The Gates of Sleep

by Mercedes Lackey

  At the bottom of the stairs was a landing, and another door. Arachne took one of the two black robes hanging on pegs outside the door to this room, and pulled it on over her street clothing. Only when Reggie was similarly garbed did she open this final door onto a room so dark it seemed to swallow up the light of their candles.

  She went inside first, and by feel alone, lit the waiting black candles, each as thick as her wrist, that stood in floor-sconces on either side of the door. Light slowly oozed into the room.

  It was a small, rectangular room, draped in black, with a small altar at the end opposite the door; it had in fact been a chapel, a hidden Roman Catholic chapel that dated back to the time of the eighth Henry, before it became what it was now.

  It communicated with an escape tunnel to the river—the doorway now walled off, behind the drapery on the right—and its existence was the reason why Arachne had built this factory here in the first place. It wasn’t often that one could find a hidden chapel that was both accessible and had never been deconsecrated.

  It still was a chapel—but the crucifix above the altar was reversed, of course. This place belonged to another form of worship, now.

  Arachne went to the wall where a black-painted cupboard waited that held the black wine and the special wafers, while Reggie readied the altar itself. She smiled to herself, in spite of their difficulties; if it was rare to find a chapel of the sort needed for a proper Black Mass, it was even rarer to find someone who was willing to go through the seminary and ordination with the express purpose of being defrocked just so he could celebrate it.

  Clever Reggie had been the one to think of going to the Continent and lying about his age, entering a Catholic seminary at the age of fifteen, being ordained at eighteen—and being defrocked in plenty of time to pass his entrance examinations and be accepted at Cambridge with the rest of the young men his age. It had taken an extraordinary amount of work and effort. But then again, Reggie had enjoyed the action that had gotten him defrocked quite a bit. Enough that he hadn’t minded a bit when it had taken him several tries to actually be caught in the act by the senior priest of his little Provence parish.

  He had made quite certain there could be no forgiveness involved. Bad enough to be caught inflagmnte delicto with a young woman of the parish. Worse, that the act took place in the sacristy, with her drunk and insensible. But when the young woman was barely pubescent—and feeble-minded—and especially put in his charge by her trusting parents—and to cap it all with defiance of the priest, saying boldly that it was no sin, since the girl wasn’t even human—well.

  The old man had excommunicated him there and then, and had gone the extraordinary step of reporting his behavior to Rome to have his judgment reinforced with a papal decree.

  Had all this happened by accident, it would have been impossible to hush up, and would have ruined Reggie.

  But he and Arachne had been planning it from the moment he was old enough to understand just what it was that his mother was doing in her little “private bower.” He had gone to France under an assumed name. No one ever knew he had even left England.

  As for Arachne, she had been planning to somehow find a true partner from the moment she found those old books at the sale of the contents of a Plymouth townhouse.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, and savored the memory of that moment. Those books—they might have been waiting for her. It had only been chance that led her to be in Plymouth that day, to go down that street to encounter a sale in progress. Had her parents known what she’d brought home, hidden among the poetry books, they’d have died from horror. Or else, they’d never have believed, magicians though they were, that anything like the Black Mass truly had existed, far less that their daughter, their pitied magicless daughter, was learning how to steal what she had not been born with.

  That Reggie was only too happy to fall in with her plans had been the keystone that had allowed her to realize her plans in a way that fulfilled all her hopes and the wildest dreams she had dared to imagine.

  And this had brought them both prosperity built from the beginning on the power drained from her poisoned and dying paintresses; power that no Elemental Mage would ever detect, for it was so far outside the scope of their experience.

  She had gone beyond anything described in those books, in no small part because the Satanists who had written them had been so lacking in imagination. Yes, the potential power gained by sacrificing children was great—but their souls were lost to the Opposition, which was a loss as great as the gain. Why sacrifice infants, when the power generated by girls just at adolescence was so much stronger? Why sacrifice those whose souls were clean when one could engineer the corruption of potential victims, and gain not only the power from the death, but from the fall, and the despair when, at the last, they realized their damnation?

