Steles of the Sky (59 page)

As twilight fell, the glass demons came, and al-Sepehr gloried. Their razored claws flashed. Their obsidian wings sliced. Here; here was the sacrifice. Here was the power. Here was the control and the understanding he had sought, the effortless puissance, the world held in the palm of his hand. Though the Rasan Wizards—one on her pale horse, one kicked forward by winds of his own summoning—chased and harried him, he waved them aside as the insignificant creatures they were. A gnat might trouble him more.

Gnats could carry disease.

He had studied. He had prayed. He had worked his benedictions. Here was the chance to win a godhead so long denied his worthy ancestor. Here he was: al-Sepehr no longer, but the Sorcerer-Prince incarnate. Not just a subject and worshiper to the Scholar-God, but Her equal, Her superior, Her fit master and lord.

The Rasan Wizard’s trick of an amplified voice was a good one. He understood it, recognized its mechanism—a forced vibration of what they limitedly considered the process of air—and took it for his own. On his first attempt to speak, even without sorcery, the voice was wrong—but he had worn many skins in his time, and spoken in many voices.

He tried again, and this time the voice that rolled from his lips was his own familiar resonance and timbre. As the Rukh’s scions flocked around her, he severed the straps that his past self had used to bind himself to the saddle. He stood in the stirrups, summoned up the resonant power of his mimicked spell, and in his own true voice declaimed, “I am Sepehr al-Rach
ī
d, called the Sorcerer-Prince, called the Joy-of-Ravens! You believed in me, and I have come!”

Below him, the fighting stuttered, broke apart, did not stop entirely because still the glass demons struck and slashed and tried to slay. But men and women, where they could, turned their faces up to the sky and stared, dumbstruck.

The Rukh twisted away under him. The air caught him, bore him up as the great bird turned to snap, beak wide. With a negligent gesture he struck her from the sky.

As Soft-dawn broke, he called the blood ghosts. And they came.

27

Great Compassion Turquoise Stone winked—or blinked—the lucent blue eyes all along its nearer side closing and opening in a wave. Did dragons smile?

The dragon reached out with one moonstone-scaled, translucent forelimb—neither quite a leg, nor an arm. The taloned appendage it crooked beneath Tsering’s chin, however, was definitely a hand.

Tsering held herself perfectly still, except in allowing the dragon to lift her face for inspection. The dragon was as chill as the mist from which it took its name. Its breath wrapped Tsering as if she had climbed into clouds, and she found herself cool, soothed, swept clean of pains and stiffnesses that had grown so customary she only noticed them in the absence. After the stench of the brimstone caverns, the relief of it came as a blessing.

The coolness, the moisture came with a memory. She had sat alone in darkness, clad only in her loincloth and halter, her flesh prickled up in cold. Water dripped somewhere in the black basalt chamber, inciting thirst. She was dry and she could drink, if she groped through the dark to find it.

Looking into the dragon’s eyes, Tsering recollected her vigil. She found the place in her center where she had gone, where she had tried to remain throughout that long cold failure, and she fell into the silence there. Something in the dragon’s gaze questioned her, held her accountable—even as something else forgave.

Failure, little wizard?

As if in a dream—as if she shouted orders to herself from a great height and a great distance, Tsering lifted up her fingers and snapped. No light sparked from them.

You failed to find your power. Does that mean you failed in your vigil?

Tsering realized her mouth had dropped open. She shut it slowly, considering.

She had not made her own way out of the chamber. After five days, they had come to find her. And they had carried her. She knew this because Yongten-la had told her, later. She had been in no state to recall.

Some things are beyond strength, Tsering-la. For humans, and for dragons.

Distantly, she was aware of Yongten-la taking her elbow, but all she could see was the thousand eyes along the length of Great Compassion Turquoise Stone, and every one focused on her.

Then we die.

The dragon bowed.
That is indeed what happens.

As if a dream had shattered, Tsering-la found herself snapped back into herself. The dragon turned away, reached out, and dragged its half-material talons through the molten sulfur. They came out tangled in a mess of semi-articulated human bones, a heap of ribs and long bones, a sulfur-encrusted skull lolling on an accreted length of spine.

What the dragon said next, it said aloud. “Here is the corpse of your enemy. What will you have me do now?”

