Traitors' Gate (44 page)

“Nine Guardians and nine colors, the hues of their cloaks. Ten Tales of Founding.”

“What about eight?” cried the girl.

“Naturally, I was hoping you would ask,” Jothinin said.

Kirit laughed, the sound so unexpected it made the dreary day brighter. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and outside first light glimmered over the sodden ground and restless waters.

“ ‘These are the eight children, the dragonlings, the firelings, the delvings, the wildings, the lendings, the merlings, the demons, and we who call ourselves humankind.' There's your
answer, Kirit. Firelings are one of the eight children—you might call them tribes or clans—of the Mothers.”

“That is no answer.”

“Lendings live in the grass, wildings in the high forest canopy, merlings in the ocean, and delvings in the stone. Firelings live in storms. They're seen most often in mountainous regions. They are blue, and sometimes red, and they appear to our vision for a moment only, as if they can slip into this world and out through the Spirit Gate, inhabiting both that place and this one. There are also tales of how firelings have saved lives of dying children, chased wandering goats home, and aided women in childbirth when they had no midwife to attend them. As the tale says, ‘the spark of the living spirit is the spark of the fireling.' That which lives draws them.”

“What of us, Jothinin?” Marit asked as the fire streamed heat and smoke over her damp cloak and wet hair. “We are met here, we three. You called us ‘the last of our kind.' But the Guardians are spirits arisen out of the pool at Indiyabu in ancient days, raised by the gods in answer to a plea. As it says in the tale: ‘In the worst of days, an orphaned girl knelt at the shore of the lake sacred to the gods and prayed that peace might return to her land.' Are we truly Guardians if we did not rise out of the pool at Indiyabu? For it seems to me that the others—Lord Radas, Night, Yordenas, Bevard—have crossed under the Shadow Gate into corruption. They sow the fields not with justice but with discord, hate, and cruelty.”

“They are demons,” said Kirit.

“Demons are one of the eight children of the Mothers,” objected Jothinin. “They, too, are sheltered by the Mothers' protection. I would not call demon any human who does wrong just on account of that wrongdoing. In older days, the gods-touched were said to be demon-born.”

“You forgot Hari,” said Kirit, stubbornly sticking to the main point. “He's one of them.”

“Hari is not like the others,” said Marit quickly.

“You hope he is not,” said Jothinin. “But if he has become their creature, then they have five. Five Guardians can kill one.”

“As the cloak of Night tried to do to me in Toskala on that night when the army attacked. But Hari wasn't there. It was Kirit who refused to cooperate with them. She saved me. For which I hope I have thanked her enough.”

Kirit frowned, her brows drawing down. To look at her with her colorless hair and her demon-blue eyes and her ghost-pale skin was to remember she was an outlander. Easy to call her a demon, since she looked nothing like a person. Yet what was a demon, really? Marit's father had feared demons, while her mother, like Jothinin, had believed they were no more dangerous than any other of the children of the Hundred, having merely their own ways and customs. Her mother always said humankind were the most perilous of all.

“If we are to fight them,” said Marit, “then we must find Hari and convince him to join us. We must seek out as well the cloak of Earth. Then
we
will have five, and they will be four, too few to hunt us down and kill us.”

He scratched behind an ear like a man trying to sort out the solution to a difficult bit of accounting. “Cloak of Earth vanished long before any of the rest of us understood that corruption was eating into the Guardians' council.”

“She deserted you, instead of warning you!” cried Marit. “Don't you think that's wrong?”

“It is what it is. I am the last to judge.”

“The gods created the Guardians to judge. As it says in the tale, ‘Let Guardians walk the lands, in order to establish justice if they can.' ”

“To establish justice. To restore peace. Do you ever suppose, Marit, that the gods never meant for the Guardians to become the final measure of judgment in the land? Of course they traveled from assizes to assizes and stood in judgment over the most intractable cases, able to see into the hidden heart of those they judged. But over time folk trusted their own courts less and began to speak as if only the Guardians could bring justice. And then perhaps the Guardians came to believe it, also. I am not so sure things have fallen out as the gods intended.”

