Lords of Grass and Thunder (69 page)

“Father,” she whispered, and heard Tayy whisper, “Altan!” at her back.

“No,” she said firmly, to assure herself as well as the prince who rode with her. Mergen had successfully passed out of the reach of demons and the hungry spirits. The khaness Temulun had told her so. She trusted in the pyre and the prayers of the shamans who had sent Altan to his ancestors as well. And logically, she understood that the demon-king could not be two of their dead, so he was likely to be neither. But it almost shattered her when he lifted a long hunting spear over his head, pointed at her heart.

“Why have you come here, little girl?” he asked. The voice was a little off, but close enough if his face had taken her in. “Whatever your reasons, I appreciate the gift.”

He was looking at the prince when he said that. With the instincts of a father, Chimbai set his steed between the demon and his dead son. “You are no brother of mine, nor are you any of our beloved dead.” He no longer carried the spear of the sky god’s daughter, nor could he risk further dissolution of his charred and tattered arm, but he drew the sword that he had worn on his pyre and charged.

The chaos of battle broke out then, and Eluneke would have thought they were too outnumbered for hope. But the khaness had her husband’s bow and rode like a soldier, with her horse between her knees. She drew again and again, releasing a never-ending supply of ghostly arrows. A demon-steed careened past. Tayy caught the reins and flung himself into the abandoned saddle. The monster’s hunting bow remained in its place at the stirrup and Eluneke saw the prince take it up and join his mother in laying down cover while Chimbai fought sword to sword.

Eluneke had her own defenses against the demon-king: her totem animals around her and her own powers as a shaman. “More valuable than iron or bronze,” she riddled, and reached into her pouch for the silver dragon spear as answer. Uttering the chant the sky god’s daughter had taught her to drive out demons, she set her pale horse against the king’s horrible mount.

Sharp hooves rose and kicked, teeth bit. Imbued with the blessings of the sky god’s daughter’s horse-head drumstick, wherever her pale horse made contact with the demon-steed, it opened a terrible wound as only a prayer might do.

“Ayay-aeee!” she chanted, and her totem animals joined their croaking to her spell. The silver spear flashed in her hand, its heavenly light shining over her like a lamp in the darkness of the underworld. Wherever demons looked at it they flinched and covered their eyes.

Chimbai was down, crushed under his fallen mount. The terrified night-mare writhed and kicked, but could not escape the horrible smoking wound bleeding spirit-stuff out of her courageous heart. The khaness dropped from her roan to stand over her husband, firing and firing her arrows while the prince took up his father’s sword and drove his demon mount among the onrushing soul-hunters.

Eluneke saw the fight out of the corner of her eye. They were outnumbered, and would soon be overrun, but her own battle took all her concentration. The demon-king was too powerful to be repelled by her spell alone, but he backed away from the silver spear that she wielded against him. When he saw that she would attack even when he took the form of her father, the demon transformed himself into a monster taller than a tree with horn for skin and empty pits for eyes that gleamed with a promise of agony and despair.

The pale horse, which was no creature of light or dark, but a gift of heaven and an instrument of her office, carried her close under the writhing tentacles of the demon-steed’s many heads. She slashed and chanted, but he pressed her back. Soon he would be joined by his court against her.

“Remember what you are.” Clinging to the basket on the shamaness’ head, Queen Toad whispered a reminder.

A toad. When Eluneke discovered her totem form, she had appeared in the shape of a very small and harmless member of that species. New at her skills, she’d hesitated to claim them as her own. Since then, she had visited the dreams of the living world and the daughters of the sky god in his heavenly realm. And she now challenged the very king of the underworld for the soul of her lover, who would be both khan and husband if she succeeded. So the queen of the toads expected more from her than the paltry creature she had been.

The demon-king sat back on his fire-breathing steed, watching her with a sneer on lips already stretched by black and tangled fangs. He could have had her then, she thought, if he’d respected her enough as an opponent. But he thought of her as prey in his hunt, and preferred to play with his food. Well.

Calling on her totem animals gathered about her, Eluneke turned into a hideous toad so huge that her pale horse couldn’t carry her. She leaped clear of it, remembering to keep hold of the reins when the beast turned again into the horse-head drumstick.

