The Gates of Sleep em-3

by Mercedes Lackey

  Sarah giggled, and so did little Jenny. “Go on with you!” Sarah replied, blushing with pleasure. “Anyroad, as for going on to a Great House, like I says, my cooking’s too plain for the likes o’ they. And I’m not minded to fiddle with none of your French messes. Missus Margherita can do all that if she wants, but plain cooking was good enough for my old mother, and it’s good enough for me.”

  Margherita took her place at the broad, heavy old table and Sarah brought over the skillet to serve her fresh sausages and eggs.

  Marina poured more tea for herself and her aunt. She wanted to ask their guest what they were going to start with, but she was constrained by the presence of the two servants.

  “I think I’ll borrow one of your workrooms for my visit, Margherita,” Elizabeth said casually. “The little one just off the library. I’d like to organize the notes I brought with me, then get started on my project.”

  “Project, ma’am?” said Sarah, who was always interested in at least knowing what the guests at Blackbird Cottage were about. Perhaps in any other household, she’d have been rebuked or even sacked for her curiosity, but curiosity wasn’t considered a vice here, not even in servants.

  And Elizabeth already knew that from her previous visits, so she answered Sarah just as she would have another guest, or a visitor from the village. “I’m trying to do something scholarly, collecting old songs, Sarah,” she said. “Very old songs—the ones that people might have heard from their grandparents.”

  “What, them old ballads? Robin Hood an’ Green Knights an’ witches an’ ghosts an’ all?” Sarah answered, looking both surprised and a little pleased. “Is this something for them university chaps?”

  “Why, exactly! How did you know?” Elizabeth might very well really have been here to collect folk ballads from the way she responded. Marina wasn’t surprised that Sarah knew that scholars were collecting folk songs for their studies; with all of the talk around this table, Sarah picked up a great deal of what was going on in the world outside their little village.

  “Well, stands to reason, don’t it? Clever lady like you? Went to university yourself, didn’t you?” Sarah chuckled, and tenderly forked slices of thick bacon onto Marina’s plate, then onto little Jenny’s. After all these years, she knew exactly what each of them liked best, and how much they were likely to want. “I could ask around, down in village for you,” she offered deferentially. “Some folks might know a song or two, and a pint would loosen tongues, even for a strange lady.”

  “If you would be so kind, I would greatly appreciate your help, Sarah,” Elizabeth replied with all sincerity, though her eyes were twinkling. Marina knew why; her feigned errand had gotten an unexpected touch of veracity.

  “Pleased to, ma’am,” Sarah replied, and turned back to her cooking with a flush of pleasure.

  But Marina knew that the “little workroom” was the one room in the house used for serious and involved Magical work. Margherita had put compulsions upon the door that worked better than any orders forbidding Jenny or Sarah—or anyone else who was not a magician—from entering. That was a special ability of the Earth-Master, to create compulsions that worked even on those without a hint of magic in their souls. Oh, others could do it, but the trick came most easily to Earth Masters.

  Each compulsion was gently tailored to the individual. For Jenny, the moment she touched the door, she would be under the impression that she had just cleaned the room and was leaving. Sarah, on the other hand, would suddenly think that there must be something on the stove or in the oven that needed tending. Visitors would believe that the door was locked, even though it wasn’t, and would promptly forget about the room the moment they turned away.

  “That will be fine, Elizabeth. Would you like Marina to help you?” Margherita replied casually.

  “I certainly would! You know me—completely hopeless when it comes to organization!” Elizabeth laughed, and the conversation went on to other things, leaving Marina tingling with excitement and anticipation.

  Elizabeth lingered over her tea until Marina finished her breakfast, then nodded at her as she rose. Marina jumped to her feet, and followed the older woman out of the kitchen and down to the workroom. As an Elemental Master herself, Elizabeth was not affected by the compulsions on the door, and opened it without a pause, beckoning to Marina to follow.

