Spirit Gate

38

A stick prodded Keshad awake.

"Ow!" he yelped, but the man at the other end of the spear merely poked him again with the haft.

"Here, now. Your turn on watch."

"Must you prod me? That hurt!"

"Heh. A lot less than those ginnies would hurt when they bit my hand or ankle if I shook you kindly awake, yeh? I saw what they did to Pehar's hand. Heh! Mean beasts!"

"True enough," said Kesh, sitting up and rubbing his sore head. The ginnies gaped their mouths to show teeth to the intruder. "Although it was stupid of Pehar to reach in on them like that. Those ginnies will protect what's mine-what I'm safeguarding for my mistress, that is."

"Heh! I'd risk their bite for a taste of Devouring right now. Is she good, your mistress?"

Kesh made a face. "I'm only her hired man."

The man, who called himself Twist, snorted in disgust. "Seems you're used to being beaten by her stick. Come on, then."

Kesh chivvied the ginnies into a makeshift sling. He saw how Twist eyed the pouch that the ginnies had been guarding, then shifted his gaze to Magic. Magic stared right back at him. Kesh had been very careful to hide his remaining string of leya, but every soldier in the cadre suspected he carried coin. Really, the ginnies had protected him. He gathered up the rest of his trifling possessions and spat to get the sour taste of bad wine out of his mouth. "Where do I go?"

"You can leave your things here."

"I'll keep them near me and my little guardsmen, if you please."

"Heh, heh! Come this way. Be careful where you step."

Twist held a rushlight that steamed off more smoke than flame. The sergeant of their cadre had opened his bedroll in the empty council house in the very village whose inhabitants had-only one night before-sought to overcharge Keshad and Zubaidit for accommodations in those same quarters. The rest of the cadre had lain down to rest on the entry porch, where they could move out quickly if need be.

It was this cadre Kesh had been absorbed into earlier that day when the mounted men had captured him on the road. They'd have killed him if he hadn't possessed that cheap tin medallion, the one he'd looted off the corpse of the man Bai had killed. But he had looted it, and so he was alive. Others weren't so fortunate.

The village was little more than a posting station with buildings strung along the road like beads. Each building was a business with an open front, an awning sheltering an entryway partly floored in earth and partly raised up as a floor of wooden planks. The strike force running ahead of Kesh's cadre had decorated these porches with the corpses of the village folk who had lived and worked within. The sight of these slack forms greeted Kesh as he and Twist trudged toward the west-facing sentry post. There was an innkeeper Kesh remembered, a jovial man who had scoffed at their attempts to secure housing for a lower price; he had been stripped of the fine sea-green scalloped silk robe he had been wearing, and sprawled on his entry porch in nothing more than a sleeveless shift as pale as a death shroud. Here was the kindly seller of rice, an old woman with a bent back now softened and straightened in death. The aura of torchlight revealed more personal details: One had a slashed throat, while the other seemed unmarked but no less dead for all that. He hoped they had died quickly.

Twist had a sickness lodged in his chest, something nagging and snotty, and the man breathed with a rattling intensity and paused now and again to cough up gunk and spit it out. He did not glance at the bodies. To him they were chaff, nothing important. Along with the others in the cadre, he had ransacked the village at sunset, complaining bitterly all the while that the strike force had carried away everything both valuable and portable, although naturally heavy household goods remained, things impossible to haul under these circumstances.

Had these folk been alive, Kesh could have passed them without a moment's thought, but they were horribly dead. Bai's words nagged at him. Was it possible that if they had acted more quickly they could have saved these hapless innocents? No, they would only have been killed as well. Had they slept the night in the council hall, they would be dead, too. These reflections allowed him to walk behind Twist without showing any sign of revulsion. If the others suspected he was not one of them, they would kill him, and he was determined to stay alive.

Laughter came from one of the porches. A group of men were joking, calling out bets. One of the men was stretched out atop a body, humping busily.

"Fifteen! Sixteen! Seventeen!"

"He'll go on twenty!"

"No, on twenty-five!"

"Whoo! Whoo! Twenty-two! Heh! I win!"

With a chorus of laughs and shouts, coin changed hands.

