Steles of the Sky (7 page)

She stroked the neck of her mount, blinking to clear tears. “Is there fodder for Shuffle? And someone to rub him down?”

His eyebrows rose. “And food for you, Dowager?”

She shrugged. She knew she would be fed.

“Shuffle?”

She hesitated. “Unless he has a name—”

“You are the Dowager Empress Regent.”

The steer had turned to gaze at her inquisitively, brown eyes half-veiled by long, ghostly lashes. She touched his gold-ringed nose, then wiped the snot on her dirty silken trousers.

“Shuffle,” she declared.

*   *   *

Sitting beside the fire with her sister-wife and what currently passed for their ladies, Yangchen found herself nodding over her rice bowl. Tsechen had spent the day on horseback and she seemed to have weathered it much better than Yangchen had—or she was equally successful at hiding it. The taller woman looked somehow more at ease than Yangchen had ever seen her, with her hair braided plainly down her back and her fingers stripped of rings, her silken slippers exchanged for hard-soled riding boots. She had scooped rice and vegetables into her mouth with appetite, and now picked her portion of the flaky white meat of a feathered lizard, seasoned with the hot-numb spice of Song peppercorns, into bite-sized chunks while avoiding all of Yangchen’s attempts to catch her eye.

Yangchen looked down at the chipped pink and gold lacquer on her own fingernails. It was all she could do to chew and swallow. Someone squatted on her right, a respectful distance away, and it was several moments before she could turn to him.

It was one of the wizards—a young eunuch, round-faced and high-cheeked and handsome as a cat, with thick black hair cut at his forehead and nape like a farmer’s. His six-petaled frock coat was naturally-black yak wool lined with silk, and the jade and the baroque pearls of his collar caught mysterious gleams off the firelight.

“Dowager,” he said, dropping a knee and bowing so his forehead brushed the earth, “I am Anil-la. I beg your leave to confer with you.”

She nodded.

He straightened and asked, “Walk with me?”

Yangchen would have left her bowl when she rose from her place by the fire—catching a gasp between her teeth at the pain of straightening her back and legs—but Anil-la took it up and placed it in her hand, careful to avoid touching her fingers.

“Eat, Dowager,” he said. “You will regret it otherwise.”

Dutifully, as they walked, she chewed. Two of her husband’s … two of
her
guardsmen followed, out of earshot, or nearly so. She could have warned them back, but they were as discreet as any man in Rasa, and she did not plan to share any of her
own
secrets with the young wizard.

“Your soldiers,” he began, and then hesitated. His voice was pleasant and smooth, trained. She imagined he must have grown up in the Citadel. “Dowager, may I speak freely and offer advice?”

“For now,” she answered. The meat was salty and fresh. Once she tasted it, it was all she could do to eat with manners rather than shoving the whole hunk into her mouth. Sedately, disciplined, she broke off tiny flakes and laid them one by one upon her tongue.

Anil-la said, “Your soldiers. We will travel faster if you speak to their commander and ask him to have his men keep discipline in the civilian column. If you ask him to have his men assist, the way your personal guard has been assisting.”

She looked at him. He tipped his head. “They are my people too, Dowager. I wish as many to live as may.”

“Even the nose-slit thieves?” she said. “Even the whores?”

The rounds of his cheeks almost covered his dark eyes when he grinned. “Perhaps them especially.”

She regarded him for a moment, his smooth face lit changeably by the flickering light of a dozen campfires. He looked down as soon as he realized the Dowager Empress Regent wished to gaze upon him.

She thought about commanding him to raise his gaze, and realized with a thrill that she could choose to do just that—and she could choose not to, as well. Her back crackled as she straightened.

“I want you to be one of my advisors,” she said. “Speak with Munye-tsa.”

“Dowager?”

“Make it happen,” she said, and forcing herself to move with dignity despite her exhaustion, turned back to the fire.

