Thresholder

No one seemed to have noticed Perry’s nighttime trip down to the dungeon. The big risk was that they were just pretending they’d seen nothing, which was even more of a concern given that Perry now knew the grandmaster already had him dead to rights.

Maya had been talking. She would have told the grandmaster everything, or almost everything. Perry felt better about not lying, because not only had the grandmaster been circling everything Perry had said, he had, in the background, been double-checking Perry’s account with a second source. If Perry had been caught in a lie, they probably would have called it an example of karmic retribution.

But there was one major lie, one that the grandmaster hadn’t pressed Perry on, the question of what had happened at Moth Lantern Hall. Perry had thrown Maya under the bus, and Maya had done the same to him, and that was all very poetic, a literal prisoner’s dilemma they’d both failed, but it meant that the grandmaster’s silence had to have some kind of meaning. Maybe the grandmaster didn’t care that two of his spawn had died and that their temple of exile had been defiled. But it seemed more likely that he was simply waiting for retribution, possibly just waiting until Perry had said everything there was to say.

Perry was very aware that he could easily end up in the dungeon too.

He tried not to let it change what he was doing, because that would be a tell, but the very next night the Grandmaster Sun Quying blew the whole thing up anyway.

“I have a guest to come join us tonight,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying after a series of questions whose only purpose seemed to be to wear Perry down.

“Oh?” asked Perry. “I had thought you wanted these sessions to be more private, grandmaster.”

“I do, I do,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “But in this case, it won’t be you I’ll be asking questions of, I only want you here in order to get your input.”

Perry nodded and tried not to swallow too hard. He was absolutely certain that Maya was about to be marched up the stairs from the dungeon, locked up tight, missing her hand. He would have to pretend not to have known she was down there, and she would probably just ruin everything with her loud mouth.

The grandmaster called a command to his attendant, and a short while later, Perry heard footsteps from behind him. They weren’t the footsteps of a prisoner in chains though, and Perry turned to look.

Xiyan was walking across the wooden floor.

Perry scrambled to his feet, and seconds later, his sword was in his hand. He was in his armor, thank god, as ready for a battle as he could be, but —

“Sit down, Peregrin,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “Any fighting between the two of you will be dealt with harshly.” He seemed bored by the prospect.

“She’s the other thresholder,” said Perry.

“Yes, you’ve said, and she’s confirmed,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “And now you’re here, together. But she is a guest of Worm Gate, for the time being, and I have questions for her.”

“How?” asked Perry, tearing his eyes from Xiyan to look at the grandmaster for just a moment.

“She came to me,” said the grandmaster with a shrug. “It’s no secret that you’re a member here. Moon Gate knows that well, and I would guess that the grandmaster’s strange visitor is a rumor making the rounds among the first sphere.”

“She’s going to try to kill me,” said Perry.

“No,” said Xiyan, the first she’d spoken. Her voice was different, deeper and richer. She was dressed the same though, the simple servant. She had her hands behind her back, and Perry worried that she had a blade. She had destroyed the microfusion reactor, which meant that she was strong enough to cut through the armor. There was no evidence she’d been shot five times at close range.

“No?” asked Perry. “That’s it, just ‘no’?”

“I believe we will do battle eventually,” said Xiyan. “But not right now. Right now, I only want to talk.”

Perry stared at her, then looked over at Grandmaster Sun Quying. “You made a deal.”

“I did,” the grandmaster nodded. “She was very straightforward, which is what I prefer.”

“A deal for my life?” asked Perry.

“No,” said the grandmaster, face turning into a scowl. “You are a member of Worm Gate. Do you think my allegiance is so brittle?” He took a breath, and the sudden affront left him. “I have decided that the details of my arrangement with Xiyan will remain between us, but she knows that she is safe here, for the duration.”

You’re giving her Maya. Perry couldn’t say that, but it was the obvious conclusion, knowing what he knew.

“I’m here to talk,” said Xiyan. She smiled.

“Peregrin, sit,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. It was an order. There was no mistaking his tone.

Perry sat back down on the pillow. Xiyan knelt on her knees, but only for long enough that an attendant could come forward with a pillow for her. There were twenty feet between them, far enough that he felt like he could spring into action if she suddenly attacked him. He was thankful for the armor, though his helmet was on the floor next to him.

