The morning had faded into afternoon before the battle plan had been laid out. When each leader knew his or her position and the task each army would accomplish for the taking of Kungol, they dispersed to pass the plan to their own generals and captains, who would in turn instruct their lieutenants. They would march for Kungol by sunrise on the following day.

The gates of heaven were another matter. Llesho had a plan of his own for that. He didn’t think his advisers would approve, so he didn’t tell them. There was nothing they could do anyway. He wouldn’t be able to keep the news from his cadre—they had attached themselves to him again and refused to be moved on any order—but he figured they’d understand better than those who thought they could do it all for him and save him from the coming struggle. Persuading his healers to help might be harder, especially since he was using Master Markko’s plan, or a part of it. He regretted what he had to ask, but knew he couldn’t defeat the demon on the mountainside without them. When the war council broke up to prepare for battle, Llesho went looking for Carina.

Behind the hospital tent, Master Den had set up his great traveling washtub and his wringers and stretchers for cleaning bandages and bedclothes. He ordered his cadre to wait outside, assuring them that he meant to go nowhere, in dreams or the waking world, and promised not to put himself in danger. He didn’t lie, exactly, since he expected no danger while in Carina’s presence. That would come later. Kaydu didn’t trust his innocent demeanor, but she conceded to his request with a stubborn bow of her head.

“We’ll be listening, in case you find trouble where least expected,” she vowed.

“I expect nothing less,” he agreed. Then he entered the hospital tent to find Carina directing Adar and several apprentices in preparations for tending the wounded.

“Llesho! What can I do for you?” She stole a quick glance of greeting at him, but focused more sharply when she saw the grimness of his countenance. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“I need your help,” he said. “I wouldn’t ask, but I can’t see any other way.”

She read the desperation in the tense set of his shoulders and the lines around his hooded eyes. Sending away those who were folding cots with instructions to help with the bandage winding, she turned the full blaze of her attention on him.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked when only Adar remained between them.

“I don’t trust anything else he’s ever told me, but Master Markko was telling the truth about the creature that lays siege to the Great Goddess’ gardens. I can’t take this demon-king in a fair fight.” Llesho’s furtive glance toward her workbench gave away his reason for being here.

“I have no poisons strong enough to kill a demon, even if my oaths as a healer didn’t forbid me to use them,” she said.

“I wouldn’t ask you to kill for me,” Llesho assured her. It would have damaged something very deep about his belief in the goodness of the people he was trying to save if Mara’s daughter had offered to do murder for him. He still needed her help, though, and he knew what he asked would test the limits of her loyalty.

“I think Master Markko was right about one thing: if I don’t find a way to weaken the demon-king before we fight, he will kill me with one sweep of his claws. If I die before I defeat him, there is no hope for any of us.” He knew he’d given too much away with that. He didn’t count on surviving the encounter, but hoped to destroy the demon before he died of the wounds he would inevitably suffer in any encounter with so powerful an enemy.

Her face tightened with anguish for him. “The magician’s plan serves himself, not the Goddess. I don’t trust anything he said to bring you out of it alive.”

“I have to do this. It’s my quest.” It would always come down to that: the ghost of his teacher at the bottom of Pearl Bay, sending him out into the world to free his people and save them from the end predicted in Lluka’s nightmares. But nothing had ever said he’d be alive at the end of it.

Carina wouldn’t look at him but stared at the herbs and medicines laid out on her workbench. “A potion to cause sleep, or a temporary illness is possible. Any draught strong enough to slow a creature from the underworld would kill a human being. How will you trick this king of demons into taking the poison from your hands without tasting it yourself?”

“Master Markko spent a season in his workshop making sure that I could sip his poisons and live, all for this very purpose. He planned that I would kill the demon-king for him. He said that I would rule beside him as his son, but I think that in my weakened state he planned to kill me and take his place alone at the head of his army of imps. That’s why I have to deal with him first.” And he’d be going after the more powerful foe already weakened in battle.

Adar’s voice interrupted from the doorway. “He plans to open the way to the underworld with your blood and lead the armies of demons to cast down the gates of heaven. The demon will be looking to water the underworld with royal blood as well. You can’t go up against either one of them alone. You’ve seen Lluka’s dreams. It’s not just your life at risk, but all the kingdoms of heaven and the mortal realm that will suffer if we fail on those mountains.”

Outside, a voice rose in terrible screams and was quieted again. Lluka, growing more mad the closer they came to the time and place his dreams led him. Llesho shivered in anticipation of the battle to come, but let his brother draw his own conclusions from that terrible cry.

“What do you suggest I do?”

“I don’t know.” Adar went to the workbench, picked up a vial, another. “I just don’t want you to die.”

“I’ll see what I can do. It would help to have that potion.”

Tears streaked Carina’s cheeks, but she handed Adar a pinch of an herb with a noxious odor and added a tincture of wine.

“Do you still have the Lady Chaiujin’s cup?” Adar asked.

“Yes.” Llesho unsheathed his knife and pried off the wooden signet. When he put it down on the workbench it began to grow of its own accord until the spell-carved box rested in front of them.

Adar opened the box and took out the cup with the spiral sigil at the bottom of the bowl. With a small brush, he painted the inside with the potion the two healers had concocted.

“Offer him this cup as a gift. He will doubtless make you drink from it first. If Master Markko has indeed hardened you against poisons, and if you only touch your lips to the tea, it will do little damage. But it’s a very powerful draught. Don’t drink more than a sip, however; you can’t kill the creature if you are writhing in your own death agony.”

Adar blew gently into the cup to dry the concoction that he had painted there. When it was done, he placed it back on its bed of earth and closed the box. “Try to handle the cup only from the sides, and keep your fingers away from the lip,” he warned. “The poison can enter the body through the skin as easily as by swallowing.”

“I understand.” Llesho stared at the spell-box that held the cup for another moment. “But I don’t know how to make it small again.”

“It’s a simple spell,” Carina placed her hands on either side of the box.

“Master Geomancer needed my blood,” Llesho told her, offering up the palm of his hand where a thin red line gave evidence of the setting of the spell.

“I won’t hurt you.” Carina sniffed, offended. “Besides, the spell has already been set. All I have to do is invoke it now. Put your hands over mine.”

Llesho did, and slowly she brought her palms together with his hands tucked against her fingers, until the box was once again small enough to fit smoothly into the butt of his knife. As Master Markko used to do, they carefully cleaned the area with pure water and wrapped the bowl they had used for the potion in a clean towel for burying.

It felt wrong to ask such a thing of his brother or Carina, but he didn’t know what else to do. “Thank you” choked in his throat. So he said, “I’m sorry.”

“I know. I wish we could have found another way.” Adar cocked his head as another desperate cry wavered in the thin air. “We’ll take care of Lluka while you’re gone.”

Llesho gave a bow to acknowledge his gratitude to the healers, and his regret. He picked up his pack and left the red tent while his brother and the woman Llesho once thought he might love stood with their arms around each other watching him go. Like his brother Lluka, whose cries shattered the growing dusk, Llesho would find no comfort until the final battle was won.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Thirty-seven

High in the mountains above Kungol, a single tree clung to the stone, shading the entrance to a cave. Scrub and underbrush grew like a filthy beard all around the rocky entrance, from which the smell of sulfur and rotting flesh tainted the clean mountain air. From the cave came the the sound of weeping, mingling with the mumbled grunts and growled curses floating like the stink on the breeze. Llesho thought he heard snuffling among those terrible noises. It had to be a dream, but Llesho didn’t know how he had come to be in it.

“Pig?” He slipped a chilled hand inside his shirt, found the black pearl wound with silver still hanging from its silver chain. Not Pig, then . . . Llesho took a cautious step forward.

Out of the cave came a scream filled with horrific pain that rose in pitch as it went on, and on. It raised the hairs on Llesho’s neck and curled his stomach in a tight protective ball in his gut. Something was dying—not easily—in that cave. He stepped back, looking for cover in the surrounding brush while the dark entrance filled with the snarling of a hundred angry voices.

A creature out of nightmares shambled into the light just as the screaming stopped. On first impression, he seemed to be short and squat, covered in a horny green hide that glistened with grease. When he stepped out from under the low roof of his den, however, he stood and stood, growing so tall that Llesho had to crane his neck to look at him. He couldn’t tell if the creature was always so tall and lived curled up in his cave, or if he—it seemed to be a he—had the ability to change his shape and size as he chose.

In the clawed fingers of one hand he dragged a human leg still dripping blood where it had been torn raggedly from the body of the creature’s victim. Razor-sharp teeth protruded so far from the monster’s jaws that the creature couldn’t close his mouth around them. His lips remained stretched in a perpetual sneer made more terrible by the human meat that dangled from the pointed fangs. While he looked Llesho over, the beast lifted the leg to his mouth and took a great rending bite that snapped bones as easily as flesh. Bits of human meat and sinew flew as he shook the shreds from his fangs and from the back of his mouth came the crunching sound of teeth strong as stone grinding bone.

It wasn’t the grisly snack that set Llesho to trembling, however, but its gaze. Instead of eyes, the awful creature looked at him out of two gleaming black pearls, the match of the ones he carried by a leather thong close to his heart.Oh, Goddess, he thought.What powers do your stolen treasures put in the hand—or in the eye—of your most dreaded enemy? But he kept this thought to himself.

“I’m glad to see you found me,” the demon greeted him with a grimace of a smile. “I always enjoy company for lunch.”

Llesho figured that wasn’t an invitation, at least not for him. The thing was not alone: more than one pair of bright eyes peered back at him from the mouth of the cave. Harsh growls and hungry chitters accompanied the bobbing and shifting of the creatures. One of the things—an imp, which Llesho figured for about his own height if it ever straightened from its cringing crouch—tried to make a break for it. The imp was dragging something that slowed it down. Llesho realized, on stealing a quick glance, that it was a human torso, torn open and with its guts trailing after on the ground.

Twenty or more of the creatures poured out of the cave, following the dripping torso, and leaped upon the thief. It seemed to matter very little to them whether they took a bite out of the human body they had dismembered or out of their own brother imp who had stolen it. The creature’s evil screams of pain and terror joined the vicious sounds of fighting and eating. Soon more screams rose from the center of that fray as the imps turned on each other in a frenzy of eating.

“I’ve come at a bad time.” Llesho took a step back. He gave a little shake of his head, but his antlers weren’t there. Still, time to go—

“You’re not leaving us so soon?” With his stolen eyes, the demon-king cast an irritated glance over at the crawling knot of savage imps. His free hand reached out and broke off the tree that shaded the cave. Using his strong sharp teeth, he stripped it of branches for a makeshift club and quickly knocked his followers into an insensible heap with it. When he had regained a semblance of quiet that way, he turned the pearls of his eyes on Llesho.

“I thought you’d be dying to meet my guests. Or is that, ‘I thought you would die and be meatfor my guests?’ ” With that he made a swiping grab with his huge clawed hand.

Llesho jumped back, though not soon enough to have saved him if he’d brought his body along. But the demon-king’s talons passed through him like a mist. He wasn’t bleeding so it had to be a dream; until that moment, he hadn’t been entirely sure.

“Ah, well, it doesn’t matter, does it?” the demon gave a wistful sigh, gusting putrid breath in Llesho’s direction. If he’d really been there, he’d be dead of the noxious gases the creature spewed before it added, “We’ll be having you for dinner in the flesh soon enough.”

The demon-king took another bite of the human leg he still carried, and another, licking the talons of his fingers when he was done. Then he crouched low on his wrongly-turning knees. “You cannot win,” he said, in a reasonable tone made terrible by the contradiction of human flesh clinging to his teeth. “I have shown you the kindliest of my faces because I don’t want you dying of fear in your dreams. That would deprive me of the pleasure of killing you myself, and that would never do.”

“Pig!” he called, because he didn’t know how he’d gotten here or where his body was on the other side of the dreamscape. Even knowing that the demon-king couldn’t hurt him, he stepped away from those knifelike claws and razor teeth. Back and back again until his heel came down on empty air.

“Later!” the demon-king yelled after him as he fell, a promise that their next meeting would go differently.

And then Llesho jolted out of a daze to catch his balance against a stumble in his horse’s gait. Behind him, Shou’s army had taken up a mournful Shannish marching song:

 “As I march from the home I am leaving by the cottage door, holding our babe My sweetheart is quietly weeping For the sweet boy she sends to the grave.”

Next to him, Master Den was watching him curiously. “Where did you go this time?” the trickster asked. “I’ve been watching your empty eyes all morning.”

Kungol had grown to fill the horizon. It was time to send his generals to lead their armies according to their plan. But her ladyship was watching him as well, and it was important that they know.

“I’ve seen Master Markko’s demon, or what he wanted me to see. I think he was playing with me, like a cat with a mouse.” He grimaced with the smell of death still caught in his throat. “I don’t think I’ll get away as easily next time.”

He didn’t mention the pearls that filled the demon’s eye sockets, reminding him of a dream the other side of Pontus.

