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

by Curt Benjamin

  From a long, narrow slot below the table, Master Geomancer slid a thin slice of marble. “A purified surface,” she said, and wiped the jade bowl carefully before placing it on the marble.

  “Now, for a nice earth spell, we need some dirt.” Dusting off her plump, capable hands, she opened one of the many little drawers under the table, sorting among a dozen or more vials of soil.

  “Not Bithynian,” she muttered under her breath, “No known affinity here. Harnish soil might do—we know she has some connection to the grasslands since you found her there.

  “But no, I think we will go with this.” She pulled out a vial and emptied it onto the marble tablet. By the color and texture, Llesho knew it for Thebin soil, from high in the mountains.

  “I’m making a guess here, but we’ll set the spell with the destination. The spell’s power will be strongest where you will need it most.

  “Now, hmmm . . .” she continued to mutter ingredients while her fellow magicians Master Astrologer and Master Numerologist rooted through the little drawers to provide what she required. Dried herbs and saffron, small vials of oil, and something that smelled so badly it made Llesho’s eyes run quickly took their places on the table.

  None of the ingredients went inside the bowl. “A spell already resides within,” Master Geomancer explained as she kneaded the ingredients into a paste. “We don’t know what effect a second spell would have upon the first. Our spell will go outside the vessel, surrounding it so to speak, like a magical fence.”

  Kaydu stood quietly at her side, cleaning up each grain or leaf that fell onto the tabletop, outside the perimeter they had created with the marble tablet. When Master Geomancer waggled her fingers, Kaydu ran for water to wash the master’s hands. When she smacked her lips, Kaydu brought water in a cup for her to drink, and followed that with equal service to each of the other magicians. Master Geomancer never gave Kaydu a word of instruction.

  At first, the workings of the masters brought back memories of serving Master Markko as he compounded his poisons. Kaydu would never aid evil so willingly, however, and the room had a familiar light and smell about it, of sunshine cutting through the gloom. It reminded him of Habiba’s workshop, where his dream travels frequently took him when he visited Shou. When he let go of his fear, Llesho was able to appreciate the subtlety and skill of the magicians. He watched with fascination as the three masters communicated their needs with little signs they were scarcely aware of giving.

  Kaydu worked tirelessly, silently, and accurately. He had always known and valued her skills as a soldier, but now he had a chance to see the other part of her training. It felt strange, but made him proud, as if he’d chosen her as his champion himself. The Lady SienMa, who had set Kaydu to guard him, knew soldiers as only the mortal goddess of war might. But he remembered, too, the water gardens of the governor’s compound at Farshore Province. Somewhere along the line he’d forgotten the promise of those gardens. His captain, however, had remembered: after war must come healing.

  He knew what Kaydu was doing among the magicians, but Llesho couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t sent him away with the others until Master Geomancer dusted off her hands in a habitual gesture that signaled a shift in her thinking. Master Numerologist had disappeared behind the table to rummage in a drawer as wide and deep as a spice chest. When he appeared again, he held in his hand a square wooden box covered all over with arcane symbols.

  “Just decoration,” he explained when he noticed Llesho’s curious look. “And it scares away the curious.”

  Inside, the box was empty. Master Geomancer lifted the cup from the tablet while Master Numerologist carefully scraped the spell-stuff into the box. When he had done, the geomancer carefully wiped off the bottom of the cup so every grain went into the box with the rest. Master Astrologer then took a knife and cut a square of satin from the geomancer’s sleeve. She set the satin on top of the soil in the box, and only then did Master Geomancer put the cup in its container. If he hadn’t seen the whole process, Llesho would have noticed nothing unusual at all about the package. Just a precious jade bowl in a carrying case with no visible sign of the spell beneath the satin.

  When the cup had settled in its place, Master Geomancer closed the lid. “And now to seal the spell,” she said. “Young king whom those of the faith of Pontus may not call Holy Excellence, we need your blood now.”

