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

by Curt Benjamin

  “We didn’t want to land before we’d found you.” Kaydu didn’t mention their worry that he’d arrive back at the ships to find them gone, or the realization crossing her face that he’d arrived just as they would have debarked if he’d been there all along. He wasn’t sure if she was happier to see him or angrier at him for giving them such a scare.

  “It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Master Den warned her with a wry shake of his head. “As a daughter of the witch Habiba, and one who has served her ladyship, the goddess of war, for all of her life, you should know that not all battles are fought with swords and armies.”

  The trickster stood a little to the side, with Prince Tayyichiut under his wing. That development troubled Llesho the more he thought about it, and on more than one level. A pang of jealousy struck like a blow to the heart for one thing. It could mean nothing, of course, or it could mean the trickster god had abandoned him for another prince to raise in the tricksy ways of kingship. He didn’t think he was ready to take on Master Markko and the demon without his teacher, but it was starting to look like he’d be doing exactly that.

  “Habiba said you were going to try to talk to Master Markko into surrendering without a battle.”

  Llesho smarted under his captain’s acid tone, which told him exactly how foolish she thought that idea was. Standing among his usual friends and advisers, the sultan’s daughter AlmaZara watched him squirm uncomfortably under her sharply measuring gaze. She’d been raised among magicians and his explanation didn’t surprise her as he thought it might. He found he was uneasy before that particular audience, however. His cadre had earned a certain degree of familiarity, and his teachers were in a regular habit of praising and criticizing at the same time. As Master Den’s new apprentice king, Prince Tayy received no better treatment than he did and understood well enough the camaraderie of the trail. But the Daughter of the Sword reported to the Grand Apadisha, who looked at war as a sport.

  As a king, Llesho had first to regain his kingdom. Afterward, he required the respect—if necessary, the fear—of his neighbors to hold on to what he had reclaimed. He didn’t want the Apadisha measuring himself for clothes to suit a Thebin crown. So he wondered what report the daughter would make to her father, of a king without a home who disappeared at will and reappeared weeks later with no explanation for his absence, other than the vagaries of the time stream—

  “And he took you prisoner?” AlmaZara asked, a hand to her spear. “Even in the camp of the magician we should have been able to find you—”

  “He didn’t.” Llesho shook his head, trying to slow her down a minute. He was still feeling disconnected from his body and his surroundings, as if he’d returned in a dream and slept on somewhere in the puzzle box of his own crossed realities. “I needed to try one last time to stop the bloodshed before it began.”

  Bixei, who had known Master Markko longer than Llesho himself, tsked his disgust at this notion. “I could have told you that wouldn’t work. I’m amazed you managed to escape him after a stunt like that.”

  “Pig helped.”

  This time Prince Tayy snorted his amazement. “Not like he helped the magician, I hope.”

  “No wishes,” Llesho agreed. He settled his shoulders in his sleeveless coat and sharpened up the gaze he fixed on his captain. “Report, if you please. What’s been going on here since I left.”

  “There’s been some movement in the mountains,” Kaydu snapped to attention, knowing that Llesho had reached the limit of scolding he would take from his worried friends. It was time to take up his kingship.

  “The gates hold, but more demons are leaking through the barrier between the mortal kingdom and the underworld. Habiba doesn’t know how much longer heaven can hold.”

  Llesho remembered the sounds from Master Markko’s scrying bowl; it figured the evil magician wasn’t the only witch with his eyes to silvered water.

  Bixei peered into Llesho’s face as if he were afraid this wasn’t Llesho at all but some imposter put among them by the magic of their enemies. “We were afraid the demon snatched you out of the dreamscape.”

  “Nothing happened to me.” Llesho shook his head, denying the terrors of his friends and followers.

  “Sometimes, the time stream slips,” Master Den suggested, and that sounded like what he’d experienced.

  “I was anxious to make shore, and overreached my landing by the time between.”

