Shadow Gate (36 page)

Almost he chuckled, to hear the voice of authority break with frustration.

She continued. “Are you Guardians, or are you not? I beg you, tell me what you know so I can understand what has happened to me.”

The girl glanced at him as a soldier looks to her captain for the order to loose, but he shook his head, yet raised a hand to show that she must stay ready.

“Show me your staff,” he called, “and we can talk.”

“I have a walking stick.” She held out a trim pole. “I can defend myself, lest you believe otherwise!”

His disappointment was sharper than he expected. Also, he recognized the stab of fear that pricked his breast, but he smiled to show a bland face. “No need to quarrel with me. I am a peaceful man, camping here in the wilderness where I had hoped to bide undisturbed.”

“You don't trust me!”

“It seems you are standing a long way from me.”

“I want to trust you. But I don't know who to trust. I have seen others. . .” She glanced at the girl with a shake of her head. Then she clucked, and a pale shape moved out of the shadows: a horse.

Telling snorted, as in greeting, and the other horse replied with a whinny and a toss of its head. Seeing flicked her ears dismissively.

“What others?” he asked, because, alas, he knew now what she was. She belonged to his opponents, her staff held by them as hostage to keep her a prisoner to their will. They had sent her to hunt him down.

“There's no point in loosing that arrow at her,” he said to the girl, “because even if you hit her squarely, you cannot harm her.”

She nodded to show she'd heard, but her gaze, and the arrow, remained fixed on the target.

“There are others like us,” said the woman.

“How do you know?”

“I have spoken to them within the labyrinth.”

“Have you approached them, as you approached me?”

She smiled, an ironic quirk that made him want to like her. But he must not succumb to congeniality; he had made that mistake a long long time ago.

“No, for it seemed to me that they smelled sweet with corruption. I am a reeve—that is, I was a reeve—so I knew better than to trust them.”

“Tell me your story. Don't come any closer. I can hear you perfectly well from here.”

She laughed bitterly. “There! I'm told by your words what you think of me. Yet what choice have I?”

Her horse nuzzled her arm. She fished in a sleeve and plucked out a turnip. This delicacy the mare peeled daintily from her hand. Telling and Seeing watched the exchange with interest; was that an accusatory gaze Seeing turned on him, as if to say
Where's my treat?

She went on. “My name is Marit, if indeed I am still who I once was, which I at times doubt. I was a reeve, out of Copper Hall. My eagle was called Flirt.” At the name her voice hardened, choking down anger. “I believe I must be dead. I was stabbed in the heart twenty years ago when I was taken prisoner by men under the command of Lord Radas. It surprised me then, for I'd
seen Lord Radas stand in authority over the assizes in Iliyat some months before that day, and he seemed a man like any other. I understand now that he had changed to become something other than what he was before.”

“He had become a Guardian.”

She covered her eyes with the back of a hand, then lowered the hand. “Yes, that's what I have had to come to believe. For a long while after I was stabbed I was not awake, not aware, but not asleep either. Dead, yet I never passed the Spirit Gate. I have been alone since that day.”

“Why would you trust me with this secret?”

“You don't have the stink of corruption that the others do. You know what I am, don't you?”

“In some ways I may, but in more ways I do not. Therefore, alas, I cannot trust you. She has been trying to find and destroy me for years, but I have so far eluded her.”

“Who is
she
?”

He waited, to see how she would answer herself, but she only watched him with a hard stare. Eager to hear. Desperate to understand. Aui! He wanted to like her. It was true there was no taint to the air, no vile taste on his tongue, nothing to suggest that she had turned on the path away from the lit road and walked into the shadows. That she was what she claimed to be was inarguable. The cloak at her shoulders gleamed with the pallor of bone. The horse—he'd not seen this mare before, or if he had he did not recognize its markings and face—tolerated her; maybe it even liked her.

Taking pity, he said at last, “If you don't know who
she
is, then I will not tell you.”

“What then?” she demanded, goaded to a burst of temper. “How can I gain your trust? I need allies. And I am guessing that you do, too, for you speak of opponents. Meanwhile, not all the Guardians are accounted for, are they?”

