Steles of the Sky (15 page)

This was no sorcery, but a prayer.

Ümmühan laid the card on the floor before her. When she stood, she was wrapped in a faint whorl of starshine—the benediction of Ysmat of the Beads.
In the path of the whirlwind,
she thought,
the moonlit desert lies afire.

She drew breath after breath, filling herself with air as if she meant to dive deep. As if she were about to declaim before a king—a task that had not daunted her since she was a maiden of seventeen rains. But in those cases, the price of stammering was embarrassment, or at worst a diplomatic incident. In this, she would have to pronounce every syllable on one breath, correctly and without stumbling. Any poet knew what happened when you mispronounced the name of a djinn; all her precautions against discovery would be as naught if she were simply transformed into a scorpion or some other scurrying thing.

One last breath, held for a second while she organized her courage, and she cried out softly: “O Fy-m’shar-ala-easfh-ala-wtqe-shra-tw’qe-al-nar-ala-fasheer!”

Silence, the air at the reach of her fingertips thick with darkness that the glow from the card could not cut. And then a lessening, a softness in it. A blue shimmer as if from the hottest embers Ümmühan could imagine. A warmth in the autumn night.

“There should have been a brazier,” whispered a voice she had heard before. But it had been booming, then, ringing tower-tall under an unconstrained sky. Now it was mild, intimate. A little fraught with mockery. “Haven’t you ever summoned a will of fire before?”

“I do not mean to bind you,” Ümmühan said. “We are all the Scholar-God’s creatures, and…” she touched the golden collar lying warm against her clavicles “… you see, I am enslaved as well.”

She knew the face that coalesced before her, triangular and clever as a ferret’s, blue as the heart of a flame, topped with spikes of indigo hair. He was no taller than she was, slender, the shadows beneath each rib like the darknesses that breathe across flickering coals.

He tilted his head like a curious dog. “So you are. But you rode the wind with al-Sepehr.”

“He is a great man,” Ümmühan said carefully, though her heart leapt a little at the sound of his name. A man like that, though, would want no liaison beyond politics with a slave-poetess. And … he had done what he had done to her city and her people. “Very powerful.”

“As powerful,” said the djinn, “as the man who holds your chain?”

Ümmühan smiled.
More so, and a better warrior.
Her approval of Kara Mehmed was severely limited. “As you are the Scholar-God’s creation,” she said, “and as you are the djinn who aided the Emperor Sepehr al-Rach
ī
d, called the Sorcerer-Prince by those who know no better, I charge you to aid me in Her work and for Her glory.”

The djinn tipped his head and smiled. “So much for not commanding me.”

“Do we not serve the same true God?”

“Do we?” The djinn seemed to study his hands. “You creatures have never learned the edge of your arrogance. You would set your gods up over the world, never knowing if they create you or you create them. You’ve no inkling of your own power, and yet are quick to shift it away. Take some responsibility, meatling.”

His derision confused and stung Ümmühan. Not her pride—she was a woman and a slave, and could afford no such egotistical male luxury—but his disdain of the Scholar-God. Were not djinn and afrit alike Her creatures, created by Her as She had created man? Ümmühan had not expected … blasphemy.

While she was considering, the djinn continued, “You spoke my name. What is it that you want of me? Wishes? I can grant your freedom. Riches. Love—”

“Love,” Ümmühan scoffed, on firmer earth now. “A trinket sold to girls in exchange for their intellect.”

“What then?”
Ask,
his pursed lips said.
And quickly. I am a very busy djinn.

“
Has
Sepehr al-Rach
ī
d returned?”

“Can a dead man rise up from his bones?”

“One who does not wish to answer often replies with a question of his own.”

Mocking, the djinn said, “If you believe he is, I suppose you might be right.”

His tone suggested some deeper context to his words, and Ümmühan hung a frame in her memory-castle to ponder his meaning later. She said, “Do you wish to be free of al-Sepehr?”

She knew he did. She—and al-Sepehr’s great Rukh—had been the only witnesses to their argument.

“I suppose
you
will help me?”

“I wish the true glory of my God recollected,” Ümmühan said, swallowing against a thrill of excitement. He had not denied that he was Sepehr al-Rach
ī
d’s djinn. “I wish Her priestesses honored as She intended. It seems to me we can be allies.”

