Traitors' Gate

by Kate Elliott

  A man coughed. “Hsst! There he is!”

  A spear jostled the branches. The hells! While he’d been lying here dreaming, a cadre of enemy scouts had rolled up and over the crest. Forgi was gone.

  Joss spun sideways under the thicket and sprang up on the far side. Thorns ripped at him as he forced a way through brambles, leading with his baton. An arrow thwacked into stout vines. Others passed over his head as he bolted for the swamp.

  “Got him!” A figure bowled into him, throwing them both to the ground.

  Joss rolled up first, planting the length of the baton along the side of the man’s head. He scrambled back as he shoved his baton into its leash and drew his short sword. The cursed enemy had gotten between him and the tangle of the swamp forest. He backed up the slope toward the crest. They were driving him into their encampment.

  “Capture the reeve alive!” a man called, although Joss could not see him. “Lord Radas wants all reeves brought to him.”

  That gave him one advantage, then. He leaped to the left, stabbing, and the soldier he probed at stumbled aside, caught himself on his spear, and lunged. Joss skipped back, to stand backed up to the thorny bramble. A man was cutting through the vines. Upslope, men advanced. Aui! Eight—neh—nine men. A burly man wearing a sergeant’s badge stepped into view.

  “No use fighting us. That’ll only get you killt. Come along with us, and you’ll not be harmed.”

  Joss laughed. “Can you truly say so and expect me to believe it? Lord Radas’s army has been killing reeves for twenty years, as I have reason to know. Even if you take me to him alive, so he can interrogate me, how can you expect me to believe he’ll allow me to live afterward?”

  The sergeant shrugged. “Agree to serve him, and he might let you live.”

  “We could use some cursed reeve scouts,” shouted the man who’d knocked him over, wiping blood from his nose. “It’s like we’re cursed blind!”

  “Enough!” The sergeant cut off a murmur of agreement with his roar. He raised his sword. “Surrender. Or we’ll kill you now. It’s really that easy a choice.”

  “It’s never that easy a choice, ver. I’ve been a reeve for a long time. Folk may say things are simple, but they rarely are. Let me assure you of that. Better you let me go, or better yet, follow me into the swamp and save your own lives before this battle finds you all dead.”

  “This battle?”

  They laughed heartily.

  The sergeant nodded magnanimously at him. He was a reasonable man, his nod suggested, and reasonable men listened to each other. “You lot from Nessumara are on your last legs. The lord commander says so. You may have won a respite with your fires, but you’ve got thin forces on the ground. We’ve scouts who’ve told us you’ve got a cohort riding up the causeway, but when your militia hits our shields, they’ll be crushed. And we’ve got two cohorts marching up from Saltow to join us, and another come in yesterday from over the river. It’ll be all over for you lot in another day. We’ll rule the north. So decide if you want to be among the winners or the losers. Tell you what, friend. I’ll meet you in a fair fight, no weapons. I toss you, you come quietly. You toss me, you come quietly.”

  The men laughed.

  Joss had a hells lot of experience as a reeve dragging out a tense confrontation until help arrived. You never knew when an extra mouthful of time might mean the difference between success and failure.

  “I’ll gladly spar with a big man like you, someone up to my weight. But I have to warn you, if I win, I’ll have to arrest you all.”

  They were laughing, relaxing, because he seemed relaxed. Because he knew how to joke; he had the power of a glib tongue and a charming smile that worked equally well on men as on women. He unbuckled his gear, set his knife down next to his baton, and waited, hands at his sides, as the sergeant handed his weapons to a soldier. The big man approached, hands raised, bobbing a little, ready to take a punch.

  Joss danced back, pretending to throw a punch or two, keeping his distance as the soldiers jeered and called him names. Dared him to close in. But he waited. And waited. For the flicker of the eyes, the moment when the other man’s attention wavered. He ducked in and shifted sideways, got the man’s beefy arm around and then up behind him, fingers back until the pain drove the big man to his knees with a shriek of surprised pain. He jammed his knee into his back and shoved him forward into the ground as the soldiers hesitated. They knew the law of fighting. There were a lot of awful things a man might do, but to violate that law seemed extreme. The sergeant slapped a hand on the dirt twice.