“Very good,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “Now, begin.”

Xiyan cleared her throat. “Is it wise for Perry to be here?” she asked.

“He knows the varied worlds and hates you,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “He is as much an expert as I have, knowledgeable about many fields. He will stay.”

Xiyan glanced at Perry. “Very well.” She turned toward the grandmaster and began.

~~~~

I grew up lying.

Perry will tell you that I still lie, that I’ve lied about who I am, and this is true, but you know that.

This will be the truth, or as close to the truth as I remember. You want to know about the worlds, the portals, the powers. I can’t tell you everything, because I don’t know everything. What I know, I will tell, and it will be the truth.

I never knew that much about the world I was from. I was a poor girl from a small city. At the age of eleven, I killed a man in self-defense, and when the guards came, I was taken from my family, not because they thought I was guilty of any crime, but because someone had seen something in the way that I carried myself afterward. I didn’t shake or cry, I cleaned myself off and went to get help, as though it had been any other day. They liked that about me. Over the next years, I was trained in the art of conversation, trained in how to lie, and later, trained in how to kill.

I was also trained to fall in love. They thought the lies came easier if they were built around truth. When you lie, you have to keep certain facts straight, have to think through what you’re going to say before you say it, and it’s better to simply have your mind run ahead of you, for everything to come out easily. I was good at falling in love.

The first portal opened up while I was on the run. I had killed a man, as the king had instructed me to. The guards didn’t know that it was ordered by the king, so they were trying to catch me. That happened sometimes. I went through the portal before realizing what it was, and then I was in a forest, with a blood-stained dress and nothing else.

I didn’t know what to do. I walked until my feet were blistered, found a stream, and followed it. I slept in the woods, chilled to the bone, moss for a pillow. Eventually I came to a small village of people with long, drooping ears, like rabbits but pink and hairless. After a night there, a man with a cart took me to an abbey some miles away. I was to be a bikkun, a woman of service, and I accepted this readily enough, just as I had accepted my training, had accepted the tasks I was asked to carry out for my king, had accepted that I should love on demand.

I learned the practices of the bikkun. They could change their faces, their tongues, and their eyes. After a month, I looked like them, spoke like them, and saw the world as they saw it. I thought that would be my life.

A man showed up after a month had passed. He wanted to be a bikkun, but they turned him away, as they didn’t allow men. After he spent three days at the door, they let him in, feeling as though they had no other choice if a man was so determined.

I felt myself drawn to him. He had short, rounded ears like mine had been. He spoke freely of the world he had come from. The bikkun didn’t say a word about me and my origins, but they were women of secrets, so I suppose that made sense.

I fell in love with him. I had always liked falling in love, that feeling of losing myself in another person. Like with the others though, there were also things I hated, big and small — but that was part of what I liked about falling in love, that tension, the goodness and badness at war with each other inside me.

When he found out who I was, where I was from, he went into a murderous rage. It wasn’t the first time someone had tried to kill me though, and I fought back. When he was dead, a portal opened, and I went through it, knowing now that there was a higher purpose.

~~~~

“Wait,” said Perry. “Sorry, he just attacked you out of nowhere?”

“He must have had his own reasons,” said Xiyan. “He made no declaration of them.”

“He’d been to other worlds before?” asked Perry. “He was a veteran thresholder?”

“We may reserve our questions for the end,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “There will be much more which must be interrogated.”

“He talked about the world he was from,” said Xiyan. “It was a world filled with water, oceans blemished only by small islands.” Xiyan cocked her head in Perry’s direction, as if asking how many more questions he’d like answered.

“We will have a catalog of worlds, in due time,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “Continue, please.”

