The Harp and the Ravenvine

by Ted Sanders

  “And there is no actual falling,” Chloe said.

  “No indeed. But you will not be able to escape the sensation, and you must not hope to save yourself. Instead, you must believe you do not need saving.”

  “So this time it’s ‘swallow your fear or be spat back out,’” Horace said.

  “Just so.”

  Chloe eyed the doorway with her typical fierce lack of respect. She stepped right up to the edge of the darkness and stuck her leg into it. Her foot vanished completely from sight, as if it had been amputated. “Oublimort,” she said. “That sounds like French words mashed together. It’s like ‘forget death’ or something.”

  “Quite right,” Mr. Meister said. “Very good.”

  “Well, that’s the story of my life,” Chloe said, and she stepped into the black.

  PART TWO

  The Sundered Bloom

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Brian’s Brain

  WHEN CHLOE STEPPED INTO THE SHADOW OF THE OUBLIMORT, Horace had no doubt she would pass through on her first try. She was as stubborn as she was brave, and if all she had to do was stay calm, surely she would have no difficulties. To his great surprise, however, Chloe disappeared into the dark doorway and reappeared instantly, heading back the way she’d come. Her eyes and mouth were open, her hand clutching the front of her shirt.

  When she saw Horace and Mr. Meister, Chloe’s shocked face collapsed into a knot of irritation. “Dammit,” she said.

  “Remember, resist the urge to open your eyes,” said Mr. Meister.

  “Yeah, I heard you the first time.” Chloe whirled around and marched into the shadow again—but again she went in and came right back out. This time, to Horace’s great surprise, Mr. Meister actually snickered softly.

  “Dammit!” Chloe cried, blazing with fury. Horace bit his lip to keep from smiling. Now the Alvalaithen’s wings flickered into motion, and Chloe turned to the oublimort for a third time. Horace half expected Mr. Meister to stop her from attempting the doorway with the dragonfly activated, but the old man said nothing. And it didn’t matter—once again Chloe disappeared and returned in the blink of an eye, the dragonfly still whirring. This time she said nothing, just balled her hands into fists and bobbed up and down angrily as only she could, her feet sinking into the stone floor beneath her and popping back up again, over and over.

  “I guess there’s something you can’t go through after all,” Horace teased. He wasn’t used to seeing Chloe fail.

  “It’s harder than it sounds,” she snapped at him. “Let’s see you do it.”

  Horace shrugged. “Why not?” he said.

  Chloe stepped aside, still fuming, as Horace approached the wall of blackness. He stopped and studied the oublimort, considering. There was nothing to see, but of course he’d been wondering how it might work, and he already had a hypothesis. If the oublimort made you feel like you were falling, but actually you weren’t, that meant it had to be messing with your senses. And earlier that very day, Horace had gained some experience in having his senses messed with, courtesy of his mother. Horace had a hunch that the oublimort worked in a similar way.

  Horace closed his eyes. He stepped into the doorway, into utter darkness. As his foot came down, instead of feeling firm stone, he felt . . . nothing. He started to fall forward. He flashed back to the last time he’d had this unpleasant sensation, at his cousins’ cabin two summers before, when he’d walked off the edge of the porch in the dead of night, thinking the stairs were there. He’d shrieked—yes, shrieked—and fallen six feet onto a gravel slope below.

  But he wasn’t actually falling now. His brain merely thought he was. Horace squeezed his eyes shut, refusing to panic, and let his step continue, a step that according to all his senses was into thin air—the longest step he’d ever taken.

  He felt himself pivot until he was plunging headfirst, falling from a great height at a great speed, and it was all he could do not to look. He was about to throw up his hands, bracing for an unseen crash, when his foot landed, ever so lightly, on solid ground. He felt bizarrely as though he’d rotated a hundred and eighty degrees, and was now walking upside down on the underside of the path he’d started on, heading back in the opposite direction. But he took another step, and the sensation faded, and he opened his eyes.

  He was through. Ahead, the square stone tunnel widened and continued. He could see bright light thirty yards ahead. Behind him, the dark void of the oublimort loomed. Through it, he heard Chloe’s voice, shrill and angry: “Dammit!” Clearly she’d realized he’d made it—and on his first try, too.

