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

by Curt Benjamin

  “Do as you will; it won’t save you from the coming storm.” Brought down in the end as much by his visions as by the gods and kings arrayed against him, the magician issued his surrender like a challenge. “The dead can afford to be brave in the face of the end of the world.”

  Not death, or the end of the world as the magician might imagine it. He didn’t think the magician was nearly as prepared for the true fate in store for him.

  Llesho reached for one particular pearl that hung at his neck. “Pig!” he called upon the Jinn who had been his guide through the dreamscape. “I would make a wish.”

  “I wish that you wouldn’t.” Pig appeared, his chains tinkling lightly as he moved. “How will I explain to the Great Goddess? How will I earn my way back into her gardens?”

  Pig was very good at fulfilling the letter of a supplicant’s desire, but in practice wishes often turned horribly against the one who asked them. Thus Master Markko, a second-rate conjurer with no dragon’s blood had wished to be a true magician at the same time a young dragon, pining for the love of a human woman, wished to be human. The result of those two wishes might still bring down all the worlds of men and gods and the spirits of the underworld. Llesho could sympathize with the Jinn’s present quandary. The Goddess he served would not be happy with a gardener who had brought her beloved husband to grief.

  And then there was the matter of the battle still to be waged in the mountains, against the demon-king laying siege to the gates of heaven. How was Llesho to defeat the demon and his army of minions if Pig did something horrid and stupid to him over a wish? If the Jinn deliberately created an evil outcome for the wishes he granted, Llesho could have persuaded him, on pain of continued exile, to forgo his tricks on this occasion. But he didn’t. He truly wanted to help each and every time. Llesho knew that. Things just didn’t work out quite the way that he planned.

  Pig begged again to be released from the wish. He clanked his chains for emphasis, to show what had happened the last time he’d granted a wish, “Please, Young God, what justice is there in rewards granted without toil?”

  Therein lay the trick. A wish was a shortcut. And a shortcut, almost by definition, abandoned the way of the Goddess for the more convenient path that led ultimately to evil. This time, though, Llesho didn’t think that would happen. This time, it was the only way. The way of justice. He thought his Goddess would approve.

  “We have all toiled long toward this end, good Pig. And now it is time. I wish that you will reverse the wish you granted these two fools. Release Marmer Sea Dragon’s son from the madness of this false magician, and free this false magician from the terror and pain of a young dragon trapped inside his body.”

  “Oh. Oh! Of course.” In the way of Jinns, Pig had no power to reverse a wish once granted, no matter how ill-advised the asking had been. But a new wish could undo a small part of the damage, at least as it pertained to the individuals whose lives had been twisted together by their foolhardy requests. With a snap that singed the hair on the heads of the gathered company, Pig did as he was told.

  A horrible scream of pain became two screams separating like the universe torn open, so that Llesho wondered what horror had resulted from his well-meaning wish. When the smoke had cleared, the haughty magician was gone. In his place huddled the shrunken shell of a man gibbering madly into his beard. In the sky above the king’s pavilion, a young dragon writhed in an agony of muscles too long cramped into the shape of a man. The creature they had known as Master Markko had split in two again.

  Marmer Sea Dragon raced after his son, wrapped his head in a tender wing and lifted him into the wind to ease his pain. In the streets below, where the sounds of battle had faded and died, new cries of panic and terror arose, but Marmer Sea Dragon led his son out over the empty plain where he might spit fire and roar out the years of his agony without doing any harm.

  Pig didn’t always know what effects his actions might cause. Llesho, fearing they had not seen the end of this one, waited for his own fate to make itself known. He waited a moment more. The Monkey God, who had traveled in their company as Little Brother, did a somersault in the air and added his own earthshaking shrieks to those of the young dragon, but nothing happened. Or, well, nothing happened to Llesho.

  “That’s it,” Pig said, dusting off his hands with a twist of distaste around his snout as his chains rattled. “Don’t you have somewhere else to go?”

  “What about—”

  “Is this the man you fought on this tower?” Pig asked him.

