Spirit Gate

by Kate Elliott

  “Heh. Heh. Just like we did at that place . . . huh . . . it had a name.”

  “Reyipa,” said Twist.

  Rabbit snickered. “Then we tossed them from the cliff, four at a time. Heh. Heh. ‘It’s the flying fours for you!’ Remember how we called that out? Heh. Pretty clever.”

  “Whew! I do have to pee,” said Kesh, not liking the turn of this conversation. “I’ll be right back.”

  Trying not to disturb the sleeping ginnies, he picked his way sideways down off the roadbed and gingerly high-stepped along the ground, to the edge of the trees. Made water there, while his thoughts spilled.

  If he ran, they would just be on him. This motley group, part of a larger unit that called themselves the Flying Fours, had embraced him into their ranks only because the reeve and his fascinating passenger had dropped down beside their cadre and warned them to “pick up the lad who is just up the road, and keep him safe.” Or so the sergeant had made sure to tell him. How Bai had managed to persuade them he could not imagine, since he hadn’t been there to see, but she seemed at this juncture capable of anything except, he hoped, raping corpses.

  He peered into the trees, but it was all darkness beneath the canopy of rustling leaves. The river ran close by, a constant chuckle of amusement, no doubt laughing at his plight. What was he to do? He could race to the shore and throw himself into the water, but he didn’t know how to swim, and anyway the ginnies would likely drown. He could hide in the undergrowth, but the dogs would probably find him. In the other direction the woods thinned where the ground began its steady rise toward the high plateau of the Lending. He might have a chance running in that direction, up the path toward the temple at first before veering into the bush, but it seemed foolish to take the chance when Bai had managed to gift him with safe passage. Such as it was. He hated to march with this group back toward Olossi, especially not knowing what they intended. He hadn’t quite asked, and they hadn’t quite said, but from the way they spoke it seemed they were riding to meet up with the strike force, which was almost a day ahead of them. That strike force had murdered the poor folk in this exceptionally inoffensive village.

  Everything had gone wrong. But at least he was still alive.

  He heard what was not a sound, felt the shadow although it could not be seen in darkness. A prickling sensation ran from his ears to his neck, and his throat went dry, and he was suddenly horribly, terribly, genuinely scared, so badly that he would have wet himself if he hadn’t just peed.

  He stepped away from the trees, thinking at first that the threat came from beneath the canopy, but as he set a foot on the slope of the road’s underbed, a shape passed low over him. He and the other sentries ducked, covering their heads although nothing came close to hitting them.

  On the road behind them, the shape descended sharply. His breath lodged in his throat. The creature made the transition effortlessly from flying to trotting. When those mundane hoof-falls slammed on the road, he choked and gasped, and scrambled up to the road’s pavement to stare after it as it moved away from them and toward the tent.

  He would have called it a horse with two heads, one equine and one human, each one streaming wings like smoke. But as it came to a halt a little away from the campfire, it separated as its rider dismounted; it was a person wearing a voluminous cloak that had gusted out in the landing. But the horse really did have wings, fanned out at first as it came to earth and then folded in against its body. They swaddled its flanks like a monstrous growth.

  “ ‘Rid us of all that is evil,’ ” he muttered.

  “What did you say?” asked Twist.

  “What is that thing?”

  It was the wrong question to ask. Twist and Rabbit looked at him, chins lowering as might muzzles dip on dogs who are thinking of taking a bite out of you.

  “You don’t know?” asked Twist.

  “Heh,” said Rabbit suspiciously.

  “I’ve never been out of the south,” said Kesh in a choked voice. “Never saw such a thing before.” He sorted through his choices and opted for belligerency. “You want to make something of it? I can’t help it I’m not well traveled like your sort. I have to go where the mistress tells me, and she doesn’t stray far, let me tell you. She works for the temple, and they don’t let their hierodules off the leash. If you take my meaning.”

  “Heh. Heh.” Rabbit scratched himself. “Like to see that.”

  The creature and its rider vanished inside shed and tent respectively. One of the guardsmen detached himself from the campfire and jogged down to the sentry post.

  “Where’s the new one?” he called when he was within earshot. It was the sergeant of their company. “Master wants him to come.”

  “Heh,” snickered Rabbit.

