Kate Elliott - Shadow Gate

One of the men checked inside the awning. Others stared at Eridit.

'She going for sale, too?' asked the leader finally, indicating her with an elbow.

'Neh. She was Captain Mani's bed warmer, although I don't see what she saw in him. I promised to see her safely back to the army.'

The man leered. 'Looking for a real man to take you on, eh? I'll consider it, but you'd have to show me what you have to offer.'

Eridit looked about to say something rude, but she scanned him in a measuring way. 'I'm looking for a man who will treat me decent. One with a bit of coin to keep me clothed and fed. Say what you will about Captain Mani, but he treated me decent and so I treated him decent. That's worth plenty.'

Simple words, and yet with her tone and posture she did get those

men to looking at each other as though sizing up their competition. Set their backs up. Sow a scattering of dissension. Good tactics. Bai signaled, and Eridit herded the children back under the awning.

'We'll move out at dawn,' Bai said.

They settled into an uneasy truce, one man from each company set to the watch. Shai was dismissed, but although he settled down against the awning, he was twisted too tight to sleep. He fretted all night, wondering where Tohon was concealed, but neither saw sight nor heard sound of the Qin scout, not even when night's shroud lifted to reveal an overcast dawn.

They walked the next day on forest tracks, pushing east through heavily overgrown countryside. At their approach, birds ceased singing. The children ate nai paste in the morning, and afterward trudged with faces set, little soldiers who had lost all hope of returning home and, in doing so, gained new strength. Shai moved up and down the line as they marched, keeping an eye out for exhaustion, quietly making sure none of the soldiers bothered them.

In the afternoon they stumbled across an abandoned farmstead, blowing through like locusts, stripping any least thing that might be edible. Dena and Eska proved adept at crawling along the narrow eaves of the storehouse to collect bundles of drying herbs. It was strange to see how sharing food altered the behavior of the soldiers, some joshing the children good-naturedly as they might younger siblings. The landscape began to open with harvested woodland, large clearings suitable for pasturage, a pair of charcoal pits, and strips of old field gone fallow. Twice again they moved through emptied farmsteads, and gleaned what they could.

Where had the farmers gone? No one made any guesses.

But in both farmsteads Shai collected an arrow fletched in the Qin style discarded in the dust beneath one of the storehouses. Tohon had been here before them.

As they traveled on, the shadows grew long. A murmur nagged at Shai's ears.

'Best we look for a camping site,' said Bai.

The leader shook his head. 'Neh. We're near enough. Keep moving.'

'Near enough to what?'

The ground gave way to an incline thick with flowering brush,

humming with bees and flitting birds. Shai's gaze skipped over these wonders to the vista beyond as the children clustered around him, murmuring in amazement, shocked out of their daze. It took him a while to realize that the wide strip of blue-green land that split the earth was not land but a river twice as wide as the River Olo. The spilling murmur was its voice.

He looked down. A second river flowed past, neither as wide nor as deep, but much closer, cutting a swath through cultivated land.

'Look.' Bai nudged him.

Where the rivers met, a city rose, ringed by walls. Within the inner wall, canals quartered the inner city. A huge outcropping thrust into the confluence of the two rivers, tiny buildings visible like children's toys set atop the broad rock.

But this astounding city was not what Bai was pointing at. The soldiers had already started down the track, which zigged and zagged through the flowering growth.

Between the rivers the land, of course, narrowed in the manner of a funnel. Tidy ranks of orchards and cultivated fields covered this tongue of land as far north as he could see. Above, a pair of eagles circled. Below, a vast army marched, rank upon rank descending on the city to the beat of drums. The drums stuttered a new rhythm, and in stages the ranks staggered to a halt, their line stretched from bank to bank. Merciful God! There were so many!

'We can't take the children into that,' he whispered.

'It's exactly what we must do.' With her body lit by the westering sun, Bai looked eager.

Vali held Yudit's hand, his gaze cold, hers exhausted like a hurt dog who knows it must keep limping. The other children watched Shai. Ladon and Veras walked up behind with the leader and his second, and Ladon shaded his eyes and gave a grunt of surprise, while Veras flung his head back like a startled horse catching sight of unfamiliar movement in dangerous country.

'Heya!' The second cheered, then laughed. 'The main army beat us to Toskala, eh? I'll be glad of a dram of cordial tomorrow.'

'Eh,' agreed the leader. 'If we can get it, which I doubt. We haven't much coin between us for cordial.' He looked at Bai, whose gaze had not left the army settling into its new camp. 'I'm counting on our arrangement, verea.'

'Eiya! Both whores and slaves need cleaning and fattening. As it is, they're too scrawny to be of interest to any but the worst sort, if you take my meaning, and that sort hasn't more than a vey or two to rub together. I can't earn my fortune that way, eh?'

His gaze slid to Eridit's behind, and back to Bai. 'Neh. Neh. I don't have many connections, I admit, but there's opportunity for those following the camp. It's true a better class of offerings will attract more coin.'

Bai's answering smile made Shai shudder and the other man grin as at a gift. 'Listen to your greed, ver. I know the temples say otherwise, yet they enrich themselves with our offerings, eh? I've a brother still in debt slavery, and mean to free him. So let's go. Before the army moves on.'

He laughed. 'Moves on? Lord Radas's army has reached its target.'

The siege of Toskala had commenced.

The flight of reeves swung wide around the road until it reached the upper reaches of the River Olossi, here not wide but swollen to a green churning roar with the flood rains. They glided southwest, strung in a line at varying elevations along a valley's edge. Each eagle bore a reeve and a soldier.

Anji, harnessed in front of Joss, said, 'Look there. A ford.'

A rockslide broken off from a treeless ridgeline had filled part of the river, boulders and debris sunk halfway across and thereby making the shallows hard to defend. This time of year, the remaining deep channel boiled with white water. A booming sound pounded at intervals like a smith hammering on an anvil.

'Where's the next crossing?' shouted Anji.

'The Westcott ferry.'

They covered about eight mey, passing hamlets and farmsteads set back from the river although mostly the land here was forest cover sprinkled with clearings, moister than the Barrens but not as lush as the countryside in the east.

They sighted a substantial village and the Rice Walk, which on the Westcott side of the river became known as the Lesser Walk. Folk in the fields spotted them. A figure ran into the village, and in

its wake the rest fled toward the palisade. By the time Scar touched down in the nearest fallow field, sixty or more people stood at the gate with adzes, hoes, rakes, axes, spears, and staffs balanced in their hands.

Anji unhooked, and then Joss, but the reeve approached alone along a raised walkway between fields.

'Greetings of the day,' he called. He addressed the eldest person, a stoop-shouldered man with the weathered face of one who has spent years working under the sun. 'I am Joss, marshal of Argent Hall, come on urgent business. I hope you'll give me your respectful attention.'