by Judith Tarr
“Why haven’t you tried to get him out?”
“I don’t know how,” said Kimeri. “Vanyi won’t even let me talk about it. The other mages pat me on the head and say ‘Yes, yes’ and don’t hear a word. Even Kadin—he says maybe so, but what difference does it make? Dead is dead.”
“And yet you leave him there. Surely there must be something you can do.”
“They won’t let me go outside the palace,” Kimeri said. “Except for the festival, and then they watched me every minute. I did try. I did.” She was almost in tears. “He doesn’t feel anything, not really. He just dreams, and makes me dream, too. I try to help him then. I try to make him feel better.”
Borti was not the kind of person to melt when a young person cried, or even to pay much attention to it unless it flung itself into her arms. Which Kimeri was deliberately not doing.
“Can you show me?” Borti asked.
Kimeri blinked at her, shaking away tears. “Now?”
“No,” said Borti a little too quickly. “I mean, can you show me where the Gate was?”
“I don’t know if I can get out,” Kimeri said.
“Can you come here?”
“I think so,” said Kimeri slowly. “I did before. If it’s night—if you don’t mind that people say the house is haunted—”
“Ah, and so it would be,” said Borti. She was amused, but scared, too. “Tonight? Before the bright moon rises?”
“I can try,” said Kimeri.
The voice inside of her was singing. Soon. Yes, soon.
She told it to be quiet, before somebody heard, and unmade it all.
21
Tonight was a night of the Great Marriage: when both Brightmoon and Greatmoon were full, dancing in the sky together, the blinding-bright white moon and the great blood-red one, so splendid together that they blocked out the stars. Here where the world was so much closer to the sky, the moons seemed near enough to touch. Near enough to knock out of the sky and shatter on the earth, and pour out their blood, white and red, in shining rivers.
Kimeri was dizzy with excitement. She had got out of the house as she had come through the Gate, by making herself a shadow. None of the Olenyai had followed her. Her mother and Vanyi were singing the rite of the moons’ rising; the mages were with them, even Kadin. She should have been there, but she made sure to vanish before anyone could start looking for her.
By the time the Olenyai understood that she had escaped, she was deep in the palace, almost to the room at the end of the hidden passage, and Borti was running toward her, wrapped in a cloak and a hood.
“Quickly,” Borti said, catching Kimeri’s hand as she ran past. “People will be following.”
Kimeri lightened her feet to run faster, and kept up easily with the woman’s long stride. They went by ways that Kimeri did not know, with many twists and turns and doublings back.
Borti knew the palace as well as Hani had ever pretended to: she never hesitated, and never paused when there was a turn to make. In almost no time at all, they had passed through a gate and found themselves in a dark and deserted street.
Greatmoon was up, casting a glow like fire into the sky. Brightmoon would follow in a little while: Kimeri could feel her below the mountain walls, climbing slowly, taking her time. The sun was still close to the horizon on the other side of the sky, staining it a different red than Greatmoon did, more rose-red, fading to palest green and then to purple as it sank. The stars were trying to come out, but tonight they would not last long, not with both moons to drown their light.
Borti paid no attention to the splendor in the sky. She was even more nervous than she had been in the morning, and her thoughts darted almost too quick to follow. More about the king, about the fight they had had, about people who smiled with their faces but who thought terrible things. She was thinking that she should have stayed in the palace, but that she had to come out, she had to get away, it was only for a little while, then she would go back before she was missed. Which did not make sense to Kimeri, since Borti had already been missed: or why had she wanted to run so fast?
She slowed down in the street, just a little, enough to seem purposeful instead of panicked. “You have to lead me now,” she said. “I’ve never been to the house where the Gate is—was.”
“Is,” said Kimeri. She let her feet go heavy again, and turned where her dream told her to go.
It was hard, because the dream, like a bird, flew the straight way, but the streets were not straight at all. They twisted and turned, went up and down, round and about, and stopped in blind walls or closed gates. She had to thread her way through them, less quickly or surely than Borti had come through the palace.
