Chapter Thirty-two

 

“OUR GUESTS don’t come to us today,” Lady Bortu commented, over her breakfast, needling him between bites of crumbly cheese and millet stew. “The treaty which would have bartered your daughter for peace remains unpledged.”

Mergen had noticed. “The Tinglut packed their tents while our noble Altan made his journey to his ancestors. By now they are doubtless halfway home.” He had offered as a bride for the Tinglut-Khan a shamaness who traveled in the shape of a toad inside the coats of his heir. Daritai would have seen the insult of that match on so many levels that he might not even have considered the murder in his decision. Mergen admitted to himself that the negotiations could have gone better.

“And what do you plan to do about it?” The beads of his mother’s elaborate horned headdress clacked and swayed as she spoke, a reminder of the power of her station. She had made more than one khan, and could make another of her blood if not her womb.

Smothering a sigh, he glared in the Lady Bortu’s direction, careful not to meet her eye, however. He didn’t want to have this conversation now. Didn’t want to have it at all until he’d dealt with the unruly youths of his court, and they hadn’t shown up yet. She would not, however, leave the thing undone.

“You need Yesugei.”

She didn’t accuse him of a mistake in sending the general away with his ten thousand of Uulgar, but it was in his own mind that he had. He would certainly need Yesugei and those conquered troops if he wished to use force against the Tinglut where marriage had failed. Picking over the breakfast for which he had no appetite, he considered whom to send as messenger to bring them back. Not Jochi, who was needed here and whose grief put him at risk in a mission of personal danger. He gestured instead for Chahar, who came forward with a deep bow. He had, Mergen noted, his father’s eyes, though with none of the shaman’s otherworldly gaze.

“Take a message to our beloved Yesugei-Khan,” he said. “Tell him that his gur-khan wishes his company, and that of his armies.”

Chahar bowed and left, carrying with him a turquoise bead as a gift for the general and the understanding that he would report all he had seen and heard for the general’s intelligence. Turquoise meant the threat of war, though not at imminent approach. Yesugei would come with his armies, in good order and fresh for fighting.

Mergen would not attack his peaceful neighbor. Marriages might, after all, still join the uluses in one blood within a generation. But if there would be war, he had no doubt who would win it. His heir would take his place as gur-khan over all the grasslands, an emperor to rival that of Shan. The Lady Bortu, noting the turquoise bead, grinned at him and ate her breakfast.

 

 

 

His mother was out when Qutula returned home late in the day to change into the blue coat of a guardsman. The firebox was still warm, but his mother’s kettle was empty. At some time during the night, while dreams of a thousand vipers seething in the grass troubled his sleep, the Lady Chaiujin, his once-secret lover, had taken away the smooth jade shard he wore. In its place she had returned the token he had carried from a distant battlefield, with its coiled ruin carved on its face. Or she’d replaced it with another like it, though he’d thought it a rare piece when he’d picked it up. This one itched like bees swarming where it touched his skin.

Sechule kept a mirror pointed at the doorway to repel demons, or so she might tell the clients for her potions. Their own faces, reflected in the polished silver, were said to terrify the evil spirits into flight. Not all the mirrors in the ger-tent palace had stopped the Lady Chaiujin from becoming the khan’s wife, of course. Buckling his sword at the waist of his blue coat, he cast a glance in that direction, half expecting to see the reflection of his lady’s obsidian eyes. The strange serpent staring back startled him. Qutula had come to terms with his lover’s other nature, however, and accepted the sinister-looking demon as her acolyte.

“Welcome,” he greeted the creature.

“How did you know I was here?” Mangkut slipped over the threshold, staring about him for other spies in the shadows.

“I didn’t.”

“Oh.”

Mangkut hadn’t seen the serpent, which had vanished as soon as he turned away from the mirror, and Qutula chose not to enlighten him. Let him be nervous, he thought, as his follower licked his dry lips. Fear will keep him sharp. Duwa he considered a necessary loss, to part the prince from his closest allies, but he couldn’t spare Mangkut as well. At least, not yet.

