One step at a time. Llesho roused himself from his brooding. First he had to find Ghrisz. Then he had to alert his armies. More than that would have to await events as they unfolded. The spy ducked past a broken door, into the last standing niche of a public building—countinghouse or shrine, there was no telling anymore—that had long ago succumbed to fire and conflict. Llesho followed, drawn through by an insistent tug on his elbow, and nearly tumbled down a ladder hidden in the shadows.
“Ah! What the—” The spy caught him up short with a firm hand raised to his collar. Suddenly, he returned to his senses and had to wonder where this stranger was taking him. What did she plan to do with him when they got there? And more pointedly, why had he followed the girl in the first place? Not memories of a long-dead childhood, but something more recent. A dream.
“I saw you in a dream-walk.” He had it now. “You were praying by moonlight on top of the temple.”
“You’re mistaken. Down, and careful about it, if you please, my lord.” The spy dismissed his assertion and punctuated her order with a nudge in the right direction, which Llesho had come to expect in his dealings outside his own camp. She finished with a court-mannered politeness to a noble visitor, if not a prince, however, which left all her meanings up in the air. Llesho puzzled over the contradiction while he groped for the ladder in the dim light from the shattered doorway.
They climbed down into the dark below. Kungol never had dug cellars or secret tunnels like the Shan, but sometime in the past eleven turnings of the seasons the city had sprouted tunnels and more, like the roots of trees growing in secret while their crowns shed their leaves and went to sleep. The Harn seemed unlikely to have done it, though he’d have said they didn’t build walls either, before he’d seen the monstrosity that circled Kungol these days.
Master Markko had lived in the North, however, and knew the ways of the empire of Shan, where the capital city was surrounded by a wall riddled with tunnels like this. Still, it seemed unlikely the Harn, even under the magician’s less than tender command, would have had the time or inclination to both build a wall and dig a tunnel system to subvert it. Which left the resistance. “You did this,” he tested out the conclusion. “The Harn don’t know these tunnels exist, do they?”
The girl examined her broken, dirty fingernails with exaggerated thoughtfulness. “Tunnels? What tunnels?” Llesho wasn’t going to learn anything from her, at least not until she had taken him to her leader and they decided what to do about him.
A door blocked the way ahead. She knocked in a pattern of raps, to which a tiny window opened at eye level, closed again without a word. The sound of a bar being removed came through the thick wood, and then the door swung inward. A small, firm hand at his back propelled Llesho into the murk. Their coattails had scarcely cleared the entrance before a guardsman with the look of the mercenary clans who had served in the court of his father pushed the door back into place.
The man had iron gray hair and a face seamed with hardship more than age. He reminded Llesho a little bit of Master Jaks; all that clan shared a certain likeness, even Khri, who had died when Llesho was seven. He thought he looked enough like his father that the mercenary wouldn’t kill him right off. Getting them to help might be more complicated, but he was probably safe for the moment with these resistance fighters.
“Mgar,” the spy greeted the doorman in the high-court dialect. He responded with a quick nod of greeting and put his shoulder into the door.
“Help me with this,” the mercenary grunted at Llesho. Between them they set a thick bar in place across the center of the door. When they had secured the secret entrance, the doorman turned the flame up on a lamp hanging from a chain at the turning of their tunnel.
“Is he here?” The beggar-spy, whose name had not come up in the exchange, asked. The doorman gave a single dip of the chin, answer enough for Llesho’s guide.
“Then he’ll want to see this one. He came out of the temple, but I didn’t see him go in.”
The mercenary’s eyes widened slightly, then narrowed again around a long memory of disappointments. “I’ll need his weapons.”
The girl shrugged one shoulder and left it to the doorman to disarm him. Llesho’s sword was already gone, abandoned on the king’s pavilion atop the Palace of the Sun. He showed the guard his empty scabbard, but refused to give up the spear or his Thebin knife.