In the dream, he had walked among the Wastrels dead upon the grasslands, plucking pearls from the orbits of their eyes. In the waking world the stone monsters had taken their hearts and left the Goddess’ pearls in their place. Either way his grief and horror had been the same. He’d thought the dream over, however. Now, it looked like he still had a part of the dream to face in yet another form. But at least he’d found where the black pearls of the Goddess had fallen.

“But the drums and the pipes now are silent and the tunic of red turns to rust And the fields are now sown with the fallen in the twilight, in blood, and in dust.”

The song cut too close to what he was feeling in the aftermath of his meeting with the demon-king, but her ladyship was quick to assure him, “Then we will strike at this demon. Your lady wife will have no complaint against your armies this time.”

“I know,” Llesho accepted her assurances rather than argue with a mortal god. It wouldn’t work out that way. The demon resided in a pocket of the underworld intruding upon the mountain at the very place where the peaks touched heaven. Mortal armies might wander forever on that mountain and never find the contending forces out of realms that existed only in magic. That battle would be for him alone. But first, they had to take back the Holy City of the Goddess.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Thirty-eight

VIEWED FROM heaven, the Thousand Peaks Mountains began as a ridge of low hills in Farshore Province. From there they swept south, rising in a spine of jagged mountains that curved in a great crescent around Thebin’s south ernmost border. The Cloud Country, as their neighbors called Thebin, lay on a broad plateau high in the mountains, as if the ancient forces that had formed that awesome barrer had paused here on the roof of the world before their final effort: the six peaks whose glacier-crowned heads pierced heaven itself.

Llesho’s heavenly ancestors, some said, had come down from those mountains to explore their handiwork and had stayed to aid and guide the people they found struggling at the foot of their great mountains. With their breath they gave the Thebin people the power to breathe the thin air. With their thumbs they created the great passes to the west in the mountains. Then they bid their people build a great Golden City and in it two towers, one to the Goddess, whose sign was the moon, and the other to recognize the earthy power of the sun.

When it was done, the king withdrew into his earthy palace and called the caravans for trade. The queen took her place among the priests in the temple built for her use, from where she might travel between the realms of heaven and earth. They had the mountains to protect them and the gaze of heaven to fill their hearts with joy. And they had no need of walls.

As a child in the palace, Llesho had been too young to sort fact from legend in the tales. His experiences since leaving Pearl Island gave him cause to wonder even now where that line should fall—or if there should be any line at all. Facing that hideous wall the Harn had forced his people to build around the fading Golden City, however, a baleful anger stirred in him for the crimes the Uulgar raiders had committed against his people and against the realm precious to the Great Goddess.

For himself that wall seemed not the devastation of his home but the setting before him of one more test. Another obstacle stood between him and the heavenly gardens that called him more powerfully than his city or his brothers or any earthly conquests. This time he was ready, with all his armies about him.

By some magic of his own, Master Den had provided yet again the appropriate wear for a king of Thebin going to war. Llesho had set the silver fillet of the king on his head and donned not his embroidered court coats, but genuine Thebin armor, the grown version of the child’s armor that he had worn on parade before the Harn had taken all that away—the good and the bad. The armor was as uncomfortable as he remembered—a big part of the bad, that. The plates across his chest didn’t shine as gloriously as Shou’s, but those among his own people who had survived from before the raiders would recognize the challenge in the very fact he wore it.

As Llesho had hoped, word of rescue arriving in such numbers followed them through the dry and seemingly empty lands of abandoned farms and desolate villages. Thebin bandits and freedom fighters alike crept out of hiding to join them. Women and children, refugees all, fell in with the armies. They lacked the skills of a trained army, and their numbers made scarcely a ripple among Llesho’s forces, but they were by their very presence symbols of the new resolve to take Thebin back from their oppressors in the name of their rightful king.

By the plan he had worked out with Ghrisz, the armies under Llesho’s command marched nearly to the gates of the city in five long columns, each four soldiers across. When they had come close enough to read the grain in the wood that barred the gates, the first rank of kings and princes, gods and noble generals, with Llesho at their head, stopped. Their forces in the many uniforms of their own nations gathered with measured march around them, filling the whole expanse of land that opened out from the unwel coming wall surrounding the city.

The raiders were cowards, preferring to make war on the unsuspecting. When the full reality of fifty thousand armed troops massed against them became more widely known the garrison would tremble with dread. Shokar had hoped that the display of might alone would bring the raiders to the point of surrender. Adar had expressed his doubts. He’d spent time as a prisoner of Markko’s lieutenant and had seen firsthand the more urgent fear of their leader that kept the Uulgar clans facing forward. Llesho had seen that for himself in the South, when terror of their master had pushed Lord Yueh’s men across the Golden Dragon Bridge that had been no bridge at all but a fierce and wily dragon.

Noise and a great show of ferocity would certainly weaken the raiders’ resolve, Adar had conceded. Like any cornered beast, they might leap in unpredictable directions when pressed between their own deadly master and the forces arrayed against them. But leap they surely would. And so in the full light of Great Sun high overhead, they rode up to the gate under the watchful eyes of the captive city.

They were not surprised when a general of imposing stature, his chest decorated with locks of hair taken from his many victims, addressed them from the lookout post above the gate. “Take your rabble and go!” he said, “before my Master of the Crows has you for lunch!”

Llesho figured he meant Master Markko, who had poisoned the Uulgar khan and fed his body to a flock of crows which had themselves died in a great stinking blanket of soot-colored birds.

“My rabble has no intention of leaving until your wall is torn down and Kungol is returned to its rightful king,” Llesho answered him. “Tell your master that the lost king of Thebin has returned to reclaim the throne for his people. Open these gates and lay down your arms, or suffer the consequences.”

“Thebin has no king,” the general jeered. “The old king died on his knees, which is what the people of Thebin do best!”

Llesho wasn’t sure if he meant the dying part or the kneeling part. Ghrisz had run them a merry race, however, something the Harnishman doubtless knew.

The general continued his bombast: “That’s why Kungol is ruled by a khan more powerful than any mortal man!”

Llesho didn’t let his anger show, but made his claim in a loud, clear voice: “Tell your master that the holy king of the Kungol people has returned. With him comes the emperor of Shan with his armies and the khans of the Qubal and the Tinglut with their armies and the Daughters of the Sword from Bithynia and the Gansau Wastrels out of legend. Tell him the mortal gods are knocking at his door, and the gods would see justice!”

The Harnish did not recognize the mortal gods, but one name among them must shake even these hardened warriors. “Tell Master Markko that the mortal goddess of war has ridden against him. Tell him she seeks satisfaction for deaths in the South and for the terrible end of all things he draws down upon all our heads. His armies will find only disaster on this field.”

At mention of the mortal goddess of war, the man looked out over their company with a disdainful sneer. He drew a breath to sharpen the cut of his next insult, when his eyes lit upon the Lady SienMa. Llesho turned his eyes also to the lady. Terrible judgment set her icy white features in chiseled lines of marble, nothing living but the death in her eyes. The general trembled so that his sword knocked against the thick plaster of the wall behind which he hid.

“You think your master has terrified you with wonders,” Llesho said, and raised his hand. “You have not seen wonders yet.”

Master Den had slipped from the bare back of Marmer Sea Dragon, who had carried him in the form of Bluebell the giant horse. At Llesho’s signal, the dragon took his natural form, rising in flight above the combined armies in a spiral of coils the color of a stormy sea. Higher and higher he rose, until he could be plainly seen inside the city walls. Then, with an elegant snap of his tail, he straightened to his full length. Without leaving his place at the northern gate his head looked down on the unbroken southern wall.

Llesho could hear voices from within the city walls rising in terror like the rumble of a storm. From his own troops there came not a sound or a stirring from their places. Marmer Sea Dragon had shown himself to the combined armies as part of field training so his monstrous appearance came as no surprise to them. It helped knowing the dragon-king was on their side, of course, but the Harnish general had no such comfort. He turned a shade of green that rivaled the dragon’s scales and disappeared. A moment later a Thebin prisoner showed his face above the gate, no less terrified than the guard who commanded him. A little smile of triumph fought its way to his lips in spite of his fear. Dragons certainly made convincing allies.

“They want to know if you can make it go away.”

Marmer Sea Dragon had made a lazy circle around the city, so that he faced back the way he had come. That was part of the plan, too. Llesho held his spear up over his head, so that the bladed head pointed skyward. He willed blue flame to shudder along its length. The flame arced overhead, snapping like lightning in the clear blue sky. The man fell back as the guard had done, but the dragon-king had seen the signal.

With a deep, powerful stroke of his wings, Marmer Sea Dragon lifted higher still in the air, until he was no larger, to the eye, than a butterfly. Then, as swiftly as a streak of lightning, he was gone, heading south. He would travel by magical routes to gather the other three worms promised in Menar’s prophecy. Pearl Bay Dragon, Golden River Dragon, and Dun Dragon would return with him for the great battle with the demon for the gates of heaven. The taking of Kungol belonged to humans and their mortal gods.

The crack of light from his spear had been a signal to his troops as well. As they had agreed, the Daughters of the Sword divided into two columns, one heading east, one west to encircle the city in preparation for attack. Mergen-Khan’s Qubal warriors did the same, matching the women warriors pace for pace. If the Apadisha’s daughter decided to take on the winner in the coming battle, with Kungol her prize, Llesho had wanted his closest ally watching over her shoulder.

Closest save one. Llesho sheathed his spear and returned to the army he had come to see as his own. The emperor of Shan had led his forces from the heart of the empire across half the world to aid him in his quest. Now he would buy Llesho time—for his armies to get in place, and for Llesho himself to enter the city in secret by the hidden tunnels that Ghrisz had shown him. If they were very lucky, he might divert slaughter yet.

“Tell your general to come out,” he shouted to the Thebin captive at the gate. “My champion challenges fair duel for your gate.”

At that, and by agreement, Shou marched his great war steed forward. He had changed his sword for a long spear, but his armor shone as it had when Llesho had first met him on the field of battle on the outskirts of Shan Province.

“Come down and fight, or be ever called a coward!” To emphasize the call to single combat he struck a shivering blow against the gate, which shook under his assault.

In council, Shou had protested the archaic call to arms. “Why don’t I just set fire to the gate?” he’d said, “If they don’t come out to put out the flames, we can walk in through the ashes when it’s done.”

“It’s not just about one battle,” Menar had explained. As a poet he knew about such things. “We need the people inside the wall, who have been oppressed all these season by the Harn, to believe they have a chance to win if they fight. For that, we need to put legend to work in our cause.”

“Then you need a legend to make your challenge,” Shou had protested further.

Only ChiChu, the trickster god, had the nerve to laugh at that. “You are a legend; that’s why it must be you!”

In all the faces around that map-spread table he had found no dissenting voice. And so Shou pounded on the well-made gate, drawing the attention of all who might view him from above, while Llesho faded quietly into the ranks, where he slid off his horse and quickly shed the armor that had already done its duty. Immediately his cadre surrounded him at the center of a protective circle of Imperial Guardsmen disguised in uniforms of a less prestigious service. They didn’t want to call attention to the very figure they were trying to protect. Well accustomed to spycraft, Llesho slipped from his place at the center of the crowd to one off to the side where Bixei waited for him with a change of coat.

“Master Den usually sees to my wardrobe.” Free of the heavy chest plate, Llesho rotated his shoulders in a few tight circles and took his first deep breath of the day. He had only a moment to enjoy his freedom before he slipped the short spear in its sheath over his shoulder and plunged his arms into the rough hooded coat.

“And you’ll need this.” Bixei handed him a small bag that held a few herbs for tea and the jade marriage cup that almost matched the poisoned one of the Lady Chaiujin. It was a rare treasure to use as a wayfare cup, but he didn’t think the demon-king would have much experience with such things. With a nod of thanks he looped the bag over his belt, next to the sheath that held his Thebin knife. He kept the circlet of silver—he would need it in his confrontation with Master Markko—but he pulled the hood low over his brow. The coat would hide his identity as well as the weapon while they made their way to the Palace of the Sun, where Master Markko had set up his own evil court.

Around them, soldiers were moving out. “Are we ready?” Kaydu glided up beside him. Prince Tayyichiut had stayed behind when his uncle the khan had led his troops into position and he fell in line with Llesho’s cadre as if he had always been there, which seemed to suit them all.

Llesho nodded. “Adar agreed to stay with Lluka, since his madness is growing.” That was no surprise. Lluka now traveled bound so that he didn’t hurt himself. Soon they would have to muffle his voice as well, or risk unnerving their own troops.

“Balar wished to stay with Menar to study the prophecy in greater depth,” Kaydu reported. “Musician to poet, he said.”

“And Little Brother?” Llesho asked. The monkey usually rode with the troops to battle, in a sling that hung from Kaydu’s saddle. “With us as always,” she said. “He is looking forward to seeing Master Markko fall almost as much as we are.”

He seemed to have fooled his cadre, who gave no sign of any suspicion that his own battles would be longer, and lonelier, than he had reported to his council of war.

“Shokar will lead our Thebin forces,” Kaydu added. “They’ll be entering the city by the escape routes hidden along the wall, so we’ll have reinforcements if we need them. All you have to do is not get killed.”

