by Holly Lisle
Minerva became aware of Murp protesting bitterly in the tongue of cats from inside the strapped-down duffel bag — and of a steady stream of profanity which issued from her own mouth, as well.
“... gave me the idea I’d rather have a goddamn flying carpet than a nice four-wheel drive, anyway?” she snarled into the breeze. “The shithead who invented the idea of flying carpets spent too much time smoking dope from a hookah! Sumbitches are unstable! They flip!”
Murp, inside the duffel bag, yowled plaintive agreement every time the damned carpet hit an air pocket and bucked. Minerva would have thrown up if she could have done it without tipping herself over.
The sun beat down with merciless intensity. The wind whipping past her could have been heated in an oven. Her mouth was parched and full of sand, her eyes gritty. Dust caked on her skin, clogging the creases. Dust turned her clothing gray.
Ahead, the Unweaver’s domain loomed. All sunlight died at that border; the Unweaver’s wall was oily, creeping smoke held back by an invisible membrane. Minerva tried to suppress a shudder. The compass pointed straight into the center of that greasy, hellish maelstrom — she gripped her compass like a lifeline and thought of her kids.
“I — can — do — this,” she said through clenched teeth. “I can. I will.”
She wished Darryl were with her. It was odd — she felt closer to him at that moment, though he was a universe away, than she had in years. Knowing he loved her helped. Knowing a lot of the distance between them the past few years had been her fault helped too. She could remember why she had once loved him — and finally she began to realize she still did. There are a few facts in life a woman really needs to be sure of, she thought. One is that she loves her husband. That isn’t always as easy to know as it ought to be. The other is that he still honestly loves her — and that can be even harder.
The flying carpet was nearly to the smoke-walled domain of the Unweaver when it began to lose altitude. Thunderheads piled higher as she approached; lightning flashed between the towering clouds. A quiet moan of dismay escaped Minerva. Then the carpet pitched through the smoke wall and tumbled to the ground.
Minerva unstrapped the duffel bag and let Murp out first. Then she released herself from the carpet belts, and stood, and rummaged through the duffel for something to tie over her face. The air in the Unweaver’s demesne — well, wasn’t. The place stank of sulphur and rotting fish and unwashed bodies in a crowded room. She couldn’t see much. The dense gray haze and the clouds overhead blocked out most of the light.
She felt a sudden blaze of hatred for Talleos. He would have left her children trapped in this place, while he got whatever it was he was after — no matter how long it took. Trapped in this stinking darkness, this hot hell—
For an instant, her anguished longing for her children nearly overwhelmed her. She could feel their cheeks, soft as rose petals, pressed against her face, their arms wrapped around her neck as they hugged her good-night. She could feel their hands, soft and fragile and tiny, clasped in her own. She could feel their weight in her arms and on her hip, the weight of a procession of babies grown bigger, who still wanted to be picked up and held and kissed “to make it better” — her children. Hers. For whom she would move heaven and earth.
For whom she was going to have to.
So be it.
The magic animating the flying carpet had failed within the borders of the Unweaver’s domain. That had been Darryl’s magic — but the fact that it ceased working was a mystery that needed to be solved before she dared go on. Did no magic work within this place? Was there something about just the flying spell that didn’t work? Or — had something happened to Darryl?
She rummaged through her duffel bag again, this time looking for vellum and pencils. She was almost out. She frowned. Somehow, she had forgotten she was so near the end of her supply.
Now what?
Minerva considered, then got out the last scrap of vellum and the last pencil. In an unused space, she sketched a good paint box and a thick sketchpad, all the while concentrating on supplies — like the energy source in her armored buggy — that could not be depleted. She watched as a closed paintbox and a luminous sketchpad shimmered into existence before her like fireflies in formation.
So magic works. I can’t think of any way to test specific problems with the carpet. I guess that means I need to figure out a way to see if something has happened to Darryl.