5

Afrit grew in balance and dexterity day by day—hour by hour—while Temur, Samarkar, Brother Hsiung, and Hrahima searched ruined Reason for more surprises: gateways, doorways, artifacts, writings … they knew not what. What Temur did know was that soon they must begin the long trek back to the steppe, and through it. Through hostile territory held now, the shaman-rememberer told them, by al-Sepehr and his Rahazeen, through the Qersnyk they had deluded. Unless, as Samarkar theorized, they might find a doorway that would lead them closer to Dragon Lake, or perhaps a way of tuning the one they had to lead to a different location.

Temur could tell this possibility excited her, and through her excitement it set his imagination on fire as well. What if you could sweep such a gateway from place to place across the world, all the while gazing through it? Imagine the maps you could make!

“Imagine the troop movements you could track,” Samarkar said dryly. “Which is probably what al-Sepehr is doing with those big birds of his.”

Meanwhile, the shaman-rememberer, whose name was Tolui—
Mirror
—largely went about his own business, mysterious though that was. He came and went like a camp cat, sometimes with a fragment of information for Temur and his companions, sometimes with silence or songs. Temur was accustomed to the peregrinations of priests, who might stay seasons with one clan or household or army camp before absenting themselves on mysterious business or spirit journeys—or simply because another place needed a bonesetter, a healer, an advisor more urgently.

For himself, Temur was glad to have the distraction of a search until the colt was strong enough for hard travel. It wouldn’t be long now; Bansh was blossoming with rest and nighttime pasturing (whatever the strange foliage wasn’t, it obviously
was
decent fodder) and Temur was pleased to watch the too-evident outline of her ribs slowly receding to mere dimples under sleek hide.

Strangely—familiarly—several times, Temur caught sight of the motionless bent bow shape of the wings of a great steppe vulture coasting on the updraft out of the river gorge. Once, he even called out to it—softly, so the others would not hear—“I see you, Grandfather!”

He fancied it dipped its wings from side to side in reply.

And while Hrahima could hunt for her supper—even here, though Temur found it a little disconcerting when she came home with one of Reason’s arm-long orange lizards, its neck neatly wrung, and proceeded to devour it down to the toenails—the monkey-type people had limited supplies and resources. There was milk from the mares and meat from the Cho-tse’s hunting … but the little party needed to come down out of the mountains before winter and find an oasis in which to trade.

At least the badlands between here and Asmaracanda would be kinder in the autumn than at the height of summer, when they had crossed before.

In the meantime, they wandered the ruins. Always in groups of two—Samarkar had insisted, and Brother Hsiung had backed her up with hand gestures vehement beyond his usual reserve—and always by daylight. When they went inside a building they did not know to be sound, one waited outside feeding in rope that the other had tied to his or her waist, and they felt their way most gingerly.

And they all tried very hard to ignore the occasional sick green light that crept into Brother Hsiung’s eyes, against which his only defense was to exhaust himself with the moving meditation of the forms of his martial art.

He carried the poison of Erem in his soul. When al-Sepehr raised its terrible powers, as had the Sorcerer-Prince before him, that poison reacted.

With wizardly callousness, Samarkar remarked, “Well, at least we know when al-Sepehr’s up to something.”

Hrahima, roasting another (gutted, thankfully) lizard on a spit over the fire for those who preferred their meat charred, glanced over at her and replied mildly, “He’s always up to something, Samarkar-la.”

Hsiung read the language of Erem—it was these studies that had half-blinded him, and left the taint behind—and so it was Hsiung who learned the marks that showed where the dark doorways lay. They were everywhere, it turned out—but the one that Hrahima had stumbled across was the only one they found that had been left active.

There might have been others they did not find. Temur was overawed by the scale of Reason, the way its bone-colored buildings climbed the steep walls of the valley on either side of the gulley through which the river flowed. He did not think to count until too late, but he was sure that he had been in over a thousand buildings by the end—and so many more had been completely consumed by the jungle, he imagined they would never be found.

Temur’s grandfather had had a finely tuned eye for craftsmanship—despite the legendary fate of a certain Padparadscha diadem—and had over many years pillaged the finest craftsmen and artisans from cities the length of the Celadon Highway. These men—Rasani, Song, Kyivvan, Messaline: men of a dozen nations—had made the Khagan’s palaces at Dragon Lake and at Qarash—and the capital city of Qarash itself—as cosmopolitan and decorated as any place in the world. Even in his brother’s army camps, Temur had grown up surrounded by beauty and craftsmanship.

