Spirit Gate

by Kate Elliott

  Folk were looking their way, faces obscured by twilight.

  “Perhaps we’re not meant to stand here,” said Mai. “Let’s go back.”

  Anji had staked out the central fire pit, and he stood near its flickering light speaking to the reeve as Mai walked up behind them. They were laughing, and did not see her.

  “You are a lucky man, did you know that?” Joss was saying.

  “It would be impolite to reply to such a question. If I knew, and said so, then it would seem I am boasting. If I did not, it would seem I am foolish.”

  The reeve laughed. “I am answered!” He turned, alert even before Anji was, and Anji turned, and saw Mai. Sheyshi scuttled away to help O’eki, who was wrestling with a steaming haunch of venison. Priya paused just outside the circle of firelight.

  “Surely you are a fortunate man as well,” said Mai, coming forward.

  His smile remained easy, but his gaze retreated into itself, as though he were staring down a long straight track into a twilit distance whose landscape was forever veiled from mortal sight. “I am not married.”

  Day seemed to shift into night with the swiftness of a child whose mood can swing from joy to tears in an instant. She halted beside Anji, but she could not look away from the reeve.

  “You have a shadow in your eyes,” she said to the reeve.

  He looked at Anji, and she looked at Anji, and the captain nodded, and the reeve spoke in a low voice as around them the camp settled into its evening routine of drinking, eating, song, and sleep.

  “I gave up telling the tale years ago. It came at the beginning, when the shadows first began to reach into the land, in the north. She was the first one—the first reeve—slaughtered. That was on the Liya Pass. Twenty years ago. Where it all began, when outlaws and cursed greedy lords began hunting down the eagle clans. I still dream about her. I shouldn’t have let her go alone. If I’d gone with her . . .” But he shook his head.

  “What then?” she asked.

  Anji remained silent, watching.

  He shrugged, and offered her a wry smile that made her want to cry for his pain. “Most likely we’d both be dead. Her eagle was found. Not just dead, but mutilated.”

  She had a nasty, prickling feeling along her back, as if someone drew cold fingers laced with slivers of glass up and down her skin. “What of her?”

  He shifted his gaze to the leaping flames, his head canted and jaw tight, and continued speaking. “Her body was never found, but we found her clothes, her boots, a belt buckle, her knife, items she carried in her pack . . .” The fire sparked as a soldier shoved a pair of branches into the flames. The reeve winced back from the flare, then caught himself and went on, although his voice seemed flatter and more distant. He might have been reciting from a scroll. “Her boot knife was found on a girl, one of the Devourer’s hierodules. The girl had been stabbed in the heart. That girl’s corpse lay there with the rest of the discarded gear. It was only her body we did not find, nor them who did it, as they had all abandoned the camp.”

  “She might not have been taken away with those who killed the other one?” Anji asked.

  “We searched, but there was never any sign of her. No, she’s dead. I knew it as soon as I saw what remained of Flirt—that was her eagle. A reeve doesn’t survive her eagle’s death. An eagle can survive through the lives of four or five reeves if it’s particularly long-lived, like my good Scar, but for the other way, no. Better dead than no longer a reeve, so we say.” His smile was a ghost’s smile, without life, but he struggled with it and shook his head and said, “It still hurts. A few years later, bones were found in an unmarked grave up beyond that abandoned camp. Perhaps that was her, hidden because they feared our revenge. I try to leave it behind.” He blew breath out through his lips and shook himself in the manner of a duck shedding water. “I keep thinking I have.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Mai, wiping away a tear. “What was her name?”

  “Reeve Joss!” A voice hailed him from the darkness. “Best come see this!”

  “Excuse me.” Joss left.

  “Every young man loses his first love,” remarked Anji to Mai, “but most get back in the saddle and keep riding. He’s tethered to one post.”

