5kops

 

 

 

Copyright © 2003 by Curt Benjamin.

 

 

 

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

 

 

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

First paperback printing, September 2004

DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

—MARCA REGISTRADA

HECHO EN U.S.A.

S.A.

 

http://us.penguingroup.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 This book is dedicated to the usual suspects: Mom and Dad and Erik and David. “Ben’s Groupies”—Barb and mom Charlotte—for their unflagging support and food for the soul. Bonnie, without whom this would have been written on stone tablets, and the Hoffmans whom I’m buttering up for their expertise on the next project. Tom and Cathy, who were there when Llesho was born and still give great advice. And of course the Free Library of Philadelphia, for slipping me the cool books.

 

 

 

 

 Raves forThe Gates of Heaven:

“Benjamin masterfully unfolds the saga’s age-old scenario of good and evil through the characters by giving readers uncommon intimacy with them; one lives inside their heads throughout. The fascinating subtleties of body language and non-verbal communication among the characters intensify the enjoyment of an excellent heroic fantasy.”—Booklist

 

“Building on the traditions and philosophies of the Far East, Curt Benjamin delivers an absorbing conclusion to his lively fantasy saga.”—Publishers Weekly

 

“Features a cast of intriguing characters and a fluid approach to magic that is reminiscent of Asian folk tales.”—Library Journal

 

“With realistic descriptions just shy of tasting the dust and hearing the jingling of the camels’ harnesses, Mr. Benjamin portrays a deposed prince’s coming-of-age journey.”—Romantic Times

 

 

 

 

 Don’t miss any of the exciting books in Curt Benjamin’sSeven Brothers :

 The Prince of Shadow

 

The Prince of Dreams

 

The Gates of Heaven

 

 

 Chapter One

IN LLESHO’S dream, Dognut the dwarf tilted his head, inviting him to consider carefully. “Who, among the thousands who follow you, would you trade for the life of your best friend?”

The dim light from false dawn hadn’t yet brightened the red canvas of their tent, but it had dulled the light of the lamp hanging from the tent pole. In the aftermath of the battle that had defeated the witch-finder, Hmishi’s murdered body lay on a pallet hidden in shadows with Lling an indistinct grieving heap at his side. Master Markko, through his lieutenant the witch-finder, had clouded Lling’s mind while he tortured her lover to death. Lling’s lover. Llesho’s best friend through all the struggles that had brought them from Pearl Island to this. He’d searched for them across the length of the Gansau Wastes and into the grasslands themselves. And now he’d found them, too late for Hmishi and too late for Lling in a lot of ways, too. She would live forever with the memory of Master Markko oozing through her mind, something Llesho shared in common with her. Almost, he’d been too late to save his brother Adar who lay sleeping, thanks to Carina’s potions, in a nearby tent.

In the haze of morning, the lamp still caught the gleam of Dognut’s eyes. Llesho gazed deeply into them as the mortal god of mercy revealed himself in all his stern sorrow. Dognut was a tag-name dropped on him by the ignorant. Like a careful farmer, the dwarf cultivated insignificance in men’s eyes. Uncounted years ago, however, some mother and father had greeted him newborn and named him Bright Morning. Had they known then that they gave birth to a god? Or that in age his warm lined face would promise rainbows and scudding clouds and blue, blue sky?

Llesho wanted to believe in Mercy, but the question—whose life in trade?—was a dangerous one. Hmishi had died in his service, one among the many who had perished to defend him since he’d walked away from the pearl beds with a quest laid on him by a ghost. Pearl Island and Farshore and Shan and Ahkenbad—he wore the names of their dead heavy around his neck like the pearls of the Great Goddess at his breast. He was supposed to be growing stronger under their weight, but he didn’t feel at all wise or kingly.

He was just a boy, sad and weary, whose best friend had died of such terrible injuries that Llesho’s heart squeezed in sympathetic pain. Not anymore, though. Hmishi’s pain was gone. And Dognut—Bright Morning—was offering what? A trick? Choose a lesser life to die, and return your friend to merciless agony that would leave him crippled inside and out for the rest of his pain-filled life? Or did the dwarf offer something more seductive: the return of his friend to life and health in exchange for an innocent sacrifice and thus, Llesho’s corruption. What kind of test was it this time, and how was this mercy of any kind?

“Who would I give, to see Hmishi alive?” he repeated in his dream, though the event had gone much more quickly in real life. His answer remained the same, however: “No one.”

He remembered the Dinha’s words—“Spend my Wastrels well”—and knew she didn’t mean this. The gods and warriors who traveled in his company were his responsibility, not his property. He could spend their lives—had done so in this very battle—but their deaths had to buy more than a friend’s laughter.

“It’s just . . . he’s one too many, you know? I need a reason to keep going. I thought that Kungol was it—home, and freedom, a kingdom—but they’re just words and a world away.

“The cadre—Hmishi and Lling, Bixei and Stipes, and Kaydu—have been my only home for so long that I’ve lost the knack of imagining another.”

When it had happened for real, his brother Balar had been there, and Master Den. Bixei and Stipes had stood guard at the entrance to the red tent. His dream had stripped the memory of their presence, and of his admission that he did not find in his brothers the home he sought.

As in life, however, Bright Morning agreed: “The mortal goddess of war did good work when she bound your cadre to each other, though its strength was never meant to last beyond its usefulness.”

“A broken sword wins no battles.” His own argument could go against him. He thought he had some value to these mortal gods because the Great Goddess cared for him as a beloved husband. But would she love him still if he were so easily broken? Would his guides and mentors abandon him if she didn’t?

The dwarf dropped his hands into his lap. “You ask too much.”

He’d said the very words himself, to no avail. The gods kept asking for more anyway; he figured it was time they knew how it felt. Bright Morning read the thought in his face and shook his head. In the end, it came to a simple truth: “Your heart needs rest.” With that, the mortal god of mercy took up a silver flute and set it to his lips.

This time, the dream had been kind to him. The music had lightened his heart and stirred Lling from her sleep. “What’s happening?” she asked, her eyes on Llesho but her ear cocked in the direction of the music.

“I don’t know,” Llesho began, but the silver tones of the flute lifted him with unreasoning hope. When he looked on his dead friend, Hmishi’s breast rose and fell, rose and fell, almost imperceptibly at first, then growing stronger with each breath, until his eyelids fluttered and opened.

“Hmishi!” Lling fell to her knees, her arms enclosing him. Between her sobs she repeated his name, “Hmishi, Hmishi, Hmishi.”

Llesho watched them. Although he stood close enough to reach out and touch them, his heart no longer felt a part of the joy of his companions. The tent itself seemed to have grown as large as the khan’s great traveling palace, and Llesho found himself in the lowest place near the door. He’d wanted this, asked for it, had thought himself the hero of this tale of sacrifice and redemption. In the end, it wasn’t about him at all.

Hmishi’s eyes roamed without focus or comprehension until they fell on Llesho, then his brows knotted. “Am I dead?” he asked.

Hmishi had asked him that before. This time, Llesho had smiled and answered, “Not anymore.”

“Good.” With a contented sigh, the dream Hmishi closed his eyes, which seemed like a signal for Llesho himself to leave sleep behind.

He rubbed his face with the palms of his hands and, as he did every morning on rising, checked his pack for the safety of the sacred gifts he carried as part of his quest. The spear he left for later, going first to count the scattered pearls of the Great Goddess’ necklace, the “String of Midnights” that he hung in a small bag from a thong around his neck. Six, not counting Pig, who dangled from the silver chain of the Tashek dream readers. Everyone from the Jinn to the mortal goddess of war had insisted he find the pearls, each as big as the knuckle of his thumb and as black as its name indicated. Touching them usually soothed him, but their hypnotic mystery couldn’t dispel the dream that lingered in the air of the red tent.

With the camp coming to life around him, he set the little bag of pearls over his heart where they belonged and drew out the jade wedding cup that the Lady SienMa had given him back before he knew she was the mortal goddess of war. It was a promise; he knew that at the end of his quest the Great Goddess waited for him. He wished she was here now, to take away the dreams that haunted him. This one had been milder than some. In the worst of them, Hmishi woke screaming in agony and Llesho knew, in the way one does in dreams, that his friend would suffer the terrible pain of his wounds forever. In another version, Lling had gazed up at Llesho with a look so near to worship that he squirmed under the heat of it.

“Don’t thank me; I didn’t do it.”

“You interceded with the gods. I know you did.”

He didn’t want her thanks. He’d done it for himself; not for Lling or even for Hmishi, but because he wanted to hold onto the friends he had left. Lling’s adoring gratitude, however, warned him that they were followers now; he’d already lost them as companions. Unlike the dream of never ending pain, this one was true.

Mercy had lived up to his name. Hmishi still needed time to rest and heal, but the mortal god called Bright Morning had mended the worst of his injuries when he’d brought him back from the dead. And his friends now treated Llesho more like a deity than they did the real gods who wandered among them. Dognut had watched him come to the realization with one of those deep, patient looks and Master Den had worn his teacher’s face. Apparently that was the lesson he was supposed to learn out of this. It could have waited until he’d had a chance to savor the joy.

Even now, he didn’t have a quiet moment to steal a might-have-been. The sounds of waking outside the tent had grown to include angry voices at the entrance. As he put away the jade wedding cup, he heard Bixei’s greeting and the Harnish prince, Tayyichiut, shouting something back at him. Llesho couldn’t make out the words, but the anger and hurt were plain to hear.

“Let him in,” he called out to his guards—if Bixei was on duty, Stipes would be nearby—and climbed off his cot, braced for bad news.

“He’s dead!” Prince Tayyichiut burst into the tent, his shirt and tunic disheveled, his braids coming undone so that his hair flew wildly as he paced. Word of Hmishi’s return from the underworld hadn’t spread in the camp yet, but the Harnish prince didn’t know him. He hadn’t been their only loss, of course. Tayy himself had lost a friend in the fighting. He’d grieved, but not like this.

This new loss had shaken Tayy to the center of his soul, however, which meant Llesho needed reinforcements. He snapped Bixei to action with the urgent command, “Get Master Den and Bright Morning. My brothers, too. And Carina.” It might be too late for her healing services, but as a shaman she was an expert at unraveling the mysteries of the underworld. She would know what had happened, what was to be done.

Bixei gave a bow to acknowledge his orders. Before following them, however, he called on a pair of Gansau Wastrels to replace him in front of the tent. Taking up their station, the Wastrels reminded Llesho to take nothing at appearances. Once he’d thought the desert warriors his enemy, but they had fought and died for him, not only at Ahkenbad, but here, against the stone monsters as well. Dread shivered through him at the memory; he had a feeling he was going to need them again before long.

It took just a moment to set the guard, and then Bixei was gone. With a nod of acknowledgment, Llesho turned again to the distraught prince.

“Who’s dead?”

“My father. Chimbai-Khan.”

“Oh, no.” Llesho sank back to his cot, stunned by the news. Balar had warned him the universe would demand balance for the return of his friend’s life. How much harm had he caused to the Harnish people and their prince with his one selfish wish?

Tayyichiut heard only the concern of a friend in Llesho’s exclamation. “Yes,” he confirmed with a bob of his head, “Dead in his sleep of snakebite, Bolghai says. I will miss him greatly.”

“What kind of bite?” Llesho asked, though he knew already.

“Bamboo snake.” Tayyichiut spoke with the calculated gravity of one who said more than met the ear. “Somehow, it made its way into his bed while the khan slept heavily with fever. Serpents will sometimes do that, looking for warmth, though Bolghai says bamboo snakes are rare in this area and they are more inclined to stay in the trees than to visit sleeping men in the night.”

No accident, then, but murder. In his dream travels Llesho had seen the bamboo snake resting on the khan’s breast. She had spoken to him with Lady Chaiujin’s voice.

“A tragedy,” Llesho agreed. “And the Lady Chaiujin, his wife, mourns her loss, no doubt.” He’d had his own encounter with the lady, who had offered the peace of the underworld in her arms and in the form of a snake had poised with tooth at his throat. He would have ended up like Chimbai-Khan if not for Master Den’s timely arrival. He wished now he’d said something, but the khan had been safe from her tooth since their marriage and he hadn’t seen the dream for the warning it had been.

