Red Gold Bridge

by Patrice Sarath

Genres: Epic Fantasy; Fantasy; Fantasy action & adventure; Dark Fantasy

Synopsis

In the heart of the gordath, danger is waiting... A year ago, Lynn Romano and Kate Mossland stumbled through the gordath, a portal between our world and the war-torn society called Aeritan. Now, a powerful Aeritan general has crossed through to Earth, and his obsession with Kate could tear both worlds apart.

Release date: October 24, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 272

Sample

The evening sun set through the tall trees that ringed Red Gold Bridge. Shafts of sunlight shot through to the ground, turning the stone of the stronghold a deeper shade of gold. Spray from the forest stream that cut beneath the stone arch, rebuilt now after the winter’s war, was caught in the sun, and a perpetual rainbow dazzled in the mist.

Joe and Arrim trudged across the arch of the bridge, Joe feeling weariness deep in his bones. The road was already in shadow behind them, and the mountain rose ahead, the wall and the great gate rising thirty feet over their heads. A slice of the setting sun illuminated the red gold of the stone, and the iron and wood of the gate caught some of the glow.

Off to the side was the smaller postern gate, the one everyone used these days. The two guardians headed that way, threading through the steady stream of smallholders heading back to their forest holdings. Once the smallholders would not have dared to travel the Wood when the sun was so near to setting. It was thanks to Arrim and Joe that they could now.

Small men and women in their drab forest clothes gave them half bows and shy smiles. Arrim bowed back, the movement coming easily to him. Joe had introduced his own custom. He shook hands with one or two people he had come to recognize on his patrols through the woods that kept the forest settled and quiet.

The forestholders came to the stronghold on the banks of the Aeritan River to trade every few days, bringing in baskets of mushrooms, dried fish, and dyes made from the plants that grew in clearings only they knew. They brought in freshwater pearls and smoked eels, thick clay, the charcoal and firewood that would be used by smiths to fire their forges, and the spicy roots that were used to make vesh, what Joe called the national drink of Aeritan. Their goods were prized all over Aeritan, and the forestholders traded them for what they needed: forged tools, textiles, and food, mostly protein they couldn’t get for themselves. The forestholders lived in dark, secret clearings in the Wood and knew the forest better than Joe and Arrim. They stayed away from the portal at its center, though. They left that for the guardians.

Waiting his turn to duck through the postern gate, Joe caught movement and looked up. Lady Sarita was watching them from over the wall, thirty feet up.

Like him, she wore the clothes from her old life, T-shirt and jeans. She held a cup in her hand. Vesh, probably. He heard that she had missed it, back in New York. He waved and smiled.

Of course, she didn’t wave back; she wouldn’t have, even when she was Mrs. Hunt, owner of Hunter’s Chase, and he was just the barn handyman.

Then Lord Tharp joined her, and Joe’s grin faded. He hurried after Arrim and ducked through the low arch inside the wall. Instantly he was plunged into darkness, the only light a narrow swath coming from the courtyard inside the wall. Even though Lady Sarita had come back to Tharp after years of living on the other side—and it hadn’t been too bad a life there, that’s for sure—she and her husband stalked around one another like a pair of pissed-off cats. Joe didn’t work for Lord Tharp, but he didn’t want to make him hotter than he already was, where his wife was concerned.

Man’s got a serious problem, if he thinks he can keep her on a short leash. Joe hadn’t known Mrs. Hunt before she was Mrs. Hunt, so to speak, but she had run her stables at a profit by keeping a tight hand on the wheel. She wasn’t the kind to put up with someone trying to run her the same way.

His stomach cramped with hunger. He looked forward to a hot meal, his first in a half month, and a bed with blankets and furs instead of a thin bedroll on a mattress of leaves. Arrim threw him a look as they emerged into the courtyard, already half in darkness. Joe shook his head at his look of inquiry.

“Just thinking of a good hot meal.”

“Thank the forest god that’s all we have to worry about tonight.” He grinned. “And maybe a girl who thinks to curry favor with the forest god by being sweet to a guardian. Your Corinna, even.”

