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

by Curt Benjamin

  “I’d rather be his servant than his lord,” Radimus answered bluntly. It seemed that he would say more, but his eyes grew distant with pain as they had before he convulsed on the khan’s playing field. They approached an area under the spell, then.

  Bolghai noted it as well and forgave the question with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Drink your tea. You’re safe here.”

  Llesho couldn’t guarantee that, not even from himself, but he said nothing, and Radimus drank. Almost immediately, he began to nod off.

  “What did you give him?” Llesho asked Carina, who passed a hand over the prisoner’s brow with a thoughtful frown.

  “Just some herbs to help him sleep while we figure out what to do about him—that’s why you brought him here, isn’t it?”

  “Yes—” She meant the doing something part, Llesho knew, and would have protested the sleeping part, but Carina hadn’t finished.

  “We know Master Markko can see across great distances, using the eyes and minds of his followers, even his captives. He did so with Tsu-tan, and for a little while with Lling.”

  Master Den agreed. “It makes sense that Radimus has survived this long because his master wants him exactly where he is—inside Mergen’s camp. Markko can learn nothing from a sleeping mind, however.”

  “Whatever our needs for secrecy, Radimus himself needs the rest,” Carina added tartly. “I do not dose my patients for the convenience of their captors.”

  If they couldn’t figure out how to break the spell that kept Radimus silent against his will, Mergen-Khan would carry out the terrible execution they had delayed but not completely halted. It might be kinder to sleep through the deliberations that would decide his life or death, but Llesho knew he would want to know every step of that decision if it were him.

  “When will he wake up?”

  “Not for a while,” Bolghai answered vaguely. “The cup heightens the dream state.”

  “Oh, no!” Llesho knew where this was going, and he didn’t plan to do it. Nuh-uh, not in any way. “I thought this was about Radimus needing rest, not Mergen’s need for answers.”

  “I offered the prisoner sleep. Dreams are a part of sleep.” Carina didn’t look happy with her own explanation, and Llesho figured she was having as much trouble with it as he was.

  “I’m not going in there,” he insisted, meaning Radimus’ dreams.

  “Of course you are,” Bolghai assured him. “The Prince of Dreams rules in all worlds dreams take him.”

  “That’s your word, old man, not mine. I am not so presumptuous.”

  Master Den interrupted with a huge sigh. “He’s telling the truth, you know,” he said over his tea cup. “Our young king resists every effort to convince him of his station. He would deny his wedding night while his head rests in the lap of the Great Goddess, his wife.”

  That brought Llesho’s head around with a blush and a frown. Master Den raised his cup and eyebrows both, to claim the hit.

  How much did the old trickster know of the dream he’d entered during morning prayer forms? How many of his deaths had the god ChiChu watched him die—how many times had he denied his worth to husband the Goddess, his wife? He was supposed to ask himself those questions, he figured, and if he knew anything about his old teacher, the answers were supposed to lead him to Radimus’ dreams. Once again destiny had cornered him, this time in a round tent where all his excuses failed him.

  Did he owe what Mergen demanded of the Prince of Dreams? No question of that. Master Markko was Llesho’s problem, brought down on the Qubal clans when they agreed to help him. Even if Chimbai’s death had come out of his own politics, the present khan had still paid in advance with the life of his anda. And Llesho asked for more, all his troops committed against an enemy who could raise the very ground they walked on as an army against them.

  Did he owe Radimus? A memory sparked behind his eyes, of men sorted like cattle in the arena at Farshore. The will of slavemasters had put Radimus in the camp of an enemy that none of them wanted. If the Lady SeinMa hadn’t moved faster to secure his own services, Llesho might have fallen to the magician right there. None of their fates had been Llesho’s fault, but maybe he did owe Radimus something for the breakfast rolls stuffed in his pocket and the four silver coins in his hand, a lord’s payment for services he hadn’t rendered. That didn’t make it any easier. The very thought of entering a mind where Master Markko already lodged filled him with such terror and loathing that he couldn’t bear it calmly and leaped to his feet as if he had somewhere to run.

