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

by Curt Benjamin

  Intruding upon the conversation at great peril, Pig answered the question. “He is, and late for an appointment. Her ladyship, SienMa, the mortal goddess of war, sent me to fetch him.”

  “And what are we to do about the young heir who lies dying at his bench, or this magician who holds my son prisoner within his own body?”

  Master Markko! “He’ll follow us. He wants that rhyme, and my brother Menar, as much as we do.” Llesho stared out at the sea, wishing he knew what the magician was up to.

  Marmer Sea Dragon followed his glance with more purpose, as if he could be everywhere at once upon the watery surface and below. Which perhaps he could. After a moment, however, the life returned to his eyes and he shook his head.

  “He is searching for you. He knows, of course, that you are on the water, but his fight with your friend the osprey has sent him back to shore to find another way. His main purpose seems to be to reach Pontus ahead of us, but I don’t know how he plans to do that on the land, which is outside of my own kingdom. For whatever reason, he now conjures a storm which may be more powerful, I think, than he knows.”

  From the start Master Markko had set into motion powerful spells that quickly spun out of his control. That weakness had released the demon bent on destroying all the realms of mortals gods and spirits that had started Llesho on his quest. Storms were tricky business, and it seemed likely he had done the same again, reaching for magics just beyond his grasp.

  Llesho wondered if this time his lack of control was all the magician’s fault. Marmer Sea Dragon ruled here, over the waters above and below, and had an interest in seeing Master Markko fail. He didn’t want to risk offending his host with the suspicion, however, but instead offered a gentle reminder that friends rode before that wind as well as enemies.

  “What of my cadre?” he asked, thinking of Kaydu and Hmishi and Lling, of Bixei and Stipes somewhere out on an angry sea. He wondered if Little Brother got seasick.

  “I see all that passes within my domain.” The dragon-king confirmed what Llesho had suspected, but then revealed a limitation, “But not what will happen in the future. Someone has trained your witch well, and the blood of dragons runs true in her veins. She is young and inexperienced at weather working, however. Her familiar has powers of his own, but he won’t be able to help her there. If your enemy loses control, as I think he must, then your friend stands little chance of success.”

  He didn’t ask how the dragon-king knew of the plan; he’d already said he knew of everything that took place upon these waters. Llesho hoped the dragon was wrong about Kaydu, though. She was even stronger than their watery host suspected, but he’d never seen her try to work a magic that powerful before. Wasn’t sure he wanted to see it, but knew he had to find her before he met with her father. Habiba would have questions.

  “I have to find her and then report to Lady SienMa. But I’ll come back,” he insisted. “I won’t leave Prince Tayyichiut to die alone in the company of pirates.”

  “I’ll make sure our young king gets back in time. You have my word.” Pig sealed the oath with a solemn bow. No one trusted his promises, least of all Llesho, who had just lately discovered the depths of the Jinn’s deceit.

  If Prince Tayy woke to find that Llesho had gone, despair would surely kill him. “Help them if you can,” he begged.

  “I’ll see what I can do.” The dragon-king didn’t seem happy about it, but he, too, gave his promise.

  Llesho accepted with a grateful bow. Dragons always honored their word. “Then I am off with our villainous friend.” With that he shook his head, imagining into being the antlers on his brow, and leaped into the sea . . .

  . . . which disappeared from under him as he ran.

  Llesho had dream traveled to places he’d never been in the waking world before and he knew to center in on something or someone familiar where he wanted to go. As he’d been trained in her ladyship’s service long ago in Farshore Province, he looked to his captain for direction. Kaydu stood on the deck of a small ship with two masts stripped to a minimum of sail. At her back, the cloud bank he’d been watching from the pirate galley boiled more ominously on the horizon. Wind blew her hair in manic tangles and snapped the full sleeves of her uniform like the pennants racing from the topmast to the bowsprit in front of them. She seemed to be staring abstractedly out to sea, but concentration drew tight lines around her mouth and her eyes. In her arms, Little Brother stared into the same distance. The same air of concentration gave an almost human cast to his wizened features. Once again, Llesho wondered what powerful secrets hid behind that monkey face and what Marmer Sea Dragon knew about them.