  “He always interviews the new ones,” said Twist with a sneer. “Sees right through you, if you take my meaning.”

  Kesh did not, but he saw no chance to escape with three armed men beside him and he with only a knife and an unstrung bow for which he had no arrows and no facility. So it would end badly after all, and just in the teeth of his victory. Fortune had turned its back on him, that was clear.

  He trudged to the tent with the sergeant beside him.

  “Young man come to my company a month back,” remarked the sergeant, “and didn’t take to our way of doing things here. So I had to break all his fingers. I did that, you see, to get him to tell me why he’d come. It seems some folk from Nessumara had sent out a few likely lads to scout the land, see what was up. I just don’t like folk who will go tattling tales of me to people who don’t like me. But he fessed up pretty quickly after I got to cutting off his fingers.”

  “Did he now?” asked Keshad, thinking of the marketplace and how you could never let your true feelings show. “What happened then?”

  “Oh, it seemed a kindness just to slit his throat. I’m not one for drawing it out, although I admit a few of my soldiers asked me to let them have a go. I don’t think that’s right, once you’ve gotten what you need. I just killed him. Most likely the vultures ate him, if the Lady was feeling as kindly as I was. Here you go.”

  He motioned for Kesh to go through a rigged-up entryway made of hanging cloth and in under the canvas roof. Kesh heard the sounds of the creature moving within the shed. It seemed to be eating or drinking; it made horse-like noises, so that in hearing it one would think it a horse. But horses had wings only in the old stories.

  In the stories about the Guardians, who had long since vanished from the Hundred.

  If this was a lord’s resting place, then it was no better furnished than the hovel of a simple farmer. There was a pallet covered with a thin blanket, a folding table on which stood a bronze ewer and basin, and a small traveler’s chest so old its edges were smoothed to a shiny curve and its planks were warped.

  The man sat on a stool, still dressed for travel. If he was a lord, then he wore clothes common to every laborer: a long knee-length linen jacket dyed an indeterminate color that the candle flame did nothing to distinguish; wide-legged trousers; knee-high boots that looked well worn and scuffed. His dark cloak pooled around his hips and thighs as if he had scooped it over them to keep himself warm.

  He looked up as Kesh halted uneasily before him. He had a strange cast of face, a little broader across the cheekbones, a shade different in complexion, the shape of the eyes more exotic, twisted and pulled. Something about his features seemed passing familiar. He might be an outlander, or else the son of some hidden corner of the Hundred whose folk rarely left their home valley, a person glimpsed once and recalled now in a spin of dizziness. No, Kesh had never seen this man before. His eyes were so brown as to be black, and they were like holes driven into Kesh’s heart to lay bare his secrets.

  He spoke with a slight drawling accent that Kesh could not place. “You were picked up by this troop yesterday afternoon, so I hear.”

  “Yes.” Kesh kept it short. He didn’t know how to address him, or how to stop from breaking down into tears out
of fear.

  “Before they found you, the troop was met by a reeve who was carrying a hierodule who said you are her slave.”

  “So I hear. I didn’t witness that meeting myself.”

  “Naturally.” Almost, he might be about to smile, but instead the expression made Kesh shiver as if a ghost were breathing on his neck.

  The candle burned straight up. There was no wind, nothing to sway that flame. The horse bumped and snuffled within the shed.

  “You are not what you claim,” said the man.

  Kesh could say nothing, because he was pinned by that stare. The air had grown as hot as the hell where dance those lilu who have not yet found a crack through which to wiggle out onto the mortal world. He was hot and cold together, so frightened he thought he might faint.

  “It would matter to the others, although not to me,” said the man cryptically. “I ask, and you must answer. Do you mean to harm me or mine?”

  “No.” The word was forced out of him by a vise gripping and squeezing until only the truth was left. “I care nothing for you or yours.”

  “How can you know, since you have not asked who me or mine are? Yet strange as it seems, you are telling the truth. Very well.” He raised a hand as though the effort taxed him. “Go. Best if you not come to my attention again.”

  Kesh backed out so fast through the curtained entrance that he stumbled as soon as he was outside and fell on his backside hard enough to jostle the ginnies. They hissed at him, and Magic nipped at his wrist as if to warn him to be more careful next time, an “I told you so.”

