Traitors' Gate (23 page)

He hurried after them. As he bolted out from the alley into the street he ran straight into the soldiers who had been following him.

“Whew! You stink!” That was Shorter speaking with a cheerful grin. “What, Holy One, you scavenging from what those refugees left behind? Aui! I thought better of an ostiary.”

“Them thinking they're better than us,” added Taller, grasping Nekkar with a cursed strong hand and towing him away from the direction in which the children had been taken. “Yet they do tax and tithe and claim to be pure as new milk when they're just gods-rotted thieves without a scrap of shame, thinking it's owed to them.”

“I—I—”

“Eh? Eh?” They mocked him, his flushed face, his trembling hands, his ragged breathing. “Are those honey-sesame cakes?” They ripped the cakes from his grasp and ate them.

“I need to see the sergent for Stone Quarter. There were some orphans given over to the temple I was meant to take possession of, but because of the curfew I couldn't get out to leash them in until today—”

“Slave takers, too,” said Shorter, and all at once Nekkar realized the young man had a debt scar scored into his face, by
his left eye. “Cursed temples take our labor and work us and then discard us. How I hate them!” Like lightning, he backhanded Nekkar so hard across the face the ostiary stumbled to his knees on the street, so much pain he couldn't stand at first even as they shoved and then punched and then kicked him until he staggered up half blinded by tears.

“I need to see the sergeant.” His voice sounded like that young child's, scoured raw.

They hauled him to the inn after all, punctuating the long walk with a running commentary about what the sergeant would do to him, fingers broken, eyes gouged out, toes cut off, cleansed on the pole. They were enjoying the conversation because they knew he could do nothing to stop their chatter. Their talk was like a winding chain, winching them tight and tighter.

The inn was empty but for three young women serving ale to ten off-duty soldiers. His pair traded jests with their comrades before prodding him upstairs. There he waited in the corridor, pain jabbing in his ribs. After a while, another man, soberly dressed and moving as slowly as if he were recovering from a severe beating, invited him into a long chamber overlooking the square.

The sergeant seated in the chamber had a lass to pour his wine, a couch to lounge on, and a pair of writing desks set against the wall where two shaven-headed clerks hunched over accounts books. As Nekkar entered they glanced up and looked down at once, as if expecting to be hit.

The sergeant had a knife in one hand, coring an apple. “What trouble are you causing? Be quick about it.”

If he talked fast, he didn't have to imagine what it would feel like to be hanged on the pole.

“Sergeant, I'm Nekkar, ostiary at the Ilu temple here in Stone Quarter. Three orphans were consigned to my care some days ago, and I've only just now been able to collect them. But your soldiers took them away. So if I can just fetch them from wherever they've been hauled off to, then I'll take them off your hands and the temple will provide—”

“They're probably being taken to the brickyards.”

“The brickyards!”

“We've a fair lot of building to do. Fire damage to fix. Defensive walls to reinforce. Small hands can work in the brickyards.”

“They're very young, the smallest not more than four—”

“I'm done with this conversation. You know, ostiary, I might well send soldiers by your temple if I've need of your novices' labor. Best you take care of your own, and be careful you don't displease me further. Indeed, I'll thank you to come by every morning after second bell and give me a report on Stone Quarter's doings. Now, get out!” He popped a slice of apple into his mouth, then offered one to the lass, who glanced at the ostiary before she took it and devoured it.

He was shaking. “Sergeant, if I may—”

The sergeant whistled, and the two soldiers entered the room, their grins fading as they took in the sergeant's grim frown. “Get this cursed ostiary out of my sight. But don't be beating on him, you gods-rotted fools!”

They were strong with youth's surety. They marched him through streets emptying of traffic as the fourth bell tolled the curfew hour, although the laborers working on the army's projects would hammer and haul until dusk. They shoved him to the closed gates of the temple, and waited until the watch let him in past the growling dogs.

He shut the door in their faces. It was all he could do.

“Holy One?” asked the envoy on watch, looking worried. The novices came to the porch of the learning hall, staring but saying nothing. “Shall we haul water for a bath?”

