“I’m scarcely likely to forget that day, or that we’ve met before, ver. The envoy was a man of mature years, not yet elderly, now that I think of it. And he was looking for something. I think he suspected I had the ghost with the demon eyes. Yet he died, so it can’t have been him who spoke to the Hieros, can it?”
“It’s difficult to see how it could have. Although the descriptions match. It does seem we’re talking about the same man.”
“Anyway, I cannot see that envoy—such an amiable man!—as being in league with those corrupt soldiers.” But, as if struck by a new thought, Keshad sighed sharply.
“What is it?” Bai asked.
“I did meet a different man, with a shadowed manner, and an odd accent. He said nothing of being a Guardian, but I was sure—then I thought I had dreamed it—”
Zubaidit grabbed his arm. “Sure of what, Kesh? You never told me this!”
“That hurts!” He pulled his arm out of her grasp. “I was sure he was riding a winged horse. He seemed to leap down right out of the sky, but it was night, and then I thought afterward I had mistaken it. Wouldn’t anyone think so?”
“Where did you see this?” she demanded.
Reluctantly, the brother spun a halting tale. He’d been marching with the army, forced to do so because he and his sister had been overtaken by the strike force on its march toward Olossi and it was the only way he could save his own life. By his unfeigned disgust as he related the tale, Joss believed that he’d had no part of the army before or after that encounter. While at their night’s bivouac, a man on a winged horse had arrived in the encampment. Keshad had been sent in to speak with him. “He wanted to make sure I wasn’t there to betray his company. He gave me such a look, I thought my insides would be torn out. I said I cared nothing for him and his, and it was true anyway, and thankfully he believed me and sent me away. That was the last I heard or saw of him.”
“The hells!” said Zubaidit, laughing again. “Say something, reeve. For I think that’s shocked you as much as it’s shocked me.”
Joss eased an itch that had sprung up on the underside of one wrist. “The Hieros also said that the envoy of Ilu told her that there has not been peace in the Hundred for these last many years.” He remembered the clipped, forceful way in which she had repeated the words. “That the war for the soul of the Guardians had already begun.”
Zubaidit dropped the reins and crossed to stand directly in front of Joss. She stared into his face, as if daring him to look into her heart—or at least, to not drop his gaze down to the swell of her breasts under her tight vest. It was a struggle, but he managed it.
She took hold of one of his wrists. Her fingers were strong, her skin cooler than his own. “Every child who’s listened closely to the tales knows the Guardians can’t be killed. That’s part of what gives them their power. What if more than one Guardian has survived? Or if some are aligned against the others?”
Maybe he swayed, because her grip on his wrist tightened as if to stop him from falling. Marit was dead, but walking again in his dreams, claiming to be a Guardian. Was he crazy?
She released him and walked to the horses.
“We’ll go back with you,” she said, over her shoulder.
“Bai!”
“Kesh!” Her rejoinder was almost mocking. Her brother winced. There was a passionate quality in the young man’s heart that seemed about to burst out over the merchant’s chilly façade. “Keshad, what’s at stake here is greater than our freedom. We’ll go back and face the Hi-eros. Then we’ll seek out the truth about the winged horses people have seen, and the truth about people claiming to be Guardians.”
“Why do we have to do it?” he whined.
“Because you cheated the temple.” Between one breath and the next, Joss’s headache returned. “That’s a crime.”
“I can’t have known a mute girl I found at the edge of the desert in foreign lands was—”
“Kesh! We have to do it because it’s the right thing to do. Because it has to be done. Because we have an obligation to the gods, and to the Hundred. Now shut up.” She turned to Joss, all business now. “Is the road safe?”
“It should be cleared by now. The Qin are efficient and effective.”
She cocked her head to one side. “So they are. Let’s hope that wolf doesn’t bite back.”
She took the reins of her horse and, without a backward glance, began the long climb up the switchback. After a glance at Scar and a roll of dark eyes that girls might find pretty, the brother grabbed the reins of the other two horses and followed.
