Steles of the Sky (2 page)

Another skinless corpse had been found nailed to a temple door, however. And her agents reported muttering that the smoke billowing from the Cold Fire sometimes took the shape of a malevolent face, pale sky staring through the empty whorls of its eyes.

The wizards said at least one of their agents reported more and more rumors of the Carrion King stalking the cold streets by night. Perhaps Yangchen had that rumor as much as the chill of encroaching winter to thank for the dissolution of the riots, come nightfall.

As for the palace—it had not been destroyed completely. One tower and a portion of the north wall had crumbled, the precisely hewn basalt stones blasted from their place by the force of the explosion. Yangchen could see clearly into several of the chambers and corridors, and she had an exquisite view of the workers below. Both stonemasons and rough laborers toiled—the laborers hauling cracked and collapsed stone, the stonemasons determining which rubble could safely be moved without collapsing the whole pile. The destroyed portion had contained the emperor’s apartments and the council chamber.

The limited destruction was why two of her son’s nurses were beside her, and her sister-wife Tsechen-tsa, and stooped old Baryan, with his spotted head uncovered because all of his hats were inside the ruined palace. That was why she was flanked by her husband’s advisors—her own advisors now—Gyaltsen-tsa and Munye-tsa, and not the whole of the council. It was also why the sun overhead was wrong and strange, a flat-looking pale yellow thing that seemed too hot and too close.

Yangchen-tsa closed her hands on the splintery wood of the unlacquered railing. She did not quite trust it to lean against. She’d scrambled up the ladder to watch this process because she felt it was her duty. Because she could not be entirely certain that this, too, was not her fault.

So many things were turning out to be.

There was no one Yangchen could speak to for comfort. Her only peer in the world was Tsechen, who stood beside her tall and impassive, with her hair undressed and her hands folded inside the sleeves of the soot-stained robe no one had been able to convince her to exchange. Yangchen’s clothes were fresh because she had been out of the palace when the detonation came, disguised as a commoner to confer with the wizards in their Citadel without her husband’s knowledge, and Baryan would not hear of her being seen as the empress regent in those wool and cotton rags.

Across the entire breadth of the city, even the ancient white walls of the Citadel had rattled with the force of the explosion, and she had stood beside Hong-la and his colleagues and watched smoke rise from the place that had been, for six years, her summer home.

Yangchen had had a mad urge, then, to take her son and head north, to keep her peasant garb and raise Namri as a—a calligrapher, an apothecary, a goatherd. Anything but an emperor.

Even as it occurred to her, she knew it for the fantasy of a child deluded by storybooks. Kings did not disguise themselves as noodle-shop proprietors. Empresses—even empresses widowed at the age of nineteen—did not toss everything aside and go running off to make a living by their fancy needlework.

Still, Yangchen was tempted. And she might have done it—except for the abiding horror that this, like so much else, was something she had caused to be done.

She could face the guilt for her own actions, her own ruthlessness. Her father had warned her it would be necessary, when she married both the future Emperor of Rasa and his brother. She could face the deaths—and the subtler wickednesses—that lay against her own choice, her own hand. It was harder to accept the evils she suspected she had been manipulated into facilitating.

It was up to her to do something about that.

She squared her shoulders in the borrowed robe—too long—and turned to Gyaltsen-tsa. He was younger than many of her late husband’s advisors, closer to the age of the fugitive once-princess Samarkar. He had kind eyes inside a framework of character wrinkles and had affected fresh flowers woven into his braid. Yesterday’s still draggled there, sour and browning, petals transparent with bruises and folds.

“We cannot stay here.” Yangchen gestured to the work below. “This is fruitless.”

“Dowager,” Baryan said from her other side, thus becoming the first to speak her new title. “Your Imperial husband—”

She looked at him, hating how the tightness of her lower lip drew up at the center as she fought tears. Her glare silenced Baryan—or perhaps the silent glare of the strange sky above was answer enough to his protest.

“If my husband were alive,” she said, “would the sky have changed? Another God has claimed this land, na-Baryan. Shall we wait for his army to come?”

