CHAPTER X
The winds were not so favourable this night as when Yeh-Lin Dotemon had made her last journey to the city. They came from the south, carrying memory of the sea, the airs of the lands beyond, the great trees and the blue hills. . . .
She had to use them anyway. Powers brooded over Marakand. Her mirror had shown her something there, warning, something to come, a rift in the world. The ice of the cold hells. All was still, waiting, poised, but the balance shifted. She could feel it, like muscles tensing to deal the great and fatal blow, something was set in motion, the first shiver far below that would wake the great wave. And the ice would reach for them, draw them in, hungry.
They were fools. They had all been fools, and they still were. Lin saw them, in her mind’s eye, three powers of the distant fires, grappling over Marakand, tearing one another to pieces over—what? Rule of a little human city, the glory of mere human tyranny? To be a lord over the little lives? They had fallen so far, forgotten so much of what, and of why. Especially, perhaps, of why.
They were here, she would say to them—but they would not listen. We are here. We are now. We have only here and only now. The ice is behind, the stars beyond our reach. Be here, be now, be in this world and use it with more honour. Be the careful guest in the hall, mindful of your lord and hosts, small and weak and swift-dying as they are.
Be quiet, and patient, and walk gently.
She thought of the Eastern Wall three, almost four weeks ago now, and the soldiers who had died there, and shook her head at herself. Hypocrite. Well, she tried. At least the fools at the gate had started that fight. She did try. She held memory of the tree in her inmost heart, her tree, who had wrapped her into her heart and held her like the tender worm in the cocoon, and sang to her, long, long years, sang the life of her land and her folk, the goddess in the baobab with her roots in the deep aquifer under the hills.
She had learnt patience there. She thought she had. The patience, not of the spider—that she had always had, when she was Yeh-Lin, who had been serf and concubine, poisoner and wizard, mistress and mother and empress and exile—but the patience of roots in the earth, of the elephant crossing the dry plain, of the hills awaiting rain. Patience of the goddess who one day opened her heart and told the prisoner she held, Go, fly free again. The chains that bound her had long worn away, and she had been content to stay, to watch, as the baobab-river goddess watched, the folk of that land. But like a fledging, or a moth new-hatched, Yeh-Lin had crawled from the nest, her cocoon, to stretch stiff and clumsy wings and find life in them after all.
She still did not know quite why she was released to the world again. The Old Great Gods would not have wished it so.
Find out for yourself, the baobab river had told her. Walk gently in the world. You hold it in your hands. The least child does.
In her wanderings in the dawn-fresh world she had found Deyandara, prickly, angry, unlovable child. She had never done well at motherhood. She had found it no easier, and yet the child needed someone. Not her, really, but she was the only one who seemed willing to take an interest, until the bard Yselly. Better Yselly than her, she had thought, but since she had failed for all her careful trying to pluck that tangled curse fully from the girl—what a mess that was, and so strangely woven, through life and death, and rooted in the land and the goddess of the land—Yselly had fallen to it. Her fault? Maybe.
Now she had sworn to protect the girl. Sworn to what, she wasn’t sure. Sworn to eyes like the night between the unreachable stars and a weight, a weight in the world she felt heavy even weighed against herself, and yet held so lightly in a single hand.
Was that what she did, now? Did she act to protect Deyandara? This gathering of powers in Marakand was a great danger; she did not lie to herself in saying so. But a danger how, and to whom? And when?
To all the human world, maybe? Surely they knew better than to be so. There was the wasteland of Tiypur to remind them, and the blasted dead lands of the eastern shore of the Kinsai’aa. A danger to Over-Malagru, which was Deyandara’s land, they were that. This day, this season?
Maybe not, but in the long run, they were a danger worse than the mercenaries and traitor lords arrayed against Marnoch’s pitiful band, a danger worse than that army, small though it was, anchored on invulnerable priests that humans and human wizardry could not oppose, and if she did not do—something, she had no idea what—who would? Who could?
Old Great Gods have mercy. She would die, probably, and ripped from her body she would die a second death, rootless in a world that could not sustain her.
It was necessary.
Or perhaps it was merely selfish curiosity. Running her neck into trouble for a childish whim to poke things with a stick to find out what would happen, to stir up trouble, to toss the stones and see where they fell and watch the ripples spread.
That thought had the heaviness of truth, landing in the chest. Or did she doubt and mistrust herself beyond reason?
The gibbous moon silvered the hillside and the god in the tree watched her, wary but unthreatening.
Earth beneath her feet. Stars over her. Yeh-Lin sat, rested her hands on her knees, shut her eyes. She floated, between earth and sky, roots in the deep waters, branches in the clouds. Thought slowed, breath almost ceased. Slow, careful, she laid out the patterns in her mind with the rhythm of her breath, the pulse of the tree’s ponderous tide, leaning to the sun. There was a power in Marakand she did not know. One she did, wounded and enraged and suffering. Could she help it?