“She weeps for the loss of her husband and for the unborn son who will never know his father,” Tayyichiut said, answering the words with the ritual responses though he marked the irony of the sentiment with a knowing drop of his lashes. As the inconveniently full-grown heir, he would be next on her murder list. Then she would claim the khanate for herself in the name of her dead husband’s unborn son. If such a son existed, which Llesho doubted in spite of her claims. As a snake, she’d shown no sign of carrying a human child. He didn’t think the Harnish clans would follow a khan hatched from an egg, however valid his claim by descent.

Llesho’s reinforcements arrived then and he welcomed the newcomers with a jerk of his chin. It said much about his adventures that he drew comfort from the trickster ChiChu, who traveled as the servant and teacher Master Den. The god filled the entrance to the tent with his huge bulk and set down Bright Morning, who had ridden to the war counsel in the crook of his arm. His brothers followed, except for Adar, who remained in the hospital tent. He had sent his blessings with Carina.

“I will be Adar’s eyes and ears,” she promised. “He chafes at his confinement but cannot hide his moans when he tries to move about. Still,” she assured them quickly, “he is recovering, and will be on his feet soon enough.”

Fixing a concerned frown on Tayy, who continued his agitated pacing in the crowded tent, she added the question they all had come to ask: “What has happened?”

“The khan is dead,” Llesho told them. Since the lady could be anywhere in her serpent form, he carefully refrained from stating aloud the obvious conclusion. Lady Chaiujin had murdered her husband and would do the same to her stepson as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

“My uncle says, ‘have patience,’ but how can I?” Tayy exclaimed. “Between one summer and the next I have gone from the most favored son of my mother and father to a homeless orphan!”

“Mergen will protect you,” Llesho assured him, though he wondered about that. Did the lady lay her plans alone, or did she scheme with her husband’s brother to take his place on the dais of the khan?

“I know he will,” Tayy agreed. “In fact, I have to go to him now. He awaits with Bolghai. The ulus will have to elect a new khan.”

“I’ll go with you,” Kaydu offered, “Little Brother has missed you.” Little Brother had traveled on the prince’s back the day before and was notoriously fickle about his attentions to anyone but his mistress, so they all took her claim for what it was. Tayy had his own band of young followers who acted as his bodyguard, of course. Until they knew in which direction the khan’s brother would move, however, the affection of Kaydu’s monkey familiar for the Harnish prince would give her an excuse to stay close.

“I’ll go, too,” Carina offered. “Bolghai will need help to tend the body.” She bowed her head in sorrow for the dead khan, remembering that the shaman’s own son had lately died as well.

Llesho couldn’t help but notice that death followed wherever his quest took him. He would have handed himself over to Master Markko on the spot to save the people around him from harm, but he knew that wouldn’t work. Heaven itself was at stake, and the mortal kingdoms both waking and sleeping, if he failed. The magician would loose the demons of hell itself, releasing chaos from the gardens of heaven to the underworld, sweeping the worlds of men along in their fury. He had to believe that the khan had died to save all the grasslands from that coming storm or he would go mad.

Tayy, however didn’t seem to blame him, and Llesho remembered that the khan’s first wife had died suspiciously a season or more before their own band had entered the ulus of the Qubal people. Chaos stalked on more than one horse, it seemed. Perhaps fate had brought him here to save Tayy, not to cause his father’s death.

The prince accepted Kaydu’s offer of company with a courtly nod. “I won’t be able to get away again until the ceremonies are completed, but Yesugei will explain the proper respects an outlander owes a dead khan.” They left together, Kaydu sweeping the area with the fierce gaze of a hawk—or a dragon—on the lookout for a snack. The Lady Chaiujin would do well to keep to her human form or she would find herself trapped in an unlikely gullet.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Two

WITH THE rituals returning a khan to his ancestors completed, Yesugei had called Llesho and his brothers to a formal audience at which strangers might pay their respects to the Qubal clans in their time of loss. Both sides would offer assurances of continued friendship, at least until a new khan was elected. The Qubal seemed unlikely to choose a leader who would move against visitors who had been granted the hospitality of the ulus, but the possibility remained a worry.

Kaydu had flown out at dawn to report to her father, but Shokar gathered Llesho’s cadre and his brothers for the audience with the royal family. Since Hmishi still needed time to heal, he had called up as temporary replacement the Thebin corporal who had worked with Llesho in the recent battle.

“Tonkuq,” Shokar introduced the middle-aged woman with the scar over her right eye. He had trained her with the other troops he had gathered for Llesho’s cause, and added from his experience with her, “None better with a knife.”

“He says that because he hasn’t seen Lling work.” She didn’t mention Llesho’s own royal skill with the weapon, but Tonkuq gave him a look that told him she guessed it. Llesho remembered her competence in battle and accepted her temporary presence beside them.

“And Sawghar.” With a gesture, Shokar motioned forward the Gansau Wastrel he had chosen to fill in while Lling recovered from her own ordeal. Llesho thought it no coincidence that his personal guard now counted in its number at least one representative from each place he had stopped since he had walked out of the bay to begin his quest. His brother had served as a diplomat to the Shan Empire before he took up farming in the aftermath of Thebin’s fall.

“Welcome.” Looking from one to the other, Llesho wondered how many of them would be alive at the end of the day. Shocked at the strange death of their khan, the camp had grown wary around mysteries. Not least of these they counted the wizard-king, as they had come to call Llesho. Word had spread about the magical spear he carried and the messenger who came and went in the shape of a bird. With the tales came whispers that he had used his unearthly powers to wrest a Thebin warrior from the clutching grasp of the underworld to serve him.

Llesho had given up his protests that he was merely the impoverished prince of a broken house on a mad quest. More than that he hadn’t figured out, though, and suspected he wouldn’t until he reached the gates of heaven in his mortal form and asked the Great Goddess herself what purpose he had on this her earth. Maybe not even then, if she decided he had to solve the puzzle of his existence for himself. In the here and now, however, Harnish warriors avoided the little valley by the Onga where Llesho’s forces made their camp, and they made warding signs against the evil eye when their paths crossed one of his fighters. His own small band of fifty could scarcely hope to stand against the grasslands if that fear turned against them.

The trickster god joined the diplomatic party as they followed Shokar through their own camp. He uttered a long-suffering sigh when he saw where they were heading. To reach the ger-tent palace of the khan, they would have to climb the steep shoulder of the valley to the plains above.

“What are you going to tell Prince Tayy?” Master Den asked, knowing without needing to be told the road Llesho’s mind wandered.

Llesho shrugged a one-shouldered “I don’t know” but said nothing until they had moved a little way from the tents clustered around the commons at the center of the camp. He had to give Tayy some explanation, and he had too little information about the alliances shifting within the ulus—the gathering of clans under the khan’s spear—to figure out the prince’s position in all of this. Would he be sharing confidences with a friend, or demonstrating the powers he wielded among the mortal gods for a potential ally?

When they had drawn away from the curious glances, he pondered his lack of a ready answer. “I’d like to tell him that Carina made a mistake which we happily discovered when Hmishi sat up and asked for a cup of tea. It’s happened before.”

“That’s why someone always sits with the body until the pyre is ready,” Master Den agreed.

Llesho shivered in horror at the thought. Hmishi hadn’t been alive, of course, until Bright Morning brought him back from the underworld. Carinadidn’t make mistakes like that. Still, it gave a soldier pause.

“But?” When he didn’t continue, Master Den prodded with the less than patient tone he took when a student deliberately avoided the point of a lesson.

They were passing through a stand of spindly trees, and Llesho gave his surroundings a wary inspection. The bamboo snake had killed the prince’s father in his sleep. As Lady Chaiujin, she’d tried to seduce Llesho to his death as well, and might have succeeded if Master Den hadn’t found him just then and sent her off to do her mischief elsewhere. He didn’t think for a minute she was done with him, however, and kept a wary eye on the reaching branches.

Before they began the steep ascent up the side of the dell, Master Den took the opportunity to relieve himself on a slender sapling with much contented sighing. Llesho kept his eyes carefully averted; he had come to know too much about his godly companions already. Wondering if the trickster god intended his relief as an insult to murderous Lady Chaiujin, Llesho decided to hold off on both question and answer. There were too many leafy hiding places where the lady might be slinking nearby, so he waited until they had climbed out of the little valley.

A chill dread pushed him ahead of his companions. Llesho reached the lip of the valley in the lead and he took a moment to look around. Here, on the high ground, the Harn had raised the white-and-silver ger-tent of the khan’s palace. Lesser tents had grown up around it, dotting the rolling landscape with round white mounds among the stony outcrops. In the late morning light of both the Great and Little Sun, sparks bright as fireworks flashed off the chips of mica in the stone. He squinted, and sniffed cautiously at the air. It still carried the taint of flesh and other objects burned with the dead khan. On a pyre taller than Llesho’s head, the Harn had stacked the most prized of their khan’s personal possessions, including his favorite horses, and a flock of sheep to feed him in the underworld.

Spirits did not eat mutton, but Bolghai, the Harnish shaman, had spent most of yesterday afternoon in the ritual slaughter of the sheep anyway. “It’s not important how useful the gift is to the one who receives it,” he’d explained to Llesho. “What counts is how much it means to the giver.”

In this case, one sheep from each clan plus horses and other goods demonstrated not only the loyalty of the ulus, but also the wealth of the respective clans that made up the gathering. “And wealth,” Bolghai had added, “is just one among the many powers in competition here until the new khan is installed.”

“There you are.” Huffing a bit from the exertion, the mountainous trickster god crested the rise. Leading them a little away from the edge of the tent city, where they could talk without being overheard, he waved a hand to signal a halt at a curved sweep of stone cushioned with a thick mat of grass.

“Better,” he declared, dropping heavily onto the stony seat.

Llesho doubted this heaving display of weakness. As Master Den, servant, launderer, and combat instructor, the trickster had walked most of the way from Pearl Island at his side, and had never drawn a labored breath. But if it bought him time, he was willing to give ChiChu even this small trick.

“But?” Master Den repeated, bringing him back to the matter of explanations. Friend or not, as the prince of the Qubal clans, Tayy would demand answers.

Llesho gave the grass at his feet a distrustful frown, but saw no creature who might be the Lady Chaiujin or one of her spies. “Prince Tayy knows his father’s death was murder, and no accident,” he offered his opinion. “He doesn’t know how the Lady Chaiujin managed it, or what part I played in the murder. I’d rather he never did—at least the last part, about me.”

“You had nothing to do with the khan’s death, Llesho.”

Master Den patted the grassy seat next to him, and Llesho climbed up, careful not to disturb the bluebells and the buttercups rising on slender stems at his feet. He was much shorter than his master and his dark legs hung inches above the ground. Shokar sent Balar and Lluka with his cadre to form a circle of defense to guard Llesho’s privacy. For himself, he remained nearby in a watchful pose that did nothing to hide his agreement with the trickster god—or, Llesho noticed, to mar his dignity like a dangling child.

Dignity wasn’t the issue, however. “Tayy’s father died because I wanted my friend back. You heard what Balar said: the universe demands balance. If Mercy grants a life, another must be taken in its place. I wanted Hmishi back and Bright Morning, in his mercy, favored my desire for a friend over Tayy’s need for his father. Now I have my cadre, and Tayy has no parent. Who will protect the prince from his stepmother now?”

“His uncle?” Shokar suggested, arms crossed over his broad chest. “Yesugei? The ten thousand Harnish troops who now stand ready at a word to do battle in his defense?”

“Bolghai?” Master Den added, with a wry little smile, “You?”

“Oh, me, right. The Lady Chaiujin asked for my life. I stood with arms outstretched and offered it to her, and I am supposed to save her stepson from the same fate?”

“You what?” Shokar came out of his slouch with fire in his eyes, and Llesho flinched at the rage he saw there.

“It was nothing. A moment’s weakness . . .”

“And knowing how you reacted to Hmishi’s death, you wonder why the dwarf felt you needed his mercy?” Shokar unfolded his arms and gripped the hilt of his sword as if he would slay the demons of Llesho’s mind. He wasn’t prepared for the eagle that swooped down and landed on it, and flinched when she wrapped her talons around his forearm.

With a flap of her wings, Kaydu rose again, just enough so that when she became human, only a little bounce on the balls of her feet gave evidence of her return to earth-bound form. The distraction didn’t save him, however. “He’s taking the blame for killing the khan, isn’t he?” she asked as she settled next to Llesho on the grassy outcrop.

He made a face at her. Jammed cheek to cheek and shoulder to shoulder on that rocky shelf as they were, he had the fleeting thought that they must look like three demons of misadventure in search of mischief.

