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

by Curt Benjamin

  Ghrisz bristled at the insult, which Llesho hadn’t intended as such but which struck the entire council a blow. They didn’t deserve that of him. While Llesho had battled his way across the vast expanse of empires, they had fought a hidden war in these tunnels and caves. He didn’t want to make enemies of the very people who might find a way for his armies to enter the city undetected. Time to make his play, therefore, before they answered the rebuke with rising tempers. But first he had to convince them he was the real thing.

  “You asked who sent me. It was her ladyship SienMa, the mortal goddess of war. I’m here to throw out the Uulgar raiders and take the throne of our father away from the magician who leads them. Who sits in it when I’m done can wait for a later discussion.”

  That could have been more diplomatically stated. It wasn’t even completely accurate, but he had an army cooling its heels while they debated the question. Llesho tried again. “Lleck, our father’s minister, set me on a quest to find my brothers and take Thebin back from the Harn. The Lady SienMa took an interest and has helped me on my long road from Pearl Bay to the Palace of the Sun.”

  He didn’t think mentioning the trickster god would help his cause. Shou and Mergen would take some leading up to, let alone Marmer Sea Dragon, so he kept quiet on those allies and advisers.

  “Lleck died during the sack of Kungol,” a woman told him with a cold voice and sorrow creasing her face. No one at that table addressed the others by any name or title, as if afraid that hostile ears might know them and single out their targets by the level of respect their fellow councillors afforded them. It was a sensible precaution and he followed their lead in it.

  “He didn’t die in the attack.” He wasn’t sure if she’d consider the news he brought the good kind or the bad. “Somehow he escaped and found his way to Pearl Island, where he taught me and cared for me until his death in my fifteenth summer. It was then he sent me on my quest.” Lleck had died again, as a bear cub fighting monsters in the battle for the Imperial City of Shan, but he didn’t think that story would add to his credibility with Ghrisz’s court. The part he still had to tell was bad enough.

  “A dying man’s wish for home,” an adviser to his brother suggested with a shake of his head. “The likeness must have addled his brain.”

  “A dead man’s quest,” Llesho corrected him. “His ghost appeared to me while I worked beneath the waves of Pearl Bay.”

  Ghrisz was not convinced. He looked at Llesho as he might at any false claimant. “So you said. To rescue your brothers. Another lie—my brothers are dead.” He made no exception for Llesho, who stood before him accused of being an imposter. “And so you appear on my doorstep with an empty scabbard and a ragged coat, telling tales of wandering the length of the known world.

  “Why don’t you give up and just tell the truth? You must know your story has fallen apart. You populate your tales convincingly enough with names you’ve heard out of legend or gossip, never thinking that the people at this table knew intimately as friends these characters you weave into your lies. Except for those you create out of children’s stories and legends, of course.”

  By that Llesho figured his brother meant the Lady SienMa. He forgot sometimes that everyone didn’t call upon the gods as their personal advisers.

  Ghrisz wasn’t finished, though. “Your story suits a madman more than an impostor set upon treachery! So I will answer you in kind: I will do as you bid and gladly when these magical creatures make their request of me in person. But I find their emissary singularly lacking.”

  The gathered ministers stirred in their seats, voices rumbling at what they saw as the upstart’s insult. But Llesho smiled. His brother didn’t want to believe, but he was in for a lot of surprises.

  “I’ve traveled not only the length of the world, but it’s breadth as well. In Pontus I found a prophecy which is said to have reached even as far as Kungol.” He gave a moment’s pause to gather his thoughts, then began to recite:

  “Seven lost princes find their brother Six heads crowned with stars a gate have hidden Five armies, like one hand, close around them Four worms breathing fire rise above them Three bitter gifts must teach a bitter lesson Two paths are offered, one is chosen One jewel alone, to each must be another.”

  “I’ve heard it,” the girl-spy, who had kept quiet for most of the discussion, spoke up now. As he’d guessed when they’d crossed the city together, she was younger than he was—surprisingly young, really, to be sitting in on the decision-making of the resistance. “A little differently and in the common tongue as you’d expect on the streets. Once even in Harnish. Until recently I thought as we all did that my brothers were dead and was unwilling to have the last of them join the others. We needed you alive, so I kept the verse to myself. Now, I think, we have to question what it means all over again. And, by the way, where did an impostor who looks like the long-dead king learn to speak the language of the court?”

