by Kate Elliott
A younger reeve with a scar on his chin and a beady, suspicious gaze answered him without stepping forward to take charge. “Marshal Alyon’s corpse was laid on Sorrowing Tower months ago. We’ve had a new marshal since the Whisper Rains.”
He let the shock of that bald statement rake through his body without betraying by frown or blink that it stunned him. “I’m sorry to hear it. We had no word of it at Clan Hall.” He took a breath and let it out. “We were wondering, too, what became of Legate Garrard and the duty reeves who were called back and never replaced. That was almost a full year ago. Clan Hall sent a reeve called Evo down here as well, some months ago, but he never returned. I’ve come to see if there’s any news of his whereabouts.”
The younger man stared but said nothing. They all stared, a dozen reeves and, by now, twice that many stewards and artificers, and even a few slaves ghosting in the shadow of the lofts as they craned necks to watch the showdown, although Joss wasn’t sure who his opponent was. He had faced sullen silences before, only not from his fellow reeves. They were supposed to be allies.
Clan Hall should have had word of Marshal Alyon’s death if the marshal had died during the Whisper Rains. That was months ago. These folk knew it as well as he did. And if they knew what happened to Evo, they should have sent word. But no one here was talking.
Shadows stretched over the dusty parade ground. A pair of eagles braked in to land on open watchtowers. Scar fluffed up his feathers. A spike of nerves thrilled up along Joss’s spine, but the old eagle held his position, and fixed his amber gaze on his reeve.
Two reeves, the ones who had just landed, clambered down the watchtower ladders. But the attention of the gathering shifted when a young woman strode out of the open door of the west loft. A frown creased her dark face. Her hair was pulled tightly back along the high curve of her skull and braided in a single rope. Folk gave way to let her through, keeping their distance. She wore an exercise kilt, tied up very short, while not much more than a band of linen wrapped her breasts. The rest of her was exposed, and there was a lot of her to see, because she was tall for a woman: smooth brown legs, taut abdomen, muscular shoulders, arms glistening with sweat and oil. She wore sandals, and her feet were clean. She stopped a body’s length from him, looked him up and down in the way she might measure a horse, and smiled with a soft whistle of approval that made his ears burn. Turning, she cast a pair of words over her shoulder at him, not in the least flirtatious.
“Come on.”
He appreciated her curves and her brisk walk and the scalloped wave of tattoos running up the back of her shapely legs, and let her get a little ahead of him before he followed, just to get the all of her in his view. Her braid didn’t reach much farther than the middle of her back. Those gathered took her departure as a signal to move away in silence, all but the man with the scarred chin whose gaze looked ready to sear both hen and rooster.
As Joss passed close by him, the man hissed between his teeth and said, in a murmur that could not have reached beyond the two of them, “The shadow of lust and greed rules here. Watch your back.” Then he, too, turned away and, with a noticeable hitch in his stride, favoring his right leg, headed for the east loft.
The woman paused in the alley between the braceworks and the high wall of the west loft, in the shadowed cleft midway between light and light, right where a double-wide door, slid back, opened onto a storehouse built into the outer wall. Ranks of ceramic vessels filled the long chamber: the tall amphorae for groundnut oil; smaller pots marked with the ideograms for sesame and chili oils; the elaborately decorated and stoppered vessels containing the most expensive cosmetic oils; an especially plentiful supply of the distinctive round, sealed pots holding precious oil of naya. Argent Hall had a remarkably well stocked storehouse, any merchant’s dream.
“Are you always this slow?” she asked as he halted beside her and gave her his full attention.
He grinned. “Only when I want to be.”
She snorted. “Men say so, but they have no stamina.”
“Spoken like one of the Devourer’s hierodules.”
“Do you think so?”
“You have the look of it.”
Her fingers, brushing his wrist, were like a wasp’s tickling walk along skin. “Do you want to find out?”
He bent toward her, lips to her ear, not quite touching. “You’ll find me far more at ease once my business here is concluded.”
