Shadow Gate (80 page)

He flexed his shoulders, tested his range of motion. “My thanks to you for rescuing me. What's your name?”

The streaming current rushed, louder than the wind.

She smiled sadly. “Ramit.”

He hooked himself into the fork where a branch had
grown out from the bole. “My thanks, Ramit. May the gods honor you.”

His words brought tears. “May you find a safe haven, Miken.”

She shoved the log onto the river and watched until she could no longer see it on the dark waters. Then she walked back and sat by the fire, contemplating the lick and simmer of flames and the occasional spat spark. Was there a pattern to its burning, a truth in the way flames ran merry along a charring log or glowed in a blue-white shimmer where coals burned dense and hot?

If Guardians can be made, then they can be unmade.

If Lord Radas and his ally can kill, then so could she.

A branch snapped. She grabbed her sword.

Hari strolled into the light. “So you didn't trust him either. Wise of you, my sweet.”

“When did I become your sweet?” She sheathed the sword.

He braced a foot on another drift log and stared at the sky, but it was overcast and thus starless. Ripples of firelight seemed to work through the fabric of his twilight cloak. Her own had a stubborn bone-white gleam, as pure as death.

“Two times I took off my cloak,” she said, “and I couldn't breathe, and then it wrapped around me, and took me back, like it refused to let me die. So you can't just remove a cloak and kill them that way. You'd have to bind the cloak as well.”

“You can't kill what is already dead. Anyway, if a living person touches the clasp which binds a cloak, their skin burns and blisters just as if they were touching fire.”

“How do you know that?”

“Yordenas does it, if a person angers him. Makes them hold the clasp until the skin burns off their hands.”

Marit shuddered. “Where is he now?”

“He was sent south to take charge of Argent Hall, and I was sent south with the army.”

“Then you both failed.”

“And I'm pleased to hear it!” His grin made her laugh. “I did my best to do as little as possible with my command. I marched as a mercenary with the Qin for a while, and I saw how disciplined their troops were, and how certain men could not bear the discipline. I was given the dregs, the criminals and the insane, I swear to you, and I let them give in to the worst that drove them. That's why they were so easy to defeat at Olossi.”

“Whose side are you really on? Had you ridden them harder, you'd have led them to victory.”

He bent to grab a stick, and poked into the fire until, with an oath, he flung the now-burning stick into the river. “Let's ride. No use lingering here.”

She raised her arms, stretching. He watched her in silence, but she did not need the sense granted by her Guardian's cloak to recognize a stirring of arousal in his body.

“Harishil, eh? Hari being your short name. You're not Water-born?”

“I don't know what that means. Although my brothers complained that I was always too full of hot air.”

She smiled, not wanting to think of Fire-born Joss. “Air, then. Which suits me. I can think of a reason to linger here, where it's quiet and isolated.”

He sucked in a breath, moving neither toward nor away.

“I don't like being alone, Hari. And whatever else you may be, you're an attractive man. Despite everything”—she leavened the phrase with a cocky grin—“I like you.”

Her dear friend Kedi had often said, “There's a reason it fits firmly in the hand, convenient for women to lead us around, for it's true that's what leads and we must follow.”

Hari spoke a phrase in a language she had never heard before. He ran a hand over his hair to his nape. She rose, because surely he was not budging, and tested him by
stroking up from his nape. He kept his coarse black hair clipped so short it was like bristles. A reeve's cut.

“That tickles!” she said, laughing.

His breath grew harsh, but not from fear.

The first time she'd bedded Joss, she'd played coy, to encourage his reckless streak, but Hari was a different man, so guarded it seemed likely he'd lost the habit of trust. Forget subtlety.

One kiss was all it took. And if he was a little desperate, in the manner of a drowning man, she didn't mind: She too was a little desperate, having swum in cold and lonely waters for far too long.

M
ARIT AND
H
ARI
rode at a leisurely pace south toward Toskala on the Istri Walk, in no hurry to reach the army although Marit knew they ought to move quickly.

