The Spirit Gate

by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

  Kassia straightened her spine and looked Matim directly in his blue eyes. “No, I didn’t, Matim. But that was through no choice of mine. If Master Lukasha had sought to test me, if he had required me to go through some ceremony, of course I would have obeyed him. He didn’t test me. He simply wrote my name in the Book.” She managed to keep all childish tones of pride out of her voice.

  “He should have consulted the Circle,” opined Matim.

  “Over the acceptance of a Initiate?” That was Casimir. “I think they have more important things to discuss, Matim.”

  “I don’t care who discusses it!” snarled Gavmat. “It’s insulting! It’s outrageous! We had to go through evaluations and interviews and ritual acceptance. Why has she been allowed to forego those things? She went through nothing to arrive here!”

  “I,” Kassia said, rising to meet her adversary eye to eye, “went through twenty-four years of hiding my abilities—of hiding myself so I wouldn’t distress the neighbors or frighten their children. I went through twenty-four years of covering my white hair with a scarf so people wouldn’t be reminded of the Fires or the droughts or the evil Tamalids. I practiced my magic in secret and sold it in the marketplace as if it were hammered out in a smithy or thrown upon a wheel.”

  “What did you do to make Lukasha take you in?” asked Matim, voice laden with poison.

  “All I offered was my talent. He seemed to think that was sufficient to buy me a place here. What did your father pay?” From the corner of her eye she saw Ari’s face go a guilty crimson.

  Matim’s reply was dammed by the bustling entrance of Master Radman.

  By mid-day break, Kassia was convinced Matim and Gavmat would join forces to put a curse on her. Black stares met her whenever she glanced in their direction; angry whispers pelted her whenever her back was turned. Naturally, she thought irritably, it would not occur to them that she might have deserved Lukasha’s immediate acceptance. That she didn’t need the years of training in the mechanics of something that was second nature to her. She wondered how they’d react if Lukasha did make her an Apprentice.

  It struck her forcefully then that among the students at Lorant, Arax-itu was her only friend. The realization depressed her; she hadn’t wanted to alienate anyone (except, perhaps, for the odious Damek). Rather, she had thought that here, among those who studied and practiced magic, she would find a community of kindred souls. That made her friendship with Ari all the more ironic, for the Poet was seemingly poorer than anyone in natural ability.

  In the space of one morning, Kassia fell from the top of her mountain of attainment to its feet. And, to add to her burden, came the recognition that she had been so smitten with Lukasha’s books and scrolls she had not pursued the vesting of an amulet for the stranger’s baby. That in mind, she gave her apologies to Ari and sent her to dine with Beyla and Shagtai as had become their habit. Then she went to the Headmaster’s office.

  Good fortune smiled; he was actually there, holding conference with Zakarij. He dismissed the Aspirant, who departed with a soul-piercing look at Kassia from his enigmatic eyes. She stifled an inward wriggle and took the chair that Zakarij had vacated.

  “Master,” she began, forcing her hands to remain relaxed on her knees. “Master, I have come to beg a great favor of you.”

  Lukasha smiled kindly. “Speak, child. What may I do for you?”

  She leaned forward, heart tripping slightly. “Teach me to invest an amulet.”

  Lukasha sap back in his chair, fingers steepled upon his chest. “Your instructor will teach you that when the time comes for you to learn it.”

  “The time has come, Master, and passed.” She pressed further forward, hands fisted on the table top. “Please, Master Lukasha, I need to know this.”

  His brow furrowed. “Such earnestness. Perhaps you will explain why?”

  “Before I came here, I went in to New Dalibor with my . . . to try to earn some money giving readings. A young woman came to me there . . . or rather, I called her to me.”

  Lukasha’s brows rose. “You called her. Using a Summons spell?”

  Kassia blushed. “Using an old fishing spell my mother taught me. I . . . edited it slightly, hoping it would draw customers instead of fish.”

  The Master’s mouth twitched at its wide corners. “It worked, I assume.”