  Oh. Well that explained why they hadn’t sent him away with the others, then. “I don’t have much to spare,” he reminded them. He had suffered only minor injuries as a galley slave, but lately he felt as though he had been drained of more than the few drops the lash had taken.

  Master Geomancer took no notice of his objection but put out her hand. When he hesitated, Kaydu whispered her own plea, “It’s important.”

  She was his captain and he had followed her orders all the way from Farshore. No point in changing that now, he figured, and put his hand, palm up, in the outstretched hand of the geomancer.

  “Not your sword hand—smart boy.”

  He was watching her for a sign of her next move so he didn’t notice when Master Astrologer reached over with the knife that had cut the satin sleeve. So quickly that he didn’t notice she was moving until blood welled like a string of garnets, the magician slashed a shallow wound across his hand.

  “Good.” Just as quickly, Master Geomancer turned their nested hands over so that the blood dripped on the box. One. Two. Three drops fell onto the wood. When she decided that there was enough of his blood beaded onto the wood, the magician freed his hand. Kaydu was waiting, silently, with water to wash the wound and a clean bandage. As she worked, the Apadisha’s masters gathered around the box. Llesho didn’t understand the words they chanted, but Kaydu paled over her bandaging.

  He didn’t have to know the meaning of the words to feel the impact of the spell. The air in the schoolroom thickened and grew more difficult to breathe, as if it were tightening around his heart. He remembered Master Markko’s spell on Radimus and the hearts of the Wastrels plucked away and replaced with stone. He though his own heart would explode. Then, between one breath and the next, the pressure vanished. When he looked at the box, the blood was gone.

  “I think you are ready to go now,” Master Geomancer said, and dusted off her hands one last time.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  THEY WERE on their way, heading out of port with all the fanfare that had been missing upon his arrival. The Grand Apadisha himself had come to the docks to see them off, not a single, limping vessel this time but thirty war galleys flying the banners of Bithynia and Thebin and Shan and the Qubal. They had no Tinglut on board and had made no agreements with them concerning Thebin, so rode with no banner displayed. They would have carried the colors of the Gansau Wastes in honor of the fallen Wastrels and those who now traveled to their aid with Shou, but the Tashek had no banner. The warriors of the Wastes rode like the wind, like smoke, uncounted and unobserved.

  As their galley slipped away from its berth, Llesho came to attention with his companions around him. Habiba was already on his way to find Shou and the Lady SienMa, but Master Den stood at his back, a hand on his shoulder and another gathering in Prince Tayy. AlmaZara, the Apadisha’s daughter, had joined them on the poop deck for their departure. She stood a little apart with several of her fellow Daughters of the Sword at her side and Kaydu like a bridge between Llesho’s band and her own. Over their captain’s shoulder, Llesho saw Little Brother’s head peeking out of his pack. The monkey clung to his mistress with a suspicious, unhappy glare for the sea on which they rode and the ship so like the one that had almost taken Kaydu and her whole cadre to their watery graves.Smarter than the rest of them, Llesho thought. If anyone among them shared his own fears for the coming voyage, they didn’t show it.

  From a bandstand set up on the dock, the Apadisha’s orchestra of youthful musicians played until a military band made up of soldiers left behind took its own turn. Farewell songs and martial anthems alternate
d between them. The magicians of Pontus had turned out in all their finery. Master Geomancer had wished to go with them, to observe for herself the lay of any further pearls they might find. On stepping aboard, however, she found that the ebb and flow of the sea did strange things to her earth-bound stomach. With tearful regret she had debarked, and now stood among her fellows with her possessions in a forlorn sack at her feet. Since neither Master Astrologer nor Master Numerologist wished to take her place, they carried with them no scholars to represent the magicians’ school but their own captain, Habiba’s daughter and an apprentice witch in her own right.

