Shadow Gate

by Kate Elliott

  “Some people can’t abide heights. That’s a strange thing about the eagles. They never choose a person who fears heights so much he can’t bear to go aloft.” He gestured meaningfully at Kesh. Your turn.

  “Eh, emm, how do reeves get chosen?” Now that he thought about it, he wondered. “I always thought it was other reeves who picked out likely candidates.”

  “Not at all,” said the reeve in a lively voice, although he wasn’t smiling. As he spoke, he scanned the ruins. “Eagles choose, not reeves nor any other person. Some do try to put forward certain young men or women.

  We’ve been offered bribes. But it makes no difference to the eagles. They will choose at their own—”

  A man shrieked. An object slammed against stone, and metal clattered. The reeve leaped from the wall, dashed across the open space, and ran out of sight around the building. Kesh grabbed the horses and pulled them away from the trough.

  The reeve backed into view, retreating against the attack of two desperate men. One slapped at him with a staff, while the other cut wildly with an axe. They were not well-trained fighters; the reeve punched away their strokes easily, but he could make no leeway because they were crowding him.

  Kesh drew his own sword, but before he could step into the fray, Bai slipped around the other side of the building, climbed over the trough, and raised an arm. She flicked her hand. A blade winked. The man with the axe staggered, fell forward onto his face with a knife lodged in his back. The other man yelped, and the reeve broke inside his guard and twisted the staff out of his hands.

  “Down! Put your hands out to the side!”

  The man dropped to his knees, ripping at one sleeve, clapping a hand over his mouth as if stifling a scream.

  The reeve slapped his shoulder with the flat of his blade. “On your face! Hands out where I can see them!”

  Bai nudged the axeman with a foot, yanked out the knife, and rolled him over. “He’s dead.” She turned back to the reeve, who stood over the prisoner. “Kill that one, too.”

  “He’s surrendered to my authority. We are not judges, or Guardians, to render a verdict. He must be taken to trial at the assizes.”

  She shrugged. “Do you mean us to escort him and feed him the entire way? He’ll eat our food, and try to kill us. It’s a cursed long walk back to Olossi, I’ll have you know. I haven’t the luxury of eagle’s wings to take me in two days what a earth-bound person must walk in ten.”

  “It’s the law,” the reeve said.

  “I agree with Bai,” said Kesh. “Bad enough we have to keep watch for these bandits, but to have to nurse one along who just tried to kill us. . . . The hells! How many were hiding here?”

  “Five.”

  “Where are the other three?”

  The prisoner shuddered, seemed about to push himself up. Bai’s intent gaze fixed on him, but the reeve placed a foot on the back of the prostrate man to hold him down.

  Bai wiped her knife’s blade clean on the dead man’s tunic, then opened the pouch the man wore at his belt and tossed its contents onto the ground beyond the pooling blood. “Vey. A spoon. A needle with thread. A razor for shaving. Flint. Not much to show for himself.”

  “They abandoned their supplies when they fled Olossi,” said the reeve.

  She laughed, a startling sound. “It’s a story good enough for the tales. The few against the many. Oil of naya, and rags set alight. Eagles swooping down from the sky.”

  Kesh was still staring at the dead man. He’d seen death in plenty, walking the roads as a merchant’s factor. There are many ways to die, and in time all people do die, even if Beltak’s priests talked of a garden where believers dwelled after death on this earth. That place had sounded a better fate than the hells that greeted most folk, but Kesh wasn’t sure he believed in hells or gardens. Certainly the sight of a dead man, and a prisoner lying so still as if pretending to be dead, made his stomach hurt. The reeve looked angry. Bai glanced toward the path.

  “Here come Qin horsemen,” she said, shading her eyes. The sun’s westering light fired the Soha Hills. “You sure you don’t want me to kill that one?”

  The reeve had not slackened his control of the prisoner. His frown made Kesh smile and Bai look twice. “If we allow the law to be altered for our own convenience, then we will have murdered the law anyway.”

  “There comes a time when change overtakes the traveler, as it says in the Tale of Change.”

