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

by Curt Benjamin

  The answer lay on the table shedding sparks. Ghrisz stole a glance at it before returning his gaze to his brother. “And the third gift?” he asked.

  The first two had been easy to figure. Llesho had puzzled over the third since Menar had recited the prophecy. His hand strayed to his throat, where a bag of pearls lay covered up again. Ghrisz hadn’t asked, but maybe he waited for an explanation now. Llesho didn’t think that was it, though. The necklace belonged to the Great Goddess, his wife, and he was only a courier where it was concerned. Lady Chaiujin’s gift of betrayal was no coincidence, however. And when it came to bitter lessons . . .

  “Another cup, similar to the wedding cup of the goddess, but with a symbol carved into the bowl.” As he described it his thumb stroked across the signet on his knife where Master Geomancer had hidden it. Ghrisz noticed the gesture but took it for a threat. With a jerk of his head he signaled Mgar, who stepped forward again to clamp a hand on Llesho’s shoulder.

  “A nervous habit,” Llesho explained, moving his hand slowly from the knife. “I mean no harm.”

  “He’ll give it back when we have decided your case.”

  Mgar reached for the knife but Llesho was there before him, ready to strike at the guardsman. Carefully, he lowered the blade to a defensive position while the spear burned its own smoking shape into the table. “I didn’t come here to fight, but I won’t give up the knife.”

  Tradition gave him an excuse to refuse. If not for the spell that held the Lady Chaiujin he would have given it over as a sign of good faith anyway. He trusted his brother, but not the lady trapped inside her box.

  “If you were really the lost prince, you would have killed him,” Ghrisz pointed out. Thebin training allowed for no other purpose between drawing the knife and sheathing it in the attacker.

  “So I thought myself, early in my training. Master Den broke me of the habit of murder, however. Now I choose when to let loose my Thebin training and when to rely on my combat instructors and battle nerves. I won’t hurt you. It would defeat my purpose in coming.”

  Ghrisz thought a moment before nodding his agreement, but made a sign with a finger resting on the arm of his chair. Llesho heard the snick of a sword leaving its scabbard, and then the prick of its point at his neck. He might kill one or two of the councillors nearest him, but Mgar would spit him before he could reach Ghrisz. Which was fine, since he didn’t plan on killing anybody.

  “About this cup,” Ghrisz prodded.

  “The lady who gave it to me had filled it with a potion to humiliate her husband and bring scorn down on my head in front of the Qubal clans. She succeeded in that small evil. In the form of a bamboo snake she later murdered her husband.”

  “It would seem the lesson was for the Harnishman, not for you.” Ghrisz dropped his eyes to the spear on the table, letting his mind wander down the track that intelligence opened up to him.

  “I learned it anyway.”

  “Oh?” That brought the prince snapping back to the point. “I’m still alive. Chimbai-Khan isn’t.”

  Ghrisz registered something of Llesho’s dark memories passing in the back of his eyes. He saw more though: a young prince dead on his feet from exhaustion and carrying an unspeakable burden. He never stopped looking at the spear out of the corner of his eye, however. With the pretense of carelessness in the wave of his hand he gave Llesho permission to retrieve the weapon still spitting sparks on the table. Llesho took it up and slid it home, willing it quiet, and the light along its shaft dimmed.

  Llesho thought his brother was on the point of accepting his identity but a woman who had remained silent until then spoke up suddenly. “May I ask the young stranger a question?”

  Ghrisz gave the barest nod of permission, at which the woman rose from her chair and came around to stand at Llesho’s side. She gave him a reassuring smile, as if to tell him that he had nothing to fear from her, but he knew better than to take any comfort from that table.

  “If you are who you say, you will know who I am.”

  The face had changed with age and she no longer wore the robes of her office, but Llesho recognized her. Fortunately, he thought she recognized him as well.

  “A priestess at my mother’s temple, when she lived,” he answered easily enough. He’d been too young to know more about her, but she smiled in spite of the grave nod with which she confirmed his answer.

