The tube was taken from her leg by no mere messenger, but by Ser Alcaeus himself, the Regent of Morea. Alcaeus read the dispatch, and was seen to smile.
“Three copies. Ready a bird for Arles; the emperor will need this immediately,” he said.
F.34 didn’t care; she was already gorging on chicken.
But E.2 cared. She was a long-distance bird, one of the fastest; she was almost never sent on short trips, because of her powerful build and extreme stamina, and now she seemed to quiver with joy; the sense of urgency in her lord’s voice was itself cause for joy, because she was going to fly!
The messenger officer brought her a pellet. She knew the pellet meant a mission; it looked like a solid gold bead, although the gold leaf was merely the conductive element for the hermeticist who set the parameters of the flight.
E.2 ate the pellet, and instantly understood. She nodded, bobbing up and down expectantly while her message was prepared.
The imperial messenger took her from her perch and stroked her black-and-white head. “You’re eager as a child for Christmas, aren’t you, my honey?” the messenger crooned.
“Who is that?” Alcaeus asked.
“E.2, my lord. One of the best.” The messenger bowed.
“Such a smart bird,” Alcaeus said in a crooning voice. “Will she be well enough, launching into full night?”
“All the star patterns are in her instructions,” the messenger said. “She’s probably better off at night than in broad daylight.”
Alcaeus took the great bird on his thumb while the messenger affixed the tube and checked the seals.
“Ready,” said the messenger.
Alcaeus nodded. “You are the heroes, my dears,” he crooned to all the messenger birds waiting on half a hundred perches. “Without you, we wouldn’t have a chance. Fly fast, my friend.” He raised his fist, and E.2 leapt into the air.
She rose from the tower of the stable block to spiral up over Liviapolis, using the warmth of the city to rise against the cool of the air coming down from the mountains to the west, and then she started out over the sea. The sea was an endless pool of spilled ink, the moon just eight nights short of full, waxing, casting a path of light across the black water, and she went fast, her wings beating powerfully; she crossed over the islands, nine thousand feet in the air and with a powerful wind behind her; ignored a handful of lights on the islands where terrified fisher folk stayed high on their hills to avoid the monsters that dominated the deeps. No sea monster gave her the least concern, nine thousand feet in the air, and she raced on into morning, which found her well up a great river valley, passing over Lucrece in the grey light and then turning south and east, straight into the rising sun at two hundred miles an hour.
Before the cocks of morning had ceased crowing, she was eating chicken in the tower of Arles, undisturbed by the triumphant whoop of the Emperor of Man.
“You’ll want to read this immediately,” Anne said, waking her master. She wondered if she would ever sleep with her head on a man’s shoulder; Blanche was curled against her husband in a way that made Anne smile, and yet a little sad.
Gabriel sat up. “Bad news?” he asked. He’d been ready for it for two days. Silence was very bad at this point. Lissen Carak fallen? Gavin dead?
All too possible. So much risk, so few certainties …
“Good news, Your Highness.” Anne handed him a steaming cup of warm cider.
He sat up. Blanche raised her head. She was already turning green.
“Bucket is there,” Anne said.
“God!” Gabriel crowed. “Oh God. Oh damn,” he said, ripping his legs out of the entangling embrace of his linen sheets and leaping onto the cold floor. “Gavin is alive! He passed south of the Cohocton and he has the army, rallied, at Redesdale.” He walked out into the solar in his nightshirt. MacGilly was ironing; Master Julius was smiling from ear to ear.
“Chart?” Gabriel asked.
Master Julius had the northern Brogat and the Albin maps open, and he had marked positions on Kronmir’s master map in coloured pins.
Gabriel drank off his cider and took a pair of dividers from Master Julius, measured the distance, and pumped a fist in the air. “Damn!” he said again. “On the wall. That was—”
“Almost exactly a day ago,” Master Julius said. In the town, the cocks were crowing for the dawn.
“There’s more good news,” the notary said, handing over a flimsy. “I haven’t copied this yet.”
