Shadow Gate (58 page)

The larger party was walking up the shoemaker's lane, the long way around to the district where the Silvers lived if you didn't know the city as well as Keshad did. But the beggar's red cap moved past the shoemaker's lane and cut up the tailor's lane, so they climbed after him, pretending at intervals to look at fancily embroidered festival jackets selling cheap because in the wake of the attack the city had not mustered a festival this year.

“The captain is actually the half-brother of the Sirniakan emperor?” Kesh asked.

Chaji gave a curt shake of his head, which meant Keshad had stepped out of bounds by asking an inappropriate question, and kept walking.

“Lost him,” said Umar. “Hu! There he is.”

They hurried through the bone-carvers' alley, in shadow under canvas slung between buildings. The carvings were polished to such a high gleam that they seemed alive in the dim light: winged horses, dancing lions, writhing salamanders, swimming dragons. Hugging the corner, they ventured onto a wider street. Uphill, Chief Tuvi's broad shoulders vanished around a sharp turn where the street split into three. A red cap slouched behind a pair of matrons.

“There,” said Umar, starting forward, but Chaji caught
him by the tunic and tugged him short as a barrow filled with bricks rumbled by, pushed by a sweating man wearing a linen kilt and an unlaced sleeveless vest flapping back from his torso.

“He's working with a second man,” said Chaji. “That one with a rag tied around his left arm, standing beneath the green awning, behind the rack of sandals. He's seen us.”

“The hells!” swore Keshad. “Two of them!”

“Maybe more. Where are Seren and Tam? Why haven't they caught up with the captain? It isn't like he's moving fast.”

A whistle blasted above the street noise. Chaji bolted, Umar at his heels, shoving past anyone in their way as they sprinted after the company. Keshad found his way blocked by the barrow-man, who was swearing as he struggled to stop the unbalanced barrow from spilling. Kesh grabbed the lip and pulled, and the man thumped it down on its legs with a curse.

“Sheh! Cursed outlanders!”

The red cap bobbed past, flowing downhill. Keshad pushed past the same pair of well-dressed matrons and followed the cap down the street. The beggar ducked behind passers-by, then twisted into an alley. Kesh sprinted after him, but negotiating the confines of the alley of combs was not so easy because the artisans recognized him, Master Feden's household having spent a good deal of coin on fancy combs and lacquered sticks and clasps. A small girl seated with legs dangling from a second story balcony watched his progress, her round face solemn as she tracked him.

Panting, he came out into the tailor's street. He scanned up the angling terraced steps and down toward the sprawl of the outer city seen through gaps in buildings. A red cap bobbed in the crowd, then stilled as the man stopped and looked back.

To make sure he was being followed.

“Aui!”

Although similar in stature, this was a different man. He wore a subtly different twist of dirty kilted rags and had less of a bandy-legged gait, a man who had spent less time on horseback than the first beggar. Now that Kesh thought of it, where did a beggar get bandy legs from riding horses so much, unless he was an outcast fosterling raised and later discarded by the lendings?

Where had they lost track of the first beggar? It could have been at any time after Avisha had tossed two vey in the man's bowl. Maybe down by the gold awning amid the clamor and slurp of the noodle stalls. Easy enough to slide one red cap in the place of another.

“Guards! Murder! Murder!”

The red-capped head was still turned to watch him, and Keshad knew absolutely that to run down past that man would be idiotic. He plunged back into the alley of the combs and halted in front of the stall of a woman he'd dealt with a hundred times.

“Where's your mistress?” he asked the lad overseeing the wares. “Mistress Para!”

She was an attractive woman, her taloos wrapped around advanced pregnancy. But she was remarkably light on her feet as she emerged onto the porch with a cup in one hand and a tiny chisel in the other. “Keshad!” She smiled. “I heard you left the city.”

“Heya! My apologies. Can I cut through your house to the alley behind?” Beyond the bright opening of the alley, traffic passed on the tailor's street.

