Steles of the Sky (20 page)

Besha paused before her. She saw its ears twitch under the cowl.

“Get them out,” Edene said, and pointed. “Get all the villagers out, out from under this sky. March them as prisoners if it’s the only way to make them move. Give them time to gather food, livestock, and belongings, but the dead must be left behind. We will bring them to the edge of the Eremite sky; we march all night if we have to. Surely this big road leads somewhere”—really, it was not much more than a track, but then, this village wasn’t much more than a wide place in it—“find out who knows where it goes.”

Besha Ghul nodded and evaporated away again. Edene stood for a long moment, her head held high only by force of will. Her arms ached for the weight of her son, but she would not bring him out into this misery.

And what of the children here, Edene? How will you erase this horror from their memories?

“What a pity you can’t just give them their sky back,” the djinn whispered in satiny tones. She had not heard him, of course, come up behind her. An instant after his words, she felt a silken wash of heat against her skin on the side turned toward him.

“Can you?” she snapped.

“Alas,” said the djinn. The smoky heat of his body should have been lost in the heat of the suns, the heat of the burning village. But Edene could feel it close and warm, like a lover’s breath against her neck.

She turned her head and fixed the djinn with a glare. All her rage, all her frustration boiled up like grain in a pot left unattended over the fire. Could she bring Temur no army beyond the sad remnants of the ghulim of Erem? Could she not even rid herself of this djinn, unwanted reminder of al-Sepehr and his machinations?

For a moment, Edene felt herself inexpressibly weary. An ache seemed to start from the center of all her long bones, from every knuckle in her hands, from each joint in her spine. Her body sagged as if her will were wires, and that was all that held it upright. It startled her, this exhaustion, until she remembered. This was what it was to be human, to be weak and worn down.

But she was not those things. These were ruins; this was a poisoned place, and broken.

She was the queen of ruins; she was not broken herself. If to be human was to be weary, to be fissured and fractured like a gemstone—then Edene was not human anymore.

When she drew herself straight again, reclaimed strength flaring along every sinew, the ghulim cringed before her. A hush swept through the huddled, keening, cowering villagers with their pale half-human faces and their hair that looked like sun-bleached manes and tails. One close by risked a glance up; Edene caught a glimpse of white-ringed irises as pale as a Rahazeen sky in a soot-smudged face—and she caught a glimpse of her own aspect in the fear frozen there. For a moment it occurred to her that she could have seen herself, that she could look through the eyes of the ghulim, or whatever small venomous creatures lay hidden in cracks, waiting for her poisoning suns to set.

It wasn’t that she was afraid of what she’d see. It was that she knew, and did not care.

When she turned back to the djinn, the ring was heavy and sharp on her hand. She almost thought she felt the wet drip of her blood from where it rested, but when she raised that hand, there was nothing but brown flesh and green ring.

She caught the djinn by the open collar of his shirt and saw blue sparks flare around her fist as if she had struck at embers with a rod. The fabric felt like smoke against her fingers as she knotted them—there was no texture of cloth or sense of bulk—but her grip held and the collar bunched and strained. She leaned toward the djinn—she was taller, but she knew perfectly well that that was his choice of aspect. His stature was a convenience, and hers a mark of her descent.

Blue flames unfurled around the djinn like war banners, flowering concentrically from the place where she touched him. They burned—the heat was enormous—but she could see her own flesh, her sleeve—the ring. She was Edene of Erem. She could thrust her hand into the heart of a star, if she chose. She could walk through dragon fire unscathed, for dragons were a thing of poison too.

For the first time, she saw a flicker of uncertainty cross the djinn’s sharp-cornered features.

Then she lifted him off his feet. The tendons in his forearm striated like ridges under slanting light as he caught her wrist and pulled. She felt him try to grow. Neither attempt to escape availed him. She was not stronger—but he stood in the place of her power. Here, at least, he could not resist her.

“Tell me again,” she said, “that you will not leave when I command it.”

“We are allies!” he cried. “We have the same enemy!”

“An enemy you serve.” The flames caressed her flesh as she gave him a little shake. They licked her with agony—but did it really hurt more than the birth of her son? She tightened her grip.

“An enemy who holds me enslaved!”