  “It’s easy,” he called back, and then grimaced as he realized how that must sound. He pictured the face Chloe would be making. “It’s only two seconds, and the landing is soft. It’s just an illusion.”

  There was a long pause, and then another angry roar from Chloe. Apparently she’d tried and failed again. “That’s more than two seconds!” she shouted.

  She was clearly frustrated. She knew better than to question Horace on matters of time. “It only feels like that,” Horace assured her. He did a quick and dirty calculation in his head, using an equation he’d memorized for falling objects. Take the number of seconds, multiply it by itself, and then multiply that by sixteen. In this case, two times two was four, and four times sixteen was sixty-four. Sixty-four feet, or about six stories—that’s how far something would fall in just two seconds. Horace was sure that if he fell out of a sixth-floor window, it would feel like a lot more than two seconds had passed before he hit the ground. But two seconds it would be.

  Chloe’s voice rang out again. “I’m going around,” she said, and then apparently spoke to Mr. Meister. “Can I go around? How big is this thing?”

  “I do not know how far it extends, exactly,” Mr. Meister replied, his voice thoughtful. “But one would think that encountering the oublimort while embedded in solid stone would be a distinctly unpleasant experience. Perhaps even a dangerous one.”

  “I’m having a distinctly unpleasant experience right now,” Chloe said.

  “Nonetheless, I suggest you keep trying.”

  But it was another three minutes before Chloe finally made it. When she came through at last, Horace almost burst out laughing—she’d pulled the collar of her shirt up over the top of her head, covering her face so that only a small round crown of black hair poked out the neck hole. Her pale belly showed, the tip of the scar the golem had given her just peeking out, pink and coarse. “Don’t tell me I’m back again,” she said, her voice muffled inside her shirt. “I swear I didn’t open them.”

  “You made it,” Horace said. “You’re here.”

  Chloe yanked her shirt down, her head popping into sight again. She looked around, clearly relieved. “Oh, thank god,” she said. A moment later, Mr. Meister stepped out of the oublimort, opening his eyes calmly at the precise moment his face emerged from the gloom. “And here we are,” he said, as if there had been no delay whatsoever. “Come. Brian’s workshop is just ahead.” He swept past them, leading the way.

  As they followed, Chloe shot a nasty look back at the oublimort and then thrust a finger in Horace’s face, glaring. “This is not a thing we discuss, okay?” she whispered insistently.

  “Hey, everybody has issues,” Horace replied. “Better you had yours here instead of someplace where something bad could’ve happened, right?”

  “Something bad did just happen,” she said. “Repeatedly.”

  The tunnel opened up into a brightly lit space, a sprawling natural chamber in the rock that twisted and rambled in every direction. Strangely, a half dozen ordinary fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling, like the kind you’d see in a garage. And beneath them—at least to Horace’s science-loving mind—lay a veritable hall of wonders.

  The chamber was a jumble of tables and shelves and workbenches, all piled high with tools and equipment both familiar and exotic. A microscope, a sledgehammer, a rock tumbler, a balance scale, an assortment of saws and knives. He spo
tted what looked like a kiln in one corner, and in another—unmistakably—an anvil. One long table seemed to be covered entirely in jagged sheets of stained glass. Another held a row of bins, a couple of which had clearly come from the House of Answers. Unfamiliar objects and devices, some of them obviously Tanu, were scattered here and there around the room, many in various states of disassembly.

  Against one wall was a kind of living area, with a kitchen table, a ratty green couch—Horace shuddered to imagine carrying that through the oublimort—and a couple of bean bag chairs. An ancient-looking TV sat on an equally ancient-looking end table, and there was a framed picture on the wall of Thomas Edison standing next to an elephant. Horace frowned at that one.

  Brian himself stood bent over one of the workbenches, focusing intently through a pair of magnifying goggles he wore on top of his regular glasses. His ponytail had fallen forward over his shoulder. He held some sort of tweezerlike tool in one hand and a minuscule chunk of something golden in the other. He wore a black T-shirt that made him look even paler than Horace remembered.

