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

by Curt Benjamin

  When he’d gained some distance from disaster, he pulled himself to his feet. He had to get away while the guardsmen were busy searching the palace. The mystical path to the mountains would have served that one purpose, but it wouldn’t have put him any closer to his brother, so it hadn’t been the best option anyway.

  The staircase at the center of the tower would have been the most obvious way down, except that it was also the most obvious way up for the Uulgar guardsmen. Which left dream-walking. That wouldn’t get him any closer to his brother—he’d been looking for Ghrisz when the dreamscape brought him here—but it would get him down off the tower, hopefully without being seen. He could look for his brother on the ground, something he couldn’t do on top of the Temple of the Moon.

  Slowly, Llesho dragged himself to his feet. His legs still felt like water from the night’s exertions against the guardsman and, if he were telling himself the truth, from his sudden terror when the bridge of moonlight had disappeared from under him. It was more than the physical exhaustion that slowed the pace of his running circle, however. The memory of voices beckoned him to the inner tower with soft whispers. His mother had lived here when he was small, with her priests and acolytes. Worshipers and diplomats had passed through the great audience hall below, and on special occasions the queen, his mother, had stood on this platform high above the city to greet her husband who waited on the other side, at the Palace of the Sun.

  His mother and his grandmother, aunts and uncles who served the Moon, had trod those steps through all the ages that Kungol had stood among these sacred mountains. Their ghosts called to him out of all his lives, both past and present. He hadn’t had the time with Bolghai to take the last test of his dream-walking skills, to visit the underworld in dream. This wasn’t quite the same thing, of course, but he thought it just might do. And he did have to get to the street below somehow. Holding onto the balustrade to steady his way, Llesho moved into the shelter of the tower.

  He’d thought the way must be dark as a moonless night inside the temple, or that guardsmen must stand in wait at every turn. But at his first step, a soft glow, like moonlight on white pearls, pulsed from the walls. It brightened ahead of him with each turning of the spiral staircase while above the way grew dark again as he passed. Llesho listened past the darkness for a sound that would mean discovery but heard no guardsmen on patrol.

  He should have realized that no Uulgar would enter the temple to find the dead man’s assailant: spirits whispered in the dark, growing more pronounced as he descended the staircase. Moving away as the light came nearer, the gentle sigh of their voices never faded wholly out of reach, never came close enough for Llesho to make out exactly what they said. As he descended from one level to the next the sounds faded away, replaced by new voices. Ancient laughter reached for him out of the distance of time. He heard song in a language he knew as Thebin but couldn’t understand. The words had changed, the accent, though he recognized the sound and tone of it as the high-court tongue.

  Down another level and weeping greeted him, the high keening wail of mourning and, beyond the ritual of grief, the inconsolable sounds of pain. Some long-ago queen had suffered a great and terrible loss here. He remembered his own dear Goddess, weeping for him in visions of lives past counting and blood upon his own breast. The thought that he might be listening to the weeping for his own dead self in those other lives sent a superstitious shiver from his heels to the top of his head.

  Not again. He had tamed the spear he carried and had further determined not to draw it again, regardless of the peril in which he found himself. The spear itself would always be the greater threat.

  “Not again,” he whispered to the voices echoing out of time against the glowing stones of the Temple of the Moon, and around again. Another turning of the spiral, another age. The temple was wider at its base by far than at its top, and each circling on the spiral of the stairs grew longer. Distant sounds of battle came to him, the cold, sure voice of a queen of Thebin defending her temple.

  Another round, more whispers. His face brightened to the color of old burgundy. Love cries, and murmured caresses. He didn’t want to think about what other things went on when the king of Thebin visited his Goddess-wife in her temple. Too-human sounds, the slide of flesh on flesh, a grunt, a sigh. He closed his ears to it and went on, wished it back again at the next turning.

  Screaming. Terror, panic, pain. Boots and battering rams and curses in a language Llesho knew for Harnish, a higher, shriller version than the Qubal spoke. He had reached the base of the temple and with it had come to the most recent of its history. The crash of swords, the warm voice of his mother, forgiving her murderers in the name of the Goddess while her priests and priestesses wept softly around her. Llesho froze, paralyzed by the soft hiss of a sword leaving its scabbard, so familiar that he felt the sympathetic shift in the weight at his own side as a memory of steel moved from hip to hand. And then the gentle voice of the queen his mother was cut off in mid prayer to the horror of her courtiers.

  “Her head! Her head!”

  “Don’t let it fall!”

  Llesho’s legs refused to hold him. He slid down in a curled-up squat with his arms wrapped around his knees and his forehead pressed against the balustrade, trying to keep his stomach where it belonged while he listened to the death of his mother and the high, terrified shrieks of a child being carried away to her death. His sister, his mother, had died here and he hadn’t been able to stop it. The fact that he’d seen only seven summers at the time, hadn’t even been in the temple when it happened, didn’t enter into it. He should have found a way to be here, and he would suffer her death over and over again until he found a way to make it right.

