Read Beyond the Gate (The Golden Queen) (Volume 2) Online
Authors: David Farland
Beyond the Gate (The Golden Queen) (Volume 2) (32 page)
“I think,” Orick said, “you’re all worried for nothing. If Gallen is dead and his enemies took his weapons, why haven’t they come after us? He had his mantle, that fancy sword, and his incendiary rifle.”
Maggie clung to his words, knowing they made some sense, hoping he was right. “Gallen may still be hunting,” she said at last. “He’s thorough when it comes to blackguards. He wouldn’t let one give him the slip.”
“Aye, that’s possible,” Orick grumbled. “Down in County Toorary, Gallen tracked a cutthroat for three weeks, chased him two hundred miles.”
Ceravanne licked her lips, looked out the open door southward. “Perhaps we should wait,” she said. “But there is something just as portentous that could have happened. Gallen has been very … deep in thought these past two days. We all know that his loyalties are wavering, hanging in the balance. He may have joined the Inhuman, or he may have gone in search of solitude while he considers his future course.”
Maggie wanted to deny this, wanted to slap Ceravanne for even bringing up the possibility, but this too seemed very likely. “I don’t think he’d leave me,” Maggie said, her voice small in the close darkness of the stable.
“I would hope not,” Ceravanne offered, and she took Maggie’s hand in hers to offer comfort. “But he is under great pressure. You must remember that he is living with many other voices inside him, rich recollections of other loves. Those who become infected by the Word, they sometimes become lost in the … history that the Inhuman offers. Their small voices are drowned out by the bitterness and despair of the Inhuman. And I fear that Gallen may be susceptible to this. Those who are most susceptible are those who are weak of purpose, or weak of mind, and those who are simply inexperienced—the young. Gallen is neither weak of purpose nor stupid, but he is young.”
“You forget,” Gallen said loudly from the far end of the room, “the others who are equally susceptible to the Inhuman’s domination.” Maggie turned, and Gallen stood in the front doorway to the stable, all draped in the black robes of a Lord Protector. Yet there was something terribly wrong. The way he stood—with a certain swaggering confidence as he leaned casually against the doorpost—was nothing like Gallen. Indeed, a terrible light seemed to blaze from his pale blue eyes, and he wore the mask of Fale. Yet strangest of all was his voice. It sounded deeper, and it resonated more, and all of his accent was gone. Where a few weeks ago he’d been a charming boy from County Morgan, now an older and wearier man stood. It seemed to Maggie suddenly that a stranger was wearing Gallen’s body, and that Gallen stood smiling, mocking their fears for him.
“What others are susceptible to the Inhuman?” Ceravanne asked. Gallen waved his hand at her. “The trusting,” he spat, then waved to Orick. “The naive. And those who are actively evil.”
Gallen reached into the pocket of his robe, pulled out his mantle, and its black rings and silver stones glimmered in the moonlight. He draped it over his head.
“So, you are Inhuman now,” Ceravanne whispered, and Maggie found her heart pounding within her. “But you have never been any of those—naive, trusting, or evil.”
Gallen straightened, and he seemed taller and more menacing to Maggie as he crossed the stable, gazed out to the south, over the wide valley below with its shroud of fog that glowed like gauze in the moonlight.
“Yes,” Gallen said, staring to the south. “The Inhuman has tried to claim me as its own.” For a brief moment it looked as if he would collapse, and he held to the door frame as he struggled for control. Maggie could see the old Gallen. “And, my friends, it is good for us all that the Inhuman has finished its task—else I would not have suspected its plans, and we would have walked into a trap.
“Maggie, come here.”
Maggie went to his side and followed his eye. He took off his mantle, placed it on her head. “Listen to the radio frequencies on the higher end of the spectrum,” he said, “and look south to Bern’s Pass, beneath that far mountain, four hundred kilometers from here.”
Four hundred kilometers? she wondered. She couldn’t imagine seeing that far. But Maggie concentrated, and the mantle brought a faint sound to her ears, bursts of radio signals squealing indiscernible messages. It was a code.