“You are a transient thing. You are gone between breaths.”

“But my God endures. And my spirit is immortal in Her care. How can it harm you, O Great One, to have allies that he who has enslaved you underestimates as well?”

The djinn paused, a hand upraised, flaming eyes narrowed. He waited, and though sweat sprang out on Ümmühan’s brow in defiance of the chill, she met his gaze and lifted her chin. The silence grew long and thick.

The immortal glanced away before the Illiterate. He might have chosen to do so; another one of his games?

“It cannot,” the djinn said. “Spin your web, mortal girl.”

*   *   *

To Yangchen-tsa, each day’s travel along the Tsarepheth to Rasa road seemed desperately inadequate. Without the punctuation of nights passed in noble houses, keeps, and strongholds the journey as a whole began to seem interminable. And if she, who had made this journey every year, was feeling adrift, how much worse must it be for those who had never come this way before?

Uncertainty and frustration were worse enemies than exhaustion and hunger, she realized. A man with a goal to walk toward would keep lifting one foot after the other long beyond the point at which any sensible person would expect his strength to have failed. A man who felt himself adrift would not be able to force himself to struggle so valiantly. And Yangchen was surprised to find herself determined to reach Rasa with as many of her subjects alive and still moving forward under their own power as possible.

Stories would help, she thought. She recruited the wizards, her advisors, and even Gyaltsen-tsa and her surviving ladies to go out among the camps at night and tell tales, such as they could—remembered bits of history, legends of heroic deeds, romances of wizards, warriors, dragons, princes of foreign lands. Each would take up a post beneath a pole upon which flapped a bright, improvised banner, and any who wished to be cheered could gather around. She saw to it that food was inventoried, that the quartermasters collected what they could from the civilians and rationed it back again to all as needed. Of course there was hoarding and resentment and tightened belts—but while there was hunger there was no starvation. Not yet, anyway. Not yet.

Finally, in desperation for some sense of progress, she had Doctor Anil paint a map on the side of her wagon, onto which each day he gilded their route and how far they had come. At first she had thought to have him work on a parchment map—but it occurred to her that the refugees—that the
rest
of the refugees—needed proof of their forward motion as badly as she did, if not more so. And thus, the wagon’s wall. He wasn’t much of a cartographer, as wizards went—but he was a wizard, which made him a better cartographer than almost anyone else.

It was something, Yangchen told herself—sipping the same thin congee the others got, nursing her fussing son, putting in hours astride Lord Shuffle, leading the column. And something was better than nothing. And at least, up here, she was ahead of the dust.

They managed to obtain some supplies from the noble household that guarded the high saddle of the final pass, a keep that would normally have been the third night’s destination and in this case took three times that. And once they got down out of the highlands, to the Rasan plateau, there would be more food and more shelter. No one would die of hunger by then, though many would be weak and miserable. They had the contents of the treasury. They were not without resources.

The mountains dropped away before them and mounted up behind. Every night was colder than the last, the frost sharp and heavy now. Yangchen took her comfort in Lord Shuffle. In the evenings, when they made camp, she took to riding the spotted steer up into the hills, scandalously alone or—even more scandalously—with Anil-la for company. This novel sensation—this was freedom, which she had never known before. Never even known enough about to imagine. And she was coming to crave it, as opium-chewers craved the bitter poppy gum.

On the night when Doctor Anil’s gilded line, burnished against the wagon slats with a round stone tool and gold leaf that had been stored on the sheets of leather it was pounded thin between, reached the boundary of the high plateau, the Dowager Empress Regent Yangchen took her supper in the form of strips of roast yak, seared, salted, and bloody in the middle. She wrapped them in a waxed cloth, gave her son to his nurse, and swung into Lord Shuffle’s saddle, sending na-Baryan away when he tugged at her stirrup and tried to insist that someone ride with her.

The itch in Yangchen’s chest quieted when she was alone, finally, riding into the stony hills and listening to the hubbub of the camp drop away behind her until it was hushed under the gentle shimmer of Shuffle’s bridle bells. She had little daylight left, and meant to use what there was to get as far from other people as Shuffle’s trot permitted.

