Shadow Gate (99 page)

He went to the door, and found Eliar panting beside him. “I'm ready,” said the Ri Amarah.

Bulging packs brushed Kesh's arm. “How much are you carrying?”

“All the oil of naya,” muttered Eliar.

“Aui! On your head, then.” He shouldered past and opened the door a hand's width, peeking out.

A struggle raged within the gatehouse, and outside the gates a crowd had grown, shouting words that Kesh was pretty sure meant something like, “Kill the foreigners! Kill the traitors!”

“They haven't given us up,” said Kesh suddenly.

“What do you mean?”

“The sergeant and his guards. They could just let that mob in, open the gates, and be done with it. But they're not. They're defending us. Eiya! Give me three of those vessels of oil of naya.”

He expected Eliar to protest, but instead the other man swung down his bulky packs and began fumbling into them. Keshad ran out into the middle of the courtyard.

“Heya! Heya! Get your weapons! Get out here! Move! Our guards are defending us against a mob that wants to kill us. If we don't help them, we're all dead. And I need rags. The rags you use to clean your harness, or some such. Anything that will burn easily. And baskets to haul. Hurry, you cursed fools!”

He ran to the forecourt. The guards had abandoned the two small watch platforms that flanked the gates. The wall walk Eliar had spoken of must run off in either direction, and obviously access to the platforms and the walk came from inside the guardhouse. Which was now being fought over.

About ten merchants came running, all with weapons, some bearing rags or cloth, one dragging a thin pallet. Two carried lamps. Eliar ran up in their wake with three leather bottles.

“Anyone else understand them?” Kesh shouted to be heard above the screaming pack of men beyond the gate.

“They want our blood, like it's our fault their cursed emperor got himself killt in battle. Gods-rotted out-landers!”

Other men, experienced traders, nodded. Muffled crashes and shouts came from the guardhouse. Someone was taking a beating.

“We're getting me and one other volunteer up there.” Keshad indicated the platforms. “We'll splash oil of naya over the crowd, and then light rags and such and throw them down on top. That should drive them away.”

“Heh. Just like the battle over Olossi,” said one older man.

“I'll go up,” said Eliar immediately.

“All right then.” Kesh took the vessels from him and as he fastened them on his back, he called the other merchants closer. “Those who can truly fight, brace yourself. Form up around the door. That's a bottleneck. Cut down the attackers as they come out of the door. One of you go back and roust out the cowards. We need everyone. The rest of you, Eliar will need flint or some such, anything that will give him flame immediately. I need a lift up.”

A man laced his fingers together and, when Kesh set a foot into the makeshift stirrup, raised him up so he could throw rope around one of the poles making the scaffolding of the platform; he clambered up and crouched on the platform as Eliar was helped up on the other side. The mob below hadn't yet spotted them. Men surged and pushed by the guardhouse door. It seemed men were pushing inside only to be cut down by the armed guardsmen. But the mob was growing, howling and barking like animals, or so it seemed to his ears because he could understand so little of what came out of their mouths. Working men who had, Kesh supposed, filled up with fear and now had to take it out on someone else, they were variously armed with torches, sticks, tools, and other such humble implements. None seemed to have bows. He licked his lips, tasted smoke. Elsewhere in the market district, several compounds were burning. The inner city remained dark. Only out here had the city's governor withdrawn his protection.

“I'm up,” said Eliar in a low voice from across the
gate. The top of the twinned gates were broad enough to walk across if you didn't mind the height. Eliar hauled a basket up behind him and knelt beside it. He snapped flint to steel. Sparks flew. Below, with the mob, a face looked up. Down along the street about ten men came running carrying ladders. Eiya! They were ready to storm the compound and kill them all!

