The Way Between the Worlds

by Ian Irvine

“Even from the Nightland I could sense Basunez working here. His corrupt experiments had thinned the wall between Santhenar and my prison, and the void too. Had he succeeded your old human species would probably no longer exist. Fortunately he failed, but I’ve been watching this place ever since. For six hundred years I kept vigil! I even noticed you.”

  Karan writhed, imagining that he might have looked down on her most private moments. “What do you mean, noticed me?”

  “I mean that I sensed you. This place is one of the most potent sites on all Santhenar for working the Secret Art, which is why Basunez built Carcharon here. What he did here allowed me to detect him, and you too.”

  She turned away abruptly.

  “Don’t worry, I couldn’t actually see anything from the Nightland. I felt that he was carrying out dangerous experiments which were of great interest to me, but I couldn’t find out what they were. Then, not so long ago, I sensed something here again, where there had been nothing for centuries. Someone strange and rare. It turned out to be you!”

  Karan trembled. “Does this mean that other people can tell that I am… triune?” Her heritage had caused her enough trouble already.

  “I wouldn’t think so! Not even I can sense you from Santhenar. The Nightland is different; a higher plane.”

  “When did you sense me?” But she knew all too well.

  “Time has funny habits in the Nightland. It might have been ten years ago, or thirty.”

  “I came here with my father when I was eight, not long before he died. And to think you were spying on us!” Her voice rose in outrage.

  “Not spying. I had no idea if you were young or old, man or girl. All I knew was that there was a unique talent in Carcharon. It made me sweat. This place might have been full of dangerous secrets, for all I knew.”

  “But I have no powers at all,” said Karan. “Tensor made sure of that when I was a child. I cannot wield the Secret Art. All I have are a few minor talents like sensing and sending and linking, abilities that often fail me.”

  “The right lever can move the world. Anyway, as soon as you left Carcharon I lost you, and no matter what I did I could not find you again. Not until you picked up the Mirror in Fiz Gorgo did I detect you once more, for the Mirror was tied to Yggur, and he tenuously to me, because I had possessed him long ago.”

  Even as a child, a watch was being kept out for her. It made Karan feel that her destiny had never been in her control.

  “The Mirror started it all,” he went on. “I still didn’t know who you were, but I could sometimes get into your dreams and give you a nudge. And now I’m here,” he said with great satisfaction. “Without you I would still be in the Nightland with no chance of ever getting out. I owe you a great debt, Karan.”

  “You can repay it by letting me go!”

  He roared with laughter.

  Karan stared into nothingness, trying to concentrate on what he had said. Without her, none of this would have happened. She had always known that, in a way, but she’d had no idea that it went back to her distant ancestors. Nothing comes out of nothing. It better explained Maigraith’s interest in her, and Faelamor’s unease, and Tensor’s attitude too. How she had been exploited!

  “And did you learn anything about Basunez’s work?” she asked.

  “Not much,” said Rulke. “I tried to compel his shade, but whatever he found is lost forever.”

  Karan looked out the window, wondering if he spoke the truth. “I couldn’t care less what Basunez found,” she murmured. “But I would dearly love to know who killed my father, and why. It must be connected with this place.”

  Rulke rubbed his jaw. “Well, there’s all day to wait until moonrise. If I can put your mind at ease it will help later on. Come with me.”

  It was still dark as they went out into the yard, but the flagstones were lit by a ray of light from an upstairs window. Rulke lifted a trapdoor and shone his lantern down a metal ladder. “Go down!” He followed her, extinguished his lamp and by means that were invisible to her in the dark conjured up the shade of Basunez.

  At first it was no more than a black and white outline on the wall. Shortly, two specks began to gleam at the top, as if she was being watched by someone who was bitterly angry.

  “Come out, shade!” said Rulke sternly. “Focus your misery on the particles of air and make them speak.”

  The outline took on a more human shape, then the ghost emerged part-way from the wall, hawk-nose first. Its thin lips moved but the squeaky wail of its voice seemed to come from the middle air.

  “Why do you call me back again?” it piped in querulous tones. “Let me go to my rest.”

  “You shall have no rest while your sins remain unpunished! Here is your granddaughter more than twenty generations on, Karan Elienor Melluselde Fyrn.” Rulke pushed her forward.

  Karan resisted. She was afraid.

