“Very likely, yes,” the Archimaede said, “though they probably know not what they guard. Bring the objects back to me, Kari. Before the sun sets.”
Kari had already started in the direction the Archimaede had pointed but stopped when I spoke again. “If we’re not back by sunset, the game’s over?”
The Archimaede hesitated, then nodded. “I believe so.”
“Okay. See you before sunset, big guy.” I figured if I was stuck in a game with no clear way out and a lot of stuff to get through before I won (if I survived), I might as well get into the mood for it just like Kari. I could go just as Conan, or Red Sonya, as she could. Well, except that she had a sword and I didn’t.
But I didn’t bother asking about the guardians as Kari and I left the Archimaede. I figured either he wouldn’t tell me, or he would tell me and I’d wish he hadn’t. It may take me a little while, but sooner or later I do figure out some of the rules.
Chapter Five
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
This whole thing wasn’t turning out to be much fun after all. Instead of enjoying a stroll through a park inhabited by friendly elves I was being chased by wolves, put down by unicorns, and lectured to by giant beavers who set ridiculous deadlines. I couldn’t recall that sort of thing happening to any of the heroes in any of my books or games. Aside from the wolf part, that is.
Worst of all, there were real consequences if I failed.
At least remembering my games got me thinking about how the characters always started out weak and grew into major heroes as they gained experience. Maybe that would work for me here. It’s not like I had any chance of turning into Conan the teenage barbarian before sunset, but I could learn enough to maybe keep from being a happy meal on two feet for the next pack of wolves we encountered. Because if it was all about figuring out the tricks you needed to survive, I knew how to do that from my games. You just needed to keep cool, don’t do anything dumb, and keep trying different things. I only had to hope I didn’t make any major mistakes along the way.
Not that I had a lot of time available to learn in, if the Archimaede was to be believed. Only until sunset. Just how long did that give us, anyway? Right now, Kari was walking along with a quick, wide stride that ate up distance and left me wishing I’d worked out harder during PhysEd class. I had no way of knowing if we should be hurrying faster or if we had time to slow down and maybe search for some food, because my stomach was very unhappy with the fact that lunch time seemed to have arrived with nothing but some long drinks from the stream the Archimaede lived along.
I pulled out my cell, which seemed to be working fine aside from no bars and no service. If my cell was to be trusted, it was about half past twelve now, but the sun here appeared to still be rising and nobody had mentioned lunch yet. Did time work the same way here? Were the days were the same length? “Is it already noon, Kari?”
She glanced at me. “No. The sun is yet a palm’s width short of its highest point.”
That didn’t help much. “How long are the days here?”
“In this season, the days are longer than the nights.”
“Kari, my cell says it’s twelve thirty—”
“Says?” Kari asked. “I heard nothing.”
She couldn’t be serious. Could she? “I mean,” I said with what I thought was great patience, “according to the time on my phone, it’s twelve thirty.”
“Twelve and thirty? What does that mean?” Either Kari was a great actor, or she really had no idea what I was talking about.
Maybe if I tried another approach. After all, what mattered was how much time we had left. “When does the sun set, Kari?”
Kari frowned at me. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah. It’s a simple question, isn’t it?”
“Very. The sun sets when the sun goes beneath the horizon,” she said.
Obviously my sister had decided to get difficult again. “And what time is that?”
That got me another frown. “In the evening. At sunset.”
“Can you be a little more specific?” She just stared at me. “Like the hour? Five o’clock? Six o’clock?”
“Hour? O’clock?” she repeated, as if she had no idea what the word meant.
“Yes!” I held up my cell. “What time is it on your phone or your watch when the sun sets?”
Kari shook her head. “Phone? Watch? You mean that thing of yours?”
“You don’t have a watch? You can’t tell time?”
I hadn’t meant to needle Kari, in fact I was too stunned to be picking on her, but her face got red and angry. “I can mark the passage of time, Liam! I am not an infant. I can watch the shadows shorten and lengthen, I can measure the span of daylight and I can read the seasons. Cannot tell time! I do not need a silly piece of jewelry to tell me the sun is high but still short of the nooning!”
I guess she had a point. “Sorry. I didn’t mean…that is, in my world we use stuff to tell us exactly what time it is, so I could tell you the sun would set in, like, five more hours.”
“Why would that matter?”
“It would tell us how much time we had left!”
“We have until sunset,” she said, as if repeating something obvious.
I had to take a moment to calm down before I tried explaining again. “Look, if we knew that we had, say, five hours left, we’d know how much time we had to get this stuff done.”
Kari frowned up at the sky. “But we already know that we have until sunset.”
“How do we know when half that time is gone?”
She raised one arm and swung it across the sky. “When the sun has fallen halfway toward setting from where it is now, of course.”
That was way too simple and way too sloppy. “But if we knew the sun was going to set at—” I stopped, trying to think. What time was the sun setting these days? I hadn’t really been paying attention. I mean, why bother when you can just flick on a light and keep doing whatever you’re doing? “You know what’s really weird? I can tell you the time down to the exact second, but I can’t tell you even within an hour when the sun sets at this time of year. I just don’t notice. How’s that for strange?”
