Steles of the Sky Read Online Free Page A

raise her veil across her face. So many eyes, and her expressions so naked now.
    At last, Esen nodded. “You’ve spirit,” he said. “It won’t be enough.”
    “My son has the mandate of the Eternal Sky,” she replied.
    He snorted and looked away. “We’ll see.”
    She had stood too long in one place. When they walked on, she had to rock her feet to unstick them from the floor. I will burn these boots.
    They are good boots. It will be hard to find others that fit as well, and you will need them. You will do no such thing.
    She blew the loose hair from her eyes, and swallowed her first three thoughts as unworthy. At last she managed to answer him:… As you say, my brother.
    *   *   *
    Tsering walked—or, rather, hobbled; she was not much accustomed to the saddle—around the camp’s perimeter, too much of her wary attention on the sun instead of the wards and banners she was laying in place for the night. The sun had vanished behind the mountains, though the sky was still bright, and the clouds to the east had begun to stain the colors of poppy blossoms around the edges. Tsering’s eye and belly insisted on reading the light as sunrise rather than sunset, even though she knew better.
    Every ten strides, Tsering pulled painfully against the stiffness in her lower back and inner thighs and bent to place a stone marked with Rasan and Qersnyk sigils of protection from the enemies that come in the night. They were prayer-stones, but they were also more than that. Every three stones, she found a place to drape a banner, or—better—to wedge its short stick between rocks so it swung freely in the light, cold autumn breeze.
    The air cooled rapidly as the sun fell. She blew warm curls of mist on her fingers where they poked from her felted fingerless mitts. It seemed as if every stone she touched sucked warmth from her body.
    The banners were sewn with images of the Guardian Beasts. The pale wind-horse of the soul—the symbol for breath and song—and the blue ice-lion of the mind were prominent among them. Tsering invoked the small gods of place where she knew them, but here they were mostly mysteries to her. The refugees has chosen to camp in a valley protected by a black basalt idol whose feet were ringed by withered offerings of food and parched flowers. A little cluster of refugees had been preparing to feed her further offerings as Tsering began her rounds. Tsering hoped that basalt boded well for propitiating against volcanoes.
    The need for these rituals was one of the reasons progress through the mountains came so slowly and at such cost of exhaustion. Each morning, the vanguard could not swing out before dawn, and all the wards of the night before must be collected and stowed, along with whatever goods had been needed for comfort before. And that same vanguard must stop at night more than a hand of the sun’s passage across the sky before it met the horizon, to give time to make camp before darkness came.
    They were still probably far enough into the Steles of the Sky to be safe from blood ghosts. But Tsering—and Hong-la, and the Qersnyk shaman-rememberers—were more worried about whatever invisible force—spores, or immaterial demons, or what-have-you—came in the night to lay the genesis of demonlings in a sleeper’s lungs.
    They could not afford infections. The only treatment any of them knew lay behind, in Tsarepheth—if Tsarepheth were standing still.
    Tsering sent a guilty glance over her shoulder. Hong-la thought he would feel it if the Citadel fell.
    Tsering, with no magic, only knowledge, had no such reassurance that all was well. Or as well as could be expected.
    Slowly, the walking and bending was easing the stiffness in her body. Perhaps she should take up one of the moving forms of meditation; she wasn’t as young as she had been, and sitting in contemplation left her stiff too—though not so stiff as the horse had. As she neared the outcrop of rock that marked the end of her