The Gates of Sleep (52 page)

“You aren’t at all as I pictured you,
are you?” the spirit continued, but now there was a bit of pride mingled
with the chagrin.
“Nothing like I imagined.”

Marina couldn’t help but feel guilt at those sad
words. Not that it was
her
fault that her parents had treasured an
image of her that was nothing like the reality. “Oh, Mother—”
she sighed. “I’m sorry.” She couldn’t bring herself to
say anything more, but Alanna unexpectedly smiled.

“Don’t be.”
Both of her parents
studied her for a moment, as she throttled down a new emotion—

Lightning emotional changes seemed to be coming thick and
fast, here. Perhaps it was that there was no reason, here and now, for any
pretense. And no room for it. Polite pretense was only getting in the way.

This new emotion was resentment, and after another long
moment of exchanged glances, it burst out.

“Why
did you just—throw me away?”
she cried, seventeen years of pain distilled in that single sentence. “What
was wrong with me? Didn’t you want me? Was I in the way?” That last
was something that had only just occurred to her, as she saw the way the two
spirits stood together. Never had she seen two people so nearly and literally
one, and she felt horrible. Had she been an intrusion on this perfect one-ness?
It was only too easy to picture how they would have resented her presence.

But the bewilderment on both their faces gave the lie to
that notion.
“Throw you away?”
Hugh said, aghast.
“Dear
child—don’t you
know
what we were trying to
prevent—what we were trying to save you from? Didn’t anyone ever
tell you?”

It was short in the telling, the more so since the curse
that Madam had so effectively placed on Marina as an infant was what had
patently thrown her here now. She listened in appalled fascination—it
would have been an amazing tale, if it had just happened to someone else.

And
why?
Why did Arachne hate her brother and his
wife so much that she declared war on a harmless infant? For that matter, what
on earth could Hugh Roeswood have done to anger her—besides merely
existing? Hugh had only been a child when Arachne left home to marry her
unsuitable suitor.

“So
we sent you away, where we hoped Arachne
would never find you, and left her only ourselves to aim at,”
Hugh
finished.
“We hoped—well, we hoped all manner of things. We
hoped that she wouldn’t find you, and that the curse would backfire on
her when it reached its term without being called up again. We hoped that you
would become a good enough Master to defend yourself. We hoped
someone
would
find a way to take the damned thing off you!”

“But why send me away and never come even to see me?”
she asked softly, plaintively. “Why never, ever come in person?”

“Haven’t you ever seen nesting birds
leading hunters away from their little ones?”
Alanna asked
wistfully.
“We couldn’t lead Arachne away, but it was the same
idea. We never sent you away because we didn’t love you—we sent you
because we loved you so much. And of all the people we could send you
to—Margherita was the only choice. We knew that she would love you as if
you were her own.”

The pain in her voice recalled the tone of all those
letters, hundreds of them, all of them yearning after the daughter Alanna was
afraid to put into jeopardy. Marina felt, suddenly, deeply ashamed of her
outburst.

“The one thing we didn’t take into account
was that she might become so desperate as you neared your eighteenth birthday
that she would move against
us,” Hugh continued, with a smoldering
look that told Marina that he was angry at himself. “
I became
complacent, I suppose. She hadn’t acted against us, so she wouldn’t—that
was a stupid assumption to make. And
believe
me, there
was
a
will, naming Margherita and Sebastian as your legal guardians. I don’t
know what happened to it, but there
was
one.”

“Madam must have had it stolen,” Marina said,
thinking out loud. “She had a whole gaggle of lawyers come and fetch me;
perhaps one of those extracted it.” She began to feel a smoldering anger
herself—not the unproductive rage, but a calculating anger, and one that,
if she could get herself free, boded ill for Madam. “She’s laid
this out like a campaign from the beginning! Probably from the moment she
discovered that—that cesspit at her first pottery!”

“Cesspit?”
they both asked together,
and that occasioned yet another explanation.

