Steles of the Sky (9 page)

“Call him Re Ganjin,” she said. Re was the clan name—his father’s clan, and the clan of the Great Khagan, her son’s great-grandfather.
Ganjin
meant
Of Steel,
for his father, whose name meant
Iron,
and for her hope that he would grow up strong and resilient and sharp. “Your concern for my son is
touching
. But who can protect him better than I?”

She wrapped both arms around him. “Besha Ghul,” she said. “You are my general. Are there ways through the Grave Roads to Reason?”

“There are ways through the Grave Roads to everywhere,” Besha Ghul said. Ghulim voices had an odd, glottal quality, perhaps because of their thick tongues and sharp teeth. “If you must go to Reason, will you consent to take a force? One of moderate size?”

“Besha—”

“You made me your general, my queen. Someone else has taken Reason. The Green Ring that makes you Mistress of Secrets tells you so. Will you go and face that adversary without an army? Because you are so strong you fear nothing—not your enemies, not al-Sepehr?”

Edene looked at the djinn. “I suppose,” she said, “that you will report everything you hear to al-Sepehr. And that you can reveal none of his secrets.”

The djinn inclined his head. “I am his creature. So long as he can hold me.”

Though the words were plainly spoken, there was no disguising the menace in them.

“You and the rukhs, too.” Edene wrapped her free hand around Ganjin and pulled him closer. Not because she was cold—she felt no cold, and had not since she donned the ring—but because the child had drifted to sleep, and his presence soothed her.

“Would you not rather bring your army and your son to Re Temur?”

“Are those your words, Spirit?” Ka-asha Ghul asked, leaving Edene to briefly contemplate the irony of a ghul calling a djinn
spirit.
“Or are they those of your master?”

The djinn turned his head and spat. His saliva was liquid flame. It sizzled on stone, a crawling, guttering fire, until it burned out and was gone, leaving only a blackened scorch behind.

“Those of his master,” Edene said. “Never fear—sooner or later, Temur will have my army. But it will not be at your suggestion, my friend. Besha Ghul.”

“My Queen?”

“How long will it take you to ready an expeditionary force to retake Reason?”

The ghul studied its clawed fingertips, ticking one against another as if counting. It probably was.

“Two days,” it said finally. “For supplies and logistics.”

Edene had been studying tactics and strategy in preparation for this event. It had seemed far-off, penumbral. Now, suddenly, it was upon them.

“You shall have three,” she told the ghul. “Now be about it. Ka-asha, please try to keep an eye on the djinn. We would prefer to keep our secrets from his master.”

The djinn raised his brows at her, a steady flame-bright regard resting on her face. Edene’s cheeks heated as if she crouched to close to a fire.

Grumpily, she said, “At least pretend.”

*   *   *

From an arched window atop the highest minaret of the caliph’s great domed palace in Asitaneh, the slave poetess Ümmühan leaned into the wind. A warm, dry updraft caught her veils and sleeves and streamed them back against the pale stone and bright tiles surrounding her. Tears stung her eyes as she watched the sunset march across the devastated city below.

She looked toward the docks. Red light thick as narcotic Rasan honey lay over tier after tier of merchant’s high houses, the balconies kissing across narrow streets; over the temples of the Scholar-God with their scriptures picked out in gold, tile, glass mosaic winding up the tower walls; across the streets marked by blackened squares of cinders and heaps of heat-cracked stone.

A third of the city had burned.

No smoke rose, and in places she could see the marks where people had begun to sort, to clear, to rebuild. The ossuaries under the city were stuffed to bursting with fresh corpses. A Rasani wizard allied to the old, vanquished caliph had used her magic to … not repair, but
repeal
some of the damage done by burning. But though she could somehow turn charred wood, charred flesh whole again—she could not return the dead to life, or rebuild a collapsed home.

Someday, Ümmühan knew, Asitaneh would again be what it had been. This was not the first time the ancient trade city had burned. She also knew she would not live to see it rebuilt entirely, and entirely repopulated.

And then there was the problem of the vanquished caliph, Uthman Fourteenth, who was fled but not dead, and who had taken a certain number of his elite personal guard, called the Dead Men, with him. That would need dealing with, and soon. As would those Dead Men who had deserted their former master and fallen in with Ümmühan’s master.

