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onto it, and Marla followed. There was a doorway at the end of the walkway, standing
open, and white light beyond.
B hesitated on the threshold. “I…I don’t know where we are now, Marla, but if we step
through this door, we’ll be even farther away from the world we know. We may be
miles and miles away now, or whatever the spiritual equivalent of miles are, but once
we go into this room, we’re light years away, you know?”
“Nothing ventured,” Marla said. “I’m not about to turn back. Are you?”
“I guess not. I just wanted you to know what we’re stepping into.” He went through the
door, and Marla followed.
The room was hexagonal, or so Marla thought at first. She quickly revised her opinion
to octagonal, then decagonal, and then she simply gave up, because the walls were
changing, too subtly for her to notice the transition. The walls of this faceted room were
mirrored one moment, then opaque crystal, then obsidian. The ceiling was so far
overhead that it vanished into darkness, and the light seemed to come from the air itself,
the brightest portion falling on an empty wooden chair in the center of the room. The
chair was as simple as it could be, made of the same dark wood as the corridor walls,
with a straight back and narrow arms.
“There’s no one here,” Marla said.
“There will be,” B said.
For an instant, something white flickered in the chair, a shape filling it, and then the
chair was empty again. Marla heard a distant crackle, like static on a radio between
stations.
Suddenly, in the kind of insightful flash that made her such a capable sorcerer, she
understood. This wasn’t the Portable Witch, or the Biddable Witch, or the Pebbled
Witch. It was—
“The Possible Witch,” B said. “That’s what she is. She deals in the possible.”
Marla nodded, impressed. He’d figured it out as quickly as she had.
Then the witch was there, dressed all in white, sitting in the chair. She—it, really, but
for convenience, she—was immaterial at first, then gradually attained opacity and
solidity.
“I’d expected three,” she said irritably. The possible witch was an old woman, dressed
in a white gown like a choral robe, and she sat stiffly (there wasn’t really any other way
to sit in such an uncomfortable chair, Marla supposed) with her fingers gripping the
ends of the armrests hard, as if she were holding on to keep from flying away, which
could be possible, for all Marla knew. Her face was pale, her hair mostly gray with
streaks of black. Her eyes weren’t human, and they weren’t exactly insectile, though
they were nearer the latter, faceted clusters of black glass with occasional flashes of
pure crystal or mirrored silver. “Sometimes there are four of you, the fourth one a god,