Steles of the Sky (58 page)

Tsaagan Buqa hung in his cradleboard beside her knee. Saadet stroked her son’s soft head and ignored Shahruz’s sharp disdain for her
unnatural
child. She wished she could un-hear her brother’s opinion that perhaps, if she were not an
unnatural
woman, her child might have been born whole, and not some Qersnyk half-thing, an abomination against the Scholar-God.

Ümmühan, shrouded in veils on the gray mare beside Saadet, touched her knee and said, “Can you see Mehmed Caliph’s troops from here?”

“There,” Saadet said, pointing. “They’re pushing the enemy center back. Do you see the blue banners?” She handed Ümmühan the spyglass and watched as the poetess rearranged her veils to use it. She managed the telescope like an expert, and Saadet quickly shifted her attention back to the battle.
Where is Re Temur?

The shadow of the Rukh passed overhead, a hurtling blur. Saadet could just make out the streaming pale robes of al-Sepehr on its back as it rocked sharply, as if a strong wind had struck it broadside and then battered it again from the opposite side. The damned wizards.

Saadet slipped the rifle al-Sepehr had given her from the saddle sheath. The rain had tapered off to a fine mist, now. She cast her eye over the churned mire below.

“Ümmühan,” she said. “Paian, Esen, you too. Look for wizards. And their barbarian princeling, too, if you spot him. Unless he’s too much a coward to come out and fight for his own empire.”

*   *   *

Iskandar had held his Dead Men back, awaiting the moment when Kara Mehmed committed his troops. In the chaos, he missed it, realizing that the caliph’s forces had charged only as they crushed into Temur’s lines like a boulder bouncing downhill. The blue banners were sodden with rain and smeared with mud; the colors of the cloth-draped helms muted in gray light. But he heard the shouting, the familiar lilt of Uthman battle-commands, and drew his own paltry force of half-a-dozen warriors around him.

Their red uniforms were makeshift, more patchwork tabards than proper coats, and none of them matched the others. The cloth had been scavenged from all over the camp—including one of the lady Diao’s silk dresses—and not a rag of it was the proper shade of crimson.

It mustn’t matter.

The moment came. The Dead Man on Iskandar’s left unfurled the personal banner of the Uthman Caliphs: blue, for the caliphate and the Scholar-God, and charged with a golden lion. As one, seven men on seven horses shouted; seven men and seven horses charged. Iskandar found the voice of an old warrior deep within himself, and knowing that Hong-la would be catching his words, amplifying them, sending them ringing around the battlefield, he shouted, “Loyal men of the caliphate! You were told my own Dead Men turned against me and slew me in my bed. That is a lie. Loyal men of the caliphate! Kara Mehmed is an usurper and a traitor! Loyal men of the caliphate, TO ME!”

*   *   *

Al-Sepehr had the perfect vantage point when Uthman Caliph’s booming, amplified voice blasted across the valley, and Mehmed Caliph’s men began to turn on one another. He could watch the wave of chaos spread from the front, where only a moment before they had been beating back Temur’s pathetic excuse for an army. Al-Sepehr’s forces were superior, not just in numbers and in armaments, but in communication. He had the Rukh’s offspring to carry messages and do his bidding, and the Rukh herself as a great, mobile platform from which he could see the entire battle and relay his commands.

He was crushing the enemy. They were being beaten back. And even this brawl among the factions for two caliphs couldn’t derail his eventual victory. All it would do was leave the caliphate in even further disarray; easier pickings for al-Sepehr. He had other weapons in reserve; perhaps they could stay there.

Al-Sepehr was still thinking that when the third army appeared at the back of the valley and fell on his own rearguard with the ferocity of steppe wolves tearing prey down in the hungry teeth of winter.

*   *   *

The ghulim were more effective than Hong-la had imagined, sowing chaos and confusion all out of proportion to their numbers—and raising the morale of their allies with the proof that even if there was no sign of Temur, the young Khagan’s plan was working. Down the valley below, Temur’s troops rallied against what had pushed them back, and pushed forward again. Al-Sepehr’s line wavered; the troops from the caliphate had dissolved into a whirl of undisciplined self-slaughter; the Kyivvans alone seemed to be regrouping.

The mountains rang, suddenly, with the echoes of distant thunder—no, not thunder. Hoofbeats, rolling the length and breadth of the valley. A sound like a cavalry charge that was also like a mad carillon of more bells than Hong-la had ever imagined.

