Spirit Gate: Book One of Crossroads (64 page)

She giggled, and gave another of those killing twitches. “Is that what they say about us Devouring girls?”

“Not most people. Most people would give me a good scolding for you know how they will blab on about the duty we owe to the gods and how we each serve and how every service maintains the balance and the many streams that flow in the world. But I say, who would serve the Devourer and give for free what they could be getting coin for, if they didn’t want a lot of filling up of what’s otherwise empty? Eh?”

She laughed, genuinely amused, and for an instant he was furious, thinking she was laughing at him somehow, and then he realized that of course she was agreeing with him.

“A lot of filling up, you like that, don’t you?” He pumped against her buttocks, wishing they weren’t both clothed although in fact that kilt and vest she was wearing didn’t cover much.

“I do like a real man filling me up, that’s true. But I so rarely meet one. I guess Olossi’s council will be getting the same treatment, eh?”

“Not at all. Heh. They’re getting nothing. They just think they’re getting a good milk, but they’ll just get a stiff shaft and nothing to show for it, which is all they deserve. ‘Greed makes of men rank fools.’ ”

“So it does. Whoo-ah!” She actually gripped his hips, tensing with fear, as Tumna came down fast to land with a bump and a thump in the grass close beside the road. Then she laughed.

The soldiers kept marching. They had long since learned to ignore the reeves who came and went. Horas ran his hands up and down her lithe body while he still had her hitched against him, but here damn it anyway came a captain wearing the lord commander’s colors riding right toward them, on a mission, just as he was. He unhooked her, and she sidled fast out of reach of Tumna’s beak, not that the eagle would do anything to her if he didn’t command it done. Tumna was strong, and that mattered, but she was balky and slow to obey, and her balkiness had gotten worse over the years, worse luck for Horas, who never seemed to get much good fortune come his way although the Devouring girl stood there waiting to see what he wanted her to do, with a dumb, expectant look on her face that got him all hot and bothered again just as the captain rode up and halted at a prudent distance and looked them over.

“Reeve Horas?”

“Eh, yeh. Captain Mani. Who do I report to today?”

“Who’s that?” asked the captain with an ugly frown and a curt tone.

“No need to bark at me like that!”

The captain gave him a look that Horas wanted to scrape right off his face, but he held his temper in while the captain gave the girl a second look. “Who’s that? And why’s she here?”

She raised both hands palm-up in the manner of a pilgrim come to worship at the temple. “I’m the Devouring girl hired on by Marshal Yordenas at Argent Hall. Maybe you heard of me.”

“I didn’t,” said the captain.

“It’s a long story,” she said with a lazy smile, “but maybe we can talk about it at length, later.”

“Hey!” objected Horas. “You’re mine!”

She had a way of lifting her eyebrows that made him feel he was already in the saddle. He flushed.

“I belong to the Devourer,” she said.

“I’m not interested,” said Captain Mani. “Except in what you’re doing here.”

She shrugged. “Marshal Yordenas of Argent Hall set me to kill a reeve out of Clan Hall who came nosing around. But the reeve got away, so I was out on West Track looking for him when Reeve Horas here found me on the road and kindly let me know that the Olossi council had already caught the reeve and put him in their dungeon. So I asked for a lift back to Olossi.”

“To do him in?” asked the captain.

“If need be. I like it said that I finish what I start. Reeve Horas offered me a lift to Olossi, and I took it. Naturally, it meant I had to come on this part of the errand first.”

The captain turned his stare on Horas. “I suppose you hoped to peel and pound the nai root on the side, eh? On your way back to Argent Hall and Olossi?”

“None of your business what’s done in the hand of the Devourer!” How these tight-lipped bastards made him want to slug their sneering faces!

Captain Mani shook his head with a grimace of disgust. “Keep it in the temple, then. That’s where it belongs. Move sharp. The lord commander saw you come in and is wanting your report.”

That shrank him down to size. The lord commander was not a nice man, or a patient one. Not that Horas was afraid of anyone or anything, but still, the lord commander wasn’t to be kept waiting.

“All right, then. She can wait here under guard of Tumna.”

