M A R Barker - [Tekumel- The Empire of the Petal Throne 01]

by Flamesong (v0. 9) (epub)

  Pale coins upon a money-changer’s black cloth. Big ones and little ones, in no discernible order, of no measurable size and of no hue that human eyes could see. Were the small circles really small, or were they farther off than the larger ones? Were they fixed in the abyss, or did they wheel like the moons and the planets?

  The dully shining ovals surrounded Trinesh completely. All of them, those in front, in back, above and below, left and right, were equally visible at once! It was as though he were a spherical eye, focused simultaneously in all directions.

  A god must have this sort of vision!

  It was horribly unsettling.

  He could neither see nor hear his companions; yet they were there. He had only to think, and his thoughts became sparkling bolts that sped away into the illimitable void. Chosun was nearest: a presence, a rough, warm, prickly, sentient tree-trunk that smelled of woodsmoke and sang like green leaves. Dineva was sandier, thicker, murmuring as a spring freshet mumbles and chuckles between its banks on its journey to the sea. The boy was an attenuated reed, a smooth-barked branch; the Lady Jai a whispering pillar of cool, adamantine fire-fronds; Arjasu a jumble of glowing rings and rods—

  He had to stop. This was no place for human perceptions, or for human minds.

  “There!” he cried, and watched the word become a great, complex, golden droplet of candle-wax spattered upon the canvas of Otherness. “There—the biggest portal—!” Sapphire crystals hurtled away, thundering and smoking, as fragrant as fresh rain, to become sigils of coruscating glory.

  The nearest—? —Nexus doorway approached. Or did they approach it? Or neither.

  He was through. Gravel under his knees, air in his tortured lungs—had there been none in Other-Space? —real darkness, sharp pebbles against his outflung palms. Nothing had ever felt so welcome. A stir behind him, and Dineva tumbled past to sprawl face down against a slab of gritty sandstone. She lay trembling, clasping the earth as a swimmer clings to a raft in a maelstrom. Chosun followed, eyes screwed shut and mouth open in a comical “Oh.” The rest came after, ending in a heap of armor, bodies, and limbs: like jumbled corpses upon a battlefield, too newly dead to salute Missum, the Lord of Death, when he came to free their Spirit-Souls for the long voyage to the Isles, the Paradises of Teretane.

  No one moved for a time. Then Thu’n got his bowed, furry legs under him and arose. He seemed the least perturbed by their sojourn among the Planes Between.

  “Ohe, Hereksa," he called as he panted. “Down there.”

  Trinesh heaved himself up onto one elbow and looked. They had emerged upon a slope: wind-worn pinnacles and squat, rugged bluffs above them, a dark plain below. A few steps to their left, and they would have plunged down into a gully. On the right, cracked and jag-toothed layers of eroded rock climbed up and away in a steeply angled giants’ staircase.

  Spread out upon the black mantle beneath their heights, where the Nininyal pointed, he saw a collar of twinkling rubies, a multitude of gems that glittered red and orange and amber upon sable velvet. The dark center of the circle was filled with sharp-edged, boxlike shadows.

  “A city,” Dineva exclaimed. He had not heard her come up beside him. “A city, and an army encamped without.” “You were right. That may well be Ke’er down there.” “Ke’er?” the Yan Koryani boy said unexpectedly. “Not Ke’er. Ke’er is upon the sea. No sea. No rocks . . .”

  “Ai,” Tse’e put in. “Ke’er’s a seaport, and there’s nothing this high behind it.” He held up a sprig of some grasslike plant. “This is Chi'omiq. It grows wherever it can find shelter against the winds of the Desert of Sighs. We’re back in Milumanaya.”

  “Ready ypur weapons, then,” Chosun declared gloomily. “If the Lady Deq Dimani and her monster came this way, then that is probably the bivouac of her Legion of Vridu below us—or that of her brother, the Fishers of the Flame!” “But did she emerge here?” Trinesh wondered. The quavering, shimmering oval portal still hung in the air behind them, and he set his followers to searching around it. They found no footprints; they themselves had churned up the sand in front of the Nexus Point, and the rock farther away was too hard to show anything.

  Trinesh gave it up. “We’d best go down. In the dark their sentries can’t see us, but we can identify them. Then we can choose: sing our death-songs and die, or walk back through the desert to our own lines.”

  “The sun, thirst, hunger—a barefoot girl, and a child?” Arjasu scoffed.

