Steles of the Sky (17 page)

Besha Ghul’s taloned hand wrapped lightly about Edene’s upper arm, black thumb so long and knobbed it overlapped the sticklike fingers. Edene rose up on her toes, a coursing hound that could not be restrained, the pull of her injuries forgotten. Besha Ghul could not restrain her, even if it had meant to try. All that happened was the ghul was swept up by Edene’s stride—and running, running flat, she crossed the distance faster than a mare could gallop, faster than an eagle could fall. It seemed three strides, a blur, and she stood with Besha Ghul before a low rectangular structure whose dark door gaped wide. The roof was hidden under knots and gnarls of flowering broad-leafed vine, giving the whole shed the appearance of a hollow hillock, the sort of barrow the Western men built to trap their dead.

The eastern sky was graying, the moons slipping behind the mountains one by one. Edene could see the trample of hooves in the dooryard—two mares and a foal—and the marks of several pairs of boots or sandals. And the pugmarks of an enormous tiger, interleaved with the others, crossed and crossed again.

“Cho-tse,” Besha said, still gripping Edene’s arm, standing sideways, but with its long neck twisted and straining for a better look. It panted. Edene raised her hand for silence and craned up, sniffing. Temur, yes, Temur had been here. But the scent was hours cold, perhaps the whole width of the night, and there was no fresher nearby.

“They’ve gone,” Edene said. “Let us find them.”

“They could be anywhere,” Besha said. “Reason was a city of doorways. Some of those ways are open still.”

The ring knew what Besha referred to, and so Edene did also. Gates, cracks in the world one could slip through. Like the Grave Roads—but other than the Grave Roads.

On the crown of her head, Edene felt the first warmth of a beloved sun. All around her, ghulim were flipping cowls up, hunching in the shade of their colored robes. Edene shook her plait back, hearing the pearls rattle.

“Do not fear this light!” she told them, but they still turned their faces away, hunching their shoulders and becoming shapeless under the mass of their robes.

Sadly, Edene stroked Besha Ghul’s arm. “This light will not harm you.”

“It is bright to the eyes nonetheless.” But the ghul let the tip of its nose peek from the shade of its cowl. Velvet eyes sparkled behind it, peering up like a shy child’s. Edene felt a rush of tender affection quite at odds with the warlike yearning that simmered in her bosom, a low heavy heat that had lived behind her breastbone since she found herself captive of the Nameless Rahazeen. She had forgotten what it felt like to move through the world ungrounded by its weight and purpose, and the instant’s release was disorienting until it passed.

On every side, though, as the ghulim cloaked themselves, the leaves and fronds and blossoms of the forest were curling up, sliding inside their stone stems, warding themselves from a blazing light that would not come. Edene started back, realizing—

They will die in the dark. They will grow white and waxen and fade. This is not the sky of Erem any longer, where the nightsun may feed even that which hides the daysuns’ wrath.

“No, children,” Edene said, touching her green-gold ring and then the arm-thick, hairy trunk-stem of the vine where it trailed down a stone trellis at the front of the structure. “There is no light for you at night now. You must seek your sustenance in the sun.”

Hesitantly, as if seeking reassurance, one curled frond reached toward her fingers like a spring slowly giving up its tension. It brushed the back of her hand, downing the fine hairs in shimmering pollen. Then, as if flame licked the edge of paper for a moment before the whole leaf caught, a thread of green seemed to rush away, to propagate through the whole vine.

Leaf after leaf after blossom, the plant relaxed into the daylight. On every side, sweeping away, a rustle of leaves bore witness to the change that raced through the jungle.

For the first time in the world, the forests of Reason bloomed under a daysun’s rays.

*   *   *

The ghulim fanned out through the trees, seeking traces of men, Cho-tse, and mares. Edene waited, still standing in the clearing beside the abandoned shelter. She ducked inside long enough to see where Temur and his party had camped, to see the dark stains and hoof-scrapes of a birthing by the rear wall. She left Besha Ghul wringing its long hands nervously beside the door and crouched next to the spot in the dust smoothed by Temur’s body and brushed it with her fingers. The patch was broad; there were two scents.

