The room was pretty big, about a third of the size of the ballroom. The floor was black and there were designs painted in silver all over it: circles with lines connecting them and a few odd shapes here and there. There were lamps hanging from hooks on the walls, but they weren’t lit. The ceiling was high and had a very large window in it—maybe the biggest window I’d ever seen. The sky was orange-red, as it was supposed to be, so I could assume it really was the sky, and I wasn’t looking at some other world or something.
I took a step into the room. There were tables of varying heights scattered about. One full-size freestanding mirror leaned against the back wall; a second hung from the ceiling in the near corner. I took another step, avoiding a head-size circle on the floor because, well, I don’t know. Would you have stepped in it?
I approached the nearest table, which seemed surprisingly cheap and rickety and had paint spatters on it. It held, scattered about haphazardly, a couple of books, a steel rod, a jar of something yellow, two polished rocks and three unpolished ones, and a small clear globe with a greenish tint.
There was also dust. A thick layer of dust over everything. I mean, thick.
I looked back at the floor, and, yes, I could see my footprints in it.
No one had been in this room for years.
Well, okay then. I put that in storage with everything else I knew. I recalled Harro’s story, and thought about the beast, and decided I really did not want to be messing around in here. I wondered what the books were, but, no, I wasn’t even going to pick them up to find out. Then I tried to remember how much dust I’d seen in the other rooms as I went by, but couldn’t remember. Maybe that meant there hadn’t been much. I’m pretty sure if I’d tracked footprints in the dust I’d have noticed. I made a mental note to watch for dust from now on.
At the far end of the room on the right-hand wall was another door, and across from it one of those four-legged ladders servants use for lighting lamps that are placed too high to do any good. I stood for a while, looking at all the juicy objects, each one with its own story and its own uses, and maybe, if I’d been smart enough, its own piece of the puzzle. I wanted to pick things up; I was afraid to pick things up. I looked up at the window over my head. Loiosh helpfully remained silent. No, I mean it: it was helpful.
I cursed and, without giving myself time for second thoughts, picked up the steel rod from the table. It didn’t blow up, or shoot lightning bolts, or do anything else embarrassing. But it felt funny; its weight was oddly distributed. I turned it slowly in my hand. There was liquid inside it, flowing as I moved it, which is something I’d run into before, though I couldn’t remember the details. I set it back down and picked up one of the polished rocks, studied it, didn’t learn anything, put it down.
One of the books was called Creating Nexus Points, the other was An Inquiry into World Drift. I was pretty sure I could read them both and know as much as I knew now. I opened them, and they were both marked on the inside cover with a seal and the name Zhayin. Also, they were both very dusty.
I looked around the room again and shrugged. It was full of stuff, and no doubt full of information, but there was nothing I was capable of learning here. I went over to the ladder, looked up, and there was a sky-door. I climbed up, pushed the door open, and saw the sky. Then I went up the rest of the way and stepped out onto the roof.
I hadn’t expected it to feel that good to be out in the open again. The air felt moist, like it should after a rainstorm, and there may even have been a bit of drizzle left. I didn’t care. I took a look around and saw, yeah, you guessed it, mirrors built into the stone itself, facing inward, one on each side, each of them a little shorter than me, and a little wider. I walked all around the top of the manor. There were walls, and the great sweeping arches as I’d seen before I entered the place, but at the low points I could easily look over them. I enjoyed the view of the ocean-sea on one side, and of flatlands on another, and a jungle on yet another, and the sight of the road back home.
“You could jump down, Boss, and we could leave.”
“Jump down, maybe. Probably even survive. But how am I going to leave with two broken ankles? I’ve heard about broken ankles. People tell me they aren’t all that pleasant. Besides, you know we aren’t going anywhere until we’ve solved Devera’s problem.”
He sighed into my mind.
Just for the sake of completeness, though, I walked up right to the edge and climbed onto the wall at a low point. Or, rather, I tried to—without any sensation of movement, I suddenly found myself back near the door I’d climbed up from. Huh. I tried it with the other walls, and the same thing happened.
“See, Loiosh? Even if I wanted to—”
“Yeah, I get it.”
I had no idea what could produce that effect, but if the mirrors didn’t have something to do with it, I’d play my next game of s’yang stones without the flat ones.
And it was there that it smacked me in the face, what should have been obvious from the beginning: yeah, Devera had spoken about “tomorrow-me,” which indicated that, eventually, she was going to get out. But that didn’t mean I was going to get out.
I stood there on the roof thinking about that, then I tried one of those invisible barriers again, and the same thing happened: one step forward brought me back to the somewhere in the middle of the roof.
