by D. N. Leo
Orla rubbed her hand along the wall, finding it damp as if it was perspiring. At the corner of the wall, her hand hit something lumpy. She moved closer to take a look, and the wall opened its eyes and blinked, sending her yelping leaping feet away from the wall. Lorcan darted to her, pushing her behind him. These weren’t the wall’s eyes—they were the eyes on an ancient man’s face which was buried in the wall. Orla missed her weapons, the convenience of the rather violent devices she used to have on Earth. They would come in handy right now, she thought. She wagered Lorcan must have thought the same.
Lacking anything remotely threatening, Lorcan pointed his electronic notebook at the eyes of the man. “Don’t move,” Lorcan demanded, and then realized that was a stupid command—the man couldn’t move. He was immobilized within the wall. Lorcan’s eyes then widened as he came to a realization. “You were the gatekeeper!”
“He would smile and nod if he could,” Orla commented as she had come to the same conclusion as Lorcan. “It must has been a long time since he’s seen anyone. You think he speaks English?”
“Only one way to find out,” Lorcan muttered. “Do you speak English? Please blink your eyes if you do.”
The eyes blinked.
“We’re going to find the key of Psuche to free you. Do you have any idea who took it or where it would be? Please blink for yes.”
No blinking this time. Orla sighed. Lorcan paced, contemplating the possibilities. “I’m guessing each gate has its own unique key, am I correct?”
The eyes blinked. Lorcan nodded, a wave of energy rushing through him as he felt they were making progress. “You were a wizard before you became the gatekeeper?”
Blinks.
“Among nine thousand gates and nine thousand unique keys, the creature chose this particular gate and this particular key. Why?” Lorcan mumbled to himself. “The key has something to do with where you came from?”
There was no blinking.
“The key has something to do with you being a wizard?”
There was no blinking. Lorcan raked his hand through his hair. Orla approached. “Someone killed for the key, so it must be very important,” Orla commented. The eyes blink rapidly.
Lorcan opened his electronic notebook. His fingers flew on the keyboard. He typed and typed, then paused, shaking his head, and resumed typing. In a short moment, Lorcan looked up and said, “The data suggests that there was a change of the gate key before your time. You were recruited to guard this gate and this key because of your magic. Does the key have anything to do with supernatural forces?”
The eyes blinked rapidly.
“Whoever got the key, can that person control the universes?”
There was no blinking.
“What about one particular universe?” The eyes blinked. Lorcan raised an eyebrow. “Eudaiz?” There was no reaction. “Xiilok?” There was no reaction again as Lorcan went through the list of universes connected to the Daimon Gate. The list was long, and there had been no further reaction from the eyes. Orla was pacing impatiently.
“Earth?” asked Lorcan.
Then eyes blinked rapidly. Sensing it, Orla whirled around. “Earth. Our friendly bloody Earth,” she whispered.
Lorcan cleared his throat. “We might need to narrow things down a little bit. The Earth is quite large to look around aimlessly. Now this is the Eastern gate, so I guess I can safely narrow it down to the Eastern countries,” he mumbled to himself, searching further on his notebook. Then his eyes sparked. “You’re from Japan. Whoever took the key, he’s from Japan as well?”
The eyes blinked rapidly. “So he stole the key to control Japan?” Orla deduced.
“Hey, don’t roll your eyes. We’re trying to help you here,” Lorcan scolded.
“They stole the key to control the supernatural forces in Japan?” The eyes rolled again. Orla put her hands on her hips. “The mode of communication is that you blink your eyes to confirm a positive answer. Rolling your eyes is not acceptable. Keep doing that, and we’ll leave you here to rot.”
Lorcan lowered his voice so that he sounded calm. “So the key is in Japan now?”
The eyes blinked.
“Is that all you know?”
The eyes blinked again then drooped.
Lorcan waved his arms in the air. “Right. Japan it is. Not as bad as searching the entire Earth!”
They heard a whoosh. Orla’s psychic ability had urged her to move just an instant before the arrow hit, so it only scraped her left arm. Lorcan charged in the general direction of the arrow’s origination. Then all Orla heard were the sounds of men grunting and of kicks and punches hitting their target. Soon Lorcan emerged, dragging the man who had attacked her earlier. He was barely conscious. Lorcan continued to pound on the man. Whatever frustration he couldn’t vent in the painstaking process of extracting information about the key from the entombed gatekeeper, he took out on this gatekeeper.
Orla pulled Lorcan back. “You’ll kill him, Lorcan.”
He gave the man a last kick before Orla pulled him out of reach of the man. “Scumbag,” Lorcan snarled.
Lying on the ground, then man chuckled. “Yes, indeed I am a scumbag. But I’m alive. If you think you can use the Host against me, you’re mistaken. I haven’t done anything wrong, but you have. Now he’s lied for you—he won’t last long, Host or not.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“What I asked you to do wouldn’t cost you anything. Giving Ciaran up is not going to end your world, but reporting me to the Host and getting him to back you will end both your world and his.”
The man pulled himself up onto his knees.
“Who are you?” Orla asked.
