The Lost Gate (36 page)

“I don't know,” said Hull, “but I do know this: Whoever it is wants the Queen dead so that her baby will never be born, so that Anonoei's little halfway bastard boys can take the place of the rightful heir who died unborn.”

“And why would they do that?”

“Because the Queen is from Gray,” said Hull. “Don't pretend you don't know the politics of this house, I know you go a-spying whenever I don't have you at a job, and sometimes even when I do.”

“Then why don't you want to see Anonoei's Icewegian sons inherit?”

“I'm old enough to know how things work in this world,” said Hull. “If both those boys are heirs, then they'll fight between each other and we'll have a civil war. Or one of them will kill the other, and then we'll have a fratricide on the throne—always a proud day for a kingdom. Old Oviak made war on Gray and lost it, and he swore to the bargain that brought peace. Queen Bexoi and that baby in her belly are the price of it, and no Icewegian with honor can go back on the word of the old King, even if he
is
dead.”

“So it's not because you love the Queen,” said Wad.

“I don't even know her. When I bring her breakfast—with my own hands, mind you, because Her Fancyship demanded it—she hardly looks at me and never says a word, not even thanks.”

“Why do you think she demanded that
you
bring her breakfast?”

Hull thought for a moment. “Well, I'm glad to know that I'm trusted even by those I don't much like.”

“You saved her life today.”

“I can't throw myself on her protection, though, can I?”

“Try the King's protection,” said Wad.

“How do I know he isn't part of the conspiracy?”

Wad did not believe the King would do such a thing, but he couldn't be sure of it.

“So now you've calmed me down and I won't kill any of the idiots who work in the kitchen. I won't tell on the conspirators and that should satisfy them, too.”

“Should it?”

“I'm busy.” She turned for the door, then stopped. “
Was
there any fungus?”

Wad shook his head.

“The King doesn't want this baby,” said Hull, “because everyone knows the Queen is a drekka, or nearly so. She can call finches! How useful! Her children will have no greatness in them. But that's the promise old King Oviak made to Bexoi's brother, and King Prayard is bound by it, and by his own marriage oath! I hate it that I don't trust him, but how can I trust anyone? Except you, Wad. You're the only faithful man or boy in Nassassa.” And with that she went back to the house.

Faithful man or boy? Wad laughed bitterly inside himself. Faithful to my Queen, and to the boy or girl, half mine, growing inside her womb. Faithful to you, Hull. But to none else, especially if they threaten any of my beloveds.

Behind this fierce loyalty, though, there was another Wad, an older one, who knew secrets he wouldn't tell this tree-born reborn squirrel. And that Wad was laughing—at the word
beloved.
There is no love, said that ancient Wad. There is only hunger and possession. You huddle like a starving man over his food, you fool, saying, “Touch not what is mine, I'll kill you if you touch it.”

Well, I will, Wad told that ancient self. See if I don't.

Just another killer, no different from any other, said the cynical worm that dwelt in his ancient heart.
You
love, and so your greed is noble and your hate is righteous.
You
desire, and so you plan to kill whoever wants to take away from you the things you have no right to have because they belong to someone else. You are the lover-by-stealth, the thief of the King's throne, for you want to put your cuckoo's egg upon it, denying the King's own sons. Do you speak of nobility? Those who would kill the Queen would only avenge
your
crime—your treason and betrayal of a man, Prayard, who has done you only kindness.

Wad sank down upon the ground in the shade garden. Why did I come to this place? he asked himself. I needed no one till I came here, and now I love three, and they will make a killer out of me in the effort to protect them.

While Wad was bitterly condemning himself, Hull went into the kitchen, where no one dared to look up from their work, and stalked off to her own room, to meditate upon the kind of foolish old woman who takes out her anger on the innocent. That was what was on her mind when she stepped into the darkness of her room, holding no candle because she knew the place by heart. She only heard one breath, one step, and then the dagger was in the top of her spine, just under the neck.
Whick whack,
back and forth, and she felt no pain as she dropped to the floor until her head struck stone. Even then, she was only dazed. She felt her brain fading because of lack of air. Breathe, she told herself. Breathe. But her body obeyed nothing. The door closed behind her. Alone in the dark, her brain starved from lack of air, and without pain or even fear, Hull died.

