Keystone (Gatewalkers) Read online

  When she came back to the desk, the unusual title came back to mind. Charlie searched it to get the longer blurb.

  Seinne Sonne needs a hero, and you have been chosen! The crown princess has been kidnapped, and the legendary Keystone has been stolen and shattered. Its pieces are scattered across the multi-verse. Are you up to the challenge of rescuing the princess and saving the worlds?

  Charlie snickered. The tone reminded her of old fashioned carnival barkers. Come one, come all! Step up to the plate and save the universe!

  Still. She had a weakness for sword and sorceries, even if they were low budget ones. Charlie chewed on her lower lip. It had been a long day. The crowd had thinned as it approached supper, the calm before the evening storm.

  She could snag a little VR time herself.

  Charlie tried to dismiss the thought. After all, why prolong the day any longer than she had to?

  It tickled in the back of her mind, persistent. Playing a quick game would be different than being on duty. Unlike lending her card to a customer, playing some VR (off duty) was technically encouraged so they could better advise customers. It had been so long since she’d taken advantage.

  Abruptly Charlie felt the full weight of the day’s stresses, combined with a longing to play this new game. There was nothing quite like the thrill of a new game. She loved all the possibilities that a new game offered. New characters to meet and become, new monsters and new villains, new challenges. Beating the game couldn’t compare. Ending was so much sadder than beginning. Perhaps that was why her home gaming unit had dozens of starts that she’d just never gotten around to finishing.

  Ah, well. Maybe she’d just clear out all those old saves, but that was for another day. Today was a new game.

  Charlie checked the waiting list and added herself to the queue for the room at the very far end of the hall, squeezing her time in right after her shift ended. Feeling a little guilty, she only marked in half an hour. She really shouldn’t linger any longer than that. It would fly by too quickly anyway.

  After that, the remains of her shift crawled along. Every time Charlie checked the time, only minutes had gone by, leaving an unimaginable gulf between herself and freedom. Waiting became pure torture, leaving her distracted and edgy. She felt like she had to go play now or she would burst.

  The moment her replacement arrived, Charlie swiped her card and clocked out. With her other hand she loaded the game on the data key. When it finished, she all but dashed down the hall, stripping off her name tag and stuffing it in her pocket alongside her pocket comp.

  ***

  Tom and Lallia exchanged a triumphant hand slap, as they had observed several of the humans do. As the woman opened the door on the hall, Tom quickly wove a new set of gate spells over the talisman in her hand, linking it to the Great Gate they had come through.

  They had their hero.

  CHAPTER TWO

  One-Winged Angel

  Legends claimed that Silverwyn Castle had been an elven outpost during the Nightmare Wars. Its defenders clung to life and clung to hope, a lone island in a land over swept by Ard Ri’s forces.

  After the Nightmare Wars ended, it was years before anyone could make their way into the unforgiving mountains to discover what became of Silverwyn’s final futile defenders.

  Investigators found the castle intact, its gates barred, its walls unbreached despite evidence of long siege. They climbed the walls to find weapons dropped where the men had stood, arrows in their quivers, armor cast away. What they did not find were bodies.

  Workers refused to rebuild, claiming the vanished defenders haunted its halls and a terrible, unnamed creature roamed its depths. They abandoned it. Forgotten by time.

  Forgotten no longer.

  The Blood Prince surveyed Silverwyn’s inner courtyard from what had once been the guard tower. Below him, the blue skinned terradi commanders ran their men through ruthless drills in the mud below. Green skinned orcs with jutting jaws and heavy muscles; nimble, crafty goblins; bloodthirsty terradi with their collections of rotting skulls hung from their belts. His army even boasted a growing community of vampires, a feat in itself for such solitary, territorial creatures. He had discovered that wearing masks relieved the vampires’ territorial urges to kill each other. He suspected that shielding the eyes – the conduit of vampiric mind magic – was the reason it worked.

