The Spirit Gate (15 page)

“Then
I may never know he’s
safe?” The thought made Kassia’s
heart feel suddenly hollow.

“Kassia,
none of us ever knows. We all, every one, live with uncertainty. Magic is not
proof against that uncertainty.” He rose and moved around the table to pace the stone floor beside her
chair. She watched him, eyes feeling like great, empty glass baubles. “I have no way to be
sure that a person I strive to protect will allow himself that protection. Will
the king wear the crown with the talisman stone? Will he put on the warded
garment? Or will he leave both at home and go out hunting on a green horse with
men he ought not trust? People have free will, Kassia—a gift from Mat and Itugen. And they will exercise
that will. I have more trust in the sound advice I give the king than I do in
any amulet or ward I may set upon him. And so, I think, does he.”

“Then
you’re telling me
you won’t teach
me this thing.”

Behind her, Lukasha sighed deeply. A moment later his hands
rested on her shoulders. “I’m telling you, dear girl,
that the ward may be outrun and the talisman neglected, but that a warning, if
taken, will serve the recipient of that warning wherever they go. Count on your
love for that unknown child, Kassia, count on his mother’s love, for that is something Itugen values above
your knowledge of wards or amulets. Your warning and your blessing are better
for that child than any ward that could be bestowed.”

“If
I could only know that she heard me,” Kassia murmured.

Lukasha shook her gently. “I am also telling you that uncertainty is a fact of
human life. If there is one thing you must learn about your magic, it is how to
detach yourself from the effects of it. By that I don’t mean you are absolved from responsibility if
something you do causes harm. I mean you must enter into every spell with a
pure heart, and having done so, practice detachment from its ends.”

It sounded like something from the little Buddhist book she
kept beside her bed. “Then
there’s nothing I
can do?”

The comforting hands lifted, leaving Kassia bereft. “Kassia, there is much
more you can do. Your destiny does not reside in the setting of wards or the
making of petty amulets. Haven’t
you realized that yet?” His voice rang so with conviction, with passion, with something more,
that she twisted in her chair, trying to follow him with her eyes. He was
looking at her, his own eyes every bit as opaque and secret as Zakarij’s.

“What
do you mean?”

In answer, he moved to her side and loosed her grasp on the
arm of her chair. Taking her hand in his, he brought her to her feet and led
her to the foot of the spiral stair. Her heart leapt in her breast. She would
enter Lukasha’s
most private sanctum—a
place she doubted more than a handful of people had entered. The place where he
performed his own magics. She followed him, quivering, like a bride being led
to her marriage bed. Up the twisted stair she climbed, her eyes ready to drink
the room above, senses extended in a questing web, to touch its every secret
contour. At the top of the steps she hesitated, but Lukasha drew her on until
she stood in the center of his domain.

It was a large room—circular
like the cesia that sat at the end of the east wing, but much smaller. The
vaulted ceiling terminated in an elaborate juncture of arches, the thick wooden
spines apparently cut from whole trees. Between the spines she could see six
equal wedges of muraled ceiling, each wedge depicting the sky at a different
time of day or night. It was like a wheel that spun from deepest night to
brightest day and back in an eternal cycle.

Dizzied by that view, Kassia lowered her eyes and realized
that she had been turning in a circle, following the sweep of the wheel.
Glancing down, she realized that she was standing at the exact center of the
room upon a circular dais of dark, satiny wood. Forming a border about her was
a band of gold inlay about four inches wide—the circle of Itugen. Just outside it, embracing
it, was a like band of silver, which represented the domain of Mat. Beneath her
feet four elongated diamonds formed a cross of gold, silver, copper and cobalt
stained tile.

“This
is the locus, Kassia,” Lukasha told her. “This
is the place from which I perform my most potent magic.”

She had known that, she realized. She could feel the power
that was uniquely Lukasha’s
rising through her and around her like a lingering mist. Shivering, she took in
the rest of the room. Along the walls were shelves bearing books, scrolls,
jars, pots, boxes and chests containing the elements, both physical and
metaphysical, of Lukasha’s
craft. There were cabinets of rich wood, with snugly closed doors.

