Traitors' Gate (80 page)

“Aui!” Rayish retched right over the bloody mess as Shai got up, very very slowly, and stepped back as the eagle slewed its massive head around to take a good long look at Shai.

He displayed knife and spear. “I'm your cursed ally. Not your cursed dinner.”

The eagle shook itself free and waddled backward out of the slick mess it had made, so awkward Shai had to wipe his eyes as laughter choked him.

Rayish spat, averting his eyes from the corpses. “Eihi! Feh! Gah!” He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. “Hurry! We're vulnerable on the ground.”

“I'm coming,” said Shai. “Find me that cohort, and you'll have my thanks.”

“You have my and Pretty's thanks already,” said the reeve. “That third one might have got us.”

That third one had ceased twitching and gushing although Pretty's two victims still spasmed. A misty extrusion twisted from the eyes and nostrils of the man Shai had killed, swirling in the streaks and pools of his blood until it took on a man-shaped form that rose to confront Shai.

“The hells! What hit me? Eihi! That cursed eagle! They said to watch, but I didn't believe—Bedi? Oyard? Can you hear me?” Hollow eyes fixed on Shai. “What are you, that you stare at me so? Are you one of those gods-cursed demons they warned us about?”

“Get over here! I have to leave.” Rayish's shouts blended with the voice of the ghost.

“Am I
dead
?” The ghost sobbed. “They promised if we believed and served that we would escape death, if we wore the Star of Life it would shield us—”

Shai dodged away from the twisting mouth and insubstantial groping hands. The raptor's fierce talons and beak were as nothing, compared to a ghost's cry or the sight of what he had himself wrought: slicing a man out of life and into death.

Rayish hooked him in, shaking and laughing. “We did it! Gods-rotted rubbish, that's what they are now! Finally!”

A whistle shrilled by Shai's ear, and the beat of the eagle's wings shattered the ghostly mist into oblivion as they rose into the wind.

 

•  •  •

 

F
ROM TOSKALA, JOSS
and Anji's scouting party flew north, intending to sweep past High Haldia and up beyond Seven and the Steps to the spectacular mountaintop fastness of Gold Hall. Anji wanted a look at the mountainous spine of Heaven's Reach, maybe even as far as the isolated valley of Walshow. The one place they were careful to avoid was Herelia, although they spoke of it often, mulling over the report Joss had heard from Marit.

So the council at Gold Hall went.

“Fifteen cohorts?” Marshal Lorenon demanded, looking at Joss. He had not once addressed Joss as “Commander.” “And more in training? Do you know how many soldiers that is?”

He was a man of middle age but not in good health, and although his querulous tone never eased, he addressed his remarks to Joss and Anji equally, not showing any prejudice toward the outlander captain. On the whole, Joss thought him relieved to have someone to talk to who had an air of competency. His senior reeves sat in attendance and were as like to talk over him as to maintain silence. Discipline was breaking down in Gold Hall, and Joss thought the senior reeves tolerated Lorenon as marshal out of habit, or because they felt, by now, that they had lost the war and were only hanging on to the remnant that survived in their stronghold and in the few high mountain villages that supplied them with provisions and necessaries.

“Surely the Star of Life has recruited from the regions you patrol,” said Anji. “Teriayne. The plateaus. The town of Seven and High Haldia. Young men do not like to feel they can be
slapped around. In the end, even the responsible ones may feel it is better to march with those who have weapons than to cower with those who must bare their throats.”

Listening reeves nodded, and ten different anecdotes poured out as they all talked over one another: a village arkhon had brought a complaint to the local assizes and was killed in the night on his pallet; lads had disappeared; trouble plagued the roads; gangs of armed men demanded coin from merchants to protect their market stalls against thievery. Men marched south in arrogant cadres, wearing a star hammered out of cheap tin as a necklace.

“It was never meant to be this way,” said Marshal Lorenon when the passionate chatter subsided. “The laws bind all in equal measure. The Guardians were meant to put a stop to those who use swords or coin to abuse the vulnerable.”

“The Guardians may have done so, in the years before,” said Anji, “but those who command the Star of Life army now are corrupted. Whether demons or human, they have stolen the Guardian cloaks and twisted them to serve their own selfish ends. They have soldiers. They have swords. They have the means to look into your mind and your heart. They do not care how many people die, as long as they get what they want.”