“I’d like a drink and a bite to eat if there’s anything to be had,” she said, with a sly smile, probably thinking to earn a little coin with a few quick milkings while he was off giving his report.

“She’ll come along where I can keep an eye on her,” said the captain. For once, Horas figured this was a man who would keep his hands dry.

“All right,” he said grudgingly. He commanded Tumna to stay. With a downcast gaze, the woman followed as he slogged over sun-bleached, heat-dried grass toward the road, keeping pace with Captain Mani. They didn’t speak. A drum rattled out a
rhythm, repeated twice, and the beat was echoed in both directions up and down the line. Soldiers faltered, and came to a halt, then set down their weapons and made themselves comfortable on the road. They drank, chewed, lay back to nap, and there a quartet formed a square and began rolling dice. Men did stare at the Devouring girl as they crossed the road and pushed into the forest on the other side. Some even licked their lips. It was good to know men envied you for what you had. He thought of slapping her on the butt where everyone could see, but then Captain Mani gave him such a look that next thing he knew his hand was in a fist and it took all his control not to punch the thin-lipped bastard.

The first rank of trees beyond the road were growth come back after an initial felling, not yet sturdy enough for heavy building. Past this strip of woodland lay open ground stretching all the way to the river’s edge, which was here steep because of the way the swift-running current cut under the land. Downstream, a herd of horses had been loosed to graze. Closer, cloth had been strung between trees as a roof, and gauzy curtains hung to make walls that undulated as the breeze groped them.

“Stay out here,” said Captain Mani to the Devouring girl. “Reeve, go in, as you’ve been commanded.”

He looked at the woman, but she was staring toward the horses with eyes narrowed and mouth pursed tight just like all those women when they told him to go milk himself. He hated that look. The captain coughed sharply, and he hurried over to the enclosure although it didn’t seem there was a door, only places where curtains overlapped, allowing entry if you fingered them aside and slipped between them. The grass here by the river was still moist and green, curling around his knees. The thin curtains curled around him as well, as he pushed the cloth away from his face and found himself in the shade facing the lord commander.

The lord commander was an attractive man with a northern look to him, a light-brown complexion, broad cheekbones, and dark-brown eyes with lashes as long and pretty as a girl’s. His beard and mustache had a trim look to them, not a touch of gray, and his black hair was braided in three loops. Mostly, Horas noticed the rich cut of his clothes, the kind of things a reeve could never afford. Best-quality wide trousers were tied over a colorless silk shirt so fine it seemed to shimmer. Over the shirt he wore a sleeveless, knee-length jacket the same dark blue as the trousers and embroidered in the same color thread down the front, the kind of decoration rich men wore to show they had the money to pay a craftsman to do painstaking work that most people would never come close enough to notice. Thrown over all this was a gold cloak so light and fine that he boiled with envy. When would he ever possess such fine things? It wasn’t fair.

The lord commander stood beside a table on which a long map had been unrolled, weighted at the edges with cunning ivory carvings the like of which only rich men could afford. He was speaking to four underlings, punctuating his comments by tapping on the map with an arrow.

“The march on Olossi is our first volley into the south. If you deliver the town to us, then we’ll see about your reward. But from today, you captains are on your own with this campaign. We have to return to the north by the end of the day. There’s too much going on there, more resistance than we expected at High Haldia—”

He broke off as Horas walked into his line of sight. With a sweeping, scornful gaze and a harsh frown, he took the reeve’s measure.

“You’re from Argent Hall. I expected you sooner. What’s your report?”

The lord commander had the kind of power that made you tuck your head even though to be spoken to in that way really made a man want to growl back. Horas hated the way he sounded when he replied, like a squeaking boy caught licking sugar cakes by the meanest of his aunties.

“Matters have not changed since two days ago. Heh. Eh.” He cleared his throat and found a better tone. It wasn’t easy to stand up for himself while keeping his gaze slanted off toward the map. “The most recent caravan up from the empire brought along a mercenary company, two hundred strong. They cleared the roads. Rumor has it that the malcontents on the council will choose this moment to strike. They’ll vote to allow this company to stay and continue safeguarding the southern roads. Meanwhile, Marshal Yordenas awaits word from you as to the disposition of his forces. As I understand it, that reeve who was nosing around lies in the dungeon of the Assizes Tower. I’ve heard it said he’s very ill.”

