The Portal and the Veil

by Ted Sanders

  Little prickles of horror skittered across Joshua’s skin. “You severed her,” he said.

  “While her legs were in the ground,” said Brian.

  Joshua remembered the Mordin on top of the car earlier in the evening, how Chloe had gone thin and put a crowbar into its leg. He remembered the scream. You couldn’t put two things in the same place at the same time. Bad things happened when you did.

  Isabel nodded. “I severed her. Just for an instant.”

  “But her legs would have been ruined,” said Brian.

  “She should have lost them,” Isabel agreed. “But you’ve seen Chloe. She’s a Paragon.”

  Brian’s eyebrows shot up skeptically.

  “What’s a Paragon?” asked Joshua. It sounded like a shape.

  “It’s just a story,” said Brian, and Isabel huffed and rolled her eyes. “But if you believe the story, each instrument—over its entire lifetime of perhaps hundreds of years—will only encounter one true Paragon. The one Keeper who can fully master all of its powers. The perfect Tan’ji.”

  “And that’s Chloe,” said Isabel. She sounded proud. “It’s not just a story. I know it now like I knew it then. When she got herself out of the ground that day, her legs were broken. Shattered. But she shouldn’t have been able to get them out at all. Only a Paragon could have done that.”

  Joshua looked down at the Laithe, at soft rings of clouds drifting over the Indian Ocean. Could he be a Paragon? Probably not, he decided. After all, he wasn’t totally sure—not totally—that he was even supposed to be the Keeper of the Laithe. The thought filled him with an anger he had never felt before. All this talk about helping Isabel, and taking Brian out of the Warren. Isabel was using him, and Brian too. But no sooner had the rage flared up than it was gone again, washed away by a flood of confusion and uncertainty, of hope and desperation. He clutched the Laithe to his chest.

  “So your daughter, the Paragon,” said Brian. “Did you ever tell her it was your fault, the thing that happened with her legs?”

  Isabel stiffened. “Not then, no,” she admitted. “But now I have.”

  “Just the other day, you mean. Seven years after it happened.”

  “Yes. And you don’t need to remind me that I didn’t give up Miradel back then, either, even though I was a danger to Chloe. I left my family instead. That should tell you something about me and my harp.”

  “It does,” Brian said softly. “It really does.”

  “I’m devoted to Miradel. She belongs to me, and I can’t give her up, just like you can’t give up Tunraden. But I want my family back.”

  “And you expect me to fix it all,” said Brian.

  “You fixed April,” Isabel said. “And you made Meister’s vest, didn’t you? I can tell.”

  Brian didn’t deny it. Joshua was confused—the red vest was Tan’ji? And Brian had made it?

  Isabel held Miradel in her hand and pushed it toward Brian. The green light inside seemed to swirl and sparkle. “If you can turn a vest into a Tan’ji, why not a harp?”

  Brian still didn’t answer. His glasses shone emerald, two copies of Miradel reflected across the lenses. And although it seemed to Joshua that every emotion was written on the older boy’s face, fear didn’t seem to be one of them anymore. And there was still that strange little fire in his eyes.

  “Do to Miradel what you did to the vest,” said Isabel. “Help me. Help my family. Fix me, and I’ll become whole again, in all the ways. And you will have done what no Maker has ever done before.”

  Brian stood there, thinking. Joshua couldn’t imagine what he himself would do, if he was Brian. Isabel was sad, and needed help. But Isabel was also bad, Joshua knew that—or at least, he knew Isabel did bad things. He tried to convince himself that the bad came out of the sad. He didn’t understand quite how that worked, or if it was true. He only understood that it might be true.

  Judging by the way he was looking at Isabel now, Brian seemed to be thinking the same sorts of things. He looked sorry for her, but sort of disgusted by her too, like the way a person might look at a badly injured animal.

  After a long time Brian said, “Twenty-four hours. That’s how long I’ll give you. If I can’t do it in one day, you bring me back and you give it all up.”

  Isabel bent her neck, pressing her forehead briefly against Miradel. She looked up at Brian, beaming. “One day,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “And you have to take me someplace safe. Someplace with a leestone. If I use Tunraden for more than a few seconds without a leestone, it’ll be like a dinner bell as big as a church for miles around. You have to protect me.”

