Traitors' Gate (50 page)

“Holy One. How may I serve you?”

Marit wanted to ask where Wedrewe was, but she had already roused their suspicions. “There is a woman here, imprisoned for not having sex with Master Forren. I heard of the matter and have come to adjudicate.”

The clerk, visibly startled, forgot herself enough to glance look into Marit's face.

Master Forren hadn't any right to try to force the girl to bed him. Just because he's the richest man in town, and connected to them who built Wedrewe, he thinks he can have what he
wants. Things like this never happened before Ushara's temple was shut down.

She threw an arm over her eyes, and groaned.

“I'll take those keys!” Marit yanked them out of the woman's fingers and crossed into a narrow courtyard that ran between the back of the building and a high wall. The cells were a row of twelve cages set against the wall, with no roof to shelter the prisoners from the rain and no ditch or gutter to sluice away their waste whose stench clawed into her throat. She halted on the edge of the porch, surveying a sludgy waste baked to a paste under the sun. She did not want to step into that.

The prisoners roused. Two stared boldly; five hid their faces. One woman was sobbing, crammed into a cage with an even thinner girl lying unhealthily still beside her. The last prisoner huddled in the farthest cage, back to Marit, unmoving, possibly dead.

The first man whose gaze she met had a steady stare; she tumbled into a morass as filled with muck as the ground beneath and around the cages. He holds a stick with which he is beating beating beating in the head of an old man all for the scant string of vey lying in a heap on the rain-soaked earth.

“That one is a murderer,” Marit said.

Osya cowered on the threshold. “So he is, Holy One. He's not from here. He came as a laborer walking the roads. You may wonder, for it is not permitted to walk the roads without a token, but he carried a token so we gave him work repairing the palisade. Then he murdered old Hemar for a mere twenty vey to drink with, and so we come to discover he had stolen the token months ago. That's the holy truth, Holy One.” With her body hunched over in fear, she resembled a crabbed old crone rather than a stoutly healthy woman.

That he was guilty was evident. “What of the others?”

The clerk trembled as she indicated each one in turn.

This woman had cheated in weighing rice—

“I did it, Holy One,” the woman gasped. “Please forgive me. My children were hungry. Now they've been sold away as debt slaves to pay for my crime.”

This man had stolen two bolts of cloth from the town warehouse,
claiming it rightfully belonged to him and had earlier been purloined by the town's militia captain at a checkpoint between Stragglewood and Yestal.

“It's a lie, what I said before. I was so fearful when they caught me, for fear they'd cleanse me right there, that I said anything that came to mind. I'll never steal again, I swear it.”

Two young women had gotten a visiting merchant drunk and robbed his purse.

“We never did any such thing, Holy One. We let him buy drinks for us, because we hadn't any coin, so maybe we was taking advantage. But he claimed we'd robbed him, and we never touched his purse! And when they brought us up in front of Master Forren, then he said he'd dismiss the charges if I had sex with him. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

“And you refused?”

“Of course I refused! He's a gods-rotted pig, meaning no offense to pigs. But we're poor folk, our people, no one to speak for us in council. We've been locked in here a year or more and Stara is so ill, you see how she can't even stand any longer. Now she's going to die, just because I wouldn't have sex with him! They won't let our kinfolk in to see us.” It was all true, and no one in town had done a cursed thing to stop it.

An old man, too weak to raise his head, was a beggar.

“Why is he here?” Marit demanded. “Can't his clan take care of him?”

“He's got no clan.”

“No one can have no clan.”

“None who will claim him.”

A young woman in the far cage pushed up to sit as she looked over her shoulder. It was difficult to tell her age because her face was smeared with muck, but she met Marit's gaze with her own wide brown one. And that was all it was: a look passed between two women. Her heart and mind were veiled to Marit's third eye and second heart. After all these months, the blank wall of a gaze hit hard.

“She's a gods-cursed demon, Holy One,” said Osya.

“You put her in a
cage
?” Marit's hands tightened over the keys until the pain bit her and she remembered where she was.

