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

by Curt Benjamin

  The point sent nervous glances darting in Lluka’s direction, but no one made any comment about Llesho’s mad brother. With a sigh, however, he had to disappoint even the goddess of war.

  “I have to try,” he said. Thousands would die in the coming battle. Tens of thousands. He knew Markko was mad, but the magician had always wanted to talk. Maybe he would see, if not reason, at least a less bloody path.

  “Then take Pig with you,” she insisted. “And remember what he is.”

  A Jinn, in spite of his piggy appearance, and the head gardener in the gardens of heaven. Which of these would serve him in the confrontation to come? Her ladyship had returned her attention to the map, however, with no more advice on how to use the Great Goddess’ rascally servant.

  “We are here.” She pointed to a bend in the river that Llesho remembered well. He’d met the Chimbai-Khan in this place, and had learned how to travel in waking dreams from Bolghai the shaman. And here he had taken control of the spear that rode watchfully at his back.

  “And the Uulgar are here—” She sketched a reach of grasslands that stretched upward to meet the high plateau from which Thebin looked down on its neighbors.

  Habiba had already scouted the enemy; he supplied the intelligence of his own expeditions as a giant bird high over the grasslands. “With Master Markko riding at their head, the gathered army of the Uulgar ulus was heading toward the Golden City. Away from our forces who follow at speed. I think he means to lie up behind the city wall and wait out our siege.”

  It didn’t change what Llesho needed to do, but it was good to know where he’d be going at least. Home, much changed as the Uulgar clans had made it. Kungol hadn’t had walls when the raiders had carried him away all those years ago. He wasn’t surprised to hear there was a wall now, however, built by the slave labor of his own people. The Harn had learned a lesson from their own attack and wouldn’t be taken as easily themselves.

  He remembered the form of the praying woman high atop the city on the tower of the Temple of the Moon, however. His mother was long dead, along with his sister. He didn’t know what other woman might brave the staircase to the bridge of moonlight, but someone had. The sapphire princess, perhaps, that Menar had mentioned from the tales. Not of the royal blood, but Ghrisz’s consort? Except that she had looked too young to be a wife, and he thought that he had heard her calling him in a dream. Not everything was real in the dreamscape, and not everything was now. Perhaps it was his mother, but from a time before the Harn came, when she was younger even than he was now. It comforted him to think that she might be reaching out to him across time.

  His brothers had by this time figured out what Llesho intended, and they joined their objections with the magician and her ladyship’s. Shou, however, said nothing until, with a cutting gesture that silenced the gathered advisers, he brought an end to the discussion.

  “If all generals fought their wars between themselves, our farms would surely suffer the lack of fertilizer—but our farmers would not complain, I think.” A raised eyebrow accompanied the reminder of land made fertile with graves of the rotting dead and watered by the tears of those left behind.

  Llesho gave a bow of thanks that Shou again waved away. “Don’t thank me, young king,” the emperor said, with such weariness in his voice that Llesho wondered if the dream he’d visited earlier was a sign of a continued sickness of the mind. Shou had turned away, however, with a sad shake of his head. “It never works,” he muttered, “But if you care at all, you have to try.”

  Which explained much that Llesho had wondered about in Shou’s behavior. It was more than he wanted to know. Not more than her ladyship did know, it seemed, and Habiba’s sigh was more long-suffering than surprised. Adar stopped the emperor’s retreat with a hand on his shoulder, which was rejected with a bleakly warning glance. Only Mergen seemed wholly to understand the path of the two kings. He’d lost a brother to battles fought with magical forces and his nephew now stood with Llesho at the center of the coming storm. His dark and thoughtful glance moved from Shou to the young king.

  “Be careful.” He offered not so much a warning as a prayer. “As you learned to be a king, so Prince Tayyichiut learns from you. Think about what lessons you wish to teach.”

  “I’m not his only teacher,” Llesho reminded the khan. He meant Mergen himself, but an ironic twitch of a smile from that direction, with a sweeping glance of the tent and all its occupants, reminded him of another teacher. He’d left Prince Tayy behind with Master Den, the trickster god ChiChu.

