Nine Gates (63 page)

She intensified her connection to the south-southeast wind, her own wind, and felt it respond. Spreading it as a carpet beneath her, Honey Dream swooped to pick up Brenda. They sped into the middle zone. As they closed the distance, Honey Dream noticed that Waking Lizard’s spell had produced thick coils of vine. He now stood back, deep in concentration, feeding them ch’i so that they proliferated.

“I must learn that one,” she said.

“It’s cool,” Brenda agreed. “Waking Lizard seems to have the middle in control. Let’s set one of these to the left. They’re not having as much luck.”

Brenda cast down the amulet bracelet, releasing the blue and white of the Twins of Heaven. The Twins of Earth joined their fellows, and then Honey Dream skewed them off to the opposite side where the air now smelled strongly of lilies of the valley.

“Nice,” Brenda said. “I always wondered what that perfume Grandma Elaine wears was. Funny how you don’t think to ask.”

Honey Dream managed a smile. The Ratling was nervous, and for good reason. The rocks were moving wildly now. Time and again, their protective winds were all that kept them from being battered. Yet, more troubling than the moving rocks, the pelting stones, the weird battle of Earth and Wood, was a tightness in the living ch’i of the place.

Scholars taught that all things are just variations in the
shape of the pervading living energy of the universe. Honey Dream accepted this, accepted that when she called upon a wind or worked some other trick, she was simply moving this energy from shape to shape.

However, never had she realized how superficial that understanding was, never had she felt the very tenuous nature of those forms that she perceived. But now something was manipulating those forces on a grand scale, and Honey Dream had the awful realization that she stood in great danger of being manipulated directly out of existence.

“The rocks!” Brenda shouted. “Oh, god. The rocks, they’re falling! And Flying Claw, Riprap… They’re all still up toward the top!”

Honey Dream struggled to hold her wind together, struggled against the fear her realization had engendered. Brenda, seeing the struggle, but not understanding its source, held out a hand cupped around another amulet bracelet.

“I’ll Knit. You concentrate on getting to them. They’re trusting us to pull them out.”

Brenda’s ch’i flowed into Honey Dream a moment later. It did not change the situation except in one way. Honey Dream was awed by the trust being shown to her—by the warriors who had climbed to the face of the gate, and by Brenda, who had no reason to love her.

She threw herself into action. They ripped through the air, grabbing Shackles as he stumbled and would have fallen.

Brenda somehow found the concentration to strip off a bracelet and hand it to the man.

“Smash this. Jump. It’ll cushion you. We need the room.”

Shackles, to his credit, did as he was told, choosing a moment when Honey Dream had circled out to avoid a hail of rocks thrown either at her or at Flying Claw, who now teetered on a rock that was pivoting itself around. In a moment it would fall, crushing him beneath its once-solid footing.

Brenda’s ch’i continued to feed into Honey Dream.
Together, almost as one, they swept in, gathering Flying Claw just in time.

Riprap was nowhere to be seen, but Flying Claw read the question in her gaze.

“Riprap jumped. I think he made it down. Chain wasn’t so lucky. The rock he jumped on split. He fell. I heard him scream.”

Flying Claw’s face was scored with dozens of tiny cuts and bruises, shrapnel that had gotten through when his protections had held the larger attacks at bay.

A yell from below—Des Lee—broke through. “It’s coming down! It’s coming down! Get clear! Get clear!”

Honey Dream obeyed. Fleeing was easy, for flight was the impulse she had been fighting, so easy that she might have continued had not Flying Claw squeezed her arm—hard.

“Hold. We must see what happens.”

Honey Dream held, and only then remembered the debt she owed Brenda. The Ratling looked very pale and drawn, but when Honey Dream broke the contact between them, she still had strength enough to make a thumbs-up gesture.

But this was peripheral. Honey Dream was hardly aware of the other two who crowded so close.

