Spirit Gate

by Kate Elliott

  Scar and Joss were circling, waiting for them. Before departing, he had doused and raked the fire and split wood for kindling to serve the next reeve who camped out on Candle Rock. Now, seeing her catch the airstream, he rose higher as Scar caught an updraft. She and Flirt followed, up and up, gliding south before turning to come up along the high ridgeline. The mountainous mound of Ammadit’s Tit was covered with pine and spruce but the actual black knob—the nipple itself—was as bare as the day the Earth Mother molded stone into mountains. The rock gleamed in the morning light, almost glinting. As she circled in more closely, she saw that it was pitted with crystalline structures—sacred to the Lady of Beasts—shot through the stone. She shivered, although the wind was hot and strong. That knot at the hollow of her ribs burned.

  At first glance the knob looked too smooth for any creature as large as they were to find a landing spot. Relief flared, briefly, brutally; then Joss hallooed just out of her sight, and she and Flirt rounded through eddying currents to see him banking in toward a cleft situated below the summit.

  “Great Lady, protect us,” she whispered. “Don’t be angry.”

  She followed him in.

  The cleft was about as wide as the feasting hall in Copper Hall was long: forty strides. It was surrounded by a rim cut into the rock, then dropped an arm’s span to a flat floor beneath, open to the air but with a sharply angled slope of rock offering a lean-to of shelter to the north. It was difficult to maneuver Flirt in, especially with Scar already claiming territory, but the raptor landed with a cry of protest, opened her wings to give Scar a look at just how big she was, then settled.

  Whoof.

  Marit sat in her harness as a chill whisper of air brushed her face, like fingers searching, like a sculptor’s probing hands. To her left, the sun shone full on Joss. The floor of the cleft was level but scarred by the glittering path of a labyrinth scored into the rock. The pattern took up half the open space; Flirt’s open wingspan brushed the path’s outermost edge, but both eagles shied away from actually crossing onto the crystalline markings. The space was otherwise empty, just the ledge and the eddy of air swirling around the knob. The northern face ended in that angled wall that shadowed the deepest part of the cleft.

  Joss coughed, then slipped down from his harness. He landed so softly she couldn’t hear the slap of his feet. He paced the rim, and back again, as she looked about nervously, but she heard nothing but the bluster of the wind. She saw nothing at all, no offerings, no altar post, no Guardian’s silk banner fluttering in the constant blow. He stopped at the curving edge of the labyrinth closest to the rim wall.

  The outer shape of the path was an oval. Within those boundaries, the shining pavement twisted and turned and doubled back until it was impossible to know how to reach the center, where the ground dipped into a shallow bowl big enough to hold a man and horse together.

  “This is the entrance,” he said.

  “Joss!”

  He set his right foot on the glittering pavement, then his left.

  Nothing happened.

  She let out all her breath.

  He turned and spoke to her. She saw his mouth working, but the wind—or the magic of the Guardians—tore his words away.

  “Joss!” she cried, but he turned away and with measured paces worked his way in on the tortuous branched path. All her worst fears choked her because with each step he seemed to recede, although he wasn’t really getting any farther away from her: he was only fading. It was as if a veil thickened around him, as if mist seeped up from marshland to conceal the landscape. There was nothing quite seen, nothing tangible, but it obscured him nonetheless. Marit had never unduly feared the dangers of her task as a reeve, although she had walked into a hundred different knife’s-edge situations with only her eagle, her weapons, and most of all her good instincts to guide her. But fear paralyzed her now.

  We’ve broken the boundaries. We’ll be punished.

  The boundaries were all that kept the Hundred safe; every child heard the stories; every festival danced the limits; every temple to one of the seven gods was an icon in miniature, each in its own way, of the ancient laws. The master sergeants and the marshal at the reeve halls made the point ten times a day if they said it once.

  He faded more as he walked deeper into the labyrinth, never coming closer or back toward her even when the path turned that way. The eagles neither moved or called; the silence daunted them. The ghost of his form, scarcely more than a shadow, reached the center.

  He vanished. Just like that: a blink, a shimmer of light—and he was gone.

