The Way Between the Worlds

by Ian Irvine

  She encountered no one during the trip to the stairs, which was just as well for she was determined to let no one, friend or otherwise, stop her. Once on the roof Maigraith prepared herself carefully. Yggur’s warnings could not be ignored. This would be the third gate in a day and a half, not to mention her calamitous experience with the flute. She was taking a great risk, but she had to get to Shazmak before Faelamor did.

  On the rooftop Maigraith went through the gate-making procedure methodically. There was no possibility of going direct to Shazmak because she had never been there. But she knew Carcharon. She would make a gate there and walk the rest of the way.

  She conjured up memories of Carcharon. It was as clear in her mind as a picture. That was a relief. It would be an easy jump.

  Maigraith worked through her preparations again, seeing the destination and checking in case the construct had warped the place. She could sense nothing untoward, but often dangerous places could not be sensed until you got there. Well, she had done all she could. Time to go.

  As soon as she made the gate Maigraith understood how weak she was. It was a clumsy, ill sort of a portal, surrounded by a baleful cage of light. She felt how erratic it was; how poorly tuned. Still, making the gate was not the part that was so draining, or even seeing the destination. It was keeping it all together at the same time as making the jump. She tried again, but the second was worse. She was weaker and had even less control than before.

  Maigraith sat down and went through her mental regimen to calm herself. “I will do it,” she told herself, working until her head throbbed. She started again. The gate was a little better this time. Dare she risk it? She must.

  Maigraith heard a cry from the top of the stair and knew that it was Karan. She panicked. She had to go. Now!

  It was a bad jump: off balance in spite of all the time she had spent preparing. Then came the terrible realization that Karan had somehow got into the gate. Maigraith saw her flung up in the air and whirled about. There was no chance of them coming through together; Karan might materialize anywhere! Already she was disappearing, trailing off, and there was nothing to be done about it.

  Maigraith reached out but she was blind. All knowledge of the destination had gone. She knew the name, but Carcharon as a place was just a distant memory.

  Karan! she cried across the ether. I’m lost, I’m lost! She looked down into boiling clouds of nothingness. Her control of the gate had gone. Maigraith could not overcome her panic enough to find it again.

  Suddenly she felt something—a questing out after her. Maigraith snatched at the link. Where are you? she called across it.

  I don’t know, Karan sent back. Her voice was calm.

  I’m lost! wept Maigraith. I’ve lost us both.

  Karan poured encouragement back across the link, her triune senses allowing her to duplicate what Rulke had done for her on the Way to Aachan. She was so strong, so assured that Maigraith’s panic ebbed a little.

  Bring me to you, Karan called. You can do that!

  Maigraith grasped that image and tried to draw it to her. Soon she made out Karan’s outline through the fog. Karan slowly drifted back to her and they clung together, spiraling down and down and down.

  Keep the link. Don’t let go!

  I won’t let go, Karan whispered in her mind. What is the destination?

  Carcharon, of course, she whispered back. But I can’t see it any more.

  Here it is, Karan sang across the link, and the way there was like a highway, clearer than any path Maigraith had ever traveled. Carcharon loomed up before her, not as an image in her mind but the real place. She reached for it and abruptly they were snatched out of the cauldron into the ruined upper chamber of the tower, in the dark.

  For a second time they clung together, crying with relief. Maigraith lay on the floor, her chest heaving. “I am utterly exhausted,” she said. “I have never felt worse.” She was sick over the edge of the construct-shaped hollow in the stone floor, then flopped down on her back.

  “Then stop right now! You’ll kill yourself.”

  “I don’t see what we have to congratulate ourselves about,” Karan said shortly, while they were taking breakfast among the ruins. The sun was rising and they were glad to see it, for Carcharon was weirder than ever now. The walls angled strangely, the stone was as soft as cheese, the light vibrated visibly. Even the air had a faint, pungent, sickly sweetness. “The gate was nothing, compared with what’s ahead.”

  “I’ll worry about that when I come to it.”

