The Fatal Gate

by Ian Irvine

Wouldn’t linger if I were you, said the sword. He’s a sorcerer; he might repair himself.

  Lumillal’s terror barrier must have collapsed the moment he was paralysed. Osseion lifted Aviel onto the rim and lowered her down. Nimil, who was waiting below, looked shocked. Aviel took stock of herself: her silvery hair was tangled and hard with mucky ice, her nose was bleeding all down her face and front, and she was covered to the knees in stinking sludge.

  She cleaned the black sword on her skirts, took a step and fell over; she could not feel her half frozen feet. Osseion dropped to the ground. Hublees, who was perched on the cauldron’s rim, uttered a command. Red light flashed; he extended his hand and the paralysed ghost vampire was forced down into the water at the bottom of the cauldron. Boom, thud. Muddy ice exploded from the top.

  Hublees jumped down. “Put the lid on,” he said hoarsely. “Now!”

  Osseion clambered onto a nearby stack of bones, heaved the heavy hinged lid of the cauldron up to near vertical and held it, straining, while Hublees positioned a half-rotten timber beam to support it. Osseion fetched another beam and, heaving with all their strength, they raised the lid past vertical, and it fell, closing the cauldron with an almighty clang.

  Osseion helped Hublees up to the rim then passed him a length of lead pipe. Nimil went up as well and, working swiftly with the Aachim’s near-magical ability to shape metal, made a hole in the cauldron lid and fitted the lead pipe into it.

  They jumped down, and Nimil fitted the other end into a large lead crystal bottle. Hublees held it in place while Nimil kindled a fire under the cauldron with liquid from a barrel they had obtained at Grund.

  “It’s naphtha,” said Hublees. “Also known as subterranean fire. Just the thing for distilling the Archeus out of a stinking sorcerer ghost vampire. I can’t wait to hear the swine scream.”

  Aviel turned away hastily. Hudigarde had been one of the most genocidal monsters in all the Histories, and as Lumillal he was no better, but Aviel did not want to witness his torment.

  “I’ll take her back,” said Osseion.

  He offered her his big warm hand, and she was glad to take it. Horror had frozen her to the core and he seemed the only normal person among them. Then she looked down the alley of bones to where Earnis lay on the cold, foul ground—handsome, kindly and dead.

  She closed his eyes and sat beside him, stroking his hair. He had loved her and, though it had been entirely unrequited, had sacrificed himself to try and save her. No small thing, that.

  “We can’t leave him in this awful place,” she said, not bothering to wipe her flowing eyes. “But …” She could not have moved him an inch, and that felt like a betrayal of everything he had stood for and all he had done for her. Not for the first time she cursed being born so small, crippled and weak.

  “We’ll bring him back,” said Osseion, “and give him a decent burial among the great boulders. He’d like that, it being such a magical place.”

  “Thank you,” she said faintly.

  Before they had gone fifty yards a naphtha-fuelled fire was roaring behind them, beneath the cauldron where Lumillal was trapped. Immediately the shrieking began, so shrill and penetrating and awful that, even with her fingers in her ears, she could not block it out.

  She did not speak again on the painful half-mile back to the sky ship; she lacked the strength, and had it not been for Osseion she might have lain down and never got up again. She felt utterly drained. She had been drained and, though the missing part of her life force was back, she wasn’t sure it was quite where it belonged. She felt fractured.

  “I’ll get the water boiling,” said Osseion. “You’ll want a good warm-up and scrub-down, I expect.”

  She dragged herself into her workshop tent and slumped in the canvas chair, but got up again, raised the black sword to her lips and kissed it. “Thank you.”

  More than I ever got from Mendark, it muttered. The thanks I meant, it added hastily.

  Aviel slid the sword into its sheath and, if it said anything else, she did not hear. She hobbled along her workbench, checking her apparatus. All was as she had left it. She flopped into her chair again, longing for sleep, though there was no chance of that. The moment Hublees and Nimil returned with the Archeus, if they did, she had to carry out the final step in the procedure, perfectly.

