The Far Side Of Forever Part 53

"Then that settles it," Rik said with continuing satisfac- tion. "We were supposed to follow Zail around from one place to the other, then break in when he failed to get us in any other way. That means we'd better be careful how we touch the rest of these outer walls. We weren't being channeled toward a particular course of action for no reason."

"Guess I should have told somebody sooner that the trail leads right up to that fake wall and then stops," Su said, the words coming out with something very like em- barra.s.sment. "Didn't want to get pushy, though."

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"Pushy," Rik echoed with a sigh, shaking his head.

"Unwilling to steal anyone else's thunder is more tike it, and don't tell me the enemy wasn't counting on that att.i.tude as well. From now on we've all got to watch it, or our own natures will do us in. Are we ready to go inside now?"

None of us insisted on staying where we were, so we all walked from the invisible floor through the wall into Cloud's Heart, InThig going first. Once we were inside and standing on a scintillating crystalline floor, Dranna gasped while Zail whistled slowly, a perfect representation of me consensus of opinion. Cloud's Heart was absolutely magnificent, filled everywhere with the most spectacular beauty ever created, its high walls and ceilings soaring, its furnis.h.i.+ngs glowing jewel-like and perfect. Everything around us made us want to stand and stare, and it was with a good deal of difficulty that Su took up the trail again at last, forcing us to follow.

If we had been attacked mere, in the midst of all that beauty, it would certainly have been easier on us. As it was it was all we could do to stay together, rather than wander off alone along some s.h.i.+ning, beckoning corridor.

InThig took it upon itself to^herd us along and not let anyone stray, growling in disgust all the while, but it took the sight of a floor-to-ceiling hanging of rubied lace to bring me out of it. That hanging reminded me of the plane on which I'd almost lost my life, and suddenly all the beauty I'd been dazzled by receded just enough to let me take a deep breath and blink the stardust out of my eyes.

Before coming in I'd prepared a couple of spells but hadn't yet spoken them, and that sobered me even more than the memory of near-death had done. I got the spells said fast in a low voice, then took a minute to curse silently before dimming everyone else's sight to bring them out of their trances. We'd been subjected to a lot of ugliness in the recent past, most of it our own doing, and then we'd been surrounded by endless beauty. We'd been meant to suc- c.u.mb to me beauty in our haste to escape the memory of ugliness, and if that isn't sneaking up from behind, I don't know what is.

After that things went a little faster, if not exactly

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happier. There was no more lagging or daydreaming from anyone-aside from Zail's very basic need to look at every piece of magnificence we pa.s.sed-but Rik was visibly annoyed with himself for falling under the spell of loveli- ness along with everyone else. The sight of his annoyance pleased me no end, as there had been no end of annoyance from him through the previous three -worlds. When he hadn't been forcing me to take needed but unwanted naps.

he'd been telling me how happy he was going to make me once the quest was over. He'd apparently learned his lesson about starting things that made other people get the urge to take a walk, but that hadn't kept him from coming as close to me as often as he could. When InThig was around he'd most often had other things to do, and that had annoyed me even more-

The trail led to a wide stairway of marble, a handrail of filigreed gold to the left, and we began climbing past portraits on the right, renderings of the most beautiful people, animals, creatures and things ever born or created.

The stairway went up and up, spiraling higher and higher, until we came to another wide-corridored floor much the same as the lower one. Again we walked through halls of beauty, backdropped by the l.u.s.trous white of dreams and fantasies, and then the real world returned when Su stopped in front of wide double doors.

"Trail goes that way," she said, gesturing toward the doors. "Should I keep following?"

"We'd better let Zail and Dranna do it," Rik decided immediately, answering the question that had been ad- dressed to him. "I find it hard to believe that it could be this easy."

It wasn't that easy. Zail looked at the doors the way he'd been looking at the works of art, his gray eyes bright with appreciation, and then he pointed to an intricate design in jade and onyx on the left hand door.

"Dranna, girl, do you think you can open that first?"

he asked, obviously seeing something the rest of us were missing. I was being very careful not to use the Sight, which meant I couldn't see any more than the others.

"Why, it is a lock, isn't it?" she answered as she

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peered closer, sounding as pleased as Zail looked. "And not a simple one. either. How delightful."

Without looking away from the design she removed two slender somethings of metal from her dark curls, then began touching them to me jewels of the design. Su, Kadrim and 1 exchanged glances and faint shrugs, all three of us obviously feeling the same way; our definition of delightful and Dranna's didn't quite seem to match.

In an unbelievably short time we all heard a loud click.

and then Zail directed Dranna to the lock on the doors themselves. The second click came even faster, but when Dranna started toward the decoration on the righthand door that matched the one on the left, Zail stopped her.