It’s one thing to decide you don’t want to leave; it’s another to realize that you can’t.
Loiosh and Rocza remained still while I digested that like a half-cooked pudding. Then I swore, and Loiosh agreed.
We went back down. I closed the door behind me because I’m a good guy that way, then walked over to the other door and through it.
I was in a wide corridor made of rough stone. There were two doorways on either side, with no doors, opening onto small rooms with nothing in them. Storage rooms, perhaps, but to store what, and why were they empty? It hit me that a lot of what was confusing me about this place is that parts of it seemed like they’d been lived in and gotten regular use for hundreds of years, and other parts seemed like they’d just been completed, and there was no pattern to it.
On a sudden thought, I studied the ceiling, then the ceilings in those empty rooms. Where the ceiling in the hallway was stone, these were wood, and they were sagging and cracked in places. And, yes, there were the yellowish stains that said there’d been leakage. This part was old, older than anything else I’d seen, and it made even less sense than before. The floor in these small rooms—or rather, the ground—was just dirt.
I continued forward.
Have you ever wished some asshole with a sword would jump out of nowhere and try to kill you, just so you’d have a problem you knew how to solve? Me neither, but I was pretty close to it about then.
There was another doorless doorway in front of me. I stepped through it into a decent-size room filled with large objects that at first I couldn’t make out. There wasn’t much light; what there was being provided by a couple of large crystals glowing in the corners of—
I smiled.
“We found the wine cellar.”
“You aren’t going to ask why we’re suddenly in a cellar?”
“No, too busy being pleased about the discovery. I may steal a bottle. I may steal two bottles.”
“Stealing is a crime, Boss.”
“Good point.”
It looked to be about a five-thousand-bottle cellar, which is pretty good as such things go. I’d always wanted a wine cellar. I’d never had five thousand bottles at the same time. I’d had five once. These bottles were covered in dust. People generally don’t dust very often in their wine cellars, but even by those standards, there was a lot. This place hadn’t seen much use in a long, long time.
Which meant, hey, they’d never miss a bottle, right?
I pulled out the one closest to me. By chance, it was a Khaav’n, one of my favorites. I read the date on the label and translated it to a time just past the end of the Interregnum, two and a half centuries ago. You’d think no wine could last that long, but you’d be wrong: the sorcery to let wine age to its most perfect moment, then keep it there indefinitely is, in my opinion, the Dragaerans’ greatest, perhaps only, contribution to culture.
Now, if I’d only had wine tongs.
Someday, I’d meet someone with a good, elegant way to remove the top of a wine bottle, and I’d kiss him.
But in the meantime, the old-fashioned methods work best. I went over to the nearest wall, gripped the bottle, and struck the top of it a quick, sharp blow. It came off pretty clean; I’d gotten good at this over the years.
I smiled, sniffed the wine, stopped smiling. Just to be sure, I poured a drop on my finger and tasted it. No, I wouldn’t be drinking that. I tossed the bottle aside. It didn’t break, it just rolled and glugged. I tried another bottle. Same variety, same year. I smashed the neck and sniffed. Same thing.
I moved over a shelf and pulled out a white Morofin, about ten years more recent, this one marked by Zerika’s reign, rather than the pre-Interregnum numbering. It was bad too. I searched some more, found a Stathin, what I would call a brandy but Dragaerans call wine because they’re idiots. One sniff, and I felt like a crime had been committed. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a Stathin, but this was a crime. I sighed.
“Okay, Loiosh. What did it?”
“Boss? Have I just been promoted to wine expert?”
As mysteries go, I guess this one wasn’t all that exciting; spells do fail every now and then. It’s just that with everything else, it made me suspicious. But there was no good way to figure it out now. Maybe I’d find Discaru again, and ask if he’d done the spell, and if so, why he was so bad at it. That was bound to work out well.
There are things I’ve gotten good at over the years, like saffron rice with kethna dumplings, roasted fowl with plum sauce, and killing people. I guess figuring out what made weird houses weird was something I’d have to work on. Bugger. What was I missing?
I tried to make myself pay attention to what the floor was like, to smells, to the dimensions of a room, to lighting, and any furniture or objects that might hold useful information. But it was hard, and mentally exhausting in a way I wasn’t used to.
I considered knocking over the racks just out of spite, but there might be a good bottle in there somewhere.
“Boss?”
“It’s all right, Loiosh. Just need to regroup, re-form the line, and prepare for another charge.”
“What, now you’re a soldier again?”
“Don’t you miss those days? Just a little?”
“Are you crazy?”
“Yeah, neither do I.”
