by Kate Elliott
“Just an animal.”
“You shouldn’t be wandering out here, Seeker,” continued the soldier sternly, hands gripped tightly on his spear. “There are bandits still, you know what beasts the Pale Ones are. They’d rip you to pieces and then eat you raw. That’s what happened to my cousin. I hope we kill them all.”
“Even the folk in those villages we passed? Even the Rabbit Clan lady who sells incense in Western Market? Even the sailors on White Flower, whose captain is a half blood?”
The soldier gestured toward the sentry fires and the earthen walls, eager to return to their safety. “Wild dogs can be taught a few tricks, but they’re never tamed. And they’ll bite you when you try to feed them.”
“Hu-ah,” said the prince softly, “so swift a judgment and so harsh a cut.” He touched thumb and forefinger to the wick on the lamp, and fire flared, so startling that Alain jerked back, thumping his head on the tree behind him.
“What was that?” The soldier raised his spear threateningly and took a step toward the forest’s edge.
“A deer. Come, let’s go back.” The prince lifted a square of cloth overflowing with leaves and stems; tying diagonal corners gave him a means to carry his bounty. “I’ve got what I wanted.”
Waking his companions at the first blush of dawn, Alain heard a horn call, low and trembling.
Maklos grabbed his weapons hastily. “They’re off early today.”
“No need to hurry,” said Agalleos mildly as he stretched out the kinks that sleeping on the uneven ground had left in his body. “Aih! To be young again!” He grimaced. “I’ll never be free of these knots in my neck! There’s only one road, so we can’t lose them. We’ll reach the Spider’s Fort by afternoon. I wager they’ll stop there for the night.”
“Why so?” demanded Maklos. “Aren’t they in a hurry?”
“There’s a crossroads there, lad. West and north runs the path into enemy lands, as far out as they’ve forced the border. To the southeast they can march by the Carrion Road and cross the Chalk Path by the Bright River. It’s but a day’s march from Bright River to the City of Islands. They can sacrifice a prisoner there as easily as they can in the City of Skulls.”
“What is a Seeker?” asked Alain. When Agalleos looked at him strangely, he explained the encounter he’d had.
“Have you learned the language of the Cursed Ones as well?” asked Agalleos, surprised. Maklos had already started out and now, half hidden in the trees, turned to wave them forward impatiently.
Alain gathered up his gear, staff, pack, and the shield left by Shevros, while he gathered his wits as well. “I told you before: I only know the language of the Deer people, and that of my own country.”
They looked at each other, each seeing distress and bewilderment in the other man’s face. Rage whined and nudged Alain, urging him to move on.
“Come,” said Agalleos. “No doubt your spirit guides have given you some gift you weren’t aware of.”
No doubt. But his thoughts were so jumbled that three times that morning he tripped over roots and once slammed right into the trunk of a tree.
“Hsst!” Maklos sprinted back and shook him. “Keep alert! You could get us all killed.”
It was like chasing down flustered geese. For some reason, his hand—the one that had been bitten—began to throb again, although it hadn’t pained him since the day they’d crossed the Chalk Path. There went one goose which he had chased before: How could he understand Agalleos and Maklos? How could he understand the speech of the Cursed Ones?
And there, crossing its path, drawing his attention, another: The prince was no shadow. He was alive. He had been a shade in the world Alain had once known, a vision from times long past.
What did that make him now?
Spider’s Fort had been built over the ruins of another town, thick stone walls raised on a low hill to make it a fortress. So many old ruined walls wandered out onto the grassy land around that the brooding watchtowers and massive walls did give it the look of a many-eyed spider nesting at the center of its web. There were many more soldiers here, and even a camp set up outside the walls on flat ground extending out to the southeast: circular pavilions of white cloth dyed a pale gold under the light of the setting sun. Soldiers were driving stakes into the ground at an angle along the east-facing slope, like a defense against cavalry.
“Do you think they have the Holy One here already?” Maklos grinned. “I can sneak in along the old stone walls and get a look inside.”