“Sarcasm,” he noted with a twist of his mouth. “I guess we’re ready then.”

Joining the crowd in apparent aimless wandering, the cadre with Llesho at its head worked its way closer to the wall, nearer to the hidden entrance that Ghrisz had sketched with a finger against a map. As Ghrisz had predicted, the guards on the city wall had gathered with drawn bows to watch the emperor of Shan challenge their general in single combat. They would expect the attack to come from the armies gathered below as soon as Shou abandoned his taunts and disappeared again into his own lines. Safe, as they must think, behind their defenses, they would assume the armies surrounding them intended a siege. And so they didn’t notice when small groups of soldiers stationed here and there along the wall began disappearing inside.

Shokar led his troops, including two hands of Gansau Wastrels with him to represent the Dinha, to the northwest ern corner of the city where resistance fighters in Ghrisz’s command waited to sneak them in through a secret passage in the wall there. Llesho turned to the northeast. With his cadre, under Bixei’s command, came a small band of mercenaries disguised in Harnish dress. They had pledged to regain their honor, lost, they believed, with the fall of Kungol. Their clan had sworn to defend the palace all those seasons ago and they meant to make good on that promise by recapturing it now.

Five thousand out of their fifty thousand in all found their assigned places along the wall, where Ghrisz’s spies waited to sneak them into the city. Each band had its assigned task. And Llesho had his. Ghrisz hadn’t wanted to risk Thebin’s young king in the fighting but there hadn’t been time for a debate: Llesho pulled rank.

His brother was waiting for them in the tunnels that riddled the Harnish wall. When the panel hiding the secret entrance slid out of the way, Bixei led his small band into the darkness, first to die if they had been betrayed. A ragged beggar with sharp, intelligent eyes waited for them with a torch in his hand. Mgar one of their own waiting to guide his brothers into the city. Llesho greeted him with a quick tilt of his chin.

“This way,” Mgar instructed, and started moving the mercenary guardsmen farther down the tunnel.

Other resistance fighters waited with their own torches until they were all hidden inside the wall with Stipes the last to protect their backs. Someone in the dark slid the panel back in place, and Ghrisz stepped out of the shadows. He wore the usual castoffs that marked the oppressed population, disguise perhaps, though Llesho wasn’t clear if the resistance had any better clothes if they had wanted them. Years of Harnish rule had been hard on all the people in the city, not least the oldest of her seven princes.

“We won’t be entering the city here,” Ghrisz said, and gestured for them to follow him. “We have tunnels that can get you closer to the magician. Or to one of our hideouts, if you’ve changed your mind. We can protect you there until the fighting is over—”

“You know that won’t work,” Llesho reminded him. “Somebody has to take on Master Markko. I’ve survived against him before, I can do it again.”

“And what makes you think he won’t kill you this time? I thought that was the point, at the end of the day? To kill a prince as a blood sacrifice to his demon lord?”

Llesho said nothing about the poisoned cup he carried in the spell-box hidden on his knife. Now that he had met the demon, he had begun to doubt that any of their plans would work against it. He didn’t think his brother would appreciate the only answer he had to give, though—that his life belonged to his Goddess to save or not as she pleased. He thought she might, this time. More importantly, he thought they would all die and their worlds with them if he didn’t succeed.

He said none of this, but Ghrisz must have seen some of his determination in the flicker of torchlight.

“All right.” He let out a disgusted sigh. “You’ll want the raiders to have their eyes turned outward tonight. Your champion can’t beat his chest all day out there. I assume you have your diversions as planned?”

“A full-scale attack on the outside of the wall will come soon.” As the cadre’s captain, Kaydu answered for them. “Shokar is bringing his forces into the city through the tunnels. When the raiders are fully engaged with the siege forces outside, we’ll spring the trap. Shokar will take the gate and let in the army that will be waiting to enter on his signal.”

Ghrisz nodded. With fifty thousand troops outside in addition to his own force and those Shokar was bringing through the tunnels, they should have no trouble defeating the Harnish raiders. They all knew the magician was the key, however. Markko could wipe the city flat with a storm like the one that had swept the Marmer Sea. He might command the demon-king to destroy the city if he chose. That’s why Llesho had to get to him first.

“We’d better get moving, then. I’ll be your guide myself.” Ghrisz gave him a fleeting smile that disappeared as quickly as it had come. “Ping will meet you in the temple. I couldn’t stopher either.”

That didn’t surprise Llesho. In his dream-walk, he’d found Ping waiting for him at the base of the temple tower and had it figured that she spent more nights than that one there. He followed Ghrisz down the long dark passage. He’d been in tunnels like this before, under the arena at Farshore, and following Shou through the secret passages under the palace in the Imperial City of Shan. With little concern for the weight of the great wall that towered above them, they made haste in the flickering light, while behind him the sound of his armies starting their attack thundered through the plaster.

Llesho tried to close his mind to the numbers who would die in the diversionary battle. Master Markko’s raiders had the advantage of cover. Their arrows would be falling from above like murderous hailstones into the midst of his troops below, with only the shields of their swordsmen raised in a protective leather shell over his own bowmen. The wall of shields would protect them for a while, but his forces would break hopelessly against the might of that great wall if Shokar didn’t open the gate.

All along the wall they heard the sound of fighting until Ghrisz angled them down, to make their way underground toward the center of the city. Bixei and his mercenaries had passed out of hearing long ago, heading for their own exit point. They would rejoin Llesho’s group closer to the palace, in case they had to fight their way through. For now, however, the goal was to pass in small bands unnoticed through the city streets.

Here the tunnels were narrower and more roughly carved. No plaster or beams held up the earth over their heads—nothing but the dry stubbornness of the Thebin soil. For more than three li they traveled that way, their shoulders brushing one side or the other, with only a torch in Ghrisz’s hand ahead of them and one that Stipes carried behind to light their way. Narrow conduits brought fresh air from the surface, and sometimes the sound of shouting or running feet. Once Ghrisz pulled them into a side tunnel to let a runner pass on his way to the front.

When they started moving again, the ground under their feet began to rise. “This way.” Ghrisz pressed against what appeared to be a solid wall.

Llesho heard the slide of stone upon stone at ear level, then a breeze tickled his face. A hidden door swung open into a storeroom at the back of a tavern. The area was poor, the walls of Thebin plaster long gone black with soot. A hallway crossed in front of the storeroom, at the end of which a door stood open to an alley stinking of piss and worse. From the other end of the hall came the angry sounds of an argument in the public room.

“By ones and twos,” Ghrisz said. He plunged his torch into a bucket that sizzled and smoked as the flame went out and pushed Hmishi and Lling into the hallway. After a few minutes Stipes doused his own torch and with Kaydu followed them into the public house, arguing loudly with the two princes.

“More beer!” Ghrisz called, and the barman grabbed a club and shook it, bellowing, “Not tonight! If you are so keen to fight, take it to the gates! You’ll find plenty of work for your fists!”

They had only just arrived and had done no fighting. Llesho figured the man was part of the plot and allowed himself to be chased from the pub.

Great Moon Lun had not yet shown her face but Han and Chen cast a dim light as they chased each other across the sky, cloaking the streets in layers of shadows. None of this was familiar ground for Llesho so he hunched ear-deep into his shoulders and ran, following Ghrisz, who knew where he was going.

Careening around a corner of broken plaster fallen in the street they were met by a squad of raiders rushing away from the temple in their direction.

“He’s one of them!” shouted the leader, drawing his sword and pointing it at Ghrisz. Immediately his own cadre drew their weapons and the battle was on.

“Go!” his brother shouted amid the clang of sword against sword.

From its sheath at his back the short spear whispered, “Kill them!” in his ear, “Only cowards run!” But it had never spoken a true word to him in all the lifetimes he had known it. If he turned back to help here, Master Markko would gain valuable time against them. Just a few streets separated Llesho from the temple in the public square: from here he could see it rising in front of him, could figure out the way on his own.

He started to run, almost stopped at the grunt of surprised pain he heard behind him. Kaydu, that was. Little Brother screeched in rage, and suddenly his monkey voice deepened, bellowed louder than Llesho had ever heard it. He did turn then, just a quick glance, that took his breath away. Kaydu lay curled on her side, protecting a wound on her arm that bled slowly but surely onto the street. Above her Little Brother, in his uniform of the imperial militia, had grown to the height of a man. In his great hairy arms he had taken up her sword and he lay about him with it in perfect form. Enemy and ally alike fell back in amazement, but Little Brother recognized friend from foe and soon the street was slippery with blood.

Hmishi and Lling recovered quickly. Having traveled with Little Brother they’d had their own suspicions about him. Ghrisz had lived with fewer wonders but knew better than to insult an ally. “Go!” he said, and joined Little Brother in the attack. Llesho ran, dodged into an alley—

—and tripped over a beggar who snatched at his ankle from the dusty shadows. “Turn back! The monsters are coming!” the voice called to him, hoarse as if he’d been shouting for a long time. If he saw the things that Llesho had seen, that seemed likely. It didn’t stop him, though; he turned onto the main thoroughfare, keeping close to the buildings collapsing in on themselves that had once been temples and markets and houses of trade and diplomacy.

The Temple of the Moon lay in front of him but so did another skirmish, between bands of Harnishmen, it seemed. Except that he was sure he recognized the fighting style at the center of the fray. Bixei, holding the way clear for him, or trying to. Llesho tried to zigzag around the fight, caught the blunt end of a short spear in the head and kept on moving while the ringing in his ears clashed with the sound of steel on steel.

Suddenly, moonlight so tangible he thought he might reach out and caress it poured like molten silver over its stepped sides. The sight filled him with so much yearning and pain and joy that for a moment he was paralyzed with the conflicting emotions. His mother had lived here, had held him on her lap and sung songs to him; had greeted dignitaries and priests alike with him tucked safely in her arms. His mother had died here, and her spirit still filled the temple with her death.

High atop her tower, two bridges of moonlight would reach out to him. Menar’s prophecy itched at the back of his brain—two paths, it had said. Llesho knew which one he wanted to take, knew also that tonight he would go the other way. Not to the gates of heaven, where the Great Goddess awaited him, but to the Palace of the Sun, where Master Markko wove his poisonous webs.

Ahead lay the small side door he’d used as a child and later in his dream travels. As he approached, Princess Ping appeared from the shadows dressed in tattered rags as she had before.

“There isn’t much time left. Give me your hand.” She held out her own small, callused fingers and he took them, studying her eyes for something . . .

“The spirits,” he began, a warning for her to stay out, to let him do alone what he had already done once.

“That’s why I’m here.” Ping gave him a mischievous smile. Lifetimes looked out of her eyes at him. “There isn’t time—come on!”

She gave a tug on his hand and he followed her willingly, into the temple, to the staircase that had haunted him with its sorrowful spirits. This time when the ghosts crowded near, his sister spoke to them and they fell silent. Only a hushed whisper, as of ghostly clothing passing on the stairs, accompanied them. There was purpose in that unearthly tread; the higher they climbed, the stronger the sound of ghosts following on the stairs became.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Thirty-nine

AT FIRST the thought of so many Thebin dead at his back sent a chill of fear curling up Llesho’s spine. Gradually, however, he allowed his awareness of their company to warm the spirit that curled at the bottom of his heart. His thoughts reached out to the temple’s ghosts and they touched him, softly, as supplicants might kiss the robes of a priest who passed through the streets. They offered comfort and their own deadly protection, though he knew they couldn’t travel beyond their own tower.

He felt the presence of his sister at his side, undisturbed by the spirits around them, and he knew she shared with him her easiness with their dead. He set the supplicant spirits aside with a promise, “Later,” but his thoughts were for the living. Reaching out to them, he touched living minds.

The emperor of Shan sat his warhorse directing armies with a sword he clenched in his fist. With the emperor’s ears Llesho heard the screaming of horses, the singing of arrows in flight from the Uulgar wall and the cries of his own followers as those arrows found their mark. Shou/ Llesho raised his hand and a hundred ladders clattered against the Uulgar wall. Shannish soldiers climbed swiftly, dodging arrows—there were too many of them for the Harnish defenders. Llesho felt their fear and their determination as they climbed; some fell, and he staggered with the impact and kept on going. Others were reaching the top, drawing swords against bows and arrows that were no use for close-in fighting.

This was new, this living in the skins of his soldiers, of the newly dead and the soon to die. Was it some gift of the tower itself, or had his own mind expanded to meet his coming trial? Shou turned his emotions to stone, focused completely on the wall in front of him. In his mind, the emperor didn’t waste men in a diversion to buy time for Shokar or for Llesho. He fought to take the wall, and if he had help from inside, fine, and if he didn’t, then they’d take it any way they could—over the top or chipping away piece by piece until they had turned it into bloody rubble.

At his side the mortal goddess of war gathered messages from runners up and down the line. They could not hold long, but with a word, a command, they would, and did.

