Shadow Gate

45

To fly lifted Nallo's spirits. To skim through low-lying clouds and get soaked to the skin with unshed moisture made her laugh. To glide on the wind – currents and thermals, which Volias told her she would learn to identify and anticipate – while the earth rolled away on all sides gave her joy. No chanter or tale-spinner, she could think of no better way to describe the earth from her harness than that it was like a textured carpet of greens and browns and yellows, ribboned and splotched with the variegated blues of water. Glorious!

Volias took them in easy stages so she would not get too badly chafed by the harness. Even so, the mey fell away with breathtaking speed. They could cover a day's journey in half a morning, and Volias said that they were going slow.

They flew upriver along the River Olo with the Lend rising to the south, its mysterious grasslands wavering like a dream in the distance. Then westward upriver along the River Hayi, with the Soha I [ills rumpling the land to the north, air currents tangled. Surely they flew over the village where she had lived with her husband, but she could not pick out earth-bound landmarks from the air. Mount Ana reared his gleaming pate, and they were buffeted through the

Aua Gap with the city of Horn seen below to resemble an onion chopped in half, its nested circles climbing the slope of a ridge that marked the terminus of a prominent range of hills whose name she did not know.

There was so much she did not know!

She'd never thought about it before.

Pil flew a ways off to her left and Volias to the right and out in front. Tumna kekked as they glided down the long descent to the Istrian Plain, known to Nallo only in the tales. She twisted in the harness, trying to see what Tumna had spotted. She kept her feet fixed on the training bar, while Volias hung with feet dangling, perfectly at his ease, and after a moment she realized something was moving where her feet blocked her view. Now it was behind them.

It was hard to know what Tumna might spy out: a deer, a bandit, an honest traveler. She tucked her knees up to her chest and scanned the earth. There sparkled a pond lined with mulberry trees, and a neighboring settlement, not more than six houses, storehouses and sheds flanked by an orchard and rice fields. This time of year the fields should have shone with green shoots working up through muddy water, but the fields lay brown and untended. No one had planted. From the air, the place looked abandoned.

Tumna dropped, and she shrieked and planted her feet on the training bar even though the harness held her. Aui! So far to fall!

Color flashed where the trees thinned by a stream. She knew in the crudest sense how to rein the eagle; she tugged the right jess, and Tumna responded with a tight circle that attracted Volias's attention. Fumbling in the pouch strapped to the harness, she got a hand around the red flag. As she yanked it free, her grip slipped, and it fell, brought up short by a leash.

She cursed, grabbed and waved it clumsily, trying to show where she had seen a person moving in the forest. Volias and Trouble plunged past her like a dropped stone, and Tumna's circling movement cut off her view. As she turned in her harness trying to get a clear line of sight, something happened because as they came around she saw Volias and Trouble had set down in a narrow patch of cleared ground stream-side and he was gesticulating to a person – a woman with a baby – who was possibly hysterical or furious.

Pil had gotten Sweet to come around at an altitude rather higher than Nallo and Trouble; he had a far better grasp of reining and leashing. He had barely settled into a holding pattern when Volias launched, the eagle beating upward until she found a rising current that would lift her. Volias set a course eastward over countryside smoothing into a plain that stretched to a cloudy horizon.

It was going to rain soon. She shivered, wondering what had happened below.

Volias stayed aloft late into the afternoon, not stopping as he usually did for an early camp and a lesson in short-range maneuvers. They passed over extensive forest lands and, increasingly, villages set amid fields and ponds and orchards and attended by the occasional temple building or compound. Every one of these had thrown up around it an earthwork or palisade, flimsy-looking barriers from this height. Folk worked in the closer fields, or hauled dirt as others shoveled.

According to the tales, fertile Istria boasted ten and a thousand villages, and it looked to Nallo like every one of them was surrounded by fresh fortifications.

Late in the afternoon, they set down in a clearing well away from village or temple. She followed Volias in checking her eagle's harness and feathers and then, like Pil, hooding the bird for the night, making sure the two raptors remained at opposite sides of the open space. Volias released Trouble to hunt. Nallo trudged farther into the woods.

Her arms were sore, her legs and hip aching, and when she slipped down her leather trousers to pee, she saw that the harness had rubbed her right hip raw where the strap was too tight over her hip bone.

Finishing her business, she walked back to camp, wincing as her leathers rubbed the same raw spot. Eiya! Next thing you knew it would start bleeding.

