The Way Between the Worlds

by Ian Irvine

  “Mellusinthe!” said Tallia. “That’s like your middle name, Melluselde. Was she—?”

  “She was one of Basunez’s seven grandchildren,” said Karan, shivering. “They all were. They came up here to picnic in the forest. The oldest was only eighteen. Six of the seven died here, torn to pieces by a mountain cat, it says in our family histories.”

  “Then why does it curse Basunez?”

  “I have no idea. That was long ago. When I studied my family histories this was just another tragedy that no one knew much about. At least I know where we are now. Let’s get on.”

  But as they continued, Karan found herself drawn back to the children picnicking in the forest, wondering what had really happened to them. She could almost hear their cries for help, nearly sense their terror. Mountain cats had never been common here, nor did they attack with such indiscriminate violence. After seeing the statues at Carcharon, she had an unpleasant idea. What had Basunez let out?

  After a few more hours of labor they found themselves in a part of the forest where the ground sloped down into a tangle of gullies. It began to snow even harder. Several times Karan went to turn one way around a rock or a fallen tree, only to realize that her feet had taken her in the opposite direction. It’s like walking around the top of a funnel, she said to herself. The way I want to go is always the hardest, but I’m afraid of the easy option.

  She stopped abruptly. “This is crazy! I know this forest, but I haven’t got the faintest idea where we are.”

  Tallia jerked her thumb to the east. “If we go downhill, sooner or later we must reach the edge of the escarpment.”

  Repressing her worries, Karan followed, but the further they went in that direction the thicker the forest became, until finally in front of them it turned into a pole thicket, the slender trees growing so close together that they had to squeeze between them side on.

  The ground became even steeper. “Surely this must be the edge!” exclaimed Karan irritably. “The whole wood is only half a league wide here. We could walk through it in an hour or two.”

  “Look!” Tallia pointed. “An open space. We must be almost there.”

  “I don’t remember it!” Karan pushed past her, anxious to get out.

  “I feel stupid,” said Tallia. “I walked right by here just yesterday.”

  “It’s a very old forest. I doubt that a tree has been cut since Basunez’s time. It’s always felt strange to me. My father used to talk about it.” Karan pressed on quickly.

  She wriggled between the last poles, having to take off her pack to do so, and found herself in a small dell, shaped like a bowl. The snow was smooth and white, with not a mark on it. In the center the thread of water they had been following tumbled into an oval pool, about as long as Karan was tall, and ran away again. Both rivulet and pool were frozen solid. It looked just like a bowl and spoon.

  “How odd,” she said, so distracted that she did not take account that the thicket continued on the other side, the poles if anything even more closely spaced than where she had entered.

  She turned around to Tallia, who had been just behind her. “That’s odd…” she began, but Tallia was nowhere in sight. “Must have been further over,” she said to herself, heading to the right. There was no sign here either. No, she had been right the first time. There were her tracks emerging from the forest. A shiver crept down the back of Karan’s neck. Perhaps Tallia had stopped to relieve herself, though it was odd that she had not sung out.

  “Tallia,” she called softly.

  There was no reply. Dropping her pack on the snow, Karan followed her tracks back into the forest. At least she tried to, but the trees were much closer together. Karan couldn’t even get her head between the trunks now. Yet the footprints went straight through.

  “Tallia!” The shiver began again, starting at the top of her head and going down her back and her arms, and up again until every hair stood on end. She ran a few paces to her right, where the thicket seemed more open, but it turned out to be as impenetrable as everywhere else. She ran back the other way. Worse yet!

  “Tallia,” she cried despairingly.

  The trees soaked up her voice. She had called as loudly as she could, but all she heard was a frightened squeak. Black clouds squeezed out the light. The clearing became gray and threatening. High above, the slender branches interlaced, cutting the sky into drab triangles.

  Karan sat down on her pack, trying to think. Things like this did not happen of their own accord. They were made to happen. But made by whom? She whirled, as if someone had whispered behind her, but there was no one there.