She sat in the the hot, stinking darkness and considered. He’s managed to see what I’ve been doing, she finally decided. Perhaps I can use a magic mirror to check on him. She could draw herself a little hand mirror, something portable.
She opened the paintbox — and a rainbow streamed out, washing against the ugliness around her like a tide of hope. Tinkerbell and all her friends in party getup couldn’t have been more beautiful, nor could they have appeared at a better time. She peered down into the surprising depths of the little paint box, and found several good mohair brushes and pots of light in every possible color.
Bewildered, she pulled out one of the little glass pots and unscrewed the lid. Ruby light, rich and deep as the heart of good red wine held up to sunlight, bright as the soul of a gemstone, glowed in the pot. A radiant overflow spilled up and out, and streaked the greasy gray air around her with one thin line of pure loveliness. She took up a mohair brush, and dipped it into the center of the glowing stuff, and lifted it out. The bristles, coated in light, shimmered and flashed like living things. Minerva waved the tip of the brush through the air once, fascinated, and the brush left a solid trail of fire hanging in the air. Mesmerized, she formed another line, and then another, fashioning them into a mirror of light. She covered the red pot, and opened one of silver — and filled the center of her mirror with glimmering fairy dust.
The mirror, completed, hung before her in the air, too beautiful to be believed. Minerva reached out a trembling finger to touch it, and it slipped into her hand, radiantly warm. She stared into glowing surface, and first she saw a ghost of her own reflection; but that fell away in an instant to reveal a dark scar on the surface of a planet, then the whole of the planet spinning in space, then all of space... and then, with terrifying speed, another planet, a continent, a building, and a man.
Darryl. Lying tied, straitjacketed, seemingly unconscious, with policemen and orderlies and a shrink she knew and despised standing over him.
“Son of a bitch,” she muttered.
He hadn’t been able to come to her. There was no gate near where she was. She looked from the box of paints to the reflection of her husband held prisoner. If he were with her, he could help her save the kids. She didn’t think he would be able to help her, or himself, straitjacketed in the psych ward of the hospital.
A gate between the universes; she’d traveled on such a thing coming to Eyrith. It hadn’t seemed like much at the time. Could she make a gate?
She took out the biggest paintpot, full of white light. In the air she painted a circle that began above her head and stretched to her feet, as wide as her arms would stretch to either side. She completed the perimeter, then spiraled the line inward, seeing herself at one end of the coil of light and Darryl at the other. With a sucking sound, the murk cleared from her tunnel. The darkness was held back by the glowing spiral, and the tunnel terminated in a bright light on the other end.
She stuffed the drawing pad into the duffel bag and slung both duffel and paintbox over her right shoulder. Then, still armed with her paintbrush and her container of white light, she stepped into the tunnel. “C’mon, Murp,” she said.
The cat mrrrped, and trotted at her heels.
She walked, until it seemed she was making no progress. Then she began to trot. The far end of the tunnel, still bright, seemed no nearer. She ran. Murp, bitching heartily, fell behind. She stopped and looked back, he ran to catch up, and when she turned again, she was at the other end.
Magic, she thought. Arrrgh!
She did a quick bit of magic
to make sure she would be visible to the people in the room. Then she stepped out of the tunnel, and the blue dragon who’d been standing by the door saw her first. “Well, goddamn,” he said, and gifted her with a crocodile grin. “Nice timing.”
“Hi,” she answered and pushed a policeman out of her way to get to her husband. “Darryl,” she said, “can you hear me?”
“Ma’am,” the police officer said, “how did you get in here? You aren’t supposed to be in here.”
The shrink puffed up and said to the orderlies, “Get her out — right now.” Then he looked at her more closely, and grew pale.
Minerva pointed a finger at the doctor. “Look, asshole,” she snarled. “You know damn well he’s my husband. I’ve come to get him.”
“His wife is dead,” Dr. Folchek said. His voice wavered.
The police looked from Darryl to Folchek to Minerva, faces showing bewilderment.
“Scary thought, isn’t it?” Minerva grinned at them, and shook Darryl. “Babe, wake up,” she said.
