Orphans of Chaos

1.

Nothing I can say can convey the horror. If I had been an astronaut on a space walk with a severed umbilical hose, countless light-years outside the galaxy, outside the local cluster of galaxies, I still would have been closer to home than I was at that moment. Because I still would have been in the same dimension.

The thing behind me, the pale wheel surrounded by lesser wheels, dipped one curving diameter into the plane I could not see, and rotated it. The wheels were made of what, in three dimensions, were sounds to be heard sequentially, linearly, in time.

We call it a song. But it is not. In this place, each composition was one simultaneous thing, eternal and unchanging, every part and every note existing in geometric relation to one perfect and harmonious whole.

I called the tiny crystalline echo ringing from the sphere in the cabinet a shock wave. It was not. It was a small sound, really.

This was not small. This was gigantic. This was larger than worlds.

With a force like a hundred earthquakes, like a storm front of unguessed power, an explosion filled hyperspace, blinding me, numbing my whole body. It was like being mashed in a trash compactor.

And then…

2.

I struck the snow with considerable force. My body was shaking with the shock of ice-cold that ran through me.

There was a haze of red and blue particles around me for a moment. I tried to get to my hands and knees, and was poleaxed by a blinding pain.

I vomited. Snow, a slurry of snowflakes, gushed from my mouth. How had snow gotten in my stomach?

I had the horrible, horrible image of a two-dimensional person being forced into the same flat plane as a two-dimensional patch of snow. His skin would just be a line; all his internal organs would be occupying the same place as the snow. Was snow in my veins, in my abdomen, my lungs? Inside my eyes and skull? In every cell?

Another moment of pain: my whole skin turned red. For a moment, I gave off a shaking shock wave similar to what the hypersphere had done; but something was carried with it. A cascade of shimmering red sparks of not-light flung snow in every direction around me, several pounds of it.

Then, it was over.

I blinked and looked around. There was an imprint around me in the snow. It looked more like an elongated snow angel than anything I can name. Whatever body had made this was long and streamlined, with wings and lines radiating from it. There were no footprints leading up to the imprint.

I was outside the Great Hall, about twenty yards from the front doors. The windows behind me were lit. I could see the rest of the campus, quiet in the moonlight.

Dimly, I could hear the faint, beautiful strains of Miss Daw’s violin, playing a waltz by Strauss.

I rose to my feet and stumbled away, shaking, in the moonlight. Quentin’s walking stick was still in my hand. As I came near the Manor House where our rooms were, I used it more and more to support my steps.

3.

It was slow and painful walking through the snow, and it grew slower and more painful as I went.

I passed by the window of the boys’ dorm as I came around the corner to the Manor House. There was a rope hanging from an upper cornice, knotted with care.

I looked at that rope with infinite hatred. Hatred, because I ached in every limb, and had pains in my knees like someone suffering the bends. And because I knew Victor and Colin had been drugged, as had been Vanity. Even though one of us had been caught, we were still to hide any evidence of what we had done or how we had done it. It was one of Victor’s rules.

So I climbed the rope. Usually, a rope climb up thirty feet would have taken me thirty seconds. This time, it took me thirty minutes, or more. Maybe an hour. It was cold, it was dark, I was in pain, and it was so very late.

I finally got to the window. It was dark inside. And locked. I couldn’t open it.

It was only then that I realized that I could have picked up the sphere, the hypersphere in the locked cabinet, just before I jumped. I could have taken it with me. Had I taken it, I would have it now. I would be able to cast its hyperlight into the fourth dimension, see the objects around me as the flat things they really were, reach through walls, open locks, walk through windows…

I tapped on the window as loudly as I dared, and called softly to the boys to let me in. Now I was sure they had been drugged. Colin would not have passed up the chance to have me come into his bedroom at night, cold and in need of comfort.

Well, there was nothing else to do. I pulled that stupid walking stick out of my belt (it had been clattering and banging during my whole trip up the rope) and tucked it into the snow that had accumulated on the wide stone surface of the windowsill. As I did so, my fingers touched something.

