by Kate Elliott
“The hells!”
He hadn’t thought the strike force could really ride that far, that fast, but cursed if they hadn’t managed it: about three hundred riders, a mix of Qin and local men who’d been training with them. Joss signaled with his flags.
Eagles closed in, thirty strong. Below, the strike force approached at a ground-devouring pace, pounding up the road with their remounts left behind for the final dash. Before the enemy could break north into the forest, the eagles flew low and dropped oil of naya in their path, driving them back toward the road. In confusion, they fled. The unluckiest caught a scrap of the unquenchable fire on their bodies. Those who ran screaming into the water still burned.
In the direction of the road, the clash of arms rang with ugly vigor, the shouts and screams of a battle engaged. But Joss’s attention was caught by a throng clamoring after the cloaked man, who was riding away into the forest. He was abandoning his own troops. Reaching open space, the horse opened its wings and flew.
“There, Scar!” But the eagle did not fix his keen eyes on the other beast. Even Joss found himself losing track of the horse’s flight, as if it literally possessed less substance in the air than on the ground, fading like mist under sun.
He wasn’t going to lose the cursed Guardian after all this!
He yanked ruthlessly on the jesses, and at first Scar swept a full circle and only reluctantly pulled in the direction Joss directed him. There! A wink of light stung the reeve’s eye. He followed sparks until he flew over a narrow ridge overlooking the booming ford. He tugged on the jesses and, sluggishly, Scar obeyed, gliding down until they skimmed low over the rock and, with a final tug on the jesses, landed at one end.
He’d seen Guardian altars as a young man, when he had defied the holiest law and, after the first transgression on Ammadit’s Tit, gone looking for other altars, trying to understand why the Guardians were lost. Why Marit had died.
Now he had followed a man who by any measure could be identified as a Guardian. Yet he saw neither horse nor man on the ridge, only a shimmering of light above a glimmering pattern etched into the rock. Was that a shadow of horse pacing to the center of the labyrinth? Did a ghostly figure walk the maze, no more substantial than fog rising off the ground at dawn?
He unhooked and ventured forward, then looked back over his shoulder. Scar had fallen into a stupor, head tucked under a wing. The reckless anger that had scarred his youth slammed back in all of its bitter fury. He’d killed two men today, stuck them like pigs. A battle had been fought, and many had died, and even if he wasn’t sure the enemy soldiers didn’t entirely deserve death after the misery they had no doubt inflicted on others far more innocent, he still could not wipe the taste from his tongue. He did not like the world as it had become. But that didn’t mean he could ignore it.
To the hells with the laws! What did it matter, when his dreams in the form of Marit whispered that Guardians walked again in the world to seek justice, and meanwhile those who met Guardians in the living world called them demons?
The path shone faintly. He set one foot down, followed with the second, and walked into the maze on the trail of a thing he could not explain. At each turn he looked onto a new vista, a distant landscape: smooth ocean waves; a ruined tower sited above a tumble of rocks which, before it flashed out of view, he recognized as Everfall Beacon; a tangled forest that was surely the Wild; the flat gleam of the Olo’o Sea just turning out of the shadows into the dawn’s light.
The visions made him dizzy. Voices whispered urgently.
“. . . I escaped from Indiyabu . . . she has corrupted them, thus are we lost . . . surely not, for if we keep our strength and our heart within us, we can still fight back . . . it is not possible for me to struggle any longer, take the mirror and give it to the one who returns in my place.”
Don’t turn your back, Marshal Alard had been used to say, but Joss could not bring himself to see if ghosts crowded behind him, murmuring in his ear.
He stumbled into a depression in the center of the labyrinth. A woman waited, plump, dark, attractive, smiling but with sorrow awake in her eyes, her hands talking in the secret language of the Guardians. He walked through her before he realized she wasn’t there. The rock sloped sharply into a bowl-like hollow. Light flashed, blinding him. An unknown force spun him halfway around.
Aui! He clawed at rock as the ground gave way beneath his feet.
