chance to prove myself to the Qin.'
More Qin soldiers poured through the doors into the garden. When Anji appeared, still talking to O'eki, Shai released her. She rubbed her wrist as Anji marked Chief Tuvi and Priya, greeted Eliar with a nod, and walked over to her.
'You'll have heard,' he said to Mai. Shai dropped his gaze to the paving stones. 'The scouts leave tomorrow at dawn.' He narrowed his eyes and leaned closer. 'You are sick?'
'I am well, just the usual trouble.'
'What trouble?' demanded Shai.
She made a sharp sideways gesture with her head, and mercifully he took the hint and moved away, then halted to watch them.
'Why does Shai go?' she asked in a low voice. 'He isn't a soldier.'
'It's true he's not ready for the rigors and subtleties of such an assignment, but it would be dishonorable of him not to seek out his missing brother at Horn.'
'He could easily die!'
'Tohon will look after him. There's another reason. You know and I know that for whatever reason, both Shai and I can see the ghosts of the newly dead. He can even hear their voices, which I cannot.'
'Yes, and in Kartu, people who saw ghosts were burned?
'That may be true, but among the Qin, they were honored as holy ones, and in the empire, such boys were taken away to become priests.'
'You weren't.'
'Because I was the son of the Sirniakan emperor, and nephew of the Qin var through his sister, who was my mother.'
'Yet both your father and your uncle betrayed you in the end.'
He shook his head curtly. 'Leave it, Mai. My point is, we don't know how such people are treated in the Hundred, whether honored or hated. But what matters right now is that a man who can hear the voices of newly- made ghosts makes a valuable scout.'
'What if he doesn't come back, Anji? He's my only kinsman here.'
'Then it has fallen out as it will fall out.'
Further argument was useless. Anji was determined, and anyway Shai did have to try to find Hari's bones or he would dishonor the Mei clan. She nodded her acquiescence. Shai, seeing her nod, smiled brilliantly at her, a rare gift from a young man usually frowning.
Anji went on. 'I am thinking it is time for me to ride a circuit of the countryside to survey possible settlement sites for us and the men.'
Anxiety fluttered within her chest. So might a bird react, finding itself caged. Anything might happen. It already had. But Mai knew from long practice how to quiet her fears. She put on her market face. 'Ride west, and survey the estate of the House of the Embers Moon. They also own this compound.'
Anji looked closely at her, rocked back on his heels, and forward again. 'You are interested in renting from the House of the Embers Moon?'
'No. We should acquire the entire house, which has no living adult members, and its assets. I'll have to look through their accounts first. Their specialty trade was in oil. Their primary olive estate lies on West Spur. That road gives access to the trade route for oil of naya.'
'King's oil. Very good, Mai. King's oil saved us.'
'So I was thinking. If we mean to establish ourselves in this country, then it seems to me we should make sure we always have king's oil in our possession.' She frowned.
'What troubles you, plum blossom?'
'West and south lies the empire. I thought today — even Chief Tuvi thought it — what if the Red Hounds follow us here?'
He did not often touch her in public, but he did so now, a delicate touch as light as a bird's as he brushed her hand. He did not smile to placate or reassure her. He never played that dishonest game. He knew the risks, as did she.
'Sometimes you have to fight where you stand,' he said, reminding her of her own words to him. He lifted his hand to show the wolf-sigil ring he had taken from her hand as a sign of the gamble they had mutually agreed on the night they had decided to make that stand, to build a new life in the Hundred. 'We can prepare our ground, so any fight we enter is under circumstances and in the place of our choosing.'
17
The Barrens were a dry and brutal place, thoroughly unpleasant. Kcshad winced as he walked down to the shore of the Olo'o Sea. The air stank, and his eyes watered, but the tears came mostly because of the stabbing pains in his buttocks and thighs.
'You're not accustomed to riding.' Captain Anji halted on a slick shelf of rock lapped by oily water.
'I was a slave,' said Kesh irritably. 'Slaves walk, or at least they do in the Hundred.'
'Yet you walked south over the Kandaran Pass many times in order to trade, and returned safely each time. That suggests you are hardier than you act, and smarter than your sulks and dagger's tongue make you appear.'
Kesh eyed the Qin captain in the last light of the day, with the sun pouring light across the calm salt sea. Anji was a* man of medium height, with the coloring and broad cheekbones common to his Qin tribesmen but a sharp- hooked nose more usually seen among the Sirniakans of the empire. He intimidated Kesh far more than his old master, Feden, ever had, because while Feden had been a tyrant, a man of pouts and rages, he was also a man whose pouting and raging made him vulnerable. As he had been in the end, for the price he had paid for selling out Olossi to the northern army was his own life.
Anji had none of those weaknesses. Kesh was sore not so much because they had been traveling for ten days but because they had pushed on, with a string of mounts for each man, at such a blistering pace. He was rubbed raw in places he did not want to think about. But in this group he would never dream of complaining. Under Anji's leadership, no one complained. They just got on with it.
Now they were many days' ride west of Olossi, having rounded the southern limit of the Olo'o Sea and ridden north into the Barrens with the land-locked sea stretching away to the east and the jagged Spires rising abruptly in the west. Broken tableland bridged the transition between mountains and water.
'You can't farm this land,' said Kesh. 'Not like that estate on the West Spur we stopped at. At least that had a substantial olive grove.' He crouched, drew a finger across flat rock, and tasted the substance on his tongue. It was oily, salty, and entirely nasty. He spat. 'But there are unexploited seeps of oil of naya everywhere in this region, if hard to reach and transport.'
'There's enough grass for sheep and goats to graze. Streams coming down out of the mountains, and other sources of water to be channeled. There may be water and forage enough for horses and even cattle, maybe even fields.' The captain scanned the landscape. 'Maybe a spring is hidden out there.'
They had left West Spur days ago and ridden north-northeast on
a cart track past a few villages and hamlets so isolated that everyone had come to stand at the side of the track to watch fifty Qin soldiers ride past. The locals had been wary, but not scared; as the local experts in oil of naya and pitch, they didn't expect trouble, even from foreigners.
More fools they, thought Kesh. The Qin could have slaughtered them without breaking a sweat.
'There's no one living this far out,' added Anji. 'I haven't even seen herdsmen with flocks.'
'All the villages we passed trade in oil and pitch. There are enough seeps and sinks south of here to keep them in livelihood. I'm sure traders send expeditions into this region occasionally, but it's difficult to transport.' Kesh shaded his eyes. 'If you keep riding north, if there's a path, which I doubt there is, you'll eventually reach the valley of the River Ireni. Ten or twenty days' walk, I'm not sure.'
Anji indicated the sea. 'Has no one thought of sailing from here to Olossi?'
'Trade over the water is expensive to maintain, and anyway there's nothing much to trade. There's a route