  Silverwyn Castle was little more than hollow ruin when the Blood Prince discovered it. He organized the orcs and the goblins, bullied and rewarded them into cutting lumber, quarrying stone, repairing walls, and rebuilding floors. Now, they had forges for tools and weaponry. They had fields of crops, and something approaching a town, nestled on the mountainside below the castle where its elven predecessor had been so long ago. When his army began outgrowing their food supply, the Prince authorized raids on outlying villages, bringing back prisoners for blood sport to sharpen their skills and for the vampires to feed.

  All of this was his doing. He had taken a foraging rabble and made it into an army, all in less than ten years.

  His forces still slowly collected more from the mountains, the Black Forest, the Dead Marshes in the east, gleaning vampires from the streets of the cities and the caves of the countryside.

  The Blood Prince felt a surge of euphoria that was not entirely his own, followed by a wash of fatigue. “Stop that,” he snapped, tightening down the shields over his mind against the intrusion of the Mara’s wispy mental “fingers.” He turned from the window to face her, fearlessly meeting her golden eyes. As one of her many children, those eyes held little power over him.

  “Your performance was convincing,” the Prince said grudgingly.

  “I would have done better if I tasted Isil herself instead of Maelyn’s memories.” The Mara still wore the illusion of Isil’s form and face, but her voice was entirely her own.

  The pulse point of her throat drew his eye. Her blood was beyond intoxicating. Even with his protections against her, the Blood Prince understood the legends that men eagerly threw themselves to their deaths for her sake. He could only imagine the strength of her power at the height of her glory, in the midst of the Nightmare Wars, gorged on all the rage and fear of battle. She was, after all, Ard Ri’s remaining queen, and the only one of the three Mara that survived the war.

  “I must say I’m not impressed with Maelyn’s sense of the chit, weeping like that.” She casually flung her fingers through her hair, changing it from Isil’s shiny black mane to bright red curls.

  “Isil has been too closely guarded to reach, despite my agent’s efforts. If matters change, you will be the second to know,” the Blood Prince said. “What of Maelyn?”

  “No change in the little princess.” The Mara settled into the niche of the window. She glanced back over her shoulder at the training soldiers, her face indifferent. No doubt a few orcs and terradi were nothing to the armies she once commanded.

  “I had hoped Princess Maelyn would be more useful,” he said. “I despise wasted resources.”

  Princess Maelyn had not awakened from the catatonic state she entered when the Keystone shattered. The Prince had her returned to her prison chambers, cared for by trusted servants, but it seemed that shattering the Stone shattered her mind as well. Pity.

  The Mara’s head tilted onto her shoulder, her red curls artfully falling across her shoulder. “Then why waste any more time?” she said, deceptively silky. “Kill her and be done with it.”

  The Prince’s eyes ran over the Mara’s chosen form, taking in the beauty of her lissome curves, and the sunlight painting gold fire through her curls. He crossed the two steps to the window and laced a lock of that fire red through his fingers. She smiled at him languidly, but her deep green eyes were still sharp, wary.

  Annoying harpy.

  The Blood Prince planted his spread hand in the center of her chest and pushed with all of his enhanced strength. Her eyes flung wide in shock, her mouth dropping open as her body fell free of the windowsill.


  Her body, with all of its false beauty, dissolved into pale green mist that swirled briefly, angrily, and dove back through the window. She corporealized, her skin poison green and her hair black and swirling as shadows. Her void eyes blazed her pure rage, her ivory fangs bared in a snarling grimace, her talons long and reaching for his neck. He caught her wrists easily and held them away while her mental storm raged against his shields.

  “How dare you!” she shrieked.

  He supposed it was too much to hope. Pure malice did not die so easily.

  “I despise wasted resources,” the Blood Prince said again, slowly, as if to a child.

  The Mara’s snarl deepened, but her physical strength was no match for his. The Mara’s power was that of the mind, feeding on the emotions triggered by her illusions. Her children, the vampires, may have inherited only a measure of her abilities, but they had inherited all the physical strength of their father, Ard Ri, lord of death.

