Steles of the Sky (13 page)

Still, Tolui let her carry his bags out of the shelter until she started toward the mouse-dun mare. “No,” he said, falling out of step. The definitiveness of his refusal to move stopped her as surely as a chain.

She arced around him and came back. “No?”

“Her name is Jerboa. She is of the line of the copper-colored mare Haerun.”

I bet she can jump,
thought Samarkar.

“I leave her to you. Call her my gift to Temur Khan, in the expectation that one day he will rebuild a Sacred Herd. The steppe feels the lack of their hoofbeats.”

“Sacred Herd?” She could not help herself.

“Ask your lover. My bags, please.” Tolui draped them over his own shoulders as if he were a mule.

“You’re going to walk out of the Shattered Pillars? With winter descending?”

“Fear not, once-princess,” he said. “I don’t have far to go.”

She did not follow, but she watched him go, back along the road they had come in by, until he vanished behind the bony trees. Inside the shelter, she heard the rustle of Temur packing up. She turned and went to him, helping to collect cups and cooking vessels and other such small impedimenta as had become scattered around the camp. Temur had the Qersnyk facility for packing, and anything else Samarkar tried to do would only impede him and increase the bulk of the load.

She was bringing him a folding leather bucket when he said without looking up, “Don’t worry too much about him. They seem to know where they’re needed. I assume the same way they also seem to know what befalls any of their number.”

Samarkar frowned at the back of her hands. “I think that a very pragmatic use of divine grace.”

Temur gave her a tolerant look that made her heart beat more warmly in her bosom. “They are Qersnyk.”

All right. She could let him make her laugh. “And the Qersnyk rulers are willing to admire the tenets of any faith that might consent to strengthen their own mandate. So why should the priests be any less hardheaded?”

Samarkar bit at the flesh of her thumb-tip, feeling a sudden—and unexpected—lack of grace. So long away from the Steles of the Sky; so long out from under the comforting embrace of her own skies, the eyes of her own Six Thousand Shrine deities.

I shall build you a shrine in the Shattered Pillars,
she promised the small gods of her homeland.
You will have a prayer from me before we leave here, whether it reaches your ears or not.

*   *   *

It should have had an idol, but in this case Samarkar made do with an altar. There was no shortage of dressed stone, and she salvaged carefully while they waited for Hrahima’s return with the meat that would fuel the first part of their journey—or feed them for a few days more here in Reason, if it turned out this doorway too was a false lead. Tolui had sneakily left them a number of supplies, but they were still walking a balance between hunger, rest, strength, the need to be where they were going, and the winter. They had opened three other doors—
Samarkar
had opened three other doors, with the attendant illness and pain—and they had learned that they could not even know until they passed through the door what hour it was in the land beyond. They had stepped from night to day, already, and from evening into afternoon.

It seemed best to be as prepared as possible, over trying to get an early start. But it also seemed wise to limit the number of doors they opened, lest one lead them out under the murderous daystars of Erem, into the tossing caldera of the Cold Fire, or some other equally terrible place.

Samarkar stacked square stones in courses like bricks, chinking with chipped bits to render them level. She found a threshold with no house remaining, small enough that she and Hsiung could lift it and slightly dished at the top with centuries of footsteps. With Hsiung’s help, she hoisted it onto the top of her structure, where the weight settled the smaller stones.

She drew up water in a folding bucket to scrub it. Once it was clean, more water filled it like a font. There were idols here and there, graven images, some more whole than others—but Samarkar was not about to use unknown bits of the ancient gods or emperors of Erem in a shrine to the Six Thousand.

As the sun drifted behind the forked peaks with evening, Reason blossomed. Branches swayed under drifts of white and blue. Some of the blossoms glowed softly in the gloaming, like drifting lanterns. Hsiung left Samarkar to her work as Samarkar moved from tree to shrub, selecting and cutting flowers with appropriate rituals to acknowledge and sanctify the sacrifice. She was arranging them in the basin when Temur came up behind her.

He waited politely, but she knew his footstep. She tucked one last heavy-headed, many-petaled white bloom into place, whispered a benediction, and turned.

“What’s all this?”

She shrugged. “I had an itch in my religion.” She knew he prayed each day, standing up under the open sky. The Qersnyk sun setting to the west was proof enough that gods listened. “Is it time?”

