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"You do not have the required magic to travel."
Richard blinked in confusion. "I don't understand. I've traveled many times before."
"Before you had what was required."
"And now I don't?"
The sliph watched him a moment. "Now you do not," she confirmed.
Richard felt like he must be hallucinating. "But I have both sides of the gift. I can travel."
The sliph cautiously reached out and again felt his face. The hand slipped down to his chest, pausing for a moment to put light pressure against him. Her arm drew back into the dark hole in the broken stone.
"You do not have the required magic."
"You already said that. It makes no sense. I was already traveling."
"While you were traveling, you lost what is required."
Richard's eyes widened. "You mean to say that I lost one side of the gift?"
"No, I mean to say that you do not have the gift. You have no magic at all. You may not travel."
Richard had to run the words through his head again to be sure he'd heard correctly. He didn't see how he could have mistaken what the sliph had said. His mind raced through fragments of jumbled thoughts as he tried to grasp how such a thing was possible.
A terrible realization came to him. Could it be that the corruption caused by the chimes might be responsible? Had that corruption finally caught up with him and undone his gift? Rotted it away without his knowing it until it had finally failed?
But that would not explain the sensation he'd felt back in the sliph, just after he'd escaped the grip of the beast and just before he'd started drowning—the sudden sensation of some dark and furtive magic reaching out when he was most vulnerable and touching him.
Richard looked around but saw nothing other than the trees. They were dense enough that he couldn't see beyond them in the moonlight. As a guide, he hated the feeling of not knowing where he was.
"Where are we, anyway? How did we get here?"
"When it happened, when you lost what is needed to travel, I had to bring you here."
"And where is 'here'?"
"I am sorry but I don't know, exactly."
"How can you bring me here, and not know where you are? You always know where you are and the places to which you can travel."
"I already told you, I have never been to this place before. This place is an emergency passage. I knew of it, of course, but I have never been here before. There has never been an emergency within me before.
"That terrible beast hurt me. I was struggling to keep all of you alive. And then, there was something else that came within me. I could not stop it. Like the beast, it entered me without my permission. It violated me."
That confirmed Richard's sense of events, that just after the beast lost its grip on him, something else, some kind of power, had reached out and touched him with its dominion.
"I'm sorry that you were hurt, sliph. What happened to the beast?"
"After this other power came into me, the beast became no more."
"You mean that this other power destroyed it?"
"No. The power did not touch the beast. It touched only you with its full force. After it did, then you no longer had what is required to travel. After that, the beast cast around in me for a brief time, and then vanished. I could no longer sustain you within me, so I had to find the nearest emergency portal."
"What about Nicci and Cara? Were they hurt? Are they safe?"
"They, too, felt the pain of what happened to me, and one of them tried to use her power in me—something that is wrong to do. After I brought you here, I took them to the Keep where they had wished to travel. I told the one that used her power that it was dangerous to do so, and she must not do such a thing."
"I think I understand," Richard said. "It hurt me, too. Were they hurt badly?"
"They are safe at the Keep."
"Then we must be somewhere between the People's Palace and the Keep," Richard said, half to himself.
"No."
He looked over at the liquid silver face. "I don't understand. We were going from the palace to the Keep. If you let me out, then this place here, this emergency passage out, would have to be between the palace and the Keep."
"While I don't know this place, I do know its general area. We are at a place a little more than halfway across the Midlands from the Keep, past Agaden Reach, almost to the wilds."
Richard felt as if the world had just lurched and slid him far from where he had been. "But, but, that's much, much farther from the People's Palace than the Keep is. Why didn't you take me to the closest place—to the Keep?"
"I do not function in that way. What to you may seem like the shortest distance between two places is not the shortest way for me. I am in many places at once."
Richard leaned toward the sliph. "How can you be in many places at once?"
"You have one foot on that dark stone, and one on a stone that is lighter. You are in two places at once."
Richard sighed. "I guess I get your point."
"I travel in a way that is different from your way of traveling. This place, here, even though it is halfway across the Midlands for you, was the closest place for me. I had to get you out into your world again so that you could breathe.
"You no longer had what was needed to travel. Your lungs were filled with me. For those without the gift, breathing
me is poison. It will kill them. But for you, since you were in me and breathing me already, there was a brief period when you were going through a transition, so having me in you was not instantly fatal. You would have died soon, but there was a brief time before that would happen. I knew that the time you had before you would die was not very long at all. I thought to do my best to save you, to get you to a place where you could be back in your world and hopefully recover.
"I brought you here, broke the seal, and placed you out in your world again. You were hurt, but I knew that the essence of me still within you would help sustain your life for a short time."
"If I could no longer travel, because I don't have the required gift, then what made you think that?"
"I was made to have properties to assist in emergencies. Those properties are within me—and thereby they were within you. They help to start the process of recovering. It is only intended for a crisis and even then I was warned that it could not be certain that it would work because there are variables that cannot be controlled.
"While you slept between worlds, and my magic that you still had within you was working to extract what had now become poison to you, I finished taking the others to the Keep. When I returned, I waited with you until you were recovered enough to be ready to breathe again, then I helped to remind you what you must to do to live.
"For a time I did not know if it would work. I have never had to do such a thing before. It was terrible to have to wait while I watched you lying there, not knowing if you would ever again breathe. I feared that I had failed you, and that I would be the cause of your death."
Richard stared at the silver face for a long moment. Finally he offered her a smile. "Thank you, sliph. You saved my life. You did the right things. You did good."
"You are my master. I would do anything for you."
"Your master. A master who can't travel."
"It is as puzzling to me as it is to you."
Richard tried to think it through, tried to make sense of it, but with the pain of breathing after nearly drowning in the sliph still feeling like it was pressing heavily on his chest, he was having trouble making his mind focus on thinking.
