Traitors' Gate (7 page)

The prince sat in his chair as the captain led them away. Yet as they walked the length of the underground corridor with its hunting stories faded in the dim light, Kesh considered the last time he had brought a woman north over the Kandaran Pass into the Hundred. He'd believed one thing about her, but he'd been entirely wrong; Cornflower had turned out to be quite different from what he originally thought she was, not a helpless mute slave at all but rather a terrible demon bent on vengeance. Aui! There was really no telling what would happen when Captain Anji's mother arrived in the Hundred, was there?

D
ON'T OPEN THE GATE
.

Those were the last words Nekkar had said to the apprentices before he had slipped out of the temple to get a look at the army that had occupied Toskala eight days ago. Reflecting back on their frightened faces and anxious tears, he knew that leaving them had been a gods-rotted foolish thing to do. He should have stayed in the temple grounds to keep some order in the place. Make sure none of the young ones panicked.

Aui! Too late now to fret over what he couldn't change.

He had reached the front of the line.

A sergeant caressing a long knife finished his interrogation of a thin man, a farmer by the look of his humble knee-length linen jacket and bare legs. “So you admit you are a refugee, come to Toskala from the country in the last six months?”

“We had to flee our village because of the trouble—”

“No refugees allowed in Toskala. You'll be marched to the gates and released. Return to your village.”

A bored soldier beckoned to Nekkar, a gesture meaning
You next
.

The farmer didn't budge. “I've children waiting in the alleys. I have to get them.”

“You should have thought of that before you left your gods-rotted village.” The sergeant nodded, and soldiers grabbed the man by either arm. As he'd done numerous times before, seen by everyone standing in line, the sergeant sliced three shallow
cuts into the man's left forearm. “We cleanse those who sneak back into the city after they've been marked.”

“But they'll starve!” The man's voice rose shrilly as his desperation mounted and the pain of the cuts stung into tears. “Their mother is dead. We lost track of our clan—”

The soldiers dragged him out by a different door. Aui! The refugees who had flooded into Toskala over the last year had put a strain on the resources of the city and caused a great deal of hard feeling, but to separate a man from his children in such a way was beyond cruel. Yet none dared protest. Soldiers lined the main room; an inn called the Thirsty Saw had been cleared of customers and set aside for their use. Many more folk besides him waited in line, some wringing their hands or rubbing unmarked forearms, others weeping. Most stood in silent, bitter dread. Eight days ago, on the cusp between the days of Wakened Ox and Transcendent Snake, their good city had been overthrown by treachery and fallen into the hands of thieves and criminals.

The bored soldier's voice sharpened. “I said,
You next
.”

Nekkar limped forward.

The sergeant looked him up and down without smile or frown. “What's your name?”

“I'm called Nekkar.”

“What's your clan?”

“I'm temple-sworn.” As any tupping idiot could see by his blue cloak with its white stripe sewn over each shoulder! Those who wore the blue cloak marking them as servants of Ilu the Herald, patron of travelers and bringer of news, became accustomed to being addressed as “Holy One.” That the sergeant had not used the customary honorific was a deliberate slight. He swallowed angry words as he glanced uneasily around the chamber. The other detainees, swept up like so much detritus by the soldiers now patrolling Toskala's streets, stared, trying to gauge what questions they might be asked and what answers would serve them best.

“What clan in Toskala marks your kinfolk?” The sergeant's impatience edged his tone. He wore a silver chain from which hung an eight-pointed tin star, a cheap medallion compared
with the finely wrought chain likely obtained in the first frenzy of looting.

“Why, no clan in Toskala!” he replied, surprised. “Why should it? I was sent to Fifth Quarter's temple at sixteen as an apprentice and transferred five years later as an envoy to Stone Quarter's temple. I have lived here in the city the last thirty years, and never regretted one moment of it.”
Until today.
“My kin are hill people from the Liya Pass, if you must know, a day's walk from the town of Stragglewood on the Ili Cutoff.”

“I know the place. Go on.”

