Third floor, he glanced out the front window and then stopped. Not raining. Sun shining. The store and building across the street looked neat and clean, prosperous but not new. The streetlights were gas units. Gaslights, but he saw cars parked on the street. Cars that looked modern.
Alternate world? What did that say about the doors that the winds had told her were normal? Did that door open into
her
hills?
Fourth floor, the window looked down on a meadow surrounded by forest, stream running out from under his feet and down the middle to a beaver pond and mounded brown lodge and sharp-gnawed aspen stumps. Did that version of the world even have humans in it? Or maybe lacked grabby Europeans, to come and build cities and bury trout streams deep in sewers? Or had the buildings fallen down from age or earthquake and weathered away to nothing, and the trees returned? Man had been here and left?
The door Mother . . .
Balkis
. . . had used—Mel had accepted and used that name, pronounced in the Arabic fashion—didn’t tell him or his nose anything. He continued widdershins around the fourth floor. The last door on that side . . .
No, don’t open it.
He glanced over the railing. The Goddess of the Mountain Winds still stared out into her memories. Not a good time for him to clatter down the stairs, bubbling over with news.
Just for kicks and killing time, he tried the rear door, the one that
should
open out over a clear drop to the alley and broken bones at best. That might actually open into Muslim paradise, or the fires of hell. The door handle wouldn’t budge. He felt his way into the metal. Knob on a square shaft, passing through a square hole in a cam inside an old mortise lockset that moved the latch against a spring. Exactly like dozens of locks in his apartment building. Not truly a lock at all, just a latch.
He asked the parts to move. They said, “No.”
Iron had never said “no” to him before. This wasn’t a loud “NO!” with the exclamation-mark of defiance, just a quiet and almost apologetic “no.”
It couldn’t. He could break it, he could feel that in his hand, no problem. A lot of the parts were cast iron, brittle and old beyond old. But he couldn’t move it. Breaking the lock wouldn’t open that door. Something beside the latch held it closed. Mel’s winds had told her true.
The moral of this story is, even gods have limits. Even Kali gets homesick.
He finished off the top gallery of doors, no further news either good or bad, and looked down into the courtyard and . . . Mel . . . was up and prowling like a caged tiger, shotgun held at the ready. No, not a tiger—a leopard, smaller and quicker and sleeker.
He was free to notice her again.
He thumped down the flights of stairs, white marble treads with green-gray veins, treads without a trace of wear in spite of the feeling they had been there since the rocks first cooled. How many feet had pounded them, without leaving a mark?
Illusions, too?
He waved around at the galleries. “Your winds give you any idea who made this?”
Head-shake. “I don’t think ‘made’ is the right word. It just is. What we see is what we want to see. The only part that’s
real
is the doorways. You probably saw what Bilqis thought she saw when she first brought you here, and now I see that, through you. Other eyes that could see it at all would see something else. Something with one way in and twenty-seven ways out, that’s the only constant. If there’s a Beaver God to go with the view out the top window, it probably sees a giant beaver lodge with many tunnels. Who knows?”
He stopped about halfway down the last flight of stairs and looked around, full circle, before turning back to her. “How do you find it in the first place? If you’re the kind of person who can see it at all, how can you tell one doorway from another, one cave mouth from another, and know you ought to walk inside?”
Another shrug. She did that a lot. “We both were drawn here, just like we both felt the Seal and were drawn to it. That’s probably why we’re in this damned backwater city in the first place. The Seal is a god-magnet, pulling us closer to better suck us dry. If Bilqis isn’t lying, she would have felt it more than we do. She still has more power. She still knows who and what she is.”
So Mel was buying at least part of that story. With reservations and questioning the source. Wise move.
“What did your winds tell you about
that
door, the last door on the fourth gallery?” He pointed.
She cocked her head to one side, looking up. “They didn’t like it. Nothing poisonous, that one shouldn’t kill us unless we do something stupid, just that it’s a closed space, tunnel or cave or cellar. No place for winds to play.” Then she turned back to him. “Why?”
