Chapter 38: Chase Through the Gates

I came out of the fold in the gate square with my ears ringing from Father's thunder and my boots skidding on wet cobbles.

The gate square in Concordia is the busiest place in the city at that hour. It's a great wide paved space at the top of the harbor quarter, with the market on one side and the customs house on the other, and in the middle of it, on a raised stone platform with steps on all four sides, the big gate. The public one. The one that goes through to the lower hall at Greykeep, and from there down the hill into Havenreach. It's the oldest gate in the kingdoms, older than the little family arches, and it's the size of a barn door: two tall pillars of pale stone with Eleanor's brass plates set into them from top to bottom, and between them, instead of the street on the other side, a soft gray shimmer, like heat over a summer road.

At eight in the morning, half of Concordia is trying to get through it. Carters. Fishwives. Clerks with satchels. Students going home for the day. Farmers with baskets of eggs. Two gate-wardens in blue coats at the top of the steps, with their ledger and their stamps, waving people through in a long, slow, shuffling line.

My father was standing in the middle of it all, beside the fountain at the foot of the steps, in a ring of scorched cobbles, with smoke rising off his shoulders. The crowd had drawn back from him in a wide, respectful circle, the way crowds do when the King of Greykeep arrives among them by lightning. Nobody was going near the gate. Nobody was going anywhere. They were all just standing there, staring.

He was turning slowly on the spot, looking at the crowd. Face by face.

"He's here," he said, when I came up beside him. He didn't look at me. "I can feel him. Cold. Somewhere close." His jaw was tight. "I can't see him."

I looked.

I looked at the crowd. At the carters and the fishwives and the clerks and the students. At the gate-wardens. At a boy with a basket of eggs. At a woman in a red shawl. At a dog. At the line going up the steps toward the gray shimmer, slowly, slowly, one person at a time, stopped now, everyone looking back at us.

At the gap in the line.

There was a gap. Three steps from the top. Between a carter with a sack on his shoulder and a girl with a satchel. A space just big enough for one person, where nobody was standing. The carter was looking back over his shoulder at my father. So was the girl. Neither of them had noticed that there was a space between them.

I looked at the space.

And then I was looking at the girl's satchel.

I didn't decide to. My eyes just went. The way they'd gone on the quay at Havenreach, from the third barrel to the gull. The way everyone's eyes had gone off me in the kitchen at Greykeep, from my face to the window, to the crow on the wall, to anything else at all.

I knew what it was. I knew it from the inside. I'd had it in me for more than a week.

Nobody's noticed it for so long that it's forgotten how to be noticed.

"Father," I said. Very quietly. "Third step from the top. Between the carter and the girl. Don't look straight at it. You can't."

He didn't look straight at it. He looked just to the side of it, at the carter's sack, the way you look at a faint star at night by looking a little away. I saw his face change.

"There," he said.

"He's got what I've got," I said. "From the quay. The god at the barrels. He's using it." My heart was going very fast. "He's walking up the steps in front of the whole city, and nobody can see him."

The gap moved. Up one step. The girl with the satchel, without knowing why, stepped aside to let nothing pass.

Two steps from the top. Then one. The gate-wardens were looking down at my father, not at the line. The gray shimmer was right there.

"Stop him," said my father. "However you can."

* * *

I'd thought about it, since the kitchen. What makes it stop. What breaks it.

Only one thing had ever broken it, for me. Not anyone else's eyes. Not Seraphina's hand on my chest, though that had helped. Not little Uriah, though he'd seen straight through it as if it weren't there. What had broken it was my name. Out loud. Said to a room. My name is Garrick Grey. And the room had slammed back around me like a door.

You can't be overlooked once somebody has said who you are.

I filled my lungs. I didn't look at the gap. I looked at the gray shimmer of the gate behind it, and I shouted, as loud as I've ever shouted anything, so that it rang off the customs house and the market stalls and every window around the square:

"ODO!"

Every head in the gate square turned.