Kesh averted his eyes and kept walking as he whispered thanks that the poor victim was not screaming. Ahead, the village ended in fenced gardens, livestock sheds, and a pair of granaries on stilts. A tent had been raised just outside the last shed, although it was little more than a lean-to of canvas rigged out from the shed's cantilevered roof. A trio of men stood at attention beside a small fire, guarding both tent and shed.

"Who sleeps there?" Kesh whispered.

"Eh! The lord does."

"The lord?"

"He don't usually stop by us, but there's somewhat afoot. Anyway, he don't like to be disturbed by the likes of us. So, hush!"

It was middle night, more or less. There was no moon. Kesh stumbled more than once before they clambered back on the road "downstream" of the shed. The road here ran fairly straight, with a long view back into the village and its emptied buildings. In an open meadow lay the ruins of the old Ladytree, fallen into a massive tangle of trunk and branches that no one dared cut up. In the darkness, the new sapling, no more than two years old, wasn't even visible.

They walked a little farther on the pale surface of the road until they came to the road's intersection with a wide gravel path that pushed straight through the woods toward the distant uplands. The path's beginning was marked by one of the three-span gates that marked a temple to Ilu, the Herald, though it was too dark for Kesh to see any buildings in all those trees and brush. Just ahead, the road began to curve. Here in the middle of the roadway stood two sentries.

"Heh! About time!" said one, a burly man with his hair shaved down against his head.

"What was all that noise?" asked the other.

"Just Rabbit," said Twist, wiping his nose.

The burly man cackled. "Eh! He wouldn't know what to do with a live one, eh? You ever get to wondering just what he did do to get run out of his village?"

Twist spat. "Did you ever think I don't want to know? Eh?"

Kesh felt sick, but he said nothing, made no expression, just waited.

Fortunately, the pair headed back for camp without any further discussion. Kesh's companion settled into a comfortable stance, feet shoulders'-width apart and weight canted onto his spear.

The ginnies slept, a heavy burden in their sling. Kesh shifted nervously as he looked back toward the camp, wondering what he ought to do. There were thirty-six in the cadre. He'd counted three times: eighteen mounted and eighteen walking on their own feet; he made the thirty-seventh. A sergeant led them, but who their commanders were Kesh could not tell. In general, the southern towns were councilled, so he wasn't sure how one could tell a "lord" apart from a well-to-do council member, although there must be signs and customs that spoke of such things. In his travels in the empire, he had dealt with merchants who were agents for lords, of whom they spoke in only the most formal of terms. But lords in the empire were a different beast, set apart, isolated. Nor could he ask Twist to explain it to him, lest Kesh seem too ignorant of things the others took for granted. As the old saying went, better keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool, than open it and be known as an impostor.

It was so quiet. The horses had been strung up on a line near the council house, visible from here by the distant glimmer of light from a single lantern hung at the porch. The mascot dogs who accompanied the cadre were tranquil beasts, and he supposed they were now sleeping. In truth, it was the look of the men with whom he marched that agitated him.

Like Twist. The man's jaw had been damaged and healed wrong. He was missing two fingers. He had a net of lash scars on his back. He carried himself with the bravado of a man who relishes a fight over nothing.

A figure appeared on the road out of the darkness and loped up to them in that gangling, hopping way he had.

"Eh, there, Rabbit," said Twist. "Finally remember you have sentry duty?"

"Heh. Heh. Yah."

Like this one, who tolerated the others calling him "Rabbit" and who had a way of grinning at unseen sights that made Kesh think he was unbalanced, and who was capable of the most grotesque acts, things Kesh had not thought anyone could force himself to do. Like what he had just done. All Kesh could think of was that if the woman, or man, was dead, then there wouldn't have been any pain.

"How long have you been on this road?" he asked Rabbit, because the silence was making him twitchy.

Rabbit fished a strip of dried flesh out of his pouch and chewed on it before answering. "Eh. Since I was kicked out of m'mam's village and forced to take cover up in the hills. There I found some who were more like me than otherwise. Comrades, you might say." He hawked and spat, then wiped his mouth clean. "Let me see. That was ten years ago now, I'm thinking."

Kesh whistled. "That's a long time. How old are you?"

"Oh, I'm a Goat, sure enough. You work it out."

"Huh. Same as me."

"Really?" said Twist. "You look younger than Rabbit."

