The Gate
From THE MERIDIAN EVENING POST, Monday, late edition
APPOINTMENTS AT THE COLLEGE. The Faculty sat in Hall this morning and appointed five, among them Mr. Oswin Pyke, whose persistence over twenty-one autumns has at last been rewarded. A disturbance during Mr. Pyke’s demonstration was contained without injury to anybody of consequence. This paper understands that a spell of lasting fire was shown by Mr. Barnaby Croft, historian, with the assistance of a colleague whose name the College did not record. The summoning of new students takes place tomorrow, weather permitting. The weather has not permitted anything since last Tuesday.
On Tuesday morning, Mr. Grey led Croft and Leon through the Long Room, where Leon had sat the written paper the day before, and out by the door at the back. It opened onto a field that lay behind the building, flat, green and very wide, with wooden stands built up round three sides of it. Behind the stands rose the backs of the College’s other buildings, with the cloud still sitting over all of them.
In the middle of the field stood the gate.
Leon had expected a gate to have doors, but this was a ring of dark stone stood up on its edge, three times the height of a man, with nothing inside it but more field. Knots had been cut all the way round its face so long ago that the rain had nearly worn them away. It was early yet, and the stands were mostly empty, though by the number of benches the stewards expected a great many more.
Mr. Grey wore a black gown over the cream suit this morning. It had come to the hotel at six o’clock and fitted him perfectly, which Leon no longer found surprising.
“Sirs.”
The chauffeur had come up behind them. Leon had not heard him, but Leon never did.
“I have the results,” said the chauffeur. “Master Leon has passed the aptitude paper and may present himself for the summoning.”
Croft lit up. “Congratulations, lad!”
“Thank you, sir,” said Leon.
He had spent most of the night deciding that he had failed, because there had been a question about three ferrymen and a goat, which he had answered twice, differently, and crossed out both times.
“But you are not through yet,” said Croft. “A boy can still be sent home from the summoning.”
Leon’s stomach went cold. “Can you tell me about it, sir?”
“Right.” Croft set off towards a pavilion at the edge of the field, talking as he went. “You know what it means to be a mage? You summon your own spirit out of the spirit world and bind it to your Sea of Consciousness.”
“What is the Sea of Consciousness, sir?”
“You will have it properly in your classes. For now, think of it as the bridge between the physical world and the spirit world.”
Leon tried to picture a bridge between one world and another and got nowhere at all. It must have shown on his face, because Croft looked round at him and stopped.
“No, that will not do.” Croft thought about it. “Think of it as a room inside yourself, where your spirit can live.”
They took a table by the pavilion’s long windows, and Mr. Grey ordered tea, then fetched the newspapers from the rack by the door and sat down with them as though he had come for no other reason. Leon put his bundle down beside his chair, where he could touch it with his boot.
A room inside yourself. Leon thought about that, and did not like where it went. Four years ago, in Ma Fenn’s kitchen, with the shutters closed and the smoke so thick he could not see the far wall, she had bound a spirit into that room. He had been twelve. He remembered the cold of her hand on the back of his, the words she said, which he had not understood, and the long ache in his arm afterwards. For weeks after that, he had woken in the night with the feeling that somebody else was in the room.
“So, as I was saying,” said Croft, “you need your spirit to become a mage. But your spirit will not leave the spirit world if your Sea is not ready for it.”
“Is there a way to measure that, sir?”
Croft said “Hmm,” and looked at the ceiling. “There is no known method of measuring a Sea of Consciousness.”
“The spirit sight of the Allard family can see into one,” said Mr. Grey, from behind his paper.
Croft looked at him sharply. “Allard? You mean the Headmistress can look into it?”
“They are known for it. When there is an injury to the Sea of Consciousness, it is an Allard that people send for.”
“I am more and more terrified of the Headmistress,” said Croft.
Leon’s mouth had gone dry, because if she could see into the room, she could see who else was in it.
“She could tell whether I will become a mage, sir? Just by looking at me?”