  “In that capacity, I must ask, delicately, as to your vigil-night. Were you able to find a way, in your servitude in far lands . . . ?”

  “I did,” Llesho stopped her as she had no doubt intended him to do, in a matter of great delicacy. “But I didn’t recognize my gifts and for some seasons believed she hadn’t come to me. I was wrong.”

  He thought he might have been able to tell the priestess about his dream travels to the gardens of heaven. The Goddess had comforted him with cool water and her own fingertips on his forehead. But they had an audience and some things, he knew, belonged to the temple alone. Fortunately, he’d figured out a lot of it with the help of his brothers and so could answer her questions both truthfully and without revealing the secret mysteries of his husbandly relationship with the Goddess.

  The priestess may have understood all that passed behind his eyes, or she may have simply had a set of questions she asked all the royal princes who had passed their sixteenth summer. She didn’t ask the questions he couldn’t answer in a public hearing.

  “Someone you knew did come to you then.” It should have been a question, but she seemed to know the answer already.

  “The Lady SienMa, with fruits from her orchard.” He couldn’t help the little smile at his own expense. Much later, Adar had explained to him the significance of that visit. At the time, it had seemed one with a disastrous night that had ended in the destruction of the governor’s compound at Farshore Province and the flight of the household before Markko’s southern forces.

  “And now you understand your gifts?” The priestess pursued him with the persistence of his enemies, but he felt no greater threat from her than from any of the teachers who had tested him in the past. This was a path he knew well.

  “Understand? Just enough to get myself in trouble, Master Den would say. Do I begin to have a notion what they are and how to use them? Yes.”

  Ghrisz sat forward at that to take part in the priestly interrogation. “And they are useful?” It was said the Goddess had passed him by, granting him no gifts but that of a normal life. Or so it should have been, if not for the Harn.

  “I dream.” Llesho found that wistfully wry smile creeping across his lips again. Ghrisz bristled at the diffidence of his answer, as if Llesho didn’t appreciate his gifts. Only the priestess mirrored his expression with her own understanding of the cost of such heavenly favor.

  “So you are the one,” she said.

  “I guess so.”

  “Two paths?” Ghrisz reminded them of the prophecy.

  “The Way of the Goddess, or the way of evil.” To follow the path of the magician, Master Markko, that was. “I chose the Goddess.”

  “As do we.”

  Llesho accepted that with a nod. “The jewel mentioned in the final line remains unclear, however. Our mother had jewels—heirlooms and gifts—a few with historical or sentimental meaning. But nothing with the power to rally all of Thebin.”

  He didn’t mention the tales of the sapphire princess but waited for his brother to answer instead.

  Ghrisz did so with a proud smile of his own. “That jewel sits with you at this very table.”

  The girl-spy gave him a smug smile. “Our fighters call me the Sapphire Princess,” she said. “Ghrisz says that the poetry of the title inspires soldiers to battle long after hope is lost.”

  Llesho saw what she meant by that. She had washed away the smudges on her face and arms that had disguised her in the doorway of the temple but still sported a bruise on her jaw, just above the scarf of beaten silk that wrapped her throat. Her arms bunched with ropy sinews when she
gestured in the air. Even her gaze reflected her life of struggle in the conquered city. Her eyes were bright as sapphires and as hard, as if she walled her spirit away from the horrors of a hostage nation in the brilliant blue facets of her gemstone eyes. If they had been softer, her smile gentler, she would have reminded him of his mother.

  “Ping!”

  “Took you long enough! Are you sure he’s the one?” she asked the priestess, though they all knew she was joking to cover her embarrassment at the emotion that gathered in the corners of her eyes.

  “I thought you were dead!” Llesho stared hungrily at her through his own tears. “I thought they’d killed you.”

  “I thought the same about the rest of you.” She shifted the scarf around her neck to show the mark of a Harnish knife, then covered it quickly again. “Mgar rescued me from the dung heap. And here you come, still alive yourself and with news of our other brothers safe as well. Which one of us is more surprised?”

  “Can we trust this?” Ghrisz asked. It seemed no member of that council was free of tears, but still the prince seemed to be afraid of hope. “Where are our brothers, if they are alive?”