Somewhere in the Palace of the Sun a raider made a decision. He would send no troops outside the wall to engage the enemy. The wall would defeat them, or wear them down, he didn’t have to make it easy for them. His master would see to their success; he just had to hold until the magician came out of his tower. A chill terror clutched at the man’s gut at the thought of Master Markko, an image of his own superior officer gutted on a spit for failing in his mission. Hedidn’t think, reminded himself not to think of surrender, of flight. The magician would know, would punish even the thought of failure . . .

Shokar moved silently in the shadows, by small gestures directing half his combined force of Thebin recruits and finely honed Gansau Wastrels up a secret stairway carved inside the wall to the left of the great northern gate. On the right, the rest of his troops did the same. Unaware of the danger rising at their backs the Uulgar bowmen continued firing down into Shou’s army below. . . .

Willing his awareness to sweep over the city like a dragon, Llesho found Habiba astride his rearing white warhorse, urging a division of Shannish and Tinglut troops against the gate. Arrows flew perilously close all around him. One would have shattered his breast and exploded his heart, but her ladyship’s witch held out his sword in a warding gesture and the arrow erupted in a shower of splinters over the pommel of his saddle. Habiba shook his head as if clearing it from a blow, then he raised his sword over his head and shouted a call to attack.

At the rear, Bright Morning rolled bandages with Master Den and Balar. Carina and Adar stole a moment for a frightened embrace while they gathered their salves and unguents and medicines to reduce the fever in grievous wounds. Lluka they had tied to a cot where he lay shivering in dreams of disaster and destruction that Llesho had no time to battle right now. But Menar held his brother’s head and wiped his brow with a cool cloth, reciting healing poems over him from both Thebin and Bithynian apothecaries.

Llesho ascended higher into the tower but now he scarcely noticed the gathering storm of spirits following him. His dream vision moved on. Little Brother was nowhere to be seen, but Kaydu had a makeshift bandage wrapping the wound on her arm. She had joined his cadre to Bixei’s mercenary forces and together they fought their way to the temple. When they tried to mount the haunted staircase, however, the voracious spirits drove them out again, half mad from the attempt. Kaydu set them about to defend the base below him, with Bixei to lead the defenders and Stipes as his lieutenant. She was a magician, the daughter of dragons, and would not abandon her charge to ghosts; Llesho felt her determination like a steady flame as she took one step and then another up the stairs. Hmishi joined her, his own heart calm. He had been where these spirits were, and had nothing to fear from them. Lling joined him, like hilt to blade he drew her into his calm, and together they climbed. . . .

Shokar’s troops had reached the parapet above the gate and, with swords drawn, fell upon the archers, hacking and slaying. Llesho felt his brother’s determination, his loathing for his own actions as he cut down men who had no time to draw sword against them. Bow and arrow were useless in this struggle. Archers threw down their weapons, reaching for their swords, but too late. The first rank were cut down with hand to scabbard, but the second turned the battle against the new invaders. The commotion was bringing Uulgar defenders from positions farther down the wall to aid their fellows at the gate, but that gave Shou’s troops a clear shot with their ladders.

Not soon enough for the emperor on the other side of the wall, however. Llesho fell back against the tower wall that girded the stairs he traveled. With a gasp of surprise he gripped the scar below his shoulder where long ago an arrow from one of Lord Yueh’s men had buried itself.

“What is it?” Ping asked. She moved his hand carefully, looking for some wound, but saw none.

“Can’t you feel it?” he winced, sliding to the step with his knees up around his chin.

“I can’t sense beyond this tower, not until we reach the top. I need the light of Great Moon Lun to read the city.” Which told him something he’d begun to guess about her, too.

The spirits had grown silent in the tower, but the sound of battle reached them from closer now. There was fighting in the city streets and below them Bixei’s mercenaries repelled a halfhearted attack on the temple. But the wounded lay on both sides of the wall, screaming, or too exhausted to weep into the mud of their own blood mixed with the soil of Thebin.

“Llesho, come back to me!” Ping was looking at him with desperate compassion. “What do you see?” she asked him again.

“Shou has fallen.” Llesho’s dream-vision found the emperor still on the battlefield, pale and bleeding in the arms of the mortal goddess of war. Her warhorse stood, steadfast as the mountains as his mistress took the emperor onto her own saddle.

Not even the gods had time to mourn their losses now. “Take him,” Llesho heard the mortal goddess of war say, and felt the emperor’s body eased into the arms of his Imperial Guard. It hurt so that he couldn’t breathe when they moved him. Llesho realized that the emperor must still be alive, but for how long?

“I think he may be dying.” He rubbed his face, trying to clear his mind of the lingering effects of Shou’s injury.

Ping nodded as if his words confirmed something that she had only guessed until that moment. “Let me help you. I can’t stop it—if I were meant to, the tower wouldn’t have given you the visions in the first place.”

“That’s enough,” he assured her, comforted by the fact that she didn’t doubt what he had seen and felt.

“Focus on me, and the staircase—direct your arms and legs as if you stood outside yourself. You can set the feelings at a distance.” She put her hand on his shoulder and the pain faded.Mother, he thought. He knew that was wrong, but her power felt familiar in that way. His mother had been a priestess-queen, a goddess in her own way.

“Oh!” he realized. “I know who you are—”

“Your sister. Always.” She meant more than this lifetime. His heart swelled within him. The sapphire princess indeed, and a stripling girl only in this world’s eyes. He trusted her utterly to lead him unharmed to the queen’s pavilion now. And he knew that, while he’d been born to be king for a little while, he’d never been meant to sit on the throne. Because his sister, Princess Ping, was going to be queen.

He levered himself up and, shaking off the reawakened ache of old wounds, he started up the stairs again. This time he kept his thoughts focused on the worn stone of the steps he ascended, and the rough walls of the tower at his shoulder.

He couldn’t quite block out the spirit presence that gathered at his back. Ping took his hand again, however, and he accepted his living sister and her dead courtiers as a comfort and support for his coming battle. When they had reached as high as they could go it seemed that every life of every priest and priestess, of every queen and all her children who had lived and died in the temple, accompanied them in these last steps of his quest.

“I can’t kill him,” he said, a confession he hoped she’d understand. “There are innocents involved.”

“We know,” Ping said, denying nothing of her connection to the spirits of the temple.

Llesho stared out into the direction Marmer Sea Dragon had flown. “Reinforcements are on their way,” he said, but his vision couldn’t penetrate the gloom.

“Our odds of success improve.”

“Thank you.” For the trek through the temple and his new appreciation of her ghosts, he meant; for the confidence she placed in him and for witnessing his struggle with the magician.

“You’re welcome,” she answered all his thanks and stood aside for him.

Llesho stepped onto the pavilion atop the Temple of the Moon. Ping followed, lingering in the shadows. Across the public square, Master Markko stood looking back at him from the king’s pavilion above the Palace of the Sun.

“You’ve come,” the magician said. In the way of magic, the voice whispered in his ear as if Master Markko stood beside him. The magician glanced away. At that distance Llesho shouldn’t have been able to see it, but he knew Markko looked toward the mountains where Great Moon Lun had begun her nightly ascent. Soon the rays of her light would pierce the eye of the needle and the bridge of moonlight would arc across the square. Already the light was striking the stone floor under Llesho’s feet, glinting now off the spear at his back. He didn’t dare take it with him into this battle, but unfastened the sheath and offered it, still covered, to his sister.

She reached out to accept it, but pulled her fingers away as sparks curled angrily along its length.

“I don’t think it wants anyone but you.”

Llesho accepted that and set the weapon that had caused so much grief throughout his lifetimes on the stones at her feet.

“I think I’m going to need it one more time,” he said with a speaking look in the direction of the mountains, where an army of demons stood between him and the gates of heaven.

“I love you, brother. Don’t forget that.”

He was almost afraid to embrace her, but she grabbed him in a tight hug and thumped him to remind him that she was still Ghrisz’s spy, and a soldier, whatever her rank or position might be when they had won.

“I love you, too,” he said, then the time had come. The fabulous bridge of moonlight sprang into existence in the air between the temple and the palace. At first it was so thin and fragile Llesho could see right through it. Gradually, it grew brighter and more substantial, until it ran with silver light like rain.

On the other side, Master Markko set a cautious foot on the bridge. It passed right through and he tumbled backward rather than suffer the fate of his guardsman so few nights ago.

Llesho shook his head, surprised that the magician, having studied so much about the mysteries of Kungol, could know so little about this one. Then he set first one foot, then the other, onto the bridge of light and began to cross.

“I knew you were the one.” Master Markko waited for him, hands at his sides and a smug grin on his face.

With a shrug, Llesho stepped down onto the stone flags of the king’s pavilion. “Now I know it, too,” he said. Mostly it had brought him grief through all his lifetimes. That hadn’t changed in a thousand seasons and a thousand more.

Below he heard death stalking the armies who fought street to street. The city gates had fallen. Cries of horses maddened by fear mingled with the death cries of their masters and their enemies both. Hemmed in as they had never fought before, they plunged down the narrow chutes of the alleyways. The wailing of the spirits of the dead sounded the same to his newfound ear; it didn’t matter to ghosts if they were friends or enemies.

Llesho felt it all and it rocked him back on his heels until he forced himself to remember Ping’s instruction. As she had taught him, he focused on each step, each move of the magician waiting on the tower where his father once had ruled. The king’s pavilion had seen many uses over time. As a husband, the king of Thebin walked the bridge of light to visit his queen, the high priestess, in her temple. In bloodier times, the people sacrificed their king to the setting sun here.

His father had been no warrior, had no army, but Llesho wondered what other tools the Palace of the Sun offered to one schooled in battle by the mortal goddess of war herself.Power, he thought, if he could figure out how to use it.

The tower fed him sensations from the battle below. The combined armies of his allies poured through the city. Off to the south the Qubal under Mergen and the Daughters of the Sword had attacked with grappling lines and ladders, swarming over the wall with their own war shrieks.

The Harnish raiders, who did not count women as soldiers, dropped their weapons in terror. Llesho focused, setting at a distance the Uulgar warriors’ fear that the Daughters were not human at all but demons dropping from the skies to suck their spirits out through their eyes. Still he flinched as a sword flashed inches from the eyes of the soldier whose mind fed him the images.

The greater numbers of his own huge army left no doubt as to the outcome, except that the Daughters were making maps as well as corpses. Likewise, Tinglut-Khan had taken more than casual note that Shou had withdrawn to the surgery tent with wounds that left his survival in question. The wound on Kaydu’s sword arm had begun to swell with infection. She didn’t know it yet, but the arm was already dying and remained only to be separated from her body or take her with it into the underworld. Witches didn’t have the power to heal their own wounds. He wondered if in shapeshifting she could repair the loss or if the eagle would never fly again.

Master Markko held a sword awkwardly in his hand, but not to fight with. “We could have done this differently,” he said, true mourning in his voice. “I trained you like a son to stand against the creature out there—” his chin rose in the direction of the mountainside where the demon-king lay siege to the gates of heaven. “You could have defeated the monster. The gates would have opened to you.”

“And then you would have murdered me and tried to take my place,” Llesho pointed out. “I have no taste for sacrifice, particularly my own.”

“Clever,” the magician acknowledged. “But there is no other way. You’ve seen the dreams, I know you have. If the gates of heaven fall to the beast . . .” he shrugged, as if the truth of those dreams did not require speaking between them.

“And you see yourself as the hero of the tale?” Llesho circled slowly, his hands outstretched, empty of weapons. Focused on the challenger. He had trained for this and battles going on elsewhere faded from his awareness.

“Of course,” Markko answered. “Who else has understood the power required to defeat the enemy? Who else has worked so tirelessly throughout the seasons to acquire that power?” Sparks rose where the magician stepped, and Llesho felt his coat snap with the lightning that charged the air.

“Who else, indeed, would be so foolish to free a demon-king and keep no reins on him?” Llesho let his hand fall to his side, damping the energy that ran through the king’s pavilion.

Master Markko brought the skills of a magician and the powers of a young dragon to the fight, but the hidden might of the Palace of the Sun ran in Llesho’s veins and he tapped into it now. Markko reached into the sky for a thunderbolt, threw it. His face turned to shocked dismay when his blow disintegrated in the air, reaching Llesho as a breeze lightly stirring his hair.

“You don’t know who I am,” Llesho mentioned casually. He imagined shackles and Master Markko dropped his sword, tugging at the bindings that held his wrists.

“It won’t be that easy,” the magician promised. With a great bunching of muscles under skin mottled with the scales of a dragon he snapped the chain, unleashing his hands again to conjure a ball of liquid fire, which he tossed in Llesho’s direction.

“Catch,” he said, and the ball grew until it claimed almost all the space between the two combatants.

Llesho remembered talking to the storm with Marmer Sea Dragon. He longed for the support of the dragon but made use of his teaching in his absence. Calling down the gentlest of storms, he extinguished the fireball with a soft, insistent rain.

The pavilion was slippery now. Master Markko moved more cautiously, taking a new measure of his student, Llesho thought.

“I didn’t teach you that.”

“No.” Llesho raised a vortex.

