Steles of the Sky (10 page)

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Even before Temur’s gaze pierced the darkness of the veil, he heard Bansh’s hooves squeak on packed snow. He felt the mare shift her weight cautiously. The long muscles by her spine tensed and her head came back, her forelegs extending and her hind legs crouching as her body compensated for a slope. Temur moved his weight to help her—a reflex, a guess, trust in his mare’s judgment when he himself could not see.

A sliding hop-step forward and he was through, breath pluming in raw air, sun bright and sharp—

—and not at all shattering off the dazzling white he had already squinted against. What squeaked underfoot was char-black, and the sunlight falling on it did not glitter. It was snow—or more precisely, a glacier. He could see the spiderweb white of vast crevasses showing through the layer of ash that covered everything.

Or, not quite everything. Distant peaks still shimmered, rising above a grassless silver plain that it took him a moment to realize was an overcast, seen from above. He was high enough to see the mountains falling back and falling back and falling back until they vanished in blue haze and it seemed they dropped off the edge of the world. His lungs burned; Bansh’s ribs heaved between his knees. He risked a turn in the saddle and nearly tumbled out of it.

That would be a disaster. He’d slide and roll and bump down the glacier until he met his death in one of those enormous cracks.

When he peeled his hands free of the pommel again, his fingers already bluing with the cold, he moved more cautiously.

Bansh crouched on a ridge below the peak of a mountain shaped like an axe blade. A thick column of smoke rose from a giant, truncated black cone of a peak off to his right and half-behind him, streaming away in one direction as if the wind caught it and sheared it like the anvil tops of thunderheads. Behind Bansh, only a step or two, loomed a sort of irregular triangular doorway constructed of two mighty gray stones leaned together. They must be somehow wedged at the top. Temur could not see, and nor could he imagine what art could haul those dolmens up here and set them in place to endure—the Sky knew how long. The doorway shimmered dark; they could return the way they had come.

She might be a god-steed, a spirit or something like it. But magic or not, there was no way his mare could turn on this ridge. Not unless he wanted to risk her trick of walking on air, and he’d only seen her do that in the midst of a fight. There was no guarantee the gift would be available to them now.

“Steles,” he said, half to himself and half to his mare. Tears froze on his lashes at the pain of this cold on his teeth, in his throat. He shivered in his armor and felt his mare shivering too, but his lightheadedness and awe were such that it was seconds before he thought to draw his hands against the reins and urge Bansh to step backward up the slope.

She struggled with it. The slope was steep, her footing bad, her weight settled on her hindquarters. He felt the way her forelegs pushed and slid, the desperate little hops of her back hooves. He saw the bright scrapes through the ash to the ice where her feet had scrabbled, and he held himself perfectly still and trusted his mare again.

And she trusted him. Straight back, exactly the way they had come, as not one horse in a hundred could have managed. He felt her hind hooves reach solid footing, the moment when she knew she would not slide. He felt the warmth of the world they had come from on his shoulders and then they were through, his clothing and her armor smoking in the balmy air. Bansh stood and Temur sat motionless for a moment, both heads bowed. His hands rested on the pommel. The reins rested in his hands. He did not lift his face until the mare lifted hers.

Then he made himself slide from the saddle, leathers creaking stiff, and lift and check and clean each of her hooves, one by one.

Hsiung had helped Samarkar to the stony stump of a fallen tree. Tolui and Hrahima stood at either side of the gateway, as if they had been ready to rush to his aid.

Hrahima watched him silently for a moment, then asked, “Where did it lead?”

The warm air still stung. “The top of the world.”

Hsiung, eyes shining only faintly green, as though a luminescent tide were retreating, gestured to the symbols by the gate.

“The Steles of the Sky,” Temur agreed. “As promised. Right on top of them, too.” He picked wet cinders and melting snow from Bansh’s hooves and dumped them on the ground.

Samarkar leaned forward, jaw set against pain. “That’s ash.”

“At a guess? The Cold Fire is burning.”

Samarkar put a palm to her mouth.

“Oh,” said Tolui. “Did I forget to mention that?”

