The Spirit Gate (11 page)

Itugen, Kassia knew, was as much a creator as she was a
destroyer. To replace what her fires carried up into the skies, she brought
forth anew from the soil. Even the ashes of destruction fueled rebirth.

A patter of renewed rain took her below to Shagtai’s workshop where he
showed Beyla how to construct a kite frame of light wood. The workshop, with
its orderly clutter of tools and twine, sticks and fabric, had become a
sanctuary to Kassia’s
son. He liked helping Devora in the bakery, enjoyed watching buns and breads
take shape, but he was in love with the kites. He had names for his favorite
ones—the ones
that resembled animals—and
already he was learning their language.

Now, eyes on his work, tongue tip peeking from the corner of
his mouth, Beyla looked the perfect kite master’s Apprentice.

Shagtai glanced up from the kite he was repairing and jerked
his head toward the inner room. “There’s a pot of hot water
on the fire. Tea’s
in the red lacquer box over the hearth.”

Kassia nodded, accepting the chore, and let herself into
Shagtai’s private
quarters. She found the tea where he’d
said it would be, put it into a little metal ball and poured hot water into the
beautiful enameled pot the kite master claimed to have brought from a land of
dragons and gods. Into the water, the tea ball went, while Kassia wondered idly
what kind of spell one could weave with a metal spell ball full of tea leaves.

While the tea steeped she let her eyes wander over the
little suite of rooms. Where she stood was a kitchen-parlor. With her back to
the raised hearth, she could see the odd box-like bed in which Shagtai slept, a
sack chair and a second fire pit with an ottoman drawn close to it. In one
corner of the room was a large black lacquered box set on end with its
double-hinged lid opened to reveal a red velvet interior. Curious, Kassia moved
to give it a closer look.

There was a censer before the box, while within it stood a
group of small figures made of wood, stone and metal. The censer implied
veneration, but Kassia couldn’t
imagine what the statues represented that Shagtai should venerate them.

“Are
you making the tea or not?”

Startled, Kassia turned to find Shagtai regarding her from
the door to his workshop. “I
was just . . .” She gestured lamely at the box. “What
is it?”

“It
is a shrine,” said Shagtai. “It
is where I perform my daily devotions.”

“What
are the little figures?”

Shagtai moved to stand beside her, wiping his hands
methodically on a piece of rag. He glanced from the shrine to Kassia’s face. “These are
onghot
—they represent my
ancestors. And . . . my loved ones who wait for me.”

Kassia frowned at the dark censer, finding no words in which
to frame her puzzlement. Finally she said, “The scriptures say that only Mat and Itugen are to
be worshipped.”

“I
offer these veneration and prayer, not worship. That I give to the God, alone.
Do the scriptures also say that you should not love the memory of your parents
or your husband?”

“No,
of course not, but—”

“In
this way, I love the memory of my parents and the parents of my parents. In
this way, I offer them my respect. It is not wise to neglect one’s ancestors or to
forget one’s
past. You are shai. Is this not because your mother was also shai?”

Kassia’s
frown melted. “Yes.
And she, because her grandmother was shai.”

Shagtai nodded. “One
is what one is because of his or her ancestors. It is unwise to forget this.
Come, let’s have
our tea.” He grinned crookedly, his visible eye narrowed to a slit. “It should be strong
enough by now.”

Kassia thought much about her conversation with Shagtai as
the week progressed. She thought much about what her heritage had made her,
more about what she had made of her heritage. Control of the earth elements, as
Master Radman had said, was no small thing, yet she had done nothing with it
but small things. She told herself that was by circumstance. Much of the
knowledge passed down to her through her mother and great-grandmother was
merely that—knowledge,
without the spark of life that would make it real and effective. The spark had
left her great-grandmother late in life and had abandoned her grandmother
altogether. Its return had been almost too late for Jasia Antavas; though she
was shai, her powers had never developed to their full potential, and her daughter,
Kassia, had grown up not really understanding the scope or import of her own
gift.

Later that week, as if some higher power felt the need to
emphasize her lack of understanding, Master Radman asked Kassia for the precise
equation she would use to bring light into a darkened room.

