The Limbreth Gate

SIX

'Would that you had taken your courage into both hands and come to me sooner.' Rebeke's voice was gentler than her words, but Cerie still bent her cowled head before them. On the black stone floor of her own hall, Rebeke Windmistress was showing little formality or humility toward this High Council member who had come seeking her out. But for the darker blue of Cerie's robes, an observer would have thought Rebeke the Singer of rank chiding a negligent acolyte. Stranger still was that Cerie accepted this new role.

She spoke softly. 'I thought long before I came. I thought it likely you were already aware of these events. I feared my coming would be a finger on the scales, overbalancing some carefully contrived gambit of your own. But at last I decided I dare not chance that you might be ignorant of all that had transpired. So I came. I did what I could to keep my coming a secret, but if the High Council wishes to know of it, they will. Well I know there are those among my acolytes who would gladly whisper any secret of mine, in exchange for a robe of darker blue.'

'And that is what weakens us, or them, I should say. Political skills are rewarded more readily than true ability to sing the winds. What do they think we will come to, when their Council is full of voices that can sway a crowd but not stir a breeze?' Cerie quailed before Rebeke's glowering eyes.

Rebeke flung out her hands as if discarding the entire High Council and began to pace the bare hall, robes swirling about her ankles. There was little to impede her stride. The shining black floors were bare of rugs, as the walls were innocent of pictures or windows. A tall black stool for Rebeke, a scattering of coarse straw cushions for the lesser Singers of her hall; these were the scanty furnishings of the room. The very austerity of the setting gave an ominous importance to the blue-curtained alcove at the end of the hall. Cerie felt her eyes stealing to it, and drew them back to her feet.

'So Yoleth has dared to put Ki through the Limbreth Gate? That one has ever been wont to sing a breeze both warm and cold. What did she think? That I would never find out? That I would find out and pretend I hadn't? Or is she hoping to force a confrontation with me? Oh, I have no time for this! I should be bending my every effort to train my Singers, to make of them what the Windsingers of old were! Or is that Yoleth's aim? To hamper and distract me from that duty? Does she sense that her days of power dwindle with every Singer I shape?' Rebeke turned a sudden glint of eye on Cerie. 'Do you know her purpose? Has she been so blatant to the High Council?'

Cerie shook her head mutely. Guilt filled her eyes as she raised them to Rebeke. 'To the Council she has said nothing. She has breathed no word since that last meeting, except to Shiela.'

'Then how do you know of it?'

Cerie gave a sigh of regret for lost innocence. 'I overheard, in a way said to be impossible. You know Iam entrusted with a speaking egg?'

Skin moved on Rebeke's face in a parody of eyebrow raising. 'No. I did not. Go on.'

'But you are familiar with the use of one, I am sure. I was seeking to reach Yoleth on an unrelated matter; on the production level of Dowl Valley. What happened should not have. I reached Yoleth, but she was speaking through an egg to Shiela. They were unaware of me. I listened.'

Rebeke stared at Cerie, at her eyes cast down in shame. She breathed out slowly. 'There is more you have not told me, isn't there?'

Cerie turned pleading eyes on her. 'There was much I didn't understand. The eggs speak not with words, but with knowledge. I think I would have been happier knowing less.'

'Go on.'

'There were two things, besides that the Romni woman had been lured through a Gate. She went, yes, but a Keeper was there who held the balance. No sign was left of a Gate being used. But the man, Vandien, did what is believed impossible. He forced the Gate. It has created an imbalance, a rip between worlds. The Limbreth world bleeds into ours.'

'Fools!' hissed Rebeke, and Cerie knew she didn't mean the teamster and her friend. 'Just as our strength begins to blossom again, they draw attention to us. A ruptured Gate is like a blazing signal fire. Do they think the Gatherers will ignore our tinkering? Do they not realize that the Gatherers would prize this as highly as we do?' With a few sweeping steps, Rebeke drew the blue curtain aside. Cerie gazed in wonder at the Windsinger revealed.

The white flesh of the petrous body seemed to glow against the plain black back curtain. The sole complete fossil of the extinct race gazed out at her with eyes serene in their complete whiteness. Cerie let her eyes and thoughts feast upon the sight, let her body take new direction and inspiration from the Relic. Thus would she be when her transformation was completed: the multi-jointed limbs, the high domed skull with the ripples that cascaded down the spine, the smooth lipless mouth, the face immaculately cleansed of emotion. Like all children chosen by the Windsingers, she had imbibed the powdered bone and flesh of such creatures, had sought a metamorphosis into the form of the ancient race that had ruled the winds. But the most intricate changes could only be guided by knowledge of the original. For long had all complete Windsinger bodies been lost to them, until Rebeke had recovered this one - incurring no small debt to the Romni teamster Ki in doing so. Rebeke had used this image to shape her own transformation more swiftly, to give to her voice and wind songs more power than current Windsingers deemed possible. This power had brought her the enmity of the High Council.

'The Gatherers would take this from us, if they guessed we had it,' Rebeke said in a low voice. 'We would be powerless to stop them.' Cerie stirred in her reverie, hearing the words but unable to draw her full attention away from the revealed body. Already she felt a new strength in her joints, the thinning of her Human lips as she stretched her jaw to a new alignment.

'The Gatherers tolerate us, are even amused by our attempts to take power for ourselves in this little fishbowl world. But they would not tolerate too much success. They tolerate nothing that upsets their balances and checks. No race may gain ascendancy; does not the Moon rule it so? True religions are those that let the races live in harmony; does not the Moon rule it so? And whence comes our Common language, pronounceable by every sentient creature upon this world, lipped or beaked or snouted? From the Moon , of course. And to whom does the Moon belong?' 'To the Gatherers.' Cerie whispered that most secret of Windsinger doctrines, stunned to hear Rebeke speak it aloud.

