The Hour of the Gate

by Alan Dean Foster

"I'm sorry," he finally managed to gasp out, "I was only trying…"

  "LOOK TO MY BACK!" bellowed the sun horse.

  Jon-Tom hesitated, then took a cautious step forward and craned his neck. Squinting through the glare, he made out a dark metallic shape that looked suspiciously like a saddle. It was very small and lost on that great flaming curve of a spine.

  "I don't… what does this mean?" he asked humbly.

  "IT MEANS A TRANSFORMATION IN MY ODYSSEY; A SHORTCUT. LITTLE MAN BENEATH THE STARS, YOU HAVE CREATED A SHORTCUT! I CAN SEE THE END OF MY JOURNEY NOW. NO LONGER MUST I RACE AROUND THE RIM OF THE UNIVERSE. ONLY ANOTHER THREE MILLION YEARS AND I WILL BE FINISHED. ONLY THREE MILLION, AND I WILL KNOW PEACE. AND YOU, MAN, ARE TO THANK FOR IT!"

  "But I don't know what I did, and I don't know how I did it," Jon-Tom told him softly.

  "CONSEQUENCE IS WHAT MATTERS, CAUSATION IS BUT EPHEMERAL. EMPYREAN RESULTS HAVE BEEN ACHIEVED, LITTLE MAN OF NOTHINGNESS.

  "AS YOU HAVE HELPED ME, SO I WILL HELP YOU. BUT I CAN DO ONLY WHAT YOU DIRECT. YOUR MAGIC PUTS THIS SHIELD ON MY BACK, SO MOUNT THEN, GUARDED BY ITS SUBSTANCE AND BY YOUR OWN MAGIC, AND RIDE. SUCH A RIDE AS NO CREATURE OF MERE FLESH AND BLOOD HAS EVER HAD BEFORE NOR WILL HENCE!"

  Jon-Tom hesitated. But eager hands were already -urging him toward the equine inferno.

  "Go on, Jon-Tom," said Caz encouragingly.

  "Yes, go on. It must be the spellsong magic that's protecting us," said Hor, "or the radiation and heat would have fried all of us by now."

  "But that little lead saddle, Hor…"

  "The magic, Jon-Tom, the magic. The magic's in the music and the music's in you. Do it!"

  It was Clothahump who finally convinced him. "It is all or nothing now, my boy. We live or we die on what you do. This is between you and Eejakrat."

  "I wish it wasn't. I wish to God I was home. I wish… ahhh, fuck it. Let's go!"

  He could not see a barrier shielding the streaming nuclear material that was the substance of M'nemaxa, but one had to be present, as Hor had so incontrovertibly pointed out. He cradled the battered duar against his chest. That barrier had momentarily lapsed when M'nemaxa had touched down, and a thousand tons of solid rock had run like butter. If it lapsed again, there would not even be ashes left of him.

  A series of stirrups led to the saddle, which was much larger up close than it had appeared from a distance. He mounted carefully, feeling neither heat nor pain but watching fascinated as tiny solar prominences erupted from M'nemaxa's epidermis only inches from his puny human skin.

  It was little different in the saddle, though he could feel some slight heat against his face and hands.

  "Just a minim, guv'," said a voice. A small gray shape had bounded into the saddle behind him.

  "Mudge? It's not necessary. Either I'll make it or I won't."

  "Shove it, mate. I've been watchin' you ever since you stuck your nose int' me business. You don't think I could let you go off on your own now, do you? Somebody's got t' watch out for you. This great flippin' flamin' beastie can't be 'urt, but a good archer might pick you off 'is back like a farmer pluckin' a bloomin' apple." He notched an arrow into his bowstring and grinned beneath his whiskers.

  Jon-Tom couldn't think of anything else to say: "Thanks, Mudge. Mate.'i"

  "Thank me when we get back. I've always wanted t' ride a comet, wot? Let's be about the business, then."

  The serpentine fiery neck arched, and the great head with its bottomless eyes stared back at them. "COMMAND, MAN!"

  "I don't know…" Mudge was prodding him in the ribs. "Shit… giddy up! To Eejakrat!"

  Whether the message was conveyed by the word or the mental imagery connected with it no one knew. It didn't matter. The vast wings seared the earth and a warm hurricane blasted those who were beneath. Those wings stretched from one side of the canyon to the other, and the honclouders, seeing it race toward mem, scattered like gnats.

  A swarm of dragonfly fighters rose to meet them, the Empress' private aerial guard. They attacked with the mindless but admirable courage of their kind.