“What report do you have?”

As he expected, Mangkut had gathered for his captain the intelligence of his Durluken, posted throughout the camp. He drew out a cord with small beads tied at regular intervals and fingered the first of them as he spoke.

“The Tinglut have run off. Scouts have scattered to track them,” he said, and his fingers moved to the next bead. “The gur-khan has sent for General Yesugei.”

Qutula gave a nod to acknowledge the news. “And our Prince Tayyichiut?” He had assigned Mangkut to watch the prince and report on his movements through the night.

“With the Lady Eluneke, as you surmised.” Mangkut’s fingers slipped to the next bead on the cord. “They spent the night together by the river.”

“Have they returned to the palace?”

“Not yet. They talked through the night.” Mangkut smirked. “I left when they fell asleep.”

Qutula hated the little dell with its dense and tangled span of forest where the river ran, waiting to drag him down into the underworld at the first misstep. The thought of sleeping on its banks raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Prince Tayy seemed to like it, but with the girl he’d given Qutula a powerful tool to use against him.

“The gur-khan won’t be happy. He has political marriages in mind.” He didn’t mention the toad part. That couldn’t have pleased his father either. Qutula had no such inclinations, either to become a toad or to wed one.

“If the prince won’t honor the gur-khan’s wishes,” Mangkut suggested, “he has more loyal kin to whom he may look.”

“I can’t speculate.” Qutula dropped his eyes, properly abashed. He had no right to claim his father yet. Once he freed the gur-khan from his obligation to Chimbai’s son, however, he would make of himself a more dutiful heir.

“And I can only serve.” With his tight grin and his bow, Mangkut showed that the Durluken likewise planned for the day when their captain might lead them from the dais instead of beside it.

Qutula recognized the offer for what it was. “I’m late already to take my place at court,” he said, and drew the jade talisman on its gold thread from his neck. “With my Durluken, follow the girl. When you have her alone, slip this over her head. It will dull her powers so that you can hold her. Don’t hurt her if you can help it, but she must be hidden away for a while. I mean only to protect her, should the Tinglut try to answer the insult by harming her.”

He expected his own plot to succeed and wouldn’t need a trap to bait for the prince. But if she remained unchecked, the girl could make a nuisance of herself when Qutula wished the gur-khan focused on his own claims to be heir.

Mangkut took the jade and Qutula saw the moment when he thought to wear the talisman under his own clothes. But already the creature that inhabited it burned the Durluken’s fingertips. Mangkut considered the thing with distaste and then slipped it into the deep cuff of his coat. With a final bow, he darted out of Sechule’s tent to gather his companions and complete his mission.

Qutula stood a moment, lost in thought with a hand laid lightly on his mother’s worktable. If nothing else, Eluneke’s disappearance would occupy the shaman Bolghai, who might otherwise uncover the poison dose before it had murdered the prince. With Prince Tayyichiut dead, he would ride out with the Nirun to free the princess and destroy his own followers as renegades. Caught between grief and gratitude, his father would have no choice but to raise him to the dais. And anyone who might have told him otherwise would be dead. Settling his coat more comfortably about his shoulders, Qutula left his mother’s tent for the sumptuous palace of his father. Soon, that, too, would be his.

His mother was there ahead of him, sitting above the firebox with a clutch of matrons who eyed her with frozen hostility. She returned their regard with a haughty lift of her head. The gur-khan was busy with the current Tinglut crisis, but he seemed preoccupied, stealing bewildered glances which his mother returned with cool dignity. He’d expected her to be happier about something. Sechule, for her part, seemed to be masking a simmering rage which she vented only in the way she held herself disdainfully apart from the other women.

Pretending not to notice, Qutula bowed and took his place at the foot of the dais. He looked around, but the prince had not yet returned from his night, and most of the morning, with the shaman princess. See, Father, who is faithful and who is not, he thought.

