“Olossi’s council will not like the idea of a regional council. They consider themselves to be the only regional council that matters, surely.”
“Is that not an excellent reason to encourage a regional council? To put brakes, as a caravan master might say, on those inclined to throw down their weight?”
They had reached the top of the hill. She paused to catch her breath. Stones from the fallen walls had been used to repair the beacon tower. The men on duty had already lined up for inspection; they were all local men, disciplined in the Qin manner but very open with their smiles and greetings toward Mai.
Anji gestured for her to follow him. Together, they climbed the stairs of the tower and stood beside covered stacks of kindling and logs. The view of the flowing river and the town spread along West Track was splendid; the light cast a mellow fire over courtyards, paths, orchards, and rooftops. Wind danced through the flags marking the river crossing. Below, the local guardsmen admired the baby, who was in a chortling expansive mood, quite the charmer as the young men competed to make him smile and laugh.
“Why did you bring me along?” she asked, leaning on the railing as he crouched to examine the stacked wood.
He did not look up. “It’s good for the people of Olo’osson to see my son, and to negotiate with the merchant who is my wife. Otherwise, they see me only as an outlander.”
“. . . One who intimidates them?” She studied him, easy to do when he was not looking at her. His topknot was neatly tied up; he had shed his armor and wore only a padded silk coat with the black silk tabard belted over it. He was not a handsome man, precisely; for simple beauty he could not compete with Reeve Joss or the many handsome young Hundred men with their ready smiles and easy way of displaying muscled physiques. He had a different quality; he was the wind that bends trees, the river that cuts the earth with its fluid strength, the inexorable sand that buries stone.
He caught her staring and did not smile, as if he was unsure of what she might be thinking, how she might be looking at him. Then she smiled, and he softened, rising to take her hand and stand beside her at the wall, a gesture of intimacy in which he rarely indulged in a public space.
“Are you content?” he asked.
She laughed. “An odd question, coming from you, Anji!”
“Yet you haven’t answered it.”
Was his tone dark, or was he teasing her? When she remembered the look on his face at the docks in Dast Olo, she wondered if she really understood him or only thought she did. The eastern reaches of West Track faded into shadows as the sun touched the western horizon. He waited, the pressure of his fingers light on her hand, as the shadows drew long and the men below laughed and joked. Several began to sing a prayer to the dusk, and others joined in.
“Look to the horizon! A voice calls.
Shadow Gate rises. Night is come.”
When the prayer was finished, she replied. “My father would never have asked his wives that question, nor would their answers have concerned him. Why do you care if I am content?”
He released her hand to lean on his elbows on the wall, watching the child, safe in Tuvi’s arms. “Are you?”
“As a merchant, I must now point out that you have negotiated me into a corner. If I say ‘yes,’ it may seem my belated agreement stems not from genuine feeling but from expediency. To say ‘no’ is unthinkable, whether or not it might be true. What am I to say to the man who has freed me from an unhappy household and a life of tedious drudgery as a wife married into the Gandi-li sheepherders’ clan, ridden with me for months through desert and foreign lands defying storm and assassins, worked in concert with me to create a new home in a very fine land where we can hope to prosper, and given me in addition a handsome, good-natured infant son? If I were to say that it’s as if I am living one of the storytelling songs I used to listen to and sing, you would laugh at me. You did before!”
“I never did.”
She placed a hand over his, claiming him. “You did.” She leaned in and quickly kissed him, although anyone who happened to be looking up would see.
“Mai!” He drew back hastily.
“I couldn’t help myself.”
His eyes flared as his hand tightened on hers. He whistled sharply; Tuvi looked up, then gestured to the escort to make ready.
“Have you seen all you wished to see from this pleasant vista?” Mai asked innocently.
He tugged gently, but firmly, on her hand. Hu! She knew that look and felt her own cheeks flush in response.
“Remind me never to negotiate with you, Mai. On this field, I am not your match.”
