was like lying beneath the surface of a pool, watching drops fall from above.
The drops were invisible, but each made a nipple sticking out at her, and a
series of concentric ripples spread out from it like a corrugated breast. The
drops began to fall faster and harder, the ripples chasing each other
continuously. Now they rebounded and reformed, and sometimes a tiny globe
would break off and drift away,. or fall back and be slowly resorbed. Once one