Steles of the Sky (21 page)

By the time Tsering reclaimed her dinner and her sticks, it had cooled enough that she didn’t actually need the utensils. She used them anyway, because Jurchadai was watching, and she was enjoying his warmth against her shoulder.

She had been so distracted that until she set her bowl aside and reflexively checked the horizon again, she hadn’t noticed the eastern sky’s mysterious refusal to go completely dark. The mountains alongside the pass were still visible, not just as blacker shapes against a black starfield but silhouetted on a smoky red horizon like andirons before a dying fire.

“What on earth?”

Hong-la sighed. His long face gave away nothing of the context in which Tsering should interpret that sigh. He paused a moment before he answered, “That is the Soft-day light. We are close enough to Song to catch a glimpse of its sky.”

*   *   *

Tsering slept better that night than any night since they had left Tsarepheth. She had feared, she realized now, that the Rahazeen sky would extend as if in nightmare—that they would reach Song, perhaps even the steppe, and find only its backward light. The dim glow in the east was brighter in the morning, the blue of that quarter sharp and intense against the washed-out color of the rest.

“Hard-day,” Hong-la said when she asked him. She had read of Song’s two suns, of course. She looked forward to seeing them for herself.

Once they had packed up and made sure the fire was dead—and collected their allotted warding stones and staves—Tsering was pleased to find that the women who had adopted them had returned to collect the previous night’s bowls and bring new, noodles in butter and tea with eggs cracked into them. She’d seen the poultry in cages strapped to the flanks of mules or balanced on wagons. She was surprised and delighted to discover the birds were laying—although Qersnyk poultry were probably accustomed to the inconveniences of travel.

Jurchadai thanked them as before, and as before Tsering and Hong-la tried to copy his forms. This time, after the women had left, he gently corrected them. “I thank them as to family. You must be more formal—so.” He demonstrated.

Tsering covered her mouth in embarrassment. “They are your family?”

“All Qersnyk are my kin. I am a shaman-rememberer.”

She bit her lip. Surely her curiosity would be taken amiss. But it was what made her a wizard, and she could not quite hold it back. “Do you have family? Blood family?”

He smiled. He handed her his empty bowl to stack with her own and stood. As he fussed with the cinch on his belled and knotted saddle, he said, “Of course. Must wizards give up their family?”

She was not the only one curious, then. Pleased but cautious, she answered, “No. Only our hopes of children.”

He hummed to himself. His mare was holding her breath against the girth. He tapped her shoulder and waited for her to get bored.

Tsering took his silence as permission to ask another question. “Can shaman-rememberers marry?”

“We can marry,” he said. “Women or men, or other shaman-rememberers. And we can get babies as well.”

“Well,” she said. “I couldn’t help with that anyway.” And then she clapped her hand to her mouth again, her face scalding. She hadn’t meant to say that at all.

“Of course you could,” Jurchadai said. The mare let out her breath with a disgusted noise; he hauled the girth tight and she flicked her ears, thwarted. “You know how to change a swaddling cloth, I’m sure.”

12

Yangchen might have brooded longer and more on the visitation by the obsidian demonlings, but there were too many tasks requiring her attention and her hand. She had known housekeeping and logistics, the tasks of a mistress. Now she learned administration and command—the tasks of a master, as well. From the moment when she rose to the moment when she slept again, one subject after another was before her, each with a problem demanding her solution. At night when she dreamed, she dreamed rations and supplies.

She demanded she be left alone to visit the privy, however—and it was there the gray bird found her.

Yangchen arose from her squat, legs trembling with more than cold, to face the eagle-sized, long-necked raptor that gazed at her with cold yellow eyes from the top of the woven partition separating the privy from the rest of the camp. The bird had a silver capsule attached to its leg with a scrap of ribbon. Now it extended that leg to her, fluffing its crimson crest.

A message from her benefactor. A message from her manipulator.

Before Yangchen quite knew what she was doing, her hands darted forward. They closed not on the capsule, or the bird’s leg, but on its long feathered throat.

It did not even have time for a surprised squawk as she whipped it around in a circle, wringing its neck. It struggled—a reflex, only—then hung limp from her fist, dripping guano.