“So what in the hells is it they want?” Joss asked abruptly.

Anji shot him a glance, as if puzzled by Joss's puzzlement. “They want to rule. Maybe they even believe that the rule of a single strong arkhon or lord—what would be called the var among the Qin or a king or emperor in other lands—is a better and more stable rule than the tumult of a hundred towns and cities each ruling itself.”

“Neh, the gods rule the Hundred,” said Joss. “Their power resides in the temples. We each serve a year's apprentice to one of the gods, and some serve their entire lives, and thus we tie ourselves to the land. It is the gods' laws that govern us. As it says on Law Rock: ‘On law shall the land be built.' Not on men, whether one man or many.”

“Maybe so,” objected Marshal Lorenon, “but right now, laws don't defeat swords. Can Olo'osson's militia really defeat fifteen cohorts, Captain?”

“Not alone,” said Anji. It was a bit unnerving: the steady gaze, the square shoulders, the air of being in command that was not intimidating but rather
assured
. “In an alliance that spreads from Olossi to Nessumara to Gold Hall.” He opened both palms in the storytelling gesture that invited listeners to make up their own minds. “Let me tell you how we can use wings of eagles to create strike forces. Combined with armed men, and stationed in small groups in high places that can't be reached by the enemy, these strike forces can pick off stragglers, assassinate sergeants and captains, sow confusion, and draw off their attention while I march an army up from Olo'osson.”

“Aui!” said Marshal Lorenon. “I'd give my cursed sight to feel like I'm striking a blow for justice. After all this gods-rotted helpless, useless time.”

He and his reeves leaned forward to hear more.

N
ORTHWEST THEY FLEW
, spiraling up on the wild thermals that raged along a huge escarpment running hundreds of mey from middle Haldia all the way into the northern wilderness of Heaven's Ridge. This steep drop-off was known to the locals, unimaginatively enough, as the Cliffs, although the towering cliffs wore fancier names in the tales. Gold Hall's marshal had loaned them two reeves to guide them to Walshow. They flew first across the spectacular “steps” where the River Istri plunged in a series of stair-step falls from the Teriayne plateau down to the northernmost reach of the Haldian plain. After, they sailed north for half the morning along a spur of the great escarpment split with ravines and isolated valleys.

“Joss,” shouted Anji, pointing in that cursed outlander way toward a teardrop-shaped valley with a lake near the center and woodland and meadows all glossy and green surrounding it, a lovely little haven. “Do you see? There's a cloak and a winged horse by the shore of the lake.”

Scar had seen nothing, and at first Joss saw nothing, only sunlight winking on the exceptional cerulean waters like a captured piece of sky. Was that flash of white an outstretched wing, or a death-white cloak? He jessed the eagle around, flagging for the other reeves to stay back, and dropped for a closer look.

“The cloak's seen us,” said Anji, gaze following movement. “The demon is running. Move off to the left. We'll follow it.”

“What color—is—the cloak?” demanded Joss, finding it hard to breathe as he thought of Marit.

“Can't tell. It's flying north. It can't outpace us, can it? We're faster.”

With Anji guiding, they tracked the cloak, Joss catching glimpses of a fluttering expanse of glimmering white. They banked away from the escarpment and over rugged foothills toward a substantial peak and three lesser ones known, the Gold Hall marshal had told him, as the Orator and Her Three Daughters. Looking ahead, Joss spotted a lake shining under the sun and spread all around it the dusty bones of overworked land leached to brown by the dry season. The town was a smear by the lake; impossible to say how many people lived there.

“This is Walshow!” cried Joss.

Anji, too, saw these things, but he twisted in the harness as they sailed past the daughter peaks. A voice sang among the spires, raised by the wind.

Anji said, urgently, “There! It's trying to escape us. It's dropping onto an altar. Do you see it? It's atop the smaller peak.”

A gleam pulsed under the midday sun, the pattern circled by a ring of boulders atop the lowest of the four clustered peaks.

“Set down, Joss,” said Anji in a cold, clear voice. “Set down
now
.”