Xiyan nodded.

~~~~

The portal led me to a place far stranger than the world of the bikkun. There were ships, not meant for land, but for space. They were arranged in many rows, parked in spaces that had been painted onto the ground, hooked up to pipes and cords. There was day and night, but no weather, no wind. I was told later that there were other places in the world, or ‘planets’, but this was the only one I saw, endless rows of these starships in all their varieties. I walked for miles and saw only these ships, always more of them, their designs always different, some bulky, others sleek, spindly ships like crabs and ships shaped like bubbles. They were all metal and glass, but sometimes other materials. A single ship had more metal than I had seen in my entire life up to that point, and early on, I thought they were dormant monsters that had been wrapped in armor.

I was found by a robot that clambered about on all fours. It led me to a camp that had been built out of one of these giant ships. I kept silent about the other worlds I had been to, and claimed to have lost my memory. It was a bad lie, but they accepted it readily enough.

None of them knew where they were. The bulk of them — fifty or so — had been put to sleep within their ship, part of a plan to survive a very long journey. They had awakened to find their ship among the others, neatly parked in a spot precisely sized for them. They had no ability to lift off, and were stranded. The idea of ships that traveled through space needed to be explained to me, and I found it too fantastical to believe. The other people in their small colony had their own stories of how they got there, but no one quite remembered arriving. Some had been born in the Dock, while others had been cloned — a new person created from nutrients, their memories given to them.

I had much to learn. I had taken the robot for an armored pet, but learned it was nothing but wires and metal. I learned about the stars and the impossible technologies these people took for granted. There were many species of person, and they thought that I was a species they simply didn’t know about. They had translators that converted between different tongues, which they used often.

The ships were almost all derelict. They had been stripped of parts decades or even centuries prior. There was something different about the sun, which they said was a star. It was too small or cool, and there were systems on the world — they called it the Lot, the Shipyard, the Dock, rarely settling on one or the other — that kept the winds from moving. Each of the parked ships was connected to pipes and tubes, whatever it needed for refueling or recharging, all of which came from within the bowels of the planet. Those pipes were what they used to stay alive. A fuel designed for a particular type of ship could allow plants to grow, and certain ships had links that allowed in water, which was rationed among our small group. Hunger was a constant concern though, since our farms were tiny and the light was poor.

I never found out who built the place, or what its purpose was. None of the ships could take off. Most couldn’t even power up. Others had been there before us, and some had left behind notes in their strange languages, trying to pass on what they knew. I had been there for two weeks when one of the scouting parties found a library. It offered nothing for survival, but chronicled a long-lived camp like ours that dwindled down to nothing when a plague swept through. I never saw one of the ships in flight, and might not have believed their capabilities if they didn’t have videos to show me. I saw ancient crashes on two occasions, places where the collection of ships had been reduced to scrap by an impact. Some of the escape attempts must have failed. Still, the group scavenged what they could, improving their lot in life, but with the ultimate goal of getting one of the ships in working order so they could fly away.

They assumed there was vast machinery below the surface of the Shipyard, given the tubes produced so many different kinds of fluids. They started a hunt for a way in, a hole large enough for a person to fit down. Eventually, they found one, a thick tube for dumping trash connected to one of the larger ships. They needed someone small though, and I was the smallest person that wasn’t a child.

I spent five days down there. The rope they were going to use to pull me up had snapped. I had a mask and a flashlight, and other tools, but the walls were slippery, and I ended up down deep. Another person might have been bothered, might have shook and cried, but I only thought about what needed to be done. That was always my best quality.

I made my way through machines the size of buildings, past tanks that could easily drown the entirety of this temple, around wires that stretched for miles. I saw robots from time to time, most of them small, but a few larger ones carrying cargo, blind to my presence. This was where the water I’d been drinking came from, where the fuel that was used for fertilizer was manufactured. Things hummed and crackled. It smelled of grease and smoke. I walked randomly, trying to get higher, back to the surface somehow, but it was a massive cave and I had no sense of direction.

Eventually, I made it. I had followed the robots along the pathways that had been built for them. The top of the stairs pushed open into the weak sunlight, and I took a breath of clean air. The entrance had been hidden, so precisely machined that it was invisible from above. I found my way back to the camp, starving, and was hailed as a hero.

Journeys into the depths of the place became routine, even if they weren’t entirely safe. We no longer had to ration water, and once we found the right tanks, our gardens could flourish. There was some hope of repairing one of the ships well enough to fly somewhere, but we were all from such different places, and were mired in ignorance.

The wizard showed up not long after that new era of prosperity. ‘Wizard’ was how he introduced himself, and they laughed until he brought his oaken staff down and caused lightning to come down from the perpetually clear skies. The people I was with had weapons scavenged from various ships, but the wizard was an unknown, his magic strange and alien to them. He made demands, and they complied.

It wasn’t long before he found me out. He requested a census of the town and a list of everyone who had joined within the last three months, and I was the only person. I ran before I could be captured, off into the endless fields of ships.

I don’t know exactly what happened with the wizard, only that I saw a ship in the air after I had been gone for a week. I knew enough about these ships now that I was afraid of it, and I hid from cameras and sensors, but it wasn’t enough. The wizard wasn’t with the ship, which was a small one. There was only a woman I had known, who seemed intent on capturing me.

She died in the scuffle, her own blaster making a hole in her gut. I took her face and tongue, then took her clothes, hid the body, and walked back to camp. I was good at lying, but not good enough to pretend to be a person others knew well. I didn’t think that I needed to be that good, only good enough to stop the wizard. In the end, I was right. It wasn’t a fight I had wanted, but it was a fight I finished, and once he was beaten, the portal opened. I left with a blaster and other pieces of technology.

