The Messenger from the Isolate arrived early the next morning.
Elabel was awakened from the depths of dreamlessness by a servant knocking insistently on the wooden headboard. The Messenger, a flushed woman with yellow hair, handed her a small scroll marked with her sister's seal pressed into wax. It broke from the paper easily enough, and Elabel stared at the words inside for several minutes before they made any sense to her.
She had not gotten to sleep the night before until sometime well after midnight. At first, she had tried to backtrack over her slip—to claim that she had been so tired from traveling that her brain had come a little unhooked from itself, that of course she hadn't meant to say there was a world of souls and she'd definitely visited it—but Istel, who had been wondering and worrying about her bizarre behavior for nearly two months now, refused to be deterred. He had never really felt right about Tadala and was ready to jump at anything that would explain her strangeness or at least her sudden presence as a hitherto unknown bosom friend of the Empress. He peppered her with questions, and those answers gave birth to more questions, and those answers whelped litters of seven and eight questions each. When Elabel looked like she was shutting down with fear and exhaustion, he got up, put a pot of water on the stove, and boiled four eggs. He waited while she peeled and ate them, and then the questions started again.
The whole story took hours to tell, partly because he kept returning to a few points over and over—how safe the other side of the city was. How close the caravans had come to the walls. How difficult the passage through the well was. Whether she had ever gotten stuck while trying to go through. How Elabel had been able to disappear for hours and sometimes days at a time without anyone noticing.
Several times Istel put his hands over his face and made a sound like someone had just kicked his foot with a very pointy shoe.
When one set of five-hour candles had nearly guttered out and he'd had to pause for a minute to go around lighting more, she said, “Aren't you going to ask how it's possible for Diagasar to exist in two places at once?”
He pointed at her with an unlit candle. “That you can discuss with my mother tomorrow.”
But it was tomorrow, and the scrap of paper in her hands said in her sister's handwriting:
I am extremely unwell. I must see you immediately to discuss matters regarding our mother's death.
She turned the paper over and over again, but there was nothing more.
Immediately meant a day's ride to Diagasar (or three days going upstream in a boat), three days over the flats into Enelreth, and a day of slogging through sand to get to the Isolate gate. All that, of course, being for someone who knew how to ride, not someone who had to be tied to the saddle and stop regularly to change the bandages stuffed down the back of her leggings.
She barely swallowed a groan.
One of the servants brought tea and an egg when she asked. The Messenger hovered in the corner of the room, explaining that she had been told to wait upon a response.
As she pulled the egg to pieces and became more and more awake, the significance of the note twisted through her brain. Regarding our mother's death. Did the Recorder know what Elabel had overheard? Had she done investigations of her own? But then she said she was unwell. What had happened? Had she eaten something bad or hurt herself? Were there no bone-splinters in the Isolate? How often could someone come through the Gate?
Immediately. Did that mean she had time to talk to Istel first? She was quite sure she didn't have time to spent seven hours re-explaining to the Threadanchor everything she had explained the night before. And if the Recorder did know what Elabel knew, and wanted to explain it—her stomach sank. That, she couldn't tell anyone, but least of all could she tell it to the ruling family of Foulkrin. Not until she knew more. Not until she was sure of something.
The servants very amenably provided her with pens and ink and paper. After a few minutes of thought, she put a sheet of parchment on the bedside table and wrote:
Your Grace the Swordkeeper of Foulkrin,
I have received word by Messenger that my sister is doing poorly in her new accommodations. I do not wish to appear to be cold to her, as there has been some concern that my treatment of her is not entirely just (Boujac.) Please relay what I have told you re: world of souls, to her Grace the Threadanchor of Foulkrin and her Grace the Threadanchor-Elect of Foulkrin.
With sincerity,
103rd Empress
Postscript: Tadala and Ntembwa and Nyoma are still my friends and under my protection.