He moved over the rough terrain like a cloud, small neat hooves leaving almost no trace of where they had been. At last, he attained a hidden meadow, concealed from the road below by a stand of the wind-twisted shrubs that grew more common as they descended toward the plateau. In the silence, all Yangchen heard was the bells, his hoofbeats, and the wind.

She reined him in and sat a moment, looking back the way they had come. The shoulder of a mountain hid most of the river’s course, and clouds banked the Island-in-the-Mists and the Cold Fire. She wondered how much of Tsarepheth still stood, and if any of those infected with the demon spawn would live. She wondered how the Citadel’s wizards were faring in their struggle to contain the eruption.
Mother Dragon,
she prayed, though Rasa’s gods were not the gods of her childhood.
Let my city survive.

She closed her eyes, as if that would give the prayer more weight. When she opened them, she resolved, she would eat. She had no appetite, but she must have food. It was her responsibility to keep herself strong.

Before she was quite ready to face it, Shuffle stomped and snorted, pulling at the reins through the ring in his wet pink nose. Yangchen’s hands closed reflexively over soft leather. Her eyes flicked open and she in her turn nearly screamed.

A semicircle of demonlings crouched on the ground before her, transparent black wings furled around their sticklike bodies, heads lowered as if in genuflection. There were a half-dozen of them—larger than the spawn that clawed their way out of the lungs of the afflicted, smaller than a grown woman.

They seemed to be carved of obsidian. Were they spirits of the Cold Fire, somehow sprung from the wrath of the volcano? She glanced over her shoulder as Shuffle backed away, horns lowered and head dropped to protect his throat. Ice crept up her throat, swam along her veins. She must be cold; her shudders rattled the reins. She had been an idiot to ride away alone, an idiot to risk herself—

The largest demonling raised its head and spoke in a voice like brittle ice.

“Waymaker! We honor you! From out of the deep past, we honor you!”

It froze her in place. She might have reined Shuffle around, risked turning her back to the things just for the sweet relief of bolting. But those words—those perfectly identifiable words, in Rasan cleaner and more accentless than her own—

Get away from me.

Shuffle’s ears flipped. He sidled again, muzzle almost scraping the earth as he tossed his head—an open threat.

“Waymaker!” the thing said. “Praise the Waymaker!”

It warbled, and after a moment the rest warbled with it. Yangchen waited for them to spring, for the air around her to fill with their razory-looking wings and talons, the lash of barbed tails. But they just bobbed and genuflected, almost seeming confused when she burst out—

“Get back! Get away from me!” Convulsively, she hurled the first thing that came to hand at the leader, if that’s what it was. It was the waxed packet of her dinner.

The thing’s head snapped, slashed. Shreds of meat fell here and there and demons pounced, squabbling over the slim pickings. Their wings rustled and chimed.

“Praise!” the demon cried again.

Yangchen broke at the same instant Shuffle did. They whirled as one beast, in perfect accord, and she gave him his head as he plunged along the narrow path back toward the encampment. She crouched over his broad humped back, clinging close. At every moment she expected to hear those wings behind her, to feel the talons along her spine. But all that followed was that brittle voice again.

“Praise she who feeds us!”

And the answering voices, more brittle still—“Praise! Praise! Praise!”

*   *   *

In the morning, Yangchen rose blinking in the early light. Her stomach knotted tightly; she had not eaten after the loss of her supper the night before. But that was forgotten as the sun rose before her. Behind their destination. Though Rasa was still invisible with distance, no mountains occluded the sun’s rays.

A ragged cheer began, stilled, and rose more vibrantly as, one by one, Yangchen’s people realized what that pale morning meant. Among their cries she heard her name, her still-unfamiliar new title. A rising chant.

They had come out of the Steles of the Sky alive, before winter. And the sun was rising in the East.

*   *   *

The stones were gritty and chill under Samarkar’s knees and palms. The air burned her ears with cold. A storm of wings whipped her hair up, the petals of her coat tossed around her. A moment, and those cold claws would score her back, those cold mandibles cut her flesh—but the pain that stitched her abdomen would not even allow her to rise.