Traitors' Gate

by Kate Elliott

  He grinned.

  He had soldiers to drill, to make ready for Wakened Ox, because they would need rigid discipline even if all went smoothly, as such things rarely did. That first, then. He was a patient man. After the fall of Nessumara, he would have plenty of time to unravel the mystery of his hostage. One task at a time.

  A whisper of wind stirred the air as a shadow passed over him. A horse, wings spread so wide they blotted out a length of sky, galloped low, dropping to earth. The cloak of the rider billowed behind, and Arras ducked without meaning to, feeling as if the sweep of that rider’s eyes was a spear-thrust that caught him in the back. Fear ripped away the strength of his legs, and he dropped to his knees, panting.

  How angry would Lord Twilight be when he returned to discover that Night had captured the outlander Arras had been tasked to protect? What if Lord Radas questioned him and chose to punish him for disobedience, even though he’d only been obeying Twilight’s orders? How was an ordinary man to balance walking this edge, when it was not even his choice to do so?

  He picked himself up, wiped off his knees. The day of Wakened Ox could not dawn soon enough. After Nessumara fell, he would ask to be sent forward with his cohort into the next assault of the campaign. Battle was a cursed sight simpler to deal with than Guardians.

  13

  SOMEHOW, JOSS COULD not be rid of folk speaking of Zubaidit. Late that afternoon he reclined on pillows in the pavilion of Ushara’s temple as the Hieros poured rice wine into cups and with her own hands offered one to Joss and one to Tohon. The old woman and the two men sat alone under a roof wreathed with harvest flowers from jabi bushes. The scent was overwhelmed by the tart aroma of tsi berries being cooked down as they were every year in this season. A pair of older women—like Captain Anji’s personal guards—hovered within sight but out of earshot, and there was a lad lurking in the bushes.

  “Strange,” the Hieros was saying, indicating two ginny lizards who had crawled up onto the pavilion floor and were sizing up Joss with mouths gapped to show teeth. “I’m not sure they like you, Commander.”

  “Aren’t those the pair that traveled with Zubaidit?” asked Tohon.

  The old woman terrified Joss, but the smile she turned on Tohon would have melted a block of ice. She’d been stunning in her youth, no doubt of it, and was still handsome in the way of women who have kept their vigor along with fine bone structure.

  “So they are. Most folk can’t tell the difference, but ginnies are as unlike as any one person is from the next. What news of my hierodule, Tohon?”

  The scout packed information into a comprehensive review of all he had said and done and seen. “If you don’t mind my asking, Holy One,” he finished, “do you think we can buy horses from the lendings? They had good breeding stock.”

  “It would be difficult. They never come out of the Lend, and we do not enter for fear of falling afoul of their boundaries. I’m surprised you made it out.”

  “The lendings took our horses,” said Tohon with a laugh.

  The Hieros sipped thoughtfully. She was so different a person seen in this light that Joss was amazed. Like this particular rice wine, she had a pleasing disposition, slightly sweet and markedly elegant. “If you are serious, you’d best inquire at Atiratu’s temple. The mendicants sworn to the Lady of Beasts journey out that way seeking various medicinal plants that grow only in the Lend. They know how to make an arrangement with the tribes.”

  “What of Zubaidit?” asked Joss impatiently as the conversation wandered away from the subject that interested him most. “Can she and Shai possibly succeed?”

  “She will do as she must,” said the Hieros coolly, unmoved by his passionate words. “As you did, in agreeing to stand as commander over the reeve halls, a position I believe you did not seek nor are eager to assume.”

  “True-spoken.”

  “Yet you will do as you must. So tell me, are you come today to embrace the Merciless One?”

  The hells! Was she trying to get him out of the way? “I’m feeling restless, it’s true.”

  Tohon smiled sweetly at him.

  Joss laughed, half shocked to realize the two of them were clearly intending to sleep together.

  The Hieros gestured, and the lad dashed out from under cover of the dense vegetation. “Take the commander to the Heart Garden,” she said to the boy.

  Joss went obediently, while Tohon remained behind.

