by Ted Sanders
A bellowing groan rocked her. A low, aching cry of pain—stubborn and surprised—and then actual pain. Agony. A callous finger probing a healing wound, pulling it apart. April scrambled to her feet, hand pressed against the Ravenvine. A flood of bewildered torment poured through it, filling her.
Isabel, somewhere in some far corner of the world. Standing before a distant Mothergate, weaving the first threads of a flow meant to yank the Mothergate wide and nail it open. It felt worse than April had imagined it would, far worse. The Mothergate was groaning in protest like a great wooden ship foundering on rocks.
This was not a dream. This was happening. Dr. Jericho’s terrible, brilliant plan was under way.
April tried to calm herself, every muscle rigid with pain. The Wardens had a plan too. A good one. The only one. Horace and Chloe.
She turned her back on the Mothergate. She gritted her teeth against the tortured keening that billowed through her, slow as whalesong and sharp as a scalpel. Help was coming. She would bring it. Just wait. Help was coming.
She launched herself into the Veil.
Chapter Thirteen
Through the Mothergate
“IF WE DON’T COME BACK,” CHLOE ANNOUNCED, “IT’LL PROBABLY be because my mother killed us.”
Beside her, Horace gazed up at the black mass of the Mothergate, clutching the astrolabe. “Let’s hope that’s why,” he said.
Chloe let herself frown at him. She had never had a lot of control over her facial expressions—or so she’d been told—and Horace definitely deserved her most miserable frown for that comment. She’d been kidding about the mom thing. Mostly. But it was no joke for Horace to suggest that something worse might happen to them as they prepared to step into the depths of the Mothergate. Horace caught her frown but only shrugged at her. He was barely sorry.
Falo stood beside them, her tall shadow seeming to dance as the Veil of Lura slid over her. “You will come back,” she said. “A Paragon of the Fel’Daera holds the astrolabe, and a Paragon of the Alvalaithen goes to meet her mother. A mother who wants nothing more than to see her daughter safe.”
Another frown, then, just for Falo. Falo saw it too, but didn’t even have the decency to shrug.
April seemed the most nervous of all, but Chloe wasn’t exactly sure where her worry lay. She’d sounded the alarm, alerting them that their greatest fears were coming true. With whatever awful power Grooma had given her, Isabel was attempting to repair one of the Mothergates. Horace and Chloe were going to stop her, in some remote Altari stronghold halfway around the world. In Crete, apparently.
“Where are we going again, exactly?” Chloe asked.
“Nlon’ka,” Falo said, the word falling out of her lips like a rock into water. “Though it was once a great Altari city, Nlon’ka is now all but abandoned. The Nevren keeps the Riven out, but since Isabel isn’t a Keeper, she likely faced no resistance when she made her way through the Veil to the Mothergate hidden there.”
“And once we get there, our plan is to . . . what, exactly?” asked Chloe. Not that she hadn’t been thinking of a plan. But planning wasn’t exactly a strength of hers. In fact, sometimes she thought her greatest strength might be not planning.
“Stop her,” said Falo. “Use your powers. Use whatever you can. But do not underestimate the power of words. Isabel is likely to be alone, which means she’ll have no Riven whispering into her ear. Because Joshua cannot open a portal into a location underground, he would have brought Isabel—and any Riven that accompanied her—close to the entrance of Nlon’ka. But Isabel would then have had to pass through the Nevren within Nlon’ka to get to the Mothergate. No Riven could have come with her.”
“Why won’t she be expecting us?” Horace asked. “Doesn’t she know that the Mothergates are actually . . . gates?”
“Travel through the Mothergates is rare,” Falo explained. “True accounts of such travel have been told only in whispers, and those whispers have faded into rumor.”
Horace studied the Mothergate. “Time is slippery inside,” he said. “The astrolabe should fix that. But won’t space be slippery too, then? Once we’re inside, how will we even know where to go? And how will we get there?”
“Once you are within, you must get to the other Mothergate at once,” Falo replied.