It was from Aneas. “Master Smythe is not dead?” Gabriel said. “It’s fucking Christmas, that’s what it is.” He embraced his surprised notary. “Christmas!” He walked to the window. The sun was rising in the east, and the day promised to be fine, and perhaps even warm. Below him, almost directly under the high tower of Arles, perhaps seven hundred feet below, a man the size of a pinprick was moving very slowly. The sound of his activity—rapid hammering—gave away what he was doing. He was driving in stakes.
“Four days,” he said to the sky. “Julius, at noon today we start a full-time, armed watch on the gateways.”
Master Julius made a note.
Three hours later, Gabriel was washed, shaved, and dressed in plain arming clothes. He went into the lowest levels of the great castle of Arles; down a ramp wide enough for the march of an army. At the base of the ramp stood an interior courtyard. A week before, it had been a hand’s breadth deep in mouse shit and dust and spiders and dead beetles, but now the whole floor, the size of twenty ballrooms, shone in the blaze of a hundred mage lights. The floor had an elaborate pattern worked in mosaic: star fields and astrological signs, thousands of years old.
“Jesu Christe,” Michael said, and crossed himself.
At the far end of the vast hall with a roof hundreds of feet over their heads, soaring like all the cathedrals in the world run together, stood a huge surface like the rose window of a great church, but dark, the panes of glass unlit. The portal stretched one hundred and twenty imperial feet from side to side; Mortirmir and Gabriel had just measured it. The portal had petals like an enormous flower; close examination showed each of them to contain scenes and words, like any religious stained glass, but in the darkness of the deep, even the mage lights could not illuminate the petal-shaped panels that spread like inky wings and arches away over their heads.
“Big enough for an army,” Michael said in awe.
“Or a dragon,” Gabriel said. “You know what we haven’t thought of?” he asked.
“Everything?” Michael asked.
“Yes, that,” Gabriel said. “But there must be some gates under the sea.”
“Of course,” Mortirmir said. “Why didn’t I think of that? So there are more than twenty-two gates. We don’t even know of the sea gates.”
“What else don’t we know?” Gabriel said. “A hundred and twenty feet wide, and sixty feet high at the center.” The three of them stood and contemplated the darkling gate.
Gabriel put a hand on the central panel, where the stone tracery that supported all the glass came together in a gold medallion with a keyhole.
“Damn,” he said. “It’s cold.”
Mortirmir reached out a hand and snatched it back. “Interesting,” he said, and snapped his fingers.
The underhall was cast into utter darkness.
“Hey,” Michael complained. And then he was silent.
Because, as his eyes adjusted to the unrelenting darkness, the darkness itself relented. A very, very faint radiance came through the great rose window.
“Oh damn,” Michael said.
“It is starting,” Gabriel said. “Assign troops, and casters, to guard it on a strict rota.”
Michael wasn’t looking at the gate. He was looking at the captain, whose skin emanated a glow slightly stronger than that given off by the gate.
“Don’t even mention it,” snapped Gabriel.
They stood in the barely lit darkness, watching the gate, which appeared like the sky at the very first hint of day.
> “Have the astrologers given us an estimate of how long the gates stay open?” Gabriel asked.
Michael looked away, because he didn’t want to look at the golden radiance of Gabriel’s skin. “No,” he said.
Mortirmir was still looking at the gate. “It’s one thing to plan and scheme,” he said quietly. “Another thing to see this. Gates to other hermetical realities. Think of it. Who built them? The power … unimaginable.”
Gabriel frowned. “Really?” he asked.
Mortirmir tugged at his beard. “Well, perhaps not unimaginable. But incredible.” He paused. “Harmodius has a theory that when we cast a summoning, we may actually be connecting to other realities. But this …”
“You like a challenge,” Gabriel said. “Any idea of how they were made?”
“None,” Mortirmir said. “I suppose that if you had a caster at either end in perfect cooperation, with staggering levels of power and near instant access to potentia …”
“When?” Gabriel asked.
Mortirmir shrugged. “I have been down here every day,” he said. “What you see, the stained glass and the stone, is about a thousand years old. It is massively reenforced. And it was meant to be seen … from either side.”
