Traitors' Gate (56 page)

Brah snorted and punched him on the shoulder—
hard
. Shai had to take a step back to absorb the blow, but he grinned. Among the Qin soldiers, he had learned that you only slugged your friends; your enemies you went after with a sword.

Sis tapped his arm three times:
Alert.
He checked for branches, the position of his feet, anything that might make a sound—all in an eyeblink—before dropping behind a screen of foliage just as six soldiers strode into view on the road, spears ready, swords in sheaths. Two were archers. They marched on upstream, vanishing as the afternoon shadows lengthened.

Now.

They raced across the open field, scrambled up and over the raised roadbed and down the other side through the dry stubble of a harvested rice field. As they sprinted through the grassy verge to the steep bank, a shout of alarm cut the air. Sis splashed through the swirling shallows, hands underwater as if feeling along the rocks.

A horn's call shrilled. Shouts clamored.

Sis whooped and beckoned, then plunged in as Brah dragged Shai over. Beneath the water, attached to the rock facing, was
a chain. He grabbed hold and took a step, was at once in over his head, the current tearing at his body with an intensity and power as shocking as the cold of the water. His knives and baton were torn loose as he went under.

Merciful One protect me!

He came up coughing and hauled himself along the chain, kicking to keep his head above water. Twice perhaps he heard a horn's call but it was difficult to be sure with the river thundering in his ears. The blanket tangled in his arms and for a moment he thought it was going to choke him; then the current slackened and he found a toehold and clambered up the far bank, heaving. An arrow skittered over the churning surface and was borne downstream. The soldiers had returned, running toward the chain; the two archers knelt, the better to make their mark.

Brah was thrashing in the shallows and abruptly a dull snake slithered away into the current: the wilding had released the end of the chain. He climbed up beside Shai, the two wildings
laughing
as a pair of arrows plunked into the nearby shallows and the archers bent their strings for a new volley.

Sis whooped a warning. Downstream, a dozen men with swords drawn were running toward them on
this
side of the river along a cart track. Brah and Sis broke into a run, Shai at their heels, as the soldiers pursued. The trees here had been harvested, replanted, pruned, coppiced—managed by human hands. They leaped over old stumps, crashed through tangles of woody shrubs.

A snap of breaking branch whipped Shai's head around; a body slammed into him, and he fell hard with weight atop him: that sour breath was definitely human. He shoved up with a hip, braced an arm within the gap that opened, and flipped the bastard; backhanded him with a ringed fist so hard the man grunted and went limp. Shai wrested a spear out of his hands, spun just in time to knock away a spear thrust from another soldier. Spears and staffs were poor weapons to bandy about in undergrowth. He charged, and tripped the man while catching him under the chin with an elbow strike, knocking his head back. The idiot went down hard. He hadn't even unsheathed
his short sword. Shai grabbed the sword, sliced the belt, and tugged belt and sheath off the unconscious man. Then he ran, still gripping the spear in his other hand; he wasn't sure where to go, only that he must go deeper in and find a better place to hide. The wildings had vanished, and the villagers in this part of the world had done a hells lot of wood management because the woodland breaks went on and on, never quite giving him enough cover to risk a halt to catch his breath. Soon his lungs were heaving and his legs as heavy as if filled with water from the river crossing. At least his feet were by now as tough as leather.

Racing footsteps rattled through the undergrowth behind him. He cast a look back: three, at least, were gaining on him. A form hurtled out of the air and smashed into the leading soldier, the impact carrying both bodies into a tangle of vegetation. The second soldier was knocked sideways as the bare feet of the other wilding crashed into the man's shoulder. Sis somersaulted in midair, like an acrobat, and landed upright a short distance away. Shai feinted with the sword as the third man hesitated, not sure which target to strike. Shai darted inside the reach of the man's spear and struck him a hard backhand, sword hilt to temple. The man collapsed.

Whoop! Whoop!

The wildings danced out of the foliage and slapped him on the back, coughing with laughter. It was all a game to them.

An arrow rattled through leaves and bounced harmlessly on the earth. The male scooped it up and snapped it in half, still coughing laughter as the female's ears flicked straight up. Men advanced through gaps in the managed forest.

