“What do you think I can do?”

“I don’t know. You’ll think of something.”

That wasn’t the answer he was looking for. In more than one sense, Llesho decided, it was time he took the reins for the Great Goddess in whose service he fought. He didn’t think Tayy was going to like it, though.

“I can’t let him do it,” he said.

“That’s the point, isn’t it? To get the information out of the prisoner somehow, so Mergen doesn’t have to gut him and bury him alive.” Tayy left off checking the cinch that held the sheepskin saddle to his horse’s back, waiting for Llesho to explain himself further.

“The Way of the Goddess is peace,” Llesho answered, “I am that great lady’s husband. Whether he speaks or not, I can’t stand by while a helpless prisoner is gutted like a fish and thrown into a dishonored grave.”

Prince Tayyichiut leaped into his saddle and looked down at Llesho where he stood at his stirrup. “If you fail, you won’t have to stand for it; you’ll be sitting on a horse.”

Not a confusion of language friend to friend, but an uneasy warning from a Harnish prince to an outlander that reminded Llesho of an earlier conversation. Friendship, Tayy had said, survives among princes only as long as it served the ulus. As a deposed king, even a wizard-king of the Cloud Country, Llesho did not rank with an acknowledged khan in his own lands. He might attend the interrogation at Tayy’s insistence, but he wouldn’t get a say in the proceedings unless he came up with something more than a crown he didn’t own yet to support his position. Tayy, and probably his uncle the khan, wanted magic from him.

Llesho looked more deeply inside himself. It had to be there, the core of what made him the god-king of the Thebin people and true champion of the Goddess. His brothers believed in it and grew impatient for him to show it. The mortal gods who trailed after him likewise insisted that he accept his nature and pick up his duty. And once, it seemed an eternity ago, he had felt it touch him in the camp of the mortal goddess of war.

Sometimes, he forgot that. But he remembered it now: that moment at the foot of the Lady SeinMa, and his words to her. He repeated them, more to himself than to the Harnish prince: “Iam god.”

Tayy blinked, then he grew more princely in his awe. “You’ve never done that before,” he pointed out.

Llesho tilted his head, a question and permission to continue, while a secret smile tugged at his lips.

“You’re glowing. Heaven seems to be shining through you. I’ve never seen—” He broke off, at a loss for what to say.

“Tell me about the prisoner.” Llesho set a hand to the prince’s stirrup, gentle insistence.

With a sigh of relief that they had not, as yet, committed some irredeemable act in the eyes of this creature out of the Cloud Country he suddenly didn’t recognize, the prince spilled answers like a sacrificial offering. “He seems to know something, but hasn’t opened up yet.”

Tayy winced at the unfortunate choice of words for reasons Llesho well understood. Tsu-tan’s lieutenant would be opened up soon enough, if he didn’t talk. He let the error pass, though his own gut was cramping. It seemed to have a mind of its own as it tried to crawl more deeply into hiding than a soft belly provided.

“Let me see what I can do,” he finally agreed. “Perhaps I can persuade him by less painful means.”

Prince Tayy gave him a long, thoughtful look. “Mergen-Khan is no magician, but he says he sees in you divine powers.” He mentioned this as if the notion had struck him as foolish before and he was still wary of accepting it as truth in spite of his own eyes.

“You may use any powers you have to persuade the prisoner to betray his master. Honor demands, however, that the prisoner retain the right to refuse.”

Which meant, Llesho figured, that he could use any means he possessed to torment or terrify the man into submission, but Harnish custom prohibited reaching into his mind to draw out painlessly what he wanted. They might take the prisoner’s life in any way they chose, so long as they left him his honor. If he had the skill, of course, Llesho would seize the man’s knowledge in a heartbeat and leave him standing in his own skin. To a Thebin, honor did not include gutting his enemy alive or burying him to suffocate slowly while above him men walked across his open, dirt-packed wounds. Unfortunately, the Goddess hadn’t gifted him with the ability either to read minds or to unseal men’s tongues against their will.

“I don’t have any such powers,” he answered truthfully.

Tayy’s frown told him his friend no longer believed that about him. “If you don’t, that man will spend the next three days dying a horrible death. You will dishonor your goddess and Mergen will spend the rest of his life with this man’s screams in his head.”

“Wanting doesn’t make it so. I have some skills, some gifts of my lady wife, but none that apply here. None that Bolghai can’t do better.” Growing into his gifts took time—that was the hard part about them. And they weren’t always what you wanted or thought you needed, though they often turned out to be both in the end. Meanwhile, the khan had ten thousand Harnish warriors to bring against Llesho’s handful. If he tried to stop the khan by force, he’d be throwing their lives away and Mergen would do what he felt necessary anyway. “I don’t know what he expects me to do!”

“Convince the prisoner to give his honor into your hands while he speaks, so that Mergen-Khan can give him a painless death. At the least, your anguish should convince the fool that Mergen-Khan doesn’t make idle threats.”

Just when Llesho was beginning to hope that theywere idle threats, Tayy added, “They always give in once the gutting begins, but by then it’s too late. They’re off their heads and can’t get a clear thought past their own screaming.”

He’d thought Tayy didn’t know. Not every day, then, but he’d seen it, or heard enough.

“He’ll have to kill me first.” Well, that was one way, Llesho decided. Not the one he’d have chosen with time to think, but the first one out of his mouth and no way to take it back now.

Tayy didn’t blink. “Uncle said as much. I think it would destroy him to do it. That’s why he didn’t ask you to attend from the start.” He stopped, as if giving some thought his full attention, then added, “Perhaps, if you screamed enough, the prisoner would break. But you’d still be thrown with all your gaping wounds into a living grave.”

It took one quick glance to realize Prince Tayyichiut was telling the truth. Like his uncle, he’d never show his feelings to the lieutenant of their enemy, but for his friend horror bled from his eyes.

“We’d better go, then.” Llesho rose into his saddle with a command for his cadre, “Stay here.”

“What are you going to do?” Kaydu had heard it all. She stood nearby with Little Brother cradled in her arms as if the animal had understood and sought the comfort Llesho would never have.

“I’m going to be a king,” he said because she wouldn’t understand. “Be a god.”

“Then you’ll need an honor guard appropriate to your station. I can muster the troops in moments.” She unwrapped her arms and set her familiar on her shoulder. Little Brother knew this as preparation to ride and crawled back into his pack until only the top of his head peeked out.

Llesho shook his head, a sad smile meant at his own expense on his lips. “Fifty or a thousand guards can’t make me more than I am in my own skin. If that’s not enough, nobody else should die for my lack.”

A protest marked her troubled frown. Then she took a closer look at him, and answered his crooked little smile with one of her own. “Holy Excellence,” she said, the title of the Thebin king, with an emphasis on “holy” and a deep bow to go with it. “A king requires pomp and circumstance,” she answered her own question, “a god carries ceremony within himself.”

So. She understood more than he’d thought. He shouldn’t have been surprised, but the notion didn’t sit comfortably in his mind yet. It came as a shock that others saw and accepted more easily than he did himself, though Kaydu was the daughter of a powerful witch and a witch herself in the court of the mortal goddess of war. Consorting with gods presented no novelty to his captain or his cadre.

“Then just us, as witness,” she decided with a gesture to include his cadre and he couldn’t forbid that. They would have marched on foot behind him, but horsemen of the khan approached with Yesugei at their head. A perfect solution, though the Qubal chieftain might not think so.

“Little king!” Yesugei addressed him with a seated bow from the waist. “Mergen-Khan sent me to find you.”

“I am at my host’s command,” he answered politely. “But will need your horses for my guardsmen—”

“Of course.” The chieftain motioned his followers to give up their mounts. He carefully blanked his face, though his glance kept stealing to Prince Tayyichiut. Wondering, no doubt, if Tayy had anticipated his uncle.

When one cadre of riders had changed places with the other, Yesugei wheeled and took off, not for the ger-tent of the khan but skirting the tent city. When they had gathered sufficient distance from the palace, he cut through a cluster of modest white felt tents, bringing them out on the wide avenue that formed the axis of every encampment. A processional to the front door, then, as an honored guest or a questionable ally.

Yesugei didn’t lead them to the ger-tent of the khan, however, but stopped instead at the playing field that opened out in front of the palace of white felt and silver embroidery. This, too, conformed to the plan the tent city followed at each stopping place. On a field almost the same as this, but a hundred li behind them, Llesho had played a Harnish game grown deadly when the ancient spear he carried at his back awoke with blood-lust in its flight. He’d conquered something in himself that day, and tamed some of the hunger for death in the weapon. Again, a crowd waited to see how the outlander would fight a different battle, for the honorable death of an enemy.

Yesugei worked their party through the waiting throng, past a raised platform set up beside a shallow grave dug into the temporary playing field. The prisoner lay spread across the platform in his shackles. Llesho spared no closer look in that direction, however. Harnish raiders from the South had shown no mercy when they attacked Kungol. They now made common cause with Master Markko, who tortured and killed his friends and had poisoned Llesho in the long days of his captivity.

The prisoner couldn’t hurt him now, though. He’d followed Tayy’s summons to save a Harnish life from torture and end it in dignity as the Way of the Goddess dictated. But in a secret part of himself, he was afraid to look at the man who had followed Tsu-tan on Master Markko’s business. His rage was so vast that it waited only a glance, a word, to sweep away his duty to his Goddess and her Way. So he didn’t look, lest vengeance take the place of mercy in his heart, but let Yesugei lead him forward until he faced the khan.

Surrounded by his guardsmen at the center of the playing field, Mergen-Khan awaited Llesho on horseback. He wore the richly embroidered silk coats and tunic of his office and, on his head, the quilted-silk and silver headdress of the khan, covered over with the silver helmet that served in battle as a crown. At his right hand, in her massive headdress of silver horns draped everywhere with strings of precious gems, sat the old woman, Bortu, the mother of this khan and his brother who had preceded him. Prince Tayyichiut urged his horse forward and took his place at his uncle’s left, the heart-side for the heir. Yesugei called a halt then, and announced, “I have brought the wizard-king of the Cloud Country, may he serve the khan well.”

With a low bow in his saddle, Llesho added his own polite greeting to his host: “I come at your call, Mergen-Khan.”

Mergen returned the bow with a courteous nod.

Those nearest him knew Mergen in all his moods, thoughtful and whimsical, determined or grieving. None would have doubted that cold judgment ruled him now. Llesho saw himself in that shuttered emptiness, however. Like Mergen, he’d learned to close away his distress behind the mask of a king; he knew how upset the khan was by how completely he hid the emotion.

“Ride beside me while your ally questions your foe,” Mergen said, and nudged his horse into slow motion, his mother and his nephew still at his side. Llesho followed his lead, with Yesugei beside him and his cadre among the khan’s own guardsmen. When they reached the platform on which the prisoner lay, Yesugei dismounted and strode forward on foot, drawing his sword. Kaydu followed, her face set as she prepared to act on Llesho’s orders even if it killed her.

The raider locked eyes with his executioner, but Yesugei didn’t flinch. The point of his sword rested lightly against the raider’s belly; it hardly shook at all when Little Brother crept out of Kaydu’s pack and swung himself onto the raised pallet.

Kaydu tried to rescue her familiar, but Little Brother whined and refused to leave the prisoner to his fate. Anxiously the monkey patted the man’s whiskers.

“Have you anything to say, Southern Man?” Mergen-Khan asked with a glance at Little Brother that promised monkey stew for dinner.

With an effort the captive turned to face the khan. “I am not a southern man,” he said.

He hadn’t worn a beard then, but his voice echoed in Llesho’s memory from the time before Farshore, when he’d trained in the gladiators’ compound on Pearl Island.

“Don’t let him send you to hell without your tip,” he said out loud, changing only slightly the advice that Radimus had given him years ago, when he hadn’t even understood what he’d been told. He’d been called up to the great house on Pearl Island. Lord Chin-shi hadn’t tapped him for the usual reasons that a lord pulled a boy out of the training compound, though. He’d wanted information Llesho didn’t have then, about the red tide killing the bay, but he’d paid his tip all the same.

“Fighting and dying you do for nothing, because they own you.” Radimus repeated his own explanation from that long ago morning. “Anything else, they pay for. It’s tradition. Llesho? I thought you were dead, boy.”

“Not yet.” Llesho dismounted and came to him while Radimus barked out a rough laugh.

“Glad to hear it.”

Little Brother darted away in a panic at the sudden noise, or so it would seem. The monkey curled himself on Kaydu’s shoulder while the khan watched for signs and miracles, as if he hadn’t already seen them.

“I’ll take it from here.” He held out his hand.

Shaking his head in confusion, Yesugei turned over his sword. “I—” he began, but he didn’t seem to know what he’d intended to say. Llesho understood, and showed it in his glance so full of forgiveness that the chieftain fumbled at a loss and turned away.

When he had gone and Llesho’s surroundings came back into focus, the khan was looking down at him like Habiba with an interesting specimen to study. “You do that very well for a boy,” he said. “Can you teach it to Tayy?”

“First, you have to be born a god.” He’d never understood that about himself, and meant it as a flip answer. The situation was too dire for him to manage irony, however. Radimus seemed not surprised at all.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Mergen promised, though whether he took it for a boast or a joke was hard to tell. He didn’t object when Llesho dropped the sword at his feet, so they had at least progressed that far.

Sweat slimed Radimus’ torso and lay in glistening pools in the hollows of his orbits. How long had the questioning gone on before the khan had sent for him? Too long. Llesho refused to let old horrors sidetrack him.

“I think we need to talk.”

“Would if I could, boy.” Radimus rattled his chains, explanation enough for that answer. There was more to his silence—or less—than loyalty to an old and dangerous master.

“A spell?” Llesho wondered.

