45.

Before the last march of the night, Chief Tuvi pulled Shai to the back of the line. "You're too inexperienced. You'll wait back here with the tailmen. Your job is to cut down any stragglers who run this way. Do you understand?"

"I understand."

"Best thing you could do is get in a kill or three, just to get blooded. You're little use to us otherwise." Chief Tuvi wasn't as encouraging as Tohon, but Shai hadn't seen Tohon since yesterday before dawn. About eight other men were also missing from the troop, but no one had bothered to tell him where they had gone.

They had left Olossi at about midday and marched as slowly as they possibly could out West Track to the intersection with West Spur. There, they had headed southwest, as if returning to the empire, moving as if led by hobbling ancients and delaying themselves with frequent stops. Late in the afternoon, when given the signal by the captain, they had simply pulled off the road as if to camp. As soon as dusk gave them cover, they had marched at speed through the night, past the crossroads that led down to Olossi and farther yet along the river bottomland east of the city. This was unknown country, but now the missing scouts appeared at intervals to give their reports. Late, as the waxing crescent moon sliced its way out of the house of the dead, the captain called a halt. Shai and a dozen tailmen took up stations along the road. Grooms led their horses into the trees. The rest of the company vanished into the night, hooves muffled by cloth.

For a long while they waited. There was no conversation.

Shai wanted to talk, but he dared not be first to break the silence, and he had a damned good idea that none of these tailmen would utter even one syllable. Every gaze was bent along the road. Shai had never seen such a road before. It shimmered, very faintly, as though a ghostly breath rose off it, like a cloud of breath steaming out of a warm mouth in bitterly cold weather. The other road they had traveled, West Spur, had exuded no such glamour.

A shadow passed overhead. He ducked. The others, those he could see, looked up, but there was nothing to see, only a cloak of stars and night thrown over the world. The wind died suddenly. An insect clik-clik-clikked. One branch scraped another. Strings creaked minutely as bows were readied. Swords whispered out of sheaths.

It caught them from behind, an explosion of wings and hooves and the crack of a staff as it met a hard leather helmet. One of the Qin went down, but the rest, these paltry tailmen, were already rolling, tumbling, jumping out of the way, finding a new position, a new angle. Shai stood there and gaped as a massive horse galloped out of the sky and right at him to trample him under.

Far away, in counterpoint, shouts and screams rent the silence. The noise of a distant battle breaking out jolted him into action. He ducked, stumbled, fell, scrambled out of the way just in time. The beast pounded past him as the tailmen whistled to each other, calls to mark position and choice of attack. The rider billowed like a cloud, only that was a voluminous cloak rising out behind his body as though caught in a gust of wind. The horse slowed to a canter, and it pulled in its vast wings and turned on a right rein, back around to face him.

The horse had wings.

The glamour on the road brightened where the horse's hooves touched it. That unnatural light rose as if with the dawn, but it was not yet dawn. Far away, the battle raged as Captain Anji and his men hit the strike force with their surprise attack. Close at hand, Shai saw clearly the face of the man who rode on the back of that impossible horse. He rose, trembling, and raised a hand to ward off what he knew must be an insubstantial ghost.

"Hari." His voice choked on the name.

A hiss of arrows answered. The tailmen were the least of the Qin company, but a Qin tailman would stand as an elite in most armies. Five arrows sprouted from the rider's body. A javelin, cast from the side, caught the man in the torso, just above the hip. He grunted in pain, and swayed in the saddle, but he kept his seat.

"Hari!"

The ghost spoke with Hari's voice, urgent and angry. "Shai! How can it be you've come here?"

"I came to find you."

"You shouldn't have. Go home before the shadows swallow you as they did me!"

The horse screamed a challenge, tossing its head, and it launched itself down the road as if to assault Shai. He was stupefied, bound, paralyzed. It leaped, and took to the air. One hoof shaved the top of his head, knocking him flat. The tailmen fixed arrows and loosed them after the animal. No arrow touched those gleaming flanks. But the rider was not so fortunate. Those dark slashes fixed in his body, yet he did not fall. His dark cloak billowed, a shadow entwining him.

Jagi whistled the alert. Shai grabbed his sword, which had somehow fallen out of his hand. A dozen or more horses bolted toward them on the road. None bore riders. Not far behind ran twenty or more men on foot, in a disorderly retreat.

"Get off the road," said Jagi in a calm voice that meant he was irritated.

Shai got off the road by stumbling backward down the ramped earth and falling hard onto his butt. There he sat, too stunned to act, as a trickle of blood, like a tear, slipped down his cheek from the scrape atop his head. Its salty heat caught in the corner of his mouth. The panicked horses swept past. The tailmen coolly picked off their enemies before those hapless men understood they were still under attack.

It wasn't the aftershock of the battle that immobilized him.

The tailmen had seen Hari. They had filled Hari full of arrows. Yet how could they see, much less kill, a man who was already a ghost?

46.