  Joss had him. Now what in the hells was he going to do, with eight men brandishing spears and swords ready to stick him from all sides?

  A vast shadow of wings rippled over the ground.

  Joss laughed.

  “And you lot can all go to the hells!” He flung himself sideways toward his discarded gear.

  Scar struck. His talons pierced one man, and he knocked another aside with his cruel beak, then shook the first man free and onto the head of a third man. Joss freed his sword, whipped around, and lunged for the sergeant. The man thrust up his spear to catch the blow. Joss cut inside the sergeant’s reach and stuck him through the abdomen, jerked his sword out, and spun to knock aside an attack from behind. Scar came down hard on a man who had panicked and started running. An archer fumbled with his bow as wounded men screamed.

  The hells. Joss shifted his sword into his other hand, drew his knife, and in one smooth motion threw it; the blade flashed, then buried itself hilt-deep into the archer’s belly. Scar fluffed his feathers and with uncanny speed pounced on the last soldier, who had been backing toward the safety of the thorns.

  No time to ponder the vagaries of life. Joss sheathed his sword and clipped on his harness with the speed reeves trained for. Scar had turned his attention to the men who were thrashing, flexing his talons in the flesh of one and then another until they ceased crying out. The archer fell down and lay still, eyes open with terror, trying to play dead.

  Joss brought his bone whistle to his lips and blew. “Scar,” he said.

  The bloody eagle swung his huge head to regard him. The raptor could rip his head off without effort, and yet Joss could never fear him. He trusted this bird. With his life.

  Men shouted; they’d been spotted. Drums raced away over the trees. Joss hooked in to Scar’s harness and tugged on the jess.

  Up!

  Arrows arced harmlessly as the land dropped away. The swamp passed under his feet. What a cursed mercy it was not to have to slog through that again. A reeve became used to flight. He jessed, and Scar swung wide and winged back over the enemy encampment.

  A massive spur of ancient rock—Kroke’s Ridge—split the river into two major channels, which then splintered into the vast web of the delta. The western channel, flowing against a western ridge, received the brunt of the current. The eastern channel, over the years, had been engineered into a net of channels, here bridged by two stone bridges and a series of ferries.

  In the eastern lee of the ridge, on high ground bordered by the ridge on one side and the eastern channel—which would soon split into the hundred channels of the delta—stood the town of Skerru. Below the town lay the open staging ground, built up over generations, where the causeway emerged from the swamplands. It was a wide area where boats, barges, wagons brought over on the ferry, and pack-animal traffic could pay the delta toll and get permission to enter the causeway and move their goods down to Nessumara. It was easy to get across the river to Skerru, but Skerru controlled access to Nessumara just as Saltow, in the east, was gatekeeper of the eastern causeway. Rich clans lived here, and here on the open ground Lord Radas had settled his encampment, fortified by ditches and berms. Two cohorts were spread along the fortifications to defend against soldiers dropped behind the lines. After all, that’s what Anji had done before.

  Because the causeway was the only entrance to Nessumara, Radas had concentrated his best infantrymen there. An entire coho
rt braced in ranks, shields wrapped with dampened canvas against fire and oil. They were ready to hold, or to march; a second cohort backed them up. No Hundred militia could hope to penetrate this sturdy wall.

  Qin cavalry, more than five hundred strong in even ranks, pounded down the causeway to the accompaniment of drums. Cantering, they transitioned in breathtaking unison into a gallop, an earth-thundering full-out run. Black wolves might bear down so upon their helpless prey. No soldier in the Hundred had ever faced anything like this.

  They hit like a blacksmith’s hammer.

  The shields didn’t hold, or waver, or even collapse. They simply disintegrated, like a fence of sticks stuck upright in the sand when a storm surge pours over them. A man stood upright in an eddy as horsemen cleared his fallen foes; untouched, he simply stood as one stunned, and then raised his sword too late as a passing rider cut him down.