  “I will. I have a plan.” She glanced at Joshua.

  “Okay,” Brian said. “We’re headed out, then.” He stuck his fingers under his glasses and rubbed his eyes, then looked down at his own ghostly pale arms. “I don’t suppose anyone has any sunscreen.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Departure

  “BUT HOW WILL WE GET OUT OF THE WARREN?” JOSHUA ASKED, looking first to Isabel, and then to Brian. “You said it was impossible.”

  Brian pushed his glasses up onto his nose. “Yeah, well . . . that’s not really a great word.” He looked down at his feet, like he had something more to say but was afraid to say it.

  Isabel laid a hand on Joshua’s shoulder. “We need your help, Keeper.”

  Keeper. The word washed over him, but it didn’t feel right. Not yet.

  Isabel went on. “I need you to find something with the Laithe. Have you ever been to St. Louis? Anywhere around there?”

  “St. Louis?” Brian said, sounding confused. But then he seemed to understand. He actually laughed. “You’re thinking of Ka’hoka, aren’t you? That’s your plan? You won’t be welcome there.”

  “There are sanctuaries there,” Isabel said to Brian. “Lots of them. And most of them are deserted. We could find a safe place with a powerful leestone.”

  “What’s Ka’hoka?” Joshua asked.

  “You might know it as Cahokia,” said Brian. “Cahokia Mounds.”

  Joshua did know that name. It was in western Illinois, near St. Louis, five miles east of the Mississippi River. There were mounds there, huge grassy ones. He didn’t think anyone lived there. But he only knew where the mounds were, not what they were for. “I know where that is, but I’ve never been there.”

  “That’s okay, dear.” Isabel put on a smile he knew was fake. He could tell she was disappointed. “We’ll just try it anyway—”

  “Um, no,” Brian said. “I’m not taking Tunraden anywhere near Ka’hoka.”

  Joshua closed his eyes. So much going on, and all of it so confusing. What was Ka’hoka, and why didn’t Brian want to go there? And what did Joshua have to do with getting there? He didn’t understand what kind of help he could be, or what Isabel wanted from him. He listened as the others argued briefly. Brian was saying Joshua couldn’t go anywhere he’d never been, which sounded like a riddle, and then he heard Isabel say, “Joshua, have you ever been to a cloister?”

  He opened his eyes. “Just the one by April’s house. By the barn. You were there too.” He wasn’t even sure it technically was a cloister. The leestone was still there, sort of, and parts of the falkrete circle, but the wall that had surrounded it was long gone.

  Isabel grimaced, apparently thinking the same thing. “That cloister has no walls. And we probably shouldn’t go there right now anyway, because . . .”

  Brian laughed. “Because you sent the bad guys there. Irony.”

  “I know where all the other cloisters are, though,” Joshua said. “I saw the map.”

  Isabel turned and grabbed his shoulders, her eyes alight. “And have you been close to any of them? Besides the cloisters near the Warren, I mean?”

  “Yes,” Joshua said instantly. The map was as clear as a window in his mind. “I know a place.”

  “Where?”

  “It doesn’t matter where,” Brian interrupted. “He’s the Keeper of the Lai
the. Let him choose.”

  Isabel nodded. “Go, then,” she said thickly. “Find it, quickly.”

  Bewildered, Joshua obeyed. Holding the meridian in one hand and looking down at the globe within it, he spun the Laithe, finding North America. He centered his view on the tip of Lake Michigan, where Chicago was, and began sliding the rabbit. Canada and Mexico slid off the map to the north and the south. The Atlantic and the Pacific melted away to the east and the west. The Great Lakes grew huge, blue, and shining. One by one they slid over the northeast horizon until only Lake Michigan remained. As the rabbit moved, the fat end of the lake, where Chicago was, got fatter.

  Chicago, and all the suburbs, looked like the crater of an asteroid, or like something had exploded, with roads leading out in all directions like flying debris. But even so, how different the Midwest was from Madagascar. Beneath the spray of roads and rivers leading from the city, everything was made of squares, from downtown on out to the green farmland outside the city. Squares inside squares, like a screen door. So tidy, like a machine.

