Steles of the Sky (23 page)

And then it heaved and lay still.

Yangchen stood. She handed the bloody knife back to Anil. The blood was already freezing on her hand. Her mitten was gone, lost when the yak thrashed out its life. She shoved the bloody hand into her pocket. That cold on her cheeks might be tears freezing, too.

“See that the meat is distributed,” she said to Tsechen. “Doctor Anil, follow the soldiers. They may catch up with that thing again.”

His knife in his hand, the blood still steaming even as it froze to the blade, he started at her direct command. And then he bowed as low as the snow would allow, turned and ran into the darkness, his violet witchlights swirling about him like a swarm of luminescent chrysanthemums.

Yangchen watched until he was out of sight. Then she turned and made her way toward the milling animals, looking for Shuffle.

*   *   *

Anil found her and Tsechen later, huddled beside the covered brazier in the darkness of their wagon, unspeaking and unsleeping. Yangchen heard his voice, lowered, conversing with the guards beyond the door, so she had enough time to straighten herself up and light a stub of taper from the embers.

He prostrated himself before the guards had even closed the door behind him. Yangchen sighed, sick unto death of rank and formality—
how quickly we grow jaded—
and finally found her creaking voice to tell him, “Come and sit.”

“Dowager,” he said, and sat across the brazier from her and Tsechen.

Tsechen raised her eyes. “The bear?”

“Vanished in the snow.” He held his hands to the brazier. Yangchen thought,
I should offer him tea.
But she would have to wake one of the women—

Her head ached with the contradictions. Any action for his comfort would discommode someone else. Or she could make the tea herself, but she was the Dowager Empress Regent. It was not done, for her to serve another. She froze between kindness and protocol, and could not decide what to do.

“Vanished in the snow?” In the silence that followed, she too held her hands out to the brazier. She looked down, to make him more comfortable. “But it was bleeding—”

“We should have been able to follow the trail, this is true. I am sorry, Dowager. There is no excuse for our failure. The trail … stopped. Among the tents and the sheltered cookfires, and no one could tell us where it had gone. Of course, the snow was heavy, and it could have walked close by any of the campsites and gone unseen. But there should have been blood, and they should have heard it, at least—and it does not seem possible that an injured, raging beast could have staggered through a crowded encampment without plunging through a half-dozen households.”

“Spirit,” Tsechen said, then covered her mouth as if she had realized that she had not been invited to speak.

Yangchen made a brushing-aside motion, half forgiveness and half out of the desire to avert misfortune. But she found herself agreeing. “An angry spirit.”

“Dowager”—he hesitated—“have you heard the rumors that the misfortunes that beset us…? Well. There are some who think they have a common cause.”

Yangchen had her own theories as to what that common cause might be. A chill settled into her shoulders.
My own actions. I brought this down on us. And now they know.
But she was not about to admit her suspicions of her own culpability.

She made a quick, cupping gesture with her right hand.
Continue.

Anil glanced aside, as if someone else might step in and save him. Finding himself alone except for the two frowning imperial wives facing him, and the lightly snoring row of women beside the wall, he said, “The Carrion King. It is possible that the demon spawn, the skinned corpses, the awakening of the Cold Fire … these things…”

“These things,” said Tsechen, “could herald his return.”

Miserably, eyes downcast, he nodded.

“This was long ago,” she breathed. “When the sky was higher than it is now.” It was a horrible idea, the Joy-of-Ravens resurrected. And yet she felt a surge of hope at the idea. A surge of relief. Maybe it wasn’t all her fault, after all. Maybe it was not misfortune and ill luck brought down on her household by the failure of her own filial duty. Maybe the empress had not poisoned her nation by proxy as she poisoned certain other things in fact.

She thought about stories. About the stories her father had told her, and the ones she read her women from books, or heard recounted by storytellers and bards summoned to bring her stories she had not heard before. She thought about how, in stories, any trick the hero performs is justified by the evil of those he performs it upon. How there are people whom one can behead, or trample, or push into a fire with impunity. How no one will mourn them.

