Spirit Gate

by Kate Elliott

  “Matters have not changed since two days ago. Heh. Eh.” He cleared his throat and found a better tone. It wasn’t easy to stand up for himself while keeping his gaze slanted off toward the map. “The most recent caravan up from the empire brought along a mercenary company, two hundred strong. They cleared the roads. Rumor has it that the malcontents on the council will choose this moment to strike. They’ll vote to allow this company to stay and continue safeguarding the southern roads. Meanwhile, Marshal Yordenas awaits word from you as to the disposition of his forces. As I understand it, that reeve who was nosing around lies in the dungeon of the Assizes Tower. I’ve heard it said he’s very ill.”

  “Why have they not simply killed him and have done with the threat?”

  “There were witnesses to his arrest. Questions will be asked.”

  “Look at me!”

  He met the lord commander’s gaze. A stone might have dropped into the pit of his stomach. He was stricken with an intense fear that the cloth walls and ceiling would fall inward, wrap him, choke him, all his breath sucked right out of him by that touch until he was only a dead husk, withering into bones.

  He thought he heard a woman’s voice speak a single word. The lord commander’s gaze shifted away, and Horas dropped hard back into himself. He was sweating, and trembling. The other three men—three dressed in soldier’s jackets and short cloaks and one dressed in humbler garb—were staring at their feet. They were afraid, too. Everyone was afraid. Even, strangely, the lord commander, who brushed his chin with the back of a hand and came a step closer, with a gesture as if he meant to thrust the point of the arrow into Horas’s eye.

  “That’s not good enough. Why haven’t they killed him?”

  “They mean to bring him up on trial at the assizes, that’s all,” Horas said in a rush, tripping over the words because if he directed the lord commander’s anger elsewhere then the man would not be mad at him. “They were waiting for that border captain to be dead, so they’d have a charge to lay on the reeve and evidence to go with it. Now that they have the body, the hearing and trial can go through the proper assizes ritual. That’s how they plan to discredit the council faction that is trying to take over.”

  “It’s taking too long.”

  “Oh, eh, yeh, of course! Clumsy oafs! No wonder they need a new governor. They’re not fit to govern themselves. But I’ve got the Devouring girl with me, the one that killed the border captain, so she claims. She tried to kill the reeve, but failed. She’s saying she’ll go back and finish him off. Not much he can do when he’s stuck in the pit, eh?”

  The lord commander’s gaze sharpened. He sniffed, as if taking in a scent. His teeth showed as lips parted, and his tongue flicked out. “A Devouring girl? Where is she?”

  Horas shuddered. Spiders might crawl on his skin so, to make him shrink away in fear. The man had a cruel voice.

  “Lord Radas. Enough.”

  The words came from beyond an inner wall of gauze. As if in response to that quiet voice, a wind caught the filmy hem of that inner wall and lifted it enough to give him a glimpse into a second chamber hidden away within this temporary shelter. A woman was seated at a low writing table, with her back to him. Just before the curtain fell back into place she raised her left hand and curled her fingers in toward her palm. Then the gauze slid back, and he could not see her.

  He hesitated.

  “Go on,” said the lord commander, voice tight with suppressed fury.

  Horas figured it best to move fast. He had trouble finding the opening. The cloth seemed heavier than it should have, the air so thick it was almost liquid, but he squeezed through and came into a cooler zone. The awning overhead rolled in waves as the wind stroked it. All trace of the outer chamber and the outside world was erased. The isolation made him twitchy.