Corinna worked in the kitchens and had her eye on Joe almost since the day he came to Red Gold Bridge. She was a broad, pleasant-faced woman about his age, and she had made her interest clear. And Lynn could be on the moon, for all they could ever be together. So far, though, Joe had just been friendly and nothing more. He made a noncommittal noise.

“I’m gonna clean up. See you at the kitchens.”

Joe dumped his gear in his guardian’s chamber on the inside wall of the stronghold. He stretched, welcoming the relief of the pack off his shoulders. Guardians didn’t carry much, just a bedroll, dried food, and water, but the constant weight put a strain on his shoulders. His old boots were not meant for walking, but he was loathe to give them up. They were in much better shape than Arrim’s hobnailed boots, and guardians didn’t exactly draw a salary with which to buy new shoes. The job was its own reward, which sucked as far as Joe was concerned. He had never made much money back home, but at least he had been able to buy the essentials. Now he got room and board after a fact, but little else.

He stripped his shirt and washed himself at the basin of clean water left for him in the small room. The soap was a lumpy chunk that hardly raised a lather. Be nice to have a shower, he reflected, rinsing off and drying himself with a threadbare cloth. A nice hot shower and a good close shave, instead of using a straight razor that he about cut his own throat with. Instead he got standup baths, long nights out in the weather, jerky for breakfast, and biscuits for dinner.

And the beer was bad, too.

Still, it was like the woods knew him. When he set foot in the forest, the woods called to him as if he were home. He sure never saw woods like this where he grew up in central Texas, just thorny mesquite and papery cedar. Not even the cotton-woods back home that lined the creek beds with green were forest like this one. Here the trees closed out the sun. Only small shafts of sunlight reached the damp, cool ground that smelled of decaying leaves. The meadows were bright with green and yellow grasses, and in spring they were studded with a small purple flower like the bluebonnets back home. Creeks ran all summer long, even in the drought of August, or what he felt was probably August. He forgot the new season names that he had learned, and he had lost track of time. All he knew was, it was summer now, and the gordath had settled down. All last winter though, things had been bad, and Joe wasn’t sure he was going to be able to take it.

Back then, the gordath had racked the woods, each earthquake cracking the frozen ground and breaking up stone. He and Arrim trod softly, letting their minds reach out to touch the uneasy portal, and slowly, slowly, it closed up. Finally, there was nothing left but traces of the gordath’s fury.

He and Arrim marked where trees had fallen and let the forest smallholders salvage them for firewood and for their new houses. One smallholding had been completely destroyed, its houses fallen and the trees toppled as if a missile had flattened the little hamlet. When they came upon it, Joe had been struck by the quietness of the small settlement. It had still been winter, and the snow covered up the fallen houses, but someone had raised a pile of stones to the dead, leaves scattered across the top and around its foot. Joe stood shivering in the cold, but a strange sad peace held the tiny village, as if it were still being soothed.

“The forest will grow up around it,” Arrim said, startling him out of his sad revery. “Vines will cover all this, and saplings will rise from the forest floor.”

“That’s it?” Joe said. He thought of funerals back home and of memorials on the side of dangerous roads, their crosses faithfully marked with plastic flowers.

Arrim pointed to the cairn. “This is all the forest god requires. Then he takes back his own.”

Joe still felt the situation called for something, so he fashioned a small cross, lashing it together with a bit of string from his supplies, and laid it against the snowy pile of rock. Maybe it would confuse the forest god and maybe it wouldn’t, but he liked to think of the little cross there, slowly decaying and returning to the forest, the emblem of a foreign god. He hadn’t been religious back home. He wasn’t sure what had happened to him here in Red Gold Bridge, except they had gods for everyone and everything, it seemed.

It was just another way he was learning to think in Aeritan.

The little village was not the only victim of the gordath. Joe began to recognize other places, older places, that had once been cleared and were now vine-covered, their sentinel trees standing around a rough clearing, old stones in a rough pattern humping under a growth of moss. Last winter had not been the first time the gordath flung itself open in a burst of energy, nor the first time the forest god took back its own. Gordath Wood was full of these mementos to the dangerous portal that hid at its heart.

