Lords of Grass and Thunder (63 page)

T
HE PRINCE’S MEN had fought with desperate energy and his own dead and wounded lay scattered among them, but Qutula’s superior forces had won the day, killing or overpowering the little band of rescuers. The fighting hadn’t ended, however; battle drums sounded in the distance. He wasn’t surprised that Tayy’s army had followed their prince, but the serpent-demon’s failure to throw them off the track disappointed him. He would have to devise a suitable punishment. In the meantime, he took a moment to savor his victory over his cousin before mus tering his army.

“We’re under attack,” he advised his closest followers who sorted their wounded while they waited for his next orders. “Tie the prisoners and throw them out where the good General Jochi’s horde must pass.

“And leave this for him to chew on.” With the last words, he picked up Tayy’s sword from where it had fallen.

He would have liked to keep the weapon for the jewels in the hilt. Its presence with the prisoners—proof of the prince’s death—would slow the horde now descending upon him, however; he needed that time to muster his own troops. With any luck, General Jochi would accept that his mission had failed and give his allegiance to Mergen’s true son. Qutula didn’t count on that, but any delay worked in his favor.

“Throw him in the pit.” He nudged the body with his toe, rolling it over so the prince’s unseeing eyes stared up at him. “Cover it and tether a horse or two to trample the ground; We don’t want anyone digging him up again, now do we?”

No one answered—he’d expected no less—but the dead prince was taken up by his arms and his legs and carried out of the tent. Presently the satisfying sound of muddy earth falling heavily on leather half-armor reached him.

In the recent wars in the Cloud Country, Qutula had seen the result of allowing a hero’s soul to return generation after generation in search of justice. He had no intention of letting Prince Tayyichiut’s vengeful spirit disturb his rest now or in any future generation. Imprisoned in the carrion of its own buried corpse, Tayy’s soul would make easy prey for the hungry spirits. Those unhappy tatters of captive souls would devour the living essence of the prince and turn him into one of their lost kind, devouring other luckless spirits in a never-ending circle of torment.

So caught up in his own thoughts, Qutula almost forgot the toad-girl sniveling in the corner. Though it pained him to look at her, he needed something to trade for his life if it came to that. With Tayy dead, he didn’t have many options.

“Are you carrying his child?” he asked.

She controlled the darting of her tongue with an effort, but gave no answer by word or the tremor of even an eyelid. That told him something in itself. She hadn’t always been this hideous, of course, but the prince
had
suffered from more honor than sense.

“So in all those nights spent on the river he never rode you at all. Pity. Pity you aren’t prettier or I’d give you a taste of what you’ve been missing.”

Her eyes burned and he was glad of the demon he’d bound in the talisman at her fat toady throat. No gratitude at all for the fact that he’d just decided to spare her life. For the present. He might have to reconsider that decision, though. She had powers that amazed even Bolghai. If she ever got loose, he figured Jochi’s army would be the least of his troubles.

But right now the general was his problem, so he turned and left her there to listen while his guardsmen entombed her hero’s soul.

The Durluken would meet the general’s horde out on the grassland, well away from his own tents thanks to the spell his tame demon had cast over the camp. Qutula therefore directed only a small force to patrol his perimeter. For the rest, he sorted them with little confusion. Duwa’s thousand he took under his command, in addition to ordering the movements of his whole army. As for Mangkut’s company . . . the patrol had found his captain. They had freed his ankles so that he could walk under his own power, but his hands remained bound.

“My lord.” Mangkut bowed deeply before he added, “I understand you have found the gift I brought you, and have dispatched it as you intended.”

“You betrayed me to save your own skin,” Qutula pointed out reasonably enough. The warriors who held the prisoner paled with fear, but Mangkut answered with a cocky grin.

“Not at all, my lord. Your orders were to bring the prince. Our plan for doing so unfortunately met more obstacles than I could overcome, so I had to improvise on the spot. He would not come as my prisoner, but I easily led him to your justice by making it seem that I believed myself at his mercy. Either way, I knew the outcome would be the same.”

