by Ted Sanders
Suddenly Chloe shot to her feet.
“Is this a game?” she demanded. Heads turned to look at her. A murmur went through the crowd. Horace heard whispers: lai’theldra, mal’gama, Alvalaithen. Everyone had heard the story of last night. Chloe seemed oblivious. “All these things you’re saying—it’s like everything’s conspiring against us.” She chopped her hand through the air, once for each obstacle they faced. “The Mothergates can be found. Isabel can fix them. Joshua can take her to them. The Veil can’t stop her. Are you sure the universe doesn’t want us to fail?”
Falo and Mr. Meister exchanged a look. Before either of them could speak, though, Teokas rose elegantly from her seat.
“The universe wants nothing, Chloe,” she sang. “It seeks order because it is order. And the Mothergates bring disorder.”
Now it was Falo’s turn to stand. She rose to her full height, the golden rings in her dark eyes glinting warmly as she surveyed the room, turning her gaze to Chloe.
“You say everything conspires against us,” Falo said. “But it does not. You are here, the Keeper of the Alvalaithen. April is here, the Keeper of the Ravenvine. Horace, the Keeper of the Fel’Daera. If I were one of the Kesh’kiri, knowing all of this, I would feel the universe was conspiring against me.”
Horace ignored the new buzz of talk that rose at the mention of the Fel’Daera. “Why?” he said. “What’s so great about us?”
“Yeah,” said Brian, jerking a thumb at Horace. “What’s so great about these guys?”
Falo smiled at them. And in that smile, Horace understood. Falo already knew how they were going to stop Isabel. This was all a show—an attempt, maybe, to further strengthen the resolve of the citizens of Ka’hoka, here in the final days.
Sure enough, Falo began confidently ticking off points on her long fingers. “One, we must listen to the Mothergate here in Ka’hoka. It is the strongest of the three, and will be the last to die. Through it, a keen ear will be able to detect when the other two Mothergates are entering their final hours—or, more crucially, when an attempt is being made to repair them. April Simon, will you stand with us? Will you listen, and warn us if such an attempt is being made?”
April stood. The Ravenvine glinted beneath the curtain of her auburn hair. “I’ll try,” she said. “You know I will.”
Falo nodded. “Two, we need someone who can face Isabel without fear. I have heard of the devastation she sowed among the Riven, cleaving them one by one with nothing but a harp in her hands. And soon she will be more powerful still. As mighty as Go’nesh is, however nimble Dailen may be, no matter how cunning Teokas, we cannot send such warriors to face an enemy who would strike them down at will. We need to send a warrior that Isabel cannot bear to strike down. A warrior she does not truly want to defeat.”
Chloe just stood there, her face practically on fire. The wings of the dragonfly were a blur. At last she threw her hands up in defeat. “I’m already standing, okay?” she said. “But I think you’re overestimating the motherly love here.”
Falo shook her head. “I think not,” she said, even as the gathered Altari in the room were grasping what Chloe had just revealed. The big new baddie in town was her mother. Low cries of concern erupted, whispers of sympathy. Horace thought he heard someone crying, a sweet melodious croon.
Chloe spun round on the crowd. “Oh, shut up, please,” she snarled. “Yes, Isabel is my mom. No, we’re not close. If she’s too sentimental to stop me, I promise the feeling is not mutual. And if you’re feeling the urge to send me your condolences, sorry—you’re like seven years too late.”
She whirled back around, arms crossed furiously.
Brian whistled low.
Falo nodded at April and Chloe in turn. “One and two,” she said gladly. “A sentinel. An invincible warrior.” Horace’s heart pounded. He was next, he knew. But he had no idea how, or why. “And now three,” said Falo, ticking off another finger. “We need someone who can get us to the other Mothergates at a moment’s notice, remote though they be.”
“But that’s Joshua,” Horace protested. “Not me.”
“It is you,” Falo said. “We have no instrument like the Laithe. We cannot open a portal to anywhere we wish, and step through. But we do not need to go anywhere we wish. We only need to go to the Mothergates. And so we can, Horace, with your help.”