He clung to one side of the ridge, a finger’s clutch away from falling to his death into the trees below. He’d been tossed out. He’d broken the boundaries once again.
But cursed if he’d let it go this time. Grunting and straining, he climbed to the top. By the time he flopped down on level ground, his hands were bleeding and the knees of his leathers were badly scraped. He lay there for a while, the wind blowing over him, and panted until his head stopped whirling and his muscles ceased quivering.
At last, he regained the strength to raise his head. Not a stone’s throw away, Scar slumbered. As for the rest, the altar lay exactly as he had left it, glittering but empty. Forbidden ground, it had cast him away.
The Guardian had vanished.
49
“Recite again the hundred and one altars.”
Marit laughed. “My head hurts from everything you’ve taught me.”
Her companion, the nameless woman wearing the cloak of night, smiled. “A rest then, before we walk. This is a particularly lovely view.”
They sat at their ease at the edge of a rock altar ringed by a thorny tangle of flowering purple and white heart’s ease. The rocky ledge overlooked the vale of Iliyat, Lord Radas’s ancestral home. Under clearing skies, neatly tended fields surrounded tidy villages, everything in order and no one moving on the roads.
“It’s very quiet,” said Marit.
“No trouble disturbs those who labor and build. Isn’t that as it should be?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you frown, Ramit?”
She could not speak her thoughts aloud: A pleasant woman with an agreeable philosophy and a concerned demeanor ought not to be marching with an army that burned villages and “cleansed” folk by stringing them up from poles to strangle under the weight of sagging arms.
“It’s hard to explain,” she said, testing a dozen phrases and discarding them all. “I see that the vale of Iliyat lies at peace, which Haldia surely does not. Yet how do I know those who live below have peace in their hearts and justice in their villages? How do I know that the folk in High Haldia deserved to be overrun? How can an army bring justice? Isn’t that the question the orphaned girl asks in the Tale of the Guardians? Didn’t the gods agree with her?”
“So they did.” The woman nodded. Her hair was pulled back and braided without ornament, suggesting a woman of simple tastes but a complex mind. “We must never forget that the gods came because of her cry for justice. But there are many forms of coercion. Brute force is only one of them. It’s not always easy to know which form of coercion causes the deepest harm, today, or next year, or when a child who is a toddling child now is stooped with age. Is it better to live quietly in servitude or die seeking freedom?”
“Why should those be our only choices?”
She nodded. “We ask questions because we want to understand. Yet knowledge can be painful. Still, despite pain, we desire knowledge because, like a sown seed, it will flourish and bear fruit if properly tended.”
It was hard to argue with such platitudes, so Marit said nothing. In truth, the woman had instructed with seemingly infinite patience and a soothing demeanor: how the horse must be groomed and the wing feathers properly cared for; that the altars were holy spaces where Guardians replenished their spirit. They could survive for long periods without entering an altar, but they would grow weak and even appear to age without water from the holy spring to strengthen them.
“Are you ready to try again?” her companion asked.
“Aui! Yes.”
They rose and set foot at the entrance t
o the labyrinth, Marit in front and her companion behind her with fingers brushing Marit’s left shoulder blade. Marit imagined a knife thrust up under her ribs, and shook the image away.
“What is it, Ramit?”
“Just shaking the cobwebs loose. I was never good at memorization. That’s why the Lantern’s hierophant wouldn’t take me for my apprentice year!”
She laughed, the slight pressure of her hand shifting Marit forward. “I, also. Impossible to line up one after the next. But here you need only look, and remember. Soon you will have visited all these places, and you will know them in your heart as well as with your eyes.”
Marit paced the labyrinth, speaking each turn out loud. “Needle Spire. Everfall Beacon. Stone Tor. Salt Tower. Mount Aua.” The first were easy, but soon she faltered, recalling some from her own travels and others too unfamiliar to place.
Her companion reminded her in the voice of a patient teacher. “Thunder Spire . . . Far Tumble . . .”
They twisted, now seeing onto an overcast ridge with a faint booming like an echo.