He began shaking, exhausted by the long years of running and hiding and by the terrible hope that this
precious ghost girl would not turn away from him on the day she came fully awake.

“I'll tell you this,” said Marit. She wasn't one to give up easily. “Myself, that's one. I heard of your existence from others, not from others wearing the cloak but from a reeve who spoke to a hieros, who spoke of how you came to the temple and claimed that girl. That's why I sought you out, and how I found you. You're two more. That makes three Guardians. Lord Radas makes four. And I have encountered three others who I believe are allied with Radas. One is called Hari, one is Yordenas. The third is a woman wearing a cloak of night. That makes seven. But there are nine Guardians. Where are the other two? What are we, if we are not the Guardians spoken of in the stories? If we are not the Guardians who sit in authority at the assizes, who guard the law on which the land is built? What happened to the real Guardians? Why did they vanish, and why are you and I here now? Do you know the answers?”

For once it was easy for him not to speak. Without trust, there can be no free exchange. Without trust, there can be no answers that have a hope of sounding out the truth.

“What can I do to earn your trust?” Her gaze burned, but he would be veiled to her just as she was veiled to him. The third eye granted to the Guardians by Ushara the Devourer allowed them to see into the hearts of mortal men, not into the hearts of other Guardians.

“Kotaru the Thunderer gave each Guardian a staff,” he said. “Where is yours?”

“I don't know. I never had one.”

Maybe she was a very good liar. Maybe she was as ignorant as she seemed. He had no way of knowing, and no way of finding out.

How sad, really, that he sought to teach the girl to trust him, while refusing to trust this woman who was, after all, asking of him nothing more than he was asking of the girl. If she was what she said she was, then they
might join forces. There was strength in numbers. There was hope in numbers. Alone, he and the girl could do nothing but run. Here she came, offering the thing he desired most. No doubt his enemies knew that. So easily they could tempt him, snare him, and destroy him. Take the girl for themselves. And plunge the Hundred so deep into the shadows that he couldn't see how the land could ever recover.

“The hells!” she said at last. “Can you not help me? Will you not?”

Weary, he remained silent.

“Eiya!” Then she laughed. She wasn't a fragile creature, one crushed by a single blow. He could well believe she had been a reeve. She had a reeve's confident physical stance, and measuring, deliberate stare. A good reeve was stubborn and observant. “Aui! The man I loved—and love still—now thinks of me only with regret and pain, while it's another, younger, woman who he burns for in his thoughts with passion and longing. While you won't talk to me at all. So be it. I've wandered too long hoping to find someone to tell me what I am and what I must do now. You've taught me something, ver, by just standing there with your friendly smile and wishing me gone. I have to find out the truth where it lies within myself. I must walk into the shadows, and see if I am strong enough to come out unscathed, with the truth fixed in my heart and my duty carried in my hands.”

She waited a moment longer. When he did not answer, she led the mare away into the trees. The rattle of their leaving faded. The wind sighed in the underbrush.

Seeing whinnied, and the other horse—now out of sight—called in answer.

“Have I made a terrible mistake?” he said to the air, to the sky, to the earth, to the water.

The girl looked at him, her gaze a question, perhaps even an act of trust.

He nodded. “We must pack up. It's time to move on. Quickly now, lass. Quickly.”

After the gates were unlocked, the women who had been waiting all morning on the hot Olossi street were herded into a courtyard surrounded by high walls. Avisha trudged in, carrying Zianna and holding Jerad by the hand. Their keepers, a foursome of militiamen hired to maintain order, kept up a running patter of crude jokes.

“Heh. I wonder if those Qin soldiers have swords or prickles, eh?”

“Sharp as their swords, eh? I wouldn't want one swiving me.”

“This lot hasn't much choice. Heya! Rufi, look there. Isn't that your mother? Eihi! No call to go hitting me, just a joke.”

Avisha kept her head down. Fortunately, she was not the only woman here burdened by children, so perhaps that wasn't an immediate disqualification for marriage. Her arms were numb from the weight of holding Zianna. Jerad was sniffling.

