Steles of the Sky (51 page)

“By himself!?” Edene asked sharply, apparently reaching the same conclusion Samarkar had. At the note in her voice, Ganjin took a breath to commence wailing again, and—hurriedly—she hushed him.

Hong-la would never be called slow. “He’s gone to deal with the dragon. Curse it, why
now
?”

“Why alone?” Edene asked.

“No, why before I could give him the news I carry—” Hong stopped himself, made a snipping gesture, and recommenced. “I have news. A scout has returned with word that al-Sepehr’s army is on the move. It is greater than we anticipated. And Jurchadai adds that al-Sepehr has troops from Kyiv, and now, it would seem, the caliphate. We are … vastly outnumbered, Khatun.”

“Damn,” said Edene. “We can hold this valley. But we cannot afford to be pinned in it.”

“Just so.”

Samarkar made a face. “Still, if we can use the Ways of Erem—”

“If we can get our hands on that map, and somehow read it, you mean?” Hong-la waved his own question away as an irrelevancy. “Actually, Zhang found something in the ledger that the Khagan should know before he treats with the Dragon. It might just solve that problem.”

For a moment, Samarkar stood undecided, the weight of uncertainty becoming inevitability paralyzing her.

Still jiggling her son, Edene said, “How far is the army?”

“The scout says … less than a hand of days behind him, but not much less. He all but killed his horses on the ride, and they have wagons and materiel.”

Samarkar recollected herself, though her pulse beat sharp in her ears. “Then that can wait a few moments before we begin to deploy for battle. The ledger?”

“One of the earliest entries lists a contract—a treaty—between the Sudden Emperor and Joyful Dawn Agate Slumbering.”

Samarkar blinked at him. She glanced at Edene, hoping for clarification, but Edene was blinking too.

“What good is a fifteen-hundred-year-old treaty that we can’t get our hands on to analyze?” Samarkar asked at last.

“Joyful Dawn Agate Slumbering,” said the Wizard Hong, “is the name of a dragon.”

*   *   *

Temur opened his eyes and craned his head back. As he had expected, the branches of the tree above him now framed a great Cho-tse silhouette against the bright sky. It must have been a prodigious leap. He had not even heard her land. “I was trying to be sneaky.”

“You snuck,” she agreed. She dropped to the earth beside him, mud smacking from between her toes. It splattered his trouser leg, but he was already muddy. He felt the thud more than heard it, and that only because she was close enough to touch. “You snuck so well you nearly went into the lair of a dragon without knowing his name. Or that he’s bound by a formal treaty.”

Of course they had sent Hrahima to catch him when they realized he was gone. She could cover the ground between here and the camp in … moments, not much more. Temur could save his breath for more immediately important questions.

“Where did you find a treaty?”

“Alas,” said Hrahima. “It’s probably in his lair. But Hong’s lover, that monkey-lord’s emissary Zhan Zhang, found the record of it in Samarkar’s library catalogue. And
I’m
willing to bet there’s some line item in it which would preclude swiping both the emperor’s copy of it … and the rest of his library.”

She held out a sheaf of papers covered in neat black calligraphy. The nail on her thumb carved a dent into the top sheet. “The catalogue of books. As translated by Zhan-zi. Of course, they’ve been in a dragon’s lair for who knows how long now. They’re steeped in slow poison.”

Temur nodded, a thinking gesture. “Do you have an oilcloth I can wrap those in?”

With a flourish, she whipped one from a pouch that dangled from her harness. She shook it out like a Song gallant offering a marriageable young lady his silken handkerchief. “Hong-la thinks of everything. Also, I’m coming with you. I can see in the dark.”

“There are magic lanterns. And I’m the Khagan,” Temur said reasonably. “I say I go alone.”

“Khagan of whom?” Hrahima replied, equally reasonably. “We could arm wrestle over it.”

He contemplated that and sighed. “All right. But you carry the paperwork.”

It vanished into another pouch, already folded and packaged securely in its attendant oilcloth.

“And the gold.”

He held out the pack as best he could, though the weight made his arms tremble. Hrahima lifted it from his grip as if it weighed nothing. “I’d have it no other way. Khagan.”

It was easy to tell when a tiger was laughing at you, Temur decided. Their whiskers fluffed forward, just like any cat’s. He put his hands on the root before his face, and—gritting his teeth—slipped down into the tunnel.

