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

by Curt Benjamin

  Kungol was no place of butterflies or bending trees, but Llesho shifted into the form of “Twining Branches,” twisting in on itself like the plots of conspirators. Like the gnarled fingers of an old healer, or the stunted trees that dotted those few places on the deserts he had crossed where water sometimes coursed beneath the surface. Strength flowed not only in the straight and smooth and young, but in the stubborn refusal to surrender to the seasons and harsh weather. He found beauty in survival and moved on to the next lesson.

  So many forms he had learned to honor the wind: over water, over grass. None of them spoke to the unyielding heart of Kungol. Llesho thought and let go of thought, listened with his heart which whispered to him in a form all his own, “Wind over Stone.” The mountains that rose around him, the platform that he stood on. Stone. Less yielding than those forms he had known, he made this new prayer the meeting of two equal powers. Softly insistent power, unbendingly immovable power, danced together, wearing each other through the ages to a gentler peace. He felt the touch of the Goddess in the wind at his face and knew he was the stone, enduring.

  As the form came to a close he continued without stopping into the Goddess Moon form, honoring the Goddess in Great Moon Lun. At the height of the form, Great Moon Lun peeked out from between two mountains where they crossed low on the horizon at his back, slanting moonlight across the Temple of the Moon on the far side of the public square. Awestruck, Llesho brought the prayer to an end with his face lifted to the wondrous sight. The Temple glowed like molten silver; Great Moon’s light, flowing with that cold heat, pierced him like a silver arrow through the heart.

  “Oh, Goddess,” he whispered: a prayer, a wish.

  “She’s not here.”

  “I think you’re wrong about that,” Llesho told the man who stepped out of the shadows cast by a pillar brandishing the sword in his hand. Uulgar by the look of him, and older than Llesho by a decade, though he wore no bits of human hair sewn to his shirt. He hadn’t been there a moment earlier, but he looked too shocked by Llesho’s presence to have dream traveled to that place. They studied each other for a moment, the guardsman the first to break that gaze with a confused sweep of the platform.

  Llesho asked the first question. “Where did you come from?”

  The guardsman’s eyes darted to an opening in the floor that had looked like unbroken stone when Llesho had examined his aerie earlier.

  “It only opens from the inside,” the Uulgar clansman said. “And the only way to reach it is past my post. So how did you get up here without my seeing you?”

  “I came here in a dream,” Llesho said. He drew the short spear from its sheath at his back and let the unearthly light flicker along its length. “Ask your shaman.”

  The Uulgar guardsman’s eyes opened wide so that the whites showed all around but he didn’t back down. “I’ve seen few wonders in my life, and fought with none. I’d like to keep my record unblemished in that regard. If you will come quietly to my master . . .”

  “The magician?” Llesho asked.

  The man paled, answer enough. Llesho slid his sword from its scabbard so that he had a weapon in each hand: one to counter the guardsman, the other to press the attack.

  Llesho had fought in tight spaces before, but then he’d been hemmed in by enemies battling all around him. He knew how to clear room to move with great sweeping swings of his sword while jabbing away at anyone who came inside the reach of his blade. This was the opposite of his experience in the battlefield, however. He had all the empty space he could want, as long as his opponent stayed in the center of the king’s pavilion. If they strayed to the edge, however, they’d be over it and dead an instant later when they hit the ground.

  If his goal had been to slay his opponent, it would have been easy enough to press him to that edge. He didn’t want to kill the Harnishman for performing his simple duty, though. It was clear that the Harnishman didn’t want to kill him either, if for different reasons. Master Markko would want to see anyone found on the king’s pavilion with no explanation how he got there. Llesho figured a guardsman who lost that prize would soon follow his hapless victim over the edge.

  The guardsman brought up his sword and Llesho engaged with a clang of steel against steel before backing off. Circling warily, he took the measure of the stone platform as well as of his opponent. This far, no farther, he counted his paces. Pressed the advantage, then retreated in a flurry of sword and spear.