Terror and longing moved in the captive’s eyes. “A—” Before Radimus could finish the word, his body contorted, conscious thought lost in a strangled scream.

Suddenly, after an endless, heart-stopping moment, the convulsion ended, leaving Radimus limp and with the life gone out of his eyes.

With a long sigh to compose himself, Llesho turned to the khan an expression of polite inquiry. “He’s done this before?”

“Several times,” Mergen-Khan answered. “Usually he makes no sound at all before the twitching begins. Is he possessed?”

“More likely a spell.” He looked again at Radimus, who watched him warily through the exhaustion that followed his fit.

“He’s told you the truth. He’s not from the southern clans. We were slaves together in Lord Chin-shi’s stable on Pearl Island, more than a thousand li north of where the grasslands even begin.”

“Gladiators?” Mergen-Khan infused the single word with doubt.

Llesho gave a little shrug. “Novices. I was in my fifteenth summer. Radimus was older; he’d come to it fully grown. We trained together with Bixei. Stipes was ahead of us in the ring.” He didn’t mention Master Den, who had taught them hand-to-hand combat for the arena.

“And now,” Mergen-Khan added coldly, “he rides at the bidding of this Master Markko, who also served the lord of Pearl Island. This same magician has swept a path of death and destruction through the Shan Empire, and now into the very heart of the grasslands. If Prince Lluka is believed, he will bring the universe down around our heads in chaos and nightmare.”

Llesho knew the terrors of his brother’s visions, had walked through their fire and smoke in his dreams, but he couldn’t let the horrors of the future distract him from Radimus’ plight in front of him. “None of that is the fault of your prisoner,” he corrected the khan gently. “Radimus is a slave and had no choice of masters.”

“Once a slave,” Mergen agreed, who had apportioned out his own lower-ranking captives to tents not of their choosing. “But now? He wears the braids of command.”

Or had, Llesho figured. Radimus’ hair was as much a mess as the rest of him. Too exhausted to show even a glimmer of hope, Radimus stirred weakly on the altar of Harnish retribution.

“They’re going to gut me,” he whispered, as Yesugei muttered an apology and took up his sword again.

Llesho said nothing. Mergen looked unforgiving.

“Don’t let them bury me alive, please—” Radimus moistened his lips with a furtive tongue. “When it comes time, wield the knife for me your own self, boy. I don’t deserve a kindness, but I would see the face of a friend—”

“You’d do better with Yesugei. He’s had more experience at this.” The khan spoke to the prisoner, but his gaze never left Llesho. “He’ll cause you less pain than the boy.”

Now was not the time to make grandiose demands. He needed to think. Too much imagination, that was his problem. The weight of Yesugei’s blade in his mind tensed the muscles clear to his shoulder. He felt Radimus’ blood on his hands, and the slick glide of entrails. Suddenly, his skin was as sweat-slick as Radimus’, his mouth as dry. The Harn would take advantage of any weakness they could find, however; a king with no stomach for the customs of Harnish warcraft might see his own troops slaughtered by the very men he had thought were his allies.

“He thinks you’ll defy me and kill him quickly, as a friend,” Mergen said conversationally. “The cut ends high, just below the heart bone. The blade is sharp, and a careless thrust might penetrate the heart itself, removing all temptation to give up his intelligence before he gives up his life.”

“Master Markko has put him under a spell of discretion!” Llesho’s temper strained to be let loose. “Prince Tayyichiut said I couldn’t interfere if the prisoner didn’t want to talk, but Radimus would tell us what he knows if he could!”

“But he can’t. He’s useless if we can’t reach the information we need about his master,” Mergen pointed out calmly. “In the meantime, we can’t trust him. He may harbor secret instructions to murder any or all of us. If he’s dead, at least he can’t hurt anyone. And it sends a message to his master.”

“With the blood of a man twice captive on your hands and no information to speak of for your troubles, you will tell his master that he wins.” Llesho was sure about that, and equally sure that, “I’ve faced the magician in battle down all the roads from Farshore, and I haven’t ever let him win.”

That hit Mergen-Khan like a slap. “What do you expect me to do,god-king? ” Sarcasm edged his words, but there was an honest plea in the question.How do we get out of this with all the Qubal clans of the East watching? he meant, in true desperation. As the newly elected khan, his brother recently murdered in his bed, he could ill afford to show weakness.

“Bring me Carina,” Llesho answered. “And Master Den. Ask Bright Morning, too, if he will come, and Bolghai. This is a matter for physicians, not torturers.”

“And we need launderers for—?”

“We need our gods about us when we challenge evil men,” Llesho answered softly the question that had troubled the Harn since his arrival. Yesugei seemed unsurprised, while Bortu looked pleased with him, a doting mother more impressed with his honesty than with Master Den’s identity. It was impossible to read Mergen-Khan, but Prince Tayyichiut was plainly furious and holding onto his anger only in consideration of the crowd that hemmed them in. He wanted his explanation to go no further into that crowd, so he addressed a supplicant’s bow to the khan and avoided meeting Tayy’s eyes.

“In that case,” Mergen said, “you must have your launderer and your dwarf as well.” Which told him clear as a blue sky that Mergen knew all along what companions Llesho traveled with. No doubt his shaman kept him well advised. “Bind the prisoner to a horse and take him to Bolghai’s burrow. Consult with your witches and tricksters, and return to me with this Radimus’ secrets, or with his living entrails.”

Which was as good an outcome of the afternoon as he could have hoped once Prince Tayy had shown up at the infirmary. Llesho bowed his thanks, rising only when the khan had departed with his retinue. Yesugei remained with a handful of his guardsmen to keep watch over the prisoner, and Llesho waited while he ordered the bringing of a horse. Bemused, the chieftain allowed Bixei and Stipes to direct Radimus into the saddle and raised no objection when they padded his shackles with strips torn from their own clothing.

“Where is Bolghai’s burrow this time?” Llesho asked when they were ready to ride.

On balance, Yesugei decided to be pleased to have escaped committing murder through an error in judgment. He answered with a wry smile and a play on an old riddle. “Where the river ends.”

Tayy had spoken the same riddle. The answer was death, but Radimus hadn’t died yet. Llesho figured the chieftain was speaking literally this time in a game of double meanings doubled. Beyond the dell, then, past the camp Down Below. Not where the Onga River ended, many li to the south, but where it grew more narrow as it rounded a bend. He had no doubt that Carina and the gods he had asked for would be waiting for him when he got there.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Seven

CHARGED AS he was to keep watch over the prisoner, Yesugei led them to the shaman while Llesho’s cadre held the nervous Harnish guardsmen to the outskirts of their party. Bolghai’s burrow—a felt tent just one lattice in circumference—was set over a depression dug into a hollow where the river broke against a rocky spit. It proved less difficult to reach than Llesho had thought.

“Wait here,” he instructed his cadre, with the explanation they could see for themselves, “There isn’t room inside for all of us.” He depended on them to keep the khan’s men out as well for reasons having more to do with information they might hear that shouldn’t go past the khan and his shaman.

Kaydu agreed, with one exception, “Where you go, I go.”

Yesugei likewise agreed, and with the same exception for his prisoner, so four entered the tiny burrow—Llesho and Radimus, each with a representative from the party who guarded him. As he passed through the doorway, Yesugei stopped and took up a position at the right. Although he was himself a leader of a clan and not a guardsman, he knew how it was done and set himself ready to defend against attack from within or without. Kaydu fell in behind his lead and took the left, hand resting on sword hilt in an equally threatening posture. The way protected by his high-ranking guardsmen, Llesho brought his prisoner forward.

The burrow was much as Llesho remembered it from their encampment to the north. Felt batting wrapped the small lattice frame like snug blankets with just a hole in the umbrella roof over the firebox for the smoke to escape. Skin rugs padded the earthen floor and the pelts of stoats hung on the walls among the rattles and drums and the fiddle that Bolghai had played to set the pace of his running when Llesho had learned to dream-travel. Bunches of herbs still hung from the ceiling. Llesho never had figured out what they were for, but he remembered the brooms the shaman used for ritual sweeping—and dancing. He tried to pick out the one he’d partnered in the strange dance of discovery that led him to his totem animal, but it didn’t call to him anymore. The narrow chest at the back of the tiny burrow had been covered with tiny skulls the last time he’d visited, but they had already been swept to the floor to accommodate the teacups.

Bolghai wasn’t alone this time. Carina, at the firebox, flashed him a smile as the shaman rose from his nest of heaped furs. The little stoat heads of his ritual garb bobbed as if they were still alive, a matter which sent Little Brother shrieking up a broom to the umbrella-spoked roof. From there the monkey vanished out the smoke hole.

“My pardon.” The shaman bowed an apology to Kaydu. “I don’t bite.” His smile showed a line of sharp teeth. “Not friends, at least.”

“My pardon, good shaman, for my companion’s discourtesy.” Kaydu replied with an equal bow. “He imagined danger from your totem animal, I suspect, and so his good manners fled.”

“Taking their hat and coat as they went,” Bolghai summed up the monkey’s disappearance. “Will your companion be safe on his own?”

“Bixei will take him up, or Lling,” Kaydu assured him, and set herself once more in a posture appropriate to a door guard.

Bolghai accepted the end of the conversation and turned his attention to Llesho, who stood waiting with a hand on the prisoner’s arm.

“Is this a social visit, or are you here to continue your training?” With a nod in her direction, he added, “Carina was just making tea—you will of course join us. And your friend.”

In his own quarters, Bolghai didn’t always speak in the formal riddles of his office. He had a way of phrasing the simplest question, however, that made Llesho certain even an invitation to tea hid a secret meaning when looked at out of the corner of the eye instead of dead-on, so to speak. Whatever the shaman’s purpose, Llesho had come for his own reasons, and he refused to let his suspicions distract him.

“A matter of professional assistance.” He urged Radimus the few paces forward with a dip of his head first to the shaman, his host, and second to Carina, who knelt at the firebox.

She wore, he noticed, her own shaman’s costume hung everywhere with silver charms and purses filled with medicines and the skins of her totem animal, the little hopping jerboa. With the teapot in one hand and a cup in the other, she returned his bow with a smile and a nod.

“Butter and salt?” she asked, looking past Llesho to his prisoner. “Or Shannish-style, with honey? I don’t think we’ve met—I’m Carina, daughter of Mara who would be the eighth mortal god and Golden River Dragon, my father.”

“Take the honey,” Llesho advised, “Bolghai’s tea tastes like stale socks.”

Radimus looked from one to the other of them as if he had fallen in among madmen. He was saved from answering, however, by a commotion at the door. Master Den strode in with two Harnish guardsmen dangling from his sleeves.

“Bright Morning has refused to come,” he explained the absence of the god of mercy, though not the presence of the guards who let him go to untangle their hair from the hanging brooms. “He said to tell you that Mercy has no place at an execution.”

The prisoner flinched at the message. It must have sounded to Radimus like his old teacher wanted to see him put to death. But how could he explain the grim disapproval Llesho heard in the words, or make clear the reminder from a god whose purpose must be served by others here?

Master Den left no room for explanations. “Radimus!” he greeted his old student, only then noticing his presence. “What are you doing here?”

“Having tea,” Carina answered. “He was about to tell me if he wanted honey or butter.”

“Of course he’ll have honey,” Master Den answered for him just as Radimus himself got out, “Yes, please,” with a gesture to show that his hands were chained. He could not easily take the cup.

“Don’t tell meyou’re Mergen’s prisoner?” Master Den asked, though Llesho thought the shock was a bit much. “Isn’t it a small world!”

They had settled themselves comfortably enough, though the size of the small tent offended propriety by setting the high-ranked visitor next to his low-ranked prisoner below the firebox. Now they shifted over once again to make room for Master Den, who lowered himself to the pelt-covered floor with much theatrical grunting that gave no true indication of the god’s ability to fold himself into a Harnish position. With a smile, Carina reached over and placed the cup carefully into Radimus’ chained hands before fixing one for Llesho and another for the trickster god. All with honey in them, he noted with heartfelt gratitude.

“My name is Radimus,” the prisoner offered in polite response to Carina’s interrupted introduction, though Master Den had made that less than necessary. “Gladiator-in-training to Lord Chin-shi, now deceased, traded in payment of debts to Lord Yueh, also now deceased, and come by right of capture to Master Markko, overseer to the properties of Lord Chin-shi, then Lord Yueh. Recently risen in the magician’s service through no wish of my own. Is your father really a dragon?”

“Yes, he is,” Llesho answered for her. “I’ve met him and, aside from swallowing my healer in one bite, he’s quite polite as dragons tend to be.”

“Hmmm,” Bolghai commented. Llesho wasn’t sure whether the comment referred to Radimus’ story or to his own description of the Golden River Dragon. After a pause to appreciate his own steaming cup, however, the shaman added, “Do you see a pattern with this Master Markko, young Radimus?”

“I’d rather be his servant than his lord,” Radimus answered bluntly. It seemed that he would say more, but his eyes grew distant with pain as they had before he convulsed on the khan’s playing field. They approached an area under the spell, then.

Bolghai noted it as well and forgave the question with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Drink your tea. You’re safe here.”

Llesho couldn’t guarantee that, not even from himself, but he said nothing, and Radimus drank. Almost immediately, he began to nod off.

“What did you give him?” Llesho asked Carina, who passed a hand over the prisoner’s brow with a thoughtful frown.

“Just some herbs to help him sleep while we figure out what to do about him—that’s why you brought him here, isn’t it?”

“Yes—” She meant the doing something part, Llesho knew, and would have protested the sleeping part, but Carina hadn’t finished.

“We know Master Markko can see across great distances, using the eyes and minds of his followers, even his captives. He did so with Tsu-tan, and for a little while with Lling.”

