The Spirit Gate (32 page)

The image surprised a chuckle out of Kassia and Michal
cocked his head to one side, trying to read her.

“Does
it bother you at all to hear me speak of taking another woman as my wife? Does
it trouble you to imagine me joined in a loveless bond with a stranger? If I
could marry you, Kassia, I would, but . . .”

Kassia swallowed the lump in her throat; muddy emotions
warred in her breast. Frustration won.
If I could cast on him a spell of
forgetfulness, making him unable to recall even my name, I would do it.

She herded her words into careful order. “My lord, you are the
King of Polia. You must marry and you must produce heirs if your kingdom is to
endure. My sole duty is to aid and protect you in any way I can. I have no
right to be troubled by your taking a wife.”

“What
if I were to suggest that the best way for you to protect me is to stay by my
side day and night—to
offer me your wise counsel, your powerful arts . . . your love?”

She looked up into his eyes and read unspoken desires there.
“I thought you
had promised my Master not to ask that of me.”

“I
only pose a hypothetical question.”

“That
I be your personal adviser?”

“My
personal adviser, my constant companion, my confidante, my friend . . .” His hands slid up her arms, brushed lightly over her shoulders, framed
her face.

In the instant that Kassia knew he would kiss her, she
sensed they were being observed. Lukasha. Surely he would prevent this. But
Zelimir’s lips
met hers with no outcry from the watching Mateu. The kiss was gentle, yet
quivering with an undercurrent of passion. Stunned, she neither responded nor
attempted to repulse him.

In a moment, he lifted his head and she thought he would
release her. Instead, he reclaimed her mouth and drew her into a fiercer
embrace. She could feel his body tremble against hers, could sense the powerful
emotions that fueled his passion and knew, suddenly, that his trembling was not
born of simple desire, nor even love. There was another element here—something dark and
hidden.

But the impression was only momentary. Whatever barriers of
propriety Michal Zelimir had erected buckled, flooding his kiss with passion.
Alarmed, Kassia put her hands against his chest and pressed, readying a ward
she hoped she wouldn’t
have to use.

“Mishka!” Lukasha’s
voice was sharp with disapproval.

Zelimir released his captive and stepped away from her,
blinking into the lighted stable doorway. Lukasha stood there with Zakarij, a
restraining hand on the younger man’s
arm. His expression was opaque, while Zakarij’s, for an unguarded moment, betrayed something dark
and violent. Lukasha turned his face to him without taking his eyes from the
king. “Zakarij,
take Kassia to the horses. I must speak with Michal alone for a moment.”

Zakarij did as bidden. Crossing to the silent Kassia, he
took her firmly by the arm and escorted her back through the stables to their
waiting horses.

“What
happened?” he whispered when they were beyond the stable master’s hearing.

Kassia moved to her mount and tried to cloak herself in its
shadow. “I don’t know. One moment he
was telling me how Master Lukasha had counseled him to patience, the next he
was . . .” She buried her face in the horse’s
mane.

“I
saw.” Zakarij’s
voice was harsh. “Did
he ask you to stay?”

Kassia managed a wry chuckle. “Hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically?”

“He
asked me what I would do
if
he asked me to stay.”

“And
you said?”

“He
didn’t give me an
opportunity to answer.”

“Then
you haven’t
promised him anything.”

She sighed. “No.
But Zakarij, what if he’s
right? What if Master Lukasha is right? What if I could protect him from
Benedict and others like him merely by being at his side? Is it my duty to
treat my King’s
wish as a command—to
acquiesce?”

“Is
that what you want to do—acquiesce?”

Anger flared, solid and recognizable. “No. Of course not. I
want to be at Lorant. I want to be a Mateu, not a King’s concubine.” Kassia realized that her
hands had begun to tremble. Before she could do much more than note it, the
trembling was spreading throughout her body. “I wish I’d
never come to Tabor,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “I wish the king had never seen me.”

Unable to hide her quaking, she turned to mount her horse.
Zakarij was beside her in a breath. She thought he meant to help her mount, but
instead he put his arms around her and drew her against him, embracing her. He
said nothing; there was nothing for him to say, but she felt his empathy.
Kassia knew that if the king pressed her, hers alone would be the decision to
go to him or stay in Dalibor.

She did not hasten to leave the circle of Zakarij’s arms. She stayed and
let him work whatever spell it was he used to calm her trembling and soothe her
fears.

Who would cross the boundaries imposed by time and place, and
break the barriers of earth and sky should stand where two worlds meet, face
the rising place of Sun or Moon—whichever
rules the hour this spell is struck—and
invoke the supreme Spirit. Follow this with a call to the angels (spirits) of
earth, air, fire and water, giving precedence to air and earth, for these must
be cloven if the spell is to succeed.

One must hold these things in the strictest balance, and with
concentration unbroken, exert the will toward establishment of a window, a
doorway, a corridor between this place and that.

The secret of this spell is this: That it has not one, but four
catalysts, and that these catalysts square each other, and that they are all of
openings, and that these openings contain the catalysts, which are living
symbols. Let him who has ears hear—these
four catalysts may represent the kingdom of Day or of Night or of Twilight, and
these four may allow the user to see or to be or to control. These are the
faces of increasing levels of power, of which there are three. I beg God’s forgiveness that we
have not always stayed in the light. May He have mercy on us.

Kassia’s
eyes drifted past Marija’s
translation of Pater Honorius’ tidy Latin scrawl to the symbols below it. They were divided into four
quarters by a set of neat, crossed lines, at the ends of which were tiny
symbols indicating the points of the compass and the primary substances: gold,
silver, copper and cobalt. Within the four quarters the symbols were grouped in
two rows.

