“We are here.” She pointed to a bend in the river that Llesho remembered well. He’d met the Chimbai-Khan in this place, and had learned how to travel in waking dreams from Bolghai the shaman. And here he had taken control of the spear that rode watchfully at his back.

“And the Uulgar are here—” She sketched a reach of grasslands that stretched upward to meet the high plateau from which Thebin looked down on its neighbors.

Habiba had already scouted the enemy; he supplied the intelligence of his own expeditions as a giant bird high over the grasslands. “With Master Markko riding at their head, the gathered army of the Uulgar ulus was heading toward the Golden City. Away from our forces who follow at speed. I think he means to lie up behind the city wall and wait out our siege.”

It didn’t change what Llesho needed to do, but it was good to know where he’d be going at least. Home, much changed as the Uulgar clans had made it. Kungol hadn’t had walls when the raiders had carried him away all those years ago. He wasn’t surprised to hear there was a wall now, however, built by the slave labor of his own people. The Harn had learned a lesson from their own attack and wouldn’t be taken as easily themselves.

He remembered the form of the praying woman high atop the city on the tower of the Temple of the Moon, however. His mother was long dead, along with his sister. He didn’t know what other woman might brave the staircase to the bridge of moonlight, but someone had. The sapphire princess, perhaps, that Menar had mentioned from the tales. Not of the royal blood, but Ghrisz’s consort? Except that she had looked too young to be a wife, and he thought that he had heard her calling him in a dream. Not everything was real in the dreamscape, and not everything was now. Perhaps it was his mother, but from a time before the Harn came, when she was younger even than he was now. It comforted him to think that she might be reaching out to him across time.

His brothers had by this time figured out what Llesho intended, and they joined their objections with the magician and her ladyship’s. Shou, however, said nothing until, with a cutting gesture that silenced the gathered advisers, he brought an end to the discussion.

“If all generals fought their wars between themselves, our farms would surely suffer the lack of fertilizer—but our farmers would not complain, I think.” A raised eyebrow accompanied the reminder of land made fertile with graves of the rotting dead and watered by the tears of those left behind.

Llesho gave a bow of thanks that Shou again waved away. “Don’t thank me, young king,” the emperor said, with such weariness in his voice that Llesho wondered if the dream he’d visited earlier was a sign of a continued sickness of the mind. Shou had turned away, however, with a sad shake of his head. “It never works,” he muttered, “But if you care at all, you have to try.”

Which explained much that Llesho had wondered about in Shou’s behavior. It was more than he wanted to know. Not more than her ladyship did know, it seemed, and Habiba’s sigh was more long-suffering than surprised. Adar stopped the emperor’s retreat with a hand on his shoulder, which was rejected with a bleakly warning glance. Only Mergen seemed wholly to understand the path of the two kings. He’d lost a brother to battles fought with magical forces and his nephew now stood with Llesho at the center of the coming storm. His dark and thoughtful glance moved from Shou to the young king.

“Be careful.” He offered not so much a warning as a prayer. “As you learned to be a king, so Prince Tayyichiut learns from you. Think about what lessons you wish to teach.”

“I’m not his only teacher,” Llesho reminded the khan. He meant Mergen himself, but an ironic twitch of a smile from that direction, with a sweeping glance of the tent and all its occupants, reminded him of another teacher. He’d left Prince Tayy behind with Master Den, the trickster god ChiChu.

“Then I don’t dare die,” Llesho promised. There was a lot more he could have said, but not with his brothers and all of their advisers and allies watching, so he turned his attention back to the maps. “Wait for us here.” He pointed to a small outpost on Thebin soil, to the north and east of the Golden City.

Time was running; he felt the pull of it, needing to be away from the argument and debate. Events were moving “I have to go now—”

A disturbance in the dreamscape caught him as he made his good-byes. He let it sweep him away, into the maelstrom of the dream realm. Screams echoed from a distance that had nothing to do with his own life course and he let them go. The cold touch of Master Markko’s interest reached out to him like a chill finger tracing the line of scars across his breast. He would have flown past in the chaos, but he caught onto that dread presence and used it like a line to track its source. When dreams spit him out again, he lay sprawled on his back on the carpeted floor of a familiar yellow silk tent.

Master Markko stood at a table lit by a single glowing lantern. A silver bowl filled with clear water rested before him and he looked up from peering into it with a mockery of welcome in his evil grin. “Welcome home, dear son,” he said, “I wasn’t certain you would accept my invitation—”

That touch, in the dreamscape, he meant. Llesho got his feet under him and shook out his coats, trying to rid himself of the sense of a clinging evil he always felt around the magician.Not your son, he thought, but kept the words to himself. It would gain him nothing to anger Markko before he’d stated his case.

There were several elaborate camp chairs scattered around the tent, richly carved wood that seemed all of a piece but folded on cleverly concealed hinges for traveling. Llesho’s whole body yearned to fall into one, but he dared show no weakness before his enemy. So he stood his ground and made his offer.

“We can stop this,” he said, ignoring the false cheer of the magician along with the trembling in his own legs. “I know about the thing you let loose from the underworld, the demon that sits at the foot of the gates of heaven. We both know what will happen if it somehow breaks through.”

“Ah, the good Lluka’s visions. All the demons of the underworld set loose to prey upon the worlds of heaven and mortals. All the kingdoms destroyed in fire and wind and chaos—”

Master Markko stepped away from the scrying bowl and clapped his hands for a servant. “Tea for my guest,” he commanded when the slave answered the summons. The servant brought cups and a steaming pot and left again at a careless wave of dismissal. Markko filled the cups before answering Llesho’s indirect question with a question of his own.

“But whose dreams are they? Surely they belong to the demon who sits on his mountain brooding over his failure. I wonder why the good prince Lluka credits thecreature’s dreams as reality and my own plans as nothing more than wishes? My power raised that beast; my power can control him.”

“And all you have to do is find him.” The demon had risen from the underworld in the shadow of the gates of heaven, which stood somewhere in the mountains that encircled Kungol. But no mortal man had ever set eyes on them. Not even Llesho, the beloved husband of the Great Goddess, who had passed through the gates in dreams, knew the way in the waking realm. Finding the demon would be question enough without an army of Harn raiders to defeat along the way.

Master Markko shrugged that off as an obstacle of no consequence. “With the right . . . incentives . . . all will become clear.” He offered Llesho a cup with a smug smile. “It’s taken longer than I’d expected to get you all here, but I will have my way.”

“I don’t think so.” Llesho refused the tea. Made a peace offering of his brother’s desperate truth. “Lluka has a gift. He sees the future in all its possibilities. The dreams you invade speak of more than the sick desires of the demon at the gates of heaven. All futures end here.

“Kungol, Shan, the Harnlands, heaven, and the underworld and all the kingdoms of mortal men who never heard of any of us will fall to fire and storm if the demon wins through. The demon and all his creatures will fall in the chaos they bring, but it will be too late for the rest of us then. With no heaven or underworld, no mortal realm for returning, the souls of all the dead will wander the darkness in despair forever.

“That’s the vision that rides Prince Lluka’s sleep and drives him mad when he’s awake. In none of his raving does he make an exception for the souls of magicians, not even yours. But we can stop it. Together.”

Master Markko gave no indication that he’d taken insult from the refusal of the tea from his hand. Setting the cup down gently, he gave Llesho a long and searching look from under a fine line of eyebrows. “You say that Lluka sees all futures truly, and all end in death,” he said. “It stands to reason, from your own argument, that nothing we can do will stop the terrors to come. Why do you feel the need to try, knowing as you must that your efforts are futile?

“And,” he added, a finger raised in warning as Llesho took breath to answer, “if you believe, as I do, that Prince Lluka’s dreams are indeed mutable, and the future can be changed, how can you imagine I would abandon my own ambitions to follow you? Haven’t I already proved, by raising him, that I am more powerful than this demon that stands at the turning point of all creation?”

“More powerful? Or a dupe used by the demon king to invade the mortal realm?” Llesho answered with his own question, and reminded the magician of what they both must know: “I have looked down your road and found nothing but death at the end of it, just as Lluka’s visions predict. A different road offers at least the hope of a different outcome.”

“Ah,” Master Markko chuckled as if they shared a joke between them. “You seem to think I care about living. But you’re wrong. Without winning, what’s the point of any of it?” He saluted Llesho’s health with the small round cup in his hand and drank the tea which, this time, seemed to be a harmless brew.

“If losing means death,” the magician set down his cup, finishing his explanation as he dabbed delicately at his lips with a silk square, “there is some consolation in knowing that I’ll take the rest of you with me. And I could, for example, start with you—”

The silk square disappeared. Master Markko reached out an empty hand and slowly closed his fingers. Llesho watched, unable to move, choking as if the magician’s fist had wrapped around his throat and squeezed. Black light sparkled behind his eyes and he seemed to be drifting, drifting. Vision narrowed to a tunnel down which he saw the magician raise a knife. Behind him, Pig frowned and adjusted the chains that wrapped him everywhere.

The sound of link against link broke Markko’s concentration. The pressure around Llesho’s throat eased for a moment, tightened again.

“Ahem.”

Master Markko whipped around, ready to attack in the direction from which the voice had come. Instead he turned pale as a ghost, or the Lady SienMa, and screamed as if his own throat might be torn out with the sound.

“Let the young king go, please. We still need him,” Pig requested politely, but he reached out with one huge black hoof that blurred into the rough shape of a hand. The Jinn grabbed the magician by his beard and lifted him over his head, slippered feet dangling like a puppet with tangled strings.

Master Markko released Llesho, but even as he hung there in Pig’s grasp, kicking to be let go, he cursed and swore against the gods who denied him the destiny he sought. “Mine!” he cried. “You can’t have him; he’s mine!”

“Never,” Pig answered. Then he gently set the magician down again. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you,” he apologized with a deep bow. “I’ve learned a lot during my exile, not least the damage of a misspoken word. I would change it if I could.”

“And I would roast you on a spit and serve you to my raiders to celebrate the fall of the gates of heaven. Neither of us is likely to get our way this time; but soon—”

The magician seemed very confident in himself, but Llesho read death in the Jinn’s eyes. “No!” he shouted, his own arm raised to stop murder. “If you kill him, the dragon-king’s son buried inside him will also die. What will happen to your gardens when that crime is added to your account?”

With a careless wave, the Jinn shifted them outside of the magician’s reality. They could still see Master Markko, but he couldn’t see them. He whirled around in a fury of summoning while Llesho watched dispassionately only inches from his face. For himself, Pig’s thoughts had all turned inward. Something about that mystical separation cooled the temper as distance in the waking realm might. For that moment out of space, the magician had become less important than the puzzle he presented.

“If we live,” Llesho reminded the Jinn, “if we vanquish the demon king and rescue the gates of heaven, my lady’s gardens will need you.”

“Yes,” Pig answered slowly, hesitant to agree to something that might bind him to a promise he hadn’t planned to make.

“When that time comes, and you stand before my lady the Great Goddess, she will ask you what you did to repair the damage you have done with your mischief in the mortal realm.”

Pig squirmed uncomfortably, knowing already where that was going. “But—”

“I know. There is no way out of the mortal realm except death.” Markko’s death. Llesho sighed, sharing the sorrow for all who would fall in battle before that day came. “But this murder will not balance your scales.”

“Because it’s my fault,” Pig realized. “I brought this on us all.”

It was true. Llesho had no comfort to give him. A tear ran down the Jinn’s round snout, but he accepted the judgment with a solemn lowering of his great black head.

“Do you have anything else you want to tell him?” Pig asked. Master Markko still raged at their disappearance, though they stood no more than an arm’s length from his foaming fury.

Llesho shook his head. “I had to try,” he said.

“I know.” The Jinn patted him on the shoulder, too dispirited even to ask him for a wish. “Now it’s time to do it the other way.”

War. He’d always known there was no way out. But he’d told the truth to her ladyship and to Pig. He’d had to try. Setting his sights on the ships he’d left behind on the Marmer Sea, Llesho took a step . . .

This time it didn’t surprise him when the girl’s voice called him. “Not yet,” he whispered in his passing. “But soon.”

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Thirty-one

STEP . . . ANOTHER, and he was tumbling onto the deck of the galley the Grand Apadisha had given him to be his flagship.

“He’s back!” AlmaZara’s guardswoman peered down at him, calling to his companions. They soon gathered in a worried circle around him: AlmaZara herself, with a Bithynian Daughter of the Sword at her right hand and Lling at her left. Hmishi came next, flanking Lling, with Bixei and Stipes. With a scuffle of running footsteps, Tayy joined them with Master Den looking curiously over the Harnish prince’s shoulder.

That seemed wrong to Llesho. Master Den belonged with him, not with Prince Tayyichiut. A crinkling smile in the corner of the trickster god’s eyes did nothing to reassure him. Llesho stuck out a hand, but no one offered to help him off his back. They waited, instead, for Kaydu to push through to the center.

“Where have you been?” She squatted on her heels to talk to him on a level, pushing him back again when he tried to get up.

“I had to confer with Shou and our allies among the clans.” He didn’t think his conversation with Master Markko would go down well, so he kept that to himself.

“My father said you left the emperor’s tent weeks ago. You’ve been lost in the time stream.” She glared at him with an exasperated frown before giving him a boost to his feet. “We’ve been frantic, but his scrying bowl couldn’t locate you in the dreamscape or any place in the living realm.”