Master Den agreed. “It makes sense that Radimus has survived this long because his master wants him exactly where he is—inside Mergen’s camp. Markko can learn nothing from a sleeping mind, however.”

“Whatever our needs for secrecy, Radimus himself needs the rest,” Carina added tartly. “I do not dose my patients for the convenience of their captors.”

If they couldn’t figure out how to break the spell that kept Radimus silent against his will, Mergen-Khan would carry out the terrible execution they had delayed but not completely halted. It might be kinder to sleep through the deliberations that would decide his life or death, but Llesho knew he would want to know every step of that decision if it were him.

“When will he wake up?”

“Not for a while,” Bolghai answered vaguely. “The cup heightens the dream state.”

“Oh, no!” Llesho knew where this was going, and he didn’t plan to do it. Nuh-uh, not in any way. “I thought this was about Radimus needing rest, not Mergen’s need for answers.”

“I offered the prisoner sleep. Dreams are a part of sleep.” Carina didn’t look happy with her own explanation, and Llesho figured she was having as much trouble with it as he was.

“I’m not going in there,” he insisted, meaning Radimus’ dreams.

“Of course you are,” Bolghai assured him. “The Prince of Dreams rules in all worlds dreams take him.”

“That’s your word, old man, not mine. I am not so presumptuous.”

Master Den interrupted with a huge sigh. “He’s telling the truth, you know,” he said over his tea cup. “Our young king resists every effort to convince him of his station. He would deny his wedding night while his head rests in the lap of the Great Goddess, his wife.”

That brought Llesho’s head around with a blush and a frown. Master Den raised his cup and eyebrows both, to claim the hit.

How much did the old trickster know of the dream he’d entered during morning prayer forms? How many of his deaths had the god ChiChu watched him die—how many times had he denied his worth to husband the Goddess, his wife? He was supposed to ask himself those questions, he figured, and if he knew anything about his old teacher, the answers were supposed to lead him to Radimus’ dreams. Once again destiny had cornered him, this time in a round tent where all his excuses failed him.

Did he owe what Mergen demanded of the Prince of Dreams? No question of that. Master Markko was Llesho’s problem, brought down on the Qubal clans when they agreed to help him. Even if Chimbai’s death had come out of his own politics, the present khan had still paid in advance with the life of his anda. And Llesho asked for more, all his troops committed against an enemy who could raise the very ground they walked on as an army against them.

Did he owe Radimus? A memory sparked behind his eyes, of men sorted like cattle in the arena at Farshore. The will of slavemasters had put Radimus in the camp of an enemy that none of them wanted. If the Lady SeinMa hadn’t moved faster to secure his own services, Llesho might have fallen to the magician right there. None of their fates had been Llesho’s fault, but maybe he did owe Radimus something for the breakfast rolls stuffed in his pocket and the four silver coins in his hand, a lord’s payment for services he hadn’t rendered. That didn’t make it any easier. The very thought of entering a mind where Master Markko already lodged filled him with such terror and loathing that he couldn’t bear it calmly and leaped to his feet as if he had somewhere to run.

“We need to move him out by the river.” Bolghai followed as if Llesho had given a signal and motioned Yesugei and Kaydu forward to carry the sleeping man. “Move the rugs there; you will find the carrying poles.”

When they had shifted the rugs away, it turned out that Radimus had fallen over onto an artfully positioned litter. Arranging his feet and legs more comfortably, they lifted him easily.

“Did Mergen plan this all along? That he’d give me the prisoner, and I’d bring him here?” For some reason that he didn’t quite understand, it made Llesho angry to think that the khan had never meant to kill the man, and that he’d anticipated all their moves.

“Mergen-Khan hoped—but didn’t presume—that you would win the goodwill of the prisoner,” Bolghai answered the anger Llesho gave voice to. “He hoped, too, that your own great flaw would not prove fatal.”

“My flaw! What about his? He’s the one manipulating us all!”

“To spare your friend a horrible death,” the shaman reminded him, “and to uncover the reason why magicians wage war on the grasslands. But you don’t ask what your flaw might be.”

“I have so many to choose from,” Llesho snapped.

“But only these will be the death of you: that you overestimate your enemies, and you underestimate your allies. Mergen-Khan is a wise and subtle man more given to thought than action. But when he acts, he has always acted well.”

“I wonder if Chimbai-Khan would say as much, if you could ask him now.”

The veiled accusation fell into a silence deeper than stone. Yesugei, a chieftain among the Qubal clans, said nothing, but his stern presence reminded Llesho that hasty words loosed in the world created their own mischief. Too late to call them back, he took a caution out of the expectant hush.

“A question for the Prince of Dreams,” Bolghai answered when it seemed that no one would speak at all, and Llesho realized that he’d been drawn into another trap. The last lesson the shaman had to teach him, the one that circumstances had kept him from, would see his totem form dream travel in the underworld to seek out the dead.

He shook his head, knowing better than to follow that path. “I would find no welcome there. Let the khan’s own shaman visit him in the underworld.”

“The prisoner,” Carina reminded them, breaking the uncomfortable pause. “The tea lasts only a short time, and by the motion of his eyes I believe that dreams have taken him.”

With that Bolghai wormed his way between his guests and led them, ducking hanging brooms and catching herbs in their hair, out of the door. There they picked up Llesho’s cadre on their short march to the river.

“Put him down,” the shaman said. “These others of your guardsmen may wish to stand apart, where they needn’t witness the mysteries of their king.”

But Kaydu refused to leave him and Hmishi scoffed at any such concerns—“I’ve been dead; not much to worry about after that—” which Bolghai agreed was a point to consider.

Standing with their companions, none of the others would remove themselves from their post at his side, though Little Brother leaped for the smoke hole above Bolghai’s tent-burrow again, watching with quick, wise eyes. “What will they see?” Llesho asked, meaning, would they see him transform into the young roebuck, his totem animal. He didn’t look at his companions, or the shaman, but at Radimus, whose eyes darted after dream images beneath his closed lids.

“They will see what they are ready to see,” Bolghai answered, which said nothing, or everything. He was used to tests and guessed that his companions were as well.

“All right,” he said, and shivered. The sun had fallen below the zenith and a chill wind had set in from the south, Llesho assured himself, nothing more. Figuring the best way to do this, he bent his head, knotted his hands into fists and pumped his elbows forward and back, in the motion of running. Then he walked a tight circle around the litter on which Radimus dreamed, going faster and faster as he set his path in the muscle memory of calves and thighs, running, running, in that tight circle until with a toss of his head antlers nearly unbalanced him. Halfway there, he had gained his totem form. Then, with a kick of his heels, he leaped into the air over the sleeping prisoner, and into his dreams.

 

 

 

No surprise, the dream took him to Master Markko’s yellow silk tent. Radimus stood guard at the entrance while voices drifted from the other side of the yellow silk curtain that divided the tent.

“You made a bad enemy at Ahkenbad,” he heard his own voice say, and in reply, Master Markko’s offhanded answer: “Of corpses and children.”

The magician hadn’t known that he’d wakened the Dun Dragon. Radimus, quaking at his post, knew only that something terrible had happened across an unimaginable distance and prayed to his own strange gods not to be called to the other side of the curtain he guarded. This wasn’t what Mergen wanted to know, however. Llesho stepped gingerly forward in his totem shape.

“Are you real?” Radimus asked.

Llesho nodded and shook his head at the same time, the way a roebuck would with new growth itching at his antlers. “You are having a dream,” he said in his own voice, which echoed him with different words—“I won’t be staying”—“but this did happen once, and I have truly entered your dream on Mergen-Khan’s business.”

Radimus knew what that meant and he winced as his dream changed sickeningly to the present. Chains appeared on his wrists. He no longer stood at attention, but lay on the altar of the Khan’s harsh justice. His eyes grew guarded as he asked, “Are you here to kill me?”

They both knew Master Markko had that skill, to kill in dreams. Llesho shook his head. “I don’t know how, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. We believe your master put a spell on you, to prevent you from speaking when questioned. I’m here to find the spell and remove it, or find the answers locked behind it and report to the khan the intelligence he needs to form his strategy against the magician.”

“If you tamper with the spell, he’ll know,” Radimus confirmed Llesho’s guess with the calm of his dream state. “He’ll find us, and kill me, and seize your mind to take my place as a spy in the Qubal ulus.”

Llesho shifted into human form. “He will try,” he said, accepting that struggle though not its conclusion. “Show me the spell.”

Radimus frowned, puzzled at the command. “I don’t—” he began.

Llesho reached out and touched a fingertip to his forehead, that place where the brows almost meet below the hidden third eye. “Show me,” he repeated.

Suddenly, the tent, and Radimus himself, disappeared. Out of a gray fog a shape grew more solid as Llesho concentrated on it: a knot, intricately tangled, with Radimus’ beating heart at the center of it. It was a trap. If he pushed at the knot, like Mergen had done with his questions, the knot would tighten around the prisoner’s heart and kill him. If he tried to untangle the spell, he might free Radimus, but the threads would weave themselves around his own heart just as quickly, leaving him in the magician’s trap.

“Cut the knot,” he thought, and drew his Thebin knife to do just that. But the spell throbbed with sentient power. If he didn’t sever all the threads in one pass, those that remained would kill Radimus. And maybe, knowing Markko, cutting the threads would only cause them to multiply, not to let go at all.

As he watched, the knot seemed to grow until it drifted almost as large as he was himself and just outside his reach. This was all a trick; he knew that as well as he knew his name. Somewhere inside that snarl of words and symbols, a part of Master Markko was daring him to do something stupid. Llesho had been here before, however. Not this dream, or this spell, but he remembered another time, dangling from a chain in a mist just like this one, with Pig for company. That gave him an idea.

Reaching into the leather pouch he wore at his neck, he pulled out not a pearl, as he carried in the waking world, but a bit of stone left behind when a stone giant plucked the heart from his dead victim. Llesho had gathered only the black pearls of the goddess on that battlefield, but the dream world allowed poetic justice, if not other kinds: once again, stone would stand in for a heart, but this time for his own. With more certainty than he had felt since finding Radimus on the executioner’s platform, he held out his open hand, infusing the stone with the pulse of his own veins. And then, carefully, he began to untangle the threads of Master Markko’s spell.

Words of power wrapped around a talisman tied to a sacrifice risen up in smoke. A living creature, burned alive to seal the spell. He trembled with revulsion as the links of the chain wrapped themselves around the pulsing stone heart he held in his hand. Each strand clung tenaciously where Master Markko had spun them, but Llesho loosened them with the promise of his own blood leaking from his fingertips and spilling onto the stone. At first he’d been afraid the spell would wrap his fingers together with the stone they held. In the dream state they seemed to want only the false heart, however. With his mind he lifted it so the inky strands might cross beneath, each pass wrapping the stone with the magician’s whispered curses.

In shrieking fury the spell fell upon the stone, drawing itself tight and greedy around the false heart and sucking its own death out of the lifeless shard. When he saw that all of the twisted curses had wrapped the stone fragment in his hand and none remained in the gray mist of the dream place, Llesho closed his fingers.

“This man is free now,” he told the thing in his fist, and squeezed until he felt the stone grinding in his hand.

The spell resisted, screaming its promises of torment, but Llesho held on tight while the last dying wail of thwarted terror faded into nothing. He knew the spell was dead when the mist cleared, revealing the Onga River and the trees. Whether this was the river of their Harnish encampment or the dream river on which he’d seen his own death, he couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. Peace had descended, and for a few quiet moments he let himself breath it in like an elixir. It would be so easy to stay here, in the dream world, but Mergen-Khan still planned to kill his prisoner—so far he’d won an easier death but no reprieve. He’d have to go back to do that.

With a last long look around him, Llesho spread his fingers. Only a handful of ash remained where spell and stone heart had lain. He pursed his lips and blew, scattering the harmless dust of the dead spell out over the river.

“Llesho! Llesho!” Bolghai called sharply to him as if he’d messed up a lesson.

“What?” He muttered, suddenly aware that on the waking side of the river a light rain had started.

They were all getting wet, including Radimus, who blinked rapidly at him as if he hadn’t caught up to events going on in his own dreams.

“Llesho?” Radimus asked.

“Not now,” he begged, brushing away explanations with a wave of a hand that wasn’t as controlled as he would have liked. Suddenly, the riverbank tilted. He was still considering the strangeness of that when he felt himself swept off his feet.

“What are you doing?” he asked sharply.

“You fainted,” Master Den supplied an answer from far too close, and Llesho realized he was riding in the trickster’s massive arms. “I’m taking you back to the infirmary. Carina can keep an eye on you while she watches Adar.”

Nearby he heard the voices of his friends: “Is he all right?” from Hmishi; and, “Did the spell catch him?” from Kaydu. Lling called his name, and even Bixei muttered angry oaths in the distance.

“I’m fine,” he insisted, struggling to get down. “The spell is dead.” But Master Den held onto him until their horses came into view and Llesho could be slung into his saddle. “I don’t need the infirmary; I need to be there when Mergen-Khan questions Radimus.”

“You are going to the infirmary, Holy Excellence.” Carina mounted behind him with the superior authority of healers everywhere. “And though of less exalted rank, Radimus needs rest as well. Mergen-Khan will be informed when the prisoner is ready to answer questions.”

Of course. Mergen wouldn’t waste the time to treat Radimus just to kill him; he still needed answers. Carina gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. Radimus would require medical attention for as long as Llesho needed rest.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Eight

“WHAT WORD?” Mergen-Khan asked, a formal request for a report. He sat on the dais amid the rich fur pelts and knotted carpets of the ger-tent. Around him gathered the chieftains and Great Mothers of the clans, the men and women of wisdom, while his guardsmen stood at wary attention with their backs to the lattices. To the side, where Llesho had found them in friendly conspiracy in the past, Bolghai the shaman huddled in quiet council with Bright Morning, the mortal god of mercy. He’d expected Master Den to join them, but the trickster god stayed at his side, a keen light in his eyes, watching for some critical move in the game he played with the lives of kings and khans.

