“How can you know people were grazing sheep here this morning?”
“Uncle! If you look at the sheep droppings, they’re still—”
“I need no description! I grew up in the city. I don’t know sheep except to eat lamb on festival days.”
“You’d be warmer if you wore wool clothing.”
“Too hot for the delta! We scorned it as shepherds’ and woodsmen’s rustic garb. Nice for durable bags and blankets, but—”
“Uncle.” Her tone altered as she slipped her bow out of its quiver and stood, an arrow fitted to the string. Seeing and Telling were flying back from the distant altar, and a Guardian on a winged horse was following them. Had they been careless? Or was it inevitable they’d be hunted down?
“Move back into the trees, Kirit.”
She did not move. “I saw him before. On the rock with the others where they tried to kill Marit. He’s one of the corrupted ones. I’ll shoot him, like I did those soldiers. Do you remember when I did that by the sea, uncle? You told Marit we can’t wield blades against the children of the Hundred. But once an arrow leaves my bow, it’s not in my hand, is it? So maybe I can kill him. I’m a very good shot.”
The hells! Was this what he wanted?
Seeing and Telling cantered to earth. A man wearing the cloak of Leaves rode onto the grass, reining aside his horse to look them over. Kirit nocked her arrow and took aim, a terrible sight indeed with her pale complexion and deadly blue eyes. She did not release. The cloak was clever enough to stay out of range.
“I’ll go talk to him,” said Jothinin.
“You can’t talk to a demon,” said Kirit.
“He’s a Guardian. Or he ought to be.” With staff in hand, he paced through grass that brushed his knees, his cloak rippling atop the stalks. Seeing passed him, trotting toward Kirit, but Telling swung around, ears flat, as if wondering where he was going.
The man watched Kirit more than Jothinin.
“Greetings of the dusk, ver,” Jothinin called.
“I never saw you before,” said the man. “You’re the cloak of Sky. Night’s been looking for you. Do you want to join us?”
“Neh, I don’t suppose I do wish to join Night. But you’re welcome to ride with us. You might find our company more congenial, if you take my meaning.”
The man licked nervously at his lips. He had the slick palms of a merchant always sure he is about to lose a good deal. His gaze flickered erratically toward Kirit in a way that disturbed Jothinin. “That girl, she’s very young. And an outlander.”
“Older than she looks. She says she’s met you before.”
“Do you know where the cloak of Death is?”
“If I did, you can be sure I’d not tell you. My friend, you must know that I know what the situation is. What have you to say to me?” He scanned the horizon for signs of movement. Away to the west, he spotted three eagles, gliding in such high spirals that he could not tell if they were wild, or jessed with a scouting reeve.
“We could set a place to meet and talk further.”
“Where you might set up any kind of ambush. I see you have your staff.” He indicated the green sapling wand stuck in the man’s belt.
The man’s startlement brightened his face, and he grinned as abruptly as a child who unexpectedly answers a question correctly at school. “You must still be Jothinin, to know which staff I carry! Foolish Jothinin, so Night told us, although no one’s seen you for generations. She was sure you had given up long ago and released your cloak. She’s been seeking Sky. Now here you are. I’ve found you. I’ve done it right!” His pleasure in this triumph was disconcertingly childish.
Kirit whistled sharply, and Jothinin’s senses prickled at her warning. Foolish Jothinin, indeed! The cloak of Leaves rode alone now, but if he was searching for other cloaks he likely had soldiers nearby. If Marit and her allies were clever enough to figure out how to use other people to kill a cloak, then certainly Night had done so long ago. Indeed, now that he considered the matter, it was the only possible way Night could have taken control of the Guardians’ council and kept replacing newly awakened cloaks until she found ones she could corrupt.
How had he been so blind?
“Tell her to stand back!” cried the man, and then he reined around and galloped away.
Jothinin strode briskly to where Kirit had halted, having taken a few paces away from the woods. She tracked his flight with her nocked arrow.
