Steles of the Sky (48 page)

Hong nodded. “Did you marry her?”

“You don’t know?”

“I went out of my way not to find out.”

“She died in childbirth,” Zhang said. “A damned pity. She was dutiful to her family and mine, and I … Once you were gone, I had no more reason not to be dutiful as well. But it was never more than that.”

“You have sons?”

“A son. Two daughters,” Zhang said. “All married now. I have seven grandchildren. Hong—”

“Then your name continues and—” Hong said.

“Hong!”

Hong-la stopped. He turned, shoulder now to the abyss, and faced Zhan Zhang. He waited.

“My father is dead,” said Zhang. “My wife is dead. Come back to Huaxing with me. Be a wizard there.”

“You don’t know me anymore.”

“I know you,” Zhang said. “I know you. You are Lu Hong. You are the man I have missed for thirty years.”

“Twenty-nine.”

Zhang smiled. His crooked eyetooth was still crooked.

“I have a life in Tsarepheth.”

“Spend summers there,” Zhang said. Earnest. Moisture shining in the corners of his eyes. “Winters are kinder in Huaxing. We are not young, Lu Hong. Lu Hong…” The name was a caress.

We are not young.

Hong-la reached out with his hands, and also otherwise. He wrapped his arms around Zhan Zhang’s shoulders and pulled him close. He kissed him chastely, between the brows, and felt the shock from his lips through his toes. “We have a war to live through. Sorcerers to deceive and humble. Dragons to out-bargain.”

Zhang straightened up with interest. “What do you know about dragons?”

“More than I ever intended.” He sighed. “I hope I live long enough to learn the rest.”

“You’ll die for this Qersnyk barbarian?”

“I’d rather live for him,” Hong-la said. “But it’s not him, so much as what he opposes. And that Qersnyk barbarian’s grandfather
did
conquer a good chunk of Song.”

“Because we haven’t been able to unite ourselves against anything, no matter what the threat, in centuries,” Zhang said, with real irritation. “If it weren’t for those conquests of Song, the Qersnyk wouldn’t even have a written language. They have a lot of horses and some painted stones. We have seventeen centuries of written history.”

“And you can read it all,” Hong-la said tenderly. The affection tinged his voice before he realized it. Thirty years—and it felt like nothing. Where, he wondered, had the wrinkles around Zhang’s eyes and mouth come from, the strands of gray at his temples? Weren’t they boys, firm-bodied and sharp-eyed?

“Not quite all of it.”

“True,” Hong said, unable to keep the delight from his voice. This was Zhang, his Zhang, with all his prickly banter and his quick temper, which he only ever gave vent to around people he utterly trusted. “That reminds me. I have a ledger you should see. Some of the entries are in the old writing, and elude me.”

Hong put his fingers under Zhang’s chin and lifted, kissing him square on the complaining mouth.

Zhang managed half a syllable and then melted into the kiss, laughing, not caring that they were
li
above the encampment and in plain sight of everyone who might happen to look up. And Hong discovered that he did not care either.

He pulled Zhang tight against him, grinned down at him, and stepped sideways onto the abyss. Zhang shrieked first, and clutched him—and then the wind rushed up, lifting them, turning their fall into a sloping, looping glide—until Zhang kissed him harder than ever, and they were flying.

23

Six months after fleeing it in disarray, the Dowager returned her court to Tsarepheth, an army at her back.

She did not know what she would find. She had set out from Rasa with her entourage in much better order this time, but she had also set out as soon as messengers informed her that the passes were opening. The Cold Fire smoked still, though there was no word of a more serious eruption. Still, ash falls stretched down into the rice-farming country along the river valley.

Yangchen expected disarray. Starvation. The worst, essentially.

Tsarepheth surprised her. At no place in the City of Clouds could one escape the rushing sound of the wild Tsarethi. As Yangchen’s entourage and army moved up the long, steep-sided valley, as they passed between the Old Man Stone and the hill called the Black Ox which marked the lower end of the valley, the voice of the river rang in her ears.

Seventeen men and four women in black awaited Yangchen and her people as they came around the curve of the trail and through the narrows.

The wizards stood shoulder to shoulder, three tiers deep across the road. The petal hems of their coats whipped their thighs in the relentless wind. They stood with folded arms, not exactly welcoming.

