Spirit Gate: Book One of Crossroads (69 page)

He spoke with a slight drawling accent that Kesh could not place. “You were picked up by this troop yesterday afternoon, so I hear.”

“Yes.” Kesh kept it short. He didn’t know how to address him, or how to stop from breaking down into tears out of fear.

“Before they found you, the troop was met by a reeve who was carrying a hierodule who said you are her slave.”

“So I hear. I didn’t witness that meeting myself.”

“Naturally.” Almost, he might be about to smile, but instead the expression made Kesh shiver as if a ghost were breathing on his neck.

The candle burned straight up. There was no wind, nothing to sway that flame. The horse bumped and snuffled within the shed.

“You are not what you claim,” said the man.

Kesh could say nothing, because he was pinned by that stare. The air had grown as hot as the hell where dance those lilu who have not yet found a crack through which to wiggle out onto the mortal world. He was hot and cold together, so frightened he thought he might faint.

“It would matter to the others, although not to me,” said the man cryptically. “I ask, and you must answer. Do you mean to harm me or mine?”

“No.” The word was forced out of him by a vise gripping and squeezing until only the truth was left. “I care nothing for you or yours.”

“How can you know, since you have not asked who me or mine are? Yet strange as it seems, you are telling the truth. Very well.” He raised a hand as though the effort taxed him. “Go. Best if you not come to my attention again.”

Kesh backed out so fast through the curtained entrance that he stumbled as soon as he was outside and fell on his backside hard enough to jostle the ginnies. They hissed at him, and Magic nipped at his wrist as if to warn him to be more careful next time, an “I told you so.”

He had forgotten about the ginnies! They had lain so still in the sling that the lord had not noticed them at all. Usually they made their feelings known. Not this time. They had chosen to avoid the man’s notice.

The sergeant glanced at him, unamused by his pratfall. “Go back to your post.”

He scrambled up, soothed the ginnies, and hobbled back to the sentry post. Best stick to the routine and do nothing, absolutely nothing, that would bring him to the attention of that man and his horrible stare.

He knows all and everything, all my secrets, all my crimes, all my hopes and all my fears. But he let me go anyway.

“Heh,” said Rabbit, seeing him return.

“Passed muster,” said Twist with a sly, cruel grin.

Kesh grunted a noncommittal reply. Above, the stars shone bright and cold, while the night was warm and the tender breeze a balmy presence. The trees whispered in a mild conversation. A nighthawk kurred. All was quiet.

No, it was only an illusion brought on by the tension of his situation, caught in the midst of an invading force whose soldiers would as easily kill him as spare him. There had been nothing strange about that man, nothing at all. Any clever man might spout truisms like “you are not what you claim to be” and “you’re not telling the truth” to the kind of twisted, rabbity men willing to join this manner of army, and know he was hitting the mark.

He had certainly imagined the wings on that horse. It was only the play of shadow in the night.

There, now. That was better. The sergeant was a bigger threat. Did he suspect, or had Kesh truly passed muster? He had to glean any useful information before he made his eventual escape. He couldn’t think any other way. Never give in to fear.

“What is the lord’s name?” he asked, treading softly on this new ground. Each word was like the snap of a finger being pinned back and broken. “Where does he come from?”

Rabbit shuddered and turned away as the smell of urine spread sharply off him. He had wet himself. He began to weep with small, animal noises. “They scare me,” he whimpered. “They scare me. Stop it. Stop asking.”

Twist snarled, and the ginnies hissed in answer, crests rising as they stirred along Kesh’s arm.

“Best keep your mouth shut.” Twist’s voice rose in pitch until he fought himself and controlled it with a grimace of dismay. “Best keep it shut and ask no more questions. If you want to stay alive. The lords don’t like those who question. That one—he’s the kindliest. He only burns you.”

“What do you mean? Like he, uh—” Now that he had set out to say it, he realized
the words might make them suspicious again, but it would be worse to break off as though he had something to hide. “—uh, sets people on fire, bound in a cage, like they do in the empire to execute criminals?”

Twist shrugged. “Eh, I don’t know anything about the empire, but that seems a nasty way to go for a poor criminal, nothing quick about it. No. You faced him. You know what I mean.”