He held out his hand and she took it. Side by side they returned to the shelter. Bansh and Jerboa stood under saddle, Afrit prancing awkwardly alongside his mother and bothering her to nurse. Someone had cut the shaman-rememberer’s knots and bells from Jerboa’s trappings, and Samarkar wondered if it had been Tolui, before he went. Hsiung leaned on a staff trimmed from one of the stony trees, his pack sagging from his shoulders, nowhere near full. And Hrahima lounged against a trunk nearby, one forearm braced casually against a bough high enough that Samarkar could have walked under it straight-spined without mussing her hair.

Temur mounted Bansh. Samarkar hesitated a moment before going to Jerboa. She had tried to argue Hsiung into riding the mare, but he had shrugged and gone back to wedging things into his backpack. It turned out a vow of silence could be awfully expedient when it came to winning arguments.

Samarkar swung neatly into the saddle. She’d become surprisingly accustomed to the high-cantled Qersnyk saddle, the flat-barred stirrups designed for standing in. Jerboa wore a more traditional Qersnyk bridle than Bansh’s headstall with its gentle, jointed bit; Jerboa’s nosepiece was a curve of steel integral to the bit, which could force a horse’s head around under almost any conditions. It lacked the Qersnyk third rein, however—a left-hand strap designed solely for drawing the horse in tight circles while the rider slashed and cut with his long knife to the right. Samarkar wondered if a shaman-rememberer’s mare would know how to fight.

She almost asked Temur, but decided it was a silly question. All Qersnyk ponies probably knew how to fight. Samarkar’s own physical combat abilities, from horseback or otherwise, were much more sadly limited.

Jerboa sidled at Samarkar’s unfamiliar weight, but settled. Her ears flicked for Samarkar’s voice, and then they were off. Before long, Hrahima led them over the time-skewed cobbles of a side path they’d explored but little, toward the doorway they hoped would take them to Song. And to the right part of Song, moreover.

Samarkar rubbed together fingertips smeared with luminescent sap, wondering if an ink could be made from it, and how long the property persisted. She was caught up enough in her musing that she didn’t hear the glassy chiming rising over the jungle night noises until Temur shouted, “Samarkar! Duck!”

She threw herself flat in the saddle, her abdomen crushed to the pommel. A rush of bitter air swept over her, stinging cold. Something dragged through her hair, tugging sharply, and she felt strands stretch and part. She grabbed at the under-edge of the saddle tree and kept her seat, though barely, wishing she had worn her helm and armor.

Hrahima snarled. Jerboa startled, though whether it was from the near-miss or the Cho-tse’s anger Samarkar couldn’t have guessed. She snatched at the reins, redoubling her right-handed grip on the saddle as Jerboa shot straight up in the air and came back down stiff-legged with a shock that traveled up Samarkar’s spine and snapped her teeth together. Samarkar fought to restrain her, thinking,
Well,
we
got off on the wrong hoof.

Confused sounds and images distracted her. Another chiming rattle. Hsiung’s eyes flaring green. Hrahima making a banking leap off a tree trunk to knock something that seemed made of black glass, barbs, and spines out of the air as it dived on Temur. Temur with his long knife in his hand, and Bansh rearing up to bring him closer to an airborne enemy.

Whatever attacked them blended too sharply with the night for Samarkar to make out clearly. There might be three creatures, or a half-dozen. Transparent or translucent, chiming with each motion as if they were made of obsidian. Taloned, with long wings and insectile heads. Cold. So impossibly cold it seemed to radiate from them like heat.

“Glass demons,” Samarkar said. “Where in six hundred Hells did
those
come from?”

No one answered. She heard grunts of effort from her friends, the melodic clatter of black wings. She hauled up a witchlantern and sent it soaring into the sky like a chrysanthemum rocket, pouring blazing blue light across the scene and rendering the trees as stark, two-dimensional tent poles. Ahead, she could just glimpse the tree-shaded bower that would lead them to the doorway.

“Run!” Samarkar cried, and let the dancing dun mare have her head again.