  Mudge's bow began its work. The soldiers riding me dragonflies fell from their mounts and none of their arrows reached the sun riders. Those that were launched impacted on me body or wings or neck of M'nemaxa and were vaporized with the briefest of sizzling sounds.

  "Hy past them!" Jon-Tom ordered. "Down, over there!" He gestured toward the blunt butte rising fingeriike near the rear of the Pass. Beyond lay the mists of the Greendowns.

  Jon-Tom's attention shifted to concentrate on a single figure standing before a pile of materials and a semicircle of metal forms. Dragonflies and riders tried to break through to do battle with swords, but wings and hooves touched them, and their charred remnants fell earthward like so many sizzling lumps of smoking charcoal.

  The imperial bodyguard sent a storm of arrows upward. Not one passed the belly of that flaming body. Jon-Tom was watching Eejakrat. He held his own spear-staff tightly, ready to pierce the sorcerer through.

  Then his attention was diverted. In the air above the computer floated two faintly glowing pieces of stone. They were so tiny he noticed them only because of their glow. Behind the sorcerer danced the fearful, iridescent green shape of the Empress Skrritch.

  What devastating magic so terrified the imperturbable Clothahump? What was Eejakrat about to risk in hopes of winning a lost war?

  "Down," he ordered M'nemaxa. "Down to the one surrounded by maggots and evil, down to destroy!"

  A whispery sorceral mumbling, rapid and desperate, sounded from the crest of the butte. Eejakrat had panicked. He was rushing the incantation, as others had done before him, though he knew nothing of them. The two glowing shards of stone moved through the air toward the onrushing spirit fire and its mortal riders, and toward each other. Stones and spirit would meet at the same point in the sky.

  They were no more than fifty yards from it and as many more from the butte's summit when M'nemaxa suddenly gave forth a thunderous whinny. The infinite eyes glowed more brightly than the stones as the two came almost together a couple of yards in front of them.

  There was a faint, hopeless scream from Eejakrat below, a desperate croaking Jon-Tom deciphered: "Not yet… too near, too close, not yet!"

  Then the world was spinning farther and farther below them like a flower caught in a whirlpool.

  Gone was the Troom Pass. So too was the butte where Eejakrat had gesticulated frantically before the Empress Skrritch.

  So were the milling mob of Plated Folk plunging to war and the insistent battle cries of the warmlanders.

  Gone were the mists of the distant Greendowns and noisome distant Cugluch, gone too the mountain crags that towered above insignificant warriors. Soon the blue sky itself vanished behind them.

  They still rode the spine of the furiously galloping M'nemaxa, but they rode now through the emptiness of convergent eternity. Stars gleamed bright as morning around them, unwinking and cold and so close it seemed you could reach out and touch them.

  You could touch them. Jon-Tom reached out slowly and plucked a red giant from its place in the heavens. It was warm in his palm and shone like a ruby. He cast it spinning back' free into space. A black hole slid past his left foot and he pulled away. It was like quicksand. He inhaled a nebula, which made him sneeze. Behind him Mudge the otter seemed a distant, diffuse shape in the stars.

  He breathed infinity. The wings and hooves of M'nemaxa moved in slow motion. A swarm of motile, luminescent dots gathered around the runners, millions of lights pricking the blackness. They danced and swirled around the great horse and its riders.

  Where the world had no meaning and natural law was absent, these too finally became real. Gneechees, Jon-Tom thought ponderously. Only now I can see them, I can see them.

  Some were people, some animals, others unrecognizable; the afterthoughts, the memories, the souls and shadows of all intelligent life. They were all the colors of the rainbow, a spectrum filled with life, both mysterious and fam
iliar.

  He began to recognize some of the forms and faces. He saw Einstein, he saw his own grandfather. He saw the moving lips of now dead singers he had loved, and it was as if their music swelled around him in the ultimate concert. He noted that the faces he saw were not old, and showed no trace of death or suffering. In fact the famous physicist's eyes glittered like a child's. Einstein had his violin with him. Hendrix was there, too, and they played a duet, and both smiled at Jon-Tom.

  Then he saw a face he knew well, a face full of fire and light. He concentrated on that face with all his strength, trying to pull it into his brain through his eyes. The face was distinct and warm; it seemed to float toward him instinctively. His whole being glowed with love as it neared him, and suddenly when it touched his lip a flame ignited inside him and he almost lost his seat. It was the Talea gneechee, he knew, and he surrounded it with his entire will.

