The Gates of Winter (30 page)

The other five Embarrans had raised their visors, and now they exchanged uneasy glances. However, Vedarr's stony expression did not falter.

“I say again, why do you wear a sigil of death?”

“Because,” Vedarr said, “we are Death Knights, or at least so King Sorrin chooses to call us. It is by his command we carry these shields.”

For a moment Vedarr's imperturbable facade cracked, and a recognizable emotion shone in his eyes. It was shame. However, a moment later it was gone.

“Sorrin is completely mad now, isn't he?” Tarus said, shaking his head. “He thinks he can cheat death by pretending to serve it. So he has his men paint skulls on their shields and calls them Death Knights.” His lip curled in disgust. “By the blood of the Bull, sir, how can you bear it?”

Vedarr thrust a finger at Tarus. “You will hold your tongue, Knight of Calavan. It is not for you to question the will of my king.”

“No, it is for you to do that,” Tarus said, his voice edging into a sneer. He was playing a dangerous game, but Grace couldn't think of another tactic. “Only you are too old or too weak or too cowardly to do so. So instead you ride about the land on the whim of a madman while the Onyx Knights control your lord like a puppet on a string and the Raven Cult leads your people to their doom.”

The other Embarran knights muttered angry words. Vedarr pounded his thigh with a fist. “I should have your head for those impudent words, Sir Knight, but I will give you all one more chance, though you deserve it not. Deliver Sir Durge to me now, and I will let you ride on if you swear to make straight for the northern border of the Dominion.”

Durge nodded. “So be it.” He started to guide Blackalock forward.

“Hold, Sir Durge,” Grace said. In an instant fear fled, replaced by cold fury. There was so much that terrified her, so many things of which she was uncertain, but there was one thing she was utterly sure of: No one was going to take Durge from her while he still had time left. No one.

Durge gazed back at her, brown eyes startled. “Your Majesty, I beg you. It is the only way. They will let you ride north if I go with them. It is imperative you reach Shadowsdeep.” He turned and started again toward the Embarrans.

“I said hold, Sir Durge. That's an order. Or have you forgotten the oath you swore to me?”

This time, when he looked back, his expression was one of horror. “Never, Your Majesty. With every beat of my heart I have served you and only you. Yet again I beg you, you must let me do this thing.”

To her astonishment, Grace found herself smiling. But then, fear was impossible when you knew what you were doing was utterly and truly right.

“No, Durge. I will not let you go, not for all the knights in Embarr. You belong at my side and nowhere else.”

As he gazed at her, an array of emotions passed across his face. Shock, then outrage, then finally wonder. His drooping mustaches twitched, almost as if they hid a smile.

“As you wish it, Your Majesty,” he said, and he guided Blackalock back to stand beside her horse.

Vedarr's gaze was hard, though not without pity. “You have made a dire mistake, Sir Durge.”

“No,” Durge said. “I nearly did, but I have been saved from it by the grace and goodness of my queen. And if you are yet even a shadow of the strong and wise man I once knew, Sir Vedarr, you would allow her to save you as well.”

This seemed to leave Vedarr at a loss of words, and the knights behind him exchanged confused glances. At that moment, Paladus came riding up the slope. The army had come to a halt fifty yards away.

“Do we fight this day, Your Majesty?” Paladus said. There was an eager gleam in his eyes.

“I don't know,” Grace said, directing her gaze at Sir Vedarr. “Do we?”

The air was utterly still, as if frozen by the tension that hung between them. One move, and everything would shatter.

“We have our orders,” Vedarr said. “And we are loyal to our king. We know what we must do.”

Behind him, his men shifted in their saddles. Their expressions were less certain than Vedarr's, but it was clear they would not defy him. Grace knew she had to say something, but Sir Tarus was faster.

“Think, Sir Vedarr,” the red-haired knight said. “For a moment don't simply follow orders, but think about what you're doing. You've seen Fellring with your own eyes. Her Majesty Grace is the queen of Malachor. She is above the rulers of all the Dominions, including your king.”