Faced with the soldier's unrelenting gaze, he cleared his throat nervously and went on. “Most of my people follow the carters' or woodsmen's trade. Easy to work together, then, you see, cousin hauling logs for cousin. Never had a badge, like they do here in the city. Honest country folk don't.” The sergeant didn't blink at that jab, nor rise to the bait, nor touch his own ugly star badge, if that was what it was. “I haven't been back there for over twenty years. My life is here in the city now.”

“What clan?” the sergeant repeated.

He wiped sweat from his brow with a hand made grimy when the soldiers who had cornered him had shoved him to the ground. His wrist hurt, and his twisted ankle was swelling. “Tumble Creek lands, mostly. Some granddaughter branches that range the roads and paths, as carters do. We're a daughter branch long split from the Green Sun, call ourselves Tumble Sun, if you must know.”

The sergeant blinked, as if the names meant something to him.

Dread opened its maw and swallowed Nekkar in one gulp. He had the horrible feeling he had just betrayed his entire clan, who had never done one wrong thing to him even for all he had been thrilled to leave the quiet hills for the glories of the finest city in all the Hundred.

The sergeant pointed to the white trim on his cloak. “You're wearing an ostiary's stripes.”

“Yes, I'm ostiary over the temple of Ilu that's located here in Stone Quarter. We're well known as the most minor of the five temples dedicated to Ilu in Toskala.”

“An ambitious person raised to a high position might feel slighted to be called ‘minor.' Maybe you were hoping for a better place.”

He was very irritating, and Nekkar was anxious about his charges and sick of seeing unoffending refugees cut like debt slaves and dragged away. Standing in line half the day with hands and ankle throbbing and without food or drink had made him light-headed enough to kick him into incautious speech, that sarcastic way he had of lecturing youth when they were being idiots. “I'm perfectly happy with an orderly, unambitious existence. Keeping to my place and serving the gods as I am sworn, and leaving others to go about their lawful business. In peace.”

The soldier's hand flicked up. A gasp voiced behind was his only warning. A blow cracked him across the shoulders and he dropped to his knees, too stunned to cry out. His gaze hazed; lights danced. He sobbed, then caught a tangle of prayer and chanted under his breath to take his mind off the pain blossoming across his back and the fear sparking in his mind.

“Hold him for questioning.” The sergeant's voice faded.

They dragged him out to the back and dumped him on the ground. Pain paralyzed him. He tried to imagine what Vassa might be cooking for dinner tonight, but his parched mouth tasted only of sand. It was easier to let go and close his eyes.

 

H
E CAME TO
with a start, his back throbbing as if a herd of dray beasts had stampeded over his body. Voices staggered back and forth, fading, growing louder, and fading in a slide that made him dizzy although he was flat on his stomach and sucking in dust with each nauseated breath.

“Just these two outlanders in the last eight days?” a woman asked. “That's all you've rounded up, Sergeant Tomash?”

“My apologies, Holy One. I have been searching according to the orders given out by the Lord Commander Radas and Commander Hetti, Holy One. Every household and guild is required to open their compound to my soldiers and present a census of their household members and their wealth. These two slaves are the only outlanders I've found in Stone Quarter.”

Someone was weeping, desperate and afraid.

“Release them, or kill them, as you wish. They are useless to me.”

“My apologies, Holy One.” The sergeant, whose contemptuous tone inside the inn had made folk cringe, sounded as near to tears as a whining boy dumped by uncaring relatives on the auction block. “I've been diligent. I am interviewing compound by compound throughout this quarter, just as I was ordered. Anyone unlawfully on the streets is brought before me. These folk I had dragged out here all need further examination, Holy One.”

“Look at me!”

The sergeant whimpered.

Nekkar opened the eye that wasn't jammed up against the ground. At first he thought his vision was ruined; his open eye scratched as if scoured by sand, and when he blinked, it hurt to open and close. Then he realized that actually it was dusk, and also that a few paces from his head floated a cloak of rippling fabric like the night sky speckled by stars.

A person in travel-worn sandals wrapped over dusty feet was standing not three steps from his nose; it was this person who wore the cloak.