In her new form Eluneke stood taller than the fire-eyed beast, and she glistened all over with the poisonous exudations of her totem race. “Excellent!” Queen Toad applauded from where she sat between the poison pits atop Eluneke’s toady head. All the toad harem added their praise. But she was just one, and the demons were many. Soon the prince would be overwhelmed.

Eluneke focused her attention on the demon-king. He pretended to a condescending indulgence with her efforts to escape his clutches but she thought she detected an uneasy fear in him now. Which told her exactly what to do.

With a shouted prayer to the queen of the toads, she turned all the gathered harem into monstrous versions of themselves, an army of giant toads, each with poison ripening in the pouches above their eyes.

“Aaaayyyeeaaahhh!” she cried as her totem horde scattered against the hunting court. And then she turned and faced the demon-king, clenching the muscles that controlled her poison glands.

A hot stream of venom shot across the short distance between them, into the black wells of the demon’s eyes.

“AAAhhhh!” the creature screamed. His mount reared and plunged, stung by the poison where it spattered steaming on the many heads. Eluneke fell to her knees, exhausted but in human form again, the gifts of the sky god’s daughters held loosely in her hands while around her the toads, enlarged to monstrous proportion, attacked on every side. They might hold the forces of the underworld at bay a little longer, but she had failed.

She had hoped to kill, but it seemed she had only blinded the demon-king. Another attack might have succeeded, but she didn’t have the strength to shape her totem form again. To escape his injury, the demon-king need only turn himself into a mist.

The demon’s shape wavered.

“Nooo!”

Prince Tayyichiut plunged past her with his reins between his teeth. He slid sideways, hanging off his saddle, and with one hand he plucked the silver dragon spear from Eluneke’s numb fingers.

“Aaayee-yaa!” the prince cried. His hand smoked and burned from its heavenly touch, but he plunged the spear into the fading heart of the beast.

Nothing happened.

The demon blinked, began to smile. Then confusion crossed his face. His monstrous steed bucked uneasily.

“Oh!” the demon-king exclaimed, staring in horror at the spirit-stuff boiling out of the wound. Then he was silent, already rotting before he hit the ground.

“I think the boy killed him.” The queen of the toads loomed over her for a moment, then, with a little shudder, shrank down and down, until she fit into the basket-crown on Eluneke’s shaman headdress. “I think we’ve won.” Around them, the battleground had fallen silent, except for the moaning of the blinded demons running from the toads who slowly returned to their own shapes. The dead made no sound at all.

“Will he—” Eluneke stumbled on the question she started to ask the khaness. “Live” wasn’t right. Chimbai-khan, and Temulun herself, had died long ago.

“His spirit remains intact.” The lady rose from where she crouched, defending her fallen husband with her ghostly bow and arrow. She didn’t leave him, however, but watched with drawn bow as a prince of demons in the shape of a flame urged forward his nightmare steed. He seemed uninjured, and his followers who surrounded him likewise looked fresh to the battle.

“I mean you no harm,” he said, and took on the solid form of his own kind as a courtesy.

Eluneke took no chances, but clutched her horse-head drumstick in her hand, marshaling her spells to cast him out. No more convinced of the demon’s goodwill, Tayy came to her aid with the dragon spear clenched in a fist of cinders. She could feel him trembling at her side, but he faced with a clear, grave eye the demons who had surrounded them. For herself, she felt as though the least breeze would pick her up like a leaf and carry her away.

“You have indeed killed the king of the demons. You have my undying gratitude for it,” he said with a bow from the saddle.

“Not so undying, it seems to me,” Tayy answered, and no demon among them could miss his meaning. Certainly not this one, who planned to usurp the place of his fallen king.

“The pair of you do seem to have a talent for killing my kind,” the pretender admitted, admiring Tayy’s handiwork with a nudge of his boot. The little that remained of the demon-king disintegrated into mist and blew away.

“I didn’t kill the last one,” Tayy demurred, but added, “I had good teachers. And we both learn fast.”

The new king acknowledged the hit with a nod, but had his own riposte, “Not fast enough, it seems, or you wouldn’t be here.”