  “This is all an illusion,” she thought suddenly. “I know how to deal with illusions. They can be disbelieved out of existence.”

  She marched back to the place where she had come out of the forest and walked confidently up to it, retracing her footsteps. She walked straight into a pair of trees, taking the impact on hip, shoulder and forehead so hard that her head rang. The poles were as solid as the bars of a cell. She might as well have been in one.

  Rulke! she thought miserably. After that night with the hrux he knew where I was. All he had to do was bring the construct back to Carcharon, when he had done his more important tasks, and attend to this minor detail. How could she have expected otherwise? He needed her.

  Karan squatted by the frozen pool, slowly coming to realize that it was not Rulke at all. Illusion was not his way. He would be much more direct. The prickling began to creep up the back of her neck again. She turned, the blood congealing in her veins. An even more deadly foe, though one she had almost forgotten about over the past half year. The one who had wanted her dead in Katazza, and in Thurkad even before that. Faelamor!

  Tallia had been just behind Karan, but approaching the clearing she felt a sharp pain in her instep, as if something had bitten her. That was odd. There weren’t any insects at this time of year. Pulling off her boot she found a welt on her instep, a dull red blotch about the size of a fingernail. It began to throb. Rubbing it only made it worse.

  Tallia put her boot back on and continued, but soon was confronted by the problem that Karan had encountered: though the tracks continued on, the thicket was impenetrable. She could no longer see into the glade at all. Everything had become quite gloomy.

  Once she heard a cry, as if someone a long way away had called her name, but it was no more than a whisper on the wind. Another time she saw a flash of movement that might have been Karan’s red hair. Then as it grew darker she could no longer tell where the clearing was. Each time she blinked it seemed to recede further.

  Tallia did not lose her presence of mind. Being an adept of the Secret Art herself, she recognized that this was illusion, and how cleverly she had been separated from Karan. Remembering the small footprint, she was almost certain that it was Faelamor. Illusion was a form of the Secret Art that many practiced but few mastered, and from the seamless nature of this one it had to be worked by a great master.

  Tallia could not break the illusion but she knew what to do to minimise the bewilderment. Karan could not be far away. Noting the direction of the tracks, she made her own markings. Faelamor could only conceal what she knew was there.

  She had no hope of breaking Faelamor’s glamour but tried anyway: all the dispelling charms that she’d learned in her apprenticeship in far-off Crandor; other cantrips she’d learned from Mendark. Nothing made the slightest difference. The illusion was unshaken.

  “Faelamor!” Karan whispered, realizing that she was defenseless. Her knife was in the bottom of her pack. She looked sideways at it.

  “Don’t!” said Faelamor, a small woman with skin like polished rosewood and eyes as deep as the spaces between the stars.

  “What do you want of me?” Karan’s voice wobbled, in spite of all attempts to show no weakness.

  “To talk.”

  “Talk! In Katazza you wanted me dead.”

  “Things have changed. Perhaps I’ll let you go, if you tell me what I want t
o hear.”

  “I have no idea what you want to hear,” Karan said.

  “Don’t toy with me—you’re nothing!”

  “Ah,” said Karan, “but a nothing who got away from Rulke.”

  “Brave words, from a liar, a cheat and a murderer.”

  This reminded Karan of another occasion when she had been so accused. “What you accuse me of, you have done a hundredfold. You betrayed Shazmak! Your crimes are legion.”

  “The Aachim are not our species,” said Faelamor indifferently. “Anyway, they are failures, scarcely human. Nothing done to another species can be a crime, else every butcher and fisher on this planet would be in the dock.”

  “They are as human as you or I! And I realized something as I was departing Carcharon,” Karan went on.

  Faelamor was drawn. “What was that?”

  “I realized that Rulke had been done an injustice,” Karan said. “I never found him to act other than with the honor peculiar to his kind.” This was not entirely true, but true enough to say to Faelamor. “The Charon fight for their very survival.”