Eliar took her from camp about midday, just before Anji and the others rode out. By the time he had escorted her and her slaves up through the city, a tedious and very hot walk, the shops along the streets had begun to close their shutters for their afternoon's slumber. Olossi's avenues twisted and turned; even the main streets shifted position with curves and doglegs and sudden sharp-angled corners. Down the narrow side streets and deeper within alleyways lay walls and gates, the walls washed white so they all looked alike and only the gates painted with symbols and colors to give a hint of what household bided within. They hurried at length down a street where gold- and silversmiths displayed their wares, but by this time scarcely anyone was about to remark on the sight of Eliar, his two male companions who carried their belongings, and the three women. They turned left at a corner where a fountain burbled, then right into a cobbled alleyway wide enough to admit a wagon and swept so clean Mai could distinguish no speck of dust. White walls flanked them. The alley dead-ended in a plain wooden gate, its double segments marked only by yellow trim, agreeting bell hung to one side in an alcove in the wall, and bronze door handles fashioned to resemble deer in full flight, slender legs thrust out before and behind. A small door reinforced with bands of iron was set into the right-hand gate, with a slit-like peephole cut just above the level of Mai's head. High up on the wall, on either side, were set small grated windows.

He rang the bell, and waited.

"Where are we?" Mai asked.

"This is the house of my clan," he said. The walls were the height of two men, but there was a single building within the compound that towered above the walls, fully three stories high with a balcony ringing the highest floor, its interior screened by latticework.

"Do you need permission to enter your own house?" Mai asked.

"This is the women's entrance. I can't go in and out through here, nor can you use the men's entrance on the other side."

"If you live separately, then do you keep secrets from each other?"

"Not secrets, no. But I don't know everything that goes on in the women's quarters."

Anji's mother, a Qin woman, had been sent to a country where women were not allowed to ride. Yet she had contrived to teach her son to ride, according to the custom of her people. The emperor sequestered his women, but clearly, he hadn't known everything that was going on with them.

"Look! Look there!" Eliar cried.

An eagle flew over, but with walls rising high around them, they quickly lost sight of it.

"Is that Reeve Joss?" she asked. "Or one of the eagles from Argent Hall?"

The metal strip blocking the slit rasped free, drawn away by an unseen hand. In the opening thus revealed appeared dark eyes, narrowed and tucked, rimmed by lovely black eyelashes and outlined with a black cosmetic.

"Enter," Eliar said to Mai with an expansive smile and a bold gesture of welcome, arm swept in a wide curve. "Be welcome to the house of the Haf Gi Ri."

"Sen Eliar!" The woman's voice brought him back to earth. "What means this?"

"I have sworn to take these women in as guests, under our protection."

The eyes blinked. The voice said, "Does anyone else in the family know what you've done, Sen Eliar? Did you ask permission, or warn anyone?"

She answered herself. "No, of course not. Very well. Get out of here."

The words were uttered so curtly that Mai could not help but flinch, despite that she had long since trained herself not to show displeasure or fear or anger.

Eliar cupped his hands over his eyes in a gesture very like obeisance, or prayer. The two companions dumped her gear on the ground, and all three men backed up to a safe distance, then turned and strode away down the alley. Shocked by the rejection, Mai shifted to follow them, but Priya grabbed her arm and caught her before she could take more than one step. Whispers teased her. Looking up, she saw movement behind the grating of the two high windows. A giggle floated on the air. On the other side of the gate, bolts were shot and a heavy weight shifted and moved. The inner door set within the doubled gate opened inward on well-oiled hinges.

"Come! Come! That boy! No need, we'll bring in your belongings."

Sheyshi started to snivel. Mai stood as straight as she could and, with Priya and Sheyshi, walked through into a small if pleasant courtyard the exact width of the alley. In the far right corner stood a dry but very clean fountain. Several planting troughs lined the walls, most of them fallow though one boasted the stalks and spiky leaves of fragrant paradom, not yet in its flowering season. One trellis supported grape vines; another bent under the weight of thickly twining rainflower. Benches offered respite from the sun. Behind her lay the gate through which she had come. Ahead rose the three-storied building, open to the air on its upper stories although she could see only the suggestion of movement behind latticework screens. To her right stood a doubled door, another gate, in a high wall; heavy wagon tracks suggested that, sometimes, wagons were driven in this way. To her left a spacious veranda welcomed her.

"Come in out of the sun," said the woman, who now appeared to be of middle years, with features similar to Eliar's but no pronounced resemblance. A pair of young women stared at Mai with wide-eyed interest, but at a gesture from the woman they hurried past to fetch the gear left out in the alley.

They must leave their footgear at the step, she showed them, and once they stepped up onto the veranda wear cloth slippers, although the ones available did not quite fit. Indoors lay a suite of rooms furnished with pillows, low couches, a writing desk, brushes and ink, and innumerable cupboards, all immaculate. Finest silk covered those pillows, embroidered with birds and flowers in pleasing designs.

"Rest," said the woman. "The girls will bring you something to drink. No one works at this hour. Dinner is eaten at dusk."