So he did. All his doubts roared up as he recalled that deadly gaze. He had been cleaned out, every crevice of him burned down to bedrock.
Rid us of demons.
He needed a plan, any plan, to escape.

“What comes next?” he asked. He could never escape if that “lord” was always watching over them.

“What comes next?” mused Twist philosophically.

“Heh.” Rabbit looked back toward the village. When Kesh and Bai had walked through that village, it had lived and breathed; now it was dead. “Heh. Maybe we get a chance ourselves, at some loot. Doesn’t seem fair the strike force cleaned this out and left us nothing but their leavings. I’d like to try—heh. Heh.”

“Olossi’s pretty big,” continued Twist, who like the rest of them mostly ignored Rabbit. “Plenty of loot for everyone.”

“Oh, yeh, sure,” stammered Kesh. “And after that? Then what?”

“How should I know? One campaign at a time, until we’re done.”

“Of course. Until we’re done.”

“Yeh. Yeh.” Twist scratched the stubble at his chin. “The armies are on the move. High Haldia first. Olossi set to fall in the next few days. Toskala will go down soon after. Or maybe it’s Nessumara next, all the cities and big towns, yeh. It won’t be long until all the Hundred is ours, just as the lord commander promised us.”

After Anji and his party returned from town with the bad news, the soldiers accepted it with their usual stoic pragmatism. As twilight turned to evening, they settled down to sleep. Why not? No matter what came, it was best to be well rested.

Anji did not sleep, so Mai sat up by the fire watching him as evening turned into night. He did not pace or curse or appear in any way restless, but for the longest time he did sit on a mat with a fist pressed against his mouth, staring at the flames.

After a while, he gathered his advisors: Chief Tuvi; Scout Tohon for his experience; Mai because it was the custom of Qin commanders to consult their wives; Shai because he could hear the words of ghosts; and—curiously—Priya, whom Anji respected because she could read and write the script used in the holy books sacred to the Merciful One. Sengel and Toughid stood a few paces away, at guard as always, but they were never consulted.

“I am not sure we have been betrayed, because I doubt these Great Houses have much interest in us except that we might bite them at an inconvenient time. We are
too few in number to truly frighten them. But I am sure that Reeve Joss has been betrayed in some manner. The question is: What are we to do about it?”

At night it was almost cool, with a lazy breeze teasing the dregs of heat. Mai slapped at the midges swarming her face and shifted to get into the draft of smoke off the fire they sat around. She would stink of smoke, but it was better than being bitten raw. That sweet bath seemed ages in the past. It was hard to believe she had luxuriated in those waters only this past morning.

“If we go back to the empire, we will be killed,” said Chief Tuvi.

“If we go back to the Qin, we will be killed,” said Tohon. “It would be death without honor, like a starving cur who slinks back to the fire though it knows it will be cut down.”

By the light of the fire, Shai was whittling at a scrap of driftwood, shaping it into a spoon whose handle was fashioned as the forelegs and head of a springing antelope. She could see the form come into being under his hands in the same manner she could see thoughts and solutions coming into being and being dismissed as unworkable by the way Anji’s expression shifted. But she didn’t know what her husband was thinking.

“I have considered every piece of information we know.” Anji sat cross-legged on a square mat woven of reeds, just like the one on which she sat. His hands were now folded in his lap. “I have turned it, and turned it, but I have no answers. Some manner of conflict boils among the reeves. Guardsmen resort to banditry to prey on the caravans they are meant to safeguard. Discontent simmers within the Lesser Houses of the council in Olossi because their voices go unheard. Rumors of trouble in the north frighten the merchants, who wonder if outright war or some demon’s spawn has poisoned the trade routes between these parts and those farther north. The reeve’s bone whistle is worn around the neck of a city guardsman. Where is the reeve, then? Living, or dead? If dead, who killed him? If living, why did he lose his eagle’s whistle, and why did the council master claim he knew nothing of the reeve?”

“He didn’t say he knew nothing of Reeve Joss,” said Mai. “He said there was no reeve here for us to see, which could mean anything, quite the opposite. That woman suggested the reeve was some manner of villain falsely claiming to be a reeve. They know what’s happened to him. There was a man dressed in similar fashion, another reeve, surely, who left before the meeting was over.”

