by Kate Elliott
Foolish. Foolish. Let her pass through Spirit Gate so she can rest. But he cannot let her go any more than he can unbind the harness that ties him to Scar. The Ox’s heart seeks in the heavens that soul which fulfills it. He has romanced, enjoyed, liked, and parted with many women—probably too many—in the second half of his life, but he has never loved any of them.
The mist boils as though churned by a vast intelligence. Here the dream twists into nightmare. As the mist parts, he will see her in the unattainable distance, walking along a slope of grass or climbing a rocky escarpment, a place he can and must never reach because he has a duty to those on earth whom he has sworn to serve.
The door opened.
Out of the darkness a woman’s figure emerges into what is not light but a supernatural glamour. Marit pauses on the threshold. She is so close to him! She is dressed in an undyed linen wide-sleeved jacket whose front panels overlap and are tied off along one side seam. Her trousers are of the kind that herdsmen wear, loose and comfortable, stained at the knees. Her hands and feet are bare, yet as if it is cold, she wears a death-white cape flung back from her broad shoulders. Her gorgeous black hair is braided into a single widow’s spine almost as thick as his arm.
It hurts to look at her.
She does not move forward. She cannot. She cannot speak or act, because she is only a spirit that he dreams as part of his torment. She is not even a ghost, only a shadow to mark his desire.
“Be warned, sweetheart,” she says. “You are in danger. Beware the third blow.”
His heart lurches. It is her voice, her very own, never forgotten! He tries to sit up, but he is paralyzed in truth, sleeping and awake at the same time, unable to shift his limbs.
“Marit!”
“I have broken my oath once already to warn you. Wake now!”
He jolted awake, jarringly alert even though only his eyes opened as the barest sound scuffed the matted floor. He grabbed his sword and sat up so fast that the shadow froze.
“Who’s there?” he said in a low voice.
A cough gave him distance and placement, two strides forward from the door and one to the side.
“I had to come see.” She was taller than Marit. “If it was true what you said.”
“What did I say?” He eased the sword onto his thighs, hilt toward the room and point toward the wall, holding it underhanded in his left hand.
“That you were slow only when you wanted to be. A woman can look a long time before she finds a man who can really take his time.”
Her voice had that drawling tone that teases a man and causes him all manner of comfortable distress. She changed position, and he saw suddenly that she was naked from the waist up, wearing only that short kilted wrap around her hips. She was all suggestive curves. He felt a stirring through skin and flesh, and in that instant of distraction, because men can be so easily distracted, she struck.
She was fast, but he was wide awake and ready. He ducked under her lunge and extended his arm in one stroke, catching her under the arm with a sharp blow from the hilt. That was enough to stagger her, and he looped his lower arm around and over and slapped her hard on the side of the head, catching her cheek with the flat of the blade.
She collapsed onto the floor with a grunt. Her weapon rattled against the pallet and rolled onto her body. He scooped it up by the handle, rolled it in his fingers, tried its weight. It was light, slender, deadly, an assassin’s knife. He knew it as surely as he breathed.
He fished for the chain at his neck and drew up the two treasures that hung there. His fingers brushed the whistle, and for an instant he considered blowing it, to alert Scar, but the pitch would wake other eagles as well. Now was not the time.
Instead, he untied the tiny bag in which he carried his flint. Striking and nursing a spark with the flint, he lit the lamp. Her body was sweedy formed, enticing him. Her braid was wrapped tight and pinned atop her head. Her eyes were closed, and she was breathing shallowly, full breasts rising and falling. . . . He forced himself to look away, to examine the knife. A sigil was carved into the handle, the four-petaled mark of Ushara, the Merciless One, the Devourer, mistress of life, death, and desire. They had found a similar tattoo on the body of that Devouring girl, twenty years ago.