  The journey they’d taken earlier that week was printed on Joshua’s mind like a map. The walk from April’s house, the car ride to Skokie Lagoons, the canoe trip down the river. He shifted the Laithe and slid the rabbit until the entire trip filled the hemisphere from top to bottom. He spotted the North Branch of the Chicago River—a thread of silver inside a finger of green that stretched into the city.

  He zeroed in on a thick patch of green along the river, inside the gray patchwork of Chicago. There was a park area nestled between Interstates 90 and 94. A golf course. He aimed northeast of there, where the river made a big U-turn, like a thumb. He came in closer. A parking lot. A swimming pool.

  The rabbit was three-fourths of the way around the meridian now, headed for the top, just about the spot where things had gone wrong in Madagascar. But he tried to focus on his memories of this place, a little peninsula where the river swung from northward to southward.

  Joshua was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he didn’t realize his fingers were still pushing the rabbit. It was nearing the top now, and he could still see. He was doing it. The view through the Laithe was so close that he could see sticks floating in the water. The treetops were just below him. He saw a fuzzy, disgusting nest of bagworms in the branches of one.

  Still he pushed the rabbit, and soon he was actually descending through the canopy of a maple tree. Pointed leaves, one after another, grew close enough to count their veins, filling the hemisphere before vanishing as he passed on by. Closer, and closer. He emerged from the green, just twenty feet off the ground now. And then he laughed—whether from happiness or just amazement, he couldn’t say—as he saw a glint of silver up against the base of a tree. A canoe, bent and battered. He watched as it slid over the horizon.

  Suddenly the rabbit came to a halt. It perched at the top of the meridian, just where it had started, but it had changed. It sat upright, ears alert, eyes open. They were blue. Somehow its legs had unfolded too. It looked like it was running now, which was strange because it couldn’t move any farther. Joshua laughed again.

  “I’m here,” he said, and then shook his head. “There, I mean—I’m there.” He looked up. He felt dizzy. He swayed, staggering, but Isabel steadied him.

  She beamed at him. “That’s good. That’s very good,” she said. “But we’re not done yet. There’s one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “Just now you said, ‘I’m there.’ But you’re not there, are you? You’re here. And do you know the way from here to there? The shortest way?”

  “As the crow flies,” he said. He’d learned that from April.

  “No,” said Isabel. “As the rabbit runs. We can get there from here. From right here. Right now. You just have to open the way.”

  As the rabbit runs. The words tickled across Joshua’s heart, up into his brain.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Isabel reached out for the Laithe. Joshua yanked it away. “No,” he said, surprised by the strength in his own voice. “Tell me.”

  She nodded. “Tear the meridian loose. Tear through space and time.”

  And to his great surprise, even though he wasn’t totally sure what those words even meant, Joshua didn’t hesitate. He grabbed the meridian with one hand, cradling the globe in the other, and he pulled. Hard.

  The meridian came loose from the globe as easily as a hat from a head. The globe instantly lit up, turning into a yellow sphere of light like the sun. Only this sun was cool to the touch. Joshua squinted, blinded.

  “Whoa!” cried Brian.

  Joshua looked down at the meridian in his other hand. There was something strange about the metal ring now. He held it up and examined it closer. And when he looked through the ring by the light of the tiny, floating sun, he saw a tumble of colors and unrecognizable shapes, a rush of movement, like it was speeding through a tunnel.

  Somehow—though no one told him to—Joshua knew he should let the meridian go. He knew this was the way. He reached out and . . . placed the meridian into the air. That’s what it felt like, placing it. When he let go, the ring hung there, motionless in the air like a little round mirror on a wall, with the rabbit perched at the very top and the hypnotizing tunnel of shapes still zooming within.

  “Amazing,” said Brian. “But is it supposed to look like that? And it’s noisy, too.”

  Joshua frowned. He didn’t hear anything.

  Isabel waved Brian off impatiently. “Spin it, Joshua.”

  Joshua didn’t move. The tunnel of shapes danced.