  Llesho looked at Markko, no longer a master at anything, curled in on his terror of all that had happened to him. “Not any more.”

  “Do you have any grudge to settle against the young dragon that he hasn’t amply paid through his torment all these years?”

  “Not at all.”

  Pig shrugged. “The consequences follow the wish,” he explained. “Your wish wasn’t about you, so the consequences weren’t either.”

  Master Markko drooled out of the corners of his mouth. He would need tending and would eventually die as mad as he was right now. It was questionable, of course, if he’d ever been truly sane.

  Marmer Sea Dragon’s son would also need time and care. He would never again be that free and impetuous youth who had made a wish for love, but with his father’s support he would survive. In the ages of a dragon’s lifetime he would absorb the lessons he had learned in what, to him, would become just a blink of an eye. At least, he would if Llesho succeeded in defeating the first of Markko’s mad magics—the demon-king conjured from the underworld.

  “Justice has been served here,” he concluded. Master Den and Bright Morning gave each other congratulatory glances at that, but the Lady SienMa watched him out of dark, sad eyes.

  “It has been a long and terrible night,” she said. “But your lady awaits you.”

  “I know.” It was time to say good-bye to his brothers and to the kings who had lent their might to his struggle. When he came to the point of it, however, there was little he could say that would not reveal his own misgivings about the battle he still faced. Even if he survived his fight with the demon-king, Llesho knew that he wouldn’t be coming back, not for a long while. Not until he sorted out all that had happened.

  The Lady SienMa seemed to understand all that remained unsaid. “It always was that way,” she answered with a tilt of her head that was a bow between the mortal gods.

  “Shou—” He was afraid to ask the question.

  “Will survive,” her ladyship assured him. “Like our young dragon, Shou has finally learned the lessons he needed to find his path as emperor.”

  Llesho wondered if that meant Shou was finally ready to seek a wife, but he didn’t intend to ask it of the lady in question. After the lady, his brothers came to him one by one. Balar hugged him as if he were still a child, and Menar touched his forehead to Llesho’s crown. “Go in safety, brother,” he whispered.

  Ghrisz, who had known him only a short time since his return, clasped his arms as one warrior to another. “Don’t leave me in the rear when the fighting has scarcely begun,” he said. “We have an army that would ride to your banner even against the demons of the underworld.”

  “If I can, I’ll find a way.” He didn’t think he’d have that chance, but the thought of an army to take against the imps that stood guard over their demon-king made his heart swell.

  Ping said nothing as she set the strap of his spear across his shoulder, but she wept when he took the silver circlet from his head and handed it to her.

  “Tell your husband to wear it well,” he said. “Whoever he may be.”

  “Tell my brothers to have sons.” She meant she would not marry, and though she didn’t ask him to stay, he saw the wishing of it in her tears.

  Ghrisz watched them both with a troubled frown. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Whatever else you are, Llesho, you are meant to be king of Thebin. Even I have realized that.”

  “I was, for a little
while,” Llesho answered him with a little shake of his head. It seemed so obvious to him. “Now I have other duties. Ping will make a good queen—the Temple of the Moon has already accepted her, now it’s time her brothers did.”

  Ghrisz still seemed uncertain, but Llesho’s good-byes had taken more time than Great Moon Lun had allowed him. The silver bridge of moonlight between the towers shimmered and disappeared.

  Marmer Sea Dragon tended the agonies of his son’s return to his own flesh, but the remaining dragons turned their gaze as one to the place where, in her rise along the mountainside, Great Moon had spun her bridge of moonbeams between the realms of gods and mortals. One pediment, Llesho knew, rested before the gates of heaven, the other on the pavilion atop the Temple of the Moon. Where he wasn’t.

  “Looks like you missed your chance,” Dun Dragon said, speaking of the silver bridge that had carried Llesho to the Palace of the Sun.

  “There are other routes,” Llesho answered, thinking of the dreamscape.

  “Or you could hitch a ride. You’ve been inside my head before.” With a lidded, inscrutable gaze, Dun Dragon rested a claw lightly on the stone of the king’s pavilion. When Llesho climbed up, he hmmmed a slow curl of smoke from his nostrils. “Still haven’t learned to say no, I see.”