  Kassia nodded. “The girl I drew had a baby boy. He was a beautiful little boy—only weeks old. But when I touched him . . .” She pressed fingers to her cheek, remembering the soft warmth of the baby’s skin, the icy cold behind it. “I felt a void. I felt that he would die. In a fire. I so frightened the mother that she took the child and ran. All I could do was call out a warning and pray she heard it. Then I . . . I set a blessing on the child, but I don’t know if it reached him, or if Itugen heard my prayers.” She thrust herself forward again, hands clasped in supplication. “Master, if I could only be sure that the baby is safe. I can’t bear the thought of his death.”

  Lukasha, smiling from the depths of his eyes, laid a hand over her clasped ones. “Dear Kassia, how kind your heart is. I wish all who came here possessed such a heart. If I teach you the investment of amulets what will you do with the knowledge?”

  “I’ll create the strongest fire ward I can devise and set it in a talisman. Then I’ll find that mother and give it to her for her child.”

  “Do you think she will accept it from one who has so terrified her?”

  “I’d make her accept it.”

  “As you made her accept your warning and your blessing?”

  “I couldn’t be sure of those things. I could be sure of this.”

  Lukasha squeezed her hand. “Dear Kassia, you can never be sure. Had you the greatest talisman or ward in the world, still there would be doubt. A warded area can be left. If you invested the very house in which this child lives, still the fire that took him might occur in a shop or while his mother visited another home. An amulet, likewise, can be forgotten, lost or stolen. What if the mother, wearing the amulet, leaves the babe in the care of another?”

  “Then I may never know he’s safe?” The thought made Kassia’s heart feel suddenly hollow.

  “Kassia, none of us ever knows. We all, every one, live with uncertainty. Magic is not proof against that uncertainty.” He rose and moved around the table to pace the stone floor beside her chair. She watched him, eyes feeling like great, empty glass baubles. “I have no way to be sure that a person I strive to protect will allow himself that protection. Will the king wear the crown with the talisman stone? Will he put on the warded garment? Or will he leave both at home and go out hunting on a green horse with men he ought not trust? People have free will, Kassia—a gift from Mat and Itugen. And they will exercise that will. I have more trust in the sound advice I give the king than I do in any amulet or ward I may set upon him. And so, I think, does he.”

  “Then you’re telling me you won’t teach me this thing.”

  Behind her, Lukasha sighed deeply. A moment later his hands rested on her shoulders. “I’m telling you, dear girl, that the ward may be outrun and the talisman neglected, but that a warning, if taken, will serve the recipient of that warning wherever they go. Count on your love for that unknown child, Kassia, count on his mother’s love, for that is something Itugen values above your knowledge of wards or amulets. Your warning and your blessing are better for that child than any ward that could be bestowed.”

  “If I could only know that she heard me,” Kassia murmured.

  Lukasha shook her gently. “I am also telling you that uncertainty is a fact of human life. If there is one thing you must learn about your magic, it is how to detach yourself from the effects of it. By that I don’t mean you are absolved from responsibility if something you do causes harm. I mean you must enter into every spell with a pure heart, and having done so, practice detachment from its ends.”

  It sounded like something from the little Buddhist book she kept beside her bed. “Then there’s nothing I can do?�
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  The comforting hands lifted, leaving Kassia bereft. “Kassia, there is much more you can do. Your destiny does not reside in the setting of wards or the making of petty amulets. Haven’t you realized that yet?” His voice rang so with conviction, with passion, with something more, that she twisted in her chair, trying to follow him with her eyes. He was looking at her, his own eyes every bit as opaque and secret as Zakarij’s.

  “What do you mean?”

  In answer, he moved to her side and loosed her grasp on the arm of her chair. Taking her hand in his, he brought her to her feet and led her to the foot of the spiral stair. Her heart leapt in her breast. She would enter Lukasha’s most private sanctum—a place she doubted more than a handful of people had entered. The place where he performed his own magics. She followed him, quivering, like a bride being led to her marriage bed. Up the twisted stair she climbed, her eyes ready to drink the room above, senses extended in a questing web, to touch its every secret contour. At the top of the steps she hesitated, but Lukasha drew her on until she stood in the center of his domain.

