Shattered Pillars (46 page)

“We send her with the wizard corps,” said the Wizard Yongten. “You, Tsering, have a special relationship with the Qersnyk refugees. You will go to them and explain why the gates are sealed.”

Thin-lipped, Tsering nodded. But Yongten-la had focused his attention on the queen. “What do you say, Empress? It will require a great deal of physical courage on your part.”

She looked down, but nodded. “It is the least—”

Her words were lost in the shattering of a tremendous wall of sound. The floor jumped; dust sifted from the gaps between the white stones of the wall. For a moment, Hong-la thought the Cold Fire had erupted, and this had all become abruptly academic.

But he would have
felt
that,
otherwise.

They stood stunned for a moment. Yongten-la was the first to recover, Tsering-la at his heels as he made for the window. When Hong-la joined them, he saw a huge billow of dust rising from the direction of the Black Palace.

A long section of its façade was cracked and fallen.

“Black powder,” said Tsering, her voice level and plain. “A wizard made that happen.”

*   *   *

Temur had said he meant to fetch water as soon as the daysuns set, but when the daysuns set and the whole soft forest rustling unveiled itself once more, Temur lay finally sleeping. It was Samarkar who picked up the leathern folding bucket from beside where he slumped against the wall, picked her way past the exhausted bay mare (nearly invisible in the gloom) and her pale colt (already standing and nursing, his stubby tail working like a pump handle), and borrowed Hrahima’s rope.

The Cho-tse was standing just within the door. Samarkar would have expected her to be looking out at the night, but instead she stood watching the foal. He did look like a ghost; a stark reverse silhouette that seemed to gather what little light there was until he shimmered. It was the steppe-pony coat, of course, with its strange reflective shine. Knowing that didn’t make looking at him any less spooky.

Hrahima handed her the rope and said, “Afrit? Do you really think that was such a good idea?”

“It was the one I had,” said Samarkar.

She picked her way to the riverbank. It was not such a steep drop here, but she went carefully even in the bright moon- and star-light. She was not unmindful of the dragon-turtle … not that she’d ever seen one before, but what else could it possibly have been? It hadn’t seemed likely that that one was going anywhere … but where there was one, there might be many.

The water was cold and clear and smelled fresh. More of those jewel-toned frogs hopped along the margins, leading Samarkar to wonder if they hid themselves in the mud when the daystars rose.

Well, she had to test it on somebody: she bowed her head and drank her fill. It did not seem to hurt her, beyond the ache of the cold across her teeth.

As she climbed back up the bank with a brimming bucket, a sound reached her that did not seem to belong to the jungle night. There were birdcalls, of course; frog croaks; the droning of insects. But above them, a faint silvery jingle, regular and repetitive.

It sounded like bells.

Careful not to spill the water, she trotted back to the others. Hrahima was outside, ears pricked, staring into the night.

“You hear that?”

“Hoofbeats,” said Hrahima, which Samarkar had not detected. “And harness bells.”

*   *   *

A steady wind blew the Cold Fire’s smoke back through the pass above the Citadel, behind the mountains and north toward the Range of Ghosts. Hong-la could not remember the last time he’d seen so much of the sky.

A ripple spread across it, and Hong-la turned his head. It had no color of its own, but behind it the color of the sky was not the same.

The empress walked beside him, head down, anonymous in ill-fitting, borrowed wizard’s weeds. All around them, Citadel guardsmen protected a dozen wizards, and the flames of a burning city flickered and died away.

Hong-la cleared his throat. Were she dressed as a colleague or not, he could not bring himself to touch an empress’s shoulder.

She looked up slowly, as if she must winch herself up to the effort. She squinted when she saw the flat expanse of turquoise overhead, the broad pale circle of the sun. She did not raise a hand to shield her eyes.

“So,” said the Dowager Empress Yangchen, first such of that name. “Tsarepheth has fallen.”

She hid her face again.

*   *   *

Temur awakened in a fighting crouch with his knife in his right hand, with Hsiung pitching pebbles at his boots.

“Sorry,” he said, and made to sheathe the blade, but Hsiung stopped him with a gesture. Their gazes met through the filtered night light, just within the doorway. Hsiung jerked his chin.
Outside.