It was comforting to think that there was a greater evil here. That she was not simply a foolish empress who had made a terrible alliance and opened her empire up to a curse.

“Comforting thoughts should be questioned more stringently than any others. For they are more likely to lead us astray, as we wish to believe them.”

“Dowager?”

“My father taught me that. My father, the Prince under the Yellow Range.”

“Are you saying, Dowager, that you think talk of the Carrion King’s return is a comforting lie?”

She bit her lip. The urge to confess her sins, her complicity and treason, to these—Anil-la and Tsechen-tsa, the wizard and the emperor’s wife—was so strong on her that she almost reached into her mouth to grab her tongue and hold it still from talking. For a moment, she wondered if she had been ensorcelled to spew truth, like Queen Fade of legend, but in a moment it passed and her racing heart began to settle.

“It would be nice to have someone to blame, don’t you think?”

There. That was the truth, or near enough to it. Lying to wizards was a dangerous habit to get into.

Tsechen was looking at her. Yangchen arched her brows; the other woman glanced aside.

“It would,” he said. “And it’s nice, sometimes, to feel as if there’s nothing we can do about a situation, when whatever we could do would be hard, risky, expensive, or unpleasant.”

Something about the emphasis in his voice drew her attention. He was telling her something important, albeit obliquely. It was up to her to figure out what.

She missed Hong-la, suddenly. He was Song, like her. Even if he’d never been able to stand her, they felt the pulse of a conversation the same way. These Rasani were always somehow slightly …
off.

Right now, for example, he obviously expected her to fill the silence—as if he had left it for her as a politeness, like the last dumpling on a plate.

“But … it may not be safe?” she hazarded. “Because the stories we believe shape the way we act?”

“And the stories others believe shape the way we are regarded, and how they respond to us.” He shrugged. “Would you rather be seen as the noble underdog struggling against an ancient, implacable enemy—or the victim who will inevitably be crushed? Or the naïve, the denier who will never know what landed on her? Some of those same rumors say that the Qersnyk that my colleague Samarkar-la and your sister-wife Payma-tsa fled with is his reincarnation. That this Re Temur is the Sorcerer-Prince reborn, and catastrophe follows in his wake. Blood ghosts, demons, war, and fire.…”

Yangchen pinched the bridge of her nose. She was aware that her perfect, implacable political mask was slipping, and had no idea what she revealed. She glanced at Tsechen and met blank, intentional inscrutability. No help there. She didn’t want to talk about Payma, or her sister-in-law, the Wizard Samarkar.

“Doctor, how would the leader of a house under a curse go about lifting that curse?”

He nibbled his thumb, dropping his challenging gaze, accepting the change of subject without a struggle. “It depends on the source of the curse. Hexed by a witch is one thing. A curse stone is another—”

“Say someone in the household attracted unfavorable attention from the Six Thousand.”

“Wrath of the gods,” he said. “Very tricky.” He leaned forward and gently picked a white yak hair off the front of her robe. “Was it the leader of that household that drew the anger, or a subordinate?”

She shrugged.

He looked at her for so long she considered accusing him of insolence. She refrained, however—it was clear that he had only forgotten himself. Finally, he let his eyes drop and said, “I will research it—as best I might, under the circumstances—and see what I can learn, Dowager.”

“Thank you.” Yangchen rose, obliging Anil and Tsechen to rise also.

“Doctor Anil. When you have finished your duties for the night, you will return here to sleep.”

“Dowager—”

“You are a eunuch, wizard,” she said. “There is no impropriety in it. And my ladies and I will sleep sounder for your protection, when blue bears and Six Thousand know what else roam the night.”

Anil-la bowed very low before he left.

In the silence after his leave-taking, Tsechen and Yangchen turned as if of one accord and wordless made themselves ready for sleep, if sleep would come. Although she knew it would fluster them come the morning, she chose not to wake the attendants. She and Tsechen could braid one another’s hair for bed.

Through the night, Yangchen dozed fitfully. As sounds from without grew more muffled, it seemed as if those within the wagon were concentrated. The breathing of the women, the occasional pop of the covered brazier, the creak of the roof under the increasing weight of snow. The whisk of falling flakes against the walls. Anil-la’s return, the stamping of his boots on the porch, the cold that entered with him and the sound of eventual, sleeping breath.