7

Ato Tesefahun had sent his grandson, Temur, the Wizard Samarkar, and Brother Hsiung east through the flames of burning Asitaneh in the care of his Cho-tse ally, Hrahima. And then he had seen to the hasty packing and evacuation of his own household, complete with servants, guards, cook, gardeners, and all. The tortoises from the garden had been released into the desert beyond the inland gates of the city, the ponies laden with household items, the songbirds that populated the courtyard trees left to see to their nests as best they could. And Ato Tesefahun led his dependents—some two score in total—west along the desert road, anonymous among all the others streaming out of burned Asitaneh.

There was an altercation at the gates, when at first one of the guards had not been willing to open them and let the refugees escape. Tesefahun had wondered worriedly if he would need to risk his men at arms to force the issue, but instead he and his household had wound up stepping into a side street and hiding the eyes of the cook’s and the captain’s and the head gardener’s children as the mob took care of opening the gates for themselves. Asitaneh had fortifications intended to protect guardsmen, but they were insufficient against an attack from within the walls.

They had stayed with the train for a day or two, planning and gathering themselves—then struck out north, along a side route rocky and uneven across the pale, dusty hardpan. It led to a fishing village on the coast of the White Sea, where Tesefahun knew they could hire a boat—and send a message to his son Kebede. He was still undecided as to whether they would wait for Kebede in this tiny village, or whether it would be best to try to meet him in Asmaracanda. But there was time to make up his mind—three days travel at least, possibly four with this entourage.

Ato Tesefahun could still read a trail, and he knew within moments that someone had come this way before them—but not too much before. Someone mounted and moving fast: two groups of them. Which said to him, pursued and pursuer, and made him interested. When the tracks of both parties diverted onto a side trail heading east, he made up his mind to follow. It so happened that that particular trail looped, cutting back below a cliff, and would make an ideal spot for an ambush—something he knew because he kept his escape routes prepared. He had not gotten to be the age he was in a difficult political climate by failing to check what lay outside of back doors.

He instructed his armed retainers to take horse and accompany him. Pretending for the moment that he was not feeling the pain of long travel in every joint, he reassured the others and told them to go on ahead to the fishing village and await him there. Then he gathered his resources, assessed the terrain, and began to plot a course of action.

He had seven men-at-arms, their families gone on ahead with the rest of his dependents. He himself was an old man, and not fit for combat. If his guess as to who they were following was correct, there would probably already be soldiers at the ambush point he had in mind. The ideal outcome would be to deal with them before their quarry reached the switchback below, and prevent the ambush with an ambush of their own.

As Ato Tesefahun and his guardsmen pounded on their horses along the dusty road—really, little more than a rubbled wash that dropped between crumbling walls to each side—they knew they were gaining on their quarry. Horse droppings were fresh and wet, the scrape of hooves on stones clear and still showing grit at the edges. Soon, they also knew they were too late to prevent the ambush—but perhaps not too late to prevent its inevitable outcome—as the sound of combat rang from the stones of the gully.

Tesefahun reined his gelding aside, shoulder to the sloping wall of the wash, and let his men-at-arms thunder past in a pall of yellow dust. He drew a fold of cloth across his face to filter air, thinking of how the Dead Men only unveiled themselves to kill.

Cries and the clash of blades redoubled ahead. He urged the horse on cautiously, for the dust rendered a tricky route all the more treacherous. By the time he reached the scene of combat, his men stood victorious over the corpses of a dozen of the new caliph’s personal guard: not the kapikulu in their blue coats or the Dead Men in their scarlet, but men who wore the private livery of Kara Mehmed and who had wielded bows, not blades, from this presumed-safe vantage point. Tesefahun’s men had come up on them unaware and slaughtered them without taking a wound.

The trail descended through a gap in the rocks, and from this point down the left wall dropped away, leaving a cliff below with an overlook to a wider road that ran through the bottom of the valley. Though the trail Tesefahun had been following continued, from this point on it hugged one wall of the canyon below and vanished between rocks ahead long before it reached the valley’s floor.

On that road below, there had been combat as well—and that combat, too, was over.

Seven or eight horses and the balance of Mehmed’s men bled out on the rocky soil, and among the red of their blood lay strewn the red coats of a dozen or so Dead Men, now dead in truth as well as in vocation. In the midst of the ring of corpses were six remaining Dead Men, mounted and armed, and a little cluster of mounted women and children—and, armored in a breastplate and helm, mounted on a gray horse pale as beach sand between its smoky nose and tail, with a scimitar sticky with blood still levered in his right hand, was Uthman Caliph Fourteenth.

