Gates

FROM THE MANUSCRIPT · READING EXCERPT

Enter the story

The oldest roads in Seratin crossed plains where no one had lived for centuries. They climbed mountains by passes that ought to have been impassable and vanished under forests whose roots had grown around their foundations. In some places they ran dead straight for distances that seemed unreasonable, refusing the easy way around a hill or through a valley. In others they curved so gently that a traveler could walk half a day before noticing the direction had changed.

No one knew who had built them. Each people had inherited its own account of their making. Far from the great cities, those accounts grew elaborate. Some held that the first Saren to settle the world had laid the roads, guided by knowledge since forgotten. Others said the stone had risen out of the earth itself, shaped by forces the stories could no longer name. The Keepers, who looked after the ancient Gates standing at intervals along the network, generally discouraged the whole subject. The roads were useful, and the Keepers had little patience for anything that did not bear on their use.

The roads were not all alike. Their surfaces changed with the country they crossed, but the oldest stretches shared a pale stone of remarkable hardness. Beneath weathering and drifted soil, the stone was fitted too tightly to admit even a thin blade between its seams. Darker bands sometimes ran along the edges or down the center, and these kept a faint warmth in every season. Travelers who noticed it put it down to the sun, even on cold mornings when the stone on either side of the bands was chilled. Regular travelers learned to ignore the warmth. The Gates were harder to ignore.

They stood where the oldest roads converged, great constructions of pale, layered stone around openings that did not always lead where they appeared to lead. Someone approaching an inactive Gate would see nothing past its frame but the ordinary landscape. Under the proper conditions, though, the space within could change, and distance with it, so that a traveler stepped through and came out in a place that would otherwise have cost weeks of walking. A Keeper would not have called it a convenience.

The Gates were temperamental. Working one took knowledge, patience and some understanding of the Veil, the subtle presence woven through the natural world. A person could not ordinarily see or hold the Veil. It was sensed in quieter ways, as a change in the air that had nothing to do with weather, or in the behavior of living creatures, or as an impression that experienced Keepers learned to tell apart from imagination. Some people were more sensitive to it than others, and most lived out their lives without recognizing it at all. Animals were another matter.

There were creatures that left certain valleys before a storm arrived, others that abandoned their nesting grounds when the earth shifted deep below, and still others that reacted to disturbances no Saren instrument could measure. The Keepers had recorded such behavior for generations. They had also learned that the Veil sometimes acted differently near the Gates, though whether the Gates shaped the Veil or the Veil shaped the Gates was a subject of disagreement. Most Keepers thought the question academic. The procedures worked. At least, they had worked for as long as anyone living could remember.

In the northern lands, where the old roads crossed cultivated valleys and rose toward the high country, the Keepers kept their stations with a discipline that had outlasted changes of rulers, languages and borders. Their records described how a Gate was examined, stabilized and opened, and apprentices memorized the methods before they were let near one. Carelessness at a Gate could kill. Every Keeper knew it, but few questioned the procedures themselves.

Far to the south, beyond the long reaches of the central lands, the people of Satharan lived among broad river valleys, sandstone heights, wooded foothills and dry country where ancient waterways had cut deep passages through the earth. Their settlements followed the rivers and the trading routes, while herds moved across the open land according to patterns older than any living memory. The southern people knew the Great Roads well, though many relied more on their own trails and the animals that carried them. Another order watched the Gates of the south: the Kordar.

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End of excerpt. This site presents a selection from the manuscript.