One of the policemen tried to grab her, but his hands went right through her. His scream cut into the air, high-pitched and wavering. It ended abruptly when he fainted and collapsed to the floor.
“Anyone else want to try?” Minerva was in a bit of a Clint Eastwood mood. She wanted to urge them to make her day. She wanted to wreak havoc. The simple fact of her presence, though, would probably be enough for that.
“She’s a hallucination,” Folchek said, at the same moment Darryl sat up out of his body and looked around the room.
“Minerva,” he yelled, and flung his arms around her.
He felt warm and wonderful. She hugged him close, trying not to look too hard at the other Darryl, the one who lay on the table, not breathing, beginning to turn a waxy, ashy gray. “Babe,” she said, “we’ve got to get moving. We’ve got to get the kids.”
Folchek twitched, staring between the dying Darryl on the table and the living one that walked toward the tunnel of light with his wife. “No,” the man said. “This is a form of mass hypnosis. A hysteria-induced hallucination. None of you are seeing what you think you see.”
“Wait up,” Birkwelch said. “I can see I don’t need to hang around here anymore.”
Minerva laughed and all of them ran for the tunnel.
“No!” Minerva heard Folchek wail as they passed into the suspended link between the Universes. “No! Call a code, for godsakes! Quick! He isn’t breathing!”
She didn’t look back. She couldn’t. Darryl was with her — the part of him that she could bring was right beside her... alive and breathing and real. What had just happened in the universe she left behind, she wasn’t ready to think about.
Not yet.
* * *
The hot wind gusted and spiraled around Darryl, Minerva, Birkwelch, and the cat.
“Can it possibly all be like this?” Darryl’s feet dragged; the clothes Minerva had magicked up for him clung to his skin. He plodded unthinkingly. The ground shifted and bubbled under him, while in front of him landmarks appeared and disappeared with terrible regularity.
“No,” Birkwelch said. The dragon favored Darryl with a slit-eyed grimace. “It’s bound to get worse.”
“Thanks, dragon.” Minerva, a few steps ahead, didn’t bother turning around. Darryl could tell by the set of her shoulders she was pissed off — probably because of Birkwelch’s big mouth, but not necessarily. He slogged faster and caught up with her.
He kissed her. “Babe, something’s wrong. Anything I can fix?”
She turned a tired, sweaty face to him and pushed her slipping glasses up her nose. “There has to be a faster way to find him than this. Has to be. We’re wearing ourselves out before we even get where we’re going. How the hell can we win our kids back if we’re too tired to fight him?” She looked away, and her shoulders sagged. “But I guess I’m too tired to think. I haven’t come up with anything that could work.”
Darryl pulled her against him and stared past her, into the endless fog-shrouded gloom. While he watched, a hulking rock plinth heaved itself up out of the quaggy ground a few feet away, towered upward until its top vanished stories above him, in the gray haze, then sank into the ground again. Nothing of it remained. It carried out the entire cycle in utter silence.
“She’s right,” Birkwelch said softly. “Wandering around in his murk like this, you’re playing his game. You might wander forever without finding him, following your little compass the way you are.”
Minerva pushed herself away from Darryl’s chest and looked at the dragon, surprise evident on her face. “How can that be?”
Birkwelch sat cautiously on the shifting ground and blew a short, blue-white blast of fire into the air. Even he looked tired and cranky and disgusted, Darryl noticed. “I don’t imagine the Unweaver’s home, or fortress, or whatever he occupies, has any fixed location within this place. I suspect his place is wandering around in this goddamned soup, and we’re chasing after it.” The dragon sprawled on his belly in a graceless flop, and snorted.
“Why didn’t you say something, if that’s what you thought?” Minerva snapped.
“Lady, I figured if you could have done something about it, you would have. And you just said you couldn’t think of anything to do — so my bitching would have been pretty pointless, wouldn’t it?” The dragon closed his eyes, and dozed.
