Shadow Gate

37

Death rode at twilight into High Haldia. Or so, Marit imagined, the tales might sing.

The broad avenue that bisected the city lay empty except for a scrap of cloth rippling along the paving stones, blown by a wind out of the north. Normally, she supposed this thoroughfare would be lit with lanterns, folk grabbing noodles or the savory buns common to Haldia for a quick bite while rushing about their last errands of the day. Apprentices released from their duties might be found traveling in packs for a night of carousing, or a shopkeeper seen sweeping her entry porch as she closed up for the night. Now, many buildings gaped as half-burned shells, roofs fallen in and broken tiles scattered. The intact shopfronts were shuttered, as closed up as a rich clan rejecting the marriage suit of a poor but ambitious neighbor.

Was High Haldia slain, or only licking its wounds?

Movement flashed to her right. Marit urged Warning into a trot down a side street. A figure dashed across the street, ducking into an alley. Marit slipped off Warning, ran in pursuit. In the depths of shadow between windowless walls, she grabbed a slight young person by his tunic.

He went limp, so she let go, and he sprawled at her feet. The side street lay behind them. Ahead, the alley met an intersection of murky lanes, the routes beyond too dim to trace.

'Jus' ran to fetch medicine.' Despite short hair clipped close to the head, it was a girl. 'I didna mean to break curfew, only my nephew needs the tisane for a fever.' She opened a hand to reveal a stoppered vial with an orange ribbon wrapped around it to mark its medicinal virtue.

'I saw folk walking in from fields earlier,' Marit said, hoping a friendly voice would stop the girl's convulsive shivering on a hot night. 'All with stooped backs and bowed heads. The guards at the loll gate outside town let me pass without a word. Why's there a curfew?'

The back of her neck had a rash, and her feet were bare, newly

blistered, as though she had formerly been accustomed to walking everywhere in slippers. 'We've given our hostage to the garrison and kept the rules,' she said into the dirt. 'It was jus' that my nephew needed the medicine. He's jus' three. Cudna you let me go this one time?' Her hand closed around the vial.

Marit heard footfalls. She turned halfway, keeping an eye both on the girl and on the six soldiers who crowded into the alley's entrance

'Lord? Any trouble here? Got a curfew-breaker?'

Averting their eyes, they approached in file, blocking the alley.

The sergeant flung out an arm to halt the others. 'Who are you?' His suspicion gave flavor to the air and made the others draw their short swords. The girl whimpered.

'I've not seen you before, lord,' the sergeant added, words as tentative as a baby's first steps.

Now it's true that anyone might affect a long cloak, especially in the rainy season, although few would choose white as their ornament. As soon as she thought it, Marit wondered if a bold rebel might attempt a disguise and thereby walk through a city such as this one, imprisoned by a curfew that made an innocent girl cower when she was caught out at dusk with a vial of medicine.

'I've just come from Walshow,' Marit said, looking them over as they glanced every way but at her.

'She's the one they warned us to look out for-' blurted the leftmost fellow, and his sergeant kicked him so hard on the shin that he yelped.

'Don't even try it,' she said wearily. 'Look at me.'

Of course they didn't want to look. Joss's determination and misery had been laid bare to her sight: his nostalgic, regretful desire for the Marit he had once loved, a desire he knew he ought to have strangled long since but could not quite kill; his hunger for a young woman so vivid and sensual that Marit raged with envy while knowing perfectly well that she was dead and he had to get on with his own life.

With no one moving and she trapped in this pointless cycle of thoughts, she prodded the girl. 'Get home.'

'We bring curfew-breakers to the captain on duty, to be cleansed, lord,' said the sergeant, trembling with the effort of staring at his hand so he would not forget and look at her.

'Take me to the captain in place of the girl. Who, if she knows what is good for her, will run off. Now.'

The girl bolted, and vanished down one of the lanes. Mark held her staff at the ready until she could no longer hear the patter of feet.

