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

by Curt Benjamin

  “Not eight.” He didn’t show the ninth, but ran a finger over the silver chain that showed at his throat when his hand brushed his shirt. “Ahkenbad, in the Gansau Wastes,” he added for the geomancer.

  The Apadisha didn’t ask to see more. “Terrible things await us if you do not succeed, young king,” he said. A small part of his burden seemed to lift from his shoulders in spite of his warning, however.

  Llesho knew they shared the dreams of chaos and destruction that awaited them. He could offer no solace but the knowledge that what he knew was shared. “A gift of prophecy gives no comfort.”

  To those who watched, it seemed that he must speak about Menar’s poem. Between the two of them, however, passed a darker knowledge. Seeing the future in a dream didn’t mean you could change it in the waking world, or even rightly understand it. “What does not drive you mad sounds mad to anyone who hears it,” he added, thinking that having company in the knowledge maybe helped a little.

  “Is your brother mad, then, young king?”

  The Apadisha’s question stunned him for a moment. Lluka surely was mad, or nearly there at least. Then he realized the Apadisha meant Menar. Did they follow the babbling of a madman, which would make them mad as well for the dreams that troubled their sleep?

  “His eyes may not see, but his mind is as clear as yours or mine.” He offered no real comfort on that score. They might yet all of them be mad. Master Den would tell him if it were so, he thought. Then again, depending on the trickster god seemed more proof of madness than otherwise.

  “I agree.” To what, the Apadisha left between them. He clapped his hands twice and two of the guardswomen came forward. One, Llesho noticed, bore a striking resemblance to the Grand Apadisha himself.

  “Take with you two hands of my guard, the Daughter’s picked swordswomen, and all who follow them. Boats will be made ready for you.

  “Now go. I have spent too much time on the puzzles of strangers already.”

  Llesho accepted the dismissal. He had at least ten soldiers from the Apadisha’s picked guard to accompany him. Not an army to bring against Master Markko, but it might, in a pinch, satisfy Menar’s prophecy. Llesho gave a proper bow and, in the manner of one who has been granted a boon remained in the abased position as he backed his way out of the Apadisha’s presence. As soon as boats could be made ready, they were going.

  But first he had to see a magician about a jade bowl. He’d rather have left it behind, but had long ago concluded that any gifts of mystical inclination that came to his hand in his quest were there for a reason. He would not leave any of them, even the most deadly, behind.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  AS IT happened, the Apadisha would send ten thousand soldiers, women all, dedicated to the Daughter of the Sword. A thousand to each of his picked guardswomen, each of whom commanded her own hierarchy of officers. All fell under the spear of AlmaZara, a taciturn warrior who wore in addition to her weapons and armor the Apadisha’s nose and his intense dark eyes. The gathering of such an army, with all their provisions and ships to carry them to Edris, took the greater part of a month.

  Habiba, in the shape of an eagle, returned to his mistress, the Lady SienMa, to alert the gathered army when they might be expected on the other side of the Marmer Sea. Among the allies were Mergen and Tinglut. In their mutual grief for loved ones lost at the hands of the Bamboo Snake Demon, the two khans had come to an uneasy alliance. Each put down his suspicion of the other with great difficulty. Tinglut-Khan had no reason to trust Llesho’s word, a new and uncomfortable ally.

  As for Mergen-Khan, personal observation had shown him little to comfort him about Llesho. To make matters worse, Habiba carried news of Tayy’s injury at the claws of Master Markko, a foreign and magical enemy. Coming so soon after the death of the prince’s mother and his father, who was also Mergen’s brother and the former khan, the new leader of the Qubal had little cause for trust. And yet, Habiba reported on his return, the khan continued to honor the agreements made before his brother’s death.

  This was partly Bolghai’s work, Llesho knew. Close contact with those who understood him best must speak for him in some way; surely one who stood in the good graces of three gods on earth and the Great Goddess in her heaven must command respect, if nothing else. He wondered if even the gods knew what they were doing, though, to put so much on his shoulders. He seemed to stumble in the dark more often than he followed a straight path in the light.

