Kate Elliott - Traitors Gate

Vassa pushed her way through the acolytes with sharper words than he had ever heard from one who was always gentle. When she shone lamplight in his face, everyone gasped.

'Gather a few things and sit out here in the courtyard until we know the danger is passed,' she said to the envoys and apprentices. 'Kellas, haul out the litter in case we must carry the ostiary.'

'I can walk-' Nekkar croaked, and put his weight on his twisted ankle. The light hazed. The world spun. Many arms took hold of him and lifted him.

'You'll take a wash and some poultices for your injuries, some food and tea, and then you'll lie down.'

'I must talk to you-'

'Yes,' Vassa agreed, and he realized in a distant way that she was trying not to cry. 'Here, you lads, carry him.'

He was too weary and too much in pain to struggle. Tomorrow or the next night, the assassin had said. Tomorrow would be soon enough to see what trouble he had called down on the temple. They had to be ready for anything.

Don't open the gate.

That was the last thing Zubaidit had said to Shai before leaving on her spying expedition yesterday. Now it was dawn, Bai hadn't returned, and someone was rapping hard on the nailed-together planks set against a gap in the abandoned storeroom in which he had slept.

'Open up!'

'The whole compound looks abandoned to me.'

'The dog thinks otherwise.'

A dog snuffled along the exterior of the planks. Shai tucked his sword along his torso and slid a hiltless knife into a sheath cut into the leather of his boots just as the soldiers kicked down the planks. Shards Splintered.

He pretended he was just waking up. He'd successfully played stupid before. 'Eh, ver. Eh. You frightened me.'

Burly soldiers prodded spears in his direction. 'Heya, Sergeant! Got an outlander here. Whew! He stinks.'

'That's because we're in an old tanning yard, you imbecile,' came the reply. 'Bring him out.'

'Out!' They treated him as they might a dog whose temperament was chancy.

'Eh, ver, Mistress told me to wait here for her. She'll whip me if I leave.'

'Our orders are to kill anyone who disobeys.'

'Maybe he can't understand you,' said the second man.

Shai had already cut a hiding place for his sword into the foundation. He rolled over the sword, shoved it into the gap, and covered it as he kept talking. 'Please don't hurt me, ver. My mistress, she said she would whip me. Please don't.'

He crawled on hands and knees, feeling the points of the spears like stinging scorpions along his back, but once he got outside into the colorless dawn, the soldiers drew a step back and let him stand. He shook out his loose trousers, flicked dust from the sleeveless leather vest that covered his chest, and wiped a smear of dust from his lips. This tannery compound hadn't been used for some time, and lay far enough away from Toskala that Bai had

thought it safe to use as a hiding place. But every structure in this entire area where the camp followers had set up days ago was being searched and their occupants driven outside and rounded up. Women were arguing, children crying, old men fumbling as they tried to keep their bundled possessions slung over thin shoulders.

As they came into the disrupted camp, a sergeant trotted over to look him up and down. 'An outlander, all right! Look at those arms!'

'Mistress said to wait for her here, ver.'

'And where is she, your mistress, eh?' demanded the sergeant.

'Out in the camp, ver. She always goes out at night.'

'A whore, eh?' cackled one of the soldiers. 'I wonder what she wants a slave for, if she can get men to pay for it?'

The other soldier poked Shai with the haft of his spear. 'He's got no slave mark. What if he's concealing a weapon beneath that vest or trousers.'

'Fancy a look, do you, Milas?' said the first soldier.

'Shut it,' barked the sergeant. 'Milas is right. Get that vest off.'

In the Hundred, folk walked about with a great deal of skin uncovered, while Shai still felt awkward about his bare arms. So his embarrassment made him slow, and the soldiers got more threatening, others circling in, attracted by the commotion. The light rose from gray to a pearly pink. Overhead, clouds chased the wind north.

Shai was strong from years of carpentry, and lean from the recent weeks of privation. He kept his head bent, knowing he was blushing as he stripped off the vest.

'Sheh! Reason enough, neh?' Milas laughed once Shai stood with with vest hanging from his right hand. 'Cursed if those camp women aren't staring and licking their lips. You want us to strip him all the way, Sergeant? A nice show for the lasses and such lads as are fashioned that way, neh?'

The sergeant had already turned away. 'This is taking too long. A cloak will sort this out. Bring him.' He raised his voice. 'Let's get this camp cleared.'

Shai pulled on the vest as he shuffled over to join the rest of the detainees. He kept his head deferentially lowered as he scanned the encampment: canvas tents and lean-tos, tiny huts precariously assembled out of scraps of wood. A few abandoned structures like the old tannery in which he had slept gave the temporary camp a look of ruined permanence, and the clotheslines where rags

Happed and the stink of the crudely dug refuse pits reminded him of certain neighborhoods in faraway Kartu Town where the outcast and the poor had barely scraped by living in their own filth. The Qin conquerors had forced gangs of townspeople to raze such compounds and build blocks of more sanitary housing, easy to police and control.

But he had left Kartu Town. He no longer lived under the suzerainty of the Qin. He had come to the Hundred together with a troop of exiled Qin soldiers only to find himself in the middle of a chaotic internal war. He and Zubaidit had been sent north with five others to spy out the enemy, and now, of course, he'd gotten himself captured.

Again.

The soldiers herded the group along a barrier of wagons that marked off the edge of the army's main camp. An early wind teased trampled ground where draft beasts and horses grazed. In the days since Toskala had fallen, much of the army had taken up stations within the city, leaving the camp followers to starve because the soldiers could get food and miscellaneous goods as well as repair work done elsewhere. Some had drifted away into the countryside. Now, it seemed, the commanders of the army meant to sweep up and dispose of the rest.

'Heya! I walked all the way from Walshow, feeding the army. What am I to do?' called a man hauling a cart laden with the pans and tripods of a movable kitchen. Beside him, a boy bent double under the weight of a bundle of goods, his left eye scarred with the mark of a debt slave.

A young woman, red-eyed from weeping, kept trying to get the attention of a pair of soldiers who resolutely refused to look her way. She held an infant wrapped in a decent piece of cloth that matched the green scarf she had wrapped around her hair. 'Where's Joran? Why hasn't he come back for me and the baby, like he promised?'

Shai hung back until he was at the tail of the crowd, the dust kicked up by their feet smearing his tongue. After months of regular rain, it had not rained in three days, and the churned-up ground had dried. Off to the left sprawled the city, too big to comprehend in one glance. It was marked most obviously by a huge rock outcropping thrust up where the River Istri and the Lesser Istri had their confluence. There, during the day, the giant eagles ridden by reeves landed and took off. A pillar of smoke drifted

above one quarter of the city, losing coherence as the wind tore at it.

'Keep moving!' A soldier prodded Shai while speaking to his own comrade. 'Milas says this one's got muscles like you wouldn't believe. A real woodchopper!' They both laughed, as if the word meant something different.