Edene scoffed. “Who enslaves a djinn? Al-Sepehr is no Joy-of-Ravens, to bind your kind into a bottle or a ring. And it’s said that even the Sorcerer-Prince was tricked by a djinn in the end.”

The djinn spat. Not at Edene, but at the ground. It sizzled where it hit.

“Is that an answer?”

The djinn’s mouth turned down at the corners. “I am forbidden to name him who commands me. But he tricked me,” he said sulkily. “I must serve him until I can trick him back, by the rules that govern contracts between our races.”

“Ah.” Edene set him down, but did not release him. “How embarrassing for you.”

The djinn avoided her gaze. He scowled.

She scowled in return. “Tell me again that you will not leave when I command it.”

“I cannot,” he said steadily. Now he looked into her eyes. His were astonishing counterfeits—flame-blue, luminescent, but with every variation of color and texture one would expect from a human eye. “He whose commands I must obey has ordered otherwise. It is
possible
that you could destroy me, here in the heart of your power. But if I were you, I would not care to make the attempt. And since, unless otherwise summoned, I must drag myself after you like a cripple on a wheeled board, no matter how badly you injure me, I submit to you, my
queen,
that it would better avail you to join your forces to mine. Before this sorcerous dog brings your whole paltry world to heel under his backward sky. It will not go well for you then.”

She did not drop his gaze. His expression seemed open, honest—if anything, exasperated. It occurred to her that she was remonstrating with him in full view of a hundred and more Kyivvan peasants and merchants, and all her supposedly loyal ghulim.

“Al-Sepehr trusts nothing he has not chained,” she said, disgusted. She peeled her fingers open—they ached, having locked in place. “He won’t trust you, even in bondage.”

“I don’t need to be trusted,” the djinn said. With his thumbs he flipped his collar smooth. “Like any weapon, it only takes one mistake for me to turn in a hand.”

*   *   *

Under other circumstances, Tsering-la would have expected the refugee caravan to make for Kashe, which the Qersnyk who had conquered it in her mother’s day called Qeshqer—the city that guarded the best path north through the mountains called the Range of Ghosts.

But Kashe was a dead city now, destroyed by the blood ghosts. Its harvest lay abandoned; its people lay piled into sucked pyramids of bones in the market square. Tsering had not seen this for herself—but she had seen Samarkar’s face outside the gates when her sister wizard returned from investigating the empty streets.

With the city gone, and with Song rather than the steppe as their goal, the Qersnyk and Rasan refugees followed a different road out of the mountains. A long valley—perhaps more a high, narrow plateau—separated the Steles of the Sky from the Range of Ghosts, and Hong-la’s maps and memory said following this would bring them out among the river-lands of Song, where the roots of the mountains gave birth to multitudinous springs. The air here was blessedly clearer—they were sheltered in the valley, and the prevailing winds swept the Cold Fire’s foul exhalation north as they bore east. But as the geography changed, so did Tsering’s worries.

Not only did Tsering continue to fear the depredations of the demonlings—although it seemed the wards were protecting them so far, or perhaps the demonling curse had simply been left behind in Tsarepheth—but now she had an added concern: the blood ghosts that had destroyed Kashe. Massive veins of violet salt underlay the Steles of the Sky, and those might be what had kept the blood ghosts from venturing farther south. But they had left that protection, and while the wards that kept the demonlings at bay—if they did, in fact, keep the demonlings at bay—might also help against the blood ghosts, it was a hard thing to trust your life and the lives of all your charges to untested magic. To be the test, in fact.

The peaks dropped about them, night by night, and the pair of bulwarked mountains that marked the pass at the bottom of the long valley grew taller and less misty and indefinite. Tsering worked with Hong-la, Jurchadai, and others each night, and found herself mostly taking her supper with Hong-la and Jurchadai—often, whatever cold bits could be had.

In the evenings, the bitter Rahazeen sun set in the east, behind those buttressing, slab-ridge mountains. The sight churned Tsering’s stomach, so she tried not to watch. She’d hoped they’d have left that taint behind, but now she guessed it would follow them to the borders of Song. Once the sky grew dark, it wasn’t so bad. The stars were wrong, and a big moon copper-red shaded with silver, but it wasn’t as disorienting as the ways in which the shadows fell all at the wrong angles and in the wrong colors, changing the outline of mountains that should have been accustomed as the shape of a sister’s nose and chin.