  She sat cross-legged on a pillow, back board-straight, her hair bound in a single thick braid running true down her spine. The blackness of her hair blended with the night-black cloak hanging from her shoulders, its lower portion draped in graceful folds around her hips and legs. She seemed to be sitting on a spear whose haft and point stuck out on either side. A table rested in front of her. Her body blocked his view of the table except for a few items lined up straight, and parallel to the table’s edge, to her right side. There lay a common dagger, nothing ornamented or fancy, but it looked serviceable; you could stab a man in the guts with such a dagger if he pushed you too far and it would kill him if you got it in deep enough and in the sweet spot. There was also a sharpened, hollow green stick, recently cut from a stalk of pipe-brush, the kind of thing you could use as a stake or to stab through the flesh of a moonfruit and suck out the juices inside. Closest to her elbow lay a narrow wooden box that contained four writing brushes resting on a silk bed with an empty space where a fifth brush must normally reside. That fifth brush was in her hand. The paper on which she was writing was hidden by her body. There was no one else. Perhaps she was the lord commander’s private clerk, his secretary, who took down his decrees and pronouncements and orders.

  Without looking at him, she spoke in a pleasant, friendly, warm voice.

  “Reeve Horas, I am relieved and pleased you have come so promptly. What is your report?”

  He repeated what he had told the lord commander.

  For a while she did not reply. He couldn’t see her writing hand, but that arm rose, bent, retreated, and shifted forward, as she brushed down words. He shuffled his feet, scratched at a bug bite on his jaw, and, thinking of the Devouring girl, gave a reflexive nudge to his crotch.

  “Come around where I can see you.”

  How was it that such mild words could dig into a man’s worst fears? Hot tears filled his eyes, and he hated the Devouring girl, for she had brought this on him, surely. But he walked around to the front of the table, sure that his legs weren’t shaking. He wasn’t weak like those men who pissed themselves, or who fell begging to their knees. He hadn’t even met this woman before. This was just spillover from being on the ugly end of the lord commander’s annoyance, a dangerous thing, truly, but he was a reeve and therefore he had stature no common soldier could possibly gain.

  Aui! After all she was a woman not much older than he was, one who had celebrated three feasts but still waited on the fourth and fifth feasts of life. She was ordinary in all ways, with the ample body best suited to a woman of her years, a round face with regular features such as any hardworking and prosperous householder might have, and confident hands. She was obviously no warrior trained, not like the lord commander, whose sword could stab a man through the guts, whose captains would order men strung up by their thumbs or tongues or ears if they displeased the lord.

  A writing mat had been rolled out on the table and paper placed upon it, weighted with a stone in each corner. The long stick of ink, carved in the shape of a crane with head bent back as if looking over its shoulder, had not been cut, and the ink basin with its sheen of water was clear. The paper remained blank. The hairs of the brush she held in her hand were dry.

  This much he glimpsed before he placed himself directly in front of the table and cast his gaze down because aunties liked young men to stand humbly before them. It was the coin they demanded, if you wanted to eat and be clothed and get work in the village. He clasped his hands behind his back to hide that humiliating tremble.

  “Look at me,” she said kindly.

  Surprised at the request, he looked up into her steady gaze.

  At first he was reminded of the nicer aunties who lived in his village, the ones who swept their porches and weeded their gardens and washed and cooked and spun and tended their silkworms and engaged in their small crafts and gossiped by the well. The ones who said it was best to give a rebellious boy a second chance, because such high spirits might mark the sign of a lad destined for greatness. She was just such a woman, come from a humble background, no different at all.

  No different.

  Not at first. Not until it seemed you were being twisted insid
e out and your secrets pulled like fish from water to gasp out their lives at the mercy of the fisher. Her gaze was a hook caught in his head. The world was clear but it was also swallowed in a haze he could not penetrate. He drowned in memories, each one plucked out and set before him like a gem for sale in the marketplace. Forgotten voices roared in his ears, and every spike of fury and prod of lust and cut of greed and claw of envy stormed in his heart and he was ashamed of it until he thought he would pass out. But he did not pass out, though he wished he could.

  “Assault, rape, murder,” she said with the same matter-of-fact tone an auntie in the market points out which vegetables she wants. “That is just what lies at the surface. A rough start in your life, Horas.”

