Labyrinth Gate (3 page)

The matches dimmed and died. For a long moment, drawn out in silence and in a force as strong as physical tension, they stared at each other through the darkness.

“Do you ever get a feeling,” said Chryse in a faint voice, “that the ground beneath your feet has suddenly vanished, and you’re just waiting for the realization to hit you before you fall?”

Sanjay knelt. “We’d better find those last two cards.”

New matches revealed a floor of old wood, split and shrunk to reveal gaping cracks beneath which they could detect nothing at all.

“Lift up your dress,” said Sanjay. Immediately the light found a card, the gateway, just before the match smouldered and failed. He tucked the card into his suit pocket and rose. “Just one. The other must have fallen through.”

“Sanjay,” she said. “What’s going on?”

He handed her her coat, put on his own, and picked up the hamper. She buttoned the pouch into the inside pocket of her coat and picked up the overnight bag. First they kissed; then he opened the door and stepped through.

The light was inconstant enough that it took some moments to fully distinguish their surroundings, to separate wall and window, floor and furniture, into discrete parts. They stared: at a high, vaulted ceiling of carved wood; at patterned windows that lanced up into darkness; at a ring of candles standing in tall sconces that illuminated an altar of white stone, a large portrait of a serene woman who, seated on a throne, held a haloed child in her arms and, below the portrait, a stone effigy of a young man pinioned in death.

Sanjay put out a hand blindly and gripped the nearest thing that came to hand. It proved to be a long wooden bench, first in a row of benches. “Now I’m falling,” he murmured.

Chryse simply gaped. Her face had lost several shades of color.

For a space there was only their breathing.

“This is not—” began Sanjay finally. He broke off to turn back abruptly, and Chryse spun as well, as if fearing what might be behind her.

There was nothing. No door—however impossible that was since they had moments before come through one. In the mellow glow of lantern light they could discern a mural, a painting of figures larger than life that stretched along the long wall, easing into shadow at its height.

A woman and a man dressed in exotic, unfamiliar clothing handled, or constructed, a series of small, rectangular objects.

“Sanjay.” Chryse’s voice died away into the vast stillness of the air. The chorus they had heard so faintly had vanished as utterly as the door. “Those are our cards—the same pictures on them—”

He began to reply. Broke off at the sound of soft footsteps.

From down the dim aisle between the benches came a silent figure holding a light. Sanjay put out a hand, found Chryse’s, and gripped it, hard. But the figure metamorphosed into an elderly woman clothed in a severe habit of unbecoming lines, like the clothing worn by members of religious orders.

“It is a fine set of murals,” the woman said. The very ordinariness of her voice seemed somehow the greatest shock of all. “The only remaining sixteenth-century murals that can be conclusively traced to Master Van Wyck’s studio when he resided here during the reign of Queen Catherine the Eighth. The subject matter is perhaps a touch heathenish for a cathedral, but none of the bishops has had the heart to order them painted over with a more pious tale. And I have always maintained that one can gain moral instruction even from such legends as the fall of Pariam, for the princess Sais certainly did the honorable and Christian thing in offering to sacrifice herself to save the city, although the skeptical might opine that as she only did it out of her illicit love for her sister’s husband, who was the cause of the whole thing and ought to have given himself up for the death he was marked for—which I’m sure he would have done had he been a godly human and not of the unnatural blood of elvinkind—” She halted and lifted the lantern a little higher. “But perhaps there is some way I can help you. We don’t usually get visitors at such a late hour.”

“We’re lost,” said Chryse without thinking. “And I’m beginning to think that we’re far more lost than we think we are.”

“Ah.” A reassuring smile lit the woman’s features. “Spiritually or physically, I might ask.”

“Both,” said Sanjay abruptly.

Chryse began to speak, but thought better of it.

The woman examined them a space longer, and at last lowered her lantern and moved away, gesturing at them to follow. “I fear it is beyond my powers to help you,” she said rather cryptically over her shoulder. “But I can show you to the door.” She led them down the aisle toward a large set of double doors at the far end of the cathedral.

“But where are we?” asked Chryse as she and Sanjay followed helplessly in her wake.

“In the church of St. Cristobal of the Gates, patroness of travellers. Of course.” She reached the end of the aisle and set a lined hand on the latch of a smaller door set into the right half of the great carved pair.

