The Limbreth Gate

‘She seemed not at all like others who have come through,’ the woman commiserated. ‘Yet I fear the Jewels will seize her nonetheless. It’s a pity. She seemed to have her heart in this world. Yet she went off down the road that leads to one end without a backward glance, a fool like the rest. Still, I shall not speak ill of one who let me through to my Chess.’

‘I will,’ grumbled Vandien. ‘She chooses her companions recklessly, and takes foolish advice. She makes more haste than sense.’

The darkened streets were deceptive in their turnings. Vandien was not sure if it were darkness or Alys that made the way so tricky for him. The game leg did not help. The mother and son preceded him, her pale garments and hair floating before him in the blackness. They seemed to find the way clear and familiar, stepping past the potholes that Vandien stumbled in, and turning at crossroads down streets that led only to darkness. Vandien followed them like a led beast. Once he found Ki, he’d fumble his way back to the tavern and his horse. For now he had to get through the Gate and catch her before she went too far. The moon grew paler in the sky.

They turned an abrupt corner, Vandien stumbling hastily after them. He stepped on the hem of her garment, for she had halted before him. He pulled himself up and looked past her. The Limbreth Gate glowed before them.

It struck Vandien as no more than a rectangular hole in the city walls. It was difficult for him to make out the country beyond it, and yet the Gate itself was strangely clear to his eyes. It was as if the darkness itself had been pressed back to make a space for this red Gate. No bars or portcullis hampered the way. Only an old gatekeeper in grey robes. Vandien put a gentle hand on the woman’s shoulder to urge her forward. Even intoxicated, he felt sure he could handle the old wretch. But under his hand her muscles were tight as a hunting cat’s.

‘So you have returned, have you?’ the Keeper charged her. ‘What will you do? Haunt me from that side now? By now you know I am beyond your reach. How can two of you ever expect to enter? No two will ever wish to leave, and the Limbreth has told me to let the Gate close. Folly. You should have returned to your farm, woman, and mourned the child as dead.’

Vandien tightened his grip on her clenched shoulder muscles. With a courtliness that was only partially the Alys, he stepped past and in front of them, placing them in the shelter of his body.

‘Why do you seek to bar these two from returning to their home?’ His tone was of reasonable curiosity. His fingers did not even venture to the worn hilt of his belt knife. There was nothing in his stance to suggest a threat, but every muscle in the set of his face promised it. It was a disparity that Vandien cultivated. He smiled hard, letting his scar pull his left eye into a sinister squint.

But the Keeper was not daunted. Instead he seemed to be staring past Vandien, considering the skyline. He smiled blindly and nodded toward it in a superior way. After a moment, Vandien’s eyes unwillingly followed his gaze. There was nothing to be seen. Only that the moon was a little paler in a sky that was venturing toward dawn.

‘What is it?’ the woman behind him whispered in awe.

‘Nothing!’ snorted Vandien. ‘It’s an old trick, supposed to unnerve us by implying he has comrades behind us. Pay no attention.’

He glanced back at the Gate Keeper. The Gate was harder to see in the growing light. Its red glow had paled and faded to match the stones of the wall. Vandien heard the boy whispering to his mother.

‘The world is going away. It does that here, Mother. A great heat and whiteness descends. If you remain out in it, as once I did, you are blinded and burned. We must seek shelter from it now. It may be hard to believe, but it becomes much worse than this. This is only the beginning, what they call “dawn.”’

‘Tavern man! Where can we go?’ Vandien turned to that piteous plea. Chess had hidden his face in his mother’s gown, and the woman had thrown her arm across her eyes. They wilted like daffodils in a drought.

‘You must let them through!’ Vandien cried, understanding only vaguely what was happening. But the Gate that had been before them a moment ago now eluded him, first winking wide, then showing only as a narrow rift in the wall. It hid in the growing light. He glimpsed the Keeper’s toothless grin. As Vandien sprang forward angrily to seize the mocking creature, his outstretched hands met a forgiving resistance, as if he pressed against the air bladder in a fish. He pushed against it, ignoring a stinging tingle like nettles. So far would his hands go, and no farther. The Keeper’s laughter did not reach their ears, but Vandien had a glimpse of his mirth as he battled with the evasive Gate.

Behind him he heard cries as the first rays of sunlight touched the city. At the same time, his fist scraped the old stone of the city walls. He pulled back his hands and stared at the coarse stone of the solid wall before him. Gate and Keeper were gone like mist in the sunlight. He spent a few futile seconds pushing against this and that stone of the wall, seeking some hidden catch or loose stone. The carved figures smiled down at him condescendingly. He pressed his hands against the wall, weaving his hand from side to side like a blind thing. The Gate would glimmer for an instant, and be gone before he could see it. Vandien cursed, clawing mindlessly at the stone. Then he felt a fumbling at his cloak.

The woman had sunk to her knees, her face huddled across her crossed arms. Chess had crept across to him, to tug at him piteously. He crouched, whimpering wordlessly before Vandien. The morning sun colored his hair between blond and grey. It fell forward over his bowed shoulders, baring a slender neck as brown as wild honey. Vandien looked at the solid wall and shook his head in bewilderment. His brain rattled sharply inside his skull; the first stabs of an Alys-inspired headache jabbed him.

