Steles of the Sky (12 page)

The Roads were no different with him gone. Dry stone, each of them, carven with the same masters’ skills in evidence in the stone houses of Erem that had been quarried whole from the face of the living rock. They were quiet except for the dry, shuffling scuffing of padded ghul feet and the scraping, clicking of curved ghul toenails. They were strangely airy, not close and chill at all but well-ventilated and comfortably warm. None of that altered. Nor did Edene’s newfound ability to see in the dark as conveniently as her subjects. Nor did her lack of hunger, her lack of thirst. Nothing concrete changed when the djinn left them—probably on some errand of his infernal master’s, a thought that sparked Edene with fresh anxiety—and yet his leaving might have been the lifting of the overseer’s whip. Edene and her ghulim all seemed to walk straighter, to move more easily in his absence.

Which irritated Edene. And the longer they walked, the more she thought about it—brooded on it, really. And the more irritated she became. Until she summoned Ka-asha and Besha Ghul to her with a flicker of desire. All she must do is want them, and there they were within moments, pushing through the ring of ghulim guards who surrounded her.

Upon contemplation, that irritated her too. It could go on the list, along with her milk-heavy breasts leaking into the front of her coat and the lack of mares in Erem. She tried not to think of Buldshak, not to wonder what had become of the rose-gray mare, descendant of the great Temurbataar. Or Sube, her mastiff. She told herself that her clan would care for her horse and her dog in her absence.

The ghulim genuflected irritatingly, and Edene irritably gestured them up to their feet. Everything chafed, hard and worrisome. Although it had not been what she meant to address, she frowned and said, “You may treat me with respect, but I do not wish to see the ghulim bowing and scraping. I am Tsareg Edene, and if you wish me to rule you, I will rule as a Khatun, not as if I were some soft-land queen with nothing better to do than sit her soft ass in a throne and cosset her soft feet with silk slippers and lotions. Have some pride in yourselves!”

The ghulim glanced at one another, startled. Ka-asha’s shoulders came up, as if it would have flinched and kowtowed some more, but Besha Ghul caught it under the elbow and pulled it upright by force.

“Apologies, Qu—Khatun,” Besha said. “We were not created for pride. But what you demand we learn, we will learn, Lady of Broken Places.”

Edene’s brow furrowed. “What of your own rulers?”

She had never met them. It only now struck her as odd. The Green Ring felt heavy, sharp on her hand.

“Our own rulers?” Ka-asha this time, hesitant, feeling its way around the words as if they had edges as sharp as its teeth and it was afraid to cut its tongue.

“The ghulim who lead you.”

Ka-asha’s ears flicked flat. “Ghulim do not command ghulim. The wearer of the Green Ring commands ghulim.”

“But surely…”

Edene had not questioned the source of their fealty before. She had only accepted it, as if it were natural, expected. As if the truth of it were inevitable. She thumbed the ring, felt the metal warm and smooth, soft as if it were a part of her palm. It was not like her not to question. She picked at the edge of the ring with her nail.

You behaved as is natural,
the calm voice told her.
You behaved as is right. You are their queen, and were always meant to be. You command the poisonous things of the world, and the broken things, and the things that creep in low places.

She found that she had folded her fist closed and wrapped the other hand around the outside, hiding the ring. In her free Qersnyk soul, she felt sick.

“You were not
created
for pride.”

“That is so,” said Ka-asha, its voice lightening with relief.

“You were created to serve,” Edene said, to make it clear to herself, clear in the air between us.

“That is so,” said Ka-asha.

It is as it should be.

“The folk of Erem … you are not the folk of Erem.”

“That is so,” said Ka-asha.

“You were made by them. Made to serve the ring.”

Ka-asha’s mouth opened, but Besha Ghul must have squeezed its elbow until claws pierced cloth, and words dried in the ghul’s throat like water poured on sand.

“We were made,” said Besha. “And when we proved more willful than our creators desired, the ring was made to master us. We have waited for its return.”

“Mother Night!” Edene exploded.

Both ghulim flinched this time, and every ghul surrounding her turned slightly, reflexively, before each as quickly forced itself back to vigilance. The ring throbbed on her hand.
Punish them.

