Shadow Gate (67 page)

Shai had never been so afraid in his life, to see a ghost calling his name as its cloudy essence chased after him.

But of course, no one else could see. They just thought he was struggling to get free.

“No fighting, or I'll let Twist cook and eat your balls after he's cut them off.”

“Don't want to eat them,” said Twist, to the laughter of the others. “Want to make him eat them raw.”

They chortled. Dizzied, Shai blinked as Edard's ghost hazed his vision.

“One moment I was walking down to find where Eridit had gone, and the next . . . Eiya! Am I dead?”

The ghost seemed less angry than puzzled as the gang of men marched through him. He drifted toward a ridge of rock adorned with curtains of orange-flowering vegetation. The way the vegetation fell down the crag made it seem there was rock all the way down, the crevice itself easily missed, unless you knew it was there because a young woman had recently dragged you in there and done what she wanted, not that he hadn't wanted it just as much.

“Aui!” said the ghost. “There Eridit is! Safe, at least.”

Shai saw her eyes, a patchwork face behind orange flowers. As she saw him see her, fear made her face ghastly. Fear for him? Or for herself?

He stumbled purposefully, drawing their attention, and surged up so they crowded in to pressure him forward, weapons bristling like so many iron thorns ready to impale. They didn't examine the nearby rocks.

Edard's ghost had vanished.

And Shai was their living prisoner.

 

 

 

D
EATH RODE AT
twilight into High Haldia. Or so, Marit imagined, the tales might sing.

The broad avenue that bisected the city lay empty except for a scrap of cloth rippling along the paving stones, blown by a wind out of the north. Normally, she supposed this thoroughfare would be lit with lanterns, folk grabbing noodles or the savory buns common to Haldia for a quick bite while rushing about their last errands of the day. Apprentices released from their duties might be found traveling in packs for a night of carousing, or a shopkeeper seen sweeping her entry porch as she closed up for the night. Now, many buildings gaped as half-burned shells, roofs fallen in and broken tiles scattered. The intact shopfronts were shuttered, as closed up as a rich clan rejecting the marriage suit of a poor but ambitious neighbor.

Was High Haldia slain, or only licking its wounds?

Movement flashed to her right. Marit urged Warning into a trot down a side street. A figure dashed across the street, ducking into an alley. Marit slipped off Warning, ran in pursuit. In the depths of shadow between windowless walls, she grabbed a slight young person by his tunic.

He went limp, so she let go, and he sprawled at her feet. The side street lay behind them. Ahead, the alley met an
intersection of murky lanes, the routes beyond too dim to trace.

“Jus' ran to fetch medicine.” Despite short hair clipped close to the head, it was a girl. “I didna mean to break curfew, only my nephew needs the tisane for a fever.” She opened a hand to reveal a stoppered vial with an orange ribbon wrapped around it to mark its medicinal virtue.

“I saw folk walking in from fields earlier,” Marit said, hoping a friendly voice would stop the girl's convulsive shivering on a hot night. “All with stooped backs and bowed heads. The guards at the toll gate outside town let me pass without a word. Why's there a curfew?”

The back of her neck had a rash, and her feet were bare, newly blistered, as though she had formerly been accustomed to walking everywhere in slippers. “We've given our hostage to the garrison and kept the rules,” she said into the dirt. “It was jus' that my nephew needed the medicine. He's jus' three. Cudna you let me go this one time?” Her hand closed around the vial.

Marit heard footfalls. She turned halfway, keeping an eye both on the girl and on the six soldiers who crowded into the alley's entrance

“Lord? Any trouble here? Got a curfew-breaker?”

Averting their eyes, they approached in file, blocking the alley.

The sergeant flung out an arm to halt the others. “Who are you?” His suspicion gave flavor to the air and made the others draw their short swords. The girl whimpered.

“I've not seen you before, lord,” the sergeant added, words as tentative as a baby's first steps.