Not to me. To the steps. To the top step but one. To the space between the carter and the girl with the satchel, where, all at once, as if he had always been standing there, there was a thin, neat man in a plain gray coat buttoned to the throat, with long gray sleeves over his hands, and a heavy leather bag held against his chest in both arms.

The girl with the satchel screamed.

Odo turned his head and looked down the steps at me.

His face didn't change. It never does. It's the kind of face you forget while you're still looking at it. But I wasn't forgetting it now. Nobody in that square was. Three hundred people were looking straight at him, and he knew it, and for the first time I saw something move behind his eyes.

Then he turned and ran into the gate.

* * *

People who've only ever walked through a gate think it's like walking through a door. You step under the arch on one side and you step out of the arch on the other, and in between there's a moment of gray, like blinking.

It isn't like that. Not really. Not if you know how to look.

Between the two arches of every gate Eleanor ever built, there's a passage. A throat. It's short, on the big gates, forty paces or so, and it's made of nothing at all: gray light, soft and even, with no walls you can see and no floor you can feel, just Eleanor's wards running down either side of it like the banks of a river, holding it open. Most people never notice it. You walk too fast. You're thinking about your basket of eggs. It's gone in a breath.

But I've spent my whole life inside folds. I know what space feels like when someone's bent it. And the moment I went into the gate after Odo, I felt the throat open up around me, gray and endless and quiet, and saw him ahead of me in it. Ten paces. A thin gray figure in the gray light, running hard, with the bag held against his chest.

Running for the other end. For the lower hall at Greykeep, and the big doors, and the road down into Havenreach, and the river, and the barges, and the sea.

Forty paces is nothing. He'd be through it in ten heartbeats.

So I folded it.

Not myself. The throat.

I've folded rooms bigger inside than out since I was two. I've folded a corridor short a thousand times, to get to breakfast faster. I'd never tried it inside a gate. Eleanor had told me never to. A gate is already a fold, Garrick. You fold a fold, and you don't know where the corners go.

I knew where I wanted one corner to go.

I took the forty paces of gray light between me and the far arch, and I pulled. The way you'd pull a ribbon through your fingers. And the throat bent. All of it. It went short for me and long for him, all at once, like a cloth folded over on itself, so that his end of it stretched out ahead of him for a thousand paces of empty gray, and mine was one step.

I took the step.

And came out of the gray into the lower hall at Greykeep, under the big arch, with the flagstones under my boots and the long gallery of lamps and the painted map of the gates on the wall.

And the Castellan.

It was standing in front of the arch. Not at its ledger. In front of it. In the middle of the gray shimmer, with its back to me and its metal hands at its sides, like a man standing in a doorway in the rain. It must have heard the thunder. It must have felt my fold. It didn't turn around.

"Garrick Grey," it said. "Inward. Concordia. By a short way."

"Castellan..."

"I know." It didn't move. "There is a man in my gate."

* * *

He came out of the long gray at a run, a long way off, and then not a long way off, and then right there, on the other side of the shimmer, three paces from the Castellan, with the bag in his arms and his breath coming hard. The fold I'd made was coming undone behind him. I could feel it. It wouldn't hold for long. But it had held long enough.

He stopped.

He looked at the Castellan. At the tall gray figure standing in the arch of the gate with its metal hands at its sides, blocking the way out.

Then he looked past it, at me, standing on the flagstones of the lower hall.

"Prince Garrick," he said. Long vowels. Soft consonants. His voice had no color in it at all. "You found my name."

"My sister did," I said. "In a mirror."

He nodded slowly. As if that were fair. Then he turned back to the Castellan.

"Let me through," he said.

"No," said the Castellan.

Odo was quiet for a moment. Then, very slowly, he shifted the bag to one arm, and with the other hand he reached into the breast of his gray coat, and took something out.

A key.

It was black iron. Long. Old. The bow of it was shaped like a link of chain, two loops one inside the other, and the shank was cut with wards so fine and so many they made my eyes ache. It was cold. I could feel it from where I stood. The air around it went white.

It liked it, Ignatius had said, with his hand on the lock of the Ember Room. The way a dog rolls over for someone it trusts.

