The Way Through Doors Read Online Free PDF Page B

five. They dropped slowly, perfectly into the “widow’s net,” the very best throw. Loren had lost.
    With a cry he threw up his hands.
    —This is foolishness, he said. I am leaving.
    The merchant stood up to his full height, and he was a large man indeed. The dice cup fell from his hand.
    —Loren Darius, I know you. I have known you long, and long you have been kept from my hand. But now my weight is upon you and I will never relent. Ilsa Darius is mine. I may not come for her today; I may not come tomorrow. I may not come for years. But when I do there will be nothing you can do. For on this day you have lost her to me. On this day you have given your wife for a skin of water.
    The man turned and called out in a strange voice. His horse trotted up beside him. The man walked away down the road as Loren watched, and after he was gone a dozen paces, a fold of heat and light arose and the man was lost to sight.
    At this, Loren stirred. He leaped onto his horse’s back and, forgetting the mule, rode at breakneck speed the remaining miles home.
    As he came up the path to his house, his horse foaming and lathering, he saw upon the porch, Ilsa. She was singing and singing the song he had heard every night in his dreams as he woke again and again into that grave hallway.
    He leaped from off his horse and ran up the steps.
    —Ilsa, he cried. Ilsa, are you well? Have there been any visitors?
    And Ilsa looked at him strangely even as he caught her up in his arms.
    —No, my love. No visitors. Only your absence, and your return.
    Loren breathed a sigh of relief. It must have been a dream, he thought, a dream prompted by the heat. Yet when he looked down at his wrist he saw a mark, a mark as of a burn where the man had touched him when taking the leather cup in his turn. The curling touch. Loren had heard of it. He had not dreamed the wager. Yet who was this man? If he came here, Loren would slay him. That was all. He would slay the man.
    And so their life continued. Things continued as they had, and Loren and Ilsa were glad in their days. Yet sometimes Loren would think that he heard things or saw things. He would be returning from a trip to gather wood and he would think he saw a man leaving the house. Or he would see from afar in the window of the bedroom a man’s shape. Always he would run to the house and come shouting in, to find poor Ilsa all alone, seemingly confused at what had aroused her husband to such madness.
    She bore such things well, yet as time went on, the occurrences began to come with greater and greater frequency. Loren would search the house from top to bottom. But never would he find anyone there, or anything not as it should have been. As had happened repeatedly in the past, the couple began to run out of money. But now, instead of going off to the city as he had before, Loren refused to leave the house. He was sure that as soon as he left, the man would come. Yet their money dwindled, and their food, and soon there was nothing for it but that he go.
    So Loren left one day, and went along the road to the nearest city. There he stayed six days gambling, and raised such a fortune as he had never seen. He took two mules and his good horse and set out home. Yet with each mile that passed, his anxiety increased, and it was all he could do not to cast aside the slower mules and gallop home.
    As he came up the path to his house he saw tracks left by a horse not his own. When he reached the house, he found Ilsa sitting, wearing clothes he had not seen before. And so his greeting to her was not, as it had been, My love, how I have missed you, or Darling, how are you, but:
    —Who gave you that dress? And what horse left tracks upon the path? You have had visitors; I know it.
    Ilsa told him that it was a woman who lived nearby, who had come several times to see her, for it grows lonely here when no one is around.
    To which Loren said, you have never grown lonely before.
    And she replied, always before you have been