The wind pushed the magician backward. Master Markko seized on it and worked a conjuring to raise a greater storm. Hailstones pummeled them and icy rain lashed the exposed pavilion. Markko pushed back with the wind. Llesho skidded toward the unprotected edge.

“Gently, gently,” Llesho answered the attack with a casual seeming wave of his hand and the storm died down again. Sounds of battle from the street below rose in the sudden calm.

“It’s time to put this to rest,” Master Markko said. “I have much to do, and little time if I wish to ride the moonlight tonight.”

Already the bridge of silver light was fading. Llesho realized he’d have time for his good-byes after all. His hand fell to his Thebin knife, but he didn’t draw it. The Lady Chaiujin’s cup—perhaps the lady herself—lay ensorcelled in the signet under his hand and he dared not risk the cup in this battle. The magician noted his hesitation and laughed at him.

“Simple tools for village butchers. No blade will cut me, no mortal hand can take a dragon’s life. By now you know I hold within me that life which feeds my power. You can moan over your goddess all you want, but know when you die that she will bend her knee to me. She will show me her gardens and take me to her bed gladly because I will be the one to rescue all of heaven from the attack the demons press upon her.”

“Your plan has several flaws,” Llesho pointed out. “The first is a misunderstanding: the lady chooses her husbands, not the other way around.”

Llesho began to move in the prayer forms that had marked the Way of the Goddess for him since he first stepped into the sawdust of a gladiators’ training yard. Master Den had showed him the point at which prayer form became combat form and Llesho made the shift, struck at his opponenet with hands faster than the eye could follow. Master Markko staggered under the blow but regained his footing.

“Simple tricks, boy,” he said, and reached for the earth below their feet. Shook it. Screams of terror rose from the square below as golden plaster shattered onto the street. Markko clutched at a pillar which threatened to fall and take him with it while Llesho fell to his knees, horrified at the trembling that went on and on below them. It was more than he thought he could do but he reached into the earth, thought of mines and wells and the dark caves that wound down through the mountains, and bid the earth be still. When the nauseating tremors subsided, a great yawning crack had formed in the tower where they stood.

“As I said, your plan has flaws. The second is that you have mistaken who I am when you call me a mortal man.” Llesho moved into the form “Twining Branches,” and conjured a gnarled old tree in his mind here atop the world of living men. He let the branches of the form wrap the arms of his enemy, so that Master Markko pulled and struggled but couldn’t draw his hands away from his sides. “I am a god, beloved by she who reigns in the gardens of heaven, and you have no power over me.”

“But you still hold my poisons in the blood and bone of your being,” Master Markko growled at him, enraged at his unnatural captivity. He didn’t need his hands to invoke his poisons, but Llesho stood upon the source of his power, in the growing awareness of his own identity. The magician’s potions couldn’t hurt him.

“The third flaw in your plan is that you judge all men by your own actions, or wishes. As it happens, I do not intend to kill you, though you must give up the powers that you have stolen.” With that Llesho moved into the prayer form he had created, “Wind over Stone,” and raised a gentle but insistent wind. It scoured them with a fine dust that seemed to wear away the surface magic like a false finish on a shoddy chest.

“It’s time to put an end to this game.” He raised his hand casually between them and called with a voice that seemed to fill the night, “Come air and earth and fire and water. Come gods and kings. Come powers of heaven and earth and the underworld. See this contest put to rest.”

One by one the four dragons gathered in the sky under the wash of Great Moon’s light. The color of their scales appeared and disappeared in the firelight of their dragon breath; green and gold and silver and the color of Ahkenbad’s dust, as they hovered over the Palace of the Sun. Llesho worried that Marmer Sea Dragon would attack before he had a chance to set right the Jinn’s mischief, but he waited with his fellow dragons, patient as his species was in the presence of the faster pace of human lives.

Master Markko recognized the dragon he had so mortally harmed, however. He struggled in terror against his invisible bonds but could not move as the stone that guarded the entrance to the king’s pavilion slowly moved aside. Out of the staircase formerly held by the Uulgar guardsmen came the mortal gods. Master Markko hadn’t known them for what they were, and he watched, agog, as first Master Den, then the Lady SienMa, then Bright Morning the dwarf, rose into the air to join the dragons in circling the king’s pavilion.

Little Brother—in his tall form, almost human in looks, he was the Monkey God—bounded through the trapdoor with a screech of laughter to join the other gods in the sky. Two figures joined them. One Llesho had never met before was the mortal god of peace, and he bowed in homage to that most desired of the gods. The last alighted from the glittering silver back of Pearl Bay Dragon, who dipped low to present her great nose as a bridge to the king’s pavilion. Llesho smiled when he recognized the newcomer—short and plump and still in the robes of the geomancer of Pontus. The god of learning grinned back at him, her feet hovering above the king’s pavilion with the rest.

The Thebin princes followed, or those who could be spared from the fighting and the tending of the wounded and the mad. Ghrisz came first, blood smeared to his elbows and streaked across his face. Not his own blood, but his sweat dug channels through the gore. “Shokar leads the cleanup at the gate,” he said, meaning the last of the fighting. “I have come as witness.”

Next, Balar led Menar, the blind poet-prince, who made his way by memory as well as by the guidance of his brother. How they had come through the fighting unscathed Llesho couldn’t figure, except by the will of the mortal gods themselves.

The kings were next to climb out onto the exposed tower: Mergen-Khan, with AlamaZara leaning heavily against his shoulder. The blood on her uniform was her own, but the wound had seen hasty treatment. Llesho worried more about the protective way Mergen wrapped an arm around her shoulder. What had he wrought in that pairing of armies that might grip Thebin in the closed fist of their association?

Sawghar followed, to represent the Tashek people, and Tinglut-Khan, whose lungs heaved like bellows. Suspicion furrowed the Eastern Khan’s brow; he had no love of magic or his neighbors.

Ping, the Sapphire Princess, who owned the Temple of the Moon as only the queen and high priestess might, gathered up Llesho’s spear and tripped lightly across the fading bridge of light to stand among the other heads of state. Llesho noted in passing that the spear remained quiet in her hand, as if now it didn’t dare exert its influence in her presence.

His cadre, which now included Prince Tayy of the Qubal people, had not come up. He hadn’t called their rank to join him but he wished they’d come anyway. Shou was also absent. Why was it that the good-byes he wanted most to make were the ones he would have no time for?

“I bear witness for the emperor of Shan,” the mortal goddess of war said from her place in the gathering of magical persons. She nodded at the candlelit square in the floor of the pavilion where the stone remained pushed back. “The emperor would beg pardon of his Holy Excellence for his absence. He currently lies unconscious below.

Are you satisfied now? Has he sacrified enough for loving the goddess of war? Or won’t it be enough until he’s dead?He didn’t say it, but she read the thoughts in his eyes. There was neither regret nor triumph in the answering look she gave him.Necessity, he thought,a life against the absence of all life. The Great Goddess herself prepared to end in a firestorm all the realms of gods and men and the underworld before she allowed the demon-king to defile her gardens.How much would you give? The Lady SienMa gave silent challenge with a little smile curling one corner of her blood-red mouth. She already knew the answer.

“Who are you?” Master Markko whispered under his breath. Eyes wide and shocky with terror, the magician had finally come to realize that perhaps he didn’t have the whole thing figured out.

Llesho bent close so that he could whisper and still be heard by his enemy. He had no wish to astound the other mortals on that tower with his revelation. “I am Justice,” he said. “Last of the Seven Mortal Gods. More terrible even than War.” The gods already knew and nodded their approval—he’d finally got it right in their eyes. Menar, too, whose blindness had sharpened his hearing, showed no surprise.

The magician doubled over and beat his forehead against the stones in his frustration. “How could I not have seen? We are lost, lost!”

“No, we’re not. It was never meant to be you.” The answer to the first question seemed so obvious that Llesho wondered why it needed saying. “I didn’t know myself.” In his journeys his own identity had lured him forward like a riddle whose answer lay always just out of reach and he wondered how many lifetimes he had traveled searching for the part of him that had lain hidden until this moment. But now he had it. Prince Llesho, king of Thebin for a moment, but always the seventh mortal god, Justice. And Master Markko was just one more obstacle on his road to the gates of heaven. And in this place where the king’s power rose, so near the gates of heaven that granted his divinity, not so great an obstacle after all.

“What are you going to do to me?” Markko covered his face with his hands, where the scales of Marmer Sea Dragon’s son showed clearly in patches against the ridged tendons.

“What should have been done long ago.” It didn’t matter how the magician might beg or defy the powers arrayed against him. It didn’t—couldn’t—matter what consequences he would himself be required to pay. That, too, was justice.

“Do as you will; it won’t save you from the coming storm.” Brought down in the end as much by his visions as by the gods and kings arrayed against him, the magician issued his surrender like a challenge. “The dead can afford to be brave in the face of the end of the world.”

Not death, or the end of the world as the magician might imagine it. He didn’t think the magician was nearly as prepared for the true fate in store for him.

Llesho reached for one particular pearl that hung at his neck. “Pig!” he called upon the Jinn who had been his guide through the dreamscape. “I would make a wish.”

“I wish that you wouldn’t.” Pig appeared, his chains tinkling lightly as he moved. “How will I explain to the Great Goddess? How will I earn my way back into her gardens?”

Pig was very good at fulfilling the letter of a supplicant’s desire, but in practice wishes often turned horribly against the one who asked them. Thus Master Markko, a second-rate conjurer with no dragon’s blood had wished to be a true magician at the same time a young dragon, pining for the love of a human woman, wished to be human. The result of those two wishes might still bring down all the worlds of men and gods and the spirits of the underworld. Llesho could sympathize with the Jinn’s present quandary. The Goddess he served would not be happy with a gardener who had brought her beloved husband to grief.

And then there was the matter of the battle still to be waged in the mountains, against the demon-king laying siege to the gates of heaven. How was Llesho to defeat the demon and his army of minions if Pig did something horrid and stupid to him over a wish? If the Jinn deliberately created an evil outcome for the wishes he granted, Llesho could have persuaded him, on pain of continued exile, to forgo his tricks on this occasion. But he didn’t. He truly wanted to help each and every time. Llesho knew that. Things just didn’t work out quite the way that he planned.

Pig begged again to be released from the wish. He clanked his chains for emphasis, to show what had happened the last time he’d granted a wish, “Please, Young God, what justice is there in rewards granted without toil?”

Therein lay the trick. A wish was a shortcut. And a shortcut, almost by definition, abandoned the way of the Goddess for the more convenient path that led ultimately to evil. This time, though, Llesho didn’t think that would happen. This time, it was the only way. The way of justice. He thought his Goddess would approve.

“We have all toiled long toward this end, good Pig. And now it is time. I wish that you will reverse the wish you granted these two fools. Release Marmer Sea Dragon’s son from the madness of this false magician, and free this false magician from the terror and pain of a young dragon trapped inside his body.”

“Oh. Oh! Of course.” In the way of Jinns, Pig had no power to reverse a wish once granted, no matter how ill-advised the asking had been. But a new wish could undo a small part of the damage, at least as it pertained to the individuals whose lives had been twisted together by their foolhardy requests. With a snap that singed the hair on the heads of the gathered company, Pig did as he was told.

A horrible scream of pain became two screams separating like the universe torn open, so that Llesho wondered what horror had resulted from his well-meaning wish. When the smoke had cleared, the haughty magician was gone. In his place huddled the shrunken shell of a man gibbering madly into his beard. In the sky above the king’s pavilion, a young dragon writhed in an agony of muscles too long cramped into the shape of a man. The creature they had known as Master Markko had split in two again.

Marmer Sea Dragon raced after his son, wrapped his head in a tender wing and lifted him into the wind to ease his pain. In the streets below, where the sounds of battle had faded and died, new cries of panic and terror arose, but Marmer Sea Dragon led his son out over the empty plain where he might spit fire and roar out the years of his agony without doing any harm.

Pig didn’t always know what effects his actions might cause. Llesho, fearing they had not seen the end of this one, waited for his own fate to make itself known. He waited a moment more. The Monkey God, who had traveled in their company as Little Brother, did a somersault in the air and added his own earthshaking shrieks to those of the young dragon, but nothing happened. Or, well, nothing happened to Llesho.

“That’s it,” Pig said, dusting off his hands with a twist of distaste around his snout as his chains rattled. “Don’t you have somewhere else to go?”

“What about—”

“Is this the man you fought on this tower?” Pig asked him.

Llesho looked at Markko, no longer a master at anything, curled in on his terror of all that had happened to him. “Not any more.”

“Do you have any grudge to settle against the young dragon that he hasn’t amply paid through his torment all these years?”

“Not at all.”

Pig shrugged. “The consequences follow the wish,” he explained. “Your wish wasn’t about you, so the consequences weren’t either.”

Master Markko drooled out of the corners of his mouth. He would need tending and would eventually die as mad as he was right now. It was questionable, of course, if he’d ever been truly sane.