She pushed him over toward a small door set into one wall where the tops of pipewood rising on the other side of the wall offered a sliver of shade. A beggar in a red cap and ragged kilt who was leaning against the door in that shade kindly moved away as she and the children approached. She sagged against the door, wiping sweat from her neck as she looked around.

The court's stone pavement and high, whitewashed walls suggested it was either an unloading ground for wagons, or an open space for people to work. She had no idea how things worked in a city as big as Olossi, with its crowded streets and aggressive inhabitants as
likely to shove you out of the way as wish you the blessings of the day. Her eyes watered from all the cook-smoke and from ash that still drifted off the burned sections of the lower city. Clouds were piling up in the east, and she was sure that on top of everything, it was going to rain.

“Vish.” Jerad's voice threaded into a whine. The sad little sprout sagged against the wall, his legs crossed.

“You have to be patient, Jer.” She shifted the sleeping girl, Zianna's weight aching her shoulder. The little girl's naming-day clothes—the nicest garments anyone in the family had ever owned—were dirt-stained and stinking from being urinated in more than once; the once-precious orange silk was probably beyond salvaging after all those days on the road. “Just a little longer. See those double doors, there?”

She pointed with her free elbow.

The women pressed forward to cluster around the impressive wooden doors that gave access into a building bigger than Sapanasu's temple hall in the village. There was a door in each wall of the vast courtyard. To the east, gates led to the street. The warehouse entry doors carved with elaborately twined salamanders were set in the western wall. To the north stood a gate trimmed in iron, big enough for wagons. The small door against which Avisha and the children huddled was the kind of entrance regular people passed through. The trees rising on the other side of the wall meant there was a garden beyond, filled with cool shade and, perhaps, a fountain. She licked dusty lips with a parched tongue.

“Don't crowd!” shouted one of the militiamen as he reined his horse in a mincing circle, whip raised.

There were about fifty women, with perhaps twenty children in arm or in tow. Most of the women were young; some were older. Most were wrapped in a plain cotton taloos or dressed in the linen tunic and trousers worn by farmers and artisans and laborers. Poor clans desperate enough to send their daughters and sisters to
make a marriage with outlanders; impoverished widows eager to find a home with their children. The beggar shuffled through the crowd, trolling for alms among folk likely as poor as he was!

A pair of elegant city girls passed him a few vey and returned to their conversation.

“My uncle told me to demand nothing less than forty cheyt as a marriage portion. They can afford it. They took the whole treasury. Greedy bastards.”

“Forty cheyt? Whew! You could never hope to see that much coin in your whole life. Who's being greedy?”

“It's fair payment for having to marry a dirty out-lander.”

“Best make sure they don't find out about—” Their voices dropped to a whisper.

A girl with a bright red birthmark splayed over one cheek kept lifting a hand to cover her face. “Auntie, don't you think they'll turn me away the instant they see me? Can't we just go home? I'd rather go to the temple than be scorned again.”

“Quiet! The dowry the temple is demanding is more than we can afford. We'll offer you to the outlanders with no request for a bride price at all. That might induce them to take you.”

A middle-aged man fussed over two girls dressed neatly in farmers' best, each in a cotton taloos, one dyed a calm sorrel green and the other a reassuring bracken orange-brown. “Be polite. Be respectful. It's a good opportunity but there's no need to sign any contract unless you're truly willing.”

“Papa, you've said this twelve times.”

He smoothed down the hair of one, twisting the end of her braid, and tugged out a wrinkle in the cloth draped over the shoulder of the other. “They have to prove themselves to you, girls, in the same way you have to prove yourselves to them. They're folk just like any other, even if they look different than we do and have different ways.”

Avisha wiped her forehead again. Taru have mercy! It was so hot. Thunder rumbled, but the clouds hadn't yet gotten to the city. Her hair felt stringy and tangled, however much she had tried to keep it combed and clean. She'd washed out her one good taloos a day ago, in a stream, but it had gotten stepped on and there was a big smudge of red clay dirt smeared across her hips. She hoped her face was clean, but Zianna would keep rubbing her hands in the dirt and then patting her big sister's cheeks.