He looked down. “Your son—”

“Must be protected. He is the Emperor of Rasa now. And he should be in Rasa, under a Rasan sky, where we can make him safe.” She turned, away from the shattered tower, toward the southern horizon. They were high enough atop this commandeered house for an unobstructed view down the fertile valley. Yangchen’s gesture took in the cradling hands of the mountains, the hills that centuries of cultivation had carved into scalloped terraces, the many-bridged canyon of the river as it plunged from stone to stone, dancing between the walls it had carved for itself. In spring the fields would be a thousand shades from pink to green to gold; now they were russet and umber or silvery-green, fallow under winter cover.
At least we got the harvest in.

But it wasn’t the fields she wanted her advisors to consider. It was the road that followed the course of the river, and the train of riders, walkers, and wagons—some one-wheeled, like giant barrows; some two-wheeled dog-carts; some four-wheeled for heavy hauling—upon it.

“With or without us,” Yangchen said, surprised at her own eloquence, “our people are leaving. The question before us is do we let them face the road alone—or do we go with them to Rasa, perhaps bring some wizards to protect them from the demonlings, and take the chance that we can save our empire?”

Baryan struggled for an answer. Yangchen knew he could out-argue her. She couldn’t afford to give him the opportunity. She turned to Gyaltsen, about to raise her appeal to his more sympathetic face—

A cry from below interrupted.
Not my husband’s body,
she prayed, turning back to the rail—even as she prayed that it was. She knew Songtsan was dead, knew it in her bones, knew it by the sky. But was it better, somehow, to hold a tiny fragment of uncertainty, of half-hope—or was it better to know unequivocally?

There was a flurry of activity among the ruins. Someone—one of the master stonemasons—was rushing to the ladder, climbing the wall of the appropriated house with one hand because a cloth sack swung in the other. He had his hands upon the rail where Yangchen’s hands had a moment before rested. Stone dust smeared his clothing and lightened his face.
Strange,
Yangchen thought with a terrible disconnection.
You’d think the dust of the Black Palace would be dark—

“Dowager,” the stonemason said, dropping his eyes abruptly. “Second-wife—”

Tsechen stepped forward. The hem of her dirty robes trembled against her shoes. Her hands knotted before her breast. She opened her mouth and made no words—just a moan.

“Honored sister-wife,” Yangchen said, placing one hand in the crook of Tsechen’s elbow. “Permit me.”

The look Tsechen gave her was not comfort but rage, but the anger seemed to strengthen her. She closed her mouth and did not draw away.

“Honored master mason,” Yangchen said. “What have you found?”

He stared at her for a moment longer and then knelt at the edge of the roof, one knee braced against the platform edge. Yangchen wondered how he did not tumble to his death, but masons must be used to scaffoldings. He reached into the mouth of the bag, fumbled, and with unsteady hands jerked it wide.

What he drew forth was the carven crown of Rasa, a spiked filigree circlet of oil-green olivine and peridot embedded in a matrix of opaque, crystalline gray iron, just as it had been cut from a piece of skystone on the command of Genmi-chen in the same year the Citadel was founded. Head lowered, he reached through the gaps in the railing and extended it up to Yangchen-tsa.

She took it in her hands. She had never been suffered to touch it before, and was surprised at its coolness and weight. It was smooth, as her fingers played over it, with only the faintest catch of changing texture where the stone and metal met. She turned it in her hands, the incredible delicacy of the filigree suggesting the forms of dragons, phoenixes, the Qooros. More familiar beasts—carp, hounds, serpents, tigers—were layered within, visible beneath the outer layer of pierced and lace-carved stone.

“It’s so heavy,” she said.

“Madam,” said the stonemason. “We have uncovered the treasury.”

Munye-tsa gasped. “Six Thousand heard you,” he said, laying a subtly restraining hand on na-Baryan. “It is a sign.”

*   *   *

Lightning throttled the column of ash and smoke writhing up the sky behind the refugee caravan. The Wizard Tsering—awkward astride a mare so weary the beast struggled to raise her head—had paused at the peak of a pass, reined her mount aside, and turned to look back along the snaking column. Groups of Qersnyk nomads and clumps of townsfolk from Tsarepheth trudged up the rise, heads as low as the mare’s. The train had spread out across the bottom of the valley; where the path ascended they fell naturally into single file again, winding up a series of switchbacks so steep Tsering-la could have dropped a persimmon on the head of someone below … had she a persimmon to spare.

