The Gate of Bones (6 page)

Someone stamped an iron staff onto the stone floor with a harsh ringing sound. The man stood tall and straight under his sweeping robes, the staff of black iron firmly in his grip, and nearly as tall as he was. The noise cut into his ears and Jason suppressed a grimace.

“The accused is here. Court is convened!”

He knew he shouldn't have gone in. Panic tingled through him for a moment, like a lightning strike. Just as quickly, it left him. He was, obviously, the accused, for he was the only one who'd just arrived. Jason lifted his chin, sizing up the crowd of strangers as he used to check out an opposing soccer team. A good defense or a good offense depended on knowing and understanding what and who he faced.

“Accused of what?” he sang out, and his voice carried just as strongly as he hoped it would. There were lapses these days when it would fail him at the oddest times, sending Bailey and Ting into fits of giggles and Trent looking the other way, clearing his own unpredictable throat and drumming his fingers to a music track only Trent could hear.

Jason squared his shoulders as the men facing him broke away from their groups and sat down in stern-looking wooden chairs. He did not assume they were human, not as he was, for they did not come from the world he'd come from, although he was now a part of their world. They were dressed much as he was now, in clothing he'd come to know as Haven garb, jerkins and tunics and short coats, pants tucked into leather boots and so on, with formal looking robes over that. Bailey referred to it as styles from the Princess Bride Shop of the Realms.

One man raised his hand, and the murmuring ceased entirely, all gazes drawn to Jason. Jason looked back at the man, his white hair braided back neatly, his chin beard neatly clipped, his dark eyes with a slant that resembled Ting's Chinese ancestral features, and his six-fingered hand lowered to rest on his knee. So like and yet unlike.

“You are accused, Jason Adrian, of bringing war and death to Haven.”

The words fell into silence, and then the fellows sitting around the speaker burst into talk again, agitated and overriding each other in bursts of sound. This was it, then, what he knew had to come, and what he'd feared. Condemnation for his actions. And yet, was it fair? Was it at all fair? Words tried to bubble out, all at once, so he kept a lid on all of them until he could sort through them and choose the right ones. What did they expect him to say? Did any of them really want to bother listening to his story of how and why they arrived?

What would he answer? What could he? “I am the Gatekeeper,” he agreed slowly, “who opened the Dragon Gate to Haven.”

“Plead you guilty, then?”

He hadn't said that! Jason shifted uneasily before the assembly. How unfair could they be? He wondered if he were indeed dreaming or if he saw something that awaited him in the future.

Finally, he said, “If death never existed here before, if war never existed here before, then, yes.”

“You mince words like a cook chopping for a stew. You deny your actions?”

“People do different things for different reasons. Do the reasons matter to any of you?”

The assemblage turned to stare at the white-haired man, as if he alone had a voice and could speak for them. He shook his head, his eyes creasing in a sad expression. “Not in this court, I fear.”

“But sometimes things happen because they have to, because bad as they are, worse things would happen if something else were done. . . .”

“It makes no excuse, Jason Adrian. Are you guilty or not?”

Jason bit the inside of his cheek to stop his words, and to create a different kind of pain than the guilt he felt. Oh, yes, he'd opened the Gate to his enemies as well as his friends, and he could never deny that. And he would never find peace in himself until the day when he found a way to drive Jonnard and the Dark Hand out of Haven, or died trying. He wouldn't lie. “I don't deny what I did, but you must understand—”

“We do not have to understand anything!”

“But you do. You have to try to . . . I didn't know anyone was here. I had no idea there were people and villages and problems. My Gate didn't show me that, I didn't know!”

“And if you had known?”

Jason tried to meet the other's piercing gaze, unflinching. It was the toughest stare down he'd ever done, besides the dragon.

“I would have asked,” Jason said.

“Do you think that would have made a difference? Giving us a choice?”

