who built the gates that order the world…
and thus Shining Gate rose and Shadow Gate rose.
Thus day and night gave order to the world.
Look at the horizon! A voice calls.
Shadow Gate rises.
Night is come.''
He approached through the darkness, footsteps quick on the earth. He was not the man she was waiting for, but he was the one she had been expecting.
'Captain Anji. Or is it Commander, now? That's what I hear folk calling you.'
He dismissed this trivial banter with a curt wave. She wouldn't have thought this man had a temper, but she could see
it in the creases of his narrowed gaze and in the way his mouth was shut as if he was holding back a scream of thwarted fury.
'We may have won a victory here,' he said, 'but the war is far from over. We've accounted for eight cohorts, but Lord Radas and the cloak of Night raised fifteen cohorts. Even if we win another battle or two, how many will be left skulking in the woodlands and the hills, starving and without cordial or rice wine to slake their thirst? Hungry, you see, without the least scrap of remorse or control? What of them? What if the cloak of Sun, so recklessly released by Reeve Joss, raises another demon? One with less arrogance and more cunning? More discipline and less vanity? How do we protect ourselves against such eventualities if we can't work together to make sure the cloaks are bound, so they cannot be used as weapons against us? If we who command the Hundred cannot even agree that the cloaked demons are our enemies?'
Overhead, the stars bloomed in profusion, like festival lamps. The churned earth was settling, but smoke from the forest fires tainted the air. A person might dart out her tongue, like the ginny lizards, and taste blood spilled in the past and blood yet to be spilled. She'd done her share of killing. As Ushara's servant, she would kill again if the goddess so demanded.
'Shai told me the cloak of Night sought outlanders and the gods-touched. She saw them as a threat to her power. Are you by any chance a seventh son?'
'I?' He sounded genuinely surprised. 'Of my mother's bearing, certainly not. Of my father's siring, I couldn't say. I had one half brother older and four younger the year I made twelve. How many had been born, or died, before and after I cannot know. Why do you ask?'
'An outlander will save us. Are you that outlander, Commander Anji?'
'It is not my place to answer such a question.'
She knew how to coax a man on. In the temple she'd helped along men afflicted by youth or age or hard luck or certain physical ailments that embarrassed them. This man was crippled by none of those things. She wondered idly if he had pleasured his young wife in the bed or merely taken what he desired. Not a question to ask now!
'You're surely correct in believing there remains more thunder and lightning and battering winds in store. Why have you
approached me tonight? For unless you've come to worship the Devourer, I'm not sure why we're talking.'
'Your Hieros and I have discussed at length that order serves the Hundred better than disruption. Order serves farmers, who must plant and tend. Order serves merchants, who desire safe roads and markets. Order serves the temples, who wish folk to have peace for prayer and tithing. The Hieros, and Olo'osson's council, agreed I must do what is necessary to restore order. The wrong choices now will have terrible repercussions. They already have had.'
Now she saw where this was going.
'Commander, if you're not here to devour me, then I must assume you are here to ask me to kill someone. Your mother, perhaps?'
'My mother!' To catch him off his guard — when she knew as well as he did that out in the evening shadows his guards stood with bows at the ready — surprised her. 'The woman who birthed me! Raised me! Taught me to ride. Rescued me from death at the cost of her own freedom. Why would I want my mother dead?' He shut his eyes, too choked to speak. Then he recovered, although his voice was hoarse. 'She did what she thought was necessary.'
'Obviously I've misunderstood. Anyhow, I can undertake no such commission unless the hieros of whatever temple I'm assigned to orders me to carry out an assassination.'
'The Hieros in Olossi told me to do whatever I thought necessary, with whatever weapons I had at hand.' He nodded at her. 'You are a sword of finest steel, Zubaidit.'
He wasn't a man who flattered. Even so, the comment made her uneasy.
He went on. 'It is the danger the cloaked demons represent that will prove hardest to vanquish. Maybe there are some people who would interfere out of a sentimental attachment to an illusion — what you might call a lilu.'
'A lilu? Speak plainly.'
For the first time, he hesitated. 'You have not heard that one of the cloaks appeared to Reeve Joss as a lilu in the guise of his old lover, a reeve who was murdered twenty years ago by men believed to be in the employ of Lord Radas?'
Handsome Joss! His name spoken in the same breath as the mention of an old lover, twenty years dead, no doubt the woman
whose death, like best-quality silk, draped him with that aura of being one laugh away from tears, an aura whose reckless lure had caught many a woman. Anyhow, what demon would not choose to appear before Joss in a guise that might encourage him to a bout of devouring? She could take men or leave them — she'd been trained to hold herself detached — and yet there he walked, the only man who really tempted her. Thoughts of him plagued her like mosks, swarming, biting, impossible. He was provoking and annoying, and too convinced of his charm's ability to get him out of any situation. He drank too much, and his smile was a cursed yoke, dragging her into endless thoughts of what it would be like to have him close and hot and wild.
The hells!
Was it actually possible Joss was a threat to their hopes for peace in the Hundred? That he was in league with the remaining Guardians, all of whom were corrupt or bound to become corrupt, if Anji was right? Or could it be Anji was just a jealous man who wanted to rid himself of a rival as in an old and tedious tale? But if so, why would it matter now that his beautiful wife had been murdered by his own mother, whose crime he could so coldly forgive as necessity?
Necessity for whom?
'Is there a point to this?' she asked, hearing the irritation she ought to have strangled before its thorny hide crawled out in her words.
'You have a brother whose life you value, do you not?' he asked.
She'd been trained from an early age in a hard school to show no emotion that might betray her thoughts. The tremor that raced through her muscles, that sliced her heart and knotted in her gut, she subsumed, but even so it hit with such force that she shifted from one foot to the other to bleed off its power, and he tensed as if expecting an attack. In the shadows, soldiers tensed as well, their movements like a whisper of thunder on a still day.
Beware.
'Keshad is safe in your household. You assured me of this yesterday when we met on the bridge. Or is he dead, too, in the attack that killed Mai? Is that what you came to tell me?'
'He wasn't there. He's alive.'
She had not wept for years. She'd forgotten how tears stung.
'I sent Mai to Merciful Valley to keep her safe,' Anji continued. 'We all want those we love to remain safe. Even a man as experienced as Reeve Joss wants to protect a demon because she appears to him as a woman he once — that he still — loves.' He gestured sharply toward the flutter of the awning where lamps burned and Chief Tuvi walked back and forth with the baby asleep on his shoulder. Never letting go. Anji's grief emerged like a kroke from the murky waters of the swamp, ready to snap. 'Just as I want to protect my son, who is all I have left of her.'