She thought for a long time before writing the last four words. She chewed the end of the pen for a minute, then started a new sheet of paper:
Your Grace the Recorder of Foulkrin,
Enclosed is a list of books with a summary of their contents provided to me by the reserve librarians of Udeski. Please consult with the citizen Tadala to see if this catalog contains anything relevant to her situation, and take measures to acquire any book which does.
With sincerity,
103rd Empress
Postscript Tadala is still my friend and under my protection.
She wasn't entirely sure who to send the next note to, but after rolling the problem around in her head for a bit she settled on:
Citizens Ntembwa and Nyoma,
Please read this note to Tadala and no one else. I believe I have found some books which are about your home and not mine (the library of Udeski is grown and not written, so no one has to have visited.) The Recorder (Astel) will bring you the list of books. Tell him to find any of them that sound even a little familiar.
I hope I will be back soon.
With sincerity,
103rd Empress
Postscript The Swordkeeper (Istel) knows nearly everything now. You can answer his questions but you don't have to.
On a fourth sheet, feeling very tired and like she had talked to far too many people already, Elabel wrote:
Your Grace the Recorder of Diagasar,
I am coming.
With sincerity,
103rd Empress
There was no road to Enelreth, because there didn't need to be. The land quickly dried out as the distance increased from Diagasar, and while the horses had to pick their way through tall grass for the first half-day, soon the clumps of grass were growing farther apart, separated by long stretches of dusty, rocky ground. When the sand dunes started, that was Enelreth proper.
Teth and Niell had insisted on accompanying her again. She had been half-afraid that they would refuse to come until Istel had been consulted, but when she had said this, Teth looked at her as though she had suggested that the two of them give up soldiery and juggle dishes for their living.
“Begging your pardon, Empress, but we take orders from you, not his Grace the Swordkeeper,” Teth had said.
“But he knows what he's doing. And I …”
“You have your business, and he has his,” Niell had responded even more firmly. “We go with you.”
In Diagasar, Elabel had sent for a Steward to accompany them, as much for a reason to rest as for any assistance the new man could provide. She was growing a little easier in the saddle. Largely this was due to the extra padding Niell had applied vigorously to said object while they were waiting for Hliedel, their Steward, to come down from the city with more supplies, but she thought she had learned a bit how to move with the horse, too. At the very least, when they camped on a grassy hillock the first night, Teth said they weren't too much slower than he expected to be.
Horses generally didn't do well in Enelreth. The blowing sand got in their gears and caused them to lock up. Teth, with an eye to this possible misfortune, had brought an entire saddlebag full of nothing but tightly-woven fabric, which at the sight of the first dune he wrapped around the limbs and bodies of their mounts and pinned snugly. The horses shook their heads and made steely noises of complaint but continued on.
Enelreth. Elabel was not prepared for Enelreth. Not because the dunes of orange sand were totally foreign to her—but because the last time she had seen such dunes, she had stood on the rampart of her empty city on the other side of the well. It did not seem right that one could reach this place just by walking, without passing through some sort of door.
This was an autonomous region and not a Node City because—while the dunes technically contained as many threads and as many people as Udeski or Gamanche—both people and threads moved constantly. The Threadanchor led her people in continual migration, chasing dense clusters of fibers that floated through the sand. Every few months the threads rooted in a new spot, giving rise to a brief oasis where water flowed and plants grew. The Enelrethar generally arrived with their flocks a few days later and set up city. They didn't camp, exactly; they dug in and shored up and built. So long as the threads stayed in the same place, the sand cooperated with them, allowing itself to be shaped into sturdy buildings with cool interiors. (While the city center, with the oasis at its heart, was always constructed in a series of practical, one-story cubes, the more eccentric citizens quickly filled the outer rings of the temporary metropolis with fantastical spirals, orbs, domes, and stairs. This was a sport in Enelreth, and sometimes there were prizes awarded.) When the outermost structures started to crumble, it was time to move on, herding the birds before them. (Most of the chicken breeding stock in the Empire came from Enelreth, though their flocks also included quail, pheasants, ostriches, pigeons, turkeys, and peacocks. These animals were real in the same way people were real—they breathed and moved and ate without any apparent mechanisms, like the horses and camels had.)
