the darkness, lost among the bracken as Eyasad spoke bitter words.
'For generations I have labored to build a haven for folk to live free of the corruption of the Guardians. Now I am betrayed. I must move all my people lest they be discovered and slaughtered. Yet where will they be safe, eh? Is any place safe from the Guardians?'
'The land will become safe if we make it safe by restoring the Guardians' council!'
'Do we execute the other Guardians at our whim just as Night did? And thereby become like her?'
'Do we stand passively aside and let her destroy us?'
'Either way, she has already won.'
'What would you have us do?' he cried.
'It is better to do nothing.'
'To do nothing when you see a man being killed, if you could act to stop it, is the same as standing among those who kill him.'
'To do nothing is to refuse to participate in what is already corrupted.'
'We are commanded to act!'
'Strange words, heard from you, foolish Jothinin, who was once nothing more than a gossip and games- player, a trifle among men, not worthy of comment except in the manner of your death.'
'I am not the man I once was. I have changed.'
'Grown older, anyhow. Once you had a youthful face.'
'Aged, I grant you, over the long years, because I have avoided the altars to avoid Night and her allies. Eyasad, I beg you-'
'I am done with the Guardians' council. If we were betrayed once, then we can be so again. Why should there be Guardians at all, if they can be corrupted?'
Kirit padded up beside him, the bow held in her competent hands. Her voice emerged more strongly than he had ever heard it. 'It is wrong not to act when there is suffering. Why do you reject us?'
'Because you have brought my enemies down upon me. Sheh! All that I have built, in ruins! Because of you! What can I do now? Who can aid me?'
'If we work together-'
'Enough! I am quit of you. Do not seek me out again.'
During their conversation, night had swallowed them. Too late, he called light and plunged into the pine woods, but for all that he searched, he found no trace of Eyasad's passing. When he returned to the ashes of the fire, Kirit had the horses ready.
'Has Night corrupted her?' Kirit asked, her face ghostly above the light she had called from her hand to guide him back.
'Only if despair is corruption.'
'I lived once in despair,' Kirit said softly. 'When I lived there, I was not a person and not a demon. I was a ghost. Maybe she is a ghost, too.'
'Eiya!' He smiled gently. 'Maybe. Yet she speaks of people she has built a haven for. She may reject us, but she still acts as a Guardian.'
'What if she's right about the Guardians? Why should any of us, you and me, look into the hearts of others? Isn't it like violating them?' She spoke the words so calmly that he winced, thinking of what she had endured in the long months she had been a slave.
'Not if we act for justice.'
Her gaze pinned him because she had no guile, nothing but the memory of the pain whose hot grasp she had escaped. 'If they do not give' permission, then does it matter for what reason it is done?'
The light of the gleaming stars looked angry tonight, or maybe it was only the prickle of his own heart, stabbed by doubts.
'Uncle, for a long time, I could not fight and I didn't know how to die. That was worse than dying. So I don't fear death. If we are truly Guardians, then we must risk our lives to help those who are fighting the demons. You already said so! To do nothing when you see people being killed, when you could act to stop it, is the same as if you are killing them yourself.'
He did not answer. He had no answer.
'So you see,' she went on inexorably, 'Marit is the one who is right. If the cloak of Earth will not help us, we have to use the other plan.'
19
North of the Liya Hills lay the plain of Herelia, its fertile fields fed by the River Vessi and its tributaries. Marit didn't know Herelia well; it hadn't been in her patrol territory. Its two major towns were Malinna and Laripa; its port city Dast Elia. At the base of the Liya Pass Road, the messenger turned in the direction of
Laripa, riding through well-tended countryside as Marit kept pace above.
Two days later, on a bright and pleasant morning, they approached a town still under construction on the banks of the River Vessi. She raced ahead; at his lagging pace, he would not reach Wedrewe until midday. She flew a circuit over the town's layers: outermost, a swath of woodland clearly off-limits to felling where a hunting party crashed in pursuit of game, horns blatting; deep within the forest cover pits had been dug and filled over with loose soil, although from the height it was difficult to figure what they were for. At the woodland edge stood a perimeter fence and guard towers enclosing fields and orchards and corrals and gardens and tanning yards and smithies. On a backwater shore, rafts of logs lashed together were being beached and hauled up to lumberyards. A second wall ringed districts of humble row houses, its access funneled through guard gates. The third wall marked out open ground where company upon company of men drilled. Barracks and storehouses ran in ranks along the outside of the fourth and innermost wall, within which lay spacious grounds and gardens that resembled the temples of the gods and yet showed no allegiance to any. This vast inner compound was square, like Kotaru's forts, approached through triple-linteled gates as were Ilu's temples. It was roofed with green slate to reflect the Witherer's fecundity, and boasted handsome private gardens as in Ushara's realm. The symmetry of the buildings reflected Sapanasu's orderliness, and a young Ladytree, Atiratu's refuge, had been planted beside each of the four gates. In the center of all lay a walled garden surrounded by covered porch on all sides whose open ground was neatly raked around a flat-topped boulder — like those sacred to Hasibal, the Formless One — half buried in the ground.
She saw not a single temple or even a humble roofed altar. There was no Sorrowing Tower to lay the dead, and no Assizes Tower for justice, but there were watchtowers in plenty.
The inner compound hummed with the buzz of steady work being carried on beneath tiled roofs: the brush of scribes writing, the clacking of beads on counting racks, the beat of a stamp pressing metal for coins or medallions. Now and again a person garbed in a fine silk jacket or taloos made his or her way from one building to another, or passed a token to the guards at a gate in order to descend into the outer rings of the city. Wagons moved goods
into storehouses whose roofs were still being tiled. In one of the private gardens, straddling a bench, a man and a woman were engaged in strenuous sex. In another, a pair of men moved stones on a checkerboard, at their ease under an awning while out in the sun slaves made sticks of incense.
In the deserted central garden, she brought Warning down. The mare's hooves stirred up the neatly raked lines in the gravel. She dismounted and led the horse over to and up onto one of the four long porches that faced the courtyard, Standing at the mare's head, she embraced the beauty of the humble garden as she inhaled the scent of late-blooming sweet-gold.
A whiff of fetid air brushed her nose. A whisper hissed and faded. She was not alone.
On three sides the porches were lined with barred doors built with hinges like smaller models of the hinged double gate in the northeast corner. Mark paced the length of the porch. Behind every hinged door was confined one, sometimes two, people: sleeping, weeping, moaning, muttering disjointed words, some mute with a despair that stung like poison on her skin. This was no meditative court, remarkable for its exquisite tranquillity. It was a prison.
At the end of porch lay a storeroom with racks of shelves. She grabbed a rake and erased hoof- and