“I don’t understand. What does that have to do with the Fel’Daera?”
“We say there are three Mothergates,” Falo explained, “as if they were three separate doors. But really they are more like cracks around the edges of a single great doorway. If you enter the Mothergate here in Ka’hoka—”
“Enter the Mothergate?” said Brian. “You mean actually go inside?”
“It is more like going outside,” said Falo, “but yes. I have done it. Quite foolishly, as it turns out, but I have done it. And if you can navigate the space beyond, you will find yourself able to exit through another one of those cracks, through one of the other Mothergates.”
For once, Horace found that he had no clear frame of reference for what Falo was describing. None at all. Was it like a wormhole through the Mothergate? Or like teleporting from one falkrete stone to the next? “You said it was foolish,” he said. “Why?”
“Within the Mothergates, time is . . . slippery,” Falo said. “It is unhinged from the flow of time we experience outside it.”
Now Horace began to grasp it. Sort of. Maybe the Mothergate was like a wormhole after all. Falo didn’t need the Fel’Daera—she needed his talents when it came to measuring time. “How slippery?” he asked. “How unhinged?”
“Very,” said Mr. Meister. “And unpredictably so. Others have entered the Mothergate besides Falo. Some never returned. Others stepped out of another Mothergate halfway across the globe in mere moments, but came out madly insisting they had been trapped inside for decades. Still others took decades to reappear, but came out feeling as though no time had passed at all.”
“I lost three years to the Mothergate,” Falo said. “Three years that passed in an instant.”
Horace and Brian exchanged a look. Like Horace, his friend was clearly enlivened by the sheer science of the thing, but he was frightened by it too.
“They want you to do what now?” Brian asked him.
Horace stood up. He pointedly did not look at his mom, still hovering in the doorway. “So if I’m understanding you correctly, you need me because I have a perfect sense of time.” He blushed to hear himself say the word “perfect,” but it wasn’t wrong. He’d always been good at knowing what time it was without looking, and since becoming the Keeper of the Fel’Daera, he’d gotten even better. Absurdly better. These days, his internal clock was accurate down to a fraction of a second. “You think I can escort people safely through the Mothergates.”
“No,” Falo said, startling him. “I do not.”
“Oh, snap,” Brian muttered.
“Forgive me,” said Falo, “but one does not make an instrument like the Fel’Daera without having a decent sense of time herself. Time and space. Thus my arrogance, entering the Mothergate. And yet I lost three years.”
“We are not certain you can do it yourself, Horace,” Mr. Meister explained. “But we believe that you can, given the proper tool.”
“What tool?”
“You may not remember it, but when you first came through the Find, I gave you a watch. A rather nice watch. To help you keep track of time while using the Fel’Daera.”
“That watch?” Horace said, his heart sinking. He might never lose track of time, but he was constantly losing track of stuff. “I don’t know what happened to it. It turned out I didn’t need it.”
Mr. Meister waved his hands. “Certainly you did not. Do not trouble yourself. The watch is unimportant. But when I gave it to you, I told you—”
“You told me there was only one clock that was really suitable for the Keeper of the Fel’Daera,” Horace said, the words coming back to him in a blaze.
Mr. Meister’s eyes lit up. “Yes!” he cried. “Just so. A timepiece unlike any other.” He hesitated, glancing up at Brula before continuing. “The astrolabe.”
Brula thundered to his feet. “No,” he declared. Beside him, Go’nesh had gone stiff, and even Teokas looked troubled. Brula pounded the table. “Never again.”
“It is the only way,” Falo said.
“Then there is no way,” Brula replied.
“What is your worry, Brula?” asked Falo. “That Horace will become another Samuel? That he could do such harm, even if he wanted to, here at the end of things?”
Horace hardly listened to Brula’s sputtering response. His head was swimming. He had never heard of Samuel before, but he knew at once who he must be.
The last Keeper of the Fel’Daera.
Horace had been hearing whispers and hints about the Fel’Daera’s last Keeper ever since the Find. Something had gone wrong, he knew, though no one would tell him what.