He whipped his head around in time to see the clouds split wide, roll back like snapped canvas. The blue sky above them blazed fierce and hot, and from it pounded a stream of horses, mares in impossible bright colors, led by a man hunched low and clinging like a burr in the mane of a shining liver bay.

The Tsareg and other Qersnyk reserves at the bottom of the height Hong-la and Zhang commanded began to make their own noise, whooping and screaming, as the mares ran in among them, slowing only long enough for a rider to swing up onto each back and find his seat before they lengthened stride again.

*   *   *

“Kill them,” al-Sepehr said to the Rukh. He pointed to the gray, toothy monsters falling upon his army’s flank. “Kill them now.”

*   *   *

The Rukh folded its wings and stooped like a hawk, beak extended like an arrow toward the ghulim company. Hong-la had seen this before. His hand moved, fingers clutching, calling up the shield—

A cream-and-emerald blur from the right of his field of vision hurtled across the sky and slammed against the Rukh, knocking her spiraling. Afrit! And on his back, wielding the wall of her wards like a battering ram, all in black armor—rode the Wizard Samarkar.

*   *   *

Yongten-la led Tsering down tunnels she knew existed, but which she had never explored. Past the dark chambers where new wizards sat their vigils, into the warm bowels of the earth. He brought her through the sulfur-reeking caverns where the hot springs boiled up in the heart of the Cold Fire; the steam rising from the swift river they trotted alongside made her feel dizzy and sick.

Soon enough, they left the water behind. Now they must skirt great orange pools of molten sulfur, and sulfur-falls that burned with a shining blue flame. Yongten-la wrapped them in the cool silver light of his wards, filtering the air they breathed so they were not overcome by heat or fumes. The floor underfoot, the walls of the cavern, were melted-and-puddled fantasias of crumbly yellow stone, as if they navigated the remains of an enormous candle.

“What if the body’s under all this mess?” Tsering asked.

Yongten-la said, “We’re going to ask directions. Here.”

A face loomed out of the mist, and smoke—tendrils and jaws that Tsering knew, attached as they were to a translucent gray-white shape with bright blue eyes blinking along its length on either side. The mist dragon Great Compassion Turquoise Stone laced one set of talons through the other and said, “Have you found the dragon in you yet, Tsering-la?”

She stopped in her tracks, uncomfortable heat filtering up through the sulfur underfoot. She wasn’t sure where she found the courage to speak, let alone to speak insolence. But she raised her voice anyway and answered, “I’m not looking for a dragon today. We have come here for the body of a man.”

*   *   *

It was harder to hammer the Rukh loose than Edene had expected, and the noise attracted a crowd. Besha Ghul and Hrahima were kept busy guarding the tunnel, and they were all lucky that the warriors among the Nameless were either scattered around the civilized world making skinned bodies appear in marketplaces, or had gone to fight Temur’s army in Song.

“We’re not getting out of here through this route,” Hrahima called, after a particularly vicious series of thuds and cries. “I don’t suppose you have another idea?”

“Jump?” Edene called back, and kept chiseling.

At least the Rukh’s nest shielded them from arrow and gunfire from below, and the Rukh itself sheltered Edene with broad wings while she worked, so no projectiles fell on her from above. She worked in a ring of its curious offspring, ranging in size from eagle to heron, jostling shoulder-to-shoulder among the limbs of the enormous nest.

At last, she pounded the bolt free, and the shackle fell from the bird’s thick ankle. She tossed the chain away—or dragged and swung it, rather; it was too heavy to
toss
.

The bird was staring down at her when she raised her eyes again.

“Go on,” she said. “Get out of here.”

The bird reached for her, its long neck bending double as if it groomed its breast, or turned an egg. Edene half-flinched, expecting a sharp bite to snap her in half—but the wickedly curved beak only nudged her.

The Ruhk, still balanced on one leg, pushed its shackle-galled foot toward her.

Hesitantly, she reached and touched it. Warm; scaly. It did not pull away.

“Oh,” she said. Then she called to Hrahima and Besha: “Fall back! We have a ride!”