  And why “sacrifice” them by knife or garrote or sword, when one could still be the author of their deaths by means of the way in which they earned their livings, and do so with no fear of the law? It was the slow, dull blade of lead that killed these sacrifices, making them briefly beautiful and proud (another sin!) and then stealing strength, intelligence, will, even sanity. And no one, not the police, not her social peers who gathered at her parties, not the government, not even the other workers, guessed that she was slowly and deliberately murdering them. In fact, no one thought of her as anything but a shrewd businesswoman.

  Sometimes, now and again, she wondered if other, equally successful industrialists, were pursuing the same path as she. Certainly the potential was there. So many children, working such long hours, among so much dangerous machinery—the potential sacrifices were enormous. Weaving mills, steel mills, mines—all were fed on blood as much as on sweat. She wondered now and again if she ought not to expand her own interests.

  No, I think I will leave that to Reggie. This is what I know. She decanted the black wine into the chalice; arranged the black wafers on their plate.

  But her ways were so much more—efficient—than the hurried slaughter of the unbaptized infants purchased from their uncaring, gin- or opium-sodden mothers in some slum.

  Not that she hadn’t done all that in the beginning. It was all she had been able to do, until she had married Chamberten, seen his pottery firsthand, and realized the other uses that could be made of it. And now and again, at the Great Sabbats, she had gone back to the traditional ways. But it was always better to be on the right side of the law whenever possible; it made life so much less complicated.

  “Ready?” Reggie asked. She smiled again. And turned to face her priest and son, with the instruments of their power in her hands, ready and waiting, for him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ANDREW Pike arrived back at Briareley in a moderately better mood than when he had parted from the Roeswood girl and her insufferable fiance. He assumed the man was her fiance. He couldn’t imagine any man acting so—proprietary—if he didn’t have a firm hold over a woman.

  He’d been so angry at the blighter—Reginald. Reginald Chamberten. What does she call him? “Reggie, dear?” He looks like a Reggie—money, looks and arrogance enough for five—that he had just driven poor little Pansy at a trot most of the way on the long way around to Briareley’s front gate. He couldn’t have turned her, of course; there wasn’t enough room on that lane to turn a cart. But the bright sun, the cold wind in his face, his own good sense, and the unexpectedly positive outcome of his anxious chase after poor Ellen put him back in an equable mood by the time he reached the last crossing and made the turn that would take him to the gates. Pansy sensed the change in his mood and slowed to a walk.

  He stopped being angry, and allowed himself to laugh at the foolishness of even bothering to be angry at the arrogant young jackanapes. Why should one overbearing idiot with delusions of grandeur get his temper aroused? No reason, of course. What was he to Reggie, or Reggie to him? Nothing.

  So those are the neighbors. The girl was all right. No, that was being unge
nerous. The girl was fine. Look at how she had stopped and managed to soothe Ellen—and she’d practically volunteered herself and her magic to help him with her.

  Earth and Water… the problem I’ve had is that if I could get that damned poison confined in lumps, I could get it out of her. And I could heal some, at least, of the damage. But I can’t suck it out of her blood, and that’s the problem. But a Water Master can actually purify liquid—and blood is a liquid.

  The girl—Marina. Must put the name to her—had said she wasn’t a Master. Yes, but she was the one who’d said she could help. So she must be able to do that, at least, and for his purposes it didn’t matter if she thought she was a Master, so long as she had mastered the aspect of her Element that would let her clean out the poison. She had the power to do whatever she needed to; that much was very clear. Perhaps it was the will that was lacking to make her a Master; she certainly hadn’t stood up to that arrogant blockhead who’d turned up to claim her. With a touch on the reins, he guided the gig between the huge stone pillars at the head of the drive, past the open wrought—iron gates. Pansy’s head bobbed as they came up the long graveled drive. The jolting of the gig ended as soon as the wheels touched the drive—hundreds of years of graveling and rolling went a long way toward making a stretch of driveway as flat and hard as a paved street in London. He looked up and caught sight of the house through the leafless trees.

