Spirit Gate: Book One of Crossroads (77 page)

No, definitely, he was well rid of them all. It was only that he missed the wide vistas and the soft colors, the stormy height of Dezara Mountain and its spacious grazing grounds, and his solitary shelter.

“Look, there!” said Tohon, startling Shai when he appeared suddenly out of the night.

Shai went over to the scout. From this angle, he could see the city walls. A single torch—the second one they had seen that night—reached the city walls and vanished inside. Closer at hand came another splash. Anji came into the light and bent down to gently wake Mai. She woke quickly and without fuss, and was on her feet in a moments, alert and ready.

“Here he comes,” said Anji.

Escorted by Seren and Umar, lad the caravan master skulked into view. The stocky man looked around nervously as if he hadn’t expected to see people’s faces, and he retreated to stand in the gloom with his face in shadow.

“I am surprised to see you here,” said Anji, not with anger, simply speaking the truth.

“I’m surprised to be here,” said the man. “I’ve been sent as an emissary by the council of Olossi to make a proposal.”

“The council of Olossi?” Not by a hair or a shading of tone or a flickering of the eyes did Anji betray emotion or thought or any reaction at all. “The Greater Houses?”

“Yes. I’m here at the behest of the Greater Houses.” lad hesitated, swallowed a gulp of air for courage, and spoke. “They sent me because you and I have dealt honestly in our crossing out of the empire.”

Anji looked at Mai. As if bothered by a bug, she scratched at her right ear with her left hand. “Go on,” said Anji, looking back to lad.

Well, now things were getting interesting. Shai moved closer, to hear better.

“They thought you would trust me where you might not trust another. They said to tell you first of all that a certain reeve, called Joss, has been discovered in the assizes prison where he was accidentally placed after a case of mistaken identity. He’s now been released, and taken no harm from his sojourn in the prison.”

“Released? Unharmed?”

In an undertone, Mai murmured a prayer of thanks to the Merciful One.

“Yes,” said lad.

“A bold if convenient move.”

“They hope this will show you they are ready to deal—” Breaking off, he wiped his brow nervously. “The hells! You must know they did no such thing. I mean, the reeve is free, and has taken no lasting harm, but it wasn’t the council who released him. Someone else rescued him—a hierodule, of all people—and brought him in to confront Master Feden about this news she had of an army approaching—”

“Hold. Hold.” Anji raised a hand, looked at Mai, then back to the caravan master. “An
army?”

Mai’s eyes had gone very wide. An army? Had the empire sent soldiers after Anji? Shai saw movement in the shadows: the Qin soldiers, those not on watch, were stirring, coming in close to listen. Everyone was on edge.

Master lad swallowed like a man wishing he could eat his words rather than speak them. “It’s like this. This is the question the council sent me to ask. Can a company of two hundred defeat an army of three thousand?” Having gotten the words out, he wiped his mouth as against a foul taste.

“An army of three thousand?” said Chief Tuvi. “Are you sure of that number?”

“The hierodule saw the army earlier today, and got a decent count: about five companies, which would be three thousand men more or less. Several days’ march east of here, Hornward, that is, on the West Track.”

“How could she have seen that today, and then have rescued the reeve from Olossi’s prison this night?” asked Anji. “If they’re several days’ march east of here?”

Iad clapped a hand to his forehead. “She got a ride to Olossi from one of Argent Hall’s reeves, but she says the entire hall is corrupt . . . Aui! It’s a complicated tale. Then a lad rode in after nightfall, saying his village had been attacked by a strike force and everyone laid to the sword, killing and burning.”

“The torch we saw,” said Anji to Chief Tuvi.

“That would explain it,” agreed the chief.

“The reeve, Joss, confirmed that Argent Hall had been corrupted. And Master Feden confessed that he had made a deal with some villains out of the north who it seems meant to betray him all along, for they said nothing to him of sending an army!”

“So what, precisely, is it that you want?”

“An answer to the question! That’s all I agreed to. Can a troop of two hundred defeat an army of three thousand?”

Anji laughed. “Not in a pitched battle, with mounted forces, such as I command. A company of two hundred would be foolish to attempt it.”