As if reading his mind, the gur-khan called him forward. “Have you seen your cousin the prince this morning?” he asked.

Cousin.

The world turned on the word. Mergen had spoken softly; his voice carried no farther than the dais, but General Jochi raised an eyebrow over the maps. It was a declaration; never before had he mentioned their relationship, even indirectly. At first, Qutula couldn’t answer. His mind had gone numb from the shock.

“Not since last night,” he finally stammered out while Mergen waited patiently for him to pull himself together. It was even the truth, though Qutula wasn’t ready to mention the intelligence of his own spies yet. “The prince sent us away to be alone . . .”

Not so alone, he wished to convey, but hesitantly as if he didn’t want to get his cousin in trouble. Perhaps he didn’t have to commit murder after all. Mergen might be angry enough about the Princess Eluneke to supplant the heir with his own son at last.

“He’s with Eluneke.”

The gur-khan hadn’t exactly asked, but Qutula confirmed his guess with an apologetic little shrug. “They were together the last I saw them.” He would have preferred the news come from someone else, but Mergen seemed to place no blame on the messenger.

“Find him, and bring him to me. As for Elenuke, she is motherless and has no proper guide in the shamaness Toragana. Take her to your mother.”

A quick glance showed Qutula that Sechule had gone.

“Ask the Lady Sechule, in my name, to prepare the girl for her place as a princess in my court. She may direct our servants to obtain for her the things she will need, the beads and silver, the silk coats, for a proper presentation. And tell her to choose the best gowns for herself as well. I want her to be the girl’s guardian at court and as for more, I will let her tell you herself. Then come back and join us in our deliberations. The Tinglut have gone—”

“As you wish, my lord gur-khan.” Qutula bowed and took his leave, wondering if he had time to stop Mangkut. It seemed that after his planning for war or murder, he might have his wish from the benevolent hand of his father after all. “You will be khaness yet, Mother,” he muttered under his breath. The gur-khan, it seemed, was more susceptible to crotch-thinking than he had guessed, though how his father’s new regard might have angered her remained unclear. But their quarrel, whatever it might be, mattered little. By tomorrow, he would be his father’s heir and then, as quickly as he could safely manage it, he would be khan.

 

 

 

They had talked through the night, falling asleep on the soft moss when the gray of false dawn was lighting the grasslands above them. When Eluneke finally woke, the sun was high enough to strike golden sparks on the ripples of the river. Prince Tayy had already wakened and sat with his back to King Toad’s tree, watching her.

“Good morning,” she said, then reconsidered her greeting. “Good afternoon. Or, midday; have you been awake long? I didn’t mean to sleep at all—”

“I’ve only been awake a few minutes.”

She thought he might be lying about that, but he seemed peaceful, as if he were holding at bay for a little while the concerns of the day. Altan was dead, and not likely for a simple quarrel.

“I have to go to my uncle.” The prince twirled a leaf absently in his hand, his thoughts far from her in that moment. “If our suspicions are true, the whole ulus is at risk.”

“The gur-khan must be told,” she agreed, though it was hard not to knock him on the head or slip him a potion, anything to keep him under her watchful eye and that of the toad people, away from the danger that circled the court.

“You’ll be all right if I leave you here?” He had subtly shifted the way he carried himself, hunching his shoulders in around his heart. Peace had fled, leaving in its place the indrawn tension of one with sorrow behind him and danger ahead.

“I’ll be fine,” she answered. “I may not be a soldier, but I can run away better than almost anybody.” She let him see the little toad of her totem in her eyes, a reminder of her powers as an apprentice shamaness. One more journey stood between her and the fullness of her station, but she had recovered well enough from her travels in the heavens and might easily escape any mortal threat through the dream realm.