It was true. Rabbit had the wiry strength of a young man but his face was seamed and weathered in the manner of a person who has suffered far beyond his years and lived to tell a noisome tale. He bore a series of parallel white scars on his right forearm, and he kept himself clean-shaven because of the knotted scar along his jaw that prevented him from growing an even beard. No telling what he had done to get run out of his home village, and since this was the second corpse he'd humped since Kesh joined the company this past early afternoon, it was best not to ask and not to know.

"How long, you?" the older man asked Kesh.

"Oh, in the service of that one, since I was twelve," said Kesh, figuring it better to tell as much of truth as he could.

Rabbit twitched. "Heh! You ever done it with her? Front or back?"

"Her? No."

"I bet that reeve done it. That one was carrying her. Heh! He was as ready as a split log to burn. Popping right out of his leathers, near enough. Fancy them dropping down just like that to warn us of you waiting there by our dead comrades just ahead." Rabbit scratched where Kesh did not want to look. That weird, crazy grin crept up the corners of his mouth. "Wonder who killed them."

"I'd like to know," said Twist. "I've been camping with Jeden and Ofass for five years now. If I caught that one who did them, I'd open their chest and squeeze their beating heart 'til they told me. And then burst it anyway."

"Heh. Heh. Just like we did at that place… huh… it had a name."

"Reyipa," said Twist.

Rabbit snickered. "Then we tossed them from the cliff, four at a time. Heh. Heh. 'It's the flying fours for you!' Remember how we called that out? Heh. Pretty clever."

"Whew! I do have to pee," said Kesh, not liking the turn of this conversation. "I'll be right back."

Trying not to disturb the sleeping ginnies, he picked his way sideways down off the roadbed and gingerly high-stepped along the ground, to the edge of the trees. Made water there, while his thoughts spilled.

If he ran, they would just be on him. This motley group, part of a larger unit that called themselves the Flying Fours, had embraced him into their ranks only because the reeve and his fascinating passenger had dropped down beside their cadre and warned them to "pick up the lad who is just up the road, and keep him safe." Or so the sergeant had made sure to tell him. How Bai had managed to persuade them he could not imagine, since he hadn't been there to see, but she seemed at this juncture capable of anything except, he hoped, raping corpses.

He peered into the trees, but it was all darkness beneath the canopy of rustling leaves. The river ran close by, a constant chuckle of amusement, no doubt laughing at his plight. What was he to do? He could race to the shore and throw himself into the water, but he didn't know how to swim, and anyway the ginnies would likely drown. He could hide in the undergrowth, but the dogs would probably find him. In the other direction the woods thinned where the ground began its steady rise toward the high plateau of the Lending. He might have a chance running in that direction, up the path toward the temple at first before veering into the bush, but it seemed foolish to take the chance when Bai had managed to gift him with safe passage. Such as it was. He hated to march with this group back toward Olossi, especially not knowing what they intended. He hadn't quite asked, and they hadn't quite said, but from the way they spoke it seemed they were riding to meet up with the strike force, which was almost a day ahead of them. That strike force had murdered the poor folk in this exceptionally inoffensive village.

Everything had gone wrong. But at least he was still alive.

He heard what was not a sound, felt the shadow although it could not be seen in darkness. A prickling sensation ran from his ears to his neck, and his throat went dry, and he was suddenly horribly, terribly, genuinely scared, so badly that he would have wet himself if he hadn't just peed.

He stepped away from the trees, thinking at first that the threat came from beneath the canopy, but as he set a foot on the slope of the road's underbed, a shape passed low over him. He and the other sentries ducked, covering their heads although nothing came close to hitting them.

On the road behind them, the shape descended sharply. His breath lodged in his throat. The creature made the transition effortlessly from flying to trotting. When those mundane hoof-falls slammed on the road, he choked and gasped, and scrambled up to the road's pavement to stare after it as it moved away from them and toward the tent.

He would have called it a horse with two heads, one equine and one human, each one streaming wings like smoke. But as it came to a halt a little away from the campfire, it separated as its rider dismounted; it was a person wearing a voluminous cloak that had gusted out in the landing. But the horse really did have wings, fanned out at first as it came to earth and then folded in against its body. They swaddled its flanks like a monstrous growth.

" 'Rid us of all that is evil,'" he muttered.

"What did you say?" asked Twist.

"What is that thing?"

It was the wrong question to ask. Twist and Rabbit looked at him, chins lowering as might muzzles dip on dogs who are thinking of taking a bite out of you.

