Not without Arrim. He stalled for time. “How was it closed?” Joe said.
“What?”
“Who closed the gordath?”
“I don’t know. One minute there was a big fucking hole in the air like usual, and the next thing it slammed shut. You passed out, and so did the other guy. But come on. You can open it again. You have to.”
Damn thing closed on its own. Unstable. Well, the only stable gordath was a closed one. They had been given a reprieve, through no ability of their own. But that meant that Hare was no closer to controlling the gordath than he had been before, unless Joe gave in to Mark’s cajoling.
“Where are the guards?” he said again.
“Again with the guards. Hare left me with you. Now come on, let’s go.”
“No,” Joe said.
“What the fuck? You like it here? You like getting the shit kicked out of you?” Mark’s voice had risen to a shout.
Behind them a torch flared sulkily, and Joe closed his eyes against the reddish light, his night vision shot to hell. He could hear the sound of swords drawn all around them and crossbows being armed.
“Lord Bahard,” came Hare’s voice. He stepped out of the woods, a silhouette against the torchlight. Another torch flared and another, and they were ringed by smoking, flickering light. Joe raised himself up achily and looked around. He and Arrim had been left to rest where they had fallen, near the closed gordath. Everyone else had camped a bit farther out. A smart move, Joe thought, considering the danger—and the smell.
“You aren’t trying to leave me, are you?” Hare said. His voice was silky, and his men ranged themselves behind him. In the fitful light Joe could see Mark touch the safety on his rifle, a small movement.
Crap, Joe thought. He was going to get them both killed.
Instead, every crossbow came up and aimed straight at Mark, the sharp points catching the dull light.
“Set it down, Lord Bahard,” Hare said. After a moment Mark obeyed, but as he did, he burst out, “Screw you, Hare! I’ve done enough! You promised me the same deal as Tharp gave me, and I haven’t seen one cent! I’m through! God damn it, I want to go home!”
Hare smacked him. The sound was loud in the night. As Mark stumbled backward, Hare grabbed him by the front of his bulky camo jacket and pushed him up against a tree. Hare was smaller than Mark, but Mark could do nothing against the man.
“You fool,” Hare said, and all the smoothness was gone from the Brytherner’s voice. “You go nowhere without my leave. Is that understood? One more try, and you are useless to me.”
He stepped back, and Mark pressed himself against the tree, cursing. Hare ignored him. He picked up the hunting rifle and handed it to one of his men. “Bind him,” he ordered, and with eagerness three of their guards went forward, two to hold a struggling Mark and the other to yank his arms around his back.
“God dammit, Hare!” Mark blustered, but Hare ignored him. He looked at Joe and Arrim.
“Are you strong enough to try again?”
Joe shrugged, though every bone hurt. “That depends. Are you crazy enough to want to go through that again?”
“I tire of your recalcitrance, Guardian.”
As if to remind them of the gordath’s presence, the ground rumbled, and they all caught their balance. Joe could feel the energy zipping beneath him. Here we go again, he thought. So much for keeping the gordath closed. Pretty soon the earthquakes would start up on the other side, and the hole between the worlds would spread. They had barely closed the gordath the last time it burned between the two worlds. He remembered the soldier who fell through into emptiness back then, and shivered. This one was worse, much worse. And if Hare made good on his threat and killed him and Arrim, nobody was going to be able to stop it.
He hoped Lynn knew the gordath was open, even if she hadn’t gotten his desperate message with the dog. Run, Lynn, he thought. Don’t stick around. Because Arrim and I are in a shitload of trouble, and when this gordath opens for good, we aren’t going to be able to control it.
How far did a person have to run before they could outrun a gordath?
“Well? Why won’t it stay open?” Hare asked. He faced his two reluctant guardians under the circle of torchlight that smoked in the little clearing. He sat on one upended tree trunk. The stench of death, of upended trees, and maybe even the stink of energy that came with the gordath, surrounded them. The forest trembled continuously. Hare’s men gathered close, all of them, even Mark, fidgeting nervously.
