Steles of the Sky (24 page)

It was a track, in all honesty—a pair of bare furrows running through the flat bottom of a valley, skirting sinkholes and fording runnels of water with great, muddy ruts and the evidence of many hooves. This was a road as entirely opposite the construction of the Dragon Road as it was possible for two such things to be while being defined by the same word.

But a road it was, and in this part of the world, Brother Hsiung knew very well that all roads led to the same destination.

It was easier to jog along the packed wheel track than it had been to hop and skip cross-country. He made better time here despite the inconvenience of a road that sometimes wound about awkwardly, avoiding hills that would have been impossible obstacles to overburdened cart-mules and oxen. And now, too, he began to find people. No inns nor hostels, not on a sad country track such as this. But carters and the occasional walker—tinkers, itinerants, entertainers, mendicants, teamsters, and the other traveling elements of a functioning economy. They were proof that the eerie emptiness of the Celadon Highway across the steppe did not extend into Song.

He still ran much of the time, but now as he came up on a new traveler—or groups of travelers—he would slow and hail them with a hearty wave. Vows of silence were far from unheard of, and his shaven head, robe, bare feet, and mendicant bowl were enough to mark him as a wandering priest. As everywhere he had traveled, he noticed that the poorest fellow journeymen were often the most kind, sharing food they might be going hungry to provide him. They would talk to him as he ate, taking his answers in nods or headshakes.

Their presence lightened Hsiung’s heart even as the news they had to share burdened him. They spoke of a plague in the cities of the south, and reaching through the ten thousand allied principalities of Song and the Lotus Kingdoms and from them, into the Steles of the Sky. Hsiung had known of this before—he had come west bearing news of it, in his own time—but it sounded as if it were spreading even more dreadfully now.

Many of the travelers went girded in bells, pierced stones, bangles, and knots and mirrors and wards of protection. They spoke of the demons that incubated in men’s lungs, and how the pestilence mimicked the black bloat but was not. They spoke of the war on the steppe, and their fears that it might result in Song being invaded anew by the Qersnyk hosts. And they spoke of the return of the Joy-of-Ravens, how he had called down blood ghosts and left skinned corpses half the world around.

But the news that made Hsiung glad of his vow, and that no one could expect him to answer or participate in the conversation, was the story he heard repeated four or five times with varying details—that the Joy-of-Ravens rode disguised in the skin of a Qersnyk warlord, accompanied by a strange group of creatures and outland sorcerers.

After the second time he heard it, Hsiung almost turned back. Someone should warn Temur and Samarkar. Someone needed to let them know that the enemy had laid traps for them—

No. Hsiung had chosen his path. He would honor this commitment and see it through. He’d be of no use to anybody, batted back and forth between crises like the feathered target of a game of stick-and-shuttlecock.
One thing at a time,
he told himself, handing the tin cup he had been drinking from back to the crop-hauling farmer who had so generously shared both rice wine and information.

Several rests and runs later—Hsiung was no longer sure how many—the road had grown busy enough that he jogged past more fellow travelers than he importuned. He’d donned his sandals to protect his feet from the detritus of the road. He rested less and ran more. His pack grew lighter. The landscape grew more rolling: less ragged, sculpted, and baroque. Sometimes his eyes gleamed green in warning. Running was as good a meditation as his forms, and he kept moving.

His first glimpse of the Tomb Immemorial came as he crested a little rise and stepped around the box of the cart he had been helping to shove up the hill. The Tomb followed the ridgeline opposite, a snake of mottled, mortared, mostly beige stones that stretched from the left horizon to the right. It looked like an impossibly extended fortress, high walls punctured by arrow slits and crowned by crenellations, punctuated regularly by the squat squares of guard towers. But it was a highway, and though height and distance made it seem no more than a thin layer of icing on the ridgeline, Hsiung knew it to be four times his height, with a road at its top wide enough for two handcarts to pass abreast.