“Where do we go?” Shai cried.

Another arrow tumbled closer, an archer getting his measure.

The male slapped Shai on the shoulder and lit out running. Shai bolted, following him, but at least twenty soldiers were swinging in to cut him off. The burn in his chest as he ran sucked away his air. A whistle fluted on the wind. Ahead rose a curtain of thorns like the end of his hopes.

Yet Brah's pace did not flag. It was not a solid wall of
thorns but rather a lacework growing over ancient trees whose vast limbs traced the contours of the ground like a massive fence on which brambles twined. They ducked under a limb and skipped over a skirt of knobbled roots.

Behind, a man shouted. “Heya! Weron! Come back! No man is permitted to cross into the wild—!”

“I've got them!” shouted a voice so close that Shai dropped to his knees, thinking it the only way to avoid death.

He rolled, but bumped against a tree as a soldier loomed with a triumphant grin, sword raised for the strike. A smear of movement flashed in the air. The man took two steps and convulsed. He was dead before he hit the ground. Seen through the lacework of the brambles and the fence of limbs, the other soldiers stumbled to a halt.

Shai had not rammed up against a tree but rather a pole decorated with a skull. In the clearing beyond the fence of thorns, each of a dozen such poles boasted a grisly head, most skulls affixed with rope but two were fresher, the eyes eaten away but sinews still making a semblance of a memory of a face. Eight wildings dropped into the clearing. The light was changing rapidly as twilight settled. The sergeant gave an order, and the soldiers fled back the way they had come.

The wildings looked him over, blinking to turn their eyes from colored facets to jet black. He glanced up at the skull. Its jawbone was missing; he spotted, in the gloom, a span of white cradled within the cushion of a fern.

Kartu Town seemed very far away right now.

Slowly, he set down sword and spear and raised his hands, palms open and empty.

No man is permitted to cross into the Wild. He had broken the boundaries, just as his scouting party had in the Lend, only this time he had no Eridit to entertain them with a chanted tale and no horses to lose in exchange for food or his life.

One of the newcomers picked up the spear and broke the stout staff over its knee, keeping the iron point and tossing the sword to a companion. Then it gestured to Shai:
This way. Come.

As night fell, he followed them into the Wild.

•  •  •

T
EN DAYS MORE
it took Marit, flying into the cold and empty north. She had seen the Eagle's Claws once, at the end of her first year as a reeve when with a more experienced reeve she had flown a circuit of the Hundred so she might learn the breadth and length of the land she had sworn an oath to protect. She was not sure what she was looking for in this wild rocky outpost where forest-covered spines of land dug like talons into the windswept sea. She flew north into the Claws as dense forest gave way to sparser pine woods with an underlayer of rhododendron and myrtle. There were no villages, no goats, no shepherds or fisherman ranging, nothing but wind and waves and a lonely emptiness like the weight of a heart which knows itself to be alone without clan or hall.

Naturally the thread of smoke near the tip of the southernmost talon caught her attention. Along the ridges and cliffs rested huge nests, torn by wind and weather, evidence that the great eagles had nested here in the past. A cluster of ruins emerged, the clear imprint of an old reeve outpost, smaller than a hall but larger than a way station like Candle Rock. Training grounds and landing spaces had been cleared, grown over by a layer of rattle grass. Rubble marked old cotes and outbuildings, but the crude rock hall's thatched roof was in good repair. An odd white growth stubbled the nearby brush and rocky fissures.

In a hollow tucked away in a tiny bay below the compound, a crude stone hut sheltered against the cliff. A fire burned in a pit ringed with stones, and skewered meat raised tongues of flame where grease dropped. An eagle dove into view so suddenly she yelped in alarm and then laughed as the raptor swung up hard and thumped down on a rocky outcropping. Aui! How she missed Flirt!

A young man unhooked from the harness and dropped awkwardly to the ground, steadying a covered basket. He paused to scan sea and shore, looking past her as she approached. Satisfied, he released the eagle's jesses and bounded down stone steps to the cottage with the grace of a careless mountain goat.
The eagle launched, found an updraft, and rose fast into the sky, ignoring Marit and Warning.

