Shadow Gate (66 page)

“Sure we do. There are folk who like that a person hasn't any choice. I think it's disgusting.” She pressed his shoulder back until he was caught against the rock, then leaned against him. “What do you think?”

Ragged corners of rock poked painfully into his back. “Slaves have no will of their own,” he said hoarsely. He could feel the pressure of her all along the length of his body.

“What does that mean?”

“They are disgraced. They have no honor.”

“Maybe so, or maybe they were just unlucky.” She licked her lips in a manner meant to make him crazy, and it did. “I wasn't asking about slaves anyway.” She traced the line of his body from chest down his torso to a hip, and slid her hand around to cup one buttock. “Aui! You have a good, firm shape. We could do it in the crevice over there, and no one the wiser.”

“Stop,” he whispered.

She ground her hips against his until he thought he would burst. “You're not going to find any trace of your brother after four days looking over this cursed field. I'm bored waiting around, and when I get bored I get in a devouring mood, even if I am one of Hasibal's pilgrims. So I'm going to devour you, right now, because you want it, you're just too shy to say so. You need a little spice to heat you up, get that . . . tongue . . . of yours slick.”

She steered him to the crevice, a slit mostly covered by a fall of vegetation sprinkled with orange flowers. He caught a whiff of their sweet scent as she dragged him through the vines. She pressed him down on the dry dirt floor and peeled back his clothing. At first she sat astride him fully clothed, teasing him with her hands and lips as
he groaned and writhed, rocking herself against him until she gasped to a climax. Then she loosed her own trousers and straddled him.

He gasped and moaned, delirious, mounting, gone.

“I knew that would be fast,” she said, hands on his shoulders, her pink tongue peeping out between slightly parted lips. “You'll last longer next time.” She stroked his torso. “Whew! You have a body a woman could just devour again and again. Do you want to try it a second time?”

“Eridit,” he said, but her name exhausted him; he could think of nothing to say to her except that all he could think of was wanting her to devour him over and over and over. No wonder they called their goddess merciless.

A fluttering bird's whistle rose on the air.

“The hells!” muttered Eridit. “That's the signal.”

She scrambled to slip on her trousers as Shai rolled into a tangle of his own clothing. She ducked out from under the crevice as he tried to get everything straightened out so he could dress. By the time he crawled out and stood, an eagle flew so low overhead that he yelped and dropped to the dirt.

“Hurry!” Eridit dashed back to grab his wrist. “A reeve is here. They weren't supposed to contact us! Edard will be furious! They could break our cover.”

They cut down over uneven ground between ridges of naked rock and bumpy grass-grown slopes. The eagle had come to earth beyond the eroded remnants of a once great spine of rock, a bit downslope toward the depths of the hollow, a landing spot that might conceal the eagle from any folk walking on nearby West Track or more distant Horn. The reeve had already unhooked, and he left his harness dangling free behind him as he strode up the slope.

Edard trotted down to meet him. “Be quick about it so we're not spotted, you rank fool!”

“Strange, I was here before,” said the reeve, unaffected by Edard's snarling demeanor. “Be sure I wouldn't have
cut my flight short if I'd not been commanded to deliver a personal message to one of your party. I'm called Volias, by the way. The man I'm looking for goes by the name of Shayi. An outlander.” He bent his sour gaze on Shai, but was distracted by the sight of Eridit sauntering up. “Whew! What's
your
name?”

“No luck today,” she said with a flirting smile.

“Didn't I see you in Olossi, at the arena? Aren't you the Incomparable Eridit?”

She did not take the bait. “Beautiful eagle. Is she friendly?”

“That might depend,” he said.

She shook her head with a mocking frown. “You need work, ver. This is Shai. What's your message?”

“Yes,” added Edard, “and then get gone. Cursed idiot. Where are you headed?”

“None of your cursed business, is it?” With a sneer, he turned to Shai. “Captain Anji's wife said to tell you—and I'm just repeating her words, they mean nothing to me, mind you—‘Beware of Cornflower.' ”

“What is a cornflower?” asked Eridit.

“She's haunting you, on your trail, out for revenge.”

