The Fatal Gate

by Ian Irvine

  She saw a steep hillside running with water, surrounded by rainforest, but it did not feel right either. Not there.

  A rugged, empty coastline appeared, one she recognised, a few days’ walk south of Alcifer. It would do. At the same time she could feel the years racing by, flipping summer to winter, summer to winter, though again she lost track of them. Then the image of the coastline and her sense of the racing years faded.

  “Uuuugghhhh!” grunted Yggur, who was leaning over the wall, holding the mimemule with both hands. “Uuuugghhhh! Uuuugghhhh! Uuuugghhhh!”

  Crack!

  Karan stumbled on wobbling legs to the wall and looked over. And there it was—Rulke’s construct, hovering in the air and looking exactly as she had seen it all those years ago.

  It was made of metal so black it would have stood out against darkness, and it hung in the air like a soap bubble though it must have weighed tons. Its sides were scooped in and bulged out in perfect, complex curves no human smith could have duplicated. The long front soared up to a flaring binnacle crammed with knobs and wheels, behind which was a thicket of levers, a place to stand and a high seat carved from green serpentinite. A round hatch beside it led down to the red-lit interior.

  “But is it real?” she said. “Is it solid? We walked right through the one in the Nightland.”

  Yggur took a gold tell from his pocket, considered it for a moment and tossed it down onto the hatch. Clink! “It’s real. I’m going in.”

  “What for?”

  “To make sure it’s set right so you can jump to the future, otherwise it might take you anywhere.”

  He climbed onto the wall, balanced there for a few seconds in the wind, then dropped. Karan held her breath, but he landed square in front of the binnacle, pulled up the hatch and went down.

  “Maigraith’s coming fast,” said Sulien. “She’ll get here before we’re ready.”

  “Stay near the wall,” said Karan. She ran across to Wilm. “When Maigraith comes—”

  “I’ll hold her off as long as I can,” said Wilm.

  “Don’t take any risks. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “The black sword will give me some protection.”

  Karan did not see how an enchanted blade could delay Maigraith for more than a few seconds but did not say so. She raced back to the far side. “Is Yggur done yet?”

  “No,” said Sulien. “There seems to be some problem.”

  Karan groaned. The plan was absurd, outlandish; it couldn’t work.

  “Smell the potion again,” said Aviel. “Focus as hard as you can on exactly where you want to go, and when—to the nearest year or two, Shand said.”

  It was hard to get rid of a host of intruding images—a wingless lyrinx stalking someone across broken black rock, a vast sky ship with three or four airbags, the redly dripping skin of a corpulent man hanging from a tree—yuk! A crystal glowing blue in a mine, a tunnel being filled in by a creeping bulge of liquid tar …

  Of all the places she had seen so far, there was only one she would be happy to go to, the coast of the Sea of Thurkad south of Alcifer. She focused on it, on a long grassy ridge she had seen many years ago and always remembered, a pretty place running all the way down to the sea. The grass was green, so it wasn’t winter, and they would be able to fish and forage for shellfish along the shore.

  She fixed it in her mind and ran the years, spring and autumn this time, spring and autumn. But again the image and the years slipped from her mind.

  “I know where,” said Karan. “And I know roughly when. It’s—”

  “Don’t tell us!” cried Aviel. “No one can know.”

  Karan felt stupid. “Sorry.”

  Sulien cried out again, and again Karan heard running footsteps on the stairs, distorted by the secrecy bubble. Maigraith was not far below, and Yggur still had not come up from the construct. They were out of time. Karan pushed out through the bubble to Wilm.

  “I’ll delay her as long as I can,” he whispered.

  Karan clutched his shoulder. He was brave and generous and good, and Maigraith would probably kill him. Karan should tell him to stand aside; why should he risk his life for them? But she kept silent; Sulien had to come first.

  From down the stairs came Maigraith’s voice: “What do you think you’re doing? Get out of my way.”

  “You may not pass,” said a familiar thick voice. Idlis!