~~~~

“Did you kill him?” asked Grandmaster Sun Quying.

“No,” said Xiyan, shaking her head.

“Why not?” asked Perry.

“I had killed in self-defense, and in the name of my king,” said Xiyan. “This was neither.”

She said that as though it explained anything, as though it was obvious. Perry didn’t trust it. “This woman whose face you took — how does that power work?”

“It can wait until the end,” said the grandmaster, though he’d been the one to start the questioning.

“It’s important for my understanding of the story, grandmaster,” said Perry. “Taking someone’s face would be, in my world, a serious offense if it was possible at all.”

“I can take only from the dead,” said Xiyan. “The bikkun believed that the dead had no need for face, eyes, and tongue in the next world. I have tried to honor their understanding.”

“But taking a face … that changes your entire body?” asked Perry. “You said that your ears became different, it includes skin tone, spreads to your hands?”

Xiyan nodded.

“And it would only work on a woman your size?” asked Perry.

“There is a difference between taking a face and trying to be that person, which I have done only seldom, and taking a face to become someone new,” said Xiyan. “If the body does not match, it will be an imperfect replica.”

Perry frowned. Stealing faces was downright villainous, but she was framing it as somehow ethical. He wondered whether Quying bought it or not. She had promised the truth, and Perry didn’t think they were getting it. He was worried about what she would say when she got to the present.

“Continue with the story, please,” said Grandmaster Quying. He sat comfortably on his pillow. From experience, he could sit there, listening, for a very long time.

