Steles of the Sky (3 page)

“You’re another Tse-ten of the Five Eyes,” she said, shaking her head in awe.

“The Process of Air wants to lift us,” he replied. “Encourage that, discourage the Process of Earth that wishes to hold us close, and one can drift like a feather on the wind.”

“If it were as easy as that, it’d be the first trick any wizard learned,” she said. “I don’t think Master Yongten could manage that.”

He harrumphed, and Tsering held out the waterskin. “We could be doing this at the height of summer,” she said, by way of apology—though why she felt the need to apologize for eruptions and revolutions was beyond her.

Hong-la took the skin in his long, heavy-boned hand. Like most wizards, his fingers were decorated with a fascinating assortment of scars. He drank water sparingly and sighed. “We wouldn’t be racing winter, then.”

“Finish it,” Tsering said. “There should be water in the next valley.”

“If it’s not full of ash.” He handed her back the skin.

“I’m full of ash. Why should what I’m drinking be any different?” She hung the skin back on the saddle, where it hung forlornly slack. They’d need to filter water that night if they did not find some fresh. One more task to exhaust the too-few wizards among them. Hong-la should by rights be sleeping along one side of a single-wheeled cart by day, but who could rest rattling over these trails? In a cart that could tip down a cliff with one misstep?

She and Hong-la rejoined the column, Tsering leading the mare. The refugee train moved at a dragging pace determined by the Qersnyk carts and oxen. Tsering did not have the energy to chafe at it. Instead, she watched the road before her feet—because looking at the horizon was too exhausting—and lifted her gaze only occasionally to see how far she had come. Beside her, Hong-la toiled uncomplainingly—but he leaned on a twisted stick, something she had never seen him do before. The gnarled wood was smooth-polished, carved to accentuate its natural curves, and glossy beneath the dust and ash. Tsering thought it was Song workmanship, and wondered if he had brought it with him all that way, when he had come to the Citadel to become a Wizard of Tsarepheth.

Another day, she might have asked him. Now it was all she could do to raise a foot and put it before the other.

Just keep walking.
It was a philosophy that had gotten her through worse losses—or at least more personal ones—than this.

2

At the palace in Qarash, the twins led a dozen men into hell. Saadet did not think she could have done it without Mukhtar ai-Idoj, al-Sepehr of her order and the adoptive father of her twin brother and herself, at her side. She was certain she could not have done it without the strength of her brother Shahruz within her, bearing her up, lending her endurance. Since his death at the hands of the Qersnyk pretender, Re Temur, he had shared her mind—a resurrection made possible by the twin’s bond that al-Sepehr’s magics had long ago strengthened.

Saadet’s belly did not heave merely because of the baby in it.

Only she and al-Sepehr had escaped the compound alive, and that much was plainly evident from the moment they stepped within again, surrounded by a half-dozen armored Qersnyk warriors and a pair of shaman-rememberers with their eyes concealed behind blue-dyed fly fringes. Each of the warriors wore the three horsehair falls of Qori Buqa and carried bows and spears. The pyramid of clean-sucked skulls in the dooryard was evidence enough.

“Blood ghosts,” one of the warriors said. He was a tall man, lighter-eyed than most, named Re Esen. His cheeks—fair by Qersnyk standards—peeled across the bones with sun and windburn. His nose, hooked like an eagle’s beak, was framed by deep squint lines. He went hatless despite the chill, and his hair, pulled back in a queue, revealed a shining expanse of pate. He glanced at the nearer shaman-rememberer. “Paian?”

Paian lifted sky-colored fringe across the back of his right hand. His eyes peered out under its shade. He pursed his lips and shrugged elaborately.

Under other circumstances, Saadet might have smiled. Now, she bit the back of her hand, sour bile rising.

Weak, sister.

It is the babe,
she told Shahruz, not really caring if he believed her. They had done what they had done for the Nameless, and she would not regret it. If her revulsion made her seem more the grieving widow to the Qersnyk, so much the better.

Paian, the shaman-rememberer, laid a hand on her shoulder. She tried to meet his eyes, but he’d let the fringe drop and it defeated her. Its purpose, no doubt: anything that made a priest seem more mysterious increased his power.

