The Gate of Bones (3 page)

Until then, he'd not realized that the two groups of newcomers were like night and day; although the Hand had made him a bit uneasy at first, they'd concealed their true nature with guile. He hadn't seen much of the Magickers since then, for upon returning to his home city of Naria, his master discovered Renart's healing condition and the Trader Guild put him through a verbal inquisition to which he
did
know the answers, and he'd had his ranking and license taken from him while they discussed his actions. How naive he'd been, he realized now, not seeing that his actions had made many traders uneasy, as a grab for power and influence. He'd only seen it as a charity.

Renart rubbed his hands together. He should have brought gloves, he knew that. It was autumn now and the nights and even days would grow damper, colder, and any trader knew how important it was to be prepared while out on the road. It was just that he'd been clerking in warehouses for weeks now and hadn't thought about being on the road again. He wondered if Chieftain Mantor would be able to influence the councillors as he promised he would. Oh, to be established again, doing what he loved. . . .

He'd get a firsthand sight of how the academy was coming along, and how the wanderers he'd sent there were working out, as well. Wanderers were a strange people, outcast by most towns and villages for their refusal to accept rule by the councils and the Warlord's Holy Spirit. No Spirit, they claimed, no matter how powerful and influential in this life, could help being tainted by evils on the spiritual side, and therefore was not trustworthy in a Spirit life. Never mind that the Warlord had proven Himself time and again. They refused to accept him, and so the rest of Haven refused to accept the wanderers.

Still, a people had to live, did they not? They were not harmful, just strange. Strange and often poor and bedraggled, as if punished for their beliefs. Perhaps they had been. Renart closed his eyes a moment in thought.

He awoke with the sun's rays striking his face, the morning fog completely gone from the meadowland, and his horse still cropping grass contentedly. He leaped to his feet, let out a groan as his whole body began to ache, and quickly made ready to ride again. To save Avenha and the other peoples he had grown to love, and to redeem himself. Traders got few chances to be heroic, and this was his! To ride! He snapped the reins and his horse raced forward on the road.

 

“Trent, if you don't stop asking for stuff, I am never going to get Henry Gated out of here.” Jason sat cross-legged on the top floor of the academy, his face shadowed by a corner beam, but nothing could quite hide the intensity that gleamed out of him. The power that he would use to open a Gate between two worlds already hummed through his body, in preparation for being loosed.

Tall and wiry Trent stopped in mid-sentence, and swung around to look at Jason, his fingers still clenching a handful of white paper. His jaw worked as if the words couldn't quite come out, then he said, “Don't you get it, Jason? You, Henry?” He turned toward Henry, who also sat with an apologetic expression over his round face, black hair unruly, and caught in mid-yawn. Henry put his hand over his mouth as heat flooded his face.

The long summer and mild autumn so far had turned the boys lean, grown them tall as they had hit that time of life when boys became men, almost overnight it seemed. Only Henry wore clothes like they'd all worn when they first came to Haven, but that was because he was going back. Back for supplies and news and to reassure families at home that the Magickers were doing fine, and Haven was indeed a Haven. Henry, the ambassador between two worlds and showing diplomatic grace, would not mention the growing menace of the Dark Hand. He scrubbed his face now and widened his round eyes, then put his glasses back on.

“I am listening,” he vowed.

“Well, good. Because you need to. This stuff is important.” Trent tapped his papers. “I need these books or articles, Henry. Anything you can pull out of a used bookstore or off the Internet, okay? Because Haven is full of people almost like us, but not us, and these myths . . . these tales they tell . . . hold the answer to their beginnings. I need as much research done as you can manage. Now, I know what Gavan and Tomaz told you to do is more important, I'm just asking for a little help here.” It went without saying that the wishes of the elder Magickers, the headmaster and the beastmaster, would rule all of Henry's actions.

Henry reached out and took the lists. “I'll do it,” he said confidently.

“Good.” Jason stood. “Are we settled, then? I can Gate now, but after the day's work, I'll be too tired to do it. So I need to get Henry out of here now, and get the passage closed again before the Hand senses anything.”

