He remembered the emerald green bamboo snake tattooed over Qutula’s heart and how dismayed the khan had been to see it there. His brother had passed it off as a reminder of past injuries, perhaps a mistake brought on by drunkenness, but Qutula never drank to excess. And Altan had died at Durluken hands, so he put scant hope in that prayer.
“When do you think this evil will strike again?”
Bekter was looking into Toragana’s eyes when he said it, so he saw the very moment when her gaze grew distant, then troubled.
“Now,” she said, and swept up her robes from their peg on the lattices and her tall shaman’s headdress with its prescient raven glaring down at him from its crown. “I have to find Bolghai.”
Bekter set his lute down. Panic wouldn’t help anyone. He had to ask her, though, “Has something happened to my fa . . . the gur-khan? Or the prince?”
“Not yet.” She shook her head, more as if to clear her ears than to emphasize her negative, which had not carried much force behind it anyway.
“Then what?” he pressed, guessing by the controlled tension with which she prepared herself that catastrophe had struck very close to the dais.
“Eluneke has disappeared. I can’t sense her presence anywhere.”
The gur-khan’s daughter, recognized by her father and offered as a bride to seal the treaty with the Tinglut only the day before. His own sister, come to that, but more importantly, the prince had fallen in love with her.
“Have the Tinglut kidnapped her?” he suggested. Bride capture sometimes happened even between consenting couples. But it seemed unlikely that, rejecting the girl as unsuitable, Prince Daritai would snatch her up and take her with him when he left. He might have wanted her for himself, of course, but had shown no sign of it on meeting her. The Tinglut prince had seemed truly dismayed to discover the princess, offered to his father in matrimonial bond of the peace between them, in the shape of a toad carried about in the pocket of Mergen’s heir.
Toragana had more pressing reasons for believing otherwise. “I don’t mean she’s not here in this tent, or that she has gone from the gur-khan’s camp. She is a shamaness in training under my care. I can tell you exactly where she goes and what she is doing at any point in the day, wherever she travels in this world or passing through the dreamscape. Her presence is with me always, as a part of the fabric of the universe. And now that presence has vanished like the shuttering of a lamp.”
“Dead?” he asked, concerned first for his father, then for the girl herself. Evil moved, as surely as Toragana had predicted.
After a moment during which her eyes rolled back in her head and she stumbled so that he had to steady her, the shamaness shook her head. “Not dead,” she assured him, though she seemed little relieved by it. “I would feel her departing spirit. The Tinglut could not have done this.”
He should have taken comfort in that. If the Tinglut prince could not have accomplished whatever had been done to Eluneke, then neither could Qutula. But when he thought of the tattoo on his brother’s breast, he guessed that might not be true.
“I have to go,” he said. “The gur-khan will need me.” Mergen would hardly desire his music, but Bekter could offer him the comforting presence of a son. As for Qutula . . .
“I’m going as well.” Toragana strode over to open the door. A stoat leaped through and chittered at her briefly. Bekter thought he must be spending too much time with the shamaness; he plainly read the worry in the bright intelligent eyes of Bolghai, the gur-khan’s shaman, in his totem form.
“Good luck,” he said.
“Remember Alaghai the Beautiful and her brothers,” Toragana answered back, though Prince Tayy was the girl’s cousin and not a foreign king.
“I’ll try.” Bekter promised only that much, wishing it were not so easy to believe that Qutula had a hand in his half sister’s disappearance. He was pleased that he managed to control his reaction when Toragana turned into a raven and flew away. The stoat had likewise gone, by routes Bekter didn’t wish to explore. He had obligations as well, so he gathered up his lute and went to find his horse.
“Prince Tayyichiut! Prince Tayy!” Tayy reined in his horse and waited for the riders to come up to him. He recognized Qutula’s voice and wondered if his cousin had ridden out to kill him before he reached the safety of the palace. There were too many in the approaching party to fight, however, and they were too near for him to run. Fortunately, his own Nirun rode among the newcomers, their faces showing only the proper concern of guardsmen who have been thwarted far too long in their efforts to protect their charge.