“I was here and there.” Llesho brushed himself off and took a good look around him. The galley stood out a bit from landfall with ten others of their kind resting at anchor in a harbor that, in person, looked more like a half-moon carved out of the mountainous landscape than a dragon’s bite. Llesho recognized it for the sultan’s private landing anyway. There wasn’t room for all the fleet he’d brought from Pontus. Since no one seemed concerned about the missing ships, he figured they must be awaiting word to advance from outside the enclosing arms of the cove.

With no crisis but himself currently in progress, they could all focus on his answers. Llesho wondered if he could come up with something else to distract them, but it didn’t look promising. The situation called for evasive maneuvers. “With Pig’s help, a little more there than here.”

“You know,” Kaydu pointed out, “you are starting to sound more like Master Den every day.” The sniff that accompanied this conclusion made it clear that she didn’t think that was a good thing.

“Sometimes it frightens even me,” Llesho admitted. “Have you been waiting here long?” On the shore a cluster of buildings remarkable for their elegant filigree work and the many slender towers that rose above them reached almost to the water’s edge. He would have liked to stop there for a while, to enjoy the beauty and the calm lapping of a sea he didn’t have to fight with an oar or a spell. Maybe on the other side of battle . . .

“We came to anchor this morning,” Kaydu confirmed what Llesho had already begun to suspect: there was no coincidence in his sudden reappearance. He had wanted the whole thing over with, and Pig warped the time stream to carry him to when he needed to be.

“We didn’t want to land before we’d found you.” Kaydu didn’t mention their worry that he’d arrive back at the ships to find them gone, or the realization crossing her face that he’d arrived just as they would have debarked if he’d been there all along. He wasn’t sure if she was happier to see him or angrier at him for giving them such a scare.

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Master Den warned her with a wry shake of his head. “As a daughter of the witch Habiba, and one who has served her ladyship, the goddess of war, for all of her life, you should know that not all battles are fought with swords and armies.”

The trickster stood a little to the side, with Prince Tayyichiut under his wing. That development troubled Llesho the more he thought about it, and on more than one level. A pang of jealousy struck like a blow to the heart for one thing. It could mean nothing, of course, or it could mean the trickster god had abandoned him for another prince to raise in the tricksy ways of kingship. He didn’t think he was ready to take on Master Markko and the demon without his teacher, but it was starting to look like he’d be doing exactly that.

“Habiba said you were going to try to talk to Master Markko into surrendering without a battle.”

Llesho smarted under his captain’s acid tone, which told him exactly how foolish she thought that idea was. Standing among his usual friends and advisers, the sultan’s daughter AlmaZara watched him squirm uncomfortably under her sharply measuring gaze. She’d been raised among magicians and his explanation didn’t surprise her as he thought it might. He found he was uneasy before that particular audience, however. His cadre had earned a certain degree of familiarity, and his teachers were in a regular habit of praising and criticizing at the same time. As Master Den’s new apprentice king, Prince Tayy received no better treatment than he did and understood well enough the camaraderie of the trail. But the Daughter of the Sword reported to the Grand Apadisha, who looked at war as a sport.

As a king, Llesho had first to regain his kingdom. Afterward, he required the respect—if necessary, the fear—of his neighbors to hold on to what he had reclaimed. He didn’t want the Apadisha measuring himself for clothes to suit a Thebin crown. So he wondered what report the daughter would make to her father, of a king without a home who disappeared at will and reappeared weeks later with no explanation for his absence, other than the vagaries of the time stream—

“And he took you prisoner?” AlmaZara asked, a hand to her spear. “Even in the camp of the magician we should have been able to find you—”

“He didn’t.” Llesho shook his head, trying to slow her down a minute. He was still feeling disconnected from his body and his surroundings, as if he’d returned in a dream and slept on somewhere in the puzzle box of his own crossed realities. “I needed to try one last time to stop the bloodshed before it began.”

Bixei, who had known Master Markko longer than Llesho himself, tsked his disgust at this notion. “I could have told you that wouldn’t work. I’m amazed you managed to escape him after a stunt like that.”

“Pig helped.”

This time Prince Tayy snorted his amazement. “Not like he helped the magician, I hope.”

“No wishes,” Llesho agreed. He settled his shoulders in his sleeveless coat and sharpened up the gaze he fixed on his captain. “Report, if you please. What’s been going on here since I left.”

“There’s been some movement in the mountains,” Kaydu snapped to attention, knowing that Llesho had reached the limit of scolding he would take from his worried friends. It was time to take up his kingship.

“The gates hold, but more demons are leaking through the barrier between the mortal kingdom and the underworld. Habiba doesn’t know how much longer heaven can hold.”

Llesho remembered the sounds from Master Markko’s scrying bowl; it figured the evil magician wasn’t the only witch with his eyes to silvered water.

Bixei peered into Llesho’s face as if he were afraid this wasn’t Llesho at all but some imposter put among them by the magic of their enemies. “We were afraid the demon snatched you out of the dreamscape.”

“Nothing happened to me.” Llesho shook his head, denying the terrors of his friends and followers.

“Sometimes, the time stream slips,” Master Den suggested, and that sounded like what he’d experienced.

“I was anxious to make shore, and overreached my landing by the time between.”

“You mean you managed to skip all the boring, nerveracking parts.” Prince Tayy had kept his peace until now, but he spoke up with a wry fit of jealousy of his own. “No boring days waking up to nothing but water and arguments about where we were going and what we would do when we got there? No nerveracking nights while Kaydu practiced her scrying and nobody could find you anywhere in the kingdoms of the living?”

“More or less,” he admitted, then shifted Tayy’s attention off himself with a report. “Your uncle was well when I saw him, by the way. For the time being, at least, he and the Tinglut-Khan have agreed not to kill each other over the Lady Chaiujin, though there will have to be some accounting for the losses there soon. Not before Master Markko is taken down, however.”

“Sensible of them,” Tayy agreed. “I assume you sent them somewhere to meet us?”

Llesho cast a glance skyward, reminder that their enemies might spy on them from anywhere, in any shape.

“Under cover, then,” Kaydu led them belowdecks, to the only cabin that the galley afforded. Low divans took the place of chairs here, and cushions on the floor, but the table on its short legs held the usual array of maps and charts.

“We’re here,” she pointed to the familiar bite on the map.

Llesho gestured to a point farther inland. “This is where the emperor is bringing his combined army. When we meet, the assault on Kungol will begin. There’s just one problem.”

“Just one?” Bixei asked in mock surprise.

Kaydu made a face at the two of them. “I assume you mean the wall and not Markko or the demon we have to defeat after we’ve routed the Uulgar raiders and captured the magician?”

As he was meant to do, Llesho winced. “One more problem than I already had on my list,” he amended. “But yes. The Uulgar have built a wall around the city.”

Tayy was frowning and shaking his head over the new intelligence. “It seems a strange thing for grasslanders to do,” he pointed out. “We don’t like fences of any kind. Don’t like staying in one place long enough to build a wall as a rule, even if we could endure living inside of one.”

“Their own attack on the city proved the need, however. Habiba says they used the Thebin people as forced labor to construct it.”

“I’ve seen it in my father’s scrying bowl,” Kaydu confirmed Llesho’s report. “But we haven’t been able to see past it, into the city. Habiba thinks Markko has set some magic about it to keep prying eyes out.”

“I don’t think he’s in Kungol yet. Heading that way, but the sounds around us were those of a Harnish camp rather than a city of mud walls. Besides, he met me in his tent. I think, if he’d entered the city he would have installed himself in the Palace of the Sun. So we have that much time, at least. But he has the advantage of us in the shorter distance he still has to travel and in the plain fact that city gates held against us will open at his voice.”

Master Den had listened in silence, but he now spoke up with a gleam in his eyes. “I presume you have made a plan . . . ?”

Llesho met his teacher’s challenge with a level gaze. “At Kaydu’s command, AlmaZara will lead the Apadisha’s army to the meeting place. That will take, how long?”

“A week, maybe ten days,” AlmaZara answered for her army of foot soldiers.

Kaydu gave nodding agreement. “Sounds right, assuming the troops are hardened to such distances.”

“It’s battle season,” AlmaZara answered with a shrug. “We meant to march north to fight the barbarians, but one direction or another matters little to a soldier.”

“That gives me ten days to make my way into the city and find Ghrisz,” Llesho concluded.

You’re going to do what?He saw the thought in the suddenly widened eyes of his cadre, but Kaydu pressed her lips together. When she had regained control of her reactions, she questioned his decision more diplomatically than her first impulse had dictated.

“I assume you aren’t planning to ride up to the gates with your personal bodyguard around you and look for a breach in the Uulgar defenses when you get there.”

“We would hardly arrive before the armies that follow us,” Llesho reasoned. “If I travel through the dreamscape, I’ll have a week or more to find my brother and see how things are before we have to attack. The resistance fighters in the city might have their own secret ways around the wall. If I can find a way to ally with them, we may be able to open the gates from the inside. Working together, we might save the thousands of lives that will be lost trying to batter their way past the Uulgar defenses.”

“You can’t go alone.” Kaydu rubbed her head. “I might . . .” Something about her distress reached Little Brother who rode in his sling at her back. Carefully, he crept onto her shoulder and began grooming her hair in a comforting way. “It isn’t my skill,” she finally said. “I would follow you into the dream world and guard your back while you search for the last of your brothers, but I’m as likely to get lost and cause you more trouble than help.”

“I know,” Llesho bowed his head, not ready to admit he was too tired to do what he had to do, but heartily weary that he had to do it alone.

“If there’s trouble, Habiba can find me. He’s done it before.” Reaching through the dreamscape the magician had brought Llesho home from his first dream-journey to the heavenly gardens. The dream readers of Ahkenbad had helped. They’d also died, but he didn’t think it was a good idea to mention that now.

Finally, Hmishi surprised them all. It was he who spoke up in defense of the plan. “It’s not just a matter of getting anyone at all into Kungol ahead of the armies or finding a way for our armies to pass through the wall the raiders have built, or even contacting Prince Ghrisz once our spy makes it into the city. The prince who leads the resistance will have to trust our envoy enough to listen.

“He won’t believe another magician means him well, or another Harnlander. Lling or I at least look Thebin, but we have country accents and farm manners, both tainted by the ways of the North where we have lived most of our lives. No Thebin would believe we had the ear of a long-lost king. At best Prince Ghrisz would consider us spell-bound hostages, at worst turncoat spies.”

“He’s right, of course.” Master Den gave Hmishi a smile with too many teeth in it that seemed to make Llesho’s bodyguard more nervous than pleased. But it was the truth, and even Kaydu had to accept it.

“When are you going?” she asked Llesho.

“Now,” he answered, with a nod that summed up “goodbye” and “good luck” and half a dozen other things that would have taken the rest of the daylight to say in words.

Dream traveling had become easier with practice. Tired as he was, Llesho had only to set a place in his mind and step . . . step . . .

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Thirty-two

MOST OF the time Llesho traveled through the dreamscape with only his dream-self visible to those he visited. He could talk and walk among those present, eat and drink and even suffer among them, but only as a dream. Before he left the Qubal encampment, however, Bolghai the shaman had taught him how to cross the river Onga with his body as well as the dream-self. He did that now.

Reality wavered, taking form and weight around him. Llesho fell to his hands and knees, his head hanging between his hunched shoulders. Shaken and exhausted from his travels, he gasped for breath in the thin, cold air, gathering his rattled senses about him. He was alone—hadn’t startled any Uulgar guardsmen or frightened a cook out of a year’s growth with his sudden appearance out of nowhere. When his chest had stopped heaving like a leaky bellows, he pulled himself back on his haunches and took stock of where the dreamscape had dropped him. A sharp wind cut through him like a knife; he knew the feel of that wind, knew the landscape spread out around him like a dream. Kungol: still so beautiful washed in the gold of late afternoon sunlight that he wept to look at it. The mountains rose up around the city, six taller than the others with glaciers at their crests that glittered like six crowns of stars. More than a marker in a prophecy, those peaks were a place out of memories he’d almost lost in the years of his absence.

He wondered if he still wandered in dreams. But no, the wind was chilling him to the bone and hard stone bruised his knees. Llesho staggered to his feet, remembering. He’d never been allowed up here as a child, but he knew where he was: the king’s pavilion at the very top of the Palace of the Sun, across from the Temple of the Moon where he’d seen in his dreams the shadow of a woman praying the forms of the Way of the Goddess by moonlight. Far below lay the great square. He remembered a festival to welcome the spring from long ago when he was small, before the Harnish raiders came. Ribbons flying in their own royal version of peasant dress, his parents had led a thousand dancers through the spritely steps to a simple peasant tune. How many of those dancers had died, like his parents, at the hands of the Harn?

Another celebration he’d welcomed with less pleasure, though he’d give his life to take back that childish anger. The priests of the Great Goddess in their brightly colored robes had sung the birth of his sister in this same square. He’d only seen five summers then and had resented the competition for his parents’ attention, his brothers’ affection. The Harn had murdered Ping, had thrown her body on a garbage heap, they said. Still, he remembered the sonorous many-voiced chant of praise that his mother had delivered a daughter for the Goddess.

Llesho himself had stood in that square next to his brothers while the first caravans of the season had passed. He’d wanted to ride a camel then, wanted to go where the caravans went and see the strange places where all the mysterious goods came from. Since leaving Pearl Island, he’d done all that and more; Llesho would have given it all never to have left home.

