by Kate Elliott
“Damn it but that was a close one, Peddo. Lucky thing that blade didn’t just whack your good friend there right off. Else you’d have no reason to visit the Devourer again, but then, I don’t suppose that would have bothered you any.”
“Peh. Uh. At least I’m choosy about where my friend takes his festival. Ayuh!” Without warning, Peddo passed out. Jabi settled, crouching over his reeve and spreading his wings to shelter him.
Volias came back. “Not good. We didn’t get here in time. Cursed wolves got them all. There’s one merchant who can still talk, but his gut’s laid open. No mendicants in sight, so I don’t see how we can save him. The rest are dead or unconscious, and the wolves are already circling. They’re gathering out beyond range, but they won’t stay out there long. We’re badly outnumbered, despite the ones we killed.”
Joss rose to survey the scene. The two wagons were rigged to run rugged and fast. The horses had bolted; a few were already being rounded up by those bandits who had fled off to a safe distance. The other two eagles were hackling, strung tight, ready to go at it again.
“Get Peddo in his harness,” he said to Volias.
The dead littered the ground, merchants and bandits alike. Some were still alive, but in that passing way, blood bubbling from their lips or dribbling from puncture wounds in the torso that could not be healed, not even by the Lady’s mendicants had there been any here along the road. A couple of the bandits were whimpering, lost in pain, all bloody and torn enough to make you wince until you remembered that they had attacked. The fortunate ones were unconscious and dying, or already dead. One of the merchants had dragged himself into a half-sitting position, propped up on the body of another man. His head was wrapped in cloth, in a turban. A strip of that cloth had come loose, and the entire elaborate structure of the headdress looked likely to unravel. His arms glinted under the weight of a sheath of silver bracelets. His silk jacket was cut through and, as the Snake had said, his gut had been laid horribly open to expose the glistening insides. It was a terrible wound made worse because it did not kill quickly.
“Will he live?” Volias asked.
Joss began to shake his head, and realized that Volias was asking about Peddo. “If we get him back to Clan Hall before he bleeds to death, and if there’s no infection, he just might. That man there, he’s a Silver.”
“Yeh. I didn’t touch him. He’s the only one of that kind in the group.”
“Strange. Usually they travel together with their own kind.”
Joss tossed an extra coil of rope to Volias, then strode over. The wounded man saw the movement and tracked him with his gaze. He even tried to smile as Joss knelt beside him.
“Ah—ah—thought no one would come.”
“We did, but it didn’t help much.”
“It is enough,” whispered the Silver valiantly. His face was sheened with sweat, and his lips were losing color. A stink roiled out of his exposed guts. Behind, Peddo’s whistle shrilled as Volias blew it to get Jabi to settle and come in.
“Must get the message through,” croaked the Silver.
Joss took one of the Silver’s hands between his own. The man’s skin was cool, and getting colder as the life drained from him. “What message?”
“Shefen sen Haf Gi Ri. My house—sent me with these others. The four of us. Sons of the Lesser Houses—in Olossi. And these eight guardsmen—brave men.”
Joss looked the man in the eye to aid him in keeping his focus as he struggled for words. He did not interrupt. The dying man didn’t have much time. Nor did the reeves. Out beyond the watchful eagles, the wolves were circling.
“Dissent, disagreement, in the council. The Greater walks hard upon the Lesser, although there are more of us—among the Lesser. We should be heard. Trade to the north has stopped. The Greater Houses say—to be patient—but we—the others of us—the Lesser Houses—we wonder—what is going on. So we sent this group—we four to carry the message. Nokki from Three Rings. Myself. Two from the guilds, Kavess and Aden. Also the eight guardsmen, brave men.” Like the wolves, he was circling, back to words he had already spoken.
“What is your message?” Joss prompted. In this moment, the world was dead to him, all emotion fled and the wind and the smell of battle fading away because he must hear the words that this man was trying so desperately to speak.
“Two. There are two messages. Why has trade stopped? Where are our caravans sent north last year? Why does no trade come out of the north? Show us support.”
“Have you asked the reeves of Argent Hall to help you?”