“Has my uncle sent you?” he asked, “I was on my way back anyway.”
“The gur-khan has sent me to request your presence,” Qutula affirmed. “My father has also asked that I send a picked hand of guardsmen to escort the Princess Eluneke to the tents of the Lady Sechule, my mother, to be properly prepared to take her place at the foot of the dais.”
Tayy said nothing while he calculated the import of that statement. He knew the gur-khan had acknowledged Eluneke in order to barter her as a bride with the Tinglut, and wondered how long Mergen’s favor would last if they defied his wishes. As for the other, clearly his cousin’s fortunes had changed in his father’s court.
“He’s acknowledged you, then.” He turned his horse and fell in beside his cousin. Managing a smile, Tayy wondered how it would influence the plots of Mergen’s blanket-son to be recognized as his father’s true offspring. He might choose to delay his plans, hoping for greater favor through his superior devotion to the khan. Or the khan might have set his son above his nephew already. But Qutula gave a slight shake of his head.
“Privately only,” he said. “And possibly in error.”
Mergen didn’t make such errors, of course. Qutula was covering his hasty appropriation of a station the gur-khan had not yet announced to the court. But if Mergen wanted Eluneke in Sechule’s care, it meant he had changed his mind about his mistress as well.
Tayy was still contemplating the possible meanings of Mergen’s change of heart when his cousin added, “Jochi was there.”
Not so privately, then, if not a formal declaration. He wondered what Mergen had offered Sechule. His own guardsmen had ringed him about, however, and he saw not more than a face or two of Durluken—his cousin was waiting with a wry smile for him to finish taking the measure of the force that had come for him.
“My followers have cost you greatly in your friend Altan,” Qutula granted with an apologetic bow of his head. “I’ve chastised them already, but I wouldn’t insult you by asking you to ride among them.”
His cousin was lying, and didn’t care if he knew it. The Durluken were doubtless on some errand of mischief. But the Nirun were Tayy’s own, which meant his personal safety was assured at least until they returned to the palace. Anything else would have to wait until he had talked with the gur-khan. Which was better done sooner than later. He nudged the mare’s flanks with his heels and let her have her head. Qutula did the same and they raced, the tails of their horses flying out behind them, for the ger-tent gleaming in its silver embroideries.
Chapter Thirty-three
PACING DIDN’T HELP, but Eluneke’s frustration pushed her to measure the small tent with her steps anyway. The count never changed, however many times she repeated the circuit of the single lattice, batted with ragged felt on the outside and with a dirty rug and a cold firebox within. Qutula’s Durluken stood guard at the door but would neither speak to her nor allow her to look out. They fed her at irregular intervals, leaving her to go hungry as often as not. Sometimes Qutula himself led the guardsmen. Sometimes Mangkut or another she didn’t recognize took turn and turn about as moonlight followed sunshine through the smoke hole at the top of her tent.
For news, she had only the movement of that dappled beam of light to tell her how the suns moved in the heavens, and the soughing of the wind in the trees rising above the rush of water nearby. They had hidden her in the forest near th
e Onga River, she deduced by these clues; not in the dell where she met with Prince Tayy but farther along its banks, where no one would think to look.
Since entering her apprenticeship, she’d had the comfort of knowing that wherever she went, she carried her teacher with her. That sensation of Toragana watching over her shoulder had vanished, however, when Mangkut slipped the jade talisman over her head. The shamaness would be looking for her pupil, though. And Prince Tayyichiut would have sent the Nirun to search for her as well.
“The prince will find me,” she’d warned her captor. “He’ll bring the forces of his Nirun and the armies of the khan with him when he comes.”
Mangkut had laughed at that. “My master has his own plans for Prince Tayy. He’ll find his ancestors before he finds this tent!”
“Your master suffers the pride of many fallen traitors, counting his corpses before they are laid to the pyre.” She’d faced down the sky god himself and refused to show her captors that they frightened her. “The prince has survived more powerful enemies than his cousin.”
