11
Mum was looking at Jay. ‘That trick with the nothingness. You said you’d open a door through the lindworm.’
‘Not the same kind of door. I was just trying to express the general concept in comprehensible language.’
‘All right. But could it be adapted for this gate?’
Jay took a moment to consider. ‘No,’ he finally said. ‘A gate — the kind you mean — is an insubstantial thing, it has no tangible presence. In a sense it’s already nothing, and I can’t open a nothing in nothing.’
Mother took this philosophically, and lapsed into thought.
I wracked my brains, too. What was known about these intra-realm gates? It was the province of the various magickal authorities to maintain existing gate networks; The Hidden Ministry poured a lot of resources into it. And, naturally, they had all kinds