“Kirit, keep your bow ready in case he has soldiers close by. I’m going to pack up our gear and saddle the horses. We’ll be departing immediately.”
“Uncle,” she said without shifting her gaze off the cloak of Leaves, “did you know there’s another person in the woods, watching us?”
He jerked as if he’d been struck, then bent back to tying up the kettle and bedrolls onto the back of Telling’s saddle as if nothing were amiss. “More than one? His soldiers?”
“Just one. Its heart does not whisper to me. Do you see that snake a few paces behind me? It might strike.” Her tone changed. “There he goes.”
The cloak of Leaves vanished over the nearest hill, in the direction of the unseen Crags. The sun set behind the high peaks in the west, its light across the meadow gilding the grass to a glossy gold in a last, tender kiss before nightfall. Jothinin, turning back, caught a slithering movement across the dark soil as a snake—easily as long as his outstretched arms—lifted its hooded head.
“Kirit,” he said softly, “do not move even a finger. That’s a very poisonous snake, and I can’t be sure it’s not simply a snake.” She was a courageous girl; she did not move, not even to look around at the threat hissing behind her.
He cupped hands at his mouth and called. “If it is you, Eyasad, why do you hide from us? You’ve no call to frighten the girl. I’ll chop that cursed snake in two, I swear it. She’s innocent, even if I am not.”
The snake’s hiss abated and it settled, not moving away but its hood vanishing.
“Kirit,” he said, “step away slowly, and saddle the horses.”
“I won’t leave you, uncle,” she said, her voice cracking.
“I’m not asking you to. But we must be ready to flee if cloak of Leaves returns with soldiers. Move now, very slowly.”
She slid her feet along the soil, and he sidestepped until he stood between her and the snake, which raised its head with an exploratory hiss.
“Eyasad,” he continued, “listen to me. You were first to see the danger. You were right, and we were not just wrong but foolish and blind. Night has indeed corrupted four of the other cloaks. Having therefore control over five staffs, she may destroy the four who remain. She has turned Sun, Leaf, and Blood although there remains a question about Twilight’s loyalties. We seek him. If we can assure ourselves he will turn to our side and walk the true path of the Guardians, and if you will join us . . . then we are five.”
“You are two, Jothinin. Not five.”
The pines clustered beneath a rockier spur of ground along an elongated hollow where richer soil had washed down over the ages to create a welcoming bed for deep roots. He did not see her because the gloom hid everything except the shadowy pillars marking the trees.
“I am one. Kirit is two, who wears the cloak of Mist. The cloak of Death seeks Twilight even now, to win him over. If you ally with us, we’ll be five. I beg you, show yourself.”
“A cloak in the hands of an outlander! No wonder it is so degraded, considering what a useless piece of chaff Ashaya was, easily led as well as stupid.”
Her voice was thinner than he recalled it, remembering her hearty laugh and robust singing. “You’re as blunt as ever, Eyasad. How I feared your tongue set on accounting my flaws!”
“You will have at your tiresome jokes all day if I do not stop you. Where is Death Cloak, if she is your ally? For I will tell you, Night pursued him who wore the Death Cloak above all of us, knowing him most likely to find a way to turn her strength against her and destroy her. What hap
pened to him I do not know. I think she captured him, and destroyed him, and that this Death Cloak you speak of, once a reeve, is merely another creature of Night. Why should she not fool you, as easily as you are to be fooled? What a cursed idiot you are, Jothinin! Flying in here in broad daylight, so lacking in common sense that you did not see the shepherds who, seeing you, fled to warn me. Have you any idea what you’ve wrought?”
“Neh, but I expect I am about to hear.”
From back by the horses, Kirit hissed, rather like the cobra, and to his surprise, the snake crawled away into the darkness, lost among the bracken as Eyasad spoke bitter words.
“For generations I have labored to build a haven for folk to live free of the corruption of the Guardians. Now I am betrayed. I must move all my people lest they be discovered and slaughtered. Yet where will they be safe, eh? Is any place safe from the Guardians?”
