The Keepers #4

by Ted Sanders

At last Grooma nodded. He hummed happily, so loud and low that it rumbled in Joshua’s chest.

  Dr. Jericho smiled and stepped back. “As we discussed, then.”

  Grooma lifted his dragging arms, still gazing down at Isabel.

  Aored blazed to life. Golden light swallowed the room. For several long moments, Joshua was blinded. As his sight slowly adjusted, he saw Grooma’s grotesque hands moving furiously, pulling thick clinging filaments of yellow fire from his own chest. The Medium.

  Aored was an oval furnace, full of golden lava. Grooma’s eyes, no longer pale and blank, fixed on the stuff with dark ferocity. His fingers worked like the legs of great spiders, and between them the Medium was woven into crystalline shapes—jagged webs and looping flowers and bristling spirals of light. He let them drop down onto Isabel, where the structures clung briefly to her flesh and were absorbed, like dangling strands of honey pulled loose from the whole and left to fall back into itself. Isabel stood frozen, back arched and arms thrown out.

  “You’ll kill her,” Mr. Meister said, and Joshua was shocked that he didn’t need to shout. The storm brewing in Grooma’s hands was violent and flashing, but utterly silent.

  Dr. Jericho shook his head, staring hungrily at Grooma and Isabel. “No,” he said. “You are blind.” And then he pulled something from his pocket, handing it back to Mr. Meister. Mr. Meister fumbled, grasping.

  His glasses. The oraculum, his Tan’ji. With it, he could see the flows of the Medium in ways that no one but Tuners and Makers could. As Joshua watched, the old man slipped the lenses onto his nose and tipped his face up at what Grooma was doing.

  His mouth fell open.

  Dr. Jericho began to laugh. “The universe finds a way to restore itself. See how the fears you surrendered to all those years ago have come back to roost, to become a thing you could not have imagined. And you will thank me, when it is done.”

  Isabel sank to her knees. Grooma’s fingers were slashing knives, jabbing needles, swooning birds. The Medium poured from them and into her body, an unending shower of lacy light.

  And then suddenly Grooma grunted and staggered back, lifting his head. The light went out; the hanging strands of the Medium splashed noiselessly to the floor and vanished, plunging the room into darkness. Isabel began to keen sharply, as if in pain.

  Was it done? Was it over? Joshua strained to see. But then Dr. Jericho’s voice cut through the gloom, angry and demanding.

  “Den’desh?” he barked. “Desh’du volgra, Grooma?”

  Grooma answered him, the first words he’d spoken, his deep voice like a foghorn. “Ji mog Altari,” he said.

  Footsteps, running. Dr. Jericho, shouting. The two lazy Mordin were anything but lazy now, hurrying out of the room, loping like giant wolves. As Joshua’s eyes relearned the dark, he saw Grooma turning in slow circles, looking up at the roof of the chamber, clearly upset by something he’d sensed, somewhere in the tunnels above. Or not something, but someone. Unexpected visitors had entered the pit.

  And Joshua knew who they were. Grooma’s final word seemed to burn and echo in his ears, filling him with hope and dread.

  Altari.

  Chapter Three

  The Empath

  APRIL WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE IN THIS PLACE.

  And also she was.

  Finding her way here hadn’t been easy, but also it had. In a way, it had been too easy.

  Here in the most remote halls of Ka’hoka, the Veil of Lura was an ocean of striped light—endless suspended waves of drifting radiance, towering above a barren seafloor. There wasn’t supposed to be a way through the Veil, really, which was the whole point. The Veil was meant to hide a thing that should never be found, but April had found it again, all on her own, buried in the folded light.

  The Mothergate.

  It stood before her now, a yawning black abyss lit with slowly streaking stars. She could not have said whether the Mothergate had size, or shape. There was no size here. The gate was enormous, something she could have swept into her palm. Through it, she could sense the other two Mothergates, fabulously distant and immediately nearby. Through it, she could sense . . .

  Everything.

