Spirit Gate: Book One of Crossroads (7 page)

“That was my
grandmother
you were ogling!” said Peddo, elbowing him to get his attention back as the children marched away down the avenue toward wherever the hells they were going.

Joss laughed. The headache was wavering; perhaps it wouldn’t hammer home after all. Banner Street gave onto Battle Square, where about fifty refugees stood in line at one of the city’s rice warehouses for their weekly allotment. Youths wearing the badge of the street sweepers’ guild worked the margins with their brooms. There were a fair number of militia standing at guard. Joss gave the square a brief and comprehensive sweep with his gaze.

“Pretty calm,” said Peddo, who had done the same thing. It was reflexive to do so. No reeve survived long who couldn’t size up a situation fast.

Not unless the situation was a perfect ambush, impossible to predict or protect against, especially if you had gone in alone, without anyone to back you up.

“You okay?” Peddo asked. “Got a headache?”

“Just the sun,” said Joss, blinking back the resurgent pain as they headed up Silk Street.

They passed weavers’ workshops and drapers and a dozen side streets advertising fine netting, coarse netting, kites, festival streamers, ribbons and tassels, and
there a pair of competing bathhouses on opposite corners. A lad was selling hot savory pies from a deep tray steadied by a strap slung around his neck. Next to him a man peddled still-slithering eels out of a pair of wooden buckets.

A line of firefighters tramped out from a side street on their rounds, their commander riding at the rear on a street-smart bay gelding. The men had their fire hooks and pikes resting on their left shoulders. They were sweating in fitted leather coats and brimmed leather helmets.

Now, after all, Peddo gave a couple of the younger, good-looking ones the once-over. “Whoop,” he muttered under his breath.

“Can’t you ever stop?” Joss asked.

Peddo had a sweet grin that gave him a mischievous look at odds with his normally sober expression. “You’re the one with the reputation.”

Silk Street dead-ended into Canal Street, the widest avenue in the city. The canal side of the street was cluttered with quays and modest piers, and there was more traffic on the water than on the paved avenues to either side. At the Silk Street gate, the two reeves cut across to the brick-paved walkway reserved for official business. Here they were able to stride along briskly. Joss had nothing to say; the headache had slaughtered his words. Peddo pulled the brim of his cap down to shade his eyes against the sun. Across the canal lay Bell Quarter. Orchid Square was visible, swollen with folk decked out in bright silks and cottons. There was some kind of singsong festival going on there, most likely prayers for rain. It was impossible to make out words over the noise of rumbling carts, tramping feet, shouting vendors, arguing shopkeepers, barking dogs, and the nerve-shattering whine of knives being sharpened on a spinning whetstone at the nearest corner.

Nausea engulfed Joss’s stomach and throat, suddenly and overwhelmingly. He lurched off the brick path, ducked under the separation rail, shoved rudely through the traffic, and made it to the sewage channel before he was sick.

After he was finished, Peddo handed him a scrap of cloth to wipe his mouth. Folk had paused to point and stare, seeing him in his reeve’s leathers, but Peddo had a pleasant way of smiling that caused them to disperse rapidly. Joss eased to his feet, tested his balance, and groaned.

“Better?” asked Peddo.

“I suppose.”

“There are those among us who just never do seem to learn that wine and khaif do not mix.”

“We’re always hopeful,” said Joss with a faint smile, “that this time will be different.”

There was, after all, a water seller just a few paces away. Joss pulled a pair of vey off his string of cash and got two dipperfuls of water to cleanse his mouth.

“Come on,” said Peddo. “The Commander didn’t just ask for you. The Commander’s
waiting
on you.”

That didn’t sound good. It didn’t look any better when they reached Guardian Bridge at the base of the rocky promontory that marked the confluence of the Istri and its tributary. The approach to the bridge lay in the open space where Bell Quarter, Flag Quarter, and the canal running between them ended at the locks. Guardian
Bridge spanned the central spillway pool and the deeply cut locks. As usual, there was a crowd waiting to get on the bridge, but reeves had free passage along a separate narrow corridor roped off over the high arch of the bridge. They could move quickly while everyone else waited.

