Xsing hurried around the balcony to an alcove where a panel sketched with a tangle of runes stood backlit and glowing softly. With one shimmery digit, Xsing sketched several new runes into the display, additional lines following the motion of his finger. He touched one, murmured a word, and brought the entire display to life.
This time Silas did make a sound. Throughout the open space, floating spheres sprang to life, like soap bubbles in the air but more solid and stationary and varied in colors. Xsing pointed toward one. “Your Earth.” The sphere was mottled in bright colors that didn’t look earthlike, but Xsing was already pointing at another more pastel sphere halfway across the space. “Yyygrdii.” A large translucent globe spinning in the center of the display. “Home.” And another closer to Earth. “What humans call a hell. Fireworld six.” Another smaller and darker red. “Fireworld seventeen.”
Silas tried to get past the sheer spectacle of the place and focus on the things he was seeing. As he scanned the space, patterns began to emerge. “There are a lot of fireworlds close to Earth.”
“Yes.” Xsing tilted his head farther than would’ve been humanly possible. “They are drawing nearer. A change I had noted over the last two seasons.”
“Three months,” Grim translated. “More or less.”
“The worlds move around?” Jasper frowned. “How can that happen? Even a small change of orbit would make the Earth uninhabitable. Planets can’t just alter course.”
“This is not astronomy,” Xsing said. “The matrix is not space, but Otherspace. You could explore the physical space around your planet for a million of your miles and never see a fireworld, never find one. But look into Otherspace and there they are, hundreds, probably thousands of worlds if we searched far enough, connected by everchanging magic, not vacuum. This display is only our small corner of Otherspace, as my power reveals it.”
Silas blinked as a tendril of orange flashed out from a reddish area on that Earth-sphere to contact one of the fireworlds. “What’s that?”
“A spell. A summoning, from the color.”
“We’re watching this in real time?” Jasper leaned over the rail to look down, then up toward Earth. “This is incredible.”
“My talent,” Xsing said. “I see and map power. It took many years for me to create a way to make the vision stable and visible to others without draining myself dry.”
Darien had worked his way around the balcony to the far side of the room with Grim and Pip at his heels. He called, “There are a lot of summonings, I guess. The Earth looks like a porcupine. That can’t be good.”
Silas, Magda, and Jasper hurried around to where he stood. From that vantage point, Silas could make out slender red and orange threads connecting Earth to several smaller red-black worlds. Grim had padded further around, eyeing the display, and he raised his voice. “There’s one to that green ball. What’s that?”
From his control board, Xsing said, “That’s been there a long time. I had recognized it as some kind of Otherspace connection between Greenworld and Earth, but I hadn’t been able to get much analysis, although it’s been very stable for years. But now clearly, Greenworld’s the world on which Lyyll was exiled, and the connection is the stable gate she and your human sorcerers created. Which helped me clarify the rest. The summoning portals from the human planet to the fireworlds have changed recently. They’re bigger, more powerful, they last longer, much like the Greenworld gate, and the fireworlds they impact are moving closer to the humans.”
Jasper craned his neck. “Moving in between this Home world and Earth? Maybe blocking the way?”
“Yes,” Xsing agreed. “The space between us and Earth has become crowded with fireworlds, and we’ve had no voyagers summoned to Earth for the last two seasons, and none returned. To Yyygrdii, yes, but not Earth. That did seem more than coincidental.”
Magda eyed the dark red threads. “A demon summoning shouldn’t open a gate for more than, what, a few minutes at most? How long are these lasting?”
Xsing created a long finger on one of his hands and pointed at the display, emitting a slender white beam of power to indicate a few threads. “That one, that, those two, and this have apparently become permanent. The others last from an instant of failure to an Earth hour or more. Highly variable, and out of the usual range.”
Silas did not like the sound of that. “You’re saying we have portal gates to five hells sitting permanently open? Like the portal in my basement, but to hells?”
“So it would seem.” Xsing shrugged all three arms. “Someone must be controlling the access though, or your world would be awash in fireworld entities.”
“And those gates may be tethering the hells closer to Earth,” Jasper speculated. “What would happen if the gates were closed?”
“I can only speculate.” Xsing used his light pointer to indicate a couple of other red spheres. “But these, which are not tethered, have drifted around as usual, as have Home and Yyygrdii and the rest. There are minor eddies in the matrix around the worlds, although we’ve never been able to predict the relative motions. Breaking the tethers might allow the hells to drift apart again.”
“With luck, opening up Earth to your Home again,” Silas said. “And reducing our plague of demons. It sounds like that has to be our goal. But how?”
Darien suggested, “If we can find the Earth end of the gates, we could destroy them. Paint over the runes, hack them down, something. Like breaking any other rune circle.”
“True.” Grim stretched up on his hind legs to set furry paws on the railing and stare at the display. “But finding those five gates and defeating the sorcerers who control them won’t be simple. If we can even get back to Earth to try it.”
“We need a giant pair of scissors,” Darien joked, pointing. “Fly through that matrix and snip, snip, snip. Solve all our problems.”
Xsing swiveled all three eyes to look at Darien, at Silas, then back at Darien. “That’s… perhaps not as farfetched as it sounds.”
Jasper focused laser sharp attention on Xsing. “Explain.”
“One magical theory holds that the Otherworld space between the worlds is represented by the Veil. Reachable in spirit and in death, but not in body. Mutable, changing, full of magic, connected to every world.”
“Really?” Jasper’s eyebrows rose.
“Necromancers from Earth have brought the spirits of demons there. Yyygrdiil travel there in world-walking. There are stories of odd encounters there, of creatures not like any known species. It clearly touches multiple worlds. Of course, some theorists believe it’s a separate dimension, orthogonal to the worlds and the matrix. But some speculate it is the matrix.”
“And if it is?” Silas asked. The Veil was his realm, his special skill. Though he’d never met creatures there. Well, other than demons and the ghoul on the River shore, and they’d originated from Earth.
“If it is, then those gates pass through it. And if they could be located, they might be disrupted there, without having to find or challenge the source on either end.”
“Surely the same problem arises,” Grim said. “Finding the gates. Might be even harder in the oddness of the Veil.”