Shadow Gate (6 page)

As twilight overtook them and the light changed, the twisting coil of the labyrinth came to life, marking the path to the center where the mare waited beside the pool. Water burbled up from the rock beneath. Marit licked her lips, smelling the moisture and craving its coolness.

She did not want to be caught out at the edge of the pillar once night fell, for fear of falling over the edge. That cursed mare had a knack for dumping her at the entrance to the labyrinth. She set a foot on the glittering path, then the other. Nothing happened.

With measured steps, she warily paced out the path. A pulse hummed up through her feet as the magic of the labyrinth came to life around her: a flat ocean pricked by the emerging milky-bright light of stars; a fallen stone tower rising above rocks barely visible above surging waves; the last rumbling footsteps of a thunderstorm over a tangled oak forest keeping time with flashes of blue light high in the sky; the sun drawing a golden road across a calm sea of water; mist shrouding a high peak; in a homely village of six cottages, farmers laughing together as they trundled their carts home.

For an instant she saw onto the place she actually stood: the pinnacle of rock beneath her feet, the vast bowl of land to the east, and the rose-painted hills to the west. She took another step and saw a dusty hilltop rimmed by boulders,
the setting sun visible as a red smear. She faltered, chest tight as she sucked in air for courage.

When she had looked onto this place before, Lord Radas had spoken to her. Hastily, she moved on. She smelled the rotting damp of marshland but could see only the suggestion of a flat landscape against the swallowing night. As she moved through the path, she must smell and hear what lay beyond each turn because the sun had set and she was walking in layers of night, some too dark to penetrate and others still limned with the last measure of day as though she were leaping from east to west, north to south, and back again, randomly.

Not randomly. The pattern repeated. And if it repeated, she could learn it.

She took another step. Air iced her lungs. Her face and hands smarted in a bone-freezing chill. A tincture of juniper touched her nostrils. She halted, startled by the brush of that perfume, remembering Joss and how he had washed with cakes of juniper-scented soap sent twice yearly by his mother. Joss, her lover. The man she loved, even if she had never quite told him so.

Twilight is a bridge between day and night. On its span, the wind blows both into the whispering past and the silent future, and you partake of them both because you are in transition from one state to the next, a condition that recurs with every passage between night and day and night. Indeed, this condition occurs many times in the entirety of a life, which is lived out as a series of such transitions, bridges between what has gone before and what will come next.

Twilight is a presence, hard to know in its impermanence.

Twilight speaks to her in a soft foreign lisp, with a good-natured voice half amused and half cynical.

“Hu! There you are. They've been looking for you for a good long while now, since long before I came to them. They're getting irritated. If I were you, I would submit now. That's better than what will happen if you can't
keep hiding from them. On the other hand, I don't mind seeing them wring their hands and stamp their feet a bit longer.”

“Who are you?”

“I'm a ghost.”

“A ghost! You don't sound like a ghost.”

“What do ghosts sound like?”

“Aui! I suppose they sound like we do, I mean, that they talk no differently as ghosts than they do when living.”

“So are you saying I can't be a ghost? Or I can be a ghost?”

“You're a flirt,” she said with a laugh, because she liked his lazy, good-natured, and sexy baritone even if she could not trust him.

“It's been said of me before.” Like twilight, he seemed not to partake completely of any one thing: he might be a good man coarsened by a bad situation, or a bad man mellowed by a good situation, or just someone caught in the middle with no way out but through.

“Don't trust me,” he added, his voice darkening. “I'd give you over in an instant if I thought it would get me what I want. Who are you?”

“I'm not telling. What do you want?”

The lazy tone worked up to an edge. “Escape from this hell of endless suffering.”

“Why are you trapped?”

His laugh scraped. “We're all trapped. Don't you know that yet? Wait where you are and submit when they reach you, or keep running and hiding.”

The bitterly cold air hoarsened her voice. “Those can't be the only choices.”

“How have you evaded them for so long? Neh, don't tell me. I don't want to know. But they're long in looking for you. They don't like that. They hauled me free at once. They made me what I am now.”

“What are you now, besides a ghost, if you are a ghost?”

“A coward who fears oblivion and yearns for it. I have more power than I could ever have dreamed of. I wish I could die. I want to go home, but I never will leave this land.”

“Who are you?”

For a long time he remained silent. Her fingers grew taut with cold until it hurt to bend them. Her ears were burning, and her eyes had begun to sting as though blistering from the cold.

He spoke in a whisper. “How I fear them, for they are sweet with the corruption that comes of believing they must do what is wrong in order to make things right. I was called Hari once, Harishil, the name my father gave me. Will you tell me your name?”

Marit had served as a reeve for over ten years. She'd learned to trust her instincts, and she knew in her gut that even if she might want to trust him, she must not. Anyway, what kind of person got a name from his father, not his mother? “I can't tell you. I'm sorry.”

Had she been able to see him, she would have guessed he smiled. “You need not apologize for what is true. I'll have to tell them I saw you, but I'll say I didn't know where you were. There's one thing you need to know. We can see into people's hearts with our third eye and our second heart, but we are blind to each other. Remember that. It's your only weapon against them.”

“Who are ‘they'?”

“Nine Guardians the gods created, according to the tale you tell in this land. I think at one time they walked in accord, but now they are at war. Two rule, and three of us submit; five are enough to hunt and destroy the four who have not yet submitted to the rule of night and sun. They will find you in the end, and if you will not submit, they will destroy you and pass your cloak to another, one more easily subdued.”

“The Guardians are dead. They've vanished from the Hundred. Everyone knows that.”

“Guardians can't die. Surely you know that, now you
are one. Hsst! That cursed worm Yordenas is walking. Go quickly if you don't want your whereabouts known to him! Go now!”

