Shadow Gate

  “Eridit,” he said, but her name exhausted him; he could think of nothing to say to her except that all he could think of was wanting her to devour him over and over and over. No wonder they called their goddess merciless.

  A fluttering bird’s whistle rose on the air.

  “The hells!” muttered Eridit. “That’s the signal.”

  She scrambled to slip on her trousers as Shai rolled into a tangle of his own clothing. She ducked out from under the crevice as he tried to get everything straightened out so he could dress. By the time he crawled out and stood, an eagle flew so low overhead that he yelped and dropped to the dirt.

  “Hurry!” Eridit dashed back to grab his wrist. “A reeve is here. They weren’t supposed to contact us! Edard will be furious! They could break our cover.”

  They cut down over uneven ground between ridges of naked rock and bumpy grass-grown slopes. The eagle had come to earth beyond the eroded remnants of a once great spine of rock, a bit downslope toward the depths of the hollow, a landing spot that might conceal the eagle from any folk walking on nearby West Track or more distant Horn. The reeve had already unhooked, and he left his harness dangling free behind him as he strode up the slope.

  Edard trotted down to meet him. “Be quick about it so we’re not spotted, you rank fool!”

  “Strange, I was here before,” said the reeve, unaffected by Edard’s snarling demeanor. “Be sure I wouldn’t have cut my flight short if I’d not been commanded to deliver a personal message to one of your party. I’m called Volias, by the way. The man I’m looking for goes by the name of Shayi. An outlander.” He bent his sour gaze on Shai, but was distracted by the sight of Eridit sauntering up. “Whew! What’s your name?”

  “No luck today,” she said with a flirting smile.

  “Didn’t I see you in Olossi, at the arena? Aren’t you the Incomparable Eridit?”

  She did not take the bait. “Beautiful eagle. Is she friendly?”

  “That might depend,” he said.

  She shook her head with a mocking frown. “You need work, ver. This is Shai. What’s your message?”

  “Yes,” added Edard, “and then get gone. Cursed idiot. Where are you headed?”

  “None of your cursed business, is it?” With a sneer, he turned to Shai. “Captain Anji’s wife said to tell you—and I’m just repeating her words, they mean nothing to me, mind you—‘Beware of Cornflower.’ ”

  “What is a cornflower?” asked Eridit.

  “She’s haunting you, on your trail, out for revenge.”

  “If Mai meant the slave girl,” said Shai, “then she’s dead. She vanished in a sandstorm. No one could survive that.”

  “He’s not too swift, is he?” said the reeve to Eridit.

  “Umm. But tasty.”

  “Oof! That hurt! All right, Shayi.” The reeve mangled the name, and seemed to enjoy doing it. “I think what the captain’s wife is trying to tell you is that you’ve got a demon stalking your tail.”

  Hu! His body recalled how it had responded to the sight of Cornflower’s slight, pale form, her demon-blue eyes, her passive air. Every one of his brothers had tasted her, repeatedly; he had refrained, but not from disgust. Not from not wanting her. Not at all. He wiped sweat from his brow, shut his eyes, trying to wring from his memory the image of her lying on a pallet dressed in scanty bedroom silks, trying to freeze his body’s fresh stirring of arousal.

  “A lilu, eh?” said Eridit, who missed nothing.

  Edard said, “If you’ve delivered your message, get moving.”

  “Where’s the rest of your party?”

  “The rest of the party is smarter than these two nimwits,” said Edard. “They stayed hidden. You find what you were looking for, Shai, or are you ready to give up on it?”

  As Shai opened his eyes, his gaze wandered to the reeve with his harness clipped tight around his torso and his tight leathers beneath, the trousers ornamented by a polished belt buckle engraved with a wolf’s head.

  He took in a sharp breath. “Where’d you get that?” he demanded.

  “Get what?” asked the reeve indignantly.

  “The belt buckle.” Shai raised his right hand to display the wolf ring, sigil of the Mei clan into which he had been born. “That belonged to my brother. I recognize it.” The shock of seeing it made him come alive, as if he were already moving, an axe in its downward swing.

  The reeve leaped back, raising his baton. “The hells! Don’t come any closer.”