  It was a large room—circular like the cesia that sat at the end of the east wing, but much smaller. The vaulted ceiling terminated in an elaborate juncture of arches, the thick wooden spines apparently cut from whole trees. Between the spines she could see six equal wedges of muraled ceiling, each wedge depicting the sky at a different time of day or night. It was like a wheel that spun from deepest night to brightest day and back in an eternal cycle.

  Dizzied by that view, Kassia lowered her eyes and realized that she had been turning in a circle, following the sweep of the wheel. Glancing down, she realized that she was standing at the exact center of the room upon a circular dais of dark, satiny wood. Forming a border about her was a band of gold inlay about four inches wide—the circle of Itugen. Just outside it, embracing it, was a like band of silver, which represented the domain of Mat. Beneath her feet four elongated diamonds formed a cross of gold, silver, copper and cobalt stained tile.

  “This is the locus, Kassia,” Lukasha told her. “This is the place from which I perform my most potent magic.”

  She had known that, she realized. She could feel the power that was uniquely Lukasha’s rising through her and around her like a lingering mist. Shivering, she took in the rest of the room. Along the walls were shelves bearing books, scrolls, jars, pots, boxes and chests containing the elements, both physical and metaphysical, of Lukasha’s craft. There were cabinets of rich wood, with snugly closed doors.

  At the four points of the compass were windows, each with a window seat, each partially obscured by a curtain of thick midnight velvet. The windows themselves were floor to ceiling expanses of glittering crystal, bound by a framework of silver metal. At the heart of the center window in each group was a quartet of colorful panes—blue, red, yellow and green—for the four primary elements of magic, cobalt, gold, silver and copper. It was the same pattern that lay beneath her feet, the same pattern that decorated Kassia’s favorite dress. It had always fascinated her that those were also the four primary elements of her father’s glass making. As a little girl she had been convinced he was a sorcerer in his own right. Now she wondered if any of these windows might be his handiwork.

  The atmosphere in the studio was thick with secrets and the highly polished wood beneath her feet seemed to vibrate with them. Of course, she chided herself, I’m only imagining these things. The secrets are closed away in their boxes and cabinets and the floors are just floors.

  She came to herself on the realization that Master Lukasha stood beside her, watching silently. “I’m sorry, Master, I’ve never been in such a room.”

  “When you become Mateu, you will have such a place yourself. Perhaps even before.”

  When! “All Mateu have them?”

  He nodded. “Each in his own place. This has been the Headmaster’s studio since it was built. Master Yesugai has a room below the cesia in a vault. Master Radman’s studio adjoins his room. If you look from the western window you will see another dome similar to this one atop the eastern wing of the college. It belongs to Master Matumir. There are others. But come, there is something I want to show you.”

  He led her across the room to a cabinet with a complex locking mechanism of metal bars and loops. That it was also guarded by arcane locks, Kassia knew by feel if not in fact. Lukasha opened the cabinet and lifted out a fat volume bound in dark leather. It was not a book, she realized as he opened it, but a folio of loose pages. He removed one and held it out to her.

  “What do you make of this, Kassia?”

  It was not writing as she knew it, not words she could read, but the odd symbols, on what she realized was a piece of thin leather, seemed to make an odd sort of subliminal sense.

  “I . . . I don’t recognize these,” she said, but a faint tugging at her thoughts told her that was not quite true. She ran her fingers over the trail of symbols, seeking a clear path among them. Energies rose from the page like the ghostly fragrance of the earth after a rain and coursed upward through her fingers the way sap rises in a young tree. The expression on her face, in her eyes, must have told all this to the Mateu, for he put a steadying hand on her shoulder. When she raised her eyes to his face, she found him reading her, his gaze bright and intense.

  He nodded, face seeming to glow, eyes exultant. “You feel it, don’t you? And I . . . through you, I shall feel it also.”

  Kassia, suddenly overwhelmed by his regard, by the warm flood of power suffusing her, lifted her fingers from the page, breaking contact with whatever spoke to her through it.