As he led Radimus to the dais, Llesho saw that Mergen had put off his outdoor coat for silks of yellow and blue, embroidered with gold and silver threads suitable to his new office. Bortu, mother of khans, sat at his right shoulder still in her mourning colors, though in fabrics as rich as he had ever seen her wear. Prince Tayyichiut, as elaborately dressed as his uncle and with a silver-beaded hat that turned up on both sides, took the place he had so lately claimed at the side of his father. His eyes still showed the mark of that loss, however, giving him a gravity that suited the heir of this grim khan. He nodded welcome to Llesho, guarded hope lifting a little of the weight of his expression.

With a quick glance around him, Llesho wondered where the Lady Bamboo Snake had gone and if more tragedies awaited the Qubal at her touch. He shook off the feeling with an effort. He had to stay focused or he’d lose everything he fought for right here.

Llesho had expected the formality. Mergen had been interrogating a captured enemy under conditions of internal security right up until the time he’d allowed a foreigner to intercede for the prisoner. Now, he engaged in statecraft with a Thebin king over the fate of a hostage. To show his respect for the khan, Llesho had come to this summoning with his whole force around him as an honor guard. Fifty men and women who had journeyed with him from Ahkenbad spread out along the back of the ger-tent, keeping to their place below the firebox but present in barely suitable numbers to honor their leader’s station.

His personal guard followed him toward the royal dais, adorned with the rankings of the services from which he had borrowed them. As a record of the powerful allies who supported him, the varied uniforms might persuade the khan to join their number. Or they might tempt him to remove a danger with one sweep of a blade. Llesho couldn’t allow that to happen, for more than the sake of his own neck. The chaos and death of Lluka’s visions awaited them all if his quest failed, so he stepped forward with all the confidence he could muster, his brother-princes at his sides. Even Adar had joined them, though Carina had bound his arm tight under his formal court coat to brace the healing bones of his shoulder. Together, the princes bowed to the dais, though Lluka did so with less grace than he might have shown and Adar with more pain. For all the pomp of their entrance, Llesho was a ruler without a domain come to beg a favor of a khan risen to power under a shadow in his own. The khan’s attention fixed more surely on the ragged prisoner who entered at Llesho’s side than on the unlanded king of the Cloud Country himself.

“Your report?” Mergen accepted their bows with barely contained impatience, only repeating his question when Llesho had drawn Radimus forward. “Have you broken the spell that binds this fellow’s tongue?”

“Yes, Lord Khan, I have.” Llesho pointedly observed the formalities of address that Mergen had omitted, drawing an abrupt gesture of apology from the khan. They had made him wait two days for his interrogation, and he had run out of patience on the first of them. But he hadn’t expected that answer. Tayy had, of course, and let his chin drop onto his fist with a little smile of satisfaction.

“This Markko’s magic is not so formidable after all,” he suggested.

“Oh, yes,” Llesho answered with a level gaze. “It is. Ask Otchigin.” Mergen’s most-beloved friend, that was, who had fought the stone monsters Master Markko had raised up out of the grasslands and who had died in battle with a stony fingertip lodged between his ribs where his heart used to beat.

The khan’s temper flared behind his eyes, and was quickly brought under control again. Mergen was no fool. “But you are more so?”

Llesho gave a little shrug. “I’m just a boy. But one does not set all his guards to defend an outhouse.”

Mergen acknowledge the riddle with a wry smile. “And have you tested your success against this lesser challenge, excellent prince?”

Better than no title at all. “No, my Lord Khan. But Radimus has promised to answer your questions to the best of his knowledge, and I have promised to intercede with you for his life.”

“His information is that good, then?”

Shou had taught him to negotiate before the markers went on the table, but Radimus had taught him something of bargains as well, and hinted at the dice in his hand to up the ante. “Yes, Lord Khan, it is.”

“You already have my word, as painless a death as a blade can deliver, in exchange for information about his master.”

Llesho smiled, more confident in the game now that he knew there was something in the pot. “Not for his own sake, but for the friendship I hold for him and our shared past, I would ask that you return him to me alive.”

“And if I offered you one favor,” Mergen suggested, turning the game on its head, “and you could have this old companion of your slavery returned to you, or the aid of the Qubal clans to fight against your enemies, which would you choose?”

Llesho studied the khan for clues. He knew a test when he saw one, was sick of them, but couldn’t risk a life protesting now. Mergen gave away nothing of his own thoughts. A glance to the side showed him Dognut watching back, every twitching muscle bent on his answer. And Llesho knew then what it had to be.

“I would have Radimus.”

“I knew it!” Tayy crowed.

“And that,” Mergen assured his nephew, “Is why the clans do not elect boys of sixteen summers, such as your present self, to the khanate.”

“It was a brave answer,” Tayy objected, and his uncle rolled his eyes.

“He risks the lives of all his followers, and the lives of the people of the Cloud Country, and the very heavenly kingdom that he says lies under siege. And for what? The life of a slave he knew briefly while a slave himself, who in the years since their parting has risen in the service of the mortal enemy who is the cause of all his troubles. Only a boy could find romance in such a tale.”

But Dognut was smiling, the tension gone out of the lines around his eyes. And when he looked to her for some sign that he’d not been as stupid as Mergen claimed, Bortu actually winked at him. He wasn’t sure what he’d just proved with his answer, but the khan made a mockery of his own exasperation with a broad wave of his hand. “Oh, sit down, and bring your guest with you. Let’s hear what he has to say before we do anything hasty.”

Prince Tayy had turned red to the tip of his ears at his uncle’s taunt. Llesho figured it for a not-wrong answer, if not exactly the one Mergen had hoped for, and took a seat where Tayy, with a grin made self-conscious under Mergen’s dubious approval, made room beside him.

With a bow as overdone as the wave, Llesho drew Radimus down with him at the side of the khan. “What would you like to know, Lord Khan?” he asked.

“I’d like to know what in the name of all the ancestors this Master Markko wants with the grasslands.” His tone made it clear Mergen expected no answer. Radimus didn’t have the rank to carry great state secrets, but they might get an observation or two out of him that would make the whole thing less of a waste of time.

He was wrong about that.

“He wants power. Even with the resources of Farshore and Pearl Island he couldn’t defeat the emperor of Shan. When we lost in the capital city he needed to find a base close to the source of his magic where his power might grow stronger. The South remembered him from a long time ago. There are still stories about the thing he set lose there, some demon that wiped out whole clans before it disappeared, off to lay waste to somebody else’s world, they say.”

“You scatter the secrets of your master like pearls at our feet, good Radimus.” Mergen-Khan pierced him with a calculating stare. “I have heard the old stories, of course, but not your magician’s part in them. How do you come by this valuable intelligence when a second of your same rank scarcely knew the name of the magician in whose service he fought.”

“I would not lie to you, Lord Khan,” Radimus swore to answer the khan’s doubts. “I owe the magician no loyalty. He calls up demons and practices his spells and poisons on his slaves and prisoners. You’ve promised me an easy death in exchange for what I know, and that is more than he will give me if Master Markko gets me back.”

“Your master does not seem a trusting enemy. How did you come by your information?”

And then Llesho remembered. “I know,” he said, diverting the intensity of the khan’s focus to himself. “I remember, in a dream-walk, seeing Radimus in the doorway of the magician’s tent.”

“I stood guard,” Radimus confirmed, “And heard his conversations. When he muttered to himself in the throes of his experiments or incantations, I couldn’t shut my ears no matter that I wished never to hear what went on there.

“I do not like magic,” he added forcefully as an explanation.

“You are no friend to your master,” Mergen-Khan repeated, to make sure he had it right, “and yet I am to believe that he trusted you enough to stuff your head full of his secrets and set you over the Southern Harnishmen, and then sent you as a gift to the hands of his enemies?”

“He rules by fear. Master Markko knows I hate him and that I’m terrified of him. He likes it.” Radimus admitted the plain truth. “He doesn’t trust anyone, certainly not me. He binds his guardsmen with spells so we can’t speak or raise a hand against him, then he forgets us, as if we were no more than his tent poles. Even if we could break the spell enough to slip a dagger in his heart, we wouldn’t dare act against him. We’ve seen what he does to his enemies when they fail.”

A quick glance at Llesho, who had experienced Markko’s treatment firsthand, then he finished, “As for why me, I’ve asked myself that question often enough. He’s known me longest, though, and thinks he has my measure.”

“Gladiators,” Mergen snorted, as if he still didn’t believe that story.

Radimus nodded. “Lord Chin-shi’s stable, until he lost us to bad debts and a plague on the pearl beds. Then Lord Yueh’s until Markko murdered him and turned us into soldiers.

“I’ve thought you were dead half a dozen times since then,” he turned to Llesho with a shake of his head. “Markko was certain they’d killed you on the road from Farshore, then up you popped again and defeated him at Golden Dragon River. They almost had you in the battle at Shan Province, but your defenders were braver and your tacticians smarter than he’d expected. Master Den isn’t just a laundryman and hand-to-hand instructor, is he?”

“Not that those things were ever just in themselves, but no. I wouldn’t say he’s more than that, but certainlydifferent than we thought him on Pearl Island.” Llesho couldn’t help the wicked grin.

The trickster god returned it with a mock frown. “More respect,” he demanded in a haughty tone, “or I’ll set the priests on you. Let them debate my good qualities while you squirm under the boredom of their arguments!”

“Boredom sounds good,” Llesho admitted. Aware Mergen was beginning to lose patience, he turned back to the prisoner with a warning, “The tales of my near death experiences may be entertaining in the peace of an evening fire, but I think we can forgo the list for now.”

Radimus gave a little shrug, still with the wary question in his eyes, how had Llesho avoided death or capture so many times when so many others had not. Mergen was likewise adding up his qualities anew, and coming to a better notion of this beggar at his door.

“The night after Llesho made his dream visit to Markko’s tent—” He stole a glance at Llesho, remembering a night when Master Markko had tortured the young prince, who had been hundreds of li away among the tents of the Qubal clans. “—he sent me to retrieve his prisoners from the witch-finder, and to find out where Llesho was hiding. He’d destroyed the Tashek mystics at Ahkenbad and knew Llesho had left the Gansau Wastes, but he didn’t expect him to recruit a new set of defenders so quickly. If he was still alive, I was supposed to capture him, not the other way around.”

The prisoner’s eyes glinted with satisfaction. Llesho had freed him from his master’s spells. “As for what you want, I know all of his secrets. All of them.”

“Truth?” Mergen-Khan asked Llesho.

Radimus gave a ghost of a nod, something he seemed scarcely to know he was doing. Everything Llesho remembered of Radimus urged him to believe, not least that he had seen this with his own dreaming eyes. “Yes,” he said.

“Very well.” Mergen had been sitting in the Harnish style, with one leg tucked under him, the other foot tucked up close so that his knee rested just under his chin. Until this point he’d sat back a bit, straight-spined and cautious, but now he draped his arm over his knee and rested his chin on his arm. Slit-eyed with concentration, he began his interrogation in earnest.

“You say he wants power, and yet he spends what power he has amassed chasing a boy with nothing but a pathetic band of deluded followers at his back. Why is that?”

“The magician follows the Way of the Goddess,” Radimus explained as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, “He wants to be one of the mortal gods so that his living body may enter heaven.”

“That’s not the way it’s done,” Master Den commented softly, and Bright Morning, in his corner, agreed with a dissonant trill on his flute.

“I’ve never met a god, so I wouldn’t know. I’m sure I don’t want to either.” Radimus frowned at Master Den’s bark of laughter. “Who knows what a magical creature can do?”

Mergen, however, did not see the humor. “The prisoner seems to have more sense than all the rest of my guests combined. Even the Qubal people can see that these gods seem only to cajole their subjects into deeper trouble than they had managed on their own.”

He challenged Master Den to deny it, but the trickster god bowed to accept the hit. “In the battles waged between the worlds, sometimes the gods’ own favored warriors suffer. Sometimes, the gods themselves suffer. We are not immune to our own struggles. But the Way of the Goddess does not lead down an evil path.”

“He doesn’t think he’s evil.” It took a great deal of courage to speak up, but Radimus was fighting for his life. “He calls it a shortcut, and blames Llesho for making it necessary. If you’d stayed with him, he thinks, and gathered your brothers under his banner, he wouldn’t have had to hurt you or your brothers or any of the other people he’s killed for getting in his way.”

“And you believe what he says?” Mergen clearly doubted, but Radimus corrected that impression.

“It’s what he tells himself. He’s mad, but he thinks he’s making sense. He talks about defeating the siege of heaven and taking the gates for himself. The Great Goddess will love him then, he thinks, and make him a god out of gratitude for all he’s done for her. But he needs the princes of Thebin to do it, the prophecy says so. He has to have them all.”

“What prophecy?” Llesho asked, while Tayy interrupted with, “If he needs the princes, why is he trying to kill Prince Llesho?”

“He’s not.” Radimus shook his head emphatically. “He wants Llesho to work with him, and he thinks he’s preparing him for some great battle with the demon he set loose a long time ago. He’s not strong enough to defeat it himself, but he thinks the prophecy means Llesho can do it for him.”

Llesho wondered why the khan was letting the two princes he’d already dismissed as boys lead the questioning. Radimus seemed more comfortable answering them, however—maybe because they didn’t plan to kill him at the end of it. Mergen would make use of that greater ease as long as it got him what he wanted. Or, like now, intercede when he needed greater clarity in his answers.

