Shadow Gate (28 page)

“Keshad, isn't it?” he asked.

“So it is. We're clear of our debts. We're free to go.”

“As it happens, you aren't.”

The young man had an expressive, passionate face, although his features were marred by a sense of perpetual impatience and anger. “That bastard Feden—”

“Master Feden is dead. His heirs, indeed all the Greater Houses of Olossi, are in disgrace. You're safe on that count.”

“What does the Hieros want?” asked Zubaidit.

She was a truly magnificent young woman, handsome without shallow prettiness, built with the strength of a woman who knows how to labor, forthright, bold, unbelievably attractive. Her black hair was pulled back from her face, but a few thick strands fell over her shoulders.
Her sleeveless vest was short enough to show a bit of belly; her kilted wrap left most of her long, muscular legs showing. The hike had made her sweaty; her brown skin glistened. Whew.

“What are you thinking?” she asked with a laugh.

“Just thirsty all of a sudden.”

“I can see you're the kind who drinks a lot.”

“Eiya! I'm hit.”

“Maybe. You clean up well, I'll say that.”

“Bai!” protested the irritable brother.

Joss chuckled. “Did I ever thank you for rescuing me?”

“Likely not. In my experience, men so rarely do. They get what they need, and they leave.”

“How can I thank you, then?”

“Not in the way you're hoping.”

“How can you possibly know what I'm hoping? Verea, I fear it's your own thoughts have taken charge of your lips. Not that I'm complaining.”

“Enough of this!” cried the brother. “Make your claim, or let us go on.”

“Yes,” she agreed, smirking in that maddening way that made Joss hotter than the day warranted. The larger ginny opened its mouth, showing teeth. “What claim are you making?”

The flirtation played between them lost its power to amuse. Whatever his expression showed, she caught his change of mood at once. The smaller ginny hissed.

“What?” she demanded.

He raised both hands, showing empty palms, the old gesture for “it's out of my hands.” “I've been sent by order of the temple of Ushara in Olossi, by order of the Hi-eros with the backing of the Olossi temple conclave, to return both of you to Olossi. For breach of contract. For theft.”

She looked thoughtful.

Her brother was not so patient. “I delivered property to the temple, which the Hieros accepted as compensation
for Zubaidit's debt. The accounts book was marked and sealed. I have it here in my possession.” He patted the strap of the pack he had slung over one shoulder.

“New information has come into the light. That's why I'm here.”

“What I offered, the Hieros accepted,” said the brother. “The payment was ample compensation for Bai's debt to the temple.”

Bai turned to look inquiringly at Joss, as if to say, “How will you answer that?”

He shrugged. “What you offered in payment for your sister's debt was not yours.”

“Of course it was mine! If I find a precious stone on the riverbank, it's mine. That is the law, that any item which has no other claimant can be taken and owned by the one who finds it.”

“There was another claimant.”

“How can there have been another claimant? I found the girl abandoned and dying in the desert so far south of here that I wasn't even in the empire, much less the Hundred! Am I to understand that now any person who likes can just claim whatever he wants? I claim your eagle, then. Or your sword. Or the temple itself! I'll claim Master Feden's storehouse, if I've as much right to do so as another person who dances in after me to claim what
I
found and
I
transported and
I
fed and cared for and I
sold to pay off my sister's debt
!”

“Kesh,” said Zubaidit in a soft tone. “Let him speak.”

“A man, mature but not yet elderly, came to the temple some nights after you made the exchange,” said Joss. “According to the testimony of the Hieros, and corroborated by every hierodule and kalos I interviewed thereafter, he was dressed in the manner of an envoy of Ilu but claimed to be a Guardian.”

Kesh snorted. “Guardians! There's a man who knows how to dance a fraud. The Guardians are gone. Vanished. Dead.”

“Kesh! Let him finish.” The teasing manner she'd had
before had fled utterly. This was not a woman you wanted to cross.

“The man went on to say he was sorry if the treasure came into her hands in any manner which led her to believe she could own it.”

