Nine Gates (26 page)

She just wasn’t ready.

Flying Claw was standing in front, obviously prepared to lead the way into danger. Nissa was moving up to join him. She didn’t look happy, but she wasn’t turning back either. Des was adjusting a strap on his backpack to accommodate the wide sleeves of his silver robe. Riprap was shouldering his own pack, and Honey Dream…

It was Honey Dream who—inadvertently—saved Brenda from embarrassing herself beyond retrieval. From the corner of her eye, Brenda caught Honey Dream staring up at the White Tiger’s gaping mouth, her lips moving slightly as she counted every fang.

Then Honey Dream’s fingers tightened around the hilt of
that curved dagger she wore at her waist, and as clearly as if she’d spoken aloud, Brenda could tell her thoughts.

“Fine. Go ahead. Swallow me whole if you want, but I’ve got fangs of my own, and I’ll give you a stomachache to remember me by.”

Brenda couldn’t bear to be less than Honey Dream in anything, even in stupid courage. She slid one of the amulet bracelets—one that held the Dragon’s Tail protective spell—down into her fingers. That might make it harder for the White Tiger to chew on her.

She didn’t activate the spell, though. Des had repeatedly reminded Brenda, Riprap, and Nissa that their ability to work magic would be limited by the dozen or so bracelets they could wear. It wouldn’t do to use one up before she needed it.

Brenda reached for her pack and tried to act as if her momentary retreat had been nothing more than getting it adjusted. She didn’t know if she fooled anyone—or if anyone had noticed her moment of funk. It was possible that, faced with walking into that yawning red cavern with its stalactites and stalagmites of gleaming white, no one had noticed.

But something in Riprap’s brown velvet eyes, something in how he stood waiting for her, made Brenda think that one of their company, at least, had indeed noticed.

Flying Claw glanced over his shoulder.

“I will go first,” he said. “Follow as you choose.”

Two people?
Brenda thought.
Did Flying Claw notice, too
?

She felt her face grow hot at that thought as it hadn’t when she thought Riprap might have caught her out. Embarrassment firmed her resolve, and Brenda moved up alongside Nissa.

The Flying Claw stepped onto the red tongue, paused for a moment, and then strode forward. Light, or maybe it was perspective, grew weird after he had progressed a few steps, and a sensation like vertigo made it impossible to track him further.

Nissa looked at the area where short middle teeth between two dominant fangs made an obvious gap.

“I have a feeling,” she said, stepping forward, “that we’re supposed to enter one at a time.”

“At least the jaws haven’t moved,” Brenda said, and was astonished to hear her voice sounding perfectly normal. “I’ll be right behind you.”

“Great,” Nissa said. “See you in the tiger’s den.”

She stepped over the smaller teeth—each still the size of a paving block—and onto the tongue. A few steps and she was as impossible to focus on as Flying Claw had been.

Brenda moved forward, and felt a hand on her arm. Des was looking at her with almost fatherly concern.

“Want me to go next?” he said. “Boy-girl-boy-girl? Yang-yin-yang-yin?”

His tone was light, but his eyes showed his concern.

Oh, damn. He noticed, too
, Brenda thought.

She was beyond blushing.

“I told Nissa I’d be right behind her,” she said, “so unless you think the balance needs me to wait…”

Des shrugged. “Hey. I’m a male Rooster. You’re a female Rat. If you want to go, go right ahead. I’ll come behind.”

Brenda nodded, momentarily sorry he hadn’t overruled her. Then she forced a grin.

“See you in the tiger’s den,” she said. “I’ll save you a chair.”

The step over those lower teeth was more of a reach than she’d thought, maybe because Brenda didn’t trust her footing on the other side. The tiger’s tongue provided surprisingly firm footing, not in the least slimy, the texture underfoot like sand on the beach right after a wave had pulled back, damp, but not really wet.

The roof of the Tiger’s mouth was ridged in a way vaguely familiar to Brenda from giving the family cat pills when it had a urinary tract infection, but that familiarity did nothing to make the experience any less horrible.

Claustrophobia washed over her, combined with the certainty that any moment now those jaws were going to close and crush her. Or maybe she’d be swallowed instead. Didn’t the great cats usually skip chewing and gulp stuff down?