“Aui!” cried Marit, for a presence waited there, green and flowering, as ordinary as a burgeoning rice field and yet with a hidden layer of rot deep in its roots.
“Who are you?” Raising an arm, he swung like a man grabbing for and missing a thrown rope. “Eihi! Mistress! I was hoping you would walk!”
“What is it, Bevard?” asked the woman. “You are making progress gathering the troops?”
“Eiya! I got some, but now I’m pursued, my companies trampled and killed. We were ambushed at the river! They dropped fire out of the skies!”
“Come back,” she said. “The army has reached Toskala. Negotiations should now be complete. You did as you were told.”
He caught in a sob like a child reassured. Marit sheared away from his presence, not knowing why he creeped her so; she hurried on, forgetting to name the angles. Finding the spring and the mares at the center, she knelt, trembling, and gulped down the cold liquid until her throat burned.
“Sheh!” Her companion arrived, filled her bowl, and drank with polite sips.
“I’m sorry. I was just startled by coming across him like that, so suddenly.”
“I didn’t mean you. You’ll learn in time to feel the presence of another before you meet. I meant rather his difficult circumstances. Bevard is not a true leader; he’s working beyond his capabilities, not a problem you will have, I feel sure. Just be patient.”
Just be patient, Marit thought. Be patient, and learn everything you can. She looked up, and the woman smiled so reassuringly that Marit opened her mouth to confess her real name. Warning stamped. Marit shut her mouth, leashing her bowl to her belt.
“What now?” she asked as she rose.
“We must cut short our journey and return to Toskala. Or I must, to oversee our meeting with the Toskala council.”
“With Toskala’s council? May I attend?”
“You are free to attend, if you wish.”
Was it a genuine offer, or a test? If ever there was a person Marit could not comprehend, this woman was that one, calm, thoughtful, and yet nameless. Only demons have no names.
“I’ll come with you.”
She nodded, as if she had expected that answer all along.
BUT WHEN THEY returned to the army’s camp outside the walls of Toskala, Marit found herself observing a council of war. The flavor of the air and the tension in the stances of the soldiers assembled in the tent kept her alert.
Lord Radas paced beside a large table on which lay a map of the city and the surrounding environs. “At the sixth bell, tonight, the gates of Toskala will be opened, and we will march in.”
The hells! She’d missed something major, for sure.
“At first, there will likely be resistance from certain elements of Toskala’s militia. Afterward, due to confusion sown in their ranks by our allies, we will triumph. Let this command pass back through the ranks, cohort commanders to company captains, company captains to cadre sergeants, and sergeants to each member of their cadre. Kill those who fight. The others, do not touch. Each soldier among you will be judged, and those who have broken this command will meet justice, which is death.”
Marit twitched the hanging aside to look into the smaller interior room behind, where Hari lay on a carpet. His cloak still smothered him, but his chest rose and fell. Otherwise he gave no sign of being alive. Kirit, sitting in silence beside Marit, looked in, too, and her grim little face creased in such a grim little frown that Marit wished heartily she could know what the outlander was thinking, or what the girl had seen or heard during the days Marit and the woman wearing the cloak of night had been away from camp.
“How much fighting can we expect, lord?” asked one of the commanders, addressing the map. “Maybe some have allied themselves with us, but the rest of the defenders will fight fiercely since they are fresh, lacking neither food nor water and with their courage still high. Might we not sit out the siege a while longer to sap their strength?”
“Is your courage not equal to the task? The sooner we have taken over an intact Toskala, the less likely reeves will be willing to drop oil of naya lest they burn down the entire city even with us in it. Or do you question our plans?”
They all kept their heads down, like cringing dogs. Marit supposed a man could get used to having folk walk around him in that posture. He might come to like it, expect it, resent those who did not truckle.
She could no longer delay. She did not want to desert Hari. Curse him. Yet she must.
Tens of thousands of people lived in Toskala, and many thousands more had crowded into the city’s five quarters in flight from the army. Someone had to warn the defenders of Toskala that traitors within the city meant to betray them—tonight.
