The Portal and the Veil

by Ted Sanders

  April supposed that was fair. Still, although she would not have thought to use the word “surrender” to describe her bond with the Ravenvine, she understood that she had embraced a kind of unconditional acceptance of it. An acceptance that was both greedy and helpless. Like a sail permanently unfurled in a volatile wind. She let her thoughts trickle through the vine, through the power that coiled there. Did that power belong to her, or did she belong to it?

  “Do you understand me?” Gabriel said.

  “I think so,” said April. “I do know that I am . . . changed.”

  Gabriel hunched forward intently, tapping the Staff of Obro softly against the floor. As he spoke, his voice and face lit with a kind of dreamy, fiery fervor. “In our world—the world of the Keepers—there are forces at work beyond us all. The Medium. The Mothergates. The Starlit Loom. We cannot truly comprehend these things—not their histories, not their functions, not their fates. And because we cannot comprehend them, we can only serve them when we surrender to them—to them, and to the arcs of their existence.” He lifted his face, clearly struggling to put words to a thing that lived wordless inside him. Watching him, April felt a stirring in her chest, fluttery and frightening. She sat back, the Ravenvine burning at her temple like a bared thread of her soul. She understood nothing Gabriel was saying, and yet she understood everything he meant.

  Gabriel pressed the silver pommel of his staff to his forehead. He closed his eyes. “To be Tan’ji is to . . . become,” he said thickly. “We become. For better or for worse. Do you understand?”

  April could only nod. “Okay,” she said, her own voice hoarse. “Okay.”

  “But as for Joshua . . .” Gabriel grimaced, his face creased with pain. “Ingrid was a Lostling, you know. Chloe had that right.”

  “Ingrid!” April exclaimed. “She didn’t choose her Tan’ji? She was taught?”

  “That’s right. She never went through a proper Find. She never fully surrendered to her Tan’ji, or to everything from which her Tan’ji flowed, and so when certain choices were presented to her—difficult choices—she . . .” He shrugged.

  “You’re saying she joined the Riven because she was a Lostling. That’s why she turned?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re worried Joshua might do the same?”

  “His bond is tainted,” Gabriel said. “Joshua is weak, through no fault of his own. And if the right words are whispered into his ear—or the wrong ones—he may not have the strength to stay with us.”

  “How do we fix that? How do we make him strong?”

  Gabriel shook his head and took a deep breath. “We do not,” he said, and April could hear years of knowing sadness threaded into those words. “He either finds that strength himself, or he is lost.”

  The front door flew open. Isabel rushed in. “We’ve been found.”

  For an instant, April’s hopes soared. The Wardens had returned, or maybe the Altari, here to rescue them. But Isabel crossed to the window and peered frantically out into the darkness. Not the Wardens, no. Not a rescue.

  Isabel turned, her eyes wild and furious. “They’re here,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The Lostling

  “IF YOU WILL, KEEPER,” SAID MR. MEISTER, “EXPLAIN TO ME exactly how you came to possess the Laithe.”

  Mr. Meister sat at his desk in the Great Burrow, his stern face focused on Joshua. Or at least, he seemed stern. It was hard sometimes to read the old man’s expression behind his thick glasses. And Joshua was tired, as tired as he could ever remember being—tired in his body, his heart. He’d slept in the cab on the way back to the Warren, slumped over on the lap of Horace’s mom. She put off an air of comforting motherness he’d never felt before. She needed nothing from him, so unlike his own mother, who—as Joshua had understood even when he was a very small child—had needed so many things Joshua didn’t have.

  The Laithe floated silently beside him now, a perfect little earth. Joshua wondered if the sun had risen outside. He wondered if it had risen over the meadow by April’s house, and he hoped beyond hope that all the friends he’d left behind there were alive to see it. April. Chloe. Horace. Gabriel. And Isabel too. It seemed like everything always came back to Isabel.

  Mr. Meister wasn’t saying anything about the missing Wardens, though. Instead, he wanted to talk about the Laithe. “Are you going to take it away from me?” Joshua asked.