  Mr. Meister cleared his throat. “My apologies. I hope we’re not interrupting anything delicate.”

  Brian didn’t move an inch. “So delicate,” he said, “that the entire fate of the world may hang in the balance.” With the tool, he pinched cautiously at the small gold nugget, as if he were unwrapping a tiny present, and stared closely at it for several more seconds. He then abruptly straightened and unceremoniously threw both the tool and the golden thing into a drawer. “But I’m bored with it now.” He stood, stripping off his goggles, and came toward them, studying them with thoughtful blue eyes. He bowed awkwardly, his ponytail and his long thin arms dangling. When he straightened, Horace saw that his shirt read VITAMIN D. “The newbies made it through the oublimort, I see. Didn’t you love it?” His eyes seemed to linger on Chloe for just a moment longer.

  “A delight, as always,” Mr. Meister replied. “And how is our . . . other project? Any changes?”

  “A little roaming around, maybe. But that could change at any moment.”

  What on earth did that mean? Horace thought he noticed a slight frown of worry on Mr. Meister’s face, but then the old man nodded and moved smoothly into introductions. “Horace Andrews and Chloe Oliver. Brian Souter. I believe you’ve all encountered one another in passing, yes? But never been formally introduced?”

  Brian pointed at Horace. “Once in passing.” He then pointed to Chloe and said, “Once in passing, once in Princess Charming mode.”

  “What are you talking about?” Chloe demanded.

  “After Horace sent the dragonfly through the box,” said Brian. “You spent the day here before you went back to the nest, remember? You were so pleasant.” He gave Chloe a wide, sarcastic smile.

  Chloe crossed her arms, her face thunderous. “That day is kind of fuzzy for me, thanks,” she spat. “But just so we’re clear, I only have one mode—and it’s not princess anything.”

  Brian gazed back at her for a long moment. “Fascinating,” he said.

  “And so we begin,” Mr. Meister murmured with a tired sigh. “As we discussed, Brian, you have much to tell our new friends.”

  “You still think this is the time?”

  “I do,” Mr. Meister said stiffly. “There are certain secrets that must be revealed before we can proceed.”

  “Fine.” Brian turned to Horace and Chloe. “Here’s the big secret . . . you two ready?” He spread his palms wide, like a magician. “It’s turtles all the way down.”

  “I’m reasonably sure it isn’t,” Mr. Meister said drily. “I will give you a half an hour to introduce yourself more fully, and then we will attend to the pressing matter at hand. Alert me if anything changes.” He turned to leave, laying a friendly hand on Horace’s shoulder as he passed. They watched him vanish into the shadows, and eventually his soft footsteps receded into silence.

  Nobody said anything. Horace examined a particularly powerful-looking heat gun, wondering what was going on. Chloe backed against a workbench and hopped up to sit on it, her feet dangling. She picked up a hunk of metal shaped like a seahorse, studying it closely, and cursed a question softly to herself before setting it down again. Brian regarded them both skeptically for several seconds, and Horace realized he was taking a long, hard look at the Fel’Daera and the Alvalaithen.

  “So, newbies,” Brian said at last. “Make yourselves useful. Tell me what it’s like outside.”

  The question threw Horace, but Chloe didn’t bat an eye. “Today, or just in general?” she asked, her voice full of thorns. Clearly Brian, as Mr. Meister had predicted, had rubbed her the wrong way.

  Brian turned toward her, apparently unruffled. “Just in general, of course.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Chloe said sarcastically. “What do you want to know?”

  “Let’s see . . . pretend I haven’t been outside in three years.”

  “Three years. Wow, you’ve missed a lot. We have flying cars now. Also it rains every day from two to two thirty, but it smells like hand sanitizer. And squirrels are the size of dogs.” She stood there staring laser beams, but Brian just looked back at her placidly, his mouth crooked with amusement. “Oh,” Chloe said, looking anything but amused, “and popcorn is legal again.”

  Horace started to laugh but choked it back. He had no idea what to say, not with Brian being so unexpectedly weird and Chloe feeling feisty. Probably better to sit this one out and just enjoy it.