Pil already had a fire going. Crouched beside it, he fed sticks into the flames while Volias tied canvas into a lean-to and spread a ground cloth beneath it.

The senior reeve looked up as Nallo approached. 'That was good eyesight, spotting her like that.'

'Who was she?'

'Eh, the usual tale. A squad of bandits hit her village, but fortunately they had a watch out and a palisade to slow the outlaws, so everyone escaped. But the houses took damage, and tools and food and the local temple's silk banners and silver altar settings were stolen.'

'Desecrating the temple…' She shook her head. 'That's the work of savages.'

Pil glanced at them, then turned back to the fire.

'I won't argue with you,' said Volias. 'Here, hold this end while I tighten it.'

'Where was she going? She had a baby.'

'Eihi! You do have good eyesight. Maybe that's why.'

'Why that woman was alone in the forest?'

'Neh, neh. Why the eagle chose you. It's as good an explanation as any, and we've all wondered. Not every reeve is a decent person. Some were murderers or become murderers, some have a thievish bent, or complain all the time. Envy, jealousy, spite, anger, vanity. Reeves boast of all these fine traits. Yet what manner of heart we have makes no difference in the choosing. Sure it is, if you eat far too much, your eagle can't carry you, but otherwise our bad behaviors don't really limit our ability to be reeves, they only limit our ability to be good reeves. So why one person over another? Why choose a reluctant recruit-' He gestured to her and then to Pil. '-over some poor lad who's dreamed of being a reeve all his young life? Maybe it's just the cursed eyesight.'

Pil grabbed the iron traveling pot and walked to the stream that snaked through the clearing. The two eagles had tucked their heads under their wings, readying for sleep. Trouble chirped nearby, but Nallo could not see her.

'She's got her dinner,' said Volias with a smile. He fished in his travel pouch for their leather bottle of rice. When Pil returned with the pot half full of water, Volias dumped in a double handful of rice and over the top crumbled two wafers of traveler's cake, a pungent blend of spices and dried, mashed nai. Pil set the pot on a tripod over the fire and settled back on his heels to watch it heat.

'What about that woman?' asked Nallo, thinking of her own journey with Avisha and the children.

He tucked his chin like the eagles readying for sleep, and the

gesture made him seem, for an instant, ashamed. 'She was angry at me for giving away her position. In case any folk were nearby to spot me. She'd gone on the forest track to see if the village her sister married into had been hit.'

'Had it?'

'She hadn't reached yet.' He grinned. 'I think, from certain words that slipped, that she left her own village's hiding place because she'd gotten into an argument with her kin, or her husband, or the elders. Hard to say. She reminded me a little of you.'

She glared at him, and he laughed. Pil looked at them, and Nallo stalked to the fire and plopped down next to him, promptly soaking her rear as she sat in a hole hidden by a luxuriant growth of spring-beam.

Pil raised an eyebrow.

'You could have warned me!' she said, shifting away.

He shrugged, then dug into his sleeves and handed her a stick of dried meat.

'Thanks.' She chewed. He chewed. There was something about his silence that always got to her. She said, finally, 'You're awfully good with the eagle. Is it a lot like riding a horse?'

He tucked his chin in the gesture she'd come to learn meant no.

'I'll tell you, I'm no good. I feel so clumsy up there, and thinking all the time how I'm going to fall, and then forgetting all that and just staring because it is so cursed amazing to see the land from the air. I just never knew!'

He chewed, watching the pot. He had exceptionally lovely thick straight black hair, which she had seen once when he let down his topknot to comb it out. Otherwise, as now, it was all gathered up tightly atop his head. He had a pleasant face once you got used to him looking so different, his eyes pulled at the corners and his cheeks broad and his nose a little flattened like someone had punched it down, only it wasn't crooked as it would have been if it had been broken. Not a bad-looking man, really; just an outlander. Nallo had never met an outlander before; she could count on one hand the times she'd even seen Silver merchants on the road, them being outlanders still with their -hidden god despite their people having lived here for almost a full cycle of years and colors according to the clerks at the temple of Sapanasu.

'What temples do your people have?' she asked. 'I mean, did your gods come with you, or stay behind?'

At first she thought he would, as usual, say nothing, so she went back to chewing on the tough stick of meat. But after a while, he cleared his throat and forced out words.

'In the upper world,' he gestured toward the sky,1'there are tribes. In the lower world there are tribes. They herd, and fish, and fight with each other. We walk the lands of the middle world and try to stay out of the way.'

