Shadow Gate (68 page)

“I'm sure it's what I must do.”

It was a relief to look at a man and not be flooded with
his thoughts and feelings, and the longer she held his gaze in a kind of defiant counterstare the more it seemed they were flirting. And since he was not truly Water-born, she could enjoy the sensation. He had broad shoulders and the graceful strength of a man in his prime, about the age she had been when she'd died.

“I thought you might pass this way,” he said. “I thought maybe we could travel together.”

As invitations went, it had charm mostly because of his lazy smile. He wasn't a happy man; trouble shadowed those thick-lashed eyes. But he wasn't the kind to let trouble stop him from making an effort to please. And surely the gods knew how bitterly lonely she had become. Maybe she had hoped for this meeting more than she dared admit.

“I can leave any time,” she said.

T
HEY RODE OUT
of High Haldia soon after. Once on the Istri Walk, the hooves of their horses lit the road, a glow emanating like a mist formed of dying sparks. The city was silent except for the occasional barking of a dog or the noise of beasts as they passed, and inhaled the smell of, stabling yards. Twice, night patrols aggressively hailed them but, seeing them close, hurriedly bowed and let them pass.

“It's quiet,” she said.

“But orderly. The troublemakers are dead or fled or in hiding. The rest do what they're told.”

“Which is?”

“Farm. Mill. Manufacture. Pay a heavy tithe to the army in exchange for not being killed. That's the bargain they were offered. Most took it.”

“And the ones who did not?”

“As I said.”

“High Haldia has a decent population. There's a lot of land between here and Walshow, not to mention Haldia in general and Seven and the uplands of Teriayne
beyond. And Gold Hall above the Falls. How can an army keep that much land and that many people under a reign of fear?”

“You Hundred folk don't understand the way of the world, do you? It seems the mountains and sea—and your reeves and Guardians—have protected you for a long time in your tiny enclaves. I was a troublemaker once, but I learned that a well-disciplined army with strong leadership can control a great deal of territory.”

“How?”

“I and some others got in trouble with the Qin overlords of the trading town where I grew up. Instead of executing us, they sent us off to be useful elsewhere, which in my case meant being sold into a mercenary company as a soldier. One day about a hundred of us marched north over the high mountains and into the Hundred on a contract. We were betrayed, and I was killed. After that, I found myself prisoner of the cloak.”

“Mine's a simpler tale. A country girl, sent to the city to find work. I was chosen as a reeve instead. I believe I was killed in the line of duty. Thus you find me.”

“Here's the first toll gate.” As they approached a stockade placed to control traffic on the road, Hari raised his voice to alert the guard. “We're passing through. I'm of no mind to mince words with your sergeant.”

Men opened the gate, careful not to look up. They rode through without slackening their pace. Beyond this stockade the city turned into a scattered collection of threshing yards, stinking tanneries, aromatic corrals, and silent timber lots. High Haldia's environs seemed as deserted as the city itself.

“Have they no patrols to control thievery?” she asked.

“You'll see.”

The roadside leading to a second barrier was lined with poles driven into the ground.

She sucked in a shocked breath. “This again!”

“You've seen the approach to Walshow, then.”

“I have. Is this how they keep the peace?”

“Those who resist, who speak out, who cause trouble or break curfew—are cleansed. Their corruption removed.”

Corpses dangled from poles, tied by ropes around the wrists, hands swollen and so deep a purple they were almost black and lower limbs puffy and distended. The dead stank, while the guards had bound linen kerchiefs over their mouths and noses. Beyond the gate, more poles rose. Flies buzzed in black clouds.

“I'd call it slaughtered, not cleansed! The hells! Those two aren't dead!”

A lad, his arms streaked with the jagged red of infection spreading down from his choked hands, was unconscious, spirit drifting deep. A man whimpered as he struggled to get enough purchase on the pole with his heels to ease the strangling pressure of the rope. She dismounted. His feet hung to about the level of her waist, making it impossible for her to reach the stake hammered into the top of the pole around which the chains looped.

