The Limbreth Gate Read online

  Vandien was suffocating. What if this wall never let him through? What if he became entrapped between, like a fish in aspic? Panic was inspiration. The Keeper had captured one of his feet. Vandien shot out the other one in a tremendous kick that caught the Keeper in the chest, breaking his grip and propelling Vandien forward.

  Vandien felt the vague stirring of birth memories, and then cold air on the top of his skull. He felt his shoulders constricted by the wall. With a wiggling surge, he forced his way out into the cool dark air. His chest was squeezed, and then he was falling, hands braced to catch himself as he somersaulted through the Gate. He tumbled into an awkward heap on a smooth straight road.

  From behind him came a muffled cursing. Vandien leaped to his feet, ready to run. He had a dim vision of the Keeper trying to hold closed the torn curtain between the worlds. His ragged clothes were stirred as if by a powerful wind; his hood fell back to reveal a band of white and wrinkled skin where Vandien had expected eyes. The torn barrier fluttered with a snapping sound backed by a rushing noise like a river heard through windstirred trees. Vandien felt the motion as it rushed past his face toward the tear. At least he need fear no pursuit; for a time the Keeper would have his hands full. He slid his knife back into its sheath and turned his steps down the long straight road.

  Barefoot, and a night and day behind Ki. The grey team always made their pace look easy, but Vandien had more than once tried to match them on foot. Even their most leisurely pace had a way of devouring the road. He gave a sigh and broke into a wolf trot. The road was smooth and cold beneath his bare feet. He rested one hand on the waterskin that hung from its shoulder strap to rest at his hip. He had never been so poorly prepared for anything. But the night air was cool and clean against his face; the arching trees garlanded with pale flowers beckoned him on. An unbidden smile came to his face. It was a fine night for running.

  As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could make out the signs of Ki’s passage. The heavy wheels had left long grooves cut in the tongues of moss that stretched here and there across the road. Vandien trotted doggedly on, his eyes fixed as far ahead down the road as he could peer. His body worked smoothly and independently of his mind. His mind chewed at the little information he had, letting the lovely night scenery slip by him unnoticed. Chess had indicated a Windsinger had set up this whole ruse. But why? They had lured Ki through this Gate, but she had met with no foul play as far as he could tell. The Windsingers had no reason to love Ki, but one at least, Rebeke, had reason to treat her with courtesy. As for Ki herself, she had never spoken of the Windsingers with anything but distrust. Her dislike of them was founded on her father’s old hatred, which blamed them for the untimely death of Ki’s mother. Ki had inherited that theory with no facts to back it up. Yet there had been a time when Rebeke would have fallen prey to the wizard Dresh, had Ki not intervened. It was all a most interesting tangle when viewed in the abstract. When considered while trotting down a black road with the aftermath of a hangover bouncing in one’s skull, it was positively unsettling. But it was also as irresistible as prodding at a loose tooth.

  His legs and feet had begun to ache dully, and he had been running in the moss beside the road for some way when the bridge came into view. He let his trot ease down to a walk, but the bridge demanded more. He stopped and gave it a full share of attention. He had no comparisons for if, rather it was like the first glimpse of a natural wonder. Like the mountain from his childhood that would always be The Mountain, or his first dimly remembered glimpse of the sea, this bridge would stay with him the rest of his days. It was the pure essence of Bridge, the perfect form that all such structures sought to attain but never did - till this one. He could spend a night looking at it, a week touching its graceful curves and still not have absorbed all the beauty of its lavish arch. If only he had the time.

  But he did not. His bare feet throbbed, his shirt stuck to him and his trousers chafed him. Unstoppering the waterskin, he swung it up for a small mouthful. He let it wet his mouth and trickle slowly down his throat. One more small swallow and he regretfully put it away. Much as he would have liked to gulp the water, he could not run with a sloshing stomach, nor did he know how long the water would have to last him. He looked longingly at the stream that chuckled and slid beneath the elegant bridge. Its cool freshness changed the air. He rubbed the back of his sticky neck and looked about at the night that gave no clue as to the passage of time. The wagon was far ahead of him now. He had found no traces of a cold campfire, nor any signs left by the road Romni-fashion. If Ki had not stopped here, then he could ill afford to. But his throbbing feet decided him. Jace had told him not to drink the water; she had said nothing about bathing in it. He trotted heavily on toward the water, pulling his shirt over his head as he went.