It was Wad who found her, an hour later, when the kitchen servants came to him and begged him to make sure she was all right. “She hasn't told us that we're done. We dare not leave the kitchen till we have her leave.” Everyone knew that Wad could approach her no matter how angry she was.

He found her door locked, but that was no barrier to Wad. He gated inside, found her body, and wept. Where was I when they did this? I knew they would try to kill her, but did I watch over her? No, I pitied and condemned myself as a killer, as being no better than any other. But who did I kill today? No one. If I had killed the right man, Hull would be alive.

Yet he could not unthink all that he had thought. The very fact that he longed to add to the blood already on his hands from handling and weeping over that good woman only sickened him and grieved him more. Kill kill kill, that's all we do, despite our powers. For magery didn't change the fact that ultimately the only way to stop a man was to threaten to kill him, if he was weak or fearful, or to kill him outright, if he was strong and brave and dangerous. Murder is the only power that we know. Am I better than they are? Hull was better than any of us, because she never killed, because she kept on trusting even when she had the proof that she was dealing with assassins. And she is dead. Does that mean that only the murderers can live? What world is that to live in?

Hull, why did you take me in, if not to be your protector? And since you have no son, who but me is your avenger?

But would you, even now, want vengeance for your death? Or simply peace?

Wad laid her back down on the floor, his tears still on her face. He gave no alarm. Let someone else discover her and raise the cry of murder. Wad had work to do.

He gated to a place he knew by a brook in a narrow canyon many miles from Nassassa. There he washed himself in the cold snowmelt mountain water of early summer. Hull's blood was sent back into the world through that stream, to be part of the sea again one day. As for his clothing, he burned it, lest the blood be seen and anyone accuse
him
of the murder of the well-loved night cook.

Naked as the hour he came out of the tree two summers ago, he gated back into the castle and closed the gates that he had made to Hull's room and to the brook where he washed. Then he made a viewport into Anonoei's room.

She was supposed to be preparing to leave Nassassa. At the Queen's request—and the demand of the agents of Gray who surrounded her—King Prayard had commanded that Anonoei and her two sons be sent away. A ship was going to take her to a place of exile, where she would be guarded so that neither she nor her sons could endanger Queen Bexoi's child when it was born. The ship was supposed to leave the next day, but Wad saw no sign of preparation for a move. Oh, there were three open trunks in her antechamber, but there was nothing in them, not even a pile of clothes waiting to be sorted.

She knows, thought Wad. Whether she is part of the plot or not, someone told her that she need not pack, because she would not leave. She knows they mean to kill my Bexoi and my baby, and she is content.

But angry as he was, and grieving, and wracked with guilt for not having protected Hull, he still did not reach through a gate into her heart and squeeze it into stillness, or pull it out and throw it in the King's face. Instead, he made sure that her two sons, six-year-old Eluik and four-year-old Enopp, were in her chambers, too.

Wad knew a place that dated from the ancient days, two thousand years before, when the first portion of Nassassa Castle was built. As the stonemages hollowed out the crag to make the chambers, halls, and corridors of the inmost keep of Nassassa, they created three tunnels down which they poured the rock they fluidized. These tunnels opened out three hundred feet above the deep volcanic lake that formed a part of the perimeter of the castle. From there the slag had fallen and been lost in the lake. Then the tunnels were filled with seamless stone. But at the mouth of each tunnel, a shallow cave remained, where the last hot slag had poured away when all the stone behind it had begun to harden. They all sloped sharply upward, the floor more steeply than the roof, so there was scarcely any level ground inside.

