Page 10 of Beyond

His cousin shrugged. “You know me. Once I’m asleep, you could hold a battle on top of me and I’d never know it till I found the hoof prints in the morning.”

Well, there was only one thing for it. He whirled and began taking the steps upward two at a time.

They found Jonaton awake and feverishly scribbling figures on sheets of reused parchment. He looked up as he heard them enter.

“I have it!” he crowed, waving a handful of papers over his head. “I have it! I tried it last night and it worked!”

Jonaton was not in his usual garb; garb that would have gotten him mistaken for a woman except for his lantern jaw. Kordas suspected him of jumping out of bed as an idea hit him and coming straight down here to his workroom, because the plain, baggy linen breeches and oversized silk shirt he was wearing looked like things he usually slept in. He snapped his fingers twice, manically remembering protocol, and said, “We’re good, here, now. All warded up. You know,” and twirled his bony, frequently bandaged fingers.

His mouse-brown hair was a tangled mess, and with the dark circles under his eyes, he looked as if he had been working all night. Kordas glanced over at Hakkon, who seemed bemused. “I know you went to bed last night,” Hakkon said.

“Yes, but I suddenly had an idea!” Jonaton waved his fistful of papers again. “I need more power, but it will definitely work! Let me tell you!”

Since by now Kordas was well aware that nothing would stop Jonaton when he was in full flow, he just looked around for a place to sit, spotted an empty bucket, and turned it over to sit on it. Hakkon leaned back against the wall with his arms crossed. Jonaton launched into his explanation without a pause.

“My problem has been how to identify a good spot to Gate far enough away from the Empire that we’ll have a long head start on anyone who chases us. Right?”

“Wait, I thought the problem was that Gates only go so far—” Hakkon interrupted.

“No, no, or the Emperor wouldn’t have his private Gates that can go wherever he wants them to,” Jonaton replied, shaking his head vigorously. “It just takes a lot more power to operate them than the static Gates we use. That’s easy, we have plenty of mages here to punch one through for a good long distance. I mean, not from up here, but where the big ones could be made. Because. I swear, you never listen to me.”

“I listen to you—” Hakkon began.

Jonaton interrupted him. “So, we know about a thousand years ago, something cataclysmic to magic swept over, well, everything, right?” he said.

“We do?” Hakkon whispered to Kordas.

“And that’s why it takes a lot of effort to gather the magic energy to do things, unless you are doing demonic pacts or blood magic, or something else Abyssal. Or maybe Elemental, but you have to have a lot of energy to bind Elementals.” Jonaton had the bit in his teeth now, and there was going to be no slowing him down. “But that’s not important right now. What is important is that the same—I’ll call them Mage-Storms, because they act like heavy weather—created Change-Circles.”

“What are—”

“I’ll tell you later,” Kordas promised, his eyes on Jonaton and his excitement growing.

“Now one of those Change-Circles south of us, in the Barony of Lepodal, brought in a tree with a trunk big enough to drive a wagon through it. Well, it would have, except it didn’t bring the whole tree. It brought a crescent-shaped bite of the tree. And that was so fantastic that Baron Lepodal got a cabinetmaker to make as many tables out of that tree trunk as he could. People competed to buy them. They’re scattered all over the Empire, family heirlooms. And I happened to be in the same manor as one of them a few years ago, and while no one was looking, I thought, ‘Jonaton, old sport, it might be handy to have a splinter of that thing some day, because you never know.’”

“You never know what, exactly?” Kordas asked.

“That’s what I’m getting to!” Jonaton shouted impatiently. “So I made sure no one was around, and I got down on the floor under the table, and I carved off a little sliver from the underside. I made sure to get it from the trunk, because I wasn’t sure what the legs were made of. And I put it in a box, and put it in my collection, and then never thought about it.” Jonaton waved backhandedly at the overstuffed shelves and stands that could start a museum all on their own.

Becoming a mage of high quality meant suffering through a long list of pain-and senses-shocking experiences just to learn the craft. An exploratory mage, well, they were rare, and every one known was recorded as eccentric. Kordas knew that it changed some mages beyond reasoning, but Kordas knew that one trait about Jonaton was that he compulsively acquired things. As vices go, it wasn’t the worst possible—but just the same, Kordas knew it was probably best that he never officially learned where Jonaton’s collections originated, or there would be no small sum of reparations money going out of the Duchy.

“How you keep track of all that—stuff—” Hakkon began.

Jonaton ignored the jibe. “Until last night! When I realized, that tree must have come from the West! Far to the West, way beyond where the Empire’s borders are, because otherwise someone would have found it and made matching tables and made a fortune! So last night I gathered up all my spare energy crystals and that sliver and decided to see if I could punch through to where that tree is—or was, anyway. And I did it! I did it!”

“So …you saw where the tree used to stand?” Kordas asked hesitantly. Jonaton used a lot of eccentric language, and he wasn’t quite sure just what “punched through” meant.

“More than just saw! I got a momentary window there! Like—if I get enough power behind me, I can open a temporary, really temporary Gate-like-thing—I call it a Snatch-Portal!—for long enough that Delia can pick up something from there, I can make a Gate-anchor out of it, we can open one again, and she can throw it back! Then I use the same bearing I figured out, in the cave, and sight in on it good and strong, and even better, the rest of that tree is still alive! So it’ll make it easier to get a lock, and if I can, I can burn in a searchable sigil. Which means—”

“We can open a Gate, a real Gate, out far beyond the border of the Empire,” Kordas said slowly. “Exactly what my father wanted. What he planned for. What we’ve been working for.”

Kordas felt the hair on the back of his neck standing up, and he grew hot and cold at once. After all this time, and all this effort—here it was. The Plan. It was no longer just a plan. They could make it a reality.

He and his family and anyone who wanted to come with them could escape the Empire. Forever.

“Are you sure of this?” he asked.

“Well, of course I’m not sure,” Jonaton said crossly. “It’s magic. It has built-in fuckery. Other mages could stop us—and will, if they’re in the Emperor’s service. But I am willing to make that Gate and use that Gate, and if that’s not good enough for you—”