The Gates of Paradise (Dark Spiral Book 2)

by Segoy Sands

  Lorca kept her eyes closed, as Reese stroked her hair. After a while, the man, who she guessed was the head merchant, left their company and she felt her mother breathe a sigh of relief.

  For seven days they travelled south along the Tourmaline, to Welen, where the merchants stopped to sell their wares. Welen was cobbled and grand, with sewers and waterworks, squat little stone houses, and prosperous wooden inns with brightly painted signs. They stayed in The Four Faces, in a high-ceilinged room with a great black-varnished four post bed and deep bearskin rugs.

  9 Ignis born

  She was not in the dark. She was back in the Four Faces, under the warm blankets of a plush feather bed and woolen mattress, safe behind silken curtains. She had the blanket over her head, against the extravagance of daylight that was flooding through the windows. Reese and Skaena had gone out, instructing her not to leave the room, and so she was trying to sleep. She assumed they’d be getting provisions for the trip to Tor Cael.

  In the inn tavern downstairs, when they first came in, men were gathered, drinking spirits, bragging about what they would do to the Bootlicker if he came a few steps further west. After the days on the road, with that terrible tension she sensed in her mother, as if nightmares surrounded them, she had never felt such perfect ease. How sufficient it was, lying in the great-bed, pretending it was dark, knowing that beyond that darkness she was surrounded by soft silks that dyed the world pink, green, and violet. It was enough to know the warm sunlight was pouring through the window. She didn’t need to see it. The ellieri lived in the sun. In times of turbulence, the Aurelius, the wayward child, the renegade, ever with one foot stretched toward the world, took birth. So the Aurum bedes preached, their breath scented with tincture of gentian. In Ojeida, even the Graelish sneered at their own quaint and harmless bedes. Naturally, Ojeida had to have one of the most stately and sanctified Aurums, which Reese had let her visit, if only to pity the lonely token scholars, and gawk at their paintings and replicas of the Rood.

  Since earliest childhood, she’d been hearing of the Rood and the many-faced Aur, who might come as a warrior, a rebel, a breaker of oaths, or a lover, a healer, a maker of bonds. The world, they said, was forever waiting impatiently for his coming, and even more impatiently for his passing. There was a spark of the Aur in all living things, the fire that could never be domesticated, a madness of love and poetry and prophecy scattered among people high and low. He was the dust of the earth, the poet-ever-living, the singer of songs, the aere perennius. She knew more of this than she should have at that age, for she was curiously split. She was a young girl stopped at the Four Faces in Welen after leaving Ojeida for the first time, and a woman in the unbinding, traveling the thirteen coils of darkness. She had lived through it already, yet she was also experiencing it for the first time.

  She must have fallen asleep with her eyes open. There was a creature in the room, in the warm sunlight, spots of white in its golden fur: round, soft, mirthful, and half and again the height and breadth of a man. Reese once told her that the Sí took whatever shape the mind casts onto them, according to one’s predilections. The images of Opo in the large, worn pages of Radda’s Emptiness on Naarwa Isle varied widely – a smiling white dog, a laughing lion, a bright creature no larger than a mouse, a fat benevolent man with the head of a white manatee, and many others. One could only see him, it was said, when one was most perfectly happy, though who knew if the Opo brought that pure joy or was attracted to it? There one stood like a wish come true.

  When it turned its eyes on her, they were warm sunshine, the eyes of a child before speech, with untaught intelligence. What could she do but smile back? Let us play, it seemed to say, let us search every room in this great inn, let us wheel through the kitchens, dance on the rooftops, then let us chase each other through the market, fly through the stalls, race down the alleys and through the wide avenues out the walled gates, to leave this world of man behind, run in the woods, roll in the hills, down riotous, profligate meadows flowering wild in the sun. Only then will we begin our aimless wandering, happening by chance upon others like ourselves, minstrels on the road, recognizing in one another’s faces the wordless places of bliss, before time. She felt it, all of it, but then the vision began to fade. She might have cried out at the sudden loss, but the invitation had been made. It would always be possible to run off with Opo into the wild world beyond. For now, she could sleep. She could fall in darkness.

