Children of the Gates

Baen Books

by

Andre Norton

Time Traders

Time Traders II

Star Soldiers

Warlock

Janus

Darkness & Dawn

Gods & Androids

Dark Companion

Masks of the Outcasts

Moonsinger

Crosstime

From the Sea to the Stars

Star Flight

Search for the Star Stones

The Game of Stars and Comets

Deadly Dreams

Children of the Gates

CHILDREN OF THE GATES

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Here Abide Monsters copyright © 1973 by Andre Norton. Yurth Burden copyright © 1978 by Andre Norton.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 978-1-4516-3889-9

Cover art by Stephen Hickman

First Baen paperback printing, May 2013

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Norton, Andre.

Children of the gates / Andre Norton.

     
pages cm

"A Baen Books Original"--T.p. verso.

"Distributed by Simon & Schuster"--T.p. verso.

ISBN 978-1-4516-3889-9 (omni trade paperback)

I. Title.

PS3527.O632C45 2013

813'.54--dc23

                                                          
2013004341

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

1

To Nick’s left the sun had hardly topped the low trees. It was a ball of red fire; today was going to be a scorcher. He hoped he could make it into the woods road before the heat really hit. Of course he had wanted to start earlier, but there was always some good reason why—Behind the faceplate of his helmet Nick scowled at the road ahead.

Always some
good
reason why the things
he
wanted to do did not fit in with plans, not
his
plans, naturally. Did Margo actually sit down and think it out, arrange somehow ahead of time so that what Nick had counted on was just what was not going to happen? He had suspected that for some time. Yet her excuses why this or that could not be done were so perfectly logical and reasonable that Dad always went along with them.

At least she had not ruined this weekend. Maybe because she and Dad had their own plans, or rather her plans. Give Nick another year—just one—and Margo could talk to the thin air. He would not be there to listen to her. That—he relished the satisfaction that thought presented—was the day he was going to start living!

Dad—Nick’s thoughts squirmed hurriedly away from that path. Dad—he had chosen Margo, he agreed with Margo’s sweet reasonableness. All right, let him live with it and her! Nick was not going to a minute longer than he had to.

The trees along the road were taller now, closer together. But the surface over which the motorbike roared was clear and smooth. He could make good time here. Once he turned into the lake road it would be different. But in any event he would reach the cabin by noon.

His thoughts soared away from what lay behind, already seeking the peace ahead. The weekend, and it was a long one from Friday to Monday, was his alone. Margo did not like the lake cottage. Nick wondered why she had never talked Dad into selling it. Maybe she just did not care. There was plenty else for her to own. Just as she owned Dad.

Nick’s scowl deepened, his black brows drawing together, his lips thinly stretched against his teeth. That scowl line now never completely faded, it had had too much use over the past three years. He swayed and adjusted to the swing of the machine under him as an earlier generation would have ridden a horse, the metal framework he bestrode seemingly a part of his own person. The bubble safety helmet covered his head front and back. Below that he wore a tee shirt, already dust streaked, and faded jeans, his feet thrust into boots.

Saddlebags, tightly strapped against loss, held the rest of his weekend wardrobe and supplies, save for the canned food at the cabin and what he would buy at the store going in. He had a full tank of gas, he had his freedom for four days—he had himself! Nick Shaw as he was, not Douglas Shaw’s son, not Margo’s stepson (though, of course, that relationship was hardly ever mentioned). Nick Shaw, himself, personal, private and alone.

A twisting curve downhill brought him to the store at the foot of the bend, a straggle of houses beyond. This was Rochester, unincorporated, with no “Pop.” on the sign Nick flashed past. He came to a stop at the store. A Coke would go good. Ham Hodges always had those on ice.

Bread, cheese, Nick had no list, just had to remember to get things that would not be affected by the bumpy ride in. His boots thumped on the porch as he reached for the knob of the screen door. Behind the screening a black shape opened its jaws in an almost inaudible but plainly warning hiss.

Nick jerked off his helmet. “I’m no Martian invader, Rufus,” he said to the big tomcat.

Unblinking blue eyes stared back but the jaws closed. “Rufe, you there—move away from the door. How many times am I going to tell you if you sit there you’re going to be stepped on someday—”

Nick laughed. “By whom, Ham? Some customer pounding in for bargains, or one going out because you ran the prices up on him?”

The cat moved disdainfully back a little, allowing him to pass by.

“Nick Shaw!” The youngish man moved out from behind the counter on the left. “Your folks up for the weekend?”

