“Very well,” Albert said. “Pai Hu did say that he would deign to inform you when we had crossed the Ninth Gate.”
“And I will hold my attempt,” Pearl said, “until he does so. That way, your team will provide a distraction.”
Albert turned to Brenda, “You okay with your part in this? No dishonor if you choose to back out.”
Something in Albert’s inflection made Pearl suspect that Gaheris had insisted on this as a condition of his permitting Brenda to participate.
“Absolutely,” Brenda said. “I’m the only one who can make the passage out of the sidhe into the Lands. Our friends are in trouble and there’s no way I’m not going to try to save them. No way.”
Those last two words were spoken directly to Gaheris, who nodded acceptance, smiled slightly, and reached for the mustard.
“Fine,” Albert said, and his tone made the single word an accolade. “Parnell will set up his gate into the sidhe from the same warehouse in which we set the First Gate.”
“There won’t be interference from two such different gates so close to each other?” Gaheris asked.
“Parnell, Righteous Drum, and Shen worked through the details yesterday, after Righteous Drum finished with Pearl,” Albert said, and this time his tone added, as you would know if you had been here. “There should be no problem, and the warehouse is already well warded against outside interference.”
A long silence, broken only by chewing, followed this statement. The doorbell rang and Nissa sprang up.
“Come on, Lani. That will be Joanne.”
Lani got up slowly but obediently. Her round face was preternaturally serious as she dragged her new pink daypack with its brightly stenciled array of manga-style bunnies from under her chair.
“Bye, everybody,” Lani said blowing a general kiss. She went over to Pearl. “Don’t worry about the Ghost Lady.”
Pearl kissed Lani on one fresh cheek. “Can I have a kiss for luck?”
Lani threw her arms around Pearl and hugged with surprising passion. Then, almost as an afterthought, she bestowed the requested kiss. Smiling now, Lani scooped up her pack and bounded down the hall.
“That’s one great kid,” Gaheris said.
Nissa, coming back into the room and dabbing at her eyes, nodded. “She is that. She’s just about the best.”
The warehouse looks astonishingly mundane, Brenda thought as Albert pulled Pearl’s van into the covered loading area. I wonder if all the magical areas of the world are like this. warehouses. Factories so boring you don’t even look at them except as eyesores on the landscape. Office buildings. I wonder what all those people who want to dance naked at
Stonehenge and old Indian ruins and places like that because they’re sure that’s where the magic is would think if they realized that a real gateway into another world can be found in the middle of the city.
“Not bad,” Parnell said, looking around him, “for an industrial park. Green lawns. Trees. Neat. I’ve seen far uglier. I like the bramble roses. Nice touch.”
“Pearl,” Gaheris said, his voice warm with the appreciation he reserved for the financially savvy, “has an excellent eye for real estate. Learned it from her mother.”
Brenda had to admire her dad. Short of sleep, doubtless less than happy about being here, and especially about her being here, still he could summon up the charm.
“Well,” Albert said. “Here’s where we separate. Good luck, Brenda, Shen, Parnell . . .”
He looked as if he was about to say more, then he shook his head. “No. No speeches, not when we’ll meet later and share tea around Pearl’s table and chatter about how this all worked out.”
Nissa came over and hugged Brenda tightly, hesitated, then hugged Parnell and Shen, too.
“Luck.”
“Luck,” Brenda whispered around a sudden lump in her throat.
Dad came over and hugged Brenda as he hadn’t done since she was much younger.
“I like the new boyfriend,” he whispered in her ear. “Grandma Elaine will, too. I’m not going to wish you luck. You don’t need it. You’ll do great.”
Brenda hugged him back. This was not the time to explain that Parnell wasn’t her boyfriend.
Gaheris thrust his hand at Shen. “Later, Teach.”
He grinned at Parnell. “Take good care of my little girl.”
The five from the Lands stood to one side, obviously impatient to be away, but equally aware of the importance of these small exchanges. Brenda was surprised when Honey Dream gave her an honestly warm smile.
