Spirit Gate: Book One of Crossroads (50 page)

He had lost the desire to revenge himself on his aunts and uncle. They were meaningless; like the old ruins to be found along every road, they mattered nothing to the caravan of life that must proceed on its way to its next destination. He was so close to success that he felt tears, and gulped them down, and shook as with a palsy. He knew suddenly and with complete conviction that the litter would be gone or the treasure vanished. How could he have left it alone? Had he really been that stupid?

But after all here it came, swaying raggedly with four bearers off-step and ungainly as they crunched over the gravel to set the litter down in the midst of the open space, about halfway between the edge of greenery and the centerpiece fountain. As Kesh approached, everyone except Bai and the Hieros backed away.

“The payment.” He hooked back the curtain, reached in, and grasped the first thing his hand came to, which was a braid. He tugged.

She came unresisting, as she had all along, and stepped out into full sun. She raised no hand to shade her eyes. Her body was hidden beneath her only piece of clothing, a voluminous cloak woven of a silverine cloth. She blinked several times as the light struck; that was all.

Breaths were caught short, or taken in hard. Several people skipped back, and one voice whimpered in fear.

“A ghost!” whispered the Hieros, crossing her forearms away from her chest to ward off the ill omen.

“Touch her. She is no ghost.”

He pulled the cloak back, each wing over one of her shoulders, and heard their moans of fear and gasps of surprise—and their sighs—as her body was revealed, as pallid as marble, as smooth as goat’s milk and as creamy. Her hair both above and below was as pale as a field of harvest-ripe grain. Her eyes were not natural eyes. They were cornflower-blue. Demon-blue.

“What I offer, you must accept,” he finished.

Bai grinned in a way that terrified him suddenly. She leaped across the clearing like a cat, halting in front of the Hieros. With a laugh, she slapped her, a crack across that old face.

“Bitch! I’ve been waiting to do that for twelve years!”

No one moved.

Without lashing out in her turn or even losing her temper, the Hieros spoke. “Do what impulse tells you, Zubaidit, but it will make no difference in the end. You are meant for the Devourer. You will see.”

Bai spat onto the pebbles. Grinning with a vicious glee, she tugged her slave bracelets from her wrists and dropped them on the ground.

“I’ll meet you at Leave-taking Pier,” she said to Kesh. She dashed away into the greenery under an arched lacework of flowering vines. In her wake, the two ginny lizards rattled away into the undergrowth.

No one spoke, and no one moved, all in thrall to the vision standing among them, no stunning beauty, not like Captain Anji’s wife—nothing so pallid could truly be deemed beautiful—but a thing of horrible and irresistible fascination. A whirlpool into which all are dragged and can never fight their way out. She was an evil thing, and Keshad knew it, but he did not care. He was rid of her, and by this means had gained everything he cared about in the wide world: his freedom, and his sister’s freedom. The temple could take care of itself.

The Hieros shook out of her stupor. She glided up to them and circled the slave as she would circle a poisonous snake. She hitched the cloak up and looked over the slave’s backside, and after a long moment she reached a hand and, after the merest hesitation, brushed her fingers over a forearm. The slave did not even flinch, only stared unseeing toward the green tangle of a witch hedge.

“Where did you get her?” the Hieros asked.

“At the edge of a desert so vast you cannot imagine it.”

“I can imagine a lot of things,” said the lanky girl, giving a lazy and lustful hum.

“Shut up!” hissed her companion. He was not laughing, but staring at the slave as if a hammer had hit him.

“A desert of stone and red sand. She was wandering, lost, as mute and blank as you see her now.”

“Insane!” The Hieros ventured to pinch the lean curve of that hip. If the girl felt the pull of those fingers, she showed no sign.

“But compliant!” he said hastily. That she might be insane had often occurred to him over the course of the journey. It was the only reasonable explanation.

“How do you know she is compliant? Did you go into her yourself?”

As Bai had, he spat on the pebbles, and the Hieros flinched away from him with a look of such anger that he shivered.
She will seek revenge.

So he smiled, to taunt her. “You know what they say. It’s bad luck to spit in your own trading goods. Men—and women—will come to see if they can bestir her. And even if they can’t stir her, if she remains as limp as a puppet in their arms, they’ll still come.”