“She does not cast it on everybody,” said Mr. Grey. “But yes, if you asked her.”
Leon decided, there and then, that he would never ask the Headmistress anything for as long as he lived.
Nobody spoke for a moment. Then the tea arrived and Croft busied himself with the pot, while Leon drank his too quickly and burned his tongue.
“Sir, can any spirit come? I mean, what if some other spirit wants the room?”
Croft put down his cup and thought about it seriously, which Leon liked him for. “Good question. I do not suppose that can happen.”
“It can,” said Mr. Grey. “It is rare.”
He turned a page.
“A malevolent spirit, like the one in the Hall yesterday, can take the chance to get into a Sea of Consciousness before its owner’s spirit does. Then it possesses him completely.”
Croft swallowed. “And what happens then?”
“Those spirits have no humanity in them. Gradually, the man becomes a monster. The mind goes first, then the body.”
Leon looked down at his gloves. He did not know what kind of spirit Ma Fenn had put in the room, and until this moment it had never occurred to him to wonder whether it was a good one.
“Have you seen that happen, Mr. Grey?”
He had not meant to ask, but it came out anyway, and steadier than he felt.
Mr. Grey lowered the paper.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “In the war, a great many children summoned their spirits with no Mage to watch over them, because there was nobody left to do it. Some of them turned into monsters.”
Croft had stopped with his cup halfway to his mouth, and he put it down again without drinking. There was nothing in Mr. Grey’s face to see. It was the same face he wore over the advertisements and the untouched glass, and Leon wondered for the first time how long it had taken him to learn it.
“Which is why,” said Mr. Grey, “the Headmistress has asked me to oversee the ceremony today.”
Croft said, “You?” and then went red. “Forgive me. I only meant… the whole of it? On your second day?”
“The professor who usually does it has been taken ill.”
“Ill,” said Croft.
“Very suddenly,” said Mr. Grey, and went back to his paper.
A string of bangs went off outside, and every head in the pavilion turned to the windows. While they sat there, the field had filled. Carriages with crests on their doors stood along the far side, and the young people climbing down from them wore coats made for them that summer. A knot of boys was letting off squibs to celebrate the aptitude results while the stewards pretended not to notice, and each of them seemed to have brought a little crowd of his own.
“The noble families, is it?” said Croft.
Leon looked at the crests. “I thought the kingdom did away with all that, sir.”
“Oh, it did, officially.” Croft settled back with his cup, and Leon saw that he was going to enjoy this. “Parliament abolished the ranks years ago. The families never noticed.”
“Who are they, sir?”
“Three of them are older than the kingdom. They signed its charter. Vance, Fox and Ravenor.” Croft counted them off on his fingers. “The Foxes hold the only spells in the kingdom that go as far as Circle 9. Whether anybody living has got there, they do not say.”
“The Foxes, sir? As in Ashfox?”
“It is their name on the kingdom. They have ruled it since the founding, and Parliament came along a good deal later to modernise things. The Vances and the Ravenors have more than one Circle 8 apiece, which is more than most countries can say.”
He nodded at the carriages.
“Below those three, there are thirty-odd old families. A family is old, in Ashfox, if it has once put a mage at Circle 7. They have land, business, commissions in the army, and a great many sponsored mages to do what they are told.” He drank some tea. “The Headmistress is an Allard, and the Allards are one of them. Though they have always kept their heads down. You will find them scattered all over the kingdom in posts nobody has heard of.”
Out on the field, two of the young gentlemen had stopped celebrating and started shoving. A third got between them, then a fourth joined in on nobody’s side in particular, and a steward went over at a trot.
Croft could not help laughing. “Ah! Youth!”
Lucian watched a boy in a coat worth a clerk’s year of salary try to push another into a squib, and wondered whether this would be the hardest mission he had ever been given. At a quarter to eight, the stewards cleared the grass of everybody who had not passed the paper and sent the families up into the stands.