  “Water’s hot,” said Osseion cheerfully, carrying in a big canvas bucket in each hand. “Enough for a quick bath.”

  He set them down, returned with a small tub and poured the water in, then went out, pulling the flaps of the tent closed behind him.

  Aviel stripped off her filthy boots and clothes, washed the worst of the muck off with a cloth then sank gratefully into the steaming water. It was only four inches deep but oh how beautiful it was, how warming, how cleansing, how normal.

  When she tingled all over from scrubbing she dressed in her warmest clothes, dragged the bath outside and overturned it, and returned to her chair. She had planned to rehearse the final alchemical step but sleep overwhelmed her and the next she knew Hublees was shaking her awake. A long time must have passed for he looked exhausted. Even his absurd goatee was bedraggled, but there was a triumphant light in his little squinty eyes.

  “Got it!” He set the lead crystal bottle down on Aviel’s bench next to the layered filters and the colophony dish.

  The bottle was half full of an oily, sluggish, yellow-green fluid, the colour of the light from Lumillal’s eyes. She wondered about the process of distilling the fluid, which was clearly real, from a ghost vampire that had been pure spirit. Her head throbbed and she gave the thought up. Either mancery or sorcery had been involved, and as long as it had been done properly that was all that mattered.

  “Look out!” Hublees leaped across the workshop, grabbed the bottle and twisted the stopper in hard.

  “What’s the matter?” she said dazedly.

  “The Archeus was oozing out around the stopper.”

  “What would happen then?”

  “I can’t bear to imagine, but it’s perilous stuff, Aviel. It aches to possess. Use only the required amount, keep it tightly stoppered, and if you spill any on yourself, clean it off instantly.”

  Aviel wired the stopper in as tightly as it would go. “I’d better get started.”

  She put a low-sided ceramic bowl in a large glass flask and set the colophony dish in the bowl to protect the glass from the fire. Then, taking exquisite care with her golden tongs, she set the best golden brimstone in the centre of the dish, poured in a tiny amount of quadruple-distilled spirits of wine, ignited it and put the top on the flask. It had a glass stopcock in the side, which she opened to allow a small flow of air, and a cooling coil running from the top of the flask then down through a glass pipe containing her multilayered filter, though it was not yet connected.

  When the spirits of wine had burned away and the colophony and golden brimstone had caught, she allowed the condensate to run into a waste beaker, then connected the first of her layered filters.

  Hublees, Osseion and Nimil had gathered inside the doorway and were watching her intently. Aviel sensed that Shand was also in the workshop, keeping well out of the way so no one would bump into him. She wondered how his own work had gone at Rogues Render. He had still needed two odours to complete his scent potion: the smoke from the desiccated corpse of a woman murdered long ago and the last breath of an undead killer. Lumillal had consumed many mourning pilgrims before they stopped coming, and Shand could have obtained both odours there.

  Aviel put a little flask under the outlet and checked the condensate. When it turned from clear to the palest pink she swiftly connected a different filter after the first and allowed it to drip into a second flask until the pink drops changed to brown, then red-brown. She connected her third and last layered filter and let the condensate drip into a third flask. Then waited. And waited, but the drips remained a stubborn red-brown.

  It was hard to see through the fumes in the container though it looked as tho
ugh the colophony and brimstone were rapidly burning away. Then, suddenly, the drips went a shimmering silvery white.

  This was it! With shaking hands she put a fourth flask under the outlet and perched in front of it, watching the drops one by one. When about a teaspoon of the silvery liquid had accumulated she saw that the condensate in the tube was turning pale blue. She pulled the precious flask out of the way and stuck a beaker under the outlet to collect what was left, which was now waste, as were the contents of the first three flasks.

  Aviel carried the little flask of silvery liquid down to the far end of the bench, holding it in both hands, and set it down. She took the diamond phial from its leopardwood case, clamped it to a stand and, with a pair of unused golden tweezers, took a small piece of sintered platinum out of a jar and weighed it. It was slightly too heavy so she took a smaller piece and, taking exquisite care, eased it into the diamond phial, where it lodged just above the curved base.