  “Is it fair to say so? You don’t know what he’s done in the years since, only that speaking the tale makes him sad. The storytellers in the marketplace would make a song out of it, like in the tale of the Rose Princess and the Fourteen Silk Ribbons. She ran off with her lover, and he left her by the riverside while he went into town to buy her silk ribbons, and she was eaten by a lion that had been sent to earth by a demon jealous of her beauty. Afterward he wore her bloodstained rags and went on pilgrimage to the fourteen holy temples, one for each ribbon he had bought for her, but he could not calm his heart and after all he turned back to seek revenge, but the demon seduced him and made him steal back the ribbons from each temple and . . . It’s a terribly sad tale!” she finished indignantly, seeing that he was trying not to laugh. “He dishonored himself! What could be worse? There is a song, but it always makes me cry.”

  “I would gladly hear the song. You sing with sincerity and a true voice.”

  “Maybe not such a strong one,” she muttered. “But the tone is good, so I am told.”

  “You are still angry. I do not laugh at you, dearest Mai. I just have no taste for such tales. To me, they seem ridiculous.”

  “How are the tales ridiculous?”

  He laughed. “Any man knows better than to leave a beautiful woman alone by the riverside in the middle of wilderness! Wild beasts and demons stalk everywhere, and not least among them the sort of bandits we drove away in Dast Korumbos. No, I have no patience for those stories.”

  “Mistress.” Sheyshi came out of the dark carrying a copper basin filled with water. “Here is warmed water, if you want to wash your hair and face.”

  “Captain!” The reeve reappeared, barely visible in the gloom, and waved a hand. “If you will. There’s something I would like you to see.”

  Anji nodded at her and went after Joss. Mai watched them fade into the twilight. She scanned the clearing and the trees but could see nothing exceptional, only merchants fussing at their wagons, soldiers grooming horses, and a dog slinking under the wheels of a cart. Guards ringed the prisoner’s wagon, but they showed no sign of alarm as they maintained their vigil.

  Movement beside one wagon attracted her gaze. Canvas had been stretched by means of an internal scaffolding to make a cabin over the bed, and two young women knelt beside a small fire, feeding sticks into it and stirring in a pot that hung on an iron tripod over the flames.

  “Look there,” said Mai to Priya. “I’ve noticed them before. They look a little like Sheyshi, don’t they?”

  “Slaves,” said Priya. “See the bracelets and anklets, hung with bells so they cannot run away without alerting their master. Someone means to sell them here in the north. So it happened to me.”

  Mai took the other woman’s arm, looking for the mark of shackles. “You have never worn such bracelets, Priya!”

  “It is not the custom in Kartu. They were taken off me before I came to your father’s house.”

  “Still.” Mai scratched a forearm carelessly. “There’s something about those two—or that wagon, anyway—that makes me itch. I don’t know what. Like that time keder oil spilled on Ti’s hand and made it blister. There’s something hidden, but I don’t know what.”

  A young man appeared by the fire, speaking to the girls, and he looked up as if he felt Mai’s gaze. She had seen him before, among the merchants. He was young, with thick, curly black hair, and vivid with a kind of hunger of the spirit, a thing which gnaws at the underbelly and never lets up. He noted her, as men always did, but looked away quickly as if to say, “You cannot feed me, so I have no interest in you!”

  “Find out his name,” said Mai to Priya.

  Priya brushed her fingers across Mai’s knuckles. “You shouldn’t stare at young men. Best we g
o on. Your water is ready.”

  She followed Sheyshi behind a canvas screen set up for privacy and, with the aid of her two slaves, stripped and had them pour the water over her just for the feel of it. It wasn’t a true bath, with a scrub and afterward a hot soak, but she rubbed and soaped and afterward Sheyshi brought two more basins and rinsed her, and anyway it was better than the constant smear of dirt on her skin. She had dried and dressed and was sitting on a stool, sipping at this nasty drink called cordial while Priya combed out her hair, when Anji returned, accepted a cup from Sheyshi, and drained it without even a grimace at the sour taste.

  “What was it?” she asked him.

  “Just in the trees, a man found two skulls, bones scattered. Wild beasts got into them, but it isn’t clear if the dead men were murdered or just died from some other cause—starvation, illness. Or where they came from or why, nothing but the bones, not even scraps of clothing, pieces of gear, nothing.”

