Steles of the Sky (57 page)

Afrit seemed not to mind the cave at all. His pale form slid through the gloom like the opposite of a shadow. It was Ka-asha who found the doorway, once it knew what to look for. There were two slabs of stone three times a man’s height, leaned together in a triangle like propped cards. These were not fallen so by chance. Rather they had been set there, and the ghul noticed the toolmarks where they had been carved to interlock.

Samarkar pressed her boot into the stirrup, leaned over Afrit’s shoulder, and laid her palm against the stone. She felt no eldritch energy in it, but neither had she in the closed doors in Reason.

She did not give herself time to grit her teeth, or even think about what she was doing. She said the words, and took the pain, and clung to Afrit’s saddle as he danced aside. Then she collected herself, collected him, and reined him through the door.

It seemed a calm spring morning in Reason, and it took a moment before Samarkar realized what had changed. On every tree, on every vine, the leaves were open and in flower, lush and green despite the warmth of the sun. She shoved a fist against her stomach, keeping the nausea in, and glanced around startled as the rest of the party followed her. Even three or four abreast, it took quite a while to bring the ghulim through.

By the time Ka-asha came up to let Edene and Besha know the army was assembled, Samarkar was feeling less like vomiting. She tried not to think that she had three doors yet to open. Perhaps she should have let one of the other wizards who had accompanied the Tsareg caravan out of Rasa help … but though one or two had offered, she had convinced herself that Hong-la needed all the help he could get.

*   *   *

The Rukh flew low and heavy, clouds and rain soaking her wings. Al-Sepehr bent low to her feathers, his wet veil plastered to his neck, sharply miserable in a bullying wind. He wondered if Temur’s pet warlocks and witches had some weather-sorcery behind them, or if this was just ill luck for everyone.

Lightning searched the distant sky, and al-Sepehr kept one eye on it—but as long as the thunder remained distant, he would accept the risk. The tactical advantage of the Rukh’s-eye view was too great to sacrifice easily.

Below him, the forces of the enemy spread out like a map. There was the long curve of Qersnyk cavalry—fewer than he’d feared, and there were steppe men behind them on foot. He realized that they did not have enough horses to mount all their archers, and some would be fighting from the ground. And there, on the left bank of the river, a little group seemed out of place—too far in advance of the others. This led to a weakness in the line behind them, and al-Sepehr determined to send the indrik-zver there.

The enemy had some advantages, however. They’d be fools if they had not held the high ground on either side, and there was no way to attack without getting caught between their pincers. Fortunately, once they committed, he had the cure for that.

He bit his lip against a surge of glee. This would not be
easy
. But he also did not think it would exactly be hard. And once it was accomplished, no one under the sky would doubt that Sepehr al-Rach
ī
d was a great God indeed, to so bestride the world again.

*   *   *

Water dripped down Hsiung’s collar as he moved up beside the Woman-King Tzitzik and her hoof-armored warriors. They were strange in the rain, the horses head-bowed and seeming half-melted, the banners like swags of hardened candle dripping on their lance poles. For a moment, Hsiung wished he were hidden among the trees with Master War—and then, for a longer moment, he wished Hrahima were at his side.

The distant sound of drums and trumpets cut the rattle of the rain. The jade of the Dragon Road jumped, then began to tremble under his feet. Hsiung heard shouts, orders, the bugled challenge of a horse. Out of the misty distance, between the sculptured limestone pillars of the mountains, the great bobbing heads of charging indrik-zver loomed.

King Tzitzik lifted her lance. What she shouted, Hsiung did not know. But he added his voice to the tumult that came after, and when she charged, his feet pounded after.

*   *   *

Hong-la had chosen his and Zhang’s vantage with an eye toward the sweep and scope of the battlefield—but that was before the rain began to cut sideways, and the clouds lopped the tops off the mountains. Now they peered through mist and relied on runners, even the flag signals vanishing in the gloom. Horses slid in mud; screams and the crash of weapons told him battle had been joined.

Zhang gave the order to fire the rocket arrow batteries, and torches were applied to fuses. The launch was erratic. Five hundred shrieking missiles whistled from their tubes, spitting and sizzling, but it should have been twice that many. All the fuses and all the powder had not stayed dry.