The caged woman watched with the resigned calm of a person who has already given herself up for dead. Her stare was as even as sunlight on a clear day, almost brutal in its intensity.

“According to the statutes. We sent word to Wedrewe last month that we'd captured one, for we're required to alert the arkhons about any gods-cursed or outlanders.”

“What do the authorities in Wedrewe do with the gods-touched and outlanders?”

“I suppose they judge them at the assizes, Holy One. As required by the statutes.”

In the cage beside her, a burly man called, “I'm not afraid to be judged! They're the ones who should fear, for they have condemned me to the cleansing just to get what is mine.”

“He's a liar,” said Osya in a shaking voice. “He killed a man.”

But he wasn't a liar. He met Marit's gaze willingly. He was not pure of heart; he had a temper, easily roused, and he'd gotten into his share of fistfights after an evening of drinking, and he had slapped his wife and been slapped by her in turn, a turbulent pair who didn't like each other much. But he worked hard, and he'd discovered an unexpected vein of iron in a shallow drift up in the hills on which he'd placed a claim according to the law. Forren had set four men including his own nephew to ambush him on the trail and it wasn't his cursed fault that he'd killed the nephew, who everyone knew was a clumsy foul-tempered lunk. He'd been defending his own life and his legal claim.

“He killed a man, it's true,” said Marit. “But why aren't the men who ambushed him being held for assault and conspiracy?”

“He attacked them, unprovoked,” said Osya. “It was pure spite on his part, him with his short temper.”

The man stared accusingly. He was ready to be ill-used. He would never get a fair hearing.

She handed the keys to Osya. “Let him free. He's telling the truth.”

He grinned, baring teeth. “Nay, I'll take the punishment, for
otherwise the town council will take their revenge on my clan, and there'll be nothing I can do to spare my kinfolk. Knowing one Guardian heard and acknowledged the truth is enough for me. As for these poor lasses—” He indicated the sobbing young woman. “You can be sure she never said one word to encourage that asstard Forren, but the piss-pot would have her just to prove he can have what he wants, and leave her and her cousin to rot to death when she had the belly to say no to him. Hear me, Holy One. Maybe it's true we have fewer small troubles than before, but why is there no justice when those who hold the reins in this town do as they wish and get legal rulings out of Wedrewe to support them? They enforce the statutes among the rest of us, but hold themselves above because they were appointed by the arkhons out of Wedrewe.”

Marit turned to Osya. “Is the town council appointed, not elected? Do they enforce the law on others and ignore it themselves?”

She hid behind her hands. “I just record the hearings and the deeds and the legal rulings set by the council according to the statutes of the holy one.”

“You're a clerk of Sapanasu?”

“The Lantern's temple is closed, Holy One. That happened the year after I served my apprenticeship, twelve years ago now.”

The words rasped out of Marit before she could bite them back. “Temples are closed? What have you become?”

“We are at peace, Holy One,” whispered the clerk. “We are a peaceful place.”

Marit sucked in a grunt as pain racked her torso. But the spasm passed, and she recognized not physical pain but the horror of knowing she had walked into a situation she had no power to alter. Maybe she could execute Master Forren or his cronies on the town council for their crimes, but she had no clear idea how her Guardian's staff—the sword she carried—sealed justice if she could not actually stab a person with it. Anyhow, if she condemned Lord Radas's justice, done at his whim, how could she justify her own?

Because you can see the truth.

Yet truth is not so easy to discern. Emotion twists memory; folk convince themselves of what they want to be true. They hide behind layers of self-deceit, not all of which are easily penetrated even by one who possesses a second heart and a third eye.

She did not trust herself to so casually wield the power of life and death over others while remaining convinced she was right. She did not trust anyone who did.

“Osya. Bring road tokens, enough for all who are prisoner here to depart unmolested. Then release all the prisoners except for the one who murdered the old man. Do not try to pass off false tokens as true ones, for I'll know the difference. After the prisoners have walked free, ring the town's summoning bell.”

It was all she could do, and in the end the angry young man who had lost his claim chose to depart, helping the young woman carry her sick cousin. He alone thanked her; the rest fled without a word.