  A gasp escaped her. She couldn’t form words, couldn’t cry out, couldn’t do anything except stare. Her eyes were wet, her heart turned to dust. A thousand years passed while she gaped, too stunned to act.

  “Marit! Marit! Come quick! Follow the path! Bring rope.”

  Where in the hells was that coming from? She slipped out of her harness and leaped down, skirted the gleaming path, and ducked into the shadowed throat of the cleft, but she could not find him. His voice carried to her on the wind.

  She ran back to Flirt and awkwardly got the eagle up onto the lip as on a perch. Her acrobatic skills had saved her from bad falls more than once. Balancing on the rim with the world plunging away far down to spruce billowing below, she swung into her harness. Flirt opened her wings and fell into the sky. Marit shrieked with glee, forgetting all fears and creeping terrors as the wind pummeled her and the eagle dove and then, with that instinct for risk that had gotten the raptor her name, pulled up just in time, just before they would have slammed into the trees. Flirt caught a draft and they rose. Marit’s pulse hammered as she squinted into the sun, up along the knob of rock, seeking, searching—

  There he was! He was standing, impossibly, at the top of the rock, poised as on the tip of a giant spear. And indeed, somehow, unseen before but perfectly visible now, a metal post thrust up from the center of the knob with torn and fraying and sun-bleached banners in many colors snapping from the post. To this he held tightly with one hand as he waved frantically at her to get her attention.

  “Thank you, Lady,” she breathed, and added a hasty prayer to the Herald, the Opener of Ways, whom Joss had served for a year as a lowly message rider before the day he’d ridden into a reeves’ gathering to deliver a summons from the arkhon of Haya, and Scar had changed the course of his life.

  She circled, but there was no way to land, so she went back down to the cleft. Scar waited with his head beneath his wing, oddly quiescent. She shed her harness as quickly as she ever had, and grabbed her coil of rope. Knowing better than to stop and think, she jogged to the entrance of the labyrinth and put her right foot on the path, then her left. The pavement seemed pure crystal, as thin as finely thrown ceramic, but so thick, perhaps, that it cut down through the stone to the center of the earth. She took another step, and a fourth, and when she glanced up the world seemed to be slowly spinning around her, picking up speed as she walked in. With each revolution a new landscape flashed into view: surging ocean; a fallen stone tower above a tumble of rocks battered by foaming waves; dense tangled oak forest; a vast flat gleam of water—not the sea—and beyond it the pale endless dunes that she recognized as the western verge of the Barrens; an ice-covered peak shining under a bottomless hard blue sky; a homely village of six cottages set beside a lazily flowing river half overgrown with reeds. The visions made her dizzy. She looked down instead, kept her gaze fixed on the path whose windings confused her, except wherever she had to choose between one turn and another it seemed she could smell the memory of juniper, Joss’s scent, and she therefore followed her nose.

  A man’s voice whispered behind her, questioning, urgent.

  “. . . when night falls . . . to Indiyabu but only when the Embers moon sets . . . she betrayed them . . . beware the third blow . . . trust me . . .”

  Don’t turn your back, Marshal Alard would say, but she was walking on forbidden ground. She dared not look back for fear of what s
he would see. Indiyabu was the legendary birthplace of the Guardians, but no reeve knew where to find it, and none she knew of had ever dared seek for it.

  The path took much longer to walk than it should have; she was sweating freely by the time she stumbled into the center bowl. A man waited for her. His long dark beautiful hair was unbraided, twisting around him in an unseen wind. He looked angry, but he was as handsome a man as she had ever seen, demon-blue outlander eyes in a brown face, taller than most reeves and with graceful long-fingered hands talking in signs, the secret language of the Guardians.

  She walked right through him before she realized he wasn’t really there; he was only a vision, like the landscapes. The pavement dipped. She slipped into the central hollow. Where her foot slapped into the ground, pain stabbed up through her heels. Light flared, like a lantern’s door opened wide, and she was spun halfway around by an unknown force and staggered.

  “Marit!”

  Joss grabbed her before she plunged off the side of the knob to her death. They stood at the very height, the sky a vast gulf and the sun glaring. Wind howled, trying to tug her off. She grabbed on to the metal post. Thank the gods it was well set into the rock. It didn’t shift at all with her added weight. The silk of frayed banners battered her; she was drowned in their colors: blood-red, black of night, heaven-blue, mist-silver, fiery-gold-sun, death-white, earth-brown, seedling-green, and the rich violet of the twilight sky just before night envelops the last light of day.

