The World of The Gateway Boxset

by E. E. Holmes

  “Wow, close one,” I muttered. “Thanks, Mack.”

  “Anytime. Follow me, and mind you keep to a whisper,” Mackie said, stepping past me and starting down the steps.

  The room below us was perfectly circular, just like inside the other towers, but unlike the other tower rooms, there were no windows anywhere. In fact, there was nothing on any of the walls at all; no paintings, no tapestries, nothing. The unbroken stretch of bare stone reached up to the dark shadowy recesses of the rafters and disappeared. In the absence of windows, the only light in the room emanated from four large torches in tall bronze standing brackets set at what I knew instinctively, after creating countless Circles, to be the four points of the compass. These torches threw an orange, wavering light over the floor, which was painted with an enormous and incredibly detailed map of the world. I stared at it for a dumbstruck moment. Though it was clearly a map of the world as I knew it—I recognized the shapes of the continents—it was not the world as I knew it. The golden borders that snaked their way through the land masses were not of the familiar countries and cities I had learned in school as a kid, but instead divided the world up in Durupinen terms. This, I realized, was a clan map, carving out the strongholds and ancient seats of different clans through the ages. All of the words were in a form of Britannic so ancient that I was sure I wouldn’t find a single familiar word upon it, even with all of my recent study of Gaelic and Britannic Castings.

  But by far the most fascinating aspect of the room was the gargantuan gold pendulum that hung suspended over the map. It was easily the size of a small car, with a round, bulbous body and a pointed bottom, rather like a spinning top. Shining runes were engraved all around it, encircling its massive bulk like an equator. The gilded monstrosity hung on a great chain of golden links, which disappeared up into the rafters, and was swinging in a very steady rhythm, back and forth over the face of the map. Other than the swish of air, it made no sound, but the longer we watched it, I felt something like a hum—the steady, singing presence of powerful energy—ringing in my bones.

  “Wow,” Hannah breathed. Her face was alight with awe.

  “Be careful not to step on the map itself,” Mackie said. “Keep to the path.”

  When we reached the bottom of the stairs, Mackie stepped onto a wide gold stripe of paint that left a narrow pathway all the way around the outside of the room, and it was along this shining band we trod to meet the keeper of the Léarscáil.

  The old woman was tiny, shriveled, and hunched, like an old crone in a fairy tale; I half expected her to offer me a poisoned apple. She wore a long, wool robe which fell to her ankles, revealing leathery old feet, the soles of which appeared to be tattooed with dozens of runes. She was seated on a rickety wooden stool at a long, narrow table that had been built into the curve of the wall. She was writing with a quill— I shit you not, an actual quill—on a long trailing piece of parchment covered in markings and words so tiny and cramped that they must surely be illegible unless you had your nose half an inch from the surface of the paper, as the woman now did. She did not acknowledge us right away, but finished whatever it was she was recording, and then slowly and carefully rolled the parchment up into a tight scroll with knobbly, gnarled fingers. Then, still without looking at us, she turned and tucked the scroll into one of hundreds of tiny cubbies built in rows above the table. Each was labeled with map coordinates, longitude and latitude recorded in degrees.

  When the scroll was meticulously tucked away, the woman shuffled over to us and looked up. I actually stepped backward right on top of Hannah’s foot, and she let out a sharp gasp, though it may have been as much a gasp of surprise as a gasp of pain. The woman was wearing a strange contraption on her face that was straight out of a steampunk fantasy. I guess for lack of a better word, you could call them glasses, but they were strapped onto her head with a leather thong, like aviator goggles. There were several sets of brass lenses, some of which she had pulled down in front of her eyes and others which stuck up at wacky angles around her face. But it was the fact that her eyes were magnified to such cartoonish proportions that had caused me such a shock.

  “Moira, I would like to introduce you to Jessica and Hannah Ballard of Clan Sassanaigh,” Mackie said, with a little tremble in her voice that made me certain she was repressing a laugh at my reaction.

  Moira still said nothing, but twiddled several knobs on her goggles, so that the little gears began to turn and multiple lenses whirred up out of place. Her eyes, now visible behind only a single set of lenses, were much less shocking, though still nearly swallowed by the black of her wildly dilated pupils.