She looked to their source, beneath the far mountains that suddenly appeared in her mind as she gazed, and Gallen’s mantle magnified the distant image. Something vast and black was crawling down a mountainside.
“Dronon hive cities,” Maggie realized, “crawling toward us.”
“Yes,” Gallen said. “They are far away, but they’re coming. Part of the memories the Inhuman gave me came from a dronon technician. All those who join the Inhuman know how to use dronon technologies, and now that the dronon have been forced to abandon this world, leaving the hive cities behind, the Inhuman hosts have taken them up. With these they will march against Northland, for the hive cities can also swim across the oceans, and here in Babel their guns are not dismantled.
“So the dronon who abandoned this world betrayed it, leaving behind weapons for the Inhuman to use.” Gallen breathed deeply. “Ceravanne, your people are in far graver danger from the invaders than even you had imagined!”
Maggie was watching the distant image of the dronon hive city, crawling down the mountainside like a huge spider, when a second crested the ridge. And then she saw something else, a knot of large birds in the darkness, their body heat registering white, hurtling across the distant valleys. She wondered how far away they were, and her mantle flashed an image before her eyes. Two hundred and twenty kilometers.
“Gallen, there are scouts flying this way, hundreds of them.”
“I know,” Gallen said. “The Inhuman is coming for you. It knows where we are, and because of the interference my mantle offered, it has guessed at our purpose.”
“It could only have learned our location from the transmitter in your head,” Maggie said, and she looked at Gallen sharply.
“I know,” Gallen admitted. “The Inhuman sent a message to Zell’a Cree in his last moments, telling him to pull off my mantle so that the downloading could be finished. The Inhuman could only have sent that message if it were tracking us and knew that Zell’a Cree and I were together.”
“Of course,” Ceravanne whispered. “Then if it knows where you are,” Maggie said, “the Inhuman only has to follow you to find us.”
Gallen looked about helplessly, threw up his hands. “Unless Maggie can remove the transmitter, or we can somehow block it, then you will have to leave me.”
Gallen took Maggie’s hand, looked steadily into her eyes, and touched it to the back of his head. “Here is where the Word burrowed into my skull. I can feel a small bump there. It only makes sense that the transmitter is still outside the skull; the Inhuman would not try to beam messages through bone. Perhaps the tail end of the Word is the transmitter.”
Maggie had suspected this possibility before, but dared not admit it. The implications horrified and sickened her. She didn’t want to have to pry this thing out of Gallen’s head. “I know what you’re going to ask, Gallen, and I can’t do it. The Word has inserted itself into your brain. I can’t just pull it out!”
An image flashed through Maggie’s mind, a vision of neural wires slicing through the gray matter of Gallen’s brain as she pulled.
“We have to try something,” Gallen said. “I want you to try now to cut away anything outside the skull. And if that doesn’t work, you must pry the Word out. I know it’s dangerous, but it is the only way for me to remain with you. Unless you do this, I might as well be dead.”
Maggie looked nervously to the south. “What of the scouts?”
“They will not make it here for several hours,” Gallen said. “And we can hide from them tomorrow.” When next he spoke, Gallen spoke not as himself, but as the Inhuman, and it was reflected in his demeanor. “For six thousand years, I’ve lived in this land. I can guide you to Moree like no others, except those infected by the Inhuman. But I cannot help you, unless you do this for me. And perhaps it will avail nothing.”
Maggie looked to Ceravanne. “I don’t think I can do this.”
“I can, maybe,” Ceravanne said. “I’ve mended festering wounds, and I’m handy with a knife. But I’m not sure what you’ll require of me.”
“Do you have any more Healing Earth?” Maggie asked.
“A pinch, perhaps, no more,” Ceravanne said. “He can have a few drops of my blood.”
Maggie wondered where to perform the surgery. It seemed ghastly to do it here in the stable, in the dim lamplight surrounding Fenorah’s pale corpse, but it sheltered them from the chilly night air and from prying eyes. Maggie looked for some clean straw. Some of the horses nickered querulously as she pulled the hay from a crib and sprinkled it on the floor. Ceravanne brought the lantern near, and Tallea brought her sharpest dagger from its sheath.