  “Tomorrow,” Llesho promised.

  “I doubt that.”

  Llesho thought the dragon was probably right. “Do you know the way?”

  “Some of us have always known the way.”

  Which led Llesho to wonder if there hadn’t been a shortcut to saving the universe. Pig had taught him his lesson about shortcuts however. Better to have done it right. “Let’s go, then.”

  Dun Dragon lifted him to his brow, between the dragon’s horns. The cavern of bone pulsed with the light from the blue crystals embedded in the walls that Llesho figured must be some dragonish form of blood or life energy. The low pallet where Llesho had learned dream travel from the Tashek dream readers still rested in a rough corner, looking the worse for its adventures. It was the most comfortable place to sit, however, so Llesho did, curled cross-legged with a hand resting lightly on the bony wall for balance as Dun Dragon rose on a column of warm air.

  “Remind me to get rid of this for you when we are done,” he promised, meaning the pallet.

  “Thank you.”

  With a powerful beat of his wings, Dun Dragon wheeled in the moonlit sky, heading for the mountains.

  Chapter Forty

  LLESHO HAD lost track of time during his confrontation with the magician, but he didn’t think he’d lost that much. Dragons had a way of distorting the elements in their presence, though, time and place no less than the others. So he wasn’t completely surprised when he looked out between the scales that covered Dun Dragon’s forehead to discover the rays of Great Sun glittered off the icy crown of the mountains.

  Almost there. Hidden deep within the brilliant flash of glacier, he made out two tall pillars of crystal. Between the pillars wound gates of silver set with drops of diamonds big as Llesho’s head and pearls that caught the light and softened its sharp glint. The gates of heaven.

  Dun Dragon circled above a dark mass seething on the edges of the glacier. Imps and demons climbed with jagged picks and lines made of the guts of their enemies. In one place they seemed to be making headway, but then a fight broke out in the midst of the creatures. Blood splashed on the pure mountaintop. Lines were cut and imps fell crashing from rocky cliffs to pick themselves up again, shake off the jarring fall, and begin again.

  Dropping lower in the dragon’s reconnaissance, Llesho saw again the cave where he had met the demon-king in his dreams. “That’s it,” he said, pointing to the entrance which now was decorated with the bones of victims, imp and creatures of every kind, including human. He didn’t see the demon-king himself, but lesser demons and imps lounged around in front of the cave, quarreling among themselves, fighting over their terrible food and picking their teeth with the finger bones of children. Shadows moving just out of sight inside the cave raised Llesho’s estimation of the force gathered against them.

  “We are going to need help,” Dun Dragon said.

  Llesho wondered when his quest had suddenly become “we” but he didn’t doubt the sentiment. “I wish Ghrisz were here,” he said. He would have called on Shou, except the emperor lay insensible from his injuries below.

  “Ghrisz for a start,” Dun Dragon agreed. Opening his great toothed mouth he bellowed a dragon call so fearsome that Llesho cowered among the scales, covering his ears and praying to the Goddess to deliver him from his friends as well as from his enemies.

  Above them on the mountain that cry was answered by a deep rumble. No creature, but the mountain itself gave throat to a great rending snap that cracked a tottering shelf of ice from the mass of the glacier. The avalanche gathered sound as it gathered speed, rolling unstoppably down on the imps and demons busy climbing and fighting on the mountainside. Burying the evil creatures in its icy snows, the avalanche continued down the mountain until it came to rest pressed up against the Harnish wall that circled Kungol. Without the hated wall, the southern end of the city would have been buried in snow. Even now the glacier threatened to break through into the streets.

  “Not quite what I had in mind,” Dun Dragon muttered. “But it will keep them until help arrives.”

  As he clung to the scales that protected the great beast’s bony cavern, Llesho wondered what had possessed him to ally himself with dragons. Hadn’t the destruction of the city of Ahkenbad taught him anything? Master Markko’s attack on the dream readers had wakened the beast, but Dun Dragon, rising from that sleep, had shattered the city built on his back. Even when they meant well, dragons carried the seeds of destruction in their breath and in the beat of their wings.

