Fenra hooked the edge of the door with her index and middle finger, inching it forward by will alone, until all her fingers were behind it and she could begin pulling it closed. Took a chance, moved a couple of inches closer, to improve the angle, give her more leverage. I could see her lips moving, though I couldn’t hear a sound over the wailing of the wind. The door inched further and further in until finally both of us stood on this side of it, pulling it shut with all our strength and weight.
Latch clicked and the noise stopped so abruptly, I thought I’d gone deaf. Fenra lay collapsed on the floor, her eyes squeezed shut, her shoulders trembling with every shuddering breath. Might have been tears on her face. Might have been some on mine. Twice I opened my mouth to ask her if she was all right. Both times I shut my mouth without speaking.
Finally she rolled over onto her side, grabbed my wrist with her practitioner’s hand.
“What . . . was . . . that?”
“A void.” Cleared my throat.
“A void? Not the void?”
“No. I don’t know.” Pushed my free hand through my hair. “Maybe it’s the only one, but I couldn’t prove it, one way or the other.”
“What’s it doing there?” She waved with her free hand, then let it flop back to her side as if it was too heavy to hold up. Perhaps it was. “There shouldn’t be anything behind that wall.”
“Inside of the building larger than it seems from the outside. Looks like a tower but there’s nothing above us.” Gestured upward. “The rooms go out, not up.”
“But the rooms aren’t there any longer.” Her grip on my wrist tightened. “When were you planning to tell me?”
“I just thought . . . I thought I’d open the shutters first, get some light. Only that door opens onto . . .” My turn to wave my arm at the door.
She let go of my wrist and rubbed her face with both hands. Could see she was still trembling, as if the room, so warm a moment ago, had become too cold. “Come on.” She flinched away when I reached out to help her to her feet. I let my hands drop to my sides. “There’ll be firewood, maybe coal in the kitchen.” Moved toward the doors in the inner wall. “We can be warmer in there.”
“Are you sure that door is safe?” Fenra waved me away, obviously intending me to go first. Led the way down the short passage to the kitchen, a wide, high-ceilinged room with a raised fire box against one wall, an open hearth against the other. The fire in the hearth was laid. All I had to do was find the tinderbox, get the thing lit.
“This isn’t a Third Mode kitchen,” Fenra said. She stood hugging herself, elbows in the opposite hands. “Any more than the other room is a Third Mode sitting room.”
“Yes, well. Once upon a time we would have found a better kitchen,” I said. “A better sitting room for that matter.”
“And now there’s only . . . ?” Fenra’s gesture took in the two rooms we’d seen. “You had better tell me.”
“The Godstone,” I said. Fenra kept her eyes steadily on me, waited. “I made the tower as a miniature version of the world, for experimental purposes. Here I could try various ideas without having any impact on the world outside. These few remaining rooms were once the City.”
“You made a copy of the world?” Fenra rubbed at her forehead with her practitioner’s hand and shut her eyes. Without opening them she asked, “How?”
I shrugged. “How do you think the ‘real’ world was made?”
“Not by . . . ?”
“No! No, not by me. But I think I’ve met the one who did. In fact, I think you’ve met it as well.”
“I have?” She sat down on a three-legged stool and leaned back against the wall.
“When you level me, do you ever feel that there’s something watching? A presence just on the edge of your vision that you can’t quite make out?”
“Yes.” Her eyes narrowed.
“Something so big your mind won’t hold it.” I shook my head, slowly. “When I made the Godstone, I felt it. It terrified me.” I moved closer to the fire. “I think that was the Maker—not just an outer Mode superstition. I’ve watched you speak and listen to animals and other natural things, and I think you’re really communicating with it, experiencing it. You don’t seem frightened of it.”
She nodded, but she was staring off into the middle distance, as if she wasn’t really listening to me at all.
“Where does the Godstone fit in all of this?”
I waved around us. “You asked me if I made the world. I knew that I hadn’t, but I thought we had, practitioners. When I opened the gate into the other world, and I found that the practice worked there as well, I thought the first practitioners had taken a stable world like the New Zone, and turned it into what we have now, maybe just for an experiment, or maybe they thought traveling the Modes would increase their power, I don’t know. I thought this world was an experiment gone wrong, that it was meant to be stable as well. I thought I could turn it back, and that I could do it all myself. I made this replica to test my theories.”
Fenra pointed toward the sitting room, and the closed door beyond it. “And you got that instead?”
I looked away. “I already said I was wrong.” I walked over to the window in the southern side of the kitchen and opened the shutter. The sky looked like rain. “Removing the Modes, making them all the same . . .” I shrugged and turned around to face her. “Apparently all that would do is return this world to the chaos it was made from.”
“But this is only a copy. What if it isn’t an accurate copy?”
“Think I should have taken that chance? I didn’t. I don’t.”
“And that’s why you locked the Godstone away.”
Ran my hands through my hair. It was getting too long. “I tried to destroy it, but I couldn’t. Locking it away was the only thing I could do.”
“And now?”
“Now that it’s loose . . . now we try again. Or rather, you do.”