  The delightful chill of it eased his feet, making their hot throb an unpleasant memory. He lay full length in the shallowness, letting it flow past and over him. He had not known how much he ached until he felt the moving fingers of water soothing it away. Tipping his head back, he let it saturate his dark curls. When he shook his head briskly, he was amazed to find his headache completely gone. The water shattered from his hair in a silver spray. When he slowly rose from the water, it clung to his body in a silver sheen. The night air closed over him like a robe of silk as he moved lazily to the moss and soft grasses of the shore. He slowly rubbed his hands over his face and stubbly chin.

  Abruptly he dropped his hands to stare at them. The flesh stood in white ridges on his fingers and palms. Had he really soaked that long? An inspection of his feet showed even their callused surfaces were soaked into tender wrinkles. He lay back on the moss, feeling foolish and relieved. Foolish to have lain so long, and relieved that he couldn’t resume his run just yet, because his heels would crack and lame him. Besides, he needed rest. No telling how far he had come from the city. No lights showed behind him, and the glowing of the horizon was as distant as ever. Ki was probably camped somewhere by now anyway. She likely wasn’t getting any farther ahead of him. He rolled over on to his belly to relax, and froze.

  Just a simple thing. Just a set of wagon tracks that led off the road and then back onto it. Vandien rose hastily to snatch up his clothes. He bent over the tracks, squinting at them in the dimness. Ki had paused here. Here were the cuts of the team’s great hooves. But the grass and small plants in them had already struggled upright again, save those broken outright. Vandien straightened to stare down the road. Ki had come through the Gate looking for him. She had stopped here, but made no fire, and had gone on. Something was wrong.

  He lifted his eyes to the horizon and the pulse of lights thronging it. Jace had said they had a pull, a lure for the unwary. He looked at them and felt only a mild curiosity. A nameless urgency laid hold of him. He began to drag clothing on over his damp skin. He gave the bridge a last admiring look and took up his trot again. He would have to gamble that he would reach Ki before he lamed himself. Unwillingly he glanced again to the horizon. What in hell was a Limbreth anyway?

  SIX

  ‘Would that you had taken your courage into both hands and come to me sooner.’ Rebeke’s voice was gentler than her words, but Cerie still bent her cowled head before them. On the black stone floor of her own hall, Rebeke Windmistress was showing little formality or humility toward this High Council member who had come seeking her out. But for the darker blue of Cerie’s robes, an observer would have thought Rebeke the Singer of rank chiding a negligent acolyte. Stranger still was that Cerie accepted this new role.

  She spoke softly. ‘I thought long before I came. I thought it likely you were already aware of these events. I feared my coming would be a finger on the scales, overbalancing some carefully contrived gambit of your own. But at last I decided I dare not chance that you might be ignorant of all that had transpired. So I came. I did what I could to keep my coming a secret, but if the High Council wishes to know of it, they will. Well I know there are those among my acolytes who would gladly whisper
any secret of mine, in exchange for a robe of darker blue.’

  ‘And that is what weakens us, or them, I should say. Political skills are rewarded more readily than true ability to sing the winds. What do they think we will come to, when their Council is full of voices that can sway a crowd but not stir a breeze?’ Cerie quailed before Rebeke’s glowering eyes.

  Rebeke flung out her hands as if discarding the entire High Council and began to pace the bare hall, robes swirling about her ankles. There was little to impede her stride. The shining black floors were bare of rugs, as the walls were innocent of pictures or windows. A tall black stool for Rebeke, a scattering of coarse straw cushions for the lesser Singers of her hall; these were the scanty furnishings of the room. The very austerity of the setting gave an ominous importance to the blue-curtained alcove at the end of the hall. Cerie felt her eyes stealing to it, and drew them back to her feet.