Yangchen swallowed thin vomit and made herself look carefully at what she’d done. She peeled the capsule from its leg and dropped it into the privy, making sure it vanished in thin excrement.

When she returned to the camp, she tossed the bird at the first cook she saw. “Pluck that. Gut it. Roast it,” she told him. “And give it to someone needy.”

He had caught the bird out of reflex rather than readiness. Now he stopped staring long enough to bob his head to her and stammer, “Dowager.”

Yangchen wiped her hands on her robe as she marched away. There was no blood on them, but they still didn’t feel clean.

*   *   *

Yangchen and her caravan had beaten the snow out of the mountains, but they did not beat it to Rasa. On the second day below the last pass, the Steles of the Sky behind them were lost in palls of whirling cloud, and the white flakes swept down and thickened the air until Yangchen could not see Shuffle’s horns before her. She was warm enough in her coat and winged hat, but with every gesture the snow cracked and shifted on her arms as if she bent a cake of pressed rice.

Gyaltsen-tsa rode up beside her, bowing so low in the saddle she was afraid he might slide off into a drift. “Dowager,” he said. “Your imperial sister-wife sends to suggest that it would be wise to make a halt and wait out the snow. The weak will not survive if we press on and it gets deeper.”

He left unsaid the inevitable: It would get deeper.

“You agree with Tsechen-tsa, Gyaltsen-tsa? What if we are snowbound here, and starve?”

“Dowager, I think her counsel is wise. Far more likely that this first storm of winter will pass, and we will have a few more days to fly toward Rasa before the next and more dangerous one comes along. We may even find shelter along the road. There are towns and farms, madam.”

Thick flakes sifted from Yangchen-tsa’s lashes when she blinked. “And I find your counsel to be sound. Wind the horns, call a halt. If we press on much farther, we will begin to find ourselves at the confluences of the Tsarethi and its many tributaries, and we will not wish to assay that in the snow.”

He blinked as if she’d impressed him. She didn’t tell him she was repeating an observation that Anil-la had made over supper the night before.

The camp was pitched in haste. Yangchen did something she rarely did anymore, and rather than observing the process, she withdrew to her wagon. It was warm within—or at least as warm as thick rugs draping the walls and tended braziers could make it—and Tsechen and two or three ladies were there, as well as Namri and his senior nurse. The wizards who slept there by day had already moved outside, ready to do what they could to help the caravan.

Yangchen stripped outside the door and hung up her snowy coat so it could remain frozen rather than becoming sodden in the heat. When she limped within, her fingers and face already ached with cold, even from that brief exposure.

“You’d think the snow would be gray,” said Tsechen, as Yangchen settled herself by the brazier on the yoke-chair kept especially for her. “From the ash.”

Their détente, such as it was, seemed to be holding. Even if it mostly extended to talking about the weather currently, and to Yangchen taking Tsechen’s advice on the problems of travel.

“Perhaps the snow washed it all from the sky before it traveled so far as this.” Yangchen extended her arms for Namri. Without a word, the nurse rose and brought him. She slid him into the dowager’s arms, leaving Yangchen with a sudden, powerful memory of the former dowager—Yangchen’s mother-in-law—seated just as Yangchen was seated now, women gathered around her. It struck her, as it had never struck her before, that she—
she,
Yangchen—was the most powerful person in the Rasan Empire. Not just wife to an emperor. Not even first-wife to an emperor. But Dowager Empress in her own right, and regent with an infant son who would not assume his majority for twenty-four and a half years.

She had worked for this. Betrayed, murdered for it. Poisoned the land she claimed to protect, and opened the door for monsters to infest it. All for this dream of power, which her father had both groomed her for and groomed her to believe she would never be strong enough to claim or hold.

The reality—the responsibility—terrified her.
What am I going to do?

But the competing reality of the babe at her breast reminded her that she had to do something. As Namri latched and began to nurse—with less fussing than his custom—Yangchen turned to the youngest of the ladies, the one perforce seated closest to the drafts of the door, and said, “Fetch Munye-tsa, pray.”

