Angel Isle

by Peter Dickinson

  “Good boy—I mean girl,” he said. “This is the tricky bit, for you, Maja, as well as me. I’m going to have to tinker with your rag-doll shield a bit so that you’ll be able to sense the trail. No one’s ever done this sort of stuff before, so I’m just going to have to guess. I won’t be able to do that once you’re inside the eggshell. But what I’ll be doing is fairly powerful stuff close up to you, about as much as you can bear, I should think, and you’re going to have to keep old Sponge absolutely stock still while it’s happening. If you kneel that side, Ribek, you can hold his collar with one hand and use your other to keep Maja steady. No, put your fingers together round her cord, close against her head, and keep the rest of your hand as high as you can. That’s better.

  “And as soon as I’ve sealed you in, Maja—you’ll feel that because the magic will mostly stop and Ribek will let go of your collar—get up and go and nose your way out through the main eggshell as if you were nosing a door open.

  “Ready, everyone? Off we go.”

  He knelt and held the egg only a few inches in front of her nose, then bowed his head and began to blow on it, a series of slow, deep breaths. Through her dog-eyes she watched a hollow appear in the top, which deepened and deepened as though the shell were folding in onto itself without becoming any smaller, until it was like the empty shell of a boiled egg. He lowered it out of sight of her dog-vision, but she could still watch its shadowy shape pass downward in front of her faint doll-vision, now that those eyes were seeing it separately. Then the other side of it moved upward, closer, as the shell enclosed her.

  “So far, so good,” said Benayu. “Now I’m going to unshield you. Let go of her, Ribek, but hang on to the collar. Ready?”

  The impulse came not as a violent blow nor a piercing thrust but as a sudden intense pressure, a pattern of innumerable strands that ignored the fabric and stuffing of her doll form and closed round her inward self and squeezed her yet further inward, smaller and smaller…

  She willed herself into utter stillness, not fighting or wrestling against it but simply resisting it, refusing to allow herself to be squeezed out of existence, though by now all there was left of Maja seemed no larger than a single droplet in a haze of fine drizzle. But it’s all here, she thought. Everything. Not just me, Maja. Two whole universes, the one I’ve known all my life—Woodbourne and the Valley, the Empire and all its cities, all its marvels and magicians, and the Pirates and their far country, the whole world, and the stars beyond the sun and moon—and the unknown universe I’m about to enter.

  Sustained by that knowledge, she endured until the pressure eased, and all that she had gathered in flowed out again beyond her and became itself again. She could still feel the magical pressure, but with little more discomfort now than she might have felt from slightly too-tight clothing. She must be still inside the egg, she realized, but somehow she was inside Sponge, too, and there was a sort of link between the two. All she could see through her doll eyes now was the bluish weave of her eye-fabric against a vague pearly background, so with a slight effort she put Maja-in-doll aside and concentrated on Maja-in-dog.

  Benayu was still there in front of her dog-eyes, looking anxious but at the same time more relaxed.

  “That’s all,” he said. “See if you can still talk to Jex.”

  “Jex? Can you hear me?”

  “Faintly, but well enough. Are you all right?”

  “Yes. It was hard for a bit, but it’s better now. Will I still be able to talk to you from outside the big eggshell?”

  “Not to me in here, we think, but I will also be there outside, in my other form, so we should be able to continue to converse until you set off on your mission. You will find it difficult to see me at first, but your dog-nose should be able to smell me since smell is not dimension-dependent in the way that sight is, and I presumably smell much the same in both my forms. You are familiar with my odor?”

  Of course she was, now. She hadn’t noticed it before, since it was too faint for human nostrils, but for Sponge’s nose almost everything had its own odor. Jex smelled a bit like old sheep droppings mixed with pine needles, a pleasant, homely smell to a sheepdog, but she didn’t like to say so.

  “I’m sure I’ll know you, then.”