Ceravanne bit her lower lip, and her hands shook as she did the cutting, opening the back of Gallen’s neck down to the blue-white bone. She pulled Gallen’s hair gently, opening the flaps of severed skin so that she could see more clearly, and Maggie had to use a bandage from her pack to daub the blood away.
There was a small, perfectly circular hole in his skull, and two small wires dangled from what had once been the Word’s hind feet. Maggie couldn’t be sure what the wires were for, so she ran up to the wagon at the front of the inn and got her mantle of technology, then came back and looked closely at the wires. The sensors in her mantle magnified the image. From the Word’s hind legs, tiny microfilaments, like veins, had grown out in a gray web, wrapping themselves around Gallen’s skull. It was not a particularly powerful antenna for either receiving or transmitting information, but Gallen’s skull acted as something of a dish.
“This is it,” Maggie said. “This is the antenna. This is a more complex design than I’d imagined, but it’s also easy to defeat—at least I think we can keep them from tracking us.”
“Do it,” Gallen said.
And to her own surprise, Maggie found that she was able to take the knife from Ceravanne. “It’s too intricate to do this without a mantle,” she explained. She severed the web in a circle, then dug out as much of the wiring as possible. She tried to clear her thoughts, concentrate only on doing the job. She watched for several seconds, to see if the web would grow back, but apparently this component of the nanotech weapon was too unsophisticated to regenerate. After thirty seconds, the wound so filled with blood that she could no longer see well.
Maggie blotted it away again with the bandage. “I’m done,” she whispered.
“Try to pry the Word out,” Gallen said.
“There’s no need,” Maggie argued, imagining how the webs of metallic neurons would slice through his brain if she pulled. “I’ve already cut off the antenna.”
“I don’t want it in me,” Gallen shouted, his voice muffled as he yelled into the straw. “Cut it out! Pull it out partway, if you can, and then cut it in half.” Maggie found herself breathing hard, imagining the possibilities for infection in the wound, the possibilities of brain damage. She touched the tail end of the Word with her knife, wondering if it
could
be pried out. Suddenly, as if it had been burned, the Word lunged forward into Gallen’s brain, and blood began gushing out from Gallen’s brain cavity.
“Ah, God,” Orick cried out in fear.
“What?” Gallen asked, moving a bit.
“Nothing,” Maggie said, suddenly terrified, her knees going weak. “I’ll close now.”
Ceravanne held out her finger, and Maggie cut it, dropped a bit of Ceravanne’s Immortal blood into the wound, and in moments the cut began to heal. Gallen lay quietly while Maggie washed the blood from the back of his neck. And when Gallen sat up, he replaced his mantle on his head and asked Maggie, “Did you get it out?” .
“I couldn’t get the Word out,” Maggie said. “It dug itself in deeper. But I cut all of the connections to the antenna, and I dug out part of the wiring. I think the Word will be permanently disabled.”
Gallen considered, got up, and gazed off to the south. “I fear that my presence could be a danger to you even still. I will not guide you south, unless you all desire me to. But I warn you in any case that we may not be able to elude the Inhuman—a great race is afoot. I suspect that those marching hive cities have come searching for us, as have the scouts. Our enemies hunt us by land and air.”
He looked back, into the faces of Orick, Tallea, and Ceravanne. “Will you have me?”
And Maggie looked into the face of Gallen, the Inhuman, and one by one, the others said yes, until at last Tallea said, “For now.”
* * *
Chapter 24
Late that night after a brief and belated dinner at the inn at High Home, Ceravanne made arrangements with the innkeeper for Fenorah’s body to be conveyed back to Battic, then Gallen loaded the group into the wagon and led the travel beast downhill, under the blanketing fog.
Though it had good night vision, the. beast could not see in such total darkness, so Gallen led it by hand. At dawn, he left the main road heading west by way of what appeared to be an old hay trail through some fields, but the deserted track held, and for many hours the wagon rolled through the lonely woods, passing only a few shacks that belonged to woodsmen.
