by Kate Elliott
Joss hung back in the sun-swept plaza as Siras hurried over. “Greetings of the dusk, Siras. How is your eagle? Your training?”
The young man grinned. He didn’t even need to say anything. But when his gaze shifted to the cave mouth and the huge vault within, his mouth turned down. “It’s like this, Commander. Verena is marshal of Argent Hall—of course you know that.”
The sun’s glare was, at long last, triggering an ache in Joss’s temples. Or maybe it was only the secret Marit had told him eating away at his heart. He nodded.
Siras went on. “She sent word to Arda at Naya Hall that the Qin have asked for reeves to be assigned as messengers and transport for the captain’s use.”
“Verena and I discussed it,” agreed Joss, rubbing his brows.
“It seems because I served as your assistant for that time in Argent Hall, that the captain decided I was trustworthy. So he came to me five days ago—”
“Anji came to you?”
“He came to Naya Hall and asked me to fly him to Merciful Valley—”
“Merciful Valley?”
“That’s what they’re calling that valley up in the mountains where the captain’s child was born. Mistress Mai placed an altar at the birthing place to her god, and no one could say her nay.”
“No, I don’t suppose they could. The Spires are the borderlands of the Hundred. I don’t see why our gods would be jealous of an altar in such an isolated place. Go on.”
“Afterward the captain said he’d like to keep the place off limits to reeves for the time being, until some holy thanksgiving boundary has passed. He’s been going up once a month on Wakened Ox with his wife to make a thanksgiving offering. They take up a small chest, the kind you’d store expensive spices in or rich folk their jeweled combs and gold necklaces. Three months running. But this time the captain asked me to transport him up there alone.”
“Alone?”
“That was the first puzzling thing, because you know he never travels anywhere without those two guards. He took up that same chest, only this time it was bound with an iron chain. He said he needed to make a father’s private offering at the cave where his son was born.”
“Go on.”
“So I flew him there. At his request I left him and came back the next day to fetch him. He was wearing a different tunic and trousers. I only noticed because the ones he’d worn the day before were threadbare and patched, and these were newly sewn.”
“It’s possible he changed clothes to make his offering. Like we do for festival days. Is there anything else?”
“He didn’t bring the chest back with him.”
“Maybe it was part of the offering.”
“What do you suppose the Qin use for offerings? I asked around. Reeves who were up in Merciful Valley before with the mistress said she takes flowers as offerings, just as folk should.”
Joss thought of what Tohon had told him about the Qin habit of ridding themselves of imperfect children. Killing them. His cursed head was beginning to throb. “Any news of the child?”
“Atani?” His smile was innocent enough to charm a cadre of susceptible young women. “The market women in Astafero talk about him all the time. The mistress, she comes out to the big house in Astafero each month right around Wakened Ox and stays for a few days to confer with that Silver woman who runs her household there. If the Qin officers aren’t carrying that child around as gentle as you please despite their grim faces and cold swords, then the house women haul him everywhere. How the market women do fuss over that baby!” His own expression was wistful, as if he missed a younger sibling from home.
“Odd news, indeed. My thanks for bringing it to me, Siras.”
“Is there some trouble, Commander?”
“No. Why shouldn’t a man make a private offering to thank the gods for the safe birth of a healthy child? If you see or hear aught else, bring it to me. I’m not just speaking of the Qin soldiers, mind you, but in a general sense. Olossi’s council. What the market women are saying. Gossip among the militiamen. Rumblings among the hirelings. Whispers at the temple of the Merciless One.”
The young man’s eyes widened as he absorbed his new assignment. “Yes, Commander!” He grinned and hustled away, no doubt enamored of the idea of playing spy for the reeve halls.
What on earth did Joss think Siras might overhear, as guileless as the lad was? He walked into the shadowed cavern, his headache easing as soon as he was free of the sun’s grasp. Yet the commander of the reeve halls was involved in a far greater enterprise than just simple patrol. The magnitude of what he’d taken on yawned before him like the gulf of air beyond a cliff face that drops away to jagged rock far below. Aui!