Looking on with evident disapproval, Shokar answered Kaydu’s question. “I thought he felt guilty because Bright Morning took mercy on his flagging spirits at cost to some other poor soul in the earthly kingdom,” he answered with acid in his words, “but now I wonder. Balar said that the universe must remain in balance, but no one ever said that the Chimbai-Khan’s death was the weight that countered Hmishi’s life. In fact, it would seem likely that somewhere a butterfly stumbled, or a miner cracked a rock deep underground to balance the small spark of a lowly soldier’s existence.

“It would take a larger price to balance the death of a khan. The life of a boy-king, for example. By the Goddess, Llesho, where do you keep your brain, because you clearly aren’t using it today!”

“He’s right, you know,” Master Den slapped his hands on his knees to emphasize the point. “Hmishi hardly seems the equal to a khan, even if murder could restore the balance upset by mercy.”

“It can’t, of course,” Kaydu finished the thought. “Ac cording to my father, murder by its very nature creates a void in the universe. One murder doesn’t pay for another, and we’ve had two of them.”

“Habiba is the servant of the mortal goddess of war,” Llesho objected, “He would say that—believe it even—to free himself of the guilt of murders done in her name.”

Kaydu glared at him. “Don’t play those games, Llesho. War is not murder, as you well know. And you, at least, have never killed except in honest combat.”

“So your death wouldn’t have saved the khan,” Shokar insisted, “But think of the people who follow you, who would have died in a vain battle to avenge you with no hope of seeing Thebin free at the end of it. Think of the Great Goddess, your wife, and what will happen if the siege against the celestial kingdom wins through and the gates of heaven fall.”

“But what about Tayy?” He whispered the question to himself as much as to his companions. He saw too much of himself in the Harnish prince, now an orphan like him and eager for revenge against the forces at work against his people. Like Llesho, his life remained in danger as long as his enemies lived.

“Good question.” Kaydu bounded up and dusted off her butt before dragging him to his feet and giving him a push. “Isn’t that what you were going to find out?”

 

 

 

They found Prince Tayyichiut of the Qubal people with his stepmother, Lady Chaiujin, surrounded by advisers in the crowded ger-tent of his father. The many guardsmen of the khan, who had failed him in his moment of greatest need, now watched the gathered clans with an alertness that begged to redeem itself. Llesho recognized Yesugei sitting in a traditional Harnish pose, with one knee propping up his chin and the other leg tucked under him, in deep but hushed discussion with Mergen, Tayy’s uncle. Around them were ranged the clan chiefs and old women, the Great Mothers of the clans, gathered there. Bortu, Tayy’s grandmother and the murdered khan’s mother, sat among them as Great Mother to her son’s clan. Llesho didn’t know what a Great Mother was, exactly, but he figured he was about to find out.

As strange as it seemed, the Harnish chieftains would actually vote for the one among them who would lead the clans in their dealings with one another and in war with outside forces like Master Markko—or, he thought, like him. Would the new khan throw the clans behind the magician’s Harnish Southerners? Or would he side with Llesho’s foreigners, who had come into the grasslands in search of their companions and had stayed to forge alliances against a mutual threat? Chimbai-Khan had favored his cause, but Llesho was painfully aware that the next few hours could turn the tent city from a sanctuary into a prison.

Leaving his Wastrels to guard the door of the ger-tent, Llesho advanced through the crowd to the foot of the dais where Tayy sat with his stepmother accepting the condolences if not the fealty of the clans. Llesho had put on the sumptuous traditional Thebin coat, sleeveless and embroidered all over with fine needlework, that Master Den had carried for him all the way from Farshore Province. Under his coat, he wore a rich Thebin shirt and breeches, with soft boots on his feet. Shokar likewise wore the clothes of his princely station. Kaydu appeared in soft greens and blues and grays, the military colors of Thousand Lakes Province, home to the mortal goddess of war in whose service Kaydu marched. Even Master Den had added a red sash on which were written many characters of prayer and good fortune, though it bound only his usual knee-length white coat over a breechcloth slung low under his enormous belly.

The interior of the ger-tent had already changed in the aftermath of the khan’s death, stripped of the personal objects that would furnish Chimbai-Khan in the underworld. The ornately painted chests remained, however, as did various objects that would count as family wealth or the property of the khan’s own clan. As the prince and the lady, watching him approach across the vast expanse of the ger-tent, were themselves both the property of the clan and its potential leaders. Llesho noticed the bronze bust of his Thebin ancestor, carved ages past in Llesho’s own image. Someone had moved it to the painted chest nearest where Prince Tayyichiut sat in his father’s place. No personal object, this had come to Chimbai-Khan through his fathers, and would pass to his son regardless of the outcome of the coming vote. That Tayy displayed it so prominently at his right hand declared his intention to continue his father’s alliance with Llesho’s band. What his gathered clans would make of this, however, was impossible to guess.

When it came his turn to speak to the grieving family, Llesho left his companions and stepped up to the dais with a deep bow. He knew where he stood with these two primary contestants in the coming battle for the khanate. The Lady Chaiujin, widow of the late khan and mother, as she claimed, to his unborn child, wanted Llesho dead. She’d already made attempts on his credibility and on his life.

Prince Tayyichiut, his own age and stepson of the Lady Chaiujin, had become a friend. The two princes shared the ill regard of the lady, who had likely murdered Tayy’s mother as well as his father, and would wait only long enough to allay suspicion before sending the son to attend his parents in the underworld. In Lady Chaiujin, they shared Tayy’s enemy. As importantly for Llesho, however, Prince Tayy had seen the battleground of the stone giants raised by Master Markko. He’d lost friends to the monsters and understood the threat that the evil magician posed to his ulus. If named khan, he would fight alongside Llesho’s other allies of necessity. So they shared this enemy as well.

The chieftains had no obligation to vote for a member of the khan’s family, however. Any one among them could win the confidence of the gathered clans, moving his own clan into the fore of power and wealth. A stranger might soon gather in his hand the warriors of all the clans to hold tight or loose against his enemies as he chose. The heirs of Chimbai-Khan would recede into obscurity then, taking Llesho’s negotiations with them. If it came to a change in rule, Llesho knew he might depend on Yesugei, who had found him on the borders of the Northern grasslands and brought him to his khan. Of the others, he had no clue.

The Lady Chaiujin held out her hands to him. “Prince Llesho of Thebin. You find the people of the Chimbai-Khan in grief and sorrow.”

“Your grief is my own, Lady.” Llesho took her hands and touched his forehead to them.

“And yet it is a lesson for us all, how the least of nature’s creatures may bring down the mighty.” She veiled the knowing mockery of her eyes behind the thick lashes of her dark-painted lids.

“Hardly the least of creatures, Lady.” He felt the nail-edge of her forefinger scrape against his palm and drew away quickly, before she broke the skin.

“You would know, young prince. I understand you encountered a like serpent, and would have joined my master in death had it not been for the timely appearance of your servant.” She raised her chin in a challenge directed at Master Den. “No wonder you give the lowly one pride of place at your side.”

“Do we have a nest of vipers, then, in the ulus of the Chimbai-Khan?” Prince Tayy addressed his stepmother politely, with none of his emotion on his face.

“Perhaps we have come upon a mother among serpents.” She considered the thought, seemed to like it. “She may strike with the intention only to protect her eggs against strangers who would destroy her own.”

Pinned under her cold stare, Llesho wondering what egg she had planted in the khan’s bed. His companions stood a little behind him and appeared not to hear, though Llesho doubted the innocence of the trickster god’s expression. No one else would have heard the lady’s low words as she alluded to the murder of her husband. With a shiver, Llesho turned to his friend.

“Tayyichiut,” he said, and bowed his head over the prince’s hands as he had done with the Lady Chaiujin. He did not use any title, nor would anyone do so until the vote had been cast and a new khan elected. Then, he would be Tayyichiut-Khan or simply Tayy until the next contest of the ulus. “I share the sorrow of your loss.” The look they shared spoke of the understanding between them, of lost fathers and murder. Tayy gave a brief nod and frowned at Kaydu standing empty-handed at his side.

“Where is your familiar, Captain?”

“Little Brother spends the day with Bright Morning, the musician,” she answered with a bow, referring to the monkey that traveled with her everywhere, except when she flew in the shape of a bird. Tayy knew this, and doubtless wondered where she had been and what she had seen. Answers would have to wait for later, however. “I would have him learn to play the sweet potato, to the indignation of his teacher.”

Her droll explanation hid the truth of her travels but brought a smile to the prince’s eyes. “We have become friends, Little Brother and I,” he informed her, and added, “I wish to be kept abreast of his progress.”

“And so you shall,” she promised.

Their message of condolences delivered, Llesho made to leave, but the prince stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Stay,” he said, “as my witness in the voting.”

Llesho wasn’t certain what being a witness might entail, but Tayy looked at him with such anguish that Llesho couldn’t deny him. They were both orphans now, a bond beyond politics or shared enemies.

“Of course,” he said, and drew aside his companions to the lowest position just inside the door of the ger-tent to await the outcome of the vote.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Three

LESHO WATCHED, taking in every step in the process of electing a new khan. For something so important—the khan would lead the clans, including their army of ten thousand—the method proved disappointingly simple. As the ceremony progressed, however, he found himself drawn into the gravity of even the simplest act.

Bolghai was summoned and came at the call. He wore his hair in a mass of plaits from each of which hung a talisman of metal or bead or bone. His robes, cut to show their many layers, still bore the bloodstains of the sheep he had slaughtered for the khan’s pyre, but he had cleaned the pelts of the stoats that hung by their sharp little teeth in a collar around his neck. He did not walk with a stately pace to the dais as a Thebin priest might do, but scampered and pranced like his totem animal, setting the pelts to kicking at his shoulders in a little stoat-dance. His clothing jingled at each step with bells and amulets that swayed on silver chains sewn onto them.

The first time Llesho met him, the shaman had shocked and repelled him. But Bolghai had helped him to find his own totem, the roebuck, and had taught him to control his gift of dreams for his own ends. Sometimes at least. Now, he watched with interest as the shaman hitched and hopped to the dais in the persona of his totem stoat. Bolghai carried a flat skin drum and the thighbone of a roebuck that he used as a stick. He wouldn’t be creating totemic magic, so he wouldn’t use his fiddle. Rather, he’d need the drum to set the pace of the coming ceremony.

When he had reached the fur-heaped royal dais, the shaman grasped the thighbone in the middle and tapped with first one end, then the other, in a rapid tattoo on his drum.

“When is a prince not a prince?” he demanded, confronting Tayy with more beating of his drum while he waited for the answer to his riddle.

If there was no khan, there could be no prince. Tayyichiut bowed his head, accepting the judgment dictated by custom and the sacred nature of the riddle. Allowing himself to be ritually driven off by the beating drum, he left the dais to sit with Bortu and Mergen of his clan.

“When is a wife not a wife?” the shaman asked next, subtly changing the rhythm of his drumming. It wasn’t what she expected. Llesho, watching Tayy carefully, saw the surprise in his eyes as well. Bortu’s features, however, relaxed in grim satisfaction. Her son was dead, but she was no fool.

“I am no barren tree, but bear the khan’s heir in my belly.” She clutched a hand below her unbelted waist and spat at the shaman’s feet. So, the riddle had set her aside not as the widow, but as one who had not truly blessed the marriage bed of the khan. Llesho figured that much. Sort of. And she objected. He wondered not for the first time what, if anything, the Lady Chaiujin did carry in her womb.

Bolghai accepted her correction, more or less, with the smallest of stoatlike gestures and adjusted his drumming accordingly. “When is a queen not a queen?” he amended.

A wife remained a wife even at the death of her husband, but with no khan there could be no queen. Lady Chaiujin bowed, as Tayyichiut had done, but with less grace, and let herself be driven from the dais. She took a step toward her husband’s clan, but Bortu turned her back, and the Lady Chaiujin hesitated, finally taking up a position alone, though closest to the dais. No one challenged her for the assumption of that right, but no one came to support her either. While few might guess her part in the death of their khan, she had made no friends among them.

Alone on the dais, Bolghai let the thighbone hang by a cord that tied it to the drum. Holding up his open hand, he asked another riddle: “Apart they are weak, together they smite their enemies.” As answer, he closed his hand tight and raised it high over his head: the separate fingers were each fragile, but made into a fist, they made a powerful weapon. So, Llesho figured, the clans, joined in the ulus, became strong.