  “What else? As I said, reconnaissance first. Then we decide.”

  The descent was not difficult. Gayel’s homed crescent presently rose to guide them, and they negotiated the boulder-strewn slope by her greenish light.

  Trinesh took a last look back to fix the location of their Nexus doorway: from below, the hollow in which they had emerged looked like the lap of an old crone asleep beside a staircase. His clan-mother’s slave, Uja, had kept the night watches thus, ostensibly guarding the way up into the loft in which all the children of the Ketkolel lineage slept. Her real task, however, had been to keep them from slipping down again upon various nocturnal escapades. Poor Uja! She had died of some ailment of old age just after he had become a man and moved into the warriors’ quarters below. Three of his clan-mothers had contributed a silver Hlash or two for her cremation, but there was no memory-niche for her, not for a slave. If he survived this, he vowed to hire a priest to recite the Solace of the All-Embracing Flame in her memory—

  Priest? By Lord Vimuhla’s Fire! Where was Chekkuru hiVriddi?

  He whirled and put the question to the others. No one had seen the man since Arjasu had bundled him into the Nexus portal. They halted in dismay. Was there time in Other-Space? Would Chekkuru awaken to scream and go mad in the alien dark? Would he perish for lack of air? Or would he float, silent and sleeping, until the sun set upon the last day of the world?

  No one knew. They dared not go back for him.

  Saddened and a little frightened, they plodded on.

  The watch-fires were more distant than they had appeared from above. Their elevation was not very high after all, no more than a shapeless, black smudge upon the horizon when Gayel set, and Kashi, the red moon, climbed up into the sky to take her place. Trinesh judged it to be about three hours after half-night when they halted in the shadow of a leaning stone monolith to take stock of the encampment. From their walking pace, he estimated that the sun had been down perhaps two hours when they emerged from the Nexus doorway. The Milumanayani skirmishers employed by both sides made their sorties at just this time, and the sentries would be at their most vigilant. They must approach cautiously or risk being slain before any questions were asked.

  Trinesh quickly made his dispositions. Arjasu, their best scout, would reconnoitre, while the others made sure that the Lady Jai, Thu’n, and the boy stayed put and gave no alarm.

  The Lady Jai’s bare feet were bleeding, and Dineva tore strips from her own tunic to bind them. The Yan Koryani boy added his longer, heavier mantle to Dineva’s to keep the girl warm. It was the boy who worried Trinesh: he looked like just the sort of plucky little daredevil who would chance escape and cry a warning. At his age life still seemed so permanent, so durable, so unending! How impossible that anything could cut it short! He reminded Trinesh of himself at a younger age.

  By the Flame Lord, he must be getting old, indeed!

  They spqnt a Kiren or so watching and listening but heard only the barked watchwords of the sentries, unintelligible at this distance. No music, no singing, no clatter of artisans repairing weapons and accouterments.

  This must be a weary army, a grim and determined army—or a defeated one.

  From somewhere within the circle of watchfires came a thudding sound, followed by a faint, hushing whisper: artillery, a mangonel, most likely. That meant that the city within the crescent of campfires was unfriendly and under siege. Artillery fired at night usually signified a long leaguer, serving more to demoralize the besieged and make them keep their heads down than to
do damage.

  “No sieges anywhere near Fortress Ninu’ur,” Chosun said. “May be some up by Sunraya. —And no Yan Koryani sieges of our positions that I’ve heard.”

  “No help for it.” Trinesh replied. “We have to go down in order to find out.” He motioned to Arsjasu.

  The crossbowman had most of his armor off and was sifting dust over his curling black locks. Trinesh had never really looked at Arjasu; a soldier was a soldier. Now he saw how handsome the man was: his face resembled one of the God-Emperors portrayed on old coins. Yet there was something incomplete about Arjasu, a dead note, like a Sra’ur with a missing string: a cold, closed sort of man, a scroll that could not be read. Surely Arjasu had a clan, a lineage, possibly a family. He was a ten-year veteran, and he might have served other enlistments before this one. Army life warped people, Trinesh thought; war was the most callous and barren mistress a man could have. The humdrum ennui of barracks officialdom, the hardships, the insecurity, the danger, the casual loss of friends: these things hardened a soldier’s skin, turned it into a carapace as tough as an Etla-crab’s, and left the Spirit-Soul a tiny, wary—and often fearful— observer peeping out from within. Arjasu’s shell was nearly perfect; it was dubious whether he could now emerge to love anyone or anything. Trinesh’ own little inner voice said something, but he did not want to listen.