They clutched the Rukh’s legs—Edene and Besha on one side to counterbalance Hrahima on the other—and Edene shrieked aloud when the bird fell into flight. She held on to the tree-trunk–like limb with all her strength, feeling the rush and swoop of the wind as the Rukh dove, without ceremony, earthward—and then the pull as it leveled off more gently than she would have expected. Which was good, that gentleness, or she would have wound up bouncing, smeared, across the desert ground.

It seemed to know where it was taking them, and set down not far from the door into Reason’s Ways. Hrahima, Besha, and Edene tumbled away from it, massaging cramped limbs, and collapsed briefly to the ground in the shadow of its wings.

“I wonder if that’s the first time a cat has gotten a ride from a bird,” Hrahima said. She shook and fluffed herself, and added, “There’s no way we’re getting a Rukh back through that door.”

“Not a grown one,” Edene said. “But will this one not lend us one of his chicks as a messenger and emissary?”

*   *   *

The Rukh rolled, bringing her talons up, flapping convulsively. Her head snaked sideways and her massive beak snapped—but Afrit was no longer where she struck. He leaped aside, snorting, as Samarkar slapped the great bird sideways with a sharp buffet of wind. She reoriented and beat hard to get above them; Afrit spun and sprinted, zigzagging, while Samarkar whirled a ward of green light over their heads. Still the great bird’s strike missed them by less than the length of Samarkar’s arm. Pinions slapped Afrit’s shoulder and Samarkar’s thigh, knocking the young stallion sideways.

He staggered on air, limping, and turned to face the Rukh as she climbed again, her wings pounding the air with a sound like heavy drums. Across the space between them, Samarkar saw al-Sepehr’s scowl, the trailing streamer of his veil knocked askew and blowing back, slipping from about his neck in a coil. He raised a hand, a dagger in it, and Samarkar sent a wand of light darting out to knock the blade aside.

The Rukh snapped, a blow solid enough to crack Samarkar’s ward and leave her sagging in the saddle. Afrit sprawled back, climbed to his feet again.

Suddenly, Hong-la rose beside Samarkar, his petaled skirts blowing wide in the wind that lifted him. One big hand slapped, as if he issued a challenge—and a buffet of wind hurled the Rukh back, wings trailing, as if a giant had punched her in the breast.

*   *   *

Saadet laid her cheek against the rifle, feeling the metal cool and bright in the sudden return of the sun. Somehow, it had become evening; twilight would be upon them soon. Hard-sunset, and Soft-dawn.

Had the battle really raged all day? Here in Song, there was nothing to stop it from raging through the night as well. Nothing but exhaustion. Which army would falter first?

The wizards rose to meet al-Sepehr; the male wizard knocked the Rukh aside. Saadet did not know she smiled. A clear shot, with no danger of striking al-Sepehr. Her finger found the trigger. First, the bitch Samarkar. And then this other wizard.

Ümmühan shouted, “I see Re Temur! I think I do!” and Saadet’s shot went wide.

*   *   *

Temur rode amidst tumult, amidst the glee of mounted warriors who had been held back from battle and now felt they had some slaughter to make up for. He heard their shouting, their cries of delight and bloodlust, the bugling challenges of the Ideal Mares. On every side, war horses and warriors threw themselves at the enemy with wild abandon.

He should have felt the lust of battle himself. But all he felt was the peace of the bargain he had made, and a sort of worried sorrow, even as his arrows flew, his long-knife carved flesh and chopped bone.

He still had things he wanted to say to Edene, and to Samarkar.

But they were reclaiming the valley, carving their way through al-Sepehr’s troops toward the pincer of their own ghulim allies. Bansh was a demon beneath him, and his heart was empty of battle-song.

Perhaps that was why he was the first to see and hear the chiming demon-things descending from the torn clouds that still flocked the sky. They fell upon the battlefield, and with shrieks and the sound of struck crystal, ripped into the fray without regard for banners.

*   *   *

Edene plunged through the door from Reason into the lanternlight of the great cavern, her arms full of struggling raptor. She opened them wide, cast the young Rukh toward the gloaming far above. Blood ran freely from her scratched hands and cheeks; the djinn’s armor had protected her chest and arms.

Behind her, Hrahima and Besha Ghul each in turn released their feathery cargos.

They did not stand to watch the long-necked birds beat skyward, but set out up the trail to the road at a run.

Behind them, more running feet belonged to the first of a group of black-coat wizards charging out of the Way from Reason, none of whom Edene had ever seen before.

*   *   *