Steles of the Sky (43 page)

“I see,” she said. “But if they belong to the Eternal Sky, how does one build such a herd here on earth?”

“One must collect a horse of each sacred color, as perfect as possible. It is a very great magic, very lucky. The man who holds such a herd is blessed of Mother Night, and it is said he will be undefeated.”

Samarkar licked her lips. They were beginning to chap in the moist chill of the cave, and she made a note to herself not to do it again. “Why did Toragana tell Temur he had bull’s balls, then, for trying to build such a herd?”

Jurchadai kept an even pace despite the uneven ground. He lofted up a high step as easily as Jerboa hopping over a wall. “To try to assemble such a herd means you must find horses of the unlucky colors too. If you don’t have the complete set…”

He shrugged. He kept walking.

Samarkar did not ask him anything more.

Now, the stream descended more quickly, and so, splashing, did they. Samarkar kept expecting to come to a place where they could not squeeze past, or where the water went underground and they could not follow. But all that happened was that the passageway widened and flattened—still lit by the gleaming lanterns—and they had to get down on their bellies and crawl. Samarkar scoured her palms and knees, certain she was leaving blood behind. A ridge in the stone bruised the tops of her breasts and then her hip bones as she slid over it. She was nearly ready to give up and try backing out when the roof slowly lifted again and she could go first on all fours and then in a crouch.

Even Hrahima sighed in relief when they could stand up again, in the winding fissure that still led down. Samarkar brushed ineffectually at her wet and gritty coat-front. She might have been cold, if she had not called on a wizard’s discipline to warm her bones. This was not the first time she had been in the wet, chill dark—and the last time, Tsering-la had left her there alone.

She turned to smile at Tsering, wanting to share the memory of how she had found her own power, and was ashamed to see the other wizard’s expression of forlorn concentration. Of course; Tsering’s trial in the dark had not ended in the finding of her power, in a flare of warmth and light, but in darkness and cold and in terrible disappointment.

But Tsering was looking forward, over Samarkar’s shoulder, as she too straightened and cracked her spine. “I think it opens out down there.”

The lanterns led on.

“Well,” said Samarkar. “Let’s see.”

*   *   *

It was another sandy slope, another limpid pool still and transparent beyond comprehending. The lanterns made a ring of shadow-punctuated brightness around the perimeter of the cavern, which was as vast as the wizard’s all-meeting chamber at the Citadel in Tsarepheth—and taller. The walls of this cavern were as ornate as those of the passages above and more brightly colored: stained with brilliant and metallic hues from violet to butter-gold to antimony. Great swags of flowstone dripped over the underground lake, and here and there, lacy floating rafts of limestone actually drifted on the surface of the water. Below the lake, though, were further and even more fantastical architectures of stone, all twisted reefs of reds and oranges and yellows. Samarkar’s eye caught here and there the soft flicker of fins.

The far shore glittered like pyrite, like crystals, in the uneven glow of the lamps, which made as many mysteries with darkness as they did revelations with light. Conflicting shadows made outlines uncertain, but Samarkar could convince herself that some of the litter on the shore had the outline of certain familiar objects—a cup, a helm. The scabbard of a blade.

“That’s gold,” said Jurchadai, extending one hand. “That’s … a very big pile of gold.”

Even more striking than the gold, to Samarkar’s eye, were the hundreds of books—scrolls, bound books, fan books—that floated in the air throughout the chamber. She reached out to touch one, incautious and heedless of it. As her hand came close, she felt that the air surrounding the bound book was dryer than the rest of the air in the cave. Her fingers brushed it. It fell into her hand, open to a page written in a language she did not know or even recognize.

“The books from the library?” she asked Hong-la, turning—then jerked her head back as the twisted, bannery stone reef below the water writhed and began to untwist itself like ribbons combed by the wind. The water domed and slid—still pellucid, still smooth—then collapsed into ripples as a huge, sleepy, tendriled head on a long scaled neck rose from the lake’s surface and blinked weary eyes.

It was a measure of Samarkar’s state of shock that her first thought was a stab of grief for the fragile, floating rafts of calcite as they cracked and were washed under in the wave. Only then did she realize, her heart a painful pressure against her sternum, that she was staring into the curved red seashell cavern of dragon’s nostril as it bowed its enormous muzzle over her.

