Spirit Gate: Book One of Crossroads (6 page)

She could not reconcile that man and this one, yet they were clearly the same.

“Hsst. Girl.”

The girl looked up. Her eyes were dry but her expression was that of a child who has given up crying because she knows comfort will never ever come. Her eyes were bruised with shadows; her cheeks were hollow, and her complexion more gray than brown.

“Come closer.”

She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have touched you. Now he’ll punish me. He likes to punish me.”

“What’s your name?”

“I don’t have a name anymore.”

A stubborn one. “I’m called Marit. Reeve Marit. If I can free you, will you help me?”

“We are all slaves to the will of the Merciless One. There is only one road to freedom.”

There wasn’t time to be subtle.

“There’s a knife hidden in my right boot. I can’t reach it, but you can. Then you can free me.” Marit wiggled her shoulders and hips and rolled onto her left side to display her bound arms. Her shoulders were aching badly, but that was the least of her worries. She knew better than to think about the problem posed by that chain and that stake. When she won free, she had to alert the reeve halls to this blasphemy and Lord Radas’s treason. She wouldn’t have time to struggle with the stake. It was a cruel decision, but necessary.

“A knife!” The girl crawled forward. Her expression changed, but the disquiet raised in Marit’s throat by Lord Radas’s frown tightened, and she had to cough out a breath as the girl tugged off Marit’s right boot and swiftly, with strangely practiced hands, probed the lining. Faster than should have been possible her nimble fingers extracted the knife. It was a slender blade, meant for emergencies.

“The Merciless One has smiled on us.” The girl kissed the blade. “She’ll grant us freedom!”

“Quick! They could come at any moment.”

Indeed, she heard a buzz of noise out beyond the willow’s canopy as though a mob gathered, with stamping and hollering and wild laughter brought on by waste wine and khaif: men working up their nerve to indulge themselves in their worst nature; men being worked up by a chieftain or overlord as music is coaxed out of an instrument by a skilled musician.

As the captain’s wife said in the Tale of Fortune:
Make them ashamed of themselves and they will not betray you, because they will know they have stepped outside the boundaries and made themselves outcast by their deeds.

The girl mouthed a prayer of thanksgiving, then sidled closer, right up against Marit’s torso. She spun the blade with the skill of an expert trained to handle knives and touched the point against the cloth of Marit’s tunic. It rested just below the reeve’s breastbone, nudging up the thick leather strap of her walking harness.

“We’ll be free. They won’t be able to touch us.”

The prick of the blade bit Marit’s skin. The reeve fell onto her back, startled and frantically reassessing as she stared up at the girl.

I’ve miscalculated.

That face was so young and so innocent, ravished by her brutal treatment, that Marit had overlooked what stared her right in the face. The girl’s gaze had the fixed fanaticism of the Merciless One’s most devoted followers, who did not separate war, death, and desire.

She’s insane!

She pushed with her legs, scooting away on her back. “Wait! Cut the rope—!”

The thrust punctured skin and gristle with a smooth, strong, angled stroke.

She’s done this before.

Right into the heart. There was no pain.

The last thing Marit saw, as the blood drained from her heart, as the white cloak of death descended out of the sky to smother her in its wings, was the implacable face of the girl who was in that instant the Merciless One Herself. Beyond, a lifetime away, men shouted and came running. The girl spun the blade, plunged it up underneath her own ribs and, with a gloating smile, died.

In the Year of the Silver Fox
(nineteen years later)
In the Hundred

JOSS WAS DRINKING
hard and had sitting on his lap a comely girl who served wine, cordial, and, if you were generous enough and to her liking, certain of her favors. A tremendous shout had risen up from the nearby playing ground, and the boy had just run in from the back to announce the current score on the game—dammit if his team wasn’t losing again—when the door of the Pig’s Bladder banged open. Light assaulted him. He shut his eyes, but opened them when the girl leaped to her feet. She grabbed her tray as a pair of swarthy men in reeve’s leathers charged up to confront him.

“Commander wants you
right now,”
said the first, a slender, nimble fellow as mean as a crate of starving snakes. He grinned mockingly at the young woman, who gave him a scowl in reply. “Not as handsome as him, am I?” he asked her. “Even though he is old enough to be your dad.”