Hari said, “They're already condemned.”

“By what court?”

Beside the gate, the night watch gathered.

“By the only court that matters. Those who command the army hold the power.”

“ ‘The cloaks rule all, even death.' Well, they don't rule me after all, do they? Help me.”

“It serves no purpose to try to save one here and one there when they're all condemned.”

“You disappoint me.” Warning flicked her ears. “And you disappoint my good horse, too.”

She walked to the barrier, a bulky fence set in front of debris piled to impede movement and with a gate set in place to allow wagons through in single file. “I need a ladder.”

The taste of their sergeant's sullen anger at being ordered about so arbitrarily flavored the air even as he kept his gaze averted. A ladder was brought. She carried it
over her shoulders to the pole where the hanging man scraped with a will, as if thinking to escape her efforts. As she braced the ladder behind the pole, Hari dismounted. He came up very close behind her, almost embracing her.

“I'll help you,” he said in a low voice.

“Change of heart?”

“I'm not doing this for him. You catch him when he falls.”

Grasping the man around the thighs, she lifted. He grunted in pain. His trousers were fouled; she sucked in a fetid breath through her mouth and held on, hoping Hari would be quick. The chain released. The man's body collapsed over her, and she staggered back to avoid falling under him as he began screaming. Then Hari had him, and together they eased him to the ground.

“Eiya!” She cut the ropes, then probed his shoulders as he writhed. “Nothing popped out, but he'll have a cursed painful time getting the blood back into his hands. The muscles must be torn from the weight. He can't have been up there long.”

“What do you mean to do with him?” Hari asked.

“Cursed if I know. Find him a place he can heal.”

“And thereby condemn whoever aids him as an accomplice, to be cleansed?”

“I can't just stand aside and do nothing! Help me with the other one.”

“A waste of time. The lad's near death.”

“How can you tell?”

“You're young to this yet, aren't you? It's a sweetness they get, when they cross beyond where they can be brought back. If you want, I'll kill him quickly.”

“Are you going to help me, or not?”

His gaze shifted past her. Anger had made her careless. She turned. The sergeant, marked by his shoulder braids, stood a prudent distance away, gaze still averted, shaking as though terrified by his own audacity.

“Lord, if you will hear me, I would tell you that the
man you cut down was cleansed for being a spy. He was sent from Toskala to infiltrate our territories and scurry back to his masters with what news he could tell them.”

Marit rose. “Take the lad down. Also, bring me a pair of saddled horses, rope, wine, and a sack of rice.” His abject obedience gave a rush that made her ears burn, and then at once she knew the shame of letting his fear feed her. Demons ate fear; that was what made them demons.

Hari nodded toward the lad. “Listen with your second heart, and look with your third eye. His spirit is passing.”

The death rattle exhaled as softly as mist rises. The young spirit lightened within the night, a shudder of trembling confusion caught between death and the Spirit Gate. The wind quickened. Chains scraped on wood as bodies shifted. The odor of death grew strong, then faded abruptly. She sucked in breath—breath is life—and that quickly, the youth's spirit crossed over and was gone, joyful in its final release.

A pair of frightened soldiers brought a pair of saddled horses—decent mounts, to her surprise—and scuttled away. The accused spy screamed in pain as she and Hari bundled him onto the horse, and tied him on the saddle. Mercifully, he passed out. She tied the lead lines to her own saddle and strung the spare at the end.

They rode for a long while without speaking, her heart steaming hot with a bitter rage. The fields beyond High Haldia had a tidy architecture. This was fertile land, well populated, sufficient to feed High Haldia and besides maintain a brisk trade upcountry and downriver. The footfalls of the horses rang in the night, as loud as hammers. The unconscious man breathed in unsteady gasps, his pain like a haze of muddy pressure around his torso. Rain washed them, pouring for a while, and then they rode out of it. In the southwest, three stars shone in a break in the clouds.

“I don't know what I'll do with him now,” she said at last.

“Why do you bother?”

“Because I can't walk away.”