Darryl noted with alarm that the instant the dragon drifted off to sleep, his color bleached from blue to gray, and he began to sink into the muck.
“Birkwelch!” he and Minerva yelled at the same time.
The dragon’s eyes flew open, and he heaved himself upright. Some of his color came back. The tips of his wings and the tip of his tail looked hazy for an instant, then solidified. His head snapped from side to side, looking for danger. When he didn’t see anything, he stared at Darryl. “I wanted to take a nap. Just a little nap. Couldn’t let me have a few minutes of peace, could you?”
He glared at the two of them.
“Look at yourself,” Darryl whispered. “You nearly disappeared.”
The dragon stretched out one taloned foreleg and gaped in horror at the gunmetal gray color it had become. “Shit!” he whispered. “This place started to unweave me.” The dragon shivered violently and stared into the gloom around him with horrified eyes.
Darryl said, “I might have an idea of how to get ourselves to the Unweaver’s door. Minerva, you have a pencil and paper in that paintbox?”
“I have some paper.” She pulled out the sketchpad she’d created for herself before she discovered her paints worked on air. “And a pencil or two in the duffel, I think.”
She shuffled through the contents of the duffel bag and came up with the required pencil.
Darryl held the sketchpad in his hands, noting the ordinariness of the rust-red Bienfang cover and the extraordinary glow that emanated from the edges of the paper beneath it. Radioactive art pad, he thought, and gingerly opened the cover.
White light streamed off the first blank page and burned a tunnel upward through the gloom. “Wow!” Darryl flipped the cover shut as fast as he could, afraid something in that murk might notice. “What the hell kind of paper is that?”
“Um—” Minerva managed half a grin. “Haven’t the faintest. I wanted something that wouldn’t run out. I would assume that’s it.”
Darryl crossed his ankles and dropped to the ground; he rested the tablet on one thigh, and began to write.
Out— he scratched, but though he pressed hard on the surface of the paper, no letters appeared. He traced the shapes of the letters again, and swore. “This pencil doesn’t write.”
Minerva and Birkwelch pointed at the air in front of them. Glowing letters burned there with the same brilliant, cool white as the “paper” on which they had been written.
Out Out, Darryl read.
“Damned spot?” Minerva asked.
“Er — no. Not what I was going to say.”
“Thought not,” the
dragon muttered.
“Well, I guess it does work after all.” Darryl put pencil to paper again, and wrote:
Out of the mist, born from the formless ground, a road arose. It was carved of a single piece of stone, raised high above the murk — beautiful, indestructible, and unsinkable. It glowed with a radiance that burned away the sullen fogs and unending gloom. And it led straight to the Unweaver in his lair.
“Yes!” Minerva said.
Birkwelch, too, seemed impressed. “Nice piece of rock, fella. I wouldn’t have thought you had anything that pretty in your imagination.”
The road was raised like an ancient Roman aqueduct, delicate arches holding up a span of stone strung over them like glowing white ribbon. “Really,” the dragon continued, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a pretty piece of engineering work.”
Thanks,” Darryl said. He was pretty impressed, too.
“Only two problems that I see,” Birkwelch added. “First, you didn’t make any way to get up there.”
Darryl sighed. “Yeah. I’ll have to fix that. What was the second problem?”
“The Unweaver knows for sure now that at least one of you is here.”
Darryl and Minerva exchanged glances. “That’s very bad, isn’t it?” Minerva asked.
Birkwelch said, “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”
I hate dragons, Darryl thought.
He focused on his paper, and wrote another line:
A ramp curved up from the ground at Darryl’s feet to the road high overhead.
Darryl pictured the curving beauty of the white stone ramp; the elegant, simple bellied sweep of upreaching path. His words burned themselves into the sky; his thoughts transformed to solid form: the ramp, seamless and perfect, lay before him.
The dragon, with a sly grin, spread his wings and flew up to the road above. From overhead, he called down, “Hurry up already.”
Minerva turned to Darryl. “Gets on your nerves a bit, doesn’t he?”