He eased himself down to untangle Chess from his cloak. Any sudden movement or violent activity would trigger a truly memorable headache. He knew he should turn his efforts to finding Ki. But he couldn’t just leave these two here. ‘We’ll go to the next Gate and circle around,’ he promised them.

As he unhooked each of Chess’s small hands, they fell unresisting to the dusty street. He continued to whimper as if he wished to cling to Vandien but found the effort beyond his strength. His high-pitched keening and the deeper sobs of his mother pierced Vandien’s brain like arrows. ‘What has happened to the Gate? Will they open it again?’ he asked them gently. There was only the rising and falling of the boy’s wailing as a reply. Vandien felt needles at the back of his eyeballs. ‘Chess, stop that, please. I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me.’

More keening. Vandien reached for the thin shoulders, repressed just in time a violent urge to shake the child into silence. He looked down in pain and consternation at the small head bowed before him. His eyes widened and his own throbbing head was forgotten.

Small watery pink blisters were rising on the back of his exposed neck, popping up even as Vandien watched. His belly tightened and he started to back away from whatever unsuspected disease this was. Where the hair parted on the boy’s skull, more blisters were popping up in a neat row like seedlings after a rain. Chess’s eyes were screwed tight shut in pain as he raised his face to Vandien. The skin of his small brown face was pure still, but as soon as the morning sunlight touched it, the blisters began to swell.

‘The light! The hot light!’ Vandien looked at the mother struggling to rise. ‘How can it be endured? We shall die here!’

She lifted her once proud head and staggered a few steps closer to Vandien. Her eyes were squinted to slits. He saw the blisters rise on her nose and high cheeks as she groped toward him. She fell to her knees, her hands seeking blindly before her. The green of her airy garments began to brown and crumple in the morning light like leaves seared in a desert wind. Pink blisters popped on her exposed hands and arms.

He did not understand why, but he comprehended the need. With a sudden movement that brought demons to dance in his skull, he whipped the cloak from his own back and floated it down over the woman. It covered most of her, and as soon as she sensed its protection she drew her arms and legs neath its shelter. ‘Chess!’ Her agonized moan came from beneath the garment.

The child at his feet whimpered in reply but didn’t move. The brown ragged garment from the inn covered most of his body. He had the sense to crouch with his arms and legs drawn up beneath him and his face averted from the sky. The cloak would not cover both of them. Vandien was tugging off his shirt when he heard the scuff of a footstep behind him.

He twirled, wincing at the pain this cost him. A portly man, the worse for his night’s revelry, regarded the group with a carefully uncurious eye. As Vandien rounded on him, he became even more disinterested; his careful walk proclaimed that the woman huddled under the cloak and the child that whimpered and scrabbled at Vandien were invisible. A true city dweller, he gave them only an oblique glance that never reached Vandien’s eyes.

Vandien knew the courtesy of the city forbade him to look at the stranger or express any need, but his splitting headache and the peril of the young boy before him banished politeness. He dragged himself free of Chess, to clutch at the man’s sleeve. ‘I need your cloak, man! The child is burning up!’

The man opened his bloodshot eyes a trifle wider. He belched, and pulled his arm free of Vandien’s frantic grip, even though the tug nearly cost him his balance. He staggered a few steps sideways, drew himself up gravely, and shot Vandien a haughty and disdainful look. But as he shrugged his cloak back even about himself, his eyes took in the blisters on the child’s exposed arms. With a speed surprising in one so large, he ripped the cloak from his back and dashed it down into the street.

‘My thanks for your mercies.’ Vandien stooped to take up the cloak.

The man’s mouth opened wider than Vandien supposed it could. His eyes were distended and suddenly sober. ‘Pox!’ The word blared from his mouth like a blast from a hunting horn. ‘Pox bringers!’ he screeched again.

Vandien flung the cloak about Chess as aroused citizens began to stir. A door slammed somewhere. Heads began to pop out of doors in the side street. A young woman stepped from a door near the corner. She halted at the sight of Vandien with the bundled child in his arms and the body huddled under a cloak beside him.

‘Pox bringers!’ She took up the cry lustily and the man made it a chorus. Stooping to the street, she grabbed a loose stone. Vandien flung up his arm to shield his face, but the fist-sized rock bounced instead off the woman. It brought a sharper cry from under the cloak. The streets were filling with people awakened by the cries of ‘Pox bringers!’ Head and heart pounding, Vandien stooped beneath his burden of the child to seize the mother by her arm and drag her erect. The cloak fell away from her face as she came up; the stone throwing woman gave a shriek of horror. The blisters were rupturing. A watery flow shone on the woman’s face and dripped from her chin. Screaming with pain, she dragged the cloak over her face again.

And then they were running, with stones skipping and bouncing past them. Vandien received a solid thunk from one that hit between his shoulders, but no more flew true after that. Mentally, he cursed the gods for his luck, and in the same breath thanked them that his pursuers were city bred and poor in the skills of aiming and throwing.