No.
A third—she could not see the third. But there would be fire, and death, and the ice reached for them all.
In this time, in this place . . . the dead gathered, puppets of greed, of the desire to possess, to control, to break the world to a single will. The dead . . . ah. And so they did not bleed. Necromancy. Ghatai’s game, that had been. She never had liked Tamghiz, vain and swaggering male arrogance made flesh.
Durandau brought the army of the kings combined to Dinaz Catairna—finally, after delaying and delaying at the ford of the Avain Praitanna, waiting for Lin and her promised return with Deyandara—but still he hesitated. Durandau the cautious. Rumours ran to him of disease, of death, and now, having given up hoping for his sister, he waited, drawn warily near, the jackal slinking to the wounded buffalo, for disease to do his work for him, against mercenary conquerors and Catairnan lords alike. Since Lady Lin had not, as promised, brought his lost sister to him, the Catairnans were without a blessed and sanctified ruler. Once the land was purged of the strong and quarrelsome who had taken the field . . . he had sons. And brothers. The land would need a king.
But the invulnerable dead massed against him, protected by a devil’s shield, and Marakand’s hand reached to take all Praitan, which he was too short-sighted to see.
Deyandara and her Marnoch needed the army of the kings. They needed Durandau.
The Red Masks would scatter his army and kill the kings, the spearhead and vanguard of Ketsim’s army, the kings would die and the wizards fall and Praitan, weak and lordless, fail. The Five Cities would stretch the tributary lands north, the secretive forest kingdoms reach south, and whatever emerged victorious from the brewing conflict in Marakand roll eastwards.
That did not protect Deyandara, be she queen or wandering child.
Find the puppet-master. Wrench the Red Masks from his, her grasp, and the Grasslanders, grown overconfident and complacent, would fall to Praitan spear and sword easily enough. Even if it cost her—everything. She owed everything.
Yeh-Lin, Dotemon, the Dreamshaper, they named her, though that was mere Northron poetry, surfaced through the dreams, the chaos where all was one and all was possible, death and victory and despair, the girl robed in blue and white, Marnoch at her back, the girl lying naked in the arms of a hard-eyed Grasslander with the scars of Tamghiz Ghatai’s long-dead cult on his cheeks, the girl dead in a burning tower, the girl, eyes shut, arms wrapped about a komuz, a dog resting its head on her feet . . . the girl at her brother’s side, mouthing his words, and dead riding at Marnoch’s side against a horde of Grasslanders, and the high king riding too late . . . the high king falling, spear-stricken, trampled beneath the hooves of riders in red, Durandau stabbed in the heart in his bed, in his tent in his camp, his guards dead, his champion Launval the Elder dead with never time to draw sword, Red Masks moving swiftly through the camp, singling out the kings and queens, the lords, the champions, the wizards, silent and sure as tigers, and a red-cloaked figure crouched over the king, a shadow shape lying on it, drinking the cool-flowing fire of fading life. . . . The girl, smiling, at a great harp in a king’s hall, dog at her side again, the same dog, a dark-haired man in a carven chair . . . Yeh-Lin opened her eyes. She couldn’t see the way. Maybe it was not her choosing that would make it.
But still she had to choose.
Deyandara needed the spears of the kings. The spears of the kings could not endure the Red Masks. Yeh-Lin could hunt them, could kill them one by one. But while she was killing one, another could be killing Deyandara, or Durandau, or the threesome of devils in Marakand might see her and ally against her, if they were allies and not already locked in some strife that would destroy the city and distract, perhaps not in time, whichever one it was who claimed the name and rights of the Lady.
Yeh-Lin sighed. She stood and stretched, and drew her sword, cut a new circle in the dust-dry turf. She began with the simplest of the sword-forms, turning slowly through the circle, drawing in the smallest and softest winds, the breeze that curled about the stems of the grass, the last shimmer of sun’s heat held captive in the day-baked stone. She wove, her sword the weaver’s, beating the layered strands into orderly flow. She drew down the upper airs, slower now, yet slower, for their resistance and their strength, their mindless will to their own course, was great, and they could not be severed from their stream, only borrowed. She wrapped her fabric of winds like scarves, Pirakuli draperies, flowing to sky and earth, horizon to horizon, the great contained in the small, the compass of her arm’s reach. Then she cut the circle, to ride the winds again. Westward, to Marakand.
Riders of the wind. It was an old title of the imperial wizards of Nabban, though very few among them ever had the strength or the skill to master the art. Half the stories of dragons were only peasants looking up from their fields to see a wisp of cloud flying counter to the prevailing wind, leaving roiling chaos in its wake.