  All this stewing over events he couldn’t control was giving Llesho a headache when he could least afford to be at less than his best. During Habiba’s absence, the physician Ibn Al-Razi suggested that his hospital was no fit place for young kings or princes grown healthy in his care. Since they no longer needed his attention, he could serve his religion best without magicians who claimed kinship with false gods under his roof.

  While their ships were made ready, therefore, Llesho and his company moved to the school for magicians. In a room that was part schoolroom and part laboratory, with a high table full of little drawers at the center and benches for the students on all sides, he was subjected to intense examination by the scholars and magicians. They determined that indeed he had no dragon’s blood in his veins and agreed among themselves that unwittingly Marmer Sea Dragon must himself have influenced the storm according to the wishes Llesho conveyed with the empathic communication possible with such beasts.

  Marmer Sea Dragon, in his human form, objected to the name of beast and assured them that he acted only as an observer. While the magicians apologized for besmirching his name, they shook their heads at his description of events.

  “It’s not possible,” Master Astrologer explained with a simplicity surprising in her speech, “and therefore it cannot have happened that way.”

  Finally, they were left with disagreeing on the topic. That brought the debate to Llesho’s greatest concern: Lady Chaiujin’s jade bowl, which he had given into Lling’s care. She had endured the strange and terrifying dreams of the Lady Chaiujin for her king’s sake. When the emerald-green bamboo snake began to commit its murders in the town, however, she had put the bowl in the keeping of the school. They all now hoped to discover whether it was indeed the source of the lady’s power in snake form.

  While dismissing as a fairy tale the notion that a mortal boy might receive heavenly gifts from a Goddess wife, the masters found no reason to doubt that the bowl might be possessed by a demon. Picking it up from the high table where the instruments of their professions lay scattered in profusion, Master Numerologist studied the rune at the bottom of the bowl.

  “I know of no computational symbol or representation of the numerical world corresponding to this mark. I would guess that it must be magical, however, since evil creatures usually are.”

  Master Astrologer took the bowl next. Since no such alignment of stars occurred in the night sky, she could shed no light on it either.

  Master Geomancer, however, took the bowl gingerly in her hand with a grim and knowing frown. “The sign of the snake,” she said of the spiral carved into the jade. “Though it’s not an emerald, the color is suggestive, don’t you think? But why give the bowl to this boy?”

  “I don’t know,” Llesho answered, “I would have thought that she was some part of my quest—a test, or a battle—but she was working against the Qubal clans before I ever reached the Harnlands.”

  “Not everything is about Llesho,” Tayy complained. “It just seems that way when the stitches pull. The Lady Chaiujin was moving against the clans seasons before we ever heard of the wandering Thebin king. She had already murdered my mother to raise her station in the ger-tent of the khan. Gradually she must have come to understand that my father the khan would never name her khanesse, and so she killed him as well. But that is a matter of the clans, not Llesho.”

  “You may be right.” Master Geomancer cocked her head to study him. “It seems likely, then, that having lost her position among the Qubal, she sees Llesho’s quest as
a way to attach herself to a victim she is better able to control. Llesho is young and his quest would leave him with a crown on his head. To one such as the false Lady Chaiujin, a crown is a crown, perhaps. Any one will do to drop her eggs in.”

  The very thought made him shudder and when he looked to Prince Tayy, he was doing the same.

  Kaydu, however, laughed. “What an absurd idea. Llesho is married to the Goddess. She is not so easily set aside as a human queen.”

  “Llesho loves his Goddess.” Here was a notion that Tayy seemed to find perfectly normal. “He has the same look on his face when he talks about her as my father used to get when he looked at my mother. Only more so, because of the whole heaven and religion part of the marriage. How could she not see it?”