  If they’d been fighting by arena rules, the fight would have been simple enough, except for that straight drop, of course. He’d learned from his first days in Lord Chin-shi’s compound how to put down an opponent without doing too much damage. But the guardsman didn’t know those rules.

  Attack, parry, retreat.

  They circled each other cautiously. The guardsman had greater strength as befit his years, but his stance and the nervous glances he cast about him said the man had little experience at hand-to-hand combat. The Harnish had war games, of course, but in their own land they trained mostly on horseback. Standing guard on an abandoned building in a subject city gave little opportunity to sharpen skills at closer combat. Even so, the guardsman must have come in from the grasslands of his clans quite recently; he fought awkwardly on his feet, with little sense of swordwork in a confined space. The man’s skills couldn’t be counted on to keep either of them alive.

  Llesho was faster and better trained for a sustained single combat. He darted inside the man’s reach, jabbed with the short spear, drew blood from a scratch that by design did nothing more than trace a line of blood along his opponent’s rib cage. Out of reach again perilously close to the drop, then away, he circled back to the center. The guardsman pressed the attack, scored. Llesho felt a wet trickle run down his sword arm. The muscles still worked, so he ignored it.

  As sometimes happened in battle, his own blood rushing in his ears blocked out other sounds. He found the stillness at the core of his own technique, where his dead weap onsmaster Master Jaks still called out the moves from the governor’s compound in Farshore Province.

  Slash, parry, retreat—

  He paced himself to the pounding of his heart, let that pulse measure his steps from the edge. He didn’t have to think; an unconscious alarm seemed to alert him each time he strayed too close to disaster.

  So he spiraled the battle inward on that high stone disk as he wove a tapestry of blows through which even his own spear could not slide. Back and back he pressed the Harnish guard until, wide-eyed with terror and gasping for breath, the man teetered on the brink. Llesho didn’t want him dead, so he took a step back, let the man do his own circling away from a deadly fall.

  Victory came with a simple trick. Llesho pressed him, the guardsman parried. Llesho counter-parried, sliding his blade under his opponent’s and circling it up, away, more quickly than the dazed Harnishman could follow. Momentum carried the weapon out of the guard’s hand, arcing off into space. Dismayed, he watched as his sword spun far out beyond the edge of the king’s pavilion and fell, fell, until it clanged into the square below.

  “Give.” Llesho pressed the point of his spear to the man’s breast. The man fell to his knees, the sword following him down, but he hadn’t surrendered yet.

  “There is only one way . . . down from this tower.” The hoarse voice rasped painfully as the guardsman wheezed for breath. Blood ran from his nose and he spat a bloody gob of it at his feet. Llesho wondered if he had wounded the man more seriously than he’d intended. He half expected to see bubbling red froth at the corners of the Harnishman’s mouth, but it didn’t come. The man wiped his nose on the back of his hand, unsurprised at the red streak the action left in its wake.

  Not his wound, then. The cold thin air on Kungol’s high plateau punished those not born to her heights. Llesho waited while the man struggled to catch his breath. “There are many more . . . of my kind . . . between here and freedom. If you kill me, you will die.”

  “And if I let you take me to your
master, I’ll die anyway.”

  He saw the truth of that in the Harnishman’s eyes. It wasn’t the only truth between them on that windswept platform, however. He couldn’t kill this man for doing his duty. Perhaps, if he’d worn on his chest the badges of Uulgar brutality, hanks of hair torn from the living scalps of his victims, Llesho might have been able to do it. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that his decision had nothing to do with the man on his knees in front of him.

  Battle had brought him no reward but to return in blood and pain to try again, over and over and over through ages so lost in time that he could scarce imagine them. For Llesho, the Way of the Goddess could no longer lead through fields of the dead. Finally he understood that.

  He wasn’t out of it completely—didn’t see any way around killing the thing that held the gates of heaven hostage. For the rest, others could carry the sword from now on. It was time for him to step away from that life. So he threw his sword down between them.

  “Go,” he said, and looked up to the mountains where the Goddess waited for him. It felt like justice, to free this man who had done nothing but his duty. The guardsman could kill him where he stood, but Llesho didn’t think he’d do it. Why would the Way bring him to this point, this understanding, just to die? If he believed, and he did, then there must be another way out of this. A just way.

