Steles of the Sky (28 page)

It was a more subtle and harmonious whole than Tesefahun had at first realized, although he could see from here that there was no wizardry in it. Even if he hadn’t known that Kyivvan wizardry ran to battle-magic (of course), he could have told from looking that this was the work of plain stonemasons and architects. And all the more impressive for it, for what he looked upon had all been done by craft and muscle and engineering.

Tesefahun couldn’t wait to see the vaulting inside that supported the weight of those upper stories.

He was so distracted by his anticipation that he startled and nearly broke character when his litter lurched to a halt. He blinked, shading his eyes, painfully aware that he looked like an old man startled in his woolgathering. After a fashion, he had to admit … that was true.

Iskandar lay a steadying left hand on the frame on the litter, but his right hand did not touch his sword. Tesefahun followed his gaze to a group of the uniformed gate guards—these moving from the direction of the visible, eastern gate—who were not dicing, drilling arms, or lounging about gazing suspiciously at passersby. Instead, they walked a pattern, each arm’s-length from the next, surrounding a group of men and women in ash-stained homespun with the ragged bewildered look of the displaced everywhere.

Tesefahun reached down to touch the backs of Iskandar’s fingers. The man who had been Uthman Caliph was utterly still, watching these yellow-haired Kyivvan refugees, half of them showing the blistering or weeping skin of burns. The Dead Men showed nothing, but their “captain’s” face twisted a little behind his beard.

“War already?” he asked softly. “This far north? Or bandits—”

Ato Tesefahun shook his head. Sorry as the sight of the injured, exhausted, no doubt starving refugees was, it was the man at the front of the group who drew his eye. He was not tall—not by Uthman standards, and so certainly not by those of the Kyivvan folk. His features were sharp, triangular, reminiscent of those of a weasel or a hunting fox. His hair was a sandy color, and his eyes a blue so bright that Tesefahun could make out the glint of the color across twenty paces of crowded market square. He was better-dressed than the others, cleaner, the ash stains on his boots, clothing, and cheeks seeming less gritted into leather, wool, and skin.

Still, he would have passed most inspections. But Ato Tesefahun was a wizard of Aezin, and he had seen these very facial features faithfully reproduced in a scroll written by an ancient wizard of his own order who had seen them for himself, some fifteen hundred years before.

The man at the front of the group was not a man.

He was a djinn, and Tesefahun was suddenly willing to bet every scrap of bullion and every ruby he had stashed away in the vaults of the Imperial Bank of Kyiv that he knew who the damned thing served.

“We need to follow them,” Iskandar whispered to Tesefahun. “That’s al-Sepehr’s djinn.”

Tesefahun bit his lip, and—against his better judgment—nodded. As naturally as if they had been going there in the first place, the litter fell in parallel to the refugees. Not precisely following, but close enough to track them. Tesefahun kept his gaze averted, watching the path of his own progress instead. If he looked in one direction, it would seem the litter tended that way, even if it drifted slightly in another. He could follow the refugees out of the edge of his eye, and the Dead Men would have no trouble at all keeping them in sight.

Instead, he trained his ears on the conversations around them, passersby remarking on the sight. He caught only scraps, but the scraps were enough. “… the village called Stechko…” “… so many dead.” “They say it was a Qersnyk witch.” “She called down an unholy sun.” “Fire angels.” “Djinni.” “They say she’s the whore of the new Khagan.” “Khagan? That’s some horsefucker whelp the Sorcerer-Prince stole the skin off, you mark my words. Barbarians, the lot of them.…”

Tesefahun shook his head and leaned down to speak in Iskandar’s ear. “This is foolish. What will we do if we catch them?”

“That creature burned my city around me while I watched and could do nothing. I’ll—”

“Put a sword through it? An immortal? Do you suppose that’s an approach that has never been tried?” Tesefahun pressed his fingers against his temples, suddenly aware of a headache that blinded him. Of course, Iskandar couldn’t understand what the people in the square were saying.

Quickly, Tesefahun told him, adding, “This means Kyiv will go to war for al-Sepehr. He’s building his twisted alliances again.”

“Gah!” said Iskandar.

