Jane Doe and the Cradle of All Worlds

by Jeremy Lachlan

  We trudge through the sand in silence. Hickory deciphers his symbols. Violet chews on her tongue. I think about Mum. Seeing her, hearing her voice, telling her everything that’s happened. I wonder if she has my eyes. I couldn’t quite tell from the dream. I even start a list of questions I want to ask her:

  1. Are you okay?

  2. Do you recognise me at all?

  3. How have you avoided being caught all this time?

  4. Do you cause quakes when you go a little nuts?

  5. Can I have a hug?

  6. Do you like coconuts?

  7. What happened after you were separated from us?

  8. Do you still have the second key? Please say yes.

  9. How do we find the Cradle?

  10. How exactly do we get rid of Roth and save the Manor?

  I go through the list a thousand times and then I get all nervous about meeting her. What if she doesn’t know who I am? What if she doesn’t believe me? What if she isn’t even there? What if the Spectre broke her mind and killed her? What if Dad got it all wrong and –

  No, I tell myself. She’s alive. She’ll be there.

  She has to be.

  I think about the Makers, too. Do I really believe everything Dad said about them? How they fooled the Gods of Chaos and created the Cradle Sea, paving the way for life in every world? Seeing and believing in the Manor isn’t enough because that only proves the present, not the past – that the Manor exists, not how and why it was made.

  How can I believe it when all I have to go on are stories?

  Say you find a loaf of bread. You can touch it, smell it, eat it, but the bread alone doesn’t tell you anything about the baker. Someone tells you it was an old man. Ten more people agree – a hundred, a thousand – but what if they’re lying? What if they’ve all been fooled and the baker’s actually a ridiculously talented donkey? Dad said some legends change every time they’re told. What if the truth about Po, Aris and Nabu-kai has been twisted into a lie?

  What if the story’s all wrong?

  A stifling breeze kicks up that smells like rotten eggs. The black sand deepens, transforming entire pillared halls and corridors into undulating dune seas, all of it eerie in the crystal glow. One of the massive halls we pass is filled with crystals so big they look like gigantic, glittering trees. They make me feel as small as the specks of sand, but it’s an awesome sight to behold, no mistake. Some of the corridors are filled with sand almost all the way up to the ceiling, and we have to shovel armfuls out of the way before we can squeeze through. It’s exhausting work, made no easier by the crystal-laden chandeliers half-buried in our path, or the stinging grains of sand cast up by the wind. Violet tears strips from her cloak to wrap around our noses and mouths. Our eyes are left to fend for themselves. We only have to backtrack once when Hickory takes a wrong turn, but we have to wait at four intersections while he paces and tries to remember the way. The crystals have destroyed some of his symbols.

  Getting there’s the easy part, my arse.

  ‘Admit it,’ I shout as we dig our way through another corridor, ‘we’re lost.’

  He shouts something back that gets lost in the howling gale, but I figure it must’ve been ‘We’re close’ because we soon lose the wind entirely and find ourselves caught in a mini-avalanche. The sand slips away beneath us, and we tumble down into a small room.

  Violet lands on top of me. Time snags us for a moment. We don’t speak. She breathes into my face and I breathe into hers, and it’s weird because the wasps start swirling round my gut again, but they feel different this time, like they don’t have dirty great stingers. They’re just buzzing.

  Why are they buzzing?

  ‘Sorry,’ Violet says at last, scrambling off me so fast you’d think she’d landed on a giant slug.

  Yep. She hates me.

  ‘Nobody move,’ Hickory says.

  We’ve come to a booby trap stalled mid-cycle. Huge metal blades and axe-like pendulums poke from the ceiling, walls and floor in varying heights and lengths, all of them overgrown with rose-coloured crystal swords and daggers. Some of the blades are embedded in these massive pillars of white crystal, too, growing from floor to ceiling.

  It’s a frozen bloody meat-grinder.

  ‘Hickory, I swear to – you’re the worst guide ever.’

  ‘We’re exactly where we need to be,’ he says. ‘Just a little more crowded than it used to be.’ Mashed-up clumps of Tin-skin carcasses are skewered to the floor, walls and ceiling. There’s barely a crawl-space to be seen. ‘Just gotta pick our way through. Carefully.’