'No need to mention the incident to the captain,' she said. 'I'll know if you do.'

'That's not how things work around here,' muttered the sergeant. She didn't need a third eye and second heart to hear how disgruntled he was, having his authority undermined in front of his patrol by some cursed woman he'd never seen before in his life. She'd had a lot of experience as a reeve in unraveling the weave of conflicted human emotion, because it was rare indeed that any one person felt any one single pure feeling unadulterated by a dozen niggling other sentiments.

The sergeant lunged.

She sidestepped, and whacked him across the shoulders with the staff. He hit the ground face first. She turned on the others before they charged. Taken by surprise, they looked at her.

Aui! Humans are a monstrous roil of sensibilities, and by far the worst part of what she had now become was in being forced to know how true that was.

If I don't go along, they'll kill me. I wish I never left home.

I want Sergeant's job, that snot-nosed ass doesn't know what he's doing, not like I do, I would like to see him strung up and kicking.

Glad they didn't catch me cheating at dice hope my sister wasn't one of the girls taken for the army the wine isn't enough to drown this ache in my head I woulda kept lighting the houses on fire it was the hells grand to watch them burn and folk begging us to stop and anyway the commanders ordered us to make an example of them.

My tooth hurts.

The lords order us to kill, they like to kill, they like it when we kill, so she's just one cursed female breaking curfew, we can take her down and kill her-

'Drop your weapons! Down on your knees! Hands up!'

She hated them as they turned craven, heads tucked, hands high with palms open. She was breathing hard with the rush, and she wanted to crack them over the heads for what they had done to the

people of this town. What they had done to countless others. What they had done to themselves.

'You.' She thrust one tip of her staff hard into the chest of the man whose tooth hurt. He fell hard, tried to hide a groan as he righted himself, and she laughed, and was shocked at herself for finding amusement in his pain. 'Unbuckle the sergeant's sword belt and give me sword and sheath.'

Cringing, he did so. She slung the short sword at her own hip before poking him again.

'You're in charge now. You three will escort me to the captain. The others can carry your sergeant back to camp.'

Even if the local captain tried to kill her, pain would be a temporary agony. I can kill, but not be killed. Yet that being so, what had happened to the man who wore the cloak before her?

High Haldia had begun its life in ancient days as a posting town, a string of buildings along the Istri Walk that led from Nessumara to Seven. From this spine, the city had grown outward into unequal halves. They walked into the eastern part of the city along a handsome avenue lined with merchant houses and trading emporia mostly untouched by the destruction that had visited the main road. These buildings, too, were entirely closed up for the night. No spark of light betrayed life within.

The streets had room to sprawl, nothing like the crowded streets of Toskala, the steep lanes in Olossi, the nerve-racking roped paths of Haorrenda, or the narrow canals and elaborate foot bridges of Nessumara-on-the-delta. Three squares were strung like beads along the thoroughfare. The entrances to four temples anchored the corners of the first square. The second was faced with two temples, north and south. On the third square, the assizes court and archon's hall stood opposite a massive compound dedicated to Taru the Witherer, beloved of farmers.

The captain in charge of High Haldia's garrison had set up his headquarters in the arkhon's hall. She rode Warning up the steps and through the main entrance hall into the courtyard. Men shrank back from her billowing cloak. A graveled path bisected the courtyard, Hanked by terraces of white and pink tea flowers and decorative herbs set out in blocks like neighborhoods. A fountain depicted the

island at Indiyabu where the Guardians had risen from the lake, but the spouts had dried up. Much like justice, Marit supposed. Run dry.

A dozen men edged out of the shadows into a loose circle around her.

'I've not seen you before,' said their captain, a trim, muscular man flanked by a pair of gargantuan spear carriers. He had the imposing presence of a man who can make decisions without second guessing himself, but he did not look her in the face.

'No, you haven't. I want an escort down Istri Walk, to the main army.'