It was easier with someone watching. The floating lanterns bobbed slightly in the updraft as he slithered down beside them, mud gritting between the polished stone of the tunnel and his coat. There was plenty of room, as he had known there must be: both Hong-la and Hrahima had squeezed through here, after all. That didn’t stop Temur from feeling as if the opposite wall—or perhaps, given his angle, he should call it the ceiling—were about to scrape his nose. He tried to listen to the sound of his boots on stone as he wriggled down the shaft, because the accelerating rhythm of his breathing was too nauseating.

“It’s easier on the way up,” Hrahima promised. “Not too much farther now.”

Still, the last drop caught him by surprise, and he found himself crouched on damp stone in a pile of half-rotted leaves before he’d quite accepted that he’d lost contact with the roof and was sliding.

He moved aside before he caught his breath, not wanting to find himself under more than three times his own mass of falling tiger. She dropped beside him a moment later, more gracefully than he’d managed. “How did you know?”

“Echoes,” she said, tail flipping. Then her ears came up and she added, “And I did it before.”

“Well, since you did it before, lead on, Lady Tiger.”

Tail lashing—in amusement?—she did.

*   *   *

The cave of the dragon was as Samarkar and the others had described it, and yet infinitely more rich, wonderful, and strange. Their words had not prepared Temur for the sense of grandeur that attended it, as if this were a place of worship. The lanterns cast a jeweled light, broken into shafts by drips and columns of stone. Some of them, over time, had become entombed in translucent calcite, so some of the formations were illuminated—radiant—from within.

The flocks of books hovering among them imparted a strange ponderous sense of ceremony. The glitter of gold and jewels on every side seemed merely evidence of dignity.

Temur walked with a hushed step, the weight of silence and the weight of stone equal on his shoulders. A moment before he had been struggling against the sensation that the cavern walls were collapsing in against him. What he felt now was peace: not the lightness of relief, but the solemnity of awe.

Then he saw the dragon.

It was as perfectly at-home and camouflaged in its environment as a mantis invisible on stems of grass, and it fastened the same species of motionless predatory regard on Temur. Samarkar had said how it blended with the flowstone, and now Temur saw with his own eyes the drape of wet tendrils, the undulating horns, the folds of loose, scaled skin and the drooping frills like wrinkled draperies. The dragon was every shade of red and gold, russet and orange—and so was the stone around it, like an icy waterfall stained with earth and rust. Its long body wound back through the cavern until Temur lost track of where rocks ended and dragon began, lying slack through a crystalline lake that lapped gently against its scaled hide in rhythm with its breathing.

Temur fought the urge to bow. He was Khagan in title if barely a Khan, so far, in actuality; surely a dragon would expect an emperor to meet it on equal footing. He heard Hrahima come out of the tunnel behind him because she allowed him to hear her.

“Joyful Dawn Agate Slumbering,” he said in his accented Song. “I am Re Temur, Khagan of the Qersnyk Steppe and Emperor of Northern Song. In accordance with the terms of treaty, I have come to meet with you.”

“Re Temur,” the dragon replied. Its voice shivered droplets from the tips of drooping stone teeth overhead, splashing Temur’s forehead and hair. The words it spoke next were a dialect of Song he’d never heard before, but somehow the meanings came clear in his mind a moment after he heard the words, as if they echoed. “An emperor and his cat. Well-met. In accordance with the terms of my treaty with your ancestors, you have brought my tribute, then?”

“I have.” Temur glanced at Hrahima. She patted the pack, which she wore slung over one arm like a shoulder bag.

Temur said, “First, we wish to negotiate the return of the emperor’s library, which we understand you have taken for safekeeping in his absence.”

The dragon drew his chin back slightly, so his beard dipped in the lake. The expression that followed could be called a smile. Temur wondered if it was one.

“I believe,” said the dragon, “that if you examine our treaty, you will find that in the absence of suitable tribute for an extended period, I am entitled to seek my own.”

Temur faltered. He would have to admit it later, too, because Hrahima stepped up beside him and asked, “Is there a copy of the treaty here? We could consult it.”

“Somewhere,” the dragon said negligently. “Perhaps if there were specific items of interest to you, we could bargain for them.”

Temur made a show of stepping back. “Perhaps it’s time to negotiate a new treaty,” he said. “I’ll send my diplomats along when they have time.”