“My first guess must have been the right one,”
Marina said, broodingly. “That must be why she went to the pottery a few
days ago—it wasn’t to deal with an emergency, it was to drink in
the vile power that she used on me!”

“We never could understand where she got her
magic,”
Hugh replied, looking sick.
“And it was there all
along, if only we’d thought to look for it.”

“What could you have done if you’d found it?”
Marina countered swiftly. “Confront her? What use would that have been?
There is nothing there to link her with it directly—and other than the
curse, nothing that anyone could have said against her. She could claim she
didn’t mean it, if you confronted her, if you set that Circle of Masters
in London on her. She could say it was all an accident. And it still wouldn’t
have solved my problem. All that would have happened is that she would have
found some way to make you look—well—demented.” She pursed
her lips, as memory of a particular interview with Madam surfaced. “In
fact, she tried very hard to make me think that you were unbalanced, mother. That
you were seeing things—only she didn’t know that I knew very well
what those stories you told me in your letters were about. She thought that I
was ordinary, with no magic at all, so the tales of fauns and brownies would
sound absolutely mad.” She shook her head. “Not that it matters,”
she finished, bleakly. “Not now. I could have all the magic of a fully
trained Water Master, and it still wouldn’t do me any good in here.”

“But there may be some hope!”
Alanna
exclaimed.
“Your friends—that doctor and his staff—they
were the ones that Arachne called! You’re in Briareley as a patient on
Arachne’s own orders, and they’ve brought Sebastian and Margherita,
Thomas and Elizabeth to help!”

She stared at them. This news was such a shock that she
felt physically stunned. And never mind that she didn’t have a way to be
physically
anything
right now. “What?” she said, stupidly.

“Wait a moment.”
Hugh winked
out—just like a spark extinguishing—then winked back in again.
“My
dear, it’s better than we knew when we first came to you! They have a
plan—but it’s one that you have to follow, too,”
Hugh
told her.
“They’re going to do something to either force
Arachne to break this containment, or force her inside it as well. In either
case, you will have to be the one to win your own freedom from her.”

He had no sooner finished this astonishing statement than
something
rocked the orb and its contents—it felt as Marina would have imagined an
earthquake would feel. It sent feelings of disequilibrium all through her,
quite as if her sense of balance stopped working, then started up again. She
didn’t have insides that could go to water, but that was what it felt
like.

“And that will be it, I think
—”
Hugh stated, as another such impulse rocked Marina and the little worldlet. A
third—a fourth—if Marina had been in her own body, she knew she
would have been sick into one of the dying bushes. Instead, she just felt as if
she would like to be sick.

“She’s
coming!” Alanna
gasped—and the two spirits winked out. With no more warning than that,
Marina steeled herself. But she made herself a pledge as well. No matter what
the outcome—she was not going to remain here. Whether she came out of
here to return to her physical body or not, she was
not
going to
remain.

THE moment after Hugh and Alanna vanished, there was a
fifth convulsion, worse than all the previous ones combined. It shocked her
mind; shocked it out of all thought save only that of self-awareness, and only
the thinnest edge of that.

For a brief moment, everything around Marina flickered and
vanished into a universal gray haze, shot through with black-green lightning.
She was, for that instant, nothing more than a shining spark on the end of a
long, thin silver cord, floating unanchored in that haze, desperately trying to
evade those lightning-lances. Something—a black comet, ringed with that
foul light, shot past her before she had time to do more than recognize that it
was there.

Then it was all back; the withered garden, the ring of
brambles, she herself, standing uncertainly at the edge of the circle of
brown-edged grass. But there was an addition to the garden. Marina was not
alone.

Standing opposite Marina, with her back to the wall of thorns,
stood Madam Arachne.

She was scarcely recognizable. Over Arachne’s
once-impassive face flitted a parade of expressions—rage, surprise,
hate—and one that Marina almost didn’t recognize, for it seemed so
foreign to Madam’s entire image.

Confusion.

Quite as if Madam did not recognize where she was, and had
no idea how she had gotten here.