Ears flat, pale head bobbing like a white flag in the gloaming, the dun bolted as if it were what she had been born for. Samarkar clung to her scraggle of mane and to the saddle, the reins now only a courtesy. She ducked as a flapping, chattering demon made another pass, but it pulled up short with a disgruntled cry like a thwarted hawk as Jerboa swerved under the limbs of a tree.

Bansh’s hooves beat a determined tattoo right behind them. Samarkar ducked overhanging boughs that seemed determined to scrape her from the saddle—or possibly just behead her. She could only hope that Hsiung and Hrahima were also following. She couldn’t hear Afrit, and hoped he was tight on his mother’s heels. Surely, Bansh would not have left him.

Trees clustered thickly, keeping the glass demons from diving. Cautiously, Samarkar began asserting her leadership over the mouse-colored mare again. The clearing was in sight, and from its center rose a long causeway leading between the trees and up, up, to a columned portico. It was just a door, unsupported by walls or any surrounding structure, high in the sky and completely undefended from the glass demons.

Samarkar would have found a use for that third rein now, but the metal nosepiece was aggressive enough that even half-panicked, the mare responded. As she slowed and they broke out of the narrowed path, Bansh and Temur drew up beside them. The calmer presence of the liver-bay seemed to penetrate the mouse-dun’s terror. Jerboa sidled, her chin pulled almost back to her chest, then took two fretful sideways hops and settled. Half-settled. Samarkar could hear the chiming of glass wings above the cover of the trees, and was none too settled herself.

Afrit ducked between his mother’s legs. Bansh offered him a good hard nosing; Temur scanned the trees above. But the heavy foliage and flowers—and the darkness—hid their hunters from them as effectively as the reverse. Hsiung jogged up behind them. Hrahima made a chuffing tiger-moan somewhere near, though she was invisible, and Jerboa nearly startled again.

“All accounted for.” Temur waved up the long, narrow, sky-exposed causeway with the point of his knife. “That’ll be fun.”

“I can ward us,” Samarkar offered. She’d been too busy riding her bolting mare to raise the protective walls of light and energy before now.

“Can you ward us
and
open the gate?”

“I did two things at once in Asitaneh.”

“One of them didn’t make you double over in agony.”

She shrugged. “I’m more concerned about the jump through the doorway. It’s a long way down if for some reason we’re not transported.”

“I’ll go first,” Hrahima said from somewhere above and to the left. Of course, the tiger could hear them perfectly. “That fall won’t hurt me.”

“I’ll go first,” Temur retorted. “Bansh won’t fall.”

“The more swiftly we proceed, the less time the enemy has to plan.”

“Do glass demons think?”

“Under the circumstances, it’s safest to assume they’re up there drawing tactical maps in full relief.”

“Your argument has merit,” said Temur, settling it. “Samarkar, raise your wards.”

“Hrahima, come inside please?”

Grudgingly, the tiger dropped from her tree. Jerboa sidled again, but Hrahima kept Bansh between herself and the mouse-dun, and Samarkar did not have to deal with any bucking—or another bolt. Afrit seemed completely oblivious to the Cho-tse as a potential danger—but his life was measured in days so far, and the tiger had been a part of all of them.

After a moment’s concentration, wavering curtains of green light spilled up from the earth around the little party, touching in a flame-shaped peak above. Samarkar allowed herself a taste of satisfaction. If she was mastering only one damned element of the wizard’s art and science … well, she’d been getting enough practice on wards.

Temur waited until they had brightened and firmed, a sheer wall shot through with wavering patterns of emerald, jade, peridot, and jasper greens like watered silk. Then he sent Bansh forward so deftly that Samarkar could not see the signal, the shift of his weight and balance that made the rider an extension of the mare. She was a perfectly competent horsewoman and had become more so over the previous months of travel … but she was no Qersnyk, and never would be. Afrit and Jerboa followed—Jerboa was obviously accepting Bansh as her leader, after the manner of mares, and was inclined to trust the bay’s judgment—and Hsiung and Hrahima kept in a tight line behind. The mares would have to ascend the causeway single file. The priest and the tiger could walk two abreast.

Samarkar’s neck was beginning to ache with the effects of her teeth-rattling shock. She worried about the colt and the wards, and the colt and the causeway.
Just follow your mother.

Fortunately, that was in the nature of colts.

*   *   *