David Farland - Beyond the Gate

So she ran uphill, west toward the ridge, and began searching. For an hour she wandered through town, investigating every street, until she met Orick and Tallea coming up from the south of town.

“Maggie, girl, what are you doing out here?” Orick demanded.

“I heard Gallen scream,” she said.

Orick and Tallea looked at each other. “We heard a shout some time back,” Orick said, “but I couldn’t say it was Gallen’s. It sounded to us as if it came from the north.”

“No sign of Gallen?” Maggie asked.

“Whoever he was chasing,” Orick said, “knew how to cover his scent. He ran me in circles, and his scent didn’t stick to the dust. And Gallen’s wearing that damned cloak of his, which hides all smell. So we’ve lost their trail.” Maggie filed that information away. She hadn’t known that a Lord Protector’s cloak masked his scent.

“Maybe Gallen went back to inn,” Tallea said, and Maggie realized that she had been gone for over an hour. If Gallen were hurt, he’d have gone back to the inn, if he could.

And it seemed her last hope. So they went back to the inn, down to the stables. A maid from the inn had brought a lantern down, and Fenorah had been washed and turned on his back. A clean quilt was stretched out over him, but it was too short for the giant, so that it covered his feet, but not his face.

Shivering from a chill wind that was beginning to blow down the high mountain passes, the companions sat in the stable, waiting for Gallen’s return for several more minutes, until at last Ceravanne said in her clear voice, “All things pass away. It is time, my friends, to consider the possibility that Gallen is gone, and what that means to the quest.” She stood above Fenorah, and the lantern’s sharp light reflected from her angular face. She seemed somehow washed out, unreal under such light.

“Are you saying we should leave without him?” Orick grumbled, rising to his hind feet. He sniffed the air once again, as was his habit when he felt nervous.

“I hesitate to say it,” the Tharrin answered. “Gallen has not returned, and almost two hours have passed. I doubt he would stay away so long, if he were able to return to us.”

“And if he’s dead, killer waiting for us,” Tallea muttered, resting her unsheathed sword by letting its tip settle into the floorboards under the straw.

“And that means we have little choice but to press on as quickly as possible,” Ceravanne whispered. “But there is something else we must consider. If Gallen is dead, then his killer may have taken Gallen’s mantle. We will have someone with the powers of a Lord Protector hunting us, and he will have access to all of Gallen’s memories. He will know where we plan to go, what we plan to do.”

“So you want us to stay and see if we can find Gallen’s body,” Maggie asked, “just to make sure we get his mantle?” And she knew Ceravanne was right. Knowledge is power, and the Lord Protector’s mantle would be a powerful weapon if it fell into the hands of the Inhuman.

“I think,” Orick said, “you’re all worried for nothing. If Gallen is dead and his enemies took his weapons, why haven’t they come after us? He had his mantle, that fancy sword, and his incendiary rifle.”

Maggie clung to his words, knowing they made some sense, hoping he was right. “Gallen may still be hunting,” she said at last. “He’s thorough when it comes to blackguards. He wouldn’t let one give him the slip.”

“Aye, that’s possible,” Orick grumbled. “Down in County Toorary, Gallen tracked a cutthroat for three weeks, chased him two hundred miles.”

Ceravanne licked her lips, looked out the open door southward. “Perhaps we should wait,” she said. “But there is something just as portentous that could have happened. Gallen has been very … deep in thought these past two days. We all know that his loyalties are wavering, hanging in the balance. He may have joined the Inhuman, or he may have gone in search of solitude while he considers his future course.”

Maggie wanted to deny this, wanted to slap Ceravanne for even bringing up the possibility, but this too seemed very likely. “I don’t think he’d leave me,” Maggie said, her voice small in the close darkness of the stable.

“I would hope not,” Ceravanne offered, and she took Maggie’s hand in hers to offer comfort. “But he is under great pressure. You must remember that he is living with many other voices inside him, rich recollections of other loves. Those who become infected by the Word, they sometimes become lost in the … history that the Inhuman offers. Their small voices are drowned out by the bitterness and despair of the Inhuman. And I fear that Gallen may be susceptible to this. Those who are most susceptible are those who are weak of purpose, or weak of mind, and those who are simply inexperienced-the young. Gallen is neither weak of purpose nor stupid, but he is young.”

“You forget,” Gallen said loudly from the far end of the room, “the others who are equally susceptible to the Inhuman’s domination.” Maggie turned, and Gallen stood in the front doorway to the stable, all draped in the black robes of a Lord Protector. Yet there was something terribly wrong. The way he stood-with a certain swaggering confidence as he leaned casually against the doorpost-was nothing like Gallen. Indeed, a terrible light seemed to blaze from his pale blue eyes, and he wore the mask of Fale. Yet strangest of all was his voice. It sounded deeper, and it resonated more, and all of his accent was gone. Where a few weeks ago he’d been a charming boy from County Morgan, now an older and wearier man stood. It seemed to Maggie suddenly that a stranger was wearing Gallen’s body, and that Gallen stood smiling, mocking their fears for him.

“What others are susceptible to the Inhuman?” Ceravanne asked. Gallen waved his hand at her. “The trusting,” he spat, then waved to Orick. “The naive. And those who are actively evil.”

Gallen reached into the pocket of his robe, pulled out his mantle, and its black rings and silver stones glimmered in the moonlight. He draped it over his head.

“So, you are Inhuman now,” Ceravanne whispered, and Maggie found her heart pounding within her. “But you have never been any of those-naive, trusting, or evil.”

Gallen straightened, and he seemed taller and more menacing to Maggie as he crossed the stable, gazed out to the south, over the wide valley below with its shroud of fog that glowed like gauze in the moonlight.

“Yes,” Gallen said, staring to the south. “The Inhuman has tried to claim me as its own.” For a brief moment it looked as if he would collapse, and he held to the door frame as he struggled for control. Maggie could see the old Gallen. “And, my friends, it is good for us all that the Inhuman has finished its task-else I would not have suspected its plans, and we would have walked into a trap.

“Maggie, come here.”

Maggie went to his side and followed his eye. He took off his mantle, placed it on her head. “Listen to the radio frequencies on the higher end of the spectrum,” he said, “and look south to Bern’s Pass, beneath that far mountain, four hundred kilometers from here.”

Four hundred kilometers? she wondered. She couldn’t imagine seeing that far. But Maggie concentrated, and the mantle brought a faint sound to her ears, bursts of radio signals squealing indiscernible messages. It was a code.

She looked to their source, beneath the far mountains that suddenly appeared in her mind as she gazed, and Gallen’s mantle magnified the distant image. Something vast and black was crawling down a mountainside.

“Dronon hive cities,” Maggie realized, “crawling toward us.”

“Yes,” Gallen said. “They are far away, but they’re coming. Part of the memories the Inhuman gave me came from a dronon technician. All those who join the Inhuman know how to use dronon technologies, and now that the dronon have been forced to abandon this world, leaving the hive cities behind, the Inhuman hosts have taken them up. With these they will march against Northland, for the hive cities can also swim across the oceans, and here in Babel their guns are not dismantled.