“The Seal went through there. I felt it.”
He’d felt the painful and pained whine he’d left at the burned-out synagogue, faint and distant. Since he didn’t know how much the Seal had weakened, he couldn’t tell how far away, whether it sat behind still another gate into still another world. Or two, or five. But it had gone that way, and left its . . . scent, was the closest word he could find on such short notice. And, he’d smelled, no,
felt,
that touch of sandalwood, as well. That impossible touch, that might be the soul-trace of a dead salamander.
Did Balkis know he had touched the star and formed some kind of bond with it? And, if she knew, did she care? After all, no
sane
god would pass up the powers she offered. The name she offered. Let the damned Seal die.
He had as much power as he wanted.
More
than he wanted.
But he
would
like to remember his own name.
The doorway framed . . .
nothing.
Albert’s stomach churned when he stared at it. Or
into
it. He
saw
blank gray without depth or texture, but something wired into his brain knew it wasn’t a flat surface like a painted wall. It made the building spin around him. It offended his sense of where he stood in the universe. He tore his glance away and his feet settled back onto solid marble. Except he knew
that
also was illusion. He turned back to the Goddess of the Mountain Winds. Kali. Mel.
Whoever
she was.
“Why do the windows give us a view, but the doors don’t?”
She sat in front of the doorway, full lotus position on the cold stone floor of the gallery, about as far back from the open door as she could get without pushing through the illusionary railing and falling the illusionary height of several illusionary floors to the illusionary courtyard, and his butt ached in sympathy. She didn’t carry much padding around with her.
It made the very picture of a serene
yogini
except for the shotgun pointing into the void, balanced on her right knee with her finger inside the trigger guard. He’d heard the click when she flipped the safety off before he’d pulled the door open. Not a particularly trusting woman. But he already knew that.
“Not exactly windows,” she answered. “You’ll have noticed, they don’t open. No hinges or latches or other hardware. And I think you would find the second floor view isn’t
quite
the same as the first, if you look and compare them for long enough. I’ve changed my mind. I think only the first floor doors open into
our
world.”
“I wonder what would happen if I tried to break the glass . . . ?”
That pulled her “meditation” away from the doorway. “I’d really rather you didn’t try. What happens to the contents of an illusion when it breaks? Makes a good Zen
koan,
but I’d rather not find that
satori
through personal experience.”
She focused back on the doorway. “Now, bug off. I’m trying to meditate here.”
So far, her public face added up to a maze of contradictions, some more dangerous than others—a Buddhist Kali who practiced yoga with a shotgun on her lap, identified quotes from the Qur’an from memory, and tossed off slang Americanisms like “bug off” at any random moment. “Bugging off” looked like a reasonable choice. He headed down the stairs to the second floor.
That door to Finland gave him the same gray nothing. Now they’d tried one on every floor, with the same result. Apparently one of the rules of this place was, you couldn’t see what waited for you beyond the gate. The homesick smell of northern forest didn’t get any stronger, just like the pained and painful whine of the damaged Seal hadn’t strengthened when he opened
that
door. She’d said her winds hadn’t changed, either. They still felt trapped, unable to use or even sense the open door.
Just for kicks, he poked the tip of his cane into the gray and watched it vanish, inch by inch up to just short of the grip and his hand. He tapped down with it and felt ground, soft lumpy ground, underneath. Then he pulled the cane back. Got it back, all of it, with a tuft of dead pine needles stuck to the end. He hadn’t been sure things could go through and then come back. He could replace the cane, but replacing a hand or foot got a little . . . complicated.
Water beaded on the surface of the steel. He sniffed. Rainwater, with the resins and aromatics of drips from pine boughs. It smelled good. He didn’t ache for the place, not as if he was bonded to it, didn’t think he was any kind of Finnish “god,” but the memories he didn’t have of it were pleasant ones. Maybe as a god of smiths, he didn’t tie as tightly to any one place as she did. His realm was the forge, no matter where it sat and who pumped the bellows.
