Steles of the Sky (30 page)

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Soft-evening puddled the valley with shadows as they descended toward the encampment, and now the light of those scores of hovering lanterns that swept like the foam of a frozen wave, like the sparks of a fire caught in amber, through the ruins of the palace came to life. Their eternal, ensorcelled paper walls glowed golden. They were beautiful, and dreamy, and Temur knew they were thick with sorcerous wards. The permanence of the floating lanterns was a side effect of the protective magics, or so his brother had once explained to him, when they were here together.

The thought of Qulan was like a cracked rib. Temur suddenly could not get a breath. If the pain of the reunion with clan Tsareg had exhausted him—or perhaps let him feel the exhaustion he had been harboring, and fighting, for half a year and more—then the pain of remembering Qulan and the time they had spent here was an impalement.

Samarkar leaned close to him and whispered, “This is a Qersnyk holding?”

“It is,” Temur replied.

“And yet it rests under a Song sky.”

He frowned and nodded, and shrugged. “It always has,” he said. “Even in my grandfather’s day.”

The last dreamy light of the red sun gilded the peaks of the embracing hills, the white and golden towers of the dead Khagan’s airborne palace, as they left the Dragon Road behind. Tsareg Toragana led them carefully as the trail curved around the weed-dripping rim of an enormous sinkhole, the mares picking their way single file and Afrit, snorting, keeping his mother’s body between him and the pit. She, of course, had as much respect for the drop-off as if she had been a mountain goat, enabling Temur to lean out over her shoulder and stare down into the imperfect darkness below. Imperfect, because there must have been some floating lanterns down there, and the rippled flowing water at the bottom of the hole reflected their light, chasing shimmering rills across the walls of the cavern below. The caverns also reflected sound, a cacophony of echoed and amplified tinkling and dripping and trickling like some great assemblage of musicians tuning up their instruments. And a sighing wind sang low hollow notes against the sculptured edges of the limestone.

“It has another entrance,” Samarkar said. “We must investigate the caverns. They might be useful.”

Temur still couldn’t answer. He nodded, hoping she would see it in the half-light, and let Bansh bear him on.

As they came among the tents and white-houses, he was more relieved not to have to speak—because the road through the encampment was lined with folk several deep where they passed. They were crowded so deep before the doors of the white-houses that Temur could not even reach out to punch the skin bags of airag that hung over every door as he passed, as was the custom. The fermenting mare’s milk needed constant mixing.

So many gathered here. Not just Clan Tsareg. Not even just Qersnyk folk, for there were Rasan townsfolk almost outnumbering his own people. But mostly women and children and the old, and anyone could see the Rasani were not fighters. They all wore those square-headed daggers at their belts, from the age where they could be trusted off of leading strings, but they had no look of warriors or even soldiers.

Still, they were here. And they had come out to hail him as Khagan.

Al-Sepehr had made at least a few enemies.

As Toragana led them through the crowd toward the white-house roofed with yellow felt, he noticed women here and there pushed to the front of the press by supporting arms. Some held up infants or young children. Some were lifted up themselves.

At first he thought it was so they could see better—see the fool who thought himself strong enough to become a Khagan with their own eyes. But then he noticed the peeling skin of one, the scaling red patches feathering the face of another. Samarkar, riding beside him again now that the path was wider, put her hand upon his elbow.

She saw it too.

“I can’t,” he said. There had been the woman in Asmaracanda, the one poisoned by dragon’s blood. He’d laid his hands on her, and all he’d done was made bruises blossom under her fragile skin. “We know I can’t.”

He didn’t say,
And if I cannot heal these of their sickness, they will know I am only a pretender to the Khaganate, and where will we be then? We can’t fight al-Sepehr without an army.

He didn’t need to confirm with her that that was why they were here, now. The goal had evolved. At first he’d meant to survive, and then to win Edene back, and then he’d made an oath to put a stop to the Nameless devils sowing war across every realm. He’d never meant to rule; that was the role Qulan had been born to.

Samarkar looked at him seriously under thick, level eyebrows that she wore natural, like a Qersnyk woman, not plucked and tweezed and penciled like the court beauties of Rasa and Song.

