“I can’t believe she closed the portal before Bob and Mary were through.” Paul spoke quietly, partly because he was still feeling sick after the terrifying step through Hazel’s portal, but mostly because Tamass was sitting on a flat rock only thirty feet down the hill.
Karen replied in the same low pitch. “She had to close it, or the demons would have followed us through. She said there’s other windows like hers all along the coast, and for some mysterious reason she thinks Bob and Mary will know where they are. I don’t know about that, but I hope they’re okay.”
“I hope so too.” If Paul’s suspicion was correct, he was pretty sure the old couple would have survived the demon attack, but not that they’d be able to catch up, even if they did turn out to be shape-shifting black leopards. “How far from home do you think we are?”
They were sitting on a ridge of rocky high ground with an ocean bay at their backs. In front, a stretch of sparsely wooded wilderness rose gradually out of the dark night towards their escarpment. A small town slept on the coast down behind them, with the lights of a bigger town twinkling across the big bay.
“Seventy-five miles.”
He squinted at her. “That’s very precise.”
“Well, that’s how far it is across the English Channel from Trenick Bay,” she pointed ahead, then jerked a thumb over her shoulder, “to Brest. Which, in our world, is just offshore from that big town over there.”
“You really think your mirror image theory is correct?”
“Never been more certain of anything in my life. I know Brest well. Dived from there hundreds of times during my first degree. That bay behind us is the exact shape of France’s northwest coastline. I can even recognise it in the moonlight. Except that the land and water have swapped sides.” She jutted her chin at something past his head. “If you want mathematical proof, there’s the Pole Star.”
Yes, there it was, in the Little Bear constellation.
He measured it up from the horizon with his clenched fist at arm’s length, the same way he’s tracked the stars during that terrifying night passage down the Bristol Channel in Marianne last week.
Five fists. “Fifty degrees.”
“Yep. The latitude of Brest is forty-eight-point-something degrees north. We’re sitting a few miles north of Brest, so fifty degrees is good.”
She was right. From a latitude of fifty degrees, anywhere in the northern hemisphere, the Pole Star would always be fifty degrees above the horizon.
She leaned closer and nudged him in the ribs. “We were both right. My mirror image theory, and your parallel worlds one.”
He could hear her grinning in the darkness.
“As long as the stars are in the same place in this world as they are in ours.”
“Ever the doubter,” she murmured with mock sadness.
“Hey, you two,” Tamass called quietly. “Get yourselves down below the skyline, will you? People will see you up there from miles around.”
They shuffled down a bit.
Despite their low voices, it seemed Tamass had heard them discussing Hazel’s portal.
“It doesn’t normally take her that long to produce a window. She finds existing ones, just like that. Thin places, she calls them. Often locates them at the edges of places. Coastlines and riverbanks. That sort of thing. But when we left the tunnel from your house, the thin place we’d come through to visit you was filled with demons, so she had to create a distant window to take us right away from there. We’d left our horses tethered on the other side, too. Those bastards probably ate them.”
“What the hell were those creatures?”
“Demons. You’ve never fought them before.” It was a statement rather than a question.
“Never even heard of them in real life.”
“Real life can mean different things.”
Apparently, it could.
“Hazel should be back soon,” Tamass said. “I didn’t want to go down there. Someone would see me and then there’d be a right fuss.”
“Couldn’t we have avoided the town altogether?”
“Sted’s waiting for us there. And we need new horses. And while we’re here I want to hear that legend again. I’ll pay more attention this time.”
Karen stiffened at the mention of Sted. She’d always considered him to be unreliable and unworthy of Tamass’s loyal friendship. Paul had seen her ranting on the subject in the forum, and she was quite pissed off when he wrote Tamass rewarding Sted with the position of Royal Wizard in The Siege of Ys.
Paul had no opinion about Sted, and wasn’t particularly interested in his character. His trustworthiness had never come up in the books. But he could understand why Karen might feel uncomfortable about meeting the wizard and being polite to his face, after all she’d had to say about him in the past.
