The Farthest Gate (The White Rose Book 1) (14 page)

Such absolute callousness!  I screamed inwardly as something in my soul snapped like dry kindling! 
The rose I wore unleashed a potent fragrance, cleansing the air.  The petals glowed with a soft inner light.

The
Keeper released me as if I burned him.

Though free, I fell to my knees, and sobbed, staring at the chemical bath as though nothing else existed.
 

T
he Keeper’s voice lightened as he spoke, “But do not worry, I am quite sure we will turn up your sword someplace.”  He laughed.

I stared as
his body dwindled, losing bulk.  His black beard blew away in the warm air like ink-stained dandelion fluff.  His cloths changed to midnight blue.  A silver chain appeared around his waist, complete with scythe.  It was the Gamesman after all.  He had seen through my game and played me a fool.

I hurled myself at him.  I would rip him apart with bare hands.  “I hate you!” I screamed.  My vision blurred with hot tears. 

The Gamesman caught my flailing arms, and registered surprise that I would take the game so personally.

I struggled to free myself, to claw that stupid expression from his evil face, but his grip had the same strength as before.  He shook me, and his eyes flashed with annoyance.  “You act as if
she were not already dead.”

Dignity was more than I could afford as
grief constricted my heart.  I could no longer struggle.  “Please, do not do this to her.  Get her out of there.  Give her to me!”  My voice broke, softening, “I beg you.  I beg you.”

The triumph on his face melted into pain.  It surprised us both. 

“Please.”  I whispered, “You’re breaking my heart.”

“I’m sorry, it is too late.”  He gazed past me to the vat.

I followed his stare.  Angelique’s body had emerged.  It dripped weird fluids from a surface
turned hard and metallic.  Her gleaming face lacked emotion.  No light illuminated her eyes.  A runnel lay on her cheek, her last tear.

“That is the shape she will wear from now on,” the Gamesman said, “until she breaks from use and gets melted down for other uses.  She is lost to you forever.”

“Nooooooooo!”  I howled denial, shaking my head in refusal against such cruelty.  “This cannot be.  Oh, merciful God…”

I felt my heart splinter and called on darkness to swallow me whole, to end this torture.  Curling in upon myself, I lay at the Gamesman’s feet with barely the will to breathe. 

“White Rose?”  He knelt beside me, reached out, but did not quite touch me.  “Celeste?”

I did not answer.  I could not.  Answering would mean that I still lived, an
intolerable situation.

At my distress,
the rose I wore flared with white fire.  Its stem branched, spewing thorny tendrils rife with saw-toothed leaves and rose buds.  Flowering branches lifted me into the air without abandoning their frenzied growth.  White roses soon covered the walkway in riotous excess.

The Gamesman pulled back cursing.

I gazed upon a sweeping wave of roses and thorny brambles that raced away, covered the machinery, and jammed the gears.  The lower world was consumed by a garden of defiance, but I was too distraught to care.  The triumph meant nothing at all to me.  Neither did the silence that followed—perfect and absolute, except for a tiny corner of my mind where I could not stop screaming my little Angel’s name. 

At some point, I was cut loose from the rose storm that reflected my boundless grief.  Azrael lowered me to the floor and pulled back a step.  But he left a translucent shape where he had just been, a shade wearing my son’s face.  He knelt and ghost tears fell on my face, cold, vanishing into my flesh.  He touched me, but his hands had no substance to grasp, passing through my arms.

“Mother...!”

Wrapped in a cocoon of madness, I could not answer, not even my son.  The inches that separated us might as well have worlds.

The
Gamesman brushed my son’s spirit with his sickle, and my son faded to nothing, lost to me once more.

“Where have you sent him?” Azrael demanded.  “Phillippe’s shade was in my care.”

“My father wants him in the Courts of Death.  Your time as his protector and vessel is over.”  His gaze swung to me, where I lay as one dead.  “Take her back to Earth.  We have broken her, I fear.  Perhaps, in time, she may return to herself.”

“
You
have broken her.”  Azrael’s cold words cut the air like a slashing sword.  “Is this how you show consideration to the mother of your child?”

“I want my family with me, my son and his mother. 
That hunger has long haunted me, whispering in my dreams.  Is it so wrong?”

“You should have told her that you were the soldier she once loved.  You should have let me tell her that her son was safe inside my
body.  All the while she fought for him, she could have had the comfort of his presence.”  The dark angel knelt and picked me up.  “Even these roses are your fault.”

His hold
tightened.  I lacked the will to wonder why.  His words continued to pour through me as Philippe’s phantom tears had.

Azrael continued,
“When you took Phillippe too soon from his life, changing the plans of Providence, did you think Heaven would fail to act?  As long as Celeste played the game, judgment waited in the wings, abated.  But when you broke her—”

“Silence!” the Gamesman hissed.  “When did you acquire a heart, anyway
?  Remove her!  Go, both of you!”  His voice became as old as his eyes, softened in defeat.  “Take her home, Azrael, and God willing, she will heal.”

The darkness I longed for
wrapped me in oblivion, holding me tenderly.  If I could have cared, I might have marveled at the tears of a reaver turning to ice in my hair.  I might have
brushed them from the uncaring mask my face had become.  But only the living can do such things and I was safely dead in any way that mattered.

7. PERILOUS ASYLUM

I rested for days in a private asylum of madness while my family sadly tended the shell of my body, moving me about—a marionette with ripped-away strings.  Voices came and went as the tide: the village priest; my aunt fussing at me as she dressed me mornings and later urged broth down my throat; and my father whose tone was patient, entreating, sympathetic, pained, and sometimes angry and despairing.  Comfort was offered, but I ignored it.  Comfort is for the living, not for the dead, even if they can sometimes hear.