The man smirked. “You don’t need to know who I am. I gave you options. I asked you to do a very simple thing for me, but you didn’t. You chose to go against me, and you helped a stranger like Ciaran LeBlanc. Now, no one is going to help you.” Then in front of Lorcan and Orla, he surged up, ran at the buried gatekeeper, aimed his crossbow between the eyes, and shot. The eyes of the buried gatekeeper flared up, glassed over, and then vanished. Lorcan snarled and charged at the man, but he swung open a gatekeeper’s dimensional hole, dove in, and disappeared. Lorcan didn’t bother giving chase. He pulled out his handkerchief and took care of the cut on Orla’s arm.
Chapter 7
As soon as they entered the hallway of their castle, they could see the lights from the control room and hear the signals echoing down the corridor. The robots announced that they had visitors and the visitors would like to see both of them. “Sure, so we’re guests in our own home now,” Orla remarked. Lorcan’s jaw clenched, and his striking blue eyes darkened. He knew this was serious.
In the control room, they found the holocast of three members of the Daimon Gate council, one of them the Host. One of the other two was a tall creature with a human shape but an alien face. There was no way for Lorcan and Orla to adjust to the appearance of the person from their earthly aesthetic standards. When the man spoke, streams of text translation in English floated in the air in front of him. The other member was a man in his late sixties who spoke with a New York accent.
“I’m sorry to intrude on your private space again. Since we last spoke, something happened in the council, and we need you to clarify some information,” the Host said, his eyes locked with Lorcan’s. Lorcan knew that was a warning sign.
He cleared his throat. “Sure. I’ll give you as much information as I know. But before we start, I’d like to let you know that the gatekeeper at Gate 131 was killed just now. The information will be ready for you at central when you return.”
“Killed? By whom?” the Host asked.
“The gatekeeper who attacked Orla came back and shot at us when we were talking to the gatekeeper at Gate 131. Then he shot him dead and disappeared into a dimensional hole.”
The alien-like council member raised his voice, “How do you know the attacker was a gatekeeper?”
“He declare
d himself as a gatekeeper,” Lorcan affirmed.
“Gatekeepers kill one another inside the Daimon Gate?” the man with the New York accent asked, shocked.
“We will make sure this is an isolated case,” the Host spoke quietly.
The alien-like member shifted. “That’s not why we are here. There were some discrepancies in the between the amount of information you provided us when you joined and the information we received just now. When did you declare Orla as a trained sorceress?”
Lorcan shoved his hands into his pant pockets and shrugged. “As far as I remember, we declared it right at the beginning—but not before I took the test because at that point I wasn’t sure whether I had passed.” A slight smile came across the Host’s face. Lorcan continued, “I was always up front about Orla’s talents.”
“So you’re saying that Orla’s skills and talents in using magic were what got you both recruited?”
“Absolutely.”
“All information was declared to the recruiter before you joined? Can you confirm that again?”
“Affirmative,” Lorcan said, his hands clammy inside his pockets. But he trusted his poker face.
The Host showed signs of relief. The man with the alien face seemed happy with Lorcan’s responses. The council member with the New York accent leaned back in his chair, contemplating, and asked, “What proof do we have of this?”
“What would you like to see?” Orla asked.
“Well, if you were recruited because of your talents, and you have had more than a month inside the Daimon Gate to learn the system and prepare, when can we expect you deliver the key to us?”
“As soon as you allow us to leave, we can get ready, investigate and dredge up a bit more information, and then we’ll be on our way. As for when we can deliver the key, it depends on our progress at the site,” Lorcan responded.
“Where’s the site?” the alien-like man asked.
“Japan.”
The council nodded in satisfaction. They had obviously never been to the place, Orla thought, as Japan was quite an enormous site to search for a little key.
The New Yorker smiled. “You know that the Host guarantees your information with his credibility, so use his trust wisely.”
“Understood,” Lorcan said solemnly.
Before he left with the holocast of other council members, the Host nodded slightly and smiled at Lorcan and Orla.
Once all the visitors had gone, tears poured down Orla’s face. “You don’t have a clue where the key is, do you, except that it might be somewhere in Japan?”
Lorcan shook his head. He pulled Orla into his arms and held her tight. “I’ll figure it out,” he whispered. “It’s not just us now, it’s the Host’s credibility on the line. I don’t want to think about the consequences if they find out we bluffed—and the Host endorsed it.”
Chapter 8
Orla walked into the control room and found Lorcan still hunched over the computer. He had worked for the equivalent of thirty hours straight. They didn’t use the same time reference here, so Orla had to use the computer translator for even the simplest of tasks, such as checking how long it had been since Lorcan had set foot outside that control room.
His fingers worked tirelessly on the keyboard as Orla opened the door to his office. He was so caught up in what he was doing that he didn’t hear her approach and ask, “Find anything yet?”
He was startled, but he didn’t let on. It was bad that he’d already lost his attention to details around him in this dimension. He’d need all of his old skills back for this assignment, and if he was this rusty, it wasn’t a good sign. “I think so. I’m checking a few more things just to be sure, but I’m pretty sure I know where we’ll be heading to. Are you ready?”