Trent made a gesture which had as much to do with the music that always seemed to be thrumming inside him as it had to do with what he and Jason and Henry were talking about. “Look . . . remember we talked about the Gordian knot and Alexander the Great? The wise men and prophets said only someone who could undo the knot would fulfill their prophecy about a great ruler . . . and Alexander, instead of trying to untie the knot, just took up his sword and sliced through it.”

“Yeah.” The list of things needed crackled a bit as Henry folded it carefully and put it in his pocket.

“That's a myth. The reality is that the Gordian knot was most likely a complicated political arrangement of alliances and religions that opposed anyone who would unite that part of the world. Rather than deal with them and get caught up in their politics and bribery and self-interest, Alexander just took his armies and conquered them. That was the sword slicing through the knot, see? So . . . we hear things from the wanderers and Renart and others, and somewhere in the myths we're hearing is a little bit of truth about Haven.”

“Right.”

Trent rolled his eyes and threw up his hands. “No one listens!”

“We all listen. And you're right. But what we have to do now is get the academy built before the rains start, and then winter hits us. If for no other reason than we need a way to keep our butts warm and dry. Then, when that's done, we can sit around a desk and talk about your theories. On long winter nights it might even be a fun thing to do.” Jason stood, folding his arms, and tilting his head at Trent.

Trent's mouth snapped shut and he settled for a mild punch to Jason's shoulder. The other boy rocked back with a soft grunt, still grinning.

“Hey! Don't punch the Gatekeeper. I have a date to go home!” Henry scrambled to his feet, gathering up his empty backpack. He'd bring it back brimming with items all the exiled Magickers had requested. Foremost on his list seemed to be chocolate, requested by Bailey and Ting.

“I'll look for you in a week's time,” Jason promised.

“Just remember, time is different here than there.”

“Right. Which is why I won't just open the Gate. You're going to have to tell me if you're ready yet. I think we can touch thoughts that long. Don't give me big explanations—just a ‘yeah, let's go, or no, see me next week,' got it?”

Henry's head bobbed. “Got it.”

“Good.” Jason gripped his friend's shoulder. “Say hi to everyone for us, right?”

“First on all my lists.” Henry took a deep breath. “Okay. I'm ready.”

Trent turned his back on them, his face creased with a kind of sorrow, and Jason knew he was thinking of his father, left behind and sorely missed. Jason filled his hands with his crystals and gripped them tightly. With a deep breath, he opened his mind, and found that essence which was the Dragon Gate, and swung it open. He literally tossed Henry through it, and slammed it shut, hoping that the Dark Hand had not sensed the abrupt flow of energies.

He stood for a long moment, feeling the surge of great power running through him, and ebbing away, as though it sank into the very floorboards of the unfinished building about him, as if the academy grounded him. Then his heart did a double beat, and he inhaled again, and his crystals stilled in his hands.

Trent waited another moment before saying gruffly, “C'mon. We've got a lot to do today.”

“Always,” Jason agreed. He looked up at the sky. “Maybe a roof in a few more days?”

“Maybe. Although I think I'd rather have hot water.”

Jason snorted. “What do you think I am? A magician?”

Trent tackled him and they wrestled with laughs and snorts and grunts until the sound of shouting for them drew them apart and into a long day of hard work.

W
AKING MEANT more than just prying the eyes open. It also meant finding the nerve to stick one's arms out from under the covers into the cold morning air and then putting one's bare feet on chilly wooden planks. So Bailey eased out of her warm cocoon of a bed gingerly, her face all screwed up in an expression of intensity as she woke and then dashed to the cupboard, flinging clothes every which way till she found the warmest combo she could find and dove in headfirst. Once dressed and with her feet shoved into a pair of fleece-lined boots, she could work on the niceties of dressing . . . like ties and belts and tucking in her blouse. She turned around, pulling on her lacings, to see Ting's brown eyes peering over the tops of her blankets with amusement sparkling in their depths.

