Revolving Door: Volume 2
Chapter 36: The Recruits - Side II
Content warning (may contain spoilers)
This chapter contains depictions of emotional manipulation.
The wind roared by, bearing the sweetness of rain. Beneath the rumbling sky, Liss pulled Pala and Fen back behind the treeline while she watched the Orsandin camp rustle on the plains.
Her heart boomed at the alien colours of the landscape, the trees whose leaves grew in curling fronds. All at once, lands she could scarcely imagine were within her reach…
Fingers tightening around Pala’s wrist, she reined her voice in and said, “Now, do that again.”
“I don't know how I did that,” she stammered.
“You’re a Traveller, Pala,” Liss repeated. “You can hop from one universe to the next. Memories are the fuel.”
Pala stared back, as if not understanding. But she would understand in good time.
“I know all that is known about Travellers,” Liss went on. “And you will soon be a master of your skill under my guidance, too. Come—you got us here, and you can get us back.”
“O…okay. What do I do?” She would not meet Liss’ eye.
“Think of something you would like to forget.”
Her brow furrowed. “My mother’s name.”
It took Pala only four leaps, back and forth between her world and Liss’, to arrive where she had asked: a temple, taller than it was wide, in the heart of a ring of islands, with a spire that pierced the clouds.
As they landed gently upon its uppermost ring, the last platform beneath its crown, she marvelled down at the coastlines beneath, at the seven verdant islands circling the central one, and at the edgeless sea beyond.
For someone who had never seen the temple nor heard its name before, Liss had expected Pala to take longer.
She could not, however, congratulate the girl while she was sobbing and barely able to stand.
Now, she pulled from her tunic pocket a length of rope, and snatched the girl by the arm.
“You have done well so far,” she said, lashing her wrists together with the care of a weaver, once, twice, thrice. “And as long as you continue to do well, no harm will come to you, understood?”
Pala nodded mutely. Fen glowered, but said nothing.
They skirted the dizzying edge of the deck towards the stairway entrance. Around them, clouds glided close enough to touch. By the time they reached the doorway, Fen was supporting Pala by the shoulder, and her sobs intervened on the silence every few steps.
She sighed. “Fen, comfort your friend.”
When he had begged to come along, Liss had thought him deadweight: another dependent to keep alive, another mouth to feed. But now she saw that bringing a friend for Pala could only make her more agreeable.
“We’ll be fine,” she heard Fen whisper. “We’ll be back home soon.”
Oh, if only you knew, thought Liss, as they descended the towering spiral.
Liss led Pala and Fen to their holding room, where Lacar and Kori already waited.
“Is this the Traveller?” asked the man, stroking his chin. “Why are there two of them?”
“She's not exactly the slippery rogue I feared,” she answered. “Her name is Pala, and her friend Fen is here to keep her company. If you could see to it that they are secured and fed?”
As she handed the rope over to her lieutenants, a cry of her name made her head whip around. Noma barrelled through the commotion, launching herself into Liss’ arms with curls flying.
“I thought you would be back an hour sooner,” she cried.
Liss gasped at the pressure of her embrace, and then relaxed into it, her steely sense of purpose melting away. She smiled, rubbing her back.
“That was a frugal estimate,” she said. “Pala took a while to find the Temple, what with all the crying, but she did it in the end.”
“I bet she’s overwhelmed.” Noma haltingly stepped out of the embrace. “I think we should give her a bit of time to figure things out.”
“You're right. If it’s what must be done to have her cooperate.”
“Is she really…the answer to all this?” Noma waved around her. “The way to end Orsand’s reign?”
Liss glanced to check that the newcomers had been taken away. “Possibly. I can’t speak in absolutes,” Liss replied, voice dropping. “Pala is one in a billion—a person with skills I can't yet fathom the possibilities of. But I already know what we shall do with her. We are closer than we ever have been to turning the world around…”
She smiled, a moment's peace washing over her. All that toil, all that agony, and they were slowly but surely clawing their way towards destiny.
But teaching the girl about her powers meant opening loopholes: to her escape, to her exploiting Liss’ limits, stranding her in the wrong place. No, none of this could be left to chance.
“Then I’m glad, though I don’t know how this fits in with everything else,” said Noma. “Anyway, dinner’s in an hour—I’ll see you there?” She made to leave, but Liss caught her by the hand and she gasped, head turning. “Yes?”