He still had a discerning eye.

They had been abandoned a long time. But these temples and shops and houses of Reason were among the most lovely he had seen.

It was a matter of the proportions, and of the artisans’ willingness to embrace the simplicity of the white stone in which they worked. Samarkar said it was often quartz—“And I’ve never seen it anywhere in these quantities”—a milky-white rock, translucent in places, through which the light of the terrible daysuns would once have glowed, filtered to something bearable. Some structures were roofed in silver slates to give them more shade; some, like the structure that the group was using as a stable, were built of a heavier and more opaque stone that Samarkar said was white granite.

There were hypostyles with endless fluted columns, houses of many small rooms half-built and half-carved into the mountainside, one great multistory hall that had all calved away and crashed into the river, except one tall eyeless façade that faced uphill. And there were doorways, doorways everywhere.

If they were to be activated, there was the danger that something might just … wander through from beyond. After all, as Hrahima pointed out, the fauna of Reason was unaccountably odd. Could not the doorways open to places stranger still, and far more full of terrors than this so-far peaceable kingdom?

On the third day, Samarkar came to Temur with all the toggles of her six-petaled coat hanging open over a threadbare shirt transparent with perspiration. Dark wisps adhered around her hairline. He had been crouched beside a broad rectangular foundation stone with no house resting upon it, engaged in the inventory of what remained of their supplies. While she waited for him to finish the tally in his head, she stood hip-canted, restlessly, one forefinger fretting against its thumb.

He fixed the number in his memory and considered remarking
You’ve been working hard.
The moue of worry on her mouth made him reconsider. “Something’s bothering you.”

She sighed and hunkered down beside him, idly reaching to square the edge of a piece of hide with the edge of the sun-warmed white stone. These were no tumbled ruins; no jumbled stones lurked beneath the photophobic vines that carpeted the earth to every side. Whatever building had rested on this ledge, it had been swept away as if by a giant’s hand. No trace remained except the smooth ledge it had sat upon.

“Big as the stones in the Citadel,” she said.

Temur pressed against his knees, straightening and easing his spine. “Maybe a wizard did this too.”

“Count on it.” She fell silent, but he knew she was thinking around how to say what she had to say. She’d get to it.

And she did. “The blood-vow…”

He nodded. “It’s taking care of itself, isn’t it? I promised to take Edene back from al-Sepehr. But she has won herself free, and all I must do now is find her.” The
all
had a curious emphasis. Indeed, finding one woman in the wide world was no small task, even for a Khagan.

“And you vowed to see Qori Buqa put out of the place that was your brother’s.”

“Someone beat me to that, too. The Sky has an ironic sense of humor. So all that’s left is helping Hrahima fight al-Sepehr. And at this point, I’d do that for the healthful exercise.” He studied her face and took a guess. “What are you scared to tell me, Samarkar?”

She startled slightly, then smiled, as if his teasing relaxed her. “Hsiung and I have figured out how to activate the gates. We found another inscription in the ruins of one of the big—temples? Palaces?—which Hsiung thinks is instructions. He’s puzzled out most of it.”

He let it rest there for a while, then made an encouraging noise. She took a piece of fruit leather from the diminished pile and began to nibble the edge meditatively.

“There’s a price,” she continued. “Hsiung found the right inscription. The instructions are very clear.”

“Of course there’s a price,” he said. “A life? A finger? Nothing comes clean from Erem—”

“Hsiung thinks the gates are somehow linked to the generative force. We have a guess…”

She bit. Chewed. Swallowed. Pulled the water flask from her hip and washed the dry stuff down.

“It’ll make me sterile,” she said, and held his gaze until they both began to laugh.

*   *   *

Every door seemed to have only one destination—but the names etched into the stones near each one were in the tongue of Erem. So even though Hsiung could read them—and suffer the splitting headaches and, Temur suspected, the slow increase in blindness that resulted—those names were not of much immediate use. Still, they strove to remember them.

“Someday we might find a map, after all,” said Samarkar.