As his horse drank thirstily from a stream at the side of the road, Aruendiel wondered whether someone was using an observation spell on him. Could Nansis have been fool enough to share the rediscovered Blueskin spell with another magician? Remounting, Aruendiel passed a quarter of an hour working out a counterhex in his head, and then tried it out, but the uneasy feeling that he was not alone remained. Perhaps, he thought with a sense of cool anticipation, the wait for his next battle would not be as long as he had expected.
Suddenly there came to mind an old tale—people used to tell it when he was younger, did they still?—about the young man who went to look for Death. Aruendiel had heard different versions. Sometimes the young man was seeking out Death to beg a reprieve for his sick father; sometimes he wanted to challenge Death to a duel; sometimes he was simply a curious fool. Whatever his motive, he arrived at Death’s domain and made his way to Death’s magnificent ivory palace—built of the teeth of all the humans and animals who had ever lived and died—only to find the halls deserted. Eventually the young man gave up his search and returned home, and his family, who had given him up for lost, rejoiced and threw a feast to celebrate.
In the middle of the festivities the young man, having drunk his fill, went out to relieve himself in the yard. But his family had dug a new latrine in his absence, and in the darkness, befuddled, he fell into the hole and drowned.
All of the stories went into some detail about the vile soup in which the young man perished. The point of the tale was that the young man was punished for his presumption. To pay a call on Death—one still heard that expression sometimes—was to be naive or arrogant or both.
The fact remained, Aruendiel thought grimly, that the young man succeeded in his quest.
He was riding through a belt of dry, low hills, lightly forested. By now he was only about a day’s ride from the coast, and the new spring was further advanced here than where he had come from. A few of the trees were misted with sprays of green. The sun shining through naked branches was so strong that Aruendiel unfastened the front of his cloak and began to think of removing it altogether.
Squinting up into the light, Aruendiel became aware of an anomaly that he had not noticed before, something that might explain his intuition that all was not right. He stopped his horse and dismounted. There was a sort of dullness in the air; he probed it tentatively with a finger. Yes, the place felt rough and thin. Not an outright breach in the wall of the world, but a weakness.
Strange to find this, just a few weeks after he had dispatched Nora through a gap that led to her world. Was there to be a glut of these things?
He tested the spot again. His fingers could press deep, but he could find no edge. Micher Samle believed that such thin, bruised places in the world’s skin were purely transient, and that they turned into holes, gateways into other worlds, only in those rare cases when they happened to align with a worn spot in another world’s hide.
There was little chance that this oddity connected to another world. Within a short time—hours or days—it would likely disappear.
Detachedly, he told himself: there is nothing on the other side of this crack in the wall of the world. Nothing. He could not use this opening as a doorway to some mad, misguided quest across worlds to recover a woman who had never been his in the first place. If he did go through it, the emptiness on the other side would no doubt kill him. Tear him to pieces, quickly or slowly. It is not easy to kill a magician, but this would be one way to do it.
No, Aruendiel thought. No, I will not do this. But he could not quite bring himself to get back on Applenose and ride away.
For a moment he stood there, tight-lipped, considering. Then he began to work a spell. It was a variation of magic designed to rip a mountain to pieces. Kemis the Stout was the first on record to use it, and the mountain he destroyed in pursuit of the Larger Goblin of Hnos has been a gravel plain ever since. To this Aruendiel added a utilitarian door-unlocking spell and, for good measure, a spell to let large objects pass through small openings.
An experiment, he told himself, to see if he could blast a hole in the world.
The air groaned, a wild noise that echoed in the trees and earth around him. Applenose whinnied, but Aruendiel ignored the horse. He was watching his outstretched hand shudder as though seized by palsy.
Then something gave way. A broken edge beneath his fingers. He lost sensation in his hand and forearm, and they disappeared from view, gone to a place where his eye could not follow them.
He felt a strained sense of triumph. It could be done. Whatever he was doing. He looked at the trembling horse and thought: at least I should unsaddle Applenose and make sure the poor beast can fend for himself, before I finish this.
He began to withdraw his hand from the hole. There was more resistance than he expected. It felt, in fact, as though his fingers had been caught in something. With an effort, and some apprehension, he jerked his hand back.
Here was the explanation, of a sort: another hand grasping tight to his own. Smaller, lightly tanned. A woman’s hand.
Instinctively, he tugged on the hand, harder, and he repeated the spell for letting objects pass through openings smaller than they were.
An arm emerged from the air, a swirl of brown hair. Nora blinking up at him. Impossible. Another heave, and she came sideways through the gap, staggering against him.
Aruendiel stared down at her, not daring to let go of her hand, which was ice-cold. She looked wan, clammy. Her hair was shorter, falling to her chin like a boy’s. But it was certainly Nora. There was a leather bag slung over her other shoulder and a rope tied around her waist, leading back into the place she had come out of.
Dropping Applenose’s reins, Aruendiel reeled in the rope, length after length coiling to the ground, until the end came into view, tied to some metal implement, bolted to a broken shard of wood, that he did not immediately recognize. He turned it over in his hand.
