‘I do not believe they can see us,’ Jaer whispered. ‘Nor hear us. This window is some device of the wizards, letting us see them, but not they us.’
‘And how do we test that?’ grumbled Medlo. ‘By putting ourselves before it, as bait?’
Jaer slapped the stallion with a cupped hand. The horse moved forward into the glowing room to stand almost against the glass, peering down at the Gahlians with intelligent eyes. The red-robed ones walked and gestured below, their eyes moving across the wall, seeming not to see the horse peering down at them. Jaer moved up to the glass, beckoning the others forward.
Below them the curved chamber was cut in half by a wall of blackness, glassy and shining, yet shifting as though some thick liquid moved behind it which carried a burden of glowing dust. Before this wall the red-robed ones knelt, busy with something which squirmed, trying frantically to escape. Medlo and Terascouros turned away, sickened, but Jaer watched impassively as the thing struggled more feebly and then moved no more. Smoke rose from braziers onto which bits and pieces of the sacrifice had been thrown, a greasy smoke billowing before the glassy wall. On that wall a face emerged, monstrous yet familiar, one’s own face seen in a distorting mirror; the face of a friend, a lover, a child. Jaer saw Ephraim in it; Medlo, Alan; Terascouros, the face of one long dead. The face brooded over the Gahlians, now prostrate before the wall; its lips sucked in the greasy smoke from the sacrificial fires, the ebon vacancy of the eyes slid across the place where Jaer, Medlo, and Terascouros stood without seeing them. Nonetheless, Jaer felt the passage of that sightless search, knew that it reached out into the western lands to search further as it had searched for him since his birth.
The lips moved, speaking to the Gahlians below, but the three could not hear what was said. The room in which they stood had dimmed with the advent of the face, as though some great reservoir of power had been tapped, and this dimness served only to make the face more clearly visible, It seemed to speak pain and a hideous desire for something which no living creature could desire. Then it faded and was gone, leaving Jaer thinking of the red-robed ones in Murgin who had had the same expression.
‘That, shuddered Terascouros. ‘I have looked upon that:
Below them the worshippers turned from the wall, assembled their troop around them and moved to leave the chamber. Some of the figures gleamed as they moved, robes falling aside to disclose scaled arms and legs, taloned hands. The heads of these were hidden by tall helmets with massive visors. Animals with long, snaky bodies and lizardlike heads on supple necks pranced, snarled, half unfurled great bat wings before being mounted and ridden out of sight. The three heard the troop pass to one side of them, then away, and the light within their room brightened.
Jaer leaned against the window, peering at the glassy wall which was now lightless and solid, while still giving the impression of fragility, thinnesss, of being only a veil between one place and another. ‘We will go through there,’ he said. The others reacted with expressions of amazement and horror. ‘No. Don’t look at me like that. You can go back, if you like. Or you can come with me; but if you do, you will go through there with me.
Medlo began to expostulate arid was cut off. ‘Think,’ said Jaer. ‘We find Taniel here, in Tchent. The Concealment begins here, in Tchent. The Gahlians come here, to Tchent, but go no further. When the – that came to the barrier, yonder, some great power was drawn as though to keep it from coming further. I could feel it. All part of the pattern. All saying, “The Concealment is maintained not to keep people from the east, but to keep that which is in the east from getting out.” It prevents our going east as an effect, not out of design. Be thankful for that, for it prevents the Gahlians going there likewise.’
‘But we saw it so close, one could almost touch, so close they could hear it….’
‘Yes. Those who established the Concealment left a window here, a place of observation, a way to see what happened there, eastward. They did not foresee my use of it, but the pattern within me tells me they left an access, too. A way to get through. As I shall.’
‘Into the very hands of…’
‘No. That has gone, Medlo. It comes here when it is called. It searches through here from time to time. It will not be here now.’
He led them out of the observation room and down into the chamber. He picked up a robe discarded by the Gahlians and threw it over what remained of the sacrifice. The stone was stained as by a myriad such sacrifices, and beady eyes winking behind carved stone, a skreeking and scuttle of lean forms along the wall spoke of rats finding enough food here to inhabit the place. At the glassy wall, Jaer paused, laid his hands against it to feel its structure. Within him, voices of his inhabitants argued with one another, the pattern of them shifting and dancing. Sternly, he bade them be still and concentrate. Slowly, all of the multitudes that were Jaer became focused upon the wall, felt it, understood it, moved into it.
To Medlo and Terascouros it seemed that Jaer melted into the Wall, the stallion beside him, leaving only Jaer’s left hand reaching toward them out of darkness. With hopeless looks at one another, they took that hand and were drawn through the barrier into a timeless, lightless dream. They walked on ashen plains. On the
