The gate was of heavy, sun-grayed planks, rough hewn from huge trees, fastened with spikes of iron. The wood had come from somewhere else. Somewhere behind the far black line of cliffs? From some chasm among those dun-colored mountains? Or maybe from Galul itself, where water ran and things grew green? Not from hereabout, certainly, for nothing grew in this desolation except black thorn, bonebush, and blood lichen.
She leaned against the door for a moment, staring at the wall, built of the same ashy stone as the cliffs, equally cheerless and forbidding. A protruding beam high above her head ended in a carved skull between whose wooden teeth a bell rope emerged like a tongue, an oily strand with a loop in the end, slightly above the level of her eyes. Almost too late she saw the stem of thorn woven through the loop. Unwary or desperate visitors would pay with agony for interrupting the labors of those within.
Genevieve thrust the crook of her staff through the loop and hauled it down, hard. After a long pause, she heard a sonorous clang so remote in both space and time as to seem unconnected to any action she had taken. She tugged again, and again. Two more long delayed and measured tolls of the distant bell. She said to herself, “We will wait to see what happens. We will not lick our lips. We will not have hysterics. We will simply wait to see what happens . . .”
Not much. A cessation of some background murmur that had been unnoticeable until it ended. A unison of treading feet, which would have been worrisome had they been approaching rather than retreating. Since the place was not eager to welcome her, she turned her back on it and stood facing outward, searching the sky and the horizons for her pursuers. She couldn’t see them, which didn’t mean they weren’t there. What she could see was the everlasting monotone of the desert gray sand, gray earth, creeping dikes of gray stone among hard gray dunes dotted with the ash white of bonebush, the bleeding scarlet of lichen, the angular thickets of thorn made impenetrable by hundreds of needle-sharp daggers that seeped glistening beads of toxin. The thorn meant more than mere pain. A puncture could fester for weeks before healing. Delganor had told them that, or one of the trade representatives. Everything anyone could find out about Mahahm had been dissected and discussed, and she had listened to all of it, to everything any of them knew about Mahahm. It had not been enough.
The skeletal lines of bonebushes were less forbidding than the thorn, but more eerie, each branch an arm or thigh bone, each twig a finger bone, always growing four or five together in a patch of blood lichen. The thorn grew only where there were many bonebushes, and the bone-bushes grew only where lichen had established a hold. Now, in the slanting sun, the lichen glowed crimson, as though it were freshly bled onto the soil. She did not want to think of blood. Had Delganor bled? Was the Marshal dead or dying? Cut down by a hundred seabone daggers. Left lying in all that red for someone to find, or not. If she went back to the house, would any of their party be there, lying in their blood?
She turned back to the gate and rang again. Clang, then again clang, and clang. Three, as before. Temperate, she told herself in a mood of weary fatalism. Not hasty. Not importunate. Merely a measured reminder that someone waited, whenever they got around to seeing who it was, or wasn’t.
“Who are you?” a voice asked, near her ear.
She swung around, eyes darting, finally locating the tiny sliding hatch in the door. It had opened without a whisper and the person within was invisible in the shadow. The voice was as anonymous as wind, man, woman, child, devil or angel, it could be any.
She cleared her throat, but the words rasped nonetheless: “My name is Genevieve.” She bowed her head and took a deep breath. “In Mahahm-qum, an old woman named Awhero told me to seek Tenopia’s haven beneath the green banner.”