The Vault of Destinies (James Potter #3) (94 page)

With a soft grating sound, Ralph pushed the unicorn horseshoe into the shape engraved in the cornerstone. There was no shocking noise or burst of magical light, and yet the crowd responded. A sigh of awe washed over the quadrangle. James looked up, as did the rest. A faint rose-coloured light glowed from every window of Apollo Mansion. It shifted softly, seeming to hint at every colour of the rainbow and even some colours that James had never imagined.

"I guess we go inside," Lucy suggested, her voice an octave higher than usual. "Is that it?"

James nodded. He reached out, took Lucy's hand in his right and Petra's in his left. Slowly, the group began to walk toward the main entrance of Apollo Mansion.

"Boys!" a voice called suddenly. James paused again with one foot on the first step. He looked back and saw Chancellor Franklyn peering up at him, his face lit with the soft, rosy light.

"If you see Ignatius Magnussen," Franklyn said earnestly, "tell him… tell him to stay away. Tell him not to come back. Will you do that?"

With those words, James thought he finally understood Franklyn's reasons for wanting to keep the Nexus Curtain closed for good. Magnussen, despite being Franklyn's friend, had been a monster. If he had escaped through the Nexus Curtain, then perhaps—hopefully—it had been a one-way trip. Perhaps the only way the murderer could ever return would be if the Curtain was opened again from this side. Franklyn had made it his life's mission to assure that that never happened.

"He won't be coming back, Chancellor," Ralph answered stolidly, raising his voice just enough to be heard. "Trust us."

Franklyn studied Ralph's face for a moment and then nodded slowly.

A moment later, Zane reached for the door handle atop the short stoop of Apollo Mansion. He gripped it, thumbed the latch, and pushed it open. The mysterious pulsing light covered every surface inside, shifting hypnotically.

"All of us together," Petra said, squeezing James' hand. "Everyone hold onto someone else. I think the moment we cross over the threshold, we'll go through. I think the whole house is the portal. Ready?"

James gulped. Ralph shuddered. Zane said, "You all go on ahead. I'm just gonna pop back to Hermes House for my camera. 'Kay?"

Ralph grabbed the blonde boy's hand and Zane gripped it, tittering nervously.

As one, the six stepped through the doorway into the faint rosy light, and vanished.

James' first step into the World Between the Worlds nearly tumbled him headlong over a rocky black cliff. Petra and Lucy were still holding his hands on either side and they pulled him back even as his foot dipped into empty space. He gasped as he drew his foot back and wobbled on the ledge. The six travelers peered carefully down into the misty distance.

They seemed to be standing on the lip of a shallow cave worn into a cliff of sharp black stone. A hundred feet below, monstrous waves slammed against the face of the cliff, sending up explosions of white water as if in slow motion. Beyond this, steely grey ocean stretched off toward the horizon, heaving beneath a low, white sky.

James shuddered. "I nearly fell into that," he commented, wide-eyed.

"This isn't the most convenient place to put a portal," Zane nodded. "Even if you survived the drop, who knows what kind of monsters swim around in an ocean like that?"

"None at all," Petra answered, her voice calm but emphatic. "There's nothing alive in that water. Nothing at all. You can sort of feel it, can't you?"

Lucy frowned. It was almost a grimace of disgust. "Yes," she answered. "It's like this isn't really a place at all. It's more like a kind of window dressing, something just to take up the space. There's no… no
taste
to it. No life or colour at all. It's like chewing on cardboard."

"Or like taking a peek behind the curtain of reality," Ralph agreed, his face tense. "Like it's here just because something
has to
be, but it's not meant to be seen by anyone."

"I think it makes sense," Izzy said, still holding Petra's hand.

Petra agreed. "It's not really a world after all," she mused. "It's just the World
Between
the Worlds."

"Look," Zane suddenly pointed, raising his arm toward the distant horizon. "It isn't
all
just water. There's something out there."

James followed Zane's pointing finger. Very faint and distant, a dark shape clung to the horizon.

"Is it a boat?" Lucy asked doubtfully.

Ralph shook his head. "It's an island, I think. But not like any island I've ever seen. It looks almost like a big giant footstool."

"It's a plateau," Petra said. "Just like this one, I think. Look over to the right. There's another one."

"There's more on this side," Zane added, peering around the boulders of the cave's left edge.

James leaned carefully out over the rocks of the cave's mouth, scanning the length of the watery horizon. The shapes were grey in the ocean mist, so far off as to be almost invisible, but once you began looking for them, more and more of them seemed to appear. They were eerily similar: rocky plateaus, oddly flat on top, rising like giants' stepping stones out of the monstrous ocean.

"What are they?" Izzy asked in a hushed voice.

"They're portals," Petra answered, and James did not doubt her. "Like this one. Each one leads to a different universe, or dimension, or reality. Some of them would be almost exactly like our own. Others would be so different, so alien, that we could barely look at them."

"They're awful," Lucy proclaimed with a shiver, hugging herself.

"No," Petra countered. "They're just themselves. They aren't good or bad. They just are."

Ralph asked, "Do you think this whole world is covered with them?"

Petra shook her head. "It isn't a world. It isn't round, and it doesn't have an end. But yes. I think all of it is like this. On and on, infinitely. If one had a boat, just think of the places they could go, the things they could see."

James shuddered again at the thought. The idea of taking a boat out onto that strangely disastrous, unnaturally flat ocean was horrible. Looking out over all that distance and those endless bland islands, James wanted nothing more than to crawl back into the shallow of the cave and huddle into a ball. He turned around and was both amazed and relieved to see a door standing in the shadows of the cave. It was framed with wood and James recognized it immediately as the front entrance of Apollo Mansion, seen from the inside. It hung open and through it, James could still see the slope of Victory Hill, the broken werewolf statue, and the crowd congregated on the quad behind Administration Hall, milling uncertainly.