Yangchen-tsa, at least, recognized the small man at the center of the group: his hair transparent with age, scalp spotted, long thin moustache falling in silky dragon-tendrils beside his mouth. Facial hair was rare in wizards, but some retained the ability to grow it.

And one of those was Yongten-la, master of his order, though they gave their chiefs no name. The head of the Wizards of Tsarepheth needed no title. The fear of other wizards was considered a sufficient mark of respect without additional pretensions.

Children feared their father; wives feared their husband; soldiers feared their general. This was the natural order of things, as Yangchen had learned it at her father’s and mother-in-law’s knees. But lately, Yangchen had found herself struggling more and more with this hierarchy of unease. She did not
wish
Namri to fear her. And the wizards who surrounded Yongten did not seem wary of him.

They seemed wary, rather, of the dowager and her people.

Yangchen’s entourage had stopped, ahead of her. She reined Lord Shuffle through the corridor that opened, Anil-la following behind her as the rest of her people hesitated uncertainly. She paused before Yongten, the sweet spring breeze ruffling Shuffle’s coat and chilling her hands within her gloves.

“Do you not know me?” she asked mildly. Her accent was better; she had been working hard to lose the traces of her Song birth in her voice. She was the Rasani Dowager now, and Song would never be her land again.

“You are known, your grace,” said Yongten. He bowed, and all his wizards bowed with him, in a wave. “But we have eradicated the demonlings in this valley. And I think you will agree with and adhere to the wisdom that everyone who enters must be screened, to prevent re-infestation. Even the dowager.”

“A physical exam, you mean?” asked Anil.

Yongten nodded.

Tsechen had come up behind her on the other side, mounted on a sure-footed, mealy-nosed gelding. Over the winter, she had adopted an almost mannish style of dress—trousers and coats, with her hair dressed plainly and only the barest minimum of cosmetics. Her horse snorted as she reined him in at Lord Shuffle’s shoulder.

“The dowager’s person is sacrosanct,” Tsechen said.

Yangchen-tsa held up a hand. “Eradicated?”

Yongten-la nodded once more. His moustaches caught on the hard cotton of his coat. Yangchen disciplined her desire to reach out and smooth the snags away, wrapping her cold gloved fingers in Shuffle’s reins instead.

“It is for the safety of the city and of the Citadel,” she said. “I will consent to being examined.”

*   *   *

The examination was brief and painless, involving only the pressing of a disc of metal and membrane attached to a long, flexible tube to several places on Yangchen’s breast and back while a wizard listened to the other end. She was quickly cleared. While the rest of her retinue was examined, she, Anil-la, Namri’s nurse, Namri, and Tsechen were made comfortable in a pavilion and supplied with tea and cushions. The pavilion’s windward walls had been rolled down and secured to the earth. They provided a welcome relief from the breeze, while enough sun still reached Yangchen and the others to suffuse their little shelter with pleasant warmth.

She was cradling her second bowl of tea when Yongten-la came back to them, a spare black-clad figure silhouetted on the brown-green hillside leading up to their shelter. He bowed low before Yangchen, while Anil-la jumped to his feet and stood uncertainly, shifting like a dog torn between two masters.

“Rise, Yongten-la,” Yangchen said. “What are your findings?”

“Your retinue is clean of infestation so far,” he said. “It will take a while to check the soldiers, but I would say your court wizard has done well in bringing you safely this far. May I have your permission to speak freely, Dowager?”

“In fact,” she said, “I require your report. Take tea with us.”

She offered him his own hospitality as though it were hers—but she was the Dowager Regent. And so he accepted it as if it were hers to give as well. He settled in and allowed Anil-la to pour his tea, though he barely tasted it before setting it aside.

“How fares Tsarepheth?” she asked. Namri woke—a big boy now, walking on his own, and how had that happened in four short seasons? Yangchen held out her arms for her son, and the nurse brought him. He tried to cling to the nurse, but she carefully peeled his grubby imperial fingers from her sleeve and placed him in Yangchen’s lap.

“The Citadel, well enough. The city—we sheltered many within the Citadel for winter. Since then, we have begun reconstruction of the palace and the streets that burned in the riots. It will take time.”

Tsechen glanced at Yangchen for permission. Yangchen, distracting Namri with a mirrored bauble so he would not cry, nodded absently.