  "We must go back. Now!" he roared at the fiery stallion.

  "YOU MUST KNOW THE WORDS, LITTLE MAN, OR REMAIN WITH ME UNTIL THE END OF MY JOURNEY."

  What song? Jon-Tom thought. There seemed no music equal to the immensity of space and stars all around him. Every song he had ever heard dried up on his tongue.

  The Talea gneechee seemed to stir someplace deep inside him, and he looked out at the cold blue distance ahead. It was time to go back where he belonged. He couldn't be specific, but he suddenly had a real sense of where he belonged in life and he knew he could get there.

  His mouth opened and his fingertips caressed the duar. A new sound rose, a new voice came both from the duar and from his mouth, and though he had never heard it before he knew it was, finally, his true voice.

  Stars spun faster around him, the universe seemed wrenched for an instant. His head throbbed and his throat burned with the strange wordless song that poured from him like a river a million times stronger than any earthly river.

  Now blue sky hurried toward them, then the snowy caps of mountains. The boundary was back-the luscious, palpable limit of existence. He felt more alive than he had ever in his life.

  "Cor, wot a friggin' ride!" Mudge's joyous voice came from behind him.

  "Love you, Mudge!" screamed Jon-Tom, ecstatic to hear that familiar sound.

  "You're crazy-where the 'ell we been?"

  Everywhere, Jon-Tom thought, but there was no way to say it.

  "THE COURSE OF MY JOURNEY HAS BEEN FOREVER CHANGED," bellowed M'nemaxa. "I HAVE HAD TO CHANGE MY DIRECTION BECAUSE OF THE EVIL IN YOUR WORLD AND NOW MY ROUTE IS ALMOST THROUGH. COME WITH ME TO THE OUTSIDE, LITTLE MAN, YOUR WORLD IS FULL OF DOOM. I WILL SHOW SUCH THINGS AS NO MORTAL SHALL EVER AGAIN SEE."

  "Wot's 'e talkin' about, guv'nor?"

  "Eejakrat's magic, Mudge. Clothahump knew mat they could not control it, and it has created devastation so utter that even M'nemaxa had to detour around it. It's happened before, but in my world. Not here. Look."

  The mushroom cloud that billowed skyward from the far end of the Troom Pass was not large, but it was considerably darker and denser than any of the mists behind it.

  Below them now the last of the Plated Folk army, those who'd been lucky enough to be trapped in the middle of the Pass, were surrendering, turning over their weapons and going down on all sixes to plead for mercy.

  Beneath the now fading mushroom cloud that marked the failure of Eejakrat's imported magic, me butte he'd stood upon had vanished. In its place there was only an empty, radioactive crater. The bomb Eejakrat had been in the process of creating had been a relatively clean one. What remained would serve as a warning to future generations of Plated Folk. It would block the Pass far more effectively than had the Jo-Troom Gate.

  Raming wings slowed. Mudge was deposited gently back on top of the wall. Jon-Tom thanked the flaming being but would not return with him.

  "THREE MILLION YEARS!" M'nemaxa boomed, his neighing shaking boulders from the cliffsides of the canyon.

  "ONLY THREE MILLION. THANK YOU, LITTLE HUMAN. YOU ARE A WIZARD OF UNKNOWN WISDOM. FAREWELL!"

  The vast fiery form rose into the air. There was an earsplitting explosion that rent the fabric of space-time. The gap closed quickly and M'nemaxa had gone, gone back to resume his now truncated journey, gone back to the everywhere otherplace.

  Bodies, furred and otherwise, swarmed around the returnees- Caz, Flor, Bribbens holding his bandaged right arm where he'd taken a sword thrust. Pog fluttered excitedly overhead, and warmlander soldiers mixed queries with congratulations.

  The battle had ended, the war was over. Those Plated Folk who had not perished in the modest thermonuclear explosion at the far end of the Pass were being herded into makeshift corrals.

  Jon-Tom was embarrassed and nervous, but Mudge glowed like M'nemaxa himself from me adjulation of the crowd.

  When the excitement had died down and the soldiers had gone to join their companions below, Clothahump managed to make his way up to Jon-Tom.

  "You did well, my boy, well! I'm quite proud of you." He smiled as much as he could. "We'll make a wizard of you yet. If you can only leam to be a bit more specific and precise in your formulations."

  "I'm learning," Jon-Tom admitted without smiling back.

  "One of the things I've learned is to pay attention to what lies behind a person's words." He and the wizard stared into each other's eyes, and neither gave ground.