Bolghai’s next words confirmed Llesho’s guess: “Who here gathered would make a fist?”

A huge roar rose out of the gathered clans, aided by the shaman’s drum. When he settled into a slower rhythm, the clans began the process of electing a khan. No one outside of the clans had ever been privileged to see the like before, and Llesho held his breath, his eyes darting everywhere to see everything, as two guardsmen came foward and set a low table down in front of the fur-covered dais.

Bortu came forward first and set a bowl on the table while Bolghai drummed and danced so energetically behind it that Llesho wondered how he managed not to kick it over. Bortu’s bowl, of simple wood but inset everywhere with precious gems, he recognized for its great age. When she set it down, she raised her chin in challenge at her son’s wife, who had no clan to bring to the ulus but must put herself forward as the regent of her husband’s unborn child.

Bortu retired to sit again among the leaders of her clan, a signal for Great Mother to follow Great Mother, each rising to place her bowl before the drumming shaman. Every bowl was made of a precious material—worked silver or gold, porcelain, or alabaster, and each was elaborately decorated with some sign or sigil prominently marked to indicate the clan of origin. None showed the age of Bortu’s, however. Chimbai’s clan was the oldest, then, and Bortu, by chance or destiny, was the oldest of the Great Mothers. When he looked into her eyes, something moved, and for a moment the whites vanished into the hard black light of a bird of prey. Not a snake like her daughter-in-law, but he wondered what magics lay hidden within the old lady.

In a contest, he would have placed his bets on Bortu and he wondered why she had not used her skills to save her son. When he looked again, however, he saw only a sad old woman, grieving for her precious child. He thought of Lluka, his brother who saw all futures falling into chaos, and wondered if the old woman sacrificed her line to some future that none of them could see. He was pretty sure he didn’t want to, all in all.

The procession of the Great Mothers had ended with seven bowls placed upright on the table at the shaman’s feet, and three placed upside down as some sign to the gathered clans.

Master Den leaned over with a brief explanation that confirmed his guess: “ ‘Up’ means the chieftain will accept the khanate for his clan if he is chosen. ‘Down’ means the clan has no wish to rise to khan right now. Not wealthy enough, or not united among themselves enough, or perhaps just wise enough to know they presently count no generals among their younger men.”

“Or waiting out the killing before stepping in to pick up the pieces, and the wealth of the losers,” Kaydu suggested. They’d both seen as much in the far provinces of Shan, where Lord Yueh had hoped to reap the benefit of Pearl Island’s fall and had been gobbled up himself by Master Markko. Llesho determined to pay more attention to those who had turned their bowls down. But now the Qubal clans focused on those who would be khan.

“One a hand may brush aside,” Bolghai intoned to a slow and steady drumbeat, “Many lift their heads to heaven with a glittering crown about their brow.”

Tayyichiut was the first to rise in answer to this riddle. In his hand, Mergen had placed a pebble—easily swept away, but many became a mountain with a crown of glaciers. He went to the table and set the stone inside Bortu’s bowl with a bow to the shaman, who had stopped his dancing and shivered in place in a fit of ecstasy, and another bow to the ancient bowl. After him, Yesugei rose and, performing the same bows, set his stone in Bortu’s bowl as well.

Master Den let go of a little sigh as their friend sat again among his clan. At Llesho’s raised brow of inquiry, he whispered, “Yesugei was the most likely candidate if the clans decided against Chimbai’s policies. He has signaled his followers where his own allegiances lie.”

Llesho nodded. He thought he understood, but Master Den seemed unsatisfied with his reaction and added, “It could have come to war among the Qubal clans, with enemies on both their borders waiting to fall on them.”

Master Markko in the South, and Tinglut, the Lady Chaiujin’s father, in the East. He looked at the lady, sitting with venomous poise, her head demurely downcast, but with calculation glinting from under lowered lashes. As soon as they were done here, he’d have to find Shou and warn him. Tinglut would sign his treaty with a pen in one hand and sword held in the other behind his back.

“Would you share the thought that wrinkles your brow like an old man?” Kaydu asked him.

“I just realized that I am starting to think in Bolghai’s riddles.”

She rolled her eyes in sympathy and added, “If you start giving orders in battle that way, I’ll thump you.”

He was so happy to hear her talk to him as his captain from the old days that he didn’t even bother to point out he had never given the orders in battle anyway. That was her job.

The vote came to an end then, or so it seemed. The pebbles all looked alike. It would be harder that way to figure out who voted against the new khan once he took office, Llesho figured. That made retaliation less likely, though he was sure that some had done it in the past. His understanding of politics had grown that subtle at least. They hushed while Bolghai gave the count: three clans had stubbornly cast their votes for themselves, but seven had gone to Chimbai-Khan’s line. The clans retrieved their voting bowls and each took a pebble from the little heap at Bolghai’s feet.

When the table before the royal dais was once more empty, the shaman declared in riddle form, “Out of many, one. Out of one, four. Out of four, one. Out of one, many.” Each part of the riddle was punctuated with a flurry on his drum.

The first part made sense: many clans had voted, one clan won. What the rest meant, Llesho couldn’t fathom, until four figures came forward and faced the dais again. Chimbai-Khan’s line, but who among the likely candidates would be khan?

If she spoke true that she carried the son of the dead khan, Lady Chaiujin might claim right to the khanate as the regent of the heir. That presupposed the truth of two potential lies: that she carried a child of the khan at all, and that the khan had chosen her unborn babe as heir over his grown son by the wife who had gone on before him. Bold as the serpent she was, the lady pushed her way to the fore all out of order of her precedence and placed an alabaster bowl on the table at Bolghai’s feet. “For my son,” she said, “in the womb.”

Bolghai looked like he would speak some prophecy or judgment, but his trembling overcame him and the Lady Chaiujin made her escape without comment.

Bortu, who should have been first, followed with greater dignity and cold, bright eyes on the back of her rival. In the death of her son, Lady Bortu had a right to seek the khanate in her own person, but she set her bowl upside down on the low table, removing herself from the contest. Lady Chaiujin settled in her place with a little gloating smile at this. Bortu returned her only a slow blink of a predator hypnotizing its prey, before turning away. Llesho had a fleeting vision of a hawk with a snake’s neck crushed in its mouth.

When he had cleared his eyes of the image, he found Bortu staring at him with the first emotion he had seen on her face since the death of her son: he had surprised her.Read my mind, old woman, he thought.Know me. I come for vengeance and you are welcome to sit on my shoulder when I ride. But she gave him a small turn of the head, an answer, “No,” and a reason—she looked now at her other son.

As chieftain of the clan during his brother’s reign, Mergen had a rightful claim to the khanate and he drew near the dais and set his jewel encrusted bowl upright next to the two that had gone before him. Tayyichiut followed, and like his grandmother, repudiated his claim upon the ulus. Instead of putting his cup facedown, however, he lifted Mergen’s up and set his own beneath it. When Bortu saw what he had done, she smiled and returned to the dais to do the same. Now the four cups were gathered into two, Bortu and Tayyichiut showing that they stood with Mergen against the outsider with the questionable belly. The Lady Chaiujin raged behind her impassive demeanor, Llesho could see it in her eyes, but the chieftains nodded their heads in approval as the pace of the drumming grew more rapid.

The contestants had no vote, since each had made their choice in the position of his or her bowl upon the table. One by one the chieftains, smiling or grim, followed Yesugei again to the dais and cast their pebbles into Mergen’s bowl. When the last vote had been cast, there was no need for the shaman to make his ritual announcement, though he did it anyway:

“When is a chieftain not a chieftain?”

To which the gathered chieftains replied in a rousing chorus, “When he is khan!”

After that came the swearing of loyalties, first, through their captains, the personal guardsmen who tended the khan and protected him. Then the chieftains, one by one, each dropped to one knee, fist clasped over his heart, to promise warriors at need and cooperation in counsel as was the custom of these Harnish clans. Not a king, but something else entirely. Llesho had known that with his head, but understanding shifted in his gut as he heard the chieftains give their conditional allegiance. Finally it came time for the heirs to swear their loyalty.

“I have lost my bravest son in service to the Qubal clans,” Bortu mourned, and added, for Mergen, “The underworld will find my smartest son more difficult to bring home.”

“I hope so,” Mergen answered. By home, of course, she meant death, and Llesho suspected that Mergen would be a great deal more difficult to kill than his brother.

Llesho recognized the worry line that creased Tayy’s forehead, but Mergen moved instantly to erase it. Taking his nephew’s hands, he announced, “The son of my brother is my son. I beg you call him prince, and treat him as you would my own person.”

“My father—” Tayy began, but Mergen-Khan stopped him with a finger touch of warning on the back of his hand. “Leave everything in my hands, Prince Tayyichiut. I am your khan.”

To the gathered clans it sounded like a good-hearted reminder to a younger relative that he owed a greater deference to his uncle’s new status. Llesho heard Mergen’s words for what they were, however—a promise—and saw Tayy’s embarrassment likewise as cautious hope and grief all roiled together. He waited to see where the ax would fall. Not on Tayy, for sure.

It came as no surprise that the Lady Chaiujin offered no allegiance but an insult. “Among the eastern clans, a brother would offer the safety of his own hearth as husband to his brother’s widow and father to his brother’s child. I expect no such comfort from a man who would take his anda for a bride, but beg a small tent and a servant to tend me until my time. When I am delivered of my dead husband’s true heir, I would ask only the freedom to choose a husband from among the clans.”

Mergen-Khan’s face became thunderous. The slight was obvious. A Harnishman, particularly a man of position, made alliances in many degrees, but anda was the closest. Blood brothers for life, sealed by gifts and held in the heart, the anda was a cherished friend. Occasionally more, which caused no trouble in the tents of a man who also kept to his wives and his husbandly duties to his clan. But Mergen had no wife, and his anda, Otchigin, had died fighting the stone giants of Master Markko.

The Lady Chaiujin threatened civil war with Chimbai-Khan’s unborn son as her instrument, but Llesho didn’t think that Mergen had noticed that. She’d called his dead anda a coward and a thief, stealing Mergen’s duties from his clan. The khan’s eyes went flat. “Better my anda than the serpent who made my brother’s sleep so permanent,” he said, and raised a hand as if to strike her.

She flinched, but the action didn’t save her. By prearranged signal, the guards of his dead brother, newly sworn to their elected khan, came forward. Two who had been Chimbai’s oldest and most valued friends seized her between them, and Mergen’s own swordmaster stepped up behind her.

“Strangle the murdering witch,” Mergen said, and the swordmaster wrapped his hands around her neck and squeezed.

“You’ll pay,” she choked out. With a twist of her neck, she turned into a jewel-green snake. Her grin exposed bared fangs she sank into the meat of her strangler’s hand.

“Ah!” he screamed, and dropped her as his hand throbbed with venom. Her captors struggled to hold on, but her arms had vanished. Slipping easily out of their grasp, the Lady Chaiujin glided quickly into hiding between the layers of rugs on the ger-tent floor.

“Everybody out!” Mergen ordered. And to his guards, “To sword! Find her and put an end to her.” He reached out and grabbed a goblet from the chest that sat by the fire and raised it over his head. “This jeweled cup to the man who brings her dead body to me: snake or woman, I don’t care which. Just find her!”

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Four

MERGEN-KHAN’S swordmaster died with blood running from his nose while the Harnish women shook out the heaped furs and beat the rugs, rolling them afterward as if they were going to shift camp on the moment. Men searched the firebox and under all the chests and boxes, and looked in all the surrounding round white tents. They dismantled the ger-tent palace of the khan and checked in all its lattices before setting it up again at a distance that shifted the orientation of the camp. Then they had to move many other tents to keep everyone in their proper place according to their status in the ulus.

The Lady Chaiujin had vanished. Neither the Tinglut princess nor her totem form, the emerald-green bamboo snake, could be found anywhere on the great high plain.

In a moment of quiet, Llesho rode out with Prince Tayyichiut to exercise their horses and their own camp-restlessness. Two hounds followed them, a black dog with a lolling grin and a red bitch with bright, intelligent eyes.

“I didn’t know you kept dogs.”

“The Lady Chaiujin claimed a fear of their barking and had them banished to the sheep pens. Perhaps she guessed they might recognize her for what she was.” The prince cast a fond glance at his hounds. A little bit of the weight seemed to have lifted from his shoulders since the lady’s disappearance, another of many changes in the camp since they had arrived, just one of many things he had to think about.