  “Return to the princess,” he said. “Do not leave her side until you have something of significance to tell me.”

  The Mara stabbed him with a flesh-rending glare. “I dislike being used as a common nursemaid.”

  “What you like or dislike is of no consequence,” he said. “Obey. Do not kill her. Yet. But you may delve into her mind to see what may be found.”

  She still glared at him. The princess’s mind was being thrown to her like a treat to a dog, and the Prince was certain she disliked being treated so.

  The Mara wrenched her hands from his suddenly pliant grip and glided to the door. As she brushed past, he felt her rip one last time into his mental shields. They buckled, giving him a small taste of her fury, but didn’t break.

  The Prince did not retaliate. This time. She was useful, and he had no intentions of angering her husband. After all, the seal over his Gate had cracked.

  The Prince disliked leaving matters as they stood, but there was no help for it. He waited until the Mara had time to leave the hallway, and then stripped off his mask, the faint buzzing along his skin created by its illusion fading away. He spun the mask between his hands.

  He looked up to examine his real face in the mirror hanging on the wall. Pale hair, pale skin, aristocratic features. He lifted the mask to pass it across his face and back, watching his hair change colors with the illusion embedded in the mask. Dark with the mask, light without. Light. Dark. Light. Dark. Which one was the true mask? Which was his true aspect?

  He hung the mask in its case along with his armor, closing and sealing it with his key.

  The Blood Prince activated the runes surrounding the doorway, creating a minor gate to his personal quarters. It was time to prepare for his appearance at court, to offer the High King condolences on the loss of his sister.

  ***

  The Mara poured into the chair at Princess Maelyn’s bedside. One of the castle’s few servants had tended to the comatose girl’s needs since the shattering of the Keystone. Maelyn looked like a proper sleeping damsel waiting for her prince to rescue her.

  The Mara wanted to carve her eyes out and dig slashes across her perfect, pale cheeks.

  She traced a nail down the girl’s slender nose, wondering what the Blood Prince would say if she broke it. Or perhaps it would be more satisfying to hand Maelyn over to the terradi officers and let them fight over that delicate little skull with its long, silky black hair.

  Maybe the terradi would let the Mara keep Maelyn’s eyes. Their vivid green reminded her of Gwalchmai’s. She’d only managed to get one of his. She felt a visceral thrill deep in her gut remembering it. She hoped his pretty little traitor wife loathed the sight of him after that.

  The Mara drew her nail across the underside of Maelyn’s eyelid. “Wakey, wakey,” she crooned. Once upon a time, her voice alone had commanded the power of life and death.

  Maelyn’s eyelids twitched, but she refused to wake, her mind shattered and trapped on the bridge between worlds. No matter. The Mara was even stronger there.

  She allowed her essence to leave her physical form, letting her body slump back in the chair. Insubstantial as a cloud, the Mara crossed over the barrier separating the worlds, stepping onto the bridge.

  Gates allowed one to cross the bridge in less than a breath, but occasionally a Gate went wrong. In the ever shifting, in-between “world” of the bridge, most sentient beings lost what sanity they possessed, trying to make sense of the pure, unmitigated chaos. The mind would attempt to create form where there was no form, producing a maze of corridors and stairs, archways and doors, all twisted and shifting around each other. Such unfortunate beings would wander until they perished, or until they stumbled through another Gate that spat them out into a “real” world, their minds so torn that they could no longer understand what became of them.

  The Mara, formless as the world surrounding her, deftly slithered through the bridge’s twisted “terrain.” She could see the evidence of Maelyn’s wandering efforts: Gates between the worlds that were closed once more. She considered trying to rip a few open again, but decided not to waste the time. It made little difference to her. She only cared about one Gate, and it was sealed shut.

  The Mara followed her instincts to the Gate as familiar to her as that of her own home world.

