Spirit Gate: Book One of Crossroads (44 page)

“This is none of your business! Move aside! Oh, by the Witherer’s Kiss, you fools!” he shouted at the lads. “You should have dragged him out from under the tree! Now I’m stuck with the cursed Lady tithe.”

Kesh rose and turned to Tebedir. “Watch the cart, if you will. If I have to stand and listen to this any longer, I’ll hit him.”

“Please hit,” said Tebedir. “That boy fought like brave man.”

“Pissing foreigners!” snarled the merchant. “Get out of my way!”

Kesh lifted a fist, and such a tide of loathing swept him that he hauled back—the merchant shrieked—and from the cart a female voice said words in a language Kesh had never heard before. It was like a bucketful of icy spring water splashed over him. He recovered; he remembered: Hit a man beneath a Ladytree, violating the Lady’s law, and you paid a fine to her mendicants. They always knew; you could never get around it. Pay a fine, and it was that much coin thrown away. He could afford to lose none of his profit, not now, not this time. Not because he was disgusted by a self-important, selfish jackal of a man who paid his lackwit servant in sticky buns since the poor boy was too ignorant and too stupid and now too dead to demand better pay.

Shaking, he lowered his hand, gave the bowl and cloth to Tebedir, grabbed his ledger and pouch, and strode away. The merchant began yapping after him, but Kesh walked fast and didn’t listen.

Dusk lay heavily over the commons. A cheerful fire burned in the outdoor hearth of the inn’s courtyard, and men gathered there, drinking, but no songs warmed the twilight and the talk looked intense but muted. No one laughed. Other merchants hunkered down beside their carts. A half-dozen hirelings prowled around the ranks of corpses, but a quartet of black-clad mercenaries guarded the dead men, and Kesh guessed that no one would strip those bodies, not tonight, not without permission from the mercenary captain or the reeve. He paused by the gate to look over the mercenaries from a safe distance, not so close that they might feel he was challenging them. A few were setting up crude tents, canvas stretched out as a lean-to over bare ground to provide shelter against rain and wind. A pair rode off toward the south gate. Others moved among the horses, unsaddling some and stringing their spare mounts along a line for the night. They watched the movement of merchants and hirelings and slaves in the commons in the same way that wolves study the behavior of deer in a clearing. They ignored the corpses, though Kesh could not. The souls of dead folk begged for release, and the longer they lingered here, the more likely they would get up to some mischief.

He touched fingers to forehead and lips, and patted his chest twice, remembering the words of the Shining One Who Rules Alone:
Death is liberation.

“There are no ghosts,” he said, as if saying it would make it true.

Too late he noticed a young man coming up to the gate carrying a full kettle of steaming barsh. He halted and stared at Kesh strangely, as if he’d heard the comment. Kesh opened the gate for him, and the young man nodded in thanks and hurried toward the mercenaries, looking back once. He was dressed differently, in loose trousers and a short kirtle bound at the waist with a sash. His red-clay coloring and pleasant features reminded Keshad more of his two Mariha slave girls than of the stocky riders with their flat, broad cheekbones, sparse mustaches, and predator’s gaze.

Inside the inn, the reeve had set up court. He had drawn up a table parallel to one end of the long room. Here he sat, stripped out of cloak and sleeveless vest and down to shirtsleeves, on a bench between table and wall, and seated beside him the man who must be the mercenary captain. The contrast between the two men made Kesh pause beside the door as he tried to decide whether to get in line with the other merchants being interviewed by the reeve, or grab a drink first to fortify himself against the coming interrogation.

The reeve had an easy way of talking to the merchants who laid out their ledgers and tallied their chits in response to his smiling questions. His manner suggested this was merely an inconvenience between friends. The other man was a stranger, reserved, removed, but aware of every action within the smoky interior. He glanced at Kesh, noting his scrutiny, and marked him with a nod before looking elsewhere. That he understood the words flying back and forth Kesh guessed by the way he would cock his head at intervals and glance sideways so as not to seem to be paying too much attention to the talk of cargoes and tallies. He had much the look of the Qin soldiers, but a striking nose and the shape of his eyes gave him the look of a man who has been twisted out of different clay. Kesh wasn’t sure which man made him more nervous: the genial eagle or the silent wolf.

