So, by degrees of wonder, Livia left the world of West-erhaven behind, and came within the realm of Raven.
"They are heralds of the ancestors," Qiingi said. Livia had asked him about the Impossibles. "The ancestors are returning to us, so all things change. You should not be surprised if the walls of your world are beginning to crumble. The elders told us to expect it."
"Who are these ancestors?" she asked. She really wanted to grill Lucius about what he was up to, but the man kept cagily near Qiingi, and as they crossed the border into Raven's country, her normal inscape resources had shut down. She couldn't call upon Peaseblossom and Cicada to run sims of Lucius, nor could she ask her Society what he might be doing.
The term for this, she mused, was working without a safety net. Most of her peers prized the stability of their reality above all else, and she had no doubt they would have run screaming
back to Westerhaven long before now. In that, at least, Lucius had judged right: Livia was unfazed by this journey. Or so she kept telling herself, while her pulse pounded and she jumped at every strange sound coming through the forest.
Qiingi smiled at her; he had been very impressed to learn she was a singer. He had taken to calling her Word-weaver Kodaly. "A time is coming when what you call the horizons of the world crack and fall," he said. "The ancestors wait beyond the horizons. They are returning to us to bring us the wisdom of centuries that they have gathered during our long isolation in this place. Our best have come to Skaalitch because this is the first place where the walls of the world will crack."
"Oh." She didn't know what to say to that. But it sounded tike some new myth was being born in this place. Myths and stories were a common spark for birthing new manifolds. Was a new reality being born within Raven's people? Was that what Lucius had brought her to witness? If so, it was a momentous occasion, and a tremendous coup for both of them.
"You have followed me well," Qiingi said. "Behold the city of Skaalitch."
Livia knew where they were. They had come to the shoreline of the lake that spread sinuously through the valley below the Romanal estate. The air here was cold and damp, full of the mist that hung around the redwoods. Livia drank in the sound of waves lapping on the shore of the dark water. She had been here many times; the Romanal boathouse should be right over ... there ... Where the boathouse should be, a jagged mound of boulders thrust up out of the ground.
Of course, that was the boathouse or how it appeared from within Raven's country. She looked the other way, and gasped.
The lake was ringed by gigantic trees and backed by low mountains. For hundreds of meters along the shore, long canoes lay upended on wooden frames and tall totem poles presided magisterially over scores of men and women who were working near the water. Behind them, receding half-seen into the maze of trees, were dozens of log longhouses, their roofs adrift with woodsmoke. Bright things like flying banners flitted half-seen in the deepening green of the forest; birds and animals laughed, and out in the lake, something huge and dark breached the surface momentarily, then sank away.
Livia had sunbathed on these sands many times, and canoed with friends on those net-strewn waters. She had never imagined this place existed parallel to the lake she knew.
Drumbeats started up somewhere among the long-houses. "We must hurry now," said Qiingi. "The potlatch of the ancestors is about to begin." He hurried into the city, greeting people left and right as he went.
Lucius and Livia smiled and nodded at Raven's people, who grinned and talked about them as they passed.
Children raced alongside them, laughing and screaming in mock fear. Ahead, a crowd was growing.
"You're a very bad man," Livia said. "Bringing me out here on a pretext, then kidnapping me!" But I am having fun, she was about to add, when she saw that he wasn't laughing. Indeed, he looked tired, and maybe even a bit frightened.
"Lucius, what's wrong?"
People were now appearing from all over some blinking into view from whatever submanifold they had been inhabiting. All were converging on the great open circle that lay ahead. Lucius shook his head, and looked away from Livia.
"I had no one else I could trust with this," he said. "Nobody I knew who might understand. Except you."
"What do you mean?"
"Look at this!" He waved at the fabulous totems and rearing longhouses that surrounded them. "It's wondrous, isn't it and you never knew it was here! Livia, don't you feel even the slightest bit claustrophobic living in just one manifold?"
She nodded, eager to have someone agreeing with her for a change. "Everyone says that Westerhaven is the most cosmopolitan place in Teven. We visit other manifolds, sure but how many of them? What you were saying earlier about us being butterfly collectors ... I know what you mean. We see the world only from our own narrow perspective. We're tourists in other people's realities."