Steles of the Sky (4 page)

“It’s not my sky either,” Tsering said. “You said Temur … How did you know?”

His teeth flashed white in the dimming day. He said, “I have it from my brothers. Re Temur has declared himself Khagan.”

Temur was the Qersnyk man she had helped to rescue almost on the very steps of blighted Kashe, when she and Samarkar had first discovered the destruction wrought there by blood ghosts. He had later fled—with Samarkar and a Cho-tse tiger warrior—assisting one of the emperor’s wives in escaping a plot that would have likely ended in her death. It was only later that Tsering had learned that Temur was her friend Ashra’s son, and a grandson of the Great Khagan.

“You have it from your—” She shook her head.

“Shaman,” Jurchadai said, touching his breast. “Rememberer.” He touched his temple beside the right eye. “What one knows, all brothers know. Re Temur says he is Khagan, and he will raise his banner at Dragon Lake.”

“In
Song
?”

“It is Qersnyk. Or was. And none of the Song princelings close by have the resources to defend a claim.”

Dragon Lake, that was a name Tsering knew. It was a name everyone knew: Temusan Khagan, the Great Khagan, had kept his summer palace there—a great pagoda in the Song style, red tile and black lacquer and gilt. But the Qersnyk claim on those lands had become a matter of contention since, with Song and Qersnyk armies squabbling fruitlessly over possession.

If Temur felt confident enough to raise his banner at Dragon Lake, he was making a powerful statement about his intentions to claim and reunite the entirety of his grandfather’s crumbling empire. Tsering wondered if he had the strength of arms and will to pull it off.

That, and when she had last seen him, he had been headed west, along with Samarkar, Payma, and the Cho-tse. He’d have to cross the entire Qersnyk Steppe to reach the Song borderlands, and the steppe was held by another would-be Khagan, Temur’s uncle Qori Buqa. Or had been, until his recent death.

Tsering stretched herself painfully. She’d stood still too long, and stiffened up again. Perhaps Hong-la knew a moving meditation he could teach her. “Won’t Qori Buqa’s heirs just crush him before he can muster an army there?”

Jurchadai had told her that Qori Buqa was no more. That he had married an Uthman girl and died on the wedding ride. Tsering was starting to understand how it was that he knew these things.

Jurchadai shrugged. His brows drew together in a frown. Only when the lines appeared did Tsering realize how fresh-faced he was. His manner made him seem much older, but even the wind and sun of the steppe under the Eternal Sky had not yet weathered his flesh.

She schooled her hands when they would have crept up to stroke the streak of silver in her braid. She was not an old woman—just a grown one—but for the moment she felt her age on her like armor. She had seen and lost things before now. Jurchadai’s youth should not wound her so.

And yet it did, quick and sharp and darting. She took a breath to soothe the pain, and another to speak on.

“Please,” she said. “Continue.”

“The sun rises in the west over Qarash,” the shaman-rememberer said, dropping back into Qersnyk. Tsering was coming to understand it better than she spoke it, at least. “Blood ghosts slew all Qori Buqa’s war-band. And the girl has proclaimed herself regent in the name of her unborn son.”

Tsering found herself standing upright, pain forgotten, back half a step and almost breaking the ward-circle with her foot before she remembered. “Can she do that?”

Jurchadai’s frown deepened. “If she’s strong enough. She can do anything. But she may have a hard time keeping Re Temur from crossing the steppe.”

*   *   *

The twins slept under the stars that night, in a roofless ruin in Qarash. Or—
slept
might be too kind a word, Saadet thought. Her brother Shahruz slept, or at least he kept his silence. She, nauseated with pregnancy and exhausted for a thousand other reasons too, contented herself by leaning back against the battered old saddle that had served as the throne of Qersnyk emperors for more than twice her lifetime and resting her neck and shoulders on leather that smelled of salt sweat, grassfires, and weapon oil.

But at least the stars she stared at lidlessly were Rahazeen stars.