“I don’t want to go,” he admitted, laughing a little at himself, but with so many emotions in his living eyes that they almost overwhelmed the death’s-head turning his wrinkled brow to bone. Then, swooping down on her like a nervous bird, he kissed her on the lips. “I won’t let him sell you off to the old Tinglut-Khan.”

“That’s all right, then.” She tried to smile when she answered him. “I’m not sure which dismayed his emissary more—my totem form or the dirt on my face when I returned to my human shape.” She didn’t mention riding in the prince’s jacket, the warmth of his flesh against her skin, the beat of his heart in her twiggy bones.

“I will fight for you,” he told her, the words no less forceful for the speed with which they rushed from his mouth.

That wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Taking his face in her hands she gave it a little shake to make sure he was paying attention to her, not the images of battle in his head. “I don’t want you to die for me,” she commanded. “Don’t die.”

“I can’t promise that.”

She was crying in spite of her efforts to be brave, the tears dripping off the tip of her nose. “Try,” she said, and returned his kiss. But all she felt were the bare teeth of his grinning skull.

“I’ll try,” he agreed on the compromise. Opening fingers of bone, he released her for the upward path to the grasslands above the dell.

“Good-bye,” she whispered as he went. The next time she saw him, she knew, he would be dead.

When he had passed out of sight, she turned to face the Durluken warrior hidden among the trees. “I know you’re there,” she said. “What do you want?”

“No one wants to hurt you.” She didn’t recognize him when he stepped out from behind the branches. “My captain just wants to speak with you.”

“Qutula?” she asked, though she knew he must have sent them. If anyone meant her harm, it was he. She couldn’t cry out. Who but the prince would hear her? She had just extracted a promise that he shouldn’t risk his life for her.

Eluneke turned to run. Already she felt her totem form taking shape in her mind. It would take only a step or two, and she could escape into the dream realm. . . .

“Qutula,” said a voice in her ear. Mangkut. She should have heard him coming, or felt his presence behind her, but he remained a dangerous void in her mind even now, when his hand clamped around her wrist.

“Let me go!” She kicked out at him and aimed a blow at his nose, but he dodged it, twisting her wrist painfully behind her. Another kick. He held her with her back against him, so she didn’t have a good angle to do any damage. Bolghai had taught her how to run in her mind, however; if she could just distract him for a moment, she could escape, warn the prince that his cousin had moved against him.

She closed her eyes, briefly, to set her imaginary feet in motion. It was a mistake. A chip of stone suspended by a gold thread dropped over her head and evil settled like a weight over her heart.

“What?” she groped at the talisman, a fragment of jade. Her fingers couldn’t seem to reach it, though her nails dug garnet rivers in the flesh of her breasts.

“Don’t, don’t.” Mangkut grabbed for her free hand and she eluded him, swinging at his head again. The thing around her neck had clouded her perceptions, however, and the blow glanced harmlessly off his jaw. Then he had both her hands held at her sides.

“The pain will stop soon. In the meantime, my orders are to deliver you unhurt, and I will, if I have to tie your hands at your sides to do it.” He was crooning as if to settle a nervous horse, but she thought he must be lying. She could abide the pain, but already the thing had robbed her of control over her body.

Why? clashed with What have you done? in her mind, but she knew part of it already and doubted her captors understood even as much as she did herself. The creature who inhabited the stone whispered in her ear, obscenities to which she refused to listen. She knew his kind, if not his name. She had seen his like in a green mist towering over Qutula in the wrestling match.

With the help of the grasslands and their neighbors, with dragons and magical beasts Prince Tayy had described to her, the god-king Llesho had defeated the demons’ reign of terror against the gates of heaven. They had killed the demon-king in his lair and closed the crack between the worlds that had allowed him passage from his rightful domain below. On that mountaintop high above the Cloud Country, many of his minions had also perished. Some had escaped, however, and some had found their way into the world of mortals long before that fateful battle. One such had murdered Tayy’s father and mother. Another, or perhaps the same, had lent its strength to the captain of the Durluken against the prince.