And all through the morning, Maggie watched Gallen in horror, studying him for signs of change. They were everywhere—in the stealthy way that he walked, almost unnaturally quiet; in the way he sometimes tilted his head to catch a sound; the new way that he spoke. Twice, when they passed small clear pools, Gallen stopped to wash his hands, and he would sit and inspect them long afterward. He’d always been tidy, but never like this.
Maggie complained about it once under her breath, whispering, “What is he doing?”
And Ceravanne whispered in her ear, “The Faylan people have olfactory nerves on their hands. They wash themselves so. I think it is a habit from another life. He will forget about it, in time.”
Because Gallen and Tallea feared Derrits in these woods, they made poor time, going little faster than a horse could pull, but the travelbeast was able to work all day at this pace. Twice they bogged down in lonely places and had to get off the wagon and push, and once they had to float the wagon across a broad river, but in the early afternoon they began climbing out of the wetlands to an ancient fortress on a small hill.
When they reached the hilltop, Gallen had them turn the wagon on its bottom and he removed a wheel so that it looked as if the wagon had been abandoned. “The scouts will be searching for us tonight,” he said. “We don’t want them to see anything suspicious.” And Maggie saw by this ruse that this new Gallen was craftier than the old.
The fortress was small—a simple watchtower that looked out over the moors and woods, several crumbling outbuildings beside the walls. Gallen let the travelbeast graze for a bit, then took it to an underground root cellar away from the main tower and penned it in for the night.
Maggie climbed the tower at dusk, and stood for a moment watching out, wishing that Gallen would come to be with her, come to put his arms around her. Doves had flown up to the tower’s tiled roof, and were fluttering about the broken window. Maggie could not see the distant mountains, where High Home sat on the slopes, and she found it difficult to believe that any scouts would come so far in a single night to search for them. But Gallen seemed certain.
When Maggie went downstairs, Gallen and the others were milling about the courtyard. Tallea had found the dungeon, and she brought up a huge turd as long as her arm, poked on a stick, and held it out for Gallen to see. “Much Derrit poop,” she said, “in dungeon.”
Goose bumps rose on the back of Maggie’s arms at the mention of Derrits, for even the Im giants had feared them, but Gallen seemed little concerned. “Fine, fine,” he said. “We’ll wet it down so that it looks and smells fresh, and put it in the tower and upper halls. The scouts will not be eager to search this place if they find it marked with Derrit spoor.”
So Gallen set himself the task of carrying the loathsome stuff upstairs while the others went below and ate a cold dinner. Maggie could find no place where the odious, garlicky scent of the Derrits did not permeate. It was terribly dark in the dungeon, the only light coming from the open door leading upstairs, and so before they closed the doors, she rushed outside and picked a great armload of straw to use as bedding.
When Gallen finished his task of moving the Derrit poop, he came below, and sealed them in for the night, barring the door from the inside with a rusty iron pole.
They sat for a long time. The only light in the room came from Gallen’s mask, a shimmering piece of starlight. Maggie did not find it comforting, for Gallen sat away from her, as if they were strangers.
Maggie found herself getting nervous, till Gallen began singing softly, song after song from their home on Tihrglas, until her heart nearly broke at the sweet memory. Everything here was getting out of control. Everything here was not as she’d imagined. And so she dreamed of the clean mountain rivers rushing under the lowering pines, the sky so blue that she could not quite hold it in her memory.
When the others had fallen asleep, Maggie crept to Gallen’s side, held his hand, and looked up into his face.
“Gallen,” she whispered. “I want to tell you I’m sorry.”
“For what?” he said, not turning to look at her.
“I’ve, I’ve been thinking hard on it—and I’m pretty sure that I could have stopped the Inhuman from downloading its memories to you. “
“How?” Gallen asked. “If I’d cut the antenna sooner, yesterday morning perhaps, the Inhuman would not have known how to contact you. It never would have received a signal from the Word.”
“Why didn’t you do that, then?” Gallen said, his voice hard. He didn’t turn to look at her.
