Steles of the Sky (22 page)

Then she thought,
Of course she’s right. An empress regent can’t go running out into a fight—

—a commander cannot huddle behind walls while men die on her behalf.

Yangchen nodded. Tsechen removed her hand. And both women, simultaneously, yanked open the door. Munye-tsa might have started forward as if to remonstrate with them, but he was still levering himself from his seat as Tsechen slammed the door behind them and made sure it latched.

A swirl of breathtaking cold enveloped them, ice particles stinging Yangchen’s face. One incautious gasp and she started coughing, her tender lungs spasming at the insult. The temperature had dropped precipitously; this was glacial air from the peaks, rolling down upon them cold as fear. It would freeze fingers and toes, faces, in moments. Though the delay chafed, Yangchen paused to stomp into her boots, shrug on her long coat and mittens, pull up the hood and tie the flaps across her cheeks, mouth, and nose. The guards outside milled uncertainly; their sergeant tried to question her and was waved aside. Something fumbled at her hand; she looked down to see Tsechen’s mitten clutching hers.

Before them, the night was brilliant and blind. The swirling snow captured the light of scattered fires, refracted and reflected it as if they stood inside a diamond. The result was a diffuse glow, sufficient to render the night soft-seeming—welcoming—even as the brutal frigidity took Yangchen’s very voice.

Yangchen held one hand before her as they stepped out of the dubious shelter of the awning. She
could
see her mitten at the end of her coat sleeve, but not plainly. It was as if she submerged her hand in milky, turbid water. She clung to Tsechen’s right hand; turning, she could see that Tsechen’s left hand clung to a rope that had been left tied and coiled beside the door. Apparently the errand-girl
had
thought of that safeguard herself. Yangchen told herself to learn the girl’s name. She’d heard it, she was sure—but the court ladies came and went like birds in a flock, and so many of them were frivolous and foolish, it was hard for Yangchen to make herself care.

A dangerous habit, to scorn those so close to you.

Yes, Father.
It was only a memory she responded to, but she burned as hot with shame as if he stood before her.

“Which way?” Tsechen asked, before Yangchen could make a coward of herself by stepping back into the shelter of the wagon. But she was no child to huddle under her sleeping robes. She was the dowager, and there was no monster out here that could not follow her within those fragile wooden walls.

Yangchen pointed her extended hand. She could still hear the noise of a fight, not far off. Five steps, ten—side by side—while other wagons and more makeshift shelters loomed out of the snow and vanished behind them. The snow came in veils and patterns, and if Yangchen watched carefully, she could see snatches of landscape through it. There, that was the rope corral, with red rags dulled by darkness tied along the edges. And there was the flash of a blade, a soldier awkward in winter gear wielding a spear against something Yangchen could not see. A towering dark shape, glimpsed for a moment, vanished again in a swirl of snow. Terrified livestock lowed and whinnied. A shaggy pony plunged past, almost knocking Tsechen down.

Something marked white and dark lay on the ground, crusted in snow, darkness soaking into the churned drifts that surrounded it.

Shuffle!
She thought, surprised at the level of her panic for a beast. She ran forward, dragging Tsechen, only to be caught by the opposite arm and slung around in an arc. She slid and skidded, her attempts to balance herself impeded by Tsechen hauling on one arm and the unknown person on the other.

“Dowager!”

She stopped struggling and let her weight drag on the grip on her arm to steady herself. “Doctor Anil!”

“There’s a bear,” he said. “Stay back!”

She jerked her arm from his grasp—not too hard, when she worked at it. Mittens did not offer the surest grip. “Go,” she said. “We’ll remain here.”

Her try for regal calm sounded mostly breathless, but he was nearly shouting. She doubted he’d notice.

He gave her sleeve a tug, as if to assure himself of her reality. “Hide under a wagon if it gets past the soldiers.”