“It's cold,” muttered Bailey.

“And likely to get much colder!” Ting agreed. “Do you realize we might get snow?”

While snow had sounded like the epitome of winter fun in sunny Southern California, here . . . far away and someplace strange . . . it sounded . . . well . . .
cold.

“I dunno,” answered Bailey dubiously.

“You'll love it! We'll have the chimneys working by then, and this place will heat up. Gavan and Tomaz promised.”

Bailey arched her back and looked at the wooden structure encompassing them, and their sleeping room just a small part, one day to be a classroom. Iron Mountain Academy (IMA wizard school, she added mentally) was no longer a dream, it was nearly a reality. One without a top floor and roof and indoor plumbing, as of yet. “First,” she commented, “we have to finish building it.”

“Not on an empty stomach!” Ting threw herself out of bed then, scrambling for her clothes in much the same hurried fashion as her best friend. Bailey would have crawled back into her still warm blankets to wait, but her boots hadn't been cleaned, and she had no intention of pulling them off just to sit on her cot. So she paced back and forth until the vibration of her boot heels set off an irritated chattering in the corner. A small whiskered mouse face poked out of a wooden barrel that had once been a nail keg but had now been appropriated for her home. As if also anticipating the return of the Ice Age, the little pack rat had promptly filled it with as many scraps of paper and fabric as she could find and drag in for her nesting.

Bailey squatted down and put her hand out, palm up. “Morning, Lacey.”

The little creature stopped chittering, put her paws to her whiskers for a quick scrub, then hopped into the hand. Bailey swept her up and deposited her in her bodice pocket as Ting gave one last brush through her gleaming blue-black hair.

They looked at one another and said, in unison and emphatically, “Breakfast!”

As they headed down the inner, spiraling stair, they could hear the sounds of others who were already awake and about. Workmen's voices rang through the air, along with the thump of hammers and the noise of handsaws. The smell of a wood-burning fire as well as cooking food filled the air, while a thin fog curled away from the ground. Breakfast was always served in the outdoor camp, to feed the wanderers who helped with the construction, for Gavan and Bailey's mother Rebecca couldn't help but take pity for the thin, tense faces of those who'd come to help build the academy.

The hardest part of leaving home and coming to Haven was trying to understand the new people they eventually met.

Quiet and wary and seemingly shy, it had been months before they'd actually met anyone face-to-face—and that first one had been Renart, the young trader who'd bartered items with them from the shadows. Some days they'd find a shirt folded up on a rock, for which they left small things of their own, the next they'd find a basket of eggs. Eventually, one day, Rebecca had been startled to find Renart himself, sitting cross-legged, awaiting them, his six-fingered hands folded in his lap, his eyes bright with curiosity, with a new sack of trade offerings at his side. They taught him to shake hands and he taught them how to “sketch a bow.” Gavan and Tomaz painstakingly made “Talker” crystals, crystals that they had imbued with a kind of translating ability, and they'd shared their first words with the native of a new world the Magickers had, basically, invaded.

Rebecca Landau turned from a great pot, hung on a cooking rod, and waved her spoon in the air. Bailey beamed at her mother in pride. “Who'd have thunk,” she whispered to Ting, “that someone who hates camping would be doing so well in Haven?”

Indeed, Rebecca glowed. Or maybe it was just reflected heat from the campfire which kept her cauldron of oatmeal bubbling. One tiny streak of charcoal etched the side of her face and Bailey grinned, wondering if she should tell her mom or not. Old, naturally, and a mom, of course, but Rebecca still looked slender and pretty, her light brown hair pulled back from her face in French braids, and her long skirt swirling down to sweep the ground. Yup, old Mom looked pretty good in Haven gear.

Over the hubbub of the workmen, Madame Qi's imperious voice could be heard, and the thump of her bamboo cane. “Shoulders straight, arms out, eyes closed . . . I want you to breathe deep!”

Ting's mouth opened in a soft laugh at her grandmother's drill sergeant tone. She nudged Bailey. “She's got them at it already.”