DEATH’S GATE

THE VIOLENCE of the impact knocked Haplo over backward and sent the dog scrabbling to maintain its balance. The comatose body of Alfred slid gently across the canting deck. Haplo crashed up against the side of the hold, fighting desperately against tremendous unseen forces pressing on him, holding him plastered to the wood. At last the ship righted itself somewhat and he was able to lurch forward. Grabbing hold of the limp shoulder of the man lying at his feet, Haplo shook him viciously.

“Alfred! Damn it, Sartan! Wake up!”

Alfred’s eyelids fluttered, the eyes beneath them rolled. He groaned mildly, blinked, and—seeing Haplo’s dark and scowling face above him—appeared somewhat alarmed. The Sartan attempted to sit up, the ship listed, and he instinctively grabbed at Haplo’s arm to support himself. The Patryn shoved the hand aside roughly.

“What are you doing here? On my ship? Answer me, or by the Labyrinth, I’ll—”

Haplo stopped, staring. The ship’s bulkheads were closing in around him, the wooden sides drawing nearer and nearer, the deck rushing up to meet the overhead. They were going to be crushed, squeezed flat except, at the same instant, the ship’s bulkheads were flying apart, expanding into empty space, the deck was falling out from beneath him, the entire universe was rushing away from him, leaving him alone and small and helpless.

The dog whimpered and crawled toward Haplo, buried its cold nose in his hand. He clasped the animal thankfully. It was warm and solid and real. The ship was his and stable once more.

“Where are we?” Alfred asked in awe. Apparently, from the terror-stricken expression in the wide, watery eyes, he had just undergone a similar experience.

“Entering Death’s Gate,” Haplo answered grimly.

Neither spoke for a moment, but looked around, watching, listening with inheld breath.

“Ah.” Alfred sighed, nodded. “That would explain it.”

“Explain what, Sartan?”

“How I arrived ... er ... here,” Alfred said, lifting his eyes for an instant to meet Haplo’s, immediately lowering them again. “I didn’t mean to. You must understand that. I—I was looking for Bane, you see. The little boy you took from Arianus. The child’s mother is frantic with worry—”

“Over a kid she gave away eleven years ago. Yeah, I’m in tears. Go on.”

Alfred’s wan cheeks flushed slightly. “Her circumstances at the time—She had no choice—It was her husband—”

“How did you get on my ship?” Haplo repeated.

“I ... I managed to locate Death’s Gate in Arianus. The Gegs put me in one of the dig-claws—You remember those contraptions?—and lowered me down into the storm, right into Death’s Gate itself. I had just entered it when I experienced a sensation as ... as if I were being pulled apart and then I was jerked violently backward ... forward ... I don’t know I blacked out. When I came to myself, I was lying here.” Alfred spread his hands helplessly to indicate the hold.

“That must have been the crash I heard.” Haplo gazed at Alfred speculatively. “You’re not lying. From what I’ve heard, you miserable Sartan can’t lie. But you’re not telling me all the truth either.”

Alfred’s flush deepened, he lowered his eyelids. “Prior to when you left the Nexus,” he said in a small voice, “did you experience an odd ... sensation?”

Haplo refused to commit himself, but Alfred took his silence for acquiescence. “A sort of ripplelike effect? Made you sick? That was me, I’m afraid,” he said faintly.

“It figures.” The Patryn sat back on his heels, glaring at Alfred. “Now what in the name of the Sundering do I do with you? I—”

Time slowed. The last word Haplo spoke seemed to take a year to emerge from his mouth and another year for his ears to hear it. He reached out a hand to grasp Alfred by the frilly neckerchief around the man’s scrawny neck. His hand crept forward a fraction of an inch at a time. Haplo attempted to hasten his motion. He moved slower. Air wasn’t coming in fast enough to supply his lungs. He would die of suffocation before he could draw a breath.

But impossibly he was moving fast, far too fast. His hand had grasped Alfred and was worrying the man like the dog worried a rat. He was shouting words that came out gibberish and Alfred was trying desperately to break his grasp and say something back, but the words flew by so swiftly that Haplo couldn’t understand them. The dog was lolling on its side, moving in slow motion, and it was up and leaping around the deck like a thing possessed.

Haplo’s mind attempted frantically to deal with these dichotomies. Its answer was to give up and shut down. He fought against the darkening mists, focusing his attention on the dog, refusing to see or think about anything else. Eventually, everything either slowed down or speeded up. Normality returned.

It occurred to him that this was the farthest he’d made it into Death’s Gate without losing consciousness. He supposed, he thought bitterly, he had Alfred to thank.

“It will keep growing worse,” said the Sartan. His face was white, he shook all over.

“How do you know?” Haplo wiped sweat from his forehead, tried to relax, his muscles were bunched and aching from the strain.

“I ... studied Death’s Gate before I entered it. The other times you passed through, you always blacked out, didn’t you?”

Haplo didn’t answer. He decided to try to make his way to the bridge. Alfred would be safe enough in the hold, for the time being. It was damn certain the Sartan wasn’t going anywhere!