  “You’ve certainly changed since Fiz Gorgo,” said Karan.

  “We both have.”

  “I desperately need to sleep,” said Karan. “Just a few hours. Can I trust you to not abandon me?”

  “You can,” said Maigraith. “To tell you the truth, I’m so exhausted that I couldn’t even walk down the steps.”

  “Well, I don’t trust you. What’s more I don’t believe you’re telling the truth. Sit down here, and I’ll put my head in your lap, and if you try and move I’ll wake up at once.”

  Maigraith did as she was told, though not without a secret smile. Karan lay down and slept almost at once. Maigraith put her arms about her but did not sleep.

  She knows me too well, thought Maigraith. I will be off if I get the chance. She sat that way for almost two hours, but finally was so cramped and cold that she had to stretch her legs. Karan’s eyes snapped open. She glared at Maigraith, then smiled and patted her hand and went back to sleep.

  They shared a frugal lunch, or second breakfast, and set off up the ridge to meet the Shazmak path. Maigraith felt relaxed, at ease after the turmoils of the past few days.

  “Well, here we are on the road again, just the two of us. It’s fitting that we should be together at the end, as we were at the beginning.”

  She was thinking back to their journey to Fiz Gorgo that had begun it all. How tense she’d been; how miserable. But all that was gone now. She was a different person and, even if she never returned, at least she was going with a purpose and a knowledge of her worth. And yet, how sad it was to be leaving Shand behind. She’d kept him at arm’s length ever since Saludith. Had to.

  And how changed you are, Maigraith thought. I remember how you looked that night as we crept into Fiz Gorgo: your face so pale and your eyes round with fear. But once you agreed, you did not shrink from it. Never have I seen you do so. The last year has burned the laughing child from you. Karan’s face was leaner, and harder, and wiser and sadder now.

  Maigraith was thinking about Yggur too. She owed him much, yet he was a part of her past. A necessary part, and a good part in some respects, but a lifetime away and ended now.

  As they went up the steep ridge, Karan surreptitiously examined her friend. They were friends now, in spite of the way their relationship had begun. No longer did Maigraith bear that lost, unwanted look. She had found herself over the past year. But she had found this great burden too, and taken it on herself without complaint. She knew who she was and her place in the world. But she knew what the consequences were likely to be too, and so she had put the world away from her.

  As they trudged along, Karan recalled Rulke’s words: You will come of your own accord when the time is right. How right he’d been.

  Karan was also thinking about Fiz Gorgo. She felt much as she had then, that she was going foolishly into something way beyond her strength. She could feel the tension building inside her, the sense of something terrible about to happen—something irrecoverable. Despite herself she began to radiate waves of anxiety, as she had that other time.

  Maigraith could feel it too. Poor Karan, to be a sensitive, a prisoner of her heightened feelings. But Maigraith knew better how to deal with that now.

  “When I was a child, dwelling in the vast land of Mirrilladell,” she said, “there were two things (save for a mother, and a father) that I yearned for.”

  Karan looked up, so unexpected was this remark.

  “The sea, and the moun
tains,” Maigraith continued. “I had a taste of the sea, with my shell sighing in my ear, but I had never been to the mountains. You have not visited Mirrilladell, have you?”

  “Never,” Karan said softly.

  “You would not like it much. It is a monotonous land—at least the child in me thought so, though going back there later I found much in it to stir my memories. It is bitter in the winter, for whether the winds blow from the uttermost pole to the south or the great mountain barrier that encloses the country in the north, preventing all commerce, they are always frigid.

  “In the summer Mirrilladell is steamy and gnat-ridden, and I swear it has insects that can bite through leather. It is a place of a million lakes, and as many bogs, hills like dingy sheep, and trees that are all the same wherever you go, nothing like your beautiful forests in Meldorin.