  He had forgotten about the ginnies! They had lain so still in the sling that the lord had not noticed them at all. Usually they made their feelings known. Not this time. They had chosen to avoid the man’s notice.

  The sergeant glanced at him, unamused by his pratfall. “Go back to your post.”

  He scrambled up, soothed the ginnies, and hobbled back to the sentry post. Best stick to the routine and do nothing, absolutely nothing, that would bring him to the attention of that man and his horrible stare.

  He knows all and everything, all my secrets, all my crimes, all my hopes and all my fears. But he let me go anyway.

  “Heh,” said Rabbit, seeing him return.

  “Passed muster,” said Twist with a sly, cruel grin.

  Kesh grunted a noncommittal reply. Above, the stars shone bright and cold, while the night was warm and the tender breeze a balmy presence. The trees whispered in a mild conversation. A nighthawk kurred. All was quiet.

  No, it was only an illusion brought on by the tension of his situation, caught in the midst of an invading force whose soldiers would as easily kill him as spare him. There had been nothing strange about that man, nothing at all. Any clever man might spout truisms like “you are not what you claim to be” and “you’re not telling the truth” to the kind of twisted, rabbity men willing to join this manner of army, and know he was hitting the mark.

  He had certainly imagined the wings on that horse. It was only the play of shadow in the night.

  There, now. That was better. The sergeant was a bigger threat. Did he suspect, or had Kesh truly passed muster? He had to glean any useful information before he made his eventual escape. He couldn’t think any other way. Never give in to fear.

  “What is the lord’s name?” he asked, treading softly on this new ground. Each word was like the snap of a finger being pinned back and broken. “Where does he come from?”

  Rabbit shuddered and turned away as the smell of urine spread sharply off him. He had wet himself. He began to weep with small, animal noises. “They scare me,” he whimpered. “They scare me. Stop it. Stop asking.”

  Twist snarled, and the ginnies hissed in answer, crests rising as they stirred along Kesh’s arm.

  “Best keep your mouth shut.” Twist’s voice rose in pitch until he fought himself and controlled it with a grimace of dismay. “Best keep it shut and ask no more questions. If you want to stay alive. The lords don’t like those who question. That one—he’s the kindliest. He only burns you.”

  “What do you mean? Like he, uh—” Now that he had set out to say it, he realized the words might make them suspicious again, but it would be worse to break off as though he had something to hide. “—uh, sets people on fire, bound in a cage, like they do in the empire to execute criminals?”

  Twist shrugged. “Eh, I don’t know anything about the empire, but that seems a nasty way to go for a poor criminal, nothing quick about it. No. You faced him. You know what I mean.”

  So he did. All his doubts roared up as he recalled that deadly gaze. He had been cleaned out, every crevice of him burned down to bedrock. Rid us of demons. He needed a plan, any plan, to escape.

  “What comes next?” he asked. He could never escape if that “lord” was always watching over them.

  “What comes next?” mused Twist philosophically.

  “Heh.” Rabbit looked back toward the village. When Kesh and Bai had walked through that village, it had lived and breathed; now it was dead. “Heh. Maybe we get a chance ourselves, at some loot. Doesn’t seem fair the strike force cleaned this out and left us nothing but their leavings. I’d like to try—heh. Heh.”

  “Olossi’s pretty big,” continued Twist, who like the rest of them mostly ignored Rabbit. “Plenty of loot for everyone.”

  “Oh, yeh, sure,” stammered Kesh. “And after that? Then what?”

  “How should I know? One campaign at a time, until we’re done.”

  “Of course. Until we’re done.”

  “Yeh. Yeh.” Twist scratched the stubble at his chin. “The armies are on the move. High Haldia first. Olossi set to fall in the next few days. Toskala will go down soon after. Or maybe it’s Nessumara next, all the cities and big towns, yeh. It won’t be long until all the Hundred is ours, just as the lord commander promised us.”

  39

  After Anji and his party returned from town with the bad news, the soldiers accepted it with their usual stoic pragmatism. As twilight turned to evening, they settled down to sleep. Why not? No matter what came, it was best to be well rested.