  ‘So Yoleth has dared to put Ki through the Limbreth Gate? That one has ever been wont to sing a breeze both warm and cold. What did she think? That I would never find out? That I would find out and pretend I hadn’t? Or is she hoping to force a confrontation with me? Oh, I have no time for this! I should be bending my every effort to train my Singers, to make of them what the Windsingers of old were! Or is that Yoleth’s aim? To hamper and distract me from that duty? Does she sense that her days of power dwindle with every Singer I shape?’ Rebeke turned a sudden glint of eye on Cerie. ‘Do you know her purpose? Has she been so blatant to the High Council?’

  Cerie shook her head mutely. Guilt filled her eyes as she raised them to Rebeke. ‘To the Council she has said nothing. She has breathed no word since that last meeting, except to Shiela.’

  ‘Then how do you know of it?’

  Cerie gave a sigh of regret for lost innocence. ‘I overheard, in a way said to be impossible. You know I am entrusted with a speaking egg?’

  Skin moved on Rebeke’s face in a parody of eyebrow raising. ‘No. I did not. Go on.’

  ‘But you are familiar with the use of one, I am sure. I was seeking to reach Yoleth on an unrelated matter; on the production level of Dowl Valley. What happened should not have. I reached Yoleth, but she was speaking through an egg to Shiela. They were unaware of me. I listened.’

  Rebeke stared at Cerie, at her eyes cast down in shame. She breathed out slowly. ‘There is more you have not told me, isn’t there?’

  Cerie turned pleading eyes on her. ‘There was much I didn’t understand. The eggs speak not with words, but with knowledge. I think I would have been happier knowing less.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘There were two things, besides that the Romni woman had been lured through a Gate. She went, yes, but a Keeper was there who held the balance. No sign was left of a Gate being used. But the man, Vandien, did what is believed impossible. He forced the Gate. It has created an imbalance, a rip between worlds. The Limbreth world bleeds into ours.’

  ‘Fools!’ hissed Rebeke, and Cerie knew she didn’t mean the teamster and her friend. ‘Just as our strength begins to blossom again, they draw attention to us. A ruptured Gate is like a blazing signal fire. Do they think the Gatherers will ignore our tinkering? Do they not realize that the Gatherers would prize this as highly as we do?’ With a few sweeping steps, Rebeke drew the blue curtain aside. Cerie gazed in wonder at the Windsinger revealed.

  The white flesh of the petrous body seemed to glow against the plain black back curtain. The sole complete fossil of the extinct race gazed out at her with eyes serene in their complete whiteness. Cerie let her eyes and thoughts feast upon the sight, let her body take new direction and inspiration from the Relic. Thus would she be when her transformation was completed: the multi-jointed limbs, the high domed skull with the ripples that cascaded down the spine, the smooth lipless mouth, the face immaculately cleansed of emotion. Like all children chosen by the Windsingers, she had imbibed the powdered bone and flesh of such creatures, had sought a metamorphosis into the form of the ancient race that had ruled the winds. But the most intricate changes could only be guided by knowledge of the original. For long had all complete Windsinger bodies been lost to them, until Rebeke had recovered this one - incurring no small debt to the Romni teamster Ki in doing so. Rebeke had used this image to shape her own transformation more swiftly, to give to her voice and wind songs more power than current Windsingers deemed possible. This power had brought her the enmity of the High Council.

  ‘The Gatherers would take this from us, if they guessed we had it,’ Rebeke said in a low voice. ‘We would be powerless to stop them.’ Cerie stirred in her reverie, hearing the words but unable to draw her full attention away from the revealed body. Already she felt a new strength in her joints, the thinning of her Human lips as she stretched her jaw to a new alignment.

  ‘The Gatherers tolerate us, are even amused by our attempts to take power for ourselves in this little fishbowl world. But they would not tolerate too much success. They tolerate nothing that upsets their balances and checks. No race may gain ascendancy; does not the Moon rule it so? True religions are those that let the races live in harmony; does not the Moon rule it so? And whence comes our Common language, pronounceable by every sentient creature upon this world, lipped or beaked or snouted? From the Moon , of course. And to whom does the Moon belong?’

  ‘To the Gatherers.’ Cerie whispered that most secret of Windsinger doctrines, stunned to hear Rebeke speak it aloud.

