Steles of the Sky (35 page)

“You could.”

“Officially.”

“Did the last dowager not have her concubines?”

She had, though it had largely been before Yangchen had come to live at the court. Still, there had been tales of the old empress’s eunuch attendants, and whispered giggles in the women’s quarters over their size, appearance, number, and the intricacies of the politics they supposedly played out among themselves.

“Yes,” Yangchen said, and kissed him just once more, quite lightly, before grasping his mittened hand and leading him toward the wagon door.

*   *   *

What the other women thought of this arrangement, Yangchen realized she would never know. She was the dowager, and it insulated as it empowered. What she
did
know was that at least for now, tonight, she didn’t
care
what they thought. She was enough of a politician to understand that eventually she would have to care, that even if no one would ever tell her, their opinions would affect their navigation of court politics—and thus, perforce, her own. She still had to care what everyone in the Rasan Empire thought of her.

She just no longer had to care what her father would have wanted her to do.

As she lay in a dim glow of Anil-la’s witchlights, her head pillowed on his shoulder, his fingers lazily combing her unbound hair, she thought that this, for now, would be enough for her. She was warm; she was fed. She was drowsy. She only half-murmured back into wakefulness when Anil spoke, his voice a rumble beneath her ear.

“You are trying to make a better empire.”

She hadn’t really thought about it. “What makes you say that?”

“You haven’t ordered one tongue slit since you became dowager.”

Yangchen could hear the women moving beyond the tapestry that had been hung to afford her and Anil what little privacy they now enjoyed. The nurse was shushing the small emperor, singing him a little silly song featuring an intrepid sheep as its protagonist. From the tick of her needle against a frame, Tsechen was embroidering.

“We’ve been busy.”

He laughed. “I laid hands on you, and yet still have both of them.”

She nuzzled the crease of his shoulder, making him squirm. “You may have special privileges.”

“Dowager,” he said. “You want to be a better ruler than your husband was.”

“My husband never got much of a chance to rule—”

“His mother, then.”

Yangchen snorted, not bothering to keep the hate from her voice. She pitched it low, however. “Lord Shuffle would make a better dowager than her.”

Anil stroked her hair. He waited.

Wizards were too damned patient, she decided, when the passage of several minutes did not allow her to drowse once more. At last she said, “So in your opinion, failure to slit noses and tongues is what makes for a great empire?”

“Perhaps a less terrible one. Greatness…” His shrug made the skin of his shoulder rise and fall against her ear. “Empires are not made for greatness. Not the kind of greatness I envision. They are not…”

“… not?”

“Just.”

“Oh.” Her right hand was tingling with lack of blood, pressed as it was between their bodies. She did not care to move it yet. “What’s justice? Beyond a word, I mean.”

“Not empires.”

“Banditry is better? No roads, no trade—is that better? The chaos and lawlessness of a world without empire, is that better? The squabbling petty princes of Song—you’d rather have that?”

Damn wizards and their silences, anyway. She might have thought he had fallen asleep, if it were not for the gentle, rhythmic motion of his hand across her hair, again and again. He let it stretch so long that even her court discipline broke, and she replied to her own question. “And if you tear down one empire, another merely rolls over the ashes of the old. Surely it is better to be the emperor than the conquered.”

He breathed out and breathed in. She thought she heard the flap of a canvas tarpaulin outside, like the close passage of some enormous pair of wings. A girl laughed; an animal lowed in the cold. She drummed the nails of her left hand on his chest. He laughed and caught her wrist, then kissed the palm.

“What,” he said, “if there were something better than empires?”

“Like what?”

He was silent again, so she wondered if he was waiting, again, for her to reply to herself. She didn’t have a reply, though, and he honestly had raised her curiosity. She gazed at the line of his jaw, the angle of smooth skin below his ear.

He doused the witchlantern, leaving them in darkness. “Dawn comes early.”

“Doctor Anil. What is an improvement upon empires?”

He sighed. He said, “I do not know.”

*   *   *

Three days later, they came to a village, and Yangchen and Anil-la slept together in a warm bed within wooden walls for the first time. Yangchen-tsa slept the sleep of the exhausted, secure in her borrowed room with the guards outside the door.