Anji nodded. “They are not dealing honestly with us.”

“No surprise there,” said Shai morosely.

Mai nudged him with her foot, bent close, and whispered in his ear. “Say something useful, or keep quiet!”

“Well, then,” said Shai defiantly, “what of my brother’s ring? I’ve heard talk of this town called Horn. That’s where the story said the ring was found.” He held up his own hand to display the family ring: the running wolf biting its own tail, with a black pearl inlaid into silver as its eye.

Her identical ring was hidden by her sleeve, although the quality of her pearl was finer than the one on Shai’s ring, because she was Father Mei’s eldest daughter rather than only a seventh, and excess, son. Everyone knew that six sons were plenty:
two to marry, two to die, one for the priests, and one for spare. That’s how it had been in their house: Father Mei and the second son, Terti, had married young and given birth so far to many healthy children. Third son Sendi had gone to the priests, while fourth son Hari, for spare, had been exiled and marched away by the Qin army, leaving fifth son Neni to marry unexpectedly in the wake of Grandmother’s grief over Hari. Of course sixth son Girish had died a spectacular and well-deserved death, shame on her even to think so, except it was true because he was a nasty man. Shai, poor Shai, was left over, the unlucky seventh son with the curse of seeing ghosts that he must hide from his own family as well as every living soul in Kartu Town lest he be burned and hanged in the town square, like Widow Lae, although the widow hadn’t actually seen ghosts but had done something just as bad when she had betrayed her Qin overlords.

“What was in Widow Lae’s letter?” she asked. The men looked at her, Shai with his mouth popping open in a most ridiculous way, Tohon and Tuvi with puzzlement, but Anji with a faint smile.

“Widow Lae?” Chief Tuvi asked. “Who is that?”

“She was burned and hanged in Kartu Town square,” said Mai, looking at Anji. “I know
you
remember that day.”

“I saw her ghost,” Shai muttered. “She said she was waiting for her reward.”

Mai nodded. “What did she do? The order we heard read in the citadel square said she had insulted a Qin officer. But the whisper told us she’d asked a passing merchant to carry a letter to Tars Fort, in the east. When he wouldn’t do it she sent a grandson instead. That merchant received a share of the proceeds of the sale of her estate and her kinsfolk, and then he left town by the Golden Road. What was she really executed for? I always wondered.”

The fire snapped, its bridge of brittle driftwood collapsing into sparks. Tuvi gestured, and Pil came in from the gloom with an armful of new branches. The soldier arranged them on the coals and blew on the lattice until fire caught and flared high, burning strongly on the dry wood but without enough smoke to smother the horrid midges.

Anji batted a swarm away from his face, scratched his neck, and nodded. “Widow Lae,” he said, musing over the name. “I think, Mai, that you have spotted the only blossom on the otherwise barren tree. I had forgotten about Widow Lae.”

A bird’s whistle startled out of the brush at the shoreline. The men leaped to their feet. Mai rose and clutched Priya’s hand. Sengel strode away toward the sound. But Anji kept talking, as if nothing strange had happened.

“You’re right that Widow Lae was not executed for insulting a Qin officer, except in the most general way.”

She waited as he rubbed his chin. He lifted an arm to point. Every head turned to look toward the shore. Inland a tiny light—torchlight—advanced along what must be the main road, heading for Olossi. They watched in silence, because it was such a strange sight to see that pinprick of brightness aflame against the dark.

At length, Tohon muttered, “A runner, or a rider. Too fast to be walking.”

Anji grunted. “It’s an urgent message,” he said evenly, “that travels into the night.”

“The Sirniakans have night runners,” said Priya, and she shuddered, releasing Mai’s hand. “Agents of the red hounds.”

“Do you think it could be the red hounds?” whispered Mai.

Anji caught her wrist. “Enough. We may never know, and it does no good to spin these thoughts when they have nowhere to go.”

“The agents of the red hounds never travel alone,” said Tohon.

Anji turned his head to look, in the most general way, toward the southwest, whence they had come. Out there lay the wide, flat delta, dark under the night sky. The river had a slow, deep voice here as it spilled away into a hundred channels and backwaters. Wind found a voice in the rushes and reeds and bushes growing everywhere. A nightjar clicked.