'I'm under no obligation to assist you.'

She snorted. 'I suppose you get folk every day riding into High Haldia on a Guardian's horse and wearing a scrap of cloak so as to pretend they are a Guardian?'

His gaze met hers just long enough that she tasted the merest tangle of his complicated mind: he admired a bold woman with a sarcastic sense of humor. He didn't like the commanders he worked for, but he was good at fighting and they rewarded him well. He liked the job more than he disliked them. 'They don't call themselves that. Which you'd have known, if you were one of them.'

'As an attempt to intimidate me, it's not bad, Captain, but I'm up here on a winged horse, and you're down there wondering how much of your heart I've seen.'

A smile ghosted onto his face and faded. 'As it happens, Lord Twilight rode into town earlier today. He said a cloak, a woman wearing the color of death, might arrive soon. I just sent a man to fetch him.'

Warning stamped. A door slid open on a long covered porch. The man who stepped into the courtyard wore a cloak very like hers, only the color of his was indistinguishable from the purpling-dark shadows. His hair was black, his eyes and complexion dark, and his expression ironic.

'You and your men can go, Captain,' he said.

They departed hastily through gates and doors.

As he crossed the garden, she dismounted and released Warning to nose among the tea flowers. The man halted beside the fountain. Lanterns hanging from tripods spread light on his face. He studied her as a smile twisted his lips.

'I wasn't sure if I had dreamed you, or really spoken to you. A wish is no better than a dream.' His voice was softly mocking, but not of her. The accent dazzled.

' "Lord Twilight"}' she asked with a laugh.

'It is grand, isn't it?' He let the grin emerge fully.

'It's ridiculous. Nor do you look like a Northerner, to carry the title.'

'Lord?'

'It's an ancient claim, found only in the north. You're not a Northerner. You're not even born of the Hundred.'

'As I admitted when we talked the first time.'

'As your face proclaims. A good-looking face, I admit, but an outlander's face nevertheless. How in the hells did an outlander become a Guardian? A "cloak", as the soldiers call us.'

He raised a hand, wincing. 'Let's not spoil a pleasant evening with a painful subject. What am I to call you?'

She hesitated.

'If you won't give me something, I'll have to make up a name. And you won't like it, Lady Death.'

'Aui! I'm wounded. You can call me Ramit.'

'I suppose it's the best I can get.'

'Yes. You said you're called Hari. Water-born, like me.' And therefore forbidden, but she didn't say that out loud.

'Water-born? They said that before to me, but it means nothing. My father named me Harishil, which means fifth of his sons. Nothing about water.'

Not forbidden, after all! She smiled. 'I'll not mention it again. Why are you in High Haldia? Why not follow the army down the Istri Walk as I'm doing?'

His eyes shuttered. 'Are you sure that's what you want?'

'I'm sure it's what I must do.'

It was a relief to look at a man and not be flooded with his thoughts and feelings, and the longer she held his gaze in a kind of defiant counterstare the more it seemed they were flirting. And since he was not truly Water-born, she could enjoy the sensation. He had broad shoulders and the graceful strength of a man in his prime, about the age she had been when she'd died.

'I thought you might pass this way,' he said. 'I thought maybe we could travel together.'

As invitations went, it had charm mostly because of his lazy smile. He wasn't a happy man; trouble shadowed those thick-lashed eyes. But he wasn't the kind to let trouble stop him from making an effort to please. And surely the gods knew how bitterly lonely she had become. Maybe she had hoped for this meeting more than she dared admit.

'I can leave any time,' she said.

They rode out of High Haldia soon after. Once on the Istri Walk, the hooves of their horses lit the road, a glow emanating like a mist formed of dying sparks. The city was silent except for the occasional barking of a dog or the noise of beasts as they passed, and inhaled the smell of, stabling yards. Twice, night patrols aggressively hailed them but, seeing them close, hurriedly bowed and let them pass.

'It's quiet,' she said.