  According to Uncle Thomas, many Elemental Masters preferred to have a religious cast to their magical workrooms; they often had an altar and religious icons such as crucifixes, statues of ancient gods or goddesses, censers for incense, and other religious paraphernalia. But since this room was shared by three—counting Marina, four—magicians, all of whom had their own very definite ideas about their magic, the compromise had been reached of leaving it bare. Uncle Thomas had installed cupboards with shutters to close them on all of the walls, and whatever each person felt was absolutely necessary to his or her working lived in the cupboards until needed. There were two benches pushed up against one wall, and a small table (which could presumably serve as an altar) against another. Although the room did not have a fireplace of its own, the back wall of the library fireplace radiated quite enough warmth for the small space.

  And it had only one small window, ivy-covered and high. Marina would have had to stand on tiptoe to see through it. So it would be fairly difficult for anyone to spy on whatever was going on in here.

  The floor was of slate, like the rest of the ground floor of the farmhouse; the panels of the shutters were of wood with grain that suggested far-off landscapes and distant hills. Between the panels, Uncle Thomas had carved the graceful trunks of trees that never grew in any living forest. The two benches were also Uncle Thomas’ work, as was the table.

  “Close the door, dear,” Elizabeth said, and pulled one of the benches out further into the room while Marina did as she asked. “Now, come sit down, please.”

  Obediently, Marina did so.

  “One of the great advantages of using a permanent workroom is that the basic shields are already in place, and one needn’t bother with putting them up,” Elizabeth said with satisfaction. “I know that you’ve been taught perfectly well in all the basics, so I shan’t bother going over them again. Nor am I going to put you through a viva voce exam on the subject.”

  Oh! Well that’s a relief! Marina had been expecting something of the sort, and was very pleased to discover she was going to escape it.

  “No,” Elizabeth continued, “What you need first from me is the understanding of how you access the energy of your own element.”

  “Shouldn’t we be outside for that?” Marina asked curiously. “Near the stream or something?”

  But Elizabeth shook her head. “Nothing of the sort. Water is all around you; in the ground beneath your feet, in the air—good heavens, especially in the air around here!” She laughed, and Marina giggled nervously. “You would be hard pressed to isolate yourself from a single element; even in the heart of the driest desert on earth there is water somewhere, if only in your own body. Each element has a sphere in which it can dominate, but none can be eliminated. Now, I assume you know how to recognize the energy of Water?”

  Marina nodded.

  “Good. Then call upon your inner eye, and watch what I do.”

  Marina clasped her hands in her lap and let fall the guard she usually kept on that sense that Thomas called Sight, but which was so much more than merely seeing beyond the material world. And the moment she did so, she was aware that the room was alive with energies.

  The golds and browns of Earth Magic and the reds of Fire invested the shields around them, forming an ever-changing tapestry of moving color, scent, taste, and sensation. Earth magic had a special scent to Marina, of soil freshly-turned by the plow; its taste, rich and smooth, vanilla-flavored cream. And it seemed to wrap her in warm fur. Whereas Fire tasted of cinnamon, smelled of smoke, and felt like the sun on her skin just before she was about to be sunburned.

  Water, though, smelled exactly like
the air the moment before it was about to rain, mingled with new-mown hay; it tasted of all the waters of the world, faintly sweet and cool, and it felt exactly like chilled silk sliding across her bare arms. In color it was every shade of green there had ever been, from the tender, yellow-green of unfolding leaves, to the deep black-green of ancient pines in a thunderstorm. This was what she saw now, investing the very air of the room, condensing out of it like fog, or like her breath on a frosty morning, or a cloud blooming overhead in the sky. Tender threads, tiny tendrils of it, coalescing out of nowhere, each one a different shade of green; they sprang up and flowed toward Elizabeth, joining thread to thread to make cords, streams, all of them flowing to her and into her, and she began to glow with the growing power she had gathered into herself.

  “Oh, my!” Marina breathed. But she wasn’t going to just sit there and admire—Elizabeth had said to watch what the older woman was doing, and she set herself to finding out just how Elizabeth was doing this.