Keshad unsealed the first vessel as he rose. This was the dangerous part! He shook the vessel, oil spraying on the men crowded up below. Flame caught in a rag. Eliar flung it outward, but it fell to the ground and was stamped out at once by the mob. Men began to fling sticks and debris up at them. The first ladder was pushed up against the gate. Keshad emptied the first vessel on top of the men at the base of the ladder and tossed the vessel down; it shattered on the ground. He unsealed the second and ran out along the top of the gate, flinging oil out as far away as he could. Men cursed at him, wiping away the oil that splashed on their faces. Spreading it. A second flaming rag fluttered down, and a third—

And this time, fire touched oil on skin.

Screaming, the man spun and staggered, slamming into six or ten of the men around him, half of whom had also been splashed by the oil of naya. The conflagration spread. The mob disintegrated as most fled in terror. The stench was horrible, and the screams were worse. But the street was clearing fast.

Keshad tossed the second vessel away and ran back to the platform, swung his legs over, and paid out the rope to let himself down. As he touched earth, his legs gave out. He pitched forward, caught himself on the wall, and leaned there as the merchants babbled and cried.

Eliar bent over him. “Keshad? Are you hurt?”

He could only grunt, “Neh. Neh.” His speech was gone. His limbs were weak. He shut his eyes, but the fire still burned and he still heard screams.

“That saved us,” added Eliar.

“For now.”

“Clever of you to think of it. Just like at Olossi.”

The door to the guardhouse scraped open. Kesh opened his eyes and looked up. The sergeant stumbled out, blood splashed all over him. Eliar stepped back. Past the sergeant, a whitewashed room looked like a slaughterhouse, with tumbled corpses, the hazy smoke of torches, and a guardsman kneeling beside a fallen comrade.

“What do you? What do you?” demanded the sergeant, his facility with the trade language vanishing under the stress. He gestured to the merchants now backing away from him.

On the other side of the gate, several men were still wailing; then came shouts of anger, and silence in the street. A distant clamor told them of riots spreading elsewhere. What of the humble barracks where he had stabled the guards and drovers and beasts?

He raised his head just as the sergeant loomed over him, swiping smears of blood from his beard.

“Good, good,” the sergeant said. He offered a hand. Hesitantly, Keshad extended his own, and the man clasped elbows in the grasp of kinship, seen in the market among believers but never extended to foreigners.

S
OON AFTER DAWN
, a squad of mounted soldiers resplendent in green sashes and helmets trimmed with gold ribbons clattered up to the closed gates. Smoke drifted over the rooftops. The guardsmen and merchants who had sat the rest of the night on watch on the roofs hastily clambered down the interior ladder and stood with the others as the gates were opened.

The sergeant knelt and genuflected before the squad's captain. They exchanged a running jabber in their own language as the sergeant kept his head bowed. An older merchant murmured a translation in a low voice for those around him to hear.

“The officer says there was trouble in the market district
last night. Many compounds attacked. Only compounds sheltering foreigners. Report came at night that this compound and several others had driven away the attackers. Some local men were killed. There is to be an inquiry.”

“Against the mob, or against us?” Kesh muttered.

The older man shrugged, worry creasing his face as the sergeant turned around to survey the merchants. The cursed soldier lifted an arm and pointed—quite rudely, as outlanders always did, using the fingers—at Keshad.

“Bring him.” The captain frowned as his gaze paused on Eliar with his butter-yellow turban wrapped tightly around his head. “That one, also.”

Every man there retreated, leaving Kesh and Eliar exposed.

“You come,” said the captain.

Eliar took an obedient step toward the squad, but Keshad held his ground.

“What about our trade goods? What surety do we have they'll not be stolen while we're not here to guard them ourselves?”

The captain raised a hand, and two soldiers dismounted and, after a word with the sergeant, posted themselves by the door into the cell alloted to Kesh and Eliar.

“Now. You come.”

What else could they do?