Ümmühan heard a step behind her, and turned to greet the new caliph.

They called him Kara Mehmed—Black Mehmed. He had traded the blue cloak sewn with stars that the old caliph had given him for a robe of royal fuchsia, stiffened with bands of bullion embroidery, worn open over a white shirt and trousers. His scimitar was thrust through his sash; even in his own palace, this was a martial king.

Ümmühan dropped gracefully to her knees, head bowed, and lowered her eyes as he came to her. Mehmed First, caliph of what had been the Uthman Caliphate, paused a step away. She felt his fingers gentle on her head, then hooked through her golden collar. He tugged her to her feet and the warm gold slid against her skin as he lifted her face with his fingertips.

How could something so smooth chafe so?

She smiled for him as—delicately—he unwound her veils. When he saw her face, he breathed a sigh. “Your face is my peace,” he said, quoting the Prophet. It was not—quite—blasphemy, not if he spoke with reverence, to Ümmühan as an avatar of the Scholar-God. Her face—every woman’s face—was sacred in that way.

But it was walking the line.

Ümmühan schooled herself. No man had ever seen a trace of displeasure on her features, not since she took a woman’s veil. She was a secret priestess of the Scholar-God, and no man would see her weakness now.

“My lion,” she said. “You are weary.”

He brushed her forehead with his mouth. He smelled of patchouli, musk, and amber—warm, resinous, alive. She closed her eyes and breathed deep.

“There is the matter of the turncoat Dead Men,” he said. “And their reward.”

Ümmühan replied with poetry: “Phoenix city from the flames arising / The red across your palms is not henna.” The couplet she recited was an example of the political form called a
viper,
for—like the little saw-scaled snakes of Asitaneh—they were always short and sharp, with dripping venom. Mehmed stiffened, then relaxed slightly as Ümmühan put her arms around him.

“Asitaneh is yours, my lion. Asmaracanda as well. You have taken back what the Qersnyk barbarians stole from our people, and you have placed them all under a Rahazeen sky.”

“Uthman still roams loose, and more than half of his Dead Men with him,” he answered. “The city lies in ruins, and al-Sepehr will expect me to pay for his assistance in the coin of alliance soon. Nothing comes for free from the Nameless.”

To hide the thrill she felt deep in her belly at the mention of al-Sepehr, Ümmühan leaned her forehead against his collarbone and hummed low in her throat. She felt him ease again. Men were such fragile creatures, so easy to manipulate. So much less than human.

It was not their fault. They could not help it that she had been made in the Scholar-God’s image, when they were poor copies at best. Deep down, Ümmühan suspected that this was why they felt the need to keep women collared like cats, in cages like birds. It was a pathetic attempt to own a soul more numinous than theirs, an urge to get closer to the divine by controlling those who were naturally more attuned to it.

She was not too proud to use their weaknesses against them. In fact, she might say she was too proud
not
to do so.

Mehmed was bareheaded, here in his private household. She reached up and brushed one of the oiled black coils of his hair behind his ear. She kissed his cheek, and let him gaze his fill on her naked face. “Shall I play for you, my lion? Will that soothe your heart?”

“You soothe my heart with your eyes,” he said. “With the curve of your cheek. You are the ghost in my heart, poetess.”

She disentangled herself from him gently, led him to a couch, and made him recline. She fetched chilled wine with her own hands—slave or not, Ümmühan had the caliph’s favor and could have summoned a servant, but she wished no one to intrude on this moment of intimacy—and settled upon cushions beside the divan, where Mehmed could, if he pleased, stroke her hair. She had brought her zither. Now she took it from its case, and having tuned it, began to play.

The song she sang was opaque, allegorical. It could pass for a love song—on one level, it
was
a love song—but anyone with the skill to read the formal second and third levels of classical poetry would hear a critique of the caliphate and the tax system—and a priestess of Ümmühan’s sect would hear another message entirely. One that would see Ümmühan most elaborately executed for heresy and witchcraft if understood by anyone else.

Her secret priesthood by itself would be cause enough for an even more elaborate execution, if anyone knew of it.

