Angel Isle

by Peter Dickinson

  “That’s a thought,” said Ribek. “Jex is going to wipe out our new trail, so suppose we follow the old one for a bit and then branch off, with luck they’ll think we’re still going back the way we came.”

  “Right,” said Saranja, rising fluidly to her feet. “Come along, horses—finished your breakfast? Lazy times are over…. We’re going to have to let them take it a bit easy to start with—they’ll be stiff as timber after last night, and it looks like Levanter’s a bit lame in his off fore.”

  Twenty minutes later they were on their way.

  The horses were in better shape than Saranja had feared, apart from Levanter’s mild lameness, so to spare him and at the same time put as much ground as possible between themselves and Tarshu, Ribek and Maja rode Rocky while Saranja activated the jewel in Zald and loped unwearying beside them. Still half shattered by yesterday’s efforts Maja dozed most of the way, with shreds of her dream sifting again and again into her sleep and the same thoughts and questions recurring and recurring when she woke. She kept in particular remembering Benayu raising his two hands in front of him, palm to palm and almost touching, and then, when he noticed what he was doing, snatching them apart and laying them in his lap.

  Two hands, two doors, two universes.

  He’d been about to explain how Fodaro had caused the explosion, and then decided it was too dangerous for them to know. Something had to be got just right. Too little, and nothing would happen. Too much, and you got what Fodaro had got. The two things—not hands, not doors; they were just ways of picturing it—the two universes must barely touch for the briefest possible instant. But Fodaro had overdone it—overdone it on purpose, perhaps—just to make sure.

  And the reason why it was impossible, even for Fodaro, to imagine the reality behind his equations was that what the equations described was the reality of an unimaginable universe. This was part of the hidden knowledge, the truth that was too dangerous for her to know. She was guessing, of course, but at the same time she was certain. And certain too that she needed to know it.

  The storm must have traveled far inland. They slept that night in the still-standing half of an isolated barn. A falling beam had broken the back of one of the sheep that must have taken shelter there when the storm struck, so they ate fresh roast meat for the first time in many days, and Maja snuggled down into the straw dozily content despite her weariness and anxiety, and fell asleep to the sound of Sponge gnawing the chop bones.

  “I’ve been trying to think about the old story,” said Saranja as they breakfasted off liver and kidneys. “I’ve never done that before—it was just a stupid story, as far as I was concerned, but until Jex tells us what to do, it’s pretty well the only clue we’ve got. What I was thinking was that Tilja and the others were in exactly the same fix as we were, looking for Faheel when he could have been anywhere in the Empire. I always thought that one of the stupidest bits was the way they did it—with a wooden spoon, for heaven’s sake! The point was it had been carved from a tree which had grown from the stone of a peach from Faheel’s garden. That was enough of a connection for the thing to know where he was and point that way. We can do better than that. We’ve got an actual hair from the Ropemaker’s head.”

  “Of course!” said Ribek. “And right at the beginning he’d hidden it in the Valley, where there aren’t any other magicians. A clue we were the only ones could find. Just in case it was needed. What about it, Benayu?”

  “Well,” he said slowly, “it would be worth a try…. Yes…If Maja…No, doing it isn’t a problem, apart from two things. Hiding what we’re doing from the Watchers is something else. For a start we wait till we’re a lot further away from Tarshu. Even then it’s going to be tricky. Saranja will have to take the hair off the feathers, and that will make both of them strongly magical, but I think I can screen that. Jex and Maja—it’s got to be her, and that’s one problem—will have to wait outside the screen and when everything’s ready Saranja will bring the hair to her and whisper the name. That’s going to send out another colossal signal, and Jex is going to have to try to stop it getting through to the Watchers while Maja follows what happens. But you can’t do that if you’re screened or shielded, that’s the other problem. It will probably lay you out for a bit, like it did at Tarshu, but maybe when you come to…I don’t know.”

  “It’s a lot to ask her,” said Saranja.