Joe finished washing up and put his old T-shirt back on, the material worn and faded. It was only a matter of time before it fell apart completely, and he would have to turn to Aeritan clothes. One of the smallholders had patched it for him once when he and Arrim had stopped in on their holding in the western part of the Wood. She had taken one look at his outlandish T-shirt and his jeans, and laughed outright, shaking her head.

“Give me that for mending,” she scolded, and he looked startled, but he slipped the shirt off over his head. She sat down and mended a tear under the arm while he sipped vesh and the kids giggled at his pale skin. She bit off the thread and handed it back to him. “Come back with enough cloth, and I will make a proper set of clothes for you.”

He looked at the heavy trousers everyone else wore and hoped that his jeans held out for a while. He knew that a shirt like Arrim’s would suit him better. He knew why he resisted, though, and it was for the same reason that Mrs. Hunt wore her rich lady’s version of his outfit.

Forget the portal; once the clothes were gone and they went native, they could never go back.

The door opened, and Arrim ducked in.

“I have a bad feeling,” the guardian said.

Shit. Arrim’s bad feelings tended to come true.

“What? What is it?”

Arrim grinned. “That they’ll run out of bread in the kitchens before we get there, Guardian.”

Joe rolled his eyes and pushed past him. “Arrim, where I come from, you know what we call people who make jokes like that?”

“Funny?”

“Stupid.”

Red Gold Bridge was no longer at war, but the stronghold still felt like a barracks. The courtyard was full of men and horses and oxen. You had to be careful where you walked, and the stench of unwashed people and manure overwhelmed Joe. He was used to the forest, not this. The stronghold was a major port on the river, and it attracted everybody who wanted to do business throughout Aeritan. There were merchants from other holdings, many of them women with their hair neatly tucked under kerchiefs, and farmers, wagon ers, coopers, wheelwrights, armsmen. Everyone fell back to let the guardians walk through, but this time it was different. The forestholders respected and liked the guardians. The strongholders mixed their deference with suspicion. Guardians were neither lords nor smallholders, and their relationship to the woods made everyone uneasy. The stronghold had been built as a way to hold off the gordath, after all, and its denizens never got over their wariness.

The kitchens were full of bustle, too, the business of feeding the stronghold never ending. Joe and Arrim threaded their way to a table, grabbing fresh flat bread, puffed and golden from the skillet, and bowls of the rich, spicy poultry stew that the Red Gold Bridge kitchens were famous for. The stew was like vesh, in that the combination of herbs and spices were exotic yet familiar, comforting in their fullness. He piled soft smoked cheese on top of the stew along with some sweet onions that reminded Joe of the 1015 onions the Aggies grew back home, and odds and ends to round out the meal. Corinna looked up from the dough she kneaded and smiled in greeting.

“Good day to you, Master Guardian,” she said. Arrim, not subtle, elbowed Joe. Joe ignored him.

“Hi, Corinna,” he said. He nodded at the bread. “Looks good.” She beamed. She reminded him of home, too; her hair and eyes had a Hispanic look to them. She could be one of his cousins. And just like he felt nothing for his cousins, he felt nothing for her. Not her fault; she just wasn’t Lynn.

Joe and Arrim stood at the hearth, scooping up stew with their flat bread as spoons. They weren’t the only scavengers in the kitchens. There were a few kids and a handful of Captain Tal’s guard, sitting by themselves at the old scarred wooden table over by the wall. They gave Joe and Arrim hard looks and turned back to their beer and soup. That was another thing. He reckoned he could do with friends about as much as anybody. It was hard to be either looked up to or distrusted.

He ate, thinking it would be good to get out of the stronghold and back to the woods, even though they had just arrived. That’s where, after all those years of being on the move, he felt he belonged the most. He could feel the restlessness of the gordath even now, like an extra heart beating alongside his. As soon as he concentrated, the thrumming ceased. Sometimes he wasn’t sure what the gordath wanted from him.

