Spirit Gate: Book One of Crossroads (34 page)

“Most likely, we’ll never know.”

THE DREAM ALWAYS
unveils itself in a gray unwinding of mist he has come to dread. He is walking but cannot see any of the countryside around him, only shapes like skeletal trees with leafless limbs and branches—cold-killed, as they call them in the Arro Highlands, where, beyond the kill line, the trees wither in the dry season and are reborn when the rains come. In the dream he is dead, awaiting rebirth. He is a ghost, hoping to wake up from the nightmare twenty years ago, but the dream has swallowed him.

The mist boils as though churned by a vast intelligence. It is here that the dream twists into nightmare. The mist will part, and he will see her in the unattainable distance, walking along a slope of grass or climbing a rocky escarpment, a place he can
and must never reach because he has a duty to those on earth whom he has sworn to serve.

It begins. Wind rips the mist into streamers that blow and billow like cloth, like the white linen and silk banners strung up around Sorrowing Towers where the dead are laid to rest under the open sky. He begins to sweat, waiting for the apparition. For Marit.

A foot scuffs on pebbles.

He jerked awake, rolled, grabbed his baton, and came up to find the Snake crouched beside him with his knife out.

“So it’s true,” said the Snake in a murmur. “You do have nightmares. You do murmur a woman’s name in your sleep, only not the one you’re sleeping with.”

The stars were brilliant, filling the heavens like a ripe field of glittering grain. Peddo was snoring softly, and the wind was loud in the trees.

“What—?” began Joss angrily.

The Snake touched his shoulder to hush him. “Someone is climbing up the ridge.”

Joss couldn’t hear anything over the shurr of wind among branches. Even the eagles were silent at their rest, all three hooded. It was long past the middle of the night, coming toward dawn if he measured the position of the constellations correctly: The Weeping Boy was falling out of the zenith toward the west, and the Peacock with his spangled tail was rising in tandem with a quartering Embers Moon.

Volias uncurled gracefully to stand. He cocked his head to one side, the motion visible against the faint backlight of the night sky. And there, just there, as the wind died off for a moment, Joss heard a scuff off to the right where the slope dropped steeply away. Then a gust rattled leaves, and the sound vanished.

He rolled up to his knees and drew his knife. Volias nudged Peddo gently with a foot, and damned if the waking reeve didn’t cough and snort and startle like a drunkard.

“Eh? Whazzit?”

The noise might as well have been drums and bells and horns, because after all that, although they stood watch in the interval until dawn, there came no further sound, nothing at all. In the morning when it was light enough to see and they explored a bit down the steep slope and afterward flew a pair of full rings around the area, they saw nothing and no one. No one at all.

Horn Hall was eldest of the eagle clans, thus “horn” for the first substance turned into tools, according to the Tale of Fortune. Its eyrie had been built into the rugged cliffs at the rim of the Aua Gap, about three mey from the town of Horn that sat athwart the juncture of three major roads: the Flats, West Track, and East Track. From its high vantage, Horn Hall’s reeves were well placed to patrol north onto the Istrian Plain, south into the high plains grassland, or east and west into hill country. The place was impossible to storm on foot or horseback because it was cut into a
daunting escarpment, and laid out atop the windswept height, which no person could reach unless she could fly.

So they came circling first at a polite distance, waiting to be marked by the watchers on the towers. When no reeves flew out to inspect them, they tightened their circle until at last Joss signaled the others to remain in the air while he went in.

Reeves got used to the wind, but this buffeting swirl of updrafts and eddies and cross-currents made landing tricky, so he shied away from the broad ledge just below the lip of the cliff, which let onto caves, and set down instead on the wide and windy open space along the top of the ridge. Here watchtowers creaked under the onslaught of shifting gusts, and hydra-headed wind vanes spun. This was the parade ground, the whole damned ridgetop. There were a couple of lofts suitable for housing travelers out of other clans, but the constant noise of the wind battering those walls would drive any reeve crazy. A pair of open-sided shelters with sturdy roofs provided shade. Latrines had been built over a crevice split into the rock. Many stone cairns were piled up at the edge as well as a dozen squat perches fixed at intervals along the parade ground, all places for eagles to land. A huge hole gaped in the rock, off to one side; it was roped off so a person wouldn’t accidentally fall in.