  “So do we fight for the survival of our world and our species,” she replied coldly. “What did you learn about the Charon?”

  Karan sorted through her memories. “I saw Rulke’s overwhelming power,” she said. “He could crush you and your puny illusions in an instant. He made an opening in the Forbidding. Even a thranx out of the void fled in terror from the power of his construct.”

  The walls of the clearing shook. It might have been someone rattling at the pole-like trees. Faelamor took control again with a gesture that sent Karan’s head spinning. “What’s that?” cried Faelamor. “Who else is out there?”

  “Tallia,” gasped Karan, her head shrieking and unable to lie.

  “She is strong,” Faelamor conceded. She moved her fingers and the trees around the dell hardened into an impenetrable wall.

  Karan felt very frightened. “What do you want of me?” she choked. The past few minutes had been just a game, a momentary distraction to Faelamor, and now she had shown just how potent she was. In Katazza Faelamor had wanted her dead and she still didn’t know why.

  Faelamor moved closer. Karan flopped on her face. She would sooner have faced Rulke again; at least his motives were comprehensible. At least he laughed. But not this enemy. Nothing seemed to crack that face like waxed timber. So cold; so unyielding. Did love matter to her? Did pain? Karan understood why Maigraith was the inhibited, closed-off person that she was, having been brought up from infancy by Faelamor. Was that why Maigraith had never been able to break away from her?

  “Where’s Maigraith?” she asked abruptly. “What have you done with her?

  Faelamor ignored her. “What really happened in Carcharon?”

  “Carcharon?” Karan stalled, trying to see where Faelamor was aiming.

  Faelamor was not only humorless but impatient. Waves of sickness crashed together in Karan’s head, to burst like an over-ripe boil.

  “He used the construct,” Karan said between spasms, “to open the Wall of the Forbidding.”

  “I know that! What else did he do? What did he want you for?” The soft voice was a threat. The pressure grew greater. Karan gagged into the snow. She looked up at Faelamor, her eyes running.

  “He wanted me to find the Way between the Worlds for him, the path to Aachan.”

  “So!” said Faelamor in triumph. “He cannot find it himself, despite his wonderful construct. I didn’t think he’d be able to. That’s very interesting news. And did you find it?”

  The nausea was coming again, in waves each bigger than the previous. Karan choked; her eyes flooded; her face went red and white. Despite what Rulke had done, Faelamor was far worse. She wasn’t going to give her a weapon to use against him or anyone. Could she disguise a small lie? Then make it part of the character that Faelamor believed she had.

  “He tried to force me,” Karan repeated. “He spent days training me for it. It was so hard! My mind could not hold what he wanted me to do. No mind could contain all that,” she said, putting a whine into her voice. “I thought I understood it, and he thought I did, and we almost achieved it too.” She looked dreamy for a second. “What a mind! What a man! You cannot understand what it felt like to work with him.”

  Faelamor looked contemptuous. “You’re just like every other woman on this wretched planet. How Rulke must have sneered as you fell under his spell—the least of all spells. All he has to do is smile and look into their eyes and they swoon. Did you share his bed as well?” She bent down over Karan. “Disgusting whey-faced creature! Surely he would not sink so low!”

  “But then I saw those awful things in the void,” Karan went on, enhancing the little-girl whine. “They pressed up against the Wall, slavering and rending. I was so frightened, the way they stared at me! One actually came through the Wall! I had to get away. Rulke should never have put me in such danger.” She almost broke into a lisp. Don’t overdo it, she thought. “It wasn’t my fault. He should have protected me better. I begged him but he ignored me. So I broke the link when he was on the way to Aachan. How was I to know what would happen?”

  Faelamor’s contempt was absolute. “How did Rulke let you live after such a craven display?” She gripped Karan by the coat and dragged her forward. “What happened then?” she burst out.

