Shadow Gate

I

'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 pas-tureland 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.