For her part, Xiyan seemed like she could go on forever.

~~~~

I had no purpose. This had been true my entire life. I fell in with people easily enough, and was ready — eager — to take orders. I did well when I was told what to do, and suffered when I was on my own. You might have noticed something that took me a long time to notice, which was that in the world of moored ships, I was sent down into the belly of the place because I was the only one small enough. But the woman whose face I took was the same size as me, and I was able to impersonate her, for a time. I had been used by them, and had not noticed. I think once I was down the trash chute, they didn’t make much further effort to rescue me. I didn’t realize it. That was how I was, then.

My third world, in what has become a long string of worlds, was a place of disconnected bulbs, all of different sizes, some miles across and others only as large as a room. Water and air flowed between them, through thick tubes, causing weather and tides, and most had a small sun sitting near the top. The walls were harder than metal, impervious. The people lived simple lives, sometimes moving from one bulb to another but often simply staying in one place, farming the land or catching fish. The bulbs were uncountable, and the tunnels twice as uncountable.

I was taken to a local king, whose castle took up the interior of a smaller bulb, the tunnels blocked off with thick gates. I had thought to lie to him, given my experiences, but instead I told the truth. I had bowed to the king of my homeworld, and didn’t suppose it would be any different to bow to the king of another place. I didn’t know what judgment he would pass on me, what he might think of the bare truth, but he was a pragmatist, and saw that I could be useful.

I was given an anointment of smoke and shadow, imbuing me with a power I carry to this day. With the tools I had taken from the world of ships and the ability to change faces, I was set to become a fearsome assassin for the king, a power beyond compare. I was given a new face and set in the direction of an enemy kingdom many bulbs away, with a handler to ensure I did what I was told. The king was practically giddy over this plan.

The trip was slow, the bulbs varied, but we made it in due time. My handler was a hard woman who nonetheless took some pity on me. She was pretending to be my mother, and I think the act became too much for her. I had training in how to pretend, how to bring real emotion into a lie while not forgetting my purpose. My handler had not been trained so well. She grew protective.

At last we were in the enemy kingdom, and with time, drew close to the enemy castle. I had the right face and tongue to be let in, promising to work for the queen until my bones bled. My handler was left to stay outside.

It took a week to make my way into the queen’s chambers, but most of that was making sure I knew where the guards would be. With the power of smoke and shadow, I could go silently through the night, the guards mistaking me for a figment of their imagination, soft as the falling of a feather. I went into the room where the queen slept and raised my dagger for a killing blow.

I hesitated. I stopped and thought. My heart wasn’t in it. I had no connection to this queen, nor to the king who had set me on this quest. I was only doing what I was told. For the first time, it seemed inadequate.

I slipped out of the room, leaving the queen as safe and snug as I had found her, and fled the kingdom the next day.

For the first time, I was deciding what I wanted to do with my life. I had no hope of going back home, and wasn’t even sure that I would have wanted to if it were a possibility. I wandered the bulbs until food became a concern, then began working. Most work came easily to me. I kept my head down, and didn’t speak often. I moved as a course of habit. And while I was quiet and tended to myself, I was thinking about what I actually wanted from my life.

Eventually, the other world-jumper came through. He had heard of me, by and by, then spent two months of his life trying to track down someone who was doing simple work and keeping silent. He didn’t even find me, only started searching in the right area, but the woman whose house I was in didn’t give me up, and instead claimed I had been living with her since the time I was small.

I had been thinking hard about what I wanted, what it would be like to follow my own path. I had decided that I would like to fall in love again, but for real this time, to feel that well of emotion naturally instead of having it coaxed forward by duty.

The world-jumper — thresholder, as Perry says — was on his third world, like I was. He was rugged and individualist, blessed with self-assurance and good looks. His right arm was red and scaly, ending in black claws, which were the only thing that prevented it from looking like a disease, but he wore heavy clothes and a thick glove most of the time. He had a bird that sat on his shoulder much of the time, and it didn’t like being within the bulbs. I don’t know what it was about him, but I took a liking to him at once. He had a thick beard and kind eyes.

I lied to him. I offered my services as a local guide, letting him know that he was in need of one. I exaggerated my skills. He grudgingly accepted, and from then on, we were inseparable.

I hid my abilities and devices from him, and followed him everywhere. He had no better idea about what was happening with the portals than I did, but he expressed that he had kept running into the most awful people, and was on his guard. He wanted answers from the woman he was chasing, nothing more, but he was prepared to kill, if it came to that. He seemed sad about the prospect.

We traveled together, all through the bulbs, chasing the woman. Sometimes I could almost forget that the woman we were chasing was me. There was a predictable pattern to it, and often, when there were no leads to chase, he would pull out his map and find a way to march us to a place we’d never been before.

He was desperate to return home. He told me of all his worlds, but his home was the one he had real enthusiasm for. He treated it with zeal. There was a war going on, one great nation clashing against the other, and he wished to be a soldier on the frontlines. He’d been skinny and weak, barred from war by those who saw him as a liability, but the worlds had been kind to him, at least in some ways. His falcon was fearsome, his arm grotesquely powerful, and he’d grown muscular and healthy. He spoke often of the glory of his homeland, and the cowardice and treachery of their enemy.

I grew to love him. For the first time, this came naturally, blooming on its own, like a plant in a garden that unexpectedly returns for a second year without thought or planning from the gardener. We were alike in that we’d been to many worlds, which changes a person. I would have done anything for him. I thought, many times, about telling him that I was the woman he had been searching for all along. He spoke of her with such venom, and of me with such tenderness, that the moments between us felt like a fragile bubble, too easily broken.

In the end, he caught me by going through my things. I had two artifacts from the world of ships, a firearm and what Perry would call a smartphone. I had kept them hidden from him, and was always certain to carry my own bag, going so far as to stitch a false bottom in, though it wouldn’t have survived close inspection. I had hoped we would travel together forever, or that he would give up his quest.

He fought me, and I tried to defend myself. I managed to get away, but not before he revealed the true extent of his power. The scaled arm could hide things out of sight, and he’d used it to capture one of the suns from a large bulb. Its power could be called forth in an instant, searing light to burn away my smoke and shadow.

His hunt was no longer directionless. He came after me with fury and force. He scorched whole bulbs trying to find me, blasting out the power of the tiny sun.

He killed innocents. That was his mistake. He hadn’t known I could take their faces. Once I did, it would have been impossible for him to find me. But I knew that I was the only one to stop him, so I did, using every tool at my disposal. His falcon was fearsome, and cut me across my face, but eventually I killed the man. I took no pleasure from it. When the portal opened, I was glad to leave the world behind.

