Steles of the Sky (14 page)

They climbed, and all at first was still. Eerily still; dangerously still. The stillness of an unsprung snare. Temur on Bansh took the lead, the mare alert and quivering between his thighs, her cautious ears pricked until they almost touched at the tips. But she trotted onto the causeway as if she were trotting toward a manger full of oats. Afrit followed close enough to be switched by her nervously flickering tail. Temur worried that Jerboa might hesitate, or might whirl and bolt—but the pressure of Bansh moving away, and Hrahima closing behind her, overcame her natural reticence at the narrow path. Temur could hear her snorting, the disgruntled noises of a horse operating against its better judgment—but she kept up, and right now that was all that mattered.

He strained his ears for the chime of glass wings, but all that reached them was the susurrus of the trees, the night cries of jungle animals which hid away all day. He stroked Bansh’s neck and found it lathered, shook the soapy sweat from his fingers and dried them on his trousers. Wet hands were no good on a bowstring. He reversed his archer’s horn thumb ring on his right hand, as well, so he could easily slide it into position for the draw.

Samarkar saw him. He knew, because when he turned to loosen the saddle ties on his bow, she caught his eye and nodded. Whatever was beyond the doorway, they were hunted here. They had to commit to the risk of it now; there would be no scouting and coming back if the gate didn’t lead where they needed it to lead.

They had climbed two thirds of the causeway when the ringing of crystal came again, carried on the night air like distant bells.

Bansh surged forward. Temur unlimbered his bow and nocked a crescent-headed arrow but did not draw. The humming tension in the string and the laminate made an anchor against his unease. Here was a thing he understood and knew. There was no mystery, no uncertainty to a bow. You stood inside it, summoned your skill, applied your strength, calmed your breath. And if you did all those things sufficiently well … the bow killed.

“There,” Samarkar shouted.

Temur followed the line of her gesture and caught the flutter of broad wings, black on black, the lash of a barbed tail. The thing slammed into the ward with a jangling discord and a shriek as of steel on slate. Its talons dragged across the barrier, striking sparks like scoured flint—sparks flaring crimson, though Samarkar’s wards were green. Temur ducked from the bright shower, but the sparks all bounced outward, streaking the night like falling stars.

Bansh broke into a canter. Temur let her have five strides, the others racing behind, then gentled her down. He could too easily see the mare running off the edge of the causeway, and while that might not be a problem for
Bansh,
Afrit and Jerboa might try to follow. Another glass demon whirred past, rolling to show them a baleful eye before slipping sideways under the causeway and tumbling wing-over-wing away, agile as a hunting bat. As Temur drew the mare up before the empty doorway, one more demon dashed itself against Samarkar’s curtain of light, raining fire behind. Even Bansh shied; Jerboa struck the wards and would have heaved herself over the edge, Samarkar and all, if they had not been there. Standing in the saddle, Samarkar got her under control.

“Doorway.” Temur felt like an idiot as soon as the command left his lips. Samarkar knew her role. And as soon as she could climb off Jerboa’s back without being trampled, he was confident she’d do whatever she could to get them out of this particular predicament.

Somehow, she kept the wards up, calmed the mare, and managed to dismount while the rest of the group turned anxiously, staring at the various quarters of the sky. Hrahima hung back at the edge of the wards, her ears and whiskers twitching. Brother Hsiung took the dun mare’s reins.

“Off the glacier and into the crevasse,” Samarkar muttered, edging up alongside Bansh and Afrit, who was doing his best to kill them all by getting tangled between his mother’s legs. The glass demons seemed to have learned a lesson, but now they pinwheeled around the wards like scraps caught in a vortex. Green radiance glared off their glossy, skeletal bodies, the glistening membranes of their wings. Temur leaned back in the saddle, drew his arrow back to his ear, and bided.

As Samarkar moved through the brief ritual of door-opening, the shrieking amplified, redoubled. Echoes broke from the looming walls of the narrow valley as the things turned, and turned, and turned again. The restless tension of the siege itched in Temur’s fingers, along his nape. Hrahima uttered a low, involuntary growl, quickly stifled when the horses—even Bansh—scuffed and sidled.

