The Gates of Sleep

by Mercedes Lackey

  “But why send me away and never come even to see me?” she asked softly, plaintively. “Why never, ever come in person?”

  “Haven’t you ever seen nesting birds leading hunters away from their little ones?” Alanna asked wistfully. “We couldn’t lead Arachne away, but it was the same idea. We never sent you away because we didn’t love you—we sent you because we loved you so much. And of all the people we could send you to—Margherita was the only choice. We knew that she would love you as if you were her own.”

  The pain in her voice recalled the tone of all those letters, hundreds of them, all of them yearning after the daughter Alanna was afraid to put into jeopardy. Marina felt, suddenly, deeply ashamed of her outburst.

  “The one thing we didn’t take into account was that she might become so desperate as you neared your eighteenth birthday that she would move against us,” Hugh continued, with a smoldering look that told Marina that he was angry at himself. “I became complacent, I suppose. She hadn’t acted against us, so she wouldn’t—that was a stupid assumption to make. And believe me, there was a will, naming Margherita and Sebastian as your legal guardians. I don’t know what happened to it, but there was one.”

  “Madam must have had it stolen,” Marina said, thinking out loud. “She had a whole gaggle of lawyers come and fetch me; perhaps one of those extracted it.” She began to feel a smoldering anger herself—not the unproductive rage, but a calculating anger, and one that, if she could get herself free, boded ill for Madam. “She’s laid this out like a campaign from the beginning! Probably from the moment she discovered that—that cesspit at her first pottery!”

  “Cesspit?” they both asked together, and that occasioned yet another explanation.

  “My first guess must have been the right one,” Marina said, broodingly. “That must be why she went to the pottery a few days ago—it wasn’t to deal with an emergency, it was to drink in the vile power that she used on me!”

  “We never could understand where she got her magic,” Hugh replied, looking sick. “And it was there all along, if only we’d thought to look for it.”

  “What could you have done if you’d found it?” Marina countered swiftly. “Confront her? What use would that have been? There is nothing there to link her with it directly—and other than the curse, nothing that anyone could have said against her. She could claim she didn’t mean it, if you confronted her, if you set that Circle of Masters in London on her. She could say it was all an accident. And it still wouldn’t have solved my problem. All that would have happened is that she would have found some way to make you look—well—demented.” She pursed her lips, as memory of a particular interview with Madam surfaced. “In fact, she tried very hard to make me think that you were unbalanced, mother. That you were seeing things—only she didn’t know that I knew very well what those stories you told me in your letters were about. She thought that I was ordinary, with no magic at all, so the tales of fauns and brownies would sound absolutely mad.” She shook her head. “Not that it matters,” she finished, bleakly. “Not now. I could have all the magic of a fully trained Water Master, and it still wouldn’t do me any good in here.”

  “But there may be some hope!” Alanna exclaimed. “Your friends—that doctor and his staff—they were the ones that Arachne called! You’re in Briareley as a patient on Arachne’s own orders, and they’ve brought Sebastian and Margherita, Thomas and Elizabeth to help!”

  She stared at them. This news was such a shock that she felt physically stunned. And never mind that she didn’t have a way to be physically anything right now. “What?” she said, stupidly.

  “Wait a moment.” Hugh winked out—just like a spark extinguishing—then winked back in again. “My dear, it’s better than we knew when we first came to you! They have a plan—but it’s one that you have to follow, too,” Hugh told her. “They’re going to do something to either force Arachne to break this containment, or force her inside it as well. In either case, you will have to be the one to win your own freedom from her.”

  He had no sooner finished this astonishing statement than something rocked the orb and its contents—it felt as Marina would have imagined an earthquake would feel. It sent feelings of disequilibrium all through her, quite as if her sense of balance stopped working, then started up again. She didn’t have insides that could go to water, but that was what it felt like.

  “And that will be it, I think—” Hugh stated, as another such impulse rocked Marina and the little worldlet. A third—a fourth—if Marina had been in her own body, she knew she would have been sick into one of the dying bushes. Instead, she just felt as if she would like to be sick.

  “She’s coming!” Alanna gasped—and the two spirits winked out. With no more warning than that, Marina steeled herself. But she made herself a pledge as well. No matter what the outcome—she was not going to remain here. Whether she came out of here to return to her physical body or not, she was not going to remain.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  THE moment after Hugh and Alanna vanished, there was a fifth convulsion, worse than all the previous ones combined. It shocked her mind; shocked it out of all thought save only that of self-awareness, and only the thinnest edge of that.

  For a brief moment, everything around Marina flickered and vanished into a universal gray haze, shot through with black-green lightning. She was, for that instant, nothing more than a shining spark on the end of a long, thin silver cord, floating unanchored in that haze, desperately trying to evade those lightning-lances. Something—a black comet, ringed with that foul light, shot past her before she had time to do more than recognize that it was there.

  Then it was all back; the withered garden, the ring of brambles, she herself, standing uncertainly at the edge of the circle of brown-edged grass. But there was an addition to the garden. Marina was not alone.

