by Carol Berg
“What’s that?”
“Not yet. You’re hard enough to convince of things I’m sure of. Let’s get closer and see.”
“Closer to where?”
“The place where the shepherd’s son disappeared. I think it’s a portal to the world I see in my dreams.”
At sunset, we stopped somewhere in the middle of the forest and made camp - if rolling off a saddle into last year’s leaves and Paulo telling the horses not to go away could be called making camp. It had been two days without sleep for both of us, and little enough for me before that. On that night in Tennebar, we slept from sunset to sunrise, and only at the end of the long night did I fall once again into dreaming. But the dream was as strange as everything else…
When I heard him screaming, I knew I’d best get Jasyr saddled. He’d be wanted within the hour, and me and Molly, too, I guessed, no matter it was the time when nobody but wolves and owls and highwaymen had any business abroad. The moon was half grown and half risen, so I couldn’t claim it was too risky. Never could get myself out of it on that account anyway, but the young master wouldn’t take the horses if it was full dark. He used to want it so, but I pointed out that Jasyr didn’t have no magic in him to make him see better in the dark, and if he was to break his leg, we’d have to put him down. So on those nights we’d run on our own feet down the forest tracks until one or the other of us dropped from it. It was always me dropped first. I’d only had two good legs for a bit more than five years, since the Prince had healed me with his magic, and I’d never yet figured out why running on ‘em had any great attraction.
“C’mon, Molly. Don’t know why you can’t saddle yourself by now, we’ve done this so much.” She blew in my ear nice and warm.
The three of us - Molly and me and Jasyr - would always be in the stableyard, when he came.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” he said. I don’t think he knew how wicked his screams were, or maybe he just didn’t like to think about it.
“Thought it’d be a good night for a ride,” I said back to him.
“You don’t have to.” He always said that.
“You know there’s nothing I like better’n riding - even if it’s the middle of the night.”
Like always, we rode an hour or so as hard as Jasyr and Molly could go. We came to a lake we knew of, and I slowed Molly down to a walk. She had a big heart and good wind, but not as strong legs as Jasyr. We’d cool ‘em down and rest ’em before we rode back. The young master always listened to me about horses.
We let the horses drink and feed a bit while we flopped on the ground in the moonlight. Lots of times we did that and never said a word, but on this night, the young master told me again about his dreams. Before I’d thought about it, I said, “Are you sure…?”
He wouldn’t even let me get the question out any more. “It’s not the Lords. I’d know it. It’s not! It’s not!”
“It’s not!” I shouted, and sat bolt upright, causing a shower of dead leaves to fall all over Paulo, who was waving a knife in the air blindly while trying to extricate himself from his blanket.
“What’s happening?”
“Nothing,” I said, and flopped back against the tree. “The usual.”
“Dreams again?”
I nodded, and closed my eyes against the bright sun, and didn’t mention to Paulo that it appeared I’d been dreaming his dreams for a change, instead of my own. I was going crazy.
We rode west and north as hard as we could get the horses to go. Paulo could coax a horse to do anything he asked, and he coddled and pampered them, staying up every night talking to them, rubbing them down, and feeding them any special tidbits he’d found along the way.
Once the gray bag was empty, Vroon, Zanore, and Ob kept us supplied with food, so we could avoid villages and towns, leaving no evidence as to our course or destination. The three would pop in and out so often that after a while we scarcely blinked at their odd comings and goings. I commanded them to pay for whatever they took with a copper from my dwindling hoard, but they didn’t understand the concept at all. Trading made some sense to them, but when they bit the coins, examined them, and spun them up in the air, they couldn’t come up with any use for them and told me I must be mistaken. I insisted, and, though I couldn’t be sure, I think they complied with my wishes at least in that matter. They still wouldn’t answer any more questions.
On the twelfth day of our flight, we rode into the highlands of Valleor, climbing unending slopes of grass littered with white rock and detouring around a thousand cold lakes and a few scattered sheep lays. The sky stayed thick and gray, and it rained every day. Our boots were sodden and our feet cold, but just when I was ready to beg Vroon to find us dry boots, the three vanished and, this time, failed to return. By the chilly sunset when Paulo and I lay behind a scattering of giant, smooth boulders tumbled on a grassy hillside, observing the shepherd’s lay, we hadn’t seen Vroon and company for three whole days. Paulo’s stomach was rumbling like a herd of oxen.
