Thresholder

Perry spent at least part of the night burning through the armor’s power, looking through what precious little video he had of Xiyan, particularly when she was using her powers. It wasn’t a very productive use of his time. He learned very little that was new. There wasn’t much in the way of archival footage either, since most of the time he’d known Xiyan, March had been in the Crystal Lake armory.

Perry also spent the night using March to monitor movements within the building. There were two guards at Xiyan’s door, which was something, but Perry didn’t trust that they would be enough to keep her at bay. Still, he wouldn’t be able to function without sleep, so he slept inside the armor with an alarm set for the dead of night.

Perry moved more swiftly this time, trusting in Marchand to keep an eye out. The drone was powered up and had been placed inside the room, though not moving, mostly so that the cameras could stay on and provide a good connection, increasing the surveillance area.

Maya was just where he’d left her, and the combination lock hadn’t been changed at all. Perry would have considered it an appalling lack of security, but he was in the heart of the temple, surrounded by guards and with a nearby grandmaster who could punch his head off in a single strike.

“How are you?” asked Perry.

“Oh, you know,” said Maya. “Being tortured in a dungeon, same old same old.”

“He brought Xiyan here,” said Perry. “Or she came here. He’s obviously trying to get as much as he can from her, but I don’t know exactly what kind of offer he made her. She’s a thresholder, she confirmed it in her own words, and … I kind of think that the grandmaster is going to give you to her.”

“Shit,” said Maya. “So you’re breaking me out?”

“Tomorrow night,” said Perry.

“Or tonight,” said Maya. She shifted under the weight of the stock that held her hand and neck in place. “Tonight would be good too.”

“Your stuff is in the next room,” said Perry. “Are you blocked from using your telekinesis?”

“No,” said Maya, perking up. “But that toad-looking motherfucker came down here earlier, and he’s going to come again, to talk about … whatever. He was asking me about space, has Xiyan gone to space?”

“Thirteen worlds, she’s been all over the place,” said Perry. “I’m not going to get your stuff for you, I’m just going to take a piece of the nanites. I developed a technique to repair the armor.” This was only slightly overstating it. “It mostly worked, if I can get it working with your nanites, then it’s not as good as full self-replication, but it’ll be something.”

“Seems good,” said Maya. “You’ll teach me how to do it?”

“It happens naturally,” said Perry. “It’s the same mechanism that repairs damaged clothes and makes you look like you just got done being airbrushed by a professional makeup artist. You just channel power out into your skin, and something does the rest. That’s the crash course. More on that later, once we’re out of here.”

“You really are doing the daring rescue thing?” asked Maya. “I wouldn’t have figured you for it.”

“I can’t fight her alone,” said Perry. “And the grandmaster … he wants to go through a portal. I don’t want to let that happen if I can at all help it. He’s a dick. It’s all kind of irrelevant if Xiyan shanks me.”

“Thanks,” said Maya. “I won’t let you down.”

“You have to trust me,” said Perry. “Can you trust me?”

“I … yeah,” said Maya.

He had the distinct impression that she was lying, but he wasn’t going to push it. She was trapped, and had been for quite some time. She probably would have said anything to get out of there. But he did need her to trust him, and he wasn't willing to tell her everything ahead of time, not when the grandmaster was lurking nearby.

Perry opened the room that held all her equipment, including the nanite bracer, which was still wrapped around her severed arm.

“This isn’t going to kill me, is it?” asked Perry, having gone back into her room to confirm. “The defense you mentioned?”

“No,” said Maya. “I dropped that for you.” She grinned at him. “I got two of the grandmaster’s guys with it though.”

Perry grimaced and moved back over, taking the bracer and arm. It didn’t take long for Maya to reform part of the nanite mass into a glove, and it didn’t take much for Perry to start generating more of them. The nanites didn’t work well for him, and certainly wouldn’t function as steel plate, nor move to cover the contours of his skin, but they were clothing, apparently, or at least worked by the same rules that clothing did.