Kassia had never dealt with precise equations, but was
reluctant to admit as much. Instead she tried to put words to a process that
was second nature to her. “Well,
sir, first, I would decide where I wanted the light to reside. A glass bottle
or a clay bowl . . .”

“A
spell ball, perhaps?”

Kassia smiled apologetically. “I suppose if I had one I’d use it, but I’ve never had one.”

Gavmat shook his head and someone else muttered something
too softly to hear. In response, Master Radman touched a finger lightly to his
lips. “So you
would use what, then?”

“Usually
a bowl or cup or bottle. My father was a glass-maker, so my mother taught me to
spell using the cups and bottles he made. For light I’d take a cup colored red by gold. I would hold the
cup and call upon Itugen and fire—”

“That’s fire, Kassia,” Radman observed over the renewed murmuring of his other students. “I asked about light.”

Sensing the sudden twitching edge of tension in the room,
Kassia frowned. She was reluctant to say that she rarely made use of pure light
and hadn’t
codified how she went about getting it. She was going to have to think on her
feet.

“There
is now fire in the cup,” she ad-libbed. “I
breathe into the cup of fire and call upon Mat. Then I think of the night and
the moon and when I remove the fire . . . there is only light in
the cup.”

“And
no more fire?” asked Radman.

“And
no more fire.”

“I
don’t believe
her,” said Gavmat. “How
can she handle fire?”

“Because
she’s shai,” answered Master Radman. “Shai
can handle fire.”

“But,
she didn’t use a
standard equation,” Gavmat persisted. “You’ve always told us how
important it is to get the equations right.”

“Gav
makes a good point,” said Casimir quietly, his pen poised above a fresh sheet of paper. “How can this meet with
success?”

In response, Radman roused himself from his contemplation of
Kassia’s face to
go to the slate. With the tip of one finger, he began to write there with
letters and symbols of light.

“Ah,
but you see, it is a standard equation. Look. She takes a vessel tinted by gold
to the color of fire—gold,
of course, is an Itugenic element.” He scribbled the word vessel on the lightless surface, then added,
beneath it,
spell ball
. He followed this with the sign of
addition. “Next,
she invokes Itugen.” He added the words
Isak Itugen
to the equation
and the symbol for equation. “She
now has fire.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Kassia could see several of
the others shaking their heads. Her temper rustled.

“Next,” Radman continued, after drawing a symbol for fire, “she adds the catalyst
for light, for which she has appropriately chosen air.” He glanced at the circle of
watchful students. “Why
is that an appropriate choice, Ioakim?”

The boy blinked pale eyes and answered, “Because it is Mat’s primary element.”

“Very
good. Ioakim is right—air
is Mat’s primary
element, and therefore the strongest Kassia could have chosen. And, having made
use of this catalyst, she then invokes Mat, Himself.”

Isak Mat
, he wrote.

“Then—ah, then she shows a
real understanding of subtractive magic. She invokes Night—that is, Darkness . . .
and the Moon, the remover of Darkness . . . and ends by removing
the fire itself.”

“Why
not just use the fire to make light?” Arax-itu’s
voice was breathless and hushed, as if she’d actually seen Kassia perform the bit of magic
they discussed.

“Not
safe,” said Casimir, scribbling Radman’s
equation on a piece of paper. “Fire’s very dangerous. Especially
since we can’t
control it.” He stopped in mid-scrawl and stared at Kassia.

Radman was beaming at her. “Good. Now, Kassia, what if I were to ask you for an
equation that would lift a large rock out of a farmer’s field?”

The morning continued in this way, but Kassia was only half
aware of what was said and done. A new awareness that had been tapping at her
brain for days had finally gained admittance. She could control fire. She could
create it with a word; she could just as easily put it out. She had known that
for years without realizing what it meant. But if she could control it, could
she not create an amulet that would protect someone from it? She’d never tried
investing an amulet with anything more than a vague blessing, but perhaps
Master Lukasha would be willing to help.

At the mid-day break before her religion class, Kassia
intended to go straight to the Headmaster’s offices to enlist his aid, but Arax-itu was at
her side the moment she stepped out into the courtyard.

