Spirit Gate

by Kate Elliott

Iad clapped a hand to his forehead. “She got a ride to Olossi from one of Argent Hall’s reeves, but she says the entire hall is corrupt . . . Aui! It’s a complicated tale. Then a lad rode in after nightfall, saying his village had been attacked by a strike force and everyone laid to the sword, killing and burning.”

  “The torch we saw,” said Anji to Chief Tuvi.

  “That would explain it,” agreed the chief.

  “The reeve, Joss, confirmed that Argent Hall had been corrupted. And Master Feden confessed that he had made a deal with some villains out of the north who it seems meant to betray him all along, for they said nothing to him of sending an army!”

  “So what, precisely, is it that you want?”

  “An answer to the question! That’s all I agreed to. Can a troop of two hundred defeat an army of three thousand?”

  Anji laughed. “Not in a pitched battle, with mounted forces, such as I command. A company of two hundred would be foolish to attempt it.”

  Master lad relaxed, shoulders sinking and lips going slack. “Eh. Ah. Exactly. I told them so, but they are so desperate, they insisted I come.”

  Mai raised a hand. “Master lad. Before you step away from a sale you believe you cannot make, let us hear your entire proposition. You can’t simply have been sent to ask a question.”

  “I told them it would be impossible,” said Master lad, “but they insisted.”

  “You treated us fairly, so it is only fair that, in return, we hear you out,” said Anji, and the poor man started, so surprised was he. “Did you say the Lesser Houses are involved in this transaction? That they knew of it?”

  “The Lesser Houses? No, not at all. They knew nothing of it. Even now, only a few know the truth, for it was just laid before Master Feden a short while ago. The Lesser Houses and the guilds may seem numerous to you, but they have no power in the council. I come at the behest of the Greater Houses. Aui! Now that I know what is upon us—an army of three thousand!—I’m cleaning out my warehouse and dependents and leaving at first light, as soon as I get back to the city, unless they’ve locked me out, which I wouldn’t put past them. The Greater Houses have destroyed themselves with their own greed! They brought this calamity down on Olossi, and the rest of us will be ruined with them!”

  “Well, Mai,” said Anji, looking at her with an expression Shai could not begin to interpret. The captain raised a hand to his lips. When had he gotten Mai’s wolf-sigil ring? He touched it to his lips, then nodded at her, waiting.

  “Can you do it?” she asked.

  Anji smiled, as Shai imagined a wolf might grin—in a manner of speaking—when it spots a helpless fawn caught in a mire. “Go on, Master lad. Now I am interested.”

  As dawn rose, the caravan master began to talk.

  42

  A quartet of guardsmen accompanied Joss to Crow’s Gate. Although he had bathed again in the court of Master Feden’s compound, and had been given clean clothes in the style of those worn by Olossi’s militiamen, he insisted on wearing his leather trousers instead of a clean linen pair. For the moment he regretted it, as they were damp from being rinsed and wiped down, so his legs chafed where they rubbed the saddle. The lingering stench of his captivity caught in his throat.

  Crow’s Gate was still barred for the night. In the half-light that presages dawn, he watched as another rider approached them. She was riding one horse and leading a packhorse and a spare on a lead.

  “You can’t have been to the temple and back by now,” he said.

  “No. As it happens, I ran into another hierodule in town, a kalos, in fact, a fellow I know and trust. He’ll take the message to the temple in my place. That gives me more time to make some distance west. What did you decide?” She indicated the four guardsmen, who had looked her over and then away. She was subdued, and with her hair pulled tightly back and wrapped into a knot at the back of her head and her body concealed in a loose knee-length jacket, she was a woman you wouldn’t give a second glance. Not unless you knew what she was.

  She smiled, teasing him for staring at her so.

  He wasn’t usually taken so off guard. “Oh, eh, yes. These good men here will escort me south to the intersection with the Old Stone Road. I believe it will be safe to call Scar from there.”

  “Yes. You’re less likely to be seen. I expect a certain reeve from Argent Hall to fly in soon after dawn. It’s best he be given no chance to see your eagle.”