As she started forward, she said something under her breath that he couldn’t quite catch, or maybe it was something he had heard before, lying in the arms of the Merciless One. She devoured the ground with her stride. An impatient woman. She sizzled with a pent-up anger, but he didn’t know enough to figure it out.
The alley gave way to the garden court with a narrow reflection pool flanked by fruit and nut trees, a pair of hexagonal fountains spilling water over blue tile, and wide corner terraces heavily planted with a variety of herbs, veil of mercy, and hundred-petaled butter-bright, so yellow that the petals seemed smeared with grease. The marshal’s cote was a humble-seeming pavilion built at the far end of the pool. The intricate woodwork in the overhanging eaves and around the closed doors and white-papered windows, and the lacing vines of veil of mercy and climbing stars twining the poles and lattices of the wraparound porch, betrayed that skilled workmanship had gone into both its construction and its ornamentation.
Their footfalls on gravel surely warned the man waiting within. She indicated the steps. As Joss mounted the first one, the door slid open and a retired reeve shuffled out onto the covered porch and stood aside. Joss unlaced his boots, stepped out of them, and crossed up and over the threshold onto the raised floor.
The cote was not a large building. The front room stretched its length, while a single door, currently shut, suggested that a private chamber waited in back. The marshal sat on a pillow at a writing desk, at his ease with a quill in one hand and an ink knife in the other. Such a slender thing, that knife. Joss watched carefully as the marshal toyed with this knife, gaze fixed on the blank paper lying on the desk. He must have been cold, for he was wearing a cloak indoors, although it seemed plenty warm to Joss.
Finally, the marshal set down the knife next to a silver handbell, and looked up. He was young enough that his youth came as a surprise: a man with an unpretentious face and a diffident manner. He was no one Joss had ever seen before, that he recalled, and he had seen plenty of reeves in his time.
“I’m Legate Joss out of Clan Hall.”
“I know who you are. Why are you come here?” The man had a child’s plain way of speaking.
“I hear Marshal Alyon is dead.”
“So he is.”
As the pause drew out, Joss understood that no further information was forthcoming. The outer door slid shut behind them, and the woman sashayed in, crossed to the inner door, opened it, stepped through into a narrow chamber made dim with shadows because all its shutters were shut, and closed the door behind her. Outside, someone began sweeping the porch.
“How did he die?” Joss asked.
“In the manner of all creatures. His time on this earth ended, and the gods plucked his soul from the husk to give it a new life in another being.”
Joss had always found these sorts of platitudes irritating, and that fueled his rash streak. “We’d heard no news at Clan Hall of his passing.”
The marshal blinked.
“We’d wondered about Legate Garrard, and the dozen duty reeves who were withdrawn from Clan Hall at the beginning of the year. No news, and no legate to replace him, and no roster of duty reeves. Clan Hall also sent a reeve this way at the beginning of the Flood Rains. Evo, his name is. Do you have news of him?”
The marshal moved his quill to a different spot on the work table.
It seemed to be all the answer Joss was going to get. He had dealt with uncooperative witnesses many times, but there was something about the hushed room, the lack of pillows on which a visitor might settle to make frie
ndly conversation, the rhythmic stroke of the broom outside, and the memory of that darkened inner chamber that unsettled him as few things did. Even dealing with the ospreys and their corrupt ally had not made his skin creep, not like this.
At last, the marshal replied in that innocuous voice. “You’re come into Argent Hall’s territories. Why?”
“I was sent here at the order of the Commander at Clan Hall to find out why Legate Garrard was never replaced, and why we’ve had no word from Reeve Evo. Nor received any news from Argent Hall in almost a year.” When the marshal made no effort to reply, Joss went on. “As it happens, I’ve also heard complaints from merchants that there is trouble both on West Track and on the Kandaran Pass. They claimed that border guards on the Kandaran Pass were in league with ospreys.”
The marshal smiled as does a child who is told a ridiculous story. “Do you believe that?”
“I have proof of it.”
Such a guileless face. “Proof? How can I believe that?”
“I have a man in custody, an ordinand who was in league with the ospreys. Who admits to the crime.”
