His right forefinger began to bleed, but he was almost at the top. The moon scattered its pale beams over the endless flat plain. When he rested, pressing one side of his face against the stone and gazing outward with his uncovered eye, he saw no movement there beyond.
Abruptly, a shadow passed overhead, coming down fast. A man's sharp cry rang out from inside the walls.
"Who goes there?"
"Reeve's shelter!" cried a voice Shai recognized as that of Reeve Joss. "I claim reeve's shelter. I have terrible news!"
Shai grabbed the topmost battlement and heaved himself up onto his stomach, kicked, scrambled, and swung first one leg and then the other over. Leaped down onto the wall walk. Dropped into a crouch. He was in.
No one had marked him. He spotted a guard off to the left, but the man was looking down into a wide courtyard mostly hidden from Shai's position. Staying low, Shai moved along the walkway in the other direction and found a ladder. Down he went, got lost in several turnings, and found himself in a garden after all, where he hid behind a fountain. No water ran. That lack of noise made him feel vulnerable, because sound was like shadow; it concealed what wished to stay hidden. It was very quiet, but even slight sounds carried in the night: the scrape of a foot on gravel, a distant laugh, the trickle of water from a second, working fountain. An insect whirred.
In the garden stood a cottage. The pair of windows he could see from this side were open; a lamp burned inside, but from this angle he saw no one. He crept along a lattice screened by a fall of vine. He reached the porch, and eased up onto it. Around the corner, a door slid open. Beyond the garden, a man shouted in alarm, and was answered by an eagle's fierce shriek.
A foot fell; a shadow breached the corner of the porch; a man's shape slipped into view.
"Who are you?" he said.
Shai drew, and thrust. The point of his short sword cut into flesh, pushed deep, kept sliding until the hilt slammed up against the body it had impaled. Panting, Shai wrenched it loose, but the blade caught on ribs. He fought with it and shoved the man back and actually got his foot up on the man's thigh and shoved with the foot while tugging on the sword.
All fell free. The man collapsed onto the porch without making a single sound, just a thump. The cloak he wore wrapped around his shoulders shifted, rising as if wind breathed into the fabric. Shai took a step back, then a second, waiting for the man to struggle up and attack him. Waiting for his ghost to rise out of his body, cursing and moaning.
The body did not stir. No misty form shimmered into the air.
Behind him, a man chuckled.
"Well done," said Tohon, appearing out of the gloom. "But move fast, now. We go on."
"He's not dead."
"Looks dead enough. If not, we finish him later. Follow me."
A clamor rose from beyond the garden. Cries and calls were punctuated by the clatter of weapons. Tohon set out at a jog, and Shai ran after him, wiping his mouth, which was suddenly moist with saliva. They crunched along a gravel path. The scout seemed uninterested in how much noise they were making. Two corpses sprawled in the garden; their ghosts were caught in an eddy around their bodies, trying, Shai supposed, to figure out what had happened to them.
He and Tohon crossed under a gate and ran down an alley, made a twist and a turn, and sprinted into a wide and dusty court. Reeve Joss's giant eagle walked with wings spread while a pair of hapless men cowered away from his talons. Several bodies had fallen in the court, but in the dim light it was impossible to know what had struck them down. A ghost was weeping beside one corpse, but the other ghosts, strangely, were already tearing away from the flesh, seeking Spirit Gate, through which they would cross into the other world.
Near the fortress's massive gatehouse, a fire burned in a outdoor brick hearth. Here guardsmen might warm a cup of khaif to keep them awake through a night's watch, but tonight the flames illuminated a quartet of tailmen as they set their shoulders to the wheel. With a groan, and a rumble of gears, the gate creaked. Black-clad riders streamed into the fortress.
Anji rode up to Tohon.
"Done," said the scout. "But it was the lad who killed the marshal."
Anji nodded at Shai. "Well done."
He signaled. Together with the Olossi militia, the Qin soldiers spread throughout the barracks, stables, chambers, and lofts of Argent Hall. Reeves and servants were caught, bound, gagged, and confined under guard, while the dead were carried into the same high loft where the prisoners were kept and lined up in tidy rows for the living to contemplate.
Living among the reeves were guildsmen called fawkners, men and women whose work was to care for the eagles. They proved most cooperative. As soon as they saw that the hooded eagles under their care were not to be harmed, they seemed, in truth, relieved at the incursion, even though many of the eagles were badly distressed, restless in the darkness.
As soon as every room was accounted for, the troop set to work. Anji and his officers inventoried the contents of the storerooms. The militiamen dressed in the garb of the hall's hired men. The Qin soldiers rolled wagons into position and took their stations. Joss hooded Scar in an empty loft, to rest him. Men napped, hoarding their strength. Shai was too restless to sleep. He walked back through the compound and found the garden and its cottage, where he had stabbed that man. No body lay on the porch, of course, but strangely, no blood stained the boards either. For the longest time, as light rose and the night softened with dawn, he stared at the spot. There was no evidence that anything at all had happened. Inside the cottage, the lamp still burned, but it was guttering on the last of the oil. He moved toward the entry door, thinking to go inside, to blow it out. To look for something he had surely misplaced, only he wasn't sure what it was.
"Hey! Shai!" Jagi waved at him from the shadowed alley. "Come on! We're supposed to take up position. You're with me."
He shook himself. To his surprise, his hand was already on the door, which was closed, but he wasn't sure whether he was about to open a closed door, or had just closed an open one. Uneasy, he backed up, then jumped down the stairs and hurried over to Jagi.
As Shai came up to him, Jagi punched him, hard, on the arm. "Tohon says you struck down the marshal. You didn't let us tailmen down."
Shai could only grit his teeth so as not to wince in front of his companion. He did not look back at the deserted cottage as they trotted away down the alley. The night's activity seemed like a dream to him, something best left behind. They took up their station on the wall walk where scaffolding gave them protection; they still had a good view over the courtyard. It was very quiet, very still. Jagi readied his bow.
To kill a man, you must be willing to see the ghost he becomes. Such was the curse set upon him. He was not sure he was willing to be a soldier, if he must face, every time, the ghost he had created. Yet releasing ghosts did not seem to bother Anji, and anyway, Shai knew he would never have the courage to ask the captain if it did.
A militiaman rang the first bell as soon as the sun's rim broached the eastern horizon.
"Captain has a new idea," said Jagi. "Something to do with the oil he found in the storerooms. He's talking it over with that eagle rider, right now. I wonder, though."
"You wonder what?" asked Shai. He wondered, too, at the empty courtyard, the abandoned rooms: Argent Hall's ghosts had fled quickly, almost as if they were happy to find release.
"Let's say we survive this. I wonder what kind of wife I can find here. She won't be able to cook the things I like to eat. I tried a bit of their yoghurt and milk. Gah! It had no bite to it! I suppose I'll have to learn to eat what she cooks. That's what my mother would tell me to do."