Gentle fingers dabbed a cooling infusion onto his burning skin, starting on his face and working down his neck and onto his bare shoulders and chest.
'You treat him as tenderly as you would a son.'
'I miss my sons and daughter. Whether they're dead or living now, which I can't know — except for the girl, of course, and the lad I know was killed in the wars — I miss them. A man likes to have a child around, as you must be well aware of at this moment, Captain Anji.'
What cools at first touch may turn to a blaze of heat. Pain flared across his body as though he were being smothered in a cloak of fire. Someone drew a sword.
'Did Commander Beje and Lady Cherfa plan Mai's death all along in concert with my mother?'
'Put down the sword, Captain, or stab me in the back after I'm done here.' The voice soothed, not wavering. Nor did the hands falter, spreading the healing infusion down Shai's raw, aching legs. 'I'm Commander Beje's man, serving at his order. He ordered me to serve you, so I did. I'm a Qin soldier, Captain. Not a red hound or an agent of the Sirniakan women's palace. I'm not even a slave to Beje's wife Cherfa.'
A sword hissed back into its sheath. 'What did you know about Sheyshi?'
'Hu! If it's true what they say, she fooled us all, for I thought her the most lame-witted female I'd ever encountered. Although now I think about it, looking back over ground I already scouted, I missed what was obvious. She was always skulking around, wasn't she, pretending to drop things or forget what she was doing? She let us believe she was stupid, and that made us stupid, didn't it? Seeing the face without ever trying to look behind it. No, I didn't suspect her. But I suppose Commander Beje knew what she was and placed her in your troop at his wife's request.'
'Why would he do that?'
'Surely you know, Captain, that Beje and Cherfa have been your mother's allies from a long way back. It's he who helped her get you out of the empire when you were twelve. It's she who gave you their daughter to wed, to give you status in court when your uncle the var meant to belittle you, even if it didn't work out with the woman in the end. It's he who warned you that your uncle was out to kill you, wasn't it? He — or his wife -
intercepted a messenger out of one of those desert towns, some widow's grandson. They knew beforehand what your uncle intended. He had time to set his snare. He sent me to intercept you and guide you to him, so he could warn you. That he placed your mother's agent with your troop certainly couldn't have been to threaten you. All your mother the princess has ever done has been to protect you, her only son. The slave was just one more knife at your service.'
Anji's breathing had gentled as a horse's might, being walked after a bruising gallop. The sting of fiery pain along Shai's skin lessened. He tried to open his eyes, but a sticky paste held them shut. He tried to move his fingers, but he couldn't feel his hands.
'She outflanked me,' Anji whispered.
'What will you do now, Captain?'
'We're still fighting a war. Tomorrow, Tohon, I'll need you to-'
'With all respect, Captain,' said the scout in a mild tone as cooling as the infusion he'd finished laying on, 'I'll not be going anywhere, nor will this lad. I've arranged for a bed in Skerru so he doesn't have to be moved. He needs not to be moved, if he's going to live. I've given you my report. There's others who can scout for you-'
'All those reeves, you mean, who might yet fly off at a word from their handsome but rebellious commander just when I need them most. You're my best scout, Tohon.'
'But I'm not your only scout, Captain. Now that Mistress Mai is dead, for which I truly grieve, for she was a fine woman, I am this young man's only family. Hu! There was something about an uncle, wasn't there? Uncle Hari?'
'No.' Anji's reply was a knife in the heart. 'There is no Uncle Hari. And Mai is gone.' The word broke; the heart shattered; the world wept. 'For her sake and in her memory, then. Stay with him and make sure he lives.'
Zubaidit walked beyond the ring of Qin guards to an open stretch of ground. The camp was held hostage under the uncertain grip of Commander Anji's temper. Would he break down and weep? Strike out in anger? How strong was his self-discipline? She'd never in fact met his wife, the woman whose beauty all praised and whose intelligence was manifest in how often she had outnegotiated her rivals and how quickly she had
woven her husband's Qin soldiers into the intricate network of kinship and obligation that was clan life in the Hundred.
Bai had had a clan once, but they'd forfeited her loyalty when they'd sold her to the temple. How she had hated the old bitch who ruled in Ushara's garden, even while respecting the woman's devotion to the Merciless One. Yet walking away from the temple after Keshad had freed her, she had realized she could never walk away from the goddess. Once she accepted this, every decision became simple. Die in the service of the goddess? Of course, if it proved necessary. Live? Then she would do so, if that's what was needed.
After so many months trapped in a guise worthy of one of Hasibal's actors, Zubaidit embraced the prayers she had been so long denied because to pray would be to reveal the truth of what she was: one of Ushara's devourers, devoted to life, death, and desire, sent as assassin and spy into the enemy's camp. As lamps flickered among the shelters and campfires burned where a few soldiers still retold their stories of the day's fighting, she stamped the rhythm with her feet and sketched the story with hands as she sang.
'The Four Mothers raised the heavens and shaped the earth,
and then they slumbered.
and then they grew large.
and then they gave birth.
The seven gods are their children,
who brought order into the world.
who built the gates that order the world…
and thus Shining Gate rose and Shadow Gate rose.
Thus day and night gave order to the world.
Look at the horizon! A voice calls.
Shadow Gate rises.
Night is come.''
He approached through the darkness, footsteps quick on the earth. He was not the man she was waiting for, but he was the one she had been expecting.
'Captain Anji. Or is it Commander, now? That's what I hear folk calling you.'
He dismissed this trivial banter with a curt wave. She wouldn't have thought this man had a temper, but she could see
it in the creases of his narrowed gaze and in the way his mouth was shut as if he was holding back a scream of thwarted fury.
'We may have won a victory here,' he said, 'but the war is far from over. We've accounted for eight cohorts, but Lord Radas and the cloak of Night raised fifteen cohorts. Even if we win another battle or two, how many will be left skulking in the woodlands and the hills, starving and without cordial or rice wine to slake their thirst? Hungry, you see, without the least scrap of remorse or control? What of them? What if the cloak of Sun, so recklessly released by Reeve Joss, raises another demon? One with less arrogance and more cunning? More discipline and less vanity? How do we protect ourselves against such eventualities if we can't work together to make sure the cloaks are bound, so they cannot be used as weapons against us? If we who command the Hundred cannot even agree that the cloaked demons are our enemies?'
Overhead, the stars bloomed in profusion, like festival lamps. The churned earth was settling, but smoke from the forest fires tainted the air. A person might dart out her tongue, like the ginny lizards, and taste blood spilled in the past and blood yet to be spilled. She'd done her share of killing. As Ushara's servant, she would kill again if the goddess so demanded.
'Shai told me the cloak of Night sought outlanders and the gods-touched. She saw them as a threat to her power. Are you by any chance a seventh son?'