  “We need to move him out by the river.” Bolghai followed as if Llesho had given a signal and motioned Yesugei and Kaydu forward to carry the sleeping man. “Move the rugs there; you will find the carrying poles.”

  When they had shifted the rugs away, it turned out that Radimus had fallen over onto an artfully positioned litter. Arranging his feet and legs more comfortably, they lifted him easily.

  “Did Mergen plan this all along? That he’d give me the prisoner, and I’d bring him here?” For some reason that he didn’t quite understand, it made Llesho angry to think that the khan had never meant to kill the man, and that he’d anticipated all their moves.

  “Mergen-Khan hoped—but didn’t presume—that you would win the goodwill of the prisoner,” Bolghai answered the anger Llesho gave voice to. “He hoped, too, that your own great flaw would not prove fatal.”

  “My flaw! What about his? He’s the one manipulating us all!”

  “To spare your friend a horrible death,” the shaman reminded him, “and to uncover the reason why magicians wage war on the grasslands. But you don’t ask what your flaw might be.”

  “I have so many to choose from,” Llesho snapped.

  “But only these will be the death of you: that you overestimate your enemies, and you underestimate your allies. Mergen-Khan is a wise and subtle man more given to thought than action. But when he acts, he has always acted well.”

  “I wonder if Chimbai-Khan would say as much, if you could ask him now.”

  The veiled accusation fell into a silence deeper than stone. Yesugei, a chieftain among the Qubal clans, said nothing, but his stern presence reminded Llesho that hasty words loosed in the world created their own mischief. Too late to call them back, he took a caution out of the expectant hush.

  “A question for the Prince of Dreams,” Bolghai answered when it seemed that no one would speak at all, and Llesho realized that he’d been drawn into another trap. The last lesson the shaman had to teach him, the one that circumstances had kept him from, would see his totem form dream travel in the underworld to seek out the dead.

  He shook his head, knowing better than to follow that path. “I would find no welcome there. Let the khan’s own shaman visit him in the underworld.”

  “The prisoner,” Carina reminded them, breaking the uncomfortable pause. “The tea lasts only a short time, and by the motion of his eyes I believe that dreams have taken him.”

  With that Bolghai wormed his way between his guests and led them, ducking hanging brooms and catching herbs in their hair, out of the door. There they picked up Llesho’s cadre on their short march to the river.

  “Put him down,” the shaman said. “These others of your guardsmen may wish to stand apart, where they needn’t witness the mysteries of their king.”

  But Kaydu refused to leave him and Hmishi scoffed at any such concerns—“I’ve been dead; not much to worry about after that—” which Bolghai agreed was a point to consider.

  Standing with their companions, none of the others would remove themselves from their post at his side, though Little Brother leaped for the smoke hole above Bolghai’s tent-burrow again, watching with quick, wise eyes. “What will they see?” Llesho asked, meaning, would they see him transform into the young roebuck, his totem animal. He didn’t look at his companions, or the shaman, but at Radimus, whose eyes darted after dream images beneath his closed lids.

  “They will see what they are ready to see,”
Bolghai answered, which said nothing, or everything. He was used to tests and guessed that his companions were as well.

  “All right,” he said, and shivered. The sun had fallen below the zenith and a chill wind had set in from the south, Llesho assured himself, nothing more. Figuring the best way to do this, he bent his head, knotted his hands into fists and pumped his elbows forward and back, in the motion of running. Then he walked a tight circle around the litter on which Radimus dreamed, going faster and faster as he set his path in the muscle memory of calves and thighs, running, running, in that tight circle until with a toss of his head antlers nearly unbalanced him. Halfway there, he had gained his totem form. Then, with a kick of his heels, he leaped into the air over the sleeping prisoner, and into his dreams.

  No surprise, the dream took him to Master Markko’s yellow silk tent. Radimus stood guard at the entrance while voices drifted from the other side of the yellow silk curtain that divided the tent.

  “You made a bad enemy at Ahkenbad,” he heard his own voice say, and in reply, Master Markko’s offhanded answer: “Of corpses and children.”

