I sighed again, my eyes falling shut. Only parts of my brain seemed to be working. There had been swords in Medlyn’s office, I remembered, but were they still there? I was reasonably sure they weren’t the kind of memento Practitioner Otwyn would have kept. On the other hand, Medlyn had moved his models into the vault; perhaps he had moved the swords as well. I did not even know why he kept them. “Here.” I laid my practitioner’s hand on Elva’s wrist and concentrated.
He gave the smallest jerk and his eyes narrowed. “Ah. Are they really there, or did you create them?”
“They’re really there,” I said.
“And will they still be there when you let go of me?”
Even my bones felt too tired to answer him. I forced myself to speak. “When Arlyn held things, they remained visible to him. As soon as I can stand, we will see if that is also true for you.” I squeezed my eyes tight. “Metenari—” I began.
“We’re not going back into that place for him.”
I frowned. “He is not there,” I said. “What was left of him was absorbed by the chaos. I meant to say the Godstone.”
Elva started to get to his feet, struggling to stand at the same time that he pulled out both guns. “It can’t come after us? We’re safe here?”
My brain seemed to take a great deal of time to find the answer. “There is no ‘here,’ as the word is commonly used.” I closed my hand around the cool bit of gold hanging around my neck. “Without the locket, perhaps there would be no ‘here’ at all.”
“And no one can use the locket but you?” He settled back again. Apparently I was not the only one too tired to stand.
I nodded. Frowned. Shook my head.
“Xandra can’t find his way here?”
“No.”
“Then let’s get some sleep.”
“I am too tired to sleep.” But I let him scoop up my legs and pull me into his arms as he lay back on the cushions, rested my head against his shoulder, and let the weariness float me away.
It may have been hours or only a moment later when I awoke. Elva’s breathing, slow and steady, told me he still slept. A part of me was proud that I had managed—with Medlyn’s help—to rescue both of us from a place so unlike any other, but I remembered with clarity the sense of another life, just beyond my mental grasp, a living being in the chaos, watching us. Examining us. I wondered if it was the same being I sometimes felt on the beach. I wondered if the locket would have worked if it had not decided to let us go.
I wondered how I knew it had done exactly that.
Elva’s breathing changed and without moving I asked him, “Why did you follow me through the door? Why did you not let go when you saw you could not hold me back?”
“Where I come from a gentleman doesn’t let a lady go into danger alone.” I could hear a smile in his voice. I almost smiled myself.
“That’s nonsense,” I said. “And you do not come from there, in any case.”
I felt him shrug. “I’ve lived there longer than I’ve lived anywhere else.”
Before I could think of any response, my stomach growled, and Elva laughed, sitting us both up, and holstering the gun I had not noticed in his right hand. “It’s good to know some things don’t change. I’m hungry myself. But it looks to me like the cupboard is bare.”
I stretched, moving first one shoulder and then the other. I felt as though I had been lifting rocks. “There is food here,” I told him. “And drink. But I will have to get it.” Elva released me from his arms slowly as I rose, and watched me cross the room to the cupboards against the far wall. He was right—regardless of our own predicament, the world moved on. At least for now.
The selection of food had changed. Chicken stew with parsnips and potatoes in a small stoneware pot, onion buns, fresh apples and plums. I wondered if I had to return the pot to the cupboard when we were done, and what would happen if I did not. I laid everything out on the round table. Elva gave a hopeful smile as he took his seat across from me.
“You look like you’re setting a table,” he said.
I reached out for his hands. “Here is bread,” I said, setting his left hand down on the basket holding the buns. “Here is a spoon, and here a pot of stew, chicken judging by the smell.” I set his right hand down on the handle of the pitcher. “And here is wine. At least it is right now.”
He closed his right hand around the pitcher’s handle, lifted it and inhaled with appreciation. “What do you mean, ‘now’?”
