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

by Curt Benjamin

  Chapter Seventeen

  GUARDSMEN BRISTLED dangerously in front of the massive, elaborate gilt doors to the audience chamber. Their chief moved to stop the newcomers.

  “No weapons beyond this point, Master Witch.” The guardsman bent his knee and bowed his head as he spoke, no doubt fearing some terrible magical retribution for doing his duty.

  Habiba touched him lightly on the shoulder. He flinched, but settled under the gentle touch. “The knife is a ritual object of the Thebin court. As for the spear, her ladyship gifted him with it. She will want to see for herself how these two have fared together.”

  The chief of the guards spared a glance filled with dread for the weapon and Llesho wondered for a moment if the man could hear it whispering in his ear.Let us go on, he willed the guard.For it will not be left behind.

  The guard lost the focus of his gaze for a moment. When he came back to himself, he seemed to have come to the same conclusion. Stepping aside, he signaled his men who swung the huge doors wide for them. Habiba swept Llesho into the audience chamber and followed in his train to the echoes of the crier announcing their names.

  As he’d noticed about those parts of the palace he’d seen before in his visits, Llesho observed that the audience chamber was crowded with the wealth that the governor of Guynm Province had extorted from his neighbors and had stolen from his own people. He remembered Shou’s horror at the torture chambers in the governor’s cellars. The corrupt official was dead now, and no loss to anyone. His legacy remained in this overheated room aglitter with gold and silver and sumptuous with carved rosewood thrones upholstered in satin and draperies of heavy beaten silk. The floor was set with glass tiles colored like jewels, each no bigger than the nail on Llesho’s thumb. Overhead, chimes in the shapes of birds and butterflies made endless music of the breeze that sifted through the slotted windows cut in the walls high above them.

  There were five thrones set in a semicircle, Llesho noted. Mergen-Khan, in the cone-shaped hat heavy with silver threads that served the Qubal people as a crown, sat on the throne that would have been the farthest right if they’d been set in a straight row. Mergen seemed to have aged since they’d last met. He’d lost a brother to betrayal and he believed that once again trust had cost him dearly in his nephew. His hooded eyes followed Llesho’s approach with predatory intensity over a set mouth made grim by the lines that etched themselves on either side of his nose.

  He sat with his back straight and his legs tucked up as if he rested on the dais of the ger-tent on the grasslands, in a caftan of red-and-yellow brocade under a dark blue sleeveless coat with the sky and the sea woven through it. Chimbai-Khan had worn those very clothes at Llesho’s first audience in the ger-tent palace that, like the clothes and the crown and the lost boy, belonged to Mergen now. Llesho met his eyes as openly as he could, but still he flinched at what he saw there. How many people would die if he didn’t get Tayy off that boat? Too many, and he figured their number would start with him. It wouldn’t happen, though. He couldn’t do anything about Chimbai-khan, but they’d get Tayy back. He’d already promised that.

  A man Llesho didn’t know sat in the throne that would have been the farthest left if the line had not curved in upon itself. The stranger was old in a human way, with iron-gray hair and a seamed face pale with some great anguish. He had a cone-shaped hat like the one Mergen wore, but with gold threads instead of silver, and a costume of caftan and coat as elaborately woven as that of the Qubal Khan. Even in less identifiable clothes, however, the strong, sharp features would have given him away as a Harnishman. Tinglut-Khan, grieving the loss of his daughter, Llesho guessed. He had seen enough of grief and battle to know they had the makings of a war sitting in those opposing chairs.

  The throne next to Mergen-Khan was empty. Shou sat next to the stranger, watching as Llesho walked across the jewel-tiled floor with Habiba at his back. The life had returned to the emperor’s eyes, which focused unflinchingly on Llesho’s approach. Little else showed of his face, however. Like the others, he had dressed for a state occasion, including the huge gold helmet that covered most of his features. Llesho had only seen the helmet once before. Shou had passed through the streets wearing it and the golden clothes of state in the celebration that followed the defeat of the Harnish raiders in the Imperial City of Shan. Then, Llesho had thought that the emperor looked like a god. Time had passed and he’d grown at least a little bit wiser. He wondered, now, how Shou managed to balance the heavy burden on his slender neck.

