“It is the wrong gate,” Gabriel said. He took a deep breath.
“Wrong?” Sauce snapped. “It’s wrong? More wrong than fucking ancient sea monsters in a world of black water with no fucking sun?”
“Yes,” Gabriel said.
“How can you tell?” Sauce asked.
“There should be three jewels,” Gabriel said.
Sauce shrugged. “Let’s see it,” she said.
Gabriel looked at her.
She met his eye. “I heard the briefings, Gabriel. This was always a wild hunt. We’re committed. But at this point, Al Rashidi could be wrong. You could be wrong. Everything is already wrong. Open the gate again. What’s the worst that happens?”
Gabriel smiled. There was something about Sauce that made him feel … calm. Maybe because, when he was ready to slit his wrists all those years ago, she’d been there. Maybe …
Maybe …
He grinned. “An ancient god from beyond the stars emerges and eats our souls,” he said.
Sauce shrugged. “Sure. That could happen.” She shrugged again. “What if this is the right gate? We could lose hours …”
He turned the key.
The gate opened.
Chapter Fifteen
There was no causeway.
A red, red sun lit a world of ash. The ash was pale grey and almost completely uniform and stretched away to a red horizon, and everything was tinted with that red except the next gate portal, a few miles of heat distortion away across the plain of ash.
No ancient god awaited them.
But there were bones. Charred bones.
As far as the eye could see, resting on the fine grey ash, there were bones.
In the foreground, nearest the gate, was a dragon. Part of its skeleton was buried in the fine grey ash, but the vast skull was obvious, and one whole wing that trailed away to the right until it vanished out of sight, perfectly polished to a gleaming white by the windblown ash.
Gabriel raised a shield and stepped through. He was wary of using power for a variety of reasons, but precautions seemed necessary.
Sauce came at his shoulder, and Daniel Favour and Wha’hae, too. They walked out onto the plain, and the ash resolved itself into an endless sand of powdered bone.
A wind stirred the ash and it rose, choking them. The scouts pulled up scarves. Gabriel closed his flying helmet.
The wind rushed past them like a charge of cavalry.
It subsided.
Under the bones of the dragon were other bones.
“I might as well check the next gate,” Gabriel said.
Sauce shook her head. “These places are all horrible,” she said slowly. “Had God no mercy? Look at them.” She bent, and lifted the skull of a Quazitsh. A freak of the wind exposed a vein of them, as if a regiment had all died here. They were so tangled together that they might have died in a vast embrace—hundreds, or thousands, of salamanders …
Gabriel put an arm around Sauce. “We’re lost,” he said. “I have to see. I have to check everything. It’s all a nightmare, Sauce. But it was never going to be easy.”
She smiled. “We don’t do easy, do we, Cap’n?” She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “Don’t die. You’re glowing like a lamp.”
He was, too. He passed back, took Ariosto, fed him some potentia, and they were in the air.
Really tired, boss.
Five miles.
Sure. But I bet you want to go back, too.
Gabriel was looking down at another dragon. And another.
He flew along, too stunned to think. They passed a fourth dragon.
And a fifth.
And by the fifth dragon he saw something amid the ash. They weren’t very high; he was saving Ariosto as best he could.
But he had no time, and he was filled with a different foreboding.
The skeletons of the dragons were …
He was struggling to think of what could kill six dragons.
Seven.
They descended toward the second portal. It, too, was the bone white of most of the other gates, but it was different, at a distance, less shapely, the dome lower.
Closer, and it became clear …
… that the dome had been destroyed.
Gabriel landed and entered to confirm what he suspected. His heart was too tired to race. He felt almost nothing.
The pedestal was blackened, and the jewels, all three of them, were gone, leaving sockets like wounds or abscesses. We can’t get out, he thought, and then he realized that, if Tancreda was correct, his only hope was that the gate behind him was still open. He thought he’d left it open, and he had left the key in it.
It was an irrational fear. He knew he’d left it open. But he all but fled the broken chamber.
