Steles of the Sky (60 page)

“Edene—” the tiger said.

The reins slipped from Hrahima’s fingers when Edene snatched them. Bansh was moving before Edene got a leg over her, but this was not her first time vaulting into the saddle of a running mare. Three strides, five: she was settled. Five strides, seven: they spurted ahead of the wards. Eight, and Bansh’s hooves rang crystalline on air.

There was Samarkar wreathed in emerald flames, black-armored on the back of her cream-gold steed. There was Sepehr rising before her, his hands spread wide, a shifting blackness outlining his form like the opposite of flames. But Edene had her own flames, her own armor, that the djinn had given her. They whipped high with the speed of Bansh’s hoofbeats, and Edene did not guide the mare toward Sepehr or even Samarkar.

No; there, on a hilltop opposite, she marked her target. Some horses and some mounted people, and one of those people raising the long barrel of a rifle shining in the sun that—just now—touched the peak of the rise.

Bansh’s hooves licked sparks from the sky. Glass demons and a few dissolving blood ghosts grasped after them. Bansh shouldered them aside, ran over them. Kicked them to pieces with her flaming feet. They dragged at her, and somehow, she ran even faster.

Edene leaned close, the mare’s sparse mane slapping the side of her helm. She had no bow, no arrows. Temur’s long knife was fallen in the mud by his hand. She had her dagger. That was all.

The woman on the blood-shouldered gray wore an indigo veil about her neck. She lowered her eye to the rifle sight. Edene knew her. Across the closing distance between them, she could see that Saadet also knew Edene.

The woman beside her, swaddled in veils, clutched her gray mare’s mane as the horse skittered away from Bansh’s charge. One of the men caught the second gray’s reins. The blood-shouldered mare stood like a statue, ears pricked, waiting on this horse that ran at her from the sky. The other man bent his bow back to his ear.

Something struck Edene’s shoulder and twisted her in the saddle. Bruised pain numbed her arm, but the djinn’s armor held, and an arrow bounced away. She lost the reins. Bansh never hesitated. A bright line of blood creased the side of Bansh’s neck, and a moment later the sound of the gunshot rattled Edene’s ears. And then she was there, the bay mare piling into the gray, teeth and hooves striking, the thud of flesh on flesh as the gray reared to take the charge.

Edene lunged from the stirrups, that dagger in her fist, and struck Saadet in the chest.

They tumbled to the hard earth, Edene on top. She outweighed Saadet; her armor took what must have been another blow from the man on horseback. Saadet’s dagger found a joint in the armor, and new bright pain blossomed, but it was in the shoulder of Edene’s already numbed and useless arm. Mares were screaming, and a woman.

Edene thrust, felt her knife scrape, bounce. Raised her hand, dove forward. Plunged the blade again.

Saadet kicked once under her and fell still.

And there was nothing. Edene expected the next blow, could not even find the strength to cower from it. Nothing fell. She put a hand under her knee and yanked her leg up so her foot was flat. Pushed down on it with both hands, abandoning her dagger. Blood all over her hands, blood smearing her armor. The bruises ached now.

Her breasts ached too, and slicked the inside of her armor with oozing milk. A baby was wailing.

She stood.

Bansh loomed behind her, head snake-low, teeth bared, holding the blood-shouldered gray at a distance. The wailing baby was in a cradleboard strapped to the mare’s shoulder. The warrior was frozen on the back of his mare, his knife still lifted. The other man—wearing the blue knots of a shaman-rememberer—held him back with an outstretched arm, and still clutched the Uthman woman’s mare’s reins in his other hand.

The baby wailed still.

The veiled woman slid from the back of her horse and walked up to Edene. She paused before her, head bent, eyes down, as if waiting for a blow. When Edene offered nothing but the acknowledgment of her eyes, the woman said, “I will give the death rite to my friend.”

She slipped past Edene to kneel in the blood beside the dead woman, and Edene barely found the strength to turn her head. She raised her eyes to the shaman-rememberer, noticing absently that the light had barely moved, that there was still shadow in the valley.

“I am Tsareg Edene Khatun,” she said, reaching to open the breastplate on her armor. Anything to stop the wailing, and the ache in her breasts. “This is Bansh, first of her line. Will you
please
give me that child?”