“If this is the headquarters of Prince Ghrisz, he will understand. If it is not, we had best begin now—” Llesho set his hand to the spear at his back, but the doorman raised both hands in a placating gesture.
“Let it be, Mgar,” the girl-spy said. “If he’s who I think he is, Ghrisz will want to see those things. But watch him.”
Llesho turned to acknowledge the girl’s intervention on his behalf, but she had disappeared down one of the branching tunnels that ran away from the entrance.
“This way,” Mgar said, and prodded Llesho ahead of him.
Lamps scattered at intervals through the tunnels gave enough dim light so they didn’t trip as they made their way underground. But there wasn’t anything to see except the rough dirt that nearly brushed his shoulders on either side. To keep from panicking, Llesho concentrated on figuring out the spy. When they left the surface for this dank hole in the ground the girl’s posture and step had subtly shifted. Her back had straightened, her head came up, and her slouching shuffle became a swift light gait carrying her away from him just as he wanted to ply her with questions.
She’d left him in the hands of a mercenary guardsman. Llesho’d thought they’d all died in the invasion, but he would have known this Mgar for what he was even if he had never seen his face or heard him utter a word. Master Jaks had moved like that and so had Llesho’s bodyguard Khri. Lately Bixei had grown to do the same. Sometimes, Llesho did himself. Mgar was a soldier, well trained and seasoned in combat of one sort or another.
Raiders of the Uulgar ulus had taken Kungol and held it by force of their army’s savagery. They had no need of tunnels to hide in or secret knocks at hidden doors. All the evidence pointed to the resistance, who might see salvation in a returning king or a threat to their leader’s autonomy. If it was Ghrisz, of course. If it truly was his brother—
“Wait here.”
They had entered an open space carved out of the cold dry earth. The single lamp hanging from a support beam gave a feeble circle of light that extended no more than a pace or two in any direction, but the flow of air felt different. Mgar’s voice didn’t bounce in the hard bright way it had in the tunnels. So, a larger space, but not empty either. Anything could be waiting for him beyond that coin of light, which made the light itself more a danger than a comfort. Llesho gave a nod to indicate he understood the order. Mgar turned and walked away, back the way he had come. And Llesho took one step to the left, out of the light. And then another, soundless, back toward the wall.
When his hand came in contact with the rough surface he drew his knife and cut a mark into the hard-packed dirt at shoulder height. Keeping his free hand in contact with the wall, he moved away from the mark he had made, counting the paces that measured off the perimeter of the chamber. Ten ahead before he came to the corner and had to turn right. He had gone ten more paces when a tinder flared. A lamp came up, then another, and another. Enough to shed light on the room he’d been measuring with his feet. Enough to recognize the figure who sat watching him from a chair not five paces from where Llesho had stopped in his circuit.
Prince Ghrisz of Thebin examined him with an arched brow but made no immediate comment. Ghrisz had been away much of Llesho’s early childhood and, of course, they hadn’t seen each other since the Harn invaded, but Llesho recognized him by the family resemblance to their brother Shokar. Ghrisz must have seen the family resemblance as well, but he gave no sign of it.
The prince sat in an artfully carved chair covered in richly embroidered fabric, one of a dozen such around a conference table. The luxury of the chairs should have looked ab
surd in the roughly dug cellar. Ghrisz should have looked like a madman playing at being king. But only one of the twelve chairs was empty. The rest each held a man or woman with an air of fallen grace and ragged desperation. This was the power center of the resistance; Llesho felt sure of it. Their rescued furnishings seemed more a reminder of what they had lost than any comfort.
Still, Llesho could have used the doubtful ease of one of those chairs about now. He’d slept so much in Ibn Al-Razi’s hospital in Pontus that Llesho had thought he’d never have to sleep again. That quiet time seemed like an eternity ago to him now.
“He’s resourceful, I’ll give you that,” an elderly man commented from the bottom of the long table. “And he looks very like the king, your father.”