  An image of Shou in the deadly embrace of a White Cobra with the Lady SienMa’s face rose out of a memory of a dream. Not easily set aside, surely, but love? His own love was nothing like that. He didn’t understand how Shou could love the cold white mortal goddess of war, even in her human form. But they did share a kinship of sorts: they both loved far beyond even their exalted stations. In past lives, that love had been the death of Llesho, and he wondered if loving the Lady SienMa would be the death of Shou.

  With a knowing little smile, Master Astrologer took the hand of Master Numerologist. “One whoknows nothing of love would see nothing of love in the young king,” she suggested as an answer to the puzzle. “He seems a mere boy, inexperienced at such things and easily tempted into betrayal. It takes someone who has known love—of a husband or wife, but also of a parent or child, or even a beloved familiar, to recognize it in another.”

  “Of course!” Master Geomancer said, scratching behind Little Brother’s ear to emphasize the last point. The monkey grinned back at her.

  Hmishi had kept quiet in the company until now, but he knew better than most the boundaries of Llesho’s loyalty. The king had called him back from the dead, after all. “Lady Bamboo Snake was wrong on two counts, then,” he said, but Llesho stopped him.

  “I would not knowingly betray my country or my friends. And I do love my lady, the Great Goddess.” He thought of her at times as my lady beekeeper, and did so now, when he needed comfort. “But the Lady Chaiujin tempted me. If it were not for Master Den, she might have had me by the river the day that Hmishi died.”

  “You were attracted to the lady’s fangs at the time, as I recall.” Master Den spoke softly, but the heads of his cadre came up as if a drum had sounded. Only Tayy seemed to understand how he had felt that day, which Llesho figured was a bad thing.

  “Even kings and the blessed husbands of goddesses are sometimes weak,” he confessed. Perhaps he had more in common with Emperor Shou than he had thought. They both had flirted with the grave.

  “You mustn’t ever give up that way again,” Hmishi insisted. “In serving their kings, soldiers die sometimes. If you choose to follow us to the underworld, our deaths are wasted!”

  “I understand that now,” Llesho said. “That doesn’t give you permission to die either.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “The bowl,” Master Geomancer said, bringing them back to the topic in her hand. “If that is the source of her power, I doubt that we can break her hold on it.”

  Master Den took the bowl from her and held it up to the light as if the soft beams passing through it would somehow reveal the lady within.

  “When accompanying a king on a quest, it is never a good idea to dismiss any magic one meets on the way as coincidence,” he reminded them. “Mischance is not one side of a coin, with strategy on the other. It is one face of a many-sided box. The Lady Bamboo Snake may have had plots of her own in the Harnlands. Llesho passing within her reach may have been an accident or fate playing a part. But we cannot dismiss the suggestion that once he fell within her reach, the lady abandoned her former schemes to influence the greater struggle which would play out in the mountains above the Golden City.”

  “You mean it’s all about Llesho after all?” Tayy asked mournfully. At that moment, the comment struck the company as funny. Llesho thought it was hysterical laughter, but he joined it anyway.

  “Not in all places, at all times,” Master Den assured him. “But in this place, and in this moment, one should hardly be surprised that it might prove so.”

  “It’s an honor I would gladly forgo in favor of a quiet life. I didn’t ask for this.”

  “Well, actually . . .” Lling gave a sly lift of the eyebrow. “I recall a certain pearl diver—with a very quiet life—on his knees before the overseer, pleading to become a gladiator.”

  Hmishi smiled at her. “Who would have thought we’d come so far?” It wasn’t really a question, just a measure of his amazement at their adventures. But she smiled a challenge back at him. “I look forward to tasting the air of Thebin again soon.”

  Having come to a decision, Master Den handed the bowl back to the geomancer. “I think we can assume that any magical item that has come into Llesho’s possession during his quest has done so for a purpose, whether we now understand that purpose or not. Until we do know what part this bowl is meant to play, we can’t destroy it. Neither can we allow Lady Bamboo Snake freedom to use the bowl against us in our travels.”