“Can you house us at the Citadel until some portion of the palace is safe for habitation?”

Yongten-la, an old court hand, smiled and spoke to Yangchen, as if Tsechen were merely her voice. “We’ve set a suite aside for your retinue, Dowager. The soldiers—”

“Have barracks,” Yangchen said.

Anil-la also waited for her gesture to interject. “Have there been more skinned bodies?”

“Not since before the worst of winter.” Yongten-la picked up his tea and swirled it in the cup. Apparently deciding it had cooled enough, he sipped it. “In Rasa?”

“Three,” said Anil. “That we know of. The dowager—”

Again, that glance for permission. Again, she nodded, smoothing a frown from her face with the application of court discipline. Yongten-la would think Anil was entirely her creature, if he kept acting so.

Well, perhaps he was. Or perhaps he was treading carefully, in order to not reveal his own treason to the master of his order. It wasn’t as if the Dowager Regent’s confidences were his only reason to tread carefully.

“The dowager,” Anil-la continued, “is in receipt of intelligence confirming that the al-Sepehr of the Nameless is engaged in a plot to bring back the Carrion King, and that he may have succeeded.”

Unbidden, all eyes turned north, toward the smudge of the Cold Fire’s fume against a Rahazeen sky.

“Gods don’t intervene as they did in the old days,” Yangchen said. Just at the edge of her vision, the nurse made a sign to avert misfortune.

“If they ever did, outside of stories,” Yongten-la replied. “I think if the Sorcerer-Prince had been resurrected, he would be doing more than skinning a vagrant or shopkeeper now and again.”

“Such as afflicting us with demonlings?” Yangchen asked, trying not to hear their crystalline voices praising her. “Is the infestation truly eradicated?”

“In Tsarepheth,” Yongten said. “We have scouted. Some of the outlying villages and freeholds seem to have maintained their wards and weathered it well. In others…”

He shook his head.

“Survivors?” Anil asked.

Again, Yongten shook his head. “Perhaps two hundred dead or unaccounted for, that we’re aware of. But that’s only within a few days’ ride. It looks as though, where demonlings hatched successfully, they attacked the unaffected.”

Tsechen grimaced. “Have we any idea what happened to them afterward?”

“We still have a few of the ones that … hatched … here,” Yongten said. “We have to keep moving them to bigger cages. The ones who did murder in the outlying areas—they’re in the mountains somewhere, I hypothesize, but we haven’t much evidence.”

Yangchen made a note to herself to avoid those cages at all costs. Al-Sepehr might not be able to blacken her name, but a few well-phrased catcalls from demonlings were another story. “I have seen some,” she said. “Juveniles, I’d guess. Last autumn, on the road south, in the distance.”

Anil glanced at her, eyebrows rising. She would not allow herself to shrug. She was the dowager, and though he was her lover, she did not need to let him think she told him everything.

“When your research is complete, destroy them,” she said.

Yongten’s moustache twitched. “Most of our research currently involves better means to do just that,” he said.

*   *   *

Saadet would not have named this season spring, but apparently it sufficed for the Qersnyk. The frozen ground softened only during the warmest part of the day, and was then slick mud over ice, treacherous for horses, oxen, and walkers alike. The wind, still bitter and biting, froze her even in her woolens and furs, fierce enough to kill the unwary.

The winter had been a time of suspension. She suffered in the cold. Chilblains decked her fingertips and toes; they itched more than they hurt, and drove her to distraction when she needed to look imperturbable and imperial. For example, when she was sitting in court—if you could call a felt-walled tent and a pile of rugs and cushions “court.”

The Qersnyk were kind enough about it. Paian and Esen in particular brought her coats and saw to it that the women of their households showed her how to grease herself and dress for warmth. Shahruz was scornful of her womanish weakness, though he condescended to help her when she practiced with the rifle al-Sepehr had given her. And al-Sepehr … barely came into her presence at all after their disagreement on the day of Tsaagan Buqa’s birth.

And yet, already, the yak cows were calving; the mares were foaling their leggy, attenuated, alien-looking fillies and colts. The meals that had achieved a stultifying sameness in the dark of winter now included eye-watering wild onions no bigger than a chickpea and the roasted remains of stillborn lambs, buried in the embers overnight.