We climbed the craggy black rocks, found a few broken shells, pink and curly-edged, and sat watching a giant sea beast blow spume into the air some miles offshore. I stretched my arms wide, taking in the smell and feel of this place.
Sitting at my side, Terris drew a pattern in a pocket of sand blown up on the rock. Over and over again he traced the doubled circle, jabbing his finger into the single dot at its center. I watched him, caught by the rhythm of his movements.
“What did you see,” he asked softly, “back there in the Light?”
I sat very still. Breathed. Wrestled with old ghosts. Lost. Breathed again. Knew I couldn’t lie to him.
“I saw the day I should have died,” I said, not sure if my words came as a whisper or a sob. I looked up and met those rainwater eyes. “I saw my son.”
Until that moment, no one else in Laurea knew I’d borne a child. No wonder I couldn’t cry for all those years. How could I grieve for a loss I couldn’t name, not even to myself?
He nodded. “A personal memory, activated by the gate mechanism. And I — ” he went on, “I saw something I could not possibly remember, something that happened hundreds — no, thousands of years before I was born, as clear and bright as if it were today.”
My heart closed, tight as a fist, around the memory. “What did you see?”
“I saw the last time the Starhall gate was used, how it became what it is now.”
I shivered, wanting nothing to do with Starhall secrets, gates or otherwise. My own visions were nightmare enough for one lifetime.
He reached out and grabbed my wrist, as if he didn’t care how dangerous that could be. But his words — and the fire behind them — held me fast. “You don’t understand! It was all there in the Archives, buried in the coded logs. Once we remembered why we built the gates — one in Laureal City and one here in the north. Once we knew what lay on the other side and why we came here. Not everyone had the secret, of course, just the most elite of the gaea-priests. Guardians they were called, real Guardians, not political figureheads. Gatekeepers.”
“Pateros was called Gatekeeper,” I said. “I remember that from the funeral.”
“But no one remembered why, not even him — not even Esme!” His eyes blazed, fire and steel. I didn’t flinch. “No matter what happens to me now — you must remember. Promise me! Promise me you’ll remember!”
I gulped. “Remember what?”
“That the gate exists! Why we came through, why we must guard it!” He relaxed a fraction, let me go. “I saw three of them standing in front of a wall of shimmery stuff. The old one was working some kind of machinery, like we saw in the Northlight dome. The strong one was guiding the apprentice, I think. I saw something clearing in the bright mist. It makes sense there would be three at a time — the old wise one, the one at the peak of his strength, the young one just learning to control the gate mechanism. I think he must have been keyed into it stepwise, gradually like I was to the Starhall. But this time something went wrong — maybe the door that separates here from there was weakened. Maybe — I don’t know.”
He broke off, staring out over the rolling waves. I waited, counting the heartbeats. “And then?”
“Something — I saw something — as big as a Laurean house, round like a mushroom, the color of blood — ” He shivered. “At first I thought it was alive. So did the apprentice. Then the old one said no, it was a pyro — a something. A weapon.”
My jaw dropped open and I no longer felt the crisp sea breeze tugging at my hair. “A weapon?” My hand went automatically to the hilt of my long-knife.
“I didn’t believe it either. But then...it rushed the gate from the other side. Everything it touched — ground, trees, stone — turned to smoke. The edges of the gate began to smolder. I could smell the stench. My eyes burned with it. The Guardians — the two older ones — began rushing around, trying to close the gate. I don’t know if it was too late or the weapon-thing too strong...Kardith, it started to come through!”
“But they did stop it?” I leaned forward, caught. “They must have.”
“Yes, but they were standing too close,” he said, shaking his head. “The explosion caught them just before the gate closed. The bright place was gone; only brick remained. Brick and the gate apparatus. The apprentice was still alive.”
“I hope he smashed the Mother-damned thing!” I cried. I hadn’t realized I too was trembling, as terrified of this awful thing as I was of any ranting gaea-priest.
“It would have been made to withstand tampering. And he was young, so he might not have learned how to turn it off. So he would have done the only thing he could do. He walled it up, did his best to make sure no one else ever dug it up. And never passed on the knowledge of what it was, why it was built, why it must be guarded.”
“And is that so bad? To forget?”