  “I could hear Jex then, even when I was unconscious,” said Maja. “Perhaps it will be like that. Anyway, we’ve got to try. I’ll talk to Jex, if he’ll come.”

  She called to him as she lay down to sleep.

  “Please come, Jex. I need to talk to you.”

  He answered, again in the pit of the night.

  “Maja? What is it?”

  She explained.

  “Yes,” he said, after a pause. “It would be possible, but very dangerous. And Benayu is right, it will be too great an output for me to absorb completely. Nor do we want to confine the magic only to the area around us because we need it to reach as far as where the Ropemaker is hidden. I can perhaps conceal what you are doing from the Watchers in Tarshu, but not from anywhere else. But I cannot at the same time give you, personally, any more protection than I am now doing.”

  “I don’t want to be shielded. I’ve got to feel what the hair does when Saranja says the name. I think I can stand it, if I’m ready for it.”

  “We have a little time, since we need to be further from Tarshu before we make the attempt, and I hope to be stronger by then.”

  “So do I. Don’t go, please. I’ve worked something out. It’s stuff you and Benayu said was too dangerous for us to know. I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it.”

  “What is the nature of this knowledge?”

  She told him. He paused again before answering.

  “It is not your fault but mine, for using the word. I was tired, and did it inadvertently. If the Watchers discover what you know, they will eventually seek both to use it in this universe and to dominate others. You observed the effect of Fodaro’s causing a minor contact between two universes. Imagine the possible effect of the Watchers’ meddling. They could destroy the world by one mistake, or they could deliberately destroy other worlds that refused to accept their domination.”

  “What shall I say to Ribek and Saranja?”

  “I suggest you wait until we have seen the result of your experiment with the Ropemaker’s hair.”

  “All right.”

  Four days later they crested a line of hills and looked down on an Imperial Highway running along the bottom of the next valley. It was a warm, still afternoon, with a few slow cloud islands floating toward the unseen ocean.

  “Left or right when we get there?” said Ribek, and pointed eastward. “Tarshu’s back that way. Right, Maja?”

  The flare of continued magical energies around the besieged city was fainter now with distance, but still vivid to her extra sense the moment Jex relaxed his protection. She nodded. The road below ran roughly north and south, so either way would be equally likely to take them further from it. Benayu sighed heavily.

  “Better get it over, I suppose,” he muttered. “We don’t want a lot of people milling around us when we give it a go. There was a place a little way back.”

  “You’re sure you’re up to this, Maja?” said Saranja.

  “I’ve got to be. It’s what I’m here for.”

  The place was a long-abandoned sheep-fold. On Benayu’s instructions, he and Saranja and Ribek settled with the horses in a corner formed by two of the rough stone walls, and he constructed a screen around them. Maja stayed close outside the fold, where a slab of fallen masonry made a level surface. She checked the position of Tarshu, walked a dozen paces toward it and settled the little stone pendant that was Jex onto a boulder. He seemed to quiver for a moment, and became the blue and yellow lizard she’d last seen on the mountainside.

  Much encouraged, she returned to the slab, spread her spare blouse across it, and sat cross-legged on
the ground.

  “Ready,” she called, and waited unshielded. She could feel the blank space that Benayu’s screen made in the busy shimmer of general background, but because the screen was there she felt nothing of the moment when the hair was unwound from the quills, only the appalling jolt of power when Saranja hurried out through the screen with it.

  She reeled, but somehow held on, sensing rather than seeing Saranja’s movements as she crouched, laid the gold thread out across the coarse green cloth of the blouse, and hunkered down to put her arm around Maja’s shoulders.

  The hair blazed in Maja’s mind, a single narrow streak, without light, without heat, but still with the ferocity of the blast from a roaring stove when the door is opened a crack. She flinched from it, and would have reeled away, but Saranja’s strong arm held her steady. Slowly she schooled herself to endure the blast, as a smith learns to endure the white heat of the metal he draws from his furnace so that he can hammer and shape it to his purposes.