The sky god hadn’t knocked her down on a filthy carpet or stood over her threatening rape or worse.
“Qutula will kill you if he comes back and finds you’ve damaged his bait.” Her shoulder hurt where she’d fallen on it and she rubbed at the soreness, settling her panicked breathing. It was a small injury compared to the ones he wanted to inflict, but her reminder stopped him.
Tense and angry, Mangkut had clenched his fists into tight balls and walked away, but at least now she knew why they were holding her captive. Qutula feared that her skills as a shamaness might defeat their plan. The court had its own shaman, with deeper wisdom than she could hope to possess, but Bolghai had also been her teacher. He’d be torn between his obligations, to a student and to the court. Eluneke hoped he had enough sense to stay at the gur-khan’s side and not fall into Qutula’s trap by joining the search. So far no one had brought news of the prince succumbing to illness or injury, but she couldn’t count on that for long. If their plan didn’t work soon, she had no doubt that Qutula would use her to lure the prince out where he might be murdered in private.
She had to escape. The talisman prevented her from shifting into her totem form or traveling through the dreamscape. She’d been trying for days. Though she thought she was growing stronger in the struggle, time was running out. Trying to fight her way through in human form had earned her some bruises and an angry red ring around her throat, where Mangkut had choked her with the gold thread around her neck. But she had to do something.
Fretfully, she stroked the rune incised on the jade talisman. She could, she had discovered, touch it as long as she left it where it lay. When she tried to remove it, however, it slipped maddeningly out of her fingers. “Damn it!” She dropped to her stomach and tried to escape between the crossed lattices, but her fingers burned when she touched the felted tent cloths.
“That won’t work, my lady. My mistress has bid me keep you here, and here you will stay.”
“Who are you?” she asked the creature who inhabited the jade. “Who is your mistress?” She had thought Qutula commanded the talisman as he commanded the guards who watched her.
She heard a chuckling in her head, and then a voice dripping acid. “A nameless minion, bound to do the bidding of my lady. I’m sure you know her name.”
Eluneke didn’t believe the nameless part, but he sounded too bitter for the second to be a lie. “The Lady Chaiujin.”
He didn’t deny that she had guessed correctly.
It took all her concentration to focus her shaman powers on the conversation, but she knew what to do. Settling with one leg crossed under her on the filthy rug and the other bent with her chin resting on her knee, she turned her vision inward, to confront the voice that rattled in her mind. “What does your mistress want, nameless one?”
“Power, of course, and revenge. The little prince will pay, as many others have before him, for standing between the lady and her desires. But he enjoys the favors of a toad; perhaps he will likewise enjoy the kiss of her fangs!” He snickered, taunting her. Eluneke refused to let him upset her.
“I understand revenge.” She nodded her head as if encouraging a patient to list his complaints. “I myself grew up an orphan in a weak and impoverished clan while my father sat upon the very dais.”
The facts, which the creature might read on the surface of her mind, were true. Since he was a creature of evil and so expected the same in others, the demon of the talisman accepted that the lie about her feelings must be true as well. One thing raised his suspicions, however. “Your affection for the prince . . .”
“Your lady herself sat on the dais with the prince’s father. Did she then trade her affections for the khan’s position, or merely offer the use of a body not even her own for access to his power?”
“Ah,” the creature cooed in her ear like a turtledove.
“With your help, between us we could take for ourselves what the lady would use us to win for herself.” Toragana would know how to defeat the creature who inhabited the jade circle; Eluneke needed only to escape the tent where Qutula had hidden her.
But: “Noooo,” the demon moaned. “She would not like it, and her reach is long.”
Eluneke’s hand slid over the disk. Distracted by her arguments, for a moment he didn’t notice. She whipped the golden thread over her head and flung it at the door, then dived for a tear in the felt.
“I don’t think so, my lady toad.” Mangkut grabbed her by the hair and shook her until her teeth rattled.