  Ghrisz clearly hadn’t thought of that. Hadn’t, from the shock that crossed his face, noticed that they were speaking a language which should have been alien to an impostor’s tongue.

  “He’s well trained for his role,” he grumbled. “Lleck might have done it, if he truly had been fooled by a passing likeness.”

  Llesho knew how closely he resembled his father and their ancient ancestor. The face he wore had called in debts to history owed by the Qubal clans, and he’d seen himself, older and dying in some past life across a river of time. But the girl who had brought him here from the temple had a more pertinent question:

  “Why send an impostor now? If we had the power to seize the throne we would have done so already and put our own prince on it. The appearance of someone we don’t know claiming to have some special right to the throne doesn’t put us any closer to winning it back than we were before. The best he can hope to gain is the same beggar’s dinner the rest of us eat. That and a cold place to sleep.”

  “A spy,” the woman who had thought Lleck dead in the raid on Kungol spoke up. “One part of his tale may be true. The Harn took many slaves before and after the invasion. As a slave they may have trained him to spy on us. If we let him go he will surely report our movements to his masters.”

  “He isn’t going anywhere.”

  Llesho kept quiet about the abilities that had brought him here, and that would take him away again at will. Ghrisz had a deadly look in his eyes; complete honesty about his gifts could get him killed. He didn’t want to leave anyway—at least not until he’d convinced his brother that help was on the way.

  “I didn’t come to ask your help. Well, not the kind you think. I’m here because of the prophecy. ‘Seven lost princes find their brother’—that was the first part of the quest: find my brothers—alive. You’re the last, Ghrisz. I’ve found the others: Adar and Shokar in the empire of Shan, Balar and Lluka among the dream readers of Ahkenbad in the Gansau Wastes, and Menar last before you, blinded and a slave in the house of a physician in Pontus.”

  “An easy claim to make when you are standing in front of us alone and in rags no better than our own,” Ghrisz challenged him.

  Oh!“Just a minute.” Llesho dragged his coat off, turned it right side out and slipped it on again, this time with the elaborate embroideries of Thebin court clothes on the outside.

  Eyes widened around the council table. No one of them retained the finery of the palace, and even in this light they could see that his own coat’s tears had happened recently.

  “I was afraid someone would see us and recognize the coat,” the girl said.

  Llesho remembered something else. “I left my sword on the king’s pavilion, but I still have my knife.”

  With that he pulled aside the front of his coat to show the blade in its sheath at his side. Except for the wooden signet afixed to the butt that held the Lady Chaiujin prisoner, it looked like the knife that Ghrisz wore on his own belt.

  “How—?” A man old enough to have been an adviser under his father’s rule spoke up wi
th a querulous resistance to wonder in his voice.

  Ghrisz silenced him with a raised hand. “You threw the Harnishman off the tower in the palace?”

  “No.” Llesho shook his head, half in denial and half to rid his mind of the image of the guardsman stepping after him on that bridge of light. Falling. With a shiver, he repeated the denial. “We fought, but I left him with just a small wound, like my own.” He touched the bandage on his arm to demonstrate. “He tried to follow me and stepped off the edge.” It didn’t seem the time to tell them about the bridge of light. It felt like one of those hidden mysteries you weren’t supposed to talk about. They didn’t believe anything he’d said yet anyway, so he let them think what they wanted.

  Ghrisz had moved from outright rejection to reserving judgment, however. “This prophecy. You say you found our brothers alive. I’ll take that statement as the first verse in a story. Go on.”

  Llesho picked up where he had stopped. “The first was the easiest line to understand because Lleck had already sent me looking for the princes and I’d already found all but you. The rest of the rhyme was harder, but Menar put his head together with the Apadisha’s magicians and we worked on it together. Once we figured it out it seemed pretty obvious.”