  A low moan of terror escaped the guardsman’s throat. Llesho turned slowly, in no great hurry to see what horror crept up on them now. Not a horror, though; he saw a miracle.

  Great Moon Lun had climbed higher, as if scaling the star-crowned mountains of Thebin. Her glorious light pierced the eye of the needle that was the tower of the Temple of the Moon. Between the earthly Palace of the Sun and the temple, symbol of the Great Goddess in her heaven, a bridge of molten silver had suddenly appeared out of moonlight. Forgetting the Harnishman, Llesho took a step, another. At first he seemed to have no control over his feet. Then he was running with all his will toward that unearthly light.

  His foot felt air, nothing, but he didn’t fall. He ran, not out of fear or to escape the Uulgar guardsmen who awaited them inside the Palace of the Sun but joyously. In his heart he knew that all he might desire at road’s end awaited him on the other side. He had only to cross that mystical silver bridge.

  The light held him, held him, until his foot found stone again high above the city on the far side of the square. He had reached the Temple of the Moon. He stepped onto the pavilion that returned the palace’s gaze across the square.

  All around the aerie atop the temple ran an elaborately carved parapet, protection on this side of the square against an accidental fall. Two breaks in the figured stone aligned with each other to allow the light of the rising Great Moon to cross the high platform, forming the eye of the needle through which Lun gazed upon the palace. Llesho remembered being here by daylight, remembered the balustrade guarding an open staircase that spiraled down into the center of the temple. Stone benches set at propitious angles allowed for comfortable viewing of the palace and the mountains in daylight. By moonglow they looked more ethereal than his memory supplied, with shadows more substantial than the stone itself.

  Llesho took a step away from the edge but turned at the sound that echoed across the square in the darkness: boots running on stone, then a bloodcurdling scream. The Uulgar guardsman had followed Llesho out onto the bridge of light. He had taken no more than a single step, however, when he realized the gossamer structure wasn’t going to hold him.

  Overhead, Great Moon Lun moved higher in the sky. Her light crossed out of the eye of the needle, rising along the mountainside. The bridge of light disintegrated. Too far from the platform to save himself, the guardsman tumbled, screaming, to his death in the square below.

  “Oh, Goddess.”

  Llesho closed his eyes, as if by shutting out the sight he might erase the memory of the man falling in terror. It didn’t work, as he knew it wouldn’t.

  “Why couldn’t you let it go?” he whispered to the dead man broken on the paving stones below. He knew the answer, of course. Duty. Knew, maybe, why the guardsman had to die. If he’d told his captain, and word had reached the magician, every raider and Uulgar clansman in the city would have been looking for him. He’d never find his brother.

  The dead man made him question all his new assumptions about himself, about the reasons he had come back to relive a life of battle and death again and again. But he couldn’t figure what else he was supposed to learn from it. All he knew for sure was that the death of this man he’d never met before cut him to the heart in ways that he had never felt a loss.

  With Master Jaks, and when Hmishi had died, it seemed as though a fate larger than himself had stolen something from him. He needed them, and what he needed was taken from him. In Hmishi’s case, the god of mercy had even seen his need and brought him back—for Llesho, not for Hmishi or for Lling. He hadn’t, when he thought about it, given any concern for how Master Jaks or Hmishi might have felt about it in themselves, as the course of their own lives and not an extension of his.

  Master Jaks had chastised him for trying to bring him back and had taken his own path into death in spite of Llesho’s efforts. He hadn’t given Hmishi a choice. Even now he couldn’t say he was sorry for that, but he knew the pain he felt for the Uulgar guardsman was for the man and not for himself. He was sorry to have had any part in the Harnishman’s fall.

  Master Den would have given a smack to the back of Llesho’s head for taking credit for it, of course. The Uulgar had his own path to follow; the thread of this mortal life ended here atop the Palace of the Sun. It reallywasn’t all about him, Llesho reminded himself. What a thought! Sometimes, it wasn’t even about Justice. Which felt, when he said it that way even to himself, like the spirits were laughing at him.

