Spear of Heaven (26 page)

She had seen the one in Shurakan. It was strange, but it had
not felt evil. It looked like a door, but on the other side of it was a place
that could not be as close as it was—a place on the other side of the world.

She came back to what Kimeri said. “The Gate is broken, you
say?”

“You didn’t know it?” Kimeri asked her. “I thought everybody
knew. That’s why we came here the way we did. We didn’t have a Gate to come
through. Vanyi has been trying to get to y—to the queen and tell her, and ask
her to help find out who did it. Her mages can’t find anything at all.”

Borti’s eyes narrowed. She looked frightening then, if
Kimeri had been the kind of person to be scared by a face. “Is it so? Has the
Gate broken and no one has told me? How did it break? Do you know that?”

“Something broke it,” said Kimeri. “I don’t know what.
Nobody does. Nobody knows what happened inside it, either. Except me. The mage
who was Guardian—they think he’s dead. Even he does. But he’s not. He’s trapped
inside the Gate.”

“How do you know that?”

Kimeri swallowed the bit of sweet she had been chewing. It
was too sweet suddenly, and too sticky. It gagged her going down. But once it
was down, it stayed there.

Nobody ever listened to her, or paid attention when she
talked about Gates. But Borti did—Borti was fixed on her without the least
doubt in the world that she knew what she was talking about. That was so
strange that for a moment Kimeri had no words in her, and no way to speak them
if she had.

Her voice came back all at once, and her wits with it. “I
know because I’m a mage, too. I felt the Gate break. I saw it trap Uruan. He’s
still in it. I dream about him all the time, about how he’s in there, and he
thinks he’s dead. He’s scared, when he remembers to be.”

“Why haven’t you tried to get him out?”

“I don’t know how,” said Kimeri. “Vanyi won’t even let me
talk about it. The other mages pat me on the head and say ‘Yes, yes’ and don’t
hear a word. Even Kadin—he says maybe so, but what difference does it make?
Dead is dead.”

“And yet you leave him there. Surely there must be something
you can do.”

“They won’t let me go outside the palace,” Kimeri said. “Except
for the festival, and then they watched me every minute. I did try. I did.” She
was almost in tears. “He doesn’t feel anything, not really. He just dreams, and
makes me dream, too. I try to help him then. I try to make him feel better.”

Borti was not the kind of person to melt when a young person
cried, or even to pay much attention to it unless it flung itself into her
arms. Which Kimeri was deliberately not doing.

“Can you show me?” Borti asked.

Kimeri blinked at her, shaking away tears. “Now?”

“No,” said Borti a little too quickly. “I mean, can you show
me where the Gate was?”

“I don’t know if I can get out,” Kimeri said.

“Can you come here?”

“I think so,” said Kimeri slowly. “I did before. If it’s
night—if you don’t mind that people say the house is haunted—”

“Ah, and so it would be,” said Borti. She was amused, but
scared, too. “Tonight? Before the bright moon rises?”

“I can try,” said Kimeri.

The voice inside of her was singing.
Soon. Yes, soon
.

She told it to be quiet, before somebody heard, and unmade
it all.

Tonight was a night of the Great Marriage: when both
Brightmoon and Greatmoon were full, dancing in the sky together, the
blinding-bright white moon and the great blood-red one, so splendid together
that they blocked out the stars. Here where the world was so much closer to the
sky, the moons seemed near enough to touch. Near enough to knock out of the sky
and shatter on the earth, and pour out their blood, white and red, in shining
rivers.

Kimeri was dizzy with excitement. She had got out of the
house as she had come through the Gate, by making herself a shadow. None of the
Olenyai had followed her. Her mother and Vanyi were singing the rite of the
moons’ rising; the mages were with them, even Kadin. She should have been
there, but she made sure to vanish before anyone could start looking for her.

By the time the Olenyai understood that she had escaped, she
was deep in the palace, almost to the room at the end of the hidden passage,
and Borti was running toward her, wrapped in a cloak and a hood.

“Quickly,” Borti said, catching Kimeri’s hand as she ran
past. “People will be following.”

