Do you know how my brother found out where I was?'
'I do not.'
'Hu. A mystery, then.' He kept his gaze on Beje, each man watching the other intently, as if waiting for a knife to be drawn. 'What do you mean to do, Commander?'
Beje tucked the message back inside his tunic. He scratched one ear again, pulling on the lobe. Mai remembered to breathe. Anji nodded at her to show he hadn't forgotten her, before looking back at the commander.
'It's too bad that you never arrived here,' said Beje. 'After that terrible storm in the desert some days ago, I sent out a scout. We found dead horses, dead men, and your banner, torn and dirty, but recognizable. Your ring, too, that gold lion given to you by the var when you were twelve and first come to court. A shame! The storm must have caught your troop unprepared.'
'It never would! That's a slur on my competence!'
The commander smiled sharply. 'You must choose between incompetence or death, Anjihosh. This is the chance I will give you, because I am shocked that my cousin the var would betray his own nephew to the Sirniakans. But then, this is the same man who gave his sister to their emperor as a plaything. It's like spitting at the gods to treat a woman of our people in such a way. I hold to the old ways.'
'None better,' said Anji with a brief smile.
'None better! But shamed anyway, because of my daughter.' He picked up the carving and tossed it to Anji, who caught it deftly. 'You'll have to take all your men. Those who won't go with you I will kill. I can't take any chances.'
Anji glanced at Priya. 'They'll all go with me.'
'Any men who know you came to me will have to go with you as well, including Tohon. He's the best scout I have. You can trust him. Your wife can take the Mariha girl as an attendant. I don't know what use she is except for pouring khaif.'
Anji had an amused smile back on his face. 'Where am I to go, Commander? If my uncle the var will not have me, then I cannot ride west. I cannot ride east into Sirniaka. South lies desert and, beyond that, mountains whose passes are so high that travelers die with their own blood boiling on their lips.'
'North,' said Mai. 'You said yourself there's a place that merchants speak of, like that one who found Uncle Hari's ring. Shai is going there anyway. We'll go with him.'
Anji laughed.
'There is one pass running north, through high mountains, to this land of a hundred lords,' said Beje. 'But it's said the land there protects its own with ancient magic. That any folk who travel that way with malice in their hearts cannot survive the journey. The road vanishes. Blizzards drown them.'
'Merchants go there,' insisted Mai.
'Merchants travel where soldiers fear to ride,' said Beje with a laugh that sounded uncannily like Anji's: amused, resigned, ironical.
'Merchants travel, but every merchant travels with a guard,' said Anji. 'Mai is right, of course. We'll go north, if you can put us on the proper road. We can hire ourselves out as a guard to some merchant caravan heading over the pass.'
'These Sirniakans are fiends for official chits and seals. I hear they arrest any person who hasn't a pass to account for his whereabouts. Heh! Even their dead must have a permission chit for their ghosts to depart for the other life!'
'I still have the palace warrant my mother gave me. We'll go swiftly.'
'That you must. You'll have to ride into the northern reaches of the empire, but I think you'll be safe if you move fast, before anyone suspects the truth.'
'We can leave at once.'
'No baths?' Mai asked, feeling all her dirt, every grain of it.
Anji chuckled. He met her gaze, and she laughed, suddenly not caring. Dirt was the least of it. Dirt was nothing, not if he loved her. 'I promise you a bath. When it is safe.'
'Why not now?' asked Beje, eyeing her with the glint of lechery in his expression, nothing she hadn't seen a thousand times in the marketplace. She smiled, in the way she'd learned to acknowledge men without encouraging them, and he laughed and slapped his thigh.
Anji rose, sobering. 'There was a troop of riders on our trail.'
'It's true you'll need to leave before they see you,' said Beje, 'but you need have no fear of them. They are the men who came from the desert, the ones who found your remains. I'll need your officer's tunic, your banner, and your ring.'
'Once I give you the banner and the ring I am no longer Qin.'
'Yes,' agreed Beje. 'You are a dead man now, Anjihosh. Try to stay alive, if you can.'
PART FOUR: TRAVELERS
16
After they climbed out of the Mariha Valley, they traveled east and north for ten, twenty, forty, sixty and more days along the eastern slopes of the spine of the world, that interlocking chain of mountains and massifs that formed the northern boundary of the world Shai knew. The southern and western deserts-Kartu Town itself-lay three or more months' journey behind them. Dusty trails led them along grassy hills and through sparse woodland. This late in the year, well into the dry season, the streams falling out of the highlands were running low, although there was still enough water for horses and soldiers alike. In Kartu Town, where water came from a trio of precious springs, water cost a tidy price. Here in the wilderness, water was free.
Tohon took Shai under his wing, as an uncle might. They rode forward to scout every day.
'You're not skilled enough to be a tailman,' the soldier explained to Shai, 'but you're cousin to captain's wife, so the men humor you. Better learn a few things.'
'My friends are teaching me to fight,' said Shai, embarrassed by this talk.
'They're just having fun, beating you up. I'll teach you a few tricks. Then they'll respect you.'
Had they been making fun of him all along, in the guise of friendship? Was he that great of a fool, just like his mother and elder brothers-all but Hari-had always said? Had he mistaken all the signs?
'Herdsmen,' said Tohon, pointing toward distant slopes.
Shai saw nothing. Escarpments limned the sky, although there were never any mighty peaks to be seen glittering on high. But the landscape kept no secrets from the scout.
'That cliff. Track, down. Here, now, follow my hand. Those aren't a field of stone. Those are sheep. Captain will send Chief Tuvi up there to trade. We'll eat mutton tomorrow night. You try that throw I taught you on Jagi and Pil. You'll see.'
The Qin loved to wrestle. When Shai threw Jagi the next night, catching his ankle behind a heel and upending him flat on his rump, the soldiers hooted and hollered in a way that shamed and pleased Shai.
'Didn't think you could do that,' said Chief Tuvi. 'We'll make a tailman of you after all.'
Having bet on the outcome, Tohon won a cupful of millet, which he shared in halves with Shai. 'Not much of this left,' he said. They washed the thick porridge down with pungent fermented mare's milk. He seemed unconcerned that the field rations they'd been issued by Commander Beje were, at long last and after being carefully rationed, running out. Mostly, they ate meat killed on the march.
They were camped beside a stream. Mai, with Priya and Sheyshi in attendance, had gone a little ways upstream. Shai could see her scrubbing at her arms and face, although the water was snowmelt, gaspingly cold. In the last light, men set snares, and one of the foreign camp men netted for fish. Anji was seated cross-legged, repairing a harness while chatting with a pair of veterans as easily as if they were family.
'Why are you teaching me?' Shai asked Tohon.
'Eh? Because we Qin respect a man who can fight.'
'No. I meant, why are you willing to teach me?' If it's true that the others were doing nothing but beating me
