The Spirit Gate (37 page)

“I
believe you are, yes.”

He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “You would fight him for me.”

“I . . .
would protect you from his intrusions.”

“To
keep me from marrying Fiorella Orsini?”

“To
keep our people from marrying into bondage to the Frankish Empire. A physical
conqueror can demand of you land, toil, servitude. A conqueror such as Benedict
demands servitude of the soul. Our borders might be safe and free in that
alliance, but our spirits would be in chains.”

He grasped her hand and pressed it to his breast. Beneath
the thick velvet, her fingertips picked up the beating of his heart, too quick,
too driven. “My
spirit is not free, Kassia. My counselors besiege me and exhort me to marry. I’m not a man. I’m a king. I find that
a king has more in common with his livestock than he does with his subjects. I’m a prize stallion
they must prod to mate. Will I take the Turkish mare, the Frankish one or the
Barb? Can you free me from that?”

“I
will try.” She became suddenly conscious of her Master, who had retired to a spot
some feet away and was watching their interplay with rapt attention. “I promise you, lord,
we will not let Benedict work his magic on you if we can help it. My Master is
powerful—”

He laughed, all but crushing her hand. “You are more powerful.” He, too, seemed to remember Lukasha then, and raised his head, his eyes
feverish and over-bright. “And
the Gherai Khan? Can you also provide protection from his forces?”

Lukasha nodded. “Let
me see what may be done about the Mongol kagan. Free your mind, my king. Set it
to rest. Clear from it all thought of Franks and Turks and Barbs. Enter into
deliberation knowing that you have a shield against the powers of your enemies.”

He included both Kassia and Zelimir in his smile, and Kassia
realized that her hand was still captive. At this moment, she did not dare seek
its release. Still holding it, the king led the way back to the council hall
where his advisers milled in confusion. He held Kassia at his side throughout
the heated consultation that followed and went on into the night. She, feeling
Benedict’s
assaults more acutely with every attack, held up her shield against them.

She wasn’t
sure exactly when Lukasha disappeared from the chamber, she only knew that she
looked up once with burning, bleary eyes, and he was gone. Adrenaline brought
her back to full consciousness, and she spent the remainder of the raucous
session staring at the place he had been. He returned in one of the rare
moments she pulled her eyes from the spot to squeeze them shut, hoping to
restore some clarity to her fatigued vision. He was not there and then he
simply was, his face gaunt. Kassia’s
heart chilled to see him look so burdened.

When the council finally disbanded well after midnight,
Lukasha whisked her from the room before Zelimir could recapture her, led her
to into the darkened atrium and concealed them both with a screening ward. Even
if Zelimir should look for them, he would be unable to see or hear them;
Lukasha did not bother to lower his voice.

“Kassia,
when Benedict is using his talents of manipulation, can you always sense it?
If, for example, he were to attempt to manipulate a member of Zelimir’s court—”

“Like
Chancellor Bogorja?”

“Is
he manipulating Bogorja?”

Kassia nodded, stifling a yawn. “I’m
fairly certain. When we left, the Chancellor was so certain the king must not
marry rashly into the Empire. Now he’s
confused, almost witless. I saw it tonight when he spoke. His thoughts were
like . . . dandelion puffs, carried willy-nilly by every breeze.
Chancellor Bogorja is not usually an indecisive man.”

“Do
you think you could sense Benedict’s . . .
intrusion, as you called it . . . even if he was not present?”

“I’m not sure. I think
so. Why?” She desperately wanted to rub her eyes.

He didn’t
answer her, but took her hand, as Michal had done earlier, and pressed it to
the mandorla badge on his robe in such a way that both their finger tips lay
over the heart of the figure. Above their joined hands, hung a necklace with
four large beads—one
blue glass, one silver, one copper, one gold. “Speak the equation with me, Kiska. I will set the
course.”

With blind trust, her heart pounding, Kassia murmured the
words of the incantation. Before she could blink, she was lost in a swift flood
of silent light and motion and found herself, only a moment later, enveloped in
complete darkness.

Afraid to move, her eyes useless, she opened her other
senses to the darkness. The sounds of night insects came to her, the scents of
earth and foliage. She realized they were in a wood, the trees deciduous, the
ground damp with a sprinkling of fresh rain. And there was wood smoke rising
sweetly from nearby along with the soft sounds of conversation and restless
horses.

