Shadow Gate

14

The man long known as an envoy of Ilu stayed too long at the thorn tree shelter on the shore of the Olo'o Sea. He enjoyed the hiss of rain over the wide waters and the smell of the first buds squeezing into the air as the rains woke the drowsing vegetation. He watched the ceaseless spill of clouds as the change in air currents between land and water shredded them. But when one day became three and three became five, their enemies caught up to them.

He never slept, not anymore, but he had learned to slip into a drowse similar to the long interlude before awakening, when he had drifted for untold days weeks months years in a state between waking and sleeping. He liked to think of himself, in this state, as similar to the condition of trees during the season of drought: not dead but held in abeyance.

Change will wake them.

He startled into awareness. First he smelled sweat and fear. Then he heard a branch snap and a whispered exclamation.

The sun nosed up in the east. To the west, the band of the inland sea remained dark, speckled with the last bright stars fading into the rising of day. The girl sat beside him. She had fallen back into her

stupor, eyes open but unseeing, mouth lax and hands loose on her thighs.

A pair of unsavory-looking men burst into the clearing, pursued by the bay mare, who had her wings tightly furled along her flanks. She was a biter, mean when she wanted to be, and they edged away as she circled. But they had spotted the two cloaked figures under the shelter. One of the men swung with his spear, and the bay shied away, although she was only playing with them.

With a sigh, he rose and walked out to confront them. They shrank back to the edge of the trees, where an unbroken fence of thorn at just that spot made them hesitate. One was taller, one shorter. He caught the gaze of the shorter man.

The flood of images and thoughts never got any easier to absorb. A man might as well be kicked and beaten, for all that the surge of emotion bruised him.

Gods! Is that a ghost, or a demon? I wonder how she tastes, and if she cries when-

The power we wield over others brings us power. Take pleasure, take pain, take life, and you'll gain strength. Otherwise, you are the victim.

And why should I be persecuted, eh? The Daped clan lied about me cheating them and shamed me in front of the entire village as the hot sun burned and burned

'Stop!' The man's shrill voice rang in the quiet dawn. He tossed aside his spear to fumble with his bow, loosed an arrow that spent itself harmlessly in the dirt.

'The hells!' cursed his taller companion, loosing an arrow in reaction, so careless that the missile wobbled to earth. Then his gaze was caught.

As reward, they give me more coin. With the coin, suck more sweet smoke. Need the coin. Need the smoke.

The bay mare snorted. The gray mare trotted into view from around the far edge of the thorn tree fence. She halted, looking things over with her usual pragmatic consideration. She was even-tempered, but not a horse to mess with. She stretched her neck, then partially opened her wings and charged.

'Shit!' The shorter man lost his anger and his courage, and tossed his bow aside. With his short sword he hacked into the thorn,

yelped as the thorns tore at him although no more sharply than his own sour thoughts.

'Eh! Eh!' The taller one stumbled in his wake, too muddled to make his own decisions.

The envoy shuttered his eyes. He let the taste of the breeze moisten his parted lips. He let the scents drifting on the air tickle his nostrils. Others hid in the brush, six in all, a cadre on the hunt.

He heard whispers pitched too low for ordinary ears to hear.

'… Can't face him…'

'Sniveling whiner. No wonder they keep passing you over for promotion. Harbi and I will go.'

'Let's just get out of here.'

'Then he'll move on and we'll have the hells of a trip tracking him down again. Or you want someone else to get the prize money and the promotion? A chance for the lord's favor?'

'I'm not going back out there. Those horses are cursed demons.'

The girl rose. She walked over to the spent arrow and fallen bow, picked them up, examined them with a frown. The envoy caught a glimpse of dark cloth where the men peered out through green branches.

'What is that? A lilu?'

'A demon!'

'A ghost.'

'I thought we were just after the sky cloak. I didn't come here to hunt demons!'

She fitted the arrow to the string; tested the pull; swung the bow around to aim into the trees. Loosed the arrow.

A scream – a hit! – surprised him. He heard a shout of pain, then the rustle of undergrowth as they retreated through the undergrowth. Men argued:

'We're six, they're two.'

'The horses!'

'Not that easy.' That was taller's voice, startled out of his dream of sweetsmoke. He spoke in a mumble that quieted the others. 'He'll kill us just by tearing out our insides, just with a look from him. You know it's true. Best we hurry back and report. Maybe he won't chase us if we go quickly.'

Eyes narrowed, she spotted the second arrow and fetched it.

In the brush, the whispered debate went on. 'You fools. Two of them, six of us.'

'Best we saddle the horses, if you will,' the envoy said to her.

For the first time, she was listening to him. She walked back to the fire as casually as if no man had just tried to kill them, as if they were not in danger of a second attack coming at any moment.

