Spirit Gate: Book One of Crossroads (39 page)

But Keshad had his own business to attend to, a wagon, mules, driver, and most crucially the goods he was transporting north over the Kandaran Pass to the Hundred. He had a very particular and complicated routine he must follow at night to keep his goods safe. So he dismissed the envoy of Ilu from his thoughts, and did no more than glance his way once or twice, until midway through the next day when the envoy, pacing the caravan, drew up alongside Kesh where he walked at the front of the line.

“Greetings of the day, nephew.”

“Greetings of the day, Holy One.”

As the two men walked along the ancient trading road, they talked. It was a good way to pass the time. Their feet scuffed up dust with each step. The rumble of cart wheels and the clop of pack animals and the laughter of a quartet of guards striding out in front serenaded them. Behind, the rest of the caravan clattered along. That ensemble of noises always seemed to Keshad the most reassuring of sounds when he was out on the road. If safety could be found in the world, then surely it was found where folk banded together to protect themselves from predators.

“In ancient days,” the envoy was saying, “the Four Mothers created the land known as the Hundred with its doubled prow thrust east and north into ocean and two great mountain ranges to the south and the west to protect the inhabitants from their enemies. The Mothers joined themselves with the land, and in that transformation seven gods emerged from the maelstrom to create order.”

Keshad shrugged. “So the story goes, at any rate.”

“Ah. You’re clearly born and bred in the Hundred.” The man touched his own left eye, as if to bring to Kesh’s attention that he had noticed the debt scar on Kesh’s face. “Yet you don’t believe the Tale of Beginning?”

“I believed it when I was a child.”

“You’ve gone over to the Silvers’ way of believing?”

“The Silvers? No, I don’t know anything about that.”

The envoy was old enough to be Kesh’s father, had Kesh still had a father; a man beyond his prime but not yet elderly.

“Something else, then. Hmm. Keshad is your given name, so you say. That means you were dedicated to the Air Mother at birth. Too much thinking. That’s often a problem with Air-touched children. In what year were you born?”

Kesh brushed his elbow, where his tattoo was. “Year of the Goat.”

“Even worse then! Goats are inconstant and unstable, prone to change their thinking, especially if they’re Air-touched and liable to think too much. Still, they can survive anything. Look at you, a young man, in the prime of your strength, good-looking, all your teeth—oh, no! missing one, probably from a fight.”

“That’s right. But the other man lost more! And he started it!”

“Happy is Ilu when he hears of those who gain justice!” The envoy grinned, and Kesh laughed. “Good eyes, not bloodshot or yellow or infected. Strong limbs, open stride. Health in order. It must be your Goat’s heart that is distracting your Air-touched mind.”

Kesh rolled his eyes, but he did not want to insult a holy envoy, who was a nice enough fellow, cheerful, lean, strong, and with an amazing set of white teeth that made his grin contagious. Obviously, the man was crazy.

“So, then, lad, you are born to be skeptical. How do you think the world came into being, if you don’t believe my tale?”

“I hadn’t given it much thought. I’m too busy wondering if we’ll be attacked on the road, and if the guards we hired will protect us. Or run.”

“That’s always a distraction,” agreed the envoy amiably.

Still, as the small merchant train and its armed escort trudged down the hip-jarring slope of the Kandaran Pass, Keshad studied the terrain of the rugged foothills where bandits lurked. He cast his gaze up at the spires themselves, shining in the afternoon sun. Light splintered off the snowy peaks. Clouds spun off into threads where they caught on summits and pinnacles. It was easy to imagine the fiery eye of a god glaring those formidable mountains into being as a warning to mortal man:
Do not cross me.

“The way I see it,” Keshad continued, “it doesn’t matter how the world came to be. It matters what path a man takes as he walks through the world.”

“A fine philosophy! Did you serve your apprenticeship to Ilu, perhaps? You sound like a Herald’s clansman.”

“No.”

“One of the Thunderer’s ordinands, perhaps? I see you carry a short sword and a bow. That’s not common among merchants.”

“I am not,” he said curtly, and was then sorry at his sour tone. The envoy had treated him with good humor and deserved as much in return. “I have spent a lot of time thinking about journeys, because of my own. For instance, a merchant has a choice of three paths to reach the markets of the Hundred.”