And what did it have to do with the astrolabe? As far as he knew, astrolabes were ordinary human devices. Amazing devices, actually, but still made by human hands. Humans had been making them for centuries. He’d even held one; his science teacher, Mr. Ludwig, had one in his collection. Astrolabes were usually disks, or rather a stacked series of disks, that showed the movement of the planets and the stars throughout the year.
Horace raised his hand, interrupting the argument that now flowed freely at the Council’s table. “Explain, please,” he said firmly. “Not about Samuel. He’s not the Keeper of the Fel’Daera anymore. I am.” Beside him, Chloe grunted in approval. “But tell me about the astrolabe.”
“The astrolabe is a Tanu,” Mr. Meister said. “A Tan’kindi, but it works better in the hands of some than others.”
“Better!” Brula snorted.
“And what does it do?” Horace asked. “It keeps time, but obviously there’s more.”
“The astrolabe does not merely keep time,” Mr. Meister explained. “It does that, yes, and in the centuries since it was made, it has not lost or gained even a fraction of a second. In fact, it cannot be inaccurate, because it moves in accordance with the planets themselves.”
“I haven’t lost a fraction of a second either,” said Horace, tapping his head. “In fact, I’m getting more accurate by the day.”
“The astrolabe is grounded in a way that you can never be,” Mr. Meister said. “In fact, some have argued that the astrolabe makes time.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Brian blurted out. “Time is an illusion created by our consciousness.”
“Oh my goodness,” April murmured.
“Then think of the astrolabe as a kind of consciousness, if you like,” said Mr. Meister. “But the point is not to debate how the astrolabe functions. The point is, it does function. It anchors itself to the flow of time as it is observed here on earth. It cannot be slowed or sped up, even by relativistic means.”
“You’re losing the slow kids,” Chloe muttered.
“He means it always keeps true time,” Horace said. “Absolute time. Even inside the Mothergates, where time is slippery.”
“Just so,” Mr. Meister said.
Horace hadn’t felt this good in days. Not because he super liked what he was hearing, or some of the things that had been hinted at, but because this was the sort of problem his mind was built for.
Brian obviously felt the same. “What if you put it in a rocket, at near-light speeds?” he asked Horace excitedly.
“He’s saying it would still keep earth time,” said Horace. “Right?”
“But that’s impossible. Would the rocket even go? Would the astrolabe stop it from accelerating?”
“That would be impossible. What would be the mechanism that would negate that force? If the astrolabe can never—”
Horace stopped, a sudden thought occurring to him. He looked back at Mr. Meister. “Has anyone ever tried to send the astrolabe through the Fel’Daera?”
Brula grimaced. Mr. Meister’s eyes got even wider behind the oraculum as he gazed at Horace appreciatively.
“It has been attempted,” Falo said.
“By Samuel, I guess,” said Horace. “And?”
“And it cannot be sent, as you seem to have surmised already,” Falo replied. “It cannot travel into the future because it is too grounded in the present.”
Horace reasoned it through, letting his love for the logic of it push aside all his troubled questions about Samuel. He was even able to pretend that there wasn’t a whole audience of Altari watching and listening now, some of whom were no doubt hostile to the Fel’Daera, and its Keeper.
“So let me see if I understand,” he said after a few moments. “You want me to take the astrolabe into the Mothergate. You think I can make it through to one of the other Mothergates without getting lost in time, because the astrolabe is grounded in the present, here on earth as we know it.”
“Precisely,” Mr. Meister said. “Excellent.”
“But if the astrolabe refuses to be sent through the Fel’Daera,” Horace said slowly, “how can you be sure it will let itself be taken into the Mothergates?”
He caught a swift tiny movement from the corner of his eye. Down the row, his mom was pumping her fist, looking quietly proud.
“That is precisely the point,” Falo said. “An unsteady hand would not be able to take the astrolabe into the Mothergate, because they would be stepping onto a slippery slope for which they were not prepared, and which the astrolabe would reject. But your hand is steady, Horace Andrews. You are a Paragon. I would not send you into the Mothergate alone, but with the astrolabe in your hand, I am confident you can make it. You, and anyone traveling with you.”