“You were not Khagan then, Re Temur,” she said.

Am I Khagan now?
He tried not to raise his eyes to the banner flapping over the yellow-roofed white-house. To the running mare appliquéd thereon: liver-bay, with one white foot, like Bansh.

If before them voices were raised in hope and greeting and cries for attention, behind him he heard the muttering about the ghost-colored stud colt that followed his mare. The foal caused more of a stir than Hrahima.
Unlucky
was the least of it. Afrit was too obviously a sign. A portent that the Eternal Sky was paying attention to them, here, now. To
him,
Re Temur. The gaze of a god was never a comfortable notice to endure.

The question they all must be asking themselves—the question Temur asked himself, too—was whether the colt with his impossible, doom-portent coat was a portent of doom for Re Temur … or for Re Temur’s enemies.

That, he would have to answer as soon as possible. And suddenly, as they reached the open space before the Khagan’s white-house that would be his for as long as he could hold it, he understood how. He paused his mare before the door, as if regarding the gorgeously cured hides of lion, wolf, dagger-tooth cat, and tiger hanging beneath the awning.

Samarkar and Toragana reined their mares, and Hrahima stepped back, giving him space as he brought Bansh around. Because she had paused, Afrit dove for the teat, provoking a stir of amusement from the gathered crowd. He might be a creature of ill omen, but he was also a baby. And adorable.

Temur swallowed to wet a dry mouth. Perhaps Toragana saw, or perhaps she meant to make a little ritual of hospitality, but she passed the skin of airag from over the Khagan’s door to him. He drank deeply, savoring the tart creaminess, and passed it on to Samarkar. Even Hrahima drank, though Temur could tell that the elaborate licking of her whiskers afterward was disgust and not relish.

When the bag came back to him, he raised it up and shook it. He knew he should make an inspirational speech. Perhaps he’d have Samarkar write him one later. For now, though, he needed to introduce himself to those that did not know him—and more than that, he needed to acknowledge something.

“I am Re Temur Khagan,” he called out, raising his voice to the tone he would have used to bellow orders on the battlefield. “My companions are Samarkar, a Wizard of Tsarepheth, and Hrahima, a Cho-tse warrior. We have come through mountain and desert, sore in the saddle, to bring you word of the necromancer al-Sepehr and his plots, and to fight for you and before you. Our good mares are Bansh and Jerboa. Jerboa is of the line of the copper-colored mare Haerun.” He paused, girding himself for the proclamation he must make next.

“Bansh is the first mare of her own line, the line of Bansh.” The murmuring grew louder. If he was Khagan, he could proclaim the founding of a new lineage of mares, of course. But no one here had yet seen Bansh fight, or seen her run. “The colt is her first get, and if he lives he will sire mares who can run from one end of the steppe to the other and perhaps back again!”

“A bay mare can’t throw a ghost colt,” Toragana said low, leaning toward him. From the stir in the crowd, she was not the only one making this observation.

Temur didn’t look at her. He said, “The colt is named Afrit, for the desert demons that plague our Rahazeen enemies. I am Re Temur Khagan, and my Khaganate will be founded under the auspices of the Ghost Stud. This is the first year of his reign!”

The explosion of consternation waited until he and the others had ducked under the awning, and were out of the crowd’s sight behind the bodies of the horses. Temur was grateful they’d waited. Toragana drew the hide covering the doorway aside and shook her head at him, but it had a sense of wonder to it.

“You have bull’s balls, Khagan,” she said.

He paused just within the door. “I didn’t see a lot of horses picketed.”

“That would be because we don’t have a lot of horses.” She said it apologetically.

He patted her on the shoulder, wondering where his confidence came from. After a moment he identified it. It was the sham of confidence, and this was a trick he’d learned from Samarkar. Seem confident, and your followers will feel confident. He was getting better at feigning it.

“We’ll fix that,” he said. “Wait until you hear them murmuring when I tell them we’re building a Sacred Herd.”

She squinted around her eye patch, then shook her head admiringly and grinned. “Bull’s balls.” She stepped within, and Temur—forgetting to play the Khagan for a moment—held the hide for the two behind.