“Three paths? I would have thought only one.” The envoy indicated the road on which they walked, but his sharp gaze never left Kesh’s face.

“He can brave the seas—”

“And their treacherous currents! The roil of Messalia! Reefs and shoals!”

“That’s right. Or the desert crossing to the west over Heaven’s Ridge.”

“And thereby across the Barrens! There’s a reason they’re called that, you know!”

“That’s so. But it can be done, and folk do it.”

“True enough.” The man coughed. “So I hear.”

“Or he can pass this way, as we’re doing. Paying a tax to the empire for right-of-way on the Kandaran Pass, because it’s the only route leading over the Spires that we know of.”

The envoy’s steady gait did not falter, but his eyebrows rose in surprise and his voice changed timbre. “That we know of? You think there’s another way over the Spires?”

“If there was, and you knew about it, wouldn’t you keep it hidden?”

The envoy snorted and lifted his walking staff, letting its crest of silk ribbons flutter as he waved the staff toward the heavens. “That I would, lad! If I were a merchant, and prized profit above all things. Or one of the Lady’s mendicants, desiring secrecy. How comes it that you know so much about traveling into and out of the Hundred, if you’re not heart-sworn to Ilu the Herald, as I am?”

“I’m a merchant, and therefore I prize profit, so I’ve tried all three in my time—”

“Ah. As well you might, being an Air-touched Goat. Still, you’re yet a sprout. Young to be so well traveled!”

“Not so very young!”

“Three and twenty seems young to a man of my years!”

Kesh laughed. “Do you want to hear what I’ve concluded about the three paths?”

The envoy’s expression was full with laughter, although he did not laugh, and for some reason Kesh could not explain, the holy man’s amusement was not condescending but warm and sympathetic. “I’ve heard a great deal about you so far! Why stop here? Go on!”

“Well, then. I’ve concluded that while Death might find tax collectors amusing, She doesn’t often masquerade as one. Therefore: I choose taxes.”

“Taxes?”

“Best to risk taxes now, and death later.”

“As they say, both are certain. Still, I can’t help but think they’re gouging us.”

“Who is? Death’s wolves?”

That grin flashed again. “Death’s wolves aren’t greedy. They only eat when they’re hungry, not like the wolves among men. I mean the Sirniakan toll collectors, the ones we’ve left behind. Double and triple toll they charged me! Even a man such as myself who is only carrying two bolts of silk. Just because I’m a foreigner in their lands.”

“It’s true their tolls cut down on profits, but taxes are still preferable to death. A man can’t work if he’s dead.”

“So it’s said. Is that all life is for you? Work?”

Kesh looked back at his cargo. He’d rented the wagon, mules, and driver at great expense in the south, and spent yet more to rig up scaffolding and waxed canvas so his treasure would be concealed from the eyes of men, although naturally every person in the wagon train believed they knew what he had purchased. If he listened closely, he heard the two chests shifting and knocking together and the two girls whispering as the wagon juddered along. Otherwise, his cargo was silent and seemingly ignored by merchants and guardsmen and travelers alike, but he saw the way they glanced at his campsite in the evenings, every man of them. Wondering.

The envoy said nothing, waiting him out.

Kesh discovered he’d tightened his hand on the hilt of his own staff so hard his fingers hurt. He shifted the staff to his other hand and opened and closed his fingers to ease the ache.

“Work is the road I must take to reach the destination I seek,” he said finally, knowing the ache would never ease.

“Ah.” Again, the envoy brushed a finger alongside his own unscarred left temple. If he wanted to question Kesh about the debt mark, he kept his curiosity politely to himself.

“What of you, holy envoy? That’s a long way to walk just to buy silk, when you can buy Sirniakan silk in the markets of the Hundred. Had you no other purpose? Sightseeing?”

“As if any priest would wish to risk execution in the south just to see the fabled eight-walled city,” replied the envoy with a chuckle, easily falling in with Kesh’s change of subject. “Silk, it’s true, can be bought anywhere, but I was looking for a particular . . . grade and pattern.” His frown was startling for being so swift and so dark, but it passed quickly, and Kesh wondered if he’d mistaken it. “I did not find what I was looking for. Did you?”

The riposte took him off guard. “I’ll only know when we reach Olossi.”

“Who will you sell the girls to?”

“Girls?”

“The two girls.”

Keshad smiled nervously. “Whichever man will pay the most.”

