Spirit Gate

45

Before the last march of the night, Chief Tuvi pulled Shai to the back of the line. "You're too inexperienced. You'll wait back here with the tailmen. Your job is to cut down any stragglers who run this way. Do you understand?"

"I understand."

"Best thing you could do is get in a kill or three, just to get blooded. You're little use to us otherwise." Chief Tuvi wasn't as encouraging as Tohon, but Shai hadn't seen Tohon since yesterday before dawn. About eight other men were also missing from the troop, but no one had bothered to tell him where they had gone.

They had left Olossi at about midday and marched as slowly as they possibly could out West Track to the intersection with West Spur. There, they had headed southwest, as if returning to the empire, moving as if led by hobbling ancients and delaying themselves with frequent stops. Late in the afternoon, when given the signal by the captain, they had simply pulled off the road as if to camp. As soon as dusk gave them cover, they had marched at speed through the night, past the crossroads that led down to Olossi and farther yet along the river bottomland east of the city. This was unknown country, but now the missing scouts appeared at intervals to give their reports. Late, as the waxing crescent moon sliced its way out of the house of the dead, the captain called a halt. Shai and a dozen tailmen took up stations along the road. Grooms led their horses into the trees. The rest of the company vanished into the night, hooves muffled by cloth.

For a long while they waited. There was no conversation.

Shai wanted to talk, but he dared not be first to break the silence, and he had a damned good idea that none of these tailmen would utter even one syllable. Every gaze was bent along the road. Shai had never seen such a road before. It shimmered, very faintly, as though a ghostly breath rose off it, like a cloud of breath steaming out of a warm mouth in bitterly cold weather. The other road they had traveled, West Spur, had exuded no such glamour.

A shadow passed overhead. He ducked. The others, those he could see, looked up, but there was nothing to see, only a cloak of stars and night thrown over the world. The wind died suddenly. An insect clik-clik-clikked. One branch scraped another. Strings creaked minutely as bows were readied. Swords whispered out of sheaths.

It caught them from behind, an explosion of wings and hooves and the crack of a staff as it met a hard leather helmet. One of the Qin went down, but the rest, these paltry tailmen, were already rolling, tumbling, jumping out of the way, finding a new position, a new angle. Shai stood there and gaped as a massive horse galloped out of the sky and right at him to trample him under.

Far away, in counterpoint, shouts and screams rent the silence. The noise of a distant battle breaking out jolted him into action. He ducked, stumbled, fell, scrambled out of the way just in time. The beast pounded past him as the tailmen whistled to each other, calls to mark position and choice of attack. The rider billowed like a cloud, only that was a voluminous cloak rising out behind his body as though caught in a gust of wind. The horse slowed to a canter, and it pulled in its vast wings and turned on a right rein, back around to face him.

The horse had wings.

The glamour on the road brightened where the horse's hooves touched it. That unnatural light rose as if with the dawn, but it was not yet dawn. Far away, the battle raged as Captain Anji and his men hit the strike force with their surprise attack. Close at hand, Shai saw clearly the face of the man who rode on the back of that impossible horse. He rose, trembling, and raised a hand to ward off what he knew must be an insubstantial ghost.

"Hari." His voice choked on the name.

A hiss of arrows answered. The tailmen were the least of the Qin company, but a Qin tailman would stand as an elite in most armies. Five arrows sprouted from the rider's body. A javelin, cast from the side, caught the man in the torso, just above the hip. He grunted in pain, and swayed in the saddle, but he kept his seat.

"Hari!"

The ghost spoke with Hari's voice, urgent and angry. "Shai! How can it be you've come here?"

"I came to find you."

"You shouldn't have. Go home before the shadows swallow you as they did me!"

The horse screamed a challenge, tossing its head, and it launched itself down the road as if to assault Shai. He was stupefied, bound, paralyzed. It leaped, and took to the air. One hoof shaved the top of his head, knocking him flat. The tailmen fixed arrows and loosed them after the animal. No arrow touched those gleaming flanks. But the rider was not so fortunate. Those dark slashes fixed in his body, yet he did not fall. His dark cloak billowed, a shadow entwining him.

Jagi whistled the alert. Shai grabbed his sword, which had somehow fallen out of his hand. A dozen or more horses bolted toward them on the road. None bore riders. Not far behind ran twenty or more men on foot, in a disorderly retreat.

"Get off the road," said Jagi in a calm voice that meant he was irritated.

Shai got off the road by stumbling backward down the ramped earth and falling hard onto his butt. There he sat, too stunned to act, as a trickle of blood, like a tear, slipped down his cheek from the scrape atop his head. Its salty heat caught in the corner of his mouth. The panicked horses swept past. The tailmen coolly picked off their enemies before those hapless men understood they were still under attack.

It wasn't the aftershock of the battle that immobilized him.

The tailmen had seen Hari. They had filled Hari full of arrows. Yet how could they see, much less kill, a man who was already a ghost?