The Spirit Gate (13 page)

Her skin crept and little hairs stood up on the back of her
neck. She hated having someone staring over her shoulder like that, but kept
her tongue from wagging out anything that would be taken as disrespect. Behind
her, Zakarij grunted softly and lowered his arm past her head, his finger
resting on the last line she’d
written some twenty minutes ago. Could he tell how long she’d been sitting here
digesting spells and theories?

The finger traced a winding path through the other entries. “Are you sure these are
correct?”

The question was unexpected enough to leave Kassia
momentarily speechless.

“Show
me this one.” He tapped a reference to an incantation for the dowsing of metals—specifically gold and
copper, both elements of Itugen.

Kassia opened the scroll in question and directed Zakarij’s attention to the
last set of incantations on the yellowed page. “This is it. You can see, here, these two
invocations and catalysts . . .”

“Those
are for Itugenic elements?”

Itugenic
. As often as she’d heard the term in class, Kassia doubted she would
ever get used to using scholarly terms for spiritual things.

“Yes,
see? This is the spirit for gold, and this for copper.” She pointed to the names
Lien and Rez where they appeared in the incantations.

“You’re certain?”

Kassia sighed, glancing up at him over her shoulder. “Look, if you’d prefer to join Damek
in despising me . . .”

Zakarij’s
eyebrows disappeared beneath the fringe of dark hair that lay across his
forehead and, for the briefest second, Kassia thought she had surprised him. “I don’t despise you,
Initiate. I just want you to understand that you’re to write down here only what you’re certain of. I don’t think it’s wise for you to
persist in believing that Damek despises you. Damek just lacks the imagination
to contemplate that you might actually be as gifted as Lukasha thinks you are.”

“So
I’ve been told,” said Kassia wryly. “Well
then, Aspirant Zakarij, you may join Damek the Unimaginative in believing I’m merely pretending.
Or you may show my work to Master Lukasha and let him validate it.”

Zakarij stepped away from the table, his face averted. “I’m not sure he could.
None of us here has been able to ferret meaning out of some of those passages—including that one.”

He left Kassia shivering in her pool of watery sunshine, her
eyes unfocused on the page of incantations.

From the studio atop his offices, Lukasha could see over
the treetops of Lorant to the flood plain of the Yeva river, miles to the
northeast. He could see the kites above the first yam telling of royal envoys
shuttling to and from Tabor. He recalled a time when those envoys came armed,
to take hostages from among the people of Dalibor, to threaten the Mateu with
the death of innocents. He had seen death then—death he could not avert because the magic he and
his brethren wielded by that late hour was simply not enough to either impress
Tamalid emperors or stop them.

Lukasha thought the Tamalids enjoyed killing; the more
pathetic or helpless the victim, the better. And they had made a point of their
hatred for both shai and Mateu. Out of that hatred, they had profaned even the
courtyard of Lorant with death. He quivered with memory too horrible to be
either recalled or forgotten. The blood of children had bathed those stones.
The blood of mothers who fought and fathers who resisted. Shagtai had lost more
than his eye in that courtyard and never spoke of it.

Lukasha grunted aloud at the sudden awareness that his nails
pressed painfully into his palms. He opened his hands, freeing the blind pain
and anger. Thank God the children here today had no real knowledge of what had
happened on the stones their feet trod every day. The blood had been scrubbed
clean and bleached by Mat’s
Sun, though if you looked with the eye of memory, you could still see it. Some
days, like today, it was more vivid.

The envoys from the court of the king now carried only such
weapons as might protect them on their long journey. They brought life to
Dalibor, not death—at
least for the time being. Kiril, Zelimir I, had been a good man. And his son
Michal, likewise, was a good man—just
and empathetic. But that was not certain to continue. The second Zelimir,
thirty-four years of age, yet had no heir—had not even selected a wife as of Lukasha’s most recent visit.

“Soon,” he would say, and smile his charming smile, “Soon, when I have time to give the matter the
attention it deserves.”

Their king was a busy man. Busy adjusting the reins of a new
and untried form of government. Even now he set his plans in motion—selecting advisers,
calling for an assembly of
darughachi
to help him
govern.