Tears froze on his cheeks. Turning away from the great square, he looked out on the city that once had thrived in the light of the gates of heaven. Temples to a thousand gods, a thousand different religions once had spread their banners across the city. Merchants and priests and guildsmen and caravanners had mingled on streets washed with the golden glow of sunlight on Kungol’s unique mud plaster. Untended now, those mud buildings crumbled where war hadn’t razed them completely. The banners were gone, the priests dead, the merchants fled. Guildsmen with nowhere else to go had hidden their skills if not their very existence. There weren’t enough Uulgar in the city to fill it with life, just enough to beat back the life that once had flourished here.

In the distance, like a dark shadow, the wall the Uulgar had built—had forced the Thebin guildsmen to build—pressed in on the city like a glowering god, a serpent king strangling the city in the coils of its great body. He wondered how they stood it. Yesugei, a clan chieftain among the Qubal, had once told him that “Harn” was a name the Tashek gave to the clans. It meant the wind blowing on the grass and referred to the way the clans were forever picking up their tents to follow their horses across the grasslands. So how could they stand to live behind that wall?

And how was Llesho going to get his armies over or around or through it? He couldn’t, and knew it. Not from the outside, not without sending his followers to wasteful deaths against the Uulgar defenses and Master Markko’s magic. But if he made contact with Ghrisz and his resistance fighters, maybe they could find a way from the inside. It had seemed a reasonable idea before he had seen that dark and looming monster of a wall closing in the city. Now, he didn’t know. Didn’t know how he was going to find Ghrisz. Couldn’t, for that matter, figure out how he was going to get away from the Palace of the Sun without being seen. The Uulgar might avoid this most exposed of Kungol’s sacred places, but they wouldn’t have abandoned the palace completely. They would surely kill him if they caught him. But they wouldn’t look for him up here.

With his eyes carefully averted from the one sight he desired most, Llesho studied this aerie of Thebin kings for a way down. He stood on a bare stone platform in the shape of the sun. Nine tall pillars circled the outer rim, each too slender to hide a staircase. Between them no screen or parapet defended the king from stepping off the platform, but only death awaited that misstep. Above, a stone roof carved with the symbols of the zodiac rested on the capitals of the pillars. No escape there. One of the flagstones that made up the floor of the pavilion might conceal a secret catch that would reveal a hidden staircase, but the surface seemed unbroken by any seam or depression that might hide such a device.

Grit spun in little windswept eddies around his feet but gave him no answers. There had to be a way down—a flash of light at the corner of his eye brought him spinning to confront it. Not a glint on a drawn sword or the head of a spear as he had feared, but little moons Han and Chen rising—Great Moon Lun would follow soon. Some things were immutable in this universe. Unchanging, like the Goddess herself.

If he believed in the lady who waited for him among her bees and her gardens, and if he believed in her way, then he must believe that he had come to the place where he was meant to be. And, if he put his faith in the Way of the Goddess, it would take him to where he was supposed to go. Slowly he moved into the first of the evening prayer forms, “Setting Sun.” In the circle of his arms he held the world and thought of warmth fading in a blaze of crimson flame on the horizon. Day gave way to night, the prayer reminded him, as summer gave way to winter and clarity to confusion.

When the circle opened, releasing all he held too close, Llesho said good-bye to fear and desire, to pride and friendship, to revenge and anger. The day ended, the sun would disappear. Holding on wouldn’t make it stay or bring it back any faster. So the form taught. And finally, at the top of the world, he learned its meaning.

Kungol was no place of butterflies or bending trees, but Llesho shifted into the form of “Twining Branches,” twisting in on itself like the plots of conspirators. Like the gnarled fingers of an old healer, or the stunted trees that dotted those few places on the deserts he had crossed where water sometimes coursed beneath the surface. Strength flowed not only in the straight and smooth and young, but in the stubborn refusal to surrender to the seasons and harsh weather. He found beauty in survival and moved on to the next lesson.

So many forms he had learned to honor the wind: over water, over grass. None of them spoke to the unyielding heart of Kungol. Llesho thought and let go of thought, listened with his heart which whispered to him in a form all his own, “Wind over Stone.” The mountains that rose around him, the platform that he stood on. Stone. Less yielding than those forms he had known, he made this new prayer the meeting of two equal powers. Softly insistent power, unbendingly immovable power, danced together, wearing each other through the ages to a gentler peace. He felt the touch of the Goddess in the wind at his face and knew he was the stone, enduring.

As the form came to a close he continued without stopping into the Goddess Moon form, honoring the Goddess in Great Moon Lun. At the height of the form, Great Moon Lun peeked out from between two mountains where they crossed low on the horizon at his back, slanting moonlight across the Temple of the Moon on the far side of the public square. Awestruck, Llesho brought the prayer to an end with his face lifted to the wondrous sight. The Temple glowed like molten silver; Great Moon’s light, flowing with that cold heat, pierced him like a silver arrow through the heart.

“Oh, Goddess,” he whispered: a prayer, a wish.

“She’s not here.”

“I think you’re wrong about that,” Llesho told the man who stepped out of the shadows cast by a pillar brandishing the sword in his hand. Uulgar by the look of him, and older than Llesho by a decade, though he wore no bits of human hair sewn to his shirt. He hadn’t been there a moment earlier, but he looked too shocked by Llesho’s presence to have dream traveled to that place. They studied each other for a moment, the guardsman the first to break that gaze with a confused sweep of the platform.

Llesho asked the first question. “Where did you come from?”

The guardsman’s eyes darted to an opening in the floor that had looked like unbroken stone when Llesho had examined his aerie earlier.

“It only opens from the inside,” the Uulgar clansman said. “And the only way to reach it is past my post. So how did you get up here without my seeing you?”

“I came here in a dream,” Llesho said. He drew the short spear from its sheath at his back and let the unearthly light flicker along its length. “Ask your shaman.”

The Uulgar guardsman’s eyes opened wide so that the whites showed all around but he didn’t back down. “I’ve seen few wonders in my life, and fought with none. I’d like to keep my record unblemished in that regard. If you will come quietly to my master . . .”

“The magician?” Llesho asked.

The man paled, answer enough. Llesho slid his sword from its scabbard so that he had a weapon in each hand: one to counter the guardsman, the other to press the attack.

Llesho had fought in tight spaces before, but then he’d been hemmed in by enemies battling all around him. He knew how to clear room to move with great sweeping swings of his sword while jabbing away at anyone who came inside the reach of his blade. This was the opposite of his experience in the battlefield, however. He had all the empty space he could want, as long as his opponent stayed in the center of the king’s pavilion. If they strayed to the edge, however, they’d be over it and dead an instant later when they hit the ground.

If his goal had been to slay his opponent, it would have been easy enough to press him to that edge. He didn’t want to kill the Harnishman for performing his simple duty, though. It was clear that the Harnishman didn’t want to kill him either, if for different reasons. Master Markko would want to see anyone found on the king’s pavilion with no explanation how he got there. Llesho figured a guardsman who lost that prize would soon follow his hapless victim over the edge.

The guardsman brought up his sword and Llesho engaged with a clang of steel against steel before backing off. Circling warily, he took the measure of the stone platform as well as of his opponent. This far, no farther, he counted his paces. Pressed the advantage, then retreated in a flurry of sword and spear.

If they’d been fighting by arena rules, the fight would have been simple enough, except for that straight drop, of course. He’d learned from his first days in Lord Chin-shi’s compound how to put down an opponent without doing too much damage. But the guardsman didn’t know those rules.

Attack, parry, retreat.

They circled each other cautiously. The guardsman had greater strength as befit his years, but his stance and the nervous glances he cast about him said the man had little experience at hand-to-hand combat. The Harnish had war games, of course, but in their own land they trained mostly on horseback. Standing guard on an abandoned building in a subject city gave little opportunity to sharpen skills at closer combat. Even so, the guardsman must have come in from the grasslands of his clans quite recently; he fought awkwardly on his feet, with little sense of swordwork in a confined space. The man’s skills couldn’t be counted on to keep either of them alive.

Llesho was faster and better trained for a sustained single combat. He darted inside the man’s reach, jabbed with the short spear, drew blood from a scratch that by design did nothing more than trace a line of blood along his opponent’s rib cage. Out of reach again perilously close to the drop, then away, he circled back to the center. The guardsman pressed the attack, scored. Llesho felt a wet trickle run down his sword arm. The muscles still worked, so he ignored it.

As sometimes happened in battle, his own blood rushing in his ears blocked out other sounds. He found the stillness at the core of his own technique, where his dead weap onsmaster Master Jaks still called out the moves from the governor’s compound in Farshore Province.

Slash, parry, retreat—

He paced himself to the pounding of his heart, let that pulse measure his steps from the edge. He didn’t have to think; an unconscious alarm seemed to alert him each time he strayed too close to disaster.

So he spiraled the battle inward on that high stone disk as he wove a tapestry of blows through which even his own spear could not slide. Back and back he pressed the Harnish guard until, wide-eyed with terror and gasping for breath, the man teetered on the brink. Llesho didn’t want him dead, so he took a step back, let the man do his own circling away from a deadly fall.

Victory came with a simple trick. Llesho pressed him, the guardsman parried. Llesho counter-parried, sliding his blade under his opponent’s and circling it up, away, more quickly than the dazed Harnishman could follow. Momentum carried the weapon out of the guard’s hand, arcing off into space. Dismayed, he watched as his sword spun far out beyond the edge of the king’s pavilion and fell, fell, until it clanged into the square below.

“Give.” Llesho pressed the point of his spear to the man’s breast. The man fell to his knees, the sword following him down, but he hadn’t surrendered yet.

“There is only one way . . . down from this tower.” The hoarse voice rasped painfully as the guardsman wheezed for breath. Blood ran from his nose and he spat a bloody gob of it at his feet. Llesho wondered if he had wounded the man more seriously than he’d intended. He half expected to see bubbling red froth at the corners of the Harnishman’s mouth, but it didn’t come. The man wiped his nose on the back of his hand, unsurprised at the red streak the action left in its wake.

Not his wound, then. The cold thin air on Kungol’s high plateau punished those not born to her heights. Llesho waited while the man struggled to catch his breath. “There are many more . . . of my kind . . . between here and freedom. If you kill me, you will die.”

“And if I let you take me to your master, I’ll die anyway.”

He saw the truth of that in the Harnishman’s eyes. It wasn’t the only truth between them on that windswept platform, however. He couldn’t kill this man for doing his duty. Perhaps, if he’d worn on his chest the badges of Uulgar brutality, hanks of hair torn from the living scalps of his victims, Llesho might have been able to do it. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that his decision had nothing to do with the man on his knees in front of him.

Battle had brought him no reward but to return in blood and pain to try again, over and over and over through ages so lost in time that he could scarce imagine them. For Llesho, the Way of the Goddess could no longer lead through fields of the dead. Finally he understood that.

He wasn’t out of it completely—didn’t see any way around killing the thing that held the gates of heaven hostage. For the rest, others could carry the sword from now on. It was time for him to step away from that life. So he threw his sword down between them.

“Go,” he said, and looked up to the mountains where the Goddess waited for him. It felt like justice, to free this man who had done nothing but his duty. The guardsman could kill him where he stood, but Llesho didn’t think he’d do it. Why would the Way bring him to this point, this understanding, just to die? If he believed, and he did, then there must be another way out of this. A just way.

A low moan of terror escaped the guardsman’s throat. Llesho turned slowly, in no great hurry to see what horror crept up on them now. Not a horror, though; he saw a miracle.

Great Moon Lun had climbed higher, as if scaling the star-crowned mountains of Thebin. Her glorious light pierced the eye of the needle that was the tower of the Temple of the Moon. Between the earthly Palace of the Sun and the temple, symbol of the Great Goddess in her heaven, a bridge of molten silver had suddenly appeared out of moonlight. Forgetting the Harnishman, Llesho took a step, another. At first he seemed to have no control over his feet. Then he was running with all his will toward that unearthly light.

His foot felt air, nothing, but he didn’t fall. He ran, not out of fear or to escape the Uulgar guardsmen who awaited them inside the Palace of the Sun but joyously. In his heart he knew that all he might desire at road’s end awaited him on the other side. He had only to cross that mystical silver bridge.

The light held him, held him, until his foot found stone again high above the city on the far side of the square. He had reached the Temple of the Moon. He stepped onto the pavilion that returned the palace’s gaze across the square.

All around the aerie atop the temple ran an elaborately carved parapet, protection on this side of the square against an accidental fall. Two breaks in the figured stone aligned with each other to allow the light of the rising Great Moon to cross the high platform, forming the eye of the needle through which Lun gazed upon the palace. Llesho remembered being here by daylight, remembered the balustrade guarding an open staircase that spiraled down into the center of the temple. Stone benches set at propitious angles allowed for comfortable viewing of the palace and the mountains in daylight. By moonglow they looked more ethereal than his memory supplied, with shadows more substantial than the stone itself.

Llesho took a step away from the edge but turned at the sound that echoed across the square in the darkness: boots running on stone, then a bloodcurdling scream. The Uulgar guardsman had followed Llesho out onto the bridge of light. He had taken no more than a single step, however, when he realized the gossamer structure wasn’t going to hold him.

Overhead, Great Moon Lun moved higher in the sky. Her light crossed out of the eye of the needle, rising along the mountainside. The bridge of light disintegrated. Too far from the platform to save himself, the guardsman tumbled, screaming, to his death in the square below.

“Oh, Goddess.”

Llesho closed his eyes, as if by shutting out the sight he might erase the memory of the man falling in terror. It didn’t work, as he knew it wouldn’t.

