The Spirit Gate

by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

  Kassia reached into the narrow hiding place and brought out a flat leather parcel. Within was a slab of wood that was the mirror image of the front cover of Honorius’ Bible. And within that, hidden beneath a veneer panel, was a small piece of the linen paper, folded into careful quarters. Her hands shaking, Kassia unfolded it and scanned the symbols and characters there.

  The arcane symbols were accompanied by a paragraph of careful script. It was in Latin. She reluctantly handed them over to Zakarij to be read.

  “Speak of the Serpent whose venom oozes from the bowels of the earth and whose maw is bottomless; let fly the iron Raptor who devours life and death, who carries away souls on the winds of hell; tell of the Dragon who eats its own tail, who leaves the hearth to scorch the earth; give mention of the all-devouring Fish, whose great tail stirs the seas to hungry froth. These must be in their order; take special care. For all is completed by the hellish name of the Fish. Vessels you must have, to the number of the seasons. Let the golden one contain the venom of the Serpent; let the iron one contain the feather of the Raptor steeped in the blood of the kill; let the brazen one contain the ash of bone devoured by the Dragon’s fire; let the silver contain a thing possessed by a victim of the all-devouring Fish. These you must set at the points of the compass, then you must speak.”

  “The hellish name of the Fish?” Kassia murmured, and Zakarij whispered, “Maelstrom.”

  The name brought a tremor of cold fear to Kassia’s heart. She looked at the two pages that trembled in Zak’s hands. “What . . . what are the other names, do you think?” Dear God, I don’t want to hear them!

  He took a deep breath and returned his eyes to the list, where now the Twilight names seemed to leap out at him. “Abyss, the Serpent with the bottomless maw . . . Shaitan, the Raptor of souls . . . Harmattan, the Inferno—also called the Dragon . . .” His voice oozed away into the silence of the room. He glanced up into Kassia’s face. “What sort of incantation is this, Kassia? It can’t possibly produce good.”

  “The Aspirant is right.” Shagtai stood in the door of Kassia’s studio, arms folded across his barrel chest, his face golden in the light of her spirit lamps. “These are the elements of Twilight. These are the names that open the gates of hell.”

  “I don’t believe in hell,” Kassia told him sharply, ignoring the chill that lanced down her back.

  “Yet there is one. Oh, it is not the hell of the Frankish Church, perhaps. But it is hell, nonetheless. What is Abyss, but the pit of hell, and Shaitan, but the wind of hell, and Harmattan but the flame of hell? If these names are used, they will bring about Twilight, they will open the gates of destruction.”

  Kassia fixed Shagtai with a direct gaze, ignoring the hammering of her heart. “Are you saying it’s impossible to do any good with these names?”

  He shook his head. “Not impossible, but difficult. These are the keys to destruction. Only the purest motives can control them. Only the purest hands can hold them.”

  “Then surely only a pure soul can summon them.”

  “Not true. They will come to the call of any sorcerer whose will is strong enough.”

  “I found a verse in Marija’s book that said they are in the thrall of the one who calls them. Do you know what she meant?”

  Shagtai nodded. “There are certain spells that belong to the first shaman in a generation who executes them. Thereafter, only that shaman may give another control. I know of such spells. They endow that shaman with much power.”

  Zakarij laid the list and its key down on Kassia’s work table. “You seem to have an opinion about what we should do with these, Shagtai. What is it?”

  “Destroy them. Destroy the names and the key. Destroy them now, before this goes any further.”

  Kassia shook her head. “I can’t do that, Shagtai. Master Lukasha needs them.”

  “No one needs these, Kiska. These are evil.”

  “How can you be so certain?”

  “Have you ever touched anything like them?”

  “No, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I’m new to this—ignorant.”

  “You are not ignorant, Kiska. Tell me, what is the essence of shai magic? Is it destruction, or is it creation?”

  She couldn’t answer, could only stare at the two seemingly innocent pieces of paper, her heart lying uncomfortably heavy in her chest.

  Shagtai crossed to her table and laid his hands upon it. “Don’t give these things to Master Lukasha,” he implored her quietly. “Don’t woo Twilight.”