'Eh, that sounds like where I grew up. We herded our goats and sheep, but there was a bigger village eastbound and a bigger village westbound, and we got caught in the middle when they had their disputes over tolls, pastures,, and contracts.'

Volias walked over. 'Hush. Do you hear voices?'

Pil stood and walked to the edge of the clearing, head bent and eyes shut as he listened. A male voice rang faintly in the distance, but after that it was quiet. They held still until the rice was done, and then they ate and, with darkness falling, stretched out under the shelter to sleep, sharing out the watch.

No one disturbed them. Trouble roosted elsewhere, appearing at dawn. She thumped down hard, agitated, and Volias called from the clearing's edge to Nallo, who was folding up the canvas shelter.

'Nallo! Get to your eagle and hook in. Where's Pil?'

'Off to do his business, I think. Or pray. I don't know what the hells he does every morning.'

'Leave everything. Now!'

She dropped the half-folded canvas, abandoned the bedrolls and cooking equipment, but grabbed her gear pouch – fortunately with her gear neatly packed away – and the baton and short sword they had issued her, not that she had the faintest idea of how to use either one effectively. Of how to fight at all, if it came to that.

She ran across the clearing to Tumna, the eagle acting restive, talons digging into the earth, wings half open, neck feathers raised. Shouts broke from the far end of the clearing. Nallo whistled, and Tumna bent her huge head down and raked at the hood with her talons. Got stuck. Nallo released her, tugged off the hood, and hooked in just as three men carrying spears ran into the clearing.

An arrow sprouted – like sorcery! – in the chest of one of the

men. His companions faltered as he tipped to his knees with a hand clutched around the shaft.

Volias had his sword drawn, but it was Pil, at the edge of the forest, who had loosed. He drew again, released, and hit a second man in the shoulder.

'Move!' shouted Volias.

A third arrow buried its point in the earth, shaft quivering, as the men grabbed their comrade and scrambled back, calling to fellows hiding in the trees.

Pil sprinted across the clearing to Sweet, and cursed if the cunning old bird didn't catch her hood with a talon and yank it off so that as Pil hooked in she was already thrusting. Volias, in his harness, waited on the ground until Pil and Nallo were aloft.

A shower of arrows painted the air with ghostly stripes. Volias swore, and then he, too, was up, but Trouble had an arrow in her right leg that shook loose and fell away. Blood dribbled earthward. Volias was still cursing, a stream of words less heard as discrete syllables than experienced like a river's flow. A cadre of men gathered in the clearing. Sweet caught an updraft, and the others followed. Nallo's pulse thundered in her ears and, slowly, quieted.

They flew north over the plain. In village after village, folk labored to complete walls and earthworks instead of tending freshly planted fields and gardens. Now and again a cadre of men rode, or marched, along a path, but Volias took no notice. Trouble flew point, but she began to labor. The sun rose higher. The day grew hot and moist. To the southeast, clouds piled up, but there wasn't much wind to move them.

Just when Nallo feared they would have to land to save the eagle, she spotted the glittering line of a river. The roads and tracks swarmed with people walking, riding, carting, draft beasts pulling wagons, all creeping in the same direction. Soon she realized that the strange cast of ground ahead, the red clay and patchwork fields and textured ground, was not a bizarre land-form but actually streets and buildings grown into the land between two rivers. The city had a massive outer wall, reinforced by a berm and ditch, although a straggle of new settlement grew up outside its protection. The main road seemed almost as wide as the river, its tributary roads and paths lined with villages and hamlets like so many beads

on a string, each bracketed by green fields and flowering orchards. At the southern tip of the city, where the muddy yellow-brown waters of the larger river were joined by the blue of the smaller, a bold escarpment jutted out, its flat top almost the breadth of Olossi's inner city.

Trouble was dropping fast.

'The hells!' She had never landed in a prescribed space which, if overshot, would dump her into water. She shut her eyes as Tumna swooped. 'Thunderer, give me courage, let me die without pissing myself-Oof!'

Tumna chirped interrogatively, and a cheerful voice close beside her said, 'Heya! Unclip, make room, there's another coming in.'

She slid her feet off the training bar and found hard ground to stand on. Unhooking, she sagged, and was helped away by a young man in reeve leathers. Fawkners ran up to hood Tumna. Off to one side, Volias shouted his wrath into the skies, and Trouble listed wrong while fawkners clustered around her with various implements and bindings.

'Heya! Here she comes!' With a grin, the reeve caught Nallo's arm.

