Steles of the Sky (19 page)

He lifted it from beneath, the wrappings cascading over his wrist and hand, and gazed into its empty sockets in the dim, flickering light. It might almost have returned the gaze from the bottomless and black pits where its eyes had been. Even through the silk, a palpable chill seemed to surround the thing, an aura of gelid cold that slid down his sleeve. Frost burned the tip of his nose.

The Emperor Danupati was not pleased to have his rest troubled.

As al-Sepehr was setting his cloth-shielded palms against the relic’s temples, there came a scratching at the door too light to wake most sleeping men. The pattern told him who had arrived. Still, he flipped a corner of cloth over the skull before stepping away from the table.

The door was barred. He lifted it to find Saadet, as awake as he, clad in her brother’s dark wool coat and trousers, her brother’s weapons thrust through the sash that dipped under the girth of her swelling belly. An indigo veil was wound beneath her eyes and across the top of her head, to al-Sepehr’s relief. It was he, after all, who had sent Saadet and her immanent brother here. But he did not delight to see her abandoning modesty—no matter how necessary her bare-faced insolence might be to win the regard of her heathen protectorate.

The guard who slept across al-Sepehr’s door had withdrawn slightly to one side. He shielded his eyes with his hand in order to protect his night vision.

“Come in.”

Al-Sepehr closed the door behind Saadet and dropped the bar again. The doors had locks, but the keys were no doubt on the rings of that Messaline merchant, wherever he might roam.

The light in the room might be dim, but it was brighter than the corridor, and Saadet had come without a candle. It would have been a sorry sort of assassin that could not move in the dark, and Saadet had assumed her brother’s skills with his soul after Temur murdered him. She crossed the room to the table with its obvious lump of cloth. She did not twitch the wrappings aside.

Instead she turned, rested her palm on the hilt of a scimitar incongruous beside the heft of her gravid belly. “Have you spoken to the djinn?”

She did not drop her eyes when she spoke to al-Sepehr. He resolved to find a time later to remind her of propriety—but for now, he knew she was struggling with the demands of acting a queen to these arrogant barbarians. Al-Sepehr was a civilized man. He could make allowances. For a time.

“I have,” he said. “Would you like to see?”

Saadet nodded. She let her bare hands hang at her sides as al-Sepehr reached out with his protected ones. He slid the wrappings from atop the skull. They slid and puddled like oil beside it.

Saadet made a sound that could have been pain or eagerness. “Control yourself,” said al-Sepehr. “Bring the candle.”

She brought him the stub, formed of wax harvested from the giant honeybees of Rasa, and set it down on the table far enough from the wrappings that the silk was in no danger from the flame.

“Awake, Danupati,” said al-Sepehr. “Awake and answer my command.”

There was no visible reaction, but al-Sepehr felt the awareness in the room shifting. From the way Saadet stepped back—quickly, silently, into a balanced stance—she felt it too, and it troubled her enough to trigger her brother’s fighter’s reflexes. But she said nothing, made no other gesture beside a quick sideways glance at al-Sepehr as if to be certain that all was well.

Al-Sepehr laid his glove-shielded hand on the skull and felt the weight of another, as if someone stood just behind him in the room, staring over his shoulder. He pushed against it, explored farther, and found a slipperier but more solid presence beneath—as if he reached into water to grab eels. A moment of focus, and he blinked and looked out through a woman’s eyes.

Tsareg Edene stood at the top of a grassy slope, the stalks all gold with summer’s end before her. A long sweep of wild grain bled off to the horizon, dotted with the cowled shapes of the ragtag jackal-creatures the Qersnyk whore called her “army.” The sky above them was the true, pellucid blue of the Kyivvan reaches, and beyond the slope of the next rise, it was smudged with the friendly smoke of some farming village. Al-Sepehr could just make out the peaks of the rooflines, the tops of the masonry chimneys.

These people are your rightful subjects,
he whispered.
You are their queen. Bring them under your roof, into your army. Bring them as tribute to your man.

I will ask if they have seen him,
she answered. Her fist clenched. He felt the resistance as she reached for the edge of the Green Ring, as if she would worry it off her finger.