“Just a token of appreciation,” she answered, squeezing her fingers.
Noma squeaked, clasped her cheek with her free hand, and then bolted, fingers slipping from her grip.
From the second their jailers locked the door on them, Pala and Fen did not leave each other’s reach. Tying them with care to the window grille, their escorts removed their bags, but permitted Pala her sketchbook and Fen is medication.
The room was modestly furnished: a large bed stood facing a table, and a crate of unused robes and towels lay beside it. Over the bed, a slatted wooden window let stripes of light fall through, only traces of leaves and a golden sky visible through the gaps.
As the shadows of leaves rustled over them, they began to trawl the room for cutting implements as far as their tethers allowed, but found nothing beyond the hinge of the crate, which was only sufficient to dent their ropes. Then they retired to the bed, and held each other while tears filled their eyes.
Their guardians arrived shortly after to leave the pair with a dinner of dry biscuits and unnameable salad—strange on the tongue, but filling. Pala choked them down, too scared to be hungry.
In the sunset glow, they fitfully slept off their exhaustion in turns, fingertips touching, though it made Pala more aware of the tether that ran from her wrist to the window. When they woke again—at what would be four in the morning, according to Pala’s dying phone—they finally sat up in a corner in the dark, and talked.
“Pala,” whispered Fen. “Do you remember your mother’s name?”
She sat expressionless. “No. I think it starts with a J…but…”
His brow wrinkled. “There has to be something else you can do. Some other source of memories. If she's going to keep making you travel.”
“Maybe I can make memories just to use them?” Pala said, eyes cast down, then breathed a sigh. “I’m sorry you got dragged along. I had no idea…I didn't know I could do this.”
“No, it's Liss who should be sorry, for forcing you into it.” Pala felt Fen's hand wrap around hers. “I couldn't just leave you to get taken away. I’d rather this than that.”
“How much of your meds do you have?”
“Two weeks’ supply, I think. And, at least they're feeding us…I guess.” He shook his head. “I’m guessing you can't just travel away right now?”
“No, I’ve been trying,” she whispered, frowning. “I think the rope is stopping me. Like it won’t let me warp the whole building away, or something. And even if I did, I’m scared she’d just…find us again. I don't know how she got us the first time.”
“Mm.” Eyes fixed on the wall opposite them, he paused. “She must need you, if she came all that way to find you. But, yeah, I’m scared too. Let's be safe for now. Once things start making sense…we can figure out what to do.”
Then they fell back asleep in the tangled sheets, and dreamt of too much at once, flashing skies and unknown seas and home.
Pala and Fen woke in the predawn blue to a knock on the door. When Liss marched into their room, she held a blade, a coddling smile plastered on her face.
“Pala,” she said, and at once the pair leapt apart, the girl shuddering, wide eyes trailing after the knife's curved edge.
Liss yanked on Pala's rope, and her arm was yanked forth with it, tearing a cry from her. “Shush already,” Liss murmured, lifting the knife to saw the bindings at the window frame. “I hope you've eaten and rested well. I'm going to need you for the next hour.”
“What are we doing?”
“It’s a surprise.” Liss’ words were ominous in a way she could not place. “Come with me. You’ll love the morning view.”
*
On the islands of Doganir, and indeed all across the islands of Makor Kirikiri, marriage was a laborious ritual, perhaps the lengthiest of them all—even more so than the inauguration of a sailing vessel, or a funeral rite.
Typically, a union would involve tying lengths of woven string around a part of each partner’s body, in what was known as a marriage knot. From the spinning of the rope to the binding itself, tying the knot was a singularly elaborate undertaking, taking days or even weeks from start to finish.
The strongest knot in the world, they called it: once tied, the marriage knot could never be cut again. The partners would live the rest of their lives with that loop of rope on their body, holding them fast to each other. The most curious property of the marriage knot was that when one partner tugged on their loop, they could always feel where the other was, through rain and hail and flood, to the opposite ends of the world.
“This is a very ancient magic, one discovered before the Cataclysm. It springs from the Being Xemself, from the very flow of energy through the universe. But, ah, it is not only lovers who take on such a happy binding. Friends do, too, if they would like never to lose each other. Some bind more than one at a time.”
