37
Death rode at twilight into High Haldia. Or so, Marit imagined, the tales might sing.
The broad avenue that bisected the city lay empty except for a scrap of cloth rippling along the paving stones, blown by a wind out of the north. Normally, she supposed this thoroughfare would be lit with lanterns, folk grabbing noodles or the savory buns common to Haldia for a quick bite while rushing about their last errands of the day. Apprentices released from their duties might be found traveling in packs for a night of carousing, or a shopkeeper seen sweeping her entry porch as she closed up for the night. Now, many buildings gaped as half- burned shells, roofs fallen in and broken tiles scattered. The intact shopfronts were shuttered, as closed up as a rich clan rejecting the marriage suit of a poor but ambitious neighbor.
Was High Haldia slain, or only licking its wounds?
Movement flashed to her right. Marit urged Warning into a trot down a side street. A figure dashed across the street, ducking into an alley. Marit slipped off Warning, ran in pursuit. In the depths of shadow between windowless walls, she grabbed a slight young person by his tunic.
He went limp, so she let go, and he sprawled at her feet. The side street lay behind them. Ahead, the alley met an intersection of murky lanes, the routes beyond too dim to trace.
'Jus' ran to fetch medicine.' Despite short hair clipped close to the head, it was a girl. 'I didna mean to break curfew, only my nephew needs the tisane for a fever.' She opened a hand to reveal a stoppered vial with an orange ribbon wrapped around it to mark its medicinal virtue.
'I saw folk walking in from fields earlier,' Marit said, hoping a friendly voice would stop the girl's convulsive shivering on a hot night. 'All with stooped backs and bowed heads. The guards at the loll gate outside town let me pass without a word. Why's there a curfew?'
The back of her neck had a rash, and her feet were bare, newly
blistered, as though she had formerly been accustomed to walking everywhere in slippers. 'We've given our hostage to the garrison and kept the rules,' she said into the dirt. 'It was jus' that my nephew needed the medicine. He's jus' three. Cudna you let me go this one time?' Her hand closed around the vial.
Marit heard footfalls. She turned halfway, keeping an eye both on the girl and on the six soldiers who crowded into the alley's entrance
'Lord? Any trouble here? Got a curfew-breaker?'
Averting their eyes, they approached in file, blocking the alley.
The sergeant flung out an arm to halt the others. 'Who are you?' His suspicion gave flavor to the air and made the others draw their short swords. The girl whimpered.
'I've not seen you before, lord,' the sergeant added, words as tentative as a baby's first steps.
Now it's true that anyone might affect a long cloak, especially in the rainy season, although few would choose white as their ornament. As soon as she thought it, Marit wondered if a bold rebel might attempt a disguise and thereby walk through a city such as this one, imprisoned by a curfew that made an innocent girl cower when she was caught out at dusk with a vial of medicine.
'I've just come from Walshow,' Marit said, looking them over as they glanced every way but at her.
'She's the one they warned us to look out for-' blurted the leftmost fellow, and his sergeant kicked him so hard on the shin that he yelped.
'Don't even try it,' she said wearily. 'Look at me.'
Of course they didn't want to look. Joss's determination and misery had been laid bare to her sight: his nostalgic, regretful desire for the Marit he had once loved, a desire he knew he ought to have strangled long since but could not quite kill; his hunger for a young woman so vivid and sensual that Marit raged with envy while knowing perfectly well that she was dead and he had to get on with his own life.
With no one moving and she trapped in this pointless cycle of thoughts, she prodded the girl. 'Get home.'
'We bring curfew-breakers to the captain on duty, to be cleansed, lord,' said the sergeant, trembling with the effort of staring at his hand so he would not forget and look at her.
'Take me to the captain in place of the girl. Who, if she knows what is good for her, will run off. Now.'
The girl bolted, and vanished down one of the lanes. Mark held her staff at the ready until she could no longer hear the patter of feet.
'No need to mention the incident to the captain,' she said. 'I'll know if you do.'
'That's not how things work around here,' muttered the sergeant. She didn't need a third eye and second heart to hear how disgruntled he was, having his authority undermined in front of his patrol by some cursed woman he'd never seen before in his life. She'd had a lot of experience as a reeve in unraveling the weave of conflicted human emotion, because it was rare indeed that any one person felt any one single pure feeling unadulterated by a dozen niggling other sentiments.
The sergeant lunged.
She sidestepped, and whacked him across the shoulders with the staff. He hit the ground face first. She turned on the others before they charged. Taken by surprise, they looked at her.
Aui! Humans are a monstrous roil of sensibilities, and by far the worst part of what she had now become was in being forced to know how true that was.
If I don't go along, they'll kill me. I wish I never left home.
I want Sergeant's job, that snot-nosed ass doesn't know what he's doing, not like I do, I would like to see him strung up and kicking.
Glad they didn't catch me cheating at dice hope my sister wasn't one of the girls taken for the army the wine isn't enough to drown this ache in my head I woulda kept lighting the houses on fire it was the hells grand to watch them burn and folk begging us to stop and anyway the commanders ordered us to make an example of them.
My tooth hurts.
The lords order us to kill, they like to kill, they like it when we kill, so she's just one cursed female breaking curfew, we can take her down and kill her-
'Drop your weapons! Down on your knees! Hands up!'
She hated them as they turned craven, heads tucked, hands high with palms open. She was breathing hard with the rush, and she wanted to crack them over the heads for what they had done to the
people of this town. What they had done to countless others. What they had done to themselves.
'You.' She thrust one tip of her staff hard into the chest of the man whose tooth hurt. He fell hard, tried to hide a groan as he righted himself, and she laughed, and was shocked at herself for finding amusement in his pain. 'Unbuckle the sergeant's sword belt and give me sword and sheath.'
Cringing, he did so. She slung the short sword at her own hip before poking him again.
'You're in charge now. You three will escort me to the captain. The others can carry your sergeant back to camp.'
Even if the local captain tried to kill her, pain would be a temporary agony. I can kill, but not be killed. Yet that being so, what had happened to the man who wore the cloak before her?
High Haldia had begun its life in ancient days as a posting town, a string of buildings along the Istri Walk that led from Nessumara to Seven. From this spine, the city had grown outward into unequal halves. They walked into the eastern part of the city along a handsome avenue lined with merchant houses and trading emporia mostly untouched by the destruction that had visited the main road. These buildings, too, were entirely closed up for the night. No spark of light betrayed life within.
The streets had room to sprawl, nothing like the crowded streets of Toskala, the steep lanes in Olossi, the nerve-racking roped paths of Haorrenda, or the narrow canals and elaborate foot bridges of Nessumara-on-the- delta. Three squares were strung like beads along the thoroughfare. The entrances to four temples anchored the corners of the first square. The second was faced with two temples, north and south. On the third square, the assizes court and archon's hall stood opposite a massive compound dedicated to Taru the Witherer, beloved of farmers.
The captain in charge of High Haldia's garrison had set up his headquarters in the arkhon's hall. She rode
