by NS Dolkart
With that she exited, leaving Phaedra to a roomful of books. Phaedra stared up at the shelves that rose so impossibly high and felt nothing but despair. Even if the answer was here somewhere, what were the chances she would find it?
She laughed sadly to herself, a puny “huhuh” that dissipated into the many folds and crevices of the stacks that surrounded her. Who would have thought that she could ever feel so intimidated by a pile of books?
She started where Psander had recommended, with accounts of the War of the Heavens. But her mind kept wandering, and whenever she thought a scroll was about to tell her something useful, it would veer off into some other topic entirely. How had the mesh been torn at the war’s onset, and how had it been repaired at its end? The dragons had torn it, the latest scroll attested. The Gods had repaired it. And without another word on the subject, the author would turn to a discussion of casualties or of human reactions or of the Gods-damned weather.
It was horrendously frustrating, and all the while that little side table kept calling out to her. Psander had promised Bandu that she would research the underworld, and then she hadn’t. But Phaedra was Bandu’s friend – didn’t she owe it to her to read those books? Psander might have abandoned Bandu and her hopes and dreams, but how could Phaedra? She might even have the opportunity to visit Bandu and Criton someday soon, after she returned to her world. And it would have been one thing if her reading so far had turned up some hint of progress, but it hadn’t. More and more, the fact that Phaedra had to save their world felt like an excuse.
Besides, even Psander didn’t know where to look for their answers. What if the clue to the sealing of gates was hidden somewhere in those books about the underworld?
Phaedra went to bed that night dreaming about that pile of books, the only part of the library that Psander had deemed “frivolous.” When she awoke the next morning, she promised herself that she would devote this day, just this one day, to reading through them. If there wasn’t anything useful there, she’d have only lost a day.
To her slight shame, she found the books in Bandu’s pile endlessly fascinating. Her mind didn’t wander once as she read account after contradictory account of journeys to the underworld, or of what steps people took to avoid getting there in the first place. The first scroll she read was the story of a man who had gone down in search of his dead wife, only to return empty-handed. In the second scroll, the same man came back victorious. The contradictions were maddening, and yet each reversal only made her want to read more.
Over the course of the day, a picture of the world below began to emerge. It was a depressing picture, to be sure. The general consensus was that the dead spent the eternity of the afterlife sleeping, dreamless and inert. Most of the clerical sources Phaedra read were preoccupied with the question of how to avoid this miserable place. The followers of the Sun God cremated their dead, hoping that Atun would take their souls up into Himself instead of letting them sink into the earth; Mayar’s followers had a similar reason for their burials-at-sea. There was a southern vulture God whose worshippers performed sky-burials. There were others who didn’t seek to avoid the underworld, though: Atel’s priests buried their dead much as the Tarphaeans had, and called death the Final Journey.
The second most common theme after avoidance was in the many stories about journeys to the underworld and back. And yet, while these stories were common, there was only one man whose success was entirely verifiable: Maira, the wizard-king of Parakas, had retrieved his wife from the underworld some hundred and thirty years ago, a success that had been much celebrated at the time. When she came across the fact, Phaedra’s heart leapt. Here finally was the information Bandu had sought! Even if she never used it to bring back Four-foot, she would know that Phaedra had kept Psander’s promise for her.
So yes, dinnertime had come and gone and Phaedra was starving and weary, but surely this merited a second day of study.
That second day began with another fascinating reversal: though the contemporary accounts of Maira’s feat all agreed that he had succeeded, there was no agreement on how. The wizard-king had told his story to scores of people, and each version was notably different from the others. The monsters and demons Maira had bested on his journey seemed to change with the telling, as did the manner of his victories. Phaedra tried to determine which version of the story he had told first, but even that wasn’t exactly clear. Unfortunately, the rescued wife didn’t seem to have contributed to any of the accounts. She had apparently gone silent within days of her return and refused to speak to anyone besides her elderly mother, who had taken their conversations with her to the grave.
The most awful scroll Phaedra read that day was a list of wizards and heroes who, inspired by Maira’s success, had attempted similar journeys over the last century-and-a-half and never come back. Most of them had been trying to bring back children, those they had lost to disease or accidents or, in one case, a grisly murder. It broke Phaedra’s heart to read summary after summary of the tragedies that had prompted grown men – and they were almost exclusively men – to willfully hurl themselves into the abyss in the hopes of seeing their beloved sons and daughters once more. When she was finished reading the scroll, Phaedra found that she had no strength to keep researching the matter. She skimmed a few more scrolls to see if she could find the method by which Maira had journeyed to the underworld, but gave up before she found it. After reading that horrifying list, the idea of helping Bandu reach the underworld was no longer appealing to her.
So she turned back to the question of the gateways, unsure, as always, of how to proceed. How many gates were there? How many would she have to seal to make up for the new one? And were they like simple threads connecting the worlds, or could each gateway on the fairy side connect to multiple human-side gates? If they formed a sort of web, then would closing a gate on just one side even work?
