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

by Curt Benjamin

  “Mercy abandoned us for a more promising target,” Llesho reminded them sourly. He really hated being wrong in an argument, and he was having a hard time defending himself against sacred verses of the god of mercy while trying to figure out how he might persuade Lling to act as his ambassador to Prince Tayy. If he put it just that way she would do it, of course, but this was the wrong time to substitute court manners for friendship. As Tayy had been trying to tell him, maybe.

  “But,” Master Den began with a wicked grin.

  Llesho sighed. They weren’t going to give him any kind of break. “But Mercy is never absent when he travels in our hearts.”

  Having won his point, Master Den was willing to end the lesson with a gift of compromise. “The greatest struggle all kings face is how to balance justice with mercy.”

  The words jangled like a memory struck by a gong somewhere deep in his belly. “Sometimes Mercyis justice.” He answered out of bone-knowledge rather than a lesson learned. He was the king. It was his mercy, his job to offer it. Jealousy had no place on that scale. With a sharp tilt of the head to acknowledge his duty, he wandered out beyond the stones.

  “Tayy!” he called. “I was being stupid, and I’m sorry! Come back!” But Tayy’s horse was no longer with the others and the night felt empty around him. With a last call that startled the horses into their own skittish answer, he returned to the fire.

  “He’s gone.” Llesho flung himself on the ground and shook off the brooding sulk that threatened to draw the trickster god’s mocking disapproval. “Took his horse and left for home, from what he said at the fire. I called and called, but he didn’t answer.”

  His companions weren’t pleased with him, but not even Kaydu said anything. They were wondering, he suspected, whether the whole king-thing had gone to his head before he even had a throne to sit on. Which was less embarrassing than the truth. He’d wanted Tayy’s friendship for himself. The cadre’s easy acceptance of the prince had made him jealous, and then he’d been hurt by the prince’s words.

  A wolf howled in the distance, followed by the nervous cry of a horse just outside the circle of stones. Llesho pulled his coat more tightly around him. It wasn’t safe for Tayy out there alone. Wolves and who knew what else prowled the night. Southern fighters might be on their way east, looking for the lost remnants of Tsu-tan’s force.

  “Maybe we should stir up the fire.” With an ill-tempered grumble he gestured with a shoulder at the lightless fire pit. “It will keep the wolves away. And, if he changes his mind, Tayy’ll be able to find us in the dark.”

  If Master Markko’s southern raiders were prowling the area, their fire would serve the enemy as a beacon as well, or they’d have kept the fire going in the first place. No one objected, however, when Hmishi threw on more bricks of dried droppings. Kaydu snapped her fingers for sparks. “We should sleep now. If Prince Tayy comes back he can settle his own billet, and if he doesn’t, we’ll have to assume he made his own way home.”

  Home wasn’t there anymore—the whole tent city had packed up and moved east, toward Durnhag. That fact went into the saddlebag with all the other issues they weren’t talking about. Later, Llesho thought, when the wolves weren’t nosing the outside of the circle of stones and the spirits of the dead weren’t pressing on the gate of the underworld where they sat. They’d talk later. In the meantime, he said, “I’ll take the first watch.”

  Kaydu nodded, allowing him this small penance. Settling Little Brother at her head, she rolled into her blankets and closed her eyes. One by one, the rest of his companions did likewise.

  Llesho climbed up on the highest of the stones that made the circle where they rested. He brought his pack with him, cautiously checking the precious objects he carried, gifts of the Lady SeinMa and the pearls of the Great Goddess. With both ears listening for any approach, and an eye for the night held at a distance by their renewed fire, he drew the leather thong from where it hid beneath his collar. The small bag that hung from it had grown fat with the black pearls of the Great Goddess’ necklace. Once again he regretted the loss of his teacher, the counselor Lleck. There hadn’t been time to learn all he needed to know, like how Lleck had stolen the first of the pearls from Pearl Bay Dragon, who he had known as the motherly healer Kwan-ti. Or how the pearls would restore the balance between heaven and earth. Or how many pearls he had to find.