'The Gatherers.' Rebeke snorted. 'We are to live in peace, to harmonize, to remain pure in our separate species, in our balanced worlds, for their entertainment.'

'Blasphemy!' cried Cerie. 'They keep us in peace and harmony. They protect us and cherish us. They give us their just laws ...'

'Common sense.' Rebeke refuted her. 'They do all you say, of course. But they do it because it amuses them. We ourselves are but a pitiful mirror of their image. We bring the winds that spread the grain pollen, we shepherd the rain clouds away from the ripe harvest standing in the field, we bring the wet winds in the drought years. Why? Because we are the Windsingers, and it is given to us to bring the weather that will make the earth fruitful for the tillers of the fields and the keepers of the flocks. Because of our great wisdom and goodness and fondness, we watch over the little folk. And because without our percentages extracted from them, our halls would be dreary places indeed. Why wear coarse cotton when the wind moves more sweetly against blue silk?' Rebeke caressed the loose folds of her robe.

'What will you do?' whispered Cerie.

'Do?' Rebeke gave a short bark of laughter. 'Nothing. Who can rebalance the worlds? It is too late to do anything. I will run away and live as a peasant in a little hut in the woods, with anemones under my window, and a wizard to warm my bed.' Rebeke's blue and white eyes had gone fey and wild. Cerie shrank from her strange words. 'That would be at least as useful as anything else I can do. Yoleth has unleashed it. All we can do is attempt to stand before a wind not of our singing. I shall do my best to be a guardian.' Rebeke's hand swished closed the curtain of the alcove.

'I fear I have come a long way, in what some would say was an act of treason, for very little good.' Cerie put her lightly scaled hands to her face and rubbed at where her temples had been.

'No journey that ends in the finding of a friend is without good.' Sanity and control had returned to Rebeke's voice. She came to Cerie and touched her cheek with a hand that asked forgiveness for her wild words. 'For myself, I shall be glad to know that I do not stand before the blast of the Gatherers alone. That is a comfort to me.'

'To me also. And there are others: Dorin and Kadra at least. The High Council guesses that you have our sympathies, and so they were elaborately careful to summon us late when you requested a Council hearing. They know what we feel; that while the Windsingers function best under a single authority, the High Council that exists now is not the only possible answer. Others might lean to us. Yoleth rules the hands of most of the Council, but she has no one's heart - unless, perhaps, Shiela's, if she has one.'

'It is good to know of your support.' Rebeke had calmed. She found her stool and perched on it to think. 'I lied to you, a moment ago. It is easier to say, I will do nothing, than to admit I do not know what I can do. But act I must. There are sources I can question to find out if there is a way to seal a Gate and hide this unbalancing of the worlds. Perhaps together we can forestall the storm of the Gatherers. Jojorum, you say? Yoleth would put her Gate in a pit of filth like that. I will go there, and gather knowledge of this Gate if nothing else.'

'There is yet the second thing,' Cerie began hesitantly. 'It cannot be worse, so tell me of it,' Rebeke said with a shade of humor.

'Better or worse, it made no sense to me, but it was clearly acknowledged between Shiela and Yoleth. Yoleth, at least, insisted on it when they spoke, and Shiela accepted her thoughts as true. She referred to Ki as a renegade Windsinger.'

Silence rose cold around them, drenching them.

Rebeke spoke at last with an effort. 'Those words make no sense together. And Ki is no Windsinger. You must have somehow taken separate thoughts out of context.'

'Not three times,' Cerie insisted, but quietly. 'It was quite plain that this is the root of Yoleth's hatred for her. The Romni song was a blind. She speaks of Ki as a dangerous traitor.'

'Impossible.'

'As impossible as rupturing the Gates between the worlds, or listening on another speaking egg.'

Rebeke's face rippled with conflicting emotions, anger the strongest. Then she smoothed it blank again. 'I will think no more on that, nor speak of it, until I have gathered facts. There is one, I think, who will know what basis there is for Yoleth's words. One who can be persuaded to talk to me.'

Cerie smiled at her. 'I marvel at you. You make me feel I can safely lay it all in your lap, and go back to sing my winds. You have gone far beyond us. What is it like, Rebeke? To be as close as you are to being fully a Windsinger.'

Rebeke chuckled in spite of herself. 'Ask a candle what it feels like to be nearly a bonfire. We can never attain it, Cerie. The more I grow, the more I know that is true. Yet what we will become will be enough for us; indeed, it will be all we are capable of holding. There is so much they left us, when they left us the knowledge of how to change. They knew they were dying, Cerie, vanishing forever. The Windsingers left us a legacy that is both a gift and a responsibility. We have fallen from their standards; our physical faults are the least of it. You will learn things beyond my words to tell you. They left messages for us written on the winds themselves. Each breeze has a name, given by them, which it comes most swiftly to. It will be as if I had called you Windsinger all my life and only today came to know you as Cerie. They knew every breeze as an individual.' Rebeke sighed, her own breath a small gust of wind. 'We have lost so much along the way. Thrown knowledge aside because we were more concerned about what percentage of crops we could ask from a given region, and too busy arguing over whether to threaten or punish when the farmers rebelled. We learned how to count our coins, and forgot how to read the winds.'

'Will we ever regain what we have lost?' Cerie asked in a small voice.

Rebeke smiled wearily. 'We may. If Yoleth and Shiela let us survive that long. We may.'