The crimson witch

than mine. But yours also rushed toward something else, something darker.” He drew a fork in the line and continued each branch for a distance to show what it was he meant. “This branch represents my world,” he said, indicating the nearer. “And this other is yours.” He marked a large X on her worldline. “About here, your people had an all-out atomic war, nuclear holocaust.”
        “Nuclear war?” She looked puzzled.
        “You call it the Great Fire.”
        “Oh, yes! I remember that they were the same now. But it has been a long time since we have used the more mystical term. We now call it the Great Fire and are done with it.”
        “That's because you've forgotten what 'nuclear' means.”
        “I-Yes, that is so.”
        Kaliglia cleared his throat, sighed, anxious for the explanation to continue.
        “Well, I won't go into the meaning of 'nuclear.' If that has been lost, there are too many basics to cover before any real understanding could be given you. But you see now that I came from this first worldline into yours.”
        “But how did you cross the gap between them?”
        “Through the use of a drug called PBT.”
        “That is?”
        “A psychic chemical that works on the mind. Synthetic chemical. Somehow, the overdose I took gave me the psionic ability to open a pathway between the worldlines, gave me a means of bridging that gap so that I merely had to step through a crack in the wall to enter your world. But I ended up here without the power to return to my own line. Stranded.”
        “And what has this to do with Lelar?”
        “In Castle Lelar-”
        “You plan to go inside?” she asked, obviously with utter disbelief.
        “He sure enough does,” Kaliglia confirmed, nodding his head and clucking his tongue so that the air reverberated with a drumlike pounding.
        “But-”
        “Please,” Jake said, “don't try to dissuade me. I'm determined that I am going back to my worldline. I need the portal in the Castle Lelar. If it is what I believe it is, I think it will take me back.”
        “Portal?”
        “There is a place in the wall of the throne chamber in Castle Lelar, a place where men can be pushed through into apparent nothingness, as if great spaces, universes, existed between the bricks and the outside. It may, just may, be a link to my world. What little I know of it makes it seem worth a try. It's all I have.”
        She looked thoughtful. She looked beautiful. “Lelar is an evil old man.”
        “I am going anyway, despite his orange crescent and his manbats.”
        “And there are far more manbats in the capital city than we have yet faced. Thousands more.”
        “I can't be convinced to give it up.” Even so, he could feel the clutching claws of hundreds of demons, the bared fangs raking his chest, the hot, heavy, ugly breath steaming in his face…
        “He's bullheaded,” Kaliglia assured her.
        Cheryn seemed not to notice the beast's remark. She pursed her lips, considering the dangers, thinking how best to outline them for her lover. “And there will be other things. Things that crawl. Things that slither. Things with claws in their mouths and teeth on their tails so that outside seems inside and inside seems outside when you have to fight one. Lelar will summon every sort of Mue to challenge us before he lets us breach his sacred walls.”
        “But why should he? I had planned merely on asking him to let me try it, volunteer to go through his portal for him-since he seems anxious to experiment with other people's bodies.”
        “You can't do that!”
        Jake frowned and snapped the drawing stick between his fingers. “And why not?”
        “First of all, Lelar will torture you to find out how you came to know of the hole in the wall. I doubt that it is common knowledge within the city. Secondly, he will torture you to discover your motive. He will not be so foolish as to think that someone would volunteer without motive for what, to anyone else, would be a horrid adventure. He will discover the truth about the portal. If it is a doorway to your worldline, he will know.”
        “I can stand torture, if it means he will eventually stuff me into that damn hole!”
        “Let me finish,” she protested, thrusting her pretty lips into a pout.
        “Go on.”
        “And when he discovers that there is another world beyond-if you are correct in