That was no kind of answer. “Will we see it?” Chloe insisted. “Is it empty in there?”
“Quite the opposite,” said Falo. “But I won’t describe what you must witness yourself. Stay together, and stay true to the astrolabe. Get to where you need to go, when you need to get there. And remember that travel inside the Mothergate is not like travel in the outside world. You must travel with your thoughts, not your body.”
“No cabs, then,” Chloe said. “No escalators.”
“That is beside the point,” said Falo. “The exit you seek might seem near or far. That distance is an illusion. You might envision yourself walking to it. The walking, too, is an illusion.”
Chloe turned to Horace for help, but he hardly seemed to be listening, still fixated on the Mothergate.
Falo tried again. “When a conscious mind enters the Mothergate, the Medium within presents itself as a kind of stage,” she said. “Many stages, upon which all the stories of the multiverse are being told. You must be one of those stories.”
“I’ve got a story,” Chloe said, not at all liking what she was hearing. “Once upon a time, we made it through the Mothergate. The end.”
Falo spread her elegant hands. “That should suffice.”
“Oh my god,” said Chloe. “Horace, are you hearing this?”
“I think I understand,” April said cautiously. “The thread of the story begins here, and it ends in Nlon’ka. The path between them—through the Mothergates—is the story of how you got there.” She wrinkled her nose. “But the path doesn’t matter. Inside the Mothergates, the path doesn’t exist, only the story. And the story is in your mind.”
“I don’t know if anybody’s noticed,” Chloe said, “but I do things. I’m not a storyteller.”
“You’re not a storyteller, no,” Horace said suddenly. “But I am.”
Chloe waited for him to explain, feeling angry and—okay—maybe a little bit panicked. Horace wasn’t a storyteller. Horace was . . .
And then she realized he had one hand on the Fel’Daera.
He shrugged at her. “What we’re talking about isn’t so different from looking into the future, is it? Two ends of a thread. A story in between.”
“You can’t use the Fel’Daera to get us there,” she said, not knowing at all if that was true.
“I’m not talking about using the Fel’Daera. I’m talking about using the thing that makes the Fel’Daera work for me. A willed path. A story I know the beginning and the end of, but nothing in between.”
“Yes,” said Falo, beaming down at him. “Let there be nothing in between. Go now. Get there fast. Stop Isabel however you can.” She stepped back, gesturing to the Mothergate.
“We’re going,” Chloe growled, furious that her usual reckless confidence wasn’t catching fire like it normally did. She still wasn’t sure she understood, wasn’t sure she wanted to understand. She blamed Isabel for the messy doubts that were clouding her now, and she was pretty sure the woman deserved it. “I never said I wasn’t going.”
And then Horace took Chloe’s hand. “Do you feel that?” he asked her.
For one stupid moment, Chloe thought he meant his hand, and how just the feel of it—maddeningly—crumpled her doubts into a tiny, tossable ball. She sort of hated that he seemed to know it.
But then she felt something else. Something steady and firm, pulsing out of Horace and into her. And whether it was some strength of his, or the Fel’Daera’s, or the heavy grounded sweep of the astrolabe, it didn’t much matter. She still wasn’t catching fire, no, but she felt suddenly calm and sure. She felt, weirdly, like an arrow nocked and drawn in Ravana’s bow. Maybe that was fire enough. Horace would take the
m true—where and when they needed to go.
And the rest would be up to her.
She squeezed Horace’s hand as hard she could, wondering if she could hurt him. Just a little.
“Don’t mess this up,” she said. “We’re supposed to be the heroes, or something.”
Horace laughed and drew her tight to his side. And then either she took the first step or he did, and they walked into the Mothergate together without saying good-bye.
A yawning, endless sweep of gold, as blank as the humour. A blast of sound like a vast wall of glass breaking into silence as they passed through it.
They emerged into a kaleidoscope.
Falo had said the space inside the Mothergates was far from empty. It turned out that was an understatement.
