The Gate that Locks the Tree

by Sharon Lee

  Cold and wind seeped in, and then all heat fled as the crystals of ice flowed around the opening, top and bottom.

  Toragin dutifully used the shovel, pushing the snow away from the door, squinting against the blowing snow, the wind howling in her ears, awed by the power of the storm.

  There were places on Liad where it snowed, but Liad’s weather was well-tracked and one needn’t generally be where it might snow unless snow was the goal. Here weather was never so well-behaved. It had said as much in the planetary guide, when she had researched Surebleak, but – understanding the theory is not the same as understanding the fact.

  The driver leaned in at the top of the door, holding on with a gloved hand. Between the wind and the uncertain footing the position looked precarious. The driver’s voice was strained as he pointed toward the back seat.

  "Miss, if you can reach that broom and hand it out?"

  Toragin turned, awkwardly seized the implement and dragged it over the seat, turning back in time to hear a muffled yell. She caught a glimpse of a gloved hand tracing a clear spot on the window glass as it slid, and there was another yell, this time of pain, as something thumped on the side of the taxi.

  The car door fell back, closing with a dull thud.

  Chelada complained.

  "Out," she said quite clearly. "Toweeell."

  "Oh, not now!" Toragin's voice carried a desperate overtone against the wind and clatter of snow.

  "Help me, Miss, I’m under!"

  Under? What could that mean?

  Under?

  What?

  Chelada spoke again.

  "Towellll!"

  TOWELS.

  Fiber towels from the roll helped staunch the blood – Toragin had never seen so much blood in her life. The driver’s legs were both scraped and bleeding. She thought that was all the trouble, and certainly enough, and dragged the driver out from beneath the vehicle by hauling on one arm, while he used the other in a swimming motion against the snow.

  Then, with blood on her gloves and the driver’s cold-weather undersuit struggling to keep temperature they’d both tried to rise.

  It was obvious instantly, as they’d held onto the door and pulled, that there was some kind of urgent damage to the driver's right leg. Or to the foot.

  Toragin was no med-tech, though she had some training in identifying and treating veterinary issues like blocked urinary tracts, pregnancy, hairballs. She didn’t think she was looking at a broken leg, but even light touches to the side of the leg, low down, and the top of the foot, showed serious swelling. There was bleeding, too, which she wrapped with a precious cleaning cloth meant for Chelada – the leg didn’t feel right to her – might there be a splinter of bone there?

  "Can you drive?" asked the driver, panting. "There’s no autopilot in this thing."

  "Aren’t we stuck?" she countered.

  A pause then, while the wind counterpointed the silence of the cab. There were clicks that matched the rhythm of the flashing yellow, green, and red lights outside the cab, and there was Chelada’s breathing, getting louder like it did when she was going into a deep sleep.

  Finally the driver spoke.

  "We are stuck, but maybe not so bad. Might be able to pull it loose, if you can drive it. Else ..."

  From the back seat came Chelada's worried mutter. Yes, thought Toragin. First, they had to arrange the inside of the cab so that she could occupy the driver's seat.

  The best bet, all things being what they were with that foot, was either for the driver to let Toragin climb over him, possibly dislodging the cab, or –

  "I can try to walk around," Toragin said.

  "Don’t fall, but try. Very slick!"

  With snow and wind flapping the hood of her coat she managed to walk around the front of the car, avoiding the slick streaks where the driver’s worn boots had lost traction and carried them and their occupant well under the car.

  Opening the door was harder – the driver having dragged himself into the other seat there wasn’t sufficient purchase for a one-legged push on the door to be much help. Chelada’s voice from the back seat gave Toragin an extra urgency – she was afraid she’d heard that sound from an expectant cat-mother before.

  "Point and shoot," the driver said. "You engage the car with this button and just aim it. Now, my plan was to go really really really slow to try to get some traction, and then aim, like I said, along this little ridge. Aim just to the right of the ridge at first, and then when we get purchase, you’ll turn it, just a little, back toward the rest of the road. That ought to do it!"