  “Aye, I know who ye are. I knew ye were about. I felt the wee shifts in the balance,” Moira said curtly by way of a greeting. She spoke with a thick Scottish brogue that left every third word almost unintelligible.

  “N-nice to meet you,” Hannah said, so softly that I don’t think anyone but me heard her.

  “You two gave Moira the most eventful few months of her life three years ago,” Mackie said with a wink. “She’s never had so much excitement before, have you?”

  “Excitement in this room is not a desirable turn of events, lass,” Moira snapped, frowning severely at Mackie. “But aye, I earned my keep that year, I did, and no mistake.”

  “Moira is the Mapkeeper here at Fairhaven,” Mackie went on, for Moira had turned back to her table and broken into a string of muttered complaints. “She’s been in charge of recording and interpreting the findings of the Léarscáil Spiorad for the last eighty years.”

  “Is that a Foucault pendulum?” I asked.

  Mackie frowned. “A what, now?”

  “A Foucault pendulum,” I repeated. “I saw one once on a museum field trip in middle school. They used it to demonstrate the turning of the earth.”

  “Oh, I see,” Mackie said. “Nah, this is different. This beauty moves according to the patterns of spirit energy in the world. When all Gateways are working properly and no major disruptive spirit events are underway, the pendulum swings in a perfect circle around the outside of the map. When there are disturbances, though, the pattern changes, and Moira can record and interpret those changes. For instance, look at what it’s doing now.”

  We watched the pendulum swing, its curve slow and mesmerizing. But as it rounded the area of the map where the UK was located, it seemed to defy the laws of physics, breaking its pattern to create a small, looping motion over the spot before continuing its wider arc around the perimeter of the map.

  “What was that?” Hannah asked, pointing excitedly. “Why did it do that?”

  “Och, it’s this lass what’s upstairs, refusing to get on with it and open her Gateway,” Moira said without looking up from her work. “What a numpty.”

  Hannah I looked at each other, and then at Mackie for a translation.

  She grinned. “She’s talking about Frankie. Her continued refusal to open her Gateway has caused a kink in the patterns, a concentration of spirit energy, sort of like a backup, and that’s what’s causing the pendulum to move like that.”

  “Oh, I get it,” I said, and then a thought occurred to me. “So, when my mother Bound her Gateway, this pendulum could tell?”

  “Aye,” Moira said bluntly.

  “And over time, the longer it was Bound, the larger an effect it had,” Mackie said, then leaned in and added in a low voice, “Best not talk too much about that, mate. Moira likes her Léarscáil in perfect balance.”

  “Oh, right,” I said, and I felt myself blushing.

  “My ears are as good as ever they were, lass,” Moira called. “And I dinnae care so much about that, not since the day of the Isherwood Prophecy, when the whole thing came to a stop.”

  “Came to a stop?” I asked. “You mean, the pendulum stopped moving?”

  “Och, aye, lass.” Moira whispered, and took off suddenly across the Léarscáil, tiny tattooed feet scuttling like an insect, until she crouched just to the left of where Fairhaven was marked on the map
. Even as she came to a stop, the pendulum swooped down upon her. Hannah and I both cried out, sure she would be killed, but Moira did not even flinch. The great sphere came within less than an inch of her nose, before arching off again across the map.

  “It stopped. Dead stopped. Quivering like an arrow. Right. Here,” she hissed, jabbing a long, yellowed fingernail at the map. “Gobsmacked, I was.”

  I turned a stunned face from Moira to Mackie, who nodded grimly. “Only time I’ve ever seen her leave the tower. She came flying into the Council Room to warn everyone. It was the only reason we knew you were coming,” Mackie said, glancing apologetically at Hannah.

  Hannah dropped her eyes, and even as I watched, two tears splashed onto the gilded stones at her feet.

  “Hey,” I said to her, grasping her hand and squeezing it. “Don’t forget who set that thing spinning again. Don’t forget that in the end, we made it right.”