“Maybe,” he said, studying me. “For some. But you won’t forget.”
“I don’t understand what this is all about. Gates, weapons, machines. Besides, it happened a long time ago. As far as I can see, there are no more things on the other side, just waiting to come through.” I got to my feet, brushing sand from my pants. It was hard to feel gloomy with the fresh sea-tang in my face. “You say it’s important to remember, fine. I said I would. But I intend to have you around to do the remembering for both of us.”
A nasty thought nibbled at the back of my mind. “Has it occurred to you, the tweak you’re putting yourself in if you let anybody else know you can do this thing? You may give a shit about how you use it, but there are some very nasty people out there who won’t. And you — or anyone you care about — could be a target for them.”
“Who else knows? There’s my sister,” he counted off on his fingers like a kid, “and Jakon and Grissem. Etch. Nobody I don’t trust.”
“There’s me.”
“You, you’re the one who thinks of these things for me.”
I held my breath as we stepped through, expecting an instant of sizzle, a flash of green and then the frozen white of the caldera. Instead, heat swept over me, laden with the pungent, familiar smell of ripe palm-cactus fruit. I blinked, gasping. My eyes raced over the reddish dunes, softly curved like a woman’s thigh. My knife was in my hand, my legs tensed for action, my breath searing my throat.
“Kardith!” Terris cried, his voice too high and tight for certainty. “Kardith, no!”
The open steppe stretched in one direction, the groves with their branches arching toward the crystalline sky in another. Jorts clustered around a dusty well; ghameli stood tethered beyond them. A pair of women were singing and dipping out water, their wrist bells chiming, children laughing and dodging behind them. Their scarves and robes fluttered in a sudden breeze, bringing me the scent of sandalwood and chirosa bark. A feeling rose up in me, not terror, not anger, no, sharp and melting all at once. I blinked hard.
Terris said something, but I couldn’t make out his words above the pounding of my heart. Something about being sorry, making a mistake.
The flap of the nearest jort was pushed aside and a man emerged. He moved with a knife-fighter’s grace; his beard gleamed like spun red-gold in the sun. He must have thought me a man in my heavy parka, for he lifted one hand in welcome. My knees shuddered.
I whirled to face Terris. “Get me out of here! Anywhere!”
He grabbed my free arm and pulled me sideways. I staggered through a wall of white flame and pulled up gasping, an inch from tumbling into a pool of yellowish, scum-crusted water.
Now I was the one to grab on to him, one-handed as I wasn’t about to put away my knife. He swore, but not at me.
Above us, around us, grayish branches dripped oozing green-black stuff, more slime than moss. Even the sky looked smudged. We stood on a little island of solid ground, lichen over rock and matted weeds. The reek of sulfur in the hot, still air sent my eyes and nose watering. Something squawked in the distance, shrill and ululating, like no bird I’d ever known.
Terris swore again. The steppe was an accident, maybe because he wasn’t yet wise to the ways of those doors of his, but this place — he must have gotten us here in sheer panic. I loosened my grip on him.
“Where are we?” I whispered. At moment, I would have given anything I owned to be back on the steppe, to raise my hands in a stranger’s greeting, to throw myself open to those familiar sights and smells, the dry clean beauty of the dunes.
“We’re still on Harth, maybe south of the Inland Sea.” He stepped carefully over the mounds of yellowed grass. Now that the first shock of the place was fading, I noticed signs of renewal, a spray of violet flowers, a few half-ripe berries. A few blades of green stood like sentinels among their fallen brothers. A water-strider, tiny legs outstretched, skittered across a clear stretch of water. From a thicket, a huge white songbat took wing.
“Why put a gate here?” Terris murmured. “As a warning, a lesson? Or did something come through here? Did they preserve this place deliberately so each generation would be forced to think in terms of all Harth?”
He scraped a layer of glistening mossy stuff off its underlying rock with the edge of his boot. I could see scattered indentations that might once have engraved letters. Terris couldn’t make them out, either.
“Let’s go,” he said at last. “I’ll be more careful this time. I’m sorry about the steppe.”
“I’m not,” popped out of my mouth before I realized it. I thought a moment and went on, “Maybe I’ll go back on my own some day.”
He smiled at me and took my hand.
