The Spirit Gate (6 page)

She had no way to know if her warning was heard; the woman
reached her circle of friends and was at once enveloped in them and trundled
away.

Fire
, Kassia thought.
Beware, the flame
.

She was exhausted, suddenly, and her heart lay in her chest
like something dead and cold. She wanted Beyla, wanted to feel the silk of his
hair beneath her cheek, wanted to hear the sound of his breath and the rhythm
of his heart. She took her cart and went home, knowing New Dalibor had rejected
her and her presumptions of augury. She held Beyla in her arms until he could
no longer be still, and that night she talked to Itugen.

Kassia woke to the creep of watery morning light through
her tiny window and opened her eyes to find that she half lay against the wall
in the corner of the room, her legs beneath the blanket that swaddled her, her
hands limp in her lap, but still cradling her mother’s locket. The little oil lamp she had lit for her
meditations had burned completely down. She thanked the Goddess it hadn’t set fire to the
rush-strewn floor.

The thought brought a swift stab of guilt and the unwelcome
memory of the red-haired woman and her baby. Kassia rubbed her breast-bone as
if she might massage away the sudden twist of pain.

“Please,
Itugen,” she murmured, “Please
make her be careful of fire.”
At
least more careful than I am.

She glanced over at the pallet where Beyla lay, silver
sun-dapples dancing and shimmering on his hair, thanking God and Goddess that
he was healthy . . . and that his mother had not burned down her
sister’s house.

She stretched stiffened muscles and tried to remember her
evening’s
meditations. She had pleaded with Itugen and Mat for guidance, prayed for it
with every fiber of her being. Their answer . . .

She glanced down at the locket in her hands, frowning. Their
answer had come in dreams. She closed her eyes and strove to remember. The
marketplace. The disappointment. The Mateu. The Mateu had been in her dream and
he had spoken to her. She had stood in the marketplace on the sun-baked
cobbles. Through the crowd she had seen the Mateu coming toward her. As he
neared all buyers and sellers and lookers faded to nothingness, leaving Kassia
alone in the plaza with the sorcerer-priest.

He met her face to face. His lips moved. His hands gestured.
She willed herself to hear him, to understand, but his words tangled themselves
in the air. She expected censure, ridicule. She didn’t want to hear that.

Then marketplace was peopled again and the air was filled
with the babble of their voices. The Mateu took her shoulders and turned her to
where her own cart sat. She saw herself seated there, reading the fortune of
one of the young priests-to-be. The Mateu murmured something in her ear, but
above the rumble of the market, it could not be heard. He shook her then, and
turned her face to his and spoke again. Now, finally, she heard him.

“What
is the end of this?” he asked her. “What
results are gotten here? Whose good is served?” He shook her again. “Look around you,
Kassia Telek.”

She did look around her and she saw that her divination had
no effect. She told partial truths calculated to put money in her hands. These
things did not change lives. She had changed only one life today; there, as if
to accuse her, was the red-haired mother with her tiny bundle, watching her
across the market square.

Kassia opened her eyes, swallowing against the lump in her
throat. Because of her, a heart that had known joy and contentment would now
know constant fear. But, she argued with herself, that fear might increase the
mother’s
vigilance—the
child might be saved because of her. But she couldn’t be certain. She had spoken from raw intuition,
not from knowledge, and that was both dangerous and foolish.

Kassia pulled herself to her feet, wrapped her blanket about
her shoulders, and moved stiffly to the window. Though the morning was chill,
she pulled open the lattice and gazed up over the tops of houses to the Holy
Hill, where Lorant’s
kites bobbed high in the smoke-laden breeze. She searched for a little blue
bird-shaped kite with a golden tail, and found it. It had been a long time
since a shai had served at Lorant, longer since one had schooled there. The art
of the Mateu had long been without its shai complement. Perhaps it was time for
the two streams of magic to recombine.