“Eagles!” Hari squinted at specks in the sky.

“You seem pleased to see them.”

“I wonder if they see us.” He grinned. “And what they make of us if they do.”

Nothing like sex to cheer up a man, reflected Marit. The edge was still there, but he chattered a lot more about nothing of importance. Good thing she liked his voice.

A wagon with a broken axle had been dragged to one side, its bed stripped bare. Vultures flapped heavenward from a pair of decomposed corpses sprawled at the edge of woods an arrow's shot off the road. If Hari had seen the bodies, he made no comment, but for a while they rode in silence. The road was wide and smooth, the powerful River Istri a noisy neighbor to their right. Normally in the rich heartland of Haldia a traveler would expect to meet steady traffic, but they encountered no one except for soldiers wearing the eight-pointed star who manned the occasional barricade.

Yet the land was green, and the sky today as much blue as cloud. It was a fine morning for a ride through
handsome countryside. What
were
the eagles doing? What hall did they come from?

“I have to admit,” said Hari with a laugh, “I wasn't sure I could manage it. It's a relief to know I still can.”

“Manage—? Aui! Is that all men think of? I ask you.” But it was true that, being dead, one might start to wonder. “Surely you could have . . .”

He had a way of tightening one side of his face, pulled by shameful thoughts he wished to cut loose. “That would be more than I could endure. Either to know her thoughts, and surely to find in them some thing I wished never to have known. Or to know I was forcing her and share every moment of dread and pain. I am not that sort of man. If you'd seen what Lord Radas had it in him to do, you'd feel as I do.”

The day seemed darker. “You're right, of course. I'm sorry I made a jest of it, if it seemed I did.”

“It makes me wonder about these Guardians your tales sing of. What manner of folk were they?”

“They were the guardians of justice!” But she faltered. “Surely the gods cannot have meant otherwise.”

Yet Atiratu, the Lady of Beasts, had foreseen that one among the Guardians would betray the others. Marit had always thought it part of the tale only because any tale must include trouble and strife, setbacks and struggles, to make a good story. She had never really thought about it as if the goddess had actually seen as with the sight of eagles into what lay far ahead, and done her best to give warning.

Patrolling out of Copper Hall, she had learned the gullies and ridgetops of Haya and the Haya Gap, the skirts of the Wild, the bays and promontories of the North Shore and the deep reaches of Istria Bay as well as the warrens and canals of Nessumara and the broad delta region with its ancient ruins and fisherman's reed houses. She had flown patrols over Iliyat and into Herelia. But she did not know Haldia well.

“Look,” said Hari as they pulled up where the land dropped away. From this vista at least a dozen villages surrounded by fields and woodland could be seen, three on the western shore of the river in Farhal and the others in Haldia to the east. What transpired in those villages she could not tell; they were too far away. A dark stain oozed along the road.

“Eiya!” Her heart contracted and her will ebbed.

The army swarmed south, boiling along the road. So huge a force would surely prove impossible to defeat.

“There's an altar near here.” Rudely, he pointed with a finger across the river. “On a promontory that overlooks this view. Best we take a drink, for strength.”

Warning chafed at the bit, smelling the presence of an altar.

“All right, then. I'll follow you.”

They approached a rocky hill whose lower reaches were blanketed with flowering thorn and evergreen ghost pine. An abutment of boulders rimmed the crown, and as they dipped to the flat ground, Hari shouted a warning. The horses clattered down to greet another mare, who nipped, forcing them to back off.

“The hells!” Hari swung out of the saddle and ducked away as his horse nipped back.

Warning trotted away from the altercation, and Marit reined her up hard. She dismounted and ran to Hari.

A person was walking the labyrinth. A ghost flickered into view on the straight stretches, vanished where the path took its twists, and shimmered again into existence. A demon's body might seem substantial walking in the world, but within the labyrinth its true nature was revealed.

Hari grabbed her wrist to stop her. “I don't recognize her.”

