Shadow Gate

16

No one disturbed their encampment in the wild lands bordering the northeastern shore of the Olo'o Sea. As one day passed into the next, the envoy of Ilu figured out how to help the girl in her work. He'd not grown up in the country, with country ways and country skills. He was a city boy by birth and training, accustomed to buying what he needed from the shops and artisans and craftsmen of Nessumara. Yet after so many years of wandering alone, he'd learned to survive.

He cleaned hide, a task he detested. Really, it was so unpleasant to get one's hands so slick and stinking. He wove a crude shelter of green saplings, and built a fire of greenwood to smoke the deer meat. He spent an entire afternoon scouring the stench of glue-making out of his precious iron pot, which had accompanied him tor so many years he sometimes thought of it as a congenial friend. 1 le left the horses to stand guard – for they would be sure to alert him if they sensed an enemy approaching – and ranged wide, gathering edible plants. He walked the shoreline until he found a place

where salt pans had formed. The deer's hooves were boiled, and antlers polished. When she vanished one day with Seeing, he took from Telling's calm manner a message, and he waited for her to return, which she did late in the day bearing the deer skin wrapped around a slimy collection of cattle parts: four horns, raw hide, intestines, sinew, heart, and the best cuts of meat. He asked no questions. She volunteered no answers.

She carved and shaped hooks and drills and points from bone; she chewed sinew to make it malleable, then rolled it into thread. She glued side strips of a denser red wood to the backbone of silver-bark, and in the shallow channel along each face, glued strips of horn. She carved out and smoothed a ring of bone to fit her right thumb.

He sat beside her. She showed him with her hands what she wanted him to do, and he did it: scraping, polishing, grinding, twisting, oiling. Talking, for he could not bear the lack of words.

'As it says in the Tale of Beginnings, "We tell ourselves stories to make the time pass between birth and death". But it's more than that. We tell tales to try to understand the world, the gods, and ourselves. Let me tell you a tale.'

He told the story punctuated by the most basic of gestures, enough to suggest the tale's outlines. As he spoke, she measured and she glued and she shaped, but he was not sure if she listened.

'Long ago, in the time of shadows, a bitter series of wars, feuds, and reprisals laid waste to the countryside and impoverished the lords and guildsmen and farmers and artisans of the Hundred. In the worst of days, an orphaned girl knelt at the shore of the lake sacred to the gods and prayed that peace might return to her land…'

The tale unfolded easily, but then, he had always found it easy to talk.

'… Now it so happened that the girl had walked as a mendicant in the service of the Lady of Beasts, and when the other gods departed, the Lady of Beasts remained behind.

' "They are content," said the Lady of Beasts, "but I see with the sight of eagles and I listen with the heart of an ox. For this reason, I know that in the times to come the most beloved among the guardians will betray her companions."

' "Is there no hope, then, for the land and its people?"-'

He broke off, smiling humbly as he watched her hands.

At last he saw it take shape.

She was making a bow.

She looked up. The feverish gleam of those demon-blue eyes, touching his own gaze, startled him.

'A good bow demands patience,' she said, challenging his stare. 'This one-' She touched the bow at her right hand. '-I'll reflex on a form and store in a dry place for many months. Then maybe after two winters it will become a good bow. This other, if the glue sets properly and I give it more time, maybe it will serve until the other is properly cured. I'll make a pair of simple bows from staves. But a cured bow is best if you want to reliably kill a man.'

He gaped, speech squeezed out of him by the force and content of her words. Her speech was fluid and easy although her vowels were clipped, very short, and she coughed certain consonants and slurred others. Had she known the language of the Hundred all along, or had it poured into her when her destiny enveloped her?

Telling neighed. Seeing raised her head to look upstream.

The girl rose, grabbing the captured bow and a handful of crude arrows, shafts with sharpened points. She pushed her cloak back over her shoulders, to leave her arms unencumbered. He stood, too, gripping his staff.

'What cursed use is it,' he muttered, 'to wait so patiently, to spend these days in silence so the child wakens a little more – with such triumph! – only to be caught yet again by those hells-bitten criminals?' He was shaking, even angry, really just entirely twisted dry of the good humor he prized most of all as a Water-touched Blue Rat sworn to serve Ilu the Herald.