The light was just as shifting and glare-blinding, but Terris strode through it even more surely, back through the startling green flashes and out again, dimmer and quieter. With a hiss and a searing flash we came shivering on to the caldera plain.
I jumped ahead of Terris, long-knife drawn, to land light and balanced on both feet.
Etch stood nearest us, with an expression of mixed feelings — worry and fear and joy. His eyes were so full, on the steppe we’d say they were all soul. Beyond him, Avi waited between Jakon and Grissem.
Jakon came toward us, and for a moment he seemed no different from Montborne or the steppe priests or anyone else who led only his own people. I raised my blade tip, bringing it between him and Terris. Once I could have killed him and would not. There was no choice this time.
“Put away your knife, Kardith,” said Terris. “Jakon and I have to talk.”
He pushed past me to face Jakon. “Did you know what would happen to me in there?”
“All that I dreamt has been fulfilled,” Jakon answered.
He doesn’t know what the Light is, I realized. He sits in front of it and drums up all these dreams, but he doesn’t know.
He’s never been inside.
“I too have had a vision sent by the Northlight,” Terris said. His voice took on the steely ring of truth. “A terrifying vision. A vision of your people and mine kept apart, two static societies — no matter what the cost. You’re just strong enough so we can’t spread out over your lands and just weak enough to pose no more than a border threat. We’re the only place on Harth that has any technological capability, but we have no frontier, everything’s closed in and watched, and who cares what happens on the steppe?
“But it’s no good,” Terris continued. “They’ve forgotten what it’s all about — the gaea-priests and Guardians. It’s not enough to keep from doing harm, hanging on from one generation to the next, squashing all research except in narrow little projects that go nowhere. Sooner or later, somebody like Montborne comes along to upset that brittle balance, and now it isn’t just Montborne we have to stop, it’s Esmelda.”
Avi moved silently toward Terris, her face white and pinched. I caught something in her movement, a tenseness that sent my skin crawling. I felt her in my blood, moving with all her Ranger’s stealth, cold and deadly intent. Her eyes fixed on her brother, and something in her watched and waited like a coiled sand-viper. All because Terris had mentioned Esmelda?
“You said Esmelda,” said Jakon, looking like he hadn’t understood a word Terris said. “We have no quarrel with her. She has been as much a friend to us as any souther could. If you mean to stop your general’s war, why include her?”
Avi kept coming, and I kept watching her. She moved like satin, like flowing brandy. Etch and Grissem had their eyes on Terris. They didn’t notice. Me, I stood absolutely still. I wanted her to see Terris, only Terris and not me. I held my knife low and hard to spot.
“Esme, our enemy?” I heard the shift in Terris’s voice, something that reminded me of the old dragon. “I must have not spoken clearly. I meant the whole situation being ripe for Montborne to exploit.”
Avi paused, the relief across her face thick enough to smell. My stomach uncoiled and I took a deep breath. Whatever it was had come and passed. But I shook a little as I let the breath out. Terris passed some kind of test out there in the Light and came out changed forever, and now it had happened to me too, just the same. Standing here, not moving a muscle, my knife ready to slice Avi’s throat if she drew her own, these few moments gave a whole different shape to my life. I could go on, but I couldn’t forget.
I’d become what I’d chosen.
And what had Avi become, that she’d draw steel on her own brother to protect some damnable secret of Esmelda’s?
Holy sweet Mother — was this why she’d left home? Had the old dragon somehow forced her to swear a thing like that?
“If it hadn’t been Brassaford,” Terris went on, “he’d have found some other excuse. He sees the end as justifying any means — killing Pateros, me, you if he could — anyone he thinks he needs to.”
Jakon’s eyes narrowed. “I asked you once before, why would you join forces with me against him?”
“For the truth,” Terris said, echoing his first promise to Jakon. “The truth alone.” Truth and steel. He held out his hand, souther style.
After a moment’s hesitation Jakon took Terris’s hand and shook it.
“We are going home now, aren’t we?” said Avi. She had already slung her pack over her shoulders with her good hand. Her face looked less white, but her eyes were still jumpy. “It’ll take at least a week from here.”
“No,” said Terris. “We can make it in a few hours. Get the horses and I’ll show you.”