I explained the nature of the jug and the baskets. “I would not have expected wine,” I said. “But I trust my old mentor, and through him, his pitcher.”
“Good enough for me.”
Lucky, I thought. I would not have known what to do if Elva had not been able to see the food. At what point would the cup, the plates, and the jug disappear for him, I wondered? When he finished the meal? Or would he always see them now? After a few moments of silent eating, Elva swallowed and cleared his throat.
“If nothing else,” he said, “we’ll have surprise on our side. It won’t dream in a million years that we escaped that chaos. It won’t be expecting us at all.”
I looked at him over the rim of my wine cup before putting it down on the table between us. “My brain feels like an old rag that’s been washed too often. One more effort and it will simply pull apart into loose threads.” I massaged my temples, but even my practitioner’s hand felt stiff. There was still a question I wanted to ask. “Had you stayed, could you have killed him?”
Elva hesitated long enough that I thought he was not going to answer at all. “That wasn’t Arlyn,” he said. “Not entirely, anyway. Arlyn would never have tried to kill you.”
“Which doesn’t answer my question.” I picked up my wine cup and set it down without drinking.
“Let me finish. I’m fairly certain I could have killed the body—that’s what I mean by ‘Arlyn.’ But I’m equally sure bullets wouldn’t have killed the Godstone. What if it jumped again, with you the only practitioner around?”
“Then it would have gone through the door with me.” I decided I was not hungry anymore.
“Then it might be sitting here right now, though I’ve got the feeling I wouldn’t be.”
“I am not so sure,” I said, pushing my spoon away. “Arlyn knows about the locket, but does Xandra?”
Frowning, Elva moved all the items on the table, lining them up along the edge to his right and then distributing them again. For some reason I thought of cards. “Do you remember when I told you what the Godstone looked like?”
I had to think. “You told me it was like a crystal, about this big.” I held my hands a foot apart.
Elva’s sad smile took me by surprise. “Did I tell you that when Xandra was working on it, I couldn’t look directly at it? It gave off more light than my eyes could take—or maybe it was the light, I was never sure which. Xandra gave me goggles to wear, made specially for me. It did look like a piece of crystal then, a prism, painting colors on the air, but it was still too bright. Even with the goggles I couldn’t focus on the shape.” He poured himself more wine, still smiling. “I never saw Xandra touch it, but it responded to him somehow. That much I could tell.”
“Pure energy,” I said aloud. That made sense. Energy could go wherever it wished. That’s why we used forrans. Without a pattern energy was just . . . chaos. “If somehow Xandra gave a kind of form to pure energy . . . Metenari could not have known what it was—no matter what documents he found. He would have had no way to control it.”
“No, it controlled him. At first I think Metenari was still there, but the Godstone wore him away, like erasing the printing on a page. We know now that when he sealed it away Arlyn left an imprint of himself—of Xandra anyway—along with his power. Though I think what it has of Xandra is a crude copy, like when a child copies an adult’s drawing. It’s Xandra, but certainly
not all of him, not the quiet, thoughtful part of him.”
“So what we have here is both—no, all three of them? The Godstone, plus the distorted imprint of the Xandra you knew, with both of these imposed on the Arlyn I know?”
“Something like that, yes.” He smoothed his mustaches with his thumb and forefinger. “So I think we have to figure that what Arlyn knew, the Godstone knows too. Including the locket.”
I stared at the tabletop, turning my spoon over and over in my fingers, finally gripping it until my knuckles grew white. “How long?” I said. “How long until the Godstone erases Arlyn as he did Metenari? How long before he wipes away the part that in the end decided not to risk destroying the world?” I looked up into his bright blue eyes. “We cannot leave this. We will still have to stop him.”
“We’ve been doing great so far.” Elva moved his wine cup to one side and leaned forward, putting his hand on top of mine. “Tell me, can you still open Xandra’s vault?”