  “Obvious?” Ghrisz lifted a dubious brow while around him his advisers muttered, “Magicians!” with fear and loathing, and, “the Apadisha!” with doubt and calculation.

  It had seemed a lot simpler to figure out once he’d stood atop the Temple of the Moon than it was in the Apadisha’s Divan, but Llesho didn’t mention that. “More obvious if you’ve spent any time with a Harnish shaman,” he did admit. “They speak in riddles all the time.”

  “A Harnish shaman, a slave—no, wait,” Ghrisz bid him with a wave of his hand, “Two enslaved princes and a Harnish shaman gather to discuss a prophecy about Thebin with the magicians of Pontus. This tale grows stranger and stranger.”

  “It didn’t happen quite that way.” Llesho didn’t think the truth—that Bolghai was busy with the emperor of Shan, and so had no time to consult with the Apadisha of Bithynia—would help him out here. “I met this shaman. He used Shannish words with me, but he spoke in riddles just the same. To understand what he wanted, I had to figure out his riddle-speech. When we were trying to figure out the prophecy, I remembered about the riddles, and then it became easier. ‘Six heads crowned with stars’ are the six mountains around Kungol covered with glaciers. As for ‘A gate have hidden’—what gate lies hidden in the mountains above the city?”

  The gates of heaven. They all knew it, but no one spoke the words aloud.

  “That gate is under siege.” That was Llesho’s real battle, but first they had to take back Kungol.

  “Five armies?” Ghrisz asked. Something fired his eyes, as if he had guessed some part of what must come next.

  But that would serve better at the end, after all the evidence was given, so Llesho shook his head. “That line and the last were the hardest to figure out. I’m still not sure we have it right.”

  “Four worms breathing fire, then,” Ghrisz prodded, moving to the next line of the prophecy.

  “Dragons,” Llesho answered, “Four of them.”

  The snorts and sniffs about the table let him know well enough what the Thebin court in hiding thought of such mythical creatures.

  The young girl, however, watched him with wide, unblinking eyes. Blue eyes, he noted. Ping had had eyes like that and he wondered if the girl was a cousin or some distant relative he’d forgotten. With a little sigh she finally freed him from the captivity of her gaze. “You’ve seen them, haven’t you? The dragons. What are they like?”

  Her elders looked askance at her, but Llesho couldn’t hold back the little smile that sneaked across his mouth. “There is no one way for dragons. I knew Pearl Bay Dragon Queen for many years in human form as a lowly healer who tended the divers on Pearl Island. I’ve seen her only once since then, but I count her one of the creatures I love most in all the world.

  “On the other hand, the first time I saw Golden River Dragon I thought he was a stone bridge carved in the shape of a beast. I had barely crossed when he sank into the river, drowning many of my enemies and turning others away in terror at the shore. Then he ate my new healer, Mara, who aspires to be the eighth mortal god. Fortunately he swallowed her whole and so he was able to let her go again when she insisted.”

  An old man at the table, one who had not spoken yet, pursed his lips as though judging the tale of a marketplace storyteller. “You recount more exploits already than most adventurers can claim in a lifetime, and yet we still have two dragons to go, boy. When did you ever have time to sleep?”

  “In Pontus,” he answered with a low, rueful laugh. They didn’t understand his answer of course, but then, neither did he, really.

  Ghrisz still didn’t believe what he heard, but he seemed to appreciate the extravagance of the telling. “Come, finish your tale so that we may doubt with the full amazement it deserves. What of the third worm?”

  “That would be Dun Dragon. He thought I had taken on more than I could manage as well.”

  He paused in his telling to get control of feelings that tried to overwhelm him. What to say about Ahkenbad, dead of Master Markko’s attack on the dream readers? What of the Wastrels dead in the war that Llesho now brought to Kungol? What of Kagar, forced to take the Dinha’s role too early amid the death and destruction that toppled the mountains of the most sacred city of the Tashek people?

  Ghrisz led a handful of followers hiding in tunnels and caves beneath the city from which his father had ruled from the gates of heaven to the Harnlands. He’d probably understand Kagar better than Llesho did himself. But his feelings were still too raw about those losses to expose them to the doubt of his brother’s council. So when his brother prodded, “And?” Llesho gave a little shrug, and answered with a voice as devoid of emotion as he could make it.