Now it's true that anyone might affect a long cloak, especially in the rainy season, although few would choose white as their ornament. As soon as she thought it, Marit wondered if a bold rebel might attempt a disguise and thereby walk through a city such as this one, imprisoned by a curfew that made an innocent girl cower when she was caught out at dusk with a vial of medicine.

“I've just come from Walshow,” Marit said, looking them over as they glanced every way but at her.

“She's the one they warned us to look out for—” blurted the leftmost fellow, and his sergeant kicked him so hard on the shin that he yelped.

“Don't even try it,” she said wearily. “Look at me.”

Of course they didn't want to look. Joss's determination and misery had been laid bare to her sight: his nostalgic, regretful desire for the Marit he had once loved, a desire he knew he ought to have strangled long since but could not quite kill; his hunger for a young woman so vivid and sensual that Marit raged with envy while knowing perfectly well that she was dead and he had to get on with his own life.

With no one moving and she trapped in this pointless cycle of thoughts, she prodded the girl. “Get home.”

“We bring curfew-breakers to the captain on duty, to be cleansed, lord,” said the sergeant, trembling with the effort of staring at his hand so he would not forget and look at her.

“Take me to the captain in place of the girl. Who, if she knows what is good for her, will run off.
Now.
”

The girl bolted, and vanished down one of the lanes. Marit held her staff at the ready until she could no longer hear the patter of feet.

“No need to mention the incident to the captain,” she said. “I'll know if you do.”

“That's not how things work around here,” muttered the sergeant. She didn't need a third eye and second heart to hear how disgruntled he was, having his authority undermined in front of his patrol by some cursed woman he'd never seen before in his life. She'd had a lot of experience as a reeve in unraveling the weave of conflicted human emotion, because it was rare indeed that any one person felt any one single pure feeling unadulterated by a dozen niggling other sentiments.

The sergeant lunged.

She sidestepped, and whacked him across the shoulders with the staff. He hit the ground face first. She turned on the others before they charged. Taken by surprise, they looked at her.

Aui! Humans are a monstrous roil of sensibilities, and by far the worst part of what she had now become was in being forced to know how true that was.

If I don't go along, they'll kill me. I wish I never left home.

I want Sergeant's job, that snot-nosed ass doesn't know what he's doing, not like I do, I would like to see him strung up and kicking.

Glad they didn't catch me cheating at dice hope my sister wasn't one of the girls taken for the army the wine isn't enough to drown this ache in my head I woulda kept lighting the houses on fire it was the hells grand to watch them burn and folk begging us to stop and anyway the commanders ordered us to make an example of them.

My tooth hurts.

The lords order us to kill, they like to kill, they like it when we kill, so she's just one cursed female breaking curfew, we can take her down and kill her—

“Drop your weapons! Down on your knees! Hands up!”

She hated them as they turned craven, heads tucked, hands high with palms open. She was breathing hard with the rush, and she wanted to crack them over the heads for what they had done to the people of this town. What they had done to countless others. What they had done to themselves.

“You.” She thrust one tip of her staff hard into the chest of the man whose tooth hurt. He fell hard, tried to hide a groan as he righted himself, and she laughed, and was shocked at herself for finding amusement in his pain. “Unbuckle the sergeant's sword belt and give me sword and sheath.”

Cringing, he did so. She slung the short sword at her own hip before poking him again.

“You're in charge now. You three will escort me to the captain. The others can carry your sergeant back to camp.”

Even if the local captain tried to kill her, pain would be a temporary agony.
I can kill, but not be killed.
Yet that being so, what had happened to the man who wore the cloak before her?

H
IGH
H
ALDIA HAD
begun its life in ancient days as a posting town, a string of buildings along the Istri Walk that led from Nessumara to Seven. From this spine, the city had grown outward into unequal halves. They walked into the eastern part of the city along a handsome avenue lined with merchant houses and trading emporia mostly untouched by the destruction that had visited the main road. These buildings, too, were entirely closed up for the night. No spark of light betrayed life within.

