Spirit Gate: Book One of Crossroads (45 page)

The reeve asked, “Where do you think the envoy was running?”

“I thought toward the Ladytree, seeing as it is sanctuary ground. . . .” He timed his hesitation perfectly. “He couldn’t be sure the ospreys would grant him safe passage. But he may have been running elsewhere. I don’t know. I had my own troubles. We were attacked. My driver got wounded. That lad was killed. I should put in a complaint to you, now that I think on it, because the merchant who hired him looks like to shirk the burying tithe, and I’ll wager he’s got no interest in seeing the boy’s family gets any death tax due them. He was a brave lad, a little weak in the mind, if you take my meaning, but he stuck his ground as brave as any guardsman I’ve seen, not that he had a chance against the ospreys.”

Captain Anji had a little secret smile on his face that made Kesh turn cold inside. But the reeve said nothing, only stared into the depths of his cordial as if seeking the tiny stems that weren’t quite all strained out.

“Did you know his name?” the reeve asked.

“His name? Whose name?”

“The envoy’s name?”

“He never said, now that I think on it. They rarely do. I never thought—”

“Yes?”

“Just . . . it all came so fast, the attack, all of that. I really thought we were safe once we crossed the border.” He wiped his brow and found that his hands were trembling. “Can I go now? Is there anything else you want to ask me?”

The reeve shook his head. “No. You can go.” His smile was so cheerful that it was almost possible to believe they were two good friends parting after a sweet drink to chase down the day’s travel. “If I think of anything else, though, be sure I’ll ask.”

“I’m leaving at dawn.”

“So are we all. I believe your two caravans will be joining forces for the rest of the journey. I’ll be patrolling the West Spur as you go, so I can always drop in if I have any more questions.”

“I’ll go, then.” He nodded at both men and moved away, swearing under his breath, until he caught the innkeeper coming in from outside. “What about that cordial you promised me?” He glanced over his shoulder to see the reeve and the captain with heads bent together. The reeve glanced up at the same moment, saw him looking, and waved at him with the kind of bright, deceitful smile that cheating merchants paraded every day of their cheating lives. It reminded him of Master Feden.

“You’re hurting my arm,” whispered the innkeeper.

“Never mind the cordial. I’d like to see the envoy.”

There wasn’t much to see. The dying man had been carried out behind the main structure, and laid out on a table set up on a raised porch covered by a solid roof constructed of lashed-together pipe stalks and thatch-tree fronds, the kind of place where people congregated in the heat of the day to escape the sun. A single tarry lamp burned, suspended from a hook in the cross quarter beam. Its smell gave him a headache, but the glower of its light offered enough illumination to see. The envoy lay on his stomach with his blue cape bunched along his left side to make him more comfortable. Kesh crouched beside him. He gave no sign of life beyond the infinitesimal movement of one eye below its closed eyelid, as though he were dreaming.

“He’ll be dead by midnight,” whispered the innkeeper, too loudly, and—startled—Kesh fell on his butt, and put his head in his hands, and after a moment roused himself to get up.

“Has any effort been made to stem the bleeding?” he asked.

“Bleeding’s stopped. Just a bubble of air coming out. See it pop—there! I mark that means it hit his lungs. That’ll end him, no doubt.” He gestured toward the smoke swirling up from the tarry lamp. “That stink’ll fetch any mendicant close by, but if there is none of them near, then there’s nothing we can do.”

“You’ve no starflower? Soldier’s friend?”

“Wouldn’t know it if I saw it. Just herbs for flavoring food and the cordial spices, that’s all we’ve got here.”

Gingerly, Kesh traced a finger around the wound. It was deep and almost perfectly round, rimed with blood but barely oozing. Bruises were blooming all over the envoy’s bare back. The bright saffron-yellow tunic lay in pieces, discarded to one side.

“It’s the trampling that done him,” said the innkeeper. “I’ve seen men run over by horses who got up and walked in for a drink as easy as you please only to die in the nighttime after with no warning. Something gets broken inside. No way to heal that.”

“No,” said Kesh quietly, “no way to heal the things that are broken on the inside.” He touched the envoy’s grizzled hair, as much silver as black. “Is there a Sorrowing Tower here?”

“Nay, none here. He’ll have to be carted to Far Umbos. Another expense!”

“He had two bolts of finest quality silk with him,” said Kesh bitterly. “That should cover your costs.”