  Anji did not sleep, so Mai sat up by the fire watching him as evening turned into night. He did not pace or curse or appear in any way restless, but for the longest time he did sit on a mat with a fist pressed against his mouth, staring at the flames.

  After a while, he gathered his advisors: Chief Tuvi; Scout Tohon for his experience; Mai because it was the custom of Qin commanders to consult their wives; Shai because he could hear the words of ghosts; and—curiously—Priya, whom Anji respected because she could read and write the script used in the holy books sacred to the Merciful One. Sengel and Toughid stood a few paces away, at guard as always, but they were never consulted.

  “I am not sure we have been betrayed, because I doubt these Great Houses have much interest in us except that we might bite them at an inconvenient time. We are too few in number to truly frighten them. But I am sure that Reeve Joss has been betrayed in some manner. The question is: What are we to do about it?”

  At night it was almost cool, with a lazy breeze teasing the dregs of heat. Mai slapped at the midges swarming her face and shifted to get into the draft of smoke off the fire they sat around. She would stink of smoke, but it was better than being bitten raw. That sweet bath seemed ages in the past. It was hard to believe she had luxuriated in those waters only this past morning.

  “If we go back to the empire, we will be killed,” said Chief Tuvi.

  “If we go back to the Qin, we will be killed,” said Tohon. “It would be death without honor, like a starving cur who slinks back to the fire though it knows it will be cut down.”

  By the light of the fire, Shai was whittling at a scrap of driftwood, shaping it into a spoon whose handle was fashioned as the forelegs and head of a springing antelope. She could see the form come into being under his hands in the same manner she could see thoughts and solutions coming into being and being dismissed as unworkable
by the way Anji’s expression shifted. But she didn’t know what her husband was thinking.

  “I have considered every piece of information we know.” Anji sat cross-legged on a square mat woven of reeds, just like the one on which she sat. His hands were now folded in his lap. “I have turned it, and turned it, but I have no answers. Some manner of conflict boils among the reeves. Guardsmen resort to banditry to prey on the caravans they are meant to safeguard. Discontent simmers within the Lesser Houses of the council in Olossi because their voices go unheard. Rumors of trouble in the north frighten the merchants, who wonder if outright war or some demon’s spawn has poisoned the trade routes between these parts and those farther north. The reeve’s bone whistle is worn around the neck of a city guardsman. Where is the reeve, then? Living, or dead? If dead, who killed him? If living, why did he lose his eagle’s whistle, and why did the council master claim he knew nothing of the reeve?”

  “He didn’t say he knew nothing of Reeve Joss,” said Mai. “He said there was no reeve here for us to see, which could mean anything, quite the opposite. That woman suggested the reeve was some manner of villain falsely claiming to be a reeve. They know what’s happened to him. There was a man dressed in similar fashion, another reeve, surely, who left before the meeting was over.”

  Anji nodded. “They are not dealing honestly with us.”

  “No surprise there,” said Shai morosely.

  Mai nudged him with her foot, bent close, and whispered in his ear. “Say something useful, or keep quiet!”

  “Well, then,” said Shai defiantly, “what of my brother’s ring? I’ve heard talk of this town called Horn. That’s where the story said the ring was found.” He held up his own hand to display the family ring: the running wolf biting its own tail, with a black pearl inlaid into silver as its eye.

  Her identical ring was hidden by her sleeve, although the quality of her pearl was finer than the one on Shai’s ring, because she was Father Mei’s eldest daughter rather than only a seventh, and excess, son. Everyone knew that six sons were plenty: two to marry, two to die, one for the priests, and one for spare. That’s how it had been in their house: Father Mei and the second son, Terti, had married young and given birth so far to many healthy children. Third son Sendi had gone to the priests, while fourth son Hari, for spare, had been exiled and marched away by the Qin army, leaving fifth son Neni to marry unexpectedly in the wake of Grandmother’s grief over Hari. Of course sixth son Girish had died a spectacular and well-deserved death, shame on her even to think so, except it was true because he was a nasty man. Shai, poor Shai, was left over, the unlucky seventh son with the curse of seeing ghosts that he must hide from his own family as well as every living soul in Kartu Town lest he be burned and hanged in the town square, like Widow Lae, although the widow hadn’t actually seen ghosts but had done something just as bad when she had betrayed her Qin overlords.