Joss watched them go. They had a hard trudge ahead, and he was already exhausted. Scar chirped an inquiry. Like their reeves, the best eagles learned to judge to a nicety danger and mood in any situation, and they were very smart birds, but they were birds all the same.
And yet what did he really know about the origin of the Hundred’s eagles? No more than he knew about the Guardians. He’d encountered strange things in his life: He had seen the eyes of a wilding at the edge of the deep forest where they hunted and lived; he had spoken to one of the rare delvings who walked out of the caverns of Arro into the sunlight; he had traded information with the nomadic lendings in the grasslands through a series of hand signs and stones; he had even heard the rippling voice of a fireling in its brief passage through the sky. He’d dealt with every manner of human greed and generosity, cruelty and kindness, anger and calm acceptance. He’d memorized the law, because it was carved in stone. He’d dedicated his life to serving justice.
Now he wondered: Was it all for nothing?
If it was true the Guardians still walked in the land, and if it was true they warred among themselves, then what could justice possibly mean? How could any ordinary person hope to live a decent life if those the gods had raised to establish and maintain justice in the land had fallen into the shadows?
A shadow fell over him from behind. Scar’s big head lowered until the eagle was able to look him in the eye. Joss stroked the curve of the beak offered him.
“We’re not beaten yet. Not as long as you and I have anything to say about it. Now go on.” He tugged on the leather cord hanging around his neck and pulled his reeve’s bone whistle out from under his vest. Raising it to his lips, he blew the set to signal to Scar that the eagle was free to hunt.
The raptor huffed, raking the ground with its talons. Joss walked out of range, and the eagle thrust, beat, and flew, then found a thermal along the steep slope and rose swiftly into the sky. Joss scanned the road. Sister and brother hadn’t gotten far. Zubaidit paused to watch the eagle’s ascent, then bent her gaze down to where he stood at the base of the trail. With a grin, Joss slung his pack over his back and walked after them.
14
The man long known as an envoy of Ilu stayed too long at the thorn tree shelter on the shore of the Olo’o Sea. He enjoyed the hiss of rain over the wide waters and the smell of the first buds squeezing into the air as the rains woke the drowsing vegetation. He watched the ceaseless spill of clouds as the change in air currents between land and water shredded them. But when one day became three and three became five, their enemies caught up to them.
He never slept, not anymore, but he had learned to slip into a drowse similar to the long interlude before awakening, when he had drifted for untold days weeks months years in a state between waking and sleeping. He liked to think of himself, in this state, as similar to the condition of trees during the season of drought: not dead but held in abeyance.
Change will wake them.
He startled into awareness. First he smelled sweat and fear. Then he heard a branch snap and a whispered exclamation.
The sun nosed up in the east. To the west, the band of the inland sea remained dark, speckled with the last bright stars fading into the rising of day. The girl sat beside him. She had fallen back into her stupor, eyes open but unseeing, mouth lax and hands loose on her thighs.
A pair of unsavory-looking men burst into the clearing,
pursued by the bay mare, who had her wings tightly furled along her flanks. She was a biter, mean when she wanted to be, and they edged away as she circled. But they had spotted the two cloaked figures under the shelter. One of the men swung with his spear, and the bay shied away, although she was only playing with them.
With a sigh, he rose and walked out to confront them. They shrank back to the edge of the trees, where an unbroken fence of thorn at just that spot made them hesitate. One was taller, one shorter. He caught the gaze of the shorter man.
The flood of images and thoughts never got any easier to absorb. A man might as well be kicked and beaten, for all that the surge of emotion bruised him.
Gods! Is that a ghost, or a demon? I wonder how she tastes, and if she cries when—
The power we wield over others brings us power. Take pleasure, take pain, take life, and you’ll gain strength. Otherwise, you are the victim.
And why should I be persecuted, eh? The Daped clan lied about me cheating them and shamed me in front of the entire village as the hot sun burned and burned
“Stop!” The man’s shrill voice rang in the quiet dawn. He tossed aside his spear to fumble with his bow, loosed an arrow that spent itself harmlessly in the dirt.
