Sunanon rubbed his eyes and took another look at the patterns of energy crawling inside the Wedge Token. He needed to sleep but he couldn't - not when the link was in such a delicate state. He ran his hands round the ornate metal lock on the Gateway, checking that the slowly turning slots were still registered properly with the key. It all seemed fine but he remained acutely conscious that any minor error could fracture the whole connection.
Bright early morning sunlight was using the thin classical columns to cast sharp shadows up the steps of the Temple Of November. Each one seemed like a spear of night hurled back inside the gloomy portal. It might have been a bit warmer in this bleak daylight than it had been under the harsher stars of night, but it was still brain numbingly cold. A thick rime decorated the white stone with a more bitter white shroud which had yet to melt in the sheltered interior. Then again, the interior never got any direct sunlight so unless the air warmed up considerably it would likely remain frozen all day.
At least they now had the place lit. Tiny aquamarine scatter sparks were radiating from the altar and from every wall niche. It was a pity that their pale blue gleam did nothing to alleviate the impression of cold let alone the reality of it.
"Phweeeeeee…." Plink.
"Phweeeeeee…." Plink.
"Phweeeeeee…." Plink.
The long low descending whistle was man made. More specifically it was Kark made. It was followed by an irritating silence of around one second and then the faintest of plinks almost at the limit of audibility as a tiny pebble hit the surface of the water. That was the twentieth now and Sunanon's nerves were beginning to wear thin.
"Phweeeeeee…." Plink.
Kark was emptying a small pile of tiny stones from the rim of the well at the centre of the Temple Of November. One by one, he held them out carefully in the middle of the shaft and let them go with an accompanying sound effect. He knew just how long it took them to reach the bottom and had that annoying pause down to a fine art.
"Phweeeeeee…." Plink.
"Can you stop chucking those frickin' stones down the well for a minute, I'm trying to concentrate!"
"Just a little harmless entertainment," Kark said with a mirthless grin. "It's boring here waiting for you to open up that link."
"So why don't you go out hunting with Browning and Jepson and leave me alone?"
"Because they’re hunting for rabbits, pheasants and grouse. That's boring too. I prefer hunting for things that might fight back.
"And in any case, I don’t want to leave you here on your own with Eryndra. Who knows what the two of you might get up to?"
"Phweeeeeee…." Plink
Sunanon gritted his teeth and turned back to the Token. He had made progress. The locking wards were broken and he'd opened up several regular connections through to the other side. So far so good. Any old connection wouldn’t do, though. He had to tap into the fixed properties of the Gate and let the Wedge Token exploit their relationship to the opposite Realm. That required a long stable connection and a delicate sense of timing. It demanded a lot of attention and it was very frustrating but he was getting there. Each time he made a new connection the link was strengthening and the task became easier. Sooner or later he'd get it. But not if this idiot kept distracting him!
"You've had forty eight hours," Kark said. "I hope it's not going to be much longer. Our 'friends' have already passed the Cross Roads. They could be here in another two days."
Sunanon chose to ignore this.
"Phweeeeeee…." Plink
"If this Gate is causing so much of a problem, I don’t understand why you couldn't give that one a go," Kark said. He waved his hand over to the opposite side of the temple where a white archway spanned a black stone slab.
"That's because I'm a Realm Runner and you're not," Sunanon answered.
"Ooo, very touchy aren’t we? Pardon me for not being a Realm Runner, I'm sure! I'm just a humble little mass murderer. Still, each to his own, eh?"
He gave a nasty little cackle then picked up another stone.
"Phweeeeeee…." Plink
Sunanon remembered the words Eryndra had used when they'd been planning the mission and he'd expressed his irritation to her.
We need Kark to deal with the Stability Council at the Moot. He's very good at that sort of thing. Humour him for me darling. Once we're safely back with the Proton King you won’t have to bother with him again, I promise you.