The place was deserted. Scar shifted, head up, looking around without any of the hackling or flaring he would have displayed were there unmet eagles nearby. The wind vanes slowed, halted to point west-southwest as the wind steadied. Grit skittered along the rock. A moan came from the forward watchtower as the wind found a voice within the framework.

Joss left Scar on a perch, with his beak to the wind. He walked a circuit, checking first the open shelters and then the lofts. They weren’t stripped bare. Each of the shelters housed a pair of benches pinned down with screws into the rock so they wouldn’t blow loose. The lofts included a dozen perches as well as tiny sojourning rooms, each tidily set to rights with a rope bed, a low table, hooks to hang clothes and harness, and the closets with their doors neatly slid closed and, inside, containing one folded mattress, a sitting mat and thin sitting pillow, and a bronze pitcher and bowl for washing up. He wiped a finger through dust, and judged that no one had stayed here for a while.

Like most reeves who had survived twenty years, he had a finely honed sense for trouble, for unseen watchers, an instinct for ambush, the things that made the back of his neck prickle, but the flavor here was all dead. He returned to the open space and signaled to Peddo and Volias to hold their positions. They signaled back the all-clear.

A stairway, cut into the side of the cliff, led to the wide ledge beneath. There was no railing, and despite his head for heights he got dizzy descending the stairs. He kept his hand on the rock to steady himself. He didn’t look down. He could have flown down, of course, but he just didn’t like the situation. He didn’t want Scar on that ledge with those tricky winds; best risk only himself, because Scar would chose another reeve, although preferably someone with a better personality than the Snake.

The ledge was itself as long and wide as the parade ground in Clan Hall, the shape of a huge oval. A rock wall, rimmed with perches, ringed the outer edge. According to the Tale of Struggle, this rock eyrie had always been here, but he wondered how such a thing had been hewn out of hard rock, and especially how the
work could be done so high off the ground. His footfalls clapped on the ground; there was some kind of echo off the cliff face, subtle and confusing.

The place looked recently swept. At any instant, he expected a reeve or hireling or hall slave to walk out of one of the five gaping cave mouths, the entries to the eyrie within. But no one did.

He walked to the wall and stood with hands on the grainy surface. Morning shadows darkened most of the ledge, but the rising sun was now high enough that it kissed the leading edge. Soon the whole place would be flooded by sun, and by midafternoon in this season, Furnace Sky, it must be hot enough to bake flatbread out here.

The view was tremendous. Only the east was closed to him by the cliff at his back and, of course, the Ossu Range behind that, running east all the long mey to the Istrian Bay and the ocean. Here at Horn Hall, facing west-northwest, he looked across the broad saddle of the Aua Gap to the magnificent face of Mount Aua some ten or fifteen mey distant, visible this morning in the clear, bright air. South onto the high plains there was already a haze, but a couple of mey to the north under the shadow of the last spur of the Ossu Range lay the whitewashed walls of the city of Horn, barely visible from this angle.

Peddo dipped down, flying past through the gulf of air; it was a drop of at least a hundred batons to the scree-laden slope that marked the base of the cliff. Off to either side the ridge fell into folds and ravines, just as deadly. To the south, out on the rolling grasslands, grazed a herd of beasts, hundreds of them, but from this distance he couldn’t mark what kind they were or if they were being shepherded by human agency.

Joss turned away from the view and walked in through the highest mouth, into the high hall where he had jessed and hooded Scar years ago on a visit to Horn Hall, then busy with reeves and eagles and hirelings going to and fro. The big hole on the height opened into this chamber, flooding it with light; he’d forgotten about that. He walked on into adjoining passages, all carved out of the rock by hands that must have labored for endless years. Most likely they’d been delved; no one else could do this manner of work. In a nearby chamber, a vast space lit by arrows of light that shot down through slits cut into the air-facing wall, the reeves and their guests had taken their feast. There were lofts for the eagles, quiet and dim. There were three chambers linked into a row given over to the care and manufacture of tack and harness. Next to them, with its own entrance onto a smaller ledge actually on the other side of the ridge, lay the kitchens. The hearths were cold. The pots were stacked neatly. No one had cooked here this morning.