Eleven
Elvanyn
ELVA LOOKED AROUND carefully as they left the City, but though Xandra had told him years ago which Road marker indicated the edge of the First Mode, he hadn’t seen anything different as they’d passed. He found himself touching his revolvers, and even his sword, again and again, but they were always the same. Or so he thought. Arlyn had told him that artifacts from the New Zone wouldn’t change here, but Elva didn’t know whether to believe it.
He knew that the colors of practitioners’ clothing—the yellow trousers, the crimson waistcoat and black jacket—never changed, but did Metenari always wear those knee breeches? Those white hose? That long-tailed frocked coat? That powdered wig?
Not for the first time he wished Fenra was with him. At the very least she could tell him whether his guns were still his guns. He couldn’t ask anyone he was with; he wasn’t supposed to know about the Modes.
In the late afternoon they arrived at the inn where they were to spend the first night. He knew he should recognize it—and he did, in a way. It seemed to be in the right spot with regard to the Road, and the windmill was still there—but then how and why would anyone have moved it? The vanes were in good repair, however, when he remembered bare skeletal wood, and the sails were evidently brand-new canvas unbleached by the sun. There was even a small wooden cart with a large dog between the shafts waiting with several sacks that could be grain.
None of this meant a change in Mode, he reminded himself. After all, these were really only repairs and renovations; prosperity was a likelier explanation.
“You have a most peculiar look on your face.” Predax appeared beside him, leading Metenari’s and Noxyn’s horses by their reins. It hadn’t taken the young apprentice long to adjust to the idea that Elva was someone out of their past. The same couldn’t be said for Noxyn.
“When I was here last,” Elva said, “this inn was a one-story building, half rough stone and half old t
imbers, and all of it stuccoed by someone who didn’t know how. This courtyard wasn’t enclosed, and the stables were just a couple of lean-tos and sheds.”
Predax looked around, eyes narrowing as he considered Elva’s words. “I’ve never seen this place before today,” he said finally. “But I’m not surprised you see some changes.” He cleared his throat. “The world has moved onward since your time.” This last was said with the young apprentice looking sideways at Elva, his attempt at a smile offset by the nervous movement of his eyes.
Elva clapped the boy on the shoulder. “Well, we’re bound to be more comfortable, in any case,” he said with the look he used to encourage his deputies at home. The smile he got in return was stronger.
And that was Metenari’s failure as a teacher, he thought. Perhaps Predax wasn’t the brightest star in the sky, but he was still a practitioner. To make it so clear that Noxyn was the preferred apprentice, to the virtual exclusion of the other boys, had to be bad for their training in the long run. And worse for their morale.
Not that it mattered much just now.
Elva gave Predax another pat on the shoulder and followed the stable boy leading the horses away. He’d learned over the years always to check on the comfort of his horse himself. Even from the rear, the inn looked brighter and better kept. Stone might still be part of the construction of the lower level, but brick prevailed above, framing each window with decorative patterns. And the windows were glazed. He could see ripples in the glass when he squinted from an angle, which put the workmanship on a level with what he was used to at home.
Home. He’d lived in the New Zone for such a long time—longer than he’d lived here—it shouldn’t be odd that he thought of the place as home. Even if he didn’t know whether he’d see it again. He wondered what Fenra would make of his house in Dundalk. Would she find it too cluttered?
Entering the inn from the stableyard, Elva found a long hallway running down the center of the building. To his right, judging by the smells, was the kitchen, with wood for the fireplaces and ovens stacked against the hallway wall beside the open door. Beyond this was a dining room, where the ceilings were higher than he remembered, and what had been a roughly furnished room of trestle tables with stools and benches was now a more formal place, with polished plank floors, separate dining tables with individual chairs, and elaborate fire irons on the hearth.
Across the hall from the dining room, in what would have been called a “parlor” in the Dundalk Territory, he found the Godstone, sitting comfortably on a settee to one side of a narrow brick fireplace, facing a similarly dressed but much older man on a matching settee. Elva had rarely seen a practitioner who looked that old. Nor was it just the man himself. The elbows and cuffs of his jacket showed wear, and his cravat was not as white as it could have been. Noxyn sat just behind his master to the left, on a less comfortable chair, holding a cup in his hand.
“I’ve been stationed here most of my practical life,” the older practitioner was saying as Elva hesitated in the doorway. “I’ve heard rumors from the City, of course. But here I’ve always been treated with the greatest respect. Thank you, my boy.” Predax had come from a sideboard out of Elva’s line of sight with a tall, narrow copper pot to refill the elderly man’s coffee cup.
The Godstone gestured Elva forward and pointed to a seat not far from its own, but not as close to the fire as Noxyn’s. Predax returned to his place at the sideboard. Evidently he didn’t merit a seat.
“The chief of my guard,” the Godstone said when the older man glanced in Elva’s direction with lifted eyebrows.
True, Elva thought, if only because at the moment there aren’t any others.