  Now, knowing what she could stand, she drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders.

  “Ready,” she said.

  Saranja breathed the name.

  As the world went black Maja felt her shudder with the jolt of power. Then sight, smell, hearing, touch, taste, all were lost. But something remained, something beyond the reach of any normal sense. The single thread of the Ropemaker’s hair still blazed in her mind with its strange, dark fire. And since it was all there was in her universe she clung to it, studied it, reaching out along it to wherever it led. It was a streak of pure power, power with life, a single living purpose. It yearned for one small spot in all the enormous Empire. There.

  The power blanked out as suddenly as it had struck. There was a salty, fishy, weedy smell in her nostrils, far stronger than the salt sea breeze that had been blowing up the slope from the Bay of Tarshu.

  “Well done,” said the stone voice, slow and grating. “I too am very shaken. That was more than I was prepared for. I could not absorb it all. We must leave. Tell them.”

  Then silence and darkness for a while. She became aware that she was standing rigid as a stone pillar, with her left arm stretched in front of her pointing. There was someone either side of her, holding her upright. Saranja’s voice spoke urgently in her ear.

  “Maja! Maja! Are you there? Oh, gods! Maja!”

  “That way,” she mumbled. “On the coast. I could smell the sea.”

  Her body went limp and Ribek eased her down, then stayed crouching beside her, his arm round her shoulders. She opened her eyes and saw Benayu and Saranja looking down at her.

  “Jex says we must go,” she said. “He couldn’t absorb it all. I’ll get him.”

  “You stay there,” said Ribek. “Saranja…”

  “No. I want to.”

  He helped her rise and she stumbled off. Jex had returned to being the stone pendant, which was lying on its side next to the boulder. She picked it up, dismayed, and cradled it between her two palms. At once a little of his day-long protection closed itself around her, weaker than it had been even immediately after Tarshu. And something else. Normally she could feel none of his alien magic at all, but nursing him like that she imagined she could sense the strange life, electric inside the granite, but only fitfully there.

  “…judging by the sun,” Ribek was saying when, moving more steadily now, she carried Jex back to the others, “and Maja was pointing a bit east of that, so it could very easily be on the coast. Any idea how far, Maja?”

  “Oh, a long way. It’ll take days and days. And Jex said it was more power than he’d expected. He couldn’t absorb it all.”

  “You mean some of the signal could have got through to Tarshu?” said Benayu.

  “I don’t know,” said Maja. “He seemed tired. I think he’s only just hanging on.”

  “What about you?” said Ribek. “You took a beating too. Can you stand any more?”

  “If it’s just ordinary stuff. Jex is still doing something. I don’t need my amulet. I’ll be all right, provided we don’t run into anything heavy.”

  “I’ll do what I can if we do,” said Benayu with a sigh. “But…”

  “If we do, you’re going to be busy,” said Saranja. “All the more reason to get away from here. Looks as if the Highway runs pretty well due north. I don’t like Highways, but you get along a lot faster.”

  “And there’ll be more hedge magic for Jex to absorb,” said Maja. “That’s what he needs.”

  “Like feeding an invalid?” said Ribek. “Little and often, no mighty blow-outs.”

  “We need him well,” said Benayu earnestly. “Even if he can’t talk to his friends and tell us what’s happening, he’s much more useful than having me keep screening anything I do. I can, but it wears you out after a while. Anyway, let’s go.”

  It was one of the smaller Highways, with only two lanes of traffic in either direction, one for noblemen and senior officials, and one for everyone else. In places it was so busy that they could only shuffle along, but then the crush would thin and they could make good speed. Most of the people going north were trying to get away from the fighting, while company after company of soldiers marched by on the southbound road.