“It won’t behave,” he whispered, when I motioned him to be quiet. Sound carried amazingly far in rocky places like that. The pounding of a hammer from one of the sheds below sounded as if the anvil were sitting between my feet. The bleats from the flock grazing in the valley, and the gurgling and whispering of fifty trickles of water across the slopes, echoed sharply through the thin air.
We had been watching the lay since early afternoon when I spotted the shepherd - easily identifiable as the storyteller from Prydina. When he had finished mending a holding pen, we followed him home. Both the shepherd and his son carried bows. I didn’t want to test how quick their hands would move if they thought we were wolves or thieves, so I decided we would wait until dark and slip around the dale without bothering them. The moon would be up soon after, and though it was still young, it was big, and the night was clear. It would show us the way to our destination. Then we’d see what we could see.
The sturdy-looking younger man milked the goats, carrying the pails into the sod-roofed hovel that squatted in the middle of the valley. Fine smells floated up from the chimney. When a girl called out that supper was ready, my own stomach growled. The valley got even quieter after the burly shepherd laid down his hammer and went into the house. Paulo and I shared out the last cold, hard bits of a meat pie that Vroon had acquired for us three days before. But the meat smelled bad and we weren’t willing to risk it, so we threw that part away and ate the stale, greasy crust.
As dusk faded into night, the family reappeared only briefly: the girl to empty a bucket onto a little garden and fill it again at a catchpool, the younger man to relieve himself out by the sheep pen, and the gray-bearded shepherd to smoke a pipe. A short while later they were all inside, and the house was dark.
Paulo slipped back up the hill to retrieve the horses, and we led them quietly around the edges of the lay, keeping downwind of the sheep and the dogs. The gibbous moon was huge and yellow over the southeastern horizon, and we used its light to find the stunted fir tree the shepherd had told me marked the entrance to a steep rocky defile. We scrambled up, leading the horses, glad the earthen banks along either side weren’t high enough to cast the treacherous path into deeper shadows. The defile led to the top of a low, narrow ridge that stretched northward.
“Are you sure this is right? This don’t look like any road to anywhere.”
“This is exactly what he described to me. He was very precise. I think he wanted to prove he wasn’t just making the whole thing up. Watch for a patch of junipers that looks like a giant cocklebur. A hundred paces past it, the track and the ridge will angle east. That’s where we start looking.”
And there, where the ridge abruptly joined the shoulder of a craggy mountainside, we found the rock pile and the wide flat rock where they’d found the one-handed boy’s things on the day he vanished.
“I don’t see nothing here,” said Paulo, whispering for no reason as we examined the rocks and the soft flat ground in the moon shadows.
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A few scrubby bushes poked out of the rocks. Only a goat could climb up the steep hillside behind the boulder pile, and in every other direction were endless slopes covered with short, stiff tuck-grass, and endless clumps of sheep’s folly, and endless night. No road. No black-and-purple sky. And the stars were their familiar white, not at all green.
“Maybe it’s the wrong place or the wrong time.” What had I expected? I’d been so sure…
Paulo snorted, pulled a scant handful of oats from a cloth bag and began apologizing to Jasyr and Molly for the long hard riding on a wild-goose chase.
Nothing to do but sleep and rethink everything in the morning. I could talk to the shepherd, perhaps, to make sure of the story, the place, the season. It had to be right. I had no other clue.
We rolled out our blankets on the damp ground, and Paulo was snoring in seconds. He could sleep in a tree limb or a saddle… or tied to a stable wall half dead, like that night in Zhev’Na when we’d become friends.