  “That is my city!” Llesho couldn’t contain his outrage. “Hasn’t Thebin suffered enough from its enemies? Do its friends have to knock the holy city flat for extra measure?”

  “It was an accident.” Dun Dragon’s apologetic shrug nearly threw Llesho off his back. “Where I come from, mountains don’t fall down so easily.”

  “It’s not the mountain. It’s ice and snow frozen against the mountain’s side. If you shake it hard enough, the ice falls off, just like from a pitched roof.”

  The Gansau Wastes, where Dun Dragon had lived and then slept through the millennia of his lifetime, had neither high mountains nor snow to crust upon a rooftop. Llesho thought the dragon knew more of what he did than he was letting on, but couldn’t figure out what the point had been. They’d eliminated a small part of the force sent by the demon-king to attack the gates of heaven, of course. But thousands more of the minions remained. Dun Dragon had already said it hadn’t been his intention to bring down the glacier on Kungol’s head. So what had he been trying to do?

  The answers to his question were approaching on long, steady wing strokes. As they grew nearer Llesho recognized Golden River Dragon and Pearl Bay Dragon by the gold and silver of their scales. Marmer Sea Dragon had returned bearing a stranger on his back, a young man with hair the color of the sea and eyes with storms at their centers. Pearl Bay Dragon carried the lady SienMa, mortal god of war, and Master Geomancer, the mortal god of learning. On Golden River Dragon’s back Master Den rode to battle with Little Brother, the Monkey God grown to the size of a man, at his back.

  Peace and Mercy had no place in this battle, but Llesho felt the strength of his newly discovered rank fill him with purpose. He had more than a personal battle to fight. The realms of heaven, the mortal kingdoms, and even the underworld depended on what they did here. In the air, the four dragons with their riders circled, then suddenly Marmer Sea Dragon broke off, following the avalanche’s fall.

  With one clawed foot the size of a small hill he raked a gouge out of the landscape and with his sulfurous breath he roared out fire upon the snow. Gradually both snow and ice began to melt, running into the seam cut into the dry ground. As it filled, the seam became a
lake on which dead imps bobbed in the steaming water.

  Delicately, Marmer Sea Dragon raked his claws through the water, drawing out the dead monsters like a sieve. When he was done, the new lake shone clear as liquid sunlight next to the heaped dead. He then lifted into the sky, leaving the task of burning the dead to the armies who crept out when he had gone.

  “We’ll need their help,” Dun Dragon’s muttered explanation roared through the air passages in his head.

  As they rose into the sunlight, he gazed out on the mountain where the demon-king’s lair lay hidden at the heights. Low on the side of the towering mountainside, he caught sight of a solitary figure beginning to climb. Lluka, he recognized with the farseeing eye of a mortal god. Determined in his madness, the prince had escaped his brothers’ loving guardianship. Whether he pursued a mad effort to join the battle against the demon-king or was drawn to the creature as a minion, Llesho couldn’t tell. It seemed unlikely he would be in time even if he found his way between the worlds, however.

  Llesho would have gone to him to save his life if not his sanity, but the demon-king had come out of his cave. Sunlight vanished into the dark gleaming pearls of his eyes, but he followed the sweeping flight of the dragons with small, tight movements of his neck and shoulders. A roar out of his awful mouth brought imps pouring from the cave.

  “It’s time,” Dun Dragon said.

  Dragons had the power of communicating mind to mind, as Llesho had experienced himself with Marmer Sea Dragon. This time, the dragons spoke by silent communication among themselves. Llesho didn’t understand the thoughts that hummed through the cavern where he waited. He felt it tugging at his gut when the dragons reached a harmony of minds, however. It felt like some part of the universe had twisted out of true, taking his innards with it. When his ears stopped ringing, he heard the sounds of a human army crying out in a chaos of terror on the mountainside.

  “You might have given them some warning,” Llesho chided the dragon.