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

by Curt Benjamin

  Llesho stared out into the direction Marmer Sea Dragon had flown. “Reinforcements are on their way,” he said, but his vision couldn’t penetrate the gloom.

  “Our odds of success improve.”

  “Thank you.” For the trek through the temple and his new appreciation of her ghosts, he meant; for the confidence she placed in him and for witnessing his struggle with the magician.

  “You’re welcome,” she answered all his thanks and stood aside for him.

  Llesho stepped onto the pavilion atop the Temple of the Moon. Ping followed, lingering in the shadows. Across the public square, Master Markko stood looking back at him from the king’s pavilion above the Palace of the Sun.

  “You’ve come,” the magician said. In the way of magic, the voice whispered in his ear as if Master Markko stood beside him. The magician glanced away. At that distance Llesho shouldn’t have been able to see it, but he knew Markko looked toward the mountains where Great Moon Lun had begun her nightly ascent. Soon the rays of her light would pierce the eye of the needle and the bridge of moonlight would arc across the square. Already the light was striking the stone floor under Llesho’s feet, glinting now off the spear at his back. He didn’t dare take it with him into this battle, but unfastened the sheath and offered it, still covered, to his sister.

  She reached out to accept it, but pulled her fingers away as sparks curled angrily along its length.

  “I don’t think it wants anyone but you.”

  Llesho accepted that and set the weapon that had caused so much grief throughout his lifetimes on the stones at her feet.

  “I think I’m going to need it one more time,” he said with a speaking look in the direction of the mountains, where an army of demons stood between him and the gates of heaven.

  “I love you, brother. Don’t forget that.”

  He was almost afraid to embrace her, but she grabbed him in a tight hug and thumped him to remind him that she was still Ghrisz’s spy, and a soldier, whatever her rank or position might be when they had won.

  “I love you, too,” he said, then the time had come. The fabulous bridge of moonlight sprang into existence in the air between the temple and the palace. At first it was so thin and fragile Llesho could see right through it. Gradually, it grew brighter and more substantial, until it ran with silver light like rain.

  On the other side, Master Markko set a cautious foot on the bridge. It passed right through and he tumbled backward rather than suffer the fate of his guardsman so few nights ago.

  Llesho shook his head, surprised that the magician, having studied so much about the mysteries of Kungol, could know so little about this one. Then he set first one foot, then the other, onto the bridge of light and began to cross.

  “I knew you were the one.” Master Markko waited for him, hands at his sides and a smug grin on his face.

  With a shrug, Llesho stepped down onto the stone flags of the king’s pavilion. “Now I know it, too,” he said. Mostly it had brought him grief through all his lifetimes. That hadn’t changed in a thousand seasons and a thousand more.

  Below he heard death stalking the armies who fought street to street. The city gates had fallen. Cries of horses maddened by fear mingled with the death cries of their masters and their enemies both. Hemmed in as they had never fought before, they plunged down the narrow chutes of the alleyways. The wailing of the spirits of the dead sounded the same to his newfound ear; it didn’t matter to ghosts if they were friends or enemies.

  Llesho felt it all and it rocked him back on his heels until he forced himself to remember Ping’s instruction. As she had taught him, he focused on each step, each move of the magician waiting on the tower where his father once had ruled. The king’s pavilion had seen many uses over time. As a husband, the king of Thebin walked the bridge of light to visit his queen, the high priestess, in her temple. In bloodier times, the people sacrificed their king to the setting sun here.

  His father had been no warrior, had no army, but Llesho wondered what other tools the Palace of the Sun offered to one schooled in battle by the mortal goddess of war herself.Power, he thought, if he could figure out how to use it.

  The tower fed him sensations from the battle below. The combined armies of his allies poured through the city. Off to the south the Qubal under Mergen and the Daughters of the Sword had attacked with grappling lines and ladders, swarming over the wall with their own war shrieks.