“ ‘Who can be trusted with this burden?' ” she said, echoing the Tale of the Guardians. “The burden of justice.”

“ ‘Only the dead can be trusted,' ” he answered in the cadence used in the tale. “We three died fighting for justice, in one way or another. You were an honest reeve. Kirit took many opportunities to help folk more unfortunate even than she was, and it is difficult to imagine, I think, people who have endured as much as she did.”

“I found a cloak,” said the girl, her voice barely audible above the patter of rain that had started up again outside. The cloak that bound her was as pale as mist, barely visible in the gloom. “I unbound this cloak from her dead body. Was that justice?”

The words rocked Marit. “No living person can unbind a cloak. Hari told me so.”

Jothinin watched the girl, his expression creased by a fissure of doubt. “A Guardian can seem dead but merely be at rest in a healing trance.”

Marit nodded slowly. “I saw Hari in such a stupor, after he was—stabbed—punished by one of Lord Radas's soldiers. I suspect I have fallen two or three times into such a stupor, after I was murdered, and then awakened afterward without understanding what had happened. How are we healed, Jothinin?”

He shrugged. “The land heals us.”

“In other words, you don't know. Kirit, how did you unbind the cloak?”

She spoke in her raw scrape of a voice. “I was out hunting and found the body. We were a very poor tribe. The silken cloth of the cloak she was wearing was very rich, something I could trade with. When I touched the clasp, the metal burned me. So I wrapped my hands in cloth and undid the clasp. Then I wrapped the cloak up and carried it with my belt. I got blisters on my skin. The blisters healed after a few days. I thought she was dead.”

Jothinin frowned, fingering his clean-shaven chin, which Marit had not, in fact, observed him shaving. Just as her own hair never grew out, his beard never grew in. “The cloak would have to be in a stupor, spirit poised on the threshold of the Spirit Gate. Otherwise no person could remove the cloak
without destroying herself. The cloak protects the one who wears it.”

“I thought the spirits within the cloaks never changed. Now you tell me it is the cloak that remains and the spirit that changes?”

“Yes. That must be obvious to you, who wear the cloak of Death, which was worn by others before you. Of the cloaks who stood in the Guardians' council when I was first awakened, only cloak of Night remains for certain, unless Eyasad, she who wore the cloak of Earth, still walks somewhere in the Hundred. All the others, and some many more times than once, are new faces. New spirits.”

“It's like the cloaks
jess
us? Like we're new reeves, chosen by old eagles.”

He chuckled. “I hadn't thought of it that way, but it's as good an explanation as any.”

She paced to the edge of the overhang. As the first kiss of dawn lightened the sea and wide plateau beyond the overhang, a vista opened toward the south where rugged spires and crowns appeared in such distinct relief they seemed close enough to touch. Like answers.

Turning back, she paused beside Kirit, who was still turning the spit with admirable patience. “Jothinin, tell me again how the cloak of Mist came to be walking in a far distant land beyond the Hundred.”

He nodded. “Here is the tale. Nine Guardians walk the land, presiding over assizes, establishing justice. Together, they constitute the Guardians' council. The gods understood that all creatures are susceptible to corruption—so it was explained to me—so within the council it was possible for five Guardians to raise their staffs to execute one. That way, if one Guardian became rogue, the council could eliminate that one.”

“And the cloak would pass to an uncorrupted spirit,” said Marit.

“Yes. But when the cloak of Night became corrupted, she concealed her corruption. She subverted four other Guardians and persuaded them to eliminate those she felt would not support her. Ashaya, the cloak of Mist, realized too late she had
become corrupted and then used to murder holy Guardians. She fled the council and the Hundred.”

“She was a coward,” said Kirit fiercely. “Running away.”

“Was she?” he asked gently.

“Why did she leave the Hundred?” Marit asked, crouching beside him.

He rested a hand on hers, for Guardians could touch each other, offer comfort they could no longer endure from other people. They could gaze into another Guardian's face without being overwhelmed by the emotions and thoughts of that person. “It is possible for the spirit held within a cloak to grow weary of the task and desire oblivion. To lie down and let your spirit pass away.”