She was Air-touched like him; it gave them a measure of kinship. She stepped aside, and he sprang up the steps in his outdoor shoes and raced through the workshop while a pair of apprentices paused in their work to gape. He ran down the long corridor that fronted the living quarters. Emerging finally in the narrow kitchen yard, he pelted through an open gate into the fetid confines of the back alley.

He cut back toward the tailor's street and hurried down the terraced steps toward the commotion below,
where men were still shouting for the guard. He hadn't meant to cut so close to the incident, but when he saw Seren leaning against a wall, holding his side as though injured, he shoved through the traffic and fetched up beside the young soldier, who was red-faced, breathing raggedly, and doubled over, barely able to keep his feet.

He didn't touch him. “What happened?”

Seren was vomiting, his face gray with pain. The hand he had clutched to his stomach was slick with blood.

Beyond a gold awning where fry-ups were sizzling ran an exceeding narrow walk between three-story buildings, accounting houses topped by apartments. A young militia man appeared in the gap. Seeing Kesh, he beckoned him over.

“Weren't you one of the Master Feden's slaves? Aren't you hired now by the outlanders? Best you come see.”

Back here the buildings were a maze, walkways barely wide enough to let a barrow pass. They turned a right corner, then a left, and in the center of a stone drainage ditch awash in spilling sewage and flowing blood lay the other Qin soldier, Tam.

He was dead.

From a ridge, Marit looked over a substantial valley, green with the season. Far below, a lake and river sparkled in the afternoon sunlight. The Orator and her Three Daughters formed a bulwark to the southeast, snow dusting their heights and clouds threatening behind. To the east rose a sheer line of cliffs running almost due north and south, ends lost in haze. The uneven patch of lifeless brown scarring the lake's shore near the confluence with the river marked the town of Walshow.

Here on the northern frontier of the Hundred, where many weather systems met and mingled, the wind blew
in changeable eddies. Vultures drifted along currents of air right where the foot of the long ridge met the valley floor. Far above, a speck circled, almost certainly an eagle, although it glided too high up for her to be sure.

She led Warning along the ridge trail to the road, a graded avenue that, having cut through the hills that separated the valley from upper Haldia, now switch-backed down the grueling slope into the depression. This late in the day, she had the road to herself, no traders, no casual traffic moving up or down. She might have flown it, but now that she had traveled all this way through the wild lands of Heaven's Ridge, keeping out of sight, she found herself reluctant to hasten into the belly of the beast.

And no wonder.

Where the road bottomed out on the valley floor, poles had been erected at intervals as trees are planted to shade a thoroughfare. Corpses in every stage of decay dangled from the posts, hoisted up by their arms and left to rot. Where the soft tissue had pulled free, remains had fallen into heaps on the dirt. Some of these bones had been weathering here for years, when they ought to have been offered release at a Sorrowing Tower. The impiety—the sheer scale of executions—was meant to intimidate anyone approaching Walshow. Where had all these dead people come from? She remembered Sediya's chant:
“The weak die, the strong kill.”

She rode on through the drowsy afternoon.

Most of the trees in the valley had been cut down. Sheep and goats grazed among stumps. After about two mey, the scrub and pastureland spilled into fields being worked by men and women who kept their heads down, glancing at her swiftly and getting straight back to work. Threads of smoke rose from the town. It was too quiet. Chains rattled when the wind caught them just right. Skulls leered at her from the ground, tilted back to make their unhinged jaws open in a wide grin.

The poles with their corpses were, evidently, the first line of defense. The second was a stockade ringing the
outermost neighborhoods of the city; beyond that rose an actual city wall with gates and battlements. Strangely, the stockade gate lay open and unguarded.

Beyond the gate, the outer town had the look of a place ransacked and left to recover. Ramshackle hovels sprouted beside sturdier row houses with shops in front and living quarters in back. Children ran away into shacks. A man trundling a barrow took a sudden detour, and a trio of women carrying washing in bundles atop their heads turned right around and hurried back the way they had come. She dismounted by the first relatively clean inn, chickens scattering from Warning's hooves as she walked the mare into the unswept yard.