Well, standing here wouldn’t do anything. I tapped Lady Teldra’s hilt and shifted my cloak a little. I’d figure things out later. For now, onward. The far end of the room had a doorway, and about halfway there, on the other side, there were three steps leading up to something I couldn’t see clearly. I went that way, scowling at the four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six worthless bottles, and up to the steps. What they ended in was one of those freight doors, installed at an angle, so the top was above me and the bottom was in front of me. It seemed to open out (which was good, because otherwise opening it would have given me a sharp knock on the head), but the odd part was that there seemed to be no lock. There were double iron loops, as if for a padlock, and there were brackets that looked like a bar would go there, but neither lock nor bar was to be seen.
I took hold of the door and pushed, and—nothing. Not even a hint of give, as if I were pushing into solid stone. Could it be stone? How could I know? If rooms were on the wrong side, and up took you down, and a stairway deposited you into some random place, how are you supposed to tell where you are relative to the land the building is set on?
I tried a couple more times, then gave up. I continued to the far end of the wine cellar, then through the doorway and into a very large empty room, which I guess was there in case anyone needed a big empty room for something. There were four pillars in it, evenly spaced, all of them made of the same stone as the floor and walls.
“Loiosh, does it seem like we’ve gone down a lot? Like, we’re below ground level?”
“Rocza was just saying the same thing, Boss. She picks up on that stuff faster than me. Better ears.”
Well, sure. Why shouldn’t a step forward have taken us underground?
“How deep?”
“She isn’t good with measurement, Boss, but I think not too far. We’re still above sea level.”
I nodded and continued forward, going slowly, looking around. There wasn’t much to see. My feet kicked up dust, but it looked different from the dust upstairs, lighter, chalkier. I was pretty sure that meant nothing at all, but I felt proud to have noticed. To the left, my boots were getting dusty. That warlock, Laszló, he didn’t have dusty boots.
There was something green on the far wall. And as I got closer, there was a reek in the air. Not strong, but definite, like rotting vegetation. Once, when I was about six and decided that re-forming produce boxes into a castle was a better idea than mulching the garbage, my father had dragged me to a place where a pile of garbage had collected and pushed my face into it so I would understand how he did not want his kitchen to smell, ever. I hadn’t forgotten that odor.
I continued back toward it. The smell got stronger, but not intolerable. When I reached the end I was able to deduce what caused the smell of rotting vegetation: there was a bunch of rotting vegetation. Vines that looked like they’d once been creeping up the wall, what looked like the remains of stunted trees complete with dead leaves around them, and dead plants that I’m sure I could have identified if they’d been alive and I knew anything about plants.
I stood there, looked, sniffed, tried to figure it out. No, I was hardly an expert, but I was pretty sure these things had been alive less than a year ago. Probably a couple of months ago.
“Great, Loiosh. Another mystery, because we don’t have enough.”
“Maybe this is where they grew all the food they didn’t have in the kitchen.”
“Clever, but it doesn’t address the mystery.”
“What mystery is that? You mean, what killed everything?”
“The mystery isn’t how they died, it’s how they lived.”
“What?”
“Those things don’t grow indoors.”
“Oh.”
“So this place, this platform wasn’t built here, it appeared.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
I wanted to ask Sethra Lavode if it were possible to teleport a building. For one thing, she’d know; for another, I’d treasure the look on her face. But I wasn’t wholly ignorant. I had some skill in sorcery. And from what I knew, no. I mean, sure, it was possible in theory to teleport a building, but in practice, the balance it would be necessary to maintain, and the details it would be necessary to manipulate, and the power it would be necessary to hold, just, no, I didn’t think even Sethra could manage it.
But if it hadn’t been teleported here, or built here, then—what?
I scowled at the walls and ceiling. Every question I answered brought up two more. It was getting old.
In the far right corner was a doorway, and I could just see the beginning of a stairway, and a mirror hanging loosely from a torch bracket.
I glared at the mirror.
Could I really fix this thing and release Devera—and myself—just by smashing a few mirrors? I didn’t know if that would work, but it was time to find out.
I let a dagger fall into my hand, flipped it, took a grip so the pommel was sticking between my first two fingers, and punched the nearest mirror.
The shock went up my arm, to my elbow and my shoulder.
I dropped the dagger and shook my hand.
“Boss?”
“I’m okay. I just wish I hadn’t done that.”
Just like the windows, then. Someone had too much bloody magic. Or money. Or both.
So much for that idea. I waited until my arm felt better, recovered my dagger, and approached the stairway. It seemed safe and normal. I climbed. There were torches burning on the walls, so at least I could see. The stairway wrapped around a couple of times, then let me off in a cave.
