The Spirit Gate (10 page)

“As
far as I know,” Kassia told him, crumpling the hated hem in her hands, “there’s been no effort to
have another made. I think perhaps Damek doesn’t expect me to be here long.”

“Well,
we’ll just have
to set him straight about that. I expect you’ll be here for quite some time.” Lukasha smiled at her, warming the room. “Now, tell me about your classes.”

She blurted out the entire story then—being the only adult in a class full of children,
the embarrassing Induction ceremony, Tamukin’s repeated misstatements about the earth magics,
the incident that led to her being banned from speaking in class.

“I’m not learning
anything, Master Lukasha,” she finished bluntly. “I
could teach a class at that basic a level. Please place me somewhere else. I
want to
learn
.”

Lukasha sat back in his chair, fingers steepled before his
face, looking, to Kassia’s
eyes, stern and musing. “You
feel you have been unjustly treated by Master Tamukin?”

Kassia, sitting arrow straight in her own chair, considered
the question seriously. “Yes,
sir,” she said finally. “I
do think he treated me unjustly. He read things into both my words and my
silences that were not there.”

“You
made him look foolish before his students,” Lukasha observed.

“I
didn’t mean to. I
only meant that they shouldn’t
be misinformed. Pardon me for saying so, Master, but Master Tamukin seems to
know very little about the earth elements.”

Lukasha’s
eyes glinted with humor. “Consider
yourself pardoned, Initiate. You’re
right. Tamukin doesn’t
know much about the earth elements. None of the younger Mateu knows much about
them. They haven’t
been part of our vocabulary for some time, you see. What we know about geomancy
comes from books. You, Kassia, are the first practitioner of earth magic to
walk these halls for a very long time.”

“That’s why you wanted me
here.” The words were out of Kassia’s
mouth before she could consider them, but Lukasha confirmed them with a nod.

“You
are also right about your place here. You are already too advanced to sit among
the first year Initiates. Accordingly, I’m going to place you elsewhere. From now on, you
will study the Mysteries with the senior Initiates, though I want you to
continue with your theology and history courses. And . . . when
you are not in class, you will work with me.”

Kassia felt the blood rush to her cheeks. “With
you
,
Master? But why? In . . . in what capacity?”

Lukasha shrugged. “You
will maintain my working notes—organize
them, transcribe them and so on. You will care for and organize my implements
and books, index spells . . . the sort of thing that junior
Apprentices usually do.”

“Apprentices?” Kassia’s
voice oozed out in a hushed whisper.

Lukasha raised a cautionary finger. “Now, now. I didn’t say you were to be my Apprentice, only that you
would have some of the duties of one. I have an Apprentice at the moment—Zakarij is his name.
You haven’t met
him yet. He’s an
Aspirant and is often busy with his own journey and studies. You will take over
his more . . . mundane duties.”

Kassia nodded, trying to digest the changes. “I see. Well, I . . .
I thank you all the same, Master. I’m
relieved to know I won’t
have to pretend at childhood any longer. Damek led me to believe you intended
for me to be with the first year Initiates.”

Lukasha chuckled. “Damek
is a man of great orderliness and little imagination. Protocol is very
important to him. I think he rather resents the fact that you did not come to
Lorant via his system of proprieties.” He cocked his head to one side, his gaze shrewd. “You may find others who bear you the same
resentment.”

“Like
Master Tamukin?”

The Mateu laughed. “Master
Tamukin likes a prodigy as well as the next man—as long as that prodigy isn’t showing him up in class. Now, I want you to come
here first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll
take you to your new classes myself.”

She could only nod and smile and try to keep fast hold on
the swelling of wonder in her breast. Prodigy, he had called her.

“Oh,
and Kassia . . .”

At the door to Damek’s
domain, she turned to find the Mateu had risen and was holding out to her a
small book bound in red leather. She recognized it immediately; it was the
little book of meditations her mother had given to her.

“You
left this on the altar at Matyash two weeks past. I wish to return it to you.”

“But
I meant it as an offering—”

He came to her and pressed the little volume into her numb
hands. “Nonsense.
It will do more good if you read this man’s words and meditate upon them. He was undoubtedly
a Master in his own time.”

