The Gates of Paradise

by Segoy Sands

  “Pssssst!” Merb signalled.

  Cole stopped leading Maidenhead and crawled forward to see what they were looking at. He hadn’t caught it while walking, but now, crouching low with Uilliam, Merb and Burnt, looking over the ridge, he made out the steady throb of feral drums. The remnants of the night’s camp blazed upriver to the west, casting lurid light on the water, but it was the queer drumming more than anything that gave the binturong away, a dark mass huddled at the base of the slope. Scanning higher, he saw the men sheltered among the rocks, a couple hundred yards away. It was a good spot, with a sheer slope behind them. Even if the binturong sent packs from above, they’d have to come from left and right, on exposed arms of the escarpment. If the men had enough arrows, they could pick many of them off before it came to close quarters.

  Merb grabbed Cole’s hand and pointed down. “There!” he hissed.

  A slender, silvery, scaly figure, with a skeletal face and the hoary hair of the dead glided at the forefront of the binturong horde. The sight of it made his heart pound. He had heard they were serpentine, but he had not expected it to be so long and close to the ground. It was undulating, he realized, pulsing rhythmically, and there was a man under it, Venn, the Hammer, his face a mask of staring rapture. Those scales looked hard as metal. An arrow from this distance would likely bounce away and only reveal their presence. Even swords at close range might be ineffectual. A heavy mace or pike might work, but both were hard to use on a quick, elusive target. No wonder they’d sent Venn. To his death. Or had she lured him down deliberately? His eyes went anxiously to the nail-studded hammer on Burnt’s hip. They crept back away from the ridge to make a plan.

  “We sit tight and watch,” Merb told Burnt, “make sure they hold. If things turn bad, Cole’ll start picking them off.”

  “That’s two hundred yards.”

  “Cole can hit it.”

  “And the butcher’s wife?”

  Merb nodded. “Them binturong will wait, wail, drum, and slink away at dawn.” He looked at Burnt. “She’ll make her move before that.”

  There wasn’t much to do but dig in and wait. Cole and Uilliam took the first watch and listened to the old timers snore. He didn’t know how they could fall asleep under those circumstances, but that was the Cora. A man threw away all the rules and took everything casually. Many of them treated fate as a lover and didn’t want it any different. Whatever took them, knife, arrow, fever, they’d been courting it, not hiding from it or running from it. He knew what Merb had been suggesting to Burnt, and Burnt didn’t seem to flinch at the notion, so Cole’s philosophy was, let him sleep and snore to his heart’s content because chances were he’d be making love to the rusalka before dawn, and liking it. Luckily, the horses were quiet. They stood in the dark, heads down, hardly twitching a muscle. Apparently they knew their lives depended on silence. After a while, Merb woke and joined them. Uilliam still didn’t want to sleep, so Cole lay down on the cold hard ground. His stomach was empty but at least his throat wasn’t dry. He closed his eyes, entrusting his life to the Lady.

  As his mind slipped into the limbo between sleeping and waking, he heard the drums growing louder. He was sinking into the oblivion of sleep, but he also felt, strangely, that he was sinking through the mountain, through soil and stone out into the dark, gathered throng. He saw them clearly all around him. Some were feasting on men they’d killed. Others were pining for the live manflesh pinned behind the rocks. The salka was dancing her sidelong way up the slope. To some of the men above, she’d appear as a reptilian succubus, while others would see the woman their heart most desired, only fuller, riper, more beguiling. As he saw her now, she was neither. She was a thin bar of bilious phosphorescence. She would fill some with aversion, others with attraction, to set the men above against each other, and to lure specific individuals down.

  Occasionally, they loosed arrows, which either missed or bounced off her scaly torso. He could feel those men, their morale, their state of mind. He’d been riding with some of them for over a year, and it was disturbing to sense their feelings, from terror to lust. But the salka was neutral, disinterested, hunting for something specific. It turned and looked in his direction with sickly yellow eyes, its thoughts and feelings cloaked. He should have been afraid but he was inordinately curious about the two primeval fox heads that were poking out through the palms of his hands. Each was a perfect skylla blade gleaming with a faint silver light. They tugged on his spirit body, moving him back up through the earth, toward a pack of binturong intent on the scent of horses and men above. Fanning out, they broke into a four-legged, bloodthirsty run.