“How
do you do it?” the younger woman asked. “How
do you grasp it all so easily? Master Radman’s equations make my head hurt.”

Kassia paused, abandoning the idea of approaching Master
Lukasha in favor of getting to know Lorant’s only other female Initiate. “I suppose it comes
naturally to me. Although, I have to admit, I don’t think of spells as equations.”

“Then
how do you think of them?”

“I
don’t know. I
suppose I think of them as . . . well, prayers or meditations. I
just . . . do what makes sense.”

Arax-itu sighed. “None
of it makes sense to me. This plus that equals thus, thus plus this equals
that, then subtract two of these and you get a ball of light.” She shook her head, dragging curls the color of a raven’s wing across the
shoulders of her deep blue robe. “Why
can’t magic be
less like mathematics and more like poetry?”

“Why
shouldn’t it be
like poetry?” Kassia asked.

Arax-itu’s
pale brow drew into a puzzled frown. “What
do you mean?”

Kassia nodded to where the kite master herded his airborne
charges. “If
Shagtai were to perform spells, he’d
probably think of them as kites and string and air currents. Maybe you need to
think of them as poetry.”

“Poetry.” The girl mouthed the word as if it was, itself, an invocation. “You mean that the
spell is . . . like a sentence? And the . . . the
elements in it are like words and letters?”

Kassia nodded, her eyes still on Shagtai’s kites. “Yes. Yes, exactly
that. Spells are like sentences. Or songs. Or whole poems. They have rhythm and
meaning and . . .” She shrugged. “Balance.”

Arax-itu awarded her with a quick laugh and a brilliant
smile. “You know
what my mother told me just last week? ‘Now,
Ari,’ she said, ‘can
spells really be any more complicated than cooking recipes?’ Recipes! I thought she was being terribly irreligious, and since recipes
didn’t make any
more sense to me than equations, I didn’t
understand what she meant. But now I do. She was putting it in terms she
understood. Maybe if I do the same thing . . .” She shrugged and smiled. “It
couldn’t hurt.”

They ate their mid-day meal together, listening to Shagtai
tell stories of the strange things he’d
seen in his journeys eastward, and sharing his bittersweet tea. Kassia thought
about how she could make an amulet against fire for a stranger’s child and Arax-itu
thought about the ways in which magic was like poetry.

oOo

It was not until the next afternoon that Kassia was able
to get to Master Lukasha’s
offices. Blessedly, Damek was not in the outer office, so Kassia slipped
quickly through to the Headmaster’s
inner chambers. The door was slightly ajar, giving her a view of the very
bottom of the steep, curving stair that led up to his private studio. She could
see no one. Made brazen by her sense of urgency, she slid into the room. Mellow
afternoon sunlight painted it with warm patterns of light and shadow that
caressed the colorful assortment of books on their neat rows of wooden shelves.
No one browsed among the books; no one sat at the table beneath the large
mullioned window.

Kassia had turned away in disappointment when she heard the
creak of wood behind her. She turned, mouth putting on a smile for the Master,
but that was not who stared at her from the bottom of the spiral stair. A dark
young man fixed her with a black, penetrating gaze, his full mouth set and
sober. He was, she guessed, about her age and wore the pale blue of an
Aspirant.

Her smile had slipped a bit under his regard. She steadied
it. “Hello, I’m Kassia Telek. You
must be Zakarij.”

He nodded confirmation, but said nothing.

Kassia came just short of cursing her white hair. His eyes
had stuck there and seemed unable to move beyond it. “Is Master Lukasha here?”

The Aspirant’s
eyes dropped finally to her face, holding it for a long moment before he
replied. “No. The
Headmaster is out just now. I’m
not sure where he is. What did you need?”

Kassia shook the sensation that Zakarij’s regard was something
with physical weight and strength, and faltered to answer. “I . . .
I was merely wondering if he might help me invest an amulet.”

“An
amulet?” The lightless eyes swept her attire, a midnight Initiate’s tunic and leggings
of the same color. “You’re only an Initiate.
What do you want with an amulet?” He gave his head a quick shake. “I
mean to say, you can’t
be studying such things in class.”