6
We reached the gate in less than an hour. I’d dismounted the trike. Overhead, the clouds were lower and darker than ever, and I didn’t think the rain could hold off for much longer. My estimate that the gray wall was forty feet high turned out to be way wrong. It was seventy at least, and the gate was titanic. It was faced in gold—real gold, I was sure, not paint—and almost as long as a football field. The staves bracing it leaned this way and that, but not from age and decay; I was sure they had been placed that way, making strange angles. They made me think of Lovecraft again, and the mad, non-Euclidian universe of monsters that was always straining to overwhelm ours.
It wasn’t just the angles that were disturbing. Those staves were of some cloudy green substance that looked like a kind of metallic glass. Something seemed to be moving in them, like black vapor. It made my stomach feel funny. I looked away and when I looked back, the black stuff was gone. When I turned my head and looked at the staves from the corner of my eye, the black stuff seemed to return. Vertigo swept through me.
Not wanting to lose what little breakfast I’d eaten, I looked down at my feet. And there, on one of the cobblestones, printed in paint that might once have been blue but had faded to gray, were the initials AB. My head cleared, and when I looked up I just saw the gate, crisscrossed by those green supports. But what a gate it was, like a CGI effect out of an epic movie. But this was no special effect. I rapped my knuckles on one of the cloudy green staves just to be sure.
I wondered what would happen if I tried Claudia’s name on the gate, or Stephen Woodleigh’s. They were both of the royal blood, weren’t they? The answer was yes, but if I understood correctly （I wasn’t sure I did, because I’ve never been good at untangling familial relationships）， only Princess Leah was the heir-apparent to the throne of Empis. Or maybe it was the throne of the Galliens. It didn’t matter to me, as long as I could get in. If the name didn’t work, I was going to be stuck out here, and Radar would die.
Stupid Charlie actually looked for an intercom, the sort of thing you’d find beside the doorway of an apartment building. There was no such thing, of course, just those weird crisscrossing staves with impenetrable blackness between them.
I muttered, “Leah of the Gallien.”
Nothing happened.
Not loud enough, maybe, I thought, but shouting seemed wrong in the silence outside the wall, almost like spitting on a church altar. Do it anyway. Outside the city, it’s probably safe enough. Do it for Radar.
In the end I couldn’t bring myself to shout, but I cleared my throat and raised my voice.
“Open in the name of Leah of the Gallien!”
I was answered by an inhuman scream that made me step back and almost fall over the front of the trike. You know that saying, my heart was in my mouth? Mine felt like it was ready to bolt out from between my lips, run away, and leave me dead on the ground. The screaming went on and on, and I realized it was the sound of some titanic machine starting up after years or decades. Perhaps not since Mr. Bowditch had last used this world’s version of open sesame.
The gate trembled. I saw those black tendrils writhing and rising in the off-kilter green staves. There was no doubt about them this time; it was like looking at sediment in a shaken bottle. The screech of the machinery changed to a rattling thunder, and the gate started to move to the left along what must have been a huge hidden track. I watched it slide by and the vertigo returned, worse than ever. I turned away, drunk-staggered four steps to the seat of Claudia’s trike, and put my face down on it. My heart was slamming in my chest, my neck, even in the sides of my face. I couldn’t look at those ever-changing angles as the gate opened. I thought I’d pass out if I did. Or see something so awful it would send me fleeing back the way I’d come, leaving my dying dog behind. I closed my eyes and reached out for a handful of her fur.
Hold on, I thought. Hold on, hold on, hold on.
7
At last the clattering rumble stopped. There was another of those protesting screeches, and silence returned. Returned? It fell like an anvil. I opened my eyes and saw Radar looking at me. I opened my hand and saw I’d pulled out a considerable swatch of her hair, but she hadn’t complained. Maybe because she had greater pains to contend with, but I don’t think that was it. I think she realized I needed her.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
Ahead of me, inside the gate, was a vast tiled courtyard. It was lined with the remains of great stone butterflies on both sides, each on a pedestal and standing twenty feet high. Their wings had been broken and lay in piles on the courtyard floor. They made a kind of passageway. I wondered if, once upon a better time, each of those monarch butterflies （for of course that was what they were） had represented a king or queen in the line of Gallien.