  “You mean you managed to skip all the boring, nerveracking parts.” Prince Tayy had kept his peace until now, but he spoke up with a wry fit of jealousy of his own. “No boring days waking up to nothing but water and arguments about where we were going and what we would do when we got there? No nerveracking nights while Kaydu practiced her scrying and nobody could find you anywhere in the kingdoms of the living?”

  “More or less,” he admitted, then shifted Tayy’s attention off himself with a report. “Your uncle was well when I saw him, by the way. For the time being, at least, he and the Tinglut-Khan have agreed not to kill each other over the Lady Chaiujin, though there will have to be some accounting for the losses there soon. Not before Master Markko is taken down, however.”

  “Sensible of them,” Tayy agreed. “I assume you sent them somewhere to meet us?”

  Llesho cast a glance skyward, reminder that their enemies might spy on them from anywhere, in any shape.

  “Under cover, then,” Kaydu led them belowdecks, to the only cabin that the galley afforded. Low divans took the place of chairs here, and cushions on the floor, but the table on its short legs held the usual array of maps and charts.

  “We’re here,” she pointed to the familiar bite on the map.

  Llesho gestured to a point farther inland. “This is where the emperor is bringing his combined army. When we meet, the assault on Kungol will begin. There’s just one problem.”

  “Just one?” Bixei asked in mock surprise.

  Kaydu made a face at the two of them. “I assume you mean the wall and not Markko or the demon we have to defeat after we’ve routed the Uulgar raiders and captured the magician?”

  As he was meant to do, Llesho winced. “One more problem than I already had on my list,” he amended. “But yes. The Uulgar have built a wall around the city.”

  Tayy was frowning and shaking his head over the new intelligence. “It seems a strange thing for grasslanders to do,” he pointed out. “We don’t like fences of any kind. Don’t like staying in one place long enough to build a wall as a rule, even if we could endure living inside of one.”

  “Their own attack on the city proved the need, however. Habiba says they used the Thebin people as forced labor to construct it.”

  “I’ve seen it in my father’s scrying bowl,” Kaydu confirmed Llesho’s report. “But we haven’t been able to see past it, into the city. Habiba thinks Markko has set some magic about it to keep prying eyes out.”

  “I don’t think he’s in Kungol yet. Heading that way, but the sounds around us were those of a Harnish camp rather than a city of mud walls. Besides, he met me in his tent. I think, if he’d entered the city he would have installed himself in the Palace of the Sun. So we have that much time, at least. But he has the advantage of us in the shorter distance he still has to travel and in the plain fact that city gates held against us will open at his voice.”

  Master Den had listened in silence, but he now spoke up with a gleam in his eyes. “I presume you have made a plan . . . ?”

  Llesho met his teacher’s challenge with a level gaze. “At Kaydu’s command, AlmaZara will lead the Apadisha’s army to the meeting place. That will take, how long?”

  “A week, maybe ten days,” AlmaZara answered for her army of foot soldiers.

  Kaydu gave nodding agreement. “Sounds right, assuming the troops are hardened to such distances.”

  “It’s battle season,” AlmaZara answered with a shrug. “We meant to march north to fight the barbarians, but one direction or another matters little to a soldier.
”

  “That gives me ten days to make my way into the city and find Ghrisz,” Llesho concluded.

  You’re going to do what?He saw the thought in the suddenly widened eyes of his cadre, but Kaydu pressed her lips together. When she had regained control of her reactions, she questioned his decision more diplomatically than her first impulse had dictated.

  “I assume you aren’t planning to ride up to the gates with your personal bodyguard around you and look for a breach in the Uulgar defenses when you get there.”

  “We would hardly arrive before the armies that follow us,” Llesho reasoned. “If I travel through the dreamscape, I’ll have a week or more to find my brother and see how things are before we have to attack. The resistance fighters in the city might have their own secret ways around the wall. If I can find a way to ally with them, we may be able to open the gates from the inside. Working together, we might save the thousands of lives that will be lost trying to batter their way past the Uulgar defenses.”