  Shaking, Shai lowered his hand, now curled into a fist. He was about the same height as the reeve, but bulkier, and he felt his strength in the way his entire body was poised; but he also recognized the reeve’s ready stance.

  “Heya, Shai,” said Eridit in a cool, amused tone. “We’re playing for the same side, neh?”

  “Want to get out of here now?” asked Edard. “If you would be so kind, reeve.”

  The reeve furrowed his brow, and slanted a glance at Shai. “Yet it’s true, I found it. Here, on this field.”

  Shai’s tongue rooted; he couldn’t speak.

  “Down this way,” said the reeve.

  “Stay here, Eridit,” said Edard sternly. “Go gather your gear.”

  Shai stumbled over every bump and root that hooked his path, while the reeve glanced back several times, no doubt the better to eye Eridit from the rear. The reeve fetched up near where the stream cut through tussocks of flowering grass and white-barked saplings growing among low-lying rocks. Farther upslope, scrub trees and brush covered the hillside.

  The reeve searched along the bank of the stream until he reached a spot dense with human remains left to the weather.

  “It was. . . right. . . here.” He probed with a boot, and lifted his foot a hand’s width with a curved bone caught over the arch. “I found it under this fellow.”

  If a tree had hit him square in the back, Shai could not have dropped harder to his knees. A jumble of shapes and colors pulsed before him: green grass blowing; the white cradle of bare ribs; red-clay-colored cloth pressed into the loam, becoming part of the weave of earth. Nearby, a skull was lodged upside down between rocks in the stream, water flowing through the eye sockets. White flowers bobbed on a nearby bush. From deep in the branches, a bird peeped at him, black eyes gleaming.

  “I need to get on.” An object thudded to the ground by Shai’s knees. The man walked away as Shai stared at the buckle; the wolf’s head stared back at him, black on silver. He sucked in an inhalation as he grasped it.

  Hari!

  Dead. Dead. Dead.

  With a trembling hand Shai touched the shattered rib cage. Closing his eyes, he tried to snare the lingering whispers of a spirit from the sun-warmed bones.

  These were not Hari’s bones.

  A man shouted.

  Shai started back, his hands cold and his chest heavy. He scrambled on hands and knees through the scatter of bones, touching leg bones, arms, fingers, a mandible. So many dead men, carved by death out of life and sent fleeing through the Spirit Gate. But none of them were Hari.

  Yet Hari had been dead when he had last been wearing the belt buckle. Hari’s wolf sigil ring had come to the family through convoluted channels, more by accident and chance than purpose, so Shai believed. Hari’s ring, too, had whispered of its owner’s death. But Hari’s bones were nowhere to be found, or at least, not here where he had left his ring and his buckle. Weeping, Shai sank onto his heels, head cupped in his hands. The obvious answer sang in his ears: Hari had died elsewhere, and another man had robbed his corpse and worn his fine ring and buckle until he himself was caught by the death that attends those who march to war.

  Enough.

  An eagle rose out of the outcropping, whose bare stone shouldered above dirt in rough surfaces and ragged spills of rock like massive frozen waterfalls. Men flowed out of the rock, spurting from between ridges, cascading down the slope.

  They had seen him.

  They were armed.

  He tied Hari’s be
lt buckle into his sleeve and leaped the stream, landing up to his knees in the rushing cold water. He splashed through and scrambled up the far side as shouts were loosed at his back. He sprinted up the slope to the shelter of the low-lying scrub. Thin straggler vines whipped his face; branches caught in his clothes as he tore through. His cap came off. The racket he made as he thrashed through the brush was trail enough for his pursuers.

  He dropped to hands and knees and scrambled among narrow trunks, squiggled into a thicket and lay, panting, on his belly. He eased around, to watch the way he had come. Branches snapped and slithered as four men pressed past not two body’s lengths from him. He could not see their faces, only their legs. White and pale pink flowers danced in the taller scrub trees as the wind rose, melding with the stamp and disturbance made by the searching men. Maybe rain would blow through, discourage the hunters, and leave him free to—

  A thorn pricked him. He shifted to get out from under it. The point pinched harder.

  “Get up,” said a man.