  Standing opposite Marina, with her back to the wall of thorns, stood Madam Arachne.

  She was scarcely recognizable. Over Arachne’s once-impassive face flitted a parade of expressions—rage, surprise, hate—and one that Marina almost didn’t recognize, for it seemed so foreign to Madam’s entire image.

  Confusion.

  Quite as if Madam did not recognize where she was, and had no idea how she had gotten here.

  But the expression, if Marina actually recognized it for what it was, vanished in moments, and the usual marble-statue stillness dropped over her face like a mask.

  Marina held herself silent and still, but behind the mask that she tried to clamp over her own features, her mind was racing and her heart in her mouth. Instinctively, she felt that there was something very important about that moment of nothingness that she had just passed through. And if only she could grasp it, she would have the key she needed.

  And now she wanted more than just to escape—for she had realized as she watched her parents together that she wanted to return to someone. Dr. Andrew Pike, to be precise. She must have fallen in love with him without realizing it; perhaps she hadn’t recognized it until she saw her parents together.

  And she knew, deep in her heart, that he wasn’t just sitting back and letting her old friends and guardians try to save her. He was in there fighting for her, himself, and it wasn’t just because he was a physician.

  I have to survive to get back to him, first, she reminded herself tensely.

  “Well,” Madam said dryly. “Isn’t this—interesting.”

  Marina held her peace, but she felt wound up as tightly as a clock-spring, ready to shatter at a word.

  Madam looked carefully around herself, taking her time gazing at what little there was to see. Then, experimentally, she pointed a long finger at a stunted and inoffensive bush.

  Black-green lightning lanced from the tip of that finger and incinerated the half-dead bit of shrubbery—eerily doing so without a sound, except for a hiss and a soft puff as the bush burst into flame.

  Madam stared at her finger, then at the little fountain of fire, smoke, and
ash, and slowly, coldly, began to smile. When she turned that smile on Marina, Marina’s blood turned to ice.

  “Bringing me here was a mistake, my girl,” Madam said silkily. “And believe me, it will be your last.”

  That was when it struck Marina—what that moment of nothingness had meant. Although her spirit might be imprisoned here and unable to return to her physical self, this place and everything in it took its shape from the minds of those who were held here.

  Madam had realized this fundamental fact first; only the faint rustle behind her and the sense that something was about to close on her warned Marina that Madam had launched her first attack. She ducked and whirled out of reach, barely in time to escape the clutching thorn branches that reached for her, the thorns, now foot-long, stabbing for her. She lashed out with fire of her own, and the thorns burst into cold flame, flame that turned them to ash—and she felt the power in her ebbing.

  Belatedly, she realized that this could only be a diversion, turned again to face Madam, and flung up shields—behind her, the thorns scrabbled on the surface of a shield that here manifested as transparent armor—while inches from her nose, Madam’s green lightnings splashed harmlessly off the surface.

  Madam smiled—and the ground opened up beneath Marina’s feet.

  Andrew dismounted awkwardly from his mare’s back, and walked toward the front entrance of Oakhurst. The place was quiet. Too quiet. It was as if everything and everyone here was asleep… and he knew he was walking into a trap.

  He opened the door himself, or tried to—it lodged against something, and he had to shove it open. That was when he realized that it wasn’t as if everything was asleep. For the thing that had temporarily blocked the door was the body of one of the footmen, lying so still and silent that he had to stoop and feel for a pulse before he knew for certain it was sleep that held him, and not death.

  Oh, God help us… Past the entrance hall, and he came across another sleeper, the shattered vase of flowers from the hothouse beside her where she had fallen. The silence was thick enough to slice.

  His heart pounded in his ears. He knew—or guessed—why every member of the household had fallen. He could only suppose that Reggie had been with or near Madam when her spirit was jerked into the limbo where she had sent Marina. Somewhere in this great house, Madam lay as silent and unresponsive as Marina, for the tie of the curse worked both ways, and as long as Marina was still alive, the magic that bound them together could be used against Madam as well as against Marina. That was the first part of what the old Master had imparted to them; that using that binding, they could throw victim and predator together into a situation where neither—theoretically—had the upper hand. Their environment took its shape equally from both of them; in a fight, they both depended on the power held only within themselves.

  Theoretically. But Madam was older, treacherous, and far more ruthless… He couldn’t think about that now. Because Madam was only half of the equation; Reggie was the other half. Satanic rites demanded a Priest, not a Priestess, and it was in the hands of the Priest and Celebrant that most of the control resided. No matter what Madam thought, it was Reggie who was the dangerous one—doubly so, if he, unlike his mother, actually had the gift of Mastery of one of the four Elements. He hadn’t shown it—but he wouldn’t have to. The power stolen from all the tormented souls that he and his mother had consigned to their own peculiar hells was potentially so great that Reggie would never need to demonstrate the active form of Mastery. Only the passive, the receptive form, would be useful enough for him to wield—which was, of course, impossible to detect. But if Reggie could see power and manipulate it, rather than working blind as his mother was, he was infinitely more dangerous than she.