He was surprised when the dragon tilted its enormous head, lifted one bushy, scaled eyebrow, and sighed. “You have no sense of occasion, Khagan.”

“You are not the first to feel that way,” Temur agreed.

Joyful Dawn Agate Slumbering half-lidded his enormous carnelian eyes and laid his chin on his forepaws like a bored dog abandoning itself to enervation. His eyebrow was still higher than Temur’s head. “What, in particular, are the items you most wish to reclaim?”

Temur glanced again at Hrahima. Hrahima nodded slightly. Temur said, “There is a map of the Ways of Reason.”

“That is a vile old magic, mortal Emperor,” the dragon said. “You would risk dragon poison
and
the taint of Erem? Find another way.”

Temur had not heard her come. He had not heard her slither down the passage beneath the tree, and he had not heard her pick her way along the connecting tunnel, but suddenly Edene was beside him, dressed in a ghulish robe worn open over Qersnyk shirt and trousers. The first outline of her swelling belly just pushed out the blouse over the waistband of her pants; her shoulders seemed broad and powerful under the drape of red wool.

She laid a hand on his elbow, straightened her back, and said—in Quersnyk—“Are they different, then?”

The dragon jerked upright, all pretense of lassitude and indifference abandoned. It had obviously had no problems understanding what she said. Clouds boiled from its nostrils like steam from a kettle as it hissed. The reaches of the cavern were lost in mist. But Edene stepped forward, holding up her hand. A bitter light flared from it, burning the mist back so it unraveled like fog before the sun. The stark green blaze washed out the more welcoming glow of all those floating lanterns, rendering the dragon’s faintly comical old-man face and the stone formations into a looming skull ringed by teeth of stone.

Temur half-expected the dragon to say something perfectly obvious and patent, like,
You wield the Green Ring!

Instead, for a long moment he stared down at Edene, and Edene stared back at him. He neither bowed nor blustered, but when he spoke, he said simply, “So it is come to this.”

“It does not have to,” said Edene. “You too are a remnant of ancient Erem, are you not? And subject to this ring.”

“All beasts with poison,” said the dragon, “are subject to that ring.”

Again, Temur heard the meaning of his words like an echo.

“In avoiding the question, you answer it,” said Edene. “Can you fly beneath the suns of Erem and take no harm?”

The dragon’s gaze did not shift from her face as he nodded. “Is that what you will of me? Or will you have me tear your enemies, as did Danupati? For I am at your command, Queen of the Broken Places.”

His voice, so resonant and cat-satisfied a moment before, had fallen flat and rote. He mouthed the last sentence like a slave asking for his punishment when he knows it will go worse if he does not.

Temur saw Edene’s face fall, and a moment after it her upraised fist. The harsh green light died, and the friendlier light of the wizardly Song lamps filled the cavern again.

Her hand twitched. She balled it up again and pressed it into the folds of her robe. “Am I al-Sepehr, or Sepehr al-Rach
ī
d? Am I Danupati?”

“You are Edene,” the dragon said. “You are the Empress of the Ruins of Erem.”

“I am a free Qersnyk woman,” she said. “And you are a dragon older than my world.”

“That is so,” the dragon said.

Temur could hear Hrahima breathing softly through her whiskers beside him, her stripes and shading rendering her—as should have been impossible, for all her size—nearly invisible in the striped and shadowy light. She did not move, and so neither did he, though his hands burned with the desire to lunge forward, clutch Edene, and shield her with his body.

She is a free Qersnyk woman,
he told himself.
She will care for our babe and herself.

Edene said, “I will not use you as this …
artifact
suggests. I will make my own decisions.”

“You always have,” the dragon said, with the same preternatural assurance in its tone that had led Hrahima to remark that it asked questions to which it knew the answers.

Regal, Edene said, “You will answer my questions.”

The dragon bowed his head, touching his nose to the gold between his forelimbs. “My queen.”

“Do you remember Erem?”

“I remember the world that became Erem, in your tongue,” the dragon said. “I had little to do with those who wrote its grimoires and raised its cities and crafted your ghulim, then destroyed most of those cities along with themselves and left the ghulim all but orphaned, long before Danupati used me and my kind to raze their final failing strongholds. They were not my race. And I remember the coming of your race, and the bindings that knit my world to your soft, wet worlds with their tender climates and gentle suns.”