  Except that he was fairly certain that he was going as mad as his brother Lluka. Perhaps that was the fatal flaw: a madness that ran through the Thebin royal family that had brought down the kingdom and all that it had protected in the temple and in the mountains. Or had their failure broken them? A gentle hand swept the hair out of his eyes. Llesho jerked his head up, saw no one. The cool fingertips soothed as they passed across his brow, not the sinister threat of Master Markko’s touch or the rough attack of an Uulgar raider. For a moment, the weeping had stopped.

  “Mother?”

  “Champion.”

  Not his mother, who remained irretrievably dead. He recognized the voice, though.

  “My Lady Goddess?”

  “Champion,” she repeated.

  Llesho felt a touch as of a kiss at his cheek. He remembered a conversation long ago, when Kaydu had asked a loaded question:Who are you? He’d wanted to put off the question, hadn’t been ready, back then, to share the secrets of his birth and the deaths that had followed his seventh summer, so he’d answered with more irony than he knew. “Just another Champion of the Goddess.”

  Half priest, half knight, the champions wandered from kingdom to kingdom performing deeds of chivalry and daring in the name of the Goddess. They were seldom presentable and generally considered mad. Which fit him as descriptions went, Llesho figured.

  “Your champion,” he answered back, not knowing if she heard him or not. The gates of heaven remained closed and under siege while her voice traveled through what ages down that terrible staircase he couldn’t guess. Or perhaps, the whole temple had been possessed of ghosts and spirits all along and he hadn’t heard them as child because his mother had protected him from that knowledge.

  It didn’t take a magician to know that he didn’t belong here now, that he’d go truly and completely mad if he didn’t escape it soon. So, up again, to his feet. He tried to remember if he’d ever seen this particular staircase when he had visited with his mother in the temple, but no memory came to him of any such place by sunlight. He wondered if the temple shifted into some other realm by moonlight, so that it abided only partly among mortals, while part belonged to the realm of heaven or of spirits. If that were true the staircase might exist only on the moonlit side of reality.

>   He could become trapped on the wrong side of that reality forever if he let himself dither about it. Better to keep moving, which would at least give him distance from the voices that had returned to whisper defeat and heart stopping sorrow in his ear. Off to the left, the dark seemed less dense and he went in that direction as if a beacon called him. He stumbled once over a piece of furniture that went over with a snap of fragile wood, and once he bumped into something that didn’t move at all but left a bruise the size of his fist on his hip. But the light grew stronger, and soon he could see that the worst of the broken furniture had been piled up along a wall, and that someone had righted the candlesticks, though they remained dented and empty of candles.

  And there, in front of him, was a door. Not the great front doors that had stood open like two arms waiting to receive the palace—or the king who resided within it. He recognized this small side door as the one he’d used as a child. Accompanied by his bodyguard Khri and a priestess nursemaid, he had often come this way to spend the day with his mother. Now he stumbled through and turned his face to the faint light of false dawn. A weight lifted from his heart, as if he’d just awakened from a harrowing dream. And yet, a longing more powerful than pain called him back to the inner temple and its whispering voices. He wanted his mother back, even if all he had of her was the sound of her voice at the moment of her death.

  The sense of what he was thinking hit him like a blow to the gut. “No!” he groaned. “Oh, Goddess, nooo!”

  As he curled into the pain, both arms wrapped around his gut, the shadows stirred and came to life.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  A FIGURE of rags and shadows raised out of the darker depths of the doorway. “Are you some ghost out of legends?” it asked in a lightly husky whisper.

  Llesho would have said the same thing back. For a brief moment that sped up his heartbeat he thought that Ghrisz somehow knew they were on the way and had sent someone to meet him. His brother’s name was on his lips but he bit back the words. Who knew what Harnish spies might hear? He was glad he did when the dim gray light of false dawn brought the blurred face of a young girl into sharper focus. This beggar who held her ground in front of what she took for wonders might have been a ghost herself, some ancient ancestor out of the darkness of that terrible staircase. Her question made that unlikely, of course. Llesho’s experience in the temple had him jumping at shadows everywhere.

  “Not a ghost,” he therefore answered, keeping the bit about legend in reserve. He had returned to Kungol with a face out of history to follow a prophecy, after all. It wouldn’t help his cause to start out here with a lie to his own people.

  The beggar didn’t look convinced. On closer examination, as the light grew stronger, Llesho decided that the girl didn’t look like a beggar either. Her clothes were rags and tatters, her face smudged with real grime from the streets, and she had the smell to go along with her fallen state. The disguise might even have worked against an enemy she knew the shape of. Faced with wonders, however, the stranger’s eyes calculated angles of escape and attack, and the longer odds that this wonder out of a night steeped in mystery might be of use to her. A spy, then, which wasn’t hard to figure. But whose? And why did he get the feeling he’d seen her before when he hadn’t been back to the city since his seventh summer? Llesho came up with no satisfactory answer to any of his questions.

  “Not a ghost. A legend, then?” the spy prodded.