Wood had conquered Earth. From the broken pile of no longer moving rocks emerged four terrible figures: the White Tiger of the West, the Azure Dragon of the East, the Vermillion Bird of the South, and the Black Warrior of the North.

Honey Dream’s mind, sensitized as it was, saw the guardians both in the symbolic forms her ancestors had given them long ago and for a single, shattering moment as the entities they were. But the human mind cannot grasp infinity without breaking, and the four guardians were grateful.

The comforting, comfortable masks descended, freeing Honey Dream to see that miracles were not yet ended. The moving rocks had been reduced to tarnished rubble. This now was rapidly becoming overgrown with thick vines, domestic flowers, and incongrous patches of tiny white lilies of
the valley. One rock, shifted on its tip so that it made a diamond shape, stood intact at the top of the heap.

This was the gate, and from it emerged the Men Shen, bristling with weapons, armored with fidelity, faces set in fierce defiance. But their defiance was not directed at the clustered humans (somehow without realizing it, Honey Dream had set the three of them down where Pearl and Deborah maintained their posts) but at the four guardians.

“You cannot pass!” they said as one.

“You were happy enough to let us through before,” Pai Hu said, his ears pinned back, a snarl showing every bright fang. “We will go through and meet the one who called us.”

“No!” the Men Shen said. Then one reached for the handle of a door that had not been there a moment before. “We shall lock the doors, and defend the gate against your passage.”

Honey Dream thought she heard a faint wail of protest. It seemed to originate on the other side of the gate.

“Move swiftly,” said the Vermillion Bird, flaring into flames, her eyes the yellow-white of heating coals. “For I fly!”

She flapped her wings, sending forth heat so intense that the heaps of rock began to melt and blacken.

The Men Shen needed no other prompting, but each seized a handle on the door and drew it shut with a clang. This was followed by the prosaic sound of a bar being dropped into place.

“Even so,” said Des, “let’s make certain it stays shut.”

He was starting to strip an amulet bracelet from his arm when the Vermillion Bird said almost kindly, “This is our place. You have done your part.”

She flew over the rubble heap and breathed not so much fire as light upon the door. The metal panels melted, becoming solid, becoming one. Then the Black Warrior thudded forward on sturdy tortoise legs. It reared forward, and came down hard upon the diamond-shaped rock, which split into dozens of tiny cubes.

Honey Dream felt the jangling sensation of distorted,
distorting ch’i ebb to almost nothing and knew the gate was not only closed, not only sealed, but completely destroyed.

The four guardians ranked themselves and looked over the gathered humans with expressions that despite their awful majesty held kindness.

“We are grateful,” said the serpent that is the other end of the Black Warrior’s tortoise form, “for the risks you have taken, to those of you who have lived and died and suffered. You will find no difficulty crossing the North when you seek the Lands.”

“Nor the South,” said the Vermillion Bird.

“Nor the East,” said the Azure Dragon, and he tossed something small and round to Shen Kung and Righteous Drum.

“And your welcome in the West,” said Pai Hu, “is more certain than ever. Come, I will take you home.”

Pearl’s voice broke the awed silence that followed these pronouncements. “Where is Waking Lizard?”

They found Waking Lizard buried beneath one of the deepest mounds of rock, his hand resting on Chain’s ankle.

“His protective spell held,” Deborah said as she examined the nearly unmarred body. “His heart did not.”

“Waking Lizard must have seen Chain fall,” Flying Claw said, “and tried to rescue him. I feel horribly ashamed. I heard Chain scream, but did nothing.”

Pearl put her unbroken hand on Flying Claw’s shoulder. “That’s not true, nephew. You were busy the entire time. If Honey Dream and Brenda hadn’t come after you, likely you would have followed Chain. Don’t blame yourself for things you could not have changed. I assure you when you’ve lived as long as I have, you’ll have enough regrets.”

Stiffly, Pearl knelt down next to a man who had been becoming a friend. Off to one side, she heard Brenda quietly weeping, Gaheris trying to find the right words to comfort her.

