Touching the Void

plunge beyond the boundaries of the universe itself. His gut wrenched, the chill of the Abyss sinking into his bones and leaving him shaking. Better not to think of the freakish distortion of space that must have separated the thousand miles of the First Realm from the rest of the world. Or was the entire planet split through the middle?

  Better not to think on it. Weakly, Rel managed, "You came here to do something about it?"

  "Sadly, no." Rissad jerked his head upwards, toward the looming concrete door. "I came here for that. I only found out about the Abyss after I got here."

  "The door? What's on the other side?"

  Rissad frowned. "Sorry, kiddo. You haven't exactly convinced me yet that I can trust you."

  "What do you want from me?" Rel snapped. The other man was in no position to be provoking him, but 'kiddo'? Really? Dora would have burst out laughing.

  "Why did you come here?" Rissad tried to lever himself up on his uninjured arm, only to gasp in pain and slump back as his weight shifted onto the mangled shoulder.

  Rel looked down at the concrete between his hands, then sat back on his heels, buying time to think. "Nothing in the Clearviewing I had made sense. I wanted - I want - to know what's going on."

  "So you can stop me? Or help?"

  "It depends. Are you still protecting the First Realm?"

  Rissad met the implicit accusation of treachery with a coolly raised eyebrow. "The First Realm? Not the truce?"

  "Our duty is to protect mankind," Rel said stiffly. "The truce is one way of doing that."

  "Maybe you do have your head screwed on right." The other man's eyebrow stayed up, but the lines of strain on his face might have softened a little. "The door's been closed since before the Crash. We built whatever's back there, and the Gift-Givers are terrified of us getting it back."

  That, at least, had implications Rel liked the sound of. "Some sort of weapon? Something we could use against them?"

  "It's the obvious conclusion. That, or some piece of knowledge that would give us an edge. This used to be a research and development facility for someone-or-other, dealing with some pretty freaky physics." Again, Rissad tried to rise, and this time his gasp of pain was closer to a quiet scream. "Help me up?"

  Rel moved around to take the Gatemaker's uninjured arm, bracing it across his shoulders and trying to lift the other man as gently as possible to a sitting position. Rissad's wrist was all bone, and Rel could feel him trembling. His eyes held a glint of fever, though Rel decided not to pursue the question of whether it was from genuine illness, the combination of hunger and pain, or just eagerness to complete his mission.

  Spots of blood marked Rissad's trouser leg where the ugly angle of his knee said the break was. Gingerly, Rel reached out a hand to investigate, but Rissad stopped him. "It's alright. The blood looks worse than it is, and it's not from the break. Get me up."

  Rel glanced at the red spots, already drying to brown, that marked the Gatemaker's trail from the rubble. Some wounds could bleed like that without being serious, but in a leg? "I should take a look at it, all the same."

  "No time." Rissad shook his head, winced again. "Get me to the door, we can get inside, look around and Gate out. Then we can come back at our leisure."

  Rel kicked himself inwardly. Stupid to miss such an obvious point, that getting out would be easy. He'd lived too long with Pevan's obstinate refusal to use her Gateways for convenience's sake. "Alright. Brace yourself."

  Rissad's arm tightened across Rel's shoulders, and the Gatemaker drew his good leg up close to his body. As gently as he could, Rel pushed to his feet, bringing the other man with him. It was clumsy and awkward, and Rel found his own legs distinctly wobbly as the two men straightened and clung to each other for balance, but they made it. Rissad cursed with every halting step as they moved towards the door. It might have been faster to crawl.

  They were both panting from exertion by the time Rissad leaned away to put a hand on the massive steel hinge - up close, Rel could barely recognise the thing for what it was, what his Viewing had shown it to be. Starting barely a foot above the floor, it loomed a good couple of feet over them, and the bracket that connected it to the concrete was a dozen feet long, several inches thick. There was no sign of wear, though Rel knew if he used his Clearsight he'd see the metal enduring many tons of strain. Just as it had for, what? Seventy or more years. It had survived the Realmcrash without a mark.

  Which raised the question of what could possibly need such a tough door. Was it keeping something out, or in? Never mind how they were going to get inside. Rissad clearly hadn't been in there before, so there was no way he could make a Gateway there. Unless he had another new trick like the one he'd used to get out of the concrete.

  Rissad dug a hand into his pocket and drew out what looked like a bundle of golden rods, linked by intricate tooling in some darker metal at both ends. It looked like-

  "Yeah, it's a Stable Rod." Between gasped breaths, the Gatemaker's voice was grim. "Not one of Chag's, before you drop me. No humans died for this."

  It was difficult to be stern with a man still half-dangling from your shoulder. Rel tried anyway, "And Wildren?"

  "Who can tell what counts as death for them?" Rissad's scowl went distant for a moment, then came back stronger. "You're on their side, now?"

  "I'm on the side of not having another Realmwar until we're sure we can win." Rel's breath was back, and with it some of his confidence. "What good will the rod do, anyway?" He realised he could feel it, ever so slightly, pushing at a point somewhere deep inside his head. Where his own Gift must be, he realised, the bubble of the rod's powerful Warding resisting the tiny piece of the Second Realm that gave him his Clearsight.