But not an immediate threat of, say, archers, because Samarkar and Hrahima were standing on either side of the door. Temur went to join them, the monk at his heels.

“Someone is coming,” Samarkar said when Temur came to stand beside her. “And is not trying to hide.”

Temur strained through the noise of the night. Yes, the clop of hooves on a stone road, and the familiar shimmer of bells. As he listened, the cries and rushings of the night creatures died away. Against a brightening sky came the hushed brushing sounds of the forest furling itself against the suns of day.

What would a shaman-rememberer be doing here?

A moment more, Temur thought, and he could ask for himself. Because there came a mouse-colored mare with a face splashed white from ears to lip, bearing a saddle with eight blue knots hung on it, wearing reins and other trappings strung with tiny bells. And on her back was—yes, a shaman-rememberer, dressed for ceremony or parade in a tall, brimless felt hat and an embroidered coat that covered him to his calves.

He stopped before Temur and bowed from the saddle as prettily as Temur had ever seen.

“Re Temur Khagan,” he said, in a high and musical voice. “Raise your banner for me.”

My banner was left in the desert, cached near the horses we had to abandon.
But it was ridiculous to raise such arguments with a shaman-rememberer. They all knew what any of them knew, and each of them knew whatever the Eternal Sky chose to share with him. Temur turned to duck back inside only to find Samarkar standing behind him. She held out her hands. A length of silk draped over them.

“It was in Bansh’s things.”

Of course it had been. Temur turned back to the shaman-rememberer; the shaman-rememberer held out a lance.

“The suns—” said Hrahima.

“Are the Khan of Khans’ to command.” Temur had heard that voice before—in a dream, a fever dream, in an iced-over slab cave in a pass through the Range of Ghosts. He stopped and squinted; the shaman-rememberer smiled encouragement, cheeks smooth and youthful where they bent around the grin.

Temur hadn’t seen the goddess’s face. Mother Night wore a veil.

But he knew that voice. He would have sworn.

Hands shaking, Temur grasped the lance around the smooth shaft, behind the iron barbs, and drew it to him. With Samarkar’s help, it was easy enough to thread the loops of the banner around the shaft and fix it there.

When he raised it and shook out its folds, the dawn breeze lifted and rippled the shape of a running mare.

Light touched the top of the slope overhead, but it seemed mellower than Temur had expected. More golden. “Bring your mare inside,” he urged the shaman-rememberer. “The light in this place kills.”

“Stand fast, Khan of Khans,” the shaman replied. “The kings that claimed this place are dead. Your sun rises.”

Temur tilted his head back, heart lifting as the familiar dawn of the steppe limned the eastern rim of the valley lavender and silver. He glanced over his shoulder, alerted by the creeping sensation of being watched.

Brother Hsiung’s eyes burned with a smoky green light as they followed him.

*   *   *

Edene was Queen, and her commands were obeyed without hesitation. By the ghulim, by the djinn.

All her commands except one.

She could not bid the djinn to go against his master’s word. She could not bid him to leave. She could not bid him to tell her what he had named her son. Well—she could bid him any of those things, and all. And she did—but he only smiled and glanced aside like a shy maiden.

It would have been easy to direct her wrath against him. But the djinn was as bound by circumstance as she was—and more, bound against his will. He came and went—she assumed al-Sepehr summoned him—and while he never showed her frustration, she imagined she could sense it in him.

They hated the same man. While she could not trust him, that made him an ally.

Her son at her breast, wrapped within the violet folds of her ghul-woven robe, she stood overlooking the sands of Erem where they glowed softly under its brilliant night. She was watching her soldiers drill upon the slopes of the ancient city. The rattle of their spears comforted her.

She had made Besha Ghul her general. There were scrolls in the lost libraries of Erem on military things, tactics and strategy and provisioning. As a daughter of the Tsareg clan, Edene already knew many of these things—and the ring knew more. The ghulim proved quick studies. She could have ordered them, commanded them—as she had when the glass demons attacked. Instead, she made them promises:
love me, serve me willingly, and when we are free I will give this ring to Besha Ghul.

The scent of al-Sepehr troubled her no longer.

