Shadow Gate

44

'What's your name?' Mark asked.

The spy stared morosely into the campfire, cradling his left forearm on his right. They'd been traveling downriver along Istri Walk for days, and the man had remained silent the entire time.

'Easy enough to find out his name,' said Hari as he untied the pouch of food they had commandeered from a passing patrol.

'He need tell me nothing,' replied Marit tartly. 'What do we have to eat? I'm hungry.'

'We're better served to drink at the altars. That's what keeps us strong, and young.'

'A fountain offering youth? Think you so?'

'It's what they tell me. It might be true. Or it might be a ruse to keep me returning to the altars, where they can spy out my movements.'

'Good man,' said Mark to the spy, who had maintained an intense interest in the fire. 'You're listening, and pretending not to. If you're truly a spy for Toskala, then I hope you go to Clan Hall and report all you've seen and heard to the Commander.'

'I'm no spy,' he muttered to the fire. 'I was walking to visit my sister in High Haldia, after hearing there was troubles in the north and worrying about her and her young ones.'

If death, the release of the spirit, tasted sweet on the air, then a lie burned, like too much red-cap scalding the tongue. Anger was sour, and hope bitter, and what joy or happiness tasted of she did not know since she'd met with little enough in the last months.

'Don't lie, ver,' she said, not unkindly, 'because you can't lie to me. Here. Can you eat?'

He could not grip the rice ball, so she broke it off in portions and fed him, and his gratitude and suspicion spiced the air as Hari paced at the edge of the fire's light. She walked into the darkness to him.

'Why do you run at Lord Radas's beck and call?'

'Because they're the only ones who can free me.'

'Release you, you mean? How would they manage it, if it takes five to destroy me?'

His shadow was made substantial by the twilight glamour of his cloak. 'I don't know. I only know it can be done, for there was a frightened woman wearing the green cloak when I first woke, and now that cloak wears a man. Not a bad sort, precisely, not vicious or cruel like the others, but there is something about him that creeps me.'

The spy had looked up, maybe trying to listen.

'Careful,' called Marit, 'or I'll guess your secrets.'

The spy looked away.

'When he falls into the hands of our masters, he'll betray you, and then they'll know your true intentions,' said Hari in a low voice. 'If this campaign against them is what you truly intend.'

'He can't possibly hear us from over there. Anyway, I want no part of an army that strings folk up by their wrists, leaves them to

rot and die, and calls it a cleansing. One that burns villages, abuses women, and locks down High Haldia like a jail. Fear is their master, not Lord Radas.'

'Lord Radas's pleasure is fear. That's why he commands the army.'

'Who commands Lord Radas?'

'She is very old, although she doesn't look it. What she is truly, I do not understand.'

'But she wears a Guardian's cloak.' She thought of the night she had watched a woman walk out of the forest and, without touching them, kill two reeves. 'A cloak of night, spanned with stars. She -whoever she is – and Lord Radas discovered how to kill Guardians, and then took their cloaks for their own. Find out how to kill a Guardian, Hari, and tell me, and then I promise you, if it's still your choice, that I will release you if it is in my power. After I have destroyed them.'

'You'll never manage it.'

He walked farther into the night, until she could not see him. Trees sighed in a wind out of the south, running up the river from the distant ocean, carrying the promise of more rain. They had camped on a stretch of beach where a bend in the river had led the current to undermine the far shore and smooth this one. Thorns bristled in plenty to shelter them from patrols, and stands of smoke tree and northern pipe separated them from the Istri Walk, a screen against prying eyes.

She walked back to the fire.

Without looking up, the spy said, 'Folk are saying the Guardians were murdered. That demons took their place for the power they could wield.'

'It's an explanation,' she agreed.

After a while, he spoke again. 'My name's Miken. Toskala's council sent me and four others to spy out Walshow, but I was caught in High Haldia. I don't know what became of the others. It's true I have a sister in High Haldia. That's why I went there.'

The truth stings.