“And so it has been,” Qutula agreed. He waited a moment to give his judgment, wanting to see Mangkut sweat for the risk he had taken—or the betrayal he had plotted. But he needed captains and Mangkut had followed him since they were on leading reins.

“Go,” he said. “You made one error in your calculations. The general followed you with his army.”

Mangkut grinned at the news. “And doubtless wanders in amazement outside your demon’s glamour,” he scoffed. “Until you fall on him as if from the sky, and disappear again to terrify his horde and send them running for their tents to hide their faces under their blankets. With their hero dead, who but our own Lord Qutula can win?”

“With such confidence, who could lead us into the fray but our own Captain Mangkut?” Qutula ordered the Durluken’s hands released and returned his grin with malice lurking at the corners of his eyes. “I honor your thousand, who will lead the assault,” he said.

Mangkut paled, understanding as Qutula knew he must the perilous role he’d been given. But he was the sort of captain who led by driving his men from behind rather than drawing them after him in the charge. He would consider his losses well spent if they accounted for his own survival. “My lord.” He bowed his head in submission before heading off to locate his company and give his orders.

Qutula watched his departing back for only a moment. His horse in full caparison stood for him to mount. The sun shone brightly, a light breeze played with his braids below his cone-shaped helmet, and Jochi awaited him on the battlefield with an ulus already half lost. It was a fine day for a slaughter.

Bolghai followed Toragana through the dreamscape. Blind to Eluneke’s spirit, he depended on the raven, with the little frog guide on her back, to find their pupil. Suddenly a darkness rose up across the horizon. Bolghai flinched, but the little toad urged the raven on, through the dark storm that blotted out all dreams and all the worlds of the living and the dead where shaman freely roam. He trembled, knowing the blight for a demon’s spell, but trusted Eluneke’s totem creature to lead them through.

It was a bumpy ride, filled with the voices of hungry spirits, and the lost, but then it ended, tumbling them into the bright light of their spirit-senses. They had passed the boundary of the demon’s spell. The toad had brought them to Qutula—below, the soul of Mergen’s blanket-son roiled the dreamscape with his dark purpose. It was this more than anything of the demon’s own devising that had fed the shadow spell.

Though Bolghai now saw the tents of the enemy clearly in the dreamscape, Eluneke remained hidden from him. With the aid of her toad passenger, however, Toragana quickly found the tent where the demon held the shaman-princess prisoner and leaped into the mortal sphere. Bolghai thought himself inside the tent and scampered, nose twitching, into the world of the living on Qutula’s soiled carpets.

Toragana fluttered helplessly around the girl’s head a moment before landing on one of the umbrella spokes that held up the roof. Like the raven, Bolghai remained in his totem form, drawing power from the creatures of the earth to protect him from the demon whose presence he sensed in the tent. Even here, so close to her, he caught no reflection of Eluneke’s bright soul in the misshapen creature, half toad, half girl, pressed weeping against the single lattice.

A tear welled from his little stoat eye. Disaster had struck, and it was his fault. If he had guided her more rapidly through the trials of her training, she might have fought off the demon who possessed the talisman around her throat. Or perhaps he was just being a fool.

She noticed him then, looking up from red-rimmed eyes that clashed vilely with her brown-and-green skin. “You’re too late,” she said, barely able to make the human sounds in her toady throat. “He’s dead. My half brother murdered his own cousin and threw him in a pit. For all your vaunted powers, your prince’s very soul lies rotting in the mud while horses pound the dirt over his head.”

Bloghai shuddered and the fur rose on end down the length of his spine. The despair in her tormented voice chilled him, so that his liver quivered in his belly.

“Prince Tayyichiut?” He twitched his beady little nose questioningly, though she could mean no one else, with such wrenching tears.

“His soul is perishing, even now torn to pieces by the hungry spirits!” Eluneke clutched the thin strands of her hair with gnarled fingers. “I have to help him!”

Her anger shook Bolghai in his dismay. He had a task to do, a princess to rescue, and a prince to save from a fate more terrible than the death that presaged it. Toragana had explained to him that the demon would stop a human enemy of Qutula’s from freeing the girl. So Bolghai must be something other than human when he approached the golden thread that bound talisman to spell.

