The House That Walked Between Worlds by Jenny Schwartz

Author:Jenny Schwartz [Schwartz, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-25T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Sylvesteri arrived on Vashti with a black eye and a bandaged right elbow. The obstacle course had not been kind to him.

The House chose a landing site a respectful distance from the Amaranthine Fire Temple. It also carefully angled itself so that its front steps unrolled to solid ground. In fact, as Sylvesteri exited, he had a clear path before him. He’d have to walk a couple of miles, but his injuries wouldn’t prevent that exercise. He would convey my request for a meeting with Bian Que.

It had taken the House a day and a half to reach Vashti mid-morning.

Gale had expressed surprise at the swiftness of the journey. She hadn’t gotten a useful response from anyone.

For me, the House’s travel time was normal.

“But it’s not,” Gale had said. “Houses aren’t as plodding as World Walker Caravans which can take months to travel between worlds. But no House is on record as traveling from Earth to Fae in less than two days.”

I’d managed an evasion, that just might be valid. “Or maybe records are hampered by promises like the one you gave me.”

She’d spent the journey time organizing her office and, via amage, dealing with the myriad of big and small issues from the life she’d abandoned to join the House.

We hadn’t drafted a statement from me about leaving without a scholar-in-residence. I hadn’t had the foggiest idea what I wanted to say, and Gale had assured me that “mystery never hurt”. So the Guild of Whispers on Alexandria would spread the word—that is, boast—about one of its members joining the House, and the scholars at the academy would gnash their teeth.

And I could chew on my guilt. Unlike Gale who was winding up her affairs on Alexandria, I had left jagged and bleeding loose ends in New Zealand. My parents’ deaths would have led to problems with the running and handover of their business even if I’d been there to inherit their responsibilities. But the fallout from their sudden deaths was complicated by me vanishing.

It would become a global news story, especially if any dashcam footage had managed to capture my parents’ being chased by the…by whom?

Who was it who’d pursued them so relentlessly that they’d crashed? Who was it who’d killed Tahlia, torturing her beforehand and dissecting her afterward?

Evil. So much evil.

But whereas I’d assumed that the evil was related to human governments, businesses or criminal gangs—and there was more crossover between the three groups than people believed—now I had another possibility to throw into the mix.

Some people had to know that our planet existed in a larger Reality where magic was real. Sylvesteri had mentioned at our first meeting that registered World Walker Caravans no longer traveled to my planet, but he’d also been confident that secret journeys happened; presumably, as part of a shadow network.

Therefore, me announcing myself as Kira Aist on Alexandria, and news of my invitation for a scholar-in-residence position spreading out to other planets, meant that anyone in Reality with links to my home world and an interest in sorcerers could connect my human identity to my sorcerous one.

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