Shadow Gate (35 page)

“Sometimes you have to fight where you stand,” he said, reminding her of her own words to him. He lifted his hand to show the wolf-sigil ring he had taken from her hand as a sign of the gamble they had mutually agreed on the night they had decided to make that stand, to build a new life in the Hundred. “We can prepare our ground, so any fight we enter is under circumstances and in the place of our choosing.”

The Barrens were a dry and brutal place, thoroughly unpleasant. Keshad winced as he walked down to the shore of the Olo'o Sea. The air stank, and his eyes watered, but the tears came mostly because of the stabbing pains in his buttocks and thighs.

“You're not accustomed to riding.” Captain Anji halted on a slick shelf of rock lapped by oily water.

“I was a slave,” said Kesh irritably. “Slaves walk, or at least they do in the Hundred.”

“Yet you walked south over the Kandaran Pass many times in order to trade, and returned safely each time. That suggests you are hardier than you act, and smarter than your sulks and dagger's tongue make you appear.”

Kesh eyed the Qin captain in the last light of the day, with the sun pouring light across the calm salt sea. Anji was a man of medium height, with the coloring and broad cheekbones common to his Qin tribesmen but a sharp-hooked nose more usually seen among the Sirniakans of the empire. He intimidated Kesh far more than his old master, Feden, ever had, because while Feden had been a tyrant, a man of pouts and rages, he was also a man whose pouting and raging made him vulnerable. As he had been in the end, for the price he had paid for selling out Olossi to the northern army was his own life.

Anji had none of those weaknesses. Kesh was sore not so much because they had been traveling for ten days but because they had pushed on, with a string of mounts for each man, at such a blistering pace. He was rubbed raw in places he did not want to think about. But in this group he would never dream of complaining. Under Anji's leadership, no one complained. They just got on with it.

Now they were many days' ride west of Olossi, having rounded the southern limit of the Olo'o Sea and ridden north into the Barrens with the land-locked sea stretching away to the east and the jagged Spires rising abruptly in the west. Broken tableland bridged the transition between mountains and water.

“You can't farm this land,” said Kesh. “Not like that estate on the West Spur we stopped at. At least that had a substantial olive grove.” He crouched, drew a finger across flat rock, and tasted the substance on his tongue.
It was oily, salty, and entirely nasty. He spat. “But there are unexploited seeps of oil of naya everywhere in this region, if hard to reach and transport.”

“There's enough grass for sheep and goats to graze. Streams coming down out of the mountains, and other sources of water to be channeled. There may be water and forage enough for horses and even cattle, maybe even fields.” The captain scanned the landscape. “Maybe a spring is hidden out there.”

They had left West Spur days ago and ridden north-northeast on a cart track past a few villages and hamlets so isolated that everyone had come to stand at the side of the track to watch fifty Qin soldiers ride past. The locals had been wary, but not scared; as the local experts in oil of naya and pitch, they didn't expect trouble, even from foreigners.

More fools they, thought Kesh. The Qin could have slaughtered them without breaking a sweat.

“There's no one living this far out,” added Anji. “I haven't even seen herdsmen with flocks.”

“All the villages we passed trade in oil and pitch. There are enough seeps and sinks south of here to keep them in livelihood. I'm sure traders send expeditions into this region occasionally, but it's difficult to transport.” Kesh shaded his eyes. “If you keep riding north, if there's a path, which I doubt there is, you'll eventually reach the valley of the River Ireni. Ten or twenty days' walk, I'm not sure.”

Anji indicated the sea. “Has no one thought of sailing from here to Olossi?”

“Trade over the water is expensive to maintain, and anyway there's nothing much to trade. There's a route that runs overland from Olossi around the eastern shore of the sea and then north through the valley of the River Ireni, that I just mentioned. Heaven's Ridge and the Spires meet northwest of there. It's possible to travel over the hump from there into the land beyond the Hundred, the white-grass plains, but it's so dry out there that no one
goes that way except to trade with the barbarians—eiya!—that is, the folk who live on the plains.”

“Like the Qin.” That quirk in his lips was Anji's way of showing amusement.