  Skaena and Reese returned and said it was time to leave. Their laden horses were saddled and waiting. Without looking back, they left Welen on a straight road that went for hours through open farmland, the sparkling Tourmaline ever at the edge of sight. Eventually, they came to a bridge that crossed the tranquil blue-green currents, and then into an primeval forest that closed around them, blocking out the late afternoon sunlight. Perhaps evening had descended more rapidly than usual outside the forest, but inside the woods, at least, the world fell dark too suddenly. She wondered, with a shiver of dread, if they would sleep in that place. As Skaena led them forward, fear grew upon her. The reins trembled in her hands, and she heard herself whimper. Why would her mother follow a hardened Nesso, a demon servant, into a place like this?

  “Mother,” her voice shook. “I think we should stop. I don’t want to go on.”

  No one answered. There was no one there. She had believed she was mounted on a horse, but she must have been mistaken. Skaena was telling them that they were anathemae, and that the Joro-Blakes had passed judgment, which he must execute. He made them dismount. He told them to say their farewells to the earth, and pray for its forgiveness. When she reached out her arms to feel the trees and branches around her, there was nothing.

  “Mother,” she whimpered. “I’m scared.”

  Skaena’s face, and arms, even the naked blade he held, crawled with black ciphers. A man no more, he was possessed by a smoky dbud. She knew about demons. When she was naughty and would not go to sleep, not yet six years old, Reese would threaten to call A’zi. The name alone frightened her, a near presence in the room, with countless razor black teeth and a crown of ebon razors, too many digits on its vicious hands, sharp silver points for pupils. Usually, she would race under the covers right away and give no more trouble. One night, though, full of mischief, she laughed and defied her mother, daring her to make good her threat. Reese’s expression didn’t change. She didn’t speak a word. But, for a moment, someone or something stood behind her. A’zi.

  “Now will you sleep?” her mother asked.

  “Yes, mama.”

  When she tucked her into bed and blew out the candle, the darkness was filled with small glowing creatures watching from the ceiling, the walls, the floor, with round golden eyes and round golden mouths, suffusing the room in soft phosphorescence as they winked out one by one. When all was dark, and mystery surrounded them, Reese explained to her patiently, “Where there are Arru and Urra, so are there Irri.”

  She was in all those places at once, falling alone into the dark, of the nog, of the room where she slept in her mother’s arms, of the gloomy forest Skaena chose for their deaths. Reese was squeezing her hand, with no move to flee or resist.

  “Those who sent you have made a mistake,” she heard herself said, with unexpected certainty. Without turning to look, she felt A’zi behind them. She knew the Skaena, or the bdud demon that possessed him, was afraid.

  “A’zi,” she heard herself say. Reese’s hand tightened around hers, chill with horror. But it was too late. Justice was coming, not mercy.

  “A’zi,” she said again.

  A man stepped from behind her, or through her: thin, casual, dangerous. Another stepped out of her, then another. She heard her own voice as if it were someone else’s. “A’zi,” she said. “A’zi.” A thousand yet indivisible, Ignis-born, the impeccable flame of A’zi streamed toward the bdud-possessed Nesso, and through him, and into him, so that she knew his mind and heart. Anathema he had called her, because her mother has been lo
ver to A’zi, and she was born of that union. But he did not hate her. Sharing his mind, she knew that among the Nesso there were women who became demon consorts, viaisa, who drank the bitter root and ate it in their meals to prevent conception. Her mother was viaisa, but one that had pleased A’zi greatly in bearing a child. Such a child would live outside the dualism of good and evil, and all the mind-made laws of man. Such a child would change all the priesthoods, bringing the low high, and the high low.