  She raised her eyes to the weathered face. “I have no choice, Shagtai. He expects them of me.”

  “You have a choice,” he told her, and there was anger in the single, smoky eye. “You simply pretend you can avoid making it by passing it to another. You are wrong, Kassia Telek. If you give these things over to Lukasha, you will have chosen a coward’s path.”

  Kassia flushed hot and cold in turns. “I am not a coward! But I am faithful to my Master. You ask me to betray him.”

  “No. I merely ask you not to betray your world.” He picked up the chisel Kassia had borrowed for her night’s work and returned to his own quarters.

  Watching him go, she thought she would drown in sudden indecision. She was vividly reminded of the flood, of swift currents that sucked away anything and anyone that did not have a sure purchase on shore or rock or deeply rooted tree. Marija’s words returned with the memory: those of us who have sown the maelstrom.

  Zakarij’s hand pressed her shoulder, warm and affirming. “I have never known Master Lukasha to work for ill. I have never known him to utter an impure word or perform a spell that was not good itself. I have never known him to act unwisely or selfishly.”

  Kassia nodded, covering his hand with her own. “Let’s record the names, then, and return to Tabor. He’ll be waiting for us.”

  He was indeed waiting, and Kassia, with warring reluctance and eagerness, relinquished the Bible and its twilight contents into his hands, telling him of the night’s events. Zakarij provided the list of names he had translated from old Polian and Lukasha peppered them both with questions about how the spell must work, recording everything they told him on paper. He was alight with excitement, his eyes almost feverish in their intensity.

  “You haven’t tried it, Kassia, have you?” he asked, and Kassia shook her head emphatically.

  “The spell becomes the possession of the sorcerer who wields it. Only that sorcerer can grant another the right to use the spell. But even if it weren’t . . .” She thought carefully about what she would say. “Master, Shagtai calls these Twilight names. He says that using them opens the gates of hell. That they’re dangerous, evil. Even Beyla sensed there was something wrong with them. He said the magic was sour, bitter.”

  Lukasha smiled indulgently. “Does that frighten you? Come, Kassia. Will you cower from these at the behest of a child and an old man? Beyla is a bright boy, true, but he is still just a boy with a vivid imagination. Shagtai, meanwhile, has spent his life steeped in shamanism.”

  “Master,” Zakarij argued, “Marija of Ohdan was afraid of this spell, too.”

  The Mateu made a dismissive gesture.

  “So afraid,” added Kassia, “that she ripped pages from her diary, wrote entire entries in Latin and split the incantations up among several hiding places.”

  “I have no doubt this is a most powerful magic, Kassia,” said Lukasha solemnly. “Too powerful, apparently, for Marija of Ohdan to handle. By her own admission, she was ignorant of the processes and the effects of it, and in ignorance, she erred. I have the knowledge that will protect me from error and you have provided me with the key to the processes. I will not stumble blindly into this, Kiska. I will take the time to study it. To learn it. To test it. Trust me.”

  Kassia sighed. “I do trust you, Master, but Beyla is right. This magic is bitter, dark. It disturbs me.”

  “Kassia, it may be difficult to control. It may take special care to perform. But it could not be a
s evil as you fear, else Master Boleslas would not have suffered it to survive Marija’s grave mistake, whatever that might have been. He would have required her to destroy it, not merely forswear using it.”

  Kassia glanced at Zakarij, whose face was as opaque as she had ever seen it. “You’re right, of course. They didn’t destroy it. Neither did Pater Honorius.” It was a reasonable conclusion, and Kassia let herself accept it and feel relief.

  Her relief was short-lived. As she and Zakarij prepared to leave their Master’s rooms, Chancellor Bogorja thunderously begged admittance. With a face as pale as his cream-colored stole, he told them, “The Gherai have laid siege to the Khitani capital.”

  Chapter Seventeen — Twilight

  The palace corridors were dark and empty as Zakarij and Kassia hurried along them, making for Pater Julian’s church.

  “How can you be sure?” Zakarij panted, his battered legs forcing him to limp. “How can you be sure he’ll be there?”