It had long flews like a dog, and they wrinkled up like a dog’s to show a barrier of fangs reminiscent of the toothed flowstone patterns above—serried, and yellow-white. The scales around that mouth were a thousand shades of lemon, citron, carnelian, coral, vermilion, scarlet, persimmon, amber, cinnabar, tangerine. The colors were arranged in no pattern, and Samarkar could not have claimed honestly that the shades of any two scales were precisely the same. Indeed, they seemed to change and shift as the great beast moved and beads of water slid across its skin, as if Samarkar had plunged her hands into a vat of polished agates and stirred, and let them glide through her fingers in a slow red and yellow rain.

The dragon’s tendrils writhed about its mouth, questing this way and that, luffing and seeking like a eager cat’s whiskers. The eyes were like agates too, bands of amber and orange that broadened as the pupils contracted, focusing sluggishly on Samarkar.

It opened its mouth further. A long tongue, prehensile and slick, flicked out, accompanied by a waft of warm sweetness. The tendrils darted forward too, hovering close enough to Samarkar’s upturned face that she felt them brush the fine hairs over her skin. Then it withdrew, smooth as if pushed on an oiled track, and gazed down at them.

“This is who wakes me?” it asked. “Wizards, Warrior, Shaman? Has the emperor then returned to Lung Ching? Why is he not among you? Where is my tithe?”

Samarkar opened her hand. The book rustled itself closed and rose to resume its old place, just above and beside her.

The dragon spoke in a Song dialect old enough that Samarkar only knew it from her endless bored and frustrated reading of historical records, when she had been a useless appendage of her late husband’s court. But she did understand it—just—and as she glanced left and right she could see that Hong understood it too. He stepped forward and Samarkar went after him, wishing she couldn’t see the way the muscles in his calves fluttered when he got in front of her. Hong-la should be afraid of nothing.

She came up beside him when he stopped, because it was her duty and because it made her feel better to put her shoulder to his. He glanced at her, though, and she understood from the look that he’d follow what she said—if she could find anything to say to this. Which was a pity, because she’d bet he was better at this archaic dialect than she was. She could read it, or understand it, well enough—but speaking it extemporaneously was a very different matter.

She decided to speak the dialect she was fluent in. If there was confusion, perhaps Hong-la could intervene and translate. In fact, her diplomat’s practiced deviousness suggested that it might not be a bad thing to be able to claim translation difficulties if they should need a second chance at some negotiation. Assuming dragons gave second chances, that is.

“Your Ancient and Enlightened Igneous Eminence, we come in the name of the Khagan. He is the emperor of this place.”

It might have felt odd to speak of Temur—her Temur—so, but Samarkar had learned at her father’s knee that the game of empire is nothing but playacting, moving dolls around dollhouses and never betraying a moment’s amusement at the nonsensicality of it all. Half of power was pretending that you had it; the other half was convincing other people that the pretense was true, and that they ought to go along with it.

Kings forgot that at their peril.

The dragon said nothing. Ripples lapped his neck where it rose from the pristine water.

She said, “Your tithe will follow, O Ancient One. We are only a scouting party.” She thought to ask him who had been the last emperor he served, and then realized that dragons probably didn’t think of it in those terms. And that she didn’t want to hand him the advantage of knowing that they were not aware of which past emperors had tithed to honor him.

That information, no doubt, was in one of the books that floated, bathed in dryness, here in this chamber. And Temur probably would have mentioned it if his grandfather had known that his palace was built over a real Dragon Lake—or Dragon Well,
Lung Ching
—with a real dragon in it. Especially when Samarkar was about to go digging around under it.

The dragon’s head turned, banking on the long neck like a kite dragging a streamer zigzag through the sky. It darted to a stop just over Tsering, cocked and looking down at her.

“Wizard, where is thy magic?”

She stood her ground more easily than Samarkar had managed. Her hands hung relaxed by her sides. She tilted her head back gently to look up at the massive head. Tendrils stroked her cheeks, or seemed to.

She apparently understood the dragon well enough also, because she answered fluently: “I do not have any.”