The bartender called from the back door. The innkeeper excused himself and hurried indoors.

Kesh was overcome by such a wave of exhaustion that for a moment he thought the blue cloak was slithering like a snake, as though something trapped inside it was alive. He dozed off. When he started awake, he remembered that the innkeeper was gone, leaving only him and the silent body. The envoy still breathed, slow and shallow. Something about the pale moon exposed in an inky sky and the harsh scent of the tarry lamp made Kesh shiver.

On the breeze he heard the sound of wagons rumbling in, and a few shouts of greeting.

“Farewell, uncle,” he murmured.

In the commons, the second caravan had arrived at last, led in by a pair of scouts. It was a bigger company than the one Kesh had traveled with, about thirty wagons and carts in all although it was too dark to get an accurate count even with hirelings and slaves trudging alongside with torches. There was even one heavily guarded wagon, a tiny cote on wheels rather like his own, but he could not be sure what treasure, or prisoner, was held within. There were another hundred of those black-clad guardsmen riding in attendance. Captain Anji led a substantial troop.

Kesh walked back to the Ladytree and his own wagon, where Tebedir kept watch. He dismissed the driver to get what rest he could. After emptying the girls’ waste pail out beyond the Ladytree’s boundaries and returning it to them, he stretched out on the ground. There he dozed, restlessly, waking at intervals to stare hard into the darkness.

He had to stay alert. Someone was looking for the treasure he was hiding. A thousand needles could not have pricked so hard. But there was nobody there, and all around him in Dast Korumbos the survivors and the newcomers slept the sleep of the justly rescued. If any ghosts walked, he at least, thank Beltak, could not see them.

“We keep our heads down,” Keshad said to Tebedir that dawn in Dast Korumbos as they harnessed the beasts and stowed the gear. “Stay away from the reeve. Don’t let that foreign captain or his wolves notice us. Heads down. Tails down. Walk quietly. Draw no attention to ourselves. Keep in the middle of the group.”

As soon as they left Dast Korumbos, a pattern developed: Each night the caravan halted where the reeve met them on the road, and each night Kesh built his fire, fed his slaves, and kept his head down, watching and listening but never venturing farther than he had to from his wagon. He heard the rumor that the faithless border captain, Beron, was being held as a prisoner, hauled along to face justice at the assizes in Olossi, but no one was allowed near that closed wagon, guarded as it was by a shield of grim wolves. Kesh had no desire to investigate. Best not to draw attention to himself. He was pleased to find himself assigned to the last third of the procession. They’d eat dust back here, but were perfectly placed to remain anonymous as the cavalcade lurched down the West Spur, moving north and east.

He looked for signs of that Silvers’ wagon that had gone on ahead, alone, out of Dast Korumbos, but he saw no wreckage, no sign of them at all. Either they’d got away free, or they and their wagon had been hauled off into the trees, never to be seen again.

At length the caravan rumbled down the long slope out of the foothills where the high mountain pine and tollyrake forest gave way to an open, grass-grown, and rather dry landscape with few trees. They came to Old Fort, a low hill where the remains of an ancient monument thrust up into the sky, looking rather like the mast
of a vast, buried ship. A palisade ringed the community at New Fort, rising beneath the gaze of the old ruin. The Olo’o Sea shimmered in the afternoon sun. The southern hills and eastern upland plains rimmed the waters of the Olo’o, but west and north the inland sea ran all the way to the horizon. Dogs lapped at the water and, finding it salty, shied back. Along the shore, fires burned merrily where families of fisherfolk smoked their catch beside reed boats coated with pitch to make them waterproof.

At Old Fort, the reeve left them and flew north. The merchants, bickering and complaining, found places in the camping ground built just beyond the palisade and its double stone watchtowers. Those merchants who had spent days walking in the rear of the cavalcade brought their grievance to the two caravan masters, and Kesh decided that he, too, had to demand a forward place lest folk wonder why he was content to skulk in the back. Others complained more loudly; he was quickly forgotten as the arguments ebbed and flowed. He waited at the back of the assembly. A man brought a complaint against a guardsman—not one of the Qin—who, the merchant claimed, had had sexual congress with one of his slave girls; three merchants carting oil of naya and barrels of pitch from the west shore of the sea begged leave to join the caravan; a dispute had arisen over payment for a driver and his teams. As soon as Master lad handed out new places in the line of march, Kesh left. At the camping ground, the fisherfolk were glad to sell their catch at an inflated price. For his party, Kesh cooked rice, with one fish shared between them.

