The Seven Gates

That night, if it was night, Elias did not sleep.

They had been given rooms in a tower on the mountain's lower terrace, small and clean, with narrow beds and a window that looked out over the sky-city. Noah had pronounced it "frankly suspicious how nice this is," then fallen asleep face-down in his boots within a minute of sitting on the mattress. Elias lay on his back, listening to the unfamiliar hum of the city, and held the pendant in his closed hand.

He kept thinking about his father.

It was a thing he had not let himself think about all day. His father would have come home by now. He would have found the house empty. He would have stood in the hallway, not calling out, because he was not a man who called out, and then he would have walked through every room and checked every window, and finally, quietly, sat on the stairs. Elias knew this as clearly as if he were watching it. His father did not panic. He just went very still.

You don't have to tell them everything.

Elias shut his eyes.

He had not left a note. He had not even sent a message. And somewhere inside that thought lay a second, much colder one, one he could not look at straight: he's done this before. He has sat on those stairs before.

At dawn, or whatever passed for it, there was a knock at his door.

It was Cael, carrying a lantern, and he did not look as though he had slept either.

"Come with me," he said. "Alone. Your friend should rest. He will need it."

* * * They went down.

It was a long descent, down staircases cut straight into the rock, past doors that were guarded and doors that were not, through a library where the bookshelves rose out of sight into the dark. Elias tried to remember the turns and failed. Every stair looked like every other. Every wall was ringed with the same small, patient seven-lined mark. The air grew cool, then cold, then strangely dry, like the air of a place that had been sealed for centuries and was just beginning to remember what breathing was.

At last they came to a round chamber.

It was bare. There was no furniture. In the center of the floor, set into the stone, lay a map.

But it was not a map like any Elias had ever seen.

It was made of light. It lay across the floor like a thin skin of water, and it did not show roads or borders or rivers. It showed the shape of the world, though a world much larger and stranger than the one he knew. Coastlines folded under one another. Continents hung in layers, as if several worlds had been pressed together and left to dry. And scattered across it, glowing white-gold, were seven points of light.

"Seven Gates," Cael said.

The words rolled gently through the room, and Elias felt them in his chest.

"Seven places where our world touches the older one."

"Older than the gods?" said Elias.

"Yes."

A voice came from the doorway. Noah stood there in yesterday's clothes, hair on end, leaning on the frame. "Sorry. Couldn't sleep. Heard the word 'Gates' through a wall and I'm very invested. Don't mind me."

"I told you to rest," said Cael.

"And I told you I'd try." Noah wandered in, hands in his pockets, and squinted at the map. "I thought the gods were the oldest things. That's what everyone says. Zeus, Odin, whoever. They're the big old ones."

Cael gave him a tired smile.

"That," he said, "is what the gods wanted everyone to believe."

He knelt, slowly, one hand on the stone to steady himself, and passed a palm over the nearest point of light. It brightened. Elias saw, under the glow, a tiny ring of seven lines, and under that, a world he could not name: a wide dark shore, a tower, a figure standing on the beach.

"The Gates were sealed," Cael said, "by the Covenant."

"The Covenant," said Elias.

"It is not merely a treaty." The old man's voice dropped. "That is the story told in the upper libraries, the one for schoolchildren. A treaty between old powers. A tidy thing, signed and dated. But it was a promise, and promises made by beings like these are not words on paper. They are structures. Walls built of intention. The Covenant was made to keep something outside the world from entering it."

"What?" said Noah.

Cael did not answer. He looked at the second point on the map, and the third, and let his hand fall.

"The promise is broken," he said. "One Gate has opened. Then another."

Elias stared at the glowing points. Two of them pulsed a little differently from the rest, darker at the edges, like bruises beginning to form.

"And your dreams," Cael said, "are somehow connected to all seven."

"Why me?" said Elias. His voice cracked, and he hated it. "I'm fourteen. I'm nobody. I can barely pass geography."

Cael looked at him. It was a long, grave look, with no pity in it. Elias was grateful for that, even as it frightened him.

He put his hand to the floor beneath the map, to a place where the stone carried a carving Elias had not noticed, and pressed. Light welled up from the cut lines. A symbol assembled itself in the air above the floor: seven lines forming a ring, and in the center of the ring, the shape Elias had seen on the door, on the coin, on the window, in his dreams.

"Your mother," said Cael, "carried this mark."

Elias's hand closed around the pendant.

Cael's eyes widened.

"That," he whispered. "That belonged to her."

"What is it?"

"A key."

Nobody spoke. Somewhere far above them, a bell was ringing, very faintly, in some other part of the mountain.

"A key to what?" said Noah.

"I don't know," said Cael. It seemed to cost him something to say it. "I had hoped she told you."

"She told me nothing," said Elias. "She left. That's all she did. She left."

"I know," said Cael gently. And the old man's face showed a grief so unguarded that Elias wished, suddenly and fiercely, that he had not said it that way.

The floor shook.

It started low, a faint vibration through the soles of his feet, and rose quickly, until the whole chamber rang like a struck bowl. The map flickered. Along one edge, a hairline crack ran across the light, a thin black line spreading through the glow like frost through a window.

One of the seven points went dark.

It went out slowly, a candle starved of air. For one second the black line stood out against the gold, and then the point beside it flickered, as if warned.

From the doorway, a new voice said, hoarsely:

"Another Gate."

It was Mara. She had come in silently, and she stood with her arms wrapped around herself and her gray coat open, as if she had run all the way. She was not looking at the map. She was looking at Elias.

Cael rose, with an effort, and turned to face Elias directly.

"They know where you are now," he said.

Above them, deep in the mountain, the bell stopped ringing. And then, from every tower in Asterion, a hundred others began.