“I—wasn’t certain that I could get to the transmitter. I was hoping our mantles would block the Inhuman’s transmissions. I didn’t want to have to lay into you with that knife!”
“You wanted to spare me pain?” Gallen asked.
“Yes!” Maggie said, and she squeezed his hand.
Gallen smiled at her, barely turned in her direction. “Then you are apologizing for having a good heart?”
“I’m apologizing for being wrong,” Maggie said. “For being weak.”
“Apology accepted.” Gallen turned to her then, and Maggie hoped that he would take her in his arms, but instead he held himself aloof, as if he were a stranger. “And your mistake may yet cause the downfall of the Inhuman,” Gallen said. “Because I know its thoughts, its ways, we have a greater hope of defeating it. Now, go to sleep, and I will keep watch.”
He reached out and patted her hand, as if she were a child. Maggie curled up on the straw and tried to sleep, disturbed by a steady drip, drip, drip of water falling into a corner from the sweaty walls.
Until at long last, she fell asleep for a while, then woke to a scratching noise. At first she thought it only a rodent gnawing on some old wood upstairs. But it came steadily, and she looked around. She could see little enough by the light of Gallen’s mask, but soon she realized that while rolling around in her sleep, she had misjudged where the door was. What she had taken to be a far corner of the building was in fact the bolted door directly above them.
Maggie got up warily, wondered what to do. The insistent scratching was from something large. She went to Gallen, and pushed him gently in his sleep, praying that he would not waken with a shout.
To her relief, Gallen merely opened his eyes, took one look at Maggie, and sat listening for a moment.
Suddenly Gallen snarled, letting a low rumble escape his throat. It was a sound distinctly nonhuman, like some savage animal, and the noise frightened her. Then in a harsh voice he shouted, “Ghisna, ghisna—siisum,” and leapt up the stairs and began fumbling with the bolt.
Something shrieked behind the door. There was the sound of scurrying feet and flapping wings … followed by silence. Ceravanne woke up, as did Orick and Tallea. “What’s wrong?” Ceravanne asked.
“A scout was here,” Gallen whispered, “and it thinks it was almost eaten by a tribe of Derrits. It will not be back tonight. Quiet, now. Go back to sleep.”
Maggie lay down again, but Gallen did not follow his own advice. The last thing Maggie saw before she fell into a deep slumber was Gallen’s mask glowing in the dark as Gallen watched the stairs, accompanied by the drip, drip, drip from the seeping wall.
Just before dawn, Gallen roused the group and began preparing to break camp. He went out and righted the wagon with Orick’s help, then harnessed the travel beast.
They headed west again, and by midday they climbed up out of the valley floor to an ancient stone highway, swept by the wind. This road headed south once more, and it led through a bleak grassy landscape where there was little shelter from prying eyes. On it, their travel beast raced like the wind, and Gallen dared not slow down, though Tallea warned him repeatedly to beware of Derrit traps.
During the day, Maggie asked Gallen how he’d been so familiar with the old stone fortress, and he explained, “I played there as a child. My mother went there daily, to take provisions to my father, who was kept prisoner in the dungeon.”
Maggie did not ask him more about who those memories had belonged to, and Gallen offered no more explanation.
Shortly before dusk, Gallen pulled the wagon off the road, then he flipped it and removed the wheel again, and led the group up a narrow defile to a small cleft that went back twenty meters into the rock. Scrub oak covered the opening so fully that when they got inside, they could not see out. Nevertheless, Gallen insisted on fortifying the entrance by stacking stones around it.
As he stacked the rocks, Gallen said, “If I know of this place, then the servants of the Inhuman may recall it, too. I think it will be safe, but we must still keep watch!”
“To me, it seems more dangerous to stay here than to find somewhere else,” Ceravanne warned him softly.
“Perhaps,” Gallen said, “but last night I learned a lesson. I went to a place familiar to me, and the Inhuman searched that place. I hope not to repeat that experience. I’ve never actually visited this cavern in one of my former lives. Indeed, I was told of it only once, and sought it, but never found it. It wasn’t until weeks later that I guessed where it might be. So my memories of this place are tenuous. I hope that the Inhuman’s servants will not even consider searching for this old haunt.”
