Traitors' Gate

by Kate Elliott

  “We found allies,” he said.

  Then she began to weep, and a pair of brothers or cousins shouted her name and pulled her away from the dead sergeant.

  Others lifted Nekkar. “We’ve won, Holy One! To the gates!”

  “Leave two cadres to make a sweep of the neighborhoods. There will be soldiers who escaped, desperate men who must be caught.”

  “Caught and killed!”

  They marched to Toskala’s gate, a roaring, singing mass, swarming out to the garrison encampment, which had already been subdued by a company of militiamen flown up from Horn. Already the uprising was losing cohesion as folk streamed toward the main road and its line of posts, to release the dead and dying who had been condemned to cleansing.

  A pair of reeves landed hard in an open field, and a passenger unhooked and jogged across the field, heading straight for Nekkar.

  “Holy One! I’m Chief Toughid. We met before.” The outlander was a good-looking fellow, not very tall but hale and strong, a bit younger than Nekkar. Once you got accustomed to his accent, he was easy enough to understand. “Commander Anji’s orders, Holy One, to speak to you first. I will order sweeps of the city to look for rogue soldiers. Also, we must set up a perimeter. Enemy soldiers from this region and from the lands down the river will attempt retreat. We must stop and kill as many as we can.”

  “What news from Nessumara?” asked Nekkar.

  “Chief Sengel’s trap was sprung at dawn. I tell you, Holy One, it is a poor commander who does not learn from his mistakes. The demon who commands the enemy did not anticipate that we might use oil of naya again. Hard to imagine such a creature can hope for victory. Good for us, though.” He shaded his eyes against the late-afternoon sun as the giant eagles rose into the sky. A frown chased across his face as he examined one of the reeves; then he looked back at Nekkar. “What is it, Holy One?”

  Nekkar had not realized how his fears and hopes were made plain on his face. Eiya! He was so weary, and yet elation lifted him. “I’d like to walk out to the brickworks, Sergeant. They were forcing children to make bricks, and I just wonder—”

  I just wonder about those poor orphans.

  But the words choked him. Across the encampment and from the city, people began to sing the famous “Prayer that lifts good news” from the Tale of Fortune.

  This is a prayer that lifts good news.

  An offering of fresh flowers in thanks.

  This is a prayer whose seeds scatter.

  Our voices honor you, who birthed us.

  The chief whistled. Soldiers whose faces Nekkar did not recognize—Olossi men—converged to form a disciplined cadre awaiting orders. “Escort the holy one to the brickyards and wherever else he wants to go, and then bring him back to me. I’ll be setting up an administrative center. Where do you recommend, Holy One?”

  “Eh. Ah.” He wiped moisture from his forehead and discovered, to his shock, that his hand came away smeared with blood. What a terrible day, for all its triumph. “Law Rock would be the proper place for an administrative center, as it’s always been. That way no quarter feels slighted or honored. But the stairs will need to be cleared. That will take time.”

  The chief nodded. With a gesture, he sent the cadre off with Nekkar, with a special escort of two young Qin soldiers for the ostiary. Wagons had ground ruts into the ground, cracked in this season of dry soil. Folk from the city had already run before him to the yards seeking kinfolk enslaved to the work; the place was a hive of weeping and wailing as people found their lost ones or heard tales of death and despair. The Qin soldiers took in this scene without comment, sticking at his heels like dogs, quiet and respectful.

  He trudged among ragged shelters, scraps of cloth fixed to broken planks to form caves against the sun. Thin children staggered in the heat, seeking a friendly face, but others remained in hiding. He would have missed them had they not recognized him, even after so many months.

  “Holy One?”

  The voice was little more than the brush of wind through delicate leaves. Under a grimy bit of canvas held down by the broken stubs of bricks a dusty skeletal hand lifted the cloth as a thin face peered out. A second body moved in the shallow pit the canvas covered.

  Were these the same orphaned children he’d lost in the alley? Did it even matter?

  “Come out now,” he said in the voice he used to calm homesick young novices crying through their first month at the temple. “We’re going to the temple. There’ll be food and a bath and a pallet to sleep on.”