I brushed the snow aside and found a tiny cup, made out of pink wax, or maybe hardened bubble gum. The cup was crudely made, with fingerprints still visible in the waxy surface. In the bowl of the cup there was a blue fluid, which had frozen into a little pebble of ice.

I was frankly too weary to wonder what it was.

Five or ten minutes of work with my cold and unresponsive fingers, and I pulled up the rope and slung it over the cornice, which was now my pulley. In the other end I made a sling (tied off with a proper bowline) to set my hips in. Now I could simply lower myself by letting out rope and, when I reached the bottom, one yank would bring the rest of the slack down with me.

That worked as planned. It was the only thing so far which had gone right that evening.

With the rope on my shoulder, I went over to our window. I called softly, and threw pebbles against the window. Nothing. Vanity did not answer.

So I walked (even more slowly, now that I no longer had the cane to lean on) over to the gardens behind the Manor House, and hid the coil in one of our agreed-upon spots.

As I walked, I thought: Why? Why did Quentin, who could levitate, need a rope to get out of his bedroom window?

And then I thought, in anger and disgust, why had I gone to such trouble to hide the rope, when I was about to be caught myself? I had no other way into the Manor House, unless I broke a window, except by the main door. Even if no one was there, and I made it upstairs unseen, whatever spell or alarm system Vanity had sensed Boggin lay down on the door to my room would reveal me once I opened the door to my room.

Well, there was nothing else to do. I was too cold to think of anything else. I marched quite boldly and bravely up to the main doors.

And, as I passed a copse of bushes, I saw a group of footprints in the snow. They were prints from a woman’s shoe, and from the kind of woman who would wear high heels in the snow. Miss Daw. She had been posted here, watching the front doors.

Well, that reminded me of the prints I was leaving all over the place. Maybe they would melt when the sun came up, maybe not. I tore a branch from the bush, and dragged it behind me as I came to the front door.

I stood on the steps with the branch in my hand, wondering where to hide the thing. Then I laughed and tucked it into the bushes to one side of the door, the same place Vanity and I had been hiding when Mr. Glum’s dog had passed us by.

The front door was unlocked. I stepped into the entrance hall.

And my eyes fell upon, yes, indeed, the old grandfather clock.

4.

Because Vanity, earlier this evening (how long ago it seemed!) had not been able to work the secret latch in our room to open the door to the hidden passage, I was not sanguine about my chances. I was assuming she was actually doing something—manipulating reality, doing magic, something—to create the tunnels out of thin air.

But when I went over to the clock, and opened the glass door, I could see that the back panel of the clock was not true to the frame. There was a little crack around the edges. Vanity and I had never shut the panel closed behind us when we went back this way.

This time, I waited to time the swings of the pendulum, pushed the panel open with my hand, waited for the pendulum to swing back, stepped quickly in, waited a third time, darted a hand out past the hissing pendulum, yanked the outer glass door partway shut, waited, reached, pulled the door shut, waited, reached, secured the door, and then backed into the stairs, sliding the panel almost all the way shut. I wanted to leave the same crack I had found, in case I needed to use these passages some time again when Vanity was not around.

I was glad space was warped here, for now I had only to climb seven steps, duck my head, and crawl. Now I was on the same level as the third floor. At least, I did not have to climb two and three flights of stairs.

I crawled. I waved my hand in the air in front of me whenever it began to seem really heavy, for it had been heavy when I was doing quadradimensional effects, and I was trying to produce the red or blue sparks I had seen, in order to create a light to illuminate the black space I crawled through. Once or twice I thought I saw lights floating, but these were the same lights anyone will see who is tired, and in pain, in pitch darkness, with her eyes blurred with strain.

Pain has a funny way of focusing the mind. Only what hurts matters. Whatever else you used to think about before is as remote and unimportant as who won some argument you had as a child. You think about moving your right hand, and then you think about moving your left. You don’t think about moving your right knee until the time comes to do it; if you worried prematurely about such things, the burden and the despair would be too much, and you would slump down in the dust, and cry. You don’t think about how nice it would be just to lie down in this coffin of a corridor, or else you won’t get up. You don’t think about how to find the secret door to your room, which, unlike last time, is closed, and giving off no light, and you don’t think about the fact that you don’t know where the switch or latch is to open it from this side.