“The hells!” cursed his taller companion, loosing an arrow in reaction, so careless that the missile wobbled to earth. Then his gaze was caught.
As reward, they give me more coin. With the coin, suck more sweet smoke. Need the coin. Need the smoke.
The bay mare snorted. The gray mare trotted into view from around the far edge of the thorn tree fence. She halted, looking things over with her usual pragmatic consideration. She was even-tempered, but not a horse to mess with. She stretched her neck, then partially opened her wings and charged.
“Shit!” The shorter man lost his anger and his courage, and tossed his bow aside. With his short sword he hacked into the thorn, yelped as the thorns tore at him although no more sharply than his own sour thoughts.
“Eh! Eh!” The taller one stumbled in his wake, too muddled to make his own decisions.
The envoy shuttered his eyes. He let the taste of the breeze moisten his parted lips. He let the scents drifting on the air tickle his nostrils. Others hid in the brush, six in all, a cadre on the hunt.
He heard whispers pitched too low for ordinary ears to hear.
“. . . Can’t face him . . .”
“Sniveling whiner. No wonder they keep passing you over for promotion. Harbi and I will go.”
“Let’s just get out of here.”
“Then he’ll move on and we’ll have the hells of a trip tracking him down again. Or you want someone else to get the prize money and the promotion? A chance for the lord’s favor?”
“I’m not going back out there. Those horses are cursed demons.”
The girl rose. She walked over to the spent arrow and fallen bow, picked them up, examined them with a frown. The envoy caught a glimpse of dark cloth where the men peered out through green branches.
“What is that? A lilu?”
“A demon!”
“A ghost.”
“I thought we were just after the sky cloak. I didn’t come here to hunt demons!”
She fitted the arrow to the string; tested the pull; swung the bow around to aim into the trees. Loosed the arrow.
A scream—a hit!—surprised him. He heard a shout of pain, then the rustle of undergrowth as they retreated through the undergrowth. Men argued:
“We’re six, they’re two.”
“The horses!”
“Not that easy.” That was Taller’s voice, startled out of his dream of sweetsmoke. He spoke in a mumble that quieted the others. “He’ll kill us just by tearing out our insides, just with a look from him. You know it’s true. Best we hurry back and report. Maybe he won’t chase us if we go quickly.”
Eyes narrowed, she spotted the second arrow and fetched it.
In the brush, the whispered debate went on. “You fools. Two of them, six of us.”
“Best we saddle the horses, if you will,” the envoy said to her.
For the first time, she was listening to him. She walked back to the fire as casually as if no man had just tried to kill them, as if they were not in danger of a second attack coming at any moment.
She whistled, and the horses trotted over to her. He held his staff at the ready, his senses trained on the thorn tree fence and the woodland scrub beyond it, on the noises of the cadre as they crept out of arrow range, debating what to do next, no one able to take charge. He didn’t fear them, and if they attacked, he’d have no choice but to kill them. Perhaps they instinctively guessed it, for the taste of their living essence faded entirely. They had chosen retreat.
A weaver bird flitted within the thorns, its wings a faint stutter. Branches ticked against each other as the breeze stirred them. A bud breathed into a trembling petal as it struggled to unfurl with the same slow majesty as wings.
She walked up beside him, leading the horses. He slid back into himself.
She had saddled them, tied on his few possessions. She said nothing; she didn’t even look at him but kept staring at the break in the thorn fence where the short man had cut his way out. She was ready to go.
He took Telling’s reins and swung into the saddle. He didn’t trust the bay mare, and because the girl tolerated her easily, he let her ride the bay.
He turned Telling’s head toward the sea, and the girl, on Seeing, followed his lead. He urged the gray to a trot, to a canter, to a run, and as they reached the shore, they unfurled their wings and skimmed over the water, rising on slow wing beats. The sea fell away beneath. As the shelter shrank with distance, the thorn trees could from the height be seen quite obviously to be planted by hand, while the scrub grown beyond them had a wilder scumble.