  She laid two fingers against her left temple, pressing the silver curls of the Ravenvine against her flesh. Through her Tan’ji—which she wore constantly, tucked snugly around her ear—she could share in the unshareable. If she’d thought she’d understood what it meant to be an empath before, she now knew that she’d understood nothing. She could listen at the doorways to other minds, yes, but some minds were off-limits. Or so she’d been told. In the outside world, she could only listen to the minds of animals, their thoughts coming to her through the vine. She’d gotten so good at it that sometimes she felt like she could almost become the animals she encountered, letting their thoughts run wild through her own—their emotions, their senses, their memories. Meanwhile the minds of humans, and Altari, and even the Riven, were forbidden to her.

  But not here. Here nothing was forbidden. Even if none of it made sense.

  The Mothergate spouted a weeping river of thought, pouring through the vine and into April like wind through a tree, rattling her, threatening to tear her down. She couldn’t understand any of it, not really. She felt certain specific things, absolutely—there were stubborn eddies in the flow, for example, knotted and troubling, and thoughts slipped from these patches, catching in her mind. Undone and again. Here and then. There and now. Over and after, undone and redone. They repeated themselves like chants, strange and familiar, flickers of clarity. But everything together was all too much—too strong, too wide, too deep, as if everyone and everything that had ever lived were speaking at once, and their voices had become a great chorus. A chorus too grand for the singers themselves to ever hear.

  Except for April.

  This was the river that poured from the Mothergates. This was the Medium. But not really a river, April learned as she listened. More like the bloodstream of the universe itself, its pulse ten million hammers striking ten million anvils. With each blow a new hammer, a new anvil, more beats, more voices, more threads, more story. She heard everything. She heard nothing. She realized she was crying. Her tears were in the story too.

  “One could drown, could they not?”

  April spun around. Sil’falo Teneves stood there, awash in the slowly sweeping light of the Veil, like a sunken statue. The Altari gazed at April as if she had been watching her all along, as if she had been here even before April arrived.

  April started to wipe away her tears, but then didn’t bother. Like so much in this place, Sil’falo Teneves, Keeper of the Starlit Loom, was a twisted skein of contradictions. Distant and present, young and old, monstrous and exquisite, frightening and comforting. She stood there as if made of marble, long hands folded, the great oval pendant around her neck so black that it gleamed with unlight. April and the others had discussed this pendant before, whether it could be some kind of link to Falo’s Tan’ji, the mysterious Starlit Loom. Every Keeper could instantly recognize a Tan’ji when they saw it, and this pendant definitely wasn’t one, but still . . . there was something powerful about it, magnetic. The same kind of pull pouring now through Falo’s gaze. In each of her dark eyes, the peculiar halo unique to the Altari blazed like the corona of an eclipse.

  “Could I?” April managed to ask. “Drown, I mean?”

  “It has happened,” said Falo, her beautiful stillness flitting instantly into graceful motion. She glided up next to April. “When other empaths, weaker than you, have followed the song of the Mothergate into the Veil. When they have lingered too long, listening.”

  April turned back to the Mothergate, its endless depths. “What is it? That song? It’s the Medium, I know. But it’s . . . more.”

  “You said it yourself, when you first came here yesterday. It is everything.”

  “Life,” said April simply.

  “The echoes of life. The felt presence of every mind everywhere. We—and every living
thing—are the witnesses that give shape to the universe, simply by being alive, by seeing what we see. And the universe knows that it is seen, simply by becoming what it becomes.”

  “And the Mothergates?”

  “Through the Mothergates, we are witness to that becoming.”

  April actually laughed out loud, a giddy burp of joy that was uncomfortably close to a giggle. Falo’s words were absurd and circular, water spiraling around a drain but never going down. And yet April understood them completely.

  “The universe is every story, braided into one,” April said dreamily, the words blooming in her mind like unexpected flowers. “And through the Mothergates the universe is telling that story back to us. The power of the Medium is the power of that telling.”

  Now it was Falo’s turn to laugh. Their laughter also belonged to the story, a tiny thing—like the faintest curve of shine on the surface of a single drop of water, falling somewhere-sometime in a downpour a million miles wide, a million years long.

  “Yes,” Falo said. “Thank you. In all my days of trying, I have never said it quite so well.”