  Instead of blood, they tasted the wicked blade of a grizzled old man. Cole saw Burnt, too, standing over his own body, and found himself struggling to puzzle out how he could see himself yet not feel Burnt booting him wickedly in the ribs. He felt a panicked urgency to feel those kicks, to be in his body again, but the foxes in his hands plunged him into the fray, ghostly as he was.

  Uilliam seemed the most beset, so he rushed to his side, though he suspected he was little more than a spirit vapor that could do nothing to stop the binturong leaping for the desperate man’s throat. But his hands acted on their own. The left hand shimmered silver, in a movement that felt gentle, but that pulped the feral’s internal organs and hurled it like a foul rag back into the pack. Merb and Burnt were ploughing through the others so efficiently that two were slinking away. Cole found himself upon them, pushing out their spirit winds, so engrossing, so tempting to follow, such beguiling twists of air that it was worth losing his name, his thread of time and identity, his way back from the ancient cave temple set into the dark stone base of the mountain, worth even moving towards the horned, wrathful, dark blue aurochs-headed demon smoldering in its recesses, nine heads in dizzying manifold colors, each with three terrible eyes and bared fangs. Its many arms and legs were slowly dancing, as it inhaled him toward its flaming nostrils, so that he began to flow toward it, a stream of tingling particles, each a perfect miniature of that ox-headed guide. But he was not of the fiáin, and that was not his entryway into the caverns of death. Vaguely, he realized that he was in the wrong place, and that untold horrors would follow from his trespass, but the ox-headed demon had turned its baleful, inexorable eyes upon him. The foxes in has hands were barking, tugging at him, speaking in words he began to understand.

  “Wake the foc up! Wake up, now,” Merb was shaking him back and forth. “Good, good, open your eyes. Come out of it. See, he’s fine, Burnt, I told you. Just sleeping like an idiot boy. Missed the excitement,” he said, patting his cheek hard, with a gap-toothed grin. Cole saw feral corpses strewn around them. The horses were snorting, and stamping, half-wild. “There’ll be more soon. It’s their archers we need to avoid.”

  Everything Merb said was sharp and clear. Maybe it was the danger, but he was wide awake and thinking fast. The ridge wouldn’t afford enough cover if binturongs with bows discovered them. He didn’t like the idea of being pinned full of their foul black quills. The other side of the ridge was too steep for horses.

  “Down. We climb down,” he said. “Shelter where arrows can’t reach.”

  Without batting an eyelash, Merb nodded and took the lead. Cole took the rear again, letting the old vets begin the descent down the steeper side of the ridge, and letting Uilliam be first to follow. They had to go slow in the dark, and soon enough the face became almost sheer, but Merb and Burnt were climbing down weapons and all. One slip meant falling, brains splattered on the rocks below, but they were either crazier or less cowardly than he was, and he couldn’t afford to figure out which. He let his fingers and toes dig into creases and crevices as adrenaline drove him away from the sprouting threat of arrows. Moments later, he was on a narrow ledge with the other three, not quite able to remember the sequence of actions that had got him there. They crouched and waited. It was nearly dawn. Maybe an hour or so. But Merb was nodding up toward the ridge, worried. Cole heard it, the slithering sound of the
rusalka already coming down the face toward them.

  “Mother protect us,” Uilliam breathed.

  Merb shook his head. “I always said one day Fionne Finnie’d be my doom.”

  “Blindfold me,” Burnt ordered them.

  “You might pulp us,” Merb noted, but he was already tearing a swatch of cloth from his own tunic. “If you can pulp her, too, those other fellas on the hill will thank you.”