At the four points of the compass were windows, each with a
window seat, each partially obscured by a curtain of thick midnight velvet. The
windows themselves were floor to ceiling expanses of glittering crystal, bound
by a framework of silver metal. At the heart of the center window in each group
was a quartet of colorful panes—blue,
red, yellow and green—for
the four primary elements of magic, cobalt, gold, silver and copper. It was the
same pattern that lay beneath her feet, the same pattern that decorated Kassia’s favorite dress. It
had always fascinated her that those were also the four primary elements of her
father’s glass
making. As a little girl she had been convinced he was a sorcerer in his own
right. Now she wondered if any of these windows might be his handiwork.

The atmosphere in the studio was thick with secrets and the
highly polished wood beneath her feet seemed to vibrate with them.
Of
course
, she chided herself,
I
’
m only imagining
these things. The secrets are closed away in their boxes and cabinets and the
floors are just floors.

She came to herself on the realization that Master Lukasha
stood beside her, watching silently. “I’m sorry, Master, I’ve never been in such
a room.”

“When
you become Mateu, you will have such a place yourself. Perhaps even before.”

When
! “All
Mateu have them?”

He nodded. “Each
in his own place. This has been the Headmaster’s studio since it was built. Master Yesugai has a
room below the cesia in a vault. Master Radman’s studio adjoins his room. If you look from the
western window you will see another dome similar to this one atop the eastern
wing of the college. It belongs to Master Matumir. There are others. But come,
there is something I want to show you.”

He led her across the room to a cabinet with a complex
locking mechanism of metal bars and loops. That it was also guarded by arcane
locks, Kassia knew by feel if not in fact. Lukasha opened the cabinet and
lifted out a fat volume bound in dark leather. It was not a book, she realized
as he opened it, but a folio of loose pages. He removed one and held it out to
her.

“What
do you make of this, Kassia?”

It was not writing as she knew it, not words she could read,
but the odd symbols, on what she realized was a piece of thin leather, seemed
to make an odd sort of subliminal sense.

“I . . .
I don’t recognize
these,” she said, but a faint tugging at her thoughts told her that was not
quite true. She ran her fingers over the trail of symbols, seeking a clear path
among them. Energies rose from the page like the ghostly fragrance of the earth
after a rain and coursed upward through her fingers the way sap rises in a
young tree. The expression on her face, in her eyes, must have told all this to
the Mateu, for he put a steadying hand on her shoulder. When she raised her
eyes to his face, she found him reading her, his gaze bright and intense.

He nodded, face seeming to glow, eyes exultant. “You feel it, don’t you? And I . . .
through you, I shall feel it also.”

Kassia, suddenly overwhelmed by his regard, by the warm
flood of power suffusing her, lifted her fingers from the page, breaking
contact with whatever spoke to her through it.

“What
are they?” she whispered.

“Mysteries,
Kassia.” The brown eyes gleamed. “Mysteries
that have lain unread for centuries. Some were copied tediously from tablets of
wood and stone; others were as you see them here, if somewhat the worse for
age. This one, for example, was found among a roll of other leather scrolls in
a wooden tube that was itself hidden in a stone bench in our very own cesia.
Others are from very ancient collections of geomancy. I have several pages of
spells that were compiled and formalized by Marija of Ohdan and her
predecessors. They’ve
been useless to us for too many years, Kassia. I dare say many of my brethren
have forgotten their existence.” He paused to search her face with his eyes and, she guessed, his own
keenly developed spiritual senses. “There
is a wealth of knowledge here, Kassia. Knowledge which has been denied us
through our own ignorance.”

“Surely
that’s too harsh
a judgment on the Mateu,” Kassia murmured. “It
wasn’t your fault
the Tamalids enslaved Polia.”

“Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it, Kassia, when we
had, in the beginning, the power to stop them, and did not?” He folded the wondrous pages back into the folio and returned it to the
cabinet, resetting both physical and arcane locks. “The Mateu should not escape blame for the tragedy
of Polia—nor did
we. There were many who said, perhaps rightly, that we and the shai together
could have averted it.” He turned to face her, his expression inscrutable.