“No, I must go,” said Agalleos. “When I wasn’t more than Maklos’ age, I spent a season here as a soldier.” He spat, as though ridding himself of a bad taste. “Even then, we were losing the war. The Cursed Ones spread their net wider every year. So far have they come.”
“Nay, I must be the one to go.” As the other two began to protest, Alain lifted a hand. “I can understand their language. Can you?”
“Truly,” admitted Agalleos, “I can’t understand their speech.” Maklos crossed his arms and grimaced, hating to miss his chance for a daring raid.
“Even if I can’t get close enough to see into the fort, I can at least hear the gossip of the sentries. What do you know of these old walls? Is there one route better than the others?”
“Along the northern slope you’ll find the ground dug through with old trenches and fallen walls. You can move in close, this way.” Agalleos drew in the dirt with a stick. “The fort’s walls thrust out like a ship’s prow at the narrow end of the hill.” He scraped a deep line diagonal to the walls he had outlined. “Move up along this cleft. To your left you’ll see an old terrace that used to be an herb garden. There was an old stair there that was hidden by the queen’s magic before the soldiers had to abandon the fort. In the corner of the garden, where three walls come together, find the carving of a lion woman. This is the sign that will open the weaving and let you through.” He showed Alain how to place his hands and press them over the mouth and eye of the carving. “Go up the stairs. There’s a hidden place where you can see into the fort.”
“So be it,” said Alain.
He ate, and drank, and fussed over the hounds, waiting for nightfall. He took only his staff, a knife, and a water pouch, refusing the shield, spear, and sword offered to him by Maklos. “The staff is the only weapon I use,” he said, “and a shield will only get in my way.”
Agalleos slipped a small stoppered bottle out of his pouch, opening it. “We have little enough, but this is a good time. Open your left hand.” He poured oil onto Alain’s palm. “Now rub this into your face from right to left, saying these words: ‘Let the swift god Erekes place his hand upon my brow and make me invisible to all my enemies.’”
Alain hesitated. The oil smelled faintly of lilies but also of something tart and displeasing.
“This is men’s magic,” said Agalleos. “Go on.”
Starting at his ear, he rubbed the oil into his face while murmuring the words. Oil tingled on his lips, but he felt no different.
Night brought the waxing crescent moon, already low in the west but bright enough together with the light of the stars that Alain could creep away from their hiding place out onto the open ground. The ground was mostly flat, but here and there pocked with depressions and rubble, easy enough to move through without too great a risk of being seen whether or not the magic worked. Fires burned on the walls above. He heard the noises of camp, men singing about ships and the sea, in odd contrast to the dust sliding under his feet, the hanks of dry grass his hands closed over at intervals, and thick patches of fennel rising up before him.
Once he had to lie low as a patrol strolled past. Maybe the spell hid him, or perhaps only the shadows did. He rose as soon as they were safely away and continued on in a crouch, hurrying from the refuge of a ditch to the lee of a fallen wall, scraping his knees on ragged stone, smelling the parched odor of the earth. The ground rose steeply beneath his feet. Above, torches burned, the edges of their flaring light obliterating the nearby s
tars. Figures moved along the walls, but their gazes were turned farther out, across the open ground to the concealing woodland beyond.
He scrambled up through the rubble of tumbled walls that had once ringed this lower slope of the hill. In an odd way it was as though those old sharpened senses, borrowed through dreams from Stronghand, remained with him. Grass sighed under the touch of the wind. Insects burrowed. An owl passed overhead, calling a warning that no man but he could hear: “Beware! Beware!”
He hoisted himself up a chest-high embankment and rolled onto an open ledge. A wave of scent smothered him, lavender and rosemary gone wild, rue and sage a heady aroma like a cloud around his head. The moon sank low along the horizon. He crawled on hands and knees through the overgrown garden and found the place where three walls met, two of them old ring walls and the third yet lower again, an ancient foundation almost consumed by the hillside. Because it was dark, he used touch to find the sphinx with her arching wing, powerful forelegs, and hindquarters carved statant into the stone. He placed a thumb in the sphinx’s mouth, a forefinger in its eye, and a little finger in a cleft carved under the wing.