*   *   *

Hrahima could have stopped Edene. She even thought of it in time. But she could not make herself feel any desire to, and so she stood aside and watched Bansh’s heels flash away through the muck until she climbed into the sky. Then the tiger knelt beside Temur in the mud.

She pulled his helm off and—casting about for a cloak or some other scrap of cloth—made him peaceful on a bloody banner. Besha Ghul helped straighten his limbs and pull his bloody queue across his shoulder. It only took a few moments. All around them, the fighting was over, and the wizards’ ward kept the blood ghosts and the glass demons at bay.

Through the ward, Hrahima could see Samarkar’s duel with the Sorcerer-Prince, her and Afrit’s increasingly desperate evasions. Shields of other colors flew up around her and were shattered as the wizards on the ground tried to help. But that, like Edene, had gone beyond Hrahima’s power.

That’s not precisely true, my warm one, is it?

You are dead,
Hrahima said.
You have left me.
Then she snapped at and bit her wrist savagely, until the blood flowed rich and meaty over her own tongue. She would not hear his voice! She would not respond as if she heard it.

She wasn’t sure if it
was
his voice, or her own, that answered,
She has lost her warm one too, and yet she fights on.

She doesn’t know yet—

Oh. The voice had tricked her.

Besha Ghul was beside her, Hrahima only half-aware of the ghul’s touch as it tugged at her arm. It could not have moved her unless she allowed it, so in the end it kept her from further savaging herself by shielding her wrist with its own body.

She did not know yet. And Hrahima had the power to tell her.

She crouched beside the monkey-king’s body again, laid her blood-streaked paw on his mud-streaked brow. He was warm still, and she knew … Hrahima knew … that there was no one to speak his true name and set him free.

He was still in there, or nearby, and it was his doom to become a ghost—eternally and eventually.

But for now, he could help her.

This doesn’t mean I forgive you for leaving me,
she told the Feroushi in her head.

I forgive you,
he answered, and she wished she had not heard him.

The wizards were gathering around her now, and some of the Tsareg—still on horseback—and was that Master War? She did not look up, but by his scent she knew the rustle of black fabric beside her was Hong-la—crouching, and reaching for Temur’s pulse before wincing and shaking his head.

Hrahima opened herself, the pain unfathomable, the howling loss, stealing the breath from her lungs and the blood from her veins until she was cold, cold, cold. She felt the emptiness, the place where Feroushi and her Khraveh had been and were no more. And through that emptiness she felt Temur—what was left of Temur—confused and startled, disorganized in his transition between states, just like any being. Trying, like a new foal, to find his limbs and move them with his will. But he had no limbs, and his will was a shattered, drifting thing.

Carefully, Hrahima gathered him up. All the shards and wisps and fragments. She gathered him into her arms, the arms of her imagination, and she turned him so he would not see the empty, despairing place where her mate and cub were not. She showed him Samarkar.

Your monkey-wizard needs you, little king. She needs your strength right now.

She felt him understand.

“Hong-la,” she gasped, opening her eyes. “Drop the wards.
Drop the wards right now.
”

*   *   *

Samarkar felt the other wizards loose their wards in unison, in a manner that could only be an intentional response. She whipped her head around to see what was happening, and might have died in a shower of bruised-black fire if Afrit—already staggering with tiredness—had not still danced aside and saved them both. He dodged behind one of the limestone pinnacles, found his footing on its stone, and charged up to the top of it. She thought he might have leapt back into the fray, even, one last doomed charge—but she reined him in. She’d dismount here. She’d save the colt at least, and fight the end on her own two feet.

But before she could swing out of the saddle, there—something—a pale streak blurred from the earth in the center of a ring of black coats. A lance of corpse-light whipped past her, though Afrit snapped at it and screamed—and blazed right into the face of the pursuing Sepehr.

She could not see, not clearly, but she had a glimpse of … a blood ghost? And its clawed hands plunged in Sepehr’s face? Sepehr screaming, taken by surprise—

Hong-la tugged at her power, a polite request, and she gave it up to him freely. Feeding him, pushing hard, willing to trust whatever he might do.

The spear of rainbow light that sprang from the earth below to transfix the distracted Sepehr had a brilliant lance of blue-green like the finest jade laced through all its other colors. Hong-la gave it the force and the guidance, but it was Samarkar’s magic that bound it together.