'But orderly. The troublemakers are dead or fled or in hiding. The rest do what they're told.'

'Which is?'

'Farm. Mill. Manufacture. Pay a heavy tithe to the army in exchange for not being killed. That's the bargain they were offered. Most took it.'

'And the ones who did not?'

'As I said.'

'High Haldia has a decent population. There's a lot of land between here and Walshow, not to mention Haldia in general and Seven and the uplands of Teriayne beyond. And Gold Hall above the Falls. How can an army keep that much land and that many people under a reign of fear?'

'You Hundred folk don't understand the way of the world, do you? It seems the mountains and sea – and your reeves and Guardians – have protected you for a long time in your tiny enclaves. I was a troublemaker once, but I learned that a well-disciplined army with strong leadership can control a great deal of territory.'

'How?'

'I and some others got in trouble with the Qin overlords of the

trading town where I grew up. Instead of executing us, they sent us off to be useful elsewhere, which in my case meant being sold into a mercenary company as a soldier. One day about a hundred of us marched north over the high mountains and into the Hundred on a contract. We were betrayed, and I was killed. After that, I found myself prisoner of the cloak.'

'Mine's a simpler tale. A country girl, sent to the city to find work. I was chosen as a reeve instead. I believe I was killed in the line of duty. Thus you find me.'

'Here's the first toll gate.' As they approached a stockade placed to control traffic on the road, Hari raised his voice to alert the guard. 'We're passing through. I'm of no mind to mince words with your sergeant.'

Men opened the gate, careful not to look up. They rode through without slackening their pace. Beyond this stockade the city turned into a scattered collection of threshing yards, stinking tanneries, aromatic corrals, and silent timber lots. High Haldia's environs seemed as deserted as the city itself.

'Have they no patrols to control thievery?' she asked.

'You'll see.'

The roadside leading to a second barrier was lined with poles driven into the ground.

She sucked in a shocked breath. 'This again!'

'You've seen the approach to Walshow, then.'

'I have. Is this how they keep the peace?'

'Those who resist, who speak out, who cause trouble or break curfew – are cleansed. Their corruption removed.'

Corpses dangled from poles, tied by ropes around the wrists, hands swollen and so deep a purple they were almost black and lower limbs puffy and distended. The dead stank, while the guards had bound linen kerchiefs over their mouths and noses. Beyond the gate, more poles rose. Flies buzzed in black clouds.

'I'd call it slaughtered, not cleansed! The hells! Those two aren't dead!'

A lad, his arms streaked with the jagged red of infection spreading down from his choked hands, was unconscious, spirit drifting deep. A man whimpered as he struggled to get enough purchase on the pole with his heels to ease the strangling pressure of the rope.

She dismounted. His feet hung to about the level of her waist, making it impossible for her to reach the stake hammered into the top of the pole around which the chains looped.

Had said, 'They're already condemned.'

'By what court?'

Beside the gate, the night watch gathered.

'By the only court that matters. Those who command the army hold the power.'

' "The cloaks rule all, even death". Well, they don't rule me after all, do they? Help me.'

'It serves no purpose to try to save one here and one there when they're all condemned.'

'You disappoint me.' Warning flicked her ears. 'And you disappoint my good horse, too.'

She walked to the barrier, a bulky fence set in front of debris piled to impede movement and with a gate set in place to allow wagons through in single file. 'I need a ladder.'

The taste of their sergeant's sullen anger at being ordered about so arbitrarily flavored the air even as he kept his gaze averted. A ladder was brought. She carried it over her shoulders to the pole where the hanging man scraped with a will, as if thinking to escape her efforts. As she braced the ladder behind the pole, Hari dismounted. He came up very close behind her, almost embracing her.

'I'll help you,' he said in a low voice.

'Change of heart?'

'I'm not doing this for him. You catch him when he falls.'