  It took some time of studying and puzzling before she figured it out.

  The clue was in what Elizabeth had said earlier, that the energy was everywhere. It was, and it could be coaxed into a more coherent form by application of the energies of her own mind, the ones that Uncle Thomas had already taught her how to use.

  “You see?” Elizabeth said softly, and she nodded. “Good.” Abruptly the older woman stopped gathering in the energies and looked at her pupil expectantly. “Now you try it.”

  Knowing how it was done and doing it herself were two different things… akin to the difference between knowing how to ride a horse and actually staying on its back. But this was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it?

  Be careful what you ask for, she reminded herself ruefully, and set to work.

  And work it certainly was. Elizabeth made it look so effortless, but compared with dipping energy out of the aura of a free-flowing stream, a spring, or a deep well, it was anything but effortless.

  Exhausting was more like it. It took a peculiar combination of relaxation and concentration that was infernally hard to master, and by the time she had managed to coax the first tentative tendrils of power out of the aether, she was limp with fatigue.

  “That will do for now,” Elizabeth said, and she let the burgeoning streamlets go with no little relief. “Luncheon, I think; then a little rest for both of us, perhaps an hour or so, and we’ll start again.”

  So soon? she thought with concealed dismay. Uncle Thomas had never made her work for this long! But it couldn’t be helped; if that was what Elizabeth wanted, then there was probably a reason for it.

  “I want you to have a firm grasp on this technique today,” Elizabeth said, as she got up and offered Marina her hand to aid her to her feet. Marina took the offered help; her knees felt so shaky she wasn’t certain she could have stood up without it. “If we left things at the point where they are now, by tomorrow it would all have to be done over again. We have to make a pathway in your mind and spirit that rest or sleep can’t erase. Then you can take a longer respite.”

  Marina sighed, and followed her out; her stomach gave a discreet growl, reminding her not only that she had used a great deal of physical energy, but that she would feel better about resuming once she wasn’t so ravenous.

  Aunt Margherita seemed to have anticipated how hungry she would be, for the main course of luncheon was a hearty stew that must have been cooking since breakfast or before. With fresh bread slathered with butter and Margherita’s damson preserves, and cup after cup of strong tea, Marina felt better by the moment. Sarah, Margherita and Elizabeth chattered away like a trio of old gossips on wash-day, while Marina ate until she couldn’t eat any more, feeling completely hollow after all her exertion.

  Finally, when she’d finished the last bit of the treacle tart Sarah had given her for dessert, Elizabeth turned away from her conversation with the others. “Have you any lessons or other work you need to do this afternoon?” she asked, but somehow managed not to make it sound as if she was asking a child the question.

  “Work, actually. German,” she replied, with a lifting of her spirits. “Die Leiden des jungen Werther, I’m translating it for Uncle Sebastian; he thinks he might want to paint something from it.”

  “Oh good heavens, Sturm und Drang, is it?” she laughed. “Obsessed poets and suicide! Oh well, I suppose Sebastian knows what is likely to sell!”

  “Sebastian knows very well, thank you,” her uncle called from the doorway. “Beautiful young dead men sell very well to wealthy ladies with less-than-ideal marriages of convenience. It gives them something to sigh and weep over, and since the young men are safely dead, their husbands can’t feel jealous over even a painted rival.”

  Marina didn’t miss the cynical lift of his brow, and suspected he had a particular client in mind.

  Evidently, Elizabeth Hastings hadn’t missed that cue either. “Well,” she said dryly, “If the real world does not move them, they might as well be parted from some of that wealth in exchange for a fantasy, so that others can make better use of their money than they can.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Sebastian said, and with the chameleon-like change of mood that Marina knew so well, beamed upon Sarah as he accepted a bowl of stew from her hands. “Sarah, you are just as divine as Miss Bernhardt! In a different sphere, of course—”

  “Tch! The things you say! I doubt Divine Sarah’d thank ye for that!” their own Sarah replied with a twinkle, and turned back to her stove.