“They can’t hear us,” said the Silver cryptically, and he went on so quickly that Joss dared not stop him to ask that he explain himself. “Two—the second message. Emergency! There are ospreys hunting on the Kandaran Pass, and along West Spur. Attacking caravans, this season. Now. Right now. Captain Beron of the border guards is no help. He claims he needs more guardsmen. He claims . . . he needs support of Olossi council, of Argent Hall. We of the Lesser Houses . . . we would give aid, more guardsmen, pay for it . . . but the Greater Houses remain silent. They refuse to listen to our voice. They no longer trust us. The wolves are circling, cutting us off at both ends. They mean to choke us. Who?”
His hand clenched Joss’s hard, as though a jolt had passed through him, as though he had found his strength and might actually live. “Who wants to choke us? Who will help them? Who will help us?”
The hells!
The effort of speaking had sucked the man dry. He went limp as the breath of life fled. His destiny, his fortune, to end here, on the West Track, about five mey from safety. If the town of Horn would have offered these men a safe haven.
And the wolves were closing in, damn them all to the hells.
Joss released his hand, tucked in the fraying ends of the man’s headdress, and twisted the bracelets off both arms. He cut a length of silk off the man’s jacket and wrapped the bracelets up with a twist knot. Rising, he checked the positions of his allies and his enemies.
Jabi had his wings spread wide, and he wasn’t happy, but he held still as all the eagles were trained to do when their reeves were wounded. Volias hooked Peddo into the harness and tied him in tightly with Joss’s rope, checked the bandage, all with a remarkable lack of concern about that vicious beak and those talons a mere kiss away from his head.
The wolves were circling, getting bolder, and one man seemed to be lining up a trio of archers far enough away that they could pester the reeves with arrows. Joss counted his dead and dying: all twelve of the Olossi men, and fourteen scruffy outlaws. He searched through the corpses for the guildsmen and the other merchant, who would wear an identifying mark on their clothing.
“Joss!” called Volias.
“Go on!” called Joss to him. “Take Peddo north to Clan Hall.”
“We’ve got to get back to Clan Hall!” yelled Volias. “Now. Those damned wolves are going to come after us in about three breaths.”
Joss lifted both hands. “We’ve got to follow this up. Bandits on the Kandaran Pass. The West Track unsafe for merchants. Something’s definitely wrong at Argent Hall. I’m flying south to see what I can see. Tell the Commander to send a flight south to meet me at Olossi.”
“Stupid shithead,” said Volias. “Don’t you get tired of it?”
“Tired of what?”
“Always having to be the one who goes in first. Ah, the hells! Never mind.” He let Jabi go, and leaped back. The big eagle lifted with a shriek. Volias gave a call with his own whistle and, when Trouble fluttered over to him, hooked into his own harness.
“You got a good haul off that Silver!” he called, as a parting shot. “The dead will make you rich!”
“Go devour yourself,” shouted Joss, “since no one else will!”
There, at the end, with the nub of their dislike spoken baldly, Volias actually laughed. “I hate men like you, so easy with the women!” He said something more, but the words were lost as Trouble lifted in a gust of wings.
An arrow skittered over the ground. The wolves were testing their range. Joss counted ten that he could see, one limping. Five had bows, always the greatest danger to the eagles. Joss stuck his bone whistle to his lips, and the blast of sound shuddered over the carnage as if it might shiver all those ghosts to rest. Scar, already strung tight by the presence of the lurking bandits, by the fight, and by hunger, flew straight at him, leaving Joss barely enough time to turn his back as the eagle landed with a massive thump just behind him. One-handed, he fastened into the harness, and then they were up, Scar beating with powerful strokes until he found a thermal and caught it.
Up and up they rose. Below, the scatter of wagons and dead and dying men looked like a child’s toys thrown carelessly about. The wolves dashed in to ransack the wagons and the dead men. After them would come the vultures; a pair glided past, already on the hunt for fresh carrion. Tomorrow or the next day, perhaps, those four children would come to glean through what remained.
