But the Apadisha made a sport of war, and Tinglut . . . Llesho determined to set the Daughters of the Sword in the field among the Tinglut forces. The two armies would no doubt watch each other, cutting off every move for advantage while they fought the common enemy. Later, his brothers would have their hands full getting rid of their allies, but that was a battle for another day.
That decided, Llesho drew a scroll from inside his coat and spread it on top of the maps on the table. It showed a rough drawing of Kungol and the wall with which the raiders had surrounded the city. The sketch had no marks to indicate the secret passages and ways in and out, but Llesho had committed them to memory and now he began to gesture here, here, there . . .
The morning had faded into afternoon before the battle plan had been laid out. When each leader knew his or her position and the task each army would accomplish for the taking of Kungol, they dispersed to pass the plan to their own generals and captains, who would in turn instruct their lieutenants. They would march for Kungol by sunrise on the following day.
The gates of heaven were another matter. Llesho had a plan of his own for that. He didn’t think his advisers would approve, so he didn’t tell them. There was nothing they could do anyway. He wouldn’t be able to keep the news from his cadre—they had attached themselves to him again and refused to be moved on any order—but he figured they’d understand better than those who thought they could do it all for him and save him from the coming struggle. Persuading his healers to help might be harder, especially since he was using Master Markko’s plan, or a part of it. He regretted what he had to ask, but knew he couldn’t defeat the demon on the mountainside without them. When the war council broke up to prepare for battle, Llesho went looking for Carina.
Behind the hospital tent, Master Den had set up his great traveling washtub and his wringers and stretchers for cleaning bandages and bedclothes. He ordered his cadre to wait outside, assuring them that he meant to go nowhere, in dreams or the waking world, and promised not to put himself in danger. He didn’t lie, exactly, since he expected no danger while in Carina’s presence. That would come later. Kaydu didn’t trust his innocent demeanor, but she conceded to his request with a stubborn bow of her head.
“We’ll be listening, in case you find trouble where least expected,” she vowed.
“I expect nothing less,” he agreed. Then he entered the hospital tent to find Carina directing Adar and several apprentices in preparations for tending the wounded.
“Llesho! What can I do for you?” She stole a quick glance of greeting at him, but focused more sharply when she saw the grimness of his countenance. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I need your help,” he said. “I wouldn’t ask, but I can’t see any other way.”
She read the desperation in the tense set of his shoulders and the lines around his hooded eyes. Sending away those who were folding cots with instructions to help with the bandage winding, she turned the full blaze of her attention on him.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked when only Adar remained between them.
“I don’t trust anything else he’s ever told me, but Master Markko was telling the truth about the creature that lays siege to the Great Goddess’ gardens. I can’t take this demon-king in a fair fight.” Llesho’s furtive glance toward her workbench gave away his reason for being here.
“I have no poisons strong enough to kill a demon, even if my oaths as a healer didn’t forbid me to use them,” she said.
“I wouldn’t ask you to kill for me,” Llesho assured her. It would have damaged something very deep about his belief in the goodness of the people he was trying to save if Mara’s daughter had offered to do murder for him. He still needed her help, though, and he knew what he asked would test the limits of her loyalty.
“I think Master Markko was right about one thing: if I don’t find a way to weaken the demon-king before we fight, he will kill me with one sweep of his claws. If I die before I defeat him, there is no hope for any of us.” He knew he’d given too much away with that. He didn’t count on surviving the encounter, but hoped to destroy the demon before he died of the wounds he would inevitably suffer in any encounter with so powerful an enemy.
Her face tightened with anguish for him. “The magician’s plan serves himself, not the Goddess. I don’t trust anything he said to bring you out of it alive.”
“I have to do this. It’s my quest.” It would always come down to that: the ghost of his teacher at the bottom of Pearl Bay, sending him out into the world to free his people and save them from the end predicted in Lluka’s nightmares. But nothing had ever said he’d be alive at the end of it.
