Winter Door

  The anguish faded a little from Nomadiel’s face and she let Shona lead her away.

  “We got her away from the Stormlord just in time,” Thaddeus said. He glanced back at Stormkeep. “I wonder why he did that with Rally.”

  “I think he was trying to break Noma in those final moments as a way of showing me his power. But he has underestimated the child.” Elle looked at Thaddeus and smiled. “I doubt that her father will be any match for her determination that he live.” She took a deep breath. “Well, I will go now.”

  “We will go with you,” Billy said decisively.

  Elle smiled. “If you want to come, then I should be glad of it.” She turned back to Lod, who hovered at her elbow with several other summerlanders. “I want the rest of you to return and celebrate the release of your companions so brightly that you will leave the Stormlord in no doubt that I am not the only one with the power to oppose him.”

  “We will celebrate your courage, Lady,” Lod promised fiercely.

  “And your own,” Elle said, clapping him on the back. “Tell some good stories for me, and remember the best so that I can hear them when I return.”

  Thaddeus caught hold of her arm. “Be careful, Lady.”

  “I have learned that caution is sometimes the better part of valor,” Elle said, waving a brief farewell. Catching Rage’s look of surprise, she laughed.

  Elle took the lead as she, Rage, and Billy walked to the bridge. They were soon passing through the cavernous maw that was the door to Stormkeep. With Elle around, ways were always short, burdens light, and dangers less fearsome. Had Elle been so special in her old world as a dog? Rage thought not. As with Billy, her transformation as she passed through the bramble gate had continued and deepened, so that far more had changed in her than her appearance.

  When they reached the Stormlord, he was still seated on his black chair, but there were no gray fliers in sight, nor any beasts. He regarded Elle for so long that Rage had to stop herself from fidgeting. Elle merely returned his dark stare with her own lively, untroubled gaze, her long, bright hair undulating in the chill breezes that played about the chamber.

  “You are the one the rebels call the Lady Elle.” It was a statement.

  “And you are the fearsome Stormlord,” Elle said, making it sound as if his title were a joke between them. “I have come to learn your decision about my requests.”

  “Requests, Lady? I would call them demands, unless your boy there misspoke.”

  “Billy is not my boy,” Elle said. “He is my friend.”

  The Stormlord sat up and gave her a haughty look. “What sort of creature are you? You are no more human than this boy, and yet I sense that you are both from the human worlds.”

  “Once I dwelt in the world of humans as a true beast—a dog—but I was changed when I passed through a world gate to the land of Valley, that land into which your winter pours so dangerously.”

  “A dog?” There was the faintest suggestion of a sneer.

  Elle laughed easily. “Do not imagine that I am ashamed of my past, Lord. I loved being a dog. To run and romp and bark and think of nothing but bones and rabbit smells. Oh, the smells! My one regret is that I cannot smell as well as once I could, but still I would wager that my nose is better than yours.”

  The ground rumbled.

  “Stop that,” the Stormlord said with a touch of petulance. Then he frowned and his gaze sharpened. “I thought that you were a wizard of some unknown kind, but now that you are here before me, I see that this power is no more than that which Null was built to oppose. You have no true power.”

  “Then why am I here?” Elle asked. She did not wait for him to speak but supplied her own answer. “Because I do have power and it is the best kind: the kind that rises only from my decision to oppose your world and all that it stands for. And I have taught the Null-landers to do the same.”

  “Perhaps you do not understand your peril, Lady. I do not value my life, and it is possible that I will allow it to end simply to be rid of you.”

  “But…” Billy hesitated, and the black cold eyes turned to him. “I was just going to say that if you are a wizard, you wouldn’t die, would you? Not just by your world ending.”

  The Stormlord’s face might have been carved of ivory for its stillness. Although nothing showed in the night-dark eyes, Rage began to feel frightened for Billy.