The arrangement seemed wrong, considering that Honorius had
written of three classes of catalysts. Either he or Marija had evidently left
the third set out. Well, that mystery she would solve in time. She had Honorius’ notes and she had Marija’s
journal. One might have provided a key to the other, except that for some
reason Kassia couldn’t
fathom, Marija had scratched out several of her Polian translations, and had
replaced them with Latin notations. There were numbers embedded in the text,
too, that seemed to reference pages that held the unknown script.

Kassia gathered up the folio, her book and papers and moved
to a chair before the hearth where a fire had been set against the cool of the
evening. Her eyes stumbled over the unfamiliar letters and words. Zakarij could
translate this; he might even have knowledge of the strange, cryptic text
Marija had used. But no—Kassia
wasn’t ready to
share this. Not yet. She would find the Traveling spell herself, without help.
She applied herself to the task of using Marija’s initial translations to dredge meaning out of the
Latin passages. Only marginally successful, she abandoned that task after a
while and began a painstaking scan of each journal page, hoping to find
something she had missed in her initial leaps ahead.

An hour later, she thought she had found something. Buried
amid chatter about the more mundane aspects of college life, Marija noted that ‘following the monk’s directions’ she had ‘visited
Tabor’. The word “visited” was underlined twice. Tabor was a place Marija had never been. But
Kassia had been there, and recognized the other woman’s “vision” of the odeon just down the boulevard from the front gates of what was
now Zelimir’s
palace.

Adrenaline surged. Surely Marija had taken meticulous notes
on how the spell was to be cast, what were its catalysts, and in what order the
spirits were to be invoked. But there were no notes in the journal—at least none that
Kassia recognized as such. Puzzled, she continued her meticulous perusal of the
fat little book, trying to find some clue. What she found was something Marija’s inconstant
diary-keeping had hidden from her before. The gaps in the dates of entries were
only partly the result of that inconstancy—entire pages had been sliced neatly out of the
book, very close to the binding. Here, a page ended in mid-sentence. There, it
picked up again in a completely different vein. If Marija had written about
Pater Honorius’ spell in these pages, it had been carefully excised.

Stunned, Kassia sat for some moments trying to collect her
thoughts, trying to imagine how the pages had come to be missing. She had found
Marija’s journal
right where the other woman had left it; no one else seemed to have any idea of
its existence. In the end she came to the only conclusion that seemed logical.
Marija herself must have removed those entries. But why?

I saw, as if through a window
, Marija wrote,
this
marvelous street with buildings that grew straight up into the sky. One facade
was painted with all the colors of the dawn. What a wonder that was! I
’
m
still shaking from the experience. Tomorrow, I will
—

The entry ended abruptly. Marija’s ‘tomorrow’ had vanished.

Kassia closed the book and tilted it so that she could
inspect the top of the binding. Now she could clearly see where pages had been
removed. There was more than one such spot—in addition to the one she had just found there
were several others later in the volume. She poked a fingernail into the tiny
gap and opened the book to find herself among entries from a number of years
later. Most were in Latin. She thought again of bringing Zakarij into her
confidence and again abandoned the idea. This was her test, her task, laid upon
her by Master Lukasha. By the Holy Seasons, she would complete it.

She closed the journal. If . . . if what she
had accidentally stumbled upon in Zelimir’s audience hall was the same Window spell Marija
had first used, then it must correlate to Pater Honorius’ first level of power. But
clearly, if she wanted to progress to a higher level, she would have to drag
the knowledge out of the monk’s
equations herself. Very well. If that’s
what it took . . .

She rose from the hearth, packed up book and papers, and
retreated to her studio. She spent half the night there pondering Honorius’ cryptic notes, and somewhere around midnight came to the realization
that she was taking the wrong approach. Whatever equations the monk had used to
see across distances, she had already replicated accidentally, merely by the
use of a fundamental Squared spell. The two things were related. Using the
fundamental elements themselves, she had effected something unstable,
capricious. The key was most certainly in the catalysts—not elements, but something those elements could be
expected to contain.

She meditated on that as the horizon lightened, and compiled
a list of things contained in air, water, fire and earth. One of Marija’s translated symbols
was definitely a fish, another might be taken as a snake or worm.
Piscis
,
Kassia wrote, and
Serpens or Nymph
.

The remaining hours of the night she spent trying these
things as catalysts with little or no success. The very best she was able to do
was to emulate her accidental opening of a spirit window, this time into her
Master’s empty
library.

Frustrated and exhausted, she went back to the pictograms to
stare at the symbols until her eyes blurred. Sleep came upon her stealthily,
forcing her to lose her grasp on her frustration. Just before her eyes closed
and her head sunk to the table top, she felt a sudden surge of clarity take
her. She fought sleep, but its momentum had already claimed her. She dreamed.

oOo

The air was a stole
of balmy silk and smelled gently wet. A whisper of sound, a breath of breeze
floated past her ears, touched her face. Beyond the golden shore on which she
stood, lay water like liquid gems, so clear she could count the grains of sand
beneath the crystalline waves. A fish swam toward her out of the deep. It swam
right to her feet and looked up at her with eyes clear and black, then swam
away again.

Piscis, the fish.

Comprehension washed
in on the gentle lake-tide; Kassia knelt and took up a handful of sand. Cool
powder of golden silk slipped between her fingers, revealing a graceful,
serpentine shape beneath its dwindling grains. A tiny burrowing snake curled in
the palm of her hand, its tail in its mouth. Now, she turned questing eyes to
the sky. Far, far away the Sun burned in a field of deep azure and across its
face flew a bird.