Traitors' Gate

by Kate Elliott

  Hari scratched his chin, looking—Mai thought—surprised as he examined each witness in turn. He indicated the men who owned the flock. “You believe the sheep were deliberately stampeded, that is true enough, you do believe it. You lost five of your flock, and that is also true. Maybe it is true the flock was deliberately set upon by people bent on mischief and maybe it is not, but there are no witnesses, so we can’t know. However, this young man’s story is also true.”

  “Then what was he doing out there, a debt slave like him?” demanded one of the owners.

  Hari laughed. “What do you suppose a young man like that was doing, out away from town? The same thing I would have been doing at his age, had a lass as lively as the one he’s thinking of made the same offer to me!”

  As men smirked and women chortled, the owners blundered on indignantly. “But then why didn’t he say—?”

  There were a hundred reasons folk might not say: maybe she was married already; or she was ashamed of her lust for a lowly debt slave; or he was skiving off work and avoiding a beating. Aui! Who could blame a young man for doing what the young liked to do, eh?

  “But what about our missing sheep?”

  Hari’s expression made Mai, who knew him so well, want to snort with laughter. “Can it be you have only taken up sheep-herding this year? No wonder! You need to hire an experienced drover, ver. Someone who knows sheep. I admit it will cut into your profit, but until you understand the ways of sheep you will find yourself in trouble again and again. I speak as a man who knows sheep. Is there another case?”

  Indeed, there was. Underweight strings of vey were being passed off in the marketplace, but no one knew where they had come from. Hari surveyed the crowd with seeming absentmindedness as one merchant after the next approached to display the string they’d been shorted. He stopped a woman in midsentence with a raised hand, his gaze fastening on a face half hidden in the crowd. His eyes narrowed. Folk murmured anxiously.

  “They’re coming from the same people who are weighting their wheat flour with chalk dust,” he said.

  His words were answered by a flurry of sharp movement in the crowd as a man and woman tried to bolt. No one had suspected. They’d thought the flat bread tasted gritty because everything tasted of grit here. Anyhow, most folk were accustomed to nai porridge and rice, coming from waterfed lands; the drylands wheat and millet were a new taste. What punishment was to be meted out for such a crime?

  Hari looked right at Mai, and she needed no second heart and third eye to see the plea in his expression. She broke in. “Olossi’s market has a code for such violations that we may follow until Astafero codifies its own market laws. Surely it is the Guardian’s business to determine the truth, and the council’s business to determine the fine.”

  Hari’s tense posture relaxed. Folk agreed that she had the right of it. The sun set over the mountains. A pair of youths lit lamps, the oil of naya so pure it blazed. The light shimmered in the twilight glamor of Hari’s long cloak, whose fabric blended into the fall of night and yet caught the final fading measures of day. The way he sat so still quieted the assembly; they were nervous, but not precisely fearful. They watched him, but did not cower. His mouth wore a lopsided smile that was also half a frown.

  He said, “What of this other matter that concerns you, Mistress Behara?”

  The words startled the noodle seller, but she rose to address Guardian and assembly both. A gang of youths trying to extort protection money had been caught by the militia and now there was a dispute over what punishment should be meted out. The lads were hauled up before Hari, where they stammered out defiant declarations of innocence.

  Hari made a cutting gesture with a hand that stopped them short. “Don’t lie to me!” The young men wept as Hari’s gaze staked them. Frown deepening, he released them and spoke to the assembly. “You have a more serious problem. These louts are an advance force from a criminal organization that was driven out of Haldia by the war. It’s trying to move its operations into Olossi.”

  Folk gave way to let Anji through to the front. “I beg your permission to deal with this matter personally,” he said to the council. “That such organizations operate in Olo’osson is not acceptable. I’ll take custody of these men. With the help of the Hieros and her agents in Olossi, we’ll track this back to its source and put an end to it.”

  The council looked to Hari, but Hari shrugged. “I’ve determined the truth. It’s up to you to determine the fine.” He rose abruptly. The assembly rose hastily, touching hands to foreheads as a gesture of respect. “I am done for this day.”

