Steles of the Sky (52 page)

Temur was transported by a sudden, vivid memory of a woman veiled in blackest indigo, the warmth of a running horse between his thighs, the thunder of hooves ringing on air. The curve of a wide world beneath him, revealed by impossible distance as a shape like an egg or a ball rather than a stretching plain. He thought of a woman’s deft hand pinching an earring through a veil, and the great curved globe it became.

I dreamed this. I dreamed this in my first dream.

“Worlds?” he asked, befuddled.

The dragon smirked at him tolerantly. “Your great-grandchildren will understand. If any of your descendants survive so long.”

“Do you know?” Edene asked. “The fate of our children?”

“Do
you
want to?” the dragon countered.

An avid moment—and Hrahima stepped close beside her and murmured, “There is only one fate for all things, Edene.”

Edene drew a breath and dashed her eyes with her unringed hand. She shook her head. “I do not wish to know.”

“Just as well,” said the dragon. “No tiger ever learned to lie.”

“Did a serpent speak the truth?” Hrahima said, but she smiled.

“When it serves one,” the dragon answered. “Sometimes we do not speak. But no, dragons see patterns, not prophecies. I can speak to likelihoods, but not certainties. Are you done with questions, Queen of the Ruins? Shall we move on to commands?”

Edene snorted, and the chilly dignity fell away from her, leaving the brash girl Temur loved. “Samarkar would have deeper questions.”

His heart aching with her loveliness, he said, “We could send for her—”

“She would have deeper questions. But for now, I have questions enough,” Edene replied. “You will tell me the name of al-Sepehr’s djinn, complete and in its entirety.”

“I can guess,” the dragon said. “I cannot be certain.”

“Guess, then.”

He slowly spoke the first half of a long and fluid name, then introduced the second half and spoke it, then repeated both again. Temur thought neither he nor Edene would ever manage to remember it, but when he looked over, Hrahima was scribbling on the back of a folded wad of paper with a charcoal-stick. She winked a slow cat-wink at him when she caught his eye.

Edene waited until she was sure Hrahima had captured it, then said, “And you will tell me the name of my son, complete and in its entirety.”

The dragon’s shrug of innocence was a little too self-pleased, like a Song bureaucrat saying
sorry, I can’t help you with that, it’s not my department.
“That is recorded in no book that I have read, and neither have I heard it spoken, O Queen. Nor has one who knows it come before me.”

She nodded, but Temur saw the frustration with which she bit her lip. She tried again. “You will tell me the name of this man with me, Re Temur, complete and in its entirety.”

The dragon’s smile grew sardonic. “That is recorded in no book that I have read, and neither have I heard it spoken. Nor has one who knows it come before me … O Queen.”

This time, she nodded as if she had been expecting it. Her hair was loose in its braid, fine strands around her face curly with the damp. “I will have, then, the treaty between you and the Sudden Emperor. And I will have the map of the Ways of Reason.”

“O Queen. They are slow poison,” the dragon said.

“Really?” Edene answered. “Do you suppose they will be poison to
me
?”

*   *   *

Tsering found Brother Hsiung among the ruins.

He moved with the aid of a stick, probing before him with each step, though the blue sun was high and the Hard-day bright. He was alone, walking what had once been a smooth garden path and was now a deer-trail through tumbled masonry overgrown by a profusion of vines and briars. In the summer it would be a riot of bloom and color such as you saw in Song silk-paintings. Tsering tried to imagine the oranges and golds, the lushness of the greens they would overlay. Would there be roses, peonies, chrysanthemums?

Would she live to see them?

She did not speak, but Hsiung must have heard her coming up behind him. He paused and turned, folding his hands over the knob on his staff. He smiled slightly, the expression both eerie and beneficent beneath his filmy eyes.

“It is Tsering-la,” she said.

He bowed, and she remembered his vow of silence and almost lost her purpose. But perhaps she needed to be heard more than she needed to be answered.

She wrung her braid like a neck between her two hands and said, “Samarkar says you are a priest—”

He shook his head, but it was a temporizing sort of denial.

