Lords of Grass and Thunder (52 page)

“And I can only serve.” With his tight grin and his bow, Mangkut showed that the Durluken likewise planned for the day when their captain might lead them from the dais instead of beside it.

Qutula recognized the offer for what it was. “I’m late already to take my place at court,” he said, and drew the jade talisman on its gold thread from his neck. “With my Durluken, follow the girl. When you have her alone, slip this over her head. It will dull her powers so that you can hold her. Don’t hurt her if you can help it, but she must be hidden away for a while. I mean only to protect her, should the Tinglut try to answer the insult by harming her.”

He expected his own plot to succeed and wouldn’t need a trap to bait for the prince. But if she remained unchecked, the girl could make a nuisance of herself when Qutula wished the gur-khan focused on his own claims to be heir.

Mangkut took the jade and Qutula saw the moment when he thought to wear the talisman under his own clothes. But already the creature that inhabited it burned the Durluken’s fingertips. Mangkut considered the thing with distaste and then slipped it into the deep cuff of his coat. With a final bow, he darted out of Sechule’s tent to gather his companions and complete his mission.

Qutula stood a moment, lost in thought with a hand laid lightly on his mother’s worktable. If nothing else, Eluneke’s disappearance would occupy the shaman Bolghai, who might otherwise uncover the poison dose before it had murdered the prince. With Prince Tayyichiut dead, he would ride out with the Nirun to free the princess and destroy his own followers as renegades. Caught between grief and gratitude, his father would have no choice but to raise him to the dais. And anyone who might have told him otherwise would be dead. Settling his coat more comfortably about his shoulders, Qutula left his mother’s tent for the sumptuous palace of his father. Soon, that, too, would be his.

His mother was there ahead of him, sitting above the firebox with a clutch of matrons who eyed her with frozen hostility. She returned their regard with a haughty lift of her head. The gur-khan was busy with the current Tinglut crisis, but he seemed preoccupied, stealing bewildered glances which his mother returned with cool dignity. He’d expected her to be happier about something. Sechule, for her part, seemed to be masking a simmering rage which she vented only in the way she held herself disdainfully apart from the other women.

Pretending not to notice, Qutula bowed and took his place at the foot of the dais. He looked around, but the prince had not yet returned from his night, and most of the morning, with the shaman princess.
See, Father, who is faithful and who is not,
he thought.

As if reading his mind, the gur-khan called him forward. “Have you seen your cousin the prince this morning?” he asked.

Cousin.

The world turned on the word. Mergen had spoken softly; his voice carried no farther than the dais, but General Jochi raised an eyebrow over the maps. It was a declaration; never before had he mentioned their relationship, even indirectly. At first, Qutula couldn’t answer. His mind had gone numb from the shock.

“Not since last night,” he finally stammered out while Mergen waited patiently for him to pull himself together. It was even the truth, though Qutula wasn’t ready to mention the intelligence of his own spies yet. “The prince sent us away to be alone . . .”

Not so alone, he wished to convey, but hesitantly as if he didn’t want to get his cousin in trouble. Perhaps he didn’t have to commit murder after all. Mergen might be angry enough about the Princess Eluneke to supplant the heir with his own son at last.

“He’s with Eluneke.”

The gur-khan hadn’t exactly asked, but Qutula confirmed his guess with an apologetic little shrug. “They were together the last I saw them.” He would have preferred the news come from someone else, but Mergen seemed to place no blame on the messenger.

“Find him, and bring him to me. As for Elenuke, she is motherless and has no proper guide in the shamaness Toragana. Take her to your mother.”

A quick glance showed Qutula that Sechule had gone.

“Ask the Lady Sechule, in my name, to prepare the girl for her place as a princess in my court. She may direct our servants to obtain for her the things she will need, the beads and silver, the silk coats, for a proper presentation. And tell her to choose the best gowns for herself as well. I want her to be the girl’s guardian at court and as for more, I will let her tell you herself. Then come back and join us in our deliberations. The Tinglut have gone—”

“As you wish, my lord gur-khan.” Qutula bowed and took his leave, wondering if he had time to stop Mangkut. It seemed that after his planning for war or murder, he might have his wish from the benevolent hand of his father after all. “You will be khaness yet, Mother,” he muttered under his breath. The gur-khan, it seemed, was more susceptible to crotch-thinking than he had guessed, though how his father’s new regard might have angered her remained unclear. But their quarrel, whatever it might be, mattered little. By tomorrow, he would be his father’s heir and then, as quickly as he could safely manage it, he would be khan.

