The strange woman followed them downstairs and took a seat in the easy chair Carson offered her. Carson and Amanda took the sofa. She still had the pieces of jewelry Sashtun had offered as evidence of her coming from another world, while Carson had the books printed in some strange writing system. He wasn’t a linguist like Amanda, but he knew a little about languages, and he didn’t recognize this writing system; it definitely wasn’t Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean — not that he could read any of those, but he knew them when he saw them, and if it were any of a dozen more obscure ones, Amanda would have recognized it.
“Do you want to hear the rest of the story?” Sashtun asked after they’d sat there in uncomfortable silence for a few moments. “Or ask me questions?”
“I think we can listen to the rest of it,” Carson said. “Just pick up where you left off.”
“All right,” Sashtun said. “Well, a few days after the movers brought the cabinet, after Kashpur and I had started studying it, Davey moved in with us. I didn’t have much to do with her — I mean him. Tashni, Kashpur’s housekeeper, watched over Davey and took care of — his needs. We had him sitting in the room where we kept the cabinet for much of the day, mostly reading, and watching it to see if the portal opened on its own, like it had that first time.
“When we had time between paying jobs, Kashpur and I worked on the cabinet, trying to figure out how it worked and how to get it to open a portal on command. It’s a really complicated enchantment, and it took us a long time to get a handle on it — we still don’t know all of its ins and outs, as proved by the fact that Kashpur couldn’t get it to stay open for as long as he expected, and wasn’t able to reopen it immediately. Probably it needs to recharge, but I don’t know how long that will take.
“Anyway, after Davey had been with us almost two months, we got the portal open this evening, and rang the bell to call Davey. I think sh— he’d been in the bath; he ran in in a damp robe, water dripping from his hair, and went through the portal, and I grabbed my go bag and followed. I was — well, I was pretty shocked, even though we’d suspected — I changed into a woman. An older woman. How old would you say I look?”
“Uh... late thirties, early forties?” Amanda guessed. Carson thought she was being generous.
“I would have said older, but, yeah, something like that,” Sashtun said. “I was twenty-three last birthday. And while Davey was in my world, as I said before, he was — or looked like — a girl about four or five years old. A Zyuneban, to be specific — it’s probably because the family who owned the shop with the cabinet was Zyuneban.”
“What’s Zyuneban?” Carson asked.
“Oh — it’s an ethnic group, like the Stasa or the Zhevru. Do you — no, of course you wouldn’t have the same ethnic groups, any more than the same languages... it’s a strange enough coincidence that you’re human.”
“No, I’ve never heard any of any of those,” Carson said. “Go on.” The woman’s clothes didn’t really fit her; they were loose in the shoulders and too tight across the chest, she clearly wasn’t wearing a bra, and the pants had room in the crotch for something that wasn’t there. That was a tiny point in her favor, but could easily be faked if she was hoaxing them for some reason.
But why? If she’d kidnapped Davey, or was involved with the people who’d kidnapped him, why bring him home with such a far-fetched story? For that matter, if she’d rescued him from his kidnappers, or found him after he’d escaped from them, why come up with such a story?
“Well,” she said, “Davey showed me around briefly, and then I said I’d go back through — but when I returned to Davey’s bedroom, the portal was closed. I stayed there and waited by it in case Kashpur got it open again right away, and Davey’s sister woke up and we talked for a couple of minutes before she said she would go and wake you up. And that’s all of it, at least at a high level — I could go back and fill in more detail, if you’ve got questions.”
While Carson was thinking about possible questions, Amanda said: “I just — you realize how hard this is to believe? None of the evidence you’ve shown us would be that hard to fake.”
“I realize that. Davey had an advantage, coming to our world, in that someone saw the portal into his bedroom before it closed. And the owners of the shop already knew the cabinet was enchanted, they just didn’t know how. But — if you think Davey was kidnapped by someone in your world, and I’m lying, what would my motive be for this particular lie? Something so unlikely?”
