The Portal and the Veil

by Ted Sanders

  “No,” Brian agreed, and then he called out, his voice thin and high. “Hello?”

  Joshua kept listening. He was a good listener. And the sound he heard told him that whatever was coming now wasn’t walking on two legs. Was it an animal? It sounded large. Maybe a deer? If only April was with them. With the Ravenvine, she would have known right away.

  And then, though it might have been a stupid thing to do, Joshua stood up and started walking toward the sound. He was a Keeper now, even if he didn’t know yet what he was doing. Maybe one day he would be one of the Wardens, if they forgave him. And Wardens were brave. He was going to be brave. He would find out what was out there. If it was a deer, it would just run away.

  He marched past Brian and Isabel, holding the Laithe by his side.

  “What are you doing?” Isabel whispered.

  “I’m going to see. You said it wasn’t a Riven.”

  Isabel hesitated, then followed him. Joshua stomped through the tall grass. A pale shape moved in the darkness just ahead. Joshua heard a faint jingle. He stopped.

  The creature came closer, and closer still. It stepped right up to him, and Joshua laughed.

  A dog. A big, yellow dog. It was limping, but panting at Joshua in a friendly way.

  Behind him, Isabel let out a little noise of surprise. “I think that’s April’s dog.”

  April’s dog! Joshua bent and took the dog’s jowls in his hands. The dog licked Joshua’s face happily. He had never met April’s dog, but he remembered his name—April had told him stories, one night in the Great Burrow when she was feeling sad for home.

  “Baron?” Joshua said. The dog licked him more furiously, wagging his tail. “First Baron, it’s you. I’m Joshua. I’m April’s friend.”

  Isabel came closer, bending to pet the dog. She leaned in close, sniffing. “He smells like brimstone.”

  Now Joshua smelled it too. “He’s limping. He was in a fight with the Riven.”

  Behind them in the darkness, Brian called out. “I don’t hear any screaming. I guess everyone’s okay? Hello?”

  “Come on, Baron,” Joshua said. “Come.” He turned and headed back toward Brian. Baron followed, Isabel just behind.

  When the dog saw Brian, he walked right over to him, sniffing his face. Brian leaned way back. “I feel like I remember I don’t like dogs,” he said.

  “He won’t hurt you,” said Joshua. “He’s April’s dog. Tell him you’re her friend.”

  “Hello, April’s dog.” Brian waved nervously. “I am April’s friend.”

  “I’m glad he’s here,” said Isabel. “He can help keep watch while Brian gets to work.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Brian said as he hauled Tunraden over to the leestone. He set the Loomdaughter down beside it and sat cross-legged in the grass. Baron, who had maybe decided Brian was a friend, came over and lay down heavily next to him.

  “I’ll need the harp,” he said to Isabel. When Isabel didn’t move, he spread his arms. “I won’t touch it. Not yet. Just put it in the grass here.”

  Reluctantly, Isabel slipped the cord from around her neck and put Miradel down in the grass, on the other side of Tunraden from Brian. She stepped back, but Brian stopped her. “You too,” he said. “Sit here.”

  Isabel did as she was told. Brian leaned in deep over the harp, his nose almost touching it. He looked back and forth between it and Isabel several times.

  “I have some ideas,” he said, sitting up. “But I like to feel my way through things before I start. That way I’m not using Tunraden before I need to.” He smiled at them like he was sorry. “You might want to get comfortable, though. This will take some time.”

  “How long?” Isabel asked.

  “Long,” replied Brian, drawing out the word. “But when I start—if I can do it—it should go fast.” He hunched over, focused on the wicker harp. Twice he reached out, nearly touching it, but after a while—a long while—he just sat there motionless. Isabel sat motionless too, her mouth firm with worry and her eyes alight.

  Joshua sat down. Baron wandered over to him, and after a while Joshua lay back, using the dog as a pillow. Baron snuffled at his hair, but let him be. Joshua listened to his pattering heart, watching Brian and Isabel sit silent. He closed his eyes and felt the comfort of the Laithe, spinning and drifting in above him, under the stars. A world between worlds.

  Joshua woke to voices. To hot breath on his face. Stinky breath. Baron stood over him, panting. The Laithe was floating in midair by Joshua’s side, beautiful and blue. He sat up, groggy, and tipped his head to the sky. Still nighttime, but the stars were different. A thin crescent moon was just rising over the far-off trees to the east.