  “Good. You had better leave now, before your shell weakens any further.”

  “All right. Say good-bye to them for me.”

  She allowed herself the last luxury of leaping up to put her paws on Ribek’s shoulders and lick his face once more. He didn’t resist. His fingers wandered gloriously up and down her spine. She dropped, wagging her tail, turned to the outer eggshell and pushed firmly into it. There was a sharp tingling in her nose, making her sneeze violently. She closed her eyes before the tingling reached them as she pushed on. Her fur stood up stiffly the moment it reached the barrier, and the tingling flowed on down the skin beneath it, a strange feeling, too intense for pleasure but still just less than pain. It had reached her rib-cage by the time her muzzle emerged on the far side.

  CHAPTER

  18

  She opened her eyes in a truly different universe.

  It made no sense at all. There was stuff out there to look at, but far too much of it, and none of it seeming to fit with anything else. Bits of it appeared to have some kind of shape, bulges and edges and planes, but they didn’t fit together into anything she could think of as a thing. And all of it seemed to be moving, flowing, but she couldn’t tell in which direction or what was nearer her than what was further off, because it seemed to be both near and far, and the whole scene was crisscrossed with dark lines, tense as winched cables, connecting one non-thing to another, but not seeming to slacken at all if the non-things moved together or to resist at all if they wheeled apart, or did both at the same time.

  Odder still that, though they seemed to be more understandable, more real, more there, than the non-things they connected, and to carry such tension within them, she wasn’t sure that the lines were real, or there at all. They were like narrow beams, not of light but of darkness, full of intangible energies.

  She felt helpless, crazy. How could she do anything in a world like this?

  “Jex! Jex! What’s happening? Help!”

  “I am here, little one. Come fully clear of the eggshell. That is confusing you. Good. Now move to your left. Trust your dog-senses to make the movement, since his brain is adapted to interpret the phenomena of this universe. Use his smell-sense in particular, since it is not dimension-dependent. Simply by moving through the phenomena of this universe you will begin to perceive it more clearly. I will wave my arms as you approach, to help you. To you I will seem to be something like a dead tree.”

  “All right. I’ll try.”

  She moved right out of the eggshell and automatically gave herself a good shaking, as if she’d just come from a dip in a pond and was shaking the water out of her pelt. That done, she raised her muzzle and sniffed. She’d been trying so hard to see that she hadn’t paid much attention to her other senses, but yes, this universe was full of smells. They were odd, weird, different, but not incomprehensibly different the way the sights were. Without her thinking about it her dog brain was already sorting them out. There! Slightly different from his smell in his other form but still unmistakable—Jex. Sheep droppings and pine. To her left, like he’d said.

  “Find, boy.”

  Her dog body trotted eagerly off, at last in this long adventure doing something it had been trained to do. Sponge had known every sheep in his flock by its separate smell, Benayu had once told her. Sheep droppings and pine needles—pup’s play. And even as she moved among the non-things of this no-sense universe they began to acquire their own crazy logic. She wasn’t seeing them as they actually were, she realized—as the this-universe form of Jex saw them, for instance. Her brain wasn’t the right shape. She wasn’t even seeing them as Sponge saw them. The images that came to all three pairs of eyes (supposing this Jex had two eyes) were the same, but Jex’s brain could pro
cess them in seven dimensions, and Sponge’s brain could magically process them into four, but hers hadn’t learned to do that yet. Jex had told her that actually she’d be seeing them somewhere along that process, or she wouldn’t have been able to see them at all.

  Once again she was reminded of the story in the Valley about the woman who’d been blind all her life and suddenly began to see, who could perceive the shape and color of a mug, for instance, but couldn’t at first tell that it was a mug until she’d touched and handled it. She was beginning to do something like that. Distances were still very strange. The non-things could seem to be both behind and in front of each other. A bit of the edge of one could turn out on its other surface to be a bit of the edge of a quite different one.