  Violet unshoulders her rifle, ditches her cloak. ‘Forward is the only way.’

  The awkward moment between us seemingly forgotten, she takes the lead, crawling and sliding through the trap. Feeding her rifle through first, considering every move. I go next and Hickory follows soon after. It’s like we’re moving through a giant, life-or-death game of pick-up sticks, twisting and contorting, helping each other through.

  Stop. Careful now. Watch your feet. Little to the left.

  Violet’s free. A clean run. I’m squeezing through a dip in the sand when Hickory tells me to freeze. My back’s about to nudge a crystal spear. He scoops sand out from under me till I can fit. I nod back at him. Hell, I even thank him. I also tell him he’s still a knob, just to remind him where things stand, and that’s when I smack my head into another crystal.

  ‘Ouch,’ I say. ‘Uh-oh.’

  The crystal cracks and grows, dislodging a giant blade. I duck and roll as it swings. The blade smashes through a pillar. Crystals burst. Shards scatter and swell. A Tin-skin corpse goes flying, and the whole goddamn trap comes to life.

  ‘Go, go, go,’ Violet shouts. As if we needed to be told.

  Naturally, there’s a lot of scrambling and swearing, but we make it. Just. I leap for a gap up high, narrowly avoiding an oncoming shaft of crystal. Hickory stays low, sliding under a blade. We hit the sand on the other side at the same time. But we’re not safe yet.

  Hickory yelps and claws at his hair. Something’s growing on my back, stabbing like a hundred needles. I cry out, and Violet’s on me in a flash, tearing a lump of crystal from my tunic and crying out herself as it pierces her fingers. The lump’s as big as a melon by the time it hits the sand. Hickory’s clump of hair lands beside it, now buried in a ball of white crystal, and they’re still growing. We step back, trembling.

  Violet shakes her head at us, sucking a drop of blood from her finger. ‘Unbelievable.’

  ‘I’d say that went pretty well,’ I say. My back feels like it’s been scraped by a grater. Thankfully, it isn’t bleeding. ‘I mean, you know. Could’ve been worse.’

  Hickory glares at me. ‘No more mistakes. Things are about to get tricky.’

  As if everything we’ve been through so far has been a breeze.

  UNDERSTANDING WINIFRED

  ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me.’

  We’re standing at the edge of the biggest bloody chasm I’ve ever seen. The cliffs are enormous, stretching into the gloom above us, below us, way off to our right. Open archways dot each cliff face, flanked by flaming torches. Dozens of thin stone bridges span the gap high and low. Crude and crumbling things. Many of them have collapsed entirely. The one in front of us only juts out a few metres and ends in a mound of glinting purple. Other pockets of far-flung crystals cling to the bridges and cliffs around us, glowing like lanterns in the dark. There aren’t that many, though. The black sand and crystals have reached as far as they can for now.

  This part of the Manor belongs to an Otherworld of water.

  We’re too high up to see the river flowing through the chasm. Even the torches down there are nothing more than misty orange smudges. We can just make out the gateway, though, lurking in the shadows way off to our left, hundreds of storeys high but no wider than a house. It’s even more pockmarked than the snowy gateway was. Thousands of water jets stream through the rock in a constant shower of rain, feeding the un
seen swell far below. The torches closest to the waterfall flare on and off, caught in an endless battle to stay alight.

  ‘Hickory, how the hell are we supposed to get down there?’

  ‘We climb.’

  ‘And you didn’t mention this earlier because …’

  ‘Wouldn’t have changed anything. You wanted the quickest way to the river – this is it. Walls are pretty rough. Plenty of grip. Leatherheads fixed some ladders closer to the bottom.’ He puffs his bottom lip at me. ‘Don’t tell me the little Doe’s scared of heights.’

  ‘Heights, I can handle. It’s what’s waiting for us at the bottom that scares me.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Violet says. ‘Fall from this height, you’ll die the moment you hit the surface. Won’t even get the chance to drown.’

  ‘Oh, that’s comforting.’

  ‘You could always try quaking up a nice set of stairs for us.’