She held on to the thought. When they passed that peak, the Rahazeen sky would fall behind.

This night, though, Tsering sat silently with Hong-la and Jurchadai. She cradled a bowl of buttered tea and made herself watch as the sky slid from pale blue to paler peach and yellow. The tea was the only hot thing in her supper—even the noodles in it were rewarmed from breakfast—as time to cook was, like sleep, one of the casualties of the wizards’ constant vigilance. The colors—too dim, too subdued—awakened a new determination in her. Her hands tightened on the comforting warmth of the bowl, and she realized even as it happened that she was feeling the shroud of stunned, mechanical activity that had kept her moving since the Cold Fire erupted slip away. She was no longer an automaton, moving forward because that was the way it was geared. She was Tsering-la, and she was returning to herself.

“Not too much longer.”

The words so closely echoed her own thoughts that, for a moment, Tsering thought she might have muttered them. But it was Hong-la’s voice, and his steady gaze was on the same horizon that had held her, moments before.

“There is still Song to cross,” said Jurchadai. His accent and vocabulary grew better every day, and at this point Tsering’s Qersnyk was nearly passable. Some days they made a game of arguing as they traveled—he riding, she often afoot—each taking the other’s language.

“Not all of it,” said Hong-la. He sipped his tea without lowering his gaze, then licked grease from his lip. He seemed nearly at peace, perhaps even calmer than Tsering-la had ever seen him. She wondered what it was like for him to be going home again. “If we stay with the foothills, there is a sacred route along the base of the Steles of the Sky. Very few will chance the displeasure of the Sages to trouble pilgrims there, and we would be many for the mountain bandits to tackle.”

His knowledge of his homeland was a relief, as in so many circumstances his knowledge often was. She did not know the details. But as she understood it, he had not left Song under the most congenial of circumstances. Many wizards came to Tsarepheth as refugees from unpleasant histories, though. Tsering was no different. Perhaps his expression of serenity was in truth resignation. Or perhaps Hong-la was closer to the silence within than she—who, after all, had failed to find her power even after all that study and all that sacrifice.

On the other hand, if she were going back to the Citadel at Tsarepheth—even now, with ash clouds looming over it and many of its people fled—she might have such a look of contentment on her face.

She certainly missed the kitchens.

Her musing was disturbed as Jurchadai lifted his head and half-turned. She might have started to her feet, but the shaman-rememberer remained seated. A moment later, Tsering also heard the footsteps.

Three Qersnyk women approached on quick, booted feet. The eldest had gray in the braid protruding from under her crimson scarf; the youngest was barely old enough to show breasts. Each held a horn bowl in her hands. They lined up beyond the fire and crouched—Qersnyk rarely knelt—the oldest before Jurchadai.

She spoke rapidly and fluidly to the shaman-rememberer, in an accent Tsering found difficult. The gist of it was that they—the women—had noticed that the shaman-rememberers and the foreign witches were not being fed, and had taken it upon themselves to remedy the situation. They hoped the gesture would be accepted as a gift, in gratitude for the work the shaman-rememberers and the foreign witches took upon themselves.

Jurchadai did not even glance at the wizards. He just bowed over his hands without rising, accepted the bowl, and passed it to Tsering. Tsering passed it to Hong-la, and by the time she turned back, there was another waiting for her. Jurchadai took the third, which had already traveled hand to hand between the women. Tsering—and Hong-la, she noticed—imitated Jurchadai as he bowed once more over the bowl.

The smells that rose in the steam that bathed Tsering’s face were so delicious she almost wept. When she raised her head again she tried to catch the eyes of each of the women in turn, to smile her thanks—but while the eldest was forthright and the youngest bold, the middle one seemed shy and kept her gaze averted.

The food was too hot to eat with fingers, but Tsering and Hong-la had sets of sticks tucked into their belts. Hers were lacquered red and black. His were matte steel and lacquered clear, pointed as weapons. She found herself demonstrating the use to Jurchadai, who—with a conjuror’s deftness—picked up the trick of it quickly as she shaped his fingers around the grip. Her own food cooled while she helped him select the chunks of prune and lamb, and showed him how to scrape boiled, burst grains of buckwheat into his mouth. Hong-la assisted mostly by laughing at them, and once getting up to make more tea.