  “Nearby. Which leads me to why I am here.”

  “What do you need?”

  “A way to bring a small band into the city undetected. Secret passages, hidden gates. A siege will kill thousands on both sides. But if we can slip into the city unseen . . .”

  “The guards on the wall will spot you before you get close.” Ghrisz stopped him before Llesho said more. “There’s no cover to hide your approach even if we gave you what you want.”

  Llesho shook his head. “The only thing we need to hide is our strategy. Remember that line of the prophecy we skipped?”

  Ghrisz went very still. “Five armies, like one hand,” he recited.

  It was Llesho’s turn to be smug. Putting his hand up, fingers spread, he began to call the names of those he’d left gathering at his back. “Ten thousand Daughters of the Sword from Bithynia,” he said, and folded in his thumb. “Ten thousand horsemen from the Qubal clans. Ten thousand more from the Tinglut. Twice that number from Shan.” At the naming of each army he brought a finger in toward his palm. When just one finger remained raised, Llesho turned his gaze on his brother. “I had hoped to find the fifth in Kungol.”

  “You make me want to believe.”

  Ghrisz still doubted him, as a general if not as a prince, but they were out of time. “Choose,” Llesho said, “as our father’s son would choose.”

  “We can’t muster more than five thousand in the resistance, but what I have I give to the coming battle.”

  Not to him, but Llesho bowed to acknowledge the offer. “Shokar returns with more of our own people among the forces of Shan. His troops will bring the Thebin count to its full tally.” He bent the last finger into the fist he had made.

  “Then I think we can help each other,” Ghrisz agreed. “A wall, after all, is only as sound as the stones that build it. The Harn have little experience of such things, and choose not to learn. The artisans of Kungol, who were pressed into constructing this vast wall, were more practiced at building houses.”

  “And a house,” Ping pointed out, “Is nothing but a wall on the outside, hollow on the inside to hold the people. When the Harn enslaved our people and forced them to raise their wall, they built what they knew.”

  Tunnels! His people had built what looked like a solid wall against the Harn’s enemies, but inside, it was riddled with tunnels! Ping seemed extremely pleased about that, though she must have been toddling around on leading reins when the wall was begun.

  “These cellars and tunnels are my palace,” she explained, “I have explored every twisting li of them both below the city and within its walls. I know every secret way into the city and every secret way out. They are too few to bring all your armies through, but with sufficient distraction a small band can move easily into the city.”

  “Sneaking spies back and forth has been easy enough under cover of darkness or the coming and going of Harnish troops through the gates,” Ghrisz commented. “Until now, however, we have lacked the army. You seem to have solved that part of the puzzle.”

  He smiled and Llesho curved his lips in a semblance of the same. Let his brother think that the battle they discussed would be the last. The priestess read him better than his brother or sister did. She wrapped her own fingers around his clenched fist. “Rest,” she told him. “And don’t give in to despair. A wife who has waited through countless lifetimes will have learned forgiveness above all virtues.”

  She expected him to fail, he thought, and tried to ease his conscience. Which could only mean she didn’t understand the full consequences of his failure. Except that grief seemed to shadow her like a shroud.

  He would have tried to reassure her, but his brother stirred just then, rose from his chair as a signal that talking was done.

  “Welcome home, little brother,” he said, and wrapped Llesho in his arms. It was the thing to do at homecoming, but Ghrisz’s doubts made an awkward embrace.

  “My turn!” Ping thumped her older brother, wedging herself between them so that she could give Llesho a huge hug of her own. “I can’t believe you’re alive!”

  A hug, a pat, a smile: one by one the councillors greeted him as they filed out, until he was alone with his brother and sister, and the priestess from the Temple of the Moon.

  “Find him a safe bed and something to eat,” Ghrisz asked her. He sent Llesho on his way with the promise, “You will have all our secrets when you are awake enough to take them in.”