Dusk had crept over them without his noticing. The gleam of their cloaks gave them an aura, and made them targets. The horses, of course, could barely be seen. He saw an inconstant pattern of light fading and waxing by the nearest thicket of chamber-bells; their delicate tinkling caught in the wind.

A woman stepped into view, wrapped in a bone-white cloak. He knew that cloak. Once, he had known the man who wore it.

'Who arc you?' she demanded. 'What are you?'

The girl nocked an arrow and drew back the string with thumb and forefinger.

The woman shifted, not moving closer but not retreating. 'Nay, that was ill-said. I am here to talk with you, nothing more. Do not think I am here to threaten you.' Yet her tone was that of a woman accustomed to ordering people about. 'I would know who and what you are, for others have spoken of you, and I think you are not what you seem. Oh, the hells!'

Almost he chuckled, to hear the voice of authority break with frustration.

She continued. 'Are you Guardians, or are you not? I beg you, tell me what you know so I can understand what has happened to me.'

The girl glanced at him as a soldier looks to her captain for the order to loose, but he shook his head, yet raised a hand to show that she must stay ready.

'Show me your staff,' he called, 'and we can talk.'

'I have a walking stick.' She held out a trim pole. 'I can defend myself, lest you believe otherwise!'

His disappointment was sharper than he expected. Also, he recognized the stab of fear that pricked his breast, but he smiled to show a bland face. 'No need to quarrel with me. I am a peaceful man, camping here in the wilderness where I had hoped to bide undisturbed.'

'You don't trust me!'

'It seems you are standing a long way from me.'

'I want to trust you. But I don't know who to trust. I have seen others…' She glanced at the girl with a shake of her head. Then she clucked, and a pale shape moved out of the shadows: a horse.

Telling snorted, as in greeting, and the other horse replied with a whinny and a toss of its head. Seeing flicked her ears dismissively.

'What others?' he asked, because, alas, he knew now what she was. She belonged to his opponents, her staff held by them as hostage to keep her a prisoner to their will. They had sent her to hunt him down.

'There's no point in loosing that arrow at her,' he said to the girl, 'because even if you hit her squarely, you cannot harm her.'

She nodded to show she'd heard, but her gaze, and the arrow, remained fixed on the target.

'There are others like us,' said the woman.

'How do you know?'

'I have spoken to them within the labyrinth.'

'Have you approached them, as you approached me?'

She smiled, an ironic quirk that made him want to like her. But he must not succumb to congeniality; he had made that mistake a long long time ago.

'No, for it seemed to me that they smelled sweet with corruption. I am a reeve – that is, I was a reeve – so I knew better than to trust them.'

'Tell me your story. Don't come any closer. I can hear you perfectly well from here.'

She laughed bitterly. 'There! I'm told by your words what you think of me. Yet what choice have I?'

Her horse nuzzled her arm. She fished in a sleeve and plucked out a turnip. This delicacy the mare peeled daintily from her hand. Telling and Seeing watched the exchange with interest; was that an accusatory gaze Seeing turned on him, as if to say Where's my treat?

She went on. 'My name is Marit, if indeed I am still who I once was, which I at times doubt. I was a reeve, out of Copper Hall. My eagle was called Flirt.' At the name her voice hardened, choking down anger. 'I believe I must be dead. I was stabbed in the heart twenty years ago when I was taken prisoner by men under the command of Lord Radas. It surprised me then, for I'd seen Lord Radas stand in authority over the assizes in Iliyat some months before that day, and he seemed a man like any other. I understand now that he had changed to become something other than what he was before.'

'He had become a Guardian.'

She covered her eyes with the back of a hand, then lowered the hand. 'Yes, that's what I have had to come to believe. For a long while after I was stabbed I was not awake, not aware, but not asleep either. Dead, yet I never passed the Spirit Gate. I have been alone since that day'

'Why would you trust me with this secret?'

'You don't have the stink of corruption that the others do. You know what I am, don't you?'

'In some ways I may, but in more ways I do not. Therefore, alas, I

cannot trust you. She has been trying to find and destroy me for years, but I have so far eluded her.'