Arrim said, “The gordath is a living being. It can’t be controlled, only persuaded.” His voice was tired. He’s given up, Joe thought. Arrim was on the verge of panic. Another beating, or even the threat of one, and the man would break, if he hadn’t already.
Hare lowered his voice and said almost gently, “Then why can’t you persuade it, Guardian?”
“It’s not—this isn’t—” Arrim faltered at Hare’s expression.
“Hare,” Joe said. The Brythern leader shot him a sour look. “Lay off.”
“You don’t give the orders here, Guardian.”
Drav growled and stepped forward, but Hare waved him to a halt. Joe pressed his advantage. “Look, this gordath is too much for us. It’s closed now, and it’s still shaking all the time.” All around them the leaves and grasses quivered, though the air was still. “I don’t know what you got us into, and you sure as hell don’t know what you got us into, but I think you need to come at this from a different angle. We can’t open it and keep it open. You keep making us try, and we might not be able to close it. Now we all know what happens when the gordath can’t be closed.”
He looked about meaningfully at the dead beasts all around them. But did Hare really know? Joe remembered the earthquakes in New York, so violent that they dislodged Balanced Rock from its support stones and flung it onto the highway. He looked straight at Hare, and the man’s expression in the weak light lost its single-mindedness. Hare was starting to think.
For a long moment they were all silent as they waited for him. The constant ceaseless rustling hummed in Joe’s bones. Finally Hare turned, and when he looked at them, he shook his head. His voice became thoughtful.
“Do I know?” he said. “Yes, I know. Last winter, the first time this troublesome man”—he indicated Mark, who sulked—“came through and brought his weapons of war, we felt the tremors in the city of Cai-sone. And then, the weapons showed up on our borders, and we knew we had to understand what your country was doing. While Aeritan went to war, our learned men and historians searched deep into our histories and discovered what these tremors meant. It wasn’t the first time Cai-sone had felt these earth shakings, and here we were, through no fault of our own, facing them again.”
“So,” Joe said. “After all that, now you want to open the gordath anyway?”
“To control it, Guardian!” Hare snapped. “The country that controls the gordath controls the world. Your weapons, what this man has told me of your country’s mechanisms, its thirst for fuel, all the trade between nations would go to Brythern, not Aeritan.”
He controlled his voice. “Our histories tell us of a stranger who came to Brythern generations ago. He wasn’t a barbarian like you, Guardian.” He gestured to Arrim. “Nor was he from across the oceans. He said he came through the forest. He spoke of distant countries we had never heard of, and he bore many marvelous objects. We still have some of his possessions in the university at Cai-sone.” He held out his hand, and one of his men placed Mark’s hunting rifle in it. Mark whined and strained toward it, but Drav cuffed him on the back of his head. “He had an ancient model of a gun like this. Not much more dangerous than one of our crossbows.”
A flintlock? Joe thought.
“But as much as Brythern marveled at this stranger, he marveled at Brythern, our alchemists and our scientists, our cities and our holdings. He wanted to deliver our country to his god, he said. He was insistent upon that fact, so insistent that finally he was beheaded, and his h
ead was placed on top of the great stone cairns that he said was a gatepost to his world.” This time he looked at Joe. “I’ve met two of you now, from your world, your ‘god’s earth.’ I’m not impressed, Guardian. Not impressed at all.”
“Tell him the rest,” Arrim said suddenly. They turned to look at him. He swayed, caught himself, but his voice had strength and intensity. “They didn’t know what they had. And after they killed the stranger man, there was no one who could close the gordath. It opened wider and wider until finally a great cataclysm struck that marred Brythern, the same one that destroyed half of Gordath Wood as well. You arrogant fool. You killed a guardian, and you let the gordath rain destruction down on the world. And now you mean to do it again.” Disgust filled his voice. The guards moved uneasily, muttering among themselves. Joe knew how they felt. Arrim’s sudden strength sent a shiver down his spine.
“No,” Hare said, as if explaining something simple to an idiot. “This time, we have two guardians. I only have to kill one of you.”
“God dammit,” Joe said. “Hare, for the last time, you can’t control it. The only control is to keep it closed. Once you open it, once you wake it up—it’s out of your hands.”