  “I met him only briefly at the fall of Ahkenbad. He told me to learn to say ‘no.’ ”

  “Thefall of Ahkenbad?” a voice muttered at the table.

  Ghrisz watched him with a focused hunter’s gaze that reminded Llesho of Kaydu in her eagle form, stalking prey. “That is very bad news indeed, if even a part of your tale should prove true.”

  His brother released his gaze with a sly nod of his head. “I can see the value in Dun Dragon’s counsel, even as a narrative device. You seem to leave a trail of destruction in your wake. It certainly doesn’t warm the next potential ally to your cause. A shorter trail might at least mean fewer dead allies.”

  Llesho wished he knew why Ghrisz was mocking him. If his brother took him for a braggart hoping to challenge his place among his cave dwellers, then they were all in trouble. But if Ghrisz was starting to believe him, and hid his own unease behind a caustic wit, then perhaps his mission would succeed after all. He chose to take it as the latter.

  “I’ll let our brother Lluka explain the stakes we fight for. His visions of the future have driven him mad, but even his madness is enlightening if you pay careful attention.”

  At the mention of Lluka’s madness Ghrisz dropped his air of mocking humor, anxious, it seemed, to move quickly from the subject. “And the fourth worm?” he asked, weighing Llesho’s words in the stillness of his perfect attention.

  “Marmer Sea Dragon. I met him while I was working as the slave of pirates on the Marmer Sea. He helped me defeat Master Markko in a battle with storms at sea.” Unconsciously, Llesho twitched at the remembered touch of the lash across his back.

  Ghrisz saw it, and knew it for what it was. “Take off your shirt,” he said. “This, at least, we can test.”

  His advisers looked at him as though he were mad, but from the shadows Mgar held out his hand for the coat. By the bleakness of his expression Llesho knew that the mercenary believed, even if his betters didn’t. Llesho gave him his coat, stripped off his linen shirt, and turned his back on the table.

  The old woman took a lamp and
held it up to study the ridged flesh. “He’s seen the lash, all right,” she confirmed, “The wounds seem to have been recent, but well tended. Why someone felt the need to beat him, however, remains to be proved. Could be payment for a lying tongue more easily than the torment of a hero.”

  After a quick glance at the wounds, Ghrisz looked away. “Give him his shirt,” he said, and added, “How did you convince this sea serpent to help you in your quest, then?”

  “We sought a common enemy.” Llesho kept that story to himself, however. It wasn’t his to tell.

  Ghrisz rubbed both of his hands over his face with a sigh.

  “You shake my doubts,” he said, “when I am least inclined to trust you. No one believes in dragons anymore. And yet, you seem to know more than you say, and say more than I’m comfortable knowing. If you’re telling us any part of the truth. And so we come to three bitter gifts.”

  “I’m not sure of all of them, but I think I’ve got it worked out.” Llesho had figured from the start that it would take the next part of the prophecy to convince his brother of the truth.

  From the sheath at his back he drew the short spear that had taken his life so many times in the past. Just for effect, because he needed them to believe, he willed sparks to shiver up the shaft of the weapon as he placed it carefully on the table. “Don’t touch it,” he warned Ghrisz. “It burned Adar’s hand and has tried to kill me on numerous occasions. We’ve come to a sort of truce, but I wouldn’t want to risk any of our lives on the goodwill of the thing.”

  They might have thought him mad, but a trickle of smoke rose from the table where it lay.

  “That is one,” Ghrisz accepted with a nod. “Another?”

  “In the keeping of my cadre. A jade wedding cup.” No need to explain it; Ghrisz knew the legends as did his advisers. The spear and cup represented the beginning and end of the story. The cup, given in love by the hand of the Great Goddess herself, and the spear, cursed gift that murdered the hand that held it throughout the ages. The prince studied Llesho’s face, the unanswered question clear in his troubled glance. Did this stranger with the look of his father tell the truth, or use a story he’d once heard to wriggle his way into their good graces?