  The Harnish raiders, who did not count women as soldiers, dropped their weapons in terror. Llesho focused, setting at a distance the Uulgar warriors’ fear that the Daughters were not human at all but demons dropping from the skies to suck their spirits out through their eyes. Still he flinched as a sword flashed inches from the eyes of the soldier whose mind fed him the images.

  The greater numbers of his own huge army left no doubt as to the outcome, except that the Daughters were making maps as well as corpses. Likewise, Tinglut-Khan had taken more than casual note that Shou had withdrawn to the surgery tent with wounds that left his survival in question. The wound on Kaydu’s sword arm had begun to swell with infection. She didn’t know it yet, but the arm was already dying and remained only to be separated from her body or take her with it into the underworld. Witches didn’t have the power to heal their own wounds. He wondered if in shapeshifting she could repair the loss or if the eagle would never fly again.

  Master Markko held a sword awkwardly in his hand, but not to fight with. “We could have done this differently,” he said, true mourning in his voice. “I trained you like a son to stand against the creature out there—” his chin rose in the direction of the mountainside where the demon-king lay siege to the gates of heaven. “You could have defeated the monster. The gates would have opened to you.”

  “And then you would have murdered me and tried to take my place,” Llesho pointed out. “I have no taste for sacrifice, particularly my own.”

  “Clever,” the magician acknowledged. “But there is no other way. You’ve seen the dreams, I know you have. If the gates of heaven fall to the beast . . .” he shrugged, as if the truth of those dreams did not require speaking between them.

  “And you see yourself as the hero of the tale?” Llesho circled slowly, his hands outstretched, empty of weapons. Focused on the challenger. He had trained for this and battles going on elsewhere faded from his awareness.

  “Of course,” Markko answered. “Who else has understood the power required to defeat the enemy? Who else has worked so tirelessly throughout the seasons to acquire that power?” Sparks rose where the magician stepped, and Llesho felt his coat snap with the lightning that charged the air.

  “Who else, indeed, would be so foolish to free a demon-king and keep no reins on him?” Llesho let his hand fall to his side, damping the energy that ran through the king’s pavilion.

  Master Markko brought the skills of a magician and the powers of a young dragon to the fight, but the hidden might of the Palace of the Sun ran in Llesho’s veins and he tapped into it now. Markko reached into the sky for a thunderbolt, threw it. His face turned to shocked dismay when his blow disintegrated in the air, reaching Llesho as a breeze lightly stirring his hair.

  “You don’t know who I am,” Llesho mentioned casually. He imagined shackles and Master Markko dropped his sword, tugging at the bindings that held his wrists.

  “It won’t be that easy,” the magician promised. With a great bunching of muscles under skin mottled with the scales of a dragon he snapped the chain, unleashing his hands again to conjure a ball of liquid fire, which he tossed in Llesho’s direction.

  “Catch,” he said, and the ball grew until it claimed almost all the space between the two combatants.

  Llesho remembered talking to the storm with Marmer Sea Dragon. He longed for the support of the dragon but made use of his teaching in his absence. Calling down the gentlest of storms, he extinguished the fireball with a soft, insistent rain.

  The pavilion was slippery now. Master Markko moved more
cautiously, taking a new measure of his student, Llesho thought.

  “I didn’t teach you that.”

  “No.” Llesho raised a vortex.

  The wind pushed the magician backward. Master Markko seized on it and worked a conjuring to raise a greater storm. Hailstones pummeled them and icy rain lashed the exposed pavilion. Markko pushed back with the wind. Llesho skidded toward the unprotected edge.

  “Gently, gently,” Llesho answered the attack with a casual seeming wave of his hand and the storm died down again. Sounds of battle from the street below rose in the sudden calm.

  “It’s time to put this to rest,” Master Markko said. “I have much to do, and little time if I wish to ride the moonlight tonight.”

  Already the bridge of silver light was fading. Llesho realized he’d have time for his good-byes after all. His hand fell to his Thebin knife, but he didn’t draw it. The Lady Chaiujin’s cup—perhaps the lady herself—lay ensorcelled in the signet under his hand and he dared not risk the cup in this battle. The magician noted his hesitation and laughed at him.