“A monk, then. Well, whatever you are, Brother Hsiung, I think I need one.”

After a moment, he inclined his head in acceptance. Then cast around, gesturing finally to a sloping granite bench set in a bank. The bank faced south; the snow had melted; the soft earth was riotous with the summer-butter flowers of winter aconite.

Tsering sank to the stone gratefully. The chill snaked through her woolen trousers before Hsiung had even settled beside her, but the green fecund odor of spring was strong enough to compensate. She folded her hands on her lap and said, “No one becomes a Wizard of Tsarepheth because they have a happy family.”

He had leaned his staff against his shoulder. Now he laced his hands over it again, hanging forward comfortably. It seemed encouragement to continue.

“I left my family,” she said, “and my family is dead. In that order. My grandmother was … the only thing that kept me with them for as long as I stayed. My father—” she shook her head, feeling the words close up her throat. “There were bad harvests. There was debt. There was the threat of the Bstangpo’s justice, which is not kind. Perhaps he thought his wife and children and his mother-in-law better served in the next life than on earth.”

How had the palm of her hand come to be so firmly against her lips? She bit the flesh to make it move away, glad that Hsiung did not move to comfort her. She might have split like a tree in a storm if he had.

She continued. “But if he acted out of benevolence, it was the first time in his life. And he thought enough of his own life to join the bandits in the mountain passes, and Tsarepheth never saw him anymore.”

She had been staring away from Hsiung. It was easier to say to a stranger, and easier to say to a stranger she was not looking upon.

“I was already in the Citadel, an acolyte.

“I was the last daughter; the last that could have carried forward my ancestors’ line. The Citadel would have released me. I chose to become a wizard anyway.”

Now she glanced at Hsiung. She did not know if he saw the movement, or if he saw well enough to see her expression, but he nodded once, as if to encourage her to continue.

She touched her warm figured-jade and pearl collar with her fingertips. It was a source of strength and a reminder of failure both at once.

“And having undergone the surgery … I failed in my vigil.” She extended her hand, snapped her fingers, watched the spark of light that did not form and flare and die. Snapped them again, just to see the emptiness once more. “So I am a scholar, and no kind of wizard, and the end of my line. My ancestors will have no grandchildren to be reborn into. And I have no magic to show for it.”

She tossed her braid behind her shoulder before she could begin twisting it again. She stared away again, out over the picked-over ruins, down the valley to the road and the camp and a small herd of horses and Qersnyk playing the bloody, violent game that involved dragging the carcass of a goat this way and that until somebody managed to carry it over a line. She could pick out the ethereal shimmer of the Khagan’s near-white stud amid the crush, but could not see who rode him. Except for one bright chestnut, all the other mounts were too smeared with filth to seem anything but a muddy brown.

Now there was a hand on her forearm, gently, and Hsiung frowning at her when her attention came back to him. Somewhere in the briars a thrush sang, more evidence of spring.

“What?” Tsering said. “That’s not enough?”

He smiled. She understood.
Enough. But not new.

She closed her eyes. “It’s Jurchadai. I don’t know how … he is not like other men. And I have had lovers, of course—I am a wizard, and we entertain ourselves as we see fit. But he does not see me as
entertainment
. And I—” She shook her head.

When she stopped, and peeked, Hsiung was still watching her, blind eyes patient and face serene.

“I am my father’s daughter,” she said. “I do not know how to trust. I do not know how to be with someone in that way, and to be kind.”

She lapsed into silence, shocked by the truth that had escaped her. It knocked the breath and words out of her, so she found herself staring into the yellow cup of an aconite blossom and sucking her lower lip. Hsiung sat beside her, his silence companionable now.

“I miss my grandmother,” she managed finally. “And because of my decisions, she can never be reborn. And taking up with Jurchadai will not change that. Nothing I do can change that.”

He looked at her. He nodded. He leaned his staff against his shoulder again, steepled his hands before his face, and without rising from his seat he bowed.

What might have happened next, Tsering never knew, because the moment was broken by the uneven patter of a child’s feet running along the path, and the streaming black hair and open coat of Toragana’s little cousin Sarangerel, healed now, hove into view. The little girl bounced up, all childish officiousness, and plunged to a halt before Hsiung.