Odo held the key up in front of the gate. Not in a lock. There's no lock on a gate. He just held it up, in the gray shimmer, the way you'd hold up a lantern in the dark.

And Eleanor's wards began to turn.

I saw it happen. I felt it happen. All down both sides of the arch, the brass plates with their curling, angular, backward Kethran letters began, one after another, to shift. Very slightly. The way a sleeping cat shifts toward a warm hand. The letters were reading the key, the way the hull script had read me from Aurethar's back. And they liked what they read. Every door in Kethra used to belong to him, a little. And these were Kethran letters, after all. Written backward, from the wrong side of the door. But Kethran.

The gray shimmer in the arch began to thin. To part. Like a curtain drawing back.

Behind Odo, through the shimmer, I could see the lower hall. The flagstones. The lamps. The big doors standing open to the morning and the road down to Havenreach.

He took a step forward.

And the Castellan put out one metal hand, and laid it flat against the brass plate on the left-hand pillar of the arch.

"No," it said again.

The letters stopped.

Every one. Down both sides of the arch. They stopped shifting, the way a cat stops when someone it knows better comes into the room. The gray shimmer thickened again. Closed. Like a hand closing.

Odo stood very still with the key held up in front of him.

"I was here first," said the Castellan.

Its voice was very quiet. I'd never heard it sound like that. Not angry. The Castellan doesn't get angry. But certain, in a way that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

"These letters were on me when I woke," it said. "I do not know who wrote them. I have never known." It kept its hand flat against the brass. "But I taught them to Eleanor Stonehand, the first winter, letter by letter, from my own chest. And she cut them into this gate. And I have stood beside them every day since before that prince was born, and said the name of every person who walked through them." It turned its head, very slightly, and looked at Odo through the gray. "They may have belonged to your master once. A little. Long ago." It turned back to the plate. "They are mine now. This gate is mine."

The key in Odo's hand went dark.

Not dimmer. Dark. The cold went out of the air around it. The white frost on the iron melted and ran down his fingers like water.

He looked at it for a long moment. Then he lowered his hand.

Behind him, far back in the gray throat of the gate, toward Concordia, I heard boots. And a clear, cold, carrying voice that I knew, saying, "Close it. Close our side," and a sound like a great door swinging shut, though there was no door. Lexander. And another voice, warmer, saying, "Done." Baldr. And the gray at the Concordia end of the throat went solid, white-gold, bright, like sunlight coming through a closed eyelid.

Odo stood in the middle of the gate.

Both ends shut. No walls. No floor. No doors. Nothing on either side of him but gray light, and Eleanor's wards, holding.

Somewhere with no doors to open.

* * *

My father came down into the lower hall a moment later by the fast way, through the Concordia arch, the little family one, in a crack of white light that left another ring of scorch marks on Mary's flagstones. Mary, who had come out of her office at the first sound of thunder with her green book under her arm, looked at the new ring, and opened the book, and made a note.

Then the others came. Not all at once. Through the little arch, one after another, the Castellan writing each of them in without taking its hand off the brass of the big gate. Lexander, with the axe this time. Io. Baldr, who had held the Concordia end shut with his light and come around the short way. Thora, small and dusty, with the raven back on her shoulder. Ignatius. Caitlin, white to the lips, with her blue book held against her chest like a shield.

And then Carol, down the hundred and forty steps from the north tower, with Iselle behind her.

They stood in a half circle on the flagstones of the lower hall, in front of the big arch. And on the other side of the gray, three paces away, close enough to touch if you'd been fool enough to put your hand through, Odo stood in the middle of the gate with his leather bag in his arms, and looked back at us.

Nobody said anything.

That was the rule. Father had made it in the small council room an hour before, and he'd made it again with a look as he came out of the lightning, and every one of us knew it. Nobody asks him anything. Not his name, which we had. Not where the books were, which we knew. Not why. Not who sent him. Not what he wanted. A man like that answers a question by opening a door.

So we stood there, and we didn't ask.

And I watched him understand it.