“Yet the young prince keeps escaping death at his hands,” Mergen reminded him.

“It’s the prophecy,” Radimus explained. “Or he thinks it’s a prophecy, though some say it’s a song and others that it’s just a tale. Master Markko doesn’t have the exact wording, just hints and rumors that grow thick around the borders of Thebin. He knows he needs all the princes, but he takes that to mean however many princes are still alive when the battle comes.”

“So, if he can’t persuade the princes to work with him, he plans to kill them.”

Radimus nodded. It didn’t need more answer than that. Adar, however, dismissed this interpretation of the prophecy. “It won’t work,” he said. “The princes of Thebin will never serve an evil power. That isn’t the Way of the Goddess. And even we know that Llesho is the key. If he dies, hope dies.” He challenged even Lluka to deny it.

Their brother dropped his gaze, but not before Llesho saw denial in his eyes.Does the magician speak to you in your visions? he wondered.Does he feed your despair with those images of death I saw in your dreams and promise your own rise to kingship if you follow him? He looked to Adar to confirm what he thought he saw in Lluka’s downcast eyes, but Adar had already looked away.

Mergen, however, had settled a thoughtful stare on Lluka’s bent head. “You pose an interesting problem, Prince Llesho,” he said. “But so far you have shown no evidence that it ismy problem. The eye of the Qubal people must turn east to the Tinglut who sent murder among us.”

“Ask questions in that direction,” Llesho suggested. “There may be more than the Qubal people who have suffered losses through trickery. But the fall of heaven is a concern for us all.”

“When the demon takes the gates of heaven,” Lluka interrupted, his voice forced and rough, “all the worlds above and below will fall into fire and chaos. All worlds, even yours, Mergen-Khan.” Something malevolent glittered hard and dark in the back of his eyes. Something mad. Llesho shuddered, but it had caught Mergen-Khan’s attention, too.

“We need to know more,” he said. “We need to find the lost Thebin princes, and uncover the secret of this prophecy. Then, we will consider how to proceed.”

“Master Markko is looking for the lost princes, too,” Radimus volunteered. “Among the rumors, he believes it true that one of the brothers is still in Kungol, leading a resistance force against the southern invaders. The whispers say that he defends a great jewel of power, but no one knows what kind of jewel it is.”

Llesho didn’t know about any magical jewels and his brothers didn’t speak up either. It might have been a secret even from the oldest of them, who had been full grown when the Harn invaded, but he didn’t think so. They either weren’t letting on, or there wasn’t any jewel. He kept his thoughts to himself while Radimus told them about the other brother.

“The magician says that brother will be easy to find once he enters Kungol, and he figures Llesho will bring the others to him when it’s time. As for the last, there are stories about a blind poet, a slave in the household of a master physician in the West. None of the stories have connected the poet to the lost princes of Thebin, but it sounds like it might be him, and the time seems right. So Master Markko seeks the last brother in the West. He says the battle will be on us soon and the princes must come together to fight it.”

Mergen nodded, accepting the truth, but not the need. “The last time I sent a scouting party on your mission, Prince Llesho, you returned their dead bodies to me. I won’t stop you, but I cannot offer you the lives of more Qubal warriors to spend on an outlander’s. Go, and bring back proof of danger to the grasslands if you find it. Then we’ll talk about your wars and what aid you may expect of us.”

“I understand.” Llesho bowed, accepting the khan’s decision, but with a question still on his mind. “Radimus, Lord Khan?”

All eyes fell upon the captive, who knelt and touched his head to the ground in the way Llesho had seen the Harn do when they begged some mercy of the khan. Radimus, however, waited for judgment, saying nothing.

“And what do you deserve of the khan of the Qubal people, Radimus?”

“I’ve been a slave all my life, Lord Khan,” he answered with the form of address that Llesho had used. “What does a slave deserve of his masters but what they will of him? If killed, however, I would ask to be set out to feed the birds, who will take me on their wings to heaven, if that is possible.”

“Your people have strange burial practices,” Mergen commented.

To which Radimus answered, “At least we wait until a man is dead,” which seemed to amuse the khan.

“Men have died in battle with your master, Commander,” Mergen chose to address his captive in his military rank rather than his more lowly status as a slave, which might have boded well or ill. His second, after all, had spilled his little knowledge and then his blood.

But then Yesugei led two women toward the dais. Ah. Prince Tayy had explained about the Qubal custom. Llesho kept his smile hidden behind tightly clenched lips and was glad he did. Mergen hadn’t expected two, and he didn’t look happy about it.

“I lost my husband to the stone monsters,” one of the women said, and Llesho guessed from her age, and the anger that touched the words with which she demanded this captive slave, that she was Otchigin’s wife. “My tent needs a man to tend the sheep and oversee the herd, and to stand between my children and the night creatures.” Wolves, that meant, creatures howling on the outskirts of any camp, even one as large as the tent city of the Qubal.

“I have no husband,” the other said, with a glare at Otchigin’s wife. “Duty to a brother and a friend took the one who should have been mine. I need a man to tend the sheep and oversee the herd, and to stand betweenmy children and the night creatures.”

Mergen-Khan inhaled sharply, as if he’d been slapped. Then he turned to Yesugei, who watched him somberly. Llesho realized he wasn’t the only one who had to put up with tests.

“Radimus,” he turned to the prisoner. “A man of this ulus died in battle with your master. Will you take his place as a slave in his household, serve his wife as she would be served, protect what is hers, and ease her suffering in all things as she chooses?”

Radimus raised his head from the fur-draped floor of the dais, his eyes full of questions, but he said, “To the best of my ability I will serve the lady and defend her children, though I do not claim any power to ease the suffering of her loss.”

“I think you’ll be surprised,” Mergen suggested dryly. Radimus was younger than the lady’s former husband, and she seemed to be pleased with what she saw before her. Llesho suspected that her relationship with her husband had not been warm for reasons that had settled weariness into her bones but lit an angry fire in the other woman’s eyes. The second woman wasn’t young anymore, but she was still beautiful and carried herself with haughty defiance. Sechule, the khan’s lover, he guessed.

Mergen-Khan confirmed it with a narrow-eyed nod in her direction. “As for you, friend Sechule, be free to enter any tent you wish. There is no claim on you, no blame will follow wherever you find shelter.”

It wasn’t the answer she wanted. Llesho saw the sharp recognition of betrayal twist at her mouth before she dropped her head in submission to the judgment of her khan. Yesugei, however, seemed pleased with the decision.

“Fool,” Llesho thought, with some compassion. Though he had barely seen eighteen summers, he knew the feeling of wanting someone who wanted someone else. Lling had followed her heart. For that matter, so had Carina. Mergen had closed off that path for Sechule, however; perhaps it wasn’t quite the same thing after all. Which, Llesho thought, just made things worse instead of better.

He took a hesitant breath as Otchigin’s widow led Radimus away by the hand. His old friend looked like a man who had plunged his hand into a sack of burning coals and come out again with a star in his fist. The widow’s eyes were clear as glass, but Llesho had a feeling the weight of a political match had gone from her as well. A look of daggers passed between Sechule and the khan. For a heart stuttering moment, Llesho wondered what had become of the plain, kind Lady Chaiujin, and who had introduced the serpent into the ger-tent of the khan.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Nine

WHEN THE public work of justice had been done, Llesho sent his troops away, all but a small cadre of guards as a dignitary would be expected to keep around him for the night watch. With nightfall, darkness had swallowed the vast empty reaches of the felted palace. Only a few scattered lamps on the brightly painted chests behind the dais shed their yellow glow over the circle of heads bent over the maps spread before the khan. At a sound out of the clotted dark, Llesho looked up sharply to see a shadow-figure approach. It took a moment to penetrate the gloom before he put a name to the shadow-figure.

Radimus. After a brief absence to introduce himself to his new mistress and her children, he returned to the ger-tent of the khan with an apology that he could not join the companions of his gladiator days on their quest. He understood his position as a slave of the Qubal clans only too well. Better this than service in the tent of the magician, he assured them all, in case they were thinking about rescuing him. Llesho suspected that Radimus was secretly happy with his fate and made a space for him beside them, accepted his offer instead to tell them everything he had learned about the enemy during his years in the magician’s service. Mergen would head east with all his warriors to confront Tinglut over the death of Chimbai-khan. Llesho warned him of the vision he’d had in his dream travels: the Lady Chaiujin whom Llesho had met at Chimbai-Khan’s side was nothing at all like the lady described within her own lands. If some other hand had kidnapped the lady during her journey and put the emerald serpent in her place, then Mergen brought not only war but grief to Tinglut, who had made a powerful alliance with the emperor of Shan. None of them wanted to see the mark of the magician’s work in the household of the khan, but Radimus warned it sounded very much like one of his schemes. He would set the ulus against each other and challenge the victor for all of the grasslands.

“He won’t respect you,” Llesho had said while the lamps burned low and went out, one by one. “He’ll expect you to attack Tinglut for revenge for the death of Chimbai-Khan or to win over the Qubal clans who chose your brother over you when he was alive. For all that he thinks the rest of humanity are lesser beings, that’s what he would do. It won’t cross his mind that you would question what you have seen.”

“Llesho’s right,” Radimus added. “When Master Markko thinks no one can hear him, he mutters that the Harn are unruly children and mindless weapons. But his own ambitions are no better than the worst of his enemies.”

“That will be his undoing.” Mergen leaned forward like a hawk sizing up its prey. A small, dangerous smile reminded them that the subtlety of his mind rivaled Markko’s own. “I’ll look for answers first and act only when—or if—I have proof of Tinglut’s treachery in my hand.” If there was something to find, he would uncover it and act within the honor Llesho had come to respect in the ulus of the Qubal people. The magician would not so easily drive the sword of suspicion between the clans.

As a token of his pledge to seek answers before war, the khan offered to care for the still healing Adar, who would travel in the hospital wagon for the long trek to the East. Then Shokar determined to stay and watch over their wounded brother. Bright Morning wished to find the emperor he served as musician and spy when not tending to his duties as a god. “For the times cry out for mercy everywhere, but always with the greatest need where the Lady SeinMa walks,” he explained. Knowledge of the future etched sorrowful lines into his face, but he said nothing of what he saw.

Three great forces would come together at Durnhag—the Tinglut, the Qubal, and the empire of Shan. Llesho didn’t need a vision to understand the hazards of Shou’s path. His inner eye flashed on a memory of burning pyres and bitter guilt. If not peace, the god of mercy had offered him a moment of release from the responsibility of so many deaths in the name of his quest. He would have had that comfort with him again, but knew that, having chosen War as his consort, Shou would have the greater need of Mercy.

When Mergen’s route had been charted, the khan rolled the map they’d studied and called to a guardsman hidden in the darkness to bring the maps of the Western Road. From the chest where the bust of Llesho’s ancestor stood, the soldier opened a drawer and drew out several long rolls of parchment. Mergen took them and spread them on the furs that covered the dais, setting small lead weights at each of the corners. The company turned their gaze to the West, where Menar lay hidden from all but rumor in the camps.

“Beyond the grasslands are not one, but three powerful kingdoms. Thebin we know as the Cloud Country, with the Golden City, once a great center of piety and learning, at its heart. Raiders from the South put an end to that. Now a traveler finds only danger and misery in the South. The caravans go elsewhere.”

Llesho flinched at the description of his lost home. Kungol would again regain its place in the world of honor and learning, but first he had to find Menar. For that, he looked to the second place on the map where Mergen tented his fingers.

“Bithynia is the ‘Door to the West,’ the greatest power in the world when it comes to trade, and second only to the former glory of the Cloud Country for its learning. From the little Radimus could tell us, I would guess you will find Menar here. The Bithynians are a people of two faces, it is said: one face looks to the stars and the sea, to the deep mysteries and the arts, while the other looks to the balance book and the armory. They say that the Grand Apadisha builds his roads and bridges and wages wars on his far borders so that his scholars may study in peace, but I have never been there to see for myself. If it is so, your Master Markko may have studied in the workrooms of Bithynia.”

“Bithynia produces as many magicians as it does master builders or healers,” Kaydu agreed. “My father attended the great school at Pontus for a time. He didn’t know Master Markko then, but there are a lot of schools in Bithynia. Then, too, a lot of magicians learn a lesser form of the trade as pages and apprentices to the magicians of the great houses.”

When Llesho first met him, Master Markko was the overseer of Lord Chin-shi’s holdings on Pearl Island. His post brought with it wealth and power, but he’d been a slave like the rest of them. A page in a household with a lesser magician, perhaps, made sense of what Llesho had seen. An inferior education in the magical arts might explain Master Markko’s obsession with arcane learning and the lack of control that had set a powerful demon loose to lay siege to the gates of heaven. Llesho gave a little shudder and cautioned himself against building a past for his enemy out of his own imagination. Only Master Markko knew where his path had led him, and none of it made his actions now less terrible.

The map beneath Mergen’s hand showed a thick scattering of stars that represented towns and cities. “So many places to search,” Llesho whispered, trying to keep the despair out of his voice. It was hard, and he wasn’t sure he’d succeeded. He’d known where he was going when he found Adar and Shokar, and Balar had found Llesho, saving him a search, though at the cost of a great many dead. To find Menar he had only the name of a territory more vast than the grasslands, filled with crowded cities. “Master Markko is already ahead of us. If he knows the land there as well, how will we find Menar first? How will we even know where to begin?”

“Pontus.” Kaydu tapped the star on the map with the point of her dagger. “There is a saying my father sometimes uses: ‘Reputations rise in Pontus and fall in Iznik.’ It’s a warning that a servant who loses the favor of a king will find himself posted to an outlying district. But he says it’s also true in its most literal sense.”