T
HEY WALKED UNDER
the market district gate and into the main city, a place no foreign merchant was ever allowed to enter. The streets were broad and clean-swept, walled on both sides with gates opening at intervals into compounds. No one roamed the streets today. The hooves of the horses echoed in an eerie silence. Once Kesh saw a face peeping over a wall, dropping out of sight when their gazes met. Their small procession wound inward and upward as the sun rose, and just when it was beginning to get really hot they arrived at a
vast gate that opened into a vaster courtyard lined with pillared colonnades carved of finest white marble.

The captain indicated a bench in the shade. “Sit there.”

They sat. The captain assigned four soldiers to dismount; these four settled into guard positions as their comrades led away their horses through a wide pair of open gates to the left. The captain rode forward alone into a farther courtyard, glimpsed through a magnificently carved archway.

“Look at the figures carved on the arch,” whispered Eliar. “There is the sun in splendor, the moon veiled, and the stars assembled in ranks to acknowledge the suzerainty of the god they worship here.”

“ ‘The god they worship here'? That kind of talk will get you burned.”

Eliar shrugged. “I'm saying it to you. Not to them. What would they do? Force me to worship at their god's temple?”

“How naive are you? Don't you know anything about the empire? They could, if they wanted. Tell you to say the prayers to Beltak, or suffer the punishment meted out to those who don't believe. Who would stop them? Who in the Hundred could do a cursed thing to them in return if they killed you, eh? Did you ever think of that?”

Eliar's smug smile infuriated Kesh. The gods-rotted Silver was still admiring the carving on the archway. Threats flowed right off him. “It doesn't matter what they do or do not do. I am a faithful son of the Hidden One. That is all that matters. Look there!”

Kesh looked up, half standing, and their guards came alert at once, then relaxed, tossing remarks to each other as he sank back down on the bench. Eliar had just been pointing to a different section of the arch.

“There, the different officers of the court come to pay homage and kneel before the emperor's throne.”

“There's no one sitting in it.”

“He is holy, like the god, not to be pictured.”

“How do you know?”

“I read it! I know most of you in the Hundred don't read—”

“ ‘You in the Hundred'! I thought you Silvers keep claiming you are simply humble Hundred folk just like the rest of us.”

“That's not what I meant—”

The edge in his tone reminded Kesh that he had to be nice to Eliar. “Neh, never mind it. Why do you think your books tell the true story, anyway? Isn't there a statue of the emperor in the marketplace?”

“That's not the emperor. It's a statue of a male figure representing Commerce, richly clad and adorned with gilt paint to remind all those in the marketplace that through trade the empire becomes wealthy.”

There was silence for a moment as Kesh stared at the archway, puzzling over that vacant throne. Sure enough, there were the officers of the court, each carefully depicted and each attended by an array of half-sized men, meant perhaps to represent their underlings, and certain animals that evidently had some significance to each officer's mandate. At the height of the arch, above sun and moon and stars, was carved an elaborate crown ornamented by wavy lines most likely representing fire.

One of the guards coughed. A group of mounted soldiers clattered in and passed directly through the open gates. Their garments were splashed with blood, and they looked grim.

The enthralling first book in an epic fantasy by the bestselling author of the Crown of Stars series

Spirit
GATE

BOOK ONE of CROSSROADS

KATE
ELLIOTT

T
here is a dark shadow across the land that not even the reeves can stop. No one knows who leads the fanatics intent on destroying the Hundred; all that is certain is that they seem inhumanly cruel and powerful. And they must be stopped. Mai and Anji, riding with a company of dedicated warriors, must try or the world will he lost to carnage.

“This promises to he a truly epic fantasy,”

—Publishers
Weekly

“Elliott's skill at building worlds and peopling them with colorful characters and vibrant societies makes this novel an excellent choice for most fantasy collections,”

—library
journal

“Elliott enjoys telling big stories. She likes lingering over scenes and milking them for all the emotional resonance”This promises to he they're worth. . . . In short, S
PRIRT
G
ATE
is vintage Elliott.”

—Starlop