They found themselves adrift in a sea of colliding, overlapping worlds. Chloe thought immediately of sea ice, broken and jagged and piled high upon itself, pushed together in grinding heaps by relentless tides.
Distant mountains groaned into the sky and then toppled. A forest, or something like a forest, rolled over like a breaking wave, all around them. A great stretch of liquid—an ocean?—filled and drained. Phantom buildings materialized out of thin air, only to fold beneath other structures demanding the same space—normal earth-type buildings, yes, but also buildings that were utterly strange and foreign. Alien. Towers of glass looming overhead, chunky works of stone, great flat expanses that looked alive but had obviously been crafted. Streets and paths and bridges presented themselves, then bent out of existence. Entire cities drifted past them, surrounding them, and then were swallowed as new landscapes arose. The sky filled itself with earth, and the earth broke apart. The ground split beneath them into rivers of red. Everything was here, piled high and buried deep, ever shifting.
None of it touched them.
The only thing missing was life itself. Just as Falo had promised, they saw no one in any of the storyscapes that churned around them like the dreams of giants. Even so, everything they saw seemed to hum with consciousness, intention, history. This was the witnessed multiverse—or all its ghosts, anyway—gathered and compacted like snowfall into an ancient glacier, grinding slowly and endlessly past.
Behind them—except there was no behind here—a white fracture like a forgotten patch of canvas seemed to yawn. A crack. Rivers of this tumbling world poured into it, vanishing. It didn’t matter, Chloe knew, because there was always more, always emerging, stage after stage.
This blank patch was the crack they’d just come through. The Mothergate. How long ago? It could have been ages, here in this place. Or it could have been less than a second, but ages outside. She turned to look at it again, but now the patch was gone, a golden hill of head-high grass swelling in its place. Chloe panicked for a moment, remembering that Falo had said she’d lost three years when she’d come through the Mothergate.
But then she flexed her hand, squeezing. Horace squeezed her back. And now she saw him, Horace as he was just a minute ago, Horace as he always was.
Or no. Horace as he would be. Horace as he could be. Changing and changing, always staying the same. His face shifted like a gallery of pictures—Horace as a child, an old man, a young man. Horace on this path or another, subtle changes to his skin and hair and color. A scar here, an alarming gauntness there, a cheerful glow or a stoic sadness. All of it melding, fusing, fluttering past, a parade of every possible Horace that could be, or maybe was. But on every face, the same look of awe as he gazed back at her. His dark brown eyes—always the same eyes, whatever happened to the rest of him—roved her face with wonder.
“How do I look?” she asked him, and was surprised to find that her voice could be heard.
“Strong,” he said. “Frightening.” He watched her. He changed and stayed the same, just as she was too. “Beautiful,” he said.
And she didn’t even care that he was saying it.
At last she tore her eyes away, turning to the madly churning worlds around them. “I feel like the brochure didn’t really do this place justice,” she said.
“Not remotely,” said Horace. He looked down at his feet. “There are currents tugging at us. Do you feel them?”
Chloe didn’t.
“Flows of time,” he explained. “Fast and slow, pushing and pulling.” He opened his mouth and lifted his briefly bearded chin. A dwindling sun roared past above them, turning swiftly red. “But it’s okay.” He raised his hand, still clenched around the astrolabe. “We’re a rock.”
She nodded at him, grateful and proud. “There are other doors here, Horace,” she said, putting words to a thought that was only now forming. “A million doors. Billions. I can feel them.”
“Mothergates, you mean?”
“No, not like that. It’s like . . .” But there were no words. Chloe didn’t even understand how she knew these doors were there, shining in the seams between the colliding realms that convulsed around them. Something in her flesh knew these doors. Or whatever passed for flesh in this place. Something about being the Keeper of the Alvalaithen. Her flesh told her that there were passages everywhere, paths she could take. It felt like there were different possibilities for nearly every atom in her body. It was frightening, invigorating.
“We don’t need those doors,” Horace said.
“I know,” Chloe lied. “We need to get to the other Mothergate.”
Horace smiled. “And since our need was so great, we did manage to get there.”