The moment he mounted Ariosto, the monster’s love calmed him.
He took some breaths. The red sun was terrible.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
On it, boss.
They flew back. Gabriel tried not to look down at the line of skeletons, but it was like a boil, and he kept worrying it, looking down, feeling the dread and the sense of skewed scale, and looking down again.
He saw the glare, the wink of light on something metal, by the great skeleton of the dragon, and he could not resist.
I want to see that.
Ariosto coughed. Very hungry, boss. We might have to walk, and I don’t really want to walk on all this dead stuff.
Gabriel hesitated.
Oh, fine, Ariosto said.
He landed. Water?
Gabriel handed over his canteen after taking a single pull. He held it until the eagle beak grabbed it, tilted it back, and the purple tongue moved, and then the canteen was crushed.
Oops. Better than nothing, though.
Gabriel walked across the ash, his flying boots leaving clear tracks. The dragon’s skull was huge, like a building.
But under it were the skulls of men.
He knew what he was looking for a moment after the skulls registered, and he reached in among the skulls and the bones. It was a single ornament: bigger than the head of a man, and hollow, made of pure gold.
An eagle, wings back, holding lightning bolts in each talon.
He held it a moment, and then put it gently back near the bony hands of his fellow men.
I will never know.
He got back on Ariosto.
Can you get us back?
Sure, boss, Ariosto said. But don’t we still need to get back past the sea monsters?
One thing at a time, Gabriel said.
They landed at the gate, and Sauce was there, and a dozen greens, prowling through the bones and making a pile of finds. There was more evidence of men: an ivory-hilted dagger, a gold medallion, an ivory shield boss, the ivory warped and mangled by time, grey with age and ash.
And a comb. The comb was magnificent, solid gold, with the figures of a soldier or knight on horseback fighting a footman, each figure as perfectly realized as a statue. Wha’hae handed it to Gabriel; he held it for a while.
“She must ha’e been something, eh, Cap’n?” Wha’hae said.
“What do you want for it?” Sauce asked.
Wha’hae looked at it a moment. “Fifty leopards,” he said. “Gold.” He smiled. “An’ that’s for a friend.”
Sauce laughed, but she snapped it out of his hands and put it in her long black hair.
“Like it were made for ye,” Wha’hae said.
Gabriel looked at her a moment. “I’m not sure I’d recommend wearing ornaments until a magister …” He shook his head.
She grinned her crooked grin. “My brain’s too tough to get fried by some sorcerous claptrap, and I’m wearing a fortune in Magister Petrarcha’s amulets, and a few by the Mighty Mortirmir hisself. I’ll be fine.”
Daud the Red produced a small silver mirror. Sauce preened a little.
Gabriel laughed. He drank some of Wha’hae’s water and laughed again.
“We’re
surrounded by horror and you lot are busy looting,” he said.
Wha’hae shrugged. “And?” he asked. “There’s a fortune out there, Cap’n. I say we bring the whole company here and comb through it for days …”
“I say we get our arses back past the sea monsters and march on,” Gabriel said. He smiled.
The greens hastily pocketed their finds.
“Who were they, Cap’n?” asked an archer.
Gabriel shook his head.
Sauce appeared by him, the gold comb magnificent in her hair.
“Isn’t that going to hurt under a helmet?” he asked.
She shrugged. “When did you last eat?” she asked.
Gabriel tried to think.
She handed him a whole sausage and an apple and a chunk of cheese. “The boys and girls are happy finding a fortune in old crap,” she said. “Eat this and rest.”
Gabriel ate while walking across the mosaic floor to the watch post at the outer gate. There, the smell of the sea was omnipresent, and the men-at-arms and archers were alert.
“Somethin’ unnatural came up at the edge o’ the water,” the lead man-at-arms said. Green banda men-at-arms were not all knights; many had come up the hard way, former royal foresters or Jacks.
“I don’t know you,” Gabriel said, embarrassed.