Carina wouldn’t look at him but stared at the herbs and medicines laid out on her workbench. “A potion to cause sleep, or a temporary illness is possible. Any draught strong enough to slow a creature from the underworld would kill a human being. How will you trick this king of demons into taking the poison from your hands without tasting it yourself?”
“Master Markko spent a season in his workshop making sure that I could sip his poisons and live, all for this very purpose. He planned that I would kill the demon-king for him. He said that I would rule beside him as his son, but I think that in my weakened state he planned to kill me and take his place alone at the head of his army of imps. That’s why I have to deal with him first.” And he’d be going after the more powerful foe already weakened in battle.
Adar’s voice interrupted from the doorway. “He plans to open the way to the underworld with your blood and lead the armies of demons to cast down the gates of heaven. The demon will be looking to water the underworld with royal blood as well. You can’t go up against either one of them alone. You’ve seen Lluka’s dreams. It’s not just your life at risk, but all the kingdoms of heaven and the mortal realm that will suffer if we fail on those mountains.”
Outside, a voice rose in terrible screams and was quieted again. Lluka, growing more mad the closer they came to the time and place his dreams led him. Llesho shivered in anticipation of the battle to come, but let his brother draw his own conclusions from that terrible cry.
“What do you suggest I do?”
“I don’t know.” Adar went to the workbench, picked up a vial, another. “I just don’t want you to die.”
“I’ll see what I can do. It would help to have that potion.”
Tears streaked Carina’s cheeks, but she handed Adar a pinch of an herb with a noxious odor and added a tincture of wine.
“Do you still have the Lady Chaiujin’s cup?” Adar asked.
“Yes.” Llesho unsheathed his knife and pried off the wooden signet. When he put it down on the workbench it began to grow of its own accord until the spell-carved box rested in front of them.
Adar opened the box and took out the cup with the spiral sigil at the bottom of the bowl. With a small brush, he painted the inside with the potion the two healers had concocted.
“Offer him this cup as a gift. He will doubtless make you drink from it first. If Master Markko has indeed hardened you against poisons, and if you only touch your lips to the tea, it will do little damage. But it’s a very powerful draught. Don’t drink more than a sip, however; you can’t kill the creature if you are writhing in your own death agony.”
Adar blew gently into the cup to dry the concoction that he had painted there. When it was done, he placed it back on its bed of earth and closed the box. “Try to handle the cup only from the sides, and keep your fingers away from the lip,” he warned. “The poison can enter the body through the skin as easily as by swallowing.”
“I understand.” Llesho stared at the spell-box that held the cup for another moment. “But I don’t know how to make it small again.”
“It’s a simple spell,” Carina placed her hands on either side of the box.
“Master Geomancer needed my blood,” Llesho told her, offering up the palm of his hand where a thin red line gave evidence of the setting of the spell.
“I won’t hurt you.” Carina sniffed, offended. “Besides, the spell has already been set. All I have to do is invoke it now. Put your hands over mine.”
Llesho did, and slowly she brought her palms together with his hands tucked against her fingers, until the box was once again small enough to fit smoothly into the butt of his knife. As Master Markko used to do, they carefully cleaned the area with pure water and wrapped the bowl they had used for the potion in a clean towel for burying.
It felt wrong to ask such a thing of his brother or Carina, but he didn’t know what else to do. “Thank you” choked in his throat. So he said, “I’m sorry.”
“I know. I wish we could have found another way.” Adar cocked his head as another desperate cry wavered in the thin air. “We’ll take care of Lluka while you’re gone.”
Llesho gave a bow to acknowledge his gratitude to the healers, and his regret. He picked up his pack and left the red tent while his brother and the woman Llesho once thought he might love stood with their arms around each other watching him go. Like his brother Lluka, whose cries shattered the growing dusk, Llesho would find no comfort until the final battle was won.