  “You’re being kind,” April said. “I know there’s more to it, layers I don’t understand yet.” She looked up at Falo. “But if it’s a story, the book is closing soon. The Mothergates are dying.”

  “Yes. The story will go on, of course, but the telling will soon fade from our hearing. As if a window where we’ve been eavesdropping is about to close.”

  Falo let the words hang in the air, clearly expecting April to ask the obvious question. The Mothergates would close soon. The Medium would cease to flow. And when it did, every Keeper would be severed, dispossessed—a condition most Keepers couldn’t hope to survive for even a single day. But April believed the obvious question had been asked and answered, yesterday when she and Horace and Chloe first stood before the Mothergate. She believed in the answer Falo had given.

  Some may survive.

  “I’ve been trying to hear,” said April quietly. She pointed to the Ravenvine, buried in her auburn hair. She tapped the tiny black flower that hung suspended just at the entrance to her ear. In this place, so close to the source, her Tan’ji was aflame with power. But not power enough. “I’ve been listening to the Mothergate, but it doesn’t make sense. I suppose I’m just not strong enough.”

  “No one could ever be so strong.”

  “Not even you?”

  Falo’s eyes widened, the Veil’s light swooning across them. “I am not an empath,” she protested. “I am a Maker. I feel the Medium the way a child feels cloth. I can fold it and shape it and tie it, yes. I can measure its strength and grain. Meanwhile, in this place, you can feel the rub of every fiber in every thread, tangling with their neighbors near and far, up and down along every endless length. Here at the very source of the Medium, the Ravenvine lets you hear things no one else can. Not even me. But you could never hope to understand it all.”

  April shrugged. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to understand it all. Still, she’d come back here, hadn’t she? She let the Mothergate’s symphony flow through her for several moments, basking in it, letting its power take her breath away. “Anyway, I do understand some of it,” she said after a while.

  Falo looked down at her sharply. “Is that so?”

  “Tangles, you said. I feel them. Knotted-up messes, clumps of contradiction and repetition, and they’re sort of . . .” April held out her hands, curling her fingers into spread claws, twisting her hands together, trying to describe it. “Ripping at each other. Pulling themselves into each other. Like bugs in a spiderweb, wrestling themselves to death, and taking the web with them.”

  Something desperate seemed to tremble in Falo’s eyes as she listened to April speak. Some kind of dread relief. Like she knew everything April was telling her, but had never had someone else say the words to her.

  “Yes,” Falo said. “And these tangles are the danger. They will be the death of everything we know.”

  “But not if the Mothergates close,” April said, surprised she didn’t feel more fear. “The tangles wouldn’t even be there if we couldn’t sense the Medium, and the only reason we can sense the Medium is because of the Mothergates. So when the Mothergates close, the danger will go away. Is that right?”

  Falo knelt swiftly and grasped April’s hands, her long fingers swallowing her arms up to the elbow. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, precisely right. And soon the Mothergates will close. It won’t be long now.”

  “It was never long to begin with,” April said, turning to watch the Mothergate, feeling woozy from the relentless flow of the Medium that poured from it. So much time and space. So many minds. She gestured at the looming black mass, pulsing beneath the light of the Veil. “This was just a moment. The Mothergates. The Tanu. Just a moment in the grand scheme of things.”

  “A moment that now must end,” Falo said, nodding. “Are you afraid?”

  “No,” said April. “Or yes. Will you tell me what the tangles are?”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re . . .” And what were they? Next and again. Everywhen at once. Everywhere here. “I was going to say familiar, but that’s not quite right. It’s more like . . .” She cocked her head at Falo. “Do Altari dream?”

  Falo nodded. “Often, and deeply.”

  “Have you ever dreamed about someone you know—a friend or a brother or something—but then when you wake up, you realize that in your dream they had the body of a stranger? Strange voice, strange face. But in the dream, you knew absolutely who they were?”

  “I have had such dreams, yes.”

  “Well, these tangles I’m feeling through the Mothergate—they make me feel like I’m outside a dream like that. Except I never actually had the dream. When I listen to those tangles, I hear things I know I ought to recognize, wearing disguises I never saw through.”