  Her ladyship, SienMa, the mortal goddess of war, sat at the center of the gathering with Shou at her right hand. Her ladyship had dressed in the colors of Thousand Lakes Province, blues and greens drifting into one another like the lake grasses floating under the water. At her waist she wore a girdle of embroidery stiffened with buckram and held by a series of buckles worked in precious metals. Her face was white as snow. White as death. Blood-red tinted her lips and the long curved tips of her nails. She wore no ornaments of hair or throat to draw the eye of the beholder from the glistening blue-black fall of her hair or the brightness of her eyes. To make her interest clear to all who saw them, she rested her blood-tipped fingers delicately against the back of Shou’s hand, which lay on the arm of his tall throne. He didn’t look at her, but settled under her touch. Just so, she showed both her favor and her control.

  On a step below the five thrones, four lesser chairs had been placed in a row and on each chair sat one of the princes of Thebin, each in the court clothes of the Palace of the Sun, and each with a silver coronet around his forehead. Adar’s arm and shoulder lay bandaged tight along his side, but he had lost some of the purple weariness that recent injury painted under his eyes. Balar watched him as one might who walked a narrow bridge over a deep gorge with rocky teeth reaching out for him from below.

  Shokar made as if to rise, but thought better of it, given the kings and the goddess at his back. He settled back into his chair though he followed Llesho’s every move with an intense protectiveness that shook him to his soul.

  “I didn’t realize,” Llesho thought to himself, shocked to see his brother’s love written so starkly into taut sinews. Seeing that love, he would have distanced himself from it to protect his brother, but knew for both of them that was impossible. Lluka didn’t look at him at all. It seemed, in fact, that Lluka saw nothing of the room where he sat, so inwardly did his gaze turn. Llesho knew what images he saw behind his eyes and shuddered, horrified at the thought of being trapped inside those annihilating images as he was himself so recently trapped behind an oar. They had to find a way to stop it before Lluka passed beyond their reach into his madness.

  He hadn’t noticed the stool at the foot of the goddess until a silver trill drew his attention. Bright Morning the dwarf, who was the mortal god of mercy, announced Llesho with a flourish of silver notes he played on a sweet potato that fit in the palm of his hand. At his back rested a quiver of flutes, and he had wedged a small drum between his knees.

  “Welcome back,” he said with such warmth in his eyes that Llesho had to blink back his tears. He had missed the dwarf’s quiet understanding, and the greeting brought all the feelings for his brothers gathered here, for Shou and even the Lady SienMa, dangerously close to spilling from his eyes. If he had come to account for his failure with Prince Tayy, the gathering of princes, kings, and deities reminded him of his successes as well.

  “I trust we find you well, King Llesho of the Thebin people, beloved of the Great Goddess who suffers in heaven as we struggle here in the mortal realm.” With that reminder of the urgency of his quest, the mortal goddess of war reclaimed the hand that had rested on Shou’s wrist and extended both slender palms for Llesho to lay his forehead on.

  “As well as can be expected, my Lady SienMa.” He placed his own hands beneath hers and bowed his forehead low over them as she had invited him to do.

  Having completed that formality, she addressed him more familiarly. “My gift has served you faithfully
, boy-king?” She tilted a brow at him as she pointed one blood-tipped finger at the spear peeking over Llesho’s shoulder.

  “It has not, of late, tried to kill me,” he reported with a grim smile more answer than the words. “I decide the direction of its flight, and the spear limits itself to the occasional muttered complaint. So far, our agreement holds.”

  “Then perhaps there is still hope.” For the first time since they had parted company in her yellow silk tent at the outset of his quest, her ladyship showed him her true emotions. She smiled with tears in her eyes, and he saw hope struggle with such despair that he would have fallen to the floor of glittering glass tiles except that his knees locked, keeping him upright. In Shou’s steady gaze Llesho saw that he shared her foreboding and would fight to the last to hold back the terrible fiery dark that awaited should Llesho fail in his quest.

