Spirit Gate

37

Captain Waras led them on a long, hot, and sweaty walk up through Olossi Town to a place he called "Fortune Square." Certainly their fortunes would rise or fall depending on the outcome of this council meeting.

At the council hall, she and Anji were allowed to sit on benches in the outer room while Sengel and Toughid took their usual places a few paces to either side of Anji, watching the occasional entrance and exit, and indeed every movement that flickered into being however brief its life, and marking each least scrape, rattle, and word that flew into the air. Priya was watchful, but Sheyshi had her eyes shut fast as she mumbled a singsong prayer in the voice of a woman near to tears with fear. There was no one else there except Captain Waras's guards, and Mai expected that Sengel and Toughid could make short work of these six callow youths who hadn't the posture of men who have been tested.

Anji listened carefully to her account of her conversation with Tannadit. He made no comment until she was done.

"Sixteen 'Greater Houses'? And an untold number of dissatisfied Lesser Houses? 'Silvers'? I wonder what they are. Useful, anyway. You learned more than I did. I mostly heard tales of merchants and traders and peddlers who could not bring their goods into the north, past a town called Horn. If goods come up from the south, and cannot be moved elsewhere, it will hurt the merchants in this city."

"You think you could offer your company as caravan guards on the roads here."

"It seems possible."

"Isn't 'Horn' the name of the town where my uncle's ring was found?"

"Yes."

They suffered an interminable and dreary wait through the afternoon while the air grew more turgid and the heat more stifling. She whispered thanks to the Merciful One that here there was no need to cover her face, as there had been in Sirniaka. She whispered thanks that she was allowed to whisper thanks without fear of being burned alive. At last, the doors slid open, and a steadily increasing stream of women and men flowed into the building through the entry chamber and on into the high-raftered hall where the council met.

She studied them as they passed, marking the most curious faces. A man obsessively fingered a fresh scar on his clean-shaven chin; it looked like someone had clawed him with a nail. An old, bent woman needed assistance to walk, closely tended by a pair of younger relatives, who resembled her about the eyes and jaw. A stout woman of middle years swaggered with the assurance of a Qin officer, a servant skulking like a beaten dog at her heels. Most of these folk had gleaming black and brown-black hair caught up in looped braids. Some of the women wore their hair pinned high, with a horse's-tail fall down their back or a cluster of heavily beaded braids that clacked softly as they walked, like gossips. A pair of men came in with their hair entirely wrapped in cloth whose ends were tucked away to make a turban. The younger was a remarkably handsome young man, despite his pale complexion and strange headdress, and he was dressed in a rich marigold-yellow silk knee-length overcoat. His gaze roamed, as if he were looking for someone, and when he saw her, he smiled winningly, but was pulled on his way immediately by the scowling older man who probably was his father if one judged by looks and dress. No other men wore their hair wrapped away in a turban.

The shutters were taken down in the hall to let air move through, although there wasn't much wind. The afternoon shadows had lengthened, and if there wasn't precisely a breeze rising up off the river and delta, there was a softening of the heat. The hall was lined with benches. It was a vast space bridged by huge crossbeams of wood. Trees never grew so large in Kartu, not even on Dezara Mountain where the sacred grove was tended. Already, these Olossi people were bickering, seating themselves in clots and clusters that suggested factions and alliances.

The murmur of their voices was like the whisper of wind in leaves -just like in the poem! Although that tale had a bad ending.

She shifted, feeling anxious. Priya and Sheyshi knelt on the floor. Anji sat utterly still, hands resting on his knees, back straight, expression smooth and pleasing in the manner of silk. She could not guess what he was thinking.

In Kartu, of course, the overlords ran everything, even back in the days of the Mariha princes. The council met only when the rulers of Kartu called in the leading men of the town to inform them of new regulations to be implemented.

The din of competing voices from the council chamber was rising. A young woman hurried past clutching pens and several scrolls; ink stained her fingers. She glanced at Mai and Anji, and her eyes widened in surprise. She dropped a pen. Bending to pick it up, she lost two more. A grand gentleman swept up the steps behind her. He was attended by a surly-looking man with a crooked nose who was wearing a leather vest and leather trousers almost exactly like those worn by Reeve Joss. Reeve leathers, Joss had called them. The clerk cast a frightened glance back as he approached, and scrambled to gather her things and get into the hall.

"Shut the doors," said the grand gentleman, pausing in the entry chamber with a gaggle of attendants bringing up the rear. He wore a magnificent overrobe of iridescent green silk, embroidered with orange feathers and gold starbursts along the hem and sleeves and neckline. His long hair was braided in three loops, decorated with ribands and beads. If he saw Anji and Mai, he did not deign to notice them, but the man with the broken nose stared rudely at them, gaze dropping down to examine Mai's chest.