  “Certainly not,” the old man said. “You are the Keeper of the Laithe of Teneves. I cannot change that, and would not if I could.”

  “But I’m a Lostling.”

  “Are you?”

  Joshua didn’t know. All he knew was, he felt lost. He looked up at the shelves of the round red room, filled with wonders. The little birds were here, comforting at first, but soon they made him think of April, the way all animals always did now. On one of the shelves high overhead, he spotted the gleaming white mouthpiece of a flute. Ingrid’s flute. It was here, and so was she, held prisoner in a doba farther up in the Great Burrow. She seemed disoriented in the Warren the same way Isabel had earlier tonight, which meant there had to be a spitestone here, just for her. She hadn’t spoken a word since arriving. He wasn’t sure he wanted her to. Somehow, she was as scary as a Mordin—a human, working with the Riven. He wasn’t sure he could imagine it. Not completely.

  “I didn’t Find the Laithe on my own,” said Joshua. “Isabel did it.”

  “Ah, yes.” Now Mr. Meister leaned forward, his big left eye wide as a ping-pong ball. “Let us discuss that for a moment. Isabel gave you no choice in the matter? Nor the Laithe?”

  “No. She opened a cabinet. There were a lot of . . . instruments in there, I think.”

  “Tan’layn.”

  “Yes, I guess. She brought me the Laithe. She handed it to me.”

  Mr. Meister grimaced. “What did she say?”

  “She said it was mine now.”

  “And did you feel that it was yours? When you laid eyes on it?”

  Joshua tried to remember. “I don’t know. Mostly I felt scared. I was afraid I would break it. And I didn’t know how it worked, so Isabel showed me—”

  “What did she show you, exactly? What did she say?”

  “She showed me . . . the rabbit.” He pointed to it now, sleeping atop the meridian. “She told me to slide it. She touched it, actually.” He felt himself frown. “I didn’t like that.”

  “Nor should you. Nor does any Keeper.” Mr. Meister tapped his fingers thoughtfully on his desk. “When you left the Warren here tonight with Isabel and Brian, you opened a portal along the riverbank where I first met you. Do you remember our meeting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember what I said to you?”

  Joshua did, word for word. “You said, ‘I believe I know why you are here.’”

  “Precisely. I knew even then—as much as I can allow myself to know—that you would become the Keeper of the Laithe of Teneves. Just as I knew Horace would become the Keeper of the Fel’Daera.” He tapped the left lens of his glasses, the oraculum. “It is my job to know such things.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do not thank me. Only remember the words I said to you then.” He leaned in close, peering at the floating Laithe. “Who chose the riverbank as your first destination?”

  “I did.”

  “Not Isabel?”

  “No. All she said was I should choose someplace close by. Someplace I’d been recently.”

  “Why did she say that?”

  “Well, she wanted to go someplace else. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make the Laithe do it.”

  “Where did she want to go?”

  “Cahokia Mounds. She thought we could find a safe place with a leestone there.”

  Mr. Meister sat back, clearly surprised. One of the little birds flew down and circled the Laithe like a huge, flapping moon, twittering. It landed on Mr. Meister’s desk. The old man held a finger out to it, and it nipped at him
gently. “Describe to me what happened when you tried to steer the Laithe to Cahokia Mounds.”

  “It wasn’t just Cahokia Mounds. The same thing happened in Madagascar.” Joshua got flustered, feeling like he was explaining it badly. “I mean, Isabel didn’t want to go to Madagascar. I was just messing around.”

  “I understand. And what happened?”

  Joshua shrugged. “I couldn’t get there. I zoomed in, but when I got close—”

  “How close?”

  “Two thousand feet.” Joshua surprised himself, saying that. How had he known that? But it was right. “When I got down under two thousand feet, things got messy.”

  “Messy how?”

  “Like . . . raindrops on a puddle. It got worse the farther I went. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t get to the ground.”

  “Have you ever been to Cahokia Mounds in person?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think that matters?”