“The land will become safe if we make it safe by restoring the Guardians’ council!”
“Do we execute the other Guardians at our whim just as Night did? And thereby become like her?”
“Do we stand passively aside and let her destroy us?”
“Either way, she has already won.”
“What would you have us do?” he cried.
“It is better to do nothing.”
“To do nothing when you see a man being killed, if you could act to stop it, is the same as standing among those who kill him.”
“To do nothing is to refuse to participate in what is already corrupted.”
“We are commanded to act!”
“Strange words, heard from you, foolish Jothinin, who was once nothing more than a gossip and games-player, a trifle among men, not worthy of comment except in the manner of your death.”
“I am not the man I once was. I have changed.”
“Grown older, anyhow. Once you had a youthful face.”
“Aged, I grant you, over the long years, because I have avoided the altars to avoid Night and her allies. Eyasad, I beg you—”
“I am done with the Guardians’ council. If we were betrayed once, then we can be so again. Why should there be Guardians at all, if they can be corrupted?”
Kirit padded up beside him, the bow held in her competent hands. Her voice emerged more strongly than he had ever heard it. “It is wrong not to act when there is suffering. Why do you reject us?”
“Because you have brought my enemies down upon me. Sheh! All that I have built, in ruins! Because of you! What can I do now? Who can aid me?”
“If we work together—”
“Enough! I am quit of you. Do not seek me out again.”
During their conversation, night had swallowed them. Too late, he called light and plunged into the pine woods, but for all that he searched, he found no trace of Eyasad’s passing. When he returned to the ashes of the fire, Kirit had the horses ready.
“Has Night corrupted her?” Kirit asked, her face ghostly above the light she had called from her hand to guide him back.
“Only if despair is corruption.”
“I lived once in despair,” Kirit said softly. “When I lived there, I was not a person and not a demon. I was a ghost. Maybe she is a ghost, too.”
“Eiya!” He smiled gently. “Maybe. Yet she speaks of people she has built a haven for. She may reject us, but she still acts as a Guardian.”
“What if she’s right about the Guardians? Why should any of us, you and me, look into the hearts of others? Isn’t it like violating them?” She spoke the words so calmly that he winced, thinking of what she had endured in the long months she had been a slave.
“Not if we act for justice.”
Her gaze pinned him because she had no guile, nothing but the memory of pain whose hot grasp she had escaped. “If they do not give permission, then does it matter for what reason it is done?”
The light of the gleaming stars looked angry tonight, or maybe it was only the prickle of his own heart, stabbed by doubts.
“Uncle, for a long time, I could not fight and I didn’t know how to die. That was worse than dying. So I don’t fear death. If we are truly Guardians, then we must risk our lives to help those who are fighting the demons. You already said so! To do nothing when you see people being killed, when you could act to stop it, is the same as if you are killing them yourself.”
He did not answer. He had no answer.
“So you see,” she went on inexorably, “Marit is the one who is right. If the cloak of Earth will not help us, we have to use the other plan.”
23
NORTH OF THE Liya Hills lay the plain of Herelia, its fertile fields fed by the River Vessi and its tributaries. Marit didn’t know Herelia well; it hadn’t been in her patrol territory. Its two major towns were Malinna and Laripa; its port city Dast Elia. At the base of the Liya Pass Road, the messenger turned in the direction of Laripa, riding through well-tended countryside as Marit kept pace above.