  “Not so great a change as to abandon the law,” he protested. “You’re the one who agreed to return to the temple because of your respect for the law and the gods.”

  She lowered her hand. “It’s true we can’t abandon the law for our own convenience. But I serve the Merciless One, not the reeve halls. Anyway, we can’t know how great a change we face. We can’t know what may happen next. We must be ready for anything.”

  Sometimes people talked with words, and sometimes they spoke with looks, and sometimes the way their posture altered communicated their emotion and the words they hadn’t uttered. Kesh watched Bai and the reeve, and he knew they were talking but in words and meanings that excluded him. He was alone, as always. Rescuing Bai had not brought him a companion. She had her own path, and it seemed to him that she treated him little differently than she did the horses, as a beast she needed for the time being to make her way.

  “Kesh,” she said. Hearing his name, his spirits lifted. “Taking the horses to drink at the trough made the bandits think we hadn’t noticed they were hiding there.”

  He twisted out a smile. He’d had no idea bandits were hiding here, and he had a good idea the reeve hadn’t either. Only Bai had. Ushara trained her hierodules and kalos in the art of love. But the Devourer was also called the mistress of life, death, and desire, the Merciless One, and in the inner precincts of her temples another sort of acolyte was trained.

  Riders appeared on the path. Dust settled around them as they halted. One man dismounted and walked across the ridge path to meet them in the fort. He greeted Joss casually as the reeve sheathed his sword.

  “Tohon, this is Zubaidit,” said Joss, “and her brother.”

  “I recall you,” said the Qin soldier with a respectful nod and the flash of a grin directed at Bai. He paid no attention to Kesh at all. “I’m Tohon, chief of this small company.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “I remember you and your captain. Your soldiers did good work in that battle, and better work later, so the reeve tells me.”

  “We accomplished what was needed,” he said, a statement neither modest nor boastful.

  “How is the road?” the reeve asked.

  “There are others fled ahead of us, but we are now strung out far from our lines. Better if they escape than if we push out too far north and get cut off.”

  “Yes,” the reeve agreed. “It is time to turn back. We’ve done as much as we can for now. If you will, Tohon, escort these two back to the temple of Ushara outside Olossi. I must return to Argent Hall. Send a messenger ahead of you, and I’ll meet you at the temple.”

  Tohon scratched his chin. “Is this temple the place where a man can walk in with no coin in his hand and a woman will have sex with him? And there is no shame in it?”

  “How do folk sate their desires in your country if there is no Devouring temple?” Bai asked. “Or do the Qin imprison women in cages as it is said they do in the Sirniakan Empire?”

  Tohon had an interesting face, of the kind of man Kesh did not mind bargaining with: He knew how much he wanted to pay and would bargain without malice until a deal was struck.

  “Our daughters and wives are not so free in what they will give to others,” he said to Bai, “But neither are we barbarians. We are not like the Sirni.”

  “Then come to the temple, and be welcome.” She finished wiping her hands. With a gesture, she called Kesh. “Let’s go. We’ve got a long walk before us.” She looked at the reeve. “Will we meet there, Marshal Joss?”

  He looked troubled as he examined the dead man
and the living prisoner, now silent and still. “I suppose we will. Here’s a prisoner, Tohon.”

  “That one? He’s dead.”

  “The hells!” The reeve jostled the man with a foot. When he got no reaction, he knelt and turned him over. Sightless eyes stared. Brown foam stained the mouth.

  “Poison,” said Bai.

  “Did you see him take it?”

  “I saw him die. Didn’t you?”

  Without replying, the reeve walked to the wall, and lifted his bone whistle to his lips to call his eagle. A hot wind rose out of the basin, humming among the stones. The sun beat down. Kesh wiped sweat from his brow as he tugged the horses forward.

  “He lives too much in the past, and can’t see how change is overtaking us,” said Bai in a low voice, but her gaze stayed on the reeve.

  “I’m just glad the man poisoned himself and spared us the trouble of guarding him. Bai! Must you stare like a lackwit at the very man who’s destroyed our plans for a new life?”

  “He’s a fool,” she added, but her eyes said something else.