  The point of a spear jabbed hard enough to break the skin.

  Cautiously, he eased up to hands and knees.

  A kick planted into his rear sent him sprawling into vines and thorns. A second kick caught a hip, and as he struggled to get out of the thorns, the kicks kept pushing him back in until he simply went limp and lay like he was dead. Blood tickled along his spine; his skin stung where the spear had poked him.

  The spear jabbed a new spot.

  “Get up,” said the same voice, in the same flat tone, no pleasure in it, no giggling sneering gloat.

  He had learned a few tricks from the Qin soldiers. With a spinning roll, he knocked the point off his back and got his hands on the shaft with a wide grip. He wrenched the spear out of the man’s grip, twirled it, and smacked him upside the chin with the shaft.

  The man dropped right into Shai, his weight smashing him backward into a bush. Shai shoved him off, then levered the spear under him to push himself up.

  Too late.

  Others pushed into view. Two had swords, three had spears, and one had a bow nocked with a ready arrow.

  “Not bad,” said the bowman, standing in back of the rest, partially screened by brush. “Kill him now, Sergeant?”

  “Give us the spear, lad.”

  They looked like ordinary folk on the surface, bedraggled from tearing through the scrub, but their eyes were hard and their clothes mismatched, and they carried their weapons like they wanted an excuse to use them. Three had lips stained red, the sigil left by sweet-smoke, whose mark he’d seen on Girish. The addicts looked ready to kill if given the order. The fallen man groaned as he staggered to his feet.

  “Cursed outlander!” he growled. “Can I rip his balls off?”

  “Neh. The master will want to know what he’s doing here pawing through the battlefield right where Lord Twilight was raised. Looks like he was traveling with that ordinand.”

  Had they captured Edard, too?

  Was it better to fight and die, or give up your freedom now in the hopes of winning it back later?

  He released the spear.

  A man grabbed it and smacked him alongside the face. He blacked out.

  And came to retching, with them dragging him through grass. They had been joined by more soldiers.

  “Walk!”

  They pulled him past a pile of clothing discarded on the ground, only there was a man still in that clothing, a face staring up at the sky and mist rising out of the nostrils in a roil of confusion.

  “Why will folk never listen to me when I try to warn them? Heya! Shai!” Edard’s ghost writhed toward him, mouth widening in an exaggerated grimace. “Did I tell you my clan’s password to make contact in Toskala? Someone needs to know. ‘Splendid silk slippers,’ like in the tale. Same as our badge.”

  Shai had never been so afraid in his life, to see a ghost calling his name as its cloudy essence chased after him.

  But of course, no one else could see. They just thought he was struggling to get free.

  “No fighting, or I’ll let Twist cook and eat your balls after he’s cut them off.”

  “Don’t want to eat them,” said Twist, to the laughter of the others. “Want to make him eat them raw.”

  They chortled. Dizzied, Shai blinked as Edard’s ghost hazed his vision.

  “One moment I was walking down to find where Eridit had gone, and the next . . . Eiya! Am I dead?”

  The ghost seemed less angry than puzzled as the gang of men marched through him. He drifted toward a ridge of rock adorned with curtains of orange-flowering vegetation. The way the vegetation fell down the crag made it seem there was rock all the way down, the crevice itself easily missed, unless you knew it was there because a young woman had recently dragged you in there and done what she wanted, not that he hadn’t wanted it just as much.

  “Aui!” said the ghost. “There Eridit is! Safe, at least.”

  Shai saw her eyes, a patchwork face behind orange flowers. As she saw him see her, fear made her face ghastly. Fear for him? Or for herself?

  He stumbled purposefully, drawing their attention, and surged up so they crowded in to pressure him forward, weapons bristling like so many iron thorns ready to impale. They didn’t examine the nearby rocks.

  Edard’s ghost had vanished.

  And Shai was their living prisoner.

  PART SIX: DEMONS

  37

  DEATH RODE AT twilight into High Haldia. Or so, Marit imagined, the tales might sing.

