The lights in the inter-station were painful to Therazine’s eyes. She was used to the soft light of a fire or light bulbs, not the harsh, blue light of the gas tubes that lined the concrete walls that surrounded her. Around her a thousand voices stammered nonsense. The lines for transport off-world were hours long, and there were three times as many people as there were available seats. Workmen in grey suits ushered people through some doors and away from other ones, checking the papers carefully of anyone who passed through. Therazine was next in line for a ticket window that was labeled ‘CELADIN’.
The decision to leave Lormian had not been easy, but her family was penniless and homeless. The fire had left nothing for them. They weren’t even able to afford a funeral for Bren. They buried him in the hills beyond the orchard where in the spring he would play with the rabbits. Leshe said a prayer over the grave, and Therazine didn’t object.
Beyond mere money troubles, MonDozer senior had made it clear that he was not pleased with four of his twenty-seven sons being killed. The death of the promising Wallace MonDozer left him especially disagreeable. Lormian was a new world with the youngest civilization in all the Real, and lacked a strong provincial authority. The High Minister of Lormian handled the interplanetary affairs from his palace in the capital city of Nalak, but left the populace of the world almost entirely to themselves. This near-lawless frontier led to communities raising their own forms of authority and justice. As everywhere else, money was power on Lormian. The elder MonDozer was quite wealthy, and owned an impressive chunk of Lormian land. He had much of the population under his employ; many families just like Therazine’s. And now that she’d killed his most favored son, MonDozer was out for Therazine’s blood.
To stay on Lormian was irresponsible. As long as she was here, she was putting her family at risk. They traveled to Nalak by cover of night and met a woman that Therazine knew they could trust. Madame Senzal was a warm, good natured woman who ran a brothel in the wharf district of Nalak. It was a profitable, black market affair that sat quietly at the heart of the world’s civilization. A decade ago, Therazine had done a job for Madame Senzal pro bono. Now Therazine called upon that owed favor to hide her husband and her son while she left the world.
Money was power. Her farm and her livelihood had been destroyed. There was a job waiting for her in a tavern call The Raven and The Cobbler on Celadin. She had little choice but to leave.
“I’d like passage to Celadin,” she said to the man in the grey suit on the other side of the bulletproof glass.
He didn’t look up at her. Only kept scribbling on a form that sat next to a pile of hundreds others like it. “Documentation,” he said.
She pushed two sheets of paper under the thin margin between the glass and the counter. This, too, was a gift from Madame Senzal. The man glanced up at them briefly, stamped them, and then pushed them back at her. “Travel warning,” he said in a monotone voice. “The state of unrest in the capital remains at level 3. Residents and visitors to Celadin are at minor risk of harm or death at the hands of insurgents.”
“Insurgents?” Therazine said.
The man shot her a look and then went back to his documents. “The rebels still hold Marshagrad, despite the greatest efforts of the Commonwealth. Fighting persists beyond the walls of the capital and shows no sign of ceasing. Travelers are advised to avoid travel to Celadin—”
“Are you forbidding me?”
The man looked up. “It’s an advisory. I’m just mandated to say it. Do whatever you like.” He pulled a lever on a machine on his desk. The machine chime, and churned out a perforated sheet of card stock. “Seventy-eight glit,” he said.
She frowned. She’d sold their remaining horse for twenty, and her rifle for another sixty. All of their other funds had vanished, just as the MonDozers’ had claimed. Would it be wise to leave herself with next to no money in Celadin? But again, did she really have a choice? She fished out a handful of silver cards in from her pocket—each no more than an inch long and half as wide—and scooted them under the window. The man returned to her a single silver card etched with a ‘2’ and then gave her the card stock.
“Next,” the man said.
The person behind Therazine pushed past her. She put the two glit into her pocket and then looked at the card stock. ‘CELADIN’ was stamped across the top. Below that it read ‘NON-REFUNDABLE.’
She made her way through the crowd to the workmen at the doors. She found the door for Celadin and showed her ticket to the attendant. He ran it through a machine of his own, and when it chimed he waved her through. She stepped into a room that was larger still, and filled with significantly more people. There was a divider that ran through the middle of the room, clearly labeled with gas-filled lights that one was for people arriving from Celadin and the other was for people departing to Celadin. The line offworld was significantly shorter. This didn’t surprise her. Once one left Celadin, one usually wasn’t eager to go back.