The innkeeper sidled past, on his way to the door, and Kesh caught his sleeve and tugged him to a stop.

“Here, now, you old toad. Those two lads you sent were useless. There’s a boy dead beneath the Ladytree—”

“Thank goodness!” wheezed the innkeeper, trying to pry his sleeve out of Kesh’s grasp. “That’s none of my trouble, then. I have enough as it is!”

“As sour as your cordial! Where is the envoy?”

“Lying as peaceful as he can, out on the shade porch.” He recoiled, although Kesh did nothing but give him a disgusted look. “He’s under a shelter! If he dies under my roof it’ll cost me half my season’s profit for the purification ritual. I am not a cruel man, ver, but it will not help me or my family if I lose everything we have, will it?”

Kesh scanned the room. An elderly man was filling wooden mugs. A lad not more than ten was cleaning the floor where someone had sicked up. The rest of the staff, evidently, was outside clearing up from the attack.

“Can’t get good help, anyway,” continued the innkeeper as he weaseled his sleeve out of Kesh’s grip. “Used to be my good wife and a niece and daughter helped me instead of these cursed useless hired louts, but after the midnight raids of four year back we moved all the women down road by Old Fort. I was lucky. I know a man lost both his strong daughters that summer to the raids. The gods alone know what became of them, poor lasses. Something awful. If you’ll kindly let me get to my business, ver, I’ll see you get a cup of cordial.”

Kesh let him go as the reeve caught his eye and gestured, smiling as if they were old friends just now reunited. The innkeeper scurried away. Kesh pushed past a trio of grousing merchants and came up to the table as another man gathered up his ledger and chits, thanked the reeve profusely and, with an innocent man’s flush of honest relief, headed for the door with a mug of cordial in one hand.

“I forgot your name, ver,” said the reeve. “Sit down.”

“You never asked it.”

“In the heat of the moment, courtesy gets lost in the fire. I’m called Joss.”

“Fire-touched,” said Kesh, thinking of the envoy as he noticed the mark on Joss’s wrist: like the dead boy under the Ladytree, the reeve was born in the Year of the Ox. Kesh’s ken for numbers figured it up, unbidden. While the lad must be sixteen, this reeve was likely two cycles older, so he was forty.

Joss smiled. “ ‘A Fire-kissed Ox! You’ll drive me to drink, lad!’ That’s what any one of my dear aunties always said. I don’t think I was
that
wild. This is Captain Anji, who commands the guard of the caravan that was traveling behind you on the road. We’re all fortunate they happened to be close enough to help us out. I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name again.”

“I’m called Keshad.” It was best to set all his chits on the table immediately. He opened the ledger to the current page. “I’m a debt slave bound to Master Feden of Olossi.”

“Master Feden of Olossi,” murmured the reeve, gaze fixing on the tabletop as though to seek answers there, or to remember a thing he had forgotten. “Feden.”

“Do you know him? He’s a member of the Greater Council of Olossi. One of the most prosperous and influential merchants in Olossi, in fact.”

The reeve blinked, as though shaking awake, and he looked hard at Kesh. “How long have you been debt-bound to him?”

“Twelve years now.”

“Twelve
years? Did you know that on Law Rock it states that ‘When a person sells their body into servitude in payment for a debt, that person will serve eight years and in the ninth go free.’ ”

He shrugged. “Everyone knows that covers only the original debt. Not any debts accrued in the interval.”

“Is that what your master tells you?” asked the reeve in a tone Kesh couldn’t interpret.

“That’s the usual way. Have you heard different? Is it different in the north?”

The hard look on the reeve’s face made Kesh nervous, but the man shook it off quickly.

“No, I don’t suppose it is.” He ran a finger down the neat column of the ledger, turning back a page or three. Kesh doubted he could read, but any educated person knew the ideograms for common market goods, the directions, numbers, and so on. “A trusted slave, I see, running your own trip south and even into lands where Hundred folk don’t normally trade. Like Mariha.”

“I like to find goods that will make a profit.”

“For your master?”

“I must clear a certain amount for each trip. After that, I keep the rest of the profit for myself.”

The reeve glanced up at him, then touched each of the chits. “Getting close?”

“Yes.”