  With a flutter of her fingers to signal that they should move on, her ladyship motioned him to the empty throne at her side. Llesho would have preferred a seat next to his brothers, or better yet, to sit by the dwarf at the foot of the goddess. He had lost that choice long ago, however, and took his place among the kings. As was his practice, Habiba went to take up his watch at the side of the mortal goddess, ever in her service. She gave him no overt notice, but a little of the tension seemed to go out of her.

  “Your hands are bleeding and rough with blisters, Llesho.” She nodded at his lap, where he had locked all his fingers in one tight fist to hide the damage. “What have you been up to?”

  “Rowing a galley, your ladyship.” Llesho took the question as an introduction to the matter of Prince Tayy. He ignored Adar’s gasp of dismay and humbly bowed his head to offer his apologies to Mergen-Khan as he knew she meant him to do.

  “Your nephew, Prince Tayyichiut, joined our party as we parted ways with the Qubal people, Lord Khan.” The circumstances, which included the delivery of bad news in front of a room full of kings and the goddess of war herself, made him more formal in his speech than he found comfortable. Comfort, of course, had nothing to do with his present situation.

  “We tried to persuade him to stay behind, but he felt it a point of honor to join my cadre’s quest. There was a misunderstanding between us. I took something he had said as a rebuff. With my own feelings wounded, I fear that I offended him deeply. When I realized what I had done, I tried to find him, to make it right with him, but he had already left our company to return home. In the morning we found signs that pirates had taken him in the night.”

  At the mention of pirates, Shokar tensed as if he would draw a sword he did not carry in an assembly of kings and in the presence of the goddess. Mergen closed his eyes, as if he could will away the terrible news. After a moment, however, the khan gestured to Llesho to go on. A glance at her ladyship gave him permission to proceed. Llesho took a deep breath and began his tale.

  When he reached the part where Marmer Sea Dragon lost his son to an ill-thought wish, her ladyship stopped him with a mournful sigh. Llesho agreed with the sorrowful sentiment.

  “I would see this injustice repaired, if it is possible, my lady.” He asked with a bowed head, as a supplicant.

  “Give this token to Marmer Sea Dragon, with my promise—” From her girdle, the goddess SienMa took a buckle and put it into Llesho’s hand. “—We will do what we can. It may not be enough, but that is a risk we all share.”

  “Yes, my lady.” The weight of it against his open blisters hurt, but only a little. The copper circle had been worked in the shape of a dragon coiled in a loop. He hoped the blood that already marked it from his rough hands did not portend an evil outcome for the young dragon. When he had tucked it into his pocket, her ladyship motioned him to go on.

  There was little more to tell. He finished with the news that Master Den now traveled among the pirates as their patron and king.

  “You bring us news of brave and worthy deeds,” she said of Llesho’s tale. Musing, she added, “One never knows the intentions of ChiChu, the trickster god, but it seems to me he wanted you on that ship.”

  Lluka, who had seemed unaware of the conversation taking place around him, chose that moment to speak out. “Proof again,” he said, “that only fools put their trust in the trickster god.”

  Catching his breath in a stifled gasp, Llesho waited for the retribution the mortal goddess of war would rain down on his brother for speaking so in her presence. The tense silence told him the whole room did the same. The Lady SienMa, however, bowed her head to acknowledge that the mad could sometimes speak the truth others would not see.

  “In my experience as his pupil,” Shou offered with an ironic drawl, both accepting and dismissing Lluka’s complaint at the same time, “Master Trickster often chooses the hard lesson learned once over the gentle one which must be repeated many times. For example, this business of offering oneself to slavers. As I recall, the last time we used such a ruse in the Imperial City of Shan the point was to free the castle without losing the foot soldier. That lesson might need relearning.”

  Shokar coughed to smother a bark of laughter. Llesho never had the time to learn the game of chess, but he understood Shou’s meaning as well as his brother had. Shou had dangled him as bait to find Adar’s owner and buy the prince’s freedom. It turned out that Shokar had already freed his brother, but Llesho had managed to stay off the block that time.

  “He might let the pupil in on what the lesson is supposed to be,” Llesho grumbled. “I learned I didn’t like being a slave when I was seven and I don’t know what pirates have to teach me about it that I couldn’t have picked up with a word in the ear instead.”

