Arrows of Time - Kim Falconer [20]
It’s a wide tunnel, Maudi. A cave. Wider than the sewers under Half Moon Bay, and the smells are broader here too. There are not as many metallic tones, though there is at least as much decomposition. There’s daylight ahead, bats behind. Watchfulness ahead, sleepiness behind.
‘Thanks.’ She strained into the blackness. ‘More light ahead? More than what?’
More than here. See?
‘Can’t see. That’s the point. Where’s Jarrod?’
Drayco pressed his shoulder against her side. I don’t know.
‘I thought you could see and smell everything! He was just in front of us.’
He was just in front of us in the portal, true. But this is not the portal and he’s not anywhere in front of us now.
Dust wafted across her face, the feel of it gritty on her lips. ‘He has to be.’
Really, Maudi? Is that true? He has to be?
‘Doesn’t he?’
Rosette cupped her hands to her mouth and called out. ‘J-a-r-r-o-d!’ Her voice echoed through the cave, waves rippling in all directions. Before the sound died away, pebbles started trickling down the walls. Jarrod didn’t answer, but the mountain rumbled and groaned. Rosette clamped her hand over her mouth, holding her breath. ‘Oh no.’ She sank her fingers into Drayco’s fur, clutching him tight.
I wouldn’t be yelling at this point, Maudi. Drayco’s tail brushed past her as he snapped it back and forth.
The mountain’s edgy.
‘What do you mean, edgy?’
I mean unstable, volatile…edgy. Like a keg of dynamite near a campfire.
‘Got it,’ she whispered. ‘But Jarrod was here only a second ago.’ She continued forward, taking baby steps. ‘Where could he be?’
Drayco didn’t answer. He gave her hand a nip and quickened his pace. I want to get out of here.
‘Me too.’ She stumbled after him towards the light.
The call to this world had been urgent. Rosette had felt it instantly. They’d been at Timbali Temple, searching the library for ancient records, looking for a map or a list that identified all the portals to the many-worlds. They knew of a few—those of the Richter line being intrinsically drawn to them—but Jarrod thought there were more scattered throughout Gaela. They needed to be identified. Rosette had suggested they search the archives of the oldest libraries, but so far they’d found no clues.
The portals were aligned to intention. If the traveller had a strong enough focus—a clear and fearless picture of their destination—they could enter. They might even end up where they wanted to go, but the real ticket was in the blood. The safest travel pass was encoded in the DNA. The Richter line had it, and Grayson. They could commune directly with the Entities, as could Jarrod. For anyone else, though, the journey would be a gamble. With the portals between the worlds open to so many—the traffic between Gaela and Earth ever increasing—Kreshkali had concerns, the risk of trackers being one of them.
‘ASSIST is down, but maybe not all the way out,’ she’d said when she and Rosette had discussed it.
‘Is there anything we can do about it?’ Rosette had asked.
‘I’m weaving a selective spell at each portal. Travellers with the wrong intentions will be stopped, or at least diverted.’
‘Wrong intentions?’ Rosette had said.
‘Wrong to us.’
‘And it will work?’
‘It will, if we can find all the portals.’
Rosette had nodded, and begun the search. She and Jarrod had found cryptic text in Timbali referring to the portals, though their exact locations were not disclosed. Rosette wondered if they might have been so well known at one time that they didn’t need a map to identify them. Jarrod wasn’t sure.
‘The ancients knew of them, that’s clear,’ he’d said. ‘And they used them, on occasion. But they were meticulous record keepers. Look at these lists.’ He had held up a scroll the length of his body. ‘You can see how many nails were in each horseshoe and an all-too-graphic description of what their dogs were fed. It makes sense that there would be a set of coordinates for the portals as well.’
‘Then there is,’ Rosette had said. ‘We just haven’t looked in the right place yet.’
She’d been up a ladder reaching