A grating and quite high woman's voice shouted for silence in the hall. When it was quiet, the gentleman strode into the chamber with his gaggle trailing him in the manner of nervous goslings. Attendants shoved the doors shut, screens colliding with other screens in a series of sharp reports like staffs whacking wooden targets.

That nasal soprano rose again, calling the council to order in rapid-fire words Mai had trouble following; at speed, and muffled by the closed doors, the differences in pronunciation and phrasing made it difficult to understand. The long wait and the stifling heat had turned her thoughts to mud. She found it hard to concentrate as words and comments emerged from the council hall.

"… never allow outlanders to settle… bad luck… goes against the gods…"

"… fools not to hire out a guard for caravans going north.. ."

"… we must get the trade going again!"

"… no need, the road is still safe…"

A burst of furious and disorderly disagreement, shouted down.

"… no news from the five-flags caravan that left after the rains…"

"… no trade out of…"

"… desperate!… need that wood in order to…"

"… you have stuck your heads in the sand… the threat.. ."

"… perfectly safe… this other is exaggeration… heavy rains have washed out the roads…"

A loud voice penetrated clearly. "Rains! Last year's rains, perhaps! How long must we wait while our commerce dies?"

Others took up the call. "We have lost patience…" And were called to order.

"Strange," said Anji in a soft voice. "Any merchant of Sirniaka speaks the arkinga, but the holy language of the empire is nothing like the same, although bits of it show up in the trade tongue. We among the Qin have our own speech, but most of the Qin who ride the Golden Road also learn the arkinga. So do the folk in Kartu Town. Yet haven't you an older speech there?"

She was startled. "The grandmother words, we call them. I knew enough to speak to my old aunt, though she's dead these ten years. They still speak that speech in the temple. The Qin forbade its use in town. Everyone uses the arkinga now."

"Here, too, it seems they use the arkinga, not just in the marketplace but in their council halls. Maybe it came from here first."

"Can a language travel?"

"It must, just as folk do."

Of course that was obvious, once you thought of it. Mai blushed, not liking to look stupid; it was the worst thing people had said of her in Kartu. Good thing she's pretty. She hasn't otherwise many eggs in that basket. Not much to say! Not like the chattering of the others, which they kept at all day. Better to keep your mouth shut to keep people guessing than to open it and prove yourself a fool. How glad she was to be rid of her family!

She smiled a little, thinking of it.

He brushed his fingers over her left hand.

"What are you thinking?" he asked her softly.

"Are you nervous?" she asked, surprised he had touched her in public.

"I suppose I am," he said, savoring the moment of consideration. "We can't go back."

It was true. The thought of returning to Kartu Town was like poison. In a way, it was a blessing that they had lit a fire behind them in the empire. They dared not travel back that way. And could not return whence they had come, because Anji's life also was forfeit in Qin territory.

A hush fell abruptly within the hall. On its wings, a door slid open. Captain Waras appeared and beckoned to them. "You are called." He surveyed their attendants, and motioned that the slaves and soldiers must stay behind.

Anji rose, waited for her, and strode confidently into the hall. She could not match his stride, so walked with clipped steps, trying to remember how to glide, how to compose her face into an expression both pleasant and unthreatening.

The hall opened above them, crossbeams floating away into shadows; the opened windows fed light mostly onto the floor of the hall. In such a building it was easy to imagine mysteries and secrets and whispered intrigues despite the crowd that jammed the space now. Benches were packed with seated people crammed in legto-leg; more folk stood behind them, elbows rubbing the backs of heads, or lined up along the back of the room and along the side aisles against the windows and even up on top of the long strip of bench that ran along each of the long outer walls. Every human emotion was displayed among those faces: a sullen old man; disdain and envy in a pair of elegant women; a bored girl, half sleeping with chin propped on a hand; anger in some faces and bitterness in many; a woman who looked frightened and a man who looked sardonically amused; that handsome young man from the entryway who was now, oblivious of all else, flirting with a pretty young woman dressed in a gorgeous length of gold-white silk wrapped cleverly around her body in the fashion that most of these women wore, a costume both discreet and enticing. Mai looked for the father, but he stood a few steps away from his son and had his attention fixed on the council table. The broken-nosed reeve stood with his back to the far wall, watching with an ugly sneer on his face.