  "I did what I had to do, boy. I'd do it again." "I know you would. I can't blame you for it anymore, but

  I can't like you for it, either."

  "As you will, Jon-Tom," said the wizard. He looked past the man and his eyes widened. "Though it may be that you condemn me too quickly."

  Jon-Tom turned. A petite, slightly baffled redhead was walking toward them. He could only stare.

  "Hello," Talea said, smiling slightly. "I must have been unconscious for days."

  "You've been dead," said a flabbergasted Mudge.

  "Oh cut it out. I had the strangest dream." She looked down at the canyon. "Missed all the fighting, I see."

  "I saw you… out there," Jon-Tom said dazedly. "Or a part of you. It came to me and I knew it was you."

  "I wouldn't know about that," she said sharply. "All I know is that I woke up in a tent surrounded by corpses. It scared the shit out of me." She chuckled. "Did worse to the attendants. Bet they haven't stopped running.

  "Then I asked around for you and got directions. Is it true what everyone's saying about you and M'nemaxa and…"

  "Everything's true, nothing's false," Jon-Tom said. "Not anymore. Whatever entered me I sent back to you, but it doesn't matter. What is is what matters, and what is, is you."

  "You've gotten awfully obscure all of a sudden, JonTom."

  He put his hands on her shoulders. "I suppose we have to stay together now.'' He smiled shyly, not able to explain what had happened in Elsewhere. She looked blank. "Don't you remember what you said to me back in Cugluch?" he asked.

  She frowned at him. "I don't know what you're talking about, but that's nothing new, is it? You always did talk too much. But you're wrong about one thing."

  "What's that?"

  "I do remember what I said back in Cugluch," and she proceeded to give him the deepest, longest, richest kiss he'd ever experienced.

  Eventually she let him go. Or was it the other way around? No matter.

  Caz and Hor sat on the ramparts nearby, hand in paw. Jon-Tom shook his head, wondering at that blindness that conceals what is most obvious. Bribbens had disappeared, doubtless to make arrangements for reaching the nearest river. Falameezar was able to help the boatman with that, being a river dragon. That is, he was when he wasn't too busy reeducating his rodent charges about their responsibilities and rights as members of the downtrodden proletariat. Clothahump had gone off to discuss the matters of magic with the other warmlander wizards.

  "What now, Jon-Tom?" Talea looked at him anxiously. "I guess now that you've mastered your spellsinging you'll be returning to your own world?"

  "I don't know." He studied t
he masonry underfoot. "I'm not so sure you could say I've mastered spellsinging." He plucked ruefully at the duar. "I always seem to get what I need, not what I want. That's nice, but not necessarily reassuring.

  "And for some reason being a rock star or a lawyer doesn't seem to hold the attraction it once did. I guess you could say I've had my horizons somewhat expanded." Like to include infinity, he told himself.

  She nodded knowingly. "You've grown up some, JonTom."

  He shrugged. "If experiences can age you, I ought to be the equivalent of Methuselah by now."

  "I'll see what I can do about keeping you young…" She ran fingers through his hair. "Does that mean you'll be staying?" She added quietly, "With me, maybe? If you can stand me, that is."

  "I've never known a woman like you, Talea."

  "That's because there aren't any women like me, idiot." She moved to kiss him again. He edged away from her, preoccupied with a new thought.

  "What's the matter? Not coy enough for you?"

  "Nothing like that. I just remembered something that's been left undone, something that I promised myself I'd try to do if given the chance."

  They found Pog hanging from a spear rack in the middle of the remaining wall. The warmlanders were beginning to disperse, those not remaining behind to guard the Plated Folk forming into their respective companies and battalions preparatory to beginning the long march home. Some were already on their way, too tired or filled with memories of dead companions to sing victory songs. They were traveling west toward Polastrindu or southward to where the river Tailaroam tumbled fresh and clear from the flanks of the Teeth.

  The sun was setting over the fringes of the Swordsward. The poisonous silhouette of the mushroom cloud had long since been carried away by the wind. Their kilts flashing as brightly as their wings, squads of aerial warmlanders in arrowhead formations were winging back toward their home roosts. A distant line of silk-clad shapes showed where the Weavers were wending their way northward along the foothills, and a dark mass was just disappearing over the northern crest of the mountains in the direction of fabled h-oncloud.

  "Hello, Pog."

  "Hi, spellsinger," The bat's voice was subdued, but JonTom no longer had to ask why. "Some job ya did. I'm proud ta call ya my friend."