  “Simple tools for village butchers. No blade will cut me, no mortal hand can take a dragon’s life. By now you know I hold within me that life which feeds my power. You can moan over your goddess all you want, but know when you die that she will bend her knee to me. She will show me her gardens and take me to her bed gladly because I will be the one to rescue all of heaven from the attack the demons press upon her.”

  “Your plan has several flaws,” Llesho pointed out. “The first is a misunderstanding: the lady chooses her husbands, not the other way around.”

  Llesho began to move in the prayer forms that had marked the Way of the Goddess for him since he first stepped into the sawdust of a gladiators’ training yard. Master Den had showed him the point at which prayer form became combat form and Llesho made the shift, struck at his opponenet with hands faster than the eye could follow. Master Markko staggered under the blow but regained his footing.

  “Simple tricks, boy,” he said, and reached for the earth below their feet. Shook it. Screams of terror rose from the square below as golden plaster shattered onto the street. Markko clutched at a pillar which threatened to fall and take him with it while Llesho fell to his knees, horrified at the trembling that went on and on below them. It was more than he thought he could do but he reached into the earth, thought of mines and wells and the dark caves that wound down through the mountains, and bid the earth be still. When the nauseating tremors subsided, a great yawning crack had formed in the tower where they stood.

  “As I said, your plan has flaws. The second is that you have mistaken who I am when you call me a mortal man.” Llesho moved into the form “Twining Branches,” and conjured a gnarled old tree in his mind here atop the world of living men. He let the branches of the form wrap the arms of his enemy, so that Master Markko pulled and struggled but couldn’t draw his hands away from his sides. “I am a god, beloved by she who reigns in the gardens of heaven, and you have no power over me.”

  “But you still hold my poisons in the blood and bone of your being,” Master Markko growled at him, enraged at his unnatural captivity. He didn’t need his hands to invoke his poisons, but Llesho stood upon the source of his power, in the growing awareness of his own identity. The magician’s potions couldn’t hurt him.

  “The third flaw in your plan is that you judge all men by your own actions, or wishes. As it happens, I do not intend to kill you, though you must give up the powers that you have stolen.” With that Llesho moved into the prayer form he had created, “Wind over Stone,” and raised a gentle but insistent wind. It scoured them with a fine dust that seemed to wear away the surface magic like a false finish on a shoddy chest.

  “It’s time to put an end to this game.” He raised his hand casually between them and called with a voice that seemed to fill the night, “Come air and earth and fire and water. Come gods and kings. Come powers of heaven and earth and the underworld. See this contest put to rest.”

  One by one the four dragons gathered in the sky under the wash of Great Moon’s light. The color of their scales appeared and disappeared in the firelight of their dragon breath; green and gold and silver and the color of Ahkenbad’s dust, as they hovered over the Palace of the Sun. Llesho worried that Marmer Sea Dragon would attack before he had a chance to set right the Jinn’s mischief, but he waited with his fellow dragons, patient as his species was in the presence of the faster pace of human lives.

  Master Markko recognized the dragon he had so mortally harmed, however. He struggled in terror against his invisible bonds but could not move as the stone that guarded the entrance to the king’s pavilion slowly moved aside. Out of the staircase formerly held by the Uulgar guardsmen came the mortal gods. Master Markko hadn’t known them for what they were, and he watched, agog, as first Master Den, then the Lady SienMa, then Bright Morning the dwarf, rose into the air to join the dragons in circling the king’s pavilion.

  Little Brother—in his tall form, almost human in looks, he was the Monkey God—bounded through the trapdoor with a screech of laughter to join the other gods in the sky. Two figures joined them. One Llesho had never met before was the mortal god of peace, and he bowed in homage to that most desired of the gods. The last alighted from the glittering silver back of Pearl Bay Dragon, who dipped low to present her great nose as a bridge to the king’s pavilion. Llesho smiled when he recognized the newcomer—short and plump and still in the robes of the geomancer of Pontus. The god of learning grinned back at him, her feet hovering above the king’s pavilion with the rest.