  “Why?”

  “Why shouldn’t he see your eagle?” There was something more than teasing in that pull of her lips. She had a way of raising her eyebrows and tilting her chin that was deeply sensual, even triumphant. She was a woman confident of her power and, in that, desperately attractive.

  “Why do you think the same reeve will come back?”

  “Marshal Yordenas will send someone back to make sure those mercenaries leave. I am pretty sure Horas will volunteer, say he knows the situation best, so best he be the one to supervise. I admit, a lot of the plan depends on it being him who returns. It’s a gamble. But we’ve only got one throw before we’re ruined, so we may as well be reckless.”

  “I still expect this is all a ploy to catch me off my guard, or capture my eagle.”

  “If you say so. Had I known you were so full of yourself, I’d have known I need only wait until you fill up with the poison of self-love and strangle on it.”

  Seeing that he had begun to lose her interest made him try harder by shifting ground. “What do you gain from this gamble?”

  Her expression was closed to him. She drew her horses aside as Crow’s Gate was opened and the first folk were allowed to pass. Riding away, she spoke a last comment over her shoulder. “Nothing so different from what’s in it for you.”

  He was flushed, and bothered. He let all the other traffic go ahead until the early tide of traffic had flowed out. Their party was released to pass Crow’s Gate, and they headed out on West Track, riding due south toward the escarpment while the sun rose east over the Olo Plain and the river’s meander. For a while they rode in silence. Farmers had set out into their fields. Early-morning peddlers trundled their goods out toward distant villages. Joss wanted to tell them all to turn back, to hide within the safety of the walls, but he could not. The reeves of Argent Hall must not suspect that Olossi’s council had learned the truth about their alliance. And so, in the service of their desperate gamble, they sent folk out unsuspecting into the lands where wolves were already on the prowl.

  The four guardsmen were likable young men who could not, in fact, stay silent for long. They had the confident bearing of those granted youth and health and strength, but the least of Captain Anji’s tailmen could, Joss supposed, take all four out without a great deal of effort. These were not hardened men. They were not honed. They were like a sword made for show, not for fighting, pretty in their dyed linen jackets and loose trousers and bright silk sashes of teal or crimson or sea-foam green.

  “Did you see the incomparable Eridit last night?”

  “No, she was engaged with another man. I went to the arena to see that new troupe.”

  “Were they at the Little or the Big?”

  “Oh, at the Little. They came out of Mar. It wasn’t much of an audience.”

  “It wasn’t much of a talking line, I heard.”

  “That’s true. But there was one girl . . . still, you know how they are, they will say they are sworn to purity until their tour is done.”

  “They say that if they aren’t interested. What they say to a handsomer man is quite another thing.”

  “That’s not what your sister said.”

  “Hey! That’s not funny. You know she’s getting married at Festival.”

  “Stop it, you two! Or I won’t cycle you off duty on Festival First Night.”

  The chatter changed course into safer channels: the upcoming new year’s festival; a jeweler who gave good deals on trinkets suitable for wooing jarya companions; a flower seller who had given good advice about a certain herbal
that gave off an arousing perfume; the cockfights and horse races meant to take place on Festival Third Day; the demise of their favorite rice-wine seller in an unexpected fall from the upper story of his warehouse; the preparations of one of their party for his appearance in a talking line on the last night of the festival, which mostly had a great deal to do with properly gathering and sewing together stiff nai leaves to make the traditional bristling wrist guards.

  These young men, like all the rest of the early-morning travelers and indeed most of Olossi’s population, were ignorant of the magnitude of the threat that stride by stride marched nearer. It seemed Olossi’s council really did like to hoard its secrets, even when knowledge might save lives. It did not, on the whole, make him trust them, neither the Greater Houses or the Lesser.

  “Look! There!” said the fourth young man, who up until now had said the least.

  They had gone a ways up the slope and could look back with enough command of the height that the wide plain and the curves of the river winding through it made a striking scene. Sunlight glittered on the river. The sea was a vast sheet of calm water, bluest beyond the delta’s mouth. Over Olossi, a reeve circled, dipped, and descended for a landing.