Marmer Sea Dragon’s son would also need time and care. He would never again be that free and impetuous youth who had made a wish for love, but with his father’s support he would survive. In the ages of a dragon’s lifetime he would absorb the lessons he had learned in what, to him, would become just a blink of an eye. At least, he would if Llesho succeeded in defeating the first of Markko’s mad magics—the demon-king conjured from the underworld.

“Justice has been served here,” he concluded. Master Den and Bright Morning gave each other congratulatory glances at that, but the Lady SienMa watched him out of dark, sad eyes.

“It has been a long and terrible night,” she said. “But your lady awaits you.”

“I know.” It was time to say good-bye to his brothers and to the kings who had lent their might to his struggle. When he came to the point of it, however, there was little he could say that would not reveal his own misgivings about the battle he still faced. Even if he survived his fight with the demon-king, Llesho knew that he wouldn’t be coming back, not for a long while. Not until he sorted out all that had happened.

The Lady SienMa seemed to understand all that remained unsaid. “It always was that way,” she answered with a tilt of her head that was a bow between the mortal gods.

“Shou—” He was afraid to ask the question.

“Will survive,” her ladyship assured him. “Like our young dragon, Shou has finally learned the lessons he needed to find his path as emperor.”

Llesho wondered if that meant Shou was finally ready to seek a wife, but he didn’t intend to ask it of the lady in question. After the lady, his brothers came to him one by one. Balar hugged him as if he were still a child, and Menar touched his forehead to Llesho’s crown. “Go in safety, brother,” he whispered.

Ghrisz, who had known him only a short time since his return, clasped his arms as one warrior to another. “Don’t leave me in the rear when the fighting has scarcely begun,” he said. “We have an army that would ride to your banner even against the demons of the underworld.”

“If I can, I’ll find a way.” He didn’t think he’d have that chance, but the thought of an army to take against the imps that stood guard over their demon-king made his heart swell.

Ping said nothing as she set the strap of his spear across his shoulder, but she wept when he took the silver circlet from his head and handed it to her.

“Tell your husband to wear it well,” he said. “Whoever he may be.”

“Tell my brothers to have sons.” She meant she would not marry, and though she didn’t ask him to stay, he saw the wishing of it in her tears.

Ghrisz watched them both with a troubled frown. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Whatever else you are, Llesho, you are meant to be king of Thebin. Even I have realized that.”

“I was, for a little while,” Llesho answered him with a little shake of his head. It seemed so obvious to him. “Now I have other duties. Ping will make a good queen—the Temple of the Moon has already accepted her, now it’s time her brothers did.”

Ghrisz still seemed uncertain, but Llesho’s good-byes had taken more time than Great Moon Lun had allowed him. The silver bridge of moonlight between the towers shimmered and disappeared.

Marmer Sea Dragon tended the agonies of his son’s return to his own flesh, but the remaining dragons turned their gaze as one to the place where, in her rise along the mountainside, Great Moon had spun her bridge of moonbeams between the realms of gods and mortals. One pediment, Llesho knew, rested before the gates of heaven, the other on the pavilion atop the Temple of the Moon. Where he wasn’t.

“Looks like you missed your chance,” Dun Dragon said, speaking of the silver bridge that had carried Llesho to the Palace of the Sun.

“There are other routes,” Llesho answered, thinking of the dreamscape.

“Or you could hitch a ride. You’ve been inside my head before.” With a lidded, inscrutable gaze, Dun Dragon rested a claw lightly on the stone of the king’s pavilion. When Llesho climbed up, he hmmmed a slow curl of smoke from his nostrils. “Still haven’t learned to say no, I see.”

“Tomorrow,” Llesho promised.

“I doubt that.”

Llesho thought the dragon was probably right. “Do you know the way?”

“Some of us have always known the way.”

Which led Llesho to wonder if there hadn’t been a shortcut to saving the universe. Pig had taught him his lesson about shortcuts however. Better to have done it right. “Let’s go, then.”

Dun Dragon lifted him to his brow, between the dragon’s horns. The cavern of bone pulsed with the light from the blue crystals embedded in the walls that Llesho figured must be some dragonish form of blood or life energy. The low pallet where Llesho had learned dream travel from the Tashek dream readers still rested in a rough corner, looking the worse for its adventures. It was the most comfortable place to sit, however, so Llesho did, curled cross-legged with a hand resting lightly on the bony wall for balance as Dun Dragon rose on a column of warm air.

“Remind me to get rid of this for you when we are done,” he promised, meaning the pallet.

“Thank you.”

With a powerful beat of his wings, Dun Dragon wheeled in the moonlit sky, heading for the mountains.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Forty

LLESHO HAD lost track of time during his confrontation with the magician, but he didn’t think he’d lost that much. Dragons had a way of distorting the elements in their presence, though, time and place no less than the others. So he wasn’t completely surprised when he looked out between the scales that covered Dun Dragon’s forehead to discover the rays of Great Sun glittered off the icy crown of the mountains.

Almost there. Hidden deep within the brilliant flash of glacier, he made out two tall pillars of crystal. Between the pillars wound gates of silver set with drops of diamonds big as Llesho’s head and pearls that caught the light and softened its sharp glint. The gates of heaven.

Dun Dragon circled above a dark mass seething on the edges of the glacier. Imps and demons climbed with jagged picks and lines made of the guts of their enemies. In one place they seemed to be making headway, but then a fight broke out in the midst of the creatures. Blood splashed on the pure mountaintop. Lines were cut and imps fell crashing from rocky cliffs to pick themselves up again, shake off the jarring fall, and begin again.

Dropping lower in the dragon’s reconnaissance, Llesho saw again the cave where he had met the demon-king in his dreams. “That’s it,” he said, pointing to the entrance which now was decorated with the bones of victims, imp and creatures of every kind, including human. He didn’t see the demon-king himself, but lesser demons and imps lounged around in front of the cave, quarreling among themselves, fighting over their terrible food and picking their teeth with the finger bones of children. Shadows moving just out of sight inside the cave raised Llesho’s estimation of the force gathered against them.

“We are going to need help,” Dun Dragon said.

Llesho wondered when his quest had suddenly become “we” but he didn’t doubt the sentiment. “I wish Ghrisz were here,” he said. He would have called on Shou, except the emperor lay insensible from his injuries below.

“Ghrisz for a start,” Dun Dragon agreed. Opening his great toothed mouth he bellowed a dragon call so fearsome that Llesho cowered among the scales, covering his ears and praying to the Goddess to deliver him from his friends as well as from his enemies.

Above them on the mountain that cry was answered by a deep rumble. No creature, but the mountain itself gave throat to a great rending snap that cracked a tottering shelf of ice from the mass of the glacier. The avalanche gathered sound as it gathered speed, rolling unstoppably down on the imps and demons busy climbing and fighting on the mountainside. Burying the evil creatures in its icy snows, the avalanche continued down the mountain until it came to rest pressed up against the Harnish wall that circled Kungol. Without the hated wall, the southern end of the city would have been buried in snow. Even now the glacier threatened to break through into the streets.

“Not quite what I had in mind,” Dun Dragon muttered. “But it will keep them until help arrives.”

As he clung to the scales that protected the great beast’s bony cavern, Llesho wondered what had possessed him to ally himself with dragons. Hadn’t the destruction of the city of Ahkenbad taught him anything? Master Markko’s attack on the dream readers had wakened the beast, but Dun Dragon, rising from that sleep, had shattered the city built on his back. Even when they meant well, dragons carried the seeds of destruction in their breath and in the beat of their wings.

“That is my city!” Llesho couldn’t contain his outrage. “Hasn’t Thebin suffered enough from its enemies? Do its friends have to knock the holy city flat for extra measure?”

“It was an accident.” Dun Dragon’s apologetic shrug nearly threw Llesho off his back. “Where I come from, mountains don’t fall down so easily.”

“It’s not the mountain. It’s ice and snow frozen against the mountain’s side. If you shake it hard enough, the ice falls off, just like from a pitched roof.”

The Gansau Wastes, where Dun Dragon had lived and then slept through the millennia of his lifetime, had neither high mountains nor snow to crust upon a rooftop. Llesho thought the dragon knew more of what he did than he was letting on, but couldn’t figure out what the point had been. They’d eliminated a small part of the force sent by the demon-king to attack the gates of heaven, of course. But thousands more of the minions remained. Dun Dragon had already said it hadn’t been his intention to bring down the glacier on Kungol’s head. So what had he been trying to do?

The answers to his question were approaching on long, steady wing strokes. As they grew nearer Llesho recognized Golden River Dragon and Pearl Bay Dragon by the gold and silver of their scales. Marmer Sea Dragon had returned bearing a stranger on his back, a young man with hair the color of the sea and eyes with storms at their centers. Pearl Bay Dragon carried the lady SienMa, mortal god of war, and Master Geomancer, the mortal god of learning. On Golden River Dragon’s back Master Den rode to battle with Little Brother, the Monkey God grown to the size of a man, at his back.

Peace and Mercy had no place in this battle, but Llesho felt the strength of his newly discovered rank fill him with purpose. He had more than a personal battle to fight. The realms of heaven, the mortal kingdoms, and even the underworld depended on what they did here. In the air, the four dragons with their riders circled, then suddenly Marmer Sea Dragon broke off, following the avalanche’s fall.

With one clawed foot the size of a small hill he raked a gouge out of the landscape and with his sulfurous breath he roared out fire upon the snow. Gradually both snow and ice began to melt, running into the seam cut into the dry ground. As it filled, the seam became a lake on which dead imps bobbed in the steaming water.

Delicately, Marmer Sea Dragon raked his claws through the water, drawing out the dead monsters like a sieve. When he was done, the new lake shone clear as liquid sunlight next to the heaped dead. He then lifted into the sky, leaving the task of burning the dead to the armies who crept out when he had gone.

“We’ll need their help,” Dun Dragon’s muttered explanation roared through the air passages in his head.

As they rose into the sunlight, he gazed out on the mountain where the demon-king’s lair lay hidden at the heights. Low on the side of the towering mountainside, he caught sight of a solitary figure beginning to climb. Lluka, he recognized with the farseeing eye of a mortal god. Determined in his madness, the prince had escaped his brothers’ loving guardianship. Whether he pursued a mad effort to join the battle against the demon-king or was drawn to the creature as a minion, Llesho couldn’t tell. It seemed unlikely he would be in time even if he found his way between the worlds, however.

Llesho would have gone to him to save his life if not his sanity, but the demon-king had come out of his cave. Sunlight vanished into the dark gleaming pearls of his eyes, but he followed the sweeping flight of the dragons with small, tight movements of his neck and shoulders. A roar out of his awful mouth brought imps pouring from the cave.

“It’s time,” Dun Dragon said.

Dragons had the power of communicating mind to mind, as Llesho had experienced himself with Marmer Sea Dragon. This time, the dragons spoke by silent communication among themselves. Llesho didn’t understand the thoughts that hummed through the cavern where he waited. He felt it tugging at his gut when the dragons reached a harmony of minds, however. It felt like some part of the universe had twisted out of true, taking his innards with it. When his ears stopped ringing, he heard the sounds of a human army crying out in a chaos of terror on the mountainside.

“You might have given them some warning,” Llesho chided the dragon.

“That only makes it worse.” Dun Dragon landed lightly on an outcrop above the demon’s cave while Llesho wondered when he’d had the experience of moving an army before, and what had befallen those terrified troops. The answer might have given him a clue about what would happen to his own army out on that mountain in the crack between the mortal realm and the underworld that Master Markko had opened by accident long ago. Dun Dragon’s tone didn’t invite questions, however, and he had work to do.

Llesho climbed down the ridge that he’d once mistaken for a staircase on the right side of Dun Dragon’s nose. When he reached the ground Dun Dragon lifted into the air, circling overhead with the other dragons in search of likely prey from among the imps attacking below. Nearby the other mortal gods had risen in the air under their own powers. Llesho hadn’t figured out how to do that yet so he kept the stony ground under his feet.

Farther down the mountain, with the demon-king’s cave between them, he saw Ghrisz, pale but standing and with his sword drawn. Ghrisz had seen him leave with Dun Dragon and so he was watching for him as he climbed down.

“For the god-king, Llesho!” he called, and the dragons lent him the power of their voices so that his words rang through the mountaintops like thunder. His own troops and those who had followed Llesho heard the call and set aside their terror as imps and minor demons poured out of the cave, where Master Markko had pierced the boundary between the worlds.

With a terrible, earth-shattering cry, the two forces of humans and imps fell upon each other, sword and shield against tooth and claw. The human soldiers had an advantage that their own battle frenzy drove them forward, against the foe, while imps and demons were as likely to attack their own as their human enemy.

The minions fully engaged, it was time for Llesho to confront the demon-king who threatened heaven. He shifted his shoulder, stirring the cursed spear at his back, and checked his belt for the bag of tea with the Lady SienMa’s cup in it. Time to release the tainted cup of the Lady Chaiujin: he removed the signet from his knife and let it grow again until it returned to its natural shape as an elaborately carved wooden box. Then he opened it and took out the cup which Adar had painted with the poison mixture. The cup went into the pouch with the tea and the box went back on the butt of his knife. He was ready.