Someone—a woman, almost, except her smell was strangely flat—a woman past her blood, then—had lain beside him.

The ring burned on Edene’s hand. The war-wrath burned under her breastbone—

He has not betrayed me. For here he is in Reason, and why would he come to the Shattered Pillars if not in search of me?

A Khagan could have many women. But only Edene would be the mother of his firstborn son. And this woman, whoever she was, was past bearing. Her scent said so, and the scent did not lie.

Edene made herself smile. This woman, whoever she was, had come with Temur in search of her. Along with another and unfamiliar man, and a person who by his scent was touched by Mother Night—a shaman-rememberer—who slept by himself away from the others, and a Cho-tse warrior. These people were Edene’s allies, because they were Temur’s allies. These people would fight to protect Ganjin and Temur both.

They would keep you from your man—!

They are mine, for they are my man’s. I need have no wrath for them.

Edene stood and went out into the sunlight, brushing past Besha Ghul. Besha turned within the doorway, still hugging the shade, but facing out now to watch Edene. Loyal to its duty even as it despised the light. Edene could see its pupils pinched down to pinpricks even in the double shadow of the roof and of its cowl.

As for Edene, though—she paused in the trampled clearing and turned her back to the delicious light. She opened her robe and shrugged it down her shoulders. It would have fallen in the dust, except Besha darted forth and caught it before scurrying back to its shelter.

Sun heated Edene’s plait, and the jewels and chains woven through it. It heated the skin of her neck and shoulders, pale with months of deprivation. It heated the half-healed scar of the glass demon’s talons, and the muscles beneath scar and skin. The warmth went deep: healing, soothing.

She tilted her head back and closed her eyes. In a moment, she thought, she would clamber down the gully wall and see if she could scrub herself in the doubtless icy little river that leaped and sparkled below, arcing from rock to rock as it made its escape from Reason.

And by then, perhaps her subjects would be able to lead her to Temur.

Padded footsteps disturbed her contemplation. She opened her eyes to see Ka-asha trotting up, recognizable by its gray-embroidered rust wool robe, and all her attempts to distract and relax herself fell away, revealing the hard-bent knot of anxiety and anticipation they had only shrouded, not replaced. She stepped forward, hands reaching.

“What news?”

Ka-asha prostrated itself so Edene bit her lip not to remonstrate. “Rise when you will,” Edene said instead, desiring not to command it to its feet any more than she had commanded it off of them.

“Signs of a glass demon attack,” Ka-asha said. “Trees scored—but no blood, or not much. And we have found several doorways that have been opened. It is likely that your mate and his subjects escaped through one of them.”

Edene wanted to correct the ghul—Temur’s companions were likely his war-band, which was something different than the Song or Rasan idea of a prince over peasants. But the ghulim did not seem very able to accept relationships that were not strict hierarchies of owner and owned, and Edene was too eager to be on Temur’s trail to waste the time on trying to explain
again.

“These doorways,” Edene said. “Show me them.”

She turned to follow the ghul, but was briefly delayed as the venomous things of Reason emerged from the trees to pay her court—crawling many-legged things with claws and carapaces, brightly colored birds with barbed tongues, serpents whose scales spelled out invocations in intricate calligraphy. Edene did her duty by them all, accepted their homages—
Lady of the Broken Places; Mistress of the Poison Things
—but her heart chafed at the delay.

Temur had been here. And she would find him.

*   *   *

The ghulim had done a brief inventory and assessment, and the ring confirmed what they told Edene. Of the open doors, most led places that were either isolated or inhospitable—a mountaintop; blazing desert; a lifeless, sandy isle swept by winds that reeked of salt and iodine. There were doorways near the site of the glass demon attack, too—but none of them were open.

But one door led to a glade of golden trees, beyond it a rolling plain—and all around this area were the faded scents of Temur and all the others.

“This is something, at least,” Edene said. She traced the letters carved into the lintel with her fingertip. “Can you read this?”

Besha Ghul sidestepped close. “It tells where the door leads—”

“I’d assumed.” Edene kept her tone light, teasing, not wanting to see the ghulim flinch all around her.

