Curt Benjamin - [Seven Brothers 03] - The Gates of Heaven

by Curt Benjamin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I’m ready.” Llesho mounted up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You can’t—”

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

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

  Chapter Ten

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You’re right, of course. There is no place next to his brother for my father’s son. Mergen will make his own heirs and there is the matter of the murderous Lady Chaiujin, who seems bent on wiping out my family. I thought I might serve better out of the eye of the coming storm.”<
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  “With one who does not serve the khan?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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