  “But from the tallest of those hummocks I could see the ramparts of the mountains, and I yearned for them. They are the greatest in all the Three Worlds, Faelamor once told me. Six and seven thousand spans are the highest peaks, and the fang of Tirthrax at least a thousand more, reaching even beyond the upper air, they say. Imagine! You can see Tirthrax from any hill in Mirrilladell, when it is clear, and it is never the same twice.”

  Karan had been calculating. “Four times the height of Shazmak? Nothing could be that high.”

  “Tirthrax is a thing to be wondered at, but first you must see it. It is impossible to imagine.”

  They were now picking their way among the outcrops where Karan had made her snow cave the day after hythe. There was barely enough snow to make a cave now. The sun shone on their backs and for once there was no wind. As they climbed among knotted gray rocks, they were soon sweating.

  “To the native people of Mirrilladell, Tirthrax epitomizes everything cruel, indomitable and capricious. They hate that mountain looming over their land, overshadowing everything they do. And that is one of the few beliefs the Faellem adopted from that people, for they hate it too.”

  “How can you hate a mountain?”

  “If you can love your mountains, as you do, and the Aachim do,” said Maigraith equably, “I suppose you can hate them as well. But I was captivated by it. Even more so when I realized how much they hated it. When I was young I used to make up stories about it.”

  The slope grew steeper as they walked beside the gash of the ravine, with its black dykes cutting across. Here and there a slender bridge of almost transparent ice still remained. Karan related her reckless escape across the ice bridge.

  “And you lecture me about being careful,” Maigraith said softly, looking down at the broken rocks in the bottom of the gorge. It was some time before she continued.

  “Later, as my education progressed, I lost that faculty of the imagination. All that was stripped from me by the harsh regime that was my schooling and my life. It was one of the things that made it all so hard to bear—there was nowhere left for me to hide. Later I built myself another place, but it was an intellectual refuge, not nearly so comforting.”

  “I’d like to hear about your childhood fancies,” said Karan. She identified readily with the miseries of children, her own later childhood having been so unhappy. Once again she was struck by the parallels between her life and Maigraith’s.

  “Most of them are gone, though Tirthrax remains. I suppose the yearnings were too strong ever to be blocked out.”

  Now they were on the main path to Shazmak, a steep track that wound ever upward. The wind never stopped here.

  “I don’t know whether there are people living in the Great Mountains. Probably they are so high that nothing could ever grow there, though at the time I thought differently. I imagined myself dwelling inside the warm heart of the mountain. Within Tirthrax there were other people, like me. Friendly people, who wanted me and cared for me. So went my dreams. You can imagine how much the mountains meant to me, especially after I lost the sea. They were the one thing that could never be taken from me, for if I climbed any hill in Mirrilladell I could see them again.”

  “The principal city of the Aachim is at Tirthrax,” said Karan. “Set deep into the heart of the mountain.”

  “It must be a wonderful place.”

  “So I hear. I’ve not been there.”

  “Your coming is a great inconvenience,” said Maigraith that evening as they ate a frugal supper. “I brought only enough food for myself. What a pest you are.” But she was smiling as she said it, and passed Karan another tiny portion.

  Karan stuffed the morsel in as if afraid Maigraith would snatch it back. “It’s only four or five days. Even if we have nothing for the last day or two, we won’t die of it.”

  “It won’t help to be half-starved when we get there.”

  Karan checked the wound, squinting in the firelight. “Try this lightglass,” Maigraith said, handing her one. “You can keep it.”

  The wound was no worse than before, but no better either. Karan bandaged Maigraith’s shoulder again. “You would have had trouble doing that by yourself,” she said. “And it would have disabled you worse than hunger.”

  They kept on, walking late into the evening, taking a brief sleep but always back on the path again by dawn. In this way they reached the top of the eastern pass into Chollaz on only the third afternoon out of Carcharon. It was good progress, but conditions had been good for walking—fine weather and the snow crusty, even at the highest altitudes.

