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I was not alone.
Brightly robed people strolled along arm in arm on these hanging paths, gossiping and laughing with gentle smiles. Others rushed past as on urgent errands. Some wore headdresses of peculiar construction, spiky like quills or curved like crescent moons. The colors they wore made a rainbow of movement. They gathered and split off into new groups at each place where bridges merged and intersections branched. Blues poured in one direction and violets and greens in another, only to meet up at a farther remove, spilling and merging until it seemed their robes changed color as easily as I blinked.
intel was carved of jade in the form of two eru with hands braced against each other’s, their lips about to meet in a kiss that would never be consummated. Did the entrance always look like this, or was it formed this way to taunt me? The doors had neither ring nor latch. When I pushed with a foot, neither budged. The cut on my forearm was still oozing, but a smear of my blood wiped onto the jade did nothing.
Frustrated, I murmured my sire’s words. “ ‘The palace where those without blood cannot walk.’ ”
“The dead have no blood to offer,” said the cacica. “Perhaps the dead cannot cross.”
“I could go forward alone. But it seems wrong to leave you behind. I should have sent you with Bee.”
“Hers is not the responsibility. You can hang the basket from the tree and return to get me.”
“What if someone steals you, Your Highness? What if I can’t return this way? Or get out at all?”
“If you are unable to get out, I will be lost regardless.” Her clear gaze measured me. “I do not fear you will abandon me. You have proven yourself loyal.”
“My thanks, Your Highness.” Her praise startled me into an unexpected spike of optimism.
I returned her to the basket, hung the basket from a branch, and from the spring drank my fill of water so cold it numbed my lips.
This time, when I smeared blood onto the jade, the stone parted as easily as curtains. As I pushed through, my first step took me into light so bright it blinded me. My second step brought me to the brink of an impossibly vast chasm. The silence made me wonder if I had gone deaf.
An entire world fell away from my feet like a bowl with tiers. Each of these tiers marked a landscape as wide as continents, and each landscape was surrounded by the Great Smoke. I looked down as might a star, hanging so high that the whole of existence lay exposed as I watched the surge and flow of the spirit world. Tides of smoke swept up from the waterless ocean to engulf swaths of land, then rolled back into the sea. Everything the tide touched was changed, except for the steady gleams that marked warded ground, the straight lines of warded roads, and a few patches that might have been briny salt flats.
According to the story of creation told by the Kena’ani, Noble Ba’al had wrested land out of ocean in his contest with the god of the sea. The sages of my people said that the world was created out of conflict. Was this not similar to what the troll lawyer Keer had told me? “At the heart of all lie the vast energies which are the animating spirit of the worlds. The worlds incline toward disorder. Cold battles with heat. When ice grows, order increases. Where fire triumphs, energies disperse.”
In the spirit world, land and ocean warred, one rising as the other fell. Where the ocean receded, the span of the land grew. When the ocean swelled, the measure of the land shrank.
How could I see it all, and all at once? For here, on the brink, I was not standing in the spirit world and yet neither was I standing in the mortal world.
The threads of life and spirit stitch together the interleaved worlds. Mages drew their power through these threads, and I used the shadows of the threads to weave concealment and enhance my sight and hearing in the mortal world.
Now it seemed to me that I was standing both inside and outside. I was caught within a single translucent thread that pulsed with the force of life and spirit that some call magic and others call energy. Its span was no greater than the span of my outstretched arms and yet it was also boundless. The contrast so dizzied me that I swayed. The lip of the abyss crumbled away beneath my feet. Flailing, I tipped and fell forward through another flash of blinding light.
My knees smacked onto solid ground. After I sucked down the pain and blinked the afterimages of spots from my vision, I looked around.
I had come to rest on a ledge cut into a cliff side that overlooked a deep bowl of land like a crater. Inside the crater the ground was cut up by narrow ridges and steep prominences in the manner of a maze. A city of bridges and wide balconies wove through this labyrinth of air and wind. Every surface had a crystalline glimmer. The spacious balconies and winding bridges were ornamented with ribbons colored blood-red and melting-butter-yellow and the stark blue those who lived in the north called “the mark of the ice.” Rainbows rippled as on invisible currents of water.
I was not alone.
Brightly robed people strolled along arm in arm on these hanging paths, gossiping and laughing with gentle smiles. Others rushed past as on urgent errands. Some wore headdresses of peculiar construction, spiky like quills or curved like crescent moons. The colors they wore made a rainbow of movement. They gathered and split off into new groups at each place where bridges merged and intersections branched. Blues poured in one direction and violets and greens in another, only to meet up at a farther remove, spilling and merging until it seemed their robes changed color as easily as I blinked.
A tiered ziggurat towered above the rest of the city, its highest tiers like an eagle’s aerie wreathed with gold and silver wisps. Somehow, from this angle, I could see the entire edifice, even though that should have been impossible. Up the center of each face of the ziggurat ran a staircase. On three of these stairs, figures descended and ascended in constant motion. The fourth stair was riven by a cleft, a gleaming canyon that sliced into a dark interior. The top of the ziggurat lay flat and open like the holy sanctuary in a Kena’ani temple.
The scene on the top of the ziggurat reminded me of a princely hall as described in tales of the olden days told by Celtic bards. A half circle of lordly chairs stood on a dais. Four shone as if beaten out of gold, and four had a texture as black as the depths of a moonless night. No one I could see was sitting in them, yet I felt the whisper of presences ready to materialize. Musicians strolled through, strumming lutes and harps. Drummers played a soft rhythm like the pulse of the hidden earth. A crowd of lordly personages waited at long tables set with platters so bright their glitter made me blink. No one seemed to be eating. I wasn’t sure there was food or drink.
The lower levels of the ziggurat lay deserted, empty of life. Four bridges, one on each side, connected the four staircases on the tiered mountain to the rest of the city. A moat ringed the city below the outer cliff wall, filled with a viscous liquid. When I peered down from the ledge, its steamy current gleamed ominously, as if warning me I could not escape, because I was trapped by molten fire. The only way off my ledge was along a narrow bridge that vaulted into the maze.
Where almost everything is in constant movement, that which stands still stands out.
A man waited unmoving on one of the bridges. A swarm of personages in bright robes flowed past, breaking around him as water breaks around a rock.
I memorized a path from my ledge to him through the weave of bridges and balconies. No one tried to stop me as I hurried through the city. Either they did not know I was there, or I was too insignificant to matter. Despite the convoluted path I had to follow, I had no trouble reaching him. He stood facing a gulf of air. A wind rising up from the boiling moat whipped through his dash jacket.
“Catherine!” he called, smiling.
I ran to him, my heart pounding and my lips dry. But as I reached him I slowed. A sword’s length from him, I extended my blade instead of my arm.
