He opens his eyes a fraction, suspiciously. “Where?”
“You don’t need magic. Just look.” I point to the rocks.
Beranabus frowns. Then he realises he’s seen the mound before and his jaw drops. “No,” he croaks. “It can’t be. This is a trick. Or somewhere that looks like…”
“No.” I walk across, pick up one of the smaller rocks, then lob it down the hole on the other side of the mound — the mouth of an all too familiar cave. “We haven’t gone anywhere. We’re still in Carcery Vale.”
→ Beranabus is striding around the hole, squinting at it, studying it from every possible angle. Every so often he stops, mumbles to himself, shuffles towards the hole, then starts marching again.
I’m with Kernel. I’ve wiped away the worst of the muck from around his eyes, using leaves and forest water. “How are you feeling?” I ask.
“There’s not much pain,” he says, “but there will be. You can delay it in circumstances like these, but not indefinitely. I’ll need hospital treatment when the spell wears off. Assuming any hospitals are left…” His head turns left, then right. “Is it day or night?”
“Night.”
“I thought so. But it was day when we attacked. I didn’t think I’d been unconscious that long.”
“You weren’t.”
“Then…?” He leaves the question hanging.
“We don’t know,” I tell him. “Beranabus is trying to figure it out.”
Kernel nods slowly. “How do I look?” he asks.
I stare into the vacant pits where his eyes once were. They’re peppered with dead maggots. A few are only half visible, their heads and upper bodies buried in the dark flesh and bone of his sockets. “Fine,” I lie.
Beranabus begins to laugh. I think he’s laughing at my lie and I turn on him angrily. But then I see that he didn’t even hear what I said.
“Of course,” he chortles. “It’s the only answer. There’s just one way she could have channelled that much power, to such an effect. You and Bec are the other two pieces. That’s the only thing that makes…”
He mumbles his way back into silence. I say nothing, waiting for him to get it clear in his head, so he can explain it to me in simple terms. I study him while I’m waiting. He looks weird minus his beard and hair, naked as the day he was born. I guess I look pretty strange too, as bare and hairless as an egg. I’d feel awkward any other time, but things have gone so crazy within the last hour, I’m not bothered by my ultra-smooth nudity.
Beranabus glances up and waves a hand at the trees. Their branches part, granting him an unobstructed view of the moon and surrounding sky. His eyes dart from the moon to the stars. I can practically hear his brain whirring as he performs silent calculations. Then the branches rustle back together and he laughs again. “I knew it!”
Beranabus bounds over to where Kernel and I are waiting. He crouches beside us, beaming like a proud father whose wife has just given birth. “The prime rule of magic — anything is possible. It’s the first thing I teach my assistants, but when you’ve been doing it as long as I have, it’s easy to forget your own advice. Just because something hasn’t been done before, and just because the power involved is way beyond that of even the greatest demon master, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Bec must have realised what she really was. She spent centuries preparing herself, waiting patiently…
“Or maybe she only saw how to do it during the battle. Maybe you were the catalyst, Grubbs. Or Kernel. Though I don’t think so — he came last to the union, didn’t he? I don’t suppose it really matters. Maybe Bec can tell us, assuming she’s…” He stops. “Yes, she must be alive — I mean, her ghost must still be here. It has to be. At least, I suppose…” He trails off into silence again.
“In your own time, Beranabus,” I mutter impatiently. “Whenever you’re ready.”
He flashes me a crazy smile. “This is so extraordinary. Every time I think about it, I discover something new. We’ve taken an immense leap forwards — well, a leap backwards if you want to be pedantic. It’s like going from the first stone wheel to the first manned flight in the space of one incredible day, one amazing spell. This requires years of study and analysis. We have to figure out how the three of you did it, how to control the power, what else we can do. That will–”
“I’m going to hit you if you don’t stop babbling,” I warn him. “Tell us what you know — or what you guess,” I add quickly as he opens his mouth to start telling me he doesn’t know anything really.
“I know you’re in the dark, I know you want answers, just as much as I do. But…” He stops, focuses, takes a deep breath. “You asked me a question once, Kernel. It’s a question most Disciples have asked, normally not long after I’ve told them that with magic anything is possible. Can you remember what it was?”
“I’m in no mood to solve riddles,” Kernel sighs. “I just want my eyes back. Can you do that for me?”
“Not now,” Beranabus huffs, waving the question away. “Think, boy. You were telling me about your early life, the night you created your first window and stepped into the universe of the Demonata. You said all your troubles started then, that if you could go back and stop yourself, everything would be fine. You asked me if–”
“No!” Kernel grunts. “It can’t be.”
“That’s what I thought at first,” Beranabus chuckles.
“But you said we couldn’t!” Kernel protests.
“And I was right. Nobody ever had, and I didn’t think anyone could. But now we have. You, Bec and Grubbs did it. You broke the final barrier. I never thought it could happen. I gave up on the notion long, long ago. When you’ve seen as much of–”
“What is it?” I cut in sharply, furious with ignorance. “What’s the big secret? What question did Kernel ask?”
“The one they all ask eventually,” Beranabus smiles. “The one you would have put to me if you’d been with me a little longer, when you looked back on all the times you went wrong, wondered how things would have turned out if you’d done this or that differently, gone down one path instead of another.”
Beranabus stops, glances up at the trees and the moon beyond, as if to reconfirm it before saying it out loud. When he looks at me again, the smile’s still there, but shaky, as if he’s not sure whether he should be smiling or not. And he says, very softly, “Kernel asked me if it was possible to travel back in time.”
→ A shocked moment of incredulous silence. Then I laugh. “Good one. You almost had me going. Now quit with the jokes and–”
“This isn’t a joke,” Beranabus says.
“You’re trying to tell me we’ve returned to the past, like in some bad science-fiction film?”
“No,” Kernel giggles, then hits me with the punchline. “Like in some very good science-fiction film.”
“Don’t,” I mutter. “Things are mad enough without you two veering off at some ludicrous angle. We need to think about this logically, go through what happened step by step, so we can understand. Wild speculation won’t get us anywhere.”
“It’s not wild,” Beranabus says. “And it’s not speculation. It’s fact.”
“I don’t accept that. You’re wrong.”
“How else can you explain this?” He points to the hole, the rocks, the trees.
“It’s an illusion. Our minds have conjured it up or Bec fed the image to us to spare us the real, grisly truth. It happened to me before,