“Why couldn’t you let it go?” he whispered to the dead man broken on the paving stones below. He knew the answer, of course. Duty. Knew, maybe, why the guardsman had to die. If he’d told his captain, and word had reached the magician, every raider and Uulgar clansman in the city would have been looking for him. He’d never find his brother.

The dead man made him question all his new assumptions about himself, about the reasons he had come back to relive a life of battle and death again and again. But he couldn’t figure what else he was supposed to learn from it. All he knew for sure was that the death of this man he’d never met before cut him to the heart in ways that he had never felt a loss.

With Master Jaks, and when Hmishi had died, it seemed as though a fate larger than himself had stolen something from him. He needed them, and what he needed was taken from him. In Hmishi’s case, the god of mercy had even seen his need and brought him back—for Llesho, not for Hmishi or for Lling. He hadn’t, when he thought about it, given any concern for how Master Jaks or Hmishi might have felt about it in themselves, as the course of their own lives and not an extension of his.

Master Jaks had chastised him for trying to bring him back and had taken his own path into death in spite of Llesho’s efforts. He hadn’t given Hmishi a choice. Even now he couldn’t say he was sorry for that, but he knew the pain he felt for the Uulgar guardsman was for the man and not for himself. He was sorry to have had any part in the Harnishman’s fall.

Master Den would have given a smack to the back of Llesho’s head for taking credit for it, of course. The Uulgar had his own path to follow; the thread of this mortal life ended here atop the Palace of the Sun. It reallywasn’t all about him, Llesho reminded himself. What a thought! Sometimes, it wasn’t even about Justice. Which felt, when he said it that way even to himself, like the spirits were laughing at him.

While Llesho pondered their relative places in the cosmos, the guardsman’s companions came running, calling to each other in dismay and amazement to find him dead on the ground. Llesho pulled away from the edge. He felt bad, but not bad enough to want to follow the man or let Markko’s raiders catch him.

Great Moon Lun had climbed higher, leaving the temple once again in shadows that hid him from his enemy below. Llesho curled himself deeper into the darkness, crouched against the doorway to the staircase that led down through the center of the temple. In the silence, he heard dry and ancient voices calling him down that long spiral passage. He tried to ignore them, concentrating on not being seen as Uulgar guardsmen poured through that narrow door onto the roof of the king’s pavilion across the square.

Quickly, they fanned out in a circle lit by the red glow of their lanterns, looking for evidence to tell them what had happened. Someone found the sword he had dropped there, and they poked their feeble lamps into every shadow. When they found nothing else, they drew back again, returning through the hidden door into the tower.

Soon all the light atop the Palace of the Sun came from that one small square as the Harnishmen descended the tower stair. Then the light disappeared completely as the last guardsman drew the cover back into place. They’d station an extra man below it, Llesho figured. But doubtless their captain concluded that whoever had pushed the man off the pavilion had escaped in the commotion. Like the dead man, however, the guardsman might well poke his head out again to survey the territory he was meant to defend. He’d have his eyes mostly on the tower he guarded, but he might look across the square as well. Llesho decided to wait a bit longer to find his way down.

The low stone wall gave the aerie atop the Temple of the Moon some protection from the wind or a fall, but still it was bitter cold up there. As he huddled in the windswept night, Llesho gazed up into the mountains. The gates of heaven lay hidden somewhere in those heights and he followed the path of Great Moon in her flight, wondering if Lun knew the way. As he gazed upward into the silvered mountains crowned with stars, something flared so brilliantly that he had to close his eyes against it. An answer to his question? He wondered, prying his lids open again. The cacophony of whispers from the tower fell silent, then rose again in wordless song as though the tower itself had become a reed flute.

The brilliant flash of light passed, taking the singing of the tower with it. In its place appeared a sight that drew his soul like filings to a lodestone. An arc of brilliant white light, like the waning sliver of Great Moon brought down to earth, reached out from the mountains to touch down on the opening in the low stone wall that faced its mate across the queen’s aerie. It made sense now, or part of it did. He’d thought the Temple of the Moon had been named for the sheen of light that set it to cold fire in the light of Great Moon Lun. But this, as if Lun herself reached a hand to the temple, he had been too young to see and had never guessed: a bridge to heaven.

It seemed to be all about bridges: the palace to the temple, the temple to the moon, the mortal realm to the heavenly. He wondered: could the gates of heaven lie at the end of that cold white bridge of light? Llesho rose from his hiding place and walked toward the edge that looked away from the square, into the mountains. Toward that bright arc of light. He’d risked one insubstantial crossing that night and survived. And now the Way stood open with a step of stone reaching out beyond the rest, a pediment on which to anchor a bridge that bore no weight. So, this great light shone not for him alone. He’d discovered one of the great mysteries of the temple and wondered if his father had known, or if this was a secret way the Goddess used.

Standing between the stanchions that marked the boundary between the stone of the temple and the insubstantial light of the white bridge, Llesho hesitated. Was he ready? Was it time? Did he have a choice?

He reached a foot for moonbeams.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Thirty-three

THE BRIDGE vanished.

“Ugh!” Llesho gasped and threw himself backward. The mysteries that surrounded him high atop the Temple of the Moon had not so dazed him that he would have followed the Uulgar guardsman to his death on the stones below. The bridge might have held him if he’d crossed before Great Moon Lun left the gates of heaven. Or maybe not. He did know that when he brought his whole being through the dreamscape and into the city he became as vulnerable to mishap as any other mortal Dream travel took a bit of planning, something even an adept might find difficult to do while falling from a tower. So he raised himself on his elbows only far enough to scoot farther back, away from the edge.

When he’d gained some distance from disaster, he pulled himself to his feet. He had to get away while the guardsmen were busy searching the palace. The mystical path to the mountains would have served that one purpose, but it wouldn’t have put him any closer to his brother, so it hadn’t been the best option anyway.

The staircase at the center of the tower would have been the most obvious way down, except that it was also the most obvious way up for the Uulgar guardsmen. Which left dream-walking. That wouldn’t get him any closer to his brother—he’d been looking for Ghrisz when the dreamscape brought him here—but it would get him down off the tower, hopefully without being seen. He could look for his brother on the ground, something he couldn’t do on top of the Temple of the Moon.

Slowly, Llesho dragged himself to his feet. His legs still felt like water from the night’s exertions against the guardsman and, if he were telling himself the truth, from his sudden terror when the bridge of moonlight had disappeared from under him. It was more than the physical exhaustion that slowed the pace of his running circle, however. The memory of voices beckoned him to the inner tower with soft whispers. His mother had lived here when he was small, with her priests and acolytes. Worshipers and diplomats had passed through the great audience hall below, and on special occasions the queen, his mother, had stood on this platform high above the city to greet her husband who waited on the other side, at the Palace of the Sun.

His mother and his grandmother, aunts and uncles who served the Moon, had trod those steps through all the ages that Kungol had stood among these sacred mountains. Their ghosts called to him out of all his lives, both past and present. He hadn’t had the time with Bolghai to take the last test of his dream-walking skills, to visit the underworld in dream. This wasn’t quite the same thing, of course, but he thought it just might do. And he did have to get to the street below somehow. Holding onto the balustrade to steady his way, Llesho moved into the shelter of the tower.

He’d thought the way must be dark as a moonless night inside the temple, or that guardsmen must stand in wait at every turn. But at his first step, a soft glow, like moonlight on white pearls, pulsed from the walls. It brightened ahead of him with each turning of the spiral staircase while above the way grew dark again as he passed. Llesho listened past the darkness for a sound that would mean discovery but heard no guardsmen on patrol.

He should have realized that no Uulgar would enter the temple to find the dead man’s assailant: spirits whispered in the dark, growing more pronounced as he descended the staircase. Moving away as the light came nearer, the gentle sigh of their voices never faded wholly out of reach, never came close enough for Llesho to make out exactly what they said. As he descended from one level to the next the sounds faded away, replaced by new voices. Ancient laughter reached for him out of the distance of time. He heard song in a language he knew as Thebin but couldn’t understand. The words had changed, the accent, though he recognized the sound and tone of it as the high-court tongue.

Down another level and weeping greeted him, the high keening wail of mourning and, beyond the ritual of grief, the inconsolable sounds of pain. Some long-ago queen had suffered a great and terrible loss here. He remembered his own dear Goddess, weeping for him in visions of lives past counting and blood upon his own breast. The thought that he might be listening to the weeping for his own dead self in those other lives sent a superstitious shiver from his heels to the top of his head.

Not again. He had tamed the spear he carried and had further determined not to draw it again, regardless of the peril in which he found himself. The spear itself would always be the greater threat.

“Not again,” he whispered to the voices echoing out of time against the glowing stones of the Temple of the Moon, and around again. Another turning of the spiral, another age. The temple was wider at its base by far than at its top, and each circling on the spiral of the stairs grew longer. Distant sounds of battle came to him, the cold, sure voice of a queen of Thebin defending her temple.

Another round, more whispers. His face brightened to the color of old burgundy. Love cries, and murmured caresses. He didn’t want to think about what other things went on when the king of Thebin visited his Goddess-wife in her temple. Too-human sounds, the slide of flesh on flesh, a grunt, a sigh. He closed his ears to it and went on, wished it back again at the next turning.

Screaming. Terror, panic, pain. Boots and battering rams and curses in a language Llesho knew for Harnish, a higher, shriller version than the Qubal spoke. He had reached the base of the temple and with it had come to the most recent of its history. The crash of swords, the warm voice of his mother, forgiving her murderers in the name of the Goddess while her priests and priestesses wept softly around her. Llesho froze, paralyzed by the soft hiss of a sword leaving its scabbard, so familiar that he felt the sympathetic shift in the weight at his own side as a memory of steel moved from hip to hand. And then the gentle voice of the queen his mother was cut off in mid prayer to the horror of her courtiers.

“Her head! Her head!”

“Don’t let it fall!”

Llesho’s legs refused to hold him. He slid down in a curled-up squat with his arms wrapped around his knees and his forehead pressed against the balustrade, trying to keep his stomach where it belonged while he listened to the death of his mother and the high, terrified shrieks of a child being carried away to her death. His sister, his mother, had died here and he hadn’t been able to stop it. The fact that he’d seen only seven summers at the time, hadn’t even been in the temple when it happened, didn’t enter into it. He should have found a way to be here, and he would suffer her death over and over again until he found a way to make it right.

Except that he was fairly certain that he was going as mad as his brother Lluka. Perhaps that was the fatal flaw: a madness that ran through the Thebin royal family that had brought down the kingdom and all that it had protected in the temple and in the mountains. Or had their failure broken them? A gentle hand swept the hair out of his eyes. Llesho jerked his head up, saw no one. The cool fingertips soothed as they passed across his brow, not the sinister threat of Master Markko’s touch or the rough attack of an Uulgar raider. For a moment, the weeping had stopped.

“Mother?”

“Champion.”

Not his mother, who remained irretrievably dead. He recognized the voice, though.

“My Lady Goddess?”

“Champion,” she repeated.

Llesho felt a touch as of a kiss at his cheek. He remembered a conversation long ago, when Kaydu had asked a loaded question:Who are you? He’d wanted to put off the question, hadn’t been ready, back then, to share the secrets of his birth and the deaths that had followed his seventh summer, so he’d answered with more irony than he knew. “Just another Champion of the Goddess.”

Half priest, half knight, the champions wandered from kingdom to kingdom performing deeds of chivalry and daring in the name of the Goddess. They were seldom presentable and generally considered mad. Which fit him as descriptions went, Llesho figured.

“Your champion,” he answered back, not knowing if she heard him or not. The gates of heaven remained closed and under siege while her voice traveled through what ages down that terrible staircase he couldn’t guess. Or perhaps, the whole temple had been possessed of ghosts and spirits all along and he hadn’t heard them as child because his mother had protected him from that knowledge.

It didn’t take a magician to know that he didn’t belong here now, that he’d go truly and completely mad if he didn’t escape it soon. So, up again, to his feet. He tried to remember if he’d ever seen this particular staircase when he had visited with his mother in the temple, but no memory came to him of any such place by sunlight. He wondered if the temple shifted into some other realm by moonlight, so that it abided only partly among mortals, while part belonged to the realm of heaven or of spirits. If that were true the staircase might exist only on the moonlit side of reality.

He could become trapped on the wrong side of that reality forever if he let himself dither about it. Better to keep moving, which would at least give him distance from the voices that had returned to whisper defeat and heart stopping sorrow in his ear. Off to the left, the dark seemed less dense and he went in that direction as if a beacon called him. He stumbled once over a piece of furniture that went over with a snap of fragile wood, and once he bumped into something that didn’t move at all but left a bruise the size of his fist on his hip. But the light grew stronger, and soon he could see that the worst of the broken furniture had been piled up along a wall, and that someone had righted the candlesticks, though they remained dented and empty of candles.

And there, in front of him, was a door. Not the great front doors that had stood open like two arms waiting to receive the palace—or the king who resided within it. He recognized this small side door as the one he’d used as a child. Accompanied by his bodyguard Khri and a priestess nursemaid, he had often come this way to spend the day with his mother. Now he stumbled through and turned his face to the faint light of false dawn. A weight lifted from his heart, as if he’d just awakened from a harrowing dream. And yet, a longing more powerful than pain called him back to the inner temple and its whispering voices. He wanted his mother back, even if all he had of her was the sound of her voice at the moment of her death.

The sense of what he was thinking hit him like a blow to the gut. “No!” he groaned. “Oh, Goddess, nooo!”