I’d sooner cast you in a fire!

Had she always had such a temper as this? Raging, she shouted, “Willful! More mindful, belike—no, no, I am not angry with you.”

But they cringed nonetheless.
Order them to stand straight when they address you, if it pleases you.

Edene gritted her teeth. That was not the point at all. She almost said,
This is loathsome.
But some sense of how the ghulim would interpret that—as if
they
were loathsome—stopped her.

“I would have you treat me as an honored leader,” she said. “Not a tyrant. I will not dictate your behavior.”

Ka-asha licked its lips. Edene wondered if the ghul was thinking of how she—Edene—had ordered the ghulim to fight when they were attacked by glass demons.

She was Khatun. She could feel doubts, even act on them—but she could never show them. She shook herself like a wet mastiff and said, “And another thing. We will not creep around the djinn. We are the masters of the ruins; we are the lords of the cracks in the world. He is—what, a thunder-strike, a big noise and a little fire. We will make him fear us, not the reverse!”

There was no murmur in response.
Was that too much a command?

She’d never know. “As you wish,” said Besha Ghul, and did not bow but nodded. There was a pained moment, and then Edene waved a hand in the dismissal the ghulim needed before turning forward to resume their walk herself. She worried at her lip with her teeth, though, in the dark they all could see through, and felt her thumbnail picking, picking at the edge of the ring.

What if I gave the ring to one of them?

What then would you do, to bring an army to Re Temur?

The worst of it was, she was not sure if the answer was her own voice, or the voice of the ring.

8

Samarkar sought the shaman-rememberer among the ruins, following the warmth of his step with a wizard’s
otherwise
senses. Night had fallen. The stony daytime vegetation of Reason had given way to evening’s lushness, uncoiled fronds finger-combing the light of the steppe’s scattered moons into tossing strands. Curls of mist caught, amplified, and attenuated their radiance as Samarkar wandered, aware that her black livery rendered her half-invisible in the dappled light.

She climbed a stone stair that rose and turned unsupported over air, secured neither by banisters nor balustrades, feeling with her boot-toe for each riser beneath the unfurled leaves of the wrist-thick vines. Tolui had come before her; she could see the green-black smears where his step had bruised the moist, tender vegetation against the stones.

The staircase ascended to a great baroque structure that draped itself organically down a cliff in tiers, its façade curtained by flowers like a hanging garden, the many domes of its octagonal chambers collapsed. Samarkar was minded of the fan-shaped fungus that grew clustered and draped up ancient trees, or the bulge and slide of layered drapes of melted candle-wax.

A thick-boled tree had taken root at the top of the cliff and its roots had crept across the stained once-white face of the ruin—temple? palace?—to seek rich loam at the base. The stair met the ruin between its parted roots, and beyond them was an empty door.

Samarkar paused at the last landing.

“Tolui?” she called softly, feeling foolish. Her voice echoed faintly, the only reply. She wiped her hands on the skirts of her coat and mounted the last dozen risers, summoning a witchlantern over her fingertips against the anticipated darkness.

But even without her light, it was not much dimmer within. The gaps left by the fallen domes admitted more moon- and starlight than the jungle trees, though their tumbled and overgrown blocks rendered the floor treacherous. The ragged-edged tops of the walls were an eerie frame for the starry heavens, making them seem close enough that Samarkar could touch them if she only scrambled up slumped stones and stretched out her hand—as if someone had draped swatches of dip-dyed and painted silk across the gap and shone a lantern through. On the other side of the floor the stair continued, mounting through the empty space enclosed by octagonal walls. At its top, Tolui stood silhouetted against the frame where a window was no longer.

Samarkar said his name again, softly, so he would not startle on the narrow staircase. Surely he must have noticed her light painting the stones, stringing out his shadow?

Perhaps he had. He half-turned from the hips, raising one hand to cup her forward. She advanced, picking her way. The fallen roof blocks were too matted with greenery to shift under her weight, but the whole ruin had a breath-held air, as if it were looking for any excuse to crumble. When she was a few steps below Tolui, the shaman-rememberer shifted left onto what might have been thin air, leading Samarkar to realize that the window pierced the thickness of the wall, but that the delicate, broken stone trellis that might once have held glass or tortoiseshell or alabaster continued the outside curve of the ruin, leaving a broad white ledge inside where they could stand within the arch of the window frame.