Vedarr pressed a fist to his brow. “Stop it,” he said, his voice edging into a hiss. “Do not do this to me, Sir Knight. Do not ask me to give up my oath of loyalty.”

“I ask you to give up nothing save madness. You speak of loyalty. What of your king's loyalty to you, to your Dominion? Has he not betrayed you all by casting his lot with the Onyx Knights?” He gestured to Grace. “And here before you is the queen of us all. Is your loyalty not ultimately to her?”

Vedarr shook his head. “If she were the queen . . . perhaps, if she were truly the queen. But how do I know it is true? How can we be certain this is the right thing?”

Before Tarus could speak again, a stunning and impossible thing happened.

Durge laughed.

The knight threw his head back, gazed at the sky, and laughed. It was a deep, rich, booming sound—like the toll of a bronze bell. His body shook with the laughter, and he held his hand to his side as if it would split. All of them stared at the Embarran, mouths agape. He could not have shocked them more than if he had suddenly sprouted wings and flown into the sky. At last his laughter ceased, though his smile did not, and he wiped his eyes as he spoke.

“You search for certainty, Sir Vedarr,” Durge said. “That is hard quarry to hunt, but I will tell you what you can be certain of.” He slipped from the back of his horse and stood on the frozen ground between the two armies. “You can be certain there is no woman or man in all the world as strong, as wise, and as good as Lady Grace. You can be certain that the blade she carries is indeed Fellring, King Ulther's sword forged again, and that it belongs in the hand of no other. But even if Ulther's blood did not flow in her veins, she would still be better than you or I, than any of us, and worthy of our loyalty. And there is one more thing you can be certain of—that we ride north with little chance of staving off the coming tide of darkness, yet also with the knowledge that someone must stand against it, and so it might as well be us.”

At last a breath of wind moved, blowing Durge's hair back from his craggy brow. He gazed northward—not at the knights of Embarr, but past them.

“It is not prevailing against the dark that matters, Sir Vedarr, for every day good and strong men are defeated by hate, fear, anger, and deceit—and by the ones who are slaves to such things.” He pressed his right hand to his chest. “It is not defeating evil that makes us good at heart. It is simply choosing to stand against it.”

Durge bowed his head, his shoulders stooped, his laughter gone. The only sound that broke the silence was the sigh of the wind through dry grass. All gazed at the knight, unwilling—or perhaps unable—to break the silence. Tears froze against Grace's cheeks, but she could not move a hand to wipe them away, and her heart was so swollen with love that she nearly couldn't bear the agony of it.

A small form slipped from the saddle before Grace, landing lightly on the ground. Tira. The wind tangled through her fiery hair as she padded barefoot to Durge. She coiled her hand inside the knight's and looked up at him with her scarred face.

“Good,” she said, then gave a firm nod.
“Good.”

Durge knelt on the ground and hugged the small girl. She threw her arms around him, burying her face against his neck.

Now the wind picked up, rushing over the ridgetop, and it was as if fear and doubt were blown away by it. Grace dismounted and moved to stand above Durge and Tira, a hand on each of them. She looked up at Sir Vedarr.

“So what will you do?” she said.

Vedarr gazed at her for a moment, his eyes unreadable, then he drew a knife from his belt and held it before him. So was that his choice? Death?

Before she could wonder more, Vedarr turned the knife and pressed the tip of it against his shield. With slow, deliberate motions, he scraped away the white paint of the grinning skull. When he was done, he turned his horse around and held his shield aloft. The five nearby Embarrans gazed at him with shining eyes, and a great roar of approval went up from the rest of the knights on the slope below, a cheer echoed by Grace's army.

Vedarr turned his horse around. “We will follow you north, Your Majesty.” He glanced at Durge. “Not to defeat evil, but to stand against it.”

“Thank you,” Grace said. It was all she could think of.

“I'll inform my men of the change in their mission,” Vedarr said. He wheeled his charger around and rode back down the slope, his five knights pounding after him.

