Traitors' Gate by Kate Elliott Page B

have to get them.”
    â€œYou should have thought of that before you left your gods-rotted village.” The sergeant nodded, and soldiers grabbed the man by either arm. As he’d done numerous times before, seen by everyone standing in line, the sergeant sliced three shallowcuts into the man’s left forearm. “We cleanse those who sneak back into the city after they’ve been marked.”
    â€œBut they’ll starve!” The man’s voice rose shrilly as his desperation mounted and the pain of the cuts stung into tears. “Their mother is dead. We lost track of our clan—”
    The soldiers dragged him out by a different door. Aui! The refugees who had flooded into Toskala over the last year had put a strain on the resources of the city and caused a great deal of hard feeling, but to separate a man from his children in such a way was beyond cruel. Yet none dared protest. Soldiers lined the main room; an inn called the Thirsty Saw had been cleared of customers and set aside for their use. Many more folk besides him waited in line, some wringing their hands or rubbing unmarked forearms, others weeping. Most stood in silent, bitter dread. Eight days ago, on the cusp between the days of Wakened Ox and Transcendent Snake, their good city had been overthrown by treachery and fallen into the hands of thieves and criminals.
    The bored soldier’s voice sharpened. “I said,
You next
.”
    Nekkar limped forward.
    The sergeant looked him up and down without smile or frown. “What’s your name?”
    â€œI’m called Nekkar.”
    â€œWhat’s your clan?”
    â€œI’m temple-sworn.” As any tupping idiot could see by his blue cloak with its white stripe sewn over each shoulder! Those who wore the blue cloak marking them as servants of Ilu the Herald, patron of travelers and bringer of news, became accustomed to being addressed as “Holy One.” That the sergeant had not used the customary honorific was a deliberate slight. He swallowed angry words as he glanced uneasily around the chamber. The other detainees, swept up like so much detritus by the soldiers now patrolling Toskala’s streets, stared, trying to gauge what questions they might be asked and what answers would serve them best.
    â€œWhat clan in Toskala marks your kinfolk?” The sergeant’s impatience edged his tone. He wore a silver chain from which hung an eight-pointed tin star, a cheap medallion comparedwith the finely wrought chain likely obtained in the first frenzy of looting.
    â€œWhy, no clan in Toskala!” he replied, surprised. “Why should it? I was sent to Fifth Quarter’s temple at sixteen as an apprentice and transferred five years later as an envoy to Stone Quarter’s temple. I have lived here in the city the last thirty years, and never regretted one moment of it.”
Until today.
“My kin are hill people from the Liya Pass, if you must know, a day’s walk from the town of Stragglewood on the Ili Cutoff.”
    â€œI know the place. Go on.”
    Faced with the soldier’s unrelenting gaze, he cleared his throat nervously and went on. “Most of my people follow the carters’ or woodsmen’s trade. Easy to work together, then, you see, cousin hauling logs for cousin. Never had a badge, like they do here in the city. Honest country folk don’t.” The sergeant didn’t blink at that jab, nor rise to the bait, nor touch his own ugly star badge, if that was what it was. “I haven’t been back there for over twenty years. My life is here in the city now.”
    â€œWhat clan?” the sergeant repeated.
    He wiped sweat from his brow with a hand made grimy when the soldiers who had cornered him had shoved him to the ground. His wrist hurt, and his twisted ankle was swelling. “Tumble Creek lands, mostly. Some granddaughter branches that range the roads and paths, as carters do. We’re a daughter