Steles of the Sky Read Online Free Page B

allotted patrol, Tsering became aware of a sort of layered, carrying drone, busy with harmonics and tonal overlays. It was the chant of a Qersnyk cleric, and as she came around the corner she was glad to see the shaman-rememberer Jurchadai setting a pole from which his last banner snapped. She placed the stones leading up to it, his singing making the soft flesh between her jaw and throat vibrate like the wings of a bee, and straightened herself painfully to stand beside him while he leaned on that long stave.
    “You’re carrying flagpoles?” she asked, in her rudimentary Qersnyk.
    Jurchadai frowned at her, but the motion of her hands seemed to lead him to understanding. “They are poles for white-houses,” he said in the Rasani he had been learning in his own turn, speaking slowly. “I just borrowed them.”
    At least, she guessed the word was “borrowed”: he used a term in his own language. She also guessed by “houses,” he meant the Qersnyk huts of felted wool, which could be put up and pulled down in a matter of minutes by skilled labor, and which they carried with them in their carts.
    Like all the Qersnyk shaman-rememberers, Jurchadai was third-sexed. A very few male wizards managed to grow sparse facial hair; Jurchadai had none. He wore his hair braided up into a sort of crown beneath his hat, and his shoulders were slight. At first it had been an effort for Tsering to remember to call this round-arsed person “he.” Now she found it odd when she heard another Rasani make the same mistake. And, she thought, it wasn’t as if she weren’t used to the smooth cheeks of male eunuchs, being a female one herself.
    Jurchadai and his colleagues were the ones who had eventually found a successful ward against the demonlings that did not rely on stout stone walls to be effective. He had, in effect, preemptively saved the lives of everyone in the camp tonight. Tsering laid the back of her hand against his shoulder briefly, trusting that he would understand.
    They stood just within the protective circle of the stones and banners. He leaned back against the big stone. She put herself beside him, stretching out her thighs and watching the sun go down on the wrong side of the sky. The sky flamed below the edge of the pall of ash, behind the teeth of horizon-cutting mountains. Jurchadai sighed.
    “It’s not my sky either,” Tsering said. “You said Temur … How did you know?”
    His teeth flashed white in the dimming day. He said, “I have it from my brothers. Re Temur has declared himself Khagan.”
    Temur was the Qersnyk man she had helped to rescue almost on the very steps of blighted Kashe, when she and Samarkar had first discovered the destruction wrought there by blood ghosts. He had later fled—with Samarkar and a Cho-tse tiger warrior—assisting one of the emperor’s wives in escaping a plot that would have likely ended in her death. It was only later that Tsering had learned that Temur was her friend Ashra’s son, and a grandson of the Great Khagan.
    “You have it from your—” She shook her head.
    “Shaman,” Jurchadai said, touching his breast. “Rememberer.” He touched his temple beside the right eye. “What one knows, all brothers know. Re Temur says he is Khagan, and he will raise his banner at Dragon Lake.”
    “In Song ?”
    “It is Qersnyk. Or was. And none of the Song princelings close by have the resources to defend a claim.”
    Dragon Lake, that was a name Tsering knew. It was a name everyone knew: Temusan Khagan, the Great Khagan, had kept his summer palace there—a great pagoda in the Song style, red tile and black lacquer and gilt. But the Qersnyk claim on those lands had become a matter of contention since, with Song and Qersnyk armies squabbling fruitlessly over possession.
    If Temur felt confident enough to raise his banner at Dragon Lake, he was making a powerful statement about his intentions to claim and reunite the entirety of his grandfather’s crumbling empire.