“Why have they not simply killed him and have done with the threat?”

“There were witnesses to his arrest. Questions will be asked.”

“Look at me!”

He met the lord commander’s gaze. A stone might have dropped into the pit of his stomach. He was stricken with an intense fear that the cloth walls and ceiling would fall inward, wrap him, choke him, all his breath sucked right out of him by that touch until he was only a dead husk, withering into bones.

He thought he heard a woman’s voice speak a single word. The lord commander’s gaze shifted away, and Horas dropped hard back into himself. He was sweating, and trembling. The other three men—three dressed in soldier’s jackets and short cloaks and one dressed in humbler garb—were staring at their feet. They were afraid, too. Everyone was afraid. Even, strangely, the lord commander, who brushed his chin with the back of a hand and came a step closer, with a gesture as if he meant to thrust the point of the arrow into Horas’s eye.

“That’s not good enough. Why haven’t they killed him?”

“They mean to bring him up on trial at the assizes, that’s all,” Horas said in a rush, tripping over the words because if he directed the lord commander’s anger elsewhere then the man would not be mad at him. “They were waiting for that border captain to be dead, so they’d have a charge to lay on the reeve and evidence to go with it. Now that they have the body, the hearing and trial can go through the proper assizes ritual. That’s how they plan to discredit the council faction that is trying to take over.”

“It’s taking too long.”

“Oh, eh, yeh, of course! Clumsy oafs! No wonder they need a new governor. They’re not fit to govern themselves. But I’ve got the Devouring girl with me, the one that killed the border captain, so she claims. She tried to kill the reeve, but failed. She’s saying she’ll go back and finish him off. Not much he can do when he’s stuck in the pit, eh?”

The lord commander’s gaze sharpened. He sniffed, as if taking in a scent. His
teeth showed as lips parted, and his tongue flicked out. “A Devouring girl? Where is she?”

Horas shuddered. Spiders might crawl on his skin so, to make him shrink away in fear. The man had a cruel voice.

“Lord Radas. Enough.”

The words came from beyond an inner wall of gauze. As if in response to that quiet voice, a wind caught the filmy hem of that inner wall and lifted it enough to give him a glimpse into a second chamber hidden away within this temporary shelter. A woman was seated at a low writing table, with her back to him. Just before the curtain fell back into place she raised her left hand and curled her fingers in toward her palm. Then the gauze slid back, and he could not see her.

He hesitated.

“Go on,” said the lord commander, voice tight with suppressed fury.

Horas figured it best to move fast. He had trouble finding the opening. The cloth seemed heavier than it should have, the air so thick it was almost liquid, but he squeezed through and came into a cooler zone. The awning overhead rolled in waves as the wind stroked it. All trace of the outer chamber and the outside world was erased. The isolation made him twitchy.

She sat cross-legged on a pillow, back board-straight, her hair bound in a single thick braid running true down her spine. The blackness of her hair blended with the night-black cloak hanging from her shoulders, its lower portion draped in graceful folds around her hips and legs. She seemed to be sitting on a spear whose haft and point stuck out on either side. A table rested in front of her. Her body blocked his view of the table except for a few items lined up straight, and parallel to the table’s edge, to her right side. There lay a common dagger, nothing ornamented or fancy, but it looked serviceable; you could stab a man in the guts with such a dagger if he pushed you too far and it would kill him if you got it in deep enough and in the sweet spot. There was also a sharpened, hollow green stick, recently cut from a stalk of pipe-brush, the kind of thing you could use as a stake or to stab through the flesh of a moonfruit and suck out the juices inside. Closest to her elbow lay a narrow wooden box that contained four writing brushes resting on a silk bed with an empty space where a fifth brush must normally reside. That fifth brush was in her hand. The paper on which she was writing was hidden by her body. There was no one else. Perhaps she was the lord commander’s private clerk, his secretary, who took down his decrees and pronouncements and orders.

Without looking at him, she spoke in a pleasant, friendly, warm voice.