I considered the question. Could I? Practitioners had excellent memories. If I concentrated, I could see Arlyn’s pattern as clearly as if I had his drawing in my hand. “I believe so. Why?”
“To get to the New Zone—no, wait, hear me out.” His hand closed tighter on mine as I tried to move it away. “What if we can’t stop it? Would we be able to at least save ourselves?” He grinned. “I’d hate to lose you.”
I would hate to be lost. For a moment I was tempted. I would still be a practitioner, though perhaps I would have to act the part of a physician, or a scientist, as practitioners did in the City. I went so far as to ask him, “Are you certain we have no chance? No chance at all?”
He released my hand and threw himself back in his seat. “Certain? Of course I’m not certain. Anything’s possible. But it’s not what you’d call probable.”
“What of the people here? If there is a chance, however small . . .”
Elva crossed his arms, shrugged, but nodded, reluctantly. “The risk . . . if we fail . . .”
“Consider the outcomes,” I said. “One: Xandra tries his new approach and is successful, leaving a world that to mundanes seems exactly the same. Two: he tries and is unsuccessful, destroying the world—”
“A fifty-fifty chance,” Elva said. I ignored him.
“Three: if we attempt to stop him and fail, the first two outcomes still remain possible—a fifty-fifty chance, as you say. If we succeed, then the world continues in its present form. The only thing we really risk in trying to stop him is ourselves, against the chance of saving everyone, without changing the nature of the world. Surely that’s worth it?”
He shifted and the candlelight flickered on his face. “At home we have a saying, ‘When you run out of bullets, use a sword.’ ” His voice lost its intensity. “Do you have an idea of how we could stop it?”
“We will think of one. At least we know the chaos won’t kill us. We may find a solution to that instead.”
“Good thing I didn’t kill the monster, then.”
“I do not think it was a monster,” I said, thinking of the soft brush against my cheek. “Unlike others we could name, it did not try to kill us.”
His teeth flashed. “Where do you think it’s gone now?”
I knew he did not mean the monster.
* * *
Arlyn
“This body doesn’t require more rest. Why are we sitting down?”
Voice didn’t sound much like mine, surprising, all things considered. “I’m frustrated.” Watched my hands tremble, then stop.
“There’s no reason for this not to work. Not now. I can feel the forrans. You’re hiding something from me.”
“How?” That shut him up.
“Then why isn’t the forran working?”
“I don’t know. You tell me. You’re in charge.”
My practitioner’s hand formed a fist tight enough to hurt. “That’s just what I am. So you’ll tell me why this isn’t working.”
Took too much energy to laugh. “Why? What’ll you do to me?” Keep him distracted, I thought. Don’t want to give him the satisfaction.
“You have no fear of death. Why is that? If you can’t die by your own hand, I wonder if you could die by mine?”
“I’d love to see you try it. Really, I would.”
“Ah. Yes. I see what you mean. I don’t think I’d be destroyed myself, but I’d be back at the starting gate again, wouldn’t I? Still, there must be something you want.”
“Can’t think of a thing.” Really couldn’t.
“What if I could get your friends back?”
Heart skipped a beat, ears buzzed.
“Wow. I guess that answers my question, doesn’t it?”
“No. They’ll just die along . . . with . . . everyone else.”
“We’d wait until I was successful—wait, you’ve thought of something. What is it?”
Would have laughed out loud. Couldn’t kill myself, but I’d be destroyed along with everyone else. Temptation. Saw myself doing it. Would it really be so bad? Everyone dies anyway. Felt like a weight disappeared. Then it was back.
“You’re thinking something.” My fists pounded my head. “Gahh! It’s like an itch. Stop it.”
Couldn’t face it. Fighting it. How long? Just wait for lowness to be complete. How long had it taken? Couldn’t remember. Too long. Too slow. Too difficult. Stall.
“What about start at one end,” I said. “Not here, not the middle.”
“The end?”
“Or the beginning, if you want to go Mode by Mode.”