  “And you think a pathetic, masterless Whelm can stop me?”

  “I do.”

  “Move or you’re dead.”

  “Go back, triune! I will not let you past.”

  There came a howling blast, a flash of red and a belch of smoke, then a shrill cry echoed up and down the inside of the tower. A cry that could not have come from the throat of any male Whelm. What had Idlis done, and how could he have hurt Maigraith?

  “You will pay for that, Whelm!” she gasped.

  Karan glanced over to the parapet. Yggur was heaving himself up onto it. She ran to him.

  “It’s ready—I hope,” said Yggur. “Llian, this is what you must do in the construct.” Yggur whispered in his ear. “Got it?”

  “Yes,” said Llian, whose teller’s memory for the spoken word was perfect.

  “All right! Llian and Sulien, onto the wall.”

  They climbed up. The parapet was a foot wide and safe enough, had it not been for the hissing wind and the thousand-foot drop if they missed the top of the construct.

  Sulien shot an anxious glance at Karan and an even more troubled one at Llian, who had his arms out and was swaying and sweating; he was almost as green as the stone floor of the tower.

  “Go!” Yggur said to Sulien.

  She jumped, landed on the construct and slid feet first through the open hatch. Karan saw her stand up, bathed in the eerie dark red light, and look around in awe.

  “Llian,” said Yggur.

  Llian looked as though he was going to have apoplexy. He gasped, swallowed, teetered, his arms windmilling, and tried to jump but could not move. Fear froze him to the spot.

  Yggur grimaced, reached out and gave him a measured shove in the back. Llian fell, hit the construct with a thud, slid sideways, gave a convulsive jerk and fell head-first inside, fortunately onto Sulien’s pack, which she had just taken off.

  “Karan, up on the wall!” said Yggur. “Then wait until Maigraith gets here. She’s got to see you jump.”

  “It’s a hell of a risk,” said Karan, climbing onto the wall. “If she looks over before the construct leaves …”

  “Leave me to worry about that,” said Yggur.

  How? She remembered, oddly, that Yggur and Maigraith had been lovers briefly, twelve years ago, and afterwards he had wanted her back but she had refused him. On the stairs the sound of combat grew louder.

  Aviel climbed onto the wall, shivering and not looking down. “Karan?”

  “Yes?”

  “As soon as you’re in the construct, take a huge sniff of the scent potion and fix your destination firmly in mind, then tell Llian to work the mechanism exactly as Yggur showed him. The instant he does, allow the future to run forwards until you reach the year you want to go to, and focus on it with all your wits.”

  “Yes,” said Karan uneasily. It could not work. The idea was ridiculous.

  “Shand said if the journey takes more than a couple of minutes, you’ll need to take a small sniff of the scent potion to maintain the where and the when.”

  Karan nodded.

  “Time to go,” said Yggur, and thrust the mimemule into his pocket.

  “Can I have that?” said Karan.

  “No, it’s part of our plan to cover your tracks.”

  “Wait!” said Wilm. He ran across, clambered onto the wall beside Aviel and unbuckled the copper sheath with the black sword inside. He shouted down to Llian, “Take this, for luck.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Llian called up. “I can’t.”

  “You need it more than I do.”

  Wil
m tossed the sheath down to him, but something very strange happened. A clear envelope formed around the sword, bulged upwards until it enclosed Wilm and Aviel, then shrank again and they were inside the construct.

  Yggur cursed. “What the hell happened there?”

  “The sword pulled us down,” whispered Wilm.

  “What do we do now?” cried Karan.

  From down the stairs there came a thick, clotted scream of agony. A dying scream, surely, and from the sound it had to be Idlis.

  “It’s too late to get them out,” said Yggur. “Put on your most insane and tragic face.”

  Karan turned to face the stairs and tried to look like a woman who had just pushed her man and daughter to their deaths. Yggur vanished the secrecy bubble and was reaching out to her, a convincing look of horror on his own stern features, when Maigraith burst up the stairs. Her hair was wild, her face crimson and her manner desperate.