“March, what’s the rate?” asked Perry.

“There appears to be an error in the reported mass from the nanites, sir,” said Marchand.

“Assume it’s not an error,” said Perry.

“A tenth of a gram a minute, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry frowned. “Six grams an hour, meaning a kilo would take me …”

“A week, give or take, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry wrinkled his nose. It was also dependent on energy, but that was in short supply. “Better than nothing.” He turned to Maya. “We don’t have a week. At this pace, we don’t have four days. So it’s tomorrow, okay?”

Maya nodded as best she could in the chains. “Third time’s the charm, eh?”

“I need to know what your nuclear option is,” said Perry.

“I haven’t ruled out that you’re working with the grandmaster,” said Maya. “Given that you are, in fact, working with the grandmaster.”

“I have a nuclear option too,” said Perry. “You show me yours, I show you mine?”

Maya winced. “Fine. But if you tell him, I’m cooked.”

Perry listened, and when she was done, he told her what he had in store. By his reckoning, it was just barely possible they might scrape though — but too much was going to depend upon Xiyan and what powers she was hiding.

~~~~

They began early the next day, just after breakfast. Xiyan hadn’t been invited to the large table where the grandmaster’s inner circle ate, but she had been fed all the same, and she sat quietly on the pillow, ready and waiting to give more of her story. Perry had decided that he was going to count up all of the times she killed someone in self defense or otherwise claimed to have acted in an ethical and honorable way. His suspicion was that most of the story beats were correct, it was only some lies around the crucial moments. Lying was one thing, but making up an entire world with its own cultures and powers and practices seemed to be a bit much, beyond the scope of what she would or even could do, given it all needed to stand up to the grandmaster’s scrutiny.

They still hadn’t heard her version of the events that had led to him coming to Worm Gate. He was dreading that. How did you counteract someone who lied so readily? He didn’t know if she was a psychopath or what, but she definitely had some kind of screw loose. Twice she had said that she didn’t react in the ways that other people did, and while it seemed admirable in some ways, it was also pretty scary, because showing fear or anger was completely natural.

“Very well,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “We will start with your account, in brief, of the fourth world.”

Xiyan nodded and began again, undaunted by the amount of talking required of her.

~~~~

I was becoming accustomed to moving through worlds, but this one was more inhospitable than the others, with a sandstorm engulfing me from the moment I stepped through. I buried myself in the sand, feeling as though I had no other option, and kept my head up so I could breath as I was abraded by the stinging winds.

When the storm passed some hours later, I was in the worst condition of my life, and might have died if not for the winged men who picked me up. I was taken to their village, which floated above the clouds. They had me rest and recuperate, but I didn’t realize until the first week that they meant to make me a slave: they had taken my pistol and phone. The greater problem was that we were high in the sky, and the wings were affixed firmly to the backs of the men, unable to be removed, which meant that I was stuck there until I could find a way down.

I didn't mind enslavement. They didn’t treat me kindly, but I only had the inklings of purpose, and I suppose I thought that the life of a slave wasn’t all that different from the lives I had lived before. I did my work as I was told, and thought that perhaps this was what I would be. The village was high in the sky, the air somewhat thin, and I was allowed to watch when storms rolled by beneath us, curiously low to the ground.

I had no tongue in that world, not yet, so I knew nothing of it beyond what could be communicated to me in pantomime. It came as quite a surprise to me when we were raided by men in gleaming armor who had dropped down from a cloudy sky. They had glittering jewels on their backs that pulsed in the air, and they dealt with the winged men and their cudgels in short order. There was much screaming and yelling from the wingless women, all of it falling on deaf ears, and I, of course, found it incomprehensible. The buildings were tossed, the valuables loaded into a large wooden box, and the women were made to line up, many of them crying over the dead.

I was taken, of course. They tried three different languages on me, and none of them worked, which made me a curiosity. I wasn’t the only one taken though, as three other women were bound and swept away for a long and uncomfortable journey.