The Devourer eats women and men both, and both women and men serve her, but only women served in her innermost sanctum. There, it was rumored, assassins might be bought who had trained in Ushara’s courtyards, equally adept at seduction or murder, but even a reeve of long standing like Joss had never been able to fix the blame for any mysterious killing on the Merciless One’s secretive hierodules. He had never been able to prove anything.
He sawed off a length of her wrap, rolled up the knife in the cloth, and shoved it into his kit bag. Quickly, he pulled on his boots, strapped on his gear, and left Argent Hall’s guest rooms behind. Scar was already awake and alert, strangely calm, as though he had been warned. Quickly, and in silence, Joss readied the eagle, then shoved open the great door and walked him outside into the empty courtyard. A single lantern burned at the night watch’s tower, overlooking the land side of the compound.
Joss was shaking as he gestured Scar up on the launching post and fastened himself into the harness. A shout rang out from the tower. A second lamp flashed. Scar raised wings and tail and thrust with his legs. No male eagle had a more powerful downstroke than Scar, and he was lifting and moving forward with such strength that he was past the compound’s wall before the sentry got his eagle off the watchtower. Joss got a glimpse of him as they flew past, gaining altitude, seeking an updraft. It was the young man with the scar. He set his eagle after anyway, rising into the night and stroking after Joss.
Sweat poured freely down Joss’s neck and forehead, although the night’s wind off the sea was cool. The heavens were clear, and the stars blazed. Far to the east, the Peacock rose. He turned Scar south-southeast toward Olossi.
As a youth, he had served his year’s apprenticeship with Ilu the Herald. He had a seeking mind that did not veer away from the unknown or inexplicable. Now his heart hammered and his thoughts skipped. He could not think through the troubling things he had seen and experienced at Argent Hall. He could make no sense of the day at all, or even the impossible dream of Marit stepping out of the mist where she had long wandered in the unreachable distance. Of Marit speaking. He ought to think of her, but he could not because he kept seeing that dead Devouring girl from twenty years ago. Although pierced to the heart, she had lost little blood, and her face had worn a rictus grin that had disturbed him ever after. So might the Merciless One smile when she suffers death’s consummatory kiss.
This night, such a knife had been meant for him.
Sweat stung his eyes, and he wiped his forehead and tilted his face to let the wind pour over eyes and nose and mouth. Scar found an updraft, and they rose and rose and rose as the land fell away below them, as dark and still as a sleeping beast. The sea gleamed, reflecting stars.
The reeve from Argent Hall was still pacing him, neither falling behind nor trying to catch up. Eagles were creatures of day, and flew at night only under duress. Scar was already angry, kekking and making his displeasure known with little stabbing motions of that huge beak. Joss didn’t want to put down, but he had enough of a head start out of Argent Hall that he figured it was better to risk the stop rather than let the other man follow.
He and Scar circled down in an open field of rice stubble not yet turned under, a pale expanse where it was unlikely they’d stumble onto any unexpected holes or rills or ditches. It was a risk, but one that paid off as the other reeve landed at the far end of the field, a gap carefully judged to allow an approach without seeming threatening.
Scar flared and spread his wings, disturbed by the difficulty of the night landing, the lack of a roost, and the presence of the other eagle, but after a command from Joss, he tucked his head under his wing and settled in to wait.
Joss unhooked from his harness, hooked the unlit lanter
n to his belt, and kicked through the stubble. The other man met him halfway. He had kept his traveling cloak on, a signal that he didn’t expect a fight. Both raised their staves out in front into “holding.”
“Why did you come after me?” asked Joss.
“You’re really from Clan Hall?”
“So I am.”
“Legate Garrard is dead.”
“How do you know?”
Wind rustled in the dry stalks. Insects chirruped. He smelled a trace of hearth fire, drifting from an unseen farmhouse. A line of mulberry trees rimmed the sea break of the field. It grew suddenly cool, as though the weather had turned back several months to the season of Shiver Sky, but maybe that was just his instinct for trouble shivering to life.
The young man cleared his throat. “Once I speak, I cannot return to Argent Hall. They’ll kill me.”