“Commander?” Captain Anji and his men were waiting.
Joss smiled crookedly and walked over to them.
Anji tapped Joss’s forearm in a rare display of fellowship. “Why wait, Commander? Send a message to my wife now. Let her be brought at once by reeve to meet with Horn’s council. If we move quickly, our enemy will be less likely to guess at our plans and prepare to fight us.”
“You would risk her walking into a hostile city?”
Anji gestured to the emptied cavern, the shadowed ceiling, the dusty corridors. “If even the inhabitants of this unassailable hall could be killed—by treachery—then there will be no safe place in the Hundred until we make it one.”
Joss grasped the captain’s wrist, feeling the strength of Anji’s arm beneath his hand. “Of course you are right. It begins here.”
• • •
THE GATES OF Horn were huge, the height of six men or more. They were closed tight shut. Militiamen leaned over the parapets, arrows nocked. Mai had practiced speeches and phrases so many times that it was not in fact difficult to address Horn’s closed gates. She had only to pitch her voice to be heard without sounding as if she were shouting.
“We are come as representatives of Olossi’s council to meet with Horn’s council in a place of your choosing, here at the gate or within your council hall. I am called Mai. Master Calon and I are merchants. This hierophant, Jodoni, comes at the behest of the temple council of Olo’osson. Please hear our words. We are come today to ask you to join with us in an alliance against the army who call themselves the Star of Life. They have overrun most of the lands along the River Istri. We beat back a second army at Olossi, as you may have heard, but you can be sure that if Nessumara falls, Horn will be next and after Horn, Olossi. Each city and town—every reeve hall—will fall as long as each attempts to stand separately. The only way to defeat this army and these demons posing as Guardians is to join together.”
“Practiced words from a pretty girl,” called a woman in a deep, powerful voice. Mai scanned the parapet but did not see her. “Are you one of Hasibal’s pilgrims? We’ve learned that an actress, one of Hasibal’s pilgrims, crept into our city in disguise months ago and spied on us. Why should we trust you?”
“Olossi did send scouts into the north. They had to discover if Horn supported the Star of Life army.”
“We did not then nor did we ever!”
“Can you defeat the northern army if it marches against you in full force, fully fifteen cohorts?”
“Fifteen cohorts!”
A murmur of shocked voices drifted down from the wall. Wheels scraped, and the right-hand gate huffed open just far enough for a woman and a man to emerge. Both were dressed in formal council robes with sashes; the woman held the baton of a council “voice.”
“I am Poro,” said the woman, displaying the lacquered stick, “who speaks for the council. Seyon is the arkhon of Horn.”
“We don’t have arkhons in Olo’osson,” said Master Calon, “but I understand an arkhon is leader of the council.”
Seyon nodded but seemed uninclined to speak. He was short and slight and held about him a sense of chained energy.
The woman’s emotions were all too evident, boiling right on the surface. “Fifteen cohorts?” She examined Mai as if Mai were a
bolt of silk labeled as best quality but merely being everyday quality. “How can you know?”
“Reeves are excellent scouts.”
“Reeves are not meant to spy for councils. They are meant to preside over assizes courts, to track down criminals, to maintain a proper distance from councils who might otherwise influence their judgments.”
“What are they to do if the northern army overruns every city and town? If it burns the reeve halls? Then who will preside over the assizes? Not reeves. Not elected councils. Let me speak to your council and I will tell you what I know and what Olo’osson’s council means to offer.”
“It’s said Olossi is raising an army, commanded by an outlander.”
“Olo’osson has already been attacked by the northerners. We intend to protect ourselves, just as you do.”
“Why not send this captain to negotiate with us, then?”
“Would you admit into your well-guarded city an armed man who is also an outlander?”
Poro laughed. “A not unreasonable point.”