This time, I had my wits about me, and was able to see the world from above. It was a place of sand and storms, with not a hint of green. During my weeks in the village, I had eaten mostly eggs and tubers, with the occasional meat I found unidentifiable but still delectable. During the trip, I saw what I believe to have been the source: enormous bugs that followed in the wake of the raging storms.

At regular intervals, the men would land in the desert, only when the storms were far away. They would stretch their muscles, check the jewels on their armored backs, drink water, and make sure that we were all fine. I watched one of the women, who I took to be a native, spit on them whenever they came near.

By and by, we arrived at a city that put their gleaming armor and bejeweled backs to shame. It was a glorious place, a city on thin silver stilts, and it had all the green that had been lacking everywhere else, mile upon mile of fields and forests that were arranged as though on top of a silver platter. In the center were the most perfect buildings I had ever seen, cathedrals of gossamer, spiderwebs of glass and stone. It sat above the low storms except on the worst of days.

We were taken to a dormitory almost right away, with hard-handed guards wielding thick wooden clubs that they had no compunction about using. I was put into a shapeless sack of a dress, made with rough fibers.

I was still a slave, it seemed, though the dormitory wasn’t to be my final resting place. I was put up on auction, still unable to understand the language, and fetched a handsome price from a well-dressed man. He had caught my eye immediately: he was the only man I had seen in that world with blue eyes.

I was taken to his mansion and given a thorough inspection, first by the lady of the house, then by the thick-fingered housekeeper, and finally by the man who had bought me. It was indelicate, particularly from the lady of the house, which is all the more I’ll say about it.

My new master took a great interest in me, and it didn’t take long for me to figure out why. If the city was a jewel in the desert, then the mansion was a work of art, but his study was the place that held all the finest jewels. Many of them seemed out of place to me, objects and figures whose purpose I couldn’t divine, but there were few labels, and I still couldn’t read the language. My master was patient with me, though he kept himself armed while in my presence, and he worked to bridge the gap in tongues much more than he put me to use doing chores.

A week in, my master was called away. He argued loudly with his wife, several times, then departed, much to her annoyance. I would later discover that he was a part of the city’s military, responsible for facing down many of what it perceived as threats. He was needed at the frontlines of their ongoing wars, and wouldn’t be back for quite some time. The beautiful city had not been built with pacifism.

With her husband gone, the lady of the house took her anger and frustration out on me. She beat me mercilessly and put me to menial tasks, which were to be done with tools that were inadequate to the task. I was made to garden in the sun, cutting weeds with scissors that were meant only for fine thread. I cleaned the bathroom floor with a fine-tipped paint brush. I didn’t react to these indignities, which only enraged her further, but inside, I was kindling my feelings. There’s a tug to emotion which I find quite pleasant, even when it’s negative, and while I’m not alone in that, I don’t believe other people experience it quite like I do. They like a book that tells a scary story, but want some catharsis at the end. That was never necessary for me, but then, fear never came easily.

I slipped away in the middle of the night one night, a creature of smoke and shadow once more, only for long enough to find the city morgue and take a tongue and eyes. Once that was done, I slipped back in, and in the morning, no one was any the wiser.

It took my master a month to come back. In that time, I came to know every inch of his study.

I didn’t know whether he was a world-traveler like myself, or had just managed to collect artifacts from different worlds, but from reading his notes, many of the things in his study were just as unknown to him as they were to me. I had felt drawn to him before, with the same feeling of tension that came with many of the men I’d felt drawn to, and the idea of him as someone like me had only intensified that. It seemed as though he had answers, and I was hoping to get them.

I didn’t let him know I now spoke his language. He continued his work with me, once he was back, and even with his wife, never spoke about the campaign he’d been on over the strange, low storms.

I learned a lot about him, though most came from other sources, rather than the man himself. He had been in the city for eleven years, having come from somewhere else. There were other cities in the world, though no proper kingdoms, only cities of elaborate construction that each weathered the storms in their own ways. My master had distinguished himself early on and received the mansion from the city’s mayor, with his wife being the mayor’s daughter.