“If Mai meant the slave girl,” said Shai, “then she's dead. She vanished in a sandstorm. No one could survive that.”

“He's not too swift, is he?” said the reeve to Eridit.

“Umm. But tasty.”

“Oof! That hurt! All right,
Shayi.
” The reeve mangled the name, and seemed to enjoy doing it. “I think what the captain's wife is trying to tell you is that you've got a demon stalking your tail.”

Hu! His body recalled how it had responded to the sight of Cornflower's slight, pale form, her demon-blue eyes, her passive air. Every one of his brothers had tasted her, repeatedly; he had refrained, but not from disgust. Not from not wanting her. Not at all. He wiped sweat from his brow, shut his eyes, trying to wring from his memory the image of her lying on a pallet dressed in
scanty bedroom silks, trying to freeze his body's fresh stirring of arousal.

“A lilu, eh?” said Eridit, who missed nothing.

Edard said, “If you've delivered your message, get moving.”

“Where's the rest of your party?”

“The rest of the party is smarter than these two nimwits,” said Edard. “They stayed hidden. You find what you were looking for, Shai, or are you ready to give up on it?”

As Shai opened his eyes, his gaze wandered to the reeve with his harness clipped tight around his torso and his tight leathers beneath, the trousers ornamented by a polished belt buckle engraved with a wolf's head.

He took in a sharp breath. “Where'd you get that?” he demanded.

“Get what?” asked the reeve indignantly.

“The belt buckle.” Shai raised his right hand to display the wolf ring, sigil of the Mei clan into which he had been born. “That belonged to my brother. I recognize it.” The shock of seeing it made him come alive, as if he were already moving, an axe in its downward swing.

The reeve leaped back, raising his baton. “The hells! Don't come any closer.”

Shaking, Shai lowered his hand, now curled into a fist. He was about the same height as the reeve, but bulkier, and he felt his strength in the way his entire body was poised; but he also recognized the reeve's ready stance.

“Heya, Shai,” said Eridit in a cool, amused tone. “We're playing for the same side, neh?”

“Want to get out of here now?” asked Edard. “If you would be so kind, reeve.”

The reeve furrowed his brow, and slanted a glance at Shai. “Yet it's true, I found it. Here, on this field.”

Shai's tongue rooted; he couldn't speak.

“Down this way,” said the reeve.

“Stay here, Eridit,” said Edard sternly. “Go gather your gear.”

Shai stumbled over every bump and root that hooked his path, while the reeve glanced back several times, no doubt the better to eye Eridit from the rear. The reeve fetched up near where the stream cut through tussocks of flowering grass and white-barked saplings growing among low-lying rocks. Farther upslope, scrub trees and brush covered the hillside.

The reeve searched along the bank of the stream until he reached a spot dense with human remains left to the weather.

“It was. . . right. . . here.” He probed with a boot, and lifted his foot a hand's width with a curved bone caught over the arch. “I found it under this fellow.”

If a tree had hit him square in the back, Shai could not have dropped harder to his knees. A jumble of shapes and colors pulsed before him: green grass blowing; the white cradle of bare ribs; red-clay-colored cloth pressed into the loam, becoming part of the weave of earth. Nearby, a skull was lodged upside down between rocks in the stream, water flowing through the eye sockets. White flowers bobbed on a nearby bush. From deep in the branches, a bird peeped at him, black eyes gleaming.

“I need to get on.” An object thudded to the ground by Shai's knees. The man walked away as Shai stared at the buckle; the wolf's head stared back at him, black on silver. He sucked in an inhalation as he grasped it.

Hari!

Dead. Dead. Dead.

With a trembling hand Shai touched the shattered rib cage. Closing his eyes, he tried to snare the lingering whispers of a spirit from the sun-warmed bones.

These were not Hari's bones.

A man shouted.

Shai started back, his hands cold and his chest heavy. He scrambled on hands and knees through the scatter of bones, touching leg bones, arms, fingers, a mandible. So many dead men, carved by death out of life and sent
fleeing through the Spirit Gate. But none of them were Hari.