“After twelve years.” He was clean-shaven like a lot of the men north of the Aua Gap: Toskala-chinned, people called it. He rubbed his smooth Toskala chin against an arm, sighed, and scooped up the rare chit. “The Sirniakans call this an
exalted
token.” He tapped the last line of the ledger. “I see you invoked Sapanasu’s veil for your cargo. Care to tell me anything about that?”

“No.”

The reeve drew his finger up to the top of the page. “Whatever it is, it seems to have come your way in Mariha together with—” He clicked his tongue, studying the writing. “Females—two, young, unmarried. What’s this?”

“Saffron.”

“Ah. Oil . . .”

“Clove oil.”

“These here—mirrors. I don’t know what that is—”

“Shell dice. This one is ivory combs—thirty-two in number.”

“No silk! That’s unusual.” His finger slid back to the last line. “Isn’t that the mark for a bouquet of flowers? Or herbs of some kind?”

Kesh did not look at either of them. He kept his hands open, and was able to speak normally. “An aphrodisiac.”

The reeve nodded, with a hearty grin and chuckle that suddenly struck Kesh as so entirely false that he shuddered and found he’d curled one hand into a fist. All this time, the mercenary captain had watched and listened and made no sound or
reaction, like one of those stone monuments so old that any distinguishing marks have long since been worn off its face. This time he raised an eyebrow and said, in a cool, elegant accent, “Have the men of the Hundred need for such medicine?”

“We haven’t any women as beautiful as your wife, Captain,” said Joss, “or we should never want for desire.”

The captain smiled blandly to accept the compliment. He did not deny it.

“Where are you come from, Captain?” Kesh asked.

“I have come from the south. I hire my company out as caravan guard. This is our first trip to the Hundred.” Anji looked sidelong at Joss. “Maybe Hundred folk need guards to hire.”

Joss shrugged. “Maybe so. Times are hard.”

“I hear things are very bad in the north,” said Kesh, happy to see the conversation flow into safer channels.

“So they are,” said Joss with the merest flicker of his eyelids as he considered the north and what it meant to him.

“Maybe you know folk who are looking for honest men seeking employment,” said the captain.

Joss let the chit fall to the table and regarded the captain. The two men had level gazes, and the ability to look each at the other without it becoming a contest. They were different men, with different authority, not rivals.

“It’s come to this,” said the reeve, “that merchants moving goods along all roads in the Hundred need caravan guards. I’ll see what introductions I can make for you, in Olossi, in exchange for the good turn you’ve done me.”

“One, in exchange for another.” The captain extended an arm, and the men grasped, each with his hand to the other’s elbow: So were bargains sealed in the marketplace, where the worth of a man’s word was soon known to everyone.

“May I go?” Kesh asked.

“Certainly,” said the reeve as though he thought Kesh had left hours ago. “Just one thing.”

Kesh waited.

Pleasant expressions were traps for the unwary. The reeve wore one now. “An envoy of Ilu is dying out on the back porch. It’s a bad thing in any event, that a holy man is murdered in this way, and I take it more personally because I was dedicated for my year to the Herald, so it’s like one of my kinsmen breathing out his spirit a few paces from me. Here I was come too late to prevent it. That’s a thing that really burns me hard, coming too late.” His entire aspect shaded to an emotion so dark that Kesh took a step back, and that made the reeve take notice and that friendly smile crawl back onto his lips just as if he hadn’t a moment before looked furious enough to rip someone’s head right off. “Tell me, Keshad, did you witness the killing? Can you tell me what you saw? Leave out no detail. Mention everything you noticed.”

“There wasn’t much to notice. I retreated under the Ladytree to defend my wagon and cargo.” The best defense was a good offense; he remembered that now. “You can imagine that I didn’t want to lose what I’d bought in Mariha. I’m close—very close—to buying back my freedom, so you can imagine—” Even so, he choked on it.

The reeve nodded compassionately and took a slug of cordial while Kesh caught his breath and thought through his strategy. The captain did not drink.

“I stood there under the Ladytree hoping we wouldn’t be noticed because of the boughs. Or that ospreys wouldn’t blood sanctuary ground—scant chance of that! Anyway, men came riding our way, and that envoy just ran out toward us. At first I thought maybe he was in league with them, but he used his staff to bring down one of the horses and its rider, and then someone—I don’t know who—shot him in the back as he was running, and after that he was run over at least once by a pair of horses. I was busy by then. I didn’t see anything more.”