But the expression, if Marina actually recognized it for
what it was, vanished in moments, and the usual marble-statue stillness dropped
over her face like a mask.

Marina held herself silent and still, but behind the mask
that
she
tried to clamp over her own features, her mind was racing and
her heart in her mouth. Instinctively, she felt that there was something very
important about that moment of
nothingness
that she had just passed
through. And if only she could grasp it, she would have the key she needed.

And now she wanted more than just to escape—for she
had realized as she watched her parents together that she wanted to return to
someone. Dr. Andrew Pike, to be precise. She must have fallen in love with him
without realizing it; perhaps she hadn’t recognized it until she saw her
parents together.

And she knew, deep in her heart, that he wasn’t just
sitting back and letting her old friends and guardians try to save her. He was
in there fighting for her, himself, and it wasn’t just because he was a
physician.

I have to survive to get back to him, first,
she
reminded herself tensely.

“Well,” Madam said dryly. “Isn’t
this—interesting.”

Marina held her peace, but she felt wound up as tightly as
a clock-spring, ready to shatter at a word.

Madam looked carefully around herself, taking her time
gazing at what little there was to see. Then, experimentally, she pointed a
long finger at a stunted and inoffensive bush.

Black-green lightning lanced from the tip of that finger
and incinerated the half-dead bit of shrubbery—eerily doing so without a
sound, except for a hiss and a soft puff as the bush burst into flame.

Madam stared at her finger, then at the little fountain of
fire, smoke, and ash, and slowly, coldly, began to smile. When she turned that
smile on Marina, Marina’s blood turned to ice.

“Bringing me here was a mistake, my girl,”
Madam said silkily. “And believe me, it will be your last.”

That was when it struck Marina—what that moment of
nothingness had meant. Although her spirit might be imprisoned here and unable
to return to her physical self, this
place and everything in it took its
shape from the minds of those who were held here.

Madam had realized this fundamental fact first; only the
faint rustle behind her and the sense that something was about to close on her
warned Marina that Madam had launched her first attack. She ducked and whirled
out of reach, barely in time to escape the clutching thorn branches that
reached for her, the thorns, now foot-long, stabbing for her. She lashed out
with fire of her own, and the thorns burst into cold flame, flame that turned
them to ash—and she felt the power in her ebbing.

Belatedly, she realized that this could only be a
diversion, turned again to face Madam, and flung up shields—behind her,
the thorns scrabbled on the surface of a shield that here manifested as
transparent armor—while inches from her nose, Madam’s green
lightnings splashed harmlessly off the surface.

Madam smiled—and the ground opened up beneath Marina’s
feet.

Andrew dismounted awkwardly from his mare’s back, and
walked toward the front entrance of Oakhurst. The place was quiet.
Too
quiet. It was as if everything and everyone here was asleep… and he knew
he was walking into a trap.

He opened the door himself, or tried to—it lodged
against something, and he had to shove it open. That was when he realized that
it wasn’t as
if
everything was asleep. For the thing that had
temporarily blocked the door was the body of one of the footmen, lying so still
and silent that he had to stoop and feel for a pulse before he knew for certain
it was sleep that held him, and not death.

Oh, God help
us… Past the entrance hall, and
he came across another sleeper, the shattered vase of flowers from the hothouse
beside her where she had fallen. The silence was thick enough to slice.

His heart pounded in his ears. He knew—or
guessed—why every member of the household had fallen. He could only
suppose that Reggie had been with or near Madam when her spirit was jerked into
the limbo where she had sent Marina. Somewhere in this great house, Madam lay
as silent and unresponsive as Marina, for the tie of the curse worked both
ways, and as long as Marina was still alive, the magic that bound them together
could be used against Madam as well as against Marina. That was the first part
of what the old Master had imparted to them; that using that binding, they
could throw victim and predator together into a situation where neither—theoretically—had
the upper hand. Their environment took its shape equally from both of them; in
a fight, they both depended on the power held only within themselves.