The room itself had a high ceiling, large enough near the entrance to shelter a four story building, and then narrowing down at the far end to no more than ten feet tall. The ceiling was ridged with a lattice-like structure which bent and flowed in a clearly painstakingly crafted manner but was in no way aesthetically appealing. Here and there along every surface were indents and divots of different sizes, ranging from a foot across to ten feet. Along the ceiling and walls this could be forgiven as merely poor artwork; on the floor it was a hazard to the hundreds of people rushing about. Therazine knew, however, that the strange construction of this huge, bizarre room was out of necessity. She didn’t understand the mathematics of the passage between worlds, but she knew that the interstices which made it possible were incredibly temperamental.
At the far end of the room was one such interstice: a hollow arch that opened into off-white light. This portal connected the Real to the Aether, also known as the Beyond, the Outside, or—in some esoteric circles—Hell. The Aether was as mysterious as it was dangerous. As far as Therazine knew, its nature and properties were still entirely unknown. The thaumaturges and the Emperor normally kept the Aether beyond the threshold of the Real (the few instances in which it had bled into reality had caused the annihilation of entire nations), but at these apertures they allowed it to touch the edges of their universe. Some mystic in ages past had discovered that the realm of the Aether was not three-dimensional, and that holes could be punched through it to create tunnels between space in the Real. Therazine was not incredibly familiar with either the sorcery or the history behind this process. But she, like many millions of others in the Commonwealth, used it for safe and easy travel to and from the various kingdoms. She would have to do no more than step through the glowing doorway at the other end of the room, and be instantly transported across countless leagues to Celadin. All for the paltry sum of her horse and her gun.
There were families in the line of people who were arriving from Celadin. Some were wealthy, upper class citizens looking to start their own private empires on the frontier world of Lormian. Others were refugees, fleeing the capital world with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and fear in their hearts. Each person went through a rigorous decontamination process and screening before being allowed to pass on to the streets of the city above them. Some—the more filthy and suspicious-looking among them—were turned away and put into Therazine’s much shorter line.
She watched with detached fascination as the people ahead of her vanished into the pale light. The meeting of the Real and the Aether was naturally chaotic and dangerous. Complex calculations, requiring constant revision and reinvention, were required to keep the apertures stable. Therazine had seen the kinds of people who facilitated the apertures; to say that she’d met them felt inaccurate. These facilitators—known as thaumaturges—weren’t even aware of the Real around them. Nothing outside of their calculations existed. They were incapable of speech, of interaction between human beings… and this left the entirety of their minds open to the task of managing the apertures. Without the thaumaturges, the doors would collapse and be sealed forever; or worse, they’d burst open and let the Aether leak through into the worlds. Ordinary men and women could not possibly hope to contain such chaos. The thaumaturges, however, were far from ordinary. Therazine pictured him (the thaumaturges were always male, for whatever reason) buried in the wall behind the Lormian-Celadin Aperture, embedded in a sprawling mechanical nightmare that kept his body nourished and kept his mind focused. She imagined the shrew-like attendants that wiped the sweat off his hairless brow. They adjusted dials across the machine and checked the seals that connected its tubes and wires to the thaumaturge’s skull. The thaumaturge’s eyes flitted across electric displays and Aethereal manifestations, absorbing the information that was fed into him and bleeding it out in the form of mechanical clicks on a keyboard. Hour after hour, day after day. Therazine shivered. She could not imagine a more grizzly fate.
No, she could. Having your son killed on your front lawn and being forced from your home. That was worse.
“Ma’am?” the workman at the aperture said to her.
She blinked, having been lost in thought. The aperture glowed a sickly white, waiting for her to step through. Her heart began to beat faster. She hated using these things. Every time she passed through an aperture (the last time being probably ten years ago), she felt sick for days afterwards. It left her shivering, retching, and bedridden. That would be an unpleasant thing to deal with in the streets of Celadin, penniless and homeless. She felt the aperture humming in her bones.
She frowned, and ignored the extended hand of the workman. Therazine stepped through.
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