  Mergen-Khan might once have questioned such magics interfering in the lives of men, but he had seen more than he wished in the ger-tent of his brother. His own shaman trusted this trickster, ChiChu, and the Lady Carina, who had learned at Bolghai’s knee as her mother had before her, had traveled with both the Thebin kingling and his tricksy teacher. “The honorable emperor probably has the right of it,” he agreed. “What we are taught is perhaps not as important as what we learn.”

  Llesho gave that a moment’s consideration. He had convinced himself he’d learned nothing, but if he accounted for all the time since discovering that Tayy was missing, he’d figured out a lot. He’d thought he already knew most of it, but it turned out that he needed it driven into his head like Shou said.

  “I knew Tayy was my friend, but mistook his confidences for rejection of my friendship. So I learned to listen more closely to the actions of a friend than to hasty words, and to question my own understanding when words and actions contradict each other. If I’d questioned him right then, Tayy would have been safe.”

  “Quests are never safe,” Shou reminded them all. “You have ridden with danger as your companion since before I knew your name, young king. Prince Tayyichiut would be no less a warrior. He will test his skill against the blades and arrows of our mutual enemies just as your cadre has.”

  Stipes had lost an eye. Lling had suffered grievous wounds and Master Markko had controlled her mind in captivity. Hmishi had died and returned as a gift of Mercy, but Harlol had joined his ancestors, murdered by stone monsters who left a black pearl in place of his heart. Llesho carried that evidence of the cost of his quest among the pearls of the Goddess he had collected in a little bag he wore at his throat.

  Even Shou had broken, for a time, under the magician’s torments. And Lluka . . . Lluka was a warning of what would happen to them all if they failed. Llesho dropped his head, humbled by the suffering endured in his cause. Her ladyship raised him up again, however, with a finger crooked under his chin.

  “It appears to me that you have learned more than this,” she said.

  He nodded slowly, conscious of her fingers rising with the motion. With a slow smile, he lifted his hands to show his bloody palms to the gathered rulers and the mortal goddess of war. “I have learned the price of my honor,” he said. “I will bring Prince Tayyichiut home safely, or die in the attemp
t.”

  “It seems you would aspire to be the mortal god of mercy,” Bright Morning teased him gently.

  Llesho knew he intended it as a compliment, and returned the smile with a shake of the head. “Not mercy, but justice.” He meant only to say that his actions were no more than Tayy’s due, but the words resonated through him like a forgotten memory.

  Bright Morning seemed to recognize more than he ought about how Llesho felt all of a sudden, because he gave a knowing wink that puzzled Llesho as much as the feeling had.

  Mergen-Khan studied him like one of Habiba’s specimens, as if the khan was working out some puzzle meant for Llesho himself. Then he let all his breath out in one great release of tension that had held the room in suspense since long before Llesho had arrived.

  “Justice. Perhaps,” Mergen-Khan agreed. “A hard-won lesson nonetheless. For myself, I find the pupil has become the teacher. I have learned that true friendship has no limits, even to the sacrifice of life and freedom. And I have learned that the honor of our Thebin ally likewise knows no bounds.”

  Mergen rose from his chair and faced Llesho, bowing deeply to show his respect. “You humble me, Holy Excellence. I am in your debt.”

  “There can be no debts between loyal friends acting in good conscience,” Llesho corrected him. “I will bring Tayy home safe because he is that friend.”

  “That may be a lesson you have to learn as well as teach,” Mergen-Khan suggested. “Free my stubborn nephew to follow his heart because it is your duty to do so. After that, it is up to Prince Tayyichiut where his honor takes him.”

  “I guess safe is out of the question, then,” Llesho conceded. For the first time since he had arrived in Durnhag, he saw smiles light the eyes of the gathered company of kings, though his brothers looked worried with it. What they didn’t know about the Harnish prince they could guess by the company he kept.

  This would, in normal times, have called for a commentary on Bright Morning’s flutes, but the dwarf kept his hands still and his lips closed. His questioning gaze he turned upon Tinglut-Khan, who watched them all as if he would call up a ward against demons.