Shadow Gate (59 page)

She surveyed the earth as well as she could, with the wings beating wide and, together with the body of the horse, blocking her view. An archer could loft an arrow into the horse's belly and she never see it loosed. From an eagle, you missed nothing.

She saw no rice fields, but a few agricultural strips recently plowed and planted. Orchards and pastureland made up the second ring, and beyond that—as she had seen before—the valley had once been forest, but it was all hacked down, leaving gouges in the earth and serious erosion where the rains had cut unprotected dirt into a hundred destructive channels. Charcoal heaps smoldered under caps of dirt.

They headed for the bulwark of the Orator. The stony peak lay directly ahead, her three daughters clustered close. The sun's last rays glinted on the spires, and as the disc slipped below the western horizon, the shadow of twilight grew. A wind out of the northeast thrummed in the spires like a voice too deep for its words to be understood.

Although the sun had set, a dazzle glimmered atop the rounded head of the shortest daughter. There they trotted to earth on a dusty top ringed by boulders any one of which might topple from the peak and crash down the steep face to the tree line below.

They had arrived at a Guardian altar.

She released the mare before setting her own feet on the labyrinth's entrance. She paced its measures, seeing how the different landscapes passed through late afternoon all the way into night and back again, depending on how far west or east they lay in the Hundred. She paused, recognizing the overlook onto Sohayil.

Twilight lingered in the west, surprise evident in his tone. “You're above Walshow!” he said through the crossroads that linked them.

“Hari! I hoped to find you.”

“Why are you in Walshow? Just where you shouldn't be.”

“The army has moved out. There's no one here but the folk they've left behind.”

“Lucky for them.”

“Maybe for the locals. There are others who are little better off than fish left to gasp on the shore. You're on the western edge of the basin of Sohayil.”

“So I am. Lost and lonely and, fortunately, not with the others. Although I must soon join them. I have made of my assigned task an utter fiasco for which I will suffer, I guarantee it. Lord Radas sent that pervert Bevard to gather up the dregs of the broken army, and has called me back to him. Thus I linger in the west, and travel as slowly as I may.” He laughed as he spoke, but the edge in his voice was sharp. “Where will you go now?”

“I'll ride the Istri Walk south, on the army's track.”

“Why go after them?”

“Because I must. Just like you.”

“Eiya!” But the lament sounded sweet spoken in that slurred foreign accent.

Saying no good-bye, she left him behind. She walked the labyrinth to its center, where she found Warning had already drunk her fill from a basin chipped out of rock, clear liquid seeping out of the stone to form a pool so still that she saw her own face as in a mirror.

She looked the same, brown face, brown eyes, black hair clipped short so it wouldn't get in her way. But she was no longer the reeve who had partnered Flirt. She was someone else now, a stranger with a face and heart she recognized but whose purpose remained in shadow.

She knelt, filled her bowl, and drank until she thought she would burn up from the inside. But she knew it now
as the nectar that demons crave, the clear milk of the gods. She could exist without it, hiding from the others, but to drink it made her strong. It gave her the clarity she needed for the path ahead.

In the Qin compound in Olossi, in the center of the living quarters and surrounded by a porch backed with rice-papered sliding doors, lay a square courtyard. Lamps set on tripods burned with a particularly bracing flavor, purple-thorn seeds crushed in with the lamp oil, that mostly cleared the twilight air of insects. On a brick platform surrounded by troughs of flowers, Mai sat cross-legged on a pillow, happier than she had been in many days, because her dear friend had at last been allowed to visit.

“Anji has forbidden me to go to the market—to go out at all!—until they've tracked down everyone involved with the attack.”

“If such people can be tracked down,” said Miravia, “which I doubt. Really, anyone might have killed Tam. A Sirniakan spy posing as a beggar, as your husband believes. A discontented laborer. A sweet-smoke addict. A thief.”

Mai shook her head. “Only a trained assassin like one of the Red Hounds could have lured two Qin soldiers into such circumstances, and then taken them by surprise like that.”