They had talked through the night, falling asleep on the soft moss when the gray of false dawn was lighting the grasslands above them. When Eluneke finally woke, the sun was high enough to strike golden sparks on the ripples of the river. Prince Tayy had already wakened and sat with his back to King Toad’s tree, watching her.

“Good morning,” she said, then reconsidered her greeting. “Good afternoon. Or, midday; have you been awake long? I didn’t mean to sleep at all—”

“I’ve only been awake a few minutes.”

She thought he might be lying about that, but he seemed peaceful, as if he were holding at bay for a little while the concerns of the day. Altan was dead, and not likely for a simple quarrel.

“I have to go to my uncle.” The prince twirled a leaf absently in his hand, his thoughts far from her in that moment. “If our suspicions are true, the whole ulus is at risk.”

“The gur-khan must be told,” she agreed, though it was hard not to knock him on the head or slip him a potion, anything to keep him under her watchful eye and that of the toad people, away from the danger that circled the court.

“You’ll be all right if I leave you here?” He had subtly shifted the way he carried himself, hunching his shoulders in around his heart. Peace had fled, leaving in its place the indrawn tension of one with sorrow behind him and danger ahead.

“I’ll be fine,” she answered. “I may not be a soldier, but I can run away better than almost anybody.” She let him see the little toad of her totem in her eyes, a reminder of her powers as an apprentice shamaness. One more journey stood between her and the fullness of her station, but she had recovered well enough from her travels in the heavens and might easily escape any mortal threat through the dream realm.

“I don’t want to go,” he admitted, laughing a little at himself, but with so many emotions in his living eyes that they almost overwhelmed the death’s-head turning his wrinkled brow to bone. Then, swooping down on her like a nervous bird, he kissed her on the lips. “I won’t let him sell you off to the old Tinglut-Khan.”

“That’s all right, then.” She tried to smile when she answered him. “I’m not sure which dismayed his emissary more—my totem form or the dirt on my face when I returned to my human shape.” She didn’t mention riding in the prince’s jacket, the warmth of his flesh against her skin, the beat of his heart in her twiggy bones.

“I will fight for you,” he told her, the words no less forceful for the speed with which they rushed from his mouth.

That wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Taking his face in her hands she gave it a little shake to make sure he was paying attention to her, not the images of battle in his head. “I don’t want you to die for me,” she commanded. “Don’t die.”

“I can’t promise that.”

She was crying in spite of her efforts to be brave, the tears dripping off the tip of her nose. “Try,” she said, and returned his kiss. But all she felt were the bare teeth of his grinning skull.

“I’ll try,” he agreed on the compromise. Opening fingers of bone, he released her for the upward path to the grasslands above the dell.

“Good-bye,” she whispered as he went. The next time she saw him, she knew, he would be dead.

When he had passed out of sight, she turned to face the Durluken warrior hidden among the trees. “I know you’re there,” she said. “What do you want?”

“No one wants to hurt you.” She didn’t recognize him when he stepped out from behind the branches. “My captain just wants to speak with you.”

“Qutula?” she asked, though she knew he must have sent them. If anyone meant her harm, it was he. She couldn’t cry out. Who but the prince would hear her? She had just extracted a promise that he shouldn’t risk his life for her.

Eluneke turned to run. Already she felt her totem form taking shape in her mind. It would take only a step or two, and she could escape into the dream realm. . . .

“Qutula,” said a voice in her ear. Mangkut. She should have heard him coming, or felt his presence behind her, but he remained a dangerous void in her mind even now, when his hand clamped around her wrist.