  ‘The Gatherers.’ Rebeke snorted. ‘We are to live in peace, to harmonize, to remain pure in our separate species, in our balanced worlds, for their entertainment.’

  ‘Blasphemy!’ cried Cerie. ‘They keep us in peace and harmony. They protect us and cherish us. They give us their just laws …’

  ‘Common sense.’ Rebeke refuted her. ‘They do all you say, of course. But they do it because it amuses them. We ourselves are but a pitiful mirror of their image. We bring the winds that spread the grain pollen, we shepherd the rain clouds away from the ripe harvest standing in the field, we bring the wet winds in the drought years. Why? Because we are the Windsingers, and it is given to us to bring the weather that will make the earth fruitful for the tillers of the fields and the keepers of the flocks. Because of our great wisdom and goodness and fondness, we watch over the little folk. And because without our percentages extracted from them, our halls would be dreary places indeed. Why wear coarse cotton when the wind moves more sweetly against blue silk?’ Rebeke caressed the loose folds of her robe.

  ‘What will you do?’ whispered Cerie.

  ‘Do?’ Rebeke gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Nothing. Who can rebalance the worlds? It is too late to do anything. I will run away and live as a peasant in a little hut in the woods, with anemones under my window, and a wizard to warm my bed.’ Rebeke’s blue and white eyes had gone fey and wild. Cerie shrank from her strange words. ‘That would be at least as useful as anything else I can do. Yoleth has unleashed it. All we can do is attempt to stand before a wind not of our singing. I shall do my best to be a guardian.’ Rebeke’s hand swished closed the curtain of the alcove.

  ‘I fear I have come a long way, in what some would say was an act of treason, for very little good.’ Cerie put her lightly scaled hands to her face and rubbed at where her temples had been.

  ‘No journey that ends in the finding of a friend is without good.’ Sanity and control had returned to Rebeke’s voice. She came to Cerie and touched her cheek with a hand that asked forgiveness for her wild words. ‘For myself, I shall be glad to know that I do not stand before the blast of the Gatherers alone. That is a comfort to me.’

  ‘To me also. And there are others: Dorin and Kadra at least. The High Council guesses that you have our sympathies, and so they were elaborately careful to summon us late when you requested a Council hearing. They know what we feel; that while the Windsingers function best under a single authority, the High Council that exists now is not the only possible answer. Others might lean to us. Yoleth rules the hands of most of
the Council, but she has no one’s heart - unless, perhaps, Shiela’s, if she has one.’

  ‘It is good to know of your support.’ Rebeke had calmed. She found her stool and perched on it to think. ‘I lied to you, a moment ago. It is easier to say, I will do nothing, than to admit I do not know what I can do. But act I must. There are sources I can question to find out if there is a way to seal a Gate and hide this unbalancing of the worlds. Perhaps together we can forestall the storm of the Gatherers. Jojorum, you say? Yoleth would put her Gate in a pit of filth like that. I will go there, and gather knowledge of this Gate if nothing else.’

  ‘There is yet the second thing,’ Cerie began hesitantly.

  ‘It cannot be worse, so tell me of it,’ Rebeke said with a shade of humor.

  ‘Better or worse, it made no sense to me, but it was clearly acknowledged between Shiela and Yoleth. Yoleth, at least, insisted on it when they spoke, and Shiela accepted her thoughts as true. She referred to Ki as a renegade Windsinger.’

  Silence rose cold around them, drenching them.

  Rebeke spoke at last with an effort. ‘Those words make no sense together. And Ki is no Windsinger. You must have somehow taken separate thoughts out of context.’

  ‘Not three times,’ Cerie insisted, but quietly. ‘It was quite plain that this is the root of Yoleth’s hatred for her. The Romni song was a blind. She speaks of Ki as a dangerous traitor.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘As impossible as rupturing the Gates between the worlds, or listening on another speaking egg.’

  Rebeke’s face rippled with conflicting emotions, anger the strongest. Then she smoothed it blank again. ‘I will think no more on that, nor speak of it, until I have gathered facts. There is one, I think, who will know what basis there is for Yoleth’s words. One who can be persuaded to talk to me.’