  Three he had received as gifts before he ever left the empire of Shan—one from the hand of the lady SeinMa herself and one from Mara, Carina’s mother and an aspirant to be the eighth mortal god. And the one Lleck had given him, stolen from the Pearl Bay Dragon. She’d told Llesho that she meant to give it to him anyway, so that turned out all right. He hadn’t told her at the time, but he had grown to love the dragon who had treated him kindly in her human form and saved his life once in the sea.

  Four more pearls had come to him like dreams. One bound in silver, had disguised Pig, the Jinn and chief gardener of heaven, who came to him as a guide in the dream world. Pig had never been entirely clear about the pearl or the silver that bound him. Was it part of the Goddess’ String of Midnights, made use of by a vision? Or was it truly the Jinn, escaped as he said in the shape of the pearls lost to heaven in some great clash at the gates? He still didn’t know, and wore it separately, hung from a silver chain by a ring in its back.

  The last pained him most to look at—he had found them like the broken bits of finger the stone giants left behind when they stole the hearts of their murdered victims. In a dream he had gathered them from the breasts of the Gansau Wastrels dead in Llesho’s own service, freeing them to continue on to the underworld. When the dream ended, the Wastrels were still dead, and the pearls remained as a reminder of his loss. He tucked them carefully away close to his heart again, wondering how many more he had to find. How much more suffering would they be a part of, before he could return them to the Goddess? He didn’t know, and couldn’t imagine how he was going to find out.

  The short spear of the Lady SeinMa had drawn his blood down through lifetimes he couldn’t count, could only vaguely sense at all. In all those lifetimes the spear had taunted at his back until it had turned and killed him, but in this one he’d had enough and wrested control from it. Like a conquered beast, it waited in silence until he faltered. Llesho would have destroyed it, but his dreams told him the weapon had a part to play in battles still to be fought before the gates of heaven. So he set it aside and pulled out the two jade cups he now carried. The first, a wedding cup from his own past lives that the Lady SienMa had returned to him, had delicate carvings on a rim thin enough that the light of the sun, or even a candle, would shine through it. He checked it for damage before picking up the second, its match in all except the thickness of its rim and a strange spiral rune, like the coils of a snake carved at the bottom of the bowl.

  The Lady Chaiujin had given him the cup, filled with the potion that had made him desire her. She had known he carried its match, the marriage cup of his past life: where had she gotten the second, and what significance did it hold? He didn’t want to think about her now, with the wolves howling nearby and the fire burning low at the center of their camp. Putting the cups away in his pack, he sent a nervous glance over his shoulder. No one moved. There could have been no breath at his ear, no shift of a sleeve at his back, but he felt as if someone was watching him intently.

  “Spirit, show yourself,” he said, because they rested at a gate to the underworld and could expect visitors from among the dead.

  No answer came to him, but a chill as if of distant, mocking laughter made Llesho shiver. The cold of night, he tried to convince himself, but superstitious dread ran little mice feet up his spine. “What do you want?”

  He thought he heard a slithering in the grass at the base of the stone he sat on but when he looked, he saw nothing.

  Great Moon Lun rose and started across the sky, but Tayy didn’t come back. Llesho shivered in his coats and wrapped a blanket close around him, but he couldn’
t keep out the cold breeze that tugged at the edges of his clothes and blazed an icy trail up his sleeves. Even the wolves seemed to have departed for the warmth of their dens, leaving him only the ghosts for company.

  “Want company?” As if conjured by the thought of ghosts, Hmishi appeared at his elbow.

  “You’re alive,” Llesho answered, sounding foolish to his own ears.

  Hmishi nodded, though, as if it were the most sensible greeting in the world, and between them, maybe it was. “Thanks to you,” he said, answering one part of the surprise in Llesho’s voice. He’d been dead, and now he wasn’t. That fact had sparked the argument that sent Tayy off into the dark, but it had just been an excuse then. Alone in the dark, so near the abode of ghosts, it was hard not to wonder if he’d made a mistake.