I hated thinking about Zhev’Na. I had lived there only a little more than a year, yet I could still close my eyes and feel the desert sun on my skin and smell the dust and smoke and blood from the Zhid practice fields. Life before Zhev’Na seemed unreal, as if it had happened to someone else - as I suppose it had. Comigor was like a castle in a story. It was easier to recall the flowery scent of Philomena’s ugly apartments than to remember her face. It hadn’t been at all difficult learning she wasn’t my mother. She’d never acted like my mother. She’d never felt it, nor had I.
It was easier to remember Papa’s face - Tomas’s face - though it kept blending into my real mother’s face. The brother and sister had resembled each other closely. I had always liked occasions when Tomas first came home from his travels, because he smelled like horses and leather and the oil he used on his swords. After he’d been home a while, he smelled like Philomena’s bedroom.
I owed Tomas a great deal. He had never known that Ziddari, the Exile, Lord of Zhev’Na, had switched his sister Serf’s doomed infant with his own child. He had tried to be a good father, but I’d been terrified he would find out I was a sorcerer and have me arrested. Ziddari twisted Tomas’s mind for ten years and lured Tomas into a battle that was never his. What would have become of me if he hadn’t thought of me when he was dying and asked his sister to tell me how much he cared for me? Maybe none of this would have happened, and I would be the Duke of Comigor right now, fighting for King Evard, betrothed to the king’s daughter Roxanne, perhaps. That’s what Tomas and Philomena had planned. Or maybe I would have been found out by the Leiran sheriffs and burned to death like my real father. More probably, Ziddari would have discovered the magic that had joined my dead father to Prince D’Natheil and taken me to Zhev’Na anyway. Then my mother wouldn’t have been there to stop me from destroying the Bridge. Enslaving the world to the Lords.
I pulled my blanket up over my cloak and around my back between me and the rock. The night was getting cold. I wished very much that I could talk to my mother. Ask her advice. She was good at puzzles and knew so much about so many things. A few times I’d been tempted to tell her more about how it was with me. But she would have felt awful and sorry, when there was nothing to be done. And I hadn’t wanted her telling the Prince everything; she didn’t like keeping secrets from him. Now I didn’t know if she was even alive.
I sat up long into that night. I’d had more sleep these last few days traveling with Paulo than I’d had on any night since Zhev’Na, so sleep just wouldn’t come. Instead I went over everything again and again, worrying about my mother, and about the Prince, who wanted me dead, and the Lords, who just wanted me.
By the time the moon had crept across the sky and dropped low on the horizon in front of me, my thoughts weren’t making sense any more. I was just staring at the moon that got bigger and brighter as it fell, until it filled the entire span of my vision. As the light swelled and filled me, the world receded. Paulo’s snoring sounded soft and distant. The chilly wind no longer made me shiver, and the hard, cold ground seemed only remotely connected to me. Only the moon was in my eyes… the moon… What had the shepherd said? Tom come late to the hold, and the moon was in his eyes…
“Paulo! Wake up!” Without turning my head, I reached out for him, and his arm seemed farther away than the moon. I felt him stir. Careful not to let anything distract my glance, I closed my eyes and turned exactly a half circle to face the rock at my back. I opened my eyes again… and there was the path of moonlight, leading straight into the hillside. Only the hillside wasn’t there any more. I was looking into another place altogether. Night, yes, but a very different night. The sky was purple and black, and unlike those that burned behind and above me, the stars were green.
“Hurry,” I said, my voice emerging at some vast distance behind me, barely audible though I made no effort to whisper. “Untether the horses; leave everything. Take my hand.” And from that same vast distance, I heard Paulo, answering me. “Good Jerrat, save us! Your eyes are yellow. What’s happened? Are you - ?”
“Don’t worry about it. I can see the way. Hurry. And hold on tight. I can’t feel your hand.”
Moments later, the lightest brush of a feather touched my fingers, and I set foot on the hard-packed road that led into the dream world. His words came so faint that I felt them more than heard them. Oh, cripes. You’re halfway into solid rock… and you want me to come with you. Until I pulled him after, and we stood wholly in the place of my dreams.
“We found it,” I said, my voice quite normal again. Paulo stood quite solid beside me with a crushing grip on my hand. “Welcome to the Breach.”