On the Wedge Token, a marching line of black dots were steadfastly refusing to synchronise with the phases of a rotating octagon. No amount of adjustment seemed to make the situation any better. Sunanon sat back and rubbed his eyes again. There was really no point in persisting at the moment. A little patience was needed now, until the calming effect of the last link had bedded down into the Gate matrix.
Sunanon stood up and stamped his feet to get his circulation going again. He began to pace round the building surveying the limits of their little encampment and warming himself with the simple expedient of physical exercise.
The Temple Of November was a spare and deceptively uncomplicated structure. There were two rectangles of Doric pillars, the outermost acting only as a low boundary to the narrow courtyard in which the main building was centred. Ten steps were cut on all four sides and mounted to the inner rows of columns which held up the roof. The architrave over the main entrance was an impressive ten metres above the level of the top step but it did not seem tall because the other dimensions of the structure were correspondingly proportioned. Thin decorative walls which didn’t even reach to the roof, cut out a single enclosed space at the centre of the Temple which could only be entered through a great double door now cast open to the day. Inside this room were the few features which graced the otherwise bare stones; a small number of alcoves occupied with some lumpen abstract statues, the low well at the centre which reached deep into the rock of Claremont Crag, two altars and of course the two Gates which went with them.
The main Gate was a rectangular gap, five metres tall between two white Corinthian pillars, surmounted by a square stone beam. It straddled an altar that was an undecorated square block of marble. One of the columns hosted the lock - a depression with a complex shape carved deeply into the stone, plated with gold and normally filled with a loose stone plug. Now, however, the Wedge Token was occupying this keyhole. It was a long black rod, projecting half a metre from the column and capable of acting as a skeleton key to Gates like this. Capable of a lot more as well, Sunanon hoped.
The other Gate - the one that Kark had indicated - was much smaller, only a couple of metres or so high, but it was essentially the same type of structure. The altar beneath this second gate was made of black obsidian and was equally plain.
"You haven’t answered my question."
Kark had stopped dropping stones into the well and was following Sunanon's restless patrol with shiny black little eyes.
What the hell, Sunanon thought. I might as well give Kark some sort of basic explanation to pass the time.
"I dare say you've done your share of travelling in between Realms. Yes? But you probably haven't devoted much thought to the mechanisms involved," he began.
"There are three basic types of transfer. Of course there are some subtle variations within each type but I'll ignore these for the moment. Let's just go through the types in turn shall we?"
He counted them off on his fingers as he continued.
"First off, we have the primal mode of inter Realm transfer - the natural leak. Here's a joke for you. How does an elephant get down from a tree?"
Kark shook his head, confused by the direction of Sunanon's thoughts.
"Sits on a leaf and waits until autumn."
"Ha. Ha. Ha."
"So it's a stupid joke, but that's the way a natural leak works. It's a waiting game driven by the Laws Of Form. The Autumn Country is as leaky as a colander. You've got tiny disruptions springing up all the time and all over the place to swap items in and out of the landscape. That's the only way that the Autumn Country can maintain a permanent autumn. It wouldn’t make biological or physical sense for everything here to live on in a long term state of decay. No. The way it works is that the Autumn Country is constantly stealing a tithe of autumnal trappings from all the other Realms that operate on a more traditional cyclic seasonal basis. It purloins a tree from here, a bramble bush from there and perhaps a few animals and birds from somewhere else. And when it's finished with them, it sends them back again and gets a replacement from another Realm which is entering its own autumn. Because there are so many Realms to choose from and because the Autumn Country casts its net widely the thefts go unnoticed in the Realms where the material originates. No single Realm loses more than a very occasional item or two.
"A natural leak is no good whatsoever for planned travelling between Realms, though. They are far too shallow and unpredictable. Using a natural leak to get anywhere is about as useful as sitting on a leaf and waiting for autumn. Which brings us on to the second type of inter Realm transfer - the controlled disruption.
"You probably think you know all about controlled disruptions - all part of the basic knowledge of an Agent, yes? Maybe you do and maybe you don't. There are several ways to open a controlled disruption. If you're a Realm Runner you can do it naturally and some of us are better at this game than others. I'm one of the best.