Hrahima paused in the doorway, too. Gently, she reached out and ran one claw through the rich striped fur of the tiger pelt nearest the entry. The tip of her claw left a fine, combed-looking part in the fur.

Temur winced. He hadn’t thought. “I am sorry. I will have them removed.”

“It is the custom of your tribe, is it not? To show respect to your kings?”

He did not have the energy to explain to her that he was not a king. “It is also our custom to show respect to our friends.”

The Cho-tse shrugged. “If I slept in a pile of golden-furred monkey-pelts, would that trouble you?”

She was gone within before he could answer, and he found himself facing Samarkar. Being Samarkar, whatever she was thinking, she did not say it. She merely studied him for a moment, then leaned in and brushed her lips across his cheek. “Sacred Herd?”

“There are sixty-four sacred colors of mares,” he said. “It’s lucky to have all sixty-four in your clan. I’ll explain later.”

His eyes took a moment to adjust to the shadowy lamplight within the tent, despite the twilight outside. As he fell in behind Samarkar, he was surprised to hear her squeal like a delighted child. A moment later and she was running forward—staggering, really, as her feet sank into layers of carpet—to throw herself into the arms of another woman, one that he recognized from a long, painful journey from Qeshqer back to Tsarepheth.

Tsering-la, Wizard of the Citadel. And the shaven-scalped figure hunched to avoid striking his head on the ceiling of the white-house was Hong-la, her colleague and, Temur had gathered, Samarkar’s instructor. He did not know the shaman-rememberer who had been seated beside them and now rose too—but they were quickly introduced, once everybody was done hugging Samarkar.

Tsering-la turned to Temur next, studying him for a moment as if readying herself to speak. She was a studious-looking woman, compact and strong without seeming small, thin-faced, her straight black hair shot through with strands of gray. Her hands were cracked with washing and labor, and Temur thought stupidly that if this were his mother’s white-house, she would have offered the guest some salve.

But this was
his
house. And he did not know where the salve was kept. There was some in his saddlebags, and he almost turned to Samarkar to ask her please to fetch it before he realized it would be rude indeed to send her away right now, even for a few moments.

“Toragana,” he asked, “has this house any balm?”

He gestured to Tsering’s hands, and Toragana nodded and went to a chest. There was a brazier beside it with a big copper kettle set atop, which made Temur hope there might be tea soon. His legs were unbalanced with travel, his calves wobbly and weak.

The white-house was well appointed, a comfortable and sheltered domicile with beds along the walls, bunked up into couches for daytime use, and a series of chests and bureaus at the back. It was so like Ashra’s house that for a moment Temur expected his mother to appear through the doorway. That dragon-footed Song armoire, inlaid with ivory, could have been one he’d seen in her white-house a hundred thousand times.

Toragana came back with the salve, folded in a parchment packet. She offered it to Tsering, who dabbed fingers in it to anoint her hands and cheeks.

“Re Temur,” Tsering-la said, giving the packet back to Toragana. Tsering bowed, though awkwardly, as if she had not quite yet parsed out the level of change in their relative statuses.

“Tsering-la. Have you had tea? How long have you been at Dragon Lake?”

Toragana seemed to have chosen herself for the role of hostess as the only Qersnyk woman present. She busied herself at the brazier. Temur glanced at her with incalculable gratitude, and she met his look with a smile. He glanced aside, noted Hrahima standing in one corner of the white-house motionless as a pillar it might have rested on, her veiny forearms folded across the width of her chest.

By the time his gaze returned to Tsering, he could smell tea brewing.

She glanced at Hong-la as if for support. He put one ridiculously long hand on her elbow. Gaunt as he had grown, Temur could see the heavy outline of his cheekbones through the flesh below his eyes. The expatriate—or repatriate, perhaps—Song wizard was tall and narrow, but he was not slender. He had bones like a steppe pony’s, sturdy and very straight.

“Bad news,” Temur said.

“A lot of it,” Tsering replied. “Payma?”

Temur sighed. “That, at least, is not bad news at all. Safe at a steading, protected by a distant relative of mine. She and the babe will do well there, assuming she survived birthing it.”

He stopped, hearing his own words. For the first time realizing that she would have had her child by now. The child he’d helped to save.