“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?”