by Kate Elliott
“What is happening to me?” Marit cried.
She rested her head against the bole of a tree, trying to get her breathing under control. The rain cleared off, and as night fell, a cold and bitter wind blew.
The season changes. Only late in the year do you feel the chill in your bones.
The reasonable explanation was that she had slept through a day and a night recovering from the shock of what she had seen and from the eagle’s attack.
When she thought it through, she had to believe that the eagle had killed her in its fury. The weather bore out the unlikely supposition that months had passed.
Guardians can’t die. They can kill, but they can’t be killed.
Now there was a recipe for corruption.
She rose to shake out her clothing. Why, in the tales, are the Guardians always honorable and upright, the upholders of a justice that is never disturbed by their own petty jealousies or grand descents into lust and greed? How honest were the tales, really?
Who would believe her, if she walked in off the street into Clan Hall and claimed to be a woman murdered nineteen years ago? Who would even remember her?
One man might.
PRAISE FOR CROSSROADS
Shadow Gate
“Highly recommended to both fans of the author and any readers who appreciate fantasy in the vein of Robin Hobb, Jacqueline Carey, and J. V. Jones.”
—Fantasy Book Critic
“Elliott’s strengths as a writer are on display in this second Crossroads book. She brings her characters fully alive with stringent detail and attentive world-building. Fans of Elliott and new readers alike will find this novel satisfying.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
“As I said upon finishing Kate Elliott’s wonderful Spirit Gate, book one of the Crossroads series, ‘I can’t wait for the sequel to see what happens.’ At last book two is finally here. What a splendid continuation of the story is Shadow Gate! It was well worth the wait. But now I am done, and so, ‘Please, Ms. Elliott, may I have some more?’ ”
—Dennis L. McKiernan, author of
Once Upon a Spring Morn
“A fabulous thriller that grips readers from the onset . . . exhilarating.”
—SFRevu
Spirit Gate
“Elliott is a talented writer whose work will appeal to that portion of fantasy readers who enjoy the historical and world-building aspects of the genre. She packs her books with the right proportion of action and detail, characters and societies, the warp and woof of real life artfully rearranged so as to be more entertaining and less distressing.”
—“The Agony Column,”trashotron.com
“Elliott’s skill at building worlds and peopling them with colorful characters and vibrant societies makes this novel an excellent choice for most fantasy collections.”
—Library Journal
“Spirit Gate has kept me up late at night for too many nights in a row; it made me burn dinner once, and it nearly caused a fender bender when I was thinking about the characters while driving. It’s a big, complex, absorbing book that interfered with my living my daily life while I was reading it, and I blame the author quite bitterly for that.”
—Laura Resnick, award-winning author of In Legend Born
“It’s a brilliant beginning to an exciting new series. The world is vivid and intriguing, and the characterization as strong as always in a Kate Elliott novel.”
—Katharine Kerr, author of The Spirit Stone
Books by Kate Elliott
CROSSROADS SERIES
*Book I: Spirit Gate
*Book II: Shadow Gate
*Book III: Traitors’ Gate (forthcoming)
THE NOVELS OF THE JARAN
Jaran
An Earthly Crown
His Conquering Sword
The Law of Becoming
CROWN OF STARS SERIES
King’s Dragon
Prince of Dogs
The Burning Stone
Child of Flame
The Gathering Storm
In the Ruins
Crown of Stars
The Golden Key
(with Melanie Rawn and Jennifer Roberson)
Writing as Alis A. Rasmussen
The Labyrinth Gate
THE HIGHROAD TRILOGY
Book I: A Passage of Stars
Book II: Revolution’s Shore
Book III: The Price of Ransom
* A Tor Book
SHADOW GATE
BOOK TWO OF CROSSROADS
KATE ELLIOTT
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK
NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
This is a work of fiction. All the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
SHADOW GATE: BOOK TWO OF CROSSROADS
Copyright © 2008 by Katrina Elliott
All rights reserved.
Edited by James Frenkel
Map by Elizabeth Danforth
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-4931-6
ISBN-10: 0-7653-4931-0
First Edition: April 2008
First Mass Market Edition: April 2009
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Constance and Kit,
who aren’t afraid to wrangle with the difficult issues
troubling the universe, and who keep me honest
and always show support
AUTHOR’S NOTE
IN THE HUNDRED, any and every set and sequence of patterns is seen as having cosmological significance. Every number has multiple associations. For instance, the number 3 is associated with the Three Noble Towers present in every major town or city (Watch Tower, Assizes Tower, and Sorrowing [or Silence] Tower); with the Three States of Mind (Resting, Wakened, and Transcendent); with the Three Languages; and with the Three-Part Anatomy of every person’s soul (Mind, Hands, and Heart). The number 7 is associated with the Seven Gods, the Seven Gems, the Seven Directions, and the Seven Treasures.