  “You can’t go alone.” Kaydu rubbed her head. “I might . . .” Something about her distress reached Little Brother who rode in his sling at her back. Carefully, he crept onto her shoulder and began grooming her hair in a comforting way. “It isn’t my skill,” she finally said. “I would follow you into the dream world and guard your back while you search for the last of your brothers, but I’m as likely to get lost and cause you more trouble than help.”

  “I know,” Llesho bowed his head, not ready to admit he was too tired to do what he had to do, but heartily weary that he had to do it alone.

  “If there’s trouble, Habiba can find me. He’s done it before.” Reaching through the dreamscape the magician had brought Llesho home from his first dream-journey to the heavenly gardens. The dream readers of Ahkenbad had helped. They’d also died, but he didn’t think it was a good idea to mention that now.

  Finally, Hmishi surprised them all. It was he who spoke up in defense of the plan. “It’s not just a matter of getting anyone at all into Kungol ahead of the armies or finding a way for our armies to pass through the wall the raiders have built, or even contacting Prince Ghrisz once our spy makes it into the city. The prince who leads the resistance will have to trust our envoy enough to listen.

  “He won’t believe another magician means him well, or another Harnlander. Lling or I at least look Thebin, but we have country accents and farm manners, both tainted by the ways of the North where we have lived most of our lives. No Thebin would believe we had the ear of a long-lost king. At best Prince Ghrisz would consider us spell-bound hostages, at worst turncoat spies.”

  “He’s right, of course.” Master Den gave Hmishi a smile with too many teeth in it that seemed to make Llesho’s bodyguard more nervous than pleased. But it was the truth, and even Kaydu had to accept it.

  “When are you going?” she asked Llesho.

  “Now,” he answered, with a nod that summed up “goodbye” and “good luck” and half a dozen other things that would have taken the rest of the daylight to say in words.

  Dream traveling had become easier with practice. Tired as he was, Llesho had only to set a place in his mind and step . . . step . . .

  Chapter Thirty-two

  MOST OF the time Llesho traveled through the dreamscape with only his dream-self visible to those he visited. He could talk and walk among those present, eat and drink and even suffer among them, but only as a dream. Before he left the Qubal encampment, however, Bolghai the shaman had taught him how to cross the river Onga with his body as well as the dream-self. He did that now.

  Reality wavered, taking form and weight around him. Llesho fell to his hands and knees, his head hanging between his hunched shoulders. Shaken and exhausted from his travels, he gasped for breath in the thin, cold air, gathering his rattled senses about him. He was alone—hadn’t startled any Uulgar guardsmen or frightened a cook out of a year’s growth with his sudden appearance out of nowhere. When his chest had stopped heaving like a leaky bellows, he pulled himself back on his haunches and took stock of where the dreamscape had dropped him. A sharp wind cut through him like a knife; he knew the feel of that wind, knew the landscape spread out around him like a dream. Kungol: still so beautiful washed in the gold of late afternoon sunlight that he wept to look at it. The mountains rose up around the city, six taller than the others with glaciers at their crests that glittered like six crowns of stars. More than a marker in a prophecy, those peaks were a place out of memories he’d almost lost in the years of his absence.

  He wondered if he still wandered in dreams. But no, the wind was chilling him to the bone and hard stone bruised his knees. Llesho staggered to his feet, remembering. He’d never been allowed up here as a child, but he knew where he was: the king’s pavilion at the very top of the Palace of the Sun, across from the Temple of the Moon where he’d seen in his dreams the shadow of a woman praying the forms of the Way of the Goddess by moonlight. Far below lay the great square. He remembered a festival to welcome the spring from long ago when he was small, before the Harnish raiders came. Ribbons flying in their own royal version of peasant dress, his parents had led a thousand dancers through the spritely steps to a simple peasant tune. How many of those dancers had died, like his parents, at the hands of the Harn?

  Another celebration he’d welcomed with less pleasure, though he’d give his life to take back that childish anger. The priests of the Great Goddess in their brightly colored robes had sung the birth of his sister in this same square. He’d only seen five summers then and had resented the competition for his parents’ attention, his brothers’ affection. The Harn had murdered Ping, had thrown her body on a garbage heap, they said. Still, he remembered the sonorous many-voiced chant of praise that his mother had delivered a daughter for the Goddess.