A rectangular platform was built in the center of the hall, crammed between the innermost interior columns. At one end of this platform was a roped-off section; the rest was taken up with an enormously long table that had the center cut out and one end open. Around the table sat-she had the gift of counting quickly-thirty-one council members. The grand gentleman sat at his ease, smirking. The proud lady yawned as if to say that her time was too valuable to waste on such trivia. The ancient woman sat hunched in her chair, with a young attendant whispering into an ear. One at that table could not hide the cloud of anger on his face. He tapped the fingers of his left hand impatiently, repetitively, and with a reckless energy. Some glanced at him with a flash of annoyance in the grimace of their mouths or the narrowing of their eyes; others ignored him; a few looked at him with anxious mouths and then glanced toward the silent reeve, if that's what he was. These were all signals to one trained in the exacting commerce of human interaction. The restless council member didn't matter to the others seated at the council table, she realized. He was the odd man out, and somehow it was the presence of the observant reeve they wondered at, and worried about. Yet time and again, the restless council member glanced into the crowd and met the eye of some attentive soul, like the turbaned older man. Then he would nod, acknowledging that one-or another-or another. He had a huge following in the hall. He did not look once at the reeve.

In the open section where the table had been cut away, at a minuscule writing desk, sat the harried clerk, pen scratching on paper. Next to and above her stood an elevated platform not much more than a stride's length squared, ringed with a railing that also served as the ladder to get up and down. Here presided a small woman wearing a brilliant peacock-blue robe belted with a wine-red sash. Her hair was mostly hidden by an artfully folded kerchief of an eye-dazzling yellow that did not, in truth, flatter her complexion.

"The suppliants approach," she cried in the nasal soprano that had opened the proceedings. She bent an arm, gestured, and the caravan master stepped up onto the platform. "Master Iad, do you give witness that this is the mercenary captain who guarded your caravan from the town called Sarida in the empire and over the Kandaran Pass here to Olossi? That this is the woman he names as his wife and business partner?"

A second attendant scurried over to hand Master Iad a lacquered stick.

Taking it, he spoke. "I do witness it, in the name of the Holy One, Taru the Witherer, to whom I served my apprentice year." He looked at Anji, nodded with a flicker of movement in the way his mouth turned down. A message, but Mai could not interpret it.

"Will you state, again, that they misrepresented themselves to you when you first met them at the caravansarai in Sarida."

His mouth twitched. He rubbed his right eye with his left hand. "They did, but as I said before, they were completely honorable and discharged their obligation-"

"Step down, Master Iad. You are finished."

Master Iad flinched, and hesitated. Before he could speak again, the attendant snatched the stick out of his hands and scuttled away to stand behind the writing desk. With a shake of the shoulders, the caravan master stepped down. If one could judge by the rush of emotion that softened his taut expression and heightened the color in his cheeks, he was either grateful to be released from cross-examination, or shamed by his own testimony.

"Let the suppliants step forward."

Anji and Mai stepped up. Out of the back of the hall, from the direction of the handsome young man, burst a flirting whistle. Folk laughed appreciatively. Men eyed her, craning forward to get a better look. Anji raised an eyebrow-just that-and there was a shuffling of feet, and knees needing to be scratched, as any number of gazes dropped away.

The envoy said, "Master Feden claims the right to speak."

"Wolves, we call them," said the grand gentleman into the awkward silence that followed. He spoke in a voice that carried effortlessly to each corner of the hall and even, indeed, into the rafters. He held his right hand with palm up, cupped around a large white stone. "Men who hire themselves out to fight."

Belatedly, Mai realized that children crouched up in those rafters, half hidden in the gloom as they peered down from their high perches.

"In the wilderness we walk softly, hoping not to attract their notice. In the fields, we kill them for stalking our sheep. Why then would we open our gates and allow them into our city? Are we all such fools?"

The last word he roared. Mai actually started, the force of his voice like a wind battering her. Anji did not move, did not react.

The angry council member leaped to his feet amid a murmur of speculation. "What of the attack at the border post? The rot infecting the ordinands, some of whom conspired with ospreys to rob merchants? What of the testimony of Master Iad and Master Busrad, both caravan masters of long experience and good character? Do you dismiss all this?"

"Master Calon, do sit and not strain yourself. I still hold the stone." The grand gentleman pursed a smile in the manner of a discerning customer who finds the bruised peach lurking at the bottom of the basket, the one he supposes you have been attempting to foist upon him. "The prisoner is dead. These caravan masters might have concocted the story between them. They might be in the pay of this wolf. He's an outlander. We already know he lied to the caravan master in Sarida, in order to get the hire. We can't trust him."

