Steles of the Sky (16 page)

She’d meet her doom on her knees, then. They’d fix it if a song ever got written.

But the thing that clutched her was not the talons of a demon. It was a hand—cold, but no colder than her own shuddering body—flesh, strong, familiar. She found herself slung over a saddle, the pommel striking in the bruise her own saddle had left, the stitched-up agony of blowback from the door-opening almost eclipsed by new pain. All the air left her in a rush and wouldn’t come back in again. She vomited, and couldn’t even get any force behind that: bitterness just trickled between her teeth and dripped down the dark shoulder of the horse beneath her.

Bansh,
she thought, too sick to feel relief, as the mare gathered herself and leaped into darkness. The heavy thud of her hooves striking soft, grass-smelling earth was the last thing Samarkar felt before more darkness followed.

Darkness, but not insensibility. The mare’s lather soaked Samarkar’s sleeve and trousers; the acid-sharp scent of vomit stung up her nose, seeming to fill every cavity in her skull. Bansh settled on her haunches and whirled. Temur’s steadying hand left Samarkar’s back, and she heard the thrum of his bowstring twice in quick succession.

Thuds, cries. The Cho-tse’s yowl and the scream of a terrified mare. A sound as if a great glass window shivered into a thousand pieces, and the patter of something light and sharp against Samarkar’s back, her hands … getting caught up in her hair. Temur brushed at her and almost immediately stopped again. His voice said her name once, then again.

I’ve fainted,
Samarkar thought, as someone—by the size of the hands, Hrahima—lifted her off Bansh’s back and laid her in softness. The grass was warm; the sun on her face was warm. The breeze tickled.

“Turn her head,” Temur said, but Hsiung was already doing so, opening her jaw, straightening the position of her tongue. Her strained neck cried out at the touch, though it was ever so gentle. This was a peculiar cottony sensation, to be aware of what the hands and voices around her were doing—but as if her awareness ended at her senses, and her body were immovably heavy. Or just disconnected entirely from her consciousness, a thing she was trapped in but over which she had no control.

She tried to say
I’m fine
. Not even a moan escaped her. Again, hands—feather-soft—brushed against her. Someone grasped her hand and chafed it; that brought sharp, unanticipated pain. She heard Temur swear in Qersnyk, and the motion stopped immediately. Heat trickled across her skin.

“This damned glass—”

“She’s fainted,” Hrahima said. “It’s all right. She’s breathing. Just give her air.”

Thank you
.

Maybe a flutter of a moan that time?
Intriguing. So this is what fainting is like. I would have thought it would be … more complete.
Samarkar would have laughed, if she were able, to recognize her own trained wizardly detachment. Observe, observe. Under all conditions. She’d read wizards’ notes on their own fatal illnesses, on experiments that had ended in their mutilation or crippling. The best of her order could find the discipline to study anything.
I guess I
have
become a wizard.

Brightness. A blur. Stems of green grass, too close to make out. Her eyes—finally—focusing. She turned her head so she faced upward. The sky was a deep, saturated violet that clenched her chest around remembrance. The sun that hung halfway up it was no more than a pinprick, but arc-blue and brighter than noon in Tsarepheth. Samarkar was certain she recognized it. She could have laughed bitterly to be so damned glad to see the cursed thing.

“I am fine,” she attempted to say again. This time she got something that recognizably tried to be words, even if they were unintelligible. The next ones came out better. “I just got the wind knocked out of me.”

“Well,” Temur said, “it looks like only one followed us. And we got it. Or at least, we hit it a few times and it burst like a cannon shell. Careful, you’re covered in glass powder, which scratches.”

That explained the drip of warmth down her hand, sticky and slowing now. “We should shut the doorway.”

“We should do a lot of things,” Temur said. “It can wait until you can sit up without falling over.”

She tried to nod, head pressed into the warm curve of the soft earth, and almost vomited, fainted, or both—again. The stabbing pain in her neck told her she had been lying when she said she was fine—but there wasn’t much any of them could do to correct that now, and it was probably just the result of the shaking she’d gotten. It gave her a sense of fragility that she found irritating, even as she began carefully to test her limbs.