Folk in the Hundred measure the passing of time not via year dates set from a year zero, but rather through the cyclical passage of time. The standard repeating twelve-year cycle is named after animals, in the following order: Eagle, Deer, Crane, Ox, Snake, Lion, Ibex, Fox, Goat, Horse, Wolf, Rat. However, this year cycle is meshed with the properties of the Nine Colors to create a larger cycle of one hundred and eight years. A clerk of Sapanasu, or anyone else who can do this kind of accounting, could thereby identify how long ago an event happened, or how old a person is, depending on what color of animal year in which he or she was born.
Each animal and color, having its own particular and peculiar associations, lends to all events in that year and to people birthed therein specific characteristics. Therefore, Keshad, born in the Year of the Gold Goat, combines Goat characteristics of cleverness, vanity, strong will, jealousy, pride, a deep sense of purpose contrasted with instability of shallow purpose, and a talent for seeking wealth, with Gold qualities like energy, intellect, intensity, dishonesty, envy, and aloofness.
SHADOW GATE
PART ONE: AWAKENINGS
1
MARIT WAS PRETTY sure she had been murdered. She recalled vividly the assassin’s dagger that had punctured her
skin, thrust up under her ribs, and pierced her heart. Any reeve—and Marit was a reeve—could tell you that was a killing blow, a certain path to a swift death. In the moment when life must pass over into death and the spirit depart the body, the misty outlines of the Spirit Gate unfold. The passage between this world and the other world had opened within her dying vision. But her spirit had not made the journey.
She woke alone, sprawled naked on a Guardian altar with only a cloak for a covering. Her eagle was dead. She knew it in the same way you know an arm is missing without looking to see: Your balance is different. Her eagle was dead, so she must be dead, because no reeve survived the death of her eagle.
Yet that being so, how could she stand up, much less stagger to the edge of a drop-off so sheer she hadn’t noticed it because she was disoriented? She stepped into thin air before she knew she’d mistaken her ground, and she was falling, falling, the wind whistling in her ears. The earth plunged up to meet her.
Then she woke, sprawled naked on a Guardian altar with only a cloak for covering, and realized she had been dreaming.
Sitting, she rubbed her eyes. The place in her dream had been a narrow ledge without even a wall to warn of the drop-off. This place was high and exposed, an expanse of glittering stone untouched by vegetation. She rose cautiously and ventured to the highest point on the bluff. She stood at the prow of a ridgeline. The vista was astonishing: In front lay a lowland sink dropping away to a wide cultivated plain that extended toward a distant suggestion of water; to her right spread a pulsing green riot of forest so broad she could not see the end of it; behind, ragged hills covered with trees formed a barrier formidable not because of their height but because they were wild. The wind streamed over the ridge, rumbling in her ears.
She knew right where she was: on the southernmost spur of the Liya Hills, an excellent spot for thermals that an eagle and her reeve could spiral on for hours with a view of the Haya Gap. The vast tangled forest known as the Wild lay to the south, and the lowland plain that bordered the arm of the ocean known as the Bay of Istria ran east.
She knew right where she was.
Aui! She was standing on a Guardian altar.
So far nothing had happened to her. But that didn’t change the unalterable fact that she had broken the boundaries that forbade all people, even reeves, from entering the sacred refuges known as Guardian altars. She had broken the boundaries, and now she would be punished according to the law.
That being so, what had happened to her lover, Joss, who had after all been the one who had persuaded her to follow him up to an altar?
There was only one way to find out: walk to the main compound of Copper Hall, which lay about midway between the cities of Haya and Nessumara, and find out what was going on.
The altar wasn’t so difficult to get down from after all. A stair carved into rock switchbacked down the stone face and into a sinkhole that twisted to become an ordinary musty cave with a narrow mouth hidden by vegetation. She ducked under the trailing vines of hangdog and pushed through a thicket of clawed beauty whose thorns slipped right off the tempting fabric of the cloak. Clusters of orange flowers bobbed around her, which struck her as odd because clawed beauty only bloomed in the early part of the year, during the season of the Flower Rains, and that was months away.
Except for the rest of the afternoon and the following days it rained in erratic bursts as she trudged through the woodland cover. The trails she followed became slick with puddles and damp leaves. She slopped alongside cultivated lands. Farmers, bent double in ankle-deep water, transplanted young rice plants. Women dragged hoes through flooded fields, skimming off the weeds and setting them aside for animal fodder. The sun set and rose in its familiar cycle. As she moved toward the coast and low-lying land, the dykes and edges had their own distinctive flora: pulses, soya, hemp, with ranks of mulberries on the margins. She kept her cloak wrapped tightly around her, but anyway people were too busy to notice her.
Soon enough paths joined cart tracks that joined wagon roads that met up with the broad North Shore Road. Although the original Copper Hall had been built on the delta, the main compound was now sited about forty mey south of Haya on one of a series of bluffs overlooking the Bay of Istria with a lovely vantage and good air currents swirling where land met sea.
