The Lightning Sword of Kazpiel and the Sixth Palace Gate

Click for full size

The Fifth Gate and the Seals in His Hands

The traveler had climbed through four palaces of blinding light, and his hands would not stop shaking. In the right hand he gripped one seal. In the left, another. He had been taught their owners by name. The seal in the right hand belonged to Zebhoriel, called the Lord. The seal in the left belonged to Margiwiel, the Prince of the Presence. Show the right seal to the beings standing on the right, he had been warned. Show the left seal to the beings on the left. Confuse the two and the climb ends.

Ahead of him the fifth palace burned white at its threshold, and two figures stood at the lintel, the beam that runs above the door. On the right of that beam stood Tehilael, the prince set over the entrance. On the left stood 'Azriel. Neither moved. Neither blinked. They were the price of the fifth palace, and there was no walking around them.

Seized From the Right and the Left

He lifted the seals.

The moment they left his palms, hands closed on him. One being seized him from the right, another from the left, and both lifted him off the burning floor as if he weighed nothing. He did not fight. He had been warned this would happen, warned not to struggle, warned that the grip was escort and not punishment. They carried him across the threshold and set him down before Tehilael and 'Azriel.

Now came the part no seal could do for him. He had to make his peace with the two princes. He had to name himself and his purpose, and tell them why a creature of dust had come this high. So he spoke. Tehilael listened from the right of the lintel. 'Azriel listened from the left. Whatever the traveler said, it held. The two of them let the fifth palace close at his back, and he stood in the corridor before the sixth.

That was where the sound reached him. Not a voice. A stamping.

The Horses That Eat Coals of Fire

At the gate of the sixth palace stood horses, and they were nothing any stable had ever held. They were heroes of darkness. Horses of the shadow of death, horses of thick darkness, horses of fire and of blood, horses of hail and iron and fog. Their coats were not colors but conditions, each one a way the world could end. Beside them stood mangers, and the mangers were burning. Heaped in the flames lay coals of juniper wood, glowing white, and the horses lowered their heads and ate them.

One mouthful took forty bushels of live coal. The mouth of a single horse could hold three mangers the size of the great gate of Caesarea, the Roman port whose gate no man could span with his arms flung wide. They chewed fire the way a plow-ox chews grass, and they watched the traveler with the patience of things that have never once been hungry and have never once been full.

He walked between them. He had no seal for the horses. There was nothing to raise, nothing to show. He simply walked, and they let the smell of dust and fear pass by, and he came to the door.

Kazpiel and the Sword That Cries Pain

On the right of the lintel of the sixth palace stood Kazpiel, a prince, and in his fist was a sword. The sword was not steel. It threw lightnings. Kazpiel lifted it and shook it against every creature who came to that door unfit to look upon the King and the Throne, and the blade had a voice of its own. When it cut the air it screamed one word. "Pain!" it cried. Only that. The sword named what it would do before it did it.

Kazpiel did not weigh courage. Courage had carried braver men to the third palace and left them as ash at the fourth. He read something underneath it. His lightning sword was a scale, and it weighed the soul standing in front of it, and if the soul came up short the fire found it and the blade cried its one word and the climb ended there against the lintel.

Beside Kazpiel stood a second prince, Dumiel. What Dumiel required, what seal or word or silence, the traveler had not been told. He knew only that two of them held the sixth door, and that the sword on the right was already lit.

Three Seals at the Sixth Threshold

Here the toll doubled. At the fifth gate two seals had opened the way. At the sixth he had to present three, and each seal had its keeper, and each keeper stood ready to turn him back toward the horses if the emblem in his hand came up wrong or trembling or false.

He raised the first seal toward Kazpiel and the lightning blade.

The sword rose. For the length of one breath it hung above him, humming its threat, deciding. He did not run. He held the seal steady and let himself be weighed. Then the lightning drew back into the metal, and the blade went quiet, and Kazpiel lowered it and stepped clear of the right side of the door. Dumiel took the second seal. The third passed to the keeper beyond him. The sixth palace opened by the width of a body.

Behind him the horses went on eating fire. Ahead of him waited the seventh threshold and the last, and the Throne, and the King no traveler had ever reached on courage alone. He stepped through, still shaking, still holding what was left in his hands.