  The Thebin princes followed, or those who could be spared from the fighting and the tending of the wounded and the mad. Ghrisz came first, blood smeared to his elbows and streaked across his face. Not his own blood, but his sweat dug channels through the gore. “Shokar leads the cleanup at the gate,” he said, meaning the last of the fighting. “I have come as witness.”

  Next, Balar led Menar, the blind poet-prince, who made his way by memory as well as by the guidance of his brother. How they had come through the fighting unscathed Llesho couldn’t figure, except by the will of the mortal gods themselves.

  The kings were next to climb out onto the exposed tower: Mergen-Khan, with AlamaZara leaning heavily against his shoulder. The blood on her uniform was her own, but the wound had seen hasty treatment. Llesho worried more about the protective way Mergen wrapped an arm around her shoulder. What had he wrought in that pairing of armies that might grip Thebin in the closed fist of their association?

  Sawghar followed, to represent the Tashek people, and Tinglut-Khan, whose lungs heaved like bellows. Suspicion furrowed the Eastern Khan’s brow; he had no love of magic or his neighbors.

  Ping, the Sapphire Princess, who owned the Temple of the Moon as only the queen and high priestess might, gathered up Llesho’s spear and tripped lightly across the fading bridge of light to stand among the other heads of state. Llesho noted in passing that the spear remained quiet in her hand, as if now it didn’t dare exert its influence in her presence.

  His cadre, which now included Prince Tayy of the Qubal people, had not come up. He hadn’t called their rank to join him but he wished they’d come anyway. Shou was also absent. Why was it that the good-byes he wanted most to make were the ones he would have no time for?

  “I bear witness for the emperor of Shan,” the mortal goddess of war said from her place in the gathering of magical persons. She nodded at the candlelit square in the floor of the pavilion where the stone remained pushed back. “The emperor would beg pardon of his Holy Excellence for his absence. He currently lies unconscious below.

  Are you satisfied now? Has he sacrified enough for loving the goddess of war? Or won’t it be enough until he’s dead?He didn’t say it, but she read the thoughts in his eyes. There was neither regret nor triumph in the answering look she gave him.Necessity, he thought,a life against the absence of all life. The Great Goddess herself prepared to end in a firestorm all the
realms of gods and men and the underworld before she allowed the demon-king to defile her gardens.How much would you give? The Lady SienMa gave silent challenge with a little smile curling one corner of her blood-red mouth. She already knew the answer.

  “Who are you?” Master Markko whispered under his breath. Eyes wide and shocky with terror, the magician had finally come to realize that perhaps he didn’t have the whole thing figured out.

  Llesho bent close so that he could whisper and still be heard by his enemy. He had no wish to astound the other mortals on that tower with his revelation. “I am Justice,” he said. “Last of the Seven Mortal Gods. More terrible even than War.” The gods already knew and nodded their approval—he’d finally got it right in their eyes. Menar, too, whose blindness had sharpened his hearing, showed no surprise.

  The magician doubled over and beat his forehead against the stones in his frustration. “How could I not have seen? We are lost, lost!”

  “No, we’re not. It was never meant to be you.” The answer to the first question seemed so obvious that Llesho wondered why it needed saying. “I didn’t know myself.” In his journeys his own identity had lured him forward like a riddle whose answer lay always just out of reach and he wondered how many lifetimes he had traveled searching for the part of him that had lain hidden until this moment. But now he had it. Prince Llesho, king of Thebin for a moment, but always the seventh mortal god, Justice. And Master Markko was just one more obstacle on his road to the gates of heaven. And in this place where the king’s power rose, so near the gates of heaven that granted his divinity, not so great an obstacle after all.

  “What are you going to do to me?” Markko covered his face with his hands, where the scales of Marmer Sea Dragon’s son showed clearly in patches against the ridged tendons.

  “What should have been done long ago.” It didn’t matter how the magician might beg or defy the powers arrayed against him. It didn’t—couldn’t—matter what consequences he would himself be required to pay. That, too, was justice.