Out on the spur, they climbed steps carved into the rock to the north-northwest corner entrance onto the wide-open ground of Justice Square, the largest open space within the five official quarters of Toskala. From here you couldn’t see the river to either side because the view was blocked by four built-up complexes. Past Assizes Tower and the militia barracks to the southeast could be glimpsed the high prow of the promontory with its bright banners and the humble thatched-roof shelter that shielded Law Rock from the elements. When you were standing out there on that prow of high rock, ready to lift, it was like sailing, with the two rivers joining in a swirl of currents below.

Peddo turned left and entered through the gate into Clan Hall with its skeletal watchtowers, two vast lofts, and parade ground within. The reeve standing watch had a broken arm dressed up in a sling. Seeing the pair, he grinned, displaying a missing tooth.

“Commander is waiting for you, Legate Joss. I’m thinking you’re in up to your neck.”

“What’s changed, then?” asked Joss, getting a chuckle from the other man.

Peddo shook his head with a frown.

These days Clan Hall stood mostly empty, with the overburdened and thin-stretched forces of reeves out on constant patrol of the beleaguered countryside. There was only one reeve and his eagle on watch up in White Tower, but when Joss shaded his eyes and stared up he saw an eagle spiraling in the updraft far above the promontory.

A young and quite attractive reeve was having trouble with her bating eagle out in the parade ground. Joss would have paused to help, but the hall loft master, standing back to advise with arms crossed and an amused expression, seemed to have the situation in hand. The young one wore long leather gloves wrapped up past her elbows, but she was wearing her sleeveless leather vest with no shirt beneath, laced up tightly over a slender but muscular frame. She glanced their way, tracking their movement until the squawk of her flustered eagle yanked her attention back.

“They do it on purpose to get you to look at them,” said Peddo as they hurried past. “I don’t mean ‘you’ as in men in general. I mean you in particular.”

“Upset their eagles?”

“No, no! Dress like that.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m the one they talk to,” he said innocently. “You should hear the things they say.”

“You won’t get me to fall for that one.”

The garden court was quiet except for the chatter of the fountain. The doors to the commander’s cote stood open. An old reeve, retired from flying duty, sat at his ease cross-legged on the porch studying a half-finished game of kot. He looked up, saw them, and shook his head in wry warning.

They stepped up to the porch, tugged off their boots, and stepped up and over the threshold onto the polished wood floor of the audience chamber.

The Snake had gotten there before them. He was lounging on a padded bench, slouched back with legs stretched out and ankles crossed and resting on a single heel, arms folded over his chest, and a sneering grin on his ugly face. His lip was bruised, and swelling. Joss opened his mouth to comment, but when he saw the commander’s grim look, he thought better of it.

The commander nodded at them from behind her low table. Her crutch had been set on the floor parallel to the pillow she sat on, which meant she expected not to get up any time soon. Definitely, yes, she was annoyed at someone, and when she indicated that Peddo was to sit, Joss guessed that Peddo was not the target.

“So nice of you to join us, Legate Joss,” she said so kindly that he winced. “I’ve had a complaint.”

Peddo hesitated, then went to sit on the bench beside the Snake. Joss was left standing, an awkward position now that the other four people in the room were seated.

“This is Master Tanesh.”

“I remember your case, ver,” he said politely to the merchant seated cross-legged on a brocade pillow to the right of the commander’s desk.

“Considering the trouble you caused me out at my estate in Allauk, I should think you would.” The man wore an overtunic of a florid purple brocade silk, embroidered with silver- and gold-thread flowers in case you were wondering how rich he really was. And if there was still then any doubt, it could be put to rest by admiring the strings of pearls adorning the loops of his threefold braid.

“I simply followed the law, ver. ‘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.’ ”

“In the ninth to go free,” agreed the man, raising his forefinger as though he were lecturing an ignorant apprentice, “but there’s nothing said in the law about additional debt run up in the meantime, which must be repaid in coin or in service, which all agree is fair. I was genuinely shocked by the decision. I don’t mind saying that I was offended by it as well, bullying my factor as this reeve did, and humiliating him in front of the witnesses just because he could.”