“Why do you have to hear it here?”
“That town down there is Tokki. According to a local legend, it’s where our father was born. It’s the northernmost town of the Boii hill country, which stretches south for a thirty-day walk down this coast. The Boii are a proud, ancient people who suffered badly during the war.”
Paul and Karen stared at each other and mouthed Boii at the same time, and Paul patted his jeans pocket.
Oh, no.
A flush of dread flooded his body and a heavy pulse drummed in his ears.
In the panic last night he’d left Sarah’s miniature photo on the mantelpiece.
His heart sank.
It was lost. Everything was lost. His house had been burned to the ground, and with it every photograph he had of Sarah would have been destroyed.
His head dropped and his eyes filled with tears of bitter self-recrimination.
It was all shit. Everything. The whole world was shit.
A distant owl hooted in the night.
Tamass returned the call. “That’s Hazel. She’ll be here soon. So, anyway, the Boii hold their legends dear, and keep them close to their hearts. I was brought here as a boy to hear one of them. I’ve never heard a whisper of it anywhere else, and I have no reason to believe it’s ever been told outside that small group of elders in Tokki. You should hear it now.”
They fell quiet and listened to the night sounds. After a while, they heard the steady steps of a hooved animal climbing the slope.
Eventually, Hazel emerged from the darkness. She was leading a donkey, ridden by an old man bundled up in white bed sheets or something.
A man of about Paul’s age walked beside the donkey. He wore a floppy sort of turban, built of some soft dark material wound around and around his head. His beard was plaited in a complicated arrangement, and he walked as if he was thinking great thoughts. He had to be the wizard, Sted.
He looked a bit of a prat.
Karen helped Hazel lift the old man from the donkey’s saddle, while Sted handed Paul a thick book bound in soft leather.
“This is for your writing. Do you have a pen?”
Paul was confused. “Oh. Thank you. No. We left home in a hurry.”
The wizard produced a quill pen and a small but chunky bottle of ink from somewhere inside his robe.
Paul accepted them. “Thank you.”
Sted handed him a leather hip satchel to carry his writing stuff in.
“Thank you.”
“Nice man bag,” Karen murmured.
“Tamass,” Hazel said. “This is Ortz, senior elder of Tokki.”
Tamass offered Ortz his comfortable seat on the flat rock, which the old man accepted gratefully.
He peered at Tamass through milky eyes. “It is good to meet you again.” Then he peered at Paul. “It is also good to meet you, brother of my king. Thank you, both, for honouring Tokki with your presence.”
Tamass smiled graciously. “You honour us with yours. I would hear the legend that concerns our father again. It’s many years since I heard it, and I was so young.”
“I remember.” Ortz chuckled. “You weren’t very impressed.”
Sted cleared his throat as if to say, let’s get on with it, but no one took any notice of him.
After some more pleasantries, and a drink of water for Ortz, Tamass sat cross-legged at the old man’s feet and closed his eyes.
Ortz closed his milky eyes too. “Twin brothers, born into danger…”
Paul sat cross-legged beside Tamass, balanced the open bottle of ink on a flat rock by his knee, dipped the quill pen’s nib into it, and started writing the legend on the first page of his new book as Ortz spoke it.
Everyone listened in respectful silence, broken only by the old man’s quiet voice and Paul’s pen scratching across the pages. The old man sipped water when he finished, and then struggled to stand.
Tamass helped him back to his donkey, where Hazel stood waiting to take him home.
She paused for a moment before they left, tilting her head to one side in that way of hers, and then nodding to the north with a smile. “Your party will be complete again soon.” She handed two blankets to Karen. “I’ll bring them some clothes to wear from Tokki.”
Tamass produced a slim brass telescope from inside his cloak and extended it to survey the land. “Can’t see anything yet. Does anyone want to watch for them?”
Paul did. He sat on the flat rock and stared through Tamass’s telescope for an hour, until, sometime before dawn, when the sky was growing lighter and features of the land were becoming more visible, he saw two black leopards loping easily towards them in the distance.