  “I remember you,” said the lad. “I’ve never seen Bai go after a man the way she did you.”

  “What’s your name? Have we met?”

  He had a sly grin, a real troublemaker. “I’m called Kass.” But his expression drew taut as he sighed. “Will we ever see her again?”

  Joss didn’t know whether he braced himself or the youth with the pointlessly optimistic words that emerged from his lips. “If anyone can succeed, she can.”

  They crossed through white gates into the Heart Garden, where men and women were seated on benches among the flowers. Here folk would linger before being called to enter the gates, but Kass led him straight to the gold gate and tugged on a rope that jangled a bell on the other side. The inner door within the double gates opened, and a young man who might have seen twenty years peered out. Joss smiled at him as the kalos sized him up appreciatively.

  “Come in.” The kalos flicked a hand to shoo Kass away. “I’ll see if there are any women wandering free who might find you of interest, not that I can see why they wouldn’t. You have any brothers?”

  “As it happens, I don’t. I was the only boy among more sisters and female cousins than I could count.”

  The kalos laughed as he beckoned Joss under the threshold and latched the door behind them. They walked into the outer precincts of the inner garden, an open area paved with flagstones and moss and ringed with trees, bushes, and carefully constructed screens that concealed the greater part of the garden. To the right, a roof topped a bathing pavilion where four men were chatting companionably as they washed themselves while waiting for acolytes to come look them over. Their clothes were draped over benches. Pipes brought water for the rinsing buckets. There was a wooden tub as well, steam rising like breath. Set farther back, half hidden, were a few shelters for private bathing.

  “I get the impression you’ve visited temples aplenty and need no instruction.” The kalos walked over to the pavilion and hitched up on a bench near to one man, starting a conversation.

  Ushara’s temple contained, like desire, an outer facing and an inner fire. To enter the outer court through the gate was to ask permission to worship. If granted, then within the central court you might loiter while you decided whether you truly wanted to approach, and by subtle signs you were shown whether any within would be likely to grant your petition. Only then did you cross under one of the gates—silver for women and gold for men. Past these gates waited hierodules and kalos, who might approach you according to how you were fashioned, if they so pleased. Water cleansed you.

  Beyond that, the inner garden lay bathed in equal parts light and darkness, impossible to discern because of many warrens and walls. There rose an undercurrent of noise something like a constant wind in the branches that made his skin prickle with anticipation. As well as private bowers in the grass, there were rooms and closets and attics in the farther buildings. Joss was pretty sure that in his time he had experienced pretty much everything the Merciless One’s temples had to offer.

  Yet even so, never once had he embraced the Devourer without thinking of Marit.

  Aui! Wasn’t it Zubaidit he’d just been thinking and talking of? He rubbed his forehead, wondering why he had come.

  Two young women fetchingly dressed in taloos appeared with empty buckets resting on their hips. They slowed down as they passed the bathing pavilion and looked the men over; then one saw Joss and nudged the other, and they strolled over while the men under the pavilion made laughing complaints about being abandoned for a newcomer.

  They looked him up and down, and the
y looked at each other and smiled.

  Whew!

  The splash of water startled him so much he looked away from the tight wrap of their taloos and their cocky grins, the vital young who expect admiration. Over by the bathing pavilion, a woman was pouring water into a bronze tub. She was a woman probably in her thirties, maybe one of those who served a shorter second apprenticeship later in life as an offering, or to break the monotony of their own lives, or to escape a difficult clan for a few months, or just because they’d enjoyed the service in their younger days and wanted to remember what it was like. She might have been dedicated to serve her whole life long. She might even have been a debt slave, although she had no debt mark by her left eye. But she walked nothing like Zubaidit; she looked and acted nothing like Marit; she looked comfortable and lush. From the distance she took her time looking him over as hierodules did, for in the measuring they decided whether they’d any interest. Indeed, the act of measuring was its own provocative delight.

  For an instant, it was just like the first time he had entered Ushara’s temple: Would she find him attractive?

  She laughed, as if she could see right into his thoughts, and with empty bucket in hand she sauntered over. The two young women shook their heads as if scolding him for turning down a bite of sweet cake, but they walked back to the men waiting at the bathing pavilion.