  “Karan, no!” she shrieked.

  “Too late,” Karan said with rolling eyes and a mad laugh that was only half-feigned. “You’ll never have her! Or Llian! I shoved him over the side and threw Sul—” She choked. It was not an act; the thought was almost too awful to articulate. “I threw my beautiful Sulien after him, down into the River Garr.”

  Karan turned and jumped, straight down through the hatch and onto the packs. Llian, still white-faced, turned seven calibrated dials the distances he had been instructed, then reached for an inconspicuous lever with a red button on the end.

  “Wait,” said Karan. “I’ve got to see the where and the when first.”

  She got out the phial, removed the bung and took a deep sniff. Nothing. Her heart gave a single leaden thud. She stared at Aviel frantically.

  “The potion must have set in the cold,” said Aviel. “Warm it in your hands, quick!”

  Karan clenched her fingers around it. From above she could hear shouting and screaming, then Yggur’s voice rose above the tumult.

  “You drove her to it,” he said furiously. “I hope you’re happy with the world you’ve created for yourself.”

  “It’s nothing to the world I’m going to create,” Maigraith said poisonously.

  The phial was warming. Karan put it to her nose, took a deep sniff, focused on the clearest image of the coast south of Alcifer that she could manage and said to Llian, “Now!”

  He depressed the red button and shoved the lever forward to the fifth notch. Karan allowed the future to run, winter and summer and winter and summer, flashing by ever faster.

  In absolute silence they vanished.

  83

  THE SEA MUST HAVE GONE DOWN

  All Karan could see was that long grassy ridge running down to the sea, and all she could feel were the seasons flicking by, one cycle every second, hot and cold, bright and dark.

  Gates from one place to another were dangerous and sometimes went wrong, leaving their passengers stranded for ever, between. How much more perilous must be the passage from the present to an unknown future? What if they ended up not just nowhere, but nowhen?

  There was no way of knowing. No one had ever gone into the future from the real world. What if the construct took them to a battlefield, a ruined world or a land in the grip of a vicious narcissist like Snoat? Or a future where they would be regarded as aliens? In addition to Karan’s coin they had a small amount of gold, donated by their friends, warm clothing and as much food as they could carry, though now they had to share it with Wilm and Aviel it would not last long.

  At a hundred and twenty seconds she sniffed the scent potion again. The years raced by, summer, winter, summer, winter, more than two hundred now. Stop!

  With a gentle sigh the construct dematerialised and she tumbled five or six feet to the grass. Pain shivered up her right leg, a reminder of old injuries. Karan rolled over and sat up. Sulien and Llian were ten yards up the slope and Aviel and Wilm a few yards higher. They were getting up, rubbing their bruises and looking around.

  The ridge ran down to the Sea of Thurkad, just as she had envisaged. The grass was green, the air mild—it felt and looked like spring or early summer. In the distance she could just make out the shore of the dry land of Rencid, sixty miles away across the sea. On this side a succession of ridges, mostly forested, extended north and south.

  “Well,” she said, walking up to Sulien and Llian, “we’re here.”

  “Where is here?” said Wilm.

  “The coast about thirty miles south of Alcifer.”

  “What year is it?”

  “It was impossible to keep count. But more than two hundred years later.”

  “How can Wilm and I get back?” said Aviel in a small, frightened voice.

  “You can’t. I … I don’t think the construct exists any more.”

  “But how will we live?” wailed Aviel, utterly distraught. “We’ve got nothing.”

  “We’ll share what we have.”

  “You don’t have much either.”

  “But we’re safe!” cried Sulien. The stress had gone from her pixyish face, the deep darkness from her green eyes. She ran to Karan and gave her a hug, then Llian. “We’re free. Maigraith can’t get to us ever again.”

  “And that’s something to celebrate,” said Llian.

  Clearly Aviel did not think so, but he could think of nothing to say to her.