Liss had learned, from many such conversations with the scholar priest Tomay, that the principle of the marriage knot was in how all sections of that same string entangled their wearers’ very being and intentions. Once linked in such a way, the spouses’ souls, like compass needles, would always find each other again.
“So, if a Traveller travels by intent,” said Liss, in her same nonchalant way, “then when they transit universes while wearing such a knot, they would always find their partner. No matter where, and how far away. Is that right?”
“In theory, very likely yes. But I have only read so much on the matters of space and time and universes. And we do not know that any Travellers exist.”
Liss had asked, then, to learn the marriage knot so she may use it, and the old scholar had been startled, but acceding. “Who would you bind, being so young?” Tomay had mused as they had taught the girl: a painstaking layered pattern of stitches in rows that looped upon themselves.
“That is my business alone,” Liss had replied.
A week under the trees weaving with Tomay, and several arms of yarn later, Liss had thought she would never see the end of this labour. Her hands were not delicate; they did not take well to the rote motions of stitching and untangling. But talking with the scholar shortened the days until, at last, stitch by stitch, row by row, four arms of rope hung from the branch, each inch twined with one strand of her hair.
Now, only one thing was missing: the reciprocal material, two strands of hair off the lucky partner’s scalp.
But it was not her partner who would wear the other half of her cord. Liss had much grander plans. When it was complete, she hid the rope away in her room. It would not be several months until it would see the light of day again.
Now, in the blood red dawn, with the two strands of hair she had solicited through Lacar and Kori, she made the finishing stitches upon that singular fateful cord. Red, black, white, yellow, spun into itself—her focus was whetted by the clarity of the answer and the path she saw towards it. It was so simple, if only the rest of the world could see.
It was done, all too soon, the ritual she had begun months ago. She coiled the rope and pushed it into her tunic pocket. Returning to the halls, she went to retrieve the girl herself, and dragged her wide-eyed up the stairs, floor by floor, to the dizzying pinnacle. In the view of those billowing clouds and glistening waves, Pala was all but silent, save for her gasps of fright in the thinning air.
Liss was starting to resent her cowardice. But she was precious, more so than anyone she had ever met in her life, and she would have to be handled with care.
“Be still,” said Liss, and Pala did as told. “And keep silent, you’re doing well in that.”
She stood motionless as Liss strode over, stretching the loops of rope between her hands. It was thinner than a finger, colours woven together in leggy spirals. Pala made no verbal response as her captor began to tie one end of the rope around her wrist, then the other end around her own—one knot on Pala’s loop, one knot on Liss’, twist by twist, shortening the linkage every time.
Half an hour they watched the sun ascend as the knots thickened on their wrists. They stood facing each other in the red blaze of the sun, in the audience of the clouds—two silhouettes, two souls connected.
Then Liss lifted the knife between them, and slit the connecting rope down the middle, like a blade through the heart of a lamb.
“Pala,” she murmured then, as she lifted her gaze to the other. “You are bound now. As long as you do as told, you will be treated as a treasure. You and Fen. I shall feed and harbour you both, and you will do what I ask of you. Am I understood?”
Pala nodded.
“Good. Now, here is your first test. I want you to jump back to your universe. Anywhere at all, anywhere you like, exactly as I taught you. Think of something you would like to forget.”
Pala nodded again, swallowing loud enough to hear. Liss smiled.
“Now, go.”
Pala landed on the roof of a wintry turret. In the howl of the wind, she glanced about, wild-eyed, at the bleak tips of conifer trees.
She had only just begun to feel the cold bite into her fingers and to pull her arms around herself, when she heard a thud behind her—and a hand wrapped around her fingers, dragging her back. She screamed and whirled around, only to find the pink hair and the tattooed face of the girl who had only just bound her and then cut her loose.
“Fantastic!” Liss laughed, glancing at the knot on her wrist. “This will make things so much easier! Come on now, take us back—back to a city called Madan. It is a port city carved into the side of a mountain—the capital of the kingdom of Makor.”
“Okay. I'll—I’ll try.” Pala closed her eyes, clenching her fingers into trembling fists.
*
The universe flashed away into concentric circles, and they spun through the lights with everything humming past their ears, the way it had every time before.
But when the visions solidified again, they were not in a city.