“We’ll be moving as fast as we can, Brenda Morris. We’ll see you in the Center.”
Then, one by one, Albert leading, they passed through the First Gate.
The air in the warehouse somehow felt different when they were gone. Brenda turned from watching the glow fade from the ideographs inscribed on the pine door and found Parnell kneeling on the floor, running his hands over the concrete.
“I’m having difficulty,” he said, “finding a ‘live’ connection. I thought I might, but I didn’t want to start everyone worrying. Shen, do Pearl’s wards extend out to the fenced area?”
“They do,” Shen said. “More than ever since the trouble we had a few months ago. Do you want to make your gate there?”
“I think I’m going to have to,” Parnell admitted. “Either there, or back at Pearl’s, and I don’t think she’d fancy an active gate at one of her houses.”
“She wouldn’t,” Shen said.
“Then let’s step outside,” Parnell said.
Once there, he walked directly over to the tangle of climbing roses. They were in bloom again, pale pink flowers flowing over green foliage almost as they had in the spring, the one difference being that here and there shreds of spent roses could be glimpsed, and the leaves looked a bit tired, as if they wouldn’t mind the quelling that would come with cooler weather.
I wonder if roses ever really die back in California, Brenda thought as Parnell reached into the curtain of roses and swept up a cluster of canes as if they were a curtain.
“Brenda? Shen? If you would . . .”
Brenda looked beyond the greenery, and saw not the fence and the street beyond it, but vaguely familiar rolling green hills. Shen gasped softly, but Brenda managed to find what she hoped was a confident smile as she walked forward.
“How do you manage not to get scratched by the thorns?”
“I convince the roses,” Parnell said with a seducer’s smile, “that for me they have no thorns.”
Brenda’s foot fell on soft, dense grass. Two more steps, and she was standing beneath a blue sky ornamented with perfect woolly clouds. She moved to clear the gate and a few moments later Shen joined her, then Parnell. For a moment, an irregular patch of sky was ornamented with pink flowers. Then even that vanished.
Shen sniffed the air. “Bracing. Invigorating. All right, Brenda, now your part. You told us that you plan on using Nine Gates.”
“That’s right,” Brenda said. “A variation on the variation that creates the first gate.” She handed him a piece of paper. “Here are the tiles I selected.”
Shen looked it over, considering. “Good. Nicely calculated.”
Brenda felt embarrassed by the pleasure that spread through her at this praise, so casually offered. She covered by turning to Parnell.
“I’d really like it if you’d call your associates first, before I make the gate.” She tried to sound matter-of-fact, not unsure. “I don’t know how long I’ll be able to hold it open.”
“Or what opening it might bring,” Parnell agreed. “They should be gathered already, but some of them are going to be a bit on the shy side. You’ll probably sense they’re here, but not see them right off.”
“I can live with that,” Brenda said. “Shen, are you all right about not getting a bunch of introductions?”
“As long as they are comfortable with omitting them,” Shen said, “I think we’d be better off not wasting time with formalitie
s.”
Brenda thought about fairy tales, thought about the purposes served by formalities in fairy tales, and felt a twinge of warning.
“Since we’re going into the Lands,” she said quickly, unslinging the light daypack she wore over her shoulders and unzipping one of the side pouches, “I’d at least like to abide by Chinese manners. Parnell, can I pick a leaf off that white oak, or will I offend someone?”
“Go ahead,” Parnell said. “What are you about, acushla?”
For answer, Brenda plucked the broadest of the leaves she could find, and set it on the ground a few paces away from where she intended to set up the gate.
“In Chinese culture,” she said, “you always ask if someone has eaten. Good manners. How can I not do the same here?”
Feeling rather as if she was playing tea party, as she had as a child in the woods near her home, Brenda spilled out the contents of a small package of trail mix onto the leaf platter.
“There,” she said, and raised her head to address the still-hidden sidhe folk. “Have you eaten? If you are hungry, please accept our hospitality while I prepare the gate.”