“Then I have no need of you, do I, Guardian? For the last time,” he mimicked, “if you don’t control the gordath, either you or your friend dies.”
“And then what?” Joe said. “So what are you going to do? Shout at it? Wave your hands, threaten it with your knife? You are going to cause the same disaster that happened three hundred years ago! All this will look like a party!” He gestured at the carnage surrounding them.
“We can’t fail,” Hare said. “We won’t fail. If we had kept at it, the gordath would be under our rule now.”
“Or maybe you couldn’t make it work because everyone was dead!”
“Christ, Felz, give it up,” Mark said with disgust.
Joe fought for control. “Hare, listen. Let me and Arrim work on quieting it. We’ll shut it down—yes, shut it down,” he repeated as Hare made to protest. “Then we can work on opening it up again little by little, instead of just allowing it to blast its way free. It’ll take time, but this way, we have a chance that we might all live through this.” He could tell by Hare’s expression that the man listened to him, albeit grudgingly. “You want it under control, this is the only way to do it. Otherwise, it’s just like last night, Hare, just like a few weeks ago right here, and just like three hundred years ago.”
Hare said nothing, and Joe held his breath. Finally, reluctantly, the man nodded. “All right. Do your best to quiet it. For now. But when I say it’s time to open it again, you will obey. Understood?”
They had been given a reprieve. A pain lifted from Joe’s chest. But he needed to ask for one more thing.
“We’ll get to work. But maybe you guys could start on burying the horses.”
As dawn rose over the woods, turning the sky from black to gray and starting the birds to piping, Arrim and Joe faced the center of the clearing. Around them the guards were set to chopping the fallen trees to create sledges to haul the horses away. Even Mark had been unbound and made to work, complaining soundly. But all that faded into the background as the guardians began their work.
A gordath wants to be open, Joe thought, concentrating. It was the first thing he learned as a guardian. He could see the livid afterimage of the portal against his closed lids. But a guardian wants to close it. He and Arrim were only following their nature. He drew strength from that concept and found himself making a kind of peace with himself and with the entity in front of him at the same time.
Twelve
Lynn drove the small, one-horse trailer around to the driveway in front of the farmhouse, parking it so she could pull out to the street. It was early, the sun barely up, the mist collecting on the fields. The lights were on in the barns for the girls who came to feed, their bikes and old cars parked out of the way for when the clients showed up. The horses were already snorting and whinnying, eager for their morning grain and turnouts, some of the more impatient ones kicking their stalls. Lynn could hear the sounds of rock ’n’ roll pouring from the tinny radio in the tack room.
Just a regular morning at Hunter’s Chase, she thought, leaving the parked trailer and truck and heading back down to the lower barn. She had already given the girls their orders. Until she returned, Mrs. Felz was in charge.
Just how she was going to tell Isabella was another story.
She had grained Red Bird herself earlier, and now she tacked him up. She put him in a western saddle and hacka more and led him up the hill to the house. He loaded easily into the trailer with only the slightest hesitation. Good boy, she thought. An old horsewoman had once told her you could add two hundred dollars to a horse’s price if he went into a trailer without fuss. Lynn knew she appreciated it. She tied him with a safety knot and left him with a pat on the rump.
Isabella came out from her barn apartment, wrapped in her tatty robe, a look of puzzlement on her face.
“Lynn, what on earth?”
“I have to go away for a few days,” Lynn said. With Mrs. Felz following, she went into the house and gathered up her things from the kitchen: a bedroll, a pack with Aeritan necessities: clothes, matches, aspirin, bandages, toothbrush, toothpaste, and toilet paper, and trail food for her and grain for the horse. She figured that she would get heartily sick of granola bars before she found Joe, but she didn’t have time for anything else. It was high-calorie food and would keep her going. That’s what counted.
With her back to Mrs. Felz so she wouldn’t see, she put the gun from the attic chest on top and tugged the straps closed. Lynn hefted the pack. It would all fit on the saddle. “I’m leaving you in charge.” She picked up a fat envelope from the table. “If I am not back in ten days, I want you to open this.”