  The clatter of his hooves on the deck distracted her from whatever magics she was controlling. “Llesho!” she cried even before he had returned to his human form.

  Slipping into his pack, Little Brother gave a last enigmatic monkey look that took in all of the deck and Llesho lying on it before hiding his head. Llesho wondered what that meant, but Kaydu gave him no opportunity to discuss the thoughts of her familiar, or Marmer Sea Dragon’s opinions on the subject. Taking advantage of her suddenly free hands, she knotted them at her hips with the air of a village scold and tapped her foot just inches from his nose where he had fallen. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m looking for you,” he explained as he struggled to his feet. The little ship pitched angrily and Llesho wondered if Marmer Sea Dragon had been wrong about Master Markko. The eye of the storm had not yet moved out to sea, but even at a distance it didn’t feel like anything had control of it. He grabbed hold of the rail, afraid of tumbling off the pitching ship or merely falling on his backside again in front of Kaydu.

  “You found me.” She gave a furtive look behind them, where a line of rain marked the edge of the shore. “Look, I can’t really talk now. Hmishi and Lling are belowdecks and they can report if you want, but I’m worried about this storm.” With that, she turned her face into the wind and reached an outstretched hand to hold back the rain with a staying gesture. Llesho felt unseen forces clash out beyond the ship as the storm pressed to leave the land behind and Kaydu pushed it back. For a moment the wind stuttered and paused. Llesho felt the whisper of a mind he knew too well, and at his peril. Then their few sails filled and the ship surged forward on an angry swell again, more steadily but still at a headlong pace.

  “Marmer Sea Dragon says that Master Markko raised the storm but won’t be able to control it,” he shouted over the sound of the wind snapping in the sails. “It’s getting too big!” He left his question unasked. Could she do what the magician couldn’t? She answered it anyway, in Kaydu style, with no surprise that Llesho had turned up another dragon when most people went their whole lives without even meeting one.

  “Then tell Marmer Sea Dragon to get his ass over here and stop the damned storm himself! I need a calm sea and a steady wind, not a critic grading my skills.”

  Llesho considered explaining his own conclusions about quests and tests, but figured with Habiba as her father she already knew. “I’ll tell him,” he said, and left her to her contest with the sea.

  Ducking down the ladder to the gangway below, he met Lling on the way up. “Llesho! Is this a dream?”

  “It was a dream when I left the pirate ship, but I don’t know what it is now,” he admitted. “Pig is around somewhere.”

  Lling nodded, accepting that answer. They’d met like this before, when Markko’s henchman, Tsu-tan, had held her prisoner. “Did you find Prince Tayyichiut?”

  “Yes, and Master Den, too, who captains the pirate ship and seems to think that rowing a galley should be part of every prince’s education.”

  “Never trust the trickster god,” she agreed, though they had both put their lives in Master Den’s hands in the past. “We’re on our way, as fast as we can move, but a storm has complicated things.”

  “Master Markko’s doing.” He kept to himself that Tayy was dying in bondage on the pirate galley. Kaydu’s ship had to stay in one piec
e to rescue them. If his cadre knew how bad things were, they might take chances that would endanger them all.

  “Where’s Hmishi?”

  “He’s below, in the quarterdeck cabin, trying to calm the ship’s captain. She seemed capable enough of coping with a normal blow at sea, but fears magic on principle and magical interference with the weather in particular. Your appearance on board won’t improve her nerves, but it would help if you could get rid of the antlers.”

  “I forgot,” he admitted, shaking his head to focus on the weight of the branches. In a moment he had his senses centered on the itch just above his forehead and then the antlers were gone. “I was just talking to Kaydu and she never said a thing about them.”

  “Kaydu is a witch. She has ridden with gods and kings, and has seen you in antlers before. Our captain, however, is a simple sailor with only the blood of human ancestors coursing through her bones.”