She had spent too long with books – she couldn’t think straight anymore. Psander was still shut in her lab, conducting Gods-knew-what horrible experiments on Olimande’s head, so Phaedra went to talk to Hunter instead. He was resting in his room after dinner, staring at the ceiling. “Am I disturbing you?” she asked.
“No,” Hunter said, sitting up hurriedly. “I was just thinking about you, actually.”
“Really?”
Hunter nodded and stood, looking self-conscious. “I was going to ask if you’d… like to marry me.”
Phaedra gawked at him. She opened her mouth, and closed it again. She was dimly aware that she must look like an idiot, but she couldn’t so quickly adjust from the conversation she had expected to have, to… to this.
“We’re finally here,” Hunter continued nervously, “and you’re learning magic just like you meant to, and as bad as it is in this world, I think we could make a life together if we wanted to. Do you want to?”
Phaedra was still staring, but she forced herself to speak. “This is so sudden,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean for it to be sudden. I thought you might already know how I feel, but I guess I’m not that good at expressing…”
“It’s all right,” she said, awkwardly.
“So… do you want to…?”
“No,” Phaedra said, and responded to his wince with one of her own. “I can’t, Hunter. Not right now, anyway. There’s no telling if we’d conceive as quickly as Bandu and Criton did, but I can’t afford the risk. None of us can afford it, really.”
“We can’t?”
“We can’t.”
She told him then what Psander had told her about the skyquakes, and of the mission she would soon be leaving on. Additional complications were decidedly unwelcome.
“Oh,” Hunter said, and his disappointment was painful to behold. “No, I guess that makes sense.”
They stood there in silence, the pain between them growing. Hunter opened his mouth to say something, but Phaedra interjected, “I don’t know,” and he closed his mouth again. She had imagined him
about to ask whether she might marry him sometime in the future, assuming Psander’s plan succeeded. Now, regardless of whether this had indeed been his intended question, they both knew it was the question she had answered.
“I see,” Hunter said.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and left him alone in his room.
She felt terrible. She loved Hunter like family, and she had always been attracted to him. He was such a sweet, gentle man, and he was good looking. In another life, under different circumstances, she thought she might have married him without a moment’s hesitation.
But the more she thought about it, the more Phaedra realized she had made the right choice. It wasn’t just the current circumstances: she didn’t think she’d ever be ready to leave her studies behind and devote herself to raising children. As terrible as it felt to admit it, she would rather live Psander’s life than Bandu’s.
She had always assumed that she would have children one day. But that assumption was now a relic of her old life on Tarphae, of the days when her options had been limited by her parents’ imagination. Had things gone as they’d been supposed to, had Tarphae never been cursed, Phaedra would have returned home after last year’s pilgrimage, married whomever her parents had chosen for her, and had however many children the Gods chose to give her. But that wasn’t her life anymore. What’s more, she didn’t want it to be her life.
Now her life was magic. It was full of questions she had never thought to ask as a girl, and answers to the ones she had. Let others marry and have children – there was no lack of children in the world, but there was a distinct lack of wizards. There would be no time for babies during her mission, and there would be no time for them afterward either. How could she ever go from a quest to save all of humanity to a normal life of marriage and pregnancies and childrearing?
And if she did, how could she do it without growing to hate the man who had asked it of her?
She lay awake that night, too overwhelmed to sleep. She ought to talk to Hunter again. She ought to explain that her inability to settle down with him was not only for now, but forever. But he would be asleep by now, and she could not go and wake him. It would give him false hope for a moment, and in the most vulgar possible way. She couldn’t do it.
But she couldn’t sleep either.
Instead she rose, conjured a ghostly candle in her hand, and stumbled to the library again. This time she didn’t make any attempt at rational strategy, but pulled scrolls and codices off the shelf at random and read each one only until she tired of it.
It was in a book about trees that she finally found what she was looking for. It wasn’t even a magical text, but an agricultural one – in one section, the author discussed trees’ ability to heal and grow, telling the story of a woodcutter who had come across an iron nail fully embedded in the bole of an oak, invisible until the tree had been cut down.
The mesh, Salemis had once said, repaired itself. Why, then, was it thinner in some places than in others? At the gateways it was thin enough that at certain times the elves could tear at its fabric and use it for their nets – at least until the healing mesh drew those nets back into itself. There must be something in those places keeping it thinner, continually wearing it down. There were nails hidden somewhere in the wood.
Phaedra put her book down. The mesh was nothing like a tree, and so this book could teach her nothing about it – all it had done was to trigger the right thought.
When she made her report to Psander after breakfast, the wizard frowned. “I’m not sure I follow you,” Psander said. “We already knew that the mesh was thinner at the gateways than in other places. How has this changed anything?”