  “Can we go down to the sea?” Sulien’s eyes were glowing with excitement. “There might be crabs … or jellyfish or … anything.”

  Karan’s thighbone still throbbed from the impact, and momentarily she thought about hrux. But she had lost the little box Idlis had given her long ago, and he had sacrificed his life for Sulien. There would be no more hrux, ever. Better get used to it.

  It was about a quarter of a mile down to the sea, and at first it felt like a pleasant stroll, though the further they descended the more strongly Karan felt that something was wrong. Sulien could sense it too; she was gripping Llian’s hand tightly, no longer smiling.

  Then, when they were about forty feet above sea level, the grassy ground became bare rock which ran all the way down to the water.

  “That’s odd,” said Llian.

  The strip of bare rock ran up and down the coast, into each inlet and out along the bottom of each headland, for as far as Karan could see, always at the same height. She looked down at a band of little white bumps. “Barnacles.”

  “What are barnacles doing up here?” said Llian. “They grow at the edge of the sea.”

  “They’re dead. They look years old.” She continued to the water line, where there was another, smaller band of barnacles, live ones. “The sea … it must have gone down.”

  “But the Sea of Thurkad is connected to the ocean. What could cause the level of the ocean to fall so far and so quickly?”

  “I don’t know,” Karan said grimly. “But I don’t like it.”

  They ate black bread with cold sausage and blisteringly hot Aachim pickles, had a swim while Sulien searched the rock pools for crabs and, to her delight, found several, then walked back up the ridge until they came to the coast road, which Karan knew to be a mile or two inland in these parts. It was so overgrown that she almost missed it.

  She leaned against a tree growing from the middle of the road, trying to work things out. “Llian, what’s going on? I’ve ridden this road several times, and it was always in good condition; you could drive wagons along it.”

  “Lucky to ride a horse along it now,” said Llian, shifting the straps of his heavy pack and rubbing his shoulders.

  Serves you right for bringing half a hundredweight of Rulke’s papers, she thought, instead of more food.

  Aviel, who was limping badly, pressed closer to Wilm. She had lost everything and no longer had the means of pursuing the art she loved; she looked utterly desolate. Wilm, who was as brave and resolute as anyone Karan had ever met, seemed unnerved, and she could not blame him.

  “There’s a town a few miles north,” she remembered. “Called Unsted. Come on.”<
br />
  They headed north along the remains of the road, which could not have been used in many years, since mature trees grew all over it. At Aviel’s slow pace it took most of the day to reach Unsted, at the end of a long, narrow inlet, but they found it overgrown, the buildings roofless and crumbling.

  “Have we come to an empty world?” Karan said quietly to Llian. “Did the Merdrun get through after all and kill everyone?”

  “Even if they did,” said Llian, “why would the sea have dropped so far?”

  Nothing they saw even hinted at what had happened. They camped by the water that night, collected oysters and mussels and caught fish and crabs, which were plentiful. Clearly no one had fished the inlet in a very long time.

  In the morning it was raining, and for three more days they continued north, making slow progress. It was a struggle for Aviel to walk even a few miles a day and often Wilm had to carry her on his shoulders. Everywhere they went it was the same: overgrown roads, abandoned towns and villages, and no sign that anyone had lived there in a hundred years.

  “Tomorrow we should get to Alcifer,” said Karan on the fourth afternoon after their arrival. “Then we’ll see.”

  “See what?” said Sulien.

  “I don’t know. But it was built to last. If it’s gone too …” She shivered and did not go on.

  They camped on a headland where they had a clear view in all directions, and were collecting mussels for dinner when Karan heard a high-pitched humming and a bizarre flying contraption appeared in the distance.

  “What the blazes is that?” said Llian, not realising that his bag was upside down and orange-lipped mussels were sliding down his pants onto his boots.

  “It’s some kind of sky ship,” said Karan. “Back into the trees! Quick!”

  They ran up the slope and into shelter, but the craft continued in a straight line, flying directly towards them.

  “Whoever they are,” said Llian, “they know we’re here.”