Gabriel started.
“I think that the gates remain open for quite a long time,” Morgon said. “More than long enough that the light of another world lit this hall.”
“I see,” said Gabriel, who wasn’t sure he saw. “And how old?”
Mortirmir shook his head, his dark hair just visible in the near- darkness.
“This hall,” Gabriel said. “Can we have the lights back?”
Mortirmir snapped his fingers, and the room was flooded with light. Gabriel blinked, looking at the vast, high-ceilinged room.
“This hall was built as an entry point. It is defensible, but elegant.” He looked at Michael.
Michael was looking at the floor. “These stones are huge,” he said. “Perfectly fitted together.”
Mortirmir bent down and looked at the floor. “Yes,” he said. “This is very old stonework,” he agreed. “Probably not human.”
“Why?” Gabriel asked.
Mortirmir shrugged. “It is all theoretical,” he said. “But I don’t think humans have been here for more than five or six thousand years.”
“How old do you think this is?” Michael asked. He’d found a corner in the stone; it was five paces by eight paces. Huge.
Mortirmir shook his head. “I cannot speculate,” he said. “Too old for any hermetical resource to read.”
“How old is that?” Gabriel asked. “I hadn’t thought of using a detection.” He looked at Mortirmir. “We’re not going to try to hold the gate, are we?” he asked suddenly.
Mortirmir smiled wickedly. “Not if you take my advice.”
Michael looked at the huge ramp. His smile was as wicked as Mortirmir’s. “You mean, let them in?”
“And unleash hell,” Mortirmir said. “The hall is subterranean, the blocks of titanic stone. I can cast anything here.” He looked around, and his voice echoed off the stone walls despite the decorative baffles.
“Anythinganythinganythinghereanythinghere …”
He glanced at Gabriel. “I took a lore working and retooled it for distance back,” he said. “I don’t have enough confirmed data points to make my measurement exact—dates of buildings, artifacts …” He glanced at Michael. “I’d kill for something that I knew was twenty thousand years old.”
“But?” Gabriel was leaning forward.
Mortirmir went and put a hand on the great basalt column that rose from the left side of the gate to the magnificent arches supporting the roof and the whole weight of the castle above. “I would be surprised if this was less than twenty thousand years old,” Morgon said.
Conversationally, Michael said, “I am not as well educated as a magister, but I was nearly certain that the Bible told us the earth itself was about seven thousand years old.”
“Foolishness,” Mortirmir said. “The earth itself is incalculably old. I’m very interested in the matter; our astrologers have some incredible calculations …”
Gabriel shook his head. “This is interesting, Morgon. And yet, I fear, I must prepare for the future. The immediate future.”
Mortirmir nodded slowly. “I worry that our ignorance of the past will be our undoing,” he said. “Why are there gates? Who built them?” He looked around. “Killing our enemies seems so banal by comparison.”
“Not to me,” Gabriel said.
Gabriel rode out of the castle of Arles in armour with Michael and Cully and Morgon and his squire, and met Count Zac on the field of Arles, the great parade ground that he and Michael and Cully had paced off in person.
Zac gestured with his golden mace. His regiment, three hundred sabers, maneuvered from a column of fours to a line four horsemen deep, every man and woman wearing a scarlet khaftan, a dark fur hat, and deep soft boots. Under their khaftans they wore maille; every horse had a pair of heavy quivers; every rider had a long saber and a bucket of javelins.
And two spare horses.
The Vardariotes opened their ranks, and the emperor and his staff rode in among them. Kriax, the most famous of their warriors, saluted her emperor, unnaturally rigid. Mikal Dvor, the left squadron commander, saluted, and the two horsetail standards dipped. Gabriel rode slowly down all four ranks; looking at buckles, and bruises, horseflesh and arrows. He stopped before a very small man with a flat nose and high, slanted eyes.
“Arrows,” he said.