Kara Mehmed was certainly clever and educated enough to pick out the second and third levels—but the layers of obfuscation were, by tradition, respected. And anyway, the satire was aimed at the old caliph.

Ümmühan hoped that Kara Mehmed, like so many men, believed that the Women’s Rite of the Scholar-God was a myth. And she had gone to great lengths to establish herself as far too flighty to be involved in anything so serious.

Men, in her experience, were eager to believe that women were silly, incompetent, small-minded. Even if they were Hasitani, poets, or others who glorified heaven through their work—as if the Scholar-God would make fools in her own image.

She finished her song and they sat awhile in silence, the calluses of his weapon-hardened palm catching on her curls as he tried to smooth her hair. She leaned back against him and closed her eyes. Whatever his other shortcomings, when it came to touching women, Mehmed Caliph had good hands.

At last, he said—reluctantly—“You were right about the assassin, beloved.”

“Al-Sepehr? The Nameless? I don’t recall a disagreement, my lion.”

“No. You wouldn’t, would you? But it was your counsel that led me to ally with him. And it was his intervention that gave us Asitaneh, and with Asitaneh the caliphate. The thing you said earlier…”

“My lion?”

“The couplet.”

Softly, she recited it again. “Phoenix city from the flames arising / The red across your palms is not henna.”

“Did you compose that?”

A chill of unease crept through her midsection. “No one composes a viper. They grow; they belong to all poets.”

A polite fiction. His amused snort was less polite. “It wasn’t a phoenix that burned Asitaneh.”

Unbidden, the memory came—an image of blue flame, rising coils like a dust devil from the desert. A string of seventeen syllables in a name, which Ümmühan had committed to her heart with a poet’s precision.

“My lion? Was it not … rioters?”

“One of al-Sepehr’s creatures,” he said, irritation sharp in his voice. Ümmühan did not believe that irritation was for her. Rather, it was because he had had to rely on another, an outsider—Rahazeen like himself, but of the radical Nameless cult—to put him on the dais. “A djinn.”

It was the long experience of a courtesan and a courtier that kept her from stiffening and pulling away. Ümmühan was no stranger to extremity or expedience—you could not be a slave or a woman and have any illusions as to how the world worked. But to burn a city—your own city!—and its people in your attempt to take her …

She had understood that Kara Mehmed was ruthless. She had not understood
how
ruthless until now.

“You regret the deal you struck, my lion?”

His robes rustled as he shrugged. “He has delivered the caliphate to me, as he promised. As you suggested he would. It is a Rahazeen sun that rises here now, and the Scholar-God may be properly worshiped in our temples. There will be an end to permissiveness, to iniquity, to the lax and indulgent ways that flourished under Uthman Fourteenth’s reforms. Asitaneh will be holy again.”

“I hear you, my lion. And yet?”

“And yet. We have been reliant upon the sorceries of a follower of the Carrion King to bring us here.”

She let him see her nod. “It doesn’t sit well.”

Thoughtfully, Mehmed said, “We have used him. Now we must be rid of him.”

Whatever Ümmühan felt, deep in her body, for al-Sepehr … she would not forget that it was at his command that fires had burned her city of Asitaneh.

She had regained control of her face. She knelt smoothly, rose up, turned, and bowed before the divan—a request. Gently, Mehmed took her hand and drew her to recline beside him. She caught his fingers between her palms and kissed them.

“It is done, however. It cannot be undone.” She waved to the window from which she had leaned, a moment before. “Not even by the powers of a heretical wizard.”

“Not a heretic,” he corrected, smiling faintly. “A heathen. A poet should know the difference.”

She inclined her head.
Indeed. A poet should.

“So we must go on from where we stand? Is that your suggestion, my Ümmühan?” Her name—her most recent slave-name, to be more precise, though she had never had a free woman’s name—meant
Illiterate
. It was considered ill luck to brag too much of one’s talents, and so when her gift and skill became apparent, the master who had eventually sold her to Kara Mehmed had given her this name.

“It is as my lion says. We must build the Asitaneh and the caliphate we wish to leave to the sons of the future.”

She laid her cheek against her hand. But what she felt in her heart was a fire far colder than the one that had burned her city, and what she heard in her mind was the djinn’s long name, echoing and echoing again.