by Katy Winter
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
They plunged steeply downwards, deep into the earth. All but Saracen suffered an appalling attack of claustrophobia. Javen caught his breath but steadied himself, and, like Knellen, began to breathe slowly. Belika gasped for a few moments, then imitated them. Jepaul fared worst of all. He panicked. By the time he got his wits together and looked round for the others, he found them gone.
And still he continued to fall. He tried for some control and had none. He arrived, somewhere, winded and gasping, hands at a heaving chest. He coughed in a spluttering wheeze. He saw a man ahead of him, thought it was one of his companions and tried to half-run to catch him, but when he reached the man there was no corporeal body - nothing. This happened so many times Jepaul got dizzy and confused and decided he simply had to sit, calm himself and try to analyse the situation.
Puzzled and disoriented, he selected a wooden seat nearby and sat. He watched a parade of people go past him for what seemed hours, but when he courteously addressed any of them he got no reply. It was as if he wasn't there. Baffled, he watched. Eventually it dawned on Jepaul that this wouldn't either get him back with the others or help him to go forward, so he got cautiously to his feet and began, rather hesitantly as if he expected a rebuff, to move after the last relay of people.
He caught up with them to find they argued vociferously at a gate. He wandered over to them. He listened. He found he was looked over in a cursory and disinterested fashion, and waited to be approached or addressed. Neither happened. Apologetically he pushed forward to the cluster at the gate itself, aware of angry or surprised looks and comments.
“Can you see me?” he asked the gatekeeper sheepishly.
“Of course I can,”' replied the keeper testily. “Go away.”
“May I go through the gate?”
“You can try,” answered the keeper curtly. He looked Jepaul up and down. “Answer the current question.”
“What question?”
The look that had been appraising was now cynically contemptuous.
“You're a right raw one, ain't you?”
“I don't understand,” said Jepaul plaintively.
The keeper eyed him hard again.
“See all those folk there then?” Jepaul nodded. “They've been coming to this gate on and off for so long I've lost count of time, but they can't get through. No answer, you see.”
Jepaul was frightened.
“Where do they come from?”
“Everywhere and nowhere,” came the ambiguous response. “What about you? Haven't seen you before, have I?”
“No.” Jepaul shook his head. “I'm from Shalah.”
“Never heard of it,” said the keeper in an accusing voice. “Do you want the current question? It's new, so you have plenty of time to ponder it.”
“Yes, please.”
“Then answer this. Why are the stars above the stars below?”
“What stars?” asked Jepaul.
The keeper turned from him with a grunt.
“Another one,” he muttered, before he turned back to minding the gate. He did this by the simple expedient of physically shoving back the crowd who surged round him, his voice one of threat and imprecations.
Jepaul approached the gate. The gate melted to nothing. Jepaul stood back from it and watched it materialise. He seemed to stand not far from the gate for days. He wasn't hungry. And he got so far. He found the stars. He stared at them so long his eyes watered and he got a dreadful headache. He approached the keeper several times. This time he offered an answer.
“If I stand on my head the stars are the same as when I stand on my feet. They may look different but they haven't actually altered in form or substance.”
“True,” agreed the keeper affably. “You progress. Go away.”
Jepaul began to feel light-headed. He thought of Quon and things the old man had taught him. Words, often stressed, were recalled.
“Look for the obvious, Jepaul. Look about you. Problems can be so simple when you open your mind and think about what is impossible. Options left from that exercise must be possibles, yes?”
Jepaul gave a start, rubbed his eyes, and saw a faint glint on the ground at his feet. Intrigued and distracted, he wearily stretched down, a trembling hand to a shard of glass he let rest in his palm. Attracted by it he stared down at it, let it move from side to side to catch the light and stroked its smoothness and odd uniformity.
Finally, heaving a disconsolate sigh, he carefully replaced it at his feet. He was about to look away when his eyes were drawn back to it, and then, fascinated, he saw the faintest illumination from it. The stars, whatever they were, created a perfect reflection in the glass that made the image shine.
Jepaul shivered. He felt small, insignificant and abominably stupid. His brain was tired. Dully, and with heavy limbs, he dragged himself to the keeper.
“The mirror image,” he whispered hoarsely.
The keeper eyed him in complete surprise.
“Just in time too,” he observed. “The question changes soon.” He stood back. The gate stayed solid and Jepaul walked through it. It disappeared behind him.