Chess jolted in his arms as he tried to keep a hand free to guide the woman along. The cloak blinded her and the pain crippled her. Their run was little more than a hurried hobble; they had no chance of outdistancing their pursuers. His rapier was in the wagon with Ki; but he had no hand free to draw it in any case. He had only his belt knife against a fear-crazed crowd.

He glanced back to check their numbers. But though they shook fists and hurled stones, they had given up the chase. Perhaps they only wished to harry the pox bringers out of their area; perhaps they feared getting closer and becoming contaminated. Vandien realized now why the man had parted with the cloak. And he had thanked him.

‘I cannot go much farther.’ Chess’s mother panted from under the cloak. Vandien cast about for shelter. But no inn would take in two marked with oozing blisters, even if Vandien had possessed sufficient coin. It was early yet, and few folk were about; but they could not rely on that for long. As soon as they were seen, they would be stoned again. He steered them down an alley.

He half dragged them past the windowless backs of squat mud brick dwellings. He was staggering under his double burden, uncertain of what type of shelter he was seeking.

They scuttled across a street that interrupted the alley, and back into the shelter of the next alley. This one appeared a little more run down. Dry yellow grass grew against the backs of the houses, new green sprouts pushing up in their shade. Another street was crossed, and Vandien found himself in an alley where the weeds and trash choked the footpath. He gave the woman what trodden surface there was, himself hopping over the tufty grasses, bits of broken furnishings and crumbling piles of rain-melted mud bricks. Chess was silent and limp in his arms.

A wooden porch jutted into the alley, clinging haplessly to the crumbling wall of a fallen-in house. But as Vandien cautiously skirted it, he realized it was not a porch. Chicken feathers and dung crushed the floor. A splintered wooden door hung crookedly on sagging leather hinges. There were no windows nor any door into the abandoned house it clung to. The dung cracked dryly under his feet as he dragged his charges into this dubious shelter. As soon as he halted, the woman sank down onto the floor. Mercifully, she became silent. He deposited his motionless bundle beside her and turned back to the door. It looked as if few folk passed this way, but it would be a bad place to be cornered. It couldn’t be helped. He dragged at the door and it scraped toward him, to wedge tight half a handspan from being closed. It could not be tugged farther. His stubborn efforts only wrenched the doorframe and threatened to pull it loose entirely. It would have to do. Vandien sat down wearily on the filthy floor. The dryness of dust, old dung and chicken feathers tortured his mouth and throat. He lowered his throbbing head into his hands, and wondered unhappily how yesterday’s pleasures had gone so wrong. Dust motes danced in the narrow wedge of light that slipped through the door’s crack. The random sounds of an awakening city came distantly to his ears.

He lifted a corner of the cloak that covered Chess. The boy’s breath was light and shallow, his eyes still squeezed shut. His face was not as badly blistered as his arms. But when Vandien lifted the cloth higher for a better look, Chess cried out and scrabbled deeper within its cover. At the sound, his mother stirred and crept closer to him. ‘Hush, Chess. Hush.’ She raised a corner of her cloak to peer out, but dropped it as soon as the dim sunlight reached her. ‘Are we safe here?’

‘For now. What manner of Humans are you, that cannot bear the light of day?’

‘Day.’ There was wonder and dread in the muffled voice. ‘It is more fearsome than any legend warned. I thought it only a myth, a tale to warn adventuresome fools who could not satisfy themselves within our own world. Each Gate, they say, has a terror beyond it. Some murmur that the Limbreth should not open Gates. But who are we to question the Limbreth?’

Vandien’s pounding head ground small sense from her words. She implied the Gate was more than a passage through the wall. Well, he had heard of stranger things, and seen a few of them proved true. He made a futile effort to cough without jarring his head.

‘Will you feel safe here if I go to fetch water? And some food, perhaps, if I can manage it. Your blisters might be calmed by cool water. And I’ve a thirst that this chicken dust only torments.’

‘We will be fine here, man from the tavern. You are very kind not just to leave us. You seem different from the other folk of your world. Do you belong here?’

‘I wonder?’ he mused bitterly. ‘Vandien,’ he offered her then. ‘My name is Vandien. And I am not all that different. The folk who stoned us were terrified; they thought we had brought pestilence into the city. Fear breeds cruelty. And I can’t let you think I am so unselfish. If I am to catch up with my partner, I need to pass through your Gate. Doing that may require your assistance. It is like no Gate I have ever encountered.’

Beneath the cloak he saw the motion of a shaking head. ‘It cannot be passed. Not unless a like number of folk were willing to come out. The Keeper calls it the balance. But I will try to recall all I have ever heard of the Limbreth’s Gates. It will not be much. I was content in my land, tending my own farm, and didn’t listen to foolish tales of the Gates. Not until Chess was lured through one.’

‘I will be back as swiftly as I can. Keep silent while I am gone.’

‘Jace.’

‘What was that?’ Vandien paused with his hand on the crooked door.