An old saying didn’t give them much to go on, but he would find Menar because he had to. Faith would take him there; his dreams and the mortal gods who dogged his steps would see to it, as they had seen to the finding of his other brothers. He just had to let himself follow the unguided path that made the Way of the Goddess.

“What is the third kingdom?” he asked, wondering how far this new road would take him.

Mergen shrugged, with no good answer to give. “Barbar ians and bankers, or so the reports come back with the caravans. Their lands lie far to the west, beyond the borders of the Grand Apadisha. On any given sunrise, only he can say where those borders are, or where they will be when Great Moon graces the sky. If you want to know more, you will have to ask the Apadisha himself.” Mergen returned Llesho’s horrified stare with a wry smile. “Or the master of his caravans,” he relented. “Pontus is where all caravans end. In the marketplaces of the city the merchants from the West exchange their goods for wares of the East, and then both return the way they came, their goods exchanged at the Silver Door, which is the name given to Pontus.”

Radimus added, “I’ve heard stories of the West, that men live in huts made of sticks and wear the skins of animals untreated and unstitched as their only clothing. It seems an unlikely wardrobe for a kingdom of bankers.” He gave a shrug. “Stories may travel like silk and wool, but they change more in the passage. The magician dismissed them as children’s tales, but there is often a seed of truth in the most outlandish tale. Whoever they may have been in their own country, Bithynia has the say of it now.”

Llesho nodded. It was a forbidding reminder of the vast power that held Menar in slavery. Llesho had met great powers before, however, including Mergen-Khan himself, and he’d come out of it with his life and his heart more or less intact. He’d do it again because he had to. Between the grasslands and the star-scattered realm of the Apadisha, however, lay a field of blue that began a few days march west of the khan’s current position and stretched more than a hundred li in every direction.

“What land is this?” Llesho asked. It seemed by far the most convenient route, though he knew there must be some reason why the caravans had avoided it for the passes above Kungol.

“No land at all, but the Marmer Sea,” Mergen said, sweeping his finger around the southern curve of blue. “Your Master Markko will doubtless take his men around the curve of the shore here.”

Master Markko himself might choose to travel as a bird or in the shape of one of the horrific winged monsters Llesho had seen him transform into before. Though they had to learn the trick of it, magicians inherited that skill with even one drop of the dragon blood in their bloodline. His Harnish followers would have to travel more mundane paths, however.

“Why not by sea?” Llesho slashed a diagonal across the blue with his finger. The sea route from the southern grasslands to Pontus would save some distance.

“No Harnishman would willingly leave solid ground to risk his life on something as soft as water,” Yesugei explained. “Any more than one would cross a fire by leaping from flame to flame. Fire and water can only be tamed so far. At any moment they may rise up against their master with soft power, dragging their victims down to their own level to destroy them.”

None of the young warriors lost at the river in the recent battle had known how to swim, which hadn’t made sense to Llesho. Now it did.

“The Marmer is well known for its storms,” Radimus agreed. “They sweep up suddenly, demon-tossed, and crush a boat like a paper toy in the palm of a giant.”

“Don’t forget the pirates,” Prince Tayy almost managed to hide his grin. “As deadly as the Marmer’s storms, and just as unpredictable.” In the grasslands, pirates were villains of tall tales passed around the stove late at night, and not the dread of seafarers.

“And dragons,” Kaydu added with her own irrepress ible grin.

“Still,” Mergen-Khan objected with a frown meant to subdue his nephew, “most ships get through, or there would be no sea trade at all.” When he received a sufficiently meek bow of the head, he turned to Llesho. “I assume that’s the route you’ll be taking?”

“When the storms blow, do they drive boats back to shore, or hurry them on to Pontus?” To Llesho there seemed no point in taking the shorter route if storms would make the journey longer, but Mergen answered, “They rise in the grasslands and drive their prey onto the shores of Bithynia, though not always so conveniently as to bring them into port.”

Llesho nodded, taking it all in. Danger, of course, but not more than facing the magician in battle, he thought. “How far?”

“Three days’ travel.” Mergen cast him a dubious look. “Two if you’re eighteen.”

The world was turning out to be much bigger than he’d dreamed when the ghost of his father’s dead minister sent him out to find his brothers and save Thebin. He wondered if the Dun Dragon hadn’t been right about biting off more quest than he could chew. If he faltered, however, Kungol would be lost forever. The very gates of heaven would fall under the onslaught of whatever demon held them under siege. So he bowed his head and prayed that Bithynia was as far as he’d have to go.

 

 

 

They talked long into the night and went to their beds exhausted for a short rest. Lluka and Balar would have traveled west to find their lost brother as well. In Llesho’s dreams, however, Lluka was a hand tightening around his throat. Somehow his brother must be dealt with, but the khan had left him no time to discover what drove a blessed husband of the Great Goddess to madness or how to stop the growing torment of his visions. As the light of Great Moon Lun moved across the roof of his red tent, Llesho lay awake with images of a wall of fire out of Lluka’s dreams sweeping over his weary head. Finally, he came to the decision he had known in some part of him that he would have to make.

On the journey they had to attract as little attention as possible. That meant disguises and speed, with only his cadre that the Lady SeinMa had gathered around him at the start of his quest. Their old disguises—as rambunctious cadets out to see the world—should work a lot better this time, since they didn’t have the emperor of Shan along to complicate things.

Balar the musician they might have fit into the scheme, but Lluka had none of Shou’s dubious talent for being other than he was. And Llesho had to accept that he didn’t trust his brother’s dreams not to betray them along the road. He would find a way to draw his cadre away from the camp on their own, therefore, and say no good-byes to alert anyone that they were leaving.

Decision made, he slept until Master Den called the camp Down Below to prayer forms. Eyes met eyes as his companions fell in around him in the beaten circle of dirt at the center of the camp. Even Kaydu joined them, her jaw firm with determination; they had each, he thought, come to the same conclusion. His mind was so fixed on the journey ahead that he rushed through the forms, paying only enough attention to hear the form and re-create it under Master Den’s disapproving glare. But none of his usual disturbing dreams visited him, for which he was grateful. The path ahead was complicated enough without receiving more warnings from heaven. When they finished, he was not surprised to find Hmishi tugging at his sleeve.

“A walk?” Hmishi suggested, drawing him away from the dispersing gathering on the common.

They headed through the trees along a path the river had carved and abandoned ages past as it rose to meet the plain. Horses awaited them where the small dell ended. Llesho went to his own mount, friend of many campaigns across a thousand li and a thousand more of mountain and desert and grassland. He recognized the horses of his companions. Pack animals of Harnish breeding bore their supplies and fodder for the road beyond the grass. Which left one creature Llesho couldn’t account for—a pale old warhorse so large that their own mounts looked like cart ponies next to it. A saddle fitted for a giant covered its back. Llesho tried to imagine how one would climb into that saddle without Dognut’s ladder, but was saved from further straining his imagination when Master Den joined them. Bixei and Stipes followed him out of the woods.

“Kaydu has gone ahead to scout the way,” Bixei greeted them with a quick nod of the head in salute. He gave his own mount a welcoming rub down the length of its long face. “She’ll join us on the road.”

Llesho was glad he didn’t have to face her at the start of this journey. They’d all been through rough campaigns and knew the danger, but still he was afraid of the blame she wouldn’t be able to hide—in his imagination, she never hid it at all. Harlol, the Gansau Wastrel and Kaydu’s love, should be with them, but Llesho had sent him out to die.

“It wasn’t your fault.” Bixei hoisted himself into his saddle and reached for the reins of her riderless mount, looping them loosely over the horn of his saddle. He might have been reading his prince’s mind, but Llesho figured he’d just let too much of what he was feeling show on his face. He’d have to stop that. If Bixei could read him, Master Markko would as well.

“I know.” He didn’t really, but he knew what answer they wanted to hear, and gave it rather than stand for more assurances that made him feel not one bit better.

Bixei and Stipes had been with him at Ahkenbad, however, and they passed a look between them that assured him of no peace on the issue. “You heard the Dinha’s prophecy,” Bixei reminded him. “She knew from the start that we would lose the Wastrels in this quest. She told you then that it wasn’t going to be your fault. You saw what the magician did to the dream readers—to the whole city. It’s not just your war. It hasn’t been since Master Markko attacked Farshore.”

“Shou’s our friend,” Lling added her arguments to Bixei’s. She hadn’t been at Ahkenbad, but she’d traveled with Shou and knew the emperor of Shan as well as any of them. “But do you think he’d have put the empire on the line for us? He fights because he sees Thebin as a warning, and he doesn’t want to find his own people dead or in exile or on a slave block in Bithynia. I didn’t know Harlol, but I’ve heard what happened at Ahkenbad. That’s why he gave his life—to keep the dream readers safe from Markko ever attacking them again.”

“Give in,” Master Den advised him, “The longer we stand here arguing over the dead, the greater the chance we’ll be found out before we have made our escape.”

Hmishi, watching him carefully, saw the question when it rose into his eyes. “Tonkuq and Sawgher both wanted to come, but Kaydu thought they would serve better by keeping their eyes open and reporting to Emperor Shou all they see on the road. The only people who will besurprised that we have gone are the ones who wouldn’t take good-bye for an answer. I think,” he suggested, “we should be gone before they come looking for you.”

It was true. He’d said his farewells to Adar and Shokar the night before, given the khan his pledge of good faith and his gratitude for his hospitality. That left only his brothers Lluka and Balar, whose good intentions hadn’t stopped them from making a complete mess of his plans before. He’d have liked a word with Prince Tayyichiut, but they’d made their formal farewells and the Harnish prince had said it himself—statecraft left no room for the personal in friendships between princes.

“I’m ready.” Llesho mounted up.

“Then let’s be off.” Master Den set his massive foot into the stirrup of the monstrous horse and hoisted himself into the giant saddle.

He should have figured it out for himself, but still the sight of his teacher towering over them on his horse shocked him. “I didn’t know you rode,” he stammered.

With a predatory grin that made Llesho wonder what lay ahead, or followed behind them, Master Den settled into the saddle. “When the army travels at a walk, I walk. When boys take flight, however, Bluebird and I travel together.”

Bluebird. Mountain was more like it. Llesho wasn’t sure what was more surprising, that his master had a horse who came when needed, or that the horse had a name. When the creature winked at him, however, he reordered his thinking. Not Master Den, but the trickster god ChiChu went with them, riding a steed as magical as himself. As they urged the horses carefully across the fording place to the far side of the river, Llesho wondered what other surprises he had waiting.

The answer to his question came flying after them, robes flapping and determination set in a frown of concentration on his face. Two hounds raced beside him, their tongues lolling. Whimpering, they stopped at the river, casting wounded glances at their master, who kept going. Llesho pulled up to confront him, but Prince Tayy refused to slow down. “Hurry up! There’s no time!”

“What are you doing?” Llesho nudged his horse to a gallop and caught up with the fleeing prince.

“Going with you. I thought you’d have more of a head start—” The hounds raised a mournful, accusing howl behind them but didn’t follow.

“You can’t—”

“There’s no time to argue.” Prince Tayy drew his horse in a little, to stay with Llesho, but pressed the pace all the while. “Lluka is searching the camp for you!” He spared a quick glance at Llesho over the neck of his horse then bent into the motion and was off again as if he could indeed fly.

Llesho had a thousand questions—starting with “does your uncle know what you are doing?” He tucked them away for later. If the Harnish prince said they were out of time, he believed it. Crouching low in his saddle, Llesho urged his horse to speed. Then they all went, like a flock of ravens skimming the rolling grasslands.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Ten

THEY LEFT any reasonable cover behind them at the dell where the Onga River flowed. A day out from the Qubal tent city, nothing broke the endless rise and fall of the ground, the swell of a sea of grass turning brown with the advance of autumn. Kaydu found them as Great Sun followed his brother over the horizon. In bird form she landed on her saddle, scratched with the talon marks of many such landings. The beast had trained for this maneuver, one which would have shied a less-accustomed mount. He steadied his gait and, when she transformed into her human shape, he accepted the increased burden with no more than a snort and a toss of his head. Prince Tayyichiut didn’t take it quite as well, Llesho noted, but struggled to blank his face to match the unsurprised welcome that the cadre around him wore.

Kaydu located her weapons in their usual places and settled them about her. After a terrible moment when they all looked at each other and realized no one had Little Brother, Master Den reached into his pouch and produced their captain’s familiar. “He refused to be left behind,” the trickster god insisted, but laughter flavored his indignation. Llesho wondered sometimes if the monkey and the trickster weren’t two of a kind, but he kept the thought to himself.

“There you are!” Kaydu took the creature in front of her on her saddle and dropped a kiss on his furred head. Then she steered them toward a dip in the landscape a little way off their heading, where a natural formation of tumbled stones formed an uncanny circle of jagged white teeth. “There’s no better cover between here and the sea,” she said, “and the wind will grow stronger the closer we come to the shore. We should rest while we can and move again at dawn.”

Llesho followed willingly. He’d ridden too many long days to be surprised at how much a day in the saddle could make him ache. Only the promise of a chance to walk on steady ground and sleep lying down at the end of it had kept him moving at all. Before rest, however, the horses must be tended, weapons seen to, and dinner put together.

“I’m a king,” he thought, “I have more important things to do,” the most pressing of which was curling up in his blankets and closing his eyes. But his companions were watching to see what he would do and Tayy had already begun rubbing down his own mount. Princely status among the Qubal did not, it appeared, free him from the care and feeding of his own horse.