He found himself in a maze but it was no ordinary one such as he'd got lost in at home as a child. To Jepaul it looked like a precise mathematical puzzle and that thought made his heart skip a beat. He'd got through the gate, but only the lessons in logic he'd learned from his mentors would help him out of this. Jepaul had struggled with pure logic. He'd hated it too. He felt he wandered through a nightmare. Again words of Quon's came to him.
“Never try to complicate things, lad. The simplest is usually the answer.”
Helplessly Jepaul sank to the ground. Already he felt defeated. How long he eyed the endless avenues and sharp turns he had no idea but he knew he had to try, even if it ended in futility. He walked for what seemed miles. Sometimes the avenues were endless and he'd have to stop and retrace his steps, sometimes they just stopped unexpectedly and he was at another frustrating dead end. Finally, he lay on the ground and slept, his exhaustion apparent to those who watched, helpless to intervene.
He dreamed deeply. He did the maze in the dream, without help, his mind working at such a fever pitch that his restless body twitched and shivered. He woke with a start and a cry on his lips. He was coated with sweat. His big eyes were like saucers. He was instantly on his feet and hurried with feverish haste down a passage, up another, his running steps like links in a chain. He couldn't stop. How long he did this he had no idea, other than that he just rushed, like a madman, from the maze. He collapsed into empty space.
He sank, very, very slowly.
He went through air denser than he'd ever experienced. It was hard to breathe or move his limbs. His lungs felt compressed with each painful breath. An object floated in front of him that a compulsion told him he simply had to catch, that it somehow had what he needed to move beyond this cloying atmosphere. Nothing, other then the object, was solid.
He was clumsy. His movements were frustratingly slow so the object always floated tantalisingly out of reach. He struggled as long as he could, flailing this way and that, as he tried to come to terms with the strange atmosphere. The air was erratic too. He'd float one way, then of a sudden he'd go another, even against his will. He had no control.
Out of breath he just hung, suspended. He fought so much he'd expended his energy. When he could, he tried, again and again, but always in vain. Despair crept into his soul. Breathing was abnormally difficult. All movement in such an atmosphere crushed the energy out of him and left him drained.
And so he hung there, motionless. He closed his eyes. Then he realised he approached his problem wrongly and again blundered when he should have taken more time to consider the predicament. He returned to the moment when he'd first entered the air. Currents and eddies lifted him or drew him down and sometimes they even drew him from one side to another. There was constant turbulence.
Broodingly, he stared at the object. Experimentally, he tried to see if, b
y creating his own waves of air current, it would move. Fractionally, it did. Heartened for the first time, Jepaul began to gently and carefully manipulate the air mass about him, in a way that only moved him with the turbulence and never against it. At the same time he created his own waves of momentum, but very slight ones indeed. It worked.
He found that he moved. It was painfully slow. The object moved too, their distance apart steadily reduced. It took Jepaul so long to get to the point where he could actually attempt, apprehensively, to put out his hand to the object, he was almost afraid to do it lest it rock away. Perseverance paid off. He grasped the object and fell again.
He woke up in a distortion field. He almost wept with sheer exasperation. If he moved to the right, that side of his body elongated grotesquely. If he moved to the left, he shrank and stretched sideways, until he looked gross and squat. There was no apparent way out. Jepaul considered his plight. There seemed nothing above or below, so he assumed he was held in some sort of stasis field where he'd presumably remain until he found a way of getting free. He sighed.
Jepaul stayed in the field an inordinately long time. He even cried. He curled up into a ball and refused to think about where he was, until a sense of violent claustrophobia drove him back to his feet and made him thrash wildly. At last, forced to calm, Jepaul began to push at the boundaries with flattened hands, the palms searching for any indication of flaw or weakness. He discovered that indeed the very front of the field had a flaw, but exactly where was a problem he had to resolve.
It took him many hours of concentrated effort. He was silently urged on by the onlookers who sat tensely watching him, before he worked out the precise probabilities of weakness which would lead him to the exact location of the flaw. But he did it. When he stepped directly into the flaw, the distortion field faded away.
He was among strangers again. They were indifferent to him, not actively hostile. Most ignored him. Some went forwards, others backwards and yet others walked in circles. He approached a woman.
“What are you doing?” he asked curiously.
“I'm doing nothing,” she replied moving away from him.
