Spirit Gate

by Kate Elliott

  “Wolves, we call them,” said the grand gentleman into the awkward silence that followed. He spoke in a voice that carried effortlessly to each corner of the hall and even, indeed, into the rafters. He held his right hand with palm up, cupped around a large white stone. “Men who hire themselves out to fight.”

  Belatedly, Mai realized that children crouched up in those rafters, half hidden in the gloom as they peered down from their high perches.

  “In the wilderness we walk softly, hoping not to attract their notice. In the fields, we kill them for stalking our sheep. Why then would we open our gates and allow them into our city? Are we all such fools?”

  The last word he roared. Mai actually started, the force of his voice like a wind battering her. Anji did not move, did not react.

  The angry council member leaped to his feet amid a murmur of speculation. “What of the attack at the border post? The rot infecting the ordinands, some of whom conspired with ospreys to rob merchants? What of the testimony of Master lad and Master Busrad, both caravan masters of long experience and good character? Do you dismiss all this?”

  “Master Calon, do sit and not strain yourself. I still hold the stone.” The grand gentleman pursed a smile in the manner of a discerning customer who finds the bruised peach lurking at the bottom of the basket, the one he supposes you have been attempting to foist upon him. “The prisoner is dead. These caravan masters might have concocted the story between them. They might be in the pay of this wolf. He’s an outlander. We already know he lied to the caravan master in Sarida, in order to get the hire. We can’t trust him.”

  Anji spoke, startling, clear, cool. The accent of his arkinga made him seem even more out of place, very much a black wolf among brightly plumaged birds. “What of the reeve? The one from Clan Hall? He journeyed here before us. He came to alert this council to the corruption ripening in the border guards. Where is he?”

  A cough came from back by the door, where the guards stood. Folk shrugged and rubbed their chins. The council members stared at Anji. The man with the broken nose had vanished. Mai had not even seen him go.

  “There is no reeve here,” said the grand gentleman. “Nor were you given permission to speak.”

  “Yet there was a reeve,” said Anji. “Dressed very like that man who just left. He called himself Joss. He came from Clan Hall, from a city he named Toskala.”

  “Out of the north,” said the man with a gloating sneer. “Every manner of villain has crawled north into the shadows. He might have been anyone.”

  “Have you many of those great eagles?” asked Anji, with all the appearance of surprised curiosity. “That ‘anyone’ might ride one? I confess, I have never seen such an intimidating creature as that raptor.”

  “A spy. A traitor. These wolves come bearing tales of a conspiracy between Kotaru’s holy ordinands, and unholy ospreys, yet their so-called prisoner is dead and conveniently cannot defend himself against these charges. They might have murdered Captain Beron themselves!”

  “If you mean to accuse us,” said Anji, “then justice decrees we be allowed to defend ourselves.”

  “Enough of these interruptions!” The grand gentleman slapped his free hand onto the table, making not a few people jump, and indicated the woman on the platform. “Envoy, I ask for this point of order: that we conclude, having determined that this wolf and his pack be banished from all the territories surrounding Olossi and with whom we have friendly relations. Red in favor. Black to decline.”

  “No!” Master Calon leaped to his feet as many in the crowd rose with angry voices to goad him on. “You refuse to see the danger. The caravan masters vouch for this man. He and his men acted honorably. We need to strengthen our militia against the rising tide out of the north. Our livelihoods, our very houses, are in danger. Our own messengers sent into the north do not return, yet you do nothing. You ignore the reports from the north at your peril! You shrug off this tale of ospreys along West Spur because you are the fools, not us! I demand an open vote, each member to state a choice. I call for an open vote.”

  “Open vote! Open vote!” the crowd chanted, while a few remained tight-lipped, hunkered down. The other seated council members stared in stony silence. This was a tangled weave, much more complex than the warp and weft of Father Mei’s household and its petty grievances and old grudges.

  “Silence! Silence!” cried the woman presiding, although by now Mai realized she was merely a facilitator. She had no more power than a shuttle in the loom, which is directed by the weaver’s hand. “You do not have permission to speak.”