  “Then I don’t dare die,” Llesho promised. There was a lot more he could have said, but not with his brothers and all of their advisers and allies watching, so he turned his attention back to the maps. “Wait for us here.” He pointed to a small outpost on Thebin soil, to the north and east of the Golden City.

  Time was running; he felt the pull of it, needing to be away from the argument and debate. Events were moving “I have to go now—”

  A disturbance in the dreamscape caught him as he made his good-byes. He let it sweep him away, into the maelstrom of the dream realm. Screams echoed from a distance that had nothing to do with his own life course and he let them go. The cold touch of Master Markko’s interest reached out to him like a chill finger tracing the line of scars across his breast. He would have flown past in the chaos, but he caught onto that dread presence and used it like a line to track its source. When dreams spit him out again, he lay sprawled on his back on the carpeted floor of a familiar yellow silk tent.

  Master Markko stood at a table lit by a single glowing lantern. A silver bowl filled with clear water rested before him and he looked up from peering into it with a mockery of welcome in his evil grin. “Welcome home, dear son,” he said, “I wasn’t certain you would accept my invitation—”

  That touch, in the dreamscape, he meant. Llesho got his feet under him and shook out his coats, trying to rid himself of the sense of a clinging evil he always felt around the magician.Not your son, he thought, but kept the words to himself. It would gain him nothing to anger Markko before he’d stated his case.

  There were several elaborate camp chairs scattered around the tent, richly carved wood that seemed all of a piece but folded on cleverly concealed hinges for traveling. Llesho’s whole body yearned to fall into one, but he dared show no weakness before his enemy. So he stood his ground and made his offer.

  “We can stop this,” he said, ignoring the false cheer of the magician along with the trembling in his own legs. “I know about the thing you let loose from the underworld, the demon that sits at the foot of the gates of heaven. We both know what will happen if it somehow breaks through.”

  “Ah, the good Lluka’s visions. All the demons of the underworld set loose to prey upon the worlds of heaven and mortals. All the kingdoms destroyed in fire and wind and chaos—”

  Master Markko stepped away from the scrying bowl and clapped his hands for a servant. “Tea for my guest,” he commanded when the slave answered the summons. The servant brought cups and a steaming pot and left again at a careless wave of dismissal. Markko filled the cups before answering Llesho’s indirect question with a question of his own.

  “But whose dreams are they? Surely they belong to the demon who sits on his mountain brooding over his failure. I wonder why the good prince Lluka credits thecreature’s dreams as reality and my own plans as nothing more than wishes? My power raised that beast; my power can control him.”

  “And all you have to do is find him.” The demon had risen from the underworld in the shadow of the gates of heaven, which stood somewhere in the mountains that encircled Kungol. But no mortal man had ever set eyes on them. Not even Llesho, the beloved husband of the Great Goddess, who had passed through the gates in dreams, knew the way in the waking realm. Finding the demon would be question enough without an army of Harn raiders to defeat along the way.

  Master Markko shrugged that off as an obstacle of no consequence. “With the right . . . incentives . .
. all will become clear.” He offered Llesho a cup with a smug smile. “It’s taken longer than I’d expected to get you all here, but I will have my way.”

  “I don’t think so.” Llesho refused the tea. Made a peace offering of his brother’s desperate truth. “Lluka has a gift. He sees the future in all its possibilities. The dreams you invade speak of more than the sick desires of the demon at the gates of heaven. All futures end here.

  “Kungol, Shan, the Harnlands, heaven, and the underworld and all the kingdoms of mortal men who never heard of any of us will fall to fire and storm if the demon wins through. The demon and all his creatures will fall in the chaos they bring, but it will be too late for the rest of us then. With no heaven or underworld, no mortal realm for returning, the souls of all the dead will wander the darkness in despair forever.

  “That’s the vision that rides Prince Lluka’s sleep and drives him mad when he’s awake. In none of his raving does he make an exception for the souls of magicians, not even yours. But we can stop it. Together.”