“It’s Micher Samle’s doorknob,” Nora croaked.
Chapter 7
After she had thrown up behind a tree and taken some shaky steps on her numb legs, Nora began to feel better. Her lungs and heart and muscles and joints still worked, apparently. She had the correct number of arms and legs and fingers. She sat down on a rock to feel her toes through the leather of her boot, and they all seemed to be accounted for.
“It is a shock to the system, having a body again,” she observed to Aruendiel, who was draping his cloak over her shoulders. He seemed so grave that she smiled to let him know that she had made a joke.
She kept smiling at him as he squatted beside her. Aruendiel was almost exactly as she remembered, perhaps thinner and grimmer than usual. She recognized the tunic he was wearing, black that was fading to a shadowy greenish tinge. There was a streak of white in his dark hair—no, that was a white ribbon, loosely braided with a lock of his hair.
“I thought I would never see you again,” she said. “Or anything, for that matter.”
Nora was almost whispering; Aruendiel could hardly hear her. She spread her hand on the stone that she sat upon as though reassuring herself of its solidity. “I can’t even tell you what it was like. It was so empty, that place. It erased me,” she said.
Her words filled him with a sense of oppression. “How long were you there?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Hours, days? How did you know to look for me?”
“I noticed something odd in the air. Open your mouth,” Aruendiel said, his brow furrowing. He looked into her nose and into her ear, the usual quick tests for enchantments, but she thought there was something hesitant, almost perfunctory about his movements, as though he were not quite sure what he was looking for.
“Here,” he said when he had finished. “You should drink something.” He conjured up a wooden cup and thrust it into her hand. “Some wine—no, that will be too strong.” The red liquid in the cup turned
clear. “Drink some water.”
Not until she began to drink did Nora realize how thirsty she was. She emptied the cup gratefully. As Aruendiel began to refill it, she said: “Actually, I would like something stronger, too. Please.” He obliged. The wine sent a faint glow down her throat and through her newly material body. “Thank you,” she said with a sigh.
Aruendiel found it reassuring to watch Nora drink, to watch the muscles in her upper neck contract smoothly, to hear her clear her throat slightly as a small, hidden bubble of air fought its way back to her lips. She was actually here. He was not dreaming. She handed the cup back to him, and her fingers brushed his. They were warmer—that corpselike chill was gone. The wine must be doing some good. He decided to summon a southern breeze for good measure.
Doing the magic had the advantage of steadying his nerves further. Not as much as he would have liked. “You have met my friend Micher Samle?” he asked, choosing at random one of the dozen questions that had occurred to him.
“Yes!” Nora said, her face lighting up. Her voice had regained more force. “And it turns out that I knew him all along. Or it might be more accurate to say that I knew of him. He’s this rather strange man who hangs around the university—most people think he’s a little mad.” She decided she should not mention the Farmer Dahmer nickname, too hard to explain. “But he was the one who sent me to your world the first time, more or less.”
She told him how she had met Micher Samle in the street and deduced from his accent and other clues who he must be. “You once told me that Micher Samle liked to transform into a mouse. And then I remembered that mouse in my kitchen, the day before I came to this world the first time. I set him free, and he apparently gave me three wishes, although he wasn’t considerate enough to explain what he was doing. And one of my wishes was for my life to be different, and, well, it worked.”
Nora looked at Aruendiel a little shyly as she said this. He had not smiled once during the entire time they had been talking. She had expected—well, she was not sure what she had expected, but certainly some signs of enthusiasm, relief, affection. Now she uneasily remembered that last day at Luklren’s castle: how they’d argued, how distant Aruendiel had been on the sleigh ride, how he had practically bundled her through the hole to her own world as she was still trying to find the words to say goodbye. Not to mention that he had also tried to marry her off to another man.
Back in her own world, everything had seemed so clear. From a distance, she could look back and pick out the traces of his love as easily as finding stars in the sky. Now she wondered if, in discovering how much she needed him, she had simply assumed that his need for her was just as powerful. Quite possibly her reappearance had plunged Aruendiel into deep gloom—the return of a troublesome burden.
But she had seen Aruendiel’s face when she stepped back into the world. And she had felt how tightly, urgently he gripped her hand. Those things could not be entirely discounted.
“Where are we?” Nora said aloud, looking closely at her surroundings for the first time. The scrubby slope where they sat was broken with long, bluish rocks like the backs of whales. A few massive oaks reared up out of the low brush, too far apart to count as forest. A gold haze burned in the undergrowth here and there, the first blooms of spring. “Do I know this place? It doesn’t look familiar.”
“We are—” There was unexpected pleasure in being able to hear Nora say where are we, because it meant that he and she were in the same place. “We are some four dozen karistises west of Pelagnia’s borders, about two days’ ride from the coast. About a week’s ride from the Uland,” he added, as Nora worked out their position on her still-vague mental map of this world.
“That’s to the south,” she said with a trace of uncertainty. “I thought Lord Luklren’s castle was northeast of the Uland.”
He perceived that she thought he was still making his way home from the Faitoren campaign. “I have already been home to the Uland,” he said. “This is a new journey that I have undertaken.”