“Perhaps.” The prince leaned forward in his chair. “What are you doing here, boy? How did you get into the Temple of the Moon without any of my guards seeing you enter, and how did you get out again with your sanity intact? Or was Mgar wrong about that last?”
Llesho scarcely heard the questions. “Ghrisz?” he asked. Now that he had reached his goal he was afraid to believe it.
“Mad after all, then,” Ghrisz said, though he didn’t deny his identity. “No one in this city speaks that name. Who are you, boy?”
“Llesho,” he said. With a little smile and a wave that took in the city above them, he added, “They tell me I am king of all this.” He wanted to say more, but the lamps seemed to dim around the edges.
“He’s bleeding!” A voice called a sharp warning out of the descending dark.
Who?Llesho wondered. But the ground was coming up at him very fast . . .
“It can’t be the prince. Prince Llesho died on the Long March.” Ghrisz’s voice, a little above him and to the right, brought Llesho back to his senses. Or, from the sound of it, the prince had been talking for some time and Llesho had regained consciousness only for the last of his argument: “Don’t you think I would have found him if he’d survived?”
That was a question worth contemplating. Slowly, Llesho returned to awareness. He had one of those padded chairs under him and someone had wrapped a bandage tightly around his arm, where the guardsman had marked him in the fight on the king’s pavilion. He’d forgotten the wound, until he’d dropped like a stone in front of his brother’s council. Now it throbbed in a dull, insistent way that didn’t quite penetrate the lethargy that clung to him from his faint. He was safe for the moment, and he’d found the last of his brothers. If he’d had something to eat the moment would have been almost perfect. As his brother’s words penetrated the haze of well-being, however, the dangers of his position unsettled his fogbound peace. If not himself, who did Ghrisz think he was? No one seemed to notice the hitch in his breathing as he shifted an aching rib off the arm of his chair. He kept quiet, hoping if they thought he still slept they would continue to talk about him as if he wasn’t there. His answer came even sooner than he’d prayed.
“You can’t deny the family resemblance,” an aged voice Llesho didn’t recognize objected. “You didn’t know your father when he was as young as that boy. The likeness is uncanny, as if your father himself had returned in the blush of youth.”
“Do you think he’s a ghost, sent from the temple to warn us of some new danger?” The spy who had brought him here, that was. He was pretty sure she hadn’t been at the table when he’d fainted in the middle of Ghrisz’s questioning. Her tone had the steel of command in it in spite of her age and he wondered if he’d underestimated her status on his brother’s council. He wished she’d call out his name to be sure, but he thought he’d heard her calling to him in his dream travels as well. What was she doing in his dreams?
Cracking his eyelids, he hoped no one would see the gleaming slits of his eyes but the table itself blocked his view of the advisers who sat around it.
“Ghosts there may be.” Ghrisz’s tone made it clear that he believed in no such thing, though he gave the suggestion his grave consideration in spite of his own doubt. “If they should exist—”
“They do,” the girl insisted.
Ghrisz conceded with a nod to accept the rebuke before finishing his analysis. “It seems unlikely, however, that they would suddenly quit the tower they have haunted all these turnings of the seasons. Less likely still that they would bleed themselves away into a dead faint at our feet before delivering their unearthly message.
“No, he’s human enough. But who sent him? And where did they find a boy who looked so much like the king?”
“He says he is the king,” another voice chimed in. Llesho thought he recognized that one from somewhere, too. Likely his own father’s council chambers, where they’d stolen this table from the Harn, he realized.
“So you, too, believe in phantoms?” Ghrisz again, irritated with his counselors.
“Perhaps. No living man has come out of the temple since we set a watch on it. None of our spies saw anyone enter by their own posts. But someone threw a Harnish raider off the king’s pavilion last night.”
Another voice, deep with years, added support to his fellow councillor: “Rumor in the marketplace confirms our own reports that no one went in or out of the temple. Only Uulgar clansmen entered or left the palace, and that only at the changing of the guard—except the guardsman who took the short route to the ground during the night.”