Llesho knew he had to start as they would go on. Their disguises wouldn’t work at all if he acted like a—but no. Shou was an emperor, and never broke his cover story to save himself from work. He was better at picking disguises that kept him out of the cook pot until the food was ready, of course. Llesho suspected that even the emperor had once had to work his way up in the ranks of spies before he took the imperial mask of Shan. “What is proper behavior for a king?” he muttered, and gave himself the answer he thought he’d hear from Shou: “Whatever it takes to keep his country free.”

Imagining the emperor grooming the horses or stirring the pot wasn’t as hard as he thought it would be. Soon he’d unburdened his own horse of its saddle and set it to graze on the coarse and faded grass outside the confines of the circle of white stones.

“What is this place?” he asked when he joined his companions at the cook pot. Lling had taken charge of Hmishi’s horse so that he could start their dinner. He carefully nursed a low fire they would keep going only long enough to warm the wayfare in the pot.

“A holy place of the ancestors,” Tayy said. Finished tending his own horse, he had wandered back with Kaydu, who laughed and shook her head at something he said. The Harnish prince showed no sign of discomfort from the long ride, but settled companionably on the grass next to Llesho with an eager eye to the first bubble in the pepper pot of millet and dried meat.

“There are gates like this, to the underworld, scattered all over the grasslands. The shamans know about them and guide the clans well clear when moving camp.”

“Away?” Kaydu asked. Her father was a magician, after all, with dragon blood in his veins. Kaydu never ran away from knowledge. “Why away?”

“No one but a shaman wants to visit the underworld before his time,” Tayy answered gravely, “or meet one who would come out of a gate such as this.”

“Not all the dead wish ill of the living,” Hmishi objected. It was the first mention he had made of his time in the underworld. “There are souls desperate to return because they have left something vital undone, and souls who were malevolent in life for whom death has come as no improvement. Most don’t realize they are dead at all, I think. I know I didn’t. I thought I had died when Bright Morning brought me back, but death itself seemed no greater a step than between the camps of Up Top and Down Below that we left behind us on the Onga.”

Rumor in the camp had said that Llesho had gone to the underworld to bring back his most trusted warrior, so this was news to the Harnish prince. He made no comment about the powers of a dwarf musician from the court of the emperor of Shan having to raise the dead, however; the fact, accomplished in whatever manner, sat in front of them stirring the dinner pot. Instead he questioned the wisdom of raising the dead at all. “Are you sorry to return to this life when you had already moved on?”

“What does it matter?” Llesho really didn’t want to hear the answer to that. Hmishi had set aside the cares of this life and Llesho had selfishly refused to continue his battle without him. Bright Morning had made the selfish part clear even when he returned Hmishi to the living world. “There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

He wasn’t sure it would matter if he could. But he didn’t want his friends to know that. “Unless you plan to help him down that road with your knife.”

“I don’t think that’s what he meant,” Kaydu interceded on the prince’s behalf. “We are all friends here, after all.”

That had been Llesho’s call. Back the other side of Hmishi’s return and the death of Tayy’s father, he’d made the offer in the rashness of the moment, “There is room in my cadre for a likely warrior,” he’d promised. He’d spent too much time with the Qubal, and he’d forgotten, almost, that the prince was one of them. And Tayy had taken him at his word. For some reason, the fact that the prince was here by his own invitation just made Llesho madder.

Hmishi was reading him like he always had, though. “It doesn’t matter,” he agreed gently. “I’m here now, and I have no great desire to go back. I would soon enough have come to realize that Lling had not come with me, and I could not leave her to fight the coming war without me.”

“I’m glad Bright Morning found you and brought you back,” Prince Tayy conceded, though it was clear he hadn’t known the powers of the dwarf and was handling the conversation not much better than Llesho himself. “But I’d just as soon avoid trouble with the underworld and all its places.”

“Then why are you here?” Llesho asked with a gesture to take in the jagged circle of stone. He hadn’t thought he was challenging Tayy’s right to be with them at all. With the words halfway out of his mouth, though, he realized that he meant that very thing. Why had Tayy left his ulus and the ger-tent palace of his uncle to chase them halfway across the grasslands on an errand with no profit for the Qubal and little likelihood of success for any of them? Why did the Harnish prince enter a forbidden place and sit with them to eat where restless spirits prowled. That was a part of his question, too. Llesho wanted all of it in his answer.

Tayy, begging off with a look that pleaded friendship, received no encouragement from Llesho.

“What’s the matter, Llesho?” Kaydu asked. His cadre was as confused as he was, only they didn’t have the benefit of the argument he’d been waging in his own head.

“No one ‘just likes’ a prince,” Llesho repeated Tayy’s hurtful words from an earlier conversation, “any more than a prince is free to make friends who do not serve the khan. Or in this case, the king of Thebin. So I have to wonder why you are here.”

Tayy paled, his hand frozen halfway to the pot. “I thought . . .” he began and remembered where he’d heard those words before. “I was talking about my father and Mergen-Khan, how life is in the royal ger-tent. Not . . . I thought it was different between us. That you understood.

“You’re right, of course. There is no place next to his brother for my father’s son. Mergen will make his own heirs and there is the matter of the murderous Lady Chaiujin, who seems bent on wiping out my family. I thought I might serve better out of the eye of the coming storm.”

“With one who does not serve the khan?”

“Clearly, I was wrong. I won’t bother you any further. My uncle must be worried sick, wondering where I have gone. It was foolish of me to leave camp with strangers and not even my personal guard around me.” Tayy bowed his head, accepting his mistake, and withdrew into himself as he rose from the circle of friends inside the gate of stone.

All of whom, Llesho discovered, were glaring at him.

“What was that about?” Lling asked, more gently than any of the others might have done. She touched the back of his hand, reminding him that they were confused but still there.

“Something he said once. I thought we were friends, and he set me straight. Princes don’t have friends. So I have to wonder what he’s doing here.

“Somebody has to ask,” he defended himself against their skeptical frowns.

Thick bubbles began to rise and pop in the pot. Master Den put out the fire with a handful and another of dirt, so that only a low glare of coals glinted through to light the night. “It sounds very lonely,” he said into the darkness. “To ride out among friends and discover at the end of the day that they are strangers after all.”

“How much better,” Kaydu recited with a nod to the trickster god, “ ‘to ride out with strangers, and find oneself among friends when darkness falls.’ I miss the dwarf already.”

“Mercy abandoned us for a more promising target,” Llesho reminded them sourly. He really hated being wrong in an argument, and he was having a hard time defending himself against sacred verses of the god of mercy while trying to figure out how he might persuade Lling to act as his ambassador to Prince Tayy. If he put it just that way she would do it, of course, but this was the wrong time to substitute court manners for friendship. As Tayy had been trying to tell him, maybe.

“But,” Master Den began with a wicked grin.

Llesho sighed. They weren’t going to give him any kind of break. “But Mercy is never absent when he travels in our hearts.”

Having won his point, Master Den was willing to end the lesson with a gift of compromise. “The greatest struggle all kings face is how to balance justice with mercy.”

The words jangled like a memory struck by a gong somewhere deep in his belly. “Sometimes Mercyis justice.” He answered out of bone-knowledge rather than a lesson learned. He was the king. It was his mercy, his job to offer it. Jealousy had no place on that scale. With a sharp tilt of the head to acknowledge his duty, he wandered out beyond the stones.

“Tayy!” he called. “I was being stupid, and I’m sorry! Come back!” But Tayy’s horse was no longer with the others and the night felt empty around him. With a last call that startled the horses into their own skittish answer, he returned to the fire.

“He’s gone.” Llesho flung himself on the ground and shook off the brooding sulk that threatened to draw the trickster god’s mocking disapproval. “Took his horse and left for home, from what he said at the fire. I called and called, but he didn’t answer.”

His companions weren’t pleased with him, but not even Kaydu said anything. They were wondering, he suspected, whether the whole king-thing had gone to his head before he even had a throne to sit on. Which was less embarrassing than the truth. He’d wanted Tayy’s friendship for himself. The cadre’s easy acceptance of the prince had made him jealous, and then he’d been hurt by the prince’s words.

A wolf howled in the distance, followed by the nervous cry of a horse just outside the circle of stones. Llesho pulled his coat more tightly around him. It wasn’t safe for Tayy out there alone. Wolves and who knew what else prowled the night. Southern fighters might be on their way east, looking for the lost remnants of Tsu-tan’s force.

“Maybe we should stir up the fire.” With an ill-tempered grumble he gestured with a shoulder at the lightless fire pit. “It will keep the wolves away. And, if he changes his mind, Tayy’ll be able to find us in the dark.”

If Master Markko’s southern raiders were prowling the area, their fire would serve the enemy as a beacon as well, or they’d have kept the fire going in the first place. No one objected, however, when Hmishi threw on more bricks of dried droppings. Kaydu snapped her fingers for sparks. “We should sleep now. If Prince Tayy comes back he can settle his own billet, and if he doesn’t, we’ll have to assume he made his own way home.”

Home wasn’t there anymore—the whole tent city had packed up and moved east, toward Durnhag. That fact went into the saddlebag with all the other issues they weren’t talking about. Later, Llesho thought, when the wolves weren’t nosing the outside of the circle of stones and the spirits of the dead weren’t pressing on the gate of the underworld where they sat. They’d talk later. In the meantime, he said, “I’ll take the first watch.”

Kaydu nodded, allowing him this small penance. Settling Little Brother at her head, she rolled into her blankets and closed her eyes. One by one, the rest of his companions did likewise.

Llesho climbed up on the highest of the stones that made the circle where they rested. He brought his pack with him, cautiously checking the precious objects he carried, gifts of the Lady SeinMa and the pearls of the Great Goddess. With both ears listening for any approach, and an eye for the night held at a distance by their renewed fire, he drew the leather thong from where it hid beneath his collar. The small bag that hung from it had grown fat with the black pearls of the Great Goddess’ necklace. Once again he regretted the loss of his teacher, the counselor Lleck. There hadn’t been time to learn all he needed to know, like how Lleck had stolen the first of the pearls from Pearl Bay Dragon, who he had known as the motherly healer Kwan-ti. Or how the pearls would restore the balance between heaven and earth. Or how many pearls he had to find.

Three he had received as gifts before he ever left the empire of Shan—one from the hand of the lady SeinMa herself and one from Mara, Carina’s mother and an aspirant to be the eighth mortal god. And the one Lleck had given him, stolen from the Pearl Bay Dragon. She’d told Llesho that she meant to give it to him anyway, so that turned out all right. He hadn’t told her at the time, but he had grown to love the dragon who had treated him kindly in her human form and saved his life once in the sea.

Four more pearls had come to him like dreams. One bound in silver, had disguised Pig, the Jinn and chief gardener of heaven, who came to him as a guide in the dream world. Pig had never been entirely clear about the pearl or the silver that bound him. Was it part of the Goddess’ String of Midnights, made use of by a vision? Or was it truly the Jinn, escaped as he said in the shape of the pearls lost to heaven in some great clash at the gates? He still didn’t know, and wore it separately, hung from a silver chain by a ring in its back.

The last pained him most to look at—he had found them like the broken bits of finger the stone giants left behind when they stole the hearts of their murdered victims. In a dream he had gathered them from the breasts of the Gansau Wastrels dead in Llesho’s own service, freeing them to continue on to the underworld. When the dream ended, the Wastrels were still dead, and the pearls remained as a reminder of his loss. He tucked them carefully away close to his heart again, wondering how many more he had to find. How much more suffering would they be a part of, before he could return them to the Goddess? He didn’t know, and couldn’t imagine how he was going to find out.

The short spear of the Lady SeinMa had drawn his blood down through lifetimes he couldn’t count, could only vaguely sense at all. In all those lifetimes the spear had taunted at his back until it had turned and killed him, but in this one he’d had enough and wrested control from it. Like a conquered beast, it waited in silence until he faltered. Llesho would have destroyed it, but his dreams told him the weapon had a part to play in battles still to be fought before the gates of heaven. So he set it aside and pulled out the two jade cups he now carried. The first, a wedding cup from his own past lives that the Lady SienMa had returned to him, had delicate carvings on a rim thin enough that the light of the sun, or even a candle, would shine through it. He checked it for damage before picking up the second, its match in all except the thickness of its rim and a strange spiral rune, like the coils of a snake carved at the bottom of the bowl.

The Lady Chaiujin had given him the cup, filled with the potion that had made him desire her. She had known he carried its match, the marriage cup of his past life: where had she gotten the second, and what significance did it hold? He didn’t want to think about her now, with the wolves howling nearby and the fire burning low at the center of their camp. Putting the cups away in his pack, he sent a nervous glance over his shoulder. No one moved. There could have been no breath at his ear, no shift of a sleeve at his back, but he felt as if someone was watching him intently.

“Spirit, show yourself,” he said, because they rested at a gate to the underworld and could expect visitors from among the dead.

No answer came to him, but a chill as if of distant, mocking laughter made Llesho shiver. The cold of night, he tried to convince himself, but superstitious dread ran little mice feet up his spine. “What do you want?”

He thought he heard a slithering in the grass at the base of the stone he sat on but when he looked, he saw nothing.

Great Moon Lun rose and started across the sky, but Tayy didn’t come back. Llesho shivered in his coats and wrapped a blanket close around him, but he couldn’t keep out the cold breeze that tugged at the edges of his clothes and blazed an icy trail up his sleeves. Even the wolves seemed to have departed for the warmth of their dens, leaving him only the ghosts for company.

“Want company?” As if conjured by the thought of ghosts, Hmishi appeared at his elbow.

“You’re alive,” Llesho answered, sounding foolish to his own ears.

Hmishi nodded, though, as if it were the most sensible greeting in the world, and between them, maybe it was. “Thanks to you,” he said, answering one part of the surprise in Llesho’s voice. He’d been dead, and now he wasn’t. That fact had sparked the argument that sent Tayy off into the dark, but it had just been an excuse then. Alone in the dark, so near the abode of ghosts, it was hard not to wonder if he’d made a mistake.

