The Gates of Winter Read Free Page A

savage monsters; she had seen a fairy. In the end, nothing could shock her anymore. They had asked all the same questions the others had, and she had answered them mechanically.
    It was only at the end of the interview, after a long pause, that a different question finally came.
    “Please tell us one last thing, Ms. Falling Hawk. If you were given the opportunity, would you go there?”
    She stiffened in the chair. “Go there?”
    “To AU-3, the world some call Eldh. Would you go there, if you could?”
    She leaned back and touched the silver ring she wore on her right hand. It was the ring Glinda had given to her at Surrender Dorothy—the London nightclub that had been a secret haven for people with fairy blood in their veins. Duratek had been controlling the folk of Surrender Dorothy, supplying them with the drug Electria, hoping to use their blood to open a gateway to Eldh. Only then Duratek had captured a true fairy; it had needed the others no longer. The nightclub had burned to the ground, but not before Deirdre had managed to talk to Glinda.
    As she had a thousand times since that night, she thought of Glinda's purple eyes and the impossible forest she had glimpsed when they kissed. A forest she was certain had not been anywhere in the nightclub, or anywhere in London.
    “Please answer the question, Ms. Falling Hawk. If given the opportunity, would you go to Eldh?”
    She twirled the ring on her finger and smiled. “I think maybe I already have.”
    The lights came up, and it was over. She had gone into the hall to wait while Farr took his turn.
    Once again Deirdre sighed. How long had he been in there? There was no clock in sight—nothing that would mar the precisely engineered patina of age and tradition that permeated the London Charterhouse. The only concessions to modernity were an Exit sign at the end of the hallway and electric bulbs in the brass sconces that had once burned oil.
    Built just before Shakespeare's time, the Charterhouse had originally been the guild lodge of some of London's most notorious alchemists. These days, passersby thought it some exclusive club. They weren't that far off. The Seekers weren't so very different from the geographic societies of Victorian times, planning trips to exotic locales. That these locales resided not on other continents, but on other worlds, was merely a matter of degree.
    Acquired by the Seekers just after the Restoration to be their first Charterhouse, the structure had been modified almost continuously, including the addition of a vast maze of offices, laboratories, and computing facilities beneath the ground floor, as well as tunnels that connected to several surrounding buildings.
    Just as Deirdre contemplated getting up and pounding on the door, it swung open. Farr stood half in the darkness beyond, so that she could see him only in stark black and white. With his chinos, rumpled white shirt, and before-noon five o'clock shadow, he looked as if he had been digitized right out of a Humphrey Bogart movie.
    “Well?” Deirdre stood.
    Without looking back, Farr shut the door and stepped into the light. “I wouldn't have thought it would go like that.”
    “Go like what?”
    A camel hair jacket drooped over Farr's arm. He unfolded the garment and shook it out, but this only seemed to encourage the wrinkles. Farr slung the jacket over slouched shoulders.
    “Do you know how many of the Nine Desiderata we broke?”
    “Yes, actually. Numbers One, Three, Four, Six, and Seven. Although I never could see the difference between Desideratum One and Desideratum Three. Do you think something was lost in the translation from the Latin?”
    “And do you know how many other directives and regulations we ignored in our actions?” Farr went on.
    “Let's see. There was the Vow, of course. Plus a dozen or so local, state, and federal laws applicable in Colorado. And as I recall, Hadrian, you only flossed once the entire time we were in the States.”
    He ran a hand