hooves on a hard road, but the pounding faded away into silence. A light flared in the sky.
'What was that?' Eliar released the scroll, stood, and stepped into the open. Miravia looked over her shoulder, her brow furrowing with puzzlement as she stood and bent back her head, the better to stare. Twisting, Mai could see nothing above the curved roof.
Nearby, many voices joined in shouting, the noise expanding outward like the clash of bells. From the courtyards, at their stations, guards cried the alarm.
A door slid open, and Sheyshi came onto the porch carrying a tray of fresh tea. Oblivious of the others, she got to the steps before she responded to the outcry. She raised her eyes to stare along the peaked roof and, with a shriek, dropped the tray. The pot shattered. Miravia reached down to pull up Mai, but by now there was nothing to see in the sky. Yet shouts and curses from the gardens grew louder, more intense. Priya hurried down off the porch without putting on outdoor sandals.
'Mistress, come quickly. Back inside.'
'What did you see?'
'A demon,' said Priya. 'Come quickly, Mistress.'
'A ghost!' Sheyshi collapsed beside the shards of the teapot, weeping noisily. 'It will eat us!'
'That horse had wings!' cried Eliar as he clattered up to his sister and gripped her shoulder.
'It is a Guardian,' said Miravia breathlessly, her face alight with wonder. 'A Guardian has entered your house, Mai.'
The household alarm bell began to ring.
O'eki set aside his counting frame and accounts book and rose from his desk. 'Master Keshad, you've done plenty. I think you can quit for the night.'
'No, thanks.'
With a shrug, the big man padded off, remarkably quiet-footed given his size, slid open the doors that led in to the public receiving rooms, and left Keshad alone in the office.
When Keshad worked, he did not have to think. Tallying accounts focused his mind. Scraping ink from stone and mixing it with water into a fluid state calmed his trembling. The firm tap tap tap of beads, flung one into another on his counting frame, soothed him with its impersonal pattern. The hiss of lamp flame eased the raging of his heart.
Would he ever see Bai again? Even if she did return, what was she now? Did he mean anything to her at all? Or would she natter on at him, trying to force him into an apprenticeship to one of the seven gods, when in truth the gods meant nothing.
He scratched tallies onto paper: rates for timber bought by the log, hire for carpenters who would bring their own tools, and hire for tools to be used by the gang of debt slaves recently sent to the Barrens.
Why had that bitch Mistress Bettia paraded in with Nasia in tow? Only to stab at him? But maybe she didn't even know that he and Nasia, when slaves of Master Feden, had been lovers. She likely didn't know how he had rejected Nasia out of hand the day he had bought himself free from Master Feden's service. Why should Nasia have thought he would clear her debt, too? There was no way to prove that the pregnancy Feden had rid her of had grown from his
seed. Surely Nasia understood that everything he had ever done, he had done to free Bai from the temple's clutches? Not because he loved Nasia.
He dipped brush to ink. While he could not write, having not been trained among the hierophants of Sapanasu, he had learned the tally marks and basic ideograms necessary to do business, to account, to recall. Anyway, it impressed the mistress when he announced he had done the tallying himself. Yet her two older slaves could write, and so could Captain Anji. There was nothing special about him, nothing anyone would notice or care about.
Why think about the captain's wife at all? Really, a man could bear her smooth expressions and pleasant smiles and doting looks for only so long. Her even-temperedness would become cursed tiresome.
Chisels and awls and files, on hire; straw bought for matting, and matmakers to do the work; extensive negotiations with the black-smithing guild, since the captain hoped to entice a smithy to set up shop in the cursed forsaken Barrens. All dust, no markets. Keshad could think of few worse places of exile. Why would anyone want to live there?
He smiled, feeling the curl of irony in his gut. Anyone, that is, except a person who wanted to control the trade in oil of naya, now that it had been proven as useful in war as in healing and lighting.
More acquisitions for the house, coin drawn against the household treasury: a bronze alarm bell; breeding ewes and a pair of rams; homespun for the eventual bridal portions of twenty women who had agreed to travel to the Barrens and set up household shops there.
To marry Qin soldiers, and raise children of their own. All that time, when he was Feden's slave, he had slammed closed his thoughts any time folk discussed marriages of people they knew. Better not to hear about the things you could never have. A debt slave could never marry.
A bead of ink dropped from the brush to splatter on the finely grained rice paper. Aui! He was clumsy, distracted despite his best efforts, an Air-touched Goat whose mind could never rest but must skip from one thing to the next. He could not find peace, not even in prayers said over the prayer bowl he had received in the
Sirniakan Empire when he had taken the oath of Beltak: Accept my obedience, you who are Lord of Lords, King of Kings, the Shining One Who Rules Alone.
Peace! Peace! Peace!
What did any of it mean? What did any of it matter?
Shouting broke the silence of his empty chamber. Doors, slid sharply open and shut, gave a series of reports like stick-fighting. He rinsed the brush and set it on its stand, untied his sleeves as he rose.
The alarm bell clanged. The very one purchased in the wake of Tarn's death! The vibration shook through his feet. Who would protect Mai?
He unlatched and opened the secret door behind the scroll cabinet, and ducked into a narrow, lightless corridor that buffered the office from the main house behind. He felt along the brackets on the low ceiling above: one, two, three, four. A latch unhooked another secret door, and he slid into the crane room. By the light of a single flame, the white cranes gleamed like ghosts.
The shouting turned into a roar of confusion as doors drummed open and shut. A woman screamed. Mai!
Mai was in the inner chambers, entertaining the Silver girl she called friend. Of course he had never been in the innermost chambers, but he knew where they were. He ran through the rat room and into a featureless chamber with bedding rolled up against one wall and a door gaping. Two Silver guards with hair concealed beneath turbans had their backs to him as they stared out the other side. He shoved past them.
'Hey, there!' One grabbed for his shoulder. 'You can't go in there.'
With a splintering crash, a wall shattered. Both guards shouted in surprise. Keshad leaped across the corridor, slammed open a door, and dashed through a small room fitted with an altar at one end, draped with cloth and adorned with wilted flowers and the stubs of candles. Men shouted after him. He shoved the next door aside, and stepped onto a porch surrounding a squared courtyard open to the air. His foot touched ground just as bodies smashed through the doubled doors to his left: Qin soldiers in desperate fighting retreat. Wood cracked, spun in the air; scraps of rice paper floated.
In lamplight, Mai stood with mouth agape. Priya stepped in front
of the young mistress. One of the soldiers — Jagi — loosed an arrow from his taut bow, but he was shaking so hard its flight went wild and stuck quivering in a beam. The Qin spread out in a half circle to shield Mai, Chief Tuvi at the apex. The chief's normally imperturbable face was creased with shock and — yes — fear.
A woman rode out of the house, ducking under the lower eaves of the porch. Her wings flared silver, only they were not wings but rather the flowing cloth of a gleaming cloak doubled over the paler silver-gray wings of the horse. She was a ghost, with pallid ghost skin in a round ghost's face, and ghost hair pulled into three braids like cords of straw. Her eyes burned with the blue fire of demons. If there was any doubt that she was a ghost, she had an arrow still quivering in her left shoulder and one that had caught in the fleshy skin of her neck, and although blood pulsed from the wound, she did not falter. Her gaze swept the courtyard, and when it flickered over him, he staggered, barely caught himself on a wooden pillar.