Kimeri lightened her feet to run faster, and kept up easily
with the woman’s long stride. They went by ways that Kimeri did not know, with
many twists and turns and doublings back.

Borti knew the palace as well as Hani had ever pretended to:
she never hesitated, and never paused when there was a turn to make. In almost
no time at all, they had passed through a gate and found themselves in a dark
and deserted street.

Greatmoon was up, casting a glow like fire into the sky.
Brightmoon would follow in a little while: Kimeri could feel her below the
mountain walls, climbing slowly, taking her time. The sun was still close to
the horizon on the other side of the sky, staining it a different red than
Greatmoon did, more rose-red, fading to palest green and then to purple as it
sank. The stars were trying to come out, but tonight they would not last long,
not with both moons to drown their light.

Borti paid no attention to the splendor in the sky. She was
even more nervous than she had been in the morning, and her thoughts darted
almost too quick to follow. More about the king, about the fight they had had,
about people who smiled with their faces but who thought terrible things. She
was thinking that she should have stayed in the palace, but that she had to
come out, she had to get away, it was only for a little while, then she would
go back before she was missed. Which did not make sense to Kimeri, since Borti
had already been missed: or why had she wanted to run so fast?

She slowed down in the street, just a little, enough to seem
purposeful instead of panicked. “You have to lead me now,” she said. “I’ve
never been to the house where the Gate is—was.”

“Is,” said Kimeri. She let her feet go heavy again, and
turned where her dream told her to go.

It was hard, because the dream, like a bird, flew the
straight way, but the streets were not straight at all. They twisted and
turned, went up and down, round and about, and stopped in blind walls or closed
gates. She had to thread her way through them, less quickly or surely than
Borti had come through the palace.

But she did not get lost, and she only ran into one wall,
and that turned out to have a door in it, which opened into another street. At
the end of that was a stair, then yet another street, and then at last, when
they were both winded and ready to rest, a house that looked from the outside
like any other house. But no people lived in it. No lights hung in strings
along its roof, and no lantern hung by its gate to welcome people as they went
past.

This street had people in it, but only a few, and they were
not paying attention to a cloaked and hooded woman leading a cloaked and hooded
child by the hand. Kimeri decided to venture a light, since the moons’ light
shone too dim yet, with Brightmoon just up and Greatmoon keeping more light
than it shed.

Her left hand was clutched tight in Borti’s. She freed the right
from her cloak and unfolded her fingers from her palm.

The sun in it shone dazzling. She damped it quickly, till it
was just bright enough to see by, like a shaded lantern.

She felt Borti’s start of surprise, the stab of fear that
disappeared as quickly as it came. Borti was brave, to be so calm about magery,
and without warning, too.

By the light of the
Kasar
they went up to the gate. It was latched but not locked. There was a warding on
it, with a taste of Kadin and a hint of Vanyi. Kimeri slipped a bit of
shadow-thought into it, until it was sure they were no one and nothing but a
night wind and a glimmer of moonlight. Then she slipped through, pulling Borti
after her.

oOo

The house was dark and cold, as if summer had never come
inside. It smelled of dust and of old stone. Kimeri knew people had lived here,
and not long ago, either: mages, Guardians, coming and going through the Gate
and into the city. The house had forgotten them.

A spell was on it, a spell of dark and of forgetfulness. It
tried to weave itself around Kimeri, but she was ready for it. She sent it
running with a flash of the
Kasar
.

In that clean bright light they walked through empty, dusty
rooms. Furniture was as the Guardian had left it, a bed that had been slept in,
a chair drawn back from a table, a scroll on it with weights on the corners,
the page half written on. Kimeri could not read yet. She was saving that for
when she had time to learn it properly.

There was a loaf of bread on the table beside the scroll,
green with mold, and a knife beside it, and a withered wheel of cheese. The
black wrinkled things in the blue bowl must be fruit.

Borti’s hand was cold in Kimeri’s. She was not afraid of a
mageling with a handful of light, but ghosts made her bones shiver. She thought
she saw them in every shadow, every flicker of light as they moved.

Kimeri could not think of a way to comfort her. There was a
ghost in the house, after all, if only one. She felt him in the innermost room.