The streets had room to sprawl, nothing like the crowded streets of Toskala, the steep lanes in Olossi, the nerve-racking roped paths of Haorrenda, or the narrow canals and elaborate foot bridges of Nessumara-on-the-delta. Three squares were strung like beads along the thoroughfare. The entrances to four temples anchored the corners of the first square. The second was faced with two temples, north and south. On the third square, the assizes court and arkhon's hall stood opposite a massive compound dedicated to Taru the Witherer, beloved of farmers.

The captain in charge of High Haldia's garrison had set up his headquarters in the arkhon's hall. She rode Warning up the steps and through the main entrance hall into the courtyard. Men shrank back from her billowing cloak. A graveled path bisected the courtyard, flanked by terraces of white and pink tea flowers and decorative herbs set out in blocks like neighborhoods. A fountain depicted the island at Indiyabu where the Guardians had risen from the lake, but the spouts had dried up. Much like justice, Marit supposed. Run dry.

A dozen men edged out of the shadows into a loose circle around her.

“I've not seen you before,” said their captain, a trim, muscular man flanked by a pair of gargantuan spear carriers. He had the imposing presence of a man who can make decisions without second guessing himself, but he did not look her in the face.

“No, you haven't. I want an escort down Istri Walk, to the main army.”

“I'm under no obligation to assist you.”

She snorted. “I suppose you get folk every day riding into High Haldia on a Guardian's horse and wearing a scrap of cloak so as to pretend they are a Guardian?”

His gaze met hers just long enough that she tasted the merest tangle of his complicated mind: He admired a bold woman with a sarcastic sense of humor. He didn't like the commanders he worked for, but he was good at fighting and they rewarded him well. He liked the job more than he disliked them. “They don't call themselves that. Which you'd have known, if you were one of them.”

“As an attempt to intimidate me, it's not bad, Captain, but I'm up here on a winged horse, and you're down there wondering how much of your heart I've seen.”

A smile ghosted onto his face and faded. “As it happens, Lord Twilight rode into town earlier today. He said a cloak, a woman wearing the color of death, might arrive soon. I just sent a man to fetch him.”

Warning stamped. A door slid open on a long covered porch. The man who stepped into the courtyard wore a cloak very like hers, only the color of his was indistinguishable from the purpling-dark shadows. His hair was black, his eyes and complexion dark, and his expression ironic.

“You and your men can go, Captain,” he said.

They departed hastily through gates and doors.

As he crossed the garden, she dismounted and released Warning to nose among the tea flowers. He halted beside
the fountain. Lanterns hanging from tripods spread light on his face. He studied her as a smile twisted his lips.

“I wasn't sure if I had dreamed you, or really spoken to you. A wish is no better than a dream.” His voice was softly mocking, but not of her. The accent dazzled.

“ ‘Lord Twilight'?”
she asked with a laugh.

“It is grand, isn't it?” He let the grin emerge fully.

“It's ridiculous. Nor do you look like a Northerner, to carry the title.”

“Lord?”

“It's an ancient claim, found only in the north. You're not a Northerner. You're not even born of the Hundred.”

“As I admitted when we talked the first time.”

“As your face proclaims. A good-looking face, I admit, but an outlander's face nevertheless. How in the hells did an outlander become a Guardian? A ‘cloak,' as the soldiers call us.”

He raised a hand, wincing. “Let's not spoil a pleasant evening with a painful subject. What am I to call you?”

She hesitated.

“If you won't give me something, I'll have to make up a name. And you won't like it, Lady Death.”

“Aui! I'm wounded. You can call me Ramit.”

“I suppose it's the best I can get.”

“Yes. You said you're called Hari. Water-born, like me.” And therefore forbidden, but she didn't say that out loud.

“Water-born? They said that before to me, but it means nothing. My father named me Harishil, which means fifth of his sons. Nothing about water.”

Not forbidden, after all! She smiled. “I'll not mention it again. Why are you in High Haldia? Why not follow the army down the Istri Walk as I'm doing?”

His eyes shuttered. “Are you sure that's what you want?”