  “You awake?” Brian said. “I’m ready to try it now.” He was moving his fingers through the air, as if practicing. Isabel sat up in the grass, her red hair in a comical tangle. Apparently she’d fallen asleep too.

  “What time is it?” asked Joshua sleepily. “How long has it been?”

  “Hours,” said Brian. “I don’t know. I’m not Horace.”

  “Can you do it?” said Isabel.

  “I actually think I can. Maybe.”

  Isabel squeezed her eyes shut, her fists in her lap, her back as straight as a board.

  “Just to be safe, Joshua, you should move away,” said Brian. “You’re a Keeper now, and I don’t think you want to be near these flows.”

  Alarmed, Joshua got to his feet and hurried away. As he went, the Laithe followed him. He stopped, not turning around to see, but just sensing it. He knew right where it was. It was orbiting him slowly. It came around his front, and he saw it was tilted just like the real earth was tilted as it revolved around the sun.

  “Is this normal?” he said, watching it.

  “No,” said Brian. “But it’s pretty wicked. I wish Tunraden could do that. Now go.”

  Joshua kept on walking, another twenty feet, until Brian stopped him.

  “Okay, son,” said Brian, “that’s far enough.” He smiled goofily. “Get it? Son? Sun? Because . . . orbits . . .” He trailed off sadly, nodding at the floating Laithe. Joshua smiled politely. Puns weren’t funny. Most jokes weren’t funny.

  “I guess my humor works better underground,” Brian said with a shrug. “Isabel, you stay just where you are.”

  “What should I do?” she asked, her voice quivering.

  “Absolutely nothing. Don’t touch the harp, or draw on it, unless I ask you to. Okay?”

  She nodded eagerly, like a little girl.

  “Promise you won’t use it,” Brian insisted.

  “I promise.”

  “This might hurt,” he said. Joshua squinted his eyes almost shut, watching through slits, not sure he wanted to see. Brian practiced his gestures again, his fingers moving quickly through the air. He looked around nervously and turned to Isabel. “I feel like I’m about to get naked in public. You’re sure it’s safe?”

  “We’re alone,” said Isabel. She seemed to be trembling. “Do it.”

  “You might want to cover your eyes,” Brian said, but if he meant it as a warning, he didn’t give them any time to obey. He shoved his hands into Tunraden, just like he did when carrying her. But this time, instead of only the circles lighting up, the entire surface of the stone oval burst into golden brilliance. A column of light shot into the sky. Joshua covered his eyes. Isabel rocked back and nearly fell over in the tall grass.

  Brian started pulling out big, loopy strings of the golden stuff. It dripped from his hands like honey. His hands started to carve it into strange shapes, and the stuff—the Medium, it must be—seemed to obey him like an animal. Isabel gasped.

  Then, suddenly, Tunraden went black. Brian cried out. The golden strings turned to ash and dropped back into the surface of the Loomdaughter. Brian went stiff and collapsed sideways, his hands bent painfully, his eyes crushed closed.

  “Brian!” Joshua cried.

  A low cry of pain slid out from between Brian’s clenched teeth. T
he cords of his neck stood out like cables, stretched tight.

  Joshua ran forward. Isabel was still on the ground too, still looking dizzily at Tunraden. In the grass in front of her, Miradel was a swollen cloud of sparkling green light.

  Isabel had severed Brian.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Shadows across Time and Space

  MR. MEISTER SAT ON HORACE’S COUCH, AND SOMEHOW THE sight—his wild white hair, his gleaming red vest, his enormous spectacled eyes—was one of the most bizarre things Horace had ever seen. The Chief Taxonomer, here in Horace’s house on Horace’s blue couch, with Horace’s cat, Loki, perched in his lap, and Horace’s mother sitting beside him. The scene, in its own modest way, was even more unsettling than the sight of the Riven, the golem, the oublimort, the scythe-wings, every unbelievable thing Horace had encountered since becoming a Keeper. Simply put, every cell in Horace’s body seemed to scream that the man simply shouldn’t be here.

  But he was. He had to be.