She flushed. “There are Devouring girls at the temple who make it a special holy duty to service men made ugly by the gods’ mercy. Or like you, by spite.” She tipped back her pretty chin and sashayed back to the bar.

Joss watched her hips sway as she walked away. The hells! He’d just spent the better part of the afternoon coaxing her away from the attentions of a much younger suitor. He downed the rest of his cup and slammed it down. “The Commander can stick it up—”

The barmaid glanced back at him, winked with a further, suggestive twitch of her ass, and turned to set her empty tray on the bar. There came the younger suitor, gods curse him, sidling up to her with a smile on his callow face.

Joss glared at the two reeves. “I agreed to work the entire festival in exchange for the first four days of the new year off. Ghost Festival ended three days ago. That means I’m still off duty for two more days. Free and clear. That was the agreement.”

“She won’t be free, a merchant like her, doing it for coin,” said the Snake, nodding toward the bar. “But I hear Sadit has a thing for you and will give you a roll for nothing whenever her husband’s not around.”

“Shut up,” said Joss, coming up off the bench with an arm cocked.

“You’re drunk,” said Peddo mildly as he pushed the other two men apart. He was by many years the youngest, broadest across the chest, and as placid as a well-fed lion. “Begging your pardon, Legate Joss. Commander’s noticed that you’ve been drinking more lately. So have some of us others.”

“I hear he has nightmares,” said the Snake. “Most likely it’s some lilu haunting him, for I swear to you that man cannot keep his cock from wandering into every henhouse. I hear he calls out a woman’s name in his dreams—”

Joss shook off Peddo’s hand and slugged the Snake. The backward stumble, the smash against the bench, the crash: those were good sounds. Peddo sighed, the barmaid laughed, and the Snake spat blood to the floor. Joss tossed a handful of coins on the table to cover the damage and staggered outside into the glare of the awful sun, which had it in for him today. From the direction of the playing field, the crowd roared appreciatively.

There was a neighborhood well in the middle of the humble square. He got his bearings, made it halfway before he realized he was veering off course, corrected three more times to avoid men bent under yoked baskets, and finally closed the gap and grabbed the lip of the well to stop himself falling over.

“Can I help you, ver?” The speaker was a remarkably handsome woman of middle years who had come with three children and eight sturdy wooden buckets slung two by two over stout poles. She had a hierodule’s amorous eye and no doubt had served the Devourer in her youth. You could tell it by the way she looked him over with his reeve leathers and whatever else she saw, including the tattoos that circled his wrists and marked him as a child of the Fire Mother.

“Just water,” he said hoarsely, noting the line of scalloped waves tattooed down the length of her right arm, marking
her
as a child of the Water Mother. With his best smile he added, “I thank you, verea.”

“Oh, it sure is nothing,” she said with amusement as she winched up a full bucket for him.

He upended it over his head. The cold water was better than a slap. She jumped back laughing as the children shrieked with delight and began to ask, clamoring, if they could do the same.

Peddo strode out of the tavern, rubbing his forehead as though to wipe away a headache, and stopped short when he saw Joss dripping. “Does it help any?”

“The hells! Does that sun have to be so bright?”

“Do you come here often?” the matron asked.

She had a pleasing figure, ample in all the right places and suggested to good effect in the worn but carefully mended taloos wrapped around her curves. The fabric was a soothing sea-green silk that did not hurt his eyes.

“Often enough,” he said.

Peddo caught him by the elbow, made his courtesies, and dragged him off. Because he was still drunk, there was no point in resisting.

“Can you never stop flirting?” demanded Peddo.

It was a stupid question, which Joss did not bother to answer. Anyway, a khaif seller had set up his cart where the afternoon shadows gave the man some respite against the cruel sun. The fellow had a brisk business going, despite the heat. Joss made Peddo stop, and he downed two mugfuls before the buzz hit and he could begin to shake off the wine.

“It’s healthier for a man to visit the temple when the Devouring urge takes him,” said Peddo.

“Won’t.”

Peddo coughed, looking uncomfortable for the first time. “Yeh. Er. So I had heard. Sorry.”