Samarkar stepped into it, to the left of the shaman-rememberer.

“Hsiung found another passageway,” she said. “We have not yet opened it. Among its markings, we have located the words for
Road
and
Dragon.
”

“Promising,” said Tolui. “Assuming it takes you to the right part of it and not somewhere by the far south ocean. And assuming that the sorcerers of Erem had the same name for the same thing, and it’s not somewhere else entirely.”

“Calculated risk,” said Samarkar.

The Dragon Road was not a single thing, but rather a series of pathways or borders, or something less obvious, marked across many of the principalities of Song and its neighboring kingdoms by polished disks of jade broad as temple floors and set as level to the earth. Its origin was the subject of dozens of conflicting legends, and whether it had anything to do with dragons in truth was a project for a more research-minded wizard than the peripatetic Samarkar.

“Qori Buqa is dead,” Tolui said, “as the moons reveal. But his threat is not ended. I have it from my brothers in Qarash that his widow is with child, and has raised his banner.”

“I see,” said Samarkar. “I came to ask you about the new moon, actually.”

“It is the moon for Temur’s son.”

Samarkar was still too much the Heir of Rasa to gasp. “So early?”

“Not early,” said the shaman-rememberer. “Just soon.” He brushed his fingertips against the crumbling stones as if idly dusting. “You should tell your lover that his son’s moon will be the Sword Moon.”

“The Sword Moon? An ill omen?” Samarkar thought of Afrit, the gorgeous and unlucky cream-yellow of the new colt’s hide. And then she wondered,
How does he know?

“It depends,” said Tolui, “on whose hand the sword falls into. But its existence will be commemorated in our calendar. This is the Reign of the Blue Stud, Moon of Swords, Autumn of the only year of Qori Buqa’s reign.”

“Blue Stud?”

“By certain portents, and the birth of certain colts, we name the epochs of history.”

“I see.” Samarkar was half-minded to ask for details, but she worried that would inevitably lead either to offense, or to an extended course in Qersnyk cosmology. Which might be fascinating under different circumstances. “So the Sword Moon
is
an omen, but the interpretation is anyone’s guess?”

“It is an omen of a child’s birth. That, we may be certain of. As for the rest, some would read it ill, to be certain. Some of my brothers do.”

Samarkar considered that for a moment, and decided that as Tolui had raised the topic, it would not be rude to ask. “How is it, Tolui, that you and the other shaman-rememberers can have so many opinions if you all share the same information, the same memories?”

He shrugged. “Are we the same man?”

Hesitantly, she leaned a shoulder against the window frame, tucking cold fingers inside the drape of her sleeves. “How did you become a shaman-rememberer?”

He laughed in that way that Qersnyk did, a huff of air through the nostrils with no sound behind. “How does one become a Wizard of the Citadel?”

“One studies,” Samarkar said, companionably. “And then one has one’s stones cut out by a surgeon, and if one survives the surgery, one sits in the cold alone until one either finds one’s power, freezes to death, or discovers that one has no power to find.”

He hummed softly. “There are two ways to be chosen. One can be born into the wrong body, or with two souls in one body. Or one can be struck by lightning and live.”

“The Eternal Sky touches you.”

He hummed again.

She did not ask which route had brought him to the service. If he’d wanted to be specific, he’d had his chance. Instead, she devoted her energy to figuring out how she was going to break the news Tolui had shared to the others. Especially Temur.

*   *   *

With the return of the sun, Tolui left them.

Temur knew better than to argue with a shaman-rememberer. Hsiung’s vow of silence prevented remonstrations. Hrahima was not the sort to interfere with another creature’s free coming and going. And Samarkar avoided battles she couldn’t win, so she simply stepped in beside him as he hefted his saddlebags and relieved him of the burden. “Let me help you with those.”

She was taller and broader, though the Qersnyk all had the wiry physicality derived from a lifetime in the saddle or at the reins of a cart, from the hard labor of herding, planting, raising white-houses and packing them down again. She could not have claimed to be the stronger.