  Since Carcharon, Karan had put her fears behind her, pretending that they were on a country stroll together. They looked down toward Shazmak, though all Karan saw was a wilderness of rocky alps and precipitous canyons. She remembered the first time she’d stood here, a girl of twelve, staring into the wasteland in dismay. There had been nothing ahead but rocks and snow, and the prospect of starvation.

  Karan remembered other times too—happy times mostly, going in or out of Shazmak with Rael or her other Aachim friends. Whether she’d been going or returning, there was always a thrill at this point.

  All gone now. Rael had drowned in the Garr, and even that tragedy was more than a year ago. The Shazmak that she had known was gone forever. Their ancient enemies had made it their own. That, too, she had set in motion.

  Maigraith must have sensed Karan’s mood, for she gave her time for herself. When it was nearly dark she put her good arm across Karan’s shoulders.

  “Time to make camp. You said there was a way station here?”

  Rousing herself, Karan led them down a barely perceptible path to a sheltered place beneath an overhanging ledge. There they found a small, round chamber cut into the rock, with a slab of stone that could be slid across to close it against the weather.

  “This is not Aachim work,” said Maigraith.

  “No, it’s much too rude for that. It’s older than their tenure here. I don’t know how old.”

  “And were there not Sentinels too?”

  “Yes, and confusions, so that unwanted visitors never found the way in. Perhaps they failed when Shazmak fell.”

  They had another scanty meal, rolled into their sleeping pouches and slept. At least, Karan slept. Again Maigraith felt no need of it. Her shoulder was painful but she willed it out of mind. A few stars were visible above the mountains, though by the middle of the night they were veiled in mist. She lay in the dark, thinking; watching.

  In the darkest hour of the night she rose, took the remaining food from her pack and put it on the floor beside Karan. Then she bent down, touched Karan’s temple with her fingertips, saying softly, “Sleep!”

  Karan sighed, shrugged herself down under the covers and settled down to a sounder, deeper sleep. Maigraith threw her pack, now much lighter, over one shoulder, pulled on her boots and went outside. A three-quarter moon shone down through thick mist. She slid the stone door closed, her fingers danced on it for a moment, then she turned and headed down the path toward Shazmak, all alone.

  35

  My Enemy My Friend

  Maigraith felt a tense anticipation. She
had finally cast off the shackles of her old life—the one Faelamor had molded for her. The future was unknown, but whatever awaited her in Shazmak the choice was her own.

  And what did await her there, she wondered as she picked her way down the track in the darkness. A sliver of moonlight illuminated the path every now and then, but the mist made everything surreal. She could hardly tell the difference between cliff wall on her right and precipice to her left, and between the snow and the ice-covered stone beneath her feet.

  Pressing on too quickly, thinking about what lay ahead, Maigraith trod on a slick patch and her boots skidded. She fell against the rock face, hurting her injured shoulder. As she picked herself up, Maigraith realized that her heart was going like a battering ram. The danger here was real, and more immediate than Shazmak. She could just as easily have gone over the edge.

  Folding her coat under her, Maigraith sat down with her back to the cliff. Her shoulder throbbed. The river far below, tributary to the Garr, rustled in its bed. The wind sighed through frost-carved pinnacles of stone above her. Her thoughts kept coming back to Rulke, to the memory of him that hot night in Thurkad when his half-embodied sending had appeared in the storm. He had been magnificent and terrible, and when he lifted her up his fingers had been burning hot. And yet, he had seemed vulnerable too.

  First Yggur, and now Rulke, she mused. Why am I drawn to powerful, ruthless men with a vulnerable side? Is it because I am so incomplete in myself? Yggur cared for me, and still does, but he doesn’t care about anyone else. He’s full of anger and fear, and he would do anything to get what he wants. Look what he did to Meldorin with his warring, and to the Second Army. And, she reflected, he kept from me the secret of my true heritage. He knew it all along, or guessed it, even back in Fiz Gorgo. I remember him saying, as clear as day, Tell me where I can find Faelamor, and why she wants the Mirror, and I will tell you who your parents were, what happened to them, and why it brought such shame upon the Faellem.