“It’s changed everything!” Phaedra cried. How could Psander not see it? “What I’m saying is that if the mesh naturally heals, any section that’s thinner than the others must be a place where there’s a hidden irritant continually wearing away at it. If we could find that irritant and remove it, the mesh would close the wound on its own!”
“But what would such an irritant look like?”
“It’s probably something different at each gate. For the new one, it could be Silent Hall or the whole island of Tarphae, or even the Yarek itself. I can’t remove any of those, but I think I can break some of the other ones if I know what I’m looking for. You said once that the wizards’ tower at Gateway was built around an old elven gateway that already existed – what did that gateway look like? How did they know it belonged to the elves?”
“There was a pattern there,” Psander answered, leaning against a lectern. “A sort of echo of the fairies’ world, as I recall people saying. It manifested sometimes in dreams and sometimes in physical phenomena. I was once instructed to count the leaves that had fallen in the clearing, and found there to be a hundred and twenty-one of them – eleven times eleven. It wasn’t any single structure, like a circle of stones or anything of that nature.”
“I’ll bet there was still something more specific causing it all,” Phaedra said. “I might be able to find it if I went back there.”
Psander’s mouth twisted, but then she nodded. “We might not do any better than that as far as theory goes, not without experimentation. I’ll show you how I open the gate in the courtyard, and we can plan for you to leave tomorrow.”
“One more thing, please.” Phaedra raised the scroll she had taken from the side table, the list of failed attempts to breach the underworld. “This list only has two women on it, and thirty-two men. I thought you said there had been many female academic wizards before you, but if there were, then why didn’t they–”
“I said no such thing,” Psander answered, cutting her off. “I said only that there had been female wizards before me, which indeed there had been. But it was not a large number, even in the best of times. The community of academics was never welcoming to us – it was a fight for every book and every apprenticeship. When I told you there had been others, I did not mean to imply that I was unexceptional.”
“Oh,” said Phaedra. “I see. And now there’s just you and me.”
“Yes,” Psander said with a slight smile. “If we survive the coming crisis, I’m sure much will be written about that fact. If others do not write it, we shall have to write it ourselves.”
She looked cheerful enough that Phaedra risked asking her about Olimande – and regretted it immediately.
“I may yet eat his brain,” the wizard answered. “He seems to have run out of useful things to tell me.”
Phaedra shuddered. “Do you think that would actually help?”
“It might,” Psander said. “Power is power, and if the elves mean to gain it by feeding on us, we may as well return the favor.”
“Has he taught you anything about how to fight the elves off?”
“Yes. It seems that if an elf is not decapitated but pierced through the heart, the magic will bleed out into the world, killing him and returning that magic to the plant-beast this world is made of. The elves have a tradition of decapitating their enemies in battle in order to humiliate them, but only slay each other under very rare circumstances. Battle is a kind of sport to them most of the time.”
“But not against us.”
“No,” Psander said, “of course not against us. They see us as lesser beings, and they envy us for the attention the Gods have shown our world, short-sighted as that makes them. They think we deserve death more than they do.”
“Auntie Gava called them demons,” Phaedra said. “I think she’s right.”
“Knowing what we do now? Undoubtedly. If you are successful in closing all the other gates, it will save countless lives not only from our colliding worlds but from the elves as well.”
“There’s a lot I still don’t understand,” Phaedra confessed. “I’ve been assuming so far that the gateways are like tunnels, but do you think they might open in more than one place in our world?”
“Not as far as I know,” Psander said, “though I have hardly had the time to verify that. The g
ate to Tarphae is the only one I have been able to open so far. I frankly would have expected to be more closely connected to the Yarek and my home’s previous location, but I suppose one can also see why the new thread connecting us to our world might attach itself to Tarphae instead. Much of the power that brought me here came from Tarphae one way or another: there were the five of you, of course, who performed the final magic, and it was Karassa’s unwilling contribution – as harvested through the tears of your king – that pushed us over the threshold into this world.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she went on, and Phaedra made a frantic sweep of her mind before realizing that it was just a figure of speech. “When I send you back to our world, I will have to send you right back to Tarphae, where you will have to evade the pirates and find your way safely off the island. I wish there was another way.”
“There is,” Phaedra said, “but it’s going to take a lot more power since I won’t be using the stronger gate here. I’ll need Olimande too, I think. Illweather and Goodweather obey the elves.”
Psander lifted an eyebrow. “If you plan to journey to one of their castles, I cannot condone that. I cannot afford for you to get yourself killed.”
“I’m not going to the castles,” Phaedra said. “I’m going underground. There’s a gate down there, among the roots of the world, that leads straight to the Dragon Knight’s Tomb.”
42
Bandu
Bandu had never been so happy. In all the ways that her relationship with Criton had been bad, the one with Vella was good. Bandu was beginning to realize how lucky she was that Vella loved her.