Tesefahun glanced at him twice, startled by the lapse in eloquence. A bit of history niggled at him as he studied the grim set of Iskandar’s jaw, the rage flushing his cheeks. “Have you heard of the Green Ring?”

“A bit of regalia, wasn’t it? One of the lost treasures of Danupati?”

Tesefahun nodded. “It was. I think we must change our plans, Captain Iskandar. We will not find an army here. Not in the wake of this news.”

Iskandar blew out, exasperated. “This is a long way to come for nothing. Can we not even hire mercenaries?”

Tesefahun thought momentarily of the copper-haired man with the axe. He would have liked to see the big Skanda fight, he realized. “I think I know where we can find our army, much faster than that. We’ll need horses, though.”

When Tesefahun raised his head again, over the crowd between them, between the shoulders of the guardsmen, he searched once more for the djinn. Only to find those blue eyes staring back at him.

The djinn smiled, showing teeth, and touched two fingers to the center of his forehead in a gesture of respect.

*   *   *

In two more nights, Tsering and the rest passed through the bulwarking cliffs into Song, and then there were no more nights at all. They traveled under Hard-sun and twilight, rested under Soft-sun, and slept beside fires in the soft grass of the foothills below the Steles of the Sky.

Among the mountains, winter had been closing in. Here it was just autumn, the trees only now changing, and a riot of color stained the valleys between the hills.

At first, Tsering convinced herself that she was imagining the muttering. The sideways glances. The quickly averted eyes. It was just sensitivity, she told herself. Old memories of worse times, before she had come to Tsarepheth. It was just the memories, crowding back again.

Strange how you could think such old wounds healed, think the detritus of a past life long sealed away, crated up and forgotten—and some seemingly unrelated event would bring it all to the fore again.

She was
not
imagining the care that some of the Qersnyk women were taking over her, Hong-la, Jurchadai, and the other wizards and shaman-rememberers. Every morning, there was tea and broth, and rice gruel—sometimes, blessedly, with an egg boiled in it. The eggs might be chicken or feathered lizard or duck; once in a while the tea had spices, milk, and the red Rasan honey harvested from the hives of the enormous highland honeybees, which had mild relaxant and pain-killing qualities in small quantities and narcotic ones in great. Each evening, someone brought her tea and noodles and butter, or sometimes dumplings fried in pork grease.

She stopped wasting, and even recovered a little weight despite the constant travel, work, and lack of sleep. Besides the wards, she and the others now tended the road-weary, the infirm, the sick. There was work for wizards at every hour, between illnesses and setting the wards. Hong-la was not willing to assume that the danger of blood ghosts and demon spawn had ended because they were out of the mountains. He seemed to have emerged as the leader-in-practice of the Rasan contingent, and Tsering was not sorry to see that responsibility adopted by somebody she trusted and respected.

Still, she worried what would happen if Hong-la’s plan failed, if they were forced to leave the narrow track through these rolling foothills and move among the fields of cultured, cultivated Song. The kingdoms that considered themselves the Heart of the World were pastoral, populated, and bucolic. They were not the wild highlands of the Steles of the Sky, or the barren sweep of the steppe. There were people here, on every fallow
li
. Song’s population was immense, and the rich land only supported it by intensive farming.

Those farmers would not meet a refugee train several thousands strong with joy and open arms. There might be soldiers, if those could be summoned in time. Tsering and all the others might find themselves interned. At the very least, they might have to fight. Wizards and shaman-rememberers aside, she did not relish facing any number of armed and equipped men with a band of women—even mounted Qersnyk women—boys, old men, peasantry, smallholders, and craftfolk from the city.

Especially as the refugee column spread out over the landscape now that the narrowness of mountain roads and passes no longer constrained them. Tsering wanted to encourage them to stay together, but didn’t know how to go about it. Not without increasing that muttering and those sidelong glances that she might or might not be imagining.

On the third Hard-day, while they still wended among the hills, Tsering rode the Citadel mule that was presently serving as her mount up beside Hong-la. The refugee column was pinched tight between two bouldery slopes, forced for the time being to follow what passed for the road.

Tsering reined in beside him. He had a horse, one of the tallest the Citadel’s stables had to offer, and it still looked like his odd split-toed shoes might be dragged off his feet at any moment by the grass.