She turned away quickly, so as not to frighten any of the shyer sidhe folk. Behind her, she thought she heard the distinctive buzz of Wasp’s wings, Oak Gall’s now-familiar chuckle, but she didn’t let herself be distracted.
“Shen, I don’t have a door as such, but we’re not looking to make a permanent gate here. In fact, we don’t want one that’s permanent, or we’ll be putting Parnell’s home at risk.”
“Kind thought,” Parnell said, “but while you’re casting your gate, some of us will be setting up wards. If you can create a gate that will last at least a day or so, that would be useful.”
“Useful?” Brenda said, then something on his face made her understand. “In case we need a fast retreat. Right. Okay, then, something that we can move if we need to ‘close’ the gate temporarily.”
Brenda cast back and forth, looking at the scenery with new attention. “It should be smooth enough that I can write on it, since I’m not up to just envisioning the ideograms that make up the spell. There!”
She pointed to a smooth slab of rock that lay on the ground near a jumbled heap of stone. Originally, it had probably been part of the formation, but some act of weather—maybe ice, if they even got ice here—had split it away.
“That will do, if I stand that up against the other rocks. Parnell, is that rock somebody’s house or can I move it?”
“It’s no one’s house,” Parnell said, “but I don’t know if you can move it. Let me help.”
Moving the slab of rock, half cemented to the ground as it was by moss and grass, did take both of them, but once it was free, it proved to be only about an inch thick. Given that it came up to Brenda’s waist and was about two feet wide, it wasn’t exactly light, but they arranged it against the other stones so it could be “swung.”
Shen now spoke. “You have your spell, Brenda, and your door, but have you considered that we’re not going to want to come in just anywhere in the Lands?”
Brenda hadn’t considered that, but now she nodded.
“You’re right. I guess I thought intention would count, but we shouldn’t leave that to chance. What do you suggest?”
“Are there any of our scouts with whom you have a particularly close bond?” Shen asked.
Brenda immediately thought of Flying Claw, but Flying Claw might not be . . . She forced herself to think it bluntly, coldly. Flying Claw might be dead. She couldn’t afford to waste ch’i on—she swallowed a horrible nervous giggle—a dead end.
“Nine Ducks,” Brenda said aloud, and was shocked at how clinical she sounded, “is the Ox, and the Rat’s partner in the House of Construction. Loyal Wind is the Horse, and the Rat’s direct opposite. Loyal Wind used that link of opposition before, when he needed to get in touch with me. Maybe I should see if the reverse will work.”
“Sounds like a good plan,” Shen said. “I’m here if you need me, but I want you to follow your own impulses, Brenda. I think they’re going to be sounder than anything I could advise.”
Brenda nodded, simultaneously pleased and startled by the blanket trust both men gave her.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said to Shen, a little shyly, “if I use a crib sheet. I didn’t want to get stuck because I couldn’t remember something.”
“Good thinking,” Shen reassured her.
Parnell nodded. “Remember, you have permission to draw on our local energies. Do you remember the training we did?”
“I do,” Brenda said. “I guess I’d better get started, shouldn’t I?”
“Do,” Parnell said, looking up into the blue sky as if he could read omens in the clouds. “The sooner you start, the better.”
The oddest thing about the flow of one’s own blood, Loyal Wind thought, is that it takes a moment to feel it against the skin. Perhaps this is because skin and blood are the same temperature, and the liquid motion of blood is almost frictionless. Perhaps it is because flow is the natural state for blood, and so there is no contrast of ch’i.
But when the blood cools, when the skin has been sufficiently abraded that the slightest caress of air is anguish, then the coursing of blood across that open wound is perceived. By that point, the sufferer does not feel the sensation as pain, for pain has ceased to be isolated.
Pain is what one has become.
Loyal Wind was becoming pain when he felt the first painting of a one of characters upon stone etch itself upon his soul. The shape of that simple, graceful line, and the tentative contact he felt through it brought him back into a focus he had lost.