  THE ENVOY AND the girl flew north along the shore of the Olo’o Sea, halting during the day to rest and water the horses. The rich farmlands of the Olo Plain gave way to sparsely settled drylands. Irrigated fields and tidy villages became separated by tracts of pastureland and finally by the wilds of scrub grasslands as the land rose steadily toward the foothills. They did not fly high enough to see the peaks of Heaven’s Ridge, the mountain range that ran like a huge stockade all along the northwestern border of the Hundred. By late afternoon he began to seek a place where they might shelter for the night.

  In a place where a silver stream spilled into the sea, she indicated by gesture and action that she wanted to make camp. Trees crowded the stream’s banks, spreading upstream and along a gully. Thickets of assertive chamber-bells in flower spilled into the scorpion grass that carpeted the far hillside. Spiny broom mingled with carob bush.

  She took the horses. He walked a wide circuit from the shore, tasting the air for threat. He allowed his sense of the world to expand until the smallest things touched him: the snuffling of a red deer through a stand of pipe tree; the rattle of a pair of yellow caps within the cover of the prickly-branched chamber-bells; the respiration of blue tranquillity flowers, petals quivering with each touch of the breeze. The gasp of breath as life, and spirit, escape a living creature.

  He stood, turned his head, listened.

  Footsteps crashed through brush. A mouth panted. There came a branch-splintering tumble, a grunt, and then a cough of triumph. The salt heat of blood spilled onto the wind. He ran back to the camp, his face hot and his hands cold with fear.

  With the other arrow, she had killed a small red deer, slit its throat, and hung it from the branch of the largest nearby tree, hindquarters up and head down. She had filled his good bronze cup with deer’s blood. Her lips were stained as red as a jarya’s as she looked up and, seeing his hurried approach, offered him the cup.

  “Neh, neh, I am sure I do not care for any of that,” he said, swallowing a bitter taste in his own mouth. To drink blood fresh from the animal was a barbaric custom known among the lendings or the herdsmen in the Barrens but not among the civilized city folk where he’d been bred and raised. Yet as the thought struck him, his revulsion vanished as he paused to watch what she would do next.

  She drained the cup and set it aside. With his machete in hand, she wandered into the trees. He followed her, taking the cup, which he rinsed out in the stream. She tested first this tree, then that. She tore off strips of bark and twisted them; she chopped down saplings and bent them, testing their spring and strength. With a quickening of breath, she saw what she wanted: the tree known as silver-bark, which usually preferred higher ground and a cooler climate. Somehow, a scattering had taken root in a damp depression where the stream had made its bed in former years. She measured, then cut down one that was more than a sapling but not yet truly a tree. This together with two saplings she dragged back through the undergrowth to their camp.

  He watched, not wanting to interfere, although he set up a shelter against the rains that might come in the night. She took out every item he possessed and sorted them: The iron pot and tripod legs she kept beside her, the cup and leather bottles she set aside. Flint and knives and awl and shovel she set beside the pot. He caught in his breath when she examined the writing box, but she placed it unopened back in the saddle bags with the small brass lamp and strings of vey and leya. Needles, leather, cordage and straps she recognized; the scissors she puzzled over.

  First, she cut three long strips of wood, like backbones, out of the trees she had felled.

  Dusk interrupted her, but in the morning she set to work. While bark boiled in the pot, she skinned the deer, then butchered it. She carefully pulled and scraped off the glistening sinew from its back and neck and legs. She cleaned and washed skin, sinew, and membranes. She rendered fat and boiled glue stock, cooling it in hollows in bare rock. She cut down saplings and shaped them into arrows. She practiced with the captured bow.

  Her industry silenced him; he had not before seen her work to such purpose, and he did not want any word he uttered to distract her, for what she did now revealed much about what she was and where she might have come from.

  15

  They reached Olossi at last, and in the temple dedicated to Ushara, the Merciless One, the All-Consuming Devourer, Keshad scratched along his jaw into the fresh growth of new beard, trying to get out the dust that chafed his skin. A dozen Qin soldiers sat on a bench in the courtyard while Bai scolded him in a low voice as Magic hissed.