Grace turned around. Durge had stood, and he held Tira in his arms. His brown eyes were deep and thoughtful.

“You
are
a good man, Durge of Embarr,” Grace said softly, and she meant it with all her heart. “Nothing that happens will ever change that.” She reached a hand toward him. “You understand that, don't you?”

“Come, my lady,” he said, his voice gruff. “It's time to ride north.”

33.

Dr. Ananda Larsen leaned forward in the desk chair and drummed her fingers beside the computer keyboard. The writeable disk drive whirred as a progress bar crept across the screen. Fifty-seven percent.

“Come on,” she whispered, her face bathed in the ghostly phosphorescence of the monitor.

For the last three weeks, she had been timing how long it took the security guard to make a complete round of the building. The average was just over twenty-three minutes with a standard error of two minutes. She glanced at the wall clock. It had been exactly sixteen minutes since the guard had walked past the lab and she had darted in behind him.

It wasn't unusual for researchers to be in Building Five after hours; many experiments, particularly those involving PCR gene sequencing, required observation around the clock. However, regulations required that the researcher notify security first, and she was not about to tell the guard what she was up to.

Her tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses slipped down her nose; she pushed them back into place. Seventy-eight percent.

Maybe she should have chosen a few files instead of copying the entire directory. Except there hadn't been time to sort through everything during the day. Dr. Adler was always looking over her shoulder, curious what she was doing—and no doubt hoping to see something he could use. As far as she could tell, Barry Adler had never had an original scientific thought in his life; all he could do was steal from others.

And that's what makes him perfect for this place, Ananda. Duratek doesn't create anything—you've seen that. All it ever does is copy the work of others, then dispose of the ones who created it.

As they would dispose of her the moment they learned what she was doing. But they would have done it soon enough anyway. After all, if they got their hands on what she had learned today, they wouldn't need her anymore.

The computer emitted a chime, and Larsen nearly jumped from her seat as a tray popped out, bearing a silvery minidisk. She took the still-warm disk, snapped it inside a case, and slid it into the pocket of her lab coat. She typed a command on the keyboard and pressed Enter. A new message appeared on the screen.

Deleting . . .

They would have archived versions of the files, but the backup programs didn't run until after midnight, which meant they would never be able to recover today's results. And it was the data Larsen had collected that afternoon that had finally convinced her to go forward with her plan.

Last October, after the sudden and violent termination of the project she had been working on in Denver, Duratek had transferred her here, to their facility just outside Boulder, and had placed her on a new project. At first, after what she had witnessed in Denver, research had been the last thing on her mind. However, over the course of the last five months, her need to learn and discover had returned, and she had immersed herself in her new work. No doubt they had been counting on that. It was why they had hired her in the first place.

Until last October, working for Duratek had been the pinnacle of her career. In Denver, Larsen had been part of an incredible project: a member of a team studying two extraworldly beings. True, she had never interacted directly with the being cataloged as E-1. However, she had read the reports, had seen the test results, and had sequenced its blood. It was more than enough to convince her that what they said was true—that this creature was alien to Earth.

Less alien in appearance was the other subject, E-2, with whom she had worked more closely. He had looked like a Viking warrior transported from another century. Only it was another world he had come from, just like the being E-1.

At the time, it appeared all her choices had been vindicated. Even in graduate school, her views had been too radical for the musty world of academia. Her idea to use gene therapy to enhance the mental functioning of nonhuman mammals had made the professors on her committee squeamish. They had granted her a doctorate simply to get rid of her.

However, someone had been interested in her work, for soon after graduation, she had gotten a call from Duratek. Her advisor had told her she was making a grave error going to work for a private corporation instead of staying in the academic world. But the representatives from Duratek had been the only ones who were willing to fund the work she wanted to do.

