Shadow Gate (11 page)

In these baths met merchants and guildsmen who desired privacy for certain delicate negotiations. She had come to these baths the first time because she'd heard she could pay coin for a private bathing room, an astounding luxury. Now she ate and drank sparingly of the cheapest gruel and watered rice wine, and slept in a boardinghouse little better than a rathole, so she could keep coming back for the conversation that her unnaturally keen hearing picked up.

She had learned a great deal about the city of Olossi: trade secrets and outside-the-temple dealings; petty rivalries pursued by narrow-minded competitors; militia men deep in schemes for the upcoming Whisper Rains games. Olossi's Lesser Houses and guildsmen were discontented, being ruled by the greed of the Greater Houses, and certain people in their ranks plotted an uprising. A group of reckless young men was engaged in smuggling, more for sport than for profit. A lad and a lass from competing clans who would never ever consider letting them marry made their assignation here, even though—as Marit knew—they were long since being followed by various agents from their own families.

She picked out voices like threads from a multicolored shawl.

“. . . No one can know we are negotiating. I'll lose the contract if the Greater Houses suspect I'm going outside the official channels. I tell you, we in the Silk Slippers clan have been providing reliable river transport for generations, and what do the Greater Houses do now? They try to force us to lower our rates, greedy bastards . . .”

“. . . If you take the cargo across the river after moon-set, Jaco's boys will meet you just downstream of Onari's Landing with the knives. . .”

“If the militia continues to refuse to send out long-range patrols, then the carters' guild has agreed to cooperate
with us. We'll send a joint mission to Toskala to appeal to Clan Hall directly, and ask them to intervene to improve the safety of the roads . . .”

“Eh. Eh. Yes, like that. Ah. Ah.”

“I want you to kill a man.”

Her breath caught in her throat as she strained to hear.

“That would be murder. Against the law.” The other man's voice had a slight hoarse timbre, as though he had once inhaled too much smoke.

“Do as I ask, and no charges will ever be brought against you.”

“How can you possibly guarantee that?”

“We control the council. It will never get past a vote.”

“The council does not control the assizes if the reeves bring me in to stand trial.”

“Argent Hall will not charge you. They have a new marshal, hadn't you heard? He'll not interfere.”

“The hells. You sound certain, Feden. Considering what manner of crime you're asking me to commit.”

“You haven't asked the name of the target. Or why he needs killing.”

“I want to know first why Argent Hall won't interfere if it gets wind of the killing. Surely the dead man's clan will seek justice.”

“Argent Hall is too busy looking for some manner of treasure that my allies in the North seek. Something valuable taken out of the Hundred years ago that they have reason to believe has been found and brought back.”

The smoky-voiced man's laugh was sarcastic. “Silk? Gems? A rare cutting from one of the Beltak temples' Celestial Golds? A stallion for stud?”

“I don't know.” This was said brusquely. “It's not my responsibility, but if you want to keep your eyes open at the border crossing it wouldn't hurt to get word of such a thing before anyone else did. I don't mind telling you, I don't trust that new marshal, Yordenas.”

The other man hrhmed thoughtfully under his breath.
He seemed distracted, perhaps spinning out fantasies of treasure and wealth as the other man—
Feden
—went on impatiently.

“I don't mind telling you I think the entire cursed mob of them are hatching a plan to overthrow the Greater Houses.”

“The reeves of Argent Hall?”

“Neh, neh, the Lesser Houses and those ungrateful guildsmen. After everything we've done to make Olossi prosperous and safe! If we kill just one man, one of the ringleaders, it may make the rest hesitate.”

“Because they'll see you can get away with it?” asked Smoky Voice with sharp amusement. “Don't they already know that you in the Greater Houses can do what you cursed well please?”

Water splashed on rock and poured away as hands emptied a bucket over stone. A door slid closed with a slap.

“What if we ran away?” the youth demanded in a husky whisper. “We could go to Toskala, make a new life there for ourselves.”

