How could I activate the Sphere? Probably just wish: the energy was pumped into it beforehand, and the route too, probably . . .

I squeezed the cold little marble sphere in my palm and wished, wished desperately, to be as far away from there as possible.

And at that very second Arina grabbed my shoulder so tightly that it hurt.

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

WITH A PORTAL, YOU SIMPLY STEP THROUGH IT. AND YOU GET the illusion of being in total control of what’s happening, even of being personally involved in it all. Lift a foot . . . take a step . . . stick your head out in a different place. Drag everything else through . . . half in Moscow, half in the Seychelles, and no problems . . . except that it’s all a bit creepy.

The Dark Ones’ paths through the lower levels of the Twilight are hard and dangerous. I don’t really know why—after all, no one lives there—but a couple of times I’ve seen Dark Ones emerge from journeys like that battered and bleeding. I don’t know, maybe they do battle with their own internal phantoms down there.

But the Minoan Sphere dragged us through space unceremoniously, in one single mighty jerk of power. It wasn’t painful, or disgusting; no one was sick or even felt queasy. But it did leave an unpleasant kind of sensation behind, as if just for a moment I had been Gulliver in Brobdingnag, a living toy in the hands of giants.

By and large and on the whole, I liked airplanes better.

We couldn’t keep our feet at the end of the journey. I tumbled over onto Arina, and Nadya landed on Kesha. I got up and offered the witch my hand without saying a word.

“Ah, you saucy thing!” Arina exclaimed skittishly as she got up. “Whatever happens, a man only ever has one thing on his mind!”

I really did like her, after all. Despite her witchy nature . . .

Beside me Nadya had already jumped off Kesha, her entire manner demonstrating that she would rather have fallen into a heap of rubbish than land on some boy or other.

But overall, no one was actually hurt.

“Daddy, where are we?” asked Nadya.

I looked round.

A little wooden-walled house with one room. Walls covered with wallpaper that had faded with age. Furnished with a table and a couple of chairs, a sideboard, an iron bedstead with little nickel balls on the headboard—the kind that used to be all the fashion in the 1930s—a ponderous ancient television, bookshelves . . . but almost no books.

That was right, the Inquisition had taken them all away when it cleaned out Arina’s home.

It was strange that they hadn’t burnt the house down.

I said so out loud.

“Strange that the Inquisition didn’t burn the house. I thought that was standard procedure for a fugitive witch’s home.”