She laughed and allowed herself, this time, to be led.
• • •
MARIT LEFT THE shore of the Salt Sea on the western edge of the Hundred and traveled east-southeast. Sardia, Farhal, upper Haldia fell away beneath and behind her as the moon waxed and waned in its full cycle of twenty-four days. The paths of air concealed her, so she rode low to the ground and measured the army’s occupation. The land lay in a kind of enforced quiescence. In her time as a reeve she had seen children stand in such stillness, heads bowed, hoping to avoid a beating from angry parents by avoiding being noticed. Stillness never helped, not when the fault lay not with them but with those who had the strength and reach to abuse them. Along major roads or outside town gates rose cleansing posts, always under guard, a warning and threat to those who might consider rebellion.
If she stopped to free the hanged from the posts, she would reveal her presence; she knew the news would eventually reach one of the cloaks she was trying to avoid. If she did not stop . . .
The hells!
She stopped each time, and commanded the guards to release those of the condemned who weren’t yet dead. She told the guards that cleansing was meant to refine the heart and that those who had been hanged from the poles were now cleansed, that you did not have to be dead to be cleansed.
Not as she was dead, her old life ripped away, lost forever.
Because she was thinking of Joss, she journeyed across the mouth of the vale of Iliyat to spend a night up on the Liya Pass, at Candle Rock, the last place she and he had embraced the Devourer. Twenty-one years ago.
Candle Rock was too stony to harbor trees; a few hardy tea willows grew out of deep cracks where water pooled in the rainy season, and spiny starflowers flourished on the steep northern slope. She came to earth on the summit of the rock and released Warning. The mare flew off toward Ammadit’s Tit, but, like Jothinin and Kirit, Marit avoided the altars; her footsteps on the labyrinth would alert any cloak who, at the same time, stood on any other altar anywhere in the Hundred.
Walking down to the craggy overhang where she had stacked firewood when she’d come here over a month ago, she observed the land in the drowsy light of a cloudless late afternoon. The Liya Pass ran from the northern slopes of the vale of Iliyat over the Liya Hills into Herelia. The road ran below the cliff face, empty of traffic. As she crossed from sunlight to shade under the overhang, she stopped short at the sight of stacked firewood and kindling braced between unsplit logs. Someone had come here after her last visit weeks ago.
A hatchet, a wedge, and a sledgehammer had been laid across logs. The old axe she had used was gone. The oldest wood had been moved to the front and freshly cut wood stacked behind in alternating pairs exactly the way Joss had always stacked wood. Outside, a trail of dust led to bands of starflower where the remains of wood too punky to burn had been dumped. Down in the hollow where reeves jessed their eagles to one of several rings hammered into the rock, the dirt had been recently raked.
She drew her sword. She listened, but heard only the peewit of a fly catcher and the whine of the wind. When she had stopped here weeks ago, the patrol station had looked abandoned. Why had reeves abandoned it, and why had they come back? What in the hells were the reeves doing these days? She was twenty years out of touch.
It was getting dark. Wind died as the sun set.
She sheathed her sword and toi
led back up the slope to the overhang. After collecting an armload of wood and kindling, she trudged to the summit. Joss was not the only person in the Hundred who stacked wood in that manner. It was just that she was thinking of him. She grinned, remembering how they’d kissed by this very fire pit. The dry season was creeping in on the last kiss of the Whisper Rains, and though it wasn’t yet cold, she appreciated the fire as a friendly companion. It was funny how after only a few days in company with Jothinin and Kirit she sorely missed them, the envoy more than the girl, for there was no denying that the girl was not quite right. It wasn’t just the way she looked, although that was disturbing enough. It was the way she acted.
As her gaze skipped around the circle of white rocks, she noticed a crevice gaping within the curving wall of stones opposite her, a pair of flat stones stacked within.