  The girl—she didn’t look even as old as he was, though it was difficult to tell what was under all that dirt in the gray morning light—was sharp. Thebin, by the look and sound of her, and posted at a door the importance of which only someone very high in the confidences of the royal family would know. Master Jak’s clan of mercenary guardsmen had known, but the Harn had murdered them in the attack. The priests and priestesses whose death cries he had heard on the stairs had known. Was she a ghost after all?

  Or had Ghrisz posted her here to keep watch? For what? Was his brother expecting his own answer to the prophecy to turn up here? Master Markko had the skills to scry his whereabouts. The magician might have set a watch for him when he recognized where Llesho had landed. But he didn’t think Markko would trust a Thebin girl as his lookout. Wouldn’t expect anyone else to trust the job to a girl either, which made her the perfect choice if she was working for the resistance.

  Llesho was used to taking risks on himself. Now, he decided, it was time to take a risk on another person. “Some might say I am the answer to a prophecy,” he answering the beggar-spy’s question, more or less. Legend seemed a bit more than Llesho was willing to claim, so he left it for her to determine.

  “I’m looking for a jewel, a sapphire.” The sapphire princess of stories, he meant. It was sort of a test. Would she know the truth behind the story?

  The spy denied any knowledge of such a treasure. “The Harn stole every trinket before either of us was old enough to fight them. There are no jewels in Kungol now.” The pupils of her eyes tightened to pinpoints, however. Llesho’s explanation of his presence had rattled the girl, no matter the deliberate way she failed to take Llesho’s meaning. Hoped for, he figured, but he hadn’t been expected.

  Great Sun had touched the mountains while they talked; they had no time left to stand around and debate the issue. Someone would spot them and then there would be questions from the Harn. With the light the beggar-spy saw what Llesho was wearing. She managed to control her reaction quickly enough, but Llesho looked down at himself, wondering what she saw that sent that look of mingled disbelief and yearning crashing through her carefully blank expression. When he saw his coat, he remembered—he’d taken this dream-journey dressed in the riding clothes of a long-dead royal court.

  “I’m not looking for a trinket,” he said, referring to the girl’s claim that the Thebins hid no treasure from their oppressors. “Your master will know what I’m talking about.”

  There it was. “Take me to your leader” as clear as he could make it. He thought the spy must have noticed that he wore the face of long-dead kings as well as one of their coats. Hoped as well that he hadn’t just invited himself into Master Markko’s clutches again. But the spy had made up her mind.

  “Take off your coat,” she gritted between clenched teeth.

  Llesho did as he was told.

  The spy took the coat with a quick, disgusted glance at the empty scabbard at his side. She didn’t entirely come out of her cringing slouch when she saw Llesho’s Thebin knife, but the look became more frozenly blank after that.

  “I hope you have another one of these somewhere,” she said, and with a deft twist turned the coat inside out and slashed it down the back with her own knife.

  “Master Den will have one somewhere, I am sure.” Llesho had never figured out where he got them, but the trickster god always seemed to have the proper clothes at hand when he needed them. He took the spy’s point, however; running around the streets of Kungol in early daylight wearing an elaborately embroidered court coat would draw more attention than they could possibly handle. Inside out and badly torn the coat became just another rag on another street beggar. He slipped into it, noted that it didn’t do a thing to protect him from the wind anymore.

  He rubbed his boots in the ugly dirt caught up by the wind and gathered in the doorway to the temple and managed to get some of it on his chin and across his forehead as well. Only a handful of the Harn who controlled the city—the raiders who had murdered the royal family—had seen the king, his father, so he wasn’t worried about being recognized for who he was. But he didn’t want to stand out in the thin crowd of impoverished, dispirited countrymen. When he had reduced his appearance to match her own, the spy gave him an approving nod and led him out into the city.

  As a child Llesho had seldom traveled on foot in the city. He had few memories to compare with the sight that now greeted him but he knew that even the worst of the city’s poor had never lived like this. Many of the houses were abandoned, their walls cracked an
d crumbling to rubble that trickled in untidy heaps into the streets and thoroughfares. Those buildings that still showed signs of life—clothing draped out in the sun to dry on the heaps of rubble, piles of trash and slops both fresh and ripened in the street—were in little better shape, with windows broken and doors unhinged in toothless grimaces. They passed a street of temples leveled by fire that had passed from building to building. The mud walls didn’t burn, but the fire had consumed the wooden beams and emptied out the rubble fill. With the supports gone, the mud plaster tumbled inward of its own unsupported weight. Each took down the next like a row of toppling dominoes.

  Llesho remembered how the smells of Kungol had delighted him as a child: incense and spice and excitement. This new foul smell of a city dying amid its own excrement bore no relation to that long ago pleasure.It’s a dream. He tried to convince himself it wasn’t real. But Lluka’s visions mocked him with the truth, that the dream world held worse for Kungol and all the realms of the living and the dead and the Great Goddess who ruled the gardens of heaven. Kungol at least they could rebuild. The world after that great cataclysm would die forever, unless he killed Master Markko’s demon. That future sickened him and he faltered.

  “This is no time to fall apart. Come on.” The spy took his arm, not roughly, but with some urgency. She couldn’t be seen offering support in a way that would alert their overseers to his presence. “This way.”