  The woman halted before him, bucket hanging from one hand and the other hand set akimbo on the curve of a hip. “You’re the best-looking man I’ve seen this month, mayhap this year, not that you’ll not have heard that line before. Do you need some help finding the garden where the young hierodules sit? Like those two.” She gestured with her chin.

  He took the bucket from her hand as she smiled. “My thanks, verea, but no. I’ve found what I’m looking for.”

  “COMMANDER JOSS?”

  He hadn’t known he was so tired. He woke on a pallet set on the porch in the outer court of the temple, suitable for worshipers too exhausted to make it home in one evening. He had a vague memory of stumbling out here late, the worse for drink but otherwise well satisfied.

  He cracked open an eye to see a youthful face looking down on him. “Kesh, right?”

  “Kass. There’s a boat waiting. Tohon says the captain’s ship came in. We can see all the ship traffic off the sea, you know.”

  The temple had kindly lent Joss a kilt to sleep in. He dressed quickly and slung his kit bag over a shoulder. Dawn had scarcely risen; the captain’s ship must have rowed up the channel the instant there was light enough to see. Kass led him to the docks, so furiously not asking questions Joss supposed the lad had plenty of questions he wanted asked.

  “How comes it she entrusts you to stand around at all her private councils?” Joss asked as they crunched down the path.

  The lad had the wicked grin of a favored child who gets away with plenty of mischief but whose nature hasn’t been spoilt to souring. “I’m her great-grandson. Her daughter chose the path of a mendicant. Her son—my father—offered at the Witherer’s altar and was able to marry into a farming clan. I’m in the middle of eight children, too many to feed. They sent me here when I was five. I’m not a kalos, you know, even though I’m old enough.”

  “Do you serve the Merciless One?”

  “I haven’t served my temple year yet. I haven’t discovered which god I’m best suited to serve.”

  Joss laughed. “And to think you’ve got that hard-hearted old woman keeping you here in luxury while you take your time making up your mind.”

  The lad sobered as they approached the docks where Tohon waited. Mist rose off the waters. A heron flapped across ripples. In the shipping channel, merchant boats sailed downstream for the sea, oars dipping in the placid water where the current broke into a dozen smaller channels. The River Olo’s estuary was but a tiny spray of channels and islets compared with the vast delta in which Nessumara nestled.

  “You’ll send word of Bai, won’t you?” Kass asked in a low voice.

  “If I can. The Hieros will hear as soon as anyone.”

  Tohon greeted him, and they settled into the boat as the oarsmen shoved away from the pier. The oarsmen worked upstream to Dast Olo through a backwater channel. Red-caps flitted among the reeds. A fish’s silver back parted the surface. The oarsmen worked in silence, and Tohon seemed content to watch the banks slide past under the early-morning sun.

  “Have a good night?” Joss asked finally, rubbing the last of the muzz out of his eyes.

  Tohon tugged on an ear as the boat rocked under them and waves slapped the side. He didn’t reply.

  “Sorry. How’d you hear about Captain Anji arriving?”

  “I saw the ship pass at dawn. There’s a tongue of land at the point of the island, out behind the buildings. You can see where the river meets the sea.”

  “They made a quick journey of it.”

  “The captain has that habit.”

  A woman knee-deep in mud, pulling a trap out of the shallows, lifted her gaze to watch them go by. She waved gnats away from her face as she stared at the Qin soldier, then shrugged and went back to work. Huts clustered on hummocks and racks of drying fish marked the edge of the village.

  In Dast Olo they rented horses for the ride to Olossi. Joss offered the usual deposit to the stablemaster, to be marked and returned at Crow’s Gate by one of Sapanasu’s clerks.

  “Neh.” The man waved away the coin, indicating Tohon. “The Qin are honest. If you say the horses will get turned in to my agent at Crow’s Gate, it’ll be done. I’ll tell you, things are changing for the better. Two years ago I’d have had to send a gang of armed men with my stock to Old Fort or Candra Crossing. Now I’m hiring stock up the pass and all the way to Storos-on-the-Water. I sent my own daughter and two hirelings to Old Fort with a wagon and pair on delivery for men hauling oil of naya out of the Barrens. Plenty of guards and checkpoints on the road against mischief. I call that new militia commander good for business, even if he is an outlander.”