Kesh found himself smiling. “Like the Qin. Horses, hides, steel, gems, slaves.” The wind off the mountains brought a chill that crawled along his shoulders. He shuddered, thinking of the ghost girl he had brought out of the southern desert. “I heard there are tribes of demons on the plains. You can tell them by their blue eyes and white-grass hair.”

Anji looked away from Kesh, and something about the way his shoulders stiffened and his jaw moved slightly, as though he was swallowing hatred, made Kesh wonder what the Qin captain was thinking. “Plenty of demons. We Qin have battled demons for generations.”

Caution stilled Keshad's tongue. The oily film oozed and bubbled on the rocks, and the smell hit so hard it was like tasting. Then a wave of salt water washed the edge of the shelf, changing the composition of the liquid, and the stink eased.

Anji said, “You know a great deal about the trading routes in and around the Hundred.”

“How much I know might depend on what it's worth to me.”

Anji's smile made Kesh shiver. “Your sister's life and freedom, perhaps?”

“You have no control over that!”

“Is that so? The Hieros placed you in my custody, and in my custody you'll remain until the transaction is complete. Yet what can you do? You're not a soldier, a farmer, a herdsman, a craftsman, a poet to weave songs and tales. A man who contributes nothing to the tribe is worthless. If he has his own tent and herd, he may survive on his own, but if hard times come—and they always do—he'll need the support of his kinsmen. You and your sister are alone, without tent or herds. That leaves you vulnerable.”

“Do you want something from me? Just say so!”

The sun set behind the mountains. A fire burned where the Qin soldiers had set up camp. Two guardsmen waited close by, arms crossed and shoulders slumped in a posture that to the untrained eye might appear as boredom, but Kesh knew from experience that the men who guarded Anji never relaxed.

Nor did Anji.

“You may carry an accounts bundle that marks you as a man freed of this debt obligation you Hundred folk call slavery. But a man is not free if his heart is not free. It seems to me, Keshad, that you are always carrying your chains. You trust no man because you cannot trust yourself.” He began to walk carefully along the rock shelf toward drier ground beyond.

Kesh hurried after him, sliding once, arms flailing, and righting himself. “Why should I trust any man? What man has ever done right by me, or tried to do anything but exploit me?”

Anji's boots crunched on gritty earth. He flashed a grin over his shoulder for no reason Kesh could fathom. “That's the first sensible thing I've heard you say since we rode out on this expedition. Trust no man. No man except one who holds honor higher than his own life.”

“Where can I find a man like that?” demanded Kesh.

A cool wind chased down from the heights. The fading light cast a warm glow over peaks whose ragged contours were softened by the change of light. Over the sea, scraps of cloud drifted into shadow, but here there was no rain.

“Where, indeed? ‘How?' is the question you should ask.”

A spark can touch off a conflagration. Kesh boiled with anger, not even knowing why. “What makes you think there is a single honorable person in this world?”

The press of darkness swept over them, the bright fire
their only beacon in an empty land. Anji spoke in a quiet voice that was nevertheless perfectly clear.

“Because I am married to her.”

No one disturbed their encampment in the wild lands bordering the northeastern shore of the Olo'o Sea. As one day passed into the next, the envoy of Ilu figured out how to help the girl in her work. He'd not grown up in the country, with country ways and country skills. He was a city boy by birth and training, accustomed to buying what he needed from the shops and artisans and craftsmen of Nessumara. Yet after so many years of wandering alone, he'd learned to survive.

He cleaned hide, a task he detested. Really, it was so unpleasant to get one's hands so slick and stinking. He wove a crude shelter of green saplings, and built a fire of greenwood to smoke the deer meat. He spent an entire afternoon scouring the stench of glue-making out of his precious iron pot, which had accompanied him for so many years he sometimes thought of it as a congenial friend. He left the horses to stand guard—for they would be sure to alert him if they sensed an enemy approaching—and ranged wide, gathering edible plants. He walked the shoreline until he found a place where salt pans had formed. The deer's hooves were boiled, and antlers polished. When she vanished one day with Seeing, he took from Telling's calm manner a message, and he waited for her to return, which she did late in the day bearing the deer skin wrapped around a slimy collection of cattle parts: four horns, raw hide, intestines, sinew, heart, and the best cuts of meat. He asked no questions. She volunteered no answers.