  Falo leaned closer, her smooth, ancient face alight. “This is precisely the manner in which other empaths have drowned. They lingered before the Mothergates, struggling to hear that which they were too frightened to understand. But you are made of sterner stuff. What do you know, April Simon?” Falo held up a finger as long as a painter’s brush. The rings inside her eyes contracted, thickening intensely, darting toward the tip of the Ravenvine at April’s temple. “Do not listen. To listen is to be awake outside the dream. In this place, our lives are the dream—the dream of the universe. Tell me what you know.”

  April tried to pull herself away from the Ravenvine, to quiet the roar of voices in her head, the pulse of a witnessed universe full of life. It was like trying to shut down a waterfall. Promises unmade. Paths untaken. Matter into matter. One or another or another.

  Falo squinted at her. “You said you weren’t afraid.”

  “To be fair, I also said I was,” April replied. She lifted her eyes high into the Veil, letting the sight of it help quell the raging river of the Medium in her head.

  When April still didn’t speak, Falo said, “Is your mind not your own?”

  “I’m trying to let it be, if you’d just give me a second.”

  But Falo wouldn’t let up. “When you heard those tangles through the Mothergate, what named shadows walked that dream? I believe you know. What do those tangles make you think of?”

  “The Fel’Daera,” April blurted out, and then she slapped her hand across her mouth. What was she saying? Horace was her friend. The Fel’Daera had saved her life. And Falo herself was its Maker.

  “I don’t know why I said that,” April said. And she didn’t. She hadn’t even thought it, really.

  But it wasn’t wrong.

  Falo’s expression didn’t change. “You are an empath,” she said. “You have tasted the mind of the universe, and the Fel’Daera, it seems, weighs heavy on that mind. But not just the Fel’Daera, I think.” She nodded, urging April to go on. April slowly lowered her hand. The Ravenvine was silent at last, her thoughts her own once more.

  “Horace,” she said. “And Chloe
too. The Alvalaithen. Joshua and the Laithe. You and Gabriel and Brian and Mr. Meister. Every Tan’ji, all of us and our instruments.” She hesitated. Undone and again. Here and then. “The Fel’Daera,” she said one more time, and she shrugged an apology she wasn’t sure Falo needed.

  Falo released her hands and stood swiftly, rising high into the light of the Veil. Her face was kind. “You are not the most powerful empath I have ever met,” Falo said. “But you are perhaps the wisest.”

  April chewed her cheek, considering. “I can live with that. But I still don’t really get it . . . the tangles, the knots. What does it have to do with—”

  “There are layers you don’t understand, you said. It is time for you to understand them.” She turned her back on the Mothergate and began walking away.

  April hurried after her, heart fluttering. And although she’d wandered for what felt like a mile trying to find the Mothergate in the first place, now she took no more than ten steps before she found herself stumbling out of the light and into the vast stone chamber deep behind Falo’s quarters. The Veil of Lura loomed behind them, a brilliant rippling curtain, stretching wide and high to walls and a ceiling April could not see.

  The shock of leaving took April’s breath away. “That was fast,” she said, trying to sound at ease.

  “It was what I wished it to be,” Falo said with a shrug.

  A rattling croak greeted them, rolling across the stone. With heavy thrusts of his great black wings, Arthur lifted off from the floor a hundred feet away and flew at April, squawking softly. She smiled as the raven approached, opening the vine to him. The bird’s thoughts sprouted easily in her mind.

  Welcome. Friend. Happy.

  April didn’t so much hear these things as feel them, as though they had come from herself. A swell of wetness rose in her eyes. Arthur’s thoughts were so simple and clean—tidy little gifts compared to the torrential consciousness that poured from the Mothergate. She wallowed in them gladly.

  Happy. Friend. Food.

  “You waited for me,” she told him as he swooped in to land on her shoulder. The raven shuffled, digging his talons into the leather shoulder perch Brian had made for her. Her head received only a mild battering from Arthur’s clumsy wings as he got situated, a soft clunking she felt both in her skull and—through the vine—the bones in her wrist and forearm that matched the bones in Arthur’s wings. He plucked lightly at her hair with his thick beak, the heavy ruff of feathers around his neck puffing slightly.