Two days later, on a bright and pleasant morning, they approached a town still under construction on the banks of the River Vessi. She raced ahead; at his lagging pace, he would not reach Wedrewe until midday. She flew a circuit over the town’s layers: outermost, a swath of woodland clearly off-limits to felling where a hunting party crashed in pursuit of game, horns blatting; deep within the forest cover pits had been dug and filled over with loose soil, although from the height it was difficult to figure what they were for. At the woodland edge stood a perimeter fence and guard towers enclosing fields and orchards and corrals and gardens and tanning yards and smithies. On a backwater shore, rafts of logs lashed together were being beached and hauled up to lumberyards. A second wall ringed districts of humble row houses, its access funneled through guard gates. The third wall marked out open ground where company upon company of men drilled. Barracks and storehouses ran in ranks along the outside of the fourth and innermost wall, within which lay spacious grounds and gardens that resembled the temples of the gods and yet showed no allegiance to any. This vast inner compound was square, like Kotaru’s forts, approached through triple-linteled gates as were Ilu’s temples. It was roofed with green slate to reflect the Witherer’s fecundity, and boasted handsome private gardens as in Ushara’s realm. The symmetry of the buildings reflected Sapanasu’s orderliness, and a young Ladytree, Atiratu’s refuge, had been planted beside each of the four gates. In the center of all lay a walled garden surrounded by covered porch on all sides whose open ground was neatly raked around a flat-topped boulder—like those sacred to Hasibal, the Formless One—half buried in the ground.
She saw not a single temple or even a humble roofed altar. There was no Sorrowing Tower to lay the dead, and no Assizes Tower for justice, but there were watchtowers in plenty.
The inner compound hummed with the buzz of steady work being carried on beneath tiled roofs: the brush of scribes writing, the clacking of beads on counting racks, the beat of a stamp pressing metal for coins or medallions. Now and again a person garbed in a fine silk jacket or taloos made his or her way from one building to another, or passed a token to the guards at a gate in order to descend into the outer rings of the city. Wagons moved goods into store houses whose roofs were still being tiled. In one of the private gardens, straddling a bench, a man and a woman were engaged in strenuous sex. In another, a pair of men moved stones on a checkerboard, at their ease under an awning while out in the sun slaves made sticks of incense.
In the deserted central garden, she brought Warning down. The mare’s hooves stirred up the neatly raked lines in the gravel. She dismounted and led the horse over to and up onto one of the four long porches that faced the courtyard. Standing at the mare’s head, she embraced the beauty of the humble garden as she inhaled the scent of late-blooming sweet-gold.
A whiff of fetid air brushed her nose. A whisper hissed and faded. She was not alone.
On three sides the porches were lined with barred doors built with hinges like smaller models of the hinged double gate in the northeast corner. Marit paced the le
ngth of the porch. Behind every hinged door was confined one, sometimes two, people: sleeping, weeping, moaning, muttering disjointed words, some mute with a despair that stung like poison on her skin. This was no meditative court, remarkable for its exquisite tranquillity. It was a prison.
At the end of porch lay a storeroom with racks of shelves. She grabbed a rake and erased hoof-and footprints until Warning gave a snort that cut through her crazed fit. What in the hells was she doing? Best just to get out of here. She raked her way back to the porch anyway. As she was hanging the rake back up on its pegs she heard voices and the thump of a door. The storeroom was large enough to accommodate Warning, and the mare ducked into the space willingly, as into a stall. Windows cut under the eaves allowed light and air to enter; she could count the shelves and the gardening tools and the other implements; there were many knives, lovingly polished and cradled on silk, and bundles of short staffs. Reeve batons. Ten bundles, at least. How in the hells did they have a hundred or more reeve batons?
“Who are you?” A man’s muffled voice came from the adjoining cell. “You’re not one of the guards.”
Aui! “I’m—eh—a gardener.”
“You aren’t. There’s a horse with you, yet the gates didn’t open.”
“Are you a prisoner?”
“I am. There are forty-three prisoners being held here, maybe more. The cells opposite are for criminals. To the left are rebels. This wing is meant for those accused of being gods-touched, which they call cursed, but they killed two some days ago and there’s been none brought in since. Now they’ve an overflow of other folk stuck on this side.”
“And what are you? A criminal, a rebel, or gods-touched? You’ve an odd way of speaking, ver.”
“I’m an outlander. Who are you, with your horse who can enter a courtyard through closed gates? Who hides her horse in a storeroom, and rakes away the tracks she’s left on the gravel?”