Haplo rose to his feet ... and kept rising. He stood up and up and up until he must crash through the wooden overhead, and he was shrinking, becoming smaller and smaller and smaller until an ant might step on him and never notice.

“Deaths Gate. A place that exists and yet does not exist. It has substance and is ephemeral. Time is measured marching ahead going backward. Its light is so bright that I am plunged into darkness.”

Haplo wondered how he could talk when he had no voice. He shut his eyes and seemed to be opening them wider. His head, his body were splitting apart, tearing off into two separate and completely opposite directions. His body was rushing together, imploding in on itself. He clasped his hands over his rending skull, reeling, spiraling downward until he lost his balance and tumbled to the deck. He heard, in the distance, someone screaming, but he couldn’t hear the scream, because he was deaf. He could see everything clearly because he was completely and totally blind.

Haplo’s mind wrestled with itself, attempting to reconcile the unreconcilable. His consciousness dove down further and further inside him, seeking to regain reality, seeking to find some stable point in the universe to which it could cling.

It found ... Alfred.

Just as Alfred’s failing consciousness found Haplo.

*

Alfred was skidding through a void, plummeting downward, when he came to a sudden halt. The terrible sensations he’d experienced in the Death’s Gate ceased. He stood on firm ground and the sky was up above him. Nothing was spinning around him and he wanted to cry from relief when he realized that the body in which he was standing was not his own. It belonged to a child, a boy of about eight or nine. The body was naked, except for a loincloth twisted around the boy’s thin limbs. The body was covered with the swirls and whorls of blue and red runes.

Two adults, standing near him, were talking. Alfred knew them, knew them to be his parents, although he’d never seen them before now. He knew, too, that he’d been running, running desperately, running for his life and that he was tired, his body ached and burned, and that he couldn’t take another step. He was frightened, horribly frightened, and it seemed to him that he’d been frightened most of his short life; that fear had been his first recognizable emotion.

“It’s no use,” said the man, his father, gasping for breath. “They’re gaining on us.”

“We should stop now and fight them,” insisted the woman, his mother, “while we have strength left.”

Alfred, young as he was, knew that the fight was hopeless. Whatever was chasing them was stronger and faster. He heard terrifying sounds behind him—large bodies crashing through the undergrowth. A wail swelled in his throat, but he fought it back, knowing that to give way to his fear would only make matters worse.

He fumbled at his loincloth, drew out a sharp-pointed dagger, encrusted with dried blood. Obviously, Alfred thought, staring at it, I’ve killed before.

“The boy?” asked his mother, a question to the man. Whatever was coming was gaining on them rapidly.

The man tensed, fingers closing around a spear in his hand. He seemed to consider. A look passed between the two, a look that Alfred understood and he leapt forward, the word ‘No.’ bubbling frantically to his lips. It was met by a clout on the side of his head that knocked him senseless.

Alfred stepped out of his body and watched his parents drag his limp and unresisting form into a growth of thick bushes, hiding him with brush. Then they ran, luring their enemy as far from their child as they could before they were forced to turn and fight. They weren’t acting out of love to save him, but out of instinct, just as a mother bird, pretending to have a broken wing, will lead the fox away from her nest.

When Alfred regained consciousness, he was back in the child’s body. Crouching, panic-stricken, in the brush, he watched, in a dazed and dreamlike fashion, the snogs murder his parents.

He wanted to scream, to cry out, but something—instinct again or perhaps only fear freezing his tongue—kept him silent. His parents fought bravely and well, but they were no match for the hulking bodies and sharp fangs and long, razorlike claws of the intelligent snogs. The killing took a long, long time.

And then, mercifully, it was over. His parents’ bodies—what was left of them when the snogs had finished their gorging—lay unmoving. His mother’s screams had ceased. Then came the frightening moment when Alfred knew that he was next, when he feared that they must see him, that he must be as highly visible as the bright red blood clotting the matted leaves on the ground. But the snogs were weary of their sport. Hunger and lust to kill both satisfied, they moved off, leaving Alfred alone in the brush.

He lay hidden a long time, near the bodies of his parents. The carrion beasts arrived to take their share of the spoils. He was afraid to stay, afraid to leave, and he couldn’t help whimpering, if only to hear the sound of his own voice and know that he was alive. And then two men were there, beside him, peering down at him, and he was startled for he hadn’t heard them gliding through the brush, moving more silently than the wind.

The men discussed him, as if he weren’t there. They eyed the bodies of his parents coldly, spoke of them without sympathy. The men were not cruel, only callous, as if they’d seen murder done all too many times before and the sight could no longer shock them. One of them reached down into the brush, dragged Alfred to his feet. They marched him over to stand beside the bodies of his butchered parents.

“Look at that,” the man told Alfred, holding the boy by the scruff of his neck and forcing him to stare at the gruesome sight. “Remember it. And remember this. It wasn’t snogs that killed your father and mother. It was those who put us in this prison and left us to die. Who are they, boy? Do you know?” The man’s fingers dug painfully into Alfred’s flesh.