Anji spoke, startling, clear, cool. The accent of his arkinga made him seem even more out of place, very much a black wolf among brightly plumaged birds. "What of the reeve? The one from Clan Hall? He journeyed here before us. He came to alert this council to the corruption ripening in the border guards. Where is he?"

A cough came from back by the door, where the guards stood. Folk shrugged and rubbed their chins. The council members stared at Anji. The man with the broken nose had vanished. Mai had not even seen him go.

"There is no reeve here," said the grand gentleman. "Nor were you given permission to speak."

"Yet there was a reeve," said Anji. "Dressed very like that man who just left. He called himself Joss. He came from Clan Hall, from a city he named Toskala."

"Out of the north," said the man with a gloating sneer. "Every manner of villain has crawled north into the shadows. He might have been anyone."

"Have you many of those great eagles?" asked Anji, with all the appearance of surprised curiosity. "That 'anyone' might ride one? I confess, I have never seen such an intimidating creature as that raptor."

"A spy. A traitor. These wolves come bearing tales of a conspiracy between Kotaru's holy ordinands, and unholy ospreys, yet their so-called prisoner is dead and conveniently cannot defend himself against these charges. They might have murdered Captain Beron themselves!"

"If you mean to accuse us," said Anji, "then justice decrees we be allowed to defend ourselves."

"Enough of these interruptions!" The grand gentleman slapped his free hand onto the table, making not a few people jump, and indicated the woman on the platform. "Envoy, I ask for this point of order: that we conclude, having determined that this wolf and his pack be banished from all the territories surrounding Olossi and with whom we have friendly relations. Red in favor. Black to decline."

"No!" Master Calon leaped to his feet as many in the crowd rose with angry voices to goad him on. "You refuse to see the danger. The caravan masters vouch for this man. He and his men acted honorably. We need to strengthen our militia against the rising tide out of the north. Our livelihoods, our very houses, are in danger. Our own messengers sent into the north do not return, yet you do nothing. You ignore the reports from the north at your peril! You shrug off this tale of ospreys along West Spur because you are the fools, not us! I demand an open vote, each member to state a choice. I call for an open vote."

"Open vote! Open vote!" the crowd chanted, while a few remained tight-lipped, hunkered down. The other seated council members stared in stony silence. This was a tangled weave, much more complex than the warp and weft of Father Mei's household and its petty grievances and old grudges.

"Silence! Silence!" cried the woman presiding, although by now Mai realized she was merely a facilitator. She had no more power than a shuttle in the loom, which is directed by the weaver's hand. "You do not have permission to speak."

As folk settled down reluctantly, Anji raised his voice again. "Am I not allowed to speak on my own behalf and on behalf of those people for whom I am responsible?"

They ignored him. Just as Mai had been ignored, in her father's house, when there was business to discuss not considered fit for the ears of a girl who would be married out of the family and thereby no longer have any interest in the matters of the household. The envoy called for an open vote, and the vote went around the table so everyone could see, the council members raising either a red flag or a black one. Now the split came clear to Mai: there were sixteen Greater Houses, but only fifteen votes allotted to the guilds and the Lesser Houses. So they voted exactly on those lines: sixteen red flags and fifteen black. So the Greater Houses won their victory while the crowd seethed with an ugly anger. What held the crowd helpless Mai did not know.

The envoy waited until the clerk scrawled the results and rang a handbell at her left hand.

"Therefore," said the envoy to the hall at large, "the decision carries: the suppliants will not be allowed to settle in the Hundred. Master Feden, have you anything more to say?"

The grand gentleman rose to his feet with a weary sigh, hoisting the heavy stone. "It is late," he said in tones of kindness, nodding toward Mai. He wore an ivory comb of astonishing beauty in his hair, fixing into place the loop of his middle braid. He wore, as well, a magnanimous aspect. The victor can afford to be generous, and can expect gratitude from the one he has defeated when that loser might otherwise expect a death sentence. "Too late really to send you on your way at once, although many have urged you be driven out of town immediately. You may camp outside the walls for one more night. As long as you are on your way by the first bell after dawn, we will not trouble you further. You'll ride south. An escort will be provided for the first leg of the journey. As for the rest of you, let the ban of Taru the Witherer be upon any of you who think to conspire with these outlanders. They are hereby called into exile from the town's commerce. Captain Waras, escort them out."

He sat.

The captain came forward with a doubled guard of soldiers. It was stuffy in the chamber despite the open shutters, and the captain had loosened his outer jacket enough that the chain of the necklace he wore sagged free, and the object fastened there slithered into the open.

The reeve's bone whistle, with which he called his eagle.