They ate another cold dinner, and afterward Orick slept on guard near the entrance of the cave, while Gallen curled up next to him and finally took some rest.
Maggie wondered at this, for it had been two nights now since Gallen had held her, and she felt that her new husband was a stranger. She tended the fire and sat with her arms wrapped around her knees for a long time, watching Gallen’s sleeping form and thinking.
Ceravanne and Tallea had been talking softly together, and Tallea must have seen how Maggie watched Gallen. “Not worry,” Tallea said. “He remembers love for you.”
“Are you sure?” Maggie wondered aloud. She did not fear that Gallen would hear her. He was so tired, he was dead to the world.
“If not,” Tallea said, “he would not try save us.”
“She’s right,” Ceravanne offered. “It takes a great deal of willpower for someone to fight off the Inhuman’s conditioning. The fact that he is working so hard is a sign of his commitment to you.”
Maggie bit her lip, feeling that something was still terribly wrong. “Aye, he’s fighting the Inhuman, but there’s something amiss. He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t kiss me. It’s keeping his distance that he is.”
Ceravanne frowned, and Maggie could see that this news dismayed her. “Maggie, I think he loves you more than you give him credit for.” Something in the way that she said it, something in the way that her voice quavered, made Maggie curious. “Why do you say that?”
Ceravanne took a deep breath. “I have something I must confess: twice now, I’ve asked Gallen to give me his heart. I wanted him to give himself to me completely, just in case this happened. I wanted him to bond with me more strongly than he might with the Inhuman.”
Maggie looked at the Tharrin and knew that Ceravanne was talking about more than just some mental bonding. The Tharrin was admitting that she had sought Gallen’s complete love and devotion. She’d tried to seduce him. “But,” Ceravanne continued, “Gallen has already given his heart to you. You’re the reason he fights the Inhuman now. But if he isn’t seeking you out, if he isn’t touching you, you need to go to him. In his mind, he’s been separated from you for a hundred lifetimes. The dronon have tried to put an incredible amount of emotional distance between you. He needs to fall in love with you all over again. You need to remind him why he loved you in the first place.”
Maggie bit her lip, looked around the cave desperately. Tears came to her eyes, and Tallea went to her side, put her hand on Maggie’s shoulder.
“Why cry?” Tallea asked.
Maggie shook her head. “That’s not Gallen anymore. That’s not the man I married. He doesn’t talk like Gallen, or move like him. He’s six thousand years old.” Maggie did not dare say what she was thinking. Ceravanne had more to offer Gallen than she did. Ceravanne was more beautiful than Maggie, and the lure of her pheromones could undermine a man’s resolve. Ceravanne, like Gallen, had apparently lived for thousands of years. On the face of it, she was a better match for him, and something in Maggie made her wonder if Ceravanne hadn’t tried to seduce him based upon such cold reasoning.
“Why did you do it?” Maggie said bitterly. “Why did you try to make Gallen love you if you knew that he already loved me?”
Ceravanne sat across the fire and licked her lips as she considered her response. “The first time it happened was when the Bock brought him to me. I didn’t know then that he loved you.”
“And the second time?”
She took a deep breath. “Was three nights ago.” Maggie considered the depth of the betrayal. She had a strong desire to pull a knife and gut the Tharrin right at the moment, but by telling Maggie of her betrayal, Ceravanne was also promising never to do it again. Still, a month earlier, the Lady Everynne had lured Gallen into her bed, and now Ceravanne was trying to do the same. Maggie wondered if all Tharrin were inherently untrustworthy that way. “Why did you do it?” Maggie asked. “Why do you Tharrin do this?”
Ceravanne was breathing hard, and she looked away, but she knew that she owed Maggie an answer. “I could tell you that it is because of Belorian, because Gallen looks like Belorian, and I love him still. It was dark, and I was frightened and lonely, as frightened and lonely as I have felt in five hundred years, and out of the goodness of his heart, Gallen was trying to comfort me. That was temptation enough for what I did.