  “What was it like?” Llesho whispered, cutting a glance at his old friend out of the corner of his eye. They’d come close over the supper pot, but no one had quite asked the question until now. He wasn’t sure it was safe to ask it here, where the ghosts could hear him. Too many had died in his short life, and his own past deaths haunted his dreams. With Prince Tayy out there alone with the wolves and the creeping mysteries he might have added to their number this very night.

  Hmishi curled up next to him on the rock, huddled close for warmth so that Llesho felt rather than saw his shrug. “Peaceful, I guess. Mostly, I don’t remember it at all. But when I think about it, it feels peaceful. It hurt so much, what Tsu-tan did, what he let his soldiers do to me. I’d been praying for it to be over for days. Lling needed me; I felt guilty wanting to escape before we rescued the princes and saved Kungol, but I’d come to the place where the river ends. I was ready to go.”

  Llesho nodded, letting Hmishi know he was listening, understanding, but not getting in the way if he wanted to go on. After a quiet moment, he did.

  “I wasn’t sorry to go. I remember thinking that I ought to be—sorry, that is—but it all seemed so far away, as if it didn’t have anything to do with me any more. As if it never had. Then I heard Dognut playing his silver flute. It makes no sense, but I heard words in the notes, telling me to wake up, to come back to the world. The melody was so joyous, but the words were sad, as if the flute knew what it was asking, and regretted the need. I didn’t want to come back at first.

  “I was afraid of the pain,” Hmishi looked away when he said it, as if it embarrassed him.

  “It was horrible,” Llesho agreed. “I still have nightmares that he brought you back all broken like we found you.”

  “I have some of those myself,” Hmishi gave a little twitch of discomfort. “Anyway, I was ready to begin again with a new life, free of all that. Still, I wanted to see Lling, and I’d left so much undone that when he called, I came back. Better to face your burdens in this life than to carry them along into the next one.”

  “I’m figuring that out myself,” Llesho agreed with a wry twist of a smile. The dreams had made it clear that he was carrying some major debt from his past life, and he didn’t plan on lugging it along to the next. He just hoped that having Hmishi here beside him hadn’t added more than he could carry to that burden.

  “You’d better get some rest.” Hmishi turned to face out beyond the rocky circle, signaling his turn at watch. “If we’re going to find Tayy we’re going to have to start early in the morning.”

  “Yeah,” Llesho agreed, speaking of debts he was unwilling to carry forward. “He can’t have gotten far.”

  With a last companionable nod, he unfolded his curled legs so that he could stand and wandered back to the dim glow of the fire. Lling, he noticed, waited only for him to settle in the place they’d left for him closest to the coals before she was tiptoeing in the direction of Hmishi at the watch. Good, he thought. No one should be alone with the wide and empty night. And with that thought, he closed his eyes and dreamed that the spiral rune at the bottom of the Lady Chaiujin’s cup uncoiled like a serpent and slithered from the bottom of the bowl. As it reached the rim the leading part became the head of an emerald bamboo snake. The body followed, with scales like green silk, until the rune had left the cup completely and coiled itself against the heat of his body.

  “Llesho!” the snake whispered in his ear with Lady Chaiujin’s voice. “I am the goddess of the underworld, and I want you. Accept my kiss and come with me.”

  “No!” he said in the dream. “You are no god, and I don’t want you!”

  “Yes you do,” she said, and Llesho felt her fingers, her lips, no serpent at all, but the lady herself, in human form.

  “You’re a demon,” he accused her, and she laughed at him.

  “So are you,” she whispered. “So are you.”

  “No!” He woke gasping for breath, with the word still on his lips and the howling of dogs in the distance in his ears, smeared with the feel of her lip rouge where she had kissed him.

  “What is it?” Kaydu had leaped to her feet, sword in hand and with Little Brother clinging to her neck. Bixei and Stipes followed not more than a pace behind her, while Hmishi sprang to greater attention on the rocks, and Lling circled their camp, leaping lightly from stone to stone.

  “I saw nothing,” Hmishi reported, and Lling added, “Nothing has troubled the horses.”

  “It was a dream.” Llesho apologized for waking the company.

  “A traveling dream?” Kaydu wanted to know. “What’s going on?”