And you do not think about the fact that you took a wrong turn in the dark somewhere. That would make you cry, too.

You don’t want to cry because you are the strong one in the group, really, the mature one. Practically an adult. Heroines in books don’t cry.

But, despite the pain, you do keep one hand on the wall between crawls, to feel for the hinges where the door is. Those big, odd W-shaped hinges can’t be hidden.

Also, it is important to remember not to crawl through spiderwebs. You were only here yesterday, so no spider (which should not come out in winter anyway) would have had time to construct a new one. If you feel a spiderweb you are on the wrong path.

And, when your hand does come across the huge, ungainly W-shaped hinge, it is important to remember that you are in a corridor only three feet high, because if you raise your head too fast, or try to jump for joy, you will bang your head with a loud noise on the stones above you. Ouch.

Good thing you are still wearing your lucky aviatrix cap. The leather, with all that hair tucked under it, offers some protection.

And then a voice comes: “What noise was that noise, friend Fraud?”

5.

The voice of Mr. ap Cymru answered him: “What noise, Excellency?”

“Hush! It may be our little wandering wanton, back from her peripatetic peregrinations.”

A moment of silence crawled past even more slowly than I had been crawling. Fear, and the bump on my head, had cleared my wits somewhat. I could hear the voices had come through the wall; through the very hidden door panel I had my hand on.

After a while, ap Cymru said, “Excellency, I don’t think…”

“ ‘Then you shouldn’t speak!’ Aha Ha! Loyalest of all my disloyal loyalists, I hereby forbid you from feeding me such obtusely obvious straight lines again. I declare this declaration to be an imperial one, and I will backdate it to this day once I am Imperator. Now be quiet more quietly.”

I moved my hand back and forth across the panel. A metal nub came under my thumb, with a smaller nub projecting from it. When I pushed, the metal nub slid in a semicircle, and a peephole opened.

So there actually were peepholes, after all.

The ray of light was brilliant after my long darkness. I put my eye to it, was dazzled for a moment, and then saw where I was.

I was looking at the Common Room. The door was open. Through the door, I could see partway down the corridor, and see the huge oaken door to my room. Even from here, I could see the padlock was open, hanging like a metal question mark, threaded through the eye of the open hasp.

In the Common Room, I saw the one television we were allowed was on, with the sound turned down. It was BBC2, and they were showing a game show. I have no idea what their normal programming is at 2:00 in the morning, but that seemed strange.

Next to a table littered with cigarette butts, a man was standing facing away from me, leaning his bottom, almost sitting, on a long black umbrella. He had on a yellow mackintosh, and, peeping over the edge of his collar and cuffs, I could see the white folds of a heavy wool sweater. From behind, I could tell that he had long black hair, as long as mine.

Despite the heavy cold-weather gear on the upper half of his body, his legs were sheathed in skintight fabric of garish green and black Lycra, like the pants professional bicyclists wear. They came to about midcalf. His feet were bare, except for some athletic tape he had wrapped around his lower calf and the balls of his feet. His toes and ankles were bare.

He had the legs of an athlete; his thighs and calves were knotted with muscle, but sleek and steel-hard, and the skintight leggings showed it off.

For a moment, I thought he had a stiff, black tail on which he rested his weight. But no.

The tightly wound black umbrella on which he half-leaned, half-sat, was one of the type with a large stirrup-shaped handle that unfolds into a tiny stool seat. The handle was unfolded at the moment, and he was using it as designed.

After what I had seen this evening, a man sitting on an umbrella-stick did not seem that odd. Of course, there were several perfectly fine seats and an overstuffed couch in the student Common Room, so maybe it was odd after all.

Tucked under one arm was what looked like a metal Frisbee, or maybe a pie plate. That was odd, just because I wasn’t sure what it was.

When two lengths of electrical cable moved on the floor, and turned out to be not electrical cable at all, but two snakes, one white and one black, things started looking more odd.