It was not at all a given that a party riding through Enelreth would even see the current city, but the path that Teth had plotted passed near to a haphazard spiral of houses, shops, and sculptures. Their horses walked through a wide gap of flat sand, where hundreds of people and birds were milling about. People in blue robes and head wraps darted back and forth, carrying bundles of clothing and folded bits of furniture out of the houses to dozens of half-loaded sledges. The threads were nearly the same squash-color as the sand, clustered as closely together as the weft of a loom. It was something of a shock after the grand emptiness of the dunes. Elabel thought she could see the threads on the edge of the city quivering.
The Threadanchor of Enelreth was easy enough to spot; she was the only person in the city allowed to dye her robes and turban orange rather than blue. (When she pulled the fabric over her face and hands and walked out into the desert, she became nearly invisible.) Now she could be seen standing on a sledge, the blue stripes on her hands flashing back and forth as she directed traffic.
She jumped off the sledge when she saw the horses and trotted up to them.
“Well, you've picked a bad time to visit. We're just packing up—the sculptures on the tip toward Diagasar started going yesterday—you can still get some water, anyway—the pool's that way—wait.” She put a hand over her eyes and squinted up at Elabel. She was either speaking in the language of Diagasar, or Enelrethar was very close to it. “Are you the Empress?”
“Yes. I suppose you weren't able to come to the investment.”
“No, we were setting up the city here. The threads have been very mobile this year. I sent my brother instead. Anar! Come say hello to the Empress!” she yelled.
A young man (though not, Elabel suspected, as young as the Threadanchor) separated himself from a group of people carrying great round jars of water out of the center of the soon-to-be-crumbling city. He was clearly the Swordkeeper, given the curving blade at his hip and the orange cord wrapped around his hand.
“Your Imperial Highness,” he said. “Hullo. It really is too bad you've come just now—we're moving out in a day or two—but if you wait a minute we can get some water on to boil for tea—”
“It's no bother, Your Graces,” Elabel said. She suddenly felt that she would like to come back to Enelreth, sometime when the city was built up and stable. “I am on my way to visit my sister in the Isolate. I just stopped to—er—well—say—give you my greetings.”
The Threadanchor and Swordkeeper exchanged worried glances. Both of them had round, open faces over which emotions played rather obviously. “I hope your sister's well,” the Threadanchor said finally.
“I do too,” Elabel said, not sure if she was lying. “Perhaps when we return from this—from this visit, we could take tea with you then. You could,” she took a deep breath and tried to think Empress-like thoughts, “tell me your concerns, or any problems you've noticed with the Threads.”
“How soon will your Imperial Highness be returning this way?” the Swordkeeper asked sharply.
“I'm not sure. In three or four days—”
“Then you must take another route, or wait another week in the Isolate,” the Threadanchor said. “The city isn't safe when it's collapsing.”
“I'm sure we can avoid the area where the sand is unstable,” Teth said from behind Elabel.
“It's not the sand that I'm worried about,” the Threadanchor said. “It's the threads. When they started moving again, sometimes with the strain … They pull out of shape, and everything around them is pulled out of shape too. They get bent. People get lost when they don't stay clear.”
“Sometimes they're lost for years,” the Swordkeeper clarified.
“A bent thread,” Elabel repeated. The thread going down the well and coming up the other side. “How soon before the threads start moving again? Will I—would I be able to see the threads bend, if I were back here when they did?”
The siblings traded looks again, this time the worry verging on panic. “I wouldn't recommend that, Empress,” said the Threadanchor. “Like I said, it's dangerous to get too close.”
Hliedel the Steward politely cut off this conversation by asking if they might take on some more water for the huge canteens stored in all of their saddlebags.
Elabel chewed on her lips the rest of that day's ride. Her heart was beating very fast. Maybe Diagasar was the only permanent door, but it seemed there were others—though, she hastily reminded herself, she didn't know where the lost people said they had been when they reappeared. Maybe it wasn't a door that opened when the threads moved, and even if it were, it might not go into Tadala's world. There was the world of bodies which they had spoken of in Gamanche, and who knew if there might be others?