CHAPTER 11
“This can’t be the Breach.” Paulo pressed his back against the rock cliff, ensuring he was as far as he could get from the outsloping edge of the precipice. “I don’t care nothing for your feelings about it. That was a fearful place. I never told you, but I saw such things… And though no man could call this place rightful, it’s nothing so wicked as that. This is just different, like Avonar is different. Well, maybe a bit more…”
We stood on a narrow spit of rock that jutted out high over a barren landscape. Streaks of blue-and-green lightning split the sky, and thunder rumbled across the dark plains that stretched in every direction below us. Storms clustered about the horizon, boiling clouds of midnight that continuously changed shape in the bilious light.
“You’re right that it’s changed - or at least this part of it has changed - since we came out of Zhev’Na,” I said. “I can’t explain why that’s so. By rights we should already be going mad.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re the Prince’s son, so you’re protecting us like he did. I’m not getting so much as a handspan away from you; you can just count on that.” I could feel him willing me away from the edge of the precipice, back toward the dark shape of the doorway in the rock, a black arch outlined with yellow moonlight.
“But I’m not doing anything! When the Prince brought us through the Breach, he was using sorcery every moment, expending every bit of power he could possibly manage.” Even when he crossed the Breach by way of D’Arnath’s Bridge, the Prince had to concentrate and hold the way open, like someone holding back branches to let you pass through a thick forest. “So this doesn’t make sense at all. Maybe Vroon and the others will show up and explain it, now we’ve arrived.”
I was not mistaken. We were nowhere near D’Arnath’s Bridge, yet we were standing in the Breach between the worlds. The Breach had been a part of me once, and I recognized it, just as you can look at a childhood portrait and know it is an image of yourself, even recalling the fancies going through your head as it was painted.
The Breach was chaos itself, the warped, broken, distorted bits left over from the birth of the universe, drawn together a thousand years before when three Dar’Nethi sorcerers named Notole, Parven, and Ziddari had reached too far for power. Since that event - the Dar’Nethi called it the Catastrophe - the Breach had divided the mundane
world from Gondai. This chaos had no form of its own, but took horrid shapes created by the deepest fears of the traveler who had the misfortune to wander into it. Monsters, flesh-eating rains, rivers of blood, pits full of snakes, spiders the size of a house… terror in a thousand guises awaited anyone who walked into the Breach.
Only the ancient Dar’Nethi King D’Arnath and his Heirs had ever been able to control this chaos. According to the Dar’Nethi, D’Arnath’s Bridge across the Breach was all that kept the worlds themselves from slipping further into ruin. According to the Lords and the Zhid, the Bridge was a blight on the world that prevented the full use of power and enslaved all true sorcerers to the greedy, spineless royal family of the Dar’Nethi. Whatever the truth, until the day the Prince led Paulo, my mother, and me out of Zhev’Na, no one had ever survived a passage through the Breach without using the Bridge. Even the Lords could not travel there, nor could they feed on the terrors of the Breach to expand their power. That’s why I was such a prize for them. I was to be nurtured until I could give them the Breach.
I had almost gone mad on that journey out of Zhev’Na. In the desert I had seen men staked out in the sun until their skin shrank and grew black and brittle, so that it cracked and tore every time they moved. That’s what it felt like with each step away from the Lords. And all the while, the Three were offering me release from the pain and reminding me of the power and immortality I was leaving behind, tempting me to take refuge in the cold, unfeeling darkness we shared.
But my masters had taught me well to ignore pain. As my father led me through a sea of rotting corpses and gales of acid wind, I rid myself of every thought, every sensation, every memory, every instinct. I forced my whole being - mind, soul, heart, senses - numb and empty. That should have been enough. But the pain got worse, and the Lords whispered and teased and tempted until I was half crazed with it.
I wasn’t sure what happened then. I tried to drown myself in chaos, thinking that only death or madness would silence the Lords’ whispers. For the rest of that crossing, I was very much a part of the Breach, like a bottle of seawater submerged in the ocean. Only when my father carried me into the green world once again did the chaos drain out of me like the water running off as you walk out of the sea. Then I was just empty again.