He was accustomed by now to riding almost everywhere, but he still preferred to walk. You saw things when walking—the blade of grass, the bee’s feet tickling a flower petal, the last tear of a wronged woman who has resolved to seek revenge—that the height and power of a horse might hide from your senses. She was at home in the saddle. Aloft, her aspect changed. Her eyes opened wide, watching everywhere as they winged over the sea. Even after all this time, each least bobble or hole of turbulence in the air made him gulp and grip and hope he did not tumble. She simply rode.
Eiya! What to do? Where to go? He dared not take her to one of the altars, because there they would easily be spied out. And once she touched her staff, she would likely be out of his control. Yet it wasn’t safe to give the staff into her hands until she understood what she was. It wasn’t safe to give it into her hands until he was sure she would walk the path he had chosen and not the easier path, the path that begins in light but soon enough crosses under the gate of shadows into corruption.
“WE TELL STORIES to make the time pass between birth and death,” Bai was saying.
“I thought the gods gave us stories to help us understand the world,” Joss replied.
“So we are taught in the temples,” she agreed. “But think about it. What is a story?”
She would chatter on so, flirting with that cursed reeve. Even huffing and puffing up the switchback trail that, incredibly, they’d had to climb back up, those two had talked and talked in the way of people showing off for each other. Kesh wished they would shut up.
“It’s not the truth, and yet there’s truth in it. It’s a way of ordering the truth, just as we order days and weeks and years, as we order guilds and colors and the Hundred itself. Did the gods create the tales? No. People like you and me made the tales and told them to others. Even so, the ten Tales of Founding are not like other stories. We made them because the gods commanded us to. Because they help us order the world, just as worship does. And what is the world except that time between when we enter this place and when we leave it?”
They reached the ruins where he and Bai had sheltered last night. Here, Kesh thought, they might decently pause to rest, but the other two w
ould keep talking.
The reeve answered her. “As it says in the Tale of Discovery, ‘Where did we come from, and where do we go?’ ”
“That’s right,” she said with such a flattering smile that Keshad actually gave a disgusted grunt. She glanced at Kesh and for an instant resembled the child she had once been, his little sister, as she rolled her eyes at him to say, Don’t ruin this for me.
The reeve didn’t notice. He walked to the ruins of a stone wall and jumped up atop it, right at the edge of the drop-off where most men wouldn’t dare to stand. Shading his eyes, he gazed across the basin now turning a hazy purple-blue as daylight faded. He was breathing hard, as was Kesh, face suffused with blood. Bai watched the reeve when he wasn’t looking at her. This was a side of his sister Kesh had never seen. Sisters weren’t supposed to have such feelings, nor to flirt with men so much older. The hells! Bad enough they should flirt at all.
He took a few steps, closing the distance between them.
“Bai, he’s old enough to have fathered you. What can you see in a man like that?”
“The horses need water, Kesh. Make sure they don’t drink too much.”
Stung, he grabbed the reins and led the exhausted horses to the trough while, naturally, she sauntered over toward the reeve.
“Not many men would stand right there at the edge of the cliff,” she called to the reeve.
“I’ve no fear of falling,” he said without looking at her. “Or did you think I was afraid of taking the plunge—”
Halfway across the open space, she paused beside a scatter of faced stones long since tumbled from their place. She turned. She raised a hand and, seeing the gesture, Kesh stepped back from the horses. The reeve turned, alerted by her stillness, and when she waved a hand, he started talking again.
“I never feared climbing trees when I was a child, or standing at the very top of the watch tower in Haya, but even so, after years with an eagle, you get used to surveying the land from very high up.”
Bai prowled past Kesh, circling the horses and the cistern, and vanished behind the remains of a round building. The reeve nattered on, but as he spoke he drew his short sword and shifted sideways on the wall, ready to move.