When they had gone a ways from the camp so they wouldn’t be overheard, Llesho hesitantly asked Tayyichiut about the Lady Chaiujin’s claim against Mergen that gossip did not answer in his presence.

“About Mergen-Khan’s anda—” His own cadre rode behind with Tayy’s guardsmen, out of hearing but not out of sight or the range of a bow. The Harnish prince could answer the question in confidence between friends of equal rank if he chose to do so, but Tayy deflected the request.

“It’s none of my business, or yours,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand.

“It’s not that I disapprove.” Llesho cast a glance behind them, where Bixei and Stipes both rode in his defense. “I’m trying to understand what the Lady Chaiujin was trying to do when she said that about Otchigin and your uncle.”

“A treasonous suggestion that Mergen had reasons to wish his brother the khan dead.” Tayy snapped, clearly unhappy with the question. Llesho waited out the scalding glower until the prince relented.

“Otchigin and Mergen were closest friends from the time they were fostered together as boys. After my father became khan, when the clan had named Mergen chieftain, Otchigin brought him gifts and swore his personal loyalty to Mergen and the Qubal people. Together they committed their lives to the service of the khan.

“Lady Chaiujin hoped to make the chieftains believe that Mergen had placed the personal relationship above the political. She hinted that my father wanted to seal a treaty but that Mergen refused any marriage. The clans were supposed to suspect that Chimbai-Khan sent Otchigin out to die so that his brother wouldn’t have a reason to disobey him anymore. From there, it wouldn’t be hard to convince them that Mergen killed the khan to avenge Otchigin’s murder.

“She didn’t have to prove anything; if she’d raised enough doubt, Mergen would have lost the confidence of the clans. Then she could have demanded a new vote to take the khanate in the name of her unborn child. My uncle was ahead of her, of course, but I don’t think it would have worked out the way she expected anyway. Yesugei has held the clans to Mergen till now, but he’d stand for the khanate himself before he’d let the ulus fall to infighting between the clans.”

“No one could have guessed what Master Markko would raise out there,” Llesho objected, “It was supposed to be safe, a simple scouting expedition.” But he wondered why someone of Otchigin’s rank had ridden on a such a lowly mission. It began to add up in ways that raised question about Chimbai’s motives.

“No one,” Tayy agreed with a warning in it, not to let his thoughts run down that path. At his heel the black hound, fretful at the sudden change in his master’s mood, added its own cautionary growl. “Nor would Chimbai-Khan have had such a need—Mergen obeyed my father’s every wish. And the khan had decided that Mergen should have no wife.”

“Are all Harnish relationships about politics?” Llesho asked. He’d thought they shared a growing friendship based on common age and rank, and even similar losses. Before the khan had died, he’d offered Tayy a place at his side, as part of his cadre. Now he wondered if the prince saw him, like Otchigin and his uncle’s nonexistent wives, as a political agreement on horseback.

Tayy’s answer didn’t make him feel any better. “In the royal ger-tent, yes, I suppose they are. How else could it be?”

“Sometimes, people just like each other.” Llesho felt stupid as soon as the words were out of his mouth, and he knew the answer Prince Tayyichiut would give him before he even said it.

“No one just likes a prince, any more than a prince—or a khan’s brother—is free to make friends who do not serve the khan.”

Tayy must have thought they were still talking about Mergen, because he returned to his uncle’s case with an ironic laugh. “In any event, Sechule would have been surprised to hear that Mergen held an exclusive affection for Otchigin.”

“Who’s Sechule?” Llesho could figure that for himself, but guesses could lead even a Prince of Dreams down a tangled path.

Tayy’s predatory smirk was answer enough without his words: “A loyal woman of Yesugei’s people, and the mother of two of Mergen’s blanket-sons, born outside the ger-tent as we call it. They ride behind us now among my guards.”

“Two of?”

“Marriage—even undeclared marriage—is political. But if a person wanders into a certain tent more often than into others, who is to say?”

And that worked out so well for Chimbai-Khan,Llesho thought, but didn’t say out loud. Chimbai-Khan may have loved Tayyichiut’s dead mother for all the politics of their marriage, but that left his second wife in a cold corner of the ger-tent. “Wouldn’t the Lady Chaiujin have known that? About Mergen and Sechule, I mean?”

“There is nothing to know about Mergen and Sechule,” Prince Tayy reminded him stiffly. The dogs had run off to chase rabbits through the flowers and he followed their progress with his eyes while Llesho worked that out.

A relationship would have meant a political alliance with Yesugei’s clan. But. With a sudden, blinding grasp of the obvious, Llesho wondered how many other blanket-sons and -daughters Mergen had scattered through the ulus, and what political ties those relationships “weren’t” binding to the khan. Tayy gave just a little twitch of an eyebrow to acknowledge the dawning light in his face, and then finished his vastly understated explanation.

“Tinglut-Khan sent his daughter in the spring. From the start she liked the Qubal no more than our hounds. Chimbai-Khan wouldn’t have confided in her, and Mergen is hard to know even among his own.”

She’d wasted no time eliminating Tayy’s mother, her competition in the khan’s ger-tent, which meant she understood the politics of her own marriage. Lady Chaiujin must have wondered why her husband hadn’t given Mergen a wife, and she’d come up with the only solution available to her in plain sight.

Bortu had told them the answer, however, when she honored her living son—the smart one, she’d said. Chimbai, too, must have recognized his brother’s subtle mind. While making use of his brother’s discreet attachments throughout the ulus, he’d assured that no legal heir gave Mergen ideas about securing a dynasty to his own line. In the true affection of the brothers for each other, the Lady Chauijin might have seen Chimbai-Khan’s caution as a weakness, that he allowed his brother to slight his family obligations for his heart’s desire—little knowing the politics long at work in the ger-tent of the khan.

When Llesho put it together himself, however, the Lady Chaiujin’s veiled accusation made sense even if she didn’t have all the facts. Chimbai-Khan had loved his brother, but feared his ambition enough that he had not permitted Mergen to marry or recognize an heir. As khan, he’d sent Mergen’s anda on a mission that eliminated any political maneuvering under Otchigin’s influence. Now, Chimbai-Khan himself was dead and his brother, who had denied any such ambition, sat alone on the dais of the ger-tent palace. Chimbai’s son remained, as Mergen’s heir rather than his khan, but for how long? Mergen-Khan could marry as he wished now, or declare his blanket-sons his heirs. Would his uncle disavow Prince Tayyichiut then, or have him killed to remove the threat to his own rule? All that Chimbai may have feared in his brother seemed to have happened.

 

 

 

Questions kept Llesho awake in his tent while the Great Moon passed overhead. Bolghai surely knew the answers, but wouldn’t likely tell them to an outsider. Master Den might give him answers as well, but the trickster was no god to the Harnish people and his idea of a good match for Emperor Shou left Llesho doubting his expertise in matters of a royal heart. Shou, however, was older and a mortal man who understood the politics of the palace and the bedroom. As emperor, and as the human lover of the mortal goddess of war, he must.

Llesho considered a dream-walk, and groaned at the very thought of dragging himself back off his cot. He’d had lessons in dreams before the shaman, however. The Tashek had taught him to travel in his sleep, which seemed a much better idea in the ghostly light of Great Moon Lun. He had scarcely thought it when his eyes pulled shut, his limbs grew heavy.

His dream brought him to the governor’s palace at Durnhag. Llesho scanned the area, saw no one. But there—he tensed for attack as starlight glinted off silver at the corner of his eye. Pig, dark as the shadows except for the fine silver chains that wrapped his black body everywhere, sat on a bucket as if he’d been waiting for Llesho to come along.

“What are you doing out of bed?” Pig asked, “You have a big day tomorrow; you need your sleep.”

“A big day of waiting,” Llesho grumbled. He’d relaxed as soon as he recognized his guide in the dream world, but the rush of fear left him edgy and overreacting to the taunt. “Mergen-Khan has refused to honor the agreements we made with his brother. He wants to ask his own questions before he makes up his mind to help us and he won’t hear us at all until he’s done interrogating the prisoners he took in the fight with Tsu-tan. He’s still mad that Lling killed the witch-finder before he had a chance to interrogate him.”

Pig made a sweeping gesture with an imaginary broom “Tsu-tan’s master would have seen his old minion dead before that could happen, but not in time to save Lling, or your brother.”

Tsu-tan had slipped his leash, driven mad like a rat in a trap with his master’s threat in one direction and his enemy’s forces in the other. Even Markko couldn’t control his lackey’s murderous impulses by then. Llesho didn’t regret Lling’s actions one bit, but Mergen still had to wonder if they had removed his best witness to keep some secret from their Harnish allies. Which left them sitting on their hands until Mergen decided he trusted them.

“In the meanwhile, we wait,” Llesho finished.

With a smirk on his face that promised more, however, the Jinn waggled his piggy eyebrows. “Ask, young king.”

“I don’t think so.” He acknowledged the old joke between them. “You can’t fool me that easily, old Jinn.”

A Jinn could bind a human who made a wish. Llesho didn’t think Pig would close that trap even if he fell into it. They both served the Great Goddess, after all, and the Jinn would never risk his place in her gardens. It was a point of honor between them, a game of matched wits. So he chose to understand it, to remain on friendly terms with his guide in the world of dreams. With a wry tilt of his head, therefore, he made his move:

“I do notwish to know what you are talking about, though I will be happy to listen if youwish to tell me more.”

“Let it wait, then. You’ll find out soon enough.” Pig laughed, accepting his loss this round but not giving up his information. “I suppose you’ve come to see the emperor?”

“Yeah.” He might even need her ladyship’s advice, though he wasn’t sure he had the nerve to ask. Face a charging army? Llesho had done that plenty of times. Discuss the marriages of kings with the mortal goddess of war? That took more nerve than any combat. With a shake of his head, he made for the wide central door.

“Not that way.” Pig stopped him with a forehoof on his shoulder. “Unless this is a formal visit of state, which would raise questions of its own.”

“It’s personal,” Llesho confirmed, though he might just as easily have called it spycraft. He remembered the secret ways of the palace at Shan and travelers arriving under cover of darkness. He could enter through the front door; he was a king, a trusted ally, and had that right. Having it, however, he found that he preferred to see Shou in the old way, before he knew he was a king making an ally of an emperor. “I just need to talk to him.”

Pig nodded sagely. “Woman trouble,” he guessed, and Llesho held a tight rein on the urge to smack him.

“Not woman trouble. At least, well, sort of. But not mine.”

“Oh.” Pig led him up a walled stairway carved into the thick palace wall, onto a narrow protected balcony, one of many that dotted the palace. “That explains everything.”

Light shone through a pair of doors made of colored glass that left shadows thick in the corners. Pig reached for the catch with a flourish. “Here you are—” He gave a less than mystical yelp as a figure stepped out of the dark.

“It’s you.” Shou slid his sword back into its scabbard with an emphatic snick. “Trouble?” He didn’t invite them in and Llesho didn’t ask what Shou was doing out on the balcony in the middle of the night.

“Maybe.” Llesho gave a twitch of a shoulder to emphasize his answer, or lack of one. “I’m not sure. You know about Chimbai-Khan?”

Shou nodded, enough to tell Llesho he didn’t have to explain the khan’s death. “Kaydu reported that the clans placed his brother in Chimbai’s place. You don’t trust this brother?”

It wasn’t quite a question. If he’d trusted Mergen, he’d be in his own bed, not dream-walking to find Shou in the middle of the night. Llesho didn’t bother to answer it except to say, “He doesn’t care if we trust him, and he certainly doesn’t trust us.”

“I can see that would be a problem,” Shou said. “I wasn’t thinking clearly the last time we met or I would have left you with a larger force to lend weight to your arguments.”

That was all he said about his torture and near-madness as the witch-finder’s prisoner. Master Markko had crawled around in his brain and made him watch the torments of all the dead in his wars. For a little while, it had broken his mind. “Still, this new khan has accepted you as a guest if not an ally. Harnish rules of hospitality should keep you safe enough.”

“I’m worried,” Llesho admitted. “Prince Tayy loves his uncle. He believes the Lady Chaiujin killed his father on her own—” which raised questions about Shou’s own treaty with the Tinglut—“but I’m not so sure now it wasn’t Mergen.”

“Then you’d better come inside.”