Tsering looked at the bones. They could be anything. But dragons did not lie.

She thought of the Rukh. She wasn’t sure after that what she thought anymore.

“Here is the dragon in me, Great Compassion Turquoise Stone,” she said. “You must come with us to Lung Ching, and bring those bones.”

The dragon tilted its head like a cat examining prey, so that its beard swept from side to side. “Then you must ride.”

“Ride?!”

But Yongten-la still cupped Tsering’s elbow in his hand, and now he steered her forward. She found herself
climbing
the dragon, one boot on its elbow, its scaled flesh cool and half-unreal beneath her hands. A long scramble across its shoulder, Yongten-la behind her, and then she slung a leg over the ridge of its neck and settled between the fluffed spines. The eyes beneath her knees lidded themselves, sealed in the dragon’s hide as Yongten-la slid into place behind her.

“Here is the dragon in you,” he whispered in her ear.

Shocked, she laughed. And clutched the spines before her as, with a rush she had not expected and should have—with a whistle like winter winds—the mist-dragon in all its endless sinuous length began to fly back out along the caverns from which they had come, and then through caverns Tsering had never seen before.

They burst out over Tsarepheth, wreathed in mists and vapors. Great Compassion Turquoise Stone did not so much arc across the sky as writhe and coil against it, like a swimming snake. Below, Tsering could see the lines of wizards and imperial guards filing up the slope of the Island In The Mists, heading for the Way into Reason and thence to Dragon Lake.

She prayed they were in time. And then she thought of the size of the doorway, and the size of the dragon—but before she could mention anything, she realized that the world around them was getting larger—no. The dragon was shrinking, and they were shrinking with him.

Of course, that made sense. Dragons could be any size at all.

“Tsering!”

Yongten-la’s urgency snapped her head around. She stared at him, then followed where he was pointing.

Above them, against a sky stained gray and bright with the last glow of the sun, loomed the ash and smoke cloud from the Cold Fire. And within it, twisting and coiling just as did Great Compassion Turquoise Stone, hung the form of an enormous dragon. Lightning flashed in her eyes; a glow of embers flared behind the fangs of her open maw. The smoke tore behind her, a full moon gleaming beside her head like a smooth, incomprehensible pearl.

“Mother Dragon!” Tsering whispered, her chest aching as if someone had punched her in the heart.

Great Compassion Turquoise Stone’s sides fluttered between her legs as he chuckled. He shifted his grip on the bones dripping between his claws and said, “We are all the Mother Dragon, Tsering-la.”

*   *   *

As Sepehr raised his palm beside his cheek and with the back of his hand struck the Rukh streaking like a meteor, wings trailing, from the sky, Samarkar felt her courage fail. It skipped in her chest, kicked like a caged bird in her belly, cringed and crumpled. Afrit pawed clouds, shaking out his reins. She knew he felt her distress. But she was watching Sepehr borrow her own spells, just from observation, and those of Hong-la.

How did you fight a sorcerer so powerful, so learned he could copy anything you did, just by watching it? Below, the noise of combat changed. Samarkar had lost sight of Hong-la. She heard shrieking, screams.

She was alone in the sky with Sepehr.

Then Sepehr cackled like an old woman cheating at cards, and Samarkar found a shred of herself again.

“Come and get me, you nothing!” she shouted, using the amplification trick herself this time. “I am the Wizard Samarkar!”

His hand came up, fingers bent to his thumb as if he meant to burst the clock of an invisible dandelion. He flicked them open and blew across, and a streak of bruised light leapt from his fingertips toward Samarkar.

A purple-black explosion blossomed beside her with the dull whump of concussed air. Her wards were back up already. Reflexively, she slammed the entirety of her will behind them, and still felt them flex and bow under the force. Afrit staggered a step—

—his ears went back, and he charged.

Samarkar’s courage might have failed her; Afrit’s flagged not once. He was a cataract; a winter storm; a thunderhead sunlicked and towering, lashed in the rain-veils of his mane and tail. As if he were cast of the shining impervious metal he resembled, he raced at the would-be godling with no hesitation at all.

He was everything his name promised and more. And Samarkar could not bear to disappoint him by being less herself, no matter what transpired. That explosion—how had al-Sepehr done that? Was it something she could manage herself?

No, she thought. Now is not the time for experiment.