  He strode to his waiting horse, his cloak blending with the fall of night.

  “Holy One,” called the hierophant after him. “Will you preside again over our assizes?”

  He half turned back with a smile as sweet as honey cakes. He beckoned, and Mai hesitated, sure he should not be singling her out, but she could not refuse him or the look that suffused him. She paced out the distance between them, not wanting to seem intimate with a holy Guardian who all presumed she did not and could not already know. Before she could speak to scold him for calling her, he was already talking, words tumbling.

  “Is this really what the Guardians used to do?”

  “So it says in the tales, Holy One.”

  He put a hand to his head as if reeling from a blow. “They lied to me. They’ve twisted and stained all of it, haven’t they? It’s not corrupt and ugly at all. Difficult, maybe. Unpleasant at times I am sure. But it’s not at all what I expected—” He swallowed, and blinked hard. “I need time to think.”

  “No one will find you in the valley. Only we know you are there.”

  “I might do something useful for once, after all the useless idiocy I’ve had a hand in.” He flashed a smile that warmed her, then turned away, mounted the horse, and rode into the twilight. Behind, folk broke into such a flood of talk and exclamation that it drowned her. Voices began a song: Wait and be patient, because the gods will answer. Let the heavens bring their voice down to the land.

  “Mai?” Anji ghosted up beside her, a hand on his sword’s hilt.

  She grasped his wrist. “He sees there is another life, not just the terrible cruelty Lord Radas wields.” She wiped away tears. A glimmer rose in the sky, briefly marking the track of Hari’s flight, and vanished. “He’s come back to us.”

  He had no time to answer as others swarmed up: Mistress Behara and council members and the priests. “What did he say to you, verea?”

  She was borne back into the assembly, stammering a half truth that none of them could discern from her flushed face and awkward words. No one seemed to find it strange he had singled her out, and anyway they weren’t really listening. They were spinning their own tale: after so many long years, a Guardian had returned, and where there was one then there must be other true Guardians, not gods-cursed demons like those in the north. By restoring justice in Olo’osson, the people here had merited a sign of favor from the gods. The overthrow of the corrupt council in Olossi last year; the recruitment of an expanded militia; the establishment of a regional council; the new settlement in the Barrens; the change of authority in the reeve hall, placing the best person in command even if she was a fawkner, not a reeve. All this they had done and must continue to do.

  Anji walked with Sengel and Toughid and a pair of young soldiers bearing lamps up to investigate the place where the horse had trotted to earth. Their black tabards made them fade into the growing darkness as they studied the dirt for signs of the winged mare’s passage and Hari’s footprints. Astafero sang. Anji frowned.

  • • •

  AFTER THE SEVENTH bell had rung its closing, the temple of the Merciless One lay quiet on its island on the estuarine delta where the River Olo poured into the Olo’o Sea. Lanterns burned at Banner Pier, appearing from the air as small as fireflies.

  As Jothinin and Kirit cantered to earth, a pair of youths came running with the stout batons in hand that would allow them to beat
off unwelcome intruders. They pulled up in astonishment as they took in the horses’ wings and the perilous cloaks. As they recognized Kirit’s demon-pale hair.

  “I remember you, Holy One,” said the younger lad. “I’m called Kass. This is Rodi. You came and took the ghost girl away last year.” He glanced at Kirit, who was scanning the shoreline and rock gardens for danger.

  Her head whipped around. “I’m called Kirit.”

  The lads leaped back, so comically surprised to hear a voice that Jothinin laughed. He dismounted, so as not to sit so imposingly above them, but he did not approach any closer.

  “Be obedient sons, and announce us to the Hieros.”

  Their frowns delighted him, torn as they were between obligations. “She’s entertaining a guest, Holy One. She’ll rip off our heads if we disturb her.”

  “I do not doubt it,” Jothinin said, recalling the Hieros: obdurate and exacting but also courageous and honest. “But even the Hieros must have in reserve a means by which she can be summoned in an emergency. We came here first to be polite, son. We could have flown straight in to the inner courts.” He smiled as he spoke.