“Where are you going?”
It took him a half second to recollect his destination. “To Hajgog, on the southern continent.” He fought down a slight feeling of furtiveness. “I want to consult a scroll in the temple library. A book dealing with the Kavareen.”
“The Kavareen! You’re going to rescue Hirizjahkinis!”
“I intend to try.”
“I’m so glad!” Nora said. “That is wonderful news. I thought you might do something like that—and I’m going with you.”
She knew that Aruendiel would say no automatically, but as he shook his head, he was not frowning as deeply as he might have been. He began to say all the things she expected about how dangerous it would be. Nora pointed out that the last time Aruendiel had left her behind in supposed safety, she had been kidnapped and almost murdered—although she’d gotten out of that tangle handily enough, hadn’t she?
“And if you’re going to say it’s improper for me to travel with you,” Nora added, thinking that she might as well head off any possible objection, “that’s not a consideration. Not at all. You know as well as I do that I don’t really have any reputation to speak of, and even if I did, I’d ruin it in a second to save Hirizjahkinis. I don’t know what it must be like for her inside the Kavareen, but if it’s anything like that hideous nowhere I just got out of, we can’t leave her there. We can’t.”
“No, we cannot,” he agreed somberly.
He rose and looked around. In all this time, he had given no thought to the horse. Happily, it was grazing near the stream at the foot of the hill. He went over to the animal with careful steps, clucking under his breath, and managed to catch the reins even as Applenose tried to sidle away. Nora watched him from a distance, thinking that perhaps—unbelievably—she had convinced him to let her accompany him on this new quest. She would have to learn to ride better. And learn more magic. She touched the stone she sat on again, then smoothed her hand across her thigh. Everything still felt real.
The horse securely tied up, Aruendiel climbed back up the slope with long strides. “Nora,” he said, “how is it that you have come back here?”
“Micher Samle thought I could come back through the same hole—probably—so I decided to try.”
“Micher Samle was mistaken.”
“Yes, I realized that. Very quickly.” Nora looked down, brushing a strand of hair out of her eyes.
Aruendiel could not make up his mind about her hair being chopped off like that. No grown woman cut her hair; it made Nora look absurdly young and coltish, and yet no one would ever mistake her for a child. And the outlandishly short foreign skirt she wore—far shorter even than the skirts women wore in his youth. Was everything in Nora’s world so abbreviated? He kept seeing other fine differences the more he looked at her. During her absence Nora seemed to have been newly purified, remade out of more pristine, select materials. Her skin and hair fairly shimmered, they were so clean, as though she had bathed every day for a month. Even her fingernails had taken on a high gleam, subtly pink, like tiny shells. So this was her chosen appearance, Nora as she went about her life in her own world. The transformation was fascinating, distracting; it showed how far she had gone away from him. And yet here she was, back again. By her own will, she said.
There was a change in her gaze, he thought. Her brown eyes looked into his with the same directness he remembered, but he saw a new shadow in them, the trace of suffering. Perhaps it was the lingering chill of the emptiness between worlds.
“It was miserably careless, very poor practice, of Micher Samle to let you go through the gate,” Aruendiel said. “I never knew him to be so slipshod in the past.”
“He told me it was risky. I insisted.”
“Then you should have known better. Traveling between worlds is dangerous magic in the best of circumstances.”
“It was what I wanted.”
&nbs
p; “Nora, why—”
A panicked whinny from the horse cut across Aruendiel’s words. Both he and Nora turned. Applenose was rearing, yanking at his tether. The horse whinnied again.
A snake was Aruendiel’s first thought. This southern country was full of them. Then he saw that a clump of grass near the horse’s front hooves was unusually pale in color, almost papery. As he watched, the clump seemed to ripple, like a reflection in water, and then it disappeared. What was left had no shape or color—or, at least, his gaze could not hold on to it.
“It’s the same hole, isn’t it?” Nora said with a sharp intake of breath. “It ate that patch of grass. It almost ate Applenose.”
“I think,” said Aruendiel, “that it’s time to close this door, and to lock it.”
He started down the slope. Nora kept pace with him. He turned to tell her to keep back, to stay a safe distance away, but she shook her head impatiently.
“Let me try,” she said. “Micher Samle told me how.” What must be done was clearer now than it had been in Micher Samle’s living room. The door was a ragged wound in the smooth, bright flesh of the world, and all she had to do to heal it was pull the edges together.
She thought there was a gleam of satisfaction in Aruendiel’s hard glance. “Together, then. Which spell do you prefer?”
“I think Horn Marn’s mending spell will work,” she said promptly. “The second variation.”
“What about the Ytrevik binding spell?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
Another spell she’d learned for mending pots. She shook her head. “That would work, but the Marn is simpler and stronger. Honestly, I don’t think it has to be that complicated. This hole is unnatural—it wants to close, you can tell.”
“Very well,” said Aruendiel briskly, and they began to work the spell, Nora counting off the steps under her breath. She pulled magic from the stream at the bottom of the hill and from a wood fire in someone’s hut nearby, and she felt Aruendiel calling magic out of trees and stones. The air sang.
How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic Page 8