‘It was more than just there. I guess it happened a few times along the way, but maybe it was my memory, you know, like muscle memory. Maybe I felt I needed the magic, and my body wanted to believe it was there.’
Gilmour nodded.
Steven rubbed his chin. He needed a shave again. Anyway, whatever it was, at the city dump, I felt the magic. It took me. I needed it, and it came in a blast. I think it came from the key. I can’t be sure, but it did knock me down twice.’
‘Why the key?’ Gilmour leaned forward, his brow furrowed.
‘Because the portal was still a good quarter of a mile away.’ Steven saw Garec frown and added, ‘About four hundred paces – and the key was right there, just a few paces away at the time.’
How did it happen?’ Mark joined the interrogation, suddenly interested.
Steven chuckled. ‘I hit a speed bump, the same one, twice.’
Garec tried the words together, ‘Speed bump?’
‘Right. And who would have thought there would be speed bumps at the landfill? I mean, who goes in there but guys in pick-ups and big town dumper-trucks? Are there really enough pedestrians that they need speed bumps?’
‘But it slowed you down just enough?’
‘Knocked me down is more like it, and when I stood up, everything had changed. I knew right where to find the portal – and the key.’
Sensing something, Gilmour asked, ‘But that wasn’t all, was it?’
‘No.’ Steven kept his eyes on the fjord. ‘I saw more than I expected. It was the Fold. It had to be.’
‘And?’
‘And there were rips in it, tears, like you would tear open a paper sack or the wrapping of a present – three tears.’
Gilmour ran a palm across his ribs, a gesture he had repeated several times that morning. He reached inside his tunic, withdrew his pipe and used Mikelson’s lighter to ignite a leafy mound of Falkan tobacco.
‘Great lords, but that’s a handy device.’ Garec was impressed.
Mark said, ‘You should see some of the nonsensical toys we’ve invented, Garec. It would have your head spinning.’
‘Speaking of which-’ Steven tossed Mark the roast beef sandwich from his pocket.
Finally Mark perked up. ‘Ah, thank you,’ he said, heartfelt, and fumbled with the plastic wrapping. ‘What kind is it?’
‘Roast beef with mayo on wheat. It was all Howard had in his kitchen – well, all that looked safe enough to eat.’
‘Thank you,’ Mark repeated, and finally grinned. ‘Try this, Garec.’ He slashed the sandwich in two, offered half to Garec and gestured with the other half towards Gilmour.
‘No thanks, Mark,’ Gilmour indicated his pipe with a shrug. ‘Anyway, Steven, these tears you saw – was anything moving through them?’
‘No, and the funny thing about them is that I think I put them there – at least, at the time I was convinced I put them there.’
‘You?’ Garec took a bite of the sandwich and exclaimed, ‘Great leaping whores! This is the best thing I’ve eaten in ten Twinmoons! Say again what it’s called?’
‘Roast beef with mayo. Mayonnaise.’ Steven was amused.
‘Roast beef with mayo. Gilmour, we have to learn to make mayo.’ Garec wiped off a smear with his finger and licked it. He gave a moan of satisfaction. ‘Great rutters-’
Smiling, Gilmour went back to the subject. ‘How could you have created tears in the Fold?’
‘That’s just it, Gilmour. I don’t know that I did, but I think I could have, or maybe – maybe it was perfectly all right with me that they were there, as if it didn’t matter.’
‘And you say there were three?’
‘Three. Oblong, and standing on end, like narrow entrances to a tunnel or roughly hewn doorways, and when they disappeared – or rather, when I let them go – I knew right where to find the key and the portal.’
‘And the magic came from inside you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Steven said, matter-of-factly. ‘I don’t think so. Why would it? The staff was here, and I didn’t have the key yet.’ He looked across at the hickory staff leaning against the small sailboat. ‘So I suppose the magic was the key. It had hit me hard in the knees, twice, so I wasn’t feeling much of anything except pain – but when I reached out, I felt as though I could grab the air, as if it was there for me to take. That was when I saw the rips. They materialised in front of me, right where the big centre hill at the dump had been, but where the magic came from isn’t actually as important as what began to take shape in my mind.’
‘What’s that?’ Mark swallowed the last of the sandwich.
‘That we can keep evil trapped inside the Fold.’
‘How?’ Gilmour looked bemused.
‘By controlling the Fold itself.’
Garec laughed. ‘Oh, of course. I thought you were going to suggest something difficult.’
‘No, listen. The Fold is not the enemy, the Fold exists; if evil is trapped inside, and evil is our ultimate enemy, then our goal can only be to keep evil inside for ever. Gilmour, you said that the Fold is the absence of perception and therefore the absence of reality. So it’s the place between what is real and what is unreal, the space separating expectations from actualisations. Right?’
‘That’s how I think of it in my mind, yes.’ Gilmour wasn’t sure yet about Steven trying to make his definition of the Fold into a tangible, controllable reality. ‘But that doesn’t make it any easier to grasp.’
‘Yes it does.’ Steven seemed convinced.
‘Again, you have me on cloakpins, Steven. How?’
‘Because if it exists and if we can conceptualise it accurately and if we can reach it via the spell table,’ Steven withdrew Lessek’s key and held it aloft between two fingers, ‘then we can seal it, not by closing the door that the Larion Senate and Nerak and a handful of other travellers have used over the ages, but rather by building a wall around it, a box around it, a-’ Steven laughed, ‘-a safe-deposit box for the whole frigging thing.’
‘Steven, you’re mixing two kinds of thinking,’ Mark protested. ‘You can’t muddle the tangible and the intangible that way. You’re creating a philosophical paradox. It won’t work.’
‘It will work. Everything can make sense if we take time to learn enough about it, about what it values, about what motivates it, about where it came from and why.’ He searched their camp for an example. ‘Look. Over there, that rock. Now, we all agree it’s a rock, right?’
The others nodded, curious.
‘We all agree it’s a rock, but let’s assume Garec is a masonry worker, and I am a geologist, and Mark is a miner, and Gilmour, you are a sculptor.’
‘Wait – I see what you mean,’ Garec interrupted, excitedly.
‘We all might see it a bit differently, but no matter how hard we try, it will always be a rock. Whether it’s a snapshot of Eldarni history, a valuable ore, a cornerstone for a public library, or even a beautiful three-dimensional realisation of a bird in flight, it’s still just a rock. There is no way, even using all our will, that we can make that rock a fish, or a grizzly bear – or a roast beef sandwich.’
Gilmour, looking interested, said, ‘So if I’m understanding your thinking: if we can understand the Fold, however intangible it may be, then we can – what?’
‘Anything we want. We can paint the damned thing yellow if you want to,’ Steven said. ‘Don’t you see? There is no paradox. We can do whatever we want to the Fold, if we are careful and thorough in developing our understanding of exactly what it is and how it works.’
Garec felt the rug come out from under them. ‘How do we do that?’
‘We need to know what Lessek knew. He found it, called it a pinprick in the universe. That’s fine. Whatever. But he found it, and he knew how to get to it, how to arrive at that place where he could reach out and grab it – like the air at the city dump. It was no different than it had ever been, but I held it in my hands, pressed against it and moved it around.’ He looked in turn at each of them. ‘That’s what we have to do.’
Gilmour slipped a hand back inside his tunic. Although his ribs no longer hurt, he could feel where he had mended them. Only hurts when I breathe! The three friends followed his gaze to where the leather-bound book of Lessek’s spells lay waiting for him to come and try again.