Kesh was really angry now, puffed up as certain animals fluff up fur or feathers to try to intimidate the beast that has cornered them. “I admit the girl's coloring was odd, her skin as pale as a ghost's and her eyes demon blue and her hair an unnatural gold-white color. But when has it ever been said that no one can own a slave? Except among the Silvers, I grant you. Heh! Did he claim that she was a Silver? None of us have ever seen the faces of their women, although the men don't look anything like that.”

“The man claimed that the girl, like him, was a Guardian.”

“How can anyone have believed that?”

“The Hieros believed it. She let him take the girl.”

“To sell for a tidy profit elsewhere! I didn't know that woman was a fool.”

“She's no fool,” said Zubaidit.

Joss glanced at Scar, who watched the interaction with his usual uncanny alertness, ready for trouble. At the foot of the hills, the basin still sloped away, and from this vantage one could see the vista rolling into a heat haze. Clouds covered the sun, and the recent rains had softened the air and made it bearable, but it was still hot. A man still sweated, thinking of how much he did not understand about the world. “He came attended by two winged horses.”

“Winged horses!” blurted out the brother. “What kind of child's nonsense is this?”

“So my eyes were not cheating me after all. I saw a winged horse in the camp of the army.”

“So you told me,” Joss said. “I didn't believe you at the time.”

“No, you didn't. What happened at Olossi?”

“Captain Anji and his troop, two flights of reeves from Clan Hall, and the newly elected council master of Olossi using the local militia combined forces to drive the northerners away.”

She nodded. “There are two of us, and only one of you,” she continued amiably enough, but Joss's instinct for danger crawled like a prickling on his skin. Like a fine steel sword, she was a honed weapon. “Even with the eagle, you can't force us to go with you. You can't carry us both.”

He braced with the haft of his reeve's staff fixed on the ground, ready to move with a mere tightening of his grip. “I can track you until the Qin soldiers who are hunting down the remnants of the army catch up to us.”

“Ah.” She nodded with a faint smile. “I concede this match.”

The brother fumed, and the glance he loosed at his sister betrayed other emotions struggling beneath the surface.

Joss said, to her, “You truly saw a winged horse at the army's encampment?”

“Yes, on West Track, a few days before the army reached Olossi. Even so, I find it difficult to believe I saw what I did. Do you think this supposed ‘envoy' who approached the Hieros could be in league with the dark spirits that attacked Olossi?”

“Dark spirits, indeed,” said the brother with unexpected heat. “I've seen what they're capable of. But now I'm wondering about that envoy. I met an envoy coming out of the south, but he was killed by ospreys in Dast Korumbos.”

“Ah.” Joss nodded. “You remember.”

“I'm scarcely likely to forget that day, or that we've met before, ver. The envoy was a man of mature years, not yet elderly, now that I think of it. And he was looking for something. I think he suspected I had the ghost with the demon eyes. Yet he died, so it can't have been him who spoke to the Hieros, can it?”

“It's difficult to see how it could have. Although the descriptions match. It does seem we're talking about the same man.”

“Anyway, I cannot see that envoy—such an amiable man!—as being in league with those corrupt soldiers.” But, as if struck by a new thought, Keshad sighed sharply.

“What is it?” Bai asked.

“I did meet a different man, with a shadowed manner, and an odd accent. He said nothing of being a Guardian, but I was sure—then I thought I had dreamed it—”

Zubaidit grabbed his arm. “Sure of
what,
Kesh? You never told me this!”

“That hurts!” He pulled his arm out of her grasp. “I was sure he was riding a winged horse. He seemed to leap down right out of the sky, but it was night, and then I thought afterward I had mistaken it. Wouldn't anyone think so?”

“Where did you see this?” she demanded.

Reluctantly, the brother spun a halting tale. He'd been marching with the army, forced to do so because he and his sister had been overtaken by the strike force on its march toward Olossi and it was the only way he could save his own life. By his unfeigned disgust as he related the tale, Joss believed that he'd had no part of the army before or after that encounter. While at their night's bivouac, a man on a winged horse had arrived in the encampment. Keshad had been sent in to speak with him. “He wanted to make sure I wasn't there to betray his company. He gave me such a look, I thought my insides would be torn out. I said I cared nothing for him and his, and it was true anyway, and thankfully he believed me and sent me away. That was the last I heard or saw of him.”