  The blood seal held fast, keeping the Gate and its surrounds unmoving, unchanging for centuries. The seal itself pulsed in living ribbons of crimson across the Gate, but a thin crack ran through its center. That crack had been just wide enough for her to slip free at last.

  Before the Gate knelt its vigilant guardian. Encased in black and silver armor, his feathered wings spreading behind him like a storm cloud of grey and lightning, he held a flaming sword before him and shielded the sealed Gate at his back. He, too, had gone unchanged for centuries, preserved by the timelessness of the bridge, still bearing the wounds of his final battle, the blood wet on his armor. Guarding his king’s lifeblood.

  The Mara had never been a warrior. Her weapons were deception and magic. Yet, the Gate taunted her with its nearness, her lord trapped behind its crimson surface.

  “Soon,” she whispered. Princess Maelyn, with her tormenting green eyes that were so beloved and so hated and her blood that tied her to the sovereignty of the kingship, might yet provide the key to the Gate.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Into the Labyrinth

  Charlie popped the “Seinne Sonne” data key into the reader and felt a fresh surge of giddy excitement. As she stepped into the room, she felt a sharp, dizzy jolt as if she’d missed a stair. Her foot met ground, but for a second she still felt like she was falling. The air rippled around her, turning warm and moist, tinged with the salty tang of seawater. Bright sunlight surrounded her.

  Her sneakered feet sank slightly into sandy ground. She stood on a hill covered in tall, undulating grass. Beyond the rise of the surrounding hills ahead of her, grey-blue ocean stretched to meet the pale horizon. Seagulls screamed nearby.

  Charlie glanced down at herself. She still wore her cade uniform, complete with sneakers. Wasn’t this supposed to be a sword and sorcery? Odd. The game had skipped straight past character creation, unless this was the tutorial phase. At least she hadn’t started out as a prisoner.

  This was no low budget production either. Some company had put major hours into this game. Most productions didn’t bother with such vivid sensory detail because most of the subtle nuances would be lost in the home editions, and that was where they made most of their money.

  Charlie paused to enjoy it, breathing deeply of the beach-side air, then descended the hill to head toward the ocean. It was as likely a starting point as any. She felt the tensions of the day flaking away like a crusty shell, leaving her feeling light and feathery.

  Once clear of the hill, Charlie could see boats on the ocean. A lot of them were small, fishing types, but there were also several full-masted beauties. She always loved this part. It was just like stepping back in time. Like stepping into another world.

/>   There was nothing of the ordinary and everyday left; no cars, no jets, no mag rail, and for a little while, no policy changes or store managers.

  A fair hike down the beach line, where the ocean curved inland to meet a river, the walls of a small castle rose above the hills. The smaller buildings of a town peppered its shadow, and more masts bristled in the small harbor fronting it.

  Civilization was always the best place to start. Charlie struck out for the town.

  ***

  The pixies collapsed in a puddle on the beach.

  “We made it,” Tom moaned, and spread out his arms to dig into the sand of their own world.

  “That was worse than the first Gate.” Good thing they’d slipped through the Gate practically on their hero’s heels, because it snapped shut right behind them, catching them in a back wave and nearly sending them in between. Lallia shuddered and clung to Tom.

  “I never want to leave Seinne Sonne again.”

  Lallia wasn’t so sure about that, but she very much agreed that she didn’t want to go through any more Gates for a while at least.

  “Wait.” Tom lifted up his head. “Where’s she gone?”

  Lallia gasped. “Our hero! She doesn’t even know where to go!” She would be completely lost in Seinne Sonne.

  “Like you do? Where are we, anyway? This isn’t Iomara.”

  Lallia fluttered upward to look around. She sighed in relief. “We’re exactly where we need to be.” She pointed down the beach. “There’s Alta.”

  “Alta? That’s the end of the world! Why would we want to go to Alta? The Keystone was stolen from the palace vaults. We should be in Iomara!”

  “No, we need to go to Alta,” Lallia said. “Trust me. Oh! There she is! Come, come!” She sped after their hero.