“But—”

The woman shook her head. “I am the keeper here, nothing more. You must find your own way.” Her tone was kind, but final. She lifted the latch.

From beyond the door they could hear, muted, a rumbling roar of sound punctuated by an occasional penetrating human voice.

“Fare you well.” The woman pushed the low door gently open. “And may Our Lady be with you.”

“Thank you,” said Sanjay reflexively. He looked at Chryse, she at him; together they looked back into the gloom of the great church interior that lay behind them. What they wanted to know, what they needed to ask, seemed unknowable and unaskable in the face of the overwhelming strangeness of their surroundings and the implacable, if gentle, determination of their companion.

“Thank you,” Sanjay repeated, as if it was the only phrase he could remember.

Having at last accepted that she was not in fact dreaming, Chryse found herself too stunned to speak.

The woman opened the door a little wider, and smiled once again.

Chryse and Sanjay had no choice but to turn and walk outside.

*
A description of all cards in the “Gates” deck appears in the Appendix.

T
HEY CAME OUT ONTO
snow. For an instant they could believe it was the parking garage corridor, the dirty white concrete, until they looked up and saw stars, cold and silent in the night sky. Buildings rose on either side, close and high. Where the snow had melted or been cleared away, cobblestones showed through.

The noise came louder here, recognizable as a rabble of shouting and cries and the roar of humanity massed and agitated. Far down, at the end of the alleyway, torches flared and gathered and separated. In the flare of light shapes moved.

A single, tenuous piece of light split off from some corner of the turmoil and began to grow as it approached them.

Both of them stepped back instinctively towards the wall. Sanjay stopped so that he stood a little in front of Chryse. He put down the hamper.

The light resolved into a smoky torch, carried by a small, cloaked, long-skirted figure.

“Trouble, trouble,” it muttered in a voice dry as an old woman’s but somehow altered. “They’ll be callin’ out the troops ’fore long.”

The figure halted abruptly, seeing Chryse and Sanjay. A hood shadowed her face. “Bless me, Mother,” she wheezed. “Nobs, ain’t you? Come down to Goblinside to get yer fortune told after a fancy-dress, I reckon. You chose the wrong night, lovies. You’d best be running back to St. Solly’s.”

She shifted her torch to survey them. The smoky light fell for an instant on her face.

Chryse gasped.

The old woman turned and fled onward, up the alley.

Sanjay reached back and gripped Chryse’s hand. Cold fingers entwined together.

“Sanjay,” said Chryse in an unsteady voice. “She wasn’t human.”

“Did she say Goblinside?” asked Sanjay in a voice no steadier.

In that brief glimpse they had seen a face vaguely mouselike, but leathery and pouched and punctuated with two alert, inhuman eyes.

“Maybe there was something in the champagne.” Her fingers tightened on his to the point of pain. “Let’s go back.”

Sanjay turned, hesitating as he set his hand on the door latch, and then opened the door. In the inconstant flare of distant torchlight, they saw, not the vast interior of a great church, but an empty room no bigger than three meters square. Its dim, dusty corners flickered in and out of view in the unsteady illumination.

Sanjay dropped the hamper abruptly and took three tense, angry steps into the middle of the tiny room. He swore, words Chryse did not recognize.

“Maybe there’s a secret door,” she said quickly, but her voice shook. “There must be.” With her free hand she pounded a circuit all the way around the dark room, rattling old, decaying boards, even prying one loose, but it was obvious there was nothing beyond, except, perhaps, more tenement rooms as decrepit as this one.

Halting at last, her fist sore, Chryse grabbed a fold of skirts into her hand and clenched it tight, as if its thick texture gave her strength. “This isn’t possible, Sanjay.”

As if a hint of fear in her tone had penetrated his anger, he turned and held out his hands to her. She let go of her skirts and their overnight bag and gripped his hands.

“Maybe it’s not possible,” he replied, “but we’re here.”

She took in a deep breath, let it out, released his hands. “And we’re together.” She picked up the bag. “I guess there’s no choice but forward now.”

“Is there ever?” he murmured. He got a good grip on the hamper with one hand. “I suggest the alley over the riot.” They looked at each other, and walked together out of the room and up the alley.