  Hannah looked up and found my eyes. I squeezed her hand again, and she obliged me with a tiny smile. Mackie punched her playfully on the shoulder. “Sorry, mate. I didn’t mean to… we all know it wasn’t your fault.”

  “Not all of you, no,” Hannah said. “But thanks, Mack.”

  A strange whistling sound made us all look up. Moira was scuttling with unnerving speed across the map again toward the source of the sound, a small metal door set into the wall. As we watched, she pulled a skeleton key from the pocket of her robe and inserted it into the door, turned it, and yanked. The door creaked open and a pigeon fluttered in, coming to rest on her shoulder.

  “What the—” I muttered.

  Moira cooed at the bird, stroking its chest and offering it several kernels of corn that she pulled from another pocket. Then she untied a small leather pouch from the pigeon’s leg and sat down with it at her table.

  “Carrier pigeon?” Hannah whispered. “What does she use a carrier pigeon for?”

  “Every clan stronghold has a Léarscáil and a Mapkeeper. This is how they communicate, to compare findings and interpretations,” Mackie said. “It’s not an exact science, and so they confer with each other to reach conclusions on what the patterns might mean.”

  “Is there, like… a legitimate reason not to just pick up the phone?” I asked.

  Mackie grinned. “Moira doesn’t trust technology. You know from working with your ghost hunting mates that spirits can mess with batteries and electricity and all of that. She knows it too, and so she won’t have anything to do with it. She’s been bringing up those pigeons for years. I think she’s got about a hundred of them.”

  Moira was now unrolling a small scroll of parchment she had found tucked inside the pouch. She took a moment to read it, then snorted loudly and started muttering as she stood up. She pulled one of her own scrolls from its cubby, consulted it quickly, and then returned to the desk, where she scrawled a hasty response onto the scroll, rolled, it up, and tucked it back into the pouch. She then tied it back onto the bird, kissed its head, and promptly released it back up into the shoot before slamming the door shut behind it.

  “That Mapkeeper in the Nordic Clans is a real walloper,” Moira grumbled as she returned to her work. “T’ain’t a reading yet she’s gotten right and that’s the truth. Can’t no one explain this spike of energy in the North Country, including me.”

  “The North Country?” Mackie asked, in a tone of polite interest.

  “Aye, that’s right. In the Inner Hebrides, round about the Isle of Skye. Can’t make heads or tails of it,” Moira said. She sat back and began fiddling with the knobs on her goggles again, leaning low over a stack of smaller maps. She continued her muttering, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a few errant kernels of corn to munch on.

  “Skye,” I murmured, frowning. “Why have I heard of that place before? Didn’t someone just mention it to us?”

  “It was Celeste,” Hannah said, staring at the pendulum’s progress around the map. “There’s a príosún there. That’s where Lucida is serving out her sentence, remember?”

  I watched the pendulum as well as it made its funny little loop around the place where Lucida sat captive among many other Durupinen enemies. Then I imagined the pendulum crashing to the ground on top of the place and squashing it flat. It was a childish moment, but it was common knowledge that I was not above childishness.

  “Well, we don’t want to disrupt you too much, Moira,” Mackie said. “So, we’ll just be on our way.”

  “Get on with ye, then,” Moira said without looking at us. She was now measuring angles with a protractor.

  “Right, then. Good luck,” Mackie said, and gestured that we should follow her up the steps again. We did so, leaving the tiny old woman scuttling around in the semi-darkness behind us, like a rodent in a lonely attic.

  “I think the rule is one raving, tower-bound lunatic per castle, Mackie,” I said, when we had closed the door behind us. “Between her and Fiona we’ve exceeded our limit here.”

  Mackie chuckled. “Yeah, she’s an odd duck to be sure. But she’s also the best Mapkeeper in the world, so we ignore the majority of her idiosyncrasies.”

  “Does she seriously never leave that room?” Hannah asked, pulling agitatedly at her own fingers. “Where does she eat? Where does she sleep?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, she’s got her own sleeping quarters off of the map room,” Mackie said. “And someone is tasked with bringing her meals and seeing that she’s got everything she needs. Story is that she took over the Léarscáil when she was still an Apprentice, and she’s tended to it every day since.”