  Joss thanked him. Tohon offered a calm nod, as if he was used to hearing his captain praised for making the roads safe.

  “Didn’t think you’d know how to ride, being a reeve,” Tohon said after they’d paced awhile.

  “I served my apprenticeship to Ilu the Herald, riding messages along the North Shore Road. I’m out of practice, though.”

  Tohon grinned. “What say we race? To that pole.” He pointed to a distant vertical line that Joss had to squint to recognize as a pole.

  With a challenge like that, it had to be done. Joss lost horribly, but he didn’t disgrace himself by falling off. The two men chatted easily about inconsequential things as they made good time the rest of the way to the militia encampment beyond the outer city.

  The local militiamen standing guard at the outer gates waved them through. The captain’s pennant rippled in a midday breeze. The black cloth was worked with a silver-white stitchery outlining the head of a wolf: a black wolf running in a black night.

  Tohon handed the horses over to a groom and instructed him to rub them down, water them, and return them to Crow’s Gate. A pair of Qin soldiers greeted the scout as the two men crossed the central drill ground, empty at this hour.

  Chief Tuvi stood on a porch that ran all the way around the raised platform, built of planks and covered by a canvas roof, that served as the captain’s office. Mai’s younger slave sat on the steps staring vacantly at the sky. The chief was chatting with the older slave, who held a baby swaddled in a length of best-quality linen. As Joss and Tohon stepped onto the porch to be greeted by Tuvi, the baby opened its eyes and to Joss’s shock fixed a black stare on him as if it recognized him.

  “Here is your uncle,” said Priya to the infant, although it was obviously too young to understand. “Do you want to hold Atani, Commander?”

  News of his new rank had reached here before him. How did Anji get his information? But when he took the baby, the tiny creature was so comfortable in his arm that he forgot all else. W
hat were those faint blue gleams shot through its irises? It had a wise gaze, as newborns did, a remnant of the memories it had left behind the Spirit Gate in its passage into this world. He smiled, hoping to evoke a similar expression, but the dark eyes just sucked him in until, disconcerted, he glanced up.

  He stood with his back to the others, who were talking. Priya’s voice was smooth in contrast to the rumble of the two soldiers. The inner and outer walls of the captain’s office were cloth that could be tied up into any configuration depending on the time of day, the rays of the sun, and the direction of the wind. Though weighted at the hems, the walls fluttered, caught in a stray gust, and for an instant he saw through a series of parting gaps into the innermost chamber where two people stood closely entwined.

  Aui!

  Certain kisses are not meant to be seen by others. Flushing, he jerked his gaze down to the baby, who had closed his eyes and, apparently, fallen asleep. The child’s face was so peaceful that at length Joss’s flush faded. He was content to hold the little one as kinfolk were meant to do, providing arms for shelter. Would Anji really have slaughtered a helpless infant? Surely not.

  “Commander!” The captain pushed through cloth to emerge onto the porch, looking trim and composed. “Here you are, elevated in rank.”

  “Yes. I’m an uncle now.”

  Anji glanced back as the cloth walls parted again. Mai stepped into view while patting her thick black hair, all bound up on her head. Her color was high and her beauty as powerful as sunlight.

  Seeing Joss, she smiled as a flower blooms. “Marshal! Ah! I must call you by another title. Commander! Will you have to grow a beard now?” She halted beside him, whatever perfume she wore as heady as the scent of the Hieros’s garden. “It suits you, that traveling look, as if you’ve not had time to pause and tidy yourself.”

  “Here I’ve been so careful all these years to keep myself neat.” It was cursed impossible not to admire her in her carefully wrapped silk taloos, best quality, the color a somber green that handsomely set off her black hair and dark eyes and dusky, flawless complexion. She had filled out with nursing. He vividly recalled that he’d been present in the cave when she had given birth. The hells! He’d glimpsed her when she was naked.