He glanced around and saw Corinna looking at him. She smiled and ducked her head a bit shyly.

“Should we prepare a handfasting?” Arrim said, half teasing, half in earnest. “She’s a pretty one, a good cook, give you good babies.”

Once he had thought about that with Lynn. She was the first woman he ever imagined he could settle down with. The gordath had other ideas though.

“I guess I should get my footing first, before I think about marrying,” Joe said evasively. Arrim snorted.

“Marrying, now? You’re a guardian, not one of the lords.” At Joe’s blank look, he said, “Marriage is for the Council, not us. We handfast—promise, before the grass god.”

“Yeah, I don’t know that I get the difference, Arrim, but no, I’m not planning that far ahead.”

One of Tal’s guards got up, and with an ostentatious look at the two guardians, he went over to Corinna, giving her a winning smile. She smiled back, blushed, and they had a conversation over the bread, with him swiping a loaf from the oven, tossing it to take the heat out of it, and her giving him a mock scolding.

“She’s trying to make you jealous, that one,” Arrim said, and Joe rolled his eyes. He’d had enough.

“Jesus, Arrim, give it a rest. You like her, you talk to her.”

Joe pushed past the guards more roughly than he had to and left the kitchen behind. Almost immediately the temperature plunged. Joe made his way through the stone fortress, automatically heading back to the outer walls. He was restless, the thought of the mountain overhead oppressing him. He paused on the top of the stairs that led up to the walkway on the wall. The air had turned thick with twilight, the barest of sunsets filtering through the shadows. He could hear the rush of the river like a distant wind. He turned south to go down the other set of stairs, his boots tapping softly on the ancient stone. He was the only person on the walls.

The walkway led around the rose tower, which jutted out from the mountain, its own winding stairs carved out of stone and patched with mortar. Climbing rosebushes trailed up along the wall. In the spring they were thick with small white wild roses. Lynn had been imprisoned in that tower.

Joe stopped along the gallery, leaning on the wall. It was his favorite place in the stronghold. Here a series of columns faced out toward the river, light and air entering in through the arched openings. The setting sun made the river sparkle until his eyes hurt. Across the river the Aeritan headlands rose above the banks and faded into the distance. He could see the barest line of a road, white against the dark hills, dipping and curving along the line of the terrain.

It was hard, missing Lynn. They had only had a few short months to get to know each other. Sometimes he dreamed about her apartment over the barn at Hunter’s Chase, its white curtains wafting in the breeze from the open windows while they made love in the evening after the day’s work was through. He told himself not to think about it, but it was no good. She was an ache that was ever-present. Only the gordath had more of a hold on him, and he knew that the gordath would use his yearning for Lynn as a wedge to pry itself open.

Can’t see her, can’t hold her, he thought. But he could still go visit an old friend.

Red Gold Bridge’s stables were in twilight except for a couple of glowing lanterns secured firmly by the main barn doors and the last remnants of the sun coming in through the high windows. A few grooms played a complicated game of cards and dice near the entrance, where the sun still lit up their table. They looked up.

“Guardian,” one said in greeting. They were used to him.

“Evening,” Joe said. He jerked his head at the big box stall on the side with the best light and the best air flow. “Just going to have a talk with Pride.”

“One of these days you’ll have to sit in with us,” another groom said, as he always did.

To be fleeced within an inch of his life, for sure. Joe knew he would be lucky to come out of a game with his boots, his belt, and his shirt.

“On payday,” Joe promised, as he always replied. They laughed and let him be.

Pride. They didn’t call him Dungiven here. The town the big Irish hunter had been named for didn’t exist in this world, so the stallion had been rechristened Pride. Dungiven had heard his voice, and the big horse turned around in his stall to greet him, his liquid eyes catching a bit of light. He snorted out, whuffing gently against Joe, his oaty breath warm and thick. The horse’s muzzle was dark, the black turning to gray and then almost white. His nostrils flared, and his ears pricked. Joe rubbed his big cheek, and the horse snorted again.