But she did not get lost, and she only ran into one wall, and that turned out to have a door in it, which opened into another street. At the end of that was a stair, then yet another street, and then at last, when they were both winded and ready to rest, a house that looked from the outside like any other house. But no people lived in it. No lights hung in strings along its roof, and no lantern hung by its gate to welcome people as they went past.
This street had people in it, but only a few, and they were not paying attention to a cloaked and hooded woman leading a cloaked and hooded child by the hand. Kimeri decided to venture a light, since the moons’ light shone too dim yet, with Brightmoon just up and Greatmoon keeping more light than it shed.
Her left hand was clutched tight in Borti’s. She freed the right from her cloak and unfolded her fingers from her palm.
The sun in it shone dazzling. She damped it quickly, till it was just bright enough to see by, like a shaded lantern.
She felt Borti’s start of surprise, the stab of fear that disappeared as quickly as it came. Borti was brave, to be so calm about magery, and without warning, too.
By the light of the Kasar they went up to the gate. It was latched but not locked. There was a warding on it, with a taste of Kadin and a hint of Vanyi. Kimeri slipped a bit of shadow-thought into it, until it was sure they were no one and nothing but a night wind and a glimmer of moonlight. Then she slipped through, pulling Borti after her.
oOo
The house was dark and cold, as if summer had never come inside. It smelled of dust and of old stone. Kimeri knew people had lived here, and not long ago, either: mages, Guardians, coming and going through the Gate and into the city. The house had forgotten them.
A spell was on it, a spell of dark and of forgetfulness. It tried to weave itself around Kimeri, but she was ready for it. She sent it running with a flash of the Kasar.
In that clean bright light they walked through empty, dusty rooms. Furniture was as the Guardian had left it, a bed that had been slept in, a chair drawn back from a table, a scroll on it with weights on the corners, the page half written on. Kimeri could not read yet. She was saving that for when she had time to learn it properly.
There was a loaf of bread on the table beside the scroll, green with mold, and a knife beside it, and a withered wheel of cheese. The black wrinkled things in the blue bowl must be fruit.
Borti’s hand was cold in Kimeri’s. She was not afraid of a mageling with a handful of light, but ghosts made her bones shiver. She thought she saw them in every shadow, every flicker of light as they moved.
Kimeri could not think of a way to comfort her. There was a ghost in the house, after all, if only one. She felt him in the innermost room.
It was like the room the mages had taken in the house in the palace, deep inside, walled all around and windowless, but larger—a good deal larger, to hold the Gate. It had been a shrine, Kimeri guessed: the walls were splendidly painted and the floor had tiles like the speaking god’s shrine in the palace.
There was no god here. Only a blank grey wall with the faintest suggestion of an outline drawn on it: posts and lintel, the shape of a gate.
There was a lamp-cluster here, with oil in the lamps, and flint and a striker hanging from the hook on the base. Kadin kept the lamps filled, Ki
meri thought. She wondered if he ever used them. He could make magelight, even darkmages could do that; or he might like sitting in the dark.
He was not there now. He was singing the moons into the sky. Kimeri lit the lamps by thinking about it, because it seemed the right thing to do.
Their light was warmer than the light of the Kasar, and gentler. The lines of the Gate were fainter in it, but the grey of the wall seemed more silvery, as if there were a Gate there still.
Borti’s voice came soft, no more than a whisper. “Are there words one says? An invocation, a calling up of the dead?”
“He’s not dead,” Kimeri said. She hoped her voice was not too sharp. “Can you see where the Gate was?”
“I see a wall,” Borti said.
“That was it,” said Kimeri. “Does it look a little odd to you?”
“It’s painted grey,” said Borti. “Like rain.”
“Like rain,” said Kimeri. “Yes. See, it shimmers. The Gate is broken, but somehow it’s still here. Like a ghost of a Gate. He’s keeping it here by being in it.”