They were in a room with a bed, a crate, and a table, and the red light streaked the floor in bloody lines. And in that bed lay Fen, stirring from slumber.
“This isn’t Madan,” Liss said.
Pala shrank towards the door. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
“Hey, what’s going on here?” Flung from his dreaming, Fen scrambled from the bed.
“Keep out of it!” Liss held up a hand, and he halted in his tracks. Then she cornered Pala and snatched her arm, grimace melting into a smile. “Now, try that again.”
*
Pala and Liss plummeted into the roar of the sea, foam swallowing them in the burning noon sun. As the first swell of water swept over her head, Pala gasped and kicked, all her reflexes seizing her at once as she thrashed to stay afloat.
“Damn it!” Liss snarled, snatching her about the waist and kicking furiously against the currents. “What’s wrong with you? You were doing fine until—”
*
Pala and Liss crashed into the ground in front of Fen, and this time, he flew to place himself between Pala and their captor. “Liss! What are you doing to her?”
Pala shook wordlessly. Puddles soaked out onto the granite floor beneath them. “Saving her from drowning,” Liss answered, face unreadable as an overcast sky. She crawled out of the tangle, trailing drops of saltwater, and went to the door.
Pala did not rise from the floor. She lay where she had landed while tears clouded her eyes, arms curling around her legs. “Please,” she sobbed, “I can’t keep doing this. I’m sorry I can’t do it right. I’m just…”
Liss stopped and turned. “Alright, alright. I’m sorry. It probably wasn’t fair to expect you to do so much so soon.” She closed her eyes with her hand on the door handle. Rivulets trailed from her fingers to the floor. “It’s you, Fen. We keep coming back to you.”
“Me?”
Staring up through the dimness, vision frosted by tears, Pala found that every sound and sensation rang too loud, and all she could do was close her mind to it all.
“You might be important to Pala’s sense of direction, or something like that. You should come along the next time we jump.”
“Okay…” She could hear the frown in his voice. “If it helps Pala…I can come along.”
“I guess letting you join us was a good idea after all.”
She felt her friend’s hand squeeze her shoulder, and the pressure remained while the door clattered shut behind Liss. But only once the girl was gone did she reciprocate the touch, clasping her fingers around his arm.
“You okay?” he ventured quietly, as the darkness fell upon the room.
“I’m not injured,” she answered, voice quavering, then coughed the last drops of seawater out of her lungs. She crawled into a seated position, her back against the polished bedframe. “I'm just scared.”
“Do you need anything right now?”
Her face contorted with the sting of new tears. “I need—new clothes.”
“They left us some in the crate.” He sank to the floor beside her, gesturing with his elbow at the box.
Pala glanced at Fen as he lifted her wrist gently in one hand, scattering drops of seawater. Both pairs of eyes were pulled to the drenched multicoloured band wrapped in intricate knots around it, stark and strange against her skin. “Is this…from her?”
Pala nodded, mouth drawn into a line. “She tied that thing on my wrist, and she tied a matching one on hers…then, suddenly, she could jump to me. I think it’s…some kind of magical tracking.”
He stared at it like it was a wound, then turned to her with glistening eyes. “Oh, Pala…I’m sorry.” He wrapped his arms around her, and she briefly thought to warn him about the water, but he didn’t seem to care. The embrace was like a flame, melting her terror at the corners. “I don’t know why all this is happening. But I’ll be there next time. She let me be there.”
“Please… Please…” Her lower lip trembled. “If you’re there…I think I can face her.”
It was over dinner in the temple’s common hall that Noma noticed the band on Liss’ right wrist. It was impossible to miss, especially sitting at close quarters—the rainbow threads, meticulously woven, clinging to the skin of her arm.
When she glimpsed it, it took a few seconds for her confusion to morph to recognition, and then to something else—some bottomless, hungry dread that she had only ever felt about death before.
“Liss,” Noma said, almost against her will. “Is that…” She pointed at the band on her arm.
Liss glanced at the object, then ran her fingers along its stitches. “Yes, it’s a marriage knot,” she said. “But it was not made in marriage. I am simply using it to keep Pala in…”
The flavour drained from her dinner. A storm stirred in her head, drowning out all else that was said thereafter. She did not hear whatever Liss and Lacar were laughing at, nor Kori’s thoughts on the matter—and when she was done with her meal, she stood up wordlessly and left.