“We go on,” she said, and led them into the open doors of the palace. She knew some of the men only followed because they would not let a woman show more courage than they.

Now it was Shahruz who held their head high as they moved down the corridors she had so recently—so briefly—lived in, and smelled the thick scent of clotted blood splashed like whitewash on the walls. It did not matter who gave her that appearance of strength; only that the Qersnyk saw her back straight and tall like a pole on which the banner of her body hung. Sticky and puddled, the bloody floor tugged at their shoes with each step. The palace stank as if someone had been butchering lambs.

They found no dead within.

“They were dragged out,” Esen said after a glance at Paian. The other men muttered and jostled, turning to put their backs to one another.

“Dragged out and eaten,” agreed Shahruz, with Saadet’s tongue.

Paian too was fair, and the shape of his nose was a smaller version of Esen’s. Saadet recognized their silent understanding of one another, and Esen’s choice to speak for both.

They’re brothers.

Brother and … whatever you call that, you mean,
Shahruz answered, the weight of his disdain for the shaman-rememberer like robes soaked with rain.

As you say, my brother.

Because she could not go back, she went forward. Esen stepped before her, or she would have held the vanguard. Still it was she that guided them—to the chamber where the Khagan’s war-band had met for the final time.

There was more blood here.

Esen turned to her. “How is it that you and your stepfather alone escaped this?” he asked. “How is it that we find ourselves now under a Rahazeen sky?”

Her blood chilled, but when her voice would have failed Shahruz spoke for her. “My husband”—and surely Saadet was the only one who heard the way Shahruz’s distaste stained those words—“told me that he had dreamed that the Scholar-God and the Eternal Sky were in truth one deity.”

Esen nodded. Qori Buqa Khagan had not been silent about his dreams. She knew he had consulted the shaman-rememberers as to their meaning, and the Qersnyk were everywhere renowned for the ease with which they adopted foreign customs, and their permissiveness toward foreign gods—so long as the worshipers of those gods rendered appropriate tribute to the Khagan.

Still, the sky made her more nervous than anything. Al-Sepehr could cast it a thousand ways as Qori Buqa’s legacy, or Temur’s treachery … but there would always be those who scratched at whatever gilt he hung on the truth.

As Saadet rested a hand on her belly, Shahruz continued, “I prayed to the Eternal Sky and to the Scholar-God for my life, and the life of my son, and the life of my father. Perhaps I was heard. Perhaps—it is just that I ran, and my father came to protect me.”

Esen’s gesture dismissed the stones over their heads as a temporary inconvenience. “And the sky?”

Saadet answered before her brother could. Her explanation was better—and she’d been paying more attention to these heathens and their customs, while he shuffled his imaginary feet at her in very real disgust.

“From what my husband told me, this is not the first time my usurper nephew Temur has been associated with blood ghosts. He was seen in Asitaneh, at the court of the caliph there, before that caliph was replaced by a Rahazeen faction. Perhaps the usurpers have allied themselves one with another?” She cupped her gently swelling abdomen. “It is my son—Qori Buqa’s son!—who will bring the Eternal Sky back to the steppe.”

She held his gaze, steady and calm, and wished she dared raise her veil across her face. So many eyes, and her expressions so naked now.

At last, Esen nodded. “You’ve spirit,” he said. “It won’t be enough.”

“My son has the mandate of the Eternal Sky,” she replied.

He snorted and looked away. “We’ll see.”

She had stood too long in one place. When they walked on, she had to rock her feet to unstick them from the floor.
I will burn these boots.

They are good boots. It will be hard to find others that fit as well, and you will need them. You will do no such thing.

She blew the loose hair from her eyes, and swallowed her first three thoughts as unworthy. At last she managed to answer him:…
As you say, my brother.

*   *   *

Tsering walked—or, rather, hobbled; she was not much accustomed to the saddle—around the camp’s perimeter, too much of her wary attention on the sun instead of the wards and banners she was laying in place for the night. The sun had vanished behind the mountains, though the sky was still bright, and the clouds to the east had begun to stain the colors of poppy blossoms around the edges. Tsering’s eye and belly insisted on reading the light as sunrise rather than sunset, even though she knew better.