“Oh, yes. I can see it.” She rubbed her hands, but he couldn’t tell if it was the thought of caressing that white flesh that bestirred her, or the thought of so many worshipers waiting at the gates for the chance to gaze on—or touch—this living ghost with her demon-blue eyes. “Better than any aphrodisiac, indeed. I acknowledge that this covers her debts.”

“I want Bai’s accounts bundle, properly sealed and marked off.”

The Hieros stepped back to face Keshad. She was truly a devotee of the Merciless One. He could see it in the set of her face, cold and cruel and passionate, devoured by the goddess until not even her soul was her own.

“You have earned an enemy today,” she said as if these were the kindest words she had ever spoken, “and you will come to regret it, but you are correct that this payment cannot be refused. Take what you have paid for. All will be sealed legally.” She smiled gently, but her eyes were like stones in that handsome old face. “Be sure that if I ever have a chance to repay you for taking from me my most valuable hierodule, I will do so swiftly and with pleasure.”

“Do what you must.” Kesh’s limbs were loose, his jaw relaxed, and his heart calm, now that it was over. “As I did.”

THEY HAD LEFT
Kartu Town and the desert far behind. They had escaped the Sirniakan Empire. Now, after many days traveling over the high Kandaran Pass, the caravan halted at a wall and border crossing guarding the road into the Hundred. In the Hundred, they would find good fortune, or disaster. Shai just didn’t expect things to happen so quickly.

At the border crossing, a huge eagle carrying a man landed in their midst, frightening the horses and astonishing even the Qin soldiers who could not, Shai thought, be astonished by anything. After consulting with the eagle rider, Captain Anji commanded his troop to take control of the border crossing. The fight that ensued blew over quickly when the border guards realized it was their own captain who was corrupt. They surrendered to the authority of the eagle rider and handed over their captain at spearpoint. After this, in accordance with an agreement reached between Anji and the eagle rider, half the Qin company galloped north along the road to a tiny way-station village where, so they were told, a smaller caravan had come under assault by bandits. Shai rode with them, under Tohon’s supervision.

The Qin slaughtered the bandits with the efficiency of a wolf pack cutting out and bringing down the weakest deer. Two men suffered slight wounds, and were roundly ridiculed for their lack of skill.

“They’ll ride as tailmen tomorrow!” said Chief Tuvi, laughing.

The soldiers dragged the dead bodies into rows, clearing the commons so the big caravan coming up behind would have space to settle in for the night.

None of this amused the new-made ghosts of the slaughtered bandits. They were angry, all right; no one liked suffering violent death. At dawn they were still angry, milling around the commons shaking their fists and cursing and weeping, and pissing on the living, not that ghosts could actually piss, but the gesture both comforted and infuriated them—an impotent defiance. They clustered in great numbers around the wagon where the prisoner—their co-conspirator who once called himself a captain—was kept under guard, but since ghosts are fixed to the earth, they had no way to reach him, who was concealed within the bed of a covered wagon, raised up on wheels.

As Shai went to get a drink of water at the rain barrel, well away from stacked bodies, he pretended not to see the commotion the ghosts made. Thwarted of their prey, the ghosts churned through the open ground and wandered among the merchants, servants, and slaves they had so recently terrorized, but this unworthy audience was oblivious of the wisps haunting them. Captain Anji prowled the
caravan as the two caravan masters argued over who should take precedence and in what order wagons and carts should be shifted into a new line of march. Now and again Anji sidestepped to avoid a misty stream of ghostly rancor. Crude men, these Hundred folk. Civilized ghosts had better manners, although their language was just as bad. The corpse of a youth lay beneath the huge tree growing on one side of the open ground, but his spirit had fled, leaving the husk. At least someone was at peace today.

On a cleared space of ground, the eagle rider set a bone whistle to his lips and blew a shrill blast. Shai slurped from the ladle, saw Mai watching the reeve. Seeing Shai, she came over. North of the border, she walked openly as a woman.

“What do they say?” She took the ladle from his hand, dipped, and drank neatly.

“What do who say?”