  “I think it is true that you would not fear death, but you do fear life,” Elle said lightly. “And once your world was destroyed, you would be forced to face life because you would have to live in the sunlight, and deal with worlds filled with beings who yearn and sing and dance and laugh.”

  “There is darkness in all of those worlds that can be made to serve me,” the Stormlord said, shifting his black regard to the dog-woman.

  “Yes, but think what effort it would require to darken the sun and oppress the people of another world. And it would not be as easy as it is here in Null. No, I think it wiser and simpler for you to grant what we ask. Why shouldn’t you, after all, if you want nothing, for that is what I am offering you? Unless you desire us to remain here.”

  The Stormlord frowned.

  Rage waited with bated breath to hear what he would say. At last he rose and said in a clear, chill voice, “What you have said makes me realize that your demands sowed in me the seeds of anger. This has revealed to me that my own soul is less pure than I had believed, for if it had been pure, you would have been unable to provoke any emotion. Therefore I have decided to agree to all that you have asked. But there will be a price.”

  “A price?” Rage almost shouted.

  The Stormlord ignored her, for all his will was bent on Elle.

  “What price?” Elle asked calmly.

  “You,” the Stormlord said. “You must remain here in Null after the door has been dismantled. Without your friends or followers, or any route of escape to the sunlight, your brightness will fade. And as you become aligned to Null, so will my heart become pure and empty of emotion. Then will the power contained within you serve to strengthen Null and hold it against future invaders.”

  “No!” Rage cried. Then she felt herself being drawn back to wakefulness in her own world.

  Logan was shaking her. It was pitch dark and the only light came from two candles jammed in a jar. Five other candle stumps were lying beside it.

  “I’m sorry I had to wake you, but they’re here,” Logan was saying urgently. “The pig things. There must be ten out there. They’ve started bashing against the door, and I don’t think the hinges will hold up for too much longer.”

  “Door!” Rage sat bolt upright because there was only one door to the extension. “They’re in the house?”

  “They got in an hour ago. I heard the sound of breaking glass. But they’ve only just started on the door.” Rage went to look at the hinges and saw that he was right. They had buckled and the screws were bent. It would not take much to snap them.

  “We’d better get the gun.”

  Logan held out his hand, and she saw that he had found it already. Logan opened his other hand, and the bullets lay gleaming in his palm. “I didn’t know how to load it,” he confessed. “I’ve never even held one before. I didn’t say anything before you went to sleep because I didn’t really think they’d come.”

  Rage took the gun and bullets from him and loaded the gun without thinking as they walked back to the bedroom. She twisted the chamber closed with a practiced flick of her wrist that made Logan gape. She sat on the bed crosslegged beside an alert Billy, telling Logan to get on the bed, too, so that she could have a clear shot. They had shifted the bed earlier, so she had a good view of the door through the study. She sighted along the short barrel of the gun, as if some other part of her mind that she had not known about had taken control.

  The bed springs creaked as Logan got himself comfortable. Then he said, “Bloody hell, Rage, you did that like Annie Oakley or something. How come?”

  “Mam taught me when I was si
x,” Rage said, realizing that she had actually forgotten that until this very moment. “I’ve never shot anything live. Only tins and paper targets. But we lived in a pretty wild area, so we needed the gun to frighten things off. Mam said I ought to know how to shoot just in case something happened to her or…” She frowned. Or to whom? For a moment, she seemed to see a man’s face as if through water. Then it was gone.

  “You shot a gun when you were six?”

  “I never liked it,” Rage said. How long ago that memory of Mam teaching her to shoot was!

  Suddenly Rage heard claws clicking against the floor-boards outside the room. Ice water seemed to pour down her spine, but she just sat up straight and steadied her gun hand with the other.

  “They’ll pace like this for a bit,” Logan said, nodding toward the door. “That’s how it’s been since they arrived. They pace, then they throw themselves at the door and bark, then they go away. Waiting for them to do something is almost harder than when they attack. Tell me what’s happening in Null.”