As if, Lukasha thought, provincial governors could
understand the imperatives of nationhood. As if they would be capable of seeing
the whole as more important than their respective parts. They would be blinded
by their own self-interests, he had argued to Zelimir. They would be provincial
in their thinking.

“That
may be true,” the king had replied, maddeningly reasonable, “but I have a council of elders to speak to me of
the realm, and the Sacred Circle to remind me of things spiritual. If I don’t hear of the
darugha
’s needs from the
darughachi, from whom shall I hear it?”

The philosophy made sense, Lukasha was willing to allow, but
he still could not trust it. The only fit advisory council for the king was the
Sacred Circle, but Michal Zelimir had made of the Circle only one party among
many to advise him. Unwise.

There was still the question of an heir. Who could say that
the next Zelimir to sit upon the throne in Tabor would value the Sacred Circle
any more?

Lukasha’s
musings were interrupted by the sound of a footfall upon the spiral wooden
stair that led to his aerie. He closed his eyes and saw the stair with Damek
upon it. Schooling his face to a peace he didn’t feel, he turned to await his aide’s approach.

The little man popped into sight and bowed deferentially to
his lord. “Master
Lukasha, some matters for your attention . . .” His bony hands proffered a page of tightly packed script.

Lukasha realized suddenly how much his eyes burned. He waved
a hand at the offering. “A
summary will do.”

“As
you wish. Tagach-itu, wife of royal envoy Gazan, has conceived. Naturally, they
wish to come before the Circle for a blessing upon the child. Gazan also
requires a reading for his new aide. There are three couples seeking marriage
blessings at Solstice. A new business has opened in the fountain square. They’d like a blessing,
too, of course. And Master Yesugai is feeling ill and asks that someone else
preside over Matyash this week. We also have an Initiate in the first year
class who is posing a bit of a discipline problem. Master Tamukin has tried to
control him, but to no avail. He wishes to meet with you to discuss the matter.
The boy’s parents
are paying a noble sum for his education,” he added, and Lukasha
grimaced.

“I
shall deal with these things later, Damek. I promise. Right now, I’m . . .
distracted.”

“Ah.
The woman, I suppose. Do you think of anything else?”

The sarcasm brought a smile to Lukasha’s lips. “No, Damek, not ‘the woman’. I was thinking about our young king and his grand plans to revolutionize
government.”

“Do
you think him frivolous in that? Or insincere?”

“Neither.
I think . . . I know he is quite earnest. My concern is about
the men and women he surrounds himself with—family elders, darughachi, tribal shaman—dear God, I think he
may even include the Frankish bishop among his advisers.”

“There
are also Mateu and priests of our faith.”

“Ah,
yes. Priests who now talk of Mat having fathered a son on a mortal woman, and
Mateu who allow the talk to continue.”

Damek’s
mouth opened and closed several times before any sound emerged. “I . . .
I had heard . . . but I had no idea . . .”

Lukasha grimaced. “I
had a few words with Master Antal about it. His opinion is that it’s better to allow
young priests a few . . . disparate beliefs than to discourage
them from participating in their faith. He fears some of the priests might be
converted to Frankish beliefs. Magic is proscribed in this particular sect and
the priests, so Antal fears, will be seduced by the thought of equality. While
any man might rise to be a bishop; only one with a gift can become Mateu.”

Damek knew that only too well. “Surely that can only weed out the insincere and
weak of faith.”

Lukasha peered into his amanuensis’ narrow face. “Sometimes, Damek, you
say the most profound things. Those were my words exactly.”

Damek bathed in the pleasure that evoked. “Do you fear the king
might be converted?”

“To
what, from what? He already picks and chooses his religious philosophy as if it
were fruit in a market barrow. No, I have no such fear. It is Zelimir’s eclectic nature that
keeps me in his inner circle—and
his respect for magic. I worry only for the future of Polia.” He made a dismissive gesture. “My
thoughts are heavy. Perhaps I’d
be better off if I did think about ‘the
woman’, as you
call her. What has she done to provoke you now?”

“You
laugh at me, Master. That is your privilege. But she is above arrogance. I
think you waste Zakarij’s
time with her. He should attend to his own aspirations, not aid hers. Do you
know what I caught her doing?”

“I’m certain you’ll tell me.”