It had a true name—the Imperial Highway, with a string of superlatives on either side—which no one used. Outside of official documents, everyone who walked it, worked it, or lived within sight of it called it the Tomb Immemorial, for the dead unfortunate slaves and dead desperate freemen entombed beneath its stones—and for its length, which ran from the ocean in the east to the escarpment of the Steles of the Sky in the west.

Men had built it over the course of a hundred and fifty years, and thousands had died in the process—carrying, hauling, mortaring stone in all weathers, in Hard- and Soft-day. It was a graveyard that stretched from one edge of the loosely united kingdoms of Song to the other, snaking and forking from hilltop to ridgeline, always keeping the high ground. It was mostly tawny limestone here, among the sinkholes and towers of the northwest, though capped in black slate to keep the rain from melting it away. Closer to the mountains, gray and white granite made it seem somber and heavy; down by the sea, red sandstone caught the Soft-day light like blood.

As always when he glimpsed the Tomb Immemorial, Hsiung thought of the Banner Wyrm, the great dragon teacher of whom it was said there was no beginning and no end—or at least, that you could never see either end of her alongside the middle, for she was too great to fold herself into one man’s field of vision. But the Banner Wyrm lived in the Sea of Storms, where the great typhoons brewed from her sleeping exhalations. Here inland, their best grasp after infinity was the endless highway that was also a wall.

A woman, hunched under a load of wood as tall as she was, paused at the top of the rise beside Hsiung, as if she too were taking in the sight. Her white hair gleamed in the Hard-sun where her queue streamed from beneath her hat. She nudged him with her elbow and asked, in a strong voice with no hint of querulousness, “Of course this isn’t your first time, Brother?”

Going home,
he thought, and made a gesture of blessing over her. They usually figured out the vow of silence then.

If she did or not, she didn’t indicate. She kept staring across the valley. “Going home?”

He looked at her sharply. The corner of her mouth that he could see—if he tilted his head to catch a glimpse around the hat brim—quirked.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re not so different from everyone else. Going home again is a trick very few manage, with worse reason than you. Or perhaps the best reason. Home is a lie we tell ourselves when we stay in a place for a while. Then we go away for a time, and the lie dries up like an autumn leaf and crumples in the wind. When we come back, we see it as it truly is, and the memories don’t match anymore.” She wiped sweat from her forehead. He swore the lining of her dust-colored, filthy sleeves flashed green as jade silk when she moved.

He stared.

The old woman hitched the wood up higher on her shoulder. “It’s like falling out of love,” she said, and crossed the road—the track—in order to start down the hill.

By the time Hsiung gathered himself to run after, a cart had rumbled between them, picking up speed on the descent while the oxen strained back against the harness. When it had passed, Hsiung could not see the woman anymore.

She had quoted the penultimate line of a poem at him. One of his favorite poems, written almost a thousand years before by a man who later died for his inability to keep his political opinions to himself.
It is like falling out of love,
the poet Hangmun had written.
Except even an old lover might lend money, sometimes.

Hsiung looked as he jogged, but did not find her again. Though one would think that an old woman bent double under a load of kindling would be easy to pick out of the crowd.

He performed an extra set of devotions for the Wood Carrier before he rested, that noon.

*   *   *

Hsiung climbed up the last steep slope to the Tomb Immemorial with his thumbs hooked under the straps of his pack to ease the strain. Though it was nearly empty of food and water, which would inconvenience him greatly before he came to the Wretched Mountain, he blessed its lightness now—and every crumb of food and water that had gone into his belly on this long run. He was lean now, he knew. Perhaps too lean, and he worried that before he reached his destination his muscles would be wasted, his bones staring as never since he had been a starving orphan, thirty years before.

Well, the care of the body was the care of the spirit. But in times of trial, both could be a form of vanity. And Hsiung could not afford vanity now.

If there was one vice his old masters could smell out from a thousand
li
away, it was thinking too well of yourself. Or the other form of vanity that was thinking too little.

*   *   *

As the sinkholes and limestone towers had given way to ridges and steep-flanked hills, so the hills in their turn rose into forested mountains. These were nothing like the Steles of the Sky—or even the Shattered Pillars—but half-mountains by those standards. Still, in his youth, Hsiung had found them quite mountains enough. Despite his apprehension at his destination, his heart lifted at the beloved sight of so much green, so many trees, the towering gray cliffs behind them.