“Hello,” he tried with a man who went crabwise past him.
“Goodbye,” came the response.
Jepaul hurried to stay with him.
“Where are you going?”
“I'm not going anywhere.” The retort puzzled Jepaul.
“Strange,” he muttered to himself.
He looked around to see food vendors and realised he was desperately hungry. He saw no exchange of money which relieved him. He had none. He crossed to a woman selling pies.
“I've no money,” he explained hurriedly.
“I have money,” came the satisfied reply.
“I'll have three pies, please.”
“You won't have three,” she sighed and moved away from him. He followed. Jepaul thought for a moment then tried a new tack.
“I won't have four pies.”
“You'll have four,” beamed the woman with a toothy smile.
Jepaul moved to a bench where he pensively ate the pies. They were delicious and filled a gnawing void in his stomach that growled gratefully as each pie reached it. Taking stock of his surroundings, he decided he was in a world of opposites, so whatever he did or said would evoke a negative or positive response from what he expected. This being so, he had to learn to think differently. It was an anti-state compared with the reality he knew. He wondered how he could move from one to the other.
He wasn't unduly unhappy. He was even intrigued, for the time being. He wandered about to get his bearings. It was easy to get directions provided he couched his questions correctly but he was baffled as to how to get out. He tried words with no result. He tried actions. The same thing happened - nothing. He couldn't even find a gate.
The place began to pall. He'd eaten many pies and was bored. Wherever he went he came back to where he'd first arrived. He decided, irritably, that the people were no use at all. There were few plants and even fewer animals. Jepaul eyed the plants and wrinkled his nose. He then looked consideringly at a small creature he'd noticed on his arrival, a grey, furry thing with four paws, whiskers and a remarkably bushy tail. Jepaul made unwitting eye contact with it and got a mental jolt that threw his mind into disorder. The creature was sentient and telepathic. It's orange eyes twinkled at him, then, unmistakably, the creature turned its head to the plant at Jepaul's foot, nodded at it, and then completely disappeared. The Doms drew in their collective breaths on gasps of sheer astonishment and disbelief that a catlin, unknown on Shalah but recognised elsewhere, should, for the blink of an eye, have materialised to assist Jepaul. They were flabbergasted.
Jepaul stared at the plant again. He pursed his lips. Then, with some reluctance, he went to his knees beside the plant and shyly put his hand to touch the downy leaf of a singularly pretty blue flower. The eye of the flower opened wide and looked straight up into Jepaul's face.
“You feel superior to us,” came a reedy voice from the centre of the flower. “It makes you feel foolish to be beside us.”
“No!” Jepaul hastened to say. “You misunderstand me. I mean no insult to another sentient life force. It's just that where I come from plants have no ability to communicate as you do.”
Leaves rustled as if in indignation, then the voice, resigned, came again.
“You've come to where all is in opposite energy. You've found that out, haven't you?”
“Yes.”
The leaves shivered again.
“You've wandered like all the other fools. If you seek the gate from this place, then you must do the opposite of your inclination. It's that simple.”
Petals closed and the flower head drooped.
Jepaul again wondered if he'd strayed into an absurd dream. Then he stood still. He had to think. Still feeling rather conspicuous and silly, he decided to try an experiment. He glanced down at the timepiece Quon had given him syns before, and decided, on a capricious whim, that he wanted time to go forward. He watched the timepiece.
At the instant the thought came into his mind, the hands began to go in reverse but faster than before. Jepaul thought about stopping it but saw the hands whirr into a blur. Immediately, and rather shaken, he thought about making time go faster, and saw, with immense relief, that the hands slowed and began to reverse again.
Rather mystified, he had to sit and sort out how he'd tackle this odd place. He finally decided that, strange as it may seem, to walk forward as he sought a way out was useless. It was extremely hard to think you didn't want to find a gate when you desperately did, and at the same time walk backwards when every fibre of your being pulled you the opposite way. Jepaul couldn't just walk in reverse. He had to think in it too. It was one of the hardest things he'd ever done.
He had to go slowly because more than once he tripped or bumped into other people and that made him lose concentration. He had to start again. He fell too and had to brush himself down. He dared not stop. He was sure, if he once again lost both momentum and concentration, he'd go back again to where he'd arrived and he so wanted to be free.