Every ten strides, Tsering pulled painfully against the stiffness in her lower back and inner thighs and bent to place a stone marked with Rasan and Qersnyk sigils of protection from the enemies that come in the night. They were prayer-stones, but they were also more than that. Every three stones, she found a place to drape a banner, or—better—to wedge its short stick between rocks so it swung freely in the light, cold autumn breeze.

The air cooled rapidly as the sun fell. She blew warm curls of mist on her fingers where they poked from her felted fingerless mitts. It seemed as if every stone she touched sucked warmth from her body.

The banners were sewn with images of the Guardian Beasts. The pale wind-horse of the soul—the symbol for breath and song—and the blue ice-lion of the mind were prominent among them. Tsering invoked the small gods of place where she knew them, but here they were mostly mysteries to her. The refugees has chosen to camp in a valley protected by a black basalt idol whose feet were ringed by withered offerings of food and parched flowers. A little cluster of refugees had been preparing to feed her further offerings as Tsering began her rounds. Tsering hoped that basalt boded well for propitiating against volcanoes.

The need for these rituals was one of the reasons progress through the mountains came so slowly and at such cost of exhaustion. Each morning, the vanguard could not swing out before dawn, and all the wards of the night before must be collected and stowed, along with whatever goods had been needed for comfort before. And that same vanguard must stop at night more than a hand of the sun’s passage across the sky before it met the horizon, to give time to make camp before darkness came.

They were still probably far enough into the Steles of the Sky to be safe from blood ghosts. But Tsering—and Hong-la, and the Qersnyk shaman-rememberers—were more worried about whatever invisible force—spores, or immaterial demons, or what-have-you—came in the night to lay the genesis of demonlings in a sleeper’s lungs.

They could not afford infections. The only treatment any of them knew lay behind, in Tsarepheth—if Tsarepheth were standing still.

Tsering sent a guilty glance over her shoulder. Hong-la thought he would feel it if the Citadel fell.

Tsering, with no magic, only knowledge, had no such reassurance that all was well. Or as well as could be expected.

Slowly, the walking and bending was easing the stiffness in her body. Perhaps she should take up one of the moving forms of meditation; she wasn’t as young as she had been, and sitting in contemplation left her stiff too—though not so stiff as the horse had. As she neared the outcrop of rock that marked the end of her allotted patrol, Tsering became aware of a sort of layered, carrying drone, busy with harmonics and tonal overlays. It was the chant of a Qersnyk cleric, and as she came around the corner she was glad to see the shaman-rememberer Jurchadai setting a pole from which his last banner snapped. She placed the stones leading up to it, his singing making the soft flesh between her jaw and throat vibrate like the wings of a bee, and straightened herself painfully to stand beside him while he leaned on that long stave.

“You’re carrying flagpoles?” she asked, in her rudimentary Qersnyk.

Jurchadai frowned at her, but the motion of her hands seemed to lead him to understanding. “They are poles for white-houses,” he said in the Rasani he had been learning in his own turn, speaking slowly. “I just borrowed them.”

At least, she guessed the word was “borrowed”: he used a term in his own language. She also guessed by “houses,” he meant the Qersnyk huts of felted wool, which could be put up and pulled down in a matter of minutes by skilled labor, and which they carried with them in their carts.

Like all the Qersnyk shaman-rememberers, Jurchadai was third-sexed. A very few male wizards managed to grow sparse facial hair; Jurchadai had none. He wore his hair braided up into a sort of crown beneath his hat, and his shoulders were slight. At first it had been an effort for Tsering to remember to call this round-arsed person “he.” Now she found it odd when she heard another Rasani make the same mistake. And, she thought, it wasn’t as if she weren’t used to the smooth cheeks of male eunuchs, being a female one herself.

Jurchadai and his colleagues were the ones who had eventually found a successful ward against the demonlings that did not rely on stout stone walls to be effective. He had, in effect, preemptively saved the lives of everyone in the camp tonight. Tsering laid the back of her hand against his shoulder briefly, trusting that he would understand.

They stood just within the protective circle of the stones and banners. He leaned back against the big stone. She put herself beside him, stretching out her thighs and watching the sun go down on the wrong side of the sky. The sky flamed below the edge of the pall of ash, behind the teeth of horizon-cutting mountains. Jurchadai sighed.