  The magician hadn’t known that he’d wakened the Dun Dragon. Radimus, quaking at his post, knew only that something terrible had happened across an unimaginable distance and prayed to his own strange gods not to be called to the other side of the curtain he guarded. This wasn’t what Mergen wanted to know, however. Llesho stepped gingerly forward in his totem shape.

  “Are you real?” Radimus asked.

  Llesho nodded and shook his head at the same time, the way a roebuck would with new growth itching at his antlers. “You are having a dream,” he said in his own voice, which echoed him with different words—“I won’t be staying”—“but this did happen once, and I have truly entered your dream on Mergen-Khan’s business.”

  Radimus knew what that meant and he winced as his dream changed sickeningly to the present. Chains appeared on his wrists. He no longer stood at attention, but lay on the altar of the Khan’s harsh justice. His eyes grew guarded as he asked, “Are you here to kill me?”

  They both knew Master Markko had that skill, to kill in dreams. Llesho shook his head. “I don’t know how, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. We believe your master put a spell on you, to prevent you from speaking when questioned. I’m here to find the spell and remove it, or find the answers locked behind it and report to the khan the intelligence he needs to form his strategy against the magician.”

  “If you tamper with the spell, he’ll know,” Radimus confirmed Llesho’s guess with the calm of his dream state. “He’ll find us, and kill me, and seize your mind to take my place as a spy in the Qubal ulus.”

  Llesho shifted into human form. “He will try,” he said, accepting that struggle though not its conclusion. “Show me the spell.”

  Radimus frowned, puzzled at the command. “I don’t—” he began.

  Llesho reached out and touched a fingertip to his forehead, that place where the brows almost meet below the hidden third eye. “Show me,” he repeated.

  Suddenly, the tent, and Radimus himself, disappeared. Out of a gray fog a shape grew more solid as Llesho concentrated on it: a knot, intricately tangled, with Radimus’ beating heart at the center of it. It was a trap. If he pushed at the knot, like Mergen had done with his questions, the knot would tighten around the prisoner’s heart and kill him. If he tried to untangle the spell, he might free Radimus, but the threads would weave themselves around his own heart just as quickly, leaving him in the magician’s trap.

  “Cut the knot,” he thought, and drew his Thebin knife to do just that. But the spell throbbed with sentient power. If he didn’t sever all the threads in one pass, those that remained would kill Radimus. And maybe, knowing Markko, cutting the threads would only cause them to multiply, not to let go at all.

  As he watched, the knot seemed to grow until it drifted almost as large as he was himself and just outside his reach. This was all a trick; he knew that as well as he knew his name. Somewhere inside that snarl of words and symbols, a part of Master Markko was daring him to do something stupid. Llesho had been here before, however. Not this dream, or this spell, but he remembered another time, dangling from a chain in a mist just like this one, with Pig for company. That gave him an idea.

  Reaching into the leather pouch he wore at his neck, he pulled out not a pearl, as he carried in the waking world, but a bit of stone left behind when a stone giant plucked the heart from his dead victim. Llesho had gathered only the black pearls of the goddess on that battlefield, but the dream world allowed poetic justice, if not other kinds: once again, stone would stand in for a heart, but this time for his own. With more certainty than he had felt since finding Radimus on the executioner’s platform, he held out his open hand, infusing the stone with the pulse of his own veins. And then, carefully, he began to untangle the threads of Master Markko’s spell.

  Words of power wrapped around a talisman tied to a sacrifice risen up in smoke. A living creature, burned alive to seal the spell. He trembled with revulsion as the links of the chain wrapped themselves around the pulsing stone heart he held in his hand. Each strand clung tenaciously where Master Markko had spun them, but Llesho loosened them with the promise of his own blood leaking from his fingertips and spilling onto the stone. At first he’d been afraid the spell would wrap his fingers together with the stone they held. In the dream state they seemed to want only the false heart, however. With his mind he lifted it so the inky strands might cross beneath, each pass wrapping the stone with the magician’s whispered curses.