  “Keep these quiet.” Arjasu stabbed a finger at their three captives. It was noteworthy that he addressed Dineva rather than Trinesh himself. She was Arjasu’s match for simple, cold-blooded soldiering. Dineva made no answer but caressed the blade of the heavy falchion she had picked up from the Gaichun's routed troops.

  Tendrils of dawn mist caressed the crossbowman’s legs as he tramped away: “Earth-smoke,” the soldiers named it.

  He was gone for less than a Kiren. Then they saw him coming back. He walked erect, and he was alone.

  “Who—?” Tse’e began.

  “They’re Tsolyani, Hereksa.”

  “We can go in then!”

  The man’s expression cut their jubilation short. “I—don’t know. They’re Tsolyani. But they’re all dead.”

  “How can that be?” cried Chosun. “Not all, surely! Some may be, but dead man don’t tend watchfires!”

  Aijasu sat down upon one of the boulders at the base of the stone pillar and laid his crossbow beside him. “Qead, all of them. But not dead.” He looked about. “They’re undead, Hereksa, troops who move and walk and fight but no longer breathe.” He uncocked his weapon and put the fat-bodied quarrel back into the leather quiver that hung at his hip. His fingers shook. “They’re all dead men.”

  Trinesh stared around the circle of stunned faces. “Exactly what do you think you saw?” Tales of ghosts and the undead were as common as chaff on a threshing floor in the dormitories of the temple school. The legends of Chmur of the Hands of Gray and Siyenagga the Wanderer of Tombs were enough to make any youthful devotee of bright-burning Lord Vimuhla forgo sleep for a month! Yet they were only tales; nothing in Trinesh’s experience had ever indicated otherwise. Certainly not out here, in the midst of a desert, during a war!

  Arjasu only shook his head.

  “Damn it, man! There may well be corpses over there, perhaps set upon the perimeter to dupe the foe into thinking there are more besiegers than there are—or to make the accursed sand-worms waste arrows. But somebody lit those fires, somebody fueled them, and somebody let fly with a mangonel no more than two Kiren ago! Somebody living.” “Not necessarily,” Tse’e said slowly. “There are stories— some more myth than history—of undead troops. Emperor Hehejallu, ‘the Dark Moon,’ and certain others who favored the Dark Trinity of the Lords of Change—Lord Sarku, Lord Hrti’ii, and Lord Ksarul—-were said to have made use of them. The two Empresses, Vayuma Su and her daughter Shaira Su, fought what almost amounted to a religious civil war in order to send them back to their crypts beneath the City of Sarku. According to the treaty Empress Shaira Su, ‘the Divine Daughter of Thumis,’ made with the hierophants of Lord Sarku in 975—”

  “Myth indeed! Chlen-shit!”

  “We have the tale, too!” Thu’n piped. “No more undead, not under any circumstances, not for any reason. As an historian, I ought to know. Your Empress Shaira Su made it an amendment to the Concordat the Engsvanyali compelled all the Temples to sign in order to keep the peace.”

  “—And yet no interference with the inner sanctum of Lord Sarku’s great shrine in His own city,” Tse’e went on. “The Empress let the undead return there, rather than see the lmperium brought down in chaos!”

  “History! Myth! Legend! Stories to make the brown-robes’ peasants soil their kilts and pay their tithes!” Trinesh peered uneasily over his shoulder at the watchfires, somehow malignant now and not reassuring at all. “And even so, who would risk breaching an Imperial Edict—or the Concordat of the Temples—to bring them forth here? In Milumanaya?”

  “You have never met my youngest nephew,” Tse’e answered. “Prince Dhich’une. He fancies himself another Hehejallu or a Kurshetl Nikuma, ‘the Viewer of Night’; or perhaps a Tontiken Rirune, ‘Slave of Demons’ or a Durumu, ‘the Copper Blade of Sarku.’ Were he to ascend the Petal Throne we would witness more than a legion or two of undead warriors!”

  “As the Flame bums pure!” Trinesh snarled. “This cannot be! We marched into Milumanaya through Thri’il and the Pass of Skulls, and we would have heard of such monstrous legions. Yet there were no rumors—nothing!”