A musty exhalation of cold air kissed his face. The moon touched the western horizon, sinking fast. He stumbled forward and banged his knees on stairs carved into the hill, too dark to see. He crept his way up using staff and hand, an arduous climb because of the darkness. After ninety-seven steps—he counted every one—he saw a reddish light flickering and bobbing to his right; a wall cut off his forward progress, and he had to turn right and follow a narrow passage barely wide enough to squeeze through because it was half filled with rubble. Fifteen more measured steps brought him to an embrasure cut into the rock, a hidden alcove from which he looked down onto a broad forecourt that fronted the main gate with its twin, square towers.
Soldiers gathered, ready to march. Their torches made the courtyard flare ominously, all smoke and fire and the glitter of bronze helmets and shields. The standard of the blood-knife fluttered in their midst. A slender figure cut through the ranks of soldiers to speak to the standard-bearer. Alain recognized him at once: the prince, whom the guard had called “Seeker.” The two spoke as the soldiers waited in patient silence. Then the prince hurried away, ducking inside a low doorway, lost to Alain’s view.
The high priest came from farther down the forecourt, where a wall broke Alain’s line of sight. His feathered headdress gleamed in the light of torches held up to either side of him. Ranks of spears bobbed alongside, a fence around their prisoner, trapped between two small wagons.
Because of her horse’s body, she stood a head taller than her captives, but her proud and beautiful head was bowed and her eyes were blindfolded. Her thick hair lay tangled and dirty over her shoulders. Bruises and unhealed cuts mottled her naked torso, and she limped, unable to put her full weight on her right foreleg. Her arms were tied behind her back, resting on her withers. Ropes bound her belly and back, held taut out to two wagons, one before and one behind, so she could neither bolt nor kick. She was jerked to a halt as the wagon drivers pulled back on their reins. The gates were unbarred and men hurried to open them.
They weren’t going to wait until daylight to take her away.
Her fine black coat, once glossy, was streaked with dirt and blood and coated with a dusting of ash. She shifted, favoring her injured leg. One of the drivers snapped his whip, a curling “snap” against her croup that made her lurch onto the injured foreleg and cry out in pain. Soldiers laughed to see her suffer. The heavy gates thudded against the towers. The way lay open for the high priest’s party to march out.
Alain stumbled backward, almost tripping when he reached the stairs. The smoky light of torches had blinded him. He counted each step so as not to fall, but feeling with his feet and his hands into the darkness it went so slowly. Was that the jangle and clank of their movements, as the troop moved out? Could he actually hear wheels grinding against dust as the wagons rolled down the ramped gateway?
Or was that only the wind moaning through cracks in the stone?
Or the whisper of men speaking in low voices?
Ninety-seven steps brought him to the concealed entrance. His hands traced the carven wings of the sphinx, sleeping forever in stone. He paused at the juncture of the three walls, seeing a pale light gleaming on the small ledge that harbored the overgrown herb garden, and stayed hidden in the shadows.
Someone stood there, back to him, a soldier with a crested helm wearing a hip-length white cloak. Bronze greaves protected his calves. The wind caught the cloak and whipped the ends up to reveal a finely molded cuirass decorated with boiled leather tassels that reached halfway to his knees.
“You’re wrong,” he said as he turned to face some other person, who was hidden by the curve of the wall. “They will fall before us because our armies are stronger than theirs. They are no better than packs of wild dogs.” The pale light limned his profile as it came into view: it was the prince, but he was now dressed in the garb of a soldier, the same clothing Alain had seen him in before when he had appeared as a shade in the ruins above Lavas.
How strange, that he had changed clothing so quickly.
“Then you underestimate them,” said his unseen companion.
Their whispers made their voices sound much alike. “That is why we still fight.”