Samarkar’s incanting voice wavered and so did the watery light of her wards. A patch paled, then flared bright again as a fresh current of her strength swept across. Crimson sparks jetted as if from struck embers as one of the glass demons tried its luck on the weakened patch, reacting only instants too late to—perhaps—break through.

Temur’s fingertip tightened against his thumbnail, holding a reflexive loosing of the arrow. Almost—

He could not look at Samarkar, but he could hear the pain in her tone—and he’d noticed it before, when she had opened the other doorways, but she seemed worse off now. The strain of working this wreaking while simultaneously holding up her wards was telling on her. Her voice caught, broke. She picked up the thread again, but not before the ward collapsed. An instant later it snapped back, smaller but brighter, but not before the glass demons had seen their opportunity.

Now they hurled themselves against the wards, squalling, one after the other. The force of the green wall—imagined, but not intangible—spun each demon cometary back into the dark. But each impact shuddered through the wall, rendering it a little dimmer, a little closer to where Temur and the others huddled within. The air chilled around them until every breath plumed, and frost feathered on the horses’ whiskers.

Hrahima was forced by the shrinking wards to take a step forward, then two. Samarkar flinched with each demonic impact as if it struck her body rather than a projection of her will. Temur held high his bow until his arm trembled like that of a boy unhardened to the weight of weapons.

And Samarkar cried out, “Go!” as she fell to her knees, and all around them the wards shivered, shimmered, and dissolved into a falling rain of emerald fireflies.

9

Privacy was a commodity scarcely to be found in a harem. Ümmühan’s status as a poetess granted her some privileges—such as the quiet of the high tower in which to work—but her status as a slave meant that these privileges were tenuous, and easily revoked.

Fortunately, she was popular with the other women. This was in no small part due to the effort with which she exerted herself to be pleasant, helpful, and charming—but also because a significant number of her peers protected her, most for her satires and a better-informed few for her priesthood. The latter was a closely guarded secret, held tight to the adherents of the Women’s Rite—but even a woman who hated Ümmühan would hesitate to disclose the identity of a priestess. Many would protect her for the sake of her office, and should a woman who believed the Women’s Rite to be a heresy discover her identity, she would still fear the retribution sure to follow a treason such as giving the name of a priestess to a man. Ümmühan thought of the best of such deniers as sad, delusional children who had accepted the twisted word of men determined to usurp the Scholar-God for their own. The worst were simple turncoats, traitors to women and blasphemous to the Scholar-God and Ysmat of the Beads, Her Prophet.

But quiet and privacy to compose poetry—to delight her fellow denizens of Kara Mehmed Caliph’s harem with vipers and to entertain the wider court with the longer, more elaborate rhyming pastoral satires that often masqueraded as love songs—was not the same thing as privacy to perform a rite she had only read, never worked before.

Not sorcery: she was no sorceress. But the far more dangerous women’s rite was what tempted Ümmühan now. There were not enough vipers in the world to pay for that order of solitude. But after some thinking, she had struck upon a plan. Audacious, to be certain … but what was a poet with no audacity?

Each night, after the women put their ouds and sacred texts away, the harem’s lanterns were doused and the windows shuttered against the rising of the Demon Star. The custom was meant to ensure the women’s protection from the influence of its baleful, wavering light. Learned doctors claimed that Al-Ghul could render women barren or insolent. Children conceived under its power might be deformed, and if they were even carried to term, they might show its influence in their character in later years. Some clerics advised drowning any babe even suspected to have been so conceived, or leaving it to the cleansing light of the desert.

The ignorant—adherents to the Falzeen sects, which to Ümmühan’s mind was a longer way of saying the same thing—claimed that Sepehr the Sorcerer-Prince himself had been both conceived and born under Al-Ghul’s light, but by her priesthood Ümmühan knew those assertions to be basest contumely. She also knew the fear-mongering about its influence on female character to be baseless. Lies, like so many lies, bred to rob women of their freedom, to constrain their sacred wit—naturally so much greater than the wit of men. It was only the just balance of the world that men were stronger, women wiser. But men, too often, used their strength to glorify themselves at the expense of women, when its rightful, sacred role was the protection of those created in the Scholar-God’s image.