  Why had he never felt it before when he'd been this close to Stable Rods? It couldn't just be that he'd only recently learned what his Gift was, unless he was imagining the sensation. Though it carried the threat of a fresh new level of headache, it wasn't wholly unpleasant, a dangerous invitation to complacency.

  Rissad said, "The Warding is powerful enough to straighten out First Realmspace enough that you get something resembling stable electromagnetics, like before the Crash."

  "But-"

  "It's only right up close to the Rod that you have enough effect to be significant." Rissad raised an eyebrow. "You don't honestly expect the Gift-Givers are going to make free with these things for our benefit?"

  "Is that why your brother was stealing them?" Rel regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth, but it was the obvious question.

  Even pained and close to faint with exhaustion, Rissad's glare had a force like a hammered nail to the skull, but it softened quickly and he looked away. "I don't know. Because of me... Chag got caught up in some stuff. I don't know whether he's even really one of us anymore."

  "A Gifted, you mean?"

  "A human." The other man shook his head, winced again. "It's not important. Let's get this door open."

  Rel's mind filled with images of the sheet of concrete sweeping them off the ledge, or snapping its hinge and taking them with it into the depths of the Abyss. "Will the mechanism work?"

  Rissad set the Stable Rod down on top of a flange running the length of the mechanism. The soft chink of contact seemed to reverberate long after it should have, a low moan that seemed to fill the entire chasm. "According to the plans. They built it to withstand pretty much anything, for a thousand years or more. And that possibly includes the Realmcrash."

  Rel shut his mouth before his brain could drop out of it. Rissad fiddled with a small panel set on the surface of the hinge, scrabbling at it with his fingertips until it popped open. Beneath was a sheet of plastic, covered in symbols Rel didn't recognise, each of which seemed to be on a round-topped bump on the surface. The two largest symbols, next to each other at the bottom of the grid, were coloured red and green. Rissad pushed the green one flat.

  Nothing happened, but he held the button down, meeting Rel's worried look with a calm smile. On anyone else - pa
rticularly Dora - it would have been knowing and smug. Instead, Rel found himself reassured, until the mechanism let out a whine piercing enough that he almost dropped Rissad to cover his ears. The sound sent a lance of pain across the front of his eyeballs, making him screw his eyes shut in a way he hadn't since before he received his Gift.

  The sound dropped sharply into a rumble that carried up through his boots, broken by a series of heavy clonks. Then the whine again, building, pressing against the sides of his brain, making his teeth ache. The door still didn't move, and Rel watched a flicker of worry cross Rissad's face. Clearsight would tell them if anything was happening, but Rel didn't fancy mixing logic fatigue with the pounding headache generated by the wail of the machinery.

  Something snapped nearby with a noise loud enough to stagger them backwards, the echoes lost under a metal-on-metal scream. Reeling for balance, Rel could do nothing to cover his ears despite the feeling that he was being stabbed through both eardrums. Rissad seemed even worse off, his chin pressed into his chest while he hissed curses and pressed his injured arm awkwardly to his face.

  As gently as he could while still on unsteady footing, Rel lowered the other man to the floor. The distressed-metal groan was starting to die away as, with ponderous grace, the door began to swing open. Even though Rel's entire job was believing his eyes when what they saw was incredible, this sight was almost beyond him. He hoped that whatever had snapped in there hadn't been part of what held the concrete slab up. The torches planted in front of the door broke like twigs, some rolling across the floor ahead of it, some getting caught underneath and pulverised.

  "Drag me clear." Rissad spoke through clenched teeth. Glancing down, Rel realised he'd left the Gatemaker lying where the door would soon start pushing him along by his broken leg. The mere thought turned Rel's empty stomach. Given how long it had taken them to get Rissad upright the first time, there was little chance of getting him on his feet now. But there was no way of dragging him short of holding his good arm and pulling.

  Rel planted his feet as firmly as he could and heaved. Rissad gasped in pain, but slid a good foot or so away from the door. Hunger had clearly taken a toll on the Gatemaker's already-slender build. Another heave, this time with Rissad's gasp turning into a scream before Rel stopped, saw the other man well out of the way. Assuming the door was going to stop at a right-angle to the opening. With a wall of concrete swinging slowly towards them and only bare rock behind, that was a more disturbing thought than Rel wanted to entertain.

  A crunching sound heralded another problem; the door had begun to smash bits of concrete off the lip of the ledge where they stuck up. The ledge itself was completely blocked by the door, and they needed to be on the other side of it. Rissad was lost in his pain, grunting as he poked at his chest.

  He noticed the problem quickly enough, though, and lifted his good arm towards Rel for a hand up. Rel eyed it dubiously. "You're sure?"

  Rissad nodded, his jaw set. It took two attempts to get him vertical, a twinge on the second try telling Rel he was beginning to strain his own arm. The other man gestured at the door, and a gateway appeared on the surface, its edges crackling and unsteady. Because of the Stable Rod, or the nearby Sherim? Were they even still near the Sherim Rel had felt on the way in?

  The Gateway seemed to open into a whole new cave, dark and vast, lit fitfully from below, until Rel realised he was looking up at the ceiling of the Abyss. Well, he should have expected that; it was after all the only place on the other side of the door that Rissad had either seen or been before. The other end of the Gate had to be in the floor of the ledge, a difficult enough proposition to get through without