"You'd like to see the gate, wouldn't you? I will show you. It's safe enough. This island isn't important anymore- my cousins do not use it. They have others, bigger and better located. Those hungry for their own principalities go through the newer ones on the larger continents. Asia is popular at the moment: they're much less troublesome than you North Americans. I'm 'just minding the store' as your kind used to say up North."
Valentine pushed at the old ashes in the fireplace with the toe of his boot. "You want to aid us against your 'cousins'?"
The Kurian shimmered for a moment in thought or emotion. "This is a beautiful world, with a gifted though primitive people living on it. I don't care to see it become a corpse, like Kur. Sad. Kur is a husk. The surface has been cleaned of all life save lichen. The same could happen here. That's why I stopped feeding on your kind."
"You aren't afraid of discovery?"
"I keep up appearances with the help of my scoundrel friend on the Cape, and a few others. Though it might be hard to say with whom the good Boul really sides, just as he does not know all my devices."
"I don't believe you," Valentine said in English, to prevent another outraged ejaculation from Victo. "How do you stay alive? I thought you needed to feed to live."
"I do feed, off vital aura, as you call it. Though you might say I just wet my lips, rather than drinking great drafts as my cousins do."
"You kill only once a month, I imagine. I'll write the Vatican and nominate you for sainthood."
"Your letter would be laughed at. There is still a powerful figure at Saint Peter's, true, but he comes from Kur, and his cardinals are to be feared. I will show you how I feed. No one dies. No one is hurt. I shall give you a tour, starting with the Door to Kur. Then you'll see me feed."
Valentine took his hands from his weapons. "You have me curious. 'Curiosity killed the cat' is another saying we have up North, though I hope it won't prove out today."
A pair of Haitian servants-"Voudou priests," Victo whispered in his ear-emerged at a wave of Papa Legba's hand. One had a small chair, like something a child might be carried in, on his back. The Kurian slid into it and crossed a seat belt across his chest.
"I have a litter for going outside, but this works better on some of the stairs, as you will see."
The priests led the way, through narrow corridors and down shoulder-width stairs. Valentine's sensitive nose noticed a change in the quality of the air, and he knew himself to be underground. The priests lit and took up oil lamps. They came to a wider corridor. A heavy door stood at the end, and Valentine startled when he saw two pinched-looking Reapers slumbering in alcoves to either side. The skin was stretched tight over their bony faces, and lips were rolled back from black pointed teeth.
"They sleep," the old Kurian said. "Have no fear."
Valentine found his heart beating in the vicinity of his Adam's apple as he passed the motionless robed figures. If they came around, they would make a quick end of him and Victo.
"I wake them once or twice a month, when sacrifices of goats and cattle are brought to Baron Samedi," Legba said in English, winking at Valentine. "I'm not the only one using that convenient charade. I would suspect there are a dozen or so Baron Samedis on the other side of the island, though the ceremonies may be a little more gruesome. Religion is useful. Don't think it applies just to ignorant Haitians. When we took your country in the days of your father and grandfathers, many of my cousins appeared as Jesus, and his supplicants were taken to Rapture in the embrace of the avatars. Dressed in white they look like tall, thin angels, and their serene eyes held many a Christian spellbound."
Beyond the doors was a well-room, less finished than the rest of the fortress, built around a pit, perhaps two and a half meters across. The stones lining the walls were not cut and shaped, but irregular, larger at the bottom and growing smaller as they neared the curved ceiling. The priests lit two more torches standing in brackets, and the room quickly filled with an oily reek. The Kurian slid off his chair-backpack. Thanks to the torchlight, Valentine could see that the wall stones formed a vaguely unsettling mosaic of light and dark rock, rather like tentacles reaching from the dark well.
"That leads to what is purportedly a cistern, Valentine. Care to climb down?"
Valentine looked down the granite-walled well. A series of metal rungs descended into the bottom. Only a single row of bricks acted as a warning of the depths beneath. Valentine's sharp eyes picked out a bottom lit by a dim red glow. He looked at Victo. The spy shrugged, wide-eyed-and kept clear of the pit.
Valentine felt a curious pull from the depths. "Why not? I've always wanted to see one of these Doors."
"If you hear anything on the way down, or while you are there, climb up quickly," Legba advised
"You can count on it."
Suppressing a shudder, Valentine clambered down the ancient metal rungs, testing each with a foot before resting his full weight on it. As he neared the bottom of the cistern, he felt if grow a good deal warmer. Appropriate enough for a descent into hell. The rungs gave way to handholds carved into the stone, placed closer together than the rungs on a regular ladder. Feeling for the holes with his feet, he descended until he stood inside the cistern.
Clammy sweat coursed down his back, but its source was not the heat. He loosened the machete in the sheath strapped to his thigh and touched the automatic at his hip. Three rings of characters resembling Chinese ideograms surrounded him, melted into the rock and lit from within. Curious, he probed one with his foot. His eyes adjusted, and he peered
at the walls. Several tunnels, also circled with the ideograms, emptied into the room, the letters glowed red, like the heating coils on an electric burner. He walked over to one and looked more closely. It gave off no heat, and reminded him of an old present from the Lifeweaver who Oversaw his training as a Cat. He walked back to the ladder and looked up.
"There are different doors down here. Do they all go to Kur?" he whispered up the shaft.
"In a way, Valentine. You're looking at me from Kur itself. The gate is in the middle of the well."
With two hands and two feet again on the ladder, Valentine looked around. "You must be joking. How can that be? I didn't feel anything when I descended. It just got warmer."
"The Doors work just like that. They are literally doors, joining one world to another. When you pass from a dining room to a kitchen, you do not feel anything save the heat of the stove. You haven't crossed thousands of light-years, you've just gone a few feet. I'm not a scientist who can explain it, but two pieces of space have been joined like a button joins two pieces of material in a garment."
Valentine sniffed the air, tasted it. It seemed drier than the air of Haiti, and it had a metallic tang like a blacksmith's shop when the forge is working. A whisper sounded from deep within one of the tunnels, and he heard a dry scrape like a snake shedding its skin on a rock. Valentine heard the shuffling gait grow nearer. He did not bother with a last look around, and shot up the ladder. A sudden, not-so-irrational fear of things reaching for him, grabbing him to pull him away from Earth forever spurred him in his climb. He sprang from the mouth of the well.