Feathery ash blossoms starred her mare’s shoulders like snowflakes. The horse could have passed for one of the Qersnyk fancies with their spotted coats, but these spots smeared and gritted in the mare’s sweat when Tsering-la passed her hand across them. She had abandoned trying to brush the ash from the mare, from herself, or from her hat brim, but she still patted the horse’s shoulder. She was unclear as to which of them she was trying to reassure.

A vaster billow of smoke rolled out, down the distant flanks of the Cold Fire, to disappear behind the shoulders of nearer mountains. Tsering could imagine she caught the red glow behind it, but it was likely only the lightning. The earth dropped underfoot—suddenly, sickeningly, like missing a stair. Tsering clutched the pommel as the mare snorted and kicked out, too exhausted for more than a halfhearted attempt at panic. Behind and below, most of Tsering’s fellow refugees did not even raise their heads.

You could even become used to a volcano—or too tired to care about it anymore. Although the eruption seemed to be worsening as wizards fled the Citadel, their strengths no longer combined to restrain it.

She wondered if this billow of ash, this shaking of the earth, was the one that heralded the failure of those wizards still left behind at the White-and-Scarlet Citadel of Tsarepheth to protect it, the city that shared its name, and the plague victims too weak to be moved—and who would have no hope of surviving away from the brewing vats of Ashra’s healing ale. The master of Tsering’s order, Yongten-la, and the others who remained behind were risking their lives for the sick—and for the Citadel, with its libraries and laboratories harboring irreplaceable centuries of knowledge.

There was very little those who were
not
wizards could do to protect themselves if the Cold Fire decided to kill them. And as for the wizards … Tsering had never found her power. All her theory, all her understanding of the mechanics of how the universe worked, would not avail her if a blast of superheated poisonous gases pushed a wall of ash and stone down on them, if molten glass rained from the sky.

She wondered if even Hong-la could manage to protect anyone, protect himself, in such a case as that.

As if her thoughts had been a summoning—and surely even the master wizard from Song could not hear minds—the tallest walker toiling up the path below raised his head and looked up at her. Even at a distance, the gesture revealed the strong lines of a long-jawed, rectangular face beneath the sloped brim of his hat. It was a peasant’s cap, meant to shade the head and shoulders while working under the blazing sun, and it did a remarkable job of shedding ash. Trust Hong-la to recognize the easiest, most elegant solution.

Wait there,
he mouthed.

Tsering raised a hand in acknowledgment. Her throat burned with the fumes of sulfur. She soothed her mare again and watched Hong-la climb. Eventually, it occurred to her that she could dismount and offer the horse water. She was no expert rider, preferring shank’s mare—or soul’s—to the actual sons of the wind, but she ran her hands down the mare’s legs and checked her feet, wondering how she would know if something was wrong and—if she found it—what she could do about it.

Samarkar, with her noble past, would have known how to care for the horse. Or Ashra, who had spent so many years among the Qersnyk. But Samarkar was far away, if she were even alive still, and Ashra …

Ashra was not alive.

Reminded, Tsering touched the saddlebags for reassurance, feeling the resilience of cloth and the weight of stones within. Those objects were the reason why she rode rather than walking. Tsering-la was one of the wizards and shaman-rememberers entrusted with carrying the wards, a cowing responsibility.

As she was placing the mare’s last hoof gently on the ground once more, the steady rhythm of trudging feet, clopping hooves, and turning wheels cresting the pass and starting down the other side was broken as carters and walkers hesitated in order to stare. She turned, and found Hong-la beside her—arms folded, chin tucked, standing on air as if it were a solid stone platform. He had levitated himself from his place below more easily than she could have scrambled up the slope.

She bit down on her reflexive envy and turned to him as he stepped forward sedately, his split Song-style boot coming to rest on the stone of her vantage point.

Tsering thought of Hong-la as a sort of human Citadel, a broad-built, bony tower of intellect and impervious strength. It was a shock to see his complexion faded and grayish, the smile and concentration lines beside his eyes furrowed so deep they seemed inflamed. His usually cropped hair, twisted into sweaty spikes by the exertion of the climb, protruded raggedly around the perimeter where his hat rested against his scalp. It seemed grayer, even—but that might be the ash.