It was a night without moon. The comforting blue-orange-white strobe of Al-Ghul showed above the western wall of the ruin, where it had just risen, and Saadet shifted her not-yet-completely-awkward body so she could regard it at her ease. Around it, familiar constellations picked out the shape of sacred words across a cold and bottomless sky. Spells were spellings, and spellings spells. When she and her twin were little, before Shahruz’s murder had driven them to share Saadet’s sacred and inadequate female flesh, both Saadet and her twin had learned to read and name them all in their childhood devotions. When there were no books to pray with, the Scholar-God’s benediction could be read across the vault of the heavens and the faithful so redeemed.

Saadet comforted herself for a while by finding the Virtues—
kindness, charity, compassion, fidelity, piety, discretion.…
That was as many as had risen above the walls and the horizon. The Virtues made an interlocking ring around heaven at midnight at midwinter over the sacred city of Asmaracanda. Saadet wondered how many would be visible even under ideal conditions, so far east as this.

She tugged her wolf-furs, gift of her dead husband, up under her chin. She was glad to lie out under the night. Glad that the house they sheltered in temporarily, until the corpses could be carried out of the palace, had not yet been reroofed for winter.

She would have thought this mood—the pleasant ache, the longing, the welcome melancholy of freedom—was Shahruz’s, for he had always been the one to seek solitude and lonely places. But Shahruz, as she had noted, did not seem to be with her on this night.

Having found the Virtues, she looked for the Benedictions, but a hazy pall blurred the southern horizon. It was the Cold Fire, burning deep in the heart of the Steles of the Sky as if to blazon the return of Sepehr, from whom ai-Idoj took his title. Sepehr had been the founder of her sect: the Nameless Rahazeen. Saadet revered him in direct proportion to the rest of the world’s loathing.

She herself had broken open the seal on the volcano’s deep fires so the world might see a sign of the Joy-of-Ravens returned.

Footsteps brushed the dust in the hall outside. She let her head roll the other way against the saddle and watched a familiar shape frame itself in the door against the pale stone of the wall beyond. Al-Sepehr paused there. Saadet listened to his quiet breathing.

She covered her face with her veil. She must go barefaced among the Qersnyk, as their Khatun. But in privacy she could make herself comfortable.

“Master,” she said, sitting up, drawing her knees into cobbler’s position before her. “You should be sleeping.”

“Not I alone,” he answered. “Are you well?”

She opened her mouth to answer and belched instead. Her palm pressed her veil to her burning face; in apology, she shielded her eyes with her other hand.

“Heartburn,” she said, apologetically. “The babe has his own ideas about what I should be eating, and when.”

Al-Sepehr stiffened, and she wondered if she had shared too much of women’s mysteries. She was becoming a barbarian in truth as well as title. But then he stepped within the door and said, “We will find you some ginger in the morning. Your son is well?”

She shrugged. “I am no midwife. No mendicant scientist, no Hasitan. But nothing suggests to me otherwise. Like most sacred duties, pregnancy seems to me unpleasant and wearying.”

His pause was long. Would he rebuke her for irreverence? But whether he took pity on her widowhood, the blood of the day before, or her sex, he just dug into his pocket and came up with a little silk bag. “This is for you.”

She took it in her hands, something hard and warm from his body, irregular but as large as an egg. She picked the bag open and shook the contents out on her hand.

Half a geode, any glitters that might strike from the crystals within dulled because they lay under a pall of blood.

“It was Shahruz’s,” he said.

Saadet folded the geode between her palms and bowed over her hands. But al-Sepehr only stepped away again. He spoke over his shoulder as he went. “Sleep, Saadet. You are guarded by me, and by a dozen eager steppe riders. And you will need your strength in the morning.”

3

This soft rain would have hidden the sunrise, even if Samarkar had been able to see it for the mountains. Clouds wrapped their slopes, coursed through the ravine that channeled the steep river below. Samarkar lay awake in the gray dawning, head toward the door of the ruined building she and her companions had appropriated. She pillowed her head on her arm, watching the mist tumble like slow water over the stones and between the trees and buildings of the valley to whose slopes Reason clung. At least it was dry inside their improvised shelter, for Samarkar had worked a little magic to keep the mist without.

The horses—Bansh, her foal, and the shaman-rememberer’s white-faced, mouse-colored dun—had made their way inside at some point and now stood at the back of the structure with their heads low, dozing and breathing and steaming. Temur too breathed, warm against Samarkar’s back, his forehead pressed between her shoulder blades, a blanket drawn up to his shoulders against the welcome chill. He snored faintly, as did Brother Hsiung. The shaman-rememberer slept silently.