  Rage told him, but it was hard to concentrate.

  “I still don’t see that the Stormlord sent those beasts,” Logan said when she stopped.

  As if they had heard, the beasts outside the door began to howl and batter at it. Billy barked in response, and this seemed to drive the creatures mad.

  “I really don’t want to end up as some sort of monster snack,” Logan said.

  Rage couldn’t believe that Logan could make a joke at a time like this. Then it struck her like a bolt of lightning that if the Stormlord had sent the beasts, maybe the same weapons that could defeat their master could defeat them.

  “Tell me a joke,” Rage commanded Logan.

  He gaped at her as if she had gone mad.

  The door hinges creaked.

  “Come on! Make me laugh!” she shouted, grabbing him by his sweater and shaking him.

  “You are crazy,” Logan said with such glum conviction that Rage did laugh.

  At once, she felt stronger and braver. Then a recklessness came over her. She stood up and headed for the door, flicking the gun safety on and laying it on the desk as she passed it.

  “What are you doing?” Logan hissed, catching hold of her arm. Billy had reached the door and was barking and snarling. The creatures outside responded in kind, still banging against the door. Any second the hinges would give way.

  “I’m going to open the door,” Rage said.

  “No way!”

  “Logan, everything to do with the Stormlord feeds on fear. If we feel afraid, it just makes those things stronger and it attracts them. We have to fight them with laughter and courage and things like that.”

  “You are not trying to tell me that you are going to open that door and laugh at those things!” Logan said.

  “I’m not scared,” Rage said, and for a wonder, it was true.

  “Well, I’m scared enough for the both of us!” Logan said flatly. “All right, open the door, but I just hope we don’t regret this.” He was white as he let go of her arm, but he turned and took up the chair from behind the desk like a lion tamer.

  Rage turned to face the door, holding the warmth of her feelings for Logan close, and dropped one hand to Billy’s soft head.

  “Stop it!” she shouted. The battering stopped. Heartened, she shouted again. “Go away and leave us alone!” Without letting herself think, she reached for the bolt, unlatched it, and dragged the door open. It moved slowly, then jammed halfway because of the bent hinges, but there were no growls and no attack. Rage put her shoulder to the door and shoved. It opened the rest of the way with a protesting screech.

  The hall outside was dark, cold, and empty. There was complete silence except for something outside banging in the wind. Rage stepped out into the hallway.

  “Be careful,” Logan said, coming out behind her. “In the movies, the dead guy always gets up and grabs you.”

  Rage smiled. She looked down to where Billy stood at her side, sniffing hard. When he looked up, his brown eyes were clear.

  “They’ve gone,” Rage told Logan.

  “What a sleepover!” he said.

  They managed to push a cupboard and some pillows up against the broken window. While they were mopping up, the power came on, so they were able to make toast and hot cocoa, even though it was four in the morning.

  “You really think they were sent by the Stormlord?” Logan asked a while later, licking cocoa from his top lip.

  “Who else?” Rage said. “We couldn’t have got rid of them the way we did otherwise.”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t really make sense. I mean, why send them after you when it sounds like it was Elle that he wanted?”

  Rage frowned, remembering the last thing that the Stormlord had said. She hadn’t told that part to Logan earlier, but she did so now.

  “What do you think she’ll do?” he asked.

  The toast Rage was eating turned to sawdust in her mouth. Because she knew what Elle would do. The Stormlord had known, too. She would agree to remain in Null. Rage looked at Billy and found him watching her with sorrowful brown eyes. She thought there was nothing designed to express sadness more perfectly than the eyes of a dog.

  “I mean, keeping Elle there will only weaken his world,” Logan was saying.

  “He wants to crush Elle as a way of proving to himself that hope and love and courage and all those things she used against him don’t mean anything when you are alone in the dark.”