The new students were put into rows facing the gate, six hundred and some of them, in coats of every quality there was, while porters went along the rows handing out cards. Lucian was given one as well. The words on it were older than the kingdom and belonged to no language anybody still spoke, so the College had printed the pronunciation underneath, in smaller type, for the convenience of all.
Nobody has known what it means for four hundred years, said one of his minds.
It is not a prayer, said another. It is an address.
At the foot of the gate, a clerk had set up a table with a register on it, and beside it two porters had stacked four crates, each packed with charged amber in straw.
“Mr. Grey.” The clerk half rose. “Mr. Hargreave generally changes his stones every quarter of an hour, sir. More often towards the end. The crates are for you.”
“Thank you.”
“The porters will stand ready, sir, so that you need not stop.”
“How thoughtful,” said Lucian.
The gate stood over the Well, the deepest on the continent, which was why there was a College here at all. Any Mage only needed to wake the gate, because the Well did the rest. The gate opened onto the whole of the spirit world at once, and every spirit on the far side could see it. The chant was the answer to that, since each spirit crossed towards its owner’s voice. The man at the gate watched the emerging spirits, and the job usually demanded a man of a certain calibre.
At eight o’clock, the clerk looked at his watch and nodded. Lucian stepped up to the ring and drew one knot on the air with his right forefinger, and he felt the Well come up through the soles of his boots.
Inside the ring, the far side of the field went dim. Then it was gone, and in its place was a depth of grey light that ran back a great deal further than the field did. A cold wind came out of it and set six hundred cards fluttering at once, and the clerk raised his hand.
The chant began badly. Six hundred voices started at slightly different moments, and some of them read the words while others read the pronunciation. Then, row by row, they corrected each other, and by the second line the whole field was saying the same words. Lucian did not chant. He stood before the gate with his hands at his sides and let the cloud go out through the ring.
Here they come, said one mind.
Mr. Pollard of the Daily Crier had held a seat on the end of the fourth row since seven o’clock by eating his breakfast in it. He had been sent to write six inches on the summoning, and he had written them in his head on the tram.
“Who is that at the gate?” he said to the row in front.
A young man in a senior’s mantle turned round. “The one from the Hall yesterday. He made Croft’s sparrow stay lit.”
“I heard it was a phoenix,” said his friend.
“It was a sparrow. I was there.”
Pollard wrote down phoenix (sparrow?).
“Old Hargreave uses three knots to open that thing,” said somebody further along. “And swears at every one of them.”
“It is the Well. The Well does all the work.”
“Then why does Hargreave swear?”
Nobody had an answer to that. Two seats along from Pollard, a small girl with a great deal of red hair coming down on one side was eating sugared almonds out of a paper twist.
“He is not even trying,” she said.
“Penny,” said the tall girl beside her, and Pollard wrote that down too.
Then the first spirit came through the gate.
It was small and blue and shaped more or less like a fluffy ball. It came out of the grey light, hung over the rows for a moment, and went straight down to a girl in the second row, who was still chanting. When it touched her hands it folded into a book, and the girl stopped chanting and burst into tears while everybody around her laughed.
After that they came steadily. A fish of pale light swam out over the heads to a boy in the fourth row, and a handful of sparks split in two on the way down and arrived in a pair of twins. Each spirit became a book the moment it arrived, but the boys and girls who had their books went on chanting anyway, because nobody had told them they could stop. Pollard crossed out the six inches he had written on the tram.
At a quarter past nine, the stands got to their feet. A spirit was coming through the gate, tall enough to be seen from the back row. It walked out of the grey light on four long legs, a stag made of white light with antlers wider than the ring, and it did not hurry. It went down between the rows with the students leaning away on either side, and stopped in front of a fair boy in the first row with a raven worked in silver on his collar. Then it lowered its head into his hands and became a thick book bound in pale leather, with silver on the corners.
“Ravenor,” said somebody.
“Of course.”
“Spirits do not care about names.”
“Nobody has told the Ravenors that.”