As he curled into the pain, both arms wrapped around his gut, the shadows stirred and came to life.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Thirty-four

A FIGURE of rags and shadows raised out of the darker depths of the doorway. “Are you some ghost out of legends?” it asked in a lightly husky whisper.

Llesho would have said the same thing back. For a brief moment that sped up his heartbeat he thought that Ghrisz somehow knew they were on the way and had sent someone to meet him. His brother’s name was on his lips but he bit back the words. Who knew what Harnish spies might hear? He was glad he did when the dim gray light of false dawn brought the blurred face of a young girl into sharper focus. This beggar who held her ground in front of what she took for wonders might have been a ghost herself, some ancient ancestor out of the darkness of that terrible staircase. Her question made that unlikely, of course. Llesho’s experience in the temple had him jumping at shadows everywhere.

“Not a ghost,” he therefore answered, keeping the bit about legend in reserve. He had returned to Kungol with a face out of history to follow a prophecy, after all. It wouldn’t help his cause to start out here with a lie to his own people.

The beggar didn’t look convinced. On closer examination, as the light grew stronger, Llesho decided that the girl didn’t look like a beggar either. Her clothes were rags and tatters, her face smudged with real grime from the streets, and she had the smell to go along with her fallen state. The disguise might even have worked against an enemy she knew the shape of. Faced with wonders, however, the stranger’s eyes calculated angles of escape and attack, and the longer odds that this wonder out of a night steeped in mystery might be of use to her. A spy, then, which wasn’t hard to figure. But whose? And why did he get the feeling he’d seen her before when he hadn’t been back to the city since his seventh summer? Llesho came up with no satisfactory answer to any of his questions.

“Not a ghost. A legend, then?” the spy prodded.

The girl—she didn’t look even as old as he was, though it was difficult to tell what was under all that dirt in the gray morning light—was sharp. Thebin, by the look and sound of her, and posted at a door the importance of which only someone very high in the confidences of the royal family would know. Master Jak’s clan of mercenary guardsmen had known, but the Harn had murdered them in the attack. The priests and priestesses whose death cries he had heard on the stairs had known. Was she a ghost after all?

Or had Ghrisz posted her here to keep watch? For what? Was his brother expecting his own answer to the prophecy to turn up here? Master Markko had the skills to scry his whereabouts. The magician might have set a watch for him when he recognized where Llesho had landed. But he didn’t think Markko would trust a Thebin girl as his lookout. Wouldn’t expect anyone else to trust the job to a girl either, which made her the perfect choice if she was working for the resistance.

Llesho was used to taking risks on himself. Now, he decided, it was time to take a risk on another person. “Some might say I am the answer to a prophecy,” he answering the beggar-spy’s question, more or less. Legend seemed a bit more than Llesho was willing to claim, so he left it for her to determine.

“I’m looking for a jewel, a sapphire.” The sapphire princess of stories, he meant. It was sort of a test. Would she know the truth behind the story?

The spy denied any knowledge of such a treasure. “The Harn stole every trinket before either of us was old enough to fight them. There are no jewels in Kungol now.” The pupils of her eyes tightened to pinpoints, however. Llesho’s explanation of his presence had rattled the girl, no matter the deliberate way she failed to take Llesho’s meaning. Hoped for, he figured, but he hadn’t been expected.

Great Sun had touched the mountains while they talked; they had no time left to stand around and debate the issue. Someone would spot them and then there would be questions from the Harn. With the light the beggar-spy saw what Llesho was wearing. She managed to control her reaction quickly enough, but Llesho looked down at himself, wondering what she saw that sent that look of mingled disbelief and yearning crashing through her carefully blank expression. When he saw his coat, he remembered—he’d taken this dream-journey dressed in the riding clothes of a long-dead royal court.

“I’m not looking for a trinket,” he said, referring to the girl’s claim that the Thebins hid no treasure from their oppressors. “Your master will know what I’m talking about.”

There it was. “Take me to your leader” as clear as he could make it. He thought the spy must have noticed that he wore the face of long-dead kings as well as one of their coats. Hoped as well that he hadn’t just invited himself into Master Markko’s clutches again. But the spy had made up her mind.

“Take off your coat,” she gritted between clenched teeth.

Llesho did as he was told.

The spy took the coat with a quick, disgusted glance at the empty scabbard at his side. She didn’t entirely come out of her cringing slouch when she saw Llesho’s Thebin knife, but the look became more frozenly blank after that.

“I hope you have another one of these somewhere,” she said, and with a deft twist turned the coat inside out and slashed it down the back with her own knife.

“Master Den will have one somewhere, I am sure.” Llesho had never figured out where he got them, but the trickster god always seemed to have the proper clothes at hand when he needed them. He took the spy’s point, however; running around the streets of Kungol in early daylight wearing an elaborately embroidered court coat would draw more attention than they could possibly handle. Inside out and badly torn the coat became just another rag on another street beggar. He slipped into it, noted that it didn’t do a thing to protect him from the wind anymore.

He rubbed his boots in the ugly dirt caught up by the wind and gathered in the doorway to the temple and managed to get some of it on his chin and across his forehead as well. Only a handful of the Harn who controlled the city—the raiders who had murdered the royal family—had seen the king, his father, so he wasn’t worried about being recognized for who he was. But he didn’t want to stand out in the thin crowd of impoverished, dispirited countrymen. When he had reduced his appearance to match her own, the spy gave him an approving nod and led him out into the city.

 

 

 

As a child Llesho had seldom traveled on foot in the city. He had few memories to compare with the sight that now greeted him but he knew that even the worst of the city’s poor had never lived like this. Many of the houses were abandoned, their walls cracked and crumbling to rubble that trickled in untidy heaps into the streets and thoroughfares. Those buildings that still showed signs of life—clothing draped out in the sun to dry on the heaps of rubble, piles of trash and slops both fresh and ripened in the street—were in little better shape, with windows broken and doors unhinged in toothless grimaces. They passed a street of temples leveled by fire that had passed from building to building. The mud walls didn’t burn, but the fire had consumed the wooden beams and emptied out the rubble fill. With the supports gone, the mud plaster tumbled inward of its own unsupported weight. Each took down the next like a row of toppling dominoes.

Llesho remembered how the smells of Kungol had delighted him as a child: incense and spice and excitement. This new foul smell of a city dying amid its own excrement bore no relation to that long ago pleasure.It’s a dream. He tried to convince himself it wasn’t real. But Lluka’s visions mocked him with the truth, that the dream world held worse for Kungol and all the realms of the living and the dead and the Great Goddess who ruled the gardens of heaven. Kungol at least they could rebuild. The world after that great cataclysm would die forever, unless he killed Master Markko’s demon. That future sickened him and he faltered.

“This is no time to fall apart. Come on.” The spy took his arm, not roughly, but with some urgency. She couldn’t be seen offering support in a way that would alert their overseers to his presence. “This way.”

One step at a time. Llesho roused himself from his brooding. First he had to find Ghrisz. Then he had to alert his armies. More than that would have to await events as they unfolded. The spy ducked past a broken door, into the last standing niche of a public building—countinghouse or shrine, there was no telling anymore—that had long ago succumbed to fire and conflict. Llesho followed, drawn through by an insistent tug on his elbow, and nearly tumbled down a ladder hidden in the shadows.

“Ah! What the—” The spy caught him up short with a firm hand raised to his collar. Suddenly, he returned to his senses and had to wonder where this stranger was taking him. What did she plan to do with him when they got there? And more pointedly, why had he followed the girl in the first place? Not memories of a long-dead childhood, but something more recent. A dream.

“I saw you in a dream-walk.” He had it now. “You were praying by moonlight on top of the temple.”

“You’re mistaken. Down, and careful about it, if you please, my lord.” The spy dismissed his assertion and punctuated her order with a nudge in the right direction, which Llesho had come to expect in his dealings outside his own camp. She finished with a court-mannered politeness to a noble visitor, if not a prince, however, which left all her meanings up in the air. Llesho puzzled over the contradiction while he groped for the ladder in the dim light from the shattered doorway.

They climbed down into the dark below. Kungol never had dug cellars or secret tunnels like the Shan, but sometime in the past eleven turnings of the seasons the city had sprouted tunnels and more, like the roots of trees growing in secret while their crowns shed their leaves and went to sleep. The Harn seemed unlikely to have done it, though he’d have said they didn’t build walls either, before he’d seen the monstrosity that circled Kungol these days.

Master Markko had lived in the North, however, and knew the ways of the empire of Shan, where the capital city was surrounded by a wall riddled with tunnels like this. Still, it seemed unlikely the Harn, even under the magician’s less than tender command, would have had the time or inclination to both build a wall and dig a tunnel system to subvert it. Which left the resistance. “You did this,” he tested out the conclusion. “The Harn don’t know these tunnels exist, do they?”

The girl examined her broken, dirty fingernails with exaggerated thoughtfulness. “Tunnels? What tunnels?” Llesho wasn’t going to learn anything from her, at least not until she had taken him to her leader and they decided what to do about him.

A door blocked the way ahead. She knocked in a pattern of raps, to which a tiny window opened at eye level, closed again without a word. The sound of a bar being removed came through the thick wood, and then the door swung inward. A small, firm hand at his back propelled Llesho into the murk. Their coattails had scarcely cleared the entrance before a guardsman with the look of the mercenary clans who had served in the court of his father pushed the door back into place.

The man had iron gray hair and a face seamed with hardship more than age. He reminded Llesho a little bit of Master Jaks; all that clan shared a certain likeness, even Khri, who had died when Llesho was seven. He thought he looked enough like his father that the mercenary wouldn’t kill him right off. Getting them to help might be more complicated, but he was probably safe for the moment with these resistance fighters.

“Mgar,” the spy greeted the doorman in the high-court dialect. He responded with a quick nod of greeting and put his shoulder into the door.

“Help me with this,” the mercenary grunted at Llesho. Between them they set a thick bar in place across the center of the door. When they had secured the secret entrance, the doorman turned the flame up on a lamp hanging from a chain at the turning of their tunnel.

“Is he here?” The beggar-spy, whose name had not come up in the exchange, asked. The doorman gave a single dip of the chin, answer enough for Llesho’s guide.

“Then he’ll want to see this one. He came out of the temple, but I didn’t see him go in.”

The mercenary’s eyes widened slightly, then narrowed again around a long memory of disappointments. “I’ll need his weapons.”

The girl shrugged one shoulder and left it to the doorman to disarm him. Llesho’s sword was already gone, abandoned on the king’s pavilion atop the Palace of the Sun. He showed the guard his empty scabbard, but refused to give up the spear or his Thebin knife.

“If this is the headquarters of Prince Ghrisz, he will understand. If it is not, we had best begin now—” Llesho set his hand to the spear at his back, but the doorman raised both hands in a placating gesture.

“Let it be, Mgar,” the girl-spy said. “If he’s who I think he is, Ghrisz will want to see those things. But watch him.”

Llesho turned to acknowledge the girl’s intervention on his behalf, but she had disappeared down one of the branching tunnels that ran away from the entrance.

“This way,” Mgar said, and prodded Llesho ahead of him.

Lamps scattered at intervals through the tunnels gave enough dim light so they didn’t trip as they made their way underground. But there wasn’t anything to see except the rough dirt that nearly brushed his shoulders on either side. To keep from panicking, Llesho concentrated on figuring out the spy. When they left the surface for this dank hole in the ground the girl’s posture and step had subtly shifted. Her back had straightened, her head came up, and her slouching shuffle became a swift light gait carrying her away from him just as he wanted to ply her with questions.

She’d left him in the hands of a mercenary guardsman. Llesho’d thought they’d all died in the invasion, but he would have known this Mgar for what he was even if he had never seen his face or heard him utter a word. Master Jaks had moved like that and so had Llesho’s bodyguard Khri. Lately Bixei had grown to do the same. Sometimes, Llesho did himself. Mgar was a soldier, well trained and seasoned in combat of one sort or another.

Raiders of the Uulgar ulus had taken Kungol and held it by force of their army’s savagery. They had no need of tunnels to hide in or secret knocks at hidden doors. All the evidence pointed to the resistance, who might see salvation in a returning king or a threat to their leader’s autonomy. If it was Ghrisz, of course. If it truly was his brother—

“Wait here.”

They had entered an open space carved out of the cold dry earth. The single lamp hanging from a support beam gave a feeble circle of light that extended no more than a pace or two in any direction, but the flow of air felt different. Mgar’s voice didn’t bounce in the hard bright way it had in the tunnels. So, a larger space, but not empty either. Anything could be waiting for him beyond that coin of light, which made the light itself more a danger than a comfort. Llesho gave a nod to indicate he understood the order. Mgar turned and walked away, back the way he had come. And Llesho took one step to the left, out of the light. And then another, soundless, back toward the wall.

When his hand came in contact with the rough surface he drew his knife and cut a mark into the hard-packed dirt at shoulder height. Keeping his free hand in contact with the wall, he moved away from the mark he had made, counting the paces that measured off the perimeter of the chamber. Ten ahead before he came to the corner and had to turn right. He had gone ten more paces when a tinder flared. A lamp came up, then another, and another. Enough to shed light on the room he’d been measuring with his feet. Enough to recognize the figure who sat watching him from a chair not five paces from where Llesho had stopped in his circuit.

Prince Ghrisz of Thebin examined him with an arched brow but made no immediate comment. Ghrisz had been away much of Llesho’s early childhood and, of course, they hadn’t seen each other since the Harn invaded, but Llesho recognized him by the family resemblance to their brother Shokar. Ghrisz must have seen the family resemblance as well, but he gave no sign of it.