She thought herself a toad, felt herself shrinking and let out a croaking call before the talisman descended again. Her own magic met the magic of the demon in the jade, clashed, and she screamed, tearing at her throat. Caught in transition, her form remained half toad, half human.
“Ugh!” he released her, but by then it was too late. She could not escape with the talisman on her breast and knew that if she did, she would be stoned to death as a demon, the very thing she fought.
Prince Tayyichiut strode into the ger-tent palace of his uncle, dripping with rain that had obscured even the light of the stars to search by. Dropping his wet coat in the hands of a servant, he approached the dais. At his back the Nirun fell onto the carpets below the firebox, weary from a day of searching for the shaman-princess. For days they had looked, in the shadow of every rock and behind every tree. In every tent they found the same answer: no one had seen Eluneke. The troops who went out every day had given up on finding her well and now hoped only to find her alive.
Tayy kept to himself and his Nirun the belief that Qutula held her prisoner. His cousin was too clever to lead him to Eluneke. He knew that, but had assigned men to follow him anyway. Qutula would expect that. For himself, he had begun by riding out on an alternate shift, following the Durluken in the hope that someone would slip up and lead him to her hidden prison. His own experience matched the reports of his Nirun, however. He would follow Mangkut or another of his cousin’s men as far as the wood where the Onga rose out of the dell, then would lose them as if they had fallen through the river into the underworld itself. They always rode out of the wood again at shift change, but none of his own could ever follow them to where they searched, or where they might guard Eluneke as Qutula’s prisoner.
At first, they’d all spent long hours at the search, but as the days in the saddle produced no results, fewer stayed out to exhaustion. He still saw his cousin very little, but that owed less to strategy and more to the fact that he kept no schedule now but rode until he could stay in the saddle no longer, and returned only long enough to restore his strength to ride again.
Tayy staggered slightly as he neared the dais. Bekter, fingering an old, half-forgotten tune in the corner, laid a hand across the strings of his lute to silence them. Bolghai was absent still. The empty place by the musicians ached like a missing tooth, but many of the chieftains and nobles had gathered above the firebox, watching as he advanced. He saw Sechule
in a new purple coat sitting among them. Chahar was gone, on an errand of his uncle’s to Yesugei, but Jochi had returned to his place by the gur-khan, a low table covered in maps between them. It didn’t take a map to find a girl lost in the tent city, but they had enemies on their doorstep, and half of their army far to the south.
“We’ve found no sign of her,” Tayy said, with a nod to his cousin Bekter to acknowledge the courtesy of his silence. He thought the song might have been a warning, if only he could remember what it was. Outside, his dogs howled their distress, but in front of his uncle’s court he kept his own voice cold as stone. “No sign, either, of the Tinglut.”
Qutula had returned ahead of him, and was already seated at the foot of the dais. His eyes were wide and dark with a false concern. “I fared no better,” he said.
The gur-khan nodded, accepting the report, but his glance at his blanket-son hid questions he wasn’t ready to ask before the whole court. Tayy would have asked them with a sword, but killing his cousin wouldn’t find Eluneke.
“Come, sit by your grandmother and calm her weeping,” Mergen invited him. Lady Bortu was doing nothing of the sort, but Tayy accepted his place beside her. She looked not much better than he guessed he must himself, but kept her thoughts, tight-lipped, to herself.
“Rest,” Mergen ordered them all. “You can’t do anything more until the rain stops. Then perhaps Lun and her brothers will help us find one of her own.”
Great Moon watched over shamans in their dream travels. Tayy didn’t think that would help Eluneke now. Humans had taken her. He didn’t think it was the Tinglut, though not from Qutula’s assurance, “I sent Durluken to follow Prince Daritai. They returned today, but report no sign of my sister on the march.”
“Wisely done,” the gur-khan thanked him, though he must have wondered, as Tayy did himself, why Qutula waited until now to tell him. His cousin’s eyes were gleaming, though he kept his mouth turned down as if in sorrow.
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