The Tomb Immemorial wound on through defiles and switchbacks, here hugging a cliff, there commanding a ridgeline. Often, mist softened the prospect ahead and behind—clouds snagged on the mountaintops or were trapped in the valleys below. Waterfalls tumbled from heights such as Hsiung could only measure with approximations. With a pang of missing his allies against the machinations of the al-Sepehr—his companions, now, if he were honest—he thought that Samarkar would know the math to find the height out accurately.

He could not stop thinking of the woman with the flash of green silk up her sleeve.

What a time is this, that Sages walk among us, and tease mere mortal men.

*   *   *

He knew a day before he came within sight of the Wretched Mountain that his journey was nearly at an end—or, at least, this leg of it. He did not fool himself that—no matter how negotiations with his brothers went—he would find long rest here. Unless they took it into their heads to imprison him, as was within their rights. In which case he’d get more rest than he wanted.

Entering the Red Forest gave him his first landmark. The earth underfoot took on the color of rust, and terraced farms fallow for autumn marched up each hill, their tiers stained as if with blood. There were legends of how that had happened—many of them, contradictory, involving battles with Sages or dragons. Or both.

Hsiung was fairly sure no dragons had actually been involved, for the earth was fertile, not poisoned as it became where dragons had bled—or, worse, died. But something had made this the Red Forest, and as he ran farther in—tireless, now, hardened to the work, even as his body ate itself away to sinew and bone—even the bark and the leaves of the trees dwarfed beside the Tomb took on a faintly sanguine cast.

He slept beneath rhododendrons and arose to chilled limbs and an empty provision bag. A frost had settled in the Soft-day, the first of the season. Soon the oaks would be truly red, not merely tainted by the color. His stomach growled, but he’d begged congee and pancakes the day before. His strength would hold.

He found his feet, climbed the nearby steps to the road atop the Tomb, and began to run again.

This was familiar country. Now his feet knew the stones, and a kind of energy seemed to inform him at every stride, though the country rose ever upward. A trellis of switchbacks rose before him, the road interwoven with itself so intricately that in places it doubled back and bridged itself—the only expedient to prevent the turns from becoming too steep for a cart to navigate. Hsiung did not envy the oxen drawing up or down it, either hauling their cartage or braking it with the mass of their bodies.

Hsiung had only himself and his empty pack to haul.

Hardened as he was to travel, his calves scalded, his hamstrings, his ass. His breath came with a burning scrape, and it might have been wise to slack his pace, to walk up like the pilgrims and teamsters he passed. But running had become a kind of expiation, a proof—perhaps—of his dedication. The cliffs were white stone and had been cut away to make the blocks from which the Tomb Immemorial was constructed. In places, they overhung it. Occasionally the overhangs were supported by nettings of wires, the workings of Song court wizards—as, in truth, was this whole vast engineering project. More often, they had left a scatter of pebbles and dust on the road below.

They didn’t collapse frequently, and not often at all in this season. Landslides were a winter peril. But Hsiung knew it did happen, and in the time before he had left the temple brotherhood, he had on several occasions come down among these hard curves to rebuild the road—or to minister to those crippled by it.

At last, he wound his way up the snake-coils of the highway to its peak. His driving feet might have paused there, but momentum had him and he let it carry him down. The slope on the other side was shallower, the ablative curves less exquisitely terrifying. Hsiung ran with soft knees, striking lightly, trying to absorb the shock of his descent.

Across the wide shallow-bellied valley, he could see the Gates of Otherwise—the colossal stone arch, as if some giant or Sage had chipped a passage in the very mountainside. It led directly to the monastic preserve of his brothers. The Tomb Immemorial did not go that way, for the monks inhabited a blind valley—the Gates of Otherwise its only entrance or exit. But there was another elevated road, smaller and less ornate, that mounted the rise to the bottom of the Gates in a series of tiered steps and vanished into the opening as if the mists beyond were a mystical gateway to another place.