It had been years since she had walked to the turning for Copper Hall. Once Flirt had chosen her, she had always flown. The paved roadbed was raised on a foundation and surfaced with cut stones fitted together as cunningly as a mosaic, flanked by margins of crushed stone. From an eagle, you didn’t notice the remarkable skill and craftsman’s work, or the stone benches set at intervals as a kindly afterthought. From an eagle, one’s view of the roads turned from textured ramps of earth, gravel, and paving stone into the all-important solid lines linking cities and towns and temples.
She trudged past the triple-gated entrance to a temple dedicated to Ilu, the Herald. The gatekeeper slouched on a wooden bench under a thatched lean-to, staring disinterestedly at the road. His dog whined, ears flat, and slunk under the bench. She wrapped her cloak more tightly, but no one—not the gatekeeper and none of the folk walking along the road—paid the slightest attention to her. Salt spray nipped the air. Fish ponds lined the rocky shore. The bay gleamed gray-blue in late-afternoon light, waves kicking against the seawall.
On the seaward edge the land rose into a series of high bluffs while the road curved inland past rice fields lined with reeds and salt grass. As the sun set, she found an empty byre to shelter in against the night rains, its straw mildewed. She didn’t really sleep; she lay with eyes closed and thoughts in a tangle, never quite coming into focus.
She woke at dawn and rose and walked, and at last saw the stout stone pillar carved with a hood and feather in relief and the huge wooden perch, freshly whitewashed, that marked the turning to Copper Hall. She was home.
Wiping tears from her eyes, she plodded up the long slope toward the high ground, feeling more and more winded, as if all the life and spirit were being drained out of her. As if she was afraid. How would she be greeted by her comrades at the reeve hall? She had broken the boundaries. She would have to accept punishment.
Aui! She had to find out what had happened to Joss, protect him if she could or back him up on his reckless decision to investigate the Guardian’s altar in Liya Pass. Hadn’t he been right? Wasn’t it true that something was terribly wrong?
No person in the Hundred had stood before a Guardian at an assizes since her long-dead grandfather was a boy. Anyway, an old man’s memory might be suspect. The meticulous records stored in Sapanasu’s temples recording the proceedings of assizes courts where Guardians had presided might, in fact, be explained as a conventional form used by the clerks and hierophants of the Lantern to account for the decisions made by wandering judges who were otherwise perfectly human.
Many said the Guardians had abandoned the Hundred. Others said the Guardians had never existed, that they were only characters sung of in the Tales. Yet on the Guardian’s altar up on the Liya Pass, she and Joss had discovered bones—the bones of a murdered Guardian, maybe, because a pelvis could have been splintered in that way only by a tremendous fall or a massive blow.
But all the tales agreed that Guardians couldn’t die.
The reeve hall was a huge compound surrounded by fields and orchards and open ground where a pair of reeves—relatively new ones, by the look of their tentative maneuvers—were learning to harness up under the supervision of a patient fawkner. She didn’t recognize the young reeves, but she was pretty sure the fawkner was her good friend Gadit, although she was holding her body at a canted angle, as if her right shoulder was stiff from injury.
High watchtowers stretched up as little more than scaffolding. She did not recognize the pair of very young men lounging on gate duty, but their bored faces and listless chatter irritated her. They did not bother to challenge her, and they ought to have; she was an unlikely sight, with her naked feet and calves and a cl
oak clutched tightly around her body, yet she walked through the gate unremarked. She would have words with Marshal Alard about their lackadaisical attitude.
It was difficult to remain annoyed in the familiar environs she loved: the wide-open land-side parade ground with its chalk-laced dusty earth; the low storehouses side by side in marching order; the barracks and eating hall sited where the high ground dipped, making a bit of a windbreak; the high lofts set back to either side, and beyond them the seaward parade ground that overlooked the cliff and the choppy bay.
Most reeves must be out on patrol, since she did not recognize the few faces she saw. Two very young fawkner’s assistants scurried toward the lofts with harness draped awkwardly over their backs. A youth shuffled past holding a cook’s ladle while sneezing and wiping his nose. A young woman seated on a bench was sniveling while Marit’s dear friend and fellow reeve Kedi spoke in the tone of a man who has said the same cursed words a hundred times:
“It’s done, Barda. When an eagle chooses you, you’ve got no choice in the matter.”
“But I don’t want this. I never wanted it.” She wasn’t a whiner. She was genuinely overwhelmed, her eyes rimmed red but hollow-dark beneath; her hands were trembling. “I was supposed to get married tomorrow. All the temples agreed it was an auspicious day for a wedding, Transcendent Ox, in the Month of the Deer, in the Year of the Blue Ox. Especially for a long and steady and calm alliance. That’s all I ever wanted, and I like Rigard, only now his clan has called off the wedding. They’ve broken the contract, because now I’m a reeve. I was just walking to market and the bird dropped down out of the sky and I screamed I was so scared. Don’t you see? My life is ruined!”
Kedi sighed in that weary way he had. His hair had been trimmed back tightly against the skull, almost shaven bare like a clerk of Sapanasu, and when he shifted to slap away a fly Marit realized he was leaning on a crutch. He wasn’t putting any weight on his left leg.