  Llesho himself had stood in that square next to his brothers while the first caravans of the season had passed. He’d wanted to ride a camel then, wanted to go where the caravans went and see the strange places where all the mysterious goods came from. Since leaving Pearl Island, he’d done all that and more; Llesho would have given it all never to have left home.

  Tears froze on his cheeks. Turning away from the great square, he looked out on the city that once had thrived in the light of the gates of heaven. Temples to a thousand gods, a thousand different religions once had spread their banners across the city. Merchants and priests and guildsmen and caravanners had mingled on streets washed with the golden glow of sunlight on Kungol’s unique mud plaster. Untended now, those mud buildings crumbled where war hadn’t razed them completely. The banners were gone, the priests dead, the merchants fled. Guildsmen with nowhere else to go had hidden their skills if not their very existence. There weren’t enough Uulgar in the city to fill it with life, just enough to beat back the life that once had flourished here.

  In the distance, like a dark shadow, the wall the Uulgar had built—had forced the Thebin guildsmen to build—pressed in on the city like a glowering god, a serpent king strangling the city in the coils of its great body. He wondered how they stood it. Yesugei, a clan chieftain among the Qubal, had once told him that “Harn” was a name the Tashek gave to the clans. It meant the wind blowing on the grass and referred to the way the clans were forever picking up their tents to follow their horses across the grasslands. So how could they stand to live behind that wall?

  And how was Llesho going to get his armies over or around or through it? He couldn’t, and knew it. Not from the outside, not without sending his followers to wasteful deaths against the Uulgar defenses and Master Markko’s magic. But if he made contact with Ghrisz and his resistance fighters, maybe they could find a way from the inside. It had seemed a reasonable idea before he had seen that dark and looming monster of a wall closing in the city. Now, he didn’t know. Didn’t know how he was going to find Ghrisz. Couldn’t, for that matter, figure out how he was going to get away from the Palace of the Sun without being seen. The Uulgar might avoid this most exposed of Kungol’s sacred place
s, but they wouldn’t have abandoned the palace completely. They would surely kill him if they caught him. But they wouldn’t look for him up here.

  With his eyes carefully averted from the one sight he desired most, Llesho studied this aerie of Thebin kings for a way down. He stood on a bare stone platform in the shape of the sun. Nine tall pillars circled the outer rim, each too slender to hide a staircase. Between them no screen or parapet defended the king from stepping off the platform, but only death awaited that misstep. Above, a stone roof carved with the symbols of the zodiac rested on the capitals of the pillars. No escape there. One of the flagstones that made up the floor of the pavilion might conceal a secret catch that would reveal a hidden staircase, but the surface seemed unbroken by any seam or depression that might hide such a device.

  Grit spun in little windswept eddies around his feet but gave him no answers. There had to be a way down—a flash of light at the corner of his eye brought him spinning to confront it. Not a glint on a drawn sword or the head of a spear as he had feared, but little moons Han and Chen rising—Great Moon Lun would follow soon. Some things were immutable in this universe. Unchanging, like the Goddess herself.

  If he believed in the lady who waited for him among her bees and her gardens, and if he believed in her way, then he must believe that he had come to the place where he was meant to be. And, if he put his faith in the Way of the Goddess, it would take him to where he was supposed to go. Slowly he moved into the first of the evening prayer forms, “Setting Sun.” In the circle of his arms he held the world and thought of warmth fading in a blaze of crimson flame on the horizon. Day gave way to night, the prayer reminded him, as summer gave way to winter and clarity to confusion.

  When the circle opened, releasing all he held too close, Llesho said good-bye to fear and desire, to pride and friendship, to revenge and anger. The day ended, the sun would disappear. Holding on wouldn’t make it stay or bring it back any faster. So the form taught. And finally, at the top of the world, he learned its meaning.