Seyon looked her up and down in a measuring way. “An armed man appears as a threat. So instead they send a beautiful young woman who spins words like golden thread. Who is more threatening, I ask you?” His smile took the sting out of the words; she knew she already had charmed him because she could see in his expression the look men got before they paid full price in the market even knowing they ought to bargain.
She met his gaze with a frankness that pleased him, seen in the crinkling of his eyes. “You have discovered our plot, ver. Forgive us the deception. But if we do not fight together, I assure you we cannot individually defeat fifteen cohorts and the lilu calling themselves Guardians who command them. If you cannot trust my report, we can send one of your trusted militia captains or council members north with a reeve to see for yourselves.”
“Why should we trust any reeves when Horn Hall abandoned us last year? Their own marshal came to the council and advised us to surrender to the northerners rather than fight a losing battle. Then they left. That’s why we locked ourselves away, not knowing who to trust.”
“The reeves of Horn Hall were slaughtered, in the far north, at a place called the Eagle’s Claws.”
“The Eagle’s Claws!” Poro bent to whisper in Seyon’s ear, and he shook his head, a dour look darkening his face like a cloud over the sun. “It’s spoken of in the tales. It’s said that on some days in the season of Shiver Sky, the rain turns white. Does such a place truly exist?”
“One reeve survived the slaughter, and he can testify to the truth of what happened. I’ve more besides to tell you.”
Seyon’s long black hair was pulled back in a trifold braid. He fingered a braid in a thoughtful motion. “I say we let her speak.”
Poro’s face bore the irritable expression of a woman who hasn’t been brought her expected cup of tea in the morning. “Whose idea was it to send you, verea?”
“The outlander captain of Olo’osson’s militia.”
“Perhaps he’s wise enough to win a war that is clearly unwinnable. Enter, verea. The council will hear you.”
Mai gestured toward her escort of soldiers, one of whom was Anji wearing an ordinary soldier’s helmet.
“Let them wait here,” added Poro. “To show you trust us.”
Calon wheezed out a breath, his face sheened with sweat. Jodoni said nothing. Mai smiled, even if it got a little hard to swallow. “Let the trust we offer you be the trust you offer us, verea.”
“So be it. Come.”
Anji gave no order to stop her, nor did she look back.
The city of Horn was built against a spur of the Ossu Range. It had evidently begun as a citadel higher up and spread downward in walled layers, so the city descended in levels, each one separated from the next by gates. In midmorning, few folk walked the streets, but the hammer and beat of their labors rang everywhere as the party toiled upward on a wide stone staircase cut directly up the slope toward towers rising at the highest point. A few kites circled above Sorrowing Tower. Here in the Hundred they did not bury their dead but left their corpses out in the open air until their flesh was devoured by beasts great and tiny. It seemed barbaric to her, a last insult.
She had to set aside her revulsion. This was their land, and if she wanted to make it hers, she must accept what she could and ignore the rest.
Seyon walked nimbly despite his seeming frailty. He chatted flirtatiously about silk and, once she mentioned her own dealings in oils, about the many varieties of oils used for cooking, cosmetics, light, perfume, healing, leatherwork, and wrestling.
“Naya oil of course is most difficult to come by, and thereby very expensive,” he added. “Yet it’s well known it can heal certain skin conditions. We heard a story that the army that attacked Olossi was driven off by pots of naya thrown on them and set alight. That they burned to death.”
She stumbled on the next step, clipping the stone rim, and he caught her under an elbow and kept his hand there as she kept climbing, angry at her lapse. “The militia and the reeves working in concert used naya to break the enemy,” she said.
“I’d like a supply of naya, to be held in reserve to defend our walls.”
She carefully let her arm slip out of his grasp. “I believe, ver, that you are opening negotiations. Should that not wait until I stand before the entire council?”
He laughed, paused in his climbing although he was not at all out of breath, not as she was. A tree cast a modicum of shade on the sun-drenched steps. He plucked out of its dusty leaves a lush sunfruit.