“Dearest,” she replied breathlessly, still recovering from her drawn-out pleasure, “the roads aren't safe. Anyway, they'd send agents after us. How can we hide from them?”

That piece of practicality silenced the idiot, thank the gods. Marit wound a path past his unsteady breathing, past the chuckling of the young fools planning their latest smuggling venture for no better reason than the lark of evading the militia, pinched out the low-voiced argument of a man sure sure sure that the gift he had proffered to the Incomparable Eridit had been rejected because she thought herself unworthy of his attentions while his friends, lounging with him in the baths, assured him rumor had it she wicked anyone who was to her taste, so gifts were meaningless because she had rejected him merely because he was one ugly Goat.

There.

“I'll do it, then. But if you get any word about what the treasure is, you'll let me know.”

“Don't tangle with the Northerners, Captain. Don't try to take what they want. You'll regret it.”

“Only if they know I have it. If the Argent Hall reeves are so busy patrolling the Barrens and the Spires, who's to say they might miss what passes right under their talons, eh?”

“Do you envy the reeves, Captain? Is that resentment I hear?”

“I have a sword, and you have your coin and your clan's power. Don't think we're friends to share confidences. Just allies of convenience, that's all.”

“You'll be glad enough I approached you, come the end of this Fox year. Mark my words. Come Goat year, you'll value this alliance. You'll thank me.”

She hauled herself out of the tub and toweled dry with the changing cloth. She dressed quickly, and slung her bag across one shoulder; it was everything she owned and needed, the essentials of her life—or her death—pruned back to almost nothing. She waited, listening for the smoky rasp of his breathing, and followed. She did not need to stay close to keep track of him. She had been a good reeve in her day, able to sniff out trouble without knowing precisely where the rot grew, but she could now follow the odor of dishonesty and cheating and corruption and depravity straight to its putrid source in a venal heart.

The compound had half a dozen gates set at discreet intervals. He left by the one closest to Harrier's Gate, and by his gait and posture—and the rank his associate had given him—she placed him as a militia man, dedicated to Kotaru the Warrior and still in service to the Thunderer. He wasn't a fool. He felt an itch in the center of his back where her gaze had fixed, and once out on the street he paused to sweep his gaze along the passersby, most of them hurrying home with lamps to light their way. She
halted some ways back, a nondescript traveler among many, but lifted her eyes to meet his.

As corrupt as they come, and willing to sell out his duty in exchange for wealth, yet even so, his were the shadows of a small heart ruled by the banal greed of a man pinched by jealousies and resentments.

He staggered, rubbing his head as if he'd been struck a blow. She stepped into the shadows. After a puzzled glance at the street, he strode to the closed gates and gave an order to the guards on duty. They let him out the postern gate and barred it back up tight, and she had no means by which to force an exit. She was not ready to draw attention to herself in a city whose masters had apparently allied themselves with the shadow out of the north. If they discovered her, she would find herself with wolves hard on her heels and a cloaked man called Yordenas ruling Argent Hall, not so far away.

As long as the others did not find her, she could continue her investigation. So she kept her head down, and worked gathering information in the same slow, circuitous way.

Master Feden she tracked to the merchant house marked with a quartered flower, just as the shopkeeper had described. But she could not reach him; he guarded his privacy too well and she never encountered him again at the baths. It was days before she identified the captain as a man called Beron, commander of the contingent stationed at the border crossing on the Kandaran Pass, which led southwest into the Sirniakan Empire. By then, a well-known merchant had vanished from town, and while gossip whispered that he'd been murdered, or decamped after a string of humiliating gambling losses, nothing could be proven.

She rode west on the trail of Captain Beron.

C
ARAVANS DID NOT
travel in the season of the Flood Rains; folk tended their fields and stuck close to home.
She traveled through the West Country, mey upon mey of empty road and sprawling vistas of uninhabited high plateau and stretches of shoreline. The majestic Spires thrust heavenward in the far distance. In an isolation that magnified one's daunting insignificance, it was easy to forget how difficult it had become to converse with ordinary folk in an ordinary manner because you did come to desire the simple everyday contact of one person chatting with another about the consequential and trivial matters of life.