Borti shivered, but she was strong. She did not run, or think about running. “I don’t see anything.”
There was nothing to see. But he was there, in the greyness that looked like a wall but was not. Kimeri wondered what would happen if she touched it with her hand. She was not sure she needed to know.
“Uruan,” she said, which was the Guardian’s name. Names had power, all the mages said so, and the priests, too. “Uruan, can you hear me calling?”
He was trapped in the Gate, drifting, dreaming. All he could see was grey, nothingness, no sight, no sound, no taste, no scent, no touch. Kimeri tried to push through the grey, to give him the touch of her mind’s hand, the sound of her voice. “Uruan!”
Borti gasped. Kimeri, half in her body and half out of it, saw how the wall changed, how its grey turned silver.
There was a shape in it. A body. A face. Uruan was a red Gileni: he was easy to see, dark bronze against the grey, with his bright mane.
oOo
“Begone, foul fiend from the hells below!”
The voice was a brass bellow. It rang in the empty space. It knocked Kimeri down and set Borti spinning, crying out. Uruan struggled in his prison, waking out of his dream into a madness of panic.
Kimeri scrambled to her feet. She was too furious to be afraid. A man stood in the doorway, a preposterous figure, shaved head and shaved face painted half black, half white, and the rest of him ordinary Shurakani brown, which was easy to see because he was naked.
Maybe he thought he was dressed: he was hung everywhere with jangling ornaments, amulets, images, fetishes, things that smelled of black dark and things that smelled of bright light, all jumbled together and jangling against one another. He was dancing from foot to foot, a rattle in one hand, a long and dangerous-looking knife in the other.
“Oh, goddess,” said Borti. She was laughing, though she sounded as if she wanted to cry.
Kimeri was not laughing at all. The man’s jumble of amulets matched the jumble of his power, and it was power, magery all twisted and odd, half real, half pretended.
He was aiming it at the Gate. At Uruan, who was a half-thing himself, half alive and half not, and like to become nothing if the man kept on.
“Stop it!” Kimeri yelled at him. “Stop it! You’re killing him!”
The man turned the force of his power on her. It swayed her, and she could not see for a bit, but she was stronger than it was.
He was dancing and hopping from foot to foot, waving his knife about as if he had the faintest idea how to use it. “Demon! Creature of darkness! Back to thy hells, and thy foul spirit with thee!”
“Oh, come,” said Kimeri, too angry to be polite. “That’s silly. I’m not a demon, and that’s not a foul spirit, that’s a man trapped in a Gate. What in the world are you?”
“He’s an exorcist,” Borti answered for him, since he seemed unable to speak. Demons, it was clear, were not supposed to talk back, still less tell him exactly what was what. Borti went on, “He sends demons back where they came from, and lays ghosts to rest.”
“He’s not much of an exorcist,” Kimeri said tartly, “if he can’t tell a demon from a Sunchild, or a trapped Guardian from a creature of the hells.”
The exorcist blinked. His magic was in rags. Under it he was not a bad man, simply ignorant.
Kimeri was not inclined to be kind to him for that. Even when he said in a completely different voice than the one he had been using, soft and rather diffident, “Have I made a mistake? This isn’t the haunting I came to be rid of?”
“Who sent you?” Kimeri demanded. “This is our house if it’s anybody’s. We certainly didn’t want an exorcist.”
“We send ourselves,” the exorcist said. “Every night of great moment, when the moons are full or the moons are new, or one or both is in a position of power, somebody comes to dance the haunting away.”
“It never works, does it?” Kimeri said. “It’s not going to work now.”
She advanced on him and plucked the knife out of his hand. It made her fingers tingle. It had a black blade; at home it would have been a darkmage’s instrument, and not a pleasant one, either. Usually its blade was poisoned.
This one was not. She broke it across her golden palm and flung the pieces away. “You shouldn’t walk around waving darkblades as if they were kitchen knives. Don’t you know they can drink souls?”