Sepehr screamed. Convulsed. And then choked softly like a man run through and sagged there, pinned on the lance Hong-la had forged from his companions’ wards.

All around the battlefield, eyes turned skyward. Sepehr hung like a puppet, arms akimbo, head twisted. The blood ghost offered one last slash to his motionless face and then, touched by the rays of the Soft-dawn, blew away as if it were a mist.

Samarkar let out a breath—

And Sepehr lifted up his head. The skin of al-Sepehr’s face was split, brow to chin, and sagging back from a skeleton grin. Blood dripped, thick and black, down his chest. He reached up and grasped the impaling energy in one fist, and though his palm smoked, began to squeeze.

The pain of his strength split Samarkar’s head like an axe. She gagged, and suddenly glad of the suffering she’d endured from the Ways of Reason, she focused her concentration anyway. The impaling beam thinned. Flickered. Brightened again. She heard a gasp from below as one of the wizards assisting Hong went to her knees.

Sepehr cast his shining eyes across them all. Then he looked at her, in particular, and smiled. “Little wizard, they believe in me more than they do you. I’ll wear your skin tomorrow.”

She sat. She could do nothing more. All her strength was Hong-la’s, and Afrit heaved with exhaustion between her legs. His head hung. She rather thought hers did too.

“Sepehr is
dead,
Mukhtar ai-Idoj!” another voice boomed, amplified until it shook Afrit’s ribs between her knees. He picked his head up, ears pricked, tracking. Samarkar turned to follow.

And there was Yongten, and there was Tsering. On the back of a dragon wrought of mist and moonstones, with a sulfur-encrusted mess of bones dripping from its claws.

“Sepehr is dead!” Tsering shouted again, while Yongten beside her made the passes to raise her voice to the heavens. “This is his
corpse
! You are a caricature, a travesty! A swindler! You are not even the force Sepehr al-Rach
ī
d was, that took a god to throw him down. For we are only mortals, and look what we have done!”

He struggled. He was no coward; Samarkar must grant him that. He struggled, and it availed him not. The glass demons shivered into nothing—into blowing black ash and the dust of obsidian. The sunlight blew the last of the blood ghosts away.

And past al-Sepehr’s pinioned, failing body—only mortal, all too mortal, just mortal enough in the end—the black wings of a steppe vulture spiraled.

*   *   *

Afrit limped down the sky like an old warhorse returning to the paddock, and if it had not been air under his hooves, Samarkar would have dismounted to give him ease. As it was, they came to ground not far from Hrahima and the circle of wizards surrounding the impromptu pallet which supported what remained of Temur.

Afrit still limped. She meant to dismount. But she had no strength in her, and sat slumped in the saddle until Hrahima came to lift her down like a child from its pony.

“Water,” Samarkar said. When someone offered her a skin she waved it away. “For the horse.” And then she saw. “Oh, stand aside, stand aside—”

She pulled from Hrahima’s grasp and ran to him. He seemed uninjured, except the blood that soaked the cloth upon which he lay. A horse huffed the back of Samarkar’s neck as she kneeled down in the mud, her armor cutting her thighs. “How?”

“A rifle bullet,” said Edene, who was there suddenly, holding Bansh’s reins, a baby on her back as if it were the sort of thing anybody might slide on over her armor. “I avenged him.”

Samarkar nodded. She lifted off her own helm. The tears dripped down her nose and fell unchecked.
You were a Princess of Rasa. Will you weep where all can see?

Yes. It seemed she would.

“That was his shade,” Hrahima said. “His ghost that saved us at the end.” Her tone suggested there was more to the story, and suggested also that it would be useless to ask.

Samarkar heard the beat of wings. She could not open her eyes. She reached out and laid her fingertips on Temur’s cool hand as Edene knelt beside her, graceful under the weight of her armor and the child.

The child who was not Ganjin. “Who—”

“Tsaagan Buqa. I killed his mother.” Edene shrugged. “He will be a shaman-rememberer when he is grown.” She laid a gauntlet flat against the armor over her womb. “It seems I will raise three children, not … oh, look, Samarkar.”

A steppe vulture hovered over them, over Temur. Its sooty body seemed to bob up and down between undulating wings. Its head—red, warty, featherless—was drawn back into a collar of pale feathers. It had a strange look of wisdom, like an ugly old man.