The envoy glanced back at the wagon. His gaze burned; for an instant, Kesh thought the man could actually see through the canopy and mark the treasure Kesh had hidden all this way by using the time-honored method of illusionists: distract the gaze with the things that don’t matter so that your audience doesn’t notice the one thing that does. Ilu’s envoys were notorious, seekers and finders who noticed
everything
in their service to Ilu, the Herald, the Opener of Ways. They were always gathering news and carrying messages; the temples even sold information to support themselves.

Still, this was none of Ilu’s business. Kesh had come by this treasure as honestly as any man could. It was his to sell and profit by, his to use to get what he needed most. After so many years toiling, this trip promised to be the one that would at last bring him what he had worked for, over twelve long years.

It hurt to think of it, because he wanted it so much:
Freedom.

“Look there.” Perhaps the envoy meant the distraction kindly, seeing Kesh’s
distress, but even if this were so, it was just as obvious that the sight relieved him. “The first mey post. We have reached the Hundred at last.”

The white post had carved on it the number one, being the first mey of the road. Above that was engraved the name of the road, written in the old writing, more picture than letter, and recently repainted in the grooves with black ink:
WEST SPUR
.

The envoy padded to the side of the road to cover the top of the post with his palm. The mey post stood chest height. It was square at base and top but tapered so that the base was larger than the squared-off top where, in time of peril, the base of a wayfarer’s lamp could be fixed into a finger’s-width hole drilled deep down into the wood. At first the envoy stared north along the road, which began here its most precipitous drop out of the mountains. Then he shut his eyes and bowed his head in prayer as the seventeen carts and wagons of the merchant train trundled closer. When he looked up, he gazed toward the nearest prominence. A rugged mountain rose just off to the east with forested slopes and a bare summit surrounded on all sides by bare cliffs. Keshad thought he saw light winking up there, as if caught in a mirror, but when he blinked, the illusion vanished.

“Home,” said the envoy with satisfaction. He removed his hand and began walking again to keep ahead of the wagons. Kesh hurried after him. “And hope of a dram of cordial at the Southmost.”

Brakes grated against wheels as wagons hit the incline. Kesh looked back. The black mey marking, which had numbered one viewed from the south, numbered sixty-four seen from this direction: the distance of the road called “West Spur” from founding post to founding post. The other end of the West Spur lay a few mey outside the market city of Olossi, their destination. For him, this was the last road he would walk as the man he was now.

He felt sick with determination, with hope, with memory.

“I will let no obstacle bar my path,” he muttered.

“What? Eh? Forgive me, I didn’t hear.”

“It was nothing. Just thinking out loud.”

“Like the winds, to whom voice is thought, and thought voice.”

“No, more like a mumbling madman who doesn’t know when to shut up. There’s the border gate.”

Stone walls stretched east and west as far as Kesh could see, with miniature towers anchoring each side of the road. Armed men leaned on those narrow parapets, eyeing the approaching caravan. Below, by the log barrier, a pair of young ordinands lounged against the fence, laughing as they traded stories with those of the caravan’s guards who’d been walking point.

“Heya! Heya!” shouted their captain from the east tower. “Get you, and you, to your posts!”

The ordinands scampered back across the ditch on a plank bridge to take up their places at the second fence, this one gated and closed.

“The guard force has doubled since last time I came through here,” commented the envoy.

“Are they expecting trouble?”

“It’s always wise to expect trouble in border country.”

Kesh grunted in reply as he dug into his travel sack for his permission chits, his ledger, and the tax tokens he had received from the Sirniakan toll stations they had passed.

“If you’ll excuse me, holy envoy. I must see to my cargo. If you would be so kind as to share a cordial with me at the Southmost, I would be honored.”

“Indeed! I thank you. I’ll drink with pleasure!”

The envoy strode ahead. His staff, tattoo, and colors were chit and ledger enough. In the Hundred, the servants of Ilu could wander as they, and the god, willed. Only Atiratu’s mendicants had as much freedom. Kesh certainly did not. He dropped back. The forward wagons creaked and squealed as drivers fought against brakes, beasts, the weight of their cargos, and the steepening pitch of the road. It was a good location for a border gate. Any wagon that did not slow to a stop would crash into the ditch, and charging horsemen who cut off the road to avoid fences and ditch would shatter themselves against the stone walls.