The other two eagles were already high above, slipping into a northward glide. Far off to the west, Joss spotted another creature in the sky. At first he thought it must be a vulture, but it moved with the wrong motion. It was not even flying as an eagle did, rising and gliding, but beating steadily. Scar kekked, seeking direction.
Joss considered the distant flyer, already fading from sight. Scar took no heed of it, and Joss hadn’t time to investigate a bird that Scar deemed unworthy of notice. Anyway, he had to keep his attention on the urgent matter at hand.
“South,” he said to himself, and signaled with the jess.
They left the battle scene behind, quickly out of sight within the rolling, golden landscape, the high plains grasslands that stretched to the southern horizon. That was the way of a reeve’s life. You had to leave it behind. If you did not, it ate you up from the inside out.
HE IS WALKING but instead of skeletal trees he sees the long rise and fall of the slopes that make up the grassland countryside where he and the eagle bedded down that night. Grass rolls away on all sides. There is no horizon. Mist boils up out of the ground as though the earth itself has exhaled. He strains to see through it into the veiled distance. Are those merely shadows on the slope ahead of him or is that a figure climbing toward the crest? Those fingers on the back of his neck are the wind. He tries to move forward, to chase it down, but he cannot shift.
Then, on the wind, he hears her voice as faintly as if she is speaking to him across a vast distance, or in a whisper just behind his head.
“The ospreys raid on the West Spur. Their leader is Beron, captain of the border guard. Break them first, before they take the treasure that the Hundred needs most. The carters and merchants will help you, for they suffer the worst depredations. Hurry. The shadows are spreading. Beware!”
“Marit!” he cried, sitting bolt upright.
It was dawn, and he was sweating, and after all he was awake and there was nothing to see except the dregs of his campfire, his pack and weapons set on the ground beside the bedroll on which he had slept, and Scar rousing himself with the rising of the light. He buried the last embers, and made ready. The sky was cloudless, utterly clear, bound to the flat eastern horizon and still purpling dark where it met the distant Soha Hills to the west. His thoughts, too, were clear, sharp, naked. He thought of murdered reeves and mutilated eagles, of River’s Bend burned to the ground, of High Haldia under attack, of farmers tied to the posts of the Witherer’s altar, of Horn Hall abandoned, of the four children, of the dying Silver and his murdered companions. He thought of the voice in his dream.
You had to leave it behind, because if you did not, it ate you up from the inside out.
But not this time. This time he wouldn’t walk away. He would fix something, serve justice somehow, or by the hells he would die trying.
22
The road north toward the Hundred ran long, and through steep, impossibly high mountains. Shai listened to the chatter of merchants and hired men as he rode through the ranks of the caravan.
“I knew it were not good, the way that other caravan did racket out yesterday.”
“What caravan? I didn’t get to the market that early.”
“It were at Sarida before us, you know, readying to go. A smaller group of Hundred merchants they were, anxious to get home. They did bolt at dawn whilst we were still bargaining with the caravan master for places. I bet they did hear something of these bandits and heretics, and hoped to outrace the troubles.”
“The market magistrate said there’s been no caravan come south from the Hundred for two months. Not a one, not since our company came five months back before the really cold weather.”
“Might still be snow up on the pass.”
“No. I’m sure it must be these troubles. I hadn’t finished with my last trades, I had a few deals to make, but I let them go. Better safe than dead, I’m thinking. I’m that glad we lucked into these strong guards.”
“May the gods watch over us.”
“Hush! No talk of the gods in the empire. You’ll get us killed!”
The Hundred merchants had a strange way of talking; many of the words were the same as the language spoken up and down the Golden Road and in the empire, but they shaped the sounds differently. They had also a peculiar manner of dressing, men wearing loose robes that left their calves bare, or knee-length tunics and sleeveless jackets over baggy trousers. Instead of heavy jackets to protect against the cold, they wore lengths of cloth, cloaks voluminous enough to wrap around their bodies, falling down to their ankles and fastened in place at the shoulder. The complexion and arrangement of features on their faces weren’t like anything Shai had seen in Kartu Town, either, where one saw a variety of folk passing through as merchants or soldiers or priests or slaves. They hadn’t the red-brown clay coloring of Kartu people, or the dusty brown complexion of the Mariha and desert people, or the mulch-brown features of many of the Sirniakan people, nor the richly brown-black skin of Priya, who came from far to the south past desert and heaven-high mountains both, close to the sun. Most of these northern men had a complexion with a golden-brown shine, black hair more commonly curly than the coarse straight black hair known in the rest of the world, and the brown eyes that marked all human folk.