The girls brought their belongings up onto the veranda and then brought cool drinks, and pitchers of cool water so they could wash their hands and faces in a copper basin. After this, they were left alone. Exhausted, Mai dozed, and she was glad of it afterward, thinking that to endure an afternoon of fretting would have been too much. After all, she was the one who had convinced Anji to make the gamble.

Later, toward dusk, the same girls brought trays of food, but this time both of the girls arranged the platters on the low table and sat down to eat with them.

Sheyshi tried to serve, but the older of the girls, a young woman a year or two older than Mai, waited even for the slaves to sit before she would portion out the meal. This task she undertook with an exactitude that Mai, accustomed to measuring out a cupful of almonds in the marketplace, could appreciate. Then she and the other girl bent their heads, closed their eyes, and touched fingers to foreheads, with palms turned inward. What words they said, if they said any, Mai could not hear. Afterward, they ate together, but no one spoke.

When Sheyshi made an effort to stand in order to clear the platters, the other girl stopped her and took everything away. Cupboards, opened, revealed mattresses and bedding to spread in the back room. Once this was settled, the young woman took her leave with the regretful smile of a friendly conspirator whose cunning plot has been thwarted. She left through the far gate, the one that did not lead into the alley. The guesthouse itself, it seemed, had no entrance except the veranda. They were, in fact, shut in, betwixt and between: not on the street and yet not truly within the compound either.

The previous night had been a long, restless one, and this night transpired no differently because of the heat and the constant spark of images that flew into her mind's eye and took their time drifting away again. She had to believe Anji would succeed, that he could manage anything, but in the dark, in a strange room, that was sometimes difficult. She would doze, then start awake thinking she heard voices, or the clatter of hooves on stone, or anguished sobbing. The food sat uneasily in her stomach; often she woke burping, and this churning discomfort further disturbed her dreams.

Very late, Priya woke also and held her close. "Rest now, Mistress. Fretting will not change our course, nor will it alter what is to come."

Sheyshi snored.

"Let the peace of the Merciful One embrace you, Mistress."

"It is hard to find peace," said Mai in her smallest voice. "I am afraid."

Priya kissed her. Held tight in those arms, Mai was able to sleep.

NOT LONG AFTER dawn, the women of the family took their morning khaif in the shade of the veranda. A trio of girls came first, bearing trays, and after them a procession of stern women of various ages: young, mature, and aged. Mai looked in vain for the friendly young woman who had brought them dinner last night.

The aroma of paradom melded with the sharp spice of khaif and the scent of freshly baked buns. That combination of spicy khaif and sweetened bread with an even sweeter bean curd core made Mai's heart race uncomfortably, but it was evident by the casual demeanor of the women that this was their accustomed morning feast, the appetizer to their day.

At length, the long silence was broken.

"I trust you rested well?" demanded the wrinkled grandmother over the rim of a very fine, thin ceramic cup.

"Yes, verea. Thank you."

They had pulled around pillows and couches the better to examine her.

"And the meal brought last night was to your taste?"

"Yes, verea."

"You didn't eat all of it. You left half of the soup, all of the cabbage, and one dumpling."

The cabbage had been the nastiest thing Mai had ever tasted, and the sour sting of the soup had made her mouth go numb. She smiled her market smile, and said, "Concern for my husband left me with little appetite, Mistress. I beg your pardon."

"Few like the way we pickle our cabbage," said the old grandmother, "but you've turned a pretty phrase by way of thanking us for our hospitality." She had wispy hair, gone to silver and let loose to straggle over her shoulders. No horns peeped through, and there wasn't enough hair to cover horns had they been there, so after all the Ri Amarah were ordinary people, not the children of demons. In a way, Mai was both disappointed and relieved. "What do you think of these sweet buns? Our baker is the best in the city."

"I've never tasted anything like them before."

Several of the women chuckled.

"A truthful statement!" agreed the old grandmother. "None make them but our own people. Do you cook?"

The question surprised her. "Even my husband did not ask me that before we wed."

"He was obviously not looking for a cook," said the old grandmother tartly. "As any person can see, looking upon you, a pretty girl, with a pretty smile, and pretty manners. Do you cook?"

"I learned to cook the specialties of our house, as do all the girls raised in the Mei clan. I can embroider a sleeve, although none of my work was considered elegant enough to be worn outside the house on festival days. I can mend. I have some small skill at carving, taught to me by my uncle."

"Can you brew a cordial or bind a lotion?"

"I was not taught such things. But I know which herbs to blend as teas and simples for remedies for common complaints."

"Distill and mix perfumes?

"No."

"Prepare silk for dyeing?"

"I've scoured wool, and applied the mordant, and thereafter dyed those skeins. We did that commonly. Our clan raised sheep."

"Can you read?"

"No."

"Paint figures and images?"

"No."

"Can you sing?"

"I have been told I have a passable voice."

"Can you dance the lines?"

"I don't know what that is. The festival dances, certainly. Everyone learns those."

"Can you reel and spin?"

"I have spun thread, and carded wool."

"Silk?"

"Silk is not grown where we come from. We buy silk at the market, but only for bedroom clothes and festival garments."