“Maybe we should send the reserves in on foot,” Zhang said.

“Give Re Temur a little longer,” Hong-la said. “If they have to fight on foot, we’ll let them fall back closer to the ruin, and see if they can hold the pass.”

Hong-la reached out
otherwise,
thinking he could dry and spark them by manipulating the process of fire. But somewhere up there in the mist was Samarkar’s trap, and he—Hong-la—was the one among them delegated to trigger it. And he must trigger it at the right moment, or Tzitzik and Hsiung would suffer the results, rather than the intended victims.

He strained his ears, listening for the timbre of a Lizard-Folk bugle. A great shadow swept over—the Rukh!—and a volley of arrows pursued it even as he pulled Zhang down and ducked. The unmistakable, terrible trumpeting of the indrik-zver rang out over every other sound of battle, and the earth trembled with their thundering feet. Had he missed—no, there! There, the sound of the Woman-King’s bugler, and there, the dip of a yellow signal flag, and another, and another as the sign was relayed. Hong-la summoned heat, awakened the process of fire. Not near at hand, but halfway up the valley and underground.

The cavern along the river that Samarkar had caused to be mined with the balance of the gunpowder exploded under the feet of the charging beasts, and the bellowed challenges of the first rank of the monsters turned to bellowed cries of pain and fear. They thrashed and slid into the suddenly open sinkhole, mud and water swirling around them, the second rank crashing into those of the first who had managed to avoid falling and plowing some of those into the pit.

Hong-la caught a breath, but only one. He straightened up, and reached out again, this time for the rest of the rocket arrows. The enemy might be too close now, too mixed up with his own people—but it would do no harm to churn up the earth behind them, and he might catch a few stragglers, he supposed.

*   *   *

Qersnyk generals led from the front, and no grandson of Temusan’s would fight differently. Re Chagatai saw the streaks of fire pass overhead, the rocket arrows sizzling in the rain. They plunged to earth ahead, and some of the enemy fell screaming before the Re and Tsareg vanguard even reached them. He heard the shuddering boom of the mines detonating beyond the river, and the hiss and whistle of the enemy’s shot piercing his own lines. Curse the Nameless guns! Curse the Kyivvan artillery! A horse on his left stumbled and rolled, fountaining blood as a bouncing cannonball severed its legs.

Its rider went down under the hooves of his own clansmen. Chagatai loosed, loosed again. He did not see what happened to the fallen rider then, but another roar ahead told him of the explosion of that artillery emplacement, or one like it. One of Temur Khagan’s foreign wizards, or the Kyivvan’s own miscalculated load? It didn’t matter. One less cannon to worry him.

There were brothers—tribesmen—on the other side of that charge, and Chagatai felt a familiar pang as he drew his bow back to his ear.

The Qersnyk had been fighting each other for too long. If he survived this, it would be good to get back to fighting outlanders again.

They struck the enemy vanguard. Screams—men and horses—and the thunder of metal on metal, shattering. Another, belated, streak of rocket arrows overhead, one leaving a smoking line of pain on Chagatai’s arm before plunging into the throat of the man he ducked away from. He dropped his bow on its lanyard, feeling it bump his thigh. His long knife came out with a hiss as he hauled hard on the third rein. His black mare Cinder wheeled, kicking out, and Chagatai’s blade whipped a shining arc in the air. Its second arc shone wet. The shock of a parry rang up the blade, numbed his arm.

Cinder slipped in mud, caught herself, skidded back as a big Kyivvan warhorse pounded into her, chest to chest. The mounts squealed and snapped. Chagatai dropped the knotted reins and snatched his left-hand dagger from the saddle sheath. He left it in the hinge of the big chestnut’s throat as the horse fell, gurgling.

A moment’s respite. He stood in the saddle, turning Cinder with his weight. The Kyivvan cavalry and the other Qersnyk were pushing his warriors back; the line was behind him. He dropped into the saddle and kicked Cinder back the way they’d come, long knife leveled at the back of a man wearing the three horsehair falls of Qori Buqa—now of the infant Tsaagan Buqa—who crossed blades with a Tsareg man old enough that by rights he should have been back with the wagons and women.

Except this time, half the Tsareg women were fighting as well.