Then he turned and ran heavily forward, lifting his feet high and still plowing through the drifted snow. A bright satiny glow crystallized around his upraised, mittened hands, a plum-blossom light so intense and pure that Yangchen was seized by the desire to drink it. It pulsed from him in waves, fading from that violet-red to a pure warm white color as it passed beyond his immediate sphere. And each wave seemed to catch the falling snow as if in a seine, pushing it aside, clearing a space around Anil-la and what Yangchen could now see were three guardsmen armed with spears. The soldiers were lined up before Anil and the women, against a great lean shape, silver-blue in the pale light—the color of a blue mastiff—with a pale blond ruff and a long, snarling tan face. It loomed over the half-crouched men, waving paws as big as frying pans.

“Blue bear,” Tsechen said. “Oh, the Six Thousand are angry with us.”

With me,
Yangchen thought.
With the treason I have done. Even the elements reject me—and the demons hail me as their savior.

What have I done?

A weaseling part of her replied,
An empress regent can commit no treason, except against her son. She
is
the state—

Her own excuses made her sick.
I was not the empress regent then!

She drew Tsechen back into the shelter of a wagon’s wall as Anil-la’s shells of light battered them with successive palls of snow. She wasn’t sure how much use ducking under such a thing would be—surely the bear could overturn it, or just reach under. They’d be dragged out like rabbits from a burrow, squirming in the polecat’s jaws.

A few running steps ahead, Anil-la blazed like the heart of a forge. His hands upraised, the light still pulsed from him like ripples chasing one another from the impact of a stone. The light washed Yangchen and Tsechen, making Tsechen’s lovely features ragged and stark with cutting shadows. There was no warmth in the light. Yangchen found that—cold light—the eeriest effect of magic, and thought she would have welcomed even painful heat. Unless it charred her flesh, it could not hurt more than this unholy cold in the bones of her hands.

Tsechen shook her head, disbelieving. Her lip had split; blood froze upon her chin.

“Tie your muffler,” Yangchen said.

Tsechen just shook her head again.

“Obey me!” Yangchen snapped.

Tsechen’s hands did as Yangchen ordered, but her eyes stayed fixed on the fight. “How did it get this far into the camp? Past men and animals? And why?”

How did it get this far into the camp?
Yangchen raised a hand to shield her face from the next thick wave of snow. “Why isn’t it
hibernating
?”

Tsechen looked at her, a frown unflattering between her smoky eyes. She’d be feeling that split lip soon, as her face thawed and blood began to soak the fur. “Does it have the rage plague?”

Yangchen’s gut dropped. She winced, a prayer to the Petal Warrior and the Compassionate One brief on her lips. If it did have the rage plague, and if it bit one of the guards, or Doctor Anil—even the wizards had no cure. They would go mad, and suffer excruciating pain, and die in frothing convulsions unless she ordered them given mercy.

And it would be she who gave that order—unless the bear got her first.

The bear seemed to be distracted and bewildered by the waves of light and snow sweeping over it. It reared up, great paws paddling the air, making confused noises when it was not bellowing. The dying yak at its feet gave one last heave, lifting a dark head, and Yangchen took an involuntary half-step forward. Tsechen pulled her back. “We need a weapon—”

Perhaps having the wizard at their back had given the spearmen a chance to regroup and to coordinate their attack. They moved forward as one, separating into three prongs as they came up on the bear. The animal swatted, growling in a tone so low it made Yangchen’s belly shiver with sympathetic vibration. She squeezed Tsechen’s hand and felt Tsechen squeeze back.

The bear whirled, immensely nimble for its size. It swiped left and right. A spear-shaft splintering sounded like a snapped limb, or perhaps what Yangchen heard was the soldier’s arm. The man in front of it was knocked back, sliding in snow. She shouted, saw the bear’s tawny face swing toward her, the froth that rimmed its bloody jaws. One of the flanking soldiers lunged forward and plunged his spear into the bear’s abdomen, just in front of the hind leg.

If it had cried out before, now it howled. It spun again, dragging the man around, and lunged toward him. Spears for hunting bear had cross-guards, so the animal could not walk up the shaft and kill as they were killed. These were spears intended for combat with other men, and as the man held on grimly, the point of the spear emerged from between the bear’s ribs on the opposite side. It swung at him with a massive forepaw, but as long as he held the butt of the spear it pushed him away behind it each time it tried to strike and turn.

That would last until it managed to push the spear entirely through its intestines.

It was dead. The only question was how long it would take to stop fighting.