Al-Sepehr let himself slip back by degrees. He might be able to reach her through the ring—and of course the cursed thing had an agenda of its own—but it was Edene who wielded the ring’s power. It was she who commanded the poisoned things, the broken things—but it was al-Sepehr who had allowed her to obtain that power, and he would see to it that his influence directed where it fell.

Conquer, Queen. They will kneel before you.

A little push, a thought she might mistake for her own—or for the ring’s. And it would be harder and harder to resist, as time went by. As the ring’s blandishments took on the nagging characteristics of unsatisfied hunger. As she grew in need, in desire, for what it could give her.

S
he thought,
I will bring your father cities, O my son.

It was enough. Al-Sepehr raised his hand from the skull’s crown and turned back to Saadet. “What do you think?”

“I think she’s unreliable,” Saadet said. “I think she’s an indrik-zver loose behind our own lines, and I don’t think we can control her.”

“Of course we can’t,” said al-Sepehr. “But whatever she does, we can blame it on her paramour, can we not?”

Saadet nodded. “Father—”

It stopped him. She so rarely called him that. He was more than a father to her; he was a father to all the Nameless. He glanced at her and quickly trained his eyes aside. He nodded.

She said, “My child. How can you be sure it will be a son?”

His lip flickered. “You took the herbs I gave you, to ensure conception.”

She nodded.

He said, “It will be a son.”

11

Brother Hsiung was awakened in the Soft-day by the light of his own eyes. Or rather the heat—except it wasn’t exactly a physical heat. It was more the memory of heat, the burn of sharp spices rather than the burn of fire. He opened his lids and sat up, seeing the green glow spill down the sides of his nose, across the backs of his hands when he raised them. The light was sickly and stark and bright enough to drown out the filmy red glow of Soft-day.

Hsiung glanced around. Hrahima was on watch, which meant she was nowhere to be seen—as invisible as if she had ceased to exist amid the cloudy blurs of river, mountains, vegetation. Even if Hsiung’s eyesight had not been fogged by exposure to the terrible magics of Erem, he knew that there was no way he would be able to spot her unless she chose to permit it. But they would never be safer than under her care.

Down here in the encampment, Temur and Samarkar slept, curled together. The mares and the colt cropped soft grass at the edge of one of the vast jade flagstones. They were not hobbled; none of the people who had traveled with Bansh could imagine she’d bolt—and neither Afrit nor Jerboa would abandon their miniature herd.

With a silent, exhausted sigh, Hsiung levered himself from his blankets and began to work his forms. The sick river of al-Sepehr’s conjuring ran through him. He must divert that energy. It was a coursing flood, and he was one man. He did not have the strength to dam or stop it—like all rivers, it would wear away the barriers bit by bit, picking and fretting until it all came down and unleashed a deluge far more destructive than what would happen if he just let it rise and rode it out until it faded again. Instead, he must channel the power and let it scour the path he wished it to take. The more it followed a course, the deeper that course would be worn.

His forms, the expression of his meditation, were the tools that made this directing possible.

That he had the toxin of Erem in him was Hsiung’s own fault. His own curiosity had led to this poisoning, and useful though the knowledge sometimes was, it was his burden to bear. Sometimes, Samarkar would do the forms with him, help to channel the poison strength. But for now let her sleep. Let her recover.

He would do this on his own. And if he failed … Hrahima was watching.

As he worked through the patterns and forms, however, the expected peace did not emerge to comfort Brother Hsiung. You could not seek emptiness—no one found emptiness by looking. Rather, you had to make a place for it to enter. You had to be hollow and receptive, offer silence where silence could be born. But now, today, though he could make that hollow space, could fall out of the center of himself and leave it silent … what was born into it was not emptiness, but worry. Moreover,
fear.

Blood ghosts in Qarash.

She claims it under a Rahazeen sky.

The green light, the burning faded slowly, but still Hsiung executed his forms. Still he could not be quit of the intrusive thoughts, the concern that nagged at him like the sort of auntie who would not rest until everyone in her family was married. He wished …

… he wished he could ask his brothers. An option so far from the reality of his exile that it took his breath away to consider it. Brother Hsiung was unsafe company, and certainly had proved that he could not be trusted near the archives of Eremite texts. The magic that contaminated him could also burn and warp others, and—moreover—he was a distraction from a proper life of contemplation.