  “I’ll go.” Kass raced away into the compound.

  The other lad stood with gaze cast down. Kirit scouted down the shore. Jothinin folded his hands and waited. The sleepy purl of the river’s backwater meander through reeds flowed in counterpoint to the deeper voice of the main channel, always strong. A nightjar clicked. Abruptly, Rodi yawned, then mumbled an apology as if the act of yawning might be deemed an insult.

  How Jothinin hated standing around in silence when there was someone to talk to! “A fine night, is it not? A little cool, though, don’t you think?”

  The lad shivered. If he had a voice, he could not bring himself to use it.

  Jothinin sighed. “When I was a lad your age, I had already served my year’s apprenticeship to Ilu, the Herald—”

  “But you’re a Guardian!” the youth blurted. “The gods made you as you are. You were never young. Unless it’s true what they say, that the Guardians were eaten by lilu who took the form of Guardians to lure us into trusting them—”

  With a pair of flying gallops, Kirit headed in their direction. The youth shrieked and bolted, vanishing through a gap in the fence as Kirit pulled up beside Jothinin.

  “You frightened him,” he observed, torn between rue and amusement.

  “He frightened himself.” She tilted her head back. “Here they come.”

  Ah! Voices heard faintly a-wing on the night’s breeze as footsteps crunched on a graveled path.

  The woman’s firm voice Jothinin recognized as that of the Hieros. “I would prefer any such encounter as this to take place before the entire council, and especially with Captain Anji in attendance, but I cannot ask a Guardian to return at my convenience.”

  “I’ll stand in Captain Anji’s stead, Jara,” the male replied in a pleasant voice, easy and calm. “All that is said here and now, he will hear exactly as it was spoken. But if what the lad says is true, the Guardian has brought the ghost girl. I saw that demon kill forty northern soldiers with nothing more than sorcery and a mirror. Not to mention the three Qin soldiers she killed before that. What if she has come here to kill me?”

  The Hieros’s airy laugh made the man chuckle. “What you Qin call a demon, we’d more likely call a lilu. With such magic, you’d think she would have killed you already if she’d meant to. Yet from from what I heard, the ghost girl killed three soldiers who had forced sex on her when she was a slave to the captain’s wife’s uncle. No other of the Qin were harmed.”

  “True enough. She even went after Shai that time, but she did not kill him. If that’s the case, then I’m safe. But whether they are Guardians or demons, the cloaked ones possess magic. It is always prudent to assume they might be our enemy.”

  “Trust my judgment, Tohon. I met this envoy of Ilu before, and it seemed to me he was what he said he was. A holy Guardian whose duty is to serve justice, and the Hundred.”

  Their footsteps changed as they crossed to a surface more grit than gravel. The Hieros emerged from the darkness, her anklet bells tinkling so softly that the river’s song had drowned their voice. An outlander walked beside her, a man of mature years Jothinin had seen months before in the company of the Qin soldiers as they rode over the Kandaran Pass when the Qin company had first entered the Hundred as hired caravan guards. Jothinin found the way they were ever so slightly canted toward each other to be very endearing.

  Kirit said, in a low voice, “That Qin I do not know. He was not in the captain’s troop when we left Kartu Town.”

  “Hush, Kirit,” he murmured, more sharply than he intended.

  The pair halted. The old woman had a tiny frame but a large presence. The outlander had a sinewy strength in his stocky frame of the kind that has been earned over a long and vigorous life. He had the manners of a cautious man, regarding the two Guardians sidelong.

  The Hieros touched her fingers to her forehead, as in prayer. “Holy One. Greetings of the night.” Deliberately, she looked at him.

  He had learned over the years how to protect himself against the onslaught. In the early years, he had avoided looking folk in the face because every look, every meeting, was like a hammer to the head. But a Guardian could not fulfill his duty if every assizes was a brutal pounding. He had learned to filter thoughts and feelings as through a net, capturing those silvery fish he needed and letting the rest slip away. Every person hides within himself grievances and cruelties, but many are simply trying their best, sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding. Most folk were like nai porridge, a little bland and even boring while perhaps sweetened with a dollop of honey or spiced with the sting of eye-watering hot peppers.

