The Unmaking (The Last Days of Tian Di, #2)(17)
The boat came closer, solidifying into a long sloop with a single mast and sail. For a moment Eliza felt a little surge of hope, until she saw the Boatman at the bow. Translucent flesh stretched over knotted muscle and flowing blood; he was not easy to look at. She glimpsed a ghastly, mocking grin on his face. As always, Eliza could not meet his eyes, did not even know if he had eyes, so powerful was the Magic that kept her from looking at them.
“Dinnay you think she’s getting better at it, lah?” Charlie asked the Boatman. “I thought that was quite convincing.”
“Command me, will you, would-be Sorceress?” jeered the Boatman, as he did every time, ignoring Charlie. “Think you I need no payment? If you wish passage, how will you pay?”
“I willnay pay,” said Eliza crossly.
The Boat began to fade.
“Stay,” Eliza commanded, which worked, but it didn’t mean the Boatman would take them. Half-faded, he waited for the inevitable next step in this dance of theirs.
“Try again,” Charlie said encouragingly.
“I cannay,” said Eliza. Her limbs felt like wet noodles, she was damp with sweat from the flight down the vent, and she didn’t have the energy to do it again. She sat cross-legged on the hard, hot rock and squeezed her eyes shut, reaching down into herself for the gift her mother’s old friend and teacher Swarn had given her. When she spoke again, it was not with her own voice but with the command of the Warrior Witch, “Bring me the Sorceress, Boatman.”
The boat came clear again, and the Boatman stepped aside with a nasty smile, indicating that Eliza could board.
“And how will you pay for your passage, Shade?” sneered the Boatman.
“Dinnay pester Swarn. You know I’m included,” said Charlie. The Boatman let him on as well.
“Lah, you dinnay have to give us a hard time,” Charlie added. “You know we’re going to get across anyway.”
“I will not be commanded,” said the Boatman harshly, “by those with no power to command.”
Eliza half wanted to apologize, for she thought it must be very annoying indeed for the ancient Boatman to have a girl like herself trying to boss him around. Instead she turned her back on him, breathing deeply as the boat sailed fast away from the rock and the black pool and Di Shang.
~~~
At sundown, Foss stood in the Library and inhaled. As his breath entered him he let the image in his mind filter into the air in his lungs. Then he exhaled slowly and a milky haze came out of his mouth, forming a square-foot replica of the Arctic barriers. He felt a surge of pride and joy when he saw it. It was an unsolvable puzzle in constant motion. He rotated the replica into the position it had been in when the Sorceress completed the most recent hole and froze it. He was impressed by her speed and precision. Because of the constant motion of the barriers, she had to move with them and work quickly in order to complete the shape she wanted. She did not allow for any careless rips or jagged edges. Each hole was a perfect circle, six feet in diameter. There were a great many of these holes but not enough of them to compromise the barriers as a whole. Each hole penetrated a single layer only. He left the replica frozen and with his breath created another, freezing this one where the previous hole had been made. The first one was bored through the centre of a giant sphere, which spun in a difficult-to-decipher orbit through the mass of barriers, then spun up to the top and rolled in a shrinking spiral over the top of the barriers before falling back to the centre. The second hole was through a flat, hard sheet that moved, along with several hundred others, very quickly back and forth across the bottom layer of barriers, intermittently rising up a few layers when a gap allowed it. These looked a bit like flying piano keys under invisible fingers. Foss looked carefully from one replica to the other but he could not work out a relation between the two holes.
He had two years’ worth of charts marking out the trajectory of the barriers and the holes the Sorceress had made. Regular study of these charts had never revealed any logic or pattern to the holes. But his trance this morning had disturbed him. It may have been no more than a personal warning regarding Kyreth but the fear had been somehow greater than that. The charts were not three-dimensional and did not simulate the motion of the barriers. Perhaps in looking at complete moving replicas of the barriers, he would see something he had missed. It was not likely that the Sorceress was acting without a purpose. Breathing deeply, he brought forth another, then another. The sun set and he felt the pull to rest but he was too intent upon his task to obey it. It was the season of his ascendancy and he was strong enough to continue working his Magic through the night. The ghostly replicas filled the long passageways between the bookshelves, hundreds of them hovering at chest height in the air. Once he was finished he walked from the first to the last, examining each one closely. He set them into orbit and they began to spin and swirl and shift. Again, he went from one to the next and though he could not pin it down something unsettled him. There was a method to her assault on the barriers; he felt more and more certain. This was no game, no accident, no mere distraction. There was another puzzle now embedded in the puzzle he had made. She was cleverer than he was. She had understood perfectly the Deep Math of her prison. She was toying with it now in ways he did not understand and the fate of the worlds depended on his understanding. When dawn came he felt it like a tap on the shoulder and startled. He had no time to retire to his chamber, so he sat on the floor of the Library amid the barrier replicas and fell too quickly and uncontrolled into his trance.