So she was all the more sleep-mazed and muddled when Anil shook her awake. She blinked aware groggily, unfocused, her vision starred and blurry. The room was not dark, but aglow with Anil’s witchlights, and they were not alone.

By the window—open to the cold and stars, when it had been barred from the inside—stood a man in black trousers and tunic, a short scimitar thrust through his sash, his face swaddled in dark cloth. Other than that narrow band of eyes and bridge of nose, his hands were the only skin that Yangchen could see on him. And
they
were decorated with drawn patterns—words, Yangchen realized, in the Uthman tongue, though she could not read them.

She clutched the coverlet to her breasts, cursing it for a useless gesture even as she caught herself making it. Anil gestured, his hand a blurred sweep, and a bolt of violet incandescence splashed from it as if he had scooped light up and hurled it. The light flashed against the veiled man’s upright hand, and splashed once more—this time, as if it had struck a wall and rebounded.

The man clucked. “This is not the greeting I hoped for, when we met at last, Wizard Anil. Mistress Yangchen, will you not greet an old correspondent? Will you not send for tea?”

Yangchen felt a sick twist in the bottom of her gut.
A price. You cannot pretend you did not always know that there would be a price.

She opened her mouth to speak—she did not know what words. And before she could shape any, the man in the veil continued. “Good as it is to see my allies in bed with one another … the night is cold. Will you not welcome me? We have much to discuss.”

Anil paused in the midst of his next gesture. Wizardry fizzed from his fingertips like bright wisps of smoke.

“A Nameless assassin claims my allegiance?”

So that’s what that costume means.
The veil, Yangchen could see in the brightening light, was indigo. Its edges had left smudges on the man’s brown skin, defining the caverns inhabited by his eyes. The patterns on his hands, she realized now, must be tattoos.

The veiled man was not young, not by the skin on his hands and at the corners of his eyes—but he moved lightly, with fit vitality. He was spare, even gaunt. His knuckles were knobs that stood out along fingerbones like fansticks.

Trailing the covers with her like a gown, Yangchen rose. She clothed her nakedness in regal poise and dignity—and was about to raise her voice to shout for the guards when the Nameless said, “Don’t bother. They sleep,
Dowager
.”

He clucked, and a flurry of gray wings filled the open window. “Do you know me now?”

His Rasani was quite good, fluent even, but lightly accented—with an Uthman liquidity, where Yangchen’s own accent was Song. The bird on the window frame was the size of an eagle, but with a long neck like a water-bird. A red crest decked its raptor’s head.

Yangchen had untied the message-capsules from the ankles of a great many of its ilk. Possibly she’d used this very one to carry correspondence, though obviously the Nameless had more than one. Since the last one she’d met she’d sent to be roasted for the poor.

The man said, “Still no tea on such a cold night? I think little of your Rasani hospitality. And you discard my letters unread. Is that politeness to one who has served you?”

“The sky over Tsarepheth,” she said bitterly. “That’s your doing.”

“Dowager,” he said. “It is your doing.”

She made a strangled sound of protest.

The veiled man said, “Yes. Your doing. Yours, and that of your … paramour. I merely supplied you the … tools.”

Yangchen bit her lip to keep from glaring her accusation at Anil in front of this intruder.
A wizard could have done what was done at the Black Palace—

Uneasily, with the sharp swift kick of betrayal, she remembered their conversation about empires, and the overthrowing of same.

The veiled man would not look at her. He kept his gaze on Anil. She wondered if this were dismissal of the less physically dangerous of them, or fear of her nakedness. Yangchen had heard of the Rahazeen’s bizarre terror of women, for all their God was a She. But before she could press that advantage—if it really existed—and attempt to discommode him by moving toward him, he said, “I perceive that you lovebirds have not shared your secrets honestly with one another?”

“I am the dowager,” Yangchen said. “No one shares my secrets.”

“You no longer cherish our alliance, your grace? Was it not I whose assistance
made
you the dowager?” She couldn’t tell if he actually smiled behind the veil, but his eyes—with their odd, bluish cast, like the eyes of an old dog—certainly gave the sense of it even though he never looked away from Anil. “Warlock! Can you not control your woman’s tongue?”