  “The world isn’t simple anymore, not even for sea captains.” Remembering the pirates’ attack on theGuiding Star, he wondered if it ever had been. Certainly not since Master Markko had called a demon from the underworld to hold the gates of heaven hostage. He didn’t ask if Kaydu could control the storm the magician had conjured. For all their sakes, they could only hope their captain was as powerful a witch as her ladyship, the mortal goddess SienMa, seemed to think when she put them in her captain’s command.

  He found Hmishi in a cabin that extended the width of the ship’s stern, with tall windows looking out over a gallery protected by an elaborately carved rail. Brocaded fabrics draped the walls and the furnishings, falling in folds where they were pulled away to let in whatever light the windows gave them. On the right, tucked into a protected corner of the cabin, feather cushions covered in bright silks were heaped luxuriously on a bed rack. Two matching chests in dark, satiny wood were clear of breakables in the high seas. Nevertheless, they showed the captain’s taste in the carved and painted scenes that decorated their tops and sides.

  Under the windows at the center of the cabin stood a spacious table covered with charts. Five chairs were set around it, all occupied but one. Bixei, Stipes, and Hmishi sat at one side of the table. A muscular woman Llesho didn’t recognize sat on the other, gripping the table with white-knuckled fingers.

  “She hasn’t let us down yet,” Hmishi said as he stared out at the storm moving on the horizon.

  Bixei and Stipes nodded their support, but the stranger gave an emphatic shake of her head. “I am a simple merchant sailor and have no business with secret missions or witches who control the wind and rain.”

  “No evil will come to this ship.” Llesho stepped into the cabin with a little shake of his head just to reassure himself that the antlers were gone. “I have it on the word of Marmer Sea Dragon himself.” That wasn’t quite what the dragon-king had said, but Llesho had taken it for his meaning.

  “Llesho!” His companions leaped to their feet, careful not to give away his title but unable to entirely still their bows.

  “More magic!” The sea captain made a warding sign which had them all speaking at once to reassure her.

  “He’s a friend.”

  “Llesho won’t hurt you.”

  “You can trust him.”

  “Safe, he says!” the captain remained unconvinced. “If by safe you mean swallowed down the gullet of a dragon and digested in the fire of his belly. For myself, I choose not to call that safe, if it is all the same to you, young master. And I’d like to know where you came from yourself. If a stowaway, you owe passage on this ship. Her few cabins are full, so you will bunk on the deck or with the seamen.

  “If you are some magical creature like yon witch and the dragon from whom you claim promises, then you can find your way off this ship the same way you got on it. And you can take that girl with the uncanny way with a storm as well. I won’t have any more magic on my ship!”

  “Pardon my intrusion, good captain.” Llesho gave her a low bow as to one of greater station, but it did little to pacify her. “The witch on your deck didn’t raise the storm. Even as we speak Captain Kaydu strives against the evil forces that rise against us in that wind. If she leaves her post, you’ll likely lose your ship and all hands aboard her before long.”

  The captain was already as pale as her skin would go, but she blinked several times, as if the news had snuffed her mind like a candle. Llesho waited as, her jaw clenching slowly, she came back to herself.

  “So, then.” Pause. “I suppose I had better get Cook to send up something warm to eat.”

  Hmishi gave her a brief smile and a suggestion: “Captain Kaydu requires a hand free at all times for her working.”

  The sea captain didn’t like the reminder of the magic on her deck, but she acknowledged the need with a curt nod. “And you, master messenger?” she asked of Llesho.

  He decided to leave her in ignorance of his true identity, which could serve only to heap more wonders on a mind that rejected all that was not ordinary.

  “I left certain property with my friends, and I’ve come to retrieve it. Then I will be off your decks.” She would wake in the night with the memory of a strange dream, he thought, though his presence on her ship was as real as the sea.

  When she departed, Stipes looked uncomfortably to his companions to speak up, but they glared him down and he was forced to offer his own defense. “Those items being of importance to Thebin interests, I handed them over to your own countrymen as seemed fit.” He mentioned nothing of his own troubles, but Llesho knew they must have been considerable.