  “There’s soldiers with you, Holy One. They look funny.”

  “They’ve come to set things right. Just like in the tale: ‘and an outlander will save them.’ ”

  The child crawled out, and after her—impossibly—the smaller and the smallest. All three had survived their months in the brickyard, although they were weak, emaciated, and covered with dirt and filth. The soldiers muttered to each other, and at first he thought they were disgusted and then he realized they were appalled, however little they revealed in their expressions. Such young men might well have younger siblings, lost to them now. Without hesitation they each picked up one of the smaller ones without regard to the reek and filth.

  Nekkar took the hand of the eldest, a brave soul too weary and hungry to cry. “We’re safe now.”

  “What if they come back?” whispered the child. “The bad ones.”

  Nekkar gestured to the Qin soldiers, who were gently cradling the littler ones. “We’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again. All will be well.”

  46

  “SHAI!”

  The whisper woke him. He sat up fast and was jerked hard against chains. The metal cuff had scraped raw the skin on one wrist.

  It was dark within the cohort command tent, where Captain Arras held his cohort councils in the day on thin pillows and slept at night on a cot. The captain, of course, had marched out to attack Nessumara. The tent was empty. The canvas wall belled inward, and Shai shivered as if a ghost were embracing him, unseen but heard, trying to drag him away from life and past the Spirit Gate into death.

  Words spilled outside. He recognized Zubaidit’s voice, but her tone was stretched and anxious, quite unlike her. What was Zubaidit doing here?

  Hu! She had joined the enemy’s army in an effort to get close to the lord commander, and was now Shai’s jailor. The entrance flap rippled, and she slid inside, the scent of her—leather and sweat and a fragrance he did not know but which sat sweetly on the tongue—rousing him.

  “I’m awake,” he murmured.

  “A cloak’s come,” she whispered. “I’ve ordered Sergeant Fossad to bring the cloak here. We have to strike before she sees into my heart—”

  Footsteps approached. Bai pressed a key into Shai’s hand and lay down on the cot. As the tent flap was swept open and lantern light blinded him, Shai fit the key into the lock, clicked it over, then dropped it. He looked full into the gaze of Night. Her pleasantly unremarkable face creased in a kindly frown. So might a patient aunt survey the wreckage of the sticky buns invaded by a horde of lively and hungry boys: She can make more, but they hadn’t asked permission.

  “You got far,” she said. “Where in the lands did you suppose you could find refuge?”

  He twisted the cuffs off his wrists and rose with chains in his hands. “I find refuge in justice.”

  Bai rolled to stand with a sharp inhalation of breath. He knew she was setting hollow pipe to lips.

  “A dart,” he said, taking a step forward to draw Night’s attention. “A dart in my eye. How it stings.”

  The cloak flinched, the barest movement; she swiped at her neck as at a midge. Shai leaped. In the instant before Shai slammed into the cloak, Fossad yelped and clapped a hand over his eye. Shai went down hard atop the woman, her cloak of night and stars billowing into the air. Where the fabric brushed his skin, his skin burned. He pressed the chains into her throat. She shoved, hands struggling for a grip on his vest, but the snake venom worked fast. Chok
ing, she worked her mouth as if to breathe, to speak, to plead, to curse him. He locked his gaze on hers, but she was just a person staring at him, dark eyes in a dark face, no one to fear because she had no lackeys to command within this dark tent. Did terror burn in her gaze? Was she afraid of him? Do eyes speak, or do we only believe they do, pouring our own thoughts and interpretations into the gaze turned on us by another? We don’t really want to know. For it is terrible to stand naked and without concealment.

  A drop of blood beaded at her nostril, swelling out as air exhaled, sucked in as she fought for breath. For life.

  I must not die. I cannot die. I will not die.

  Yet all things die, in the end. Dead riverbeds wind a course across the desert; mountains shed in flakes and sediment their rock and soil. Grass withers, and new grows where the old has seeded the dust.

  “It’s time to pass onward,” he said, “to cross the Spirit Gate. You’ve done enough here. Let go.”

  Her lips moved, but her breath was extinguished. No sound stirred the air, and yet he understood her.