When the whip again touched his back, Loyal Wind screamed with a new awareness of the wet leather ripping through skin into muscle.
His ears, which had long since been unable to hear beyond the rasp of his own breathing, the erratic rhythm of his heart, heard a man’s voice speak casually.
“See? He wasn’t as bad as you thought. Faking it. These warrior types have incredible stamina, and they do say this one has already been dead. There’s some question as to whether he can die.”
Loyal Wind had wondered the same thing himself. Reincarnated by the grace of Yen-lo Wang, could he die? Or could he only suffer?
The lash stroked over Loyal Wind’s shoulders, across his upper back, agony exploding through his skull as leather touched exposed bone.
Yet horrifically overwhelming as this pain might be, as pervasive, was the awareness of ideograms being shaped upon stone, upon soul. The hand that shaped them was unsteady, uncertain, but the force of ch’i that flooded through the link was as a striking bolt of lighting: sharp, jagged, incredibly focused.
In the afterglow of that strike, Loyal Wind knew whose hand shaped those ideograms: Brenda Morris.
He saw her, looking out through the ideograms she was shaping to bridge the gap between them. She knelt before a piece of stone, a pen in one hand, the other hand braced to hold her steady.
Long, straight black hair, tied back from her face. A touch of lavender ribbonjust visible when she moved her head up and down, checking her drawing against a small piece of paper. Little earrings, tiny drops of jade and onyx, shaped like flowers.
Brenda’s dark brown eyes were narrowed. In their intentness, in their shape, Loyal Wind saw Brenda’s great-grandfather, who had been his friend, his companion.
Exile Rat, who, by his cowardice, his selfishness, Loyal Wind had betrayed.
Pain ripped through Loyal Wind’s body once more, felt acutely, as he had not suffered for many whip strokes.
Loyal Wind understood through his gut. His intellect was still not fully his to command.
Unintentionally, in working this spell, a spell doubtless meant to help effect Loyal Wind’s own rescue, Brenda Morris was feeding ch’i into him. The ch’i gave him strength, but not the sort of strength that would enable him to struggle or to fight. His tortured body was long beyond anything other than hanging by the leather bond
s that tied Loyal Wind to the whipping post.
Unknowing, while trying to save him, Brenda Morris was granting Loyal Wind strength enough to suffer.
Loyal Wind screamed, sensate horror giving nearly articulate meaning to sounds that had long ago deteriorated until they contained less sense than the insane snarls of a rabid dog.
Freed by suffering from the realm of thought, now once again Loyal Wind knew what was happening to him, what would happen to him. He passed back to where dread adds its spice to sensation, giving piquancy to the torturer’s art.
Another ideogram was shaped. Another thin channel of energy flowed forth to sustain an intellect that wished nothing more than to descend into the maelstrom of unconsciousness.
Loyal Wind began to throw himself from side to side, seeking to break not the bonds upon his wrists but the bindings upon his soul. He could not bear it, could not bear feeling, thinking. Could not . . .
Or could he? Could he?
Loyal Wind dropped limp once more, so limp that he was only vaguely aware of the attempts of his torturers to ascertain whether or not he lived.
One rough voice argued that he must, for the blood that flowed from his open wounds still moved with the pulsing of a heart. The other said he could not be alive. Surely that frenzy had been the brain or heart giving way beneath the demands of the whip.
Li Szu would be angry, the torturers whispered nervously. He had not wanted his prisoners to escape him, especially into death.
Argument stilled the whip. With this small relief, Loyal Wind struggled to shape the coherent thought that he had sought to banish breaths before.
He could not bear it. Could not bear the pain.
If he broke this link—whether by forcing his death (if he could die) or by forcing unwelcome ch’i back along the silk-fine fiber that connected him to Brenda Morris’s spell—then once again Loyal Wind would have surrendered to cowardice. To betrayal.
If he could bear it, bear the pain, bear the even worse awareness, then . . .
He resolved.
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