She looked away, reaching for the bag of provisions. 'You want more rice? Maybe some wine to wash it down?'

LWhy did you save me?'

He had a cautious gaze, and she found that if she struggled to

draw an imagined curtain between her and him, his thoughts did not overwhelm her. He had nice eyes, but his face was thinned with hunger and hollow with the pain he still endured from the aftermath of beatings and then the final hanging, for he'd told his captors everything and they had laughed at his weakness.

'I was a reeve, once. In my heart, I'm still a reeve.'

He indicated Hari's presence beyond the light. 'What about the outlander?'

'Listen, Miken. You can go free now, make your own way. You can travel with us, pretend to be my prisoner or my hireling. We're headed for the army. I'll try to get you back into Toskala, but there's no guarantee I can manage it.'

'I'll never know if it's true or not, what you're saying.'

'No, you won't. But I give my oath as an apprentice to the Lady, where I took my year's service, that I'm telling you the truth. It's her honor I hold in my hands when I tell you that if I can bring them down, I will.'

'You alone? That one seems to me a bit of a coward and an outlander besides, which might account for it.'

'I can't stand aside and do nothing.'

He was seated on a log, hands laid loose in his lap and arms slack, everything still too sore and abused to work properly. But he was stronger than he'd been when they'd cut him down.

'I know the back routes. I'll make my own way to Toskala.'

'We'll leave you provisions then, if you can carry them.'

He closed and opened his right hand, face scrunched up in pain, but he managed the movement, and then closed and opened his left hand to show it could be done.

'Tie the bag to my back, and help me shove this log into the river. They can't see me at night, and we're past the cataracts. It's smooth water more or less downstream.'

'A reasonable plan, if you can hang on.'

'I've hung on this long. I endured worse.' He rose. 'No point waiting. The council needs my report.'

She rigged the provision bag around his torso, then dragged the log into the river. 'You're sure?'

He flexed his shoulders, tested his range of motion. 'My thanks lo you for rescuing me. What's your name?'

The streaming current rushed, louder than the wind.

She smiled sadly. 'Ramit.'

He hooked himself into the fork where a branch had grown out from the bole. 'My thanks, Ramit. May the gods honor you.'

His words brought tears. 'May you find a safe haven, Miken.'

She shoved the log onto the river and watched until she could no longer see it on the dark waters. Then she walked back and sat by the fire, contemplating the lick and simmer of flames and the occasional spat spark. Was there a pattern to its burning, a truth in the way flames ran merry along a charring log or glowed in a blue-white shimmer where coals burned dense and hot?

If Guardians can be made, then they can be unmade.

If Lord Radas and his ally can kill, then so could she.

A branch snapped. She grabbed her sword.

Hari strolled into the light. 'So you didn't trust him either. Wise of you, my sweet.'

'When did I become your sweet?' She sheathed the sword.

He braced a foot on another drift log and stared at the sky, but it was overcast and thus starless. Ripples of firelight seemed to work through the fabric of his twilight cloak. Her own had a stubborn bone-white gleam, as pure as death.

'Two times I took off my cloak,' she said, 'and I couldn't breathe, and then it wrapped around me, and took me back, like it refused to let me die. So you can't just remove a cloak and kill them that way. You'd have to bind the cloak as well.'

'You can't kill what is already dead. Anyway, if a living person touches the clasp which binds a cloak, their skin burns and blisters just as if they were touching fire.'

'How do you know that?'

'Yordenas does it, if a person angers him. Makes them hold the clasp until the skin burns off their hands.'

Marit shuddered. 'Where is he now?'

'He was sent south to take charge of Argent Hall, and I was sent south with the army.'

'Then you both failed.'

'And I'm pleased to hear it!' His grin made her laugh. 'I did my best to do as little as possible with my command. I marched as a mercenary with the Qin for a while, and I saw how disciplined their

troops were, and how certain men could not bear the discipline. I was given the dregs, the criminals and the insane, I swear to you, and I let them give in to the worst that drove them. That's why they were so easy to defeat at Olossi.'