Even then, she had known that Duratek was not a charity organization, that ultimately they were interested in her research because they believed they could profit from it, but it had been easy to forget that fact in the course of her work. They gave her a lab filled with state-of-the-art sequencing machines and computers—light-years beyond the shoddy equipment she had been forced to scrounge for in graduate school. They had bought her expensive research animals, from the first lemurs and monkeys all the way to Ellie, her chimpanzee.

A sigh escaped her. Ellie had been the culmination of everything Larsen had worked for these last ten years. A pygmy chimpanzee bred in captivity, she had been both curious and accustomed to humans. Ellie had never struggled or fought back as Larsen administered the treatments.

Her progress had been incremental in the beginning, though measurable. Manual dexterity and abstract reasoning test scores rose by over 10 percent. Then Duratek acquired the being E-1, and a whole new world opened up.

Where they had found E-1, she still didn't know. She supposed
he
had brought it to them—the one in the gold mask and the black robe. At first she had thought him some kind of joke, but just standing near him, hearing that hissing voice, made her shudder. And despite the crudeness of his methods, he had known things; it was the gold-masked one who had told them to try using E-1's blood as a delivery vector for the gene therapy.

Skeptical, Larsen had done so—and the results were astonishing. In a matter of weeks, Ellie's complex reasoning skills more than doubled. Intelligence shone like a light in her eyes. Soon she was on the edge of language—real language—and Larsen had looked forward to the day they could finally speak to one another.

Then everything changed in an instant. Something had placed the secrecy of their research in jeopardy. The order came down to evacuate. However, in the confusion, the human male E-2 escaped the lab, taking Ellie with him. Larsen had watched in horror as Ellie murdered one of the other scientists with her bare hands. Then the guards arrived, and they had shot the chimpanzee.

Ellie was trying to protect him—the man E-2. She jumped in front of the gun.

The experiment had worked. Ellie had finally achieved a human level of consciousness—she had sacrificed her own life to save another. Then, in one moment of lightning and thunder, the gun fired, and all of that work was undone. Ellie lay dead on the pavement, a hole in her chest, the light gone from her eyes.

Despite her shock, Larsen had managed to keep the guards from shooting the human male as well. However, it had all been for nothing. She still didn't know the full story—she never would—but somehow the transport caravan was waylaid on the highway to Boulder, and both of the extraworldly subjects, the being E-1 and the man E-2, had vanished.

In the weeks after, some of her associates whispered it was the Seekers who had stolen the two subjects, but she doubted that. From what Larsen had heard, the Seekers were some sort of scholarly society that sounded every bit as dry and dull as the world of academia. However, she had seen the fierceness in the man E-2's eyes. Whatever world he came from, she could only believe it was a perilous place. More likely it was from there his rescuers had come.

The computer had finished deleting the files. She glanced again at the clock. Twenty minutes had elapsed. She had only one more minute; after that, the guard could return at any second. She switched off the computer, then moved to the door. Just as she touched the handle, the door opened.

A gasp escaped her. This couldn't be happening—she had double-checked the numbers. Statistically, the guard couldn't be here already.

He wasn't. The man who stood in the doorway wore, not a uniform, but a crisp lab coat. In photographs he would have been handsome, but in person there was a waxy quality to his flesh and a stiffness to his manner every bit as artificial as his shiny hair. He had all the life and charm of a manikin.

“I didn't expect to find you here, Dr. Larsen,” he said, baring whitened teeth in a facsimile of a smile.

“I was just leaving, Dr. Adler.” She angled her shoulder as if to brush past him, only he didn't move out of the doorway. He was easily twice her size.

Adler kept smiling. “I just saw Mel. He's on security tonight. He didn't tell me you were in the building.”

Larsen shrugged, hoping the action hid her trembling. “I suppose he forgot to mention it.”

It seemed as if he wanted to frown, but all he could manage was a slight reduction of his smile, though a furrow did shadow his forehead. “Mel never forgets things.”

“What are you doing tonight, Dr. Adler?”

He blinked, obviously confused. Maybe he wondered if she was asking him out; he had hit on her often enough those first weeks when they started sharing the lab, before he finally got the hint she wasn't interested.

