We stepped behind the altar and out onto the path in the Maze. It opened to our right onto the same road we had left.
“Wall,” Peter gasped, breathless. “Gah. Oh. That wasn’t what I expected.”
I tried to take a deep breath, choking myself in the effort. Horror. Sheer horror. After a time the feeling diminished. I managed to ask, “What did you see out the window?”
“Eesties. I mean, I guess they were Eesties. I’ve never seen them, but Mavin has. And Queynt saw them, of course. I don’t know what else they could have been. Star-shaped. Hundreds, maybe thousands of
them, all roaring at the building we were in. Why did you yell at me like that?”
“I was afraid you’d slip through. Cernaby said each ‘place’ has many ways out. That’s what makes it a maze. If you’d gone somewhere else, I’m not sure I could have found you.”
“Is it all like that?”
“I think so. Places. No, not exactly places. More like events. Did you notice that first one we were in? . . .”
“It was the Base. The place the Magicians called the Base. I’ve seen that ship before. I’ve been there.”
“Have you really!” Somehow this was astonishing to me. Even though I knew Peter had had a life before we met—or met again—evidence of it always had the power to surprise me, to shame me, as though I felt he could not have survived without me. “Then you know what was happening?”
“It was the human ship arriving. The ship with all the Magicians on it. Barish was on that ship, and Didir, and Queynt himself. It landed a thousand years ago. Didn’t you see Barish come out the door on the side of it? I wanted to get closer and see what Barish was like before—when he was just Barish.”
Barish was no longer just Barish. I knew Peter blamed himself sometimes for putting old Windlow’s mind into Barish’s body, but then at the time we all thought Barish had no mind of his own. Since then, the two of them had lived an uneasy joint tenancy, two sets of memories, two sets of opinions on everything, all in one head, and it would have been interesting to see what Barish was like, just as himself. Nonetheless, we hadn’t time to think of it now.
“All I could see was something that didn’t look natural,” I confessed. “Even though I knew it was human, I thought it was very strange. I couldn’t understand it.”
“That’s odd.” He thought about this, peering at me intently, then nodding. “Well, no, not really odd. If these are the memories of the world, as your Dervish friend told you, then you’re probably picking up how the world feels about it. Felt about it. To this world, men would have been strange. Very strange. Come from some far place, not of `itself,’ so to speak.”
This made sense. At least it was no stranger than the rest of it, and it would explain the horrifying feelings I had been having.
“The second place we got into was the Wastes of Bleer,” mused Peter. “At the time the moon fell. You said Storm Grower brought the moon down, just to prove she could. Lom must have found that traumatic, too.” He thought for a time longer. “And I have no idea what the third place was.”
“I don’t, either,” I confessed. “But I do know how it’s connected to the other two things.” It had taken me a while to figure it out, but I had come up with an answer. “Just as we came out, there was this sound from above, the sound of something breaking. Like a great beam of wood.”
“I heard it.”
“Well, after it broke, I think something fell. Something huge.”
“So each event was about something falling?” He sounded doubtful. “I think so. Each event was part of a category labeled `Something falling.’ Or, more specifically, not merely ‘something,’ but ‘something very big.’ I’m not really sure about that last one, because we didn’t stay to see.”
“Could we step back in and find out?”
“I’m afraid to.”
“Can it hurt us?”
“Quite frankly, Peter, I haven’t any idea. Reason says no. My skin savs yes. I barely made it out of there this time.”
You stay here,” he said, patting me fondly on my head as he might have petted a tame fustigar. He stepped back the way we had come, leaving me with my mouth open. I swallowed, choked, started to go screaming after him, then thought better of it. Peter often did things I was afraid to do. Then my fear for him overcame my fear for myself, and I went roaring after him, usually quite unnecessarily. Just now there was something I had wanted to do that would take a few moments alone. There might be no better time later.
Peter had Shifted inside the maze. If his Talent worked there, then mine would probably work close by. Not my Talent of understanding languages, but my Wize-ardlv one. There was a spell I’d been saving, a multiple one Murzy had taught me early on, telling me not to use it save in times of great need. It was a combination spell used to find appropriate destinations. Not particular ones, you understand, but appropriate ones. Murzy called it a blood, dust, and total trust spell. Nothing needed but a drop of my own blood on a roadway and total faith that what I would ask lay in
