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.“God knows, I’ve searched for some trace of him, but it’s as though he never came back.”Died, Sara thought.And then came back.But what was it that had come back? Not really Jamie, she’d believed.There had always been a ghost in the house, a spirit living in it, looking after things like the Hobberdy Dick from that Briggs story that she’d loved as a little girl.She hadn’t been able to believe it was Jamie, until now.Now that he was gone.“But did he leave voluntarily, or was he coerced into doing so?” Ohn asked.“I’d say voluntarily,” Esmeralda said.“He’d been talking for some time of finding a way to visit the Otherworlds.I just don’t think he realized what would happen if he deserted the House.”Like I deserted him, Sara thought.“You believe it followed him?” Ohn asked.Esmeralda nodded.“The House must have been drawn into the backwash of his departure.At that point he would have realized that something was wrong, but it seems that there was nothing he could do about it.The Weirdin he left on the screen, the cloak he sent to Sara.these were all he could do to warn us of the danger.”Ginny looked away from the computer screen to study the two of them.“What are you talking about?” she asked.“Jamie Tams,” Esmeralda said.“The previous owner of the House.”“But he’s supposed to be dead.You’re speaking of him as though he were still alive.”“He was,” Esmeralda said.“In a way.His spirit lived in the House; it spoke to us through Memoria.”Ginny looked at the computer where the Weirdin symbol still flickered on the screen.“I always thought that was just the way you spoke about your software,” she said slowly.“I never took it literally.The way everything here has its own name.”“Jamie was real,” Esmeralda said.“More real than many people who have a body to carry them around in the world.”Sara shivered.She watched Ginny study Esmeralda’s features, looking for the joke that wasn’t there.“I.” Ginny began; then she shook her head and turned back to the computer.“Never mind,” she added and began to work the keys again.“How can we.find him?” Sara asked.The look in Esmeralda’s eyes lacked her usual confidence.“I don’t know,” she said.“He could be anywhere.The Otherworlds are scattered through so many temporal as well as spatial layers that I can’t think where to begin.I reach for him—for that individual essence that sets him apart from everyone else—but it’s like he’s everywhere.Or nowhere.”“While each moment we stay here, our danger increases,” Ohn added.Sara nodded.She knew that much about the Otherworld.To those unprepared for the potency of its mysteries, the Otherworld was less a place of marvels than a source for madness.It wasn’t simply the imagination of storytellers that was the source for all those tales of mortals straying into Faerie coming back as either poets or mad.“Like the boar that attacked me?” she asked.“Or those memegwesi that Tim and I saw in the garden?”“The bodachs,” Esmeralda said.“They themselves won’t do us any harm unless we begin to believe their illusions.But the boar.” She rubbed wearily at her eyes.“We’re like a disease, insofar as the Otherworld is concerned.Continuing with that analogy, the boar is an antibody, trying to expel us from the Otherworld’s body.The longer we stay here, the more potent its defense will become until we’re finally gone.“It wouldn’t be so bad if there were just a few of us—but we’ve the House itself and close to forty people, most of whom aren’t in the least bit prepared for what they’re undergoing.”“We were here before,” Sara said.“The House and a bunch of people.”“But you had a protector in the House then,” Ohn said.“This time we’re on our own.”“If we could find Jamie,” Esmeralda began.“I’ve got something!” Ginny called.They crowded around the computer to see images of the Weirdin symbols flickering rapidly across the screen.Sara tried to pick them out, but they were going by too fast for her to focus on any single one of them.“It’s like that story about the I Ching,” Esmeralda said, speaking more to herself.“What’s that?” Sara asked.“Someone was supposed to have asked the book to define itself.In response, it gave back six moving lines when the yarrow stalks were thrown.”“Which means?” Ginny asked, a half breath before Sara spoke.“If you follow the moving lines through in their proper progression,” Esmeralda explained, “it gives you all sixty-four hexagrams—the entire I Ching.That’s what we’re seeing here.All of the Weirdin, every disc.”“But—”“Shhh.Let me concentrate.”Esmeralda closed her eyes.The light from the screen flickered on her face, waking strange shadows that were here, gone again, there.Sara could feel something like a static charge building up in the room.A breeze seemed to have spring up, although there was no window open.“Got.something.” Esmeralda said.“Take care,” Ohn told her, but Sara could tell that Esmeralda hadn’t heard him.Esmeralda turned from the screen and took two steps into the center of the room.“It’s closer,” she said.“I’ve almost.”The breeze turned into a sudden wind, spinning paper from the desk and tossing Esmeralda’s long hair about her shoulders.She took another step and then it was as though she’d stepped behind an invisible wall.There was a slight sound of air being displaced, then the wind was gone.And so was Esmeralda.Ginny stared open-mouthed at where Esmeralda had vanished.Sara was almost as surprised, for all that she was used to the abrupt magical appearances and disappearances of Pukwudji and his kin.Only Ohn seemed calm.“Goath an lar, “ he murmured.Sara automatically translated the Gaelic words into English.The first time she’d met Tal he’d given her the gift of tongues.Westlin Wind, Ohn had named Esmeralda.Now she understood that mercurial feyness that she had always sensed around Esmeralda.She was like the little mysteries of the Otherworld, an air spirit with the secret of the wind hidden in her breast.“I fear for her,” Ohn added.With a vague sense of surprise, Sara knew that she did too [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]