“They’ll kill you anyway, if it has come to that. They’ll never trust you, knowing you came after me. Tell me what you know. Afterward it’s best you fly to Clan Hall to report to the Commander. Do you know the way?”
“I was there one time, my first year.”
So were they all. It was part of their training.
“I think I can find it,” he added, but he didn’t sound sure of himself. He lowered his staff to “resting,” as a measure of trust, but Joss only spotted the tip of his own against the earth, ready to strike if this proved to be an ambush.
“What’s your name?”
“I’m Pari. That’s Killer.”
“Killer?” He peered through the curtain of night, but the eagle seemed smaller than average and already asleep, head tucked.
“She’s very calm,” said the young man with a hoarse laugh. “Kind of lethargic, actually. I think her first reeve gave it to her as a hope name.”
“Well, then, Pari, I’m Legate Joss, out of Clan Hall. That’s Scar. Why did you come after me?”
The other man was breathing harshly, and he caught back what sounded like a sob. “Ai, where to start? You know, they tell you that the reeves are incorruptible. It’s what they teach you the day you step into the circle. Reeves are incorruptible because the eagles can’t be corrupted. The hells! What a stupid thing to believe!”
“Don’t take it too hard,” said Joss softly. “It’s true about the eagles, anyway.”
“Oh. Sure!” He was aggrieved as only the young can be, when the still waters in which they have gazed all this time are shattered by a tossed stone. “But a dog can no more cleanse his master’s shadowed heart than a child can stop its father from drinking away the wages his family needs for food, or drag its den-crawling mother from clouds of sweet-smoke where she drowns while her children bawl outside.”
“A sight seen too often,” Joss agreed. “What happened at Argent Hall?”
“I’m three years in, and I never knew that reeves did come and go so much. Folk transferred out, and transferred in. Why, I think a hundred reeves come in just in these last three years, and there was already a big turnover before that, so the old ones tell me. And no new reeves chosen for over two years now. That’s even though there’s more than forty eagles who’ve lost their reeves and flown off in the last few years, and never returned.”
Joss shook his head. “I’ve never heard of that happening before. No new reeves chosen at all?”
“Only one who came after me. She’s dead, now, and her eagle flown.”
A nasty feeling was gnawing at his gut, like a lilu turned from tempting woman to its natural form right in the middle of its grazing. “Clan Hall is aware of the transfers, but in truth there’s nothing can be done by the Commander. She has only a supervisory position. But everyone knows it’s disruptive to the eagles to transfer them. It’s done only if necessary.”
“Yeah, it was plenty disruptive here, or so they say, as I’ve never known anything but trouble in Argent Hall. All the ones who had a bad temper, or weren’t getting along in their other hall. Reeves who had hit someone too hard, or drank too much, and one woman who’s addicted to the sweet-smoke, even, though she still flies! One reeve—that would be Horas—they said he murdered a man but nothing came of it when the family tried to get justice. And the reeves at Argent Hall who complained most about the disruption, they were asked to leave and go elsewhere. Or they just left, and weren’t seen again.”
“All this done at the order of Master Alyon?”
Once started, Pari spoke so quickly that Joss had a hard time following him. “I admit Master Alyon was ill, and infirm, there at the end. There were a foursome of veterans who had the running of things. I heard whispers that he was being poisoned. He did get better right toward the end when he brought in that Devouring girl to do his cooking for him and who knows what else besides. That was around the time when he recalled Garrard. Talk was that Marshal Alyon had Garrard in mind for succeeding him. But then comes this man who calls himself Yordenas—not much older than me, mind you!—and first he tells Dovit that he’s out of Iron Hall and then he tells Teren that he’s out of Copper Hall, so there’s some confusion, as you can guess.”
“The eagle would have a band to mark its territory.”
“That’s just it. None of us have ever seen Yordenas’s eagle.”
“How can that be?”
“He says it’s nesting up in the Barrens. But I’ve never heard tell of an eagle gone on its nesting season for that long.”