Wad could do no work with stone, but still he could make each cave into a prison cell. He simply made a gate across the mouth of each cave, a gate so wide that you could not get around it. If you fell from the cave, you were caught in the gate, which took you to the narrow back of the cave. If you were careless, you could then roll right down again to the gate at the cave's mouth, and fall again, and be caught again and returned to the back of the cave—over and over, until you finally caught yourself and held on to the stone and clung there.

It was a terrible prison, a cruel torment, but Wad kept telling himself, It is not death. No one can call me murderer.

Then Wad formed a gate just behind Anonoei and passed the mouth of it over her, carrying her into the steepest of the caves. He heard her scream as she tumbled down to the cave's mouth, and back to the top, and down and out of the mouth again. It was a delicious sound to Wad, in his rage and hate.

He took Eluik and Enopp the same way, each in turn. They, too, screamed—and Wad wondered if their mother could hear them. Let them all do their screaming, thought Wad. Hull was not allowed to scream; they scream for her.

Then he went back to Anonoei's room, passed gates around the open trunks, and bore them each to a cave. There he fastened them in place, using a technique he had not known that he knew, though it came with the ease of old habit the moment he desired it. Each lay longwise along the side of one of the prison caves, with a gate at the bottom end that led only the tiniest fraction of a fingerwidth higher up the slope. So the trunks were constantly falling, yet never perceptibly moved at all.

The prisoners caught themselves on their trunks, then climbed in and lay down or sat inside them, weeping and crying out, but safe from the terror of the yawning cave mouth. That torture was over—but the memory of it would never end.

They would know that some powerful mage had done this to them—but what kind of mage, and who? Perhaps the children had no idea of their mother's plotting, but they would learn of it eventually, and recognize that whatever mage had done this could not be resisted. When eventually he released them from the cave—after Bexoi's and Wad's firstborn child was openly proclaimed the heir of Prayard—they would think twice before they plotted again, for they would know what could be done to them, and how powerless they were to resist.

Each day, Wad would gather up the scraps from the King's table—a duty he had often performed—and instead of carrying them to the pigs or to the compost bin, he would divide them into three bags and push them through a tiny gate into the trunk in each cave, along with a pitcherful of water, which would pour down into the bottom end of the trunk, where they must drink it from their scooping hands, or lap it up like dogs, before it leaked away. His prisoners would quickly learn to be glad of the water and the scraps, would press the sack into the bottom of the trunk to soak, and then wring out the last drops of water from it.

He took pleasure in all the cruelty of the way that he would provide for them, make animals of them, even though he knew that the children, at least, could not be blamed for anything. They must learn fear! he told himself. Only fear will keep them from threatening my child when they grow older.

Meanwhile, another part of him, that ancient soul, roiled within him, as if it were a thousand souls, and all of them angry and afraid of him, all of them crying out that he had no right to such power as he had, if this was how he used it; and crying out, Is this all you can do? Make prisoners of the innocent, because you have someone else you would protect? Are we not all your prisoners here, and have you no compassion for our imprisonment, either?

And Wad wondered how his ancient soul had become so shredded, that it thought itself to be a multitude.

His work done, his prisoners' first meal and drink provided for, Wad came naked to the Queen in her nightbed. He wrapped his arms around her as, only that morning, he had wrapped his arms around beloved Hull, and whispered to her that she was safe. No one would kill her or the baby, not when they did not know where Anonoei was, or the sons King Prayard had begotten on her. Who would be the heir then? Not knowing, they would not dare to harm the Queen.

“What have you done?” said Bexoi.

Wad told her of how Hull had saved her life, and then been murdered for it. And then he told her every detail of how he had abducted Anonoei and her sons and how he would provide for them.

“Good,” said Bexoi. “But wouldn't it be simpler to remove the gate at the mouth of each cave and let them fall to their deaths?”

“What if they slid into the water and came out alive?” asked Wad.

“Then gate them down to the bottom of the lake,” said Bexoi.