He could step through that door. He could leave this whole stupid “quest” and re-forging the damned Seal, let it die, gain his memories and the powers of a god. If Legion wanted to argue, they’d met the letter of its contract. They’d found out who’d abused the salamander, who’d
killed
the salamander, and stopped her. Albert didn’t remember anything in the agreement about repairing magical artifacts. Or getting paid for that repair. And he objected to working for free . . .
But I don’t
like
gods.
Mel hadn’t tried the door into her hill country. She wouldn’t even go back to that gallery of doors on the first floor. The ground-level door they’d tried had been across the court from hers. He could understand.
He wandered over to study the second floor window, the one that
might
look into a different version of the street he’d walked.
Details. Two rust-rimmed bullet holes punctured the “No Parking” sign beyond this one. He climbed down to the first floor and verified his memory. Three. He climbed back up the stairs again. Everything else looked the same, on a quick scan. He doubted that it held down to molecular-level detail.
The glass felt cold to his finger-tips, as glass on a rainy day should. Tapping with a knuckle gave a hollow thump, about as resonant as his ear expected from a pane of glass that size. Nothing . . . disturbing . . . like that formless gray. His cane would shatter it, no problem.
A half turn and he glanced up. She stared down at him from that upper gallery. She didn’t speak, didn’t nod or shake her head. Just watched.
He had a sudden flash-image of a popped balloon, a stroboscopic photo with shattered stretched rubber blasting out from the pin-point that had caused the catastrophe. What would breaking an illusion look like, if he could break it—something like that, with both of them thrown into the gray as “reality” pushed out into nothing? Or would they appear in the center of the tattoo parlor, suddenly contesting with a chair or cabinet or bit of structure for that particular volume of space-time?
Maybe not a good idea. He lowered the cane. He walked around the gallery, out of her gaze, and climbed back to the fourth floor. When he looked down again, the door to Finland, whatever alternate Finland, was closed. He hadn’t closed it.
Back up the stairs, her dark eyes studied him. “I sometimes get bored with living, too. Do you know if we
can
die?”
He shook his head. “Mother told me that my brothers and sister died. I never saw them killed. Never saw a body. She’s not the most reliable source.”
Her eyes shifted to staring across the courtyard, but their focus seemed far beyond any wall, any illusion. “I asked you for a blade to kill a god. Not for Legion, or for any blood feud cherished and kept warm through the centuries.”
She paused for a moment that ran on to a minute. Then, in a flat cold voice, “For me.”
Her stare came back to him. “I don’t know if I would use it. I don’t know if I have the balls. But
having
a blade like that, having a
chance
of dying after all these years, that would be a comfort in the night. I don’t sleep well.”
Neither did he. Except when he’d worked himself to exhaustion, one of the attractions of his forge. Then he could sleep. Working metal was a drug.
Gods sleep fitfully, if at all. It’s part of the job description.
She shook herself loose from the black mood. “You want to poke your cane through
this
door? I’d like to know if we’ll need parachutes when we step through. A fifty-foot drop might not kill us, I’ve tried it once or twice, but broken bones still hurt.”
So she’d been watching him for a while, over that gallery rail. Watching him, and making no move to stop him if he’d stepped through the door, if he’d tried to break the window.
He poked his cane through the . . . nothing. Wiggled it around, up and down and sideways.
“We’ve got a floor, feels like natural rock, rough and uneven, pretty much on a level with the gallery. Nothing within reach to either side or up or straight in. Nothing has tried to bite or grab my cane.”
He tapped and tapped, could feel the hardness beneath the opening, but heard nothing. Again, he got the full cane back when he pulled on it. It felt cool when he ran his fingertips down to the brass ferule, like it would in “room-temperature” air. And dry this time.
“Your winds are sure we can breathe in there?”
“If we can’t, we’ll die. What’s the downside in that?”