“The Sartan,” Alfred heard himself answer and he knew then that he was Sartan and that he’d just killed those who had given him birth.

“Repeat it!” the man ordered him.

“The Sartan!” Alfred cried, and he wept.

“Right. Never forget that, boy. Never forget.”

*

Haplo fell into darkness, cursing, fighting, struggling to retain consciousness. His mind rebelled against him, dragged him under for his own good. He caught a glimpse of a light, as he seemed to be receding farther and farther away, and he exerted every ounce of his being to reach that light. He made it.

The falling sensation ended, all the strange sensations ended and he was filled with a vast sense of peace. He was lying on his back and it seemed to him that he had just awakened from a deep and restful slumber lit by beautiful dreams. He was in no hurry to rouse himself, but lay still, enjoying slipping into and out of sleep, listening to a sweet music in his mind. At length, he knew himself to be fully awake and he opened his eyes.

He lay in a crypt. He was startled, at first, but not frightened, as if he knew where he was but had forgotten and now that he remembered, everything was all right. He felt a sense of excitement and breathless anticipation. Something that he’d been waiting for a long time was about to happen. He wondered how to get out of the crypt, but knew the answer immediately when he asked himself the question. The crypt would open at his command.

Lying back restfully, Haplo glanced down at his body and was to see himself in strange clothes—long white robes. And he […] with a pang of terror, that the runes tattooed on his hands […] and were gone! And with the runes, his magic. He was helpless, helpless as a mensch!

But the knowledge came to him instantly, almost making him laugh at his own simplicity, that he wasn’t powerless. He possessed the magic—but it was inside him, not outside. Experimentally, he lifted his hand and examined it. The hand was slender and delicate. It traced a rune in the air and, at the same time, sang the rune to the […] door of his crystal crypt opened.

Haplo sat up and swung his legs over the side. He jumped [lightly] down to the floor; his body tingled all over with the unaccustomed exertion. Turning, he looked back into the crystalline surface of the empty crypt and experienced a profound shock. He was looking at his own reflection, but his face didn’t look back. Alfred’s did. He was Alfred!

Haplo staggered, physically jolted by the knowledge. Of course, that explained the absence of runes on his skin. The Sartan magic worked from within to without, whereas Patryn magic worked from without to within.

Confused, Haplo looked from his own empty crypt to one located next to his. He saw in it a woman, young, lovely, her face calm and tranquil in repose. Looking at the woman, Haplo felt a warmth [well] up inside him and he knew he loved her, knew he had loved her a long, long time. He moved over to her crypt and rested his hands upon the chill crystal. He gazed at her fondly, tracing every line of that [beloved] face.

“[…],” he whispered, and caressed the crystal with his hands. A chill stole through Haplo, freezing his heart. The woman isn’t breathing. He could see clearly through the glass tomb that it [was not] supposed to have been a tomb but only a cocoon, a resting until it was time for them to emerge and take over their duties.

She wasn’t breathing!

Admittedly, the magical stasis slowed the body’s functions, [he] watched the woman anxiously, willing the fabric across her to move, willing the eyelids to flicker. He waited and watched, pressed against the glass for hours, waited until his strength [gave] out, and he crumbled to the floor. And then, lying on the floor, he lifted his hand and stared at it again. He noticed now what he had not before. The hand was slender and delicate, but it was aged, wrinkled. Blue veins stood out clearly. Dragging himself to his feet, he stared into the crystal of the crypt and he saw his face.

“I am old,” he whispered, reaching out to touch the reflection that, when he had gone to sleep, had been bright with youth and alive with eager promise. Now it was aged, skin flabby and sagging, his head bare, the fringe of hair around the ears whitish gray.

“I am old,” he repeated, feeling panic surge through him. “I am old! I have aged! And it takes a long, long time for a Sartan to age! But not her! She is not old.” He stared back into her crypt. No, she was no older than he remembered her. Which meant she had not aged. Which meant she was ...

“No!” Haplo cried, clutching at the crystal sides as if he would tear them apart, his fingers sliding down ineffectually. “No! Not dead! Not her dead and me alive! Not me alive and ... and ...”

He stepped back, looking around him, looking into the other crypts. Each one of them, except his, held a body. Inside each was a friend, a comrade, a brother, a sister. Those who were to come back to this world with him when it was time, come back to continue the work. There was so much to do! He ran to another crypt.

“Ivor!” he called, pounding on the crystal sides with his fingers. But the man lay unmoving, unresponsive. Frantic, Haplo ran to another and another, calling out each dear name, pleading incoherently with each one to wake, to be!

“Not me! Not me ... alone!”

“Or maybe not,” he said, stopping in his mad panic, hope cool and soothing inside him. “Maybe I’m not alone. I haven’t been out of the mausoleum yet.” He looked toward the archway that stood at the far end of the round chamber. “Yes, there are probably others out there.”

But he made no motion toward the door. Hope died, destroyed by logic. There were no others. If there had been, they would have ended the enchantment. He was the only survivor. He was alone. Which meant that somewhere, somehow, something had gone horribly wrong.

“And will I be expected, all by myself, to set it right?”