"Not that one, my sweet," he said with a grin, reaching forward to throw open the doors. "The placement of that one tells me it's set to undo the neutralizing produced by opening the first two locks in their proper order. Save that marvelous talent of yours for the next ones."

The "next ones" he referred to were the locks in the next set of doors, no more than seven or eight feet past the first set. We'd gained access to a small, featureless room with nothing but the new doors in it, an accomplishment only insofar as it brought us that much closer to the stone.

The next small room we gained access to had its doors in the right-hand wall, the one after that to the left, and so on in seemingly pattemless repet.i.tion. We pa.s.sed through room after room with Zail reading the locks and Dranna opening them, and after a short while a stone of apprehen- sion appeared to put an edge on our boredom. I'd lost count of how many of the doors had had identical lock patterns, and so, apparently, had Zail. His careful exami- nations had degenerated to cursory inspections, the lure of a challenge no longer there to capture his complete atten- tion, and he had already gestured Dranna forward with shrugging indifference when he suddenly stopped and put a hand on her shoulder.

"Wait a minute," he said, frowning at the doors he'd already looked at, stopping the rise of her slender metal implements which had been nearly to the first lock. "Some- tiling is faintly out of balance here, not quite right, not what it should-"

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His words ended as he fell into that total absorption which had characterized his inspections at the beginning, and when he came out of it to turn back to us, his handsome face was grim.

"The opening order is changed very slightly in these doors," he announced, clear self-anger in his gray eyes- "If 1 hadn't caught the change they would have been opened in the wrong order, and that would have caused-whatever it's supposed to cause. All I can say is-I'm sorry."

"Why be sorry?" Rik asked immediately before anyone else could speak, his amused satisfaction real. "You were supposed to be bored to distraction by all the repet.i.tions.

so badly bored that you let this change slip by. Since you didn't let it slip by, what's there to be sony about?"

Zail looked at him for a long moment before a faint smile came to his face, and very quietly he said, "Thanks, Rik." Then he turned back to the doors, and gestured Dranna forward again.

After that Zail practically took every door apart with his eyes before letting Dranna near the locks, but he wasn't the target any longer for our enemy's cute little tricks- Two doors later we discovered that it was Dranna's turn, when she opened a lock and then jumped back with a cry of disgust.

"It's some kind of slime," Zail announced with vast distaste, examining the awful-smelling substance that had squirted out of the door pattern and over Dranna's hands with the click of the lock snapping open- "What's it doing to her?"

"It's not doing anything but making me sick." Dranna answered for herself, pulling her arms out of Rik's con- cerned grip to wipe her hands on her skirt. Her face was still twisted into a look of extreme disgust, and her small body was shuddering. After a few minutes she calmed down enough to go on to the next lock, and I doubt if any of us were surprised when the same thing happened again.

The second jetting was slightly different from the first, but our eyes and noses told us it was no less foul.

"Dranna, why don't I make you a few pairs of gloves?"

1 suggested as 1 watched her frantically scrubbing her hands on her skirt, her thin metal implements on the floor

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where she'd dropped them, her skin taking on a definite tinge of green. "That way it won't matter what comes out of those doors."

"I can't work with gloves on," she whispered in an- swer, struggling to control the illness rising inside of her, "Any glove, no matter how thin, keeps me from feeling the inside of the locks the way 1 have to. If 1 wear gloves, I won't be able to open anything."

"And if you don't wear gloves, you won't want to open anything," Rik muttered under his breath, turning away in anger. It was fairly clear that his anger wasn't directed toward Dranna, and needless to say, we all felt the same.

Even if we talked or bullied Dranna into trying anyway, it was highly unlikely she would succeed. Her mind would know that opening a lock meant instant nausea, which in turn meant she would instantly find herself unable to open anything.

The rest of us moved a few steps away to discuss the problem, but there didn't seem to be much we could do. If I tried using a very small sphere to ward Dranna's hands, the warding was almost certain to interfere at least as much as gloves. Breaking through the doors was possible, but that was something the enemy^was obviously trying to force us into, which meant it was the last thing we should do. The only possibility left was for me to duplicate Dranna's ability in myself, which was guaranteed to take a good part of my strength. Creating tangible objects was effortless when compared to creating an ability, but I didn't see where I had much choice. Rik didn't like the idea, Su went along with him, Kadrim and Zail were undecided but unhappy, and InThig paced around with a faint growl, trying to think of something else- I was grow- ing very impatient with the lot of them, when a sudden, unexpected interruption came,

"I think I'm ready to go on now," Dranna announced from the door she was standing next to, her entire bearing still showing her illness. "Which one do I do, Zail?"

Her most immediate answer was six pairs of eyes staring at her, probably with mouths hanging open; Zail, having been addressed, managed to recover first.

"The lower one," he answered faintly, then took one

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