It would have made a difference to
him.
Having a choice seemed to be a great and wonderful thing. Like in being asked if he'd wanted to be born a Magicker, or losing both his parents, or being yanked out of his own world, or . . . the list went on too long. This was beginning to sound like a debate class in high school. Did choice make a thing less evil because it chose to be evil? Not Jonnard. Not the Dark Hand! “It would have made it easier on all of us,” Jason said. “We could have been ready.”

“There was nothing to be made ready for,” the judge told him, “till you brought disaster amongst us.”

With a deep breath, he raised his arm. The iron staff struck the flooring again, and rang like a bell throughout the immense room. The sound stabbed through his ears, making Jason wince. “The accused accepts the charges!”

Jason made a stammering sound and stopped, before he could feel any more idiotic and guilty under their stare. He managed a deep breath. “Then,” he said, a lot more evenly than he felt, “since you're so determined to have me guilty . . . what are you going to do with me?”

“Not just you, Jason Adrian. All of you. The Magickers.”

“Oh, no. Huh-uh. You brought just one of us here for trial, and that was me, and no one else. I'm the Gatekeeper, anyway. So . . . what are you going to do about it?”

“You insist on standing alone?”

“You're not going to try the others without their being here! That's bogus! Where's the justice in that?”

“The justice in that,” said the white-haired man quietly, “lies in the oath all Magickers swear to one another. But it is you, and you alone, who puts that oath aside now. So be it.” He inclined his head, deep in thought for a moment, both hands wrapped about the staff.

For a very long, cold moment, Jason had the feeling that he'd just failed some sort of test. But he couldn't think how he could have done that, or what else he might have said. Nor did he think it was very fair that he was being given the sense of all this
after
it was a done deal! Where was the fairness in that? But it was a dream, he told himself, just a dream, and when he thought about it later, it would make about as much sense as a certain young lady falling down a white rabbit's hole into a tea party.

“This is serious business,” the judge finally said. He wrapped and unwrapped his hands about his staff. “Remember you this.”

It was as if he'd just read Jason's thoughts. . . . Jason took a deep breath, then swallowed, and nodded. Serious business. He'd keep that in mind, for later.

Their gazes locked. “Guilt being undeniable, then, the punishment is mine to give. I charge you with undoing what you have wrought.”

That was the trap, then. From the frying pan into the fire. “I can't take them back,” Jason said. “Not my friends. It's too dangerous to go back. You don't understand what our world would do to us for our Magick. As for Jonnard and the others, I'll do what I can.” He tightened his left hand into a fist, gripping his crystal so tightly it slashed into his skin. “I'll either send them back or make it so they can't do any harm here.”

“The undoing is your punishment. No more, no less.”

“But I can't do that.”

“You stand, Jason Adrian, with a foot in each world. To undo what you have done, you must choose!”

“Choose?” He stared back at the other in disbelief, feeling his jaw drop slightly. What did choice have to do with any of this? It had already been made . . . did they think he could back up time? What did they expect of him? Did they make fun of him because he hadn't given them any choices?

“Choose!” The white-haired man raised a hand and chopped it through the air, and at his signal, the staff rang out sharply yet again. This time, the stone floor cracked under its impact. A huge line began to open up, and then widen, snaking its way toward Jason, spreading between his feet and zigzagging onward. Jason looked down.

The rift began to yawn, a chasm opening up, and he was straddling it. A mist began to swirl about each booted foot and he would have moved, but he could not. He seemed rooted in place. And the chasm widened and deepened until he could see that he would soon fall in, and indeed, the whole room would collapse into its unseen depths. Perhaps even all of Haven might be swallowed up.

“You must choose, Jason Adrian.” The white-haired man waved to his fellows and, cautiously skirting the doom that was splitting the hall, they began to leave. “Or you will destroy both worlds in which you stand.”

“Wait!” Jason struggled to raise feet that felt as if they'd grown roots and anchored themselves into the stone, even as they pulled apart, and his position grew worse and worse. “It's not just my world, it's yours, too. Things can't just rest on me!”

They passed him relentlessly, just out of reach, until the last man stood next to him, the white-haired judge. “Do you see your dilemma?” he asked Jason, softly.