  So the Joro-Blakes had sent him to kill them, mother and child, and, after, to purge himself of the pollution of that act. In his heart she saw doubt that he, or his blakes, could ever atone. She saw relief, too, for now it was clear to him that there was no one to kill, nothing but Arru pouring from itself to itself. She felt his ecstasy, and glimpsed, in the vision at the back of his brain, the gates of paradise that only the Al Jaebra open.

  Later, she grew dimly conscious of the thin web of her veins threaded through the forest soil, in the life of roots and fibers, in the restless motion of minuscule creatures, in the flow of minutest particles, the ceaseless seething interchange, the subtle music of life. Skaena was speaking to her tenderly, tears streaming down his sallow cheeks. She remembered someone striking her across the face. He had no need to be sorry for that. Her mother was ghostly pale. Neither of them would speak to her. Reese looked at Lorca’s hands, turning them over and over in hers. “It wasn’t you, darling,” she said. She seemed to want her to remember that. Why was she looking at her hands?

  They made her drink small sips of water as they erased all traces of camp. When they came out of the woods onto the tableland, a tumescent sun was dropping over the curl of a sinuous green river. Beyond the river, the ground climbed again toward the Western Stair to Cairn, then to Tor Cael, guardian of the western sea.

  In Tor Cael, they stayed a month. Every other day, it seemed, the blakes summoned Skaena to the tower. Reese told her they were furious with him, and that it was a great imposition that they stay in his house. Yet for now they must impose. He had a woman and children. It was a dark house, with no stairs but many rooms, all of them filled with unfamiliar smells and colors and sounds. The food was new to her, flat bread and spiced lentils and heaps of some tiny golden grain. There was spice even in the tea. For days they stayed in a dark room on a wide, low bed with richly embroidered blankets, in textures she had never imagined, with patterns dizzying in their unexpectedness. The eldest daughter, Zema, only a few years her elder, came twice a day with copper tea pots and platters of food. She neither spoke nor smiled.

  Lorca had seen Skaena’s woman, slender, with many long dark braids, a wide forehead, and resolute eyes. She was dressed in a sleeveless loose garment of dark dyed wool, sashed at the waist. She tolerated them in her house, but did not look at them. Skaena would come sometimes, late in the night, and discuss things with Reese in a low, barely audible voice. She was asking him to let them leave for Naarwa, with or without him.

  “Don’t go there,” he said.

  “What choice is left me?”

  Lorca tried to keep perfectly still. Her shallow chest rose and fell under the thin blanket. Her pulse beat in her ears so loudly she was certain they would hear.

  “You are safe only here.”

  “Safe?”

  “You sought the gates of paradise,” he said. There was another long silence. Skaena was first to speak. “You are viaisa, consort to A’zi.”

  She heard, in her mother’s sharp intake of breath, mingled emotions: guilt, sorrow, shock, relief, defiance. Silent beneath her blankets, it made her heart beat all the more wildly, to know, by that one sign, that Skaena spoke the truth.

  “You came to our door, with Joggen. You agreed to take us to Naarwa, but made me promise to stop here, in Nessere. But you never meant us to make it all the way to your home.”

  “I meant to kill you,” he said. “That’s what you think.” When she did not reply, he said, “Always, A’zi is in the world, but one like me must find him. We do not always succeed, and yet we train. Although I am not worthy, my training has borne fruit. You thought, maybe, that A’zi protected her, and that he will do so again. No. He has been drawn to me, the prepared vessel.”

  There was silence.

  “In the Spiral, we have our own beliefs,” Reese said. “Our wish is not for your fires of paradise. Nor is it for your war with the Aurum. We believe in the Lady’s full return, and in the ending of the cycles of violence.”

  “She would have to live long enough, then, for the world to know she existed,” he said.

