"Why aren't you at your Gate?" Axis said.
There was a silence, and when the GateKeeper answered, her voice was puzzled and unsure.
"I sat at my table," the GateKeeper said, "when, just then, just now, a moment ago it seems to me, the soul of a beautiful girl child drifted up. Before she went through the Gate, she turned to me and she said, 'Rejoice, GateKeeper, for your task is done. Time is ended, and the Gate must close.'
"And then she stepped through the Gate. And then ... then it imploded, and I had seized the birdman and your wife and Urbeth's two girls and brought them here."
"Then I thank you for that —" Axis began.
"Oh, I did not think of you when I returned your wife and companions," the GateKeeper said. "It was merely convenient that I brought them with me."
"Then why did you come here?" said Axis.
"Because of Her," said the GateKeeper. "The Child."
And Axis nodded, and understood. Not Katie at all, but Leagh's Child.
They waited.
"Has ma'am finished?" said Raspu, returning from wherever he had been, and Faraday put her cup back into its saucer and extended it into the dark. The mausoleum had completely vanished, and now there was only a nothingness.
"Yes. Thank you." Faraday was not perturbed by the dark and the nothingness, nor by the fact that she currently shared the void with a former Demon.
All would be well as it eventuated.
They waited.
DragonStar rode his Star Stallion through the void, his pale hounds fanning out behind him in a comet's tail.
There was something he should do, but for the moment he did not care. There was only the wild ride, the freedom, and the void.
Nothing else mattered.
The stallion snorted, and shook his head. Sicarius bayed, and the Alaunt clamoured. DragonStar sighed. "Faraday," he said.
She heard him before she saw him. The faint fall of a horse's hooves, the snuffling of a pack of hounds.
Slowly Faraday rose to her feet, accepting Raspu's hand on her elbow.
Then, suddenly, there was a presence, and the faintest of luminescence, and there was DragonStar, sitting his stallion, his hounds milling about him.
"Come," he said. "We have a Garden to plant."
Raspu watched as DragonStar helped Faraday mount behind him, and then, as they rode away and the darkness closed in again, he waited.
The Star Stallion stopped, and DragonStar turned slightly.
"Faraday? Are you ready?"
"Ready for what?" she said. What had he meant, plant the Garden?
She felt, rather than saw, him smile. "You have something of mine," DragonStar said. "Something you have kept for a very long time. Will you now give it back to me?"
Faraday frowned, and then jumped slightly in surprise as she remembered what it was. "Oh!"
When DragonStar had worked the enchantment to ensnare the twenty thousand crazed people in the Western Ranges, he had shot the enchantment into the sky with an arrow.
After the arrow had done its work, it had fallen to the ground at Faraday's feet, and, eventually, she'd wound it into the rainbow band that the Mother had given her.
Together with the sapling.
Her hands trembling, Faraday leaned back very slightly from DragonStar's warmth, and unwound the band.
She took the arrow, the sapling still safely coiled about it, into her hands.
And then Faraday gasped, for the arrow had been strangely supple all this time it rested so close about her waist. Now, in the space of one heartbeat, it solidified into strength again.
The sapling still wound its way about its length.
"Faraday?"
She took the arrow, and passed it to DragonStar.
He held it briefly, then lifted the Wolven from his shoulder and fitted the arrow to it.
He paused, and Faraday could tell he was crying, then in one fluid movement, DragonStar lifted the bow and shot the arrow high into the darkness.
Chapter 72