He shook his head roughly. “I'll haul the water myself.”

So he did, each bucket spilling into the bronze tub along with his tears.

And when he poured the last bucketful in, the water splashed, rippled, lapped, and stilled to become a mirror. His own filthy, bruised face stared up at him, the ordinary face of a man who has done his duty and lived as decently as he could manage according to the precepts of the gods. No special craft, no exceptional skills, no particular ambition.

“I will fight,” he said to his reflection, to his hidden spirit, perhaps, or to the gods. “Let me be a messenger, as befits my calling. Let me be an envoy, to carry resolve where it is needed. There must be a way to defeat them. We must find a way.”

T
WENTY-FIVE DAYS AGO
, Mai had taken refuge in a valley entirely wild, its soil untrammeled by human feet and its bounty unharvested by human hands, a place so high and isolated in the mountains it could only be reached only by eagles. Here, in a cave behind a waterfall, she had given birth to a son.

At dawn on the day called Resting Ibex, Atani's hungry fussing woke her. She nursed him from the comfort of her sleeping mat. She slept under a framework of poles raised two steps off the earth with canvas hung for walls and roof. A second structure housed the reeves and hirelings and guards brought in to assure the baby's comfort and safety. Their stores of rice and grain rested in a storehouse raised on stilts.

After Atani's demands were satisfied, she tucked the infant in a sling, slipped into her sandals, and stepped out. Sprawling jabi bushes fenced in the clearing; the stream burbling down from the waterfall higher up in the vale chased into the trees beyond. She greeted the sentries and, with them pacing behind her, followed a track downstream beside trees whose branches drooped, so heavily laden were they with sunfruit and mamey and mango.

The mountain escarpment rose on three sides, all bold peaks and daring angles. On the fourth side, the stream that welled out of the sacred pool upstream spilled over a rocky ledge at the edge of a mighty cliff overlooking a wilderness of rugged foothills. In the right light at the right time of day, rainbows glittered in the spray below, and if the last gasping breath of a
high-mountain storm sprinkled out of the Spires from the heights behind you, you might see rainbows above and below.

Surely the Merciful One favored this place. From this vista a person might hope to see into the future, or recall the past.

How long ago had Mai been carried away from her family and childhood in Kartu Town by the Qin captain and his troop? One year? Two? It seemed like half her life ago. Far more had happened to her in that short span of time than in the seventeen years previous: she had been married off to a man she did not know, had embarked on a long overland journey, had sealed a merchant's bargain on which her life and fortune and that of many others depended, had made a dear friend, had supervised the building and expansion of a settlement, had survived battles and assassins, and borne her first child.

“Mistress?”

She turned. “Greetings of the day, Priya. I'm coming.”

Together, she and her attendants walked back to the clearing and onward up a path twisting through the foliage toward the heights. Mai carried whatever small offering took her fancy. This morning she plucked a bouquet of red-and-yellow fall-of-joy with its swoony scent. Each morning more attendants followed, most no doubt out of curiosity, some in the hope of currying favor, and a few with perhaps a bud of faith. Even Sheyshi accompanied them, although poor Sheyshi could still barely recite the most basic of prayers, stumbling over the same words every time.

Not that the Merciful One was a jealous or critical god, demanding fearful obedience or exacting perfection. Far from it! The Merciful One was a pilgrim who had wandered far from home, finding a resting place wherever folk raised an altar. The procession—fully eighteen people today including all six off-duty Qin guardsmen as well as the three on-duty ones—climbed to the rocky clearing around the pool. The waterfall boomed, which meant rains had fallen higher up in the Spires beyond sight and sound of the valley. The churning waters hid movement beneath the foam, but she never quite glimpsed an actual living creature swimming there.

She led the way through low walls that marked an ancient
ruin. The walls had once entirely rimmed the pool, but now they were as broken and worn as the teeth of an elder. They entered the cave in single file along a ledge, cliff wall on the right and the waterfall's curtain on the left.