Nick shook his head. “Just me.”

“Sorry your Dad couldn’t make it, Larry Green sighted some big ones in the cove. He was just saying to me no more’n an hour ago that Mr. Shaw sure ought to come up and cast a line for one of those. He hasn’t been here for a long time now.”

Ham was being tactful, but not tactful enough. Nick shifted his feet. They never mentioned Margo, but she was always right there, in their minds as well as his, when they talked about Dad. Before Margo Dad had loved the lake, had been here in the summer and the fall every minute he could get away. How much longer will he even keep the cabin now?

“No,” Nick answered in a voice he kept even with an effort. “He’s been pretty busy, Ham, you know how it is.”

“Don’t suppose I can sell
you
any bait—”

Nick managed a smile. “You know me, Ham. I’m about as much a fisherman as Rufus is a dog lover. What I do want is some stuff to eat—what I can carry on the bike without a smashup. Any of Amy’s bread to go?”

“I’ll see. No reason why we can’t spare some baking—”

Hodges turned to the back of the store and Nick moved around to pick other items. A package of bacon from the freezer bin, some cheese. From all the years he had been stopping at Ham’s he knew where most things were. Rufus was back on guard at the screen door. He was about the biggest cat Nick had ever seen, but not fat. Instead, in spite of the plates of cat food he could and did lick clean each day, he was rather gaunt. His conformation was that of his Siamese father, though his color was the black of the half-breed.

“How’s hunting, Rufus?” Nick asked as he returned to the counter.

An ear twitched, but the cat’s head did not turn even a fraction. His interest in what lay outside was so intent that Nick moved up behind him to look out, too. There must be a bird, even a snake—something in the road. But he could see nothing.

Which did not mean that nothing was there. Cats saw above and below the human range of sight. There could be something there all right, something invisible—

Nick wondered just how much truth there was in some of the books he had read—those that speculated about different kinds of existence. Such as the one that had suggested we share this world with other kinds of life as invisible to us as we might be to them. Not altogether a comfortable thought. You had enough trouble with what you
could
see.

“What’s out there, Rufus? Something out of a UFO?”

The cat’s attention was manifestly so engaged that it made Nick a little uneasy. Then suddenly Rufus yawned widely, relaxed. Whatever had intrigued him so was gone.

He returned to the counter. There was a paperback turned upside down open, to mark the reader’s place. Nick turned it around to read the title—
Our Haunted Planet
—by somebody named Keel. And there was another book pushed to one side—
More “Things”
by Sanderson. That one he knew, he had read it himself, urged by Ham to do so.

Ham Hodges had a whole library of that type of reading, starting with Charles Fort’s collections of unexplainable happenings. They made you wonder all right. And Ham had a good reason for wondering—his cousin and the Commer Cut-Off.

“Got you a loaf of whole wheat, a raisin one, and a half-dozen rolls,” Ham announced coming into sight again. “Amy says give the rolls a warm-up, they’re a day old.”

“They could be two weeks old and still be good if they’re hers. I’m lucky she can spare so much a day ahead of baking.”

“Well, we had some company who was going to come and didn’t, so she was overstocked in the bread box this week. Funny about that.” Ham thudded the bread and rolls down in a plastic bag before Nick. “This fellow called up last Friday—just a week ago. He said he was from the Hasentine Institute and they were gathering material about the Cut-Off. Wanted to come out here and ask around Ted and Ben—” Ham paused. “Hard to think of it being all this time since they disappeared. At least it scared people off from trying that road for a while. Only somebody’s taken the Wilson place for the summer and, since the new highway to Shockton went in, the Cut-Off’s the only road to reach that side of the lake now. So it’s getting traveled again.

“Anyway, this fellow said he was doing research and asked about a place to stay. We’ve that cabin, so we said we’d put him up. Only he never showed up or called again.”

“How long has it been, Ham?”

“Since July 24, 1970. Why, you and your Dad and Mom were up here at the lake that summer. I remember your Dad was out with the search party. I was just home from the army. We sure gave that land a going over—Ted was a good guy and he knew the country like it was his own backyard. Ben was no fool either, he’d buddied with Ted in the Navy and came up for some fishing. No, they just disappeared like all the others—that Caldwell and his wife and two kids in 1956, and before them there were Latimer and Johnson. I made it my business to look it all up. Got out my notebook and read it through this week so I could answer any questions the fellow from the Institute might want to ask. You know, going as far back as the newspapers had any mention of it, there’s been about thirty people just up and disappeared on the Cut-Off. Even before it was ever a road, they disappeared in that section. It’s like that Bermuda Triangle thing. Only not so often as to get people all excited about it. There’s always a good long stretch of time between disappearances so people sort of forget in between. But they should never have opened up that road again. Jim Samuels tried to talk the new people out of it. Heard they didn’t quite laugh in his face, but I guess they took it as some superstition us local yokels believe in.”