Grasping the man around the thighs, she lifted. He grunted in pain. His trousers were fouled; she sucked in a fetid breath through her mouth and held on, hoping Hari would be quick. The chain released. The man's body collapsed over her, and she staggered back to avoid falling under him as he began screaming. Then Hari had him, and together they eased him to the ground.

'Eiya!' She cut the ropes, then probed his shoulders as he writhed. 'Nothing popped out, but he'll have a cursed painful time getting the blood back into his hands. The muscles must be torn from the weight. He can't have been up there long.'

'What do you mean to do with him?' Hari asked.

'Cursed if I know. Find him a place he can heal.'

'And thereby condemn whoever aids him as an accomplice, to be cleansed?'

'I can't just stand aside and do nothing! Help me with the other one.'

'A waste of time. The lad's near death.'

'How can you tell?'

'You're young to this yet, aren't you? It's a sweetness they get, when they cross beyond where they can be brought back. If you want, I'll kill him quickly.'

'Are you going to help me, or not?'

His gaze shifted past her. Anger had made her careless. She turned. The sergeant, marked by his shoulder braids, stood a prudent distance away, gaze still averted, shaking as though terrified by his own audacity.

'Lord, if you will hear me, I would tell you that the man you cut down was cleansed for being a spy. He was sent from Toskala to infiltrate our territories and scurry back to his masters with what news he could tell them.'

Marit rose. 'Take the lad down. Also, bring me a pair of saddled horses, rope, wine, and a sack of rice.' His abject obedience gave a rush that made her ears burn, and then at once she knew the shame of letting his fear feed her. Demons ate fear; that was what made them demons.

Hari nodded toward the lad. 'Listen with your second heart, and look with your third eye. His spirit is passing.'

The death rattle exhaled as softly as mist rises. The young spirit lightened within the night, a shudder of trembling confusion caught between death and the Spirit Gate. The wind quickened. Chains scraped on wood as bodies shifted. The odor of death grew strong, then faded abruptly. She sucked in breath – breath is life – and that quickly, the youth's spirit crossed over and was gone, joyful in its final release.

A pair of frightened soldiers brought a pair of saddled horses -decent mounts, to her surprise – and scuttled away. The accused spy screamed in pain as she and Hari bundled him onto the horse, and tied him on the saddle. Mercifully, he passed out. She tied the lead lines to her own saddle and strung the spare at the end.

They rode for a long while without speaking, her heart steaming hot with a bitter rage. The fields beyond High Haldia had a tidy architecture. This was fertile land, well populated, sufficient to feed High Haldia and besides maintain a brisk trade upcountry and downriver. The footfalls of the horses rang in the night, as loud as hammers. The unconscious man breathed in unsteady gasps, his pain like a haze of muddy pressure around his torso. Rain washed them, pouring for a while, and then they rode out of it. In the southwest, three stars shone in a break in the clouds.

'I don't know what I'll do with him now,' she said at last.

'Why do you bother?'

'Because I can't walk away.'

'Didn't you see the dead ones? The empty poles waiting? How will you save them?'

'I can't walk away from the one who is in front of me.'

His glance was shadowed by night, but she felt its brooding force. 'They'll feed on you. That's what they do.'

'These poor souls feed on you?'

'No. The ones who control us. They feed on us, who are their slaves.'

'Are they demons?'

'Maybe. If you turn around now, you might be free of them a while longer.'

'No.' She wiped her brow, still wet from the rains. 'To run is to be their slave. I'm going to fight. All I ask is that you stay out of my way, and don't betray me.'

'Don't trust me,' he said. 'I'm not like you.'

'You're the only ally I have.'

Looking at each other, they both laughed.

At length, she wiped away a tear. Within the strange shimmering gleam off the road, she watched his face, his wry smile, his habitual shrug as of a man who has trained himself to let water run where it may, making no effort to shield himself from the downpour.

'Don't make me like you too much,' he said, 'because it will end in grief.'

"Will it? That's up to you.'