“Dad,” Brenda said, her voice choked around sobs, “it’s not that he’s dead. I’ve been to the afterlife or something that passes for it. I believe like I never did before that we live on, somehow, some way. It’s that… He was so kind to me. I was so scared, and I never got to thank him.”

Brenda started crying harder then, and Gaheris gave up on reason, folding her in his arms and letting her sob. Standing where she was, Pearl was in a perfect position to notice Flying Claw’s reaction to Brenda’s tears, and guessed he’d be perfectly ready to take over when Gaheris got worn out.

Brenda wasn’t the only one with tears in her eyes. Even Righteous Drum, whom Pearl had gotten accustomed to thinking of as rather stuffy—unless Honey Dream was involved, of course—was dabbing at his eyes.

Shackles, who was kneeling beside Chain’s body, looked greatly comforted when Shen came over and put a hand on his shoulder.

“He died as he would have wanted,” Shen said. “They both did. It’s not much comfort now, but remember it for later.”

“Thank you, Grandfather,” Shackles said very softly. “I will. It just seems so wrong, so unfair. We were almost home, and now he’ll never get there. He had a wife. I’ll have to tell her.”

“Tell her,” came the voice of Pai Hu, “that although Chain died far from home, he died as a hero and his tomb will never lack for offerings.”

The White Tiger had taken form among them as a tiger only slightly more overwhelming than the natural ones. Now he lashed his tail back and forth, and the rubble heap reassembled itself into a lovely burial temple. At each of the four roof corners, one of the four guardians was depicted.

“Lay them there,” Pai Hu ordered. “This place is at the Center. My fellows and I will give them honor even when the memory of all humanity has faded.”

No one argued. It was a tremendous honor.

So Waking Lizard and Chain were placed in the tomb,
and fifteen considerably battered humans followed Pai Hu to where the pine door maintained its vigil.

Nissa was walking under her own power again. Riprap wouldn’t say what he had done, but Pearl suspected he’d knocked her out when she had tried to flee.

Did he do it for her own good
, Pearl thought,
or because of his own desire to do something important? I’ll never ask. I don’t think any of us should ask what desires touched us when we were caught within the hunger of a universe struggling for completion. Not all of our desires were as innocent as a mother’s yearning to return to her child.

Pearl looked at Albert. His eye was swollen completely shut, and he had refused several offers of treatment. The long slices on Gaheris’s face were less livid—probably he’d washed the worst of the blood from them at some point—but they’d take time to heal.

And which of them struck first?
Pearl thought.
That’s another question we shouldn’t ask. After all, neither of them were completely themselves.

Pearl remembered how she’d felt when Flying Claw’s blade had made its hissing descent. Her reaction had not been fear or anger. No. It had been perfect understanding of his desire. There should not be two Tigers. Flying Claw’s goal when he had left the Lands had been to reclaim, remake his attenuated Branch. Under the influence of the terrible need on the other side of the gate, all the rationalizations for not taking what he wanted had vanished.

And she? Had her reaction been much better?

Not much, for all my years, for all my supposed wisdom
, Pearl thought ruefully.
Only when we realized how we were being influenced, manipulated, did the nature of our conflict change. Before…It’s a good thing we both had protective spells up, otherwise I’m not certain either of us would have survived.

They were passing through the pine door now, one by one, each stopping to say a few words to Pai Hu.

Pearl held back until she was almost the last—she and Flying Claw.

“What was that on the other side of the gate?” she asked. “Do you know?”

“I do, but my answer will tell us little,” the White Tiger said. “Someone created a mold, a form. A universe that was created without what we four guardians and our realm are, so that we would be drawn to fill the mold. We could not resist because there was nothing for us to resist against.”

“But there was someone,” Flying Claw said, “who created the mold.”

“I cannot believe something so perfect was an accident,” Pai Hu said. “But I never saw, nor smelled, nor otherwise sensed that person—or people.”