  ‘I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that.’

  Violet shrugs. ‘Climbing it is. Hickory, you first. We move quick, we stay quiet, and we keep an eye on those archways. Any Leatherheads spot us, we’ll be sitting ducks.’

  Hickory eases himself over the edge. Violet pauses. Chews on her lip for a second, lowers her voice.

  ‘Hey … remember the time you had to climb up the house opposite Mrs Jones’s because she let her dogs loose on you? And she started throwing bottles at you, and I stopped her by –’

  ‘Setting fire to her curtains through her front window,’ I say. ‘Sure. She threw rocks, though. I had bruises for weeks. That was only a few months ago actually.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ She stares into space the way people do when memories come rushing back. ‘I suppose it would be for you.’ She shakes the memory away and starts climbing.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, and her head pops up again. ‘Thanks for helping me back there. With the crystal on my back and all.’

  She actually smiles then. It’s still sort of a sad smile – nothing like the beaming grin I used to see on mini-Violet – but it’s sure as hell more than anything she’s given me so far.

  She opens and closes her mouth a couple of times, as if she wants to say something but doesn’t know how. All she gets out is a ‘Jane’ and an ‘I’ before Hickory tells us to get moving, which kills me because once she starts climbing again all I can think is Jane, I what? Jane, I have a cramp? Jane, I’m sorry I was so pushy before? Jane, I like you?

  No, shut up, brain, it’s Violet.

  Still. A thank you and a smile.

  Progress is what it is.

  Dad would probably freak out if he knew I was dangling over a gazillion-foot drop right now, but it turns out I’m the best climber here. Isn’t long before I’m in the lead, testing hand- and foot-holds, finding the best line down. Climbing barefoot hurts after a while, but at least I can wriggle my toes into the cracks. I take us on a zigzag down, from archway to archway, so we can rest our arms and legs. The first few are blocked by crystals. The others are deserted.

  ‘Hey, how long do you reckon the river is, anyway?’ I ask as we check one of the corridors for a staircase, a ladder, some other way down. ‘Where do you reckon it ends?’

  Hickory shrugs. ‘How long’s a piece of string?’

  ‘What string? I don’t have any string.’

  ‘He means,’ Violet says, ‘he has no idea how long the river is. Personally, I don’t think it has an end. It could keep flooding new parts of the Manor till it drains the world it came from dry. Or until we find a way to heal the Manor, of course.’

  ‘So it’s underwater, right? The gateway. On the other side. What good is that?’

  ‘It probably hasn’t always been underwater,’ Violet says. ‘Otherworlds evolve. Rivers change course, sea levels rise and fall, people build dams and flood valleys. But you’re right. That world’s cut off to us now. Unless there’s another gateway there.’

  ‘So Bluehaven isn’t the only place with more than one way into the Manor?’

  ‘Of course not. Winifred used two gateways in The Crusade of Sallis-Ur. Some worlds might even have three or four. Anything’s possible.’

  We find a stairwell a little further down the corridor. Hickory says it should take us down a couple of levels at least, so Violet takes the lead, rifle at the ready. She tells us to keep it down but I’m getting a real kick out of chatting to her again.

  ‘What’s she like? Winifred, I mean.’

  ‘You know what she’s like.’

  ‘No, I don’t. We only hung out for, like, an hour. Didn’t exactly have time to chat about our favourite things. You must know her pretty good by now.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone really knows Winifred.’

  ‘You never talked about normal stuff?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘You just trained.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘But you’ve read all her books –’

  ‘Which detail the legend, not the woman. Most people bang on about themselves for ages in their Chronicle entries. How amazing they are. How they were worshipped like gods. Winifred sticks to the facts. Her actions and victories speak for themselves.’

  ‘Do you know how she got her scars?’

  ‘Battles, escapes, close shaves. Booby traps and torture. You can’t do the things she’s done and come home unharmed.’

  ‘Do you really think she never saw all this coming?’

  ‘I told you. She only saw flashes of her own path when she touched the symbol.’

  ‘Yeah, but what if she was lying?’

  Violet sighs. ‘You still don’t trust her. After everything she’s done.’