  “We need a spell—isn’t that obvious?” Kaydu asked. “Something to lock her up so we don’t leave a path of dead among our allies.” As a student she should have withheld her opinion until the masters had finished their discussion. As the captain of Llesho’s royal guard, however, her opinions on the matter of his safety came before any more arcane discussion. Fortunately, Master Geomancer agreed both with her conclusion and her right to state it in front of the Apadisha’s great mages.

  “Exactly,” the master said. Taking the bowl from Master Den, she held it up as he had done, examining the jade in the light. “If we cannot destroy it, we must contain it. So, this box of possibilities between strategy and mischance—we must set the bowl inside it and lock it with a key of our own making.”

  “A numerological spell.” Not surprisingly, that was Master Numerologist’s suggestion. “I’ll weave dates and times and the latitude and longitude together in a spell that will trap her in confusion. If Llesho’s time and place are here and now, we must make it so that she never finds the coordinates of his conjunction again.”

  “A star spell,” Master Astrologer volunteered. “If we lock Lady Bamboo Snake’s magic in the heavens, she cannot influence the coming battle in the mortal realm.”

  Llesho shuddered. He knew it wasn’t the astrologer’s intention to set the demon snake among the gardens of his lady beekeeper, but he could not escape the possibility that if she broke the spell she could do more damage in the heavens than even the failure of his own quest.

  But Master Geomancer gave up the bowl to no one. “She is an earth demon, I believe, since she takes the form of a snake in the waking world as well as in the dreaming one,” she said. “She will be bound only by an earth spell. Be careful, however, that you don’t release her. Captivity will do little to improve her disposition.”

  He nodded his agreement. The distinction she had made took a great burden from his mind. Lady SienMa, he believed, had never turned into a snake when she was awake. He didn’t think a demon could become a mortal god, but sometimes he had wondered.

  “All right, then.” She set the bowl back onto the table and rolled up her sleeves to work.

  “This takes concentration, so the rest of you, out! I want the boy who will carry the bowl—our young king in exile. And a student assistant—you will do, if you can remember you are a student and not a general, young lady.”

  Llesho had never heard anyone talk to Kaydu like that, and her humble bow to the round, stern magician shocked him even more. But the geomancer accepted the bow as a promise and turned to the rest of the company flapping the skirts of her robes as if she were shooing chickens in a farmyard.

  “Go!” she instructed his cadre. To Llesho’s great reli
ef, Prince Tayyichiut fell in with them as if he had always been a part of the quest. Together, they turned to their captain for orders. Kaydu had taken on the role of student, however, and gave them only a shrug for an answer. She would neither overrule the master nor set her own orders over those of the geomancer. They would have been at a stalemate, but Llesho added his own wave of dismissal to the geomancer’s.

  “Kaydu is here; I’ll be fine.”

  When they had filed out, the other magicians gathered around the table. Master Den came with them, but the geomancer raised her hands to bar his way.

  “We respect your skills, Master. And you have brought this boy not only through a thousand li of danger and a thousand more, but from childhood to a manhood of strength and wisdom as well. For that you have our respect. But your religion is not our religion, and your methods not our methods. We cannot trust our secrets to one whose ends are always in doubt.”

  It seemed for a moment that Master Den would challenge the geomancer for his place at the table. That battle they waged silently with their eyes, however. When it was over, the trickster god bowed humbly and departed. Kaydu looked after him with amazement, but it didn’t surprise Llesho.

  “Even now, do we know he means us well?” he asked her. “He’s the trickster god—it appears that he wants us to succeed, but we could be no more to him than a tool he carries to a place where he has other interests altogether. Then we may find out that our failure is more to his advantage than our success.”

  “You don’t believe that, do you?”

  He’d shocked Kaydu, but that didn’t change his mind. “It doesn’t matter what I believe. I don’t know.”

  “Good answer!” Master Geomancer applauded him. “Now, shall we set a trap for Lady Bamboo Snake, or shall we let her kill another innocent citizen of Pontus while we argue the niceties?”

  Duly chastened, they turned to the jade bowl on the table.