“I can't do what you want. Don't
you
see? What's past is past. All I can do is change things that may happen.”

The judge shook his head slowly, the creases about his eyes deepening them into even sadder folds. He bowed deeply, turned on his heel, and followed the others out of the great room.

The doors slammed shut. “Wait!”

His voice bellowed, echoing, in the hall. Below, the chasm growled as if it had a voice as well, earth and stone groaning in movement as the crack deepened. And he couldn't do anything about it!

He grasped his crystals tightly, feeling the Magick surge through them. “Help, trouble, danger!” he cried, and the crystals sang with his need, his last and only chance.
Alarm! Warn the Magickers! Alarm!

Darkness yawned under him. The edges of the abyss crumbled, and he began to fall. He looked down into the crevice and saw orange flame and heat rising to meet him as if he'd opened the gates of hell itself. Then it rushed toward him with a roar, and he realized he looked down into the mouth of a dragon. Eyes glared up at him as the snout snapped shut and massive black claws gripped him, snatching him up. The beast winged out of the abyss, Jason tight in its hold. Pain pinched him even as the icy nothingness of the void tried to reach out and swallow him. The dragon had him and would not give him up. Its claws tightened without mercy.

A
NGRY DRAGONS make the sound of a hundred hissing teakettles, Jason had a moment to think. Maybe a thousand, but then, that would be a Bailey exaggeration. A hundred would be sufficient, all whistling at eardrum-piercing sound and strength. The pain of the claws hooked around him, and the shrill of the hissing woke him from his dream, for once and for all. Cold night wind shrieked past his ears till his nose turned icy cold. For good measure, the dragon shook him once, as they soared out over the Iron Mountains, leaving the framework of Iron Mountain Academy and the work camp of the Magickers in tiny relief below them.

He was awake now, well and truly, and what good did it do him? One of the biggest, most dire beasts he could dream of had him in its grip.

Unceremoniously, the dragon swooped low over a plateau, barely visible in the near dawn sky, and baited its wings as it settled to land, dropping Jason in a heap.

Jason rolled and got to his feet, dusting himself off. Plucked both from a dream and a sound sleep, he was nonetheless suddenly wide awake, as the dragon lowered its immense snout to look at him.

“Do I look angry?”

Steam boiled off his orange-red scales like steam off one of those teakettles Jason had been thinking about, and firelight danced deep in his amber eyes. Smoke curled out of his sooty nostrils in a slow, deliberate flow.

“Do I look sleepy?” Jason shot back, trying to comb his fingers through his hair.‘

“What would I know of sleep, with the nightmares of Gatekeepers keeping me awake day and night?” the dragon grumbled back, his voice deep in his chest and sounding rather like a freight train laboring uphill. He settled next to Jason and wrapped his long tail about him rather like a blanket against the still chilly night.

“Truce?” Jason asked.

“Truce,” the dragon rumbled. They paused for a very long moment, watching the edge of dawn flirting with the deep of the autumn night, with the Hunter's Moon still riding high in the sky. It would no doubt be there till nearly midday, Jason decided.

He'd been asleep on the seventh floor of the now distant Iron Mountain Academy, the unfinished but final floor, awaiting beams and roofing, but a rather fine place to sleep. A solid floor underneath, the only roof that of the sky . . . he and Trent enjoyed it. He wondered what Trent would make of waking up and finding him gone. Or if he'd even seen the dragon snatch him up. Trent slept deeply, whatever troubles he gathered during the day usually banished by nightfall.

“Deep thoughts,” said the dragon, flexing a paw and then stretching it out, to curl his talons gently about Jason's body. Jason sat back into the embrace of a deadly yet oddly comfortable chair. There was a brilliant dark blue sky overhead framing the dragon's orange-red form, and soft, sweet grass under Jason's legs, and yet there was nothing peaceful about Haven this morning. He wondered that grass grew so far up in the mountains, and decided that when the frosts hit, the grass would probably die off for the winter. His sanctuary, and far removed from the world he'd grown up in, and yet he could not find what he looked for.