They camped in the rapidly-cooling sand that evening; Teth thought they would reach the Gate early the next day, and the thought of conversing with her sister when she was exhausted from heat and riding made Elabel's stomach heave. Actually the thought of conversing with her sister at all brought on nausea, and she spent a long time staring at the stars and imagining various terrifying conversations.
I couldn't have come any sooner.
I wasn't dallying on purpose.
I'm not trying to punish you. I just want to find the truth.
I may be stupid for thinking you had something to do with the death of our mother, but I can't ignore what I heard you say.
That was what it came down to, she thought. Maybe it made her insane, or queer in the head, or stupid, but she couldn't pretend that conversation between the Recorder and the Swordkeeper hadn't happened, and she couldn't pretend she hadn't heard it. It had been three years and she had not forgotten a word.
The bedroll was lumpy, and no amount of writhing seemed to smooth it down. Her armpits were hot and her nose was cold.
She had been looking for a book in her mother's rooms. There had been some breakdown of the chain of command—either the Stewards didn't know who to ask for permission to clean out these rooms and put them in order for the next Empress, or the Recorder had forbidden them from touching anything. In any case, they had grown dusty and ever-more disorganized since her mother's death, as her sister and brother rifled through the books and papers looking for something, anything to help them govern the city and the Empire that had been so abruptly dumped in their laps. (Elabel remembered On the Nature of the Threads and wondered bleakly if the Recorder had stolen it from the Empress. But her mother would have surely told Elabel about such a significant book if she'd had it.)
The sound of a door opening had sent Elabel scrambling for the Stewards' door that was halfway up the wall in the octagonal study. She wasn't supposed to be here, at least as far as her siblings were concerned, and only her siblings visited these rooms. Anything Elabel touched, she destroyed, the Recorder had said (no doubt referencing a few dozen bits of broken crockery and twice that number of lost spoons).
She had just managed to the get the little door shut behind her and was starting to crawl away down the Stewards' tunnel, when the sound of a book being thrown against a wall made her freeze.
“It's not here! Where in the name of all the cities would it be, if it's not here?”
The Recorder's voice was followed by the Swordkeeper, and now Elabel was simply too frightened to move. “It has to be here. I gave it to her, and she was a magpie about papers.”
“That was ten years ago, and nothing came of your investigation. Why shouldn't she have thrown it on the fire?” This last was said in a tone of voice that suggested the Recorder didn't care much about the answer.
“Apparently something's come of it now,” the Swordkeeper had said coldly. “I know that man was there, Elathal.” (Elabel, who had never in her whole life heard the Recorder referred to by any name other than her title, had to stuff both hands in her mouth to keep from gasping.)
“How can you be sure?” the Recorder had snarled. There was a strange note in her voice, one that Elabel could not remember ever having heard before. “It's been ten years. Eleven, since the killings. Why would he have hung around Sleketh all that time? Just so you would recognize him a decade later?”
“At least one of us knows something.”
“If you really saw anyone at all, and if it was the man you saw in Sleketh, and if he really did something to her horse to make it throw her. That's a lot of if, brother.”
“He was behind her horse,” the Swordkeeper had said.
“I didn't see him.”
“You were in the trees. He was too far away for you to see.”
“If he wasn't that close, how could you be sure you saw him?” the Recorder demanded querulously. This part of the conversation had had the rhythm of a quarrel they'd had with each other many, many times over.
“I am sure.” A pause, then the sound of books being tipped off the table, then more silence. Finally, “Maybe she gave the report to Foulkrin. They've always had more brains between them than any of our relations.”
“Whereupon he would have promptly thrown it on the fire,” the Recorder had snapped. “He has no patience for conspiracies, brother.”
Elabel had crawled away while they continued to squabble in the study, unable to hear any more terrifying words or books being abused.