“Rocza says we’re lower now, almost sea level.”
“Of course we are. I just went up, why wouldn’t we be lower?”
There was no light in the cave, but there was another burning torch right behind me.
Why were there burning torches? Did some servant come and check them every so often? And if so, where were all the servants? I’d run into three, total. I cursed under my breath and grabbed the torch from its bracket.
The cave was your basic rocky cave, but I could smell sea-water. A few steps later I determined that it was coming from the right, so I turned to the left.
I followed the cave into the cliff for a long way without seeing anything but more cave in flickering torchlight.
“Are we looking for something in particular, Boss?”
“No, something in general.”
The ground was hard and uneven, difficult to walk on. It would be even harder to fight on, so I hoped that wouldn’t come up. Not that I often hoped it would come up.
“I mean, Boss, we’re no longer even in the house.”
“That should make you happy. Why doesn’t it make you happy?”
“Guess I’m getting hard to please.”
Just after that the cave ended. There were no bones, or abandoned nests, or dens, or any other signs that there might once have been life here. I don’t know what kind of animals live in caves, but none of them had ever been here.
I studied the walls, holding the torch close, and felt myself smile.
“What?”
“There are marks here, just where I thought there might be.”
“So, when you said you weren’t looking for anything specific—”
“I was lying. Ouch.”
“Sorry, Boss. I slipped.”
I wished I had some paper. I should start carrying a notebook, just in case I ever again find myself in a cave with a tenuous connection to a magical house, and I need to write down the obscure symbols carved into the rock. But I at least knew what they were, if not what they meant. They were sorcery runes, the kind of marks a sorcerer would use to help maintain concentration during difficult or complex spells. All sorcerers started that way, using them for even the simplest spells. It’s how you use the energy from the Orb without burning out your brain and destroying yourself, which would interfere with further lessons. I had often used them when teleporting, just to make sure I didn’t do something embarrassing. Expert sorcerers use them when doing something they find difficult. This specimen was one I’d never seen before.
“How did you know it would be here, Boss?”
The torch flared, then guttered for a moment. Time to go back. I took another good, long look at the runes, then turned around and started walking.
“Because of the dead vegetation, of course.”
“Want me to bite you again?”
I chuckled. “If this house suddenly appeared, it was either purely random, or there had to be an anchor.”
“Anchor?”
“A way to magically connect to the manor’s previous location, so it could be brought here.”
“So, you think it was teleported?”
“I think necromancy, and wish I understood it better. But if you’re moving an object around among dimensions, then you need to establish a position so it doesn’t get lost. A tunnel into the side of the cliff would be perfect, because it would be fixed, out of the way by a good distance, and easily found. Loiosh, I’m so smart, sometimes—”
“What about the torches?”
“I’m still working on that.”
I made my way to the stairway, hesitated, continued past it.
After about twenty or thirty steps and a long curve, I saw daylight ahead. I walked out into it and blinked. When my eyes had adjusted, I took a good look around. The mirror that had to be there was big, and fixed to the top of the cave with iron bars.
Well.
“Boss—”
“I know. Let me think.”
I didn’t so much think as remember.
* * *
“I have a question,” I announced to the Enchantress of Dzur Mountain.
We were in the library of Castle Black: Sethra, Morrolan, and me. In a short time, my life would be turned upside down and my marriage would explode and I’d end up running for my life, but I didn’t know that, so life seemed pretty good. Aliera had just ducked out, muttering about important business, which meant she was visiting the necessary room or killing someone. Her leaving provided a break in the conversation, and let me ask about something I had been nervous asking about with her there. To wit: her daughter.
“Oh?” said Sethra.
“It’s about Aliera’s daughter. Devera.”
“You’ve met her?” said Morrolan.
“A few times.”
Sethra nodded and looked very knowing, but then she always looked very knowing, possibly on account of knowing stuff. “What about her?”
“Things she’s said make me wonder.…” I stopped, considered, reconsidered, and said, “Is it possible to teleport to a different time, instead of a different place?”
“No,” said Sethra.
“Okay, then.”
Morrolan cleared his throat. Sethra looked at him, they exchanged some sort of communication, and Sethra shrugged and said, “I guess it can’t do any harm.”
“Hmmm?”
She turned back to me. “No, it is impossible to travel to a different time, as if one were traveling to a different place. We travel through time at a rate of one second each second, forward, and that’s that.”
“I hear a ‘but’ coming on.”
She nodded.
“There are places that are—I don’t know how to say it. Warped, perhaps.”
“The Halls of Judgment.”
“Yes. Time there isn’t the same as time here.”