She carved and shaped hooks and drills and points
from bone; she chewed sinew to make it malleable, then rolled it into thread. She glued side strips of a denser red wood to the backbone of silver-bark, and in the shallow channel along each face, glued strips of horn. She carved out and smoothed a ring of bone to fit her right thumb.

He sat beside her. She showed him with her hands what she wanted him to do, and he did it: scraping, polishing, grinding, twisting, oiling. Talking, for he could not bear the lack of words.

“As it says in the Tale of Beginnings, ‘We tell ourselves stories to make the time pass between birth and death'. But it's more than that. We tell tales to try to understand the world, the gods, and ourselves. Let me tell you a tale.”

He told the story punctuated by the most basic of gestures, enough to suggest the tale's outlines. As he spoke, she measured and she glued and she shaped, but he was not sure if she listened.

“Long ago, in the time of shadows, a bitter series of wars, feuds, and reprisals laid waste to the countryside and impoverished the lords and guildsmen and farmers and artisans of the Hundred. In the worst of days, an orphaned girl knelt at the shore of the lake sacred to the gods and prayed that peace might return to her land. . .”

The tale unfolded easily, but then, he had always found it easy to talk.

“. . . Now it so happened that the girl had walked as a mendicant in the service of the Lady of Beasts, and when the other gods departed, the Lady of Beasts remained behind.

“ ‘They are content,' said the Lady of Beasts, ‘but I see with the sight of eagles and I listen with the heart of an ox. For this reason, I know that in the times to come the most beloved among the guardians will betray her companions.'

“ ‘Is there no hope, then, for the land and its people?'—”

He broke off, smiling humbly as he watched her hands.

At last he saw it take shape.

She was making a bow.

She looked up. The feverish gleam of those demon-blue eyes, touching his own gaze, startled him.

“A good bow demands patience,” she said, challenging his stare. “This one—” She touched the bow at her right hand. “—I'll reflex on a form and store in a dry place for many months. Then maybe after two winters it will become a good bow. This other, if the glue sets properly and I give it more time, maybe it will serve until the other is properly cured. I'll make a pair of simple bows from staves. But a cured bow is best if you want to reliably kill a man.”

He gaped, speech squeezed out of him by the force and content of her words. Her speech was fluid and easy although her vowels were clipped, very short, and she coughed certain consonants and slurred others. Had she known the language of the Hundred all along, or had it poured into her when her destiny enveloped her?

Telling neighed. Seeing raised her head to look upstream.

The girl rose, grabbing the captured bow and a handful of crude arrows, shafts with sharpened points. She pushed her cloak back over her shoulders, to leave her arms unencumbered. He stood, too, gripping his staff.

“What cursed use is it,” he muttered, “to wait so patiently, to spend these days in silence so the child wakens a little more—with such triumph!—only to be caught yet again by those hells-bitten criminals?” He was shaking, even angry, really just entirely twisted dry of the good humor he prized most of all as a Water-touched Blue Rat sworn to serve Ilu the Herald.

Dusk had crept over them without his noticing. The gleam of their cloaks gave them an aura, and made them targets. The horses, of course, could barely be seen. He
saw an inconstant pattern of light fading and waxing by the nearest thicket of chamber-bells; their delicate tinkling caught in the wind.

A woman stepped into view, wrapped in a bone-white cloak. He knew that cloak. Once, he had known the man who wore it.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “What are you?”

The girl nocked an arrow and drew back the string with thumb and forefinger.

The woman shifted, not moving closer but not retreating. “Nay, that was ill-said. I am here to talk with you, nothing more. Do not think I am here to threaten you.” Yet her tone was that of a woman accustomed to ordering people about. “I would know who and what you are, for others have spoken of you, and I think you are not what you seem. Oh, the hells!”