Kassia grimaced at such a self-congratulatory thought, but
deep inside she could not deny she felt confidence in her own ability. She had
the raw talent to have a real effect in the world around her, she needed only
discipline—discipline
Lorant offered. Eyes on the proud walls, gold where the rising Sun blessed
them, she squared her shoulders. Today she would go to Lorant and apply for
initiation. Today she would change her own life.

oOo

She wore her best dress. An orderly riot of bold colors on
a field of midnight blue, it had faded only slightly in the years since her
wedding to Shurik Cheslaf. The pattern was traditional; the four points of the
compass rendered as a brightly hued cross in the four elemental colors—green, blue, red and
yellow. This was set in the midst of a double circle—the inner circle green for Itugen, the outer circle
golden for the Sun in Mat’s
sky. She did not cover her hair, but marched up the long, tree-lined road to
the college bare-headed, entering beneath its grand arches into the main
courtyard.

Apprentices, Initiates and lay students went here and there
about their business; she saw no priests, Aspirants or Mateu. Since everyone
else was in motion, Kassia targeted the shaggy, white-haired old man who was
tending the school of kites.

“Excuse
me,” she said to his back as he reeled in a message to the royal yam, “but do you know where
I must go to apply for initiation?”

“Just
a moment, boy. Just a moment. I’ve
a kite to bring down, here, and another to send up. I suppose you can wait a
moment, eh?” He turned then, and got an eyeful of the “boy” behind him. His good eye—the
one not hidden by a patch—widened
to a stupefied circle of charcoal gray, and his yellowed teeth tightened on the
deer horn pipe he clamped between them.

Uncomfortable beneath his disconcerting gaze, Kassia stifled
anger and schooled her face to a neutral expression. “I suppose I can, though it would only take you a
moment to help me, I’m
sure.”

The man loosened his grip on the pipe stem and blinked at
her. “Initiate,
heh?” The gray eye looked her up and down. “You’re
not the usual type.”

“Meaning,
I’m not male?”

“Meaning,
you are shai. There have not been shai at Lorant since the death of Marija of
Ohdan. Many years now.”

“Well,” Kassia said, with more confidence than she felt, “soon there will be shai here again.”

The kite master raised his brows, the left one peeking above
the edge of his eye patch. He pointed over her shoulder at the main facade of
the huge stone building that dominated the courtyard. “In through the center door there. Turn to the left.
You’ll want the
Headmaster’s
parlor. You’ll
see the banner by the door.”

She thanked him and turned to go.

“Let
me know how you do,” he said to her back.

She glanced over her shoulder, mouth open in reply, but he
had already gone back to his kites. They danced to the movement of his fingers
upon the strings, this one rising, that one dipping earthward. It would be
pleasant to linger, to watch him handle them, but Kassia turned away from the
pleasant and toward the unknown.

Within Lorant it was as he had said; she entered a broad,
high-ceilinged hall with a gallery overlooking it on three sides. Light fell
from clerestory windows above the door through which she entered, cutting
great, bright slices out of the tarry shadows in the hall. The long beams of
radiance seemed so solid Kassia imagined for a moment she might reach out and
feel the texture of sunlight.

She heard voices to her right, and glanced that way. A group
of Initiates clustered around an open doorway. The banner hanging there
indicated it was a library or archive. Not wanting to draw their attention, she
turned her face away and saw a second doorway to her left bearing the banner of
the Headmaster. Stepping toward it, she fell into a pool of sunlight so
intense, it blinded her.

Caught in the brilliant flood, she hesitated, floundering in
light and silence. The Initiates’ regard was smothering; it made her break out in a sudden sweat. It was
as if Mat held her under a lamp that they might study her, perhaps judge her
worthiness to be here. The flesh of her back crept. Then someone in the watching
group coughed and Kassia bolted to the Headmaster’s parlor.

The door was slightly ajar and she rapped at it quickly,
lightly. The sound echoed in the great empty hall like the report of the tiny,
paper-wrapped firecrackers Ursel Trava had purchased all the way from the Shin
Empire for last year’s
Summer Solstice festival. A voice acknowledged her with merciful swiftness and
she stepped into the parlor, half-closing the door behind her.