The storm gave no signs of abating. They would not be traveling tomorrow either.

Yangchen heard Tsechen’s breathing break. It had been a little too smooth and soft, and she did not think Tsechen was sleeping deeply either.

Her whisper still startled Yangchen, though. “Dowager … did you kill the old Dowager Empress?”

Yangchen bit her lip. Feign sleep? Answer? Lie? These were not ideal conditions for a lengthy discussion of treason. Finally, she just said, “And if I did?”

“If you did, Dowager, you should not have allowed Tsansong-tsa to be burned for it.”

“Your argument is impeccable,” Yangchen agreed.

Tsechen rose in the dark, her layers of warm clothes rustling.

“What are you doing?”

“Clearing the vents,” Tsechen said. “So the fire doesn’t breathe up all the air and leave us to suffocate.”

In silence, Yangchen got up to help. She tore an already-ragged nail and bit the scrap off, tasting blood. She thought with amusement of how she once would have guarded her lacquered and bejeweled talons with fingerstalls and the avoidance of all work. A clear chimney assured, she and Tsechen lay side by side in silence again.

Eventually, Yangchen thought Tsechen slept once more.

13

Brother Hsiung ran on through the rising heat of Hard-day, as his shadow stretched before him, flickering long then short over the uneven ground like a serpent’s questing tongue. He’d stripped his sandals and tucked them into his pack. His feet beat an unsteady pattern, the rhythm of his running affected by the terrain—but he was not unsteady. Brother Hsiung, like the bear his namesake, was a thick-thewed, heavy-bodied creature. But he had walked from Song to Ala-Din and halfway back again, and he was nimble with long years of practice in the forms of his monks’ art.

He did not push himself, instead settling into a ground-covering trot that he could maintain indefinitely. Running could be a meditation too, though it was not one he had practiced since he was an acolyte and his masters had set about to strip the mental frailty of perceived limitations from him. And running over rough ground, barefoot, for long distances required focus and mindfulness.

Hsiung found his core, the center of his strength and focus, and he stayed there as the sun tracked across the sky. He stopped to drink at each source of clean water, and occasionally he chewed dried meat or fruit from his pack. He had taken very little in the way of supplies; the others had farther to go than he did. And he knew, if he stayed within his limits, if he remained uninjured, if he foraged some little along the way, if he found habitations where a humble Brother of the Wretched Mountain might beg sustenance … his body would support him until he reached the temple. He had used up a great deal of himself in their journeys, so his belly was small and soft rather than stout and firm. But there was enough of him left to fuel him to sanctuary with his brothers.

Assuming, of course, that they were willing to take him in.

At Hard-noon, Hsiung drank deep from a water-filled sinkhole, the limestone-saturated water sharp, funky, and homely on his tongue. He chewed another strip of leathery meat—the mortal remains of something Hrahima had killed as they were crossing the desert—soaked his sore feet in cool water and inspected them for injuries. Then he rolled into the shade of a weeping scholar-tree, where he stretched his legs and hips and rested. He slept through the heat of the day, until the singing of birds awakened him.

He crawled from his bower in Hard-evening, and after stretching and refreshing himself, he ran on.

The first
li
were hard, his body sore and protesting. He put his breath into the pain, keeping it even and smooth. He let himself walk up the worst hills and ran down their backs, leaping from rock to tussock, careful to land softly and avoid jarring his knees and ankles as much as possible. His muscles warmed and the pains faded to aches, the aches to a saturated feeling of warmth all through his lower body.

The chafing of the pack straps was worse. The weight of his supplies pulling at his shoulders made his collarbones feel sharp with pain. Despite chest and waist bands, the pack wanted to shift and send him tumbling down hillsides. When Hard-dusk came, he walked again, through to Soft-dawn, when there was light again to run. His clouded eyes did not aid him when the light grew indirect, gray, and diffuse.

He slept again at Soft-noon, and as Hard-dawning came upon him he found the road once more.