  Burnt made sure the blindfold was doubled and cinched tight over his eyes. Then he pulled his hammer off his hip and held the heft in one hand, the haft in the other. Cole hadn’t thought to bring anything but the knife in his belt, which wouldn’t be any good. For his part, Merb still had his peculiar double-edged square-headed chopping blade. Ugly weapon, but not likely to be much use. After a long, awful silence, they heard a young woman’s tremulous voice.

  “Help! Help me, please! I don’t want to fall!”

  He knew it for a trick, but it pulled on him. What if it really is a girl? He couldn’t help but need to make one hundred percent sure.

  “Please, someone help, they’re coming!” she cried again, and they could hear her slipping, making scraping sounds, clinging desperately to the sheer stone face, sobbing. “Mother of life, mother of mercy, please help me!”

  After a while, there was silence. Dawn was sifting the darkness through its slow, subtle sieves. Blindfolded, stolid, grim Burnt stood waiting. Merb knit his fierce white brows together, listening hard. Uilliam backed up as far as he could against the wall. A hand reached down from the outer rim of the overhang, close to Cole. Before he could convince himself to stab at it, a pretty young girl with a gently reproachful expression pulled herself onto the ledge. He had thought it would take the likeness of someone he’d known, but he’d never seen her before in his life. Only, naked and fair as she was, with that look of fond rebuke, she reminded him of dozen lazy summers. He might have more lazy summers if he lived until dawn. But, supporting herself against him, she made him weak. He’d never known how little he had let himself feel. Out of a long numbness, he could feel for others. His body was freed from itself as from a prison. Her hand on the small of his back sent heat up his spine, and though was anxious to take his eyes off her to warn Merb not to harm her, he realized now that such cautions were needless. All fears were groundless. The goodly world was far more benign than he’d allowed himself to believe. All the wasted energies of defensive wariness - all those extraneous deluded imaginings - those vestigial animal instincts that kept one from being fully human - were becalmed.

  Even the sudden wind of Burnt’s blind swing, and the bellow of his deep voice, was harmless. She caught the iron head of his hammer in her small hand, like a harmless toy. They needed no weapons because she was the tender promise of happiness that rested in all things. Stepping forward, she deftly pulled the blindfold from Burnt’s eyes. The big man knelt and trembled.

  “I’m the butcher’s wife,” she said, as dignified and sweet as a young queen to her subjects. “But the butcher won’t mind if you keep me company.”

  7 The doorless door

  Bu and Hog spent the day in pointless, circumlocutionary palaver about the eventuality of a return visit to Nessere. For his part, Dillan was content to lie in his bunk and let them talk about him like he wasn’t in the room. He needed time to himself to think about what had happened between him and La’mo. Had something passed from her to him? Why had Kunnok stopped the three of them if not because La’mo truly was a viaisa? She’d been very interested in his pendant, and maybe she’d sent word to Kunnok. But either of them could have had it stolen from it easily, if that was what they wanted. In fact, he had to admit, he’d felt so wild for her that he would have given it to her, whatever its worth might be, if Lorca had not asked him to give it eventually to Boinn. No matter how he looked at it, his heart told him he had to go back to Nessere as soon as he could. Je might answer some of his questions, but for reasons he couldn’t explain, he felt more reluctant to go to Je than to walk back through the Black Gate.

  Bu and Hog were as nervous as he was, and therefore, all the more deeply involved in outdoing one another in expressing eagerness for another night of revels at Zodo’s. They did have, for all appearances, good cause for a return visit. They’d won quite a bit on Dillan’s match, placing bets from outside. Big bets. A piece of gold each on Dill against the Darad boy. Even even when they heard the odds, they still did not put two and two together to grasp that the so-called “boy” might be a ringer. They figured people hadn’t seen milk mild Dill fight yet and preferred to bet on the guy they’d just seen win. Truth was, the Eye had done them a massive favor by not letting them in, because if they’d seen for themselves, they’d have bet heavily against Dillan, too, no hard feelings. After Je left, when it seemed appropriate to return to the default mode of shameless hedonism, they’d brought out a jug of the strong stuff, and it wasn’t long before their minds, grown philosophical, turned back to the epic smile on Dill’s face when he came out of Zodo’s house of iniquities.