Yangchen tasted fur, realized she had shoved her muffler between her teeth while trying to bite down on the back of her left hand. She made a hard choked sound. The man who had been knocked down, spear or bone shattered, was dragging himself forward again. He had an axe—just a woodcutting axe, that he might have snatched from the ties of any cart nearby—in his left hand, and his right arm dangled by his side. The third soldier circled, choked up on his spear, looking for his opportunity to dart in and catch the bear from another angle.

Another light flared—a red-violet star around the head of the transfixing spear. Anil-la gestured with his right hand, his left still upraised, the shells of light still bursting from it. The new magic seemed to lock the spearhead in place, jerking the bear to a halt.

It roared, thrashing side to side like a gaffed fish. The third soldier took his chance and darted in, plunging his spear into the bear’s chest below the forward point of the shoulder. He ducked one swipe of the paw, released the spear, and was knocked back before he could dance clear.

Anil-la still pinioned the first spear as solidly as if it were cemented into a wall. But somehow, suddenly the bear was free of it, the man who had been clinging to the butt sprawling in the snow. Yangchen did not clearly see what happened next: the snow gusted, the bear backed into the snowy darkness, violently shaking its head. Someone shouted. The man with the axe charged forward, chasing the retreating bear. The spear—still held midair—collapsed to the snow, and the waves of light pulsing from Anil-la intensified.

But they showed nothing, now, but blowing snow and the three soldiers dragging themselves from the snow, forming ranks again behind the crushed body of the yak.

Yangchen ran forward, dragging Tsechen with her when Tsechen would not let go. The ground was uneven; the snow slid and squeaked and dragged against her boots. She got her hand free, but heard Tsechen still running beside her as they charged past Anil-la. Her sister-wife overshot as Yangchen stumbled to a halt beside the downed animal.

It was not Shuffle, she saw with abject relief, then felt a twist of guilt. Because if it was not
her
animal, it was still an animal, and until a few moments before it had been as alive and sensitive as Shuffle. No, worse. It was still alive—and suffering greatly, heaving in whistling breaths, half-disemboweled by a swipe of the bear’s claws, ribs staved in so the shape of its barrel was awkward and lumpy.
Like a slept-in bed,
Yangchen thought, and laid her hand behind its ear. Through the mitten, she could not feel its heat, or the pulse of blood, but it seemed to calm under the pressure.

“Anil-la,” Tsechen called. “The beast is suffering.”

He must have come up on them, because he crouched beside Yangchen and put his mittened hand over hers. This was the night when every man and woman of Rasa would lay hands on the imperial person, apparently. He reached for his knife, the square-pommeled blade that every Rasan seemed to carry from the cradle, and she imagined him feeling for the yak’s pulse under the line of its jaw, the spill of hot blood on the snow.

“I’ll do it,” she said, and took the knife out of his hand. Hers shook, and the cold when she pulled her right mitten off with her teeth was numbing, daunting. Somehow, reaching over its neck from her position behind its head, she managed to locate the throbbing vein with her numb fingertips where they burrowed through shaggy coat. The animal’s warmth kept her from losing sensation entirely. She was grateful. The animal moaned, a sound that shuddered through her from her knees, pressed as they were against its hide. Quickly, she grasped the knife. The hilt burned with cold; if her hand had not been dry, she would have frozen to it instantly. She put the point against the hollow of the throat.

“Push hard, Dowager,” said Anil-la. “Her spirit will thank you for it.”

The skin was tough, hard to pierce. She tested once, found the strength, and realized it would be easier to slash than thrust. As Anil-la concentrated his light over them, the edge of the knife winked like a razor. Of course he kept it honed.

Yangchen focused her gaze on the knife, on the hide beneath, on the shaggy fur over the vein.
Just like cutting meat,
she thought. She pressed down hard and drew the blade toward her, sudden and decisive.

So you can not only kill by treachery.

The blood fountained—away from her, toward the trampled snow where the men had fought the bear. Toward the darkness into which they had vanished in pursuit. The yak thrashed and Yangchen tumbled back, Tsechen and Anil dancing aside more adroitly. It convulsed, once, twice, legs scrabbling in its own intestines as it struggled pitifully to stand.