Nothing to do with those dreams,
thought Joss sourly as the mud cleared and his sight and thoughts clarified.
Neh, it’s everything to do with them.
Nineteen years of bad luck, and dreams to remind him of how one rash act in youth could destroy what you cherished most and scar your life forever.

They started off again through the tidy streets of Flag Quarter.

“What in the hells does the Commander want from me, if you don’t mind my asking? Considering the Commander was the one who made the agreement that I would get these days off.”

“Don’t know,” admitted Peddo cheerfully.

Despite the heat and the hour and the crowd gathered at the playing ground, the streets of Toskala were not at all quiet, not as they had been a few days ago during the festival, the ghost days that separated the ashes-end of the dead year from the moonrise that marked the beginning of the new. Everyone was out, eager to get on with their business after the restrictions of the ghost days. There were, indeed, more people than usual in the streets because over the last many months a steady trickle of refugees had filtered in from neighboring regions: mostly northeastern Haldia, the Haya Gap, north and west Farhal, and these days a handful from the Aua Gap and regions around the town of Horn. Come to think of it, that handsome matron at the well had spoken with a western lilt. Maybe she, too, was a refugee, fled from the plague of lawlessness that had engulfed the north.

And yet she had smiled and laughed. How could anyone smile and laugh who had seen the terrible things he had himself seen, or heard about? How could anyone smile and laugh who knew what was coming, everything his nightmares warned him of? Getting drunk gave him a moment’s peace, but that was all.

Aui! The hells! Why shouldn’t she laugh, if she wanted to? If it made her day easier? Folk
would
go about their lives once they had a measure of peace, even if they guessed that peace might only be temporary.

“Busy today,” remarked Peddo, surveying the scene as they walked.

People stepped up onto the covered porches of shops, took off their sandals, and brushed past the hanging banners whose ideograms and painted representations advertised the nature of the shop within: bakery; sandals; bed nets; savory pies; candies; apothecary; milled and unmilled grains. A pair of peddlers trundled past pushing handcarts piled high with dried fish. The pungent smell hit Joss hard between the eyes like a kick to the head, but they were already gone beyond, turning down an alley. A young woman sauntered past. Over her right shoulder she balanced a pole from which hung unpainted round fans. Her twilight-blue silk taloos was wrapped tightly around exceedingly shapely breasts.

“Are you still that drunk,” asked Peddo, “or do you just never stop?”

“What?” Joss demanded.

Peddo shook his head as they negotiated a path around the clot of servants and slaves that had gathered around an oil seller set up at the corner. Squeezing past, the two reeves swung out onto the main thoroughfare and headed toward the distant
towers that marked Justice Square. Banner Street was lined with prosperous shops that wove, painted, and sold banners and flags of all kinds. Various side streets advertised dye merchants, paint merchants, ink merchants, paper makers, and fan makers and painters. Business was brisk. Walkways were crowded with customers ducking in and out of shops. Carts rolled past laden with bags of rice being brought in from the wholesale markets in outlying Fifth Quarter. Ideograms were stamped on the burlap: first-quality white; new-milled; on the stalk; ordinary yellow; first-quality yellow; old rice. A pair of surly chairmen pushed through, their customer concealed by strips of tinkling bells whose muted chiming alerted the people ahead to make way.

A pack of children wearing the undyed tabards common to youngsters attending one of the Lantern’s schools sang in unison one of those tiresome learning songs as they padded down the avenue under the supervision of three elderly matrons.
These are the seven treasures! Virtue! Conviction! Listening! Compassion!
The silver-haired woman in the lead had a face to die for, much lived in, lined, and weathered; she possessed an astonishing grace and dignity. She must have stopped traffic in her youth and was doing a pretty good job of it today, too.

Generosity! Discernment! Conscience!

She caught him staring—women who had lived that long didn’t miss much—and smiled with reciprocal admiration. She knew how to flatter a man with a look alone.

“By the Lantern!” swore Peddo. “That’s my grandmother!”

Hearing Peddo’s voice, she shifted her gaze. “Peddo!” she called with cheerful surprise, raising a hand to mark that she had seen him, but she did not leave the head of the line. The children’s piercing voices—they were very young—cut off any other greeting she might have thrown their way.
These are the eight children: the dragonlings, the firelings, the delvings, the wildings, the lendings . . .