“This looks like a Hard-day. Are we in Song?”

“You’re asking for a guess based on slim evidence, monkey-wizard,” Hrahima said. “There are other blue suns in the sky.”

But her voice was amused, and Samarkar heard the rustle of Brother Hsiung’s threadbare robes as he bent over her and nodded, his shaved pate catching the light.

The dizziness waned. Samarkar suddenly wanted very badly to be on her feet. “Horses?”

“Fine,” Temur said warmly. “Bansh got a bit of a slice while we were picking you up, but she’s had worse and lived to brag about it. You can stitch it for her when you’re upright.”

“Help me sit.”

They did, Hrahima standing back and observing as Brother Hsiung and Temur supported her. It was easier than she’d feared, and those black tunnels did not swirl in again from the edge of her vision. As long as she kept her neck straight and still, she could bear the pain. Still she could see nothing but the long grass tossing in the breeze and obscuring the horizon. The sky above, violet-blue as lacquer, was the impossible Song sky she remembered from her time in her late husband’s court.

“Song,” she said, after a few more moments. She felt strong—despite the bruised ache in her ribs and solar plexus and the wringing spasms that still racked her interior. Temur gave her a hand, and Hsiung lifted under her elbow. Samarkar leaned on them more than she really thought she needed to, because they seemed to want to feel useful. Once on her feet, above the level of the grass, the landscape that surrounded them was such that she almost forgot to be wobbly.

They stood on a rise near one edge of a narrow valley, more lush and green than any place Samarkar had ever seen. Gray-white limestone towers and hills so tall and steep and narrow that they seemed the result of some carver’s art, not nature, rose lopsided and heavy with greenery on every side. Tier upon tier, melted-looking and strange, they marched back until lost in the haze of distance. A slow shining river meandered down the valley’s center, gleaming under the sun, and closer at hand Samarkar could make out mirage-bright pools of water, many of them almost perfectly round.

The whole landscape had the look of a Song silk painting, as if someone had taken a heavy brush thick with streaky green and gray watercolor and dabbled impossible arabesques into a misty background.

On the hillside—really a rock face—to their left, a moss-hung stone archway stood alone, unattended by other structures. Samarkar supposed that was this end of the doorway from Reason.

She shaded her eyes with a flattened hand for a better view down the valley. Temur and Hsiung stepped back, giving her room, but not too far. They were ready to catch her if she stumbled. Warmth flushed her at their concern.

Blinking, then, she realized that some of what she had taken for pools of water were in reality a flat jade pavement composed of flagstones thirty paces across, each polished from one gigantic massif. This enormous road meandered along beside the river, green and serene under the light of the sun.

Samarkar gaped. “The Dragon Road. We found it.”

“We found it,” Hrahima said. “Now what we are going to do with it, that’s an open question yet.”

10

They came out of the darkness of the underworld into the darkness of a night that nevertheless lit Edene with the buoyancy of joy. In the midst of her ghulim, she stopped dead, feet planted, neck arched as her head tilted back. Her plaited hair fell over her shoulder to drop along her spine, heavy with the ropes of black and silver pearls the ghulim had insisted on braiding into it for her triumphant return to Reason. For a moment, she just stared and blinked, eyes watering.

Her sky. Her stars.
Her
moons.

And moreover, Temur’s moon, iron-red and iron-gray, and beside it—leading it—a moon Edene had never seen before. A moon with wavering bands of dark and paler silver streaking its face, like watered silk or fold-forged steel.

She knew whose moon that was. And she knew what it meant, moreover. It meant the Sky accepted Re Temur’s claim to be head of his clan, and his clan’s claim to be head of all clans. That could change, of course—it had changed in Edene’s mother’s mother’s mother’s lifetime—but her son was marked as one of the heirs of the sea of grass, and only his death or the fall of Clan Re could strike that mark from the heavens now.

“Ganjin,” she whispered, her fingers curving as if to grasp, her arms aching for the weight of her son. Instantly, his ghul nurse was with her, offering her son. Ganjin’s head cradled in the crook of Edene’s elbow as she drew him to her breast. She curved over him protectively for a moment, breathing in the warm sweet scent of him. Then with sharp confident movements, she unwound his swaddling cloths.

