Shadow Gate (40 page)

“These ties are called the brace,” explained the injured fawkner. “You stayed calm.”

“Best get that arm tended to, Rena,” said the small fawkner, taking charge. “Aras, can you run and get the salve? I'll need the imping needle and—Eiya!—just bring the lot of it. What's your name again?”

When no one answered, Nallo realized he was talking to her. “I'm called Nallo.”

“Well done. Tumna's famous for having an uncertain temper at the best of times, but you handled her well. Better than Horas ever did.”

“Who is Horas?”

“Her last reeve.”

“What happened to him?”

Tumna dipped her head, huge beak probing the air as the marshal and Volias walked over.

“Keep talking,” said the small fawkner. “She likes the sound of your voice.”

“Tumna, don't fret, they're coming although I must say they're slow about it and why all these staring fools have to stand here and stare so rudely is beyond my understanding. How badly is her wing injured?”

The fawkner was grinning, although she couldn't figure what he thought was so funny. “She can fly on it, so that's one thing. But we've got bleeding even after this long because she's not resting properly. As you can see, she's still in pain and not healing as she ought.”

“Volias,” Nallo said, “can't you just chase these people off? Don't they have anything better to do?”

He said, to the marshal, “You're a hard man, Joss. I didn't know you had it in you. I thought sure the cursed bird was going to rip—”

“Shut up, Volias,” said the marshal in a flat voice.

“I'll take it from here, Marshal,” said the small fawkner in the manner of a man rushing to fill a gap.

“What was he going to say?” Nallo demanded.

“Rip off the hood,” said the marshal. “They're trained to accept the hood when they first come to the hall. An eagle like Tumna or my Scar is accustomed to it. It eases them, helps them settle if they're injured or exhausted. An eagle tumbles quick from keen-set to frail-set.”

“If you don't mind,” said the fawkner, “we'll get her settled.”

Thus dismissed, she had no choice except to walk with the marshal out of the parade ground and down an alley between storehouses. The reeve hall was a prosperous place, with plenty of impressive buildings to house its reeves, fawkners, assistants, hirelings, slaves, and eagles, and to store the provisions necessary to maintaining the hall.

“What happened to her other reeve?” she asked as her feet kicked up chalky dirt.

Volias coughed.

The marshal said, “Dead in the recent battle.”

“Do eagles mourn their reeves when they go?”

“Hard to say. We like to think so.”

“Do reeves mourn their eagles?”

He sighed as he looked at her. “Reeves don't survive the death of their eagles.”

“You can't mean it. How old can an eagle get?”

“Hall records show that the longest known life span of an eagle encompassed six reeves, although only one of those reeves lived to old age.”

“Do you mean if I agree to become a reeve and that eagle dies, that I'll die?”

“You already are a reeve.”

“Is this how you force people to agree to become reeves? Because they think they have to? We're no better than slaves. I'd have better luck walking to Olossi and trying to get a husband from those foreigners.
At least I'd be my own mistress, able to do what I wanted.”

“Who knows what disgusting customs those out-landers have,” said Volias with a smirk. “You're better off with us. Not that you have a choice.”

They walked into a garden so fancy that Nallo gawked. It had its own pool, with fruit and nut trees along either side, reflected in the still water. Aui! There was even a fountain of burbling water, just like in the tales! Avisha would have gushed over the many herbs and other flowering plants burgeoning out of troughs and terraces. A pavilion overlooked the far end of the pool. That pest Siras was seated on the steps leading up to the covered porch, and when he saw them he leaped up and brushed his hands on his trousers as if he'd been eating.

“I guess Tumna didn't rip your head off, then, eh?” said Siras with a big grin as they reached the porch. “Not like she did to Horas. Not that he didn't deserve it, mind you. He was rotten all the way through.”

“The hells!” said Volias. “Siras, you're a bigger horse's ass than even I thought.”

Nallo halted with a foot on the porch and one on the step below. The marshal turned, balancing on one foot with a sandal half pried off the other. He grunted with irritation, a man who has just been caught out in a lie.

