Heaven's Gate

by Toby Bennett

  “Yes.” Rugan answers in a dull voice

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, master.” Mordiki nods only partially satisfied, “that will have to do. Now you must restore yourself, you must look wounded but no one must realize that you are actually dead.”

  At his master’s command, Rugan strains to recall the glamour that had hidden his desiccated flesh for so long. All the while the bone clown plays on his macabre pipe, blessing the fact that he hardly cares that he is there, let alone what his old and new master do decide to do.

  General Angus Leedon wakes to the sound of someone knocking on his bedroom door, his pain wakes with him and it takes all his discipline not to groan at the burning sensation running down one side of his face, despite the drugs his physicians had plied him with. Miraculously he had sustained no more serious damage than the burns and scrapes down one side of his body. The doctors had assured him that his wounds would heal completely, barring a few scars but they were too eager to constantly inspect things; obviously the last thing they wanted to appear was negligent with a patient of the Generals stature but it was tiresome being constantly prodded and checked. With the initial shock of his injuries gone, General Leedon was beginning to bristle against the constant attention.

  “If you’ve come to change the dressing, come back in the morning,” the General growls and roles over, instantly regrets it and turns back onto his good side. All the while the knocking continues. “Hell’s tits! Someone checked on me an hour ago. I’m a soldier not a sickly babe,” he bawls.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but the Father says it can’t wait till morning.” One of the men posted at the door calls back.

  “Rugan?” The General asks, blinking and trying to clear his head. The image of the last time he had seen his mentor plays in his mind again. Their horses had collided in the explosion but he had been thrown clear where as the priest had gone down with his horse and half a wall falling close behind that, “Nathaniel told me he was dead, lost somewhere under the rubble.” The General speaks as much to himself as to the lad outside, could it be that Nathaniel had been wrong? Leedon wrings his fragmented memories of those last few seconds before he had hit the flagstones. “By what miracle did the old dog manage to escape that falling wall?” Once more the General speaks his thoughts out loud.

  “I would have been dead soon enough if the horses had not taken most of the impact and allowed me to extricate myself, but I believe that was what the Chief Pardoner intended all along.” Rugan thrusts the door open, giving the soldier guarding the door a look that dared him to make any protest.

  Despite the pain the General forces himself to his feet and crosses the room to greet his old friend.

  “Rugan I’m happy to hear you survived, but I have to say you look terrible, have you seen the physicians yet?”

  “I’m afraid there was little time, there is something more important than my health or I would not have bothered you.”

  “This is nonsense, who knows what damage you took in the explosion or the fall? Not only that, you look like you must have been lying out there for a while. Surely anything you have to say can be said after you have had a doctor see to you and taken some rest?”

  “I’m afraid this cannot wait, Angus,” Rugan says fixing the General with lifeless eyes. “Quickly, bring him in,” the priest calls out into the hall, summoning in two bleary eyed soldiers, holding a wounded man on a stretcher between them.

  “By the sainted cross, it’s Clark!” The General exclaims recognizing the officer, “you look near dead man, Rugan why have you brought him here? The man needs a medic.”

  The lich glowers inwardly at this, the last thing he needs is to be confronted by any medical men, neither he nor the corpse of Clark Ginmann would hold up before close medical examination. He had not bothered to do much to hide the dead man’s pallor, reasoning that it would hardly matter in one who was apparently dying. This now seemed to have been a mistake, it was the sort of thing that Rugan knew liches were prone to. It was one thing to know that academically but it was another to have to try to compensate for it in oneself. It is hard for a dead thing robbed of the various trappings of ‘meaty’ living thinking, to anticipate the reactions of their living counterparts. Mordiki had simply ordered him to tell his story and make the General aware of Tenichi’s betrayal but Rugan still had enough of his old shrewdness to realize that more might be required. Despite his apparent cunning and even with all his knowledge, Rugan now realized he had made a simple miscalculation. He had dug the colonel out of the rubble because he had judged that General Leedon would hold him to be a credible witness to Nathaniel Tenichi’s betrayal. The men had fought in many battles together and Clark had been a trusted aide. What Rugan had forgotten, or rather had been too disassociated to even consider, was the possibility that Leedon might care for Clark Ginmann’s health above the information he might reveal. A mixture of panic and desperation, terrible and dull plays uncomfortably through him. Many stories were told of the apparent madness of the lich’s behaviour but he understood, better than ever before, that what the living saw as madness was simply the gulf between the creature’s memories of what it had been and the senseless monster it had become. Even the disquiet that Rugan felt at the thought that this curse was already at work in him, was only a memory of what it meant to feel a lich could never learn or feel anything new. Rugan knows it is not madness, rather a merciless clarity, it is not the obsession of the undead that drives them to count each grain of sand or the mania and frantic hungry lusts of the Strigoi. This was the madness of a sprit still as alive as it had ever been, trapped amongst the living in a rotting husk in the ruins of its old life, with no capacity to shape a new existence. There will be no renewal for him, none of the youth and strength that the Strigoi enjoyed, only centuries with his body as the prison, trapped until the last atom of his bones was swept away by the desert winds; even then he might become one of the shrieking spirits that careened across those sands like torn ships before a storm. To forget how the living might think was just the first symptom of the beginning of an eternity deprived of the weakness of the flesh. Rugan would never again sleep or dream or forget or feel, all was memory growing ever more distant and experience growing ever more meaningless.