  Now with one of her eyedroppers she drew up a quantity of the shimmering silvery white condensate and dripped precisely seventeen drops onto the sintered platinum. The shimmer disappeared though the fluid remained the same colour.

  Her heart was crashing about in her chest. Now for the final step. If it failed, or she did something wrong, she would have wasted weeks of work, countless thousands of gold tells, a diamond fit for a princess’s tiara and, most important of all, Earnis’s life.

  She laid out another eyedropper but, in putting it down, crushed its finely drawn tip against the bench. She pushed it aside and took another. Her hands were shaking so badly that she dared not open the lead crystal bottle by herself.

  “Need help,” she croaked, turning to Hublees. “Can you open the bottle and seal it again the moment I take the Archeus?”

  He nodded. “It might be better if you instruct Nimil how much to take and how to use it.”

  “In this kind of alchemy the whole procedure must be done by the one person.”

  She walked back and forth, reciting her herbal mantras until her hands were steady again, then took a deep breath and flashed the watchers a feeble smile.

  “I’m ready. This is the final step—if I get it right.”

  She took up the new eyedropper, a large one. Hublees unwired the stopper and lifted it out. Tendrils of yellow-green Archeus oozed out and he grimaced. Aviel inserted her eyedropper and drew some up, then discharged it into a measuring cylinder until it contained exactly three drams. She dribbled it into the diamond phial, giving it a shake on its stand after each half-dram. Hublees put the stopper in the lead crystal bottle and wired it on again, then stepped back.

  Aviel stoppered the diamond phial, removed it from the clamp and inverted it three times. The liquid in the bottom of the phial, which had been a muddy brown, went clear. She inverted it again so it flowed through the sintered platinum and it changed to a mustard yellow. After the next inversion it turned blue, then pale grey. She inverted it for the final time and the liquid, now resting on the base of the diamond stopper, set to a pale azure jelly.

  “All’s well so far,” she said with a weak smile. Her heart was thundering again and the shake in her arm was back.

  She turned the phial upright, and a small quantity of liquid oozed down the sides, through the sintered platinum and collected in the bottom. It was a brilliant green, though there wasn’t much of it. Aviel removed the stopper and the plug of azure jelly came with it. She scraped it into a waste jar and wiped the diamond stopper, then, with a pair of tweezers, picked out the piece of sintered platinum, rinsed it and put it back in the jar with the other pieces.

  She replaced the diamond stopper in the phial and held it up. “The colour’s perfect—just as the method describes. The whole sequence of colours went right. It’s nivol! We’ve done it!”

  Hublees was beaming. He shook her free hand. “I never would have believed it. Very well done, Aviel.”

  Nimil’s oval eyes shone for a moment, then he turned away. A feeling of great exhilaration surged through her. She had done well. No, she had done the impossible. She let out a great sigh. But then she looked into the phial again and her smile faded.

  “What’s the matter?” said Hublees.

  “All that labour, pain and danger, and Earnis’s life, and all we’ve got is one lousy drop of nivol.”

  39

  I SHOULD HANG YOU FROM THE PORTICO

  For a man so crippled, Hingis could move very quickly when he was desperate. Before Karan realised what was happening he had scuttled up to the cabin door and wrenched it open. A blast of freezing air thrust him back several steps. He leaned forward, fighting against it, clearly planning to hurl himself out to his death.

  Behind Karan, Ussarine let out a despairing cry, and there was a clatter as she knocked over her crutches. Karan tried to push herself to her feet but a piercing pain shot through the knife wound in her left shoulder and she fell back again.

  Sulien dived and caught Hingis around the ankles. “Don’t do it!” she gasped.

  But he was insane with despair. He lunged forward, one dragging step, then another. He was going to jump.

  “Let him go, Sulien,” cried Karan, making another attempt to get up. Hingis was at the door now. “He’ll carry you with him.” She came to her feet but felt very weak; her head was spinning, the cabin wavering.

  “Enough!” roared Yggur.

  Abandoning the controls, he leaped across the cabin, hauled Hingis back from the door and, with a punch to the jaw, knocked him down. He crashed down on his back beside Karan’s seat and lay there, moaning and twitching. Sulien came to her hands and knees by the door, her eyes wide and her mouth open, and her red hair slowly whitened with frost in the icy blast.