Mindful of the grooms’ presence, he didn’t say aloud what he was thinking. I miss her, too. He didn’t know horses the way Lynn did, but he sometimes thought that Dungiven looked over his shoulder first before looking at him, as if expecting Lynn to be right there beside him.

Dungiven snorted again, and his ears cocked forward, just as the grooms exploded out of their seats. Joe turned as Mrs. Hunt came in.

She acknowledged the grooms and their startled cries of “My lady!” with a graceful nod, but she came straight over to Joe and Dungiven.

Joe tried to keep his expression neutral. If she were here, Lord Tharp wouldn’t be far behind, and he didn’t want to have to deal with the man and his jealousy. Hearing them fight or watching as they punished each other with icy silences was bad enough. She never should of come back.

He wondered why she did. She could have just pointed him and Arrim in the right direction, after all. Likely it had been out of guilt for opening up the gordath all those years ago and causing a war over her disappearance. He and Arrim had talked about it and decided that they better keep her away from the woods in case she had a change of heart and started things up all over again.

She stopped a few feet away from him. He didn’t know if she had come here to talk or just to take in the horse, like him, so he waited for her to make the first move.

“Joe,” she said in her even voice.

“Ma’am,” he said courteously.

She didn’t say anything for a while. He studied her, her face lost in the dim light. She came up on Dungiven’s off side and laid her hand against the stallion’s neck. The horse’s skin quivered, but he stayed still, one ear tilted back—not flattened, as when a horse is angry, but attentive.

“You come here often,” she said. It was a statement, but it was so close to a come-on he almost laughed. She couldn’t have known that. Or maybe, since she had lived seven years in New York, she knew exactly what it meant.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I just like to keep an eye on him.” Dungiven was one of them, after all. He didn’t say that to Mrs. Hunt though. He didn’t think she would like being lumped together with the barn handyman and a horse.

She gave a small laugh, and he could sense the grooms’ shock. “He reminds me of home as well.”

Busted, he thought. She knew exactly why he came to the stables, and it wasn’t just to check on the big horse. But her words bespoke a dangerous homesickness. Aware of the grooms’ interest, Joe tried to be tactful. He kept his voice low.

“Ma’am, best you don’t think of New York as home.”

She looked at him over the horse’s mane. “Perhaps,” she said, and he knew that would be the most he would get. She gave the horse a final pat and turned to face Joe head-on, her expression lost in the darkness of night.

“I should go. Eyvig will wonder where I am, and I know you are not comfortable with me here.”

He was about to protest, even though she had the right of it, when she forestalled him.

“Sometimes, I just need someone to call me Mrs. Hunt. Or ma’am.”

He heard the smile in her voice, overlaid with the faintest of tears, so he gave her what she needed.

“Good night, Mrs. Hunt.”

“Good night, Joe.”

He watched her go, the grooms so shocked at the familiarity of their conversation that their card game was forgotten. Joe sighed. Their meeting would be all over the stronghold in no time; the only thing that ran faster than the river in Red Gold Bridge was gossip. God only knew how Lord Tharp would take it. Well, he and Arrim would be out in the woods soon enough, and Tharp would just have to stew.

Joe woke in his small cell, groggy and disoriented, with only the faintest memory of a dream to disturb him. He lay shivering with the blankets kicked half off, the rest a tangle, and tried to figure things out. It was pitch-black, the small fire on the hearth having gone out while he slept, and the darkness pressed down on him. His vision played tricks on him, making him think he could see sparks and flickers of light, so he closed his eyes. The cold stronghold air rushed over his bare chest, chilling him.

What woke me? He couldn’t remember his dream except for a sense of foreboding. He sat up, untangling himself from the twisted blankets, and groped for his candle and rough matches. He scratched the match on the wall, and the light flared, the acrid smell of sulfur making his eyes water. He lit the candle and set it into the sconce on the side of the bed. The darkness retreated sullenly as his eyes adjusted.

Even before he reached out, he could sense it. The gordath was open.