The next step, getting himself captured, was easy enough. The tricky part was making it look like an accident. That was less difficult then he’d expected. A stone gave way under his foot, his ankle turned and he fell, skidding down the mountainside on his belly to land at the feet of a minor demon.

The creature looked up from tearing an imp apart to confront the disturbance. “How did you get up here?” the demon mumbled around his fangs. Acids dripped from the corners of his mouth as he talked, raising sizzling smoke as it hit the ground between them.

“I flew up in the head of a dragon to kill your master,” he said.

“A likely story,” the demon sighed, not believing a word of it. He dropped the bleeding imp and dusted off his hands, which only succeeded in spreading the blood. “Still, I guess I’d better give you to the king. He’ll want to question you before we eat you.”

Llesho tried to walk but his ankle wouldn’t carry him. With another exasperated sigh the demon grabbed him by the braids of his hair and dragged him the little way to the mouth of the cave from which imps continued to pour.

“You have a caller,” the demon made the sarcastic introduction. “He says he’s come to kill you.”

“Does he have anything worth stealing?” The demon-king, folded in upon himself like a paper crane to fit inside his own cave, shambled into the light and peered at Llesho through the stolen pearls of his eyes.

He made a gesture of command and his imps seized Llesho by the arms, stealing the little bag of tea things and reaching for the spear at his back. It burned their fingers when they touched it, however, and they quickly backed away, cluttering and hissing angry threats at him.

When nothing else seemed to follow, however, one of the more daring of them snatched the empty silver chain from his neck. Pig was gone, freed when he released the dragon-king’s son or simply traveling on his mistress’ business in the dreamscape. Llesho hoped that he would return to his person and not to the chain which now wrapped the wrist of the demon-king as a bracelet. “Tasty,” he said, licking his fingers of the last scraps of his imp-snack.

“What’s this?” the demon who had brought him reached for the bag in which Llesho had gathered the Goddess’ pearls.

“A charm to ward off demons,” he answered, and used the powers of a god to channel the angry fire of the spear into the cord around his neck. When the demon touched it, blue light arced across the cave, throwing the demon against a wall and cracking his head open.

The demon-king considered the unconscious and bleeding heap of his minion. “Your charm seems more intent on protecting itself than its wearer,” he pointed out. “And it strikes me that you’ve come ill-prepared either to storm my cave or to woo the lady in the gardens we all covet.”

“Not so ill-prepared,” Llesho pointed out. “I’ve brought an army.”

The sound of battle came to them dimly through the stone of the mountain. The demon gestured for him to follow and imps jumped to surround him and push him deeper into the cave. He thought the demon-king would have him bound, but the creature flaunted his power. Surrounded by the creatures of the underworld, Llesho had no chance of escaping. Fortunately, escape was the last thing on his mind. As he had anticipated, the jade cups among his few possessions soon attracted the evil creatures who had stolen them, and their fighting drew the attention of their leader.

“Give me that!” With his sharp claws extended, the demon-king cuffed the imp who had opened the pouch. The imp scampered out of the way but not before a claw had split his pointy face from his temple to his long narrow chin.

Llesho kept his own features unconcerned when the demon-king took out the cup the Lady SienMa had returned to him. The trickster god had trained him well, however. When the tainted cup of the Lady Chaiujin was drawn out, he made a face of indignation and yearning.

“Does this cup mean something to you, young prince?” the demon asked.

“Nothing,” Llesho answered, with heat in his eyes.

“I see.”

From outside the cave came the squeal of imps and the bellowing roars of the dragons, the clash of armies and the howls of imps raised against the high piercing shriek of the wind whistling with the speed of his movements as the Monkey God mowed them down in rows with his hundred-yard staff. Inside, however, the demon-king watched Llesho with no expression in his stolen eyes.

“This wouldn’t be where you draw your power, by any chance?” he asked, holding up the Lady Chaiujin’s cup.

“I don’t know what you mean.” He did, of course, and he let the knowledge show in his eyes. Of what, however, he kept to himself.

“I thought so.” The demon-king gave him a triumphant smile. “Bring us tea,” he ordered. Imps dashed about to do his bidding while he sat, still as the mountain, watching Llesho. So wrapped in his thoughts had he become that he didn’t notice the new arrivals until they walked into his cavern and presented themselves below his squalid throne. Lluka cringed in the company of a young man unsteady on his feet. Llesho recognized him as the passenger who had ridden to war on the back of Marmer Sea Dragon, but he didn’t know who he was.

“Bring me my tea!” The demon-king held out the poisoned cup for the imp to fill while he looked the newcomers over. “I know who you are,” he said to Lluka. “You have troubled my sleep for many cycles of the seasons now. It will be a pleasure to put an end to the disturbance. As for you . . . familiar, but . . .”

“We’ve met.” The young man crossed his legs and sat. He made a graceful job of it, but from the quaking of his limbs, Llesho thought he couldn’t have stood any longer if he’d tried. “Tea?”

“Not for you, little one. This is a drink for kings.” The demon-king lifted his cup to drink, blood still dripping from his awful teeth. He watched Llesho as he did so; something in what he saw stopped him with a question.

“Or have you learned more from the tricksters who surround you than it seems? You’ll drink first, I think.”

Llesho had anticipated caution on the beast’s part. He took the poisoned bowl with both hands, his expression one of gloating pleasure meant to entice the demon-king to drink deeply when it came his turn. For his part, Llesho did as Adar had told him, and barely sipped.

It hurt, but Master Markko had prepared him for that pain. He sat quite still, an eyebrow cocked, and waited for the demon-king to take his turn. The demon drank with loud slurping noises, tilting his head back so that he didn’t lose a drop. When he was done he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and turned his dark and gloating gaze on Llesho. Who smiled back, though the sweat had beaded on his brow and the pain had cramped his gut.

“What have you done?” The demon-king jumped up in a rage, but already the draught was coursing through his veins.

“I’ve poisoned you.” Llesho confirmed what the monster already knew.

“But you poisoned yourself as well!” Sweat had formed on the monster’s brow and Llesho didn’t have to imagine the chill rattling the demon-king’s bones. He shook with the same waves of hot and cold himself.

The demon-king flung down the cup in his rage, shattering it on the stone floor of the cavern. Quick as the flicker of a thought, an imp darted out of the darkness to snatch at the shards and dash out the yawning entrance to the cave. Llesho thought he saw something slither away from it, but his eyes were cloudy with sweat and with pain, so he couldn’t be certain. He couldn’t know the scream that followed was the imp dying either, but he felt the passage of the shard from one hand to another as if a thread that had tied the Lady Chaiujin’s gift to his soul had broken.

“A word of caution could have prevented your own suffering!” the demon cried at him. He could make no sense of Llesho’s actions. “Why would you allow yourself to be poisoned?”

“To save the gates of heaven,” Llesho answered through teeth that had clenched shut. “To save the mortal realm.”

“You must know human poisons can’t kill even a minor demon.” The beast paced as he ranted, his size shifting as he lost control of his folds. “No human weapon can kill a king of the underworld!”

“But it will make you suffer, at least for a little while—” He reached for the spear at his back, but the pain was too great. Wrapping his arms tightly around his belly, he toppled over while his muscles grew rigid, curving his back like a bow.

No,he thought,not yet. The demon-king was still alive, and though the poison would soon render him as helpless as Llesho was now, he’d told the truth; no human weapon could kill him. Llesho needed to use the cursed spear, the weapon of a mortal god.

“This is your fault!” The demon rose up to his great height and turned on Lluka, who muttered mindless incantations in the corner, wrapped as tightly around his own middle as if he had himself drunk from the poisoned cup. “Your visions brought him here! Your visions drove him!”

“Not mine,” Lluka mumbled from his corner. “They were your dreams all along.”

The demon-king seemed to grow more huge and terrible in his rage. He took a step, faltered as the poison tied cold knots in his gut. “They were my dreams! You had no right to invade my sleep and steal my dreams!”

Muscles rippled and snapped under his skin with the effect of the poison and his terrible anger. He had his back to Llesho now, who lay in agony on his floor. Llesho willed his hand to move, to reach for the spear at his back, and felt it slide away from him even as he grasped it.

The strange, shaking boy clasped the cursed weapon, wincing as the thing sizzled and burned the flesh of his palms. But he made no sound that might give away his purpose as he put the shaft firmly into Llesho’s hand and closed Llesho’s cramping fingers around it. It wasn’t enough. He couldn’t feel the weapon in his hand. It began to slip again. Then, with a slow smile and a nod to reassure him, the strange boy with eyes like the sea clasped Llesho’s hand in his. Using his own trembling strength to secure the spear in both their hands, he crept along at Llesho’s side.

Imps and demons all around them stopped in their tasks, casting nervous glances from the mouth of the cave where the sounds of battle still raged, to their monstrous king, whose color had paled and darkened by turns through shades of putrid green. They made no move to warn him as Llesho, with the strange boy at his side, dragged himself closer.

The demon-king snatched Lluka from his corner by one leg. “You are going to die for this!”

The poison stole the will from his wrongly jointed limbs, however, and writhing, the monster fell to his knees. “All you measly mortal creatures and the foolish gods who gather you like stones upon the board. You’ll all die!” Bent over his poisoned gut, he reached for Lluka’s other leg, to tear him in two.

Llesho staggered to his feet with the strange, silent boy at his side, and together they plunged the cursed spear into the demon-king’s back. Cold fire ran like lightning up its length. The boy fell. Trembling with the effort of containing the shock, Llesho held on. But the monster still moved. Calling on previously unknown strength as the mortal god of justice, a strength greater than any mortal could summon, he plunged the weapon deep into the monster’s heart.

“What?” The demon-king sighed on his last breath, and fell dead at Lluka’s feet.

Suddenly, the madness cleared from Prince Lluka’s eyes, leaving confusion in its place. “Where are we?” he asked.

Llesho heard him at the very edge of consciousness, but he wasn’t able to answer. Didn’t know what answer he would give if he could have spoken. The monster was dead, but what came next he didn’t know, except that the strange boy who had helped him wasn’t moving, and his own hold on consciousness was slipping away.

“Is it over?” Lluka tried another question. He likely didn’t mean the battle, but the future that he had seen end in disaster so often in his dreams.

“Almost.” He knew that voice, from long ago. Kwan-ti: Pearl Bay Dragon in her human form. A figure crossed at the corner of his eye and he saw her silver drapes glimmering like scales as she knelt at his side.

“Drink this,” she said, and held his head while she fed him an antidote from the marriage cup that Lady SienMa had returned to him at the beginning of his quest. The draught in it was sweet and clear and pure as water from a mountain spring. Llesho drank sparingly, afraid that anything he added to his stomach would make the cramps and nausea worse. Kwan-ti’s elixir soothed his pain, both of body and spirit, however. With each sip he found himself stronger and cleaner, as if some terrible stain caused by Master Markko’s poisons was being purged from his soul as well as his body.

“Thank you,” he said.

“We would have spared you if we could.”

“I know. But it was my quest.”

“And now it’s time to rest.” Satisfied that he’d taken enough, and that he would sleep for a while, she left him in Lluka’s bewildered care.

“I don’t remember much,” Lluka whispered. “But I think I’ve done terrible things. I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” Llesho mumbled. He turned his head to watch as Kwan-ti knelt beside her next patient.

The boy who had helped him kill the demon-king lay unmoving, his eyes fixed. Tears gathered in Llesho’s eyes; he recognized the bloodless look of a body growing cold with death in the healer’s arms.

Kwan-ti brushed the stormy sea of his hair away from his chill brow. “Brave boy,” she said, and took the stranger’s hand in her own. “You learned your lesson and amended your errors as well as any creature might. Now rest.”

“My son?” Marmer Sea Dragon joined them. He brought the smell of blood and battle with him, more stinks to join the charred smoke of burning demon.

“Gone,” Kwan-ti answered him. “Though he helped to save us all.” As she spoke, the body of the stranger was changing, shifting slowly back to his true form. “Stories of the human king and the dragon-prince who fought together to defend the gates of heaven will keep him alive forever.”

So,Llesho thought.That’s who he is. Always at the center of Master Markko’s thoughts, no one would know better than the dragon-king’s son what disaster would come of the false magician’s schemes. It was, after all, his own powers that had freed the demon-king to wreak his havoc.

But, dead? Too high a price to pay for an anxious heart and hasty word. Many had died in the battle to repair the damage of the wish he asked of Pig, the Jinn, however. In Justice, he couldn’t rail against the fate of this young dragon-prince, as badly as he might wish to.

Marmer Sea Dragon roared with the terrible anguish of his dragon kind, so that Llesho feared his voice would shake the cave down on top of them, but soon the roaring gave over to weeping. He lifted the coils of his dead son into his arms and cradled him close to his breast, as if the beating of his heart could encourage the dead organ to resume its pulse in the other’s chest. It didn’t happen, of course. As the dragon-king started toward the door, he cast a glance at Llesho, who stared back out of half-lidded eyes.

“What of the boy-king?” he asked Pearl Bay Dragon in her human form.