Now she shook herself and crawled clumsily into the tent, where Niell was already asleep. Hliedel was stitching up a rip in Elabel's leggings by the light of a small lamp. He nodded to her, and she wondered if he was any relation to the Hliedec whose book of maps her sister had stolen. She tried to smile back at him but found herself blushing. She quickly looked down.
There had been no investigation into her mother's death. Her brother and sister had been the only two people with the Empress when her horse had lost its footing on a narrow section of a stony riverbank, sending them both falling into the shallow water far below. They couldn't have left her broken body there for someone else to look at; it would have washed away.
If that was where the Empress had really died. If they hadn't made up that story to hide the fact that someone else had killed her.
That was a lot of if, Elabel thought. Especially given that they had officially stated that they had both seen it happen, when obviously they had not.
She didn't know why they would lie about that. Well. She knew why she had never told the Foulkrin Threadanchor or any of her family or any of the Stewards about what she had heard: no one would believe her. There still wasn't anyone who believed her, and she was eighteen and the Empress, not fifteen and a scrawny Empress-Elect.
Abruptly Istel's voice was in her head, saying, The Recorder your sister, who is a vile, vicious woman—
She had never realized, somehow, that the ruling family of Foulkrin held her own in such contempt. What would he say about the Swordkeeper her brother? she wondered.
As if from a very long way off, another question came to her: what would Istel say if he knew that only her brother had seen her mother die? What would he say if he knew that the man who had done something to her horse had been seen only by her brother?
But why hadn't the Recorder trusted Istel to take the report seriously? Could it really have been the same man linked to the Massacre of the Feast of Leaves and her mother's death? It could have been a coincidence to see the same man in both places. It could have been an accident. But it was a strange accident.
And why? Why do either of those things? Who was this man, and where was he, and what did he want?
The Recorder would have some explanation, though Elabel had no idea how to make someone tell the truth.
“And how was your passage through the Gate, your Imperial Highness?” asked the Master of the Isolate, bowing.
Elabel looked over her shoulder at the passage of thick Veil-threads that were now closing into a single line behind her. It had felt like walking on a rope bridge made of bags of water, with the sound of howling winds barely kept at bay on all sides.
“Strange,” she said. “How is my sister?”
The Master hesitated. A number of possible responses hovered in his face, before he finally said, “Perhaps you should go and see her.”
It was not as if the Isolate itself required much of a tour, Elabel thought, as she followed him. There were pipes in Boujac that were wider than this island of reality past the Veil. At its center was a very tall, narrow round tower, built of gray and blue stone. Next to the tower stood a poplar tree, and on the other side a fountain gurgled into a stone basin. At no more than twenty paces from the edge of the foundation stones, the Veil-threads reared into the sky, forming an impenetrable curtain. The Isolate was separate but not unlinked from the main reality of the Empire. The sky still lit and darkened at the same times (though the sun was rarely visible), and there were occasional winds (though usually blowing straight up or straight down.)
She had a sudden vision of how the Isolate would look for people who could not see the Threads: truly an island, suspended in a sea of whirling, gray nothingness that went on in all directions. Elabel shuddered. At least no one could fall off into the unreality—that was the peculiar quality of the Veil-threads; they were solid even to the touch of a citizen.
The Master studiously removed an iron key from his belt and unlocked the door. Surely that was for show? It wasn't as if her sister could just walk out, not with all the Isolate threads that Elabel had wrapped around her. Maybe the Master didn't know that. Maybe the threads hadn't held. It wasn't as if she'd had time to test the process … But when she looked up, there was a little cloud of threads over the tower jerking back and forth, as though a puppet on a toy stage had suddenly decided to get up and march about of its own accord.
Elabel felt as though all her muscles were going to freeze and crack at the sight of those threads heaving back and forth.
The Master went ahead of her, vanishing through a doorway on. She had the vague impression he meant to bring the Recorder down to meet her. When the screams started, she hurried to follow him.
The staircase was a tight spiral set into the thickness of the wall. The screaming voice was getting clearer.