Lord Radas went on. “At dusk, assemble your companies and move in silence to the gates. Account for me the disposition of your cohorts.”
“What about you?” Marit asked Kirit in a low voice. “Do you mean to attack the city with them?”
The girl turned that inscrutable blue gaze on Marit. “I will ride with them. My mirror will show me what is truth, and what demons have corrupted with their shadow.”
As the commanders rattled off numbers and composition of various cadres, Marit eased behind the cloth wall separating her from Hari and crawled over the rug to kneel beside him. She dared not touch the cloak lest she interrupt whatever sorcery healed him. Finally, she left the chamber through another entrance, ignoring a guard’s surprised exclamation. He wasn’t the one she need worry about.
Saddle and harness and saddle bags rested beside a rolled up mattress. She gathered her things and, choosing boldness over caution, walked to the corral. She hadn’t finished saddling Warning when a procession with Lord Radas at the lead and Yordenas and Kirit trailing paraded to the corral. Kirit lugged her own gear, but soldiers carried the harness belonging to the two men.
“You are here before us,” said Lord Radas with a gloating smile that told her, if she had not already suspected, that he had never trusted her. Had Kirit betrayed her? Or was she just so cursed obvious that anyone could have guessed? “We’ll be ready shortly.”
“I was just going to water my mare at the nearest altar, the one upriver by Highwater.” She meant to play her game to the bitter end, anything to stall.
He laughed. “You will be surprised to learn that the nearest altar lies in Toskala, long forgotten but very much still there. Below the council chambers on the promontory most call Justice Square. We’re expected for a council meeting.”
The hells! She’d been outmaneuvered. Too late she realized that over the last eight days the others had been engaged in an elaborate form of misdirection, keeping her out of the way. Yet they had made no direct move against her. How could they? It wasn’t as if they could kill her.
“I thought,” said Yordenas peevishly, “you said Bevard was on his way back.” He fidgeted like a distempered lad too spoiled for his own good.
“Patience,” said Lord Radas. “Shall we go? Ramit?”
She’d have slugged him for all the good it would do. She had to go to Toskala and the council meeting. She had to try.
With night they flew, Lord Radas taking the lead and Yordenas flying in the rear, while in the camp below them the soldiers, like so many night-crawling serpents, began creeping into attack formation.
AS BAI’S CHOSEN escort when she trolled the camp pretending to be a merchant, Shai had plenty of opportunity to observe because folk tended to ignore him, thinking he was an outlander slave. The army that had laid siege to Toskala had good discipline, a neat camp, and clear lines of authority. An off-duty sergeant could drink a bit, knowing others had his back. He could afford to be expansive.
“You see, it’s like this,” said the sergeant, leaning close to Bai in a confiding manner. “There was a woman who wore the green cloak, but now the green cloak is a man. The woman displeased them, and Lord Radas raised someone else up to the honor, eh? So who’s to say that some of us, the best and most obedient ones, might not have a chance at being raised to a cloak? Why not?”
“Do you think that’s how it works?” Bai asked him. “That Lord Radas chooses? I thought the cloaks—Guardians, that is—were made by the gods.”
“The cloaks rule all, even death. I think the Guardians that was, in the tales, that they’re all gone. Dead, maybe. Maybe they never even existed. Our commanders, now, they’re something else.”
“What do you think they are?”
His gaze flickered toward the high banner pole, deep within the camp, that marked the big tents where the cloaks sheltered. He had a broken nose, healed crookedly, and a scar under his left eye. His expression shifted uneasily, and Bai quickly changed the subject.
“I’m getting my slaves fattened up and healthy, although it’s costing me a cursed lot of vey. What do you think, sergeant? Think I should sell all of them outright? Or just the younger ones, and keep the older for a business? There’s plenty here who will pay coin for sex. I could set right up in camp, maybe even work out of a pair of wagons if the army keeps moving south to Nessumara. I’m new to merchanting, as you might have guessed, but you seem like an experienced man who’ll give me fair advice.”
