Or was it only the ladder linking the spheres? She toiled upward, the current pushing her on from behind. Beneath her feet the land dropped away into darkness. Above, stars shone and yet began to fade into a new luminescence, one with a steely white light like that of a great, shining wall, the boundary that marked the limit of the lowest sphere. Low, like the delicate thrumming of plucked harp strings, she heard an eerie music more pulse than melody.
Rivulets sprang away from the main stream, so that the river itself became a labyrinth winding upward. On the currents of aether, insubstantial figures shaped in a vaguely humanlike form but composed of no mortal element danced in the fields of air through which these rivulets ran. The daimones of the lower sphere, those that lived below the Moon. If they saw her, they gave no sign. Their dance enraptured them, caught in the music of the spheres.
The thin arch of a gateway manifested in the shining wall that marked the limit of the sky. With a shock like the sight of a beloved kinsman thought dead but standing alive before her, she recognized this place. She had known it all along. Da had trained her in its passages, in the spiraling path that led ever upward. Although the way seemed obscure and veiled before her, she had a feeling very like that of homecoming as she ascended to the first gate, the gate she knew so well from the city of memory in whose architecture Da had trained her.
Had he known that the city of memory reflected, like a hazy image in a pond, the true structure of the universe? Or had he merely taught her what others had taught him, and by this means passed on to her what had remained hidden to generations of magi before him?
No matter.
She knew where she was going now. Each gate was part of the crossroads that linked the worlds.
As though her thought itself had the power of making, an archway built of aether and light flowed into existence against the shining wall. Before it stood a guardian, a daimone formed out of the substance of air and armed with a glittering spear as pale as ice.
“To what place do you seek entrance?” Its voice was as soft as the flow of water through a grassy side channel.
“I mean to cross into the sphere of the Moon,” she replied, determined not to quail before this heavenly creature.
“Who are you, to demand entrance?”
She knew well the power of names. “I have been called Bright One.”
It stepped back from her, as though the words had struck it like a blow, but kept its spear fixed across the gateway. “Child of Flame,” it whispered, “you have too much mortal substance. You are too heavy to cross. What can you give me to lighten your load?”