Brenda could see neither Nissa nor Flying Claw, and if Des had kept his word and entered right behind her, she couldn’t hear him either. She was alone in the mouth of a tiger, and as many times as she tried to tell herself that it was all an illusion, all a dream, all some sort of magical trick, her mind knew the truth.

This was real, and reality was far stranger than she had ever been prepared to accept.

At last, she emerged, not as if from a tunnel or even from a mouth. One moment she was pacing along, trying to keep moving, trying not to give in to screaming fits or the urge to run back the way she had come, the next she was walking on thick grass, pale green light filtering through the leaves of towering trees.

Flying Claw was there, and Nissa, and from how they turned to look at her, Brenda sensed they hadn’t reached this place much before her.

“Where are…” Brenda began, and then Des was stepping out behind her.

She turned to see from where he had emerged, half expecting to see the back of a tiger’s head, like the archway in an amusement park, but seeing only more of the same grass.

“Where are…” Des said, and seemed astonished when the three who were present started laughing uncontrollably, but only until Riprap arrived and asked, “Where are…”

Honey Dream came last, and Brenda, knowing that the Snake had experienced her own moment of fear, respected her for having the courage to wait until last and still coming on. She had to have wanted to stay back, to come up with excuses.

Brenda didn’t much like respecting Honey Dream, even for this, but she was too stripped to her bare emotional bones to deny it.

With Honey Dream’s arrival, a hoarse sound, somewhere between a growl and a cough, demanded their attention. They turned as one to see the enormous—if not so completely
overwhelming—form of the White Tiger of the West before them.

“You have entered the West,” he said. “Now let us see if you can earn the right to remain. Make yourselves comfortable. Have you eaten?”

“We have,” Des said politely.

“Still,” the White Tiger said with equal correctness, “something small would not be amiss after your journey. Be seated and make yourselves welcome.”

Shrubs that a moment before Brenda would have sworn held nothing but leaves and the occasional starlike blossom now bent beneath the weight of aromatic berries. They looked and smelled like blueberries, one of her favorite fruits, but the berries were easily the size of her thumb.

Around their feet the turf seemed to grow somehow more inviting, the grass not so much thickening as becoming mossy plush in its density. Rises and falls Brenda had not noticed appeared, comfortable spots that invited sitting.

Des gathered his skirts and seated himself. Without pause, he reached out and plucked a berry, eating it with every sign of enjoyment. With a touch more hesitation, the others followed his example. What Brenda ate tasted like a blueberry, and she suspected left the same blue-grey stain.

Surreptitiously, Brenda sucked at her lips to make sure they were clean. Des had blotted his own mouth with a handkerchief he removed from his sleeve, and addressed Pai Hu.

“You told Flying Claw there might be a favor we could do for you, great White Tiger of the West. Now that we are refreshed, would you care to explain what humble mortals like ourselves might do for an immortal of your stature?”

The White Tiger’s ears twitched back and forth, forth and back. His nose wrinkled slightly so that his whiskers twitched, but Brenda had the impression that Pai Hu was amused rather than otherwise.

“For several months now,” the White Tiger began, “I have
been walking through a recurring dream. It begins with fire. Small flames lick first at the pads of my paws, then rise to leap to the height of my shoulders and then over my head. I feel the heat, smell the flames, but I remain untouched, unharmed. At least initially…

“Then I feel the ground beneath my feet growing hot. It does not singe or burn or otherwise catch fire, but rather begins to soften and then to melt. Soon the ground is gone. I am swimming in a sea that is silver, eddied with gold and bronze. It is deep, so deep that I know it is bottomless. Infinite, so that I know it has no shores.

“I swim and feel no tiredness, for the White Tiger of the West does not ever feel tired, but as I swim I realize that I am also beginning to melt. As with the lands that had been my domain, I neither singe nor burn, but rather I begin to soften, then to lose shape, and finally I see myself as black streaks among the silver of the endless ocean.

“The ocean spreads, and although there are no shores for it to lap against, no bottom to its depth, yet it comes to an edge. The water falls over that edge, falling into a Void that contains nothing, even the water that empties into it. The water falls, and as it falls I know no more.”