Joss's hands worked the jesses and Scar was turning before he quite realized he had done so. Before Joss could protest at being ordered about in such a way, Anji went on in a measured tone of exceptional intensity.

“We have to do it.”

Because of Scar's swiftness and the angle of the currents,
they came around so quickly that Scar pulled up over the boulders before Joss quite realized they had reached the altar. Was that a flash of wings at the center of the labyrinth? Did a ghostly figure walk the path, no more substantial than fog rising off the ground at dawn? He had seen a Guardian walk an altar once before, at Hammering Ford. Was this the same one, one of the army's commanders?

Before Scar actually touched ground, Anji unhooked and dropped, rolling sideways out of the way. The eagle thumped down so hard that Joss swung in the harness, fumbling at the hooks as the captain jogged away toward the glittering entrance of the labyrinth. The hells! Joss dropped and stepped out from under Scar's shadow. The other reeves circled by the Orator, as if looking for him; as if the altar's magic concealed even the big eagle.

“Anji!” Joss shouted. “Don't walk the path!”

Anji did not walk the path. He strode
straight across
the open space as if the labyrinth did not bind his feet. It might not have been there at all. Yet when Joss ran after, with some crazy idea of supporting him or protecting Marit, he could not cross; what force held him back he could not name, only that it was like a wall, or a storm, or a woman's unyielding refusal.

Anji vanished into a swirl of mist pouring up out of the maze, and Joss stood there with one foot on the entrance and one off, shouting, but his words scattered into nothing. Was that a whisper that teased his ears from down the long, twisting path? He shut his mouth and listened.

“Who are you?” said a woman's voice. “How have you followed me?”

“Just come to offer my help, verea. Were you looking for something?”

“Eiya! You are another outlander demon! Veiled to my sight.”

“I am no demon. I am a man, just like any other man.”

“Obviously you are not a man, if you can walk here with no repercussions. What is your name? Why have you followed me?”

The pause before Anji's reply was measured by a sound like the exhalation of a sword being drawn. “Forgive me, verea. I mean no disrespect.”

Scar took off abruptly, launching himself into the sky and abandoning Joss. The hells! His cursed flags were hooked into the harness, dangling beneath the raptor right where Joss could not possibly reach them now. The other eagles had flown out of sight behind the Orator. Neh, there was one, high overhead—

A light pulsed out of the labyrinth, followed by a blast like a sound so strong Joss felt it as a blow within his flesh that lifted him off his feet and flung him backward. He hit his head.

 

A
ND THEN HE
awakened.

“Joss.”

An iron stake had impaled his head. He did not want to open his eyes, and yet he must.

“Joss!”

Not a stake, only a gods-cursed headache ripping open his eyes. He staggered up, shielding his vision from the hammer of the sun. Anji stood before him. The captain was not wearing his black tabard; he wore a quilted coat of silk whose color was as rich a blue as that cerulean lake they'd seen, soothing on the eyes. Joss cracked his lids a little more. Anji's right cheek was reddened, and he was favoring his left hand, its glove shredding to ash as though the fine leather had been singed. His black tabard was rolled up, his outer belt wrapped tightly around it end over end, looped and mazy, and fastened to loops in the quilted coat so the bundled tabard rode against Anji's hips. Blessed Ilu! The cursed fabric shifted and fluttered as if the wind had gotten inside it. Or his vision was blurring and distorting as the headache spiked.

Joss blinked away tears.

“Anji,” he whispered hoarsely, surprised his voice worked.

“Call your eagle,” said Anji, words bitten back with pain. “Let's get out of here.”

“But—”

“Now.”

Joss groped for his bone whistle, blew on it once, getting nothing because there was no air in his chest. He panted softly, then blew again. Scar banked sharply and descended. When the eagle thumped down, Joss ducked under and hooked in. With the familiarity of practice, Anji hooked into the secondary harness in front of him.

They rose on a thermal. Three eagles came into view, reeves frantically flagging. He fumbled at his all-clear flag and waved it. His headache had exploded into a knife of agony that made the air shimmer with bolts of light as he had a horrible feeling he was going to vomit right down Anji's back and over that expensive first-quality quilted silk coat.