  “I can hardly remember. Rulke was struggling to stop the Forbidding from tearing right open.” Karan tried to convey an air of childlike stupidity. “There were monsters, horrid creatures everywhere. I heard him cry out ‘Thranx!’ and a great winged man-beast sprang at him. They fought and he blasted it with the construct. It fled, but others came. Lorrsk! he called them, and while Rulke was struggling with them I ran away. I escaped,” she corrected primly.

  “I was right about you the first time,” Faelamor said. “Treacherous, whining little wretch! I almost feel sorry for Rulke, thinking that he could use you. How he must regret ever seeing you. But you’ve taught me a great deal. He tried and failed. His confidence must be shaken. He’s weak! Not even a thranx would have cowed him before the Nightland.

  “Hold on,” she continued in afterthought. Faelamor was given to soliloquy. “Don’t underestimate him! When she let go it would have been a terrible blow—it would have torn his mind.” Yet Faelamor allowed herself to crow a little. “Rulke is weaker than I’d dare to hope, and now he’ll have to look for a new sensitive. Well, what am I to do about this one? If it hadn’t been for the warning about the triune, I might have let her go. One so treacherous would do my enemies more harm than me.”

  Karan sat listlessly in the snow, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. Her eyes were dull. “Perhaps it is better to be sure,” Faelamor said, flexing her fingers.

  Tallia was still trying to find a way around the illusion. She knew what kind it was now, and that helped a little. Sometimes she even caught a glimpse of them as they moved. She wondered how the glamour was formed. It certainly felt solid, but it could not be solid. Manipulating solid matter was an entirely different branch of the Secret Art, one even the most powerful rarely mastered.

  She might have cut her way into the clearing, had she an axe, but somehow she doubted it. Probably she would be unable to strike what she was trying to cut. She considered all the ways she knew to break such glamours, but none would work against the greatest illusionist of all.

  Suddenly a way occurred to Tallia. How cunningly it was made must depend on what Faelamor knew about them both. An illusion that was impregnable from all possible approaches required her to visualize each such attack and make something to foil it. But one that was proof against the mind of Karan, which Faelamor had some knowledge of, might not succeed so well against the very different mind and training of Tallia, whom she did not.

  How high did the illusion go? The trees here were poles about the size of her upper arm, with only an occasional twig-like branch to right or left. She moved back beyond sight of the clearing, took off her boots and socks and p
acked the pockets of her jacket with cones. They were the feeblest of missiles but there was nothing better.

  Choosing one of the more sturdy poles, Tallia began to climb. It was hard work, for the other trees pressed in on her, snagging her clothing so that the climb was a perpetual struggle. Sometimes, with her heavy, swaying progress, her pole would clash against another, grinding her foot between their rough bark. She almost cried out the first time it happened. When she snatched her foot out, a strip of skin was gone from either side, and blood began to drip on the snow below.

  The second time it happened she was better prepared, escaping with just a mashed big toe, and as the trunks narrowed and the bark grew softer she had no more trouble.

  When she was high up, seven or eight spans, she found that the illusion did weaken, up where there had seemed no need for it. Tallia could see the clearing through the branches. She crept from one trunk to another, in mortal danger if she slipped. In a few minutes she was as close to the rim of the clearing as she dared go, only a few trees from the edge. Parting the needles she peered down.

  The illusion shimmered the air like a mirage but she made out Faelamor and Karan some distance away, across the other side of the dell. Faelamor’s back was toward her and Karan was facing her way, though she looked dazed and fell down several times.

  Tallia felt a cone out of her pocket and weighed it in her hand. It wasn’t much of a weapon. Moreover, the twigs and branches were still too dense to get a good shot. It would have to be perfect, with such an inadequate missile. In Karan’s present state she might not be able to help herself.

  Karan fell again, and this time did not get up. Tallia hurried from trunk to trunk, gripping the thin poles with fingers and toes. She reached the edge of the clearing and drew back her arm. The pole swayed alarmingly under her. For an instant she thought it was going to snap. It did not, but to her horror the tree bent outward and kept going, for there were no trees to support it on that side. It accelerated under her weight. The snow rushed toward her.