  Master Markko gave no indication that he’d taken insult from the refusal of the tea from his hand. Setting the cup down gently, he gave Llesho a long and searching look from under a fine line of eyebrows. “You say that Lluka sees all futures truly, and all end in death,” he said. “It stands to reason, from your own argument, that nothing we can do will stop the terrors to come. Why do you feel the need to try, knowing as you must that your efforts are futile?

  “And,” he added, a finger raised in warning as Llesho took breath to answer, “if you believe, as I do, that Prince Lluka’s dreams are indeed mutable, and the future can be changed, how can you imagine I would abandon my own ambitions to follow you? Haven’t I already proved, by raising him, that I am more powerful than this demon that stands at the turning point of all creation?”

  “More powerful? Or a dupe used by the demon king to invade the mortal realm?” Llesho answered with his own question, and reminded the magician of what they both must know: “I have looked down your road and found nothing but death at the end of it, just as Lluka’s visions predict. A different road offers at least the hope of a different outcome.”

  “Ah,” Master Markko chuckled as if they shared a joke between them. “You seem to think I care about living. But you’re wrong. Without winning, what’s the point of any of it?” He saluted Llesho’s health with the small round cup in his hand and drank the tea which, this time, seemed to be a harmless brew.

  “If losing means death,” the magician set down his cup, finishing his explanation as he dabbed delicately at his lips with a silk square, “there is some consolation in knowing that I’ll take the rest of you with me. And I could, for example, start with you—”

  The silk square disappeared. Master Markko reached out an empty hand and slowly closed his fingers. Llesho watched, unable to move, choking as if the magician’s fist had wrapped around his throat and squeezed. Black light sparkled behind his eyes and he seemed to be drifting, drifting. Vision narrowed to a tunnel down which he saw the magician raise a knife. Behind him, Pig frowned and adjusted the chains that wrapped him everywhere.

  The sound of link against link broke Markko’s concentration. The pressure around Llesho’s throat eased for a moment, tightened again.

  “Ahem.”

  Master Markko whipped around, ready to attack in the direction from which the voice had come. Instead he turned pale as a ghost, or the Lady SienMa, and screamed as if his own throat might be torn out with the sound.

  “Let the young king go, please. We still need him,” Pig requested politely, but he reached out with one huge black hoof that blurred into the rough shape of a hand. The Jinn grabbed the magician by his beard and lifted him over his head, slippered feet dangling like a puppet with tangled strings.

  Master Markko released Llesho, but even as he hung there in Pig’s grasp, kicking to be let go, he cursed and swore against the gods who denied him the destiny he sought. “Mine!” he cried. “You can’t have him; he’s mine!”

  “Never,” Pig answered. Then he gently set the magician down again. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you,” he apologized with a deep bow. “I’ve learned a lot during my exile, not least the damage of a misspoken word. I would change it if I could.”

  “And I would roast you on a spit and serve you to my raiders to celebrate the fall of the gates of heaven. Neither of us is likely to get our way this time; but soon—”

  The magician seemed very confident in himself, but Llesho read death in the Jinn’s eyes. “No!” he shouted, his own arm raised to stop murder. “If you kill him, the dragon-king’s son buried inside him will also die. What will happen to your gardens when that crime is added to your account?”

  With a careless wave, the Jinn shifted them outside of the magician’s reality. They could still see Master Markko, but he couldn’t see them. He whirled around in a fury of summoning while Llesho watched dispassionately only inches from his face. For himself, Pig’s thoughts had all turned inward. Something about that mystical separation cooled the temper as distance in the waking realm might. For that moment out of space, the magician had become less important than the puzzle he presented.

  “If we live,” Llesho reminded the Jinn, “if we vanquish the demon king and rescue the gates of heaven, my lady’s gardens will need you.”

  “Yes,” Pig answered slowly, hesitant to agree to something that might bind him to a promise he hadn’t planned to make.