Master lad relaxed, shoulders sinking and lips going slack. “Eh. Ah. Exactly. I told them so, but they are so desperate, they insisted I come.”

Mai raised a hand. “Master lad. Before you step away from a sale you believe you cannot make, let us hear your entire proposition. You can’t simply have been sent to ask a question.”

“I told them it would be impossible,” said Master lad, “but they insisted.”

“You treated us fairly, so it is only fair that, in return, we hear you out,” said Anji, and the poor man started, so surprised was he. “Did you say the Lesser Houses are involved in this transaction? That they knew of it?”

“The Lesser Houses? No, not at all. They knew nothing of it. Even now, only a few know the truth, for it was just laid before Master Feden a short while ago. The Lesser Houses and the guilds may seem numerous to you, but they have no power in the council. I come at the behest of the Greater Houses. Aui! Now that I know what is upon us—an army of three thousand!—I’m cleaning out my warehouse and dependents and leaving at first light, as soon as I get back to the city, unless they’ve locked me out, which I wouldn’t put past them. The Greater Houses have destroyed themselves with their own greed! They brought this calamity down on Olossi, and the rest of us will be ruined with them!”

“Well, Mai,” said Anji, looking at her with an expression Shai could not begin to interpret. The captain raised a hand to his lips. When had he gotten Mai’s wolf-sigil ring? He touched it to his lips, then nodded at her, waiting.

“Can you do it?” she asked.

Anji smiled, as Shai imagined a wolf might grin—in a manner of speaking—when it spots a helpless fawn caught in a mire. “Go on, Master lad. Now I am interested.”

As dawn rose, the caravan master began to talk.

A quartet of guardsmen accompanied Joss to Crow’s Gate. Although he had bathed again in the court of Master Feden’s compound, and had been given clean clothes in the style of those worn by Olossi’s militiamen, he insisted on wearing his leather trousers instead of a clean linen pair. For the moment he regretted it, as they were damp from being rinsed and wiped down, so his legs chafed where they rubbed the saddle. The lingering stench of his captivity caught in his throat.

Crow’s Gate was still barred for the night. In the half-light that presages dawn, he watched as another rider approached them. She was riding one horse and leading a packhorse and a spare on a lead.

“You can’t have been to the temple and back by now,” he said.

“No. As it happens, I ran into another hierodule in town, a kalos, in fact, a fellow I know and trust. He’ll take the message to the temple in my place. That gives me more time to make some distance west. What did you decide?” She indicated the four guardsmen, who had looked her over and then away. She was subdued, and with her hair pulled tightly back and wrapped into a knot at the back of her head and her body concealed in a loose knee-length jacket, she was a woman you wouldn’t give a second glance. Not unless you knew what she was.

She smiled, teasing him for staring at her so.

He wasn’t usually taken so off guard. “Oh, eh, yes. These good men here will escort me south to the intersection with the Old Stone Road. I believe it will be safe to call Scar from there.”

“Yes. You’re less likely to be seen. I expect a certain reeve from Argent Hall to fly in soon after dawn. It’s best he be given no chance to see your eagle.”

“Why?”

“Why shouldn’t he see your eagle?” There was something more than teasing in that pull of her lips. She had a way of raising her eyebrows and tilting her chin that was deeply sensual, even triumphant. She was a woman confident of her power and, in that, desperately attractive.

“Why do you think the same reeve will come back?”

“Marshal Yordenas will send someone back to make sure those mercenaries leave. I am pretty sure Horas will volunteer, say he knows the situation best, so best he be the one to supervise. I admit, a lot of the plan depends on it being him who returns. It’s a gamble. But we’ve only got one throw before we’re ruined, so we may as well be reckless.”

“I still expect this is all a ploy to catch me off my guard, or capture my eagle.”

“If you say so. Had I known you were so full of yourself, I’d have known I need only wait until you fill up with the poison of self-love and strangle on it.”

Seeing that he had begun to lose her interest made him try harder by shifting ground. “What do you gain from this gamble?”

Her expression was closed to him. She drew her horses aside as Crow’s Gate was opened and the first folk were allowed to pass. Riding away, she spoke a last comment over her shoulder. “Nothing so different from what’s in it for you.”