  Joss swung around to look up along the road. A fair stretch ahead of them, where the going got steepest, a rider moved at a leisurely pace. The rider was leading two spare horses, one of which had the bulky outline of an animal laden with supplies. As he watched, she reached the turn where the road bent sharply right to run east parallel below the escarpment.

  To his companions he said, “Let’s get moving.”

  43

  Horas spent a dreary evening stuck in hall while Master Yordenas made him repeat his report twice like a simpleton who couldn’t understand two words rubbed together, and while the party of four argued. At length it was agreed that someone really had to go back to Olossi to make sure the mercenaries got the hells out of town and well away from anyplace where they might have a hand in disrupting the larger plan.

  “There aren’t many of them,” said Horas. “I don’t see why they’re such a threat.”

  “Ten would be too many,” said Toban. “You were given strict instructions.”

  “We’ll have to send a reeve to oversee their departure,” said Weda. “You ought to go, Horas. You know the Olossi council master better than the rest of us do.”

  “You just don’t want to stir your fat ass out of here,” he retorted. But he thought of the Devouring girl, and stirred restlessly in his chair. Yet those thoughts drew up from the well of his memory the stark gaze of that woman under the awning, the clerk with her brush and blank scroll. Her gaze had left him raw and shriveled. “Let someone else go. I’m due a break from running messages.”

  He pushed back from the table and took his leave. He thought of checking in on Tumna, but there were loft masters, the hall’s chief fawkner and his assistants, to tend to injured birds. Anyway, he was tired and cranky. Before the lamps could burn dry, he retired to his usual cot in the barracks. The musty smell of his mattress, the angle of the wedge propped under his neck, the feel of his beads wrapping his wrists: these brought sleep and chased away bad dreams.

  In the morning, he woke with a clear head and a niggling sense of disgust with himself. What a fool he was to have let that Devouring girl get away without paying for her passage! Thinking of her got him stiff all over again. He was no better than a child, flinching at shadows. Indeed, he could not really identify what had gotten into him yesterday. Likely it was sour wine curdled in his stomach whose gassy effusions had made him believe that a gaze from a meek clerk had power beyond what was natural. Strange how a good night’s rest and a comfortable meal could set things right.

  He rose early and told Toban that it was best for he himself to go back and personally supervise Master Feden and the council. “I’ll even follow the troop for a day, make sure they’re really getting gone.”

  “No matter to me who goes,” said Toban. “You might think about giving that eagle of yours some rest, though.”

  “Yah. Yah.”

  Toban was a withered stick who hadn’t any juice left in him. He wouldn’t understand about lusting after a woman, the kind you didn’t get a chance to gorge on more than once or twice in your life. Tumna was ragged, surly, and slow from the oversized feeding the chief fawkner had stupidly insisted on last night, but she was strong enough for another day of flying.

  Ragged the eagle was, and slow, and cranky at being roused early, but the pair took their distance easily and circled over Olossi soon after dawn. Every Assizes Tower was required to maintain a perch for eagles, and space enough for flight in and out, but Olossi’s council had always begrudged Argent Hall their due. First he thought of landing outside the walls, but then he’d have to walk. He had made this turnaround and steep approach enough times that he knew how to bank the turn just right and give a last hop of height in the landing, just before the gap of Assizes Court opened below. They made it, even if the landing was hard. He left Tumna hooded on the perch and commandeered a pair of young guards to escort him to Master Feden’s compound, always difficult to find in the twisting streets of Olossi.

  After a bit of confusion at the compound gate, he was led to a spacious courtyard and seated at a low table shaded by a cloth awning. Platters of fruit and soup and porridge and dried sourfish were brought. A slender slave girl poured khaif and leavened it with a spicy tincture of moro milk. He gave her a good look-over, but she wasn’t anything compared with the Devouring girl, hardly worth mentioning. He set to without waiting.

  It was a reasonably good feast, not perfect. The sourfish had a proper bite, but the flat cake was bland. The nai porridge was sharp with kursi, but the soup hadn’t any cut to it at all and only a pair of trifling leeks when any decent cook would have layered them on to give a morning kick. Still, the fruit was ripe, moist with juices.