Sweet pulled up neat as you please and easily gripped one of the huge perches built into the wide parade ground. That left Pil dangling about his own height off the ground, but he unhooked and let go, catching himself in a deep crouch when he hit dirt, then straightening.

'Eihi!' The reeve had cropped hair, and muscular shoulders and arms revealed by his sleeveless leather vest. Watching Pil, he grinned. 'Interesting. What is that?'

'That's Pil,' she said irritably.

'That may be,' agreed the reeve, 'but what is he? He doesn't look like any man I've seen before, and I've seen plenty.'

'He's Qin.'

'One of those outlanders that fought the battle of Olossi? We heard rumors, mostly from Volias-' He flicked a glance toward Volias and his stricken eagle, then away as if to stare would be rude. '-but now I see the truth. What's he like?'

'He doesn't talk much.' Unlike you, she thought, but held her tongue. 'He saved us today from an ambush. He's an amazing archer.'

'We'll be needing his skills. I'm Peddonon, by the way. An old-fashioned name, I admit. Everyone calls me Peddo.' He grinned.

She laughed, because usually only women had names like that, and she liked him the better for being amused about it. 'Maybe you're a bit like me, eh? I'm called Nallo.'

'You'll fit right in. Let me find someone to get you to the barracks – Likard! Get over here and take her in hand.' He nodded at Nallo. 'I was just about to head out on patrol when we saw you three, and Trouble injured. Wsst!' His brows drew down. 'Volias can be a bit of a jerk, but we all love that bird, and so does he. Will you be all right? Don't let that fat-ass Likard try to give you the bunk by the door. Glad you're here, Nallo. Sure as hells we need you.'

He walked off, head cocked to size up Pil as the Qin carried weapons and gear over to Nallo. The soldier set everything down and glanced around. If he was as nervous as she felt, she could not tell by his bland expression.

A short, thin man with his long hair tied back in a tail hurried up. 'You have the look of novices, eh? I'm Likard. If you'll come with me, I'll show you bunks where you can dump your gear, and then Ofri'll want to meet you.' They followed him, feet crunching on the gritty dirt. 'You been in training long?'

'I haven't,' said Nallo. 'I came here to be trained.'

Likard looked at Pil, who shrugged, his gaze flickering down, and all at once Nallo realized he was not a stolid, laconic, arrogant out-lander but a youth not much older than she was who was simply very shy.

'I figure he's been training at Naya Hall two or three months, since it was established.'

'Naya Hall?' Likard squinched up his face.

'It's what they call it, because of the oil of naya. It's where they sent the overflow of novices out of Argent Hall.'

That Joss is now marshal over, eh? Who'd've thought that cursed drunken womanizer had it in him? I'm impressed, heh!' He led them up onto a porch and had them unlace their flying boots before they went inside. The barracks hall had an open room for work, unswept at this hour and littered with wood shavings and scraps of leather. Behind half-open screens lay a raised sitting room strewn with

pillows and low tables. Pairs of doors opened off either side of the work room. Likard slid one open, gesturing to a shuttered room beyond.

'Unless you got any preference otherwise, I'll put you both in here where most of the younger reeves bunk.'

She stepped into the chamber, which was long and narrow and had a musty odor, nothing unpleasant, just redolent of bodies. There were about twenty beds, most decorated with homely remembrances like a flower-patterned quilt or an embroidered pillow.

'Here's one for you, Pil,' said Likard, gesturing toward the sole bed set against the same wall as the door.

'Neh, not that one,' said Nallo. 'It's likely too noisy.'

Footsteps sounded on the floor, and a young woman in a hurry barged through the door, jerking to a halt before she slammed into Likard.

'Heya! Why be stopped like that in the middle of- Here, now. Who are these?'

'Novices from Argent Hall, sent to train here,' said Likard. 'Greetings of the day to you, too, Kesta.'

'Fuck off, you turd.' Then she turned a bright smile on the others. 'I'm Kesta. Sorry, not much of a greeting, is it? Welcome to Clan Hall. Always glad to see a new face.'

The words seemed sincere enough, and she had the grace not to stare at Pil. And she was cursed attractive, with her sleeveless vest laced tight over a muscular frame.

Nallo averted her eyes, trying for something safer, like the reeve's chin. 'I'm Nallo. This is Pil. He's an outlander, as you may have noticed, and he doesn't say much.'