“But if it’s the only way to get into the Wilson place—” Nick knew the legend of the Cut-Off, but he could also understand the frustration of outsiders needing an easy access.

“Yes, I guess it is a case of needs drive. You can’t get the county interested in laying out a new road to serve just a few summer cabins because there’s a queer story about the one already there and waiting to be used. You know, this writer”—Ham tapped the book with a fingertip—“has some mighty interesting things to say. And this one”—he indicated the More “Things” volume—“makes it plain, for instance, that we think we know all about this world, that it’s all been explored. But that isn’t the truth, there are whole sections we know nothing about at all, mountains never climbed, places where nobody civilized has ever been.”

“ ‘Here abide monsters,’ “ Nick quoted.

“What’s that?” Ham looked up sharply.

“Dad’s got a real old map he bought in London last year—had it framed and hung it down in his office. It shows England and part of Europe, but on our side of the ocean just some markings and dragons or sea serpents, with lettering—‘Here abide monsters.’ They filled up the unknown then with what they imagined might be there.”

“Well, we don’t know a lot, and most people don’t want to learn more’n what’s right before their eyes. You point out things that don’t fit into what they’ve always accepted, and they say it’s all your imagination and nothing like that is real. Only we know about the Cut-Off and what’s happened there.”

“What do you think really happened, Ham?” Nick had taken a Coke from the ice chest, snapped off the cap, and now drank.

“There’s this Bermuda Triangle, only this writer Sanderson says it’s no ‘triangle,’ but much larger, and also they’ve made some tests and it’s only one of ten such places all around the world. Ships and people and planes disappear there regularly—nothing ever found to say what happened to them. A whole flight of Navy planes once and then the rescue plane that went out after them! It may have something to do with magnetic forces at those points. He makes a suggestion about breaking into another space-time. Maybe we have one of these ‘triangles’ right here. I sure wish that Hasentine guy had shown up. About time some of the brains did some serious investigating. And . . .”

What he was about to say was drowned out by a wild yapping from without. Rufus, his back arched, his tail a brush, gave a warning yowl in reply. Ham swung around.

“Now what the heck’s all that about?” He headed for the door.

Rufus, ears flattened against his skull, his Siamese blue eyes slitted, was hissing, giving now and then a throaty growl of threat. The yapping outside was apparently not in the least intimidated.

A car, or rather a jeep, had drawn up, and a girl slid from under the wheel, but had not yet stepped out. She was too busy trying to restrain a very excited and apparently furious Pekingese that fought against her hold, its popping eyes fixed on Rufus.

She glanced up at Ham behind the screen, Nick looking over his shoulder.

“Please,” she was laughing a little. “Can you cope with your warrior? I want to come in and I certainly can’t let go of Lung Hsin!”

“Sorry.” Ham stopped to catch up Rufus with practiced ease in avoiding the claws the big cat had already extended to promise battle. “Sorry, Rufe, you for the storeroom temporarily.” He departed with the kicking and growling cat, and Nick opened the door for the girl. She still held the Peke who had fallen silent upon witnessing the unwilling exit of the enemy.

“He’s mighty little to think of taking on Rufus,” Nick commented. “Rufe would take one good swipe at him and that would be that.”

The girl frowned. “Don’t be too sure about that! This breed were once known as dragon dogs, lion dogs—they helped guard palaces. For their size they’re about the bravest animals alive. Hush now, Lung, you’ve made your point. We all know you’re a brave, brave Dragon Heart.” The Peke shot out a tongue and licked her cheek, then stared about him imperiously as if, having chased the enemy from the field, this was now his domain.

“Now what can I do for you?” Ham came back, licking one finger where Rufus had apparently scored before being exiled.

“I need some directions, and a couple cases of Coke and . . .” She had Lung Hsin under one arm now as he no longer fought for freedom, and with her other hand she pawed into the depths of her shoulder bag. “Here it is,” she said with relief. “Thought it might have gone down for the third time and I would have to empty this thing to find it.”