It took a long time. It went across his forgettable face very slowly, like a cloud crossing a field. He looked from face to face along the half circle. My father. Lexander. Io. Baldr. Thora. Carol. Me. He waited, the way he'd waited against the wall of the narrow hall in the Kethran house, the way the Lockwarden waits on the bow of the middle ship. He waited for someone to say why.

Nobody did.

"You could ask me," he said at last. Very quietly. "Where the rest of it is. What I've done with what I read." He shifted the bag in his arms. "You'd want to know. Anyone would want to know."

Nobody answered.

"The girl, then." He looked past us, at Iselle, standing behind Carol at the foot of the north stair. "You could ask me why it was you. Why your scarf. Why your wax. Why your road." His voice didn't change at all. "You must want to know that. You must lie awake wanting to know that."

Iselle looked at him for a long moment.

Then she put her hand into Carol's, and held on, and said nothing.

Odo's eyes moved to me.

"Prince Garrick," he said. "You kept something. On the quay. I felt you take it." Something that might have been a smile went across his face and didn't stay. "You must want to know what it is. Whose it is. Where it came from. You must want to know how to give it back."

I wanted to know so badly it hurt.

I didn't ask.

* * *

It was my father who spoke in the end. Not a question. He'd thought about it, I think, all the way through the lightning.

"Put the bag down," he said.

Odo looked at him.

"That isn't a question," said my father. "You can't answer it. There's nothing for you to open." He held Odo's eyes across the gray. "Put the bag down."

For a long moment, nothing happened.

Then Odo bent, slowly, and set the heavy leather bag down at his feet, on the floor of the gate that wasn't a floor. He straightened up. He looked at it.

And then, very carefully, with the toe of one plain gray boot, he pushed it toward us.

A hand's width.

Exactly a hand's width. Not more. Not less. To the left, toward the Castellan's side, so that it sat just inside the shimmer, just within reach.

He looked up at me when he'd done it. And I knew, the way you know a voice in the dark, that he'd done it for me. So that I'd know who'd been moving the elf weaver's silk, and Ansgar's awning, and the old woman's stool, and the sign of the Lantern and Oar. And Grandpa's rocking horse, out of the sun, into the shadow.

The Castellan took its hand off the brass of the big gate, and reached down into the gray, and picked up the bag.

It held it out to Io.

Io took it in both arms. She didn't open it. She didn't need to. She knelt down on the flagstones of the lower hall with the bag held against her chest, the way you'd hold a child you thought you'd lost, and bowed her head over it, and stayed there. Lexander knelt beside her and put his arm around her shoulders. Thora knelt on her other side. Nobody said anything at all.

Nine books. Four hundred years. Every bearer of the Flame, back to the first.

Uriah Grey. Son of Seraphina, daughter of Io. Greykeep.

* * *

Odo sat down.

Right there, in the middle of the gate, in the gray light, with both ends shut and nothing around him but Eleanor's wards. He folded his hands in his lap, inside his long gray sleeves, and sat with his back very straight, the way a servant sits in a hall when he's been told to wait.

He didn't look frightened. He didn't look anything. He looked like a coat on a chair.

"You'll have to ask me eventually," he said. To all of us. To no one. "You know that. Everyone does, in the end." He looked down at his folded hands. "And when you do, I'll tell you. Everything. Politely. Truthfully. Exactly as I was given it." He raised his eyes and looked at my father. "That's what I'm for."

The same words. I'd heard them on the quay at Havenreach, from a lean man in a long gray coat, the morning he went back down the river. Exactly as given. That's what I'm for.

My father looked at Odo for a long time through the gray.

"We'll see," he said.

He turned to the Castellan.

"Hold him," he said. "Both ends. Nobody in. Nobody out. Nobody speaks to him. Nobody asks him anything at all. Not a question. Not a greeting. Not good evening." His voice was very quiet. "Not until I say."

"Yes," said the Castellan.

It turned back to its ledger, and dipped its pen, and in the neat printed hand that looks like type, it wrote one more line at the bottom of the morning's page.

Odo. In my gate. Held.

And then, after a moment, smaller:

Not asked.