  As for his mother, Horace still couldn’t gauge her surprise. She’d been startled when she answered the door—in her pajamas and a huge T-shirt that read I READ PAST MY BEDTIME—but hesitated only a tiny bit before inviting the old man in, with Horace following awkwardly, as if he didn’t even live here. She was plainly relieved to see Horace. The last time she’d seen him, hours before, Chloe had been dragging him out the door on yet another unexplained mission. His mother said nothing now, only tousled his shaggy hair with a bit of extra verve.

  His dad was at the door too, looking alarmed and almost comically ready for action. It was now 1:18 in the morning, after all. But his mother had simply said, “It’s okay, Matthew. This is an old friend. From before.” The way she stressed the word “before” made Horace wonder, not for the first time, just how much his father knew. Quite a bit, obviously. His father had gone back upstairs without comment, rims of worry crinkling his eyes.

  Now Horace and his mother and Mr. Meister sat in the living room eating bagel chips—bagel chips! Horace’s mother stared at Mr. Meister as he scratched Loki’s lifted chin. She seemed to be having as much difficulty absorbing the old man’s presence as Horace was.

  “Did Beck drive you,” she asked Mr. Meister, “or did you come by falkrete stone?”

  “Beck drove us. We’ve had enough falkrete stones for one night.”

  “Good old Beck. Any address anywhere.”

  Hearing his mom talk so casually about the Wardens’ secrets—secrets Horace himself had been keeping from his mother—wasn’t making any of this feel more real. “Yup,” he said lamely, trying to go with the flow. “Good old Beck.”

  His mother took a bagel chip but didn’t eat it. “So,” she said to Mr. Meister cheerfully, “this was not a moment I’d bothered to imagine. You coming here. Ever.”

  “Why should you?” replied Mr. Meister. “Overpreparation is a waste of energy. Better to be nimble in the face of the unexpected.”

  “Ah, so you’ve come to see how nimble I am. Is Horace in trouble?”

  “This instant? No, no more than usual. Considerably less, in fact, than in other recent instants.”

  His mother frowned, avoiding Horace’s eyes. She folded her legs beneath her and nibbled at her bagel chip. “Look, I don’t know if I seem very calm right now,” she told Mr. Meister, “but there’s a pretty big, confusing dance going on inside me, and you being here . . .” She crossed her eyes and spun her fingers in circles at her ears.

  “My presence is disorienting,” said Mr. Meister. “I understand.”

  “Disorienting to say the least. I’m trying to adapt.” She plucked at her pajama pants. “You sent a very powerful leestone home with Horace, the day of his Find. I appreciated that.” The leestone in question, a bulky sculpture of a raven atop a tortoise, had been sent home with Horace the same day he brought home the Fel’Daera. The statue, like leestones everywhere, protected the home from the attentions of the Riven.

  “It was not a courtesy,” Mr. Meister said with a wave of the hand. “It was a necessity.”

  “I was told it was a Mother’s Day gift.”

  “Was it not?”

  “You knew I would recognize it for what it was. You knew Horace was my son.”

  “Of course. And yes.”

  “Because you were still keeping tabs on me. After all these years.”

  “Yes.”

  “I never knew that. I assumed you might be, but never knew for sure.”

  “Good. Perhaps I haven’t lost the step I sometimes fear I have.”

  “Oh, I imagine whatever steps you’ve lost have been compensated for.” She glanced down at the polymath’s ring on Mr. Meister’s hand.

  Mr. Meister laughed. “That is the Wardens’ way, for better or for worse.”

  “Your way, you mean.” To Horace’s ears, these words sounded like they could have come out of his own mouth. For a moment, he glimpsed in his mother the young, rebellious teen she would have been all those years ago. His mother must have felt it too, because she shook herself off a bit and then said, “I wouldn’t be thrilled tonight to act the way I acted back then. Not because I regret it, but because I’m different now. You, though—you talk the same. A half cup of mystery, a teaspoon of aphorism, a dash of blunt truth once in a while. I used to dream about you talking.”

  The old man’s eyes twinkled. “My condolences.”

  “What’s aphorism?” asked Horace.

  His mother said, “An aphorism is an apparent wisdom, wrapped up in a pretty package of words.”

  Mr. Meister laughed out loud, startling Loki to the floor. “Marvelous,” he said. “Just so. And you say you’re different now, Jessica, but it seems the best of you remains. And you still have your talents. You still have your harp.”