The prince sat in an artfully carved chair covered in richly embroidered fabric, one of a dozen such around a conference table. The luxury of the chairs should have looked absurd in the roughly dug cellar. Ghrisz should have looked like a madman playing at being king. But only one of the twelve chairs was empty. The rest each held a man or woman with an air of fallen grace and ragged desperation. This was the power center of the resistance; Llesho felt sure of it. Their rescued furnishings seemed more a reminder of what they had lost than any comfort.

Still, Llesho could have used the doubtful ease of one of those chairs about now. He’d slept so much in Ibn Al-Razi’s hospital in Pontus that Llesho had thought he’d never have to sleep again. That quiet time seemed like an eternity ago to him now.

“He’s resourceful, I’ll give you that,” an elderly man commented from the bottom of the long table. “And he looks very like the king, your father.”

“Perhaps.” The prince leaned forward in his chair. “What are you doing here, boy? How did you get into the Temple of the Moon without any of my guards seeing you enter, and how did you get out again with your sanity intact? Or was Mgar wrong about that last?”

Llesho scarcely heard the questions. “Ghrisz?” he asked. Now that he had reached his goal he was afraid to believe it.

“Mad after all, then,” Ghrisz said, though he didn’t deny his identity. “No one in this city speaks that name. Who are you, boy?”

“Llesho,” he said. With a little smile and a wave that took in the city above them, he added, “They tell me I am king of all this.” He wanted to say more, but the lamps seemed to dim around the edges.

“He’s bleeding!” A voice called a sharp warning out of the descending dark.

Who?Llesho wondered. But the ground was coming up at him very fast . . .

 

 

 

“It can’t be the prince. Prince Llesho died on the Long March.” Ghrisz’s voice, a little above him and to the right, brought Llesho back to his senses. Or, from the sound of it, the prince had been talking for some time and Llesho had regained consciousness only for the last of his argument: “Don’t you think I would have found him if he’d survived?”

That was a question worth contemplating. Slowly, Llesho returned to awareness. He had one of those padded chairs under him and someone had wrapped a bandage tightly around his arm, where the guardsman had marked him in the fight on the king’s pavilion. He’d forgotten the wound, until he’d dropped like a stone in front of his brother’s council. Now it throbbed in a dull, insistent way that didn’t quite penetrate the lethargy that clung to him from his faint. He was safe for the moment, and he’d found the last of his brothers. If he’d had something to eat the moment would have been almost perfect. As his brother’s words penetrated the haze of well-being, however, the dangers of his position unsettled his fogbound peace. If not himself, who did Ghrisz think he was? No one seemed to notice the hitch in his breathing as he shifted an aching rib off the arm of his chair. He kept quiet, hoping if they thought he still slept they would continue to talk about him as if he wasn’t there. His answer came even sooner than he’d prayed.

“You can’t deny the family resemblance,” an aged voice Llesho didn’t recognize objected. “You didn’t know your father when he was as young as that boy. The likeness is uncanny, as if your father himself had returned in the blush of youth.”

“Do you think he’s a ghost, sent from the temple to warn us of some new danger?” The spy who had brought him here, that was. He was pretty sure she hadn’t been at the table when he’d fainted in the middle of Ghrisz’s questioning. Her tone had the steel of command in it in spite of her age and he wondered if he’d underestimated her status on his brother’s council. He wished she’d call out his name to be sure, but he thought he’d heard her calling to him in his dream travels as well. What was she doing in his dreams?

Cracking his eyelids, he hoped no one would see the gleaming slits of his eyes but the table itself blocked his view of the advisers who sat around it.

“Ghosts there may be.” Ghrisz’s tone made it clear that he believed in no such thing, though he gave the suggestion his grave consideration in spite of his own doubt. “If they should exist—”

“They do,” the girl insisted.

Ghrisz conceded with a nod to accept the rebuke before finishing his analysis. “It seems unlikely, however, that they would suddenly quit the tower they have haunted all these turnings of the seasons. Less likely still that they would bleed themselves away into a dead faint at our feet before delivering their unearthly message.

“No, he’s human enough. But who sent him? And where did they find a boy who looked so much like the king?”

“He says he is the king,” another voice chimed in. Llesho thought he recognized that one from somewhere, too. Likely his own father’s council chambers, where they’d stolen this table from the Harn, he realized.

“So you, too, believe in phantoms?” Ghrisz again, irritated with his counselors.

“Perhaps. No living man has come out of the temple since we set a watch on it. None of our spies saw anyone enter by their own posts. But someone threw a Harnish raider off the king’s pavilion last night.”

Another voice, deep with years, added support to his fellow councillor: “Rumor in the marketplace confirms our own reports that no one went in or out of the temple. Only Uulgar clansmen entered or left the palace, and that only at the changing of the guard—except the guardsman who took the short route to the ground during the night.”

“He strayed too close to the edge,” Ghrisz countered that argument. “Or one of their own dispatched him, in some argument between thieves.”

Llesho was on the point of revealing himself to defend the honor of the soldier. The man had fought wonders in the performance of his duty on that tower, and had died of wonders, though not at ghostly hands. But Ghrisz picked up the thread of his argument, and Llesho listened.

“No, the boy is clearly a living being. Note the rise and fall of his ribs as he breathes, and the fact that he rests with his face on the council table rather than passing through it like a vapor. That leaves us no closer to understanding who he is or why he has come, however.

“If he truly is the prince, who has held him in secret all these cycles of the seasons since Kungol fell to the Harn? If he’s an imposter, who went to the effort to find a Thebin boy with such a striking likeness to Kungol’s dead king?”

“He doesn’t necessarily look like the king,” another voice objected. “Someone may have set a glamour on his features to deceive us with his appearance.”

“But why have his captors—or his makers—sent him to usnow? ” Ghrisz wanted to know.

No one at that table hazarded a guess, but the first who had spoken from among Ghrisz’s advisers did make a suggestion. “If we knew how he got into that tower, we’d have some of our answers,” he suggested, bringing them back to the center of the argument.

“I don’t know how he came to be inside the Temple of the Moon,” the girl who had brought him here gave her own testimony to the council. “But I know how he left it. And I know that since the priests were killed no man has survived the descent from the tower. If he’s not the king, then why is he still alive?”

Llesho wondered the same about her. Why had he seen her in a dream on the queen’s pavilion above the Temple of the Moon? Did she pray regularly in the ancient place of the queen, or had he seen her there in another life? Who was she?

Llesho had the answers they debated—or some of them—while he pretended to sleep. He wasn’t quite ready to ask his own questions, but figured Ghrisz was onto him and wanted him to hear their deliberations. But it was time to wake up and start talking before they’d argued themselves into believing their own speculations. So he yawned and stretched in a broad display of rousing from his collapse.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Thirty-five

AS LLESHO expected, Ghrisz showed no surprise when he stretched and blinked himself awake at the council table.

“And do you have anything to add to our councils, my young lord?” the resistance leader asked with exaggerated politeness.

He didn’t offer to explain, which told Llesho his brother had a good sense of when he’d actually woken and started to listen. That was fine with Llesho. He didn’t want to deceive his brother; he’d just needed time to get a sense of where he stood. Which wasn’t in good shape, but he figured he could talk his way through that.

“I’ll answer any questions you want about myself,” he offered. Honesty compelled him to add, “By your own arguments, if I were a stranger picked up on the streets because I look like a dead king would I tell you the truth? If a magician had laid spells on me, would I even know the truth?”

That was a question that woke him up at night in his own camp, surrounded by gods and kings. Master Markko had poisoned him and could evoke those poisons even now. What else had he done that might make of Llesho a weapon against his own allies?

“I can only tell you what I’ve seen and what my teachers and allies believe about me. Which is that I am his Holy Excellence, King Llesho, the seventh son of my father the king, and his chosen successor.”

“And so you would take my throne, boy?” That was the first time Prince Ghrisz had admitted his identity, though he looked to the girl when he spoke. She gave no sign that she had noticed but focused her wide blue eyes on Llesho, as if she could weigh the merit of his soul in his answers.

Now that he was here and had found the last of his brothers, impatience got the better of him. Llesho heaved a sigh, thinking of how many times he’d been tested and judged by gods and kings. Not by his brothers, though. He hadn’t always appreciated their greetings—Balar had hit him over the head with a lute and carted him off flung over a camel—but they had never doubted who he was.

“At the moment, Master Markko holds the throne.” Llesho’s eyes lifted of their own accord in a telling glance at the dirt ceiling over their heads. He didn’t know yet if he could defeat the magician but he was pretty sure his brother couldn’t.

Ghrisz bristled at the insult, which Llesho hadn’t intended as such but which struck the entire council a blow. They didn’t deserve that of him. While Llesho had battled his way across the vast expanse of empires, they had fought a hidden war in these tunnels and caves. He didn’t want to make enemies of the very people who might find a way for his armies to enter the city undetected. Time to make his play, therefore, before they answered the rebuke with rising tempers. But first he had to convince them he was the real thing.

“You asked who sent me. It was her ladyship SienMa, the mortal goddess of war. I’m here to throw out the Uulgar raiders and take the throne of our father away from the magician who leads them. Who sits in it when I’m done can wait for a later discussion.”

That could have been more diplomatically stated. It wasn’t even completely accurate, but he had an army cooling its heels while they debated the question. Llesho tried again. “Lleck, our father’s minister, set me on a quest to find my brothers and take Thebin back from the Harn. The Lady SienMa took an interest and has helped me on my long road from Pearl Bay to the Palace of the Sun.”

He didn’t think mentioning the trickster god would help his cause. Shou and Mergen would take some leading up to, let alone Marmer Sea Dragon, so he kept quiet on those allies and advisers.

“Lleck died during the sack of Kungol,” a woman told him with a cold voice and sorrow creasing her face. No one at that table addressed the others by any name or title, as if afraid that hostile ears might know them and single out their targets by the level of respect their fellow councillors afforded them. It was a sensible precaution and he followed their lead in it.

“He didn’t die in the attack.” He wasn’t sure if she’d consider the news he brought the good kind or the bad. “Somehow he escaped and found his way to Pearl Island, where he taught me and cared for me until his death in my fifteenth summer. It was then he sent me on my quest.” Lleck had died again, as a bear cub fighting monsters in the battle for the Imperial City of Shan, but he didn’t think that story would add to his credibility with Ghrisz’s court. The part he still had to tell was bad enough.

“A dying man’s wish for home,” an adviser to his brother suggested with a shake of his head. “The likeness must have addled his brain.”

“A dead man’s quest,” Llesho corrected him. “His ghost appeared to me while I worked beneath the waves of Pearl Bay.”

Ghrisz was not convinced. He looked at Llesho as he might at any false claimant. “So you said. To rescue your brothers. Another lie—my brothers are dead.” He made no exception for Llesho, who stood before him accused of being an imposter. “And so you appear on my doorstep with an empty scabbard and a ragged coat, telling tales of wandering the length of the known world.

“Why don’t you give up and just tell the truth? You must know your story has fallen apart. You populate your tales convincingly enough with names you’ve heard out of legend or gossip, never thinking that the people at this table knew intimately as friends these characters you weave into your lies. Except for those you create out of children’s stories and legends, of course.”

By that Llesho figured his brother meant the Lady SienMa. He forgot sometimes that everyone didn’t call upon the gods as their personal advisers.

Ghrisz wasn’t finished, though. “Your story suits a madman more than an impostor set upon treachery! So I will answer you in kind: I will do as you bid and gladly when these magical creatures make their request of me in person. But I find their emissary singularly lacking.”

The gathered ministers stirred in their seats, voices rumbling at what they saw as the upstart’s insult. But Llesho smiled. His brother didn’t want to believe, but he was in for a lot of surprises.

“I’ve traveled not only the length of the world, but it’s breadth as well. In Pontus I found a prophecy which is said to have reached even as far as Kungol.” He gave a moment’s pause to gather his thoughts, then began to recite:

 “Seven lost princes find their brother Six heads crowned with stars a gate have hidden Five armies, like one hand, close around them Four worms breathing fire rise above them Three bitter gifts must teach a bitter lesson Two paths are offered, one is chosen One jewel alone, to each must be another.”

“I’ve heard it,” the girl-spy, who had kept quiet for most of the discussion, spoke up now. As he’d guessed when they’d crossed the city together, she was younger than he was—surprisingly young, really, to be sitting in on the decision-making of the resistance. “A little differently and in the common tongue as you’d expect on the streets. Once even in Harnish. Until recently I thought as we all did that my brothers were dead and was unwilling to have the last of them join the others. We needed you alive, so I kept the verse to myself. Now, I think, we have to question what it means all over again. And, by the way, where did an impostor who looks like the long-dead king learn to speak the language of the court?”

Ghrisz clearly hadn’t thought of that. Hadn’t, from the shock that crossed his face, noticed that they were speaking a language which should have been alien to an impostor’s tongue.

“He’s well trained for his role,” he grumbled. “Lleck might have done it, if he truly had been fooled by a passing likeness.”

Llesho knew how closely he resembled his father and their ancient ancestor. The face he wore had called in debts to history owed by the Qubal clans, and he’d seen himself, older and dying in some past life across a river of time. But the girl who had brought him here from the temple had a more pertinent question:

“Why send an impostor now? If we had the power to seize the throne we would have done so already and put our own prince on it. The appearance of someone we don’t know claiming to have some special right to the throne doesn’t put us any closer to winning it back than we were before. The best he can hope to gain is the same beggar’s dinner the rest of us eat. That and a cold place to sleep.”