“Where—?” Kassia started to whisper, but her Master, barely visible as a white
blur in the darkness, raised his hand to his lips.

Then he took her hand and pressed it against something made
of rough fabric that gave beneath her touch. A tent, she realized, or a yurt.
His hand left hers to make a circling gesture in the hair above his head, and
she realized he had set a screening ward.

Now Lukasha broke the silence. “We are in the camp of the Gherai kagan. In fact,
this is his yurt. He is even now within, asleep. Tell me, Kassia, do you feel
the imprint of Benedict’s
magic here?”

She considered that, reaching about her with feelers of
sense, probing the sleeping Mongol, the men whose laughter she could hear
beyond the yurt on its nether side. Her brow furrowed. There was . . .
something. An odd residue in the air like dew on a morning leaf. But was it
Benedict?

“I
can’t tell,” she murmured. “Maybe
if he were awake . . .”

Silently, Lukasha placed a hand against the fabric wall of
the yurt and made a circular gesture with the flat of his hand. Words escaped him
in brief hiss of sound. The barrier seemed to evaporate, going from solid to
transparent in a matter of seconds. He stepped through the bespelled breach,
pulling Kassia after him.

Within, the tent was nearly as dark as the night without,
lit only by firelight that trickled through seams around its door flap and a
tiny, dying flame that curled in a brazier at the center of the enclosure. A
man slept in a bed of fleeces, his face turned toward the guttering flame.
Beside him lay a woman, her naked arm flung across his back.

“Listen
carefully, Kassia,” Lukasha told her. “Be
prepared to perform the Traveling spell the moment I give the word. Can you do
that?”

“If
I work out the equation right up to the last catalyst and hold it for
completion . . .”

A smile touched his lips. Before she could guess what he
meant to do, his arm raised and lowered in a throwing motion and the dying fire
exploded with intense heat and light. She cried out, startled, then nearly
leapt out of her skin when the Mongol kagan sat up with the swiftness of a cat
and produced a sword seemingly from thin air. Regaining her composure, she
ignored the babble of sound that poured from the waking woman. She set the
Traveling spell in motion then, concentrating on the man, she reached out to him,
feeling around him, gently brushing his mind.

There! There was something. It was different than what she
had sensed around Michal, yet strangely akin. She couldn’t be sure it was Benedict; the strange
directionless passion might even come from the kagan himself.

She opened her mouth to tell her Master what she had sensed,
when she realized that the woman and man were both staring at them, that the
woman was getting ready to scream. Lukasha created a pouch of silence in which
to receive the scream; it went nowhere to be heard by no one. The man, sword in
hand, leapt to his feet, his roar of rage going to the same soundless void.

“I
am Master Lukasha Dalibori, Mateu,” said Lukasha evenly. “And
this, the Mistress Kassia Telek, a powerful sorceress and medicine woman. You
trespass, noble Khan. You trespass on the sacred ground of Mat and Itugen. God
and Goddess bid you leave.”

Kassia, stunned, yet was able to glimpse the fleet tide of
emotions that passed behind the Mongol’s
dark eyes. Fear, but only momentary. Awe, disbelief. Belief followed in quick
succession by anger and frustration. Then, as if a door had flung open, came a
steely, implacable resolve to resist. The other emotions rose up in a brief
battle and lost. The cold resolve won out. It was, Kassia realized, a resolve
external to the kagan, whose impulse told him to respect beings that could
materialize out of the ether. It bore Benedict’s signature, and yet was warped in some indefinable
way. Perhaps it was the distance.

The kagan spat upon the floor of the yurt. “That is for your
sacred ground,” he said in deliberate but clear Polian. “Your alien gods mean nothing to me.”

That feeling again, as if he struggled against the words
even as they left his mouth. “Yes,” whispered Kassia just beneath her breath. “Yes, it’s
Benedict . . . somehow. I’m sure of it but—”

“Block
him,” Lukasha murmured, his eyes still on the Mongol, then aloud, “They will mean
something to you if you continue to harass their people.”