Yet Hari had been dead when he had last been wearing the belt buckle. Hari's wolf sigil ring had come to the family through convoluted channels, more by accident and chance than purpose, so Shai believed. Hari's ring, too, had whispered of its owner's death. But Hari's bones were nowhere to be found, or at least, not here where he had left his ring and his buckle. Weeping, Shai sank onto his heels, head cupped in his hands. The obvious answer sang in his ears: Hari had died elsewhere, and another man had robbed his corpse and worn his fine ring and buckle until he himself was caught by the death that attends those who march to war.

Enough.

An eagle rose out of the outcropping, whose bare stone shouldered above dirt in rough surfaces and ragged spills of rock like massive frozen waterfalls. Men flowed out of the rock, spurting from between ridges, cascading down the slope.

They had seen him.

They were armed.

He tied Hari's belt buckle into his sleeve and leaped the stream, landing up to his knees in the rushing cold water. He splashed through and scrambled up the far side as shouts were loosed at his back. He sprinted up the slope to the shelter of the low-lying scrub. Thin straggler vines whipped his face; branches caught in his clothes as he tore through. His cap came off. The racket he made as he thrashed through the brush was trail enough for his pursuers.

He dropped to hands and knees and scrambled among narrow trunks, squiggled into a thicket and lay, panting, on his belly. He eased around, to watch the way he had come. Branches snapped and slithered as four men pressed past not two body's lengths from him. He could not see their faces, only their legs. White and pale pink flowers danced in the taller scrub trees as the wind rose,
melding with the stamp and disturbance made by the searching men. Maybe rain would blow through, discourage the hunters, and leave him free to—

A thorn pricked him. He shifted to get out from under it. The point pinched harder.

“Get up,” said a man.

The point of a spear jabbed hard enough to break the skin.

Cautiously, he eased up to hands and knees.

A kick planted into his rear sent him sprawling into vines and thorns. A second kick caught a hip, and as he struggled to get out of the thorns, the kicks kept pushing him back in until he simply went limp and lay like he was dead. Blood tickled along his spine; his skin stung where the spear had poked him.

The spear jabbed a new spot.

“Get up,” said the same voice, in the same flat tone, no pleasure in it, no giggling sneering gloat.

He had learned a few tricks from the Qin soldiers. With a spinning roll, he knocked the point off his back and got his hands on the shaft with a wide grip. He wrenched the spear out of the man's grip, twirled it, and smacked him upside the chin with the shaft.

The man dropped right into Shai, his weight smashing him backward into a bush. Shai shoved him off, then levered the spear under him to push himself up.

Too late.

Others pushed into view. Two had swords, three had spears, and one had a bow nocked with a ready arrow.

“Not bad,” said the bowman, standing in back of the rest, partially screened by brush. “Kill him now, Sergeant?”

“Give us the spear, lad.”

They looked like ordinary folk on the surface, bedraggled from tearing through the scrub, but their eyes were hard and their clothes mismatched, and they carried their weapons like they wanted an excuse to use them. Three had lips stained red, the sigil left by sweet-smoke, whose
mark he'd seen on Girish. The addicts looked ready to kill if given the order. The fallen man groaned as he staggered to his feet.

“Cursed outlander!” he growled. “Can I rip his balls off?”

“Neh. The master will want to know what he's doing here pawing through the battlefield right where Lord Twilight was raised. Looks like he was traveling with that ordinand.”

Had they captured Edard, too?

Was it better to fight and die, or give up your freedom now in the hopes of winning it back later?

He released the spear.

A man grabbed it and smacked him alongside the face. He blacked out.

And came to retching, with them dragging him through grass. They had been joined by more soldiers.

“Walk!”

They pulled him past a pile of clothing discarded on the ground, only there was a man still in that clothing, a face staring up at the sky and mist rising out of the nostrils in a roil of confusion.

“Why will folk never listen to me when I try to warn them? Heya! Shai!” Edard's ghost writhed toward him, mouth widening in an exaggerated grimace. “Did I tell you my clan's password to make contact in Toskala? Someone needs to know. ‘Splendid silk slippers,' like in the tale. Same as our badge.”