“Okay,” said Horace simply. “Okay then.” He’d heard enough. Big, burly questions still simmered at the edges of his thought, but at the center of himself he felt nothing but a cool slab of determination. Fascination. A sense that this was the proper path. He tried not to suspect that this willingness might be partly because of one small detail—no one had told him he would actually need to use the Fel’Daera. But maybe it didn’t matter. “So . . . where is this astrolabe?”
His confidence sagged almost at once when he saw the look that passed between Mr. Meister and Falo, a reluctant glance of doubt.
“Oh my god,” said Chloe, watching them.
“It’s not here, is it?” Horace said. “It’s in the belly of some terrible beast we haven’t met yet, isn’t it?”
“Not exactly,” said Mr. Meister. “It is safe, in a manner of speaking. It remains where it has been these many years, where we intended it to remain safe forever. Behind the blue door, in the hall of the kairotics. In the Gallery.”
“The Gallery,” Horace said stupidly, unable to get a grip on the name.
“Back home, Horace,” Mrs. Hapsteade said. “Back home . . . in the Warren.”
Chapter Ten
The Same Fire
JOSHUA WOKE FROM DREAMING OF GROOMA.
He tried to grab hold of the dream as it slipped away from him, so that he could tell someone about it—although who would he tell? But the more he grabbed, the more it slipped away, and the more it slipped away the more he remembered that some of his troubled memories hadn’t been dreams at all.
The last twenty hours or so had been hazy and terrible, full of terrible things. This new place Dr. Jericho had brought him and Isabel to—a set of abandoned concrete silos along the Chicago Sanitary Canal, four and a half miles southwest of the pit by the lakeshore—was an altogether different place. There were far more tunnels, tunnels beneath tunnels, and more Riven. This was a lived-in place, one of the Riven’s nests. It smelled terribly of brimstone.
And this morning, though Joshua still wasn’t sure what had been a dream and what had been real, Grooma had finished the work he had started the night before. Dr. Jericho had made Joshua watch, again, and he would never forget the sight. Golden strands of the Medium dripping like streams of molten snowfla
kes into Isabel’s body. Clinging to her, disappearing into her flesh. And she’d been ready for it. Asking for it, desperately. It felt like it took all day, and near the end she’d started screaming. Screaming with an awful grin on her face—or had that been only in his dream? And then it was done. She’d become whatever it was Grooma had made her. Some kind of harp, maybe, an instrument only she could control.
She’d collapsed then, carried limp and laughing from the room by a hunchbacked Mordin. Now she slept, and according to Dr. Jericho might sleep another day at least, recovering from what had been done to her. The miraculous thing that had been done, according to Dr. Jericho.
And then she would fix the Mothergates.
Joshua rolled over on the thin mattress he’d been given, licking his lips. His mouth was dry and tacky. The Mordin standing guard grunted at him and looked away. The shining globe of the Laithe floated just above the bed, the blue-eyed rabbit asleep atop the meridian. The Riven still hadn’t taken the Laithe from him, despite what he’d done for Mr. Meister, but they’d been guarding him more carefully. The room he was in was far from a prison cell—it didn’t even have a proper door, just a wide opening that led into the tunnels beyond—but there’d been a Mordin at his side every second since arriving. In fact, usually there were two Mordins. One of them had slipped away.
“Where’s your friend?” Joshua asked, surprising himself. The sick rags of his dream, and the memories tangled inside it, had him feeling antsy.
“Ja’raka Sevlo asked to be informed when you were awake,” the Mordin said flatly, and then he blinked, slow as a frog. “You are awake.”
Moments later, Dr. Jericho himself arrived. He dismissed the guard and set a huge tray on the ground. Water, and food—an orange, and a kind of stringy dried meat that smelled of pepper. Joshua didn’t touch the meat, but drank the water until he thought he’d burst, then broke into the orange. Dr. Jericho sat in a chair opposite the bed, watching him silently.
“Where’s Isabel?” Joshua said at last, breaking the silence. Juice trickled down his chin.