Yet on every stop she made on West Spur to buy a bag of grain or a bladderful of ale, she was reminded all over again that people did not feel comfortable around her. To minimize these contacts, she spent more time foraging for food. Twice, Warning insisted on flying free, stranding her for a day each time in the wilderness but then returning. Marit had a very good idea that the horse was visiting Guardian altars. When she thought of the fountains that lay at the heart of every altar, her throat burned with a physical longing. Yet she dared not enter a Guardian altar, where the others could find her.

So the journey passed.

One evening, riding through a series of isolated valleys, she spotted a campfire in the trees. After dismounting, she led Warning under the cover of pine and tollyrake. Alone, she walked forward alongside the road. Night wrens queried, cicadas buzzed, evening chats chivered. Her hearing had sharpened so much that it seemed she could hear every mouse creeping and night cat padding through the undergrowth.

Ahead, the forest was cut back into a clearing rigged out as a caravan rest point with troughs, hitching posts, fire pits, and a pair of corrals. She surveyed the open space. Aui! Two eagles slumbered upright on opposite sides of the clearing, talons fixed around logs mounted as perches. One wore a hood; the other did not, but its head was tucked against a wing.

The campfire burned well back in the trees. She
approached cautiously. Because of her newly acute vision, she was able to step around clumps of thorn-fern and whispering thistle and avoid roots grown out from the earth or branches torn free in the recent storms.

A man and a woman sat on either side of a briskly burning fire, their faces in light and their backs in shadow. Short cloaks hung from their shoulders to keep off the rain, should it come. By the cut of their leathers and the tight trim of their hair, they were reeves.

The man gesticulated as he spoke, hands cutting circles in the air. “I say we abandon Argent Hall. There's nothing we can do, Dov. Nothing. Garrard is dead. We get out while we still can.”

“We can't just abandon people. The fawkners will never go. They won't leave eagles with no one to tend to them. There must be something to salvage. Something left we can do.”

He laughed bitterly. “We lost. Argent Hall is the playing ground for bullies, cowards, thieves, and murderers now. You would think that every crooked reeve has flown in and made himself a cozy nest in our lovely hall.” He choked down a sob.

She reached out to touch his hand. “Garrard's death isn't your fault.”

“If I'd called out sooner—” he whispered.

She slapped him under the chin. He reared back, and she jumped to her feet. “There's nothing you could have done! How many times do I have to tell you?”

He rubbed his jaw. “We could fly to Clan Hall, give them our report. Surely they ought to have sent someone to investigate. They should want to know why Yordenas swings the marshal's staff yet we've never seen feather or talon of his eagle.”

The woman slumped down on the log. “Clan Hall! Didn't they authorize half the transfers of those criminals into Argent Hall? Maybe they're up to their beaks in the whole corrupt enterprise.” She shoved a stick into the
fire, then cursed when the edifice of burning scaffolding cracked and tumbled, spilling sparks and spits of red-hot wood everywhere.

They both leaped up, stamping and laughing in the way of old comrades who can down a mug of ale and enjoy a bowl of porridge after exhuming a rotting corpse from the pit where the murderer buried it.

“Eridit's Tit! That's burned my arm.” The man brushed himself down. His face, turned into the light, had a grim pallor. “Eiya! Dov, what will we do?”

She sat back down, kicked a charred stick into the fire pit, and picked up a new branch to poke around until she rousted fresh flames. “See if it's true that this Captain Beron is in league with Argent Hall in some murky doings. I just don't get it.”

“What's to understand? There's a larger conspiracy boiling under our noses. Yordenas is taking orders from the north. He's got his cronies hunting into the Barrens for this ‘treasure' everyone is whispering of. Gold. Gems. Silk.”

The woman shook her head. Like the man, she had the look of an experienced reeve not much older than Marit had been, in the prime of her reeve service. Tall and lean, she had a firm grip as she grabbed his wrist.