  I’ll do anything. Just don’t let me die.

  “And so you have done anything,” he said. “You did terrible things, and let terrible things be done. Go away now and leave us to build a peaceful life.”

  With a final burst of strength, she surged upward, the cloak wrapping him as to choke him, burning blistering cutting off his air and he saw

  into her heart

  the well that is fear which pierces from deepest earth to highest heaven, that eats your strength and leaves you hollow

  the orphaned girl had bundled her courage and her heart like a pack to be borne and she had climbed the treacherous path to seek the gods in their high eyrie and there she had boldly walked into the water expecting to die but she had not died. The gods had brought forth the Guardians out of the pool of Indiyabu to walk the lands and establish justice, and the orphaned girl had gone on with her life in the ordinary way, and when the day of her death had come as it does in time to all creatures born out of the Four Mothers, she had been embraced by a cloak. For had she not offered her life in service of justice for the land?

  Only the dead can be trusted, it said in the tale. But those who walk a second time may still fear death. Corruption and virtue wax and wane in the heart, and where fear feeds corruption, it consumes virtue until the heart is only a shell in which echoes its own voice speaking to its own self about its certain selfish concerns. Hearing no voice but her own, she had betrayed not only her companions, the other Guardians, but the land and the legacy of her own tale.

  Shai held on because he knew how to endure pain; because he was stubborn. Because he lived, and she had to die, again, to finally cross the threshold of the Spirit Gate.

  The spark that burns within the eyes of the living faded. The cloak eddied and sagged. Blood trickled from her mouth as the poison killed her. She died.

  “Shai!” Bai was standing by the entrance, sword raised as she flipped aside the flap to glance out. Fossad was dead, with blood leaking from mouth and nose and a smear of blood staining the eye that had taken the second dart. His startled ghost oozed from his body and reached for the lantern as though to light his way.

  “Eiya!” cried the ghost. “My eye stings. What happened?”

  “Hurry!” Shai said to him. “The Gate awaits you.”

  “Eh! I see the light!” Then his spirit was gone.

  “The hells!” Bai cried, eyes flaring as she stared at Shai. She was so very alive that life radiated off her like threads of blue fire; she was as bright as the lantern, and only he, in the shadowed tent, was veiled and therefore opaque. “You’re hells burned, Shai! All red. And look at the gods-rotted cloak!”

  The ghost of the dead woman was pouring into the cloak, rather like the way the priests of Beltak had sucked the ghosts of dead men into their blessing bowls. The cloak would hold her ghost until its magic knit the body, and then she would live again. And again. And again.

  “We’ve got to get this cloak off her body. Give me the gloves.”

  “The cursed cohort’s returning,” said Bai, but she leaped to the dead man’s body and stripped his gloves, then tugged them on Shai’s hands one at a time as he released his grip on the metal cuffs. He tossed them aside; they’d served their purpose. With gloved hands he grappled at the clasp, and the clasp burned into the leather; heat stung his palms, raising tears of pain. Hu! The cloak came undone, and he yanked it away so hard the body tumbled gracelessly, like rubbish. With a wordless wail, her ghost writhed out of the cloak into the body and reached for the cloth as if to insinuate herself back into the weave that had kept her alive for so terribly long. The cloak billowed wildly around him, humming as in a wild storm wind.

  “We’ve got to bind it!” he cried.

  “Release it to the wind!” said Bai.

  “Her ghost will crawl back in if it touches the body. We have to keep them separate.”

  Bai grabbed a blanket folded neatly at the foot of the captain’s cot. She ripped belts off Fossad and the dead woman. Shai wept as the bite of the cloak burned his hands, but he stepped on it, pressed it to earth, rolled the fabric inside the blanket; they folded it up and over and over again, pressed it tight and winched the belts over it and after that wrapped it in chains. How pain burned. The living were not meant to handle that which has the power to trap and succor ghosts.

  A horn woke in the night. Shouts crashed like thunder.

  “You betrayed me!” Her ghost swelled to fill the space like a storm of sand wailing out of the desert.