He had purchased me at auction for a reason. He knew what I was, though never said as much to my face, not with the language barrier I pretended was between us.

Eventually, he tried to kill me. I don’t know why. I had been steeling myself for it, preparing as much as I could, honing the powers I had been granted. And when I had beaten him, the portal opened, and I was once again through.

~~~~

“That’s it?” asked Perry. “I mean — you were enslaved by this man for weeks or months, he had his horrible wife, and one day he decided to kill you, but you beat him? You never went back to the people with the wings? You escaped from the house once and only once and then just never bothered to go out again?”

Xiyan nodded.

“That’s a terrible story,” said Perry. “Narratively … it doesn’t make sense. There’s no comeuppance for his wife, for him, or for their terrible society.”

“It’s what happened,” said Xiyan.

Perry glanced at the grandmaster, who didn’t seem inclined to stop Perry’s interruption. He turned back to Xiyan. “Okay, but this violates some of the rules of thresholders.”

“I have heard your rules,” said Xiyan. She had her hands folded in her lap. “They don’t match my experience.”

“The largest gap I’ve heard of is three months,” said Perry. “This man had been there for eleven years? Just waiting for you?” If it was a lie, he didn’t see what she had to gain by it.

“I do not know,” said Xiyan.

“And you didn’t gain a power, a reward?” asked Perry. “Your phone and gun got stolen and you just … lost them and got nothing?”

“My master had bought them,” said Xiyan. “I took them back before I left. And that world was not without its reward. I received a blade as a gift.”

“A gift?” asked Perry. He held up a hand. “Sorry, back up. You hadn’t mentioned that.”

“I had been at the house for two weeks when it appeared, carefully placed, on my bed, clearly intended for me,” said Xiyan. “I hid it and said nothing of it. I still don’t know who it was from, but my master wasn’t without enemies.”

“And it’s a special dagger?” asked Perry. “The kind you stabbed me with?”

“Stabbed you?” asked Xiyan. Her voice had gone completely calm.

“Are you denying that you stabbed me?” asked Perry. “Because we both know that’s bullshit.”

Xiyan pursed her lips. “When you attacked me, I defended myself,” she said. “I stabbed you then, yes. And it was with that very same dagger.” She reached her fingers up into the back of her hair and pulled the dagger out to demonstrate. This time, Perry was certain of what he’d suspected before: the dagger wasn’t hidden there, it was being pulled as if from nowhere. She held it awkwardly, as though she didn’t know how to use it and didn’t want to touch it. “You may not believe it, but I’m glad to see you’re okay.”

Perry looked at Grandmaster Sun Quying, who was watching impassively. “I never attacked her, grandmaster,” said Perry. “I gave you my account of what happened that night.”

“And she has already given me hers,” said the grandmaster. He waved a hand. “I don’t care.”

“You don’t care that she’s lying?” asked Perry, leaning forward. “She’s telling us these stories, and it’s obvious she’s leaving things out.”

“Many people say many things,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. He scratched his chin. “It is the job of the listener to sort the fact from the fiction, the useful from the pointless. I ask my own questions, in my own time, and come to know the truth without needing it to be pure from the source. She lies, but you lie too, Peregrin.”

Perry’s lips were thin. There wasn’t all that much to say. He could challenge Xiyan, or maybe try to bluff and say that he had video, but he didn’t have video, not conclusive video anyway, and it seemed like a terrible lie, since the grandmaster would naturally want to see. He could confront Xiyan about having put her dagger through March, but he didn’t really see that helping him either. She would either admit it or not, and it just wouldn’t matter. At least it was better that it was out now rather than at the end of her story.

He tried to slow down the beating of his heart. It was better to be like a chessmaster than a barbarian, as much as the wolf within wanted to come out swinging.

“There is something I haven’t said about my master in that world,” said Xiyan. She slipped the dagger back up into her hair, which would have been super dangerous if it behaved like a normal dagger. “Though it’s only a guess, some speculation.”

“Go on,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying.

“The many years he had spent in that world had been prosperous,” said Xiyan. “The many artifacts from other worlds within his study were so numerous they would have needed to be taken from dozens of worlds. My guess is that I wasn’t the first world-hopper he faced in that world.”

“Interesting,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “You do not know what happens if you don’t continue through a portal?”

“No,” said Xiyan. “I have been delayed a few times, a matter of hours, but I’ve always gone through.”

“And you think — you speculate — that this man faced thresholders over his years of prosperity?” asked the grandmaster.

“It’s only a guess,” said Xiyan with a shrug. “I was very curious about him, but we never had a proper conversation. If there were other thresholders, the only sign of them was in that study, and in the paranoid way he carried himself, though that might have been because of me.”

“He knew what you were … and kept you around?” asked Perry.

“Yes,” said Xiyan. “What would you have done?”

“If I was facing never-ending threats and just wanted to settle down, and someone came in who was obviously a thresholder, then I guess I wouldn’t beat them, I would lock them up without beating them,” said Perry.

“You’ve said yourself that beating someone badly enough opens a portal,” said Xiyan. “How would you lock them up without beating them?”

Perry frowned at that. “Make friends, I guess. But if the spell keeps firing, or whatever’s happening, maybe you could stop it by having a match that goes on forever.” He shook his head. It still felt like she was leaving a lot out. “That doesn’t explain why he would attack you though.” And if he knew you were a thresholder, sent to kill him, or at least an oppositional force, then he was an idiot to treat you as a slave and make all that worse.

“I don’t know,” said Xiyan, shrugging again. She’d put a tone of helplessness into her voice. “I don’t think like you do, don’t try to plan and calculate. I have sought answers, but not in the same way, with the same ferocity.”

“Enough,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “We will continue. If you have only guesses, and we have only guesses to add to your guesses, we gain little from speculation.”

Perry bit his tongue, but they would circle back around, and could have their speculation then, if he really thought it was going to go anywhere. He wanted to know more about the conflict, about the powers her master had, which she hadn’t touched on at all. But instead she was off to the next world.