  She meant elsewhere in the dream world, but Llesho shook his head. “Nothing like that. It was just a dream, and a stupid one at that.”

  “Oh?”

  They weren’t going to leave him alone until they heard the dream and judged it for themselves, so he told it, how the rune at the bottom of his cup had become a snake, and the snake had become the lady, that he’d known her for a demon, and she’d known him for the same. When he had done, Kaydu was watching him with the greedy eyes of a magician. “Have you checked the cup?”

  “I don’t need to check it. There was nothing here.”

  With one eyebrow raised in an expression of doubt, she reached over and wiped the corner of his mouth. When she held her hand up in front of her, the dull firelight showed a dark stain coloring her thumb.

  Llesho swiped the back of his own hand across his lips, wanting to erase every sign that the dream had been true. If she could reach him past their guard, touch him in his sleep and no one see, she must truly be a demon. He wondered, sick with dread, if that meant the rest of it was true as well. Was he a demon, as she said, and no prince of Thebin at all? Perhaps the real prince had died in Pearl Bay at the very beginning of the quest, and he’d been going through the motions of someone else’s life—

  “Llesho! Snap out of it, you’re scaring me now!”

  Llesho came back to himself with the realization that Kaydu had been talking to him, and that his whole cadre had formed a worried circle around him. “I’m not a demon!” he insisted, though he wasn’t sure he believed it himself.

  But Bixei was looking at him like he’d lost his mind, not his soul. Stipes was shaking his head and Hmishi reached out a hand to check his forehead for fever.

  “You’re not a demon, Holy Excellence.” Kaydu reminded him with his title of what he should never have forgotten. He was the beloved of the Great Goddess, who had cared for him when Master Markko had awakened the poisons in his body. He had received gifts of his past from the goddess of war and had been granted the gift of a life by the god of mercy. He had traveled with the trickster ChiChu almost from the first moments of his quest. A demon could not have tricked the trickster god himself, nor could such a creature win the love of the Goddess.

  “But she was here,” he explained away his confusion. “In my bed, as snake and woman.”

  Bixei gave his shoulder a little shake. “You recognized what she was and told the truth. She just wanted to scare you, and hasn’t said a truthful word since the first time we set eyes on her.”

  “I know.” And he did. But there was more to it than that. Not a
demon, surely. But she’d seen something about him. He wondered if ChiChu could tell him what it was. When he looked around, however, he realized that the trickster’s blankets were empty and Master Den was nowhere to be seen.

  “I didn’t see him leave,” Himishi admitted, though that didn’t mean anything where the gods were concerned.

  Lling gave a long look to the grasslands rolling in waves beyond their tiny circle. “Perhaps he went to look for Tayy,” she said, and the shuffling that followed told Llesho that they’d all been worrying about the Harnish prince.

  “We’ll find out in the morning,” Llesho said. He didn’t, at heart, believe it, however.

  With nothing more to be said, they wandered off to their separate blankets. Llesho sat with his legs tucked up and his back against a rock, watching the fire die out in fits of falling embers. He didn’t think he was going to sleep any more that night, not with the Lady Chaiujin haunting his dreams, and suspected the rest of his cadre was pretending to rest as well.

  Master Den returned as Little Sun was calling to his brother. He said nothing about where he had been, and Llesho said nothing about his dream. Secrets were deadly. Lluka was proof enough of that. But somehow he couldn’t bring himself to ask, or to reveal his own secrets while the trickster god was hiding something from him. Instead he rubbed his face in his hands to brush away the sleep, wondering if he hadn’t just set their quest on a road he’d regret, while the mountainous mass of his teacher turned his back and went to sleep.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE LADY Chaiujin did not return to him during the night in her form as woman or as emerald bamboo serpent. No dreams came to him at all that he could remember, but Llesho woke with exhaustion dragging at him so that he thought his body must have spent the night wandering while his mind slept. His companions looked no better, except for Master Den. The trickster god rousted them out for prayer forms with a bounce to his step, as if he had not just crept back into camp with barely time to close his eyes before starting the day again.