The star had ill influences, it was true … but as Ümmühan allowed her hair to be braided for bed, the only apprehension she felt was the apprehension of anticipation. A slave, one much less exalted than she, moved about the harem-chambers shuttering windows and dousing lights while Ümmühan reclined upon her couch, knees elevated with a velvet cushion. Darkness followed her movements, and a muffling of the night-sounds from beyond the windows.

The sighs of other women, the rustling of coverlets followed the movements of the slaves. Ümmühan lay tense, pinching the soft flesh of her hand to keep sleep back, rehearsing a name of many syllables in her head. She had heard that name spoken twice, which was enough for a poet’s trained memory. Vipers were not written down, and she could recite a thousand of them perfectly. What was one long name?

In her careful—and carefully concealed—research, she had found the book where that name was written down, at least in part, though the balance had been concealed in cipher. It had been enough to confirm her recollections and awaken in her some deeper suspicions. Perhaps it would be wiser to chase those answers down before she sought the djinn’s attention … but she feared that too precise an answer would only make her hesitate.

Even Ümmühan was not entirely immune to intimidation. So she lay in her covers and counted heartbeats until a muffled crier beyond the window announced the turning of the old day to the new: the darkest hour of the night.

Ümmühan rose in darkness and drew her nightclothes around her. They were rich, figured silk, but once she slipped from her quilted covers they did little to ward off the desert night’s autumn chill. The stone floors bit through her slippers when she walked between the heaped rugs, making her toes ache. She had never seemed to suffer cold feet when she was a younger woman. Now, they afflicted her through all the stub of the year.

With their shutters drawn, the interconnecting rooms of the harem were that dark beyond dark where one could imagine one saw motion, outlines, shadows dancing—but it was only the eyes telling stories in the absence of true knowledge, as anyone would. Ümmühan stood a moment, listening to the breathing of sleeping girls and women. Kara Mehmed’s wives and the wives of his retainers slept in a series of chambers off to the right, with a eunuch guard’s couch pulled across the doorway. Another pair of men guarded the entrance to the whole of the harem.

Fortunately, Ümmühan did not need to leave her gilded cage tonight.

From the pocket of her over-robe she drew a pen, a modern ebony one with an angled nib of steel that she had honed to a razor edge against the grindstone on her ivory-inlaid writing desk. That desk was tucked away under her couch now, ink and paper and other precious things locked up inside, the stubby legs that just fit over her thighs folded underneath.

She crouched, cold silk draping against the skin of her feet and thighs, and from another pocket produced a stiff card of white leather, trimmed oblong and no bigger than her own delicate palm. She caught her lip between her teeth and breathed out all the air she held, so she would be holding none to allow her to betray herself with a squeak.

Grasping the pen in her right hand, she drove the left palm against the sharpened nib, piercing skin over the little mound below her forefinger. The pain was sharp—it always was—and her teeth nearly left a betraying crescent in her lip. But she managed to gasp only, with no voice behind it, and held the pen in place while heat told her the blood welled.

She rested the leather card upon her knee, and quickly, with sure strokes despite the darkness, she wrote her prayer. The letters for
silence
and
slumber
took shape behind her nib. As they formed, they shone with a delicate silvery shimmer like starlight caught in glass, casting only enough illumination to gently limn her fingers and the barrel of the pen.

The woman who was called by her master the Illiterate was no wizard, no sorceress. She was a priestess. The greatest poet of her generation. And when the perfectly formed letters of the Uthman tongue echoed the writings of Ysmat of the Beads, they had a power all their own.

This was not blasphemy, was not heresy. Was not demon-magic such as the heathens practiced. This was the purest refinement of Ümmühan’s priesthood, the blessing of the Scholar-God on those who kept Her scripture and Her Word. The faint light filled Ümmühan with peace as she spent a moment regarding the sacred beauty of these words, contemplating their power to protect her—drawn from the Prophet’s own faith and strength. Ysmat of the Beads gave miracles to protect those who properly honored Her.