  “Look!” Joss shouted to be heard above the wind. “Look there!”

  He pointed to a crevice just out of arm’s reach along the curve of the rock but because of the wind and their precarious perch too far to get to safely. Something fluttered there, a banner torn off the pole, perhaps. It was hard to identify because it was so white and because there were pale objects jumbled beneath, caught within the crevice.

  She was a reeve. She knew what it was with a gut knowledge that slammed down, no question—only a hundred questions. A thousand.

  Joss hooked his elbow around the metal post and deftly tied and slipknotted the rope around the post. He’d grown up by the sea; he knew twenty kinds of knots.

  “Let’s get out of here!” he shouted. He was shaking, gray, frightened.

  Bones.

  The bones of a Guardian were caught in that crevice. That was the Guardian’s death-white cloak caught in the rocks, the cloth sliding and shivering with the purl of the wind as though a snake struggled in its folds. Those were the dead one’s long leg bones rattling as the wind shifted them. That was his pelvis, if it had been a man, shattered on one side. Most reeves learned to identify human bones: in the course of seeking out lost shepherds whose remains were discovered beneath spring snowmelt; or runaway wives dead of starvation in forest loam; or miners tumbled under a fall of rocks who couldn’t be recovered until the dry season made digging safe. She had exhumed the occasional murder victim buried under the pig trough or beyond the boundaries of a village’s orderly fields. That pelvis told her something, even seen from a man’s length away. That pelvis had been splintered in a tremendous fall, or by a massive blow.

  Guardians couldn’t die.

  “Give me the rope,” she shouted. “I’m going to recover the remains. We have to find out what happened, if we can!”

  “Marit!” He almost lost his nerve. He clutched his stomach as though he would retch. He squeezed his eyes shut but opened them as quickly, and steadied himself, ready to aid her.

  She tied the rope around her waist, fixed it, and turned round to back down over the curve of the rock, to reach the crevice. As Joss paid out the rope, she walked with her feet against the rock and her body straight out over the world below, nothing but air between her back and the trees. The wind sang through her. She was grinning, ready to laugh for the joy of it and almost down to the crevice when, above her, Joss screamed an inarticulate warning cry.

  A fog shrouded her, boiling up from underneath to choke her. A roaring like a gale wind thrummed through her. Her bones throbbed, and it seemed her insides would be rattled and twisted until they became her outsides, all as white light smothered her.

  I can’t hear. I can’t see.

  I can’t breathe.

  She fought, and found herself ripping at cloth that had enveloped her, that seemed likely to swallow her.

  An axe smashes into her hip, shattering it; the pain engulfs her like white light, like death.

  “Go to Indiyabu! Beware the traitor . . . mist . . . I can’t reach her.”

  Then she was free, feet still fixed to the rock wall. The wind tore the shining white cloak off her body, and it flew out into the sky rippling like light, spread as wide as a vast wing. The bones clattered down the curving slope of the knob until they reached the sheer cliff, and then they fell and fell, tumbling, and vanished into the forest. The cloak spun higher into the sky and was lost to sight in the sun’s glare.

  “Shit!” cried Joss.

  He hauled her back up. She fell on her stomach over the rampart and lay there panting, trying to catch her breath. The wind screamed around them, tearing at their clothes, at the banners, at their hoods. She was grateful for the rule that forced all reeves to wear their hair short, since there was no braid to catch at her throat, and there were no strands of loose hair to blind her.

  “What do we do now?” he asked.

  “We’ve got to get down!” she yelled.

  She turned, dead calm now, too stunned to be otherwise, and surveyed the rock face. She’d gone that way the first time. In her head, she mapped a new route to take them to the ledge below.

  “Follow after I’ve tugged twice.”

  She eased out the rope between her hands, let herself lean backward into the air, and walked backward out over the curve of the rock. Down. She was compact and strong and always had been, her chest and arms made more so by ten years of weapons training, by ten years, especially, of controlling Flirt. Strangely, the wind eased once she was on the cliff, and she made it down to the cleft swiftly. There Flirt and Scar waited, heads down, dozing.