  In shrieking fury the spell fell upon the stone, drawing itself tight and greedy around the false heart and sucking its own death out of the lifeless shard. When he saw that all of the twisted curses had wrapped the stone fragment in his hand and none remained in the gray mist of the dream place, Llesho closed his fingers.

  “This man is free now,” he told the thing in his fist, and squeezed until he felt the stone grinding in his hand.

  The spell resisted, screaming its promises of torment, but Llesho held on tight while the last dying wail of thwarted terror faded into nothing. He knew the spell was dead when the mist cleared, revealing the Onga River and the trees. Whether this was the river of their Harnish encampment or the dream river on which he’d seen his own death, he couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. Peace had descended, and for a few quiet moments he let himself breath it in like an elixir. It would be so easy to stay here, in the dream world, but Mergen-Khan still planned to kill his prisoner—so far he’d won an easier death but no reprieve. He’d have to go back to do that.

  With a last long look around him, Llesho spread his fingers. Only a handful of ash remained where spell and stone heart had lain. He pursed his lips and blew, scattering the harmless dust of the dead spell out over the river.

  “Llesho! Llesho!” Bolghai called sharply to him as if he’d messed up a lesson.

  “What?” He muttered, suddenly aware that on the waking side of the river a light rain had started.

  They were all getting wet, including Radimus, who blinked rapidly at him as if he hadn’t caught up to events going on in his own dreams.

  “Llesho?” Radimus asked.

  “Not now,” he begged, brushing away explanations with a wave of a hand that wasn’t as controlled as he would have liked. Suddenly, the riverbank tilted. He was still considering the strangeness of that when he felt himself swept off his feet.

  “What are you doing?” he asked sharply.

  “You fainted,” Master Den supplied an answer from far too close, and Llesho realized he was riding in the trickster’s massive arms. “I’m taking you back to the infirmary. Carina can keep an eye on you while she watches Adar.”

  Nearby he heard the voices of his friends: “Is he all right?” from Hmishi; and, “Did the spell catch him?” from Kaydu. Lling called his name, and even Bixei muttered angry oaths in the distance.

  “I’m fine,” he insisted, struggling to get down. “T
he spell is dead.” But Master Den held onto him until their horses came into view and Llesho could be slung into his saddle. “I don’t need the infirmary; I need to be there when Mergen-Khan questions Radimus.”

  “You are going to the infirmary, Holy Excellence.” Carina mounted behind him with the superior authority of healers everywhere. “And though of less exalted rank, Radimus needs rest as well. Mergen-Khan will be informed when the prisoner is ready to answer questions.”

  Of course. Mergen wouldn’t waste the time to treat Radimus just to kill him; he still needed answers. Carina gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. Radimus would require medical attention for as long as Llesho needed rest.

  Chapter Eight

  “WHAT WORD?” Mergen-Khan asked, a formal request for a report. He sat on the dais amid the rich fur pelts and knotted carpets of the ger-tent. Around him gathered the chieftains and Great Mothers of the clans, the men and women of wisdom, while his guardsmen stood at wary attention with their backs to the lattices. To the side, where Llesho had found them in friendly conspiracy in the past, Bolghai the shaman huddled in quiet council with Bright Morning, the mortal god of mercy. He’d expected Master Den to join them, but the trickster god stayed at his side, a keen light in his eyes, watching for some critical move in the game he played with the lives of kings and khans.

  As he led Radimus to the dais, Llesho saw that Mergen had put off his outdoor coat for silks of yellow and blue, embroidered with gold and silver threads suitable to his new office. Bortu, mother of khans, sat at his right shoulder still in her mourning colors, though in fabrics as rich as he had ever seen her wear. Prince Tayyichiut, as elaborately dressed as his uncle and with a silver-beaded hat that turned up on both sides, took the place he had so lately claimed at the side of his father. His eyes still showed the mark of that loss, however, giving him a gravity that suited the heir of this grim khan. He nodded welcome to Llesho, guarded hope lifting a little of the weight of his expression.