"If you don't happen to be a Realm Runner then there are always the cross-passage tokens - common enough little devices and useful in their way but they aren't powerful enough to open up a deep disruption and if you were a Realm Runner you'd realise that they have all sorts of other limitations as well. They're confined to certain natural fault lines between Realms. You can only use them properly on limited routes.
"Of course, if you need to open up a deep disruption and you're under Contract to a powerful enough Patron then you may be able to procure the services of a specialised Token. There are all sorts of special Tokens which fall in to this category and I have made something of a study of them out of professional interest. It was in the course of these studies that I uncovered some of the forgotten properties of the Wedge Token.
"Which brings me to the third and final mode of inter Realm transfer - the Gate, sometimes called the Way or even the Gateway. Really, you can think of each Gate as a dedicated Token if you like. They are all built to one of two fundamental plans.
"Fixed Gates are far and away the most common kind. A fixed Gate bridges two Realms with a permanent or semi-permanent link although they can usually be locked at either end. Switch Gates on the other hand, are rare, potentially very useful but difficult to control and dangerous. A switch Gate can be dynamically cross linked to another switch Gate so that the inter Realm transfer is re-routed. The trouble is that the switching process is itself unpredictable and the knowledge of how to do it properly has been lost. Switch Gates are old and no one builds them anymore.
"The whole point of travelling via an established Gateway is that it is relatively easy. If you imagine that a pair of Realms are in valleys separated by a mountain range then using a cross-passage token is analogous to walking up a mountain pass between the Realms. It's exhausting. Those mountains are the forces of nature which we call the Barriers. They do not take lightly to being breached. You are familiar with the feeling of fatigue which accompanies a Realm transfer using a cross-passage token. Even as a Realm Runner I may be able to find and climb a new mountain pathway but I still have to face the reality of the Barriers. It's tiring for me to travel between Realms my way.
"A Gateway is like a tunnel under the mountains. Because a traveller never has to climb and descend again, they arrive refreshed. It's reliable and you don’t need a token to use it. That's why they were built."
"Now tell me something new," said Kark.
Patience, patience, Sunanon thought.
"In a minute. I just want to be absolutely clear about what we're doing here. The Gateway I'm using is a fixed link through to the Christmas Passage. That's pretty handy because the Proton King controls the Christmas Passage now. And the Proton King has been busy on the other side of the Barrier. He's the one driving this scheme, remember.
"The other Gateway - your Gateway - is a switch Gateway. They call it the Broken Gate in the local lore of this Realm. That's because it hardly ever works. It needs a sacrifice to open it up. That black altar is there to receive the sacrifice."
"Umm... interesting. What sort of a sacrifice?"
"A human sacrifice."
"That could be arranged."
"I dare say, but that isn’t the point. Even with the right sort of sacrifice I don’t know how to connect it to the Realm we want. There probably isn’t a switch Gateway in the Christmas Passage."
"Perhaps you could connect it directly to the Winter Country?"
"Perhaps. But more likely not. And even if I could…. Even if I could, it wouldn’t be any use. The Wedge Token can only be used for our purpose with a fixed Gate. It's to do with the way that fixed Gates are designed. Switch Gates are much lighter on the laws - they have to be so they can handle different links. Fixed Gates are deeply bedded into the Laws of Form of the Realms they connect. In fact they are probably the most deeply bedded entities in the Realm. The Wedge Token exploits the rigid grasp of the Gate matrix on the local Laws of Form in order to do its work. It's only a lever and the Gate is the fulcrum.
"Now can you see why I have to work the way I do?"
Kark shrugged.
"You'd better get on with it then, hadn’t you?"
Sunanon forced a thin smile and was returning to check the Wedge Token when Eryndra entered the temple.
"Good news gentlemen", she said. She swung a short length of string over her shoulder and a bundle of limp black feathers dropped to the floor.
"I've found our spy. Crow pie for supper, anyone?"