  “The undead require neither bread nor boots.” Tse’e held up a gaunt finger, skeletal enough in the half-light to make Dineva flinch. “They may have traveled overland, through the barrens where neither Tsolyani nor Yan Koryani go—or they may have come sealed in coffins carried on C/j/ew-carts and marked as armor or crossbow quarrels. Lord Sarku’s creatures do not care.”

  “But why?” Dineva’s tone told Trinesh that superstitious dread was not limited to worshippers of the Worm Lord.

  Unwillingly, he himself saw the glimmer of an answer. “With Prince Eselne in the west, and our own brave Prince

  Mirusiya here on the eastern front, what glory is left to Prince Dhich'une? He may want a cup of the stew as well.”

  Tse’e nodded.

  Chosun grumbled, “Undead or just corpses, what do we do about it?”

  The big Tirrikamu had a way of striking right to the heart of such practical problems.

  “None of the Legions fielded by the Temple of Sarku or His Cohort, Lord Durritlamish, has artillery,” Tse’e pondered.

  “So any artillery Cohorts must be from some other unit?” Trinesh took up the thought. “Living troops?”

  “Probably still friendly to Lord Sarku’s cause, but alive. Yes.”

  “Bring the Nininyal, the Lady Jai, and the boy. There’s nowhere else to go. We can’t walk off blindly into the desert.—And 1 think we’ve lost the Lady Deq Dimani and her creature.” That meant no promotions, no rewards, and much explaining,!but at least they were alive and hopefully close to people who might aid them. The besiegers were still Tsolyani, whatever God they worshipped, and that meant living masters someplace in the camp. He beckoned to Dineva. “Where’s Arjasu?”

  “He prays,” the woman said. “Shouldn’t you?”

  They skirted the sprawling encampment. Its silence now seemed due to something other than sleep, and they walked as warily as though in the presence of the Worm Lord Himself. From a distance they could see the sentries, cloaked, motionless, watchful, and grim. Were the passwords they called formed with living lips, or were they uttered with the aid of the darker energies of the Planes Beyond? “Earth-smoke” flowed along the hollows to hide their features, as did the visors of their homed helmets, but Trinesh imagined that he saw the white of bone, the gray of mortifying flesh, and the cerements of the tomb. The devotees of Lord Sarku painted their faces bone-white, he knew, and those men might well be living, weary soldiers, fellows with clans and families, dozing, cold, and dreaming of home.

  Yet a
s they drew nearer he did not think so. Arjasu was too good a scout.

  “There, Hereksa'.’' Chosun crowed. “That man—he’s different! His helmet has another sort of crest! And he’s moving, scratching himself!”

  “I see him too.”

  Another thump and a hiss came, much nearer now, and they watched the great stone ball fly up to glitter for a moment in the dawning sun, arc, and descend again. There was a distant crash.

  “Ohe! Hoi! Tsolyani!” Dineva did not wait for a command. “We are Tsolyani!”

  Heads popped up. The sentry raised a curve-bladed sword. Someone shouted, and others replied. A man bearing a torch, unneeded now in the charcoal dawnlight, left his post to gaze out at them from behind a round leather shield.

  “Who are you? Your Legion?”

  “Trinesh hiKetkolel, Hereksa of the Legion of the Storm of Fire. And you?”

  “The Legion of Mengano the Jakallan,” the other called back. “Twelfth Imperial Artillery. —Come forth and we don’t skewer you!”

  Never had the soft and lilting accents of Jakalla sounded so sweet.

  The crowd had grown to a good three score before they reached the headquarters tent. Some cried questions; others pointed and plucked at the unfamiliar armor Trinesh and his companions wore; and a few offered Chumetl—the salted and hot-spiced buttermilk preferred in Tsolyanu—wine, water, and food. They halted to salute the tall Kaing, the plumed standard of their hosts’ Legion, in the center of the tent-square, just behind the first rows of squat ballistae and squareframed mangonels.

  Then the sentries led them inside, into canvas-smelling dimness.

  The man who arose to greet them was a Kasi, a captain of a Cohort. He had the straight, delicately modeled nose and fleshy lips of a southerner: almost feminine, were it not for his square-cut black beard. Trinesh judged his age at about forty summers by the threads of white in his hair and the silvery patches at both temples. He was a career soldier-—his stained leather tunic and scuffed campaign boots attested to that—and he had obviously just arisen. At the moment he was scrabbling about among the welter of documents that overflowed from the rickety camp table in the center of his tent.