“Oh,” he said, finally getting her meaning. “I wanted to get a new PCR reaction going so I can have the results tomorrow. You got the memo, didn't you? There's a bonus for any researchers who complete their current projects ahead of schedule.”

Larsen did her best to mimic his smile. “I'm sure you'll get it, Barry. The bonus, I mean.”

She didn't wait for a reply. Instead she turned completely sideways and edged past him. He still didn't move, but she was small and thin—too thin, some people said, but it was difficult to remember to eat when there were so many experiments to perform, so many answers to find—and she managed to squeeze past him into the hall.

“So what was it
you
were doing here tonight, Dr. Larsen?”

Something in his voice made her hesitate. Her hand slipped into her lab coat pocket, and she turned around. “I was just reworking some numbers. I thought I had made some mistakes in a calculation earlier today.”

There was a sly light in his eyes now. “You never make mistakes, Dr. Larsen.”

“Yes I do,” she said softly, clutching the disk in her pocket. “Sooner or later, we all do.”

She turned and started down the corridor. Everything was pale in the fluorescent lights, washed of color and life, and she felt dizzy, but somehow she kept going. Only there was no point, was there?

Larsen glanced at her watch. Twenty-two minutes. The guard would be back any second. He would talk to Adler, and Adler was a pathological blabbermouth; he would say he had seen her in the lab. The guard would alert the front gate, telling them to detain her for questioning, and even if she didn't want to, she would tell them everything. Because over the last few months, she had learned that, despite his rigid views, her graduate advisor had been right about one thing. Signing a contract with Duratek had been like making a deal with a devil.

Over the years, she had fooled herself, believing her work would lead to good. She had even been able to rationalize holding the subjects E-1 and E-2 against their wills, even though it broke the most fundamental rules of scientific ethics. After all, one day her research could help to heal those with brain injuries, or give those born developmentally disabled a chance at normal lives. However, she knew now that Duratek cared nothing for such goals.

These last months, she had been performing a different kind of research: observing, listening, trying to understand what it was the company was really doing. As secretive as they were, the managers still let things slip, and while she couldn't be certain—there wasn't enough data to support her hypothesis—she believed she knew something of what they planned. A belief that was confirmed earlier today.

The work we're doing here is going to change the world, Dr. Larsen,
said the black-suited executive who had come to the lab that morning to check on the status of her research.
In fact, it's going to change two worlds. Once we can reproduce the alternate blood serum, doors will open for us—doors to entire new worlds, new possibilities. Just think of the potential for profit, Dr. Larsen.

In that moment, her illusions had finally shattered like a beaker heated too long on a burner. Duratek wasn't interested in her genetic research—they never had been. All they wanted was a complete sequence of the being E-1's blood and a method for synthesizing it so they could somehow use it to gain access to another world. Only there was one compound in the blood that had resisted all attempts at modeling and reproduction.

Until today. For the last five months, every researcher in this facility had been trying to solve the problem. Today, Larsen had done it. She had found the key to synthesizing the being E-1's blood.

And she was going to do everything she could to keep them from getting it.

Larsen made it to the elevator. She pushed a button and stared as the numbers crawled by with maddening slowness. At last the doors whooshed open. Down a long hallway were the doors that led outside, to night and to freedom. She started walking, trying not to imagine what was happening upstairs. Adler talking to the guard. The guard picking up the phone . . .

She started jogging, then running. White walls slipped by, the doors grew larger. Beyond the glass was nothing but darkness. A feeble spark of hope flickered to life in her chest. Duratek was always talking about destiny—how they could only succeed in their endeavors because fate was on their side. Maybe fate was on her side tonight. She reached out, her fingers brushing the handle of the doors.

White light went red, streaming through the corridor like blood in an artery. An electronic wail pierced the air, causing Larsen's nervous system to spasm, her hand to jerk back. She heard the metallic sound of metal bars slamming home.

“No!” she shouted, throwing her body against the doors. It was no use. They were locked.