Orla nodded. She was back in the business mode she’d reserved for her jobs when they lived on Earth.
“The bad news is that we’ll be going back to Earth. The good news is that I’ve found a link between the key of Psuche and a secret Japanese society called the Ryojin. We’ll be heading to the Kaihanshin Prefecture. A combination of factual data, historical events, and suggestions from my underground sources led me to this conclusion, so it’s not just a wild guess.”
“Underground sources!” She winked at him.
He winked back, erased all of his research, and closed his computer. “We have a little time before we leave . . . how about a celebratory romp in the sack?” Orla laughed as he picked her up and carried her to their bedroom.
“Aren’t you only supposed to carry me across the threshold if we get married?”
“Marry me then. Otherwise I’ll be breaking the rules, and that wouldn’t be good, now would it?” They both fell silent as Lorcan’s innocent line reminded them that they had indeed broken the rules of this place, and death lingered at their door.
“Let’s just forget about all of that right now, okay? I don’t want to think about serious things right now.” She rubbed her thumbs at the shadows that darted in and out of his striking blue eyes. Then she pulled his head down and kissed him, long and hard. He reciprocated her newfound level of energy and lay her on the bed, taking his shirt off before he climbed on top of her . . .
The trip to Japan was a nonevent. Unlike on Earth, where they had to be physically in transit, travel the distance, and face all the troubles associated with international travel, now they had only to open the portal, and in the blink of an eye, they had reached their destination.
“Welcome to Japan. We’re in the second largest city in the country, next to Tokyo of course.” Lorcan smiled. Orla’s eyes were wide, and her mouth hung open. This was the most beautiful place she’d ever seen. It was a mix between old-world Japan and the modernization of the 21st century. She felt like this would be a wonderful place to live out the rest of her days with Lorcan if the mission should fail. She was getting ready to tell Lorcan that, but he was too busy staring at the ground. She nudged him gently, but he still didn’t break his focus. She cleared her throat to no avail. She nudged him again, a little harder, trying to get his attention. He nearly stumbled and finally looked up at her. “What?”
“I wanted you to take in the beauty of this city, but all you’re doing is staring at the dirt. What gives?”
He stared at her blankly for a minute, then laughed. “I’m sorry. I was trying to find someone to help us. The contact you gave me doesn’t seem to be here.”
“Contact?”
“Well, you told me some messenger called Kitsune would guide us. I sent a message and got a response that the messenger would be here. But I don’t see anyone.”
Orla laughed at Lorcan’s confusion.
“Do you plan to tell me what’s going on, or am I just going to learn everything as we go?” There was a definite note of irritability in his voice, and Orla knew that it was in her best interest to explain.
“A kitsune is a sort of intermediary between the world we live in and the Japanese otherworld. They’re the gatekeepers that protect us from the dragons and demons that try to break through into our world. They’re also damn good at finding people,” Orla said solemnly, trying to keep a straight face.
“Oh, so it’s not a guide-bug.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “A guide-bug?”
“Like a GPS, a very advanced one.”
“Oh no.” Orla laughed again. “It’s a magical animal. You’ll know it when you see it.”
“Right. But now, because we don’t see it, we might have to use my robot. We need to find a woman named Chiyo Maki. She’s the last surviving member of the Maki family, and they’re the head family in the Ryojin group. Chiyo is a medical doctor, and she didn’t seem to have much to do with the family business. But at least, it’s a lead. The Ryojin group seems to have disappeared a few decades ago, but they might still have some of the items. If we’re lucky, they’ll have the key.”
“Okay, even if they do have it, how are we going to get it from them? It’s not like we packed a substantial amount of mon
ey or anything. You should have told me that we were going antique shopping.” Orla smiled and winked at Lorcan. “Unless you want me to use the skills that I made a living with on Earth.” Lorcan laughed. She loved that he laughed. The shadows still hovered in his eyes, but as long as he eased up a bit, she would feel much better.
Then Orla suddenly squatted down and began talking to nothingness. Lorcan blinked. The shape of a little brown fox was slowly starting to become visible. This was very interesting to him. The little thing twitched its tail and then darted off down the street a few feet, turning around to see if they were coming. “That’s our guide. Let’s go.” Orla smiled brightly.
“It won’t bite. But if it does, I’ll protect you.”
Lorcan shook his head.“Are you sure? I don’t mind furry animals. But I’d prefer to use my technology.”
She pecked Lorcan on the cheek and turned on her heel to follow the magical animal.
He shook his head again, but then followed her. “This is a mistake,” he muttered.
Chapter 9
Two hours later, Lorcan and Orla were shuffling along on very tired feet when the little fox jumped up on a stoop and began to clean its paw. Orla thanked it, and Lorcan watched in fascination as the little fox became invisible. The only thing he could see was a distortion of the objects behind it. Then it moved, and it was gone. They were standing in front of an old Japanese house, tiered with many roofs. Lorcan pushed the doorbell, and a few minutes later, a young woman in her late twenties with long, straight black hair and deep, soulful brown eyes answered.