After a pause, he lifted his chin, tipping the brim of his broad conical hat back so he could peer at her from under it. The suns of Song required special precautions if one did not care to burn. Tsering herself was wearing a hat of wide wings, supported by red cloth bolsters, that someone had unearthed from the bottom of a wagon for her. It was ridiculous, a court lady’s extravagance that should have perched atop elaborately dressed hair—but it kept the sun off her face and the nape of her neck. And before long, it was as covered with road dust as her wizard’s weeds, so at least she looked all of a piece that way.

“I’m worried about the farms,” she said. “And us.”

He nodded. “We’ll turn north at Hard-noon. These hills are not fertile—”

“I noticed that nothing but grass grows on them. No trees.”

“Grass and rocks. No crops,” he said. “There are farms in the bottom land below them, but all we’ll find here are some sheep and goats that are allowed to run feral all summer, maybe tended by a shepherd who sleeps rough and carries a sling against wolves. If we stay among the hills, it will be harder going—but we won’t be charging through any towns, and we can keep to the pilgrim’s route. We’ll have to cross the Tomb, and the soldiers will see us then—but once we’re north of it, the people are Song, but it’s Qersnyk territory and has been since a Qersnyk Emperor ruled over Song. We can head east to Dragon Lake from there.”

“It’s good enough.” She bit her chapped lip. “I wish I knew how Master Yongten and the rest were doing. I wish I knew if they were safe.”

Hong-la didn’t look at her. His hand tightened on his reins and he leaned toward her a little, as if—if they were walking together—he would have let their shoulders bump. “That’s what happens when we leave a place,” he said. “We wish we knew so many things. And we try to pretend that nothing will change for the worse while our backs are turned.”

It rocked her back in the saddle. For a moment, she thought he was speaking out of some personal knowledge of her own past—and then, with a sickening spurt of empathy, she understood that he was speaking out of his own.

After a silent moment, desperate, she changed the subject. “We should post more guards, and find a way to convince the stragglers to ride in with the column more.”

“They’re tired,” Hong-la said with a shrug, but the slight uplift of his mouth said he was grateful to her for patching over his moment of too-bare honesty. “We can tell them about the wolves.”

*   *   *

The children and the old suffered most. Tsering set the wards when they camped at twilight, then found herself summoned to the bedside of a sick child. A girl, not old—if asked to guess, Tsering would say this coming winter might be her eighth—she had thinned to ribs and eyes and shadows over the past weeks of hard travel. When food was rationed, it was those with the highest demands who got the worst of it, and the girl had a sensitive digestion and suffered diarrhea on a diet of noodles and rice. There was no fresh food, little in the way of vegetables and fruits, and Tsering thought that every bit of nutrition that could be gotten into the child was just running out again.

She treated her with an antidiarrheal tea—getting some water into her might help to plump her cheeks a bit as well—and told her mother to give it twice a day, three times if possible. “You can make it once and feed it to her cold.”

Her tongue itched with the desire to prescribe a bland diet, easily digested and rich in colorful vegetables to replenish the healthy processes the child was expending in her illness, but that would only be cruel. So she gave the mother three iron nails and a slice of clean horse bone, and told her to boil them in the water with which she made the tea. The tea had rose hips in it; the whole might help a little.

And when we get to Dragon Lake? What then? It’s too late in the year for planting. Maybe we can find a market and buy or trade for beetroot and millet and beans to live through the winter.

At least Song winters aren’t like ours. Even as far north as the edge of the steppe.

When Tsering left the side of the child’s pallet, tucking her tools away inside her bag, a man beyond the circle of the encampment very deliberately looked at her, then turned his head and spat and turned his back. In the instant she’d had to glimpse his features, she’d seen that his cheeks were slashed, heavy scars disfiguring a face that would have been slabby and pockmarked with a lifetime of poor food and hard work even without the marks of the emperor’s
justice
carved upon it.

Tsering glanced down at herself. She did not wear her jade and pearl collar, but her wizard’s coat was plain to see—six ragged petals of its threadbare hem slapping against her thighs as she moved. The color was as close to beige as black with road dust, and her ridiculous hat perched atop her head, but there was no mistaking what she was. And with her medical bag in her hand, there was no mistaking what she was doing there.