  ‘Well, everything she’s done hasn’t exactly been trustworthy. I mean, she started all this, remember? If she hadn’t handed me over to Atlas that day –’

  ‘You’d still be back in the basement and Roth would’ve kept looking for the Cradle until every gateway fell apart and all the Otherworlds were destroyed.’

  ‘No, but – well – yeah, I guess,’ I say. ‘She should’ve told me you were coming, though.’ Violet glances back at me and I shrug. ‘Would’ve been nice to know, is all. I could’ve waited somewhere for you. We could’ve planned a proper breakout for my dad. Could’ve avoided so many bad things.’ I jab a thumb back at Hickory. ‘Like meeting this guy.’

  ‘I heard that.’

  ‘Shut up, Hickory,’ Violet says. ‘Everything happens for a reason, Jane.’

  I roll my eyes. ‘Ugh, don’t you start. You sound exactly like her.’

  ‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’

  ‘All I’m saying is if I was her, I would’ve done things differently. I would’ve told me everything – told us everything – right from the beginning. Before the festival even started. She says she only saw her path in the flashes? Fine. But her path doesn’t run along all on its own. Nobody’s does. Our paths cross and collide, unravel side by side. Hers, mine, yours, Hickory’s, Mum’s and Dad’s. Not to mention the paths of everyone on Bluehaven. Winifred should’ve told us all exactly what we were in for. Made things easier for everyone.’

  The stairwell winds on. The candles on the walls flicker as we pass.

  ‘Would you?’ Violet asks after a while. Her voice is so quiet I figure she’s talking to herself, but then she speaks up. ‘Would you do things differently? Say you were the one who touched the symbol under the catacombs. Saw flashes of the horrible things to come. But after them you saw something beautiful. You and John, happy and healthy in a new home. And if you knew this final, perfect vision could only come true after suffering through all the misery and hardship first, would you really do things differently? Would you change the path the Makers had laid out and risk that happy future, or would you let the bad things happen?’

  I don’t know what to say. She’s right. I wouldn’t just let the bad things happen. I’d do anything I could to make sure they did. Just like Winifred has.

  ‘Terrible but necessary, Jane. Isn’t that what she told you all those yea
rs ago in the boatshed, back when all this started? She said the same thing to me again and again. You may not like her methods, but you have to trust her. Even if she did see more than she’s letting on, you have to believe there’s a reason for all of this.’

  Goddamn puppet strings. Now it’s my turn to sigh.

  ‘Did she actually tell you she saw a happy ending?’

  ‘No,’ Violet says. ‘But I choose to believe she did. Why else would she sacrifice so much? Why else would she still have faith in the Makers? So much faith in you?’

  A question pops into my head then. Spills into the stairwell before I can suck it back. ‘Do you have faith in me?’

  Violet leaves me hanging till we reach the bottom of the stairs and head back towards the chasm. ‘Yes,’ she says, but it’s impossible to miss the silent I guess dangling at the end of it, clinging to the word like a shadow.

  THE RIVER

  ‘There she is,’ Hickory says.

  We’re lying on our stomachs now, beside another broken bridge, and we can finally see the river coursing between the cliffs far below. A crooked structure crouches in the shadows near the base of the raining gateway, built over the water, stretching between the two cliff walls, shrouded in mist. The Leatherhead camp. A haphazard network of rickety wooden platforms and ladders scale the cliffs either side of it, clinging to the rock, connecting the archways like some vertical maze.

  ‘See? Cells down on the left. Quarters in the middle. Dock’s over on the right.’

  I count five tiny boats tethered to the jetty.

  ‘The place looks deserted,’ I say.

  ‘Might be patrol time,’ Hickory says. ‘Or nap time. Either way there’ll be guards.’

  He takes the lead again, climbing to the first of the wooden ledges a short way down. It’s only a few planks wide. Fixed to the rock with rusty metal clasps and dodgy, knotted rope. We take each section one at a time. The platforms and ladders creak and groan.

  ‘Careful,’ Hickory says. ‘Sometimes they post Leatherheads up these parts.’

  ‘How do you know so much about this place again?’ Violet asks.