Anil had stood from the bed as well. He was naked, but either did not notice the chill from the open window or he affected to be above it. His hands were still raised, the light streaking after each gesture of his fingertips. “I don’t serve you.”

“You have.”

Anil continued as if there had been no interruption. “And her tongue is her own. We’re not so weak as to fear the truth on women’s lips where I come from.” He glanced at Yangchen, and she read his intent in his gaze. She should make for the door, and he would hold the assassin.
Anil!

She could not flee. She loved him.

But she was the dowager, to be protected at all costs. She must.

He knows you betrayed Rasa. If he dies, you are safe.

If he died, she would be alone again. She had made mistakes, so many mistakes. But from the sound of it so had he—

“Did you come here to bargain, al-Sepehr? Or simply to taunt?” Anil stepped between Yangchen and the Nameless. Yangchen lifted one bare foot, but did not step back toward the door. She heard what Anil called him; she knew that it was true.

“I came to see if our alliance could be reclaimed,” the veiled man said. “I am willing to forgive a great deal, Wizard, Dowager. We could be of use to each other still.”

“Use,”
Yangchen said, flaring. She stepped up beside Anil, ignoring his horrified sideways glance. “Yes, you’ve had your
use
of me. You’re not the first man to get it, either, so don’t look so fucking smug—”

“Oh, the ferocity of twenty winters,” al-Sepehr said reverently. “I pray you, child-queen, hold your tongue.”

Yangchen recollected her dignity and lifted up her chin. “You made our contract under false pretenses, al-Sepehr. You led me to think you were an ally of my father’s, and that your guidance was for my sake. Shall we talk of the demonlings devouring my subjects from the heart out? Shall we talk of corpses skinned in the marketplace?”

“Oh, let us talk of demonlings,” said al-Sepehr. He folded his arms and rested easy against the window frame.

Anil touched Yangchen’s elbow. She did not shake his hand away.

Said al-Sepehr, “Have they hailed you as their mother yet? It was you who opened the way for them, after all.”

Yangchen flinched. Anil’s fingers tightened sharply, reflexively—but he did not let her go, and she was sickly grateful for it.

“Any consent you gained from me was tricked—”

He sighed. “What would your people say, if they knew how the Bstangpo died? And that it was at the hands of the half-man who now shares the dowager’s blankets? What would they say if they knew you laid down the wards of Tsarepheth, Dowager, and allowed the demonlings in? That you used witchcraft to prevent your sister-wives from conceiving?”

Yangchen bit her lip, half-stunned, a hollow ache inside her as if she had swallowed a ball of ice too big to get down.
Who will raise Namri? Who will be his regent if I burn?

Anil stepped forward, scoffing, his unbound hair tossed behind his shoulders. “Because any Rasani would believe the word of a Nameless assassin, a Rahazeen chantmonger over that of a dowager empress who has saved countless lives? You need a better threat, carrion.”

There was a silence, long and lean, before al-Sepehr straightened himself away from the window frame. Yangchen braced herself for combat—there was a pair of tongs beside the fireplace, and she thought her new, road-hardened self might be able to swing them with conviction—but he only steepled his hands, thumbs touching his breastbone, and bowed sarcastically.

“Alas,” al-Sepehr said. “I’d hoped you might someday come to understanding, and to Sepehr’s banner. I’d hoped we could be friends.”

Before either Yangchen or Anil could react, he was gone out the window in a swirl of blowing snow. He must have had a rope on the wall outside, but when they rushed forward, Anil-la’s hovering violet lights revealed nothing in the darkness beyond. Yangchen heard, however, a sound she recognized: the ponderous flap of enormous wings.

Anil pulled Yangchen inside and barred the shutters again—for all the good that might have done them. “These were warded,” he said.

“So he’s a wizard, too.”

“He’s something,” Anil said. He turned and put his arms around Yangchen, pulling her against his own clammy body. She cast the sheets over his shoulders and wrapped them both.

“He has letters,” she said.

“Letters can be forged.” Anil touched her cheek. “I too was duped, Dowager.”