“So, I could go there, and come back at a different time?”
She shook her head. “No, but it’s possible the Necromancer could. I don’t know. She isn’t foolish enough to try.”
“When I visited there before, and emerged, time hadn’t done anything strange.”
“Hadn’t it?”
I tried to remember. I don’t get how memory works. Some things that happened ages ago are sharp and clear, and some have gotten foggy, and I don’t know why. I can usually count on my memory, for most things, or at least for anything that hasn’t been messed with by—
“Such language, Vlad,” said Sethra. “What is it?”
“Verra. My Goddess. She did things to my memory. I hate that. And I think the whole thing with the Paths of the Dead and the Halls of Judgment are part of it. May her—”
Morrolan cleared his throat.
“Oh, right,” I said. “She’s your friend.” I shrugged. “Sorry.”
He nodded.
“It’s possible,” said Sethra, “that it has nothing to do with the Goddess. Mortal minds are not meant to understand the Halls of Judgment.”
“Yeah, so, back to that.”
“Yes. Time. The Paths of the Dead are another world that touches our own, with Deathgate Falls providing the point of connection.”
“With you so far.”
“Of course, time on another world doesn’t have to match time on our own.”
“Of course,” I said.
Sethra ignored my tone and said, “Different worlds, different laws, different time streams.”
“All right.”
“The Halls of Judgment permit contact among many of these worlds. That is how the Lords of Judgment created it. Multiple worlds, and time streams, have that point of contact.”
I considered that. “But if they’re different time streams, uh, whatever that means, it can’t have any influence on ours, right?”
“You have understood exactly,” said Sethra.
“Which means, it doesn’t matter, because it has no effect on anything I’m likely to run into.”
“Yes.”
Morrolan coughed.
Sethra looked at him, then back at me. “All right, it’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “For one thing, there’s Devera.”
“Devera. Well. You might say she was born in a state of timeless flux.”
“Just what I was about to suggest,” I said.
Morrolan was polite enough to chuckle. “You need to decide,” he put in, “whether you want to know how time works, or how Devera works, because it isn’t the same conversation.”
I looked over at Sethra, who nodded. “Oh,” I said. “Well, okay, Devera then.”
Sethra nodded. “She—oh, hello, Aliera.”
She nodded, resumed her seat, and poured us all wine. “What are we discussing now?”
“Time,” said Morrolan. “Its nature, its variations, and how we swim along in it.”
“Ah. We should have the Necromancer here.”
Everyone there liked the Necromancer, so I didn’t say she gave me the creeps. Actually, I kind of liked her too.
“What you need to understand,” said Sethra, as if just picking up where we’d left off, “is that place and time are intertwined. If the time in one place does not correspond with time in another, that does not mean you can move between places at the same time, or between times in the same place.”
“Unless you’re my daughter,” said Aliera, looking smug. Then she said, “Why the curiosity, Vlad? Did you have somewhen you wanted to be?”
I drank some more wine. “No, just trying to make sense of my visit to the Halls of Judgment.”
“That was years ago,” said Aliera. “A long time, for you.”
“There,” I said. “You see? It’s all about time. Everything is about time. Time to do this, time to do that, need to get the timing right, this happened before that did. Time is everything. If sorcery were to provide a way to control it—”
“It doesn’t,” said Sethra.
“Okay. Too bad.”
She frowned. “Vlad, is there something going on?”
“No,” I said, because I didn’t think there was. “I’m just, I don’t know, fascinated.”
“You’re fascinated by everything,” said Aliera, as if that were a bad thing.
“Yeah. Part of being an Easterner. No telling what odd directions our curiosity will take us.”
Aliera nodded. “Yes. Lack of discipline in thinking. That’s probably why you keep getting conquered.”
“No, we just keep running out of time,” I said, and the conversation drifted off onto other things.
* * *
I stared out at the ocean-sea, then up at the cliffs.
“Boss?”
“That isn’t supposed to be there.”
“What?”
“That chunk of rock, up there, sticking out from the cliff. It shouldn’t be there.”
“I don’t—”
“It fell. During the Interregnum.”
“Oh,” he said. Then, “When are we?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, except that it’s before or during the Interregnum.”
My first thought was to remove my amulet and see if I had my connection to the Orb. It should be safe, right? If I was back in time to before the Jhereg was after me, they wouldn’t be looking for me yet. And they certainly wouldn’t look for me in the past.
I almost did it, but then I hesitated. Just how confident was I that I wasn’t still inside the manor, even though strange paths took me through time? Not all that confident, when I thought about it.
I looked out at the restless water again and considered.