In his totem form, therefore, he beckoned the spirit of the stoat and released it from his human control. In his own place he left not a thought but an impulse, to gnaw the thread and rid Eluneke of the jade disk at her breast. Then he crept into her lap and began to chew.

“Hurry!” Toragana cawed at him as he bit down on the golden thread. “There’s no time!”

The toads had returned, nudging their way under the felted tent cloths. Gathering in hundreds around the center pole, they climbing over each other in their need to be near the shaman-princess. King Toad himself joined them, his demeanor solemn.

“How can we serve you?” he asked, and reverently bobbed his head, for Eluneke had taken the toad people with her to visit the sky god and he had himself frolicked in the grasses of heaven for a while.

“Can you dig?” Eluneke asked.

“We will do what we can,” King Toad promised, though his people preferred trees by the waterside and grass for their homes.

With a last snap of his teeth, Bolghai parted the thread. “I can dig.” He looked up from his work and grinned to show his sharp stoat teeth. Still more beast than man in spirit, he flexed his clawed hands, admirably shaped for digging burrows.

The gleaming jade of the talisman caught the attention of the stoat mind while the carved rune of a coiled serpent on its face drew Bolghai’s more subtle shaman thoughts. He grasped the broken jade of the talisman in his paws and examined it. He’d seen that rune at the bottom of a wedding cup the Lady Chaiujin had given the god-king Llesho, back the other side of the war, when Chimbai still lived. It had certainly caused enough mischief then, so it didn’t surprise him that even broken into bits it retained its ability to harm. He wondered if Qutula had known what he was playing with when he found it, or if the lady had bent an otherwise straight twig to shape a tool for her vengeance.

But now was not the time to contemplate what might have been. He took the disk and scampered to the lattice with it, then hesitated, unwilling to risk the influence of the thing by keeping it nearby, but equally dismayed to leave Eluneke to her fate while he disposed of it.

“I’ll take that,” the king of the toads offered, seeing his distress. “What do you want me to do with it?”

“Throw it in the river,” Bolghai suggested. “Let the demon’s own kind draw it back down into hell.”

The king of the toads bobbed his head in agreement and summoned a hand of his most trusted subjects to drag the thing away by its broken thread, trailing the talisman behind them. The snake that was the demon in the rune screamed in his rage, but he could do little to harm them from the bottom of the Onga River.

Eluneke shook out her besmirched sleeves and found her human form again; her eyes returned to their orbits, and her cheeks grew familiar under her smooth brown fingers. “It wasn’t the Lady Chaiujin,” she said.

“It would have been too much to hope,” Bolghai agreed. He, too, returned to human shape, though his body felt strangely stretched and awkwardly large after days and weeks in his totem form.

“He was one of the lady’s servants,” she confirmed. “The lady herself whispers in Qutula’s ear, and in his bed.”

The ulus was in terrible danger. One demon might be defeated, or beaten back as they had beaten the Lady Chaiujin before. If she gathered followers, however . . .

“At Qutula’s command, the demon-serpent murdered Prince Tayy or injured him so mortally that Qutula’s sword seemed almost a mercy.”

The princess seemed not to notice the tears running down her nose. It was, of course, no mercy at all, and when she told him what had happened, Bolghai dropped his human head into his hands and wept with her for the child he had loved and the man he had admired and the khan he might have been.

“I have to save him,” she said, and he frowned, not sure he understood.

“You mean they buried him alive?” The thought of their brave, beautiful prince suffocating beneath the horses’ hooves while his wounds bled into the dirt distressed Bolghai so much that his shape wavered and he found himself with his human hands drawn up like paws to shield his face from his own sorrow.

Toragana fluttered to the ground and when she had turned back into a woman, set a comforting hand on her pupil’s shoulder.

“No!” Eluneke shook her off, rejecting any comfort. “You don’t understand. Tayy’s death was just the first half of my vision. He’s supposed to be my husband; somehow, I have to bring him back.”

That had always been the crux of it, Bolghai knew. Fate meant them to be matched, but how? He’d never heard of the like, even among the feats of the greatest shamans of legend. And Eluneke was just a girl, not even a full shamaness yet. . . .