  They drove through the shields, a breaking wave. Through this narrow passage a second cohort galloped four abreast like a strong current cutting through weak soil. Ahead, the Qin cohort split like the delta channels into smaller cadres to make room for the soldiers coming up behind. They swung wide to hit the enemy’s two forward cohorts from the flanks. Steel flashed. A horse went down, its rider tumbling to earth and yet somehow coming out on his feet, slashing as he rose. Shields pulled together, trying to hold. Out in the encampment, horns blew frantically, signaling a retreat, as the cadres who had been deployed for an attack from behind used ditches and berms to create barriers between them and the incoming horsemen. Out of the north, not yet visible to the people on the ground, flights of eagles were coming in, weighted with passengers to drop for a rear attack.

  Joss tugged on the jesses, and Scar found an updraft skirling off Kroke’s Ridge. He rose higher and higher yet, until the land seemed like child’s vat of clay and all the people moving below toys whose lives and deaths fell away into insignificance compared with the sun’s fierce eye and the sky’s immense indifference. Clots of smoke still rose out of the delta. The fires set by the defenders had given Anji time to reach Nessumara, but how easily the measure might have turned back upon the defenders or burned all the way into the hundred isles of Nessumara!

  And Joss thought: Could I have ordered the forest set ablaze? Could I have set men on fire with oil of naya, knowing in what agony they would burn? Could I stand aside and order that all captured prisoners must be executed immediately, lest they slow down the progress of the army? Could I kill a Guardian? Or let another man do so, knowing the act would kill him?

  He could not shake the feeling that he—that everyone—stood at the edge of a precipice. Aui! Did he envy Anji? For his skill at command? For his evident intelligence and powerful ability to focus? For his beautiful, devoted wife? For the handsome child Joss would never have?

  And yet why not? He wasn’t too old to father a child. It wasn’t too late to build a different life. He didn’t have to be commander of the reeve halls; it wasn’t as if the reeves seemed eager to accept him in that position. A simple reeve might hope to have a cottage to come home to with a spouse and children. Wasn’t that what he had hoped for?

  For it always came back to Marit, didn’t it? To the ordinary life the likes he had dreamed of twenty years ago, when he had asked Marit if she would consider making a child together with him. Was that what he mourned more than anything? The life so many other humble people took for granted that had been ripped from him by a band of criminals up on the Liya Pass? And how was he therefore any different from uncounted Hundred folk whose lives had been destroyed and lands laid waste by Lord Radas’s cruel army?

  Out of the east, just beyond the eastern channels, horns cried and banners waved. The reserves from Saltow had reached Skerru. Lord Radas had reinforcements. Zubaidit, marching with the enemy, didn’t know they were about to smash into Anji’s army.

  One way or the other, she’d be killed. He sure as the hells was not going to fly away to report to the hall while leaving another woman behind to die as he’d left Marit.

  He jessed Scar hard, and they sailed over the eastern crossings, over the heads of the first Saltow contingent. The six staves cohort had gained ground and was now perhaps half a mey behind, closing the gap. He swooped recklessly low as, above, reeves flagged him desperately in warning. Below, the horse-tailed captain marked his approach, nudging Zubaidit.

  Was the gods-rotted woman insane? A traitor? She said something to the captain, and cursed if a reeve flag didn’t go up, signaling him to land: Help needed! Every reeve was obliged to answer the call. It was their duty.

  Down.

  They thumped hard, and Joss unhooked, dropped, and blew Scar’s retreat. Scar launched without hesitation, leaving Joss to stand in front of an oncoming enemy cohort with his baton in hand, like a reeve facing down a riot single-handedly. There were worse ways to die. And Scar would be free to take a new reeve.

  Yet the cohort halted in a display of discipline almost as impressive as Anji’s Qin horsemen. Three people jogged out from the vanguard to meet him: the captain, accompanied by two women in sergeant’s badges. The woman standing to the captain’s right was past the first bloom of youth, tall for a woman and thick with a laborer’s strength. Her eyes widened as she took in Joss; she shook her head with the twisted half frown of a woman who wants to laugh but isn’t sure she ought to. She carried a stubby spear in her left hand and a short sword sheathed at her side. A long leather pouch was slung over her back.

  The captain stopped a stone’s toss away, rubbing his chin with the back of a hand as he examined Joss with a crooked half smile, as a man might not quite smile when he realizes he’s lost a bet.

  Bai sauntered forward, grinning that cursed grin that made Joss flush. “Reeve Joss. Come to my rescue.”