  “Why have you brought him here Rugan?” the General repeats breaking in on the priest’s churning thoughts and bringing his frittering attention back to reality.

  “I had no wish to risk his life, Angus but you have to hear what he has to say.”

  “What could be so important?”

  “He insisted on being brought here.”

  “He must be delirious! Why do you allow him to risk his life?”

  “Tell him.” Father Rugan commands his creation.

  “I saw Tenetchi with Lady Carter and Captain Blake when we entered the square, just before the explosion went off. That had to be how they knew we were coming.”

  “No, Nathaniel was guarding the second entrance, that’s why he couldn’t get through the crowd to stop them in time, he even got wounded trying. You can’t be right, Colonel, you are in a lot of pain, you must be mistaken.” Leedon argues.

  “I know what I saw, sir,” the pale soldier insists from his deathbed, “it was the Chief Pardoner, clear as day, he and some of his men were talking to them, warning them I’m sure… that’s, that’s…” the soldier coughs blood from a punctured lung, “that’s how they were ready for us, the only way they could have got away and done this.”

  “It cannot be! Why? Why would he betray me?”

  “It is as I feared, Angus. As I have tried to tell you before but you mistook my concern for jealousy or rivalry. That is why I hoped Colonel Clark’s words might make things clear. Tenechi has always served the interests of darker powers, he betrays us now because the Gate is near.”

  “But he could have sought the Gate on his own all the time, he need never have even told me of its existence… why all this, just to betray me now? That bastard Blake near
ly tore his throat out with his teeth for God’s sake!”

  “Or was it all part of the deception? Such things would be child’s play for the Strigoi. He himself admitted that he needed the girl, perhaps he was only loyal to you as long as you could gain him access; now he has made some deal with the Captain, who has been seeking the Gate for years. If it were not so then how could they have timed their attack so perfectly?”

  “You swear on your immortal soul that you saw this?” General Leedon asks leaning over the prone officer all concern for his health consumed by the possibility of the Chief Pardoners betrayal.

  “On my soul! On my life!” The dead man answers before slumping back into natural death.

  Behind his mask of sorcery and flesh, Rugan yearns to join the soul in its rest but there is no such escape for him, now. Ginmann had been a loose binding of soul and flesh, a puppet to be used then discarded, his own bonds are stronger and far more tightly coiled about him.

  “I cannot deny the word of two witnesses and I cannot deny events as they happened. I had already wondered who could have warned them of our coming but I had not even considered that it might be Nathaniel.”

  “Remember how he excused himself almost as soon as we arrived? He barely stayed long enough to hear how you wished the troops ordered.”

  “But he did stay that long! even that would not have been possible without your vision Rugan, I have been a fool! You are a holy man, who has served me with wit and rare perception and I judged you to be like any other that serves me. I saw your distrust of Nathaniel as being motivated by self interest and ambition, rather than being the truth, which I now see it was.”

  “You could not have done anything else, Angus, I know you did what you felt to be right in your heart.”

  Only a short distance away, the lich’s creator helps to school his face into a look of forgiveness and understanding. For Rugan it feels like pulling the strings on a marionette, he is not the flesh that curls and smoothes at his master’s will he is the ginning skull underneath.

  “You understand what this means though?” The General asks, unaware of his confessor’s inner detachment. “There may be civil war, Tenechi as the son of a baron and my second, gave the air of propriety. Now, without the alliance to the Carter house, who I must hold suspect on your advice since you have proved to be correct in other matters, some of the other barons might rally to Tenechi along with a good number of the Pardoners. It has the potential to tear the Union apart, when we may need all our strength to deal with a more insidious threat. Do you still think the Strigoi are behind all this?”

  “Unquestionably, sir,” Rugan responds, “one of their Elders in particular I think, all this has been about gaining the power of the Gate for himself.”

  “Why do you presume there is only one of them behind this? For all we know they have restored their numbers in six years,” the General says, suddenly realizing that his complacency about Rugan’s warnings might extend to other matters, “there is no way for us to tell how far they have already gone. If Nathaniel has always been their creature they may have been manipulating us, as they did the old barons, from the very beginning.”

  “It is possible that they have been manipulating us, I am afraid, the Strigoi prince or princes behind these recent events may even have used us to destroy their rivals. However, everything we know of the Strigoi tells us that they do not grow to their full power in six years. The Strigoi as a whole cannot have undone the harm done to them at Golifany. I believe that it can only be one or two of the Elders, who were not present at the destruction, behind all this. They do not have strength of numbers, they seek to achieve their ends by circumspect means and at the moment, think they have succeeded in hiding their involvement, this is a weakness. If we act now we may even be able to turn their tactics against them.”