“I
caught her poring over the old texts. ‘Studying
them,’ she said. At your own reading table. While she was supposed to be
indexing them.”

Lukasha was vastly amused and silently thanked Damek for
providing him with some levity. He feigned shock. “I am appalled. Do you think she has any idea what
she’s reading?”

“No.
But that doesn’t
keep her from pretending that she does. To get at me, most likely. No, I accord
myself too much importance. It’s
Zakarij she wants to get at, I imagine. You, she merely wants to impress.”

Sensing another presence on the staircase, Lukasha raised his
hand to stop the flow of Damek’s
diatribe. “Hold a
moment . . . Ah, it’s
only Zakarij. Come up, boy!” He moved across the head of the stairs as Zakarij emerged into the room,
and dropped into the window seat overlooking the courtyard. “Damek tells me Kassia
is trying to impress us with a pretended knowledge of the Mysteries. What do
you think of that?”

Both Zakarij and Damek reacted with a swift raising of
eyebrows—Zakarij
because he caught the wry humor in his Master’s voice, and Damek because he caught the implied
ridicule. One smiled fleetingly, the other bristled.

“I
don’t believe her
knowledge is pretended, Master Lukasha, though I’m sure you’re
more qualified to judge. I believe it’s
quite real.” Zakarij held up the thin folio of papers he held in one hand. “These are her index
entries for the Scrolls of Find. Perhaps they will help you decide if Damek’s suspicions are
well-founded.”

Lukasha tool the folio and scanned it, well aware of his
Apprentice’s
patient regard and Damek’s
discontented fidgets. It appeared Zakarij was right; Kassia had indexed
incantations and entire spells, that had been as impenetrable as the stone
walls around Lorant to its Mateu masters. Did he doubt her interpretations? No
more than he doubted her ability to interpret. But he supposed that for the
sake of his audience, he ought to show doubt. What he would not show was the
now icy, now hot tide of excitement that lifted his spirit and rolled beneath
his heart. It spread through him like liquid fire, suffusing his limbs, heating
his cheeks, making his breath come more quickly.

None of this did he allow to rise to the surface. Instead,
he lifted his eyes to Zakarij’s
intent face and smiled indulgently. “It
seems you may have a prodigy on your hands, Zak,” he said lightly. “How would you feel
about that?”

The Aspirant blinked at the unexpected question. “If you mean by that,
would I be jealous of her success, I can only say, I would hope not to be. I
would pray not to be.”

“Well . . .” Lukasha returned the pages to the folio and laid it beside him on the
window seat. “There
is probably no reason for you to worry. We’ve yet to establish that these are anything more
than what Damek supposes them to be—the
imaginations of a young woman who is trying very hard to impress someone.
Kassia will have to be tested. I will see to it when I have the opportunity.
Thank you, Zakarij, for your report.”

Zakarij bowed lightly and returned to the library below.

Damek was unable to hide his delight. “So, you begin to think
the girl is somewhat less than she pretends to be?”

Lukasha looked up from the pages of the folio, which he had
retrieved from the padded seat. “What?
Oh no, not at all. In fact, I have every reason to believe her insights into
these spells are perfectly legitimate.”

“But
you said—”

“That
was for Zak’s
benefit. I’d hate
him to be over-awed by her.”

Damek uttered a sharp, choking laugh. “I’d hate
you
to be over-awed by her! Cease teasing me, Master. A seven year Aspirant,
over-awed by a . . . a woman who isn’t even a real Initiate?”

Chuckling, Lukasha shook his head. “Damek, Damek. You are the most stubborn human being
I have ever known. How often must I tell you that Kassia Telek is more
legitimate than any Initiate now walking these halls?” He shook the folio at the
other man. “She’s a piece of a mystic
puzzle. Half of a whole that was severed nearly a century ago.”

The ardent expression on his master’s face made Damek almost queasy. “I don’t mean to seem
disrespectful, Master, but you and the Masters Radman and Yesugai are the only
Mateu I know who believe that. The others—”

“Yes,
yes. I know. The others want someone to blame and the shai have done very
nicely for that purpose. If the Mateu want to place blame, the Tamalid’s shoulders are broad
enough to bear it alone.”