Rain spat through the pretty garden. In the distance, thunder rolled and faded.

Rip your head off.

They had all known that the eagle was a killer who had murdered its own reeve.

When she got really mad, her tongue lit and she couldn't stop herself. “That's why everyone came to watch. Was it a good show? Or is everyone disappointed she didn't rip my head off, too? Does it happen often? Because if I were an eagle, you three would all be in little pieces by now, but I wouldn't eat a single scrap of bloody flesh because your foul taste would make me cast it all back up.”

Her heart was sucked dry, and her blood was raging. She walked away.

Volias called, “Here, now, Nallo—”

The marshal interrupted him in that smoothly dishonest voice she should have distrusted from the first. “We didn't say anything because we didn't want you to fear her before you had a chance to understand eagles. And Tumna in particular.”

“No one
told
her?” yapped the young one in a tone that couldn't have made him sound stupider if he'd been a novice entertainer acting a part.

Ignoring every soul who tried to talk to her, she strode through the compound until she found the cot she'd been assigned. She grabbed her bundle of useless odds and ends, the worthless rubbish of her life, and walked out the gates of Argent Hall, never to return.

The arrival of the seventh Guardian, wearing the cloak of death, forced his hand.

He and the girl flew west across the Olo'o Sea, heading for the isolated western Barrens and its mountainous desert high country where few folk traveled and fewer lived. With Argent Hall no longer under the hand of one of his enemies, they might be able to walk an isolated labyrinth without falling into the custody of the others.

After that burst of speech, while shaping the bow, the girl again ceased talking. It wasn't fear that closed her mouth, he thought. She liked to fly. She enjoyed the wind and wide waters below. Nothing frightened her.

They flew a night and a day and into the next night, a steady pace that would eventually exhaust the horses, but he had no more time to wait. At length, in the glimmering twilight before dawn, they flew into the swirl of
currents that marked the western shore. South of them a pair of campfires burned, so far away they appeared like candle flames. But the salty air and fine grit on the wind told him no sour tales of the folk camping in this wilderness. He would have to take his chances that they were no threat.

They crossed over briny pools and streaks of dried salt and minerals that marked the shoreline, and beat crosswise up tableland that rose in stair steps to rugged highlands beyond, the massive foothills of the Spires. Peaks glittered as the first edge of sun out of the east caught on their icy crowns. Antelopes and gazelles nibbled on grass on broad terraces. Wild goats bounded alongside coursing streams as dawn's light scattered them from their night's stupor. The sun pushed into the sky. The horses labored, but they struggled on. They knew where they were going.

This altar was hard to find if you didn't know where to look. Unlike many of the others, carved into cliff faces or sited atop granite pinnacles or bare peaks or breathtaking spires of rock, this altar had a humbler position nestled in a rocky saddle between two forested peaks. A homely place lacking magnificence, but one where he felt sheltered because of its immense isolation.

The horses clattered onto the open space. The rounded peaks rose to either side. The saddle linked the two high spots but was itself pretty much impossible to reach because of unstable slopes falling away to either side. Boulders lay in shattered heaps at the base. Pieces of broken rock like so many discarded roof shingles littered the slopes, piled in frozen waves at the bottom.

The girl dismounted and paced the rim, careful to stay away from the entrance to the labyrinth just as a canny animal shies away from a trap. The horses abandoned him, making straight—as only the horses could—for the pool at the center where they could refresh themselves.

He gripped his staff of judgment, knuckles white. He tried to relax but could not find calm within. With his
free hand he parted the pocket sewn into his sleeve and grasped the mirror he had carried hidden within it for so many years. Three times he tapped his staff against the rock. The third time she looked at him. He beckoned. Hesitantly, she crossed to him.

“Come.” He tried to gentle his voice, but he could hear how tightly coiled ran the thread of words. “Walk with me.”

He set first one foot, then the second, on the glittering entrance to the labyrinth. That which is cut may heal, but if it scars, then the flesh loses its flexibility and can easily tear itself open. Her ability to trust was scarred.

But on this day, she was willing to trust him.