  “I’ll come fetch you from your room in an hour or so,” Elizabeth said to Marina, who took that as her cue to escape for some badly needed rest.

  Translating Werther was not what she would have called “work,” even though Uncle Sebastian said it was. She had taught herself German from books; she couldn’t speak it, but she read it fluently enough. German seemed useful, given all of the medieval poems and epics that the Germans had produced that could give Uncle Sebastian subjects for his paintings, and so she had undertaken it when she was twelve.

  Mind, she thought, as she wrote yet another paragraph of Werther’s internal agony, I can’t do much with figures. And as for science—all I know is what the old alchemists did! She supposed her education had been rather one-sided.

  She was amused, rather than enthralled, by Goethe’s hero. She couldn’t imagine ever being so utterly besotted with anyone as to lose her wits over him, much less kill herself because she could not have him. Poor silly Werther.

  But he’d make a fine subject for a painting, her uncle was right about that. Pining over his love, writing one of his poems of wretchedness and longing, or lying dead with the vial of poison in his hand.

  I suppose I’ll have to pose for him, too. It wouldn’t be the first time that she’d stood in for a young, callow man. Uncle Sebastian simple gave her a little stronger chin and thinner lips, flattened her curves, and took care to give her a sufficiently loose costume and there she was. More than one lady had fallen in love with the masculine version of herself; Uncle Sebastian never enlightened them as to her sex.

  A tapping at her door told her that another sort of lesson—and work—awaited her.

  “Come in!” she cried, and put the book aside. “I’ll just be a moment.”

  Elizabeth pushed the door ajar, and gazed with delight on the room. “I swear, I wish I could get your guardians to create something like this for me,” she said with a chuckle.

  “It would take them eighteen years, I’m afraid,” she replied, tidying her desk and making sure that the ink bottle was securely corked.

  Elizabeth sighed. “I know. And it would cost me a hideous amount of money, too—I certainly couldn’t ask them to work for less than their normal commissions.”

  “You’d be surprised how many would,” Marina said sourly, thinking of all the people who, over the years, had attempted to trade on past acquaintance to get a bargain.

  “No magician would,” Elizabeth said firmly. “No magician could. Well, enough of that; back t
o work for us.”

  Back down to the little workroom they went, and Marina saw when Elizabeth opened the door that she had brought in a lamp and had moved the table to the center of the room. And in the center of the table was a clear glass bowl full of water.

  “What’s that for?” Marina asked, as Elizabeth closed the door behind them.

  “Later,” her tutor told her. “When I’m sure you’ve mastered the first lesson.”

  Marina raised an eyebrow, but didn’t argue; Elizabeth was the Master here, and had presumably taught more pupils in the art of the Element of Water than she. She took a seat on one of the benches, and took up where they had left off.

  It was easier this time; at Elizabeth’s signal, she released the power, then gathered it in again. A dozen times, perhaps more, she raised the power and let it flow out again, until the gathering of it was as natural as breathing and almost as easy.

  Only then did Elizabeth stop her, this time before she released it.

  “Good. Now, hold the power, and watch me again.” Elizabeth cupped her hands around the bowl, and gazed into the water.

  Then Marina sensed something curious—she felt a tugging within her, as if she heard a far distant call or summons.

  Strange—

  Was the summons coming from—Elizabeth?

  Yes! It was! Marina concentrated on it, and on her mentor. Slowly she deciphered the silent message written in power, sent out into the world. Not a summons, but an invitation.

  But how on earth did Elizabeth expect it to be answered? There were no streams here for the Undines to follow, no way for them to get into this sealed room.

  How—

  Something stirred in the bowl, like a trail of bubbles in the clear water, a momentary fog passing over the surface. The water in the bowl rippled, as if Elizabeth blew on it, or moved the bowl, but she did neither.

  And then—there, perfect in miniature, were an Undine and a Naiad, looking up at Elizabeth in expectation.