  Brian nodded at Chloe with mock seriousness. “Your stories of the overworld fascinate me,” he said. “Tell me, is the squirrel situation related to the rain thing?”

  Chloe’s scowl only deepened. “What’s your deal, anyway?”

  Brian sighed. “Oh, man, where do I start? I tell you what. Let’s start here: I haven’t been outside in three years.”

  Now Horace leaned forward. “Wait, you were serious about that?”

  “Yup.”

  “Like you haven’t been out of the Warren?” Horace exclaimed. “In three years?”

  “Roughly, yeah. I’m a valuable asset. Too precious to go outside, I’m told. But I’m also told that being stuck down here makes me ‘difficult.’ The stress makes me ‘challenging’ to deal with—or so the rumor goes. It’s also why I have this lovely complexion.” He struck a dramatic pose, gesturing grandly down his face and one bony, pale arm.

  “So you’re a prisoner?” Chloe said. Horace could hear her disdain.

  “I’m a reluctant—but voluntary—resident. Look, it’s not all bad. Sounds like your squirrels are out of control at the surface. That’s one bullet dodged.”

  Suddenly, the wondrous workshop seemed a little less enticing. Brian had been here for three years? Three years ago, Horace had just finished third grade. It seemed a lifetime ago. Why on earth had Mr. Meister kept Brian down here for all that time?

  Brian’s blue eyes darted back and forth between the two of them. Horace realized he and Chloe were both staring at him like the new animal in the zoo. Brian said, “You guys get that I’m kidding about the squirrels, right? I know there’s no giant squirrels. Or flying cars.”

  “Yeah, I think we got that,” said Horace.

  “Not everybody does. Some folks down here take things way too seriously. I think Mrs. Hapsteade thinks I’m insane.”

  Chloe scoffed. “Maybe she has a point. You’ve lived underground for three years. Voluntarily.”

  “Maybe. But maybe you’ll feel different when I explain why I can’t ever leave—why the Riven can’t know I exist. It’s because of what I do.”

  “And what do you do?” Horace asked.

  “I make things.” He gestured to the jumble of the room all around. “Clearly.”

  “Like what?” Chloe asked, still suspicious. “Muffins?”

  Horace laughed, but Brian remained serious. “No,” he said. “More like . . . Tanu.”

  The very idea staggered Horace for a moment. “What . . . what?” he said lamely.
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br />   Chloe pointed at Brian. “You,” she said, her voice dripping with disbelief.

  “Me, yes. Hi.”

  “You make Tanu,” Chloe pressed.

  “That’s right. Hello.” Brian flashed a curt wave.

  “Wait a minute,” said Horace. “You’re a Maker?”

  “That’s not a word I like to use,” Brian replied. “I’m not Altari, obviously. I’m a Tinker just like you. I mostly make relatively simple things—mainly Tan’kindi. Let’s see . . . you’ve both been to the warehouse on Wexler Street. You saw the little round sign on the front door. ‘State your name your state your name,’ et cetera?”

  Horace remembered the sign on the door to the House of Answers. The door opened only when visitors honestly stated both their names and their mental state. And of course, Horace realized now—it had to be Tanu. “Are you saying you made that?”

  “Yup,” said Brian. “Meister wanted something that would only grant entry to people who weren’t hiding anything. Basically, the sign was just a lie detector—tell the truth, and the door opens.”

  Horace, deeply impressed, had to keep his mouth from hanging open. “Wow,” he said, his brain scrambling to imagine how such a device might work.

  Chloe, however, rolled her eyes. “Yeah, wow, great idea,” she snarked. “Too bad it didn’t work.”

  Horace understood at once. “Chloe,” he chided, embarrassed for Brian.

  “It’s okay,” Brian said softly. He seemed to understand too. His eyes dropped thoughtfully to the Alvalaithen, gleaming at Chloe’s throat. Clearly he’d heard about the day the Riven invaded the House of Answers. They’d brought with them a huge and powerful Tanu called a golem—more creature than device, like a living river of stone. Horace and Chloe and Mrs. Hapsteade had barely escaped, but not before Chloe, using the Alvalaithen, had actually gone into the belly of the golem to rescue Mrs. Hapsteade’s Tan’ji.