Marit tugged away and stepped into the entrance. She strode, pushing as through water, each angle compressing as the landscapes flashed past: the quiet sea, the
ruined tower, the pillar, the dunes, the marsh, and more places she'd had no time to mark and learn. Winded, she staggered into the center.

As she'd thought, she did recognize her.

A girl drank from cupped hands at the spring. Rising, she turned with liquid dripping off her chin. A polished bronze mirror hung from her belt, and she first grasped the mirror but then released it and with practiced skill slid a strung bow from its quiver, nocked an arrow, and drew the string just as Hari bumped into Marit.

“You can't kill us,” said Hari, with a lopsided smile, “although I admit you can inflict a lot of pain. And I must say, I am cursed sick of the pain.”

She seemed comfortable looking down the arrow at Marit, gaze fixed on target. “He said you were a traitor. He was right about that, at least.”

“No,” said Marit. “You do not know what you are seeing. How can you? My heart is veiled to your sight, as yours is veiled to mine.”

“I want to meet others like me.” She dipped the point so it menaced the ground instead of Marit. “You two are like me. Did you lie to him, about what you mean to do?”

“I did not lie. He rejected my offer of alliance, so I am forced to work on my own. Did he reject you?”

Her body had a woman's shape, yet there remained something girlish in her speech and aspect, as if the body had grown apace while the mind was trapped and now hurried behind trying to catch up. “No. I left him. I seek to punish those who harm others, but he is afraid to pass judgment. How can he be? I encounter people so twisted in their hearts. They are locusts, eating everything in their path. And I saw a man cloaked as we are, only he was twisted, too, like Uncle Girish. There must be others, like me, who are not afraid to pass judgment on the ones whose hearts are diseased. We are the wolves. It is our obligation to cull the sick ones, so the tribe remains strong.”

Hari laughed bitterly. “The ones you seek are the ones who released the locusts.”

“Best you go home, lass,” said Marit, trying to sound kind, although the girl's words disturbed her. “Find your companion and return to him. He is wiser than you know.”

But after they watered their horses and drank their fill, the girl followed them.

To fly lifted Nallo's spirits. To skim through low-lying clouds and get soaked to the skin with unshed moisture made her laugh. To glide on the wind—currents and thermals, which Volias told her she would learn to identify and anticipate—while the earth rolled away on all sides gave her joy. No chanter or tale-spinner, she could think of no better way to describe the earth from her harness than that it was like a textured carpet of greens and browns and yellows, ribboned and splotched with the variegated blues of water. Glorious!

Volias took them in easy stages so she would not get too badly chafed by the harness. Even so, the mey fell away with breathtaking speed. They could cover a day's journey in half a morning, and Volias said that
they were going slow.

They flew upriver along the River Olo with the Lend rising to the south, its mysterious grasslands wavering like a dream in the distance. Then westward upriver along the River Hayi, with the Soha Hills rumpling the land to the north, air currents tangled. Surely they flew over the village where she had lived with her husband, but she could not pick out earth-bound landmarks from the air. Mount Aua reared his gleaming pate, and they were buffeted through the Aua Gap with the city of Horn seen below to resemble an onion chopped in half, its nested circles climbing the slope of a ridge that marked the terminus of a prominent range of hills whose name she did not know.

There was so much she did not know!

She'd never thought about it before.

Pil flew a ways off to her left and Volias to the right and out in front. Tumna kekked as they glided down the long descent to the Istrian Plain, known to Nallo only in the tales. She twisted in the harness, trying to see what Tumna had spotted. She kept her feet fixed on the training bar, while Volias hung with feet dangling, perfectly at his ease, and after a moment she realized something was moving where her feet blocked her view. Now it was behind them.

It was hard to know what Tumna might spy out: a deer, a bandit, an honest traveler. She tucked her knees up to her chest and scanned the earth. There sparkled a pond lined with mulberry trees, and a neighboring settlement, not more than six houses, storehouses and sheds flanked by an orchard and rice fields. This time of year the fields should have shone with green shoots working up through muddy water, but the fields lay brown and untended. No one had planted. From the air, the place looked abandoned.