As the Mongol spat a second time to underscore his
fearlessness of foreign gods, Kassia threw up a barrier around him. Nothing
happened. The stream of alien power still flowed to him through her ward; she
could feel it—almost
see it.

“I
can’t block him!” she whispered.

Lukasha stiffened perceptibly. “This is sacred ground you have soiled with your
impudence, kagan,” he told the Mongol. “It
will spit back at you.”

Mengli Khan leapt forward, sword raised and ready to strike,
but as swift as he was, Lukasha was swifter. “The spell, Kassia!”

At the moment she uttered the last catalyst for the
Traveling spell he traced a mandorla on the ground about them with a beam of
pure light and clothed the opening doorway in a fantastic ring of fire and
cloud. In less time than it took to expel a sigh of relief, Kassia found
herself in the chambers she had inhabited during their last visit to Tabor,
Lukasha still at her side.

“Benedict?” he asked her. “Or
have we some new adversary?”

She grimaced. “I’m not sure. It felt
like Benedict . . . yet it didn’t. And I can still block Benedict from reaching the
king, yet this intrusion was proof to that.” She shook her head. “If it is Benedict—and my every instinct
tells me it must be him—I
can’t imagine how
he’s doing it . . .
unless he has a second sorcerer among his entourage. To manipulate the Gherai
kagan from such a distance, and Bogorja and Zelimir as well . . .
it would be impossible for one man.”

“What
we accomplished tonight seemed impossible little over a month ago.” Lukasha’s
voice matched his face for grimness. “Well,
whether he has help or no, Benedict is a dangerous adversary. One we must face.” He glanced at her, seeming to notice for the first time the doubt in her
eyes. He grasped her arms, turning her toward him. “You must help me in this thing, Kassia. I can’t do this without you.
Alone of all the students I have ever had, you have the talent, the will, the
affinity for the spirit world that would make you equal to this task. Don’t fail me, Kassia. Don’t fail Mishka. Don’t fail yourself.”

“No,
Master,” she whispered.

She nearly collapsed when he pulled his hands away and left
her to prepare for sleep or sleeplessness, whichever the night would bring.
Exhausted, she crawled into her night robe and began to brush her hair. She was
standing at the tall chamber window, doing less brushing than toying with her
confusion, when she heard a soft sound behind her—the slip of fabric on fabric. She turned, too tired
to feel more than lethargic alarm, to find Zakarij standing in the center of
her room.

For a long moment, the two stood in stunned silence, staring
at each other, then Zakarij pressed a trembling hand to his chest and expelled
a pent up breath. “I’m here. I can barely
believe it, but I’m
here.”

Kassia sighed, relaxing. “Zakarij,
why
are you here?”

“You
said you would be back tonight. When you didn’t come . . .”

“I
have been known to take care of myself.”

He gave her a hooded look. “I don’t
doubt it, but Beyla was worried about you. I promised him I would try to find
out where you were. I knew a Locator spell—”

“That
was no Locator spell.”

“I . . .
thought I might try . . . this one.”

“It
seems to work very well.”

He smiled fleetingly. “Yes, it does, doesn’t it?”

“Beyla
was worried about me?” Kassia moved to a hearthside chair and sat in it.

“And
Devora and Shagtai . . . and me.”

“What
might have happened to me here, with Lukasha?”

Zakarij moved to sit across from her, his face lit only
dimly by the very mundane hearth lamps she had lit. “Benedict might have happened to you. Or perhaps
Michal Zelimir.”

“What
is that supposed to mean?”

Zakarij raised his hand. “Never mind. It’s enough to know you’re safe and sound.” He cocked his head to one
side and studied her. “You’re exhausted. What’s happened?”

Memory brought Kassia upright in her chair. She leaned
forward, elbows on knees, lowering her voice. “Benedict is not only influencing the king, he’s manipulating some of
his courtiers as well. And . . . I can scarcely believe this,
Zakarij, but he’s
somehow found a way to take hold of the Gherai Khan, himself.”

“Take
hold of him? What do you—?” Now Zakarij leaned forward as well until their foreheads nearly met. “You mean Benedict
brought on the incursion into Khitan?”

“I
think so. I’m
almost positive of it.”

“How
can he do that? Even a Mateu could only influence one individual at a time—were it permissible to
do so. What sort of magic does this man control?”