  “It doesn’t seem likely that naked people would go wandering in the forest. Unless these Hundred folk have strange customs.”

  He smiled, but sobered immediately. “The reeve tells me they have no holy followers of the Merciful One at all.”

  “No followers of the Merciful One? How can that be? We saw a shrine to the god, but it contained no statue, nothing but withered flowers.”

  “He kept thinking I was saying the Merciless One. It took us a while to sort it out. He had never heard of the Merciful One.”

  “You might as well say you have never heard of the color blue, or the sun and the moon!” she protested. “Surely all creatures know the Merciful One.”

  He smiled. “Not in Sirniaka, where Beltak, the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the Shining One, rules alone.”

  “Everyone knows that this Shining One is only one aspect of the Merciful One.”

  “You would be burned alive for saying so.”

  “Then I am glad we did not have to stay in Sirniaka!”

  He touched her hand, and cradled it between his. “Not even for another amaranth parasol?”

  “I only needed one!” She laid her other hand atop his, thinking of the flash of jealousy he had displayed. Of course it was gratifying, but it scared her, too. “I only need one,” she added, and his hand tightened on hers and he looked at her intently in a way that made her both bold and nervous, as though she stood in the court of judgment knowing she had done nothing to dishonor herself.

  “Well,” he said, releasing her hand and rising, breaking the gaze. Her shoulders relaxed. “They’ll be given a proper funeral, however they do that kind of thing here. Still, it makes a man wonder.”

  “How they came to die?”

  “How much trouble the Hundred folk are having in their lands, to find border guards working in league with bandits and bones abandoned in the forest. Another thing I wonder at.” He paused, and she watched him as he regarded the starry heavens with a thoughtful gaze. His profile was a noble one, given a patina of unworldliness by night and stars and the fitful illumination of firelight. So might a man out of legend appear as he considers his destiny, because it is the duty of night to mask his thoughts and lend glamour to his fortitude.

  She waited—she had always been good at waiting—and at length he continued.

  “Their ghosts were still there. Where men die violently, there remains a whirlpool of rage and fear where the spirit was cut from the body. I had Shai come over. Do you know what he told me?”

  “Poor Shai. He’s so afraid of being burned for seeing ghosts.”

  He frowned. “It’s true you Kartu folk have odd ideas, which we Qin often remarked on. Among the Qin, the few men and women who can see ghosts are honored. It’s a rare gift. In the empire, a boy who sees ghosts is given to the priests and becomes a powerful man. It’s also true, though, that a woman in the empire who saw ghosts would be executed. So, after all, on all counts, you’re better off with me, Mai.”

  “Did I ever suggest otherwise?”

  “You did not. But, hear this and wonder, as I do. Those ghosts claim to have been reeves, so Shai tells me. They were murdered, although they cannot say who killed them. Yet where are the bones of their eagles? How comes it that our good ally Reeve Joss had no inkling of these deaths? Are these reeves not soldiers together in one unit? Does a crime that assaults one not lash the rest into action? Why is he here alone? Where are those who must stand at his shoulder?”

  “What are you saying? That he is a rogue? Or a liar?”

  “I think he is an honorable man. But what of other reeves? Are they as honorable as he is?”

  “Did you ask him? Maybe he had heard of the deaths but not thought to tell you.”

  “He said there is a fort—a hall, he called it—of reeves a few days’ journey from here. He’ll leave us tomorrow at a place he calls Old Fort, and fly to that place to meet with these other reeves, to see what they have heard of this situation. I am thinking he wonders why they have not acted, when all these crimes take place within the lands they are responsible to patrol.”

  “He can ask them if they are missing two reeves.”

  Anji shook his head. “I did not tell him what the ghosts told us. I am mindful of the laws of Kartu. Before we let these Hundred folk know that both Shai and I have ghost-touched sight, best we know whether they’ll wish to burn us alive.”

  She put her hands to her cheeks, wishing that fear did not make her skin burn so.