She hung up the ladle from its hook. A pair of drops stretched off the curve of the cup, parted, and fell onto the glassy surface. Drip. Drop. “The ghosts.”

“What are you talking about?”

“These bandits. Are their ghosts saying anything?”

“How would I know?”

She looked at him. He hated that look. She had changed since they departed Kartu Town and she became a married woman. He had always been her trusted older uncle—even if only by a few years—yet now he felt he was the younger one. “I know you see ghosts, Shai. Anji knows it, too. You admitted as much to him out in the desert. Anyway, you’re a seventh son.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Seventh sons see ghosts.”

“What about seventh daughters?”

“Who ever has seven daughters? Just tell me! We’re not in Kartu Town anymore. You aren’t a witch here.”

“How do you know? Maybe they’ll burn me alive like they do in the empire. Or hang me, or tie me to a post and shoot me full of arrows, or poke me with spears until I’m all full of holes. You don’t know anything about this place!”

“You shouldn’t be afraid. Anji isn’t.”

“Then why don’t you ask him what the ghosts are saying?” he snapped.

This revelation did not disturb her. Of course she already knew Anji saw ghosts! She considered him with a placid expression, but he guessed from the tilt of her chin that she was annoyed. “He doesn’t hear ghosts. He only sees them. What you hear might help us.”

When he only looked at her, she continued as she would to a particularly slow slave child who needed each least task explained at length several times over. “Help us. From the ghosts you can learn of any danger that might be ahead . . . learn the customs of the Hundred . . . Shai! The ghosts can teach us, warn us, even if they don’t mean to. If we know more, we’ll do better in our new life, don’t you think?”

“You don’t understand ghosts, Mai. They only talk about the past. What lies in the future no longer exists. That’s why they’re ghosts.”

Which was why ghosts were often boring, as these were, bawling and bleating like so many discontented sheep:

Captain Beron! You betrayed us, you sheep-tupping son of a bitch!

I didn’t mean to eat that rabbit. It isn’t fair I was exiled for such a little thing! Forced to live the osprey life. I never wanted it! Why won’t you forgive me? Why can’t I go home?

I hate you! I hate all of you! Piss on you all!

“One thing, though,” he said, because he found it so curious that he had to share with Mai. “You know how the arkinga here sounds so strange.”

“They speak it wrong,” she agreed. “Sometimes I can’t understand them.”

“I don’t notice it so much with the ghosts.”

“Maybe ghosts only speak the language of the dead. What are they saying?”

The only way to be rid of her questions was for the company to start moving, and the caravan wasn’t ready. He’d never seen people slower to get moving in his life! The Qin stood beside their horses, not by a whisker betraying they might be impatient to go.

“Some person named Captain Beron betrayed them. Don’t eat rabbit meat—it’ll get you exiled. Now I don’t want to talk about it anymore. How can I know it’s safe here? In the empire, they burn those who believe in the Merciful One. What would they do with me?” When he spoke of the empire, he remembered how that Beltak priest had imprisoned the essence of a ghost, trapping it forever within a simple wooden bowl.

She touched his arm. “Are you all right, Shai? You’re pale.”

He looked around to make sure no one was within earshot. Mai’s slave women were busying themselves by the cart Mai had obtained south of the pass through some clever trading of silks and woolens given to her as a wedding gift by Commander Beje.

“Can’t you see? I’ve seen so many ghosts. I don’t want to become one myself by speaking when I should have remained silent!”

Her expression softened. “I’m sorry. Of course you’ve had to keep it secret all your life in Kartu. I can see why you would still be anxious.”

It was almost worse when she gazed at him with sincere concern. “How do we really know it’s safe here?” he demanded. “Captain Anji made common cause with that eagle rider awfully quickly.”

She shrugged. “Sometimes you have to know when to leap. Anyway, he liked him.”

Abruptly, many of the horses whinnied and startled and shied. The big eagle landed with a whomp in the clear zone. The reeve fastened himself into his harness, and the eagle launched itself skyward with a mighty thrust of legs and wings whose strength and majesty brought tears of admiration to Shai’s eyes. Mai touched fingers to heart, her gaze open with awe. They both followed the raptor’s flight until it vanished away over the trees.