“A spy,” the woman who had thought Lleck dead in the raid on Kungol spoke up. “One part of his tale may be true. The Harn took many slaves before and after the invasion. As a slave they may have trained him to spy on us. If we let him go he will surely report our movements to his masters.”

“He isn’t going anywhere.”

Llesho kept quiet about the abilities that had brought him here, and that would take him away again at will. Ghrisz had a deadly look in his eyes; complete honesty about his gifts could get him killed. He didn’t want to leave anyway—at least not until he’d convinced his brother that help was on the way.

“I didn’t come to ask your help. Well, not the kind you think. I’m here because of the prophecy. ‘Seven lost princes find their brother’—that was the first part of the quest: find my brothers—alive. You’re the last, Ghrisz. I’ve found the others: Adar and Shokar in the empire of Shan, Balar and Lluka among the dream readers of Ahkenbad in the Gansau Wastes, and Menar last before you, blinded and a slave in the house of a physician in Pontus.”

“An easy claim to make when you are standing in front of us alone and in rags no better than our own,” Ghrisz challenged him.

Oh!“Just a minute.” Llesho dragged his coat off, turned it right side out and slipped it on again, this time with the elaborate embroideries of Thebin court clothes on the outside.

Eyes widened around the council table. No one of them retained the finery of the palace, and even in this light they could see that his own coat’s tears had happened recently.

“I was afraid someone would see us and recognize the coat,” the girl said.

Llesho remembered something else. “I left my sword on the king’s pavilion, but I still have my knife.”

With that he pulled aside the front of his coat to show the blade in its sheath at his side. Except for the wooden signet afixed to the butt that held the Lady Chaiujin prisoner, it looked like the knife that Ghrisz wore on his own belt.

“How—?” A man old enough to have been an adviser under his father’s rule spoke up with a querulous resistance to wonder in his voice.

Ghrisz silenced him with a raised hand. “You threw the Harnishman off the tower in the palace?”

“No.” Llesho shook his head, half in denial and half to rid his mind of the image of the guardsman stepping after him on that bridge of light. Falling. With a shiver, he repeated the denial. “We fought, but I left him with just a small wound, like my own.” He touched the bandage on his arm to demonstrate. “He tried to follow me and stepped off the edge.” It didn’t seem the time to tell them about the bridge of light. It felt like one of those hidden mysteries you weren’t supposed to talk about. They didn’t believe anything he’d said yet anyway, so he let them think what they wanted.

Ghrisz had moved from outright rejection to reserving judgment, however. “This prophecy. You say you found our brothers alive. I’ll take that statement as the first verse in a story. Go on.”

Llesho picked up where he had stopped. “The first was the easiest line to understand because Lleck had already sent me looking for the princes and I’d already found all but you. The rest of the rhyme was harder, but Menar put his head together with the Apadisha’s magicians and we worked on it together. Once we figured it out it seemed pretty obvious.”

“Obvious?” Ghrisz lifted a dubious brow while around him his advisers muttered, “Magicians!” with fear and loathing, and, “the Apadisha!” with doubt and calculation.

It had seemed a lot simpler to figure out once he’d stood atop the Temple of the Moon than it was in the Apadisha’s Divan, but Llesho didn’t mention that. “More obvious if you’ve spent any time with a Harnish shaman,” he did admit. “They speak in riddles all the time.”

“A Harnish shaman, a slave—no, wait,” Ghrisz bid him with a wave of his hand, “Two enslaved princes and a Harnish shaman gather to discuss a prophecy about Thebin with the magicians of Pontus. This tale grows stranger and stranger.”

“It didn’t happen quite that way.” Llesho didn’t think the truth—that Bolghai was busy with the emperor of Shan, and so had no time to consult with the Apadisha of Bithynia—would help him out here. “I met this shaman. He used Shannish words with me, but he spoke in riddles just the same. To understand what he wanted, I had to figure out his riddle-speech. When we were trying to figure out the prophecy, I remembered about the riddles, and then it became easier. ‘Six heads crowned with stars’ are the six mountains around Kungol covered with glaciers. As for ‘A gate have hidden’—what gate lies hidden in the mountains above the city?”

The gates of heaven. They all knew it, but no one spoke the words aloud.

“That gate is under siege.” That was Llesho’s real battle, but first they had to take back Kungol.

“Five armies?” Ghrisz asked. Something fired his eyes, as if he had guessed some part of what must come next.

But that would serve better at the end, after all the evidence was given, so Llesho shook his head. “That line and the last were the hardest to figure out. I’m still not sure we have it right.”

“Four worms breathing fire, then,” Ghrisz prodded, moving to the next line of the prophecy.

“Dragons,” Llesho answered, “Four of them.”

The snorts and sniffs about the table let him know well enough what the Thebin court in hiding thought of such mythical creatures.

The young girl, however, watched him with wide, unblinking eyes. Blue eyes, he noted. Ping had had eyes like that and he wondered if the girl was a cousin or some distant relative he’d forgotten. With a little sigh she finally freed him from the captivity of her gaze. “You’ve seen them, haven’t you? The dragons. What are they like?”

Her elders looked askance at her, but Llesho couldn’t hold back the little smile that sneaked across his mouth. “There is no one way for dragons. I knew Pearl Bay Dragon Queen for many years in human form as a lowly healer who tended the divers on Pearl Island. I’ve seen her only once since then, but I count her one of the creatures I love most in all the world.

“On the other hand, the first time I saw Golden River Dragon I thought he was a stone bridge carved in the shape of a beast. I had barely crossed when he sank into the river, drowning many of my enemies and turning others away in terror at the shore. Then he ate my new healer, Mara, who aspires to be the eighth mortal god. Fortunately he swallowed her whole and so he was able to let her go again when she insisted.”

An old man at the table, one who had not spoken yet, pursed his lips as though judging the tale of a marketplace storyteller. “You recount more exploits already than most adventurers can claim in a lifetime, and yet we still have two dragons to go, boy. When did you ever have time to sleep?”

“In Pontus,” he answered with a low, rueful laugh. They didn’t understand his answer of course, but then, neither did he, really.

Ghrisz still didn’t believe what he heard, but he seemed to appreciate the extravagance of the telling. “Come, finish your tale so that we may doubt with the full amazement it deserves. What of the third worm?”

“That would be Dun Dragon. He thought I had taken on more than I could manage as well.”

He paused in his telling to get control of feelings that tried to overwhelm him. What to say about Ahkenbad, dead of Master Markko’s attack on the dream readers? What of the Wastrels dead in the war that Llesho now brought to Kungol? What of Kagar, forced to take the Dinha’s role too early amid the death and destruction that toppled the mountains of the most sacred city of the Tashek people?

Ghrisz led a handful of followers hiding in tunnels and caves beneath the city from which his father had ruled from the gates of heaven to the Harnlands. He’d probably understand Kagar better than Llesho did himself. But his feelings were still too raw about those losses to expose them to the doubt of his brother’s council. So when his brother prodded, “And?” Llesho gave a little shrug, and answered with a voice as devoid of emotion as he could make it.

“I met him only briefly at the fall of Ahkenbad. He told me to learn to say ‘no.’ ”

“Thefall of Ahkenbad?” a voice muttered at the table.

Ghrisz watched him with a focused hunter’s gaze that reminded Llesho of Kaydu in her eagle form, stalking prey. “That is very bad news indeed, if even a part of your tale should prove true.”

His brother released his gaze with a sly nod of his head. “I can see the value in Dun Dragon’s counsel, even as a narrative device. You seem to leave a trail of destruction in your wake. It certainly doesn’t warm the next potential ally to your cause. A shorter trail might at least mean fewer dead allies.”

Llesho wished he knew why Ghrisz was mocking him. If his brother took him for a braggart hoping to challenge his place among his cave dwellers, then they were all in trouble. But if Ghrisz was starting to believe him, and hid his own unease behind a caustic wit, then perhaps his mission would succeed after all. He chose to take it as the latter.

“I’ll let our brother Lluka explain the stakes we fight for. His visions of the future have driven him mad, but even his madness is enlightening if you pay careful attention.”

At the mention of Lluka’s madness Ghrisz dropped his air of mocking humor, anxious, it seemed, to move quickly from the subject. “And the fourth worm?” he asked, weighing Llesho’s words in the stillness of his perfect attention.

“Marmer Sea Dragon. I met him while I was working as the slave of pirates on the Marmer Sea. He helped me defeat Master Markko in a battle with storms at sea.” Unconsciously, Llesho twitched at the remembered touch of the lash across his back.

Ghrisz saw it, and knew it for what it was. “Take off your shirt,” he said. “This, at least, we can test.”

His advisers looked at him as though he were mad, but from the shadows Mgar held out his hand for the coat. By the bleakness of his expression Llesho knew that the mercenary believed, even if his betters didn’t. Llesho gave him his coat, stripped off his linen shirt, and turned his back on the table.

The old woman took a lamp and held it up to study the ridged flesh. “He’s seen the lash, all right,” she confirmed, “The wounds seem to have been recent, but well tended. Why someone felt the need to beat him, however, remains to be proved. Could be payment for a lying tongue more easily than the torment of a hero.”

After a quick glance at the wounds, Ghrisz looked away. “Give him his shirt,” he said, and added, “How did you convince this sea serpent to help you in your quest, then?”

“We sought a common enemy.” Llesho kept that story to himself, however. It wasn’t his to tell.

Ghrisz rubbed both of his hands over his face with a sigh.

“You shake my doubts,” he said, “when I am least inclined to trust you. No one believes in dragons anymore. And yet, you seem to know more than you say, and say more than I’m comfortable knowing. If you’re telling us any part of the truth. And so we come to three bitter gifts.”

“I’m not sure of all of them, but I think I’ve got it worked out.” Llesho had figured from the start that it would take the next part of the prophecy to convince his brother of the truth.

From the sheath at his back he drew the short spear that had taken his life so many times in the past. Just for effect, because he needed them to believe, he willed sparks to shiver up the shaft of the weapon as he placed it carefully on the table. “Don’t touch it,” he warned Ghrisz. “It burned Adar’s hand and has tried to kill me on numerous occasions. We’ve come to a sort of truce, but I wouldn’t want to risk any of our lives on the goodwill of the thing.”

They might have thought him mad, but a trickle of smoke rose from the table where it lay.

“That is one,” Ghrisz accepted with a nod. “Another?”

“In the keeping of my cadre. A jade wedding cup.” No need to explain it; Ghrisz knew the legends as did his advisers. The spear and cup represented the beginning and end of the story. The cup, given in love by the hand of the Great Goddess herself, and the spear, cursed gift that murdered the hand that held it throughout the ages. The prince studied Llesho’s face, the unanswered question clear in his troubled glance. Did this stranger with the look of his father tell the truth, or use a story he’d once heard to wriggle his way into their good graces?

The answer lay on the table shedding sparks. Ghrisz stole a glance at it before returning his gaze to his brother. “And the third gift?” he asked.

The first two had been easy to figure. Llesho had puzzled over the third since Menar had recited the prophecy. His hand strayed to his throat, where a bag of pearls lay covered up again. Ghrisz hadn’t asked, but maybe he waited for an explanation now. Llesho didn’t think that was it, though. The necklace belonged to the Great Goddess, his wife, and he was only a courier where it was concerned. Lady Chaiujin’s gift of betrayal was no coincidence, however. And when it came to bitter lessons . . .

“Another cup, similar to the wedding cup of the goddess, but with a symbol carved into the bowl.” As he described it his thumb stroked across the signet on his knife where Master Geomancer had hidden it. Ghrisz noticed the gesture but took it for a threat. With a jerk of his head he signaled Mgar, who stepped forward again to clamp a hand on Llesho’s shoulder.

“A nervous habit,” Llesho explained, moving his hand slowly from the knife. “I mean no harm.”

“He’ll give it back when we have decided your case.”

Mgar reached for the knife but Llesho was there before him, ready to strike at the guardsman. Carefully, he lowered the blade to a defensive position while the spear burned its own smoking shape into the table. “I didn’t come here to fight, but I won’t give up the knife.”

Tradition gave him an excuse to refuse. If not for the spell that held the Lady Chaiujin he would have given it over as a sign of good faith anyway. He trusted his brother, but not the lady trapped inside her box.

“If you were really the lost prince, you would have killed him,” Ghrisz pointed out. Thebin training allowed for no other purpose between drawing the knife and sheathing it in the attacker.

“So I thought myself, early in my training. Master Den broke me of the habit of murder, however. Now I choose when to let loose my Thebin training and when to rely on my combat instructors and battle nerves. I won’t hurt you. It would defeat my purpose in coming.”

Ghrisz thought a moment before nodding his agreement, but made a sign with a finger resting on the arm of his chair. Llesho heard the snick of a sword leaving its scabbard, and then the prick of its point at his neck. He might kill one or two of the councillors nearest him, but Mgar would spit him before he could reach Ghrisz. Which was fine, since he didn’t plan on killing anybody.

“About this cup,” Ghrisz prodded.

“The lady who gave it to me had filled it with a potion to humiliate her husband and bring scorn down on my head in front of the Qubal clans. She succeeded in that small evil. In the form of a bamboo snake she later murdered her husband.”

“It would seem the lesson was for the Harnishman, not for you.” Ghrisz dropped his eyes to the spear on the table, letting his mind wander down the track that intelligence opened up to him.

“I learned it anyway.”