"I guess that's how we go back when we're ready," he said, gesturing toward the doorway. The others turned and looked, and there was a palpable sense of relief. The view of the dark quad and the familiar campus was very comforting after all that bright, blank vastness.

Lucy finally let go of James' hand. "So what do we do now?"

James glanced around nervously. "I guess we just look around," he ventured. "The whole reason we came here is because this is the one place that someone could hide something as powerful as the stolen thread from the Vault of Destinies. If we can find the thread, then perhaps we can find out who really broke into the Archive and prove Petra's innocence."

"Not to mention," Zane added suddenly, as if the idea had just occurred to him, "if we find the missing thread, maybe we can put it back into the Loom! Maybe that would set everything back to rights again! After all, our Loom was switched with one from another dimension, right? It got stuck here instead of reverting back to its own universe because whoever broke into the Vault stole the crimson thread from it! Remember what Professor Jackson said? He said that the switching of the Looms between our dimension and some foreign one changed everything, and maybe even broke the balance of the destinies! He made it sound like if the thread wasn't returned, eventually things would break down into complete chaos! Maybe if we put it back…"

"Then all of our destinies will snap back to the way they were before the break-in happened," James said, completing his friend's thought. "I wonder, is that really possible?"

"Perhaps Petra will never have been arrested?" Izzy suggested, a small ray of hope alighting on her brow.

"Maybe, if we replace the crimson thread," Zane replied thoughtfully, "then
none
of this will have happened."

The gathering was quiet for a moment as they all considered this. Finally, James nodded decisively.

"All right then," he announced. "Everyone take a look around. Let's see if we can find any evidence that someone from our world was here recently."

Ralph blinked. "Like, maybe, a candy wrapper or something?"

"Why," Zane asked, "do you see one?"

"No," Ralph shook his head, and then pointed. "But there are some stairs carved into the rocks by the ledge over there. Maybe somebody dropped something there…?"

James peered around the larger boy, looking toward the right corner of the cave's mouth. Just as Ralph had said, a series of worn, narrow steps curved around a boulder, leading out into the dull light.

Lucy asked, "Where do you think they go?"

Petra took a step toward the stairs. "Up," she said simply. She let go of James' hand, renewed her grip on Izzy's, and moved toward the nearly hidden stone staircase. The rest followed in silence.

The stairs did indeed go up. As James followed Petra and Izzy into the strangely flat light of the World Between the Worlds, he saw the stairs rising unevenly before them, carved into the crags of the cliff. The steps were worn smooth with age, and were wet with mist so that James gulped as he began to climb them. He felt the pull of the distance on his left side, heard the shuddering crash of the surf as it reached up, up, trying to drag them all down into it. To compensate, he leaned against the cliff face on his right, nearly hugging it as he climbed. Behind him, Lucy, Zane, and Ralph followed closely, shooting worried glances into the hungry depths.

Several minutes went by. The cliff was remarkably high and James felt that the steps had taken them some distance around the strange island. Finally, unexpectedly, the six travelers reached the top. Petra and Izzy moved a few paces out onto a flat plateau and the rest gathered around them, clustering unconsciously against the gaping white space all around.

James realized where they were even before he saw the black castle. He remembered the hissing shush of the yellow grass and the march of the clouds as the wind pushed them. He'd seen it all in Petra's dream-visions and had assumed it had only been a figment of her subconscious mind. Now, standing on the solid rock of this place, feeling the salty mist on his face and the feather of the wind as it combed through his hair like fingers, he felt the subtle shift of destinies. Here, everything was possible. The six of them were standing on the raw bedrock of reality, from which all dimensions sprang and grew. Here, every footstep had the potential to shake universes. And somehow, deep in the basement of Petra's mind, she had known. She had sensed they would end up here, and because she had known it, so had James. He just hadn't made the connection.

"I sure wasn't expecting that," Ralph breathed, staring with astonishment at the black castle. It stood on the distant ledge of the plateau, defying gravity, encrusted with turrets and conical roofs. Its windows were tall and narrow, glassless, black as doom.

"That's where we need to go," James said, not at all
wanting
to go there, but knowing it was their destination nonetheless. Beside him, Petra nodded.

"Someone's there," Lucy said in a low voice.

Zane peered up at the castle. "Looks empty to me," he commented, a little hopefully. "It almost looks… sort of… dead."

"Nice," Ralph moaned.

Petra spoke calmly. "If there is someone there, then they're expecting us. This is what we came for, isn't it? Let's go. But… keep your wands handy. You never know."

The group began to make their way across the gentle hump of the plateau, wading through the whispering yellow grass. With a sinking jolt, James remembered that he had dropped his own wand during the last seconds of the Clutchcudgel tournament and had completely forgotten to retrieve it afterward. He cursed himself silently, but reminded himself that he was walking alongside one of the most powerful people in the magical world. If Petra proved unable to confront whatever was to come, then his wand surely would not be of any help anyway.

As the minutes passed, the castle grew gradually closer. It was rather small, at least compared to Hogwarts, but nearly fantastically tall, scraping its towers at the grey clouds. James noticed that just as in the dream-visions, the castle was perched on the ledge of the far cliff, jutting partly over it in complete defiance of gravity. Perhaps magic held it in place or perhaps it was simply balanced there by habit. Either way, it was very disconcerting to look at. James felt that the mere weight of his gaze might be enough to send the structure collapsing backwards into the waiting waves below.

"What's that?" Izzy asked suddenly, stopping and pointing. James turned and saw an object protruding from the grass some distance away, in the shadow of a low outcropping of boulders. Silently, the troop angled toward the object, cautious but curious.