  And if he actually believed? He could have allies on his side that no mortal could hope to overcome. The one advantage to this was that such allies were tricky at best and traitorous at worst. “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.”

  “Aye, so can I, and so can any man, but will they come when you do call them?”

  Countering this was that true believers must be few and far between, and would the Lord of Darkness be willing to squander them?

  Andrew felt himself trembling, and tightened his muscles to prevent it. Yes, Reggie was the more dangerous, as this house full of sleeping servants demonstrated. Their condition proved to Andrew that Reggie was, if not a Master, a magician as well as a Satanic Priest. He had, in one ruthless move, pulled the life-energy of every servant in this house that could not resist him into his own hands, draining them just short of death. Not that he would have balked at killing them—but that could not be done by occult means, or at least, not without expending as much energy as he took in. So Reggie was now immensely powerful, bloated with the strength stolen from an entire household—his mother’s collapse a half hour ago had given him plenty of time to array his defenses, and he would, of course, be expecting an attack.

  And before he went to face his enemy, Andrew now found himself faced with a dilemma. Of all of those sleeping servants, there must be some who had fallen while doing tasks where their lives would be in danger—tending animals—near fires—

  He ran for the kitchen.

  Marina, transmorphing into the form of a wren in the blink of an eye, shot up through her own shields and darted into the cover of the dying bushes. All she could do was to thank heaven that she had spent so much time among wild creatures—she knew how they felt, moved, acted. She could mimic them well enough to use the unique strengths they had. And it didn’t take nearly as much power to do so as it did to lash out with mage-fire or change the world around her. If she could keep attacking Madam physically, Arachne could not possibly attack Marina magically. To change into a beast or a bird or some other form cost Marina a fraction of the power it took to lash out with mage-lightning. And she was younger than Arachne; that might be an advantage too.

  She left the shields in place behind her, hoping that Madam would be deceived into thinking she was still inside them.

  She peered out from under the shelter of a leaf the same color and almost the same shape as she, shaking with fear and anger mingled. Green lightning lashed at the shields, splattering across their surface, obscuring the fact that there was nothing inside them. Madam held both her hands out before her, lightning lashing from her fingertips, her face a contorted mask of hatred mingled with triumph.

  Go ahead. Waste your power. You won’t find any more here. Marina let the shields collapse in on themselves. Taken by surprise by the sudden collapse of those defenses, Madam lashed at the empty place for a moment, the energies that pummeled the spot where Marina had stood so blindingly powerful that when she cut off her attack, there was nothing there but the smoking ground.

  Madam stood staring at the place for a moment, then cautiously stepped forward to get a better look.

  She was so single-mindedly intent on destroying Marina that it had not yet dawned on her that if Marina really had been destroyed, Madam herself should have been snapped back into the real world again.

  And in that moment of forgetfulness, it was Marina’s turn to strike.

  Madam’s advantage—she was swollen, bloated with stolen power. Still. But bloated as she was—and used to having all the power she needed—she might not think to husband it. And here, probably for the first time, she was able to see what her power was doing, able to use it directly instead of indirectly. That might intoxicate her with what she could do, and make her less able to think ahead.

  Marina had to combat Madam in such a way that Madam couldn’t use all that stolen power directly. So it was a very, very good thing that Elizabeth had been so very busy collecting folk ballads as the prime motive for her visit to Blackbird Cottage—and a very good thing that Marina had been employed in making fair copies of them.

  Because one of them, “The Twa Magicians,” had given her the pattern for the kind of attack she could make, one that might lure Arachne into making a fatal mistake.

&n
bsp; That curse—I can do things against it here that I couldn’t do in the real world. I can see it—and I can move it. It’s a connection between us, and I think I can make that work in my favor.

  Swift as a thought, Marina the wren darted out of the cover of the leaves, and in the blink of an eye, had fastened herself in Madam’s hair.

  But she didn’t stay that way for long.

  With a writhing effort of will, she transmorphed herself again, and a huge serpent cast its coils about Madam in the same moment that the evil sorceress realized that something had attacked her.

  By then, it was a bit late, for her arms were pinned and the serpent was getting the unfamiliar body to contract its coils. Belatedly, Madam began to struggle, and Marina squeezed harder.

  But Madam wasn’t done yet. And what Marina could do—so could she.

  Suddenly, Marina found her coils closing on air, as a little black cat shot out from under the lowest loop just before she collapsed in a heap under her own weight. Then the little cat turned to a great black panther, and leapt on her, landing just behind her head, pinning her to the ground and biting for the back of her neck.

  That’s a ploy anyone can play—Marina became a mouse, and ran between its paws. And from behind the panther’s tail, went on the offensive again; became an elk, and charged at the big cat, tossing her into the air with her massive antlers.

  Ha! Into the air the great cat flew, and she came down as a wolf.

  But not just any wolf—one of the enormous Irish wolves, killed off long ago, but which had, in their time, decimated the herds of Irish elk.

  Oh no—! The wolf slashed at her legs, by its build and nature designed to kill elk; Marina leaped into the air—