The prince laughed harshly. “This war will only be over when the pale dogs and the shana-ret’zeri cease to hunt us, and that they will never do. Because they are still beasts, they cannot live peacefully, nor will they ever let us live peacefully.”
“Spoken like a soldier.”
“Do not mock me, brother. You know they are our enemies.”
“I know there will never be peace as long as our leaders persist in thinking they are beasts.”
“Tell me you did not cry with joy when news came to the blood-knife lord that the witch who calls herself Li’at’dano was captured!”
The name made Alain slip in surprise. Pebbles fell in a spray, skittering onto the ground at his feet.
But the unseen man was already talking; neither seemed to have heard. “She is not even the most dangerous of those who oppose us. But at least once she is sacrificed, her power is lost to our enemies.”
“We don’t need magic to defeat them.”
“If you think so, then you are a fool.”
“You have been listening to the mumbling of the sky-counters again. We have spears and swords enough.”
“Why will you never listen, elder brother? Spears and swords will never be enough.”
“What great magic are the pale dogs hiding? How will they rise up and defeat the Feathered Cloak and her sorcerers? What are they waiting for? The witch mare will be taken to the temple of He-Who-Burns, and there she will walk the spheres. So we will be rid of her. The rest will die or surrender or flee.”
How could it be that this man, who was alive and not a shade, knew of Liath? Wasn’t she already walking the spheres? Or was it Liath he was in fact speaking of? She was no “witch mare.”
“That is what I am afraid of,” said the other man as he stepped at last into Alain’s line of sight. He carried the pale light, a simple oil lamp flaring and flickering as the night wind teased it, held away from his body to illuminate the face of the prince. “That as we march our armies out to the frontier and leave our cities unprotected, the pale dogs are hiding and hoarding their magic. That is how they will strike us. That is why the sky-counters have sent out raiding parties to the four winds.”
“To be eaten by guivres, clawed by sphinxes, and smothered in sandstorms!”
The man carrying the lamp shifted, and all at once the light shone on his face.
Which was a twin to that of the soldier prince. Here was the Seeker again, dressed in simple garb and adorned by feathers.
Maybe Alain made an involuntary squeak of shock. Maybe his foot slipped. The next thing he knew, the soldier had spun around and lowered his lance, balanced to slide right into Alain’s belly
.
“Who’s there?” he demanded, squinting into the darkness.
“Do not act rashly.” The Seeker laid a restraining hand on his brother’s arm. “I have smelled this one before.” He lifted the lamp to shoulder height. He had a young face, handsome and proud, but not cruel. Feathers bobbed in his hair as he lifted his chin. “Come forward. You are trapped.”
With his staff held in his right hand, Alain stepped forward cautiously into the light.
“I am only one man,” he said quietly, “and I do not understand this long war. Wouldn’t you live more easily if you could make peace?”
The soldier hissed through his teeth. He held his lance steady, but did not lunge.
“Do you not mean to stab the pale dog through at once and have done with its barking?” asked the Seeker with some amusement. Seeing them together, side by side, Alain could now detect certain differences of stance and expression—the soldier tense and slightly thinner, as grim as death, and the Seeker with a gleam like mischief in his expression and a sardonic lift to his mouth. Otherwise they looked exactly alike except for their clothing.
“What are you doing here?” demanded the soldier as the point of his lance hovered an arm’s length from Alain’s abdomen. “How did you come to our walls without being seen by the sentries and patrols?”
Alain touched his own face, but the taste and feel of the oil Agalleos had given him to rub into his skin was long since wicked away by wind and night. Before he could answer, he heard the distant sound of barking, all at once, as though the hounds had been surprised out of sleep.
Hard on that sound, the darkness came alive as the blat of conch horns rose out of the east. A rumble like distant thunder shook the earth. Torches flared at the edge of the woods. Alarms rose from the fort’s walls, and men shouted out warnings as, along the entire northern sweep of forest, lights bloomed and, in the hands of shadowy figures, swept in toward the fort.