She shouldn't run, Elabel thought, in a fog of terror. She was the Empress. Her mother hadn't run.
The Recorder was leaning over a chair, screaming at the Master, who was doing a creditable job of not backing away from her. Her sister looked terrible. Her hair, never as bright a red as Elabel's, was dark and heavy with grease; her face, always pale and thin, was blueish and nearly skeletal. She was wearing only a shift, and it was dirty.
The Recorder saw Elabel and stopped speaking, mid-sentence. For a moment, it was though she was transfixed. But just as suddenly the Recorder's face twisted, and she flew at her.
Without really thinking, Elabel grabbed for the Threads on the opposite side of the room, then looped them around her sister and—slowly—let go. The Recorder stopped with a jerk.
Her dark eyes darted around the room before fixing themselves on Elabel. “Let me go. Send me back to Diagasar.” Her voice was hoarse.
“No,” Elabel said.
“Do it at once. I won't tell you again!” Her sister's voice slid up an octave over the course of this last sentence.
“No,” Elabel repeated, feeling puzzled. Her fear was slipping away, to be replaced by what felt horribly like sadness. She looked at the Master, whose face contorted with embarrassment. “Your—er—Grace, is there a private room where I may speak with my sister?”
He bowed. “I will withdraw below, your Imperial Highness, and tell my squires not to bother you.”
“Thank you,” Elabel said to his retreating back. She twisted the edge of her tunic and looked back at her sister, who had started to struggle against the threads pulling her toward the wall. Every time she lifted a foot, she lost purchase, and the threads tugged her a little closer. This wasn't how this was supposed to go, Elabel thought. The way it went was: The Recorder screamed, Elabel cowered, the Recorder slapped her, Elabel cried or escaped or cried and escaped, and then they avoided each other for as long as possible until the process repeated.
“You said you needed to talk to me about our mother's death,” she said finally, politely, as though she were talking to a stranger.
“Yes.” The Recorder's eyes rolled wildly. “I needed to—tell you that I had—nothing—to—do—with—it!” The threads finally yanked her flush against the wall, breathing heavily. “Let me go!” she commanded, with the miserable tone of someone who knows they are not going to be obeyed.
“What about the man that our brother saw?” Elabel asked.
The Recorder jerked against the threads, for all the world like a fish flopping on a dock. “What man? What are you—speak sense!” Her voice had risen back to a scream.
“The man the Swordkeeper said did something to the horse that made it throw Mother,” Elabel said slowly and patiently. “The man he saw right before she died. What do you know about him? What have you been able to find out?”
Her sister was still, panting, staring, though whether out of disbelief or panic it wasn't clear. Elabel pressed her palms together, then her fingers, feeling each knuckle under her skin in turn. The pressure of the Recorder's stare was overwhelming, and she turned away, toward the stairs—
“I never saw him.” The words were jerky, sharp.
“You said that,” Elabel said. Her heart seemed to be beating in her stomach.
“When—how do you—” The Recorder cut herself off. “I never saw him,” she repeated. “Only the Swordkeeper did.”
“Yes. But did you find the report the Swordkeeper wrote after Sleketh? Do you know where the man went, after Mother's death?” A thought occurred to her. “Did he return to Sleketh? Did you search there?”
“You—you—you stupid—you little—you—do you not understand? Are you so stupid you do not understand?” the Recorder screamed, so loudly that Elabel made it all the way to the doorway to the stairs before the somewhat modulated voice of her sister made her pause. “Wait—no—sister.” The Recorder had no idea how to make that last word sound like an endearment. “What I mean,” she said, and those words sounded like they were forced out between her teeth, “is that I suspect the Swordkeeper was not entirely truthful about what he saw.”
“Why?” Elabel asked. “Why would he lie to you?”
“What do you mean, why would he lie to me? Because he must be the one who did something to her horse! What other reason could he have?”
Elabel thought about this. “If he was responsible for her death, why wouldn't he have told you, so you could help him hide what had happened?”