  As folk settled down reluctantly, Anji raised his voice again. “Am I not allowed to speak on my own behalf and on behalf of those people for whom I am responsible?”

  They ignored him. Just as Mai had been ignored, in her father’s house, when there was business to discuss not considered fit for the ears of a girl who would be married out of the family and thereby no longer have any interest in the matters of the household. The envoy called for an open vote, and the vote went around the table so everyone could see, the council members raising either a red flag or a black one. Now the split came clear to Mai: there were sixteen Greater Houses, but only fifteen votes allotted to the guilds and the Lesser Houses. So they voted exactly on those lines: sixteen red flags and fifteen black. So the Greater Houses won their victory while the crowd seethed with an ugly anger. What held the crowd helpless Mai did not know.

  The envoy waited until the clerk scrawled the results and rang a handbell at her left hand.

  “Therefore,” said the envoy to the hall at large, “the decision carries: the suppliants will not be allowed to settle in the Hundred. Master Feden, have you anything more to say?”

  The grand gentleman rose to his feet with a weary sigh, hoisting the heavy stone. “It is late,” he said in tones of kindness, nodding toward Mai. He wore an ivory comb of astonishing beauty in his hair, fixing into place the loop of his middle braid. He wore, as well, a magnanimous aspect. The victor can afford to be generous, and can expect gratitude from the one he has defeated when that loser might otherwise expect a death sentence. “Too late really to send you on your way at once, although many have urged you be driven out of town immediately. You may camp outside the walls for one more night. As long as you are on your way by the first bell after dawn, we will not trouble you further. You’ll ride south. An escort will be provided for the first leg of the journey. As for the rest of you, let the ban of Taru the Witherer be upon any of you who think to conspire with these outlanders. They are hereby called into exile from the town’s commerce. Captain Waras, escort them out.”

  He sat.

  The captain came forward with a doubled guard of soldiers. It was stuffy in the chamber despite the open shutters, and the captain had loosened his outer jacket enough that the chain of the necklace he wore sagged free, and the object fastened there slithered into the open.

  The reeve’s bone whistle, with which he called his eagle.

  38

  A stick prodded Keshad awake.

  “Ow!” he yelped, but the man at the other end of the spear merely poked him again with the haft.

  “Here, now. Your turn on watch.”

  “Must you prod me? That hurt!”

  “Heh. A lot less than those ginnies would hurt when they bit my hand or ankle if I shook you kindly awake, yeh? I saw what they did to Pehar’s hand. Heh! Mean beasts!”

  “True enough,” said Kesh, sitting up and rubbing his sore head. The ginnies gaped their mouths to show teeth to the intruder. “Although it was stupid of Pehar to reach in on them like that. Those ginnies will protect what’s mine—what I’m safeguarding for my mistress, that is.”

  “Heh! I’d risk their bite for a taste of Devouring right now. Is she good, your mistress?”

  Kesh made a face. “I’m only her hired man.”

  The man, who called himself Twist, snorted in disgust. “Seems you’re used to being beaten by her stick. Come on, then.”
r />   Kesh chivvied the ginnies into a makeshift sling. He saw how Twist eyed the pouch that the ginnies had been guarding, then shifted his gaze to Magic. Magic stared right back at him. Kesh had been very careful to hide his remaining string of leya, but every soldier in the cadre suspected he carried coin. Really, the ginnies had protected him. He gathered up the rest of his trifling possessions and spat to get the sour taste of bad wine out of his mouth. “Where do I go?”

  “You can leave your things here.”

  “I’ll keep them near me and my little guardsmen, if you please.”

  “Heh, heh! Come this way. Be careful where you step.”

  Twist held a rushlight that steamed off more smoke than flame. The sergeant of their cadre had opened his bedroll in the empty council house in the very village whose inhabitants had—only one night before—sought to overcharge Keshad and Zubaidit for accommodations in those same quarters. The rest of the cadre had lain down to rest on the entry porch, where they could move out quickly if need be.