She grabbed a stick out of the fire and beat it on the ground until the flames died. With this tool, she poked into the crevice to make sure no creeping stingers dwelt within. Then she reached in for the stones. The one on top had been painted white on one side and black on the other; the white had caught her eye. The stone beneath was also painted in white and black, but on one side as a Sickle or Embers Moon and on the other as a Lamp or Basket Moon, just past the half. Reeves often left each other stones painted with the phases of the moon as a way to arrange meetings. So she and Joss had communicated. At Candle Rock, more than once.
When the pulse races, the world can grow hazy. At length her breathing steadied, and she smiled wryly. She had not yet let him go. No shame in that. Folk would hold on in their memory to what they had lost. In time, the attachment would fade, as attachments did. Even if twenty-one years had passed in the world, to her the wound was still fresh. Anyway, Joss was in the south, marshal over Argent Hall. Every reeve left such messages.
She considered the clear sky, lighter in the west and purpling in the east as the first bright stars penetrated the veil of daylight. The waxing Sickle Moon lingered in the west. The moon would lamp to the full in about ten days.
Was it time to talk to the reeves? Or was it only Joss she trusted? All the events that had transpired before her awakening, while she lingered on the threshold between death and life, were not even dreams to her; they were a hall devoid of light, a place in which she was blind.
Aui! She and Jothinin and Kirit were not alone in fighting the cloaks. They had to cast a net of alliance, because they would assuredly never succeed alone. She found another flat stone and stacked it beneath the others, leaving the white surface facing up: Meet at the full moon.
20
THE PRISON IN which he was being held, Shai reflected, had the pleasing symmetry of a well-tended garden. It was walled on all sides, and the cells were tiny barracks rooms, each with a barred and locked door that swung on hinges rather than sliding, and on the opposite side up very high there was a long slit of a window, too narrow to squeeze through. His window overlooked another garden within whose greenery folk sometimes walked, conversing or arguing; occasionally, he overheard the sounds of a man and woman having sex. He preferred the arguments, because the other forced him to remember that time with Eridit. Yet memory—a thorough consideration of the events that had led him here—helped him endure.
He had a bucket to eliminate in, porridge to eat, and watered-down cordial to drink. Day after day he had nothing to do except eat and sleep, so he trained his body in a fierce discipline, running in place until a trance gripped him, grasping the rim of the window and pulling his weight up and easing it down over and over until sweat made his fingers slick. Once a day at dusk he—and only he of all the prisoners—was allowed into the courtyard with its raked gravel and pots of blue and white flowers whose fragrance was the greatest pleasure of his day. There, he was allowed to bathe by pouring buckets of cold water over his head while the guards made jokes and the hirelings who hauled water from some cistern elsewhere said nothing.
Late one night the bar at his door was removed, and the door opened. An attractive woman entered, carrying a lamp and wearing a taloos of such sheer silk you could see the dark circles of her nipples through the wrapping. Four guards waited outside, making wagers on how quickly he’d succumb and how long he’d last.
“I just had to see your body myself,” she said. “Strip.”
“What are you going to do, beat me if I don’t? You can’t kill me, because the Guardian wants me alive.”
She shifted ground, baring the curve of a breast but not venturing too close. “You must be terribly lonely here.”
“Neh. There’s plenty of prisoners more miserable than I am whose moans and cries I hear every day.”
“You might hear me moan and cry, if you wished. I can see you’re aroused.”
“Sheh!” For shame. “You’re like a demon, feeding on suffering.”
She slapped him, and he caught her wrist and held it motionless, despite her twisting, to show her how strong he was. Panicking, she screamed, and the guards ran in with spears. Before they hit him, he shoved her away, into their advance.
“Perhaps the body is aroused, but the mind is disgusted. Beat me for refusing, if you must, but then I’ll tell the Guardian. Do you want the cloak’s scrutiny?”
“Maybe the cloak doesn’t care what’s done with the condemned before they die,” said the woman as she recovered her composure, surrounded by the guards.
“Maybe not. I’m willing to find out. Are you?”