“The last of the year,” he said, presenting the yellow globe to Mai with a flourish.
Poro laughed. “Ever the flatterer,” she said.
Master Calon raised an eyebrow. Jodoni shifted his writing box to the other arm and said, in his scrape of a voice, “Is it much further?”
Was Seyon only humoring her? Yet she had risen to face challenges more daunting than talking sense into the intransigent and fearful council of Horn. She only hoped they were not secretly in league with Lord Radas.
She tested the weight of the sunfruit in her hand. “Let us share both the sweet and the bitter, ver.”
As the others laughed, she peeled the fruit and handed out its slices, which they ate as they climbed the last and steepest stairs, licking the juice from their fingers.
The council hall sat between Watch Tower and Assizes Tower. The squat stone Sorrowing Tower stood isolated up a lone path through a field of uncleared boulders, on a spur of ridge behind. A message pole stood on open space sufficient for a pair of eagles to land, but no red eagle banners were folded at its base; it looked abandoned. Overhead, about ten eagles seemed to hang in the air, and although she shaded her eyes and squinted, she could not make out if any were carrying passengers, soldiers primed to drop in fast if there was trouble.
The council hall had a tile roof and many pillars to carry the load, but no walls. From any spot within the spacious covered area, the view was so tremendous that Mai stared. She saw the distant peak of Mount Aua and the rolling gap of land between which flattened into the golden Lend to the southwest and fell away in hazy hill country to the east, dropping down toward the Istrian plain. Any movement on the roads that met below the city’s gates was visible from the height. The inhabitants of Horn had closed their gates and watched the army out of the north march past, heading to Olossi. They’d done nothing.
How often did folk do nothing because they believed no action of theirs could deflect the inevitable? Had she not done so herself in Kartu Town? All her life she had grown up as the favored daughter of the Mei clan. She might observe untouched while others toiled and suffered; not that she had not worked hard, but even when her father had agreed to the Qin captain’s marriage offer—one he naturally could not have refused in any case—she had been fortunate in the husband who had chosen her. Yet she had learned on their long journey and in the Hundred that she had the means and opportunity to aid those who stood “outside the g
ate.” She could have done nothing. Instead, she had acted.
“Verea?”
She faced an assembly of forty-eight men and women, all considerably older than herself.
“The view is magnificent,” she said with a smile that caused half of them to smile and the others to snort or frown with the impatience of people who, like certain customers in the market, have already decided before negotiating begins that you are out to cheat them. “Horn is well situated.”
Half nodded, as if they were determined to be pleased by every word she spoke. The others sighed, tapped toes on the stone paving, nudged their companions; one old woman even rolled her eyes.
Mai gestured to Jodoni, and he opened his writing box. It was a capacious box, because clerks of Sapanasu carried all the tools of their trade with them. Instead of a brush or inkpot, he handed her a slender stick.
She stepped forward and offered the humble stick to the eye-rolling woman, who accepted it with an expression of skeptical bemusement. “If you will, verea, could you snap that stick in half?”
The old woman had a bit of Grandmother Mei’s look to her, a complainer, but she also had a much cannier gaze. Grandmother Mei had never looked past her own desires, as if always gazing into her mirror rather than at the world beyond. With a grimace of satisfaction, she popped the stick in half.
Mai extended a hand, and Jodoni handed her a bundle of slender sticks tied together. Many chuckled as Mai raised the bundle.
“Can you break this so easily? It is only made up of flimsy sticks, just like that one.”
“You’ve made your point,” said the old woman, brandishing the two halves of the stick she had broken. “But haven’t we already lost this war?”
Mai looked at each of them, forcing them to meet her gaze so they had to acknowledge her. “No. We haven’t already lost. Listen! My nose is itching. Many whispers have tickled my ears. This is my tale.”
They listened as she spoke, at length, describing what might be done: her speech contrived between her and Anji and Commander Joss spun a thread meant to convince without betraying too much of their purpose, in case traitors walked within Horn’s council.