Despite the helm, Tesefahun had no doubt as to his identity. The horse’s tasseled caparisons were in indigo sewn with stars all over, and the plumes on the helm were indigo and fuchsia, bending sideways in the constant wind.

Tesefahun stepped down from his gelding and handed the reins to the nearest man-at-arms. He stepped up to the edge of the cliff where the wash broke away, one hand on the stones beside his head to steady himself. A hot updraft pushed his veil into his mouth and nose and dried the horse-sweat on his thighs. His own fresh sweat sprang up between his shoulders.

He tugged the veil down to show his face and leaned out over emptiness, just a little. “Uthman Fourteenth,” he called down, into the breathless desert heat. “Hail, you old bastard. How does it feel to be among the mortals now?”

*   *   *

Uthman and his six remaining Dead Men and all the women and children of the household trudged back up the trail, leading every horse that they could catch. Tesefahun met them among the rocks and fell into step beside Uthman, leading on. The usurped caliph was worn and weary, and all that midnight blue showed trail dust spectacularly. But he walked up to Tesefahun and threw his arms around the older, slighter man’s shoulders in a hard, quick hug that smelled of gunpowder and horse before setting Tesefahun at arm’s length.

“Were it not for you, Wizard, I’d be bleeding into my own shit in the sand down there. I’d say, name your reward, but”—a gesture took in the wasteland around them—“this is my caliphate now.”

Tesefahun put his own hands on Uthman’s shoulders, a strong clap. Uthman’s helm bumped at his hip now, allowing the wizard a long look into the former caliph’s brown eyes. The man who had been king squinted in the slanting sun.

“You didn’t want to hear about al-Sepehr, Uthman, when we brought the question before you previously.”

“Times change,” said Uthman. “But I haven’t an army to loan you these days.”

“Follow me,” said Tesefahun. “I think we have some things to discuss. About Kara Mehmed, and an enemy in common. And armies, and other things.”

*   *   *

The caravan narrowed as Yangchen-tsa’s people followed the Tsarethi road through a series of winding passes that the river—and the work of ancient wizards—had carved between the mountains. They could not group to camp at night, and so the wizards took it in turns to ride or walk the length of the train every evening, warding each family or group against demonlings and the less tangible terrors of the night. By day, they slept atop the loads in their wagons, exhausted by their vigils.

The Steles of the Sky rose on every side, clean peaks robed in white, broken edges sharp through their glaciers—but at least for now both rain and snow were merciful. Clouds stretched and tore between them, as if the Jade Courtesan had snagged her gauzy veils. Tiered trails of bar-headed geese echoed the angles of the peaks, then collapsed with a shift of the wind into twisting prayer banners. The benefit of the river road was that the trail tended ever downward. It was hard on knees, hard on the brakes of wagons, hard on the beasts who strained back against the tongues of the carts to slow their descent—but it meant that when a cart got stuck in the furrows and wallows of so many others’ passage, the slope was in their favor for pushing it free. And they pushed a lot of carts free over the days that followed.

Yangchen and Shuffle (
Shuffle-tsa,
she came to call him affectionately;
Lord Shuffle
) made themselves ubiquitous along the train. It was perhaps an unfair name; under his fluff the steer had long lines of hard muscle through his loins and haunches, and from the saddle his gait had a rolling quality. He wasn’t as fast as a pony, but he picked his feet up smartly, his fringes swinging like heavy robes when he ran. Yangchen thought he didn’t notice her own insubstantial weight, or that of her son, or the saddle, at all. And no pony could have scrambled up the rocky margins of the trail so sure-footedly, leaving Yangchen’s guards and attendants racing to follow.

Each night, Yangchen was less sore than the night before—and every morning was a little easier. She no longer wept silently as she struggled into the saddle. Na-Baryan and Munye-tsa kept to the wagons, in deference to their old bones. But Gyaltsen-tsa and—more and more—Anil-la rode with the Dowager Empress Regent, trading their ponies for a mule and a yak cow, respectively.