'Who is she}'

He waited, to see how she would answer herself, but she only watched him with a hard stare. Eager to hear. Desperate to understand. Aui! He wanted to like her. It was true there was no taint to the air, no vile taste on his tongue, nothing to suggest that she had turned on the path away from the lit road and walked into the shadows. That she was what she claimed to be was inarguable. The cloak at her shoulders gleamed with the pallor of bone. The horse – he'd not seen this mare before, or if he had he did not recognize its markings and face – tolerated her; maybe it even liked her.

Taking pity, he said at last, 'If you don't know who she is, then I will not tell you.'

'What then?' she demanded, goaded to a burst of temper. 'How can I gain your trust? I need allies. And I am guessing that you do, too, for you speak of opponents. Meanwhile, not all the Guardians are accounted for, are they?'

He began shaking, exhausted by the long years of running and hiding and by the terrible hope that this precious ghost girl would not turn away from him on the day she came fully awake.

'I'll tell you this,' said Marit. She wasn't one to give up easily. 'Myself, that's one. I heard of your existence from others, not from others wearing the cloak but from a reeve who spoke to a hieros, who spoke of how you came to the temple and claimed that girl. That's why I sought you out, and how I found you. You're two more. That makes three Guardians. Lord Radas makes four. And I have encountered three others who I believe are allied with Radas. One is called Hari, one is Yordenas. The third is a woman wearing a cloak of night. That makes seven. But there are nine Guardians. Where are the other two? What are we, if we are not the Guardians spoken of in the stories? If we are not the Guardians who sit in authority at the assizes, who guard the law on which the land is built? What happened to the real Guardians? Why did they vanish, and why are you and I here now? Do you know the answers?'

For once it was easy for him not to speak. Without trust, there

can be no free exchange. Without trust, there can be no answers that have a hope of sounding out the truth.

'What can I do to earn your trust?' Her gaze burned, but he would be veiled to her just as she was veiled to him. The third eye granted to the Guardians by Ushara the Devourer allowed them to see into the hearts of mortal men, not into the hearts of other Guardians.

'Kotaru the Thunderer gave each Guardian a staff,' he said. 'Where is yours?'

T don't know. I never had one.'

Maybe she was a very good liar. Maybe she was as ignorant as she seemed. He had no way of knowing, and no way of finding out.

How sad, really, that he sought to teach the girl to trust him, while refusing to trust this woman who was, after all, asking of him nothing more than he was asking of the girl. If she was what she said she was, then they might join forces. There was strength in numbers. There was hope in numbers. Alone, he and the girl could do nothing but run. Here she came, offering the thing he desired most. No doubt his enemies knew that. So easily they could tempt him, snare him, and destroy him. Take the girl for themselves. And plunge the Hundred so deep into the shadows that he couldn't see how the land could ever recover.

'The hells!' she said at last. 'Can you not help me? Will you not?'

Weary, he remained silent.

'Eiya!' Then she laughed. She wasn't a fragile creature, one crushed by a single blow. He could well believe she had been a reeve. She had a reeve's confident physical stance, and measuring, deliberate stare. A good reeve was stubborn and observant. 'Aui! The man I loved – and love still – now thinks of me only with regret and pain, while it's another, younger, woman who he burns for in his thoughts with passion and longing. While you won't talk to me at all. So be it. I've wandered too long hoping to find someone to tell me what I am and what I must do now. You've taught me something, ver, by just standing there with your friendly smile and wishing me gone. I have to find out the truth where it lies within myself. I must walk into the shadows, and see if I am strong enough to come out unscathed, with the truth fixed in my heart and my duty carried in my hands.'

She waited a moment longer. When he did not answer, she led the mare away into the trees. The rattle of their leaving faded. The wind sighed in the underbrush.

Seeing whinnied, and the other horse – now out of sight – called in answer.

'Have I made a terrible mistake?' he said to the;air, to the sky, to the earth, to the water.

The girl looked at him, her gaze a question, perhaps even an act of trust.

He nodded. 'We must pack up. It's time to move on. Quickly now, lass. Quickly.'