Kari seemed ready to make some comment, but stopped herself.
“But you don’t even know what hours are,” I continued, “and you probably have a much better idea than I do of how long we’ve got until sunset. How could knowing more mean that I understand less?”
“The Archimaede calls that a paradox,” Kari said. “But he also says that almost every paradox is imaginary, that if you adjust your own way of seeing things you will understand that what you think is impossible is actually just the result of how you are thinking about it.”
“You mean a paradox like me not having a sister but her showing up to haul me off on a quest?”
“Something like that.”
I didn’t answer for a while, taking the Archimaede’s advice and thinking about it. “The Archimaede really is pretty smart, isn’t he? Now that I think about it, I don’t even know if you use daylight savings time here, so whatever time I thought it was might be off anyway.”
This time Kari looked surprised, as well as impressed. “You can save daylight in your world? How is this done?”
“Uh…we don’t really save daylight. We just call it that.”
“Why do you call it saving daylight when you aren’t saving daylight?”
“We take some time from the morning and put it in the evening.”
“You move the sun?” she asked skeptically. “And then put it back later?”
“No. The sun stays where it is, but we just say that’s a different place.”
“And this gives you more sunlight during the day?”
“No,” I said. “It just moves the sunlight around.”
Kari gave me a look like she was trying to figure out if this was another jest. “Why? Do people in your world enjoy pretending to move the sun?”
“Um…I don’t know why.
It’s not because we enjoy it. Nobody I know seems to like daylight savings time.” This time I frowned as I looked ahead. “You know, there’s a lot of things like that in my world. Things we do even though nobody really likes them and they don’t really make sense, but we have to do them anyway, maybe because we’ve always done them. Like daylight savings time and the qwerty keyboard and irregular verbs.”
Kari nodded as if she actually understood me this time. “Customs usually are created for a good reason, but will often continue long after the reasons for them no longer exist. White Lady told me that. The unicorns still meet with the Elven court once a year in the Spring, because at one time unicorns and elves fought together to stop the yearly incursions of ogres. The ogres ceased coming long years ago, though no one knows why, yet the meetings continue.” She looked troubled, and stopped talking quickly.
Having already messed up once talking about elves and Kari, I decided to drop that. “Let’s start over. I was just wondering how much time we had to finish this quest thing.”
Kari pointed at the sun. “Until sunset.”
“I mean exactly how much time!”
“You mean in these hours of yours? What difference would knowing that make?” Kari asked. “We are already pursuing our quest as quickly as we can. Would you work any slower if we knew how many of these hours we had before sunset?”
“Well, yeah. Of course. Why rush if you have plenty of time? We could pace ourselves. You know. We could take it a little easier and still get done before the deadline.”
Kari screwed up her face in bafflement. “How could you judge that we had plenty of time? In order to know that we would have to know all possible obstacles and all possible hindrances and how much distance we must cover and what unpredictable things we might encounter!”
“Yeah, but, if we knew that stuff and we knew how much time we had…” My voice trailed off as I realized how dumb that sounded.
“We do not know those things,” Kari pointed out.
“Yeah.” Forgive me for trying to think things out. Though I knew I was really mad because she was right. I didn’t like Kari being right and I didn’t like having a deadline so close but being unable to measure that deadline. I didn’t like having to rush like crazy toward some “guardians” because we couldn’t tell how much time we had to think stuff through beforehand.
And let’s face it, I was getting worried. I was used to knowing details, knowing what I had to do and how long it would take and what I could get away with and how long I could put off doing it until I had to. But now I was in a situation where I didn’t know any of that.
If Kari had doubts like mine, she didn’t show any signs of them. But since we had left the Archimaede she had been alert and serious in a way I was starting to recognize. When Kari wasn’t worried she did the annoyingly cheerful bit, but when danger threatened she got real business-like. I wasn’t sure whether I should be comforted by the fact that she was taking things seriously or scared about whatever danger had her worried.
Now she sped up a little more, her eyes fixed on a point ahead of us where some sort of structure had become visible. I walked faster, too, determined not to let on that I was having trouble keeping up. Whatever she was looking at was too far off for me to make out anything but the fact that it was sort of blocky and pointy. “What is that?” I asked.
“It is a castle,” Kari replied immediately.
“A castle? Cool. Who lives there?”
She shook her head. “I have no idea.”
“You’ve never been there?”
“I have never even seen it before,” Kari said.
I looked back the way we had come. “We haven’t come that far from where the Archimaede is. How come you’ve never been to this castle? Don’t the unicorns or the Archimaede ever talk about it?”
Kari shook her head again. “It was not here,” she explained. “It has not been here. Now it is here.”
“Castles just appear out of nowhere?” I asked.