~~~~

The arrival in the new world was as gentle and easy as I’d ever had. The skies were clear and the temperature was warm. The air smelled of mint.

I had never been too capable of surviving in the wilds on my own, and had no knowledge of how to build a shelter or make a fire without the proper tinder and matchsticks, but I spent several days in those woods, and had no particular trouble with it, even if I did worry about rain. Food itself was no problem, because everything in sight, from the rivers to the trees, was edible and sweet. The smell of mint had been the grass, which was crystalline and snapped off in my fingers. The leaves had a citrus flavor to them, and were sour enough that I didn’t dare to eat more than a handful at a time, but their bark was more substantial, being a confection of hard chocolate and cinnamon. The rivers themselves, in fact, were —

~~~~

“This is Candyland,” said Perry.

“What?” asked Xiyan. She seemed genuinely confused.

“It’s a children’s board game from my world,” said Perry. “The whole world was made of candy? That’s Candyland.” He didn’t know how else to describe it, and didn’t remember enough about Candyland to press for details.

“I’m … not familiar,” said Xiyan. She seemed nonplussed.

“It is a common childhood fantasy,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying. “Those who starve wish the world were made from the most delightful things they have ever eaten.” He looked at Xiyan. “I know of cinnamon, but ‘chocolate’ is not meaningful to me.”

“It’s a confection made from a fermented bean, grandmaster,” said Xiyan. “Similar in flavor to roasted black tea leaves. There’s an oiliness to it which I would describe as being similar to sesame paste, but the scent is nutty and earthy, like roasted chestnuts, with floral notes, like jasmine. It melts on the tongue like tallow fat.”

“Hmm, and now I’m hungry,” said Grandmaster Sun Quying with a smile. Perry didn’t like that smile in the least. It looked too friendly. “Hold for a moment.”

Without the grandmaster having called for anyone, an assistant appeared bearing a load of desserts, or what passed for desserts in this world. Perry didn’t recognize everything on the platter, but a small plate was made for him by the assistant, and in spite of himself, he started cautiously eating his way through it. The mooncakes and dragon’s beard candy were at least identifiable, as were the candied berries and melon, but there were roasted nuts he’d never had before, something that looked like mochi and was definitely some kind of rice-based treat, some sugar figurines, and a few jellies.

Xiyan had been presented with her own small plate, but she took only one of them, then with a nod from the grandmaster, continued.