  How strange that they should doze when the peculiar nature of their surroundings ought to have made them nervous.

  By the time she slipped down hand over hand and dropped the last length, her right hand was bleeding and the left was bright red, rubbed raw from friction. Panting, she tugged twice on the rope. Blew on her hands. Pain stung. It would hurt to handle the harness with her hands like this. She pulled gloves out of one of the pockets sewn into the hem of her tunic, but hesitated, not quite willing to pull them on. The gloves would shroud her hands as snugly as that cloak had wrapped her. She shuddered.

  No time to dwell on it. Must get on. Must act.

  The rope danced beside her. A moment later Joss slid down, half out of control, and she caught him as he fell the last body length. They stood there, holding tight. He was crying. She’d known him almost two years, but she’d never seen him cry. She’d seen him at his first winter feast in the hall, and happened to be called in to assist when he’d found that poor mutilated girl who’d had her hands amputated by her husband’s angry relatives. She’d cried that day, but Joss hadn’t. Now he wept noisily.

  “What about the rope?” she said finally. “If we leave it, they’ll know we’ve been here.”

  He gulped down tears and spoke in a shaky voice. “I have to report, even if it means I’m flogged out. They have to know.”

  Since he was right, there was no answer.

  He sighed heavily, stepped back, and wiped his eyes. He looked ten years older than he had that morning. “Best go,” he said.

  She nodded. “I haven’t forgotten that woodsmen’s camp.”

  “You can’t go in there alone!”

  “I won’t! I won’t, Joss. I won’t go to the woodsmen’s camp at all. But there’s a temple dedicated to the Merciless One up at summit of the Liya Pass. I want to stop there, ask their Hieros if they have any hierodules missing. You fly ahead to Copper Hall.”<
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  “I think it’s best if I go straight to Clan Hall.”

  She considered, nodded decisively. “That’s right. Take it to the commander. He needs to know first. Once I’ve stopped at the temple, I’ll follow you to Toskala without stopping anywhere else.”

  He was in no mood for kissing, though she was. She would have laid him down and loved him there on the stone floor of the forbidden altar, but he was too tense and too preoccupied, wholly absorbed in considering just what it all meant. It seemed that despite his talk he believed in the existence of the Guardians after all. An earthquake would have tilted those foundations less. He was unable to talk or to do anything except prepare to go.

  As for her, she couldn’t dwell on the horror of that cloak twisting around her, of that instant when she’d thought she would asphyxiate; of that noise; of that pain; of that voice.

  She couldn’t think about what it meant: A Guardian had died, although the Guardians were immortal and untouchable. Maybe all the Guardians were dead. Maybe the Hundred was thereby doomed to fall beneath an uprising of such evil as sucked dry men’s hearts, lust and greed and fear chief among them.

  She grimaced as she finally tugged on her gloves, wincing at the pain, at the fear. Joss ran back over to her, kissed her hard, then returned to Scar without a word and swung into his harness. She smiled softly, ran a gloved hand through the soft stubble of her hair, and crossed to Flirt, who blinked as if surprised to see her.

  “Let’s go, girl.”

  No use dwelling on what she couldn’t change. Best to concentrate on what she could do. That’s what she was best at. That’s why she was a good reeve.

  JOSS HEADED DUE west and was lost fairly quickly among the hills, but Marit flew Flirt south up the cut of the road to its summit in the Liya Pass, a saddle between two ridgelines. Just east of the road lay a wide pool worn out of the hills by the tireless spill of a waterfall off the height. On the banks of this isolated vale the acolytes of the Merciless One had erected a small temple to house no more than a score of adepts in training. Obviously, with their holy quarters set in such a remote location, these were not hierodules who served the goddess by trafficking with passersby. Most who dedicated their service to the Devourer served as hierodules for less than a year before returning to life beyond the bounds of the temple; the Merciless One was a cruel and exacting taskmaster. Many of those who remained trained as jaryas, pearls beyond price, the finest musicians and entertainers in the Hundred. As for the few, they served Her darker aspect, and it was rumored they trained as assassins.