She whistled, and the horses trotted over to her. He held his staff at the ready, his senses trained on the thorn tree fence and the woodland scrub beyond it, on the noises of the cadre as they crept out of arrow range, debating what to do next, no one able to take charge. He didn't fear them, and if they attacked, he'd have no choice but to kill them. Perhaps they instinctively guessed it, for the taste of their living essence faded entirely. They had chosen retreat.

A weaver bird flitted within the thorns, its wings a faint stutter. Branches ticked against each other as the breeze stirred them. A bud breathed into a trembling petal as it struggled to unfurl with the same slow majesty as wings.

She walked up beside him, leading the horses. He slid back into himself.

She had saddled them, tied on his few possessions. She said nothing; she didn't even look at him but kept staring at the break in the thorn fence where the short man had cut his way out. She was ready to go.

He took Telling's reins and swung into the saddle. He didn't trust the bay mare, and because the girl tolerated her easily, he let her ride the bay.

He turned Telling's head toward the sea, and the girl, on Seeing, followed his lead. He urged the gray to a trot, to a canter, to a run, and as they reached the shore, they unfurled their wings and skimmed over the water, rising on slow wing beats. The sea fell away beneath. As the shelter shrank with distance, the thorn trees could from the height be seen quite obviously to be planted by hand, while the scrub grown beyond them had a wilder scumble.

He was accustomed by now to riding almost everywhere, but he still preferred to walk. You saw things when walking – the blade of grass, the bee's feet tickling a flower petal, the last tear of a wronged woman who has resolved to seek revenge – that the height and power of a horse might hide from your senses. She was at home in

the saddle. Aloft, her aspect changed. Her eyes opened wide, watching everywhere as they winged over the sea. Even after all this time, each least bobble or hole of turbulence in the air made him gulp and grip and hope he did not tumble. She simply rode.

Eiya! What to do? Where to go? He dared not take her to one of the altars, because there they would easily be spied out. And once she touched her staff, she would likely be out of his control. Yet it wasn't safe to give the staff into her hands until she understood what she was. It wasn't safe to give it into her hands until he was sure she would walk the path he had chosen and not the easier path, the path that begins in light but soon enough crosses under the gate of shadows into corruption.

'We tell stories to make the time pass between birth and death,' Bai was saying.

'I thought the gods gave us stories to help us understand the world,' Joss replied.

'So we are taught in the temples,' she agreed. 'But think about it. What is a story?'

She would chatter on so, flirting with that cursed reeve. Even huffing and puffing up the switchback trail that, incredibly, they'd had to climb back up, those two had talked and talked in the way of people showing off for each other. Kesh wished they would shut up.

'It's not the truth, and yet there's truth in it. It's a way of ordering the truth, just as we order days and weeks and years, as we order guilds and colors and the Hundred itself. Did the gods create the tales? No. People like you and me made the tales and told them to others. Even so, the ten Tales of Founding are not like other stories. We made them because the gods commanded us to. Because they help us order the world, just as worship does. And what is the world except that time between when we enter this place and when we leave it?'

They reached the ruins where he and Bai had sheltered last night. Here, Kesh thought, they might decently pause to rest, but the other two would keep talking.

The reeve answered her. 'As it says in the Tale of Discovery, "Where did we come from, and where do we go?"'

'That's right,' she said with such a flattering smile that Keshad actually gave a disgusted grunt. She glanced at Kesh and for an instant resembled the child she had once been, his little sister, as she rolled her eyes at him to say, Don't ruin this for me.

The reeve didn't notice. He walked to the ruins of a stone wall and jumped up atop it, right at the edge of the drop-off where most men wouldn't dare to stand. Shading his eyes, he gazed across the basin now turning a hazy purple-blue as daylight faded. He was breathing hard, as was Kesh, face suffused with blood. Bai watched the reeve when he wasn't looking at her. This was a side of his sister Kesh had never seen. Sisters weren't supposed to have such feelings, nor to flirt with men so much older. The hells! Bad enough they should flirt at all.

He took a few steps, closing the distance between them.

'Bai, he's old enough to have fathered you. What can you see in a man like that?'

'The horses need water, Kesh. Make sure they don't drink too much.'

Stung, he grabbed the reins and led the exhausted horses to the trough while, naturally, she sauntered over toward the reeve.

'Not many men would stand right there at the edge of the cliff,' she called to the reeve.

'I've no fear of falling,' he said without looking at her. 'Or did you think I was afraid of taking the plunge-'

Halfway across the open space, she paused beside a scatter of faced stones long since tumbled from their place. She turned. She raised a hand and, seeing the gesture, Kesh stepped back from the horses. The reeve turned, alerted by her stillness, and when she waved a hand, he started talking again.

'I never feared climbing trees when I was a child, or standing at the very top of the watch tower in Haya, but even so, after years with an eagle, you get used to surveying the land from very high up.'

Bai prowled past Kesh, circling the horses and the cistern, and vanished behind the remains of a round building. The reeve nattered on, but as he spoke he drew his short sword and shifted sideways on the wall, ready to move.

'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.'