  “Except that they are already off seeking the Gate, together with Captain Blake and that treacherous Carter bitch, for all we know.”

  “Or perhaps not, after all Tenechi did not escape with the fugitives, when he could have.”

  “He only waited to avoid rousing suspicion and immediate pursuit, you said yourself he warned them.”

  “So if we give chase now there must still be hope of thwarting them, the enemy believes that you have swallowed the lie. What better time to strike?”

  Rugan pauses, fixing the General with a look that brooks no argument, “whatever our doubts, one thing is certain they must be stopped, the Strigoi cannot be allowed to reach the Gate and Nathaniel must not be allowed to split the Union. We have an advantage however small.”

  “Indeed! As yet Nathaniel does not know that his treachery is revealed, he rode off with his forty remaining Pardoners many hours ago, supposedly he was going to apprehend the fugitives but now it seems more likely that they are going to seek the Gate together. We must find them as soon as possible, while Nathaniel has only a small force, he must be killed and the Gate claimed by its rightful inheritors, the true children of the Inquisition. Then we shall see about hunting down any Strigoi princes that may have survived Golifany and this time I will not stop or be diverted from that holy path by the advice of fools”

  Still squatting next to the body of the dead colonel, Leedon looks up at his old advisor, “`I shall need you in this, Rugan, your ability to penetrate the shadows and lies employed by our enemies is vital if we are to succeed in holding the Union together. Can you find them as you did once before?”

  “I shall pray, Angus and God willing, we shall find them once again.” The corpse says, granting benediction with a hand still as cold as the desert night.

  Chapter 16:

  “Pilgrims”

  Heat merciless and fierce sends thundering blows down on the wind swept Anvil of sand. High above birds circle, rising and falling like moths or ragged angels desperate to reach the burning heights, but repelled by the sun’s brilliance. It is not common to see the black winged birds this far out, this is the deep desert, there is no moisture here not even sweat. Life in these extremes is rare, only one thing could draw the shameless scavengers so far out and that is the dark line of riders trudging through the twisting haze of smoldering air and ash fine dust.

  Of all that grim host only one soldier still pauses to look up at the circling shadows. The brightness and discomfort remind him of his youth, his father had been an unholy man leading his family from town to town, despite the heat and the risk. It had been far more risk for the pimp and gambler to stay in one place, where his creditors or God fearing people might catch up to him. So they had tramped from town to town, the boy’s skin turning red then brown. His father sold his mother and the strength of his slim arms at every town where they stopped, until the night when his father had found a degenerate who preferred the idea of the boy over his empty eyed wife.

  The boy had never been able to tell if the man who wanted him, wanted him more because he preferred the vice of sodomy or that he knew the boy would scream in a way that his mother no longer could. The man had certainly enjoyed pain and the boy had obliged him by screaming. He’d screamed till the deaf walls seemed to shiver, then when it was over, he made sure that he was not the only one to scream that night. The one thing his father had ever done for him was teach him to use a gun. More than once the degenerate gambler had used the shock of being shot at by a child to buy him a few moments.

  The boy had not killed his tormenter with the gun he found amid the man’s discarded clothes, though, just put a well aimed bullet through his knee. His father had rushed in then, dispelling all doubt that he had not been heard. It had taken him a second to kill his father for that betrayal and then he had found the blade he kept hidden even from his parents in the ragged pile of his own clothes. He had killed many men since that day one way or another, riding with his boys, who he had made the most feared gang in the Union before he was even sixteen, then the priest had come and he had been reborn and refocused. He had killed many but no blood had been as hot as the blood that flowed f
rom the man with the busted knee in the back room of a Drycreek tavern, as hot as the days marching through the desert, as hot as today. It takes him a long while to force the images to the back of his mind and refocus on what the man in priest’s robes beside him is saying.

  “We are close now, General,” the dead man reassures his commander, “we made the right decision to press on. I can only imagine one place in this desolation where they could be heading.”

  “Silversnow.” The General replies through cracked lips, surprising the lich with both his depth of knowledge and the fact that the man can still speak, let alone recall something so obscure, he could only have found it in one of the old texts that Tenichi had had him reading.

  “Was there ever really snow out here?” The General asks no one imparticular, staring around at the flat expanse of burning sand. The only respite might lie in the tall walls that rose above them but the General was loathe to go any closer, if there was any choice he would turn away, away from the heat the thirst and the ghosts that lurked in the shadows cast by that natural stone wall. There was no choice, though, because that was where the traitors were going and if he did not find them soon, he would be dead. Indeed he was amazed that no one had died already. Almost every one of the men he had taken into the desert had collapsed at one point or another but Father Rugan seemed to be possessed of a strength to rival that of the Christ man, when he spent forty days in the wilderness. Rugan had personally helped each man to his feet again and after only a few words from the confessor the unfortunate straggler seemed to find the strength to go on, becoming an inspiration to his fellows through his endurance. Even the horses seemed to respond to the Father’s encouragements