  “He’ll be there,” Kassia said firmly. “It’s his sanctuary, his safe haven. More than that, he believes in the magic of the place and its icons.”

  “If Benedict is merely using him as a focus, does it matter what he believes?”

  They stepped out into an open courtyard now, the moon high overhead, its silver light spread over everything like a fine coat of gleaming dust.

  “When I faced the Khan, Zakarij, Pater Julian was there. Not just a spirit puppet of Benedict, but Julian himself. When he saw the magic I had done he became alarmed and made the sign of the cross.”

  “I’ve seen Benedict do that as well.”

  Kassia shook her head. “When Benedict does it, it’s a formality, a ceremony—precise, careful, considered. When Pater Julian does it, it’s . . . almost a reflex. He throws it up as a shield, the way you or I might throw out a ward.”

  They entered the church through an ancillary door in the northern end of the transept. Even from that vantage point they could see that Pater Julian was indeed there, kneeling before the altar, his eyes uplifted to the great window above and behind it.

  Silently the two moved along the outer aisle, hoping they were beyond the priest’s peripheral vision. Zakarij doubted he would have seen them if they’d popped out of the baptismal only a foot or two from where he kneeled. He was a thrall of a magic so strong, she could almost see its threads binding him. Zakarij followed Kassia along the narrow wall to where the transept joined the main sanctuary at right angles. They were behind the priest and to his left, and could clearly see the stained glass window at which he gazed. The dual rings of the mandorla in which the lordly Figure sat glowed with an eerie light, a light that seemed to shimmer and pulse as if echoing the breath and heartbeat of the man who gazed upon it.

  Zakarij’s pressed a hand to Kassia’s shoulder, drawing her to the floor behind a row of pews. “What do we do?” he mouthed.

  “We have to break his concentration,” she pantomimed back, making a breaking gesture with her hands. “Cut him off from Benedict.”

  Before he could worry about where Benedict might be, she had risen again and was moving to the main aisle behind the oblivious priest. She signaled Zakarij to come up behind the man, and gestured her own intention to circle to the front. He could only nod and follow her lead. In seconds she had covered the short distance to the altar and circled the baptismal, bringing herself into Pater Julian’s line of sight. The priest did nothing. She moved to stand directly in front of him, cutting off his view of the window. Zakarij felt the break between the priest and his power source as something tangible.

  Eyelids fluttering rapidly, mouth open, Julian struggled to focus his eyes on Kassia. “You!” he gasped, at the same time making the sign of the cross with one hand.

  Kassia was right, Zakarij thought, he performed the movement differently than did his Bishop. So differently, a casual observer might even interpret it as a different gesture.

  Now the priest scrambled to his feet, fumbling with something within the billowing sleeves of his robe. “You will have no success here, sorceress. I wield a magic stronger than any you could hope to possess. Be gone!” He emphasized the bold pronouncement by producing a cross-shaped amulet on a long, beaded chain. This he thrust into Kassia’s face. She, blinking, raised a hand to repel him.

  When no destructive magic sailed at her from the amulet, she lowered her hand and spoke to him in a firm, gentle voice. “I think you are not a violent man by nature, Pater Julian. An experienced soldier would use something more deadly than his prayer beads to do battle.”

  His face blanched and he stared at the rosary as if it had suddenly become something unfamiliar. “I said, be gone!” he repeated, and this time, touched the amulet to the side of Kassia’s neck.

  Zakarij only just kept himself from leaping to her defense; she stopped him with a tiny shake of her head.

  “Please, Pater Julian. Listen to me,” she said. “You’re Polian. Why do you allow the Bishop Benedict to use you against your own people?”

  His hand, still clutching his beads, was shaking. He lowered it. “What I do, what my blessed Bishop does, is for the good of this people. I do the bidding of the Lord.”

  “Your Lord bids you incite the Gherai Khan to murder innocent Khitanis? Just this evening we received news that he has besieged the city of Zemic. Can this be the will of your Lord?” She gestured at the window behind her. “Your faith teaches love and sacrifice. Yet, the Bishop makes you a weapon with which he sacrifices innocent lives. Every moment you give yourself over to him, allow him this use, you cause untold suffering.”