Mrs. Felz took it, dumbfounded. “Lynn—”
“Look, believe me, I know how weird this is. But please. You have to do this for me. Just sit tight, run the farm like you’ve seen me do it, and ask Sue Devin for help if you need it.”
Sue. She needed to call her—well, that could wait. She’d call her at the entrance to the trail to the morrim and let her know what she was doing.
Mrs. Felz looked at her like she wanted to say a bunch of different things but didn’t quite know how to begin. Finally she settled on, “Does this have something to do with Joe?”
It was time to come clean. She nodded.
Mrs. Felz sat down heavily at the table, her face crumbling. “So he’s alive,” she whispered through her tears. “I thought—I thought he must be dead.”
Lynn waited awkwardly, and then she set down the pack and knelt by the older woman.
“Please believe me,” she said, “It’s more complicated than you—or even I—can understand. But the dog was a message. I think Joe needs help.”
Mrs. Felz got herself under control, wiping her eyes. “Then go. I’ll take care of things here. Call me when you find something out.”
“I’ll try,” Lynn lied. “Now I really have to go.”
She picked up the pack and whistled to the dog. It got up, wagging, from its little bed. It was still thin, but a warm night and a full stomach had done wonders for it. It followed Lynn to the truck and hopped in as if it knew what was going on. Lynn threw her gear into the bed and got into the driver’s seat.
The farm truck handled the single horse trailer with ease, as Lynn put it in gear, and they bumped slowly down the driveway. She pulled out onto the road and accelerated smoothly away from the farm. She glanced at it in the rearview mirror. She might never see it again. She tried to put that out of her head. The envelope she had given Mrs. Felz contained the papers for signing over the farm to her as well as instructions as to what was in the chest in the attic. Lady Sarita wouldn’t mind; she had left it there, after all. She meant it for the farm.
The morning’s slanted shadows striped the little gravel parking lot at the trailhead to the Connecticut trail.
Lynn parked the horse trailer and got out, the dog jumping down behind her. She let down the ramp and led out Red Bird. While the dog and the horse touched noses, the dog wagging eagerly, Lynn called Sue Devin.
“This is Sue Devin speaking.”
“ ’Morning, Sue. This is Lynn. I need a favor. Well, two favors, actually.” While she talked, Lynn strapped her gear and her bedroll onto the back of the saddle one-handed, holding the phone at her ear with the other. It was awkward, but she needed to hurry. She didn’t want some early morning walker to come upon her.
“Lynn?”
“I’m at the trailhead to the hiking trail in Connecticut. Can you come by and bring my truck and trailer back to Hunter’s Chase?”
There was a long silence. Then, “Those aren’t riding trails.”
“I know, and I’m sorry.” The perambulators had all in veighed against riders on the hiking trails because horses’ hooves cut into the soil and caused erosion. Lynn knew she was committing a cardinal sin. “Please, come get my trailer and bring it back to the farm.”
“Lynn . . .”
“I’m going to leave the keys in the water bucket. There’s still water in it, so be forewarned.”
“Lynn, don’t you dare . . .”
“So the next thing is, I want you to call out the perambulators. You need to watch the woods in two places. Up here, in these woods, and over by the old house at Daw Road. Keep an eye out for anything strange. And I think—I’m not sure but I think you’ll know what to do.”
“Lynn . . .”
“Bye.” Lynn closed her phone and put it in her pocket, locked up the truck, and plunked the keys into the water bucket as promised. She flipped the reins around Red Bird’s neck. She swung aboard and pushed Red Bird up onto the trail. With luck she would be through the gordath before Sue came to get her horse trailer. With the dog following, she pushed the horse into a trot, and they headed up the trail.
It wasn’t a riding trail. It was too rocky, and the trees closed in until she was thrashing through branches and brush that she had not noticed on foot. But they made good time, and Lynn dismounted for the steep climb up to the overlook, taking long strides next to Red Bird as they made their way to the summit. When they got to the top, Lynn let the horse blow, walking him in gentle circles, his coat darkened with sweat. The dog sat, tongue lolling. When they had rested, she turned off to the little glade that held the morrim.
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