“Jeff Kearny,” the man said. He was short, broad, and red bearded. “This here is Tom Wilsit. You know Short Tooth and Long Tail, eh? Sir?”
Gabriel looked out into the oddly lit night. The patch of pure darkness had the same effect as an hour before.
“Don’ look at it,” muttered Short Tooth. “Seriously, Cap’n. That’s fucked up.”
“No shit,” Gabriel said. “And then what happened?” he said to Kearny.
“It moved back,” Kearny said. “We did nowt, like Sauce said.”
“Never piss off somethin’ ye cannae’ kill,” said Short Tooth. “Long Paw’s rule number two o’ scoutin.”
Gabriel finished his apple and lobbed the core out into the endless night. “Rule number one?” he asked.
“Scoutin’ an’ fightin’ are two different jobs,” Kearny said.
“He’s full o’ crap like yon,” Short Tooth said.
Gabriel nodded, suddenly feeling much better.
“We’re going to cross in groups of three lances,” he said when he’d walked back to Sauce. “I’ll go first with whomever you choose. You’ll come last. I’ll pause at the midpoint in the causeway, in case—”
Sauce leaned up and gave him a sudden kiss. “You are so full of shit,” she said. “You go. All the way to Mortirmir. If’n you want to cover us, send him to the midpoint. Not you, Mister Emperor. Not now.”
He thought about it.
“Just once, do as I say,” Sauce said.
Gabriel made a face. “Sure,” he said.
She laughed. “Things must be desperate.”
The first three lances included Wha’hae, and they went out at a trot. Gabriel mounted Ariosto and they launched into the wet air.
So hungry, the griffon said. Love Sauce, too?
Gabriel’s breath caught. But there was no lying to a griffon. Love Sauce, he admitted.
The griffon seemed to chuckle, and something like a rippling purr passed along its trunk and spread to the wings.
By then they were high enough to make out the first three spots of phosphorescence. They were farther away—two or three thousand paces. Gabriel watched the second party of lances depart. And the third.
On the far side of the causeway, a great lidless eye of pale green began to drift in.
Gabriel turned Ariosto. Sorry, he thought. I need you to fly about ten more minutes.
Ouch, Ariosto said.
Gabriel turned again, coasting back along the causeway. He flashed over the fourth trio of lances, spooking Kearny’s horse, and he turned Ariosto and they went in through the gate as if it was not a magnificent flying achievement.
Gabriel didn’t augment his voice; he was trying to use no ops whatsoever. But he used his lungs, which were powerful.
“Everyone. Right. Now!” he called, and pointed with his spear at the outer gate.
They all saw him. And Sauce understood immediately.
He turned Ariosto, or Ariosto turned him, and they were out in the moist dark, the griffon’s wings beating strongly in the eerie moonlight. Another phosphorescent patch was creeping in.
The fear was palpable, like the onrush of a dragon or twenty wyverns.
Gabriel rolled Ariosto at about the midpoint of the causeway and took him down over the water in a long dive away from the causeway. Three minutes.
Doing it, the griffon seemed to pant in the aethereal.
Gabriel plunged into his palace and began casting, working new ops from purest gold and pushing a quantity of this sphere’s dark blue into it, raw. The result was crude and it leaked raw potentia. Gabriel hung the bag from one of his javelins …
In the real, he turned again, now over a black patch of empty water between the two nearest whorls of phosphorescence.
Here goes nothing. Literally.
He dropped the javelin into the fathomless water and turned.
Gate! he called.
Which one? Ariosto asked.
You think that’s funny? Gabriel thought as the griffon put on a burst of speed in three great wingbeats that pressed him back into his high-backed saddle.
Yes, the griffon said, just as the water behind and below began to boil like a pot on a campfire far too long, huge bubbles rising.
Both of the spiral clusters began to drift rapidly toward the boiling sea.
Hooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom
A third came in from farther out at sea. From altitude, the whorls and whirls and globs of phosphorescence out there, out to the far horizon, began to move in, drifting on some invisible tide.
Oh yes, Gabriel thought. Ariosto was labouring, the wings jerky with fatigue, his noble head down, drooping …
The last horse was past the midpoint on the causeway. They were racing, galloping through the moonlight. The sea had risen, and the horses were raising spray as they cantered along the beach.
A huge dome, wrinkled, black, slick with seawater and crusted with some nameless parasite, began to rise from the sea. The size of it baffled the eye and the human sense of distance. Veins of glowing ice green ran across it. It rose slowly, and with it, the nameless dread increased …
Gabriel fed his mount some of his ops. He was burning gold, and he knew how dangerous it was now for him to cast almost anything.
What would happen if I achieved apotheosis here? he wondered, even as he passed over Sauce and Ariosto’s wings gave a shiver.
Love you, Gabriel said.
I bet you say that to all the monsters, Ariosto said. But the wings shot back and cupped the kelp-reeking air and then the lion legs were on the sand, running.
Gabriel was thrown right over the pommel of his saddle even as Ariosto rolled over his folded wings.
Gabriel lay in a hand’s depth of warm salt water, staring up at the darkness as the water filled his helmet.
Tancreda stood over him. He wriggled his toes; his neck hurt.
“Damn,” he said aloud.
Hungry! Ariosto wailed.
“Get through the gate! Get clear!” Gabriel roared, coming to his senses. He was soaking wet. “Go, go!”
A dozen greens poured across the last sand spit. Mortirmir was casting; Gabriel could tell from his posture. So was Petrarcha.
“Go!” Gabriel screamed at the company archers who stood across the gate. “Milus! Form ranks on the other side of the gate.”
Ser Milus turned immediately, gesturing. The Company Saint Catherine retired; the line of lances went back with it.
More scouts were coming down the end of the causeway. The water was rising.
“They know we’re here,” Morgon said. “And they hate us.”
Gabriel grabbed Mortirmir by
the shoulder. “Run. Don’t walk. Run.”
He put an arm around Petrarcha, even as he could feel the malevolent will working out in the water … working … magnified …
Sauce was galloping. She had someone riding double; she was last, and alone.
Behind him, Anne Woodstock got Ariosto through the ranks of the company and through the gate.
Sauce had a long way to go still. She’d stopped for someone.
Gabriel went into his palace and slammed the iron gate shut, just to be sure. Then he reached down through memory and practice to the Umroth, and their passive shield. He took it out, examined it, and rolled it off as an effort of will powered entirely from within himself; from the same source that made his skin glow gold. He didn’t need to understand it completely; he knew enough, now.
It was like working with emotion instead of power, and he wove a shield of hope. And he built a wave front of hope; the antithesis of the hate of the sea creatures.
It was as if everything he’d ever learned, from Prudentia, from Harmodius, from his mother, from the Patriarch, from Al Rashidi and Mortirmir, all came together in a single expression of his innermost will.
There was no casting.
There was only being.
In the real, the sea rose until Sauce was galloping through water up to her charger’s fetlocks. And the deep dweller rising from the water was exposed; vast, bloated, and it threw a fell wave of pale green light …
The light struck something invisible, like the prow of a ship, and passed along either side of the causeway to break against the island of rock that contained the gate; and the stone began to crack.
Sauce, with Daud clinging to her, burst past Gabriel who began to walk backwards, carefully. The green light was everywhere; not the green of home, but a watery green, pale, and eager to drink his essence.
His hope met its desire to destroy, and defeated it.
He took another step backward, and another, and another.
“Gate!” called Mortirmir.
A hand seized his hand and placed it on the key in the plaque.
He turned it.
The gate closed in silence.
He let go his nonworking and stood breathing, feeling superb.
Mortirmir leaned around him. “That was spectacular,” he said.
“I liked it,” Gabriel admitted. “Ready the company. Two minutes. All magisters, on me.”