Amanda didn’t say anything right away. “I’d like to hear more about your world,” Carson said. “What’s it like there? About how many wizards do you have relative to your total population?”
Amanda started to object: “What good would more details on this hoax do us?”
“The more we ask, the more chances she has to contradict herself,” Carson said.
“I don’t think we need contradictions to disprove it when the basic premise is so unbelievable. — Thank you for bringing our son home, ma’am, but I think we have to ask you to leave now.”
“Oh,” Sashtun said, her face falling. “Then — could you please direct me to some place where I can sell gold and jewelry? I’ll need some of your local money to pay for a place to stay, and food, and so forth until you get more evidence of the portal and let me know when I can come back.”
“Why would we —” Amanda began, but Carson put a hand on her arm.
“I think we can do that,” he said. “It’s the least we can do for bringing Davey home. I’ll look up where the nearest gold-buying place is. But you don’t want to go there now; they wouldn’t be open. And it’s a really long walk, I’m sure, and I don’t want to drive you there when I haven’t had a good night’s sleep.”
“You think they walked here?” Amanda said.
“If she’s telling a story like this, and it’s not true, she wouldn’t make an obvious mistake like parking her car where we could see it from the house, anyway. She wouldn’t admit to having a car nearby. Or, conceivably, she had an accomplice drop her off here. But why would Davey back up her story? Or why would she back up his, if it’s not true? I’m having a hard time believing it, but I’m having an even harder time figuring out why they would both tell such a far-fetched lie.”
“That’s true. I don’t understand it either.”
“And there’s the question of how they got quietly into the house. Davey’s key was on his dresser when he disappeared, and none of our other keys went missing then or since. So why not listen to more of what she’s got to say?”
Amanda furrowed her brow and didn’t answer. Sashtun said: “Well, as for your question earlier, if you define ‘wizard’ in the broadest sense, about one person in a hundred and sixty is a wizard. But many of them can just barely sense magic. The ones who can actually cast spells are fewer, and the ones who have enough power to benefit from an advanced magical education are fewer still. The numbers are similar but a bit smaller for nulls, people who can weaken or break spells — about one in two hundred in the widest sense, one in a thousand or less for the more powerful ones.”
“Tell us more about this — uh, Kashpur — he’s your employer?”
“Yes, I’ve been working as his intern for almost a year now...” Carson continued asking her questions without catching her in any contradiction for some time; Amanda pitched in with a question now and then, and he thought her skepticism might be eroding slightly.
Maybe.
At last Carson caught himself yawning. “We’d better get back to bed soon. Amanda, I think it makes sense to let her sleep on the sofa; I can drive her to the gold-buying place in the morning.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Amanda said. “Let’s talk.” They went into their bedroom and Amanda continued in a low voice: “What if she robs us blind as soon as we’re sound asleep?”
“If she’s running a scam of some kind, it’s a long-term one,” Carson said. “Bringing Davey back to get into our confidence? But if we assume she’s the person who kidnapped Davey, or more likely is connected to those people without Davey knowing it — they could have robbed us the night Davey was taken. But nothing was missing except Davey. And feeding and caring for Davey for six months seems like a lot of unnecessary prep for a mere burglary. If she starts trying to finagle our bank account numbers out of us, we’ll know something’s fishy, but...”
“Yeah. I don’t know what her deal is, but you’re right, it’s not burglary. All right.”
Carson stepped back into the living room and said, “You’re welcome to spend the night on the sofa there. I can get you some blankets; just give me a couple of minutes.”
“Thank you,” Sashtun said. “What time of night is it, anyway? It was about an hour after sunset when we went through, but it seems to be later here.”
“One forty-seven a.m.,” Carson said, having glanced at the clock in the bedroom while he was talking with Amanda. “Do you know what that means?”
Sashtun furrowed her brow. “Ah... almost two hours after midnight?”
“Right. Well, I need to be at work at nine, and we’ll need to leave by eight if I’m going to drop you off at a gold-buying place on the way. It might not be open yet when we arrive; you might need to wait a while.”