  She wondered if the strange rays of darkness connecting the non-things were where Sponge’s brain had put the extra dimensions, so that it had only four to deal with, though the rays didn’t really fit with each other now. Even when she seemed to be loping toward one that barred her way it was somewhere else when she reached it, without having moved or lost its tension.

  A new non-thing loomed in front of her, clear enough to be almost a thing—a dead tree with wildly waving branches, except that the branches moved both behind and in front of each other and some of them might be off to one side, or the trunk itself, though still attached to them, was somehow much further away. For a moment she saw it fully clearly, and with a shock of horror realized that it must indeed be some kind of distant cousin to the appalling demon that had so nearly destroyed them all, north of Larg. She had to will herself to speak to it.

  “Jex?”

  “Welcome, little one. I wish I were seeing you in your own form. You have done very well yet again.”

  The voice in her head wasn’t the granite one she knew so well, but had the quality of good timber, cut from a great tree and then sawn and planed to show the clean, smooth grain. She thought of the mighty cedars in the forest behind Woodbourne, whose voices her aunt had been able to hear when the wind stirred their branches. The memory banished the specter of the vanquished demon.

  “I wish I could see you properly too. I’m very fond of you in your other shape. You’ve really looked after me.”

  “The affection is reciprocated. But are you ready to go, Maja? It is now of some urgency. I can sense that our enemies are preparing a more sophisticated assault. I have told the others, and Benayu is ready, but he needs to have you on your way before the attack begins.”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  A pause. Then…

  “I have told them. You will feel a brief pulse of magic, and then Saranja will count to ten and say the name.”

  “All right.”

  The pulse came almost at once, brief and blinding as lightning, and then gone. She held herself steady and started to count.

  …nine, ten…

  And there was total darkness, with the trail blazing through it. Only that single dimension of distance. She was barely aware even of Sponge’s physical solidity enclosing her as she spread her wings and raced along the trail. Its power was appalling, not shaped and controlled by some magician to a specific purpose, but a shaft of pure magic. It was like the light of the sun must be before it strikes the atmosphere of earth and softens into daylight. She felt herself shriveling in its intensity, wasting away. She was at the limit of what she could endure.

  Not long now, please!

  Oh, finish, end!

  “Ramdatta!”

  Darkness. The trail gone with its unendurable power. Gone. Lost.

  No, it was she who was lost and gone. The trail would still be there, skewering its seven-dimensional universe, but there was no one to follow it. Nobody now could. Benayu couldn’t. The Watchers might break through and overwhelm him, but they couldn’t either. Only she, Maja, could have done it and she had failed.

  “Ramdatta!”

  Nothing. Not a quiver of change in the emptiness.

  Thinking the name wasn’t enough. To be truly powerful it had to be spoken aloud. If only Saranja had been here instead of her, to cry it into the void, as she had done on the hill above Tarshu.

  But here there was only a useless rag doll, with no lips to shape the syllables, no lungs to give them their power. Only a useless rag doll…and a dog.

  Sponge.

  Try doing something Sponge wouldn’t normally do.

  Somehow she forced herself into awareness of him, of Sponge himself, not just of his body as an extension of herself. He was still there, patient and accepting of what was happening to him, but at the same time vaguely bewildered by it all, and longing for Benayu, with a grassy hillside and a flock of sheep to herd.

  “Good boy,” she thought, trying to comfort him. “Won’t be long now.”

  Three syllables, then. Three sharp yaps. A bit of a growl at the start of the first one to make the R shouldn’t be too difficult, and then…

  She experimented, moving the long tongue round inside the narrow mouth, touching it against palate and front teeth in various positions, trying to imagine the explosion of the yap forcing its way through. Nothing was the right shape. Her lips wouldn’t make the M. The closest she could come was a sort of humming noise in her throat…

  “It’s all right. Good boy…”

  She raised her muzzle.

  “RRAGHnng! dhAGH! dtAGH!”