~~~~

The world was, indeed, made entirely of confections of one sort or another. I hadn’t been given nearly enough food when I was enslaved, so I gorged myself, and soon became ill. Even the rivers had a sticky sweetness to them, and provided no relief to the cloying feeling in my mouth. I took a few moments to right myself, then headed down the river, where I hoped to find civilization. I had never been to a world like this, and wasn’t sure that I would find people, or what they would be like. I had seen a crow whose black eyes and soft feathers were a dark anise treat called licorice. I imagined the people to be made of pastries or taffy, sticky sweet in the same way that everything else in the place was.

When I arrived at the village, I saw houses made of bricks of hard sugar, but the people themselves seemed normal enough. I looked nothing like them, not in the color of my skin nor the clothes I wore, but they greeted me with open arms and gave me a place to stay. I spoke their language, funny enough, as it was the same language I had spoken in the previous world, using a tongue taken from a dead woman.

The world had not always been made of sweets, they told me. A little boy had made a wish and turned the world into candy, so that no one would be hungry. Whether the wish-granter was stupid or malign, it isn’t known, but while the world had no problems with a lack of sweets since that time, it had all kinds of other problems, namely that people could not subsist on sweets alone. Even beyond that, there was still something in the world that was constantly reshaping the candy, making it so that the chocolate never melted in the heat of the day, so that each piece of sweetgrass would stay stiff, and so the sticky rains wouldn’t melt everything down into sludge. Metal was the only thing unaffected, and was jealously guarded, especially as getting a fire going was quite difficult, and a furnace was essentially out of the question for all but the royal blacksmiths.

After a day of rest and some food and water that was only marginally sweet — nuts extracted from nougat, cheese made from rivers of cream — I set off along the Gum Road for the largest city of the land, which had been given the title of the Cherry Palace.

I had a plan this time, which was unusual for me. I had always found a counterpart of some sort, and this time went looking for him. There was something about people who had shared the other worlds that appealed to me. Those who had only known one world, one life, felt pale by comparison. Of course, a world can contain many pieces to it, many experiences, but not as the thresholders have experienced, with so much rich variety. There are challenges to our conception of what it means to be, and I have only ever found companionship with other thresholders.

The other thresholder had made himself obvious: he had arrived ahead of me by only two weeks, and had quickly become the Red Queen’s wizard, with a laboratory of his own within the Cherry Palace. He was a man of science, something that I only dimly understood, but through a taking of faces I was able to get installed as his assistant. I’ve found that it’s easy enough to get where you want simply by enthusiastically volunteering to do things without pay, and this was no different. I pretended that I deeply cared about the mysteries of the world, and no one had the heart to turn me down more than twice. It helped, I think, that I was young and pretty, but I can’t say for certain.

The wizard wasn’t a wizard like the one I had met in the Shipyard. He was much younger, for a start, but his wizardly powers were far different and less dangerous. He had a power of far-reaching sight, and could see practically the entire kingdom if he wanted to, from the Peppermint Swamp to the Chocolate Forest and beyond. He could take things apart with his mind, including all the candy and sweets, and many foods were brought to him raw so he could extract the sugar on his own rather than needing to boil or leech it away. His other powers took me some time to learn of.