  “They asked for it!” His hands were stinging, and his heart pounded in his chest so loud it seemed like those drums that had earlier called the army to rest, only he couldn’t rest, only stand there, sweating and shaking and as flushed as if he’d been standing in the sun all through the blasting heat of a blazing afternoon.

  She looked down at the blank paper and set down the brush. Suddenly it was cool again, and he heard wind in the branches, and the murmur of the captains making their plans with the lord commander, and folk bantering outside. The hells! Some of those dogs were chatting up his girl. Their voices drifted through the gauze.

  “Think of me as a dagger,” the Devouring girl was saying in a voice made strong by a laugh bubbling up. “Watch you don’t get pricked.”

  “I’d like to prick you,” replied a wit.

  “My friend, you’ll need to sharpen that dull point of yours if you want to be pricking anything.”

  “She’s handling them with ease,” said the woman. “I suppose such dreary banter is the kind of thing hierodules become accustomed to when they venture outside the temple. Within the temple walls, no one dares act with such disrespect. The ceremonies are sung and danced and paced out in their proper order, and with proper respect to law and custom. Those who walk in the hand of the Devourer are holy in the sight of the land. It falls ill with the ones who think only of their own lust and not of the holy act of joining. Isn’t that right?”

  He slid his gaze sideways so as to avoid hers, but he knew that if she demanded he look at her again, he would have to.

  “I believe that Wakened Crane is council day in Olossi,” she continued, without making him look. “Which is today. Go to Olossi immediately. Speak in private to their leader and tell him that these mercenaries must under no circumstances stay in the Hundred. After this, attend the council as a silent observer. That will be message enough to the council members who may think to disagree with those who rule them. Watch and mark who speaks and what they say. Set the hierodule on her road, to eliminate the imprisoned reeve. Then return afterward to Argent Hall and tell Marshal Yordenas that I am displeased with him.” Her fingers brushed the hilt of the dagger. “Just that. Nothing more. He’ll know what I speak of. As for you, Horas, know that I will know. I am watching you now. I do not like disrespect toward those who are holy in the sight of the gods.”

  She picked up the dagger and turned it in her hands as though it had a message for her. This was his dismissal.

  He staggered outside and stood there panting until the world stopped spinning. When no one offered him so much as a drink to cool his parched throat, he cursed the lot of them for selfish bastards, but not out loud.

  “Come on,” he said to the Devouring girl.

  She looked surprised but followed without asking questions. His thrill in the day, in the catch, in the promise, was ruined. On West Track, the army was being drummed to its feet. Tumna waited in the open ground beyond. He hooked into the harness and hitched her in before him, and she was puzzled but cautious, trying to read his mood.

  “We’ll go quickly,” he said. “Get there as fast as we can.”

  That was all. They flew to Olossi and though he thought once or twice of the things the Devouring girl had promised to do to him and let him do to her, fear doused his rod. He showed her no disrespect, and without his charm to loosen her tongue, she made no offer.

  36

  The dream unveiled itself in the gray unwinding of mist, but this time the mist did not end, nor did it part. There was offered both drink and food on a tray lowered down through a hatch in the ceiling. In a haze he gobbled down what was there, but it all came right back up again. Much later, he drank, coughed up some but kept down a little, and after dozed fitfully. He could not remember where he was, only that he was so terribly thirsty.

  There it was again, the bowl, and he drank, but the liquid churned in his stomach and he retched it all up. The effort exhausted him. His head was shattered with pain. Through these choppy waves he sank into the depths.

  Later, he discovered he had emerged out of deep waters into a kind of waking delirium.

  Woozy-headed, he tried to make sense of his surroundings. There was an awful stink, and when he managed to hold up a hand he was after all holding up two hands; both blurred even while he felt he had another arm braced under him. Had he grown a third hand? The effort of thinking and moving made his guts lurch and bowels go loose, and he coughed and heaved and felt the fog overwhelm him once again.