  The way station where they stopped that night was a small and homely one, used to catering to no more than a few dozen travelers, but tonight it was as crowded as a city market. The news was all gossip. According to the official announcements the attack on Tarshu was only another Pirate raid, which the Watchers had well in hand, but the travelers agreed that whole regiments were swarming ashore, armed with weapons just as strange and just as formidable as the airboat. Without their magicians the Imperial armies would have been mown down like grass in a hayfield. One man claimed—he’d heard it from another man whose sister was married to the mayor of a town further south—that the troops they had seen marching by would be paraded in front of three of the Watchers before they went into battle. The Watchers would combine their powers to enspell them, company by company, and send them on to fight, fearless, tireless and invulnerable.

  “Yes, it could be done,” said Benayu. “You’d need to borrow all of each man’s future life and pack it into a single day of fighting, so that when the day was over he would be as old as his destiny decreed. He’d not live long after sunset.”

  “Well, that’s more Watchers too busy to look for us,” said Ribek cheerfully.

  “I don’t know,” said Saranja. “If I were a man, I’d be…Look.”

  She waved an arm toward the crowded way station.

  “Notice something? A lot of men on their own, don’t you think? If they were just trying to get clear of the fighting they’d be bringing their families. What they’re running away from is being rounded up and enspelled and sent to fight. So the next thing that’s going to happen is that the Watchers will start raiding the way stations and rounding them up that way. They’d pick you up, and Benayu too. Unless Benayu can screen us.”

  Benayu shook his head.

  “Not from a Watcher,” he said. “All right, I’ve done it once, but they were in a hurry. I’m not ready to try again.”

  “Back to the byways, then?” said Ribek. “Ah, well. I like the road life. Bustle. Gossip. We get a surprising amount of that at the mill, with all the comings and goings. A right old scandal exchange, we are. I miss it. There’s several good juicy stories I left halfway through.”

  “Nothing like at my warlord’s fortress, I’ll bet you,” said Saranja. “Most of the time there wasn’t anything else for the women to do, and I don’t miss it at all.”

  Lying in the way station that night, Maja dreamed her dream again. It began in the same way, waking on an empty hillside, looking up at the stars, turning to look at them again in the little pool, falling into the pool, plunging down between the stars to the very end of the universe to where the magical doorway rose on another naked hillside. This time something began to stir in the unreachable elsewhere beyond the door. A shadowy shape. Monstrous. Human-shape
d, but all wrong. Tall as a tall man as far as the shoulders, but the head above that reaching almost to the top of the arch, and twice as wide at the top than it was at the bottom. “Help me. Trapped,” it said in Maja’s head and at that moment it stopped being frightening. The head wasn’t monstrous, it was just huge. In fact it was vaguely familiar. In her dream she searched for the memory.

  Then, as happens in dreams, she was no longer looking at the door but sideways, across the slope. A Watcher stood there. He could have been the one who had come to the way station, and like him he was turning slowly round, studying the whole scene. At the moment he was sideways on to Maja and turning away from her, which meant that he would see the doorway before he saw her. It was for some reason desperately important that he shouldn’t do that. That was why she was here. She did the only thing she could think of.

  “Here!” she called. “I’m here!”

  He stopped turning away and swung just as slowly back toward her.

  Terror woke her.

  That part was only the old nightmare, she thought as the shudders died away. It didn’t mean anything. But the part before…Awake now, she searched again for the memory, uselessly, of course, until she gave up, turned on her side and drifted back toward sleep. In the shadowy borderland on the edge of oblivion it came to her.

  The story. Tilja, bound and helpless in the robbers’ cave. The shape of another prisoner, black against the moonlit opening of the cave. Horrifying until he had by his magic set them all free and Tilja saw him again outside the cave and realized that he was only a tall thin man wearing an outsized turban. That had been Tilja’s first meeting with the Ropemaker. Satisfied, she slid back into dream and spoke to Jex in her head.

  “I don’t know if you can hear me, but I need to talk to you. I think the Ropemaker’s trapped in the other universe somehow, but when we used the hair it told us to go to somewhere in the Empire. It doesn’t make sense.”