“Is he with you here?”
“No.”
“Where, then? It’s a serious charge. The Thunderer’s ordinands are the gods’ holy soldiers, famous for their devotion to duty and the straight path. It’s a hard thing to imagine one of them casting aside his oath to hunt with ospreys.”
“He’ll come before the Olossi town assizes. Had Argent Hall no word of these attacks?”
“Who told you of this?”
“Some among Olossi’s merchants tried—” He broke off, and reconsidered. “Word reached Clan Hall of the council’s concerns.”
The marshal touched the quill, but picked up the bell instead and rang it. As in answer, a deeper bell rang twice, breathed twice, rang twice, breathed twice, and rang twice again.
“We’ll speak tomorrow,” said the marshal. “At the parting of day, we take our supper.”
Joss considered gain and loss, and decided he had no choice but to stay. He took leave to tend to Scar, to get the eagle settled for a night in the guesting loft. Scar was the only eagle present in the space. For the first time in his life as a reeve quartering in a reeve hall, Joss did not properly leash the eagle. He wasn’t sure how quickly he would need to leave.
A fawkner’s assistant wearing a slave’s bracelets came by to offer a huge haunch of mutton, but Joss fed Scar lightly and sent the rest away. He remained in the semidarkness talking to the eagle about nothing in particular, just that soothing, mellow chatter necessary to allow the old eagle to adjust to the new surroundings, although all guest lofts were built exactly the same in every hall. But Scar had the patience and calm of a veteran and, when the second bell came, took the hood without fuss.
The same slave who had brought the mutton waited outside the door. They crossed the parade ground, skirted the west loft by an alley running along the sea side of the compound, and moved directly into the hall where the reeves and their community ate together every night under the eye of their marshal. He did not see the young man with scarred chin whose strange warning had raised so many alarms. A place on a bench awaited Joss, but not at the marshal’s table. The marshal ate alone, still in his outdoor clothing. He was served by the old reeve, who had a habit, Joss noted, of tasting each dish before ladling out a portion onto his master’s trencher.
Joss sat at the second-rank table among a flight of experienced reeves, stolid, laconic men and one woman who said nothing, apparently because it was now the custom at Argent Hall to listen to a reading while the meal was taken. A middle-aged woman read in a clear alto from a book of children’s poetry about the origins and functions of the fourteen guilds, known to Joss from his schooling days when he’d been set the whole to memorize. It was as nourishing as straw.
Hew! The forester, strong and stern,
Swings with the axe the blacksmith forged.
Soon comes carter to haul the logs
To the shop where woodwright plies his turn.
Gods, how had he endured it then? Well, he had not, and had been caned on the hands more than once for his tricks when he got bored.
The mention of the carters got him thinking again about his dreams. Strange that he had folded the dying Silver’s words into a dream and given them Marit’s voice, as if to give himself an excuse to fly south straight into the fray rather than return with the wounded Peddo. For twenty years, hers was the only death he had never been able to leave behind.
The poem droned on and on.
Even bramble, healer uses
To give to dyer for handsome blues
Ghastly! He kept himself busy by sampling every dish, although he was careful to eat lightly, to avoid getting too full and thus too heavy. Argent Hall ate well: boiled fish covered with a spicy red chili sauce, rice cake, fried vegetables, nai porridge smothered in butter. Steamed spine-flower petals, heated just until their edges began to curl, were strewn over lamb basted in sharp ginger. The ubiquitous flat-bread and mounds of rice rounded out the meal.
Trenchers were cleared away and cups of wine brought. A cluster of giggling youths dressed in short, sleeveless tunics scurried into the hall. In the pause while this unprepossessing entertainment readied itself, his companions ventured a few comments.
“Clan Hall, is it?” asked the youngest of these veterans. He had a nose once broken but long since healed with a bump and a twist.
“It is,” agreed Joss pleasantly.
They stared at him as though he had grown a second head. The man with the broken nose scratched an elbow.
“Toskala is besieged,” said the woman. “How goes it there if foodstuffs can’t come in or out?”