  He dreamed, but in fragments: the pain in his head; Scar; a woman inviting him to her bed with a sly smile; a field of rice stubble; sipping from a bowl of water whose pure fragrance drowned him; the deserted temple up in the high hills of the Liya Pass that stank of fear and shame. Here he is wandering. Where has Marit gone? He tries to call after her, but his voice makes no sound. He will never find her.

  A click and a scrape woke him.

  “For shame!”

  He stirred, hearing a voice young and feminine and pleasing.

  “Is it right you allow this man to lie in his filth? He looks ill. Is he even conscious?”

  “He’s a murderer.” That was a man’s voice, low and rumbling like sifting through gravel.

  “Has he been seen at the assizes yet?”

  “No, verea. He has not.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Not our business to know, verea.”

  “If he hasn’t been seen at the assizes, then he’s only accused. The magistrate hasn’t read the sentence. You’d think it best if he came to the court smelling like a decent person. If you won’t clean him up, I will.”

  “Not allowed, verea. He’s not allowed up, nor anyone allowed down.”

  He cracked one eye, then the other, but it wasn’t easy; some dried substance had crusted them over. The walls—for there were walls all around him—were stone built, and not so very far away. He was curled up in one corner on stone that was both slicked in patches with a drying stink and elsewhere rimed with a dried coating that crackled under him as he tried to shift up, to sit, to see where those voices were coming from. The walls were plain, with no openings.

  “He’s waking,” said the young woman’s voice. “Do something, I pray you!”

  He gagged and his stomach heaved again, but he had nothing in him. His throat was raw; each swallow was a stab of pain. His head throbbed. His clothes were stiff and nasty, and it became clear to him immediately that he had soiled himself while ill. But at least now he could sit up, blinking in the flickering lantern light. Where was that light coming from?

  Ah! It was above.

  He squinted up. The movement hurt his neck. Far above, floating in a sea of darkness, was a ceiling constructed of night or, possibly, planks of wood. There was an opening cut within them, and floating in this hatchway the veil of mist.

  Yet as he stared, the gray mist hovering over the opening vanished abruptly to be replaced by a man’s disinterested face. The light was withdrawn, a lantern hauled up on a rope, and he sat in blackness trying to recall who he was and why he was here. Footsteps cracked away down an unseen corridor above him, quickly swallowed in the echoless stone.

  “I like that,” said the gravel voice.

  He was answered by a wheedling tenor. “That
the Silver girl who always comes?”

  “That one? How should I know? Always got their faces covered, don’t they?”

  “Heh! But you’d recognize the voice.”

  “Yeah, I would do. Same one. Seems nice enough, but you know how it is.”

  “Neh, I don’t, for I’ve never stood so close to a Silver before, not even one of the men. Never seen one of their women. I thought they weren’t allowed into the light.”

  “You’re come recently from the country, aren’t you!”

  “No shame in that!”

  “Neh, neh, never meant there was. Those Silvers, the women are so ass-ugly that they daren’t show their faces in the light of day where others can see. That’s what I hear.”

  “You ever seen one of their faces?”

  “Not me! It’s a curse if you do, for they’ve certain tricksy magics, you know. Curses and rots and suchlike. Make your cock fall off if you so much as look at them crosswise. They paint their hands with all manner of spells, did you notice that?”

  “I thought she had a skin disease on her fingers.”

  “Oh, no, those are spells. Not even tattoos. Spells, painted on their hands. It’s the only part of them you ever see. Nay, don’t mess with them, I tell you.”

  “Aui! I won’t!”

  “She’s all right, though, that one. She comes through and brings food for the prisoners whose families have no way to feed them. Else they’d starve, you know.”

  “What would make a person go and do that?” asked Tenor. “If family can’t help you, then why would you go and trust a stranger? Probably better to die.”

  “Don’t know why she does it. They’re outlanders, you know. Comes of their peculiar customs, I’d wager.”

  “I did hear one thing,” added Tenor cunningly. “That they pay off those who would make trouble for them. That’s why they never come to trouble before the law.”