“Not her,” the creature of the talisman whispered in Eluneke’s ear. “She is the queen of us all now that the king her father is dead.”

The rune carved in the fragment—she saw now it was jade—began to uncoil. A grinning serpent’s head rose on a jeweled neck. She struggled to escape it, but Mangkut pulled her wrists up tightly behind her back.

“Now, now,” he said, and may have crowed more, except that the creature struck, sinking fangs into her breast. She knew the effect of a viper’s bite. The searing pain didn’t come, however. Sleep, instead, swept over her head and she sank to her knees, the pain in her shoulders from the wrenching of her arms grew distant and meaningless. Then she didn’t feel anything at all.

 

 

 

 

“I liked Altan.” Bekter sat on the low stool the shamaness reserved for patients and picked out a random tune on his lute. “With Jumal gone, the prince needed him. His loss will hit his father hard, as well.”

“An evil wind sighs through the grass,” Toragana agreed in the riddle form of her calling. “Soon, it will howl.”

Bekter looked up, surprised. They had spent the night as man and woman, not poet and shamaness. Now, and without warning, his innocent observation had moved them back into the professional. Her meaning seemed pretty clear, however. Altan’s death had been no crime of passion or accident of temper, but murder, planned and carried out in cold blood. Not the first piece removed from the board, but the first in the current round to be swept away so unalterably. Jumal could be recalled, but Altan’s return would take more seasons than the prince could spare. What greater evil awaited them he could only guess, and prayed that it didn’t involve his brother.

He remembered the emerald green bamboo snake tattooed over Qutula’s heart and how dismayed the khan had been to see it there. His brother had passed it off as a reminder of past injuries, perhaps a mistake brought on by drunkenness, but Qutula never drank to excess. And Altan had died at Durluken hands, so he put scant hope in that prayer.

“When do you think this evil will strike again?”

Bekter was looking into Toragana’s eyes when he said it, so he saw the very moment when her gaze grew distant, then troubled.

“Now,” she said, and swept up her robes from their peg on the lattices and her tall shaman’s headdress with its prescient raven glaring down at him from its crown. “I have to find Bolghai.”

Bekter set his lute down. Panic wouldn’t help anyone. He had to ask her, though, “Has something happened to my fa . . . the gur-khan? Or the prince?”

“Not yet.” She shook her head, more as if to clear her ears than to emphasize her negative, which had not carried much force behind it anyway.

“Then what?” he pressed, guessing by the controlled tension with which she prepared herself that catastrophe had struck very close to the dais.

“Eluneke has disappeared. I can’t sense her presence anywhere.”

The gur-khan’s daughter, recognized by her father and offered as a bride to seal the treaty with the Tinglut only the day before. His own sister, come to that, but more importantly, the prince had fallen in love with her.

“Have the Tinglut kidnapped her?” he suggested. Bride capture sometimes happened even between consenting couples. But it seemed unlikely that, rejecting the girl as unsuitable, Prince Daritai would snatch her up and take her with him when he left. He might have wanted her for himself, of course, but had shown no sign of it on meeting her. The Tinglut prince had seemed truly dismayed to discover the princess, offered to his father in matrimonial bond of the peace between them, in the shape of a toad carried about in the pocket of Mergen’s heir.

Toragana had more pressing reasons for believing otherwise. “I don’t mean she’s not here in this tent, or that she has gone from the gur-khan’s camp. She is a shamaness in training under my care. I can tell you exactly where she goes and what she is doing at any point in the day, wherever she travels in this world or passing through the dreamscape. Her presence is with me always, as a part of the fabric of the universe. And now that presence has vanished like the shuttering of a lamp.”

“Dead?” he asked, concerned first for his father, then for the girl herself. Evil moved, as surely as Toragana had predicted.

After a moment during which her eyes rolled back in her head and she stumbled so that he had to steady her, the shamaness shook her head. “Not dead,” she assured him, though she seemed little relieved by it. “I would feel her departing spirit. The Tinglut could not have done this.”