  Llesho would have objected that there wasn’t time, but Ghrisz needed time to absorb his change in fortunes. Sharing the secrets of a lifetime would not come easily. So he followed the priestess to an underground room with a warm lamp and a bed that was heaped with blankets, and didn’t complain when someone put a bun and a cup of tea in his hand.

  “You’re safe here, even from your dreams,” the priestess assured him. He figured he ought to question that, but he didn’t plan on sleeping anyway. He needed to gather his thoughts for the next audience with his distant, desperate brother. It was time to talk strategy.

  When they came for him again, he was ready.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  WITH A tumble of hooves over antlers, Llesho arrived in the yellow silk command tent of the mortal goddess of war. Fortunately his advisers who awaited him had seen him dream travel in his totem form before. Master Den looked up from his conversation in the corner with Bright Morning and Balar to give him a nod of greeting but otherwise made no comment on his precipitous arrival. At a table strewn with maps and crowded around by kings and princes and generals, the mortal goddess of war sat in the same chair he remembered from Farshore Province at the start of his quest. Then she had shown him a map and asked him what he knew of the blocks of color on it. Kungol, he remembered, had been gold, and the Harnlands a sea of green. Bithynia had been a question on the fringed edges.

  Now he could identify each of those countries by a wound or a companion lost in crossing it. And the lady had a different question for him.

  “Tea?” she asked, with a gesture at the pot that rested on a small table at her elbow. When Llesho respectfully accepted a cup from her hands, she continued with the business that concerned their gathered allies.

  “Have you found the last of your brothers, holy king?” she asked. That was the first test of the prophecy which foretold their success. The next question spoke to the practicalities of conquest: “Will he join his forces with ours against the magician?”

  “I have, and he will. However—” He knew that what he had to say next would inflame the khans who were his allies, and raised a hand to stop their protests before they were begun. “Prince Ghrisz was less than pleased to hear that we counted Harnish clans among our allies.”

  Mergen took this in with no more than a blink of his lashes, but Tinglut-Khan’s face flushed a deeper shade of bronze. He took a deep breath
to voice his indignation.

  “Understand him, please,” Llesho begged before words were said that could not, among kings, be withdrawn. “Of the clans, they know Harnishmen only as torturers and oppressors who murder for sport and wear the scalps of Thebin dead on their shirts.”

  “Thebin has no great cause to trust the Qubal ulus,” Mergen-Khan reminded those at the table.

  In the distant past, the Qubal had murdered a Thebin king for loving a daughter of the clans. Llesho wore that king’s face, and sometimes he thought he remembered that king’s death as one of his own. Sometimes he thought it was all his imagination.

  “The clans have had no dealings with Thebin for many generations. Those ended badly, in treachery.”

  “And yet my brother Ghrisz, with caution, joins his forces with yours in the battle to come. His words come with a warning, but he is willing to judge by the actions he sees.”

  “With the spirits of my ancestors to guide me,” Mergen pledged in the name of Chimbai-Khan, who had first promised aid when Llesho’s forces had counted less than a hundred souls, “I hope to repair old wounds between our people. Friendship may be too much to ask, but we would be quit of this debt we owe for the death of your murdered grandfather.”

  That history, and not Llesho’s uncertain memories of lives lived in the past, bound Mergen-Khan to him now. He accepted the khan’s pledge as he had that of Chimbai, the Qubal Khan’s murdered brother.

  Tinglut made to speak up in his own defense, but Shou answered his bluster with a twitch of an eyebrow. The Tinglut ulus had plotted with the governor of Guynrn Province to make war against the empire. Only Shou’s timely appearance, and the execution of that false official, had put a halt to the scheme. In the meantime, the Tinglut had aided Master Markko’s Uulgar raiders in their attack on the Imperial City of Shan.

  Thebin had no cause to trust him either. A king had to be cautious about the armies he invited into his country—they could be a lot harder to remove when the fighting was done. Tinglut wasn’t the only worry in that regard. Shou’s armies served at the will of the mortal goddess of war to preserve the kingdoms of heaven and earth and Mergen to repair his family’s honor. He could trust them as much as one king can trust any other—to the extent it served their mutual need.