A woman appeared on the porch, tying her black hair up into a bright linen kerchief in the northern style. Her eyes were darkly lined with cosmetics, and she smelled of sour milk. Within the inn, soup boiled, a thin broth flavored with smoky sesame oil. Her gaze flashed away from Marit, a tangle of startled wonder at seeing the sacred winged horse so close that she could distinguish each silver feather, and anticipatory fear because after all how could anything good come of one of them walking into her humble yard and maybe after all now she would get the news of his death because she knew it was coming eventually however much she dreaded it. A child cried in one of the back rooms. She bowed her head and hid her face behind her hands.

“Shardit, are you coming?” called a man impatiently from the interior.

“Shardit,” said Marit, recalling the name. “Is your man with the army? Is that him in there?”

“Just a customer,” she said into the space between her face and her hands. “I haven't seen my man for months, have I? What else am I to do?”

“Do what you must,” said Marit hastily, thinking of Joss. “You have to go on with life. I'm not here to judge you.”

The awkward silence dragged out. Inside, the child's crying faded to a grating whimper. A weight was shoved over a floor, like furniture being moved. Beyond the yard, a dog yelped; the steady stroke of someone chopping wood rang.

“Where can I find the commander's hall?” Marit asked.

“In town, in the old Assizes Court.”

“In the Assizes Court? Where is the actual Assizes Court held, then?”

Marit heard Shardit's tone alter, because really even a child ought to know this. “Lord Radas runs the Assizes Court, him and his underlings.”

“So that's where I'll find him?”

“Him?” The woman was surprised enough that she dropped her hands and looked: a shuddering memory of a man cloaked in sun riding a dazzling winged horse in the vanguard of a mass of armed men. “Neh. You're come too late. They've already left.”

“Left?”

The hands came up to shield the face, like an act of obeisance. “They marched weeks ago. They're gone.”

Gone.

“Where did they go?”

Shardit shrugged. “High Haldia first, then Toskala, and after that Nessumara. Not that we were told anything, not folk like me, but the soldiers have a song about it. ‘The cloaks rule all, even death.' The Star of Life will rule the Hundred. That's what they say.”

“And then what? Will the soldiers who lived here come back?

She hunched a shoulder, seemed about to turn away in shame but did not. “I have to hope they do. If there's no one to sup from my kettle, then how will I feed my children?”

“Did you live in Walshow before, or were you brought here?”

“Oh,” she said, and then, “oh.” She began to cry, not sobs but simply tears trickling down her face, the taste of their salt like sorrow.

“Can you go home?” Marit asked more gently.

The man called from inside. “Shardit! How long do I have to wait?”

“Why do you torment us?” Shardit whispered. “Teach them to kill, who were peaceful before? Isn't it enough to rule us?”

The hells!

“Don't give up hope,” said Marit, and knew it for a stupid thing to say the instant the words left her mouth. She tugged on Warning's reins and rode out of the inn yard without looking back. There's only so much a reeve can do. But she swore under her breath the entire walk back to the outer gate, as if her words were knives to cut away the bonds that confined people like Shardit.

Guards had meanwhile shown up at the gate, two elderly men who raised hands nervously to shield their faces as she approached. Their rustic spears, little more than sharpened tips, leaned against their frail bodies to leave their hands free for the obeisance: the hiding of their eyes.

“Where's the army gone?” she asked them.

In stumbling words, clearly frightened, they told her the same story Shardit had. By the look of these broken-down men, Lord Radas had sucked the town clean of all able-bodied men and left the leavings to fend for themselves.

“Is Walshow abandoned?”

“The commanders pulled everyone out, Lady. By your leave, Lady. Is there aught we can do to serve you, Lady?” They cringed away from an expected blow.

“Nothing,” she said furiously, which only made them cringe more.

Outside the gate she mounted, and gave Warning her head. Near here, surely, she would find a Guardian's
altar. The horse must walk, then trot, then gallop and lift. She liked the horse, but the slow rise into the sky had none of the thrill of an eagle's thrust or soaring glide. It was more as if the horse paced out a road of air invisible to all others and rode it above the ground.