Steles of the Sky Read Online Free

revulsion made her seem more the grieving widow to the Qersnyk, so much the better.
    Paian, the shaman-rememberer, laid a hand on her shoulder. She tried to meet his eyes, but he’d let the fringe drop and it defeated her. Its purpose, no doubt: anything that made a priest seem more mysterious increased his power.
    “We go on,” she said, and led them into the open doors of the palace. She knew some of the men only followed because they would not let a woman show more courage than they.
    Now it was Shahruz who held their head high as they moved down the corridors she had so recently—so briefly—lived in, and smelled the thick scent of clotted blood splashed like whitewash on the walls. It did not matter who gave her that appearance of strength; only that the Qersnyk saw her back straight and tall like a pole on which the banner of her body hung. Sticky and puddled, the bloody floor tugged at their shoes with each step. The palace stank as if someone had been butchering lambs.
    They found no dead within.
    “They were dragged out,” Esen said after a glance at Paian. The other men muttered and jostled, turning to put their backs to one another.
    “Dragged out and eaten,” agreed Shahruz, with Saadet’s tongue.
    Paian too was fair, and the shape of his nose was a smaller version of Esen’s. Saadet recognized their silent understanding of one another, and Esen’s choice to speak for both.
    They’re brothers.
    Brother and … whatever you call that, you mean, Shahruz answered, the weight of his disdain for the shaman-rememberer like robes soaked with rain.
    As you say, my brother.
    Because she could not go back, she went forward. Esen stepped before her, or she would have held the vanguard. Still it was she that guided them—to the chamber where the Khagan’s war-band had met for the final time.
    There was more blood here.
    Esen turned to her. “How is it that you and your stepfather alone escaped this?” he asked. “How is it that we find ourselves now under a Rahazeen sky?”
    Her blood chilled, but when her voice would have failed Shahruz spoke for her. “My husband”—and surely Saadet was the only one who heard the way Shahruz’s distaste stained those words—“told me that he had dreamed that the Scholar-God and the Eternal Sky were in truth one deity.”
    Esen nodded. Qori Buqa Khagan had not been silent about his dreams. She knew he had consulted the shaman-rememberers as to their meaning, and the Qersnyk were everywhere renowned for the ease with which they adopted foreign customs, and their permissiveness toward foreign gods—so long as the worshipers of those gods rendered appropriate tribute to the Khagan.
    Still, the sky made her more nervous than anything. Al-Sepehr could cast it a thousand ways as Qori Buqa’s legacy, or Temur’s treachery … but there would always be those who scratched at whatever gilt he hung on the truth.
    As Saadet rested a hand on her belly, Shahruz continued, “I prayed to the Eternal Sky and to the Scholar-God for my life, and the life of my son, and the life of my father. Perhaps I was heard. Perhaps—it is just that I ran, and my father came to protect me.”
    Esen’s gesture dismissed the stones over their heads as a temporary inconvenience. “And the sky?”
    Saadet answered before her brother could. Her explanation was better—and she’d been paying more attention to these heathens and their customs, while he shuffled his imaginary feet at her in very real disgust.
    “From what my husband told me, this is not the first time my usurper nephew Temur has been associated with blood ghosts. He was seen in Asitaneh, at the court of the caliph there, before that caliph was replaced by a Rahazeen faction. Perhaps the usurpers have allied themselves one with another?” She cupped her gently swelling abdomen. “It is my son—Qori Buqa’s son!—who will bring the Eternal Sky back to the steppe.”
    She held his gaze, steady and calm, and wished she dared