He had not walked for many years, because it was too dangerous to reveal himself. Yet even after so long away, he knew the path as well as he knew his own hands.

Needle Spire, a slender thread of rock thrusting out of the ocean beyond Storm Cape; Everfall Beacon now in ruins on the South Shore; Stone Tor in the midst of the Wild; Salt Tower on the dead shore of the high salt sea; Mount Aua; the friendly environs of humble Highwater and its tumbling stream; the Pinnacle above the crumbling archon's watchtower overlooking the basin of Sohayil; the dusty Walshow overlook; the deep swamp within Mar-lake-swallows; Horn Vista; the Dragon's Tower; Thunder Spire; the Five Brothers; the Seven Secret Sisters; the Face, whose sheer cliff overlooked the first mey post on the Kandaran Pass. He knew the name and location of every one; he had walked them all, at one time or another: the hundred and one altars sacred to the Guardians, scattered throughout the land.

He walked quickly, although at intervals she slowed as if wanting to look through onto one of those faraway landscapes. Passing through the turn of Hammering Ford, the river overlook north of Westcott, he scented blood, tainted with the sweet-sour smell he had come to associate with those of his brethren who had crossed under the shadow gate into corruption.

“Who are you?” an unfamiliar male voice whispered from within the maze. “Where—?”

The girl hissed, her shoulders tensing, but they moved beyond the taint. Finishing the path, they fell out into the center.

In a basin hollowed out of rock, clean water bubbled up from a crack in the ground. With a cry, she fell to her knees and cupped her hands. She drank, sucking in the clear liquid until it dribbled down her chin. The horses watched her with patient gazes. He slid the mirror out of his sleeve.

The bronze openwork backing curved with the shapes of twining dragons rising out of a stylized rendition of layers of mist. The silver-white finish of the actual mirror flashed where sunlight caught in it, like the flicker of a soul.

She looked up, gasping from the bitter drink, blinking like a sleeper coming awake.

“This belongs to you,” he said, holding out the mirror. “This is your Guardian's staff, which you must carry.”

Her hand extended, but whether she chose to reach or the mirror pulled her to it, he could not say. She took it from him, drew it toward her body. Turned it. Stared into its polished face, seeing her own face hovering ghost-like.

Her mouth opened, and closed. The smooth lines of her face cracked as she hunched her shoulders. For the space of a breath he thought she would scream, or faint. Then she moaned, a low sound of despair, the worst cry in the world for being so weak.

“She lost her mirror, so she is dead. Don't make me remember her.” Although she trembled, she could not release the mirror. It would swallow her, and she would awaken in truth.

How he hated himself for what he had done, even knowing he had no choice.

The trembling in her hand passed into her body, a palsy shuddering through her. Grief is an anvil on which
you are beaten, beaten, beaten. We cry for many things, but there are sorrows that lie beyond tears. Sometimes it is easier to look away, and when you are forced to recognize the hammer as it descends, all you can do is wait for the impact that will shatter you.

“Let her stay dead!” she cried.

The hammer fell.

In the Western Grasslands Beyond the Hundred (Four Years Earlier)

 

 

O
NE NEVER KNOWS
what gifts a stranger brings.

“There's nothing of interest in our lineage or possessions or grazing lands to cause a man of his tribe to wish to marry into ours,” said Kirya to her cousin, but as soon as the words left her mouth, she was sorry she had said it that way.

Mariya dabbed at teary eyes with her free hand. Three tiny beautiful beaded nets were cupped in her other palm.

“Nothing besides you, I mean,” added Kirya hastily. She looked away, toward the eastern horizon, measuring the curve of the sun's back as it rose.

“He didn't have to give me this gift,” said Mariya. “He told me his aunt would speak with my mother at the confluence.”

“Mari, be practical. In our entire tribe we have nine hands of sheep, four hands of goats, and five horses. Three proper tents. He's born to a daughter tribe of the Vidrini lineage. Who are we to even think of bringing a son of that lineage into our tents? We can't possibly pay the marriage price. We've no son of our own tribe old enough to make a marriage across the lines in exchange, if they would even take one.”