Kassia nodded. “Mother
thought so. It was given to her by a Buddhist monk traveling to Tabor to speak
to Emperor Tamal the Second.”

Lukasha’s
smile was forlorn. “I
can’t believe he
fared well in that court. He was wise to leave the book with your mother. Among
the Tamalids it most certainly would have been despised and destroyed.”

“Perhaps
he knew that.” Kassia gazed down at the book. “Do
you think Mat and Itugen spoke to this Buddha? Or . . . through
him?”

“Mat
and Itugen speak to us however we will hear them. Many are the voices; one is
the message.”

Kassia smiled, feeling the warmth of the Master’s acceptance. “Mother said that.”

Lukasha returned the smile. “Then your mother was a wise woman. I wish I had
known her better, but she was . . . very ill during the short time
your family spent within these walls. I heard she died soon after.”

“Of
a broken heart,” murmured Kassia, her smile fading. “My father died in the flood. And my husband.”

Lukasha looked at her then as if he could see into her very
soul and said the oddest thing: “Yet,
because of that, you are here with us now.”

The words had given her a strange chill, but repeating them
to herself later, she realized they were true. If half her family hadn’t died and the other
half all but abandoned her, she would not have been driven to the gates of
Lorant.

If she had known the end at the beginning, she wondered,
would she still have grieved so? Yes; no foreknowledge could have lessened so great
a loss—but she
might not have been so hopeless these last three years, so indecisive, so . . .
useless.

Now she could be of use in the world. She would study and
meditate and learn how to control the forces within and around her. She would
be careful with her magic, careful. The mother at the fountain stood before her
mind’s eye.
Careful, she told herself again, and certain.

The third day of the week the skies opened and poured
forth rain. Though it was the normal course of Polian spring, still Kassia eyed
it with unease, praying it was not also a portent.

Just before dawn she made her soggy way up to Lorant, where
Damek grudgingly awarded her a Initiate’s
tunic of midnight blue with a sunburst embroidered on one shoulder. There was a
pair of soft leggings to wear beneath the knee length tunic and to Kassia, who
had worn nothing but the full skirts of a village girl, the masculine garb felt
strange, though not uncomfortable. Damek, seeing her discomfiture, made no
apology; he seemed to take perverse pleasure in it.

It was Lukasha who apologized as he led Kassia to meet her
new professor of Mysteries, Master Radman. “So few women have walked the halls of Lorant,” he told her, “that
we have neither clothing nor quarters for them. Years ago, there were female
Initiates and Sister Mateu. Some shai, like Marija of Ohdan and yourself, most
not. Most were like our young Arax-itu—Ari,
they call her.”

“There’s another woman here?”

Lukasha stopped in the middle of the broad hallway. “A girl, really.
Younger than yourself. Her family sent her here for an education; she feels
called to the priesthood. She’s
a bright girl—a
brilliant poet and musician. Very devoted, very good at theology and history
and undeniably Radman’s
pet, else she wouldn’t
still be here. Unfortunately, she has trouble grasping even the basic Mysteries
a Mateu must have. So, she is in Master Radman’s class, struggling to understand.”

“Then
she’ll be in the
same studio?”

“Yes.
Ari will be a classmate of yours.” He smiled wryly. “Radman’s class is a mixed
lot.”

They were indeed. Casimir, who acted as class aide, was
Master Radman’s
Apprentice. He was a somber young man in his early twenties with wide, green
eyes and a mouth that seemed reluctant to smile. Among the novices were Gavmat
and Ioakim, an inseparable pair who could not have been more dissimilar. Where
Gavmat was small, dark and wiry, Ioakim was tall, lithe and golden. His twin
brother, Matim, also a member of Radman’s
elite group, was a gawky, over-thin Initiate struggling, Lukasha confided, to
become an Apprentice by the summer Solstice when his father had threatened to
remove him from Lorant and install him in the family business.

Arax-itu, a tall, willowy girl with at least a yard of
blue-black hair and a voice as dulcet as wind through the pines of Lorant, was
obviously delighted to see another female student. From the others, Kassia felt
a bitter-sweet combination of curiosity, surprise, affability and suspicion.
Which came from whom was difficult to sort out.