"You don't know?" asked Twist.

"Heh," said Rabbit suspiciously.

"I've never been out of the south," said Kesh in a choked voice. "Never saw such a thing before." He sorted through his choices and opted for belligerency. "You want to make something of it? I can't help it I'm not well traveled like your sort. I have to go where the mistress tells me, and she doesn't stray far, let me tell you. She works for the temple, and they don't let their hierodules off the leash. If you take my meaning."

"Heh. Heh." Rabbit scratched himself. "Like to see that."

The creature and its rider vanished inside shed and tent respectively. One of the guardsmen detached himself from the campfire and jogged down to the sentry post.

"Where's the new one?" he called when he was within earshot. It was the sergeant of their company. "Master wants him to come."

"Heh," snickered Rabbit.

"He always interviews the new ones," said Twist with a sneer. "Sees right through you, if you take my meaning."

Kesh did not, but he saw no chance to escape with three armed men beside him and he with only a knife and an unstrung bow for which he had no arrows and no facility. So it would end badly after all, and just in the teeth of his victory. Fortune had turned its back on him, that was clear.

He trudged to the tent with the sergeant beside him.

"Young man come to my company a month back," remarked the sergeant, "and didn't take to our way of doing things here. So I had to break all his fingers. I did that, you see, to get him to tell me why he'd come. It seems some folk from Nessumara had sent out a few likely lads to scout the land, see what was up. I just don't like folk who will go tattling tales of me to people who don't like me. But he fessed up pretty quickly after I got to cutting off his fingers."

"Did he now?" asked Keshad, thinking of the marketplace and how you could never let your true feelings show. "What happened then?"

"Oh, it seemed a kindness just to slit his throat. I'm not one for drawing it out, although I admit a few of my soldiers asked me to let them have a go. I don't think that's right, once you've gotten what you need. I just killed him. Most likely the vultures ate him, if the Lady was feeling as kindly as I was. Here you go."

He motioned for Kesh to go through a rigged-up entryway made of hanging cloth and in under the canvas roof. Kesh heard the sounds of the creature moving within the shed. It seemed to be eating or drinking; it made horse-like noises, so that in hearing it one would think it a horse. But horses had wings only in the old stories.

In the stories about the Guardians, who had long since vanished from the Hundred.

If this was a lord's resting place, then it was no better furnished than the hovel of a simple farmer. There was a pallet covered with a thin blanket, a folding table on which stood a bronze ewer and basin, and a small traveler's chest so old its edges were smoothed to a shiny curve and its planks were warped.

The man sat on a stool, still dressed for travel. If he was a lord, then he wore clothes common to every laborer: a long knee-length linen jacket dyed an indeterminate color that the candle flame did nothing to distinguish; wide-legged trousers; knee-high boots that looked well worn and scuffed. His dark cloak pooled around his hips and thighs as if he had scooped it over them to keep himself warm.

He looked up as Kesh halted uneasily before him. He had a strange cast of face, a little broader across the cheekbones, a shade different in complexion, the shape of the eyes more exotic, twisted and pulled. Something about his features seemed passing familiar. He might be an outlander, or else the son of some hidden corner of the Hundred whose folk rarely left their home valley, a person glimpsed once and recalled now in a spin of dizziness. No, Kesh had never seen this man before. His eyes were so brown as to be black, and they were like holes driven into Kesh's heart to lay bare his secrets.

He spoke with a slight drawling accent that Kesh could not place. "You were picked up by this troop yesterday afternoon, so I hear."

"Yes." Kesh kept it short. He didn't know how to address him, or how to stop from breaking down into tears out of fear.

"Before they found you, the troop was met by a reeve who was carrying a hierodule who said you are her slave."

"So I hear. I didn't witness that meeting myself."

"Naturally." Almost, he might be about to smile, but instead the expression made Kesh shiver as if a ghost were breathing on his neck.

The candle burned straight up. There was no wind, nothing to sway that flame. The horse bumped and snuffled within the shed.

"You are not what you claim," said the man.

Kesh could say nothing, because he was pinned by that stare. The air had grown as hot as the hell where dance those lilu who have not yet found a crack through which to wiggle out onto the mortal world. He was hot and cold together, so frightened he thought he might faint.

"It would matter to the others, although not to me," said the man cryptically. "I ask, and you must answer. Do you mean to harm me or mine?"