  Llesho had grown stronger, and Prince Tayy had healed a great deal since they had come to Pontus, but still they were glad to hear the call to oars at their backs that would mean the formal leave-taking would be over soon. With a roar like thunder the oars hit the benches in a showy display of rowing skill for their departure. Almost unconsciously, Llesho counted the beats. Muscles tensed under newly healed skin as his body responded to the demand of the beater to step, step, pull. The boat surged ahead in that leaping manner of a galley under oar. He kept to his feet, casting a sidewise glance at Prince Tayyichiut and receiving a shrug of one shoulder in answer. Tayy was twitching to the rhythm of the drum as well, but he wouldn’t sacrifice his dignity to acknowledge it.

  When the dock had grown so small that they could no longer make out the bands playing their clashing instruments, the travel party broke from its stiff pose.

  “Pardon, Holy Excellence.” AlmaZara had picked up the court-formal title. She approached him with the slight bow for almost-equals befitting the daughter of the Grand Apadisha to a foreign king. “If it would not cause offense, I would stay with my own swordswomen. I will, of course, come to your call under the light of the Father or the Daughter should you require my services or my counsel.”

  By night or day, she meant. Bithyninans, he had learned, saw Great Moon Lun as male instead of female, giving a stern, cold light. Great Sun’s furious heat, the physician Ibn Al-Razi had told him, must belong to the heavenly Daughter of the Sword. And so the people of Pontus reversed the order of the Thebin universe. The pledge that AlmaZara meant by it, however, was the same.

  “As you wish.” In the normal course of things, he wouldn’t agree with her decision to travel with her guardswomen, apart from his own company of advisers. Much of his decision-making went on in the informal give and take of the cadre. She would miss out on that if she separated herself from them. But it made what he had to do a lot easier. He could avoid at least one uncomfortable explanation about abandoning his guards to travel alone and unprotected in the dreamscape.

  “I would also, for my peace of mind and the comfort of my father, set two Daughters of the Sword to guard your safety at all times. Not that I doubt the intentions of your own picked cadre—” She did not say that she distrusted his male guards. Her glance at Prince Tayy’s middle, however, indicated that she’d formed her own opinion and it did not cast a favorable light on the ability of his companions, male or female, to ensure his safety.

  “I would not wish to impose on your privacy, of course,” she added, gesturing to take in the guardswomen in question, who stood watchfully at a distance. “They have orders, however, to keep you safe, even against your persuasive arguments. The pirates who roam this sea make poor hosts.”

  That last she said with a disapproving frown in Kaydu’s direction. Her guardswomen didn’t owe this king of Thebin any loyalty except as it served the will of their sultan. They wouldn’t be trusting him to his own devices while he went off on one of his dangerous schemes involving, oh, selling himself into slavery, for example.

  “No more pirates,” he assured her, but kept his current plan to himself. He had an army moving on land as well as by sea. AlmaZara seemed to take his promise at face value, however, and with a formal bow, left him to find her own troops gathered belowdecks.

  When she had gone, Bixei glared over at the foreign guardswomen, who glared back, weapons bristling. “What does she think we are?” he grumbled under his breath.

  “Men,” Lling stated the obvious. She kept quiet on the matter of how many times their charge had escaped their benevolent watch to get into more trouble than they could handle. But, with a knowing little smile, she pointed out, “She’ll find out soon enough.”

  They all understood what she meant, and Llesho rolled his eyes at her. “I’m not that bad.”

  “Yes, you are,” Prince Tayyichiut retorted. “It’s just that no one else on this ship has the rank to tell you so.”

  “That’s not true! Master Den . . .”

  They laughed. Even his teacher had a twinkle of humor in his eyes, not an unusual sight, but still . . .

  “That’s right.” Tayy didn’t need to remind him, but he did anyway. “You are depending on the trickster god to guide you away from foolish risks!”

  “Should a king run away and hide when his people are dying under the yoke of invaders and tyrants?” Llesho asked with perhaps more indignation than necessary. He didn’t think they were going to like his next plan any better than they’d liked the last one, and he was setting up his defenses early.

  “It depends on the king,” Tayy answered, but he lifted his chin a little, a reminder that he, too, followed a dangerous path to pay a debt his people owed to the royal family of Thebin.