The room was not what she expected. Somehow she had thought
the Headmaster’s
parlor would be austere. This room was luxurious, comfortable. Far more
comfortable, Kassia decided, than the angular little man who sat to her right
behind an imposing, carved writing table with his rod-straight back to a wall
full of books and scrolls. Her eyes rising to the buttery parchment and glowing
leather bindings (she had never seen leather in some of those colors), she
forgot the little man until he opened his mouth and expelled a voice like a
rusty pump lever.

“What
do you want here, young woman?”

She brought her eyes back to his narrow face and swept the
rapt curiosity from her own. “I . . .
I’ve come about
initiation, sir. Are you the Headmaster?”

“Do
I look like the Headmaster?” he asked in return, sarcasm dripping from his voice. “Do you see a Mateu’s vestments on me?”

“No,
sir. I do not.”

“Then
I am not the Headmaster, who must, necessarily, be Mateu.”

And bitter, you are, about that, prickly one,
Kassia thought, and barely resisted the urge to scratch her nose. “I’d like to see the
Headmaster, then, if I may.”

“I
am Damek. You will see me. You’ve
come about initiation, you said.” He paused to pick up a quill and open a large, leather-bound volume that
sat to one side on the table. “Very
well. What is the boy’s
name?”

“There
is no boy. There is me. My name is Kassia Telek and I wish to enroll as an
Initiate. I wish to become a Mateu.”

The not-Headmaster sat up even straighter (if that were
possible) and closed the book with a thud. “There has not been a female Mateu here since the
death of Marija of Ohdan.”

“Yes.
So I’ve heard.” Kassia frowned at the closed book, willing him to open it again. To
write her name in it. “I
think it surely must be time for another, Master Damek.”

His entire face squinted. “It is just Damek. I am Master of nothing. You call
only the Mateu ‘Master’, silly girl. You want
to be an Initiate and you don’t
even know that?”

“How
can I know what I haven’t
been taught?” Kassia protested. “I
have the shai gifts. I believe I could use them best if I learned the things
Lorant can teach.”

Damek’s
eyes, black and shiny as obsidian pebbles, darted to her hair and then away as
if its brightness hurt them. “Yes,
I can see that you’re
shai. As to your gifts, I’m
sure we’ve no use
for them here, such as they are. I’ve
heard of you—peddling
your petty magic in the marketplace. I doubt you’ve a legitimate bit of divination or enchantment to
your name. The power leaked out of your kind long ago. Why don’t you go back to your
elixirs and false fortunes and leave the work of Mat and Itugen to those
endowed with spiritual gifts?”

Stung by the sheer acid in the man, Kassia very nearly did
turn and storm away. Her face burned with embarrassment, her fists clenched in
anger, her heart swelled with the desire to redeem herself. Before she could
bolt, her mind seized on the idea that this might be a test of some sort. She
had heard of them from young men who had applied for initiation. The two
priests-to-be who sought their fortunes from her had spoken of how they’d been tried as
applicants at Lorant.

Unwilling to fail, Kassia bridled her ire. “The power is returning
to the land, sir. As it does, it returns to the shai. I will not leave until I
have had a chance to prove myself. I wish to meet the Headmaster.”

Damek rose. He was not any more imposing on his feet than he
was sitting down, which helped Kassia face him across the dark, fine-grained
table. “You are
both arrogant and misguided. Take yourself and your worthless earth magic away
from Lorant, and do not come back.”

Kassia pointed behind her at the window through which
sunlight entered the room, and through which she knew Damek could see the
courtyard with its many kite strings. “The
blue and gold kite still flies, sir. You seek Initiates; I seek to enroll. I
haven’t yet heard
a reason why I should not.”

“Neither
have I.”

The voice came from behind and to her left and Kassia all
but leapt to the table top in surprise. Instead she turned, wondering how she
could not have heard or sensed the new presence. She saw, in the doorway of
what must be an inner office, a tall man of regal bearing wearing the white
vestments of the Mateu. His long, dark, silver-laced hair was bound and braided
with gold, but it was his face that captured Kassia’s gaze. Fine-planed and strong-featured, it
suggested that the wisdom of ages lay behind its clear, brown eyes.

Kassia burned with new embarrassment. She knew this
formidable face; it belonged to the Mateu who had often studied her as she
hawked divination in the Dalibor market, and who had appeared in last night’s dream.