He should have taken comfort in that. If the Tinglut prince could not have accomplished whatever had been done to Eluneke, then neither could Qutula. But when he thought of the tattoo on his brother’s breast, he guessed that might not be true.

“I have to go,” he said. “The gur-khan will need me.” Mergen would hardly desire his music, but Bekter could offer him the comforting presence of a son. As for Qutula . . .

“I’m going as well.” Toragana strode over to open the door. A stoat leaped through and chittered at her briefly. Bekter thought he must be spending too much time with the shamaness; he plainly read the worry in the bright intelligent eyes of Bolghai, the gur-khan’s shaman, in his totem form.

“Good luck,” he said.

“Remember Alaghai the Beautiful and her brothers,” Toragana answered back, though Prince Tayy was the girl’s cousin and not a foreign king.

“I’ll try.” Bekter promised only that much, wishing it were not so easy to believe that Qutula had a hand in his half sister’s disappearance. He was pleased that he managed to control his reaction when Toragana turned into a raven and flew away. The stoat had likewise gone, by routes Bekter didn’t wish to explore. He had obligations as well, so he gathered up his lute and went to find his horse.

 

 

 

“Prince Tayyichiut! Prince Tayy!” Tayy reined in his horse and waited for the riders to come up to him. He recognized Qutula’s voice and wondered if his cousin had ridden out to kill him before he reached the safety of the palace. There were too many in the approaching party to fight, however, and they were too near for him to run. Fortunately, his own Nirun rode among the newcomers, their faces showing only the proper concern of guardsmen who have been thwarted far too long in their efforts to protect their charge.

“Has my uncle sent you?” he asked, “I was on my way back anyway.”

“The gur-khan has sent me to request your presence,” Qutula affirmed. “My father has also asked that I send a picked hand of guardsmen to escort the Princess Eluneke to the tents of the Lady Sechule, my mother, to be properly prepared to take her place at the foot of the dais.”

Tayy said nothing while he calculated the import of that statement. He knew the gur-khan had acknowledged Eluneke in order to barter her as a bride with the Tinglut, and wondered how long Mergen’s favor would last if they defied his wishes. As for the other, clearly his cousin’s fortunes had changed in his father’s court.

“He’s acknowledged you, then.” He turned his horse and fell in beside his cousin. Managing a smile, Tayy wondered how it would influence the plots of Mergen’s blanket-son to be recognized as his father’s true offspring. He might choose to delay his plans, hoping for greater favor through his superior devotion to the khan. Or the khan might have set his son above his nephew already. But Qutula gave a slight shake of his head.

“Privately only,” he said. “And possibly in error.”

Mergen didn’t make such errors, of course. Qutula was covering his hasty appropriation of a station the gur-khan had not yet announced to the court. But if Mergen wanted Eluneke in Sechule’s care, it meant he had changed his mind about his mistress as well.

Tayy was still contemplating the possible meanings of Mergen’s change of heart when his cousin added, “Jochi was there.”

Not so privately, then, if not a formal declaration. He wondered what Mergen had offered Sechule. His own guardsmen had ringed him about, however, and he saw not more than a face or two of Durluken—his cousin was waiting with a wry smile for him to finish taking the measure of the force that had come for him.

“My followers have cost you greatly in your friend Altan,” Qutula granted with an apologetic bow of his head. “I’ve chastised them already, but I wouldn’t insult you by asking you to ride among them.”

His cousin was lying, and didn’t care if he knew it. The Durluken were doubtless on some errand of mischief. But the Nirun were Tayy’s own, which meant his personal safety was assured at least until they returned to the palace. Anything else would have to wait until he had talked with the gur-khan. Which was better done sooner than later. He nudged the mare’s flanks with his heels and let her have her head. Qutula did the same and they raced, the tails of their horses flying out behind them, for the ger-tent gleaming in its silver embroideries.