He was flushed, and bothered. He let all the other traffic go ahead until the early tide of traffic had flowed out. Their party was released to pass Crow’s Gate, and they headed out on West Track, riding due south toward the escarpment while the sun rose east over the Olo Plain and the river’s meander. For a while they rode in silence. Farmers had set out into their fields. Early-morning peddlers trundled their goods out toward distant villages. Joss wanted to tell them all to turn back, to hide within the safety of the walls, but he could not. The reeves of Argent Hall must not suspect that Olossi’s council had learned the truth about their alliance. And so, in the service of their desperate gamble, they sent folk out unsuspecting into the lands where wolves were already on the prowl.

The four guardsmen were likable young men who could not, in fact, stay silent for long. They had the confident bearing of those granted youth and health and strength, but the least of Captain Anji’s tailmen could, Joss supposed, take all four out without a great deal of effort. These were not hardened men. They were not honed. They were like a sword made for show, not for fighting, pretty in their dyed linen jackets and loose trousers and bright silk sashes of teal or crimson or sea-foam green.

“Did you see the incomparable Eridit last night?”

“No, she was engaged with another man. I went to the arena to see that new troupe.”

“Were they at the Little or the Big?”

“Oh, at the Little. They came out of Mar. It wasn’t much of an audience.”

“It wasn’t much of a talking line, I heard.”

“That’s true. But there was
one
girl . . . still, you know how they are, they will say they are sworn to purity until their tour is done.”

“They say that if they aren’t interested. What they say to a handsomer man is quite another thing.”

“That’s not what your sister said.”

“Hey! That’s not funny. You know she’s getting married at Festival.”

“Stop it, you two! Or I won’t cycle you off duty on Festival First Night.”

The chatter changed course into safer channels: the upcoming new year’s festival; a jeweler who gave good deals on trinkets suitable for wooing jarya companions; a flower seller who had given good advice about a certain herbal that gave off an arousing perfume; the cockfights and horse races meant to take place on Festival Third Day; the demise of their favorite rice-wine seller in an unexpected fall from the upper story of his warehouse; the preparations of one of their party for his appearance in a talking line on the last night of the festival, which mostly had a great deal to do with properly gathering and sewing together stiff nai leaves to make the traditional bristling wrist guards.

These young men, like all the rest of the early-morning travelers and indeed most of Olossi’s population, were ignorant of the magnitude of the threat that stride by stride marched nearer. It seemed Olossi’s council really did like to hoard its secrets, even when knowledge might save lives. It did not, on the whole, make him trust them, neither the Greater Houses or the Lesser.

“Look! There!” said the fourth young man, who up until now had said the least.

They had gone a ways up the slope and could look back with enough command of the height that the wide plain and the curves of the river winding through it made a striking scene. Sunlight glittered on the river. The sea was a vast sheet of calm water, bluest beyond the delta’s mouth. Over Olossi, a reeve circled, dipped, and descended for a landing.

Joss swung around to look up along the road. A fair stretch ahead of them, where the going got steepest, a rider moved at a leisurely pace. The rider was leading two spare horses, one of which had the bulky outline of an animal laden with supplies. As he watched, she reached the turn where the road bent sharply right to run east parallel below the escarpment.

To his companions he said, “Let’s get moving.”

Horas spent a dreary evening stuck in hall while Master Yordenas made him repeat his report twice like a simpleton who couldn’t understand two words rubbed together, and while the party of four argued. At length it was agreed that someone really had to go back to Olossi to make sure the mercenaries got the hells out of town and well away from anyplace where they might have a hand in disrupting the larger plan.

“There aren’t many of them,” said Horas. “I don’t see why they’re such a threat.”

“Ten would be too many,” said Toban. “You were given strict instructions.”

“We’ll have to send a reeve to oversee their departure,” said Weda. “You ought to go, Horas. You know the Olossi council master better than the rest of us do.”

“You just don’t want to stir your fat ass out of here,” he retorted. But he thought of the Devouring girl, and stirred restlessly in his chair. Yet those thoughts drew up from the well of his memory the stark gaze of that woman under the awning, the clerk with her brush and blank scroll. Her gaze had left him raw and shriveled. “Let someone else go. I’m due a break from running messages.”