“Didn't you see the dead ones? The empty poles waiting? How will you save them?”

“I can't walk away from the one who is in front of me.”

His glance was shadowed by night, but she felt its brooding force. “They'll feed on you. That's what they do.”

“These poor souls feed on you?”

“No. The ones who control us. They feed on us, who are their slaves.”

“Are they demons?”

“Maybe. If you turn around now, you might be free of them a while longer.”

“No.” She wiped her brow, still wet from the rains. “To run is to be their slave. I'm going to fight. All I ask is that you stay out of my way, and don't betray me.”

“Don't trust me,” he said. “I'm not like you.”

“You're the only ally I have.”

Looking at each other, they both laughed.

At length, she wiped away a tear. Within the strange shimmering gleam off the road, she watched his face, his wry smile, his habitual shrug as of a man who has trained himself to let water run where it may, making no effort to shield himself from the downpour.

“Don't make me like you too much,” he said, “because it will end in grief.”

“Will it? That's up to you.”

The soldiers who had captured Shai had set up camp north of West Track, in woodland cover. It was dusk by the time the patrol reached a clearing with canvas shelters and one campfire. Men came to stare as the others tramped in.

“Make more noise, and you'll bring one of Horn's patrols down on us, you great cursed ass.”

“More important, did you find anything?”

“Field was picked over,” said the sergeant. “Not a cursed thing worth carrying.”

One man pointed with his elbow, indicating Shai. “Found somewhat, you did.”

“Waste of time bringing this big dumb ox with us,” said the one called Twist.

A man holding an axe sniggered. “Look at those arms and shoulders! Whew! Bet he can chop wood! Save me the trouble.”

“There was others with him, including an ordinand we killt,” said the sergeant, “but I don't know how many or where they come from or why they was there. That's why we captured him and brung him back, you sorry fools. For your lack of thinking of it, is why I am sergeant and you will always be walking in my dust.”

A few men spat.

But the man the sergeant had scolded merely laughed. “Got him a ring, doesn't he? I like that belt buckle, too. Very fancy.”

“They're mine,” said the sergeant. “Finder's rights.”

“What about me?” demanded Twist.

“You can have his good-quality sandals, eh?”

Shai weighed his chances, and did not struggle as they stripped off his ring and belt, his sandals and good tunic. A mewling cry whispered from the trees, maybe a trick of his ears, but it made him terribly uneasy. He kept his mouth shut and his eyes open as they prodded him away from the campfire and into the shelter of a brake of lush ferns. A man sat on a stool under the curving fronds, braiding the hair of a girl seated on the ground with her head bowed.

“Who is this?” the man asked without looking up.

The sergeant said, “We found him on the battlefield you sent us to search, lord. We killed an ordinand. There
were others that eluded us. You know how spies plague us.”

The girl did not look up. The man did.

His was an unremarkable face, middle-aged and stout, not a man you would look at twice. He wore a cloak whose color Shai could not distinguish against the leaves. His hair was bound into a single long braid that fell almost to his waist, tied off around what Shai was sure was a finger bone.

Shai repressed a shudder as he regarded the cloaked man, awaiting the ugly verdict on his fate. He was afraid to die, but after all, what could he do about it now? Maybe he would use a few of the tricks Tohon had taught him, and at least take a few down before they slit his throat and punctured his belly.

Looking startled, the man dropped the girl's unfinished braid. “You're veiled to my sight. Yet you wear no cloak.”

“Eh?” Shai took a step back, into the prodding point of a spear. He eased forward off the pain.

The man cocked his head, as dogs did sometimes, trying to figure out a thing they could not comprehend. “He must be simpleminded, Sergeant. He's got nothing in his head.”

“He's an outlander.”

“That shouldn't matter.” The clipped arrogance of the cloaked man's tone made you want to answer. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“Eh, eh,” said Shai, grunting to give himself time to think, cutting up his timing to make each word awkward. If they throw you rope, you're damned if you don't grab it. “Eh, ver. The master calls me Shai. I can chop wood.”