  “Brian said—”

  “Brian is not the Keeper of the Laithe. You are. I ask you again—do you think it matters whether you have been to a place or not, when it comes to the Laithe? Would that have been the Maker’s intent?”

  “I don’t know, I—”

  “Where is Cahokia? In the real world, I mean. Point to it,” said Mr. Meister.

  Joshua’s arm shot out automatically. He pointed almost exactly southwest by south, directly at Cahokia Mounds.

  “I have no idea whether that’s right or not,” Mr. Meister said. “Yet I trust you implicitly. And how far away is it?”

  “Two hundred and fifty-seven miles, as the crow flies.” Or the raven, he thought miserably.

  “What does Cahokia look like?”

  “It’s a park. A couple thousand acres, I guess. It has . . . you know . . . mounds. Big grassy ones. There are fields and forests, and a couple of ponds. A visitors’ center.”

  “The visitors’ center has a parking lot, I assume. On which side?”

  “South, mostly. A little west.”

  “But you’ve never been there.”

  “I told you, no.”

  “If you were to walk to Cahokia Mounds from here in a perfectly straight line, are there any towns you might pass through, once you left the city?”

  Joshua walked the route in his head. He was, to be honest, surprised at how easily it came to him. There were a handful of towns directly along the way. “I guess . . . Fairbury, Clinton, and Mount Auburn.”

  “In order, I assume.”

  “Yes. Eighty-nine miles away, one hundred and thirty-seven miles away, and one hundred and sixty-eight miles away. Mount Auburn is the smallest. It’s very small. Only eight blocks by four blocks.”

  The old man threw his hands up. The bird on his desk fluttered into the air with a startled chirp. “Have you any idea of the absurdity of what you’ve just done? I’ve been to Cahokia many times but can only give you a passing idea of where it lies. Somewhere to the south and west, one or two hundred miles away. I couldn’t name a thing along the way, except for corn.”

  “But I’ve studied the Midwest the most,” said Joshua. “I don’t know as much about other places.”

  “Nor do I. Madagascar, for instance. I can tell you it’s an island, a rather large island—”

  “The fourth largest in the world, if you don’t count Australia.”

  “—a very large island, located on one side of Africa or the other.”

  Joshua spit out a laugh. “There are no big islands on the west side of Africa. Just the Canary Islands, and Cape Verde, and the islands along the Cameroon line. But all of them put together aren’t anywhere near as big as Madagascar.”

  “You continue to make my point for me,” Mr. Meister said with a smile. “Admittedly, I don’t get out much, but I am positive that in all my many years, I have never heard anyone even utter the words ‘the Cameroon line.’”

  “Okay, so I’m smart about maps. So?”

  “You are more than smart. You are preternaturally skilled. You are as talented with maps as Horace is with time. Do you know I once gave Horace a watch, so that he would know the time down to the second, should he have the need? But he did not have the need. Not because the occasion did not arise, but because he already knows the time down to the second. I have neither seen nor heard mention of that watch since I gave it to him.” His smile turned to a thoughtful frown, and his eyes got faraway. “Indeed, if he does not want it, I would like to have that watch back. It was quite nice.”

  Joshua crossed his arms and slumped down even farther into the couch. “I know what you’re trying to do,” he said seriously. “You’re trying to build up my confidence.”

  Mr. Meister roared with laughter. “That I am, yes. Is it working?”

  “Not in the right way. I already know I’m good with maps, and directions, and distances. But what I’m not good at is the Laithe.”

  “So you say. I happen to disagree.”

  “I’m a Lostling.”

  “Everyone who goes through the Find feels lost at times. But a true Lostling is different. When a Keeper receives his Tan’ji from another—as opposed to Finding it on his own—a stagnation sometimes occurs. The Keeper becomes a Lostling.”

  “What’s a stagnation?”

  “A slowing down. A dulling. A loss of will and motivation, particularly when it comes to the new Tan’ji. This stagnation is often made worse by outside forces, who—seeking to help, or perhaps giving in to impatience—interfere with the natural process of the Find. The Lostling, in turn—being stagnated—may welcome this kind of interference.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  Mr. Meister’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “No?”