  “You have to wait here with them. Explain the way things go. Make sure they don’t insult any of the hierodules or kalos.”

  “Why not just let them wait outside the temple while you attend the council? Outlanders can never be properly respectful in the temple. You ought to know that.”

  “If the Qin truly intend to settle here, they must learn our ways. Since they have to wait for me anyway, this is a perfect opportunity to begin. So, you’re responsible for their behavior.”

  “Me? They don’t even like me!”

  “Stop whining, Kesh.”

  Mischief parted her mouth in a brief, mocking smile.

  With the ginnies on her shoulders, Bai sauntered to the white gates that led into the garden of the Hieros, the innermost sanctum of the temple. The Qin soldiers watched her go, but Kesh couldn’t tell if their interest was sexual or a more masculine form of comradely respect. Certainly during the long ride here she had joked and sparred with the soldiers in the most casual manner. She was not as physically strong, one to one, but she was quick, fearless, toughened to pain, and well trained in every kind of dirty trick. The soldiers had liked that about her. Of course they had ignored Kesh.

  The white gates opened a crack, and Bai slipped inside. A hush settled over the Heart Garden where Kesh and the Qin sat. Men shifted, toying with their hands or shuffling their feet. One rose, turning toward the entry gate, ready to leave.

  “Shai, sit down,” said Tohon.

  The young man sat.

  The glorious blue and violet stardrops of Kesh’s previous visit had been stripped bare by the rains, but the rest of the garden had bloomed, and the woozy scent of flowering musk vine overlaid everything. It made you open your eyes and look around, aware of the sharp, bright beauty of the world.

  “Heya! Zubaidit’s brother! Where are the whores?” asked Chaji, the soldier with pretty eyes and the features that most passed for good looks in the Hundred.

  As if his words were a summons, the gates of gold opened without a sound. Four young women and one young man strolled out to look over the foreigners. The kalos was dressed in a kilt and vest, while the four hierodules wore taloos draped fetchingly around their figures.

  One of the hierodules was a tall, lanky girl with a teasing grin. “I’m Walla,” she said to Kesh. “Do you remember me?”

  He tried not to stare at the swe
ll of her breasts under the tightly wrapped taloos. Every part of him remembered her, although he’d never touched her.

  “You’re Bai’s brother. You thought you were so smart, but you two are in deep trouble now. Hah!”

  Chaji stood and grabbed Walla by the forearm. “I take this one.”

  The look she turned on him should have killed him; he didn’t even notice as he tightened his grip. The other holy ones became very quiet and very still. Even the breeze seemed to falter and catch its breath. Tohon rose. The younger soldiers watched with steady gazes.

  “Eiya!” Kesh made a show of getting up with a hefty sigh. “That’s not how you do it! There are customs to be followed. If you offend the holy ones you’ll never be allowed to pass the gate a second time.”

  Chaji, despite his pretty eyes or perhaps because of them, had a spoiled temperament. He stared blankly at Kesh and did not remove his hand from Walla’s shapely arm.

  Tohon said, “This is a brothel. We choose one. Coin changes hand with the mistress of the place. We get our pleasure. She gets the coin. We leave. Neh?”

  “There are times I wonder why the Merciless One opens her gates to all,” murmured the kalos to Walla as the other three rolled their eyes, looking disgusted. “They’re such savages. In their lands, those who should be allowed to offer pleasure freely are slaves forced to the work.”

  “No,” said Kesh to him, “those who might offer freely aren’t allowed to. It’s considered shameful. Those who are slaves are forced to the work whether they wish it or no.”

  Now he had shocked them. Here in the southwest, where they entertained the most traffic from outlanders of any of the temples, the holy ones ought to have known better. By their horrified expressions, they did not.

  “The customs of your country are not the customs here,” said Kesh to Tohon. When he looked at Walla he received for his pains another mocking smile that made him sweat. “This is not a brothel. No coin changes hands. This is a holy temple. The holy ones give freely because they serve the goddess Ushara, the mistress of war, death, and desire.”