It was like the room the mages had taken in the house in the
palace, deep inside, walled all around and windowless, but larger—a good deal
larger, to hold the Gate. It had been a shrine, Kimeri guessed: the walls were
splendidly painted and the floor had tiles like the speaking god’s shrine in
the palace.

There was no god here. Only a blank grey wall with the
faintest suggestion of an outline drawn on it: posts and lintel, the shape of a
gate.

There was a lamp-cluster here, with oil in the lamps, and
flint and a striker hanging from the hook on the base. Kadin kept the lamps
filled, Kimeri thought. She wondered if he ever used them. He could make
magelight, even darkmages could do that; or he might like sitting in the dark.

He was not there now. He was singing the moons into the sky.
Kimeri lit the lamps by thinking about it, because it seemed the right thing to
do.

Their light was warmer than the light of the
Kasar
, and gentler. The lines of the
Gate were fainter in it, but the grey of the wall seemed more silvery, as if
there were a Gate there still.

Borti’s voice came soft, no more than a whisper. “Are there
words one says? An invocation, a calling up of the dead?”

“He’s not dead,” Kimeri said. She hoped her voice was not
too sharp. “Can you see where the Gate was?”

“I see a wall,” Borti said.

“That was it,” said Kimeri. “Does it look a little odd to you?”

“It’s painted grey,” said Borti. “Like rain.”

“Like rain,” said Kimeri. “Yes. See, it shimmers. The Gate
is broken, but somehow it’s still here. Like a ghost of a Gate. He’s keeping it
here by being in it.”

Borti shivered, but she was strong. She did not run, or
think about running. “I don’t see anything.”

There was nothing to see. But he was there, in the greyness
that looked like a wall but was not. Kimeri wondered what would happen if she
touched it with her hand. She was not sure she needed to know.

“Uruan,” she said, which was the Guardian’s name. Names had
power, all the mages said so, and the priests, too. “Uruan, can you hear me
calling?”

He was trapped in the Gate, drifting, dreaming. All he could
see was grey, nothingness, no sight, no sound, no taste, no scent, no touch.
Kimeri tried to push through the grey, to give him the touch of her mind’s
hand, the sound of her voice. “Uruan!”

Borti gasped. Kimeri, half in her body and half out of it,
saw how the wall changed, how its grey turned silver.

There was a shape in it. A body. A face. Uruan was a red
Gileni: he was easy to see, dark bronze against the grey, with his bright mane.

oOo

“Begone, foul fiend from the hells below!”

The voice was a brass bellow. It rang in the empty space. It
knocked Kimeri down and set Borti spinning, crying out. Uruan struggled in his
prison, waking out of his dream into a madness of panic.

Kimeri scrambled to her feet. She was too furious to be
afraid. A man stood in the doorway, a preposterous figure, shaved head and
shaved face painted half black, half white, and the rest of him ordinary
Shurakani brown, which was easy to see because he was naked.

Maybe he thought he was dressed: he was hung everywhere with
jangling ornaments, amulets, images, fetishes, things that smelled of black
dark and things that smelled of bright light, all jumbled together and jangling
against one another. He was dancing from foot to foot, a rattle in one hand, a
long and dangerous-looking knife in the other.

“Oh, goddess,” said Borti. She was laughing, though she
sounded as if she wanted to cry.

Kimeri was not laughing at all. The man’s jumble of amulets
matched the jumble of his power, and it was power, magery all twisted and odd,
half real, half pretended.

He was aiming it at the Gate. At Uruan, who was a half-thing
himself, half alive and half not, and like to become nothing if the man kept
on.

“Stop it!” Kimeri yelled at him. “
Stop it
! You’re killing him!”

The man turned the force of his power on her. It swayed her,
and she could not see for a bit, but she was stronger than it was.

He was dancing and hopping from foot to foot, waving his
knife about as if he had the faintest idea how to use it. “Demon! Creature of
darkness! Back to thy hells, and thy foul spirit with thee!”

“Oh, come,” said Kimeri, too angry to be polite. “That’s
silly. I’m not a demon, and that’s not a foul spirit, that’s a man trapped in a
Gate. What in the world are you?”