Shadow Gate (88 page)

One group of six men made the shallows and, banding together, used a pair of wicker shields and their spears to push onto shore. Ten Olossi militiamen closed in a
disciplined group to confront them, trying to drive them back. Menard had crafted a long pole with a thickly knotted rope fastening a club to one end, and driven bits of jagged metal into the club. Coming up on the flank of the militia, he hefted the flail and, grunting, swung it. The club crashed down twice on enemy shields, which shuddered but did not splinter. Again the old man raised the flail, but this time as he stretched, an arrow caught him in the belly and a javelin's bite drove him back. He fell, tried to raise himself, and collapsed. With a scream of rage, one of the village lads hoisted the flail and waded forward, club swinging so wildly that the Olossi militia men cried out both in warning and in laughter as the lad broke apart the enemy.

“Heya!” the youth next to Joss leaped back, abandoning his neat pile of stones.

Joss spun to face a man splashing up out of the shallows. Joss stabbed with his short sword, wrenched it free, and waded in as a second man lunged at him. He knocked aside a spear thrust and cut him down, and leaped back to realize he had just killed two men.

This was butcher's work. Reeves were never meant to chop and hack like ordinands.

“Marshal! Your back!”

Spinning, he faced one of the enemy, who had axe raised; the man slumped, toppling forward and bringing Joss down with him. He squirmed out as the man twitched, to find Sengel grinning at him as he offered a hand up.

“Hu! That was close!”

Six rafts had been released into the waters, and the stragglers, their arrows spent and their comrades dead, dove into the water to swim back to the far shore. A single raft floated downstream, spinning away in the night as arrows vanished harmlessly into the river behind it.

Above the eastern woodland, the Basket Moon rose.

Anji trotted out to Joss, streaks and splashes of blood revealing he'd done his share of fighting. “Thirty of the
enemy accounted for, and more lost in the river, I expect. We lost one man in the river, another three in the fighting on shore, and have five wounded. But we've delayed them.”

Joss wiped his brow. “I need a drink,” he said, looking at the bodies littering the shore. Villagers were already cutting their throats to make sure they were dead, stripping anything of value, and then dragging the bodies into the river.

“Now we wait for the strike force?” Joss asked.

Anji nodded. “Now we wait.”

J
OSS WHISTLED
S
CAR
in at dawn. The enemy camp was in turmoil, men arming, rafts abandoned. It looked as if they were readying to march upstream to Hammering Ford. He got high enough to scan several mey down the road, and he did suck in air, then, as Scar chirped interrogatively, feeling the shocked tightening of Joss's shoulders.

“The hells!”

He hadn't thought the strike force could really ride that far, that fast, but cursed if they hadn't managed it: about three hundred riders, a mix of Qin and local men who'd been training with them. Joss signaled with his flags.

Eagles closed in, thirty strong. Below, the strike force approached at a ground-devouring pace, pounding up the road with their remounts left behind for the final dash. Before the enemy could break north into the forest, the eagles flew low and dropped oil of naya in their path, driving them back toward the road. In confusion, they fled. The unluckiest caught a scrap of the unquenchable fire on their bodies. Those who ran screaming into the water still burned.

In the direction of the road, the clash of arms rang with ugly vigor, the shouts and screams of a battle engaged. But Joss's attention was caught by a throng clamoring
after the cloaked man, who was riding away into the forest. He was abandoning his own troops. Reaching open space, the horse opened its wings and flew.

“There, Scar!” But the eagle did not fix his keen eyes on the other beast. Even Joss found himself losing track of the horse's flight, as if it literally possessed less substance in the air than on the ground, fading like mist under sun.

He wasn't going to lose the cursed Guardian after all this!

He yanked ruthlessly on the jesses, and at first Scar swept a full circle and only reluctantly pulled in the direction Joss directed him. There! A wink of light stung the reeve's eye. He followed sparks until he flew over a narrow ridge overlooking the booming ford. He tugged on the jesses and, sluggishly, Scar obeyed, gliding down until they skimmed low over the rock and, with a final tug on the jesses, landed at one end.