Two lamps burned within the cave. A slab had been set across the birthing stones where Mai had labored to create a humble altar covered with a red cloth. Here she laid today's offering of flowers as Priya intoned the first prayers.

“ ‘The Merciful One is my lamp and my refuge.' ”

The others settled, the most interested kneeling at the front behind Sheyshi, the merely curious to the back. Four had not come in at all, loitering in the ruins beside the pool hoping to catch a glimpse of the mysterious creature that lived within what all now called “the birthing pool” in honor of Atani.

Yet as Priya chanted the Three Refuges, the Four Undertakings, and the Five Rewards, as Mai repeated the responses and joined in where she knew the longer threads, she tasted an iron tang on her lips and felt the tingling in her bones that betrayed the presence of unseen others. The lamps burned, flames hissing softly, but she did not need oil's light to see within the cave's dim enclosure. Threads glittered along the ceiling of the cave. This morning, twenty-five days since she had given birth, less than a full month according to the calendar of Sapanasu but a full turn of the moon, fewer threads netted the ceiling than had been there yesterday, or the day before. That these threads were themselves living creatures she did not doubt. She had felt their touch while in the throes of labor; their net of light had clothed her when she was naked. When she entered the precinct of the sacred pool now, she still heard an echo of voices whose speech—if it was speech—she did not comprehend.

She did not fear them, nor did they fear her.

“ ‘Merciful One, your wisdom is boundless. Excuse me for the transgressions I have made through thoughtlessness, through neglect, through fear.' ”

Human voices whispered, their changed timbre causing her to turn. Did the glimmering threads brighten? Or was it only her own heart and eyes that caught fire as Anji ducked into the cave? He kneeled at the back of the group, asking for
no special precedence; he bowed his head in the same manner as everyone else.

“ ‘May the rains come at the proper time. May the harvest be abundant. May the world prosper, and justice be served. Accept my prayers out of compassion. Peace.' ”

Priya's attention never wavered from the altar, but as soon as she finished, she efficiently herded the others out of the cave, leaving Mai and the baby alone with Anji. Mai rose. While once she might have grasped for Anji immediately, seeking solace, protection, strength, and reassurance, now she waited, watching him.

“Well, Mai,” he said with that slight upward twist of the lips that signified his satisfaction. “You are looking more beautiful even than before. By all reports—which I naturally have been receiving daily—the child remains healthy.” He glanced up at the threads gleaming on the ceiling, and a frown bruised his expression so briefly that in the instant after it cleared she thought she must have imagined it. “Let's go outside.”

“It's been a full turn of the moon since I gave birth. I admit, I was expecting you to arrive yesterday or today. Yet I had hoped for a more private reunion.”

His answering smile was sharp with desire; she felt it in her own flesh; maybe the air sang it. The baby stirred.

“Patience, Mai.” He grasped her wrist as his gaze swept along the ceiling with the look of a man deciding whether or not to commit his troops to battle. “Not here. This valley puzzles me, and I don't like puzzles. I've come to take you home.”

“Back to the Barrens?” She sighed, thinking of how much dried fish she had eaten in the settlement in the Barrens. Atani woke with an exploratory mewl of discomfort. “Am I going to be exiled to the Barrens forever?”

After all, he was teasing her. “Home to Olossi.”

He was so close!

After a full turn of the moon, it was no longer forbidden. She could not resist.

She kissed him, and he caught her close, and they forgot to say the formal words in which the father greets the mother of his child and the child itself, who have survived for a full turn
of the month without demons finding and devouring spirits made vulnerable by the precious and difficult passage known as birth.

He let her go and stepped back. “Hu! This is not the place!” He wiped his brow. “I have been considering the situation. As we have seen, the red hounds can track me anywhere. So it is better to accept the risk and attack in its turn that which we
can
alter. I'm making changes in how traffic is secured on the roads. Folk can still cross wilderness on deer tracks—we'll never be able to stop that—but we can place controls on the roads and gates that will alert us to anyone who does not belong.”