'Whose side are you really on? Had you ridden them harder, you'd have led them to victory.'

He bent to grab a stick, and poked into the fire until, with an oath, he flung the now-burning stick into the river. 'Let's ride. No use lingering here.'

She raised her arms, stretching. He watched her in silence, but she did not need the sense granted by her Guardian's cloak to recognize a stirring of arousal in his body.

'Harishil, eh? Hari being your short name. You're not Water-born?'

'I don't know what that means. Although my brothers complained that I was always too full of hot air.'

She smiled, not wanting to think of Fire-born Joss. 'Air, then. Which suits me. I can think of a reason to linger here, where it's quiet and isolated.'

He sucked in a breath, moving neither toward nor away.

'I don't like being alone, Hari. And whatever else you may be, you're an attractive man. Despite everything' -she leavened the phrase with a cocky grin- 'I like you.'

Her dear friend Kedi had often said, 'There's a reason it fits firmly in the hand, convenient for women to lead us around, for it's true that's what leads and we must follow.'

Hari spoke a phrase in a language she had never heard before. He ran a hand over his hair to his nape. She rose, because surely he was not budging, and tested him by stroking up from his nape. He kept his coarse black hair clipped so short it was like bristles. A reeve's cut.

'That tickles!' she said, laughing.

His breath grew harsh, but not from fear.

The first time she'd bedded Joss, she'd played coy, to encourage his reckless streak, but Hari was a different man, so guarded it seemed likely he'd lost the habit of trust. Forget subtlety.

One kiss was all it took. And if he was a little desperate, in the manner of a drowning man, she didn't mind: she too was a little

desperate, having swum in cold and lonely waters for far too long.

Marit and Hari rode at a leisurely pace south toward Toskala on the Istri Walk, in no hurry to reach the army although Marit knew they ought to move quickly.

'Eagles!' Hari squinted at specks in the sky.

'You seem pleased to see them.'

'I wonder if they see us.' He grinned. 'And what they make of us if they do.'

Nothing like sex to cheer up a man, reflected Marit. The edge was still there, but he chattered a lot more about nothing of importance. Good thing she liked his voice.

A wagon with a broken axle had been dragged to one side, its bed stripped bare. Vultures flapped heavenward from a pair of decomposed corpses sprawled at the edge of woods an arrow's shot off the road. If Hari had seen the bodies, he made no comment, but for a while they rode in silence. The road was wide and smooth, the powerful River Istri a noisy neighbor to their right. Normally in the rich heartland of Haldia a traveler would expect to meet steady traffic, but they encountered no one except for soldiers wearing the eight-pointed star who manned the occasional barricade.

Yet the land was green, and the sky today as much blue as cloud. It was a fine morning for a ride through handsome countryside. What were the eagles doing? What hall did they come from?

'I have to admit,' said Hari with a laugh, 'I wasn't sure I could manage it. It's a relief to know I still can.'

'Manage-? Aui! Is that all men think of? I ask you.' But it was true that, being dead, one might start to wonder. 'Surely you could have…'

He had a way of tightening one side of his face, pulled by shame-ful thoughts he wished to cut loose. 'That would be more than I could endure. Either to know her thoughts, and surely to find in them some thing I wished never to have known. Or to know I was forcing her and share every moment of dread and pain. I am not that sort of man. If you'd seen what Lord Radas had it in him to do, you'd feel as I do.'

The day seemed darker. 'You're right, of course. I'm sorry I made a jest of it, if it seemed I did.'

'It makes me wonder about these Guardians your tales sing of. What manner of folk were they?'

'They were the guardians of justice!' But she faltered. 'Surely the gods cannot have meant otherwise.'

Yet Atiratu, the Lady of Beasts, had foreseen that one among the Guardians would betray the others. Marit had always thought it part of the tale only because any tale must include trouble and strife, setbacks and struggles, to make a good story. She had never really thought about it as if the goddess had actually seen as with the sight of eagles into what lay far ahead, and done her best to give warning.