  Toragin’s experience as a fair-weather driver was hard to translate to this spot, this now.

  The doing, after a few minutes of effort, just didn’t. Tires spun and the car chattered side-wise just the smallest bit, ending up, so Toragin thought, even deeper in the morass of snow and ice. The rest of the road was either across the ice ridge in front of them, if the turn-loop they’d used to avoid the on-coming lorry was traversable at all, or it was behind them by multiple car lengths.

  Breathing was loud in the car, again. Toragin could see the driver dabbing at one gashed leg slightly.

  "If I take the shovel and dig until I reach dirt, can I put that under the wheels and ..."

  The driver considered her briefly.

  "Not snowbred, are you? I mean, you just about got me in the car, with us both working. You think you have snow-shifting muscles? Can you move gravel that’s froze together? Gets hard fast."

  There was more silence. In the back seat, Chelada’s breathing was faster and louder.

  The driver spoke again.

  "How much did your boots cost? Where’d you get 'em? Did someone help you or did you just buy them off the rack?"

  Toragin bristled. She doubted she’d ever talked about the cost of anything with a casual stranger and why now?

  "That’s not something I share!"

  "Calm down, Miss. I can’t go nowhere with this leg. Cab's stuck. I’m trying to figure if we can get you to walk out for help or not, and if you bought cheap or stupid, it ain’t gonna work."

  ACT THREE

  In the Hall of the Mountain King

  Enter Talizea, Miri, Jeeves, Val Con, the Tree,

  clowders of cats and kindles of kittens

  UPHILL THE WIND WAS stronger than on the roads below, the flattened plateau a left-over of Surebleak’s early days, when the company used this spot to prove their claim and take the first modest dense-lode of timonium.

  On one side of the road, not quite as exposed to the weather, due to being tucked back into a grove of small sturdy trees, Yulie Shaper’s holding huddled against the storm. A goodly-sized property, with house and outbuildings above ground, most of the real holdings were subsurface. Long-dormant market gardens were coming into their own after generations of disuse.

  Also above-ground, between house and subterranean gardens, a small, brave Tree, in fact a planted branch of the larger Tree in whose shadow it lay in the evenings of the summer’s brighter days – did not so much huddle as dare the winds that shook it.

  If the larger Tree communicated with the smaller there was no sign of it amidst the fury of the storm. The large Tree stood shoulders above the rest of the plateau, dwarfing the vehicles parked on the outside of the small fenced drive as well as the several more inside that were not garaged. For that matter the Tree dwarfed the house that circumscribed the Tree’s ancient trunk. A walker outside the gates might have noticed the way the Tree absorbed the local winds, might have realized that the spirals and eddies carried snow that had not only been deflected from the house and Tree but from the nearby grounds, and to a lesser extent even the smaller Tree was spared the worst of the storm's abuses.

  Outside, then, snow and wind, filling the air with energy.

  Inside Jelaza Kazone, the house, the wind was distant, the fallen snow as much as the ancient stone serving to muffle the roar. The directed energies moderated by the Tree’s gathering and dropping of s
now, by the local wind patterns born under the branches and reaching out to the very edges of the plateau were invisible inside, even to those with surveillance cameras available.

  Though it was quieter inside the house than out, the storm's energies still made themselves felt to the inmates.

  Talizea was particularly alert to the storm. She, like a number of the other residents, had never experienced a storm quite like this – indeed, the house itself had in all of its many Standards never had seen so much snow in such a short time, so much wind burdened with so much precipitation all at once. The child was not quite comfortable with the wind-sounds, muffled as they were, and her edge of alertness gathered around her and drifted onto others.

  Talizea’s cats – for usually she had an honor guard of two or three – were this evening increased by a half dozen, or perhaps more. The cats shifted position as if taking point when a particular blast of air from the northeast slammed the same windows twice.