  The broad avenue that bisected the city lay empty except for a scrap of cloth rippling along the paving stones, blown by a wind out of the north. Normally, she supposed this thoroughfare would be lit with lanterns, folk grabbing noodles or the savory buns common to Haldia for a quick bite while rushing about their last errands of the day. Apprentices released from their duties might be found traveling in packs for a night of carousing, or a shopkeeper seen sweeping her entry porch as she closed up for the night. Now, many buildings gaped as half-burned shells, roofs fallen in and broken tiles scattered. The intact shopfronts were shuttered, as closed up as a rich clan rejecting the marriage suit of a poor but ambitious neighbor.

  Was High Haldia slain, or only licking its wounds?

  Movement flashed to her right. Marit urged Warning into a trot down a side street. A figure dashed across the street, ducking into an alley. Marit slipped off Warning, ran in pursuit. In the depths of shadow between windowless walls, she grabbed a slight young person by his tunic.

  He went limp, so she let go, and he sprawled at her feet. The side street lay behind them. Ahead, the alley met an intersection of murky lanes, the routes beyond too dim to trace.

  “Jus’ ran to fetch medicine.” Despite short hair clipped close to the head, it was a girl. “I didna mean to break curfew, only my nephew needs the tisane for a fever.” She opened a hand to reveal a stoppered vial with an orange ribbon wrapped around it to mark its medicinal virtue.

  “I saw folk walking in from fields earlier,” Marit said, hoping a friendly voice would stop the girl’s convulsive shivering on a hot night. “All with stooped backs and bowed heads. The guards at the toll gate outside town let me pass without a word. Why’s there a curfew?”

  The back of her neck had a rash, and her feet were bare, newly blistered, as though she had formerly been accustomed to walking everywhere in slippers. “We’ve given our hostage to the garrison and kept the rules,” she said into the dirt. “It was jus’ that my nephew needed the medicine. He’s jus’ three. Cudna you let me go this one time?” Her hand closed around the vial.

  Marit heard footfalls. She turned halfway, keeping an eye both on the girl and on the six soldiers who crowded into the alley’s entrance

  “Lord? Any trouble here? Got a curfew-breaker?”

  Averting their eyes, they approached in file, blocking the alley.

  The sergeant flung out an arm to halt the others. “Who are you?” His suspicion gave flavor to the air and made the o
thers draw their short swords. The girl whimpered.

  “I’ve not seen you before, lord,” the sergeant added, words as tentative as a baby’s first steps.

  Now it’s true that anyone might affect a long cloak, especially in the rainy season, although few would choose white as their ornament. As soon as she thought it, Marit wondered if a bold rebel might attempt a disguise and thereby walk through a city such as this one, imprisoned by a curfew that made an innocent girl cower when she was caught out at dusk with a vial of medicine.

  “I’ve just come from Walshow,” Marit said, looking them over as they glanced every way but at her.

  “She’s the one they warned us to look out for—” blurted the leftmost fellow, and his sergeant kicked him so hard on the shin that he yelped.

  “Don’t even try it,” she said wearily. “Look at me.”

  Of course they didn’t want to look. Joss’s determination and misery had been laid bare to her sight: his nostalgic, regretful desire for the Marit he had once loved, a desire he knew he ought to have strangled long since but could not quite kill; his hunger for a young woman so vivid and sensual that Marit raged with envy while knowing perfectly well that she was dead and he had to get on with his own life.

  With no one moving and she trapped in this pointless cycle of thoughts, she prodded the girl. “Get home.”

  “We bring curfew-breakers to the captain on duty, to be cleansed, lord,” said the sergeant, trembling with the effort of staring at his hand so he would not forget and look at her.

  “Take me to the captain in place of the girl. Who, if she knows what is good for her, will run off. Now.”

  The girl bolted, and vanished down one of the lanes. Marit held her staff at the ready until she could no longer hear the patter of feet.

  “No need to mention the incident to the captain,” she said. “I’ll know if you do.”

  “That’s not how things work around here,” muttered the sergeant. She didn’t need a third eye and second heart to hear how disgruntled he was, having his authority undermined in front of his patrol by some cursed woman he’d never seen before in his life. She’d had a lot of experience as a reeve in unraveling the weave of conflicted human emotion, because it was rare indeed that any one person felt any one single pure feeling unadulterated by a dozen niggling other sentiments.