He'd seen Guardian altars as a young man, when he had defied the holiest law and, after the first transgression on Ammadit's Tit, gone looking for other altars, trying to understand why the Guardians were lost. Why Marit had died.

Now he had followed a man who by any measure could be identified as a Guardian. Yet he saw neither horse nor man on the ridge, only a shimmering of light above a glimmering pattern etched into the rock. Was that a shadow of horse pacing to the center of the labyrinth? Did a ghostly figure walk the maze, no more substantial than fog rising off the ground at dawn?

He unhooked and ventured forward, then looked back over his shoulder. Scar had fallen into a stupor, head tucked under a wing. The reckless anger that had scarred his youth slammed back in all of its bitter fury. He'd killed two men today, stuck them like pigs. A battle had been fought, and many had died, and even if he wasn't sure the enemy soldiers didn't entirely deserve death after the misery they had no doubt inflicted on
others far more innocent, he still could not wipe the taste from his tongue. He did not like the world as it had become. But that didn't mean he could ignore it.

To the hells with the laws! What did it matter, when his dreams in the form of Marit whispered that Guardians walked again in the world to seek justice, and meanwhile those who met Guardians in the living world called them demons?

The path shone faintly. He set one foot down, followed with the second, and walked into the maze on the trail of a thing he could not explain. At each turn he looked onto a new vista, a distant landscape: smooth ocean waves; a ruined tower sited above a tumble of rocks which, before it flashed out of view, he recognized as Everfall Beacon; a tangled forest that was surely the Wild; the flat gleam of the Olo'o Sea just turning out of the shadows into the dawn's light.

The visions made him dizzy. Voices whispered urgently.

“. . . I escaped from Indiyabu . . . she has corrupted them, thus are we lost . . . surely not, for if we keep our strength and our heart within us, we can still fight back . . . it is not possible for me to struggle any longer, take the mirror and give it to the one who returns in my place.”

Don't turn your back,
Marshal Alard had been used to say, but Joss could not bring himself to see if ghosts crowded behind him, murmuring in his ear.

He stumbled into a depression in the center of the labyrinth. A woman waited, plump, dark, attractive, smiling but with sorrow awake in her eyes, her hands talking in the secret language of the Guardians. He walked through her before he realized she wasn't there. The rock sloped sharply into a bowl-like hollow. Light flashed, blinding him. An unknown force spun him halfway around.

Aui! He clawed at rock as the ground gave way beneath his feet.

He clung to one side of the ridge, a finger's clutch
away from falling to his death into the trees below. He'd been tossed out. He'd broken the boundaries once again.

But cursed if he'd let it go this time. Grunting and straining, he climbed to the top. By the time he flopped down on level ground, his hands were bleeding and the knees of his leathers were badly scraped. He lay there for a while, the wind blowing over him, and panted until his head stopped whirling and his muscles ceased quivering.

At last, he regained the strength to raise his head. Not a stone's throw away, Scar slumbered. As for the rest, the altar lay exactly as he had left it, glittering but empty. Forbidden ground, it had cast him away.

The Guardian had vanished.

“Recite again the hundred and one altars.”

Marit laughed. “My head hurts from everything you've taught me.”

Her companion, the nameless woman wearing the cloak of night, smiled. “A rest then, before we walk. This is a particularly lovely view.”

They sat at their ease at the edge of a rock altar ringed by a thorny tangle of flowering purple and white heart's ease. The rocky ledge overlooked the vale of Iliyat, Lord Radas's ancestral home. Under clearing skies, neatly tended fields surrounded tidy villages, everything in order and no one moving on the roads.

“It's very quiet,” said Marit.

“No trouble disturbs those who labor and build. Isn't that as it should be?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you frown, Ramit?”

She could not speak her thoughts aloud: A pleasant woman with an agreeable philosophy and a concerned
demeanor ought not to be marching with an army that burned villages and “cleansed” folk by stringing them up from poles to strangle under the weight of sagging arms.