He could not go back. He could not ask for help. And yet … he needed to. At last he stopped, sweat-drenched, bare feet chilled by the grass, toes numb. He rested his palms on his thighs and let his head hang down. Salty droplets swung from his nose, his eyelashes. They spattered away with every blink.

He could not return to them. Not as a brother.

But a supplicant was not a brother.

Hsiung nodded to himself, acknowledging the birth of a plan.

I will leave a note,
he thought.

*   *   *

At Hard-dawn, Temur awakened in the cool half-light, when neither red sun nor blue was firm in the sky, but instead both hovered low behind the twisted, vine-hung limestone mountains and the horizon. The rattle of the river—tumbling briefly into a cavern before emerging again farther downstream—made a peaceful background with the songs of birds he had not heard in a long time. He extricated himself from Samarkar, who was sleeping hard, and reluctantly dragged himself out of the warmth of her embrace. Mist shrouded everything, thick enough that the warmth of the fire’s embers was stopped as solidly as if by a stone wall.

Hrahima surprised him; she crouched by the banked fire, warming her great pale-palmed hands, her elbows resting on her knees as she crouched there. Usually, her turns on watch were exercises—for everyone else—in “Spot the Tiger.” Futile exercises, at that—though she maintained it was good for the humans to get as much practice as possible in checking for ambushes.

What they had learned so far was that if they were under ambush by Cho-tse, they could all expect to die before they even knew to tighten the buckles on their armor.

“Good morning,” he said to the tiger.

She chuffed and handed him a pot of broth.

When he had drunk—if not quite his fill, at least a good few swallows—he handed it back. She set it beside the coals to keep warm and folded her arms upon her knees again. Temur envied the ease of her crouch—for all his life had been spent standing in the stirrups, still Hrahima made positions seem comfortable that would have driven Temur to curse and creak.

“Where’s Hsiung?” Temur asked softly. He’d have to wake Samarkar soon enough—but let her have a few more moments.

“Left,” Hrahima said. She held out a scrap of paper, syllables sketched on it in charred wood. Temur could read enough Song to make it out.

I have gone to my brotherhood,
said the note Hsiung had left.
They must know what we have learned, and perhaps they will have wisdom to offer. I will rejoin you at Dragon Lake, if I am so permitted.

“Permitted.” Temur looked up at Hrahima, aware his expression had grown quizzical.

“Monks have rules,” said Hrahima. “It’s possible our Brother Hsiung may have broken some.”

*   *   *

Edene looked down on the rising flames under the light of dawn and was not proud, though she felt the pride of the Green Ring within her. She was horrified. She told herself that she was horrified, that this cold glee that rose up inside was alien, not her. A kind of poison.

Why? Why did I not realize this was how it would be?
But she had not. She had not thought clearly. She had listened to the ring.

And the ring was a liar.

So now she stood in the square of a burning village, watching thatch roofs flame like torches under the light of Erem’s brutal suns. To every side the fields of grain were swept under sheets of fire, whipped to peaks as hot winds gusted. Blistered bodies lay in the square, in the streets.

Only a few, at least. Only the first who had come running out at the dawn, at the smell of smoke, when Edene and her ghul army had marched into this once-pretty, once-peaceable village. The rest she had been able to protect … but why, oh why, had she not realized sooner that what she conquered with Erem’s power would awaken under Erem’s sky?

Women, children, men huddled around her—a dozen dozen or so, just right for a village this size, some fifteen households. Beyond them, in a wider ring, milled the ghulim, cowled and—if Edene imagined them through the eyes of the villagers—terrible. She pictured those soft gray muzzles as they would look to a man with his wife’s burned flesh stuck to his hands. She imagined how the wrinkled folds of velvet skin would look, the lips concealing daggery yellow teeth …

Edene looked about for Besha Ghul. There it was, hurrying to her as villagers squealed and threw themselves from its path—at least, those who were not just so numb they huddled down and waited to be eaten. Edene remembered the aftermath of the sack of Qarash quite vividly. She was sure many, many of them wished only to die. If they could manage to wish even that. There had been a time when Edene had managed to move through her days only seeking the next task that needed to be done, the next meal to cook, horse to water, babe’s ass to wipe.