Far away, in counterpoint, shouts and screams rent the silence. The noise of a distant battle breaking out jolted him into action. He ducked, stumbled, fell, scrambled out of the way just in time. The beast pounded past him as the tailmen whistled to each other, calls to mark position and choice of attack. The rider billowed like a cloud, only that was a voluminous cloak rising out behind his body as though caught in a gust of wind. The horse slowed to a canter, and it pulled in its vast wings and turned on a right rein, back around to face him.
The horse had wings.
The glamour on the road brightened where the horse's hooves touched it. That unnatural light rose as if with the dawn, but it was not yet dawn. Far away, the battle raged as Captain Anji and his men hit the strike force with their surprise attack. Close at hand, Shai saw clearly the face of the man who rode on the back of that impossible horse. He rose, trembling, and raised a hand to ward off what he knew must be an insubstantial ghost.
"Hari." His voice choked on the name.
A hiss of arrows answered. The tailmen were the least of the Qin company, but a Qin tailman would stand as an elite in most armies. Five arrows sprouted from the rider's body. A javelin, cast from the side, caught the man in the torso, just above the hip. He grunted in pain, and swayed in the saddle, but he kept his seat.
"Hari!"
The ghost spoke with Hari's voice, urgent and angry. "Shai! How can it be you've come here?"
"I came to find you."
"You shouldn't have. Go home before the shadows swallow you as they did me!"
The horse screamed a challenge, tossing its head, and it launched itself down the road as if to assault Shai. He was stupefied, bound, paralyzed. It leaped, and took to the air. One hoof shaved the top of his head, knocking him flat. The tailmen fixed arrows and loosed them after the animal. No arrow touched those gleaming flanks. But the rider was not so fortunate. Those dark slashes fixed in his body, yet he did not fall. His dark cloak billowed, a shadow entwining him.
Jagi whistled the alert. Shai grabbed his sword, which had somehow fallen out of his hand. A dozen or more horses bolted toward them on the road. None bore riders. Not far behind ran twenty or more men on foot, in a disorderly retreat.
"Get off the road," said Jagi in a calm voice that meant he was irritated.
Shai got off the road by stumbling backward down the ramped earth and falling hard onto his butt. There he sat, too stunned to act, as a trickle of blood, like a tear, slipped down his cheek from the scrape atop his head. Its salty heat caught in the corner of his mouth. The panicked horses swept past. The tailmen coolly picked off their enemies before those hapless men understood they were still under attack.
It wasn't the aftershock of the battle that immobilized him.
The tailmen had seen Hari. They had filled Hari full of arrows. Yet how could they see, much less kill, a man who was already a ghost?
46
Eliar took her from camp about midday, just before Anji and the others rode out. By the time he had escorted her and her slaves up through the city, a tedious and very hot walk, the shops along the streets had begun to close their shutters for their afternoon's slumber. Olossi's avenues twisted and turned; even the main streets shifted position with curves and doglegs and sudden sharp-angled corners. Down the narrow side streets and deeper within alleyways lay walls and gates, the walls washed white so they all looked alike and only the gates painted with symbols and colors to give a hint of what household bided within. They hurried at length down a street where gold- and silversmiths displayed their wares, but by this time scarcely anyone was about to remark on the sight of Eliar, his two male companions who carried their belongings, and the three women. They turned left at a corner where a fountain burbled, then right into a cobbled alleyway wide enough to admit a wagon and swept so clean Mai could distinguish no speck of dust. White walls flanked them. The alley dead-ended in a plain wooden gate, its double segments marked only by yellow trim, agreeting bell hung to one side in an alcove in the wall, and bronze door handles fashioned to resemble deer in full flight, slender legs thrust out before and behind. A small door reinforced with bands of iron was set into the right-hand gate, with a slit-like peephole cut just above the level of Mai's head. High up on the wall, on either side, were set small grated windows.
He rang the bell, and waited.
"Where are we?" Mai asked.
"This is the house of my clan," he said. The walls were the height of two men, but there was a single building within the compound that towered above the walls, fully three stories high with a balcony ringing the highest floor, its interior screened by latticework.
"Do you need permission to enter your own house?" Mai asked.
"This is the women's entrance. I can't go in and out through here, nor can you use the men's entrance on the other side."
"If you live separately, then do you keep secrets from each other?"
"Not secrets, no. But I don't know everything that goes on in the women's quarters."
Anji's mother, a Qin woman, had been sent to a country where women were not allowed to ride. Yet she had contrived to teach her son to ride, according to the custom of her people. The emperor sequestered his women, but clearly, he hadn't known everything that was going on with them.
"Look! Look there!" Eliar cried.
An eagle flew over, but with walls rising high around them, they quickly lost sight of it.
"Is that Reeve Joss?" she asked. "Or one of the eagles from Argent Hall?"
The metal strip blocking the slit rasped free, drawn away by an unseen hand. In the opening thus revealed appeared dark eyes, narrowed and tucked, rimmed by lovely black eyelashes and outlined with a black cosmetic.
"Enter," Eliar said to Mai with an expansive smile and a bold gesture of welcome, arm swept in a wide curve. "Be welcome to the house of the Haf Gi Ri."
"Sen Eliar!" The woman's voice brought him back to earth. "What means this?"
"I have sworn to take these women in as guests, under our protection."
The eyes blinked. The voice said, "Does anyone else in the family know what you've done, Sen Eliar? Did you ask permission, or warn anyone?"
She answered herself. "No, of course not. Very well. Get out of here."
The words were uttered so curtly that Mai could not help but flinch, despite that she had long since trained herself not to show displeasure or fear or anger.
Eliar cupped his hands over his eyes in a gesture very like obeisance, or prayer. The two companions dumped her gear on the ground, and all three men backed up to a safe distance, then turned and strode away down the alley. Shocked by the rejection, Mai shifted to follow them, but Priya grabbed her arm and caught her before she could take more than one step. Whispers teased her. Looking up, she saw movement behind the grating of the two high windows. A giggle floated on the air. On the other side of the gate, bolts were shot and a heavy weight shifted and moved. The inner door set within the doubled gate opened inward on well-oiled hinges.
"Come! Come! That boy! No need, we'll bring in your belongings."
Sheyshi started to snivel. Mai stood as straight as she could and, with Priya and Sheyshi, walked through into a small if pleasant courtyard the exact width of the alley. In the far right corner stood a dry but very clean fountain. Several planting troughs lined the walls, most of them fallow though one boasted the stalks and spiky leaves of fragrant paradom, not yet in its flowering season. One trellis supported grape vines; another bent under the weight of thickly twining rainflower. Benches offered respite from the sun. Behind her lay the gate through which she had come. Ahead rose the three-storied building, open to the air on its upper stories although she could see only the suggestion of movement behind latticework screens. To her right stood a doubled door, another gate, in a high wall; heavy wagon tracks suggested that, sometimes, wagons were driven in this way. To her left a spacious veranda welcomed her.