Open, and Close.
The word sat waiting on her tongue, growing heavier with every passing second until her mouth fell open, and the sound tumbled out.
“Erro.”
The box shivered, and strained, and for a second Tes thought it would shatter, thought she had made a mistake, bound two threads wrong among the hundred there—but then it drew itself in, like a breath, and the spell took hold. The box unfolded, the inside limned with light, threads that shot out beyond its wooden borders, vaulted up through the air, tracing the outline of a door.
The air inside the outline rippled and darkened until the shop vanished, replaced by a curtain of shadow. Beyond the veil, a scene rippled and took shape, insubstantial. The blurred outline of an empty road. Motionless. Colorless. Still.
Tes rose, and walked around the door, waiting for something to come out. Nothing did. She reached out, and brought her fingers to the door, let them hover there above the darkness. There was a draft. A metallic smell, like rust, or blood. The bitter edge of frost.
“How strange,” she said, and she must have leaned forward, just a little, as she spoke, because her fingers touched the veil and the veil wrapped around her hand, and dragged her through.
VII
SOMEWHERE ELSE
Tes stumbled.
She threw out a hand, intending to steady herself on the table she knew was there in Haskin’s shop, but it was gone. The shop was gone, too.
Tes caught her balance, just barely, and saw that she was now standing on the street outside. She looked up, expecting to see the stores that faced her own, but they were all gone, replaced by an unfamiliar stretch of pale stone wall. She shivered, suddenly noticing how cold she was, and remembered—
The door.
Tes spun around, afraid it would be gone—but it was still there, thin as a pane of darkened glass propped upright in the road. Through the doorframe, she could just make out a pale shadow of the shop she’d left behind. The box-that-was-not-a-box sat on the ground, in the center of the threshold. Its magic traced a burning line around its edge. Tes knelt and reached out to touch the device. She tried to lift it, but it wouldn’t budge, weighed down as it was by the activated spell. She stood again.
Where was she?
An alley, one she didn’t recognize, though she knew every one of the routes through the shal. Looking around, Tes noticed thin threads of magic that wove through the stone of the wall, and shimmered in the sky above, but the light was different than usual. A deep sound echoed around her, steady as a heartbeat, and it took her a moment to realize what it was: a drum.
She cocked her head, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from. To her right, something moved.
Tes jerked around to see an old woman peering out from an alcove. She was dressed strangely, in layers of tattered cloth, her face gaunt, her weathered skin traced with thick black marks. Tattoos. She spoke in a voice as dry and brittle as paper. A question in a language Tes didn’t know, which itself was odd—as a child, her father had forced her to learn all the dialects they spoke in Arnes.
She shook her head in reply, and as the woman shuffled forward, into the light, Tes recoiled. The threads of the old woman’s magic hung in the air around her like blackened roots, withered and lightless. This wasn’t a curse, poisoning the flow of power. There was no flow, no movement at all.
The magic was ruined.
Dead.
The woman spoke again in that strange tongue, and this time her eyes darted from Tes to the doorway—she clearly saw it too—and back again, her hand drifting up, palm open, gnarled fingers flexing toward the veil. Whatever she was saying, it was no longer a question. The edges were flat, her tone sharpening as she began to repeat the same words over and over again like a demand, or a curse.
And then she shot forward, a sudden, feral burst of speed, and caught Tes’s wrist with a bandaged hand, her fingers vising, tight and cold as iron. Tes tore free and scrambled backward, catching her heel on the box and falling back through the open door, into the repair shop.
The box didn’t move, but as soon as Tes hit the familiar ground, the world beyond the curtain vanished behind its shroud, taking the strange alley and the ravaged woman with it. And yet her hoarse voice was still audible, getting louder, and closer, and Tes’s mind tripped after her body, trying to catch up as the withered, inky hand pierced the veil, reaching toward her.
“Ferro!” shouted Tes, and the door came down, fast as a falling blade.
Something fell with it, bouncing across the floor before coming to a stop several feet away. Tes crept forward, her hand halfway outstretched before she saw what the object was.