My body moved to the window and looked out. “Which is closest?”
I thought again about not telling him. Problem was, he knew I had an answer. He couldn’t see what it was, but he knew one was there.
“I’m fond of you, but don’t test me too far.”
Tired. What difference would it make? “The City,” I said finally.
“So the City’s the beginning. Where’s the other end?”
“Nowhere. Keeps on going.”
He smiled. “As if we create it with our presence. That makes a great deal of sense.”
If he thought so.
“We’ll go back to the City then, and we’ll see which of us was right.”
I closed my eyes. Appalled. Was the horse still in the stable? Any horse? Would we have to walk? How long would it take? Forever? Found myself on my feet without any intention of being there.
* * *
Elvanyn
He hadn’t known why Fenra had stopped him from killing the creature touching them. He just knew that in these matters he trusted her instincts more than he did his own. And he remembered how the horses reacted to her back home. Though to be honest, he’d have felt better if he’d been able to shoot something. Preferably Xandra, even though it wouldn’t have killed the Godstone.
Suddenly he felt a floor under his feet and Fenra’s weight sagged against him. He still couldn’t see anything, but after a moment his hearing adjusted. Somewhere nearby he could hear wind rippling through the leaves of trees. He felt her lips close to his ear.
“Follow me. Do not let go of my hand.”
He grinned, safe in the knowledge that she couldn’t see him. The last time a woman had said that to him, events had turned out very pleasantly indeed. This time, however, Fenra just led him through what his ears told him was a stone corridor. A familiar size, he thought. There must be dozens like this one in the White Court. He almost spoke, but thought again and shut his mouth. He knew the locket had brought them back to the Court, though evidently not to her old mentor’s office. Elva felt he should be able to place these corridors, even in the dark; for years it had been his job to patrol them.
“Where are we?” he said finally.
“Down the corridor from Lorist Medlyn’s private rooms in the Watchmaker
’s Tower.”
As if her words were a forran, his sight cleared and he saw moonlight coming in a nearby window. Someone had left the shutter open to catch the night breeze. Ah, now he knew where they were.
“If we live through this,” Fenra said. “The first thing I do is find a way to go somewhere else, and not just to Medlyn’s places. It’s like going back to the beginning every time.”
“It’s a safe beginning, you have to admit that.”
“Compared to what? What do you think will happen to us if we’re caught here? You’re supposed to be with Metenari, what will you tell your Guard captain?”
Don’t answer, Elva thought. These aren’t the questions she wants answered.
They descended one staircase and then another before passing through the left half of a large door swinging wide but silently open into the Moonlight Patio. Suddenly he heard voices and before they could hide—if there had been somewhere to hide—three apprentices walked into the patio from under the arcade on the far side. Elva braced his feet and reached for the sword Fenra had found for him, but just as his hand closed around the hilt, Fenra hissed and jerked him over a small curb into a hedge of thorny bushes.
Though they were no more than ten feet away, across the narrow width of one of the long pools, the apprentices passed them by without reacting at all. Elva would have sworn one of the trio looked right at them. Once they turned a far corner, Elva waited until the sounds of their footfalls died away before asking her.
“How long have you been able to make yourself invisible?”
“Since early in my training. I was always the one sent to steal food in the middle of the night.”
“And why haven’t I seen this skill before?”
“Because it takes a great deal of energy, and it only works in the middle of the night. And best when my feet are touching actual earth.” She stepped back onto the path and slipped her arm through his, now that they were walking on stone. Sucking on a scratch on the back of his free hand, he thought about walking this way with Xandra, holding each other up when they’d had a little too much to drink, or when Xandra was giddy with some revelation or success. Fenra led him down to the far end of the patio, through the beam of moonlight trapped by the lilies in the pool. Fenra’s arm stiffened in his, tightening her hold, and when they were back under the concealing darkness of the arcade she drew him further into the shadow.
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