  Yggur closed the door and locked it, picked her up and said, “There’s such a thing as too much courage, child,” and put her in her seat.

  The sky ship lurched. He took the controls long enough to steady it, then bound Hingis’s hands behind his back, cast an enchantment on the bonds so they could only be undone by himself and tied him to a seat as far from Ussarine as possible.

  “It’s obvious that they’re in love,” said Sulien in a low voice, “so why doesn’t he make it up with her?”

  “Every time Hingis looks at Ussarine he sees his dead sister,” said Karan, “and he blames himself for her death.”

  “Well, I think he’s stupid!”

  Hingis hunched in his seat unmoving for the rest of that eternal and utterly miserable day, refusing food and drink, just staring straight ahead, his jaw tight and his face frozen in despair. A hurt and uncomprehending Ussarine approached him half a dozen times, trying to comfort him, but he would not even look at her.

  Sulien went quiet after that, and Karan could get nothing out of her, though surely she was agonising about how close the attack at the rooming house had been to succeeding, and worrying how the triplets would attack next.

  In the evening of the following day Yggur flew over the desert lands surrounding the River Zur, heading for Zile. The once vast network of irrigation canals was dry, crusted with salt and partly filled with windblown sand, and the industrious people who had farmed here were long gone.

  “Look, there’s Zile,” Karan said to Sulien. “Which was—”

  “Built by Daddy’s people, the Zain, thousands of years ago. It was once the most important city in the west, until they fell out with everyone.”

  “And made a pact with Rulke, and were banished.”

  The broad avenues of Zile were lined with massive granite columns that had stood for millennia. Behind the columns stood the ruins of many other great buildings, now slowly being overwhelmed by the drifting sand. The only one that remained intact, set on a rise a mile from the city, was the Great Library, that wonder of the ancient world. It was a vast rectangle of red marble with colonnaded walks on all four sides, four storeys high and, Karan knew, with many levels below ground.

  Yggur brought the sky ship in to land on the western end of the libr
ary’s flat roof. Three elegantly curved Aachim sky ships, each different, were tied down in the middle of the roof a hundred yards away. Two more sky ships were moored at the eastern end, though these had the crude rectangular box cabins of the vessels made in the Thorst Shipyards. Soldiers stood guard by each vessel. There were boxes and bags by the ladder of the furthest sky ship, and its rotors were turning slowly.

  Someone burst up a set of stairs in the nearest corner and came stalking across the roof in the bright moonlight. Malien! Tallia followed, along with a well-fed officer whom Karan assumed to be Commander Dedulus Janck, and a slender young man in an adjutant’s uniform. Tallia looked furious, Malien grim. Janck’s face was expressionless. Karan waited for Yggur to disembark, quaking. She had been dreading this moment.

  “The music!” said Yggur theatrically, gesturing to the door. “Best you face it, Karan.”

  Her wounded shoulder throbbed. Her heart was racing and her palms were sweaty. She had let Malien down badly. What would she do?

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Sulien said anxiously.

  “Stay here for a bit.” Karan tossed out the ladder and went down.

  “Well?” said Malien, whose face was so brittle it looked about to crack. “Did … did you find her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “We got her back.”

  Malien shoved past her, sending pain spearing through Karan’s shoulder, ran up the ladder and hurled herself in through the door. Inside the cabin, Karan saw her dancing round and round, holding Sulien in her arms. Karan’s eyes prickled.

  “Lucky for you,” Tallia said coldly. “You cost us dear, Karan.”

  “What happened?” Karan said defensively.

  “Dedulus Janck,” the commander said, holding out his hand. She shook it warily.

  “For want of a sky ship we lost most of Snoat’s men,” said Janck. “His other armies disbanded before we could take control of them, and the officers stole the army war chests. It was a grievous blow.”

  Karan had given little thought to what the loss of the sky ship would mean to Malien or the allies; she had been utterly focused on Sulien. She looked up into Janck’s penetrating gaze.