~~~~

Perry had no idea how much of it to believe. Xiyan had started by saying that it was all the truth, but he didn’t believe that. Her stories painted her as sympathetic, too sympathetic. She was a trained assassin, but only killed in self-defense or the defense of others. She fell in love and was betrayed. She was a listless wanderer, self-less, always with others finding her first, always forced into conflict, a victim who came out on top. Even the horrifying face-stealing power took only from the dead, not the living.

Perry remembered the look in her eyes when she’d disemboweled him. He remembered the tenderness with which she said she’d watch him die. It wasn’t glee, exactly, but it wasn’t all that far off. She had wanted to watch him die.

Despite Marchand being in the room, there was no video of the event. Perry had March in stringent mode, microphones and cameras as disabled as possible so the precious power wouldn’t be wasted. There was video of the immediate aftermath, once March had woken up, but that only showed Perry on the bed, dying, and Xiyan fleeing. It picked up just after when it would have been most useful, at least when it came to proving she was a liar.

But Perry also didn’t know why, if she was lying, she would say so many things that seemed incriminating. Why admit to having been an assassin and spy? Why tell them both that she could steal faces? It was a power that Perry wouldn’t have revealed to anyone. Was it in order to sell the lie? Or was it because so much of her stories wouldn’t make sense without that foundation? There was too much unknown, but Perry didn’t want to wait until the end of it.

“I have questions now,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “How many worlds have you been to?”

“Thirteen,” said Xiyan.

“Then we will speak over the course of a few days,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “You will tell us of the worlds, one by one, and what happened in them, but for now, you will answer questions.” He turned to Perry. “Now is the time for your questions to be asked.”

Xiyan proved to be a deft interrogation subject. She kept her face placid and her voice almost pleasant, and where she had no answer, she was apologetic. Perry felt his blood boiling. He knew she was lying, if not about what had happened, then about who she was at her core. He picked at the details of her story, particularly the fights, which hadn’t been described in too much detail. Nothing much was illuminated. Xiyan said the gun and phone were both lost on other worlds, and she promised to explain that later. She explained, as far as she understood it, the difference between her phone and what Perry had told her about the phones in his world. Nothing all that much was illuminated.

For all that Perry had questions, the grandmaster had more. She explained certain basics to him, things that he’d already heard from Perry and Maya, grilling her understanding of science and chemistry, which was poor, and of other ways of arranging a world. He wanted to know about power structures, who ruled, what personal might they brought to the table, and more. He wanted to know whether Xiyan’s powers could be transmitted to others, whether she knew how to anoint someone with smoke or gift them the ability to change faces. She claimed ignorance, naturally, which Perry assumed she would have even if she knew how. That’s what he’d done, after all.

It felt good to have someone else be on the other end of the grandmaster’s questions, and Perry felt glad to be watching his technique without the pressure of answering, but he had the sense that Xiyan was better at this dance of questions than he was. Where he had misconceptions, she gently explained things to him, and Perry knew from experience that some of these misconceptions were simply tactics, part of the grandmaster’s attempts to catch someone in a lie.

It would take her a few days to tell her story in full, at least if the grandmaster insisted on so many hours of questions. She didn’t seem concerned with that, and neither did the grandmaster.

By the end of the questions though, as the grandmaster was preparing to attend to his grandmastering around the temple and Xiyan was preparing to stay as his guest in a room on the other side of the building from Perry — under guard, at least — Perry had made up his mind.

He was going to make what moves he could before she got to the end.