She raced, cold as stone, through empty corridors and out into the night, where the dark sea roared invisibly and the wind stirred the branches. The sky was as thick as the foliage, roiling along with it. She strayed off the pathway to the dock, out among the boulders and trees, to where the insects scuttled. She sat down heavily on a rock and let her legs dangle off the edge.
She noticed then, for the first time, the way her heart ached, and that ache rose to her throat, threatening to wring tears from her. “Stop, stop, stop,” she growled. “It doesn't matter. She can do what she wants.”
It wasn’t until ten minutes later that she heard the crunch of footsteps in the grass behind her, with Lacar’s trudging rhythm.
“Hey, Noma,” he called out, just loud enough over the wind. She turned. Windows glowed out of the temple’s lowest floors—the circumference of the island hill was a terrace of lights. “Are you all right? You seemed pretty sour about Liss’ new trinket.”
Noma pouted as Lacar sat down beside her. “It’s not a trinket. It’s a marriage knot.”
“And that’s a happy thing, no? Never mind the bizarre way that it was made.”
“Yeah.” She folded her arms and turned away. “I shouldn’t be upset. And I wish I weren’t. It shouldn't bother me in any way, that Liss is bound to someone else.”
He chuckled. “Someone ‘else’ is one way to see it.”
Indignation reared up, but resignation chased it on its heels. She sighed. “Maybe I did want it for myself.”
“Want…to tie the knot with Liss?”
Noma clutched her face. “Don't say it like that. It’s so embarrassing.”
“Nothing embarrassing about falling for your best friend, especially when she’s so…illustrious.” He folded his arms. “First time?”
She groaned. “Now you're just rubbing it in.”
“Well, if your people do it the same way as ours, she can tie the knot with more than one person.”
Noma turned away. “Yes, but I think…I hoped that our connection was…”
“Special? Unique?”
Noma grumbled her assent.
“Well, I think it is,” he said. “I don't know that you can see it, but she spares you more kindness than everyone else combined. And besides, you’re the only person who could possibly hold her in such a good light, too.”
Her eyes unfocused on the sky. “She could make anything happen. All she has to do is want it.”
“For better or worse.”
“So why should she care about me?”
“Maybe even a ruthless prodigy like Liss doesn’t understand her own feelings.”
“Then…what do I do?”
Lacar turned to Noma, meeting her gaze. “Anything,” he replied. “You could do anything, and she would smile at it.”
“I’m…I’m not sure about that.”
“Well, only one way to find out.” He dusted off his lap and began to rise. “Anyhow, I'm just here to check that you're fine and healthy. I ought to turn in for the night soon. Big things are about to start happening ‘round here, I can just feel it. And before even that, a storm will be upon us.”
“Sure. I'll see you tomorrow.”
Noma continued to sit in the wind while Lacar returned to the temple halls. She toyed at the blades of grass, and watched the stormclouds roll above her, pondering his words.
Standing on the rain-dampened stones of a temple terrace, Pala linked hands with Fen and Liss.
“You remember what I said of Madan, don’t you?” said the latter.
“It’s a port city carved from a mountainside,” Pala repeated. In the last trace of the pink of dawn, she closed her eyes, thinking of something easy—the taste of dinner from the night before—and willed herself home.
It was getting easier, as Liss had said it would. She watched the visions around her blur in radiant technicolor, then sharpen, and this time, the dizziness did not slam her quite so hard.
They stumbled on a pavement in the middle of Kaona Hema, before its famous watchtower, and saw it for merely seconds—then, focusing on the heat of the street, the way it warmed through her soles, she leapt again. Both grips tightened on hers, and she heard Fen cry out as the street began to bend away, along with the rest of the city.
Unnameable seconds of warped skies and placeless colours later, they snapped back onto the ground in a city she had never seen before. An obelisk threw its shadow across the symmetrical square, stolid merchant’s houses raising banners over its streets. By the obelisk, the stump of a statue stood with its fragments at its feet.
None of the trio spoke for a minute. Then, Liss said, “This is Madan. Congratulations!” she laid a hand on Pala’s shoulder. “I believe we have our procedure nailed down.”
Pala felt her heart leap. But from her relief crawled a new horror, like the first inkling of a monster beneath the waves—the planetary silhouette of all she did not know, about herself, and the universe.