  It was this cadre Kesh had been absorbed into earlier that day when the mounted men had captured him on the road. They’d have killed him if he hadn’t possessed that cheap tin medallion, the one he’d looted off the corpse of the man Bai had killed. But he had looted it, and so he was alive. Others weren’t so fortunate.

  The village was little more than a posting station with buildings strung along the road like beads. Each building was a business with an open front, an awning sheltering an entryway partly floored in earth and partly raised up as a floor of wooden planks. The strike force running ahead of Kesh’s cadre had decorated these porches with the corpses of the village folk who had lived and worked within. The sight of these slack forms greeted Kesh as he and Twist trudged toward the west-facing sentry post. There was an innkeeper Kesh remembered, a jovial man who had scoffed at their attempts to secure housing for a lower price; he had been stripped of the fine sea-green scalloped silk robe he had been wearing, and sprawled on his entry porch in nothing more than a sleeveless shift as pale as a death shroud. Here was the kindly seller of rice, an old woman with a bent back now softened and straightened in death. The aura of torchlight revealed more personal details: One had a slashed throat, while the other seemed unmarked but no less dead for all that. He hoped they had died quickly.

  Twist had a sickness lodged in his chest, something nagging and snotty, and the man breathed with a rattling intensity and paused now and again to cough up gunk and spit it out. He did not glance at the bodies. To him they were chaff, nothing important. Along with the others in the cadre, he had ransacked the village at sunset, complaining bitterly all the while that the strike force had carried away everything both valuable and portable, although naturally heavy household goods remained, things impossible to haul under these circumstances.

  Had these folk been alive, Kesh could have passed them without a moment’s thought, but they were horribly dead. Bai’s words nagged at him. Was it possible that if they had acted more quickly they could have saved these hapless innocents? No, they would only have been killed as well. Had they slept the night in the council hall, they would be dead, too. These reflections allowed him to walk behind Twist without showing any sign of revulsion. If the others suspected he was not one of them, they would kill him, and he was determined to stay alive.

  Laughter came from one of the porches. A group of men were joking, calling out bets. One of the men was stretched out atop a body, humping busily.

  “Fifteen! Sixteen! Seventeen!”

  “He’ll go on twenty!”

  “No, on twenty-five!”

  “Whoo! Whoo! Twenty-two! Heh! I win!”

  With a chorus of laughs and shouts, coin changed hands.

  Kesh averted his eyes and kept walking as he whispered thanks that the poor victim was not screaming. Ahead, the village ended in fenced gardens, livestock sheds, and a pair of granaries on stilts. A tent had been raised just outside the last shed, although it was little more than a lean-to of canvas rigged out from the shed’s cantilevered roof. A trio of men stood at attention beside a small fire, guarding both tent and shed.

  “Who sleeps there?” Kesh whispered.

  “Eh! The lord does.”

  “The lord?”

  “He don’t usually stop by us, but there’s somewhat afoot. Anyway, he don’t like to be disturbed by the likes of us. So, hush!”

  It was middle night, more or less. There was no moon. Kesh stumbled more than once before they clambered back on the road “downstream” of the shed. The road here ran fairly straight, with a long view back into the village and its emptied buildings. In an open meadow lay the ruins of the old Ladytree, fallen into a massive tangle of trunk and branches that no one dared cut up. In the darkness, the new sapling, no more than two years old, wasn’t even visible.

  They walked a little farther on the pale surface of the road until they came to the road’s intersection with a wide gravel path that pushed straight through the woods toward the distant uplands. The path’s beginning was marked by one of the three-span gates that marked a temple to Ilu, the Herald, though it was too dark for Kesh to see any buildings in all those trees and brush. Just ahead, the road began to curve. Here in the middle of the roadway stood two sentries.

  “Heh! About time!” said one, a burly man with his hair shaved down against his head.

  “What was all that noise?” asked the other.

  “Just Rabbit,” said Twist, wiping his nose.

  The burly man cackled. “Eh! He wouldn’t know what to do with a live one, eh? You ever get to wondering just what he did do to get run out of his village?”

  Twist spat. “Did you ever think I don’t want to know? Eh?”