“No,” it continued. “These rumors are nothing that need concern you. Public opinion ebbs and flows like the tides in the sea, and more so with attitudes toward the practice. I’ve seen our status—and the public’s attitude toward us—change several times. At the moment we’re at an ebb, but when things have gone too far we have only to effect some great cure, or some great rescue, preferably of a poor man’s child, to swing things round in our favor. These things are easy enough to arrange when needed. Then you’ll see the tide turn, and we’ll be heroes again until the next time the Red Court feels insecure.”
Noxyn looked over as the Godstone spoke, his eyebrows drawing together, and Predax glanced from his mentor to Elva and back again, biting his lower lip. The older man merely raised his eyebrows and then lowered them to a frown, as if he was waiting for clarification. Clarification that never came. Apparently the Godstone wasn’t aware that it had said something unusual.
Later, when the Godstone and Noxyn had gone to dine in private with the older practitioner, Predax brought his dish of lentils and chicken to sit across from Elva at one of the dining room tables. Elva smiled. At this point anything was better than being left to his own thoughts.
“Looks like you’ve got something on your mind,” he said, watching the young apprentice stir his food without lifting his spoon from the dish.
“It’s what Practitioner Metenari”—the boy never neglected the title—“said about the popularity of the White Court ebbing and flowing with public opinion.”
“He’s quite right,” Elva said. “In the New Zone, the monarchy—like the Red Court,” he added when he could see Predax didn’t understand, “—and other forms of government go in and out of favor, depending on whether the people have been given the things they were promised.”
“But how would the practitioner know this?”
“He’ll have studied it, surely. It’s something every educated person knows, whether it happens in their lifetimes or not.”
Predax shook his head. “I’m an educated person. I’ve never heard of anything like this, and I’ve studied all the history there is.”
“Well, obviously not all the history,” Elva pointed out.
Predax set his spoon down onto the tabletop. “Why wouldn’t the practitioner have told us this before? If it were commonly known, we apprentices would not have to be . . . we wouldn’t have to be . . .”
“Afraid all the time? That might be part of your training.”
Again the headshake. “But none of the other practitioners have told any of their apprentices. We compare notes, you know, and if even one of us had heard of this, we would all know.”
That Elva could easily believe. “But what about all this has you scared? I would have thought that you’d be pleased knowing that your status could be secured so easily.”
“It isn’t that.” The boy leaned forward, his sleeve dipping into his bowl. “It’s . . . how does Practitioner Metenari know this? And how has he never mentioned it before? The way he said it, the way . . . He speaks as though he’s seen this with his own eyes. As if he remembers something he couldn’t possibly remember. He’s not all that old, you know.” Predax must have seen something in Elva’s face, because he stopped, mouth hanging open. “You know something,” he said finally. “What is it?”
“Remember we talked about how Metenari didn’t seem like himself?” Elva watched Predax’s eyes widen and his face pale.
* * *
Fenra
I was not even aware of sitting down. I had no sense of the stool under me. I only knew that Arlyn had shoved a pillow behind my back when I no longer felt the cold of the wall.
“You are insane,” I said. My throat hurt. “Your lowness has turned your head. If you, the great and powerful Xandra Albainil, could not destroy this thing, how can I do it? If the best I can accomplish is to contain it, you are asking me to do what you once did. To use all my power.”
“But—”
I lowered my head into my hands. If Arlyn continued speaking I did not hear him. All I felt at this moment was a smothering exhaustion. I did not know what kept me from collapsing to the floor. I welcomed the feeling, tried to sink into it thoroughly, tried to think of nothing except ho
w heavy my bones were, how heavy my head, my hands, my skin.
For an instant I felt a cool, damp breeze on my skin, smelled the sea, but my brain refused to stop circling the image of my facing the Godstone, of sealing it away. Of living without power for the rest of my life. Unable to help anyone, unable to heal them. What would I do? Who would I be? I began to see what might lie behind Arlyn’s lowness.
Who would level Arlyn? If the lowness was a result of losing all power, who would level me?
These were just surface thoughts. Under them, I knew that I was going to do this, or at least that I would try. I would make the same choice that Xandra Albainil had ultimately made.
“Did you know?” My head felt as heavy as a block of carving stone.
“What, specifically?”
“Did you know what containing the Godstone would do to you?”
I recognized the look he gave me. I had seen him use it on pieces of wood, on tools, even on his own drawings for furniture. Calculation. Weighing of options. Would this serve the purpose? He considered his answer just as carefully.
“Not at first, but it became apparent.”
“Would you have done it? If you had known before you started, I mean?”
The shadow of a smile ghosted across his face, and he shrugged. “I knew what I had to do. Nothing could change that. I couldn’t let him destroy the world—I couldn’t even let him make the attempt.”
“Him?”
This he waved away. “I began to think of the Godstone as a part of myself I had to set aside, to put away. The part of me that thought it was worthwhile to risk the lives of every mundane living, just to find out whether I was right about something.”
A part of himself. “You risked your own life.”
Again the shadow smile. “Of course, that’s what makes it fun. And there was always the New Zone. Anyway.” He slapped his thighs and straightened to his feet. “That’s not what I’m asking you to do. You don’t have to contain it, all you have to do is help me shove it through the door.” He tilted his head toward the other room. I forced myself to look, the muscles in my neck protesting every degree of movement.
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