  House? What a totally inadequate word for the place. It was an amazing pile of a building, parts of it going all the way back to Henry the Third, and it was no wonder that its former owner had let it go so cheaply. If it hadn’t been for magic, he would never have been able to make the place habitable. But it was amazing what a troupe of Brownies could and would pull off, given the reason to.

  Odd little beggars, Brownies. Lady Almsley claimed they must be Hindu or Buddhist, the way they worked like the very devil for anyone who really, truly deserved the help, and were off like a shot if you tried to do something to thank them. “Building up good karma, or dogma, or whatever it is,” Lady Almsley said in her usual charming and deceptively muddle-headed manner. “I get rather confused with all those mystical things—but it just quite ruins it for them, steals all of it away, if you pay them for what they do, or even try to thank them.”

  Of course, they couldn’t abide Cold Iron, not the tiniest particle of it, and he’d had to remove every nail and iron hinge in the place before they could move in to work. Thank God most of the place was good Devon stone, and the woodwork had mostly been put together the old-fashioned way, with wooden pegs instead of nails. Even so, he’d spent all of his time moving one room ahead of the busy little beggars, pulling nails and whatnot, and hoping what he took out didn’t mean parts of his new acquisition were about to come tumbling down on his head.

  Hearing what it was he was going to do with it though—that had pretty much insured that every Brownie not otherwise occupied on the whole island of Logres turned up to help. One month; that was all it had taken for the Brownies to do their work. One single month. Two months of preparation by him just to give them a place to start, and the one month keeping barely ahead of them. He never would have believed it, if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

  He suspected that they had had help as well; Brownies weren’t noted for forge-work, and every bit of ironmongery had been replaced with beautifully crafted bronze and copper. They didn’t do stonework so far as he knew, but every bit of stone was as good or better than new, now. All the wet rot and dry rot—gone. Woodwork, floors, ceilings, roof, all repaired. Every draft, hole and crack, stopped. Chimneys cleaned and mended. Stone and brickwork retucked (and who had done that? Gnomes? Dwarves? Surely not Kobolds—though not all Kobolds were evil-minded and ill-tempered). Slates replaced, stones made whole, vermin vanished. He’d asked one of the fauns how they did it, he’d gotten an odd explanation.

  “They remind the house of how it was, when it was new.” Though how one “reminded” a house of anything, much less how that could get it repaired, he could not even begin to imagine. Sometimes the best thing that an Elemental Master could do was to bargain with the Elementals themselves, then step back and allow them to determine how something was accomplished.

  All right, none of it was major repair, it was all just little things that would quickly have required major repair if they’d gone on. The problem was, with a mismatched barn like this one, there were a great many of those little things; probably why the original owner hadn’t done anything about them. When the money got tight, it was always the little bits of repair that got put off and forgotten. Tiny leaks in the roof that never gave any trouble became gaping holes, missing slates let in hordes of starlings and daws, cracks widened, wood rotted—then gave way.

  Thank heavens I was able to step in before the trickle of small problems turned into a flood of disaster.

  He could never have paid to have it all done in the normal way, no one could have. Not even one of those American millionaires who seemed to have pots and pots of money to throw about. It hadn’t been just his doing; every Earth Master he knew had called in favors, once word had gotten around of what he was up to. Bless ‘em, for they’re all going to be doing their own housekeeping for the next ten years, doubtless.

  For that was what Brownies usually did; household repair was just part of that. Mind, only the most adamantly Luddite of the Earth Masters still had Brownies about—people who lived in remote cottages built in the Middle Ages, genuine Scottish crofters, folk on Lewis and Skye and the hundred tiny islands of the coast. Folk who cooked with copper and bronze pots and implements, and kept—at most—a single steel knife in the house, shielded by layers of silk. Now they would be doing their own cleaning and mending for a time.