“Perhaps Olossi's sweet-smoke addicts have surprising talents.”

Mai laughed, and then was ashamed she had done so, thinking of Tam, a polite young man who had never said more than ten words to her in all the time she had been with the Qin.

“It isn't funny, is it?” said Miravia as she picked up
her ceramic cup and examined, with half her attention, the egrets in flight painted around the white finish, brushstrokes of gray and black suggesting the movement of the wind. “Nor do I suppose a common thief or disgruntled laborer could have managed such a skillful murder, or known to put such a deadly poison on his blade. Your husband is correct in being cautious.”

“Surely any attack is directed against him, not against me.”

“Because of his connection to the Sirniakan throne?” She set down the cup. “But it has always been true that one way to strike at a man is to strike at what he values most.”

“Must I live forever trapped inside the compound?” Mai rubbed her belly. A flutter like butterfly's wings startled her. “Oh! Here, feel it. It moved.”

They sat in silence as Miravia pressed her hands over the curve of Mai's belly. Then she, too, gasped, and laughed. “I felt it!”

Priya looked up from her seat on the porch, smiled, and resumed her discussion with Miravia's brother, who naturally had to act as escort to make sure his sister was at all times isolated from the men of the house, although Mai suspected that he had also been tasked to make sure that Miravia behaved according to other, more subtle strictures. Miravia's attendants remained beyond the doors, the veiled women in a private sitting room and the male guards relegated to duty beyond the private rooms in tandem with the regular Qin guard.

“It will be a healthy boy,” said Miravia.

“That's what everyone says. Naturally I am required to desire a son first and second, and a daughter third.”

“No, I meant that Grandmother says it will be a boy, so it will be.” Miravia sipped thoughtfully at her tea. “Grandmother has been against my coming all along, of course, but Mother said you must be lonely in circumstances to which you are unaccustomed.”

“So poor Tam, by getting murdered, made it possible for you to visit me?”

“Perhaps. But Grandmother herself tended that other soldier.”

“She saved Seren's life.”

“Yes. I never saw him, of course. That would never be allowed, as I remain unmarried.” Miravia's tone slid toward a darker edge. “He was very polite to her even when the poison was at its worst. Since he was in unspeakable pain, she determined that even the lowliest Qin soldiers had sufficient good manners and proper notions of propriety as well as discipline to be trusted not to barge in and discover me unveiled. And trusted to guard me, in this house, since of course no household in the Hundred can be trusted to safeguard the dignity of women.”

Mai picked at the tray of cakes and fruit. She was hungry all the time, nibbling constantly. “Even at home I was never confined like this, and certainly my father was strict about the dignity of the women of his household. It's just that I'm accustomed to being in the market. It's so dull, being stuck inside the walls all the time.”

“You have plenty of company.”

“That counts for something, certainly, but many of the women will marry and go off to establish their own households. So we must hope. Priya is always with me. And there's a sweet girl my age among the ones we're hoping will marry the soldiers. I like her, she reminds me of my sister Ti, but she is not a deep thinker, Miravia, if I may say so. As Ti would say, I think I would die die die if I couldn't see you.”

Miravia pressed her hand softly.

In pregnancy, Mai's thoughts had begun to wander down strange paths unknown to her before, or perhaps it was the long journey she had undergone, from being Father Mei's favored pet in Kartu Town across months of travel through desert and hills and mountains to the fragile peace she had grasped for herself in this new land. Her thoughts, once confined by the limits of Kartu
Town, had roamed into a wilderness she did not at all comprehend.

“Is it strange to say,” she said hesitantly, “that even so quickly, I felt when you and I met that we knew each other already?”

“Not strange at all. Souls are reborn, and in their new lives they move toward the souls they have loved in previous lives.”

“Is that what the Ri Amarah believe?”

“What we believe? It is the truth. Perhaps you and I were sisters in another time.”

“I hope not among your people, for I think I will go mad with these restrictions!”

“Yes. Your husband is out on his own business.”