“To die?”

“To release yourself. It is possible, but it takes courage to embrace the second death if you have become accustomed to surviving beyond death.” He caught Kirit's eye and held it until the girl frowned. “So Guardians have done before. Released themselves and let the cloak pass to a new spirit who might have more vigor for the task. So Ashaya meant to do. But once the cloak left her, she would have no control over what spirit the cloak would choose when it was ready to claim a new spirit. She did not want Night to have a chance of reaching that new cloak and poisoning its spirit, as she had poisoned so many others. So Ashaya walked out of the Hundred, hoping to release the cloak in a place so far away that Night could never reach her.” He removed his hand from Marit's and, with a wry smile, indicated Kirit. “It seems the gods had other ideas. For by one means and another, the cloak returned to the Hundred.”

Marit rose. “I think the gods chose well,” she said, trying to coax a smile from the serious girl, but Kirit kept turning the spit. “Yet had the cloak of Night succeeded in having me executed by five Guardians in Toskala, she could not pass my cloak on to whatever person she wanted it to go to, could she? You said cloaks choose, just as eagles choose reeves. Otherwise you could turn any criminal into a demon with the power to kill but not be killed. So if the cloaks wrap spirits at the behest
of the gods, how could any corruptible person become a Guardian?”

“Is there an incorruptible person, Marit?”

“Aui!” she murmured, with a weary smile to answer his. “Of course there is not. At best, some are less corruptible than others. For instance, what of you, Jothinin? You are a man who strikes me as having little arrogance or vanity, and a cursed gentle way of laughing at yourself, and yet it seems you have walked as a Guardian for so long that a story from your youth has become one of the ancient tales we chant at festival time.

“The brigands raged in,
they confronted the peaceful company seated at their dinner,
they demanded that the girl be handed over to them.
All feared them. All looked away.
Except foolish Jothinin, light-minded Jothinin,
he was the only one who stood up to face them,
he was the only one who said, ‘No.'”

He flicked a hand up in a gesture that softly mocked himself. “I am sure I cannot understand what I ever did beyond drinking and gossiping and gaming. None could have been more surprised than I, after the brigands killed me for refusing to hand her over, to awaken and find myself wrapped by a Guardian's cloak. I was always the most frivolous of men.” He studied her. “Where are you going with this, Marit? You hunt like a reeve. Your questions quarter the ground as you seek your prey.”

“Is that not the best way to proceed?” she asked, surprised, and then realized he was laughing at her, as he laughed at everything. Perhaps it was the way he had managed to thwart corruption all these years. “Listen. When Lord Radas punished Hari, he had a guardsman stab him. He did not do it himself. Why not?”

“The cloak of Sun wields a staff shaped as an arrow, but its point does not pierce physical substance. Because we are ghosts, in a way, we cannot wield a blade against living flesh. Our staffs—your sword, my staff, Kirit's mirror—sever spirits from flesh, it's true. But we can only judge humankind and
then only when guilt is laid plain. We cannot judge the other children of the Hundred, who are veiled to us. Therefore, we cannot ourselves strike or kill another Guardian. Not alone.”

“We can kill another Guardian if a majority of the Guardians' council agrees. And
we
can be hurt by the swords and arrows of others. It's just that our cloaks—or the land—will heal us if we are injured. Isn't that right?”

He seemed about to reply but she raised a hand as thoughts cascaded. Too agitated to stand still, she ran to the shore of the sea, where water drowsed along the flats. She kneeled at the edge to pull a hand through fingers of salty foam left where the waves had receded after the turbulence of the night's storm.

The cloak of Night had always been present at the Guardians' council, so Jothinin claimed, and if he was indeed the Jothinin sung of in the tale of the Silk Slippers, then he was unimaginably old. Yet the first time Reeve Marit had met Lord Radas in Iliyat, he had been a man. He had passed judgment on criminals as fairly as he might; possibly he had striven for justice and mercy. The second time, when he had ordered his men to kill her and Flirt, he wore a cloak. He was already corrupted.