A vast and gentle herd of sand dunes rolled past them like a pod of dusty whales. They melted away, scattering into whispers and revealing a city of green stone. The city was already before Chloe’s eyes. It was nothing special, this city, just another stage. But there—or here, rather—she suddenly saw another slash of vacant space. Part of the same door they’d come through before, another crack of light around its edge. A sky of purple clouds dripped slowly into the discolored crack like paint, fading into absence.
“The Mothergate,” she said. “You did it.”
Horace laughed. “I guess I did. Are we ready?”
But being ready had been part of the story from the start. No sooner had he spoken than they fell into the crack, or the crack fell upon them. A blinding white cosmos, another shattering wall of sound.
They stumbled out into a dark sea, solid unchanging ground beneath their feet. They were through.
But they’d emerged into a lightning storm.
Jagged streams of golden light surrounded them, streaking past. Chloe swore she could hear thunder booming, and the crackle of electricity. But the storm was silent, and now she found her bearings. These were Isabel’s flows, weaves of the Medium, hurtling into the Mothergate they’d just left, trying to pin it wide open. There were colors laced in among the gold. Colors that didn’t have names, colors Chloe had seen before, watching Brian work with the Medium back at the Warren. Horace couldn’t see the colors, she knew, and with that thought, her rage finally kindled, blessedly. She could only see the colors because she was the daughter of a Tuner, of a would-be Dorvala.
Isabel’s daughter.
Abruptly the storm subsided. The streams of light vanished, revealing the deep, rippling ocean of the Veil. The Mothergate stood atop a low raised platform, surrounded by a wide circle of broad steps, descending in every direction. This was Nlon’ka.
And there was Isabel.
Her mother stood alone, at the bottom of the steps, hands hanging slack at her side. Her wild red hair was drawn back tight behind her head, revealing a face that Chloe knew mostly from her dreams, from a few worn photographs, from a handful of gut-twisting hours over the last several days. That face had always been wild, always fierce, too uncomfortably like Chloe’s own.
But now it had changed. Isabel’s eyes had gone deeper into the wild, into something closer to madness.
“Chloe,” Isabel said, her voice full of wonder.
Chloe couldn’t speak. Not yet. She looked back at the light-streaked black chasm of the Mothergate,
memories of the jumbled landscapes within still clinging to her like dreams.
Her gut heaved at what she saw now. Partway around the edge of the Mothergate—though it wasn’t even meant to have an edge—a gruesome stretch of flowing gold swept out like a curtain blown in through an open window and frozen in place. Although it was thick where it emerged from the black, it thinned as it rose high into the air above, dwindling into a hundred zigzagging fingers, each one like a ragged row of hasty stitches. Colors bled from between each stitch, crimson and rust and scarlet and mahogany and a thousand other shades of red-but-not-red. This was how Isabel was doing it. Peeling away sheets of the Medium as it flowed through the Mothergate and sewing it to the very fabric of this world. Chloe didn’t need to be a Maker to know that this was wrong, that it was violent beyond reason, that it was the work of a desperate hand unable to do anything else.
And that it would work.
If Isabel finished the job, the Mothergate would be splayed open like a gutted carcass, unable to close.
Chloe wanted to puke.
“Chloe,” Isabel said again. She sounded grateful now, happy to see her. As if there could ever be a universe where that would be a thing.
Chloe turned.
“You came through the Mothergate,” said Isabel, shuffling closer. “You came to see how I’m doing it. I’m fixing it.”
“No, Mom,” Chloe said, the first time she’d spoken the word without venom for as long as she could remember. Her rage was a coiled tiger. “You’re not fixing it. And that’s not remotely why I’m here.”
Isabel’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “They’ve tricked you,” she said, as if she was gravely disappointed. “The Wardens have you believing that the Mothergates can’t be fixed.”
“And the Riven have you believing that you’re something you’re not. That you can do things that can’t be done.”
Isabel sank into a cloud of outrage. Her eyes flicked to Horace, like she was just now seeing him.