  The fierce, urgent bark shattered the immense silence into shards and fragments. In the selfsame instant those particles were reborn into unnumberable universes, exactly as they had been before. And in that instant Maja was caught up and whirled away, back onto the trail and shuddering under its ferocious power.

  But now she was at the longed-for end. The trail reached it and stopped. She hovered for a moment, staring at the object, bewildered. It was utterly unexpected, but yes, of course. If this was the only way to do it, then this was how he must have done it.

  A four-dimensional thing hanging above the shadowy landscape of non-things.

  Another egg.

  Unable to hover for more than two or three wingbeats, she began to circle the egg, and found that once she was round the other side it screened her completely from the intense input of the trail. No impulse whatever came from the egg itself. She backed away a little until she could circle in that shelter studying the thing.

  It was about the size of the one she was in, and it had the same odd solid-mist surface, but rougher, as if it hadn’t been shaped out of something smooth, like a clay pot, but had been woven or knitted from fine cord. One bright point of mauvish light was moving across it, trailing a short glowing tail, like a comet. It moved out of sight on one side and reappeared, crossing the surface at a different angle this time, and again, and again, once more at a different angle. It was oddly hypnotic. It meant something.

  I was wrong, she thought. This wasn’t the only way he could have done it, if that’s him in there. Jex told us that he thought he must have put the essence of himself into a creature of this universe and then he could have gone where he liked and done what he wanted and the seven dimensions wouldn’t have mattered. Benayu could have done that too, he’d said, if it had only been him. It would have been much easier than making the eggs, but he couldn’t do it because he had to bring the rest of us so that the Watchers couldn’t get us.

  That means that the Ropemaker must have needed to bring someone or something from our universe with him. Something small. And he made himself small too so that his egg wasn’t too big to move about.

  Round and round, round and round, round and round as she thought it out. She found that she’d unconsciously started to time her circlings so that she was facing the egg each time the light crossed its surface. Round and round, round and round, round and round. She couldn’t stop. She wasn’t doing it. The light was doing it to her. Round and round…

  It was like…like…

  Something horrible. Some old nightmare, just beginning…

  No, not a nightmare. Real.

  She and Ri
bek, Saranja and Benayu, all walking in step along the Highway north of Larg, because the demon was forcing them to do it.

  But the light wasn’t horrible. It was trapped too in the egg, going round and round and round because it had to, making her do the same not because it wanted to but just because it was there.

  The Ropemaker, trapped, helpless, in his own egg.

  She didn’t need to think what to do next. She drew a deep breath of the strange seven-dimensional air into her lungs, raised her muzzle, and bayed.

  “RRAGHnng! dhAGH! dtAGH!”

  If she’d been expecting anything it was that the eggshell would shatter, but instead the light began to spin faster and faster round its surface and the comet-tail remained behind it for longer and longer, covering the surface in a net of lines that joined together into an intricate dense mesh. A moment or two and the last gaps closed and she was staring at a shell of glowing light…

  The egg hung there, bright enough to cast dense, wrong-shaped shadows over the landscape of non-things as far as her dim dog-eyes could see. And at the same time the compelled rhythm of her own circlings was broken and she could swing round to the far side of the egg and watch the trail she had followed streaming into it, with all its immense power.

  Gone.

  Once more she circled the egg, watching and waiting.

  Relief flooded through her as a voice spoke in her head, quiet but slightly gravelly, and jerky with suppressed energy.

  “Thanks. Been waiting for that. Didn’t even know I was waiting. Knew it was a risk, of course. You found my bit of rope, I take it.”

  “Yes. In the oyster-beds.”

  “And you’ll be one of the Urlasdaughter lot?”

  “I’m Maja. But I’ve got my cousin Saranja with us—she can hear the cedars—and Ribek Ortahlson.”

  “You can’t have got here on your own, though. All three from the Valley. No magic there.”