After they were gone, Marit led Warning into the main square, where she mounted and waited as the bell rang once, twice, and thrice. Folk approached in twos and threes in a stuttering stumble, fearful of her presence in a way that disturbed her so mightily she could not look at it squarely for it would make her consider what the Guardians had become in their eyes: not guardians of justice but “holy ones” who demanded obeisance.

It was foul. Obscene.

It was easy to recognize the members of the town council, replete in fine clothing and shiny ornament. They strutted until they marked her bone-white cloak; then they cowered with heads bowed. When she drew her sword, the assembly trembled like leaves battered in a storm.

“Look at me,” she said, indicating each member of the council.

Amazingly, they first glanced toward the tallest man among them, who was also the most sleek, well-cared-for, and puffed up.

“Look at me, or be known as criminals because you fear my gaze.”

She might have enjoyed the thrill of anger assuaged by their cringing fear and abject obedience now that they faced her sword, whose blade can cut death out of life, but she did not want to think she had anything in common with people such as this.

“First you, Master Forren.”

“I am entitled—!”

Such a rush of self-important impatience frothed in his mind: He had done nothing wrong! The girl had encouraged him with her simpering glances and coy refusals. She was a cheap piece of rubbish, cadging drinks off visiting merchants and begging for a rich man to toss her a few vey. Was it wrong of him to demand something in return? As for the man who had murdered his nephew! He had claimed mineral rights that properly belonged to Forren; the town was given to him in its entirety to oversee in the name of the holy one's arkhons out of Wedrewe. How could Forren be blamed for exercising the rights given to him?

Who was this cloak to say nay to him? She might be unclean herself!

It is not easy to shame those who are sure of their own shamelessness.

He spoke the truth, but so twisted in his own mind it was no longer a meaningful truth; he could not see the difference.

Marit had never been as stunned in her life, not even at the moment of her death, when the dagger plunged up under her ribs. All that she, as a reeve, had flown for, had worked for, had believed in: justice, the assizes court, the temples and their offerings, truth. In this man's mind, hers was the dream and the lie, and his was the reality: The land was peaceful under the supervision of the holy ones and their arkhons at Wedrewe. His prosperity was all that mattered.

“You are not entitled by the law as written on Law Rock,” she answered him.

“The old ways brought disruption and crime! We are better served by our new statutes.”

“Some are better served, while many are served ill. Enough!” He shut up, as she meant him to do. Yet she had no
power where folk did not recognize her authority. Fortunately, ironically, she could still lie. “I will return here in a month's time to stand again over your assizes. Act justly, and you will have no reason to fear me.”

She sheathed her sword and urged Warning up. Wings spread, the mare jolted into a trot, found the paths of air, and galloped into the sky as the crowd ducked. Anger and despair smothered her, and then she clawed free. She could not overturn all that had gone wrong. She had to do one thing at a time, within the tiny sphere she could control. As she flew past the inner palisade she began to look for the lad named Peri.

She spotted him on the road running northeast. At each town where an inn boasted stables, he displayed a token that bought him a meal, a rest, and a horse; it was an efficient system, and he always got good mounts. He rode on oblivious of her presence. Folk on the ground might feel the tremor of her passage much as they felt the bluster and pressure of wind, but as long as she remained in the air their eye was not drawn to her; the movement of Warning's wings did not alert them.

She followed him north, over the Liya Pass, into Herelia.

“D
O YOU LIKE
flying?” The reeve, Miyara, shouted to be heard above the bluster of the wind.

Mai laughed, nervously, it was true, but also because the journey was so astounding. The sea lay behind them. The sun rode aloft. The land looked so different a place from up here. The steep ravines and ridges had a beauty that a person struggling to cross on foot could never see. The mountains spread in majesty into the southwest, and from the height, Mai saw how many more peaks marched away into an unknown distance. Clouds made turbulent pools of gray in the blue sky where they had caught on summits. A strange pattern glimmered on a saddle-backed ridge, but it was only a trick of the light on bare rock.