island where Copper Hall lay in slumbering quiet. The gates lay open, and a tired guard — an elderly man — recognizing his reeve leathers, waved him through.
Everyone was asleep except for fawkners busy in the lofts and debt slaves repairing harness and sharpening swords, but they brusquely sent him on his way. They had no time for any man, even one who called himself commander of the reeve halls. His legs were stiffening and his rear in agony before he tracked down Kesta, who had fallen asleep on a thin pallet in the third barracks he checked.
'The hells! Can't I get some rest? I've got to fly out at dawn, Joss.'
'Is Arkest up to it?'
'She's close to her limit, it's true. But-'
'How can there be a but?'
'How can there not? There's room for you. Just take off your cursed boots and maybe wash your feet first.'
There was a bench and table at one end of the barracks, but the lamp usually burning there had run dry. In darkness he washed face and hands and feet, and lay down beside Kesta, her familiar warmth as comforting as a sister's. They were both fire-born and thus forbidden; in truth, it was pleasant just to know you could be comrades. She flung an arm over his torso, and in her light embrace he fell hard and at once into sleep.
He dreamed.
Mark stands at the shore of the Salt Sea, a remote place he'd been only once. Her death's cloak billows in a wind he cannot feel. Beside her stands a slender man of mature years wearing the blue cloak of an envoy of Ilu; Joss has seen this man before, dying in Dast Korumbos, but he looks every bit alive now. Isn't there something uncanny, even wrong, in a man who can die and yet live on after? Who would ever choose to die, if given a chance to keep living?
Marit is speaking. 'I searched for weeks around the valley where I met that young shepherd, the very place you yourself saw her. I even found the village the lad came from, but they told me — I saw in their minds — that they have not seen Earth for months. Not that they ever saw her much. It might not mean anything.'
'I do not like it.' The envoy glances over his shoulder.
A young woman is walking toward them, the wind pulling mist off her shoulders. With her pallid white face and pale grass hair and demon-blue eyes, she looks inhuman. What can it mean that the gods have cloaked an outlander, who cannot know what justice means in the Hundred? Have the gods abandoned them? Do
they just not care? Or is there a deeper whisper here, a hint he cannot tease out?
Is his faith in the gods meaningless?
'Joss!'
He startled awake, sitting up so hard he slammed into Kesta.
'Aui!' She rubbed her chin, and he slapped a hand to his throbbing forehead. 'You were muttering in your sleep. Why is it always Mark?'
'He killed her.'
'We know the story-'
'He killed the cloak of Earth, the one she's looking for. But if Marit thinks she's an ally, then he killed a Guardian who is not our enemy.'
'What in the hells are you babbling about?'
He scrambled up, wincing as his muscles screamed. 'Where is Anji?'
'They marched out already. They took a short rest, food and drink, and kept going. Since you've not got Scar, I can give you a lift if you want to catch up to them. Best you eat before you go. No telling when you'll have a chance to eat again. Whew! I suppose we both stink. You look like the hells, I'll tell you.'
He laughed. 'That good, eh? They say the hells are filled with attractive women. We'll have to fight over them, you and me, eh?'
She slapped him on the chest as she stepped away. 'There's a few who don't bend your way, thank the gods. Say, what news of Nallo?'
'What, that termagant? You've an interest there?'
'You might not see it, but she's cursed attractive. I like a woman who can rip off a man's head when he's being a gods-rotted idiot.'
'She's given me the edge of her tongue, anyway, but not in the way I like it. I tell you, she scares me.'
'Like I said, I like that woman.' She grasped his wrist and tugged as he grabbed his gear and stumbled after. 'You need some cordial to wake up, Joss?'
'At dawn?'
'It's what you always used to take.'
'The hells I did!'
'Tell yourself what you must. Here.' The barracks muster was abuzz with chatter, reeves and hirelings and fawkners drinking and eating in haste. A few women glanced twice, but nothing
more than that. He ate and drank — the cordial did settle his stomach — and afterward relieved himself and washed in a trough half full of unpleasantly murky water, but the water was cool and the day was already sticky and hot. Kesta headed for the loft.
Joss stopped her. 'Shouldn't we check in with the marshal?'
She shrugged. 'There is no marshal. Chief Sengel gives the orders. Reeve Iyako acts as administrator. She's steady, and too old to fight. But we don't need clearance from her. I'll deliver you to the command unit and take my flight's orders from there.' She waved to familiar faces waiting in the shade of a parade ground, next to lofts, and while she went in to talk to the fawkners, Joss greeted six reeves from Horn Hall, each one in a state of enflamed excitement at the prospect of impending action. Their talk poured like the river's current, a flood of noise that meant nothing to him. Any way you looked at it, it seemed that Horn Hall, Clan Hall, Copper Hall, and Gold Hall were treating Anji as their commander.
'Joss!'
Arkest waddled out into the empty parade ground, already harnessed. The raptor's feathers hadn't the bloom one liked to see in an eagle, but she wasn't obviously ailing.
'Best you rest her after today,' he said as he paused beyond talon range to brandish his baton in the signal taught to eagles to recognize other reeves.
Kesta flashed him a look as good as a cut. 'I'm not a fool, Joss. Hook in.'
Up!
Arkest had a hitch in her flight that would have troubled him if he didn't know the bird was compensating for an injury taken in battle a year ago. She wasn't the fastest, but she was a smart bird and very experienced. They swung wide to the east so he could see the eastern approaches over the dried out wetlands where Chief Sengel's trap had lured in almost two thousand men, many to their deaths. The surface of the shallow channels had a rainbow gleam, slicked with the remains of oil. The foliage along the banks was charred, brightened by spots of untouched growth. Folk were dragging corpses off scorched ground and onto barges piled high with dead.
'They're hauling them down to the ocean and dumping them in!' shouted Kesta.
'The hells!' Yet what else could they do?
They sailed on along the empty stone earthwork of the eastern causeway until they came to Saltow. The town with its staging warehouses and many roads and paths lay as empty as if it had been abandoned, but folk peeped from behind shuttered windows. Here and there an adult scuttled down a back alley as if bearing contraband on a deadly mission. The enemy camp had been substantial; abandoned tents fluttered, several having collapsed into heaps. Dogs had dragged the corpse of a woman out beyond a tent's entrance while vultures watched warily, edging in.
It was easy to find the enemy, because reeves were tracking them, hanging lazily on the wind as the soldiers trudged on the main road in the heat below. Curiously, there were two distinct groups. One. was hastening ahead in a disorganized hurry, flying the banners of three different cohorts, although there weren't enough soldiers to fill out two cohorts. They marched with no supply wagons, only wounded being bounced around in carts.
A stage behind the lead group marched a second cohort, this one in disciplined ranks under a single banner marked with six staves. They had supply wagons, extra dray beasts, horses, and sheep carefully herded in the center, and only four wagons with canvas shades that, presumably, sheltered their injured. One of the wagons was surrounded by the bristling spears of a cadre of guards, as folk might circle treasure or a valuable prisoner. Their