Chagatai plunged his blade into the back of a Re clan brother, the shock knocking his body back against his armored coat and the high cantle of the saddle. This was no ordinary war. And yet, it was no different from every other.

*   *   *

The feet of the Citadel of Tsarepheth were buried in masses of wildflowers. Tsering stumbled down the rocky lower slope of the Island-in-the-Mists, running flatly toward the guarded stair. A thousand steps led up the face of the great white stone bulwark that spanned the pass between mountains and she hurtled toward them without hesitation, trusting that the guards would know her.

The guards did know her; they drew together at first, but when she ran up they lowered their spears and stepped aside. What they thought of a wizard last seen heading for the northern mountains sprinting up shouting, she did not ask. She suspected the Citadel staff in general had a lot of opinions about wizards she was better off not knowing.

Travel and life in the camp had hardened her, but the stairs were not easy to manage at the breakneck pace she took them at. By the time she reached the battlement, Yongten-la awaited her, his arms folded and his hands tucked inside his black cotton sleeves.

She doubled over, dropped to her knees. When she tried to speak, someone held a cup of millet beer to her lips and she was forced to drink three swallows before they would take it away again.

“Wizard Tsering,” said Yongten-la. “Why such haste?”

More evenly, now, between heavy breaths, she told him.

*   *   *

It seemed that Edene was never going to run out of new reasons to feel gratitude to Hrahima. The most recent was the ease with which Hrahima and Besha Ghul brought her through the tunnels below Ala-Din. Edene more than once found herself rubbing at the empty place where her finger had been, longing for the smooth courageous certainty that had come with the Green Ring. She wished it even more so when the last great stone door—after the straight stair and the winding stair—opened to Besha Ghul, and not to her. She had been a goddess, she realized now. And she had given it up to be a girl.

I will regret it all my life,
she thought. And then she thought,
And if I had not, I would have regretted that as well.

Once they were inside the compound, however, it was she who led them. She who knew the way to the Rukh’s perch, and she who had cleaned and cared for him when she, too, was caged in this aerie. They met only one guard—an old man—and Hrahima smashed his head into a wall before he could gurgle. The Cho-tse bowed to the corpse and apologized. Edene simply stepped over the blood.

And then they were in the tunnel that led out to the Rukh’s perch, and Edene realized that this was for her, her only—and that the others would have to stay behind. She felt herself trembling and wondered,
is this what it is to be human? To know fear? Or is it merely cowardice?

She set her foot in the passageway and walked on.

The Rukh was waiting for her.

It knew her step, it knew her scent. She had served as its handmaiden once, and here she was again. It stared at her, crimson crest fluffed, first out of one vast gold-gray eye and then out of the other.

She wondered how long it had been abandoned here. Someone had been feeding it—that was plain—but the nest was filthy, caked with guano and redolent with carcasses, and its long primaries had gone unclipped through the last molt. The shackle on its leg had galled it viciously. It stood with that foot drawn up, the talon balled tight in a fist. Edene wondered if it could even open it.

“Hello, handsome,” she told it. Then, when it cocked its head and cheeped at her—a cheep the size of a mountain range, but somehow encouraging nonetheless—she added, “If you promise not to eat me, I brought a chisel.”

*   *   *

Shahruz seemed to think they were winning, though even from the height and with a spyglass, it was hard to see what was going on. The first fury of the storm had broken, the clouds now lifting and giving the twins a better view of the battlefield—but everyone below was black with Song mud now, and the valley they fought in had become a bloody mire. On the far side of the river, one vast flagstone of the Dragon Road hung mostly unsupported over a smoking crater, and the screams of an injured indrik-zver dominated even the frightful sounds of the rest of the battle. Two more had been killed in the explosion, and a third lay broken-spined on this side of the river, forelegs scrabbling intermittently. The cannon mounted to its howdah had exploded.

The three remaining indrik-zver spread terrible carnage among a company of Song monks, trampling everything that did not run from their paths, even though the hide of all three bristled with Qersnyk arrows. One suddenly shrieked and went down, thrashing; Saadet managed to trace the flight of the arrow that had felled it to a woman using a Western-style longbow, well-back from the line of battle, who stood in the stirrups of an Asitaneh horse.