wall of the cube and found herself in another space exactly like the original one: a cube attached to a cube, though she could not visualise how it connected to the first. She fitted it to her mental map anyhow and went through the right-side wall to another cube, which led back to the first. She recognised it because one wall was open and she could see her face staring in. The thought made Tiaan so dizzy that she fell off her chair.
Had Vithis been lying when he gave Malien the key? She didn’t think so, but how could she tell? He’d deceived and manipulated her from the beginning.
Maybe the gate was all in the mind, and the way would only become clear if she could imagine the unimaginable – the hypercube the way it really existed.
Tiaan recreated her mental image, passing through the black walls into cubes which only led to more cubes, and more that lay back to back with each other or with the first, the one that lay open in the upper room in Nithmak. She looked out but this time did not see the room at all. Tiaan saw only stars and constellations entirely foreign to her. She tried to go further but could not get through.
She backtracked and went at what she thought was the opening again, but this time looked out on nothing but green: a dense, verdant, dripping forest. She couldn’t reach it either.
Tiaan retreated, knowing she was getting further away from what she was looking for. She dismissed the images from her mind, whereupon the hypercube flashed into view of its own volition. It only lasted a second but that was enough. It was there! She had seen it, perfect and complete.
Tiaan tried not to dwell on it, for the four-dimensional image was impossible to think about logically and she might lose it. And yet, her visual mind had done it, and now she saw a box that she had never seen before. Its walls were thinner than the others and Tiaan could make out shapes and lights through them.
She went closer. One wall showed a double sun and a field of stars sprinkled across black silk. Another, a roiling miasma like the solidification, in jelly, of a multicoloured field. A third was a pattern of dots, extending regularly in all directions. A fourth she could not make out at all until she went up close, when she realised that it was a fanged, horned and whip-carrying monster the like of which must strike terror into even the fierce heart of a lyrinx. Was she looking into the void? The fifth was equally obscure, until it resolved into an eye staring back at her. Tiaan jumped and the eye disappeared. It was her own. The sixth wall led back to the box she had just come from.
She withdrew, knowing that a long time had passed. It had grown dark while she’d been working and the moon was shining in through the glass. The tesseract was empty. She’d been looking for a device like the port-all she’d assembled at Tirthrax, but there wasn’t one. And yet, there had been that aura.
What if the box itself was the device? It hardly seemed possible; how could an empty box open a gate? But on the other hand, there could be anything in compartments which were there one time she looked and not the next.
Could the port-all be all in the mind, something she must also visualise? Perhaps that was the answer. It wasn’t hard to recall her earlier port-all to view, for she’d often done so, trying to analyse why it had gone so wrong at Tirthrax. In her spare moments she’d tinkered with her mental image of the device, using her new-found geomantic knowledge to make it perfect.
She recovered the image of that port-all, mentally dusted it off and placed it in the tesseract. Nothing happened, of course, for there was nothing to power it.
Tiaan inserted her best image of the amplimet in the centre, just as she had placed the real amplimet into the port-all in Tirthrax that fateful day nearly two years ago. There was no resistance this time, which made her feel that she was on the right path. Or so far off that …
No, don’t think negative thoughts. It seemed as though the port-all ought to be ready. She began to operate it as she had the original. A whip crack shook the building and cries rang out from