  “Maybe you’re right, but you know what?” Logan said. “If it’s a one-on-one competition the Stormlord is after, I’d bet on the Lady Elle anytime,” Logan said. “You know, of all the people you talk about from your dream-travels, it’s her I most want to meet. She sounds…special.”

  “She is,” Rage said huskily. She looked down at Billy resting his head in her cupped palm, his forlorn expression perfectly reflecting the ache in her own heart.

  “So you’re going to try to sleep again?”

  Rage nodded. They were back in the extension, having decided that they did not want to bother moving to her bedroom. “I have to find out what happened. I wish I could take you, Logan.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “But maybe you should will yourself to Valley. I mean, if a couple of days have passed, the winter door might already be gone.”

  “I think I’m supposed to be there when it happens,” Rage said. She lay down on the bed and Billy stretched out beside her. Logan switched the overhead light out. The only light came from the desk lantern.

  “I’m going to leave it on,” he said. “I was thinking that I might have a look at your uncle’s notebooks. I mean, if you don’t think he’d mind.”

  “I don’t think he’ll be back for them anytime soon,” Rage said sadly.

  She relaxed, feeling tired but peaceful despite her fears for Elle. Forgiving the wizard had done that. Mam had often told her that she had a good rage inside her, but now she understood that there had been the potential for destructive anger as well. Anger, Mam always said, made people stupid.

  Rage’s eyes drooped, and she tried to picture herself and Billy standing with Mr. Walker. In her vision, Billy had an arm around her shoulders. Whether he was a dog or human shaped, they belonged together, she thought. Then she tumbled into a dream of walking through snow falling on a snowy plain. There was nothing to indicate where she was, nor any sign of Billy or Mr. Walker. But she heard the same voice that she had heard calling her before.

  “This is a dream,” she muttered. “I must have gotten sidetracked.”

  She was about to close her eyes and try another dream leap when she heard the voice quite clearly.

  “Help me!” It was weaker than it had been, and she had the feeling she knew the voice.

  “Who are you?” she shouted on impulse.

  “Who are you?” the voice responded. Rage gave a snort of disgust, realizing it must merely be a distorted echo of her own words. She closed her eyes and willed herself and Billy to Mr.
Walker.

  This time when she opened her eyes, she and Billy were standing on a snowy plain surrounded by jagged mountains. There was no snow falling and it was night. Before her stood a great crowd facing what could only be the Null side of the winter door: an enormous, pale arch of glowing ice with a fringe of icicles that glimmered white in the light of the torches carried by many of those assembled. Humans and other beings were passing through the door, one by one, and vanishing.

  “Look!” Billy cried, pointing. “It’s her! Elle!”

  Rage scanned the crowd until she saw Elle standing to one side, talking with the wizard, Mr. Walker, Nomadiel, and the rebel leader, Shona.

  “Maybe she said no,” Rage murmured hopefully.

  Billy shook his head. “Just before I woke, I heard her agree. She would never go back on her word.”

  They made their way over the slippery ice. They skirted the gathering until they came to where Mr. Walker was speaking with Elle. Rage was touched to see that he was holding his daughter’s hand.

  “This is not fair,” Mr. Walker was saying hotly.

  Elle laughed. “Dear Prince Walker, you know that the real stories do not always end with everyone getting what they want. But do not think you have seen the last of me, for I intend to torment the Stormlord with my endless desire for the summerlands, until he begs me to leave Null and him in peace.”

  “What of Fork?” Mr. Walker asked.

  Elle sighed and a shadow crossed her face. “Part of Fork’s grief is caused by what flows through the winter door. But the city will grieve for me, I know. Upon your return, someone must go there and make it understand that there was no other way. Tell Fork that I send it a world full of lost souls to fill its empty streets, and charge it to produce beauty enough to open their withered hearts and help them grow. Tell Fork not to fail me.”

  She caught sight of Rage and Billy and stepped forward to clasp them close. “I am glad to see you to say goodbye.”

  “You are staying,” Rage said, unable to believe that it would come to this.