“No.” She gave me another one of those quizzical looks. “The castle had to have come from somewhere. I do not know where. But it could not have been nowhere, because then it would not exist somewhere.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” I said, as if all of that made sense. Maybe it did make sense, though. Or maybe rules don’t have to make sense as long as everyone understands what they are. Sort of like daylight savings time. The rules here might be different, but there were still rules.
Kari continued talking. “Things appear in Elsewhere. Then they leave, then they appear again, somewhere else. Some things stay the same, but others do not. Does everything stay the same in your world?”
I thought of buildings being torn down and replaced, and new houses being built everywhere you looked. “Not exactly. Sometimes it seems like you just turn around and there’s a house standing where there were only trees before.”
“Yes.” Kari nodded. “Just like here.”
I didn’t think it was all that much “just like here,” but didn’t see any sense in arguing about that. “How do you even know it’s a castle, then? Can you actually see that well from here?”
“No. My bird friends told me.” She gestured forward. “I asked some of them to scout the castle for us. They should be back soon to let us know who lives there.”
I’d noticed her chirping and singing to passing birds as we walked, and had tried to ignore it. But maybe Kari’s ability to talk to birds wasn’t simply annoying and weird. Maybe it could actually be useful. Before I could say anything else, three birds came swooping in close, one landing on Kari’s offered arm to twitter and tweet. She tweeted back, then the bird leaped into the air again while Kari walked on, her expression troubled.
“They say the castle is uninhabited,” Kari reported.
“Nobody’s there?”
“Nobody and nothing,” Kari corrected. “They saw nothing living at all.”
I didn’t want to ask the obvious question, but figured I had to know the answer. “Did they see anything dead?”
“No.”
That was a relief. Unless something had killed and eaten everything. “Do you have any idea why a castle would be uninhabited?” I could think of various reasons and didn’t like any of them.
“The birds say they could not see anything to account for it. It is not a large castle, but it is surrounded by something odd. They could not explain it to me.”
An abandoned castle surrounded by something odd. Just my idea of a great place to visit. “Isn’t that sort of strange? That the birds can’t explain it?”
Kari shook her head again. “Not at all. There are many things in the world that birds have trouble understanding. Like windows.”
“Windows?”
“Yes. It looks like an open arch, and sometimes it is, but other times there is an invisible wall across it. Glass. It simply baffles the birds.” She looked over and caught my expression. “It is not because they are dumb, you know. It is just something outside of their experience.”
I almost laughed at Kari’s defense of her bird friends, then remembered our little walk through the woods to get to this place. I still had no idea how Kari had done that. Definitely something outside of my experience. Until today, that is. “That’s a good point,” I finally agreed. “So, is there a reason why we’re walking toward that mysteriously deserted castle with something odd around it?”
“One of the objects which we seek must be there,” she replied confidently. “The Archimaede said we should seek it in this direction, and that it lay behind walls of stone. Well, you see the walls of stone, and they are in the right direction. Nothing lies beyond the castle but the Great Sea, and if the object lies in the Great Sea we shall face serious troubles indeed in recovering it.”
I mumbled something about getting travel directions from giant beavers.
“What was that, dearest brother?”
“Nothing. Nothing.”
Kari glanced up at the sun and started going
even faster, pushing our pace, even though I felt a lot more like hanging back and waiting to see if any nasty guardians showed themselves. As we got closer, we could make out the outlines of the castle better, and see that it rested on a rocky bluff which fell away toward the sea. The far side of the castle walls must be right on the edge of the cliff. Despite my skepticism about scouting reports from birds, I couldn’t see any sign of life either as those gray stone walls loomed higher and higher before us. A couple of pennants hung totally limp from the tops of towers even though I could feel a fair breeze blowing in from the water, as if the wind itself refused to visit the abandoned castle.
It gave me the creeps. This appeared to be exactly the sort of place where in the movies the teenagers’ car breaks down and they have to seek refuge for the night and then they all meet horrible fates one by one until nobody’s left but the Smart Girl who figures out how to narrowly survive. Kari would obviously fill the smart girl role, since I was reluctantly concluding that she was sort of smart even if she was also crazy. That left no room for me, the smart-aleck, self-absorbed kid, at the end of the story.
Not only was I beginning to regret watching movies like that, but I also didn’t like my growing realization that I would be the smart-aleck, self-absorbed character. Not the hero, but the guy whose painful death made the audience applaud.
Some more birds flew down and perched on Kari, chirping frantically. She gave them a soothing song back and then released them once more into the air. “They are worried,” she confided to me in a whisper.
“So am I,” I whispered back at her.
She smiled as if she thought I was kidding. By this time, we were both jogging. I started to wonder if Kari planned on just running into the castle, but she finally slowed to a walk again when we were a short way from the castle’s gate. Loosening her sword in its sheath, she scanned the battlements in a careful way that made me feel a little better. Kari looked so competent at times like that, like she knew exactly how to handle things. She might be annoying and crazy, but she also knew what she was doing when dealing with stuff in this world.