  “No. I don’t even want to be talking to you right now.”

  “But I could teach you so much.” Mr. Meister scooted closer. Behind the oraculum, his left eye leered at the Laithe. “I know all about the Laithe, after all. I can see things even you do not. I could tell you everything you need to know.”

  Joshua grabbed the Laithe out of the air and yanked it away, hugging it to his chest. “No.”

  “You do not want me to teach you?”

  Joshua shook his head. He just wanted Mr. Meister to go away. He just wanted to be left alone with the Laithe, pretty much forever. And maybe that was stagnating, but he didn’t care. “I don’t want you to teach me.”

  “It would be so easy, though,” Mr. Meister crooned. “I can teach you, and within the hour, you could be opening a portal back to the meadow, to rescue our companions.”

  Joshua caught his breath. Was this what the old man wanted from him? But Joshua had been ready to do that right away, back in the forest, and Mr. Meister had stopped him. “I can do that anyway,” Joshua said. “I told you. I can open a portal back in the meadow right now.”

  “Certainly you could. Just as you’ve been taught already. But are our companions still in the meadow?”

  Joshua hadn’t thought about that. “I don’t know.”

  “Let us imagine they are in the general area, at least. Let us imagine that our friends have taken refuge, and that you—through sheer luck, or intuition—open a portal a mere quarter mile from them. Will they see it?”

  “They might.”

  “And there will be no Riven around, of course.”

  Joshua squirmed uncomfortably. “There might not be.”

  Mr. Meister snapped his fingers, as if he’d remembered something disappointing. “Oh, but even then—there is still the small matter of Dr. Jericho. Sensitive to any portal you might open, and swifter than any of us, by far. Shall we hope he has given up the hunt, and gone home?”

  Joshua said nothing. Mr. Meister got louder, his eyes wild. “How close would you need to get, Keeper?”

  “Closer,” Joshua mumbled, unable to even look at him.

  “How close? An eighth of a mile? Two hundred yards?”

  “Closer, I guess.”

  “The Keeper of the Laithe does not guess. He knows. And
he opens the portal precisely where he means to. Anywhere he wants to.”

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  “It’s easy. Let me show you. All you need to do is—”

  “No!” Joshua shouted. He shot to his feet, still clutching the Laithe.

  Mr. Meister leaned back. His face melted into kindness again. He watched Joshua silently.

  “Stop it,” said Joshua. “Just stop it.”

  “I have stopped,” said Mr. Meister, holding up his hands.

  “I said I don’t want you to teach me.”

  “Good, because I will not.” Mr. Meister stroked his chin, his eyes as sharp as ever. “Dr. Jericho made you an offer tonight, I believe,” he said. “He asked you to join him.”

  Startled by this sudden shift, Joshua felt his anger fritter away. “No.”

  “Come now,” Mr. Meister said, his voice full of gentle doubt. “That is his very purpose. To lure Keepers away, to bring powerful instruments into the Riven’s fold. And the Laithe is very powerful. A great prize. There are few Tan’ji that the Riven desire more.”

  “Dr. Jericho didn’t say anything like that to me.”

  “He offered you a kind of refuge. An assurance. A clean path through the Find.”

  It was true, of course. And it made Joshua sick to think it, but . . . he’d listened to the Mordin. He wasn’t sure he’d actually considered the offer, but he hadn’t not considered it either. He’d never be able to say that out loud, though. It was too terrible, and too true, to ever admit out loud. “It doesn’t matter if he said that or not,” Joshua muttered. “I’m here now.”

  “And is that what you want? To be here?”

  “Is it what you want?” Joshua shot back.

  Mr. Meister looked astonished. “Absolutely,” he said. “Do not doubt it for a moment. I only press the matter because you are a target now, Joshua. If Dr. Jericho believes you are a Lostling, he also believes you are weak. Ripe for the picking. Easy to turn.”

  “But I’m not,” Joshua said, as if trying the words on. “I hate the Riven.”