His urgency impelled her. She took a step, and a breath of fetid air washed her. She took another step into a spitting salt spray with the crash of surf far below, and another step to warm rain in her face amid the racket of crickets and the smell of damp grass. Her hands smarted as blood rushed back into the skin. The pulse beneath her feet throbbed with a third tone, hot and intense, the presence of blood washing down the path like an incoming tide.

She could not run within the confines of the labyrinths, but because she was compact she could negotiate the path's twists and turns economically, keeping ahead of the other presence. The muzzy confusion of earlier days had lifted and she felt both the widening focus and the pinpoint awareness of her surroundings from her days as a reeve when her instincts—right up until the last day—had served her so well.

She was back in the game, one step ahead of fear. Flirting with danger, the rush that her eagle had taught her to love. Wasn't all of life like that: never more than one step ahead until the day death caught you?

The path spilled her into the center of the labyrinth, where the horse waited, looking aggrieved, if horses could look aggrieved, as if to say: “Why did you take so long?”

Gods, she was thirsty. Hands shaking, she filled the bowl and drank her fill, the water blazing into every part of her body. She sank down cross-legged, panting, and rubbed her forehead. Night had fallen. Knowing a cliff plunged away on all sides, she dared not move, not unless the horse was willing to fly at night, something an eagle could not do because they depended so heavily on their vision. She'd heard tales of eagles who could be fooled or forced into flying at the full moon, but she'd never had such luck with Flirt.

But as she sat with a sweet breeze steady against her face, she realized the mare actually had a kind of sheen to it that might be described as a
glow.
Its coat was not so much pale gray as luminescent silver. Indeed, the horse had an unnatural look, a ghost in truth, if ghosts flicked their tails and tossed their pretty heads.

Why did the cursed mare keep bringing her to Guardian altars? Her chest was tight the way a person gets when they don't want to breathe for fear of inhaling where they know there will be a noxious smell.

A Guardian altar. A winged horse. A cloak. A simple begging bowl. Light from her palm, if she needed it, and a patterned labyrinth through which she seemed able to speak across distances to others like her.

She knew the tale. She could chant the words or tell it through gesture, as every child could.

Long ago, in the time of chaos, a bitter series of wars, feuds, and reprisals denuded 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.

A blinding light split the air, and out of the holy island rising in the center of the lake appeared the seven gods in their own presence. The waters boiled, and the sky wept fire, as the gods crossed over the water to the shore where the girl had fallen.

And they spoke to her.

Our children have been given mind, hand, and heart to guide their actions, but they have turned their power against themselves. Why should we help you?

For the sake of justice, she said.

And they heard her.

Let Guardians walk the lands, in order to establish justice if they can.

Who can be trusted with this burden? she asked them. Those with power grasp tightly.

Only the dead can be trusted, they said. Let the ones who have died fighting for justice be given a second chance to restore peace. We will give them gifts to aid them with this burden.

Taru the Witherer wove nine cloaks out of the fabric of the land and the water and the sky, and out of all living things, which granted the wearer protection against the second death although not against weariness of soul;

Ilu the Opener of Ways built the altars, so that they might speak across the vast distances each to the other;

Atiratu the Lady of Beasts formed the winged horses out of the elements so that they could travel swiftly and across the rivers and mountains without obstacle;

Sapanasu the Lantern gave them light to banish the shadows;

Kotaru the Thunderer gave them the staff of judgment as their symbol of authority;

Ushara the Merciless One gave them a third eye and a second heart with which to see into and understand the hearts of all;

Hasibal gave an offering bowl.

All she lacked was a staff of judgment, whatever that was.

Really, a reeve who tallied up the evidence might suggest, against all likelihood, that these added up to an obvious conclusion:

Here sits a Guardian.

W
AS SHE MERELY
spinning and drifting on sweet-smoke, unmoored from the world around her? All she knew for sure was that she was being hunted by forces she did not comprehend, ones her gut—and Hari the out-lander, if that was really his name—warned her never to trust.

She didn't know what precisely she was now, but she had been a reeve once. She could investigate. And it would help to figure out where the hells she was, where her enemies were, and what they wanted.

“Y
OU MIGHT WANT
to turn back,” said the old woman as she scooped nai porridge into Marit's bowl. They stood under the triple-gated entrance to a temple of Ilu, where Marit had come to beg for food. “Once you ford the river and cross through West Riding, you'll have left Sohayil.”

“Merchants will trade, and beggars will beg, and laborers will seek work wherever they can find it.” The nai's richly spiced aroma made Marit's mouth water; it was all she could do not to bolt down the food right there.

“In the old days that was certainly true, but not anymore. We can't be so easy about things in these days.” Morning mist rose off the river and curled in backwater reeds. A last gust of night rain spattered on the waters, and stilled. On the grounds of the temple, an apprentice trundled a wheelbarrow full of night soil to the temple gardens, while a pair of children carried an empty basket to the henhouse. A trio of elders even older than the gatekeeper paced through the chant of healing from the Tale of Patience, their morning exercise. From the round sanctuary rose the sonorous chanting of male voices. “I don't mind telling you, for your own good, really, that we've recalled all our envoys who've been walking the roads from here to Haldia and Toskala. Sund and Farhal and Sardia aren't truly safe, although some still make the journey.”

“You must have envoys carrying messages to the Ostiary in Nessumara, to the other temples of Ilu. Not to mention your work as envoys.”

The old envoy was spry, comfortably plump, and nobody's fool. “Think you so? Why are you headed that
way? If you don't mind my saying so, your clothes and walking staff mark you as a beggar or a laborer down on her luck—and the gods know we've seen enough of them in these days—but your manner doesn't fit. The cloak's nice. Is that silk? Good quality.”