He opened the door and went in, leaving Llesho to follow with Pig coming last in their little procession. The room was sumptuously draped in a richness of color and style that the Guynmer people would abhor, but which had suited their corrupt governor until his emperor removed him from his palace, his office, and his earthly existence. The bed lay empty now, its covers smooth except for the single untroubled indentation a man’s still body might have made.

In a white robe richly draped and clasped in gold, the mortal goddess of war stood at a table covered with maps. Llesho remembered her this way from another dream. He would have wondered if she existed outside his dreams at all, except that her magician, Habiba, stood at her side. Kaydu’s father. He said nothing, but searched Llesho’s face for tragedy, relaxed when he found only confusion.

“What have you brought us?” The Lady SeinMa asked. Her eyes glanced off him, to Shou, who lounged against the doorjamb, but returned to Llesho with the full force of her gaze. He squirmed under the attention.

“I asked Prince Tayyichiut about his uncle today. He defended Mergen-Khan with politics, but I’m not so sure.”

He explained the conversation, and his own political calculations, all of which led to Chimbai-Khan dead and a worrisome brother set in his place. He finished with the conclusion that troubled him most, that had sent him out looking for Shou in the dark of his night: “Did Mergen plotwith the Lady Chaiujin to kill his brother?”

Habiba watched him out of hard dark eyes that reminded Llesho of the times the magician had appeared in the form of a roc. “According to Kaydu’s report, he wants her dead, to avenge his brother’s murder.”

“It’s what he said,” Llesho agreed, “and Prince Tayy believes it. But what if Mergen-Khan really wants to remove the only witness to his conspiracy?”

“Or,” Shou lifted his shoulders away from the doorjamb and wandered—casually, he would have them think, though some restless torment burned in his eyes—into the room. “He may be as innocent as he claims, and wary enough to keep secret the people he loves, who might still die for being close to him.” His glance flickered off the Lady SeinMa’s face, as if his point went to a different argument, one that tightened her ladyship’s mouth into a cold frown.

“You’re the emperor of Shan,” she reminded him tartly, “One values your life for more than the entertainment it affords.”

In the silence that followed, Llesho dropped the question he hadn’t wanted to ask at all in front of the mortal goddess who shared the emperor’s bed. “Has Tinglut offered you a daughter?”

“One serpent in my bed is enough.” Shou bowed his head at the lady, who glared back. “I declined.”

Llesho remembered another dream: Shou and the Lady SeinMa as a turtle and a white cobra. Hereally didn’t want to be having this conversation. But they were waiting for him, so he plunged ahead.

“How can we trust a treaty with Tinglut here in the East when he’s already murdered Chimbai-Khan and brought down all our agreements in the West? And how can we defeat Master Markko if all the Harn ally with him against us?”

The Lady SeinMa actually smiled at him. It didn’t make him glow with pride. He wanted to curl up in a little ball under the table where, hopefully, her piercing eyes could not find him. That didn’t seem like the kingly thing to do, however, so he locked his knees and tried not to shake.

“You are beginning to think like a general,” she praised him, and he wished he could crawl inside himself and disappear. “But you base your conclusions on two assumptions that may not be true.”

Habiba nodded support for his lady’s argument. “You assume that Lady Bamboo Snake is the true daughter of Tinglut-Khan,” he said.

With his gaze fixed on the Lady SeinMa, Shou added, “And you assume that a man of subtle ambition will betray his brother and his duty for the whispered promises of a serpent in his ear.”

Llesho wondered who, besides Mergen, Shou referred to in that comment, but he grabbed for the part he felt safe to address: “You think that the Lady Chaiujin isn’t Tinglut-Khan’s true daughter?”

“More properly,” Habiba corrected him, as a teacher might, “one must ask if the serpent is the Lady Chaiujin at all.”

“Then you think Master Markko killed the real daughter, and put the snake in her place?”

“Only the underworld knows the truth of that,” Lady SeinMa said, “But it wouldn’t do to underestimate Lady Bamboo Snake herself, who may have acted for her own reasons.”

He’d come for answers, and they’d given him more questions. A huff of frustration escaped him and Llesho pressed his lips closed. Unthought reactions wouldn’t serve him here. But the exasperation was still there. “Do you have any proof at all that I can take back with me?”

“Just this,” Habiba told him, “that Kaydu, in her report, described the Lady Chaiujin as very beautiful and young. In the camp of her father, the aged khan, the lady has a reputation for kindness and plain features.”

That certainly didn’t describe the Lady Chaiujin he knew. Llesho felt as if he’d been set adrift in deep water, and without a paddle. “What am I supposed to do?”

Shou blinked, surprised. “Exactly what you are doing,” he said. “Watch, evaluate, act as well as you can. That’s all anyone can do.”

Habiba nodded. “Leave the problem of Lady Bamboo Snake to Mergen-Khan, but see what he does. It will doubtless teach you something.”

He would have objected, but Pig, who had said nothing during this conversation, moved toward the door. Llesho felt a tug at his gut, moving him away from Shou and toward the light of morning.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Five

HE AWOKE from his dream travels with more to worry about than when he’d gone to bed, and stumbled out into the false dawn of Little Sun for morning prayer forms. Their camp had followed the pattern of the Harnish one they had replaced in the dell. It had a clearing at its center where horsemen mustered for battle or to play the competitive games that honed their skills at mounted warfare. With Master Den to chivy them on, the space easily became a practice yard for the prayer forms of the seven mortal gods, first step on the Way of the Goddess. The forms had been a lifeline through all the turmoil and struggle that had brought Llesho from the pearl beds to the very brink of his own country again. With a sense of fitness that settled in his heart, therefore, he scrambled sleepily for his place in the ranks of the worshipers, and stretched into the familiar patterns as Master Den called out their names.

“Red Sun.” Den moved his huge pale body with agile grace into the simplest of the fire forms.

Llesho followed his lead, stretching his body with arms raised in a high curve. Secure in his companions, with Kaydu on one side and Bixei on the other, with Hmishi in back of him and Lling in front, and Stipes a steady presence nearby, he reached for the zenith as the Sun might, chasing its lesser brother. Then down again, until the backs of his fingers almost reached the ground to represent the setting of the sun in the slow circling of the Way of the Goddess.

“Flowing River,” Den called next, a water prayer to honor the Onga at their backs.

The present was a landmark passed in a never-ceasing flow into the future. But sometimes, as if around an unexpected bend in the river, you saw the past as well, the one you knew and the markers grown strange long before you were born. Llesho stretched and moved in the slow rhythm of the prayer form, letting his mind drift with river-thoughts flowing back into time. Ages drifted past his mind’s eye. In all of them, he fought and died, and fought and died again, until he wondered how many lives had ended violently, and why?

No sooner had he thought the question than he saw, across a turning in the flow of movement, a man wearing his face but twice his age and more, worn down with battle. A bloody spear lay beside him—Llesho knew that weapon, carried it in his pack—and blood crusted on his skin grown pale with wounds and the poisons coursing through them. A woman wept for him, his head cradled in her lap. Llesho knew her from his dream travels. The Great Goddess, his wife, had appeared to him in the guise of a young girl and other times as a beekeeper. She had comforted him after Master Markko’s torments, when the magician’s potions had left him shattered and weak, and he knew his duty to rescue her from the siege at her gates. Her presence at this one of his deaths did not surprise him.

Watching the scene as if across a curving river, he saw the boundaries between past and present thinning in the way he had come to know under Bolghai’s teaching. He stood on one side of the river bend, with the answers to his questions on the other, and centered his mind. The prayer form carried him deeper into his vision and—step, step—he stood above his dying self, looking into the grieving eyes of the Great Goddess, his wife in that life as in this. He saw, first of all things in her eyes, that she loved him as truly and deeply in age as he loved her in youth. And each of his deaths left its mark on her heart, which he regretted.

“Will it always be like this?” he asked, while the breath of his older self stuttered and bubbled in his broken chest. He recognized the wound, had seen it in dreams of other ages as the mark of the spear he carried, that now lay stained upon the riverbank. Llesho would have run away, afraid he saw his future in his past. This was his own fate, though like a dream he saw nothing to tell him how his former self had taken such an injury, or what threats waited just outside the boundary of his vision.

“That depends on you,” the lady his wife answered with tears in her eyes, and he wondered if she meant he had failed the past, and would fail again in this turning of the wheel. But she gave no sign of blaming him, only mourning all the pasts in which he’d died as he was doing now, on the grass by a river that couldn’t be the Onga.

The lashes of his dying self fluttered open, and for a moment, his own older eyes, dulled with pain fading into death, met his younger ones. His dying self gestured for him to draw nearer, and he bent to hear the strangled whisper,

“Remember justice. The world cannot endure without justice.” Satisfied that he had said what he must, the dying Llesho’s eyes clouded. A tiny frown marked his ravaged brow until the Great Goddess his wife leaned into his field of vision again. Then, with a sigh as if something had completed itself, breathing stopped.

He wanted to ask if he’d been so unjust in his actions that he needed a reminder, but the lady’s eyes had closed and she rocked the body in her arms as if she could not hold the pain inside her. This was one of those moments that wasn’t about him, he figured—or not about the present him at any rate—and he didn’t want to intrude on her grief to make it so. But her Way had brought him here to learn something. His questions might save them all from going through the same again.

“What did he—I—mean about justice?”

“Remember,” she said, while she pressed his dead mouth to her bosom, “your heart will guide you.”

He’d gladly do as she bid him, if he had any idea what it was she meant for him to know. But she wasn’t seeing him anymore, he could tell. With a step, and another step, he found himself among the ranks of his cadre again, with Master Den calling out the prayer forms. At his side, Bixei started, but quickly regained his place in the slow procession of the movements.

“Wind bends the willow,” Master Den called out the air form.

Like the willow tree, Llesho thought, he must bend to the Way of the Goddess, accepting his fate in her service. His past had spoken to him of justice, but he didn’t know why. He would die in battle in this life as he had so many times before, he thought, killed by his own tainted weapon or by the poisons of some secret enemy, shot through with flights of arrows, or cut down by sword or with a dagger to a kidney in the embrace of a false friend. So many ways had he died, and nothing he had seen promised an old age surrounded by grandchildren. When the prayer form returned them to the rest position he discovered tear tracks on his cheeks and a yearning powerful as the river current drawing his gaze to the distant mountains.

“To die in your arms,” was all he had asked of the Great Goddess out of all his pasts. He knew that now, and felt her kiss in the breeze that lifted the hair from his brow. That did comfort him: wherever this turn of the wheel brought him, he loved and was loved in return, and gave his life in the service of that great love. It had, his vision told him, always been enough.

Master Den brought them back to rest. With a bow to the gathered students, and a bow from the ranks in turn, morning prayers ended.

“Where did you go?” Bixei asked him while his cadre gathered their gear.

Llesho gave a shrug. “I don’t know. The past, I think.” He wouldn’t accept it for his future—not this time around.

“What did you see?”

Kaydu had returned, sword and dagger cinched at her waist and Little Brother perched on her shoulder. “You were there,” she said, “and then you weren’t.”

Hmishi handed Llesho his gear. “And then you were back again,” he finished for his cadre.

Llesho took the short spear and strapped it to his back. The sword he clipped to his belt where his knife already rode, never leaving him as was the way of Thebin royals. Settling his weapons about him gave him a moment to compose his thoughts, but only Lling and Stipes did not press him for an answer. Lling shied away from her own questions and Stipes, he knew, still felt as though he rode above his station in this company. He flicked a challenge at Hmishi, however, daring him to speak of where he had been before Bright Morning had raised him from the dead.

A soft smile told him this most gentle of his fierce companions would not take the bait. “How can we protect you if you insist on going places we can’t follow?” Hmishi asked. And he added, “At least you could tell us what to expect of your sudden excursions out of this world.”

Before he could come up with an answer, Master Den joined them with a wide grin. “Well done, young king,” he praised Llesho with a pat on the back that nearly threw him to his knees. “I knew that with a little help you’d figure it out.”

“Figurewhat out?” Kaydu insisted. She was their captain, and had the right to demand answers where it concerned the safety of their charge. More to the point, she was a witch like her father, and wanted to understand the workings of any magic she came in contact with.

“The Way of the Goddess,” Master Den answered, “is the path to heaven. For some that means a life well lived in a manner that finds welcome from the Great Goddess. To others, who practice the forms with extraordinary skill, the Way is a more direct road which one may travel at will, or stumble upon in moments when need and proper form come together.”