Said the dragon, “How is it that you wear the black, then, and smell of my brethren?”

Samarkar saw her hands clench, but no trace of whatever emotion caused that sudden convulsion emerged on her face or in her voice. Tsering’s spine straightened and she shook back her hair as if grooming tendrils of her own. The whites of her eyes flashed as the lids widened.

“Because I earned it.”

The dragon’s head glided back, twisting aside. Its gaze next fixed on Hrahima. The Cho-tse had crouched, one elbow resting on her knee, the other long arm draped down with the backs of her fingers resting on the cavern floor. It looked relaxed; Samarkar knew she could uncoil from it like a compressed spring if necessary. When the dragon’s gaze fell upon her, she might have been a statue; as unruffled and carved from amber as the dragon itself.

The dragon breathed on her in turn. Her ragged, beringed ears flicked flat with their familiar soft, sweet jingle.

To her, the dragon said, “Warrior, where is thy
own
gold?”

Hrahima glanced at Hong-la. Frowning, he translated.

“This is mine,” she answered. “Earned, with my own good hands.”

“Bought and paid for,” scoffed the dragon. “Who tore the gold you were given away from you? Does it become a warrior to play make-believe with honors?”

There was a pause, while Hong-la related what had been said.

Hrahima stood, shoulders broad and square. “You ask questions to which you know the answers. Does that become a dragon?”

The dragon tipped his head at her—Samarkar could not have said how she was so certain that it was a
he,
but she was. He huffed, and long slow parallel ripples chased across the surface of the pond, like wind-driven waves on the surface.

Silence built upon silence, and finally the dragon tipped his head and said, “Return upon the spring equinox with my tithe, and your emperor. Or I will be … displeased.” The lanterns behind them winked out, leaving only those trailing forward, past the pond, into another tunnel. “I believe you will find this a more direct route to the surface.”

*   *   *

The trail up was shorter, and more steep, but allowed them to walk or scramble upright, mostly. It took them through a cavern whose ceiling was thick with hibernating bats and whose floor was swamped with guano, which made Tsering, Hong-la, and Samarkar all gaze at one another speculatively. And from there, it was only a short trip up through a passageway to the surface via a cave mouth hidden amid the roots of a slumped old elm.

They were less than four
li
from the camp. Samarkar swore everyone to secrecy twice before they rejoined Temur’s ragtag but swelling army.

*   *   *

Samarkar and Tsering nominated themselves to tell the Khagan what they had found. He was picking over a nervous meal with Edene when they entered the white-house, and both turned to open the circle to the newcomers. Samarkar and Tsering sat and allowed Edene to pour them tea before quickly explaining their discovery, and the significance not just of the dragon, but of the other cave inhabitants.

“I am not sure,” Temur said, abandoning his pretense of eating, “exactly why I should be excited about a cave full of bats.”

“Not the bats,” Tsering said. “The guano. We can harvest saltpeter from under it, and if we can find a source of sulfur, we can make black powder.”

“We have no cannon, nor forges fit to cast some.”

Tsering smiled. “It’s easy enough to make mines. Bombs.”

Samarkar appropriated Temur’s abandoned bowl and dipped rice and meat from it with her fingers. “In Tsarepheth, we’d get the sulfur from under the Cold Fire—”

“My ghulim can find sulfur,” Edene said. “By the Grave Roads, or some other means.”

Samarkar chewed and swallowed. “We need to find out what the dragon’s bargain with the old Song emperors was. We need to find out what it knows, and what we can learn from it. If we must tithe to this thing, we need something more for our gold than just its forbearance.”

“We can’t just ask it?”

“It assumes we know. We’d be sacrificing all our advantage, letting it set its own terms, if we let on that we don’t. We don’t even know its name. Someone, somewhere, has to know the damned thing’s name!”

“That’s probably in the books it stole from the palace library.”

Samarkar sighed. “Along with all the maps that would help us set up our ambush.”

“So much gold,” Temur said. “Would pay for a lot of armaments and horses.”

“Dragon gold,” said Tsering-la. “It’s as poisoned as the earth where their blood falls. Everything in that cave is poison. Stay there too long, hold anything you bring from out of there too close, and your flesh will fall off your rotten bones before you die crumbling.”