  “I’m sorry if I worried anyone—”

  “Anyone!” Hmishi snorted indignantly. Having spent some time dead in the underworld, he felt more freedom to speak his mind, even to the Holy King of Thebin. “Whatever possessed you to go off on your own on such a cracked-brain scheme! Kaydu takes it as a personal failure that she could not protect you from your own foolishness. And as for the rest of us, we hardly know how we will greet the Lady SienMa, having lost the one hope we had to save the world from disaster!”

  “I’m sorry—”

  Bixei had been quiet until now. Bound to the quest only by the luck of his servitude, he had neither the tradition of family service to the mortal goddess of war nor the fealty a subject owes a king to hold him. That and his attachment to Stipes, who had joined their cadre in spite of his injuries because they didn’t want to be separated again. For him, Llesho’s disappearance had caused a private injury.

  “How could you do that to Stipes? Did you ask for him to accompany you to the market because you knew he couldn’t say ‘no’ to you? You must have known he would be blamed for your actions, though there was little he could do to stop you.”

  “You can’t think I meant to deceive you from the start!” Looking from face to face, he realized that they believed just that, though Hmishi admitted, “Kaydu never did. She thought it was one of your harebrained spur-of-the-moment ideas that look good until you get into them and then turn out to be quicksand in every direction.”

  Which pretty much described it. He wasn’t sorry he’d done it, though. Not yet at least. “The plan will work,” he insisted. It had to work, or Prince Tayy would be dead. “But my rest period will be over soon. I don’t have time to argue the matter.”

  They seemed unwilling to let the matter go. Lling, however, remembered Llesho’s dream visit to Tsu-tan’s camp during her own rescue. She understood the urgency of speed and rose to find her cabin and the objects she and Hmishi had hidden there. “What do you need?” she asked. “Everything?”

  Llesho stopped her with a shake of his head. “I will need my knife and my spear, and that which you wear around your neck for me.” He didn’t want to mention the pearls—most particularly the one he was most worried about at the moment—where a seaman might be passing at any time.

  “I’ll bring them right away.”

  Hmishi followed her, a wise precaution to guard all their movements in a strange ship. At the hatch, however, Llin
g turned around and asked again, “Are you sure you don’t want the cups?”

  “Why?”

  “They give me strange dreams,” she answered uncomfortably. “In the night I hear a woman weeping, and sometimes the slither and hiss of a serpent—”

  Llesho knew who that was. His dreams had been blessedly free of her presence since he’d sent the cups away in other hands. He didn’t want to put Lling at risk, but he didn’t dare carry the false Lady Chaiujin with him into the court of the mortal goddess of war. Not when he still had Tayy to rescue.

  Lling read both of his concerns—over leaving the cup and about taking it with him—in his hesitation and waved off the request. “I can carry her a while longer. But she must be dealt with eventually.”

  “I know. Just not today.”

  With a nod that accepted his decision she disappeared after her partner.

  Settling to wait, Llesho took a chair at the table. “Her ladyship SienMa has called me to attend her in my dream travels,” he told Bixei and Stipes, counting on them to fill in Hmishi and Lling. “She will want a report of all our doings.”

  Bixei still hadn’t let go of his anger, but he leaned forward, his hands between his knees. Between those two he always did the talking. “Kaydu thinks we’ll catch up with the pirates by tomorrow afternoon. If we can outrun this storm, we’ll stand off until dark. If the storm proves stronger, we will all need rescuing, I think.”

  “That’s what Marmer Sea Dragon says.” Falling silent, Llesho stared off into a broody distance.

  “We won’t fail you,” Stipes promised. He seldom spoke up except at need, and Llesho wondered how badly he had hurt all his cadre, how they must have interpreted his rashness as their failure.

  “You never have,” he assured the two, knowing they would pass the message along. “I trust you with my life, and with my honor, as I trust the air to be there when I breathe. But Marmer Sea Dragon is right. It’s a risky plan. The storm has a strange character to it. Master Markko had a hand in its birth, but it grows a wild and powerful soul of its own, I think.” The enormity of the task that remained ahead bowed him for a moment.