  “That can’t be healthy, though,” Hannah insisted. “People need fresh air and sunlight. And besides, she looks much too old to be working like that.”

  Mackie smirked. “You go in there and tell her she’s got to stop tending that map, and see what happens. They’ve been encouraging her toward retirement for years, but she just refuses. And it’s hard to argue with her, because she is still the very best in the world at what she does. In fact, she’s the one who discovered where you were, Hannah.”

  Hannah started. “What? What do you mean?”

  “I mean the Trackers acted on a tip from her that a latent Durupinen might be active in the New York area, and that’s how Lucida and Catriona first tracked you down. You started using your Calling abilities consciously and it caused a disturbance on the Léarscáil. So, in a way it’s all down to Moira that you’re here.”

  Hannah blinked. She looked over at me. “Did you know that?”

  I shook my head. “I knew that the Trackers had located you, but Lucida never told us how.”

  Hannah was so lost in thought that she did not speak again all the way back down to the entryway, though Mackie kept prattling on about the Léarscáil and all of the fascinating types of spirit activity it could detect. I could not blame Hannah for continuing to ponder her first glimpse at the contraption that had been responsible for breaking her free from eighteen years of misery.

  38

  Finding Frankie

  THE MOMENT WE SET FOOT in the entrance hall we knew something else had happened. There was a heavy pall over the room, a silence as though at a funeral, and the whole chamber was thick with the smell of smoke.

  “What is it? What’s going on?” Mackie asked a young woman standing at the base of the stairs.

  “Another Habitation,” the woman replied, and her voice was full of tears. “Just now.” She pointed a shaking finger toward the fireplace, from which puffs of deep grey smoke were billowing, though the fire itself seemed to have gone out. A glistening puddle of water was spreading across the floor in front of the hearth, and a small knot of people, including several Caomhnóir, were bent over, struggling with something just beyond it.

  Then two of the Caomhnóir straightened up and turned, so that we had a clear view of the commotion. Patricia O’Toole lay pinned to the floor, whimpering and struggling. Finn rushed forward to help, but there was nothing for him to do. She was already being hauled to her feet an
d carried in the direction of the hospital wing.

  I walked over to the fireplace and squatted down beside it. I hadn’t knelt on this spot since a spirit had used me to cover the walls in a grotesque mural depicting the Prophecy. I woke from that trance with third degree burns from my elbows to my fingertips and no memory of having drawn the mural, which stretched all the way up to the ceiling two stories above.

  I reached into the fireplace, careful to avoid the places where embers still glowed like rubies. I extracted several large fragments of porcelain—the remains of a large pitcher that Patricia had undoubtedly used to try to douse the flames.

  “What is this about?” I said out loud, more to myself than to anyone else, but Finn answered me, having followed me over to the fireplace.

  “The Shattered spirit must have died in a fire, or else had a terrible fear of it in life,” Finn said quietly. “It seems to be one of the only characteristics strong enough that every Shard still remembers it and acts upon it. Celeste said that the Shards would be confused and disoriented, but they certainly show no confusion around fire.”

  “Yeah, I bet you’re right, Finn. Spirits nearly always fixate on the major events of their lives, especially their deaths, and most especially if those deaths were traumatizing,” I said, thinking through the many spirits I’d felt Cross through me. Hardly one had slipped through without a visceral flash of his own death.

  Hannah and Milo had walked over to join us, their faces grim. “Since Catriona was the source of the Shattering, do you think Fairhaven was the source of the spirit itself?” Hannah asked.

  “It’s possible,” Finn said, nodding his head. “I’d even say probable.” Celeste and the Scribes are researching every clue that the Shards are giving them. They are trying to connect it to the spirits that they have records of here at Fairhaven.”

  “But the resident spirits here Crossed during the Prophecy,” Hannah said, staring down at her twisting fingers. From where I sat on the floor, I could see guilty tears welling in her eyes again. “So, searching the history of the castle isn’t going to do much good, is it? Any spirits from those recorded deaths will have gone.”