He had guards, provided by the Red Queen, but no interest in the other thresholder, aside from warnings issued to me about the arrival of an opponent, which he considered inevitable. Instead, his eyes were on the mysteries of this world, and what they might tell us about the mysteries of other worlds. He was convinced that the world-hoppers were due to some spell gone awry, and this world of candies felt, to him, like it was similar. He sought to discover the mechanism so that he might reverse it, or possibly control it. The story of the boy who made a wish was dismissed out of hand, and the wizard, with all his powers, sought to find the ‘real answer’.

He was only as old as Perry, perhaps even younger, but he had spent some time wandering the worlds. He’s been to more than I had, almost twice as many, but he wasn’t a fighter at heart, and I think he’d have preferred not to get into conflict, save for that he wanted to wander the many worlds.

I heard quite a bit about the worlds he’d been to. One, the first he’d visited, had been an academy, one which stretched on for miles, with learning being the only thing anyone cared about, and all duties handled by various sorts of wizards — wizards to wash clothes, wizards to make clothes, wizards to make food, wizards to clean up, wizards to build the structures and wizards to tend to the grounds. Everyone was born there, trained there, and eventually taught there, a whole system of teachers and students, neverending. Even those who served vital functions only did it for part of the time, being teachers and students for the bulk of their schedule.

Another world had an obsession with games and magics that bound people to the rules of those games and their outcome. To hear him tell it, the wizard excelled at the intellectual games, which allowed him to rapidly rise to a position of some power. He fought the other thresholder not physically, but within the constrained mental battles of the games of that world, boards with grids and marked wooden pieces, sometimes cards and other times dice. He was proud of himself and his triumphs there, and would repeat his anecdotes, refining them, whenever someone came to visit the laboratory.

Of other worlds, this wizard spoke little. There was a world of cinder that he mentioned only twice, and when I grew curious, he grew silent. He suffered a loss there, I think. Similarly, he spoke only briefly on a world with giant lizards, which he had hated, in part because the only other person around was his opponent, a woman who hunted him through the jungles as they were both slowly worn down.

Eventually, we set off. He had a second ‘research assistant’ with him, and we had two porters. We were looking for the source of the ‘spell’, which the wizard thought might vary across the world. He had a way of testing it, in part because of what he called the ‘stasis effect’, that aspect of the spell which prevented the candy from melting into mush or going rotten. He drew up a direction on a map from what he’d learned around Cherry Palace, then we set off as a group, having several guards as our retinue.

The group dwindled as we crossed the Marshmallow Marshes, and dwindled further once we reached the Caramel Coast. The sea was some kind of fizzy drink, as sugary as anything else, and the bubbles caused most boats to sink like rocks, as well as being acidic, but our destination lay on the other side of the Soda Sea, and so the wizard hired out special ship, one which could withstand the voyage. By then, we were down to only four: myself, the wizard, a guard, and a porter.

“What will you do, when you find the source of the spell?” asked the guard.

“I mean to contain its power,” said the wizard. “You people suffer greatly under all this candy.”

It was the wrong thing to say. The guard and the porter had lived their entire lives with these candies all around them, and had suffered basically not at all. They had never known any other world, and couldn’t imagine that things could be otherwise. Water was difficult to get, this was true, and foods had to be processed so as to remove most of the sugar. Teeth were, as a rule, rotten, and stomach aches abounded. But these were part of life, and a mythical past that was supposedly better held no pull. The guard began plotting, and drew me into the plot. He meant to attack the wizard when the boat landed on the far shore.

For whatever reason, I defected from the plot. By Perry’s understanding, a thresholder shouldn’t do that, but I was curious about the nature of the spell and the ultimate fate of the wizard. The wizard believed that world-hoppers were special, that we were chosen for some purpose, and I had begun to find that attractive.

The guard attacked and the wizard killed him. The action was almost casual, with slivers of metal formed in the air and hurled at outrageous speeds. I hadn’t known that the wizard could do that, and neither had the guard. The wizard waited half a day for a portal to appear, sometimes striking the body again to make sure the man was dead, then set off again, angry. The porter fled at the first opportunity.