  “When that time comes, and you stand before my lady the Great Goddess, she will ask you what you did to repair the damage you have done with your mischief in the mortal realm.”

  Pig squirmed uncomfortably, knowing already where that was going. “But—”

  “I know. There is no way out of the mortal realm except death.” Markko’s death. Llesho sighed, sharing the sorrow for all who would fall in battle before that day came. “But this murder will not balance your scales.”

  “Because it’s my fault,” Pig realized. “I brought this on us all.”

  It was true. Llesho had no comfort to give him. A tear ran down the Jinn’s round snout, but he accepted the judgment with a solemn lowering of his great black head.

  “Do you have anything else you want to tell him?” Pig asked. Master Markko still raged at their disappearance, though they stood no more than an arm’s length from his foaming fury.

  Llesho shook his head. “I had to try,” he said.

  “I know.” The Jinn patted him on the shoulder, too dispirited even to ask him for a wish. “Now it’s time to do it the other way.”

  War. He’d always known there was no way out. But he’d told the truth to her ladyship and to Pig. He’d had to try. Setting his sights on the ships he’d left behind on the Marmer Sea, Llesho took a step . . .

  This time it didn’t surprise him when the girl’s voice called him. “Not yet,” he whispered in his passing. “But soon.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  STEP . . . ANOTHER, and he was tumbling onto the deck of the galley the Grand Apadisha had given him to be his flagship.

  “He’s back!” AlmaZara’s guardswoman peered down at him, calling to his companions. They soon gathered in a worried circle around him: AlmaZara herself, with a Bithynian Daughter of the Sword at her right hand and Lling at her left. Hmishi came next, flanking Lling, with Bixei and Stipes. With a scuffle of running footsteps, Tayy joined them with Master Den looking curiously over the Harnish prince’s shoulder.

  That seemed wrong to Llesho. Master Den belonged with him, not with Prince Tayyichiut. A crinkling smile in the corner of the trickster god’s eyes did nothing to reassure him. Llesho stuck out a hand, but no one offered to help him off his back. They waited, instead, for Kaydu to push through to the center.

  “Where have you been?” She squatted on her heels to talk to him on a level, pushing him back again when he tried to get up.

  “I had to confer with Shou and our allies among the clans.” He didn’t think his
conversation with Master Markko would go down well, so he kept that to himself.

  “My father said you left the emperor’s tent weeks ago. You’ve been lost in the time stream.” She glared at him with an exasperated frown before giving him a boost to his feet. “We’ve been frantic, but his scrying bowl couldn’t locate you in the dreamscape or any place in the living realm.”

  “I was here and there.” Llesho brushed himself off and took a good look around him. The galley stood out a bit from landfall with ten others of their kind resting at anchor in a harbor that, in person, looked more like a half-moon carved out of the mountainous landscape than a dragon’s bite. Llesho recognized it for the sultan’s private landing anyway. There wasn’t room for all the fleet he’d brought from Pontus. Since no one seemed concerned about the missing ships, he figured they must be awaiting word to advance from outside the enclosing arms of the cove.

  With no crisis but himself currently in progress, they could all focus on his answers. Llesho wondered if he could come up with something else to distract them, but it didn’t look promising. The situation called for evasive maneuvers. “With Pig’s help, a little more there than here.”

  “You know,” Kaydu pointed out, “you are starting to sound more like Master Den every day.” The sniff that accompanied this conclusion made it clear that she didn’t think that was a good thing.

  “Sometimes it frightens even me,” Llesho admitted. “Have you been waiting here long?” On the shore a cluster of buildings remarkable for their elegant filigree work and the many slender towers that rose above them reached almost to the water’s edge. He would have liked to stop there for a while, to enjoy the beauty and the calm lapping of a sea he didn’t have to fight with an oar or a spell. Maybe on the other side of battle . . .

  “We came to anchor this morning,” Kaydu confirmed what Llesho had already begun to suspect: there was no coincidence in his sudden reappearance. He had wanted the whole thing over with, and Pig warped the time stream to carry him to when he needed to be.