He sat on the steps of his wagon to watch the sun set. Red spilled along the waters, painting a gods’ road where no mortal could walk. Much of the company settled down for the night, though a fair number felt safe enough to get drunk and sing.

Kesh was too restless to sleep. He sat late, marking the slow wheeling of the stars. The sigh of the water on the flat shore nagged at him all night, like his doubts and fears. Twice, he thought he heard the soft sound of weeping from inside the wagon, and twice, it ceased as soon as he rose, thinking to look inside. Shadows crawled along the shoreline. He saw a dark figure striding knee-deep far out in the quiet waters, a death-bright white cloak billowing out behind as though caught in a gale. He blinked, and it was after all only the light of the rising moon spilling along the sea. It wasn’t even windy.

In the morning, the caravan pushed north along the road, which took the upland route, always within sight of the Olo’o Sea. This good road, which he had walked before, was packed earth. The sights were familiar and comforting, the glassy stretch of sea to his left and the long rolling swells of the grassland to his right, shimmering under a wind out of the east. It was nice to walk in the front for a change. Each of the next five days, he marked the remaining four of the five fixed landmarks of the West Spur: Silence Cliff; the Scar; Rope Tree; the intersection with the Old Stone Road that led to the Three Brothers, the intersection that was the terminus of West Spur, the last mey post.

An hour after dawn, they passed the alabaster gates of the Old Stone Road. Other folk were also on the road and its attendant paths this early, most carting goods toward town: a girl drove a flock of sheep alongside the road; a dog trotted beside a
lone traveler with pouches and loose packs hung from his shoulders and belt; a cripple seated on a ragged blanket was selling oranges, but no one stopped to buy.

Kesh stepped aside from the line of march and walked over to touch the mey post that marked the intersection. The gesture made him think of the envoy of Ilu. It was strange how a brief acquaintance could haunt a man, even a man like himself who kept all those who wished to call him “friend” at arm’s length. He watched as the point of the caravan turned southwest onto West Track. It had taken nine days to travel the West Spur from Dast Korumbos. Now the three noble towers of Olossi shone in the distance, where the land sloped down to the wide river that snaked along the lowland plain.

Tebedir, making the turn, waved at him, and he left the mey post and hurried after.

On the long slow descent down the gradual incline, they maintained an excellent view of the mouth of the River Olo and its environs. The alternating colors of the patternwork of agricultural fields, cut into sections by irrigation canals, faded into the hazy distance to the north and west on the Olo Plain. The town itself lay upstream. The walled inner city was nestled on a swell of bedrock almost entirely surrounded by a stupendous oxbow bend in the river. There were walls of a sort even around the sprawling outer districts, but although Sapanasu’s clerks and Atiratu’s poets related stories of sieges and attacks fended off by the impressive inner wall works in days long past, the outer wall was little more than a palisade thrown up in stages to mark the slow outward crawl as Olossi “let out her skirts.”

“A disorderly town,” remarked Tebedir. “In the empire, all is laid in a double square. Every door and gate has a number and name.”

“With the Shining One’s aid, I will leave that place by tomorrow, and never return,” Kesh said reflexively. Olossi’s shortcomings did not interest him.

His gaze followed the winding river downstream to where the delta glistened with a dozen slender channels. Tiny fishing boats worked the estuary, sliding in and out of view among great stands of reeds. Even from this distance he saw the rocky island in the delta crowned with a compound of whitewashed buildings. The temple had high walls, four courtyards, and three piers: one for supplies, one for those coming to worship at the altar of the Merciless One, and one for those departing sated or scarred.

He was then and for a long time as he trudged beside the wagon almost delirious with fear and hope. He was sick and dizzy. To keep his balance he had to clutch one of the stout posts that held up the taut canvas cover that tented the wagon’s bed. He silently wept with longing, and fixed his gaze on the ground to watch his feet hit, one after the other and again and again. That repetition soothed him as he tramped along. The steady plodding impact of his feet, like the post, was something to cling to as he cut away his fears and hopes and ruthlessly consigned them to the furnace, where they burned; to the cold ice, where they grew a sheen of frost. He set them aside. He must not be weak. Not now.