He explored down a corridor lit by cunningly angled shafts along which lay rooms for Horn Hall’s reeves. Every one had a blanket folded at the end of the bed, and a table with a lamp or whittling knife or spoon or cup set on it, or the other little things that marked something of the character or habits of the reeve who slept here: a half-sewn glove; a set of ceramic bowls painted with scenes of acrobats; a leather vest hung from a hook, stained at the underarms and with a musty smell; a basket covered with a striped cloth, beneath which he discovered a cache of handsome dolls gotten up to represent each of the fourteen guilds; a set of dancer’s wristlets and anklets tucked beneath the two wool blankets folded at the end of the
bed; a whip, left right out in the middle of the floor; a forgotten loaf of bread tucked in the back of one of the freestanding storage closets, quite desiccated now and almost as hard as stone.

It was as if they’d all grabbed their traveling cloaks, packs, and weapons, and left at dawn, for there wasn’t any dust to speak of. Horn Hall was well kept and well supervised. Even the sliding doors on the closets moved effortlessly, recently oiled. He felt like a ghoul, desecrating the body of the dead.

The master’s cote had a separate entrance, but it was a place so bare of any personal touch—there wasn’t even a change of clothes in the tiny closet—that he could make no guess as to what kind of woman, or man, it was who was now marshal at Horn Hall. If that swordsman hadn’t been lying about that, too.

Farther back lay storerooms and the stairs that led down into the depths of the cistern, but it got dark too quickly and he’d left his lantern tied to the harness. A cursory search did not turn up the halls’ store of candles, rushlights, or oil lamps. The air moved softly through hidden vents, and the whole place breathed an uneasy peace, the calm of a spot where the storm has just passed, maybe, and has swept everyone away, or one where the folk have abandoned their home to escape the storm they know is coming.

Gone altogether beyond.

That line from the Tale of Struggle, in the episode of the cunning outlander, had always stuck with him. He had no idea what it meant—or at least, what the cunning outlander had meant by using it—but he felt now that he understood it in a way meaningful to him, at this moment. Maybe he was crazy, and probably he was, but it seemed to him stepping at last back out onto the ledge, now half covered in blinding sunlight, that the soul of Horn Hall had fled together with its inhabitants.

This time Volias and Peddo were both circling within sight of the ledge, watching for him. He gave them a wave and trudged back up the stairs. This time, the lack of a railing did not bother him. He could have tumbled forever into the gulf of air, and then he would have sprouted wings, and come safely home.

“
THERE’S SOMETHING ALTOGETHER
strange here,” he said after the other two landed on the parade ground. “It’s deserted.”

“All gone out on patrol?” asked Peddo. “That doesn’t fit protocol. There should be three duty reeves left on hall at all times.”

“Best we ask at the town,” said the Snake.

“Best we do,” said Joss.

HORN WAS NAMED
after the hall, or the hall after the town. No one was sure.

This was sure: The folk working in the fields ducked and scattered when the three reeves approached overhead, and the militia standing at guard on those whitewashed walls took up their bows and loosed warning arrows.

No arrows came close, but the shock of having arrows shot after them at all hit Joss so hard that he spent some wasted time circling high over Horn’s sturdy walls and knotted streets trying to sort it out into any pattern except the obvious one: The people of Horn did not trust reeves. And how in the hells had that come about?

At last he set a course out to the crossroads where the Flats, West Track, and East Track met, not more than half a mey from Horn’s gates, and circled there over the wreckage of a line of wagons that, by the look of them, had been burned and upended recently. Folk in the nearby fields retreated, bunching into groups for safety or grabbing their tools and running back toward the gates.

He wanted to investigate, to see if he could estimate how long ago those wagons had burned, but they were still visible to the militia’s watchful eye since the town lay upslope with no woodland to break the line of sight. Instead, he turned south with Peddo and Volias off to either side, and they flew along the empty road and fields that, out of eyeshot of the walls, had been left fallow. This was a landscape of smooth ridges and hollows that rolled like sea swells out beyond the breakers. They had flown for not more than a mey when they crossed over a tumble of old boulders and outcrops where the soil had worn down to expose ancient seams of rock. Peddo’s whistle blasted within moments of the Snake flagging an alert.