Master Radman was a great pudding of a man—a man, Kassia
suspected, who spent much time in or near the sweet shop she had seen on the
square in New Dalibor. He immediately enveloped her in his warm, billowing
regard as if she were a lost daughter newly found.

“Ah!
This is Kassia!”

He set aside the scroll from which he had been copying
figures to a large slate of lightless black and gestured broadly at an ottoman
close to his left hand. There was a writing board balanced atop it, along with
a thin sheaf of paper and a bundle of reed pens. The other students, most
already seated on their hassocks, were grouped in a rough half circle around
the rotund Mateu.

“My
dear, how good it is to have you here! I must thank Lukasha again for the
bounty of having you in my class.” He watched Kassia seat herself, beaming all the while, then added,
grasping and squeezing her hand, “It
will be so good to feel the earth magic tremble in these stones again. We Mateu
can rattle the rafters, but only shai enchantment can shake the earth.”

To be sure, not everyone Kassia met that day offered her as
warm a welcome as the amiable Master Radman.

“So,” murmured Gavmat, as he passed by her to gather his own board and pens, “
you
’
re
the one,” and Kassia knew she was once again the source of rumor.

Fine
, she thought wryly.
It wouldn
’
t
do to have my life change too much all at once.

Master Radman delivered the expected lectures on the
elements, lingering for a bit on the earth elements and describing how, during
the last century, the Mateu had learned to deal with them through subtractive
incantations. He noted, with a nod to Kassia, that the shai could deal with
these things directly and emphasized how important that direct manipulation of
Itugen’s elements
could be.

“Let
us take, for example, the Great Fires. You are all too young to remember them—indeed, I was little
more than a boy, myself. You’ve
no doubt studied them in History—or
will do so.” He inclined his head toward Kassia. “They ravaged the valley of Dalibor, nearly
destroyed Ohdan, and reached almost to the first yam between here and Tabor.
The Mateu could do no more than still the winds to slow the fire’s rage, but it was not
enough. Shai magic, alone, could have stopped the flames at their source.”

“It
seems to me,” said Kassia, trying to keep her voice from betraying nerves, “that shai magic and
Mateu magic together would have provided the best solution.”

“Yes,
but the shai wouldn’t
help, would they?” Gavmat was pointedly not looking at her.

Master Radman frowned. “Is this what Brother Sisa taught you in History,
Gavmat?”

“No.
He merely said the Mateu magic wasn’t
enough. That all they could do was try to stop the wind from blowing and
fanning the flames higher. But even that was hard, of course, because the fire
made its own wind.” He looked at Kassia now. “Shai
wind.”

Kassia had opened her mouth to retort, but Master Radman
gave her a warning glance. “Where
did you learn that the shai refused to stop the fires?”

“My
father. He’s a
mason, you know. His father was a woodcutter. After the fires there was no wood
to be cut, except what was around Lorant, which is sacred. Father said the shai
let the fires eat the valley.”

If she could have reached the ignorant pup, Kassia would
have smacked him. As it was, she thanked Itugen that he was seated safely out
of reach and tried to speak moderately. “That’s
not true. My mother was shai—the
only one left in the village. She tried to stop the fires. But she couldn’t. The earth wouldn’t speak to her; the
fire wouldn’t
listen.”

Master Radman stopped Gavmat before he could utter whatever
taunt quivered on his half-open lips. “The
fire wouldn’t
listen,” he agreed. “And
because of that, much of Dalibor valley became a charcoal heap. So you see, the
control of the earth elements is no small thing.”

No small thing. Kassia remembered that later in the day as
she stood on the flat rooftop of Shagtai’s little apartment with the narrow valley of
Dalibor laid out below her like a multicolored carpet. Beneath the steely sky,
amid the gray of ash and the black of the skeletal forest, were splashes of
color—the
blue-green ribbon of river, the brighter green of young spring grass and
adolescent saplings, the rich browns of new wood. Here and there were even
flashes of blooming hues—pinks,
reds, violets—as
wildflowers struggled amid the wastes.