Dvor had to translate. The man nodded, swung a leg over his horse, and dismounted. Then he pulled both quivers off; one economical movement, untying the laces that held the quivers in one pull, the way he would have to do if required to fight dismounted. He knelt, laying out the quivers; sixty arrows, points up, fletchings down. He began to draw them from the quivers. Anne Woodstock leaned forward, fascinated.
Gabriel flashed her a smile. “Let’s take a closer look,” he said, and dismounted. MacGilly, the page, sprang forward and took his horse, and then took Anne’s, and Gabriel, armoured head to toe in his old harness, went down on one knee as the small easterner told of his arrows.
Mikal Dvor, a different kind of easterner, with high cheekbones and pale eyes, dismounted, slipping easily to the ground and nodding back over his shoulder at Count Zac, who looked pleased at the man chosen; better him than almost any other man in the third rank …
“He says here are forty arrows for men or horses. He says they have no soul, but they are fine arrows.” Dvor held one up: a Liviapolis Arsenal manufactured arrow, with a cane shaft, a light steel head, diamond cross-section, armour piercing point, goosefeather fletch.
“No soul?” the emperor.
The small man spoke at length.
Dvor shrugged. “He is Klugthai, a nomad from so far to the east that it is as far from his homeland to mine as it is from mine to … Lucrece.” He spread his hands and winked at Anne.
She flushed for no reason and was annoyed at herself.
Dvor waved at Klugthai. “He says when a warrior makes his own arrows, he gives them something of his soul. But he says he rides far, and eats the emperor’s salt, and kills his enemies, and he admits that the emperor’s sorcerers make arrows that kill.” Dvor met the emperor’s eyes. “I find him hard to understand, and I have ridden with him ten years.”
“Show me the other arrows,” the emperor commanded.
Klugthai held out a handful of arrows. “These five are for very long shots. He made them himself,” Dvor translated. “These two are signal arrows; they shriek. Every rider must have one. It happens that he is one of my squadron’s best men and has a spare.”
Morgon took the arrow. He moved his hand over it. “Is louder better?” he asked.
Dvor repeated the question.
The little man grinned. “Da,” he said.
Morgon released the working and handed back the shaft. “It will be very loud,” he
said.
The small man bowed, clasping both hands and tapping them to his forehead.
“And these?” the emperor asked.
“One for killing horses. One for killing very big things; monsters.”
“Just one?” the emperor asked.
Dvor shrugged. “Most of us shot away all our monster killers facing the Umroth, Your Grace.”
“Got it,” Michael said. He made a note on his wax tablet.
“And that’s why you have inspections,” the emperor said to his squire.
She nodded, fascinated by the row of arrows left.
“And that one?” she asked, greatly daring.
Dvor smiled at her. “It holds a line. For shooting a rope, or starting a trap.”
“This one?” she asked.
The emperor looked at her.
Dvor smiled and the small easterner laughed. “Bird hunting. It is his own, for knocking down game. To eat.”
She smiled.
Gabriel reached over and took the easterner’s hand. “Tell him that I believe that of all the men who serve me, he has come the farthest, and I treasure his service,” Gabriel said.
Dvor spoke. The easterner’s heavily wrinkled face, windblown and bright-eyed, broke into a brilliant smile.
“Rose Leopard,” he said to Anne, and she fumbled in her purse and produced one—the most valuable imperial coin, solid gold, worth five Leopards. The easterner took it and dropped it inside his khaftan and nodded his head.
All of them remounted. The emperor noted that the easterner retied his quivers while he was mounting.
Gabriel raised an eyebrow to Michael, who caught the direction of his attention. “The value of veterans isn’t just that they understand war,” Gabriel said aloud. “It is that they know how to do everything.”
The Vardariotes were merely the first of the regiments of the casa to return from the campaign in Galle, and as the day wore on, the Nordikaans rode in, and then the guildsmen, and then Ser Thomas Lachlan himself leading the lances of the imperial bodyguard, as they had taken, somewhat mockingly, to styling themselves. Some wag had painted a small banner on silk, the black silhouette of a tusked Umroth with a red line through it per pale on an ivory ground.