  The priest winced as if in pain and raised both hands to ward her away. “You are a daughter of Lucifer. You seek to subvert me. Like the Serpent in the garden, you seek to force my lips to taste evil fruit.”

  The Serpent, thought Zakarij, fleetingly, whose venom boils up from the bowels of the earth.

  As if she’d heard his thoughts, Kassia flicked Zakarij a glance and went on. “I try to reason with you. To make you see that the aims of your Lord and the Bishop of Tabor are at odds. Your Lord would have you convert by loving example; the Bishop would do it by force. He would enslave our king and our people.”

  “Service to the Lord God isn’t slavery! It is peace and purpose.”

  “Yes, Pater. It is both peace and purpose, which you’ve come to by an act of faith and will. Would you be an instrument by which others are forced to accept what you love, not by faith and will, but by threat and pain?”

  He stared at her, blinking, and Zakarij thought the poor priest had actually listened. But in an instant, a curtain of resolve had lowered itself over his face. He shook his head vehemently and began backing away from Kassia, circling toward the baptismal, closer and closer to Zakarij, whose presence he’d still not recognized.

  “You lie, sorceress. Bishop Benedict is charged with the spiritual salvation of all these souls. He does what is best for their spiritual welfare. Their suffering here is immaterial. And you . . .” His shaking hands came to rest atop the ewer that sat next to the baptismal bowl. “ . . . you are trying to distract me from my purpose. But I will not be distracted.” With those brave words, Pater Julian picked up the golden ewer and flung its contents into Kassia’s face.

  Zakarij stifled a cry, while Kassia gasped in surprise and whisked wetness from her hair and tunic, but that was obviously not the reaction Pater Julian had expected. He gaped at her as if she had suddenly transformed herself into the Serpent he so feared. His hands gripped the bowl again.

  “How . . . how is it you are not burned?”

  “Burned?” Kassia asked, still brushing at the front of her tunic. “By water?”

  “It’s holy water. It should . . .”

  The priest’s eyes made a frantic circuit of the altar area, trying to re-establish contact with the mandorla. Kassia lifted her hand and blocked him with a gleaming ward that completely obscured his view. Panic, pale and dewy, covered his face and he began to murmur prayers, closing
his eyes and making the sign of the cross over and over.

  “How can we ward him?” Zakarij asked. “How can we keep Benedict from reaching him?”

  Pater Julian’s chanting ended abruptly in a high-pitched yelp. He spun to face the unknown other, upsetting the baptismal completely and sending the golden bowl to the floor in a spray of water. Then, with a sound that was both sigh and whimper, he fell to the floor in a dead faint.

  Zakarij stepped to the altar to stand beside Kassia. She had turned from the poor priest’s senseless body and was gazing up at the glowing Christ sitting within its twinned circles.

  “Is there anything we can do here?” he asked her. “Is there any way we can keep Benedict from using this man . . . and this place for his sorcery?”

  “This is a holy place. It isn’t natural that it be used for dark magic or made a tool of destruction. The place creates its own wards. If we can but reach them . . .”

  Zakarij nodded, sensing the truth of that. He leaned over to pick up the golden ewer and place it back on the baptismal pedestal, then let his eyes lift and roam from stained glass to stained glass. The only light in them now was reflected from the candles lining the altar; the colors were night colors, somber, muted.

  “We are surrounded by holiness,” he murmured, and as he said the words, visualized a great web of pure, benign light weaving, warp and woof, between all the glazed scenes. A glance at Kassia’s face assured him that she saw it too.

  There was a second ewer of holy water in a cabinet behind the altar; there was fire on the myriad wicks that made the altar glorious. The combination was called a Battle in the books of the Mateu, but in the hands of Kassia and Zakarij, they did not battle, they struck a harmony, and conjured so great an elemental spell that it resonated in the stone sanctuary like a musical tone, drew shafts of radiance from the glass mandorla and filled the sanctuary with its light. They were bathed in it; Pater Julian was bathed in it, though he couldn’t see. And though they were not used to the shape of the magic of this place, it fit in their hands and vibrated in their bones and rang in their souls just as did the magic of the cesia.