  “What are they?” she whispered.

  “Mysteries, Kassia.” The brown eyes gleamed. “Mysteries that have lain unread for centuries. Some were copied tediously from tablets of wood and stone; others were as you see them here, if somewhat the worse for age. This one, for example, was found among a roll of other leather scrolls in a wooden tube that was itself hidden in a stone bench in our very own cesia. Others are from very ancient collections of geomancy. I have several pages of spells that were compiled and formalized by Marija of Ohdan and her predecessors. They’ve been useless to us for too many years, Kassia. I dare say many of my brethren have forgotten their existence.” He paused to search her face with his eyes and, she guessed, his own keenly developed spiritual senses. “There is a wealth of knowledge here, Kassia. Knowledge which has been denied us through our own ignorance.”

  “Surely that’s too harsh a judgment on the Mateu,” Kassia murmured. “It wasn’t your fault the Tamalids enslaved Polia.”

  “Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it, Kassia, when we had, in the beginning, the power to stop them, and did not?” He folded the wondrous pages back into the folio and returned it to the cabinet, resetting both physical and arcane locks. “The Mateu should not escape blame for the tragedy of Polia—nor did we. There were many who said, perhaps rightly, that we and the shai together could have averted it.” He turned to face her, his expression inscrutable.

  She felt impelled to speak. “My great-grandmother was past middle age when the House of Tamal arose. I don’t think she even realized the danger. I recall someone saying to my father that the Mateu could have laid a curse upon the Tamalids or done something to prevent the terror they brought.”

  “What did your father say? What would you say?”

  “That the Mateu were charged with the spiritual realm, not the petty kingdoms of men.”

  A glint of irony came to Lukasha’s eyes. “Ah. Our heavenly work is too important for us to be bothered with the lives and deaths caused by earthly tyrants.” He shook his head and light cascaded through the golden bindings in his hair. “An unworthy argument to foist upon a suffering people. An unworthy rationale to fall from the lips of a Mateu, yet many times it has.”

  He moved past her to the window overlooking the courtyard. “I stood upon those stones, Kassia, and watched people from this village, people I knew and loved, die horribly. That was the way the Tamalids struck at th
e Mateu, by murdering innocents in their presence and daring them to do anything about it. Often, it was the kin of the Mateu they struck, but I had none. So I watched young Initiates, Apprentices and Aspirants die. I watched priests be slaughtered. Only rarely were Mateu the direct targets of Tamalid wrath; it seems they were wary of provoking a conquered peoples’ gods too far. So, I personally lost only my dignity and my sense of control. But Shagtai could tell you, though he would not, what it is like to watch a beloved wife and daughter die.”

  Kassia barely stifled the sob of pain that leapt from heart to lips. Shagtai! She thought of the onghots and their little shrine. My ancestors, he’d said, and my loved ones who wait for me. Now she understood his attachment to her and Beyla.

  Lukasha, watching the play of emotion on her face said, “I know about the shrine and the icons Shagtai keeps. There are those who would call them perversions of faith, who think I am wrong not to order Shagtai to destroy them. Perhaps I am wrong, but I will never order such a thing—that would certainly be a perversion.” He shook his head, made a dismissive gesture. “I have digressed far from what I meant to say to you, Kassia Telek. Today, you touched a piece of your heritage—the old magics, the secrets of both shai and Mateu from a time when they were one. Some of that magic has not been used for centuries.”

  “Why so long, Master?”

  “Even before the days of Empire, the shai that devoted themselves to Lorant were few. Then, a choice was required. A difficult choice for most women—an unfair choice, perhaps—to become Mateu, or to become wives and mothers. To belong to a broad family of spirit, or to foster families of their own. Very few women chose the path of the Mateu .”

  Kassia’s brown furrowed. “There is no law to keep the Mateu from marrying.”

  “No. There is only pragmatism and duty. It has been enough to keep most women from doing what you and Arax-itu are attempting to do. But again, we digress. What I’m saying to you, Kassia, is that you have been brought here to resurrect the old magic.”