“What was it like?” Llesho whispered, cutting a glance at his old friend out of the corner of his eye. They’d come close over the supper pot, but no one had quite asked the question until now. He wasn’t sure it was safe to ask it here, where the ghosts could hear him. Too many had died in his short life, and his own past deaths haunted his dreams. With Prince Tayy out there alone with the wolves and the creeping mysteries he might have added to their number this very night.

Hmishi curled up next to him on the rock, huddled close for warmth so that Llesho felt rather than saw his shrug. “Peaceful, I guess. Mostly, I don’t remember it at all. But when I think about it, it feels peaceful. It hurt so much, what Tsu-tan did, what he let his soldiers do to me. I’d been praying for it to be over for days. Lling needed me; I felt guilty wanting to escape before we rescued the princes and saved Kungol, but I’d come to the place where the river ends. I was ready to go.”

Llesho nodded, letting Hmishi know he was listening, understanding, but not getting in the way if he wanted to go on. After a quiet moment, he did.

“I wasn’t sorry to go. I remember thinking that I ought to be—sorry, that is—but it all seemed so far away, as if it didn’t have anything to do with me any more. As if it never had. Then I heard Dognut playing his silver flute. It makes no sense, but I heard words in the notes, telling me to wake up, to come back to the world. The melody was so joyous, but the words were sad, as if the flute knew what it was asking, and regretted the need. I didn’t want to come back at first.

“I was afraid of the pain,” Hmishi looked away when he said it, as if it embarrassed him.

“It was horrible,” Llesho agreed. “I still have nightmares that he brought you back all broken like we found you.”

“I have some of those myself,” Hmishi gave a little twitch of discomfort. “Anyway, I was ready to begin again with a new life, free of all that. Still, I wanted to see Lling, and I’d left so much undone that when he called, I came back. Better to face your burdens in this life than to carry them along into the next one.”

“I’m figuring that out myself,” Llesho agreed with a wry twist of a smile. The dreams had made it clear that he was carrying some major debt from his past life, and he didn’t plan on lugging it along to the next. He just hoped that having Hmishi here beside him hadn’t added more than he could carry to that burden.

“You’d better get some rest.” Hmishi turned to face out beyond the rocky circle, signaling his turn at watch. “If we’re going to find Tayy we’re going to have to start early in the morning.”

“Yeah,” Llesho agreed, speaking of debts he was unwilling to carry forward. “He can’t have gotten far.”

With a last companionable nod, he unfolded his curled legs so that he could stand and wandered back to the dim glow of the fire. Lling, he noticed, waited only for him to settle in the place they’d left for him closest to the coals before she was tiptoeing in the direction of Hmishi at the watch. Good, he thought. No one should be alone with the wide and empty night. And with that thought, he closed his eyes and dreamed that the spiral rune at the bottom of the Lady Chaiujin’s cup uncoiled like a serpent and slithered from the bottom of the bowl. As it reached the rim the leading part became the head of an emerald bamboo snake. The body followed, with scales like green silk, until the rune had left the cup completely and coiled itself against the heat of his body.

“Llesho!” the snake whispered in his ear with Lady Chaiujin’s voice. “I am the goddess of the underworld, and I want you. Accept my kiss and come with me.”

“No!” he said in the dream. “You are no god, and I don’t want you!”

“Yes you do,” she said, and Llesho felt her fingers, her lips, no serpent at all, but the lady herself, in human form.

“You’re a demon,” he accused her, and she laughed at him.

“So are you,” she whispered. “So are you.”

“No!” He woke gasping for breath, with the word still on his lips and the howling of dogs in the distance in his ears, smeared with the feel of her lip rouge where she had kissed him.

“What is it?” Kaydu had leaped to her feet, sword in hand and with Little Brother clinging to her neck. Bixei and Stipes followed not more than a pace behind her, while Hmishi sprang to greater attention on the rocks, and Lling circled their camp, leaping lightly from stone to stone.

“I saw nothing,” Hmishi reported, and Lling added, “Nothing has troubled the horses.”

“It was a dream.” Llesho apologized for waking the company.

“A traveling dream?” Kaydu wanted to know. “What’s going on?”

She meant elsewhere in the dream world, but Llesho shook his head. “Nothing like that. It was just a dream, and a stupid one at that.”

“Oh?”

They weren’t going to leave him alone until they heard the dream and judged it for themselves, so he told it, how the rune at the bottom of his cup had become a snake, and the snake had become the lady, that he’d known her for a demon, and she’d known him for the same. When he had done, Kaydu was watching him with the greedy eyes of a magician. “Have you checked the cup?”

“I don’t need to check it. There was nothing here.”

With one eyebrow raised in an expression of doubt, she reached over and wiped the corner of his mouth. When she held her hand up in front of her, the dull firelight showed a dark stain coloring her thumb.

Llesho swiped the back of his own hand across his lips, wanting to erase every sign that the dream had been true. If she could reach him past their guard, touch him in his sleep and no one see, she must truly be a demon. He wondered, sick with dread, if that meant the rest of it was true as well. Was he a demon, as she said, and no prince of Thebin at all? Perhaps the real prince had died in Pearl Bay at the very beginning of the quest, and he’d been going through the motions of someone else’s life—

“Llesho! Snap out of it, you’re scaring me now!”

Llesho came back to himself with the realization that Kaydu had been talking to him, and that his whole cadre had formed a worried circle around him. “I’m not a demon!” he insisted, though he wasn’t sure he believed it himself.

But Bixei was looking at him like he’d lost his mind, not his soul. Stipes was shaking his head and Hmishi reached out a hand to check his forehead for fever.

“You’re not a demon, Holy Excellence.” Kaydu reminded him with his title of what he should never have forgotten. He was the beloved of the Great Goddess, who had cared for him when Master Markko had awakened the poisons in his body. He had received gifts of his past from the goddess of war and had been granted the gift of a life by the god of mercy. He had traveled with the trickster ChiChu almost from the first moments of his quest. A demon could not have tricked the trickster god himself, nor could such a creature win the love of the Goddess.

“But she was here,” he explained away his confusion. “In my bed, as snake and woman.”

Bixei gave his shoulder a little shake. “You recognized what she was and told the truth. She just wanted to scare you, and hasn’t said a truthful word since the first time we set eyes on her.”

“I know.” And he did. But there was more to it than that. Not a demon, surely. But she’d seen something about him. He wondered if ChiChu could tell him what it was. When he looked around, however, he realized that the trickster’s blankets were empty and Master Den was nowhere to be seen.

“I didn’t see him leave,” Himishi admitted, though that didn’t mean anything where the gods were concerned.

Lling gave a long look to the grasslands rolling in waves beyond their tiny circle. “Perhaps he went to look for Tayy,” she said, and the shuffling that followed told Llesho that they’d all been worrying about the Harnish prince.

“We’ll find out in the morning,” Llesho said. He didn’t, at heart, believe it, however.

With nothing more to be said, they wandered off to their separate blankets. Llesho sat with his legs tucked up and his back against a rock, watching the fire die out in fits of falling embers. He didn’t think he was going to sleep any more that night, not with the Lady Chaiujin haunting his dreams, and suspected the rest of his cadre was pretending to rest as well.

Master Den returned as Little Sun was calling to his brother. He said nothing about where he had been, and Llesho said nothing about his dream. Secrets were deadly. Lluka was proof enough of that. But somehow he couldn’t bring himself to ask, or to reveal his own secrets while the trickster god was hiding something from him. Instead he rubbed his face in his hands to brush away the sleep, wondering if he hadn’t just set their quest on a road he’d regret, while the mountainous mass of his teacher turned his back and went to sleep.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Eleven

THE LADY Chaiujin did not return to him during the night in her form as woman or as emerald bamboo serpent. No dreams came to him at all that he could remember, but Llesho woke with exhaustion dragging at him so that he thought his body must have spent the night wandering while his mind slept. His companions looked no better, except for Master Den. The trickster god rousted them out for prayer forms with a bounce to his step, as if he had not just crept back into camp with barely time to close his eyes before starting the day again.

Llesho followed his lead through the forms, scarcely noting what he did until his teacher called him to attention with a sharp reminder that the earth they honored in their prayers deserved better of him. It did, he realized with a jolt. The sun cast spears of yellow light around small, puffy clouds drifting low in a sky of blue so brilliant it brought tears of wonder to his eyes.

Those clouds would release no drop of rain, would drift no lower to brush their cheeks with mist, until the spring came again. Already the grass around them had turned the color of old Dun Dragon, drawing back to reveal the dusty bones of the earth as the dry season passed its arid hand over the land. Still, the day was beautiful in an unforgiving way.

A jerboa watched him from the shadow of a boulder in the circle of their camp for a moment before hopping away. Llesho thought of Carina mimicking her totem animal’s skipping gait in the shade of Bolghai’s den and the way his brother Adar watched her when she moved around the hospital tent. He thought about Balar playing his lute and Dognut his silver flute, and wished that he’d remembered to sing more when he’d been with them. A harmless black snake slithered by on its own business, and in the distance a herd of wild horses ran like a dark cloud come to earth. They were too far away to see clearly, but his mind’s eye supplied the tails flying out behind them and the manes rising like gleaming halos around their supple necks. Their own mounts whickered to join them.

The wild run pulled at the spirit of Llesho’s totem animal, the roebuck. He felt the change start in him, the weight of antlers on his head. But Master Den called him back to his prayer forms and his companions and the burden of kingship. Menar remained ahead of him and Prince Tayy was out there somewhere, maybe hurt, or lost. There was too much to do before he could indulge the call of freedom. As he finished the Wind through Millet form, returning to the rest position, he felt the wildness settle a little. He might be a roebuck in the grasslands, but his heart belonged to the gardens of the Great Goddess, and to the high sweet call of the priests and priestesses in the Temple of the Moon. If he had to be a king to win back those things he loved, that’s what he would do.

But first, he had to find Tayy and repair the damage he’d done there. No one had friends enough to throw away.

“We’re going for him, aren’t we?” Kaydu lifted Little Brother out of his pack and settled him on her shoulder. She looked more tired than any of them, having taken the last watch. As a bird, she’d spent much of the day before in the air, scouting the way to the sea.

He nodded, and a tension drawn fine as wire seemed to let go of his cadre. Somehow, Tayy had become one of theirs. Of them all, it seemed, only Llesho hadn’t noticed until it was too late. Master Den heaved a deep sigh, but said nothing. Just as well, since he had no intention of listening to any objections.

“We go,” he said, with an eye to the horses playing in the distance. “And we start there.”

They didn’t find him, though their search grew more determined after they circled in on the wild horses. Prince Tayyichiut’s mount was among them, free of its saddle and trailing its reins. Hmishi and Lling tried to catch it to bring with them, but the horse shied away when they drew near and the chief stallion of the herd challenged them with teeth and hooves to defend his new prize. They wouldn’t capture Tayy’s mount without fighting the leader, and Llesho decided he’d rather lose to the animal than cause it any injury. Cutting among the herd he kept the beast distracted long enough for Lling to clear the escaped horse of its bridle and then he drew his companions away again. With a toss of its head, the creature left them, returning to the life it had known before the Qubal had put their saddle on it.

After that they watched the ground for signs of where Tayy had fallen or been thrown. As the shadows grew longer than the rays of the sun, however, the truth became too pressing to ignore. They weren’t going to find him.

“It’s time to stop,” he admitted to Master Den, who rode beside him on his dusty old horse.

“Maybe,” Den agreed, but Stipes interrupted his reply with a cry and a frantic wave of his arm.

“A trail!” he called. “Dismount before you come any closer! Horses have passed this way.” Crouching close to the ground, he added, “Their feet were covered.”

Llesho leaped from the saddle, as they all did. In matters of tracking, however, whoever found the trail took the lead. Therefore he deferred to Stipes, suggesting only, “Two hands or more of horse,” as he tested his own eye against those of his cadre.

“I’d say.” Stipes agreed as Bixei joined them, followed by Hmishi and Lling. “One is carrying a double burden.”

“Tayy’s horse got away,” Lling reminded them. Tayy hadn’t been so lucky. They all figured that.

Stipes reached out and measured with his finger the depth of the print left in the dirt. “Rear hooves,” he said. “Dug in really good.” The horse had carried a dead weight slung over its rump. Tayy was hurt, knocked out in the struggle at least, though Llesho saw no evidence of a fight.

“They found him when he was sleeping,” he said, and thought,alone, without anyone to guard his rest. “But who took him? Not the Southern Harn, they don’t wrap their horses’ hooves like this. And they’d be taking him south, to their own camp, or east, to bargain for ransom. These prints are heading west.”

“Pirates,” Master Den suggested with a tone of certainty that made Llesho wonder again where’d he’d been the night before and what he’d seen or been a part of. “The sea is no more than a day’s ride; they’ll have been scouting for slaves.”

“So we’ll find him.” Llesho gave a shrug more casual than he felt. “We can trade the horses, use part of the money to buy him back and the rest to pay our passage across the sea. If he even needs our help. When he tells the pirates who he is, they’ll ransom him back to his uncle. Tayy said that’s what they do with valuable captives on the grasslands.”

He knew what they did with conquered royals of no particular value but didn’t think a Harnish prince would suffer the same fate. Reluctantly, Kaydu shook her head. “The pirates aren’t from the grasslands. They come from everywhere, but mostly from Bithynia.”

Master Den added his own grim intelligence: “Pirates usually sell young female prisoners as concubines or servants in the marketplace. The old they murder outright, throw them overboard at sea or strangle them on land. Men of an age for hard work they put to the oar.”