Spirit Gate

38

A stick prodded Keshad awake.

"Ow!" he yelped, but the man at the other end of the spear merely poked him again with the haft.

"Here, now. Your turn on watch."

"Must you prod me? That hurt!"

"Heh. A lot less than those gi

"True enough," said Kesh, sitting up and rubbing his sore head. The gi

"Heh! I'd risk their bite for a taste of Devouring right now. Is she good, your mistress?"

Kesh made a face. "I'm only her hired man."

The man, who called himself Twist, snorted in disgust. "Seems you're used to being beaten by her stick. Come on, then."

Kesh chivvied the gi

"You can leave your things here."

"I'll keep them near me and my little guardsmen, if you please."

"Heh, heh! Come this way. Be careful where you step."

Twist held a rushlight that steamed off more smoke than flame. The sergeant of their cadre had opened his bedroll in the empty council house in the very village whose inhabitants had-only one night before-sought to overcharge Keshad and Zubaidit for accommodations in those same quarters. The rest of the cadre had lain down to rest on the entry porch, where they could move out quickly if need be.

It was this cadre Kesh had been absorbed into earlier that day when the mounted men had captured him on the road. They'd have killed him if he hadn't possessed that cheap tin medallion, the one he'd looted off the corpse of the man Bai had killed. But he had looted it, and so he was alive. Others weren't so fortunate.

The village was little more than a posting station with buildings strung along the road like beads. Each building was a business with an open front, an awning sheltering an entryway partly floored in earth and partly raised up as a floor of wooden planks. The strike force ru

Twist had a sickness lodged in his chest, something nagging and snotty, and the man breathed with a rattling intensity and paused now and again to cough up gunk and spit it out. He did not glance at the bodies. To him they were chaff, nothing important. Along with the others in the cadre, he had ransacked the village at sunset, complaining bitterly all the while that the strike force had carried away everything both valuable and portable, although naturally heavy household goods remained, things impossible to haul under these circumstances.

Had these folk been alive, Kesh could have passed them without a moment's thought, but they were horribly dead. Bai's words nagged at him. Was it possible that if they had acted more quickly they could have saved these hapless i

Laughter came from one of the porches. A group of men were joking, calling out bets. One of the men was stretched out atop a body, humping busily.

"Fifteen! Sixteen! Seventeen!"

"He'll go on twenty!"

"No, on twenty-five!"

"Whoo! Whoo! Twenty-two! Heh! I win!"

With a chorus of laughs and shouts, coin changed hands.

Kesh averted his eyes and kept walking as he whispered thanks that the poor victim was not screaming. Ahead, the village ended in fenced gardens, livestock sheds, and a pair of granaries on stilts. A tent had been raised just outside the last shed, although it was little more than a lean-to of canvas rigged out from the shed's cantilevered roof. A trio of men stood at attention beside a small fire, guarding both tent and shed.

"Who sleeps there?" Kesh whispered.

"Eh! The lord does."

"The lord?"

"He don't usually stop by us, but there's somewhat afoot. Anyway, he don't like to be disturbed by the likes of us. So, hush!"

It was middle night, more or less. There was no moon. Kesh stumbled more than once before they clambered back on the road "downstream" of the shed. The road here ran fairly straight, with a long view back into the village and its emptied buildings. In an open meadow lay the ruins of the old Ladytree, fallen into a massive tangle of trunk and branches that no one dared cut up. In the darkness, the new sapling, no more than two years old, wasn't even visible.

They walked a little farther on the pale surface of the road until they came to the road's intersection with a wide gravel path that pushed straight through the woods toward the distant uplands. The path's begi

"Heh! About time!" said one, a burly man with his hair shaved down against his head.

"What was all that noise?" asked the other.

"Just Rabbit," said Twist, wiping his nose.

The burly man cackled. "Eh! He wouldn't know what to do with a live one, eh? You ever get to wondering just what he did do to get run out of his village?"

Twist spat. "Did you ever think I don't want to know? Eh?"

Kesh felt sick, but he said nothing, made no expression, just waited.

Fortunately, the pair headed back for camp without any further discussion. Kesh's companion settled into a comfortable stance, feet shoulders'-width apart and weight canted onto his spear.

The gi