Patrolling out of Copper Hall, she had learned the gullies and ridgetops of Haya and the Haya Gap, the skirts of the Wild, the bays and promontories of the North Shore and the deep reaches of Istria Bay as well as the warrens and canals of Nessumara and the broad delta region with its ancient ruins and fisherman's reed houses. She had flown patrols over Iliyat and into Herelia. But she did not know Haldia well.

'Look,' said Hari as they pulled up where the land dropped away. From this vista at least a dozen villages surrounded by fields and woodland could be seen, three on the western shore of the river in Farhal and the others in Haldia to the east. What transpired in those villages she could not tell; they were too far away. A dark stain oozed along the road.

'Eiya!' Her heart contracted and her will ebbed.

The army swarmed south, boiling along the road. So huge a force would surely prove impossible to defeat.

'There's an altar near here.' Rudely, he pointed with a finger across the river. 'On a promontory that overlooks this view. Best we take a drink, for strength.'

Warning chafed at the bit, smelling the presence of an altar.

'All right, then. I'll follow you.'

They approached a rocky hill whose lower reaches were blanketed with flowering thorn and evergreen ghost pine. An abutment of boulders rimmed the crown, and as they dipped to the flat ground, Hari shouted a warning. The horses clattered down to greet another mare, who nipped, forcing them to back off.

'The hells!' Hari swung out of the saddle and ducked away as his horse nipped back.

Warning trotted away from the altercation, and Marit reined her up hard. She dismounted and ran to Hari.

A person was walking the labyrinth. A ghost flickered into view on the straight stretches, vanished where the path took its twists, and shimmered again into existence. A demon's body might seem substantial walking in the world, but within the labyrinth its true nature was revealed.

Hari grabbed her wrist to stop her. 'I don't recognize her.'

Marit tugged away and stepped into the entrance. She strode, pushing as through water, each angle compressing as the landscapes flashed past: the quiet sea, the ruined tower, the pillar, the dunes, the marsh, and more places she'd had no time to mark and learn. Winded, she staggered into the center.

As she'd thought, she did recognize her.

A girl drank from cupped hands at the spring. Rising, she turned with liquid dripping off her chin. A polished bronze mirror hung from her belt, and she first grasped the mirror but then released it and with practiced skill slid a strung bow from its quiver, nocked an arrow, and drew the string just as Hari bumped into Marit.

'You can't kill us,' said Hari, with a lopsided smile, 'although I admit you can inflict a lot of pain. And I must say, I am cursed sick of the pain.'

She seemed comfortable looking down the arrow at Marit, gaze fixed on target. 'He said you were a traitor. He was right about that, at least.'

'No,' said Marit. 'You do not know what you are seeing. How can you? My heart is veiled to your sight, as yours is veiled to mine.'

'I want to meet others like me.' She dipped the point so it menaced the ground instead of Marit. 'You two are like me. Did you lie to him, about what you mean to do?'

'I did not lie. He rejected my offer of alliance, so I am forced to work on my own. Did he reject you?'

Her body had a woman's shape, yet there remained something girlish in her speech and aspect, as if the body had grown apace while the mind was trapped and now hurried behind trying to catch up. 'No. T left him. I seek to punish those who harm others, but he

is afraid to pass judgment. How can he be? I encounter people so twisted in their hearts. They are locusts, eating everything in their path. And I saw a man cloaked as we are, only he was twisted, too, like Uncle Girish. There must be others, like me, who are not afraid to pass judgment on the ones whose hearts are diseased. We are the wolves. It is our obligation to cull the sick ones, so the tribe remains strong.'

Hari laughed bitterly. 'The ones you seek are the ones who released the locusts.'

'Best you go home, lass,' said Marit, trying to sound kind, although the girl's words disturbed her. 'Find your companion and return to him. He is wiser than you know.'

But after they watered their horses and drank their fill, the girl followed them.