Chapter Thirty-seven
High in the mountains above Kungol, a single tree clung to the stone, shading the entrance to a cave. Scrub and underbrush grew like a filthy beard all around the rocky entrance, from which the smell of sulfur and rotting flesh tainted the clean mountain air. From the cave came the the sound of weeping, mingling with the mumbled grunts and growled curses floating like the stink on the breeze. Llesho thought he heard snuffling among those terrible noises. It had to be a dream, but Llesho didn’t know how he had come to be in it.
“Pig?” He slipped a chilled hand inside his shirt, found the black pearl wound with silver still hanging from its silver chain. Not Pig, then . . . Llesho took a cautious step forward.
Out of the cave came a scream filled with horrific pain that rose in pitch as it went on, and on. It raised the hairs on Llesho’s neck and curled his stomach in a tight protective ball in his gut. Something was dying—not easily—in that cave. He stepped back, looking for cover in the surrounding brush while the dark entrance filled with the snarling of a hundred angry voices.
A creature out of nightmares shambled into the light just as the screaming stopped. On first impression, he seemed to be short and squat, covered in a horny green hide that glistened with grease. When he stepped out from under the low roof of his den, however, he stood and stood, growing so tall that Llesho had to crane his neck to look at him. He couldn’t tell if the creature was always so tall and lived curled up in his cave, or if he—it seemed to be a he—had the ability to change his shape and size as he chose.
In the clawed fingers of one hand he dragged a human leg still dripping blood where it had been torn raggedly from the body of the creature’s victim. Razor-sharp teeth protruded so far from the monster’s jaws that the creature couldn’t close his mouth around them. His lips remained stretched in a perpetual sneer made more terrible by the human meat that dangled from the pointed fangs. While he looked Llesho over, the beast lifted the leg to his mouth and took a great rending bite that snapped bones as easily as flesh. Bits of human meat and sinew flew as he shook the shreds from his fangs and from the back of his mouth came the crunching sound of teeth strong as stone grinding bone.
It wasn’t the grisly snack that set Llesho to trembling, however, but its gaze. Instead of eyes, the awful creature looked at him out of two gleaming black pearls, the match of the ones he carried by a leather thong close to his heart.Oh, Goddess, he thought.What powers do your stolen treasures put in the hand—or in the eye—of your most dreaded enemy? But he kept this thought to himself.
“I’m glad to see you found me,” the demon greeted him with a grimace of a smile. “I always enjoy company for lunch.”
Llesho figured that wasn’t an invitation, at least not for him. The thing was not alone: more than one pair of bright eyes peered back at him from the mouth of the cave. Harsh growls and hungry chitters accompanied the bobbing and shifting of the creatures. One of the things—an imp, which Llesho figured for about his own height if it ever straightened from its cringing crouch—tried to make a break for it. The imp was dragging something that slowed it down. Llesho realized, on stealing a quick glance, that it was a human torso, torn open and with its guts trailing after on the ground.
Twenty or more of the creatures poured out of the cave, following the dripping torso, and leaped upon the thief. It seemed to matter very little to them whether they took a bite out of the human body they had dismembered or out of their own brother imp who had stolen it. The creature’s evil screams of pain and terror joined the vicious sounds of fighting and eating. Soon more screams rose from the center of that fray as the imps turned on each other in a frenzy of eating.
“I’ve come at a bad time.” Llesho took a step back. He gave a little shake of his head, but his antlers weren’t there. Still, time to go—
“You’re not leaving us so soon?” With his stolen eyes, the demon-king cast an irritated glance over at the crawling knot of savage imps. His free hand reached out and broke off the tree that shaded the cave. Using his strong sharp teeth, he stripped it of branches for a makeshift club and quickly knocked his followers into an insensible heap with it. When he had regained a semblance of quiet that way, he turned the pearls of his eyes on Llesho.