“Oh?” That brought the prince snapping back to the point. “I’m still alive. Chimbai-Khan isn’t.”

Ghrisz registered something of Llesho’s dark memories passing in the back of his eyes. He saw more though: a young prince dead on his feet from exhaustion and carrying an unspeakable burden. He never stopped looking at the spear out of the corner of his eye, however. With the pretense of carelessness in the wave of his hand he gave Llesho permission to retrieve the weapon still spitting sparks on the table. Llesho took it up and slid it home, willing it quiet, and the light along its shaft dimmed.

Llesho thought his brother was on the point of accepting his identity but a woman who had remained silent until then spoke up suddenly. “May I ask the young stranger a question?”

Ghrisz gave the barest nod of permission, at which the woman rose from her chair and came around to stand at Llesho’s side. She gave him a reassuring smile, as if to tell him that he had nothing to fear from her, but he knew better than to take any comfort from that table.

“If you are who you say, you will know who I am.”

The face had changed with age and she no longer wore the robes of her office, but Llesho recognized her. Fortunately, he thought she recognized him as well.

“A priestess at my mother’s temple, when she lived,” he answered easily enough. He’d been too young to know more about her, but she smiled in spite of the grave nod with which she confirmed his answer.

“In that capacity, I must ask, delicately, as to your vigil-night. Were you able to find a way, in your servitude in far lands . . . ?”

“I did,” Llesho stopped her as she had no doubt intended him to do, in a matter of great delicacy. “But I didn’t recognize my gifts and for some seasons believed she hadn’t come to me. I was wrong.”

He thought he might have been able to tell the priestess about his dream travels to the gardens of heaven. The Goddess had comforted him with cool water and her own fingertips on his forehead. But they had an audience and some things, he knew, belonged to the temple alone. Fortunately, he’d figured out a lot of it with the help of his brothers and so could answer her questions both truthfully and without revealing the secret mysteries of his husbandly relationship with the Goddess.

The priestess may have understood all that passed behind his eyes, or she may have simply had a set of questions she asked all the royal princes who had passed their sixteenth summer. She didn’t ask the questions he couldn’t answer in a public hearing.

“Someone you knew did come to you then.” It should have been a question, but she seemed to know the answer already.

“The Lady SienMa, with fruits from her orchard.” He couldn’t help the little smile at his own expense. Much later, Adar had explained to him the significance of that visit. At the time, it had seemed one with a disastrous night that had ended in the destruction of the governor’s compound at Farshore Province and the flight of the household before Markko’s southern forces.

“And now you understand your gifts?” The priestess pursued him with the persistence of his enemies, but he felt no greater threat from her than from any of the teachers who had tested him in the past. This was a path he knew well.

“Understand? Just enough to get myself in trouble, Master Den would say. Do I begin to have a notion what they are and how to use them? Yes.”

Ghrisz sat forward at that to take part in the priestly interrogation. “And they are useful?” It was said the Goddess had passed him by, granting him no gifts but that of a normal life. Or so it should have been, if not for the Harn.

“I dream.” Llesho found that wistfully wry smile creeping across his lips again. Ghrisz bristled at the diffidence of his answer, as if Llesho didn’t appreciate his gifts. Only the priestess mirrored his expression with her own understanding of the cost of such heavenly favor.

“So you are the one,” she said.

“I guess so.”

“Two paths?” Ghrisz reminded them of the prophecy.

“The Way of the Goddess, or the way of evil.” To follow the path of the magician, Master Markko, that was. “I chose the Goddess.”

“As do we.”

Llesho accepted that with a nod. “The jewel mentioned in the final line remains unclear, however. Our mother had jewels—heirlooms and gifts—a few with historical or sentimental meaning. But nothing with the power to rally all of Thebin.”

He didn’t mention the tales of the sapphire princess but waited for his brother to answer instead.

Ghrisz did so with a proud smile of his own. “That jewel sits with you at this very table.”

The girl-spy gave him a smug smile. “Our fighters call me the Sapphire Princess,” she said. “Ghrisz says that the poetry of the title inspires soldiers to battle long after hope is lost.”

Llesho saw what she meant by that. She had washed away the smudges on her face and arms that had disguised her in the doorway of the temple but still sported a bruise on her jaw, just above the scarf of beaten silk that wrapped her throat. Her arms bunched with ropy sinews when she gestured in the air. Even her gaze reflected her life of struggle in the conquered city. Her eyes were bright as sapphires and as hard, as if she walled her spirit away from the horrors of a hostage nation in the brilliant blue facets of her gemstone eyes. If they had been softer, her smile gentler, she would have reminded him of his mother.

“Ping!”

“Took you long enough! Are you sure he’s the one?” she asked the priestess, though they all knew she was joking to cover her embarrassment at the emotion that gathered in the corners of her eyes.

“I thought you were dead!” Llesho stared hungrily at her through his own tears. “I thought they’d killed you.”

“I thought the same about the rest of you.” She shifted the scarf around her neck to show the mark of a Harnish knife, then covered it quickly again. “Mgar rescued me from the dung heap. And here you come, still alive yourself and with news of our other brothers safe as well. Which one of us is more surprised?”

“Can we trust this?” Ghrisz asked. It seemed no member of that council was free of tears, but still the prince seemed to be afraid of hope. “Where are our brothers, if they are alive?”

“Nearby. Which leads me to why I am here.”

“What do you need?”

“A way to bring a small band into the city undetected. Secret passages, hidden gates. A siege will kill thousands on both sides. But if we can slip into the city unseen . . .”

“The guards on the wall will spot you before you get close.” Ghrisz stopped him before Llesho said more. “There’s no cover to hide your approach even if we gave you what you want.”

Llesho shook his head. “The only thing we need to hide is our strategy. Remember that line of the prophecy we skipped?”

Ghrisz went very still. “Five armies, like one hand,” he recited.

It was Llesho’s turn to be smug. Putting his hand up, fingers spread, he began to call the names of those he’d left gathering at his back. “Ten thousand Daughters of the Sword from Bithynia,” he said, and folded in his thumb. “Ten thousand horsemen from the Qubal clans. Ten thousand more from the Tinglut. Twice that number from Shan.” At the naming of each army he brought a finger in toward his palm. When just one finger remained raised, Llesho turned his gaze on his brother. “I had hoped to find the fifth in Kungol.”

“You make me want to believe.”

Ghrisz still doubted him, as a general if not as a prince, but they were out of time. “Choose,” Llesho said, “as our father’s son would choose.”

“We can’t muster more than five thousand in the resistance, but what I have I give to the coming battle.”

Not to him, but Llesho bowed to acknowledge the offer. “Shokar returns with more of our own people among the forces of Shan. His troops will bring the Thebin count to its full tally.” He bent the last finger into the fist he had made.

“Then I think we can help each other,” Ghrisz agreed. “A wall, after all, is only as sound as the stones that build it. The Harn have little experience of such things, and choose not to learn. The artisans of Kungol, who were pressed into constructing this vast wall, were more practiced at building houses.”

“And a house,” Ping pointed out, “Is nothing but a wall on the outside, hollow on the inside to hold the people. When the Harn enslaved our people and forced them to raise their wall, they built what they knew.”

Tunnels! His people had built what looked like a solid wall against the Harn’s enemies, but inside, it was riddled with tunnels! Ping seemed extremely pleased about that, though she must have been toddling around on leading reins when the wall was begun.

“These cellars and tunnels are my palace,” she explained, “I have explored every twisting li of them both below the city and within its walls. I know every secret way into the city and every secret way out. They are too few to bring all your armies through, but with sufficient distraction a small band can move easily into the city.”

“Sneaking spies back and forth has been easy enough under cover of darkness or the coming and going of Harnish troops through the gates,” Ghrisz commented. “Until now, however, we have lacked the army. You seem to have solved that part of the puzzle.”

He smiled and Llesho curved his lips in a semblance of the same. Let his brother think that the battle they discussed would be the last. The priestess read him better than his brother or sister did. She wrapped her own fingers around his clenched fist. “Rest,” she told him. “And don’t give in to despair. A wife who has waited through countless lifetimes will have learned forgiveness above all virtues.”

She expected him to fail, he thought, and tried to ease his conscience. Which could only mean she didn’t understand the full consequences of his failure. Except that grief seemed to shadow her like a shroud.

He would have tried to reassure her, but his brother stirred just then, rose from his chair as a signal that talking was done.

“Welcome home, little brother,” he said, and wrapped Llesho in his arms. It was the thing to do at homecoming, but Ghrisz’s doubts made an awkward embrace.

“My turn!” Ping thumped her older brother, wedging herself between them so that she could give Llesho a huge hug of her own. “I can’t believe you’re alive!”

A hug, a pat, a smile: one by one the councillors greeted him as they filed out, until he was alone with his brother and sister, and the priestess from the Temple of the Moon.

“Find him a safe bed and something to eat,” Ghrisz asked her. He sent Llesho on his way with the promise, “You will have all our secrets when you are awake enough to take them in.”

Llesho would have objected that there wasn’t time, but Ghrisz needed time to absorb his change in fortunes. Sharing the secrets of a lifetime would not come easily. So he followed the priestess to an underground room with a warm lamp and a bed that was heaped with blankets, and didn’t complain when someone put a bun and a cup of tea in his hand.

“You’re safe here, even from your dreams,” the priestess assured him. He figured he ought to question that, but he didn’t plan on sleeping anyway. He needed to gather his thoughts for the next audience with his distant, desperate brother. It was time to talk strategy.

When they came for him again, he was ready.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Thirty-six

WITH A tumble of hooves over antlers, Llesho arrived in the yellow silk command tent of the mortal goddess of war. Fortunately his advisers who awaited him had seen him dream travel in his totem form before. Master Den looked up from his conversation in the corner with Bright Morning and Balar to give him a nod of greeting but otherwise made no comment on his precipitous arrival. At a table strewn with maps and crowded around by kings and princes and generals, the mortal goddess of war sat in the same chair he remembered from Farshore Province at the start of his quest. Then she had shown him a map and asked him what he knew of the blocks of color on it. Kungol, he remembered, had been gold, and the Harnlands a sea of green. Bithynia had been a question on the fringed edges.

Now he could identify each of those countries by a wound or a companion lost in crossing it. And the lady had a different question for him.

“Tea?” she asked, with a gesture at the pot that rested on a small table at her elbow. When Llesho respectfully accepted a cup from her hands, she continued with the business that concerned their gathered allies.

“Have you found the last of your brothers, holy king?” she asked. That was the first test of the prophecy which foretold their success. The next question spoke to the practicalities of conquest: “Will he join his forces with ours against the magician?”

“I have, and he will. However—” He knew that what he had to say next would inflame the khans who were his allies, and raised a hand to stop their protests before they were begun. “Prince Ghrisz was less than pleased to hear that we counted Harnish clans among our allies.”

Mergen took this in with no more than a blink of his lashes, but Tinglut-Khan’s face flushed a deeper shade of bronze. He took a deep breath to voice his indignation.

“Understand him, please,” Llesho begged before words were said that could not, among kings, be withdrawn. “Of the clans, they know Harnishmen only as torturers and oppressors who murder for sport and wear the scalps of Thebin dead on their shirts.”

“Thebin has no great cause to trust the Qubal ulus,” Mergen-Khan reminded those at the table.

In the distant past, the Qubal had murdered a Thebin king for loving a daughter of the clans. Llesho wore that king’s face, and sometimes he thought he remembered that king’s death as one of his own. Sometimes he thought it was all his imagination.

“The clans have had no dealings with Thebin for many generations. Those ended badly, in treachery.”

“And yet my brother Ghrisz, with caution, joins his forces with yours in the battle to come. His words come with a warning, but he is willing to judge by the actions he sees.”

“With the spirits of my ancestors to guide me,” Mergen pledged in the name of Chimbai-Khan, who had first promised aid when Llesho’s forces had counted less than a hundred souls, “I hope to repair old wounds between our people. Friendship may be too much to ask, but we would be quit of this debt we owe for the death of your murdered grandfather.”

That history, and not Llesho’s uncertain memories of lives lived in the past, bound Mergen-Khan to him now. He accepted the khan’s pledge as he had that of Chimbai, the Qubal Khan’s murdered brother.

Tinglut made to speak up in his own defense, but Shou answered his bluster with a twitch of an eyebrow. The Tinglut ulus had plotted with the governor of Guynrn Province to make war against the empire. Only Shou’s timely appearance, and the execution of that false official, had put a halt to the scheme. In the meantime, the Tinglut had aided Master Markko’s Uulgar raiders in their attack on the Imperial City of Shan.

Thebin had no cause to trust him either. A king had to be cautious about the armies he invited into his country—they could be a lot harder to remove when the fighting was done. Tinglut wasn’t the only worry in that regard. Shou’s armies served at the will of the mortal goddess of war to preserve the kingdoms of heaven and earth and Mergen to repair his family’s honor. He could trust them as much as one king can trust any other—to the extent it served their mutual need.

But the Apadisha made a sport of war, and Tinglut . . . Llesho determined to set the Daughters of the Sword in the field among the Tinglut forces. The two armies would no doubt watch each other, cutting off every move for advantage while they fought the common enemy. Later, his brothers would have their hands full getting rid of their allies, but that was a battle for another day.

That decided, Llesho drew a scroll from inside his coat and spread it on top of the maps on the table. It showed a rough drawing of Kungol and the wall with which the raiders had surrounded the city. The sketch had no marks to indicate the secret passages and ways in and out, but Llesho had committed them to memory and now he began to gesture here, here, there . . .