Aware of the fear in Rachel's eyes, Shavi took her arm reassuringly. 'Is this how you remember it?'
'I don't remember much at all, but it feels familiar.'
'Do not fight the sensations you are experiencing,' Shavi said. 'If you allow yourself to go with them, it is not unpleasant.'
'That's easy for you to say.'
'Tom, what are you thinking?' Ruth asked, seeing Tom's serious expression.
'I'm finding this both familiar and unfamiliar too,' he replied, anxiously twisting the ring Freyja had given him. 'I have moved through the medium of the Blue Fire many times, across our own world between nodes of power, and between the worlds, but this is different. Yet the same.'
'Yep, you lived through the sixties, old man,' Laura said.
For once, Tom ignored her. 'I've heard talk of this. Somewhere that bleeds around reality, around all the worlds and the connective tissue of the Blue Fire that joins them. Some occultists I encountered in San Francisco believed if you could find a way to this place you could access all places and all times.'
'You could run away for ever,' Ruth said, eyeing Church askance.
'Or you could fight a constant guerrilla war,' Church countered. 'No one would know when or where you'd pop up.'
'What's that?' Veitch pointed to a place where the colours appeared to have thinned so that it felt as if they were looking through a gauze onto the world. The sun was just disappearing below the horizon, casting its dying golden rays on a stone circle surrounded by trees. Beyond were well-tended fields. Figures moved in the circle, hazily coming into view.
'That's Caitlin!' Ruth exclaimed. 'But she looks younger. More… innocent?'
'And that teenage thug Mahalia,' Veitch noted. 'And Crowther.'
'The past,' Shavi said. 'Perhaps when she was just beginning as a Sister of Dragons?'
Tom and Rachel hung back, but he flinched and stepped forward when he glimpsed the young boy he had encountered on the Last Train who Mahalia had sworn was dead. Eerily, the boy appeared to be looking directly at him, and smiling knowingly, as if he was aware of all that was to transpire.
Caitlin looked directly at them too, but didn't recognise them, and then the colours swirled back in and the scene was lost.
'I have a feeling we could have gone right there if we'd carried on walking,' Church said.
'Caitlin wouldn't need us,' Ruth said confidently. 'Whatever happened back then, I bet she dealt with it, no problem.'
They moved on through an environment that felt both timeless and placeless, the hallucinogenic colours giving the sensation that they were floating. For the briefest moment, Church once again felt as if he was lying on a table, locked inside his own mind, with the odd belief that a group of people were observing him.
'Don't investigate that notion,' a voice deep in his head told him. 'What you have is better. It will always be better.'
Scenes came and went: Celts fighting a furious battle, a World War II pilot standing beside his downed Spitfire, a thick, semi-tropical jungle through which barely glimpsed beasts moved, a castle under siege, a Victorian funeral.
Several times Veitch witnessed himself committing some atrocity in service to the Void and turned away, unable to look. Once he had to be restrained by Church from leaping through the veil to right the wrongs he saw there.
When Laura glimpsed Hunter fighting a furious battle with the Lament-Brood in a past time, she broke down in long, juddering sobs. Nothing the others did could console her.
'I'm concerned we might get lost in here for ever,' Tom said.
The Rhymer's voice sounded oddly distant and when Church turned, Tom was fading into the swirling colours. It felt like only a step or two away, but when Church dashed back, Tom and the others were nowhere to be found.
There was little point searching in a place that appeared to have no dimension. Putting his trust in fortune, Church continued to walk in the direction he had been following; if they were meant to reunite in the world, he was sure it would happen. If this was a road he had to walk alone, that was fine too. Go with the flow, Tom would have said, followed by some rambling tale of the West Coast in the sixties, but Church felt it was an important lesson he had been taught many times during his long journey.
In the colours, any sense of time passing was lost. It could have been five minutes or an hour when he heard a voice saying, 'What is the point of the world?' It was the same voice Church had thought came from deep in his head when he had the impression of lying on a table, but now it appeared to be coming from all around him.
'Where is the meaning in life?' the voice continued.
'Who are you?' Church asked.
'What is real?'
'You don't sound like Tom, but you've mastered his degree of irritation, ' Church muttered.
'These are the only important questions,' the voice said. 'Once you consider them, all else flows from them. The answers may seem impossible to find, but it is the same as with any story: the author embeds keys in the text to help the careful reader decipher the true meaning. The rules that apply to the tiniest thing also apply to the greatest. The flower dies, but grows back the next season. Energy cannot be destroyed; it simply changes shape. What does this say for death? And is man a random collection of atoms, like a tree, or a rock, even though his nature is so very different from everything else in the world? In that nature, the key is writ large for all to see if they will only look. The nature of a being is the purpose of a being. If man has the capacity to find meaning, then there is meaning to find.'
'Is this for my benefit, or is everybody getting the travelogue?' Church recognised a quality to the voice; once again it appeared to be coming from within his head.
'Is reality a model of a town laid out on a table-top, with each house representing an adjoining world? Is each world a school for souls as John Hicks proposed, and as it was taught to the Knights Templar in the Fortress of Salisbury? How is a world created? By a powerful being? A god? Or in the head of a man, lying on a table, in the last seconds of his life?'
Church flinched. 'What are you saying? That all this is my dying dream? That it's all meaningless?'
'And so I return to the three questions: what is the point of the world? What is the meaning in life? What is real?'
Church fought his annoyance at the barrage of questions and considered them for a moment. 'A long time ago, I was told that I couldn't be given all the answers — I had to earn them, because only by doing that would I become the person able to utilise that information. Is this part of that? More teaching, but work out the damn answers for myself?'
He walked on a few paces in ringing silence, and then the voice said, 'Nothing is fixed in the Fixed Lands. Everything is fluid.'
'Yes, I changed reality. I brought Tom and Niamh back.' What is real? he thought. He made a new reality. And then: energy cannot be destroyed; it simply changes shape.
Other voices began to echo all around, some familiar, some unrecognised. 'We are all stars.' That sounded to him like Niamh. 'Love turns Fragile Creatures into gods.' Niamh again.
'So this is a puzzle?' he said, before adding, 'Everything I've been through is a puzzle, right? Like those complex traps that guarded the four great artefacts — the Sword, the Spear, the Cauldron, the Stone. We had to solve them before we got our reward.' The rules that apply to the tiniest thing apply to the greatest. 'So the keys are embedded in the text of life. Of my life. There's another story behind everything I've been experiencing.'
The colours shifted, and for the briefest moment he felt as if he was in a room with opposing mirrors so there were images of him reaching out to infinity; yet each was slightly different — in dress, or in whatever action they were engaged in. It was swallowed up by another flash of him, lying on the table.
'What is real?' he muttered again. 'What is real is what's on the inside, not what's around us. That's where the truth lies, where the meaning can be found. Is that what you're saying? We can create our own realities, which are as real as what we perceive to be real around us. We are all stars. We are all gods. So we don't look to the world for answers, because it's fake… and it's real at the same time. It's just… not important. We look inside.'
A transcendental sense of revelation overwhelmed him, and while he still couldn't grasp the immensity of