  “His funny bone,” Hog mused. “She found it. Then she giggled, too.”

  “Indeed,” Bu nodded, sententiously. “I can clearly conceive the cooperative causal processes that might produce such consequent concomitant conditions, and therefore, with a fair degree of confidence, I can assert that, physiological facts so fleeting yet agreeable, rooted as they are in direct corporeal experience, leave profound impressions in the memory stream, to the benefit of a growing body of knowledge.”

  “Just so, my dear Bu,” Hog said, not quite as up to the game (for lack of an itinerant apothecary father glib from frequent dealings loan sharks), but brave in his efforts. “I know the lengthening body of knowledge of which you speak, and agree with you, and in this we are both of one carnal mind.”

  “Hence, it follows, pursuant, that she’ll have an exponentially easier time finding my funny bone,” Bu measured out what appeared to be a voluminous length of cord. “Her giggling will blossom into gratulant glee.”

  “A big belly laugh,” Hog agreed.

  “Bah! Big is vacuous, belly pregnant, a breached bag,” Bu dissented. “I’ll have her jiggling and and squealing and squalling.”

  “Spoken like an earthling in his earthly debasement. Like the bastard second son of a swineherd.” Belching, Hog tried to sustain the rich rolling sound for as long as possible, the better to simulate a stream of projectile vomit.

  That night he had a dream. A big white bird was trying to get in, its heavy wings flapping against the wood. But when he opened the door, it was gone. Outside, a full moon glowed, milkier than an opal, huge and cratered, above trees that seemed taller and older than they should have. The air smelled all at once too fresh, and the sound of the distant river too loud. Countless ásu were bursting in the air, radiances so small and gentle one could not say if they were lives or non-lives. They seemed to gather thickest around the amulet of the Lady at his neck, intelligences communing in a language that just escaped sense, in a world withdrawn by its very nature. He could almost hear the ceaseless chaunt of holy syllables and the shining of presences beyond his ken, from the effulgence of the Lady herself. The sior. The high Orroch name for Aina Livia was Siorsior, though the two were moving apart from one another.

  A hand took his arm and drew him from the moonlit woods to an arid canyon under a blue sky, leading him to the mouth of an ancient temple complex carved into dark basalt cliffs. Some of the temples were embedded in the rock face, their entries marked by white pillars, with no visible way up. Others erupted in open courts that led into vast caves. High atop one of the largest buildings - perfectly square, every inch ornamentally graven, less a thing of mundane stone than of some celestial substance - four gilded lions faced the four directions on a carved flower of many petals and many hues. He had never seen anything so heavy with the past, but Lamo was next to him urging him to attend to the details. There were thousands upon thousands of figures at varied scales in varied scenes, on hig
h columns, freestanding pillars, rock bridges, porches, panels, aisles, vestibules, niches, stairs, arches, rails, porticos, and colonnades, engaged in every imaginable variety of sexual union. Looking at them, he had to blink his eyes, because they seemed to be moving, as if not stone but fluid. Some were twice his size, others no bigger than his little finger, but all were blissfully absorbed in ceaseless forms of ecstatic union. Even the minute threads of Lamo’s garbs were commingling lovers.

  “These are the doors, the father and mother, the subtle energy and essences. First is the seven-bolted door, which is called the father, the blissful nodes of the body, which flow with warmth through union with a lover. When warmth and bliss melt the man-made structures of ideas, then the dissolved mind glimpses the subtle dancing infinite sweetness. Second is the open door, the bare, pristine dancer without body that is the mother, the sweetness itself. Third is the most difficult, the doorless door. There, sweetness arises in the midst of gross ideas themselves.” She traced a line from his navel to his solar plexus to his heart. “By these passages, countless have climbed the spiral.”