After that, they left him alone and no longer made jokes when he was allowed his nightly freedom in the courtyard. Something had happened to him that he didn’t entirely understand. It was as if seeing the demon wearing the shell of Hari had strangled the last vestiges of the young man Shai had once been, the seventh of seven sons, least and superfluous, who had spent his youth remaining silent, keeping out of the way, and doing what he was told. The only one of his brothers he’d loved was lost to him; he’d likely never see his beloved niece Mai again; Zubaidit had walked alone into the army without him. Even Tohon and the children he’d helped save—presumably now safe—were as far away as if death had severed them one from the other.
So be it. He had a task to accomplish.
He was not a clerk or priest to know how to mark the passing of days, but the rains fell less frequently, and the pots of blue and white flowers withered and were replaced with pots of a mellow golden bloom. Occasionally new prisoners were brought in, some weeping, some protesting, some silent; he heard their voices but he never saw them nor could they communicate. The cell to Shai’s right remained empty; the chamber to his left was the gardener’s storeroom with all its tools. If he could only get in there he might acquire a weapon, but they’d stripped him when they’d first captured him, taken everything—his clothes and boots and knife and even Hari’s wolf’s-head belt buckle. They’d given him a flimsy kilt and vest to wear and, strangely, left him both wolf’s-head rings. Besides that reminder of the Mei clan, all he possessed was mind and muscle.
He knew when Night came because of the way the voices of the guards changed. Many of the prisoners were taken away and never returned. At dusk, his door was opened. They herded him onto the porch. Out in the courtyard, a carpet had been laid over the gravel and a low table placed on it. A person was seated at that table, hard to see in the gloom.
“Strip,” said the sergeant in charge.
After he stripped out of the kilt and vest, they gave him new clothing, exactly the same, and led him to the table. A pillow waited; he settled cross-legged on its plush opulence opposite the woman wearing the cloak of Night. Her hands were clasped and resting on the table beside a sheet of rice paper, a writing brush, and an inkstone. A lantern had been hooked to a post driven in the ground to her right, its light illuminating her pleasant expression and a lacquered tray with a wooden cup and a ceramic pot.
“Will you drink?” she asked. “It’s a late harvest tea, sweetened with rice-flower-grain.”
“Do you intend to poison me?”
&nb
sp; “You’re too valuable to poison. You’re my hostage for Harishil’s compliance.”
The tea had a remarkable aroma that made his mouth water after so long on an unvaried diet. “I’ll drink,” he said, wondering if he could move fast enough to grab the lantern and bash in her head before the archers standing at a remove could kill him.
She smiled, as if guessing his thoughts, then poured. She, too, was sitting on a pillow, and beneath the pillow, sticking out on either side, lay a spear. His breathing quickened. She pushed the filled cup to his side of the table.
He lunged over the table, slamming her back and rolling to one side as he grabbed the spear’s haft and yanked it free—
If thunder had shock rather than sound, it might lay a man flat.
Evidently, he blacked out.
When he came to, he was lying flat on his back with three spears—not the one he’d grabbed for—pressing into his chest. His right hand was in a hot flame of agony, and his mouth was as dry as if he’d not tasted liquid for days. His head throbbed.
“Let him up,” she said kindly.
The spears withdrew. He winced as he sat up. Grainy spots of light spun and flickered in his vision, and yet there sat the cloak on her pillow with the table arranged in exactly the same tidy way as if nothing had happened. Only a spot of moisture on the gravel betrayed where the cup had spilled. How long had he been out? The moon had not yet risen for him to mark time’s passage by its height in the sky.
“As you have just discovered, not even one who is veiled to my sight can hold a Guardian’s staff,” she said in her mild voice, lifting the pot. “Tea?”
He drank three cups in quick succession, and the spots faded and the pain ebbed, although his hand still hurt.
“What do you want? If I am meant as a hostage to force Hari’s obedience, why talk to me at all?”