The fair boy held his book up over his head so the stands could see it, and the stands, on the whole, applauded. The old families’ children seemed to go in a batch after that: a hawk that circled the stands twice before it came down, a great grey hound, and a winged spirit the shape of a lantern. Every one of them was bigger than any spirit a grocer’s son had got all morning, and the stands noticed.
The Veldran boy stood in the middle of the second row. Pollard knew the face from Central Cross a week ago, when the crowd at the arch had shouted at four black carriages. It was pale, square and handsome, and it had not changed expression once all morning.
“Is he allowed to chant?” said somebody.
“He has a card like everybody else.”
“I hope they printed it in Veldran for him.”
Somebody laughed, and somebody else said “Shh,” not very seriously.
Then the grey light inside the ring went dark from the middle outwards, and the wind stopped. The spirit that came through was the colour of gunmetal, a wolf the size of a pony. It came out of the ring with its head low and looked at the stands before it looked at the boy it had come for, and Pollard found that he had put down his pencil. Then it went to the Veldran boy and became a book, black and thin, with a clasp of iron.
The boy did not smile. He put the book under his arm and went on chanting, and for a little while the stands were quiet.
Down at the gate, Lucian had felt the wolf cross. For the second it took, its whole weight had rested on his knot, and a first-year’s spirit did not weigh that much.
Veldra does not send its second-best boy four hundred miles with nine horses, said one mind.
He is a message, said another. Every service in these stands is reading it.
At ten o’clock, one of the porters caught the clerk’s eye and lifted a stone half out of the straw, but Lucian did not turn round and the porter put it back. Across the field, the man in the brown coat had not looked at the gate once.
He is watching us, said one mind.
Then give him something worth writing down, said another.
Lucian turned and had the porters carry one of the crates away, while the clerk watched it go with his pen in the air.
A man nobody notices gets looked into, said a third. A man everybody notices only gets talked about.
At twenty past ten, a boy in the fifth row dropped his card. He bent to pick it up, lost his place, and stood with his mouth open, hunting for the line. A stray came along the inside of the ring, low and close to the stone, with no proper shape to it, and it was going for the boy. Lucian closed his right hand at his side, and the stray was gone. The boy found his line and went on without ever knowing how close it had come, and by eleven Lucian had closed his hand four more times.
At half past eleven, the senior in front of Pollard took out his watch.
“They brought him four crates.”
“He will want them by ten,” said his friend. “Hargreave always does.”
“It is half past eleven. He sent one back at ten.”
There was a pause along the row.
“He has not opened the other three.”
“Perhaps nobody told him they were for him.”
Pollard wrote down four crates (one sent back, three unopened). Then he looked at the man at the gate, who stood exactly as he had stood at eight o’clock, with his hands at his sides.
Along the row, the red-haired girl said, “That is five.”
“Five what?” said the tall girl.
“Nothing at all,” said Penny, and ate an almond.
Two rows down, a stout man in a new collar had stood up every time a spirit came through and sat down again every time it went to somebody else. Across the field, in the stand opposite, a man in a brown coat sat with his hands folded on his knees. He was the only person Pollard could see who was not watching the gate, because he was watching the man in front of it. Pollard wrote that down as well, and could not have said why.
By noon, the field had changed. Nearly every boy and girl in it held a book, most of them had finally stopped chanting to show each other, and the stands had begun to talk about lunch. A handful still had nothing. They stood in their places with their cards and went on saying the words, more quietly now, while the students on either side tried not to look at them.
Leon Grey was one of them.
He stood in the third row where the chauffeur had put him, with his bundle at his feet and his card in his gloved hand, and his other hand was empty. Lucian had been counting, and the boy had not stopped chanting once since eight o’clock.
Then a spirit moved on the far side of the gate.
It was a long way down, deeper than the wolf had been, and it was coming up slowly. The others had come up towards the gate, but this one was coming up towards the third row.
That is not a stray, said one mind, and the other eight said nothing at all.
In the fourth row of the stands, Penny Holloway folded her paper twist shut and put it in her pocket.