  The Hieros did not fear him. Her faith in the gods’ laws was strong, and she had made hard choices that caused suffering to others, but she was not ashamed of her life or her tenure as hieros over this temple, her prominent place in the hierarchy of Olo’osson’s temples and guilds and councils.

  “What do you want from the temple?” she asked, because for her the temple always came first. There had been a girl, once, named Jarayinya—an old-fashioned name taken from the Tale of Patience—but that carefree girl had been swallowed up long ago by the All-Consuming Devourer. “When we met before, you told me that the war for the soul of the Guardians has already begun.”

  He nodded. “We are at war, Holy One. Now we are in need of allies. I am as you see me a humble man, an envoy of Ilu in appearance and a Guardian in truth. This young woman is an outlander, and yet she is also a Guardian. There is one other Guardian we count as an ally. That makes three.”

  “There are nine Guardians, Holy One. Every child knows that.”

  “Among the Guardians some have become corrupted. She who wears the cloak of Night rules them. Three obey her without question: Sun, Leaf, and Blood. One, a man wearing a cloak like to the twilight sky, obeys her but with reluctance. We’d take kindly to news of him, in the hopes of making him our ally.”

  “I have seen no Guardians but you two.” She was speaking truth.

  “So she’s not a demon, then?” the outlander asked, indicating Kirit. “The spirit of an angry dead girl?”

  “She is a Guardian,” said Jothinin, “as am I.”

  “I have seen you before, ver,” admitted Tohon. “You walked over the Kandaran Pass when we did. But you were trampled in Dast Korumbos during the bandit attack. I thought sure you were dead then.”

  Jothinin ignored his words. “Have you seen or heard tell of other Guardians?”

  The outlander looked up. A glancing blow, that glimpse: he was an honorable man, loyal, cautious, and too deep to scan easily. He was far too deep to be easily led astray.

  “I heard of one wearing a green cloak, a very bad man who did unspeakable things,” he said as a spark of entirely unexpected anger flashed in his otherwise guarded gaze; so might a father swell with outrage at an attack upon a beloved son. Upon Shai. “Whe
re he went I do not know. Marshal Joss spoke of seeing a death-cloaked woman in his dreams. Before the attack on Olossi our soldiers shot a cloaked rider on the West Track. We’re told demons command the northern army, Lord Radas among them.” He was telling the truth.

  Jothinin raised both hands, palms out. “Let me tell you a story. My nose is itching. Many whispers have tickled my ears. The Guardians are not single spirits who have existed in all this time in the same vessel since the day the gods raised them at Indiyabu. The cloaks carry the authority and power granted by the gods. But the individuals who wear the cloaks change.”

  “How can this be?” demanded the Hieros. “Guardians can’t die.”

  The outlander tugged on his ear, saying nothing.

  “The cloak leaves a person when his tenure on this earth comes to an end, and awakens a new vessel. Any who inherit the cloak were ones who died fighting for justice, and are therefore granted a chance to restore peace.”

  “Then you are demons!” said Tohon.

  “Neh, I think not. Maybe we are ghosts, of a kind. Solid enough. Able to laugh and to cry, to eat, to piss if we drink too much.”

  “But if Guardians can’t die,” the Hieros said, “then how can the cloak pass from one vessel to another?”

  “Within the Guardian council, there has always have been a mechanism to guard against the shadow of corruption. Five cloaks, acting in unanimity, can execute one.”

  The Hieros laughed curtly, quick to see the flaw.

  “Indeed,” Jothinin said with a wry smile, “if a Guardian is canny enough and persuasive enough, she may corrupt enough of the council to make it party to her will. As the cloak of Night has done.”

  The Hieros snorted, her mood darkening with skepticism. “So this is your Guardians’ war? You seek a majority of five, to destroy the others. What is to stop you, then, from becoming corrupt in your turn? From taking over this army that is ravaging the north?”