  While Llesho pondered their relative places in the cosmos, the guardsman’s companions came running, calling to each other in dismay and amazement to find him dead on the ground. Llesho pulled away from the edge. He felt bad, but not bad enough to want to follow the man or let Markko’s raiders catch him.

  Great Moon Lun had climbed higher, leaving the temple once again in shadows that hid him from his enemy below. Llesho curled himself deeper into the darkness, crouched against the doorway to the staircase that led down through the center of the temple. In the silence, he heard dry and ancient voices calling him down that long spiral passage. He tried to ignore them, concentrating on not being seen as Uulgar guardsmen poured through that narrow door onto the roof of the king’s pavilion across the square.

  Quickly, they fanned out in a circle lit by the red glow of their lanterns, looking for evidence to tell them what had happened. Someone found the sword he had dropped there, and they poked their feeble lamps into every shadow. When they found nothing else, they drew back again, returning through the hidden door into the tower.

  Soon all the light atop the Palace of the Sun came from that one small square as the Harnishmen descended the tower stair. Then the light disappeared completely as the last guardsman drew the cover back into place. They’d station an extra man below it, Llesho figured. But doubtless their captain concluded that whoever had pushed the man off the pavilion had escaped in the commotion. Like the dead man, however, the guardsman might well poke his head out again to survey the territory he was meant to defend. He’d have his eyes mostly on the tower he guarded, but he might look across the square as well. Llesho decided to wait a bit longer to find his way down.

  The low stone wall gave the aerie atop the Temple of the Moon some protection from the wind or a fall, but still it was bitter cold up there. As he huddled in the windswept night, Llesho gazed up into the mountains. The gates of heaven lay hidden somewhere in those heights and he followed the path of Great Moon in her flight, wondering if Lun knew the way. As he gazed upward into the silvered mountains crowned with stars, something flared so brilliantly that he had to close his eyes against it. An answer to his question? He wonde
red, prying his lids open again. The cacophony of whispers from the tower fell silent, then rose again in wordless song as though the tower itself had become a reed flute.

  The brilliant flash of light passed, taking the singing of the tower with it. In its place appeared a sight that drew his soul like filings to a lodestone. An arc of brilliant white light, like the waning sliver of Great Moon brought down to earth, reached out from the mountains to touch down on the opening in the low stone wall that faced its mate across the queen’s aerie. It made sense now, or part of it did. He’d thought the Temple of the Moon had been named for the sheen of light that set it to cold fire in the light of Great Moon Lun. But this, as if Lun herself reached a hand to the temple, he had been too young to see and had never guessed: a bridge to heaven.

  It seemed to be all about bridges: the palace to the temple, the temple to the moon, the mortal realm to the heavenly. He wondered: could the gates of heaven lie at the end of that cold white bridge of light? Llesho rose from his hiding place and walked toward the edge that looked away from the square, into the mountains. Toward that bright arc of light. He’d risked one insubstantial crossing that night and survived. And now the Way stood open with a step of stone reaching out beyond the rest, a pediment on which to anchor a bridge that bore no weight. So, this great light shone not for him alone. He’d discovered one of the great mysteries of the temple and wondered if his father had known, or if this was a secret way the Goddess used.

  Standing between the stanchions that marked the boundary between the stone of the temple and the insubstantial light of the white bridge, Llesho hesitated. Was he ready? Was it time? Did he have a choice?

  He reached a foot for moonbeams.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  THE BRIDGE vanished.

  “Ugh!” Llesho gasped and threw himself backward. The mysteries that surrounded him high atop the Temple of the Moon had not so dazed him that he would have followed the Uulgar guardsman to his death on the stones below. The bridge might have held him if he’d crossed before Great Moon Lun left the gates of heaven. Or maybe not. He did know that when he brought his whole being through the dreamscape and into the city he became as vulnerable to mishap as any other mortal Dream travel took a bit of planning, something even an adept might find difficult to do while falling from a tower. So he raised himself on his elbows only far enough to scoot farther back, away from the edge.