Growing up in the Mei clan, where her father ruled with a whip hand and his wives by turns quarreled and cooperated, had not prepared Mai for her own married life. Nothing could have prepared her for Anji. He was indeed the very prince both dangerous and lovely who walked through the sentimental stories she had loved as a girl. The songs hinted of stolen pleasure, the sensuous delights of the bed, but in the Mei clan she had observed discontented or quietly abused women who had to accept every whim or cruelty laid on them by their husbands and masters. She had supposed her own husband would offer a similar service, the Gandi-li boy of whom she had never heard a bad word except that he was an obedient son of a wealthy family determined to increase its stature in town.

Anji was nothing like the colorless, uninteresting men of Kartu Town.

“You're blushing,” said Miravia with a smile. “Is he very good to you?”

Grandmother Mei, disappointed throughout her life, had had sharp words for any person who admitted to happiness. She would crush a flower before she would see a child rejoice in its fresh beauty. Yet why allow Grandmother Mei's bullying ways to dictate her own
path? If boasting was bad, surely it was because it demeaned the hopes of others, and embittered your own modest spirit.

“He is good to me. So is it wrong of me to be a little angry that he gets to go out, and I must be confined?”

“He's out on militia business.” She gestured toward her brother. “It's not only women who aren't allowed to go where they wish.”

Priya, wearing a humble cotton robe, and Eliar, with his butter-yellow turban wrapped tightly to conceal his hair, were bent over a scroll. Eliar was holding the ends open while Priya used a hair pin to point out the words as she followed them from top to bottom.

“ ‘To arrive on the far shore. Six virtues carry you, as ships ferry passengers across a turbulent sea. Generosity, which is communication. Discipline, which is openness. Patience, which is space. Energy, which is joy. Contemplation with the inner eye, which is awareness. The highest of these is knowledge, a sword with two edges to cut through the knot of confusion and trouble, the obstacles that confine us and stand as barriers to our liberation.' ”

Miravia continued as Priya paused in her reading. “Eliar wanted to join the militia, but he was consigned to escort me, since he is my only brother of age, so you can see there are strictures laid upon men as well. Eliar is wild to go on some adventure. But no one will let him. It would be easier for me to go.” She made a face to show she didn't mean it.

“You can conceal yourself under the veil and go anywhere you wish,” said Mai, “and no one would recognize you. We could go out together, veiled in that way.”

“Everyone who saw us knowing we were Silvers!” She spoke the common word for her people with a biting lilt. “Afterward we would have to face my grandmother, and your husband, dear friend. I do not have the courage to attempt
that.
”

The glamour of twilight passed; night settled, and with it the daytime sounds of rumbling cart wheels and
casual traffic. Water burbled through the complicated system of pipes that fed the fountains of the compound. Now and again they heard the fire watch clapping through the streets, or a swell of singing from one of the temples, and once they heard a man's startled shout.

Eliar said, “The waters represent death? And the far shore is the existence we hope for after death?”

“No,” said Priya. “To arrive on the far shore is to follow the path of awakening.”

“There was still a light burning in your office when I came in,” said Miravia.

“That was Keshad. He never stops working. I don't think he sleeps.”

“Your factor?”

“One of them. He's young, but knowledgeable. I don't know if any of the Ri Amarah ever had dealings with him. He was a slave to Master Feden.”

“Any merchant in Olossi knows better than to send slave factors to deal with my people. It would be terribly insulting.”

Mai glanced again at Priya. Would Miravia hate Mai if she knew Mai had slaves of her own? Surely Miravia already knew, and looked the other way. And yet, Mai could not see the harm in it. Everyone kept slaves, who could afford to do so. Slavery was what happened to people when they had lost everything. Yet that did not mean slaves were not human. When folk mistreated their slaves or forced themselves upon slaves who had no recourse but to accept unwanted attentions, that was cruel.

“Cruelty is always wrong,” she said.

“Yes, of course,” said Miravia with a surprised look. “Slavery is cruel because it deprives a person of their own life and of their honor. It is always wrong to permit slavery.”