Often, I was guided into my son’s room to visit with him, as if his presence could draw me back from apathy’s vault.  At such times, I felt myself fall further away, surrendering to the consolation of void. 
My strength had failed him though not my heart.  I had broken, and he must now pay the price.  It was more than I could face.

This morning, my
father joined me in the garden.  He placed a blanket over my legs and a shawl across my shoulders, for the winds coming over the wall were winter winds.  Despite the wisdom of the village doctor, Papa insisted on exposing me to sunshine, gray as it was, and fresh air.  He touched my face as if he trusted his hands more than his eyes.  His voice thickened with the same anguish I had surrendered to in my grief. 

“I’m losing my grandson, daughter.  I beg you not to go with him.  Don’t leave me alone—”   His voice broke and he paused to mend it, continuing with more control.  “I know this is selfish of me, but there you are.”  He shook
off weakness and stiffened his back with pride.  “I will be back in an hour and will read more of Amelia’s diary to you then.  I do not know where you found it, but the story it tells…”  His hand fell away from my face.

Father strode toward the practice room he’d built adjoining the house, and the lost part of me wept for him, as well as for myself.  The deep place of “little forgetting”, the
oubliette
I’d cast myself into, was not as absolute as I might have wished.

My mother’s rose garden—blooming by some strange virtue

I’d never understood—was fragrant, luring me with lush green leaves and the white blaze of roses.  Any other time, the beauty around me, the gurgling fountain, would have soothed my shattered heart.  But my mind stayed shuttered.  Coming fully out of my inner darkness would only torment me with sharp recollections of Angelique’s piteous scream, and my failure to save her.  Her sweet face drifted across my mind’s eye at odd intervals, driving me deeper into myself, where no one required my heart’s attention.

In the distance, I heard the cheerful clash of blades—my father with one of his students.  The rhythmic sound enticed me, but I denied it as well, uncurling a hand that longed to hold a weapon.

I shuddered, as a cold shadow fell over me like loam across an open grave.  Ice-cold hands enveloped mine.  The white-flame eyes were back, accompanied by a whisper-soft voice.  Azrael knelt before me.

“Celeste, look at me.  Speak to me.”

A flight of moments passed that would have been silent if not for the clatter of rapiers.  He sighed, then continued.  “I know you are deeply angry with me.  I hid your son close by, there in my shadows
all the time you fought to reach him.  I never told you.  I could not.  Phillippe and I had promised the Gamesman.  The only way he would allow us to aide you was if you did not know of the merger, that your son looked through my eyes.  I agreed to be your son’s prison and protector, but that was before his heart created another within me—and I came to love you.”

My wounded heart stirred in the deep chasm where
I had cast it.  I shuddered as conflicting passions threatened to tear me asunder.  Thought was agony and feelings were perilous.  I tried to sink deeper into silence and darkness, but his words followed.

“He is beyond the hand of the Gamesman now, in the Courts of Death with your grandmother, Amelia.  I care not if you hate me, Celeste.  That is preferable
to me than the empty brokenness you wear like a shroud.”

Azrael reached into his shadow and pulled out my missing sword, offering it hilt-first. 
He studied me carefully for a response.  “How long are you going to stay this way?  I know dark fury lurks in your soul.  Let it out!  Take this blade and plunge it into me.  Cut me into ribbons!  Please…”

His whispery voice broke on the reef of my indifference.  He gained no response.  Azrael set the sword across my lap, and rose in a graceful flow.  His tone became casual once more.  “It is probably small consolation, but you won the game, not by finding the
Key
, but by changing the lock.  The city is paralyzed, unable to move.  The gates cannot open.  That does not stop the work of the reavers, the Courts of Death still fill, but the smaller game is over.”

Another lull in the conversation followed during which the clash of distant swords increased tempo, rushing toward a climax.

Azrael sighed and crumpled into his shadows.

I was alone again.

My hand lifted, trembling.  My fingers caressed the fine steel blade like a long lost lover, and then subsided.  Swords were for vengeance and vengeance was the business of the living.  I was a shade haunting an eternal ache that nothing could ever fill.

I heard the sound of
hooves as someone approached our cottage.  The visitor drove his mount with furious haste just beyond the garden walls.  The hooves fell silent.  I heard grunting and the rustle of cloth as someone climbed the wall.  A new voice pierced my peace.

“Human, there you are.”

Boots clomped across the flagstones, drawing nearer.  A hand grabbed my shoulder and half dragged me from my chair.  The sword in my lap clattered to the ground.  I made no effort to catch it.  As though boneless, I sagged in that hold.  My head drooped like a sunflower without the sun.

After a moment, I was returned to the chair with a great deal more gentleness than I had been handled previously.  For the second time in minutes, a visitor knelt before me, searching my slack face with inhuman eyes.

Amberyn sighed heavily and offered me a friendly smile.  “You have been a disaster to my plans, you know.  How am I supposed to storm the Courts of Death and rescue my wife when I cannot get beyond the Gamesman’s city?  You have crippled it with roses.  What use is the
Key
to me now?”

He waited for an answer, but I no longer had the will to even lift my head.

He sighed again.  “It is fortunate that Death cannot touch my world.  It may take a while, but I have all the time I need to eventually win.”

Slowly, he climbed to his feet and turned to leave.