“I thought you’d be dying to meet my guests. Or is that, ‘I thought you would die and be meatfor my guests?’ ” With that he made a swiping grab with his huge clawed hand.
Llesho jumped back, though not soon enough to have saved him if he’d brought his body along. But the demon-king’s talons passed through him like a mist. He wasn’t bleeding so it had to be a dream; until that moment, he hadn’t been entirely sure.
“Ah, well, it doesn’t matter, does it?” the demon gave a wistful sigh, gusting putrid breath in Llesho’s direction. If he’d really been there, he’d be dead of the noxious gases the creature spewed before it added, “We’ll be having you for dinner in the flesh soon enough.”
The demon-king took another bite of the human leg he still carried, and another, licking the talons of his fingers when he was done. Then he crouched low on his wrongly-turning knees. “You cannot win,” he said, in a reasonable tone made terrible by the contradiction of human flesh clinging to his teeth. “I have shown you the kindliest of my faces because I don’t want you dying of fear in your dreams. That would deprive me of the pleasure of killing you myself, and that would never do.”
“Pig!” he called, because he didn’t know how he’d gotten here or where his body was on the other side of the dreamscape. Even knowing that the demon-king couldn’t hurt him, he stepped away from those knifelike claws and razor teeth. Back and back again until his heel came down on empty air.
“Later!” the demon-king yelled after him as he fell, a promise that their next meeting would go differently.
And then Llesho jolted out of a daze to catch his balance against a stumble in his horse’s gait. Behind him, Shou’s army had taken up a mournful Shannish marching song:
“As I march from the home I am leaving by the cottage door, holding our babe My sweetheart is quietly weeping For the sweet boy she sends to the grave.”
Next to him, Master Den was watching him curiously. “Where did you go this time?” the trickster asked. “I’ve been watching your empty eyes all morning.”
Kungol had grown to fill the horizon. It was time to send his generals to lead their armies according to their plan. But her ladyship was watching him as well, and it was important that they know.
“I’ve seen Master Markko’s demon, or what he wanted me to see. I think he was playing with me, like a cat with a mouse.” He grimaced with the smell of death still caught in his throat. “I don’t think I’ll get away as easily next time.”
He didn’t mention the pearls that filled the demon’s eye sockets, reminding him of a dream the other side o
f Pontus.
In the dream, he had walked among the Wastrels dead upon the grasslands, plucking pearls from the orbits of their eyes. In the waking world the stone monsters had taken their hearts and left the Goddess’ pearls in their place. Either way his grief and horror had been the same. He’d thought the dream over, however. Now, it looked like he still had a part of the dream to face in yet another form. But at least he’d found where the black pearls of the Goddess had fallen.
“But the drums and the pipes now are silent and the tunic of red turns to rust And the fields are now sown with the fallen in the twilight, in blood, and in dust.”
The song cut too close to what he was feeling in the aftermath of his meeting with the demon-king, but her ladyship was quick to assure him, “Then we will strike at this demon. Your lady wife will have no complaint against your armies this time.”
“I know,” Llesho accepted her assurances rather than argue with a mortal god. It wouldn’t work out that way. The demon resided in a pocket of the underworld intruding upon the mountain at the very place where the peaks touched heaven. Mortal armies might wander forever on that mountain and never find the contending forces out of realms that existed only in magic. That battle would be for him alone. But first, they had to take back the Holy City of the Goddess.
Chapter Thirty-eight
VIEWED FROM heaven, the Thousand Peaks Mountains began as a ridge of low hills in Farshore Province. From there they swept south, rising in a spine of jagged mountains that curved in a great crescent around Thebin’s south ernmost border. The Cloud Country, as their neighbors called Thebin, lay on a broad plateau high in the mountains, as if the ancient forces that had formed that awesome barrer had paused here on the roof of the world before their final effort: the six peaks whose glacier-crowned heads pierced heaven itself.
Curt Benjamin - [Seven Brothers 03] - The Gates of Heaven Page 49