“You've spoken the truth about the outlanders,” said the cloak.

The sergeant sobbed with a gasp of relief. “Yes, Holy One.”

“You've done as well as anyone could.”

“My thanks, Holy One.”

“Bring the prisoners before me one at a time.” She moved away to a trellis.

Nekkar eased up onto his side. He was lying in the inner courtyard of the Thirsty Saw, where he and other folk in Stone Quarter often drank under the shade of an awning green with vines. Soldiers lined the compound wall, staring at their boots. Prisoners were tied to the posts that supported the massive trellis, and more were stuffed doubled over and in evident pain into livestock cages. Many had soiled themselves from being confined for so long, their reek mixing with the sour stench of spilled wine.

The sergeant designated a pair of reluctant soldiers to haul the prisoners forward one at a time. The first man had been beaten so badly he could barely walk, and his head swayed on his neck as if he were not quite conscious.

The woman held a writing brush and a neatly trimmed sheet of mulberry paper. Her cloak's hood was thrown back to reveal a nondescript face, pleasant enough in its lineaments and near in age to Nekkar, who had at the turn of the year made forty-seven and counted his thirtieth year in service to Ilu, the Herald. The prisoner's gaze was forced to meet hers.

She marked on the paper like a clerk. “Veron, son of the Ten Chains clan of Toskala. You have committed a terrible crime.”

The man collapsed. After a moment, it became apparent he was dead. Just like that. His spirit had fled through the Gate, leaving its husk.

A soldier retched. Two others grabbed the dead man's ankles and dragged him out of sight as another prisoner was shoved forward. This one, a woman Nekkar knew by sight from the market square, sobbed noisily as she confessed that her clan had hidden its gold beneath the planks of their weaving house.

“Were you not commanded to reveal all coin and stores in your household's possession, as well as provide a full census of household members including any outlanders or gods-touched residing there?” asked the cloak, her tone calm. “Why do you not obey when you know there will be a punishment?”

“We cleanse them who disobey our orders so flagrantly, Holy One,” said Sergeant Tomash. “As an example.”

The woman began to scream, pleas for mercy, anything but to be hung by her arms from a post until she died of exposure and thirst, but the cloak gestured and she was dragged away. Another was hauled forward in her place.

So went the weary round. The sergeant was a cunning man in his own way; every person here had triggered his suspicion, and every one now confessed either to some petty crime or to concealing valuables or in one case an outlander slave. A merchant babbled about how he cheated on his rice measures. All were condemned to the post.

One frail old fellow fell to his knees as he begged her pardon for having killed another laborer back in his youth.

“You killed him? You confess it?” She lifted her brush, touched it to the rice paper.

He croaked a gasp, or perhaps it was meant to be a word, but like the first man he tumbled forward onto his face. Dead.

Nekkar shut his eyes as the corpse was dragged away.

“This man turned himself in to spare his clan,” the sergeant said. “He confessed to hoarding nai—”

“Look at me,” said the cloak. “Sergeant, lift his chin—”

Nekkar opened his eyes just as the sergeant wrenched the man's chin up. The prisoner was young, hale, and with the thick arms and powerful legs of a laborer. He struggled, keeping his head down, but his eyes flicked up anyway, as though gauging his distance.

She took a step back. “Kill him.”

As soldiers drew their swords, the young man fought free and tugged a knife from his boot; he leaped toward the cloak, but spears pinned him before he reached her.

“He concealed no nai.” Her tone remained even as she watched him thrashing, still fighting forward despite flesh pierced and his blood flowing. “He came to attack me. That is why he hid his gaze.”

“No heart can be hidden from you, Holy One,” murmured the sergeant. “Cut his throat.”

The young man screamed; his failure was worse than the pain, no doubt. At least this one had fought back instead of waiting passively, too fearful or too shamed to stand up.

“Enough,” Nekkar said aloud.

What a gods-rotted fool he was, knowing he was responsible for the temple and yet staggering to his feet because he could not bear to watch this perverse assizes any longer. He straightened, grimacing at the stabbing pains in his abused body.