It was just the two of us. I find that I enjoy traveling with a companion. The wizard talked often, about his theories, about the other worlds, about his ambitions and goals. I was content to listen.

The candy effect was getting stronger the closer we got to the source. We could see the sweets spring back into shape after only a few minutes, erasing any sign of our passing. This also made our passage more difficult, as fires grew more difficult to start, and we grew dependent upon the water and unsweet foods we’d set out with. We were going to run out of nut butters and cheese made from ice cream.

The places we were going through no longer had names, so the wizard made them up on the spot, the Gingerbread Glacier, the Cotton Candy Chasms, the Brittle Butte. The weather got harsher and more exotic the further in we went, with rains of sticky syrup, snows of powdered sugar, and the occasional hail of gumballs, which drove us into hiding until it had passed. I think we might have died, had the wizard not shown another of his powers, that of shielding. He could use it only rarely, but saved us on a few occasions. If it wasn’t the weather, it was the creatures, which were getting larger, no longer small bunnies made of marzipan but hulking bears made of taffy.

Eventually, we found what the wizard termed the Confectionary Cathedral, an immense building of metal surrounded by a moat of molten chocolate. A bridge extended across that moat, and we went inside, to a place unmarred by candies.

Everyone inside was dead, and had been for a long time, possibly since the Sweetening had happened. We moved slowly, cautiously, but never saw anything that would give us cause for concern. There were so many things that were odd to see, papers and pencils that hadn’t been made from refined candies, chairs made of wood and glass that had not an ounce of sugar in it. We were malnourished, our bellies too full of sweets, our teeth starting to rot and our only liquids coming from the occasional river of milk or juice.

“This is it,” said the wizard. “Finally, after all this time, the source of the spell. It has to be. Now it’s only a matter of discovering how it works.”

I had been playing the part of his research assistant for so long that I almost went along with it. But I knew, by that point, that the people of this world didn’t see the candy as a curse. They had whole trades dedicated to the refinement of food and water, and lived quite comfortably, though not as comfortably as a small boy making a wish might have thought they would live. The wizard saw the candy as a curse, but he was the only one.

And of course, his ambition extended far beyond this one world. He wished to take aim at the world-hopper, at the rare breed I had found myself a part of. I liked moving through worlds. I liked hearing the stories of those who had done the same. They were as close as I had to kin.

I revealed myself to him and told him that I was the world-hopper that he’d feared coming all along. I said that I was nothing to be feared. He didn’t believe me until I showed him the shadow and smoke that I had kept hidden until that time.

I hadn’t meant for us to fight. I had wanted to persuade him that the institution was worth keeping, to persuade him that if he did figure out how this candy spell worked, he wouldn’t attack the tradition that we were both a part of. But from the very moment I made my declaration, I could see in his eyes that he was going to try to kill me.

He had more in the way of defenses than attacks. The fight took quite a long time, and in the end, he begged for mercy — but it was too late, because I had cut him deep in the leg, and he was bleeding profusely.

When the portal opened, I did my best to pick him up and take him through, but he was too heavy for me, and as I tried to drag him, I felt him slip from my grip.

~~~~

“And you never learned the source of the spell?” asked Grandmaster Sun Quying.

“We assumed that the answer was somewhere in the building, among the rotting papers, or perhaps in a contraption of some kind,” said Xiyan. “Our fight happened before that search could be completed.”

“He struck first?” asked Perry.

“He did,” said Xiyan. “Before he could hear me out.”

Perry didn’t think he believed that, but if it was a lie, it seemed less egregious than the others. He didn’t know what to make of the story, except that he was certain it, too, was missing something. Worlds were supposed to come with a power of some kind, and it seemed that neither she nor the wizard had gained anything from the candy adventure except for cavities.

There were questions to ask, but Perry took his cue from Grandmaster Sun Quying. Such questions could be asked later.

Perry was distracted from the stories anyway. For better or worse, plans were in motion.