The sound of the rain had awakened Samarkar. It pattered and shivered on the stone roof and the pavement, a sharp and welcome sound after so long in the desert and so long sleeping under shelterless skies. Temur’s home might be wide horizons, but Samarkar had grown up in strong dwellings mantled by mountains’ wings. Reason also curled within the embrace of high peaks, though the Shattered Pillars were not so high as Samarkar’s own Steles of the Sky. She supposed that was how such an alien, ancient ruin could in some ways feel like home.

Sunrise was now imminent: jungle birds and night creatures spent their energy on one last burst of noise and activity before falling silent all at once. They anticipated the killing suns of ancient Erem. With a wizard’s curiosity, Samarkar wondered how long it would take them to learn that the new sun, the sun of the steppe, was a friendlier creature—one that might burn, if treated disrespectfully, but would not sear eyes and scald living flesh from bone. Of course, suns changed over the world time and time again—but those were the suns of men, not the savage light of elder races. Reason was home to tree ferns that withdrew into limy, calcified trunks each dawn; to vines that folded their leaves and blossoms away like the opposite of a Song queen’s parasol; to creatures that aestivated, hid, or—like the half-entombed dragon tortoise they’d passed on the road—simply drew into their shells and waited for the fire to go.

How did something so adapted to a perilous light ever begin to change?

As well ask how to govern without empires.

She thought it had grown as bright beyond the door as it was likely to. Perhaps she should rise and fetch water, start tea, let the others sleep—but she lay there, smelling the half-salty, musty petrichor of water falling on parched earth; the warm herbal bitterness of horse manure; the acrid char of last night’s cooling fire. Soon there would be no more quiet.

A shadow moved through the mist and rain beyond the empty doorway. Samarkar knew the silence of its step, the breadth of its shoulders, and she did not fear it. Fog broke around the figure, its last tendrils reluctant to release their embrace, revealing the pale belly and black-striped, rust-colored shoulders of the tiger Hrahima. Her fur twisted in wet spikes through her heavy ruff, was slicked so smooth along her lean forearms that Samarkar could see every vein, every bone, every tendon, every ridge of her extraordinary musculature. Beads of water, dull in this light as pendant jewels, swung and slid among the gold rings in her lobes until the ears flicked, splashing the droplets free.

The Cho-tse paused inside the door, whiskers plump with satisfaction. She glanced around the room, huffed at all the sleeping men, and hooked the claws of her huge hand in a delicate, beckoning twist that could have seemed incongruous.

Though she was stiff from her hard sleeping place, Samarkar rose without a sound. She slipped from under the damp wool blanket, found her boots, and pulled her worn black wizard’s frock-coat from its peg—a stick jammed between the unmortared stones of the wall. She only paused to tuck the bloused bottoms of her trousers into the top of the boots before stepping out into the rain after Hrahima.

The mares and the colt watched them go.

When they were far enough from the doorway for their voices not to carry, Samarkar said, “You’ve been exploring.”

Hrahima scratched idly at the proud flesh of a fresh pink scar marring one forearm. She kept her claws sheathed. “And I have found something, Wizard Samarkar.”

*   *   *

Samarkar followed the tiger through the rain. Her footsteps were not so silent as Hrahima’s: her boots splashed and creaked, and the wet six-petaled skirt of her coat slapped her wet thighs. Strands of hair escaped from her braid and plastered her cheeks. Every sound seemed to resonate, amplified in the wet air and the amphitheater of the valley’s enfolding walls.

Morning had by now most definitively broken, though the light still groped through the fog in a directionless haze. Hrahima’s path led them between still more eyeless structures, houses and shops or things more mysterious, vanishing shapes serried one beyond another in the mist. “This must have been a city of … tens, hundreds of thousands,” Samarkar whispered, overawed. Even she, once-princess of Rasa and Tsarepheth.

“A city of many thousands,” Hrahima confirmed.

“How did they feed them all, here in the mountains? Under killing suns? How did they travel? Move goods?”

One would have to shelter everything by day—even the draft animals. Samarkar fell silent as she pondered the logistics problem.
Or maybe they weren’t killing suns, to the people of Erem.