“The law is clear,” said Joss, who was beginning to get irritated all over again although he could not show it. The merchant’s factor had possessed just this same manner of self-importance. “Indeed, we can walk up to Law Rock and see that the law is
carved in stone.”

“Legate Joss!” The commander rapped the table with her baton.

“You’d think he was wed to a Silver the way he goes on,” added the merchant. “If it were allowed, that is. And I don’t mind saying I am not the only one who has gotten tired of those people putting in their petition every year at the Flowering Festival, although what right such outlanders think they have to change our holy laws I can’t imagine.”

“The Ri Amarah clans are not the issue under discussion,” said the commander.

He backed down unctuously. “No, no, not at all. That’s right. Let’s stick to the business at hand. It’s just one of my grievances that I’m sometimes on about.”

No doubt he had a dozen wagonloads of grievances.

“The matter will go before the Legate’s Council next week,” continued the commander, “and I assure you that you will not be disappointed in the ruling.”

“The law is clear,” objected Joss. “I found according to the law that the man in question had served his eight years’ servitude in payment for his debt and was unlawfully retained against his wishes past the ninth year.”

“In truth, Legate Joss,” said the commander, “the law doesn’t say anything about debt compounding through actions of the slave which accrue further debt during the period of servitude. Master Tanesh, if you will, we’ll send you a messenger when the case comes up next week.”

The merchant rose and fussed and bowed. The commander, naturally, did not get up, and so he went on his way expeditiously. When the doors had slid shut behind him and a decent interval had passed in which the old reeve could escort him at least as far as out of the garden court beyond the possibility of overhearing any further conversation, she addressed Joss.

“We’re already fighting what appears to be a losing battle, one that is spreading day by day, that might as well be a wildfire burning out of our control. You know that better than any person here, by the names of all the gods.”

“You know he’s wrong! These people pad out debts and assign frivolous fines and make arrangements with corrupt clerks to work debt in their favor. That’s the beauty of the law. It’s simple, and it understands how to get around some people’s desire to take more than they ought just because they are greedy—”

“Joss!”

“Is it any wonder there’s been a rash of reports of slaves running out on their debts? Why shouldn’t they, if they believe the law is being twisted to work against them? Indenture was meant to be a temporary measure, not a permanent one.”

“Legate Joss! You have to fight these battles when there is peace to fight them in.”

“How can there be peace when the shadows have corrupted even the law? Hells, it isn’t the shadows that corrupted the law. It’s us, who have allowed it to happen by making an exception here, and another there.”

“Certainly it would be easier to abide by the law of the Guardians if there were Guardians left to preside at the assizes. But there aren’t. As you know best of any of us.”

In training, you learned how to absorb the force of a blow from a staff by bending to absorb the impact or melting out from under it, but this hit him straight on.

“That’s silenced him, thank the gods,” muttered the Snake.

He could not speak, not even to cut that damned snake to pieces. That Peddo was hiding his eyes behind a hand did not blunt the shock.

The commander studied him. There was not a hint of softening, not in her, not even though she had let him into her bed off and on for over a year about twelve years back, before he became a legate and she the commander. Before her injury. She was not a woman swayed by fond memories. She was not sentimental, not as he was. If nightmares haunted her, she gave no sign of it. She was cold and hard and in charge of an impossible situation.

The Guardians are dead and gone.

And the young Joss, that utterly stupid and bullheaded youth who had thought
far too much of himself back in those days, was the one who had brought that knowledge back to the reeve halls while abandoning his lover and her eagle to be murdered at the hands of a band of criminals who had never been caught and bound to justice for the deed. Maybe, somehow, by breaking the boundaries, he was the one who had brought it down on their heads.

As if the commander knew the way his thoughts were tending, and because she would not have said those words if she hadn’t meant to hurt him, she went on.