That was enough for Eluneke. She was sick of the underworld, sick of demons, and sick of fighting, whether with words or spears or her own venom. “We will be happy to leave,” she said, “if you will just show us the way.”

“I can send you home easily enough,” the demon agreed, adding, “you don’t belong here anyway. I don’t even mind whispering in your ear all the secrets that shaman come here to find. Call it a gift.

“But these others are mine. They’re dead, after all, and have lingered long beyond any hope of joining their ancestors in the underworld.”

“The prince goes with me,” Eluneke insisted, and clasped the prince’s charred hand, still holding the dragon spear. “Given why we are having this conversation at all, I don’t think you want him around anyway.”

“I’ll grant you that,” the new demon-king answered, with half a smile lurking at the corner of the lips turned back by his curling tusks. “I suppose you want her, too.”

They all looked at the khaness then. When it had become clear that there would be no further attack, she had dropped again to hold her husband. Chimbai’s soul had almost ceased its struggle against the monstrous weight of the dead steed that held him down.

“I won’t leave him,” the khaness insisted.

Eluneke closed her eyes, searching within herself for a healing spell that would revive the fading spirit. Several came to mind, but none that would help her lift the weight that pinned the old khan down. When she opened her eyes again, the khaness had leaned over in a lingering kiss. Eluneke knew she ought to look away, to give the loving wife some privacy for her farewells. But she couldn’t. And while she watched, the Lady Temulun took a deep breath.

At first, her lips remained pressed to those of her husband. Then, Chimbai-Khan drifted out of his ghostly form, becoming a breath. When she stood up again, the khaness held within her the vaporous spirit of her beloved khan.

“I think we’re ready to go now,” she said. When she smiled, a tendril of soul-stuff escaped her lips. She licked it up again and joined them before the new demon-king.

“All or nothing, then,” the king bargained. “A contest of riddles. Answer this:
a string of jade beads, hidden in the branches.”

“A snake,” Eluneke answered, “The emerald green bamboo snake.” The old king’s daughter, who had murdered Chimbai and his wife, took the shape of a bamboo snake. Eluneke willed her horse-head drumstick into the form of a pale steed and posed her own challenge from the same height as her opponent: “Brindle-legged among the Qubal, red among the Tinglut.”

“A toad,” the king answered, with a tilt of his head to acknowledge the warning, and a riddle to issue another of his own: “The camel calls to its mate; far away, a light glitters.”

“A bow and arrow,” Eluneke answered, and countered, “Another camel opens his mouth and the tether flashes.”

“Lightning,” the king of demons answered and paused to think about the meaning of the riddle. Though shaman often came demanding the secrets of the dead from the demon world, he had never met one before who had climbed to heaven on a bolt of light. It said something for her skills as well as her courage. “But enough of games. Something more difficult: “Three things full at a distance, empty in the hand.”

Behind her on her ghostly horse, Eluneke heard Prince Tayy gasp. The riddle was harder than the others, but her teachers had trained her well. “A dream, on waking,” she said, “a greeting, returned by an echoing mountain, a tent city reflected in the dust of a mirage. And for you, three joys.”

The demon king bowed his head to acknowledge her answer, and her riddle. “Though such things are foreign to my kind, I have heard the voices of the dead speaking of their lives on the path to the realms of their own spirits. Three joys must be, the rapturous sigh of a lover, victory cry in wrestling, the first squall of a newborn child. And now, for you, three lacks.”

“Pillars for the sky,” Eluneke answered, “A stone to cover the sea, and a girdle for the mountains.” She didn’t give her next riddle right away, but thought for a long time, until Prince Tayy shifted cautiously in the saddle and the Lady Temulun’s eyes shadowed with despair. Then, the shaman-princess said, “A she-goat drags a tether through the gate.”

The khaness blinked at her, amazed, it seemed, that Eluneke had chosen such a homely riddle. But she was counting on exactly that.

The demon who ruled the underworld frowned, thinking. He took a breath, as if to answer, and let it go again. “This is no fitting riddle,” he complained, “I have heard no spirits talk of such things on their way to their ancestors.”

“It’s a riddle for the living, not the dead,” Eluneke conceded, though she held him to his bargain. “What would spirits have to do with threading a needle?”