  “I’ll expect a reward,” said Joss, with a smile that stopped her in her tracks.

  The other sergeant snorted.

  The captain said, on a sharp sigh, “I see you two know each other.”

  “Not in that way, if not for lack of trying,” said Zubaidit. “Don’t be jealous.”

  “How can I be jealous for what I’ve never possessed? Reeve Joss, I’m called Arras, captain of Sixth Cohort. This is Sergeant Giyara. So tell me, reeve, why would you come down from your safe haven in the sky to parley with the captain of an army whose men you know are eager to kill reeves?”

  These were cursed interesting currents, truly.

  Joss turned his smile on Sergeant Giyara, who smirked in the way of a woman who was immune to his charm but enjoyed watching the effort. “The first time Zubaidit and I met, she tried to kill me. So I suppose I feel I still have the advantage. Tell me, Captain, are you marching into battle?”

  “We’re marching to meet up with Lord Radas, as ordered. What battle?”

  Joss indicated the hazy sky. “That’s dust, churned up by fire and battle. Captain Anji has broken Lord Radas’s army.”

  “So you might claim. If I join up with the other Saltow contingent, we can flank the enemy and drive him back.”

  “You might, although I doubt it. Toskala is fallen to an uprising. Reeves from Gold Hall ought to be falling on the garrison in High Haldia today. Your side has lost, even if the limbs still function. You can retreat with your men and lose the war another day, or you can surrender.”

  “I can kill you at this moment,” said the captain, not in an angry way, just pointing it out as a comment between friends.

  “You haven’t killed me. And I think you won’t. I’ve given you fair warning, because Zubaidit marches beside you. Let me take her and go.”

  “She’s our hostage,” said the captain.

  “Cursed spy,” said Giyara without much heat, eyeing Zubaidit sidelong. Without looking at the other sergeant, Bai smiled provocatively, and Joss’s ears flamed. Had she had sex with the other woman? Was that her game? The hells!

  “For a man of your experience,” said Bai in a voice whose purr made him think she’d seen into his mind as easil
y as might a cloak, “you’re as innocent as the sky is blue in the dry season, Reeve Joss. I need to tell you that my brave comrade Shai killed the woman who wore the cloak of Night. He rests in one of those invalid wagons, badly hurt. I have to stay with him. Tohon would never forgive me if I let him die.”

  Joss’s heart went cold; his limbs seemed paralyzed; his mouth went dry.

  “Did you release her cloak to the gods, as is fitting?” he croaked.

  “I gave it to Captain Arras.”

  The captain didn’t even glance at Sergeant Giyara, who stood loyally beside him with a pouch slung across her back. An innocent burden, to the naked eye.

  “I beg you,” Joss said to Bai, “release it.”

  Captain Arras shook his head. “You comprehend my dilemma, Reeve Joss. I’m torn between my old commander and the prospect of a new one. A traitor has earned a short life, don’t you think? I need a cursed valuable treasure to bargain with, and while the life of that young outlander we’re hauling along in the wagons seems useful, I don’t think it’s enough.”

  Joss glanced at Bai and lifted his chin. A quickly drawn sword, and a pair of lunges, would take care of the captain and sergeant; they could release the cloak. Then he realized she wasn’t armed.

  Arras laughed. “I like you, reeve. You think the way I do. She agreed to walk unarmed. I’ve a Guardian’s cloak and a veiled outlander to bargain with.” Horns blatted in the distance, a call to arms. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got a battle to fight. Best you move aside, and let us march.”

  They were almost seven hundred men. He was one reeve, not quite ready to die pointlessly. He stood aside, and let them march.

  48

  ARRAS CLIMBED UP into a wagon’s bed to address his soldiers, who were straining eagerly for news. They had heard the horns’ cries from ahead. They’d watched the captain’s conference with the reeve.

  “I’ve brought you this far,” Arras called. “You may have wondered why we retreated from the attack on Nessumara. You may have wondered why we did not march out in company with the Saltow survivors. Why we left our camp slaves behind in Saltow rather than bring them with us.” He surveyed the assembled cohort but saw no man or woman there who looked angry or suspicious. They trusted him.