Mr. ap Cymru came into view.

He was crawling along the ceiling like a spider.

His arms and legs were twisted backwards in their joints in a fashion that was hard to describe and horrid to look at. His feet were flat on the ceiling, with his heels pointed inward and his toes pointed outward; his knees extended in two great triangles past his bottom. His elbows, likewise, were waving in the air at angles no unbroken human bones could achieve. And his hands—which seemed to be exuding some sticky sap or gunk—were placed so that his fingers were all turned toward him and his thumbs were pointing away from his body. The whole thing looked like something Colin had done to his soldier dolls back when he got tired of them, the ones with fully posable limbs.

OK. This was certainly odd.

Ap Cymru rotated his head through 180 degrees like an owl, and spoke down toward the other man: “Excellency, that noise did not sound like a footstep.”

“Ho hem. Maybe it was the sound of someone’s grade average falling. This is alleged to be a school, you know. It is an excellent place to learn a lesson. Would you like me to teach you a lesson, Fraud?”

“Excellency, I have not betrayed you.”

“And you give me your word, as a traitor?”

“Whom have I betrayed, Excellency?”

“Boreas told you his plans in confidence.”

“Sir, he did not explicitly say not to tell you.”

“Hum hemp hump. Well, I can see that. How could he overlook to say, by-the-by, don’t spill my plans to the one person everyone thinks is dead, buried alive, having fallen farther than an anvil dropped from the zenith can fall in nine times the space that measures day and night, into the Tartarian Pit, after having been shot in the mouth and the eye by the Queen of Huntresses, whose bow of certain death leaves no prey alive? Yes, you are right. An obvious angle. The windbag should have covered it. Hired a lawyer before speaking to you.”

“Lord, why would I lie to you?”

“Why would the Goddess of Lies in disguise lie to the Father of Lies? Hmm… let me think…”

“Boreas had schemed to lure the Uranian girl from her room tonight, in such a fashion as to put her in his debt. Perhaps she is less venturesome than he assumed.”

“No, she is merely more clever than he assumed. No matter.”

Now the man in the mackintosh jumped to his feet, snatching up the umbrella from behind him. He snapped the handle shut and struck a pose.

“I am a god, one of the Twelve! Boreas is a god as well, true, but his domain is only over the air that moves between north-northwest and north-northeast. My angle of action is larger.

“Fate is my toy to toy with as I will. I ordained that what Boreas wove into the tapestry of destined things would come unravelled. I ordained that the girl would find her bauble tonight; it has happened, or will. I ordained that she and I would meet; I assume she is watching us now.

“Little girl, wherever you are, in this dimension or in another, hear my words: I am your friend at a time when you will need friends most needfully. I offer you rescue, advice as honest as will suit my needs, power, glory, wealth, blah, blah, blah. The whole nine yards. I will grant you three wishes, but do not ask for immortality without asking for eternal youth. Think it over.

“OK, lesson over. Were you taking notes, Taffy ap Cymru? That is how to be a master of intrigue.”

Ap Cymru rotated his head left and right. “Do you say she is in this room, invisible?”

“No. She is in plain sight, just not in our plain sight. Time’s up! Are you going to turn me in?”

“Sir?”

“You could get a very good price for my head.”

“Excellency, you will give me a better price for helping you keep it on your shoulders. When you are Father of Gods, make me Father of Lies.”

“Oh, well said, Taffy. Well said. There is hope for you yet.”

The man whistled, and poked his umbrella at his snakes. They wound up the shaft of the umbrella in two spirals, and rested their heads, facing each other, along the stirrup-shaped handle.

“Oh dear. Now I am not going to be able to get my umbrella open. I do hope it doesn’t rain. I always hate the weather in England,” the man said, moving toward the window. I now saw his face. He wore an eyepatch over one eye. There was something metallic in his mouth. It looked like his tongue was made of gold.

With no further ado, he put the pie plate on his head, flung open the sash, and stepped out onto the windowsill. A white vibration, like little wings beating too swiftly to be seen, flickered into existence around his ankles. He shot up into the night sky like a rocket.