Kwan-ti had risen to her feet again and wiped her hands on the crisp white apron of a healer that she’d tied over her shimmering silver robes.

“He lives,” she said, and mused, thinking him asleep. “I wonder if he knows how close we came to disaster today? If the demon-king had managed to shed his royal blood here, we would all have died, more horribly than the monster did himself.”

“Could he have killed the demon-king without the help of my son?” Marmer Sea Dragon asked. Llesho heard in that question the more pressing one: did my son give up his life for nothing?

Kwan-ti gave a little shrug, not indifference but, as she explained, “Maybe. Maybe not. At best, however, he would have fared no better than your son. And the consequences of that cannot even be measured.”

Llesho wondered why that might be. The pearls, of course, but that seemed hardly an immeasurable goal. Pig might take them home in a pinch now that they had broken the siege, he thought. But he’d done what he set out to do. His Goddess, and his nation, were both safe now, whether he lived or died.

Marmer Sea Dragon didn’t pursue his question, however. “I’m taking my son home now,” he said.

“Won’t you wait for the arrival of the princes?” Kwan-ti asked him. “They have much to thank you for, and will want to honor your son’s bravery against the demon-king.”

“Thank the princes for me in my absence. My son has paid for his mistakes; now it’s time we both left such adventures to those for whom death stirs the blood.”

“You do them an injustice,” she chided her fellow dragon gently. “They started none of this. As for Llesho—”

“About the young god you need say nothing.” Marmer Sea Dragon didn’t look down at Llesho, but his words were meant to be overheard. “I have traveled with him, and have seen into the bottom of his soul. I know what this day has cost him.”

There seemed nothing more to say then. Marmer Sea Dragon was determined to be gone before the princes and their sister could reach the cave which, freed of the demon who had lodged there, had entered the mortal realm again. And so he left, carrying his burden of sorrow close to his heart.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Forty-one

WHEN THE dragon-king had gone, Llesho pulled himself to his feet.

“Not yet,” Kwan-ti cautioned him.

The elixir had renewed his strength somewhat, but a poison strong enough to distract the demon-king could not be so easily thrown off. He still hunched over his aching gut. “One last thing—”

The fighting might be over, but he still had one task to complete. There it was, the corpse of the demon-king, rotting already as was the nature of that kind. It lay like a vast lake of putrefying flesh with its feet in the doorway and its head pressed up against the back of the huge cavern. Llesho climbed over an outthrust arm and made his way to the head, where two black pearls stared emptily out of the creature’s eye sockets.

Llesho remembered a dream, long ago. Then it had been the eyes of the Gansau Wastrels that he plucked. He found it no less dismaying to take the jewels from the head of the monster, but knew what he had to do. They popped out easily enough; carefully wiping the slime off them with the hem of his coat, he added them to the pouch he wore at his throat.

“Come,” Kwan-ti said when he was done. “If you are up to the walk, our people await you.”

Llesho followed her slowly from the demon-king’s cave. Once outside, the healer gave a little snort and toss of her head. Transforming into her dragon form, she rose to join Dun Dragon and Golden River Dragon, who perched on the rocks above him. He noted the presence of the dragons with only a part of his attention, however.

He’d thought she meant a delegation from the forces that the dragons had brought to the mountain to fight the demon invaders. Instead he found the mountainside covered with all the combined armies that he had gathered from the far reaches of the world. Kaydu and Shou had remained behind in the infirmary—he remembered the shock of their wounds—but Habiba was there, and all the kings and generals who had accompanied him to Kungol. Sawghar, the Gansau Wastrel, who represented the dream readers of Ahkenbad and even the Thebin corporal, Tonkuq, who had sometimes fought at his side in the Harnlands. The mortal gods, all but the mortal god of learning, gathered at the fore of all that massed company. He’d seen Master Geomancer as she was in her mortal form, muttering to herself at the mouth of the demon cave when he’d come out. “There were shards here, I know I saw them,” he’d heard her say, but he wasn’t tracking well enough yet to figure out what shards she meant. She bustled after him, however, and took her place among the gods.

This time the Lady SienMa stood not at the head of gods and humans, but to the side, deferring to the mortal god of peace who smiled at Llesho with tears in his eyes. “A costly day,” he said, meaning not this one battle. In the way that god spoke to god, Peace meant all the trials that had brought them here, from the attack on Kungol by Uulgar raiders and Master Markko’s wish to be other than nature had made him, through all the wasted lives and destruction that led them here, to the death of the demon-king.

“The rift between underworld and the mortal realm—” Llesho held his breath, fearing the answer, that the damage was permanent and more nightmares were coming.

But the god gave him a reassuring smile and said, “Closed by the demons themselves, who feared the champion of the Great Goddess might bring his war to the dead. For now, at least, the worlds of gods and men are safe.”

That was good to know. “Thank you,” Llesho said.

Peace answered, “I haven’t earned your thanks yet, but I hope to, starting today. For a little while the Lady War will sit out the dance and Peace will have his turn at the floor.”

“I trust there will be a place in this most peaceful of all worlds for a bit of mischief from time to time.” Master Den pretended indignation at all this harmony. He carried Bright Morning the dwarf who, in turn, carried Little Brother. The Monkey God had returned to his small size—a good thing, Bright Morning declared, since the Monkey God would otherwise be forced to carry the god of mercy on his shoulders!

The company laughed a little too hard and a little too long at the joke, but that was okay. They’d narrowly escaped the end of the world, after all, and with fewer losses than they had any right to expect. Llesho mourned his dead, but few among their company had known Marmer Sea Dragon or would regret his son’s passing as he did. He could see himself in the position of the young dragon-prince, had it not been for his teachers.

His brothers and his sister were there, including Lluka, who stumbled from the demon’s cave as if newly woken from a daze. Adar took him gently by the arm and led him over to where Balar stood with Menar’s hand on his shoulder. The wars had caused damage to mind and body, but Peace, he thought, would go a long way toward healing the worst of their wounds. From their midst came the warrior princes Ghrisz and Shokar, who would deny the title, as honor guard for their sister Ping, the sapphire princess, now their queen. Already she wore the robes of her office as high priestess of the Temple of the Moon. With her priests about her, she reminded Llesho of his mother so much that he didn’t know whether to smile or weep.

“Ceremonies and celebrations can wait until we bury our dead and rebuild our country,” Ghrisz said. “I know and accept that you will not be our king, but let us honor you before you leave us, at least.”

Of his family only Ghrisz himself seemed particularly surprised that Llesho would not stay. They had seen him grow thinner and more distant from his mortal life with each li closer to the gates of heaven they had traveled and seemed to have known the outcome of his quest even before Llesho had. It hurt him that he couldn’t give his brother even this one thing, but he’d kept the Goddess waiting far too long.

“Have your ceremony in my name,” he said. “But I can’t stay. I have a wife who misses me dearly, who I have longed to serve for more lives than I can count. I think I got it right this time, though, and I’m going home.”

“You’re not dying?” Ghrisz asked hesitantly.

He would have fought another war to prevent it,Llesho thought. He shook his head though. “I don’t think so.”

But he wasn’t sure. He was so tired, so sick, both in his body from the damage of poisons and battles and in his spirit from the many things he had seen and done on his quest.

“Not for a long time, I should judge,” Bright Morning agreed. “For most of us, however, comes a time of rest, to figure things out. Then a time of wandering. Then a time, perhaps, of coming home.”

With the lifting of his madness Lluka had just begun to glimpse a future. While he still suffered from the memories of what he had done, and the horror he had lived with for so long, he wished his brother well with all his heart. “I hope my children’s children see that day,” he said, meaning the return of the wandering king.

But: “Us?” Shokar asked with a quizzical cock of his head in the direction of the god of mercy. This most grounded of the seven brothers had come to accept the presence of gods and magicians in his life. But to add one to his family seemed too much for a simple farmer-prince to accept. He hadn’t been on the pavilion above the Palace of the Sun, and hadn’t heard Llesho’s true identity uncovered.

“Justice,” Bright Morning told him, and from the shoulder of the massive trickster god he gestured to left and to right where the gods of war and peace and learning had gathered with the Monkey God and the trickster and the god of mercy to welcome their lost fellow to their ranks again. “Too long has Justice been absent from the world.”

While his brothers stared from one god to another in amazement to find him among their ranks, Llesho answered Mercy’s rebuke.

“The world must make do for a while with the aid of mortals.”

“Rest,” Bright Morning agreed. “And I think you have still a task to complete for the Goddess your lady wife. The world will be here when you get back.”

“Indeed.” Llesho set a hand to the pouch in which he had gathered the String of Midnights, the black pearls of the Goddess. He set his gaze on the gates of heaven, which he knew that only the husbands of the Goddess could see inside the ice of the glacier high above the demon-king’s cave. It would be a long climb. If only he could sleep first . . .

“If I may—” Dun Dragon bowed his huge dragon head. “One last ride, for my lady, the Great Goddess?”

“Thank you,” Llesho said, “for everything,” and meant their first meeting as well as this last, the fulfillment of the prophecy, and the water flowing once again in the Stone River where Ahkenbad once stood against the thirst of a dusty desert. He was grateful as well for the offer of one last ride but, looking up at the huge creature, he knew he had to come to his lady wife on his own.

“Not this time,” he said.

“And about time,” Dun Dragon said, and meant:good-bye, and you’ve done well. “I’m glad I lived to see a young king learn to say ‘no.’ ”

“So am I, old friend. So am I.” Llesho made the heartfelt nature of his feelings known with a pat on the dragon’s nose. Then, with all the gathered support of gods and men and dragons at his back, with all the five armies of the prophecy looking on, he started to climb.

 

 

 

The crystal pillars entwined with silver flashed with diamonds and pearls, with sapphires and garnets of the dawn. Llesho would have known them for home, however, if they’d been made of ash and tied together with thongs of leather. Foot by foot, handhold by handhold, he climbed toward his goal.

Although his battle with the demon-king had sapped his strength, he found that as a god he pulled life from the ground beneath his feet and the air which grew thinner with each step. Mostly, he found the energy to go on in the sight of the gates that waited for him. The first part of this last journey on his quest taxed him no more than the steep staircase inside the tower of the Temple of the Moon. He found that part an easier climb, since no ghosts tormented him in his passage.

Gradually, however, the air grew too cold to breathe, and the stone under his fingers became ice. He had come out onto the glacier and he used his Thebin knife to dig his handholds as he climbed. Only the hope that called from above him, the precious gates of heaven, kept him moving. It began to seem as though he would never reach them, when, suddenly, he was there. But he was still on the outside, in the eternal winter of the glacier.

 

 

 

 

No gatekeeper stood to greet him, no gardener wandered down a leafy path to say hello. All he saw beyond was more ice. Llesho set his shoulder to the gates and pushed.

They didn’t budge.

He pushed again.

They didn’t move.

If he’d had the strength to fuel a temper he would have pounded on the gates, but he had used up the last of it climbing the mountain. Exhausted, he clung to the silver-turnings that barred his way.

“My Lady Goddess,” he called. “I’ve come, but I can’t get in.”

No one came, and finally he fell asleep.

In his dreams he saw the Goddess, his wife, in all her glory, which was beautiful and unearthly. He could not have described the warmth of her, or the welcome he saw in her arms, which were not arms as he had thought of them before.

“My lady,” he answered her call, though no words passed between them. She took his hands and led him forward and somehow the gates were meaningless and he had walked through as if the silver and jewels that barred his way did not exist.

The eternal dull light of heaven pressed down on them however, and the gardens had fallen to ruin as he remembered. Her pleasure at seeing him was equally dimmed by her uncertainty. “The String of Midnights?” she asked. “Have you found the pearls?”

“I have, my lady.” He drew the leather thong over his head and into her cupped hands he spilled her pearls.

Her eyes of many colors tallied up the number and she turned to him, stricken down so near to hope. “There is one missing.”

“Perhaps me?” Pig wandered out of a thicket, bound round with the silver chains that were the symbol of his disgrace. The Goddess put out her hand and Pig disappeared, shrinking down into the pearl that once had dangled from a silver chain at Llesho’s neck. Now he wore no chains, however, and Pig lay expectantly on his lady wife’s palm.

“The very one,” she said. When she had them all in her hand she flung them into the sky, as far as she could throw. And when they had reached the highest point in their arc, they stayed there. Suddenly, the heavens darkened with a cloudless clarity. Where each pearl had stuck, stars bloomed in the shapes of the constellations: the carter and his cart, the weeping princess, the bull and the goat. At the top of the sky, most resplendent of all the stars, Pig the gardener took his hoe to the rich, loamy darkness. It seemed to Llesho that the Jinn looked down on him and winked, though he thought that must be the twinkling of the stars.

Night had returned to the gardens of heaven.

“Come, husband,” the Goddess said as Great Moon Lun peeked over the gates of heaven. “You have been made to wait too long for your bed.”

She took Llesho’s hand and he let himself be led away to the bedchamber that had called to him across all the thousands of li of his quest. Soon enough he would return to the world as a mortal god with all of humanity to tend. For now, however, he had finally come home.