  The tent flap was swept aside, and a lamp’s steady glow cast gold over the interior as Bai stepped back with sword raised and Shai reeled, stumbled, and fell, his gaze hazing. The ghost reached into him but its substance passed right through his body; his heart was safe from her.

  Then she was gone.

  “The hells!” Captain Arras drew his sword in answer to Bai’s guarded stance as he and his loyal sergeant stepped into the tent, she with lamp in hand and a hand on her knife. The entrance closed. Behind, a man called, “Captain Arras?”

  “Tell the soldiers to set a doubled guard. Everyone else rest. We move out at dawn.”

  He scanned the scene. His mouth twitched, but he showed no other emotion and it was difficult anyway to trace the lineaments of a face slathered in muck. He did not lower his sword. “Sergeant Zubaidit. Can you explain this?”

  “Fossad attacked this woman, Captain.”

  “The hells he did. That’s one of the gods-rotted cloaks, the woman who wore the cloak of Night. The most fearsome of all. Yet now she lies here, just another cursed corpse like to the many that have been made today.”

  “Did we win?” Bai asked without blinking.

  “We lost. I took my cohort and got out before we all got killed by soldiers who knew what they were cursed doing. Where is her cloak?”

  His gaze caught on the bundle at Shai’s knees, which had an odd way of shifting and bulging and receding as if the thing inside it were trying to find a way out. “Who in the hells are you, Zubaidit? A cursed spy, no doubt! An infiltrator. I should have seen it!”

  The sergeant with him grunted.

  “You warned me, Giyara,” he added.

  “Kill her,” suggested the sergeant, not angrily but with resignation.

  “You can kill me,” Bai said coolly, “but you’ll still take the blame from Lord Radas. You’re the captain. Therefore you’re responsible. Everyone knows you raised me up from hostage to soldier to sergeant.”

  “You’re cursed calm about it. If I go down, you’ll go with me.”

  “I’m prepared to die.”

  “I’m not!”

  Her smile was thin. “That’s the difference between us. But if that is your sole concern, I may be able to save you if you’ll listen to me.”

  “What about my cohort? I won’t sacrifice them to save myself.”

  “That you say so is the only reason I haven’t killed you already
. Believe me when I say, Captain, that you’re a decent enough man, and good at your job. Do you love the cloaks? Has Lord Radas treated you well?”

  “He didn’t listen to me months ago when I urged him to push into Nessumara at the first attack, for I’m sure we could have broken the militia and taken the city without much trouble. He didn’t listen to me this very dawn, when I warned him that something wasn’t right. No doubt he’s abandoned the cohorts who were killed this morning and flown away to the safety of his cohorts on the northern causeway. He’s lost less than half his army, after all. He can still fight.”

  “Then choose new allies, Captain.”

  “And betray the old?” He looked at Shai, shaking his head. “Are you truly Lord Twilight’s brother? The resemblance is strong. Are you the outlander who will save us?”

  “I need water,” croaked Shai. His head was muzzy, and the pain was building.

  “He’s not the only outlander in this tale, Captain,” said Zubaidit. “Lord Radas betrayed not just you personally but the Hundred itself. Time and again he has betrayed the cause of justice. Why do you aid him?”

  “Because the gods command us to obey the judgment of the Guardians. Because with him, I could fight. Anyway, who can stand against the cloaks, who can see with their third eye and second heart, who defeat even death?”

  “We can, and we did.”

  “Her cloak is gone,” muttered the sergeant. “She looks no different than you or me. Just a dead body. Was it all lies? That the cloaks defeat all, even death?”

  Bai’s sharp smile made Shai shudder. Bai hadn’t known if the cloaks could be killed, but she’d been willing to throw herself into the battle without thought for her own fate. Ought he to admire her ruthless purpose, or fear it?

  “Now you see the truth of it,” Bai said. “Join us.”

  “You might believe it’s a tempting offer to a man like me,” retorted the captain. “Especially since I’ll have to immediately order you stripped and thoroughly searched, and all your gear confiscated and burned, to make sure you aren’t carrying any hidden weapons. Weapons that can kill a cloak and Fossad, there. Then afterward tell me, you who have stood loyal to your commander, why should he trust me if I turn traitor to the one whose orders I obeyed before?”