She waited for an answer, staring at the door that opened into the stairwell. A blue-and-white tapestry hung on this side, woven with patterns of little birds ascending into the sky. It occurred to her that she should have checked in the stairwell to make sure no one was hanging about to eavesdrop. It occurred to her too that this meant that she was going to have go to the Penin to talk to her brother. She had kept a shred of hope that she would be able to track this thing to its source without seeing him. She supposed it was possible to stick him to a wall with threads, too.
Elabel blinked. Her sister had still not spoken. The silence had become so loud that her ears rang.
She turned and accidentally met the Recorder's gaze for a moment before looking down. Her eyes were unpleasantly bloodshot around the dark irises.
The silence grew, and Elabel felt behind herself for the latch of the door.
“You hate me, don't you.” The Recorder's voice was utterly flat.
Elabel had to play the words over in her head a few times to be sure that her sister had said what she thought she had said.
“No. I don't hate you.” Because that didn't feel quite honest, she added, “I would be much happier if I never had to see you again.”
The room was very silent again, and she chanced a look across the room. Her sister's face had gone slack and gray. She was not struggling against the threads anymore.
“Ought I to send you a bone-splinter?” Elabel asked finally. “You did say you weren't well.”
“I don't need a bone-splinter.”
Elabel hesitated, then said. “All right. Please tell the Master if you lack for anything. I'm sure he will arrange things properly.” There didn't seem to be any response forthcoming. “Perhaps you could spend some time in the Isolate's library. I hear it is very good.”
She released the threads binding the Recorder to the wall as she opened the door, but she heard no footsteps following her.
The Master offered to put them up for a week to wait out the shifting of the Enelrethar threads, but Elabel thanked him and said firmly that they would be leaving immediately. Even if the thought of sleeping in the same building as the Recorder hadn't filled her with dread, she had left Niell, Teth, Hliedel, and the horses a forty-five minute walk from the Veil. Teth and Niell she thought would handle crossing the Gate with equanimity, if not enjoyment, but there was no way the horses could be brought through. Just the sight of the edge of reality tended to make the larger animals slip gears and lock their joints.
It hadn't been a complete waste of a trip, Elabel thought (but very nearly slithered across her mind immediately after). She knew she had to talk to her brother. She knew—she was fairly certain that if the report her brother had written still existed, her sister didn't have it and hadn't ever had it.
She was sure the Recorder was lying, but not about what or why.
She was sure—and this surprised her when she thought about it—that there was something physically wrong with her sister, no matter what she had said. The Recorder was angry and afraid (of what? a small voice in Elabel's head asked; surely not me?) but anger and fear alone wouldn't account for how changed she had been. A bone-splinter would be sent, along with a message to the Master to make sure that her sister was seen, she decided.
The others had sheltered by a cluster of standing stones that cast long shadows in the afternoon light. Hliedel was the first to see her, and he waved the tunic he was patching like a flag over his head.
“Your Imperial Highness,” said Teth, getting to his feet. He seemed to have been dozing against the stones. “Any luck?”
“Not really. When we find the Threadanchor's camp again, I'll ask them to send someone to check on her. She doesn't look right at all.” The soldiers and the Steward exchanged glances with each other. Elabel wondered for a moment but went to stand by her horse. It poked its gently-vibrating nose into her hand, and after smoothing its face plates, she offered it a twig with dried leaves on it that she had picked up at the base of the tower. “We'd best start moving, I think. I have been away a long while.”
“Is that wise, Empress?” Niell asked, a frown in her voice if not on her face. “The Threadanchor said that the desert would be unstable—”
Elabel's heart jumped. She had forgotten the possibility of a door in the sands.
It might not be the right door, she reminded herself. And even if it was, it wasn't responsible to bring other people so close to it if she wasn't sure how it worked—
—but she would see the Threads bending long before they were close enough to the door to go through. She could warn them off and go to look at it herself. She needed to know.
“We've still got some time,” Elabel said, her heart thumping very loudly. “She said the citizens wouldn't even be done moving before the end of today. We'll make it through before there's a problem, I'm sure.”