Legacy of the Darksword - Margaret Weis [13]
Saryon, having lived for many, many years in the magical world of Thimhallan, was much more accustomed to such arcane manifestations than I was. He immediately entered the hole, then beckoned to me to follow. I started to cross the room, remembered that I didn’t have to rely on my feet, and wished myself at my master’s side.
I was in the hole. The hole closed behind me and formed a bubble around us, holding us suspended in the air, floating somewhere near the ceiling of Saryon’s bedroom.
“A Corridor?” Saryon asked, amazed. “Here on Earth?”
I must mention, by the way, that we did not speak, but communicated mind to mind. And it occurred to me that, in this spirit realm, I was no longer mute. I could talk and be heard. The knowledge filled me with such trembling joy and terrible confusion that I was immediately rendered more silent than I had ever been in the physical realm.
“Not as you mean it, Father. Not a Corridor in time and space such as we had on Thimhallan,” Mosiah replied. “That skill has been lost to us, and we have not regained it. But we do have the ability to slip inside one of time’s folds.”
I must try to explain the sensation of being hidden in a “fold” of time, as Mosiah called it. The only way I can put this is to say that it was very much like hiding behind the folds of a heavy curtain. And, in fact, I began to feel an almost smothering constraint upon me, which is caused by, so I learned later, the knowledge that time was passing for my body and I—the spirit— was standing still.
The sensation is not as bad, I understand, for those who enter the fold with both mind and body, for one has only to step out again to be caught up in time’s flow. But, despite the fact that my body was slumbering, I began to feel a panic inside me akin to that felt by someone fearing he may miss the last train home. The train—i.e., my body—was moving on ahead, and I was running frantically to catch up. I think I would have attempted to escape, then and there, but I would not leave Saryon.
I found out later that he felt the same, but that he would not leave because of me. We laughed over that, but our laughter was hollow.
“Shh, hush! Look!” Mosiah cautioned.
He did not silence us so that we would not be heard—for that was not possible, not even for the D’karn-darah. He silenced us that we might hear them. What we heard and what we saw chilled us.
Though we could move through physical barriers, we could not see through them. Trapped inside time’s fold, we could not move to another part of the house or see what was transpiring in any other part of the house except Saryon’s bedroom. My hearing is acute, however, and the nervous tension I was under accentuated it. I heard a slight clicking sound, which was our front-door lock giving way. The creak of the door’s hinges (which Saryon had been asking me to oil) meant that the front door was being stealthily opened. At the same time I heard the snick of the lock of the back door, heard the door itself scrape across the mud rug which we had placed at the entrance.
Whoever had been out there had entered the house by the front and by the back. But try as I might, I could not hear them moving at all through the front part of the house. One of them was in the bedroom before I was fully aware of his coming.
He was clad all in paper-thin silver robes that clung to his body and crackled faintly as he moved, occasionally emitting tiny blue sparks, like the fur of a cat in the darkness. His face was plastered with the same paper-thin silver, so that only the outline of features—a nose and mouth—were visible. Silver fabric covered his hands and feet like a second skin.
He stood in the bedroom and Mosiah, with a whispered thought, called our attention to a strange phenomenon. The machines in the bedroom knew the D’karn-darah was there. The machines responded to his coming.
The machines’ response was not overt or dramatic. I would not have noticed it, except for Mosiah’s mention. The bedroom’s overhead light, which had, of course, been turned off, flickered on. A faint hum of music came