“There must be many roads to heaven,” Llesho suggested the thought as it came to him, and Master Den applauded his perception.

“The Goddess honors the path of earth and air, fire and water, out of which all living things are formed. The spirits of the grasslands travel the underworld of dreams and spirit-animals and the dead who lately honored the living world and the ancestors who went before them. Between them roam the mortal gods and mortal humans who would aspire to the ranks of heaven, which must surely count among their numbers the beloved husband.”

At this last Master Den gave a little bow. His cadre had fallen silent, half afraid even to hear the conversation between the trickster god and his royal pupil. For himself, Llesho didn’t quite know if his teacher honored him or mocked him. Perhaps both: honored for reaching through the prayer forms to what lay behind them, and mocked for taking so long to discover what that was. He ducked his head in confusion, unsure whether to be proud or embarrassed, but still troubled by what he had seen.

“I died,” he said.

“Often,” Master Den agreed in a familiar tone that reminded Llesho he traded words with the trickster god. ChiChu had, perhaps, known him in those others lives and deaths.

“The Goddess wept,” he added, and again his teacher nodded his agreement.

“Always,” Master Den said.

“Then perhaps it’s time to try a different way.”

With that, Llesho drew his sword, baring steel, and he showed his teeth in a warrior’s grin. His cadre understood. Kaydu met his grin with a like challenge of her own and Little Brother dived into the pack on her back as steel hissed from its scabbard.

“Defend yourself,” she dared him, meaning in this practice contest and also to learn enough to stay alive in the battles that lay ahead.

They had, he realized, taken on another charge in their growing quest—to arrive at the end of it alive, and end the tears of the Goddess. And as he fell into a fighting stance, an echo of a feeling shivered down his spine. He lay dying, beyond pain, except for the breaking of his heart at the tears of his beloved wife who wept above him. “Don’t cry,” his own voice whispered down through memories he could not have, and he resolved that she would not, this time, weep for him.

 

 

 

 

“Enough!” Kaydu called out, and Llesho dropped his aching arm to his side, waiting for the trembling to stop before he tried to settle his sword in its scabbard. His knife went easily to its sheath, however. He wiped his brow with the back of his wrist and let the practice yard come back into focus while he caught his breath. Shokar, he saw, waited patiently for the warriors to settle battle reflexes before he spoke.

“Adar would like to see you,” he said when nerves had calmed enough for Little Brother to venture out of his pack. Bixei and Lling had ended their practice as well, and along with Stipes and a still struggling Hmishi, came to achy attention.

“Tales of the Lady Chaiujin’s challenge to the new khan and her transformation into an emerald bamboo serpent have reached the infirmary,” Shokar explained Adar’s summons. “Our brother has heard and needs assurance that you won’t do something stupid.”

Shokar softened the message with an ironic twist of his mouth. Adar never doubted what he must do, but if the story of Llesho’s own meeting with the lady had reached him, his brother would surely have words for him to rival Shokar’s angry lecture.

“I suppose it won’t help my case to say I’m busy.”

“You can delay the inevitable, but not for long. And he won’t forget about it,” Shokar pointed out. “It’s not like he has anything else to occupy his mind.”

He would have questioned that. Adar had the healer, Carina, to think about, something he did with fixed attention. She returned Adar’s gaze with stars glittering in her eyes. Once Llesho had wanted her to look at him that way. He’d gotten past that and now hoped that their interest in each other might distract them from his own foolishness.

“Best get it done, then,” Kaydu suggested as his cadre settled itself in defensive formation around him. Llesho never went anywhere without his cadre now, including Stipes. The man wasn’t officially a part of the team as constructed by the Lady SeinMa, but he’d been an unofficial member since he and Bixei had found each other again in the midst of battle several countries ago in the flight from Farshore. Despite the loss of an eye in Llesho’s service, he fought for his right to be there and refused to be left behind. No one tried to stop him as he fell in beside them now.

They had all walked through the fire and come out wounded in one way or another, Llesho figured, and each had earned a place at his side at cost to heart or mind or body. Even Kaydu’s monkey-familiar, peering out of her pack at him, had served his quest, bringing help when they would have been murdered on the road without it. When the cadre sometimes overlooked his newly acknowledged status and treated him like a comrade-in-arms, he accepted their criticism or their teasing, grateful for the momentary forgetfulness. With the death of Chimbai-Khan and the elevation of his wary brother, Mergen, to rule the northern Harnish clans, however, no one was forgetting anything. They watched him like hawks—sometimesas a hawk, in Kaydu’s case. They were giving the Lady Chaiujin no chance to send Llesho after the khan into the underworld.

At the infirmary, Bixei and Stipes took up positions outside the door while Hmishi and Lling went round to the back. He would have questioned their fitness for duty so soon after their ordeal but Master Jaks had shown him long ago that a leader who wanted his orders obeyed didn’t give commands he knew would be ignored. The defiance in Hmishi’s still-awkward salute told him this time he didn’t want to challenge his friend’s determination. Kaydu shook her head, but followed him inside.

“You didn’t tell me it was a family meeting.” Llesho wondered why Shokar had failed to mention this important point. Adar lay upon his bed. Healers, everyone knew, made terrible patients, and this one was growing anxious to be up and about. Only Carina’s gentle insistence kept him in his place. He’d expected to find Adar, of course, but not Balar, who sat in the corner, one hand muting his lute at the neck while the fingers of his other spidered idly over the strings. Balar kept his eyes on his instrument when Llesho came in.

Lluka, however, stood away from his camp stool. “Blessed Husband,” he said with an ironic flourishing bow.

“You overstep,” Llesho warned him with a frown in Kaydu’s direction. He’d argued his status often enough with Kaydu and his cadre but that particular term was used only between husbands of the Great Goddess, and only at the exchange of most sacred oaths.

“Then don’t bring strangers to a family council.”

“Enough!” At Llesho’s sharp tone, Kaydu came to righting readiness, her hand on her sword.

The raised voices brought Bixei into the doorway, a pike held ready. “What?” he asked.

The company of princes gathered inside might fault the informality of his response; they did not doubt that his pike would find its mark in any one of them at Llesho’s least gesture. Balar looked shocked. But Shokar, who had ridden with Llesho’s witch-captain and his cadre, arched an eyebrow as if he watched the playing out of a game where the outcome was already clear on the board.

“You find humor in his threats now, Shokar?” Lluka demanded, his fury barely contained.

Shokar gave a little shrug. “His cadreis his family,” he explained with subtle patience. “They are his temple of worshipers and his first defense against the worlds arrayed to oppose him. If they perceive you as a threat to him, they will kill you. Given what I’ve seen of his captain, I’m surprised she hasn’t killed you already.”

“Llesho is supposed to findall his brothers.” Kaydu answered the question even though he hadn’t asked her. Since she couldn’t use her sword, she cut him with her words: “Not just the useful ones.”

“And what are we princes of the same father to him, if these ragpickers’ sons and daughters are his family?”

“Family again, someday, I hope,” Shokar suggested, “But right now we are his dim past and little more to him than the stones he picks up as he crosses the board his master set him.”

Not true,Llesho began to say, but it was more so than he wanted to admit, so he started again, with, “More than that.”

Lluka brushed aside his protest with a careless wave, his mind chasing a different conversational rabbit altogether. “And who would his master be?”

“Lleck, of course,” Llesho answered with an edge in his voice. “The ghost of our father’s minister. You know that.”

“Ah.” Lluka gave him a mocking nod. “Your adviser among the dead, and not the god of suds and linen who visited after prayer forms this morning, then?”

“Don’t let him hear you say that,” Llesho suggested with a tiny smile. He loved the trickster god best in his persona of laundryman, the hours they had spent together in the washtubs tipped with gold in his memory. But ChiChu, who went by the name Master Den in his mortal travels, suffered fools with little patience and malice not at all when directed at himself. Against others, he might give assistance, of course, which brought a laugh bubbling from Llesho’s throat. What a mad quest he pursued!

Lluka didn’t take kindly to his laughter, nor did he appreciate the weapons bristling in the tent.

“Oh, send them away. No one is going to hurt you here!”

“Pardon, Holy Excellence,” Kaydu begged permission to speak, directing her request at Llesho in the full title due the god-king of Thebin. She had grown up in the court of the mortal goddess of war and knew how to offer the camaraderie of a friend when it was needed and to turn any rough tent into a royal audience with a word and a shift of posture. Llesho followed her lead in this as he had so many times in battle. Drawing himself up with a regal tilt of his chin, he gave a slight nod for her to speak.

“We cannot, in conscience, leave the chosen husband of the Great Goddess unguarded.”

“Against his brothers?” Lluka gathered himself in a pose that mimicked deep offense.

Kaydu had grown up on easy terms with gods and emperors, however, and would not be cowed by a lesser brother. “Serpents are everywhere,” she reminded him with a pointed stare that challenged him to reveal the schemes bubbling beneath his public display of indignation.

Balar brought their arguments to an end with a discordant bleat of strings on his lute. “Adar is falling asleep.”

“No, I’m not,” Adar insisted around a yawn. “But I am heartily tired of the quarreling. Can we get to the point?”

“Which is?” Llesho demanded of his brothers. “You summoned me—I don’t know who called us together, or why.”

“Master Den has been in to visit,” Balar said, which explained much about Adar’s growing fretfulness.

“The old trickster exaggerates,” Llesho suggested.

It didn’t help his case that he offered the excuse before hearing the outcome of the visit. Even held to his bed by a broken bone and a wounded spirit, Adar wouldn’t be taken in by the lie. He said nothing, however, but waited for Llesho to continue.

“What has he told you?” Good start, Llesho applauded himself. Give away no advantage, but make the enemy come to you.

Adar refused to accept the role of enemy, however, and likewise refused to treat the discussion like a game. “That the Lady Chaiujin came to you with the offer of peace,” he said, “and you would have gone willingly to the underworld in her scaly embrace, had he not come along when he did.”

“That sounds more like a tale than you or Master Den talking.” They all knew he was stalling. He wondered if he should tell them what his dream-travel conversation with Shou had suggested—that the Lady Chaiujin never had made it to Chimbai-Khan’s great traveling city. The woman who counted herself the khan’s wife was no such thing, but a demon snake who had taken her place in the khan’s bed, and in his ulus. Before he could sort his thoughts, however, Lluka sucked in a breath to complain. Shokar took his lead from Adar and silenced their brother with a glare, but the moment had broken. Llesho decided to keep that bit of information to himself and watch, as Shou had advised him.

He wasn’t getting out of this conference without telling his brothers something, however. Balar looked up at him with a gentle smile, letting his fingers wander over the strings of his lute. “We’re not going anywhere,” he said, a reminder not only that they would wait out his silence, but also, perhaps, that he would not lose them by his answers.

With a little shrug, Llesho decided to come clean, at least as far as his own experience went. “Carina gave me something to counteract the Lady Chaiujin’s love potion, but a trace still lingered. I could feel it, like an itch under the skin. It made me think about all the other mistakes I’d made since I started out. It was my fault Hmishi and Harlol and Master Jaks were dead. Tsu-tan might have killed Adar, too, and all because Master Markko wanted me for some purpose I still don’t understand. Now I seemed to have another enemy.

“And I was thinking about Shou and Lady SeinMa.”

Adar’s face had gone very bland through all of this, and Llesho should have worried about that. But the question, “Love potion?” gently asked, slipped right under his defenses. His brothers were holding out on the injured healer.

“She didn’t want me.” He’d been sure of that even when he’d wanted her. “I would have embarrassed our cause and made a complete fool of myself.”

“And you know this because?”

“You know the wedding cup I carry, that Lady SienMa returned to me at the beginning of my quest?”

Adar nodded to indicate he knew the cup, but didn’t speak. Llesho knew that was a trap, to draw him out, but he fell into it anyway.

“She served me in another, its match except for a symbol carved at the bottom, like a coiled snake. I was supposed to accuse the khan of stealing it from my pack, I think, but I recognized that the lip was thicker than my own cup. So instead of accusing her, I mentioned both the similarity and the differences.”

She’d made him a gift of it; he had it in his pack, carefully kept separate from his wedding cup. Unfortunately, she’d also had a backup plan.

“When I didn’t fall for the cup, she fed me the potion in the tea. That one did work, sort of.”