She felt impelled to speak. “My great-grandmother was past middle age when the
House of Tamal arose. I don’t
think she even realized the danger. I recall someone saying to my father that
the Mateu could have laid a curse upon the Tamalids or done something to
prevent the terror they brought.”

“What
did your father say? What would you say?”

“That
the Mateu were charged with the spiritual realm, not the petty kingdoms of men.”

A glint of irony came to Lukasha’s eyes. “Ah.
Our heavenly work is too important for us to be bothered with the lives and
deaths caused by earthly tyrants.” He shook his head and light cascaded through the golden bindings in his
hair. “An
unworthy argument to foist upon a suffering people. An unworthy rationale to
fall from the lips of a Mateu, yet many times it has.”

He moved past her to the window overlooking the courtyard. “I stood upon those
stones, Kassia, and watched people from this village, people I knew and loved,
die horribly. That was the way the Tamalids struck at the Mateu, by murdering
innocents in their presence and daring them to do anything about it. Often, it
was the kin of the Mateu they struck, but I had none. So I watched young Initiates,
Apprentices and Aspirants die. I watched priests be slaughtered. Only rarely
were Mateu the direct targets of Tamalid wrath; it seems they were wary of
provoking a conquered peoples’ gods too far. So, I personally lost only my dignity and my sense of
control. But Shagtai could tell you, though he would not, what it is like to
watch a beloved wife and daughter die.”

Kassia barely stifled the sob of pain that leapt from heart
to lips. Shagtai! She thought of the onghots and their little shrine. My ancestors,
he’d said, and my
loved ones who wait for me. Now she understood his attachment to her and Beyla.

Lukasha, watching the play of emotion on her face said, “I know about the
shrine and the icons Shagtai keeps. There are those who would call them perversions
of faith, who think I am wrong not to order Shagtai to destroy them. Perhaps I
am
wrong, but I will never order such a thing—that would certainly be a perversion.” He shook his head, made a dismissive gesture. “I have digressed far from what I meant to say to
you, Kassia Telek. Today, you touched a piece of your heritage—the old magics, the
secrets of both shai and Mateu from a time when they were one. Some of that
magic has not been used for centuries.”

“Why
so long, Master?”

“Even
before the days of Empire, the shai that devoted themselves to Lorant were few.
Then, a choice was required. A difficult choice for most women—an unfair choice,
perhaps—to become
Mateu, or to become wives and mothers. To belong to a broad family of spirit,
or to foster families of their own. Very few women chose the path of the Mateu
.”

Kassia’s
brown furrowed. “There
is no law to keep the Mateu from marrying.”

“No.
There is only pragmatism and duty. It has been enough to keep most women from
doing what you and Arax-itu are attempting to do. But again, we digress. What I’m saying to you,
Kassia, is that you have been brought here to resurrect the old magic.”

“I
couldn’t even
read the symbols!” she argued, her heart clenching in her chest. “They were just . . . patterns to me.
They made no sense.”

Lukasha raised a warning hand, bringing the white linen
sleeve of his under vestment into a shaft of crystalline sunlight. Kassia felt
as if she had looked directly at the Sun. “You lie to yourself, Kassia. Never do that. I would
prefer that you not lie to me either.”

She blinked, blinded by both the light and the knowledge
that he was right. She had lied to herself. She felt his hand on her shoulder,
felt the regret in his voice when he said, “You are not, I think, ready for those ancient
secrets just yet. But I think you are ready to do more than index a few murky
spells. I think you are ready to annotate, illustrate and perform them.”

“Illustrate?” Kassia fought to see the expression on her Master’s lean face. Slowly, her blurred vision righted
itself.

“I
will teach you that part. And you will teach me the other.”

“I
teach
you
?
Master, that’s
absurd!”

He tapped the end of her nose with a mock-stern finger and
affected a whiny voice. “Don’t call me absurd, you
silly woman! That is not way for an Apprentice to speak to her Master.”

Three thoughts collided in Kassia’s reeling brain—from the absurd (
He
’
s imitating Damek
!),
to the sublime (
Apprentice, he called me
!). What came out of her
mouth was, “What
will Zakarij think of this?”