Soon she would find a way to free the djinn, too, or at least twist his bonds of service. Soon she would bring the ghulim to Temur, the finest betrothal gift a queen could offer her warlord bridegroom: an army of loyal monsters.

*   *   *

In the Qersnyk camp, beneath the pall of the Cold Fire’s foul breath, Tsering resigned herself to wandering. She was hoping for someone to recognize the black coat she’d changed back into and to come up to offer assistance. Since Altantsetseg’s death, the meticulous maintenance had fallen off somewhat, and Tsering found herself kicking through drifts of ash as she meandered aimlessly between tents.

The problem was, she decided, that the refugees were used to seeing her. Except every other time when they’d been seeing her, she’d had someplace to go.

She’d just resigned herself to collaring people at random until she found someone who spoke enough Uthman or Rasan to take her to a leader when someone she recognized stepped up. A blue coat thrown loosely over his shirt, his collar untied, it was the shaman-rememberer Jurchadai.

She opened her mouth to explain that he and his people needed to evacuate, that except for the few who stayed behind to mind the Citadel, the wizards were surrendering Tsarepheth to the volcano. He spoke before she could shape the words.

“Re Temur is Khagan.”

She choked; swallowed the words she had meant to say; spat out the ones that formed in their place. “Qori Buqa is Khagan.”

“He is,” said Jurchadai.

“How can that be?” Tsering asked, uneasily certain that she already knew the answer. “That two men may be Khagan?”

“Two men may call themselves Khagan,” the shaman-rememberer said. “Until one of them is dead.”

*   *   *

It had been a beautiful wedding. All the more so because al-Sepehr had planned it himself. Oh, not the ceremony, carried out at the hands of one of the Qersnyk she-male monstrosities they called priests. And not the horse races, the archery competition, the lancers on galloping mares tilting at rings and each other. Not the endless ritual exchange of gifts between the bride’s family—in this case al-Sepehr—and the groom’s family and war-band … although al-Sepehr could not deny the bride-wealth would be usefully deployed to hire more disposable mercenaries.

Certainly
not the food. Or the rotten mare’s milk served as a beverage. And al-Sepehr found himself wincing a little when the groom lifted his new bride over the withers of a blood-shouldered gray—carefully, with respect for her gravid state, for all it was in its early stages. Bitterly, he wished that Shahruz were there beside him, to share his discomfort in this barbaric ceremony with its bare-faced, swollen-bellied “bride.”

Amid a great deal of whooping and protests—both from al-Sepehr’s chosen escort of Nameless and from the war band of the new Khagan, Qori Buqa rode off with the twins into the distance, leading a dappled mare who would serve as the twins’ mount once they were a discrete distance away.

There were protests but no whooping when the twins rode back the next day, leading Qori Buqa’s mare. She was burdened with the body of Saadet’s husband, draped flaccidly across the Padparadscha Seat.

He had fallen racing his new wife, she said. Like his father, and broken his neck in the slide from a running mare.

*   *   *

“My daughter’s son will be Qori Buqa’s heir,” said al-Sepehr, dropping a hand upon the twins’ shoulder. Saadet kept her head down demurely, her hands hidden in a fold of cloth in her lap. Al-Sepehr thought he was the only one who could see that she was picking at the edge of her nail. “My daughter is his regent. That is how it shall be.”

The war-band in the council chamber did not like it. They shifted in their yoke-backed chairs, and one with gray streaks in his hair—al-Sepehr wondered if he should have bothered to learn the man’s name—stood up. He said, “Qori Buqa has other sons. Your daughter’s child may be a girl, yet—”

They had argued the night through. The sky was silvering. Soon the sun would rise. “Qori Buqa had no other sons in wedlock.”

The gray-haired man slammed his hand down on the table.
Barbaric children.
“As if your bizarre prejudices matter!”

But another man, this one with a forked beard and a high forehead, put a hand on his war-band brother’s arm. “The girl has spirit,” he said. “And sense. If she accepts our counsel, why not? We will need united tribes, if Otgonbayar’s son Temur is raising an army. Do you think he’d let a one of us live,
forgive
a one of us, if he came to power?”

The gray-haired man frowned. But they all knew—word had come through the shaman-rememberers—that Re Temur had raised his banner.