'Eh, so you talk for him?' She grinned, and lifted her chin in a gesture almost flirtatious. 'Fair enough. Anyway, I'm late for duty-'

'There's a surprise,' muttered Likard.

'-so I can't chat, but I'll see you at hall this evening, if I get back. The hells! There it is.' She grabbed a baton off the bunk decorated with the embroidered pillow, and ran out.

Pil said, with his careful diction and heavy accent, 'Where lies the men's hall?'

'Men's hall?' Likard looked him up and down in an intrusive way

that truly annoyed Nallo. 'Can't wait to get to the temple and be devoured, eh?'

Pil blushed.

'Leave him be! Among the Qin, men and women who aren't kin or married don't bunk down together. So he'd be uncomfortable bunking in these quarters.'

Likard scratched an eyebrow, as if this answer confounded him. 'Why in the hells would we be wasting our time here with a men's hall and a women's hall? He want a private chamber, like a legate? Or his own cote, like the cursed commander?'

'He's got no idea of our ways and customs, so don't mock him. You know, Likard, it seems to me there are in general more male reeves than female. Maybe one of the bunk rooms has all men in it, or fewer woman, anyway.'

'I never thought to count,' he said with an exaggerated and sarcastic smile. 'Aui! Just throw your gear in the workroom. I'll let Ofri sort it out.'

But Pil would not leave his weapons or his gear, so in a show of solidarity, Nallo lugged her gear as well. Likard led them through the compounds into a private garden court where a fountain spilled water into a series of stone basins carved to look like giant nai leaves, whose root feeds all people.

An old man sat on the porch, studying a half-finished game of kot. Seeing them, he rose. 'What's this, Likard?'

'Novices brought from Argent Hall to train here. Volias brought them.'

'Where is Volias, then?'

'Trouble's injured.'

'Eiya!' His expression darkened. 'How bad is it?'

'It's the leg. She had to fly while losing blood.'

Nallo faltered. 'Will Trouble die?'

'No use courting worries, lass,' said the old man. 'The fawkners will have all in hand.' He considered Pil with a frown, then gestured. 'I'll let Commander know you're here.'

They heard voices engaged in discussion as they took off their boots. They waited on the porch until the old man came back out to beckon them into a spacious audience chamber where six older men and two women sat on pillows, with a ninth seated behind a low desk.

'Your names?' The woman behind the desk had years, and pain, etched in her face.

'I'm Nallo. This is Pil.'

'Can the outlander not speak for himself?'

'I am Pil,' he said, curtly enough that it might be taken for arrogance, but Nallo recognized the way he had of looking at people without quite having the nerve to look at them. She could not reconcile his shyness with his killing arrows.

The woman nodded, not one to take offense at trifles. 'I'm the commander. These are my council.' She ran off names, pointing to each reeve, and ended with a middle-aged man called Ofri. 'Why did Marshal Joss send you from Argent Hall? Why not keep you there?'

'I didn't want to train at Argent Hall, verea. As for Pil, here -you'll need to ask Volias – but I think it was determined he'd train better away from the other Qin soldiers.'

'Is that true?' asked the commander, tone like a whip. 'Pil, you'll answer me.'

'Captain Anji asked it be done, Commander,' he said in his soft voice. His mouth twisted as if he was in pain. 'He said it is better I go away to train. I am no longer a proper Qin soldier.'

'Because you are chosen as a reeve?'

He parted his lips to reply, then closed them.

'We'll sort it out later. At the moment, we can use you to ferry messages so more experienced reeves can patrol. Wait outside. When we're finished, Ofri will take charge of you.'

Outside, they sat cross-legged on the porch. Pil had the knack of sitting perfectly still, hands at rest on his thighs, while he stared at the fountain and seemed, if anything, to be praying. Nallo could not find a comfortable seat. The raw burn on her hip smarted. Everything else itched, poked, ached. She listened to the reeve council discussing the approach of a vast and terrible army, the flight of refugees from burned villages, a spy recovered from the river, the death of two reeves and an eagle. What had happened to the Green Sun clan? They'd abandoned their warehouses and all left town, very odd, and the council wanted the reeves to search for traces of them. Should we use oil of naya, as they did at Olossi? How do we transport a lot of oil quickly, if we do, when river transport down the lesser Istri might be blocked?

The words, by themselves, had no tangible meaning, like a tale sung at festival time, but their voices had an edge so sharp that Nallo found her own shoulders tightening in response. A great ravening beast was lumbering down on them, and they just sat there helplessly in its path.