  “Spin the ring,” Isabel said. “Let the rabbit run now.”

  Joshua gripped the edge of the meridian and yanked it. It was a clumsy, bad spin, but the golden rabbit at the top of the hanging ring began to run in place. The meridian rotated beneath it, and as it rotated, the ring began to grow. From six inches wide, it grew to a foot. The flickering images inside seemed to slow down just a tiny bit.

  But no sooner had the meridian started growing than it stopped. The rabbit rocked to a halt atop it.

  “Again,” said Isabel. “Faster.”

  “He shouldn’t have to do it this way,” Brian mumbled.

  “How should I do it, then?” said Joshua. But Brian only shook his head.

  “Spin it again,” Isabel said.

  Again Joshua grabbed the meridian and spun it. The rabbit ran. The circle rotated and grew beneath it, and the tumbling tunnel of movement inside the circle slowed a little bit more. The ring grew to three feet wide, and the rabbit stopped running again. Joshua kept spinning. The circle grew wider and wider. The rabbit ran, rising into the air as the circle grew. The images inside the circle got slower and slower. Joshua started to catch glimpses of shapes that had names—a tree, a car, buildings. Or so he thought.

  At last he gave the meridian the hardest spin he could. At the very top, the rabbit’s golden legs were a blur. The ring grew wide open, eight feet wide at least, and the view inside started to drift into focus. The spinning meridian came to a halt with a deep thump that made Joshua’s chest vibrate. Atop it, the rabbit was frozen, seated now, but ears still alert. It seemed to stare at Joshua with its shining blue eyes.

  And through the wide-open ring . . .

  The forest. The river. Roots and dirt.

  The image flickered a bit, but it was definitely there.

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Brian said, staring, “but . . . I can’t believe it.”

  Still holding the shining Laithe in his left hand, Joshua reached out with his right. He reached through the meridian. For some reason, he thought it might feel like reaching into water, but instead it felt like very faint static shocks, a ring of prickling surprise around his flesh, and on the other side, the air was wet and warm with summer, so unlike the cool air of the Warren. His hand was there. There, and not here.

  Brian stepped up to the gateway, staring at the forest and the river. He stuck a hand through, too, and laughed happi
ly. “Warm,” he said dreamily. “Summer.”

  Joshua felt like he was in a dream. Or maybe like he was finally awake from a dream that had lasted his entire life until now. Maybe this was real, the most real thing he’d ever done. “But what did I do?” he whispered.

  “You opened a door,” said Isabel. “A portal. That’s what the Laithe does.”

  Joshua stared. He stuck his hand through the portal again. He wiggled his fingers. What did it look like from the other side? Just his hand, hanging in midair?

  “Let’s go,” said Isabel. “Joshua, you’ll need to come last. The portal is only open on one side—whichever side the Laithe is on.” She nodded at the golden sphere in Joshua’s hand and then touched Brian on the shoulder. “Keeper?”

  “Right.” Brian tore himself away from the flickering portal. He went to Tunraden, cracking his knuckles. And then he dipped his hands right into the surface of the big, oval stone.

  As he stuck his hands through the engraved circles, the circles lit up, glowing as golden as the Laithe itself. With his hands buried to the wrists in the stone, Brian lifted Tunraden off the pedestal easily.

  “You’re strong,” Joshua said.

  “Gee, thanks,” said Brian, raising his eyebrows at his own pale, scrawny arms. “But don’t be fooled. Tunraden weighs over a hundred pounds. When I ask her to, she mostly lifts herself; I only steer.”

  “You look like a prisoner,” Isabel remarked. And he did. He was handcuffed by the Loomdaughter, his hands still buried deep inside the stone.

  “People have been saying that a lot lately,” Brian said. He glanced at the dark forest through the hanging portal. “Maybe it’s time for a change.”

  Isabel tipped her head way back suddenly, like she was trying to look through the roof of the chamber into the Great Burrow above. She frowned and said, “We need to hurry. Brian, you go first. I’ll be right behind.”

  Brian took a deep breath. “I feel like I might regret this, but hey—at least it won’t be boring, right?” And then he stepped into the portal.