It gave out onto a wider street, snow swept off the cobbled surface by the passage of small groups of people hurrying all in one direction, toward the swelling noise of agitation. A wagon drawn by two oxen passed, carving its path through the scattered traffic. Faces fled by them, many commonplace in their humanity, others altered but still strangely familiar. Men in overcoats and top hats made their way down the street, women in long skirts, shoulders draped with shawls. Glass windows shot warped glimpses of lamplight reflecting back on the streets, unshadowing the surfaces of shop signs: Haberman’s Lock and Key Emporium; Master Bitterbrew Hearth Spells and Gates Tellings; Mistress Penty’s Bookshop and Seeing Eye; Meriwisp & Daughter Tobacconist. A child stood huddled against a lamppost, barefoot, clothes in tatters, a little cap forlornly askew on a wealth of dark hair that framed a pointed face.
Truly
pointed—ending in a whisker-tipped snout.

Sanjay and Chryse were still staring when the flow of traffic, like the tide’s reflex, suddenly reversed and began to pour back in the other direction. They were pressed back against a shop window as the flood increased. Inchoate shouts and warnings swept through the press:

“Troops out.”

“Damn the Regent for her bloody ways.”

“Old Devina’s gang broke in at the goldsmith’s—”

A trio rushed past bearing a tattered cloth sign that folded itself just as they came through enough light to illuminate the letters:
Universal Suffrage.
More shouts and a sudden explosion from away down the street.

“To the Daughter with the damn landlords and the House of Nobles with ’em!” shouted a man as he ran.

“Votes for all!” cried a woman, hidden in the crowd. “Free and equal!”

Closer, incongruous by its nearness and its complete opposition to the rising hysteria and flight, came laughter, light and slightly uncontrolled. An instant later a man collided with Sanjay.

“Forgive me, sir!”

Torn from their hypnotic appraisal of the street, both Sanjay and Chryse turned to stare at a well-dressed gentleman. He doffed his hat. “Monsieur, I am clumsy. Please, again, forgive me.” His eyes strayed to Chryse. “Madame!” he said appreciatively, and bowed.

“Bloody hell, Julian, can’t you hold your liquor?” A second, slighter gentleman collided with the first, stumbled, and straightened to reveal a woman rather than a man. She was dressed in the same dark coat and trousers, waistcoat and white shirt and cravat set off against the darker colors. Several muffled reports sounded from farther up the street, punctuated by a scream and the shattering of glass. “Come on,” she said, sounding abruptly more sober. Her gaze took in Sanjay’s dark coat and trousers and Chryse’s rich gown. “Slummers like us?” she asked good-naturedly. “Troops are coming. They’ve got quite a lather up from the riot in the square—there’ll be a few heads broken tonight.”

The man called Julian, with a smooth maneuver unhampered by the obvious smell of spirits, took Chryse’s arm and steered her along the walkway. “Really, Kate,” he said over his shoulder, “how are we to remove ourselves from this charming neighborhood? I fear that I am not as well acquainted as you are with such haunts and am therefore utterly lost.”

“Like bloody hell you are.” Kate laughed again as the crush of the traffic grew worse and cast an eye, as obviously appreciative as Julian’s, on Sanjay. “You must have connections with the East Seas Trading Company. Turn down this alley, Julian.”

Chryse looked once at Sanjay; by unspoken consent they let themselves be led through a maze of small streets until at last their companions came to a stop by a carriage in a deserted square.

At their approach, the figure walking the horses pulled the animals to a halt and bowed briefly. “My lord. Miss Cathcart.” He moved to open the door into the carriage. “An uneventful trip, may I hope?”

“You may hope, Abbott,” said Julian. “But as usual Miss Cathcart does not live by such uneventful rules. Madame.” He turned to face Chryse. “If you will allow me to hand you and your companion into the carriage, I would be honored to deliver you to anywhere in the city.”

Chryse and Sanjay looked at each other.

“We thank you for the trouble—” began Sanjay.

“No trouble at all,” interposed Julian smoothly.

“—but unfortunately,” said Chryse, with a small lift to her hand that she hoped would signal Sanjay to silence, “not only do we not know where we are, but we shouldn’t even be here.”