  And by the time their Brownies returned, they’d probably had gotten used to having Cold Iron about, and all the conveniences and improvements that Cold Iron meant, and the Brownies would never come back to their homes. The price, perhaps, of progress?

  Makes one wonder. I cannot even imagine doing without Cold Iron, steel. Well, think of all the screws and nails, the hinges and bits and bobs that are absolutely integral to the building alone! Let alone iron grates in the fireplaces, the stove and implements in the kitchen all the ironmongery in the furniture! It was only this one time, for this one reason, that I was able to. And very nearly not even then. It had been an exhausting three months, and one he hadn’t been entirely certain he would survive.

  Already there was so much Cold Iron back in the place that the creatures who were most sensitive couldn’t come within fifty miles. Small wonder few people saw the Oldest Ones anymore, the ones the Celts had called the Sidhe; there was no place “safe” for them on the material plane anywhere near humans.

  He drove Pansy around to the stables—ridiculous thing, room for twenty horses and five or six carriages in the carriage house—driving her into the cobblestone courtyard in the center of the carriage house to unharness her, getting her to back up into the gig’s bay so he wouldn’t have to push it into shelter by hand. Another advantage to being an Earth Master, his ability to communicate with animals.

  With the gig’s shafts resting on the stone floor of the carriage-bay, he gathered up the long reins so that Pansy wouldn’t trip on them and walked her to her stall in the stables. He supposed it was ridiculous for the chief physician—and owner!—of the sanitarium to be unharnessing and grooming his own horse but—well, there it was, Diccon was still in the manor, probably looking after some other chore that needed a strong back, and he wasn’t going to let Pansy stand about in harness, cold and hungry, just because he was “too good” to do a little manual labor.

  And Pansy was a grateful little beast. So grateful that she cheered him completely out of any lingering annoyance with that arrogant Reggie Chamberten.

  But how had a girl like that gotten engaged to someone like him? They were, or seemed to be, totally incompatible personalities. Unless it was financial need on her part, or on her famil
ys. Stranger things had happened. Just because one owned a manor, that didn’t mean one was secure in the bank. Look what had happened to Briareley.

  He went in through the kitchen entrance—a good, big kitchen, and thanks to the Brownies, all he’d had to do was move in the new cast-iron stove to make it perfect for serving all his patients now, and the capacity to feed the many, many more he hoped to have one day. Right now, he had one cook, a good old soul from the village, afraid of nothing and a fine hand with plain farm fare, who used to cook for the servants here. Red-faced and a little stout, she still moved as briskly as one of her helpers, and she was always willing to fix a little something different, delicate, to tempt a waning appetite among his patients. Helping her were two kitchen maids; a far cry from the days when there had been a fancy French cook for upstairs, a pastry cook, and a cook for downstairs and a host of kitchen maids, scullions, and cleaning staff to serve them.

  “Where is Eleanor?” he asked Mrs. Hunter, the cook.

  “She’s still with that poor little Ellen, Doctor, but Diccon recks the girl will be all right. He’s took up a hot brick for her bed, and a pot of my good chamomile tea.” Mrs. Hunter beamed at him; she approved of the fact that he took charity patients along with the wealthy ones—and she approved of the fact that he was trying to cure the wealthy ones rather than just warehousing them for the convenience of their relatives. In fact, Mrs. Hunter approved of just about everything he had done here, which had made his acceptance by Oakhurst village much smoother than it would have been otherwise. Not that the folk of Devon were surly or standoffish, oh, much to the contrary, they were amazingly welcoming of strangers! During his early days here, when he’d gotten lost on these banked and hedged lanes time and time again, he’d found over and over that when he asked for directions people would walk away from what they were doing to personally escort him to where he needed to go. Astonishing! So much for the stereotype of the insular and surly cottager.