  “Of course. You heard that Isabel found it earlier, I’m sure. That she was messing with that spent raven’s eye. Is that why you’re here now?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she do? Is everyone okay?”

  Horace nodded yes, but his mother didn’t seem to be paying any attention to him.

  “Was Isabel turned?” she asked the old man. “Is she working for the Riven?”

  “I do not believe so,” said Mr. Meister.

  “I was stupid to let her come here.”

  “I imagine it was hard to resist the opportunity. Isabel’s return was a shock—to Chloe most of all, no doubt. Yet not even Chloe can claim the connection to Isabel that you can, Jess.”

  A trembling silence fell. Into it, the soft wet sounds of Loki washing his face crept like tiny waves coming ashore. Hands in her lap, Horace’s mother rubbed the knuckles of one hand against the nails of the other.

  Mr. Meister scooted toward her gracefully, the oraculum glinting in the lamplight. He laid a knobby hand on her knee, his voice suddenly gentle. “Long ago, difficult decisions were made. Decisions in which neither you nor Isabel had a say. Do you wish me to apologize?”

  Horace held his breath. His mother seemed to hold hers, too. Whatever else had happened all those years ago when his mother worked as a Tuner for the Wardens, an apology—if it was going to come—would be for one thing and one thing only.

  The kaitan.

  Only yesterday, Horace’s mother had told him the terrible story of how she had become a Tuner. When she was Horace’s age, and Isabel was younger still, the two of them, separately, had been drawn to a warehouse full of Tan’layn. But instead of being invited to return in order to go through the Find, as Horace had been with the Fel’Daera, the girls had been invited back only to be seated together in a terrible device called the kaitan.

  Embedded within the kaitan, unseen, were two Tan’layn, one for each of them—instruments they could have bonded to, had they been allowed to go through the Find; instruments chosen by Mr. Meister and Mrs. Hapsteade with the help of the oraculum and the Vora. The instruments were weak, of course, expendable in the eyes of Mr. Meister—nothing like the Fel’Daera or the Alvalaithen.

&nb
sp; They had to be, because as the girls sat there, somehow the kaitan tore their bonds permanently loose from those undiscovered instruments, leaving the Tan’layn powerless and Keeperless forever. But instead of letting those broken bonds shrivel away, the kaitan instead wove the two girls together directly, binding them. The Medium flowed back and forth between their bodies. The process was ghastly, unthinkable . . . but that hadn’t even been the end of it.

  Now, in Horace’s living room, they sat in the quiet for a full minute. At last, Horace’s mother began to talk into it, soft and calm. “I’m sure you can’t imagine how much it hurt—can’t imagine the way it hurt,” she said, looking at Mr. Meister as if he were an earnest child learning a gentle lesson. “Not the kaitan—what came after. You took us away, took us apart so that the bond between us would stretch and break and leave us raw. Leave us wounded. Leave us Tuners.”

  This was how it worked, Horace knew. Once the bond between the two was broken, the ruptured ends would linger, raw and exposed and sensitive. It was this sensitivity that gave Tuners their powers.

  His mother continued. “I could feel the bond stretching, you taking Isabel away from me. I had only just met her, but for that hour or so, because of the bond, I knew her. You know? She was so scared, but excited, and was trying to crush her fear down deep. I could feel her moving farther and farther, and it just . . . ached.” She wrapped her arms around her stomach, rocking gently. “I didn’t know it then, but it was a motherly sort of pain. I wanted to stop, of course. Mrs. Hapsteade said no. She told me the cure to the pain was ahead and not behind. And that was the truth, I guess, even if I had no idea what was happening. I remember I was crying and a woman on the street stopped and asked me if I was okay, and Mrs. Hapsteade said, sort of sad but sort of proud, ‘These are tears of bravery.’ And I was just thirteen and lost and, in that moment, I thought those words were so . . . kind. They seemed like the kindest words anyone had ever said about me. So, I kept walking, I don’t know how many blocks more, all the while thinking about those words and Isabel moving farther and farther away, and when the bond finally ripped apart, it was like every muscle being ripped from every deep bone. I screamed. I fell onto all fours right there on the sidewalk. I could feel the Medium through every pore. It felt like hot water over a fresh burn. I just sat there, people walking by. Mrs. Hapsteade sat beside me. She didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.”