  “The worst of the danger is over anyway,” the Harnish prince added hopefully. “You defeated Master Markko at his own storm and sent him running when he tried to kill me. You’re stronger than he is and now he knows it. He’ll be afraid to come after you.”

  Kaydu looked nervous at that, and Llesho figured she’d been talking to her father, who would know better. “I’m not stronger,” he corrected the misunderstanding before it took root in the minds of his company. False confidence could kill them all.

  Tayy was right about rank; his captain couldn’t call the prince’s conclusions into doubt. For an ally to do so might, under other circumstances, have brought their nations to war. But this was Llesho speaking, a friend beyond rank, and about his own weakness.

  “Master Markko raised the storm and threw it at our heads. The strength of that blow measures the growth of his power and learning. He couldn’t control it, but I couldn’t have raised it in the first place. I didn’t control it either. With Marmer Sea Dragon’s help, I shifted its direction just enough to protect our ships. The storm continued its destruction on a slightly altered course—it may still be out there.

  “I’m no magician, just a man favored by the gods with certain gifts in the dream world.” He knew that wasn’t quite true even as he said it. Echoes sounded in his heart, something he was supposed to remember but couldn’t quite grasp.Later, he thought. It didn’t have anything to do with the current point, though it felt like it was going to be important later on.

  “You heard what Marmer Sea Dragon said. Master Markko is as much dragon as human. The question isn’t how powerful he is, but how well he has learned to control the dragon that has become a part of him. If we’re lucky, Marmer Sea Dragon’s son will resist Markko’s efforts to turn his powers to evil. But I’m guessing they’re both mad as loons by now because of what Pig did to them.”

  In the course of his argument with Tayy, he said a lot of things he hadn’t told his cadre before. They listened in a silence unnatural to them lest he remember that he’d meant to keep the dragon’s conversation a secret. Tayy had been present to hear it all the first time, however, and hesitated not at all to argue right back.

  “Then how will we defeat him?” Prince Tayy had grown pale during the farewell ceremony, and now he gripped the rail as if he might tether himself to the world that way.

  “Not with my powers as a magician, because I don’t have any.” But he hadn’t given up hope. “The thing about being a king, though, isn’t how strong or how powerful he is at doing all that needs getting done, but how well he leads others who have the strengths he needs.

  “We have
Habiba on our side, and Kaydu, and Marmer Sea Dragon and the seven mortal gods, or at least some of them, each one of them more powerful than I can even imagine. We have the emperor of Shan and the khan of the Qubal and the Tinglut and the Dinha of the Tashek people, who has given us her Wastrels. We have the Daughters of the Sword from Pontus, and the mortal goddess of war chose my cadre. And in the dream realm I am defended by a servant of the Great Goddess herself.”

  “A pig with more mischief than good sense,” the prince reminded him about the last. They had met during a storm-tossed dream at sea and Tayy hadn’t been impressed.

  Llesho had to smile. The Jinn seldom made a good impression, even after long acquaintance, but somehow, he managed to bring Llesho home safely from his dream travels. Which he mentioned, adding the point of his list-making:

  “Who does Master Markko have behind him? How long do you think the Uulgar raiders would stay there if they weren’t terrified of his dreadful powers?

  “If we win, it will be because all the powers of all the realms of heaven and earth and the underworld have thrown in with us against the terrible chaos that awaits if Master Markko has his way. It’s a better chance at winning than you can imagine, but it doesn’t offer any guarantees for the safety or survival of any of us. Not even me. The one thing we know for sure, though, is that if we don’t try, all the realms will end in fire and chaos.”

  “But what if you die?” Prince Tayy challenged while his companions looked on with the same question in their eyes. “Who will all these powers follow then?”

  “They’ll follow the person who picks up my sword.” Llesho didn’t say who that might be, but Tayy got the message.

  “Oh, no! Don’t you put this on me! I’m not even from Thebin! I have my own problems and they don’t include the mortal gods of Thebin or a heavenly garden I don’t even believe in!”

  “Hopefully, it won’t come to that,” Llesho tried to reassure him.