“Let me go!” She kicked out at him and aimed a blow at his nose, but he dodged it, twisting her wrist painfully behind her. Another kick. He held her with her back against him, so she didn’t have a good angle to do any damage. Bolghai had taught her how to run in her mind, however; if she could just distract him for a moment, she could escape, warn the prince that his cousin had moved against him.

She closed her eyes, briefly, to set her imaginary feet in motion. It was a mistake. A chip of stone suspended by a gold thread dropped over her head and evil settled like a weight over her heart.

“What?” she groped at the talisman, a fragment of jade. Her fingers couldn’t seem to reach it, though her nails dug garnet rivers in the flesh of her breasts.

“Don’t, don’t.” Mangkut grabbed for her free hand and she eluded him, swinging at his head again. The thing around her neck had clouded her perceptions, however, and the blow glanced harmlessly off his jaw. Then he had both her hands held at her sides.

“The pain will stop soon. In the meantime, my orders are to deliver you unhurt, and I will, if I have to tie your hands at your sides to do it.” He was crooning as if to settle a nervous horse, but she thought he must be lying. She could abide the pain, but already the thing had robbed her of control over her body.

Why?
clashed with
What have you done?
in her mind, but she knew part of it already and doubted her captors understood even as much as she did herself. The creature who inhabited the stone whispered in her ear, obscenities to which she refused to listen. She knew his kind, if not his name. She had seen his like in a green mist towering over Qutula in the wrestling match.

With the help of the grasslands and their neighbors, with dragons and magical beasts Prince Tayy had described to her, the god-king Llesho had defeated the demons’ reign of terror against the gates of heaven. They had killed the demon-king in his lair and closed the crack between the worlds that had allowed him passage from his rightful domain below. On that mountaintop high above the Cloud Country, many of his minions had also perished. Some had escaped, however, and some had found their way into the world of mortals long before that fateful battle. One such had murdered Tayy’s father and mother. Another, or perhaps the same, had lent its strength to the captain of the Durluken against the prince.

“Not her,” the creature of the talisman whispered in Eluneke’s ear. “She is the queen of us all now that the king her father is dead.”

The rune carved in the fragment—she saw now it was jade—began to uncoil. A grinning serpent’s head rose on a jeweled neck. She struggled to escape it, but Mangkut pulled her wrists up tightly behind her back.

“Now, now,” he said, and may have crowed more, except that the creature struck, sinking fangs into her breast. She knew the effect of a viper’s bite. The searing pain didn’t come, however. Sleep, instead, swept over her head and she sank to her knees, the pain in her shoulders from the wrenching of her arms grew distant and meaningless. Then she didn’t feel anything at all.

“I
liked
Altan.” Bekter sat on the low stool the shamaness reserved for patients and picked out a random tune on his lute. “With Jumal gone, the prince needed him. His loss will hit his father hard, as well.”

“An evil wind sighs through the grass,” Toragana agreed in the riddle form of her calling. “Soon, it will howl.”

Bekter looked up, surprised. They had spent the night as man and woman, not poet and shamaness. Now, and without warning, his innocent observation had moved them back into the professional. Her meaning seemed pretty clear, however. Altan’s death had been no crime of passion or accident of temper, but murder, planned and carried out in cold blood. Not the first piece removed from the board, but the first in the current round to be swept away so unalterably. Jumal could be recalled, but Altan’s return would take more seasons than the prince could spare. What greater evil awaited them he could only guess, and prayed that it didn’t involve his brother.

He remembered the emerald green bamboo snake tattooed over Qutula’s heart and how dismayed the khan had been to see it there. His brother had passed it off as a reminder of past injuries, perhaps a mistake brought on by drunkenness, but Qutula never drank to excess. And Altan had died at Durluken hands, so he put scant hope in that prayer.

“When do you think this evil will strike again?”

Bekter was looking into Toragana’s eyes when he said it, so he saw the very moment when her gaze grew distant, then troubled.

“Now,” she said, and swept up her robes from their peg on the lattices and her tall shaman’s headdress with its prescient raven glaring down at him from its crown. “I have to find Bolghai.”

Bekter set his lute down. Panic wouldn’t help anyone. He had to ask her, though, “Has something happened to my fa . . . the gur-khan? Or the prince?”