The girl stood and let herself out into a swirling wall of whiteness. It was well they had stopped when they did; Yangchen feared now that some would not have time to start and shelter fires before the cold of night descended. The awning over the wagon’s entrance would keep the snow out of the girl’s collar while she shrugged into a coat and stomped boots over her slippers, but Yangchen did not envy her the search for Yangchen’s advisor. Perhaps she should call after her to string a rope, so she could at least follow it back to the wagon—but by the time Yangchen thought of it, the door was shut and the footsteps outside had retreated.

Well, any Rasan girl would know more about surviving a blizzard than Yangchen, bred and born in soft, fecund Song. She bowed her head over Namri, savoring his warmth, careful to keep her own cold hands on his swaddling clothes or shielded by her long sleeve, rather than laying them directly on his unbelievably soft skin. When Tsechen picked up her seven-stringed lute and stripped her own sleeves back, Yangchen smiled. There was something to be said for music when the sky shed its frozen feathers and wheels creaked to a cold halt.

By the time the girl returned with Munye-tsa, the nurse, relieved temporarily of Namri’s care, had stirred herself to cook tea with noodles and brought bowls around to each of the women. The noodles were dried, not fresh, but for the first time it occurred to Yangchen that as an experience of hardship went, having enough to eat and a warm dry place to sleep might be considered the lap of luxury by many.

She was having an adventure. Some of the people outside were fighting for their lives.

When Munye-tsa and the errand-girl were also provided for and sat warming their blue hands on their bowls, Yangchen gave the emperor back to his nurse. She applied herself to her own food without distraction now, warming the cooling noodles with fresh tea. She slurped them from the bowl’s edge like a peasant, the heat seeping through her chilled body while she gave Munye, too, an opportunity to stop shivering and focus his thoughts. He was old and stick-thin, once tall and now bent like a bow. His fingers stayed blue around the nail beds long after the hands of the errand-girl were warm and olive-toned again.

It occurred to her that this was something Anil-la would do, or the dead Bstangpo’s younger brother Tsansong. The Bstangpo, her husband, himself would never have offered an underling the courtesy of time to warm himself so that he might think better. His own time was too precious to him.

Finally, Yangchen said, “The soldiers—are they helping the needy pitch camp?”

“Dowager. There is also a communal kitchen in place, where those who cannot build their own fire can come and sit and eat,” Munye said. “It was Anil-la’s idea, and na-Baryan thought it would please your majesty.”

“How much fuel do we have?”

“There is a lot of dung. Less coal.” The arc of his hand encompassed the dimly lit wagon box, the dull brazier glow that barely revealed tapestried walls. “Few lamps or candles.”

“And the storm,” she said. “Do the wizards have an idea of its duration?”

“Not long,” he said. “A day or two—they
hope
. Weather witching is never precise, as you understand, and they do not have their books of ancient records here. But I am given to understand that these early season storms rarely last more than a few days on the plateau. Tsarepheth, however, may be cut off until spring.”

Yangchen had never been in Tsarepheth in winter. But it was easy for her to imagine the snow drifted second-story deep along the ancient city’s narrow streets, a warm and isolating blanket. The wizards would be snug in their Citadel, warmed from below by the hot springs of the Cold Fire, whose heat was what kept the valley habitable and unglaciated at all. Her inner eye offered an image of the Black Palace frosted white like an iced bun before she remembered its trellised towers cracked and smoking like the peak of the Cold Fire.

Yangchen had to set down her bowl before the remains of the tea slopped over her shaking hands.

“Perhaps we could have a story,” she said. “There is no light to read. Who knows something by heart?”

*   *   *

Munye-tsa had barely begun the story of the Flower-Girl and the Peach-Boy (a Song tale, and one Yangchen guessed he might have chosen to curry favor with her) when the tenor of the noise from outside changed. Shouts and a clamor of metal arose; then the horrid screaming of an injured animal. Yangchen started to her feet before she realized she was moving, and Tsechen was moving as well. She put her hand on the latch string as Tsechen put her fingertips on Yangchen’s wrist and both women froze. Their eyes met; Yangchen for one moment thought wildly,
I could have her dismembered for that.