“The hells!” said Zubaidit, laughing again. “Say something, reeve. For I think that's shocked you as much as it's shocked me.”

Joss eased an itch that had sprung up on the underside of one wrist. “The Hieros also said that the envoy
of Ilu told her that there has not been peace in the Hundred for these last many years.” He remembered the clipped, forceful way in which she had repeated the words. “That the war for the soul of the Guardians had already begun.”

Zubaidit dropped the reins and crossed to stand directly in front of Joss. She stared into his face, as if daring him to look into her heart—or at least, to not drop his gaze down to the swell of her breasts under her tight vest. It was a struggle, but he managed it.

She took hold of one of his wrists. Her fingers were strong, her skin cooler than his own. “Every child who's listened closely to the tales knows the Guardians can't be killed. That's part of what gives them their power. What if more than one Guardian has survived? Or if some are aligned against the others?”

Maybe he swayed, because her grip on his wrist tightened as if to stop him from falling. Marit was dead, but walking again in his dreams, claiming to be a Guardian. Was he crazy?

She released him and walked to the horses.

“We'll go back with you,” she said, over her shoulder.

“Bai!”

“Kesh!” Her rejoinder was almost mocking. Her brother winced. There was a passionate quality in the young man's heart that seemed about to burst out over the merchant's chilly façade. “Keshad, what's at stake here is greater than our freedom. We'll go back and face the Hi-eros. Then we'll seek out the truth about the winged horses people have seen, and the truth about people claiming to be Guardians.”

“Why do
we
have to do it?” he whined.

“Because you cheated the temple.” Between one breath and the next, Joss's headache returned. “That's a crime.”

“I can't have known a mute girl I found at the edge of the desert in foreign lands was—”

“Kesh! We have to do it because it's the right thing to
do. Because it has to be done. Because we have an obligation to the gods, and to the Hundred. Now shut up.” She turned to Joss, all business now. “Is the road safe?”

“It should be cleared by now. The Qin are efficient and effective.”

She cocked her head to one side. “So they are. Let's hope that wolf doesn't bite back.”

She took the reins of her horse and, without a backward glance, began the long climb up the switchback. After a glance at Scar and a roll of dark eyes that girls might find pretty, the brother grabbed the reins of the other two horses and followed.

Joss watched them go. They had a hard trudge ahead, and he was already exhausted. Scar chirped an inquiry. Like their reeves, the best eagles learned to judge to a nicety danger and mood in any situation, and they were very smart birds, but they were birds all the same.

And yet what did he really know about the origin of the Hundred's eagles? No more than he knew about the Guardians. He'd encountered strange things in his life: He had seen the eyes of a wilding at the edge of the deep forest where they hunted and lived; he had spoken to one of the rare delvings who walked out of the caverns of Arro into the sunlight; he had traded information with the nomadic lendings in the grasslands through a series of hand signs and stones; he had even heard the rippling voice of a fireling in its brief passage through the sky. He'd dealt with every manner of human greed and generosity, cruelty and kindness, anger and calm acceptance. He'd memorized the law, because it was carved in stone. He'd dedicated his life to serving justice.

Now he wondered: Was it all for nothing?

If it was true the Guardians still walked in the land, and if it was true they warred among themselves, then what could justice possibly mean? How could any ordinary person hope to live a decent life if those the gods had raised to establish and maintain justice in the land had fallen into the shadows?

A shadow fell over him from behind. Scar's big head lowered until the eagle was able to look him in the eye. Joss stroked the curve of the beak offered him.

“We're not beaten yet. Not as long as you and I have anything to say about it. Now go on.” He tugged on the leather cord hanging around his neck and pulled his reeve's bone whistle out from under his vest. Raising it to his lips, he blew the set to signal to Scar that the eagle was free to hunt.