“The Kyivvan steppe,” Besha continued as if Edene had not interrupted.

“Steppe,” Edene answered. “Yes. He might very well have chosen to go there.”

*   *   *

Though Ümmühan returned to her couch and lifted the prayer of silence immediately, she still lay awake, worry-wrinkles forming across her forehead, until the cracks around the shutters glowed and the caged songbirds in the next room twittered their greeting to the morning. Once she drifted off, she did not sleep much, for no sooner had she finally relaxed when one of the eunuchs Mehmed had claimed as spoils along with the palace came—most apologetically—to whisper her awake. Blinking and confused, she lurched halfway up, clutching the coverlet against her bosom.

It seemed the household was already arisen. Another slave struggled with the heavy bar on one set of shutters. Women moved about the chamber, the comfortable robes they wore in their own harem trailing in the autumn morning breeze that swept through as window after window was thrown open. The Demon Star had set, and now light and air could be allowed within, until the heat of the day grew too stifling.

Ümmühan struggled into a sitting position, wishing she could lean on the arm of the eunuch—but even that much contact, and even with someone who was no longer a man, was not permitted. She stretched her neck against the back of the couch in exhaustion. “Begging your pardon,” she said, barely remembering to simper. “Say that again?”

“Ka—the caliph our master. He is executing the Dead Men this morning.”

“Ysmat!” Ümmühan swore, then covered her mouth in consternation. A tiny cup of coffee, black and thick, appeared in her hand. She put it to her lips and licked the foam from the rim. Bitter and aromatic, it concentrated her thoughts. She swallowed it in one gulp and met the eunuch’s gaze.

He glanced down, preserving her modesty.

“The Dead Men who supported us?” Ümmühan asked, finally gathering herself enough to form the words into a sentence.

“And their families,” the eunuch said.

Ümmühan made a note to herself to learn his name. “Has he said why?”

The eunuch shrugged. “They turned coat on one master. Won’t they turn it again if the wind shifts?”

His tone was bitter, and Ümmühan knew why. They were all servants of great men, and the only protection they had from other great men was that service. Slaves and the indentured looked out for one another, because there was no one else who would. Oh, of course, there were always those who could not be trusted, who’d bear tales for a scrap of favor. Ümmühan considered such actions to be a sin.

“Is there nothing you can do?” the eunuch asked. “You have … the caliph’s eye, poetess.”

With her finger, she swiped the last dew of coffee and foam from inside the cup, and licked it away. “What is his intention?”

“The caliph has decreed that all the dependents will die, down to two years of age. The orphans will be raised as Dead Men. Unless they are female. Those will go to swell the harem.”

A blow to the belly could not have shortened Ümmühan’s breath more. She could hear voices rising from the courtyard now, a child weeping. “If I had more time—”

“There is no time.”

“He kept this from me on purpose,” she said. “He knew I would argue for the children, at least.”

It was more than just the potential for renewed treachery that would lead Mehmed to kill these men and their families, she knew. Because not only had they turned against their old master—but their old master had escaped, and many of their colleagues with him. There was no guarantee that one or more of the Dead Men—or their dependents—was not still loyal to the old caliph.

“I can’t,” she said, and bit the skin of her hand. “I can do nothing for them.”

The weeping and the voices became a great wailing, a shriek of denial and then a stunned silence followed by terrible screams. The executions had begun.

“I would go down and observe,” she told the eunuch. “I would give them at least that.”

His face had hardened. He looked like he had some Aezin in him, and some Messaline. When his expression set, it set like stone. He had considered what she said. She did not know whether the conclusion he had drawn was in her favor or against until he breathed out hard and sat back on his haunches, the fierceness gone out of him.

“You must not,” he said, glancing from one side to the other. No one was close enough to hear them. Ümmühan had already, surreptitiously, made sure. “If he already suspects you are in charity with those who would stay his hand … you will only arouse his suspicions. You too must be protected, poetess.”

“I
would
stay his hand,” she said savagely. “But mine is but a woman’s strength.”

“From a woman’s strength,”
recited the eunuch, shocking her,
“come we all.”