“But then,” Brenda blurted, “you wake up, right?”

She clapped her hands to her lips, horribly embarrassed, but right at the end there Pai Hu had sounded like Dylan or Thomas back when they were young enough that they’d still come and climb under the covers with her, or, when they were a little older, sit on the edge of the bed, their feet trailing on the floor as they told her about nightmares that seemed more real than the carpet brushing their toes.

“Sorry,” Brenda said, softly. Then she straightened. “But you do wake up, don’t you?”

The White Tiger twitched his ears at her. His tail, which had started thumping when she’d spoken, stilled into a black and white striped curve in the thick grass.

“As I do not sleep,” Pai Hu said, “I cannot wake up, but, yes, I do become aware of myself and know this for a vision
rather than reality, yet there is a fear within my viscera that rather than a foreboding, this is a foretelling, so that each time the vision comes to me, I do not know whether this is merely a vision or the coming of my end.”

“But,” asked Riprap, “can you end? I mean, you’re an immortal principle, not a mortal creature.”

“All things can end,” the White Tiger said. “Between mortals and immortals it is only the manner of that ending that differs. Some sages teach that even the nature of that ending is less different than we might imagine.”

“I can see why you’re worried then,” Riprap said.

The White Tiger’s tail twitched, as if not wanting to admit to ever worrying, but he did not gainsay Riprap.

Brenda glanced at the others. Flying Claw and Honey Dream were sitting very still. Neither of them looked as if they wanted to attract the White Tiger’s attention. Nissa was also silent, but hers was a silence of listening, not of dread.

I guess the four of us who aren’t from the Lands
, Brenda thought,
are too dumb to know how dangerous this conversation is. Still, we’re not going to learn anything by trembling and hoping the White Tiger will deign explain himself.

Des, who despite his robes was now lounging in a manner both comfortable and decorous, stroked his beard. Brenda thought he looked like a Taoist sage in an ink-brush painting, finding wisdom among the glories of nature.

“Pai Hu, is there any interpretation you would place upon this vision or dream?”

The White Tiger’s tail lashed. “I have my thoughts, but I would like to hear yours—if you have any.”

Tiger, Tiger, Temper Bright
, Brenda thought.
Be careful, Des. Pai Hu didn’t like admitting that he had a bad dream, much less that it has scared him. Be very, very careful.

Des inclined
his head respectfully. “I have some thoughts, mighty White Tiger of the West, but my knowledge is slim and secondhand, learned from books and mortal teachers.”

“I know you are limited,” the White Tiger growled. “Even so, I would hear you speak.”

“Very well,” Des said. “Two things occurred to me. When you first spoke of seeing flames, I recalled that the Lands Born from Smoke and Sacrifice were created through fire. I wondered if you might be having a vision of those days, but this did not quite fit. What your flames led to was dissolution, not creation.”

“I know that well enough,” the Tiger growled. “Have you anything more?”

“I do.” Des did not seem in the least disturbed by that growl. “I recalled that in the manifestations of ch’i within the physical world, West is associated with the element of metal, the color white, and the season autumn—and, of course, the Tiger.

“In the cycle of creation and destruction, metal is destroyed by fire, but gives rise to water. This is very much the character of your vision. When, within the vision, the flames begin to have an effect on your land and yourself, neither burns. Instead, there is melting. In the end, there is a sea, so Metal although destroyed by Fire is not gone. Rather, Water remains, and you within that Water.

“What disturbs me—and you as well, mighty Pai Hu, I am certain—is the next part, for instead of Water giving rise to Wood, Water tumbles over the edge of the precipice and falls endlessly into the Void, thus interrupting the cycle of creation from destruction. You say your vision ends there. Do you have any sense of the water’s final destination?”

“None,” the White Tiger rumbled. “The water falls, first
as a wave, then as a sheet, then as droplets, finally as mist. My awareness of myself as myself fades with each attenuation, until I believe the vision ends not because there is nothing left to see but because I am no longer sufficiently aware to have any sense of anything at all.”

“So you are seeing a vision of your dissolution,” Des said.

“I agree,” the White Tiger said. “But what I do not know is whether this is an unalterable vision. If it is a warning, then I will have the chance to fight.”