“Shit,” Joe swore under his breath. A sorry-ass excuse for a guardian he was. It should have been the first thing he thought of. He reached out tentatively. It wasn’t like the last winter, when he first encountered a full-on gordath that had been out of control for months. Back then, the power was like a roaring turbine, overwhelming, dangerous, malevolent. This felt urgent but distant.

His gear sat at the foot of the bed. Joe put his feet on the floor and cursed again at the cold. He searched for his socks, found them, and put them on, then his jeans and shirt. It was too cold to stay naked, and he wasn’t about to cower under the covers until morning. As he drew on his boots, he tried to shake the last remnants of sleep from his head. He grabbed the candle, holding it carefully so as not to drip wax down onto his fingers, and pushed open his door, just as Arrim stood about to open it, dressed and ready to go with his own candle, his pack slung over his shoulder.

“Good,” the other man said, with no other preamble. He jerked his head. “Let’s go, Guardian.”

Joe grabbed his pack, glad he had kept it ready. He followed Arrim, their flickering candlelight throwing crazy shadows on the wall, glistening where the walls were damp. He wasn’t sure whether to be pissed off or worried. A little of both, he thought. He didn’t know what time it was, but if he wasn’t going to get a full night’s sleep after two weeks of deadheading through the woods, he was going to have to have a come-to-Jesus talk with whoever was messing around with the gordath.

And if it were Mrs. Hunt, he was going to be seriously pissed.

The tall, narrow house stood in a clearing in Gordath Wood between three tall trees, its rough stone weathered by time. It looked ancient, as if it were older than the forest itself. Narrow, vertical slits scarred the old stone. Its slate roof was broken. Where leaves had fallen and decayed, creating soil, a garden of moss and other plants grew among the slate. The house looked like a tor, a jagged mountain upthrust from the forest floor. The gordath, the portal between the worlds, was centered on this house. Joe knew that it lived in two places, at the end of a run-down lane in hunt country in upstate New York, and here, in Aeritan. Once the guardians lived here, Arrim had told him, but they had abandoned the house to live in Red Gold Bridge between patrols. He didn’t say why, but Joe figured that it was because the guardians felt the same thing he felt every time he was near the place. The power of the gordath was most on edge here, most alive, most conducive to opening. It was dangerous to be too close to it, even if your job was to keep it closed.

The clearing was quiet, dark. It was high summer in Aeritan, but the forest stayed cool.

“What do you think?” he asked Arrim, keeping his voice low.

Arrim gestured toward the door. “Make sure no one’s here. I want to take a look around the clearing.”

Joe pushed open the heavy wooden door, putting his shoulder behind it as the door stuck. The wood scraped across the threshold with a dull squeak. The bottom floor was a bare room, and the cold from the stone floor seeped into his old boots. A fireplace hulked at one corner, debris collecting on the hearth.

There were a few remaining cartons that had once held shells for the guns that Bahard had run from New York to Aeritan, but the boxes were empty, and the cardboard had gotten clammy and fallen apart. The guns themselves—well, no one knew what had happened to them. The Aeritan Council had confiscated what they could at the end of last year’s war, but Joe knew how that went. Plenty of guns to go around. At least there was a shortage of ammunition, and he doubted that Aeritan had the technology to make more. The smiths and metalwrights were good, but there was only so much they could do, and making modern ammo was beyond their capabilities. Nothing to stop a little reverse engineering, though, he thought. An enterprising Aeritan engineer could probably figure out how to make a decent facsimile of a modern gun if they took one apart.

The air inside was cold, and the house felt abandoned. Joe headed up the narrow stairs. Cold light spilled in on the landing, more debris in the corners and beneath the windows. At the top, he pushed open a door to one room. Empty.

The gathering emptiness in the house pressed down on him, and the gordath throbbed along with his heartbeat. It lived, he thought. Maybe it wasn’t like a human, or even an animal, but it lived.

He thought he could perceive an extra edge this time, a malevolent intention. It wanted to be open, and it knew Joe was . . .