There was a trick to the portal spell, Pel discovered, even for a wizard; it required one to look in a direction that wasn’t there, and then draw enough magic into one’s perceptions to make the direction real. It was no wonder that no one had discovered it before Shadow, or that it had taken Shadow herself several centuries to come up with it.
It was, in fact, much harder to learn this single spell than to acquire all the basics of matrix wizardry; he had to work at it for most of the day. Shadow let him pull as much energy from her matrix as he needed, so much power that the air in the stuffy little workroom seemed to vibrate with it, the walls glowed pale green, the stones on the shelves buzzed and chimed-but even with all that power, it still took some time before he begin to get the hang of it.
It seemed so strange-as if he had found himself in a funhouse, one where he had to learn to work all the tricks just by wishing. Shadow never explained why the walls glowed green, what the stones were for; she forced him to concentrate on the portal spell.
He tried very hard to concentrate, and at last, in a way he had no words to describe, he began to sense how it would work.
Shadow forbade him to make any attempt to contact Earth, but she guided him in finding the Galactic Empire, in scanning through the worlds therein, in choosing one, and in opening a gateway.
The stone walls fluoresced blue, then vermilion; stones crawled and twisted; but at last he managed to create an opening.
And once the portal was there, holding it open was fairly easy. He simply had to not let the currents of magic slip away.
Colors shifted oddly around him, and he ignored them. He had succeeded in creating his first portal, creating a hole into another world!
Pel marveled at it. He had worked magic. He had opened a path between universes! The feeling of power, of accomplishment, and most of all of strangeness, was overwhelming; he found himself weeping with no idea why.
Shadow summoned servants from somewhere; the single door of the workroom swung open and admitted one of her silent, black-clad people. She ordered him through the portal, to test it; the man stepped through, vanishing, and a moment later reappeared unhurt. He bowed before Pel.
“Don’t they talk?” Pel asked, when the man did not speak, did not say a word about where he had been.
“Not well,” Shadow replied.
* * * *
The remains of breakfast had congealed into an unappetizing mess; no one had ever cleared them away. Amy thought it was time for lunch, past time, though it was hard to be sure when the only light came from a shaft overhead, a square opening in the ceiling that obviously opened to daylight, but which was angled so that she could not see the sky.
No lunch came. Maybe Shadow had forgotten, or perhaps the folk of Faerie only ate two meals a day; Amy could only guess.
She and Ted and Prossie had made no attempt to leave the dining hall beyond visits to a privy that was just up a short corridor; she and Prossie had discussed leaving, had twice almost decided to go back to their bedchambers, but both times they had lost their nerve.
Ted hadn’t said anything; most of the time he had just sat there, staring at his thumbs, occasionally glancing around disinterestedly.
All three of them, even Ted once or twice, had walked about the room, stretching their legs; all three had spent some time just sitting, as well. Amy and Prossie had talked a little, and several times Amy had found herself starting to slip into confessions and confidences, only to veer away whenever she remembered Ted’s presence. Despite his silence, she thought he might be listening, and she did not care to share her memories, and her concerns about her pregnancy and Stan and Walter and Beth and Susan and all the rest, with a madman sitting a few feet away.
For that matter, while the three servants still in the room gave every appearance of being inanimate, she didn’t know whether they might not be listening. Amy was now convinced that whatever the servants were, they weren’t fully human; ordinary people could not possibly stand so still for so long. These things might be some sort of magical robot, or people under some sort of spell, Amy didn’t know; but whatever they were, they might be listening.
And of course, Shadow herself might be listening-any time, any place, Shadow might be listening.
So Amy kept her conversation vague and general, or else trivial.
She was just about to suggest, for the third time, that they return to their bedchambers, when the abandoned servants suddenly jerked to life. Two simply turned and walked out, leaving the door open behind them; the third beckoned for Amy and the others to follow her.
* * * *
The two of them had moved from the workshop back down to the throne room, where Pel had practiced, opening and closing a portal into the Empire unassisted three or four times, using power drawn from just one strand of Shadow’s web; Shadow wanted to be absolutely certain that he would be able to let her back into Faerie.
Pel had discovered some interesting things in the process of this practice.
For one, he had found that Shadow’s geas, or post-hypnotic suggestion, or whatever it was, worked; if she told him to open a portal, he had no choice in the matter. He began the spell whether he wanted to or not.
There was no compulsion with other requests or commands, but there certainly was with the portals.
He supposed this was intended to ensure that he wouldn’t strand her in another universe. It seemed there was a problem with this in that Shadow would be unable to give him orders from the Galactic Empire, but he supposed she would have thought of anything that obvious and found a way around it.
He had also discovered that it was very difficult to open a new portal-each time, after a moment of wild gyration, the spell tried to settle on the exact same spot he had used the time before, like machinery settling into a well-worn groove, or an animal on a familiar path, and had to be forced away. It was downright impossible to open a portal near, but not at, one that had been used before. That explained why Elani’s spell gateway to Earth had always come out through Pel’s basement wall.
And he couldn’t control exactly where a portal would come out; he didn’t understand why, and Shadow did not explain it, but even when he thought he knew the exact location where his portal would appear, even when he could sense the shape of the other world so clearly he felt as if he ought to be able to step right through without any portal at all, the portal might come out a hundred feet, or a thousand, away from the intended target.
That might explain why Elani’s spell had come out in his basement in the first place, instead of somewhere more useful.
Of course, he couldn’t really see where it would come out, he could merely sense certain characteristics of the place, characteristics for which he had no words-he could feel them magically, but had no idea how to explain them in words. He guessed that they might relate somehow to magnetic fields, but he didn’t really know.
He knew the spell, though, which was the important part. He could open portals.
When Shadow was satisfied that Pel did, indeed, know the spell, she began making her final preparations for departure; Pel leaned against a wall of the throne room and watched.
Every so often he glanced at Susan Nguyen’s corpse, lying in a corner where Shadow had left it-she had had her servants remove Valadrakul’s scorched remains, and there hadn’t been enough left of Raven or Singer to trouble about, but she had perversely left Susan’s body. Each time he looked, Pel shuddered slightly.
He had never seen Nancy’s body, or Rachel’s; he had grieved for them, but he had also been almost numb in some ways, had struggled through moments of disbelief.
He could hardly disbelieve in Susan’s death, when the poor little Vietnamese lawyer’s corpse was lying right there.