  “We must keep our eyes open,” he went on. “Reeve Joss promises to meet us in Olossi, to help us in our request for settlement privileges. Mai, there is a part for you to play as well. You are my negotiator. When we reach this city, Olossi, you must speak innocently, and listen well.”

  “You want me to be a spy.”

  “A merchant, darling Mai. Merchants make the best scouts of all. Anyway, men speak freely with you in a way they will not with other men. Your beauty and clarity are like wine, loosening their tongues. We have ridden into a strange land. If we are to survive here, we must know what we are up against.”

  30

  From Old Fort, Joss and Scar flew east-northeast along the ridge that separated the narrow coastal fringe from the upland plateau. They glided from updraft to updraft, making good time. The southern mountains were marked with icy tips. South lay the golden brown grasslands, blurring into the horizon. Just to the north, the Olo’o Sea was fringed with white frills where salt encrusted the shoreline. Seen from above, the sea had the silky luster of a rare gem, and the intense blue of its waters matched the color of the sky.

  For two days they paused to feed and rest at one of the abandoned bastions that guarded West Spur, but although Scar could have used another day or two to really recover his full vigor, Joss pushed on. On the day that they passed the last of the bastions, a circular ruin of stone sitting on a bluff and overlooking road and sea, Joss turned Scar north over the sea itself, cutting across the estuarine bay which he had been told was known locally as Fisherman’s Delight.

  Below, a swirl of currents and contrasting colors marked the outflow from the River Olo, a cooler layer of water borne down from frigid springs and northern hills that had not yet mixed into the warmer sea. Joss no longer hoped that the hidden currents ripping through the reeve halls would be so easy to discern.

  Late in the day he glimpsed an eagle off to the north, a speck seen flying above the dark border of the distant shore. Soon he could see the broad Olo Plain with its stripes and squares of fields measured by the straight lines of ditches and orchard rows. From this height, the rocky escarpment of the city was a mere smudge in the east, many mey distant, with the ribbon of the river no more than a wink as the light of the lowering sun caught in its majestic curves. Best to tackle the reeves first, before they had news of his coming. He had a few days before the caravan would reach Olossi.

  Argent Hall had built its headquarters right at the coastline, in the midst of rice fields and sheep pasture, making it impossible to sneak up from any side. The huge re
ctangular compound was elevated on a massive earth platform and lapped by the sea on one side and by a murky moat on the other three. The steep banks of the earthen platform were reinforced along the base with stone, and grown green with mown grass. Sturdy stone corner towers offered a vantage to survey the surrounding fields and the open sea. Skeletal watchtowers suitable for eyries rose at intervals along the long walls. As he came in, two eagles rose on a coastal updraft and circled to fall in behind him.

  So he would do, placing an escort on an approaching visitor, if he thought trouble was coming. Apparently Marshal Alyon thought trouble was coming, even in the person of another reeve. Joss considered this bleakly as Scar took the turn in toward the chalk-lightened parade ground and the cart-sized perches, painted white, where they could land. Before the shadows, the reeves from different clans had trusted each other, but that trust had eroded. Sometimes he felt he was himself to blame, since in the first years after the murders of Marit and Flirt he had broken the boundaries multiple times, had invaded the Guardian altars even knowing they were forbidden.

  Yet this was not the fault of one young, foolish, reckless reeve.

  He had to shake it off, but the dreams kept coming.

  Scar pulled vertical, wing and tail feathers fanning out and his false wings standing up as he slowed, and landed. Then he spread his wings to show his size before settling. A kind of flurry of wings and fluffed-up feathers flowed around those few eagles visible from the parade ground and up on the watchtowers. Heads swiveled to stare.

  Joss slipped out of his harness and dropped to the net, then swung down to the ground. He bound up his harness out of the way and tied the leash onto the perch’s swivel ring.

  Folk gathered, most in reeve leathers but a few in loose tunics or in the kilted skirts commonly worn for exercise. He strolled out into the center of the vast parade ground, where he could be seen and examined from all sides.

  “I’ve come to see Marshal Alyon,” he said, and added, unnecessarily, “I hail from Clan Hall.”