“It could be. I’ve heard tell of a nesting pair gone most of a year’s time. But it is odd, that he comes to you as a reeve, and yet has no eagle. So what happened then?”
“Master Alyon just up and died one night, and it all changed. We blink, and overnight this Yordenas is sitting in the marshal’s cote and there are more reeves supporting him than opposing him. When Garrard protests, next thing you know Marshal is calling it out as a mutiny and thirty or more are dead and their eagles flown back to the mountains, just like that.”
“Those are the eagles that never came back to choose new reeves?”
“That’s right, most of them. Thirty or forty others left then, reeves and eagles both, although I don’t know where they went. It just gets worse. Patrol routes changed. Marshal closed the gates to outsiders, any outsiders, even folk come to report on trouble in their village or to ask for help. We got word anyway of ospreys on the Kandaran Pass and along the West Spur, and there come some Olossi merchants to beg for our help one night, so Dovit and Teren went out on patrol without permission, but they never came back. That was a two-month back, I think. Most of them I knew from three years back when I first got chosen are gone, except the ones I never liked at all. The others are dead with Garrard. Or they left.”
At last, he took a breath. He was trembling. The sliver of moon called Embers Moon was rising in the east, heralding dawn.
“Why did you stay?” asked Joss.
His chin tilted back. The faint moonlight seemed to catch and gleam on the white scar of his chin. He was Toskala-chinned, like Joss, recently shaven. He looked very young.
“Someone had to.”
Joss grinned sadly. “You’ve courage to have stuck it out.”
Pari shrugged, as if embarrassed or ashamed. “Didn’t do anyone any good.”
“You did what you could. You’ll have to go north. Follow the course of the River Hayi. It runs east-west until the Sohayil Gap; a little past that, the river bends northeast. Once to the Aua Gap, continue north. You can’t miss the River Istri. Any landholder there can tell you in which direction—seaward or ridgeward—Toskala lies, if you don’t recognize the lay of the ground.”
“Where are you going?” asked Pari.
Joss considered. This might be some kind of complicated ploy, and he daren’t risk trusting him, although his heart told him that the young man was being honest. It was hard to playact that kind of righteous, helpless pain.
“I’ve heard tell of this trouble along the West Spur, as I told the marshal. I’m investigating it. What do you know about it?”
“No on
e confides in me,” he said with a tone very like a child’s whine. “Just that caravans were being attacked. Women kidnapped, although that was before my time. I suppose the merchants in Olossi would know about it. It’s their trade that would be hurt.”
“What do you know about the merchants in Olossi? Anything that could help me? Any names? Anything?”
He shrugged. “I’ve went to the Devouring temple a few times, but not recently. Marshal likes to hold us close against him these days, those of us he doesn’t trust. I see reeves flying out solo, so I suppose they’re carrying messages. Maybe to Olossi. I think they have some kind of understanding with the council there, but I don’t know. Anyway, I come from Sund. That’s the territory I know best. I’m not allowed to patrol out on my old rounds anymore. I suppose no one is patrolling there at all.”
“So Yordenas is the name of this new marshal?”
Pari laughed as at a cruel joke. “He calls himself Yordenas.”
“When you get to Clan Hall, be sure to tell all of this to the Commander just as you’ve told it to me. They can check the records, see if such a reeve is recorded.”
“It won’t matter,” said Pari.
“Why not?”
“This is the thing. Garrard stabbed him, when they got in that fight. It was ugly, the things they said, and afterward it was worse. But he didn’t die. He should have died, but he didn’t. A day later he was up and walking like nothing had happened. I think he’s a demon, not a person at all.”
“A stab wound can call out a lot of blood, but do little real damage.”
“So you might think. It was a killing blow, I’m telling you.”
Joss whistled softly, under his breath. He could not make sense of this young man and his passion and his anger and his tendency to slip into a child’s manner of grievance.
“You don’t believe me.”
“I’m not sure what there is to believe.”