Not like Cornflower’s demon-blue eyes.
Why must he still think of her? Those memories made him flush, made him itch. They shamed him. Chief Tuvi rode through, casting orders as to the winds, and in his wake Tohon dragged Shai away to ride point.
Out ahead of the rest, they pushed their faces into the wind that ran down off the tremendous height piled up before them. Tohon rode in a concentrated silence, his gaze roaming over the unfolding road and the narrowing vista of the land, but Shai sucked in the flavor of the wind and mumbled to himself in a low voice. By breathing in air that tasted of far places and unknown destinations, he hoped to thrust her ghost out of his mind, because she would not stop haunting him. Yet she ought to stop, here in a land where women were not permitted to walk abroad alone and uncovered. She ought to stop, because there were no ghosts in the Sirniakan Empire. Not one.
“Tohon, the Qin soldiers and that groom who died. What happens to them? To their bodies and spirits?”
“To die in battle is a good death. The gods take the dead man’s spirit into the heavens, and their flesh is scattered by the animals, returning to the earth.”
“But don’t you keep their bones with the ancestors?”
Tohon burst out laughing. “Hu! You folk with your feet stuck in the bricks of your cities. I’ve seen those tombs where you bury the bones of your ancestors. How are we Qin to carry so many bones with us? I’ve my weapons, my saddle, my string of horses, my field rations. Back in my home country, my son tends the family herds. I’d a daughter once, but she died, and my good wife died of grief at the losing of her. It was a bad death. The girl drowned. When the water takes you, the demons capture your soul.” He shook his head, face creased with a frown. Shai had never seen him look so dow
ncast.
“I—I’m sorry to hear such a sad tale. May the merciful heart of the Holy One ease your burden.”
“Huh. That’s why I rode east with Commander Beje. I’d done my years in the army, I could have stayed in the home pastures and raised my grandchildren, but the burden was too great. My daughter’s ghost haunted me. I wonder in what land my bones will be scattered. This north land, this Hundred land, perhaps.”
“You don’t just leave everyone behind, do you? Like those men who died. We just left them behind. Isn’t there shame in having no remains to bury with the ancestors? Is there nothing their family has of them, in the end?”
“How is a person to stop in a battle, or on the trail? You talk too much, Shai. I told you before. Once the spirit is fled, the body is just meat. The spirit can be born again and again, and travel on the winds. You can meet them in another life.”
“Not once they’ve passed Spirit Gate. The Merciful One teaches that once you pass Spirit Gate, you can be free of the world, free of suffering, gone altogether beyond.”
“Why would you want to be free of the world?” asked Tohon. “I’ll never understand you people.”
“WHAT HAPPENS WHEN folk die, here in the empire?” Shai asked Anji that night as the captain waited for his tent and awning to be set up. They were standing by a freshly kindled fire. In the hills, there was plenty of wood to burn.
Anji considered, as if searching the question for traps. Finally, he shrugged. “The Sirniakan magistrates investigate every death and determine its cause. The guilty are punished. Those responsible for the corpse pay the death price. Afterward, the body is taken to the temple and burned. The ashes are plowed into special fields to nourish the living. Everything is always tidy in the empire. Not like in the rest of the world. Ghosts dare not trouble the priests of Beltak, Lord of Lords and King of Kings, the Shining One Who Rules Alone.”
Shai flushed as though the fire had washed over him. Why would Anji mention ghosts? Had he betrayed himself somehow? He had tried so hard to keep his secret. Maybe Mai had whispered the truth to Anji, as pillow talk. Best he not talk about the dead at all, lest folk got to wondering how he knew so much about ghosts.