He’d enough experience with potions to know when he’d been dosed with one, and managed to get out of the lady’s presence before he committed a serious breach of etiquette, though the khan and those closest to him had seen the sudden longing in Llesho’s eyes. They hadn’t, he recalled, blamed him for his reaction to their queen, but allowed him his escape with good grace.

“Carina figured it out quickly enough and gave me an antidote that cleared most of the potion. But there was a bit of a residual effect I hadn’t counted on. I wasn’t thinking too clearly.”

“I figured that much.” His brothers seemed content to let Adar carry the gentle interrogation. Even Lluka had settled back into his chair and watched Llesho with eyes wide and nervous as Adar suggested another question: “Shou and the Lady SeinMa?”

“I wanted to see the emperor, so I asked my totem self where he was. I found him in Guynm Province. The Lady SeinMa had joined Shou in the old governor’s palace at Durnhag. And, well, they weren’t exactly interested in company when I showed up.”

He kept to himself his most recent visit, which had left him more confused than ever.

“You’ve been getting quite an education while I’ve been away.” Adar twitched his lips as if he had the bitter taste of unripe plums in his mouth.

“Oh, yeah. I’m learning to dream travel.” That qualified, without going into areas he shouldn’t have brought up at all. With any luck he’d divert their attention enough that they wouldn’t ask him any more questions about Shou or his love life. “Of course, you can’t guarantee what you’ll find when you travel in the dream world anymore than you can in the waking one.”

“I suppose the emperor of Shan tucked away with his lover surpassed the guarantee,” Balar commented under his breath. Llesho could see his brother plotting more than chord progressions in his head and wished he remembered how much Balar knew about the Lady SeinMa. It wasn’t any surprise that the emperor of Shan had a mistress, or even that he loved her. But the mortal goddess of war scared him more than Lady Chaiujin did, and with good reason. She was the embodiment in human form of all the chaos and bitter pain of war. Its strategy and gamesmanship, its sweep of courage and valor as well, but Llesho remembered mostly the chaos and the pain. He could not imagine loving that.

“So,” Adar summed up the high points for him, “with a love potion in your veins, and worry for your companions mixing with thoughts of lovers—disturbing lovers—in your head, you wandered off without a word to anyone, right into the arms of the Khan’s murderous wife.”

When put that way, it seemed pretty stupid—even Little Brother had sneaked back out of his pack to grin his disapproval—but Llesho had his defense ready. “I didn’t know about the murderous part, or the serpent part, then. Even Carina wasn’t sure why Lady Chaiujin dosed me with the love potion. It seemed like a political move to discredit our party in front of the khan. Chimbai-Khan might have ordered me killed for the insult to his wife, I suppose, but Bolghai is a friend of Carina’s mother and had trained Carina in the ways of a Harnish shaman. Master Den is pretty good at getting me out of the permanent kind of trouble and, on balance, it seemed more likely that the lady just wanted me to look foolish in front of her husband.”

“You were wrong.”

“Yeah,” Llesho admitted. “Still. She didn’t ask Mergen’s swordmaster if he wanted to die when she bit him, and I suspect she didn’t ask Chimbai-Khan if he was ready for the underworld either. So why did she ask me?”

“Not out of any romantic attachment,” Adar suggested dryly.

“She didn’t wantme, ” Llesho agreed, “Not in that way, at least.” He wasn’t ready to offer his suspicion that the mix of powerful emotions he had scarcely been able to contain had drawn her like a jackal to the smell of blood.

Adar seemed to understand what Llesho was thinking without being told, however. His mouth, already drawn in pain, tightened into a thinner line.

“Don’t wander out alone,” he said. “She’ll try again.”

Llesho was on the point of objecting that he wasn’t that foolish, but on second thought, wasn’t sure anyone, including his own cadre, would believe him. A mission from the newly elected Mergen-Khan saved him from further debate on the issue.

“Prince Tayyichiut, of the Qubal clan, to speak with his Holy Excellence King Llesho of Thebin,” Bixei announced just ahead of the Harnish prince.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Six

“TAYY,” LLESHO greeted the prince informally with a bow, as between equals.

“Llesho,” Tayyichiut returned the bow, but with a distracted air. The dogs had not accompanied him, so his visit must be official, or secret. “My uncle the khan would speak with you on a matter of some urgency for your quest.”

“I’ll come right away.” He’d have taken any excuse to escape his brothers’ disapproval, but Mergen had been questioning the prisoners captured during the recent battle.

They’d seized a handful of survivors. As a guest, Llesho had no choice but to put their disposition in the hands of Mergen-Khan. From what he had heard from Tayy, they’d talked quickly enough. Tsu-tan, the witch-finder, had scared even these hardened bandits, who told tales of possession by an evil demon of the underworld. They’d have been even more frightened if they knew how close to the truth they really were, but the khan hadn’t found anyone who had any useful information until now. Mergen-Khan’s summons must mean that he’d uncovered something important.

“I have horses waiting Up Top,” Prince Tayy added as they made their withdrawal from the unhappy brothers.

They had taken to referring to the two camps by their locations: the tent city of the Qubal clans “Up Top,” on the grassy plain, and “Down Below” in the dell through which the narrowed Onga flowed, the camp of Llesho’s small force. Yesugei called it Llesho’s honor guard, though at the moment it was the only army he had. Horses could manage the slope between the camps at a pitched run, but for convenience they gathered the animals Up Top, where the grazing and exercise were plentiful.

Llesho would have walked the easy distance between the infirmary tent Down Below and the ger-tent of the khan Up Top. Prince Tayy, however, considered it demeaning to go on foot. “Only slaves and servants would approach the khan on foot,” he insisted. “Mergen-Khan will ask your opinion, but you will have to convince him that your words are worth hearing. To persuade him, your suggestions must carry the full weight of your own position as a king. At the least that means a horse.”

The Harn in their traveling cities of felt and lattice were more exacting in the formalities than the emperor of Shan with all of his stone palaces. Or perhaps, it was that those you didn’t trust had to announce themselves with their approach and stand inspection before they reached the seat of power. Llesho had come gift wrapped to the emperor, and after a trial run. In the camp of the khan, he hadn’t yet proved himself, so Llesho readily agreed to Prince Tayyichiut’s conditions.

With the prince at his side and his cadre at his back, Llesho crossed the beaten common. As he passed, soldiers of Thebin and mercenary volunteers from north of Farshore bowed in salute. Out of the corner of his eye, Llesho noted that he’d picked up his Thebin corporal and the Wastrel Sawghar again, pacing his cadre like outriders, ready to cut off any assassins hidden within bow range.

“I thought the prisoners had turned out to be a dry well,” Llesho commented, meaning no source of information. He hoped to draw Tayy out about the summons of his uncle, but the Harnish prince wasn’t filling his bucket any more than the prisoners had.

“They did,” he said. “My uncle the khan figured that out pretty quickly and gave them to his guardsmen as spoils of war.”

“Oh.”

Enslaving the prisoners made sense according to Harnish justice. The khan wouldn’t put a warrior to death for following the orders of his captain, but he couldn’t free him to fight again either. Slavery offered each captive some freedom of movement natural to the nomadic people while charging each slaveholder to control his new property with punishments as necessary. Llesho figured that he ought to be glad for anything the khan did to the witch-finder’s followers. After all, Harnish raiders—perhaps some among these very captives—had laid waste to his country, killed his mother and father and his little sister, and sold him into slavery as a child. In spite of all his arguments to himself, however, the fate of the prisoners reminded Llesho too much of his own.

Tayy gave him a curious frown, but continued his explanation of Harnish ways. “If we’ve caught a firstborn by some chance, his family will probably ransom him, which would be good, because we need the horses. The rest will be stuck with the dung-work in their masters’ tents for a year or two, but then they’ll be adopted or marry in. War makes widows, after all, and widows need husbands. Down the long path, their families in the South will consider it a favorable alliance and our khan will work those connections for the benefit of the ulus as well.”

Llesho wondered what Kaydu would say about the need for husbands, but for the Harnish it wasn’t the part of the story that he doubted.

“That is not slavery as I have known it among the Harn.”

Tayy bristled at the challenge, but caught something in the bleakness of Llesho’s disbelief that stopped him in his tracks, thinking. “Bolghai told me a story once, when I was little,” he said, and began walking again, “that he had dream-walked in the life of an outlander slave. Like cattle led to slaughter, he said, only Chimbai-Khan, who had asked for the tale, would never treat his cattle so badly. Bolghai wept at the telling, and wouldn’t speak of it again.”

The Long March, Llesho thought, and shivered in weary dread of his own memories.

“These men are prisoners taken in fair battle. The Qubal clans aren’t raiders,” Prince Tayyichiut insisted, “When we kidnap someone, it’s to ransom him back where he came from, or for marriage, not to sell to strangers for the highest price.”

Llesho wasn’t sure the Qubal’s neighbors, paying ransoms and weeping for their lost daughters, would appreciate the difference, though it apparently mattered to the khan who traded only in “honorable” slavery. The Ulugar clans had committed horrors on his people, however, had tortured Hmishi and served the master who had driven the emperor of Shan mad. For his own sake, he was glad that the northern clans he counted as allies had no part in death marches or the sale of their foes into perpetual servitude. But he would have no mercy for the southern clansmen who had fallen into Mergen’s hands.

“And Tsu-tan’s lieutenants?” he asked. “What has your uncle the khan learned from them?” Unlike the warriors sent to work off their parole, battle commanders were held accountable both for the orders they received and for the ones they gave. There had been two, he had heard, taken alive.

“Nothing, yet. They had the usual choice. One talked. He had no information of value to offer, but it saved him from a worse fate. Mergen had the man’s head cut off this morning. The other will not, or cannot, answer the khan’s questions, not even to say he doesn’t know. So we are come to the place where the river ends.”

Llesho frowned. “What river is that?” he asked, though he could guess what the riddle meant.

Prince Tayyichiut gave a little shrug as if the answer should be obvious, but explained in plain terms that Llesho couldn’t ignore. “Mergen-Khan has run out of options. Prisoners of military rank may choose to give up their master’s secrets in exchange for a swift death. If they prefer to take their knowledge with them to the underworld, they do so with their bowels in their hands and their enemies walking on their living graves.”

Burial, Llesho had learned from Bolghai, was an eternal prison for the Harn. In Harnish belief, fire sent the dead of the grasslands to join their ancestors in the spirit life and to be reborn into the world. A man put into the ground would remain there, trapped body and spirit to molder and rot forever. But Prince Tayy meant more than that. As they climbed the steep path that led onto the grassy plain above the dell, he explained his uncle’s quandary.

“It will hurt the khan soul-deep to hand this man his liver and bury him alive. Mergen’s a rational man and knows the value of fear when trying to extract information from an enemy. Once you’ve torn out his entrails and thrown the dirt in over him, though, your enemy can’t tell you anything. So you reward the traitor with an easy death and punish the honorable man with unspeakable horrors, all for the hope that next time a fool tries to hold onto his honor, he will believe that you’re serious and give in before you have to do the same to him.”

“Does it work?”

Tayy gave him a defensive glare. “It’s not like it happens every day.”

Llesho had never dealt with this part of the aftermath of battle—interrogating prisoners—before. The Way of the Goddess allowed him defense both of self and subjects, and his training had turned killing into a reflex to save his own life or the lives of his companions. The Goddess forbid causing pain for its own sake, however; he had never used torture as a means to even his most worthy ends.

Thinking about it now, he realized that he hadn’t wanted to know what Shou had done to the captives after the attack on the Imperial City of Shan, or how Habiba extracted information from the enemy. With a countenance as flinty as the stone that littered the plain, Kaydu climbed the side of the dell at his side and he wondered what acts of terror she had committed in her father’s name, for his cause. By his silence he had lost the right to ask about that now, but he was done leaving the decisions to others.

They had reached the high plain where horses waited for Tayy and Llesho as promised. None for his cadre, however, nor had Tayy’s young guardsmen-companions awaited them on the edge of the Up Above, which gave Llesho cause to wonder who really had sent the prince.

“Your uncle doesn’t know that you’ve asked for my help, does he?” If he hadn’t been distracted by his brother’s more gentle interrogation, he might have guessed sooner that the prince had taken on himself this mission to save his uncle the khan from his prisoner’s agony. He expected Tayy to look guilty when he confessed, but the prince raised his head proudly. “He doesn’t know you the way I do, or he would have thought of it himself. But he’ll listen if you go to him. I promise.”