  Coming halfway out of the wall, the shade of Basunez spat at the floor near her feet. The phosphorescent stuff evaporated to nothing in the air. “Hideous little mite,” he fluted.

  “She demands to know what happened to her father, Galliad, who died here.”

  Basunez flapped his hands in agitation. “Never heard of him,” he muttered, vainly trying to pass back through the stone.

  “Liar!” she shouted. “He often came here. He used to tell me stories about the ghosts of Carcharon, at bedtime.” The tales of Basunez had always frightened her.

  Basunez came right out of the wall, fluttering through the air at them. His lean bearded face was furious, his nostrils flaring. He had an arching nose and black eyes, no resemblance to her at all. He shouted in her face and flapped his cloak at her. Karan jumped, falling backward against the ladder.

  “Stop that!” Rulke roared. By the time she recovered Basunez was back in the wall, only his eyes and hook-nose showing.

  “I wonder…” said Rulke.

  “What?”

  “You say Galliad was beaten to death for a few coins. What robber would lie in wait here, so far from anywhere? I wonder if he might not have pestered Basunez’s ghost too much.”

  “My father was not afraid of ghosts.”

  “Out with it, shade,” said Rulke, and did something in the dark that made the ghost glow like a red-hot poker. “What did you do to her father?”

  “Unpleasant, inadequate man,” wailed Basunez, wrenching himself out of the wall again. “Always prying and trying to learn my secrets. Hah! I burned everything to ashes before I died. No one will get the benefit of my labor, not even you, Rulke! Anyway, the struggle is the answer! But he took the easy way—he ripped my bones out of their crypt and dared to raise me from the dead. And don’t think I was the first either!” he sneered at Karan. “He was well practiced in the unwholesome art of necromancy.” The ghost blurred back into the wall, fading almost to nothing.

  “Don’t go,” said Rulke in a velvet voice. “Why did he die?”

  “He was not as cunning as I was!” Basunez’s eyes gleamed, rat-like. “I led him on a playful dance, a merry climb right to the very tower top. Still he pestered me, and I grew angry and flew at him. He fell to his death.”

  “You killed him!” Karan screamed. “You murdered my father.” She tried to strike the shade with her fists but all she got for it was bloody knuckles.

  “A death for a life,” said the ghost of Basunez with grim irony. “He reanimated my dead bones, a greater crime by far than easing his miserable life out of him.”

  “Murderer!” she shrieked, thrashing about wildly. Rulke held her arms.

  “Life-giver!” Basunez spat. “I am dead six hundred years and still I cannot lie in my grave. Send me back!”

  “Enough!” said Rulke. His lantern flared brightly and Basunez faded to nothing, though his cries could still be heard, “Send me back, send me back!” as Karan hurried up the ladder and Rulke closed the trapdoor of the cellar.

  Back in the upper tower he sat Karan down and put a cup to her lips. She was trembling. She held
the vessel in two hands and slipped from it, staring at the floor for a long time. Finally she gave a great shudder and looked up at him. The light made her malachite-green eyes glow. She took a deep breath.

  “He wasn’t murdered at all, was he? It was just a stupid accident that means nothing.”

  “No more than a malicious accident,” he said. “Ghosts can’t do murder. Do you feel better for knowing?”

  “That my beloved father practiced the black art, necromancy? No! But only the child of eight thought he was perfect. I had to know the truth.”

  Nonetheless she paced back and forth, as agitated as she had been down below. Behind her back, Rulke did something with his fingers and suddenly her head nodded. “Oh, I’m so tired.”

  “Sleep,” he murmured, drawing his fingers down over her face. “It’s nearly dawn and there’ll be no rest for either of us tonight.” Her eyes fell closed, she subsided on the floor and he drew the sleeping pouch up around her.

  “Well,” Rulke said just before moonrise that evening. “Are you ready?”

  “Almost!” She was still wondering what her father had been up to. “But before we begin I must know what has happened to Llian.”

  “Another condition! He’s out there with the rest of the company.” He gestured to the embrasure that faced east toward the amphitheater.

  “I must know that he’s safe.”

  Rulke restrained his impatience. “Very well. Come up!”

  “What?”

  “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 Ghâshâd, a man with gray 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 practiced 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 amphitheater. 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, signaling 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 paralyzed. 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 honor 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 Ghâshâd, 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.

  3

  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 li
ghts 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 out now than later.”

  Waving the Ghâshâd 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 Carcharon, 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.”