So he kept on judiciously backing to nowhere, his self-mocking laughter long gone as time ticked by and his legs felt like blocks of wood. They were leaden to lift. Almost at teetering point and his under lip gripped between his teeth in grim determination, he felt something solid behind him and groped for it.
Disbelieving he sensed a gate. And because he thought that way he felt it begin to fade. Urgency, and terror that this might be his one chance of escape, forced him to make his mind obey the thought of there being no gate.
He felt it again. This time, in desperation, he grasped it, still backing painfully, until he knew he was halfway through it, then, finally, on the other side. He collapsed to his knees. He gasped, his breath rasped and his heart hammered.
He woke, fully refreshed, in a room of many compartments. Curious, he advanced. He felt no drag, no sense of opposite, just normal spa
ce. He breathed more easily. In the compartment nearest him was a game set out. He eyed it then moved to the next closed area where he found yet another game ready to be played. And so on it went, round the room. In all, five games were laid out for him. He knew, instinctively, that he had to graduate from first to last, and wouldn't leave where he was until he did. A faint sigh escaped him. Quon had warned him of this and he knew what they tested, but he wondered if he was really capable of coping with them.
However, he wasn't ready to give in to the games he played. He entered the first area, sat thoughtfully at the chair provided and set out to race the unknown opponent who made precise and decisive moves as if guided by an unseen hand. Time was critical. As each game progressed, the player's mental faculties had to keep up with an accelerated pace. Jepaul was on his mettle.
He won the first and second games but failed lamentably at the third. To his profound shock and dismay, he found he didn't just have to try the failed game again. He had to begin at scratch, at game one.
The contests took on a grim earnestness. Jepaul gritted his teeth and began again. Frustration and irritation shook him, when, after a long session, he reached game four and lost. Angry with himself for an ill-considered move, and eying the room crossly, Jepaul failed at the very start. By now he'd endured enough. In sulky silence he walked from the games with hunched shoulders.
He stayed that way for a long time. Anger smouldered at the surface of his consciousness. Then he realised, with a bitter laugh, that his very reaction was a lesson in itself. If he lacked conviction of self and had no inner control, then he simply wasn't ready to succeed in games clearly designed to see if had mastered both. Chastened, he brushed a shaking hand across tired eyes.
This trial tested him most. His failures mounted. His control went. Time and again he nearly beat the odds, only to fall at the very last game. The last time he let out an oath and tore at his sweaty curls before he flung away, grinding his teeth. Exhausted and feeling emotionally battered, Jepaul was very close to conceding defeat. He sat cross-legged, head hanging, a black depression holding him. He'd just decided this simply wasn't worth the effort when Sh’Bane's words came back softly and scornfully to taunt him. Sh’Bane expected him to fail. It was what he wanted. He wished to remove Jepaul from Quon.
The thought of Quon steadied Jepaul. He had a flash of the image of the old man, heard the gentle encouraging voice in his mind and it was enough to jerk him upright and onto his feet.
“No!” he snarled through drawn lips. “No!”
He walked purposefully to the first game, drew in a deep breath and took a long time to control and focus his mind before he began. He stopped trying to beat the opponent. He concentrated on skill and purpose. He became fascinated and drawn into the games completely, as if they physically absorbed him. The challenge was met purely on an intellectual level, the personal approach gone. He'd no idea how long he played but he emerged from the last game in tempered triumph, a game that had been anything but easy, tested him to the limit and was a struggle of mammoth proportions. But he did it.
He staggered up from the chair. He found he stood in the centre of a large rock. It was ringed by four circles, one of solid earth, then of fire, followed by air then water. The four elements lazily rotated round the rock in a way that made Jepaul lick his lips apprehensively.
He had a lowering presentiment that he knew what each band represented and he lacked the necessary courage to take the baptism he had to endure to finally reach the other side. He dithered on the rock for so long those who patiently waited for him began to have grave fears for him. He couldn't do it. He sought any way out. There was none.
In the end, hunger and despair drove him off the rock, the tall boy so thin and so frantic for water the men couldn't bear to watch. Quon turned away with trembling lips. His deepest fear, that Jepaul was far too young and untried to be put through such adult ordeals, appeared about to be fulfilled. The boy could well die.
And Sh’Bane, amused by the constant reports the Rider sent him, gloated. He was ready to despatch the Riders to bring the boy to him. He believed, with some justification, that it was only a matter of time.