  10 The Lady Withdrawn

  They set out on horses on a rainy morning, and after a damp three day ride, arrived at the sea’s shapeless, misty edge, where they parted from Skaena, embarking on a skiff bound for Naarwa’s shores. There was a small market town, Traedglas, at the base of the island, inhabited mostly by fisher folk, who traded across the waters with farmers in Llawglas, and were responsible for feeding the sisterhood in the great temple. Upon disembarking, they found humble lodgings in what passed for an inn. The floor was dirt and there was no window. After a few days, a blue-robed member of the sisterhood came to their room, so tall she bent her head slightly under the low ceiling. Pushing back her hood, she revealed rippling brown curls, large brown eyes, and a face moulded less to austerity than laughter and pleasure. She greeted Reese with a firm smile, hugging her tightly.

  “Well, you’ve grown up,” the visitor said, regarding her over Reese’s shoulder.

  “She was three months old when you last held her,” Reese said, leading her to the bed, the only place to sit in the room. “Lorca, this is Wyn. She and I are very old friends.”

  “From the message your mother sent,” Wyn said, “you’ve had to leave your home. If peace depended on the absence of war, there’d be no peace in the world. But war does not bring peace, though people rarely remember that. Peace is to be understood on its own terms. I hope returning to Naarwa brings you peace.”

  “I hope so, too,” she said.

  “Come then,” Wyn held out her hand to her. “Have you been up to the temple mons yet?”

  They walked the dirt streets of the market town, to the base of the great white stone stair, which was broad enough for the three of them to climb side by side in the sea wind, straight up the to the white pillars of the temple dome. At the top, an immensity of blue seemed to engulf her as if space were a deeper and wider element than the the earth and sea over which it pressed. She wondered how it might feel to be a creature of air.

  “However high we stand, we are of the earth,” Wyn said, the wind carrying her voice out over the waves. “Bound to earth, living in this body, we suffer, born in tears to die in tears, sooner or later to experience the dissolution of whatever we hold dear, brief atoms in flux. But the atom finds wisdom the moment it ceases to shelter itself from the knowledge of the flux. So it is not as simple as some say, that we would unbind the winds in order to be free of the prison of our bodies. Without our bodies, there would be no wisdom to unbind.”

  Wyn reached out her hands, and for a moment the air solidified into a tiny funnel of wind that opened and grew, moving away from them, lengthening, until its stem touched the waters and its mouth touched the sky. Lorca had never seen anything so beautiful, for it unwound from within itself new depths of blueness. She understood, as it dwindled and vanished, that it was an image of the blue spiral for which the sisterhood of Naarwa was named. Watching it, she lost her separateness from the world; the ocean, out beyond the temple mons, seemed close enough to touch.

  Reese put an arm around her. “I left here with you in my arms. I made that choice for the two of us. But now you must decide to stay or leave.”

  Wyn peered into her eyes, as serious as Reese. “Here, you will not live with your mother. Novices live with novices and respect their yeme, yemes live with yemes and respect their ambas, ambas live with ambas and respect the Aksama. We live as sisters, with no thought for the ordinary lives of women, dedi
cated to the one goal of unbinding the wind, undoing those knots that limit the mind. This takes energy, which comes from commitment. Commitment comes from stability. Stability comes from wisdom. Wisdom comes from seeing the source of one’s mind in all minds. This we mean by the Lady. You will be absorbed in all of Her aspects: La Sera, La Vera, La Ora, La Teine. But above all, La Nila.”

  So she entered the blue sisterhood, though she was found to have little natural gift. For the first time in her life, she lived among other girls. The noviisi of her cylch seemed to know nothing about her mother. Her yeme, Lethe was not more than twenty, and would have been at most ten years old when Reese left Naarwa, with a three month old babe in her arms. As she had little real dealings with anyone outside her cylch, her world was indeed very small. Each day, with the seven other girls, she spent the hour before dawn and the hour before dusk in the qiva with Lethe. Otherwise, her cylch, and seven others, spent the hours of the morning at breakfast and chores, and the hours of midday at lunch and exercise. They trained in aer, movements of the body said to gently and gradually open the channels. The life was simple and peaceful, and in time she felt it was good. She could leave Ojeida in the past.