  “Good to see you enjoying the food, Reeve Horas,” said Master Feden, entering.

  “Couldn’t eat last night,” said Horas as he pulled the tough strings from a globefruit and gulped down its sweet pulp.

  “I’ll join you.” Master Feden gave a command, and a small, wiry-haired dog whose coat was a mixture of gray, white, and black settled down, its gaze fixed on its master. Seating himself on the only other pillow, Feden took his khaif without milk or spice and dismissed the girl. “How can I aid you this morning? Is there a message from Argent Hall?” His hand trembled as he lifted the cup, but after he sipped at the hot khaif, the trembling eased and he set down the cup with a firm hand.

  “Uh.” Horas swallowed the last of the luscious globefruit and licked the sticky sap off his lips. “Just need to make sure the mercenary company departs for the south. Master Yordenas isn’t wanting any trouble with them.”

  “I shouldn’t think they’re likely to give any trouble.” Master Feden glanced across the courtyard as he said it, but there wasn’t anyone over there except a pair of guardsmen loitering under the arcade, out of the sun. “Have more khaif?”

  “Can’t eat too much.” Horas took a good long look at the abundance of food, and levered one more sourfish off the platter. Popping it in his mouth, he savored its bitterness, the sting it brought to the eye. That was good. “I’ll have to catch them up. When did they leave?”

  Feden looked startled. He snagged a round of flat cake, cut it in half, cut the halves into quarters, and tossed one of those eighth pieces to the dog, which caught the treat in its mouth and gulped it down without rising. He put a piece to his own lips, but lowered it again.

  “The report’s not come in yet.” He beckoned, and one of the young guardsmen trotted over. “Find Captain Waras. I’ll need his report.”

  “I’ll go out myself and look.”

  “A strange thing,” said Feden. “That Devouring girl asked about you, after you’d left.”

  That was something to make a man burn brighter, even better than the sourfish. “Did she, now? How was that?”


  “She came back to report to me, rather later in the night, if you take my meaning.”

  Thinking of the imprisoned reeve from Clan Hall, Horas nodded.

  “It was strange. She must have known you were going, but she asked again if you’d happened to stay the night. Said it was late enough when you left the council hall that maybe you’d had second thoughts about flying back to Argent Hall.” Then the merchant smiled. “Seems you roped a bit of interest there. She’s a little too—whew!—spicy for my taste.”

  Horas looked at the pieces of untouched flat cake placed on the master’s platter, and made his own judgment about the merchant’s tastes. Casually, he dabbled his fingers in the cleansing basin. “She still around?”

  “Nay, she left at dawn with a packhorse and a spare, off to fetch some hired man she mislaid on West Track, so she said. I got to wondering if it was a lover she was going after, she was that eager to get out of town.”

  “Hierodules don’t take lovers.” But after all, she was out and about, and she had shown an unusual concern for the man she’d left behind on the road. Now he got to thinking about it, maybe she was hiding something from the temple.

  “Lots of things we say we don’t do, that we do do,” agreed Master Feden with a hearty chuckle.

  That got Horas to thinking about what she had promised, and why the hells hadn’t he gotten what he wanted when it was offered? Was he crazy? Surely it must have been something he ate, to make him feel all woozy and beaten down yesterday when it was there for the taking, all the sweet juicy flesh, just like the globefruit, only better.

  He patted his fingers dry on a cloth and tossed it back on the table, where its edge lapped over his platter and one corner dipped into the unfinished soup.

  “That mercenary troop ought to be gone by now. Let me get out to see them.”

  “I’ve some fresh redberry juice. Are you sure you don’t want to wait for Captain Waras? He’ll know what’s up.” He called over the slave, sent her off with a slap on her hindquarters, a good clout that got Horas to biting his lip for it did make him think of what he might get up to with the Devouring girl if only he could catch up to her before she got lost one way or the other, or killed by accident, now that he thought about it, which was the likely outcome if she came across the strike force who would act first and say sorry for it later.