  The child’s mother, Miri, was also alert to the wind. The other sounds she knew from her past, especially the sound of snow sliding, peeling from a wall or window ledge or branch, to fall with a slow whomp. Miri doubted she’d ever felt this safe or this warm in a storm like this as she did tonight, but – she’d never had her child in hand during a blizzard; so she, too, was alert.

  The cook and other staff walked carefully, listening. They too, with decades of experience in-house, and generations of back-story, were new to this kind of storm, and this much storm. Even Jeeves, butler, security, and possibly the best military mind in the system – wandered the floor as if calculating and cataloging all the new sounds and all the potential dangers. His wheels played the floorboards like a xylophone, the ancient wood toned by the feet of generations of clan members.

  It was perhaps the robot’s musical movements that brought Val Con yos’Phelium from the delm's office, where he had been called to speak with the so-called boss of Surebleak Transport. Mr. Mulvaney's plan was to consolidate several local small trucking operations under his company's name, and thus gain the benefits of numbers for all. It was a plan ill-suited to Surebleak and the current regulations governing the Port Road. Still, Mr. Mulvaney kept in touch, but never during the Road Bosses office hours.

  Finishing the call with less than the abruptness it merited, Val Con stepped out of the office, aware of Jeeves' pacing, of the wind, and something ... else. At first, it seemed to be Tree-touch; on consideration, though – not entirely so. Was the storm so desperate that it concerned the Tree?

  Now, there was an unsettling thought.

  Val Con tarried another moment, trying to remember the last time the Tree had seemed – concerned. Nothing came to mind.

  Which was possibly even more unsettling.

  Frowning slightly, he moved down the hall, silent in soft house shoes, heading for the room that had become Jelaza Kazone's center.

  The ruckus room was quiet, where quiet encompassed the snoring of cats, the wrestling of kittens, the crackle of paper as Talizea fingered her book; and another, as Miri turned a page.

  They sat together in the pillow corner, tucked comfortably under the same blanket. There were cats atop the blanket, curled next to the quiet readers, several purring.

  Val Con dropped to the blanket beside Talizea, rescuing his own book from under the chin of Merekit, who found every object a pillow.

  "I am released," he said.

  "'bout time," Miri commented, looking up at him with a lopsided grin. "Like to find who gave that loobelli the delm's comm number."

  "That would be interesting," Val Con agreed. The sound of wheels rolling along wood caught his attention, and he called out.

  "Jeeves, will you join us?"

  "At once, Master Val Con."

  Indeed, almost immediately the door opened silently and the robot’s headball flashed blue-and-violet greetings to Talizea, who laughed and, lacking a headball with the appropriate capabilities, flapped her hands in reply.

  More cats arrived in the wake of the butler. They, like Val Con, seemed to have ears lifted, trying to track a sound they could not quite hear.

  "Jeeves, tell me if you might, is there something amiss? Are we forgetting something, overlooking a small thing that needs done? Have we already forgotten something? Is there a ... a problem? Is the house – unsettled?"

  Jeeves, who could instantaneously send pinbeams across space, who could directly read the planetary defense nets, who could communicate with intelligences far from human, flashed a subdued fog-green to the assembled.

  "I understand the question to be: Is the house unsettled? Working."

  Val Con and Miri, Road Boss, Delm of Korval, looked at each other.

  "Working?" Miri repeated.

  "Apparently so."

  Val Con glanced about, taking in the sheer numbers of whiskers on display.

  "Do we have this many cats, cha’trez?"

  He swept his arm out, encompassing those in the room, and inferring as yet untold numbers in the halls.

  One of the newcomers – a fluffy grey cat with large black feet – caught Val Con's eye.

  "Is that not Yulie’s favorite? Jeeves, have they all come to us for safety in the storm? Is there danger?"

  Jeeves repeated the word, head ball flashing. "Danger?"

  "Working still?"

  Val Con and Miri exchanged another glance, each feeling the other trying to shrug off unease.