She backtracked to the ruins of the outpost and landed. A byre had been repaired with freshly cut wood, one post listing. Wind whined through the gaping doors of the rock long house, the kind of hall northern barbarians lived in, without proper doors and windows or even a porch. She left Warning with reins to the ground and approached the door, slowing as the musty scent of its interior assailed her.

A human leg bone gleamed in the entrance.

The wind's chill cut her as she retreated to quarter the area, seeing with new eyes the odd white growth strewn through the brush.

Human bones aplenty, arms, legs, ribs, skulls, the fluttering remains of sashes and the ribbons of belts, if not much in the way of scraps of actual clothing. But other bones, too: tumbled columns of vertebrae, huge sternums big enough to shelter under, and talons whose strength was bleached by sun and scoured clean by rain and wind. Tangles of old harness, its leather more resilient than flesh.

Hundreds of humans and eagles had been slaughtered here.

If the earth had dropped out from under her feet, she might have better known how to react: by flailing and shrieking. She stumbled back to the training ground and halted there, rocking with eyes shut until a keening wail burst from her throat.

A scuff of foot alerted her to a figure leaping behind the corner of the stone long house. She bolted after him, and although he was young and lean and knew the ground, she caught him, grabbed the back of his jacket, and yanked him to a halt so hard his feet went forward while his body slammed back. He rolled, kicking and grunting, and she flipped him and sat atop his chest. He'd braided his long hair neatly, and his face was scrubbed clean and his chin shaven, cuts healing in two places where he'd scraped too hard. His eyes were wide with fright as he gaped up at her.

She took in the weight of his memories like a hammer to the head: a poor fishing clan's superfluous son, restless enough to
range into dangerous waters and plucked from the stormy wreck of his sinking boat by reeves. The reeves were in exile, they'd told him, fled to the uttermost north and gone into hiding from implacable enemies whose name they did not share. He'd been too awed by the huge eagles and their fearless handlers to ask questions. What right did he have to do so, anyway? They'd taken him in and treated him well, that was enough, wasn't it? His fishing helped feed the hall, and he'd worked around the place in exchange for his keep. Once a month a ship came, its hold filled with sheep or cattle, because the Eagle's Claws did not nourish enough big prey to feed so many eagles. And one month he'd been out fishing beyond the point a day after the ship's arrival, when he heard shouting, screaming, the sharp calls of frantic eagles.

“I didn't know what to do,” he stuttered, choking on sobs. “I was afraid to come in. After it got quiet, the ship sailed. I came back to find them dead.”

He'd seen the corpses of clansmen washed ashore after losing their boats; he'd seen elders pass over to the other side, hands limp atop frail chests; he'd seen infants washed gray by death. But he'd never seen anything like this butchery, a brutal attack by people who had lured the eagles to their death by feeding them poisoned meat and killing any who did not succumb.

“Even after they were dead they hacked them up, like they hated them. How can you hate something so beautiful?”

He flung a hand over his eyes.

She felt the wings of an eagle swell in the air and heard a raptor thump down behind her. Its shadow fell over her. She moved very deliberately, remembering the time an eagle's talons had ripped into her, and shifted to sit off to one side. No threat. The hem of her cloak flickered on the ground as the wind picked up.

“Do you know who it was who killed them?” she asked in the voice she'd used as a reeve to question people who had just faced a violent death or sudden fatal accident in their clan.

“I don't know.” He was telling the truth. He was just a village kid, way out of his depth.

“Where did these reeves come from?”

“They called themselves Horn Hall. They made a couple other outposts, in other ruins. But those others got killed, too. I went to every place. They're all dead!”

His voice raised to an edge of hysteria. He'd been living on the brink for a long time.

“They can't have all been killed. How could anyone manage it?”

“They killed the eagles first!” he cried with the frustrated disgust of youth, unable to penetrate the obliteratingly stubborn blindness of elders. “They brought good meat for all that time and got them into the habit of feeding it out in a certain way. And then they just did it.”