“It's hard to explain,” she said, testing a dozen phrases and discarding them all. “I see that the vale of Iliyat lies at peace, which Haldia surely does not. Yet how do I know those who live below have peace in their hearts and justice in their villages? How do I know that the folk in High Haldia deserved to be overrun? How can an army bring justice? Isn't that the question the orphaned girl asks in the Tale of the Guardians? Didn't the gods agree with her?”

“So they did.” The woman nodded. Her hair was pulled back and braided without ornament, suggesting a woman of simple tastes but a complex mind. “We must never forget that the gods came because of her cry for justice. But there are many forms of coercion. Brute force is only one of them. It's not always easy to know which form of coercion causes the deepest harm, today, or next year, or when a child who is a toddling child now is stooped with age. Is it better to live quietly in servitude or die seeking freedom?”

“Why should those be our only choices?”

She nodded. “We ask questions because we want to understand. Yet knowledge can be painful. Still, despite pain, we desire knowledge because, like a sown seed, it will flourish and bear fruit if properly tended.”

It was hard to argue with such platitudes, so Marit said nothing. In truth, the woman had instructed with seemingly infinite patience and a soothing demeanor: how the horse must be groomed and the wing feathers properly cared for; that the altars were holy spaces where Guardians replenished their spirit. They could survive for long periods without entering an altar, but they would grow weak and even appear to age without water from the holy spring to strengthen them.

“Are you ready to try again?” her companion asked.

“Aui! Yes.”

They rose and set foot at the entrance to the labyrinth, Marit in front and her companion behind her with fingers brushing Marit's left shoulder blade. Marit imagined a knife thrust up under her ribs, and shook the image away.

“What is it, Ramit?”

“Just shaking the cobwebs loose. I was never good at memorization. That's why the Lantern's hierophant wouldn't take me for my apprentice year!”

She laughed, the slight pressure of her hand shifting Marit forward. “I, also. Impossible to line up one after the next. But here you need only look, and remember. Soon you will have visited all these places, and you will know them in your heart as well as with your eyes.”

Marit paced the labyrinth, speaking each turn out loud. “Needle Spire. Everfall Beacon. Stone Tor. Salt Tower. Mount Aua.” The first were easy, but soon she faltered, recalling some from her own travels and others too unfamiliar to place.

Her companion reminded her in the voice of a patient teacher. “Thunder Spire . . . Far Tumble . . .”

They twisted, now seeing onto an overcast ridge with a faint booming like an echo.

“Aui!” cried Marit, for a presence waited there, green and flowering, as ordinary as a burgeoning rice field and yet with a hidden layer of rot deep in its roots.

“Who are you?” Raising an arm, he swung like a man grabbing for and missing a thrown rope. “Eihi! Mistress! I was hoping you would walk!”

“What is it, Bevard?” asked the woman. “You are making progress gathering the troops?”

“Eiya! I got some, but now I'm pursued, my companies trampled and killed. We were ambushed at the river! They dropped fire out of the skies!”

“Come back,” she said. “The army has reached Toskala. Negotiations should now be complete. You did as you were told.”

He caught in a sob like a child reassured. Marit sheared away from his presence, not knowing why he creeped her so; she hurried on, forgetting to name the angles. Finding the spring and the mares at the center, she knelt, trembling, and gulped down the cold liquid until her throat burned.

“Sheh!” Her companion arrived, filled her bowl, and drank with polite sips.

“I'm sorry. I was just startled by coming across him like that, so suddenly.”

“I didn't mean you. You'll learn in time to feel the presence of another before you meet. I meant rather his difficult circumstances. Bevard is not a true leader; he's working beyond his capabilities, not a problem you will have, I feel sure. Just be patient.”

Just be patient,
Marit thought.
Be patient, and learn everything you can.
She looked up, and the woman smiled so reassuringly that Marit opened her mouth to confess her real name. Warning stamped. Marit shut her mouth, leashing her bowl to her belt.

“What now?” she asked as she rose.

“We must cut short our journey and return to Toskala. Or I must, to oversee our meeting with the Toskala council.”

“With Toskala's council? May I attend?”