  Kesh felt sick, but he said nothing, made no expression, just waited.

  Fortunately, the pair headed back for camp without any further discussion. Kesh’s companion settled into a comfortable stance, feet shoulders’-width apart and weight canted onto his spear.

  The ginnies slept, a heavy burden in their sling. Kesh shifted nervously as he looked back toward the camp, wondering what he ought to do. There were thirty-six in the cadre. He’d counted three times: eighteen mounted and eighteen walking on their own feet; he made the thirty-seventh. A sergeant led them, but who their commanders were Kesh could not tell. In general, the southern towns were councilled, so he wasn’t sure how one could tell a “lord” apart from a well-to-do council member, although there must be signs and customs that spoke of such things. In his travels in the empire, he had dealt with merchants who were agents for lords, of whom they spoke in only the most formal of terms. But lords in the empire were a different beast, set apart, isolated. Nor could he ask Twist to explain it to him, lest Kesh seem too ignorant of things the others took for granted. As the old saying went, better keep one’s mouth shut and be thought a fool, than open it and be known as an impostor.

  It was so quiet. The horses had been strung up on a line near the council house, visible from here by the distant glimmer of light from a single lantern hung at the porch. The mascot dogs who accompanied the cadre were tranquil beasts, and he supposed they were now sleeping. In truth, it was the look of the men with whom he marched that agitated him.

  Like Twist. The man’s jaw had been damaged and healed wrong. He was missing two fingers. He had a net of lash scars on his back. He carried himself with the bravado of a man who relishes a fight over nothing.

  A figure appeared on the road out of the darkness and loped up to them in that gangling, hopping way he had.

  “Eh, there, Rabbit,” said Twist. “Finally remember you have sentry duty?”

  “Heh. Heh. Yah.”

  Like this one, who tolerated the others calling him “Rabbit” and who had a way of grinning at unseen sights that made Kesh think he was unbalanced, and who was capable of the most grotesque acts, things Kesh had not thought anyone could force himself to do. Like what he had just done. All Kesh could think of was that if the woman, or man, was dead, then th
ere wouldn’t have been any pain.

  “How long have you been on this road?” he asked Rabbit, because the silence was making him twitchy.

  Rabbit fished a strip of dried flesh out of his pouch and chewed on it before answering. “Eh. Since I was kicked out of m’mam’s village and forced to take cover up in the hills. There I found some who were more like me than otherwise. Comrades, you might say.” He hawked and spat, then wiped his mouth clean. “Let me see. That was ten years ago now, I’m thinking.”

  Kesh whistled. “That’s a long time. How old are you?”

  “Oh, I’m a Goat, sure enough. You work it out.”

  “Huh. Same as me.”

  “Really?” said Twist. “You look younger than Rabbit.”

  It was true. Rabbit had the wiry strength of a young man but his face was seamed and weathered in the manner of a person who has suffered far beyond his years and lived to tell a noisome tale. He bore a series of parallel white scars on his right forearm, and he kept himself clean-shaven because of the knotted scar along his jaw that prevented him from growing an even beard. No telling what he had done to get run out of his home village, and since this was the second corpse he’d humped since Kesh joined the company this past early afternoon, it was best not to ask and not to know.

  “How long, you?” the older man asked Kesh.

  “Oh, in the service of that one, since I was twelve,” said Kesh, figuring it better to tell as much of truth as he could.

  Rabbit twitched. “Heh! You ever done it with her? Front or back?”

  “Her? No.”

  “I bet that reeve done it. That one was carrying her. Heh! He was as ready as a split log to burn. Popping right out of his leathers, near enough. Fancy them dropping down just like that to warn us of you waiting there by our dead comrades just ahead.” Rabbit scratched where Kesh did not want to look. That weird, crazy grin crept up the corners of his mouth. “Wonder who killed them.”

  “I’d like to know,” said Twist. “I’ve been camping with Jeden and Ofass for five years now. If I caught that one who did them, I’d open their chest and squeeze their beating heart ‘til they told me. And then burst it anyway.”