  At that moment, came the sound of thunder – a distant rattle – then more, like cannon fire near the front gates. Val Con snapped to his feet as cat ears swiveled.

  Silence followed, soft whomps were more felt than heard, as the thunder-shaken snow fell from the branches of the Tree, visible through the windows overlooking the inner garden.

  Talizea looked around, an expression of grim concentration on her small face. Several cats detached themselves from nearby clowders and came over to her, draping themselves across her lap and tucking against her sides.

  Jeeves gave what might be termed a mutter in a human, a small sound of frustration or disbelief.

  "Sir," he said formally, head-ball a steady pale orange. "As usual, you have astutely assessed the situation. The cats – all of them – find the weather to be unusual. The cats from Liad, you understand, are not yet entirely acclimated – they have perhaps not assimilated all the tales and information shared by the local cat clans. The local cat clans are not yet fully synced, you might say, with the information shared by the cats who have lived undertree, and who of course bear the memories of the generations who went before."

  "Among the cats, there is uncertainty. The Tree is uncertain as well."

  Miri rose and leaned gently against Val Con's side, arms folded tightly across her chest.

  "So," she said, "being uncertain makes the cats unsettled, which we feel, since the cats bring us so much news?"

  She unfolded her arms – tapped Val Con on the shoulder –

  "You been holding out on me, Tough Guy? Tree been slipping you inside information?"

  "Cha’trez, I think the Tree has not been in touch with me today, certainly not to the point of passing coded messages via the cats!" He paused.

  "Jeeves, I wonder if you might be able to tell me exactly how you and the Tree communicate, or you and the cats? How is it that you know that the Tree is unsettled if it has not shared this directly with me?"

  The head-ball brightened momentarily.

  "I believe that I cannot precisely explain that, sir," Jeeves said earnestly. "It does seem that certain of the – means – of sharing information among us all are less sharply defined than they might be, almost a matter of habit rather than content.

  "But on the day, yes, the energy level has been strange in the lower atmosphere. That, combined with an unpredicted bomb cyclone, resulted in the storm growing much larger than expected. That led to a – revelation of error, and – forgetfulness, on the part of the Tree."

  Miri put a hand on Val Con’ shoulder, then settled h
er chin on it. With her other hand she made a rolling motion –

  "Please go on," she said, "if there’s more."

  "Yes, thank you. It appears that something has been forgotten, or understood – incorrectly. Now that it has come clear to me, I must inform you that there are visitors on the way."

  "Visitors," Miri repeated, and Val Con added.

  "On the way from where, I wonder? I mean to ask after an arrival time."

  "Ah," said Jeeves. "Tonight."

  "In that?" Miri twisted her free hand overhead, perhaps miming the storm without.

  "Yes," said Jeeves, head-ball losing a bit of brightness. "In fact, if you will permit, we – that is, the Tree and myself, with the cat clans, have a request to put before the House."

  Val Con turned his head and caught Miri's eye over his shoulder. He raised an eyebrow. She wrinkled her nose.

  He turned back to Jeeves.

  "Please continue," he said politely.

  "Yes," Jeeves said again. "It would be good, for the House and for projects undertaken by those of the House which date before, even well before, our removal to Surebleak – if we might welcome guests. Soon. Tonight, in fact. It would be good if a guesting suite, or several, might be made ready for use."

  Once again, Val Con surveyed the room, and the cats therein. Inside his head, he heard Miri laughing wryly. He felt a bump against his knee, and looked down, to find that they were surrounded by cats, tails held high, purring, and bumping.

  "Tonight?" Miri’s voice did not hide her wonderment. Talizea shrieked laughter at the circling felines, and Val Con asked.

  "How many, and who?"

  "I believe at least two, but, given the weather, there may be more. As to who they are – I do not believe we have a permissive agreement to share that information. Formerly, we have had a coded arrangement. I speak of that pair of guests. The others, if there are others, will be with us as storm-wrack. Travelers in need."

  Val Con was silent. Miri was silent. Talizea was purring at a cat.