“Tss! What are you thinking?” demanded Broken Nose as two of the grizzled elders hissed through tight lips. She paled, shaking her head.
“Besieged?” Joss asked, startled and troubled by the comment. “Beleaguered, truly, but Toskala is not under siege. A strange turn that would be!”
“Beleaguered,” said Broken Nose, elbowing the woman.
“That’s right. That’s what I heard.” She wasn’t a good liar.
Broken Nose continued. “That’s what we heard. Refugees. Food shortages. Fighting in the hills. Fields laid waste in the night. What news have you heard, there in the north? What of the regions north of you? Heard you anything?”
Joss wanted to ask them why no one from Argent Hall had sent any manner of communication to Clan Hall this entire year, but the prickling along the back of his neck kept him quiet on this subject. He shrugged instead. “The north is lost to us. Few reeves dare patrol there now. The reeves of Gold Hall and Copper Hall say the same, of their territories that touch anywhere along the borders of Herelia and Vess. No news at all from the high vales, so I’ve heard. But that’s only hearsay. The worst news—this I saw myself—is that High Haldia has come under attack. Under siege. Perhaps that’s what you were thinking of.”
Six of the seven youths fell into the familiar “talking line,” and the seventh raised a stick and mirror-drum and commenced to beat out the pulse. As the storytellers fluttered their hands and stamped their feet, it took him a bit to start picking out the phrases from their gestures, because they were not accomplished: “bird flies to mountain” “the wind of ice weights its wings” “falling! falling!” “a cave” “the spring fountains, an overflowing wine cup carved into the stone” “caught in the current!” “the tumbling water spills into the hidden valley” . . .
This was the familiar Tale of Indiyabu, but he had never seen it performed so crudely. And at such length! Every hamlet and village had a girl or boy who had been trained in the Lady’s garden and could entertain visiting dignitaries with a more graceful rendition; any member of the guild of entertainers would be shocked by this display. He yawned, caught himself, and forced a cough. Two of the older reeves were snoring softly. The woman watched her hands; her fingers twitched, as though they knew the gestures and wished to spea
k. Broken Nose stared at the marshal as if awaiting a signal, but if expressions were anything to go by, there was no love lost between him and the hall’s master. Joss scanned the tables again, but the young man with the scarred chin remained absent. No one made a move to leave. Indeed, the audience seemed lulled into a stupor. By the Herald’s Gate! Now they meant to repeat the entire thing for a third time!
It was a relief when the drumbeat ended, the marshal rose, and the company was allowed to depart. A row of tiny cells lined the southern exterior of the guest loft. Each cell had a sliding window built into the wall above the pallet to let the reeve check on his eagle at any time during the night. A slave indicated the cell he was meant to inhabit. The rest were obviously empty, doors ajar, pallets bare of mattresses, even. It appeared no visitors had stayed here in many months.
He made his last check of Scar for the night, finished his own ablutions, and paced out the cell to get his bearings in the wavering light of a small oil lamp. Four strides from door to pallet; four strides diagonal to the corner to the right of the door where a square chest, hip-high, could hold baggage and, with its lid closed, might also serve as a writing table; side to side the cell was three strides wide. There was a double shelf at the base of the pallet and some hooks set into the wall on which to hang clothing and gear. He slid the window open. The loft was dark and silent. Scar would alert him if anyone came through that way. Still wearing his leathers, he took off his boots, placed his quiver and staff on the floor just to the left of the pallet, and tucked his short sword between him and the wall. He hung the lamp from a hook and blew out the flame. Then he lay down, resting his head on his rolled-up cloak.
Maybe the food had been contaminated with sleeping herbs. Once he closed his eyes, he dropped so fast into slumber that he had a moment of disorientation before he was inexorably dragged under.
The dream unveiled itself in the gray unwinding of mist he has come to dread. He is walking within a forest of skeletal trees, and by this knows he is dead, awaiting rebirth. He is a ghost, hoping to wake up from the nightmare twenty years ago, but the dream has swallowed him and he walks in a world both sleeping and waking that has no Marit in it.