She focused her wards, hardened them. Slammed them before her into a moving wall with all of Afrit’s unearthly momentum behind it. Sepehr raised a hand, palm flat this time—just as negligent a gesture as before.

Samarkar braced herself against the saddle. The force when her wards struck Sepehr shattered them into spinning plates of blue-green light, like shattered glass, like shattered jade. She felt as if she, too, had ridden into a wall. Air punched from her. Afrit staggered, missed Sepehr.

As he ran past, out of the corner of her eye Samarkar saw Sepehr raise his hand in the flicking gesture again. She threw her weight against Afrit, curving him; there was no time to collect her wards again. The explosion streaked the sky like one of Hong-la’s celebratory fire-chrysanthemums. The explosion scorched and deafened her. But they were on their feet still and moving, Afrit zigging and zagging across the sky as if they were engaged in a game of buzkashi.

Assembling her wards again, Samarkar glanced back over her shoulder to see Sepehr streaking after.

*   *   *

Temur had seen the dawn mists boil and tear that way before. He’d seen the vapory shapes detach themselves and drift earthward, their eyes as white as their wounds. He witnessed it now and—ducking the whistling pass of a glass demon—he reached for his riding crop with the whistle carved in the butt end, and for the bag of salt he’d kept in his sash ever since the morning when Edene had been stolen.

Tsareg Oljei had established a system of warning signals, should the encampment be attacked. Temur blew the one for blood ghosts now, and salted his knife as he heard it spread. Bansh’s hooves sucked in mud, thumped wetly on a body in the mire. An Ideal Mare as red as heart’s-blood raced past, a whooping warrior standing in her saddle. He glimpsed Afrit above, heard the unmistakable ring of hooves on clear sky, and knew that he—and Samarkar on his back—meant to charge the transfigured al-Sepehr. Where was Hong-la?

Where was Hong!
Temur reined Bansh around, intent to follow, and realized—

Men were not fighting men any longer, nor were men fighting ghulim. Temur saw an unhorsed Qersnyk wearing the three falls of Tsaagan Buqa back to back with Master War; he saw a Kyivvan lean from a ladder on the shoulder of an indrik-zver at the lumbering gallop to scoop one of Nilufer’s men-at-arms from the path of a glass demon’s stoop. Swords, arrows, talons turned now to fighting the horrors from the sky.

But command and discipline had evaporated, and half the armies were in rout.

“Hold out,” Temur shouted. “The ghosts flee with full sun! To me, to me! To me!”

Did the rout turn? He could not tell. The flight of those closest to him checked.

He heard a voice take up his name. Another.

Temur! Re Temur! To Re Temur!

The sky behind Temur flared with light, so sharp and thousand-colored it cast his and Bansh’s shadow before them as heavy and dark as a stair. He shaded his eyes and turned—

—to see black coats by the dozens, and the army parting before them as they advanced. Each one shone like a lantern, like a baby sun, like a star as Mother Night hung it in her veils. The tallest among them, hatless, crop-headed even in silhouette, raising his hands—a savage glare—a patchwork wave of brilliance sliding across the battlefield just above head-height to a man on horseback, as if somebody were closing a box with a lid.

The Wizards of Tsarepheth were there, and the Imperial Guards surrounded them. They were warding the entire battlefield. The knot of grim sorrow and ferocity in Temur’s belly broke, unfolded, blossomed into unexpected hope.
Mother Night, how did I misunderstand you?

Temur heard Sepehr laughing, heard Afrit’s stallion scream. He reined Bansh around; they must outrun the wards to help Samarkar. But if ever a mare could outrace light itself, this was her.

Just before the light would have passed over Temur, something punched him sharp between the shoulders. The impact knocked him sideways and Bansh staggered too. Then he was on his side, in the mud, seeing a glimpse of her mud-sheathed legs straddling him through the slit in his helmet knocked askew.

From very far away, someone was screaming his name.

*   *   *

Temur was already gone when Edene reached him. She knew before she fell to her knees in the bloody mire of the battlefield, before she tried to lift his helm and felt the spill of all his blood hot as boiling water across her hands. There was a hole in the center of his armor-coat she could have put her thumb into; he was limp and stank of piss. Besha Ghul crouched beside her but did not touch. Hrahima had caught the reins of Temur’s mare.