Nekkar took the hand of the eldest, a brave soul too weary and hungry to cry. 'We're safe now.'
'What if they come back?' whispered the child. 'The bad ones.'
Nekkar gestured to the Qin soldiers, who were gently cradling the littler ones. 'We'll make sure it doesn't happen again. All will be well.'
39
'Shai!'
The whisper woke him. He sat up fast and was jerked hard against chains. The metal cuff had scraped raw the skin on one wrist.
It was dark within the cohort command tent, where Captain Arras held his cohort councils in the day on thin pillows and slept at night on a cot. The captain, of course, had marched out to attack Nessumara. The tent was empty. The canvas wall belled inward, and Shai shivered as if a ghost were embracing him,
unseen but heard, trying to drag him away from life and past the Spirit Gate into death.
Words spilled outside. He recognized Zubaidit's voice, but her tone was stretched and anxious, quite unlike her. What was Zubaidit doing here?
Hu! She had joined the enemy's army in an effort to get close to the lord commander, and was now Shai's jailor. The entrance flap rippled, and she slid inside, the scent of her — leather and sweat and a fragrance he did not know but which sat sweetly on the tongue — rousing him.
'I'm awake,' he murmured.
'A cloak's come,' she whispered. 'I've ordered Sergeant Fossad to bring the cloak here. We have to strike before she sees into my heart-'
Footsteps approached. Bai pressed a key into Shai's hand and lay down on the cot. As the tent flap was swept open and lantern light blinded him, Shai fit the key into the lock, clicked it over, then dropped it.He looked full into the gaze of Night. Her pleasantly unremarkable face creased in a kindly frown. So might a patient aunt survey the wreckage of the sticky buns invaded by a horde of lively and hungry boys: she can make more, but they haven't asked permission.
'You got far,' she said. 'Where in the lands did you suppose you could find refuge?'
He twisted the cuffs off his wrists and rose with chains in his hands. 'I find refuge in justice.'
Bai rolled to stand with a sharp inhalation of breath. He knew she was setting hollow pipe to lips.
'A dart,' he said, taking a step forward to draw Night's attention. 'A dart in my eye. How it stings.'
The cloak flinched, the barest movement; she swiped at her neck as at a midge. Shai leaped. In the instant before Shai slammed into the cloak, Fossad yelped and clapped a hand over his eye. Shai went down hard atop the woman, her cloak of night and stars billowing into the air. Where the fabric brushed his skin, his skin burned. He pressed the chains into her throat. She shoved, hands struggling for a grip on his vest, but the snake venom worked fast. Choking, she worked her mouth as if to breathe, to speak, to plead, to curse him. He locked his gaze on hers, but she was just a person staring at him, dark eyes in a dark face, no one to fear because she had no lackeys to command
within this dark tent. Did terror burn in her gaze? Was she afraid of him? Do eyes speak, or do we only believe they do, pouring our own thoughts and interpretations into the gaze turned on us by another? We don't really want to know. For it is terrible to stand naked and without concealment.
A drop of blood beaded at her nostril, swelling out as air exhaled, sucked in as she fought for breath. For life.
I must not die. I cannot die. I will not die.
Yet all things die, in the end. Dead riverbeds wind a course across the desert; mountains shed in flakes and sediment their rock and soil. Grass withers, and new grows where the old has seeded the dust.
'It's time to pass onward,' he said, 'to cross the Spirit Gate. You've done enough here. Let go.'
Her lips moved, but her breath was extinguished. No sound stirred the air, and yet he understood her.
I'll do anything. Just don't let me die.
'And so you have done anything,' he said. 'You did terrible things, and let terrible things be done. Go away now and leave us to build a peaceful life.'
With a final burst of strength, she surged upward, the cloak wrapping him as to choke him, burning blistering cutting off his air and he saw
into her heart
the well that is fear which pierces from deepest earth to highest heaven, that eats your strength and leaves you hollow
the orphaned girl had bundled her courage and her heart like a pack to be borne and she had climbed the treacherous path to seek the gods in their high eyrie and there she had boldly walked into the water expecting to die but she had not died. The gods had brought forth the Guardians out of the pool of Indiyabu to walk the lands and establish justice, and the orphaned girl had gone on with her life in the ordinary way, and when the day of her death had come as it does in time to all creatures born out of the Four Mothers, she had been embraced by a cloak. For had she not offered her life in service of justice for the land?
Only the dead can be trusted, it said in the tale. But those who walk a second time may still fear death. Corruption and virtue wax and wane in the heart, and where fear feeds corruption, it consumes virtue until the heart is only a shell in which echoes its own voice speaking to its own self about its certain selfish
concerns. Hearing no voice but her own, she had betrayed not only her companions, the other Guardians, but the land and the legacy of her own tale.
Shai held on because he knew how to endure pain; because he was stubborn. Because he lived, and she had to die, again, to finally cross the threshold of the Spirit Gate.
The spark that burns within the eyes of the living faded. The cloak eddied and sagged. Blood trickled from her mouth as the poison killed her. She died.
'Shai!' Bai was standing by the entrance, sword raised as she flipped aside the flap to glance out. Fossad was dead, with blood leaking from mouth and nose and a smear of blood staining the eye that had taken the second dart. His startled ghost oozed from his body and reached for the lantern as though to light his way.
'Eiya!' cried the ghost. 'My eye stings. What happened?'
'Hurry!' Shai said to him. 'The Gate awaits you.'
'Eh! I see the light!' Then his spirit was gone.
'The hells!' Bai cried, eyes flaring as she stared at Shai. She was so very alive that life radiated off her like threads of blue fire; she was as bright as the lantern, and only he, in the shadowed tent, was veiled and therefore opaque. 'You're hells burned, Shai! All red. And look at the gods-rotted cloak!'
The ghost of the dead woman was pouring into the cloak, rather like the way the priests of Beltak had sucked the ghosts of dead men into their blessing bowls. The cloak would hold her ghost until its magic knit the body, and then she would live again. And again. And again.
'We've got to get this cloak off her body. Give me the gloves.'
'The cursed cohort's returning,' said Bai, but she leaped to the dead man's body and stripped his gloves, then tugged them on Shai's hands one at a time as he released his grip on the metal cuffs. He tossed them aside; they'd served their purpose. With gloved hands he grappled at the clasp, and the clasp burned into the leather; heat stung his palms, raising tears of pain. Hu! The cloak came undone, and he yanked it away so hard the body tumbled gracelessly, like rubbish. With a wordless wail, her ghost writhed out of the cloak into the body and reached for the cloth as if to insinuate herself back into the weave that had kept her alive for so terribly long. The cloak billowed wildly around him, humming as in a wild storm wind.
'We've got to bind it!' he cried.
'Release it to the wind!' said Bai.
'Her ghost will crawl back in if it touches the body. We have to keep them separate.'
Bai grabbed a blanket folded neatly at the foot of the captain's cot. She ripped belts off Fossad and the dead woman. Shai wept as the bite of the cloak burned his hands, but he stepped on it, pressed it to earth, rolled the fabric inside the blanket; they folded it up and over and over again, pressed it tight and winched the belts over it and after that wrapped it in chains. How pain burned. The living were not meant to handle that which has the power to trap and succor ghosts.