"No." The word was forced out of him by a vise gripping and squeezing until only the truth was left. "I care nothing for you or yours."

"How can you know, since you have not asked who me or mine are? Yet strange as it seems, you are telling the truth. Very well." He raised a hand as though the effort taxed him. "Go. Best if you not come to my attention again."

Kesh backed out so fast through the curtained entrance that he stumbled as soon as he was outside and fell on his backside hard enough to jostle the ginnies. They hissed at him, and Magic nipped at his wrist as if to warn him to be more careful next time, an "I told you so."

He had forgotten about the ginnies! They had lain so still in the sling that the lord had not noticed them at all. Usually they made their feelings known. Not this time. They had chosen to avoid the man's notice.

The sergeant glanced at him, unamused by his pratfall. "Go back to your post."

He scrambled up, soothed the ginnies, and hobbled back to the sentry post. Best stick to the routine and do nothing, absolutely nothing, that would bring him to the attention of that man and his horrible stare.

He knows all and everything, all my secrets, all my crimes, all my hopes and all my fears. But he let me go anyway.

"Heh," said Rabbit, seeing him return.

"Passed muster," said Twist with a sly, cruel grin.

Kesh grunted a noncommittal reply. Above, the stars shone bright and cold, while the night was warm and the tender breeze a balmy presence. The trees whispered in a mild conversation. A nighthawk kurred. All was quiet.

No, it was only an illusion brought on by the tension of his situation, caught in the midst of an invading force whose soldiers would as easily kill him as spare him. There had been nothing strange about that man, nothing at all. Any clever man might spout truisms like "you are not what you claim to be" and "you're not telling the truth" to the kind of twisted, rabbity men willing to join this manner of army, and know he was hitting the mark.

He had certainly imagined the wings on that horse. It was only the play of shadow in the night.

There, now. That was better. The sergeant was a bigger threat. Did he suspect, or had Kesh truly passed muster? He had to glean any useful information before he made his eventual escape. He couldn't think any other way. Never give in to fear.

"What is the lord's name?" he asked, treading softly on this new ground. Each word was like the snap of a finger being pinned back and broken. "Where does he come from?"

Rabbit shuddered and turned away as the smell of urine spread sharply off him. He had wet himself. He began to weep with small, animal noises. "They scare me," he whimpered. "They scare me. Stop it. Stop asking."

Twist snarled, and the ginnies hissed in answer, crests rising as they stirred along Kesh's arm.

"Best keep your mouth shut." Twist's voice rose in pitch until he fought himself and controlled it with a grimace of dismay. "Best keep it shut and ask no more questions. If you want to stay alive. The lords don't like those who question. That one-he's the kindliest. He only burns you."

"What do you mean? Like he, uh-" Now that he had set out to say it, he realized the words might make them suspicious again, but it would be worse to break off as though he had something to hide."-uh, sets people on fire, bound in a cage, like they do in the empire to execute criminals?"

Twist shrugged. "Eh, I don't know anything about the empire, but that seems a nasty way to go for a poor criminal, nothing quick about it. No. You faced him. You know what I mean."

So he did. All his doubts roared up as he recalled that deadly gaze. He had been cleaned out, every crevice of him burned down to bedrock. Rid us of demons. He needed a plan, any plan, to escape.

"What comes next?" he asked. He could never escape if that "lord" was always watching over them.

"What comes next?" mused Twist philosophically.

"Heh." Rabbit looked back toward the village. When Kesh and Bai had walked through that village, it had lived and breathed; now it was dead. "Heh. Maybe we get a chance ourselves, at some loot. Doesn't seem fair the strike force cleaned this out and left us nothing but their leavings. I'd like to try-heh. Heh."

"Olossi's pretty big," continued Twist, who like the rest of them mostly ignored Rabbit. "Plenty of loot for everyone."

"Oh, yeh, sure," stammered Kesh. "And after that? Then what?"

"How should I know? One campaign at a time, until we're done."

"Of course. Until we're done."

"Yeh. Yeh." Twist scratched the stubble at his chin. "The armies are on the move. High Haldia first. Olossi set to fall in the next few days. Toskala will go down soon after. Or maybe it's Nessumara next, all the cities and big towns, yeh. It won't be long until all the Hundred is ours, just as the lord commander promised us."