“He strayed too close to the edge,” Ghrisz countered that argument. “Or one of their own dispatched him, in some argument between thieves.”
Llesho was on the point of revealing himself to defend the honor of the soldier. The man had fought wonders in the performance of his duty on that tower, and had died of wonders, though not at ghostly hands. But Ghrisz picked up the thread of his argument, and Llesho listened.
“No, the boy is clearly a living being. Note the rise and fall of his ribs as he breathes, and the fact that he rests with his face on the council table rather than passing through it like a vapor. That leaves us no closer to understanding who he is or why he has come, however.
“If he truly is the prince, who has held him in secret all these cycles of the seasons since Kungol fell to the Harn? If he’s an imposter, who went to the effort to find a Thebin boy with such a striking likeness to Kungol’s dead king?”
“He doesn’t necessarily look like the king,” another voice objected. “Someone may have set a glamour on his features to deceive us with his appearance.”
“But why have his captors—or his makers—sent him to usnow? ” Ghrisz wanted to know.
No one at that table hazarded a guess, but the first who had spoken from among Ghrisz’s advisers did make a suggestion. “If we knew how he got into that tower, we’d have some of our answers,” he suggested, bringing them back to the center of the argument.
“I don’t know how he came to be inside the Temple of the Moon,” the girl who had brought him here gave her own testimony to the council. “But I know how he left it. And I know that since the priests were killed no man has survived the descent from the tower. If he’s not the king, then why is he still alive?”
Llesho wondered the same about her. Why had he seen her in a dream on the queen’s pavilion above the Temple of the Moon? Did she pray regularly in the ancient place of the queen, or had he seen her there in another life? Who was she?
Llesho had the answers they debated—or some of them—while he pretended to sleep. He wasn’t quite ready to ask his own questions, but figured Ghrisz was onto him and wanted him to hear their deliberations. But it was time to wake up and start talking before they’d argued themselves into believing their own speculations. So he yawned and stretched in a broad display of rousing from his collapse.
Chapter Thirty-five
AS LLESHO expected, Ghrisz showed no surprise when he stretched and blinked himself awake at the council table.
“And do you have anything to add to our councils, my young lord?” the resistance leader asked with exaggerated politeness.
He didn’t offer to explain, which
told Llesho his brother had a good sense of when he’d actually woken and started to listen. That was fine with Llesho. He didn’t want to deceive his brother; he’d just needed time to get a sense of where he stood. Which wasn’t in good shape, but he figured he could talk his way through that.
“I’ll answer any questions you want about myself,” he offered. Honesty compelled him to add, “By your own arguments, if I were a stranger picked up on the streets because I look like a dead king would I tell you the truth? If a magician had laid spells on me, would I even know the truth?”
That was a question that woke him up at night in his own camp, surrounded by gods and kings. Master Markko had poisoned him and could evoke those poisons even now. What else had he done that might make of Llesho a weapon against his own allies?
“I can only tell you what I’ve seen and what my teachers and allies believe about me. Which is that I am his Holy Excellence, King Llesho, the seventh son of my father the king, and his chosen successor.”
“And so you would take my throne, boy?” That was the first time Prince Ghrisz had admitted his identity, though he looked to the girl when he spoke. She gave no sign that she had noticed but focused her wide blue eyes on Llesho, as if she could weigh the merit of his soul in his answers.
Now that he was here and had found the last of his brothers, impatience got the better of him. Llesho heaved a sigh, thinking of how many times he’d been tested and judged by gods and kings. Not by his brothers, though. He hadn’t always appreciated their greetings—Balar had hit him over the head with a lute and carted him off flung over a camel—but they had never doubted who he was.
“At the moment, Master Markko holds the throne.” Llesho’s eyes lifted of their own accord in a telling glance at the dirt ceiling over their heads. He didn’t know yet if he could defeat the magician but he was pretty sure his brother couldn’t.
Curt Benjamin - [Seven Brothers 03] - The Gates of Heaven Page 46