“Brother Hsiung! Brother Hsiung! Elder Sister says come back to camp now! There is a map that you must read, please!”

*   *   *

They had left the tithe with the dragon—cast Tesefahun’s gold bullion out around his taloned feet as if they were scattering corn for chickens—and come back to the surface carrying their spoils. Edene had handled both scrolls: the map, and the treaty. She would let no one else hold them.

Temur argued that they might be a threat to their babe; she had countered that Ganjin had been
born
in Erem, and he was fine, so obviously the ring protected her children as well as herself. But she was nevertheless incapable of getting him—and Hrahima, and Samarkar—to leave the white-house when she sent her sister for Brother Hsiung. Instead, Temur sent for a casket of lead and gold, into which he sealed the treaty for later examination. That accomplished, he insisted on having a table set up for Edene, with Samarkar’s witchlights hanging over it. Both of them refused to stay nearly far enough back as she unrolled the map.

It was parchment of some sort, and she expected it to be stiff and friable with age. Indeed, she half-expected it to crumble in her hands. Instead, it was flexible and soft as new leather, fine and well-preserved, scraped so thoroughly that she could not even pick out the pattern of the hairs that had once grown on it. Maps were not her expertise, but as she spread it, she recognized the outline of the steep valley inhabited by the city of Reason.

Whoever had drawn it had used a variety of inks and dyes in several colors—black, violet, green, blue—and had gilded it with illuminations. The hand was fair and even, it seemed to her, though what did she know of such things? Written words were a wizardry much wasted on Edene.

The others turned away and flinched at the sight of them, and so Edene draped a finely woven woolen banner over the surface, found her sister playing with puppies in the yard, and sent her after Hsiung.

When she came back inside, Samarkar frowned at her like a thundercloud. “I disagree with this.”

Temur, behind her, nodded. Hrahima had vanished into the shadows in that way that she had.

Edene hooked her thumbs through her belt and answered, “I too. But what other choice do we have?” and stood back with them to wait for Hsiung.

He arrived before the sun had moved another finger’s width across the sky, accompanied—led—by Tsering and a somewhat officious Sarangerel.

Samarkar explained the problem, and her objections to so using Hsiung. Hsiung seemed to listen, head turned toward her, and then made it plain by gestures that he could not proceed without Master War. This led to another delay, and another joyous opportunity for Sarangerel to feel like she was part of the proceedings, while Master War was located.

Edene retrieved Ganjin from his cradleboard—he had been sleeping, miraculously, through all of this, and remained asleep when she pulled him into her arms—and paced. She envied Sarangerel her freedom from responsibility and doubt. The child was still young enough that her pleasure was to be included—to be thought useful. The ethics of what transpired would not be her problem for another five years or more.

May we all live that long.

War-zi came, and with him Besha Ghul, following on like a shadow. It wore its deep hood up, hiding its expressive ears and its face except for the tip of the long muzzle, and Sarangerel watched it with the same adoring fascination she usually devoted to the mastiffs.

Perhaps Besha Ghul could read the map.
The ring pricked Edene, but she fisted her hand around it and turned away. She was finished with its blandishments. Instead, she explained the problem quickly to Master War. He listened, then glanced at Hsiung. Hsiung nodded.

“This must be Novice Hsiung’s choice,” said Master War, as if the words pained him. He scratched the stump of his arm. “I will not forbid it.”

Hsiung bowed very deeply and turned away. Two steps took him to the table, which Samarkar uncovered for him with a show of steely resolve. He bent over it, gesturing for more light as his nose nearly brushed the paper. Samarkar, scowling, hung more witchfires about his head, but still he waved impatiently.
More light.

She brightened them, and Hsiung squinted down. Again he gestured, and now the witchlights glowed more white than green. They did not trouble Edene, but she saw Master War’s eyes streaming. Sarangerel hid her face in the hem of her coat, and Samarkar and Temur both turned away. Besha Ghul stood unmoving, but perhaps the robe low across its eyes protected it.