She raised her son naked to the light of the new moon.

“In the name of Re Temur Khagan,” she said to Mother Night and to her other half, the Eternal Sky, “I present to you your son.”

He wailed, of course, as the cold air struck him. That was good, the lusty cry of a strong infant’s irritation. The Sky would hear him. Hands unsteady with emotion, Edene wrapped him up again. His nurse reached for him, but Edene shook her head and loosened the collar of her robe to put him to the breast.

Her hands were not all that trembled. Suddenly, her whole body ached with need. Temur was here. It was Temur who had claimed this place, who had raised his banner and reclaimed it for the Qersnyk people. Because only by declaring himself Khagan could he have caused Mother Night to hang for his son a moon.

He was here. He was close. He was well.

And Edene was about to see him again.

“Search everywhere,” she told her ghulim, while the trees whispered around them and dog-nails clicked on white cobblestones. “Harm no one!”

“Do we fight?” asked Besha Ghul.

“Not under this sky,” said Edene, cradling her son. He was warm and heavy, solidly reassuring her that—unreal as it seemed—this was not a dream. She half-expected him to turn to smoke in her arms, taking this blessed, blessed sky with him—

“Young Rakasa drinks the ring with every suck at your teat, witch-queen.”

The voice could have made her jump, except now she was always steeled against it. Not an evaporating sky—but perhaps the next least-welcome thing. Edene would not give the djinn even the satisfaction of acknowledging his existence. She turned her head aside and said to Ka-asha, “If your people find anyone here at all, that person is to be protected at all costs. Do not approach them. Do not engage. Come and find me at once!”

“As you command,” said Ka-asha.

Edene winced, though the ring hummed with pleasure on her hand. Its comfort seeped into her as well, lessening the irritability she was coming to think of as a natural part of her personality. She could not prevent herself from making commands. And yet, every order she offered was an affront to dignity—her own, and that of the ghulim. It was one thing to take captives in battle. Quite another to command their wills by the magic of some filthy sorcery.

And yet … she needed them.

“You look in unexpected places for your lover,” said the djinn.

“Shut up.”

“As you command,” he mocked. But when she turned on him, eyes stinging with rage, he raised his hands in a parody of surrender. She fixed him with a glare. He dropped his eyes.

He doesn’t need those to see with.

No, but at least it was a parody of submission. Close enough to placate her.

The ghulim fanned out through the forest and the ruins that framed it. Edene found a white road leading down into the valley, and with her honor guard she followed it. It met another path that ran along the edge of a gully and she paused there for a moment, wondering in which direction to go. It would be most sensible to just wait—but Temur was here, so close. She knew that it would not be her who found him, enmeshed as she was at the center of a web of ghulim. But she did not have it in her to stand still.

Or to pace aimlessly back and forth like some Uthman in her tower. She snorted scorn at the image. It was the impetus she needed to choose her left hand at random—not quite at random: it was the direction that followed the moons—and stride raggedly along the road. Her ghul-tailored robe slapped her booted ankles. Ganjin had released the breast and stared up at her with eyes dark and starry as the sky above. Every step came with a heart-stutter of excitement and anticipation. The first sweat she had broken since she put the Green Ring on her finger stuck her clothing against her shoulders. She trembled, and held her son close to hide it.

Before long, she smelled horses. Horses, blood, fire. Amniotic fluid. The funk of a big cat, and the smell of several people. That she could pick that out with the aid of the ring; the scent was too far and faint for her to have noticed alone.

The ghulim smelled them too. Heads went up; black noses rose sniffing as cowls were dropped down backs. Then a baying rose in the distance—the scouts crying for attention and assistance. The crash of running feet—some of those same scouts returning.

The djinn chuckled. “He’s collected another paramour already, by the stink of it.”

“Leave me,” Edene said, without turning to look at the djinn. The ring blazed on her hand; her anger blazed in her chest.

“Not forever,” he answered.

She jerked her arm up, showed him the back of her hand. He melted into a whorl of blue sparks, a coil of smoke, and without a sound was gone.