The exorcist opened and shut his mouth. “I don’t—I didn’t—”
“Obviously,” said Kimeri. “So you people think there’s a ghost here, and he walks when the moons are up. He doesn’t, really. He’s trapped in the Gate. It’s just his fetch that walks, trying to find its way out. If you hadn’t interrupted, we might have been able to help him.”
The exorcist looked completely crestfallen. He was not very old, Kimeri saw, for grownfolk. He was maybe as old as her mother. He was full of himself, all fresh and newly initiate, and this was supposed to be his first great charge.
It served him right, she thought nastily, for being such an idiot.
He tried to scramble together his dignity, and his crooked magery with it. “You are a demon,” he said in as steady a voice as he could manage. “You were set here to test me.”
“I am not,” said Kimeri. “I told you that already. People look like this where I come from. Now will you go away? We’re busy.”
That was the wrong thing to say. He had his power all together, and his temper to make it stronger. He rolled it into a ball and threw the lot of it at her, so fast and so hard she could barely get out of the way, and even more barely see where it was going. Her own power lashed out desperately, all anyhow, and struck it sidewise.
There was a blinding flash, a clap of thunder. Kimeri was knocked down again.
But her body did not matter. Her power was flying into the broken Gate, locked with the exorcist’s, and Uruan was right in its path. Holding himself there. Seeing his death, wanting it, wanting to be gone, away, out of this agony of half-existence.
“No,” said Kimeri. She said it in her ordinary voice. In the howling of Gatewinds, no one should have been able to hear it at all, but it was clear, its sound distinct.
The Gate was awake. It should not be—it was dead. But neither should Uruan be alive, and he was. Somehow he and the Gate together had kept it all from falling apart.
The bolt of power struck them both. Something ripped. Something else tore.
It might be the inside of Kimeri’s head. It might be the fabric of the Gate, or the thing that had bound the Gate, knocked it down and fallen on it. Through the gap, something fell—something large and breathing and bruised, that looked around, laughed once as a madman might, and crumpled to the floor.
So that was what Uruan really looked like. He was more like the people here than anybody else in the embassy, copper-bright hair and all. He looked like the prince in Han-Gilen, which was not surprising, since the prince was hi
s elder brother.
His face at the moment was grey, as if he had brought some of the nothingness with him, but that was only shock and unconsciousness. He was very much alive, and very much there, lying on the threshold of the new-waked Gate.
Kimeri scrambled to her bruised knees. Borti was struggling up, too, and the exorcist was starting to come to himself. They were both staring at the Gate. It was awake but not focused. On the other side of it was night, with stars; but no stars that shone on the world Kimeri knew.
They were quiet, and that was what mattered. Kimeri asked them to guard the Gate for her.
They did not exactly agree, but she felt as if they had. They were inside of her somehow, as they were in the Gate. It was strange, but it felt right; they belonged there, they and the Gate both. Nothing would touch that Gate, or pass it, or hurt it, as long as they were there and she was there. She was content with that; she hoped that everyone else would be, too.
22
Kimeri should have known better than to expect that anybody would be reasonable about the new-waked Gate. Especially with Uruan back, as they all thought, from the dead.
Borti had to make the exorcist help her carry him, since Kimeri was too small and too tired from everything she had done; then they had to go by back ways, because a naked exorcist and a hooded woman and a yellow-eyed child carrying an unconscious man through the streets at night was suspicious to say the least. Kimeri had enough power left to cover them all with shadows, which helped.
Vanyi and Daruya met them halfway to the house in the palace, with Olenyai and mages behind. Kimeri could have hidden from them, but she was too glad to see them, even if she would get a right tanning when they had time to think about it.
At least she did not need to explain anything to start with; Uruan was enough to engross them all, and Borti and the exorcist rather faded into insignificance. They were swept along whether they wanted it or not, but no one asked questions, nor said or did anything but keep them under guard.